Special: The Texas Winter Storm Episode - GDC Podcast

hey everyone this is chris graft editor-in-chief of gamasutra uh doing something a little bit different in this special episode of gdc podcast we're talking to lars dusay he's co-founder of level up labs which made the successful rpg slash tower defense hybrid defenders quest he also did some work with valve on its steam labs experiments in this episode we talked less about game development and design here and more about our experience as as texans amid the brutal winter storm that left people without access to heat power and in many cases even food for days um so you can feel free to skip on past this episode if that doesn't necessarily interest you we're going to get back to the purely game development related content yet this month but you know i encourage you to

listen and stick around uh we do talk a little bit about systems and and our reliance on them and we talk a little bit about lars's experience uh making a a game about uh power grids and energy and and all of that stuff which is obviously relevant um so one last thing if you'd like to help people who are continuing to need help in texas there are a variety of mutual aid groups to donate to and that includes mutual aid houston mutual aid austin dfw mutual aid feed the people dallas um you can also google mutual aid texas to find more and uh there are people who are who are still going to be having issues for a while now even though we are now back to normal beautiful texas weather so thanks for listening

we'll be back in a sec [Music] okay so we are we're here with lars not duckett but do say lars and i were uh kind of tweeting back and forth amid everything that was going on in texas so the reason that i decided to have him on this this show is because i just feel like we both had a lot to say about it and i think that it's difficult to convey what um happened over the past week and what is still ongoing it's difficult to convey the uh like the severity of

right of of the issue because it really is kind of like and i don't blame people for not like just for context we were both without power heat all of that for quite some time and people you know still to some degree aren't yeah yeah we're gonna get into the specifics of our of our situations uh uh but it's just something that i don't i don't blame people for not totally absorbing or understanding the severity of what happened here and is happening over the past week it's just difficult to to convey so i thought that maybe you know using this venue to talk about some game developer related stuff you know with a game developer like lars but also just talk about this happen and maybe people can gain a better understanding of of the situation down here by listening to us rattle on about it yeah it's it's so weird like my

first game dev project professionally was an educational game called super energy apocalypse in which you as um the leaders of the post-apocalyptic republic of new texas have to like balance your energy grid so it doesn't dead spiral and like it was like funded by an educational um not educational story but a non-profit nonpartisan like environmental research group called houston advanced research centers like right in houston and like um it's like i have a lot of background knowledge about natural gas and coal and wind and solar and all that um and then this happens like 15 years later after i'm doing all kinds of other stuff and it's like it's like really kind of eerie to me um that's wild i i didn't even realize that you know um from having you on i know from you know uh from your from your games and uh from working at uh you know working for valve on different steam projects i i didn't know uh about the

what what's the name of it it's called super energy apocalypse and most of you probably can't play it anymore because with a flash game it's still up on congregate it's free um probably got played more than any other game i ever made even like the ones that did well on steam you know which is hilarious but it was like yeah like i i went and i did all the research on different kinds of energy generation and so like you know it does little things like when the wind stops blowing the turbines turn off you know like nuclear produces nuclear waste like you know what is the relative cost versus the relative emissions of natural gas where's coal i got to crunch all those numbers probably badly because i was like 20. but um you know like i still retain a little bit of that but it's like so weird now also another background fact about me is i'm norwegian like a passport holder it's my first language um and it's so weird being in texas being this damn cold like i feel like i it's kind of like a finally a chance to use my degree kind of situation because like like if you have norwegian

relatives they'll just like make you all these sweaters and stuff and you're like that's great i love it it's so beautiful you work so hard i live in texas and i'm like today the prophecy is fulfilled you open up the uh you know the the treasure chest of just of sweaters that you've been saving up this whole time yeah seriously like i have and also have like a russian friend um like from my church she's russian and um she her son's grown up now so she's like here's all these ski bibs i can't use anymore you have use for them it's like yeah i might go visit my relatives in norway one day so we'll put the kids in those it's like we use those we have i'm so glad we had this stuff where are you exactly in texas don't need your address or even like what where are you in in general in texas i'm in the brazos valley i'm in central texas right okay you know you know so so there's a texas triangle between i always embarrass myself and get one of them the city's wrong but it's like austin dallas and houston and san antonio i forget which one is the one that's supposed to be the western edge of it i

think it's either austin or san antonio right but i don't know which one's austin is closer okay i know geography so we're like in the middle of that triangle right and you know we're close to texas a m university you know and there's like a big medical hub here and that's where i am and you're in austin right yeah yeah i'm in um austin suburbs i've been down here for going on seven years and uh it wasn't quite like my relatives are sending it from from norway or sending me sweaters but like i felt like you know i i spent about like 33 years or something like that in um in indiana northern indiana so i felt like a total badass when oh yeah i found my ice scraper and like because i had to i had the roads are terrible this is like like of course there's there's zero infrastructure for clearing roads at all and that's

something like zero zero as in nothing and this is something that like i i think we'll get into like how many heads should roll about this probably in a minute but like just a perspective for people and i say this as someone who like you you've lived in louis in indiana where presumably it gets cold and you've lived here i i'm a norwegian i'm a pathetic excuse for a norwegian like i speak the language but like i mostly only went there in the summer you know like i've not had to endure like a black norwegian winter where the sun does not come up right you know um but like i have any kind of absorbed by osmosis experience at all with winter weather and um i think people like like canadians and like people in the north like oh texas can't handle a little snow huh it's like yeah it's like it was five degrees fahrenheit which is like sub freezing by a lot in texas parts of mexico were snowing like this is the equivalent of 105

degrees fahrenheit in oslo like now i think they're probably when all is said and done and then cooler heads have prevailed and we're done dunking on each other on twitter and actually looking at the information we're gonna find like what was the actual cause of this and probably we should have done better preparing but it's like this was kind of unprecedented um but i also want to talk about the fact that like unprecedented the part of my friends unprecedented [ __ ] is happening all the time now like just before this like i had two 500 year floods in my area just locally you know hurricane harvey came a couple years ago and like whacked my brother's apartment to death in houston and i had some friends had to evacuate and stay locally like that was awful and then you know and and like the amount of water that was dumped on houston was ridiculous and then like um we're in the middle of a global pandemic already right yeah that's that's the other thing it's a disaster within a disaster yeah i mean let's talk about our personal experiences here okay i think i think you've had it worse than i have i've had power um

like my pa like i had three days of really bad stuff and what that looked like for me is probably easy mode compared to you and some other stories i've had from friends and relatives yeah let's let's go let's go to um so i i want to just return to where you said like uh you know people from norway or for that matter people from northern indiana or like anywhere in the midwest that gets way colder than than this i mean we're talking about like double digit negative wind chill type stuff and negative fahrenheit right yes yeah fahrenheit yeah yeah so that's like super cold yeah and it it's it didn't get that cold it did get down to like five seven degrees like where where i am but it's kind of like i can you know you know i i can handle that so i was i was dismissive about it on um on twitter because like i get annoyed with because i saw at the beginning of the pandemic people hoarding stuff that from grocery stores

for example that they don't need and i i you know my feeling is that you're leaving your neighbor in the lurch if you're taking you know more than your share um so you know like it was to me that was over like overdoing it like why are you panicking why are you panicking to that extent like it's you know it'll be fine oh i have a lot to say about proper culture because i know some preppers but yeah so you're like going into that go ahead yeah and like so um you know like a day later like so our power went out um like right at midnight on sunday and um it stayed off for the coldest part of all this it was out for 36 hours straight yeah so my gosh yeah and and we're lucky and like and this is one thing what's what's cool about like texans that i see them tweeting about this almost everybody is like

i had no water for this amount of time and no heat and power for this amount of time and it's always couching and i'm one of the lucky ones i always see people saying that and that's how i feel like yeah like the fact that we were having a podcast about this and i was able to like tweet live tweet the thing because i never lost cell service and i had rolling blackouts like i had four hours of power a day on the good days like two hours on the bad days and they were like like it was one hour at a time spread out evenly so it was like big dark periods but like some of my like direct relatives i'm talking like brothers sisters in laws and stuff like that um like some of them didn't get power back until like yesterday and some of them still don't have a water and like they went 50 to 72 hours without like anything it was insane yeah and like maybe some like and and then you just think of like all the homeless all like poor people and stuff and the counties that have really like one thing it really impressed upon me was the importance of my local utility

like there's all this hoopla going on with ercot which is for those who don't know that's like the managing entity for the whole texas grid but your local utility has like how how good they are at getting it down power lines it's like dealing with just infrastructure damage versus rationing right and then their rationing strategy too like they were able to like it's kind of like a video game to like keep a grid up right it's like you got to keep your people you got to give them enough power to like get them through this crisis but you also got to like manage the strain on the grid and like everyone's pissed at you because you're rationing their energy but you have to do it right or everyone's going to get screwed and they were able to give us a couple hours of juice a day evenly spaced communicate with us when it was happening through the local like news station and stuff and everyone was like give them all this flat because they're mad at what's happening at all but then i hear about these other stories like where you were in other places and it's like maybe they had it harder there but like man they did a bang-up job and maybe they had good circumstances too but i'm so

grateful for my local utility so if anyone here listening works for btu utilities in the brazos valley i am super grateful for all of your hard work like like we talk about frontline essential workers that's them out freezing their asses off to literally keep their friends and neighbors alive it's kind of like oh wow everything does run on on electricity so we have yeah obviously like you know a power outage it's like lights off yeah you lose your wi-fi like obviously that kind of thing it's like okay i can deal with that um we've got gas um you know our house is heated with gas well um our our her furnace is activated by electricity and it runs oh that's yeah yeah so and then it's like okay but we'll we still have water well the um the water plant runs on electricity right it's like now you don't have water you don't have you know exactly yeah and all this stuff just dominoes and my thermostat is digital right yeah which means they're telling me like

they're doing good communication right they're like guys everyone shut off your heat so when the power comes back on it doesn't instantly get shut off from the instant load and i'm like when the when the lights go back on for my one out like my hello did it happen again oh it's just my screen saver oh my god i've got ptsd oh my gosh that's awful okay i was like i was just picturing you oh man we're keeping that that's that's awful yeah that that's okay that's that's hilarious though that's that's the kind of humor we need to get i'm moving my mouse right now to make sure that you know i don't get freaked out and wake my computer back up yeah so anyway so um what was i saying yeah so like i have this digital thermometer right and so like the utility is telling me it's essential that i wait 15 minutes before i turn my fur my heat on when i get my rationed hour of power for you know the next like 10 hour block and i can't do it because my because the power the power showed awful i had the heat on

and i can't change the thermometer setting because it's digital i have to like run like a ninja when the light comes on to go okay okay system heat off done yeah yeah oh geez and like that's impressive that you even got that that communication so we were um okay let's uh we're we're going back yeah it's like like for my household and i've got kids you know um me too yeah and uh so 36 hours of that we're um like luckily we have um a gas range so we can uh boil water i was like the whole water thing it started like we got a handle on staying warm and our um our our town tweeted out um the amount of water is like two to make sure that you have two gallons of water uh per person for over the next 30 like for the next 36 hours uh yeah

and boil it and i was thinking like what because at that point our water hadn't already gone out it must have at that point just been draining out of the rest of our pipes but we were collecting the dripping um with pots and and bowls and stuff right and i was i saw that 36 hours and it's like what are they what are they getting at here it's like certainly they're just not gonna turn off you know turn off the water because people need that to drink and live and they did and we like we resorted to um so so we went from level one um uh water gather water gather people who like okay we can um get like these drippings in pots and pans and we can boil them uh and then we can we can use those and then once those were done like uh my wife anna she became like a level 100 water farmer

outback um collecting like like we we drank the the roof water i know that it's like last resort stuff but like what else are you gonna do so we're we're drinking the the roof water and boiling it i am scooping uh like snow i took a a five gallon paint bucket and uh went to the backyard and filled our uh our bathtub with snow so that uh we would have that reserve there and we would use that to flush toilets um mainly and yeah we didn't have we didn't drink drink out of the bathtub um but we we did we did drink some boiled some boiled snow and uh and and roof water and you were filtering that too so like you would boil it and then filter it through paper towels you said yes yeah yeah we had a um a strainer and then we would just put a couple layers of paper towel down and just run that run that baby through uh yeah

yeah i'm really i'm really impressed that but you know we never lost our water they did give us a notice that we might lose water and um i want to make sure not maybe not now but like talk about the issue of like panic prepping versus like making sure that you can take care of yourself so you can also take care of other people because i think that's a distinction that is is really important um go ahead and talk go ahead like give me your give me your thoughts on that well like so an example okay you get a notice that you're about to lose water what does everybody do they go fill up their bathtub right you know and then the act of everyone filling up their bathtub put strain on the water system and cause it to crash down for everyone right it's it's like everyone doing a run on the store and panic buying all the paper the the toilet paper like yeah our people said specifically do not do that right right and so that is where like planning ahead matters because i did fill up my bathtub because but i did it early i did it that's the trick with all these things is you have to prepare before it's

obvious there's a crisis when you might still be embarrassed for preparing right because like if i go to walmart not not now but if i go to walmart like three days ago and i just buy a bunch of stuff i'm not being a strain on anybody if i do it right when they're it like i mean walmart just makes a bunch of money and then they order new stuff right you know if i do it right when there's a crisis then i'm doing like damaging hoarding because other people need that stuff and i'm causing a crisis by causing a run on the stores and also like also when people do runs on stores they buy all the wrong stuff like they just they just like buy all the ketchup and all kinds of weird things you know they just like they're just like you know it's because they're panicking right and it's it's like um and so like even something like filling up your tub you can do it the right way or the wrong way and i'm so impressed by your resourcefulness because we never lost water you know the prep work that we did though was um try to do i always try to do

the smallest amount of prep work i can that is gonna be useful no matter what so for instance i have a berkey filter if you don't know what those are they're like really top of the line water filter like brit is like level one this is like level 100. big aluminum or whatever cylinders these big filters they use them all over the world like like ngos use them throughout like every kind of devastated country with like no safe water supply right and they're just gravity-fed filters no like moving parts no electrical parts no nothing you know and you just put water in the top doesn't matter how awful and brackish it is like they love to do this test with like food coloring in the top and then it like comes out all clear and um so if you just order one of those after a crisis is over and not about to start and just have one in your garage then like like i wish i could have shipped you mine you know by jumping into my time machine and giving it to you your life would have been a lot easier because i certainly didn't wind up having to use it this time but i'm glad i had it

because i live next to a creek and when it's freezing cold it's snowing usually we prepare for a drought not like freezing to death yeah um but like i could have poured brackish water from my creek that is probably full of every kind of amoeba and drain chemical possible and had fresh water you know and um but like filling up your bathtub the minute you know your bat your water is about to go off in 10 minutes it's gonna cause your water to go off in two minutes yeah yeah it's all it's all the same resources that that we're pulling from and uh yeah i'm taking i'm taking notes on on the filter too and it's funny that you know so like my dad was my dad was older um like he he was born in 1930 and anybody who lived through the great depression has these uh different you know quirks like hoarding it's like keeping keeping everything my mom grew up in norway post-war without electricity which is like hardcore yeah yeah yeah my

my mom was uh uh born in the philippines and they were the most abject poverty so she also has these right you know these resourceful um like cells in her body that you know are are thinking about when you have nothing and then your your brain start like even through like one week of this you know um like just a week your brain is already by the end of it is adjusting to like when you're hearing the snow melting right now and dripping away it's like um like that we're wasting like that's wasteful like right right right yeah we should be collecting that water like like i had filled up like i had filled up my tub you know before i thought there would be a crisis before there was any notice you know because it's just i'm not i'm not trying to tub shame you by the way no no i i understand i understand it but like like i'm afraid to drain the tub now like i'm like i'm like if i if i drain it i might need that water i'm like i've got the filter but like i don't want to drink creek water

you know yeah and it's like it's like like i'm afraid now you know and it was it was so funny because we had we were so blessed with the intermittent power the rationed four hours of power a day that like when the lights came on we had like at first we didn't know what to do but we got like got a little dance i was like okay charge the phones all right turn off the furnace okay everybody like you know it's like that feeling when the power comes back on after so like ours was out for 36. it was on on for six and then it was off for like 14 or 15 more hours right and then it it finally came back on and and stayed oh so the first time the power came back on um all that it was about at like four in the morning i think and uh our fire alarms all went off so yeah it was just like what the heck is going on and we couldn't get them to shut off so we like i had to get on my my ladder and then just uh

like uninstall all of them because there was nothing that that we could do and i i was looking around and smelling for smoke and it's like okay this is definitely a false alarm and it wasn't the carbon monoxide alarm because it's a different like right alarm it says carbon monoxide oh the carbon monoxide is such a thing though it's because you're like i should get in my car and like shut the garage door it's so it's so it's so sad because like you see people hospitalized or even die every time something like this happens because you know like some someone got carbon monoxide from poisoning from uh charcoal like using charcoal inside and and yes of course like people use generators in a closed garage and it just poisons the whole house um right i mean you can't and you can't tell that it's happening you just get sleepy and die you know yeah i have a fireplace too and like i kicked myself this is where like prepping is all about like like smart prepping not crazy prepping it's all about liking your head yeah half the things i did but like the real resource is family and friends and communication

because half the stuff i did is not because i'm smart it's because someone told me offhand several days before this all went down yeah and like and like i'm kicking myself off my fireplace because i've got a fireplace and i couldn't figure out like it took me forever to figure out that i could actually burn logs in it and my norwegian mom had given me a gift of these beautiful decorative birch logs but they're like they'll burn i have like 10 of them i'm like we could burn that wood yeah i was sure this fireplace wouldn't set my attic on fire because six years ago we had someone come look at our dryer vent and what's funny is the people who fix dryer vents are the same people who sweep chimneys like chimney sweeps re-specialize and re-twine in dryer vents when all the fireplace work dried up like they mostly do dryer vents but they still do fireplaces and we had them come out for a driver in six years ago and it's like oh you've got a nice fireplace here i'm like yeah it's texas we'll never use it and he's like yeah well if you ever do want to use it you should get me by to inspect it so you don't set your attic on fire based on how your installation is done

and so like i'm there with my fireplace i'm like do i risk it yeah but i'm like i'm like power's rationed we've got heat we'll do it if we're about to die but no yeah yeah oh i i smoked a chicken on the coldest night like we knew we needed uh um we i don't know we we needed food for those who don't know uh chris graft is an amazing barbecue grill master he's the best i i'm told uh well i mean i'm not i'm not bad he's as amazing as he is modest folks it is a treat yeah it's true so i i smoked this chicken and he smokes chicken the way he smokes noobs i don't know about that lars what are you talking about but it gave me it gave me like you know it was like it was at that point i checked and it was like 14 degrees on its way down to seven and yeah i sat i sat up there with the chicken i didn't want to go back in inside and

outside because i'm letting like what remains of the right and like luckily our house even after um like 36 uh the first 36 hours uh it got down to like 50 like 50 inside um which is impressive that it was able to maintain that that the installation was good enough yeah so like we and we just dressed like you know at night we just dressed like winter right they say they say heat your body not the room you know like i mean i mean i slept in like long underwear pj pants and like sweatpants and like a shirt an undershirt a jacket another jacket and a hat yeah exactly me too i i it was like i was going out um you know to the grocery store during an indiana winter and i just uh i just slept like that yeah and like my mom was saying i mean my mom like who grew up in norway where it gets this cold and like power had not been brought to her rural village yet so that was just how life

was she's like wear a hat son you need to wear a hat because most of your energy gets i wave gets lost in your head like all these little like survival tips from the old country it's so it's so true like uh yeah i put a hat on and like i got warm and and i know this stuff but you know i only like re-appreciated it when this past week happened like my life didn't depend on it until yeah yeah and i i'm like telling hey everyone try the hat go get a hat it really works yeah so like if we're talking about um like systems and and things like that you know you talked about the game that you designed uh is there um have you even had any chance to kind of think about and analyze uh what happened uh as as far as like the texas grid uh goes and anything or anything like that yeah has your game design head kind of automatically went there i've i mean

there's a there's a whole genre of games that are all about balancing power grids right you know and i like balance of power yeah so like um there was this there was this really fun like flash game like tower defense game called the space game which is all just like about building a power grid um um more recently on steam there's a game called um industry which has okay okay that's just my screen saver again can you hear me chris yeah how many times is this gonna happen i think it is literally ptsd i think i'm not abusing no you're yeah no you're that is what's happening to you i can i can i'm not you're not even on video or anything like it's palpable your your panic is palpable yeah so anyway yeah so like um industry i haven't played victoria but i assume it has and of course my game had it so yeah the thing about energy grid games is they're all about death spirals right like cascading failure

something goes wrong which causes something else to go wrong and then something else you weren't even paying attention to and like like and taking for granted goes around too and then you're just screwed so in energy apocalypse it's this like really simple one screen tower defense game where you build like a power grid right so you mine coal out of the ground and then you burn it in coal power plants and the coal power plants give you energy but they also create emissions and then the shtick of the game is that i just take all negative externalities and just arbitrarily reify them as mutant alien zombies and the rule is they're invading earth and they're terraforming it and everything that is bad for us in terms of pollution is good for them and so um the more you pollute the stronger the enemy gets and um so like you're burning all this energy and stuff and you've got lots of energy and then your defenses are powered by your materials so you have flood lights that use energy and you have tesla coils that use energy you have guns that use metal that you mine out of the ground you have flame throwers that use oil or gas

whatever's available right and so as you're going through the game you know um it's night and so your solar panels stop working because it's night you know or the wind stops blowing and your wind turbines don't work anymore and um or you run out of coal and your coal fire plant which is just like amazing for generating energy stops working and then you build a couple of units so that you can like defend yourself and you use up all your metal and your guns stop working right and you have these like cascading failure on cascading failure and so typically like you're doing pretty good until you stop paying attention to something it goes down and then like you can't get back up and like the challenge is like not falling so far down the slope yeah and there's also this inherent trade-off between efficiency and redundancy right like um an efficient system is one that has no waste and usually super efficient systems like run to the wire like to use a metaphor

like um uh just like an olympic athlete right has like zero percent body fat you know they're just made completely for running say right it's super efficient you know because that's what it takes to get that extra bit of performance um but if they get the flu they're going to just like die because they have no body fat they have no reserves right and um then there's also just mismanagement which is neither efficient nor redundant it's just bad you know yeah it's it's interesting like when you're talking about cascading failures and and mismanagement it's interesting emerging from the past few days uh when you know you're conserving your cell phone uh power your um you don't have any access to like tv or you know your laptop so you're basically kind of in the dark about a lot of things and emerging from it and then seeing the way that you know uh you know people like politicians for example uh

the things that they're talking about like uh whereas there's now this you know that people are like our governor is using this as an energy right like pitting fossil fuels against uh against renewable energy like windmills and like there is at one point um at the beginning of it like somebody mentioned to me about mentioned windmills and then this was this was like on monday it's like well it's because of the windmills like and it's like what like i didn't know what they were talking about and you emerged from this and it's like you know people are using this as a debate point um about like different kinds of energy it's like this is what you all were talking about like when we're trying to figure out the the you know roof water situation and like those things need to be talked about and they need to be considered within like the overall power grid and tech and stuff but um to see the discourse around that you know that that's happening

where people in tech while people in texas are suffering is it grosses me out yeah it did me too you know and it's like it it's a little weird for me because like on the one hand like a lot of my family is really conservative right on the other hand i'm also norwegian and the norwegian side is like a little more liberal but like not in the way americans expect at all like norwegians can be pretty provincial and and not part of like america's idea of what liberal means um but then also like my entire game dev like twitter feed and friends are all like really far left right and so like i feel like conflicted because like i i log on you know just check in what's going on and like everyone's having this like big like it seems the impression i get which is probably false is that everyone has these strong opinions and of course like yeah abbott and cruz go into freaking cancun and all that nonsense like i'm not i'm not a fan of our state leadership by any means but like i feel like everyone's like really busy making sure they score enough political

points while like we're [ __ ] freezing and so are our friends and family and like and i see and the really thing that like saddens me is when people who should know better are like really like happy about it like that makes me that that was weird because i saw that also um and the only reason like the terrible stuff that people are saying about like you know uh but basically what we're talking about is you know texas is uh and has been a red state there's republican leadership and there are some people that are just like well that's that's what you get and it's kind of like oh okay we got this back in hurricane harvey as well was it's like well you believe in climate change now and it's like thanks my brother might be drowning but good for you for being correct on the internet yeah and then um like it's weird for me too because like i said like growing up in indiana no one talks about indiana no one talks about indiana and then like when i

come to texas like texas is the central point for like politics and climate and and you know this being it's just weird to log on and like see you know people that you know aren't having the experience that we're all having have such strong opinions about it so it's a new thing to me you want to know something hilarious in norway we literally have a catchphrase that's like decades old called that thing is totally texas or in norwegian it goes you know and it means about what we expect it's like it's like totally crazy guns blazing insane you know yeah and it's like i mean texas looms larger than life because it is like if texas was a person which it's not and it's important to establish that it would be this very like self-assured kind of braggy i mean texas has great pr in terms of getting lots of it whether all of it is positive or not right but i think what people

are reacting to on the internet is this you know very braggadocious like larger than life texas attitude i mean i know people who have said things like let the yankees freeze in the dark whenever you know someone's like well if you want green energy then you know coal and natural gas is what keeps you warm at night you know it's so weird one thing that does bug me about abbott talking about like windmills and stuff one thing i think a lot of people are surprised to know is that texas in many ways like is this world that contains multitudes and contradictions like it is oil and gas capital of the united states and the world but um you might also wonder like uh lars is a norwegian in texas that's kind of weird um it's not super weird like this isn't the reason i'm here you know it's just because my mom married my dad but there's a lot of norwegians in texas actually they're all in houston because norway is also oil and gas producer of the world and like texas a leader in green energy which is so weird no one thinks of texas as a leader in

green energy but like if you look at charts of wind and solar and and nuclear it's like we're really really up there and that's why i feel kind of like angry about people i i do i do feel resentful like the whole like dragon on windmills because everything went down everything went down and i do want to underscore this point this point is really important i really wish in the wake of any crisis everyone would just shut up for 72 hours and not have an opinion not proclaim themselves an expert on whatever domain just happened and just like look for some evidence like i am all in favor of heads rolling like yes let the heads roll but the problem is that a stopped clock i read you know idiot politician can be right two times a day just like a stop clock and when we just like go off and like instantly it's like oh i know what the reason is it's the thing that i'm all it's my dead horse that i'm beating is the reason it's like you're gonna be wrong sometimes and when you're wrong

that politician is gonna love it and he's never gonna shut up about it for six months and the only thing that matters which is making sure that we take care of human beings and that this crisis doesn't happen again is gonna get lost in all that you know yeah there was one take i've read in the last 72 hours from someone who actually provided a bunch of evidence for what went wrong and he might be wrong i don't know um if his account is going to check out but he said here's the data i have i've tried to be fair about this and my conclusion is that there was a problem in texas but we might have this problem nationwide and the fact that texas has an isolated grid and this is something a lot of people are talking about oh those texans hate that federal regulation yeah and federal regulation were to save them maybe maybe like that could i'm 100 willing to believe that but another thing that's equally possible is that the grid being isolated kept oklahoma and louisiana and neighboring states from going down too right i hadn't thought about that yeah for for like listeners that haven't picked up on this

yet like the power good from texas it is it's it's its own it's isolated from from everything else and nearby states that have got that had just as bad um icing and things like that ended up fearing so much better than than we did right and so the conclusion is okay like you look at a map texas is like as black and dark as north korea is on a nighttime map right and so everyone's like okay well texas screwed the pooch it's all their fault their infrastructure sucks um you know and and maybe it is you know but like i'm not an expert in you know power grid engineering despite the fact that i made a flash game 12 years ago you know um so like i i really wish just you can wait 72 hours like that the truth can wait that long and then we'll figure out who's really to blame it and then and then you know and and then we can have all the righteous fury we want because then we'll actually be directed in a positive useful direction to actually solve a problem rather than just score a bunch of little red hearts on twitter yeah right i like the little red hearts

they're so addictive i love them and they and they and they just erode my soul so like so there's there's a couple other things i want to talk about so um again with the cascading like uh you know failure uh apparently like i was reading a really good article today on texas monthly about um about what has happened and it's a really good clear um like telling of what happened and it's kind of what you're talking about it's a step back looking at things in very near hindsight um and it's called like the title is the the texas blackout is the story of a disaster foretold so it you know with the benefit of hindsight it talks about why this happened why the systems failed and how close we actually were to going total blackout so right like we were able to maintain um you know some levels of energy at different places in the state but apparently something happens like

where everything is gone and once everything is gone there is a really complicated way that they have to use like diesel uh generators to start different um plants across the state and it sounds like you're hand cranking like an old-timey car um except multiplied by like a trillion yeah it's it's um i've been kind of a sort of like keeping at an arm's length from but morbidly interested in what's called collapse porn you know which is just like post-apocalyptic literature right and fiction and non-fiction accounts of like what happened in argentina and venezuela like and stuff like that and and prepper culture who have these doomsday obsessions and like here's kind of where i'm at like when i tell people i do some light prepping like you you get that push back it's like oh you're one of those people who hoards the toilet paper and i'm like like there's this kind of

um person who's never been through a crisis before who doesn't really get it and they think that it's about selfishness and it can be because there's certainly people who like f you got mine gonna get my bunker gonna shoot anyone who knocks on the door right those people certainly exist and they have weird fantasy books that i've read that are disturbing um but um there's another school of thought that's like do you have a fire extinguisher in your house that's the most likely crisis that's going to happen to you and do you know where it is do you have a drill to go get it if i say fire right now will you you know and like when i said that in in some chat room or someone like somebody meeting point is like that happened to me there was a fire i didn't know what the fire extinguisher was i almost died and you build general survival skills like you don't have to plan for the zombie apocalypse like i have a berkey filter i built that in case the water was shut off i never anticipated a blizzard yeah in texas but now i can filter welder if i have to yeah for the cost of a hundred bucks i like i and this is

this is obvious but like it it this past week really drove the point home like how reliant we are on systems and how there is like a single node of failure that shuts everything down and then you get the you know the cascading failure that you were talking about yeah and some people say like if you get too much into if you drink too much of the prepper kool-aid um the problem is like you start preparing for the complete breakdown of society and it takes on this very like anarchist kind of everyone out for themselves mentality where it's like raiders are gonna come and like eat your flesh and stuff and and like people are gonna shoot you and so you gotta shoot first you know but the other perspective is it's like like society doesn't have to be this fragile like we can build a better society that that that is a little better and then at the same time we can stop waiting for i really hate this one attitude i have i see a lot among otherwise enlightened liberals that i look up

to is when they're like it's not worth taking any personal measures we just have to like take over the government and make a perfect society and it's like i'm not going to feel bad that i'm not going to wait for a perfect society to emerge i don't think it's selfish to take care of my family so that i am not a burden on everyone else so that i can have some overflow to help my neighbor right it's like if my neighbor is freezing and i'm not in the middle of dying i have a warm house she can stay in right you know and i i think if we focus a little more on the local aspect of government and just society and just helping each other out i mean i think that the term of art is mutual aid then we can build a more robust to use the silicon valley fancy pants term anti-fragile society yeah absolutely and that's it's funny because that's the last point that i wanted to talk about about how kind people in my experience doing this have been

like i like we have local restaurants that are already completely you know um hammered by the pandemic and not being able to you know uh you know run business as usual they're giving away food like yeah like in one of the so we have down here we have p terry's which is like a fast food place and there's one that is pretty close to us and there they got a shipment of food like and there was just like and this this was sad like there was like a line of cars um just like like like a couple miles long or whatever there were a lot of cars going through this fast food uh fast food drive-thru and all of those represent i'm just like these aren't people they're you're not going to wait like you know hours in line because you just want you know a taco

like these people must not have food like they're they're they're people who are are desperate to get to get food and one of the things that i read is that um or actually like uh that anna told me my wife uh said that she she saw that people were paying for the people behind him like and just like going down the line like that there's that kind of thing we have like people who are um offering up like you know somebody's out of medicine for their kids you know they're sick and you know you can't go to the pharmacy but they need it post that on the facebook group is like where are you i'm bringing it there do you need anything else that type of thing um and nobody is asking if you voted for ted cruz or not before they extend some help we'll we'll deal with that afterwards for now we'll go get you we'll get you fed you know i'm i'm thankful that you know you and your family and and sounds like your community are on the other side of this um and

uh yeah i'm just uh i hope hopefully we all uh learn something from this just i think we should just close with the fact that this isn't over a lot of people that you're not hearing from have it much worse because of survivorship bias because they can't tell you how bad it is um the damage even once the temperatures are back up and the power is back on the water's back on for everyone the lingering damage is gonna last yeah i i agree with that and um everyone out there take care we'll go back to our regularly scheduled um 100 game developer centric conversations next time and uh thanks for uh thanks for hanging out with us take care definitely gonna play frostpunk now oh yeah [Music]

[Music] you