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Guaranteed Human

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Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron. As a reminder, you can now buy shirts, hoodies and even mugs in our merchandise store.

There's a link in the notes.

God damn it, give me money.

I need you to wear the shirt for me.

Today I'm joined by the new owners of Gaming Site Giant Bomb, Jeff Backelard, Jeff Grubb, and Dan Reichert. Fellas, welcome to the show. It's pronounced this. Bertron. Okay. All right. Yeah. Okay. Most people get... I definitely on an interview a few days ago, missaid my own name. And Missed better. I was like, Zayrater off shit. And Matt Osseski, my producer regularly

hears these things. So that's always fun. But congratulations, by the way. So walk me through,

Dan, perhaps, walk me through what happened. So there was some filing in and out from Giant Bomb.

And then you guys kind of took it over. Yeah. So, I started the longest ago in like 2014. So in terms of how the recent stuff went down, I think the Jeff's here. Fellas, tell me if I'm wrong. I feel like you maybe have had some more time on the phone with lawyers and things like that. I like watching this guy's sweat. Let's see. No, I just wanted to make sure I didn't. I'm not like,

oh yeah, I did all this work. You know, it's like, I just kind of fell into this. No, Jeff and Jeff

left fandom, our previous parent company. And as part of the deal, we're able to buy Giant Bomb and are bringing in, you know,

me, Janiceoa, our longtime producer, and our good friend Mike Manati, who has been trying to be

full-time at Giant Bomb for a long time. And he completely skipped full-time and went straight

from contractor to co-owner of the website. That rocks. Yes. Yes. So, yeah, long history of corporate ownership and, you know,

dating back to 2008 and, you know, four different owners, basically. And now I guess we are the fifth

group. Nice. So what is the new structure? So you guys are all the owners. You're going to be

doing the same kind of games journalism you're already doing. I know that the YouTube channel went offline. Is it coming back? Yeah. Yeah, we were streaming to YouTube just right before we came here. Yeah, we were doing our Black Club show. So right now, the structure looks like, are we getting all the stuff from fandom that we need?

And they've been very helpful in that stuff.

But it's like just kind of getting the keys to everything.

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