The Domain That Outlived a Country

Speaker 1: In 1990, two things happened very close to each other that seemed to me like they would have happened very far apart. Tell me more. The first, the Soviet Union. 290,000,000 people. One sixth of the Earth's land, you've heard of it, registered a domain name, .su.sovietunion. It was assigned by an American nonprofit in California as part of, like, the early bureaucracy of this fledgling network you might have heard of, the Internet. The man who filed that paperwork was a physicist named Aleksei Soldotov. He was a guy working at a nuclear research facility in Moscow. He built The USSR's first internet on the same kind of institute hardware, Relcom, and launched just like seven weeks prior that same year. That domain is the first thing that happened. The second thing that happened at the same time in history is this dawn of the Internet, 12/25/1991, the Soviet Union that registered that domain ceases to exist. For reasons that are beyond this podcast, The USSR goes away.

Speaker 2: It still lives on in the hearts of Benny Jordan.

Speaker 1: And we're gonna get to that. It goes away, but the .su domain did not. So what happened in the thirty five years between that registration and today? To this domain that, like, outlasted the country that registered it? Cybercrime? Yes. Political intrigue? You bet. Soviet era nostalgia, a lot of it. And what happened to the man who built it? And is he still in a Russian penal colony for refusing to hand over the keys?

Speaker 2: Oh, interesting twist. This is the story

Speaker 1: of the zombiedomain.su, brought to you, of course, by our title sponsor Nord Lair. The network security platform for modern teams.

Speaker 2: But we'll tell you more about that later.

Speaker 1: Here on Hacked. Talking about a theme music. Oh. Scott, how you doing?

Speaker 2: How am I doing? I'm doing pretty well. A little hectic. Today's been a little busy. A lot of meetings. Got my brain kind of in overdrive. So trying to decompress to make a a fun podcast recording with my friend Jordan. How are you doing?

Speaker 1: I'm good. I'm back from some travel. We'll talk about all that maybe after the main story and the break, but I'm I'm happy to be here. I'm happy to be home, and I'm happy to be chatting about this. It's not a domain, is it? It's a top level domain. Tell me about that.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Sorry. I was gonna I was gonna jump in and interrupt you, but I didn't want to. But, technically, the dot s u, the dot c a's, the dot, you know, EDUs, they're called TLDs, top level domains. Usually, when you say they register a domain, people people think, like, google.com.

Speaker 1: Sure. They don't think .com.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: So I'm gonna keep calling it a domain for the rest of this entire episode, but As you should. As I should.

Speaker 2: As you should.

Speaker 1: For brevity and simplicity, but I appreciate that clarification. We should start with the guy who registered it. Oh. Because I he this is kind of his story.

Speaker 2: Can we start with something else, though? Like, I just wanna say that .su is, like, kinda cool. Like, especially as, like, a root user, like, sue super user accounts. But, like, .ussr would have been a way cooler domain.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Everyone was getting two letters. Like, up here in Canada, we got .co. But if you could push that and just .ussr, pretty cool.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Exactly. I actually just did a look and search to see if .ussr is available as a TLD, and it is. If you had enough money, you could register .ussr, which to me is just cooler than .su if you're the if you're, you you know, the old Soviet hack.

Speaker 1: A a listener of this show with too much disposable income has the opportunity to do something very funny.

Speaker 2: Exactly.

Speaker 1: Let's start with the guy who who kicked this all off, Alexei Solitov. If you wanna kinda understand him, it's helpful to understand where he worked. The Kerchitov Institute was a nuclear research facility on the Western Edge Of Moscow. It was named after a guy named Igor Cherchitov, the physicist who, like, built the Soviet atomic bomb. By 1989 it was home to one of The USSR's most advanced computer networks and to this guy, Soldatov, who ran the computing center at the facility. Important for where this is going, Soldatov was not a dissident. He was not even a particularly political figure. He was a physicist and a systems administrator who figured out pretty early that this global computing network that was being assembled over in the West was gonna matter a lot. And in 1990, he used Kurchatov's, like, hardware to build Relcom, The USSR's first Internet. It connected these research institutes in The USSR to each other and eventually to the outside world.

Speaker 2: So he was he was an OG OG Internet guy.

Speaker 1: He was an OG.

Speaker 2: I like

Speaker 1: that. To to the point that the World Wide Web didn't even really exist at that point. Like, Tim Berners Lee hadn't pub he just published his proposal for it, was still writing the first browser. ARPANET, like The US military network that preceded the modern Internet, had only just been, like, decommissioned kind of right at the same time. This is all happening right in that pressure cooker moment for the Internet. The global network was mostly just used for research and academics and Soledotov sees it, kinda digs his heels in a little bit and starts trying to build the thing he thinks it's gonna become. Which is why, in 09/19/1990, acting on behalf of the Soviet Union, Soledotov registered the domain.su with this thing called IANA, which is the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Mhmm.

Speaker 2: It's the

Speaker 1: body based in California that distributes those two letter, like, codes. Every UN recognized TLDs. Country gets one. TLDs. We got .ca. You get the idea. Solitatov is the guy that filed the paperwork. And then fifteen months later, super inconvenient thing happens. The USSR collapses.

Speaker 2: And the other pressure cooker that was going on

Speaker 1: Just a little bit. 12/25/1991. Mikhail Gorbachev resigns. That flag comes down over the Kremlin. The USSR dissolves. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. So typically when a country goes away, so does the domain. Like, East Germany got .dd. I didn't know this. It was retired after reunification. You see this a bunch. Yugoslavia .yu goes away. .Su wasn't retired. And the argument was basically like, don't get rid of this. It's working. Fledgling Internet. Every little website counts, and people were using .su. He makes this practical argument to ICANN saying, don't get rid of this thing. There's tens of thousands of legitimate users. We have universities using this research institute scientific networks. You're gonna hobble this thing right when it's getting going. They were all registered under dot s u. It would cause real disruption. You have to, like, at minimum, give them time to migrate, but hopefully just don't get rid of them. I can, like, accepted this argument, and they kinda took no action. So two years later, this thing is still growing, and Solitov cofound this thing called RIPN, the Russian Institute for Public Networks, at this institute he works at. And it becomes like the formal kind of registry for dot su. This body is important for where this is all going. Two years later, Russia assigns its own new domain.ru. And Solotov's network, this thing he's kind of building on the back of .su, is gonna administer that too. They're gonna administer .ru and .su.

Speaker 2: Sure. He's got a registrar for both of them. He's becoming the national registrar.

Speaker 1: Two domains. One for a dead country, both running through this same independent infrastructure. The Internet Development Foundation was this nonprofit cofounded by him and colleagues. His wife's serving as the director. They're taking on day to day management of all this, you gotta. It's not state owned. That's super important. It's not government controlled. It's Soledotovs. He runs it that way for thirty years. Through the February, dot su grows, steadily. It becomes like a weird little corner of the Internet used by, as I sort of saw it in the research, three major groups. You've got Soviet nostalgists.

Speaker 2: People that want it back to the old way.

Speaker 1: Exactly. Yeah. Former researchers who never bothered to migrate. And then the growing number of people who have noticed something very useful about .su, which is that there doesn't seem to be anyone really in charge of it. Sure. It's technically sold at all with the Internet Development Foundation. But like I said, they're not state owned or government controlled. They're not auditing every website. Yeah. It's privately administered. Because the

Speaker 2: domain loves cybercrime.

Speaker 1: You said it, not me, but I thought it. And because the domain has no clear government owner, think about how this would work. An enforcement request from a foreign authority comes in, like, hey. Someone is hosting, I don't know, a giant tranche of leaked data, including the vice president's Social Security number, for random example that will become relevant in a few moments. That request being, like, take this down, comes in. It has no obvious landing point.

Speaker 2: Sure. It just keeps going. Just goes to an endlessly growing inbox.

Speaker 1: Yes. He's managing the tactical infrastructure, but he's not a regulator, and he doesn't try to be one. The next major milestone in 2011, the administrators of Russia's .ru domain start to tighten their rules, being like, this is the government administered thing that he's managing.

Speaker 2: We're we're an international player. We need to act by the rules. Identity verification.

Speaker 1: Know your customer. Know your customer, take down processes, anything for that. It's starting to lurch into catching up with the rest of the world. Criminal operators again, this is by 2011. So criminal peop like operators who had been using .ru comfortably for years go, crud, and they start shopping for alternatives and they find .su. According to Group IB, one of Russia's official internet watchdog firms, the number of malicious sites on .su doubles in 2012. It doubles again in 2013 as this migration is happening over to .su. At which point, like, this domain TLD for a country that hasn't existed in a very long time is hosting way more criminal activity than .ru itself. In no particular order it becomes a real huge home for botnet command and control infrastructure, like taken over hijacked civilian computers, phishing sites, loads of them, credential markets. You wouldn't believe what you can find on .su. And it's here that, like, it really starts to regress into the wild west at this point. Because again, there's no single authority with clean jurisdiction to order takedowns. You make a request to Russian authorities, it might go unanswered if it's about a dot SU. ICANN's authority and responsibility, whatever you wanna call that, doesn't extend to the site level content. So there's this weird decade long sweet spot where dot SU is functionally ungovernable. Just

Speaker 2: just a domain TLD for play. TLD for hire. TLD for hire.

Speaker 1: And let's talk briefly about one of those incidents before we take it to the finish line. One that got a lot of heat, so there's a lot of coverage about it so it was easy to read about, is exposed. Su. It was kind of a story of a guy named Eric Taylor. This could be its own whole episode. In March 2013, exposed.su publishes what it claims are the personal financial records of 16 people. In no order and not all of them, Michelle Obama, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, director of the CIA, John Brennan, Robert Mueller, former FBI director. And then just sort of on the fun celebrity side, Beyonce, Jay z, Kim Kardashian, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Ashton Kutcher, Tiger Woods, Bill Gates, Mel Gibson. Boof. A bunch of information. Social Security numbers, home addresses, credit card details, credit reports. The there had been a breach of three major US consumer credit bureaus, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. And this was, I think, 2013, pretty early to be doing this, posting all of that on this dot sovietunion website.

Speaker 2: Exposed. I just went I just tried to go look it up. It's not there anymore.

Speaker 1: I would think not. Because, Obama confirms publicly that the authorities are looking into this. This is one of these, like, early data leak stories. The primary hacker linked to the data, there's a few different people, allegedly, is a guy named Eric Taylor operating on allegedly I don't even know if I need to on this one. So I mumble. You'll know when I mumble. He was operating online as Cosmo the God. He was a member of a group calling itself UGNATZI. He was 18 at the time. The way they got the information, u g nazi, was, like, they breached a Russian identity theft service, which had already compromised The US data brokers. It was a whole thing. Basically, these personal and financial records, get exposed get published on exposed.su. They're pulled from that kinda criminal intermediary. Taylor gets identified. He's an American. He gets prosecuted. He pleads guilty and is sentenced in 2017 and '19 to I think it was thirty six months probation in federal court. Gets no prison time. He's banned from computers and the Internet till he turns 21. There's a whole weird story there where he becomes a consultant and then he gets accused of a different situation of paying local cops to go after members of the old Eugene Nazi crew. We're gonna put that aside.

Speaker 2: That put that to the side. Talk about that maybe in the future.

Speaker 1: Exactly. As you mentioned, expose.su goes dark, but it doesn't seem like there was ever, like, a takedown order. It seems like they just took it down.

Speaker 2: They're like, too much heat. Turn this one down.

Speaker 1: Turn this one down. We don't need none of this noise.

Speaker 2: Our our botnets and malware for hire services are gonna be mad at all the heat this is bringing.

Speaker 1: We don't need this.

Speaker 2: Turn that off. Yeah. It's not making us money. Get rid of it.

Speaker 1: The other little layer, more on the trivia side, was, like, the cultural dimension of just, like, that Soviet era nostalgia. You wanna go to a you wanna find a site eulogizing Soviet dictator? Go to stalin.su. You wanna go to nashi.su which is like pro Kremlin youth group. They need a website. It's there. And then just American IP, apple.su, and ford.su registered by totally unrelated companies. It's good fun. At its peak, the domain hosted over 111,500 registered sites. There were legitimate users like universities and businesses and research institutes. There was hardcore cybercrime. There was weird Stalin nostalgia.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Communist organization.

Speaker 1: It is not one thing. It is, like, sort of the echo of, like, a country in a moment and an era and all of it in this government gap that was not yet closed until we're gonna take a big final turn towards a pretty rough finish line. In 2019, Russia passes what it calls the Sovereign Internet Law. It was legislation that designated dot su, .ru, and the Cyrillic Russian, like, tld.po with a line through it, all of those as part of Russia's official national domain, like, zone. And under this new law, passed in 2019, these domains would be managed by an organization with state involvement. Soledatov's Internet Development Foundation had no state involvement. It does not qualify. Negotiations are attempted. According to, like, different sources, the deputy communications minister I apologize. A lot of Russian names I'm gonna try and work through here. Deputy communications minister Alexei Sokolov approaches Soldatov, our character, about, like, hey. Do you want to transfer control of this? And Soledatov is like, no. It's just a bold play.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I feel like the urgent negotiations with the Putin administration generally aren't much of negotiations.

Speaker 1: So The pat the pattern's pretty recognizable. When a negotiation fails, a criminal law is sort of conveniently found. The pretext here is that in winding down RIPN's, like, technical operations, Solotov and his two colleagues had transferred a block of just shy of half 1,000,000 at like, of these addresses to a check holding company, company he founded called Reliable Communications that they co owned. Transfers is giant block of these of these websites. And investigators argued that this constituted the theft of state assets given that law that was passed in 2018. The alleged damages were 500,000,000 rubles, which is like just shy of 10,000,000 USD. Independent experts have all said, like, that's a nonsense legal argument. It was their thing. They moved. But we're way past

Speaker 3: that at

Speaker 1: this point.

Speaker 2: You you you don't get that that you don't get that chance.

Speaker 1: Maxim Berkhatov, like, the the director of the organization that actually allocates IP addresses across Europe and Central Asia, has said that, like, no. This was not illegal in the traditional sense of the word. IP addresses, the idea goes, are not property under Russian law. They can't be included on a company's books. They can't be stolen, so nothing was like, he makes a very good case that this was not actually illegal. Alexey Plasanov, a member of RIPN's board board of directors acknowledges, like, a conflict of interest in the way it was transferred, but says it's still not criminal conduct. There's other comparable cases, but in any case, Solitov's charges are filed. There's an investigation, according to two sources, independently cited by, media outlet, Medusa was initiated at the request of a guy named Andrei Lipov. Andrei Lipov is a Kremlin official overseeing information and communications technology, A man who for years had been in a very well documented feud with Soldatov over control of dot s u. Lipov has wanted it for years. This law gets passed. He's able to file like, be part of this project of filing these charges to try and claw control back of dot s u.

Speaker 2: Do we know why he didn't wanna release control of it? Like, was it was it inspired by his communist era allegiances, or was it more like, oh, I make a ton of money with this now, and I don't wanna give it up?

Speaker 1: Porque no los dos. Like, why not both? I I think it's I think it was lucrative. I think the Kremlin targeted the value of these assets he was sort of moving out of the country to preserve his control of as being around worth $10,000,000 Yeah. Which to say. And, also, think back to 1990. Like, he built this.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Sure.

Speaker 1: I could see thinking I really that part I relate to, I'm like, this is mine. I did this. Whether or not you agree, I can at least empathize with that part of it. Trying to move control of them to a Czech external company. Oh my god. That was a bold place, sir. But I get feeling a sense of ownership and creativity in having made this thing because he kinda did. So I think both. I think both.

Speaker 2: Yeah. He's the he's the steward. The steward

Speaker 1: is a better word. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Okay. Dot s u. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. He registered it. He didn't make it, but he registered it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. He gets it alive, negotiated it.

Speaker 1: Probably he's got him a lot of power over the years. Well, sort of. Criminal investigations opened in December 2019, kind of within weeks of the Kremlin looking into the Kerchstov institution. At this point, Soledotov is 67 years old. He's been running Russian Internet for, like, thirty years. He served as Russia's deputy minister of communications. Again, this guy is not a dissident. He's not even an activist. He's a sysadmin. He's a party man. He's a sysadmin. He's kind of an insider. This investigation into him opens. It runs for four and a half years. And in 07/22/2024, a district court convicts Alexey Soldotov of abuse of power. His business partner is convicted in the same case, and Soldotov is sentenced to two years in a general regime penal colony. Solotov is 72 years old by this point. He is taken into custody the same day as the verdict is delivered. He is transferred to a penal colony in the Ryazan region south of Moscow. You don't wanna go there. In the weeks that follow, Solotov contracts a lung infection. He's moved to a prison hospital. Things don't get better. On a visit from his wife, he's, like, losing consciousness and collapsing. Prison medics are looking at him. They transfer him back to his cell. Right around here in September, one of the big quotes that got me looking into this story was his son, Andrei Soldotov, tell who tells him a journalist, my father, Alexei Soldotov, is dying in prison. He's terminally ill. He's been in jail since July 22. People start calling for this guy's release. And the rough irony of all this is that in February 2025, while he's in this penal colony, ICANN sends a private letter to the dot SU administrator, the domain, this letter from ICANN states is gonna be phased out. The target date is 2030. So the the don't the TL that TLD that he's in prison for having moved around and tried to preserve his control over is being phased out while he's in a Russian penal colony for allegedly trying to kinda steal it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's rough. I looked up the average life expectancy in Russia because I know it's quite low. 68. So to be what is this? 72? 72 prison colony.

Speaker 1: Russian penal colony. Yeah. Not great.

Speaker 2: Not

Speaker 1: great. A twist. A twist is common. Okay. .Su was removed from the ISO, three one six three one six six one, this international kind of code standard. The .su registry has publicly denied that any retirement is planned. They're saying it's still gonna keep operating, but domains are kinda starting to get taken down and transferred all over. Aleksei Solasov who had registered this thing in 1990, he'd kept it running and independent for thirty years, who refused to give it to the state, was convicted on these charges, and he's sent to this colony but a happy ish ending. On 05/13/2025, ten months after his conviction, several months after his son tells the world, like, this guy's gonna die in a penal colony over this, Andrei Solnitov, his son, posts again. His father's prison sentence had been converted into a large fine, and Alexei Soldatov was now home.

Speaker 2: Money money money changes everything.

Speaker 1: Money talks.

Speaker 2: When in Russia, make sure you have money.

Speaker 1: And now this domain that he had built and kinda kept independent for thirty years and went to prison rather this than surrendered is scheduled for retirement in 2030, and he will potentially be there to see that that final chapter close of a very strange story that he started.

Speaker 2: The closing down of his life's work. I'm sure he did many other things. But

Speaker 1: It's a fascinating, weird story about, like, the history of the Internet and this guy and our the law. It's it's an interesting one.

Speaker 2: Well, it's it's I I find it just most intertwined because, you know, the USSR obviously broke up, stayed quasi communist even though it just became a rampant capitalist oligarchy state. And I'm sure I'm sure had he been a part of the oligarchs code and paid the right people, it would probably have been just fine. Just like everything else in Russia, it seems like make sure that everybody all the party men get their peace and everybody's you will be allowed to do as you would like.

Speaker 1: Well, it's like So don't steal from the coffers. I think that that that choice to transfer the control of of the the TLD and and that tranche of of addresses out, I think that would be viewed as sort of, like, skimming skimming from the wrong pile. You know what I mean? It's like Totally. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. No. You got rich and powerful administering this thing, but it does not belong to you. You can't do that. And it gave Exactly. The other guy, a sort of a toehold. They've been in this beef that I couldn't find a ton about the beef other than there had been one and he was the guy who finally kind of got got a leg up on Soledotov. So it's a it's a really interesting story. It has like death of Stalin vibes to me of these two men just like beefing for years as the Internet is being built around them till finally one of them does something that the other one's like, you done fucked up.

Speaker 2: Totally. You didn't pay the right people, and I paid the right people, and now it's mine.

Speaker 1: And now it's mine, and now you're in a penal colony. Oh, you got a lung infection. Like, it's you you can kinda see the, like, the anger between these two men and the way it all plays out. Oh, man.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Russia Russia, fascinating. Like, if you haven't read the book Red Notice, I'd recommend reading it. Interesting book about the collapse of the USSR and, like, capitalism moving in. I know it's being made into a TV show or movie or has been made into a TV show or movie, but highly

Speaker 1: recommend it.

Speaker 2: Really? Yeah.

Speaker 1: No. Good book. This sounds fascinating. It's an interesting moment in history, and I was shocked to find out that it was kind of happening at the beginning of the dawn of the Internet. Like, I intellectually know those things happened at about the same time, but they feel like they should be much further apart in history to me.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, they are far apart, but they're also very connected.

Speaker 1: Like, 1989 to 1990. Like, it'd be, like, one like, kind of happening at the same time.

Speaker 2: Yes. That yeah. Yeah. You're talking about the registration and the breakup. Yeah. I was thinking the registration and the the closure. Yeah. The yeah. Very Dominance

Speaker 1: is new.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Dot USSR, I can't believe nobody's registered that as a now that it's no longer it's, like, not really a country based TLD, but, like, if you could register it as, like, your own unique TLD, I feel like a lot of people

Speaker 1: That's funny.

Speaker 2: You know, as communism is growing and socialism across the world, I could see dot USSR having, like, some, you know, legacy homage elements.

Speaker 1: I think if you were trying to rebrand, you probably wouldn't wanna go with .su. It's a it's a really interesting story. I do want to, at some point, dig into that kind of side story of Eric Taylor who used this Soviet domain to post this leaked information in this as part of a beat. Like, there there's all these weird little stories branching out of it because it was this little corner for such a long time.

Speaker 2: Totally. Just have this pseudo legitimacy of, like, a for a TLD that really was uncontrolled, unregulated. Yeah. Didn't respond to yeah. Should we talk about our new title sponsor?

Speaker 1: I think we should.

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Speaker 2: I think, since we last recorded, the world's largest IPO happened, SpaceX, which is both tech related, space related. We all know that The USSR was very intrigued by space. Ties right in here. The, SpaceX Republic, not sure what your thoughts are, went from an insane valuation to an even insaner valuation and has now returned back to the insane valuation. Yep. Came came public at, like, what, $1.50. I think it peaked at, like, $2.25. You know, we're in the economics finance corner of Hacked right now, and that was back at $1.50 ish. Pretty wild story. I was strongly contemplating buying some put options when it was Explain

Speaker 1: what that means for anyone that doesn't know what a put is.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So you buy the option to sell a 100 shares at a specific price. So one put option is the rights to sell at a strike price. So say I bought $220 puts, I would have the option over a timeline to sell a 100 shares of SpaceX for the price that I've set as the strike. So when it was up at, like, $2.20, I was looking at buying some put options. So the right to sell hundreds of shares at $220. So when the price returns back to $1.50, which it has, I would make the difference minus the cost of the option. You're talking about a short. A share.

Speaker 1: I'm talking about a short.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm talking about like a like, a margin short. Like, instead of just shorting the stock and borrowing it and selling it and then having to buy it back later, which is how shorts work, I'm using derivatives to, like, amp it up.

Speaker 1: To put it even more, explain it like I'm five.

Speaker 2: Sure. A bet against. Yes. A very yes. A bet against.

Speaker 1: You are correct. Yeah.

Speaker 2: That I have to pay for the bet. So I there's a price to buying the options, which is the cost of making the bet, and then the bet has a return variable based on how much it shifts, how much the price comes

Speaker 1: down. My my sense of what's happened here is, like, anytime there's one of these kind of big blockbuster IPO type moments where a company is suddenly available to be bought and sold by normies like you and me, it's like there's typically a lot of volatility in those early trading days, and it's it's kind of just speculation. This thing is Yeah. Available for the first time, and everyone's speculating. So things can go up and down, like, very, very fast. And that's interesting because SpaceX had been valued at this kind of unprecedented scale as, like, however you measure it. It's a multiple of earnings or whatever you look at. It's just it's a really, really, really expensive company to buy a piece of.

Speaker 2: It is the highest valued, most ex most overvalued company in history, I think.

Speaker 1: I get why you would bet against that. There's all this speculation, and it goes

Speaker 2: up up up up up up up up,

Speaker 1: and it comes Yeah.

Speaker 2: Back down down down down down down down down.

Speaker 1: And this is all still in the early days before this thing enters into indexes. And, like, there's there's all a whole bunch of milestones that are still to come for this.

Speaker 2: There's lockups. Like, employees that have equity can't sell them except for on specific dates to get released to the market. Even people that were allowed to go into the IPO had lockup agreements. There's, yeah, there's all kinds of stuff happening, but it the FOMO when it hit the retail market because it's such a small percentage of the company actually was sold on the public markets. The price jumped so much because there was a bunch of people rushing to get in. They didn't wanna miss out. And it it quickly shot it from, like, $1,700,000,000,000 in enterprise value all the way up to, like, 2.7 or something trillion dollars, which puts it, like, in 20 I'm trying to think when Apple was, like, $2,000,000,000,000, 2 and a half trillion dollars. It would have been, like, 2023, 2022. So it's, like, substantial massive like, it was worth more than Amazon was at one point.

Speaker 1: SpaceX was?

Speaker 2: And it's, like yes. Correct. Or it was, like, in the ballpark of Amazon, like, within a $100,000,000,000 of Amazon, which is like, employs a million people. It's one of the largest global cloud system, you know, online retailers. Like, you know, Amazon's got its fingers at everything. And SpaceX is, like, you know, we send a few rockets up. We have Starlink, which is cool, and they own XAI and and what was Twitter, which, you know, is what it is. They they flip their they had the option to buy Cursor, which is like a agentic software engineering IDE, and they they flipped that on and said, yeah. We'll take that. So they did an equity conversion with Cursor and took them over. But, again, their equity was so highly valued that it costs SpaceX almost nothing to buy Cursor. So if SpaceX's share price comes down, the Cursor guy is gonna have got a pretty short deal.

Speaker 1: We didn't didn't isn't that exactly what happened? Like, didn't the Cursor deal happen during the the hockey stick before L. K. Yeah. Bummer. I mean Well, they Air quotes bummer. I'd be like, oh, no. Your second yacht's a little smaller, but, yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The the people that found

Speaker 1: the curse are are, you know They'll be fine. Yeah.

Speaker 2: They'll be just just fine. Yeah. For, like, 80 generations.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's like the Instagram cofounder when someone was talking about how much is is equity would have been worth if he'd kept a bigger trunk or something, and it still turned out he walked away with a billion dollars, and he just kinda laughs. Yeah. No.

Speaker 2: I Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker 1: Hard hard to be mad. Yeah. I mean, it's a lot of money flooding into a thing and a lot of money moving around, and it's a milestone in the story of a stock market that is frothy and overheated. I'll leave it

Speaker 2: at that. Yeah. There's a bunch of cases being made for why SpaceX deserves such a value. You know, there's a lot of discussion that they're gonna release a satellite based cell network. So all of our cell phones will be global, and they'll connect to Starlink satellites rather than to local cell providers. You know, a bunch of things like that. Obviously, the merger with Tesla, which is highly touted. A lot of speculation that SpaceX and Tesla will merge and be relisted under the ticker Elon. I'm not sure if that's gonna happen. But, you know, obviously, the humanoid robots, you know, kind of Tesla's advanced robotics goals require the SpaceX XAI goals to kind of hybridize and create fully functioning, you know, AI robots, which so I'm not sure what's gonna happen. Tesla's already a company that carries a pretty high valuation. SpaceX carries the highest valuation, For a company that loses billions of dollars a year to be worth trillions of dollars a year is

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: Pretty insane. So, anyway, I just thought it was worth mess mentioning. I know a lot of people are talking about it. Now a lot of people were excited about the IPO and trying to get in on it. So, yeah, I just thought it'd be a a neat tat touch in the, hacked finance corner.

Speaker 1: Well, after we get back from the, the ad ad waterfall, we should talk about another knock on effect of sending RAM to space for space server farms, which is the Ramageddon back down here on Earth and the way it's impacting stuff like the steam machine and other little fun gadgets that I'm I'm pretty excited about. Why don't we why don't we chat about that when we get back from the break?

Speaker 2: Let's do it.

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Speaker 1: And we're back. Scott, do you do you like video games?

Speaker 2: Nah. Well, you know, I've gotten older over the years, Jordan, and, I love them as much as I did as a kid. I just can't find as much time to play them. Why do you ask?

Speaker 1: You and me both, brother. Well, if if you're an adult who likes gaming, you probably have a pretty gnarly Steam library connection of video games. And, maybe you were excited about the Steam machine, and now that it's out, maybe you're less excited about its price. And I wanna talk about that kind of in connection with with RAM and all that good good stuff.

Speaker 2: Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna instantly counter back with, did you see that Nintendo has released a Switch two pricing increase? I did. Pretty much anybody that makes integrated hardware devices at this point are releasing news releases talking about price increases coming because RAM, CPU, memory modules, storage, pretty much anything that AI uses has doubled in

Speaker 1: price. Yeah. I I would go ahead and say that that's not, a response or a clap back to what I'm saying. I think we're saying the same dang thing. So Valve launches this thing called the Steam Machine, like three days ago, June 22. For anyone who is unfamiliar, Valve makes a platform called Steam where people buy PC games. They've started getting into hardware. They made a thing called the Steam Deck which is a little portable console. Now they're coming out with their version of, like, a TV type console, a little cube that can sit on a desk or under a television. It's, PC gaming kinda coming for console gaming has been the sort of story that you've heard. They come up with this little looks like a little GameCube. In the internal projections It's a computer. It's a computer. It's running like a base

Speaker 2: computer that connects to your TV and has a controller to control it.

Speaker 1: And SteamOS is gonna be runnable on, like, NVIDIA cards, so you can basically make a PC out of this. What it says is it's less like a new thing, kind of trying to, like, blur the lines between a home console and PC gaming, which for a very long time have felt very separate, and this is starting to try and make that line be really blurry.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. The the thing that I found interesting about Steam Machine like, obviously, you wanna talk about the price because everybody was kind of hoping it was gonna come in at, like, $6,700. And I think the final price was about $11.99 USD.

Speaker 1: It depends on the the pricing model. $10.49 base, but you can go up to 1,400, like, depending on how you can back it out.

Speaker 2: Which is USD. Like computer pricing.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's computer pricing. It's pricing

Speaker 2: in the computer. Yeah. Exactly. They they the architecture and design that they went with, like, they're all AMD based Mhmm. Internally. I know Steam OS prefers AMD right now. I'm not sure about their NVIDIA support. Not sure where it is in the pipeline.

Speaker 1: They're they're gonna support it with Steam OS. They are. Yeah.

Speaker 2: I I don't know if it's done yet, though. But I know I know that they fully support all the AMD stack. The Steam box Steam machine Machine. Steam machine Machine. Is essentially just an AMD laptop wrapped up in a

Speaker 1: It's a

Speaker 2: laptop processor. Yeah. Yeah. Laptop processor, laptop GPU, which makes sense. But the thing is is I like, that makes it like, to me, the difference is is, like, the your handheld devices. The the Steam Deck, lots of the other handheld by Asus, things like that, they're all just essentially AMD laptops built into a handheld with the screen. Very similar configurations to the Steam machine, just the Steam machine can sit in your media center, plug into the wall. I'm not sure why they went with something that has such a power conservative chipset when they had the option of using bigger components, burning more energy for higher performance. That's the really thing that stood out to me is, like, why why why did they go with mobile architecture in a situation where it's not a mobile device?

Speaker 1: The performance I've seen coming out of it it's like I'm probably not gonna buy one of these. So I got I got no horse in this race, but people are saying it's like PS five comparable performance. It's like current gen. That's what they're trying to get to. It's like we were trying to reproduce just twice the price, which is like an interesting play. It's it's leveraging the fact that a lot of people have massive game libraries. So there's an economy of, like, I can play that over here. I don't need to buy the new games for this other thing. There's there's some economy there. And it doubles as a PC. But it is a much harder case to make, you know, internal projections at Valve. And, like, the number they'd been saying was seven fifty. So we're looking at, like, a 40% overshoot when it actually got down to launch. The quote that they said was it was due to rapidly evolving market conditions, and those conditions were the DRAM prices had rose like a 170% year over year since that November 2025 announcement. So less than a year ago, a 120 a 170% increase in the value of these things. You then layer on tariffs on top of that, and it's this kind of double squeeze situation. Totally. That is all part of this larger RAM crisis that's going on.

Speaker 2: The like, with, like, SteamOS cool, there's a bunch of really good, like, kind of more open source projects, Bazite, Fedora based Linux, you know, very comparable to SteamOS. Like, you can build your own Steam machine pretty easily these days. I know some some listeners of the show have messaged me about their Linux based gaming computers. Yeah. I I I don't know if this is I don't know if this is gonna be impactful. Like, the Steam Deck was an impactful product that Valve released. I don't know if the Steam Machine's gonna be as impactful. That's my honest opinion.

Speaker 1: No. It's it's fair. The Steam Deck, like, hit so hard because it put your PC library into a portable form factor, and it sparked all these other companies to start trying to compete in that space. I could see Steam OS being a bigger deal than Steam Machine because now there's

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: If I'm a PC maker, I can make my home console play. You know what I mean? Like, now there's a platform for it. It's like, no. It runs SteamOS, same as all the Asus ROG ones started running it. It's like, I think the platform is a bigger deal. And then secretly, I think that the controller is maybe the biggest deal. Because if you can make a PC and bundle it with that cool Steam controller that gets touchpads and trackpads that are so useful for PC gaming back onto the couch, that's pretty cool. And none of it matters if it all costs so much more money than anyone can afford.

Speaker 2: Well, the, like, the Proton layer, like, I don't know if you know what Proton is, but but Valve built a layer to essentially sit on top of Linux, which allows for compatibility with DirectX games and stuff. That is probably the most impactful thing that they've built because that has launched, like, Nobara, Basite, Pop, Kechi, all of the, all of the new Linux gaming distros. That's the biggest shot over the bow at Windows because Windows was always the platform that, like, if you were a gamer, you had to use Windows or a console. Exactly. And now it's kind of open sourced it a bit.

Speaker 1: Yeah. There's two stories there. And on that one, it's like, Valve had tried years prior to the Steam Deck to do more of the Nintendo model, which is if we build it, they will come, and that didn't pan out. They didn't have the proton layer, and they said, you make your game for Linux. Yeah. We're gonna be the Linux hub, and you make it for us. And it just didn't happen. The people that did it, the games were buggy and unreliable. The the migration didn't occur. So they sort of, like, retreated and figured out, okay, we need to make all the Windows stuff run really well on Linux. They invest the time and money, more money than God. They build that Proton layer and this is sort of Gen two. Start with the Steam Deck, great value at the time, its price has since hiked. But I I think you're right that the Proton layer and SteamOS are maybe the most interesting parts about this. Seeing those come to more things that again are just gonna cost more money. RAM's three to six times what it cost a year ago. Raspberry Pi costs double what it cost. Like, everything costs double what it costs. And I think that there's, like, an interesting second story with that price increase because we're talking about, like, luxury consumer electronics here. No one needs a steam machine. No. The price of it going up is, like, well, how much are you willing to pay for your bougie unnecessary TV home PC console? If I think about the bottom of the price ladder, that's where it gets really interesting. Because, like, whether I need a $1,500 computer couch console is very different than a person in some part of the world that can afford a $200 Android phone. That's the full phone they can afford is the $200 one. CMF, which is a sub brand of the Android manufacturer Nothing, it's their, like, affordable phone. They put out a $200 phone two years ago, the CMF Phone two Pro, and they're not doing a a a Pro three. They're just not they're canceling that entire lineup. They basically said that, like, if they launched that phone from two years ago that cost $200, that they launched today, it's a $400 phone. They cannot produce the $200 phone anymore. It doesn't. That supply chain has vanished. And I think that that is like, oh, that's something to pay attention to is the whole giant chunk of the world that relies on those bottom of the price ladder products.

Speaker 2: It's like Yeah. Accessible products.

Speaker 1: Being priced out is very different than me being priced out of a game console.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Very, very true. Very true. The the one thing that really stands out to me here is, you know, Steam had an issue. Valve I'll say Valve had an issue with Linux gaming. Yep. And they went ahead and built Proton. Mhmm. Apple has had and this is I'd like this is be the second Apple rent in a matter of weeks is Apple, on the other hand, has had endless capital, endless time, endless capacity for software engineering, and probably would any Mac users and a lot of the Mac ecosystem would have loved to have attracted and secured this, this audience. So how did Valve fix it so quickly and Apple's had all this time and hasn't? Same as Siri. Like, I know that recently since the since four episodes ago or whenever we, like, crapped all over Siri, Apple's announced that Google Gemini will be coming in and Siri will just be replaced with Gemini, which is great news for any Apple user because Siri is unusable. Why is Apple not taking direction from Valve writing Proton and essentially Proton being an open source solution for running on Linux, mapped it over to their metal graphics structure and released it? I don't understand why they haven't done this because these new MacBooks and Mac chips and Mac GPUs and the ability to share VRAM and have you know, you can have a a Mac studio with 500 gigs of VRAM, which is, like, unheard of for any kind of gaming development. Mhmm. Apple has the infrastructure to do amazing things in the gaming space and just hasn't done it,

Speaker 1: which is been kind of doing the thing we were talking about, which is the if we build it, you will come kind of attitude. Like, they have the game porting toolkit, which is a proton like thing, but it's at the developer level. It's meant to be like you Yeah. Make your it's so easy now for you to make your thing work on our stuff, where Steam is like, we'll make your thing work on our stuff. That's a really big difference, in who you're asking to do the work. The device versus the developer. Totally.

Speaker 2: Radically different. Like And and if Valve solved it, why can't Mac and Apple solve it?

Speaker 1: It seems like they have. Like because then people build I know there's open source things that take GPTK and let people run Windows games inside of it, but it's like a janky open source middleware solution. It's like the technology literally does the thing we're describing the proton layer is doing, I think. I'm I'm not that deep in the tech on this, but, like, it seems all the parts are there for you to just flip a switch and be like, you can just run Windows games on your laptop.

Speaker 2: You Yeah. Just dedicate a small dedicate a small team, give them a bunch of whatever they need, and just make Windows gaming a thing. Like, if I could install the new Grand Theft Auto six, which has been released for preorder on my Mac laptops, on my Mac desktops, on any of my Apple devices, it'd be amazing.

Speaker 1: K.

Speaker 2: The one thing I will say is the just to loop back to the cheap chips thing, Android things, is, like, the quality of those Android Qualcomm Snapdragon, Ambernic, retro Yeah. Like, things that were typically seen as retro gaming handhelds. Yeah. Lots of the better ones now have such advanced capabilities and processing power, memory, things like that. You can get a pretty good handheld gaming device for hundreds of dollars. If you wanna spend more and more, like, you can get a device that's better than a Switch two that can run Switch emulation and Switch two emulation. I think that there's, like, a there's an interesting fight in the world going on in this space, and I'm intrigued to see how it's gonna wash out. I think Apple really could differentiate themselves here if they made some big investments in it, decided that they were gonna become a gaming platform. I I know they've always wanted to, but it's like, yeah. Like, I have SIV five or whatever installed on my laptop, but, like, that was one of the last games for Mac that was released native for Mac, and it's, like, great.

Speaker 1: I I think there might be there's an argument you made that they intentionally never will. Because you think about it from their perspective is, like, if we can get oh, yeah. We're really excited for you to run your Steam library on Mac where we don't get any cut of anything, as opposed to we're really excited for you to convert your game to be Mac friendly. And then you know where it's great for you to sell it? The App Store, where we get 30%. Like, there there is a business incentive to only go so far with supporting, pre existing Windows titles. Because it's like, the more of them we make you convert and sell over here, the more of a cut we get.

Speaker 2: Yeah. But nobody nobody's doing it. Nobody's doing it. So the like, my email would be

Speaker 1: The experiment, man.

Speaker 2: Would be, if I'm gonna be a MacBook Neo user

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 2: And I'm gonna have a $5,000 gaming PC, If I could run all of the stuff from my gaming PC on my MacBook, I might be a MacBook Pro or a Mac Studio user, and your marginal revenue per end user goes up because you're you've lost the fight. Like, Steam installs on Mac already. They have it. There's games for Mac on it. It's done. To work. Valve is one of the highest revenue per employee companies in the world because they get 30% of all the hard work of all these gaming studios literally to have the most basic old antiquated store app in the world. Yeah. One which small developers like Jordan relies on.

Speaker 1: For sure. And I, for one, think it's sick as fuck.

Speaker 2: No. I I So so yeah. I don't I don't know. I I I think that Mac's missed the boat on this. If they were to just take the lessons learned from Proton, roll it on a Mac, I think they would see that the marginal expenditure on Mac devices go up as people would be adding more RAM to have more shared memory to play bigger games. Like, if you could play Cyberpunk on a MacBook Pro at sixty, eighty frames, if you bought the $5,000 version, they'd probably sell a lot less Mac Neos and a lot more Mac Pros, and the PC market would take a bigger hit.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's interesting to think about the Mac Studio moment that we had for, like, OpenClan stuff a couple months ago. It's like, you could engineer a Mac Studio moment for gaming. Like, if you if you if you released the update that turns it into a gaming rig, which is by having that proton layer style thing in it, at the same time as, I don't know, the most popular game in history were to release in a few months, you could probably, like, do some real damage. You could probably have people that are thinking about buying this machine or this machine or this machine being like, I'm gonna buy a Steam Controller and a Mac Studio because it costs about the same thing as a Steam Machine. And now I have a great home computer, and it can run this game. It's like, there's we're simplifying a lot of detail here, but it's like, you could imagine that moment. You could imagine that working.

Speaker 2: But but, like, we're not even really simplifying that much because Apple in their quest to have a custom UX, which we love Apple for custom UXs. They have the Apple TV UX. They have the iPhone, like, UX. They have the iPad UX. They have the computer UX. They already have a UX for TV. Like, if if you could buy a Mac mini that was spec'd high enough to be a gaming console, throw it in your media center, plug it in HDMI to your TV, and grab a wireless Apple controller, which would be beautifully designed and everybody would love. And it immediately knew that it was a TV console and spun up with a UX built for TV, which they already have built that could then launch games, it'd be it'd be an instant contender.

Speaker 1: The only all of that is bang I think bang on except for the idea that an Apple video game controller would be nice. No, it wouldn't. Because I've seen the Magic Mouse. I'm like, nope, that's the one part that wouldn't. And I think they know it. I think they know it in their hearts because every time you see them doing gaming on a Mac, it's always a PlayStation controller in the official photography. It's like they just know. They're like, we would fuck that up. It would have one big button made of glass. It would not function. The the the system would rip.

Speaker 2: You're true.

Speaker 1: Would rip. You're right.

Speaker 2: You're right. If if they really dedicated the hardware design team to designing a proper gaming controller, it would rip. But if they just, like, released an Apple ish glass ball that you had to, like, infer how to use

Speaker 1: Exactly. Yeah. It would not it would not be good. It, it was like that there was this weird era. This is

Speaker 2: we're

Speaker 1: in the weeds. Yeah. But there was that the era a few years ago when all of the big companies were trying to do cloud gaming and cloud streaming services. Amazon had, I think, Luma and Google had theirs. Stadia

Speaker 2: They still do.

Speaker 1: Is Stadia still a thing?

Speaker 2: Stadia's dead. There's a dead Stadia in my background. Anybody that's seeing video of the dead Stadia over there somewhere.

Speaker 1: That's funny. And then Amazon Luna is still alive. Yes. Anyway, they were all releasing. It was during that era that, like, all of the controllers kinda just a master on looking like an Xbox controller. So you could just do that, Apple. You could just release, like, functionally an Xbox controller. 8BitDo does it. All those other companies did it. It's fine. We've solved that problem.

Speaker 2: Or you could just use an Xbox controller. And there there's amazing third party Xbox controllers coming out of China

Speaker 1: that you can do. My. It's on my desk. It's one button press. It turns on. Exactly. Like

Speaker 2: I have a I have a I have a Flydigi, Vader five.

Speaker 1: That's actually ransomware. You plug that in, and it hydrates the system.

Speaker 2: I I that would not surprise me at all. But they make

Speaker 1: a nickel.

Speaker 2: They no. They're they're expensive, but they are very good controllers. I buy that. But, yeah, I I I I don't know. I that's that's the takeaway for me on this is we look at the price of a of a Steam machine. You look at it versus the PlayStation, which are getting price increases.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Apple has announced price increases on some of their hardware. Everybody's announcing these memory related chip storage related price increases. And there's a lot of Apple hardware in the ecosystem that would make amazing like, I can't see how an m five Mac mini is gonna be worse hardware spec than the Steam machine. Like, it will be a better hardware spec, have faster memory bus speeds, have more access to GPU and VRAM and and RAM, and it's cheaper. They just need to add something like the proton layer to make it so that I can just download Cyberpunk and install it and run it on my TV.

Speaker 1: Cyberpunk must be available natively on Mac by now. Right? They've got to have they I feel like that's the new do like, they have it running on fridges. Like, it's it's become the new You can it run cyberpunk?

Speaker 2: You are correct. Cyberpunk 27 set ultimate is $83 Canadian on the Max or right now. I had no idea.

Speaker 1: Well, there you go. You can do it.

Speaker 2: You could do it.

Speaker 1: Live that life. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Same with the

Speaker 1: I played Control on my Mac, like Remedies Control. Cool game. I played that on my Mac. That can be It's

Speaker 2: only, like, 15 years old. But yeah.

Speaker 1: The sequel's coming out pretty soon. That that'll be fun. They were they were showing that off.

Speaker 2: Game. I played it back when it released in 2012. Or was

Speaker 1: it that old?

Speaker 2: I think so. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Wow. Okay. Anyway, we're we're trying.

Speaker 2: Let me let me fact check myself here.

Speaker 1: Fact check myself here.

Speaker 2: Oh, 2019. Never mind.

Speaker 1: A little bit fresher. Medium. Somewhere in the middle.

Speaker 2: I'm a liar. You're a liar, Scott. The yeah. Anyway, that's I think the biggest thing. I I I touched on it briefly, but we've talked about it numerous times, but Grand Theft Auto six, as of date of recording June 25, has been released for preorder. The bigger shock on this one is that the pricing is not as high as I think people thought it

Speaker 1: was gonna be. I didn't see the pricing. What are they what are they putting it at?

Speaker 2: Standard edition 80 US, which is, I think, a little bit premium, but not like, I think there was a lot of people that were expecting this to be the first $100. $100 base game. The ultimate edition, I think, is a $100, but that I think a lot of people were thinking that it was gonna be in the $1.40 ish range.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's funny. The, the entire games industry has been sort of orbiting around when this is gonna happen in the sense that, like, do not release a game at the same time as this game is coming out. It is a bad idea. So it's looking like it's November. And then included in the announcement is that it is not going to include at launch the online component.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Multiplayer.

Speaker 1: Yep. Which, for anyone who's unfamiliar, has become one of it's the long tail of Grand Theft Auto five has been the online play. It is basically its own game, its own world at this point. And so the thing people are saying is, like, oh, god. There's two. Two launches.

Speaker 2: Like, we

Speaker 1: thought it was gonna be there's two launches. Oh, god. Oh, god. There's two. And, like, we don't know when the second one is. So the tension has just been kinda kicked down the road. It's like if you were planning something, I don't know, a few months after it comes out, good luck. Like, now we all have to just wait and see when the online component's gonna come out because that'll that'll be its own fun, gravitational orbit to try and escape.

Speaker 2: I can't see them I can't see them. Like, it comes out November 19. It's been declared. It will be released. Preorders allow you so this is another funny thing. Preorder only gets you the ability to download the game and get ready to play it as of November 12. So, essentially, you beat the server congestion of downloading the digital copy

Speaker 1: of the game. I see.

Speaker 2: So you you don't get any additional days for the preorder. You just get to download it in advance. Right. But I can't see them waiting beyond maybe to, like, like, early January at the latest for the multiplayer. Like, most people will get it on November 19 and complete the main story single player mode within a week, I would say. Like, I think there's gonna be a lot of people taking days off to play it. This game's been highly anticipated for, what, a decade now? When did five come out?

Speaker 1: Yeah. If you don't if there isn't a hacked episode in the week following the I guess it'd be December 1. You'll you'll know what happened.

Speaker 2: Thirteen years. Jesus. 09/17/2020 Xbox three sixty? PlayStation three, Xbox three sixty. 09/17/2013. That is Crazy. They've been building this game since that game launched. That is insane. This is gonna be a opus. So To

Speaker 1: to anyone who is excited for us to stop talking about it Yes. You and you and us both. You know? Like, it's gonna be a good day.

Speaker 2: Few other things that I think we should mention.

Speaker 1: Yeah. What else?

Speaker 2: We put up a new hackpodcast.com website. Check it out. Jordan and I just got back. We were actually together. We were just in Banff, Alberta at the Banff World Media Festival where a project we worked on was up for an award, but had a bunch of interesting conversations with film and TV studios. So, hopefully, we'll have some more chitter chatter about that in the future. Maybe something happen in there. Yeah. What else do we gotta update people on?

Speaker 1: Oh, man. I mean, like and subscribe. Smash that like

Speaker 2: button. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. We're being good at our jobs now.

Speaker 2: YouTube. Yeah. You like and subscribe.

Speaker 1: Like and subscribe.

Speaker 2: One person that hated that we mentioned Patreon and and, the merch store last time.

Speaker 1: Can't help you, brother. Sorry.

Speaker 2: Can't help you, brother. The the, yeah, like and subscribe. Check out the new website. It's interesting. It's all built up. Definitely AI was facilitated. The development of it automates everything.

Speaker 1: You put a lot of love in that. Let's just be clear. You were twenty plus hours in on that.

Speaker 2: You Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1: Let's not make this sound like a clod one shot. You you put the time in on that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: It's you got a bunch of custom plugins that do a bunch of stuff for us without us having to like, when we post a new YouTube video, it immediately comes up. When we post a new episode, it immediately gets pulled in, transcribed, all the rest of it.

Speaker 1: You did a nice job with it.

Speaker 2: Looks good. Thanks. Thanks. The, yeah, check it out. Check out the thing. And then, yeah, another word is that, big thanks to NordLayer for a sponsorship of Hack. Check them out at nordlair.com/hackedpodcast. We're happy to have, NordLayer on as the title sponsor. Makes things Yeah. A little bit easier for us and provides us a bit more funding for some of the things that we're doing over on the YouTube space and we're planning to do over there. Watch for the big face reveal as sooner than later, you will see some of these live episodes, the new episodes coming live on YouTube as well. So you'll actually be able to see Jordan and I's faces.

Speaker 1: We're booking you're gonna get used to my bad webcam frame with the poorly blurred out background, but, we're trying to book some interviews that might be worth popping into a studio or popping out to meet the person. Getting more into that. Yeah. Just trying to just trying to mix it up. But again, thank you to NordLayer for their sponsorship of Hack. Zombie top level domains, SpaceX IPOs, Steam machines. I think that's a wrap, my friend.

Speaker 2: Take care. Catch you in the next one.

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