Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #736: Matt Place, Part 2

Episode Date: April 30, 2020

Matt Place had so much to say, we had to do a second podcast.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. So last time I was interviewing Matt Place, we didn't get done. There was more to talk about. So I brought Matt back. So we're going to talk more with Matt. So say hi, Matt. Hey, Mark. Okay, so last we left off, we had talked about dissension. That was the first set you had led. So what was the second set that you led? What was your second development team? Oh, let's see. Nowension that was the first set you had led so what was the second set that you led what was your second

development team oh let's see now what was the second set was it I'm trying to remember I gotta do I have to cheat and look

you can cheat and look yeah you said your first design was Zendikar but your first well I remember last time we were chatting we were talking about initial design teams.

Yeah. You know, we were kind of talking about how much we... Yeah. Color Pie and Planar Chaos. I was actually on that team. Oh, you were on Planar Chaos. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, we messed around with purple on Planar Chaos. You remember that? Yeah. How much do people know about that? I've mentioned in passing. So the whole premise was, real quickly, it was past, present, and future

was the way I lined up the block. But present, what is present? The past, look at Magic's past. The future, look at Magic's future. What does the present mean? So I came up with this idea of doing an alternate reality present. What if Magic had been different in some way?

And so we reconfigured the color pie so that different colors, like, we kept the philosophies the same, but we said, well, what if growth was shown through card drawing? And we just did different things. And one of the things we seriously toyed with was doing the six

color. Because we joked about it forever, but we're like, okay, what if in this reality there's six colors? And so I think purple's what we called it. Do you remember much about purple? Do you remember much? I do. I do. It had broken cards. I remember one card specifically

we put in. What do you remember in purple? I remember mana drain. Yes, that's what I remember. We had mana drain in purple. Custing PP. Yeah, the idea was that, I think we called it a cave, is that what we called it for the land? It was the basic that, and it was one of the only ways to

generate purple was a big part of... Correct, correct, right. You had to have this land, so it let us push the power level because it was a little harder to access it. And so, right, we had cards like literal mana drain, but in purple. You know, purple, rather than blue, blue, purple, purple. Yeah, there were four of us on the team, and we were generally, like, very excited about it.

And one of them, Bill Rose, was, you know, at the time your boss. Bill Rose led the team. He was the lead designer of that team. And he was into it. So I thought, there's a good chance we are adding a sixth color, maybe just for what's set. Yeah. But, yeah, and Paul Sittasanti, he was creating a lot of the cards whenever he was...

Yeah, that was the team, the four of us. Right, right, right. Yeah. I mean, it's the closest we've ever come to doing purple. It's the one time, like, oh, maybe we're doing this, and we really explored it. It ended up not working out, but we did... So, okay, you were on Planar Chaos. That was your

first design team. Okay, so you were on Fifth Dawn, I don't believe, okay, you were on Planar Chaos, that was your first design team. Okay, so you were on Fifth On, I don't believe. Yeah, I wasn't on the team, but I did playtesting for a little while for Fifth On, right? Okay, and then following that was, we're getting to Lorwyn Block. Did you do anything in Lorwyn Block? Yeah, Lorwyn was my, well, yeah, so of the four sets, right, um, my first, my second lead. Okay, which set? Even Tide. Oh, even Tide! Yeah, well, yeah, so of the four sets, right, my first, my second lead. Okay, which set? Eventide.

Oh, Eventide. Yeah, yeah. So that's the first time I led the design, you led the development, right? Okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, real quickly, my Eventide story, I'm not going to name names, but you'll know who it is. Somebody else was supposed to lead the design for Eventide, and at the last minute, they decided not to do it. And so I ended up doing it because I had nobody else to do it. So I did it.

Yeah, right. I remember that. Yeah. Okay, so what was doing Eventide like? So that... I made a decision that I think, in retrospect, might have been a mistake, which was... Let's just do Enemy.

We did Ally Hybrid. Let's do enemy hybrid. Right. That was, and remember the times, the audience knows, um, back then when we did drafts, you drafted in order of the set release. We later changed that. Like you, later on, it was like the most recent set was the first set. But back then you would draft Shadowmore. So Eventide, you would draft Shadowmore,

Shadowmore Eventide, or you would draft two Eventides? One Eventide is my memory. I think Shadowmore, Shadowmore Eventide. So we made a set, but we were the third set in one pack,

and we had to make our themes matter. And the first two sets were the allied colors. We were the enemy colors. The first set, yeah. Yeah. And, yeah,

and, yeah, it's still interesting to me to this day. During design and development, we had a lot of debates on, like, what is hybrid? Why is it cool?

Right? Because a lot of us believed it was cool, but it was actually easier to cast than normal monocolor cards. Yeah. So what can we give away?

And I remember a lot of the debate is just how powerful can we make these cards? You know, it's easy to push a card with casting cost of Absorb, right? WWU. That's easy to push because it's so restrictive. But it's the reverse with Hybrid.

So it was a challenging set for sure. And in hindsight, I think, you know, one of my regrets with the set is not putting, you know, the power and the designs behind enough, you know, just straight Timmy, you know, hey, if this set's confusing or weird to you, here's just the latch on to awesomeness. I think we could have used more back then. But anyway, you know, long time ago.

So even Ty, I'm afraid there was, even Ty's familiar for a couple things. One is, it was the introduction of Chroma, which most of the audience knows much more now is Devotion. Right. Chroma, we didn't, like, it's one of those mechanics that we didn't quite figure out the right version, and then we came back to it, and the redone version was a little, just

flavorfully cleaner. Oh, also, what's the name of the red-white that you activate three different times to upgrade it? Oh, yes. The Hero. What was his name?

That was probably the most popular card out of that set. Oh, yeah, easily. I'm flicking the name, though. I'm so bad with names for sets that I worked on. It's funny, right? Because the playtest names often confuse me with the real names. I will still to this day say names of cards

that people are like, that's not a magic card. I know. People are saying, how do you always get the names right? I'm like, none of the names are the names I use. That's why it's so hard. Okay, so the one thing is I can look this up because I'm not actually driving. So I'm going to look this up

and see what the name of this card is. This card has inspired a lot of things. It has inspired a whole mechanic. Brian Tinsman made Level Up based on it. Right, right, right. And I think he made the original, right? Yes, I think Brian did make the original. Right, Brian was on the team.

So it was red and white, right? Right, correct. Okay, so let me look at red and white cards. Yeah, Brian was on the team. So it was red-white, right? Right, correct. Okay, so let me look at red and white cards. Yeah, this is funny. Normally, when I'm doing my podcast, I'm driving, so I can't just look cards up or something. So this is... Oh, Figure of Destiny! Of course! Figure of Destiny. Yeah, so Figure of Destiny,

it's a 1-1 for one hybrid mana, red-white, and then for one red hybrid mana, you make it a 2-2. And then for three, you make it a 4-4. And then for six, you make it an 8-8 flying first-ranker. Right. So one of the cool things about it, you got it early, but then it evolved as the game went on. So it was actually pretty powerful.

Yeah, just an awesome design, right? Very powerful, but still fair, right? Not an 11 on the 10-point powerful, but still fair, right? Not a, uh, 11 on the 10 point scale, as we used to say, uh, and inspired of, like you said, a major mechanic in Tenzin's lead for Rise of Eldrazi, the initial design. Yeah. It's funny. Cause the, um, one of the things about this card is there's certain cards in magic that just like go on, like from a design standpoint, they're just like something about them just inspires people. And like, for example, Plague Rat, there's all sorts of cards that,

you know, Richard made Plague Rat and Alpha, and then just infinite cards got made because of Plague Rat. And Figure of Destiny is one of those cards that just kind of like, infinite cards have been made of people inspired by it doing different things. In fact, Monstrous, Monstrous,

which is a mechanic in Theros, is somewhat owes its allegiance to this as well, in addition to level up. So it is definitely a very influential card. Okay, so after Eventide, let's see, then we get into Shards block. Did you work on any of the Shards sets? Shards of Alara, Conflux, or...

Oh, no, you did... You did Abyssinian Restored? You did... I'm sorry, you did... I was... You did... You did Avacyn Restored. You did... I'm sorry. You did... What's the last set? Alara Reborn. Alara Reborn.

Alara Reborn. Yeah, I was the lead developer on that. And then I was on the design team for Shards that Bill Rose was leading generally, right? If you remember that. That was the craziest design team, by the way. Bill... It broke up into five design teams. Well,

what happened was, real quickly, what Bill did early on was he did this rotating thing where the team

kept rotating and eventually got to the point where he broke into five teams and each team designed a something.

But before that, it's like every month it would be a different team. And so it's funny, if you ever

look at the design team for, it's like everybody was in at Wizards that like, it's like a was in at Wizards that, it's like a 30-person design team. Right. It's kind of crazy.

Yeah. Yeah, first set with Mythics as well. Okay, so Alara Bourne was a challenging set because it's one of our gimmick sets where we decided that every card is gold. What was that like? Right. It was crazy so uh a lot of our questions especially early on were all right how do we make this work this can be sweet a lot of the debate was well is it too much of a good thing right is it ice cream for breakfast

right is this just too much um but we often point especially bill rose would point to Legion, the second set in the Onflat block. My daughter's here to help us out, too. But Legion was all creatures, right? And it was awesome. People loved it. We've often referred to it as one of the best small sets. And so this was kind of going down that same path, like, okay, every

card's a gold card. Sweet. And we sort of explored it, like, okay, but how do we do mana fixing? How do we do, if there's no land, but every card is, you know, asking you a lot from your mana, what do we do?

We came up with these crazy ideas, right, the artifacts that basically you could play turn two of the path land, right? Yeah.

But yeah, it was a crazy set. It's fun to open and see every card being gold. Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. We don't do the

gimmicky sets quite that anymore. I mean, we'll do... Like Tormund back in the day. Yeah. Most cards are black set. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you led Alara Bourne.

Okay, now we get into Innistrad block. Is that right? No, no, no. I'm sorry. Zendikar block. Zendikar block. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you were on the design team for Zendikar.

Yeah. Me, you, Doug, and Graham. Yeah. I think there was a fourth. Wasn't there a fifth? Yes. I feel like there was a fifth person, but maybe not. Eric Lauer?

No, Eric wasn't. I don't think it was Eric Lauer. Anyway, okay, so you were on the design team for Zendikar. Did you, Zendikar Block, did you do any development? Yes, I went over... So I was the... Back then, we had often one person who was the liaison, right, to development. Okay.

So often when I was on the design team, initial design, I would go on to the development. So I did that for Zendikar as well. For Zendikar, okay. And that one was crazy, too, with different leads and whatnot. Yeah, I think that set had three development leads during the course of its... Yeah. Ending with Aaron.

Yeah, Aaron was the final one. Yeah, I think... Because Aaron was the lead of development, and after two leads, he's like, okay, I'll just do it. Right.

So... And it's one of the best sets, you know? So, good job. Oh, yeah. Zendikar turned out great. It's funny, because one of my memories of Zendikar was

that I had wanted to do it forever, and the running joke was I would make seven years of sets, and it always was my seventh year, and then it kept getting pushed back, and, like, for years and years, and everybody would mock me about no, no one understood like why I'd want to land focus that.

Uh, and then it finally gets made like after, like, so Bill Rose, for example, do you know this Bill Rose before we began gave me three months or two months, two months.

He said, I have two months to prove it. And if not, we're changing it. And I had like two months for the team to, and then after two months, Bill said, okay, that looks cool. But anyway, years later, we're talking about

doing a return to Zendikar, and Bill's like, we gotta go back to Zendikar. I'm like, what, Bill? What was I saying? Right, yeah, no, I remember the drama about it, right? Because it was, you know, I don't know who else was supporting you, honestly, back in the day. One other person was, you know the one person who know who else was supporting you, honestly, back in the day with Lane. One other person

was, do you know the one person who when I first pitched it that said, I think this will work, and he was the only person other than me, obviously, to say that they thought it would work? Well, it definitely wasn't me. It was not you. It was Mike Turian. Turian, alright. That is Turian's claim to fame. He was the one person that

backed me on Zendikar. He was very right. Yeah, so anyway. It's funny how I go back to a lot of my successes. How hard I had to fight for that success. It was very... Okay, but we'll get to a few others on the road. Okay, so

Zendikar block. You were on Zendikar Design. You were on Zendikar Development. Did you do Worldwake or do... I skipped that. Oh, no, were you on Rise of the Eldrazi? Yeah, Rise, I was the lead developer. Okay, let's talk about Rise. Rise is the end of the Zendikar block. Oh, no, no. Right, yeah, Rise is the end of the Zendikar block. Right, okay.

Yeah, hands down the most challenging thing I did at Wizards, for sure. It was, let's totally flip, right, you know, Tensman was the lead, Brian Tensman, awesome designer. Hold on, real quickly, just so I can tell the audience in, because us saying Brian Tinsman doesn't necessarily, I got to get, Brian was a balls-to-the-wall designer.

Like, he would have an idea, and he would just, he would go full throttle for his idea. And he had really cool ideas, and he definitely was a really inventive person. But when he wanted to do something, like, he would go... So, the whole idea here was, he had pitched this idea of,

we would call battle cruiser magic. Just, it's giant creatures! So, talk about making this out of giant creatures! Right, exactly. So, you know, a lot of his ideas in the beginning... Yeah, a lot of his ideas in the beginning were like, what if there were no little creatures, right? What if it was only battlecruisers? What does that mean? And, you know, we explored it, we went around, and like you're saying, Brian would want to push the limit, and he was very good at, you know, making them happen. So he actually made it happen. We shipped battlecruiser magic, and I think figured out a great way to do it. ship Battlecruiser Magic, and I think figured out a great way to do it. But there was a lot of doubt, of course,

because we were doing so many things radically different, right? Like, you know, how many, what if it's just bad in this world to play cheap cards? Like, what does that mean, right? We knew that this format for Limited would be played by itself. So, and I think that was good, right? It would be hard to do something this radical when it was part of something else for limited yeah yeah you want to go run okay uh sorry march but uh but yeah so you know we're at home so yeah real quickly if you want to take care of let me explain a little bit about uh rise of the drossy so brian really had a vision he had a very strong vision for the set and one of the challenges that the developer has is, now set design

and play design, is vision sets a vision, you know, and then or design at the time sets a design. And it's really the job of the development team slash set design team to figure out how to execute on that. And one of the things that Matt had to really figure out was

yeah, how do we make it in Limited so you can play giant creatures? Because a lot of times in Limited, the game's over before you even get to the point where you can play a giant creature. And there were a lot of tricky decisions to make to figure that out. I was on the design team for that set, but I wasn't on the development team. Yeah, and leveling, you know leveling from the... Yeah, level up was in the set.

was a perfect solution, where it's still... These could turn into battlecruisers, right? So these giants win the game, you know, super epic timmy cards, while still giving you things that you're doing, you're spinning your man on in the early game. But yeah, you know, that set of common, I think

had, what was it, an Eldrazi that was a 7-7 Yeah, it had a 7-7 common. Destroyed something, right? Just things that easily would have been rare when I started playing. We were going to put it common. Yeah, it was definitely a tough challenge.

I think we got there, and people really enjoyed the Limited for sure. Okay, so next set was Innistrad block. Did you work on any of the Innistrad block? I assume you did something. My last set, so I left early 2010. Okay. My last set was Scars and Mirrodin, where I was on the

design team with you. Oh, right, right. I'm sorry. Scars was before I jumped ahead. Scars was before Innistrad. Right, right, right. Okay. So were you on, what did you do in Scars and Mirrodin. Scars before Innistrad. Right, right, right. Okay. So were you on, what did you do in Scars of Mirrodin? Scars,

so I left pretty early on that set, but I remember doing some of the designs that actually got shipped, like the, the guys that they start in your hand,

you can reveal them to get like a 1-1 Goblin or whatever it was. I didn't actually design those. I kind of pitched some of the ideas for that and then you guys made it a cycle.

Not a lot in that set. Okay, so did we skip... We talked about sets. Were there stuff you worked on that I didn't hit because we were mostly hitting sets? Yeah, a big part of what I did there too was the original duels of the planeswalkers.

I got to do that with stainless... Let's talk about that. What was that like? The original duels of the planeswalkers uh got to do that with stainless um let's talk about that what was that like the original doing duels of planeswalkers that that was great so but the precursor to that was something we called the nth edition tutorial cds right so for ninth edition we made a cd that went in a video game magazine these used to exist i'm feeling old mark explaining these things from back in the day but yeah see yeah, see, once upon a time, we used to print on paper, and you could purchase the paper and read the things printed on paper. Right, exactly.

And so one of the common things, you know, there are game demos in these video game magazines, and so we included the in-edition tutorial CDs in those where people could, like, learn how to play Magic, but they weren't great at doing it. So we worked on this and tried to make it better and better and better. But a lot of the learning was, how do you teach magic? And we all make this mistake when we're trying to teach magic in the beginning,

which is, okay, here's all the rules, you need to know this, and there's an exception here, and da-da-da-da, right? And the real way to teach magic, we started to learn, is, okay, this game is super fun, watch what you can do, and then show them the giant growth block, or know, just fireballing a creature, right? Something that's cool and evocative as fast as you can. So they get into it and then they'll naturally, naturally learn more of the mechanics. Yeah. So, so the goal of, and it turned out it worked out pretty well, of Duel of the Planeswalkers was to be on Xbox

and kind of reach a whole new audience. And so it was definitely not trying to be, you know, hey, if you're, you know, watching this really hard, complex game, come check this out. So we had, you know, sounds and, you know, made it a real video game. And yeah, so that was a cool way

to kind of turn some of our learning as we went on, you know, how do you actually teach somebody? What's appealing to people who are new? We tried to pack that into this video game we were putting on Xbox. And it's interesting. One of the things that I think you really were one of the leaders on,

for a long time, the philosophy at Wizards had been the way you teach somebody is to teach them the absolute simplest version you can. And we would always kind of like try to peel everything we could away so we're giving you the simplest version. And you were one of the

people that really said, hey, that's not what makes Magic exciting. It's not like, oh, you want to play Magic? Well, let's play the most simplest version you can. What made Magic exciting was you were doing exciting things, that you had you were interacting with cool, flavorful things and you were one of the big people that already said

hey, you know, if people are excited, they're more willing to learn, and so rather than giving someone the simplest thing that maybe they can comprehend, give them something exciting, that even if they don't comprehend they want to comprehend it and that was a big shift,

I think, and I really attribute you with being a big part of leading that shift at Wizards away from make it the simplest it can be to make it the evocative, the most evocative it could be. Right, cool, thank you. Yeah, I remember a learning moment. We were doing a playtest

of the Infinite Edition tutorial CD, and there was this kid, you know, 12 years old, who was getting it, right? He was playingructional TV, and there was this kid, you know, 12 years old, who was getting it, right? He was playing the video game, and it would tell you, you know, here's what 3BB means, right? You have to tap two black, like, and he kept trying over and over, and he got it. And without us intervening, he was able to actually go play

Paper Magic in the other room. That was how we did the test. And we talked to him afterwards, like, oh man, you figured it all out, what do you think? And because it was so grueling and terrible to try to learn all these rules without the fun he's like yeah i figured it out but i'm never playing this game again right i was like oh wait we did teach him magic but we fail oh okay right right yeah the the thing that like i said that you really bring the forefront is the idea that it's not the important goal at the end of teaching somebody is not that they understand everything is that they, they want to play again.

That like, Oh, I understand everything, but I don't want to play that. That's not succeeding. And that one of the things that I think we walked away is look, if somebody is invested and interested, they'll spend the time to learn.

But if they're not interested, not invested, yeah, they're not going to continue. And that was my story when I first started playing. I was fascinated by all these cards. I just understand. But it was pulling me in.

Just going, oh, what's going on here? A Northern Paladin. Such good top-downs to D&D and whatnot. That's what got me in. Okay, so we're trying to take a little bit of an overview of your time at Wizard. So last time we talked about New World Order, which I think was a big contribution that you had. Obviously, the shift over to how we thought about teaching, I think, was big. What else do you think were, like, where does your thumbprint on Magic?

Well, a lot of my time there was spent balancing, too, right? Being on balance teams. I was the lead for the FFL for like the last two and a half years I was there. So real quickly, explain what the FFL is for those who don't know. Yeah, FFL was the, basically, we would get together, and it was a team of people who were going to get together on balance tests, right? Do some battles, you know, figure out broken decks, et cetera. And that often included people who were good at Magic

that worked in the building, but weren't necessarily R&D members or even on designer development sets. And we meet weekly and kind of go through things. You know, we made the big mistake, we had this new Umidala Jitte, right? Like, we're just totally overpowered and totally embarrassing. Why?

Right? We basically had a rules issue that leads it to this overpowered version right you can't make mana at the same time you do other things therefore we have to change the mana ability on this equipment to minus one minus one we ship it out the door without playing it honestly right super bad mistake it changed very late in the process changed very late and we didn't play it enough i should say um so we we became more serious about that thing, obviously. And, yeah, so we would, you know, in the NFL, we had something called the JIT list, which was what cards do we think we have in a set right now that might make us regret like we regretted in the JIT. And, yeah, so I think I helped out with, you know, just being aware that, you know, while we need to ship 10, right,

we need to ship the most badass, awesome, cool cards we can, we need to make sure that they're taking the game in a good, healthy direction unlike things like JIT, which are I can't play a 2-2 against you now because what I block, I can't even block because you kill it. So the unfun power versus the

this is really fun and still powerful. I think we did a big shift from that from Mirrodin up through my last two sets. Yeah, it's one thing, one of the things that's interesting to me, I mean, having been a wizard so long, is watching the evolution over time,

like just how we make magic kind of constantly itself evolves. Right. And I mean, I think the period you were there, so you started in 2003, and when did you leave? 2010. 2010, so you were there seven years. Yeah, almost, yeah.

I know. And it's funny, because I think of that time, like, there's different periods where we learn a lot of different things, and I think a very, very important point of that, and I think you were a big part of this, is really rethinking how beginners look at the game and how people learn the game.

And like I said, in a lot of ways, both New World Order and sort of a shifting on how we teach the game were us spending a lot of time trying to understand, you know, how to look at magic in a broader way. And I really think that shaped in a broader way, and I really think that shaped, in a big way, how we make magic. Yeah, because part of the challenge was, you know, we could

get into a silo, right? Well, we all understand these cards we're making, so what's the problem? Well, I mean, in future, I mean, Time Spiral Block was basically us doing that. Right. Like, we made a set that was really fun for us. Yeah, and I remember hearing back that you know the grasp of like sales versus tournament attendance that was the first time those two broke right the tournament players were loving the set so we did successfully make it for people like us

or at least like you know the pro players right yeah uh but but overall it was a mistake and that's very interesting to hear that's the first time those two graphs actually separated. Right. Real quick, to explain what Matt's talking about, we track a lot of things. Two of the things we track is, how do the sets, how do they sell? And the second thing is, how much organized play did we have? How many people played it? And up until that point, up until Time Spiral, they were always in lockstep.

If a set sold well, it played well. And Time Spiral had this weird dynamic where it played very well, a lot of people were playing it in tournaments, but it sold poorly. And it made us step back and go, wait, what's going on here? They'd never deviated before. And it made us realize there's this large

group of people, I think we called them the invisibles, meaning they're people that play magic, but they don't play them where we see them. They're not playing in sanctioned tournaments. And one of the things that's really important to understand is, the people that play in sanctioned tournaments, while they're very important to us, they're a small portion of magic players

in the larger scope of things, and they're the diehard, they're the very enfranchised players, we very much care about that group of players, but they're one section of a much larger group and it was interesting trying to learn about that larger group. Right, right, right.

Yeah, and you were very central to a lot of those discussions. Yeah, and I feel like since I've left, something you guys have gotten very good at, which is awesome, is appealing to both groups. Right? Like, clearly casual magic has just exploded beyond anything I would have imagined

while I was still there. And still super fun for, you know, the more hardcore player. So, yeah, it's nice to see that you can, you know, appeal to both. Please, everyone. It's great. One of our tricks? We make a lot more products.

Oh, my God. We used to argue about, right, with four set years versus three set years. Yeah. This is too much, right? That was a big debate. A lot of people were very passionate about this is too many magic cards.

Clearly not. Yeah, but... You guys have it anymore. The very first year I was there, I was talking about how many sets we released. And, like, I think the first year I was there, we released two sets the whole year. Crazy, yeah.

That's the only year we ever released two sets. But every year before then and after that was at least three. So anyway, Matt, I'm almost to my den. So anything you want to say as we're wrapping up here? Anything you would like to add in in our final moments? Oh, it's great chatting with you. Yeah, this was anything you would like to add in, in our final moments? Oh, uh,

it's great chatting with you. Um, yeah, this was really fun. Thanks for having me, Mark. Well, glad having you here.

So like one of the things I've been trying to do with my interviews is sort of mix it up. I've been interviewing a bunch of current employees, but I like going back and interviewing some older people. Um, so this was fun. So I'm, thanks for joining me,

Matt. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. So anyway, guys, uh, I, I see the den up ahead. So we all know what that means.

It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So before I wrap up, Matt, once again, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you for joining us on two whole podcasts. So it was great having you. Awesome. Thanks. Bye-bye.

Okay. Bye-bye. I'll see you guys next time. Bye-bye.