 When I was younger, I learned about Dungeons & Dragons in the weirdest way. At a very young age, I watched Tom Hanks' classic film, Maze's and Monsters. I have spells. I'm going to fly. You don't have enough points. I am the maze controller. Yes, the movie that involved Hanks playing a deadly knockoff of Dungeons & Dragons, which, by the way, inspired the third season of Riverdale. Millions of fans have their own D&D origin story, the game having been around since 1974 in multiple iterations, and now includes an annual event, which I covered earlier this summer. It draws actors, authors, game developers, super fans, all of them. It's the single greatest gift in my life. It's better than any poker game or any football game or watching football or going to a football... I mean, whatever guys do to socialize or people do to socialize, for me, getting together, gaming, telling a group story for that many years, creates not only a bond with the men or the people you're playing with, but there's this bond with this imaginary world and this creativity that electrifies your own joy. Every Sunday night, the whole world is crammed in front of a television set watching dragons. You know, people fight on top of dragons and then Monday morning, getting on Twitter and letting everyone know what they think about the episodes. You know, and I think that we're a culture that's much more open to this type of fantasy entertainment. There's podcasts, there are live shows, there's burlesque now. Like, there's, right? Like, it's gotten to a point where it's everywhere. And so I think that my theory is that not only is it sexy, but once it becomes ubiquitous enough, people kind of feel like maybe this is okay. And so, like, things have been getting easier and better, you know, on a, on a straight progression. D&D isn't just this. Yeah, the monster manual. Stunches and dragons head book. Do you play? It has become this. A mass of black fur. Just leap out of the woods in your direction. Roland would turn to you and say there are three such creatures stationed at this bridge. Now in his fifth edition, it continues to be an area of growth a parent company has, bro. One of our goals in designing fifth edition D&D, upfront, we told people this, we want to make the version of D&D that will appeal to everyone who has loved D&D in the past and might love it in the future. And also, I think the rules are redesigned in a way to make it accessible to people. A lot of people are like, oh, I need a math degree, I can't play this so hard to make a character. But fifth edition really opens up to a lot of people. I think people are definitely more open to the idea of jocks playing Dungeons and Dragons. Of everybody playing Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah, I think that the stories that we're trying to tell resonate with a lot of us just as human beings. And they're fun. There's lots to play with. The game has moved far beyond your friend's basement to the Global Streaming Service, Twitch, where 7,500 unique streams were watched four more than 25 million minutes in 2018. Talking about an era where hundreds of thousands of people watch Twitch all the time. And Dungeons and Dragons is one of the biggest channels, the biggest games that you can watch on Twitch. And the representation is key. We like to make sure that in all the streams that we're doing that we have a really wide net cast for whoever's going to be playing and showing on camera. It's really important in the creative process that we reach into different, not only communities, but types of people from different backgrounds so that we're getting different representation. I had two communities that I was a part of. And then when they started to merge together, I was like, yes, wait, yes, yes, yes, it's perfect. And, you know, people talk about experiencing, discovering that they were trans because they were able to play a character of a different gender or exploring different relationships romantically. And it's a safe space with your friends that you can explore that that you maybe couldn't before. Similarly to the entertainment business and all this is that the more stories we can tell with the more backgrounds, more personal stories that people can bring, the more all of us are going to learn. So, you know, whether you are queer or cis or trans or black or white or however you identify, you will learn more about other people through their stories. The game has long been a source of companionship as strangers with endless imagination and common interest and fantasy become lifelong friends. I'm about to get real and a little dark. So, three weeks ago, a guy from our stream, very close friend of mine, and we've been playing for three years, took his life. Oh, yeah, really close friend. And so you don't realize how much the people in your D&D circle have an effect on you. And he literally didn't show up to our game one night and then that's when the ball started rolling, we found out that he took his life. So it was tough. But that said, it just really helped the rest of us around the table to kind of literally grow hug and say, we don't, we play D&D every week, but we need to also see how each other is doing. Right, yeah. This is also a brotherhood as a word. There's just a lot of the brand, it's been around for 46 years now, Nathan, are we on 46 or 45? Almost, we're in our 45. Yeah. And people grew, people from my generation grew up with it. And now we're starting to both rediscover it and share it with our kids.