Think Like A Game Designer - Ryan Scott Dancey — From Fake Mail Order to Legend of the Five Rings, the Power of Self-Belief, and the Future of AI (#109)

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

About Ryan S. DanceyRyan S. Dancey is an absolute titan of the gaming industry whose strategic vision has fundamentally shaped the modern tabletop and digital landscapes. Ryan co-created Legend of the Five Rings, published the 3rd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and spearheaded the creation of the revolutionary Open Gaming License (OGL) alongside an elite team at Wizards of the Coast—a move that forever altered the trajectory of role-playing games. His entrepreneurial journey spans from bootstrapping a "fake" mail-order company that accidentally became real, to orchestrating Wizards’ historic acquisition of TSR, to living in Reykjavik as CMO for CCP Games working on EVE Online, and serving a decade as Chief Operating Officer at AEG (publisher of the Spiel des Jahres winner Cascadia). Today, Ryan serves as President of Wide Pacific Horizon, a strategic consulting and content creation firm based in Everett, Washington. In this episode, we unpack the wild dawn of the '90s TCG boom, the mechanics of collectible economies, what it takes to pull off industry-defining business deals, and a deeply honest, transparent conversation about the reality of AI and the future of creative work.Connect with Ryan:* Website: widepacifichorizon.com* LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rsdancey* BlueSky: @ryandancey.comAh-ha! Justin’s Takeaways* The Fine Line Between Self-Belief and Arrogance: To be a successful entrepreneur, you have to possess an almost irrational confidence in your ability to figure things out. When you are young or broke, you take wild leaps because you truly believe you will survive the fall. Look, you don’t need to have every answer on day one, but having the intrinsic belief that you can pivot, adapt, and learn on the fly is what separates dreamers from builders.* The Math and Mechanics of TCG Booms: Trading card games are powered by an irresistibly addictive loop of intermittent positive reinforcement and a healthy, long-term TCG ecosystem requires a delicate balance across three distinct groups: competitive players, casual collectors, and serious collectors/investors. If your game tilts too heavily toward speculation without a solid player base, the bubble will inevitably burst when investors run out of buyers.* Practice with AI : We are living through a civilizational inflection point right now with machine learning. While the origins of these models come with thorny ethical questions, hiding your head in the sand will only leave you behind. These tools are democratizing production, allowing single creators to execute projects that used to require entire studios. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I speak with world-class game designers and creative pioneers across multiple industries. Each episode takes you on a deep dive into the creative process, exploring the nuances of game design and the extensive cultural, technological, and business factors influencing various creative fields. Tune in for practical tips and inspiring insights that will expand your creative perspective, whether it's inside the gaming realm or beyond.

In today's episode, I speak with Ryan Dancy. Ryan is a serial entrepreneur who's worked in high-tech, tabletop, and digital gaming. He co-created Legend of the Five Rings, published the third edition of Dodgers of Dragons and created the Open Gaming License with his team at Wizards of the Coast. He's lived in Reychjavik, Iceland, a CMO for the CCP working on EEO online. He created Pathfinder Online, and he served for 10 years as a chief operating officer of AegeG. after recently being let go because of some controversial statements he made about artificial intelligence. And we get into all of it in this podcast. We learn Ryan's origin story about making a fake mail order

company buying Dungeons and Dragons campaign materials that ended up turning into a real business. We learn about his origin story with John Zinzer and the start of L5R. We talk about how he was able to orchestrate the sale of TSR, the creator of Dungeons of Dragons to Wizards of the Coast. and change the entire fate of the role-playing game industry. We talk about the rise of the TCG space in the 90s and what that looked like and how that compares to the modern recent boom of trading card games and what technologies might impact that and how that is likely to go. He gives his predictions on all these fronts.

We talk about what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur and the fine line between self-belief and arrogance. And yes, we get into AI. The back half of this episode is all about the impacts of AI. the ethical and unethical origin stories of AI, how you can practically use it in your business today, what the world is going to look like hopefully in the far future, what the world is likely to look like over the next one to three years. And Ryan has a lot of great insights here. As many of you know, I've been trying to bring insights about AI to you along with all of the

design and creative material that I put in this podcast and I do this because I think it's important. The world is changing every single week. And if we are not prepared for it, then we are going to get overtaken by that technology. If you are prepared for it, I do still believe we are living in the golden age of AI. I wrote an article about this on my substack, which you could check out. But I do think right now, the creative work that is possible is greater than ever before. And there's a lot of opportunity out there for those of you who have been dreaming about making something happen.

You can now have the tools to do so. A lot of people who have joined recently joined my Think Like a Game Designer Design Lab. Several of them are working in industries that have been transformed. They're using them to create things that I never would have recommended. people making three or four years ago. So there's a lot of really practical stuff to dig into here. There's a lot of great history that's transformed the tabletop game industry. And there's a lot about the future of where we're headed. So without any further ado, here is Ryan Dancy. Hello and welcome. I am here with Ryan Dancy. Ryan, it's great to have you here, man.

Oh, it's awesome to be here too. Yeah, so there's so many things I want to talk about with you. You're a unique mind in the gaming space. I love the way that you analyze things and break them down. You are not afraid to say what is on your mind. And you've broken a lot of boundaries throughout the career that have changed the way gaming, frankly, exists today. I mean, your legacy is pretty amazing.

So I want to just start kind of at the beginning, because I know about your background with, you know, kind of L5R a bit, but I don't know how you got into this space in the first place. So could you give me a little bit of origin story background? Yeah, for sure. I was born in 1968, and by the mid-1980s, role-playing was a thing that kids did, and I did it. I started playing D&D when I was 12 and absolutely fell in love with it.

That was an entree into a wider world of what at the time were called hobby games. So I played miniatures war games and a bunch of different role-playing games, a bunch of Avalon Hill bookcase games. And then my wife took me out of that space. I went to college and I got married and I had a baby. And I was at my first startup at the time and we didn't have any money. And so my business partner and I decided that we were going to create a fake mail order. company. We were going to use our fake mail order company to get an account with a local wholesaler, and we were going to re-buy all of our old, you know, D&D supplies at a wholesale discount and

restart our, you know, high school D&D campaign. So we created an ad for a company that didn't exist called RPG International, and we ran that ad in Dungeon Magazine. Dungeon Magazine was the companion magazine to Dragon magazine. They were both published by TSR. Dungeon magazine was just adventures. And TSR really didn't run ads in it. They had an advertising rate card, but I don't think anybody had ever done an ad before. So we contacted them and kind of got the details. And it all worked out to be like, I want to say it was $350. It was something like that to get this ad to run, which we like scrape together. We put a like a pool of money together from five or six families, ran this ad, took the ad to a local wholesaler called The Right Ones, which was located

where I'm living right now in Everett. And they said, sure, you look like a real company. Buy whatever you want. And then the phone started to ring. And it turned out that our fake mail order company was going to be a real mail order company and that people really did need to buy gaming supplies. At the time, this was using an 800 number. This was before the internet. So we

turned RPG International and do a real business. And one of the things that mail order companies at that time did is they had catalogs that had pages that were devoted to individual manufacturer's products. I'm talking about mail order in general, not

just tabletop gaming. So my partner, Steve and I, we decided we were going to do that. We were going to make a catalog. And we were going to go to to GenCon and go around and meet all the publishers and basically sell them ads in our catalog so that we could sell their products to our

customers. And that was basically how I met John Zinser at AEG. We were going to run an ad in Shadis Magazine, so I made a connection with John before the show. But Steve and I walked into the Mecca Center in Milwaukee in 1994.

And I think we were the only two people in that room wearing suits and ties. And by the time we got to the Alderac Entertainment Group booth, we were shambolic. We had no idea what was going on. And we didn't know anybody and no one knew who we were. And I had told John before we got to the show

that we would be easy to spot. My buddy Steve and I are roughly the same size. I'm six foot six. So we told John, look for the two really tall guys in suits. And we like, up to their booth and John reached through this crowd of people around the booth, grabbed me by the hand and pulled me into the gaming industry.

And the rest of that weekend was just a whirlwind of introductions and cool ideas. And I mean, it was an amazing time. This was 1994. Magic the Gathering was a year old. That year at Jen Khan, a lot of companies had spent the previous year trying to copy Magic. So kind of the first generation of magic clones, they weren't all, you know, copies, but they were the first trading card games that weren't magic were available. And a whole group of us, my buddy Steve, John, John's business partner, Dave Say, a few other

people, we walked around that hall just thinking, man, we could do better than this. So we did. That was the genesis of the Legend of the Five Rings project. We kind of collectively, this group of people collectively decided, well, we're going to make a trading card game. And then it was like, okay, well, what are we going to make it about? And we were all on the West Coast. And in the 80s and the 90s, if you were on the West Coast, like Japanese culture was just everywhere. And samurai were so cool.

And everybody wanted a katana. So it was a natural idea to say, let's use, you know, kind of a Japanese focus for the thing we want to build. And we were off to the races. That was how it started. That's how it all started. Wow. Okay.

So I've got, you know, I'll also refer listeners to, you know, John Zinser has been on the podcast twice. and he tells his version of the story, which I'll link in the show notes, which is well worth listening to both those episodes. But let me just, I want to go back to a small detail here. So you had a startup that you were working on before

a mail order company that was just to feed your own interest of getting cheap D&D books and supplies, right? What was that other business? What made you get entrepreneurial in the first place? Yeah. It's a great story. I was never good at school.

School and I are not super compatible. I think it would actually be much better at it today. But man, when I was a kid, I was no good at school. And I went to college and I was no good at college. And I dropped out of college. And shortly thereafter, my girlfriend told me the three scariest words that any 20-year-old can hear, the stick is blue,

which meant we had a baby on the way. So at age 22, I had a lot of tough decisions to make real quickly. And I was working at that time for a company called Multiple Zones, and they had a series of divisions. They were called the Mac Zone and the PC Zone, and they sold computer hardware and software

in what was called at that time, direct response, which was 800 numbers and catalogs. And I was working with my childhood best friend, Steve, who I mentioned earlier, and a bunch of other guys that all kind of got along really well. And one of those guys was made aware that Sony was about to release a piece of technology, which would allow someone to create a CB ROM essentially at home, at home or in the office. Up to this point, that was not possible. You bought CDs that were produced in a factory.

They were pressed like a record album. This technology was going to use lasers and what they called blank media to burn a CD. That machine cost $15,000. So we pooled our money together, bought that machine, and then we tried to build a company around it. And we left that business. we were working out in multiple zones and we created a startup. We just, we went for it. So I'm 22, 23 years old. I've been married about a year. I've got a baby. My wife's in law school. Crazy. But you know what? When you're 22 years old, that's the stuff you do.

Well, wait, wait, wait. Wait. I, okay. Well, I feel you here, but like I got to dig into this more because most people, most people in this situation, hey, I've got a baby I got to take care of. My wife is in law school, which I'm up into law school. That ain't cheap either. And you now give up a paycheck and spend $15,000 on an untested technology for an unproven business with, it doesn't sound like all that much of a clear business model. Yeah. You just do this sort of thing. I think most people listening are not going to buy that logic.

What makes somebody do this sort of thing? I should probably also mention that at the time, my annual salary was full. $14,500 and I had about $300 in the bank. Okay. So again, I say, your response of that's what you do, does not track. Most people in that situation would just try to get their head down, try to get a salary increase, try to make sure that they could just survive from day to day. I didn't even know where this $15,000 to buy the equipment came from if you have $300

in your account and it's more than you make in your entire annual salary. Yeah, I was real lucky that one of those guys. that wanted to start the company had had cash. He had access to some money. Yeah. It was crazy. I mean, I don't know what to tell you. But I don't know when you do crazy stuff,

except when you're in your 20s. Yeah. And you know what? Okay. As you probably can tell, or maybe you don't, maybe you can't. I don't know. I'm not, I'm on the spectrum.

So I have, always been a very kind of arrogant and self-confident person. The line between self-confidence and arrogance is a hard one for me to detect. And I've always believed I could figure out how to be okay. Yeah. So I believe in myself and I believe in my friends and I believe in the world. Like, I just believe, like, I'm an optimist. I believe in the American dream. I believe you can go out and find a way to make a success of yourself. So, like, the worst that was probably going to happen is I was going to have to crawl back to that other job and ask for my job back.

You know, the best that was going to happen was I was going to be in business owner and have control of my destiny. And I really believed that we could make it work. So we did. We went through a bunch of different business models with that machine. We ended up weirdly becoming one of the very first internet service providers. We had a business of taking corporate data that was originally going to microfeash for long-term archival storage. And instead, storing that data on CDs with this machine that we bought. And we had a customer who wanted to send us that data electronically rather than have us

drive to their offices and pick up their storage media. So we had to learn how to do telephone digital data. This was kind of right at the dawn of the commercial internet. So we got a T1 line. We got some modems. We figured out how to do routing. We got this customer's data in the shop. But we only used it for like 25 minutes a week.

Like it was a tiny usage of this. of this giant pipeline of data. So, you know, we were like, okay, well, let's do this internet thing. Let's sell internet to people. Okay. So that company changed its name a couple times. And at that point, that company's name was ISO Media. ISO is the standard setting body that is used in the computer world.

And CD-ROMs are burned according to a thing called ISO-966. So our company's name was ISO Media. And Isomedia kind of got out of the business of data archiving and got into the business of being an ISB. And oh, by the way, we had a fake mailer company selling hobby game products, which has nothing to do with any of the rest of the company. And oh, by the way, we're going to make a trading card game, which has nothing to do with any of the other things we were doing. It was pretty scattershot.

Yeah. Well, yeah, it feels to me like there's a few, there's a few things. This is why I push for these, you know, digging deeper, right? Because what I look for when I, when I hear stories like yours is like kind of these universal principles and lessons, right? And I think you're very self-aware response, right? I don't know the difference between, you know, the fine line between arrogance and self-confidence. Yeah. I think that to be an entrepreneur, you have to have that. You have to be pushing that boundary, right? You have to have this intrinsic belief in yourself that I'm going to do something better than anybody else in the world for, my audience and that is somehow I'm going to survive and make that happen. You have to be able to have that belief and that the strength of that belief comes from not necessarily, you know, I'm smarter than everybody else, but like I will figure it out. I will have this persistence and I will be okay. If I don't figure it out, I'll pivot and figure it out. And that's like that confidence and ability is the superpower that you need to even attempt, let alone succeed, this kind of life.

And it's incredibly rewarding and incredibly powerful. And so I just, yeah, I wanted to kind of underscore that. And then the second thing that I hear in all these stories is this, you know, you just try things and then you let your customers tell you what's real. Right. And like, so you tried a bunch of different stuff. And then your customers would ask like, hey, we just started getting orders from this fake ad. I guess we should, there's a business here.

Or we just, you know, people wanted us to serve them via digital technology transfer. there's probably a business here. And then, and then you just sort of make some, and you'll correct me or maybe flesh us out more, there's some calculation that you make. This is often how I think about it in terms of like, what is the demand that's showing from the company, you know, from the world? What are the things that I'm just personally interested and passionate about and I feel like I could spend hundreds of hours on? And what is the capacity, like what resources and skills do we happen to have, right? Like I've got an internet bandwidth. I've got somebody who's really good at, you know, doing mail order responses. I got something, you know, whatever. Like, and there's some, some, you know, making of that soup of all those things that determines what your business should look like. Does that resonate with you? Is there, you're, you dad to that?

Yeah. Yeah. You're exactly right. Like, I think, I think that one of the things that the two things that really make a successful entrepreneur is the ability to try a bunch of different stuff and not be, not, not think there's only one right answer and the ability to walk away and stop when it's obvious that something that you would like to do isn't working. Or, and this is what's going to happen in my story, break it up. So we had this company doing all the stuff that wasn't connected and didn't make

sense. So we broke it up. And that was painful, but it was the right decision. We took the legend of the Five Rings business and the fake mailer company that was a real mailover company. And we spun it off into a standalone company called Five Rings Publishing Group. And I went with it. So that was kind of the end of my formal association with the company that was Iso Media, although it was my best friend and a bunch of my good friends. So, I mean, I didn't really walk out the door and never see them again. But it was the point where we had to say there is traction here.

There is a product market fit. Something is happening. and it's not, it isn't going to work to try to divide Ryan's attention across all these different businesses or the business's attention across this things Ryan wants to do. So time to go. And that, you know, that's as hard as starting a business. Breaking up a business is super hard. A lot of times it doesn't work.

You break the business up and you end up with less than you started with and then both halves suffer. But in our case, it worked. Icy Media went on to be a very successful. It's still in existence today. My buddy Steve is the CEO. He's still running it. He's had one job as a entire adult life running that company. It serves customers all over the United States.

I mean, it's just kind of amazing. When we get together and we talk about it, I feel like a grandparent. I'm very proud of it. Even though I had very little to do with it. I was only there for like the first three years of its existence. That's a big deal. You got a lot of your DNA in those first couple years. Yeah, I did.

I really did. And then the business we created to publish Legend of the Five Rings, we called Five Rings Publishing Group. And that company was like a meteor. We raised Angel Money, which was unheard of in 1995, 1996, unheard of in the gaming industry. In fact, I know, I went to people in the industry that I know and asked their advice and basically everybody said it can't be done. No one will do it. But we did it. We raised three quarters of a million dollars from.

angel investors in the Seattle area. And we went for it. And Iso Media put in its half ownership of Legend of the Five Rings and me and RPT International. And Aegee put in its half ownership of Legend of the Five Rings and then agreed to continue to do the design work on the game under contract.

So Five Rings Publishing and AEG were like connected, business connected. And then over time, FireRing Publishing connected with other studios to do the same kind of work that AEG was doing. We connected with Last Unicorn Games and they designed a game for Dune. We empowered a couple of guys to basically start a company to try to rebuild the White Wolf, Werewolf CCG. It was great. It was like a hub and spoke model.

And we were successful in that the company we made was making money, but it wasn't making enough money, and we were going to run out of money. And that was kind of the intention all along, and this is another entrepreneurial thing. Often, you have to gamble on future success and not know what you're going to do if you don't get it. You have to bet on yourself.

You have to bet on growth. You have to invest in R&D. You have to invest in inventory. And it can be really scary when you look at your burn rate and there's a point in the future that isn't that far away, When you say, well, if we get to this point and nothing has changed, there will be no money in the bank account and we won't be able to make the payroll. But that is kind of the life of, you know, fast moving entrepreneurial businesses. And that's what we did.

And we got closer and closer to that point where it looked like we were going to run out of money. And so we decided we had to raise a lot more money. And the only way to raise a lot more money is to tell investors that you're about to do something truly extraordinary. And so we decided we were going to buy TSR. So TSR is the company that invented role-playing games. They were the publisher of Dungeons and Dragons and a bunch of other stuff. And they were for a long time the largest publisher in the tabletop gaming space. In the mid-1990s, their business collapsed for a ton of reasons.

And the collapse was a little bit invisible to the rest of the industry. But there were signs. And we read those signs and interpreted them to me. mean that TSR was really in distress. And by pure accident, the guy that we had hired to be the CEO of Five Rings Publishing Company had worked as a young man for TSR, and he was able to parlay that connection into getting a meeting with Lorraine Williams, who was the controlling shareholder and the president of TSR.

And Bob and I flew out to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and got into a room with Lorraine, and she told us how bad things really were. and Bob, who is a brilliant salesman, convinced her that we were the answer to all of her problems, and we walked out of that room with a letter of intent to buy the company. We flew home to Seattle, and Bob called Peter Ackison at Wizards of the Coast and said, Peter, I need you to lend me a million dollars. And Peter basically said, there is no way on earth, I will lend you a million dollars, Bob. And Bob said, what's your fax number?

and Bob faxed him the cover letter that showed that we had the right to buy TSR, and Peter called back and said, where should I wire the money? And so the output of all that was that a deal was arranged where Wizards of the Coast bought TSR, and they bought Five Rings Publishing as a twofer. And that was unbelievable. This little tiny company making a trading card game and a bunch of other games that was a spec had engineered the buyout of the most important role-playing game business by at that time the biggest company in tabletop gaming.

And it all worked out. Like, we didn't miss the payroll. Yeah, I love that. I love that story on so many levels. Peter Atkinson, also former guest of the podcast. We will link to that episode, and he talks about this purchase from his perspective. So you get a lot of the narratives here. It's great to hear you as the, you know,

That's the orchestrator puppet master here. This is a big part of what's happening. A couple things. Well, a lot of things I want to dig into. One is the, you said you saw signs that TSR was failing where other people didn't see it. What kinds of signs are those? Or how does someone analyze that? You didn't go to business school.

You just kind of saw, you just kind of intuitive that this was happening. What was the clues for you that gave you that insight? So it turns out that running that fake mail order company was actually a really, really great way to understand the publishers in the industry. Because we had to think about what we were going to be selling based on what they were saying they were going to be releasing. For years, TSR would publish a catalog in the beginning of the year. And that catalog would basically show all of the products they were going to release in the upcoming year. And I mean, this thing had like product shots. They were so organized and so good at what they do.

did that they could project 12 months, 16 months, 18 months in the future. And then they delivered on those products like clockwork. You could just assume that if TSR said they were releasing a Ravenloff book in October, there was going to be a Ravenloff book in October. But in 1995, that stopped. They missed release dates. They had products that didn't come out. They told people that they were going to do certain things.

and then those things didn't happen. And there were other signs. People in that building were aware that there were problems. There was famously a very deep layoff that happened at TSR precedent to these events. And that word of that layoff kind of ricocheted through the gaming industry that TSR had had to lay people off was a pretty big deal. It was also pretty obvious if you just went into game stores that the things that TSR was making weren't selling as well as they could have or should have or had been. The whole industry was changing. It was being just shocked by the rise of trading card games, the rise of games workshops, miniatures were gaming business.

Electronic games were becoming a more powerful force. There was just shock after shock after shock. And what I saw sitting at my desk was that TSR, which had been a clockwork organization, the clock was broken. And the quality of what they were publishing was dropping. You would open up a source book and there would be an inch wide margin around the text, which meant they were putting fewer words. in every book. And the quality of the artwork in the products was degrading. And they were chasing

all kind of new lines of business. They did trading card games. They did dice games. Like they were just all over the map. It was like they were floundering around trying to find their way out of the maze. And this was a time when the gaming industry as a whole was rapidly growing. Money was pouring into the industry. So it was not a situation where rising tides were lifting all boats. They weren't lifting TSR. And I just had the intuition that all of these kind of surface level

indicators meant that there was a serious problem inside that company. Okay, great. I appreciate the insight there. And so then let's let's let's then zoom back to the you know, potential lessons from this era and how they might apply to today. Right. So you know, there's this, you know, clearly the

magazines and mail order business ain't quite what she used to be. Nope. But there's maybe some parallels to some of the ways that we have direct to consumer sales today, making a bigger and bigger portion of the market. And in addition, I want to dig in a little bit because we could speak to some of the specifics of L5R and why it was successful, though I've, again, I have covered that in previous podcast, but you, you are creating a TCG in the era of TCG booms, right? Post magic. Everybody really realizes there's there's an incredible market here. There's an incredible game, you know, category here. This is brand new. Everybody's rushing into the space. Lots of them were successful for

short periods of time. Eventually, there was a massive collapse and crush. And it feels to me like we are living that again now. There are so many TCGs of the market. There's more even sustained successful TCGs over the last five years, maybe probably, yeah, probably since COVID, that have existed, which it shocks me. But there's, and so, you know, what does it look like in terms of somebody thinking about launching or sustaining or how would you think about the TCG business today, given what you learned then? And how would you, maybe if there are other parallels between what you learned from a, from

a fake mail order company turned real business into today's marketing. So take that any way you want to go. But I think there's some interesting lessons on both sides. Yeah. The first thing that I think is that I think we are in a rapid. aging TCG boom, I feel like this is going to end badly for a lot of publishers. And the reason I say that is that trading card games, unlike all the other kinds of entertainment in the tabletop gaming space, are driven in part by the asset value of the cards.

There is a component of investing that goes along with trading card games. And if you are an investor in magic or an investor in Pokemon, your investment has done very, very well. And that brings in other money and other opportunities to invest. But what has happened in the past, and I think will happen in the future, is that eventually the people who are the investors will no longer be able to find buyers for those investments. and the value of the money that they have put into trading card games as an investment will evaporate. I don't think that's going to happen for Magic or Pokemon, but I definitely think that's going to happen for lots of the games that are out there. That's what has happened before, and that's what I think will happen again.

Unfortunately, the best time to make a trading card game is when nobody wants to make a trading card game. And the worst time to make a trading card game is when everybody wants to make a trading card game. So a lot of the games that are in the pipeline now are probably too late. They might get lucky, but they probably are too late. I think we're seeing games come to market now in a way that is hard to understand from any perspective other than a lot of people are betting on investment, on future sales of these cards. I think that cyberpunk is a great IP. I own all the original cyberpunk role-playing games.

They're downstairs at my library. I think that Mike Ponsmith created an amazing property. I think that CD Project Red translated that property into an amazing video game. I've played it a couple times.

I don't, I cannot tell you how that product translates into $26 million of trading hard game cards, which is what it just did on Kickstarter. A huge portion of that $26 million, in my opinion, has to be investors who are hoping that they are going to get a multiple of that money out by selling those cards at some point in the future. And I'm very pessimistic about that. So I think that there's good reasons to share your skepticism.

I want to flush it out a little bit more, right? because I I what you know what is the same what's different you know now versus you know the 90s era I think so TCGs as you said part of it is is is is speculators and there's some amount of that that's healthy for the market there's some amount of that that is you know going to lead to a bubble as is true in all investments I suppose there is a some amount of it that is you know these are your core players that are you know actually enjoying the game and and there's some you know more people who just like to collect and like the IP, right? Most of the successful recent genre of TCGs are tied to some big IP, not 100%, but pretty damn close.

And those, you know, a healthy ecosystem is some percentage of each of those things. Yes. I don't know if you have an instinct as to what that healthy ecosystem is. If there is a range that comes to mind, like, this is what I would, what looks good for a, you don't want it to be all investors. possibly all players is not realistic, but you know, you want some version of that secondary market spike. What does that look like in your mind? Intuitively, I think it's a business of thirds. I think you want a third who are collectors, who are collecting out of the joy of collecting. I think you want a third that are competitive players. We're talking about trading

card games. A third that are competitive players. And I think you want a third that are asset investors. They think they're buying cards to make money in the future. I think that if you're in some kind of rough balance between those three groups, I think they all feed on each other in a positive feedback loop. I think that a trading card game would be really successful and have no problems if it was 100% competitive players. I think that would work just fine. I think it would be a very business-wise size.

It would be very small. But it would be more than reasonably big enough to pay the costs to make it, right, and support it. I think the problem with a pure collector business is you get something like beanie babies, where it goes through a cycle. People think it's cool, and then it stops and goes away, and nobody cares anymore because they're on to collecting something else. So I think the collector market is inherently fragile

in that it's hard to imagine a pure collector business sustaining itself over a really long period of time. So I think that balance that, you know, a third, a third, I think is the real sweet spot for trading card game. Yeah, it's interesting. I think there was like a Planet Money podcast that was a while ago that was talked about magics intentionally, you know, deflating their investor marketplace for a while because they were afraid of the Beanie Baby problem, right? They didn't want things to get too out of hand. So there is like kind of a manual economy management process to some degree that you're like, you want things. You want. So from my perspective as like a designer, the TCG offers this opportunity to be like, I open. open up this thing and I get the excitement of like, this is a super rare card that's worth a lot of money. And so it gives you that like jackpot moment.

There's a game to the opening of the packs in addition to the game of building your deck. In addition to the game of actually, you know, playing the legitimate game that we made. Yeah. And so I want to create those moments and those excitements. And that's in my mind, that's what the secondary market serves that purpose to like give people flags of like, okay, here's what this is what a spike looks like. is what success looks like.

So it's, you can't go. The booster pack system was not created by Wizards of the Coast, obviously. It long predates manager the gathering. But it turns out that it is wicked good as a business model, as they say, out east. Booster packs provide what psychologists call intermittent decreasing positive reinforcement, which has been determined to be the most addictive behavior pattern you can subject a human brain to. So what happens when you open a booster pack?

The first time you open it, every card is new. You haven't seen any of them before. It's 100% awesome. And then as you open booster pack after booster pack, you've seen all the comments. And then you've seen all the uncommonds. And then you've seen most of the rairs. But every once in a while, you get a rare you've never seen before.

And that pattern is unbelievably addictive. So is it. Fair to say that the booster pack model is an integral part of the successive trading card games. I would say yes, it 100% is because addictive businesses are great businesses. Talk to Starbucks, talk to Marlborough, talk to Caesar's Palace. Like, businesses with addiction at their heart are really, really good businesses. So one of the reasons trading card games are so successful compared to the other two or three categories in the hobby gaming space is the fact that they induce people

to spend outrageous amounts of money on them feeding their addictions. Yes, the lifetime value and annual spend of a customer, of a TCG customer rivals that of pretty much anything on the planet. Yes, it is an extraordinarily great business model. I mean, there's a reason that nobody makes a trading card game that you just buy it in a box and you have all the cards. Well, that does exist, right? the LCG model is a version of that, right?

And so this is, I'm going to play in the space a little bit, right? Because I love the gaming. I love TCGs. I do. And, you know, obviously I grew up and I wouldn't be in this space without it. You know, magic transformed my entire life. And, you know, I've built a lot of TCGs over the years. And I think that there's, you know, the LCG model, which for those that don't notice,

it doesn't necessarily need this brand of living card game, which fantasy flight, I think, still owns or created, which is that you take, you know, instead of buying booster packs of cards, we sell you a box of cards that has, you know, everything you would need to play. And then maybe periodically we release expansions that are similar. So closer to a business model of a traditional board game with expansions than a TCG booster pack model. Now, every single one of those only existed because it used to be a TCG. Right. And so they, right? This was all of them were Tcg that rose and fell and they were reborn as an LCG. Now, why is that? Right. Because the business model,

it's very expensive to make a TCG with all of the art that's required, with all of the overhead. And so because that work and cost had already been spent, it was okay to launch an LCG and then support that slowly. And you also,

of course, had some pre-existing players that were eager for this. So it was like not super viable for anybody who was going to start new to make an LCG. If those things existed, they were very,

very small. But there's a market for it. And I believe that there's a possibility, and this will tie into some of our future conversations, where modern tools can allow us to reduce the cost of production and maybe make it viable that people could make, hey, look, you could have a cool, the other aspects of the TTC experience that you like, which is, you know, deck building and playing that kind of game and having a competitive here, without necessarily requiring either a booster pack or it requiring such a big market that would potentially allow more TCGs or TCG-like experiences to sustain.

Yeah. I think the thing that's critical to understand is that the collectible nature, the addictive nature of booster packs generates revenue that is so out of scale with the kind of revenue gets generated with other kinds of games, that it funds a lot of stuff that other kind of games cannot possibly fund. Part of the reason that you get these amazing experiences for Magic and Pokemon in One Piece and all the other games is because they're so successful at generating revenue and profit. Making a game that doesn't have that at the center of its business model might still make a great game and people might really enjoy playing it, but it isn't going to fund these, you know, epic level expenses that the trading card games. So you're talking about like big organized play events and tournaments and things like that, right?

those spectacles. And the ability to like sit down with Middle Earth enterprises and and do a super high end license for, you know, middle earth magic and make something like the one ring card. Like it, there's just a lot of money in trading card games that can be used. That cash can be deployed in ways that are amazing. Okay. You teed me up for this one perfectly. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to swing. Because you don't know this, because we haven't announced this yet at the time we're recording this. But at the time that this is live, it will be, it will be announced. So we are doing the Lord of the Rings ascension. We've, we've signed this deal with middle earth enterprise. Now, that is a, and it's a great little parallel, right? We're not,

I know we're not going to make nearly as much an order of magnitude less money than Magic the gathering does with the same thing. But it is possible to sit down with a deal like that with a regular tabletop game experience and create a box experience in that space. And so, for, those that are listening to this and are excited to see the journey, go to GameFound.com and sign up for the Lord of the Rings of Cetion. But plug aside,

I do think there's an interesting story here because with a TCG you're right that there's the expectation and the bonuses that come, the expectation of significant organized play support, of tournaments that are happening in stores, of a community that's built around it.

Like a lot of things that come with it. And if you don't have those things, the expectation that the community will perceive that TCG is failing and it will lead to like a downward spiral, right? But with traditional card games or expansion-based card games, it's not quite the same.

Like there's some level of support, but it's not nearly the same level of expectation. It's not, like it always shocked me. Like, I've worked in a lot of games over the years and many of them are out of print. And if I have a game that I made a long time ago that was a board game that's out of print, people are like, oh, that was a great game.

Yeah, good job. But if I have a TCG that I made a while, ago that's out of print. That game failed. And I won't play it anymore. It's dead. Yeah. That has always been so weird to me. I know. Isn't it crazy? It's like it is. It's just there's a psychology

that drives this. The game could be just as fun. Like I have an example, the Eve Online Trading Card game. I don't know if you ever played this game. Oh yeah. I love that game. It's so good. It was such a cool, so many unique elements to it. So many things that were just different.

It never, you know, it did not, you know, It's dead, long dead, but like, and for some reason it just doesn't hit the table in the same way that like my old versions of like, you know, talisman or whatever that's not around anymore, I still hit the table. You know, it's a weird, there's a weird psychology to this that I, I want to break because I would love to make more of these TCG-like experiences without it feeling like a failure if they don't last forever. Yeah. Can I ask you just a couple of questions about your Lord of the Rings thing? Yeah, go for it. Are you doing that in conjunction with Asthma Day? I am.

Okay. So Asma Day paid a billion dollars to get the rights to the Lord of the Rings games. And now you get to make a deal with Asmoday to make a Lord of the Rings game. That's how you're able to make a deal to make a Lord of the Rings game because Asma Day paid a billion dollars. Fair enough. I mean, like, let's be honest. Like Iron Crown did Middle Earth. They did a trading card game.

They did it in the 90s. And they were a relatively small company. like it was possible to go to Middle Earth, token enterprises and do a trading card game. That's not exclusively the province of magic or Asmode. It's just a lot harder today because everybody's expectations about what kind of value you should get for your IP

are stratosphericly high. Yeah. Yeah, well, it does make a big difference. And I think IP, like we have seen the majority of the successful games in the marketplace be IP-based games. Frankly, we've seen the majority of successful games across all, successful things across all media. Yeah. Now seem to be, you know, substantial IP driven things, right?

It's a way to cut through the noise of where we are today. Yeah, I mean, it's very, that's very timely that we're having this conversation because before cyberpunk, the most successful trading card game in crowdfunding was a game done in France, and I cannot believe I forgot the name of that thing. Altered? Yes. They had the highest funded crowdfunding campaign for a trading card game, and they're done. they did a couple of follow-on campaigns.

They launched a campaign this year. They didn't get anywhere close to how much they expected to get. And they announced that they were going to stop production and exit the field. Yes. And that game has no IP. It was purely self-built IP from scratch. Yeah. Well, and let me speak.

I'll speak to that on a couple levels, right? Because their chief marketing officer was also on the podcast. And we had a lot of deep dives on that because they saw what we did with SoulForge Fusion, which still exists. and we made that they they they I believe that when you you can succeed on IP is kind of the easy road to success not easy but easier because you could get attention to certain number of eyeballs people will come in right so for me doing this with Ascension it's great because I've got a core game that I you know people know and love obviously a brand that people don't love and I'm able to like marry those together in a way that feels really good and that that's great but with the other option in addition to using an IP is to innovate like really innovate mechanically like do something that people haven't seen before. And so altered did a similar thing with what Soul Fort Fusion did

where it's like, okay, we're going to digitally print cards. We're going to make every, you know, we're going to make unique cards that only you get. And they had a different mechanism for how they did it compared to how we did. But it was like, that got a lot of attention. Some from the collectors, from players, from everything. I think they had a great product. I think their game was very good.

And so they had an opportunity for success there. And that's something that, you know, I'm biased because I'm a designer and I want to make the cool, exciting new thing. But I do think that there is room for, you know, radical, you know, reinvention and a radically new mechanism for play, mechanism for purchase model, business model, some things that could get people through. But I think it takes something pretty massive to be, you know, comparable to a, to a large IP scale. I mean, it's pretty amazing that here we are in the year 2026. And essentially,

all of the top selling trading card games in the market are clones of the game that started it in 1993. It is stunning. It is stunning. The design space of success is unbelievably narrow. Yeah, it's tricky because, like, I've wrestled with this myself when it comes to, you know, again, I've made a lot of different TcGs

and I feel like I've made some pretty innovative ones. But when you're building to an IP, right? Like, if you're Lor Canna, if you're just like, we have the Disney eye, we have the hottest freaking Disney subset of IPs, and we have a choice. We could either take a risk with a new game design that's like pushing the boundaries, doing something crazy, or we could just build a magic clone

with a couple little twists, and then we know for sure we're going to be successful. You don't, there is a problem of too much innovation, right? Even if you want to be creative, there are times where you're like, look, I'm going to lose so many people if I go down this road. Is it worth it to create here? Is it even upside to create here?

And it's a reasonable argument, even though it kind of hurts my soul to say it, that actually innovating in that situation is a mistake. Whereas if you're going to do something that's never been done before, if you're Soul Forge Fusion or you're altered or you're something that's like, all right, we're going to try. Then yeah, you're leaning into that evolution.

But even then, you usually want like one big twist. Like one thing that's like, here's what's new. Here's how I can explain it to you in 30 seconds or less. And then everything else you probably want to keep familiar because that's how society and culture evolves, right? Little innovations that push the ball forward. Yeah. It feels to me, and it has me, basically for all of the existence of this entire category, it has felt to me like there would be another game. There would be another branch on the tree,

another way to do trading card games that people would find as fun and exciting as the magic branch of the tree. I've got a book downstairs that Scriy magazine published in the late 90s that's basically a page for every game that had been released at that point. It's like 400 pages long. And in that book, there are two. two games that lasted more than a couple of years, Magic the Gathering and Legend of the Five Rings. And since then, you know, there's been another, whatever, 15 years, 20 years of development. And you know, there's been tons of games that are not magic clones. Like, really smart people have designed many different kinds of games

that use the core idea of trading card games. And not a single one of them has broken through and become wildly successful. And it just, it feels like, could happen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, I agree with you.

And obviously, you know, I'm committed to sort of keep trying, but it's, it's, it's always tricky because when you're going to go down that road for specifically a TCG with the level of expectations of support of, you know, sustaining it and, you know, product release cycles and everything, events, everything, you know, you can't, it's really hard to do it for less than two or three million dollars, right? It's just like, it's a massive, massive undertaking. Yeah. And so, yeah, how many bets, how many of those swings can you take?

Right. And how much are people willing to have the level of, you know, self-belief that's required? Yeah, and from an investor perspective, you're going to say to whatever team comes to you, what are your credentials? And if your credentials are, well, I worked on magic or I worked on Pokemon, that looks really good to an investor. If your credentials are, well, I worked on 15 games you've never heard of before because they all fail, that does not look good to an investor, right? So the ability to accumulate that capital you just talked about,

two to three million dollars, maybe three to five million dollars, maybe five, ten million dollars. It is self-limited to people who are really good at Haiku, like working in that really narrow bound of things we know are successful. It's a huge leap of faith on the part of an entrepreneur to say, I'm going to take a wild gamble on a totally untested idea by a bunch of people who can't show me a track record because they've put in their dues learning how to make trading card games that don't look like magic.

So I talked before about the thin line between arrogance and self-confidence and an entrepreneur. Well, there's a thin line between like arrogance and idiocy when it comes to being an investor. You know, if you make those investments and they fail, you just look like an idiot. Every once in a while, you might look like a rock star. But wow, it's tough to find that opportunity. It's tough as an investor. It is super hard to say yes to crazy.

Well, and yeah, investing in creative projects, like, you know, intrinsically creative art form projects is always going to be a massive, massive gamble. I mean, right? It's like our industry is so hit-driven and it's, you know, one out of 100 become the kind of giant evergreen successes, you know, if that. So I want to use this as a pivot to why. what creating the games looks like. Okay.

And probably what's going to be the more controversial part of our conversation. And to tee this up, I believe that whatever you feel about AI kind of morally or how it was created or anything, that it is going to transform the way that all of our work is done and that we need to be prepared for it and having a conversation around it. How are we going to handle it and what's going forward, including what will it do to our work? what do we want it to be doing to our work and to the future of humanity? How do we handle all of these things? We need to have a rational conversation around it. It is not the devil.

It is not the all being all know savior. There has to be a public, honest conversation about what's happening. And I have tried to be pretty public about it. I've done podcasts on AI entirely, one with Ethan Mollock, who's one of the foremost experts on it. I've talked about it with a ton of creators and a ton of different people. I've written articles about it on my substack. And I have found that the conversation is very hard to have. And you are a canary in the coal mine in many ways because you brought up a topic that felt to me like a very reasonable one to address and a reasonable position to hold, whether or not you agree with it.

and that led to, whether or not it directly led to you being let go from your former position, we don't necessarily have to get into, but from the public persona and shitstorm, for lack of a better term, that came around it, you became the lightning rod for this controversy. And so I wanted, one of the reasons I wanted to have you as a guest, not, you know, frankly, I wanted to have you as a guest a long time ago and for many of the reasons that people have been listening already have heard. your incredibly key part of the entire evolution of the tabletop gaming industry. But this is a conversation most people are afraid to have. You clearly are not and you've taken the blows for it.

I am not and I have taken some blows for it already and we'll probably take more for this conversation. But I think it's worth it because I think the worst thing people can do is to keep their heads in the sand and pretend like this isn't a supersonic tsunami, as Elon Musk called it, that's coming our way. So I'll give you a second to react to that. Earlier this year, a guy who works in the tech space wrote an essay called Something Big is happening about his experiences with AI and his workplace. And he led that essay off, and I'm going to paraphrase, with a paragraph that essentially says, a year ago, I felt like if I talked to my friends and family about AI, they would think I was

crazy. Today, I feel like if I don't talk to my friends and family about AI, I'm doing them harm. And that is how I feel. I believe that we are about to experience a revolution in civilizational affairs at the level of the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It is going to change everything. And we're unprepared for it. And we're kind of in denial that it's happening. It's important that we talk about artificial intelligence as of real things.

that's really happening. And it could all stop. It could fizzle out. It could turn out to be something that doesn't actually work. And it could just stop it wherever it is today. And where it is today is already civilizationally level transforming. I feel like I have an obligation to talk about this topic with my friends and family. And Justin, I consider you a friend.

And by extension, the people that listen to your podcast. I will embiggin. We are. Think like a game designer family. We're all in this. The circle of friendship. Let's talk about AI. I made a post on LinkedIn where I said in response to somebody asking me a question

that I thought that AI was capable of coming up with ideas as good as those in several of the games that AEG published. And one game that AEG doesn't publish, Flip 7. And the result of that statement was that 12 hours later, I lost my job. And the reason I lost my job is that people in the game design community chose to interpret that statement as me advocating that AI should be used to replace them. And I didn't say that and I don't believe that, but that's what they interpreted those comments to mean. and as a publisher, Aege cannot lose access to the game design community. So if the choices between keeping Ryan Dancy on the payroll and having access to great game designs from great game designers, Aegee has to choose the latter and not the former.

And that's really unfortunate. I have said things in the past that I regret. I feel like I stuck my foot in my mouth many, many times. and I own all those mistakes. I occasionally say dumb things like everybody does. I like to say things in public, and so a lot of people hear the dumb things I say, as opposed to maybe a dumb thing somebody might say at a bar.

I say it on the internet. And when I make a mistake, I own up to it, and I apologize, and I admit that I was wrong, and I remediate to the degree that's possible. I didn't do anything wrong here. I didn't tell people that game publishers or AEG should replace them with robots. I said that it's reasonable that AI today can come up with ideas for games. And if you don't think that it can, then you are not paying attention to the current state of

the art. That is not the same as advocating for replacement. And I think it's really dangerous and really bad if we can't have a conversation about the capabilities of this technology, separate from the actionable choices that we make about how to deploy and use that technology. We have to understand it and be reasonably aware of what it can and cannot do, and we need to talk about how we're going to use it. We have to do both of those things kind of at the same time. And if there's no safe space to have that conversation, we're going to harm ourselves. And people are going to be blindsided when they lose their jobs.

or in their way of life, it revocably changes because they didn't see it coming or they didn't want to see it coming or they didn't think it was possible. Now is the time to be having these conversations and to be thinking about what our world is gonna look like in a couple of years. Now is the time to be planning about how you're gonna change your life

and live in a world with machine intelligence. Now is the time that we need to think about new ways of living and new ways of being with each, other and with the alien intelligences that are about to be our daily companions. And if I paid a price because I was willing to start that conversation, I am willing to pay that price. And I did pay that price. I didn't expect to pay that price, but I'm not angry that that that price got paid.

I would feel badly if I was not doing what I could to try. try to have these conversations with my friends and family because I think not having them would be hurting them. Yeah. Yeah. No, I appreciate that. And I'm going to be transparent here too. Like what happened to you specifically made me take a step back because I have been very AI forward.

And I wrote a whole article about the upstream art in the age of AI. And that's one of the things I want to talk about. It ties into our TCG conversation earlier. Right. Like when I tell designers, when a new designer, I teach game design. Right? People could join my Think Like Game Designer Design Lab and be part of it. And I help everybody to be the best at what they do. And every time they're like, I want to make a TCG.

I'm like, hell no. Stop. Don't go near it. Build something way smaller, way easier, way more concrete. You cannot do this. It's not possible. And now if you're willing to use AI to support you, I don't, I think it is possible. I think there are. Absolutely possible.

100%. Yeah. Like individual creators can build something that would be actually impossible at a, fraction of the budget and with something that could be a very high what's higher quality they could do otherwise. And so is it wrong for them to do that? Like that, you know, we can have that conversation, but you're crazy if you're not willing to like talk about it and understand that that's a possibility. And so I, we have a, we have a game grass fed, which is, uh, will be launching in the fall, which is a farm to tabletop, uh, deck building game. Uh, and it's basically teaches the principles

of regenerative farming through a deck building game format, partner with a real regenerative farmer. portions of the proceeds are going to to support that cause and I used AI art in a lot of the and AI to support a lot of that project to get us ready to launch because it was a risky project for me and I couldn't afford to

spend all the art and do everything on that and then when I saw what happened to you and it was one and I saw the comments and like kind of blowback that was coming from that even though I was employing artists that wouldn't have been employed otherwise even though the overall cause was going to be net carbon neutral or better, even though, et cetera, it became a huge distraction.

And fortunately, there was good traction on the page and a lot of followers. So I decided to pull all AI art, the whole project is going to be zero AI. All of this happened around that time. And you were one of my important data points that I didn't want to like face the firestorm. But I have sat with that decision of, you know, and I think that while I'm fine with that project and, you know, we're continuing to do, you know, contractually. cannot do any AI art with any of our

Lord of the Rings things. We're not doing any AI for any of the essential stuff. But when it comes to future projects and how we use it, I am still a believer that this can lead to a better creative world.

I believe that we can have more empowered things, right? We talked about, you know, I'm going on a little bit of a rant here, but like, you know, we talked about the what, you know,

that things are all IP forward, right? And this is why I wanted to have these conversations before we got to say that. The fact that we have to say, I have to have every top 10 movie in cinema is a sequel or based off of an existing, a pre-existing IP or both. And every major new TCG that you're going to try to launch

has got a big IP attached to it. And the reasons are because it's so expensive to do. But you can use AI animation and tools to make a fantastic blockbuster Marvel-like movie at a fraction of the cost. And you could make something that wasn't Marvel, that was a brand new vision that would push the boundaries and took risks, which you couldn't do otherwise.

And the same is true in games and the same is true in a variety of fields. So to me, like, I want to paint that hopeful picture that there's like these tools, you know, in the same way that electronic music generation allowed a single, you know, producer in their bedroom to make music that would transform the world that used to take an orchestra, like a live performance that couldn't do it. I think that there's a, there's a positive revolution here beyond just the one that we're all afraid of of certain tiers of art becoming less economically viable. Yes, I agree with everything you just said.

I want to go back a few steps and say a few things and then I want to respond to what you said. The first thing I want to say is that modern AI has what I think is an unfixable ethical problem. It was created using people's work without permission. the legal framework around doing that is vague, and so far the decisions that have been handed down have all been in favor of the companies that did it. But that being legal and being ethical are not necessarily the same thing, and this is one of those times when that's a true statement. The technology that's being used, which is called large language models, benefits from having the largest possible data set to work on. And the breakthroughs that have come in transforming this technology from a curiosity in the lab to something people are using every day were only possible by basically feeding it everything that humans have ever done.

And the only way to do that was to steal it, to use it without permission. There was no mechanism possible to get permission in any conceivable, economically viable or politically viable way. So it was just done. And lots of things that we live with every day have an ethical compromise to them. They're everywhere. And some part of the way we live as people and the societies that we have built accept the fact that tremendous awful crimes happened. at the birth of some of these things.

The United States is a country that was built on slavery. We're not going to unwind the United States and start over. Tremendous resources were sucked out of two-thirds of the world by colonialism and sent to the one-third of the world that happened to have better guns and ships. And we're not going to unwind the way the world works and try to put that back. I could go on at length. Like, these things are everywhere around us. They're embedded deeply into our societies.

And AI is going to be one of those things. There is going to be forever the knowledge that it was tainted at its birth by the way that the data was accumulated to train the models. And I don't believe we can fix it. And I don't believe it's going to be fixed. I think that there could be lawsuits. I think there could be settlements. I think eventually new law will be written that will clearly define how these things are done and how they're not to be done.

But we're not going to be able to go back to make 2019, 2020 and unwind the stack. These tools are going to exist built on the way that they were constructed. And we're going to just have to learn how to live with it. And that makes many people very, very angry. They don't want that to be true. And I just don't see a way to fix that problem. And I don't see a way that this technology stops being used. So I just feel like we have to say to ourselves,

yep, a really bad thing happened. It did. And we're all going to use that thing. And we're all going to therefore be somewhat culpable for the fact that we are participating in that bad thing. But we're not going to change the world and go back. It just isn't going to happen. We need to be honest about the fact.

that we're going to do it. We're going to use this technology. I don't think it's any way back. Yeah. Let's let's let's let's let's let's let's let's linger on this for a while because you're right. I did you know, I left over this part of it.

Though I did I do talk about this in some of my articles because I think one, you know, us driving towards a world of, you know, you know, maybe reparations is the right word. But since you brought up the slavery analogy, there is a, um, uh, it was trained on all of humanity, right? It wasn't just trained on your work. or my work or anything that we put out on the internet that we have collectively

uncreated in the human unconscious conscious hybrid. This new intelligence is spawned from that. So at a certain point, everyone in humanity, including those who never wrote anything on the internet, but for whom we stood on their shoulders to then build the information that then became the internet, we all are owed a debt. And I think that the successful future making this right is something along the lines of, whatever, universal basic income, a percentage of the AI profits, of something where this creates a new economic system that supports all of us. So I do think there is a way to quote unquote

make things right if we can navigate this path to economic abundance. So that's point number one. Point number two on this is I just want to flesh out what it means to say this is unethical. because I agree with this point. And so let me flesh it out. And then let me just talk about a counter, you know, some, sorry. So right insofar as, you know, it was actually anything that was taken on actual stolen private data, clearly unethical, clearly problem. But the stuff that was trained on like the things that were posted on the internet, right? The, it looked at the previous artworks that existed and said, hey, this is how arts is done.

I'm going to use that to frame my understanding of art and use it to generate new things. Like when I've, I have not just studied creativity. I've taught creativity. I've done creativity workshops at the Wharton School of Business and done workshops for Fortune 500 companies. And we've broken down the principles of what makes people creative and how this works. That's all any of us ever do. All that we do as humans is take preexisting ideas and then we just combine them in new ways. We use those things to create networks in our mind and different patterns that we recognize.

And then we bring those forward in a way that makes a new connection and moves the ball forward into the next step. I don't have to pay Richard Garfield for creating Magic the Gathering, even though I rely on the principles of Magic the Gathering every damn day in the games that I work on and the new things that I do, right? All of these things, and Richard doesn't have to pay Cosmic Encounter for the ideas he took from there to build Magic to Gather, right? And the train goes all the way back the first time somebody moved stones and thought

this was fun, right? Like, I don't know that the, yes, it would be great if I didn't want this thing to learn from my stuff that I understand the ethical outrage at that. But I also don't think, other than the sort of speed and scale, that this is all that different from how humans are trained and how creativity works in general. I agree with all that. 100%. I mean, it's like, okay, but other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

You know, it's so easy to say, well, it would be nice to opt out, but you can't. I mean, for some people, the ability to opt out is, it's everything. Like, they want that power to say no, and they don't have it. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And look, we built, you know, it's really funny.

Intellectual, I've been studying intellectual property for decades. It is one of my weird passions. And the evolution of how we embody value in ideas is really interesting. and really recent until about the 1970s, the idea that you could, the way that you fixed value in an idea was really straightforward. It was a copyright or a patent. And patents were for things and copyrights for words effectively.

I mean, they applied to music and things. But basically, if you could write it down on a piece of paper, it was a copyright. If it made toast, it was a patent. In the 70s, that transformed. And we came to with realization that ideas are valuable, their property. They're like a piece of land. And we want to acknowledge that that's true.

And we want to let the people who stood on the shoulders of giants and used all of that preceding knowledge to create something new. We want them to be able to extract value from that effort, that human, you know, that, work. And our systems of copyright and patent aren't very good at that. And so we've been kind of struggling in the legal system to apply mostly the copyright law to ideas in ways the copyright law was never really meant to work. And that process has been ongoing for decades, and it's still kind of working itself out and still hasn't reached anywhere close to where it needs to be. And then AI came along and just blew it completely out of the water, absolutely transformed every major question of property law,

intellectual property law, just overnight. And now it's possible. I can go to an AI and I can say, write me a Harry Potter novel. And depending on how that AI is configured and the software that runs it and certain choices that were made when it was built, it might spit out word for word,

Harry Potter and the Sorcercerer Stone. Or it might spit out an entirely new Harry Potter novel that J.K. Rowling had nothing to do it. Like, the same technology can do both of those things. And we just have no way, our current legal system does not know how to deal with that problem. Yeah. Yeah, no, measuring the output and when that is a copy that's not okay. Yeah. And like, so that's the, yeah, that's the secondary piece of it.

Like, I think that the inputs for how this thing was trained, I would argue is not. I don't know how unethical it really is. Uh, training on things in the public domain, whatever, but the outputs, 100,000. percent. That's the thorniest area. I agree. Where it's like, okay, this is like pretty, this is a, obviously if it's an exact copy of something somebody else did, we know that that's not okay. If it's a pretty damn close copy of something like that with a couple little twists, we don't know. And I actually think, you know, just to linger on intellectual property, because I also

find this fascinating, right? In my mind, like property rights, as intellectual property rights should be as little as necessary to allow for innovation to go, right? Like the, the reason why I would stop you, because it's a form of blocking free. speech, right? Saying you can't say this thing, do this thing, write this thing, read this thing, because I own it. I'm going to block you from doing that, which the bias should be against that, right? The bias should be, you could have your ideas as free as they could be. But sometimes you have to invest a lot to make an idea worth sharing. And so if I have to invest a ton in building, we talked about the Marvel movie, it costs, you know, however, hundreds of millions of dollars,

you have to protect their ability to make money off of those things or slightly more controversial, but even more expensive, if Eli Lilly makes a really, really powerful drug that saves millions of lies. And that first pill costs them a billion dollars to make, but the second pill costs them $10 to make, letting them charge $1,000 a pill or whatever, you do want to protect that to some degree to make sure that they can invest that billion dollars up front. And then we let those things lapse after a certain amount of time. And so even those cases, we say, okay, you have copyright for this long, and then it goes away. And so I think like, you know, games, as an example, are specifically with the idea of trademarking

game mechanics and protecting games very hard to protect, very, very limited protections. It is not something that the world thinks needs a ton of protection to be able to move forward. And frankly, as much as I prefer to protect my own things, the world is right. The people will keep making games. And in fact, the more freedom is possible

because if Richard, you know, if Magic trademarked the entire idea of a trading card game, there would be so much less to the world. so many less things as they did. And there was, I mean, I don't, you know, the legal structure of all of that, uh, is probably not worth getting into it this podcast. But, uh, you know, that you want to allow for innovation and things like that. So there's a, there's a degree to which IP law should change over time and that the cheaper

and easier something is to make and get, the less protected it should be. And the more that society should be free to like remix and re-leverage those tools. So, you know, there's not, it's not an answer, but it is a directional, thing that AI has accelerated that I think is... Okay. So let's agree, and I think you and I do agree, that there were problems at its birth, and we're going to have to figure out

how to deal with it and recognize it. But it's born. It lives. It's here. It works. It's getting better every day. If you have not spent time with a frontier AI system, Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT,

Opus, Google Gemini, in the last couple of weeks, you do not understand how powerful these tools are. They have gone through an inflection point. Many people think that inflection point was right at the end of 2025. The release of the models that came out early in 2026 are just definitively better in ways that many people thought might be impossible. And the work that they are capable of,

of doing today is unimaginable except to like science fiction writers. A threshold has been crossed and it is accelerating. In science fiction, there is a term called the accelerando. And the accelerando refers to the moment when computers start to write their own software at computer speed, not human speed. And we have passed that threshold. We are living in the accelerando. What that means is that the Frontier AI companies are using their Frontier AI to write the code of the Frontier AI.

And they're working faster than humans can work. They are working at superhuman speed. So a thousand engineers are now being aided by 10,000 machine intelligences that work a thousand times faster than a human engineer. It will be exponentially powerful. It will grow in capability in ways that are really difficult for human minds to understand. Human brains have a very hard time with exponential growth. We like straight lines, not curves. An example of that is Anthropic produced a piece of code that they call mythos.

And trust me, the irony on that is not lost on me. Mythos was fine-tuned to do software development. And it is so good that it is finding bugs in critical software faster than human. can find them, and in some cases, finding bugs that are 25 years old. And so Anthropic has decided to not make that tool generally available, and instead they've shared it with a limited number of institutions like Microsoft, Google, the U.S. government, like places that have critical software, and they're using this tool to analyze that code and look for these bugs. Because if they just made that code available, everybody on Earth would be a superhuman level hacker tomorrow. And there

would be exploits and vulnerabilities everywhere. This is the world that we now live in. We have to start thinking about this kind of technology being commonplace. It's everywhere. Yes. So I will also agree with you. And I do, you know, I spend five hours to 10 hours a week, either playing with AI myself or like keeping up to speed on what's current, you know, the current discussions and

things like the mythos release. And I still feel horribly behind all the time behind. And I think that, so I don't want this to be a fear mongering or something that creates anxiety because I'm imagining a lot of people listening have anxiety right now. And I do think some of that is appropriate. I'm not going to say you should have no anxiety. But I do think that the reality that has helped me the most is just get on the ground with it. So get into one of these tools.

and it's at the frontiers, it's either, my number one choice is still Claude, Anthropics Claude, but Gemini and Chachibati are totally fine. One of those three, pay the $20 a month because there's a big difference between the pay, the fee version and the free version. The capabilities are not the same. And then pick a problem actual in your life that you want to solve and start trying to solve. And the other step that has changed in the last several months is not to just go. to the chat bot and ask it for advice and then do the thing. The shift has been agentic AI.

And so the new thing to do is either use things like Claude has a mode that's called Claude co-work or Claude code if you want to make apps or you just want to use it to do stuff. So I'll use that as the example. Gemini has anti-gravity and chat chiptiptis codex. And using that to actually do work that you care about doing. And I started this really simple. I took Cloud Co-Work, I gave it access to my downloads folder, which was a complete mess, just random stuff I download and say, hey, can you organize and sort this for me, please? And it asked me a few questions. And it just did it. It renamed my files. It put them into folders by project. It suggested which ones I could probably delete and which ones I should probably save. And it

did it perfect, like one shot. Right. And that was something that's just, so think about tasks that are in your life that are like, man, if I had the time, I wish I could do this or this is a really annoying thing that I just don't, you know, I don't know how to do, I don't have the capabilities to do. and you will find that everyone in the world is at least a B minus at everything. Now, at least. And that ability to say, like, as an entrepreneur, somebody out there that has a dream about making a game or I'm starting a business, every single thing that used to be a blocker to you is gone. Yes. Like, gone.

You can do it. I promise you you can do it. It's crazy. It's insane. You can't just say AI, hey, make me a game and publish it for me. It won't work like that. But you could take, if you break it down in the chunks, you have a vision and you are willing to work with it back and forth a little bit.

You could do a ton. And so starting with something small just to get that sense that you were talking about, right? The, the, oh my God moment. And I've had to do this. I've had to drag my team kicking and screaming across this threshold. Like, I know a lot of people are afraid of this stuff. But like we did an internal AI hackathon where we had everybody, I said, write down your list of problems.

like what are the things that you have to do that you really don't want to do to take a ton of time? And then write down your list of dreams. Like what are the things you wish you could do, but you don't have enough time to do them. And then we collectively picked a few of those, broke into teams, worked together to find solutions using AI tools. And then we have them. So we have a thing that lets us prototype our decks way faster, right? Because it took a lot of time to get from a spreadsheet all the way into something we could test. And now we do that in a fraction of the time.

We have another thing that manages our like process. using a task management tracking system like Jira or whatever Asana, our team didn't like doing that. And so now we have something that lives in our discord that finds our tasks from our conversations and then turns them into the task for us and tracks them and pokes us about it.

It's effectively a little project manager. And that makes our lives better. It makes our lives easier. And there's a million things like this of which we are just scratching the surface. But if you don't start scratching, you're not going to make it to the surface. You're going to get here.

You're going to drown. Yeah, I saw some responses to that post that got me fired. People saying things like, yeah, a year ago, I asked it to do something and it produced this garbage result. And I just, I just shake my head. I'm like, tell me you don't understand AI without telling me you don't understand AI. What you did a year ago is really meaningless. It really is. Like, you need to do it today and see how it works today and tomorrow and next week and a month from now.

Like, don't rely on what you saw when you played around with ChatGPT in 2021. Because you don't understand AI. That's what you're doing. And you're harming yourself. You're not going to be aware of where this is moving and how quickly it's moving, right? Yeah. And so then what, you know, let's spend a little bit of time then. We've talked about the past and the sins of the past.

We've talked about some of the far future and, you know, the UBI creative vision dream. Right. We've talked now about the present, which is like what should you do now and how do you live now in the capabilities today. So then I think I just, the only gap I see is the kind of near term future that we haven't really talked about, right? Like, what do we see, how do we see the world transforming over the next, you know, one to three years? And what can people listening do to position themselves to a place where their life gets better, not worse? Yeah. Okay.

The first thing I want to say is that we are going to see an explosion of everything. not just games, everything. But let's just talk about games because that's what this is about, right? Explosion of games. And there is a thing called Sturgeon's Law, which is that 90% of everything is crap. And 90% of this explosion is going to be crap. But 20% of it is not going to be crap. And maybe 1% of it is going to be transformative.

It's going to be liminal. It's going to be the stuff we look back on and say, the world is better because that came into existence. And much of that content could not be created without AI. AI is going to enable individuals and teams to do things that they could never do. There are people out there who are trapped. They're trapped by their bodies. They're in wheelchairs and they can't move.

Or they're trapped by their personal experience. They've got trauma. They're trapped by their economic circumstance. They're poor. They're trapped by language barriers. They speak Urdu. Those people are going to have the ability to use AI to take the thing that's in their mind and put it out in the world in a way that other people can interact with it.

And they would never have that pathway if it wasn't for AI. It would be impossible. It's going to allow somebody like the expert designers in our industry who today rely on a whole pyramid of other people to create their vision, it's going to allow some of those people to individually create completely, from start to finish, the exact expression of what they want in the way that Michelangelo carved the David or Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa. It will let some of these people do the whole,

project, which they don't do now. Let's not kid ourselves. Very, very rarely does a designer also do the art and also do the industrial design on the components and also do the packaging and also do the cover. They are a part of a team, but AI will let some of those people do the entire thing exactly as they want it without any compromise. And a lot of that's going to be crap, but some of it might be amazing. It's going to let somebody who is, for example, a really good artist transform their workflow from I can do a painting a month to I can do a hundred paintings in a month. It will be my vision. It will be my skill. It will be what I want to have that thing look like. But AI is going to multiply what's inside me by doing work on my behalf, under my

direction in the way I want it to my standards that will be good enough that the people who receive that artwork will look at it and say, ah, yes, this is, this is as good as anything that Sally did before she began using AI. Like the creation of value is going to be almost incomprehensible. And it's going to be fast. This is coming real soon. Like you said one to three years. That's a legitimate time frame, I think. So in the last couple of months, since I left AEG, I've been really privileged to have a lot of people show me their work. And I've seen amazing things. Like, I feel like I'm living six months in the future right now.

I have seen tools that will let you make a game by writing a prompt. And like, when I say make a game, I mean, it will output a finished physical product at a factory that you could have mailed to you. That is coming probably this year. I have seen tools that will transform the way, people do the thing we currently call role playing with with vectors in every direction like it is coming so fast and a and a lot of it is coming AI native it's not coming from established players it's not coming from big publishers it's coming from individuals who are coming into this hobby and

saying I've always wanted to do this and I never could figure out how and now AI is letting me do it like they're not coming in with the baggage of what if we do this is going to make all of our friends angry they're coming in and saying i'm going to do this and it's going to transform my life i'm going to meet new people i'm going to make a whole new social group i'm going to have new friends because i did this thing with ai like ai native is a powerful force if you were around in the dot com era you might remember a lot of big companies try to do web and they mostly fail. Most of the companies succeeded in the web were web native. They were companies that were started to do internet things, not big companies doing some internet thing as a project. And I think

that's going to happen with gaming. I think we're going to see a tsunami of brand new companies and people no one's ever heard of before that are going to just astonish and delight us with their creativity. I love it. Okay, that's exactly the kind of positive vibe I like to wrap up on. It is a, it is a, you know, it's going to be a very challenging future to navigate, but there is a bright, a bright path ahead. And I think that hopefully this has helped to shine a bit of a light on that path. So I want to give people an opportunity to find you because you are recently now a freelancer and able to consult and do things. So what's the best way for people to see your writing and your thoughts that you post publicly for better or for worse and or to contact you if they want to. your advice specifically.

Yeah, I would say, follow me on LinkedIn, and my company's website is widepacifichorizon.com. Fantastic. Ryan, I really appreciate you sharing your insight. I really appreciate the impacts that you have had on the industry that I love dearly, and I am very appreciative that I now get to call you a friend. Yeah, it was great. I was glad to be here.

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