and I hate to say it guys but I honestly question and I had this in my thought while I was there I almost felt like this was a giant scam this video is again brought to you by old brass puddin I love this beer so much and uh in order for me to talk about what we're going to talk about i needed to have a few of these in me so oh and i know that i'm going to be the last one to talk about this but you know what hopefully we can save the best for last what's up guys and welcome back to my channel where i talk and do everything pinball so if that sounds interesting to you then hit that subscribe button down below so if you've been living underneath the rock then by all means allow me to give you a little bit of education of what we're going to be discussing here and that is the fact that robert Sébastien Muller the principal the big guy over deep root pinball as well as deep root llc has got he's in some deep trouble needless to say but before we get into the current let's let's go back a few years and just put you in my mental perspective of how i felt about robert and deep root from the beginning so whenever i first saw deep root pinball it was at texas pinball festival of 2016 something like that I want to say 2015 or 2016 around that time frame and I remember seeing the posters and I was like okay so somebody else is getting into the pinball thing didn't know who Robert was or anything like that time went by do not know the exact time frame on this but all I know is that eventually it came to be that I was aware of who Robert Mueller was and that he started making these big claims about what they were going to be producing. And I want to say it's probably the main video that everyone's accustomed to seeing, maybe when it comes to like Pinball Expo 2018 probably. And I started to see how he was as an individual. Robert was talking a lot of talk. And it was yet to be seen if he could walk the walk. Such famous quotes would be that he's going to be putting out more games than any other manufacturer in one year. That their games will have more than any other manufacturer, better quality. I mean, anything that you could possibly think that someone would try to outdo on other manufacturers, they were going to do. He was putting Deep Root in the position of saying that Deep Root was going to own the pinball market and they were going to be the best of the best. But of course, as time goes by, it's one of those things where it's like, okay, who was funding this? Where is Robert getting the money to have the facility, hire all these people, engineers, designers, coders, all of that overhead? Where is this money coming from? and so then it became to be that i guess i found out or read or whatever that he supposedly owned a lot of businesses or properties or whatever and that i guess my assumption was is that he was just so rich and had so much money from all these other things that he owned or made doing whatever that he had all this money that he loved pinball so much that he was going to use all of his profits that he would normally make and just build up a pinball company and then once it's there obviously start profiting that way so that was my main thing was that that's pretty awesome this guy has got some you know love for the hobby if he is using his own personal money as like a little piggy bank basically to fund a pinball manufacturer now after all this report it turns out that that is exactly no not exactly but that is basically what he was doing guys he had money in a personal little piggy bank that he was utilizing to pay all the employees all the overhead and some extras on the side obviously but the only thing is is that the money he was getting it from was from other people's investments allegedly and just for future references everything that i'm about to discuss that is on the report that if you want to see it for yourself i will put a link down in the description below but allegedly robert has done this stuff so going from this entire video allegedly is the word that needs to be put in front of everything because there's no way i'm going to be able to remember to say that before all of this another oh so sec the securities exchange commission put out this entire report and first of all whatever it's the sec even though we still have to use the term allegedly they don't mess around guys this is whenever they have a report like this and they list everything including using the word facts it's pretty much an open and shut case basically they've got all the evidence they've done all the research they're ready to nail somebody to the cross this is merely a formality so as much fun as it would be to go through the 24 page report provided by the SEC I have merely just kind of gone through and I'm going to give you the the juice that is within this report and the only things that you really need to kind of like know about so first off it states in the report that the average person invested 193,000 dollars now obviously out of the 300 individuals some gave more some gave less this is merely just an average now just so you know in order for you to invest in deep roots 575 fund it had to be a minimum of $25,000 if you had less than that then no they would not take your money you had to give them $25,000 to invest in this life insurance Ryan Policky thing so right here Robert persuaded mostly retiree investors to cash out their current investments to put into their 575 fund supposedly for life insurance and deep root related business for safe returns yes there is nothing safe about what is going into this and there's no returns so over the course of these years they raised 58 million dollars but only 10 million of that 58 actually went into these life insurance you know Ryan Policky items robert used this 58 million well 48 i guess million dollars he used this as his own personal piggy bank there you go there you go thank you sir there you go there you go There you go. And that's the funny thing is they use that term in the report. His own personal piggy bank. I'm not just making that shit up. This is what it says. He uses it as... There we go. I got to move these empty bottles out of the way so I know which one actually has in it. And by doing so, Robert defaulted on a $10 million face value life insurance Ryan Policky, losing $3.5 million of the funds in the process. therefore causing him to make 820 000 ponzi like payments to earlier investors by using new investors so if you if if what i said there doesn't make any sense take it as it's the old saying rob from peter to pay paul so you have these older investors that got in real quick that are like hey uh we need our money what's going on and then robert's like oh shit I need to give these guys money. Well, I need to find some new investors because my piggy bank's running a little low right now. Let me go get some new investors. Hey, you want some life insurance Ryan Policky items? It's got safe returns, but it really doesn't. And they get the new investors money And they like oh thank God we got some new money Now we need to give this new money to the old investors so we can at least you know dodge a bullet here and then they rinse and repeat that for god knows how fucking long next item robert made statements he took no compensation from the funds but he made ad hoc salary payments to himself whenever money was available totaling roughly 1.6 million dollars between the years 2016 and 2020 and let me just break it down that's 400k a year 33k a month or 8.3k per week but this is where it gets really interesting he also used 1.5 million for personal expenses personal expenses what does that mean Well, let's begin. So starting off at the top of the list, here we have his daughter's private school tuition. Well, I'll tell you what, Lady Mueller, when it comes to your economics class, do not let your father do your homework. Johnny has 17 apples and Eric has 23. How many apples do you have? Well, according to my dad, I'll just take them all. Vacations with his family. now you got to give the guy break he's got to take his vacations because evidently stealing other people's money is fucking exhausting his second wedding i had a feeling that the first marriage wouldn't work his second divorce you know you know and this isn't too surprising he seems like a taker and not just from the scc report he definitely seems like some guy that would just take take take it you know if i had to put money i bet his favorite sexual position is 68 then and in case you don't know what that is that means where you do me and i owe you one his third wedding jesus man and i'll tell you what i i don't want to put money on this one but i got a feeling we've got a third divorce just around the corner jewelry for both second and third wives other lifestyle spending for the family what the hell does that mean i guess that could mean fancy restaurants whatever stuff like that condominium in kawaii hawaii how do you say that k-a-u-a-i kuai i don't i don't know i'm probably seeing multiple vowels at this point and their language which is mostly vows. So, fuck it. Condominium in Hawaii. So, you're not even hiding it at this point. If you are stealing people's money, if you're embezzling doing the Ponzi scheme, the last thing you want to do is buy a condo in Hawaii. Oh, come on! This is where it's like, okay i was i could see some certain things where i'm like well you know you got to do what you got to do until you get to that then you're like okay he doesn't give a fuck at this point he just doesn't care but you know what he only got it for 135 000 and he he was being kind of thrifty at that point i guess because he he did spend 59 000 in renovations on the fucking thing or then he spent 75 000 in season tickets to sports events wow and of course whenever the sec council asked him about his personal spendings he responded with i plead the fifth sir will you tell us well of course you would and that's pretty much the meat and potatoes of the 24 page document like i said link in the description down below for you to peruse and see for yourself so i think it's pretty clear that deep root pinball is no more this there's no way that they can go on like this it's already been stated i've already given you the information from previous employees that they are on furlough as of over a month ago. So they're not paying their employees. They have a historical record of not paying their employees in the past at that. I'm not extremely surprised by this. It's one of those things where it's like, oh, the Rubik's Cube comes completely together and you see that, oh, that's where all the money was coming from. Now it makes sense why I saw certain things that I saw when I was there. But the really troubling thing about that is the fact that I was there merely a day. And not just me, five others, but once again, I'm only speaking on behalf of me. I cannot speak on behalf of them. But during the time there, and I specify in a previous video, I'm going to try to put that into the intro, that I honestly felt like this was a scam. And I'm guessing for those of you out there that were just rooting, rooting, rooting, looking past all the excuses all this time, I can only assume that you've never been fucked over in your life. You've never had people, a company, or somebody just do you wrong. You just don't realize that there are people out there that are going to take advantage of you. that give zero fucks about your money and want it for their own kind of thing have you never been screwed over have you never like you know just been like oh i can't believe people are like this no see and that's the thing that's something i could quickly see in people's eyes and i say people i mean like you know at the grocery store you see these good looking girls like hey oh they're obviously too young because they don't have the look of just i have been through hell in their lives it's still the young everything's all rainbows and gumdrops life is all sweet nothing can go wrong because they haven't been through hell yet they haven't experienced loss so they don't know so you can just usually tell by looking in someone's eyes on what they have possibly been through in their life. And I feel like a lot of the people that just like, oh my goodness, I can't believe this happened or whatever, have never been fucked over. Because I remember for the longest time, guys, I looked at Deep Root Pinball as the Willy Wonka for pinball. Meaning that you didn't know what was going on in the facility. You hoped it was something magical. And then I got the golden ticket and was able to go into the factory. Although it's not a factory, and I've stated this before, it's merely a building facility. It is definitely not a factory. And so once again, this time last year, I was well aware that I was going to be going to Deep Root and getting to see everything. I was going to be one of the first to see what they've been working on for over four years at this point. And I was like, man, and I honestly thought that I wasn't going to see anything but a fully working Raza. That's my only thing that I thought that we were going to see. But they showed us, it's difficult to say, they showed us so much more. But at the same time, it was nothing at all. So take that as you will. So when it comes to more stuff that I saw while I was there, let me just disperse this now in case I haven't dispersed it in a previous video. So let's say, for instance, first thing we saw when we walked in, one of the first things that caught my eye, actually, when we first walk in to just the facility in general and wait for Robert to chaperone us to the next area, is that there was a cubicle section where I think even Steven Bowden and other coders and IT, if you want to call them that, and other people that sit at cubes, that was like their cube area. All of the computers there were pretty high-end gaming PCs, not just your typical desktop, office, Dell, or whatever that you would have in a cubicle to do office work. you could easily have a badass land party with the computers that they had here we're talking like the see-through side glass panel the graphics card these were pretty damn nice computers in office cubicle stuff and you could argue that these were oh these were the coders or the graphic designers i and if they were they weren working on a game that for damn sure all of them were just kind of lounging back sitting back just chit shooting the shit the entire time and every time that I did see them Then we get brought into the design room where you have Barry Osler and J-Pop. Barry Osler did not have the same setup going for him as J-Pop did. J-Pop had his fire and brimstone game that he had the like the paper setup kind of going on where he was building the ramps and the the lanes and everything using the white paper and drawing stuff on there uh there were some objects on the playfield like a magnifying glass of some sort that really obscure what was on the playfield underneath it it looked kind of cool actually a little bit as far as like the exact layout I mean I would say that it was pretty close to like a totan type of thing the way it looked just out of my memory over a year ago um but he he was working on that uh Barry Oursler was kind of just there uh we got to see the playfield art for food truck but as far as an actual like you know whitewood or anything like that no we did not get to see that so once we leave uh the designer's room we got brought into the prototype room or the whitewood room which is also the same room where one individual was doing all the soldering for all their games game so the whitewood room has got at least six to eight whitewoods and i can't say for sure that all of them were this way but for the one white wood that i did play with the flippers on there were no flipper mix they the flipper bats were just easily able to be moved around so everything looked like it was just kind of a placeholder like that this is basically a model just to be here to look like a play field a game play field so that's the way that looked and then we get shown Goonies. And this is Barry Oswald's game, and obviously there's a large portion of the game missing. And we question, you know, what's going on here. And I kind of don't want to give this away because it might be something that may come along in the future, but I don't think it will be. But what they're wanting to put into the middle of the Goonies is like a coin pusher or like gold coins and stuff like that so that's what they kind of described it to us there was no actual mech to show us in action because more than likely all those white woods were just for show anyways but they were wanting to do like a coin pusher mech within the game on the play field then we got brought into a little further in where they showed us the topper Ferrazza. Now the Topper Ferrazza is not what you're currently seeing that he's showing off. The original Topper Ferrazza, or one that I believe was going to be on the top tier, was actually a roller coaster. And the roller coaster actually reacted and it moved and everything. The cart on the track, the way it was much more intriguing than what we currently have. but there was motion on this car and roller coaster i think it was like uh zombies or a i think yeah aliens on a roller coaster cart on a track that moved and that was pretty cool so i was like okay that's a pretty cool topper in the making but i'm guessing they couldn't get it to work probably for whatever reasons doesn't fucking matter but that's what that was i think a lot of the other things that I could mention have been mentioned before in video so there's no sense of me going into great detail but something that no one else has talked about is what the fuck is octo manufacturing and this is something that I don't understand why he was so proud of this as if it was so original that no one else needs to know what this is this is a big secret this is not a secret this is the one of the worst ways you could probably try to mass manufacturer pinball machines especially since your goal is evidently pinball for the masses so we get brought into the manufacturing room and there's nothing well there are some things there are eight harbor freight tool carts and i don't i don't want to say tool carts but they're like it's basically a workbench yeah they're harbor freight eight of them eight harbor freight workbenches i will try to get a picture offline or online and put it up here for you to see. But there were eight of them. Octo-manufacturing guys. Eight Harbor Freight workbenches. Two people would be assigned to each of these Harbor Freight workbenches. And these two people would be assembling a game. and we were getting like walked through how the whole manufacturing process would be. Be like, all right, so yeah, two people would be right here. We would have all the parts and everything somewhere over here where they would be all organized, and then they would go and get the parts needed for a particular machine and bring them over, and the two of them would be able to assemble a game a day, or they probably had a different number at that time. But I remember that's what Octo Manufacturing was. It was eight Harbor Freight workbenches building pinball machines. Wow. And I really don't know what else needs to be said about my time there. it's but i i do want to talk for a bit about people in this hobby and this is the fucked up part about people is that the information gets out that robert has taken 58 million dollars from people more than likely elder people that are going to be retiring within the next decade kind of thing or are soon to retire getting ready for it and definitely need money to stay afloat robert has taken money from these people and this isn't even fucked up part i'm gonna man alcohol is a hell of a thing so robert's ideal insurance investment plan basically he was betting against people's lives this should tell you about his mentality he was betting that you would die and if you died he made a lot of money so he was basically betting a short on your life so the longer you lived the more money he would lose okay that's what this investment basically was in a nutshell so you've got 300 people that invested in this 575 fund and that were told that they were like any other financial advisor would and does tell you i mean mine calls me you know once a month for crying out loud so would tell you hey we're putting this into this It's going to have safe returns, blah, blah, fucking blah. And then, lo and behold, this happens. The person that owns this fund has taken your money and spent it on his own personal items, as well as paying for a venture in a pinball company. Paid salaries. this is i mean this is where i'm like why are people not thinking like this why do i have a comb bringing out a pen i like this better 300 people accumulatively have lost 58 million dollars this 58 million dollars was to go to these people to their retirement and it's gone. Their money is gone. And then you have people in this hobby and these are even certain people that have messaged me commented on my videos sent me personal messages wanting to know if the people that put in a deposit are going to get their money back. Are you fucking kidding me? that what you curious about out of all the 24 pages and all the details that have come out that is the question that you have Are the people that put in a deposit which is maybe what is that Are they going to get their money back Fuck you and I'll lose subscribers I'll get my thumbs down from you assholes but tell you what fuck you what else do you want me to say this is beyond a deposit on a fucking pinball machine guys this is on to 300 other people that put their trust in an individual that spent their money on a fucking condo getting divorced getting remarried that's where these people's fucking money went and you have the audacity to go are they gonna get their deposits back are they gonna get their rosa look i love pinball i and all that kind of stuff but to that be the only thing that you're curious about you might be just like robert do you think I haven't lost money before? I haven't like thrown over a grand at something and gotten nothing in return? Oh, it's happened. Definitely. Definitely. I've thrown money out and gotten nothing back. And thankfully, it was only that much. If I knew that my current 401k was now non-existent, then yeah that would not be good obviously i would rather lose two grand than what the hell these people just lost now some of you are probably thinking this video took a turn real quick i'm on my last beer and something else that i guess bothers me is that, and this sucks, you have to think about the other people involved in this as well, guys. I mean, even for Robert. I mean, this is someone's father. This is someone's husband, actually, going by his track record. This is a couple of people's husband. Whatever. But like, then you have the people that worked there all these years and were getting paid whenever they got paid. But evidently were getting paid very well. And I'm hoping, I hope that the people that worked there really realized where their money was coming from. Now, obviously they didn't know. So you can't really blame them. be like how come you didn't know although i was there one day and felt that something was definitely wrong and something was fishy and not right i'm like this doesn't feel right and that's something i really got a question guys about you got people that have worked there for years what are they doing this this even goes to you coders out there is like okay you've coded one game maybe you don't know the game doesn't fucking work so you don't really know for sure how well it's coded are you doing 40 hours a week i mean to take you 40 hours a week for years to put one fucking game together no that i'd hope not i would hope not i would hope that those that work there at multiple points were questioning the legitimacy of this company. And I'm thinking that the reason why these people stuck around for as long as they have is for a couple of reasons. One, contract based. Two, they were getting paid pretty damn well. You would have to be getting paid damn well to have the problems that we've been reported that they were not getting paychecks all the time. I'm trying to think in my own mindset. If I was working somewhere and they were like, hey, you're not going to get a paycheck this week, but hold up. You're going to get paid next time around, so just stick around. Good things are coming your way, blah, blah, fucking blah. And then I got paid. I'm like, okay, good. We're all good. It's one of those things where I think I would only be okay with this if I was getting paid extraordinarily well. And you're getting paid extraordinarily well to do what with whose fucking money? I need to calm down and stop recording. I typically don't even drink on the weekdays, but in order for me to even discuss this topic, I felt that I needed to be a little bit inebriated to just make it more fun for me. because talking about this isn't fun. I fucking hate talking about Deep Root. Especially now. I mean, before I didn't like talking about them because they couldn't prove that they were going to be doing good for the hobby. So now I really don't want to talk about them because it's provenly factual or allegedly that they're not going to be doing anything good for the hobby. and I know that there's going to be probably plenty of things that I'm going to miss when talking about this and so chances are I may have to do a fucking follow up video and I really don't want to I don't know what else needs to be talked about guys I'm going to talk to the other members of the deep six to see if maybe we can do a reunion show type of thing Zoom meeting style obviously I don't know if any or all will be interested in doing something like that or if any of you out there would be interested in seeing anything like that where the six of us would get together on a Zoom and just kind of reminisce about that weekend that we had almost a year ago if that's something that you are interested in seeing then by all means let me know in the comments section down below if you like what you've seen here give me the thumbs up oh it's so good hit the subscribe button ding my dong that way you can be notified of whenever i upload something for your viewing pleasure and until next time guys another robert i would like to hope that in the beginning you really did have great plans for this hobby. I would also hope that you didn't start this whole venture and have an end game of just screwing people out of their money. You had ideas. You had determination. But you had too much pride. You could have been humble from the very beginning, built your Raza machines without the pin bar, sold much more of them, and you could have grown Deep Root Pinball. I bet within the last 12 months, you knew that your wrongdoings were going to be catching up to you. You were throwing a Hail Mary by bringing in the Deep Six, showing them the facility, getting things all set up good enough, putting on this dog and pony show just so you would hope that the six of us would spread the word on how great things are and what you guys are going to be bringing to the hobby but that failed we saw through the facade that you had set up for us you made so many wrong decisions along the way then you were praying that when you finally opened up your pre-orders that you were going to sell so many of your rosas and once you saw that you had less than 100 orders you knew it was game over somewhere along the way you got lost i truly believe that you do love pinball as much as a lot of us do with this hobby there are so many of us that are fighting with each other whether it be on pin side or on other types of media formats that were just almost at each other's throats when we disagree on something. And it sucks that it took you and your actions to finally bring us all together and agree on something. You are a bad person. And pinball is a hell of a lot better without you.