NZXT PODCAST - #106 - BrickinNick

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

This week on the show we are joined by Lego mastermind BrickinNick! We talk about Lego Pucci, Lego Tiny PCs, and more Lego! Learn more about Nick at brickinnick.com Tune in live every Thursday at 10AM PT on twitch.tv/NZXT and send your questions to: podcast[@]nzxt.com

Hello, everybody, and welcome to episode 106 of the NZXT podcast. This is the official podcast of the NXT community. This podcast is recorded live every Thursday at 10 a end Pacific Center time. The official NZXT Twitch is available to stream on demand on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. So watch for your step on, folks, as you might catch a brick to the foot. My name is Dennis. With me, as always, is Ivan. How do you do, Baby Boo?

good good i like i like that beanie thanks uh i stole it so summer's officially over it's time to bust out the beanies time to bust out the hoodies uh let's forget about you know this uh this this this was like the hot i think this was the hottest summer on record like ever and i'm over it man like i'm ready to just bundle up and drink my my hot cocoa i'm uh i hate summer I first off I'm a little fluffy right or in other words I'm a little fat and I like winter clothing on me a little bit more right you know so hoodies jackets right I just look better I can style it better plus you know I like being able to layer like my outfits and whatnot so that's just me but yeah I agree it's been it's been super hot and then also you know for the puppy like he'll he'll want to go

out like at 12 or something you use the restroom and then he's like oh it's hot never mind let me just poop and run real quick because it's it's he literally sits like any shade he can find he just hangs under that shade and he's like I'm moving anywhere from your man like unless you're going home that's it we're doing nothing else and we uh so we do have a special guest today he's not wearing a purple beanie but he does have purple hair that's something welcome to the podcast bricking nick how are you man i'm doing great how are you guys doing fantastic happy to have you very excited to be here It's going to be a fun time. Yeah, it is.

So for those who don't know, Brick and Nick is a content creator, a gamer, a host of Battle of the Bricks, another Canadian. I guess we just attract Canadians on the show like every other day. Former Canadian dead. Right? Where are you guys at? And I, so I was going to say Master Builder, but then I did a lot of research into what a master builder actually is. And I'm like, thank you for that. Yeah.

And I was like, okay, no, never mind. So I was going to say, well, a world-renowned Lego builder. That works for me. That works for me. I'll take that. Yeah, I think that works, right? Yeah. So before we get to you, Ivan, I think you have something you wanted to let people know real quick

before we just start this off right? Yeah, we have a couple of giveaways going on. So if you are tuning in live right now on Twitch, the commands are exclamation, free gift card for a chance to win some free steam gift cards. Cool. And if you do exclamation, make a splash, you will get a link to answer our hashtag make a splash upgrade challenge where if you show us a picture of your PC, you could potentially win an all white and ZXT hardware bundle. We just came out with a bunch of new white products yesterday in case you guys didn't know. So check it out.

Yeah, actually, big shout out to you guys. You got a massive drop yesterday. So much awesomeness. I think a lot of things people have obviously been asking for. So you guys just like just hit the mark across the board. Way to go. Yeah. It's funny.

Like we haven't released anything in a long time. Well, I guess we did a microphone a couple weeks ago. But we were like, okay, on this one day, we're going to literally just come out with everything people have been asking for. It's pretty cool. It is awesome. Everything is incredible. Everything is awesome. You could say, right?

Everything is awesome. Indeed. Yeah. So Nick, we were, sorry. the someone's fire smoke alarms are going off here so the dog's going nuts so i apologize for that real quick uh work from home situation right um so nick we we returned on to you uh because we did a what was this this was during during we do it this was redemption instructions it was during the august calendar is that what it was yeah you posted on trello man no i know i'm scrolling up on it okay no it wasn't it wasn't

so this is just like a random thing that we posted it was like uh in here i'll show i'll show everyone here on the on the stream okay you can do that sweet yeah we can yeah we have the technology so we just we just did look at the technology yeah so we just decided we want to post something fun because i haven't started going back to the office right and i'm like hey why don't just post a box of a bunch of freaking poochies right it's a good idea and i'm like hey what if we turns into something more fun so what if we ask people to do a drawing of poochie right and then maybe we'll send one out and then we got a lot of really good a lot of really awesome responses actually a lot of people did some really really fun art with the stuff and then we notice uh this this this gentleman uh

named Brick and Nick, who've never heard of before, made a Lego Pucci and some Lego NXT cases. And I was like, wait a minute. I'm like, Ivan, this is really, really cool. Let's hit him up and see, like, if he wants to hang out in the podcast. So he did. That was back in August. It's now September 23rd. And since then, he's also done a vigilantee poochie variant of Lego, which I thought was hilarious.

As soon as I saw, I cracked them, I'm like sharing everyone on Slav. Like, guys, check us out, check us out, check us out. I couldn't resist like it like and wait you guys call him say his name for me Pucci Pucci it is Pucci okay someone was like it's not Pucci Nick it's Pucky and I'm like What there's no way yeah and like I was so ready to say it wrong multiple times but now I can say it the way I wanted to this whole time it's perfect I'm Italian so like it makes sense for me to say it that way just like Gucci Pucci Pucci exactly yeah yeah and that's where it came to them yeah Poochie can't so it evolved Poochie evolved from this thing, which is the puck.

It's a magnetic headset holder. You put it on your computer case and your rapid cables around it. And when we came up with our mascot, the original name was actually Pucky. But what ended up happening, though, is on our Discord server, like during this time, it was a thing where like every time I would go on the server, people would ask me, hey, how you doing?

And I would say, oh, I'm Gucci. I'm Gucci. I'm all Gucci. Everything was Gucci, Gucci, Gucci. And then one day I was just looking at the word pucky. And I was thinking, you know, to be funny, we just spelled this like Gucci and then just pronounced it poochy. And it just stuck for some reason. Like, I never.

It's like, yeah, I like it a lot. I like it a lot. I'm a big fan. So I fully support it. I fully sport it. Yeah. So going back to the whole like vigilante thing, like we had so many like meetings about like coming up with a name for it. And at the end, we're like, you know what?

This thing doesn't need a name. They're just calling the mass vigilante. We should actually talk about that, huh? Since it was kind of a, to me, it was super exciting. And it was kind of like, we've never done anything like that before. And I feel like you always say that, right? We never done anything like this before. We're always doing things we've never done before here at NZXT.

So before we get anything else, I do want to go, I do want to talk about this because it was a lot of effort. It was a lot of work. It was a lot of meetings. You know, Ivan knows. Amanda knows, right? I know. It was a thing to get this thing done.

So let me throw some stuff up here real quick, and we'll just talk about this for a half minute. And then we'll talk all about Nick, because I have so many questions. I'm excited to hear the story, though. This is awesome. So we knew we were going to launch like a million things yesterday, right? We did the airflow case, right, which we'll talk about that too. We definitely will. We got the new Cracken, the White Crackens, the Cracken 120, the Air Fans.

I'm missing something. Power supplies. Bronze PSUs. Yeah, bronze PSEUs. What else was it? I think that's it. Crackin 120. Yeah, yeah, I already said that.

Yeah, yeah, I already said that. And then it said the White Crackens too. Yeah. I think that's it. It's like a total, I think, like 10 or 11 skews or something like that. Which is a lot, which is actually a lot. And we here on the community team knew, based on all the comments that the two things are going to be the most popular are going to be the White Cracken, but especially the H510 flow. Right?

So we're like, we should probably highlight this in some way and do something with this because people have been bugging us on Twitter, on Discord, on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok now, on GeoCities, on Gilded, if anyone still on there. To, like, bring out an airflow case, right? It's like, it's like the one thing people kept bugging about. And we're like, yeah, we know, we know. We already told them, right? So we're finally doing it and we wanted to do some kind of almost like teaser to, I don't know, just have some fun with this thing. So we decided to come up with like a, I don't even know where it came from, but the original name was like super not good. It was the whole bandit.

And we all recognized that's a really kind of like sussy name. So maybe we just don't name them that. Right. But that was like the internal like name for like the character that we knew we weren't going to put out there. Right. And we had like long conversations in a bunch of meetings and we're like, one would just call him the vigilante. And you're like, okay. That's a good idea.

Right. What's funny too is like a lot of the names that we didn't go with, I did see people. commenting those names like on these posts like one of the one of the names was Pucci Lanti yeah and we were like look there's no way people are gonna be able to read that pronounce that and then like one of the comments was like oh the Pucci Lanti and I was like well I guess people were yeah you know guess that or be able to pronounce it and then another one of my favorites was Pucko someone someone also did say Pucko yeah Pucko we had a couple weird ones too

Yeah, but it was something that we wanted to do to kind of have some fun with the launch and like announce it. And the funny thing is this is the first time we've actually ever announced a product without having like a video or like a banner. And it's been like actual art. But you think it's cool and I kind of want to do more of just do more art type launches because it looks great. Right. And I don't know. It just adds like a different threat. Like who does that, right?

Who does that? What is funny too is like. When we showed the case like this, I did see some comments from people saying, like, oh, it's not real. You know, it's like a drawing, like it's fake or whatever. But then I think 30 minutes later is when we published the actual launch trailer and like, people were like, oh, damn, it is real. Yeah. Yeah, it was cool. It was cool, you know, teasing people and also seeing everyone's reaction.

I'm glad people liked it. Yeah, no, it's been really popular, really exciting that we were doing this. finally, you know, and I can finally stop telling people that Airflow is a meme because Airflow is now no longer a dream. It is a reality and you can go get one soon. Now we're going to put holes in everything. Exactly. Even things you don't want there to be holes in. We're going to sell RAM with holes in it.

We're going to sell crack in. Yeah, we're going to sell cracking with holes in the tubes for more airflow for your liquid. We're not going to stop here, folks. We're going to remove holes from things that had holes. previously. So like the puck is going to be just like one solid brick. So enjoy that, folks. Okay, anyway, enough of that. Nick, how are you doing? Oh, Nick's gone. He went to go grab some. He's grabbing stuff. So, okay, so when, when we first called Nick, I swear, oh, yeah, there we go. I thought, I thought he was in, and it's he, right? It's he? Yes. Okay,

cool, yeah. Making sure, right? We're making sure, folks. We're being respectful these days. So I thought I thought this guy was in like a In almost like a green screen kind of situation because like that that room looks so freaking awesome Can you can you go over your room a little bit like where are you right now? Yeah it looks nuts dude yeah um I'm very very lucky admittedly like I'm gonna be a typical gamer and this is uh this is my parents basement actually Hey let's go um I'm very liking my parents are really supportive of uh I guess my pursuits of my uh lego building passion uh so they let me take over the basement here to to build out a Lego studio.

And yeah, it makes for a really great workspace, of course. Gives me a lot of space to show off some of my builds. And allows me to have all of my parts nicely organized so I can quickly work my way through my pieces so I can build the things that I want to. Yeah, I saw some, I saw on Lego TikTok like a few weeks ago. And this is before I was like actually searching for stuff. This dude was in like this giant room and you had like a bunch of like this little like little drawers and everything.

And I think like he spilled a bunch of them on purpose or something. And then like made me super cringe because I can never imagine to have all those things to organize and then just like, all right, this is for the memes.

Just toss it on the ground, right? Yeah, I mean, I've never done it intentionally, but it has happened many times on stream and such like while I'm building. It's just, uh, sometimes you knock your elbow the wrong way. You hit a little container and boom,

everything's spread across the floor. So I'll get me a clip of that. I want to watch that on stream. So, Nick, who are you? Who is Brick and Nick? For those who don't know, what do you do all day? Why is Brick Nick? How is Brick and Nick?

Who at where, why how? Yeah, exactly. So Brick and Nick is a lifelong Lego builder, particularly focused on creative builds. I really love taking Lego and going beyond instructions and stuff and coming up with my own designs for the things that I love and I'm interested in. So you'll see, you know, tons of builds in the background related to the things I enjoy, whether it's things like the Lego movie, the Lego Batman movie, you know, lots of video game inspired builds. I've got some Lego Nintendo Switches here, some Destiny stuff, Pokemon. Oh, the Destiny.

I whipped out. I made sure to have the Destiny ones ready to go. I even built up a little Tetris build last night for Ivan there. So that way you can get into the actual. I didn't have anything already built for many of your games because yours are a little more classic. But I just love being able to build stuff. general and then I guess it's gosh almost approaching six years ago now I discovered Twitch through my love of destiny actually so I was you know seeing

kind of people do some fun stuff and sharing their love of video games online and at that time Twitch was pretty heavily pushing like creative and so I was like oh my gosh this is like a massive platform I had never really heard about but they're interested in creative stuff so I'm like let me go in and find like the Lego builders on Twitch and they were non-existent and I was like what the heck how is there like no people doing Lego on this thing. So I was like, you know what?

Maybe I can be the guy who does that. And so I started up my stream a few months later. And slowly, and very fortunately, I've been able to kind of continue to build my community, do a lot of awesome stuff. I've done events with Twitch directly at like TwitchCon and stuff. I've done some streams for like Overwatch. And I've obviously gotten to work on tons of cool like builds with different games and stuff. And I'm even now like not like affiliated with Lego, but I'm like part of like a creator program that they have.

Right, right. So I sometimes actually get my hands on Lego sets early so I can do like reviews and live streams and stuff. That's awesome. Yeah, very, very lucky. That's cool that, you know, you took something that literally has nothing to do with, well, I guess it has something to do the video games. You know, there is a Lego video game, but, you know, it's not really like, you know, you don't really associate Lego with gaming. And you were able to kind of, you know, tap into this gaming culture community, whatever you want to call it, with your passion for Lego. building. That's super cool, man. Congrats.

Yeah, I honestly always thought it was such a shame that like, Lego hadn't tapped into video games more. Like, they've obviously done Star Wars stuff for a really long time, but like it was never really tied to the games much. And then I think like their first major gaming theme, and I'm probably remembering incorrectly, but Minecraft was one of the bigger ones that they first went with. And then they've slowly started to do more gaming stuff over the years. They'd have overwatch about two years ago. And like, I think there's even rumors right now of like a gaming theme that's just going to cover a bunch of different games.

But I take that lightly because Lego rumors are all over the place all the time. But yeah, it's been really, really cool to kind of fill in a lot of the gaps and like come up with my own creations related to the video games that Lego is probably never going to really get into or may not get into for whatever reason. And yeah, it's just cool getting to build on stuff. I'm like, so I'm really surprised to hear that there weren't too many people on Twitch doing Lego stuff because like I think almost as. Because you're saying six years ago, what was happening six years ago? on Twitch. So it was like I joined Twitch in October of 2015. Yeah.

And like I don't know, Twitch just felt like a lot tighter knit back then, like a lot of a smaller community type thing, even though it was obviously a huge platform. Like it had been around already for a long time. Like I did find like one stream of like some random channel building a Lego Minecraft set. But that was like literally all I could find. And but funnily enough like around the time that I had started, a very good friend of his name's set to build also started streaming on Twitch and then like the two of us together kind of stumbled across each other and we slowly started to like find other people so it just it seemed like

just around that time a bunch of people were kind of discovering the same thing at the same time and there's there's definitely an awesome Lego community out there there is a tag for Lego building on Twitch it's called Brick Building oh cool and we're currently like pushing to maybe someday get a category made because I think that'd be really awesome to have so here's a question if you guys are in the building it's building category brick building is the tag we like we use I use art because

they're doing like creative builds but most builders will use makers in crafting so does that mean you guys fight with like the mega blocks peeps with the same hashtag physical ward building is it is purposely meant to be more all encompassing like we do not want to discriminate against other building brands

and I will say like megablocks are it's actually called mega constructs now I've definitely stepped up their quality game over the last little while. They do some pretty decent stuff, I can't deny. Much better than when I was a kid when it was literally just trashed. And you came onto Twitch, I think, at a perfect

time too, because October 2015, if I remember correctly, that was actually the month where they had the very first TwitchCon. I think it was. Yeah. I didn't know about TwitchCon at all at the time, but like it was definitely good timing. And I

think it was like sometime within the next year was actually or maybe it was the year after like surely had I hadn't heard about Twitchcon like that I had actually pitched my Lego building idea for TwitchCon it actually only had panel submissions so I'm like I don't know where this should go but like I think we should do a giant Lego build at TwitchCon and luckily the like Twitchcon coordinator is like a massive Lego fan and they were like oh my gosh I really like I like this idea a lot let's do this yeah perfect timing man I'm really fun bringing that to life that's perfect timing for you that's really awesome indeed So, I've been like, sorry, I've been rearranged some of my questions, so it's, it's, it's a, it's a mystery. I'm confusing. I know, right. So did you, so what was your first Lego set? My first Lego set. I physically have it.

It's chilling in the little display case in the background there. It is a 1996 Lego set. It's from a theme called rescue. So if anyone grew up. I remember those. Yeah, yeah. You may know it. They're black and yellow color scheme like rescue vehicles.

So it's just this little tiny truck. I think I had actually, I feel like there's a bit of a story there and that like I was pretending to feel sick one day from like great school. And so I always stayed with my grandparents like right before and after school. So I got to go there. And I was just like, you know, I don't know, I was making it seem like I was really not feeling great and stuff. So I was like, oh yeah, can we go to like Walmart and get a Lego set to make me feel better? And that's like what I had picked out. And that's kind of what started at all.

Can you clip that, please? I am. I'm going to go back in time and report you. It changed the fate of breaking Nick forever. Do you remember how much that first Lego set cost? I was probably like, I would guess like three to five dollars. It was pretty, pretty small, pretty cheap. A lot of these Lego sets are expensive, man.

They definitely are. Like, it's funny because people I think like now look at Lego and they go, oh my gosh, it's so much more expensive than I when I was a kid. But like Lego's never made sets as big as they are today. So like the reason a lot of them seem so expensive, and don't get me wrong, there's like a Star Wars and Disney tax on like lots of sets that make them more expensive as you would expect like anything else. But the reason that so many sets like are so expensive is because they're just going way bigger than they ever have before, which honestly makes for some really cool and unique like building opportunities and kind of having sets exist in ways that never could have before without going to that scale. Yeah, I recently went to the Lego store with my daughter and she's, It's at downtown Disney.

Oh, amazing. Oh, my gosh. Never been. Never been. She's, you know, she's like obsessed with Frozen right now. And she saw this Frozen Castle at the Lego store. She's never built anything Lego, like ever. Okay.

Yeah. And then she's like, I want that. I want that. And I was like, all right, let's go get it. You know, me thinking like, yeah, sure. You know, I'll buy her a Lego set. And then I look at the price. It was literally like $300.

Yeah, they just released like a, we call that silo set UCS. They use it typically for Star. It's called like Ultimate Collector Series. But like there's been frozen castles that are like 50, 60, 70 bucks. But like this is the first time they did like a really serious one. So your timing kind of sucks. Yeah. No, she's definitely too.

I mean, she's only three. So I don't think she's ready. Oh, yeah. She's not ready for that one. Yeah. But I think eventually I'm going to probably have to buy some expensive Legos here pretty soon. Yeah, you'll be in trouble for sure. Yeah.

Ivan, are you trying to gatekeep Lego from your daughter? Legos for everybody, my friend. It says right there on the box. Actually, I don't know. I don't know what the age range of that. To be honest, that box, I would not be surprised if that says like 14 plus or 16 plus or something like that. A lot of Lego sets are like it was actually very heavily targeting adults right now and

they put 18 plus on tons of their boxes. And even though I would say most of them are not restricted to like an 18 plus year old, they're more sort of make an 18 plus year old feel comfortable buying that set and they're not like, oh, I'm not buying a set for a kid. This is a set for adults, you know. I have this set here. This thing was gifted to me a couple years ago by Jin, our creative director here at NCC.

And I never built it because I opened it and I... You were too intimidated by like a set recommended for ages 10 plus? Yeah, I was intimidated by this. It's number of bags. It's very straightforward. And I was like, dude, do I really have the time for this? You should do it. Maybe we can get you started with the other little thing that you have today.

You know, I'm going to build it now, now that you're here. Also, fun fact, our CEO, Johnny, he is obsessed with Lego. Like, it's like his... Me and him should have a chat sometime. Yeah. Like, I don't know if it's like his meditation

or anything like that, but I know he's constantly, like, building these, you know, big Lego sets. And I think he even has a room in his house where he just, like, displays all his Legos. That's incredible. So awesome. Yeah.

Yeah. We should probably do a Johnny Ligone. tour one of these days. That would be the sick video 100%. Yeah. So Nick, to kind of get back to the little content stuff. Yeah. That's in the word way.

That little concept, to get a little back to the content stuff. That little content you make, right? So when you do hop on stream, what do you typically doing? Yeah. So I right now stream three times a week. And I would say my schedule is made up of like two or three main things. Mondays we're typically known for doing something called viewer build requests. That is where people can come into the

stream, suggest ideas in the chat, we'll take 10 ideas at a time, chuck them in a poll, everybody gets to vote on them, and then I will build that thing in the moment. I use a very limited set of pieces, so it kind of makes it challenging for me in that I can't just like run around and grab all the pieces that I want to from my collection. I kind of got to work with a limited pool of pieces. And it like forces kind of some creativity for me as well. But it's really, really fun getting to do that, kind of, you know, building something for someone in the moment.

Right. So those are always a really good time. We do those every Monday. I even have some lying around here. So like one of the requests was for a tree house the other day. That's cute. So in about like I don't know, maybe 30-ish minutes, I whipped up to just this little tree house. So they're not like complicated.

They're not very refined, but they kind of like get the message across of like what it's supposed to be. So like and then you're saying like 30 minutes for the tree house. I feel like it would take me forever to make that like. That would take me 30 days. Yeah. I'm like, wait, you just made that. 25 years of practice, you know, it goes.

For sure, yeah. You hope you can do things a little more quickly in that time, right? And then yeah, we do a lot of creative building projects, of course. So almost everything you see in and around me here was built on stream at some point or another. So projects can have a huge range in how long they take. Sometimes it's one stream. Sometimes it's a couple of weeks. And then sometimes it's even like, you know, over a year or more sometimes depending on like the complexity.

Oftentimes if I'm getting really stuck with a project too, just like any artists I think kind of can relate to, you'll set aside a project and then come back to it later when you're kind of feeling refreshing. ready to tackle the challenge again. And then we do like set reviews and stuff sometimes as those kind of come through. So we were building some like of the new Marvel Eternals sets from the upcoming movie earlier this week. So it was pretty fun too. What's the weirdest theme someone has asked you to build?

Oh gosh. Like my community has definitely developed a habit of asking for extremely odd things on purpose. I remember I built like a cow riding a cloud of lightning before. I built a Batman toilet an Irish potato just very very strange things for sure there's been some what is

I swear they just like think of three different things stick them together in one sentence like here you go Nick figure this out and I'm like oh what am I supposed to do with this but what is a Batman toilet for those who don't know it was it was like I the toilet was in all black and I put like a little yellow logo on it and that was yeah I don't know

I tried my best that's awesome um that's really cool that you're able to be like that creative because um i think that's one of the things that like makes twitch really fun is kind of um dynamic content right stuff that is like the same every single day i mean it's it's like the same theme but like something new comes out every time right and it and exactly it's like you have like a pretty a pretty engaged audience like really likes to see you like do cool stuff yeah i'm very lucky for sure that i got an audience that wants to see lots of fun stuff so how long did the like Lego pooch you take to make?

Um, not that long. Maybe like 30, 45 minutes. All right. Do you have 30, 45 minutes now to make it? So I see like the, uh, the curved pieces there in the corner. I had no idea that there are curved Lego pieces. I, so I know nothing about Lego. I've never owned a Lego set ever.

I've always wanted one. Never? Never in your whole life. My parents always told me they're too expensive because like, I want to like the really cool ones, right? Like, like, it's fair. I've always wanted. to lower your expectations for what you wanted yeah exactly exactly yeah i've always wanted like the lego

like millennium falcon and another thing would policy like a million years to make i do have that right over there you can't see it unfortunately i don't have a camera that shows it but don't grab it because if you dropped it because of me i feel so bad i did 21 hours straight with two friends to build that jeez that's so nuts it was fun that is that is so much time yeah it's a long time i've done a couple of 24 hours rooms as well which i'm i promised myself i wouldn't ever do again yeah too much. In prep for the show, I did a lot of research because I was, as I was telling you before, right, when we're doing the copy for the, for like the intro, I was about to write down Master Builder

because like I know that from the Lego movie, right? But then I actually researched what the heck a Lego Master, a Lego Master builder is. And it's a lot more involved than I thought it was. So my question to you is, have you ever applied to become a master builder? And I guess first, what is a Master Builder from someone? someone who knows so much about Lego. Yeah, for sure. I can give you all that.

So a master builder is someone that officially works for Lego doing a lot of the large-scale sculptures and models you see at places like Legoland. Typically a master builder will work at Legoland. There are some exceptions to that, but that is generally what is defined as a master builder. So it isn't actually an, it is an official job title, which is why it is very appropriate that you did not attempt to call me that, so I appreciate it. I have interestingly applied once. They have these things called Legoland Discovery Center.

They're kind of like indoor theme park exploration places unlike the major Lego lands like in Florida and California where you can like go on big rides and stuff. And they opened one in Toronto back in 2012. And they how they find their master builders actually host a competition at like a place for two days and they have all these bricks available. And they put people through a series of challenges and they see how they interact like they invite the public to come. Yeah. So they can see how the master built kind of interacts with kids and gets them excited and stuff. So I did go out to that. I competed. I ended up in the top 12 of people. Like I think there were over 200 people and ended up in the top 12. It's crazy. But I was actually still in university at that time. And at that stage, they moved into like actual interviews and they were like, hey, are you actually really serious about this? Like if we decide to move forward with you. And I was like, actually no, I'm more just here for fun. Unfortunately, I'm still in school. I'm not planning on dropping out because it was a full time job, the master builder role. So I like to.

jokingly tell myself that if I had said yes, I might have gotten the job. Funnily enough, the guy who ended up winning is actually a really good friend of mine now. He worked at the Legoland for about two years and is now a full-time, like, freelance Lego artist. And he's actually recently become another cool title, which is an official one. He's a Lego certified professional. So he is like certified by Lego to do building projects, which is like something you've been working towards for a really long time. So it's really cool that I get to say he's.

my friend because there's only like 20-ish people in the world who have that title it's actually a probably one of the most prestigious titles you could receive as a Lego builder. Yeah, that's nuts. Yeah, those giant like Lego, I guess they're almost like statues you call them, right? Yeah, for much. Stultures, statues, yeah. Are they like super glued together so they don't come up? Oftentimes, yes, and that's just for like safety purposes because they don't want like a kid running up and like

knocking out part of it very, very easily. Yeah. And for like your ability as well, a lot of those creations end about doors and stuff. And, you know, weather's pretty harsh on like, like, surprisingly harsh on Lego and stuff. So it just makes sense for your because I don't think something that big like that, that you would want to glue it together. At the Lego store, they had this like crazy like giant buzz light here. Like, yeah, yeah. Three teams size of me.

And I was wondering, I was wondering like, dude, like, what if someone just comes here and just like, you know, hits it with the baseball bat? Does this thing just like fall down? But I guess not, right? If it's all glued together, it's, it's probably all just like super sturdy. Yeah, it definitely can be. It definitely can be. And I mean, Lego is really strong. Like, I think you'd be surprised at how durable you can build it and stuff.

Even without glue, I actually like try to pride myself on like building stuff, like not gluing it and having it like people be like amazed at that. Is it okay if I actually grab a build in the background to demonstrate? Yeah, go for you. Yeah. Yeah. This is your, this is your world. We're just living in it. I know, I know, like, people are listening.

So if they're curious, I'm currently holding, like, a Lego lightsaber. Oh, my God. This is something I actually know when I used to work at the Lego store. So, like, obviously, this is a very nice build. Kind of looks cool. It doesn't have lights. But the reason it doesn't have lights because I want it to be very strong. So, like, I can take this thing and, like, fully twirl it.

Oh, my God. You've got the technique, too. You see that wrist movement. So I pride myself on, like, building things to be very tough and resilient. And I like being able to, like, I can bring this to a show. I can let a kid play around with it and know that it's not going to be at risk or anything. What kind of glue do you use for that? No, that's the thing.

There is no glue. How does that thing just not fall apart? It's all in the engineering. And I did some like TikToks on this one a little while ago. Oh. It's just in how you construct the core. They're basically like multiple layers of plates. And plates and Lego are very, very strong.

If you do like two layers of plates, you suddenly got something really, really like tough. So by like surrounding the whole core in two layers of plate systems, actually has got three. You got a really strong build. I understood half of what you said, but when you peeled off that like side, I flipped out. Can you can you can do that one more time? Because that was that blew my mind. But look at that. That is so nuts.

Yeah. And Lego has some weird bending properties. It's actually a really cool like social media channel called brick building branding. They've blown up like crazy over the last of a while. And they just like do build. that show how you can like manipulate Lego into like being curved and stuff. It's really impressive stuff. I'm sure people have seen it before.

You said you built that when you worked at the Lego store? Yeah, I worked at the Lego store for almost six years. Obviously an incredible place for me for me to work. I had a lot, a lot of fun there. I also built this Lego Captain America Shields when I was working at the store. Holy shit. Sorry. Holy shit.

I had one hand for kids to play with two. And this is another one. is not glued you can actually see how I've did the handle here it's literally like 12 or 13 layers of plates and as you add in more and more plates they just develop like all this crazy friction so I can actually pretty confidently take this and like shake it and it doesn't like fall or break or anything so it's pretty cool what you can uh what you can do with lego that is insane that is super nuts I which legal sort did you work at uh I I live in Toronto I actually worked at two of the three stores that exist here how how was it working at a lego store like was it

it was a lot of fun like they were pretty awesome about letting us uh like be free to you know just kind of engage in the way we wanted to so like even just like you know during downtime getting to build some stuff and then being able to like kind of inspire and excite kids and like seeing the things that you can do with lego was really really fun um and then it was just like you know just trying to help people find the things they were looking for already you know most people when they come to the store luckily like already know they're looking for something and it gets to kind of be your job to just help find the right thing for whatever their situation is, whether it's a gift or for themselves.

So it was really cool just kind of being able to be excited about helping them find the thing that's going to make them or someone else the happiest, you know, possible they can be. You ever catch anyone trying to steal a Lego? Oh, all the time. All the time. I mean, pieces are pretty small. They're pretty easy to tuck into pockets. We had some crazy instances where people would just walk in and attempt to walk out with a full-on box.

Luckily, they've found ways to crack down on that, but it was very interesting watching some of that stuff go down. Sorry, Evan. I'm just grabbing some questions here from the community. Thank you for sure, for sure. Yeah, we got it. All right, we got it. We'll answer the community questions at the end when Dennis and I are done asking our dumb

questions here. Because we have a lot of dumb questions. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff. We have a list of dumb questions, actually. I can't wait. I can't wait. My first real dumb question for you. since you mentioned you're from Canada yeah what are your thoughts on the Montreal

bagel a Montreal bagel like in particular yes I mean I don't mean like I'm not honestly not even sure I would say I have like a strong opinion on that why do you ask um because our boss is obsessed with them she our boss is from Montreal and she she's like every day she says something about Montreal bagels and how us American folks don't know a good bagel stuff. I mean, I've heard very good things. I'm sure I've probably been like treated to one at some point. I haven't been to Montreal. Like I've actually only been once in my whole life, unfortunately. But I'm sure a lot of Montrealians. I don't know what you actually call people from Montreal, but I've probably made their way down Toronto. I'm sure I've had some before too. Do you know what a

Montreal bagel is? Not off the top of my head. I'm sure I would like maybe recognize one if you showed me one but it's basically it's just a like a regular bagel but it doesn't have a hole in it oh oh okay no i don't that isn't even sound familiar to be honest maybe i'm wrong yeah i guess the idea of it sounds familiar but no he's joking it's not actually i'm from geron i can tell me anything and i'll believe it i'm not terrible exactly uh my god i'm sorry is there to me says that that doesn't have a whole joke i just like is my eyes roll so far back i can't I can't deal anymore. We're doing that earlier.

Yeah. My memory really bad, so that's why, like, things like that can just go right over my head. You know, one thing I forgot to ask you, too, you showed us the poochie you made. Can you also show the, you also made, like, two little computers? Yeah, and I've actually done a bunch more of them as well. I actually came up with this about a year ago. It is based on my own PC, which is encased in an NDXE H510I. And, yeah, I don't even remember why I had started.

started this but like I was actually glasses comes off all casually too and then I was like wait a minute I think it could like work a fully buildable PC into this very small space so I was like I came up with like a motherboard and I miraculously came up with like an AIO design and so like this is actually fully buildable in the way that you build a normal PC wow yeah that's amazing man that is awesome you look at you want to see I actually have some like ready to go I can show you yeah for sure yeah Yeah, yeah. Sweet, let's do it. Let's do it. Yeah, we're super down. Let me switch cameras here quickly. I'm going to disappear, but I had to do the camera flippy thing. Yeah, so I saw this earlier and it's like this thing's going to build stuff for us. Right? This is correct. Okay, it's very confusing trying to see which way is right and which way's wrong. Um, so like I did I've done a bunch of variations in some different like color schemes and stuff, but you can see and like my case is a little bit more modular,

then like an actual case will be uh would would be because you need a little bit more space to work with in so the top and the back come off but if i lay everything out here you'll see i've got all the essential components of a pc ready to go so you've got the motherboard you got your processor you've got your uh sd your m2 mvm e some ram uh your graphics card i call this the expansion card it kind of represents my capture card um your aio and then a power supply so you can build this like you would build an actual PC. So I can grab my processor here, get my SSD on. I'm going to snap my RAM in first, even though I know usually you should put your AIO on first. Like so. These kind of snap in and everything like that. You have everything except the airflow.

Yeah, I do not have any sort of like system cooling. I found that like while there are ways to technically add it, it made the build a little bit too crowded. But you could definitely add it. I can definitely show you how I would do that too. So yeah, the AIO, which actually has like little flexible pieces that use a I think this was like a wet piece introduced from like some of the Indiana Jones stuff way back in day. So I can attach that on although of course before you put on your AIO. The most AIOs I know have stuff. You got to grab your little a little needle of a coolant here or thermal paste and get that on there and forget that part very important. It's too much thermal pace, Nick.

I think it's going to be all right. I think it's going to be all right. Lego, Lego, you know, it needs a little bit more heat resistance. And then I can stick that in there. You know, it can attach to AIO. It could be funny if the Lego GPU was out of stock. And then the GPU, or actually, I'm going to do the expansion card first just because it takes up a little less space.

And it actually adds a little bit more structural integrity. and then I'm going to slide the GPU in now before I put the back case on and that just like slides into a slide just like it kind of would on the actual thing and then I'll put the back cover over that and it's even got like a gap for the GPU ports to be available and it's not like the most perfect build just a little finicky but rip you forgot the I.O shield the IOS shield was luckily on this motherboard in advance so good to the whole build all over in the back for the power supply which you can stick in right there and then we can get on the remaining pieces of our case slip in the side cover just like you went on the real one and boom oh my god that is so cool this this lego computer costs more than an actual computer definitely would not and i actually i'm gonna have a video drop i have it scheduled to drop i think in half an hour maybe or something oh nice so i have a video showing you how to do this and i'm I'm going to have free instructions posted on my website so you can actually go out there

get the instructions and order all the parts for this if you want to. Dude, that's super amazing man. Like really, really like I don't, I don't, I'm not going to say like you're a genius, but this is like a really like brilliant idea in my opinion. Like, it's cool man. I can't believe that you even came up with it to be honest. It felt like a lucky street kind of just as I was doing each part. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is actually working. Like how has this happened? Like I was I was very surprised myself that it was that it was possible. So it's really fun to break the life. And you seem like you know a lot about computers. I'm assuming you built your computer. I did. Yeah. So the PC I'm using right now was the first one I ever built. And since then I've done five more builds. Two for myself. One is like I use some of my old pieces in my original PC to build a secondary PC, which like my girlfriend uses a lot when she comes over and so we can play stuff together. And then I did a third system for my myself as a gosh I'm totally blanking on the name it's got the raid hard drives in it for backing up my main PC camera which call that NAS tower and NAS tower yeah and then I helped and then I've helped like three different friends with their PC builds so how many computers have you

know a little experience with it now yeah how many have you built yeah six total six total and you know some people say that building a computer is a lot like Lego is that true would you say I would agree like in a lot of ways but there are definitely a lot of ways that PC building is scarier and harder. Like I've been so lucky that all six PCs I've built have like booted and posted first try. I'm sure that luck is going to end soon enough. But like even just like snapping, like to this day snapping in the CPU like just terrifies me every time. I hate the sound it makes. It's it just gets me. And do you use your computer for anything else besides you know, gaming, I guess, like anything like Lego related? Yeah, I do.

So a lot of the instructions and stuff that, like, I have a guy who actually makes a lot of them for me now, but I do up a lot of my builds digitally so that he can easily create instructions from them. And like sometimes even just doing a render of a build can be quicker and easier and more appropriate than actually doing the physical build for whatever reason. And then obviously I use it for like editing photos that I take of my own builds and stuff. So it's definitely like, like my system is an all in one thing that. does everything I need. Obviously, it helps him with all of my streaming and content creation, of course. Have you ever thought about making like a life size Lego computer? That is like one of my dream projects. I don't think it's one like I can really just like tackle kind of on my own. It would need to be something I like, I guess partner in with someone on. But like I, and I know one

of my friends in the chat mentioned it earlier, like Square T. He's been, he's a Lego builder and like PC guy as well. And he's like, we're like, we've always. always said like when that time comes that we can tackle this project we're going to make sure we do it together's and he's already done some like pre-design work and i've certainly spent a lot of time thinking about how i can translate like all the aspects of what a real pc case does and like do that in lego form because my goal is like like people have built lego PCs before um so they've built like a lego type enclosure for a PC but they always end up being kind of like weird things and never really look like a nice clean yeah so my goal is to like get that balance and like

like have something that maybe from a really far distance, you wouldn't guess is Lego, but then as you get closer, you're like, holy crap, that's Lego. Like, wow. And then like have all the actual PC parts running inside of it. Yeah, I've seen a few Lego computers on the, I think the battle station subreddit throughout the years. And you're right. Like it, it always looks cool, but it never looks like a real computer, I guess, right? Yeah, yeah, that'd be cool. In Ripcourt, Jack here, you know, said he always wanted to do he always wanted to get an H510 and just covered in Lego and yeah I always thought the same thing too it'd be cool to have a computer case where the outside was

just like those like the studs and stuff oh yeah what those called the panels I guess is that what they call yeah just like brick panel base plates so you yeah these plates and you can just like stick Legos on there that'd be pretty cool yeah I agree I think it'd be awesome that's interesting actually I wonder if we can we can we probably could do that to be honest just like make one of the the is make one of the panels that it's like a replacement side panel iven we should probably talk to jeff about this because we might actually be able to make it happen to be honest we're seeing five years ago is he the lego expert on the call i know a guy deal come up with our own Lego block oh imagine that and that's where we come up with it where we finally put the name pucco

to uh to use pucco blocks i like it that's a good name for it uh now Nick, when you're planning like a really big project, do you use any special like tools or anything like that to kind of plan it out or do you just go all brain power and just kind of figure it out as you go? Yeah, I'm a brute force kind of person, a trial and error guy. So it's very rare that I will do any sort of pre-planning. Typically, when I have a project in mind, it's usually like there's something, like a particular part of a project that I've managed to start visualizing.

I'm like, okay, if I was going to do, you know, if I was going to build X, X, Y, Z thing, you know, this particular thing. I can see it kind of coming together in this way. I guess I would say a very good visualization with Lego pieces. So like I'll start at that point and then I'll just kind of go out from there. That's awesome. Yeah. Because when I was in my research, I saw that they have, they being Lego, they have like this

software you can download to plan out Legos builds, which I wasn't aware of the thing. And that's like super smart because I was thinking like Lego Digital Designer. Yeah. Because I was thinking like, I thought that people were doing this stuff on like CAD or something or like figuring out some kind of way to do it, but it's really cool that they have the tools available. There are ways to do stuff like that. The more, there's actually a program called Bricklink Studio.

That's a lot more popular. Lego weirdly owns Bricklink now. It was the world's largest secondhand Lego marketplace and then Lego bought them, which is a weird thing. But like, it's a really great program for doing like designing and drafting in. Lego digital designers actually not quite supported anymore. So it's a little out of date in terms of like what pieces or anything stuff. That sucks. That's sad.

That's a bummer. Yeah. Yeah. So I also want to ask you about the Battle of the Bricks. Yeah. How did you get into that? What is it? When's the next one happening?

Yeah. I'll give you the whole lowdown. Battle of the Bricks is a Lego building competition that I created. It is live streamed on Twitch. And the idea is an awesome opportunity for both like builders and creators alike to kind of compete in a wide variety of wacky and a fun Lego building challenges. Right. And because it's live, a big focus of it, of course, is having the audience get involved.

So I usually tie it to like charity as well. So when we hit certain donation goals, it'll unlock like different challenges that the audience can vote on. So it's like builders have to build with one hand or with, you know, with like glasses on that they can barely see through and, you know, like behind their back and stuff, fun stuff like that so I've run three seasons of that show on all on my own on my own Twitch channel and then I've done a special for Twitch rivals before as a fill in during some Lego like a Lego overwatch event and then I also got to do it as part of the GCX charity marathon this year so for my four hour block I invited four creators to do a bunch of them throughout that stream which was really really amazing as well

that is awesome that's super cool yeah I noticed like And this is me, right? The people that I tend to gravitate towards to, like, on Twitch, I just, like, internally just love to watch all the time are those who do a lot of cool, like, outside charity type of things or, like, community events. Like, it's actually one of the reasons why I'm such a huge fan of Dr. Lupo because he does that, like, Build Against Cancer, like, every single year, and he does a bunch of other charity stuff, the St. Jude's and all that.

Yeah, I was actually part of Build Against Cancer in December last year. Oh, really? Nice. Yeah, I had, like, a 4 a.m. time slot. It was tough getting up for, but I was beyond honor to participate. I was trying to build his logo, but the stream had a bunch of different ways to mess it up. And we didn't even get halfway done. It was this butched thing. That's so funny.

But it was really, really fun getting to do that. Nice. Are you, sir, God oven. So I was going to say, like, is your whole life Lego? Pretty much. Like, it's a very easy way to define who I am. It's like, Nick, Lego, great. You're good.

That's awesome. No, seriously. Like, I guess when you go outside of this basement, like, you know, do you have like Lego cereal bowl? and like as you're he's wearing Lego shoes right now that intense like like and I mean this isn't my own house so I won't deny that when I do have my own place someday

it'll probably be a little bit more like that you can find some side tables maybe some lamps a lot of like everyday you know things in the place probably built out of Lego in my place I definitely want to do that yeah that'd be awesome like walls that people have seen where like they can open up and stuff and have cool things

hiding inside I would definitely do that too but we're not there quite yet So there's this thing when you play too much Tetris, it's called the Tetris effect, where you see like everyday objects and then in your mind you try to like, you know, make them fit. Is there something similar with Lego, like a Lego effect? I would 100% say so. Like I regularly look at stuff and immediately start to visualize like how I could build that out of certain types of Lego pieces and stuff. A lot of the time that is definitely how like my creations kind of get inspired is just seeing something being like, oh, like, you know, if I use like, you know, if I use like, this piece and this piece that could actually really match that look and then like you just start building from there so for those who do know he's talking about uh think the when he said it

had to search for it but a zd the edm artist zd has a has a has a lego wall so it's up here on the stream right now yeah there's an artist auntie d'antone who has become known for doing these um they're really really fun very unique super cool yeah and this has a little club in it Sometimes sweet lighting and stuff like that. Yeah. It's super cute. And I can definitely see you just having your whole house just made it a Lego. Also, folks, real quick.

So there's something that he said earlier, and I didn't mention it because I was doing something on the stream. But he sent him he invites his girlfriend over to play with Legos. So anybody can do it, folks, right? Find you one who can do both. That's what I'm going to say. Yep. That's really cool.

She's even been awesome enough to, like, do some of the streams with me. Oh, that's nice. She tanks through a 24-hour stream with me. Like, that's, I like, if there's no way, like, what more could you possibly do for someone than stream for 24 hours with them, right? Talk about the ultimate sacrifice. I don't say buy them more Legos. That's probably another one.

You never have enough Lego, so. Yeah. How many Legos do you own? I don't actually know. I would estimate between 500,000 and a million bricks. Possibly more. like it's it's a really difficult thing to keep track of i buy a lot of small pieces in bulk um so it can get very easy to lose track of it do you know how much money have you spent on lego i i generally don't like to

go into that i have like a reasonable idea like i'm like and obviously i worked at the lego store for a really long time i've also been lucky to get a lot of free lego over the years um i'm sure i'm not far from like six figures stuff but probably not quite there yet well you're gonna say if you if you so you say you have like a million bricks right yeah what's the average cost of a lego brick like when you buy a lego set the like golden price ratio is 10 cents per piece so let me see one million yeah he's about do the math right now that's a hundred thousand yeah six figures probably uh there you go it's a lot of legos my friend yep yeah it was like over time right it's like some people buy computer parts some people buy lego some people i don't know buy uh yeah what's the

and it's a 25 it's a 25 year collection right yeah it's been going on for a long time and yes my my legend of a girl friend is indeed here it is dairy girl 23 okay yeah i just wanted to confirm before i like said something and you're like oh that's actually not You're just a random person on the internet saying it. A stalker, actually. I mean, if you really care about someone, you're almost like a little bit of a stalker, right? If like it comes to a territory. In a non-toxic, super loving way, folks, right?

Let's not, let's not, you know, we don't promote toxic relationships here at all whatsoever. Would you break up with your girlfriend if she pronounced it Legos instead of Lego? No, I've like definitely moved away from being so negative. towards the pronunciation thing. Like, I haven't, I've resisted correcting Ivan so far on all the times he said it at least. Because,

yeah, technically, like, and Lego has, like, a legal post about this on their website. Like, it's Lego bricks or Lego sets or Lego pieces.

Technically not Legos, but, like, everyone says Lego. So many people, you'll never really get it out of them. So there's no, there's no point to going too crazy about it.

What about, um, What are your thoughts on ego waffles? You know, I found out that at some point, Lego and Ego did do some sort of collaboration. I had no idea. Back in, I discovered this. This was like a lot. I think it was when I was a kid, they had this whole thing called Lego, my ego.

You know, like the whole commercial was like, you're some kid was telling people, you know, his mom or whatever, like, not to touch his egos. And he was saying, Lego, my ego. And yeah, I remember Lego did do something with ego. back in the day. That was a long time ago. Yeah, it was. It was for sure. But it's a fun saying.

And I mean, I'm surprised they haven't continued to try to do stuff because it seems like a natural collaboration, you know. Have you ever built anything out of Duplo? Actually, yeah. My friend Graham that I mentioned earlier, the master builder, he has a large collection of Duplo, which helps him to do like really big. builds for events and stuff. So he's actually like let me borrow some of his bricks for events that we've done in the past. I did one a little while ago. Oh shoot, do I have pictures of this?

I'd to ask what the heck is Duplo? I've never heard of that. It's like the kids Lego. The name is actually like it's kind of a short of double because duplobricks are exactly twice the size of a Lego brick. And they actually do fit together with regular Lego pieces. That's cool. Because of that mathematical property. So it's these guys here.

So it's funny that you mentioned that because I forget it was it was like on Netflix. It was like a documentary about like this cool stuff. And there was an episode on Lego that I saw. And the Lego company is like pretty like awesome, if that makes sense. Yeah, they are. They are. Yeah, they seem to do like a lot of really cool stuff. There seems to be also very socially conscious, which I'm super happy for.

For myself, right, someone who tries to be a conscious consumer, right? As everyone knows, right, there's no such thing as like ethical, you know, consumerism under capitalism whatever, whatever, right? But Lego's still dope, and they do cool stuff, right? Yeah, 100%. And, like, especially with, like, how strict they are when it comes to,

like, the quality control is nuts. Like, they go super hard on that stuff. Yeah, they go really, really mess. It's really, really impressive. They are definitely crazy, crazy good. Yeah, and I think it's probably why they've been, like, so big, right? I don't know if I can't know if I'm a goodplo here.

I have to go on Amazon because I want to look up Lego Star Wars. I see how much that stuff costs because I've always wanted one of these Star Wars things. Yeah, like this is this is not my build, but like this was an event I did with my friend Graham. Oh, that's cool. Well, what's cool because it like works in the same way as Lego, but it just makes everything way bigger. So like at an event, we did like a giant warp pipe and a Yoshi build. Like it was really fun doing stuff like that.

That's so cool, man. I would love to be able to build something like that for my daughter, just put it in a room. Oh, it'd be awesome to have something like that for sure. Yeah. Um, I had a question and someone's asked me about something in the Twitch chat, so I totally skipped my mind. Oh, Ivan, so the next MZXT party we have at a live event, we should definitely have Nick over, one to hang out, but also two, to build us something for, for the, I don't know, for the spaces or whatever. Like, imagine another pop-up. I've done that for Twitch.

Yeah, exactly, right? I have experience necessary. And, like, honestly, one of my favorite things about the, like, building events that I do, is that they are designed to be community building events. So it's not like I just come there and I build this thing and I leave it for you guys. Like it's something that everybody can participate in together. Because like that. It's designed is that people can build these little blocks and those all come together to build something giant and awesome.

Now I really want to find like at least the TwitchCon build. So you guys can see that. Okay. So that gave me an idea. and give me a second here. Ivan, do you want to do a little bit of role playing with me? Not really, but I'll do it. Okay, okay.

So I'm going to set the scene, and Nick Kim, Pitchin's paid as well. Let's see me this real quick. Okay, so the year is, what's the 2021? Let's say it's 2020, 27, right? I'll throw some music on here. It's not the song I wanted. Okay, here you go. Okay.

So the year is 277, right? The pandemic is finally over, right? And it's time for TwitchCon, whatever, right, 27-7. So Ivan and I are grabbing a drink, right, at the NXT party, the after-party, because the show's over. I'm like, hey, Ivan. Go for it, Ivan. Yes, Dennis? Thanks for that beer, dude.

Do you want to go over and hang out with Brick and Nick and build some stuff with me? Let's go, Dennis. And then we're just partying, builds into the EDM, right? And we're drinking our beer. we're building stuff and we break something right I accidentally fall over

and I break the whole thing Nick what do you say I say don't worry guys that just means we get to do some more building there you go and see perfect sorry guys I have to go to bed because I'm 96 years old

in the year 277 bye that'll be young by then don't worry don't worry about it actually hold up I'm going to hold the year right now I'm going to be 40 next month okay so 2021

I was born in 1981. So I was born in 1987. Yeah, yeah. That's 56 years from now. Yeah. I'll be 96. All right. Well, I mean, you know, maybe by that time we'll have like some super technology, right?

Maybe the secret to eternal life is getting the vaccine, right? And now you're just like super spry and you can build and your hands are still capable of doing stuff right in the year 277. That's a real secret. That's why you should get vaccinated. So you can live forever and go to the next. non-COVID-in-fested COVID-free Twitch Connery and build the Legos with Nick E.

Besides building Legos or sorry, I shouldn't say Legos, besides building Lego, whatever works for you on. I'm pretty sure I've been seeing LEGOs the entire time. I'm so sorry. Are you nuts? You're good, Dennis. Don't worry. Do you play Lego video games? Do you watch Lego movies? Do you go to Lego land on vacation? A good question.

Yeah. I do. I do. do watch the like of movies i love the like a movies and and i think i think i actually overheard at some point dennis was recommending the lego movies to you ivan yeah the first one's really good if you haven't watched it folks like it's it's it's way better than it has any right to be based around like a children's toy um it's an excellent movie and i obviously there's a lot of bias there but like it's really well reviewed on like rotten tomatoes and stuff and like it's it's critically acclaimed because it's it's really solid um i actually don't play the lego video games i did growing up a little bit but like I think I'm so entrenched in Lego all the time that when I go to

gaming it's like the last thing I want to see I want to be as far away from Lego as possible that's interesting it's just like you can't have too much of something and then like outside of that I feel like those are the two main things actually I feel like you said something else and I forgot oh I'm just wondering if you were also apart from the movies also playing the Lego video games okay yeah so like the answer is no mainly I did I was growing up I don't anymore because it's just it's too much Lego. What about a Lego land? I'm about to go to Legoland actually pretty soon.

A real Lego land once, the one in California. Definitely cool to see like all the amazing creations that the master builders kind of come up with and have on display there. So like I definitely you know recommend if you ever ever get an opportunity, especially if you have kids like it is a much better experience enjoyed with kids. It's a little bit less exciting. It just going as an adult because like half of what you're paying for is like the rides and stuff and you can barely go on any of them being an adult because they're really kid-arranted but it's still really really cool to see all the creations they have on display there yeah we're about to get into community questions but before we do that I want

to I want to ask you one more question sure and after I asked that I want to open up yes oh yeah as you send us so he Nick was so nice. He sent us some packages here with our names on it, and he's telling us not to open it until a certain date and time. He got me one. He got Dennis one. And he got one for everyone at the office here.

So we'll open these live on the air, but before I do that, I'm going to ask you the most important question that I saved. Here we go. I'm ready. Here we last. Have you ever stepped in a Lego? it. A thousand percent I have many times. It actually used to be a thing I regularly did on stream. I had it as like a channel point incentive very often. So I've not only stepped on Lego, I have danced on Lego. That's often been a cherry incentive of mine. So for like one to three minutes, I'll like play it on like a music clip and I will literally dance across Lego. I've even like I built I did some like I'm sure you guys may have heard of the show Lego. masters it's like the televised Lego competition on Fox and they like I last year I

emulated all the challenges they did on my own stream so I had like a three-hour time block and I tried to do every challenge and I even built they had like a bridge challenge and I built one that I could like jump on so I've jumped on Lego I've gone all in on all forms of it I think the only thing more painful than stepping on a Lego is bumping your shin on the edge of your bed, like in that little corner part. Oh, yeah. No, that is way more painful for sure. The Lego pain is kind of temporary.

It's really not that bad. And actually, I've actually jumped into a pile of Lego. Is it okay if I actually posted a Twitter link in chat real quick? Oh, yeah. Yeah, go for it. If it'll let you. So, yeah. No, I'll let you.

And honestly, that was like genuinely one of the happiest moments of my life. So actually didn't let you post a, the the the the the the bach bot got you uh if you want to send it to us okay i'm sorry yeah if i want to send us on discord i can i can oh sure yeah yeah that makes way more sense yeah make it easier yeah there you go um it's either like it works or it doesn't work um it all good this was like maybe six years ago i got to like go to like this big like lego event they had at uh conventions center here in toronto it was like one run by lego and they had of course like a giant pit of it.

I needed like three showers after that because who would have known what kind of things the kids were doing in there. But. Oh, Lord. genuinely one of the happiest moments of my life. Here it goes. You're blessed. You're blessed. Dang.

Like zero pain. Like there was just so much Lego there. Oh, it's like softened the blow. It just completely eliminated the like pain aspect of it. And it was just heaven. Just heaven. Yeah. Someone in the chat was saying,

I used to be an indie wrestler and gotten body slammed onto a bunch of Lego bricks during a near death match. That sounds horrible. That sounds like... Thorne Leviathan said that. Yeah, it's a little... We do have some questions from the community here to ask you. And if anyone in chat has anything to ask Nick, ask away and he'll answer.

So first question here is from God of Death Wish. What is the largest number of Lego pieces you have used on a single project? So admittedly, I don't count how many pieces I use in a project just because it would be like extremely difficult to do so because there's a lot of trial and errors and like bringing builds to life. And I never really like do digital versions of them so where I can have a parts count from. The Lego Batman logo in the background is definitely one of the biggest. That's about four feet long. I think the all time largest build that I've ever, sorry, put together was a life size rainbow smash pickax from Fortnite, which Dr. Lupo actually now owns. So if you look in the very corner of his background, it's actually on his wall.

I went to his house to install it. Oh, wow. So that was a really, really cool build. I can probably quickly, I can probably finally find a picture really as quickly if you want to see that. Because I don't have it to show you physically, unfortunately. Yeah, you can. That'd be awesome. Yeah, I'm going to grab that for you.

While you do that, I'll ask you a follow-up question here. Keep the questions coming. Keep the question. From Venar, what was your longest Lego build? How long does that take? My longest legible is actually one I've completed recently. You can see a little bit of it in the background here. It is,

Lego came out with this like Super Mario theme, which has like a Mario that like has like a screen and like sensors in it. So you can build out these levels and then like play with Mario through the levels. So I've taken like some of the elements from that and I've put it into this build. And it's there's like eight modules there that all connect together into this like five plus foot long build. That represents world one one. the like first level from super mario bros uh so i started that actually i think in august of last year and like i said it aside for many months but it's definitely been the longest build i've ever worked

on that is insane yeah that's super nuts i think it was worth the time like i'm really happy with how it turned out and like i still actually have to i'm actually not done yet i have one more thing i need to um but it was a as an intense project to work on and i really enjoyed a lot of the challenges I even have the hidden underground part from it. Death Rage wants to know. How often do you step on a Lego? You know what? I actually don't know if I can truly recall an instance where I've done it unintentionally.

Like typically my instances where that's happened has been because it's been like something that my community has made me do. So yeah, not a lot. really like it's very rare that like I drop a lot of pieces and then accidentally end up stepping on them I might also be so at the point where it's just like I wouldn't even notice anymore if that happened so I'm not I'm not quite sure all right uh just dance pro 505 wants to know who your favorite character is from the Lego movie uh I like Benny a lot my my emotes are Benny I have a giant Benny here he's like the classic space man and he's just so silly and ridiculous and all he wants to do is built spaceships and I actually haven't built a spaceship in ages but I love doing them when I get the

chance. So just really, really enjoyable doing that. And yeah, he's just an awesome, fun, wacky character. Writing Graboids wants to know. Was interacting with customers at the Lego store helpful with you becoming more comfortable on your stream? Yeah, I would actually say that is absolutely true. Like getting into the world of retail really broke me out of my shell. I was definitely an introvert. especially growing up as a guy who like was playing with like a way beyond like when you're supposed to be um having an opportunity to like go and just like be social and be forced to be forced to approach people and have conversations with people and stuff um was definitely a huge part in what like opened me up socially and definitely made me more comfortable with streaming

social yeah very very true definitely recommend retail if you're kind of like in a shell and you're looking for a way to force yourself to break out of it that's my experience too when i was working retail I had to like really be like that guy right especially for working sales right because you have to talk to people you have to like you know kind of I'll say push but like learn how to like get people to do something that they normally wouldn't do like whether it's like buying warranty or credit app and like tell them in a way that is going to want them to do it and I don't mean that and I don't mean to be like you have to like you know lie to them like just like explain them the benefits and why they might want to exactly with people the information

they need to make the best decision. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And if we do it in a right manner, folks, right, you can make a lot of money and not feel gross like in the day. I'm very lucky. In Italy, the only retail I've ever worked, never had commissions.

So, like, a lot of that typical pressure was not there, which I'm very thankful for. I think, like, nowadays, most retail spaces have some form of kind of pressure, whether it's, like, sending up for, like, rewards, like, email list or, you know, like, it doesn't have to be, like, selling something, but, like, like, bug you to do something, which, like, to me, like, like I'm like yeah, just take my own care. Like, whatever. I'm blocking it anyway. So I recently just this week gave a store employee a negative review on a survey.

I, after I completed my purchase. That must have taken a lot because I feel like it'd be very rare that you would bother with that. I've never done this in my life. But I felt like I had to say something because it was so bad. So I took Tuesday off because Tuesday was my wife's birthday. And as luck would have it, my refrigerator died that day. So I had to spend the entire morning, you know, trying to get a new fridge.

And I went to different stores. And one of the stores I was at, you know, I had a question about a fridge. So I walk over to the closest associate standing in their refrigerators. And I'm like, hey, excuse me, can I ask you a question about this fridge? And before I could even finish my sentence, this guy, I said, I'm on break. That's all he said. I'm on break and he just turned around.

And I'm like, hmm, like, okay. Like, that's cool. And I'm still on the floor. Yeah, I mean, it's cool. Like, if you're on break, I'm sorry, I didn't want to bother you. But can you like, you know, point me in the right direction? Like who here isn't on break that can help me, you know? And it was just like such like a like a rude experience that, you know,

after I bought the fridge, which, you know, it's not like a refrigerator is not a cheap purchase. You know, you're spending at least $1,000 if you're buying a fridge. And then, like, you know, the cashier is like, oh, and here she circled it on the receipt. And here's a survey where you can tell us about your experience today and you could be answered to win, whatever. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to fill this stuff when I get home. So I did. I went home and I filled this out and wrote the whole story.

And I was just saying, like, you know, this guy was really rude. But, yeah. So I had the opposite experience than you guys did when you guys worked in retail because I didn't not like this guy. Anyway, Bricks O'Brien here wants to know. Oh, boy. I know this guy. Yeah. Yeah, with the name like Bricks O'Brien, yeah.

How could you know? Exactly. What is your favorite Lego? No, Lego what? Yes. The answer is yes. So that's my Lego Nintendo Switch. This is a really, really fun project to work on.

For those you can't see it, this is a very close to in-scale creation of the the Nintendo switch with the blue and red joycon what's special about this build is it functions like a Nintendo switch it actually has sliding joycons that slide in and out and click into place and then the center area actually is kind of like a removable game cartridge oh jeez it's so cool and flip around you can like be playing the game inside of your switch dang that's awesome and then of course like I did up the joycon holder as well which has the same function,

although apparently I broke it a little bit, but... What's your favorite Lego piece? Actually, just little piece? Peace? I would actually say this guy right here. These tiny little Lego brackets are easily one of the best pieces Legos come out with recently.

For a lot of the types of building that I do, they are just so handy for a wide variety of, like creations and building techniques and stuff. So I really, really, really love tiny little Lego brackets. Very handy for building. That was awesome. I swear I thought those were real Nintendo switches back there.

I love hearing that. I'm not going to lie. It's hard to tell what's real and what's not real in that room. I feel like if Nick turns a certain way, he's going to end up being like an actual Lego person. I'm going to be like a Lego built. Oh my God. I'm so freaking out.

It's like a good TikTok waiting to happen or something. Yeah, make it happen, dude. You got a pretty popping TikTok, right? That's a lot of Lego. I actually, I would not have enough Lego to build a large statue of a person. Definitely not. Rando builds wants to know. And I'm not sure I understand this question, but they're asking if you've ever done anything

for Lego ideas. Yeah, so Lego Ideas and Randos is one of my community members, shout out to them. Lego Ideas is a platform where fans can submit their own ideas to potentially become a Lego set. So it's like a crowdsourcing platform. So if a fan submission can get 10,000 ideas, Lego will actually do like a review type thing and like look into potentially turning it into a real set.

So it is something like obviously, well, maybe not so obviously, but like one of my childhood dreams is to be the designer of a Lego set. And typically you would need to work at Lego to do that. And in particular, you actually have to live in Denmark to do that job. And I don't really want to live in Denmark as much as awesome it would be to like design a Lego set. So like I've I've submitted many creations to Lego ideas for different projects. One of them was the Cybertruck and that was my first and only project so far to get to 10,000 supporters. Unfortunately, it was rejected.

So Lego is never going to make that. But I do have that thing in the background here, which is a large scale recreation of the original Lego patent design as a 3D Lego model I have that posted and then I have a fall guys build in the background here which has like some motorized elements and has like a bunch of the cool fall guys characters moving around and I have that submitted as a project as well did you also make that what is that a cast iron stove or something back in that yeah that's a table's Lego his hair is actually let go I need you to run your hand to that just make sure it's not actually Lego.

Twin Dad wants to know. Wouldn't be a podcast episode here without a twin dad question. True, true. What has been your favorite mini fig? I actually struggle with this one because there's been so many good ones for so many different reasons.

It's like I love Emmett from the Lego movie. I loved Benny, the Space Man, from the Lego movie as well. That had a lot of really, really good characters and stuff. Anything space-related has always definitely had a soft spot for me and then I really like seeing mini figures in different colors so like a recently released this set called everyone is awesome and as part of that set they included just like a ton of mini figures just in a rainbow of color representing like pride and stuff

like that um so really really cool set and i just love how like all the plain colored mini figures kind of look for them from this so it's awesome and decent stuff and i really like actually uh actually do have a logo thing hold up i'll grab it right now i forgot that it was here because uh oh look it is he's got some lego so so i do So I didn't buy it. My partner bought it. But as soon as you showed that, like,

we have one here in the back. So let me grab one real quick, a beer back. Oh, there we go. Look at that. See, he's hard to avoid Lego.

All right. Well, Dennis is gone. I'm going to open up his gift. Oh, seeing he has that set. So it's actually the thing for pride that did this year. The full set. Yeah,

I just have the mini figures later. And I stole all the pieces for my collection, of course. That's really cool. Yeah, we have a little thing here for, you know,

like snaky snack and some, you know, Minecraft B, all kinds of stuff. Destiny goes up there. But yeah, so this thing's pretty cool. It's nice. It's nice to being there.

I just knocked it over. Uh-oh. Oh, well. I'll fix it later. Yeah. All right. Last question here from the community before we unwrap our gifts here.

Yeah. Do you, or Dan and Loth wants to know, do you have a problem with bears stealing your brick and nick baskets? Yeah, I saw that question in the chat, and I actually have no idea what they're asking. So I actually, I had no idea right over my head. I had no idea until I read it out loud.

You know how Yogi Bear says, pick a nick basket? I get it. I guess that does sound like my name, doesn't it? I mean, I got it. I got it immediately. That's why I put it into the questions, and I thought it was funny.

That sounds is really good. Like, I watched Yogi Bear at some point, but like that was a long time ago. My memory's that bad, so. All right. I haven't yet, at least. Which one should I open first, Nick? I would open yours.

Yeah, just open yours and then they're technically all the same content. All right. Once again, I'm actually going to fire off a really quick email. Uh-oh, here we go. With the link that you will need. Secret emails. Oh, okay. Let me pull that up.

Is this what I think it is? It is indeed. A little. It is the parts to build your own poochie. Awesome. That's so cool. And then what I emailed you is the instructions. I will put it right next to these bags.

Yeah, perfect. I'm actually, you know that? I'm going to build this Pucci. I'm going to build my Back to the Future Lego out of respect. I can't I can't just let these labels. Save it for like a like, but like feel free to save them too for like a time when you want to like relax and chill out because they're just such nice builds. Like Lego's just such a fun way to like chill out and take it easy. So yeah, keep it.

Keep it for when you. That's cool you have these instructions on your website. Is that inverted? It was dark mode. It was dark mode. Oh, you have that. like forced dark mode on yeah dark reader because uh if you guys don't notice like if you guys been looking me on the podcast my face will get really bright because i open up like chrome

or something gotcha yeah uh and i have a webcam i suddenly get a better camera for this thing but this is cool yeah so like i'm looking at this and i think it makes sense um i have to try it yeah yeah i'm not going to overthink it because i'm definitely an overthinker and i'm just going to follow it step by step and see how works but this is really cool like grab the little parts in the box of the top left and then put the pieces together in the way they show and that step yeah and you'll be good to go It's all you need. So, sorry. You said that, uh, you said that Dennis is the same?

It is the same. Yeah. And this one is a little thicker, but is it the same? There's, it's like four copies of it. So like some people at the office can build some as well. Heck yeah, man. Some TikTok content, Ivan. Very thoughtful gift.

Very, very, very nice. I'm just very honored to be here. So I had to find a way to really say thank you. No, man. Thank you. I mean, uh, we, we love having folks on and just, you know, chatting, uh, chatting about what they do all day and like what their, you know, what their content and just what they do. So actually, I do have a question

about this in general. Sure. I noticed that, so first of all, you have your website, which is really cool, and your logo is actually hilariously, like, it makes sense. I get it.

Like, I saw it. I'm like, ah, that's really clever. But so you have, like, instructions on your site. You have everything set up here. Is this, like, a thing that, like, people who are, like, super into Lego do?

Like, I guess in, like, the Lego content creator community, where they, like, make, like, these, like, instructions and show, like, what pieces you got to get? Yeah, yeah. Okay. There's definitely common.

There are actually websites where people will upload stuff and can choose to actually have a price with them as well. I've, I don't know, like, I don't know what's made me decide to do, but I just like putting them out for free. And I usually have a video to go with them as well. But yeah, it's definitely very common that like fans, like fans were a little bit more dedicated, I would say. Because just because in making instructions, frankly, I hate it. Like, I don't actually, this is why I have my friend is Guardian studios. He was also and also like an awesome Lego builder is the one who does the instructions for me. he enjoys the process of it so like I'm like you know what why do something I

hate when like someone who likes it can can have some fun with it but yeah it's it's really really cool just being able to kind of like let people share in the fun of of doing the bills that I do so yeah I'm I'm I like being putting them out there for people when I can that's awesome who actually designs the instructions for you did you say yeah his names is Guardian Studios there you it's Guardian I think he said Guardian his name is on the front page of every instruction booklet. Wow.

He does a really good job. Yeah, he's really, really good at it for sure. Oh, there are a bookbook. Her studio, sorry, there's no S on it. My bad. Yeah, he's a good dude. And he's a really great builder as well. Did I misspell as Guardian Studio?

Probably did. I'm seeing this pops up. Yeah, you put, there's no you in Guardian. It's like Asgard. Okay, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. All right, studio. You see my typing, process is really bad because my keyboard's not referring there you yeah yeah and so you can see like

that's a digital build of like like a drone he did that's awesome yeah okay we're just looking through his or their twitter now so enjoy this folks this is great radio that model that he did as well that plane there this is awesome he does a lot of military stuff too he's a really good builder cool dang now kind of want to like build like video game theme lego stuff like games that i like Yeah. It's really fun. And like, I mean, that's why I grabbed a bunch of the stuff from Destiny. I thought Dennis would be pretty appreciative of stuff like the, uh, the risk runner that I have here. That's so cool. That is awesome. It's in it like a custom color scheme. Unfortunately, there isn't enough. There weren't enough pieces at the time in the color of the risk runner for me to do it in.

So yeah, I've done, you know, like I love doing life-size stuff again just because it's fun to be going to have. Something that's become way more popular more recently. I never thought it would be traveling or traveler shows Me and my friends call it Travely Travely To Toe for some reason. I don't know, we're all weirdos. But one of my favorite things about this little build, as well as the risk runner, but you can actually load this up with a little Lego string. Oh, my God. That is so cool. Bullet over the trigger and it shoots.

Whoa. It's so cool. It actually has like a four bullet semi auto function. It doesn't always work. It's a little finicky. It's not meant to shoot more than one bullet at a time in the system, but managed to find a way to make it work. That's awesome. So someone in.

one of the thing is asked a question. And I don't know if I put it here. And I don't remember. I haven't asked it. Let me see. If people want like to actually go out and build their Apucci, I wasn't sure how interested people would be in that. I'll make sure that like that's a private link right now,

but I'll make sure to add it to my main instruction. Oh, got you gotcha. Okay. And have a digital model available, which people can use to put like you can upload a digital file to Ricklink, which is where you can order pieces from. Okay. And then you can just order the parts you need for the build like that.

Okay. So sorry folks that link this. work. It technically does if they want the instructions, but I'll hold the full stuff after. So someone asked here, and I think I saw earlier, I guess I must not have saved it, but they're saying that purple is not is a fairly rare Lego color. How does that work? I would say it like used to be a lot rarer.

It is less rare now. Right. So yeah, it's just like over the last few years, it's definitely become quite a bit more common is Lego's done some more like out there themes. They had done some troll stuff that I think introduced a bunch of purple parts. They've done some wackier themes that have introduced a lot. So thankfully, the selection is much better these days. That's interesting that there's like rare, rare Lego stuff.

Have you, have you, is there like a, like a bootleg Lego market out there for stuff? There's definitely a huge market for like ripped off Lego stuff. Like you can expect to find it on like Al-Express and things like that. There's some very like well-known companies. that have become particularly known for ripping off LEGO's design and selling them at a fraction of the cost with way lower quality bricks. In the Lego community, we almost treat that as like a swear word. It's like an unspoken word kind of, but yeah. It reminds me of back in the day I wanted to get into like Disney pins because we're like right next door to like Disneyland.

Until everybody is how expensive it is. But there are like people who will like tell you like, to figure out like what's a fake Disney pin and what's a real Disney pin and yeah there there's all kinds of crazy stuff like uh it's it's it's really interesting how when something is kind of popular uh you'll see these like third parties tried to like kind of cash in on it exactly do that stuff have you ever like accidentally gotten like a fake a fake Lego brick but like uh Lego honestly like you said like you mentioned earlier like their quality control is just so unbelievably good that like it would be pretty much impossible for any company in the world to get close

enough that you would not be able to distinguish like an actual Lego brick from a fake one. Minimi said, I can't believe how many Disney pins are fake. Yeah, yeah, no, it's a pretty big thing, especially with Disney. Because this is huge. Like, you can buy literal bags of like fake pins for like 20 bucks on like internet and stuff and it's pretty nice. Yeah. Yeah. But at the very least, with like with like the Disney pins um the way that I would do it is is a I don't want to open a TikTok link for the way that I would do it is um I would I would just trade with the people who are working at Disneyland and apparently the way that they do it is like how to explain this it's almost kind of like it's almost kind of like our like like like like like like like like

like like like like like like like like like like like like real life Pokemon right right where you like hey I want that one they go cool and then they just give it to you because they can't can't deny it right and it gets like when they get a pin they they have themselves check it after the fact to make sure that like they're not also giving out fake pins to people yeah it's like a whole thing um but apparently there's you know because it's Disneyland they can't like check it in front of you in front of your face because you know it's like they have the whole Disney magic stuff so so I just think it's kind of funny that like you know like you might sometimes end up with like a fake pin from one of the employees there because they

you know they they just happen to grab them with someone else and like they can't deny it and they can't do anything else like they just have to like accept whatever they get because you know They don't want to assume that you just bought a fake pin and gave it to them. You know, they assume on, they run on good faith that like, you know, you just maybe got one on an accident when you bought it from a store or somewhere online. So I don't know what I'm talking about. My mind's wondering. That's what you get for collecting pins, Dennis. Yeah.

It's like anything, right? It's like, you know, what was like, who was it who was making videos? Was it a, was it, I'm trying to think, there's someone either on TikTok or on YouTube who was buying like cheap. like Ali Express, like Chinese GPUs and testing them and like builds. Oh, that's fun. Yeah, which I wasn't aware you could like third party manufacture like

I want to say fake GPUs, but like GPUs like that and I don't know if I would ever trust something like that, but you know sometimes the real thing doesn't work out of it. Yeah, exactly. Anyone really bad. Yeah, so that's it for our questions. Nick, do you have any questions for me

and Ivan or for the community? You know, we didn't really get to, like, all the, like, a little bit more about the stuff you guys dropped. Like, what's your favorite of the new things that you guys announced yesterday? Yeah, yeah. Are you looking forward to getting any of them into your builds at all? So I'm, I'm happy with my build, TBH. I'm running a H510 elite with an X62 and, you know, a bunch of RGB fans. I'm not, I'm not one for the whole white setup, so that doesn't really interest me.

I like a darker setup. And for me, if I want color, I turn on my RGB, right? that's what it's there for. But I mean, honestly, I think the thing that I'm most excited is to see is people, you know, rocking those, those flow cases, you know, because. Yeah, it can be really awesome. See that out in the wilds for your family. We know there's, like, a huge, huge aftermarket for third party H510 elite panels

because we see them on our server at all the time, which is awesome, you know, like, I think it's really, really cool. And now, you know, there's like an official way for you to get it. And for those who are asking if you are going to sell the panel separately, because I think I saw the question earlier, there's currently, as far as I know, there's no plans for it, but, you know, ask enough and, you know, it might happen. You guys asked us for airflow cases and 20 years later, we finally did it, you know? So we'll see you in 20 years, folks.

Same thing with the white, with the white crackens and all that stuff. So if you guys do have any questions, though, regarding any of the new drops right now in chat, you can. If Nick has to go anytime soon, I don't want to hold them up past. If you just want to chill for a bit more, I'm down. I will throw out if I may. Yeah, go for it. That video that I said earlier about the PC build, I did just drop.

Is it all right if I send that to you guys on Discord? Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah. Yeah, so that just went live. And then, like, I have the free instructions for the little PC. And you can actually, like, I have two variants of it within the digital model. And you can, like, remove the things you don't want and keep the things you do.

So if you want, you know, a, you know, a. direct fan cooler instead of an AIO for your build. And you want a more stylized case or whatever, you can like fully customize kind of how you go about getting your little Lego PC. So I'm watching at, no man, there's no more speed. I thought I was running at two times speed because I was watching.

No, no, the intro is a little sped up. Yes, because, so, and I even did like a little fake setup to go along with it. That's super cute.

We're all wired up and everything. Yeah. I was just worried there was that two times because last night, I went through like a huge like ADHD thing where like I was watching Lord of the Rings and I think it was a scene where they find like the the like tobacco or whatever in Saraman's like I don't know tower thingy and I'm like you know what I've never actually seen someone like pack an actual pipe of tobacco so I just Google the video of some dude like showing you like how to how to use like an actual like tobacco pipe just just just because I wanted to know but it was really

slow so I had to speed up the video because he was like talking about. And super slow with a lot of long pauses. It's very obvious. This guy is not, like, training how to, like, create content, right? For, like, an audience or whatever. Like, it was a good video, but he was like, and then you take your pipe and you just pack it. And he's just sitting there. And I'm like, okay, do you cool.

Can you get to the end? Because, like, I don't want to skip. Boodle on. Yeah, I want to skip it. I do have time stamps in this video. So if you want to jump certain parts because there's really little fluff in here. I'm so glad you do these. I'm so glad people know that they can skip around.

Not enough people do it. You didn't let me answer Nick's question about what my favorite product that we announced yesterday. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. He jumped to his cool video. Sorry. That was me. That was me.

I'm so sorry. I was going to say my favorite is the C-650 bronze power supply. Really? No. I just wanted to throw it out there before I forgot to say my stupid joke. Thank you, Ivan, very cool. This is dope. So you made a, it's like a replica of your actual PC, you know?

Yeah, it is a whole Lego computer? That's awesome, dude. I wish to me, someday. It'll happen. I like how we actually saw, like, a different view of your room, too. I like seeing all those bricks. Yeah, this is awesome. This is really, really cool.

So this tutorial, there's the very, It was variations. Okay, I see. It's different versions of it. That's cool. That's like a cyberpunk kind of. Yeah. I actually, when I first designed it, it was just before cyberpunk dropped.

So I like the color scheme was in my head at the time. And like I had the cool like black and yellow striped pieces. So they kind of like fit in with that theme. So I thought it made for a fun build. Andrew is 100% right. We can't be too sure if it's Lego not. We have to ask. That's cool.

Actually, oops, I accidentally double-click that. I like that you also made this GPU vertical. That's hilarious. Did you paint the studs on this or is that just how it is? No, those are, and those pieces are actually from the, there was a Tron Lego set. That's that I was going to ask if it's Tron because it looked like Tron. Yeah. That's awesome.

That's so cool. And then there's the air cooler. This is hilarious, like it's hilarious, not like as a joke, but just hilarious, like just how kind of almost like accurate it actually is. What are these little long blue pieces here? I did my best. Yeah. Yeah. And I even put lights in that one.

Like, I would love. to maybe look into finding some like third party lighting that could like I could so I can do an RGB case and stuff but that's uh maybe that's a long term goal or something what are these little blue uh like pieces up here for the RAM they're just transparent like little Lego pieces like he's has someone hand he's like yeah I know exactly what those are they're right here that's so cool okay that's awesome like Lego makes a lot of their pieces in transparency as like transparent colors as well So I thought it was a good way to represent and allow some of the lighting to kind of come through Transparent pieces and Lego lights work well together to like make some for some cool effects. So that's sick

So I'm still looking through this. This is great. Sorry folks if you're not watching live. This is a this is a Twitch show. So you know You have your position. Wait hold that. What's that? Oh, okay, that's cool. Oh, you made Pookie mains. That's sick. Yeah, I was just like trying to like find like random points. of inspiration for like different designs I could do and I was like I really want to get some like more like fun bright colors and she is like a really nice pastel theme kind of going on with her street yeah she does someone I actually like no tiny makes things she does like really awesome custom keyboard stuff she's cool she's done really really well on TikTok too and she had like a like a pastel color scheme merch thing going with like her keyboards and I was like yeah let me get a little bit inspiration from both of these she made a a poochie keycap she made a oh did she okay awesome

Yeah, she's amazing. Yeah, she's awesome. Yeah, we used and stuff with her in the past. That's really cool. This isn't ad. This is like the boring part of the video that walks you through how you can like customize the PC and then order the pieces. So this isn't very interesting or exciting.

It's just kind of a brutal necessity. That's awesome though. That's really cool. All right, awesome man. That's super sick. Did you did you already post that video on the YouTube? Yeah, that's live. So like that's a live link if you

It's on Twitter. You already liked and commented Dennis. Nice. Oh, incredible. Is it on Twitter yet? You should probably tweet about it. Yeah, I was going to post it after the stream. It's probably tweet about it.

You guys are welcome to do what you like with it. I'll definitely share that, yeah. I did post it on our internal company Slack here too. Awesome. Thank you. You have a bunch of. So for that site where you can order the bricks and stuff, is this, do you get any commission off of that?

It's like a thing that you can do. There's nothing like that for that website. for that website. It's like, I would say it's like kind of like the eBay of Lego. Right. Again, for a long time, it was, it was like not owned by Lego. It was like a fan created website. It just became the best known for like buying pieces secondhand. It is weirdly now owned by Lego, but it's like still people who operate and own their own individual stores. So like when you go to order, you can obviously like make sure like, you know, it might be easier to order from somewhere within the US or North America rather than like ordering it from

like Germany or something like that. So and there are like filters that you can play around with when you're like going to do that order that you can make sure you're getting it from the places you want and stuff is there is there a way for someone to like make a living off a lego like in that way just like selling packs for like builds and stuff like there are a lot of people who own very lucrative brickling stores 1,000% oh okay that's that's good to know Evan you are you are you ready be a Lego dealers what that would that be funny yeah there and I have a friend who's like kind of like well-known within the lego community and he's a brickling seller he does a lot of awesome stuff for a bunch of us like streamers and stuff uh so a lot of us will go to him because he's

super duper helpful and stuff but yeah that's great all right um any last minute questions from the community let me see here lego pc tower talked about that asking if the panel was mesh yeah we'd be getting that feedback a lot that they want the uh the the airflow panel on the 510 flow in in white why we didn't or if it's possible. I think I saw someone post a picture of another white panel somewhere and they said that it looked weird because of the holes in it made it look almost like black or gray or something. Some kind of like optical effect.

I don't know if that's it. Maybe there's like white paint's like not cheap right now. I don't know. Yeah, but like feedback like that's definitely something that we've, that we've reported, you know. Yeah, you know, any comments, questions feedback you guys have on, on the products that we launched. You know, let us know here. Let us know on Twitter.

You know, if you want to send us an email, I would say don't, because that's for the podcast. But if you want, you know, you have questions about other stuff, you know, can definitely send us an email. That's a podcast at nzixi.com. If you want to do that. Actually, I think I might have it.

See, where is it? I think I actually have a podcast at n6c.com here somewhere. I don't think we got anything, though. I was looking around and people aren't sitting us. There was one email that was like, I have a question about product. I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to answer that, homie. Like, we have a customer support team, and they're literally on, like, all day every day.

The podcast email is just me. Yeah. So exciting times in ZXT. Ivan, what are those giveaways we got going on on the socials? All righty. So we got a couple of giveaways going on right now. The first one, I guess, is the most important one for the people listening right now. Hey.

listening live. It's for our Steam gift cards, which ends in about 15 minutes or so. If you win, you will be contacted via email. So check your email. A lot of people don't check their email surprisingly. They think we're just going to message them on like Twitch DMs or something, but that's not how it works. So check your email. The other giveaway, the more interesting one, if I must be completely honest, it's our hashtag make a splash upgrade challenge. So So we are challenging you all to just show us a picture of your PC with the hashtag Make a Splash on social media for a chance to let us upgrade it with our new white components that we announced yesterday. So go to our social media and you'll see the link there, nzac.co slash splash dash giveaway. Speaking of products that we launched yesterday, like Nick mentioned, we launched a bunch of stuff yesterday.

Probably the most products you've ever launched on a single day, and we launched a lot of stuff that people have been requesting for a long time, namely the H-510 Flow, our white crackens, our white air fans, also announced a new Crackin 120 AIO and new bronze PSUs, lots of new stuff. Go on our website, nzxti.com, to check it out. Dennis also mentioned the email here. You guys have a question about the podcast or just want to annoy Dennis email podcast at nzixt.com.

And last but not least, the most important announcement of all, please follow at Brick and Nick everywhere on social media and visit his website, Brickandnick.com. So you guys can see all his cool creations, all his instructions. and I must say your photography and videography, top-notch, man. Oh, thank you. Yeah. And I think it goes a long way too because, you know,

your builds are awesome. So it's only fair to, like, you know, make them look as awesome as possible. And I think you do a good job with your photography and your videos, man. It looks awesome. Thanks so much. I appreciate that, yeah. Yeah.

It would definitely feel wasteful to not kind of show them off in their best, like, as close to the best possible way that I can. So, yeah, having, you know, a good photography setup, of course, is definitely a huge part of making sure you can share your Lego bells with the world. Did you, did you have to learn how to do that stuff to show up your, yeah, I just kind of learned it on my own, like, I've been part of, like, the on Lego community for like years. Like, there was a really tight-knit community on Flickr that I had, like, had been part of in, like, 2007. Yeah, there's a really, like, intensely close-knit Lego community on Flickr for a very long time.

And like through that, I learned from a lot of different people, like, on how to like that book your photography game and stuff. So I've like a light box and I bought a bunch of different colored backgrounds that I can have in there. So like the stuff that you'll see on the left in most of these, like this on my website, are the renders for the instructions. And then the right picture is usually the ones that have physically taken of the actual object. What's a what's this dot I.O. file, studio file.

So those are the ones for that software. Gotcha. that I mentioned earlier. So, like, if you download that software, you can open it up and see the digital file. But you can also take that file and upload it to Bricklink so you can order the pieces for the model. Okay.

That's actually, that's really smart like that. Yeah. It's, you know, it's really cool how, like, these communities that, like, deal in, like, physical stuff have found a way to, like, translate that fandom online in a way to make it, like, that makes it super easy to, like, do stuff on it. Because, like, I know, like, I,

I go back to like the Disney pin stuff just because it's like it's very reminiscent of that It's like a very physical thing like You can't really participate in that community Unless you like have stuff To like trade or collect or whatever But it's the same thing right Where they have like websites and like you know

And like all these other like hubs Where you can grab things and like Throw them into a site It's just really really cool I think um The only other community is very similar like that That like unfortunately died was a Disney infinity Which is like

Yeah A weird bridge between like the digital and like the physical stuff, but we can talk about for like a million hours in like a different show. Lego did their own thing of that too. Lego Dimensions and unfortunately that died out as well. Yeah, I wonder why that isn't a thing. Like I

it reminds you of, and I don't if you guys remember this, there was this old anime, I think it's still around, it's called the Monster Rancher, right? Where like, I think it was, there was a PS1 game of it where you could take, so the premise of Monster Rancher is that it's basically like Pokemon kind of,

but instead of like you catch the Pokemon, you get these like discs and the disc like turns into a monster. I don't know. I don't know. This is a really good thing. But for the video game for the PS1, you could actually take out your disc in the middle of the game, put it into like another CD.

It'll read it. And like it's like whatever random code is on the disc, it'll translate that into a monster. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's cool. Geez. Or I don't know if you remember.

You, I had no idea how, how old you are, Nick, but I'm assuming you're probably younger than I am. But there was, there used to be this like little toy you could buy. They would scan barcodes and it would same thing. It would like read the barcode and like translate that into like certain monsters. It was like a little device. It was really cool. I don't know if you guys remember or have an idea at all what I'm talking about.

Was like there a name for like the general stuff? Yeah. Let's see. Barcode monster scanner toy. Let's see here. It was called it was called Scanners. Here we go. Oh.

It feels like a vague word. Damn it. That sounds the right video. I'm looking for the. commercial of it. There's a, but I always one of those, but I always love the idea of like transiting like physical stuff until like digital stuff. I will say Lego dimensions did well, like twin dad pointed out in chat. Like there were a lot of licensed related stuff that we got that I don't think we would have gotten otherwise. Like so Portal was one that they mentioned. It was like

the first Sonic Lego thing we had gotten. There was like arcade related stuff with like Midway. We got like Mission Impossible. Some Ghostbusters stuff. There was like a lot of cool things that I don't think it Lego would have ever touched on otherwise. So it was really, really neat for getting some sweet Lego stuff related to some awesome franchises. Get your builder a Lego Dimensions mashup multiverse. They can collect their favorite characters and breathe into life in the video game. That's really, really cool.

Yeah. That's, um, I guess people just don't want that stuff, right? Yeah. Like, I feel like people were always more interested in the, like, the physical stuff. Yeah. And it's like no one actually was into the games in a sense. So they just like, like if the games weren't being. supported like they can really continue to push it yeah like for me i like pushing the digital and the physical

like i have the last uh the last two jackets that did for destiny the uh garden salvation and the uh whatever the stone stone stone crypt stone stone yeah yeah so that's that's a big jacket i don't if you have it but i think i did get the vault of glass one myself i only started playing destiny again in april so i was a little bit behind yeah i i stopped after i did a stick keystone crypt whatever the heck it's called because uh deep stone crick yeah because i got i got bored i wasn't it's in a pretty good place right now i got to say that's what i keep hearing if you're looking to get back into it that's the thing too now yeah that's what i keep hearing it's a lot easier to connect with your friends and stuff which has definitely been uh pretty awesome so yeah don't get me stuck on that because like i

literally put in oh it's a time suck yeah when i was playing like heavily i was putting at least like 30 40 hours like a week oh 100% just like after work i would all it would do is play desk I would grind it. I would stream it. I would talk about it. I would watch videos. I would grind and do the boring stuff and I would listen to, I would listen to Biff, do like his long, like hour long, like, yeah, Lord videos.

All right guys, it's now a destiny stream. So the second part of the podcast is where we're talking about destiny all day. You want to make sure like Dennis gets to, or yeah, sorry I can get to this. This was the little Tetris build I whipped up for you yesterday. That's awesome, man. I tried to even like match like these colors for the blocks are based on the um Tetris 99 colors. Yeah, I wanted it to have a little bit of the classic look. So it's got like the lines at the top there and stuff.

I did up like a simple little builds to do the text. That is so cool. So you're very talented, man. Thank you. Yeah. Keep it up. You're just looking love with you right now. There isn't nothing that can that is going to stop me from building.

I just love it too much. So yeah. Yeah. No, yeah. I mean, it shows, man. We can tell you that you love it and that love, you know, like it, it, you know, it flows out of you and everything you're doing. We can see it.

So kudos, man. We like seeing all the cool stuff you're doing. Yeah, the passion is a hard. I'm glad I have, like, the internet as a place to kind of share it with. It's really, really fun being able to do that. So thank you guys for having me here today. It's been amazing. No worries.

No worries. Okay, so folks, we're going to try to solve some different. We're going to go ahead and, so I know it's going to have a hard. cut, but I want to get this before we start doing the outro. So we're trying to remember, and I'm really bad remembering, you can ask Ivan, to, like, raid and host people after the show. So I have someone lined up who we're going to raid after this. So if you guys can stick around, say hi for like five minutes if you want, stick around if you like or not. We're going to pick someone that, you know, that we've worked with or that we want to work with. I have a list.

I know. Ivan probably has a list. And Amanda has a lot of people on that list. So I'm going to, I'm going to be a little selfish and choose someone that I know that I think is a really cool creator who could use some love. So before we end the show, we're going to throw that out. If you have, I would say if you have someone, send an email. If you're someone that, you know, we'll check them out and we'll make sure that they're friendly for the show. And we'll, where do they send that email, Dennis? To, I have no, podcast. At nzxy.com.

You'll start sending you emails now. podcast at nzxy.com or again if you want to ask this question off the air you can so with that let me just get this ready to go hope it's not too loud uh who cares doesn't matter thank you again for joining us brick and nick thank you so much for having me it was seriously a blast out chat and you know anyone else who's going to be listening later enjoys uh hearing about some uh lego fun with us so yeah and uh thank you to everybody who tuned in remember to tune in next week at 10 a m Pacific Center time of the official NZ60 Twitch and follow at N6T on all relevant and irrelevant social media. And if you want to ask a question off the air, send it to podcast at nzxte,

perfectly enunciated.com. And don't forget to listen to previous episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud, folks. Don't forget also to share the show with a friend if you like them or an enemy if you don't like them or maybe an enemy you like. that you want to turn into a friend because this show is about making friends. I think, I don't know. I feel like we made a friend today. I think we did too. I literally just want to hop on calls with Nick and say, hey, just show me all your stuff, dude.

I just want to show all your stuff. We run around and show you built for hours. Got tons of builds. Yep. So, thank you very much. And we'll see you next time. Bye.