Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #743: Mark Heggen

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

I talk to product architect Mark Heggen to explain how he got into the game and just what exactly he does for Magic.

I'm not pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another Drive to Work Coronavirus Edition. Okay, so while I'm stuck at home, I decided to interview people that have stuff to do with magic from all over the spectrum. So today I have a very exciting guest, Mark Hagen. So say hi, Mark. Hello. Okay, so... It's truly an honor to be on the podcast. Long-time listener, first-time guest, so thank you. Okay, so first off, the thing I've been asking everybody is, well, what is your title so the audience knows what... We'll get into what you do, but just what's your title?

Yeah, I am Product Architect. So within the group that makes tabletop paper magic, within that group there's a team called the Product Strategy Team, and I'm part of that team called the Product Strategy Team, and I'm part of that team as the Product Architect. Okay, we will get into what you do, but the way I've been starting all these interviews is by asking the following question of everybody. How did you get into magic? Okay, I was in fourth grade when Beta came out. I was at my friend Paul's house. I still remember his big brother brother who was kind of like we both looked up to he ran in the door he was like guys get all the money you can and follow

me down to the gaming store down on central avenue um so we went down there he's like just trust me buy this new thing it's called magic card so we i think we had enough money for like maybe two boosters back then you could get either boosters or like the starter deck um i think we had enough money for two boosters each um we opened them up started looking through and immediately immediately i was like this is the most interesting thing i've ever seen the idea of cards combining the idea that i got to make my own deck the idea that i had to um that i didn't even know what all the cards were and someone would show me a new card from their pack and like not only was i not aware of it i didn't i didn't even understand whole parts of the game you know so i just immediately fell in love with it and uh i never looked back okay

so you started in fourth grade what What was the first thing you purchased? Yeah, so I got, right, I got two, we were super, we had no money. Fourth graders don't have any money. We had like, you know, lawn mowing allowance money. So I got, I would get like a booster every couple weeks. So me and my friends would, we'd like, I remember going halfers on boosters. Me and our friends would like chip in enough money to buy a booster and then we'd like split the cards up um we had to we traded a lot because we needed to see new stuff um and we we picked colors because like if i i picked green and paul picked blue and then we could just like it just kind of sorted itself out so i ended up with green and then i moved into blue so i had like this huge collection huge for me you know like a hundred blue magic cards it felt very powerful what was the first set though what was your first set what's that first set it was beta so yeah this was beta and i think we was like early magic would would come into the store and then quickly evaporate so when it would come in you know we'd go in and ask every day after school like now we're gonna get some more tomorrow um

and yeah so we were just playing beta back then i mean some people were certainly more connected but being as young as we were we we literally didn't know what the cards were there was no you know we weren't looking at any list or anything we had no idea how the rarity worked or value i remember just like gleefully trading away dual lands and moxes for like crawlworms and um like walls of stone i'm like you you idiot i'm invincible like you'll never get past my wall of stone have fun with your artifact that makes a man and it didn't matter like it was we were truly like engaging it on the the most joyful level um okay so yeah let's fast forward a little bit, okay? So you're in fourth grade.

How long have you played consecutively since fourth grade? I have, no, there's been gaps of years. So there's like two-year gaps kind of sprinkled between then and now. But I'll say this. Ever since I was like, once I got to high school and the internet was kind of around, from that point on, I've been continually kind of tuned into magic so even in stretches where I wasn't playing much for me I really enjoy magic just as kind of a spectator sport like seeing what the thing is hearing about what the new meta is um you know reading about the debate over if a card should

be banned or not like even in the parts of my life where I wasn't playing I was always kind of just reading both the articles that would go up on the website. I just enjoyed kind of being around it. Okay, so let's talk about how you went from being a Magic fan to being a Magic employee. So how did that happen? Yeah, I went to college for graphic design. So I went to undergrad and then grad school for graphic design. And I was kind of like lined up to do typography and poster design and that kind of stuff.

And when I got to grad school, I went to a school where you had a lot of freedom. There weren't really classes or grades or assignments. You kind of do what you wanted. And I realized one day, oh, my God, I think they mean it. I think when they say I can do whatever I god, I think they mean it. I think when they say I can do whatever I want, I think they actually mean that. And I realized games, which I'd always loved, I'd always played, I'd always thought about, I was like, oh, maybe I should just be thinking about games with my education. So I started doing game design.

I don't know. I just kind of dove in. I started reading what I could, designing stuff, making stuff um like submitting board game prototypes to companies and never hearing back doing whatever just like all the stuff that that felt so fun um and through that process I realized oh no I actually could could get into game design so I I got an internship while at grad school in in game design for a studio in New York and then from that that point on, I was just always in gaming. I was always in digital gaming. And I just kind of went through a series of jobs doing kind of different elements of game stuff that was interesting to me and fun to me.

But that whole time, I always thought, yeah, but Wizard R&D, like Wizard R&D to me just my whole life had been this kind of like, I don't know, it's like the city of Oz. It's just like this thing. And so how did that happen? How did you how'd you how'd you get into the city of oz how'd you how'd how'd the actual job happen what i did was i i set a for like a decade i had you could subscribe you probably still can't you can subscribe to the wizard's job posting so every time there's a new job that goes up they email you so for literally a I would, I was aware of every job that was posted. I knew I wasn't like, I was not a strong magic player. I was not a strong, super strong, like pure game designer. But I thought there's something, someday there's going to be a job

that's for me. And one day this job showed up, it was called principal product designer, was the job that came up. And I started reading this description and it was like, you know, help craft magic, like be the kind of nexus between business and design and experience and and it was it was things that were very similar to what i had been doing at the time and i i was living in new york at the time i had a great job i loved it very much but i read that description and i was like i think this is it so i went home i told my wife hey i want to move to seattle is there a chance we should to take a run at this thing and so after a decade of looking at this stuff i sent in my application and before you know i was having interviews i came out i sat down with you um and and all these people that i had

been you know like looking at your tiny headshots you know while reading articles for forever and i was um talking to you guys i remember your interview that was uh fun you were uh do you do you remember what happened you when you walked in the room what happened when i walked in so i'm in this tiny room and the way the interviews were done then is you have like four people for half an hour then they leave then four more people then it was a grueling day and halfway through this day i'm like i look up and you walk in the room and you're hey i'm mark and just then there's a clock on the wall behind you and it falls off the wall and it explodes on the ground like shatters this plastic clock explodes on the wall and um i'm like oh this is some kind of test to see how i react under

pressure or something but i i remember seeing i remember your first interview i remember the clock falling off the wall by that okay okay so you the job. So let's talk a little bit about what you actually do. Like, you gave a name, and that sounds impressive, but what... Taxfully, what do you do? Yeah, there are... There's kind of two main parts to what we do.

We are not... We are working on the product of Magic, not the game of Magic, if that makes sense. So I'm not working on card designs. I am not spending my time crafting sets or worlds. I'm spending my time thinking about the ways that we are building and our group can take those cards and those sets and those worlds and turn them into products that people can actually buy and own and open. So sometimes I'm thinking about our product strategy. Like, hey, should we be doing more fixed decks like commander decks or planeswalker decks,

or should we be doing less? Right. That's kind of, it's not obvious how that works. Should we be releasing a set, um, you know, in this month or should we push it back to the following month? That kind of stuff. What is the released product that you worked, you worked a lot on? It's something that we can talk about because it's been released. Yeah. Let's see. I've worked on a combination of individual products and sets. So some sets I've been, we have a product architect assigned

to every set. So Modern Horizons or Let's talk about Modern Horizons. You were the, so what does that mean? You're the product what's the technical term? I was the product architect. Okay.

Product architect. Okay. So Modern Horizons comes. Okay. So Ethan and I picked Modern Horizons during the hackathon. It gets picked as the product. And then Ethan leads the vision design. We make it.

It passes off to, I think, Adam Prozac, who did the set design. And so what happens? when do you get involved when are you and what do you what are you doing with modern horizons right that's a great question so um if you can so all the people you just you just listed are kind of working um on how this thing plays but you can you can imagine kind of in parallel for the whole life of a set like that there's a bunch of questions about how this thing will work um not mechanically but just kind of in parallel for the whole life of a set like that. There's a bunch of questions about how this thing will work, not mechanically, but just kind of in the world.

So for example, there were questions early on around how legality of the set should work. Like, should this be like, in what formats can you play the set? And it's not my decision to make that, but it's my job to kind of help facilitate that, get our heads around that,

have the right conversations. There's also questions about like when it should come out. So's not obvious when when to release a set there's a lot of constraints and so i worked on that stuff but then there's also stuff like what's in the pack like should this have a foil in every pack should it have some new interesting stuff that we've never done before what should the frames look like what should the expansion symbol look like all that stuff is stuff that i'm really helping run and And is price point part of what you do? And price point, right? Like, how is this thing meant to work? Is it limited? Do we print only a little bit and let it run out? Is it print to demand? How much do we sell it in for? All that stuff. So yeah, as you can see with Modern Horizons,

we did a bunch of interesting stuff. The formats are unusual. You look in a booster and it had those art cards. That's a great example. It had these little art cards. It's not a magic card. It's just a kind of a collectible piece of art that came out of thinking I was doing with other people. Like we had a lot of beautiful artwork in the set. This set works a little bit different. It feels appropriate to try some new stuff. So after a lot of brainstorming, we said, hey, what if we just took a shot with these kind of weird objects? And then from that point, I had i had to work with okay like how many of them will fit on the form and how much will that add to the production costs and will it slow things down and who picks them and all this stuff so i'm i'm kind of like working

alongside i'm kind of advocating for a product all the way through again i'm not designing it i'm not um i'm not building it myself but i'm i'm the kind of through line as it's going between groups like the legal department and the production and sales and world building and game design. I'm the kind of constant thread who can go through all that. And it sounds like your job is to ask a lot of questions. Yeah, absolutely. Your job is to say A, B, C, and D all have to get answered. Not that you answer them, but you make sure the people who have to answer them know that they have to answer it.

Right. Right, right. There's so many, like these sets are so complicated that we can't afford to play like a game of telephone each time something comes through. So, for example, I work on the, it's my job for the products I'm on to make sure that the kind of finances that we can afford to make what we want to make, for example. that we can afford to make what we want to make, for example. So if someone has an idea, if game design has an idea, hey, what if we did a thing with double-faced cards that sounds fun from their side? I can't ask that person to then go talk to the finance department and see if we have the budget to run the printers in that way.

They're too busy. People don't have time to answer those questions. And it's too, like, it would never work. So I'm the person, I hear it from, so game design comes to me and says, hey, Mark, we would love to be able to put double-faced cards on the set. And then I say, say no more, I got it, I'll report back. Then I go to a whole different part of the building, I talk to production, I talk to legal, I talk to whatever, whoever I need to talk to.

I get the answer, I go back, I help make decisions, I advocate or adjudicate or whatever needs to be done. And then at the end of the day, I come back and I say, we got it. Here's how, you know, go forward. We got this. Or sometimes I have to say, you know what? Unfortunately, double-faced cards aren't really on the table. Let's work together to find out other exciting stuff we could do that is inbounds. that is in bounds. Yeah, one of the things that I don't talk a lot about the business side of things, but

like when I'm making a set and I'm doing something that I know is not normal, one of the things I have to do is go talk to my product architect and say hey, like exactly, when I did Innistrad for the first time very early on I had to go and say, double-faced cards

is this a thing we can do? It requires extra sheets, and it requires different stuff. Or even more recently, like Ikoria, this wasn't you, I know you didn't probably regret this, but like, the punch-out cards, you know, I want to have punch-out cards. Well, not that Magic can't do it, but it

costs something, and it, like, every set has so much budget, and when you're trying to do something, you have to figure out whether it fits in the budget and i think your job is somebody's got to be kind of the overseer that's coordinating everything and the way i interact with you and with uh all the different project architects is i have grandiose ideas and i gotta go right okay is this something i can explore and And usually the answer I get from, from you guys is go explore it and then let us know what you need. And then we'll go figure out whether or not it's feasible or not. And they come back and it's either it's feasible, but

there's some, you know, it, it, because you're doing this, you can't do something else or, oh, here's why it's not feasible. Maybe you want to consider something else. Right, exactly. Yeah, so I think when things work well, I'm hopefully taking as much. I'm letting all the different parts of the system be as creative and kind of expansive as possible, whether that's game design or world building

or our sales department or our partners in Arena. I want all those people to just feel like they can have ideas all the time they don't have to self-censor and then i'll help figure out what we can or can't do um but you know hopefully i'm kind of like making everyone else around me be a little bit more aggressive and creative and and experimental because they feel like well i have the support and if i'm causing trouble to some other part of the system hagan will figure that out and and I won't get in trouble. Yeah, no, I mean, one of the things that's nice, I mean, like I said, one of the reasons I've been doing all these interviews,

A, I'm stuck at home, but B is so many people make magic that I think the average player doesn't understand all the nuance of things, and I find the business part of things, like a lot of times people ask me something and I'm like, oh, we didn't have the budget. It's like, they don't think in that terms. I mean, we have to think of that terms, but they don't think in that terms of

why did you do A or do B? And I'm like, oh, like, for example, another big thing that comes up is how many cards do you get? How many pieces of arts do you get? You know, that's one of the questions I'm always asking. How big can my set be?

The main sets, the normal sets, somewhat have a structure. But the supplemental sets can be all over the board depending on what you're trying to do. Right. I was just going to say, this game is so complex in so many different ways. Every day I'm surprised, realizing more impacts this game is so, it's so complex in so many different ways. And it's every day.

I'm surprised thinking, realizing more kind of like impacts and, um, the realities that, that happen when, when, you know, you're, you push one button on one side of the machine and on the other side,

something dramatic happens. So there's a lot going on. Yeah. Were you the, um, were you the project architect for unsanctioned? Or is that, is that a purpose? No, that that's not me. Yeah. So we, we, for Insanction? Or is that purpose?

No, that's not me. Yeah, so for the Lister Zone, there's multiple people who act as product architects on sets. And we each assign different products. And so some of these things I'm very, very close to. And the other sets, it's like, oh, no, I have very little time. And you tend to do a lot of the core set stuff. What is your specialty? Yeah, I started off doing, when I first kind of showed up,

the first sets they gave me were the core sets. I was doing all our acquisition stuff, so I still oversee our acquisition strategy. So anything that we're creating in paper to try to welcome people into the game, that's under me. So, yeah, so I did M19, M20, M21. And then after that, I started doing other stuff. So War of the spark modern horizons um yeah those things just kind of layered in it as i spent more time here and then some of the

stuff i'm doing is like guild kits so when we did ravnica we wanted to make these guild kits which are like little special boxes that celebrated one of the guilds and those were just a very interesting kind of standalone product with lots of you you know, we spent a lot of time figuring out like what the taxation on a metallic pin was in Italy, you know, like these very specialty solutions that you just end up answering once for one product and then never deal with again. Okay, so another project that you were very involved in, I want to talk about is Secret Lair. Right. So talk about the origin of Secret Lair. How did that come about? Yeah. So when I first got here, I've been a wizard for three years. When I first got here, we didn't sell anything direct to consumer. We also weren't selling on Amazon. We really were

running everything through basically one sales channel, through our distributors than to WPN or to mass market. Meanwhile, I'm a sneaker collector. I was really getting into sneaker collecting at the time. And so every morning I was setting my alarm clock and waking up to compete for these little flash sales they were having for specialty release sneakers. And then I would go home at night and I would look at old sneakers or decide

what to put next to my collection. What's behind you? Oh, they can't see it. I can visually see you. This is an audio, sorry. But all behind you is all these sneakers. I'm in my shoe closet during the recording. It's not video. I forgot for a second

it's not video. But behind him is all these sneakers. Okay, so you were into sneakers. It was so much fun. It was like I enjoyed shopping for these things and collecting these things. And they have so much in common with Magic cards. They're collectible. They kind of have reissues, which is kind of like our reprints and special versions, special edition, all that stuff. And Magic was just doing none of that. And I thought,

there's got to be some version of this for Magic cards. It just is a joyful, like, there's a fun way to buy Magic cards for some people that involves just interesting ways of buying things. You can't just get it off the shelf, it works a little differently. So I started thinking about what would it mean if we released cards in different ways, maybe only available in limited numbers or a limited time, or we could just do different things with them. We could surprise you with them. We didn't have to worry about, I don't know, the person at the store seeing it before we wanted to announce it, all that stuff. And so I started thinking hard about this idea of kind of a direct line where we could sell special versions of cards, get them in the hands of people who are interested. It's kind of totally optional. So people who aren't interested can just ignore

the whole thing. That's fine. It's like sneakers. Most people on the planet don't care at all when they come out with a new version of shoes. But for the people who do, it's kind of a beautiful part of the hobby. And so, yeah, it took years, frankly. We worked with a lot of groups, a lot of partners to solve problems. And then we ended up launching at the end of last year the Secret Lair Drop Series. And, yeah, we're going strong. So one of the things I enjoy about Secret Lair is how it just has such variety to it that it's just who knows what the next Secret Lair is going to be. There's something very fun about that.

Like, for example, talk a little bit about how the April Fool's one came to be. Yeah, with Secret Lair, you can do small things, which isn't the case with a set. If you're going to build a set or a world or a mechanic, nothing can be small. It's too big of a thing. With Secret Lair, you can just have little, sometimes dumb little ideas, and they're great. They great they're fantastic it's the right size so we had a bunch of brainstorming around like okay we're gonna do these secret layers we're gonna do a pack about rats we're gonna do a pack about goblins we're gonna do a pack about this art style and actually brian holly um from play design came to me and he was like here's what april fool should be it should be full art

squire um and we just thought it was so funny we laughed so hard and so yeah we worked really hard here's what April Fool's should be. It should be full art Squire. And we just thought it was so funny. We laughed so hard. And so, yeah, we worked really hard on kind of fleshing that out. I worked with him in play design actually very closely. Like, what are the funniest bad cards? Like, you know, is Stormcrow more or less funny than this other option? And we ended up with a list. We got our artist to do these, like, gorgeous full art cards.

We ended up with a list. We got our artists to do these gorgeous full art cards. And then we always knew the launch was good. The actual sale was going to be special. We ended up getting kind of blown out by the coronavirus and everything. But it ended up, you know, these things are going to go out. They will exist in the world. Stores will have these beautiful, terrible cards.

And it's going to go down. And, you know, for people who like this stuff, you just never would have, there's no other way to do this. You could not have done that in a set. You could not have done that in some kind of big, expensive, I don't know, commander deck.

I don't know how else you would ever get to these things. So that's what Secret Lair is for. Okay, so my next question for you is, what is your favorite impact you've had on a Magic product? That's a great question. That is a great question. There's some upcoming stuff I'm really proud of. I've stuffed the audience's nose.

We can't preview things they don't know. There's cool stuff coming, though. We'll say that. Yeah. the audience knows we can't preview things they don't know there's cool stuff coming though we'll say that yeah the you know i i will say like when i look at some of the stuff we're doing with secret lair the artists we're working with the styles we're bringing into cards um to me that is really it's so exciting to me magic has always been about a lot of kind of um we're telling a lot of different stories there's a lot of characters we have we have a lot of different worlds that we point the camera at but to me you know looking at something like the serum visions cards that we created which just have art styles that that are stuff we probably never would have gotten to um ever just just visiting world after world um to

me that's really uh i hope other people i hope some people out there enjoy it because to me it means so much that we've kind of opened up magic in a way and let it kind of explore on the sides. Not, you know, we're not changing the bread and butter. Mainstream magic is always going to be mainstream magic. But the fact that we kind of like opened our door and invited a few more people in to just fall in love with magic card to which that art really speaks to, that's something I'm very proud of. Okay, so you mentioned that you did War of the Spark. Yeah. That was another very well-received product. So what was your involvement in War of the Spark? What were the challenges of War of the Spark?

Yeah, War of the Spark was one where, when I picked that up, I think the idea of going big, having a lot of planeswalkers, all that stuff was worked out. We hadn't ever done an event set. I mean, as you've talked about, it really was new in so many ways. So a lot of my challenge was explaining this to people, honestly, just to start inside the building. Like we'd go to our partners who were going to be doing a marketing campaign for this. And we really had to spend a lot of time really getting their heads around what this thing even was like what do you mean an event set what do you mean 36 you can't do 36 like what do you mean how will they be bad

or like and so we spent a lot of time just working with them kind of getting them you know like bringing them onto our page and like here's the vision of this thing um so that they could then go out and spread that to the audience. Yeah, one of the original things that people don't realize that in the building is they thought that us staying on Ravnica for a third set was like insane. And we kept saying, well, it's not really about Ravnica. I mean, yeah, it's on Ravnica, but it's not about Ravnica. And that I know that was a hard sell inside the building. Yeah, so we had all these conversations around that kind of stuff.

We did the Japanese alt planeswalker promotion, and that was brand new. We'd never really done anything like that. And so, yeah, it took a lot of work from a lot of people. I was one of them, but a lot of people worked very hard to figure out how would that even work? What's that going to mean for collectability? How will you get these cards? Will they be too rare or too common or will people enjoy them so yeah we did a lot of work on on a lot of those kind of things to to just kind of make the final um product happen were you involved with the trailer in any way no the trailer no the trailer comes out of a different group i i i kind

of it was a big part of my job to get that group up to speed, but then they did the trailer work itself and worked with us. We were kind of like chipping in and answering questions. How much do you guys work with marketing? A lot. I think they are, we are a very close partnership. We spend a lot of time making sure they understand what we're trying to do. They spend a lot of time making sure that what they want to say about the set is true. You can imagine with something like a tagline for a set, it's kind of – if you're not paying attention, it's easy to get that stuff out of alignment with what's inside the set. the set so like you know um with something like war of the spark like what is you know if you have to sum that all up in a poster in one image and one tagline or or a little bit of copy they want to make sure that that's going to match what's inside the boosters and so we become their conduit where they can come to us bounce ideas off show us drafts of stuff and we can say you

know oh actually this set's not really about ravavnica. You know, yes, it takes place there, but War of the Sparks is not really a Ravnica set. So maybe, you know, play down this part about Ravnica or really the highlight here. What we really want to focus on is the Planeswalkers or that kind of thing. So we work with them all the time and set them up to do the work that they need to do. So you were the product. we can't talk too much because it's not out yet, but on the next Core Set. So we'll talk

in oblique terms because I don't want to give anything away, but did you find that to be a challenging set to do? Are Core Sets, what are the challenges of Core Sets? What does it require of you? I'll tell you what, so when I first came back, my first set was M19, which at the time was the return of core sets.

We had taken a break. We came back to core sets. Our approach to acquisition and to what new players should be handed has evolved a lot since then. And so I think when we were doing M19, we were spending a lot of time thinking about how to kind of comfort new players. Like, OK, magic is very confusing. There's so much going on. The rule, there's a lot of rules, there's a lot of words, a lot of lingo, all that stuff.

And so back then, you know, a lot of our effort was thought like, OK, how can we make sure we're not overwhelming or confusing players? How can we make this work on their terms? It's changed a bit as we've gone. We've kind of learned a lot. We've done a lot of research, and we've kind of changed a lot of our acquisition strategy. And these days, as you'll see with M21 when it comes out, we want it to be welcoming.

We don't want to confuse people. But also we realize that a lot of what we, the power here is how not to not, not, not confuse players, but to excite players that even a new player, it doesn't, it's not good enough just to have words they can understand or rules that are simple enough that they can get it. We also have to get them excited and help them fall in love with the game. So over time, my approach to core sets and our whole buildings approach to core sets has evolved, which has been really fun. It's been interesting to see what that does to a card set, what it does to the things we do or don't allow ourselves to do with these products. And so, yeah, it's been great to kind of evolve personally and professionally

and from a product side between M19, M20, and now M21. Yeah, one of the things that are exciting for M21, like I said, we're only talking oblique terms here but um the fact that uh how jumpstart connected to it and they sort of they're two products that have some synergy with each other um like i think jumpstart like once again we can't talk too much about it but i it's a very innovative and cool product and it's something i'm like really excited for the public to eventually get their hands on yeah jump jumpstart is it i'm right there with you and as people will see jumpstart is it's a very it's not just a different kind of set like it is a set

technically it's a set of magic cards but it's not just like a different approach to designing a set it is a different approach to every part of magic what it means to be a booster what it means to open boosters what it means to play sealed what it means to build a deck what it means to to wrap up cards within a booster in plastic like all of those things we rethought for jumpstart it was super fun it was one of the hardest products we've ever made um but it's so rewarding because yeah when you i think when people get their hands on it they're going to see like maybe it's for them maybe it's not but i think everyone's going to agree like wow this is not business as usual this is not what i expected from a core set this is a very different kind of experience yeah i mean one of the things i will say i i'm almost to work here so we got to wrap

up but uh one of the things i will say is i'm very impressed that arnie doesn't tend to rest on its laurels i mean magic's been doing very well uh but we're like we're constantly pushing to try to do new things. And, I mean, Jumpstart's a great example of that. There's things in the future that you guys don't know yet that I can't even talk about, but we are definitely pushing a lot to see what we can do. And a lot of that job rests on Mark and the product architects, because we're constantly like, here's a new idea of something we've never done before.

How about that? And I always always get a you're always enthusiastic the thing i like about you guys is like i'll come with some crazy idea and you're like okay how can we make that work and you don't you never say to me or rarely do you say to me yeah we can't do that i mean sometimes you do eventually sometimes you come back but it's always like okay and then at least you gather data like when you turn me down it's more like well here's the reason why we can't do it right right so yeah it's it's so true and it's um it it's i think it really is that it's the centerpiece of why this is such a great place to work and a great team to be a part of um it's just a very people have people are hungry people here have big appetites and big eyes and they're like, well, what if? And they just let,

we let ourselves fall in love with these crazy ideas. And then, you know, for something like Jumpstart, we, you know, we literally had to, there were people who built like a new robot

to work in the factory and to invent a robot to make that product work. Right. It was worth it. It was worth it, right? Yeah, I mean, it's funny,

like the people, our printers couldn't do it and we're like, we want to do this. They go, okay, we'll figure out how to do it. Right. They had to innovate so that We figured out how to do it. They had to innovate so they could make the product.

Right. That shows up. I want to thank you for joining me. This has been a lot of fun. Once again, I hope the audience, I hope this was very illuminating in that while people like me might be on the forefront, I'm a little more visible than most. Magic is made,

there's a whole network of people doing all sorts of important jobs and I just want to stress that you do a lot you're the center of a lot of the chaos and trying to control things so A. I appreciate you very much thank you, thank you. That's why I wanted to have you on my show but

I've now come to my den so we all know what that means, this is the end of my drive to work so instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic so I want to thank you for being on the show yes thank you so much Mark thank you

that's a wrap guys so I will see you all next time bye bye