Big Walk Made Us A Better Podcast

Welcome to Big Walk, a Triple Click corporate trust exercise that has made us all better co-workers and better people. Kirk, Jason, and Maddy break down the new hit game from House House and talk about their experiences playing it together... and falling off cliffs.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Jason Schreier?

  First, there was Baby Steps, then Big Walk, after that Marathon, and finally Dante's Inferno. Welcome to TripleClick, where we bring the games to you. This week, we're talking about Big Walk, a game that all three of us have been playing, exploring the Australian outback, solving puzzles, and Big Walkin'.

• 0:31Jason Schreier?

  I'm Jason Schreier.

• 0:32Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm Kirk Hamilton.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  And I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:35Jason Schreier?

  And hello.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 0:37Jason Schreier?

  Are you guys ready to go for a walk?

• 0:40Speaker 02

  I am ready.

• 0:40Kirk Hamilton?

  I am. Wait, I can't, I can't hear you. I'm too far away. I need to come back over to my microphone, so you can hear what I'm saying, because I walked, I got too far away from it.

• 0:48Jason Schreier?

  That's good. Could you imagine if we recorded a podcast that was just entirely just us feeding in and out?

• 0:54Kirk Hamilton?

  We should make an episode in Big Walk.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  We should.

• 0:57Kirk Hamilton?

  That would be amazing.

• 0:59Jason Schreier?

  If you would like to hear us try to make an episode in Big Walk, you can become a Maximum Fun

• 1:05Kirk Hamilton?

  A bonus episode.

• 1:07Jason Schreier?

  And help us make the show possible. Yeah, we could call it Click Walk. Triple, triple Big Walk.

• 1:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Big Click.

• 1:12Jason Schreier?

  Big Click.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Big ol' Click?

• 1:16Jason Schreier?

  Wasn't that a movie? The Big Sick, The Big Click.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  The Big Sick is a great movie.

• 1:20Jason Schreier?

  You can go to MaximumFun.org/join and support our show. In addition to making this show possible, you will also get access to our monthly bonus episodes, including one we just did a few weeks ago about the new movie from Christopher Nolan, The Odyssey. And of course, we are finishing our ongoing watch of The Sopranos. Our next bonus episode at the end of August will be us talking about seasons four and five of The Sopranos. We'll cap that off in a month to come with season six. So a whole lot of episodes, lots and lots of good bonus episodes for you. We talk about games, we're talking about movies, we talk about films, we talk about

• 2:02Jason Schreier?

  life advice, we talk about all sorts of stuff. So go and check that out. Go to MaximumFun.org/join. All right, as for this week, Kirk, what are we talking about today?

• 2:14Kirk Hamilton?

  We're talking about a very cool video game called Big Walk, as we have basically already explained to people. We'll be talking about Big Walk. Before we get into that, I actually wanted to mention one thing real quick related to our conversation last week about Soma. That was a very fun conversation, and in it, I mentioned that some of the philosophical ideas explored by Soma are likely explored by philosophers with whom I am not familiar. And friend of the show Brett Duvall wrote in to tell me about one of those philosophers, a philosopher named Daniel Dennett, who we can maybe link just to his Wikipedia or something in the show notes. I was not aware of him, but he is very interesting and posits some of the ideas. Like, he was doing some of the thought experiments, the kind of current

• 2:59Kirk Hamilton?

  thought experiments that feel similar to some of the things explored in Soma. So I wanted to throw that out there. For anyone who might find that interesting and want to do some further reading, Daniel Dennett is one place to start. And thanks to Brett for sharing that.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 3:11Kirk Hamilton?

  As for this week, we're going to talk about a very different game from Soma. We're going to talk about Big Walk, the newest from House House, a multiplayer sensation that's sweeping the international nation.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  The gamer nation?

• 3:26Kirk Hamilton?

  That's taking the game, sweeping the gamer nation. There we go. Taking the world by storm.

• 3:30Jason Schreier?

  It is kind of like Soma in that when you disconnect, your body is left behind with X's on it, and then you come back in and a new body.

• 3:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that can be maybe a running theme of this conversation is finding the surprising parallels, because there are some.

• 3:45Jason Schreier?

  That's, that's the headline. That's the YouTube video.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Surprising parallels between Soma and Big Walk. That's gonna do numbers. That's gonna be huge.

• 3:54Kirk Hamilton?

  If those were two big budget games out at the same time, that would absolutely be the Kotaku article that one of us would have written.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  But it said they have essentially no relation, other than to fans of TripleClick, of course.

• 4:04Kirk Hamilton?

  I feel like I saw a headline that was like, what, what GTA 6 can learn from Big Walk, right? I feel like that headline is somewhere in the world.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  That's gotta exist. We're manifesting that.

• 4:14Kirk Hamilton?

  It's gotta exist. Someone has to have written it.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Someone, someone's writing it right now as we speak.

• 4:19Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm sure that some of the ideas in it are interesting and valid. So anyhow.

• 4:22Jason Schreier?

  I can't find a headline that actually says that, but you never know.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  I'll write it up after this, Jason Doring.

• 4:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, please do. It can be on mothership. You guys can get the sweet SEO juice for everyone.

• 4:31Jason Schreier?

  I did find, I do find IGN GTA 6 could learn a few lessons from Bully, but that's a little bit, a little bit different.

• 4:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Not quite the same. But anyhow, Big Walk, let's talk about it. So this is the new game from House House, an Australian game developer, very small studio for people who made The Untitled Goose Game, is their most famous game from 2019, though they did make a game before that called Push Me, Pull You. That's a neat game. But Untitled Goose Game was their breakout success that came out in 2019, was a big hit, especially among all of my friends who play video games with their kids, but really among everybody.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I loved that game, and I didn't play it with a child. I played it by myself.

• 5:16Kirk Hamilton?

  I really, I really thought that it was a brilliant, a brilliant little game, especially like taken as a whole. I thought it was much more than it needed to be, maybe. It was a really, the sign of some very sharp design minds. So it's not a surprise that their follow-up is a tremendously cool game, but it is a little unexpected what kind of a game it is, and, and the ways in which it is so special and neat. So Big Walk has been out for a little while. It is a multiplayer game for anywhere from two to, I believe, 12 players online. It can only be played online. It is not a couch co-op game due to the way that it is designed. And that is because it is a sort of, it is all about

• 5:58Kirk Hamilton?

  communication and the ways in which we communicate. And it makes communication difficult in some ways. It adds some barriers to communication in ways that make all of the puzzles go. So in Big Walk, you design a little character. You're kind of just this little dude. You've got little arms and little legs, and then you are set loose in a world that looks somewhat like the Australian wilderness, kind of an island covered in play structures. It is an open world, largely undirected game, full of just player-directed puzzles. So you and your team begin together, and the first thing that you will notice upon playing is that proximity chat is turned on, and that is how you will communicate with your, with your

• 6:42Kirk Hamilton?

  fellow players. So instead of being in a Discord chat where you can just talk and do whatever you want in the game, you must walk up to one another in order to talk. And if you walk too far away from them, you will no longer hear what your teammates are saying. And then the whole game kind of flows from there. You're then put in situations in which you have to solve a puzzle, and one person is in a different room and can't hear you. So you have to figure out how to communicate the necessary information in order to solve the puzzle. And really, you also just find yourself wandering around this big, interesting, open space together, looking for things to do, talking about whatever you might want to talk about, and gradually uncovering the secrets and surprises of this island. That's the structure of the game. I'm finding it completely delightful and honestly revolutionary

• 7:25Kirk Hamilton?

  in a way that I find sort of shocking. And I'm very excited to talk with the two of you about-

• 7:29Jason Schreier?

  Can you, you gotta set the scene. You gotta tell everybody how we've been playing.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is unusual for us.

• 7:34Jason Schreier?

  This is a rare game where the three of us are only playing together for the most part.

• 7:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, we have been playing this game together. And I mean, I could do that, or you could do that, Jason. How about you describe it? How have we been playing this game?

• 7:44Jason Schreier?

  Sure. Yeah. So Maddie, I played a session, but then the three of us got together a couple of weeks ago and started playing it. And since then, we've done like four sessions. It's like a triple-click, like corporate trust-building exercise.

• 7:56Kirk Hamilton?

  It feels like a corporate retreat.

• 7:57Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, instead of going to like a ski shelle in the mountains, we go to the world of Big Walk and learn how to communicate with one another. And it's super cool. Occasionally, we've had cameo appearances from, from friends, from other shows.

• 8:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Those are like the guest speakers at the corporate retreat. Russ Prushtick turns up.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Russ Prushtick came and gave a keynote speech to all of us.

• 8:18Jason Schreier?

  He gave us a lecture about avoiding spoilers.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  That is what his keynote would be on, if you were to get one.

• 8:24Jason Schreier?

  But for the most part, the three of us have been going around and solving puzzles together, and it's been very rewarding and fun. And I mean, I think we all love it. I certainly love it, to the point where we have a date scheduled tonight to play it after recording this episode, which I think is especially rare, because usually it's like, all right, played the game for the triple play. I don't know if we'll keep going. Got to keep playing other stuff for the podcast. But this game is so enjoyable that we're going to keep playing it together. I think there are a few things that make it masterful. I think that one is the communication that you mentioned, Kirk, and just the way that it's designed. Not only are you like, is, do you quickly discover the way that proximity

• 9:06Jason Schreier?

  chat works? At the beginning of the game, it says very explicitly, do not use external voice chat for this game. Use headphones and your mic, and don't put on any other apps, because that just ruins the experience. And while I'm sure there are a couple of people out there who have just been cheekily playing on Discord chat or whatever, I imagine most people would realize that that just ruins the fun and ruins the purpose of this game. And then, of course, the way that you communicate really dictates a lot of how the world functions and how the puzzles function. There was one puzzle where, I think, we'll, we'll probably lightly spoil a few of the puzzles in vague ways, but there was one puzzle that I will

• 9:47Jason Schreier?

  spoil, just warning, warning everybody out there. But, but it has to be mentioned, just because, while trying to explain the appeal of this game, where we all were kind of in separate rooms and had to communicate with one another- Others using these intercoms in order to say what this pattern looked like. And then it gradually dawned on all three of us that each of us was only talking to one other person, that there were one way intercoms and he couldn't talk back. He'd only talk to the other person. Can only imagine what that would be like with like six different rooms or something like that. Fortunately, these are puzzles and then for three, but very fun experience and very fun realizing that and then figuring out how to communicate that at a certain point. I was like Kirk, tell Maddie, I can't, I can't talk to her. She's only talking one way.

• 10:31Jason Schreier?

  It's very fun to go through. But the other big thing that I think really just makes this game special is the way that there is no real tutorializing and the game's kind of puzzles that are dotted all around the landscape of the world and all have the same sort of reward, which is just these kind of like gourds or seeds that you are collecting and using to unlock keys, which then take you open different routes of the game and different fast travel opportunities for you. And I assume eventually you'll get to some big end game state. We're not quite there yet, but the, the thing I think is brilliant is the way, almost like a Destiny raid, which might be the, the closest comparison point here. It doesn't tutorialize, it doesn't tell you, okay, this is the next puzzle.

• 11:16Jason Schreier?

  Here is how you do this. Instead, it just throws you into it and you have to just kind of figure out both parts of the puzzle, the concept and the execution. And the concept can vary a great deal. Sometimes it's like a sports concept where you have to get a basketball into a hoop a bunch of times. Others, other times it's a little clear, it's a little less clear and you're not a hundred percent sure what you have to do. You just see like a, a bunch of signs and a button and a telescope and you just have to piece together what's next. And I think that kind of, that little bit of endorphin rush that comes with both figuring out what you have to do and then also executing on that concept and, and actually pulling off the solution.

• 11:58Jason Schreier?

  I think that's a, a great one to punch that I always appreciate in puzzle games. And you combine that with the multiplayer aspect and the teamwork aspect, and it just makes for a brilliant experience that I have been loving a great deal every time I've played with you two.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think this is our first triple play where we can't quite go around the horn and be like, here's how far I got in the game and here's what I thought of it. And we kind of like delight and surprise each other with what our actual takes on the game are, because we have been playing the game together for pretty much the entire time. I did start playing it with my gaming group, my Thursday gaming group, but then continued on with the two of you after that point. And you two are the only people I've played with because some of the members of the gaming group continued on without us. This is one of those games where you kind of need a core group that is going to continue playing it and just decide like, this is the group I'm playing with.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Because you, you, once you've seen the solution to the puzzles, I mean, you can still enjoy playing it with somebody else a second time. But I, I think when you're in that position, which I was for the very beginning of our time playing it together, you don't want to spoil the puzzle for the other people that you're playing with, because part of the fun of Big Walk is figuring out what the puzzle even is and what the, not only what the solution to the puzzle is, but what it even entails. And that's, I didn't want to spoil it for you guys. So I was kind of glad when we got past the part I'd already played and when the three of us committed, we were like, we're going to play Big Walk together. We're, the three of us are a trio in Big Walk and I think we're going to see it through to the end.

• 13:37Jason Schreier?

  Hope so.

• 13:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that, that I think is, that's something else that it has in common with a Destiny raid that we, Jason and I have experienced this many times on a raid. Maddie, I don't think we ever raided together, right?

• 13:48Speaker 02

  We didn't. I had a different rating group long after you two had stopped rating.

• 13:54Jason Schreier?

  We did a lot of blind raids, like when the raids came out, which is a little bit different of an experience.

• 14:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. And we definitely had the experience of wanting to have a core group where no one in the group knew what to do, because it just like taints it a little bit when there's one person who's biting their tongue. Oh, that button over there. Well, that is interesting, isn't it? And you're like, it's just kind of annoying that you know what to do. So it's just nice when everyone is discovering it and figuring it out and experiencing it together. And it has been nice to have that experience. That said, I do think that this game has a little more replayability than your average puzzle game, only because a lot of times you'll come across a new structure, you know, a new puzzle, and it is usually very clear what you have to do. It doesn't really take that long. It's not so mysterious. And then the execution itself is kind of a big part of the fun.

• 14:45Kirk Hamilton?

  It's just saying, okay, well now we have to figure out how to execute this, you know, how to actually do it. And I could imagine specifically, if the three of us played through the whole game together, and then a little later, if we knew a group of people who got together 12 people to play through this game again, I think that would be incredibly fun. Because something I guess we should say about the way that this game works is when you kind of populate your island, like when you create your server, you pick how many players you have, the puzzles redesign themselves according to how many people there are. So I could imagine playing through this with a lot of people being really fun. It sounds like I was initially not sure how this worked. And then Maddie, you were saying that it is, it goes up to four plus.

• 15:27Kirk Hamilton?

  So four plus is like the biggest group that you can have on the island. So anything above that, that's like as big as the puzzles get, which I guess makes sense that they, they haven't designed it so that there's like a different island for every group size.

• 15:41Jason Schreier?

  Be a little, well, just like imagine the intercom puzzle that I mentioned. Imagine that with 12 people, that would be impossible to actually.

• 15:48Kirk Hamilton?

  It would be so good if there was a version, but.

• 15:50Jason Schreier?

  Very funny, but yeah. Four seems like a more reasonable limit.

• 15:55Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, especially given the small team size, like designing these puzzles to scale up like that. I mean, just the geographic space you would need would be really tricky.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Well, but also I do think there is like a very different experience playing it with two people, which, which I haven't done versus three versus four. Like even that is different. And then also there are the social dynamics in play where you kind of naturally fall into who's going to lead the puzzle, who's going to be in charge of the puzzle. And one person kind of has to go into that role. And I mean, we can get into it, but I feel like that was, that's been like an interesting part of our group dynamic is like each of us figuring out which of us is going to be in charge of each puzzle and, and you know, whether we're going to, when and how we're going to work together.

• 16:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I think that that's part of the sort of team building, you know, corporate retreat part of this game is that without putting a lot of structure on it, it's just allowed us to collaboratively problem solve in a space that isn't triple click. You know, we spent a lot of time problem solving triple click, you know, figuring out programming, deciding scheduling on stuff, that kind of thing. And I think we're very good at that at this point, because we've been doing it a long time. And it's nice to take those dynamics and then put them onto a completely different context, which I do think is the kind of core idea of a corporate retreat for like, you know, any group of coworkers. It's the same thing. Okay, now we're on an island and we're going to do some survivor style games so that we

• 17:23Kirk Hamilton?

  can kind of put different people in different roles and let everybody kind of get to know one another in a different context.

• 17:29Jason Schreier?

  Can we, okay, I want to draw some parallels here. I want to extrapolate a little bit and draw some parallels between Big Walk and making video games. A couple of thoughts. One is that Maddie, your point about everyone, about needing someone to step up and take the leadership role makes me think about that sort of creative collaboration where if you don't have someone stepping up and taking that leadership role can just lead to a disaster. Like someone has to be making the calls and actually making decisions and saying, look, you know what? We can't just discuss this ad infinitum. We have to actually make some decisions here. But two, and this might be even bigger of a thing, is it makes me think about how much harder communication gets the bigger your team is and how much easier it is when it's just three of you trying to coordinate and collaborate and one of you can, one person

• 18:14Jason Schreier?

  can step up at different times and make choices. Imagine trying to do something like Big Walk with a team of 500 people or 1,000 people.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  I mean, even 12 sounds very difficult.

• 18:25Jason Schreier?

  Exactly. I would love to try that, man. We should try to do a group of 12 just for kicks, but like imagine trying to do this sort of like collaborative, creative collaboration. And then obviously in, when you're making a game or doing something, making a movie, making something, a piece of art, it's way, way harder than solving a puzzle in Big Walk. So it's just, just fun, fun to think about those dynamics is applied to much, much trickier things to accomplish.

• 18:52Kirk Hamilton?

  You know what would be really cool would be team competitive Big Walk, where you have a team of 12 and your job is to solve, to open all of the keys as quickly as possible. I guess we can say how far we've made it.

• 19:06Jason Schreier?

  GDQ, speedrunning, Big Walk, speedrunning.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  So like, multiple teams could split up, basically, is what you're proposing, Kirk.

• 19:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Right, so yeah, I'll, yes, that's kind of what I'm picturing. And first off, just to kind of explain the structure of the game a little bit, since we can say how far we are. We have gotten two keys, which is to say, we've filled up two, like, there are these kind of receptacles that you have to fill up.

• 19:26Jason Schreier?

  Three, three keys.

• 19:27Kirk Hamilton?

  With the gourds. Oh, do we have three?

• 19:28Jason Schreier?

  Well, if you count the intro one, we've gotten two after the intro, right? Yeah.

• 19:33Kirk Hamilton?

  Hmm, okay.

• 19:34Jason Schreier?

  We got the red tower and the green tower.

• 19:35Kirk Hamilton?

  You're right, you're right, you're right. Okay, so we're up to three keys. So basically, that's kind of how you measure your progress. You fill up these receptacles with gourds or seeds that you get from solving a puzzle. I think you get, I believe it's five of those, and then you get a key, five or six. And once you have a key, you can use that to kind of unlock something. And Jason, you said fast travel. We should specify that there isn't actually a fast travel where you warp around.

• 19:57Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I guess I meant shortcuts.

• 19:58Kirk Hamilton?

  You unlock travel options, like, they're really cool. Like, there's a monorail that we haven't unlocked, but there's a monorail around the island that will be really cool. And we do unlock it, and we actually just unlocked a chairlift, like a ski, you know, like at a ski resort.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  We have to tell that story about how that went unlocking it.

• 20:14Kirk Hamilton?

  It was very funny. Okay, we'll tell that in a second, but to finish the thought about multiplayer. Yeah, the way that that could work is, you have 12 people, you can do, you can organize that however you want. But with 12 people, given that four plus is the size, you could have three teams of four. And then, the goal is to solve, you know, to get every key maybe, as quickly as possible. And so you would have to be really coordinated and know exactly what you're doing. And the more you do it, the better you would get at it, because you'd know which puzzles you were going to solve. But the puzzles do have some randomized elements, so it requires a fair amount of skill. I would watch that. I think that would be amazing, to watch two teams on separate servers trying to complete the game more quickly. I hope somebody organizes that. Yeah, maybe at GDQ.

• 20:58Jason Schreier?

  You, you know that, like, this is gonna get turned into an Amazon reality show. That's like, Big Walk with Mr. Beast, and it's just like, teams competing.

• 21:07Kirk Hamilton?

  I guess the Beast Games kind of is this. Yeah, that's true.

• 21:09Jason Schreier?

  I guess so. Um, yeah, Matty, you want to tell the story about the ski, the ski lift?

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, so, I don't even remember how we managed to unlock the chairlift. It's, it's one of many things where you do a series of puzzles and then you get a key and that unlocks the chairlift. I think it's just a key. And so, as soon as we unlocked the chairlift, it started, I think it wasn't moving and then it began to move.

• 21:31Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it turned it on.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  And then, Jason immediately hopped onto one of the chairs and started.

• 21:37Jason Schreier?

  Well, no, I had time, I had time before it was moving. I was like, oh, I wonder if I could get on here. Yeah, I didn't realize that it was gonna take me away.

• 21:46Kirk Hamilton?

  That's so funny. Matty, my experience of it was just, we turned it on and we looked and there goes Jason. And we were like, well, there he goes.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  And we were like, what the heck? Jason just left? Okay, but, but let me complete the story. So Jason hops on a chair.

• 22:00Jason Schreier?

  Hold on, hold on, no, I have to tell you an important detail here, which is that I'm holding the blue walkie-talkie. So I'm like, oh, okay, fine, I could just communicate with them, no big deal. And I start talking in the walkie-talkie, and then I hear the response. I hear my own voice, because the yellow walkie-talkie is in my backpack. Someone decided to put that on me for some reason.

• 22:20Kirk Hamilton?

  This is why you don't give one player both of the walkie-talkies.

• 22:23Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, so Jason is unwittingly holding both walkie-talkies.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  As for how that happened, clearly either Kirk's or my fault, although I don't know who's to blame in that scenario. Some of that is just part of, part of the merriment of Big Walk. That just happened somehow. So Jason is riding off into the sunset by himself with both halves of the walkie-talkie. And Kirk and I are like, oh my god, okay. And so we hurriedly, both of us, hop onto a chair, on the chairlift. And we're like, okay, great, we're gonna catch up to Jason. Except, what we don't realize until we're already on the chair, is that we are headed in the complete opposite direction of the chair.

• 22:55Kirk Hamilton?

  I realized that when we got on. I was like, well, there goes Jason, I'm going the other way.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  We're like, going the other way. Did you get on backwards on purpose, Kirk? Because I did not. I was like, I'm just gonna get on a chair.

• 23:05Kirk Hamilton?

  I didn't think of it as backwards. I, yes, so I should say, like, when I'm playing this game, I am actually very willing to embrace separation.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, this is Kirk has a somewhat chaotic approach to Big Walk that I swiftly learned.

• 23:20Kirk Hamilton?

  I don't think, I don't see it as chaos, but I do think it's, it's really fun to embrace the, the friction in this game. I think it's fun to put yourself in positions where, to put yourself into situations where you've been separated.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Which means, like, seconds into the game, Kirk was saying things like, I'd like to get lost. What happens if I get lost?

• 23:39Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, because I think that's really cool, because in the game, they've built all these systems to make up for that. When we were playing, for example, and Russ Ruschek dropped into our game, he was then, he fired a flare up from the tower where he was. And we could see the flare from where we were. And then he was on a PA, kind of saying, hey, guys, I'm up here. And I think those systems are all really cool. If you play the game perfectly and are always a little unit, you don't actually get to use a lot of the systems that they've built in. And I like the idea of trying to solve a puzzle, you know, in a little bit, a little bit more difficult way. Like, for example, there was one puzzle where there are a series of symbols far away from a tower. On the tower, you have a telescope, or a series of telescopes that are pointed, you know, at the different locations, you know, maybe half a mile away.

• 24:24Kirk Hamilton?

  So one player can go and look at those shapes. And then, the shapes that they're trying to communicate are actually gestures. So the player who's gone to look at the, you know, whatever, the gesture in question, they can like, do, they hold their arm up in the air and one arm to the side and crouch. And that sort of tells you, okay, we need to do the crouching, arm up in the air symbol for this first one. So, you can do the whole thing just communicating with gestures. Or, as we wound up doing it, you can do the whole thing with the walkie-talkie. So we went and got the walkie-talkies, and then, I was actually going out and looking at them and setting down the walkie-talkie and doing the gesture. But halfway through, I realized, oh, I could just tell them, oh, it's like a guy crouching with his arm in the air. And the walkie-talkie makes it way easier.

• 25:05Kirk Hamilton?

  To me, it's kind of more fun to try to do it the slightly harder way, to work out these elaborate methods of communication, because I just think that's interesting. And when Jason went the opposite direction on the chairlift, I definitely thought, oh, cool, he's gonna go that way, we'll go this way. One way or another, we're gonna meet back up, like, it'll be fine, but I'm kind of curious what's gonna happen when we now go the other direction.

• 25:23Jason Schreier?

  Okay, but you guys have to finish, you have to finish the story. You gotta finish the story, guys.

• 25:27Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, so that, continue, Matty. There is a little more to the story.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, I am none the wiser of any of this.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  I'm none the wiser, apparently. I'm the third party in this story who just got on a chair, following Kirk, being like, okay, we're gonna catch up to Jason. Only to realize that Kirk had apparently intentionally gotten on a chair going the opposite way, which I guess I should have known would happen. So then we, we continue along, we continue along, Kirk and I talking about how now we've been separated and we don't even have the walkie-talkies anymore. And eventually, we get to kind of a stopping point for the chairlift, like a point where we can stop. And then I think, I'm trying to remember what we did. Jason, how did we get back in touch with you? Did we use the PA system?

• 26:07Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, so I got off, and I looked around, and we were at a, you know, a kind of a new high point. And then I see, right next to the chairlift, a walkie-talkie. Because, you know, there are items in this game that you just find around, and you find copies of them around. So there's a, a laser pointer, for example, that you can use to point at things far away, that you can actually see from a great distance. Or binoculars, or, you know, and so on and so on, these various useful tools. And there was a walkie-talkie up at the top of this point. So I just picked it up, and then I pressed the send button, and I was like, Jason? And then Jason's like, hey, what's up?

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Where are you guys? Yeah.

• 26:43Kirk Hamilton?

  Which was just an incredible moment. It was like a little confluence that feels like an amazing coincidence, but also, I think, actually displays how smartly this game is made. Like, it was actually a moment of design where they thought of that, and they put the walkie-talkie at that point, thinking it is possible that someone will wind up here and want to communicate with someone else elsewhere on the island, because this will be their first time riding on the chairlift, since it's one stopover from where you turn the chairlift on. So it was like a little hand of the developer moment that then led to this delightful moment of, you know, us getting back in touch and saying, Jason, oh, where are you? And he's like, oh, I went this way, I'm gonna come around and get on the chairlift, and then eventually, he, he came to where we were.

• 27:19Jason Schreier?

  I feel like you need to approach it like you're going to Disneyland with small children, and you have to be like, if we get lost, we're all gonna meet at this statue. If we get lost, there's nobody to ask for help, so you gotta come meet us here.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not like Disneyland of that sense. There's no, like, professionals standing around who will be like, okay, I'm gonna help you find your mommy. You're like, out in the pseudo-Australian wilderness, the outback, and you, you only have walkie-talkies to find. But there are all these other tools there. There are the walkie-talkies, there are flares, and there's also this massive PA system that we described Russ using, which are all different means of explaining to somebody where you are. But, again, there's no fast travel, so I think we just waited for you to come back, Jason.

• 28:03Jason Schreier?

  Well, you got, we had the walkie-talkie, but I was already, I knew you were coming back. I had already turned around, because I saw you guys were going in the opposite direction. So, um, the other thing, another, or, another thing, not the other thing, but another thing that I find very appealing about this game is that it's very easy to play in short bursts. And so, like, for me personally, I can only play after I put my kids to bed, which is like 8:00 or 8:30 at night, my time. And I like to go to bed around 10:00. Matty, you like to turn off screens before 10:00. And so, we wind up only having like an hour or an hour and a half to play, which is perfect, because we can like, go in, knock out a few puzzles, and then just call it a day.

• 28:41Jason Schreier?

  It's almost, that's one area in which it is much better than Destiny and its interminable raids, where we really, I had to stop playing that game when I had children. From part of, like, that's one of the big reasons, is because you could spend five hours just knocking your head against a raid. And then when you, next time you came back, you basically had to start from the beginning if it was, the weekly reset had happened since then. So, yeah, um, in this, it's, it's very easy to just kind of jump in. We are finding the thanks to shortcuts and just like, a little bit of hiking, it's really not so hard to get where we were. Even though you don't, you don't just, when you, when you log out of the game, you don't just come back in where you left off.

• 29:21Jason Schreier?

  You come back in in the starting area, with whatever items that were on your person, just kind of tucked away in the lost and found part of that area.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  You do have to actually go to the lost and found and pick those items back up.

• 29:32Jason Schreier?

  We forgot, uh, one of the times that we played. But yeah, thanks to these shortcuts that we're unlocking, including the first big one, which like, gets you right from the tutorial into like, that main, main area. It's really not so bad, and plus, it's just kind of chill to walk around that world anyway. Isn't that the whole point, to go for a big walk? So yeah, I mean, not, going in and knocking out two or three puzzles a night, or a session, I think is like, a really good cadence. I don't know how long it's gonna take us to actually finish this thing at that pace, but I don't really care that much. It's, it's been fun.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll see. I also appreciate that unlike Destiny Raids, there aren't always time-bound puzzles. There are a few puzzles with like a ticking time bomb of some kind where it's like, okay, we have to finish this in 10 seconds or 30 seconds, or whatever the case may be. But most of the puzzles, you can really just stand around and be like, huh, let's figure this out. Let's like, take some time and really talk out how we want to approach this, especially if we're gonna have to contort our avatars' bodies in some type of silly way. And I just like that. It has a much more chill vibes, hangout type of an energy. And there are also parts of the game where the point is just to hang out. Like, we've passed a few of them already where there's

• 30:48Speaker 02

  just nice music playing and like, there's no puzzle there. It's just like a bunch of radios set up, just playing, playing a cool song. And the whole point is that you just sit in the chairs and you listen to a nice song. It's like, that is another design ethos for the game that emphasizes this hangout vibe.

• 31:05Kirk Hamilton?

  I think that's really the thing that makes the game so distinct for me. It's one of the biggest distinguishers of this, if comparing this game to any other puzzle game or co-op game, is how playful it is. It just feels like going to a big playground with your friends and having a fun time. It so encourages this playground sense of just experimentation and joy. There are puzzles, but also, everything is just very funny and fun. You know, you pick things up and drop them and they roll all around. You can kind of troll one another. You can pick a character up and throw them off a cliff. You know, when you fall off of a cliff, if you fall too far, you drop whatever you're carrying and your like, googly eyes start spinning around. There are a lot of really

• 31:46Kirk Hamilton?

  funny little character animations that are built into the game. Everything just feels like playful. It feels like it's embracing this feeling of play. And that's actually something that a lot of multiplayer games don't do, because they're so scaffolded around rewards and punishments, you know, around friction and kind of pushing you. Like, the low-level frictions of this game, you know, you can only carry one thing. It's really easy to drop it. You fall and like, lose your way. You can get separated. All of those little things are very constant. Like, there is a lot of low-level friction in the game. But the high-level friction, what are the stakes? You know, are we gonna lose a lot of time? Is this really difficult? Is, you know, is there a lot of pressure on

• 32:27Kirk Hamilton?

  me to do, you know, to successfully solve this puzzle in this given moment? The high-level friction is very low. Like, there's not very much of it. Even if you have to start all the way over, like we've said, the island isn't as big as it looks. You really quickly start to be able to just get wherever you're going in a few minutes. And then, even when you have to take a little while, as we've also said, you wind up just sort of talking. And the fact that there's proximity chat and you have to stay close to people to talk really changes the energy of the game for me. I mean, that's the other thing that I'm super struck by with this game. Proximity chat is not new. It's been in games for a long time. But I am really struck by how much of an impact it has on this game and how dramatically it changes the experience of playing it.

• 33:12Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, it's funny. I was talking to Steven Totillo, who I just saw this morning. We were talking about Big Walk and he said he hadn't played it because he would want to play it with his kids, but there's no couch co-op. And I was like, no, Steven, this is not a game that could ever have couch co-op. That's just not how it's designed. You need that in order for the puzzles to work, in order for the vibe to work. Everything around this game is just built around that system. Kirk, we did one thing that you were like, oh, I gotta tell this story on the podcast, which I'm gonna remind you of now, which is that one night, we were just walking somewhere, like, probably just had started, walking for the tutorial to like, our first, the first place we wanted to go. And I was like, uh, I was like, shit, my daughter is still awake. I gotta tell her on the monitor

• 33:57Jason Schreier?

  to be quiet. Kirk, can you, can one of you carry me? And so, one of you carried me so I didn't, so I could put the controller down and like, tell my daughter to go to sleep on the monitor.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was amazing.

• 34:08Kirk Hamilton?

  And wonderfully, we could hear you talking to your daughter, you know, as we're carrying you, coming out of Jason's little guys, you know, just you saying some nice things to your daughter.

• 34:17Jason Schreier?

  Which is another brilliant mechanic. There's so, so this game has been in development for seven years, or at least the Untitled Goose game came out seven years ago. So, the last game came out seven years ago. And the amount of like, polish, including things like that, just like, aspects of the game where like, if one of your friends is, I don't know, away from their keyboard or something, you can just pick them up and walk for them. That sort of stuff is so smart and so well-designed. I really love it. I'm really, I'm so impressed by this game for that and many other things.

• 34:48Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, the polish is definitely noteworthy. Even though you would look at it, I think people have had this discussion of, is this game Friendslop? You know, is this the same as something like Peak? Because looking at it, you can kind of see an aesthetic similarity to some very mechanically simple, just fun multiplayer games. But then actually playing it, and leaving that debate aside, because whatever, like, actually playing it, there's a lot of polish in it. And it's, it's polish of a certain kind. It's a very thoughtfully made game. They've thought through so many things. You're in a very carefully and thoughtfully arranged space. All these little things, like Jason, you were talking about, when you talk into the walkie-talkie, you then heard yourself coming out of your backpack.

• 35:30Kirk Hamilton?

  That's because your voice comes out of the walkie-talkie. And that experience of talking into a walkie-talkie and then hearing myself, when, you know, Maddie has the walkie-talkie and she's 20 feet away, and I can hear a little bit of my voice, that really takes me back to being a kid and playing with walkie-talkies. Because when I was a kid, that's what made walkie-talkies cool, was you could talk to your friend when they were 100 feet, 200 feet away from you, and you couldn't otherwise. And because the game imposes that limitation, and because they've so carefully implemented the sound design so that your, your voice comes right out of the walkie-talkie, like, if you drop the walkie-talkie off a cliff while you're talking in it, into it, and it goes by someone else, they'll hear your voice coming out of the walkie-talkie as it bounces along. And there

• 36:12Kirk Hamilton?

  are all these other little bits of polish like that, that really make it all kind of feel very sturdy.

• 36:17Jason Schreier?

  It feels like a Nintendo game. That's, that's the thing. Like, you're playing a Friendslop game, and I haven't, granted, I haven't played a ton of them, but they feel a little bit more like you're playing something rough and just kind of amateur, I would say. Not in a bad way necessarily, but just, it feels like something that was made pretty quickly. Like, there's bugs, there's glitches, and that's part of the fun of it. You play this, this is not a buggy game. There, I haven't experienced any glitches or anything like that. It feels very polished, and that level of detail and polish just feels very Nintendo. It feels like, like, this could very, if this had different skins and maybe slightly different art direction, it could totally feel like something that Nintendo put out for the Switch 2 as like, a weird experiment.

• 36:55Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, and Untitled Goose Game felt that way as well. It had that, it could have just been a silly concept indie game. And, but then, when you really played it, it was remarkably polished and thoughtful. It had all these little unique bespoke mechanics. And especially when that game came out on Switch, you know, I just, I remember playing that with my nieces. And it just felt, it felt of a piece with the Nintendo Switch. It felt totally at home there.

• 37:18Jason Schreier?

  And by the way, I just want to say real quick, we haven't gotten to any of the like, end game stuff yet, but from everything I've heard, from friends who have played it, from reading articles online, the ending just knocks it out of the park. And there's like, a ton of like, really tough stuff in the end game that I'm really excited for the three of us to get to and

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's gonna get harder, allegedly. So, we have more to go that will be more difficult for us, I'm sure.

• 37:38Jason Schreier?

  I'm very stoked for that.

• 37:39Kirk Hamilton?

  And to quickly even tie that to Untitled Goose Game, that was also the case for Untitled Goose Game. We're playing that game. I thought it was really neat. And it was the finale of that game that made me, that really elevated it for me, where I was like, oh.

• 37:51Jason Schreier?

  Man, I haven't played it. I feel like I should.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  What?

• 37:53Kirk Hamilton?

  You really should. It's short and it, and

• 37:55Jason Schreier?

  I gotta get it on my, it runs on Steam Deck, right? It runs on Steam?

• 37:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, yeah, for sure. Yes. And it's at the end where you realize, like, oh, the people making this game are something special. This team, like, really has something going. And I really find it wonderful that they then took their same design sensibilities and put it towards something so different, but also so much more ambitious. And so, so cool that they've made a multiplayer game that stands apart in 2026. I mean, that is a really remarkable feat. And it's of a piece with Untitled Goose Game in a lot of ways. And it's just nice to see that artistic continuity.

• 38:31Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, and it just fits into this mold that I think a lot of the Friendslop games too fit into, a lot of the Friendslop games fit into also where people just want more experiences, where they're just like, being social with their friends and getting together with their friends. And to kind of, to do another extrapolation, to do another zoom out, as I might say, I think that like, one of the biggest problems that a lot of these trend-chasing service games run into is that they're all trying to do sweaty PvP, just really intense stuff, especially PvP. Whereas what players tend to want a lot more of is just a place to hang out with their friends, such as this, such as the Friendslups, that places where a lot of the point is just like, getting together and goofing off with people,

• 39:16Jason Schreier?

  not necessarily playing this game where you have to do this daily grind in order to get your PvP medals or whatever.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wanted to talk about Peak a bit, because I actually, I really enjoy Peak, but I think that this game has some benefits that Peak doesn't have, which is part of why people are comparing them, because they also have a lot of similarities. They're both hiking games, they're both team-based proximity chat games, they both have really adorable, non-human, super colorful avatars, and like, a limited amount of items that help you navigate the world, all of that. And Peak has so many

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Benefits that are just oriented around hanging out. Like you get to the top of a, of a mountain and you just roast marshmallows together. It's very Outer Wilds. There's like this moment where the point is just that you sit down around a campfire and you eat a marshmallow. And like, just having those touches in a game, I think, have become really important to people and probably always were. But like you said, Jason, I think now it's seemingly indie developers that are realizing this and kind of speaking to this need that people have where it's like, well, actually I was playing Destiny because I just wanted to talk to my friends. I didn't like have some really intense need to like be competing or like even doing the timed aspects and stressful aspects of a raid. The point of the raid being fun was that we were all working together and like all meeting at the same time and same place virtually to do something.

• 40:38Jason Schreier?

  Well, I just want to step in for one sec. I think that the time, the stressful aspects can actually be really cool, too.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  They can, and they can also be like rewarding in their own way.

• 40:46Jason Schreier?

  Well, that's what I'm saying. What I'm saying is more that just, I think what Destiny had that was special is the PVE aspect and co-op aspect of it. And I think a lot of service games go for, well, all of, all of Destiny, other than the crucible, all of Destiny is, is co-op. And I think what a lot of service games try and then fail to do is just be competitive, PvP. And that, I think, is, is not the market, that's not what the market wants right now. That's not what people want. People want much more this kind of experience where they get to hang out with their friends, whether it's stressful or not. And I think both types of game can work well.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:21Kirk Hamilton?

  It's funny, Jason, it's like you forgot about Gambit, the PVE VP game mode that they added.

• 41:27Jason Schreier?

  That counts as co-op when you're talking to your friends and competing.

• 41:30Kirk Hamilton?

  But there was a PvP element. And I do think that some, some of these games try to incorporate some PvP element just because that seems like it'll add more replayability or more variance.

• 41:40Jason Schreier?

  That's the biggest thing.

• 41:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Where actually people just like the PVE. Like you don't need any PvP at all, and a lot of people are happy with that.

• 41:47Jason Schreier?

  Well, okay, so that's, that the replayability is the biggest thing, right? Like PVE is a lot more expensive to make because you have to make all this stuff. It's very difficult to make it feel more replayable and it's like the same strikes you're doing over and over again. Destiny pulled it off. Most games cannot pull it off. Which is why even a game like this could never be a service game because you can't play this forever. At a certain point, you finish all of the content that's in there and then it's what? Got to wait for DLC or something. So when I say that like this trend chasing service game, I'm not necessarily saying that a service game could be something like this, but I think the market and the appetite for people out there, when I say the market, I sound a little business analyst-y.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  He's sounding like a CEO.

• 42:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Been working at Bloomberg for a while.

• 42:26Jason Schreier?

  I know, it's true. I guess what people want, I think, and what people are really craving, especially since COVID, especially in this modern era, is just ways to bond across games. And I think this just really appeals to that and so does Peak and so does Mechachameleon and many other games that have been really popular in recent years.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. And just to echo that, I think one of the only real downsides with Peak is that it's running up against that problem. Like it's why it has the procedurally generated mountain, so that it's different every time. But it actually ends up still feeling really samey to have to climb a very similar looking mountain over and over again to get to the next peak because it's, you have to climb the peaks in order every time. You can't skip ahead and be like, okay, we've gotten past the first mountain and now I want to climb the next peak and start where we left off. There's just not that same functionality in Peak to do that. Whereas Big Walk actually speaks directly to that and is significantly more bespoke because it doesn't have procedurally generated anything that I know of that we've found so far.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  I don't think that exists in this game. It is like very specific puzzles and it has an ending. And that, I think, is interesting. I think it's an interesting choice.

• 43:39Jason Schreier?

  Well, because Peak was made in less than a year and Big Walk was made in six years. That's the, that's the key here, right? Is that Big Walk, the reason it's all handcrafted is because the people took the time. And the House House was in a position after the success of Untitled Goose Game, which I think sold like a million copies in its first few months after release, that they could just keep working on this game as long as they wanted. So different, it's kind of the apples and oranges there in terms of dev timeline. But yeah, that's why this sort of thing can't really be recreated is because it takes six years and a lot of money to be able to create this bespoke puzzles everywhere in a world this big with that many cool puzzles. It's really difficult to pull off. It's really a monumental achievement that they did this.

• 44:21Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. I mean, six years, a lot of money and these four specific people.

• 44:24Jason Schreier?

  Yes, and a lot of talent.

• 44:25Kirk Hamilton?

  I think this game is very much the, it's not just the talent, it's the specific philosophy, the creative philosophy of this group of people. I think it's really cool that that is still possible, that this, that a group of people with a specific and as it turns out, wonderful artistic philosophy are able to find the success and create the things that they want to create. That makes me feel really good, just given how much bleak news there is in the world of video games. And it wasn't because some like Saudi billionaire gave them a bunch of money. It's because they made a good game that was successful and broke through and now they've done it again. I find that really cool. And yeah, I mean, the, I think that there is something about a playground that makes you feel very cared for.

• 45:07Kirk Hamilton?

  I think that when we are on a piece of civic infrastructure, like a play structure that has been built by someone designed to be safe yet fun, built with the very specific intention of giving someone, specifically children, a like place to play. I think that that is like a very cool and special thing, that it exists in our world thanks to civic investment in public spaces, you know, thanks to the play structure at the park that all the kids can play on. And that's something that I think, at least for me, is very deeply ingrained in me, that I see a, a structure like that and I just think, how cool. Someone made this for me and now I'm here and I can use it. And that's something that this game really captures and that it would not capture if it were procedurally generated.

• 45:52Kirk Hamilton?

  It wouldn't be the same. The feeling of like, oh, here's a little puzzle. This was made just for us. And they really, the whole thing looks that way. And I don't think that it's a coincidence that the architecture in this game, its design language is very much civic architecture, civic play structure. It looks like a playground you would find in a city in Melbourne or in Bloomington, Indiana, where I grew up or wherever, you know? It has that kind of universal design language. And I think that that's a really cool part of this game. It's a subtle but pervasive part of its aesthetic that I find very appealing.

• 46:23Jason Schreier?

  You can even slide.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  You can slide.

• 46:26Kirk Hamilton?

  You can, that's true.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  You can slide down the slide or down a cliff edge.

• 46:30Jason Schreier?

  A slope.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Whichever.

• 46:32Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. Well, my final thought on this game, I suppose, is one, one observation I wanted to share and didn't find room for earlier. And that is just, one of the most striking things I have found about Big Walk is the feeling of briefly walking away from your friends and just standing in the quiet outdoors. And that is a remarkable feeling. It's something that can only exist with the contrast of the chattering group that you're normally a part of. And it's something that I've felt many times when on a walk with a group of friends in nature or when backpacking with people. Anytime I'm out in nature, walking with people is, it's nice and you're on a walk and you're talking in the way that you talk when you walk, because I do think that's a particular type of talking. You know, anytime I really want to have a good conversation with someone, I'll say,

• 47:16Kirk Hamilton?

  let's go on a walk, just because when you're walking and talking something, it's good for your brain. So you're having that experience with people and then maybe it happens accidentally. They went left and you didn't realize, but there will be these moments in Big Walk where you're just briefly alone with your thoughts and the sound of, you know, nature and the world that you're in. And I think that is also a really special thing about this game. And it's, you know, kind of the culmination of a lot of the design ideas that they've made, in particular, the way that proximity chat works, but also that polish, the way the audio fades in and you'll hear just murmurs, but you can't quite hear, make out what people are saying as you draw closer. The sound design, that's so key to this game. And it's really another magical thing that this game manages to do over and over again.

• 48:00Kirk Hamilton?

  There were multiple times where I'm talking to Jason and Maddie and of course, we're all three very loquacious, talkative people and we're trying to talk through some puzzle. And then I'll go off and just be on my own for a minute. And it's really wonderful. It's a, it's a nice contrast. So one more little bit of magic that this game captures.

• 48:16Jason Schreier?

  Very cute. Yeah, my final thought, I mean, I really love it. I was trying to think like, is there any kind of critique I have of this game? And I legitimately can't think of anything. Like maybe that'll change when we get to the end game. Maybe I'll be like, oh, this is so frustrating, this last part or something like that.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe the hard puzzles will get us.

• 48:33Jason Schreier?

  Like when this, when it comes to a game that like has a clear vision and executes on that vision impeccably, like I really can't think of anything that I don't like about this game or that it does wrong in, in any way. It's really remarkable. It's really quite an accomplishment.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. And I think even the moments of what one might call tediousness are part of the ethos of the game as well, in the sense that it's about just being mindful and walking and hanging out. Where it's like, yeah, oh, I have to go all the way down there and get that item. And it's like, well, yeah, that's part of the game, is that you have to go all the way down there and figure out how you're going to get back and not get lost and so on. Or getting lost is maybe part of it as well. And that's all, that's Big Walk, baby. We're big walking.

• 49:20Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, man, that's Big Walk, baby. And as we've said, I think the greatest endorsement of this game is that we're all going to go play it in a few hours.

• 49:28Jason Schreier?

  In three hours from now.

• 49:29Kirk Hamilton?

  And I can't wait. I'm, I'm really, I'm really excited.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  We're all going to play it. We're going to eat dinner and then we're going to play Big Walk.

• 49:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, we are. Nice. All right. Well, that's Big Walk, a wonderful game. Let's take a break and then we'll be back for one more thing.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  International Waters is back, baby.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Do you like fun, silly conversations? Do you like fun, silly games? We got them both and it's on International Waters. I am the host, Dave Holmes. This is a panel show that pits American and British comics against each other in a lively and hilarious competition. What is gentleman's relish? Who is bag puss? Why is the Oscar Mayer Wiener Mobile so emotionally resonant? And why doesn't American cheese have its own anthem? Get the answers and be left with numerous questions about that and so much more nonsense and/or codswallow twice a month here on International Waters. You can catch International Waters on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 50:29Speaker 04

  Say, what's the trivia show where dreams come true?

• 50:32Speaker 05

  It's gotta be Go Fact Yourself.

• 50:34Speaker 04

  Legend in the house. We quiz celebrity contestants about topics they love.

• 50:40Speaker 05

  Then bring out surprise experts.

• 50:42Speaker 04

  To delight and amaze. And then finally, tell us why you know and love the lyrics to the song Knockin' Boots by Candyman.

• 50:48Speaker 05

  Joining us tonight is a rapper and producer. It's Candyman.

• 50:55Speaker 04

  This is among the greatest moments of my life.

• 50:59Speaker 05

  This is one of mine, too. I love it. That's Go Fact Yourself.

• 51:02Speaker 04

  Twice a month, every month.

• 51:04Speaker 05

  Here on Maximum Fun.

• 51:08Kirk Hamilton?

  And we're back for one more thing. Maddie, kick us off.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Sure. So Deena and I watched this television show this week that just surprised and delighted us so, so much. It's called The Other Bennett Sister, and it is like a spinoff of Pride and Prejudice, for lack of a better way to describe it, as in the famous Jane Austen novel, which has been adapted and retold so many times, countless times, many of which I have seen myself. I'm a big fan of the Keira Knightley adaptation personally, but I think they're all wonderful. Fire Island is like another modern retelling of it that I talked about on the show a while back and thought was really great. But this version of the story, it's based on a novel that I haven't read, but the novel is entirely from the perspective of Mary,

• 51:58Speaker 02

  who's the fifth sister who does not get married over the course of the events of the book and is largely forgotten by the plot and pretty underdescribed, I would say. She's kind of like the nerdy one, for lack of a better description.

• 52:12Kirk Hamilton?

  She's the and Peggy, the Peggy Skyler.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  She's like the odd one out, and she's like described as plain, essentially, and like sort of unremarkable as compared to all of her sisters. And so the first couple of episodes of the show, I was like, oh, I'm not sure if I'm gonna love this because the first two episodes basically recap the entirety of Pride and Prejudice just from Mary's perspective. And I was like, oh, are we gonna redo like this entire story? Like, I really know all the plot beats, and I'm just not sure that I'm up for this. But then there's another eight episodes that continues on after all the events of Pride and Prejudice have concluded, and Mary is just still living with her parents and what is going to become of her.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  And she gets her own entire sequence of events and her own love triangle and story and like way of finding herself. And kind of her relationship with her sisters gets redefined. The actress who plays her and the actress who they have playing Lizzie Bennet, both of them are really wonderful. And it's like a really interesting reconceptualizing of how one might perceive the Bennett sisters if one were maybe not quite as exciting and charming as those other four women are. And I thought it was really wonderful, and I just really ended up enjoying the hell out of it. So I recommend it. If you like Pride and Prejudice, give it a shot. I would say try to stick with it until the third, because then that's where like the quote unquote new stuff starts

• 53:39Speaker 02

  and like a completely new story is told about all of these characters and like their continued lives and what might happen after the events of the book are done, that I think is actually pretty true to what the characters might be like, and I enjoyed it a lot. So yeah, it's called The Other Bennett Sister, and here is how you could watch it because that was a point of contention for us in our household. It is on Amazon Prime seemingly, but they'll get ya. The first episode's free, and then you have to sign up for this service called BritBox, which we did do because we were like, well, we want to see what happens. So you can sign up for that if you want. They have a seven day free trial. And yes, I did put a reminder in my phone to cancel it. So you can watch it for free if you already have Amazon Prime

• 54:22Speaker 02

  and you sign up for this additional service called BritBox.

• 54:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice. Yeah, I think BritBox is its own thing owned by the BBC, and you're kind of subscribing through Amazon.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you can also pay for it separately. Yeah.

• 54:34Kirk Hamilton?

  The way you can watch like others, like separate streaming services through Amazon, and you're kind of getting it through.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how we chose to do it. If you already have a BritBox subscription, then you don't even have to worry about it, and you're probably watching BBC content all the time on there. But we are not really doing that in our house, so that's how we went about not paying for it.

• 54:51Kirk Hamilton?

  We're really living in an age of this kind of adaptation. This makes me think of Circe, the Odyssey story, you know, telling a side story, a side character's story.

• 54:58Jason Schreier?

  I mean, really, it all comes back to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

• 55:03Kirk Hamilton?

  Probably the OG. Yes, that's true.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  I mean, I love Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. That is one of the most fun movies and stories. Tom Soper, genius.

• 55:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Has anyone ever done this with Little Women? Speaking of famous stories of families with lots of different, interesting female characters, I could imagine a Little Women variant, you know, where you get one of the less, the non-Joe characters.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that'd be interesting to see.

• 55:27Jason Schreier?

  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the original play, came out in 1874. Wow. Wow. I wonder if that was the first edition of someone being like, let's take these minor characters and tell the story from their perspective.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Oh, surely not. That's gotta be something that's appealed to humans since time immemorial. That feels like, you know, like even in the Odyssey era.

• 55:48Jason Schreier?

  Since time immemorial, Maddy Myers quoting The Sopranos.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  You're right. You're right.

• 55:55Jason Schreier?

  Hey, so which business is a recession?

• 55:57Speaker 02

  Speaking of spinoffs, check out what we're talking about at MaximumFun.com/join for the spinoff of Triple Click, the bonus feed for Triple Click.

• 56:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Right, right. The Sopranos podcast that we spun off of our main show. Well, that sounds really cool. Jason, what is your one more thing?

• 56:10Jason Schreier?

  You joke, but I feel like we should do a Sopranos podcast where we just do every episode because we could totally, totally break it down.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  We practically did do that, though.

• 56:19Jason Schreier?

  I know, but I feel like we still had so much to talk about, even after hours and hours.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  You just do it all again.

• 56:24Jason Schreier?

  My one more thing is a TV show called Homeland. So on Saturday, I found myself home alone without my children for various reasons, or my wife. So I was home alone for the evening, and I got some work done. And then I was like, I'm just gonna put on a show and zone out. And I was like, oh, there's this show on Hulu. I was browsing through Hulu. Oh, Homeland. I've heard of that. Everyone has told me for years that it's good, but for some reason I've never watched it. And so I watched the pilot of this show, and oh my God, holy crap. Maybe the best pilot of television I've ever seen, certainly up there.

• 56:56Kirk Hamilton?

  It starts strong, is what I'll say for Homeland. It starts very strong.

• 56:59Jason Schreier?

  Everybody, everything I've heard is that the first season is amazing, and then it all just goes downhill from there.

• 57:04Kirk Hamilton?

  I'd say you could just stop after the first season.

• 57:05Jason Schreier?

  That's what a lot of people have told me.

• 57:06Kirk Hamilton?

  Actually, wait, specifically, I would say, watch like the first two or three episodes of the second season and then stop.

• 57:11Jason Schreier?

  Okay, good to know.

• 57:13Kirk Hamilton?

  I know it's a very specific recommendation, but that's my memory.

• 57:15Jason Schreier?

  We'll discuss this. We can discuss this off the air because I'm still in the thick of season one. The plot of this show, if you're not familiar, it was, it came out in, it started in 2011, the first season. And it starts Claire Danes, who is an incredible actress, as this bipolar CIA agent. And I mentioned that she's bipolar because that's an important part of the story is that we see her manic episodes unfolding, and Claire Danes plays them masterfully. And she is given a tip at the very beginning of the show that a prisoner of war that is coming back, that has been rescued, an American prisoner of war who was in captivity, has turned, is now working for Al Qaeda.

• 57:58Jason Schreier?

  And so she thinks that this guy, this guy Brody, played by Damian Lewis of Billions fame, I guess Billions came after this, but still, that's where I know him.

• 58:11Kirk Hamilton?

  At the time, he was Damian Lewis of Band of Brothers fame.

• 58:13Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I know him from Billions.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  He's from Billions.

• 58:16Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, that's where I know him. That's where all three of us have gotten to know him over the years. But anyway, so Damian Lewis plays Brody, and it is left unclear. I won't spoil everything that happens in the pilot, but like throughout the season, you're just like, well, is he turned? Is he not turned? Is he turned? Is he not turned? And it's kind of an ongoing question. And you watch the show from Claire Danes's perspective and try to piece together what actually happened and saw a thwart this big overarching terrorist plot that is going on at the same time. And man, what a show. So one of the producers on the show is Howard Gordon, who is a producer on 24, and it's definitely got some of that kind of 24 pacing to it

• 58:58Jason Schreier?

  because 24 was a show where it was just compulsive, it was propulsive, addictive to watch because it was paced so well and just had so many twists and turns in every episode that you really, it was hard to look away while you were watching. And the show has some of that same energy, but I think is a little bit smarter and certainly gives you more to chew on than 24, which is a little bit more popcorn TV viewing. This, I think, is certainly, has more calories than 24 does. And God, I'm really enjoying it. I'm like almost done with the first season. I've been binging it because I was like so hooked by that pilot that I'm really glad that I happened to randomly stumble upon it and watch it.

• 59:43Jason Schreier?

  Apparently, there are eight seasons. I find it, I don't know if I buy that like all of them are bad. I don't know. I guess I'll see what happens after I watch season one. But yeah, I mean, I certainly believe that it goes downhill after this just because this one first season is so good and tightly constructed that it's very easy to imagine them losing the plot afterwards and not knowing where to go with it. But I don't even know how it ends, so don't say anything. I'm very excited to finish this first season, and then we'll see how it goes from here. But yeah, what a performance. Great performances by, of course, Damian Lewis and Claire Danes, but also Mandy Patinkin, who plays Claire Danes's mentor, Saul.

• 1:00:23Kirk Hamilton?

  He's really a highlight for me. I love Patinkin in this show.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  That's awesome. I love him.

• 1:00:26Jason Schreier?

  Fantastic. But yeah, just a lot of great performances and a lot of just really fun writing and twists and turns. And I have really enjoyed watching it. Good show.

• 1:00:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice. That's a blast from the past. I remember that first season thinking like, wow, this show's on fire. And then, yeah, I mean, I lost steam on it very quickly, so I actually don't have an informed take on those subsequent Billions seasons. I just was like, oh, okay, I'm not gonna watch this anymore.

• 1:00:52Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I wonder if it's one of those that just has a bad second season and then gets better. I don't know. I'll look into it a little bit.

• 1:00:57Kirk Hamilton?

  That is not my sense of things, but I'll be curious what you think.

• 1:00:59Jason Schreier?

  Because there have been shows, like Friday Night Lights is the best example of a show that had a really good first season, terrible second season, but then really good three, five, three, four, and five. So.

• 1:01:09Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. My sense is that Homeland is not one of those, but I'm not sure.

• 1:01:12Jason Schreier?

  Fair enough. I guess we'll find out.

• 1:01:14Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I'm looking forward to when you finish. We can talk about it. So Maddie, have you seen Homeland? I know that Jason and I are talking about it. Okay.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  I haven't. I similarly had always intended to watch it. And I remember all the advertisements and Claire Danes beautiful, mysterious facial expressions and billboards and so on many years ago. I just never got around to it.

• 1:01:31Jason Schreier?

  She is so good, especially when she is like going through these manic episodes. She's incredible. And it really feels like, I don't know, I'd be curious if anyone out there like suffers from bipolar disorder and has thoughts on this. I would be curious to hear it.

• 1:01:45Kirk Hamilton?

  This podcast you were talking about last week.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. We gotta get savant guard on the case.

• 1:01:49Jason Schreier?

  That would be interesting because it really feels like an authentic, like sympathetic portrayal of like what it's like going through that, those kind of episodes because she usually she takes these this medicine, but then there's like a period in the first season where she's off her medicine for, for reasons that are explained in the show and, and you see her going through it. And it's really, it's tough. You really empathize with her character. So yeah, I'd be curious to hear from people.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  I mean, the good thing about watching a show from 2011, Jason, is that I am sure you could Google this and find just dozens of wonderful essays about this very topic.

• 1:02:23Kirk Hamilton?

  It was the blog.

• 1:02:24Jason Schreier?

  But I'm not Googling it. But if you Google it, you will be spoiled.

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  You're right.

• 1:02:29Kirk Hamilton?

  Spoiler.

• 1:02:30Jason Schreier?

  Like it used to be fun, fun, quick divergence. It used to be that when you, when you like typed in something on Google, the autocomplete would spoil it. Now the autocomplete spoils it. And also the AI box will spoil it. So like you'll Google Homeland.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  The AI box.

• 1:02:44Jason Schreier?

  It'll be like, it looks like you're searching for Homeland, the show where Claire Danes, Claire Danes dies.

• 1:02:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, where everybody died in the season finale.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  Like, ugh. The number of times AI overviews spoil me on something. We don't need to get into it, but god.

• 1:02:57Jason Schreier?

  God, the worst.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  Fucking hell.

• 1:02:58Kirk Hamilton?

  I remember there is, this is probably out there somewhere, there being an incredible video montage of Claire Danes crying face because she makes this very particular like, oh, like her whole face is melting with anguish. And she is an amazing actress. And in those moments, she is, it's very intense, but it was just this like montage set to, I don't remember what music, of just her making that face over and over. And it was very funny, if a bit unfair to take them all out of context.

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  It's very 2010's internet to have that kind of video.

• 1:03:27Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, it was very 2010's YouTube.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  Good times.

• 1:03:31Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice. All right. Well, I am last. My one more thing is a book that I just finished called Martyr by Cave Akbar, which is an incredible book that I wanted to recommend. It also has a kind of a funny story behind it. I heard about this book from my sister who recommends a lot of books to me. She was giving me sort of a list of interesting new fiction. Martyr was published in 2024 to great acclaim, a really big, kind of big literary release. And she said, oh, this book is really interesting. And I'd love you to read it because I want to know what you think of it, what you think of the ending, like how you think, what do you think it all means? I just want to talk to you about it. And I said, cool. So I put it on my, on my to read list, kind of check it out

• 1:04:13Kirk Hamilton?

  at Libby and kind of get on the waiting list to get it on my Kindle. It finally comes through a little while later, download it to my Kindle. All right, I've got Martyr. I'm ready to read it. And then I get an email from Cave Akbar saying, hey, what's up? I really like your podcast and I really dig Triple Click and Strong Songs. And I just wanted to like, reach out because I love that you make this cool thing. And I wanted to share the thing that I made, which is this novel called Martyr that I wrote. And I was like, no way. Like I just got this guy's book on my Kindle and here he is revealing himself to be a base Triple Click listener who wants to tell me about his book. So anyways, I responded to him and just thought that was very funny. So this is a book by Triple

• 1:04:57Kirk Hamilton?

  Click listener and noted author Cave Akbar that I have now read. And yeah, I'm gonna share my take on it, even though I'm guessing he's listening to this. I guess fortunately I thought the book was really good.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I'm guessing if you didn't like it, we'd probably never be hearing a word of this.

• 1:05:13Kirk Hamilton?

  No, it is, it is a remarkable book, but not surprising. It was a very acclaimed release. And he is a beautiful writer. Holy crap. And I just really want to recommend it. This is, the story is a story, I sense a semi-autobiographical story of an Iranian American man named Cyrus. That's my pronunciation anyhow. And he is, his father emigrated to America in the 1980s and then worked, he actually grew up in Indiana and worked at a chicken farm. His father was basically just like working a kind of menial job after coming over here from Iran, where he left kind of during, you know, the late 80s, the

• 1:05:56Kirk Hamilton?

  period of kind of the post Iran Iraq war, that period in, in Iran. Cyrus's mother is dead. She was aboard Iran Air Flight 655, which was a passenger airline, an airliner that was shot down by a US battleship by the USS Vincennes. This is an actual thing that happened in 1988, near the end of the Iran Iraq war. A US naval ship shot down an Iranian airliner with civilians on board and just killed a whole bunch of civilians. In this story, Cyrus's mother was on board that plane. So she died and he never knew her. So Cyrus is a poet. He is an addict and now in recovery. And Martyr is basically

• 1:06:40Kirk Hamilton?

  his story as he becomes fixated on the idea of martyrdom and on the idea of writing a book about martyrs and what it means to be a martyr. And Cyrus is definitely like, he's not, his mental health is not great. He's not in a great place. He is really struggling with the idea of death and what it means to still be alive, like whether life owes him anything, whether he even should be here, both because of the way that his mother died in this freakish and sort of horrible way. And also just because I think a lot of this book is about what it is like to be an addict and to be in recovery and to see that recovery as time that maybe you weren't even supposed to have. Like, it's

• 1:07:23Kirk Hamilton?

  like bonus time. Like you really could have just died from your addiction. And now you're a year in, like past when you were supposed to die, which is a way that Cyrus describes this frequently. So like, what is my life? And am I maybe just supposed to die? That's kind of what it's about. But really, it's, it's not a very plotty book. It's more just an exploration of identity and self and language, just all, all of that through the lens of language and how language forms our world. It is, this is a book about words and language and meaning and the beauty and the frustrations of words and all the different ways that we use them and all the stories and the poems that so many people have told over the years

• 1:08:05Kirk Hamilton?

  and how those poems and stories let us understand ourselves and let our countries and our cultures understand themselves and the ways that Iran and America both understand themselves through language and how we, how we find lies and truths through the stories that we tell and the words that we use to tell them. And the way that Akbar writes this story, like his mastery of language and the different characters and perspectives that he jumps around through, especially like by the end of the book, it's pretty, a pretty incredible reading experience. So Akbar is a poet. That's like what he is known for. This is his first novel. His poetry has been published like a bunch of places. He's a very celebrated poet and I think a beautiful poet. I'm no poetry expert, but every time

• 1:08:47Kirk Hamilton?

  I read any of his poetry, I'm just like, wow, this is like doing things with language that are really remarkable and actually like go beyond my ken when it comes to formal analysis. But he is a really amazing poet. There is a lot of poetry in this book. There's much discussion of language, the nature of writing, what words can do, how we try to find meaning and struggle to find meaning in words, the things that words can express and the things that words can't express. And in telling Cyrus's story, it also bounces back to both of his parents and his uncle, who are all, you know, they're all alive at different periods of time. So we learn his mother's story in the 1980s in Iran and we learn his father's story, like through his immigration to America. And then his

• 1:09:31Kirk Hamilton?

  mother's brother, his uncle's story, who was serving in the Iranian military and like what, you know, so you get all these different perspectives on Iran and on America and on what it is to kind of be both Iranian and American and what that means. And then also, he has, there's a device that he introduces that I think is very clever. Cyrus is an insomniac. And in order to sleep, he begins to imagine conversations between different characters and people in his life. So it will be a conversation between his mother and Lisa Simpson. And then we'll get a chapter in the book that is just Lisa Simpson and Cyrus's mother, who he never met, talking about, who knows what, talking about life, talking about whatever it is that he's currently thinking about. And those scenes play out

• 1:10:14Kirk Hamilton?

  in this really beautiful dream logic way because they exist at this kind of, the space right before you fall asleep. And it, he captures that so beautifully, like as just the background changes, the setting changes, Lisa shrinks and becomes a different color. You know, his mother now looks like this and now looks like that. And now is speaking in a different voice. Like it has this kind of hallucinatory dream logic that then begins to infuse the book more broadly as these scenes recur. You know, we're doing these kind of expected flashbacks. We're coming to Cyrus's story in real time. You know, he goes to New York to meet with this artist and have these conversations, but we're always flashing back to his ancestors and then going into his dreams to meet these different

• 1:10:56Kirk Hamilton?

  characters. And it's a lot, like you can tell, I think, just by the way I'm describing it. There's a lot in this book. It's doing a lot. And I think because Akbar is such a wonderful writer and has such a confident and strong style, it all holds together. He manages to like unify the whole thing under his own writing style where it feels completely coherent. And by the end, I like really, I mean, I have a million questions for him. I need to like email him and just say, okay, I have some questions. Though I guess my questions are like more procedural than they are. Formal or than they are specific about the content of the story. This book embraces abstraction. It embraces that dream logic in some ways that I

• 1:11:39Kirk Hamilton?

  found truly, I don't know, kind of transcendent, really beautiful. And they also resist a kind of straightforward interpretation. And in reading about this book after finishing it, I found that a lot of people are kind of debating what happened really in the end. I think the ending is something that people are kind of debating in this way that I found kind of frustrating, or at least really wanting. It left me feeling unsatisfied because to me, this book's forays into the abstract, I guess, into dream logic and then just, you know, into some really ecstatic spaces. They feel like these emotional explorations, like he's conjuring feelings that go beyond words in ways

• 1:12:22Kirk Hamilton?

  that I found really beautiful and kind of purely emotional and purely experiential in, I guess, in the way that poetry can be where, you know, it's not about like, did so and so live or die? Did so, like, you know, did this person betray that person? What was the actual story there? It's just about the feeling that it gives you. And I think, I don't know, this might be more common in books than I realize, but this is not something that I've experienced that often in a book where it kind of goes beyond language and into pure feeling. And I think that's something this book is doing. And there's an emotional truth that it conveys that to me was actually quite clear by the end of it, even though I find so many of the particulars and the ways that he conveyed those feelings to be fascinating.

• 1:13:06Kirk Hamilton?

  And I would love to ask him about them just because I'm sure he spent a really long time just crafting all of it and figuring out how to make it land since this is something I find in music, like as a composer, you spend a really long time with these kind of abstract musical ideas, just trying to capture a certain feeling. And you know, the feeling when you, you know, when you hit on it, but it takes a lot of work and a lot of iteration to get to that point. And I would imagine the writing process for this book, and in particular, for the final, maybe couple of chapters, was a kind of a similar process. And I'd love to hear him talk about it. So this is a really remarkable book. I, you know, don't always read books like this, books that are just interested in language, identity, and

• 1:13:50Kirk Hamilton?

  these kind of high ideas, rather than focusing on plot. And I think it is, I always find it so refreshing when I do. It really engages me, it makes me really think. I came away from it, just I called my sister immediately and was like, okay, let's talk. Like, I want to go and meet with her book group so that I can really hear what they all thought about it, because I just have so many thoughts and I, you know, it raised so many questions for me in a way that, you know, a fun fantasy novel with a cool story does not. So I really recommend this for anyone who's like looking for that kind of an experience, just a truly rich literary experience. And also recommended for anyone who wants to know more about an Iranian-American perspective and to just understand one perspective on Iranian history

• 1:14:34Kirk Hamilton?

  and on what it is to be Iranian-American, especially at this time when our countries are locked in such needless and awful conflict. And I think understanding Iran better is something good that more Americans should be striving towards. So this book will certainly help accomplish that. So it's a beautiful book, Martyr by Cave Akbar. And Cave, if you're listening, good job. I liked your book. And thanks for listening to Triple Click. Glad you enjoy our show.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  That's awesome. It sounds really neat.

• 1:15:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it is. All right. And that is another episode of Triple Click. We, I gotta go edit this thing so that we can go play more Big Walk together. So let's call it there and I'll, I'll see the two of you in Big Walk and then again for our episode next week.

• 1:15:20Jason Schreier?

  See you next time.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:15:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddy Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network. And if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join. Email us at [email protected] and find links to our merch store and our Discord server in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

• 1:16:23Speaker 03

  Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.