All right. Who's ready for it? Me. It's my birthday. I'm ready for it myself. Happy birthday. Thank you. This marks the seventh anniversary of the Electric Bat Arcade. Electric Bat Arcade is seven years old. You're of another age range. You're more than seven. I'm seven years plus several score, many, many score and seven years. All right. Welcome to the Electric Batcast. My name is Cale. I'm Rachel. And we operate the Electric Bat Arcade in Tempe, Arizona. Seven years old. We do pinball tournaments. That's right. Many different kinds, as long as you just keep listening to us, you're going to learn about that. What else do we do? We have a bar. We only do one kind of pinball tournament, and that's fun. ladies and gentlemen there you go having a good time at electric bat arcade from the low desert of the great american southwest this is the electric bat cast what's coming up at the bat anything special yeah the uh today's the seventh official seventh anniversary but the seventh anniversary tournament bash is october 3rd 4th and 5th And so that's a huge tournament party. We're going to be giving away a really cool Jackson guitar, some spooky playfields, cash, and the guitar in one of the playfields are just going to go to random people. You don't even have to do anything. No, just sign up. Well, you have to buy a ticket. You've got to buy a ticket. But you don't have to win. You just have to participate and have a good time. You don't have to beat John Chappell. You don't have to beat Ray Day. uh that's gonna be a lot of fun i mean every tuesday at 6 30 we have uh our pinball league uh today you have the earnings report for which month i forgot where we are august august what what month are we in we're in september right which is after august right okay good and then we have the mailbag we usually answer people's questions on here that's uh the majority of what we do here. About operating. Yeah, we talk about operating pinball machines and having a lot of fun. For sponsors, thank you so much for the sponsors, Marco Specialties, EBA150 at checkout. It's going to save you some money at checkout. How does that work? Well, if you have $150 or more worth of items in your shopping cart, you enter EBA150, your shipping is free. There you go. And we never have a problem of working up to $150. We meet that minimum. Yep. Also, game room goodies. If you need anything for your game room, not just pinball machines, video games, pool tables, jukeboxes. Basketball machines? Basketball machines, dart boards. What else? Man. There's a lot of stuff. And sometimes they can even find some older machines for you. Sure. They can rework those machines. What's it called? Shop. Is that what it's called? Yeah, you can shop them. People like to call it shop. You shop in a machine. And they can even do more than that. They can kind of fix them up and get them much, much nicer. There we go. And then how can we forget? We can't forget Stern. Yeah. Insider Connected. Pinballs. Insider Connected. We love that. Man, they're nailing it with all kind of wonderful badges. Ty is showing me all of his badges. It looks like a Girl Scout stash. Isn't that? You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, like a really overachieving Girl Scout. I think he's like a completist, right? Has he gotten all of the badges? 100%, yeah. That's so impressive. They should send him something special for that. Yeah, he should be like when you beat a video game in the old days. You had to write down the phone number real quick. You had to take a picture. A code. What was it for like Electronic Gaming Monthly? had to send in a photo of your of your your crt or whatever whatever i just remember having to write down stuff whenever minae would be my my best friend minae whenever she would beat video games at arcades we'd have to like i remember one time we had all we had with us was like eyeliner and we were riding on our arms so that she could get i don't know the t-shirt or whatever it was kind of score she was writing down a score well there's like a a phone number and some like where you contact that says you did it how cool is that she's really good at pac-man yeah this was pre-internet so you couldn't just like look it up yeah man the good old days yeah let me tell you what take us back uh let's get into it we have jean-marc oh this is this is the mailbag in case you didn't know i'm just gonna go right into it i'm answering questions we'll answer some questions we'll get into the earnings report uh jean-marc via email hello rachel and kale i'm jean-marc from France. Wow. An above average pinball player. He's honest. I love French honesty. I am above average. He's also a proud owner of three games, but this will probably expand. And he's a regular visitor of local arcades and follower of the Batcast, and he has a question. Cool. I'm on Stern Insider Connected, playing from home on his TMNT machine. or on location. On location, he likes to play Jaws, Kong, Godzilla, and D&D. Jean-Marc, he plays by the rules with good days and bad days, just like all of us, collecting badges and achievements, trying to improve his scores. But a thought crept recently through my old, wicked mind. Are there any cheaters out there? people who would somehow restraint the outlanes and drain to keep on playing and achieve incredible scores. Your thoughts? Thank you both for sharing operator insights. This is both entertaining and instructive. You guys have such a cool batitude. Oh, I like that. Kind regards, Jean-Marc. Bonjour, Jean-Marc. Now, with the people cheating to get your crazy scores on Insider Connected, one good thing Insider Connected does is there are – what is it? There's like official – Yeah, like a green – Authorized. A green authorized. Is that what it's called? It's an official, yeah. When you become a location, you become an authorized location. And if you haven't yet, if you are a location and you're not authorized – Get authorized. You just email Stern and they walk you through. There's a process. But they actually do. Our friend was going through this process recently. It's not just like you fill out a – He talked to Roper. Yeah. They double-check that you're not doing any tomfoolery for precisely this reason. Correct. And when you become an authorized location, of course, the glass is going to stay on. Yes. unless there's a nefarious operator. Yeah. You can see by our achievements and our scores that we are not that. We're not doing that. So you don't have to worry about that. Right. But at home – You could do that. You could do that at home, but that's not an authorized – you don't get a little checkmark for your score. Right. And I do know of people who quote-unquote cheat. I mean, it's not really cheating if it's at home. we we have friends who will uh put rubber bands on the outlanes and then and set the ball to the 10 ball yeah set the machine to 10 ball so you can get through like get to the wizard mode yeah we had a friend uh back during covid when we were renting machines he rented jurassic park and he did that trying to beat the game and he still couldn't do it couldn't do it uh so yeah uh but as as far as the stern insider connected goes with like the world leaderboards and all that stuff you're as long as they're the authorized location leaderboard it's hard to cheat right yeah that's that's about it for that one huh yeah and if you were going to cheat like why bother with rubber banding the outlanes why not just use your finger and touch switches until you like get to 10 billion or whatever there you go so hopefully jean-marc you can sleep well tonight after you After you get this answer to your question. Yeah. Good deal. Thank you so much for your message. Here is a message from Amy via email. You get all the email stuff. I do get the email. You probably saw this. Excuse me. I just read the Phoenix New Times article about your journey with arcades and wanted to reach out. I've been a listener to your podcast and a follower of the Electric Bat on social media for a while. Your feedback and advice have been incredibly valuable to me, and I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you for your inspiration. You've truly created something special, and it motivates me as I work to start my own arcade. That's me. I had to flip the page. If you're just listening to this. He's like licking his thumb, turning the page. Back to Amy. I'm in the process of launching a pinball-focused arcade here in western Massachusetts after a career in renewable energy. Thank you for that help. We love renewable energy. We have some on our roof. Yeah. I've been working on this vision since last October. Finding the right large space for an arcade with a bar and kitchen has been a real challenge. You bet. Super difficult. That is hard. While I'm searching for a location, I've increased my collection to about 45 pinball machines. That's amazing. She's not screwing around. Yep. And I'm building a community through home open play hours and by co-founding the Northampton Bells and Chimes chapter. I will get some IFPA knockouts on the home schedule soon also. I wanted to make a connection and introduce myself as another woman in the arcade business, and I do have a question for the podcast. My question is, how do you manage your social media posting? Do you maintain a schedule? Do you have specific formats you always follow for posts? What platforms do you find effective, and do you do it yourself in-house, or do you have someone that does it as a service? That's the question. All right, let me answer this one. Okay, go. My answer is we just happen to have the best social media man in the whole business, and he is in-house, and he's sitting right here. It's Kale. Oh, I'm sorry. So maybe you could give her some more direct advice. Is this where I get into it? We are so fortunate to have you as half the team. Yes. Man, this is a loaded question. and I could probably do a whole back cast just about social media. We should do that. People should ask questions and I will be the reader. Well, I don't even need questions. Oh, okay. You can just go. I could just go. Ted Talk it. I could Ted Talk it. It could be like a 30 minute long thing where I'm just running my mouth about social media. I have so much to say. I have to keep in mind lots of times when we talk about social media stuff, you and me, and I'm like, why are people doing this? And I have such a head start on so many people. I keep forgetting. I have been studying social media marketing since the MySpace days. Like heavily, not just like, you know, I was also on MySpace, but I wasn't like gaming MySpace or just really paying attention. And you have been, and it's, I think that you have the advantage of both, you know, you have many, many years in social media of like dedicated to social media. It's a fascination for you, but you also have a knack for people. Like you just have a social knack that we've talked about that like anything social with electric baddest kale, anything. Well, anything non-social. That's me. so you have two big advantages coming up on anybody else uh so sorry to interrupt but i think that that isn't important you didn't interrupt i love all the accolades you know you don't mind being interrupted with that i will be quiet and let you talk um uh well like i say like back in the myspace days when i uh kind of first got into marketing, I was in a band and I had to push things about the band I was in and this and one of the most important things that I did and it still stuck with me. Even though people are used to being sold stuff on social media, you don't really want to do that. it's called social media for a reason. And I still see people making this huge mistake of thinking it is print media, thinking like old school print media billboards, like you had to get your message out in one frame and then that was it. This is social media. You want to start a conversation. And I remember back in the MySpace days when I would post like a flyer, For my band, my band is playing here, blah, blah, blah. And you would get complaints like stop even from friends. Stop spamming me with advertising. Yeah. And that's when I first learned about, well, I'm going to make this a conversation. You know, you know, back then, I mean, it was it was hard back then because it was just like my band's playing, blah, blah, blah. You're posting it on a wall to your top eight. Yeah, but then you turn it into, you know, what bass and bass rig do you think the bass player is going to bring out? He has a few different ones. What sound do you like? And that would spark a conversation, which – Then people are a part of what it is you're doing. And that's very important, especially nowadays with these algorithms because it looks at the conversation. You know, you have your post and then you have you, you know, your people commenting. when people comment, it boosts responsibility. It boosts a little bit, especially when a lot of people comment. And then you want to engage with those people, no matter what they say. And you'll get people, we see it in our posts, especially some of our reels that have gone viral. You get people being a smartass. Respond to that and be genuine. like like tell them you know you know hey actually it's like this and that and then but have a real you know one of one of my mentors in social media it's one of my buddies from high school uh thomas dotson who's now the ceo of brand builders it's a it's a huge marketing agency and branding agency and he and he always just by watching what he does in social media really engaging with people and in a very cheerful manner and even when somebody's being an asshole it's really great there's assholes on the internet yeah it's really great what he does and and what he showed me uh god so so many years ago but i think it's very important to understand this is social media and you have to be social and i know it's incredibly hard for some people But to basically answer your question about – it sounds like what you are doing is you're having a pinball tournament. So number one, just – you have to do posts letting people know where you are, what time. The who, what, when, where, why stuff. You would not believe how many – I've seen it. Arcades. Wild. Still screw that up. Come to our monthly. Well, when is it? Where are you? What's your address? No clue where it is. And sometimes they'll even leave out the time. Yeah. And on big tournaments. I've seen places do this. I saw one yesterday for a big tournament. I don't want to call them out. It's somebody we know. And they posted this thing. And there's no date or time on this big tournament that they're involved in. Wow. That the most important thing Yeah Be very clear about what you doing Also everybody has a story Our story is we're running this arcade, we're doing stuff. I do videos of me collecting tokens out of the coin boxes. Your story is like what brought you here and what are you doing daily? And one thing that you coached me on is because I am socially awkward. Cheers. We know that nobody cares, right? Like the people that know me in real life know that I'm socially awkward. The people that get to know me on the internet, guess what? Same thing. That's who I am and it just is what it is. We all have different die rolls on our strengths and weaknesses. and whenever you see others it can be very endearing whenever you see that side of people even if it it takes a little uh convincing right for for you to be the person putting yourself out there like that like people really don't care they don't and it it makes it so much more interesting whenever i feel like i'm seeing the real people behind you know we go to different like pastry shops, things like just any type of industry, not just pinball. Like when you feel like you get to know somebody and you're part of the family, it just ties you to the brand in a way that we're all looking for. I mean that's really what we do in real life is create this community. So like what you're saying is do that on the internet. Yeah, and the most important thing is to be genuine. I think everybody people get a little worried about posting on social media because they see these like professionals. Right. That are just crushing it. And what I mean by professionals, the people that know how to talk to the camera, the people that know how to talk to people, the sales people that are like they they don't misspeak. You know, it's just it's incredible. It's polished. Don't try to be like that. Be yourself. You know, some of my favorite accounts to follow, not just pinball stuff. I follow all kind of cool stuff. It's just like really genuine people. And it's so funny and endearing when they are kind of awkward because they're like, that's what most of the population is like. Yeah, almost nobody is great on camera. That's a very small percentage of people. But just that's the nuts and bolts of it. Just be genuine. Be yourself. There are so many opinions on how often do I post. But my rule of thumb is a video – reels are very important. Videos are very important. You have to do videos and talk to your audience. Like at least every other day, one a day is really good. some social media experts say like one or two a week i don't agree with that i've seen the people that have the most momentum are doing like multiple posts a day but i understand that's a lot of hard work and when and when you're doing other things that is that's that's tough to do especially if it's not your wheelhouse for you to make a video is 100 times easier than for me to make a video. That's correct. But at least try to do two to three reels a week, which shouldn't be difficult. Talk about what you're doing. And make it short. Make it one or two minutes. Tell people what's going on. And Amy, you have a wonderful thing going on. Talk about your area, what pinball is like in your area. You have 45 pinball machines? I want to see them. That's 45 videos. Yeah. Hey, this is why I bought this machine, and this is why I think it's cool. You have so much content right there because pinball is so interesting, and most people in the world haven't even seen a pinball machine. We have a huge advantage. We're showing people, I mean, these are like diamonds. Actually, they're rarer than diamonds. But you know what I mean here. It's like you have a very important. It's a cool toy. It's a very cool, rare device you have. Show people how cool it is and why you like it, why a certain mech is cool. What do you think about TikTok versus the – That's a good point. I would – I've always said this, and it's actually come back around, Facebook Blue and Instagram. Just do those. Just do those for right now. and um because you know people are like well tiktok's so hot right now it is it's fine um i'm not a fan of it you know they'll pull your stuff for weird reasons i found out the hard way that nudity will do that yeah a drawing that and i have i have a friend that was like goofing off and roughhousing with his girlfriend and he got dinged for that for like uh violence um uh and And they'll pull our stuff for like using copyrighted songs. That's fine. I get that. But Facebook and Instagram are a little more lenient with that. Yeah. So I like those. And also the age groups you want to hit are on Facebook, which is like the older crowd, right? Yes. 40, 50, 60. uh those are those that's the meat and potatoes of the pinball fans also you're seeing a shift now where there's more like late 20s and 30s coming back to facebook no kidding they're thinking it's cool again yes there's a lot of traction there facebook marketplace is great um so i mean facebook is just the king i mean that that's like the yellow pages you know if the people if i say that do people know what i'm talking about half of them do yeah but um i would just stick with facebook and instagram and they're both owned by the same company they're helping each other to share between it's easy to share between it i would i would just focus on that and and not and just to make it easy on you and so that way you don't have to worry about tiktok you don't have to worry about twitter or x or whatever they want to call it now or any other weird yeah social media network um and then finally i think i can answer this part but in-house is the only way to go on this one 100 um it it is uh it is very important that it comes from your voice when you hire somebody there are great social media people you can hire um i've done i've run social media for other accounts and man it is hard because you have to show up at their place get a feel for the product or the company and and really you you want to post from the heart you know and most social media people will not do that they'll stay in their cubicle and they'll just post garbage and lots of times they they're using chat gpt which is like stop doing this it's so noticeable you know uh there's a big pinball company uh we all know and love uh not stern not jersey jack another one that was posting and they were all their posts were chat gpt generated i got in touch with the owner and i was like dude what the hell are you doing it's so obvious yes you know it's kind of like if you got in a fight with your significant other and the next day they wrote this amazing letter to you and like, oh, this is so wonderful. How did you do that? It was real easy. I used ChatGPT. I outsourced my apology. And it's like it looks so cheap and it looks like you don't care. Yes. And when I told that person, they changed everything up and you could tell now they were handcrafting their social media posts. It just goes back to showing your personality And like what you were saying is if you do outsource, if somebody is a person that outsources their social media, the only people that even come close to doing a good job are people who pay so much attention and become such a part of the company that it's essentially an in-house job at that point anyway. Like we know people that do the marketing side of things and they become a part of the families of the people that they're promoting. So that's correct. In-house only way. Yep, do it in-house. All right, I think we covered everything. That went a little bit longer than we expected. Well, it's a very important thing. We want Amy to be super successful. Yeah, I think I'm going to do a whole episode on social media and focus on pinball stuff. That's great. I think it would be – do an outline. Like do it for real. I'm excited about this. You have so much information. I'm going to do it anyway. Okay. Okay. all right let's uh thank you so much and good luck uh amy and keep us up to date let us know what's going on um i don't know if you're on social media yet and if you she got in touch with us via email uh when you start doing some social media let's link up let's we'll help promote you you know what you're doing uh moving right along to mike brown via email greetings from Memphis, Tennessee. Love the area. This is Mike from Flipside, Memphis, home of the Yopsicle. Hello, David Yop and the Yopsicle. So David must operate there also, I guess. David is at Flipside. Cool. Very. We love David. As a fellow operator, the one thing that grinds my gears more than people putting their drinks on the glass is a jammed up token machine. Screws and nuts finding their way into the coin box are inevitable but with modern sterns i feel like i am in an uphill battle with replacing end of stroke switch actuators i have gone through half a dozen of these in the past few months on both old and new inbox games alike have you had similar experiences and if so do you still bother to replace them from what i understand the eos on a modern stern is largely redundant as Stern uses a timer switch from high to low voltage on flipper coils. So the board handles that, the software and all that. Looking forward to learning from your experiences. Hope I can make it back to Tempe in the near future and play in another one of Chewy's world-famous bounty knockout tournaments. um so right before this i sent gomez george a message because i want to get a definitive answer to this what because i don't know what is the why is there an eos switch if it's all handled on the board side yes uh so we but we can still talk about the way we handle it yes when we find them broken we fix them correct and we do find them broken a lot yep they come off a lot yep but yeah go ahead i was gonna say because the intro to this was about uh jammed up token machines and that's just because he's emptying his his coin box into the token machine so these broken off pieces and parts are winding up in the token machine jamming it up just a little clarity yeah for sure and we don't run into that issue because we we when i get all the tokens out of the machines i throw it on a big table and i pick all of the quarters out yes because i don't want to put the quarters back into the token machine right uh we do run mechs that take both tokens and quarters that's how we run into this predicament so we also take the screws and other detritus that we find in there out at the same time yeah it's really funny because on this table i have a cup filled with uh screws yeah like all kind of stuff let's play we'll guess the machine this came off and then you know in like a like a week we'll figure oh this that's where this screw went um yeah so we don't run into that issue of jamming up the token machine but i really i do want to get a definitive answer about this like why are there eos switches we might hear this in the discord somebody might respond but uh i would like to talk right to george and see like what's the deal what's going on uh because you know with uh you know data east became sega which became stern and the i was just working on a tales from the crypt the weirdest thing is there are eos switches on the on the flipper mechs but they're not connected So all the voltage is handled on the board. Huh. We don't own a Sega machine, so I don't know how those were handled. And now we have these, the most modern stern board. The spikes have both the EOS switch and the voltage is handled on the board. I don't know why. I would like to know. Yeah, we'll post about it when we find out. But I do know if your EOS switch actuator breaks, you're not going to run into any issues. We never have. And we've sometimes had them off for a good bit of time. You get a little tech notification, broken EOS, no EOS. That's the great thing about Insider Connected. It'll let you know which machine that came out of. You just check it and be like, oh, here's a little red circle. Well, you got to go check that machine, and sometimes it's that. Mike Brown, we are going to get a definitive answer, and we're going to talk about it on the next Batcast. Yeah. Because I would like to know. I'm sure everybody would like to know. Yeah. What's going on? What gives? Yeah, what gives? Yeah. All right. You know what? It would not be an electric Batcast without a question from Gutter Ghoul. And here we have it. We have Gutter Ghoul. He's on Discord. And if you want to join the Discord, you can join in on the fun. Go to electricbatcast.com and click the podcast link, and there's a little link to get in our Discord. Electricbatarcade.com. What did I say? Electricbatcast. Oh, electricbatarcade.com. That's why I have you here. Yeah. To correct me, but also guide me, and you do so much. Happy birthday. Thank you. Speaking of requesting a business to allow you to route games at their location, I think we talked about that on the last back cast. What are some surefire ways to lessen the burden on the business and sweeten the deal? Is the 20% offering incentive enough to buy a 20% split with the other coin drop? What about offering to put a quarter machine on location as well? One machine I'd assume would be on location for you is the Star Trek The Next Generation. Is that a machine you just haven't come across, or is there some quirks to keeping it from being worthwhile? Thank you for answering my questions. Got a ghoul. Let's answer the second one first. I knew you'd want to go with this one. You know how much I love Star Trek. Star Trek TNG is notorious for? Being just a pain in the ass, a gigantic pain in the ass. And it's a wide body, so it's a heavy, gigantic pain in the ass. and we have come across we've been offered many of them and i love playing the game i love playing it when it's at someone else's house or someone else's arcade because i do not want to keep that beast of a Steve Ritchie machine going so that's why we don't have a next generation yeah i mean i've heard this before i even met you yeah i've heard operators complain about this machine yep uh so that deals with that um and then sweetening the deal um what are some surefire ways to lessen the burden on a business and sweeten the deal i mean i would say just like i mean you're telling if you're bringing a couple of machines into a bar you're really just like hey you don't have to deal with any of this right hopefully i'm i'm not far i say yeah i mean if you're starting out But from square one, you're going to be close to this place, hopefully. There are some big operator operations that don't make their rounds all the time, and you end up with machines that are really screwed up. But if you're starting off on the ground floor, you're just going to tell them, hey, I'm going to be by a couple of times a week. You're not going to have to deal with anything. Here's my phone number. if there's a coin jam or anything that's going to keep people from playing. You know, most modern machines have two coin slots, so that shouldn't be a showstopper. Just let me know Yeah Hit me up You could even put a QR code and say you don even have to deal with this The customers will message me directly However something like that works Sometimes it's going to make sense for you to put a quarter machine there. If you've got more than one or two games, that might help out. And it really is a case-by-case basis. That's right. How much space do they have? And then how much promotion can you offer if you put five machines in a place and call it Kale's Pinball Hideaway, all of a sudden you've got an Instagram account with 10,000 people or something sending them to Kale's Pinball Hideaway at Kale's Pizza Palace, and then that's helping to get some customers. That is a really good point. If you don't have a location and you're just operating a dozen machines out of like three different bars, start your own social media account. and promoting this. Check out the game that I just put in Kale's Pizza Palace today. I love that. We're going to add that to the social media special episode. Thank you so much, Gertie Gould. Moving right along, this is Josh via Discord. Probably an easy question. We'll see. Yeah. Does operating pinball at scale, you do take away from the fun of playing? Oh, does doing that take away from the fun of playing? No. And also, does it take away from talking about pinball in general? Nope. This is a great question. This is about life. Yeah. And whenever your hobby becomes your job and enjoying what you do. I'm really weird. And no matter what, I've had all kind of crazy jobs. I've I used to be a dispatcher at FedEx and I love that before, like MapQuest and all that stuff. I used to stand in front of this giant map that was on a wall. It was like a war room type thing. And drivers would call me, and I would have to figure out where they were, what quadrant they were in, and then get them to these – like we were dealing with a very rural location. Your second dirt road on the right after the third mailbox kind of scenario. Oh, 100%. And I love that, and I love telling people about it. I haven't done it in probably 20 years, and I'm telling you about it and all these people. I thought that was like the most fun thing ever. Any job I've ever had, I've done construction. I have always really enjoyed what I was doing and I enjoyed talking about it. But I get what you're saying. Most people in the world hate their jobs and that's what he's talking about. Which is why they want to do what we do because they know that it would be fun. I think yeah we still love playing pinball I play much less pinball than you would think for somebody who is at an arcade for many dozens of hours a week but I still love it and I look forward to it I can't wait for our tournament tonight where I get to play some pinball I like talking to people about pinball it's a toy, it's fun even though it is our job we look forward to going to work every day. Yes, we really enjoy it. We even like playing at home. We play at home? Yeah. We play at other people's arcades? Yeah. This is so much fun. But I have heard people talk about sometimes when they have to run a tournament, where they're like, oh, it's no fun because I can't play. You run a tournament and TD. I, yeah, 100 and 100 something people every Tuesday. I play it. I'm a tedious. Yeah, it works. Yeah, I get what you're saying, Josh. But man, we we enjoy it. You have to. In order to be very successful at anything, you you have to enjoy it. You have to have passion, whether you're a financier. Yes, a financier. What else? A magazine editor. A magazine editor. A art director. Bricklayer. Whoa. This always happens. It wouldn't be an episode if it wasn't Cale falling out of his chair. Yeah, I think that's so important about any job you do. And if you're not enjoying the job that you are currently sitting at your desk right now listening to us, ask yourself why. Is it something that's innate to the job? Is it how you're looking at the job? Why do things that you don't enjoy? Are you not getting enough exercise? Are you not getting enough exercise? You're not getting morning sunlight. Deliberate sun exposure. Yeah. There's all kind of factors that go into unhappiness, and we're trying to help people out with that. Let's get into Electric Pat. Oh. She has a question via Discord. Patrick here, and she has a little emoji with a waving hand and her little smiley emoji with tears in her eyes. She's so excited to be a part of this. absolutely honored for the mention in the last last bat cast it's been such a privilege to be a part of this community and even more to get to learn from you two talking about us oh so excited to be on this journey as a novice tech and happy to share my experiences throughout and and if you you don't know this is someone you've been working with closely to learn how to tech pinball machines Yes, she is our bar manager and learning to tech. Yep, and she's doing a great job. Her question, in response to talk about parts quality and such, is there much of a market or growth in the arena of 3D printed parts slash replacement parts? Yes, there's a huge market there for 3D printed parts. I remember when I first got into selling pinball parts, I don't know, was that like nine years ago or so, the 3D printed stuff was not there. It was brittle. It wouldn't last. The stuff we're seeing nowadays is like amazing, and it's much more durable. We're seeing stuff that almost feels like rubber. And we know it's plastic, but it's like it's bendable, it's malleable. Yeah, there's just been so much progress in this sphere. I still don't think you could use it for like a drop target. But, man, there are so many things that you can use it for. Right. So we are headed in that direction, and it may not be too long before you can use it for something like a drop target. Absolutely. Yep. Thank you so much, Electric Pat. We will probably see you later today. Yeah, a couple of hours. At the pinball tournament. At Electric Pat Arcade, 6.30 p.m. every Tuesday. That's right. Here we have another question from Vincent via email. Thanks for sharing so much valuable information on your podcast. I'm fairly new to pinball and would like to learn to fix my machines. I don't have anyone in my area that can teach me. What do you think about the use of ChatGPT to help with sorting out problems and repairing the machines? I had an interesting experience about ChatGPT, using ChatGPT recently. Let's hear it. So I have a couple of examples, and one of them was fantastic. There was some menu diving in one of the replacement boards, the Pascal board, where I couldn't find the thing I was looking for, and it wasn't where I thought it would be. So I asked ChatGPT on this Pascal, this Gottlieb replacement Pascal board, where is, how do I change XYZ? Response was perfect. Took me right there, did it exactly. Excellent experience. So I thought, well, dang, maybe this is like really going somewhere. Later that day, I had to repair a board or I was trying to figure out where a problem was on a board. And I was asking it about voltages. And it told me very confidently about the voltages that I should be seeing at these various test points. And I started to get, you know, I noticed that mine didn't match that. And I thought, well, gosh, this is weird. there's a lot of these that are off. Then I noticed that it was giving me more test points than were on the board. Like, well, this is definitely not correct. So then I, you know, use the manual. I RTFM it and found that this was completely made up, right? This was just a chat GPT hallucination. It sounded very confident. It had values that you would expect to see on a board, but they were just not in the right place. It was completely incorrect, and had I followed that, I could have really blown some shit up. Right, and this is a known thing that ChatGPT does. Maybe all Grok and Gemini and all of them. It will just fabricate an answer. It's a known thing, and you've actually seen it in literature also. Yeah, I was looking up Thomas, like, why does this seem like it's referring to Thomas Pynchon? Well, on page eight and nine, you'll see these quotes. Well, those quotes, like, that's completely made up. And the way that the AI works, my understanding is just that it's working on probability and percentages. And so that means there's a certain percentage of times that it's just going to be wrong. So the trick is to get all the AI to recognize this may be wrong and to clue you in, Instead of saying with confidence, you know, plug this into this. Right. And then boom. And what I really like, you experienced this and I've read about this. It'll actually tell you, oh, that was a lie. Yeah. I said, that's incorrect. Oh, I'm sorry. I made that up. Yeah. What the. Right. Yeah. So long story short, chat GPT can be helpful, but be very careful. Yeah. I think it's great in situations where accuracy doesn't matter. For example, when I was trying to find something in a menu, if it was wrong, it was wrong. No harm, no foul. But if you're trying to figure out a value of a capacitor to replace something, you don't trust it for that. User beware. User beware. And something where it matters, don't use it yet. There you go. I like that. That's very interesting stuff about using AI for anything. Of course. Kind of makes you wonder about the Waymos that we ride around in. Yeah, speaking of AI, I can't wait at Expo. There's going to be a panel about AI art. This is going to be great. You should be on there. But from what I understand, you have Ian from Nudge Magazine. You have who is not a fan of AI art. He's an adamant un-fan. Correct. You have – Jeremy. Zombie Yeti, a.k.a. Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti), not a fan of AI art. And then you have Christopher Franchi, fan of using AI in art. As a tool, mostly. Is there any other way you would use it? It's a tool. Fair. And Jack Guarnieri, I believe. Isn't he going to be on there? He is supposed to be on there, and I'm not really sure what his stance is because there's been – Oh, he's a fan of AI art because he – before the whole Harry Potter thing where they printed the wrong art, like some – Right. Apparently they printed some type of preliminary art, and it was a huge mistake, and they still have not been able to come out and make a statement about it for legal reasons, contractual reasons, which I guess are legal reasons. And before that, he's on record for talking about how excited he is about using AI in pinball stuff. Okay. Well, this is going to be a banger of a panel. We'll be there. That's what I'm saying. And this is the kind of panel you want. There's going to be people screaming. I think this should be more – I'm sad it's only an hour long because this is a two-hour long conversation. Bring your popcorn. From some very, very smart and influential people in the pinball industry. Check that out. come out to expo i'm sure they're going to record that one if not i will yeah let's pull up my little phone and record it uh cool thank you so much vincent that's that's a great question about using chad gp to fix your pinball machines be careful uh this is from m n i gotta write that time i still i still have to look at i still have to look at it and think run it three times in my head uh mn retro gamer our good buddy on discord and instagram and we chat all over the place um question i notice you guys do one dollar entry for tuesday nights uh i assume that covers the ifpa fee do you feel that is a big part of the success of your tournaments a lot of places locally here in Minnesota do a $6 entry, $5 goes to the winning pot, and $1 goes to IFPA. Also, does your winners earn cash prizes? And if so, how do you do that since the $1 they enter is going to the IFPA? Okay, so I do think keeping it inexpensive at $1. Right. I mean, $6 is also, in this world, inexpensive, but $1 is nominal. I think that's a big part of making sure there's no barrier to entry because nobody that's new and presumably not going to win the money, it's not a good feeling week after week to be lining the pockets of one of the few people that is likely to win. Correct. So I do think that that is important. If you want to keep your top players coming back and trying to win that money, great. I know a lot of tournaments do it that way. For us, I think it's much better this way. I think we reach a broader audience. Our winners do get prizes every week, and it varies. Sometimes it's T-shirts. Sometimes it's whatever kind of merch or cool stuff that we have. So there is a physical prize that a person wins every week. But I think just knowing that you won and the Whopper points at the end of the series are the primary motivators for winning. I don't think that adults that have jobs are as motivated as you'd think by the purse. I think they're motivated by winning, the fun of winning, the acknowledgement of winning, and, of course, the sweet, sweet whoppers. Correct. Yeah. I mean, people aren't showing up to pinball tournaments to pay rent by winning $30 at a – Right. Or even $100. I mean, $100 is cool. Yeah. But – and I guess if we did it, it would be like $500. Correct. Which would be significant. But again, it's that the feeling that the bottom 90 percent are paying for the top 10 percent. We know how people feel about that in general economic terms. So we do it differently at the arcade. Yeah. And it's been working. It's been working. And then on the other side, you have Chewy's. Once a month, Chewy runs his tournament, and the cash is the fun part about the tournament. You get a token, a poker chip that represents five bucks, and you can knock people out and take the five bucks. That's sort of like a fun thing, but still, nobody's living or dying over the five bucks. Right. It's always cool when you make your entry back, but it's more fun to just make your buddy give you five bucks. It's the feeling of winning a bet more than it's the feeling of lining your pockets with five-dollar-y dues. Yep Moving right along LI Pinball Society via Discord Can you guys go into a little detail on the cash game of the month and the use of the tournament button I'm trying to find some info online but can't find what I'm looking for. For example, let's say I operated a game on location and wanted to run a monthly tournament. How does the coin drop work? I know as a player I would put in my dollar and then press the tournament button, but how does the cash split between the pot and the operator work? Hope the ask makes sense. It makes perfect sense. How does that thing work? So first off, it has to be on a stern that supports it. And this is called the TOPS. TOPS, T-O-P-S. What does that stand for? Tournament of, I don't know. Tournament of Potential – is she going to get some money? Stuff. Scratch. Tournament of Potential Scratch. I'm sure somebody from Stern will reach out and be like – This is new. And this has been around since White Star? I think so. I think White Star. But certain – we only operated on Spike 1 and Spike 2. Correct. and there are tournament settings in there. There's two styles. There's high score and bump and win. Bump and win is dumb. Ignore that. High score is what you want to do, and you can set it to have, we set it to have three winners, top three payout, and then you can also set how much money you want to start the pot off. We usually seed the pot with $10, and then you can set the amount that you want the game to cost, and then how much of that money you want to go into the pot. So all of those things are variable and you can set for the operator. You can set the time span. You can make it go for a day, a week, a month, any amount of time. And then at the end of the month, it will calculate how much each person wins. It does that math for you. So it's super easy, and it's all handled in the software. All you have to do is read the payout notes and pay out those people that amount of money. There you go. Simple and easy. Next question from RazorQuest via Discord. He's a noob to the Batcast. Is this an individual that John Schaupel has been helping with certain machines? I believe it is. In the Discord. Razor Crest is really enjoying all the info and excited about what I have found. Oh, that I have found a podcast that's passionate about getting others to route pins and set up leaderboards. Question for the group and or Batcast. If you were to just get started in routing and buying your first pin, to do so, which pin or pins would you consider to route first? I ask this question because I live in an area where there are nine pinball machines spread out locally. For the most part, not regularly maintained and not leaderboard insider connected. I'm motivated to help them all out and start routing in the area. Very cool. Yeah. This is why we do this. We want people to take this knowledge and learn how exciting and fun this is and do it in their own area. Yes. Well, I can tell you which machines. I would just throw some brand new sterns. I mean, I think that's kind of the general consensus, right? If you want a turn, make it a stern. If you can afford to buy some new sterns or recently some used recent sterns, that is a great way to get into it. If you have space for some classic games, I love to mix in some older games and they're less expensive. Although those prices seem to be rising. But some classic ballets, those mix it up a little bit. And it's going to help you with your maybe the age of people that are interested in playing your games and just diversifying your audience. And I personally like them. Sure. And what I would get, you know, a lot of people laugh at me when I say this. Find this game. Find a used one. It's not a favorite amongst pinball fans, but I think it is an operator's dream. The Led Zeppelin Pro. There's no mechs on this thing. There's no ball lock. There's drop targets. And one kick out. Right. There's not a whole lot to break. And it looks cool. It's a very cool looking machine. It has Led Zeppelin art on it. And, man, this thing earns. It plays music. Well, yeah, it plays Led Zeppelin music. Who doesn't like that? And then a bar, that's a hit. But we had a friend who put one on location and was immediately like making a couple hundred bucks. Yeah. And this is a – there's not a whole lot to break. A very cool machine, very fun to play, and actually has good rules. You know, that's a good point. As a good – you don't want to get something to start off with that's going to have a whole lot of breakable things or a whole lot of layers that you have to remove to fix or replace anything underneath those layers. Correct. Yeah. There you have it. Get that. Get that. You can find them pretty inexpensively relative to other ones. You can probably get one for like $4,000, right? I would say get a Godzilla Pro. Yes. We have one right here. Yeah. Love playing that thing. I would say generally get Pros. Yeah. I don't think there's a need to put premiums on location. We have a few premiums just because me and you wanted them, but you will see no difference in earning from you paying a couple thousand extra dollars. Correct. Correct. Also, don't forget, and this person has already mentioned the leaderboard inside of Connected, Sterni inside of Connected. Get a cheap television. You can go to a pawn shop. You can even use like a computer monitor. and put a Yodek connected to it. It's like a little Raspberry Pi. If you buy the device, there's no subscription fee for Yodek. And you can just find a Raspberry Pi, flash the software on there, and then you're up and running. Yeah, but I think that's very important to have in there. Have a leaderboard there that people can see. Cool, thank you so much for the question. we have a few other questions here but would you like where are we right now we're at an hour we're at one hour do you do you want to get to the yeah we can do some earnings are we going to save some of these questions for another podcast or are we going to i think so we'll just record one we'll record one maybe in a week or so yeah um we have a lot of questions but don't let that stop you from asking more we would uh we'd love to hear them okay so this is what everybody's been waiting for. This is, I'm trying to make sure my microphone doesn't go flying across the room here. Gosh. Flying back in your chair. It's always an exciting time at the Electric Bat Arcade Studios. We are looking at August. These are the August earnings. Top 10. Let's go with it. This is top 10 out of 65. We're starting with 10. medieval madness I think that was in there last time we moved that to the front room moving stuff around and we also moved it to an end cap that might bring a little more money I forgot that is on the end if you want a game to make more put it on the end of a row just like at Trader Joe's Mm-hmm. Number nine, Metallica Remastered. Now, isn't this cool? And it just still is surprising to me that a game that's been around for a very long time gets a refresh and earns top ten money. Yep. Wow. Number eight, Pulp Fiction. Banger. Man, I love that game. It is a great game. Number seven, Big Buck Hunter. and that just so people know that are new to the electric back cast that is not the john borg classic that right this is a pinball machine this is the one where you hold the little gun did that didn't he you know i don't know i've only played it one time i hope there's one at expo this year uh yeah this is the one where you where you hold the guns and shoot the various things on the screen it's a video game video game also is a descriptor an apt description number six John Wick. Oh, I love that. Now, what was the – Metallica was the cash game, the Tops game the month before. I think John Wick was this last month. Oh, so this bump was from that. Yes. Okay. John Wick. That's right. Game of the month. That's right because now it is Munsters. It is currently Munsters. Okay, so John – September is Munsters, so that's not reflected on this. So John Wick would have gotten a slight bump from being the cash game. The Tops game. For August. Yeah. Tournament of Pot of Scratch. Yep. Number five, Jaws. Still earning. Number four, Dungeons and Dragons. Great. I'm happy to still see. Personally, I'm happy to see that still so high up in the top of the list. Okay. Now we're getting to the top three here. Top three. Okay. This is where it gets exciting. Yes. This is where you wonder what's going to be where. Number three, spooky fan favorite, Evil Dead. Oh, so Evil Dead dropped. I don't remember what it was last month. Was it two last month? You know what? I can't remember. It's been consistently. The audience probably knows better. But it was number one at one point. At one point, yes. And maybe at two points. But it's a consistent high earner. And again, the difference between third place and first place, not that great. So these are all kind of not interchangeable, but they've all earned close to an equivalent amount. Number two, King Kong. Oh, I think King Kong was number one last month. Or not last month, but would it have been March? Maybe I still have my notes in here. King Kong was number one last month. Oh, you do have your notes. I do have my notes. That's a great place to keep them. Yeah. so yeah evil dead moved up from last month okay yeah oh nice yeah so we uh king kong was in first place last month okay so we have a new number one yes should i can i guess yes godzilla yes back back to number one you just can't beat this thing i it's crazy you know it is not in a prime spot it's not in a prime spot people find it you know what i'm gonna take back get a get a led zeppelin uh get a godzilla yeah and a led zeppelin sure but if you're gonna spend i mean i would say if you're finding a used one of either and and the godzilla is a thousand dollars more by the godzilla the godzilla will out earn the led zeppelin everything three to one yeah but this isn't that weird because the godzilla is in a room that people don't it's not people's favorite room to be in of the arcade. It's not on an end. It's kind of next to the rhythm games, which can be loud. Yeah, and annoying. Yeah, some Japanese tunes going. So there's nothing about where it is that is making it earn. And it kind of makes you curious, what happens if we were to put it in a prime spot? How much would it earn? I'll tell you what, this week... I don't want to move it. I don't want to jinx it. Oh, really? I want to leave it where it is. The people that play it know where it is, and they're going to go there. And I don't want to take away from another game that's earning more because of where it is. Okay, so I won't move it. See, I was thinking I was going to move it, but not a good idea. If you're already selling the most of this, I don't need to sell even more of the most. I need to sell more of the middle. That's why I keep you around. Well, actually, that's not really how that works. So one thing that we wanted to check up on from last month was Munsters, because you remember Munsters was very, very high. I think it was in second place, second place last month. And that's because we had brought it back down from Flagstaff and put it back in the arcade. So everybody was really excited to play it. Right. So I wanted to see, well, how excited are they? How is this going to hold? Is this going to have a long tail, short tail? The answer is short tail. So Munsters this month dropped from second place to 20th place. Wow. So in dollars, it earned half as much as it did last month. Okay. But this month, it's the game of the month. It's the cash game. So we'll follow it again to see what happens there. How very interesting. Yes. And another experiment that we're doing is at the beginning of this month, Congo got moved to 75 cents. it was at straight dollar it's what's mark's game and he wanted to have it at a dollar because it was expensive and fancy no breaks um so now it is less expensive to play so we want to see how that impacts the overall earnings so those are two things we're going to be following next month monsters up down congo up down so that's because people ask us a lot yeah um does it matter if i If I charge a dollar, straight dollar play, three plays for $2, 75 cents, how does this end up impacting your overall earnings? And so now we're going to have some more data about that because I personally find this very interesting. For sure. It all matters some way. Yeah. It all matters some way. It all matters in some way depending on what direction you like, and we'll figure it out for you. Wow. That was deep. Yep. Super, super philosophical kale. Right on. So that's the earnings for August, and we're a couple weeks away from having September earnings. There you have it. Good deal. All right. Let's save these other questions. We'll do another back cast before you have some earnings. Yeah, we'll do in the next two weeks. We'll do another episode to answer the rest of these questions, get feedback from George Gomez about those EOS. why are they there is there anything else in the pinball machine that we could take out that would not matter yeah that would be great fantastic cool and don't forget October 3rd, 4th and 5th we're having the 7th anniversary bash for the electric bat arcade it's a 3 day tournament well actually the main tournament is only 2 days you have your qualifying on Saturday then your finals on Sunday. But for the people coming in from out of town, the people that are already here in town, we're going to have a classics tournament on that Friday, which is the 3rd. And then we're going to have a lot of fun. And then there's also another tournament on Sunday if you don't make finals. Oh, that's right. And it's a cool format, right? Yes, pace. Pace match play. I still haven't played one of those yet. It's very fun. So basically you have to after a set number of rounds you have to maintain a certain score in in match play otherwise you get booted so it's kind of like a cross between a normal um a standard match play tournament and a knockout how cool so it's very fun i can't wait i think that would be the first time i've played something like that um so okay so cool we will we'll be seeing you guys soon with a couple hours with another uh well with another back half i'm speaking to the audience here yeah but we'll be seeing the uh the locals the locals soon at the electric bat arcade um for our tuesday tournament yes it's gonna be a lot of fun happy birthday thank you thank you for spending your birthday with me here live on the electric bat cast and uh we'll be we'll be seeing you guys next time see you later the bats are out bats out with a cool secret handshake thank you for joining us we'll see you next time bye-bye bye-bye