Marty O’Donnell the Ytram: Always Take the Risk. Never Stop Weaseling

The worst possibility is not taking the chance and always regretting it. That actually would keep me up at night. So he typed in the code, up came and up comes Myst.

And I was like, I turned off all the lights. I turned up my speakers. I was just like, what is this?

And then Josh just sat next to me and I just started playing. And like, you know, two hours later, I look over at him and he’s still there, just watching me play. He said nothing.

And I’m like, can I buy stock in your friend’s company? If I push through and take this chance, something good might happen. Now, a hundred bad things could happen, but how bad is it?

That’s always what I think. Like the worst possibility is not as good, is not as bad as the best possibility. So I’m going to take a chance.

Do not be afraid. There is nothing you should fear. Failure is your friend.

You’ll never be successful at anything if you have fear. Hello, and welcome back once again to Hard Knocks the show, where we bring on exceptionally interesting guests to share the wisdom they’ve learned through their lives, all the hard lessons, the hard knocks that they’ve learned along the way so that you don’t have to. On this episode, we are speaking with Marty O’Donnell, the man that you probably know of as the composer for one of the most well-known video games in history, Halo.

However, there is so much more to his story than many of us even know, such as his entire history being a jingle writer. Bet you didn’t know that one. Or how his entire recording studio burnt all the way down to a crisp, losing almost everything.

All of these stories give so much more credence and meaning to a lot of wisdom he shares, such as don’t be afraid. What is the worst thing that really could happen? Because sometimes it takes three years of wheezing your way in somewhere that you know you belong, you know you should be.

But you should never stop and give up. All this and more on this episode of Hard Knocks. So, Marty, you gotta take me back to the day that you decided I want to be a jingle writer.

You know, I never had a day where I said I want to be a jingle writer, but I can tell you this. I was working as a grip, but I’d already had my degree in music composition. So I’m on the set of a film, and the producer came up to me.

This is an absolutely dead true story, and she said, hey, Marty, you’ve got a degree in music composition. Why don’t you write music for film and television here in Chicago? And I said, I don’t want to prostitute my art.

And I mean, I said it. I meant it. Yeah, it was, you know, I’m a 22-year-old stuck up or whatever I was.

I might have been older by that point. I was 24 or something, but I actually meant those words. I truly thought that was the thing.

I thought I was going to go in and teach, you know, at the university. There was a conservatory in Chicago. I thought I was going to teach, but I was just working to put food on the table.

That’s why I was a grip. You were married at this point. I was married, had a daughter.

So actually, I think I was 26. I’m a late bloomer. No excuse.

No excuse at all. And this is absolutely what happened. On the set the very next day, the director came to me, and he said, you know, Marty, it would be great.

If you did the score for this film, I’ll give you 500 bucks. And I’m like, OK. It was the film you were working on?

Yeah, yeah. It was a nothing film. It was a porn purchase film for Sears.

But he said, I’ll give you 500 bucks. And I’m like, absolutely. And then I realized that was my price.

Prostitute was OK. Nobody had offered me money before. Now I get it.

Now it’s a little different. And of course, I had to split it with my partner. My friend, Mike, who had a recording studio.

And I thought, well, how do I even do anything? I had no equipment. So I went to Mike’s house.

I said, I’ll split the 500 bucks. And so that was the very first night. We came up with five different songs that we produced in his little basement studio with eight tracks.

We had equipment from the band he was recording at the time. So we were borrowing. What was the band’s name?

I have to know. Oh, gosh. I have no idea.

No idea.

It was a nothing. It was a nothing band, right? But they had a Roland TR-808, which is, for those who know, are in the know.

It’s a very, very hip little drum machine. And there was a Casio keyboard and a Prophet Pro-1, which is not the Prophet 5, which is the Pro-1 was a single monophonic synth. OK.

And I’m like, OK, what’s this? And how does this work? And he’s like, OK, that’s cool.

Let’s do that. Sounds like it was your first time working with those kind of things. Yeah, yeah.

And so Mike sort of knew how to make it work. I knew how to make music. He had some ideas.

I had ideas. We just had a blast. So that evening, the next day I brought the cassette in of what we had done.

The director said, yeah, this is going to be great. You’re scoring the film. And there was another client there for a commercial we were doing for Marshall Fields.

And that client heard what I was playing and he’s like, that’s the music we’ve been looking for. And so this is like on a Thursday. And the next day we were in an editing studio.

The music was being put to this big campaign for Marshall Fields. And they had not found the music that they wanted. And this sort of crazy, punky, synthy, poppy music that we did was perfect for them.

And that Sunday, I’m watching the Bears game. And right in the middle of the Bears game, up comes the commercial for Marshall Fields with our music, no voiceover, just music and visuals for their new Vivere Italiano campaign. And I’m like, this is easy.

I’m going to keep doing this.

Did you up your price? Or was it still a slight $500?

Yeah, I think we got $750 for that one. Because he said, how much would it be? I think it was $750.

I still, at some point, I have in my archives, I think I’ve got the invoice. But yeah, it was, you know, we, I just thought, well, let’s just do this. This is, how easy is that?

Everything just fell into place. You know, we got the film score, got the commercial on TV. It’s a commercial on TV with no voiceover, just music.

I’m like, oh, well, obviously we’re geniuses and we’re, this is going to be an easy life. Me and Mike, yeah. So I went back to Mike.

It took me a while to convince him to quit his job. He actually had, at the time, he had two kids and a house and a mortgage. And I had one kid and an apartment and no equipment.

Mike had a couple of little businesses going. So for me to say, you should quit your job and let’s just do this. That was not an easy decision for him.

How did you go about, like, what was the moment where you were able to finally convince him? And also at the same time, what convinced you? I mean, having a kid, that’s still a lot.

I don’t have that. And I thought about a lot of other stuff. So one of my strengths and weaknesses is, like, just believing the future is going to be better.

Believing that this is just, I’m going to accomplish whatever I put my mind to. And everything’s just going to fall into place. And all I got to do is convince some stick in the mud, like Mike, that he’s got to go along with me.

We got a couple other little gigs. One was, I was still gripping while we were trying to do this music thing. He was, Mike was still working at his printing house where he was a, he worked as a printer.

So I was working for Joe Settlemeyer. And Settlemeyer is the one who did the Where’s the Beef commercials. Right.

The Federal Express. This is an ad agency. This is a director who had used to work at an ad agency.

And then he ended up doing some of the most iconic commercials ever out of Chicago. And I had gotten to be part of his crew. And so there was this day where we were doing a commercial for a chicken restaurant.

And if you know Joe, you should look up Joe Settlemeyer. He’s got some just unbelievably funny classic commercials. Yeah.

He was a genius. If you’ve never seen the Where’s the Beef series for Wendy’s, you haven’t. You’re too young.

You’re so young.

It certainly is a big bun. It’s a very big bun. Big fluffy bun.

It’s a very big fluffy bun. Where’s the beef?

So we were doing this series of commercials for Mrs. Winter’s restaurants. And I was a grip. And most of his commercials are surreal parody kinds of worlds.

So in normal chicken restaurants, it’s this nightmare thing. And then Mrs. Winter’s, of course, is the great restaurant. So there was this nightmare set of a chicken restaurant with all these people standing in line.

And there was a giant cut out wooden chicken with the menu on it. And the menu rotated. So everybody in line was doing this as they were trying to read the menu.

So it was just this funny, funny looking thing. Well, I was the grip behind the scenes, rotating and pushing on the chicken. Okay.

So I had this rhythm going. And then Joe was in front, the director. And to get sort of loosen up the room, he started going.

Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. And that was the rhythm of the menu. And I’m like, oh, that is so funny.

That little melody is hilarious. I wrote it down, went to the studio that night, recorded this hilarious version. I think it’s hilarious still to this day.

Recorded it, brought it in. And so the next day, the way Joe worked is he would shoot on one day and then have the clients and everybody come in and see the dailies. But he always wanted it to be a little bit of a show.

So the dailies would be with the clients in a dark theater, show the dailies. But he would have music playing. So people would be loosened up.

So he’d already chosen music. And I had this cassette. And I went into the editor behind the scenes.

And I said, put this in instead. Oh, and I remember the editor’s like, oh, man, Joe doesn’t like that kind of stuff. And I said, yeah, if you put this on loop, I think it’ll be really cool.

And so I thought, you know, what do I have to lose? I don’t want to be a grip the rest of my life. You don’t have to be a gumption to do that.

No, I need to know that. So archaeologists looking at where hard knocks and stuff like that is, that is the biggest thing. How?

You know, this happens to me every once in a while. Little opportunities come along. And I just say, if I push through and take this chance, something good might happen.

Now, 100 bad things could happen. But how bad is it? That’s always what I think.

Like, the worst possibility is not as good, is not as bad as the best possibility. So I’m going to take a chance. So how, what, what is it in your life?

You think that helps you think that way? Because that’s a big thing. There’s a lot of people, you know, there’s a classic, oh, I’m going to make a pros and cons sheet.

Yeah.

I’m going to walk through all this. And even if people do it, they still get stuck just seeing any bad thing. So what was different for you?

There’s probably a part of my brain missing. Whatever that, that fear part is. I’m looking around.

I don’t see like a hole anywhere. It’s just, it’s just the way I’ve always been. I don’t know how to explain it.

I’ve always, every situation I’ll look at that seems important. I’ll look at worst case, best case scenario always. And I’m, I’m always convinced that this is going to probably fall somewhere in between, but I always want to judge what the worst and best is.

And it’s just, it’s like an intuitive thing. I call it dominoes falling. So I’m here.

There’s this whole line of dominoes. And then this is the result here. And for some reason I’m here and I just go, oh, that’s where it’s going to be.

I don’t see all the things, but I know that there will be a rope, a bunch of dominoes that will fall. I’m convinced that will be in my favor. So what’s the worst thing that would have happened?

You would have just gotten fired, right? Exactly. Well, actually it felt like that because he was, he loved his crew.

So it was always a small crew. So he let the crew stand in the back of the theater, you know, and we’re talking a room, not much bigger than this.

Yeah.

Okay. And so, you know, I’m standing in the corner, it’s all dark. And the thing comes on, I’m standing there.

And all these takes of these people doing all this stuff. And it’s just take after take of stuff that we’re watching the dailies. And everybody in the room just starts cracking up.

And Joe’s of course sitting in the major seat, the main seat. And that music starts playing and people are laughing. He just shoots out of his chair and leaves the room.

And I’m like, okay, well, that’s it. Go collect your paycheck. I’m out of here.

And like 10 seconds later, he comes back in. He goes, he points at me. He goes, did you write that?

I’m like, yeah, that’s me. And he goes, okay, you’re done being a grip. You’re doing, you’re scoring the next three commercials.

Wow.

Those are great dominoes.

Yeah, yeah. All right. So let me, let me get this straight.

Okay. Okay. So you start off, you’re, you know, you’re a grip.

Yeah. And at the same time as being the grip, you’re also starting to, had it be named as Total Audio? No, no.

We was just, at that point, I don’t even know if we, I think I convinced Mike that we should just be, you know, him and me, Salvatore and me, O’Donnell. And I said, okay, well, we’ll call, we should just call ourselves O’Donnell Salvatore. Oh, okay.

Got you. And he says, well, why not Salvatore O’Donnell? And I said, well, because.

It’s alphabetic, it’s not alphabetic. Number one is alphabetic. Number two, Salvatore O’Donnell.

Is it Salvatore O’Donnell? Or is it Salvatore? Is it?

It’s hard. There’s a different world where he was a salesman. Oh, no, no.

I was a salesman my whole life. That’s, that’s part of the deal. Yeah.

So Mike is like, yeah, you’re right. Okay. And I’m like, yeah, yeah.

Good job.

You did a good job right there.

Okay. So you do that. You’re doing all this on the side.

You’re staying a grip so that you can, you know, pay the bills while you’re building up this new. You’ve built some music. You see an opportunity.

And you’re like, what is the absolute worst that can happen? And I believe what you said before that I love, which is you’re a big believer and you believe in the future. Yeah.

And that things will just fall into place. And you see this domino up ahead. You’re like, sure.

And you just push it over, you watch it over and it happens to turn out well. Right. That’s pretty much the story of my life.

I can point to several different moments in my life where there’s a little nexus points where I see it. I can see what this could be. And then I push through.

And the worst, to me, the worst possibility is not taking the chance and always regretting it. That actually would keep me up at night. I was talking to an investment counselor one time and they were like, what’s your tolerance for risk?

And I’m like, oh, no, you don’t want to ask me that.

It’s infinity.

It’s infinity. You should not ask me about my risk tolerance. I said, I realized this back in, oh gosh, I think it was in the late 80s.

I actually had this feeling. And I had just this tiny little profit sharing. We’d had a company now for almost 10 years.

Not quite. No, it was probably about eight years. But anyway, there was, so I was putting money into some mutual funds or stocks or whatever.

And Mike and I would compare, right? So I would say, look, I’m up $1.50 today. And he goes, oh, I’m only up $1.10. So I’m winning. We had a chart of who’s winning in our profit sharing.

It’s hilarious.

I love that. Very competitive. Yeah.

But anyway. And a two-person company. Right.

Nobody else. That was great. Because I remember the logo.

It’s like a little diamond-shaped ODS or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

So anyway, so I had this little bit of money in profit sharing. And I don’t know why I had this feeling something bad was going to happen. And it was one of those Black Monday things.

And I sold all the stock that I had. I sold it. It was in cash.

And then the stock market went down like 60%. It was one of those Black Monday. Everything went down.

Everything was horrible. I think it was like 1987, 88. You should look it up.

87. It was 87. You would know.

I would know. Yeah. Because we were buying a house at that moment.

Oh, you’re kidding. Okay. Well, so 87.

So I was one of those guys who total gut. I don’t know why I thought I had gone into cash. Okay.

So I was like, I am a genius. And then a couple of days later, the stock market started bouncing back up. And I couldn’t move because I was in cash.

I thought, I don’t know what to do. And what kept me up at night was the fact that I had no risk. To me, the risk was not actually being in.

And so when I finally realized that I am much better just throwing something at it, seeing it go down to nothing and maybe comes back up. I can sleep when the risk is at its peak. I can still go to sleep.

When I can’t sleep, I wake up in the middle of the night going, I’m in cash. I have no risk. It’s horrible.

So not having risk is risk. It’s risk for me. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. All right.

You have to tell me. So this methodology of believing in the future. And I really, really love that.

What is a time where it hasn’t gone well for you? And the only reason I have to ask that is I really love that. That hits hard, especially for me.

I totally feel that. But for anyone else watching, they’re going to ask, all right, obviously it hasn’t always worked out. And how did you handle that situation then?

You know, here’s one of the parts of my brain that’s missing.

Yeah.

Is that part that would say, oh, you failed. The thing you were hoping for didn’t turn out. Because even when that doesn’t happen, number one, I’m like, well, that’s not the end of the story.

I never believe that that’s the end of the story. Even so, for example, my run for Congress, I was defeated in the primary. And I took a giant risk on that.

And we can talk about that later too. But at this point, now suddenly you’re like, well, gosh, I’m actually friends with Governor Lombardo. I’m friends with Sam Brown.

I’m friends with John Lee. I have these connections that I’ve made. Well, that’s a win.

I’m glad I did this. Even though I failed at what I thought was going to be the cool thing. I see that there’s another, the story keeps going.

Yeah. So I cannot tell you, I can tell you tragedies. I can tell you things that failed, but I don’t see them as the end of the story.

I was like, well, the story keeps going. Could you give us like one example of that where you’re like, a lot of people would see it this way, but I saw it this way. And that’s what helped me keep going forward.

Well, I got two. One would be when our studio burned in 1999. We had a gorgeous studio downtown that we’d been in business for 17 years.

Beautiful pool table.

That’s right.

There was a pool table? Oh yeah.

Oh, are you a pool shark? Not a shark. No, I can play, but I’m not good at it.

My house came with a pool table. Oh, you’re kidding. It did.

I’m serious. The owners looked at, were looking at me like, well, we don’t want to move it up. Do you want it?

I’m like, yeah. I always wanted a pool table and Mike did too. So we got this place that was big enough and we’re like, wow, we’re buying a pool table right here.

Clients are going to come in. Every time you take a break, you just go out and play pool. It’s going to be great.

Yeah, but you’re talking about the fire at Wabash. Yes. So no, it was Erie.

Erie. Yeah. I got that intel.

Yeah, that’s right. We need better researchers. I don’t understand.

Oh, we got you now. So there you go.

It was on Erie and it was a great little building. And I mean, we’d had problems there, but like when that thing burned to the ground, it was probably, it had to feel like the darkest day possible. Like this is the end of everything.

We lost all the masters to so much work, years and decades of work. Oh, wow. Yeah, it just was devastating.

But there were some things that could be done. And I had a friend who had a company that had access to a cherry picker. And our studio was on the third floor of this three-story building.

And everything was burned out, the building had collapsed in the middle. But there was still, on the two ends of the building, we could see through these windows that there was still some stuff that maybe was salvageable. But the police and fire department had said, nobody’s allowed to go in, that’s it.

So I had my friend come over with a cherry picker. And he- Here we are again. Yeah, drove it up, hoisted me up through the top, went into the building.

And I recovered a whole bunch of work that were on, oh, what were those? Jazz cartridges. Anybody remember?

It was jazz. Not the zips, it was the ones that were almost a gigabyte.

Oh, yeah, there we go.

That’s huge. And so we were able to salvage all this voice work we had done for this game we were working on. And that was the only copy because everything else had melted.

And I was able to get that recovered. And we were able to publish that and finish working on it. And a bunch of the studios in Chicago, a bunch of the guys owned jingle houses and recording studios in Chicago came to our aid.

They said, anything you and Mike need, you can record for free here. So it was just an amazing little time in our lives to sort of dig ourselves out. And it was during that period that we did the Halo music, the very first 1999.

It was right during that period, we had no studio anymore. And that’s when the Halo gig came up. And I was able to write and we were able to produce that music for Halo.

You moved into a different studio at that time, right? But it was a place that was owned by an editing company. Post FX was the name of the company.

And they were, you know, the guy who owned it, Mike Fayette, was really, really nice to us and took us in under his wing. We were, because he saw the fire, his building and company was only a block away. So it was a lot of people who reached out to us and helped us out.

But at that point, then it was sort of like, oh, this is interesting. It’s no longer O’Donnell Salvatore. It’s Total Audio at Post FX.

So we were now a subsidiary of another company. And then I didn’t, I didn’t, I knew that wasn’t going to last. Yeah.

I didn’t like that. They actually invested in your company. Yeah.

They gave us a place and helped us get our feet back on the road. And that was the connection with Bungie? No, I’d already been working.

We had already been working with Bungie. Okay.

Then they came to you directly.

Bungie did? Yes. No.

Okay.

Well, tell us how that happened. So this is back in, well, first of all, the game industry was another one of those Nexus moments. What had happened is over the years of doing commercials and jingles and TV spots, I, you know, if you remember, so in 1982, I’m like, I don’t want to prostitute my art.

And then I did. And then this is great. And built a company, several studios, downtown Chicago, you know, Clio award winning, you know, whatever, we won the awards.

We do a national spots. We had a couple of spots on Super Bowls. I mean, we were just like, this is great.

We did, we are playing stones kids, you know, which was a huge jingle at the time. Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean. So we were doing the real thing.

Yeah. Which, which, by the way, on, on the Wikipedia and a bunch of other things that people have written about you, people mention ho, ho, ho green giant. No, we did not do that.

Oh, you didn’t do that? Oh, we worked with the guy who was the green giant singer. Oh, okay.

His name was Len Dressler. He was a bass singer. He was great.

He sang on a couple of our commercials. Okay. He definitely had a low voice.

Yes, he did. I can’t even do it. It was hilarious.

But you’re known for quite a, like, I mean, clean, Mr. Clean, the Flintstone Viamins. And those are, those are very well known. Yeah.

Yeah. They were, we were successful. Yeah.

And at some point in probably like 1990, we had our, we had a studio on Wabash 405 North Wabash, which was on the 10th floor, looking right over the Sun Times building and the river. Did you ever go over there? Yes.

Okay. It was a really nice studio. So, so we’re at one of these jobs we’re working on.

It’s late at night. The client’s coming in the next morning and we’re trying to come up with, you know, what’s going to happen. And we were scoring a commercial and it had claymation.

So it was a cool animated claymation thing. And there was this cat and a group of cats. I still have it.

And they’re doing this thing and we’re scoring them. So we’re scoring every, it’s an animated thing. So you score all the movements and stuff.

And I remember this one cat puts his finger up and, you know, I was cueing it with like some flute flourish and Mike thought it’d be better with a clarinet. I don’t know why. So we were arguing about whether it should be a flute or a clarinet doing this little detail.

Yeah.

And of course the client was a tidy cat. So there were, we’re arguing like at two in the morning about the music for a cat litter commercial. And like a bolt of lightning hit me in the head.

And like, I have prostituted my own person. You should, if you, do you still have that animation? I still do.

Yeah. Oh, if you do, you should send it over. We could put it in, in, into the, uh, the podcast right here.

Sure. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll give you the, I’ll give you my stuff.

Cat three with the power to absorb odors and deodorize for a fresh clean scent, making tidy cat three, the number one cat box filler in America. So whether you have one of these or lots of them, all you need is one of these, the tidy cat team clobbers cat box odor.

So, yeah, anyway, I, it was just one of those things where I’m like, what am I doing? I it’s, we’ve been doing this for like, you know, whatever it is, 12 years now. And, and I’m just tired of the whole thing.

It’s like, it’s the coolness of like, my music is on during the bears game. Like that was the pinnacle, right? You’re like, you can’t get better than that.

And then it just, it’s, it’s like a drug. It no longer gets you high. Right.

So, um, suddenly I realized, I think I got to do something different.

Yeah.

And, um, within, I don’t know, probably within that next year, my, our mutual friend, Dick Staub had a son who was 18 at the time, Josh. And Dick says, you know, Josh is, you know, he’s creative. He’s going to go to school.

He’s going to go to the university of Washington. And he doesn’t know what exactly what he’s going to do, but he’s an artist and he’s a musician. And man, it’d be great if you could, you could show him your studio.

I’m like, sure, Dick. I’d be happy to. So Josh comes over to my studio in Chicago.

Lots of people visited your studio. Yeah, that’s true. A lot of people did.

I remember just bringing random friends. We are right now. Yeah.

We’re in the studio right now. Yeah, it’s true.

Would you like to play some pool? So Josh comes over and, you know, he’s, I’m showing him the gear and all this fun stuff and what we do. And he looks at one of my shelves that had stuff on it and he goes, oh, do you like video games?

You know, he’s an 18 year old kid, right? Yeah, yeah. And I’m like, yeah, I love video games.

You know, I’m a big fan of video games. I have all these computer games on my shelf. So he’s looking, he goes, oh yeah, you like uninvited and this, he goes, you know, I have friends that make video games, computer games.

And I was, well, that’s cute. You know, because he said, I didn’t say that’s cute, but in my head, he’s 18. He’s from Spokane, Washington.

He’s got friends in Spokane that make computer games.

And I’m like.

The good Lord heard you. Okay. No, it’s really, he goes, oh yeah, I got a, I got a beta version of the game we’re working on.

I’m, I’m interning for him this summer. This was in 93, I think, 92, 93. Um, and I said, oh, well, you know, I’ve got a CD-ROM at my house, at my home studio.

And he goes, well, yeah, I’ll come over and show it to you if you want. I’m like, sure, that’d be great. So he comes over that night.

I plug it in and this is 93. So having a CD-ROM was a big deal. So, oh yeah.

So I plugged it in and up. Well, believe it or not, first it, nothing came up. So he says, I got to call my friend, you know, so he calls his friend in Spokane.

He goes, yeah, hi Rand, it’s Josh. Um, I’m at this, I’m at a friend of my father’s house. I’m trying to play this, play a beta version of the game and it’s not working.

And then I could tell the guy on the other side is like, oh, you got to type in this special code to flip a few bits in, um, you’ll love this. What was the, uh, the stack program? Um, HyperCard.

Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah.

So it was written in HyperCard, which is hilarious, but it was colorized. So there was a, in order to flip a color on and allow certain kinds of videos to play within our HyperCard, you had to type in a few lines of code. So he typed in the code, up came and up comes Mist.

Yeah. And I was like, I turned off all the lights. I turned up my speakers.

I was just like, what is this? And then Josh just sat next to me and I just started playing. And like, you know, two hours later I look over at him and he’s still there.

He said nothing. And I’m like, can I buy stock in your friend’s company? And he goes, no, I don’t think so.

But I was like, no, Josh, you don’t understand. This is going to be huge. So that was another one of those Nexus moments where I knew for an absolute fact that Mist was going to be huge.

And I was like, oh my gosh, I like computer games. I love computer games. I’m playing Nintendo.

I’m a weirdo to my friends who are my age. Like, why are you playing these games? But I never thought computer games would have any attraction for me from a production or a music standpoint until I saw Mist.

And then I saw, oh, it’s a sea change. Things have just leapt forward. Now, real quick, take me back really quick that video games wouldn’t, that you didn’t see yourself doing that.

No, because Nintendo was like, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. It was 8-bit and maybe 16-bit at that time. But I just didn’t, none of the music seemed interesting.

None of the way audio and music was implemented in these video games seemed like it was going anyplace from a cinematic storytelling, you know, just high quality aesthetic. Just, I just didn’t see it yet. Like the ability to put yourself in, say, this is like a work of my own art inside of here or, okay, yeah.

It just, just didn’t feel like, I mean, I was working with Chicago Symphony players and like really good actors and like, why would I want to go way, way backwards and work on some chintzy kind of, from a production standpoint. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Until I saw Mist and then I just saw, it just all opened up for me.

I’m like, oh, this could be, this is the future. But then I actually thought I missed it. I’m too ensconced in my own business.

Yeah.

This is, this would be a huge risk and they’re already so far ahead of where, you know, I can’t just jump in. How could I possibly hop on? I’d be grabbing onto the caboose of this train that’s going, you know, 110 miles an hour.

But you did anyway. I did anyway. And Mist was really one of the very first games like that, right?

It was immersive.

To me, it was the first. Yeah, it was, it was a sea change. And I’m not the only one who believes this.

There’s tons of people who, when this came out, they’re just like, okay, this is the future. And it’s an aesthetic. It’s not a design.

It’s the idea that you can tell stories in a super immersive cinematic way where the player is immersed inside the game as a character, however that is. You can, there’s so many different ways of, you know, doing that. But this was the first one that I think really just drew the player inside that world, made the world seem very real, and then used all the production techniques of voice acting and great sound design and music that enhanced the emotional journey.

And they had done everything. I think they did it just based on their own gut instincts of what they wanted and what they liked. And it was genius.

It was an absolute leap. And I’m like, I get to see it at this early stage. And by the way, that’s in 93.

Yeah. I immediately said to Josh, after he said I couldn’t buy stock, I said, can I meet your friends? Can I work with them?

And he goes, oh, yeah, I don’t know. I mean, it was just like, so it took me years. This kid is an intern, you know, and all of a sudden he’s like, yeah.

So, the next thing that happened. And so, this is like in, I don’t know, July or something of 93. And I knew the game was coming out in the fall.

Yeah. And I would talk to everybody like, there’s this game coming out. It’s just going to be huge.

And of course, nobody believed me. Yeah. But then Josh called me like in September, before the game came out.

Yeah. And he goes, yeah, Mr. O’Donnell. By the way, Josh is an Academy Award winning animator, worked at Disney, worked with Lasseter.

He’s had an amazing career since. Wow. So, that’s the punchline to what I’m about to tell you.

So, he’s still 18. Yeah. A friend of my, you know, son of my friend, Dick.

And Josh says, yeah, I’m supposed to start at University of Washington like, you know, next week. But the guys at Cyan, Robin and Rand Miller have offered me a job at their studio. And I’m like, you’re kidding me.

I said, well, what sort of job? And he said, well, they want me to be art director for the next project. And I’m like, holy mackerel.

That’s amazing. And he says, but, you know, I’ve already got, you know, I’ve been accepted at University of Washington. I’m supposed to disappoint my father, you know, my mother.

And I said, okay, Josh, here’s the thing. What’s the worst possible thing that could happen? There we go again.

So, I said, you take this job and the whole thing blows up. And in a couple of years, you’re back in college and you start two years late. I said, I’m telling you, by the time you’re 28 years old, nobody cares how many years it took you to get through school.

Yep.

Absolutely nobody in the world will ever care. I said, what is your art director? What will you be working at at Cyan?

He goes, well, we’re going to be getting all this latest equipment, these silicon, I forget what they’re called.

Silicon graphics.

Silicon graphics machines. And we’re going to be rendering. And I, you know, I’ve learned all this stuff and they really trust me.

And I said, well, what’s your major at University of Washington? He said, computer graphics. I’m like, okay, here’s how this works.

Universities and schools are at best five years behind technology. I said, if you take this job and things work out, you will be teaching these classes. Yep.

You will be the guest, you know, lecturer for, because you will be on the cutting edge of everything that’s going to happen. You will never be on the cutting edge if you’re in school. Yep.

And so he said, you know, thanks a lot. Oh, no. Mr. O’Donnell. Yeah, Mr. O’Donnell. No, I, it’s funny. I’ve talked to him since, I work with him all the time now with this show.

And I say, you know, Josh, I’ll say to him every once in a while, because his son is in the business. His son is a filmmaker. And I’ll say, you know, I’m responsible for your, you know, your career.

He goes, no, I’m responsible for your career. Because of course he went to Cyan and then I kept the line of communication open and weaseled my way in until I was able to do Riven, the sequel to Myst. Yes.

So, but that took three years. It took three years of weaseling from 93 to 96. So 93, I decided video games is where I need to go.

Yep. And I wasn’t able to do a thing until 1996. Wow.

All right. So three years, which is a long time. Measeling in.

Yeah. What’s that mean? Literally weaseling, literally figuring out ways of trying to get myself in front of Robin and Rand Miller, calling, sending stuff, being a pest to the point where there’s a character in Riven.

You got me listening. Yes. There’s a little, there’s a little frog.

In Riven. That’s very important to the sound. I think I know exactly what you’re talking about.

And this frog, they modeled after a frog that was sitting outside their studio in Spokane that kept annoying them.

I see where this is going.

So they modeled the frog and they decided to call the frog a Yitram, Y-T-R-A-M, which is Marty spelled backwards.

I love that.

That’s really. So they had already designed the Yitram and I was the annoying guy before I ever got the gig. So I still hadn’t gotten the gig yet.

And there was a point where Dick called me and said, Hey, Robin and Rand Miller are coming into Chicago. They’re on a worldwide tour. I mean, they were so huge.

They were going all over the world being interviewed. They were not working hard on the sequel. Why work on the sequel?

They were the biggest selling computer game of all time for an entire decade from 92 to 2002, 93 to 2003. I forget what it is. They just never stopped selling Myst.

It was insane. And I might be overstating that. I mean, they just remade Myst like last year and they just finished it for Riven this year.

But so the thing is, is that he said they’re coming in and Dick had a radio show and they were friends with Dick. So Dick knew them too. But I still wasn’t getting in.

Because you’re a Yitram.

Yeah. I didn’t know that at the time. That’s what I call the title of this episode.

Don’t be a Yitram. So he said, they’re having a driver. We’re having a driver pick them up at the airport.

But if you want to be the driver.

Oh, I love it.

So I said, absolutely. I’m picking them up. So I picked them.

I’d never met them before. I picked them up and they’re like, I’m the driver. And so they get in the car and we’re driving.

I’m like, okay, by the way, we’re going to lunch near my studio before we do anything else and you’re going to see my studio. They’re like, wait, what? I said, yeah, I’m Marty O’Donnell.

And they’re like, oh my gosh. What? And so.

That is so perfect. Yeah.

I think at that point you press the auto lock door.

Well, it’s like a Japanese taxi where you can’t open the door. The driver is the only one who can open and close it. Oh, that’s nice.

Yeah. I probably did have child locks on the car. I should have.

But yeah, anyway, that’s, I mean, I was just determined. It’s just like, look, no, you guys need me. Trust me.

You are so close to, you did everything sort of, you know, seat of the pants. You don’t know stuff that you should know. You need me to be producing audio for your next game.

And so they saw the studio and they’re like, oh my gosh. Yeah, this is, you know, they didn’t have anything like that. It was, you know, they started off in a garage.

Then they started off in some other little place. And now they were building a really, really nice, unbelievably nice studio. And they just didn’t know what to do with everything.

But they totally understood art and game design. And, but their guy who was doing their audio, super talented guy, but they had no real experience doing top level pro audio. So what I got from that was, okay, well, you come out and visit us and meet the team.

And, you know, sort of sell us. So I put together a little reel of sound design and stuff and went out there. And they asked me to come to, they were doing a shoot that day.

And they go, yeah, Marty, you know, meet us at the studio. We’re doing a shoot and it’s, we’re testing to see how this whole system is going to work. And so it was a nice little, I mean, it’s a video studio in Spokane.

Yeah. So I’m showing my, you know. If you’re in Spokane.

Sorry, yeah. But I mean, you know, I’d worked in LA and Chicago and New York and San Francisco. And I’m like, okay, Spokane, you know, it was exactly the kind of studio you would expect.

It’s like they shoot industrials, talking heads, fake news kind of broadcasty things. Probably not much better than what we’re doing right now. Oh, yeah.

Okay. Believe me. I love making skits.

I get it. That’s the fun of it though. Yeah, yeah.

So they’re out there, they’re shooting. And I’m looking at people running around. I just got insulted by that.

I know.

No, now it’s the cool way to go. But anyway, they’re running around and they’re trying to get lights. And what they have is I see on the monitor, I see, you know, the cool rhythm graphics.

And then they’re shooting a guy against the blue screen. Okay. And, but he, he doesn’t look like he’s in the environment.

I can, I’m looking at it. I’m like, yeah, the lighting’s bad. Yeah.

I know lighting. Yeah. And Robin’s looking at it, goes, no, that’s not right.

We need one of these little lights. And nobody can find the right kind of lights. They’re doing this thing.

They’re not doing well. It’s taking them forever. Nobody’s in charge.

At this point, had you formally joined or you’re still weaseling?

I’m still weaseling.

Okay. And this was how long after you chauffeuring them? Uh, probably a month.

Okay. A month later. How’d you, how’d you get out there again?

Well, they asked me cause, cause my chauffeuring and showing my studio.

Okay.

They’re like, we got them very interested.

Got you.

Okay. But it wasn’t, it wasn’t a done deal yet. Yeah.

Okay. So now I’m out and, and so I’m staying with Robin Miller. Who’s just a great guy.

He was so much fun to be with. So we’re sitting around that night and I’m playing him some music that I’ve done. He’s really liking it.

He’s the musician. He’s the guy who wrote the music for Riven and Myth, uh, Myst. And, uh, so we’re talking and he goes, well, what did you think of the, the shoot today?

And I’m like, Oh, well, you know, it was like, you know, it was really interesting. I’m like, I was a little confused though. Who’s, who’s your, uh, who’s your lighting director?

He goes, what’s, what’s, what’s a lighting director. And I said, well, I mean, you’re the art director. He goes, well, I’m, what do you mean art director?

I’m like, Oh, who’s the director? Who was the director on the set? I couldn’t tell him because what do you mean director?

And I’m like, Oh my gosh, no wonder. Wow. He had, none of the people had a clue.

So I said, okay, well, here’s how a crew works in normal film. And here’s what a director does. Here’s what art directors do.

Here’s what a lighting director does. Gaffers and grips. This is why there’s an actual list to a movie.

And, you know, he was explaining to me, I said, no, back up a little bit. How did you, how’d you guys make Myst? And he goes, well, you know, we realized Quicktime was just coming out and you could put these little, you know, stamp sized videos inside the game.

And so we decided to shoot ourselves against in the church basement against a blue towel. And we will go with a blue towel, shoot ourselves, put it in the game. And it was really cool.

They literally had captured lightning in a bottle. Yes. And they didn’t know how to recreate it.

No. So I’m listening to that. I’m like, wow, that is, that is really cool.

That is really cool. And I said, so now you’re doing the sequel. It’s three years later.

I’m just curious, like, how are you deciding, you know, your budget and how are you deciding the production for the sequel? I mean, you’ve had all this success and they’re like, well, you know, we just figured whatever the whatever we spent on Myst, we’ll just times it by three. And that’s what we should spend on Riven.

And I’m like, OK, so three blue towels.

Yes, exactly.

I said that, you know, and I knew at that moment he could just like say, get out of here, you son of a. But, you know, I it was just so funny to me. It’s just like, no, you guys are really thinking about this the wrong way.

Like, I got to tell you that what you’re trying to do, which is have a completely computer graphic generated environment and put a human being in it using green screen or blue screen, which at the time I was like, you should be doing green screen anyway. I like I said, Robin, this has already been figured out. You don’t have to figure this out.

There are studios that know how to do this. You just got to like. But you can’t be thinking three times the Myst budget anymore that and saying three blue towels just sort of like, oh, now he got it.

Yeah, they were thinking wrong. You put in perspective. So the next day I’m in this big conference room of all the Myst or the Cyan guys.

And Robin’s like, OK, Marty’s opened my eyes. We need an art director. We need a director.

We need a producer. We need all this stuff. And I’m like, yeah, I’m the audio director and I’m the audio director.

No, no. Everybody took a title. Everybody took a title that I said they needed.

So at this point, you still aren’t part of the team. Not quite part of the team. By the way, if you’ve ever thought that you don’t what weaseling in means, this is a perspective.

Yeah, it’s funny. I don’t think I’ve told this story in this detail before. This is almost like a like a mole, just like constantly.

But I thought, OK, well, he’s taking my advice for this and this and this. And and, you know, he was going to be the director. And I’m like, oh, boy, you know, he shouldn’t be the director because he’s an art director.

Right. And for those of you in marketing.

Right.

You know, how many art directors does it take to change a light bulb? A lot. Does it have to be a light bulb?

Yeah. Well, I’m thinking of flute and clarinet. Yeah.

So he got hit by a lightning bolt. So I was able to convince them that I that, you know, that me and my studio needed to be on their team. Mike and I worked on Riven.

What was the moment here? You know, I think they just followed up and said, yeah, here’s a bunch of stuff. Can you do some sound design and send it back to us?

And, you know, and then we sent it back and they’re like, oh, come on. All right. So you’re telling me after three years, sounds almost like a four at this point.

Weaseling in, they just randomly call you. There wasn’t like one thing that happened. Well, they I think when I was at the studio and at that conference, they were like, yeah, Marty’s probably going to do work for us.

But at what level? They hadn’t decided. And then when I showed them, they sent me some stuff.

I think they sent me the little there was like a little globe thing that was metallic sphere that you had to turn and it had all this really cool stuff. You turned it and it clicked and had little puzzle mechanical pieces that came out. Super sort of steampunky looking thing.

And so we did the sound design for that because the guy who had up to that point and did the mist sound design. This will probably shock you. It shocked me at the time.

Hold on, hold on. OK, I’m ready.

I said, you know, how did you do how did you do the sound for this? Well, I’d looked at this, you know, the QuickTime video that needed sound and I’d look at it a few times and then I would go out with a microphone and do this thing in the driveway. And then, you know, we throw it in to see if it worked.

I said, you were not ever working to picture. You didn’t have like Pro Tools. You didn’t have a machine that allowed you to have picture and sound like no full on monitor or anything.

Yeah, it just didn’t exist for that level of what they were doing in game design and production. And I’m like, oh, my gosh, how do you keep things in sync? Well, you know, we just keep trying it till it gets to where we’re sort of lucky.

And I’m like, that was missed. So it’s like, OK, well, you cannot do the next level. Riven is now three years later.

And in computer time, as you guys know. That’s 100 years. It’s 100 years.

So you can’t get away with that kind of production. You have to step it up. But you don’t have to figure it out.

On the video side, I hooked him up with a studio in San Francisco. We cast actors for help, cast real actors for them. At that point, Myst was.

Robin Miller playing one of the guys, Ran Miller playing one of the other brothers and then putting his glasses on. So now he was the dad. Oh, oh, that’s so cool.

I didn’t know that. Yeah, there’s three characters in Myst and only two actors. And it’s the brothers.

OK. So what I’m hearing here is you seem to be very good at realizing just because it worked one way before, it doesn’t mean it’s going to again. Right.

How is how have you come to that realization? Well, I mean, something a lot of people fail at. Yeah.

If you go back to that very first moment where I was in the studio with Mike in 1982 and I’m looking at this new piece, this gear. This is pre MIDI. MIDI is the thing that allows musical instruments to talk to each other.

Oh, yeah.

So there was the drum machine, which is by Roland called the 808, which is if you look it up. He’s told me about that before. Yeah.

And then there was this Prophet One and the Pro One. And the Pro One had a little what they call a sequencer. You know about sequencing.

And it was a little thing you push the button. It’s like you would hold the note down, push the button four times.

Oh, yeah.

Push it, you know, take your finger off, push it two times. That’s an eighth note rest. So you could make this.

You know, whatever it is. And I’m like, and then you program the drum machines, which had these buttons on it. You know, whatever.

And we’re making a song.

Yeah. And I’m like, well, this very first night I said to Mike, I said, is there a way to make the sequencer drive the drum machine? So they’re locked together.

And he goes, oh, yeah, I don’t I don’t know. I’ve never heard of that doing that. And so we looked on the back of the drum machine and said clock out or clock in or something.

And then on the sequencer, there was another port that said sync out or sync in whatever it was.

Yeah.

I’m like, well, gosh, if we could connect the sync out to the clock in or whatever, who knows what’s going to happen?

I love that.

And he’s like, we looked at it. It was like, this was, you know, this kind of plug. And this was this other kind of plug.

What’s the worst that could happen? What’s the worst that could happen? And I said, well, he says, we can’t connect them.

I said, well, what if we could we put this in someplace else and then connect that cable to that? He goes, well, I have a little amplifier. It was a little Sears amplifier was about this big, had like, you know, two channels and two knobs on it.

So you were able to go in on that and then out a quarter inch. And then we were able to go do the put the signal in one channel here for the sequencer and bring it into the drum machine. And so we had it hooked up.

And so I hit the button, start the drum machine, and it just started flashing. So it was waiting for clock. I’m like, oh, this is great.

It’s waiting for this. So then we push the button on here and it went. You know, the drum machine was like completely not syncing up at all.

And it’s sort of Mike is sort of like, well, you know, we tried. I’m like, wait a minute, wait a minute. We’re close.

This is actually talking to this. This is working. But it wasn’t.

And so I’ve talked about this with technical people since because they’re like, that should have never worked. And so I said, wait a minute, it’s just the volume knob for the output. He goes, yeah.

So I started doing this with the volume. I was moving it slowly. I mean, I’m like, there it is.

So we put a magic marker to remember that volume 7.2, you know, it wasn’t even digital. It was working on the the band of. Oh, my gosh.

So what it turns out it probably was was that we distorted the signal until it became like a square wave that yeah, readable. But it was in the right. The temples locked in it.

We probably did. I mean, that was that piece was, you know, one of those pieces was on the Bears game. What’s the worst?

So I think this leads back to your previous question about like, I knew we were getting back, but it’s like, you know, we were always on sort of this cutting edge of technology without really thinking about it. It was like, what’s the cool thing that’s coming out? Oh, you know, analog sense.

Oh, we bought a profit five. It’s got five oscillators. Oh, let’s get this new drum machine that’s using samples.

And, you know, I had so many connections, even back at when I was at USC, I was getting my graduate degree. I was a T.A. So this is years earlier, a couple of years earlier before we ever I ever got into the business. And the head of the department invited me to this dinner for the professors and the T.A.’s. So it’s like you don’t get to be with all the guys. Halsey Stevens is Professor Emeritus who knew Bela Bartok. I mean, this was a really big deal. And so Robert Lynn said, oh, you know, Marty, I think you’d be interested in meeting my son.

He’s got a little studio over here. So I went over there and this guy named Roger Lynn had a studio. He was his son.

And it was one of these old studios with, you know, shag carpeting up the wall and all this kind of stuff. And he had this cool looking wooden paneled machine. And it was the very first Lynn drum.

He was this is you look up Lynn drum. You’ll see how seminal this was, L-I-N-N. And he goes, yeah, this is this new drum machine I have.

And this is before I even knew about the 808. This is a couple of years earlier. And I had seen, you know, fake drum things like on organs.

And, you know, I was in a band and we were trying to do cool stuff. And none of that was any good. But like he said, yeah, press this button.

And it was just a perfect snare drum. Just suddenly playing back a snare and kick and snare and hi-hats open and close. And I’m like, this is this is mind blowing.

And it was like, you know, $10,000. So it’s like there was no way I had that. But yeah, so I’m at this early point.

I’m meeting Roger Lynn, who was also ends up being friends with the guy who was in charge of sequential circuits who made the Prophet. And the Prophet 5 was the first polyphonic sequence synthesizer. So I sort of rubbed shoulders with those people and saw where the technology was going.

We couldn’t afford any of that technology when we started. So we were just like way the cheap versions of all that stuff. But as we went through the 80s, we were always looking to see what the next cool thing was, trying to figure out how to use that technology to make money.

It’s like, yeah, it wasn’t just technology for technology’s sake. It was like, OK, what does this give us now? So we ended up just because we were there, you know, I’m calling the the the the weird chain of events was Roger Lynn back in 1980 or 79 or something saw that EPROMs were coming out.

So EPROMs for telephony. So for telephone calls, you can have these little EPROMs that would have digital audio on them.

Sure.

For like, please hang up or whatever it is. I sold those. Did you really?

So there was this company in San Francisco that was making EPROMs for telephone people. Sure. And it was called Emu Systems.

And Roger went up there and said, I have a bunch of audio samples that I want you to burn custom EPROMs for me. So he did. They did.

He took them back, put them in his drum machine. And that’s how he programmed his. That’s how he made his drum machine.

There we go. And the Emu guys were like, what the heck? And so then they decided to start doing that.

So the next thing that came out was the what’s called the drumulator. Emu made it. And then Emu made the emulator.

And their history of what they ended up doing. So they ended up making the drum machines that we ended up buying, the SP-12 and these digital samples. And they were spectacular.

At one point, they made what they were making because they were realizing that they should have noticed what Roger Lin was doing. So they got into the business super, super successful. As a matter of fact, Emu made the machine called the Proteus-1, which is the entire soundtrack to Myst that Robin Miller did, comes from the Emu Proteus-1.

Wow. So, I mean, I’ve been watching how technology just folds on itself for years, for decades. Then at some point, I’m looking in a keyboard magazine, and it’s like, hey, do you want to make your SP-12 even better?

Buy our drum samples. And so there was this little company that had a little mailing, you know, mail-in for their drum samples.

Yeah.

You can take our drum samples, put them in using a Commodore disk drive.

There we go.

With SCSI.

Yep.

Nobody’s going to be interested in this because it’s so old, old, old. There’s a lot of Commodore Amiga people out there. Hello, the Amiga still lives.

I want you to know that.

Yeah, the Amiga. But so I looked at this ad, and I’m like, hey, Mike, you know, we, instead of using the SP-12 factory sounds that Emu is making, we can put our own ones in or get some new ones because, you know, you’re always wanting to upgrade your stuff.

Yeah.

So I called these guys up, and it was, you know, it’s called DigiDrums. So I call up DigiDrums, talk to the guy. He’s one of the owners.

They were not super successful, right? They were, they were like, they knew the Emu guys. How come these Emu guys are making drum machines?

We’re better. We’re going to do this thing, and we’re going to start sampling better than their samples. So they’re sampling drums, and they sent us the stuff, and I’m like, this stuff is great.

You know, I remember talking to them on the phone, and I said, like, okay, you know, how did you guys do the samples? And they’re like, oh, this is really cool. We’re going to release the program that we wrote for sampling, and we’re calling it Sound Designer.

And so Sound Designer 2 is coming out, and we’re going to, so we bought Sound Designer 2. And they changed their name from DigiDrums to DigiDesign. Okay.

DigiDesign, of course, years later, makes Pro Tools, which is… Oh, wow. So we were there at the early stages of game development, music development, technology, computers, the whole thing.

So a lot, if I were to cycle back to the original question, which… Who remembers that? Yeah, which, that’s where my job is right here, right?

That’s why I got this pencil, right? If the original question was more or less around, how did you gain the perspective not to always just rest on your laurels and always thinking, no, we can’t do the same thing as before, we have to do something different.

Yeah, that’s interesting.

It feels like a lot of, from the stories you’re telling here, the reason why you’re able to think that way and why you gain that wisdom was because especially in anything tech, you’ve seen that all it really takes to completely radically change an industry are a couple of dimwits sitting in trying to sync together two different pieces of audio equipment with something that shouldn’t work, it does. And all of a sudden, boom, what we thought worked before is now, it has been changed forever.

And you’re seeing these people with Riven right now, and you’re like, no, if you do the same way, by the time this game comes out, it’s not going to be as impactful and you have to go do something big again. I don’t know if it’s certainly part of my DNA to not look at something and then just accept the way it’s being done. To not only say, is there an easier way to do it or is there a better way or is there something, believe it or not, sometimes it’s just the cool factor.

This would be cooler. So let’s try that. Tell me more about that.

Okay. This would be cooler. Yeah.

So let’s do that. Well, I mean, think about it. I’m playing a bass line and then maybe I’m playing it to a drum machine and I’m not really in sync very good.

So I keep playing until I get as tight as possible.

Yeah.

And what I saw was like, well, gosh, if I could make this drive that, it will be just the tightest rhythms groove you’ve ever heard. It’s now called drum and bass. It’s in Acid House from Chicago.

It was all based on the 808 and MIDI and all of these things. But for some reason, I’ll tell you this. Okay.

Something good always comes whenever you do this. That night I was talking to Robin Miller. I was asking him the same way you’re sort of talking to me, how did you get to the point where you’re doing this?

How did you guys start this? This goes back a number of years. He says, I was in Spokane trying to do art and my brother was in Texas as working at a bank.

And this thing called HyperCard came out for the Mac and you could like Rand called Robin. This is Robin telling me the story. And he said, my brother called me and said, hey, I got an idea for a children’s book.

I need you to do the artwork for me. And it’s going to be a children’s book that’s on the Mac where you just click on the page and the page turns and now there’s the fuzzy bunny and then there’s words you read and then you click next and it goes to the next page and there’s a thing. But I need someone to be able to do the art.

And Robin’s like, yeah, I hate computers. So he had this little Mac and it had a drawing program on it. Yes.

And so his brother says, yeah, you got to draw a bunny. You got to draw a tree, whatever it was. He had a list of things he was supposed to draw.

And then because Robin’s like, yeah, I don’t want to draw any of that. So he’s messing with it. Didn’t have a stylus.

It was the mouse. Yeah, everything was drawn with the mouse. So he’s learning how to draw with the mouse.

He’s hating it. But he starts to figure it out and he draws this manhole. It was just that he made a really nice looking manhole sitting in the sidewalk.

Yeah.

And so that’s what he drew. And then he looked at it. And the interface for the drawing program inside of HyperCard looked like this.

It was just a person’s hand and finger. It was just this disembodied. So that’s how you could push buttons and move your hand around.

It was the cursor turned into this little finger. And he’s looking at that and he clicks on the manhole and he goes, oh, I should be able to open that manhole and have the manhole cover slide over.

Yeah.

And I should click again and then look down the manhole.

Yeah.

Oh, wow. Their first game was called Manhole. It is a classic and that’s what it is.

But what he figured out at that moment was a interface design for a graphical game that didn’t depend on menus like drop down menu, open manhole. It was just point and click.

Sheer creativity.

He invented the point and click adventure at that moment. And when he told that to me, I just got chills because I’m like, he did not realize what he had invented. He invented the point and click adventure.

The idea that the environment you’re looking at. I mean, think about how many websites and just everything.

Oh, I’m just thinking Monkey Island right now.

But you think, you know, you look at your iPhone, the idea of using your finger to click through things. I mean, it’s just so he I’m telling you, in my opinion, he was the first one to actually have that little moment click in his head. Now, for some reason, I think.

I have a certain ability or insight or something to kind of see those little seminal things. And if I’m not involved in it, at least I can sort of see it and realize it’s important. Yeah.

And so it was at that moment, I was like, yeah, I got to work on Riven with these guys because this guy, Robin, is a genius without actually understanding how revolutionary what he’s doing is. And actually, what was nice is he called his brother Rand and said, hey, Rand, yeah, I didn’t make the bunny or the tree or do any of that stuff. I made a manhole cover.

I made a manhole cover. And now here’s another image of it opened up. Can you like animate between those?

Is there a way to click on that and have it happen? And Rand was the one who was like, that’s genius. That’s what our game needs to be.

Or that’s what our story needs to be based on. So manhole, if you play manhole now, you can still play it. It’s just this sort of surreal Alice in Wonderland kind of point and click adventure.

You go down the manhole and then this entire world opens up. And then you see some creature floating on a teacup. And then if you click on that, you’re in the teacup and the whole world gets big.

And then you end up on somebody’s table. I mean, there’s no point to the game at all.

Yeah.

I remember Dick saying, Dick Shay, wow, I played that manhole game. What’s the point? Like, Dick, it’s genius.

Don’t you get it? You know, what’s interesting to me is that… So I entered University of Illinois, computer science, 1975.

We had Play-Doh back then. Sure. Okay.

And Play-Doh had point and click. It was a membrane key screen. Really?

Which was plasma. Right. Wow.

That was invented by Carroll. I can’t remember if it was Professor Carroll. He was the inventor of the LED or whatever it was that you could touch something.

So this is not even HP. It’s happened for very, very long, but no one did anything with it. Yeah.

Right. That’s the thing. It’s back there.

Yeah. Right. So then someone has to do something with it.

Yes, with it. Yeah. I mean, we had games that we played.

Sure. Right. But nothing like that.

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

That’s the thing. If you’ve ever seen that, there was a TV series 30 years ago called Connections. When you look at the history of different inventions, every invention comes out of nowhere.

The printing press came out of how they would squeeze liquid out of fabric. And somebody had to say, oh, well, what if I took that machine that cranks down this thing? And then wood carving and all these things came together.

So you make all these connections, but somebody had to make the final connection. Gutenberg made that final printing press connection. But yeah, it’s those kind of things that I think are…

I love those moments. When I was a kid growing up… In fact, I want you to talk about that for just a second.

Yeah, go ahead. Because the question I was going to ask is about your dad. Yeah, okay.

What he did, because it seems to me every time I’ve heard this, I’m like… Because we all stand on the shoulders of other people. And not much is said about your father and what he did.

Yeah. Because I know you’ve told me about him. Because it seems like there’s a lot of where you’re at, you’re standing on his shoulders.

Yes, absolutely. Well, I mean, he was a film director and also an actor and a radio personality. He’s done so many different things.

But he did his own film editing. Well, hold on. What was your dad’s name?

Bob O’Donnell. Bob O’Donnell. Yeah.

And I just watched him work. And he was a creative guy. But he was also…

He knew how to direct and work with a crew. He produced. He knew how to produce.

He got things done. So I was always a big admirer of everything my dad did. But he would also sit with me and we would analyze TV shows.

Really? Yeah.

So he would say, oh, there’s bad continuity there. What’s continuity? And he would say, from this scene to that scene, this didn’t happen.

And that’s out of sync. The lighting is whatever. So I got to the point where I could analyze certain things and still enjoy it.

But I was a little kid coming down and watching what my dad was watching. So I would come down the stairs and watch through the balusters there, right? Oh, same.

Yes. I know exactly what you’re talking about. I wasn’t supposed to watch it.

Same. Right. Yes.

My dad was watching The Twilight Zone. And of course, I would have nightmares. And they’re like, Bob, did you already watch that show?

Oh, I didn’t know he was watching. Anyway. But I remember being such a fan of Rod Serling.

But it was early television, right? The 50s. TV was a brand new medium.

And by the time I’m doing TV in the 80s and I’m doing jingles and film scores and stuff like that, I’m like, films kind of peaked in 1939 with Gone with the Wind. You know, Gone with the Wind and Wizard of Oz, like the same year. I mean, just think about how great those things are.

Ben-Hur in the 50s. And then these TV shows came out of nowhere. And all these pioneers in TV.

And then TV is this established medium. And I remember sitting there thinking, I want to be a pioneer in a medium, not someone who’s just working in a medium and crystallizing what’s already good and just doing it a little bit better. So I was always like, I want to, what’s the next cool thing to do?

And it just, going back to cool, it’s like, I just said, yeah, it’s all been done. There’s no new medium. And when I saw Myst, I’m like, that’s it.

That’s the new medium. Game design and games are going to be the next huge thing. And I missed it.

I thought, I have two… It’s going 120 miles an hour already. So I grabbed onto the caboose.

And it’s funny, my whole career in games is 30 years long now. And four of which was spent being a weasel trying to get in. So 26.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. I was just weaseling my way in. But it’s so funny because some people think I’m sort of a pioneer in the game industry.

But I’d never thought of it that way. Because by the time I saw that sort of aesthetic leap, I thought it’s been done. But what I didn’t realize is how much more there was still to go.

And so I’m, you know, music technology, game technology. One more thing I’ll tell you. Yeah.

Yes, I was waiting for it. I was waiting for it. So I got my master’s in music composition at USC in 1982.

I graduated. And I’m home. Marcy’s pregnant.

About to have our first child. Have no idea what I’m going to do next. I’ve got all these resumes out to all these schools around the country.

But I’m looking around and I’m like, ah, you know what? This computer thing I think is going to take off. And I know nothing about computers.

Now you, years before, you already grew up on it. You were the thing. But I’m like, yeah, I don’t know how it’s going to intersect with what I do.

But I know computers are important. And so I said to Marcy, I said, you know, I think computers are going to be a thing. 1982.

So I went to the local community college, Pasadena City College. And I signed up for 14 units of computer science. After I had my master’s from USC.

How old were you right now? At that point? Let’s see.

Yeah, maybe 24. Okay. So you had, you basically had finished your life.

Yeah. Done with that. I don’t need anything else, right?

And then immediately you get hit with a, I’m not done. I’m not done. So I took- You went to a city college.

Yeah. That’s fascinating. And I was like, I just like, I just got to find out what is this stuff?

So I took, you know, intro to computers. I took Fortran. I took COBOL.

I, you know, I even, one of the things they had you do is actually use punch cards.

Sure.

So I was at a machine using punch cards and feeding those in. And it’s like, that’s where you understand, like every character in your code is important. You miss one character, you get one card out of order.

Yeah. Program doesn’t compile. Or you drop them.

Oh, drop them. This is why you have a rubber band around them. Oh my gosh.

So like, at that point, I got this sort of fundamental understanding about computers and I really loved it. And so the guy who was teaching Fortran, I forget this guy’s name. He was a young guy.

He was probably, couldn’t have been more than maybe two years older than me, but he had spent his whole life in computer science. The first night of his class, he starts talking. And this is an intro to Fortran, right?

This is Fortran 101, whatever it is, at a city college. And there’s like 30 people sitting in the room. And at that point, I still looked relatively young.

I looked like I could have been an 18 year old, like half, or most of the room. Oh, you know why I started having this beard? Oh, you have to.

Yes. Do you know why? No.

Okay. So like short, super short, because it was about this guy, right? Not me.

Okay. But I want to know. I was making a micro conference when I was 16 for all these game developers and flash games.

Oh, okay.

Because I was big in that community and I made a conference and I did it. It was online. Everyone loved it.

Okay. And I got invited out to a conference out in San Francisco just to go meet all these people.

That was GDC, right?

GDC was at the same time as Flash Games Summit. That was what it was called. Oh, okay.

Sure.

And so what ended up happening was I went to go fly out. I’m 16. And I have a baby face, by the way.

And this guy looks at me saying, you need to keep your beard so that you actually get taken somewhat seriously. And ever since that day, I have never not had a beard. Oh, excellent.

All right. That makes sense. Yeah.

I was sort of using it like I didn’t want people to know I was like an adult taking a beginner’s class.

Yeah.

So I was just like, yeah, I kind of fit in here. You know, my hair was long. I still had a somewhat baby face.

Yeah.

This is basically why I have this. Make sure people know I have a chin. So anyway, I’m sitting in this class and this guy starts talking and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I’m like, oh my gosh, I couldn’t understand anything he was talking about. He was so hot. The language he was using, the words he was using, the concepts he was doing.

I’m like, oh, wow, I think I’m in the wrong class. I really thought this was going to be an intro class. So I took notes.

I’m listening. And so that was like a Tuesday night. I came back on the Thursday night for the next class.

And there were like 10 people in the class. 20 people dropped out. But you came back?

I came back. And because he’s looking around and he’s like, wow, I thought we had a lot more people. So I went up to him afterwards.

And he was around my age. He was maybe a year or two older. And I said, look, I got to tell you, I already have a master’s from USC.

I thought this was an intro class. He goes, it is an intro class. I said, well, you are talking above everybody’s head.

That’s why nobody’s here. He goes, oh, you’re kidding. He was not a good teacher until he decided that he needed to start way back and explain all of his.

You know, he was so into the jargon that it was on. You couldn’t translate it if you didn’t know the jargon. He had what’s called, we call the curse of knowledge.

Yes. Once you learn something, it’s impossible to remember what it was like before you knew it. Right.

And so I kept, he really depended on me. And then I was like, of course, I was his number one student. I did the best work.

And now this is weaseling.

I was weaseling.

So this is like. Never, another great word of wisdom. Never stop weaseling.

Yeah, exactly.

So we became friends. I was his star student. He loved this program.

I did a scheduling system for airlines. I did some other thing. In Cobol?

No, that was in Cobol. That’s right. But Fortran, what did I do in Fortran?

Something scientific.

Something scientific, but whatever. He liked what I was doing.

Figured out, you know, the right volume to turn on the thing that connected, right?

You know, I said, find a job during Y2K when all the Cobol programs.

That’s right.

Brand Miller was a Cobol programmer and he had a job during Y2K. He’ll say, I’m leaving. I’m doing Y2K now for a while.

But anyway, so this guy came to me and at the end of the class, he goes, look, you’re a natural at programming. You really understand this stuff. He says, I just got headhunted.

This is in Pasadena. He got headhunted by a Silicon Valley company. He just said, it’s a company in Silicon Valley that headhunted me.

And they said, do you know anybody else that’s young and has aptitude and would come up there? He says, you know, you could probably do really good up there. And I’m like, no, no, no, no.

You know, it’s the old prostitute in my heart thing. Like, no, I’m a musician. I’m a composer.

This is just a side. I’m coming back to that later on to figure out the genesis of that. I got that circled on you, but not yet.

The thing is, I’ve always wondered, there’s a fork in the road that I didn’t take. Yes. Like, what if we said, okay, was it Apple?

Who was it that was headhunting? Right.

Couldn’t have been anybody.

Yeah. And so like in 1984, years later, now I’m doing jingles and stuff and I’m watching the Super Bowl and then I see the 1984 Mac commercial.

Yep.

And it was like, it was another one of those seminal moments where I’m like, yeah, Steve Jobs is a genius and this is the next big thing. And I just became a complete Apple believer from that point on. There was a lot of my friends who were like, no, Apple is a toy.

Well, that’s not true. Just so you know, my first computer was an Apple. Really?

The Apple one or two or something? The first one. Oh, the Apple two.

Yeah, it had to be. Well, no, it was the first Mac, I should say. Oh, the first Mac.

Okay.

So one of my good friends at Intel, John Rizzo- The 512. Went on to, right? He went on to be the product manager for the Macintosh.

Yeah, John Rizzo. I know his name. Okay.

So John invited me to come visit him at Apple. Yeah. This is now, what, 1983.

Sure. It was. Right.

And he said, let me show you this thing I’m working on. Right. And so he turns on this Macintosh and like- That was a- Oh my God.

Before it came out way, way early, you know, it was totally pre-release. I’m like, oh, that’s so cool. And I remember that I ended up at US Robotics and I convinced them to buy a- There we go.

Hold on. Everyone quiet. Yeah.

Every modem out there just connected. That’s why I was doing it. Right.

And I remember getting that first Macintosh in our office. And then we got a Lisa. Oh, yeah.

The Lisa. That was Steve’s private- So I’m a big Apple fan. By the way, the Silicon Valley company could have been some total loser startup that I would have just- No, no.

It was Apple.

It was Apple. I like that. It was Apple.

See, if you do this- Yes, it’s Apple.

It’s for sure, it’s Apple.

It was actually, it was calling.

Yeah, it was. Yeah, totally. It was the icon.

All right.

So I want to Ziploc this up, but we’ll come back to it after it marinates for a teeny bit. I just have to do one last thing. Sure.

It is something I do for anybody who thinks they might be a good programmer. And I’m interested to see how well you perform. Oh, boy.

Okay. This is not a contest. Give me all the steps you would follow right now from- For those of you listening online, all right, we are sitting in chairs inside of his personal studio.

All right. Now, just picture that in your head, okay? What are all the steps you’re going to follow to take yourself from where you’re sitting right now to going outside in your garage?

Okay. Step one, I push my chair back. Step two, I stand up.

Step three, I turn to the left. All right, you passed. Oh.

All right. He already won. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Most people- It’s going to take me a while to get to the garage. Well, yeah.

Yeah. The thing is, most people will be like, I stand up immediately. Yeah.

And I always look for someone thinking I’m going to rotate my chair or I’m going to push off my right leg. I’m like, this person is a programmer. They understand.

That’s hard to teach. Yeah. The learning, you know, I learned Cobalt, Fortran, and Intuitive computers all at the same time.

And I still remember the whole idea of an algorithm. I’m like, oh, I totally get this. And then you’re looking like, what shortcuts can I do?

What modules can I make? Just repeat, and then put that to a side. So when you need that function, you just go here.

My brain just clicked. I don’t know if it’s a musician thing or a composer thing, but it just clicked very quickly. The main thing I’m happy that I took the computer science for wasn’t so much that I wanted to be a programmer.

Yep.

It’s just that I could argue with programmers. The classic XKCD comic out there that Randall Munroe makes, I know if you’re familiar with it, you’d love it to death. But there is a famous one where a guy says, well, got to get back on the computer.

Someone’s wrong on the internet again. So I want to transition over here, and I’m going to change my typical question to be how you would say it, which is, what was the moment that you decided, eh, what’s the worst that could happen? And you delved into politics.

Well, that’s very recent. That is just like four months ago. You had done some things in that realm for a little bit in the past.

Let’s go back to the Democratic National Convention, when you were the roving reporter for Dick Staub on WILL. I remember this. Oh, my gosh.

That’s funny. That’s the last time I was at Chicago, and it’s coming back. It’s coming back.

I remember watching the 68th Democratic Convention as a 13-year-old. Oh, so we do. And I was watching.

The whole world was watching. It was such a horrible thing. And then 96 was the next time.

And Dick said, hey, Marty, you want to be a roving reporter? I’m like, yes. What’s the worst that can happen?

Exactly.

So I go, I got my jeans, I got my denim shirt on, whatever it was, and I put a tie on, because I’m a reporter. But it was a Rush Limbaugh tie. Rush Limbaugh used to make ties.

So I put a Rush Limbaugh tie on. Nobody recognized, because back then, I looked like a former hippie. I definitely, you know.

So I’m walking around trying to interview everybody for Dick. And James Carville’s there, and Mary Matlin, who’s his wife, and she’s the conservative. And I came up there.

I talked to Cokie Roberts and Dan Rather. I was interviewing politicians.

You had a lot of fun with Dan Rather.

Oh, my God. Yes, I did. Oh, he kicked me out, because you ambushed me.

What’s the frequency, Kenneth? No, I didn’t say that. I should have.

You don’t know that reference, do you?

I don’t. No, I don’t.

Somebody out there knows the reference. OK. You’ll see it.

It’s a great one. Anyway, I go up to, I talked to all these people, and they were all really nice. As a matter of fact, George Stephanopoulos walked by with his cadre of people.

And I’m standing there, and I’m like, hey, George, how you doing? And he goes, hey, yeah. Like, he thought he should know me, because I looked like somebody.

I was similar age, had long, floppy hair. He was young. And so he looked at me like, oh, I’m sure I know that guy.

I’m like, yeah, you don’t know me. But I go up to Mary Matlin. If you’ve ever seen her, she’s hilarious.

And she looks at me, and she goes, you’re at the wrong convention, babe. And I’m like, do you know what I am? She goes, yeah, I know that tie.

And I flipped it around and rushed limbo on it. She just laughed. So anyway.

That’s amazing. So that was my first forum.

That wasn’t my first.

I did. Yes, yes. And had a good time.

I was also at the National Review Convention, which was in Washington, DC. Dick took me to that. So I was sort of his assistant.

And so we were sitting there at the National Review. It’s a conservative Republican convention in 96. And the guest speaker was Bob Dole.

Bob Dole running for president. This is before he did Viagra commercials. Yes.

See, I’m glad I’ve got him to go help me out. No, we’re in the same generation. My hair is grayer, but other than that.

Anyway, so at the end of Bob Dole speaking, I raised my hand. You know, I want to ask a question for the audience. And I said, Senator Dole, you know, power runs into Washington, DC, like water runs downhill.

When you become president, what are you going to do to reverse the flow so power leaves Washington? And he said, well, I’m not sure I really understand the question. Oh, gosh.

I’ve been working my whole life to get this power. Why would I give any of it up? And I was like, and there it is, in a nutshell, the problem with politics.

And this is the year of what? 96. 96.

And I still voted for Bob Dole. I thought he’s a great guy. But like, I’m like, nobody in politics understands Tolkien.

It’s the ring of power that corrupts everybody. Everybody gets corrupted by power. You all of a sudden just took any viewers who are like, oh, straight looking back.

Tolkien mentioned, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whiplash.

Yeah, exactly.

This is my domino here to my domino here, right? It goes like this. But Tolkien’s here.

Throw the ring of power into the fires of Mount Doom. Why? Because nobody can hold the ring of power.

It corrupts you. You think you can grab the power and do the good. Everybody thinks they can do good with power.

But actually, it’s the power itself that will corrupt them. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Yes.

And so I realized that I’m in my little Tolkien-esque, C.S. Lewis world and the politicians, nobody’s there with me. So of course, that was the last time I dabbled in politics. It was just fun because it was with my friend.

Yeah, of course. But then I went off and eventually moved to Seattle and did Halo and did Destiny and did work with Paul McCartney and did all those things. But politics has always been something that’s interesting to me.

What about it was interesting to you? Because you have such an interesting mind of just talking right now, like it goes all over the place, making these connections everywhere. I can see how you got along.

Both of you love doing that stuff. So what about it was interesting to you? Well, actually, pretty much nothing other than- That’s a great answer.

Sitting on the couch watching news and throwing my shoes at the TV. And basically, what’s wrong with you people? You’re all jerks, all these career politicians.

But my daughter, Allison, who’s lived in Las Vegas for 15 years, started a nonprofit over 12 years ago, which works for children whose parents are gone and are being raised by their relatives. So she has this company called Foster Kinship. It helps these families navigate through all the bureaucratic crud that’s thrown at them.

And it’s just a great, great thing. It’s the one thing that is actually legitimately a good thing. Everything else in my life is like, hi, this is cool, this makes money, this is this.

But this is something that when I work with Allie or I try to help her out, I feel like, yeah, somebody’s figured out how to do something that’s actually good for society. And I feel like maybe I can help get into habit because I said, well, my daughter’s Allison. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

St. Peter’s just like looking here and being like, all right. Yeah, you’ve failed a lot of places here. Oh, wait, your daughter’s Allison?

Okay. This will give you five points of extra credit. You needed four more to get in.

You’re still the negative, but oh, your wife is Marcy? Okay, well, you’re good. So anyway, by the way, that is not my theology.

We have to be sure. We have to be careful. Right, right.

Yeah, some people will take that very literally.

Yes, I know.

So Allie has over the last few years, since we moved here three years ago, she would tell me about some of the political bureaucratic stuff she’s working through. And she’s been invited to go to DC and testify on behalf of family things. And she’s much more connected.

And so just four months ago, she said, hey, Dad, I’ve met this guy. I know you’ve contributed to a few candidates. I met this guy who’s running for state assembly here in Las Vegas.

I think you’d like him. He seems like you. I’m on a board with him.

He’s a cool guy. You should talk to him. So I called this guy.

His name is Raphael Arroyo. And he absolutely is salt of the earth. I love the guy.

Young, running for state assembly. And we hit it off.

Yeah.

And so I said, Raphael, how can I help you? Like, I contribute money. Is there something else I could do?

I’ve got a career. I’ve got a studio. Like, just tell me how I can help.

And eventually, he just said, well, I want you to meet the people I’m working with. So these people called me. And they were running his campaign.

But they also ran Governor Lombardo’s campaign from two years ago.

OK.

I’m like, oh, that’s pretty cool. That’s the one guy in Las Vegas, in Clark County, the state of Nevada, that was, as a Republican, won a major seat, which was the Republican. So I’m like, this is cool.

And so I started talking to them a little bit. And after a few conversations, this guy said to me, after I said, well, what can I do? What really can I do?

And I’m thinking, I’ll write a little music. I’ll record some voice thing. Or I’ll contribute money to somebody who needs to do something.

And he says, have you ever considered running for Congress?

Wow.

And it hit me like, of course, no. But he said, it was a long pause, by the way. He goes, well, you’re not laughing.

So then I started laughing. And I said, yeah, this is crazy. And I said, the weird thing is that I used to tell my daughters as they were growing up, as I’m throwing shoes at the TV, and these career politicians are all jerks, that’s not the way politics should be.

These are not the people who should be in politics. They think of it as a career. It should be a civic duty.

It should be the same as jury duty. And it should be called Congress duty. And you should get a letter in the mail.

And it’s like, it’s your turn to go to Congress. And then you can do your two years and then go home. So I said, it should be called Congress duty.

And every American citizen might be on the hook to serve in Congress. And that way we would, in my mind, we would get the greatest, instead of a bunch of lawyers or a bunch of CPAs or MBA or whatever it is. You’d hear the voice of America.

You’d hear, it would be random, just like jury of your peers. It’d be Congress of your peers. And so I never anticipated that that’s something that could happen, but I sort of preached that.

And so at that moment, when he said, have you ever considered running for Congress? I thought, oh my gosh, this is my jury duty, Congress duty letter just came in the mail. Yeah.

Yeah. The good Lord took something you said and said, hey. Hey.

Okay. No, no, it’s this. I was like, dang it.

You know, I can’t just say no. So I said, I’ll get back to you. This is on a Friday.

Prayed about it. Talked to Marcy. And here’s what’s, you’ve just met my wife.

Yeah.

So this is funny. I asked her about it and she says, what? That’s insane.

I’m like, yeah, I know it’s insane. And then she goes, it sounds like something you would do. What Dick told me?

Yeah. It wasn’t a surprise.

Like, oh, okay. Yeah. This is just the next jury.

It was something cool because what’s the worst that could happen? What’s the worst that could happen? So yeah, I talked to Allie.

Now Allie, of course, was thrilled. Dad, you’ll have an in with all these politicians that I need you to pull strings for it. Wait, Allie, I’m not going to be a sock puppet for you.

If I do this, it’s going to be my own thing, but I will absolutely make sure that foster kinship gets all of the best stuff it can politically. So I called the guy back and I said, okay, look, if I were to say yes to this, his name is Jeremy. So Jeremy, if I would say yes, or if I wanted to just take the next step, what’s the next step?

Yeah, of course. He said, well, we want you to meet with the governor on Friday. And I’m like, that’s not a next step.

That’s like a giant leap. It’s a leap. So I mean, my dominoes thing, he’s doing it.

He had me go all the way to the governor of the state of Nevada. And sure enough, that Friday, I’m sitting in a room with Joe Lombardo and we’re talking and comparing notes and telling him about my political journey and my music journey. And he’s telling me about his military and police background.

He was sheriff of Las Vegas. I mean, he was in charge of the investigation in that worst shooting of all time, the guy who shot out the thing. I mean, it’s just fascinating.

And he was very encouraging. And after talking to him, I realized that these guys actually were serious. So I’m talking to Jeremy after that and I’m like, okay, it feels a little bit like a Hail Mary pass.

It’s late in the process. And he’s like, yeah, it is late. It’s a long shot, but we feel that you check a bunch of boxes that nobody else checks.

But Marty, you have to understand how hard it is to find good people to run for office. And as soon as he said that, I was like, oh, that’s the deal. That’s why if good people don’t choose to do their duty, then the only people who end up being in Congress and politics are the bad people, which is why I keep throwing my shoes at the television.

So at that moment, I thought, I can’t say no to this because then I will always wonder, was there some little thing I could have done by saying yes? So that’s why. I don’t have this vision of being able to change the system or do anything like that.

But the worst thing, the minimal thing that I thought I could take from whatever this experience is, is I will learn a little bit about how the sausage is actually made. I’ll open some doors I’ve never looked behind before. I will meet people I would never have met.

I will see something about this process that is definitely a mystery to probably 99% of the people. And I did. And I would love to share some of the stuff I learned over the four months.

But I didn’t win. I didn’t win in the primary. Basically, this was a four-way race.

And the guy who came in first took 10,000 votes. And then three of us split the remaining 18,000 votes. So it was basically a second place split.

But to a certain extent, I’m kind of happy that I didn’t win because I enjoy all the things I learned. I have some connections. And I don’t know where this is going to lead.

Like I said before, at this point now, after a few weeks after losing, you could see that as the closed door end of that chapter. Or you could see it as just there’s a new chapter. This is how this chapter ended.

But the story is still continuing. So I don’t know where this is going to lead. I don’t know if I’m completely done with politics or if it just is going to move me in a different direction.

And I’ll take what I learned and do something new. But what that is, I don’t know yet. I, wow.

No, I just, I think that, so that put together a lot of pieces for me. Because the whole concept of what’s the worst that can happen? I feel the thing that you’ve really figured out is that when you’re in life, you want to take advantage of like, okay, this seems like a really cool moment.

And you set yourself up at the beginning to realize, this is what I’m expecting. If, because you even said, like, when I was getting into this, like when we’re talking about, you know, running this year, you’re like, well, I’ll meet a lot of really cool people. And you’re already thinking ahead in terms of, well, if something did go wrong, because what’s the worst thing that could happen?

Well, this would be, and I’d gain all of this. Yeah, right. And you have that beautiful perspective.

And I feel like that’s probably the key thing that allows, and you, I’m always going to chase your curiosity because you’re more concerned of, if I say no, I’m going to lose all of this. But if I say yes, and I fail, I’ll still gain all of this. And you know, it’s weird.

I think that’s a good insight that I’ve never thought about myself. But it’s like, even if I say, what’s the worst that can happen? It’s almost like the worst can’t happen because the worst never does happen.

What actually happens is something that fails, but out of that failure, you get something you weren’t expecting. You get this other knowledge, you get these other insights, you see another chapter opening up before you. So that’s essentially, it’s almost always like, yeah, the best always happens.

Well, you mentioned token. So I’m a big token nut too. So I’m thinking of all those times in the trilogy, you know, Gandalf falling down with the ball rock.

That’s the end. Yeah, that’s the end there. The fellowship breaking, you know, Boromir betraying the party, right?

And you get to the very end and all of a sudden you’re like, oh my gosh, the ring isn’t getting thrown in. Yeah. But every single one of those steps was just another part of the story started.

Tolkien, his, I’ve heard it called, you know, the most Christian book ever written or something like that, the most Catholic or whatever they say. And it has no direct allegorical symbolism. But if people don’t think that that’s coming from an extremely Christian spiritual, deeply spiritual point for that artist, the writer Tolkien, then they just don’t understand what he was doing or what he was saying.

And all of those are lessons, but he tells it in such a way, this is the way I put it now. There is, and you probably have never read this author. His name is F.A. Hayek, H-A-Y-E-K. And he wrote a book that came out in 1948, maybe. It’s been reprinted a zillion times. It is the foundational document book, one of the foundational documents of the 20th century for conservatism, economically.

He’s the Austrian School of Economics. He inspired William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman, you know, all the conservative groups.

They all go back to Hayek’s and the book is called The Road to Serfdom. And if you read The Road to Serfdom, it is like the nonfiction version of Lord of the Rings. And if you think about it, Hayek and Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were all British authors in London at the same time, lived through World War I, lived through World War II. Those experiences. Hayek wrote a book that tells you in nonfiction terms the nature of human beings. And Tolkien gives it to you in fictional terms.

So it’s like they actually just go together so well. I’m probably one of the weirdos in the world that actually think Hayek and Tolkien are like the same thing. But when we get it out there, I’m sure you won’t be anymore.

Okay. But that’s why, believe it or not, when I went to Washington, I was just there like a month and a half ago and I was a guest speaker at the Heritage Foundation and Club for Growth. And I went to all these conservative places.

And when I got to the Heritage luncheon, there were a couple other people speaking before me. And I’m like, yeah, I keep hearing the same, same things. I agree with all the things I’m hearing.

And when I got up in front of these people who, you know, all conservatives, old and young, and I said, look, here’s my political philosophy. If I was to wrap it up in a nutshell, it’s Hayek, roads to serfdom, but the thing that actually really speaks to people is Tolkien. So I believe it’s time to take the ring of power and throw it into the fires of Mount Doom.

And everybody clapped. I’m like, okay, good. You guys get it.

And somebody said, what caucus, if you get into Congress, what caucus will you be in? And I’m like, I have no idea. I said, I’ll probably start my own caucus called the Fellowship of the Ring.

And they clapped again. Now I didn’t make it, but I still believe that the problem in Washington is that it can’t, power will not leave Washington. The people who are there are so determined to hold on to power and it’s corrupted the whole system.

And the founding fathers, the Federalist Papers, if you read the Federalist Papers, it’s all about protecting citizens from the tyrannical rule of governments and making sure power doesn’t stay centrally located, but is diluted back out to the states. And we have 50 states that are being starved because most of the power is in Washington, DC. And I believe the Heritage Foundation and a bunch of these other conservative groups completely agree that this has to happen, but they’ve been there so long.

They’re like, they’re too comfortable. I looked around this room. You guys got a building.

You guys have lunch every week at this place and you keep talking about the same things. I didn’t say that at the time, but I was thinking in my head, everybody in Washington, regardless of where they are on the spectrum, they’re comfortable. They have the parties they can go to.

They have the buildings they go to. They have the clubs they can go to. Nobody is saying, I shouldn’t be here.

This is Mordor. Mordor with the eye, the Capitol building looked like the eye of Sauron to me. It was lit up at night.

I’m like, oh my gosh, this is it. I went through my Tolkien stage really heavy when I was in DC. It is, I did simply walk into it though.

One does not simply walk into the, yeah, yeah. He’s good. He’s smart.

Smart, no, that dude is an inspiration. I wanna be a world-class storyteller like that guy. That guy’s amazing.

See, that’s one of the other things that C.S. Lewis discovered. He was a great writer of nonfiction works like mere Christianity and the abolition of man and these great things. At some point late in his life, in his 60s, he realized that he couldn’t argue people into the kingdom.

And he realized that his friend, Tolkien, and Lewis had already done some great storytelling. It wasn’t like he wasn’t a great storyteller, but then he decided I’m going to do the Chronicles of Narnia, Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe. And that is, more people, I think, have been affected by those works than all of the other works Lewis has done.

Well, that’s the thing of what’s truly beautiful about a story, like a true story. And I know you know what I mean by that. Yes.

Because when you watch it or you read it or you hear it, something changes. Yeah. Well, that’s art.

We’re created in the image of God and God’s a creator. So we’re, as Tolkien talks about, sub-creators. We don’t create from nothing like God did.

We create from stuff that we already have experienced. But it is still something we can’t not do. We have to be creative as people.

And you can’t just receive all your information from these sort of rational, nonfiction, non-spiritual places. Like, human beings just don’t thrive that way. They thrive because of music and art and story.

And it’s so powerful. I think it’s the most powerful thing. So, yeah.

Hey, you’re preaching to the choir right here. I think one thing I’ve learned from you and other artist friends that I have is there’s beauty in every job that you do. And it doesn’t matter whatever that job is.

There’s beauty in that. And I remember one of my first art directors was saying, this is the work that we’re doing for advertising. It should be beautiful.

So we started using words like, that’s really pretty. Yeah. And it was okay to say that, right?

Yeah. But we don’t say that often enough. Right.

Right. No, I mean, the functional nature of the pure, this is the problem with my Protestant life was I’d gotten so intellectual. I was so in my head about everything that I’d forgotten how you have to include the heart, the whole self.

And for me, at least, returning to Catholicism has brought a more holistic thing, which I needed. So I’m not saying everybody needs to be Catholic, but I think as Christians, especially, we can’t just get, where is it written? And that’s it?

That’s as far as you’re going to go? Where’s the Holy Spirit? Where is some tradition?

Where is the community? Where is worship as a group? Where is our history?

Where does that fit in? You can’t just like, it’s on the page, it’s these words and these mean this. It’s like, you can do that.

I’m not saying that doesn’t have merit. It’s just not complete. It doesn’t give you everything.

I think we talked about this earlier, not in this room, but why was Jesus telling parables? He was like the greatest storyteller. And what I love about some of his stories is like you see the apostles are like, yeah, what?

We didn’t get that. I mean, it’s in his Bible. And then he would explain it.

Yeah, he would try to explain it to them. And I’m sure he was like, why aren’t you getting this? So I have to really quick, you said something.

You mentioned how it took you a long time to realize that you had to include like the heart and the soul and everything. I’m going to say that maybe consciously it did. But if I’m looking at all these notes that I took down, you subconsciously got it the whole time.

Like what could possibly go wrong? No, I’m even joking. Like believing in the future that happens here.

It’s not the end. Always chasing your curiosity, loving what’s cool. And I think in, you know, cool to you was, well, what did you feel in here?

Yeah, because I mean, what is cool? There’s no, you can’t define it. So I feel like you had done that all along.

You’d been running after it. You might just not have realized that’s what you were doing. I think what I’m saying is that you are correct.

I think that’s who I’ve been. And I realized how valuable that was, especially as a composer, because when I compose music, I usually start from, okay, try to clear my mind and just play, just go into the playground. And when I do something that feels cool, when I do something that I like, when I do something gives me a little emotional chill, I’d make a note.

And the next day I’ll come back and look at the stuff I did. Now I put my analytical hat on and go, okay, that wasn’t very good, but there is something there. What is there that I can work on and expand and make better?

And now I’m using more of my left side of my brain. But at some point you have to just, for me at least, you have to just be instinctual in your right side of your brain, playground. Don’t be trying to judge everything you’re doing while you’re creating, because that just stifles creativity.

But that doesn’t mean you turn your brain off the whole time. You wanna have the analytical side and the training you’ve had to recognize why something is good and how to make it better. But all of those instinctual left, right, holistic heart intuition side of my personality, I think I’ve done a pretty good job at that in my life, but I wasn’t doing it in my spiritual life.

I was just staying down the rational analytical, where is it written, exegesis, that kind of approach. And then I started realizing that wasn’t enough. Of course, like, duh, but it took me a while.

What was that moment though that you made that decision to say, okay, I no longer wanna go down this path. I’m now going to shift to this path. Well, it’s probably not a violent shift.

So being a sort of lapsed Protestant, a Protestant is like, yeah, I’ll just talk about faith with my friends who understand me. And this whole organized religion thing has failed so many times, I’m not gonna bother with it. And I realized something was missing.

Now, once again, my wife is the saint. So she’s the one who realized that she needed to do something for herself. She went to the Catholic church and spent quite a long time working through all this.

And she didn’t grow up. No, no, no. Yeah, and you didn’t either.

No, no, Wheaton College. So I went to the Protestant Vatican. Which by the way, that joke doesn’t work in Catholic churches, right?

Number one, they don’t know what Wheaton College is. You could have said Fullerton. Yeah, that still wouldn’t have worked.

I’m not kidding. Anyway, I saw her journey. I saw what she was doing.

And so I thought, well, now she’s Catholic. I went to her when she was entered into the Catholic church. And I went to that ceremony.

And one of her longtime Catholic friends was with her. And it was very moving. I liked it.

And so I started going to services with her. Then you go up for communion for Eucharist. But one of the rules is that if you’re not a Catholic, you shouldn’t actually take communion.

So you just go up and you do this. And the priest blesses you. And then you’re done.

And it sort of hit me. This is how shallow I actually am. I’m like, gee, am I going to…

Are we going to spend the rest of our married life going to church together and I can’t take communion with my wife? Wow. So that was it.

That’s a decision point right there.

That was just a decision. I’m like, well, maybe I should do this RCIA thing and see what Catholicism is actually all about. And, you know, go ahead and make the deal.

RC, tell us what that is.

Oh, RCIA is the… Ooh, I should know it. It’s funny.

RC does not stand for Roman Catholic. That’s the funny part. All right.

That’s okay.

But it is… Whatever it stands for is the education of non-Catholics. You have to take this two-year educational program.

It’s not just non-Catholics, as I’ve learned. It’s people who are Catholic. I want to take it.

And have really fallen away. And I want to come back. Yeah, right.

As a matter of fact, there’s a podcast guy. I think he’s written a book too. It’s called RCIA for Catholics.

Okay.

His father is John something. Of course, it’s John. That’s right.

But anyway, yeah, it was… You know, when I went to RCIA and you’re right, at least 80% of the room were what they considered to be cradle Catholics. People who grew up with the Catholic church had fallen away, but decided to come back.

That’s so cool. They knew a lot of stuff, but they didn’t know why certain things. I was sitting there, and you’ll laugh at this, because you grew up Protestant, right?

Yeah. Both of you?

Yes.

Covenant church. Covenant church, I know. The guy doing the class would say, turn to 2 Corinthians 2, 12.

And they were like, oh, everybody else… They never cracked a Bible before.

Is that an apocryphal?

Yeah. But it was like the fact that I knew my way around the Bible. I’m like, well, look, that’s just…

A lot of Protestant churches, you do a thing called sword drills, and they’re like, what are sword drills? It’s like, well, the Bible is the sword of… Is known as the sword.

So you’re doing drills. This is probably… They didn’t do it at RCIA.

No, we had like a Awanas.

Awanas, sure.

But I mean, my Sunday school would be like, the teacher up front would throw out some book reference. And the first kid that came up with it stood up. And then that kid got to read it.

You didn’t do candy quizzes. No. But I was Bible quizzer.

I was on an actual team in junior high. We always got candy. You got candy for looking it up.

Man, you didn’t get the goods, man. I didn’t, I lost out. But yeah, I mean, it was fun to sit there.

And at what point, I think I was telling you this earlier, but we were going through the Nicene Creed, the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed. And I’m like, yeah, that’s the same creed I’ve said in every Protestant church I’ve ever been in. And I said, you know, this is the same creed that all the Protestants say.

And the teacher and the other Catholics are like, what? And so I realized at that point that Protestants believe this junk about Catholics. Catholics believe this junk.

Like the two are not in sync at all. The difference between Catholics and Protestants is so like cultural and misunderstandings. And it’s almost just not worth even going into.

So I really enjoyed it. That’s really cool. Do you have any other questions, by the way?

I just wanted to take a couple of minutes and talk about foster kinship. Oh, okay. And what that’s all about, because I think that anyone that knows you would be really interested to know how that came about from your perspective.

And I know that Marcy’s had some involvement too. Yeah. But I think it’s such a cool thing because as much as we want to believe that the world is getting better, it’s not.

There’s just so many people that struggle and they lose their children. One reason or another, drugs, alcohol, prison, something. And now you have these children that are either left to the system or someone comes along, generally grandparents that are raising these children.

And then the question is, who’s going to pay for all of that? Right. Because the grandparents may not have that kind of money.

Right. Well, Alison had gotten her degrees and had gotten work in HR at Microsoft. And then she ended up getting hired to be in DCFS, the Children and Family Services kinds of things.

She was basically a caseworker. She came, moved to Las Vegas, a caseworker for children and families. And this is 15 years ago now.

She had, and this is how we found out about it. So she had a client, a case that came in and it was horrific. Things can happen, especially in Las Vegas that are really horrific.

Husband, drug addict, gets out of prison, four kids, kills the wife in front of the kids. Either he killed himself or he was back in prison. I think he might’ve committed suicide.

This gets dumped into Allie’s lap. She’s in her 20s now, so late 20s. And it’s just horrific.

But she sees it from the government standpoint. One of the things that she’ll say is, if you’re gonna have somebody raise your kids, the government is the last choice. That’s the last thing you wanna see, that the government is the final safety net.

If you’re all the way down where the government is raising the kids, that’s the worst possible place. And she’s a data person. She has statistics degree and she knows how to read data and she really gets it.

So she’s like, she knows that’s the worst thing, but she’s in a system where you come in and you become a case and it becomes a government case. And then here’s how you get into the foster system and all this stuff. So these four kids are gonna come into the foster system and all four of them, I think they range from age eight to two.

And these kids were all gonna be broken up and sent to four different foster homes. But the great aunt came in, so almost the grandmother, but it was the sister of the grandmother came in and said, I’m taking these kids. And the department basically is like, good.

Now it’s no longer a case for us because a relative is gonna take care of the kids. They’re off the books. So Allie kept in touch with this woman.

And this woman, of course, within the first week is calling her back saying, I can’t have these kids in my house. It’s too small. I need a new apartment.

I’m able to get this new apartment that will be enough for these four kids to live with me, but it’s $800 more than I have. I need $800. So Allie went back to the department saying, this woman can do this, but she needs another $800.

And the response was, well, that means she’s not capable. So we have to take the kids and split them up and put them in four foster homes. So Allie went out to the parking lot, called Marcy, my wife, in tears.

And so we just was like, well, here, here’s $800. Let me just make this work. And so she saw that there was this gulf between what agencies do and what they’re capable of doing and how the system works.

And then what is the percentage of children who are being raised by their relatives? And I love the fact that JD Vance is now the new vice presidential nominee. He’s a foster kinship.

He was raised by his mama. He’s raised by his grandma because his mother was a drug addict and his father had abandoned the family. This is not an unusual thing.

I’m sure people right now in the audience, there’s probably, I don’t know, 60% who were raised by their relatives. Wow, 60%, wow. Okay, don’t ask Allie what the actual statistics are.

It’s a huge number.

Yeah, yeah.

And she was just like, okay, whatever, how can we get some of these government services and some of this money that’s being allocated to these things? How can we get people educated to know the right things to do? So they’re not, the government doesn’t penalize them.

How do we make sure they have the right amount of space? How do we make sure they have the right supplies? How do they get education?

And how do we get some of these funds to also come to foster kinship areas? And so she is now, since that point, she started this nonprofit, 37 employees. They’ve serviced over 10,000 families.

18,000 children have gone through the system. So it’s this amazing thing. In the last 12 years, it’s hugely important.

So I think, and she’s got a system now that is, I call it franchisable, which she hates, but it’s, she has a system that could work in every state of the union. Like this can be taken to other places and people can use this model and make things happen for this really sort of forgotten people. And it cuts through all demographics.

It’s not rich or poor. It’s not black and white. There’s no racial component.

There are, she says she gets these wealthy aunts who come in and suddenly their two nieces and nephews are on their doorstep and they just don’t know what to do. How do they get them registered for school? Oh, you’re not the parent?

You take them to the doctor. Oh, you’re not the mother or father? Well, you can’t sign off on this.

So Allie has figured out all of these hurdles and helps people with all of that stuff. Yeah. That’s really amazing.

So thanks for asking about that. Yeah, you bet. So two more things.

I want to end on a really fun note.

Okay.

Tell me about Paul McCartney. And the reason I know this, the audience has probably figured it out. I’ve known this guy for a very long time.

Very long. And so anything Beatles, it didn’t matter. They walked on water.

Oh yeah, for me, absolutely. And we grew up in that same era, right? Because I remember my sister going crazy when the Beatles came on Ed Sullivan’s show.

Absolutely.

So I go back to that time. I want to know how that all came about. And then I have one, just to wrap up.

Okay. Well, we had done Halo, Halo 1, 2, 3, ODST and Reach. That’s 10 years, a full decade of Halo games.

All this music. I’d worked with all sorts of famous actors and musicians. And when we started working on Destiny, it was a whole new project.

And the guy that I knew in Hollywood that used to help me get actors that I wanted, you know, Ron Perlman and Keith David and Nathan Fillion, you know, all these different people, Kenny Sackhoff, I saw him someplace and he said, hey, oh, he called me up and he said, we’re sitting in the office. We’re thinking, you know, who should you work with next? You know, wouldn’t it be cool?

So we’re brainstorming who you should work with next. And we decided you should work with Paul McCartney next. I’m like, Paul McCartney?

I’m like, well, yeah, of course. How are you going to make that happen? Who do you know?

Oh, we don’t know anybody. We’re familiar with that. That’s the news you want to hear.

And I’m like, oh, okay. You just pull this out of the air and you think it would be cool. And so I said, yeah, well, good luck with that.

So two months later, I’m at GDC and doing a keynote address and his name is Lev, Lev Chepelsky. And he’s straight out of Hollywood. Everything about Lev is pure Hollywood.

It’s great. He’s just, he’s so much fun. So that means there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors going on.

It’s just a lot of BS. But Lev comes up to me just before I’m on the stage and he’s down here and he sort of pulls on my, what? He said, he goes, Marty, I got you a meeting.

I’m like, a meeting, a meeting with, with what? He goes, with Paul McCartney. I’ll talk to you after your speech.

And then this guy goes, and now it’s Marty O’Donnell to do the blah, blah, blah. And I’m like. If you could have called like after.

Could you told me after this? Like my whole brain was just scrambled. So I had no idea what I said at that thing.

So afterwards he goes, yeah, I got a meeting. Come back two weeks from now. I’ll come down to Hollywood.

So what I remember doing was. I got this whole presentation ready for Paul McCartney. And I was told he’s coming in at the end of the day.

He’s coming into the office. We’ve got a screen set up, a computer. You can show him stuff.

He’s got 10 minutes. So he’s like, you’re the last guy at the end of the day, 10 minutes. And then that’s it.

So make your pitch. I’m like, okay. So I get on the plane.

I’m flying from Seattle to LA. And I remember thinking, wow, I’ve really arrived because somebody bought a plane ticket for me to meet Paul McCartney. Now, I’m sure he’s not going to show up, but I can say there was a point in time where I was going to meet with Paul McCartney.

That’s how hot I am. Yeah, that’s pretty hot. He didn’t show up, but hey, you didn’t get an invitation to speak.

I didn’t. No. Okay.

Yeah, it could happen. Yeah. So we get there.

I set everything up and the day is dragging on. And then sure enough, it’s like, okay, I’m expecting a call any minute. Yeah, Paul just can’t make it.

He’s tired, whatever. Nope, he shows up. He comes in, he comes through the door.

Well, here I am. And I’m like, yes, you are. It’s actually you.

So he sat down and I sort of gave him my spiel. He asked questions and we started talking. And it was like two hours later, hour and a half.

I forget how long it was. And I’m like, okay, this has gotten way past the 10-minute stage. This is good.

And so now it’s wrapping up. He was really interested in working with me and working on games. So I stood up to shake his hand and he just comes over like you.

And he gives me this big hug. And I’m like, okay, this is a good first date. I think this worked out.

It’s a good sign, yeah. So yeah, we ended up working together for like two years after that, different places, Abbey Road twice. Which is, you know, Abbey Road.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah. So yeah, that’s, you know, I have many Paul McGartney stories, but like that’s the main, it’s like just getting over that and then finding out he actually wanted to work with me. And he said, I have a phone message I’ll share with you from Paul.

And he basically, it’s, you know, when I was working with him, I knew he could call at any moment, but his number was always blocked. So every time I’d see blocked, I knew it was Paul. So I had my ring around all the time.

But I was in the shower, I came out, I missed a call from blocked. I’m like, oh no. So I listened to the message.

It’s the only message he ever left, because I always picked up the phone. And he was like, hello Monty, this is Paul calling from England. Of course.

And I’m like, like. Not Berlin. Yeah, Paul from England.

And I’m like, yeah, that Paul. Oh, I thought it was my other friend, Paul. Yeah.

Like, I don’t think he understands like how iconically recognizable his voice is. Right. But he’s just a sweet guy.

He’s a regular person. We had a great time. And it was once in a lifetime.

So, yeah.

Paul here calling from England. Just to let you know that I’ve had a chance to listen to the piece you sent back. And I really like it.

I think it’s really cool. I think it’s a good direction. And I like what you told me that you put, you know, a few of the constituents together.

And I think it works very well. So there you go. I was just hoping to say that in person to you.

But I said it to your machine. So consider this as being in person. All right.

So you can say you got a hug from Paul McCartney. More than once. I probably have had five hugs from Paul.

Wow. Pushing two fingers. Sorry, two hands.

Two hands, not two fingers. Almost six, yeah.

I should have asked for one more of them. But yeah, that was good. So last question.

Sure. I always like to think about these hopefully go on way past us, right? Sometime your grandkids are going to sit down and watch this.

Oh my gosh, I hope not. What is the message? What do you want them to hear from you?

They took a huge journey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don’t be afraid.

Do not be afraid. There is nothing you should fear. Failure is your friend.

You’ll never be successful at anything if you have fear. So I think fearlessness is just really important. You know, I teach these kids when they come over and I throw them in the pool and stuff.

And of course, you know, grandma and the mom are always like, you know, pop, pop, don’t make the kids swim or whatever. It’s just like, I just feel like there’s so much fear. And fear just freezes you in positions.

And then the worst thing that you can have happen to you is not failure, it’s regret. I think regret is the thing that will stay with you forever, at least for me. That’s my experience.

So I never want to say, wow, I had a chance to do X, but I was afraid and I didn’t do it. I mean, when you think about it, it’s almost always after you dive in the cold pool and you get used to it, you’re like, oh, that’s not so bad. What was I afraid of?

It’s always in hindsight. If you’ve done the thing, you go, what was I afraid of? Yeah, so that’s what I would say.

Awesome. Thank you very much. Sure.

That’s really cool. That was a blast. Great.

It’s a blast for me too. Thanks, guys. Thanks.

Well, hey, you made it to the end. I did. So that is all yours.

Do you want to say anything to anyone else before we sign off? Is there anything you want to say to anyone? I will say one last thing.

Be nice to the goose. Be nice to the goose. You can look it up or yeah, I can explain it.

But you know what? We’ll make them look it up. You can tell us afterwards.

I will. Sounds good. All right.

Well, hey, everyone. It’s been a blast as always. And remember, stay curious.

See ya.