Grubstakers - Episode 52: Markus "Notch" Perrson

Episode Date: March 1, 2019

This got pulled for a copyright music claim. We edited the music out and reupped. I can't remember what the description was last time but this episode is about the creator of Minecraft, Markus Perrson (Notch). He made a cool unfinished game then got a team to help him finish the game then fucked the team out of over a billion dollars when Microsoft bought the game after he hadn't worked on it in years. Anyway now he lives in a mansion and talks about IQ differences on twitter.

Hello, welcome to Grubstakers. This week we're talking about Markus Notch-Pierson, the Swedish inventor of Minecraft and the man who made a billion dollars screwing over his employees. Hear all about his Twitter, his treatment of aforementioned employees, and how having one billion dollars might just change your politics. All that and more coming up on Grubstakers. And also how the last few years of his have been one long extended heated gamer moment. On Grubstakers. and a union can't change that fact. I mean, it is the magic elixir of our age and of all ages. What it does for prostate cancer is amazing. You get a $200 million profit and you didn't have to pay any tax. Isn't that true?

Listen, it's... Is that true or not? Yes or no? It is. You do not pay a profit when someone... a tax when someone makes you sell assets. You become Secretary of Treasury so you didn't have to pay the tax there. Oh.

Try to again. In five, four, three, two. Hello, welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. I'm here. I'm joined by my friends. Yogi Poio. Andy Palmer.

Steve Jeffers. And this week, we are taking a look at Marcus Pearson. So he is the inventor of Minecraft, and this will be an episode about the richest man to wear a fedora on a regular basis. But yes, no, you might be familiar with, if you're an avid Twitter user, Notch's Twitter presence.

And it just kind of shows, I guess, what a billion dollars will do to you psychologically. Eight hours ago, at this moment of this recording, he tweeted out, sometimes I just want to grab people and shake them until I wake up. Not sure what that means, but a billionaire tweeted it. Let's make sure he doesn't listen to our last episode and know that he can just do that with zero repercussions. That tweet tells me he's moved on from weed to research chemicals from China. Let's make sure he doesn't listen to our last episode and know that he can just do that with zero repercussions.

That tweet tells me he's moved on from weed to research chemicals from China. He's in the drug discovery now. But so Marcus Pearson, however you pronounce it, basically, this is kind of an interesting case, because I guess when you talk about, say, the Koch brothers, essentially they got rich because their father got a bunch of money from Nazi Germany and then invested it in the United States. And then they basically just collected the rents from that money and gradually expanded throughout the energy sector. But they did very little actual work. Innovated and took over in philanthropy yes bootstraps they they did invent a political party that is uh creating a mass extinction event as as we speak but business is business what are you gonna do but they're laughing all the way to the bank sean but the point is the point that i'm getting at here is that like if you were to like tell me what they did creatively i don't think you could either

you know anything creative they did is actively destructive i would argue uh whereas when you're talking about notch i mean the guy did invent a game that's very popular i haven't played it but you know yogi andy i know you guys have played stevie ever played no okay so you know he invented a fun game that became he arguably taught taught Gen Z the N-word. Yeah, I think so. This is where PewDiePie got it from. But so, yeah, I mean, it's kind of an interesting episode because I guess kind of the open question here, and we can debate this,

is essentially how much does he deserve to be rewarded? Because he launches Minecraft. It's a game he invented himself. I guess he did copy elements of it from existing games, but he put enough in it that it was his. Wait, that game was made by only one person? The alpha version of Minecraft was... With those graphics?

That interface? No sound when he first launched it either that was added by other people but it was essentially like the the the short and dirty story is he launches the alpha in 2009 it becomes popular enough that he has to hire a team and then this team you know works on it pretty pretty much nonstop from like 2010 to 2014. He sells it to Microsoft and 90% of the money or even more than that goes to him. According to Forbes, he's worth about $1.6 billion net worth as of this moment. And so just kind of the question is, because he literally stopped working on Minecraft after November 2011 when they officially released,

you know, does, because he came up with the idea, does he deserve all that money if you just kind of walk away and let other people be your wage slaves and then say, oh, hey, you guys grew my product. Great. All the money's mine now. I'm going to say yes. Well, I don't know if 90% of 2.5 billion is 1.6,

but I see what you're saying. Right. Well, essentially the it was him and the two other founders who got percent of 2.5 billion is 1.6 but i see what you're saying right well essentially the uh it was him and the two other founders who got all the equity that was in uh the the company was called uh mojang mojang uh but so it was those three but that is a swedish for mojan oh really famous tile game swedish for the M word so basically the point here jeez oh my god that's PewDiePie

noted Minecraft enthusiasts they told me to get the PewDiePie N word drop and they told me not to get it what a fucking jeez oh my god. What the fuck? So we settled on a compromise where we just took out the N-word. What a fucking...

Jeez, oh my god. What the fuck? You remove the gunshots, though. That removes the context as to why PewDiePie is talking. What a fucking... Jeez, oh my god. What the fuck? This is the worst episode we've ever done.

There are some gunshots. What a fucking... Jeez, oh my god. What the fuck? You also move the part after where he apologizes to his sponsors. And then he immediately donated money to the NAACP. But anyway, so the point here is

essentially it's kind of an open question and I think Notch is a pretty fascinating character because he also answers the question is like, what if just like an average person gets a billion dollars? Like what kind of things happen to you psychologically? How do you behave? Like some of his Twitter stuff will go through. I think he doesn't love it.

Yeah. Well, he's clearly I guess like the other thing is he kind of fucked these people out of money. And then he complains on Twitter that like only one or two people said thank you to me and it's like yeah all right you fucking employed them but again you know in terms of like you stopped doing work for several years and then you just kind of collected all the rent that they'd built up on there but you know if uh if you are a um if you are a notch defender you will find a good home on reddit because i can tell you that every single thread about this will explain entrepreneurial risk to you and how these uh these salaried employees do you mean to imply

there are bootlickers on reddit these salaried employees are are just whiny babies who don't understand that the fucking creative destruction of geniuses like notch entitles them to, you know, all of the labor hours. Yes. Open invitation to all those Reddit commenters to, uh,

join me at the live stream on, uh, Tuesday, February 5th. When this episode drops, David Harvey will be, uh, talking through Marx's Capital Volume 1

Will Notch be there? I hope so I would drop everything for that Notch is going to be in my Capital Volume 1 seminar Okay now this is epic PewDiePie's here too

PewDiePie is escorted out five minutes into the lecture. Ah, the capitalist is like the vampire. The vampire that I created in the Minecraft at night. But yeah, so I mean... I became the capitalist by making the vampire. I don't know if Dr. Strangelove was going to be part of this. But yeah, so this is our Notch episode,

our Marcus Pearson episode. So this will is our notch episode our marcus pearson episode so this will be our first episode where we just read tweets for an hour and a half straight and comment or last yes but i guess just like uh so for those not familiar with the the actual video game minecraft uh according to business insider they got about 91 million monthly players as of late 2018 uh around 106 million copies of the game have been sold to date. It's incredibly addictive and it's been described as like kind of a building block game like you know Legos or whatever. It's essentially Notch and his team created a sandbox and then there's been infinite creativity put into that where like some guy built a two-scale replica of the starship enterprise

basically someone someone else built like a functioning computer within minecraft you know yeah it's it's it's basically this game where there's enough variance um where you can do a bunch of different things but at the same time it's so um it's it's it's got little enough detail that you can make fairly large things and somewhat complex things without having to really go into it and use a lot of CPU power. In some of the research for this episode, the best thing that I found were op-eds talking about how did Notch steal essentially Lego's computer game? Lego had the, and apparently Lego tried making a couple of games similar to this, but just didn't crack the code that Andy just said about how

if you keep the graphical capabilities low, you can make it in an open world that is not so hard on the CPUs. The other thing that was great was finding op-eds from parents that are mad. They're like, all my kid wants to do now is play Minecraft. I don't understand the blocks.

I will say, like, a couple years ago, I had this girlfriend, and I was visiting her, like, extended family. What happened to her, Andy? She's dead. She broke up with Andy after Andy had a heated gaming moment. It was against Pewdiepie she was like you never take out the trash and i was like what a fucking no she uh so like i was like oh fuck how am i gonna like get along with her um extended family because they're black is that what you thought that no then like uh she had like her cousin had like this 10 year old kid who was like super into minecraft and it turned out like it was really easy to like talk to him because that's all he wanted to talk about was minecraft

her family's like yeah ever since he got vaccinated he's been playing so much minecraft and that's that's all he talks about. We're not sure what happened. He keeps talking about sand is glass. I was sharing it with my co-hosts earlier, but so my theory on how the 21st century is going to play out is that PewDiePie will become dictator of Sweden and Notch will be his hidden dark money backer.

Yes, I like this. And then he will Twitch livestream Holocaust 2.0. Okay, now this is epic. We're rounding up the migrants. No one will ever deny this Holocaust. But so I guess we could just kind of go through the short biography of Notch, Marcus Pearson. And it's pretty bland bland to be honest with you

well i guess he's had a couple tragedies in his life but yeah you know he has a very stereotypical um affluent engineer upbringing where it's uh you know lonesome childhood to a certain degree um child of divorce um and his his sister was a drug addict later in life. He was born... Do you know what she was on or does it just say drug addict? It just says drug addict, but she's clean now. From like a New Yorker profile? Yeah, with the help of Notch's Billion, she was able to get clean. But his father also had alcohol issues and that's why his parents got divorced when he was a kid.

What if she was addicted to Minecraft? How has this cure-free drug addiction just been sitting out in the open? Get a billion dollars. Yeah, just have a brother with a billion dollars in that. A good chunk of why he spends so lavishly now is because he said he's making up time because of all the time he was working in his 20s. It's a pretty vanilla upbringing story when it comes to Notch

and how he became who he became. Yeah, you know, in his 20s when he couldn't afford the top shelf fedora and had to get them off rack used from the thrift store. Had to get one of those plastic New Year's fedoras. That's not my joke, but people have like speculated on Twitter that the fedora has taken over his brain. Because he is like walking around in like a trench coat and fedora and like this uh 2011 2010 documentary i watched on him uh the story of uh mahjong um and minecraft but so anyways the point

is uh the basic bio we just kind of went through he's born 1979 in stockholm sweden his mother's finnish his father is swedish uh he lives uh for like the first seven years in uh edsbyn which is born 1979 in Stockholm, Sweden. His mother's Finnish. His father's Swedish. He lives for the first seven years in Edsbyn, which is north Sweden. It's kind of isolated. It's dark and snowy a lot of the year. But after seven years he moves back to Stockholm and apparently

he starts programming around eight years old. He builds a text-based adventure game around then. His life kind of goes on like this until in 2005. You know, so he's like programming a lot. We've kind of mentioned he's an isolated, introverted kid. And in 2005, he gets a job with the game developer King. And he works at King from 2005 to 2009.

He works on a few games there. But it's there that he meets a guy named Jacob Posner who would go on to be his co-founder at the company but he's working at king 2005 to 2009 and he kind of steps away in 2009 to develop the alpha version of minecraft played by no alphas uh but so yeah i mean basically again uh this is like according to some people it's uh it's a partially a clone of a game called uh infin infiniminer uh which was a game uh released earlier in 2009 oh really so he like he kind of bases it on an existing game but he does add enough to to make it be considered its own game. Everything's stolen these days. And so the first alpha version of the game called Minecraft was released June 2009.

And this is like actually a significant enough success because he, Notch, sells it through his website. And he says, hey, this game's in progress, but you can like pay me a bit of money and you can play it while I'm making it. Right. You know? And he sells it through his website. And within the first month, he's actually making a healthy profit off of this. And within a month, he's able to actually take time off from his day job at the time. And within a year, by May 2010, he quits his day job.

And he's just doing Minecraft full time. And so basically, like May 2010, he quits his day job and he's just doing minecraft full-time and so basically like may 2010 he quits his day job he's doing minecraft full-time but by september 2010 the demand is so much that he has to form a company and get other people in on it with him right so you know like this kind of first period and again this is kind of the argument where this first period he has this game that he's built himself, partly based on existing code. But, you know, I mean, everybody is inspired or bases their ideas on something. No idea is original.

But what happens is he brings these other people in. He brings in his co-worker from King, Jacob Posner. He brings in a guy named Carl Manna. And these three of them are the co-founders of the company Mojang AB. And then they hire four employees. So essentially there's seven of them as of September 2010. And they kind of work their asses off

for about a year to release the initial finished version of Minecraft in November 2011. So again, you know, three founders, four salaried employees working around the clock and essentially the,

you know, it's one of those things where it's like a lot of companies where it's kind of like, hey, we don't need a management. We're all equal. It's egalitarian here. But once the actual money starts flowing in,

it's like mostly going to notch and the other two co-founders and then the other four get fucked yeah essentially um at this time in 2011 he marries his longtime girlfriend elin zetterstrand and then they get divorced uh essentially within months this is 2011 he's married he's divorced 2012 so yeah august 2011 to august 2012 yeah it's like a few days after their one-year anniversary and you're like you know there was like a fight on the anniversary yeah and then uh shortly after the divorce uh his father kills himself oh jesus yeah so i mean basically 2012 is the beginning of the end of like a decent to notch that's not bland at all i mean i guess it's not

that bland it's not it's not epstein you know uh billionaire power circles are jerking off one another juicy but i mean in 2012 between a divorce his father's death he kind of i think at that point says fuck everything to a certain during the time that he was engaged did he say that their marriage was an alpha version you can pay some money to to comment on it as they're moving towards the final product

but yeah so that's weird so his father kills himself in 2012 which is interesting because I mean last words were what a fucking but seriously mental health is a serious issue and uh if you're having any trouble seek someone out to to talk to and get help that's so weird so yeah like and so again this timeline here is by january 2011 again we mentioned you know notch is doing this game by himself for almost a year, but it gets to be so much demand that he hires this team in September 2010.

He starts this company. And by January 2011, there were 1 million registered accounts on this game, just after he founds the company. Then within six months, there's 10 million more. So it starts growing really exponentially so one thing i want to mention is that because the early version of minecraft was primarily made by uh one person if not a few people the way to play minecraft was extremely convoluted there were no instructions there wasn't a guidebook obviously because there wasn't an end

at that time so and it was a very complicated game uh walk up to dirt hit dirt walk up to tree hit tree yeah but i mean like you know making stuff like you know redstone repeaters and stuff that all that stuff was uh you had to figure out but even the you can hit a tree to get its wood and then how to organize said wood to make items which is a feature of the game weren weren't told to people. So I think some of the folklore of Minecraft early on was that, hey, there's this game. We don't know how it ends. We don't really know what's going on.

But we know this much. And I think that as video game enthusiasts, we love a mystery and it's a lot rarer now to be able to get your hands on something where you're like we don't know how this works well so that's interesting and i mean again just kind of going back to this because we mentioned so uh january 2011 they got a million registered users six months later they got about 10 million and throughout this entire time, Minecraft is in alpha or beta. And then they're moving up to November 2011 is when they officially launched the game. And they say, this is a finished game now. We're selling this.

And what happens on November 2011 is almost immediately... It's ready for betas. Almost immediately, Notch steps aside. He passes off to one of the first four hires they made, a guy named Jans Bergenstern. Every 10-year-old who in 10 years will be posting on the RN cell forum downloads it. You know what's better than 10 million blocks?

100 million blocks. But so regardless like essentially uh just after this official launch in november 2011 notch passes the lead developer role to yon's uh bergenston or jen's bergenston i don't know how to pronounce it yeah yon's but so the the important thing is notch stops working on the game at this point. November 2011, it'll be sold to Microsoft in 2014. And according to a couple people, actually Yogi just mentioned the Redstone repeaters. Apparently this guy Jans invented the Redstone repeaters.

It wasn't part of the original game, and so much of the depth and complexity that allows you to build a computer in Minecraft requires these repeaters. Wait, what's the repeater? Can you explain? so much of the depth and complexity that allows you to like build a computer in minecraft requires these repeaters wait what's the reds what's the repeater uh can you explain so essentially you know i haven't gotten this far by the way yes um basically there's a product in the game called redstone and you can use it as a electronic circuit essentially so if you want to do something like you know an automatic opening door or like a bridge to a certain degree you would use a redstone repeater

to activate said you know like uh not pneumatic but uh to make shit move without you having to physically move it you would need to build a program within the game and to do that you'd use redstone dust in a trail like an electronic circuit to uh make something work essentially no it's around the time that they decided um as a game manufacturer to not have the water make any sense in terms of direction and manipulation i think i don't know i mean like that's the thing about minecraft that's kind of great is that it's a consistently broken and working game and because of its uh low graphic uh i'm just saying i'm trying to make a pool and there's a waterfall in the middle of it like how he changed all the water uh to make it not drown people after his father's suicide

i mean maybe like the timeline does add up um but like so various improvements of the game could only happen with a team of people this thing the the redstone repeater thing that jan's probably put in yeah i don't think that's not an easy ad i don't think one person can make something like that happen um but also with more users comes more server space and something like the redstone repeater i'm sure kind of falls easily within um the kind of rhetoric at the time. I guess you would say like the Obama era rhetoric of like learn to code. And so like I remember around this time when like Minecraft was at its peak, there were articles all over the place that were like,

Minecraft is teaching children to code. And Redstone Repeater just kind of fit within that narrative that I think really gave it a lot of free PR. But it's also coders making this game. I mean, like, you know, they want to figure out... Well, every game. Fair. Yeah, it...

All right. It is people that love video games adding the concept of being able to make a video game within the video game. Like, it's not necessarily meta, but it is certainly what a video gamer would do. There were really probably some nine-year-old Minecraft players screaming at us as we attempted to explain Red Star.

If we have nine-year-old fans, turn the show off. Go play Minecraft. Yeah, there's an explicit badge on iTunes for a reason. When I was trying to do the research for this episode, we saw in the documentary, some guy built a computer with Minecraft, and I'm like, oh, I'll just say that, and then if anyone asks me to explain it, I will freeze.

Yo, you think that bad? Look up Minecraft VidCon clips. It's literally the most awkward, anxiety-ridden kids asking the adult versions of themselves questions that neither people know the answers to whether it's technical and like hey why

doesn't your game work on my computer when I have steam and salt to like one kid asked how many people of the Mojang team have autism like the panel just goes we're gonna refuse to answer that question and it's kind of heartbreaking because in your head at one point part of me was like well maybe that kid has autism and wants to like have like an identifying moment of like hey we can you know create uh video games and stuff and at the same time i can completely see that panel being like we need to shut this shit down yeah immediately that's pretty adorable though yeah i don though. I actually asked Sean to explain the computer, and he said,

What a fucking... Jeez, oh my god. What the fuck? I feel like our choice of using one drop per episode is a real gambit in this one. Sure. But yeah, so I mean, it is just kind of interesting. Again, like, you know,

there's no actual logical explanation for depression, but essentially Notch's father kills himself at the height of Notch's success. Yet in the article... Retire at the top. Apparently Notch's dad, previous to his suicide, was very supportive of Notch's video game prowess. And he wanted to be isolated. I mean, he was an alcoholic growing up.

And I think that was one of the reasons why they moved to... Notch's dad was? And that's why they moved to Stockholm after the divorce, I believe. But, you know, I think that the most harrowing thing about having a parent kill yourself is knowing that you have that in you. And so a good chunk of the way of how notch blows his cash now is very like we're all gonna go do this crazy thing like he bought um he also blames himself to a degree if he's not i think so yeah oh yeah i mean that he bought the uh beyonce the house that beyonce and jay-z were bidding for for 70 million dollars And it's just a gigantic mansion.

But it's like, a guy like Notch wouldn't think he needs that unless he's like, I need to throw parties constantly to not want to kill myself. He's definitely the first poster billionaire. T-Boone Pickens was on like Twitter for a minute. This fucking venomous...

Is that Cory Booker's friend? This venomous corporate raider t-bone pickens was like this uh uh he's still alive corporate raider energy guy and uh he's billionaire and he was on twitter and a few years back everybody was celebrating because he like clapped back at drake because drake tweeted like uh it's there's nothing like making that first million T Boone Pickens tweeted back yeah except for making the first billion and that was back before there was any clash

consciousness in American Twitter Drake claps back I don't need a billion dollars to be a pedophile tricks out any billion dollars to be a deadbeat dead but so you know it's so fucked up when I a file. Drake said, I don't need a billion dollars to be a deadbeat dad. You know what's so fucked up? I hate

Drake unequivocally just from day one, but when I found out that he was a deadbeat dad, I was like, well, he's got some flaws. What are you going to do? Nobody's perfect. That's how warped my mind is. Drake back, you know, Hotline Bling even before they did Gracia, I was like, fuck this guy. Oh, it turns out he, like,

has a kid that he doesn't care about. Yeah, I find that less offensive than his music. He just assumed his ghostwriters were taking care of the letters to his kid. Yo, I need two verses, and I need a birthday card. Like, when it comes to the letter of his

kid, like, it's like, write a word, get a third. He gets a third of the credit to the letter of his kid like that it's like write a word get a third like he gets a third of the credit for the letter uh so but but as we were mentioning here in march 2012 uh minecraft has sold about five million copies by november 2012 uh mojang mojang mojang god damn it it has five it has 25 employees by November 2012. This is from the original seven employees. So it's like a humming little studio. And again, at this point, Notch is working on other games within Mojang, but he's not actually there working on Minecraft anymore.

With increased... by the way i was totally bullshitting when i said it meant mahjong mojang it's mojang uh with more people playing the game you have more people complaining about said game and i think one of the reasons why notch originally tweeted his uh plea to sell his share of the company was just being tired of people saying the thing you made suck right yeah because i mean it is a lot of pressure once you have like all those people and we mentioned like it grows exponentially and that is entirely because of the community and again this is kind of the genius of a sandbox game is that people build all this cool shit in minecraft and then they put it up on say youtube or whatever and other people see it

and they're like oh shit i should play play Minecraft you know so it grows very exponentially very quickly so that's also the issue with why I think there were so many complaints because since it's an open world game that you know feasibly has no end on the original PC version the Xbox version has sides in on it even though they've increased that since the original Xbox version. You have people building gigantic objects in Minecraft, and to house the amount of people just in a server space for that alone must have been a minefield for the Minecraft people. A whole bunch of mines there.

And I think that that's part of the reason why they weren't ready to deal with the amount of people that were playing it. Because they didn't expect the growth that they got. And to have people building city-worth escape things every day, every hour. I mean, it's just too much. It's so big. But so, according to one article, Notch makes about $101 million off licensing alone in in 2012 so he's making a lot of fucking

money and again he he walks away from minecraft because of the stress you know he wants to like build little bullshit games and like focus on things that are fun for him this is a huge growing community he's tired from building a little bullshit game he wants to build other little bullshit games exactly and there's like a huge community a lot of pressure millions of players so he's within the company uh as one of the original co-founders the guy who owns the majority of the company but he's working on other projects whereas minecraft remains the cash cow as we just mentioned there's hundreds some million in licensing in 2012 right um and it kind of goes on like that for a couple years with him not working on Minecraft, but then in September of 2014, they sell to Microsoft.

Again, this deal is about $2.5 billion is what Microsoft buys it for. About $1.7 billion of that goes directly to Notch himself. And I just wanted to quote a little bit from the book, The Unlikely Tale of Marcus Notch Pearson and the Game That Changed Everything, second edition. But they kind of updated it just to talk a bit about what happened when this sale went through. And- What did it say in the first edition?

I don't believe they'd sold yet to Microsoft at the first edition. But Jans Bergensten is brought into the office by one of the other co-founders, Carl Manna, the CEO. We should wait for the third edition. And he's basically told, we're going to sell to Microsoft, so you have to get the code together. Don't tell anybody, but we have to show them the code and this kind of stuff.

And I just want to kind of quote a little bit from here. Because they feared an exorcist, everyone at Mojang was made the same offer. Whoever stayed on board for at least six months after the sale would be rewarded with uh about two million swedish crowns which is about 300 000 us dollars after taxes um at the time uh yawns was not alone in being dissatisfied with his paycheck from mojang in fact a shared feeling had for some time been spreading amongst the staff

that they were not really seeing their fair share of minecraft's astounding success sure mojang employees received more perks than most the regular trips that were arranged for employees would have made most people jealous and yet some couldn't shake the feeling that their hard work mainly benefited marcus jacob and carl the three co-founders the three founders were yet to make anyone else a shareholder in the company not even those who had been with mojang from the start this meant that the massive profits generated by minecraft still went straight into their pockets even though marcus himself hadn't done any actual work on minecraft for over two years now according to one anonymous mojang employee quote mine

management has been really good at keeping wages down instead we've been told that mojang is a nice place to work that we get free trips to, we've been told that Mojang is a nice place to work, that we get free trips to the Game Developers Conference, and that we all receive a Christmas bonus. He said that during summer 2014. So, you know. Yeah, I mean, he certainly gives them treats, but he doesn't pay them their wage.

What a piece of shit. Yeah. Now, one thing that was interesting, and Yogi and I had a little debate about this before we started recording, was the $2.5 billion figure. Because I don't think that as a straight game, Minecraft is worth $2.5 billion. Or at least it's not going to recoup that in direct profits. And one thing that I started to suspect because Sean directed me to this book, Surveillance Capitalism, written by a woman by the name of Shoshana Zuboff.

And in that, she talks about how Microsoft, around the time of 2014, actually, when they switched CEOs from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella, Microsoft also kind of switched its focus from, you know, what it had always done, which was kind of selling Office to larger companies. Being a monopoly. Being a monopoly that sells Office products to offices and then also has Windows for people who want to shit a computer. But the new kind of direction that Microsoft is going in is sort of the Google and Facebook direction, which is the direction of surveillance capitalism. where basically you gather as much data from users of your devices as you can and then apply behavioral techniques in ways where you can both predict people's actions and then eventually try to shape them. By the way, be sure to subscribe to our Patreon as soon as it's up. Yeah, we're going to go into this. I also got the book Lean In, so that's going to be exciting. But essentially, one of the things of note in this book is that Pokemon Go, when it came out,

it was basically the idea was to test a bunch of surveillance capitalism principles, where they used Pokemon, which is really popular just to basically be able to gather as much data about um out of people's phones as they could just pull like their location data um see if they could manipulate people into going into businesses by putting rare pokemon there it was essentially a massive like social experiment in uh tracking and manipulating people's behavior and so what I'm starting to suspect is that Microsoft, under their new CEO, Nadella, he's talked about how he is trying to shift Microsoft

into focusing on systems of intelligence and basically going the Google and Facebook route of using behavioral analytics to kind of track human behavior, sort of create models of it, and then ultimately manipulate it to bring in profits. And so it seems like with the Minecraft acquisition, paying $2.5 billion isn't just for paying for the game and, say, the dedicated players on it. But I think also because Minecraft has a lot of just raw behavioral data, because it's this open sandbox game, because there's so many kids using it, you can harvest a lot of data for that. And also, the guy from Watergate was on the grassy knoll. Yeah, I think everything Andy said is wrong.

So Xbox currently has 57 million Xbox Live users. And I believe the, I think we looked up the population of people playing Minecraft was like 97 million a moment ago. 91 million. 91 million. So you have more people playing Minecraft than Xbox Live users, period. And so getting a hold on that market is important, not paramount. The other reason I think that Microsoft decided to buy Minecraft is because Mojang is an international company,

the overseas cash pile, based on current tax laws, Microsoft's overseas cash can't be brought back into the U.S. without a hefty hit. So essentially, they just need to make more money on it than they would interest in the bank to have it be a better profitable deal and that number is 25 million dollars a year and that my ladies and gentlemen is why microsoft bought moshing none of the shit andy just said i just was thinking about how like because pokemon go was a huge surveillance project, that Hillary Clinton-lined Pokemon Go polls were actually much more sinister than we all thought.

She was trying to collect our data. No, what Andy said is correct, though. I think that later on, Microsoft will definitely use Minecraft users' information. You have to imagine they're going to try to collect information from this user base in various ways that Mojang might not have done. When I play

Seahawks and Madden on my Xbox against the team we're going to play that week, we usually win because Xbox Live looks at the Madden Seahawks information and then tells it to Pete Carroll directly. Obviously, guys. That's how. And when I don't play Madden on games when Seahawks have to play, we lose. So put. Obviously, guys. That's how. And when I don't play Madden on games

when Seahawks have to play, we lose. So put me in, coach. Alright? I do just want one more excerpt from this book here. Can you play a game with the Mariners? I mean, MLB, the show. Do one more quick thing from this book. The day before

Notch leaves, he puts in his last day of work. This is right after the sale to Microsoft. Several others were in the office as he stood up to leave. He hesitated, not sure how to say goodbye, so he decided not to. He made his way past the desks outside

where his employees sat working, past the shelves stacked with awards and prizes. He took a left out the door, went down through a small stairwell, and stepped out of the building. The cold November air stung his cheeks as the door closed behind him. To be fair, that's how he always leaves anywhere.

I guess I was sure that they stung his cheeks. Did he report that? Right, right. Did he put that somewhere? I mean, he has a beard, right? They can't have stung his cheeks that bad. Look, they gotta put their English degree to some use okay expository writing is important but yes now it's uh you know i will say um irish good buying your employees after you fuck them out of money pretty relatable but so this is kind of like and the thing is like the other thing is for some

employees yeah it's like what's he gonna do likeassed, like, hey, it was great working with you. Like right after he stabbed them all in the back. Right. Get him $30 gift baskets. Like, come on. Come on, not. You know, you can give me a $50 gift basket. Give him one with oils in it.

Yeah, and I mean, it is something where a lot of people who worked for Mojang, you know, obviously they would prefer, excuse me, a lot of people who were employees there would have preferred to work for a small studio as opposed to fucking Microsoft because once you are working for one of these behemoths, you know, you are a cog in the machine. I know nothing about that. Everybody

docks Andy. He'll be happier if you get him fired. I was referring to a past job, not one that i'm happy with oh well they've already doxed you so sorry about that but but the the point here is like essentially like if you're like an employee with no uh a stake you know like at least if you like feel like you're part of something cool as opposed to being a part of Microsoft where you're just, again, cog in the machine, you know, that's worth more than... Excel.

Pretty cool. Access 2013. That's fucking awesome. Yeah. I will say... Flight simulator? What do you know about that, Sean? I am enjoying the view of the Manhattan skyline that Excel has provided for us right now.

But the point was essentially like uh and this has been written about an episode on index match versus pivot versus vlookup sometimes i think it was so sad how like before the deal all the mojang employees were just vendors for microsoft and so they had v-dash email and microsoft employees just called them v-dash trash yeah i mean obviously until they joined they were V-Trash. I can't wait until we do our Bill Gates episode and we have to admit that he's a good billionaire because of the audio quality of this podcast. Yogi got some Microsoft money.

Technically, we all do when you think about it. So the point is, oh yeah, the point here was essentially like this has been written about when microsoft came in and bought up uh mojang they had other games in the pipeline obviously they weren't as like wildly successful as minecraft but there were other projects that people were working on there and microsoft was like now fuck all of that yeah and basically just trash canned every other game and you know said hey we're doing minecraft you know and now they're currently in development there's like a minecraft

dungeon game right now is in development they're also um developing a or they also bought uh basically an equivalent of google glass like wearable um augmented reality technology similar to how also facebook bought oracle and oculus oculus yeah and all these companies um basically the ones again in the surveillance capitalism they're trying to get into this game of like presenting augmented reality to their customers and in microsoft's case it's um they very explicitly talk about how like oh yeah with uh once we had this uh augmented reality technology like we had this uh augmented reality technology like we had to buy minecraft because now it feels like you're in minecraft you can build blocks in your house and which you know that's not worth 2.5 billion dollars but uh like clearly getting

people used uh to that technology especially young people used to that technology so that they just see it as like a natural part of their day-to-day life makes it more likely that then they will take that technology out into the world where then, you know, their every movement and... It's going to be so addictive. You know what they're going to call it? Blockchain. Oh, shit. I will say as much as palatable as Notch is as a billionaire,

just like Oprah, he did validate and encourage the rise of youtube live streamers such as pewdiepie and ninja and alike with their minecraft less plays so the world that's been emboldened due to minecraft is horrendous the fact that pewdiepie has the amount of money he does think about that that, ladies and gentlemen. Just think about it. Well, yes. I mean, he's essentially built an entire economy of streamers. He has created a lot of

middle-class jobs. I will give him that. People play his fucking game, and millions of people watch. He got Patton Oswalt to pay out on the Netflix Minecraft movie. that's a choose your own adventure that was like a testing bed for Bandersnatch that's probably his greatest crime PewDiePie is a worker it's a wage slave that's why Patton Oswalt looks like that he looks like a

16-bit Minecraft character I wanted to get to what Notch does after he sells the company. Because, again, his share is about $1.7 billion. He says that he pays out some of the employees. And he gets a little bitter about this. And I want to read. It's interesting also if you look up the press accounts of Notch. As of, like, 2014 and 2015, there's, like, a lot of sympathy for him. But he kind of goes, like, all the way on, I guess,

either the trolling or maybe he is actually a fascist. He goes all the way to the alt-right? Yes. Civic nationalist, whatever you want to call it. I assume that there's probably a great deal of disappointment after you purchase the world's most powerful masturbation machine and it's not as good as you thought. Not better than your ex-wife yeah what's the point of having this if i can't share it with my father

the point is uh so this is just kind of a tweet stream from August 29, 2015. This is Notch writing on Twitter. The problem with getting everything is you run out of reasons to keep trying, and human interaction becomes impossible due to imbalance. Hanging out in Ibiza with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people. Able to do whatever I want, and I've never felt more isolated. In Sweden, I will sit around and wait for my friends with jobs and families to have time to do shit, watching my reflection in the monitor. When we sold

the company, the biggest effort went into making sure the employees got taken care of. And they all hate me now. Found a great girl. It sounds like a billion dollars turned him into a bird, just sitting around staring at his own reflection. And so the other thing is

seems like he's kind of useless uh the other the the follow-up in this thread is so uh he says i made the greatest effort to take care of the employees and they all thank me now and somebody replies to it who knows them like what are who are you are you did you steal notch's account and notch goes like three people thanked me for the two million kroner after tax bonus I gave them for my own private money. Others said I was cheap. And again, this is about 300,000 US dollars. Right.

Which, I mean, he gave them- Drop in the bucket. He gave them more than zero, but you walk away with 1.7 billion dollars on a game you haven't worked on for two years that you're basically just collecting rent on while people add vital features that make the game keep selling, you know?

You don't get it. He had the brilliant insight that kids like building things out of blocks. And it's like, the other thing is the entitlement. He says, only three people thanked me. These are your employees. They fucking built your game and your company that gives you this fuck you money. And again,

we can argue about how much every person is entitled to, how much is the original idea worked, but in my head, if you're walking away with $1.7 billion, which is more than any one single person, and this is a single person, not married, no kids, can spend...

can spend, then you should at least give your initial employees enough that they don't have to work again, especially that they don't have to be ground down by Microsoft. You know, $300,000 is a significant amount of money, but you're not going to be able to retire with that. And then also Notch will blow like $100,000 in a night partying as well. So it's not like he's giving them three hundred grand and then is saving every penny. He also

is spending money out the ass and is cheap with his former employees. He couldn't spend that money in a hundred lifetimes. Partying is an interesting word because it sounds from what I've heard about Notch in this episode, it sounds more like he's ruining parties.

No, people love it when the guy in a fedora and trench coat shows up at the yacht docked off Ibiza. And starts talking about cultural leaders from the dominance of Western culture. Yeah, he's never felt more alone at this party in Ibiza because nobody will talk to this guy in a fucking fedora and trench coat. That must be so aggravating, though, to go from being a well-respected game developer to just the rich guy no one wants to talk to at parties.

Yeah. Did he come up with the idea for the minecarts? I don't know. I'm not sure. No, I think that came later. Okay. Yeah, no, he didn't earn it. Yeah.

But so, and just like one other thing from this thread. You can make your own roller coasters. And it can be automatic with a redstone repeater. One of his employees, former employees, Patrick Guder, tweet replies to him. So he said, like, three people thanked me for the $300,000 he gave them. And Patrick says, that seems way too few of us to me. I mostly hated you for leaving, but that was only during the shock.

You know that. And then, of course, this is a guy who had his job thrown to fucking Microsoft after he was, like, working for a cool independent company and so notch tweets back and he goes i do not know that nobody reached out and said it was just the initial shock so fuck all of you fuck you so hard and again this is like he's saying fuck these and of course you know moment of emotion whatever but he's he's saying like yeah he did gaming developer moment fuck you people for not thanking me enough for my exploitation of your labor you know i don't get it i just made you work for goliath why are you mad at me david um and then like you know and with the time we have left here we can just go through some of

uh not just tweets because it is like you know this 2015 is like, you know, with the time we have left here, we can just go through some of Notch's tweets. Because it is, like, you know, this 2015 is, like... Well, you tweet this very interesting thing in 2017 that I think we should talk about. What a fucking... Jeez, oh, my God. What the fuck? That was Notch, 2000. There was also this from 2016.

What a fucking... Jeez, oh, my my god what the fuck so Notch also in 2017 he tweeted Pizzagate is real and I was thinking about that like we talked about it on the Matt episode like it would just take a random guy

with a billion dollars to investigate it so Notch could actually investigate it i don't think that the billionaires other billionaires would trust him like there's still got to be a baseline level of trust like maybe you can like who do you think are the other celebrities in abiza that's why no one will talk to that's why no one will talk to yeah of course i think that they just like right before he shows up they're like all right no one tell him about the back door what does does Notch know? I'm just imagining Notch at like one of those eyes wide shut parties with a mask and everybody can see the fedora on his head.

Don't tell him about the children. He's got the eyes wide shut mask and the fucking trench coat just every time he walks into an orgy room they're like oh wow let's go check out the hors d'oeuvres that's what happened at abiza they made him leave the eyes wide shut party because his trench coat hadn't been washed for several months they just put him in another room and it's just got like a console and minecraft was like hey we made this room specifically for you man just check it out uh so it's just kind of like going the password is creeper

i'm just glad in like you know this decade we got to see what would happen if you gave uh eric or dylan clebold and eric harris a billion dollars uh so just like really i think 2017 is when notch kind of like i don't maybe he's trolling like he explained it on reddit like i realized i'd fuck you money and then a lot of people started encouraging me privately when i would lash out at people on twitter and say you're speaking for all of us right it's like no i think they're winding you up buddy i think but so you know maybe he's trolling maybe he's actually a civic nationalist or whatever the fuck but just like kind of to go through some of this june 2017 he tweets quote

i think it's just a lonely guy who craves validation. I think they're all kind of like that. Yeah. But like the other ones, at least, they've been a billionaire long enough that they know not to interact with the masses. I meant the nationalists. But yeah, even still, though, I mean, like, you know, at the end of the day,

if you have enough time, you will become a monster. Yeah. It will happen. So Notch says, just like the four of us that's right with this show notch says uh june 2017 we are not monsters i took out the n word once we launch the patreon we will all step aside and let other people be lead developers but we will maintain ownership yeah we'll have four employees it's like four new mics and we stop uh four new hosts of the podcast right right we're not even hosting we're collecting rents from

it i know it's so hard but uh well your contract said that you uh would be willing to work up to 80 hours a week and i know that we said that when you signed that that you know it's very rare that that would happen but you know and i hate to do this i hated this you hate to do, it's very rare that that would happen. But, you know, and I hate to do this. I hate to do this. You hate to do this. It's really awkward. But it does say in the contract, 80 hours. Don't share our plans. We're tweeting out from the official Grubstickers account. None of our employees thanked us for their $20 Starbucks gift cards. Fuck all of you so hard.

We're rounding out. We should be finished momentarily. I just wanted to give a shout out to our listeners. We are at a year of this podcast. Thank you very much to all of our listeners and friends and fans. Your support has been appreciated.

If you like what we do, please do the algorithmic thing and say that we're bad or good on the internet preferably good I mean you can talk shit about talk shit about Sean Andy not do enough drops and Sean how attractive Stephen Jeffries is

are you really going to say I don't do enough drops after this episode yes you did what no no two drops if that oh my god what the fuck you did the same drop like less than ten times No, no. You did two drops, if that. Oh, my God. What the fuck? You did the same drop, like, less than ten times? What happened to our classics?

It's true. All of the classics are gone. But I guess, like, we can kind of round out this episode by, for the one-year anniversary, we will finally talk about Gamergate on this podcast. Because that's what you get to with the Notch podcast. But so just like a couple highlights. In June 2017, he tweets, quote,

if you're against the concept of a hashtag heterosexual pride day, you're a complete fucking cunt and you deserve to be shot. He would later backtrack and delete that one. He was mad that he used the F word but not the C word. Yes. But he was speaking British English, so it's not as offensive. Also, similarly, when he called the woman at the center of Gamergate Zoe Quinn a cunt, he was being British English.

Yes. But so basically I, I think she, she tweeted something about like, uh, not forgiving, uh, uh, developers who kind of like egged on harassment and gamers gate and notched,

uh, called her. Notch just had a grudge because his dad had a bad time with depression quest. So, uh, so the, the point point was oh yeah so notch tweets at her something about you know fucking cunt or something but then later she like she quote tweets it and then he says oh i didn't know it was you you know zoe quinn and then he says quote stop changing your name I had no idea it was you act

like a cunt and get called a cunt and that was on May 21st 2016 I mean megalomania certainly comes in during the billion dollar acquisition this is the real reason you don't tell people to learn to code so and then

just like going on if you don't want to be called the c word don't get in the coding business in uh november 2017 he tweets it's okay to be white which is kind of like a 4chan meme to like uh you know uh what this guy's on 4chan yes uh he is on 4chan and um i am shocked he also tweets recently like he took the hashtag uh when trump opens his mouth and he tweeted winning occurs you know and again it's like maybe he's trolling maybe he's actually a trump supporter i don't know but i did just want to highlight one last classic from december 2018 uh and so somebody tweets at notchch, do you love Jews? Question mark.

And his response to this, December 2018, if we were allowed to discuss IQ differences between populations, if we were allowed to discuss IQ differences between populations, there'd be fewer conspiracy theories. And then this gets a bit of a reaction. And then somebody tweets and reply to it be careful of what you say or triple parentheses they will silence you and notch replies then i am already silenced then i already am silenced you gotta bet that like his dms are just full of like pr people just salivating at the opportunity to say i fixed notch but yeah i mean and so i guess um that's kind of the story of of notch we will see you know uh when he uh officially becomes a member of the

Swedish Democrats and launches the campaign to make Sweden great again. How far he takes this. Parents, don't let your babies grow up to be coders. We're going to make Minecraft great again people.

We're going to take it back from Microsoft. But so, I guess just to close out this episode i would like to read one more notch tweet from uh 2016 december and this is speaking of his own employees he says quote if you want to create a bunch of entitled people treat them right for a long time and uh that's how we feel about you the listeners You might have thought this episode was all over the place. It was a bit of a letdown from the high of the Epstein episode. But you know what? We've been treating you right for a year. And this is how you create a bunch of entitled people.

And this is also, we mentioned he has this meltdown. Tell him, Sean. Notch has this meltdown in August 2015. Like, you know, oh, fuck all my employees for not saying thank you for like this fucking scraps of all the labor I stole from them. He comes back a year later, December 2016,

having time to reflect on it and says, if you want to create a bunch of entitled people, treat them right for a long time. But anyways, unsurprisingly... So take that, listeners who have only been nice to us the whole time we've been doing this.

Unsurprisingly, a weird thing happens when you achieve a billion dollars that you start to hoard for yourself. You start to flirt with fascist political ideology. For some reason, you start acting

in your own economic self-interest and with that this has been Grubstickers I'm Yogi Pollywall I'm Andy Palmer Steve Yevers I'm Sean P. McCarthy

thanks for listening we'll be back next week speculation time Lily Pons Liza Koji David Dobrik Yudeling Kid Late Night Show Hosts some political bullshit David Dobrik Youdlink kid late-night show hosts

Some political bullshit. So rolling not a stop watch shit don't never stop How much money do you have I would say I'm being humble, but I actually don't know. I would just like to ask how many of you have autism and if so, has it helped you in your modern career? career. That's a very personal thing to ask. I think we're going to refuse that question. I'm afraid we're going to pass on that one. Sorry. Hey guys, it's Ebers here with another Minecraft video.

I'm going to be showing you how to make an infinite loop with redstone repeaters. Okay, so let's go. As you can see, this is an infinite loop. It never stops. Redstone keeps emitting energy. So, if I put a piston here, it would go constantly like this. So, I'm going to be showing you how to make it right now. So what you want to do is have forward.