Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Fire Escape cast. It is episode 107. I'm Mike Mahardi, here as always.

Unfortunately, once again, we're not all together. I've got some subs here. I've got Ben Hansen from Minmax. Oh, hi. Yeah. Well. And, uh, Ben, how's it going? Oh, good. Yeah, it's good. I can't do this. I don't even know. I'm in my head trying to, like, I've heard that man talk more than most people in my life and I cannot place a, yeah, I don't know how to do that. He sounds like he's always smiling. You ever play Shela Clausus while you're listening to three podcasts and wonder, how did they make this? Do you hear that? Do you hear the story about Hideo Kajima apparently just refuses to use toilets? It's crazy. That's my first try at Ben Hansen.

That's better in mind, yeah. I'm also here and I'm not pretending to be Ben Hansen. I'm just

regularly here. But this is so exciting because this is the first time. The three of us have

been together in several episodes because we have been so busy with travel and corpo life

and like crazy stuff that's been going on. We haven't had time to just be together. About four episodes, I think, last time. It was me, Mary Drew, and then Dan, the Blight Club boys. And then me, Mary, Caleigh, Fadams. Jeez. Yeah. It's been a lot of stuff going on. I was going to say, we don't really have much to catch up on. Yeah, I saw Mary this weekend. I guess we didn't really talk about it, Mary. Yeah, I got some stuff going on at work. I have so many cute videos of you. I have, like, really funny videos of, like, asking Dan to dance in a nightclub, and he did this, like, car racing maneuver. It was very fun. I have never been more out of my.

I was out of my element when I went to clubs like twice in my life in my 20s and immediately

hated it and left. Boy at 40 with a bunch of influencers, I am out of. I guess technically,

I'm in that same world, that same orbit. You are an influencer.

I feel like my version of that is very different than the people of this party. I got news for you, baby boy.

You just walked into a world of influencers by doing what you did.

Hey, I'm a businessman now.

I'm CEO.

What's your title?

Chief Content Officer.

Wait, can you run us through?

All right.

For like the maybe 3% of listeners who don't know what we're referencing,

can you, in two sentences, Max, explain what happened.

We bought Giant Bomb. Yes. I'm a co-owner of Giant Bomb now. Yes. And it's independent. Yes, it is completely independent. Fully funded by fans. Fully funded by fans. There's no secret shady money above us. There's no investor or company or venture or whatever. No, literally, it's just fans.

That's it. I mean, we'll do ads and stuff for sure. But, like, fans and subscriptions.

Giantbom.com slash join are the backbone of this operation now. And your chief content

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