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TranscriptJames: Well, hi everyone, and welcome back to Crossed Wires. It’s James here, and this week we are going to be focusing on the environment, or rather, the impact our technology and our own use of technology, not just technology itself, but our own habits has on the environment. I have a wonderful guest this week, Chris Adams. Welcome to the show.
Chris: Thank you very much for having me, James. It’s a pleasure to be here.
James: Thank you. And I have to give another shout out to James Smith. So we got Dr. Catherine Flick for our, blockchain discussion and James wonderfully pointed us, to each other and, made that connection. So thank you again, James, genuinely. But Chris, before we get into the show and get into what is I am sure going to be an amazing discussion, we’ve got a Google Doc sort of beside us, which has evolved over the last hour, even as we just jumped on to start a show prep. There’s so much great stuff going in there. But Chris, do you want to tell people a little bit about yourself and why you’re speaking on in the environment?
Chris: My name is Chris Adams. I am the executive director of the Green Web Foundation. It’s a Dutch foundation that for the last 15 years or so has been tracking the transition of the internet away from fossil fuels towards a more advanced and humane form of power. We now work towards an entirely fossil free Internet by 2030, and we largely work to accelerate that transition using open data, open source and open culture. One of the things that’s probably most you could try immediately if you’ve come across, if you’ve heard of us before, would be our API and our Green Web Check service. So you can check any website in the world. And we will tell you if we can find any information about whether it’s running on green energy or not. We do this because there are more websites in the world than there are data centers. So • if you know which data centers to actually speak to, we basically allow data centers to register with us and share the information they do have about how they’ve sourced their power. When people check a website run on those data centers, you’ll get a smiley face showing a green website. And if we can’t find any information, we’ll show a gray, sad face saying that, no, we cannot find any information for this. We are running on the default, which is like well, most of energy largely comes from fossil fuels right now, so this is what we do. We also do a couple of other things, but, I suspect you might have some questions there, James. So I can go there, then we could talk about some of the other things we do.
James: Absolutely. So, I mean, the first question is, I’ll be completely transparent. We host with DigitalOcean. • How are they doing?
Chris: Yes, Digital Ocean are interesting because they have a number of dedicated employees internally who kind of in many ways, push for this kind of stuff. And DigitalOcean • actually do use some providers who we have evidence of them running on renewable energy. So we have stuff like this. And we even actually our platform that we use to track check this stuff. It’s on GitHub. We have an open issue with DigitalOcean • asking them to do a DigitalOcean • cleanup and actually share information with us so that we can actually mark the green regions, the regions where there is evidence of them accounting for the fossil emissions from the use of data centers. So we can get smiley faces for the people who do have that. So DigitalOcean, • because they’re using Equinix in a number of places, and because Equinix do actually have a pretty good record in this compared to other providers. They are middling at the moment, but they could definitely be moving a lot faster. And if there were users who cared about this, I’m sure they would move even faster.
James: I will absolutely be talking to them. Absolutely something we want as much as possible the stuff that Crossed Wires is using to be on the green web. Now, I know that’s not going to be possible. We use a lot of different services. I would be very curious to see how SquadCast • fares. I, can go and yell at Zack if it’s not doing too well. I know they host a lot of stuff with Google. They host a few other bits and pieces as well. Now, interestingly, one of the reasons I asked this is we did an episode recently with a team at Backblaze • and I don’t know if you’ve heard about the new Nautilus is the company providing it, but one of the new data centers, which is entirely river water cooled.
Chris: This is pretty cool. Just before we go any further on the previous one, I’ve just shared in the show notes the issue specifically. So if there are only people who want to actually contribute to the actual platform we have, and the data that we do have, so that you’re using DigitalOcean • and you can actually get marked as green, that’s where we can add that in the show notes. Awesome. I just want to kind of tidy that one up. So, you mentioned about Nautilus, the data center, from run of the river staff. Yeah. If I understand it, this is actually how I got into this cast, actually. And I’ll briefly speak about, James Smith’s shadow he casts about us being on this podcast in a bit. But let’s go to that part there. You said that the water is the data center is called by the water running through the river, is that correct?
James: Yeah, that’s right. So it’s in California and there’s a whole paper that Backblaze put out explaining the partnership. And so I think the idea is that it draws the cold river water in and then it loops up through the cooling system. And I will be honest, I am not a data center expert by any definition. The closest I’ve come is punching a Cisco switch at one point because it wasn’t working properly. but then that water is then put back out once it’s done its job, put back out into the river. And from what I understand, they’ve done it in a way that it’s not going to impact the aquatic life in the area. They’ve done the studies to make sure that I think it’s only maybe a couple of degrees warmer, it’s not a huge jump. And yeah, it’s fascinating.
Chris: Yeah. I need to be kind of clear that I’m not a data center expert either. But there is a lot of talk about free cooling as mechanisms for being able to use water like this. And as long as it’s not actually having an impact or like you said, affecting the outside environment, this is actually a good thing. And in many cases, this is in many ways better than other forms of, cooling people might use, like evaporative cooling, where it just goes into the sky. For example, you’ll see some places where you have like a water table or aquifer, that people draw water from. And you can have cases where data centers use as much as the rest of the entire community • for this. And that’s like one source of power, that one source of water usage. But it’s also worth bearing in mind that when you’re generating energy, most of the time, if you’re not using something like kind of renewable or geothermal sources, then you’re basically doing something to like you’re taking heat. You’re making heat somehow, either nuclear or setting fire to things that turns water into steam, which is then used to turn a turbine. And then you need to figure out what to do with that waste heat in that water. One of the significant uses of water is actually and this is by far the largest usage of fresh water both in America and probably the UK. Still, is actually power, generation, thermal power generation is one of the biggest, if not the biggest source of water usage. And it’s really important to have this in mind when we talk about water, usage related to data centers. Because a lot of the time, the data center part you can solve with clever usages, like the Backblaze example. But for the other part, which is in many cases, much, much larger, if you want to get rid of that, you’re going to probably need to get away from thermal generation, where you heat up water to turn a turbine, basically. • for this. exactly. And that’s like one source of power, that one source of water usage. But it’s also worth bearing in mind that when you’re generating energy, most of the time, if you’re not using something like kind of renewable or geothermal sources, then you’re basically doing something to like you’re taking heat. You’re making heat somehow, either nuclear or setting fire to things that turns water into steam, which is then used to turn a turbine. And then you need to figure out what to do with that waste heat in that water. One of the significant uses of water is actually and this is by far the largest usage of fresh water both in America and probably the UK. Still, is actually power, generation, thermal power generation is one of the biggest, if not the biggest source of water usage. And it’s really important to have this in mind when we talk about water, usage related to data centers. Because a lot of the time, the data center part you can solve with clever usages, like the Backblaze example. But for the other part, which is in many cases, much, much larger, if you want to get rid of that, you’re going to probably need to get away from thermal generation, where you heat up water to turn a turbine, basically.
James: And it’s interesting, isn’t it, that little explanation of power. My mind went straight to the Chernobyl miniseries and the experiment they were trying to run there. All I’m going to say is you didn’t see graphite on the roof, there is no graphite. But it’s an interesting one. it’s fully public where I live. I live in the south coast of England. I live in Bournemouth. So we do get a lot, quite a reasonable amount of sun and a lot of properties here are south facing. So I’m seeing more and more solar panels. Now, solar has, because it’s correct me if I’m wrong, because solar is not a guaranteed form of power, it’s wonderful. But obviously it’s a varying amount of power generation. Would it be considered stable enough for data center use? I mean, I guess if you run it through your typical huge Ups systems that those data centers have, can solar play a part here as well?
Chris: Absolutely. In fact, solar power, because it is roughly ten times cheaper than it was ten years ago and it’s getting cheaper, more or less around 20% year on year. Going forward, it’s likely to become more and more popular. so you are going to see this and as long as you have a way to store that power, it’s viable to run data centers with this as part of it. Now, unless you’re somewhere where it’s only ever sunny, then you obviously are going to have an issue when the sun goes down. And that’s when you’d often resorts to other forms of energy generation or some way of actually making sure that you can use power. So a common thing, for example, if you’re not connected to the grid is actually having things like storage itself, like either form of batteries or other forms of storage, possibly like a backup fuel cell or something like that. So Ebay, for example, they have fuel cells in some of their data centers as an alternative to using the grid. And what we’ve seen over the last two years in particular, is that as the cost of energy from the grid has just skyrocketed because of the cost of fossil gas, you’ve seen a real drive for people to find other forms of onsite generation as a way to reduce the cost that they do actually have. so yes, you can have solar as a key part. And solar is only going to become a greater and greater part of our energy mix, according to all of the analysis, simply because it’s getting cheaper, faster than any other power source that we are really deploying right now or have access to at present.
James: So very exciting. So do go and check your favorite websites. Maybe if you’re hosting a site for your business, go and check it and see if it does meet that green web check. And then maybe consider, let’s just be really honest, maybe consider moving to a hosting provider that will give you that yellow, that smiley face because that’s helping you be more of a positive impact on, the environment. And look, it’s one of the things, isn’t it? Companies want to get all that certification. Well, having a control, I think it’s something you talk about later in our show us, is the importance of not just your own production, but the supply chain behind it all.
Chris: This is actually maybe a nice elegant segue to one other thing we do, which is running a fellowship. So last year, because when people first come to when lots of techies and people who are tech adjacent start thinking about the link between technology and environment, they often are extremely overwhelmed. And we actually applied for some funding with the Internet Society Foundation. And they funded us to basically run a series of fellowships where we would basically pay for someone’s time, pay for five fellows to basically share their learning in the open about how they figured out how to incorporate ideas like climate justice into their work. So, for example, one of the projects was a kind of cool interactive map from one woman, Melissa Hsuing. She was doing a sustainability course. A master’s in sustainability at Columbia University. But, alongside this, she was reading the entire set of literature about climate justice and about what some of these conversations are about and how, in many ways, climate change is very much a story about some of the things we see back in kind of colonialism, kind of, moved all the way forward and projected into the future. So she ended up doing a bunch of research around that. And one thing she did was she built this cool map Google Earth to show where all the various parts of hardware would actually come from. So you could use like a really slick activity like that, but the map would take you to parts of Africa, and it would take you to parts of say, the Congo or parts of Peru, where certain minerals came from. So you could actually kind of visually see all these different mines and places like that. But we had other people doing other research like this and one thing that came out of that is a second year. We’re now doing some work with the Ford Foundation for a second and third year of this fellowship program. But we also created a library on using an open source tool called Zotero where we’ve been collecting all of these reports and papers and websites and things so that if someone doesn’t want to come to this field and basically start making sense of it, we’ve kind of dropped some breadcrumbs for other people who might have may be interested. And later on in February, we’ll be announcing the next set of fellows who will be sharing their learning as they come along.
James: Brilliant. That’s fantastic. So the next thing we talk about, obviously we talk about data centers, we talk about infrastructure, what about the software that runs a lot of the tools that we use? Now, this is a big one. Again, how that’s all run, and how we can have how that can be more green rather than just a color code in the CSS. No bad jokes.
Chris: So there’s a few things that you might want to look at or if you are interested in this field specifically, I think most engineers would, if they’re given all things being equal, they would prefer to have be responsible for an application which is not causing avoidable harm if they can help it. And because pretty much electricity or any of the usage is coming from places where fossil fuels are being burned, there is avoidable harm while we have that. So there is like a kind of reflex that you do want to kind of make the tools you do have tread lightly on the world, or at least avoid that avoidable harm, right? And if you’re looking at software, there’s a few organizations that we do some work with and some libraries, some software libraries that we’ve created to make it easier for this. So most recently, and I’m going to share something now, because by the time this goes live, I think it should be visible for people. we worked on a library called Co2.js • which as you’d imagine, is a JavaScript library, which embeds a number of various models so that you can say, well, I’m doing this much, this kind of activity, it’s using this much power. This is what the environmental impact of that is likely to be. We basically got that merged into the Firefox browser itself. So when you’re using the browser itself, you can basically visit a web page, you can use all of Firefox’s profiling tools and you can get a rough idea of what the likely environmental impact of that website and that particular session is likely to be. And this is shared. We did this to create some tooling so that people who build the web are able to set more kind of humane and considerate defaults, which don’t unnecessarily burn through people’s batteries, but also don’t have a kind of wider impact, as well. So that’s like one thing we did. And yeah, we’re pretty proud of that because, that literally came out of a discussion in the second half of 2022. And, we’ve ended up using Co2.js • in a number of different places now. And it’s an open source project, open to pull requests, as with other ones.
James: That’s fantastic. And look, I’m a big Firefox fan. I did a video, on our YouTube channel a while ago about their multi-account • containers. They may not have the biggest browser share anymore, but there’s so much of that legacy of Mozilla and Netscape. Some really clever innovation, I would say. I have all three browsers, sorry. I run Chrome for SquadCast, • just because WebRTC, • that’s where the best support is. But Firefox. I use so much. That’s incredible. And of course, that is you’re building your website. So, say, for example, when me and Jay were building the Crossed Wires WordPress site, we could have used those profile and tools to say, okay, how much impact does our new site have? And, where can we be looking at things?
Chris: Yeah, that was the idea. We wanted to create something like that because there is a lot of public discourse in our kind of little digital sustainability circles about what makes an environmentally friendly website? How do you measure this kind of stuff? And there are some models which we include in the library. One is called the Sustainable Web Design Model, which largely goes on the amount of transfer that’s sent over the wire. Because that’s one thing which is easy to measure. And in many ways, a lot of the academic literature basically says if you’re going to look at the environmental footprint of things, then working out a CO2 • per gb figure is one way to do it. Now, there’s good things about that, it’s easy to do, but there’s also bad things about it because in many ways, as we learn more about this, about like this field, the actual relationship, it’s not necessarily kind of proportional. So a lot of us think, and this is what we spoke about before, James, the idea that if you have a kind of car model where, well, let’s say that you drive twice as far in a car, it’s going to have twice as many emissions, it’s not necessarily the same when you have websites and things. And in fact, the mental model that’s more useful to kind of have at hand is maybe rather than cars, think of maybe like putting cycle lanes down and then having people cycle along those. So there’s obviously an environmental impact to building cycle lanes, right? But once you’ve got that set up, the marginal emissions from every single person cycling on that, yeah, it’s not zero, because people breathe in oxygen and breathe out CO2. But it’s not the same as you would have with cars. For example. And I think it’s a lot of time, we don’t really have the mental models yet to do this. And this is partly what we did some work with on CO2.js • to do to a provide a kind of vessel for different models, but also to provide easy access to some of the kind of conversion factors. So that if you’ve got direct information from a browser, you can use that. But if you only have the information, that you might measure indirectly, like say, transfer, you’ve got an option there. We try to basically serialize some of these ideas in code. So it’s possible to use different models to see what’s the most effective and relevant for your particular use case.
James: Yeah, and it’s great to get those models established so people can think about this. And, that leads me nicely to at least at this point in the show, the big question I want to ask and put to you and put into the minds of our, audience, of our listeners. Before we go any further, I do want to say this is absolutely an episode where we want to invite discussion. So there are the comments on the episode itself. Of course, you can tweet or toot, whatever have you calling it. Post. I’m hoping we’ve changed it away from Toot.
Chris: I’m using post instead of Toot because I feel a bit silly saying Toot.
James: Yes, it doesn’t sound quite right, does it? So you can either toot or why not come over to our discord, CrossedWires.net/Discord • • We will have a forum post for this episode, come and discuss with us. Just follow our community rules and everyone will be welcome. That’s our rule. So on the back of that, the question I did pose in our document, is why should we, as people, as me and you, right now, sat here recording this with lights on. With computers on or when we go elsewhere and maybe charge our phones or watch Netflix, watch YouTube or watch PeerTube, • whatever we want to watch. Why should we care? Why should we care about what the environmental impact of sending my email is or playing the latest game?
Chris: I think there’s two reasons. So first of all, if you’re in a position where you can play the latest game or watch Netflix or something like that, you’re already in front of a pretty exclusive club of people who enjoy really good access to things that lots of other people don’t have, like shelter, energy access, cool gadgets, or stuff like that. And in many cases, if you’re in that kind of group of people, you’re probably proportionately like to have a greater environmental impact than maybe the other, say 80% plus of the planet, right? So there’s a degree of responsibility that you might actually have just because you’re in a position of power compared to other people. This is not to say that there are people who are more powerful you that should not be also need to be doing things. Because when you look at the environmental impact, when you look at, say, if you look at like, the higher you go up the kind of food chain, the greater the environmental impact tends to be from various people. So you and me, we might have a carbon footprint of between 5 and 15 tons per person. When you go up to the kind of millionaire or billionaire status, you’re looking at thousands of tons for people, which there’s a kind of unfairness aspect that you might want to have. So there’s basically a kind of in my view, there is a kind of somewhat moral related aspect of that. Like, if I’m able to make changes to avoid harm, then I probably should do some of that stuff. Especially if it’s not going to be creating significant amounts of sacrifice at my end, for example. And a lot of the time, I think the things that you might want to do are actually or the things people might be advocating do actually represent a win on an environmental scale, but they also represent a win in terms of quality of life scale yourself, for example. So I think going back to your original reason why you should care, I think there is a kind of justice and moral argument, but there’s also a kind of isn’t it cool? Argument, right? There’s a whole thing about if you want to build something you want to, you do in a really efficient fashion. Because a lot of us, you know, we’re nerds we’re quite, we kind of have this kind of aversion to waste, if possible, right? It seems like we’re taught to avoid some of that stuff. So I think there’s different reasons that you might actually have. I think that it’s useful to bear in mind that when, you do have this, it’s worth realizing that there are some things you can do that might feel good and there are some things which are systemically effective. They’re not necessarily the same thing. So a lot of the time you’ll see people basically say, well, if you feel bad about, the environmental impact of technology, then you should turn off the video on a Zoom call, for example, or something like that. You can do something like that. Or you might feel terrible about watching Netflix, for example, or having a Zoom call with someone when you’re in middle of a pandemic. You’re not going to have that much of an impact there. I feel that it might help you feel like you’re more in control of and feel like you’re able to do something. But systemically, I don’t think it’s anywhere near as effective as being able to engage at a political level or speak to like, say, local government, for example. So I think there is an argument, which is basically just it’s probably aligning with how you feel. And in many cases, it can help you feel a little bit better about some of the kind of general ennui and dredge people tend to have around climate, basically, because some kind of action does often help you move to a larger or more impactful thing elsewhere.
James: I can completely echo that sort of food chain, because something has just come back to, if I’m going out for a walk in the evening, there’s a certain route I take, and it goes past quite a, shall we say, well off street. I won’t name it, but there’s a new build there. And every time I walk past it, every single light is on in that build. There’s no one in there, but all the lights are on, everything. I’m thinking, okay, there might be LEDs, but that’s still why do they need to be on? Okay, for me, there’s a difference we’re talking external lights. There was a difference between safety, so security lighting, and then why does your house need to be lit up like Blackpool Tower and Blackpool Illuminations? If there’s A, there’s no one there, and B, why okay, sure, security spotlights that are motion based or whatever, that makes perfect sense. But I don’t need to see the outside of your house. I don’t need to see how wealthy you are. And I think the problem for me is that class of person that can afford to pay the energy bill on that. But what they’re not considering is their contribution to the environmental impact. I’ve seen a lot of discussion around football stadiums, leaving their spotlights on for longer after there was a big argument about, Bournemouth recently, where they’d left their spotlights on, and it was causing, like, this huge orange glow in the sky. It’s a very interesting again, and businesses who’s, a real estate, agent office, who they’ve closed that office down, but we’ve left all the lights inside on and all the, like, display panels, all the signage permanently on. Why?
Chris: I think a lot of the time, okay, this stuff like this can happen because there is either no one responsible for it, or it’s not costing enough for people to actually feel the kind of negative impacts of that a lot of the time. And in many cases, for example, your example of light pollution into the sky. Right? It’s probably not the people who own the stadium who are harmed by that kind of light pollution. So the harms can be very diffuse, but the upsides are much, much more concentrated. And this is the thing that this is all the kind of wider governance problem, but it might be worth referring to like this. You spoke about one or two things, about the idea of saying, well, there’s a degree of comfort I might want to have, and then there’s maybe a cost to providing slightly more comfort for this. And this might be a nice segue to one of the stories you hear about the Xbox story about the shutdown thing, because this is one thing we looked at before.
James: Most modern consoles will have a couple of different modes. They’ll have what they call energy savings standby. So the console will go to sleep. This is true across a lot of devices. The concept of sleep versus suspend versus shutdown. And on the Mac in particular, I remember being a big fan of Hibernation, because Hibernation would effectively write the contents of your RAM to disk and then it would completely power off a machine. And the idea would be that yet when you turn your machine back on, there’s a little bit longer to time to come back up, but you don’t have that same environmental impact. But Microsoft, if I remember, they’re basically doing something to effectively nudge people towards more of a shutdown, mode, the power saving shutdown, rather than just having a system on standby, what are they actually doing? And is this something that’s common across the games? Because I’ve got two systems in front of me games wise. I’ve got the Nintendo Switch and the Steam Deck, both of which are probably in standby.
Chris: So the story that I think we’re referring to is ArsTechnica • • about Microsoft switching a default to shutdown rather than sleep mode, right? The impact of this is that when you’re not using an Xbox being in the kind of shutdown mode versus the sleep mode means that it uses 20 times less power or around about that. So it’s like rather you’re using like 0.5 watts compared to like 10 to 15 watts. Now, that doesn’t sound very much when we talk about it right now, but if something is like sleeping all day long, over a year, that works out, I mean, 15 watts over, I think, all the hours in a year, it’s comparable to a very efficient fridge in the UK, right? And a lot of the time we don’t have a kind of reference point for this, right? so it’s maybe like £15 or so, or some figure like that in terms of costs for this. But it’s just avoidable for this, because, for example, the difference in experience you might have is that it takes 15 seconds to come on, rather than 2 seconds to come on, for example. And a lot of the time I’m not sure waiting 15 seconds is worth that 20 fold increase in energy usage or resource impact. And you see this in lots and lots of other places. So one example, there’s an organization called the Greening of Streaming group, and they’re trying to do something like this for streaming because a lot of the time we’ve gone from maybe 720p • 1080p, up to there’s discussion about having like 8K • displays and stuff like that. And you have a default to sending as much data as you can down the pipe to people all the time. And there’s a question about how much quality can we perceive, but also there’s a question about, are we even paying attention to this kind of stuff in the first place? And stuff like this means there are ways where if you can’t perceive the actual usage, or if you’re not going to benefit from it, then it’s not really worth the extra resource usage. I mean, the example that I guess we all experience every day is browser tabs, right? Once you tap out the browser, your browser will usually try to throw it back a bit, right? And most of the time, this is a good thing. It means you have a longer life on your battery, for example. But it’s the same concept, and it’s about where you actually choose to use it. So there’s a whole thing around efficiency and where you choose to use this kind of stuff and where the marginal increase is worthwhile. And the Xbox One is a really nice example. The Greening of Streaming stuff is also, in my view, quite an interesting one. And the thing that comes into here is it starts asking questions about, okay, how much power do you actually need in your typical gaming rig? When you compare different things, like, I’m not sure if I want to go into the field of saying is, I don’t know, The Last of Us on PS4, • really the 20 or 30 times better than the energy usage than the value I get from playing. I know. Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild on a Switch. There’s going to be a difference in power usage there. And I don’t think that’s the thing you should probably go to that level. But for cases where there is no loss, it feels like this is a really low hanging fruit and there’s loads of avoidable, basically waste that we could probably do without, in the short term, the very least.
James: And that’s a really good point. So yeah, if I finish my gaming session for the evening, I don’t mind actually shutting down the system because I’m not going to come in back to that evening. And look, I can go and do if it takes an extra 10-15 seconds, we’re talking consoles that use solid state storage. We’re not talking 90s gaming PCs with drives that will take 20 minutes to boot. We’re talking incredibly fast SSDs. And I think it’s worth considering that, and something that of course I realize is, well, what devices need to be permanently on? We’ve talked about WiFi routers. I guess you could potentially shut down your WiFi overnight. Now there is a potential problem there in that that means your phone then goes on to cellular data. Does that then use more power?
James: There’s a balancing act. One thing that I did want to touch on a little bit. You talked about quality and gaming rig. It’s something, you’ve put the power of these GPUs and the CPUs. Now, I’m a huge fan of what Apple are doing with their Apple Silicon. Such a low powered system that can perform just mind blowing performance. But then you look at Nvidia’s 40 series cards, which are like 350 watts, 400 watts per card, if not more.
Chris: You can end up with figures like this. Mind blowing power.
James: Yeah, when we look at our gaming rigs and our streaming rigs, do we want to be conscious of making sure we’ve got the performance we need for things to be comfortably playable? Is there an excess, do you think, in those really silly GPUs and CPUs?
Chris: Here’s the thing, I don’t really play the games that need such high resolutions at like 120 FPS. And as far as if you’re choosing to do something like that in my book, I feel like that’s probably better than taking a flight every weekend, for example, or something like that. And I feel that if you are doing that and you really enjoy that, I don’t think it’s really my place to tell you not to do that. But it might be my place to say, well, if you’re going to do that, and you know, there’s an environmental impact from the power you’re using, that heightens the importance of you probably doing something to decarbonize the electricity you are actually using. Because in many ways the story of progress is us having greater access to energy, which allows us to do more things or benefit from all kinds of services. And I feel that because these are not cheap cards, right, to do that, but not then spend a little bit extra spend to actually have like, say, a green energy plan, for example. That seems like a misplacement of priorities in my book here, I suspect. I think that’s what you could actually do. I mean, you can also make the argument that if you’re going to go down this route, you could do something really, really wacky like say, well, I’m only going to run this GPU on the power that I can store from the solar on my roof. So I’ve got a certain amount of time to play, right but there’s things you could actually have there to have my entirely guilt free gaming session. But I’m not sure that and to be honest, the people who buy gaming rigs and stuff like that, I’m not sure that telling people you shouldn’t be using this is going to make that much of a difference to their behavior. But being able to be a bit mindful about where the power comes from and how and trying to take steps there, I think are useful. And this actually speaks to a model that we use internally where we work. We talk about the CID model. So consumption, intensity, and direction, we largely talk about it in terms of consumption. It’s like, can I reduce the amount of resources I need to do something? And now intensity is about, can I reduce the harm done when I use those resources? Because in some cases, you will have to use resources, but you want to reduce the harm there. And then direction is basically okay, what kind of world am I heading towards to build? For example, we use this as a model for helping organizations figure out what kind of intervention they might actually want to make to do something about the climate crisis. And the reason we have these three is that you might talk about, say, consumption and intensity, for example. But there’s a whole piece about what world you choose to create. Right now, let’s talk about, say, something like AI, for example, using machine learning to do something. You can have super efficient machine learning, like the most effective model, rather than a wasteful one. And you can use it running on green energy. But if you’re using machine learning or AI to do something like help people extract oil, for example, or you help it or you’re helping use it to radicalise people on social media, I feel that’s, like, that’s probably not. That’s just as important as how green the energy is that you might be using for any of these tools. So I think there’s very much a kind of direction aspect for this kind of stuff, too.
James: Absolutely. And look, one, of my biggest reasons for we talked with, Catherine Flick a couple of weeks ago about the environmental impact of blockchain and cryptocurrency. Insane GPU farming with massive power draw, I just don’t see a benefit in that at all.
Chris: Yeah, to be honest, I think I sympathize with that. I really, really struggle with finding, whenever I speak to people whose opinions I respect when they’re trying to solve a technical problem. I can’t think of many scenarios where a blockchain improves things, or performs better than existing non blockchain related environments. There may be some cases which are really, really, really nation specific. I don’t know about them. And I’ve never come across anything like that in my 25 years of working as a professional in this field. So I suspect maybe they do exist in the same way that maybe unicorns do exist or stuff like that. But for the most of the time, I’m not going to base my career around this case. And I feel like, yeah, from a technical point of view, that’s kind of problematic, but also just from an, idea of who is benefiting for the amount of usage. There’s another problem there. Like, if you look at the numbers from the International Energy Agency, I find this stuff really fascinating, because they’ve released some reports recently, basically showing that data centers might be using I think when they looked at all the figures, there was something in the region of 200ish • terawatt hours is the figure cited by the IEA. Right. That’s quite large. Right? And when they looked at blockchain by comparison, or like kind of cryptocurrency mining or something like that, it was around at least 40% of that. So you got 200 terawatt hours to benefit half of the globe, right? Because I’m not sure if this included China, then you got almost 40% to benefit, not half of the globe. So there’s a whole equity issue at play there, actually. And I suspect we might not knock this one on the head, because this could be a rabbit hole that we’re not going down. Because blockchain discussions tend to take up a lot of oxygen, basically.
James: Yes, they do. And we’ve already had one with Catherine. So folks, go back, we’ll put a link in the show notes to that episode, because it’s worth going and listening to, but just something to mention. Now, one of the things, obviously I’m looking at the shownotes, so this story, putting it on, working with RIPE NCC.
Chris: Yeah. So the link I shared there is actually there was a workshop called The E-Impact • Workshop by the Internet Architecture Board, where actually some of the discussion I said about, say, the relationship between energy usage and network usage and stuff like that. They, there’s a series of one or two hour workshops where by a number of experts, like people with lots of letters after their name and published papers and things, they all got together and shared their stuff. And they shared some of their findings and had some discussions about, OK, what are the levers for change? They were all put online. and what that link is, is basically me collating those YouTube videos, which were recorded, for the workshops, but it also records some of the work we did with RIPE NCC. RIPE NCC are, one of the groups who issue IP addresses to people. So like, they control IP address space. And we did some work with them to basically annotate every single public IP address on Earth with information about how clean the energy was at that point, that public point of presence on the internet as well, you might say, with the idea being that could support new ways of routing. So we actually submitted our own paper called Extending IPv6 • for carbon aware networking. With the idea being that you could kind of build an awareness so that when you want to route a packet of data from say, one computer to another computer, you could take into account the carbon intensity to go through maybe the greenest possible grid. So if the grid itself knows that it’s really, really sunny or windy in one part of Earth, you would have the packets take that kind of greener route. And as long as it stays inside a kind of latency budget, it should be fine. And you end up with like low carbon trick shots of packets zipping around all across the world. So that was one of the ideas that we proposes for a paper ourselves. And it turns out that you can extend IPv6 • to do this. We didn’t realize that. And yeah, so this is one thing we’d like to do in 2023. So we wrote a paper to propose this as an idea. And this is builds on the project we did with RIPE NCC to provide that initial layer of annotation with open data from a climate nonprofit called Ember Climate, who are based in the UK. And basically publish data about the carbon intensity of electricity all around the world.
James: Fascinating. It would be one even more important when we start really adopting IPv6 • because it’s not really going as well as it was meant to go. We are still very heavily reliant on IPv4. • I don’t, for example, get an IPv6 • address from my ISP. We talk about obviously the wider infrastructure of the Internet. But one thing we would talk about preshow is actually a lot of that usage. Maybe you’re streaming Netflix actually comes down to your own internal network infrastructure, your own router, because it’s obviously having to work harder, particularly if you’re on WiFi, I guess, having to put out more transmission power. How much do our internal networks have an impact?
Chris: So yeah, this was actually one thing which was counterintuitive, and I think it’s the second of the videos on the link I just mentioned, where people explore this. essentially it’s not so much a case of routers having to work harder, it’s more the case of do you remember when we were like 20 years ago with a website, when someone could deploy website, they would provision it for all the traffic. So you would buy a chunking great web server, even though you’re going to get maybe single digit utilization, right? just in case you get that spike. Now with things like cloud, the idea would be that you might be slightly higher level of utilization, so it’s not quite so wasteful so there is like a degree of power, proportionality. And then if you go all the way to things like serverless, then when things are supposed to kind of switch themselves off after use, you’ve got a much, much greater relationship between the provisioning of resources and the usage of resources. It turns out that with networking, we’re still ten years ago, or 20, it’s like we’re at that point 20 years ago where you provision for maximum usage all the time. So for WiFi and they, you’ll see a fairly static usage. There is a bit of a fluctuation, but not massively. And one of the things that surprised me when, all these findings were being shared on the workshops was that I think Carbon Trust and the digital impact, the DIMPACT, project, they were looking at the energy usage from, say, video streaming, for example. And it turns out that a significant part of it, like around between 30% to 40% of domestic usage is actually at the router level. And that’s, over a given year. And that’s because we never turn routers off. So, over a given year, right. A router can have the same environmental impact as the fridge, for example. Just because it’s on one thing is on all the time, and a fridge, which obviously is going to have spikes of power usage, but most of the time is not on. Yeah, you end up with on average, the same usage, for the two of these things. And when you start adding repeaters all around the house again, you’ve added another, say, ten watts, 24/7 365, that’s going to have another impact there. So there is a kind of I was actually surprised by this because I to be honest, I didn’t really think much of it at all. And one of the reasons is that manufacturers have had no priority and no reason to scale this up and down and to really, really think about this. But in aggregate, when you’ve got millions of people with this, it turns into a non-zero • number. But in many cases, I’m of the opinion that you really should solve this part here, rather than trying to optimize every single person’s router, which would be incredibly complicated. Just if you have a way to make sure that base load that you might have is just green or very, very low carbon in the first place, that’s probably going to be cheaper and much less invasive than trying to get millions of people to replace all the routers going forward. You might want to have efficient ones. But right now, there’s a discussion about, okay, which bits do you retrofit? And there are probably other loads and other uses of power in a house that you might want to start with first, rather than going straight for the routers, for example.
James: That’s a really interesting thing. Now, in my own home, I was very fortunate when I moved into this flat. part fortunate, part not fortunate. So when I moved in, I thought I’ll get my broadband turned on straight away. There’s a socket down there. In this case, it was in the lounge. Well, no, the new build next door, which backs onto the outside wall in my flat. They had managed to cut the copper cable into my flat, so Openreach • had to come and install a brand new point because we could no longer get to outside. So it was now a point down here, but I was very fortunate. But where, is it? Yeah, literally down there. The previous tenant had left a hall between this is my office and bedroom on the other side of this wall. no one else but Chris can see. But you’ll see in the SquadShot • where the calendar is, in the SquadShot down at the bottom of their folks, there is a hole that they put in that goes into the kitchen and lounge, and it’s just the right size, or was nearly just the right size for a network cable. So when we open, the chap turned up, I said, hey, could you just drill this just a little bit wider for me? and then I’ve tried to, as much as possible run ethernet if you have the means to do so, and maybe if you’re having a new build, don’t neglect having ethernet put in. My friends had a new build and they said to me, is there anything we should do? Techwise? I said, pay the extra to have ethernet throughout the house because you’ll get better performance, especially for you. my friend, I won’t name him, but he works from home. So I said, look, if you get a ground burial out to your little outside office, you will have far better performance and more reliable connectivity. So it’s something to consider. And do you need the fastest WiFi? Genuinely, this is something that’s crossed my mind. If your broadband is in this country, fiber to the • cabinet, maximum theoretical is about 80 megabits at the most. But if you’ve got that sort of speed, why do you need a WiFi route if it’s capable of gigabit speeds? You probably don’t. Maybe I’m wrong on this, but as Chris said, there’s other things you can solve. I think the term that keeps getting branded around the media at the moment is vampire devices, isn’t it? Where you’ve got things that maybe have screens on and, lights and things like that.
Chris: So this notion of powering things down to when they’re not in use, right? It’s very much a function of how many things you have and how much they add up to. I mean, this is probably one of the uses, one place where having things like smart meters is actually quite helpful, because you get an idea of what these figures might actually be, either at a daily level and then see if there’s any benefit in choosing to have them or not have them. let’s be real, most of us are human. And in many ways it feels like it’s very much about defaults. Like Microsoft is flipping a switch to change the default that most people aren’t bothered enough to kind of change, and that ends up having an impact. And I feel that, this is something that a manufacturer should be thinking about more than other ones because, they have the impact. It’s much easier to get a manufacturer to make a change here or have a law that says, well, you’re just going to have this default from now on, than trying to individually persuade like half a million people to do this kind of stuff. And this is like discussion all about regulation rather than where you go. But I think that this is actually some of the things you really do need to do when you’re talking about this. I feel like vampire usage and stuff like that. It may be a thing, but to put it at the end of people feels like it’s maybe misunderstanding human nature and what people will choose to optimize for on a daily.
James: Absolutely. And I think one thing I do like in devices is where manufacturers have actually gone to trouble giving you the option to turn off things like the status LEDs. There’s various reasons for doing that, particularly if you don’t want those LEDs in your room. But okay, they’re not going to make a huge impact, but they can altogether if you take everything in your house. We talked pre show about the difference between LEDs and, fluorescent bulbs and traditional bulbs. Is it fair to say one thing that people can do is if you’ve still got traditional light bulbs or any sort of Cfls, invest a little bit and change them to LEDs because it’s well, that’s my take anyway. It’s worth that spend to replace them with LEDs.
Chris: LEDs are like, so much cheaper and so much better now in 2023 than they were before. It feels like an absolute no brainer.
James: Because I think, you’ll know, those horrible, like, loopy, energy saving bulbs that we had first, things take almost a decade to power up and they look awful. Whereas an LED instant on. And look, if you want to be fancy, you can have color changing ones, Nanoleafs, • Hue bulbs, everything like that. Of course, that does come with an additional power drawer because they have to be on, but it’s probably minimal. Now, one thing I want you to also touch on is batteries. Because batteries typically single use batteries, they’re done. But what about using it was a story from your newsletter, and we’ll make sure we link to a newsletter edition in question. And the story but coal waste been potentially used to make new batteries. That seems like a win win.
Chris: Yeah, so this is a really nice story that I came across in The New Yorker, actually. Basically the idea was that when people burn coal, because there’s so much stuff, there is like some waste which is left over. And you might refer to this as like tailings. It’s the kind of stuff that’s left over. And in many cases, when you’re mining, you’ll have stuff left over as well. You have all these things which are considered waste products. And because mining is so inefficient in the first place, like it’s, you know, hunt it’s like hundreds of kilos just to get, you know, grams out most of the time, for for particular m for particular metals. There has been like a real interest, in people trying to find other sources, because we know, we know that there’s going to be a demand for various rare earth metals or other forms of metal, that you might need for what people refer to as transition materials. So things you might want to put into an electric car, or to provide wind turbines and things like that. Now, this story in The New Yorker, which I shared and I really loved, was basically people looking at the tailings at that were basically dumped by say, most kind of coal fire plants. They’re they turn out to be quite rich in all kinds of minerals. The general thrust of the story is that rather than having to dig stuff up, or try and, say, have all kinds of problematic issues in, like, the Atacama Desert in Chile, to kind of get lithium, it’s maybe plausible to actually treat these massive piles, which already, blight on, say, a particular landscape, and poisoning the land. Use that as your feedstock instead to kind of pull out the minerals you want. And the story was basically, there was some research that was funded by the US government to find this. And they pretty much identified that there is so much coal waste in America already, they reckon they can probably meet most of the demands for rare earth, minerals just within America itself, just by kind of mining these sources of junk without having to kind of open new mines or get stuff from elsewhere. Now, the article goes through some of the economics. So in some cases it’s economical, in some cases it isn’t. But there is a kind of nice side effect in that you treat otherwise really, really toxic kind of parts of landscape. And there’s a kind of similar story in Europe which is not in this one, but I think I can find a link for the show notes in that urban mining is generally being seen now land fuel, for example, and other things as ways to kind of get gold, for example, or get other minerals that you might use for making electronics. Because once again, the concentrations are high enough to be. Comparable to drilling or mining for virgin materials, if you excuse the term, to get this stuff out. So there’s a whole thing there about like circular minerals. And this is one of the difference between things like fossil fuels where you burn and it’s gone to stuff where you actually have a circular economy, where you have minerals they’re used, and then you find another way to you keep them in circulation. In the kind of what we might refer to as there’s a very specific term the industrial ecologists use to talk about this kind of, cycle. basically. But for the purpose of this podcast, we could just refer to as in circulation with us basically in the industrial metabolism. I think that’s the phrase people use to describe this idea that yeah, there’s things you can use and you needn’t go on overseas adventures, for example, if you’re able to look a little bit more closer to home and realize that lots of these things are around in untreated forms that could be treated.
James: That’s incredible. That would be fantastic if we could get that commitment.
Chris: I love this story. It’s so nice, isn’t it? Right? It’s pretty freaking cool.
James: It’s very cool. That sounds like such as I said earlier, it’s such a win for everyone if we can start using that. And it brings us on maybe to something we haven’t talked about. But I think is just as important is device cycles and the supply chain, and how often we change our devices and upgrade. Because we talk about of course, everybody wants the latest tech, right? It’s desirable. The manufacturers incentivise it like oh, buy the latest phone and you will get these new features, you will get a bit of a better camera. Particularly smartphones. Smartphones are a great example. What can we do? What should our mindset be about our device cycles in terms of obviously the original cost of environmental impact of producing those devices? There’s been the ongoing energy usage. But what, what should our mindset be in terms of how often we look at replacing devices? And maybe one of my favorite things is be able to refurbish devices or give older devices a new lifestyle and not ending up in landfill.
Chris: I guess this question might come in two parts, right? So one of these is should we be on this kind of consumerist treadmill, continually running to stay up to date? Right? And the short answer, the easy answer is no. Right? But it’s also worth bearing in mind that in many ways, the actual kind of expansion from hardly people using them, to them being at saturation, there have been some knock on effects that broadly, in my view, have actually been quite helpful. Right? But for the most part, this idea of continually having to buy new electronics is a real problem. simply because for end users, the majority of the impact comes from the making part of electronics, simply because, achieving the temperatures necessary to turn sand into, say, microchips into like, integrated circuits is incredibly high, and most of it comes from burning fossil fuels at present, right now. Now, I can share a link for those kind of people who are kind of into heat pumps with a really good podcast and some papers about the fact that actually you can decarbonize some of this high heat. So it’s plausible that you could decarbonize the creation of electronics. But until that is mainstream, most of the impact will come from the making of this. And that means that if you want to have an impact at the hardware level, you need to either find a way to make them last longer or find ways to only reduce the amount that you need to change each time. So Fairfone. Do this. Fairphone have got to the point now where they have a kind of modular design so you can swap out a camera for another camera and things like that. That’s really, really cool. And I think, they basically say that by doing this, you extend the life of a phone by maybe two years that has something like a 40% impact or 25% reduction on the environmental footprint of the device, over its life cycle. So that’s one example. And like you said, the refurb thing is another example. Like, a lot of the time, computers are now so good that we don’t necessarily need to buy one right now. And there are things that can stay in circulation a lot of the time that can be used. So, pretty much all the electronics I buy are pretty much refurb now, simply because I’m not that demanding a consumer such that I need the absolute latest and greatest anymore. And I feel like there’s an argument that we might have for that. But right now, the mental model we probably have, I think it’s actually one that is difficult to solve at the consumer level. It feels like a thing you need to have a government level to either basically say, if you’re going to make something, you need to make it from reclaimed minute materials, like the car industry does with most of its steel, for example, like 80% plus, close to 90%, I think, is of, the steel is recycled. Compare that to electronics where we are like single digit at most, right? It’s simply because there are norms that you have there. If you were to do something to tax virgin materials so they were that much more expensive, you would very quickly see companies like, say, Fairphone being rewarded for what they’re doing, compared to companies which force you to buy an entirely new machine for this. And I feel like a lot of the right to repair stuff happening in Europe and America is nudging in this kind of direction, but it’s very much a case of regulation and business model rather than a thing to kind of put on a consumer in my view.
James: I would wholeheartedly agree with you. Look, I’m a big Apple fan. I’m an iOS user. But I recognize that as great as I said, as great as Apples silicon stuff is the nature of the SoC means the sam is on package, which means that you can’t upgrade your ram on an Apple Silicon. I mean to be fair, you haven’t been able to do that on Apples Intel machines for a while, but that be able to upgrade ram. Now there’s the Fairphone, great example, be able to change camera modules to upgrade because if that’s the only thing that you need to change, you might be a videographer and you’re actually I need a better 4K sensor. Let’s swap out that camera module. Brilliant. There’s the framework laptop that Linus Sebastian recommends and is an investor in, where they’ve shown already that you can just swap out the entire main logic board in the same case. Change out your modules change out your screen. And what I love is that they built the logic board to be run outside of the laptop enclosure. So you can go into a desktop case. But things like, I mean look so great example of this. So tomorrow morning I’m meeting up with a friend of mine and is technically a client in this case, but helping him with some tech buying. And he said, look, I don’t need the latest. Gray says, well why don’t we look at Apple’s refurb store then? Because tell me, talk to me about your use case. What are you going to be doing on these devices? I said, okay, you do not need the latest m, two matt M bucket. Let’s get you a refurb m. One, you still get the benefits of the power efficiency, M-series • chips. And the same with his iPhone. He’s not someone who’s going to be playing games on it. He’s not going to be taking lots of photos. So we’ve gone for an 11, an iPhone 11 because it’s still supported. There is one thing I want to call out here as well, and I don’t think you will agree with this, but we’ll see. There should be regulation on device manufacturers to say you have to provide so many years of full security updates for the operating system that ships with that device. And I will say I think Apple do this fairly well. And I think the big Android OEMs, m obviously Google themselves do this well I don’t know too much about Fairphone’s • OS. I know it’s Android based. But there are Android OEMs out there, who are selling phones that will never get updated. These are phones that came out a year ago that will never get updated beyond the current version of Android. Is that something that we need to think about as well, or we need to push for.
Chris: So yes, it’s a short answer. You can talk about that. Absolutely. This type speaks to the whole idea of like open operating systems and everything like that right. So one of the reasons that you end up having to buy the things you have to buy from Apple, for example is because yeah, everything’s welded in place. So you can’t use this. I use a Mac. I mean there’s reasons I like using a Mac, but also one of the reasons I’m stuck using a Mac is that some of the software that I have is only going to be available on there and the packaging is only going to come in a certain place. And if I want to have something like m one or actually even though in my view, I think the hardware is actually absolutely fantastic now right but in order to actually use that you might be able to use Silicone Linux, I suppose, if you want to really dive into the specifics of that. But that I’m not sure I’m ready to do that kind of thing. I feel in many ways, ah, a lot this is tied to the business model that lots of organizations have now to speak to Fairphone. Fairphone are actually pretty good in this sense because they actually have been actively trying to support a number of different operating systems to run on their hardware. So they have been doing a bunch of work in that field. I think they support Sailfish and maybe another example. But we have like a kind of consolidation of operating systems here that you don’t have that many options. Maybe seven or eight years ago, when Firefox OS was a possible option. What Firefox OS became is another something else. But that’s something I don’t really feel I know enough to kind of talk about. Even though I know it’s actually very popular in India now for other kinds of phones. Yeah, it’s worth looking at that like literally two years after Firefox kind of shuttered down the operating system, it became massive in India. Like tens, if not hundreds of millions of users and hundreds of millions of handsets have been sold using a variant of the operating system that Firefox spent a bunch of time working on.
James: Fascinating. And I’m a big fan of I have not used them yet. But the Pine phone and the Pine laptop, the concepts there really interest me. Just like you, I use a Mac, I like macOS, I like a lot about it. But there’s a lot that I think Apple could do better and Microsoft could do better. I think the problem is there’s no perfect tech company out there. Because in most cases they’re all answerable to shareholders and their goal is to make those shareholders money.
Chris: Yeah, there’s a piece about some other things that you can actually do as a shareholder if you do care about this. because there’s a whole suite of people doing actual shareholder activism for this. And this has been one of the pivotal things that led to both Microsoft being much more kind, of warm to right to repair, but also Apple like. there’s a really lovely piece that I think is relevant. But you’re right, we have no employee owned, hardware manufacturing gadget company that I’m aware of at present, even though they exist from providing services. Simply because I think maybe the hardware requirements are so high for any of this stuff.
James: here’s one to pose for yourself and for our listeners. Right now, pretty much every phone in manufacturer, I’m going to use Samsung, Apple and Google as examples here. They all release new phones, at least one new phone every year. Sometimes too. I mean, Apple typically can release what? Three or four phone models a year in their line. Samsung the same. You have a note, you have S series. And then Samsung in particular have everything else under the sun as well. Do you think if they all said actually, why don’t we agree that we’re going to change to a two year cycle? Would that have a huge impact? Is that something that’s even, that they would even go for? Or are they so stuck in that we have to have a new product so that people spend money with us every year?
Chris: I’m out of my league here, mate. I don’t know enough to know what the impact that would be. Whether you would just have pent up demand like we’ve seen with Raspberry Pi’s for two years, or whether you’d actually have real change. This one here, I don’t have enough data to make
James: That’s fine. Don’t apologize. It’s a question I ponder. And I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there because it’s not been done. I mean, we are several years into Raspberry Pi 4. there’s been a huge supply shortage of them, but there’s still huge demand. Yeah, I don’t know. And this is where I’d love to hear from you lot, our listeners, please. What do you think? Would you wait two years for a new iPhone? If you’re someone who buys an iPhone every year, which I don’t. Look, I’m a tech nerd, but this is a 13 Pro. I’m not going to be upgrading this for at least three or four years. My general rule of thumb is once a device stops receiving security updates, be that through its original operating system, or by installing something like Linux. a couple of weeks ago I recorded with Nick from The Linux Experiment and we were talking about breathing new life into laptops, older laptops. By installing Linux onto them, you can really revive some old machines. I think like just putting an SSD in there, putting a bit more ram in it can really revive old tech. I’d be generally curious to see how that would play out. One final thing I want to talk a little bit about is smart home tech. And more so around does the additional energy consumption and the additional environmental impact of smart home gadgets things like, maybe, Apple’s ecosystem HomeKit • or via, Amazon ecosystem and trying not to save a word. So I don’t trigger anyone’s devices do the automation potentials that they bring to say, okay, make sure that my lights switch off when I leave. Or make sure my lights turn off at sunrise, turn on at sunset, but not before. Does that again, that cost of manufacture, that cost of energy usage, does that outweigh the benefits of a home automation?
Chris: Don’t apologize. It’s a question I ponder. And I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there because it’s not been done. I mean, we are several years into Raspberry Pi 4. there’s been a huge supply shortage of them, but there’s still huge demand. Yeah, I don’t know. And this is where I’d love to hear from you lot, our listeners, please. What do you think? Would you wait two years for a new iPhone? If you’re someone who buys an iPhone every year, which I don’t. Look, I’m a tech nerd, but this is a 13 Pro. I’m not going to be upgrading this for at least three or four years. My general rule of thumb is once a device stops receiving security updates, be that through its original operating system, or by installing something like Linux. a couple of weeks ago I recorded with Nick from The Linux Experiment and we were talking about breathing new life into laptops, older laptops. By installing Linux onto them, you can really revive some old machines. I think like just putting an SSD in there, putting a bit more ram in it can really revive old tech. I’d be generally curious to see how that would play out. One final thing I want to talk a little bit about is smart home tech. And more so around does the additional energy consumption and the additional environmental impact of smart home gadgets things like, maybe, Apple’s ecosystem HomeKit • or via, Amazon ecosystem and trying not to save a word. So I don’t trigger anyone’s devices do the automation potentials that they bring to say, okay, make sure that my lights switch off when I leave. Or make sure my lights turn off at sunrise, turn on at sunset, but not before. Does that again, that cost of manufacture, that cost of energy usage, does that outweigh the benefits of a home automation?
Chris: I think it’s worth, when you’re talking about what is effectively an investment in a home improvement, it might be worth using that kind of language to help. Right. So when you think about solar panels, you talk about how long does it take to repay? Right. You could think about that as well. you could use that kind of mental model for this and that highlights that. these questions need to be asked with time frames associated with them. So if you had something where if you’re using huge amounts of power and this allows you to switch things off, then over a year, yeah, you’re going to make an impact. Right. But it may be a question of how many years do you need for that. Now the thing I would share with you though, is that if we are getting to the point where we are increasingly thinking about electrifying, most of the services we might have in a house. When I say services, I’m referring to light connectivity, heat, things like that. And we haven’t really spoken about this, but if we know that the carbon intensity of electricity will change based on times of day, for example, so sometimes it might be more green to run on a battery in house. Versus putting from the grid, then, yes, you could make an argument that having something to help manage that, to think of your house as a kind of nano grid connecting to a larger grid. You can make an argument for that. But you really need to have some data on what the embedded impact associated is for getting all that stuff deployed into your house. And so far, I don’t know anywhere you can actually come up with those numbers yourself. So you have to come up with a figure every single time for every single home. So there is, I hate to say this, but the answer is probably it depends for this. But the thing I can point you to, which might be interesting if you’re into this, is some work by Facebook Research. They did something specifically for carbon for trying to work out at what point, the environmental impacts of their data centers are improved by them having batteries and solar, on site or not, or just making it scale up and down to their usage, depending on what the carbon intensity of the grid might actually be. So they were a so there is some research in this field, but it’s largely a very, very large devices rather than home devices. And I’m not familiar with any home based stuff that comes up with numbers for you to end up with any reasonable figures for that.
James: No, it is really interesting. I mean, look, all this comes back to we have to consider that our convenience and our enjoyment of tech does come with an environmental cost that we should be considering. And it’s really interesting where it’s getting picked up. Things like other devices beyond maybe simple tech like this whole thing of an air fryer might be better because it’s using less electricity to do the same thing. Great, that’s wonderful. Here’s one final thought. If you need to if you watch a lot of TV, is your current TV as energy efficient as it could be? And where does that trade? And again, it comes down to where’s the trade off between that investment in upgrading versus how much it’s going to save you and how much it’s going to have an impact on the environment. I think that’s maybe a good point, Chris. We’re going to wrap up. But if we were to leave our listeners with one sort of thought, and I haven’t asked you to pursue, I do apologize, but one sort of thought as to this whole landscape that we’re talking about today, what would you say that would be?
Chris: If any of this has interested you and you care about the climate impact of electronics, or even just being a technologist, there is a community called ClimateAction Tech that I’d really recommend joining where there’s lots of people similar to you. And if you think any of us stuff has been interesting, I’d really recommend following the work we do, at the Green Web Foundation, because we basically exist to help people like yourself embed an awareness of climate and climate justice into your professional life as a technologist. And we do it in a kind of open, nerdy, open data fashion. So if you are listening to this podcast, I suspect you’ll probably like what we do.
James: Awesome. Chris, thank you so much for your time. Where can people find you if you’re one of those people who likes to be followed on social media, where can people find you?
Chris: So I’ve been MrChrisAdams on most social media and professional tools for the last, like, ten years. I’m MrChrisAdams on Twitter, but I’m also on Mastodon at times as well. But, generally, if you do a search for Mr. Chris Adams, all one word on most search engines. I should be coming up as one of the top results because I’ve spent ten years trying to Google wack that and I hope it’s working.
James: Yeah, I have to admit, I’m spending most of my time now on Masterdon rather than Twitter. Just such a nicer place. Chris, thank you again so much for your time.
James: Thanks for listening to this episode of Cross Wires. We hope you’ve enjoyed our discussion and we’d love to hear your thoughts. So please drop us a note over to [email protected].
Jae: You can also drop us a comment on the post, or if you’re a Goodpods • user, why not start a discussion there too?
Jae: You can also follow us on Mastodon at @[email protected]
James: And of course, you can find us in all the good podcast apps and all the really bad ones too.
Jae: For more of our content, head on over to CrossedWires.net/YouTube for all our videos, and keep an eye on our Twitch channel at CrossedWires.net/Live for our • • upcoming streams.
James: If you like what we heard, please do drop review in your podcast directory of choice. It really does help spread the word about the show.
Jae: And of course, if you can spare even the smallest amount of financial support, we’d be incredibly grateful. You can support us at ko-fi.com/crossedwires
James: Until next time, thanks for listening.

We love technology, both old and new, and want to explore how it can be used in positive and ethical ways. We are James and Jaes and together we make up the Crossed Wires team. Every week we bring you a new episode focussing on a specific tech-related topic with a guest, or guests, who really know their stuff in that field. We've covered things like backing up your data, how art and technology can be used together, we've taken deep dives into Linux, explored cool hardware like the Valve Steam Deck. And if you're a bit nostalgic for the tech of your youth, we've got you covered with episodes focussed on retro computing like the Amiga, Atari ST, and even good old computing magazines. Our chats are always relaxed and we truly hope you'll find an episode you'll love and maybe even learn something new from our discussions.

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TranscriptJae: Hello, and welcome to Crossed Wires. I am Jae. So James minus the Ms.
James: Oh, dear, no. that’s not how we’re going to do stuff. No. At this point, our guest is thinking, what have I come into? What’s going
Jae: I’ve known Bradly a little bit. We’ve talked in voice chat before, so Bradly knows I’m a little quirky.
James: I was going to say you’re used to this then. Okay, fine.
Jae: I am joined by my co host, James. How are you doing, James?
James: I’m really good. We’ve had a very productive day. We’ve obviously planned this episode out. we streamed earlier. We did, our coffee chats, and it was great. We tackled some scammers. One of the reasons we brought Bradly on and we’ll talk about it is because of the fundraising we’re doing at the moment. But it’s been really cool being able to see people donate to the American Heart Association this month for the whole of February. That’s what we’ve been doing. this episode should come out unless I really screw up. The edit should be out before the end of February, so it should still be within Heart Month.
Jae: Speaking of Heart Month, I think I will introduce a very hearty guest. I’m so sorry. You told me to host, James, and coming with the hosting is my quirky. You obviously did not listen to my old podcast enough.
Bradly: Honestly, it’s very hard not to make heart puns, to be quite honest with you.
Jae: So our guest today is Bradly of the American Heart Association. How are you today?
Bradly: I’m doing great. How are you all doing?
Jae: Doing amazing. And before we actually get into this, I actually wanted to ask a question. Who is Bradley? How did you get into the role you’re in and what are some of your passion and your interests?
Bradly: So, to make a very long story short, I, was actually a fundraising staff person for Kids Heart Challenge. Many of you would probably remember jump rope for Heart as a kid. I was managing that program with ten different counties, about 200 different schools, at once, before this role. And then, I’d been here for a year and saw the potential with content creators and just said, I’m just going to start fundraising with content creators and get something up and going. I had no name for the program three years ago. And, we had no prizes. We had no nothing. No T shirts, no logo, no nothing. And I was sending streamers at the time, ducks from Kids Heart Challenge and they loved them. Like a little rubber ducks on a keychain, they loved them. and that’s how this program started. It was just like some old kids heart challenge stuff. And turns out people in their 20s don’t change much from elementary school.
James: No, we don’t.
Bradly: So, they got all kinds of Kids Heart Challenge stuff. And three years later. We have gone through lots of different changes, learned lots of different things. Last year we were American Heart Association Revive. And now we’re American Heart Association live. I think that’s the final branding of the program now. So, yeah, that’s kind of how I got here. Just, kind of said, there’s potential here, I’m interested to do it. And then they gave me a full time position for it. So I’m thankful for that.
Jae: I think I’ve been a part of this, at least the last two to three years, but maybe since at the beginning or very early in the beginning.
Bradly: Very early.
Jae: And it’s definitely been something that I’ve enjoyed working with the American Heart Association. And one thing that I want to go into is what is the American Heart Association? It always seems like the heart is something that until I started fundraising for, I did not realize just how much it’s important to a lot of what we do.
Bradly: Definitely, in my personal opinion, I don’t think heart disease necessarily gets the attention it really deserves, especially compared to some other things. Heart disease is the number one killer in the world. and stroke by itself is just one cardiovascular disease that ranks as number two on its own. We have number one and number two in our hands, and I think it deserves a lot more attention than what it gets. And most people have the conception too, that it’s some older person’s thing. But I myself, at, 25 years old, had to have some pretty major surgery just last year because of my own heart condition. Turns out my heart was want to, beating 27,000 extra heart beats a day. You only have 100,000 in a day. So that was about 27%. It was working harder. So, just to put it out there that it can happen to people, people our age and younger. Just another quick fact, our star pupil for kids heart challenge, his name is Finn, by the time he started kindergarten, he had 15 open heart surgeries. He’s one of like 40,000 babies that are born with some kind of congenital heart defect every year. So it’s not just an older person’s thing. It does defect all ages for various reasons. some people are at higher risk than others. And what the Heart Association does is we try to help people, like myself and others, live their longest and healthiest life possible, literally. Our mission statement, we do so from research, which is kind of our top down approach, because research will affect literally every person on the planet. That’s our main call to action. And then we also try to do a bubble up approach as well. over the past few years, we’ve really ramped up our local impact efforts as well. And we’ve looked into down to the very zip code. Like, me and you could be neighbors and literally our houses to be within visual distance of each other. But if you live in a zip code that’s different than mine, your life expectancy could be 60. and mine could be 90. So there literally could be a 30 year gap. So we’ve actually done things like setting up a local impact fund to give back to other local nonprofits that might have the infrastructure that we don’t to support things like homelessness food shelters. We’ve worked with local legislators to actually expand internet access because that’s something everyone needs. And there’s some spots in rural parts of the states that people couldn’t even buy it even if they wanted to. So very long answer, but that’s what the American Heart Association is and does.
Jae: James has learned a little bit about some of the health care in the United States, or in many regards, lack of health care. Like, there’s a few doctors appointments that I want to get, but right now, because of tight funds, I have to prioritize what I’m doing and some of its mental health, some of its actual down to health on my left foot, for instance, I have to get that checked, but I can’t afford it right now. And over in the UK, there’s a little bit more access to health care, even if there’s a time gap. And I think that’s one reason why it’s, incredibly important for organizations like the American Heart Association to bring out things to help where our medical does lack and our access to medical resources lacks heavily.
James: It’s interesting because over here in the UK, obviously, we are focusing on the American Heart Association. But of course, over here we have a British Heart Foundation. And I think it’s wonderful to see so many charities across. One random question. Do you guys all get together? Do you work with eachother in partnership or is it like I’ll stay in my little bubble?
Bradly: As far as fundraising, we do kind of bubble up for fundraising. However, as an organization as a whole, we probably are the biggest and the oldest one of what we like to call our sister organizations. We kind of have agreements that, research is research and that gets scattered across the globe. So if you do something with us, if you do something with them, it gets scattered everywhere. Because research is research. Everyone’s going to know about it and know how to do these things, and we’re going to spread that around as best we can. In fact, the American Heart Association actually hosts the biggest scientific convention in the world to do just that. It’s called Scientific Sessions. We hold it every single year and we gather all the world scientists together to share their findings and research, since we are one of the biggest research charities, period. And one of the oldest, in fact, 2024, next year will be our 100 year anniversary.
Jae: Wow.
Bradly: So when you think of something and just to paint a picture, I think of stuff like like Disney, 50 years old and the impact that’s made on people’s lives. Pokemon, now 26 years old in just a couple days. Just think about that and the things that they’ve done to impact your life. And we’re four times as old as Pokemon, twice the age of Disney. That’s a very long time.
James: Wow. Yeah. Because another nerdy, one doctor who turns 60 this year. Yeah, I know. He’s got two hearts. Sorry. That was cheesy. I’m sorry. Yeah, that’s awesome. And it is great. But that’s all been shared. So, Bradly, obviously we talked about fundraising. People say, oh, well, why should we fundraise? Why should we give money to a charity? Surely they can get this from a government. And maybe some people’s perception oh, they can get it funded by the government. There’s big companies that will fund. Why is it so important that maybe individuals consider how, they can support, as we’re talking about streamers and content creators supporting you, why is that fundraising so vital to a charity like the American Heart Association?
Bradly: So kind of going back to what, I was saying before, in the very beginning, all this, it goes towards a lot of different things. We are so big that we are able to really use basically the entire country’s resources to look at exactly what is the problem. And we’re seeing that research has helped, but we’re seeing things like rural areas, for example, don’t have the resources that metropolitan areas do. So we’re able to set new standards for hospitals. It’s called Get with the guidelines. We have a whole program just for that where rural hospitals aren’t necessarily up to speed. So that’s one of the things that we’re able to do with those donor dollars. But in particular, with content creators. The thing that I’m so excited about, we talked in the very beginning about how people have this misconception that this is an older person’s disease while you’re at higher risk, the older you get, because we’re just kind of falling apart the more we get older. That is generally true. Content creators, people on Twitch, people on YouTube, TikTok, those three places where we’re fundraising, the general audience is like 15 to 30. And honestly, that’s an area of improvement for the American Heart Association because generally speaking, we have them in Kids Heart Challenge. We’re pretty good there in elementary school. We kind of lose them in middle school, high school. And we kind of hope that in between that area, that when they start work that we kind of grab them in their workspace. Other than that, we kind of lose them in that little middle space there. So that’s why I’m so excited about content creators in general, because it really is a brand new audience for us. So when you are streaming for the American Heart Association, you’re funding research, resources, local impact for the number one and number two killer in the world, while also educating people that aren’t even aware of what heart disease is, let alone that this is the thing they’re most likely to die from. If you want to talk about impact, I can’t think of anything bigger than this.
Jae: Absolutely. And you’re finding people like where they are at, and you’re finding because a lot of my content is YouTube and Twitch and even like, TikTok’s, like YouTube shorts or TikTok. People send me. I’m not on TikTok itself. I’m one of those, fuddy duddies who doesn’t want to be on TikTok itself.
Bradly: Honestly, I don’t blame you. I don’t even have a TikTok account. we will fundraise on there, but that’s a conversation for another day. Go on.
James: Yeah.
Jae: And whenever people talk about awareness, because I know one of the jokes is, I’m already aware of it. But no, you are right. Part of the awareness is saying, hey, this is for us. And also, what does it do? Because even like, when I’m looking at some of the resources that you provide during the heart month, I’m like, wow, I did not realize how this can affect me. Too little sleep can affect me. Too much sleep can affect me on all of those parts. And that’s just building that awareness. And the stories that I’ve had my community share, even the stories that James and I have, because we both have family members who have had heart problems. I’m very much high blood pressure because I’m very high stroke. And it’s definitely affecting me. And I think bringing that awareness to be like, hey, if you don’t see it I know that people have asked me, why should you get a smartwatch? And I know there’s a slight tangent, but it’s very true. Why should you get a smartwatch? Because I know people who have had a smartwatch that can read their heart rate. All of a sudden it says, hey, I’m noticing, based off our sensors, that your heart is actually a little weird. You might come on to get it checked out. My mom found out that she was having AFib • because of her Apple Watch. And it’s definitely very much one to keep mindful of. So it’s bringing that awareness of your heart is important because without it, you’re not going to be living, I’m not going to be funny. I’m being very serious.
Bradly: Yeah.
James: It goes back to Bradly’s wonderful point about the amount of research it’s done. Because let’s be honest, this Apple Watch has ECG. It has heart rate monitoring, but none of that would be possible without wonderful research. I seem to recall that Apple even talked about the American Heart Association in some of the keynote stuff around, the heart health stuff and my heart health studies. When you’ve got technology, be able to influence that research. I think it’s fantastic. And yeah, I wear a Smartwatch for a slightly different reason related to heart health, and it’s an interesting one. So my dad, I’ve got his permission to share this. he had a heart attack about, oh, gosh, it will be eight years this year since he had his heart attack.
Jae: Wow.
James: And, he’s fine, by the way. He’s absolutely fine. In, the end, he had to have a stent put in. and I’m very grateful to the work of the cardiac unit at the hospital he was at. I obviously won’t name the hospital, but they were fantastic. but I only found out that he was having a heart attack and I needed to go home because I was wearing a Smartwatch. The call center I was working at at the time didn’t allow phones to be out on the floor. It had to be in your pocket or in your bag. But because I was wearing a Smartwatch, I got the notification from him saying, hey, call home urgently. You need to come home now. Because she didn’t say why in the message, but I called home. Oh, yeah, he was having a heart attack. You need to come home. Because we were going to be driven up to someone’s going to drive us up to the hospital, because it was near where he worked, you see, and it was a good hour and a half away. So we had a very good friend who drives it. But if I hadn’t been wearing a Smartwatch, I wouldn’t have known about that notification for an hour or so. Very important. But Bradly, before we move on to some of the actual fund stuff around streaming, one thing that’s always struck me, it’s something I’ve learned from working a little bit with charities, is that people, think obviously the funding has to go to the research, has to go to the outreach programs. But that’s not always true, because charities are effectively a business. And you do have to raise operational funds as well. A charity doesn’t run itself, rather. And, there are things we are not going into too much detail. Would you say that’s a fair assessment where people maybe don’t understand the operational costs that have to be covered by those donations, too?
Bradly: Yeah, even the government, like, you have to pay people to there is always operational cost. It’s unavoidable. Like, we need ink in the printer, we need paper in the printer. We need the printer. We need the people that print the stuff. We need people like me too. I can full on say, like, we’ve been around for 100 years. And fundraising through content creators has been around since at least 2013. And this program didn’t exist until like, I started reaching out. So the million dollars we raised last fiscal year through content creators, it wouldn’t happen if outreach staff didn’t exist. These are all very important things. And you can go back and forth and say what you want to about paying staff at, nonprofits and how much they should get paid or expenses or whatever. But that’s what things like Charity Navigator, for which we have the highest score on, and they look and compare us to other charities and how wisely we’re spending our dollars. it’s one of the lowest compared to other nonprofits, especially. We’re very good on the donor dollar. And like for an example, when COVID came up and things were just horrible for us that first year, new staff were being hired and they put everything on freeze. The new people couldn’t even get a name tag or business cards. Everything was shut down. We stopped all the spending. and out of all the nonprofits that I’ve seen that have handled their spending through COVID and things, like layoffs and stuff, we probably handled that the best out of anyone I’ve seen. I’ve seen other nonprofits have to go through multiple rounds of layoffs and decreases in spending, losing fundraising programs. It got really messy, really fast. But we had some very smart people here that really took the reins and took control and made what could have been just an awful situation. Just got a pause, band aid, one at a time. And then we were good. And we’ve been better ever since then.
Jae: And I think that one thing that I’ve been impressed at is just your use of creative ways to reach people. And one of the reasons we have you here today is Twitch streaming. Because I’ve been fundraising for the American Heart Association for the last like two to three years and it has been pretty incredible just to see what you’ve been able to do with that. And for those who don’t know, Twitch streaming itself is people going live on Twitch either by yourself or with other people. You’re playing a game, you’re doing something, you’re doing just chatting. And it’s a content medium that a lot of people are watching. In fact, Crossed Wires is streaming a couple of times a week and it’s a fun outlet for us also. Way to raise some, some money. But I think Twitch streaming has been around since justin.tv • in the early, in the early, stuff like that.
James: justin.tv…. • •
Jae: Yeah, I actually remember streaming on that one. But yeah, it’s brought a lot of awareness into Twitch streaming itself. We’re going to do a whole episode on Twitch streaming at some point because there’s so many cool avenues about it and so many cool things but yeah, streamers can raise money and someone will stay. So streamer have people pay them and then they pay the charity? In the beginning days is how it was done, but there was some, let’s just say nefarious things that happened.
Bradly: Really?
Jae: Yeah. In the early days, sometimes Streamers would say, hey, when you give me a sub or send me a tip and I will donate the profits to charity. And some streamers were not quite ethical. They were getting their accounting wrong accidentally or intentionally. So over time, services like Soft Giving and Tiltify have come around. And even now, Twitch, through Twitch Charity have come around where when you raise that money, it goes directly to the charity. The service may have whatever their costs are for the transaction fees, all that stuff, but the money that’s raised there does not hit the Streamers bank account whatsoever. So there’s that accountability and it’s been pretty incredible how much money has been raised. Do you have a figure of how much the American has raised on.
Bradly: Average through Twitch this last fiscal year? Our fiscal year starts on July 1. so last fiscal year was a million dollars that we raised. And really, that was our first full fiscal year that we had last year. The year before that was me scrambling together three months of, work to prove that this could be a thing. And that was $100,000 in three months. And then the first full fiscal year was a million dollars. So now we’re on the third one. We’re on track to beat that probably by half a million, if I had to guess.
Jae: And that’s from streaming?
Bradly: Yeah.
Jae: That is incredible. And that shows that you’ve tapped into a great market because I’ve just been impressed at how much money has been raised through streaming and through charity. And it makes sense. It’s where people are at, it’s the communities people are a part of. And what is so cool is to see all these creators using their platform for good, using their platform to do good in the world. Like, I did a charity for Trans Lifeline, and I raised probably, I think 25 to 2800 somewhere around there. And that has changed lives just there. And it’s been cool every year to see what we are raising money for with the charities. And it’s been cool to realize we affected somebody’s life because of what our community did. Our community came together and brought that collective fundraising because our community enjoys seeing what we’ve raised, and what we’re doing. I’ve had members share stories, saying, thank you for what you’re doing, because I have a family member who’s had this or this has happened to me, and it’s been able to really bring people together.
James: And, how does it work from your side, Bradly, in terms of your partnership with Tiltify and Twitch? How does a charity like American Heart Association get on board because obviously, I guess you’ve got two elements. You’ve got the content creators themselves, and then you’ve got the actual platforms. How do you go about getting those relationships with the platforms? For a start, maybe with the Giving platforms.
Bradly: Yeah.
James: So obviously, for the first time, we’re using Twitch Charity. and I was actually impressed. When you go on and look at a fundraiser, there are so many charities out there. So I’m guessing would it be correct you register as a charity with that platform so people can then give?
Jae: Twitch uses the PayPal Giving Fund. So that’s their registered database.
Bradly: I actually didn’t know that. I knew we didn’t register for Twitch Charity. It was just kind of available one day when they rolled it out. So I was like, great. Tiltify is a little bit different because you actually have to register for Tiltify. It’s a little bit different. And this is very typical for fundraising websites. Like, don’t take this as a bad thing, quote, unquote. This is very standard. you have to sign up for it because it’s like every other fundraising website. They do take a certain percentage to keep the website running and keep all the awesome perks that Tiltify • has that Twitch Charity doesn’t. It’s like 2%. It’s very small. So like two pennies on the dollar. It’s well worth the expense. And it’s very standard. Like, not even Heart runs without any expense. You want to talk about your expenses earlier? That’s one of them. in fact, the only way to actually give 100% of your dollar is if you just did a bank to bank wire transfer. That is just about the only way you can do it. Except, the most interesting thing that we’ve been dabbling around in is YouTube Giving. I love YouTube Giving, by the way, because it’s just as integrated as Twitch Charity. Twitch Charity does not take that 2% that Tiltify does, which it doesn’t come with all the bells and whistles that Tiltify does. But on top of that, YouTube Giving, they also cover those transaction costs from credit cards and stuff. So YouTube Giving is actually the only other way to give 100% of your dollar, which I’m so excited about.
James: That’s awesome because we’re talking about Twitch. But as you said, this is very much a content creator. So it could be people doing YouTube videos and doing something for Heart Month throughout the whole month if you like this video, maybe instead of supporting us through Patreon this month, give to American Heart Association. One of the things I love now, I haven’t used Tiltify. Jae has.
Jae: Yes.
James: One of the things I love about Twitch Charity is the fact that it does take over that sub button. So it doesn’t remove the ability for people to sub to our channel, which is great, but it means that the charity fundraiser, we’re running enrollment and I think j, am I right? You can only run one fundraiser at a time, correct? Yes, which is an interesting one, because next year what we’d love to do is to have it sort of geographical based. So if you’re in the States, you’d give to AHA, if you’re in the UK, you’d give to British Heart Foundation. I don’t know how we might look at other you know what, I bet they’ll have a different fundraising period. So that will probably won’t even be, an issue. But the point is, all these tools, as Bradly said, they are fantastic. And they do have to cover their transaction costs. But it’s great to see somebody coming along.
James: So in terms of like, the individual streamers, because obviously you’ve got that wonderful Discord. But do they have to come and sort of get on board with you to fundraise? Or can anyone fundraise? It’s just optional to come and partner with you for more resources?
Bradly: People can just fundraise for us whenever they want to. I mean, obviously the resources are out there for people to register whenever they want to. For most, I would prefer they come talk to me because I can help you raise more money than what you would probably do by yourself. Especially if it’s a first time fundraiser that has never done a charity stream, never seen a charity stream. They don’t know about setting up donation incentives, how to use the Tiltify • fundraising bar, how to set that up, how to set milestone incentives. Maybe they didn’t know we have access to CrowdControl. • To make your fundraising even more fun. We do these things for a reason. We know they raise more money. And it could bring your fundraising from literally one hundred dollars to one thousand dollars. That’s a big difference. And if we do that per person, that’s even a bigger difference. I want you to come talk to me.
Jae: Yeah. Because for those who, aren’t aware, CrowdControl • is a lot of fun. And I want to actually see if I can get to run on my Steam Deck. Because last year when I was raising money for the American Heart Association, I was using CrowdControl. • And I still remember I was in the first dungeon in Skyrim, and MsAshRocks • • from Tiltify, she kept donating to make my health go all the way down.
James: Oh no.
Jae: And she was cackling in so much laughter every time it would happen. I’m like, I’m almost in the dungeon. Health down. So yeah, there’s. Like those cool things where a donation can actually affect your game. And it’s a really cool thing.
Bradly: Yeah, it’s so cool. They are also one of those sites where they don’t take a fee from us. We we just paid, like I think it’s, like, $100 a year to use it. And then after that, all the money rolls to us. And what I love about CrowdControl • even more is that it takes care of all those donation incentives for you. It makes it so easy. It might be a little tricky to set it up, but I’ve heard no complaints. I’ve heard everyone say that it’s very easy to set up.
Jae: Yes.
Bradly: And what I love about it is that all you have to do past that is, set a fundraising goal. Past that, all your incentives are taken care of. The stream just kind of runs itself at that point, and it’s chaotic, but it’s so much fun.
Jae: Yeah. And what I love is just like, people will do something for the incentive. One that, we have is, like, I think every 100 dollars we raise, James has to dress up like Mario when we play Mario Kart. One, of the ones I have is, every time someone donates $50, I will eat a sour pickle ball, which is absolutely awful.
James: I don’t know you do that. • • •
Jae: I don’t know how I do it either, because they’re awful. But, yeah, it’s just fun incentives that make people just, have fun, but you’re, at the end of the day, doing something good for somebody.
James: What do you think it is? That, I guess this is a question. We, this time, didn’t use Tiltify. We didn’t have any CrowdControl • setup. And part of that is on us. We weren’t as well prepared as we would have liked to be this time, but we had a lot of fun. We made up incentives where there was a wonderful thing that we neither used, and we’ll definitely use the spinning wheel to get people to pick an incentive when someone hits that goal. One of the things we did to try and bring it up is, Bradly in between provided a lot of great, artwork assets that we used to incorporate it into our own designs, because we did a Valentine’s Day stream. So we tried to make it very cutesy as well, and it worked. We just realized that streaming on Valentine’s Day isn’t exactly going to give you the most audience beyond very sad, lonely I’m just saying that out loud.
Jae: you and I are never mind.
Bradly: You could just amend that by saying sad, lonely, and happy, lonely people.
James: There you go. There you go.
Bradly: Because some people are just happy alone.
James: What do you think it is, Bradly? That gets people donating to charities with content creators. Because, I don’t know about you lot, but whenever I’m stopped on the street by charity fundraisers, it’s usually when I’m on the way to do something, unfortunately in a hurry, I’ll try and stop. But I guess part of this is me being very honest. The challenge I found with traditional on street fundraising, I don’t know what the rules are in the US. But here there’s a lot of rules and regulations around that. But I always feel I want to donate to every charity, but I feel quite a lot of pressure to donate monthly and things like that. But what do you think it is about this method of fundraising where it’s almost built into the content that you’re already watching? Why do you think that’s so appealing?
Bradly: Well, I mean, you all have already said this statement several times. It’s meeting people where they are. I mean, we talk about that internally every single day. It’s all about meeting people where they are, and truly providing a custom fit just for them to make an impact on in the ways that they can. We’re not asking Twitch Streamers to go to a heartwalk. We’re not asking them to go to a Heart Ball. We’re not asking them to donate half a million dollars because they don’t have half a million dollars. This isn’t a sponsorship thing or whatever other way we fundraise. We’re asking them to stream. That’s what they do. So it’s a very integrated ask. And just like kids Heart Challenge that used to be Jump Rope for Heart. We send home envelopes to the parents. We have prizes for the kids to earn that are exciting for them to earn. So Heart Walk, that can be a very corporate thing. That’s how we ask for big donations from corporations and inviting a lot of people and putting logos in front of people. That’s what businesses want. So every single thing is customed towards each audience. and everything is very intentional. I don’t even know what this would be like just going someone and say, hey, give us money, hey fundraise. No. It’s always a very specific ask. So that’s the difference there.
Jae: And I think the incentives are a huge thing because again, I have had my stream just again, rolling in laughter whenever they make me do something, I’m like, no, not again. Or like, I used to have a rainbow hat, I need to actually find it. But it would be like always, like, I put on the hat for a couple of seconds or oh frazacorn, it’s a unicorn hat. I would always have that out for like ten minutes or so. I need to actually find some of these incentives. I know one streamer would put like little hands on their fingers to try to play a game.
James: And there’s times where, again, using CrowdControl • to convert your control or change your buttons. I really want to see if it’s a work on the Steam Deck because it’s one disadvantage of moving away from Windows. Half of that control stuff only works on Windows. Yeah, but anyway but I’m impressed at how easy it is to start a charity stream. Even if you don’t have all this stuff set up, how easily you can press the button and instantly be raising money for charity.
Bradly: Yeah. Honestly, I am too. It’s come a very long way. I actually did a charity stream myself, like ten years ago. It’s been ten years ago now, in 2013. I remember having to get help because I was so lost on how to just start a stream. It’s gotten so much better. And like, we didn’t have Tiltify back then. There was no SoftGiving. • In fact, I had to use a Walk fundraiser page and say, donate to this, I really got clever with it, and used another fundraising website. I’m very impressed with how far it’s all come.
James: And I think streaming has become so much simpler. Obviously we’re both using fairly decent microphones and fairly decent audio interfaces for Crossed Wires and for our streams. But the accessibility of good microphones and good cameras, the fact that it’s so easy now to use your iPhone, particularly if you’re a Mac user, but even if you’re not, and you’re on Windows, there’s things like EpocCam • and DroidCam • which are so easy to use for high quality cameras. I remember back in the day of Leo Laporte where he’d have his Tricaster set up and all that fancy gear that we could just never afford. But now you can stream off almost anything. It’s a lot easier. And as Bradly said, because it is so much easier to get stream started and to get the charity side, I encourage you if you want to raise funds, obviously, particularly for American Heart Association, connect with Bradly, then get going. Get some incentives going. I think it all very much depends on what your type of streams are and what your resources are. But people are generous in general, I think. And if you are entertaining people and you’re making people aware. I think some random things that you can combine, obviously the resources from a charity with things that come into news. I sort of think about, putting olive oil into your coffee to help with heart health. That sounds like the most disgusting thing ever. But let’s look at the science of it. Not really my nice coffee with olive oil.
Jae: I’ve even seen streams raise money without incentives too. I think part of just putting the awareness out there is, hey, we’re raising this money, and you can be a part of our community in raising that money. And there’s just that. You feel good when you see what your stream has done. Even as a streamer, I am blown away when my community has raised funds. It almost makes me feel guilty that all I did was just stream, but that’s all I did. I mean, sometimes I’ve had more incentives than others, but still, all I did was just stream and say, hey, here’s my charity link. Go here and spend money from a different perspective.
Bradly: I’ve been in fundraising since 2010. So how many years is that? The 13 years I’ve been in this? And, you know, 13 years ago, what I was doing to raise $100 was I was going around to family and friends with a physical envelope. And I was collecting checks. I was collecting physical cash and change, if you can imagine counting it. And it would take me all year going to different people collecting $10, $20 at a time to get $100. We’re seeing like, the average is like $1,700 per charity stream. Wow, that is crazy. And most of the time, it’s done in one day. Even $100, $50 in one day is pretty insane.
James: I mean, we’ll be really transparent. As it stands at the point of this recording, we raised $90. I sort of get what Jae said, and I think that’s what I kind of hinted at is we’ve raised $90 by just doing a few streams and saying, hey, please give to the American Heart Association. We’ve put a few incentives in where people have been great. And part of that is because our streaming is really rebuilding after we brought that back. And it’s awesome. We’re still relatively small, but frankly, if people are feeling guilty, oh, but I can only host a stream, I can’t donate myself. Would you say it’s a fair comment to say that actually the very act of opening that fundraising, being able to allow people to donate and to be able to encourage people to give is just as valuable as donations themselves?
Bradly: Oh, yeah. There’s so many things you can do, even if, you can’t donate yourself. My favorite thing to do is say, hey, send it to the people that can you have a phone? Like, send it to family, send it to friends, say, hey, this charity event is happening. You can watch it, but I just want you to donate to it. Or you can just share the stream. We all know how algorithms work. Send some more people over there. Like, come on now, retweeting. How long does it take to retweet something? Go retweet it. That helps. Goes a long way. There’s so many different ways that you can just be present, be active, and not have to donate even just being in chat and keeping the chat active and keeping things exciting, to help the streamer out. That goes a long way. I know streamers certainly appreciate some active chatters in their chats.
Jae: Absolutely. And from my communications background, one thing that I think charity streaming does in an amazing way is also brand awareness. And it does help market the charity. I’ve had people who may not have donated during the charity remembered the organization I was raising money for, because someone was like, I was out somewhere, I saw this charity, and I remember them because I saw it on your stream. So you’re helping promote that organization.
James: To touch on my point, a really good example, Bradley, if I’m wrong, I don’t know, what the case is, but here in the UK, a lot British Heart Foundation have a lot of stores. They have regular sort of charity stores, like Goodwill type stores. But have, British Heart Foundation, for instance, have their furniture and electronic stores, which are dedicated to furniture, electronics, and they do some absolutely wonderful deals. The sofa at my last flat, which unfortunately had to go, we would have donated it back to back to a charity, but it wouldn’t fit. We couldn’t get it back out of a flat, But it was a free seat of lemon sulfur. It was a British heart foundation. I went and paid them and paid them extra. Come and take away my old sulfur. I think they could actually use it. I’m not sure if they could, but the point is, I got a sofa, they got the donation and, the money to raise. There can be so many ways you can give to a charity beyond. Does that exist in the States?
Bradly: I don’t know if we have stores like that. I don’t know. I mean, just to say no, we don’t. however, there probably is someone doing some kind of American Heart Association auction somewhere where you can auction it off. I would say if you’re looking for something that could impact, besides raising money, for us, it’s learning hands only CPR. Let me just paint a picture. When someone goes into cardiac arrest, I mean, we just saw what happened with the NFL, just a few weeks ago. When someone goes into cardiac arrest or has a heart attack, you have about four minutes before they die. That’s it. That is not enough time for someone to get an ambulance there and get them to the hospital. It’s not you have to do something immediately. And you have about a minute, if not less than a minute, before serious brain damage is done. Because when the heart stops pumping blood, it stops going to your brain, and immediate brain damage can happen. So not getting trains in it, not paying for classes, going on YouTube, getting your beat right? Make sure you’ve got the pressure. You have to push hard. We say push hard, push fast. Learning hands only. CPR not getting certified, just learning. It can save a life. And you have to act quick. It’s two steps called 911. Push hard and fast. Push the beat to staying alive. And if you want to know another song, we have a whole list of songs on Heart.org that are CPR certified that you can memorize another song if you want to. We’re growing the list every day. And then if you want one more thing, you can learn the signs of a stroke. Stroke is the number two killer in the world. The acronym is FAST. So you’re looking for facial drooping, you’re looking for your arm. Sometimes people’s arm isn’t functional when they’re having a stroke. Speech difficulty. And then the last one is time to call 911. So again, face drooping, arm functionality, speech difficulty, time to call 911. If you have those three signs, it’s time to call 911. And this actually happened to a content creator that we had fundraising for us this past December. He is in his thirties and had a stroke this past December. So I would say learn, hands-only • CPR, learn the signs of a stroke. And don’t assume when someone collapses or is having the signs of a stroke, that it’s not a heart attack, it’s not cardiac arrest. That it’s not a stroke just because of their age. Because I can’t tell you how many people have come to me and told me that we saved their life, we saved their husband’s life, we saved their wife’s life, we saved their partner’s life, we saved their mom, whoever, because they identified this as a stroke and got them help immediately.
James: Absolutely. And again, look, so one of Jae’s family, we’re not going to name him but he’s a wonderful man. He’s had multiple strokes now Jae, hasn’t he?
Jae: Yeah. And seizures, and stuff like that.
James: Yeah. And again, I think I’ve mentioned it before, I have high blood pressure. I’m on ramapril for it. So I’m at risk. And it’s education. And I think the final question that I ask you, Bradley, and this is just one for us all to think about, is we see a lot of negative things on social media, a lot of negative things on YouTube. YouTube can be full of absolute garbage. But would you say it’s fair to say that the resources on YouTube and other platforms, for CPR again, for recognizing the FAST signs and for general awareness around cardiovascular health would you say that that’s one of the benefits of our online world is that we’ve got so much more resources, literally at our fingertips? When you’ve got a phone available to learn on.
Bradly: You, yeah, I mean, there’s people on, Twitter and YouTube and they’re just going to be negative, whatever. But most of the time it is largely very positive working with this space. I will say, maybe not the most organized group of volunteers I’ve ever had.
Jae: No.
Bradly: But most times the creators that I’ve worked with are probably the most passionate volunteers I’ve ever had. So they’ve, got that going for them. There’s tons of passion. Everything they do, they put 110% of their whole being into it. And just to tag on if this is my last little bit here, the other thing that you can do besides donating is taking care of yourself and learning actually how to prevent the stuff from happening and teaching others how to here’s an alarming thing, right? Number one killer in the world, and number two 80 percent of it can be prevented. 80% of it can be prevented. So if we just kept better care of ourselves, we taught others how to take better care of themselves. And if we as an organization can get people to have access to the resources to take care of themselves, this could be a non issue today. But most cases, it could have been prevented.
James: Unfortunately, it is sad. I agree. It is sad about the case. And look, things like, look, a lot of people listening here will be techies, will be maybe fellow content creators. I know that I need to get better at going out for walks. I live on a beautiful stretch of coast and I should be out enjoying that.
Jae: I’m jealous of that walk.
James: I know at least you get to come and see it every couple of times a year. But correct me if I remember, Bradly, but a simple thing like getting a daily walk can dramatically change. Yes, again, your heart health. While we’re wrapping this out. Is there anything else, maybe anything else that people can because I might be wrong on this and this is why I’d love you to correct me, but things like diet, exercise and sleep are probably free. Would it be fair to say are probably the three biggest things that people can do to make sure that they are staying heart healthy?
Bradly: 100%. Nutrition is a big part of it. I mentioned at the very beginning that we give back to food drives and we give back to homelessness. Ah, it’s a mental health thing. It’s a physical health thing where if you’re not in the right state of mind, that can put you at higher risk. Your heart is under greater stress. If you don’t have the right nutrition. Blood vessel arteries, they can get blocked and clogged and that can cause some issues. Exercise that could lower your blood sugar. I found that out last year because my blood sugar was too high. So yeah, exercise could do a whole lot of good for you. Just taking a walk outside to put you in a better mental state and also get you a little bit of exercise. We actually recommend, about 60 minutes of cardio a day or 30 minutes of intense exercise every single day.
James: That’s really important. And again, as an encouragement, we are being really transparent. We wanted to try and get an episode together about how smartwatches and, health trackers, helped with this stuff. We couldn’t find someone who was knowledgeable enough beyond our own experience, to come and join us. But hey, we could absolutely organize that, if not sooner, but definitely before next year’s Heart Month. We want to be able to talk about that. But I can say the encouragement I get from my Apple Watch to go on those watch, the encouragement I get, a lot of smart watches are of course, available, but the encouragement of my mum’s found this. But closing those rings, doing the competitions is so encouraging. And again, it helps promote stuff.
Jae: And one other thing that helps is the encouragement of people that, you know, James, helps encourage me. And I try to encourage James.
James: I try. Yeah.
Jae: So I know that the American Heart Association can be found heart.org and also, people can immediately start raising money through Twitch Charity, through Tiltify, through a myriad of sources. But where would be the best place for people to either find more information or to get in touch with you.
Bradly: I would say find, us at our Discord. Tiltify.com/AHA, • there’s a link to our Discord there. And if you message me, you can go into our discord. we have all of our staff at the very top and I’ll be in there. You can find me. I’m just Bradly on discord in there. It’s nothing complicated. You, might think I spelled my name wrong. It intentionally doesn’t have any in there. That’s a story for another day. My mother is very spiteful of it. Make it very short, though. Come find me and come chat with me on Discord. We’re in there.
Jae: Well, thank you so much for joining us. I thought it was a very hearty discussion.
James: A heart warming, halt felt discussion.
Jae: And I hope that it definitely pumped you up. Like the way that your heart pumps.
Bradly: It’s hard not to make them I mean, they’re just kind of everywhere. It really is.
Jae: Exactly. And I think with that, we’re going to roll the outro.
James: Thanks for listening to this episode of Crossed Wires We hope you’ve enjoyed our discussion and we’d love to hear your thoughts. So please drop us a note over to [email protected].
Jae: You can also drop us a comment on the post. Or if you’re a Goodpods • user, why not start a discussion there too?
James: You can also join our new Discord server at crossedwires.net/discord • • We’ve got forum channels for each episode and we’d love you to join the discussion there.
Jae: You can also follow us on Mastodon at @[email protected] • • • •
James: And of course you can find the show in all the good podcast apps and all the really bad ones too.
Jae: For more of our content, head on over to crossedwires.net/YouTube • • • for all our videos, and keep an eye on our Twitch channel crossedwires.net/live for our upcoming streams.
James: If you like what we had, please do drop reviewing your podcast directory of choice, it really does help spread the word about the show.
Jae: And of course, if you can spare even the smallest amount of financial support, we’d be incredibly grateful. You can support us at ko-fi.com/crossedwires
James: Until next time, thanks for listening.

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Episode Transcript[00:00:00] Butters (South Park): I don’t play World of Warcraft
[00:00:02] Cartman (South Park): Butters, you said you’re on your computer all the time.
[00:00:04] Butters (South Park): Yeah, but I’m playing Hello Kitty Island Adventure
[00:00:07] Cartman (South Park): Butters, go buy World of Warcraft. Install it on your computer [00:00:10] and join the online sensation before we all murder you.
[00:00:12] Butters (South Park): Oh, oh, all right. All right then.[00:00:20]
[00:00:21] Jae: Hello and welcome back to Crossed Wires. I am Jae, and today I am joined by my co-host who is again [00:00:30] confirming that Squad Cast is indeed Steam Deck certified. Hey James, how are you?
[00:00:36] James: Uh, I’m good. Yeah, this, this works great on deck. [00:00:40] Honestly, this is the second time we’ve done a session. The only challenge this time is that I do currently look like I’m recording from like one of us outdoor scenes in total [00:00:50] recall.
[00:00:50] Like, get your butt to Mars.
[00:00:53] Jae: Yes.
[00:00:54] James: Okay. This webcam is junk. Seriously, it’s a [00:01:00] Logitech C 270 . I think I, I got it for free when I bought something else. Uh, I bought a capture carpet that didn’t end up working. And yeah, so, um, [00:01:10] because I was an idiot and didn’t bring a really nice camera, but Jae spent all the time bringing over from the US for me because it was too much work to, of course, I realized [00:01:20] it wasn’t too, oh, j just shoot me Jae
[00:01:22] that’s what we just need to do. Okay.
[00:01:24] Jae: Okay. Okay. Um, I, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll be over soon.
[00:01:27] James: Thanks .
[00:01:29] Yeah, I’m doing good. [00:01:30] I’m, I’m doing good. Enjoying um, enjoying time with the family for Christmas. We should, we should say close as we record this, it’s well for you and our guest. It’s for [00:01:40] 22nd of December for me.
[00:01:42] It is the 23rd of December. So by the time this comes out, I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas or, uh, whatever holidays you happen [00:01:50] to celebrate and, and in fact, a wonderful new year.
[00:01:53] Jae: And, and also for the guest that is that we have here a Happy Winter Veil because we, for [00:02:00] this Winter Vale episode, welcome Berzerker.
[00:02:02] Berzerker: So, uh, happy to be here with the J and J connection. Uh, you know,
[00:02:06] James: oh, no, don’t, don’t, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not, [00:02:10] that’s not sticking up. That makes it sound like a seventies pop group. No.
[00:02:14] Berzerker: Yes, yes. You’re gonna make
[00:02:17] Jae: We’re the J in J connection. . [00:02:20]
[00:02:20] Berzerker: There it is. I knew I came here for a reason better than Abba. You already shot out of a Cannon .
[00:02:26] Jae: Take a chance, take a chance on me. Okay. [00:02:30] Sorry, James.
[00:02:31] Berzerker: They’re gonna make a movie about you with Meryl Streep in it. It’s gonna be amazing.
[00:02:35] James: Oh, I, no, Meryl Streep is absolutely playing Jae I love that. And, and for me, [00:02:40] I, I want, I don’t know,
[00:02:41] Berzerker: Pierce Brosnan come on. What are you doing?
[00:02:44] James: Pierce Brosnan? Oh, no, no, no. Will Arnett Will Arnett
[00:02:48] Berzerker: Will Arnett [00:02:50]
[00:02:50] James: for some, for some rand no, no, no, no, no. Michael Cera.
[00:02:53] Jae: Ooh,
[00:02:54] James: I,
[00:02:54] Jae: yeah,
[00:02:55] James: I dunno. Michael Cera
[00:02:57] Berzerker: A young Michael Kane.
[00:02:58] James: Ooh, [00:03:00] okay. Yeah, I could, I You were only supposed to blow the blinking doors off.
[00:03:06] Berzerker: Beautiful. I knew I came here for a reason today.
[00:03:08] Jae: Absolutely. Well, and and, [00:03:10] and the first thing you came here for is to tell us who are you and what do you do?
[00:03:14] Berzerker: Yes. Well, uh, yes. Thank you for having me on this show. I am one of [00:03:20] the millions. And millions. How the Rockies say of players of the wonderful game world of Warcraft? And beyond [00:03:30] that, uh, somebody who’s played now for almost its entire duration.
[00:03:34] It’s, uh, coming up on 20 years, couple years shy, but, uh,
[00:03:36] James: Wow.
[00:03:37] Berzerker: For, uh, ooh, [00:03:40] 16 of those years. Getting close to that, uh, at this point. But I also host a podcast like every other middle-aged white guy in America, . Gotta have a podcast. [00:03:50] So I’ve got. And, uh, I’ve been running that for, uh, about seven years now, and it is called Unshackled Fury.
[00:03:58] So, uh, it’s, it’s, uh, [00:04:00] told from the, the perspective of myself, sort of a, a battle worn warrior, although it’s not just about warriors stuff, if you know the game, it’s about [00:04:10] kind of everything. I, somebody once described the show back to me as a cross between like a news network and like Howard Stern, like a shock jock, kind of thing
[00:04:19] it’s [00:04:20] a little bit of everything. Nothing’s off the table. Sometimes you talk about the game, sometimes you talk about the people around the game. Sometimes you talk about community boo booo stuff going on in the background. [00:04:30] It’s, it’s anything and everything, frankly that I just find of interest, uh, mostly to myself.
[00:04:35] Uh, but, uh, I’ve been putting that show out for, uh, 119 [00:04:40] episodes over seven years. So it’s a, it’s a, it’s a labor of love. I don’t do this. You know, every week or every day or anything like that. It’s kind of a collection of my thoughts over a couple of weeks [00:04:50] time and then off we go. And, uh, I’ve been doing it ever since, uh, ooh, 2015.
[00:04:55] Yeah. And I’m finally Jae, I think I’m finally starting to get somewhere. I got, uh, [00:05:00] recently, uh, I got recently a chance to interview the game director himself, Ian Hazzikostas.
[00:05:05] Jae: Oh my gosh!
[00:05:06] Berzerker: Uh, I got to sit in on a group interview with him and I got to [00:05:10] ask him a couple of questions, including the question I’ve always wanted to ask him if I ever got the chance.
[00:05:14] So, yeah, very excited and, uh, been been having a great [00:05:20] 2022, uh, the, the real world aside and, uh, spreading the love of World of Warcraft. And if, uh, no better time than now because baby, we are rolling high on a [00:05:30] new expansion that I think people across the spectrum are loving as they should because Dragonflight is, is shaping up to be [00:05:40] the best expansion of all time.
[00:05:42] And I say that as somebody who thinks Wrath of the Lich King is the best of all time, uh, and nostalgically. So it’ll probably always be [00:05:50] my king, but, uh, it’s, it’s a new era for Warcraft and really happy to see so many people return, so many new faces coming on [00:06:00] board.
[00:06:00] The the game really is, uh, entering what we’re calling sort of a third era, kind of a different philosophical look, uh, at, at the whole, uh, kitten caboodle that it involves. [00:06:10] So I’m happy to be here and, and talk about that. And anything else you got on deck, I’m just, frankly, I’m just happy to see Jae
[00:06:15] Jae: Oh,
[00:06:16] Berzerker: that, that’s, that’s, that’s my, my big thing here.
[00:06:18] Jae and I have been friends, [00:06:20] uh, for a number of years, over many iterations of, of different shows and different eras, and, uh, always been there and, and truly [00:06:30] one of the finest people I’ve ever known has some of the best energy, uh, of anyone I’ve ever known. And I’ll tell you what, the world of Warcraft community is the [00:06:40] lesser for Jae’s absence, but happy to see her out here spreading a good word and doing her thing because, uh, she is, she is truly one of the most phenomenal people [00:06:50] I’ve ever met.
[00:06:50] One of the strongest people I’ve ever met. Um, and so it’s just, it’s just a blast for me to be here and, uh, and have a nice little chat.
[00:06:58] Jae: Thank you, Berserker. And,
[00:06:59] James: And [00:07:00] how much of our podcast budget did you spend on that? Jae? Getting Berserker
[00:07:04] Jae: Maybe about 3000.
[00:07:06] James: Okay. That’s our budget gone for the year, then told you before
[00:07:09] Berzerker: [00:07:10] The check did clear the check clear before I got it.
[00:07:12] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah.
[00:07:13] Jae: And I made sure it was in Bitcoins, cuz I know he .
[00:07:15] Berzerker: Thank you. Yes, thank you. Yes, Bitcoin. Of course. You know, [00:07:20] that’s, that, that’s how we roll now.
[00:07:21] James: About, about wonderfully stable currency. Yeah.
[00:07:24] Jae: Yes.
[00:07:25] Berzerker: The whole planning on my own retirement is all
[00:07:28] Jae: Well now it’s worth about, about a [00:07:30] dollar Berzerker. I’m so sorry.
[00:07:31] Berzerker: Oh, well guess I’m gonna have to show up to work.
[00:07:35] Jae: And Berzerker, it means a lot like I’ve met you in Water Warcraft and through podcasting and I’ve, [00:07:40] I’ve had you on my, on my former podcast and
[00:07:42] Berzerker: mm.
[00:07:43] Jae: I have to say, I, I, do you remember if I met you? No, I think we, we, we did not cross paths at BlizzCon 2019.
[00:07:49] Berzerker: [00:07:50] No, no. That is the one, one of the few true laments. Uh, I’ve had a lot of fun times at the BlizzCons that I’ve been to, but, uh, you and I did [00:08:00] not, uh, physically come face to face, unfortunately.
[00:08:03] Jae: No. I, I, I, I, Ali was surprised at how tall I was because Ali’s um, was like, Ali’s looking around for [00:08:10] this, like, like sh seriously was looking around for a short person.
[00:08:13] All of a sudden. I, I’m over here and she’s like, Oh hi, at the time of Frazley, hi .
[00:08:19] Berzerker: [00:08:20] Hello up there.
[00:08:20] Jae: So one thing that I wanted to kind of like real quickly go over is the term MMORPGs.
[00:08:26] Berzerker: Yes.
[00:08:26] Jae: So for those who don’t know, massively multiplayer [00:08:30] online roleplaying game, and that can take a variety of forms.
[00:08:33] Berzerker: Mm-hmm.
[00:08:34] Jae: But one of the biggest aspects of it that makes it an interesting game is you [00:08:40] are there playing this game, but at the same time, you have other people who are also playing the same game as you. So you may be like over in the fields of [00:08:50] Elwynn Forest trying to take down the Defias Brotherhood, but all of a sudden, out, out of the corner, Berzerker comes rushing through and, and, uh, takes the mob that you’re [00:09:00] going for.
[00:09:00] But this is back in classic and stuff like that. Cuz because I know Berserker would always steal mobs in classic.
[00:09:05] Berzerker: Oh, of course, of course.
[00:09:07] Jae: This the, the idea that you’re playing this game that is not [00:09:10] just a single player experience, but with other people and then say, Hey, you need to group up with this person for this quest.
[00:09:16] Then in that group you may start a party and [00:09:20] you can get probably guess I would be the jokester, I’d be the punster and I’d be punting a lot in, in the group chat. But you start talking to people through it. If you get along with them, you can add ’em to your friends list. So that’s, [00:09:30] that’s kind of the, I would say the, uh, TLDR of of MMORPGs is that it’s a game with other players where you are not by yourself, and a lot of [00:09:40] regards.
[00:09:40] That can be amazing. Like word work after to me appealed because you log into this game and you can go anywhere with almost [00:09:50] no load screens. The, and the only reason they have low screens are like different continents. We can go almost anywhere. And I just love the idea of you’re exploring this world, but then other people out there who may be doing things, someone may, [00:10:00] maybe I overhear gathering herbs for, for alchemy.
[00:10:03] Someone may be over here, getting meat from boars for, for cooking. You’re doing all these things in this quest. [00:10:10] I mean, we need, when you need to, to group up with somebody, take out on say that, that, that Kobold at the end of the cave, you’re like, okay, I’m gonna group up with them. And then you may either [00:10:20] continue questing, I requested with the dwarf down in Dun Morough
[00:10:23] and then they logged off and I never saw ’em again. But it was just cool to be, to be doing that. And it’s an experience that you don’t get a lot [00:10:30] like first person shooters, like kinda like Overwatch or Fortnite, while you may be with other people, the aim there is killing the other player in a lot of, a lot of regards.
[00:10:39] But [00:10:40] here the aim is you’re at adventuring with them. There is player versus player combat sometimes, but a lot of it is you’re talking with other people. Or you may join up with a guild or you may [00:10:50] join a raid team and that. I think what makes them interesting. Am I missing anything, Berzerker or James, do you have any questions?
[00:10:56] Berzerker: As want to hear James’s questions. Ha, as you know.
[00:10:59] James: [00:11:00] Oh, okay. So I did say I, so look, I know of World of Warcraft, I have seen people play it. I think I’ve seen Jae play it maybe once.
[00:11:09] Jae: At least [00:11:10] once.
[00:11:10] James: You see, I do remember. Going to visit a friend once I, the entire time I was where he was just playing World of Warcraft.
[00:11:18] And I’ll be really honest, that kind [00:11:20] of put me off the game a little bit because I made all this effort to go and see his friend . Uh, you know, um, there is a certain episode of South Park. [00:11:30]
[00:11:30] Jae: Yes.
[00:11:31] James: Which, we watched recently again.
[00:11:34] Berzerker: That’s what got me to play the game.
[00:11:36] James: Oh, okay. Wow.
[00:11:38] Berzerker: I didn’t even, I didn’t even know [00:11:40] really that much about World of Warcraft and it wasn’t until the Make Love Not Warcraft episode that, uh, I told my wife.
[00:11:47] Uh, ah, maybe I’ll [00:11:50] try this 10 day trial. She’s like, dude, didn’t we just watch this episode? Wasn’t that an entire warning not to do this? And I was like, oh, he’s fine. 10 days, no problem. And that was, [00:12:00] um, February of 2007.
[00:12:03] Jae: Wow. Okay.
[00:12:04] James: Okay. So yeah, so
[00:12:06] Berzerker: That 10 day trial is going real long.
[00:12:09] James: [00:12:10] So, I mean, one question do you have is correct me if I’m wrong, just to this, so World of Warcraft, it, it is derived from the universe, that Warcraft [00:12:20] is.
[00:12:20] Berzerker: Yes, yes.
[00:12:22] James: And I’ve played, I, I have played Warcraft, I think once. Uh, and this is by, this is by Blizzard who [00:12:30] are now, again, correct me if I’m wrong, part of Activision, which
[00:12:34] Berzerker: Yes.
[00:12:35] James: Brings its own fun. This challenges. Yeah. Yeah. I [00:12:40] can hear the moaning. I can hear them moaning going on. Now look, ju just again, MMORPGs.
[00:12:46] I’ve heard of other games like Star Trek Online [00:12:50] is another very popular and, but this is a very different sort of game. Obviously there’s not starships involved. Can you just answer one more question?
[00:12:58] Jae: But there are aliens. Just a fun [00:13:00] lore
[00:13:00] James: Oh.
[00:13:00] Jae: teaser. There are aliens and, and spaceships.
[00:13:02] James: Okay.
[00:13:02] Jae: But
[00:13:03] Berzerker: It’s true.
[00:13:03] James: So can you explain, cause obviously as you said, you can go around and do all these things. You can, you know, do alchemy. You can get [00:13:10] gather food, you can get your herbs. What’s a quest?
[00:13:13] Berzerker: A quest can encompass many things, but it is typically a task that is assigned by. [00:13:20] Someone that wants you or needs you to do something and then you accept that task in exchange for, it could be [00:13:30] currency, it could be in exchange for a piece of gear that your character needs to wear.
[00:13:36] Um, you know, or some other type of reward [00:13:40] that is hopefully useful to your character in some way. And those quests can vary from ver, you know, little small tasks where, Hey, I need you to [00:13:50] go collect six things in this area over here cuz I’m baking a pie. Okay, cool. I need you to kill ragner, roast the fire Lord, [00:14:00] uh, because he’s wreaking havoc from the elemental plane of fire.
[00:14:05] And I’ll give you this necklace as a reward, right? It’s got [00:14:10] some stuff on it.
[00:14:11] James: So very similar to, to missions in, in other games or, you know, I mean, I guess in instant, uh, of course now, I’m gonna [00:14:20] show, look, I love my gaming, but Quest is like, uh, Zelda is in RPG, just not online. Is that, am I right about that one?
[00:14:29] Berzerker: Like, [00:14:30] like old school Zelda?
[00:14:31] James: Well, well, Breath of the Wild.
[00:14:33] Jae: Yeah, because it has, it has inventory management, it has objectives. Um, there are some MMORPGs that [00:14:40] do or, or at the time did not have questing, but just had killing, like EverQuest, one of his biggest things was just killing, killing, uh, mobs over and over for experience [00:14:50] gain.
[00:14:50] One of the, one of the, the biggest things that, that World Warcraft was starting to change in the industry was they added a storyline and questing versus just killing things. I, I, [00:15:00] I actually interviewed John John States of the WoW Dev Diary, the book that came out a while back, and he said it was interesting how world work out changed that [00:15:10] focus to actually doing quest in addition to everything else.
[00:15:13] James: Okay. That makes a lot more sense and I, I think my thing will always, confused me with, particularly [00:15:20] with World of Warcraft, is this levels thing.
[00:15:22] Berzerker: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:23] James: And I assume that is just building up your character so that you have more skills, more abilities. You can maybe [00:15:30] hang in a fight a little bit longer.
[00:15:32] Berzerker: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:32] James: Or have certain, because again, trying to understand this, like the, so again, referenceing that the South Park [00:15:40] episode.
[00:15:40] Berzerker: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:41] James: You know, where, where they talk about, oh, use your enchanted casting thing and, and that’s based on your character and is that right?
[00:15:49] Berzerker: Yeah. Like the [00:15:50] concept of. Yeah, like it’s an rpg, right?
[00:15:52] So the idea of playing into the story, like pretending like, you know, this is your character, your character’s going through these adventures, [00:16:00] and as they go through these adventures, they become more experienced, right? So you are able to harness your energy or your power or these abilities or whatever they are.[00:16:10]
[00:16:10] And as you go up, yeah, you’ll learn new things along the way. And so where you start off in one area, You know, pretty low level, easier to manage situations. [00:16:20] Well now you’re growing in level. You’re growing in skills. So now let’s take on some tougher challenges. Let’s go over now to this other area where maybe there’s some more serious stuff going on, some bigger [00:16:30] things going on that now your character might be able to handle a little bit easier or, or have a better fighting chance at doing something.
[00:16:37] One of the things within that, that World [00:16:40] of Warcraft does so well, and I think one of the reasons why it has been so popular over the years is because you’re not just going kind of from here to here to here just because there’s a story, there’s a [00:16:50] narrative, very wide ranging. Uh, in some ways it’s, it’s a little, uh, a little unwieldy, uh, but there is a very [00:17:00] rich, deep story.
[00:17:01] You mentioned Warcraft earlier about the franchise, right? There was the original Warcraft works in humans. Warcraft Two, Warcraft Three. Warcraft Three is where a [00:17:10] lot of World of Warcraft comes from. A lot of the story of World of Warcraft comes from, although now we’re moving finally away from that.
[00:17:17] They’ve made a, they’ve made a big point to say that Shadowlands, the [00:17:20] previous expansion was kind of the last page of that book in, uh, in the whole Warcraft saga. Now we’re gonna kind of move on a little bit. From some of those stories, but that’s kind of the [00:17:30] general idea, right? As you start off as a level one, whatever, in some area where the stakes are pretty low.
[00:17:36] And then as you level up, as you get to max level, you know, whatever that [00:17:40] is, 60, 70, it’s been as high as like, I think 120 at one time or one 10, it was pretty high. Um, they, they’ve done little squishes to make it a little more manageable. You know, you’re able to take on challenges all the way up to [00:17:50] what we, you know, what we have as an end game in World of Warcraft where there are raids, which are usually.
[00:17:57] Up to, you know, we’ve been up to 40 people [00:18:00] at one time, as low as 10 people at one time. And now the, the size of the group required to do the task is, is, is a little more malleable Now. They, they’ve made that a little [00:18:10] friendlier. Uh, but it takes that group of people with different skills and different abilities to be able to, you know, take down these dragons or take down this dude over here.[00:18:20]
[00:18:20] Somebody’s getting wild in the back over here and causing elemental problem. You know, all kinds of things that revolve around the story. Going back to the story, all right, there’s some big challenge that needs to be [00:18:30] met. And so for some people that’s, that’s the central. Thing that you do, you level your character, you get to the end game, and then you raid with your RAID [00:18:40] team.
[00:18:40] You know, a dedicated group of people that you play with to take down these challenges because they design these challenges. Blizzard does to be hard enough that it, it takes time to [00:18:50] do, you know, practice and have the ability to get past these challenges. And typically there’s, you know, anywhere from eight to 12 to even 15 of these [00:19:00] challenges in a raid in one centralized kind of location where these things happen.
[00:19:04] And so for some people, that’s the game that they want to play. For other people, it’s, they want to do pet [00:19:10] battling because you can collect pets and then you can battle trainers and other people. And for some people it’s the PVP element that Jae mentioned where, you know, you’re in Battlegrounds [00:19:20] and you’re fighting against other players.
[00:19:21] And for some people it’s collecting mounts and, uh, transmogs. So, you know, you can make your gear look like all kinds of different stuff. There’s all these different [00:19:30] perspectives within World of Warcraft. It’s such a big game and has such a deep. That it allows for that kind of thing to occur where you [00:19:40] have people that are very dedicated to their one portion.
[00:19:43] And it’s part of, I think, what keeps so many people involved, because there are so many things that you can do. The [00:19:50] gameplay itself is very smooth. It’s, you know, it’s not the highest quality graphics, uh, you know, as somebody who’s played way too much cyberpunk
[00:19:59] Jae: Yes [00:20:00]
[00:20:00] Berzerker: You know, you know, a game where it, it, it is graphically, it’s just, it’s mind blowing.
[00:20:05] And now we’re getting into real engine, uh, unreal Engine 5 where stuff’s gonna look even more [00:20:10] real than it ever looked. You know, that’s not World of Warcraft. It’s, it, it is cartoony to a point, but everything is very smooth. It plays in a way that your brain, [00:20:20] I find just clicks so well with it. When you, when you press a button and something happens, it’s that feedback that you get with the sound and the sight and [00:20:30] the reaction.
[00:20:30] It’s just, there’s something very special about it. And then you go from like kind of one thing to the next thing, to the next thing. And before you know it, it’s been six months and no one’s seen you and you haven’t taken a shower. And you’re like, [00:20:40] where have you been? What’s going, I’ve been playing World of Warcraft.
[00:20:42] It’s this amazing game and I can do all these things. So it is, it is so. Huge in [00:20:50] scope. Um, and I, and I think that always being online, that’s the other portion of it, right, is all of the other people. So it’s not just you doing these things, there’s literally [00:21:00] millions of other people in your, in your, uh, put together, like on servers where you’ll have, you know, several thousands of people will all be kind of together on one server and you’ll interact with those people.
[00:21:09] [00:21:10] And so, like Jae mentioned, you’re doing a question, you need help ensemble, maybe there’s some other people doing it, and then there’s something over here. Well, I need help with that. Let’s do that thing over there too. So there are plenty of things that you can do [00:21:20] solo. I’m somebody who kind of prefers to do the solo gig quite a bit, but it’s built on community at the end of the day to do all the things that you [00:21:30] want to do after a certain point.
[00:21:31] It’s built on community and that ultimately is what makes World of Warcraft so special is the community itself and more specifically the [00:21:40] community that you find. For yourself
[00:21:43] James: And be before, because we are gonna talk about our community. I’m sure Jae I, I’ve seen Jae’s show notes. One, one question, but I think is [00:21:50] important to ask from an accessibility point of view.
[00:21:52] I mean, obviously what with it been at its base, an older game, what, what sort of [00:22:00] hardware does it require? What it run on? You know, how, how accessible is it maybe for different groups of gamers? Because traditionally I’ve always seen it as a PC game.
[00:22:09] Berzerker: It is a [00:22:10] PC game. They, there, there are hints and whispers and things all the time about it potentially coming to a console, uh, with the [00:22:20] purchase by. Uh, Microsoft, uh
[00:22:23] James: Oh, Activision. Yeah, of course.
[00:22:25] Berzerker: Yes. They are attempting to finalize that purchase sometime in the [00:22:30] next year. It’s meeting some regulatory hurdles, but there are a lot of whispers and rumors that potentially you’re looking at it being reported over to a console at some [00:22:40] point. Not being a game designer and just knowing how complicated the game is on pc, I don’t know how you rearrange that to make it [00:22:50] workable on a console, but that’s why other people get paid big bucks to figure that out.
[00:22:54] So it is a PC game, however, it does not require some [00:23:00] kind of world beating, you know, 40, 90 GPU in a, in a, you know, some threadripper something, something. It, it’s not like that. It, it is [00:23:10] really a game that is designed to be as accessible as possible in the PC arena, where you can always turn down settings and do different things.
[00:23:19] But, [00:23:20] uh, if you look at the minimum specs to play the game, it’s, it’s not very high. And in fact, I have an older computer sitting right next to me that I have rigged up for my [00:23:30] son to be able to play a few blizzard games and this and this computer. It is, 12 years old at this point and it’ll run it just fine.
[00:23:38] James: Okay, that’s good. And what about [00:23:40] pricing? Cuz obviously with this being an on, this isn’t just a pay once game. What’s for pricing like for a World of Warcraft account? Cause I, I, again, you know, I go back and I seem to [00:23:50] remember, you know, seeing, um, YouTube videos of pair of kids reacting to a parent’s cutting off a World Warcraft account.
[00:23:59] Jae: Oh, you’re probably [00:24:00] thinking of WoW Outrage 1 video I used to, I think I, I can think of
[00:24:04] James: It’s for one big one who kept the kid who came in smashing up his room. Am I thinking of [00:24:10] the correct one?
[00:24:12] Berzerker: I remember that one. I remember that well. Uh, yeah, it is, it is unique still in its ability to be able to pull in [00:24:20] a subscription.
[00:24:20] So the base game, which is rolled into whatever, typically the latest expansion is you do have to purchase that. So, [00:24:30] like for myself, been around forever, I, I’ve had to pay for every expansion as it’s come along, and those prices have varied over time. They add a lot of digital deluxe items, so [00:24:40] extra in-game, you know, little bits and bobs if you’re into that kind of stuff.
[00:24:44] And, you know, it’ll range from anywhere from 50, 60 all the way up to like a hundred dollars, depending on how [00:24:50] much you’re willing to pay. Plus, a subscription for every month, and I believe it’s about 15 bucks a month right now. But there’s also a one month, I think a three month, a six [00:25:00] month. And right now they’re doing a year subscription and there is a certain amount of price break up to a point depending on whether or not you want to [00:25:10] do any of those bundles.
[00:25:10] So if you’re in a position to be able to do that, it is, it is pretty nice to be able to, you know, save some money kind of in the long run. But there is, there is a [00:25:20] running cost to play World of Warcraft, which is often why you’ll see kind of a boom and bust cycle in terms of the player base where around an [00:25:30] expansion, whew.
[00:25:31] Numbers will swell and things are going on. And then once you know, a certain segment of the player base is consumed the content that they want to see, they’ll [00:25:40] let the subscription lapse and they’ll move on to whatever else they’ll do. And you’ll see those numbers fall. But for that, I do believe that we get a well-funded and well run [00:25:50] game, which I appreciate.
[00:25:52] James: No, thank you. That’s really, thank you. Er, that’s really helpful information to understand and put, put this into context because you know, again, [00:26:00] and, and in a way I would say that from what I’m hearing, world of Warcraft, because it’s endured so long, to be honest, I didn’t even know until Jae said, Hey, let’s have Berzerker on the [00:26:10] show to talk about World of Warcraft,
[00:26:11] I was like, that game’s still around? Like the fact that it’s endured and that it’s been well funded. Cuz that [00:26:20] is possibly one of the problems with free to play or pay to, yeah, pay to play games where unless people are buying them, uh, and [00:26:30] paying for those items but aren’t getting funded and at some point those service gets shut down.
[00:26:34] Jae: Yeah. Like City of Heroes is a game that I I to this day longingly, miss and like same Star Wars [00:26:40] Galaxies, those are two games that are MMORPGs. No longer here. I mean, they’re, they’re here in the emulation realm and I may have to look into those because, uh, any, these City of Heroes got [00:26:50] the, uh, grace from the, uh, developers to continue it.
[00:26:53] But yeah, it, it, it is definitely one of the things that, like you put all this all this time cuz one thing about the World Warcraft and a lot of [00:27:00] games and World Warcraft has done a lot recently to, lessen in this, but they are a time sink and they are built to keep people playing. And that is one of the things that, like you [00:27:10] can buy a, a $60 game play through it in like 10, 12, 15 hours or, or more depending on how, how long it is.
[00:27:17] But World of Warcraft, you have to [00:27:20] keep playing to progress and, and there’s an intentional, you’re, you’re gonna spend time with us. It’s, it’s why, it’s why sometimes people do leave is that time grind.
[00:27:28] Berzerker: It can be quite a bit. That’s [00:27:30] true.
[00:27:30] Jae: One of the things that I want to talk about, I’m going first start, start with some of the, the, the bad sides and then go into some of the really positives.
[00:27:36] Berzerker: Mm-hmm.
[00:27:37] Jae: I would say definitely one thing about World of Warcraft and [00:27:40] MMORPGs is that that addictive nature, I think a lot of us can talk about. You remember that person and like even James mentioned, uh, his friend who just played World [00:27:50] Warcraft the entire time, and I’ll admit I’ve been that friend too. A friend comes over and I was just playing, so I’ve been that friend too.
[00:27:56] But like there is that, that that ability like, like [00:28:00] you will just play a game nowadays that I don’t do that anymore. Nowadays. I’m like, if, if, if I’m gonna, I make, I take time for, for, for, for, for friends and all that. But, and it is definitely very addictive [00:28:10] and, and it’s, it’s by design. Um, there is a lot of research I’ve done where they actually have people who are psychologists hired by the [00:28:20] companies to know how can we make the game more addictive so they know like, like what are some of the things we can get.
[00:28:25] Try to get you to keep you going. And that is one thing about, about games. I’ve, I’ve [00:28:30] done some people who have like, definitely stopped going to work to play this game or like, called off work. And like I, I, I know one, um, one person I, [00:28:40] I remember, I’m not gonna go to too much detail, basically had, um, had, was, was given a choice of their relationship with their wife or the game [00:28:50] at the time that they chose the game.
[00:28:51] And they told me it was one of the worst decisions they ever made. But that, that is part of the, part of, one of the, one of the negative [00:29:00] downsides of MMORPGs is how addictive it can be.
[00:29:03] Berzerker: Yeah. You know, obviously when it comes to addiction, the nature of addiction, you know, there’s [00:29:10] a. Lot can that can be said about that.
[00:29:13] You know, for me personally, coming from a family of addicts and even [00:29:20] recognizing those traits in myself, right? It is a game that is very well built when it comes to that sort of [00:29:30] mini dopamine dump feedback loop.
[00:29:33] Jae: Yes.
[00:29:34] Berzerker: Where it doesn’t require a whole lot of effort. Like sometimes it’s a big thing, but [00:29:40] there are just lots of little things, little quests, little things now, especially nowadays, little treasures you can find, little areas that you can discover, like all these little [00:29:50] things that give your brain that little pop and you know, you do it over and over and over and over and over again.
[00:29:58] Right. And you can [00:30:00] lose all kinds of time. When I first started playing, it was before I had, you know, any kids of my own, and it was just my wife and I, I lost weekends, you know, [00:30:10] whole days. I, I mean you, it’s dark out. How did that happen? You know, it just, that is, I think an experience that I would hazard to guess.
[00:30:19] I’ve no numbers to [00:30:20] back this up, but I would hazard to guess that a majority of Warcraft players have experienced that. At one time or another, probably earlier on when first [00:30:30] discovering the game. And it can trigger that kind of behavioral pattern. And so if you are somebody I think that is [00:30:40] prone to falling into that trap world of Warcraft can can be that vice.
[00:30:45] I would argue it it’s better than the, a few others have come across. But at [00:30:50] the same time it can also be a very destructive and you see things like this where people can’t control themselves and they do choose the game over their relationships or [00:31:00] you know, I’ve known people that got fired from jobs or that like got kicked outta school.
[00:31:04] I mean, yeah, it’s wild that this happens, but it’s just, it’s so good in its [00:31:10] feedback reward loop. And I’m not saying that that’s negative, I’m just saying it’s so good in that, that if you are, I think prone to that kind of behavior, world of Warcraft can, can [00:31:20] be a bit of a challenge in that regard.
[00:31:23] Jae: Yeah, I, I remember when I was, uh, 16, my parents were like, Jae, you need to stop playing this game because, [00:31:30] you are literally going into your room around five or 6:00 PM We are not seeing you till 1:00 AM. You need to stop this. And that’s, that’s [00:31:40] why I, I left Warcraft for a while.
[00:31:40] I was like, yeah. Because I would be, I’d be ready in Molten Core where, so James, this is gonna, you’re gonna love this.
[00:31:48] James: I will understand this. Go on. [00:31:50]
[00:31:50] Jae: I was, I was, I was raiding, uh, in a 40 person group against Ragnaros. And literally the only thing I had to [00:32:00] do was I had to heal five people.
[00:32:02] That was, that was my entire job the entire night was these five people in this one raid party. I had to raid them. And you’re doing that for hours and [00:32:10] hours and hours and hours as they’re just unloading all of the spells into the main boss. And obviously they’ve, they’ve modified where they’ve added more [00:32:20] diversity to the mechanics from that, cuz they’re no longer just, um, I would say sponges for, for damage.
[00:32:27] But yeah, I would do that for hours and hours and [00:32:30] hours and hours every day for a while. And I was like, I need to stop.
[00:32:35] I need to leave. So yeah, there is that .
[00:32:38] James: But I mean, let, let’s be [00:32:40] very honest, that’s not unique to World, the Warcraft. It’s not unique to MMORPGs. No, I know. You know, miss modern age games like Fortnite [00:32:50] games, like even Minecraft, me and Jae are huge Minecraft fans.
[00:32:54] Berzerker: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
[00:32:55] James: But Minecraft can be up. Oh, just one more block. One more, one more [00:33:00] layer, one more mining trick . Oh yes. Yep. You know? Yes, yes. And I will admit, there’s been times where I was meant to be chatting with Jae you know, to catch up on stuff. [00:33:10] And I’ve been, uh, playing Hardspace: Shipbreaker, and Jae…
[00:33:15] Jae: I open up Steam Chat to see that you were playing the game.
[00:33:17] James: She’s like, she’s like, you’re playing [00:33:20] Shipbreaker. I’m like, yeah,
[00:33:21] Berzerker: Busted.
[00:33:22] James: Busted, busted. I, I mean, and it is, look, game addiction is you, you know. Um, so a point of recording [00:33:30] this episode. The episode, but it’s just gone out. on Monday of this week was our chat with Andrew Keates director and [00:33:40] wonderful chap, uh, and huge Star Trek nerd.
[00:33:42] But one of the things he talked about is social media addiction and
[00:33:46] Berzerker: mm-hmm.
[00:33:47] James: I think there is an element where game, I, I [00:33:50] mean, I might be wrong, but I think game addiction does actually get some recognition as a genuine thing. There are, I don’t wanna say treatments [00:34:00] because I’m not sure whether or not there is help available for gaming addiction.
[00:34:04] I think more so than say, social media, actually, you know what, there is even social media addiction [00:34:10] help now. Um,
[00:34:11] Jae: yeah.
[00:34:11] James: But it’s not unity. But I think when you’ve got a game as a immense and world building as World of Warcraft, I think it makes sense. I mean, look, you know, that [00:34:20] whole South Park, every episode, as much as we joke about it, definitely did a good job of highlighting the potential issues.
[00:34:26] Uh, you’re not gonna turn into [00:34:30] thoseoverstated caricatures of a World of Warcraft player that we saw a boys turn into. And I can’t do a good car, so I’m not going to
[00:34:39] Berzerker: [00:34:40] Mom. Bathroom. Oh my little sweetie.
[00:34:46] James: Cartman’s mom, such [00:34:50] an enabler. Um,
[00:34:53] Berzerker: That’s my boy.
[00:34:54] Jae: The sword of unbeatable or whatever. .
[00:34:58] James: Jae, [00:35:00] your impersonations of cartoon characters are not, um, they’re not very good. lois. Lois? Lois?
[00:35:09] No. [00:35:10] Mine aren’t either. Alright. Right. Alright. So Jae, I think you, you, gosh, look, I, I’m just, I’m just sat here amazed [00:35:20] at this.
[00:35:20] Berzerker: I totally derailed the show.
[00:35:22] James: Oh yeah. No, I love this. I love this one. Getting into this deep discussion of, of games and, and picking and, you know, cultures around [00:35:30] games. I, I have one question, which I know Jae’s in the show notes. I, I, we, we talked about negatives, but there are some positive things and from a tech standpoint, games like [00:35:40] World of Warcraft, I think it’s fair to say probably, it really pushed forward what we would consider VoIP and Team Chat
[00:35:47] Jae: yes.
[00:35:48] James: technologies.
[00:35:49] Berzerker: Oh yeah.
[00:35:49] James: Tell [00:35:50] me a little bit about how that whole communication element played into it. Like, because it wasn’t just tech speech, you know? I know, I remember TeamSpeak, uh, you know, uh, [00:36:00] Cartman, AFK.
[00:36:03] Jae: Uh, so, so yeah, there was definitely the, like when, when people started getting into raids and dungeons, they [00:36:10] realized that they needed the ability to communicate without having to re to take, take time to type. So like, you’re, you’re typing and you’re doing all these, all these like [00:36:20] spells and macros and, and, and attacks and, and formations.
[00:36:23] So then they started looking at some of the, the technology that was available, like TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, [00:36:30] Mumble, and looking at that and the real time feedback that, that, that, that you had allowed it allowed you to, to stay in [00:36:40] touch. But the, the biggest problem was, at least back then, you had the inaccessibility of say, like the ability to, if someone needed a [00:36:50] mic or head or headset, cuz a lot of people didn’t have headsets that have mics weren’t able to to speak.
[00:36:55] Or I sometimes if you’re, if you’re in a, a house with other people, you don’t wanna be too [00:37:00] loud. Be like, More Dots. More Dots. There’s a whole meme about that . But yeah, it definitely did, oh yeah. Um, push those [00:37:10] software because all of a sudden they, they started to see more people using that software. And I think, uh, the, the one interesting thing, They’d be using voice chat and forums.
[00:37:19] Then [00:37:20] around, I would say early, like the late 2010s Discord was like, what if we were to take voice chat but combine it with something like [00:37:30] Slack or forums into a way to not only have the voice chat, but also have text chat around that, that cuz when you’re outta the game, the Guild chat [00:37:40] doesn’t persist out of the game.
[00:37:41] So a lot, so guilds, um, who had forums were, were, were, were moving there. And it’s, it’s interesting now, like used to the, like, log in [00:37:50] to voice chat or your, or your guild chat and talk to people now. You can talk to people any, anywhere. No matter, no matter where you are. And it can persist outside of the game itself.
[00:37:59] But it [00:38:00] is interesting, yeah, that the MMORPGs and FPS cultures progressed. What we have Berserker did, did I miss anything in there?
[00:38:08] Berzerker: It’s so different [00:38:10] now. And that’s, part of what’s bonkers to me is when we first started playing, I had no concept of any of this stuff or, and then, yeah, when I joined my first rAID [00:38:20] team and they’re like, oh, well we gotta get on Ventrillo
[00:38:23] What’s Ventrillo well, you know, we have to be able to talk to each other. We talk to each other. I didn’t even, I didn’t even [00:38:30] know what I was getting myself into. I just knew I wanted to do it. That’s it. And so like, all right, well you need a, a microphone. Okay. And sort of the Jae’s point there, there is [00:38:40] a little bit of a barrier to entry there when it comes to equipment and, you know, a certain amount of accessibility there.
[00:38:46] And I, I think one of the [00:38:50] benefits to the proliferation of this technology is that that barrier has gotten cheaper where. Is it the best mic and headset combo at [00:39:00] 10 bucks? I mean, you’re not gonna be recording voiceovers for Entertainment Tonight, but you can certainly jump onto Discord and talk to your team to get through a fight.
[00:39:08] Right. And so I [00:39:10] think that that has also kind of had the benefit of making the required equipment cheaper, uh, than it used to be. And also easier to find. I feel like there’s more of it now than there ever [00:39:20] used to be in the past. You know, there was a time just kind of also in terms of tech and I, I’d have to look at the exact number, but there was a time when World of Warcraft was young that [00:39:30] like a third of all internet traffic was World of Warcraft servers.
[00:39:34] I it was, it was just, Lights out, how much, how big [00:39:40] the game was, uh, in, in perspective to how things used to be. But yeah, the, the, the, the graduation away from forums and over to Discord, [00:39:50] Discord, Discord is king, able to combine all of these things that we did separately and now into one simple to use centrally [00:40:00] located platform.
[00:40:01] Uh, what a, what a boon that has been. And man, I wish I had been on the ground floor to get in on some financing on [00:40:10] that deal, cuz it is, it is. It’s unbelievable. And you know, with all of the headaches, with Twitter and everything else, everybody’s looking for the next big thing. And I always think [00:40:20] about discord where like, gosh, we used to be on all these different.
[00:40:23] How do you get better than that? I’m not really sure. Cuz it does video, it does audio, it does written [00:40:30] format. You can post pictures and videos and it’s kind of an all in one situation now. So my guess is some billionaire idiot will buy it and crash it, and then we’ll have to start over. [00:40:40] But, you know, that’s another, that’s another story. We don’t have to go
[00:40:42] James: No, no, no. I, I’m with you, I just hope that doesn’t happen. But I mean, look, you know, uh, okay, I, I, Jae, maybe by the time this episode comes up, we will have [00:40:50] launched publicly launched our Discord. So that is happening. We are
[00:40:54] Berzerker: All right.
[00:40:55] James: We are having a Discord server for, for the sh uh, for our, you know, for our little [00:41:00] content Empire.
[00:41:01] Empire?
[00:41:01] No, that’s a word, empire.
[00:41:03] Jae: Because I mean, we, we have live streams. I’ve, I’ve been doing some, uh, some live test streams and by the, and by the time this is out, we will have, we will [00:41:10] both be, uh, streaming on regular schedules. So, yeah, there’s a lot of cool things and,
[00:41:13] Berzerker: Ooh, breaking news.
[00:41:14] James: But forums, you know, the discussion, like we are, we have already, and we’re [00:41:20] working on automation on this.
[00:41:21] When a new episode comes out, we post in the episode like a discussion forum for that. And you, you know, that is Discord [00:41:30] keeps getting better, you know? Yeah. And one big thing is it does not require, I remember trying to help people with firewall [00:41:40] configs. Oh, for TeamSpeak and Ventrillo because Oh yeah, they used to need it now.
[00:41:45] Oh no, you just, you don’t need to open. And he put, look [00:41:50] what?
[00:41:51] Jae: And now Discord works on Xbox too. So I mean, and I, and I believe, unless I’m wrong, um, I believe it also works on PlayStation as well. I mean, the, so like, they’re bridging the [00:42:00] gap on a lot of, a lot of these areas. So it’s, it’s incredible this one unifying platform.
[00:42:07] I mean, and how many, how many servers are that you can [00:42:10] have for a myriad of, of topics.
[00:42:12] James: One, one thing on accessibility that I, I think Berzerker made a really good point about for technology to do audio calls is getting a lot [00:42:20] cheaper. Because look, if you don’t have a mic and maybe you’re playing World of Warcraft on, and Jae, we need to look into this possible for you, but you know you’re playing the Steam Deck.
[00:42:29] [00:42:30] Well, you might just plug in your iPhone or your Wired headset or you might use your phone. Not this phone.
[00:42:39] Jae: No, [00:42:40] not that one.
[00:42:42] Berzerker: Look at that baby.
[00:42:43] James: Isn’t that beautiful, except… for our listeners.
[00:42:45] Berzerker: Oh my god!
[00:42:47] James: For our listeners. Uh, in fact, Jae, you want to take [00:42:50] another SquadShot? And I’ll
[00:42:51] Jae: Yes, absolutely.
[00:42:52] James: And I’ll put this into the episode, cause I think this is probably a current phone around the time of World of Warcraft.
[00:42:59] Jae: [00:43:00] Yes, because back then World of Warcraft was playable on dial-up.
[00:43:01] James: But, but, but the point being.. Oh, isn’t that brilliant? Um, but point being that, you know, you can now run Discord on your phone. You could have your game on your [00:43:10] device and just have your AirPods in or your, you know, cheap headset in and be chatting.
[00:43:16] I think it’s, I think it’s wonderful. I, I really do. So, go on Jae, you were [00:43:20] gonna, I, I do apologize. I’ve derailed your, your show notes a little bit.
[00:43:23] Jae: Oh, no, no, you were all good. And, um, and then in fact, I, I’ve, I’ve got a good segway.. So, so do trust me on this one. I, I, I know I, I wanna also [00:43:30] mention that there has been a change. I, there’s actually a guild, I think it’s called, I think Dauntless, if I’m remembering right, actually is a guild [00:43:40] of, of deaf individuals who have all,
[00:43:42] Berzerker: Oh yeah.
[00:43:43] Jae: Were able to do amazing raids without voice chat. And they were able to do
[00:43:48] James: Oh, that’s awesome. Doing ta [00:43:50] like, like, like they, they had technology and, and things to be able to make it work.
[00:43:54] And there are like raid markers, but they, they used a bunch of things. They were all coordinating this huge raid. I [00:44:00] do wanna also use voice chat to bring up the toxic side. One aspect that a lot of people may not. Think about is as a trans woman, [00:44:10] if I speak up in voice chat because my voice is not what, what some people would, would consider feminine.
[00:44:17] it would be the, the I may get misgendered or I may get made [00:44:20] fun of. I’ve also heard of a lot of, a lot of women who, who get harassed or they, or, you know, I, I like, there are a lot of people who, who don’t wanna go on voice [00:44:30] chat and there, and there’s a, and there’s a lot of regards where voice chat being required for things.
[00:44:34] In my opinion is, is a bad design that, that you shouldn’t have to use voice chat. Sometimes you [00:44:40] do, and I think that goes into part of the toxic community that you can find in, in, in any game. But like World Warcraft, one of the big things, whenever we [00:44:50] get a new player, we’re always like, Turn off general chat or turn off trade chat because talk successfuls and for some reason these studios refuse to [00:45:00] moderate those channels.
[00:45:01] And I, and, and, and I that still, but that bugs me because like even on the social media, during my, my tenure doing, uh, [00:45:10] podcasts for World of Warcraft and doing streams and, and stuff like that, I got by my fair share of people that attacked me simply for being a trans woman. And, and I make onto 4chan quite often [00:45:20] because I, because I was a World of Warcraft player and I, I, I still, every once in a while will get like the email that, that someone has referenced me again and there’s a picture of me that they always, and it’s, there [00:45:30] is that, that toxic nature that that, that you, that you can find out there.
[00:45:34] And, and it’s, it’s, you can find some of the, some of the best of humanity, but, but you can also [00:45:40] find. Some of the worst of humanity in the game. And, and I think that’s, that has a Berzerker, you definitely have done like, on, on, [00:45:50] Unshackled Fury talked a lot about sometimes the, the bad reaction or the people that, that will attack the devs or the people that will do these things.
[00:45:56] Berzerker: Mm-hmm.
[00:45:57] Jae: What, um, what can you add to this? [00:46:00]
[00:46:00] Berzerker: Yeah, um, guess I’ll touch on a couple points. It’s probably a good thing I can’t, uh, use my usual blue language, which by the way, if you ever [00:46:10] check out Unshackled Fury, it is an uncensored show. So my language here is definitely moderated, uh, to a certain degree. And, and, uh, I do, it’s probably a good thing because, you know, I [00:46:20] have seen. Plenty of things out there that I’m certainly not proud of when it comes to the world of Warcraft community. I have, and I’m not saying this to pat [00:46:30] myself on the back, but I, I have found myself in positions of defending Jae or defending others because, you know, I,
[00:46:38] I have to learn too, [00:46:40] right? Like the upbringing that I had, I’m a, you know, little class straight white guy. You know, I mean, there, there is a certain amount of mentality and privilege that comes with [00:46:50] that. And I think as you know, the world expands and changes and grows. Like, you gotta try to move with that too.
[00:46:55] And, you know, Jae has been somebody who’s taught me quite a lot, which I really appreciate, and [00:47:00] I feel part of the need, uh, my responsibility is to pass on, you know, pass on what you have learned, right? That is, that is very much, you know, a charge that I feel. And so I have [00:47:10] found myself in, uh, you know, conversations that I wish I hadn’t had to have, but we did, because, There is an element of, you know, when I worked at [00:47:20] another job dealing on the phone with people, you know, telephone tough guys, and now it’s keyboard warriors, or whatever you wanna call it.
[00:47:25] It’s, it’s that veil of anonymity that, that people feel, this security blanket [00:47:30] and the ability to act in a way that I guarantee you that 99 out of a hundred people would never say to your face because they’re [00:47:40] cowards. Right? Certainly not gonna say it to me. Cause I guarantee you most people see me in person, they go, oh, nevermind, I’m not gonna say that.
[00:47:46] You know, and, you know, same with Jae. I think even just [00:47:50] by height alone would be intimidating. You know what? I did not say that thing. I’m gonna rethink my ways and, uh, I’m gonna dedicate myself to a new cause. There are those elements [00:48:00] out there and it is really unfortunate and it, it, I think, behooves those of us that see that to try to do better and to push back against that.
[00:48:09] And [00:48:10] whether that’s, you know, throwing those people out of your guild or off your raid team or booting ’em out of dungeon runs or whatever it is, which is hard because when you are in those groups, you often [00:48:20] find toxic people that again, feel the need to act a fool because they think they can, because nobody knows who they are.
[00:48:28] And so you, you [00:48:30] know, when you feel like there’s no consequences, you really show people who you are. And a lot of times it’s, unfortunately people are trash and there’s nothing you can do about that other than. Keep them out of the community [00:48:40] that’s closer to you and, uh, you know, try to call them out and to try to shine light in that darkness.
[00:48:46] It’s something I’ve tried to do on my podcast, you know, for whatever reach it has, [00:48:50] it has some kind of reach. And so I’ve tried to tell people like, listen, you know, you, you gotta act right. If you’re upset about something, there’s a right way to handle that and there is a wrong way to handle [00:49:00] that. You’re attacking somebody because of the way that they look.
[00:49:03] Hey, you probably wanna rethink that one. Listen, I’m guilty of it all the time and you know, I gotta think about it too, like, you know, was that the [00:49:10] smartest, nicest thing? No, I probably wasn’t. I have a dark soul. It’s a black heart, but you know, I gotta find ways to grow and get light in there. Just like the Grinch did.
[00:49:18] You know, it’s the holiday season. Gotta throw that in [00:49:20] there, you know, as for the moderation, I think, to be fair, I’m just gonna, this is devil’s advocate time here. I think it is incredibly difficult to [00:49:30] physically monitor millions of communications. With, you know, the staff that they have. I mean, in order to [00:49:40] actually appropriately moderate all the chat, all the messages, all the stuff, they would need to hire an army of tech [00:49:50] support to do that.
[00:49:50] And I just don’t think that they will ever make that a priority because it’s money they can spend elsewhere, keep for themselves because they’re, I better watch my language, [00:50:00] uh, because they’re people who just don’t value those things. And so you end up with, sometimes it’s automation, right? They try to automate these things and it’s, it’s a bit of hit or miss, but it [00:50:10] is definitely something that they could do better on because even myself, again, somebody who has the least to fear, In all of these situations, Overwatch is [00:50:20] a great example.
[00:50:20] Never have voice on, I’ll hardly ever play it. There’s a lot of these kinds of situations I avoid because I don’t wanna have to deal with the people because as soon as something goes sideways [00:50:30] or as soon as you don’t do something that they want you to do and the way they want you to do it, screaming and yelling and throwing a tantrum.
[00:50:36] And that is the kind of behavior I think that turns off a lot of new [00:50:40] players. So to the kind of, the point of all of this is that new players coming in, you run that first dungeon, which is a a five, a five person group, will run through a dungeon typically, [00:50:50] and you’ll get people that are gearing up their alts, which they’re not their main characters, right?
[00:50:54] They’re alternate characters and they just wanna run through as fast as possible, run through as fast as possible, or they’re pushing to get [00:51:00] gear for something and they just want to get it done and get it, get it, get done. People have to learn how to do this stuff. And so it takes time to learn how to do this stuff, but they don’t have the patience and so they just start [00:51:10] yelling and kicking people outta groups and, and so you get this reputation within that community of it being hostile.
[00:51:17] And it does unfortunately happen way [00:51:20] more often than it should. That being said, I do feel like in recent years there has been a lot more attention within the community that we need to do a better job of policing [00:51:30] ourselves. Cuz as I said, I don’t think Activision Blizzard will ever dedicate the resources necessary to do it the way that would meet all of our satisfaction.
[00:51:38] So it’s kind of [00:51:40] up to us. And, you know, I’m not above a little vigilante justice from time to time and you know, if I see something, I’ll say something because I feel like I can, and I feel safe enough that I can do that. [00:51:50] Uh, because I know that there’s also people that don’t feel like they can and they don’t feel safe to be able to say something.
[00:51:55] And again, those of us that think that are positioned to be able to do it, we have to do it. I mean, it just, [00:52:00] it’s one of our moral imperative, um, because we have to clean this stuff up because at its core world of Warcraft, to me, is one of the. Experiences I’ve ever had [00:52:10] as a, as a community. The game, the game is great.
[00:52:12] I love the game, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve made friendships I never thought I would made. I’ve been with the same guild now for [00:52:20] almost 10 years. That’s wild to me. I never thought I’d find a group of people online, most of whom I’ve never met in person. I’ve only met a handful of [00:52:30] these people in person at a couple of BlizzCons.
[00:52:32] Most of them. They could walk past me on the street. I would’ve no idea who they are, right? But we’re there. We support each other. We’ve been there [00:52:40] through life and deaths and marriages and divorces, and babies and bankruptcies and, all kinds of stuff. And that to me [00:52:50] is what you’re trying to get to across the board.
[00:52:51] You want everybody to have that experience, but when you have, you know, undesirable elements, it makes that more difficult. So yeah, it’s, it’s out there [00:53:00] and it, it’s upon us all to try to try to help clean that up.
[00:53:04] Jae: Yeah. And I think it’s definitely a, like the, the anonymity is a, is is [00:53:10] a, is a huge part cuz people will say things that they don’t wanna say.
[00:53:12] But I will also say to, to, to flip it around too, the smaller that I, I’ve gone in, in, in the World of Warcraft [00:53:20] community, like say the, the podcaster community or the, uh, creator community or the, the, the, the Twitch streamer community, or even like my own guild or my groups that I, I, [00:53:30] I’ve met, I have met so many amazing people in World Warcraft.
[00:53:33] Even though there’s that, that huge level of toxic, at least on the reputation. There’s so many great people I’ve met. Like again, [00:53:40] I bet you, I, I, I went to BlizzCon, met, met some friends there.
[00:53:43] Berzerker: Mm-hmm.
[00:53:43] Jae: Um, I’m still talking with, with, with, with one of my former Guild members. Uh, Cara, I’m still talking to her all the time.
[00:53:49] Berzerker: Mm-hmm.
[00:53:49] Jae: And there is [00:53:50] that, that level, like I got, I got to meet people that I never would’ve met before I got to meet. One of my, uh, uh, best friends is, is, is Sascz. And he, and [00:54:00] he’s, and he, and he’s a trans man and I met him through the World of Warcraft. And that was a, I just happened to meet him one day in the podcast community, started talking with him [00:54:10] and we built a, a friendship, and, and that is, that’s the, I don’t think I would’ve ever met some of the people I’ve met in my circles, but because of it, [00:54:20] I’m a better person. I’m a, I am able, I’m able to, like, I’ve changed, changed my, per my perspectives. I mean, one of, one of the coolest things was, uh, [00:54:30] was joining this podcast.
[00:54:31] I, I became friends with, uh, James on a niche hosting Slack channel. And, and, and see. It’s, and, and I [00:54:40] think, like if you look at, I, I, if I were even like to look at the, the podcasting community itself, that can be a very toxic community. Oh yeah. If you go to r/podcasting on Reddit. [00:54:50] Oh my gosh. But then you find,
[00:54:52] Berzerker: oh yeah.
[00:54:52] Jae: The smaller niche community. And I think that’s the, that’s one of the, uh, the, the, the, the keys. If anybody’s going into an MMORPG, [00:55:00] one of the keys I would say is look for the smaller communities. Look for people that you actually are enjoying talk to, talking to, see if they may have a guild. Don’t, don’t just accept the first guild invite that [00:55:10] that will be coming across your
[00:55:12] Berzerker: Yeah, don’t do that.
[00:55:13] Jae: No, cuz that’s, it’s gonna probably be a very toxic guild with probably No, no, no moderation, no policies. But look,
[00:55:19] Berzerker: You end up in [00:55:20] Goldshire Inn with no clothes on . We don’t wanna do that. Don’t do that. I mean, do that if you want to do that. I’m just saying be careful. That’s it.
[00:55:27] Jae: James, there’s a whole thing you will never understand [00:55:30] about Goldshire,
[00:55:30] Berzerker: Moonguard, baby. That’s where the action’s at. But you know, that’s where, that’s the after dark show. We’ll say that,
[00:55:36] James: Honestly, I, I’m worried, I’m worried.
[00:55:39] Jae: I will [00:55:40] explain some of this stuff I saw in Goldshire.
[00:55:41] James: Please do, please do one day.
[00:55:42] Jae: But like, that’s, that’s, that’s where like again, I was just somebody that was logging into World of Warcraft from [00:55:50] someplace in Ohio and I got to meet so many amazing friends and I, I actually got the opportunity to, to go to BlizzCon 2019 and see people in real life.
[00:55:57] But it was just, that was the, the, the, [00:56:00] the cool aspect of World of Warcraft after the fact that I, I met friends. Berzerker, I’m still talking to you now. And we met.
[00:56:07] Berzerker: Yeah.
[00:56:08] Jae: We didn’t actually meet in games. We, we’ve met in [00:56:10] the, the community around the game though. I think we are in the sa we, we were in the same guild at one point, but yeah, but I still, we,
[00:56:15] Berzerker: we were.
[00:56:16] Jae: Yeah, I, I, I met you through that, and I think
[00:56:18] Berzerker: mm-hmm.
[00:56:19] Jae: [00:56:20] That’s the, the, the, the one of the coolest things I will ever, ever, ever take away from it is these people that you log into every day. Like, I’ll, I would log into a game. Into World Warcraft, talk to guild, be like, Hey, [00:56:30] how’s everyone doing? And you would like talk back and the night I would like do puns and all that.
[00:56:33] And then I get ignored by some people who didn’t want puns . Cause they’ve been adding to their block list .
[00:56:38] James: Wait, wait. [00:56:40] It’s was an option to ignore your puns?
[00:56:42] Jae: Yes.
[00:56:43] James: Oh.
[00:56:44] Jae: Cause they ignore everything else about me, but yeah, you can.
[00:56:46] Berzerker: Is that what’s gonna get you to play? My goodness. Boy, that was [00:56:50] weird hook.
[00:56:50] James: No.
[00:56:50] Berzerker: Alright. Oh, no.
[00:56:52] Jae: James, I need help with this kobold. James, james
[00:56:57] Berzerker: There it is. Oh, Jae’s right though. And, and I do [00:57:00] want to, I do want to kind of just put a, a finer point on, on one thing she said is that above all else, and I, and I put this top five experiences in my [00:57:10] life, is going to the first BlizzCon that I ever went to.
[00:57:12] Oh yes. I, I went to another one after that and it was great. Don’t get me wrong, but all of the BS aside. The [00:57:20] community feeling that I felt, oh yeah. At a BlizzCon with everybody with, you know, tens of thousands of people, 20,000 people there. It is unlike [00:57:30] any feeling or emotion or vibe I have ever felt anywhere else and my whole life.
[00:57:35] And it was nothing but awesome. And I know that there, you know, listen a convention with that many people, there’s [00:57:40] stuff that happens that goes sideways and you know that, that, that’s just humanity being human. Overall, I’ve never experienced anything as wonderful and positive [00:57:50] and inclusive as that environment.
[00:57:52] And it, it is something that you can’t replicate in my mind and anything that I’ve ever done. And if there’s like one big [00:58:00] thing that like I would advocate is getting into the community just to go to one, just to go to one. Even if you only go to one. Cuz it’s not cheap to get to these things. The tickets are expensive, they’re hard to get.[00:58:10]
[00:58:10] You gotta get to LA or Anaheim. It’s a whole, it’s a whole thing, but the, it’s worth it. It’s even just to do it that one time, just, just to be with the people and to be [00:58:20] around it and, and it’s, it’s incredible. It’s almost indescribable. It’s incredible. Um, and then one other thing just about sort of community and the connections, and again, this is not, [00:58:30] this is not meant to pat myself on the back or toot my own horn, but I just, I kind of want to give you a train of events here.
[00:58:35] So Jae plays World of Warcraft. I play World of Warcraft. [00:58:40] We through a series of, you know, events in the universe, we come across each other’s paths. We become friends, we get to know each other. We have podcasts and we do these [00:58:50] things. And Jae’s got her own life adventure that she’s going through. And, and kind of as a, as a side to that, I’m learning a lot of things that I never knew.
[00:58:58] The things that I have [00:59:00] learned from Jae, who I met because of Warcraft, has influenced policy in the state of California. I have the ability through my [00:59:10] job. To have a hand in a few things. Not a lot, but a few. And I have been part of discussions that have helped shape the policy in the state of California and the [00:59:20] things that I have said has been a direct result of the conversations that I have had with Jae and the things that Jae has taught me.
[00:59:26] So it’s great to talk about community and it’s great to do [00:59:30] all these other things that we do for the sake of like a game, but there have been times when there have been real. Differences in the world because of these relationships and how they [00:59:40] came about through World of Warcraft and, and it’s just one small example of literally millions of others that are out there in the world.
[00:59:46] But it’s, again, it’s one of the things that makes it so special is all of the [00:59:50] other things that happen because of the connections that we make. In this game,
[00:59:55] James: I, I can see Jae obviously getting Jae’s very emotional by this, [01:00:00] which is awesome. And, and I, I think it’s one of the things that really stands out to me is that if community’s done right in a game and you have that genuine love and, [01:00:10] and you can affect real life things, you know, you can make sure each should is okay.
[01:00:13] You know, I know there have been times where I’ve had a really rough day and I’ve reached out to Discord [01:00:20] communities, you know, even just for a bit of a, you know, a bit of a chat and people have lifted my spirits. You know, there’s, there’s times where the SquadPod, you know, the [01:00:30] SquadCast community have, have done that.
[01:00:32] And I’m so grateful for outside of, you know, of communities and it is great to rally around that and get in a game and look, you know, [01:00:40] I am sure that lots of content creators got their start. In World of Warcraft, Jae, you, you know, a lot of your podcasting was because of that. Yeah. And [01:00:50] now you are host co-hosting and, you know, producing our streams on a we’ll, we’ll see about relatively successful.
[01:00:57] But, you know, I’d like to think a decent podcast. You [01:01:00] know, we’ve, we’ve. Decent values and great guests, of course.
[01:01:05] Berzerker: Oh yeah. Well, yeah. Trying to hold it. My head
[01:01:08] Jae: And I, I [01:01:10] want to like mention like, I’ve not met so many people who have met their, their partners through World of Warcraft. That’s pretty incredible.
[01:01:18] Berzerker: Yes.
[01:01:18] Jae: Um, one of [01:01:20] my, uh, one, one of the one I can mention is, uh, JenEricLive. They’re an amazing streamer couple and what’s cool?
[01:01:26] Berzerker: Oh yeah.
[01:01:27] Jae: They met in World Warcraft, not realizing that [01:01:30] they only lived right down the street from each other.
[01:01:32] James: Wow.
[01:01:32] Jae: In Texas. Yeah. It was one of those, like, they just started like playing together and then they, and then they got married after that.
[01:01:38] But it was like, it’s, it’s [01:01:40] just, it’s cool. Some of those relationships that, that, that meet. And Berzerker, it means a lot like that. Like I’ve been able to have some impact just from [01:01:50] gaming and, and like, I. I will say I, because of some of my, my podcasting and some of my streams, I don’t wanna go into too much detail, but I have saved lives from some of the [01:02:00] people I’ve talked with.
[01:02:01] And I just wanna say that like it’s, I’ve always, I’ve always tried to be the very, I’ve always tried to look into small communities and things. I’ve always tried to look at, even if I can’t affect the bigger [01:02:10] community, how can I affect my community? How can I, as a streamer, I always was like, I want my community to be good.
[01:02:16] I want my community to be positive, not toxic positive, but, [01:02:20] but a, I want to be doing good, having real conversations if we need to, but standing up for the right things. And I think that’s the, it’s made [01:02:30] me more confident. If you had seen me before, I, I started doing some of the, the podcasting. I was very shy.
[01:02:37] I was not so outspoken, not [01:02:40] so extroverted. So I’m a different person than I was even before. And last things before we like wrap it up. I wanted to say like two, like there are [01:02:50] so many community events, somebody charity events. DesMephisto has raised so much dang money for the Autistic [01:03:00] Self-Advocacy Network.
[01:03:00] It is unbelievable. And it’s all because like, like he’ll stream a game or he’ll do like a charity event and raised all this money and like bring brand partners together. Dravvie has [01:03:10] done the, the Gnome run, which raises money for breast cancer awareness. Oh yeah. And also the, uh, the troll run, which raises money for the, for the, uh, Trevor Project.
[01:03:19] Berzerker: Mm-hmm.
[01:03:19] Um, [01:03:20] and, and the, uh, Troll Run is when I first came out as well because I saw, I was realizing who I was in 2020. I went on and I was, I was terrified, but I went on that run and saw [01:03:30] all these other individuals and the, the, uh, the talk even in my own little guild, cuz we would all make, make a, a troll character at level one into a, a [01:03:40] run to, to from the, uh, troll starting zone to boot to the town of Booty Bay.
[01:03:45] And the chat that was in there was like, okay, I am not [01:03:50] alone in how I feel. I’m not alone in who I am. I’m not, even though my family may have some differing opinions on stuff, there are people that are like me. And [01:04:00] that’s that, that, that type of connection I came out. Publicly after this, after that event.
[01:04:05] And it’s just finding people that are, that are, that are like you and, [01:04:10] and finding people that like, that help you see things differently. That is, I think, one of the, one of the, the powers of these small communities that, so I just, I could speak so [01:04:20] forever about this, but I have always been about the, the community.
[01:04:23] Like I’ve interviewed so many people in World of Warcraft on my, on my former podcast, getting to know them, getting to know what, what [01:04:30] makes them tick. Getting to know like, like what they, what they do. And like I have, I have still, I have so many friends. Berzerker is one of them again, that I have talked to on that podcast.
[01:04:38] And we’re, we’re still friends. And [01:04:40] that’s, that’s why I, and yeah. BlizzCon 2019. I, again, I don’t wanna ramble. I just, it was so amazing being there.
[01:04:47] Mm-hmm.
[01:04:47] Jae: At one point I was like, for the [01:04:50] Alliance and everyone going RAHHHH. Can I just tell you one final thing? And then I, then I’ll, I’ll give this back to, to James.
[01:04:56] I was in the hotel, I was in that check into my hotel the first night of BlizzCon. [01:05:00] This, these, the, these two, these two men are walking around with a Horde thing. I’m like, for the alliance, and I’m like running this way, not realizing that the elevators are this [01:05:10] way. So I’ve run back out, like, I gotta go this way.
[01:05:14] James: I have to admit, hearing of a very positive things about the community built around World Warcraft. Really [01:05:20] does, you know, I, I’m not gonna say I’m gonna start, go out and start playing this game. I might do,
[01:05:26] Berzerker: I got a referral for you.
[01:05:27] James: Oh.
[01:05:28] Jae: No, no. I’m giving you my referral code. [01:05:30] I’ll fight you Berzerker!
[01:05:31] James: Don’t, don’t fight. You two. Don’t fight .
[01:05:35] Berzerker: Come on, James. We wanna fight over you, why are you stopping?
[01:05:37] Jae: Hey James, I’ll, I’ll teach you World of Warcraft, if, if you, if [01:05:40] you, if you do my code, I’ll teach all the finer points.
[01:05:43] James: What I don’t like now is the look for Jae’s giving me on webcam. . All right guys. ,
[01:05:49] Jae: [01:05:50] Join us. Join.
[01:05:51] James: So, Jae, Jae isn’t expecting this, but I think, uh, we should, [01:06:00] there are people who know about this.
[01:06:01] I think we should probably open up to to you, our listeners. Me and Jae aren’t just co-hosts. Me and Jae have been dating [01:06:10] for about, what, nine months? Eight, nine months now?
[01:06:12] Jae: Eight, nine months, depending on my math, but yeah. Yeah.
[01:06:14] James: Well, your maths is, math is terrible, but
[01:06:17] Jae: It is!
[01:06:19] James: [01:06:20] Uh, yeah. So, yeah, it just goes to show you we, we are incredibly happy.
[01:06:25] Berzerker: Yeah.
[01:06:26] Jae: Yeah. And we get along so well. Even, even if I annoy you sometimes, [01:06:30]
[01:06:30] James: Oh, you do. And I’m sure I annoy you as well. Um,
[01:06:34] Jae: Maybe…
[01:06:34] James: Maybe… Maybe…
[01:06:37] Berzerker: Well, and you know, if, if you don’t mind, I’m, I’m [01:06:40] gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna Bogart this deal here. I just wanna say, as somebody who’s been a friend of of Jae’s for a number of years, I have not seen her this happy
[01:06:49] James: Aw.
[01:06:49] Berzerker: [01:06:50] In a long, long time. And, you know, again, sort of bearing witness to the journey that’s been happening. I [01:07:00] am so incredibly happy to see. How happy Jae is. And it, it, it’s part of the reason why I’m so jazzed to be here with the [01:07:10] both of you, just to kind of see you both together and, you know, kind of see how, uh, you both are.
[01:07:15] It’s, it, it really, it, it, it fills my heart up and, [01:07:20] and, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of really awful stuff. Life will beat you down and not care. And finding people that you connect with and finding [01:07:30] love is so, so, so important. I’ve been blessed to have been in a, in a long term relationship, since the nineties.
[01:07:38] Um, I’ve, I’ve married my [01:07:40] high school sweetheart and, you know, I’ve been, I’ve been very lucky in that regard and I know how lucky I am every day when I go to bed. And I, [01:07:50] I have that love in my heart and I know that’s returned. And to see that for Jae has been heartwarming. So I just wanna say thank you to James, uh, [01:08:00] for, for being there and for helping my girl out and, and for being, you know, support and to return her love.
[01:08:07] Cause if anybody out there deserves it, it’s [01:08:10] her. Um,
[01:08:11] James: A hundred percent.
[01:08:12] Berzerker: It’s really great. And, and thank you for letting me watch this unfold. I I really appreciate that. So now that I’ve done, uh, stealing the thunder here, I’m gonna turn [01:08:20] this over to Jae.
[01:08:21] Jae: And I just wanted to, I just wanna say listeners, it, it’s true.
[01:08:24] And like, uh, James is my best friend and I’ve, I met him on a, on a, on a [01:08:30] slack channel for our podcast host. Yeah. Which, uh, one of the podcasts on, that I was doing on that host was a, we’re working on podcast, believe it or not, so, and yeah, I, I just, I started to [01:08:40] get, to get to know James and Yeah, it’s that, it’s that community that you, you never know who you’re gonna meet.
[01:08:44] You never know, like that, that bond you’re gonna build and you never, and then the one day you’re like, wait a second, [01:08:50] I really, really love this person. Not just as a friend, but, and then you fly out ly enough to England, [01:09:00] and you’re like, what am I doing by myself?
[01:09:06] James: I, I will say I was not prepared for how tall Jae actually [01:09:10] is.
[01:09:11] Berzerker: Nobody is. I, I, I don’t, I’m not even prepared. I know.
[01:09:16] James: I I, I’m only five foot eight Jae’s a lot taller than me.
[01:09:19] Berzerker: [01:09:20] Oh.
[01:09:20] James: I, I i, we, I mean we definitely got some interesting looks on, uh, on, on trains. Um, we, we, we might, and I, I I [01:09:30] think it might have been a conservative, uh, Mp. Um, we, we think we know who it was. Yeah.
[01:09:36] Jae: Oh yes, cuz I remember we were cuddling watching Friend’s on the train [01:09:40] and there’s couple staring at us.
[01:09:41] James: Oh, we’ve got death Stairs, we got absolute death stares.
[01:09:44] So yeah, look,
[01:09:45] Berzerker: They’re just jealous cuz you got somebody who can get the jars off the top shelf. . I mean that’s, that’s what it [01:09:50] is.
[01:09:50] James: It is very handy. It’s like, Hey Jae, can you reach that cup? Yep. See, see I don’t use that couple in six months cause I can’t get here.
[01:09:59] Berzerker: [01:10:00] Forgot it was even up there.
[01:10:01] James: Yeah, it, it is brilliant. And look, you know, look, we’ve made this really clear, uh, on, on our show. We want to hear from all of you, but. Just [01:10:10] wanna be really clear, there’s no room for hate in our comments or in our emails.
[01:10:14] You have a problem with our relationship. You can, you can do one. Quite frankly, I really don’t care. [01:10:20] Send us hate mail, it will get deleted. Um, uh, we’re not entertaining, we’re really happy. This, this podcast, these streams, we [01:10:30] are, Crossed Wires is awesome. I’m really, really proud of the work we are doing. I’m so proud to have Jae as my co-host and my partner, so yeah.
[01:10:39] [01:10:40] Um, and whatever consequences of making this announcement on my podcast for our, I will deal with.
[01:10:45] Jae: And I just wanna, I wanna say thank you again, James, for bringing me on on the [01:10:50] show. And like, I, I, I love that like I get to, to podcast with you and, and, and talk with, with, with, uh, great guests and like I, and like, and spend the rest of our [01:11:00] life with you.
[01:11:00] It’s just, it’s, it’s amazing and we get to stream. And now that you got rid of the GoXLR, you won’t have to hear me doing like my autotune singing that I did. You remember this?
[01:11:09] James: I’m so [01:11:10] glad about that. Look, if, if I could do nothing else in Jae’s life, it’s bring her decent audio and video gear and, you know, all of this stuff. Anyway. [01:11:20]
[01:11:20] Jae: Oh, no, no. I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to cut you off.
[01:11:21] James: No, no, no, it’s fine. I’m just thinking if there’s anything we need to do.
[01:11:25] Jae: I think we covered a lot of it. So, Bezier. Yes. So, so after, after James [01:11:30] made me, uh, cry over, over all this. He’s so sweet. After, after all that, I just wanna say Berzerker, thank you for coming on again.
[01:11:37] Like thank you for helping talk about this. Like, I wanna talk about, I [01:11:40] wanted to talk about the good and the bad Yeah. Of, of, of, of Warcraft because I, I feel we’ve not do justice if I just talked about all the good, but I, I wanted to, but I wanted to get a show. [01:11:50] You are a, a, a friendship that has been because of a, of a game.
[01:11:54] I, when I resubscribed to that, to World Warcraft for 15 bucks a month, I [01:12:00] did not realize all the people I would meet. Like, like
[01:12:03] Berzerker: Mm.
[01:12:04] Jae: I actually have a, a member of my former podcast community, uh, of my former f podcast, uh, [01:12:10] fan base who has me with my signature right next to Ion Hazzikostas. And I’m like, I think Ion Hazzikostas has more professional qualities than I do.
[01:12:18] Like, like I’m just, I’m [01:12:20] just a podcaster. But yeah, like in the, and again, the, the people that I’ve gotten to meet, like, I, like, again, I got to meet Ali and I got to meet, uh, I got to see [01:12:30] two of my, two, my, uh, friends enter into a, a, a dating relationship and then they went to BlizzCon and then they got married, or I, I think they got married or they haven’t got, but yeah, I got to like, I got to see those things and it’s [01:12:40] just, it’s really cool to see the cuz one day I saw them getting, being really close and I’m like, and I’m like, I wonder if they’re together and then all of a sudden you, you, uh, you hear them announce they’re together like, [01:12:50] yes.
[01:12:51] So, but before we go, can you tell us where people can find you a across the, the interwebs?
[01:12:57] Berzerker: Sure. Before I do that, I just wanna say how [01:13:00] much I’m honored, uh, to be here, especially when, uh, y’all are announcing, uh, to your listeners, uh, the state of your [01:13:10] relationship. And, and thank you for trusting that I would be somebody you could bring on for that.
[01:13:15] Cause you’re right. Um, you know, there’s enough hate in this world, and [01:13:20] frankly, if anybody has a problem with anything that was said here today, you can come to me. Yeah, I’ll deal with it. Uh, so, you know, have fun with that. But, uh, uh, happy for you [01:13:30] both. Uh, thank you so much for having me. It’s, we could, we could, if we could have made this a five hour episode if we wanted to.
[01:13:35] Jae: Cause I know, I, I almost did and I know James was like, no, no, no. So ,
[01:13:39] Berzerker: I know [01:13:40] James gotta go to bed. It’s like 4:00 AM over there, sometimes. Don’t,
[01:13:42] James: It’s only, it’s only 1:30 AM It’s fine.
[01:13:45] Berzerker: It’s so late over there. So I, I, I need to be respectful here. But yes, if, uh, [01:13:50] if you are interested. Uh, in checking out, uh, anything that I am doing, uh, you listen to this here, you’re like, I wanna listen to what this Berzerker guy is all about, you can check [01:14:00] me out on Twitter. I’m still there at BerzerkerRage. There’s no space. Just, uh, two words. Berserker Rage. At Berserker Rage. The, uh, [01:14:10] podcast that I host is called Unshackled Fury. You can find that anywhere you get your podcast. It’s all over the place.
[01:14:16] Uh, on Twitter at [01:14:20] Unshackled_Fury. And like I said, it is a, uh, an adult rated show. The warnings right up front, so there should be no surprises, uh, but try [01:14:30] to talk about, uh, anything and everything around the community and the game and gaming and it’s kind of all over the place. Um, it’s just you know, a running dialogue of what goes on in my [01:14:40] brain, which is a little scary at times, but uh, you know, it is what it is. And, some people seem to enjoy it cuz I still have at least three or four listeners, so we’re gonna keep it going , [01:14:50] as long as they’re there.
[01:14:51] Jae: I will say, as somebody who’s not playing World of Warcraft, it’s still one of my favorite podcasts. And like your production quality is top notch and
[01:14:59] Berzerker: [01:15:00] Oh, thank you.
[01:15:00] Jae: As I, and I would definitely, I highly recommend Unshackled Fury, like, again, know that, like, don’t listen with like, um, without knowing that there is like [01:15:10] cursing and, and all that, but. You will, you will laugh your butt off. You’re just gonna have a great time.
[01:15:15] And I think it is a positive force in the, in the Blizzard community. And it’s [01:15:20] one of the podcasts that I truly think the Blizzard community needs. So it it be, Berzerker. I, I wanted, I wanted to thank you for what you’ve done, cuz again, you’ve, you’ve been there for me so many [01:15:30] times and your podcast is there for so many people that like, it’s, it’s awesome.
[01:15:34] So check it out. And even if you’re not a World of Warcraft player, you’re gonna love it.
[01:15:37] Berzerker: Thank you. Thank you. That means a lot. And you [01:15:40] know, at the end of the day, I think even as somebody myself who is often kind of lone wolf, McQuaid, you can find your community out there. You are not alone there. There’s a lot [01:15:50] of darkness in this world right now and it is very easy to be consumed by it and to think that you are alone, the things that you wrestle with, the challenges that you face, that you [01:16:00] are in it by yourself.
[01:16:01] I’m here to tell you, you are not, there, there are people out there for you. There are resources out for you if, if it gets to that point. But there are communities [01:16:10] out there that can pick you up on your worst days, like you said, and get you through those moments to get you through that next day. Cuz there always is another day, there always is another day, there’s [01:16:20] always another sunrise, right?
[01:16:21] No matter what happens. But you can find the community that’ll, that’ll sort of grease the path and make it easier to get there. And it is. One of the great things about World of Warcraft is there is a community [01:16:30] out, out there for you, whoever you are, and we welcome you. Unless you’re a dirt bag and you’re trash, then you can go, I don’t know.
[01:16:37] Play Fortnite, don’t, don’t come here. Don’t come here cause we’ll [01:16:40] throw you out. But, uh, but thank you for having me.
[01:16:43] Jae: As long as you’re not ganking newbies in, in, in, uh, Stranglethorn Vale.
[01:16:46] Berzerker: That’s right. That’s right. How dare you. [01:16:50] That’s where you can find me. Welcome aboard. Uh, love to have it. And you know, listen, shameless plug time.
[01:16:57] If you do check out Unshackled Fury and you find it is [01:17:00] of any value whatsoever, you know, feel free to throw a brother a a a five star rating. You know, cause, uh, listen, Apple doesn’t care, uh, what I do, but they care what you do. [01:17:10] Uh, so you know, and do the same for this show. Come on now. If you’re not, if you’re not hitting five stars on this, uh, this fun Crossed Wires program, then you, if you, I don’t even know what you’re doing with your life, do it before you go to the [01:17:20] store.
[01:17:20] That’s, that’s, there you go. That’s it. Tell’em, Berzerker sent you.
[01:17:22] James: I, I will say Apple. Maybe. Time to move away from star ratings for podcast. Why? How about just a lover? How about just a love like [01:17:30] that? Thumbs up should have emoji vs.
[01:17:32] Berzerker: What is the difference between a 4.5 and a 4.7? I dunno?
[01:17:37] Jae: Well, the, the, the, the difference is like, uh, [01:17:40] for the four.
[01:17:40] For the four point, um, four, they are, um, only delivering you continental breakfast. The 4.7 is they’re delivering you breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
[01:17:49] Berzerker: Which one has the [01:17:50] good sausages?
[01:17:51] Jae: Ah,
[01:17:52] that’s the one I care
[01:17:53] James: That’s the 4 point seven 7 7 7 7 7 7.
[01:17:57] Berzerker: Ooh. Yeah. Okay. I got a goal [01:18:00] now. There you go.
[01:18:00] Jae: Uh, and you heard, you, you heard it here first. Uh, folks, if, if you give, um, Unshackled Fury, a a four point A above Berzerker will come directly to your house and give you a, [01:18:10] a, uh, a, a full breakfast, uh, uh, pla.
[01:18:13] Berzerker: You got all the pork sausage you could ever handle.
[01:18:15] James: I, I don’t think, Jae, will you please stop pimping [01:18:20] our guests? like I, I, I’m really worried about like all this, you know, like offering our guest services [01:18:30] out to the public
[01:18:31] I’m, we need to talk about etiquette on this show, you know?
[01:18:35] No, no.
[01:18:35] Berzerker: I’ll make that 4.8 or 5.0 by the time I leave.[01:18:40]
[01:18:42] James: No, seriously do go and check up Berzeker’s show and look, genuinely, we, we say it in the outro, but you know, if you do like what we’re doing, please do go write, [01:18:50] write any podcast. Okay. Genuine message. If you love the podcast you are listening to, they really do value. Those ratings and well reviews. They gen they help [01:19:00] more than you would think.
[01:19:01] They expose the shows, go and do that. You know, we, we encourage people to go and check out good pods and start discussions today. Please do that. Um, and [01:19:10] one thing we don’t really put in our outro, which I just want to mention, if you go to our site, at crossedwires.net down at the bottom is actually a couple of affiliate links If you need backup from Backblaze, [01:19:20] if you need hosting by DigitalOcean, or if you wanna start your own podcast and you wanna record it in the most amazing quality, in the easiest way with [01:19:30] SquadCast, go and check us affiliates today.
[01:19:31] Do help us out and we’ll have more ways that you can support us soon. Jae over to you.
[01:19:36] Jae: And I with that Berzerker, can you, [01:19:40] uh, do, can you do your, uh, podcast intro in the cleanest way possible?
[01:19:45] Berzerker: My, my intro or my outro?
[01:19:47] Jae: Oh, your outro, yeah. Can you do your outro?
[01:19:49] Berzerker: Oh, okay. [01:19:50] Uh, until next time, keep your swords wet and your banners high, and we’ll see you next time.
[01:19:56] Farewell.[01:20:00]
[01:20:00] James: Thanks for listening to this episode of Cross Wires. We hope you’ve enjoyed our discussion and we’d love to hear your thoughts. So please drop us an note over to [email protected].
[01:20:09] Jae: You can also drop [01:20:10] us a comment on the post, or if you’re a GoodPods user, why not start a discussion there too.
[01:20:15] James: You can also join on new Discord server at crossedwires.net/discord
[01:20:19] We’ve got [01:20:20] forum channels for each episode and we’d lo to join the discussion there. You can also follow us a Mastodon @[email protected], and of course, you can find the show show in all the [01:20:30] good podcast apps and all the really bad ones too.
[01:20:32] Jae: If you’d like to check out more of our content and on over to crossedwires.net/youtube for all our videos and keep an eye on our [01:20:40] Twitch channel at crossedwires.net/live for our upcoming streams.
[01:20:44] James: If you like what we heard, please do drop review in your podcast directory of choice. It really [01:20:50] does help spread a word about the show.
[01:20:51] Jae: And of course, If you can spare even the smallest amount of financial support, we’d be incredibly grateful, and you can support us at [01:21:00] ko-fi.com/crossedwires
[01:21:05] James: Until next time, thanks for listening![01:21:10] [01:21:20]

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