Lately, the video games industry is in turmoil. The rise and fall of Blizzard, the trailblazing and toxic studio behind World of Warcraft, shows us why.
Lately, the video games industry is in turmoil. The rise and fall of Blizzard, the trailblazing and toxic studio behind World of Warcraft, shows us why.
Our guest, Jason Schreier, is an investigative reporter who covers the video game industry for Bloomberg News. His most recent book is the best-selling Play Nice: The Rise, Fall and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. Jason shares his years-long reporting on the frat-like culture at Blizzard, the scandal-plagued games developer that Microsoft bought for $75.4 billion (U.S.).
He talks about how commercial success can lead to creative decline, why Candy Crush is evil, and the future of gaming.
Also, Vass and Katrina go on an epic quest.
Subscribe to the Lately newsletter, where the Globe’s online culture reporter Samantha Edwards unpacks more of the latest in business and technology.
Find the transcript of today’s episode here.
We’d love to hear from you. Send your comments, questions or ideas to lately@globeandmail.com.
Vass Bednar: I'm Vass Bednar and I hosts this Globe and Mail podcast lately.
Speaker 2: And I'm Katrina Onstad. I'm the show's executive producer and Vass. Can I play something for you?
Vass Bednar: Of course, yes.
Katrina Onstad: All right.
[warlike orchestra music with ominous brass]
Katrina Onstad: Bom bom bom bom, bom. Okay.
Vass Bednar: Is everything okay?
Katrina Onstad: Do you know what that is?
Vass Bednar: No, I don't. What's going on?
Katrina Onstad: How can you not know what that is? No, that's not just the new theme music that I expect you to play every time I go into a room. It's actually the theme music to World of Warcraft, which is arguably the biggest video game of all time. And also it's here to tee up our episode.
Vass Bednar: Perfect. I love that. A two in one. How did you know that today we're talking about the rise and fall of Blizzard, the video game company that created World of Warcraft and other hit games like Starcraft and Overwatch. And we've got Jason Schreier here. He's a Bloomberg reporter and investigative journalist covering gaming, and he wrote the book. It's called Play Nice The Rise, Fall and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. This book is a New York Times bestseller. It's an epic profile of a company. Jason follows Blizzard from its very scrappy beginnings in California three decades ago through explosive growth and success to a series of scandals. And right now, fans and gamers are watching very closely because Blizzard's future is a bit of a question mark, having been purchased by Microsoft in the biggest acquisition in video game history.
Katrina Onstad: Yeah, and even if you can't tell an ORC from a dwarf, it's in the ears. I think this is a fascinating business book, a very detailed portrait of how any workplace can be equal parts innovation and toxicity. He paints a very vivid picture of the early days culture at Blizzard. It's pretty wild. Strip clubs, fistfights, porn and the computers. The New York Times critic who reviewed the book described the vibe as Mad Men without the hygiene or nice decor, which is now chilling.
Vass Bednar: Well. And this boys being boys energy or vibe wasn't just harmless fun happening in the background. A series of lawsuits and labor practice complaints eventually came to a head. And in 2023, a California regulator settled a suit that alleged a culture of sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard for $54 million.
Katrina Onstad: Activision being Blizzard's parent company. So there's a cautionary tale here, right? One that's both specific to the gaming industry and also a lesson for any startup and try to return to this idea of rapid growth, like what happens when a company explodes really fast and the culture there just can't meet that moment.
Vass Bednar: And the video game industry isn't some, you know, tiny growing thing. It's a $406 billion revenue machine that's bigger than the music and film industries combined. And it's also been described as an industry in a bit of a crisis. There have been massive layoffs and a bunch of consolidation through mergers, leading to speculation that it's in a bit of a creative decline right now. So it's a great time to look at this foundational company and the cracks in its foundation by diving into the story of Blizzard. That is my quest for today. Let's talk to Jason Schreier, the author of Plain Ice. This is Lately. Hi, Jason.
Jason Schreier: Vass, thank you so much for having me.
Vass Bednar: Jason, what do you remember about playing your first video game?
Jason Schreier: That is a great question. It's funny, I so I was born in 1987, which was a couple of years after the launch of the Nintendo entertainment system here in the States. And my parents actually had one of those before I was born. Even so, I grew up with it just in the living room. And I my earliest memories of playing games are two maybe three years old, playing Sesame Street games. Wow. Yes. So I really I literally grew up with the controller in my hands.
Vass Bednar: Amazing. What's special about Blizzard? Why did you write a book about this one company?
Jason Schreier: A lot of things are special about Blizzard. It's one of the very few video game companies that has kind of turned into a cultural phenomenon. They're essentially the Pixar of video games. I think it's a good way to describe them. They, for a very long time were just a hit making machine. I believe they have more billion dollar franchises than just about any video game company in the industry other than maybe Nintendo. But between Warcraft and Starcraft and Diablo and Overwatch, they have four massive franchises that have just led to spinoffs and sequels and billions of dollars in revenue and made millions and millions of people very happy over the years. So they're a fascinating company and they're also a company that has been through a whole lot of trials and tribulations. And the origins for my book Play Nice actually started that kind of the seeds were planted around 2018, which is when I started to hear as a reporter, I started to hear from people there that there was a bit of a corporate takeover in the works that Activision, their parent company, was starting to get involved in operations, which led me to think, okay, this isn't just a company that is like a hit maker. It's also a company that is now dealing with a lot of drama. And believe it or not, I actually started working on the book in early 2021 before the California government would go on to Sue Blizzard's parent company, Activision Blizzard, for sexual misconduct and discrimination, leading to a whole lot more drama and twists and turns in that blizzard saga. So it really was a confluence of all sorts of things by me and.
Vass Bednar: Drama, indeed. Could you take us back to the early days of the company and describe what it was like to work there? I know you didn't work there, but you covered this in the book.
Jason Schreier: Yeah, I've talked to many of the people who were there. So Blizzard was started. It was started by two UCLA students named Allen Adham and Mike Morehaime 1991. And their idea was, hey, we want to make a game company because it seems pretty fun. We like video games. And also we figure like there's very few other industries where two people with no experience and very little seed money could just start something and really wind up making something that a lot of people enjoy. And that proved to be prescient. From the business angle, they've cultivated a really good reputation within the video game industry for being able to deliver on games really efficiently, really quickly, hit their deadlines and really high quality culturally. It was quite the interesting place. It was more like a frat house than a business. And the context here as they saw it was was not so much that kind of like frat bro hazing dysfunction boys club that we think of today, although that actually was the atmosphere. But the way they saw it was like, hey, this is fraternal, this is informal. This is a place where you don't have to wear your stuffy suits to the office. You can wear shirts and flip flops and be best friends with your coworkers and play games during the workday, hang out at night, and we're our best friends and we get to make video games together. Like, how cool is that? That's the way they saw it. Of course, there also was the boys club nature of it. I mean, it was almost entirely men. So boys club in every definition of that term. And also kind of the intertwining of personal and professional relationships could also lead to some some strangeness, to say the least. There were occasional brawls and thrown controllers and other kind of strange, I guess, quirks of being at that type of office environment, which I think a lot of tech and gaming companies were like in the 1990s when almost the entire video game industry was like geeky males in their 20s.
Vass Bednar: And then maybe we could talk about one game in particular. What is World of Warcraft? You mentioned Nintendo. How is this game different from my very dusty Nintendo 64.
Jason Schreier: Yeah, World of Warcraft. So cutting to 2004, which is when World of Warcraft came out. World of Warcraft is what's called a massively multiplayer online roleplaying MMORPG for short, which essentially means it's a virtual world. It's it's not the type of game that while you're dusted in 64, those games are not in operation. And so you plug them in and turn them on. And if they still work, you might have to blow blow.
Vass Bednar: Blow the cart hard
Jason Schreier: To get them work. And but your your copy of Super Mario 64 is not functioning until you turn it on. Whereas World of Warcraft is living. It's persistent. It's online 24 seven. It is something that will exist whether you are in there or not. That is one of the key differences. So the way it works is it is a game where players who are paying monthly to access to it create a character and can move that character around this 3D virtual world, this fantasy recreation of the Warcraft universe, which is full of orcs and trolls and deserts and forests and all sorts of fantastical creatures. And you take your character and you do quests for people and errands for people, and you level up and you hunt for good equipment and you go on dungeon runs with your friends and you meet new people and you maybe meet some of your closest friends in this game. In many cases, people meet their spouses in this game and it becomes essentially another life for a lot of people because unlike your standard video game, which is kind of like, again, you just turn it on, you turn it off, you're done with it. It's kind of a single player experience this game. It could become this virtual resonance for people where maybe you spend eight hours at work and then you get home and you spend the rest of your day on World of Warcraft. And that at the time it wasn't this wasn't the first game like that by any means, but it was the most popular of them. It was one of the most popular games of all time and one of the most lucrative games of all time and really ushered in this world, which we still see today, of video games becoming a social space for people to this day. Some of the most popular games in the world, like Fortnite, for example, are popular not because they are particularly fun to play, although they are, but they're popular because that's where you go to hang out with your friends. Kids play Fortnite because that's where their friends are. Yeah, and that was really the ultimate kind of secret sauce behind that game. Yeah.
Vass Bednar: And then reading your book, it seems like the employees there were engaged in a whole lot of user testing, but they were the users, right? Everyone who joined the company, they played and they tested blizzard games. It was totally baked into the culture. Do you think that was a good thing and were they actually getting anything done?
Jason Schreier: Yeah. No, that I think is really a lot of people ask, What are the secrets behind Blizzard's success? People playing the games is one of the biggest secrets behind their success. And in fact, I've heard horror stories about the opposite a few games in recent memory that have turned out to be disasters because the people behind them just didn't play them enough and didn't really know what they were making. No, it's actually a good thing to really know your game inside and out. And Blizzard would have these kind of playtest days back in the day where every single person at the company, from the CEO to the receptionist would drop everything they were doing and test out the latest game and write up notes and notes of feedback bugs that they found or things they really liked about it. And then it led to this really, I think, phenomenal almost test that they had, which is they knew a game was going to be hit when even after work, people just wouldn't stop playing it. Like people at the office who had spent all day working on World of Warcraft would then go and play World of Warcraft for fun and after work they knew those games are going to be special when that happens.
Vass Bednar: And then how did World of Warcraft change Blizzard? What did that success look like from the inside?
Jason Schreier: Yeah, it was really phenomenal. I mean, World of Warcraft just took them to the stratosphere and they went from a company of several hundred people to a company of 3000 people. They opened up offices all across the world from Irvine, California, where their main office was to Austin, Texas, to Korea, South Korea to China, all over the world. They were opening offices. I mean, I'll give you a fun little story, which is that ahead of the release of the game. So like 2004, right before they came out, came out in November of that year, everyone was kind of like, what is going to happen with this thing? Like, is it going to be a success? It's unlike anything we've done before because their games before this had all just been traditional box games. You sell it, people play it, and then you move on to the next thing. This was just a living world that would have to be paid for monthly and updated every month. So Mike, Morhaime, who was the president at the time and a co-founder, he said, I think we're going to get to 500,000 users because that's what EverQuest had. And ever Quest was at the time, the most popular of these games. Alan at him makes co-founder. He was a little more optimistic. He was like, I think we're going to get to a million within the first year. I think that's that's a feasible goal. I think to do that, everyone was like, Are you crazy, Alan Like a million users. Nobody's. Never done anything like that before. By the end of their first year, World of Warcraft wound up with 5 million people playing it. It would wind up peaking at 12.5 million. And remember, that's not just sales, because all of those people, they're buying the game. Yes. But they're also paying monthly to play it $15 a month. So the amount of money it was generating was just astronomical. And it would go on to change blizzard in both good and bad ways for the people who work there.
Vass Bednar: If we can go back to what it was like to work there, I feel like you and I are making it seem totally fun, right? You get to play the game that you're building and then you kind of have this wild success and there can be a huge sense of pride through that kind of work. But it also led to divorce for at least one Blizzard employee. And this mode of work, right, relentless, grinding overtime has emigrated far beyond video games. Even the word crunch feels like it's everywhere. Is the industry responsible for how we work now?
Jason Schreier: I think that, like people who worked at Blizzard and really a lot of video game companies have really complicated and sometimes contradictory feelings about what it was like there. Because when you're in your 20s and you're putting in 12 hour days with your best friends, like making video games, it can be really fun and exhilarating at the time. And then maybe ten years later you're looking back at that New Year like, holy crap, like that carved a chunk out of my life. Like I might have health problems now because of what I did there, because of all that time I put into it. Yeah, it's really tough and it's really complicated an issue and been a really complicated issue in the video game industry. It's something that has been alleviated over time. I mean, the type of kind of overtime and work hours that people were doing in the 1990s in the video game industry are a world away from what people are doing today. Today, I think when people are crunching, it looks a lot different and it still sucks, but it's more tame than it was back then.
Vass Bednar: Structured crunching.
Jason Schreier: Yeah. I mean, there are all sorts of different like crunch can look like a million different things that can be like, Hey, we're going to work Wednesday evenings for the next month until we finish this thing. Or it could be like, Hey, you better not leave the office until two in the morning tonight, which the latter is more like things where things are like in the 1990s when Blizzard was was on the rise. And yeah, and that's just part of it. I mean, there was a lot of just kind of like cultural issues that for some people were part of the charm and for other people were like real serious problems. And so your mileage may vary depending who you were at Blizzard, for example, I mentioned the frat house Boys club of in all, if you're part of the boys club, it can be super fun to be in a boys club if you're not if you're a woman China or a blizzard in the 1990s, it can really be a hellish experience. But then again, I also spoke to women who were like, Yeah, it was a boys club, but I had fun being part of that boys club. So it's kind of a nuanced thing to talk about.
Vass Bednar: You have a quote in the book from one of the executives saying that hiring women would ruin the vibe. That was half a joke, maybe a whole joke, we hope. And they did eventually start hiring more women, as you said, which led to a whole new set of gender dynamics. Could you elaborate on that environment and the lawsuit you mentioned earlier?
Jason Schreier: Yeah, and a lot of that comes from them just having like these fond memories of what Blizzard was like in the 90s when it was all dudes and they could all, I don't know, make like explicit jokes and like fart around. And I mean, you could extrapolate that to culture at large, right? And a lot of the backlash that we've seen in recent years to kind of progressive cultural waves, a lot of that has come from people who are like, hey, I like to add things or like back in the day. So this is a good microcosm of some of society's conflicts in the bigger picture. But yeah, I mean, some of the things that led to the lawsuit include that atmosphere for sure. I think that there were a couple of different factors here. One, and I think this is maybe one of the biggest ones is that at Blizzard, I mentioned earlier that personal and professional lives were intertwined. And as more and more women started joining the company, that grew to include daily lives. And it got to the point at Blizzard where so many people were dating or married to each other on campus that even the C-suite, like from the CEO of the company to his lieutenants, like they were all dating or married to people, women below them at the company. Wow. Which created a strange vibe and an uncomfortable vibe for a lot of people. And like I had heard horror stories about, say, like a Q, a tester to a as quality assurance that's kind of the lowest rung on the corporate ladder at a company like Blizzard. They're the people who, like play the game and try to find bugs and stuff. But a Q tester, a woman Q, a tester who is hit on by her manager. And when she complains about it, her manager says, Well, hey, I mean Mike Mara, I'm the CEO of the company, married someone below him, and so why can't I? And that creates. All sorts of problems. I mean, just even having that kind of taint, your relationship with your boss really just ruins everything. It's impossible to really keep working at a company when that has happened. So yeah, that kind of vibe I think, led to a lot of problems that the lawsuit would then bring to the forefront. But there were others too. I mean, there was everything from like straight up physical harassment to gender pay discrimination. A whole lot of problems kind of festered. Some of which were unique to Blizzard and others of which I think are industrywide.
Vass Bednar: And where was management for all this? We're talking gender dynamics, harassment, unpaid overtime. Why was the firm allowed to kind of stay so undisciplined for so long? Was the idea that it had to be that way in order to make good art?
Jason Schreier: Yeah. I mean, it's a little complicated, right? So pay was always kind of a big conversation topic. Abolition from the very beginning. People who worked for Blizzard felt like they were being treated unfairly when it came to pay in all sorts of different ways. And there was always a back and forth with management. Some people, a manager, it would be like, Well, you should be thankful to work here. It's blizzard like. You should be working here because of the prestige that we bring. Whereas sometimes there would be promises that like profit sharing bonuses would make up for the pay, and it became this messy situation. And then it became a bigger issue with gender pay discrimination because there weren't a lot of women in leadership. So there weren't people at the top who could advocate for making sure, like looking around and doing these kind of holistic evaluations and being like, Hey, are we paying women less than we're paying men? One thing I'll say is that Mike Manheim, who ran the company for more than 20 years, he is someone who has been characterized to me as like one of the nicest CEOs like this, this incredibly amicable, like, generous guy who, for complicated reasons, surrounded himself with a circle of brows. And one of the reasons for that is because he had a lot of loyalty to people, didn't really like firing people he really liked, just kind of keeping people around him who had been there since the very beginning. And some of those people turned out to be problematic in different ways. And it was very difficult for more him to do anything about that for various reasons.
Vass Bednar: Well, in the book you write, Why is success so awful? Question mark, What did you mean in terms of Blizzard? What was some of the fallout of this massive success?
Jason Schreier: World Warcraft so fascinating. Like I mentioned earlier, that game was so enormously successful beyond anyone's expectations. And as a result of that, Blizzard kind of had to morph into the World of Warcraft company before World of Warcraft, Blizzard was coming out with a new game every two, three years or so. Yet after World of Warcraft in 2004, it took six years before they would release another game in Sars-cov2 in 2010. And the reason for that is because World Markoff just vacuumed everyone's attention and took resources from everywhere else. It became this problem of success where you have something so big and so lucrative that it almost doesn't make sense to work on anything else, which is something that I think a lot of creative companies and teams have had to deal with over the years, where you have a big hit and you're kind of like, Well, why would we bother innovating new things when we could just put those people on this big hit? And then that really came to a head when tensions between Blizzard and Activision started. And Activision was a company that very much believed in kind of exploiting franchises and maximizing the value of hits. And that was very much at odds with this idea of making new stuff and innovating and incubating new projects.
Vass Bednar: Right. And just to clarify, games publisher Activision had merged with Blizzard in 2008 as part of an acquisition spree, and then that merger created Activision Blizzard, which was then bought by Microsoft in 2023 for $75.4 billion. That second merger was so big that the FTC challenged it because of antitrust concerns. What effect did that Microsoft acquisition have on Blizzard and maybe even the whole video game industry?
Jason Schreier: It's still very, very early days for that acquisition. That said, the almost immediate effect of that was that Microsoft laid off 1900 people in its Xbox gaming unit, including hundreds at Blizzard. So almost immediately there were cuts and layoffs, which often happens when an acquisition of this scale comes together. So started off on a bad note, that's for sure. I think it's still TBD exactly what it's going to mean for Blizzard as far as the industry as a whole. I think it definitely has some repercussions that so much of the video game industry in that market is owned now by a single company in Microsoft because they not only own Activision Blizzard now, and that includes Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. They also still own all of their properties. So Halo and Gears of War and Forza. And then also they bought Bethesda. A few years ago. Bethesda is the company behind Fallout and Skyrim and Doom and all sorts of other games. So Microsoft now owns a really, really big piece of that pie, which could cause a lot of problems in the years to come. But we're still pretty early days.
Vass Bednar: So our video games in a moment of crisis.
Jason Schreier: Well, the video game industry has faced a lot of turbulence. It's dealt with a lot of layoffs in recent years. I wouldn't say that video games are in crisis because like from a product perspective, there are more and more better and better video games every single year, especially in the indie space, which has just gotten so spectacular and vivid and lively and is just full of so many cool titles these days. But from an industry perspective, I mean, in part because of that oversaturation of the market, it's become harder and harder to make a hit and it's become harder and harder to sustain a games company these days.
Vass Bednar: Well, one thing I want to talk about is addictive design. Activision Blizzard has been at the forefront of creating really engaging games that keep people kind of coming back and getting immersed. But where do we draw the line between engagement and just straight up addictive design?
Jason Schreier: So I think addiction can come in a couple of different ways. One of them is actually the social element I mentioned before and the social pressures of games that can be just as addictive as anything else because of the FOMO of it all, because everybody wants to be keeping up with their friends and not missing out on like, Hangouts. And then there's also I mean, we could do another hour about the world of mobile games and kind of predatory monetization, which is a big problem in the world of what's called free to play games, which are games that you can download usually on your phone for free without paying anything. And then they kind of suck you in and convince you to pay by like depriving you of things unless you pay for them. Candy Crush is a good example of that. But there are plenty more and there are all sorts of games in that space that have timers on them where like you have to pay to speed up the timer so you can keep playing. That's where a lot of the really predatory addiction is, as opposed to games, which I think if a game is meant to be fun and meant to be addictive and sexy, when for a while, if it's not taking your money as a result of that, I think it's a little bit less dangerous for most people than, say, a mobile game that is encouraging you to spend extensively so you can keep playing or so you can keep up with your friends.
Vass Bednar: Fair enough. You've got two little people at home that I've seen you post on Blue Sky about. Do they play video games? Are they on Sesame Street with a controller in their hand?
Jason Schreier: There are two little. I mean, I've been trying to get them into games. I've been trying to play astronaut with them. My kids are five and two, so they're a little too young to really appreciate it. Even the five year old is not really super into them yet, but I'm working on it. I really want them to be and I want to make sure they get into good games and not the predatory, addictive, free to play games that I mentioned earlier. But it's a work in progress. I'm working on them.
Vass Bednar: No candy crush for them?
Jason Schreier: No, absolutely not.
Vass Bednar: Is the future of video games actually TV? We were talking about how Arcane became one of Netflix's most watched shows, and it's based off the video game, League of Legends. The Last of Us was also a huge hit. Does that show that creating great intellectual property that people love just kind of transcends format entirely? What do you see in terms of the future of that relationship?
Jason Schreier: I think that for 40 years now, Hollywood has been trying to, like, figure out their way into games. If you remember the Super Mario Brothers movie was that was one of the first. And then there was like a street fighter movie in the 90s Doom movies and and all sorts of other kind of like attempts. Mortal Kombat, I think was a movie right point. And they all just were awful for a variety of reasons. And recently we've seen this this renaissance, this resurgence of games and them actually releasing high quality stuff. I mean, Fallout might have been my favorite TV show last year, also based on the game franchise. And the reason for that is that I think finally, these shows and movies are being created by people who, like, actually respect the source material and really appreciate it and are trying to do justice to it. And you can see that with The Last of Us, which is a show that is Showrun in part helmed in part by Neil Druckmann, who was also a director on the game. You can also see that with Fallout, which also has an executive producer, Todd Howard, who works on the game. So you can see that like Hollywood is finally bringing the creators of the games on board. It's finally really treating these game properties with respect. It's not like in the 90s and games were just associated with, I don't know, kids and Columbine. Today I think generally the culture treats games more as an art form and as a result some of these shows are coming out that really take their inspiration seriously.
Vass Bednar: After all your research. What would you say is the big or biggest lesson of Blizzard for companies or businesses outside of gaming, and you think Blizzard has actually learned that lesson?
Jason Schreier: The lesson that I took from it. It's a little too late for Blizzard to adapt, but I think it's an important one, which is be cautious about growth and know exactly what you want your company to look like. And don't get bigger than that. Because fundamentally, I think that one of Blizzard's core problems was growing too big too quickly. And that led to a lot of problems down the road. This, of course, being after the release of World of Warcraft, when Blizzard went from a team of hundreds to a company of thousands. And I think they had to do that for good reasons. The game was successful beyond their expectations. They had to hire armies of like customer service people to support it. But still, I think when you get that big, your company and your culture just irrevocably changed and you have to be cautious about that. But success can really be a problem for companies. Some of the cultural issues were just kind of ingrained in the company because they were founded at a time when people didn't really know any better. And that's not to absolve people or anything like that. But I think that most video game companies in the 1990s were all dudes and I think felt like they didn't even think to be like, Hey, we should have more equality here. Hey, we should try to bring in women because maybe we can make better games or maybe we can make games that actually appeal beyond the teenage boy demographic. That just wasn't something that people even considered at the time. And so I think that companies that are starting in the modern era have the advantage of being able to look back on that and be like, no, we are not going to do that. We are going to make a company that like, it's all about equity and not just like being a bunch of dudes and having a bro culture. So that's another big lessons that people can learn and that again, Blizzard cannot.
Vass Bednar: Jason I had so much fun talking to you. I would become an orc and log on to Warcraft just to chat with you.
Jason Schreier: Unfortunately Bass, I haven't played World of Warcraft in many, many years.
Vass Bednar: no. What should we play together?
Jason Schreier: I prefer single player games and virtually lone wolf. When you have two small children, you can't be like sitting at your desk. Yeah. Headphones play. You can't be like, Sorry, guys, I got to interrupt this raid we're doing because my kid is calling me. It just doesn't work.
Vass Bednar: That toddler parenting. The issue is finally being served.
Jason Schreier: Exactly.
Vass Bednar: You've been listening to lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Jay Cockburn, and our sound designer is Cameron McIvor. And I'm your host, Vass Bednar. In our Shownotes. You can subscribe to the Lately newsletter where the Globe's online culture reporter Samantha Edwards unpacks more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of Lately comes out every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.