All right, Tori. It's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

It's a real pleasure to be here, Danny. I'm excited to chat with you.

For people that aren't familiar with your work, why don't you give us a brief background in your studies and how you came about with this Red Dead Redemption story.

Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Tori Olson, and I am a professional historian. I'm a history

professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee. And I work on modern American history, really the 150 years or so since the Civil War.

And I've always been really interested in pop culture as a way of telling histories.

When I teach my kind of big American history survey class at the University of Tennessee. I actually call it American History in 30 pop songs.

And we listen to at least one song for every lecture and analyze it and, you know,

use music as a way to engage with the past,

in part because it gets students like emotionally excited and, you know,

hooked on the topic.

And I started off with music, but then, course I got really interested in video games as a way to get people interested and enthusiastic about grappling with some really hard questions in American history.

And a lot of this stems from my own personal background, right? Because even though I'm a serious academic historian, right?

This is my day job.

Before I became that, I was a kid growing up in 1990s America and that kid really loved

video games.

It was just the 1990s was a good, good moment to be playing a lot of video games, some

really great franchises

coming out to the market at that time. And that's really what I cared about. Like in high school,

you know, sure, I did okay in my history classes, but I was really just enjoying playing

Starcraft and Deus X at home. Those are the kinds of things that really enthused me. So I was

a big gamer when I was a teenager.

...