NZXT PODCAST - #117 - Andy Lunique

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

This week we're joined by Epic Games' Marketing Manager Andy Lunique! We discuss cooking, baking, video games, being a chef, and content creators. Follow Andy at twitter.com/andylunique Tune in live every Thursday at 10AM PT on twitch.tv/NZXT and send your questions to: [e-mail]

I apologize for anybody's ears that I blew out there. The record, the trap version of the song is pretty flames. Oh, but, okay. If you want other versions that we shop, hold up. Hold up. Oh, you don't know. You don't even understand. I got, I've got remixes on remixes on remixes.

How about this one? How about this one? Actually, I don't even play like five seconds, though, for obvious reasons. Hell breezy. Let me show you how to keep the dash running. And that's it. Because I forget what the lyrics are. I need that link right now.

I need that link right now. I got you. That was amazing. Have you never heard that one before? So good. I've never heard that one now. I've also got, let's see it. I've got a SCA version of it.

If you ever heard of SCA2 Network? This guy's great. He does remixes of SCA. Scala remixes of popular music. I don't like SCA, but at the same time, I also really, really like Scott, you know? I personally think the next time we have these gamer parties, these little events, these Twitchcons,

or whatever you want to call them. We should be paying ska and punk and rock instead of the same old stuff we always hear. I'm super down. I'm super like if like the furthest, the latest year I want to play music at like a gaming event or whatever, it has to be like 2005 EDM. Anything after that, it's like when you start hitting like the dubstep years and that's when it starts going really crazy with like, you know, all these other artists, which is fine.

it's good music, but I've heard it so many times over so many years. You know, it's just a lot. I'd be down for, like, your really cool gamer show where we're just, like, hip-hop and stuff all day. That's, like, where I kind of, like, that's, like, my thing. For those who understand. I mean, we can do it in teams. So we can, not teams, one of the spaces?

We can just do that, right? It'd be cool. It's like, we just listen to beats all day. Or we'd have different shifts. Yeah, shout out to those two who, uh, who caught those, uh, instrumentals before we started started the show anyway hi everybody hello welcome to episode 117 of the nz60 podcast the official podcast of the nzc committee i'm turn this off this podcast is recorded live every thursday at 10 a n pacific standard time of the official nzcd twitch and available to stream

on demand on apple podcast google podcast spotify and sound cloud so get your knives out and grab a clean ex because we're about the chop some onions my friends my name is dennis and with me as always it's not ivan he's having some technical difficulties we have tally today with us Woo! I'm so excited. What's going on? How are you, Tyler? How are you feeling?

You know, I didn't sleep very well last night, so I don't know if this is going to be coherent, Tali, or if I'm just going to laugh at everything. So this could go in any direction right now. Be prepared. Everyone, be prepared. Are you excited for your debut as the co-host of the show? I mean, I feel like I've been a good.

guest host before, but never a co-host. I feel like this is a massive level up. Like, I feel the weight of the responsibility. This feels tougher than, like, raising a kid, I think. The mantle of responsibility shall be held with great effect. Yeah, I don't know that I'm going to be able to live up to Ivan. And Ivan, of course, will return. But I am happy to support in this moment when I'm needed.

Maybe he will. Who knows? Jury is still out. No, kidding. So we have special, special, super deeper special guest today. Andy Lunique. So I had like a whole thing planned, but since we were to kind of already kicked it off, can you just let us know, Andy?

Who are you? What do you do? Why are you here? Who are we all here, really? Such a fascinating philosophical question. My, in life I am, I would say, food enthusiast, chef and guest. gamer, bridge creator. My professional job is I manage influencer relationships for the Epic Game Store.

So if there are folks out there who need content from my group, that's the ones you, I'm the team you go to. But when it comes down to what I do in the metaverse of food and gaming, if you had to create a menu that was just themed off of Castlevania, I could do that for you in five minutes. If you had to easily create an entire menu that was based off of the game awards, I'm your guy. If you need to know how tall a very deep-looking NCXT PC Tower is via pancakes, I'm also your guy. None of those things have any value whatsoever, but that's what I'm here for.

So, yeah, that's what I do. That's awesome. You know, I actually have two gamer cookbooks. I have the Elder Scrolls cookbook and the Destiny cookbook, actually. Ah, those are good books, but you got to get that Final Fantasy cookbook. Probably one of Victoria's best. If you guys have to check those books out, the Final Fantasy Cookbook is Beyond the Shadow of a Doubt,

one of the best she's ever done. It's really solid, and I really got to say some of the recipes there are like hardcore staple recipes. You'll love it. I actually don't like Final Fantasy, so I won't be buying that book. Doesn't matter. recipes are great. But I can't knowingly support Final Fantasy ever.

I'm sorry. I can't do it. Sorry, this is over. I'm done here. All right. Have a good one. So, Tiley, how's your day going so far? What's good?

My day. I just dropped my phone. So other than that, great. Yeah. Oh, sorry, Andy. We're going to talk about my now broken phone. Yeah. Well, dialogue.

So, Andy, what got you into working with creators and streamers? Oh, goodness. This question, whenever it comes up, it's interesting because I have had the opportunity to work with these folks since I started in the industry because many of them were just friends. They were the folks who were back on Justin. I watched YouTube religiously. It was before it was what it is today.

But I genuinely remember seeing what it was like in the early ecosystem. Once I had left the hospitality industry and once I got out of cooking, when I studied at full sale, I focused in on gaming, game marketing, but had, how do you say, a major focus on influencer marketing as well as content creators. Like new media is what they used to call it. And now it's just media. So it feels like once I understood them, I'm not. is leaned in and got all of the understanding and the accreditation and all the advice from these creators themselves to like build programs and build the right way to do it and that's how i got into it and now i'm genuinely dedicated to making sure these folks are as successful as possible like

my entire work revolves on making them and their lives as easy as possible if they win i'm happy and then when anyone does any harm to them i want to destroy anybody who does that so very protective of my children in the ecosystem no matter how many millions they make. So, yeah. That's awesome. I thought, what would you say, can I follow up, goes into helping a creator become successful? Oh. Hmm.

You've heard the typical tropes of what makes a creator successful, but I guess you should first start by defining success. We have folks out there who are Cream of the Crop, top 1%, consider successful. But we also have folks that you may not even heard of, but have such a driven, communicative, and very dedicated audience that also find success. So I'd probably say one of the first things you should do is set your expectations, if that makes sense. Being able to say, I want to reach these levels. And if you happen to supersede or rather go beyond those boundaries of where you've learned, that's what you find that you're going to hit another milestone. But keeping yourself focused if you're not keeping yourself relegated to a schedule for success. But most importantly, keeping yourself authentic to what your brand and content is about is probably the easiest way to go about it.

Because if you ever move away from your initial thoughts behind how you want to create your content, who you want to vibe with, what communities want to be part of, you'll find yourself getting further away from your goals. And finally, from your success. So I'd feel like that's probably the best way to communicate that advice to folks. Right. Now, as someone who works on programs for creators, how do you help facilitate that success? Well, at Epic, I'd probably say the entire ecosystem

is dedicated to making sure creators of all types, shapes, and sizes have the support they need. Whether it's, I just need information. I just need our affiliate program that we provide, you know, the revenue share to some of their games the program, but also just getting access to certain things. Like, you know, if you're a content creator, that's a variety creator. Getting access to games might be the way that you get support.

But sometimes it's just information, upcoming titles, maybe just getting advice about how to pursue other avenues. In other cases, some folks are looking for, I see these things happening next year. How do I engage with those pieces? That's how they're kind of looking at it. Other than that, yeah, that's pretty much how it would probably drop it. That's awesome. That's really cool.

Yeah. I know, you know, we work with creators here all the time, right? And, you know, we're always trying to build something new. It's always, to me, super interesting to hear how others in the industry kind of help, you know, their favorites, non-favorits, whatever. Just like creators in general kind of be successful. Because I know, you know, there's a lot of creators out there who just do it on their own, right? And to be able to come in and, like, support them and, like, uplift them to me is super, super important, right? because I think as much as a lot of people want to say, right, or want to say to the contrary,

say to the contrary, I cannot talk today. I'm sorry, it's been a morning. It's been a morning. Have you had enough coffee yet? Take another sip. I'm just not going to do it. It's just not hitting all kinds of stuff. Yeah, but you know, there's, you know, I see a lot of discourse among, you know, the regular folk on the internet's, right, who are like, I don't get creators. I don't know why they're a thing, right? But I think in like the overall gaming ecosystem, they do provide a very important service. Not just that. There's like super entertaining, right?

There are certain creators like, you know, when I'm bored or I'm feeling down, I'll pop on their stream. And it's always a good vibe and I'm feeling fine and I'm learning something new or I'm enjoying, you know, like what they're doing. And I think, you know, us in the industry on the other end, if we have the ability to kind of help them do what they want to do but better, I don't see why not, right? Exactly. And we have a tendency to pigeonhole ourselves into our perspective genre of creator. Like often when we're talking about gaming creators, we just like, okay, all gaming folks, gaming all the time, gaming streams. But I've especially in the last couple of years, I've learned just how impactful it can be to work with creators who dabble in other areas that are talking to audiences in the gaming ecosystem. But their content, while somewhat related to gaming, it might be related to entertainment and media. It's still super effective.

Like one of my favorite channels on YouTube is cinema wins and then sitiflix, right? All about moves. All about movies. All about film. Looking at the other side of it. But lots of gamers love film. We do love films. We're all talking about Spider-Man.

We're all going to see Spider-Man. Don't spoil it. Like it's, yeah. What was that? I said, don't spoil it. And by the way, anybody who spoils anything in the chat, you're gone. That's it. No appeal.

Nothing. Wherever they ban you from, I'll ban you as well. I'll destroy you. Don't think about it. You can't play Fortnite or anything. You got Andy on here. It's got the juice. When it comes to it, you start to speak to folks who live in different ecosystems, and then suddenly it's just like, oh, I'm able to talk to different audiences because they're not always just watching gaming content.

So when we start to expand what we consider our creator in our programs, whether there's interest or not, it doesn't matter about what the creator is talking about. It matters what the audience is receiving. And sometimes the messages cross over. So it helps us also get out of that bubble. Because you know what that looks like. Over time, it's just like, I'm in this bubble. And I only split the same 1,000 people every single year. And it's like, you don't know.

There could be somebody who's making movies who could really, you know, want to speak to a company like yourselves, for example. It's just like, yeah, I use all of your equipment, but I've never talked to you before. And suddenly the opportunity is missing because we don't think about that. So I feel like that's a good way to look at it long term. That's awesome. That's great.

So how do you do that, day to day, what does your everyday look like to help your, your, help your children be the best that they possibly can be? Well, first I start by crying for an hour, you know, because there's too much going on. That's just the first part of the day. Yeah, right. And then the pushups and things like that. And they actually get to work. Essentially, the best way to go about it is just one, be in the know, right? Know what's coming, but also find out what they're interested in. I will often just put out tweets of, hey, who's playing XYZ games? mostly because I need to understand how those games might impact other folks.

More often than not, I'll be like, this is an obscure game. I don't know if anyone will like it or not. What's the interest level? What goes on? I talk to folks that way. Other than that, it's also listening a ton. Right now, most folks give you all the information you need. What do you want to play?

What's coming up? What do you want to talk about? Who are you looking to get in contact with? Good God, that's 90% of the conversations of. I want to do this. Who do I talk to? And then suddenly, oh, yeah, it's this person. It's an email away.

So many creators essentially are coming around with their hat in their hands, looking for contact from developers. They want to speak with these folks. They want to speak with companies. And I try really hard to just make sure I open up those books to them. But other than that, it's just a lot of preparing for different launches. And you know, we just launched Final Fantasy 7 on the Epic Game Store today. And we're also giving away Shenmood today.

Like, those are very big games. And most folks think, oh, it's so exciting. And then you just want to keep them in the loop about what's going. going on. And yeah, I have lots of content creators looking for Final Fantasy right now. In fact, way too many. But nevertheless, yes, if that's going to help you create content, you go right ahead and play. If people using your creator code and like, you know, pushing that is going to help you succeed even if it's just, you know, a little bit of monetization over time, you go ahead and do that. That's an important piece of it. So yeah, that's what we do.

That's awesome. And before, before Epic, what were you doing again? I was at Discord before this. Discord, okay. What? What? You know, wait a minute, Discord. I know someone who works at Discord. What?

I had no idea. No idea. Yeah, I know. I worked with some really interesting people at Discord. Don't remember any of them though. Yeah, I heard it's pretty forgettable over there, to be honest. Wow. Wow.

So can you, can tell us a little bit about what you did at Discord? Briefly, briefly, I would say, manage all of the paid influencer campaigns for user acquisitions. user acquisition. So if you were... These are all lies. What Andy did. I will tell you what Andy did it. I would hear what Tal and you do. What did Andy do? He made us

waffles. It's very true. Help me emotionally stable and supported and made us more waffles. So there you go. That is what I think should be on his business card of Discord was the chief waffle maker. It's a big C-level executive rule.

That is required. all companies now. Okay. What do you think is accurate? Is that an accurate description? I can genuinely tell you I don't remember anything else but the waffles. And then, you know, we did a few businessy things. But yeah, I remember spending an entire day catering to an entire company making

waffle. So yeah, that's a good point. It's a good point. I don't really remember anything else. So nothing else is important. And wait. And hung out with me at events. I will throw that in there because fair hung out with me at events should be part of it.

So. We did some of the best of events. Yeah. We did some really good events. So if that's true, what does a new Twitter about bio safe, former Discord Discord CWO, chief waffle officer? I don't have enough characters. I would love to have a few more just to be like former, former, because most folks don't really know the history. Yeah.

But at that point, you're just like, just go to my LinkedIn, leave me alone. Yeah, that's that's very true. Yeah. I'll see a lot of a lot of former former formers. I'm like, yeah, but where are you at now? What are you doing now? How are you feeling? What's happening?

How you feel? So I'm actually going to jump ahead a little bit on the questions and ask you. How much did you hate working with Talley? Oh, no. She was, you need to stop that right now. She was a great spot. Tally's amazing. Tally's amazing.

You know, if there's one thing I really enjoyed at Discord, especially working with Tali, is no matter how crazy or bad things might be, no matter how difficult things might be. get beyond the shadow of a doubt, the coolest thing was, you were still kind of happy at the end of the day once it was over. Like we were all in hell together. The bad days, stuff where it's like, yeah, we're still working towards it and it's all good. And, you know, I haven't been there for a little bit now, obviously. But I think, you know, right, pre-pandemic, it was a pretty nice place because we still had fun, or at least we still try to have fun. Now, obviously, I hope everyone's still doing well. And naturally, people are still happy there. But I can't say that it's an easy time for folks. So at the very least, just finding as much positivity as you can get. I mean, come on, we're in, right? But at the very least, for sure. Yeah, I feel like that's a good piece. It's true. 100% true.

I mean, it's tough. I feel like everyone's been hit so hard by everything that's going on in the past couple of years. And I think seeing people come together in places like this is what brings me joy and what gives me life these days. So I think the one thing I would just throw in. In addition to that, Andy is that we had such a great. great group of people and I think that's why I love gaming and I don't know if you feel the same. I know you've been in it as long as like as long as I have. But like it's such a good group of people who work in this industry who support each other. And I feel like I've been super

lucky to work with great people and I still get to work with great people. And that I think is what's helped me get through the pandemic and being away from my family and being not being able to go to Canada and get my bagels and all of that stuff. It's been tough. But, it's because of this industry and the people in it that I think it's been bearable. Okay. So you just said the magic word. I'll be right back. Give me like 30 seconds.

I will quickly return. Hold up. Wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Excuse me? We're going to find out. We're going to find out. I have a guess at where he's going and I will fill you in when he gets here.

I feel like he's coming to kill me or something. Here's the story. He just left and covered the camera. Now he's going to enter the room any second. I feel like that would be a really far commute, so I think you're good. I'm going to paint a picture with my words, all right? So I'm working, you know, I'm doing my normal day to day and I'm doing stuff right. And I hear a doorbell ring and my dog starts going absolutely insane.

I'm like, dude, what the heck is wrong with you, dog? Stop barking all the damn time. I open the door and knew what I get. This is what I get. I get this box. And I knew immediately what the heck was in the same. this box, right? And you know what the hell is in here?

It's bagels. But not just that. It's not just what thing is bagels, right? It's this. It's this. And this. And one more pack is actually open in the freezer. I didn't put him in the freezer.

I don't like freezing. Let me guess that someone who has a bagel complex, a bagel superiority complex, happened to send you. some of the best bagels on the planet. Is that about right? Montreal bagels, by the way. I may have sent my entire team Montreal bagels for the holidays, maybe. Oh, my God.

I may have sent everyone bagels a little holiday treat. I can't. So I feel like. I'm a little cranky because I'm a little cranky. Like, I haven't gotten bagels. I'm a new dad and everything and you didn't send a single, Marya bagel. You know what? Marial locks.

And you sit there criticizing me. Oh, my God. I owe Andy bagels. I owe a box of bagels to Andy. It's because Andy, I was like, I want to deliver them in person, but pandemic made that really hard. So I'm pixelated. Hold on. Whoa.

He's got snap by Thanos. Oh, gosh. Oh, no. He's completely. Okay, but wait, wait. Can I just ask, Dennis? Yes. now that you've experienced the bagel

was it worth the hype they are good as you know my favorite bagel that's not a good start my favorite bagel my favorite bagel are blueberry bagels because I love blueberries hold the cats in the box with it okay

so I think they're good right they're a little bit thinner than I was expecting right and there's also a hole in them and I was told that that Canadian Montreal bagels don't have a hole in them. That's what makes them special. And there's holes in all these things. So I feel like I've been lied to. Um, I never said the thing about no holes in bagels.

I just wanted noted that like that was a, you know, Ivan's not here. So that was Ivan. I'm throwing Ivan right under that bus. Yeah. Ivan lied. There were holes in our bagels and they are delightful. I will say to everyone, I had to teach everyone how to warm up a bagel because not everyone knew how to do it the right way. Y'all do it wrong. That's all I'm saying. The way, the way, the way Let's take a step back. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Thank you. Please, please, Annie, continue.

Go on, go on. Explain yourself because the two correct ways and only correct ways to heat a bagel, besides having it fresh, is A, a grill with butter, or B, a toaster or broiler, topside down. Toasters, the American Toasters, garbage. I just want to be clayed, that's what I'm talking about. I mean, they are bad, yeah. Useless. Were you, Andy, were you there when I did the bagel tasting at Discord?

Are you serious? I was the first one. They said, get over here right now. I was in the meeting with several developers. You walked to the glass, knocked on the glass and said, move your ass in front of a third-party publisher. And then I had to leave to get the bagel. Came back and ate it in front of them.

Don't act like you don't remember that. And how was it? How was it for you? It was absolutely delicious. You gave me cream cheese, one, and then butter and peanut butter on the other ones. I was not upset, and I ate them all in a week. Okay.

So let's discuss the fact that the way you warm up a bagel, at least a Montreal bagel, I am not going to pretend to be an expert in New York bagels, is you do not slice it, you put it in the oven, whole. I put it in for like, I don't know, a couple minutes, just enough to get the outside crispy. And then when you cut it open, you have the crispy outside and the soft doughy inside. And that is when you put the cream cheese on. So you don't cut it in half first so it gets all crusty on top.

You have it. It's the way to do it. It's like how it is when it's fresh. Shot is punching the air right now. They're so mad hearing this. I just, everyone knows the real, this is the real. I'm giving you all the real gaming chair. She's saying that you cut it afterwards.

You don't cut it during, you cut it after. After. First you warm it up and you let the like heat inside make it extra delicious. I had, I'm not going to lie last night. I was like, I'm really craving a bagel. So I had like a late evening bagel. which I very rarely do. I very rare snack later in the evening.

And I was like, I just need this bagel. Like, I need some extra life. And so I'm getting it. I'm getting some bagel. Did you know, Andy, that I got a bagel tattoo? I feel like you know that. I would have remembered that. Yes, I did indeed get a bagel tattoo on my ankle, a Montreal bagel tattoo, just to be clear.

I pre-sliced because I like the outside where I put my cream cheese to be crispy. I have a little bit of crisp to it. Yeah. Yes. It's wrong. Yes. It's wrong. Yes.

It's the wrong way to do it. No. It does give me an idea, though. It gives me an interesting idea because if I were to, for funsies, make a cream cheese powder or like a cream cheese sauce for a bagel ordive. So I said it is cream cheese and a bagel. You have a really, really high-end bagel experience and like a little bit of like perfected locks on top. What kind of hors d'oeuvre? that be right oh my god it's a good idea a delicious one um but before we go deeper on the bagel

i do want to say does anyone else here have any food tattoos i'm just curious because i feel like i'm not the only one so i just want to share that i am not the only the way that andy was moving i thought he was going to like lift up his shirt and he has like a whole chest piece of like pizza or something crazy like that? Pizza? No, incorrect. I first of all, TOS, okay, I can't do that on Twitch. But on top of that, on Zendez's arm, I'm not going to show it.

But on this arm, I have a waffle holding Xbox controller. I also will be getting my next tattoo once things are a little bit more safer. The next one is going to be a pancake holding a PlayStation controller. And then beneath that is going to be a biscuit holding a Nintendo Switch. dual controller at the very top over the shoulder is going to be my chef with a PC controlling all of these marionette breakfast foods playing video games the perfect combination of my gaming and food uh uh uh uh ties but i just love tattoos i mean i've got devil make cried tattooed on this arm so i believe believe me when i say i'm not shy about ink so yes that is that is me there you go

the french toast i haven't figured it out because the french toast this looks like bread so i was just like i don't know how to make the french toast look so i haven't figured out the design for the french toast but i also would want the french toast holding a vr set that's what i'm hoping for because french toast is just you know next here this next level you do you have color on your tattoos or you black is there are they all like just outline black outlines i've stuck with black outlines i have not been dead sure about how i want to perceive color so i'm going to try something small and then go from there like i wonder if on your french toast you could have like a powdered sugar thing on it and that makes it look less like just regular toast.

Some syrup and powdered sugar. Yeah. Oh, good Lord. How did you do that, that fact? I have a degree in internet sleuthing that I learned in my days, the early internet. That is terrifying. Yes, that is my tattoo. And that is.

There you go. Yes, I got that with a friend after her father had passed. I promised that I would get, she was going to get a tattoo. And I said just to make sure that she was comfortable that I would get a you're with her and then I just chose this and she's like you're just going to pick that and I'm like yes trust me it's going to be great I have all my tattoos planned out but yes that is on my arm I love it it's amazing it's amazing yeah I am I have to say I the bagel tattoo is my only food tattoo but I think I am ready for my next one so this to get ready fam here because at some

point I'm going to be like I need help with what the idea is but I I'm leaning towards a little bit, a little robot, possibly from Ratchet and Clank. Maybe there's a little robot in that game that I would like because he's so a cow. But that is what I think is going to be my inspiration, is a little robot tattoo as my next one. Have you seen Rivet yet? Have you played Ratchet and Clank? I don't want to spoil anything. I have just got my PS5 and I've started it.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. I started it. It's been really fun. And then the, what is it? Big Brain Academy came out on Switch. And that's my favorite fit.

Is that picture? You can find anything on the internet these days. That is so weird. There you go. I'm just scrolling through where you guys are talking about food tattoos. Because I have no food tattoos. Any tattoos count. I think any tattoos are good tattoos.

I got to wear the wild things are tattoos. All right, right. To go to Wonder Woman tattoo. I'm going to do on my leg. I just, like, would have to do a lot of maneuvers to get it up. But, like, I've actually never thought of a food tattoo. And I would, like, I don't know what food I would love enough to get on my body. And I would say maybe it's like spaghetti because I really, really like spaghetti.

And I make a really great spaghetti with, like, a mild Italian sausage or, like, I, like, decase it and, like, brown that first before I put it into the sauce. But I feel like they might look kind of weird. And, like, my second, my second. My second favorite food is tacos or are tacos, specifically pastoral tacos. But I'm mostly Hispanic and it might be kind of weird, right? There's like a weird implication of like having tacos as a Hispanic person as a tattoo. So I don't know if I want to go that far into it. But maybe I do, right?

Maybe it's like, hey, I don't care. I got tacos on my arm or wherever. Like here's my question. I would, so I have one very favorite food outside of bagels. I am wondering if Andy knows what it is. Wait, say that again. Do you know what my favorite, my favorite thing to eat is given the opportunity other than a bagel?

Wait, hold on. Give me a moment here. I'm just curious to see if you know. You might not. Some people know. Some people don't. No, no, no, no. Because I've gifted this to you several times.

Oh. And you've never once in your lifetime said no. Even on the worst days, even on the dredges of the packs floor, even in the worst of times, even at 2 o'clock in the morning. You've never said no to cheese. Yes, geez. It is! All the time.

I remember. I remember I, my camera's probably messing up because this thing probably fell, so I'm not 100% sure why it's doing that, but I remember it was the last day of Pax. It was maybe 1 a.m. I remember seeing this at the airport, and I remember begging someone to open the store because I had to bring it to you because I already knew what kind of day you were having and I had to deliver to you. And I remember saying, just trust me, it's going to be great because Beechers is the big cheese out in Seattle. And I remember just like, no, no, no, she needs to have this.

And I remember watching your face change after having a few bites. In that moment, you were good. It went straight to hell afterwards. But nevertheless, you had that moment of bliss. So yes, I feel like it was pretty solid. So I don't forget those things. Correct. Yeah.

Cheese is definitely it. I will also share with this group that Andy is one of the few people who has been in my house, has experienced the chaos. that is my house, has even cooked in my house. He, like, officially helped me make some treats for my, was it my housewarming? It was the housewarming. And then someone's birthday. And then on top of that, another party I can remember.

So, see, I invite Andy to parties and then he ends up working. But he's so good at it. He's so much better than me and making stuff tasty. I mean, what's just kind of thing. Some things that people don't know about me is that I am insanely uncomfortable on, at most parties. Like I don't like mingling. If I'm not dancing,

I don't like to make small talk. So I will find a job or project to avoid having to go meet people. Everyone comes to me. And then once I've worked enough, it feels like it's a good, oh, the food's ready. Okay, I can leave now and I don't have to talk. So yeah, it's a really good, like, it's a really good, like,

it's a good way to kind of escape having that. I don't want to call it social anxiety. I just hate big parties. Social anxiety, too. I told 100% I will say that I have tremendous social anxiety. I am such an introvert and everyone's like, tell you're such an extrovert. I'm like, I'm really not.

I can just like, it's like wearing a costume. You know, I can put the costume on and go out. But like it takes, like I have to really think about it. So I do think it's totally a form of social anxiety. I am so interested to see how we all do when we're back in reality and going to things like events. again and being around all those people. Like I am definitely interested

to see how that's manifested, but I feel the same. I go to parties and I literally want to like stand against the wall and see if I can just blend in to the background and hear things out from there. Or I find my anchor person and I'm like, that's it. You're hanging with me all night

and we are staying together as my safe space. And whatever that is, that poor person is then stuck with me. I would classify myself as a, as a extroverted introvert in the sense that like I'm cool to be around people, but then after a certain point, I'm just done and I want to go.

You have a battery. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's only so much. And once that's done, I'm gone, I'm like in my room or like in my cave and I'm playing a game and just like turning my brain off and just like not doing anything.

But when I'm on, your boy is on. We're ready to go. Yeah. The next convention that's going to hit is PACs. And PACs East is going to be the full test case of how ready, quote-unquote, we really are for this entire experience. And after that, whatever E3 is, and after that, who knows. But nevertheless, I hope that we have fun again.

I'm looking forward to private parties where not everyone's invited and, you know, selling that foam. I personally love those experiences. But so the one thing I will also throw out, because I'm making Andy say it on air, is I'm about to reach my kitchen, as Andy knows, because I've shared with him my plans. I feel like it's not going to be official official until Andy's in town and comes helps me do cool stuff in my kitchen. So you've all heard it here that all of this work that will go into this new kitchen that will give me tremendous anxiety over the next few months is not,

is only going to be in like a beta phase until I've had Andy buy to visit. That's the rules. I shall christen this kitchen and I will do so by making three items. Number one will be a soup. A soup? Two. Yeah, soup. It could trust me, it like sticks to the bones of the kitchen. It's worth it. So one will be a soup. Another will be an entire fondue set. Yes, that's for you. So like three cheeses, like 12 dips. Therefore you can just, I need that as decoy food, though, because you tend to like keep walking into the crossfire of the kitchen. So if I just like have an entire table of food that you can't, like you're just there. I just move you out of the way. And then I make like the real food. It's just like I'm like the steak and the chicken and things like that. But yeah, I need to have a decoy plate for you. It's fair. It's probably fair. I'm like, I am easily decoyed when it comes to snacks and treats of various. So then I have a question then to follow up on that. Talley, are you looking at a person who like when someone's cooking like a Thanksgiving dinner, you'll like pick at the stuffing like before it's even like done being cooked? Because I totally do that.

Guess and no. It depends on what someone's cooking. It depends on what's like I don't think even though, you know, maybe Andy has a different perspective. I don't necessarily get in the way unless there is something that is. pickable. Like when cookie dough is happening, I got to try the cookie dough. Like you can't make cookies without sampling the cookie dough or, you know, like if there's a sauce around and someone needs someone to taste it. When I like make mac and cheese from scratch, I got to test the sauce out in the process. But it depends on the food, right? Some are more appropriate for picking. Some are less appropriate. I will pick it anything and everything. If it's edible and it won't make me sick, I will just grab a little bit and just and then, and just walk away and then come back, just really sneaky like a bird. You know how birds eat, right?

They're like in a pick and then they like run away. It's true. You're like this. I want some of this. Yeah, exactly. I have a question for you, Andy. Okay. You are a newish dad.

What, how is your daughter doing with food? Oh my God. Okay. I am, if there was ever a doubt that this. this kid is mine. It is gone because when it comes to food, you need to have food that's seasoned. You need to have food with salt and pepper. And if it's the wrong temperature, she will let eat. I often have to show she and I actually have to plate up her food. Like I remember this was a competition a few times where the day went out and then essentially, you know, mom let me

know she couldn't get her to eat. And so when she came over, it was just like, hey, what did you do different? And she's destroying the noodles that I had made, eating all of the puffs that I I just done. Food already needs to look appealing to her. This is most kids. But if I don't take a bite first, she won't trust that it's tasty. So often, whatever I'm making her, like, she prefers cauliflower puree over mashed potatoes. She has ramen noodles with broth over regular spaghetti. She likes that she loves garlic. She isn't a fan of sweets just yet. She is a food pro. And what's amazing is she's in the kitchen with me constantly, which is pretty impressive. Like, she has her own little shelf. She has her own micro kitchen. She's tasting things. I have to stop with the bad, what's the word? I have to stop with the bad habits of like dipping my finger into hot boiling water because I don't feel it. I can taste boiling water to see if it's season, but I'm realizing someone's watching everything you do. So everything that became a pleasure to me when she's in the kitchen is now one giant risk that is anxiety inducing. So it has been amazing. She's going to love food, but I am doing my best to keep her from.

being a chef. If I can just not make her a chef, I'd be so happy. But we'll see. I mean, she can be like, like you, have cooking as a creative outlet and not necessarily a career direction, even though I'm sure if she decided to be a chef, she'd be incredible

and she'd be Michelin starring it all over the place, and I'd be calling you and be like, can you get me a table at the hot new restaurant that you're running? That would be great, thanks. I know. I just feel like the more I try to keep her away from certain things. I just know that, yep, eventually it's just going to turn into that, whether I like it or not. 100%. I will say that I'm, like, as the mom of a 13-year-old boy, I can tell you that my kid,

who is at school, so he's not watching, but is the worst eater in the world. If it's not like mac and cheese or pizza, those are the peanut butter and jelly, those are the food groups. Okay. And if it's green, it's an absolute hard no. So I'm pretty sure he's going to get some kind of like scurvy something at some point because vegetables are a no. I finally convinced him to try cauliflower and I literally pour cheese sauce. I had to make cheese sauce from scratch

and pour it all over the cauliflower to get him to eat the cauliflower and put noodles in it too. I was like it's kind of mac and cheese, but it's like mac and cauliflower and cheese and he was like, yes, I can tolerate it. He has started, but interestingly, he'll eat sushi. He's like, I like California rolls

or tamago or ramen and I'm like I don't understand your palate at all but he has a light palette like he's not into deep flavors that's what I'm hearing right now like he's not he's not into like that like he would he eat like black and chicken for example nothing with any spice he's 100% my kid and we all know I'm the biggest wimp when it comes any spice it is like a joke like it's it's embarrassing and he is as bad as me he is like oh my god did you put there's like a flake of pepper thing he's like I'm dying so No, but I think that's my fault.

And I also, like, I don't use salt too. So he's super sensitive to salt, which I am also. So I don't know. I kind of broke him. I think it's a little bit my fault. I'm trying really hard to just be like, you should eat all these things, even though I don't want to, but you should. People say this all the time, and I was a very different eater when I was in high school

until I started working in restaurants. So, like, by 15, whenever I was eating at, like, 14, completely changed night and day. And the difference was different cooking. style, different cooking methods, right? Like, I have made Brussels sprouts six different ways for the same person. And every single time they've had it, he's just like, wait, are you still Brussels sprouts? And I'm just like, yes. You have to understand things are very, very different. So it feels like it is beyond the shadow of it out, just how they prepare things. He's going to be fine. Don't worry. And besides, if he's not fine now when he's out there dating and, you know, obviously has to

impress someone, that's going to change his palette real quick. Because when you're cooking for somebody else, you'd better get that right. Yep. What I'm saying right now? Like, I can't, that is not something I am emotionally prepared to think about is him dating. I did make a reference the other day.

So it was his 13th birthday a couple weeks ago. So everyone should know. I don't know how to survive the next few years of the teenager. Congrats, buddy. But I was like looking at my car and I was secretly like, I want a new car even though I don't need one at all. But I was like, I want a new toy, which I can't afford to buy. but I was like I I max can just have this car in a couple of years and I was like what did I just say?

Like did that just come out of my mouth? Like is this even a real like a thought in my brain and it was and I wanted to like curl up in a corner and cry a little bit? But we'll see. I mean I for sure there are foods I did not like as a kid that I'm obsessed with now like Indian food any day. Any day put me in an Indian restaurant and I was joy but I remember going to Indian restaurants my parents as a kid and being like absolutely not. Like absolutely no interest. Like this is way too exotic for me. And now I am like, please take me there every day.

Like I literally want to live in this Indian restaurant. I never leave everything. So I do think you're right. These like palettes evolve and people evolve. But it's also what you're exposed to, right? Your daughter is exposed to a crazy amount of foods, I'm sure. And so I do feel sometimes like it's on me to make sure that Max is getting some exposure and that I push his boundaries a little bit.

even if he doesn't like something that he's got to try it like he's got to just try it once you don't have to like it but you have to at least be open to tasting it and then my job is done what you do from there you um what else do we want to know tennis what else do we want to know about andy i feel like there's so much more a couple things actually so so first splattering uh first congratulations to the folks who figured out the secret word for the giveaway uh it is cooking the secret word is cooking So who are figured out, GGs. Also, apparently I'm looking through the entries. Some, someone entered and got it right, but it says fraudulent behavior detected.

So I don't know what you did to get a fraudulent behavior on that, but loll. So that's void. GGs. I mean, how you manage that to be a thing, but that's funny. But on the topic of cooking, I used to call it out because that was funny. I know you can like fraudulently figure out a secret word, but I guess there is a way. Gigi's gleam. Good job.

So I'm the top of cooking. Andy, how did you get into cooking? What made you want to start cookering and like making stuff? I want to be crystal clear. My interest in cooking is directly related to a post-9-11 world. Okay. I know. It sounds crazy, right?

But I made some context. I was on track to join the military. I wanted to join the Air Force. I wanted to come back. I wanted to go to Sentinel military school. I wanted to be in the FBI. I was like full on. gun hell military law enforcement wanted to be.

My stepfather is actually, well, I shouldn't say that. Let's just say I have family members that are in the service at increased levels of national security. Bays have visibility, and it was just a family thing to do. And then September 11th. So I completely just changed up my entire perspective on hospitality, on work, and essentially just focus on cooking. So I worked in restaurants at like what, 14, 15. And then essentially kind of kept going through that, went through culinary school, in high school, went through tons of different aspects of cooking, obviously through throughout my lifetime. And that's when food was really becoming popular.

So that kind of got me into cooking. But, you know, the one thing that gave me the affinity and respect for it was hungry people. Like my mom would come home after work late as hell. And I would never quite understand how impactful it was to have food ready for her after. a day like that and i remember watching the moods change like when i fed people i just see them change like their entire energy is completely different and i think i found myself a bit addicted to that like i think you i mean to telly knows but i think anybody in this chat were to say man i'm really hungry i have this instinct to just go i need to give you food i need to make sure you're okay i need to

feed you something yeah and i want you to be uh i want you to be good so yeah it just feels like it's uh absolutely something i'd like to do does that make sense Andy is more Jewish mom than me, I think, in that way. He is, he trumps me in that department because he can actually make good food for people to eat. And I'll just be like, I will give you whatever snacks are in my cupboard. But I feel like that's, you know, the idea of people being feeder. It was like a nurture thing. Andy's a nurture.

And he can nurture me with snacks anytime he wants for the record. Anytime. I love feeding people. It's why like going to events, like I try to get a truck at the food at the game. Awards recently, but I couldn't get the permit. And it was kind of a downer where I was just like, oh, man, suddenly I can't get it now. That's kind of a downer. That stinks.

So it felt like I was unable to enjoy that experience to give folks food. But I was able to get like 90% of the way. So now I just have a food truck available at some point in time next year. So if there's anyone who wants to bring out a food truck that's going to serve probably chicken and waffle sliders where the waffles are the buns. I'll probably do that. And then I would equally do something like, I don't know, some type of chocolate truffle bowl,

but instead of it being like, you know, a really big thick truffle, it would be like a deep fried chocolate rice cracker on the outside. So it was a really light truffle pop. That sounds good. It's like, you know, sandwich and dessert, done. So let me hang it out next because I'm starting to get a little hungry. Yes, seriously, I'm starving.

I will tell you, Andy Max's favorite food is chicken and waffles. 100%. If I tell him what you just said, he will die. Literally die. I'm confident in my chicken and waffles because I use a recipe that uses sweet tea as brine. I double fry in my flour. I've been working on this flour recipe for like years. The preserved lemon that I use in the gravy for the maple, it is like maple syrup and there's like a nice like maple gravy that's made with compound butter.

Like you can take chicken and waffles way beyond what you've had. Oh my God. I'm so hungry right now. More. It's like torture. I swear. So hungry. I did see someone ask, Andy, what is your favorite thing to cook?

Or like, what's your favorite thing if you're going to cook something? Favorite meal or style of cooking? Any of what? I have to answer this two ways. I love dragging really, really upscale fancy foods down to like a street food level. So like I will take an age. I'll take like a 90 day age steak, foie gras, shallot, and then like slice it all up, Philly cheese steak style and put that on a Hawaiian bun.

Like, I want to drag it all the way down. I love making, like, really fancy food, really ghetto. That's a big favorite of mine. That's awesome. So, because, you know, you can make lots of other things upscale. I have a ton of chefs doing it all the time. But, like, you know, who's getting real ridiculous, right? I think I would say my favorite food to cook of all time.

I was trained classical Italian. That was the first restaurant. I grew up in Italian neighborhood. Portuguese food. Italian was probably the two biggest areas. But I would probably say I'm, I'd go toe to toe with anyone. with, you know, with Italian food, I feel really confident in that food. But finally, the last thing like death row food, like last meal I ever want to make,

I love making this dish. It's paella. Like, I can spend six, seven hours making paella. How many different ways and taking very, very careful steps to make it just, but like at the end of the day, you have this beautiful dish that everybody can just come in and take a spoonful. I love that. Love paella. Do you, Andy, question from me.

Do you play cooking games? Oh, absolutely. I'm obsessed with them. Favorite? What's your favorite? I am too, by the way, but what's your favorite? The number one cooking game out there is Battle Chef Brigade. Here's why.

Battle Chef Brigade. Yeah, okay. Battle Chef Brigade, everyone should play it. Here's why. It is actually talking about the fundamentals of cooking without actually explaining it to you. So you go out and then you go out and you hunt your ingredients, you collect what you want, you make what you want. Here's the difference, though. It's Iron Chef style, so it's a game where you literally like Devil May Cry style, beat up your ingredients and bring them back.

However, you are supposed to meet a flavor profile for the chef. They don't tell you what to make. They say, I want you to hit this particular color. I like an earthy flavor. I like a fiery flavor. I like a more watery flavor. It's then up to you to go as far as you're comfortable going, taking the risks associated with fighting those animals, bringing it back, and then creating some type of dish that's your own making.

You could really do whatever you want. You can even change pots, change different cooking methods, and then serve it to those dishes. And then the game properly interprets what you were trying to do. Not to mention the actual competitive cooking style of it is pretty awesome. The developers have hidden so many interesting culinary and tropes as well as messages from other chefs in the past. Like one quote that said at the very first battle is, an ingredient is only as a remarkable as the chef that wields it. It's a very beautiful message. And it's just like super inspiring.

And the way the game is presented, I tell everyone if you want a really strong cooking game, I think that's far, far outpaces, overcooked or cooking mama, because it feels like we're talking about the essence of food creation, regardless of the dish itself. Right. What about, have you played my favorite cook service? You know, I've never played that? What? It's so good.

It's so good. I've got every version of that, literally every version. Yeah, I feel like I've never tried to. And I don't know why I keep missing it, but I think it's because I'm seeing new and new games coming out. I think there's a new game coming out that has a, it's from a group of developers that has to do with arranged marriages and disappointing your exes. I can't remember. It was just enough to game awards. But at the core, it's a cooking game.

We also have another game called Epic Chef, but which is like, you know, it's like it's Star Dew Valley, but you also have to cook and serve. Like quite literally, that's the game. It's just like, I'm an RPG and I'm Stardue. And then I also get to do these things. Like, those games are pretty sick. Like, I'm really top to bottom. You can really get crazy with it. And I also just find out that New World has an entire cooking area as well.

Yeah, they do. Oh, my God. That's insane. So, yeah, that felt like that was pretty solid. So I need to play Cook Serve Delicious. I feel like I should do that. But I didn't know if that was a service game or a cooking game. But I really would check that game out.

I love it. I mean, I think, I don't. I don't, I mean, I don't know. Cooking game or service game. That's interesting. I mean, you should just try it. And tell me what you think. I've been playing the latest one, which I three.

And it's more, it's food truck. It's a food truck in this one versus a little restaurant. So I love it. I play them all. So you should try it. And I can discuss on your next appearance on the podcast. You got a deal. You got a deal.

That's awesome. Okay. Yeah. I can't remember the last time I played a cooking game other than cooking mama. But I kind of like what you. said about Battle Chef Brigade because the thing about Cooking Mama is like you're just following what the game tells you to do, but you don't really feel like you're like doing, you know, what like I feel was to me or is to me always fun about cooking because, you know, I started cooking

a lot more during the pandemic. And it's like, I follow a recipe, right, just so I know what I'm doing? And then over time, like, okay, I'm going to try this again, but what if I did this little different? What if I added this spice? Maybe I let this cook a little bit more, a little bit less, whatever. And like, I can like that. So I'm definitely actually going to check this out. I'm, I think I need to my wish list right now. So good. So I can pick it up. It is also on Switch.

So I actually played it for the first time on Switch, which was great for me because I was traveling to things like Pax at the time. So I could actually take it with me. So, you know, when there's a hand system that I can play games on, that is I have very, like I like to bring my games with me everywhere I go. That's a big deal for me actually because I. Play everywhere in the house. Like if you're on the couch and you can play a game, if you're upstairs in bed, you can play a game or if you're outside on the yard and you can play, you seem to be happy.

Yes, that is my happy place. But also, like, I have a kid who's always on PC. He steals my PC all the time. So there's no way I'm ever getting on the PC unless he's like at his dad's or asleep. And so, and I like to travel. So there's that. Yeah, Battleship Free is really good. Now I kind of want to go back to it.

even though again, I've been playing Brain Academy just so I'm in case. Anyone was not sure about that. I want to throw out there that I'm a genius. But I do want you all to check out some of these other games. There is also a cooking me game on VR. I don't know if you've tried that one. It's on a populace. It's super random.

I use the term cooking lately. It's more like a sandwich game. But you have to like you're running like a little cafe and you have to feed all these animals that come up so you've got to put your sandwiches together in the right order to get them out to the customers but I will of course never play it in front of other people because I look like such a tool while I'm trying to like move around and get all to reach for everything but I was like I could cook in VR I feel like that is a level up experience for that is I got to tell you you you could assume that it's one of my dreams to make a cooking game

one day and if I ever get crunchy on being able to use PlayStation Dreams, or maybe even the Unreal Engine because it's really easy to use. Maybe I'll be able to do that one day. But I've always wanted to make a game that allows you to learn more recipes just by talking to people and walking around. Like you learn recipes by going to restaurants and you tried this out and then like you get inspiration points and then it unlocks even more recipes or you can put it together any want. And like you can be able to take components and be like, I made this dish, this dish, and this dish and it makes something else. I feel like that could be a really successful game. But it's just insanely difficult to like make something like that because people love food, but often people who love food don't love it so much.

They want to cook all the stuff. Like you still need to have a game component. But maybe in the future someone will come up with the idea. Because so far, you probably noticed, there's games like Noir, No, N-O-U-R that is all about hot pot and cooking. And it's about the experience and it's telling a story with family. It's like a mother cooking for her son, but learning from her. mother and it's this whole dialogue, but it's centered around the food. There's another game that's centered all around hot pot cooking. There's another game that's centered around so many different

areas of food. It's super interesting. Like, I've seen how many different titles in the last few years just speak to the food ecosystem and then even just thinking about what it means to be a chef, what it means to eat? Interesting all the way. Come on. We've seen games incorporate food. Yeah, there it is. So, you know, even seeing games incorporate food is pretty fantastic, don't you think? Like, it's pretty awesome. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Yeah. All right, Dennis, what other questions do we have? I know we had a whole list for him totally taking us off the, no, no. It's all related, actually, because my next one was about to be, Andy, if you give someone advice who wants to learn how to cook, what's your first piece of advice? Okay. I have recently been trying to break this down because I realize that who I'm speaking to. Oh, hold on.

My camera's starting to do that weird thing again. Who I'm speaking to actually makes the biggest difference. Okay. And here's what I mean. And you're going to laugh at me. Anybody who's familiar with theoretical physics and how civilizations work, I'm going to be using something based off the Cardiff scale. If you know what that is, thumbs up.

If you don't know what it is, go Google it. But if you look at the Cardiff scale, you have a range from folks who genuinely have no value in food, only order out, can maybe microwave a burrito, right up until there's folks who could run food empires, who could legitimately start a restaurant tomorrow morning if they needed to. So there's a scale. But in that scale, there are still people who need to learn food. So the first thing you want to do is start to sort yourself as to what level you're at.

Because there's a lot of people out there who say, I can't cook, but some folks who genuinely can easily make eggs, noodles, pancakes, things like that, other folks who cannot. So the first thing you do is categorize yourself. So once you know where you're at, you should start. to perfect your recipes. So if all you can make is eggs, make the best eggs you can. Look at YouTube videos, look at tutorials, try different methods, try poach, try scramble, then try Sunnyside. Perfect those basic skills and then level yourself up. That's a good way to start. So if I were to take that exact same theology and move that up to like a high level chef, you know how to make really

high-end black-squitting pasta with seared scallops. Make that several times, make different variations, try to get better of that one. Thank you very. very much, Misfit. I appreciate that. So when you look at that perspective, that's where you start really learning how to improve. Because cooking is maybe six different cooking methods done over and over and over and over again. Every single culture in the world has a dish that is breaded with flour, egg, and then fried. Every single culture in the world has a dish that is thickened with flour and or some type of starch and then made into a soup. Every culture in the world has some type of egg usage. Everyone has the exact same foods. You just realize you're

repeating the same steps. So if you know how to do that. to make one dish 10 out of 10 times you can probably make another type of dish. So that if you want to train yourself, whether you use recipe books or if you use a class, at the root of that particular lesson for you, that's how you're going to learn how to improve by just improving that one thing you could do to a maximum level, really hone those skills. And then after that, you'll be able to tackle any other recipes. I could tell you to go to Blue Apron easily. I could tell you to go to all these other websites.

They help. You know, they certainly help you kind of like get your feet off the ground. I think Blue Apron is a really good means to an end. Like, hey, start Blue Apron for a year, but then stop and then start to, you know, repeat what you've learned. Yeah. I think that's a good way to go about it. But for the folks who are already a little bit more, I'd say, initiated when it comes to food, starting to get real crispy about how well you do. That's pretty awesome.

So, yeah. Do you, Andy, have you watched Ted Lasso? I have not. Because that's Apple TV, correct? Yeah. I had a big question there, but now I can't ask. That is on the holiday watch stuff backlog. Ted Lassar's a show that I'm upset about not watching right now.

Genuinely, like, sat about it. So, yeah, I'm going to watch it. I'm going to hold back on my question, which I feel like anyone who's watched it may be able to figure out what I was going to ask, Andy. But after you've watched it, I have a question slash challenge for you. But we will discuss it after you've watched the show. After you have that show completed before the end of 20. 21. Okay. All right. We will discuss pin in this combo. All right, Dennis, keep going. What else do we want to know about Andy? Yeah. So we're almost up on time here for with our with with with the fabulous Andy. So I'm make sure I get some like the more kind of like important questions. I think people really want to hear. Um, so we're kind of. So we're kind of interesting. I have no idea why people are even here in the first. I know. I just, you know, it was just tallies like we should have mom. I'm okay, sure. I know 10 people who can do everything I do better. Prove it. No. So you've been in this. So you've been in this. for a while, right? We're going to, we're going to switch your gears a little bit.

What advice would you give someone who wants to work in the video game industry? Because that's the question that we get all the time. It's interesting because I've learned that the biggest barrier to individuals who want to get into the game industry is they don't realize just how many jobs are involved in the game industry. They only see developer, some marketing people, spokespeople, and then maybe host and press editorial. But they don't realize just how wide that spectrum goes, right down to some of the teams that's set up for conventions and spaces, all the way down to people who are involved with art creation, asset creation, sounds. It's probably saying, number one, educate yourself on just how many jobs are out there. Like, scroll through, but the jobs in the market and then ask yourself this very simple question, what are the things that I know now that can apply to this company? and then start to just adjust your knowledge, adjust your education, and then start to learn that.

Because I came from hospitality. I was a chef. I was somebody who organized kitchens. I did costing. I was able to do a lot of things. But I also had to write menus. I had to present to certain folks. I had to speak in public.

I had to speak in front of audiences. And I had to perform at a very fast-paced level. So being able to easily translates, well, I think this is how this works for this job and this is how it works for that job. I would call HR companies often to say, how do my own? skills translate and then you jump in head first and start asking yourself what you can do my first gaming job in the industry i pitched an agency after i finished school i went to full sale after i was done with the restaurant i got my master's there i pitched an agency saying i know this this this this and need any help and i got to call like 7 30 at night of sandbox strategies and they were just like yeah

check this out what do you think of this and then they gave me a chance to make a proposal and i made a suggested about influencer marketing did the research and then kept going that was one way I got one particular job you'd be surprised how many things that you know now apply to different areas and then as you learn in those subsections you start to advance and go to other places because no one I know essentially started in gaming and stayed there in the exact same area like some folks even in engineering started with other skills maybe financial uh uh systems fintech or even just like, you know, hospital systems. There's people here who worked in like, you know, emergency medicine.

And then sure enough, they found themselves working in gaming because they had the skill set. That's the one wonderful thing about gaming where I feel like we all find ways to connect, but at its core, do you love games and do you enjoy the communities behind those games? And I think you can do very well. All right.

That's probably the best advice I can give these days. No, that sounds great. That's a, I think it's how a lot of us do it, right? You know, like, if you're like, because like for myself, like I have no college degree right. So a lot of it was just like working internships, right? And like getting skills that way. And then, you know, looking for positions that translated to those skills. And then, you know, slowly but surely, you're going to start moving around and building more knowledge and more knowledge until you're,

you know, super awesome. And then everybody wants you, right? All right. So we're going to get into a little bit, a little bit of Q&A with the community. I have a couple of questions here. What exactly is your time again, Andy? Is it at 1130 or? Yeah, I got 10 minutes left. 10 minutes. Awesome. Awesome. Great, great. Great. Okay. Okay. So first question. This is from, Hey, I'm not you, one, two, three. Should you as a creator promote only your brand specific genre or show more of your personality? This was like a- One more time on that question. Should you as a creator promote only your brand-specific genre or show more of your personality?

Absolutely show personality. Show range. Show variety as an individual because you will find that if you are stuck in a perpetual bubble, that you end up speaking to the same audience over and over again. And you miss out on being able to speak to new individuals who might have passing interest. Nobody eats chips every single day nonstop. You can be a chip expert, but you need to say, careful. You know what I mean? But you can essentially start to move a little bit further away from it by being more variety.

Show that you have more than just a single item of interest. Right. Okay. And I want to be clear, that is. regardless of whatever platform you're talking about, whether it be, I don't care if it's anime, I don't care if it's, you know, the entire adult industry. I don't care if it's waffles. I don't care if it's dolls. Show some variety in what you do. Okay. Awesome. All about that. Leg. Leo Gorath wants to know, panel. What are your opinions on

Sherbert? It's a good palate cleanser. There we go. Here's my controversial opinion, which I will give very quickly. I don't, I'm not necessarily a fan of cold desserts. So like the ice creams and all that are not a thing for me. With the exception of It's It bars, I could literally eat those any day because they're ridiculous. Or if I'm somewhere and it's hot and they have those old school like soft cones that are dipped in chocolate that I can, I can be down with. Noted. There you go. They're broad, broad opinion.

Gently cold. Okay. Okay. And you, sir. But me? I think it's bad. I mean, he said the panel. So yeah, but people always skip me anyway. Somebody's used to just like moving along. Not all one.

It's not good. I don't like sherbet. It tastes like perfume. Like okay. If you were to drink like I'm going to. That's what I imagine. I'm going to give you lemon grass sorbet, which is a close sherbet. I think you'd like that a lot more.

That sounds way better than just whatever the concoction that Sherbert is you get like the thrifty or something like the right 80 now. Like whatever that is, I don't want it. But if it's like something that someone has made it. themselves, I'm down, super down. Okay, I forget who this is from because I didn't copy the name on an accident. I think it's who hacked me. That's awesome.

I wonder, Andy's opinion on his school full sale. What does he think compared to UM? I don't know what UM is, but I'm sure you know. Oh, yeah. So, well, first of all, both schools accreditation are going to have a great, you're going to have a great background if you go to either title. Full sale will demand all of your attention immediately. I went to full sale because I know I was able to turn around a career and education at a piece.

Like honestly, full scale was just as vigorous as culinary school. That's how many hours they demand of your time. And the truth is, I find that the full sale graduates who are just hungry and out of it immediately are the first ones who went out the gate and were successful and ended up on that Hall of Fame. But if you don't have that kind of time, if you were in any kind of way a parent or somebody who does need to kind of balance things out, it'll be tougher unless you go to the out. route. Those are my opinions. But I love full sale. A lot of good folks came from that school. And it felt like depending on what you're trying to get out of it, you'll take it. But for folks who left the school with, you know, feeling undesired, then they might have to think about another career. All right. Awesome.

I'm still trying to make that wall of fame one day. I really want to be on it. I don't know why. It doesn't matter at all. I know it doesn't. But I was just like, I just want to find out what do I have to do as like a badass to be like, I am on the Hall of Fame at full sale someday. I feel like we need to like share this clip and tag full sale in it and be like, make Andy's dream come true full sale. Come on. Just tell you what to do. Like, I don't need it right now. I can earn it.

But if you just tell me hit that target, I can hit the target. Right? Like it's like, okay, Andy, do this. Like, sell a million copies of a book. Okay, cool. I can do that in like five years. I can do that. Damn, Andy.

That's hardcore right there. I like it. They also want to know what year you were there for. I graduated 2000 and must have been 2007. Yeah. All right. No. Is that right?

2012? I can't remember how old I am. Hold on. This is why you're not in the Hall of Fame, by the way. Was it 2011? When did I graduate? I can't remember. I genuinely can't remember.

Yeah. It was 10 years ago. That helped. So that was 2020. But that, sorry, 2010. Yeah. It doesn't feel right either. It was over 10 years ago.

How about that? Okay. All right. I think it's Kyle, Kyle, I-U-X-U-I-U-I-N-E-Y. Come on, guys. You got it to make this easier. Is there a difference between cooking for photos and cooking for eating? Absolutely. I envy my, my peers in the space, especially, like, folks like, you know, Josh Shreier and definitely Josh Wiseman. There's a lot of Josh's in the system. Babish, a lot of, like, folks who I've worked with and talked to for a while. Instagram friends. Some of them have the eye to be able to cook for the photo. I have still been unable to turn off the restaurant chef and me because I think food, it needs to be hot. It needs to

be tasty. This is how I want you to eat it. I don't care about the photo. I care about the experience. And that does not make good. That does not make for good food content. So I struggle there very difficult where I have to sometimes draw out my plate before I start cooking because then I was this like, I know this tastes good. I know people with the keen eye knows that looks delicious, but it certainly isn't Instagram worthy sometimes. Like, so now they look at my phone, I go, I know that looks good for a restaurant dish because you're getting food and it's hot and it's steaming. Yeah. But I just know that it's so hard. Like, I could probably use a class or two to get that ready. But for the record, I could, if I had somebody else handling all my food photography

and like all of my dishes, I'd probably bake four times as much food. Because when I'm getting ready to take pictures of my food, it takes hours. But like, 50% of the dishes you see. It was like, I just made that for fun. Yeah. Like, I made that for a little bit. It was like, whatever. That's all.

So would you say that, so when you say like cooking for photos, is there like a different method of cooking it or are you talking just plating and presentation? Plating and presentation. Okay. The knife cuts, the presentation, the sauce, the plate, all of it matters. If you don't think about that ahead of time, right down to your lighting and the time of the day of the photos being taken, the context, the background, all of that has a big difference on how well it goes off.

Okay. Awesome. Great. And the final question I have for you, is you have any questions for us? I do. For both of you. Oh, no. I would love to know, because we're on the topic of cooking and games, I think it's very important.

If you were to see culinaryians, famous chefs, other people, step into the gaming world, who would those folks be or what would you have them do? because it could be as big as Gordon Ramsey but if you wanted to be able to pull folks into the gaming world what would you do and who would it be? I have no idea. I'm not going to lie, I totally played the Gordon Ramsey game. I was all over it.

I love Gordon Ramsey. So I totally. He's hilarious. I want to cooking Gordon Ramsey's kitchen and this is the closest I'll ever get. So I fully put that. I don't know that I know. Honestly, like I,

I don't, I just don't. I don't know a ton of it. Like my, at home, Max loves to do chalk. That's what we do. We like to like do little chop challenges around the kitchen. Well, he does. I am less good at that. He's creative than me.

I am like, put Eminem's on a plate. Job you've done. I have made a meal. So it's definitely like that sort of chopped, competitive, have a bunch of stuff and see what you come up with is, what I think about the comes to playing a game. I don't know if I know a specific chef

that I'd be like this this is the who and the what and the direction I'd go in, but I know that of like, here's a bunch of stuff, figure out how to make good is that I like and what is fun.

It's fun around the house, especially because as Andy knows, my kitchen is a mess. My fridge is insane. My cupboards are bonkers and disorganized. So like, you can find all, I don't even,

it's out of control right now. So I feel like you can find a lot of treasure. Atala, your, your, your mic's cutting in and out a little bit. I think your, yeah, it's being weird. Voice activation might be a little bit too high. Sorry, yeah, you won't miss my secrets. I know. Yeah.

Yeah, if you just turn your voice activation threshold a little bit lower, I think, I think it's fine because I think that's what's cutting off. While she does that, uh, I, that's actually very good question because I don't know what they would do other than like, you know, the like typical, make a cooking game or like play like you know a VR cooking so it's supposed to realistic thing um or maybe like make dishes from like games right and try to figure out but i i know that like that that's like a thing that already happens like on youtube right there's like a lot of channels that do like we're making the you know whatever the the stuff from like animal crossing the food

you see and yeah so i'm i'm not sure maybe it's it's good yeah because because I feel like when you're a chef at that level, like what you're like, are you, are you really cooking or like, are you mostly just like telling others what to do in like your in like your kitchens, right? Like I'm sure you cook as well, but I think like a lot of it also is like, I know what I'm doing, right? Now I'm helping others do what they need to do with my direction at my restaurant and make sure everything's going well, right? But like I don't know like the life of a celebrity chef. So I don't know what that looks like, you know. I've only ever. It's funny because it's funny because there's a lot of celebrity chefs out there.

Many of them don't understand most of the tech world. If you want to talk about people who are technology dense, it is 100% chefs. Like they can understand milk and good astronomy. They can make these incredible pieces. They can work with new tech. But when they, it's just like, hey, could you make a favor install this program? Their brain's break. It's really embarrassing sometimes.

I would probably say what tends to happen is they assume that chefs can only cook or talk about recipes. Right. I would probably ask a chef. to do something like along the lines of you know how the Assassin's Creed historical tour of certain areas and regions I would say that but talk about the food of the regions and like talk about that the end of that whole experience but in 3D like do the whole thing as a virtual tour and talk about those things I probably say like bridging that gap is where it's not about the cooking and the food that food network BS it's more so let's respect food together let's talk about the history about how this just came to be Let's go to Wallachia, Castlevania, for the sake of example, and talk about the history of that entire area and how that food came to be loosely related to Castlevania, but now we're talking about a real location.

You could do that for tons of the games. Like the Assassin's Creed is an easy example, but that'd be a really fun way to go about it. That's actually a really awesome idea, and you should literally just do that. Like literally just make that a thing because I would watch that. I watch video essays like all day every day. Literally, I was in my own personal Discord with a few of my friends. I'm like, these are all like the 50 channels I watch that make like three hour long videos that I just watch in the background while I'm working on stuff.

Same. I do the same thing. Weisskaic, Ray Heveck, like all these folks I have to watch all the time. You know, actually, you give me an idea. What I would have them do is build a computer or like build different types of computers following like a quote unquote like computer recipe, you know, because we just have like our like we this, okay. So not an ad, right?

Not a hashtag ad. But we like we just launched our build kit, which is like. a full set of instructions, all the computer parts, everything you need to build the computer. And it's like step by step, this giant, thick old book that we give you. So I'd like to see chefs actually try that out. It's like, okay, you can follow a recipe, right? Can you follow this computer recipe and build a computer? Without any instruction, without any assistance, just go through and see how that works.

And maybe, you know, even have them as like chefs who look at these kind of things all day, maybe let us know what we can do better to make it easier for people to use. That's actually some great content tally. Write that down and give the Josh. Oh my gosh. I mean, I wish I could speak to more chefs to talk about how to make certain aspects of hospitality better. They don't really think about technology. What happens is, you know, the Valley ends up thinking about food technology for their sake. But they often don't go to the chefs who are in the cut every single day to think about what would actually make your life easier. It's always the celebrities. It's always the high-end people who are thinking about like far off tech. But some of the simple, I'm going to go off on a tangent because I totally have to go.

But it's insane to think that the same toaster, the same containers, the same tools that I used 20 years ago are still the exact same things in restaurants now. Like when I see a toaster, when I see a microwave, I was just like, that's the same tool I was using 20 years ago. I can understand that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But the fact that we don't have walk in refrigerators with bacteria detectors, with shelves that have weighted measurements on. on it that we don't have the ability to scan in our entourage order to be able to tell us when food's going bad. We have the ability to track all of these pieces to know exactly where our food is, but we're still sitting there having folks unload and manual unload potatoes and peel them and not even

count the yield on that one. It's insane. How little technology has integrated with the food world and they're using the excuse of, I don't have time for that, I don't have the money for that. And we're sitting there realizing that none of people bridge that gap, it drives me out of my line. I can tell you why that is. is held back because of technology, not food,

technology isn't holding food back. It's that if they're afraid to use it because a lot of folks assume my job's going to go away if I work for technology. They're going to replace me with a robot. And I'm just like, yeah, we have literally done that with other aspects of food, but we still need good chefs. So yeah.

I can say part of the reason why that hasn't happened either is because I feel like a lot of people who are really, like, in that industry and like are like veterans are like, well, I just know. I can tell, right? I have the sense, you know, I have the, it's like a gamer word, right? I have the game sense for when these potatoes are going to go bad or whatever. And they just rely on that as opposed to relying on data, which, you know, as we all know,

data is the king of everything these days, right? And it won't replace chefs, but maybe it'll make your job easier, right? Or maybe it'll make your job more efficient. Or maybe, you know, you can, you know, it can enable you to not do these, like, really weird tasks that now a shelf that's smart can do for you. So you can focus on other things like making more amazing dishes, right? Exactly. That's all. That's all I'm saying. Believe me, I'm going to be building my custom fridge one day.

I want Samson to build it. I know exactly what it needs to do. And my Bluetooth camera installation is going to be perfect. Trust me. All right, then. Well, Andy, I know you're going to go, man. Thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate it. Hopefully we can have you again on super soon to talk about more stuff because I feel like you have like a plethora of knowledge. It's like stuffed up in that nog in years. I owed you guys big time. I'd reschedule too many times. So I very much appreciate you being patient with some.

me. Thank you for your time today. If there's anything I can do for you, to the community, to the folks in chat, hit me up, Andy Lanique on Twitter. But nevertheless, you guys are always good to talk to. We should just talk casually. I should make you food while we talk. But yes, I'm down. I'm down. I will never say no to food. Is there, is there anything that you want to help the people before you go? Top two things. Have a good holiday. It's been a tough year. Please just take the break you need. Take care. Number two, Final Fantasy 7 is. on the Epic Game Store right now. Let's go.

That's a big one. And number three, if you're a creator in the chat, if you're somebody who's learning how to build, please listen to the advice that we gave because it's genuinely looked on as something that is harder to do than people realize. So even if you're just thinking about getting into content creation, just know that us at Epic and here at NST have a respect for just how hard it is to get up every day and create content that you don't even know if people will watch. And that is a whole lot harder than it is just going to a job nine to five, then people might realize.

So please respect yourself in that regard. And that is everything I'm going to say to folks here. All right. Awesome. Thank you very much, man. I really appreciate it. Thank you again. All righty, guys.

You have a good one. We're going to stick on for a little bit because we have some news to give y'all. And we're going to do that right now once I get this music going. Also, I'm totally going to give you guys fine fantasy code to give away. It'll just be funsy. Oh, okay. There we go. Bye, guys.

Bye, Andy. I think I can fix that. Hey, look at that. Look at that. Nice, nice transition. Ooh. Okay, so we had a couple of announcements where we head out. Number one, make sure that everybody is following Andy on Twitter.

Where's my chat? There we go. Everybody follow Andy on Twitter because they're amazing. Why am I clicking on this? Go away, Twitch. You're being annoying. Because Twitter's lit. Check it out.

Everyone go, go read it every single day. Your daily news. Also, follow Talley on Twitter, because Talley is amazing too. Honestly, one of my favorite people here, a mentor, a friend, a mom, a homie, constantly subjecting us to her dog yelling for no reason sometimes. Also, don't forget to check out. We have a 12 days of giving, so this is really cool. Props to Ivan for setting this stuff up.

We're all doing really cool stuff for the holidays. I got stuff coming up to you so don't worry it's coming we're doing 12 days of giving every single day for 12 days we're giving away something so we gave away 12 poochies actually here let me let me pull this up on the on the old fancy feed hopefully those pop up you know it didn't because it's not we got this here but yeah okay so we gave away I wonder if I even threaded this he didn't he should have all right so we gave away like to tell everybody we've been tweeting a bunch so apologies but we've given away 12 poochies right we've given away 12 hood 11 hoodies then 10 shirts right yeah right 10 shirts I shouldn't know this off top of my head

but I'm blanking right now and then today we're giving away nine nzxte lanyards so you definitely want to do those and all you got to do is go on these tweets so the the winners are announced the day So if you didn't, if you missed the other ones, don't worry. We have more coming and some awesome stuff coming up. I wonder what the grand prize will be. I wonder what they won or day 12 with the only one prize will be. Who knows it could be? Yeah, so all you're going to do is go into the comments, like the tweet, retweet if you want,

and just leave us a purple heart emoji. And that's it. And you can see a lot of people here are throwing all the love. So make sure you do that. Also, don't forget. my other stuff where do my tabs go dude oh my god hold up tabs tabs tabs tabs on tabs all oh yeah this is actually pretty important too i should probably talk about this huh this is uh it's not a tell you will kill me if i don't um make sure it's not loading okay here you go i know the

amazon's having issues lately um we just released our cyberpunk craft 8 710 the the the the the the the 8, 710i, Cyberpunk, is the official name of it. It's an awesome case. It's really, really cool. We've been working on this thing for a long time. You know, all the same stuff you get with almost every craft case, which is a cool limited edition, unique, can only get it with the case puck, a cool little charm that hangs off the side of the glass, which is awesome.

I guess, you know, if you want to sign up for our newsletter, too, go to the bottom of the page of our website, so that's the thing. It retails for $2.99. It's limited edition. We only make a small amount. And I think we have a picture here of it somewhere of the little tab on the inside. I just broke this thing. Hold up.

Where is it? No. It's here somewhere. How many do I make of these? Was it 500 to 2,000? I forget what the total is now tally. Oh, I'm not sure. Yeah.

It should be here somewhere. The point is it is limited. It's limited. You can only get it for. certain uh okay i i'm not going to trust that video because i'm pretty sure the video might not be the correct thing but yeah it's their limited edition cases once they're gone they're gone just like the hyperbeats just like the rainbow six case just like the asses creed case just like the wow cases just like all the cases that we've done in the craft series in conjunction with cd project grads thank you to them

and they've been awesome partners on this thing uh their their copywriting team is super big brain their social team is awesome and they have super cool stuff coming up uh so yeah so celebrate the one year of Cyberpunk's anniversary by buying a case, I guess. Or just play the game if you don't want to buy the case. The game's still cool. I like the game a lot.

Okay. What else you got going on here? I have a request. Is my sound better now, or am I still wonky? Oh, you sound great. So here's my request. I would love everyone to send us all kinds of messages on Twitter,

either NZXT or send them or tag me in them, But I want to hear everyone's favorite games so I can play all of the good cooking games or favorite indie game, but cooking game, let's say to stick with theme. And I need cool robot pictures as I prepare for this next tattoo adventure. So I would love for everyone to also send us those. So social media, people, I need your help. Cooking games and cool robots that I might turn into a tattoo.

And I'm also going to do one thing as well. Chef Handy did give us some codes for Final Fantasy 7. I'm about to drop one to chat. Actually, here, actually, let me do this. This actually might be more fun. I'm just going to throw a block of text here. This might be a chin interesting. Where does it pop up on top of the screen?

Oh, on top. It's on top. Okay, so to make sure where it's that. We're going to get this away right now. And I'm not going to type it in. So bots don't steal it because bots always be stealing stuff. So make sure that it's not too big. Actually, let me let me test this in the test thingy.

That doesn't work. How do I make this font smaller? Oh, here we go. 255. That's not right. Let's make it 100. Okay, do that. Oh, here we go.

Okay, it's up now. There's one code. I'm pretty sure it's for Epic Game Store because he does work for Epic Games. I think if he gave away Steam code, probably didn't. trouble. So there you go. There's one code. Uh, oh, you got it. Hopefully someone got it. It's going away now. There you go. screenshot if you can get it. Um, also, yeah, so, so send, send tally are your favorite

holiday games, uh, and us tag us tag tally. Tag tally every day for everything. Doesn't matter what, just, just, just, just tag. I'm very lonely. Yeah. I'm going to be actually by myself for the hallup for a good check of the holiday. Oh, yeah. Send me all the thing. Because I'm going to curl up on my couch with my PC and my switch and my PS5 and just play games for. And your puppy and my puppy and the cats. Yeah, there's a lot. So where to redeem? I'm pretty like 99.999% sure you redeem it on the Epic Game Store because Andy does work for Epic Games. So there you go. Have fun logging in and doing your two factor. If you're not prepared, we got two more coming up.

Also, check out the NZXT holiday gift guide. We've been talking about this for a little bit now. We're still doing it. It's not going away. You can't escape it. It's here forever. The holiday gift guide. So if you're looking for a present for the gamer or non-gamer or aspiring gamer

or gamer adjacent person in your life, check this out. NSXC.com. I'll just drop the link here too. The big old link. So check that. out what if you already have the thing you're giving away on Twitter and don't enter yes I don't know like you do you or enter and have an extra in case you break one easy piece or get to a friend yeah win and give it to someone you love exactly holiday cheer everybody

holiday cheer it's cheer the holidays um okay what else you got here I think that's it's for announcements Talley do you have any other announcements that you want to let people know about anything cool happening here there no Oh, yeah? So much, but I feel like the priority is sending me games, right? That's what we have to do, is send us some favorite games. I want to play all of them. And I want to see all the pictures of people playing games on there during their holidays.

There's a second code, folks, by the way. Go get that free game. Oh, that free video game. Final Fantasy 7, just launching Epic Games. Shout out to Epic Game Store. They're out here making it happen. doing it for real. Get your Fortnite on.

Get your Rocket League on. I forget what else is exclusive to, the Epic Game Store. But yeah, there you go. Second game. I don't know who got it, but get it. I don't think what else here? I think that's pretty much it. Oh, yeah, another announcement.

We'll be off next week. We won't be doing a podcast next week because it is the holidays and it's the day right before Christmas Eve. And for those who don't know if you're Hispanic, Christmas Eve is pretty much Christmas for you. Because you stay up all night, we eat, we drink, we play games, listen to music, we hang out, we enjoy each other's company, and then right at 12 p.m., sorry, 12 a.m., that's when we open presents. And then we sleep and just do nothing the whole day after that, because we're tired from partying on night. So there you go.

You sure it's epic games? I'm pretty sure it's epic games. Actually, I don't know. It should be epic games. Yeah, it's epic games. Okay, yeah. Someone's saying it can't be redeem me and do it in the launcher. Yeah, you're probably going to do it in the launcher. I don't know, man. I just got the codes. Andy bounced, right?

He's, he's cooking for the Queen of England right now. Epic Game Store, for sure. For sure. Yeah. But someone might have gotten it before you did. People are speedy here. Yeah, people are super, super fast.

I was, I was watching Dr. Lupo the day when they released the Destiny 30th anniversary bundle. And I wasn't even locked in to like my bungee net. That was like, oh, man, it should probably snack some of these codes from Dr. Lupo. I didn't get one, by the way. It would have been cool.

though so don't have to pay for that thing i never i never i'm never fast enough on that no i'm slow as heck yeah although it's always indie games i'm interested anyway and i'm super happy to pay for those because my yeah same secret obsession is supporting all the indie devs so send me like i love tell me the indie games to play too because i feel like those are so hard to find there's so many amazing games there's so much content out there so i want to know all the cool games i'm playing boyfriend dungeon right now and how is it i like it but i mean this is of course only when i can get to the pc because you know it gets stolen for me all the time i uh i'm a fan of vr games because almost every single vr game is like indy there are very few big publisher vr games um but apparently ever since

like facebook announced the metaverse is like a huge influx like funding for vr games so maybe we'll see some higher quality games but you know sometimes the Small symbol games are like the best ones, right? Just do one concept and just do it super well and hone it in. And it's like, this is all I'm doing. This is fun. All right. All right.

Next code coming up. I think this is the right code. I think this is the final code for Final Fantasy 7 on the Epic Game Store. Word on the street is you got to do it from the client, not from the website. Don't quote me on that, though. I would be dealing this Vod so that you don't. I'm kidding. I won't do that.

They'll just get rid of it on their own because that's how much works. I'm seeing some like interesting chatter. over here. But love the Ori games. So totally who hacked me, totally agree. Finley 1, 2, 3. Behemoth is also one of my faves. They do make great indie games.

And I've played much of what they've put out there. I love the super giant team also. No more robots. There's a lot of really good teams out there. So yeah, agreed. Awesome suggestions. Beat Saber I play constantly. Too much.

That's it. you know all my favorites now you know all my secrets i'm just spending on twitter right now on uh on the on this show i am on twitter it's really boring social media feed but please that's fine i don't think it's cool i put up a lot of graphic novel stuff so if anyone like comics then it might be but why's the receiver so expensive it's a great game so here's the thing right here's the thing you can make it very cheap if you use custom songs and they're super cool with it too The BeatSaver devs are like, yeah, go ahead and mod it up. You want to add games if you want or add songs.

Also, you know what? I never do this because I always feel weird about it, but there's my Twitter. If you go ahead and just see all the dumb crap that I tweet that I can't tweet on the corporate account. It's just like dumb jokes. Like, I can't believe they made an anime based on the popular Netflix original live action series, Cowboy Bebop. They even uploaded every episode all at once. I just think about dumb stuff and I just throw it up there. That's really all it is.

And then photos of my dog and me. I like it. But for real, follow Tally more. She's way more interesting than I ever will be. So not interesting. Talley's got stories. Tally's got stories and bagels. No stories. So I have no stories. So got the bagels here. All right. So with that, thank you very much for your time. Talley really appreciate you. Love it. I love hanging out with everyone here. And with you, it's so fun. I could do this every week. I'll do this every week.

That's it. I'm just going to start popping in randomly. Let's do it. Thank you again to Andy for taking time out of his busy schedule from cooking and being a dad and saving the world at Epic Games to hang out with us. I really appreciate him for that. Don't remember. Don't remember. Do remember to catch the show next week, not next week, the week after next week, at 10 a end 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, you can do that at podcast.

at nc60.com. Apparently people don't use email anymore unless it's like, I don't know who, there's a lot of people in the company who still use or like super heavy on email for some reason.

But you can send an email to podcast at podcast at ncxte.com to ask us a question off the air. And don't forget to listen to previous episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud.

And if you can do us another super duper huge favor, probably the biggest favor of all, keep yourself safe, have fun check on your friends and make sure they're having a good time as well

and share the show with someone that you like or that you don't like the winners for the giveaway will be announced not here you'll be emailed if you win because that's the easiest way to do it

so keep it on those emails if you don't get an email by like tomorrow then you did not win I'm sorry sometimes this happens if you if you didn't win that means someone else did. And those are words live by.

That is very positive thinking. Power of positive thinking. Yeah. And also stick around because we're going to raid somebody. We're going to raid somebody and show them some love. I know exactly who it's going to be a brand new Twitch ambassador. Wink, wink, wink, nudge. Yeah, folks, thank you very much. We'll see you next time. Stick around for that raid. And we'll see you in two weeks. Bye. Bye.