YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Kaplan

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326
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2026-03-11
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2026-03-11
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  1. “Yeah. And you'd like to cling on to this. Oh, glimmer train said, you know, showing promise, you know, and you just hang on to that for like a week, you know, pretending like that was. But it was just soul crushing. And I really stuck and I became more and more isolated. Part of that was leaving that group of writing friends in New York. I'm prone to just introversion anyway, the type of person I am. Breaking up with the girlfriend at the time I just sort of fell into that world of all I was doing was writing. It broke me. I went into very deep and heavy depression. I drank too much. I really had a problem with alcohol. And all those things compounded into just deep, deep depression. And I don't, there wasn't like a magic. Rejection that broke me, that would have been epic Someone out there is like the The dude who broke Jeff that one day”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And so everybody's like, You're a writer. You named your Jack Russell Terry or Jack. I'm like, I named him after Jack Kerouac. It's poetic and epic. I just look like a dumbass, but it was just me and this dog. And I was writing all that time intensely. And this was mid to late 90s. So even though internet existed, email was very primitive. And you had to send a manuscript off, like printed paper to all, like I was trying to get short stories published in literary magazines. And you had to send envelope with return self address stamp. So it was expensive too. Like if you didn't have money, you were just, there was a cost to it, to every single one of them.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And I ended up alone in California, and I think it was a good three years that I structured my life where I was going to write for eight hours a day because it's that writer's habit. Like you have to just force yourself, this is a job, this isn't a hobby, whether I like it or not, rain or shine, sick or healthy, I'm going to write for eight hours a day. And I did. I was fortunate. Like I said, my dad had his company and he hired me as a research associate. So I was calling up generating nameless for recruiting company. And I would take whenever there was East Coast assignments, I would take those so I could start at like five in the morning. And I created all this space for me to write. And I just, I had a dog named Jack, who was Jack Russell Terrier.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So I moved back to California and I did it for a girl and I think within two months of moving back we were broken up. And I knew it when I was standing in my studio apartment, when it was empty in New York. And I was about to close the door for the last time. I had that like, you know, little me on the shoulder saying, Dude, what are you doing? You're making one of those epic life mistakes that is going to come back to haunt you.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “It was hard. I had moved from New York. I did the most terrible dumb thing that I knew I was doing at the time. I had a really great group of writer friends from grad school in New York. And I think writing's a very lonely, solitary thing, but weirdly writers kind of support each other and just who do you give the story to? You know, you don't want to give it to your mom or dad. You know, you kind of want to give it to somebody who's going to really punch you in the nose and tell you what's wrong with it. And I had left that writing circle to move back to California.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah, it was, I think it was necessary. This is like rationalizing it after the fact, you know, which is easy to do. But at the time, I think I was so broken and so defeated with failure that I needed the moment. It was like throwing in the towel for a boxer. It's that moment of like, I'm not going to win this fight. And you need to move on from it. And if there was any element of that sitting around. Be tempted to try again or bring it out of the drawer 10 years later.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, and I do think ego is a big part of it. It's one of the many lessons I've learned hearing your Kafka story is funny because fast forwarding to how my writing career ended. I literally threw away everything. I mean, in a dumpster, I used to keep copious notes like journals, my writing journals, everything I ever read, every story idea. I probably had 20 volumes of just handwritten notes. And then I also kept personal journals of just to keep the writing habit up, of just, you know, what happened to my day, how I was feeling all of that. And then either digitally or typed, I had all of my manuscripts and I threw it all in the dumpster.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Is going to read. That's a giant leap of faith. That's a moment of putting yourself out there completely. And there's got to be some part of that's ego. There's some part of it that's masochistic And I think for people who want to create and build stuff, they can't help but to do it. You don't really have an option. That's just how you're wired and you're going to do it anyway. And, you know, I admire people like Dickinson who can just write all the poems and leave them in a drawer to be discovered by somebody else. That's one way to go about it.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Well, it started with being a fan first and being inspired and reading. And it's the not only being transported to a different world or into a different person, but also, you know, The way that stories can touch emotions in you and trigger feelings, sometimes you didn't even know you had. And that was very appealing for me. And the big challenge with it is, and I think this is for anybody who creates anything is putting yourself out there. To some degree, there's a lot of ego that goes into that moment where you say, well, I've been reading 1984 or Greenhill's a Stranglethorn. And I think it's amazing and now I'm going to try to write something that somebody”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Kept getting better, the responsiveness, the sharpness of the gameplay, you have to credit id in those days and Carmack and Romero. As somebody who worked on an FPS, that wouldn't have existed without them. Credit where credits do.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “To see it in 3D. And it's funny you look back at the screenshots or videos of it now, and it seems almost childish like, oh, why were you so? And you were transported. There was the intimacy of first person, you know, putting the hands in front of you, holding the gun, being transported to Nazi Germany, but you're the hero fighting the Nazis. And then the evolution, like when Doom came out, I'm a huge army of darkness fan, like one of my favorite movies of all time. And I was like, this is army of darkness, the video game. You know, like give me the boomstick. Here we go. And the graphical advances, but it wasn't just how the game looked. It was how it played, the smoothness.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Those early geniuses at id, like I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you right now if they hadn't had the breakthroughs that they had at the time. Gaming engines were evolving, but the level of breakthrough that they achieved with Wolf 3D, that was the first, I remember playing Wolf and Scene when it was a 2D game. You'd run around, you'd dress up as a German, you throw a grenade.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And there was an id programmer named Brian Hook. And he said, I'm leaving id to go work at Varant, which became Sony Online, to work on this game called EverQuest. And I was like, how does anybody leave Id the greatest institution in all of gaming ever to work on any other game? I'm like, this guy must be crazy or whatever this EverQuest thing is, I need to see it. I need to know what's going on. And if he hadn't made that post, I never would have checked out EverQuest.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Which was like someone actually teased me recently, I linked him a story. I'm like, oh, did you hear this new thing's coming out? I sent the link, and they're like, dude, this is from blues news. Like, what time machine did you just step out of? And a guy named Stephen He slip. I'm probably pronouncing his name wrong. I apologize. And it was actually through that site that I learned about EverQuest. They had those programmer plan updates, the dot plan files and guys like Carmack would, you know, they'd post about what code they were writing or how they had optimized something or just their personal life. Like, you know, the Ferrari talk would always happen once they had achieved.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “That was magical, like that, that that moment happened and that person could be in another room or across town from you. And Quake kind of took it to the next level. Like that's where everybody knew what they were doing. The systems were more refined. And this Quake community formed with all of these great websites, mods. The community was divided into there were two castes of players, the Loping bastards, the LTDs, and then the rest of us, you know, and I remember rolling into quake matches. You know, on a dial up modem with a 300 ping connection, and I thought it was the greatest thing ever. And just connecting with people, like I said, the websites to this day, the only gaming website I reach, I don't read any of the news sites anymore, but I read blues news.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “My first, like, what online gaming, what define online gaming for me was quake and doom and Duke Newcombe. You know, it started with doom and they had, you could basically land, you could network with your friends or you could connect with a modem and hook up with somebody. And that was like a mind-blowing just seeing another entity in a video game and saying that's a person on the other side of that.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I was busy and I missed Ultima Online. Like I would have had that experience. And when you hear the Ultima Online stories or some of the craziest, funniest, you know, I know somebody who they learned how to poison in the game and then they would poison apples, then leave them on the ground and somebody else would be adventuring and then feed the apple to their horse and kill their horse. Then they steal all their stuff. And, you know, Ultima Online was kind of, it was the earliest grief-based experiment, really like when you're treating the humans like ants in the ant farm, that was kind of Ultima Online. So”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Well, the big one for me was EverQuest. But like you mentioned, Ultima Online sort of was the predecessor. It came before EverQuest. And it was like one of those unfortunate times in my life where I was actually at grad school.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “And when you're just a jackass kid, you spend your time endlessly trying to do these things over and over. And Ultima was really a profound kind of experience for me.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And he was Lord British. We knew him as Lord British. He put himself in the game. And you want to talk about world building. You know, there was Eu Forest and there was all the characters. And the first Ultima i play was Ultima 2 because Ultima One was before my time. And that series, it was this RPG group-based PC game. And the worlds were just so rich. Like you could get on a rocket ship. You're playing in this fantasy world, fighting demons, and yet somehow you could get on a rocket ship. And then there was just all of this sort of crazy stuff that would happen in games that are based in the world. Like there were bouncers in the towns and merchants. But if you really wanted to, you could try to rob these people or kill Lord British. Thing that was super hard”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And it was weird in sometime in the 90s, there was this era of what they called CD-ROM games. That's how they branded them. And they made a return to Zork, but it now had graphics. And somehow that just shattered everything because the Zork you knew in your head didn't exist anymore. Yeah, Zork was fantastic. I think it might be open source now, which I think is fabulous, but I highly recommend Zork. There was also in those days on the PC that worked on our IBM was Ultima Which was the Richard Garriott series.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Text based game. You just type in Go West open mailbox, you know, and It's that power of imagination. It's why the book is always better than the movie, you know.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “And it was like suddenly the world opened up more and games could be more. And then there was like a big PC gaming push that hit me. My parents ran their own business. Like I said, my dad was an executive recruiter. And they bought an IBM. And this is like when it was DOS before MS-DOS existed. I was so disappointed because, like, other kids had the Amiga or the Commodore, which, you know, they were better for gaming than the IBM at the time. And my mom, she really encouraged my brother and I, she bought a zork. You know, it was just infocom word games and where your imagination would take you like Zork holds a place in my heart. I think few games will ever touch.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “And my brothers and I just loved in television. Like, we would just play it endlessly. And the comparison was always like, is this game close to what's in the arcades? And it was just such a golden era. And I think the big moment where it really blew open and kind of hit the next level was when the NES came out. And that like NES with Super Mario Was kind of gaming at the next level at that point. And I have like warm, fuzzy memories even thinking about it to this day. I remember we played Super Mario for weeks. My brothers and I. And then I had a friend come over and he showed me all the secret stuff. That I didn't know existed at the time.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “In the 80s, I was born in 72. So, you know, I was a kid with that skateboard BMX culture where we'd ride two towns over. We knew all the pizza parlors and liquor stores and arcades. And we just lived in that coin op phase. That was where the love started. And then you started to see things like Pong. You go to a friend's house, they'd have Pong. And it was just mind-blowing. Like we're playing this thing on the TV and it was so much fun. Atari was a big thing at that time as well. But the big one for me was actually intelligent because my dad was an executive recruiter. And one of his clients was Mattel. And he said, hey, they gave me this thing and he would get discounts or free games.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I was lucky. I was born in that golden era of coin op. So. I literally remember the first time seeing Pac-Man. I was with my uncle Ronnie, and he just kept feeding me quarters. I think he wanted to play but was too scared to. So his little nephew, he was just give him quarters to play Pac-Man. I remember being at my brother's graduation in Philadelphia. They had an asteroids machine in the lobby. That was one of the first coin op machines I had played as well. And my brother and I would try to get the high score and we'd finally get it, but we had to go to bed early because we were little kids. And then in the morning, somebody else had like beat our high score. And then, you know, I grew up in Southern California.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source