710: Gary Whitta and Microsoft Flight Simulator

Larry Hryb:
Hi, it's Larry Hryb, Xbox Live Major Nelson. Welcome to the show. We are strapped in and ready for takeoff. Joining me as usual. Your copilot, Jeff. Jeff is your copilot.

Jeff Rubenstein:
It's going to be a bumpy ride here Larry, if the first 30 seconds are any sort of inclination. I got to be honest after last week, having Chris Charla here, just the two of us feels a little lonely, feels like not enough.

Larry Hryb:
I got to tell you not only does it feel lonely, but we need to bring in some real talent. So I am so thrilled to have joining us today, the man, the myth, the internet legend right here in the center square, Mr. Gary Whitta. Gary, good to see you.

Gary Whitta:
Wait, where's the real talent. I'm excited. Who's it going to be? I can't wait for this reveal.

Jeff Rubenstein:
We thought you booked it, are we not having a special musical guests like Lisa Loeb or somebody like that?

Gary Whitta:
Well, now it's just awkward. No, if I'd have known, I could have called Lisa and got her here, but too short notice now.

Larry Hryb:
Well, here we are.

Gary Whitta:
Anyway. Yes. Thank you. Of course, I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you.

Larry Hryb:
And it's funny. Gary you and I have not ever met in person and this-

Gary Whitta:
That's actually incorrect Larry.

Larry Hryb:
When did we meet?

Gary Whitta:
You and I played PlayStation VR at Comic-Con a few years ago. We were both in VR headsets together for about an hour. And frankly I'm insulted that you don't remember.

Larry Hryb:
Remember PlayStation VR or?

Gary Whitta:
Well, I mean any of it, we played PlayStation. It was an offsite thing across, I mean it was a few, whatever year it would have been when they were first demoing PlayStation VR.

Larry Hryb:
Jeff [inaudible 00:01:32].

Gary Whitta:
I mean, I get it. It's all the before times, right? Nobody remembers anything in the time before where we are now. But no, it was you, me and Meggan Scavio.

Larry Hryb:
That's right.

Gary Whitta:
And the three of us played PlayStation VR together. So we have in fact met in real life.

Larry Hryb:
I apologize. Well, the reason why because I was thinking about you, because we're going to talk about all that you've been up to lately because you've had some incredible success. But the connection that you have to this show goes back many years, because you were very good friends with a former cohost of mine StepTo, Steven and-

Gary Whitta:
Yes, that's right.

Larry Hryb:
...and I know that whenever StepTo would come into the show, "Oh I talked to Gary [inaudible 00:02:10]." I'm like, "Boy, I really want to meet Gary, I'm a big fan, I really want to end." So I just remember him speaking. He always spoke very highly of you. So to have you on the show here, I know he's looking down on us right now and he's pleased.

Gary Whitta:
I appreciate that. Thank you. And I know you mentioned Chris Charla. Chris Charla is one of my oldest friends as well. He and I came up in the '90s when I was editor in chief of PC Gamer. He was right on the other side of the cubicle wall as editor in chief of Next Generation. So he and I came up through the magazine game together in the glory days of the '90s. And we're still friends to this day.

Larry Hryb:
[inaudible 00:02:43].

Gary Whitta:
And Blake Fisher is a bunch of guys over there though. Oh, yeah. Well, I know everybody.

Larry Hryb:
I didn't realize you [crosstalk 00:02:49].

Gary Whitta:
Apparently not remembered by anybody, but I do know everybody.

Larry Hryb:
You're a [inaudible 00:02:55]. I thought I knew a lot of people, but the Venn diagram of who we know is pretty full right now.

Gary Whitta:
Well, you know what they say Larry, it's not what you know, it's who you know.

Larry Hryb:
Here, here. Now I've to tell you I've been watching your show for the past few months, Animal Talking. And I want to talk, first of all, the incredible success you've had with that. Tell us a little bit about that and how the journey that got you to where it is because it's been a wild ride, hasn't it?

Gary Whitta:
Yeah, I often describe it as a hobby that spiraled wildly out of control. And that's really what it was. I didn't expect any of this. I was playing Animal Crossing, I was streaming it on my Twitch channel. I played every day and I streamed and I was goofing around in my basement. I was trying to figure out what to do with the basement of my house, the bonus room, what do I want to do with this extra room?

Larry Hryb:
Sure.

Gary Whitta:
And I was just goofing around with furniture and at one point I had a desk and a couch in there, and what's interesting is, we've all grown up with the late-night talk show, right? It's a cornerstone of American popular culture and has been since the 1950s.

Larry Hryb:
Sure.

Gary Whitta:
We've all grown up with Jay and Johnny and Letterman and Conan, and now the current generation. You have Kimmel and Colbert and all these guys. It's been locked into our cultural imaginations collectively for decades. The monologue, the host, the desk, the couch, the band, the celebrity guests. Well, you all know what that looks like.

Larry Hryb:
The show open, which you do very well by the way. The show [crosstalk 00:04:23].

Gary Whitta:
The whole thing. And we lean into all of those tropes and that's part of the fun of it. And the project in Animal Crossing initially wasn't even anything as ambitious as let's do a talk show. It was, can I just recreate the set almost like a doll's house with the items, because Animal Crossing has this amazing variety of items and furniture and wallpapers and things like that. Could we at least recreate the set almost like a model of it? And we were able to do it to such a degree that people in the chat, because I was doing this live, people were watching me. They're like, "Oh, you should do something with it. It looks really good." And I thought, yeah, maybe we should. It's a shame to waste that we have this set. Now, we build a talk show set and caught up a good friend of mine, Naomi Kyle, who used to have IGN and is a popular internet host and actress.

Larry Hryb:
Sure.

Gary Whitta:
So the way I pitched it to her was like, "Do you want to play dress up? Do you want to play talk show the same way that kids play, tea party?" And so her character put on a dress and mine put on a suit and she came over to my island and we just did all the tropes. Tell me about your latest project. I understand you brought a clip, let's roll the clip. That kind of stuff. And again, it was so easy to fall into those rhythms because we all know that format, right?

Larry Hryb:
Yeah.

Gary Whitta:
It's so traditional. The show that Jimmy Fallon does now, is not sustainably different from the show that Steve Allen was doing in 1954. That format is just cemented in stone and it's changed a little bit. Letterman really changed the game a lot and Conan. But for the most part, we all know what that format is. It's sitting behind the couch, sorry, behind the desk, guests are on the couch. So it was really easy to fall into all of those tropes. And that was also really fun. And we got such a kick out of doing it and the audience got such a kick out of watching it. It was, "Oh my God, let's do another one." And the objective was never to get big celebrity guests. The second show that we did, the guests on the couch were literally my wife and her friend.

Larry Hryb:
Right.

Gary Whitta:
And then the third guest was a streamer friend of mine who I know. And it wasn't until the fourth episode when Twitch started to caught onto what we were doing and realizing that it was cool and that no one else was streaming Animal Crossing in this way, using it to make late-night television, they put us on the front page and it blew up from there.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. I mean, it just goes on and on because I'm showing the video right now [inaudible 00:06:42].

Gary Whitta:
Oh yeah, I love our theme music. Live from the beautiful Sunkist Island of...

Larry Hryb:
Anyway, I love this. You're right, it leans into all the tropes. You talk about all the things that we know as television viewers, and you nailed every single one of them. So it's interesting that you came up with this concept right off the bat and it just lent itself as you said, it just took off.

Gary Whitta:
Yeah. I mean, the show itself is not in any way innovative. It's the same show that's been on TV since the 1950s.

Larry Hryb:
Right.

Gary Whitta:
The guests, the couch, the hosts, the bad jokes, the music, the standup comedy. What's innovative is the fact that no one's ever done it this way before inside of a video game. Again, none of this was deliberate. It all happened by accident. But as it turned out, in much the same way that Animal Crossing itself was the right game at the right time. You know the world sucks right now, everyone's miserable, we're all stuck at home looking for a distraction and Animal Crossing really provided that distraction, like an escape to this bucolic island getaway where everyone's your friend and nothing bad can ever really happen to you. People really responded to that. And this is just an extension of that concept.
The show is kind of whimsical and fun and silly. And I thought a lot about this, the chemistry of vitality, what makes something take off like this? Only after the fact that I really think about this. And I think the notion is if you take something that's very familiar and comfortable to people again the late-night talk show, nobody needs to have that explained to them because we've all grown up with it for generations, but then you take that familiar comfortable format and present it in a new way.
Well, here it is inside a video game that you already enjoy, now it's super cutesy and fun and we somehow managed to figure out a way to make this game that wasn't built to host a talk show. We somehow shoehorned a talk show inside of it and figuring out how to make that work. The hobbyist angle of it. It's trying to come up with creative solutions to these problems has been really fun to do, but that combination of here's something that you've seen a million times before, but you've never seen it done like this. I think that's what people responded to.

Jeff Rubenstein:
So Gary, how did you go from having your wife and close acquaintances to let's say having Selena Gomez debut new music on this show, or head of Xbox, Phil Spencer.

Gary Whitta:
Yeah. I mean, that's kind of crazy, right? The head of Xbox PhilSpencer.

Jeff Rubenstein:
That was crazy. How did that happen?

Gary Whitta:
So it happened gradually. I'm fortunate enough that, my first career, I came up through the video games world. I was a journalist, I worked on PC gamer magazine for many years and then I have this whole second career as a Hollywood screenwriter. And because of those two backgrounds, I know I'm fortunate to know a lot of people, some of whom are of some note. Whether they'd be actors, directors, writers, video game personalities. I was able initially when I started to get a bit more ambitious, it was like, maybe we could actually get really interesting people to come on the show. Again, not that Naomi and my wife and her friend, Tanya and Kate Stark weren't-

Larry Hryb:
Sure.

Gary Whitta:
...interesting, but how far could we take this? And I started to get a little bit seduced by the concept of, wow, people really respond to this. Let's see how far we could push it. And we started to get more ambitious and we licensed our own theme music, that music that you just heard that was composed for us. And we started doing animation and opening titles and trying to figure out ways to boost the production values. And then part of that was, can we get guests that would make people that would make people really sit up and take notice?
I think the first one that we got that people were like, "Oh, wow!" It's Felicia Day, who's obviously very well known in the nerd space. And then what happened was because Animal Crossing is having this cultural moment right now, a lot of celebrities are playing it and it's gotten to a point now and it did very quickly that basically any time a celebrity puts their head above the parapet and tweets about how they're playing Animal Crossing, I know about it within five seconds because 50 people tweet that me going, "Oh my God, you've got to get them on the show."

Jeff Rubenstein:
Right.

Gary Whitta:
And that's how we got Elijah Wood, that's how we got Danny Trejo, that's how we got T-Pain, because, "Oh my God, they're playing Animal Crossing. They'd be great guests for Animal Talking." So the Twitter community became like it was crowdsourcing my talent booking. And I would reach out to them through, either I might know them already or I would know a way to reach them. And at that point we had a few shows under our belt, so I could send them a video and say, "Look, this is the concept." And again, people got it immediately because it combined two things they already knew. Oh, I know what a talk show is, I play Animal Crossing, I get what this is, that's really cool.

Larry Hryb:
This is great.

Gary Whitta:
And people wanted to be on it. And as guests have gotten bigger and bigger, the irony is we are now at a point where these guests approach us. Selena Gomez's people approached us, Stings people approached us about wanting to be on the show. And of course we were happy to get them on. But yeah it's somehow gotten to a point now where in the coronavirus eras, as we currently still are unfortunately, we are the only late-night talk show on the air that actually looks like one. Because Jimmy Fallon and Colbert, and all the big boys are stuck in their broom cupboards, interviewing celebrities over Zoom, which we're all frankly sick of, right?

Larry Hryb:
Right.

Gary Whitta:
Looking at people's faces over Zoom all day, but that's all they can do. They can't go to their studios. But I can go to mine because my studio doesn't exist in the real world. It exists in the metaverse where there's no coronavirus, there's no social distancing and we can do whatever we want.

Larry Hryb:
Everybody's happy.

Gary Whitta:
Everyone's happy. The worst thing that can happen is you get stung by a wasp. And this is the great thing about the metaverse is that we can bring people from around the world together and put them in the same virtual space. We did a show where, I'm behind my desk in San Francisco, my band leader, Adam is up in Vancouver and I had two guests on the couch. One was in New York city and the other one was in [inaudible 00:12:23], France, but rolling on the same set.
And that's the magic of the metaverse. And so we're able to do things that conventional talk shows cannot do. And it's like a snowball rolling downhill, right? It gathers momentum and grows in size. And as we started to do bigger and bigger guests, each celebrity guests that we got, made it easier to get the next one.

Larry Hryb:
Sure.

Gary Whitta:
Like I said to Sting, when he came on the show, "Not only is this awesome having you on the show, but it now makes it possible that we can get anybody." Because I can say Sting did the show. You're telling me it's good enough for Sting, but not good enough for you-

Larry Hryb:
You get the rest of the police.

Gary Whitta:
...that's the beauty of it. That's the beauty of it that we don't have to twist anyone's arm. They want to do it. Selena Gomez's people were stunned. They were like, "She's turned down every interview this year, this is the only one she said yes to." And she ended up sitting for what was actually, I found this out later, the longest live interview she's ever done. And she just had so much fun doing it.
The beauty of the show is we just make it so much fun and it's so silly. You of course have ever seen the show. Phil Spencer just did the show just recently, he had a really fun time because we just goof around and people almost forget that they're doing a talk show because we make everyone feel so relaxed and so comfortable and it's so goofy that we always hear back from our guests. We've never had a guest on the show, we have about 50, 60 guests. Never had one who didn't have a good time and didn't say they would love to come back again. Because we just make it really fun.

Larry Hryb:
So the reports of you onset being a diva and being co... Oh, nevermind. That's not you, that's a different talk show.

Gary Whitta:
You got me mixed up with another popular talk show host. That's right.

Jeff Rubenstein:
So what's pretty funny is, oh, go on Larry, it's your show.

Larry Hryb:
Go ahead.

Gary Whitta:
Yeah. I am a diva, but on camera I'm intolerable on camera and I'm nice behind the scenes.

Jeff Rubenstein:
You were wearing a crown when Phil was on there the whole time, you were [inaudible 00:14:15] in royalty.

Gary Whitta:
I won my first Fall Guys crown you better believe I was going to wear a crown on that episode.

Larry Hryb:
I'm actually showing it right now with Phil and his crazy parted hair and his Xbox shirt. That was a great show by the way.

Gary Whitta:
I got to say Phil was a terrific sport for coming on that show. And I have a lot of admiration for him, not just for doing it, but also doing it in what was a very difficult week. He came on the day after the Halo Infinite delay announcement was made, but he still came on the show and he took a bunch of questions about it. And I think he gave a great account of himself and had a great time and ended up singing along with Lisa Loeb live. I mean, what could be more fun than that?

Larry Hryb:
Yeah that's-

Jeff Rubenstein:
And he told a dad joke.

Gary Whitta:
And he told the dad, yeah. A particularly bad one, which is what we like to hear on the show.

Larry Hryb:
When you look back at this, I mean, this is really just a moment of time. Do you want to go to maybe twice a week or three times a week or Monday through Friday? What are your plans here Gary?

Gary Whitta:
Quite the opposite Larry. The first season we did three shows a week and it almost killed me. In fact, one week we did four shows a week because we were doing Monday, Wednesday, Friday, the week that Danny Trejo wanted to come on, he could only do Thursday. What am I going to do? Say no to Danny Trejo.

Larry Hryb:
Right.

Gary Whitta:
He's machete, of course you're going to say yes. And so we did a show on Thursday. And so we were doing at one point almost a nightly show.

Larry Hryb:
Right.

Gary Whitta:
And I don't think it necessarily particularly clear from the broadcast, but a lot of effort goes into making each show. For each two hour show, I probably do about 10 hours of prep.

Larry Hryb:
Sure.

Gary Whitta:
Because we have to do pre-interviews, I have my little note cards, we do sound checks, we have to make sure everyone's Nintendo switch is set up the right way, there's technical checks that we do, there's a whole discord process that we go through. We have to do new music and animation, record new intros every episode, I have to clear music anytime that Lisa or Selena Gomez wants to play music on the show, I have to go through a copyright clearance process. It's a lot of work.
One of the reasons why we went from three shows a week to doing a weekly show was it was the only way that it was sustainable. You've got to remember, this is not my job. This is just a hobby that now prevents me from doing my actual job. And so one of the reasons why the show is on hiatus right now is that even the weekly show to do it at the level of production that I wanted to do with the amount of prep that that required, is simply unsustainable and not compatible with me having my own full-time job.
And so we're pausing the show a little bit. We're doing this other show Talk Guys in the meantime, which is easier to make. But for right now, Animal Talking is on pause because I want to keep making it. And we do have plans for more ambitious plans for the future of the show, but I need to figure out a better way to make it that isn't quite so labor-intensive for me every week.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. Something that's important is that, a lot of people forget is that any other talk shows, all the ones you talked about earlier, there's a staff of 20, 30, 40, 50, a hundred people. And certainly being a host is one part of it. And it's a hard part, but there's a whole team and with this, it's kind of just you and your wife, right?

Gary Whitta:
Yeah. It's me, my wife and a guy called Adam Nickerson, who is not only my on air sidekick, but he also does a lot of technical work behind the scenes. And my friend Kate Stark, who is our stage manager and it's her job to make sure that the guests are all taken care of. We have a virtual green room in our discord. She makes sure that they walk onto the set at the right time and their discord levels are all good. There's a really a tremendous amount behind the scenes that people never see, but that's what's necessary to make a show that actually looks and feels like a real talk show. It doesn't just happen. And so it's me and three volunteers essentially.
But yeah, I do 80% of it because there's only so much I can technically offload. I'm streaming from my own channel, I can't have people in a VT booth. When Jimmy Fallon says "Let's roll the clip." Someone in a booth is doing that for him. I have to do that myself. And that's why things often go wrong on the show because I'm trying to pat my head and rub my tummy at the same time and it's often difficult to be a one man band. One of the things I'm trying to figure out is, how can I focus more on just being the host and not have to worry about doing six other people's jobs at the same time? And that's something we're trying to solve right now.

Larry Hryb:
I mean, as somebody who's been hosting a show for a long time and we've recently migrated to video, I mean it's a similar set of problems where I'm pushing buttons and I'm making sure that Jeff goes full screen, is Gary going full screen? We've got three people, it's hard work. And a lot of people don't realize that it's all happening in your case, it's happening live. So when you screw up, you got to keep rolling, the show must go on.

Gary Whitta:
Yeah and we talked about doing it prerecorded and making sure that we edit out all the goofs and the flubs and putting it on YouTube the next day. And we do do that. There's an episode, we clean up the edit a little bit. If something goes wrong in a funny way, we'll keep it in. But if it's just clumsy and awkward and bad, we'll take it out. And then that goes up on YouTube the next day, but there is something particularly invigorating about doing a live show.
That last 20 minutes right before we go on air and I'm in the green room with all the celebrities, I'm like, "Okay, have a good show, everyone. I'm about to go live." You've never felt more alive than in that moment, and I totally get why people who perform on stage whether it be rockstars or stage actors or comedians or whatever, why they get such a rush from it because it is thrilling, but there's also a lot of anxiety that goes along with it. And I never feel better than right after I say good night and the credits roll and everyone had a good time and people in the Twitch chat are saying, "That was a really fun show." You really feel like you've accomplished something, you've made a lot of people happy and that's really all we can strive for.
Those three hours are great. Again like I said, it's the other 10 to 15 hours of arguing with record labels over whether or not we can clear the copyright for their music and stuff like that, that part's not fun. And I'm trying to find ways to mitigate some of that and offload it so that I can continue to go forward. Again, I can't afford to hire a staff. The show doesn't make any money. We don't accept any sponsorship, we make a tiny little bit of money off the Twitch and YouTube backend, but it's not much, it's not enough for me to pay anybody.

Larry Hryb:
You can't put a staff against it.

Gary Whitta:
Right, exactly. There's no business model here for this version of the show. I mean, maybe in the future if I continue to evolve it, but right now, again, it was always just meant to be a hobby project. And I always said, if it becomes more hassle to do, if this starts to feel like work, starts to feel like a job and is more a source of anxiety and stress than it is a source of fun, then I'll stop doing it. And we're at a point right now where that equation is right at 50/50. So in order for me to continue doing it, I need to step back for a moment and figure out a way to make sure that I can continue doing the show in a way where that equation doesn't fall out of balance. Because it brings me tremendous joy to do the show. And it brings joy to a lot of people, but in order to continue doing it, I have to find a better way to actually make the show every week.

Larry Hryb:
Don't kill yourself. Well, we got a lot to talk about and Jeff, I'm sorry you had a question. So I want to talk about what we're playing and Gary, I want to talk about what you're playing if you had time.

Jeff Rubenstein:
Sure. Just one last thing that I think was really interesting. You had mentioned that this is the only talk show right now that actually looks like a talk show and I'm not sure how you found all of those parts of the set because it really does. But it's something I thought that was really cool that you did is you've opened it up. Because people want to visit the set. That's something that real talk shows do. I've toured the Saturday Night Live set back when it was Leno's set. And so you can actually go through and you've opened it up to tour the Animal Crossing set haven't you?

Gary Whitta:
Yeah. That was something I was reluctant to do at first. I don't know why, but Nintendo added this feature, this dreams feature where you can go visit someone else's island in a dream and you can't interact with anything, but you can go walk around it-

Larry Hryb:
It's read only mode.

Gary Whitta:
...and just look and see. Yeah, read only mode. Yeah, exactly right. And when that feature first became available, people said, "Oh, you should put up your dream address because I would love to come visit the Animal Talking set." And when the show went on hiatus this past week, essentially the set is kind of a joke, right? Because we could do it any time. But the idea is now that the set is dark, we're not using it to make the show, so we may as well open it up to the public for tours.
And I published my dream address on Twitter yesterday. And I got to tell you, it's funny. This is a continuation of something that's been going on for a while. We had a friend of mine, a comedian by the name of Mike Drucker who was a guest on the show, episode four. And he used to work for the real Jimmy Fallon Tonight Show, he used to write Jimmy's monologues. And he came on our show and walked onto the set and had a moment where he was like, "This is like being back in my old job." And that was the best compliment I could have received.
We've had actual celebrities come on the show who watch Animal Talking. And when they walk down those stairs, because we do... The first time they walk onto the set is not on the live show. We do a whole run through where we have them on the set, we explain to them how it works, they come visit the set, we do sound checks, we do pre-interviews. When they come onto the set and it's just me and they walk onto the set and then they're like, "I can't believe I'm on the actual set of Animal Talking." It's a big deal. It's hilarious to me. And then the last couple of days, it's been so much fun since I put the dream address out there. I've seen so many people sending me photographs of them sitting in the host chair and sitting on the couch and again, just the same way that when you go on the Warner Brothers studio tour or whatever and you get to walk onto the coffee shop from Friends or whatever, and people got to go, "Oh my God, I'm actually here."

Larry Hryb:
[inaudible 00:23:51] throne and all that sort of thing.

Gary Whitta:
Yeah, exactly. People have been doing that without stupid, virtual set because it's become a thing. A lot of people watch the show and just the same way as the talk shows that we stand on the shoulders of, Animal Talking has in this moment at least become a part of everyone's, it's in a lot of people's imaginations and for them to be able to actually now visit the set, or be in a dream, is something a lot of people have been really enjoying and I've got a kick out of seeing them do it.

Larry Hryb:
Something that I've done as Jeff said, I've certainly been on a lot of the sets and I know you have as well. And when they're dark, as we say in the entertainment business, there's the fluorescent lighting and there's a drop cloth over the desks. Do you do the same thing?

Gary Whitta:
Yeah.

Larry Hryb:
You just have overhead lights and a drop cloth over there.

Gary Whitta:
No. Well, that's the benefit. I remember, years and years ago I was at the Paramount lot. When Voyager was still on the air and I got to go sit in Janeway's chair on the Voyager bridge. Again, the set was dark. And so it's not impressive because none of the consoles are lit up, to doesn't look like it does when you see it on TV. It was cool, but it didn't feel like I was actually there. When I was on the Rogue One set, those sets were lit because they were actually shooting at that time. I was there on the days they were shooting. And that was amazing.
When I first walked onto that rebel base, I almost cried because they had recreated it to such a degree. They pulled all the original blueprints and it was basically like walking back in time to 1976 when they were shooting that movie. And it was just absolute magic. Now, of course the beauty of Animal Talking being a virtual set is, I've just left all the lights on. When you walk onto that set in dream mode, it's like a night that we're shooting. I could turn the lights off I guess, but that would be a dick move. Well, I've left them on because it doesn't hurt to leave them on. There's no carbon footprint or anything leaving the lights on. So the cameras are up, the lights are on, even the jukebox is playing with the KK jazz music that we play in the background on the show. And so people, when they're there they really feel like they're there during a live broadcast of the show. And that's really cool.

Larry Hryb:
Best dream ever. Anyway, we got to move along here because we've got a lot to talk about. Jeff, I want to find out what you're playing. Gary you just talked about the show last week, so you're a little bit on hiatus now, but what if you had a chance to play. Have you had a chance to check out Flight Simulator? Got to ask you.

Gary Whitta:
What did it drop yesterday, or the day before? It's brand new, right?

Larry Hryb:
Yeah.

Gary Whitta:
I've had it-

Jeff Rubenstein:
Tuesday, yeah.

Gary Whitta:
...pre-installed from the first minute and I've got a Ninja PC here. I have a Core i9-9900K with a Titan RTX. So this thing is going to chew Flight Simulator up and spit it out. I'm very excited to crank it up to its highest settings, ultra everything. Because I mean the game looks absolutely phenomenal. I was watching YouTube video of it on stream the other night and my jaw was on the floor because I can't believe they've done this. And you have to remember, I come from a PC gaming background. I've been working and reviewing PC games since the late '80s. So I remember the early days of Flight Simulator. So to see how far it's come has been astonishing.

Larry Hryb:
To your point. And we've got an interview with Jorg, with the head of Flight Simulator that we're going to roll in just a second and exactly that. I mean, Gary, you and I are of similar age where I remember playing that in 1982, in 1983, the originals where it was just a green phosphorous screen and a bunch of lions. And to experience what you're about to experience Gary is going to be phenomenal so, yeah.

Gary Whitta:
I watched a YouTube video that was a really great compilation of Flight Sim through the years. It was every version of Flight Sim from those early, what would it have been? CGA, EGA I don't even remember. But it would have been really, really basic through the windows 95 versions and 2000 and even combat Flight Sim that I'd completely forgotten even existed. Up to where we are now where you've achieved this level of photo realism and the ability to fly anywhere in the world that is just astonishing. And I see a lot of people getting sent by these amazing flight sticks and throttles by Microsoft. By the way you guys have my address because I assume it's lost in the mail. But it's been-

Larry Hryb:
Jeffery, I'm looking at you for that.

Gary Whitta:
...amazing to see.

Jeff Rubenstein:
We didn't know you were a fun. Let's talk afterwards.

Larry Hryb:
Well you do now Jeff.

Gary Whitta:
And the funny thing is that would be cool to play with, but the reality is I'm probably going to want to play. I don't know how dumbed down you can make it in terms of ease of flight, but I'm going to want to play on the dummy settings basically.

Jeff Rubenstein:
Put it on all the cysts at least to start and just pick whatever airport you want, flight out of Heathrow. I'm playing with a controller and a couple of key strokes on the keyboard. So I can do what is called active pause, which allows you to photo mode as you would see in a lot of other games where you hit I think it's just all pause. And I'm having a great time. You can get from A to B very easily. Yes, you can go full on and you can [crosstalk 00:28:33].

Gary Whitta:
Right. And you have to be able to simplify a little bit, you have to be able to simplify it to a certain extent. Because it's also coming to the Xbox, right? It's got to work on a controller.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. We talked about that. In fact, you know what Gary? We're going to stop right now. We're going to roll the interview because we talk a little bit about that. You'll learn more of the history. Will you stay with us and join us on the other side?

Gary Whitta:
Absolutely.

Larry Hryb:
All right.

Gary Whitta:
For sure.

Larry Hryb:
Let's go ahead and roll that interview with Jorg. And you're going to learn a little bit more about Flight Simulator. Big week for flights and fans joining me now is the head of Flight Simulator, Jorg Neumann. Jorg, great to see you. How are you my friend?

Jorg Neumann:
I'm doing great. So good to see you too.

Larry Hryb:
I got to tell you, you guys have had a heck of a week. First of all, congratulations on the launch. I mean, anytime you launch a game, it's extraordinary, but this thing is getting amazing reviews. And I know because I've made this mistake before, never call it a game, it's a simulator. So congratulations on the launch of Flight Simulator. How's the week been going for you guys?

Jorg Neumann:
Oh, it's been amazing. I think from the review scores and then now we're seeing all the streamers come in and they're having so much fun. And you can really see people explore the world together. There was a multiplayer stream just yesterday and it was just amazing. And it's delightful to see it. What's really awesome I think it's the simmers are there, and they are happy. And then people that we call newcomers, people that have never played a sim before are also fascinated by this. So they're all also coming in and having fun. So it's just awesome.

Larry Hryb:
I have to talk to you a little bit about your history, because you've been around Microsoft studios for quite some time and I didn't know this. I was looking at your credits. You've actually done voiceover work as well.

Jorg Neumann:
Oh, my.

Larry Hryb:
That's going back [crosstalk 00:30:09].

Jorg Neumann:
Yeah, with the German accent. I was always the bad guy.

Larry Hryb:
Well, there's no reason to have that and in Flight Sim. But you've been around Microsoft Game Studios for quite some time. Tell us a little bit about few of the games and the journey that brought you to working on Flight Sim.

Jorg Neumann:
Oh my. So yeah, I mean it started in 1996 or so. We all were in Texas still and there was a company called Origin Systems that I was a part of. And at some point we decided to form a startup and wrote an email. We actually framed it and emailed to Bill Gates, [email protected] Maybe we had a little bit too much to drink when we wrote that email and we said, "Hey, we're the world's best game developers. If you want to work with us, just go ahead write us an email or give us a call."

Larry Hryb:
Right.

Jorg Neumann:
And lo and behold, a few days later, Adefris called and we formed the studio called Digital Anvil. I worked on a game there called Freelancer, it's a big space game and then we got actually acquired by Microsoft, I think in 2000. We worked on Brute Force, which was an Xbox original game and then I moved up here actually in 2006 to Redmond and worked on Mass Effect and Alan Wake and all the Connect Games. And then I moved over to HoloLens and then I moved back to publishing and there was Quantum Break and ReCore and all kinds of, Killer Instinct, [inaudible 00:31:32] 2K, lots of games.

Larry Hryb:
All of these games that just mean so much to Xbox fans that you've got your fingerprints on so many of them. So then you make the migration to work on this Flight Simulator. And Flight Simulator, your history is incredible. But Flight Simulator's history is even more incredible. A lot of people don't know this that it predates Windows.

Jorg Neumann:
[inaudible 00:31:56].

Larry Hryb:
Look at that behind you. Let's talk about that.

Jorg Neumann:
It's 1982, 1983, 1985, it's incredible. I mean it's the longest running series, certainly at Microsoft. It's one of the longest running entertainment series all up. And I can tell you when we started this, the idea came in 2016. We looked up the history obviously, and at the last five versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator were all best simulator of the year. So it was like, oh, that pressure's on-

Larry Hryb:
The bar's a little high for you.

Jorg Neumann:
...we got to do something. That's a little high. And we're like, we got to do something special and actually it all started on HoloLens. I had worked with Asobo Studios, the French developer on HoloLens app called HoloTour where you teleported yourself around the earth, right? And you had your AI headset on and it looked real that I remember sitting there in Machu Picchu, which I'd never visited in real life. And it felt so real and it looked so real and it was made possible by Bing maps.
As a game maker typically you say, "Let's go model Machu Picchu." You very quickly realize, you don't do that. It's mountains everywhere, millions of trees, don't do that. So I went to Bing maps and they have a full representation of earth. They have a photogrammetry for some cities, which is amazing, basically that's up to five centimeters down resolution, just amazing.

Larry Hryb:
Now, that's like that much.

Jorg Neumann:
It's nothing. It really, when you think about it, it's mind boggling. But then they had also the rest of the world. So I went to them and said, "Hey, can you help me out? I need to do to Machu Picchu." And they're like, "Sure can." And we put that in the engine and it looked amazing. I put the headset on and I literally felt teleported to Machu Picchu. And then I thought, "My God, if we could do this across the planet, wouldn't this be something?" And then it was the same time we had talked about doing Flight Sim again. So it was just perfect coincidence.

Larry Hryb:
It's funny because I remember that demo for HoloLens. And I remember bringing a HoloLens home and putting it on my wife and I believe we were transported to, I think it was Rome or the Vatican or something. And it was exactly-

Jorg Neumann:
Exactly.

Larry Hryb:
...where she and I had never been. And she's like, "This is amazing." So you're right, bringing that photo realism into your experience is amazing. So I can see where you get the mapping data. So you've got this idea, you've got Flight Simulator. Okay. We've got the world because that's where we're flying around, but there's so many other components to it. But then you've got Azure, which is kind of powering the backend. Tell us a little bit about that.

Jorg Neumann:
Because it's amazing. If you think about it, I say it so lightly, "Oh yeah. They have the world." So they have two and a half petabytes of data, which if you do the math, it's almost two million DVDs.

Larry Hryb:
Right.

Jorg Neumann:
Two million DVDs and so basically it's only usable-

Larry Hryb:
So it won't fit only usable fit on my USB stick.

Jorg Neumann:
Let's look at a hundred years from now. Maybe there's a stick like that. No, it won't fit. I mean it's incredible. And as if you think about it, you have to get all that data to the end consumer via streaming. So you can only do that with the Microsoft tech stack really. We have Azure where all that data is stored, but we have so many cool data centers now across the planet. We can get that data to all the machines at low latency. That's actually the key. So it's like the perfect combo. We have the data, we have the Bing maps, they keep updating it, we have Azure, they keep making data centers and the download speed gets faster and faster. This literally wasn't possible just a few years ago.
So it was just a light up moment. We said, "Oh my God, this is another way to use the cloud." And it's not just that we're also using Azure for cloud compute, we're actually doing [inaudible 00:35:43]. So what we get out of Bing is essentially a height field. It's the entire world, the pictures are right, but there's no trees, there's no buildings, there's not none of that stuff. So we basically, I hired another company, found a company of experts in Austria called Blackshark.ai and they basically have vision scientists, a lot of them. And they look at the satellite pictures and analyze the rooftops. So they have the roof top colors, then they see sort of the folding of the rooftops and based on that they construct the roof in 3D, then we build the walls of the building, we put in the windows, the staircases, et cetera. So it's just incredible.
So with that method, we find 1.5 billion houses on the planet. And we built those, we always jokingly say to ourselves, we built the world every seven days because we basically refresh this all the time. And it's not just that, there's also trees.

Larry Hryb:
That's important to point out is that the data that you're getting from [inaudible 00:36:38], it's not like you guys said, "Hey, give us some data and we'll build it." It's constantly being refreshed as the new data comes in from the satellite scans and all the different data points they have. So this is in all effects a living breathing world. I remember I was just last night, I was flying over my hometown. You added in traffic. I couldn't believe it. I've never seen that much traffic in my small town, but it was pretty amazing.

Jorg Neumann:
Yeah, we know where the roads are.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. You know where the roads are-

Jorg Neumann:
We know where all the roads are.

Larry Hryb:
...and you could put traffic on it. The interesting part about this is, so you've got all this data, then you start laying it over. And I want to bring some photos in here with the photo realism here. And then you start introducing aircraft into this, tell us about that. Because this is really amazing. There's amazing aircraft in here.

Jorg Neumann:
Yeah. So maybe just another element that's really important is, I mean, aircraft are critical, right? We built 30 aircraft, we worked with all the aircraft manufacturers, some of them give us their CAD files, we talk to either the designers or their test pilots. So the integration with the aviation industry was huge and that's where all the realism really comes in for us. So we built it down to 0.5 millimeter detail. So that's a lot of detail. And literally, the plane works exactly like the plane in the real world. So it's every button does exactly what the button should do. We have board computers on the Boeing 787 or something where we rewrote the board computer. It's maybe not exactly what Boeing has, but it's close.

Larry Hryb:
Right.

Jorg Neumann:
And so that's amazing. But the thing in between that's also important is so we have the static world from Bing, but we also needed air and weather. And that's where all the imagery comes in and where the flying really becomes fun because flying really is super fun. And it's also an adventure because it's never the same depending on the time of day, the weather, all that stuff. Super cool. And we basically hooked up with a company in Switzerland called Meteoblue and they're the leading scientists in the world to do weather prediction. So they have imagined 250 million boxes, little boxes around the planet in different altitudes that have weather information, wind direction, temperature, particles-

Larry Hryb:
Right all of that.

Jorg Neumann:
...all that stuff. And that is how the planes really come to life because you fly through a storm. I remember the day when I got a call from the Asobo team, they said, "Jorg guess where we are." And I said, "I have no idea. Where are you?" And they're like, "We're in the middle of Dorian." It was last year. There was a hurricane that was just battering the Bahamas, it was horrible. But what was interesting about it we had it in the sim and they were like flying through it and it was super realistic.

Larry Hryb:
Wow!

Jorg Neumann:
So it's really, truly a living world. What you said.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. You talked about the weather and I've seen these videos online. I linked to it a few days ago about people that are using it to, they go to a point on the earth, because you can go virtually anywhere on the earth, drop in whether it's at ground level, a thousand feet, 10 wherever you want and go up and down and you can dial in exactly the time of day, the weather, the clouds. And you can take photos. This is a world simulator in terms of [inaudible 00:39:48] and the gentleman that posed the video and I can link to it again was a photographer. So he travels the world and he said, "This saves me time because I can go somewhere and look, should I go in April or maybe late March? Because again, it's seasonal." So the data here, there's so many unintended causes or uses for this data. I mean, you must be so thrilled to see that.

Jorg Neumann:
People are so creative. So there was a person who wrote me an email saying he basically has a website that tracks running. So typically they basically run anywhere in the world and they track the geo data and he attached that data to our world and basically had a chase camera going through it as he was running, I think he was running in somewhere in the Middle East, like Afghanistan, it looked like he was running. So that was incredible. And we light up creativity by having a software development kit being part of the product.
So we have basically packaged up all the tools that we use to make the game or the sim and let people be creative. And we made a marketplace where people can upload this so they can reach everybody. And that's really where this product is not just a sim, it's a platform. It really is. And the things that you just said about photography, I bet your money there's going to be an app soon that somebody puts up it's either free or paid whatever, but it's going to unlock the creativity of people, really just wanting to use this digital twin for all kinds of purposes, things we haven't even remotely thought of yet.

Larry Hryb:
It brings such a tear to my eye because as you and I are chatting here and I look over your shoulder, that red box over your right shoulder, that was one of my very first games. Because I remember playing that.

Jorg Neumann:
Wow!

Larry Hryb:
My family and I growing up, we couldn't afford a PC and a friend of mine, when I grew up in Connecticut, his dad worked at Sikorsky, which makes helicopters, PS, we need helicopters in there. But I remember going to his house and playing this thing. It was a green foster scree and I could see what was then the Sears tower. Remember that?

Jorg Neumann:
Oh, yeah. The two lights. Yeah.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah exactly the two lights. And the fast forward through all of those iterations to where we are today, where last evening I flew over my childhood home and I looked down and I saw the baseball field I learned how to play baseball on or some of those moments, it was just incredible. And by the way, oh, and I can do it, either freeform because again, to your point, you have so many tools where you can just drone mode where you can move around the universe, the world, or you can actually fly. Let's talk about the aircraft, because you've got quite a collection of aircraft in this thing. Tell us about what we can expect in it.

Jorg Neumann:
Yeah. So basically we tried to go really wide. So there's beginners aircraft that you would take when you are just really starting out, began taking flight lessons, like a Cessna 152 or 172. We also do the DR400, which is a French plane. So the Europeans use that plan more, in America we use the Cessna's more. So that's the entry level. Then there is planes that I love like the Cubs. Actually some of my mates in Washington. I love him because he can land literally anywhere. If you want to just land somewhere on the grass strip on a mountainside, super robust, the tires don't break, so those are great.
Then we have turboprops that can go pretty fast and much higher like the TBM or those types of things. Then we have small jets and it goes all the way to wide body jet. So we have a 747, the Queen of the sky. We have to have that. We also have an Airbus 320 and in the biggest version, we have a 787. You can have for general aviation, all the way to big airliners. You can really have a great sample of anything you want.

Larry Hryb:
When you're doing this-

Jorg Neumann:
Oh, yeah. One more thing there's a lot of planes called the ICON. I highly recommend it in California. It's a great plane specifically for where we live here in Washington. Because there's so many lakes. So we calculated there's 117 million lakes on the planet. So that plane is great for that. You don't need an airport, you don't need a grass strip or anything. Just land on the water.

Larry Hryb:
Any body of water is your runway.

Jorg Neumann:
Yeah, it's awesome.

Larry Hryb:
Now, we talked about this and this is about Flight Simulator and so forth. Are you a pilot or how many people on your team are pilots or maybe even not pilots, but want to become them?

Jorg Neumann:
The answer we give is not yet. So I did fly, I flew in Texas. My wife's grandfather had actually a Cessna in his backyard hence we could just take off for a famous hundred dollar hamburger.

Larry Hryb:
Wow, all in Texas.

Jorg Neumann:
But I haven't flown in a while honestly, just not enough time. On the Asobo side, was super great to see you. They weren't pilots, but I basically approached them, "Hey, how about what we work on Flight Sim together." And the very first thing they did was sent the entire company into exploratory flights. And then several of them are now pilots, they just finished their pilot licenses. And on the Microsoft team side we have some really experienced pilots. One gentleman's name, [Wirl Winchester 00:44:50] is his name. Super experienced pilot used to fly f-15s. We have people that do search and rescue. So there's a lot of knowledge on aviation, a ton.

Larry Hryb:
When you look at this game, and again we talked about the wall behind you and the progression of Microsoft Flight Simulator. And this feels like it's the perfect storm of Microsoft, where we've got Azure and we've got Bing maps and all these elements to come together. I mean, to you, it must've been a slap the head moment when you saw this come together, this is perfect. No other company on the planet could probably pull this off, right?

Jorg Neumann:
You're exactly right. I mean, it's this combination of our tech stack. I mean, look at the history that we have in flight simulation and game making, and also connecting with customers. I think we have this perfect storm coming together to make this product.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah, it's phenomenal because there's so much going on. I mean, certainly we have Flight Simulator that came out in 1982 that who knew that we would now be flying photorealistic versions of that, many, many, many years on. When you look at the product, I mean, it feels like much like and again that's not a game. But it feels like a game like Minecraft, where it's a platform. You talked about when we say platform, we mean a base that people can build on and that's what you've designed with the APIs and so forth, right?

Jorg Neumann:
That's totally true. So even at launch, I mean we launched yesterday. We had already, I think five airports and an airplane from third party developers. We have tons more coming. We expect to have a hundred airports and dozens of planes by the end of the year, but it doesn't end there, there's people that made already replay cameras, I know of somebody who's making an MMO right now on top of this. So this is going to be used as a digital twin, as a platform for digital twin and people will come up with all kinds of cool stuff. And I think that's really what kept this whole ecosystem vibrant over the years.
Our last Flight Sim was in 2006, so we've been gone for a while, but people kept going and they innovated. So they drove this forward. And I think it's so critical to embrace that. And they have embraced us as a new platform, which is one of the most important things actually for us to accomplish that the simmers belief that [inaudible 00:47:04] sim and that the creators see us as their platform for the future and they really have.

Larry Hryb:
I mean, you go back to Flight Sim X and Bing maps didn't exist, Azure certainly didn't exist the way it does. So it's almost like we had to wait for this moment to take off, right?

Jorg Neumann:
Yeah.

Larry Hryb:
We had to wait for it. Would you agree with me?

Jorg Neumann:
I call it the confluence of things. So the cloud and the infrastructure that we have, obviously the data. It also occurred to me, just look at us. We're running around with our phones. When you look at your car it has dozens of sensors. The world is being scanned and it's getting scanned on an increasing frequency, higher fidelity. So it really is just the beginning. We have currently we're this vessel of all this data, and we're looking at all kinds of additional data sources right now. So this is just going to get more and more refined as we keep going. Not just a visual representation of it. Also, the accuracy of what's really going on in it, like the heartbeat of the world is going to be here.

Larry Hryb:
And it's also important to note that it's on PC right now. So if you have Game Pass Ultimate on PC, you can pick it up. I know you have plans. And I get asked this all the time. What's going on with the Xbox version. So I'm going to let you talk about that for a second, because there's not much to say, but I want to let you say it.

Jorg Neumann:
We are dedicated to come to Xbox, we're working really hard to make this happen. We don't have a timeline quite yet. But we are working full speed because we know it's important.

Larry Hryb:
I will tell you this, is that I found it so much easier when I was flying around to hook up my controller. Because I've been flying and I'm going to use air quotes in video games for a long time. So being able to use that methodology was for me was easy, but what kind of setup do you have? Do you have the whole yoke and the pedals and the whole routine?

Jorg Neumann:
I have the whole routine, but interestingly its different times, right? So when I just want to test something, I actually just use the path that you have. When I want to do something more serious, specifically, if you go into big airline, it's probably better to have pedals because you need water control and there's a whole bunch of buttons to press. You can do it with just a controller. It's totally doable, but it's a little bit more natural. And the whole thing is about realism and accuracy. So when we really go after testing complicated things, we typically do the full controller set.

Larry Hryb:
When you look forward, I mean this is such an incredible launch to have now and we talked about it a moment ago the reviews are just 10 out of 10 and it looks like you may be getting sim of the year. You better get sim of the year, I'll tell you that right now.

Jorg Neumann:
Our forefathers are looking at us, we need to.

Larry Hryb:
You're going to get the email from Bill Gates now. But when you look forward, I mean again this is really the beginning of the journey for you. You talked about everybody plugging into this. Again, you have a lot of plans for this platform, right?

Jorg Neumann:
It's super cool. So the next thing we're going to talk about is the first, what we call world update because basically what's going on right now, there's planes flying overhead right now over the Northern Hemisphere because it's summer and there's no clouds. So we're going to get a ton of new data. It's actually coming into Bing right now. So we're starting to process it. And we're going to put that together as packages, basically in order to faux people, we're going to take a country or region of earth and make that look even better with the latest and greatest. And on top of that, we're going to build some handcrafted airports and make some missions that really that light that area up. We hope that people will explore the planet and go to places that they've never been to because we have new data, we have new things to do and that's going to be on an ongoing basis.
And then right after that, so this first update, which is coming in September frankly. The next one is in October, we're trying to do this monthly to have something really meaningful every month. On October we're planning on launching on VR and Larry, I have to tell you it is the best thing ever and I mean it. I've been doing this game games for 25 years. I've never seen anything like this before. Because the world looks real, it is as real as we do see it in the pictures, but the planes are real and the cockpit is real, and the behavior you have, like you're sitting in the plane chair, you actually look over your shoulder when you're looking for the runway, just like you would in a real plane.
So it is eerily reminiscent to the real world. Please play it in VR, everybody. It's just the most amazing thing I've ever seen. And then after that we're going to do sim updates. We have a bunch new data coming in, we're obviously improving things all the time. And then we have some really big new things that I can't talk about quite yet, but it's going to be a ride. So every month you're going to get something new.

Larry Hryb:
First of all, that's so exciting to hear. When you look at this and you've worked on, we talked about it at the beginning of the interview. You worked on so many games, Mass Effect and so on and so forth with [inaudible 00:52:07] where there's a lot of real intense fan love. This is again, not a game, it's a simulator, but this is an incredibly vibrant subculture unto itself, outside of what we're normally used to in games. What are some of the nuances of the Flight Sim community that have surprised you?

Jorg Neumann:
How gracious they are. A, they're incredibly knowledgeable because it's the real world, it's a real hobby. They are reading the pilot manual. So sometimes looking at the manufacturer manuals, which are like going down to every screw. So the audience out there knows everything about the planes, they're super gracious about their knowledge about the earth. I mean, I remember the first time somebody sent me, we put the beta out and somebody sent me a screenshot of Hobart, Tasmania, I don't know where that is. So I went and looked it up and he sent me a screenshot from the sim and what he had done the previous weekend in the real world. And he said, "You guys are doing a great job. It's a little bit too red. Can you just change the red a little bit?" We were like, "Sure. Why not?"
So I think that it's super gracious, super engaged. It's been a dream honestly, to have the community. We have the alphas now for, I don't know, 10 months or so. And we're going to continue to listen to them because they know so much about everything. Oftentimes our priorities for what we do in the future, is driven by the community. They tell us, "Hey, we want seasons." I mean, right after E3 they actually said, "We need the VR guys." And we're like, "Oh yeah, right." So we put a team on VR immediately.
Then they talked about seasons being important, we're like, "Hmm, yup." So we put a team on seasons and we put snow in even now. And we're going to keep refining that. So the action with the community here is super critical and I'm looking forward to it so much because it's really exciting for us, right? When somebody calls us. Every day we get a phone calls like, "Hey, I'm a helicopter pilot. I would like to help you make the best helicopters ever whenever you make helicopters." And helicopters is a thing, you mentioned it earlier. So we need to go make helicopters now.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. It's interesting because we talked about certainly the enthusiast community, whether a console or PC they like to trick out their gear. But Flight Sim is one of the only areas of game development and simulator development where people are turning their garages into cockpits, right? They spend thousands of dollars. You don't need to do that. You can do it with your PC. But I'm saying this is a real dedicated community that wants to have the most accurate, the most realist flight simulator experience ever, right?

Jorg Neumann:
That's exactly right. I mean, yeah. You say thousands, instead of tens of thousands of dollars. I mean, some people rebuild entire Boeing cockpits in their garages and they send us a picture of them and our SDK allows that. So you can basically hook up literally every single button, which is it's super important to them and we're dedicated to working with them. But you're right. And what's also interesting is that there's a real world counterpart to what we do here. So all the manufacturers are actually interested in working with us too. Because they look at our visual representation. They're like, "Oh my God, this is better than what's called level D simulator." So we're at $4 million a pop simulator. So there's lots of interesting applications coming.

Larry Hryb:
I know that I got to let you go in a minute because we've been talking almost a half an hour and I could just go more with you, but I want to talk a little bit about, we talked about the Flight Sim is in Game Pass, you said you've committed to bring it to Xbox in the future. But tell us a little bit about the multiplayer because there's air traffic control, there's a lot of components what people may consider traditional multiplayer. I don't know if you even call it multiplayer in Flight Sim. So tell us about that experience.

Jorg Neumann:
We call it multiplayer-ish. So there was a deliberate attempt and back in the day you had to set up a server and we said that doesn't really make any sense because what we really want is to share the planet and the planet, so I think you might know this, we have the real world planes flying around. We've licensed something called FlightAware. It tracks every plan on earth that has a transponder signal, and they're actually flying in the air. And then on top of that, we wanted everybody who is currently flying in the sim also to be there.
So by default, it's a shared world for everybody who is currently in and we're basically doing it with filters. So you can filter out and say, "Oh, I just want to see my friends." Or, "I just want to see people in this area." Or, "I just want to see people really adhere to the true flight rules, instead of doing some crazy stuff."

Larry Hryb:
Right.

Jorg Neumann:
So it's completely empowering for people to set up the world the way they want to experience it with friends or with new people that they've never met before. So it's so super duper open.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. I mean, I love the fact that you can do that and you've got this air traffic controller component. It's phenomenal.

Jorg Neumann:
More and more to that. So there's communities like [inaudible 00:57:15] and IVAO and others that are basically have hundreds of thousands of members. And the way that works is they actually act out as the air traffic control of a particular area. So somebody might have a job to be the air traffic controller in Queenstown, New Zealand that's their job. And they can take that job in that community, they're totally trusted. So when a virtual plane comes in, they can talk to the plane and it's literally role-playing and they all embraced us. So there's hundreds of thousands of people that's already working in the sim today at launch they made the systems work and it's just so great. So second step, if you really want to get a taste of what it is to fly and to talk to the towers, you can talk to them in real time to actual humans.

Larry Hryb:
That's just phenomenal. Jorg, again, I could talk to you forever. I want to have you on again, you talked about this monthly cadence, so I'd love to have you back on the show again. I have one request. I really want to fly a Concorde.

Jorg Neumann:
Ooh, that's an interesting one. We should talk again then. Maybe get something going.

Larry Hryb:
I know you can't confirm anything or just that's my own personal request. I really appreciate you.

Jorg Neumann:
It's a great idea.

Larry Hryb:
I mean, you have so many aircraft, I'll tell you my other favorite aircraft is the Boeing Clipper. I think it's the 301.

Jorg Neumann:
Wow.

Larry Hryb:
It's the one that lands on the ocean. Anyway you've lots of work to do.

Jorg Neumann:
I love that you say that because the world I've been doing a ton of research into planes and my God, there's such cool planes out there, modern ones, historical ones. I want to build them all, we want to build them all, it's going to be so cool. But the good news is the third parties are going to build a ton. Somebody just said, the Rutan EZ is coming. It looks great. I said, "I'm going to buy this immediately when this is coming out." So I think it's going to be great.

Larry Hryb:
We need to have the Kitty Hawk. The very first the Wright brothers airplane. There'd be no controls-

Jorg Neumann:
It wasn't.

Larry Hryb:
...it would just be a stick.

Jorg Neumann:
Yeah. I remember this. Might be a century of flight.

Larry Hryb:
That's right there it is.

Jorg Neumann:
It was in here and we want to honor our history. So there's another hint for you.

Larry Hryb:
You have so many places you've been with Flight Simulator. Just look at the wall behind you. But again, there's so much and I don't want to say road ahead of you, but there's so much air ahead of you. So again, I want to thank you on behalf of everybody in the sim community and gamers around the world, what you guys have done with technology. This is nothing short of astounding. So I want to thank you on behalf of everybody and Jorg, it's always great to chat with you. And can I have you on again, maybe in a couple months we can talk some more stuff.

Jorg Neumann:
It would be great. It was great. It took a great team to get here so thank you all for the team. Asobo is amazing, Blackshark, the team here at Microsoft, Bing, Azure, it takes a village to make this and we got there and it's so good to see.

Larry Hryb:
This is so exciting. Well again, thank you again. If you have Game Pass for PC it's on there, and as Jorg said, they know we wanted to Xbox. I wanted to X-Box as well. So when we have details on that we'll share, right Jorg?

Jorg Neumann:
Yes, absolutely.

Larry Hryb:
All right. Thanks. Jorg we'll talk to you later.

Jorg Neumann:
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Larry Hryb:
Thanks to Jorg, Flight Sim. Gary you've seen all these reviews, Jeff you've seen the views. People dig it. People love the game. So lot to look forward to in that.

Jeff Rubenstein:
It's not a game Larry, it's a sim.

Larry Hryb:
Yes, I caught myself, I know I caught myself. It's a simulator, Gary I'm looking-

Gary Whitta:
The thing that I find, sorry Larry. Go ahead didn't mean to cut you off.

Larry Hryb:
I was looking at your studio with Jorg we were talking about these people that turn their garages into flight simulator cockpits. I think you have some room in the back there that you could probably put in a 747 cockpit.

Gary Whitta:
Yeah maybe, I could bolt some stuff on. I need to get a flight stick and some of the other stuff for Star Wars: Squadrons anyway. It's funny. Again, growing up through the PC gamer years we used to have a whole section where we would review flight sticks and throttles and yokes and paddles and things like that, because Flight Sim for a long time, and again, we're all old enough to remember this, was a cornerstone of the PC gaming for a long time. And then it went away. And so I'm really glad that the MS Flight Som, which is the mac daddy of them all is back. And I remember I used to watch these videos and I'm sure you've seen these, people really get into it. Have you seen these people that just role play as air traffic controllers, like all day long?

Jeff Rubenstein:
100%.

Gary Whitta:
And they never break character. It's amazing.

Jeff Rubenstein:
AirForceProud95 highly recommend. He went viral a few years ago, taking it-

Gary Whitta:
It's incredible.

Jeff Rubenstein:
...super seriously around people that weren't. Yeah.

Gary Whitta:
I mean, for the people who are into Microsoft Flight Simulator and have been for years, but may have felt like a little bit neglected over recent years because it went away. They must feel like it's like 10 Christmases all at once right now.

Larry Hryb:
They have been upgraded to first class and they are getting the service right now. So it is extraordinary. So I'm glad you're going to take a look at that. Jeff, you've had a chance to play it as well, right? Did you fly the new vet in Philadelphia?

Jeff Rubenstein:
The new vet, the vet's been gone for 20 years, Larry.

Larry Hryb:
I call it the new vet.

Jeff Rubenstein:
I actually did fly the first time I played it over Citizens Bank Park, for sure. But it's funny. We were talking about Gamescom and a year ago this week we were at Gamescom, and while there is a digital Gamescom this year, I'm not in Cologne, you're not in Cologne, we're not drinking Kolsch and eating curry wurst and restocking our dwindling gummy bear supplies from [inaudible 01:02:53] company. So I took a flight down the Rhine. I flew off from Dusseldorf and I could navigate just right down the river and saw the Dom and the [inaudible 01:03:02] on the left side. And there's a little something about us not being able to travel to the places that we normally would or that we might miss or places we've never been to. And being able to see it within this sim, it's never going to replace it, but it is stoking a little bit of something. I don't know it's making me feel good to play it. So, yeah.

Gary Whitta:
Well-

Jeff Rubenstein:
I thought it was really interesting, Gary. Oh, go on Gary.

Gary Whitta:
No, I was just going to say Jeff to that point because I think you were touching on it there. In the same way, I mean, not in necessarily the same way, but in a similar way to how Animal Crossing offered an escape from our troubles in these times, I think that Flight Simulator might also in its own way be the right game at the right time, because in the real world right now we can't go anywhere. Everyone's afraid to go to an airport.

Jeff Rubenstein:
Especially if you're in the United States we can't go anywhere

Gary Whitta:
Here in the US we can't even leave the country because the rest of the world has built a wall around us and rightly so. But this is the only way you're going to get on a plane and go and explore and see the world and see it in such incredible fidelity. I honestly think that's going to be a factor going forward. The idea that there's that sense that wow, I can actually go and explore the world right now in a way that in the real world is just not accessible to me. I think that's going to be a factor.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. And that's something that we've seen. I was talking a little bit about that at the beginning of the interview about the videos that I've seen where people go to these locations, and then when you're at the location, Gary you can stay at ground level or go to 1000, 2000 all the way up and down, but you can also change the season, the time of the day, the weather. So you can tweak and go, you want to spend fall in Paris? Have at it. You want to spend, winter in Colorado? It's all yours. There's just tons of things you can do to get the beauty of the globe without ever leaving your keyboard in a way that's never before been possible so...

Gary Whitta:
Yeah. It's really remarkable. And I was watching DJ Nights, a popular streamer on Twitch that I like to follow. And he posted some images for him streaming the other day. And it's like, they could have been photographs. I mean, it really is stunning the level of fidelity.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. So anyway-

Jeff Rubenstein:
Here's the thing you fly in real time in this game and there's a lot of times, it's very chill experience. So I think much like Animal Crossing, it is the right game at the right time. At the same time, I feel like there's a great opportunity to converse, to talk. I don't know, Flight Sim talking. I feel like there's probably something there, pilot and co-pilot.

Gary Whitta:
Like I said, right? I mean, so right now you asked what games I've been playing. Right now I'm obsessed with Fall Guys, as everyone is currently. And to such an extent that again, we already have a talk show that we're in fact launching next week on Talk Guys where we attempt to interview celebrities while also playing Fall Guys and surviving the chaos of the game. People have described it already and never even seen an episode yet, but they're right as like the hot ones of video games. Like can you survive this brutal ordeal and also somehow conduct an interview. So we're going to have fun with that. We've got some great guests we're going to announce next week. But yeah, the talk show concept is very portable. Yeah, let's fly from London to San Francisco, get it in the air, put it on autopilot and then just have a chat, why not?

Larry Hryb:
Yeah, Jeff maybe, we should do that next week. We should figure that out.

Jeff Rubenstein:
We absolutely could do that.

Larry Hryb:
Gary, another question I want to talk to you since we've got you here and we talked about Animal Talking is, as somebody who is at the nexus of the video game industry and the entertainment industry, and when I say that not just as a show host, but as somebody who has written some amazing cultural pieces like one my favorite Star Wars films. What are you seeing from Hollywood now that they can't get people in theaters and some movie sets are shut down? What are you hearing from that in terms of the real engagement on the video game side are people who never really looked at video games, were they interested, have they always been interested? Tell me what you're hearing.

Gary Whitta:
I think we've already seen a lot of data that indicates that people are really turning to video games in a big way right now, because again what else are you going to do? I don't think Animal Talking would exist were it not for the pandemic because I wouldn't have been so bored as to create it. The fake production company that rolls up at the end of the end credits is called lockdown bored and productions, because that's what it was born out of. And one of the reasons why we've been able to get, again, to some extent, all these amazing guests is they have nothing better to do.
Colin Trevorrow, who's a friend of mine and a well known film director. I called him up, "What are you doing on Friday?" "Well, I'm supposed to be directing the new Jurassic World movie, but I'm not, because they've shut us down." "Well come on the show." And he wore a tuxedo on the show and he's a little character. And he genuinely was like, "This is the first time I've gotten to dress up and go out in ages." He was so excited about it. And so that has played a factor and yes, of course. I mean listen, thank God that the internet infrastructure is held up. Because if that went down, along with everything else, we'd be in the last of us right now. We'd be in really bad shape.

Larry Hryb:
That's why we have data caps.

Gary Whitta:
Well, I mean, I fortunately don't and thank God because I would have blown through mine a long time ago. I have a very good deal with my ISP, but yeah. I've already seen the numbers of what is it like. Internet gaming traffic is up 75% above the norm, just anecdotally, I've seen a lot of pieces in the mainstream media, "Hey, if you're interested in turning to video games during the pandemic here's a starter's guide." There's a lot of guides out there right now onboarding people that would normally be interested in video games, but they really want something to do. There's a reason why you still can't find a Nintendo switch anywhere right now, because everybody wants something that they can play on.

Larry Hryb:
They want to see your set, is what they want.

Gary Whitta:
Well, that's what it is obviously. If you want to know why Animal Crossing is breaking all the records it's because everybody wants a chance to be on Animal Talking, obviously. Look, the movie business is really, really struggling right now. They're struggling to make movies under the lockdown conditions, they're obviously struggling to put movies into theaters. I think what they're doing with Bill & Ted next week is the right way that they'll release it into a handful of theaters where it might be actually safe to do so. But releasing it into the home, I'll be watching Bill & Ted next Friday at home, well, I think probably with everyone else. And my kid loves the Trolls movies. The new Trolls movie came out, 20 bucks to rent it for 48 hours, which usually would be expensive, but really that's cheaper than the price of three movie tickets for us to all go and buy popcorn and everything else.

Larry Hryb:
For a first run film.

Gary Whitta:
Yeah, exactly. That's the point for a first run film and Bill & Ted will be, and we'll see more examples. And I think, in many, many, many, many ways in almost every way, everyone talks about going back to normal after the coronavirus at some point in the future, hopefully abates. But it won't be the same normal as before, it'll be a new normal because everything is so fundamentally changed from the way that we meet the way that we do business, the way that we work, the way that we entertain ourselves, we've learned so much about ourselves. Well, actually I didn't need to go to this meeting, we could have just done it over Zoom.

Larry Hryb:
Right.

Gary Whitta:
And I think as movie studios are looking at the numbers, let's see, I don't know the numbers and how well Trolls World Tour did or how well Bill & Ted's going to do. But if the studio see numbers coming and going, "Huh, we actually made more money doing this than if we had to put it into theaters." They might not want to go back to the old way of doing business. It remains to be seen how much of the old normal remains when we get back to "Normal" but yeah. There's a lot of things that will have been changed forever and I think the way that we consume entertainment and the way that we make it and the way that we present it is going to be one of those things that will be fundamentally changed.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. And I'm sure Phil talked about it last week on your show, but we're seeing talking about right things at the right place, we are seeing incredible engagement and pickup with Xbox Game Pass, right? Because now you know what game do I want to play? I don't know. I'm a Game Pass member, let me just go download one of over a hundred titles and find something to play, right? Of which Flight Simulator is in it.

Gary Whitta:
So listen, I've said it before, and I'm not just saying this because I'm on your show, go back and look at the Xcast, go back and look at Animal Talking or any of the other places where I've said it, I've said it on Twitter. Game Pass right now is just this phenomenal thing. I said to Phil Spencer, "Do you think it's the silver bullet?" And he gave a nuanced answer, but I really think that it is, and I've said many times, it's not just the best deal in gaming right now, it's the best deal in entertainment. If you stuck me on an island and said, "Have some technology and you can have one a subscription to anything." I would take Game Pass, because it's the most bang for your buck that is out there and it really, really is remarkable. Somebody sent me a code for Battletoads the other day. I don't need it. I got it already because I got Game Pass and Flight Sim and everything else.

Jeff Rubenstein:
You can call now by name Gary.

Gary Whitta:
I did appreciate the cassette tape that you sent me. This thing is remarkable. You of course have seen this, right?

Jeff Rubenstein:
USB. Yes, of course.

Gary Whitta:
It's mad. It's like, "Why have they sent me a cassette tape?" It's actually a USB drive. Just magical. I love it. So no, it's remarkable. There's a reason why Netflix during the pandemic developed a bigger market cap than Exxon. It's because everybody is relying on this and Grubhub and all these companies. Basically, any company that can bring something to you, whether it be Amazon, whether it be Game Pass, whether it be Netflix, whether it be Grubhub, those are the companies are doing well right now it's the companies that rely on you going somewhere, theme parks, cruise lines, hotels. Those are the ones that are struggling.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. We looked at-

Jeff Rubenstein:
It's a great time to invest in sweat pants.

Larry Hryb:
I can assure you.

Gary Whitta:
I'm wearing sweatpants right now. It's funny, people have said to be, "How are You doing during the..." Everyone asks that question, "How are you doing during the pandemic?" I'm like, "Honestly, I barely even noticed it." Apart from the fact that my kid can't go to school, which really sucks. For me personally, I sat at home in my basement behind a computer in my sweat pants, before this, I'm doing it during this and I'll do it after. I never liked going out anyway. Literally every time I used to go out, at some point would have occasion I'd say to my wife, "You see, this is why I don't like leaving the house." And I'm glad I'm glad to be here.

Larry Hryb:
You're also in a very rare position because a lot of your work requires you staying at home. Your focus work to do screenwriting and writing video games and of course doing all your hosting works. There's a lot of people unfortunately, that just don't have that opportunity. So it's great that we can do that. I remember talking to a friend of mine in Silicon Valley, eight, 10 years ago, who put it this way. He said all of the services that we're coming out whether it's Grubhub, all the ones you mentioned, what they're trying to do and what a lot of the successful ones have done is do things that your mom would have done. When you were a little kid would your mom go get you food? Would your mom give you a ride like Uber, right? So all of those things that your mom would do that's... And then to bring it even further home, now that we're stuck at home we need our mom to really help us so...

Gary Whitta:
Yeah. And I've noted, this has been commented on many times before there was a really popular wave of startups recently. It was like apps that will do your laundry for you, we'll come get your laundry.

Larry Hryb:
Right, that kind of stuff.

Gary Whitta:
That's exactly what you're totally. It's like, I worry sometimes that we're raising a whole generation of people that just won't know how to take care of themselves, because if there's not an app for it, they won't know how to do it. It's like, well, I can't press the button anymore? What do I do now? I don't know how to do my laundry.

Larry Hryb:
I can't go look it up on YouTube. How am I going to do this, right?

Gary Whitta:
So, I mean pretty much everything you need to do to survive, to eat. You don't need to cook anymore because again, as long as you've got the money, right? You don't need to know how to cook, Grubhub will deliver it. You don't need to do your washing, well, some app with a ridiculous name will do it for you. The great technological future will take care of all of your needs. And again, whether or not we are developing a generation of really technologically dependent people. I mean, we almost certainly are. Yeah. I mean, with the wally thing. Yeah. I mean, I think very likely where we're going to end up.

Larry Hryb:
I actually wanted to talk to you about one thing, which is you and I remember Jeff, we all remember growing up and watching these dystopian films where Logan's running. We're all wearing those suits, the bodysuits.

Jeff Rubenstein:
Studded leather, was very big. We're actually at that point, because everyone's wearing sweat pants. We're actually at the point where we're wearing-

Larry Hryb:
That is the-

Jeff Rubenstein:
Oh you're saying, this is the Starfleet uniform?

Larry Hryb:
Yes.

Jeff Rubenstein:
[inaudible 01:15:50] and blend.

Larry Hryb:
This is the start of what we saw in a lot of these films. Gary here, take it, run with this idea. I'm telling you.

Gary Whitta:
Okay.

Larry Hryb:
This is it. I don't know what it is.

Gary Whitta:
I'm listening.

Larry Hryb:
I'm just saying that this is the inflection point where nobody cares what they look like, fashion melts away, we're all optimizing for comfort.

Gary Whitta:
Right. And the metaverse is going to play a big part of that, right?

Larry Hryb:
Right.

Gary Whitta:
Fortnite is leading the way with their big virtual rock concerts and social events. The people at Epic I think figured out a long time ago that they were watching the trends of the way that kids were playing that game, right? And kids stop thinking of Fortnite, for example, as a place to play a game, they stopped thinking about it in those terms a long time ago. Now it's just a place to go and hang out with their friends.

Larry Hryb:
It's a playground.

Gary Whitta:
And Epic saw that behavior and responded to it, Party Royale. Now it's a place where you can just go. I think Animal Talking is a place where you can just go and hang out. And it's funny, people say to me like, "Why does your host character have hair? And you don't, you're bald." I'm like, "Well, the same reason, my water Warcraft character is a fucking muscle ripped barbarian and I'm not." Because video games afford you an opportunity to be someone that you're not, and that's part of the escape and that's part of the fun. And so I love the idea of disappearing into an alternate self, an alternate universe. The ready player one Holodeck reality it's really just, right now we're just waiting for technology to get there.
I think, 20 years from now, we'll be looking back at the current VR technology is pretty decent, it's pretty amazing, but we're looking back on it in 20 years, going and the same way you look back now and the Atari 2,600 and think I can't believe we ever thought that was cool, but compared to what we have now. And so, that of course is going to come with its own ups and downs. The iPhone and mobile technology has been amazing, but it's also bread and tie generation of people who wander around like zombies, bumping into lampposts because they're looking at their phones and you see entire families, sitting at a restaurant or used to-

Larry Hryb:
It's heart breaking.

Gary Whitta:
...before they all closed, just staring at their phones and it's killing us. And we have a rule or we try to have a rule in our house where at dinner time everyone puts their phones away because it's connecting us and also disconnecting us at the same time. And it's a fascinating topic. But for example, right now it's been such a boon. It's been so valuable at a time in which we cannot, we simply don't have the option to connect with each other in real life. To be able to connect with each other, through social media, through Twitch, through streaming platforms, through video games is really...
This is hardwired into our brains and anthropologists and psychologists will tell you, humans need to connect with one another and it's mentally extremely, extremely bad for your mental health to not connect with other human beings. And there's a lot that we're still missing like just physically the act of hugging. It triggers so many endorphins and positive things. Humans need to be able to do that stuff. And a lot of that we cannot do right now, but just the ability to be able to connect with each other, even through a medium like this and to see each other's faces and to talk, it's not as good as being in the room, but it's better than nothing and thank God we have it.

Larry Hryb:
Yeah. Well said, I couldn't have said it better, right Jeff?

Jeff Rubenstein:
That's an exclamation point on that. I'm glad we do have this and I think you see it, I see with my daughter with, even with her virtual classes, when she gets to see her friends she's become very adept at setting up a Zoom call. But I'm encouraging her now, [crosstalk 01:19:30].

Gary Whitta:
My kid is a master of Google Classroom. When I watch my daughter play Battleship with her best friend over FaceTime, it's both super sweet, and heartbreaking at the same time.

Larry Hryb:
Right.

Jeff Rubenstein:
Totally feel it.

Larry Hryb:
I've got the same thing. I have a young daughter and trying to explain to her, "No you need to keep the mask on because you don't want to get sick." It's mind numbing the world that the little ones are growing up in, but here we go. Anyway I think we're going to wrap it up here Gary because we've had you on for quite some time and I know you need to work on probably way more important stuff, right?

Gary Whitta:
I mean, technically yes but like I said, I've enjoyed doing this. I mentioned again, I sit behind my desk all day but these are my outlets. I'm actually trying to get better at saying no to things. Because if I say yes to every podcast request, I would never have time to do anything, but I try to say yes to the ones that I actually I'm excited about doing like this one, because again, this is how I interact with people. I can go days at a time without talking to another human soul outside of the people in my immediate family. So just to be here, chatting with you guys is good for the soul. So I'm grateful for the opportunity.

Larry Hryb:
What we need to do is maybe we need to, once you get your Flight Simulator going, maybe we should do a little bit of Flight Sim action, we can do a group flight, we can-

Jeff Rubenstein:
Fly and formation.

Gary Whitta:
Let's do it.

Jeff Rubenstein:
Where it's got the low red blue angels or something like that.

Gary Whitta:
I got it here. I'm going to boot it up. And like I said, if you want to send some flight hardware my way, I'll be happy to make use of it.

Larry Hryb:
Oh I'm sure of it.

Gary Whitta:
You know where to find me. I want that throttle.

Jeff Rubenstein:
Suppose I do. I'll send it to your dream-

Gary Whitta:
There you go. Send it to my dream address.

Larry Hryb:
We'll leave that there. All right, gang. We're going to let everybody go, Gary. Thanks so much for catching up with us. How can people find you? What's the best way to find you online?

Gary Whitta:
You can find me at Twitter just at garywhitta, G-A-R-Y W-H-I-T-T-A on Twitter. I'm also on Twitch at twitch.tv/gary, that's where we typically broadcast Animal Talking, but starting next week, we're going to be broadcasting live our new show Talk Guys, which is a talk show that takes place inside Fall Guys ultimate knockout. And then the one thing, if you're going to do one thing, please do go to the YouTube channel, youtube.com/gwhitta G-W-H-I-T-T-A. That's where all of the Animal Talking episodes are archived along with clips and highlights, our new show Talk Guys will be there, Danny's Diary the show that we do with Danny Trejo is there. Dungeon Crossing our new show, where we play dungeons and dragons inside Animal Crossing and all my Fall Guys clips are there as well. I know you want to see those. So youtube.com/gwhitta, G-W-H-I-T-T-A, please do go give us a sub.

Larry Hryb:
Oh, we'll go-

Jeff Rubenstein:
I can't believe you're not wearing a crown right now. I fully expected you to show up in a crown.

Larry Hryb:
Do you have one? Hold on, lets see. He's going to get one. There we go.

Gary Whitta:
I usually only wear this when I stream Fall Guys but I did earn it. I have of them now.

Jeff Rubenstein:
Wait a minute.

Gary Whitta:
This is the only one that, what?

Jeff Rubenstein:
Are those not so hidden Mickeys at the top?

Gary Whitta:
So what I did was, after I won my crown-

Jeff Rubenstein:
Did you have a birthday party today?

Gary Whitta:
No, I took my daughter to see Disney on Ice. A couple of years ago, she had this crown and I stole it from her after I won my crown.

Larry Hryb:
Well done.

Gary Whitta:
In Fall Guys.

Larry Hryb:
Well done. All right. We're going to-

Gary Whitta:
I have no shame.

Larry Hryb:
I appreciate you taking the time. Can we get you on again now that we've opened up the communication we'll have you on again, maybe [crosstalk 01:23:09].

Gary Whitta:
Yeah. This was fun. And also don't forget the Kinda Funny X cast every Saturday morning is dropped at youtube.com/kindafunnygames. Me, SnowBikeMike and Alanah Pierce now host the official Kinda Funny Xbox podcast and we've had a lot of fun doing that as well.

Jeff Rubenstein:
Do you plan to get that renewed? Because that has been my Saturday morning routine now.

Gary Whitta:
What's that? Tomorrow we're recording the sixth episode of the six episode pilot. And I think right now the powers that be act Kinda Funny are reviewing how it's done and deciding whether or not we'll get to continue making that show. So stay tuned.

Jeff Rubenstein:
I certainly hope so.

Larry Hryb:
Well, I will say this that one show I had to sit in and I had to sit in your chair. I felt I had big shoes to fit in.

Gary Whitta:
Big shoes to fill Larry.

Larry Hryb:
That was very difficult Gary I'll tell you. So anyway all right, gang. We'll see you guys next week. Gary, thank you again. Everything that Gary mentioned, I'll put links in the show notes below. Jeff thanks for joining us and we'll see-

Jeff Rubenstein:
Play Battletoads.

Larry Hryb:
At play Battletoads and look for us in Flight Simulator, we'll see you in the skies. Bye, bye everybody.

Gary Whitta:
Bye.