Thank you. So how do we do that as distributors, hobbyists, operators, and podcasters? So that's kind of what we're going to talk about a little bit. So before we get started, the first thing I want to do is definitely thank Mr. Burke for inviting us. This is definitely, you know, a peak honor for us to be able to be at basically the, you know, the top of the mountain. So thank you, Mr. Burke. Can you hear me now? So how do we attract new audiences? Like how is it done? How are we not just always regurgitating the same 30 people through that are hardcore pinball people? We have five basic things that we do. Social media marketing, pop-up events, advertising and being in pinball-adjacent spaces, collaboration, and community. So we're just going to go through each one of those quickly. So social media marketing, that's probably me and Don more so than the other three. Social media is just at the apex of how people communicate, how people get information, how people interact with you. Don and I both just create daily, if not hourly, content for people to engage with, interacting with the followers, having reliable and unique scheduled events that they can interact with, and then building a community. Don, did you want to kind of piggyback on that a little bit? Because that's really a huge part of what you do. Sure. How about now? Oh, there you go. What's up, everybody? My name is Don Garrison. I run and started Don's Pinball Podcast this year, and I have a little tinny in the back. But, you know, I'm a regular consumer of the same kind of content that I'm putting right back out there. And so I want to just kind of give back to the community that has given me so much to listen to when I'm mowing the yard, walking the dog, making excuses not to do the dishes. and so forth. So January of this year, I decided, dang it, I'm going to do a podcast. I got the mixing equipment. And then I put together a little bit of a plan to try to really launch this thing in the best way possible on the hopes that it would be maybe successful. And it's already exceeded all of my expectations. I did that by building my Facebook page first. I made sure I had a Gmail account. It was also linked to that, a YouTube account, placemarked. Everything was ready to go. I went on the website Fiverr, F-I-V-E-R-R.com, and it's just full of freelance artists from around the world that do great art, music, images, whatever you need, social media packages. And for, you know, $30 to $60, I had Banner Graphics made in much better detail than anything I could come up with. I sent them some sample photos, and they did illustrations for me, and that's now kind of the logo for the podcast on Spotify and everywhere else that's available. It's on the Facebook page. It's on the YouTube page. So it was all consistent. And then I launched all that simultaneously with my first episode. And then I do 20 to 30 minute episodes two to three times a week because the news, man, it just keeps coming. And so I'm able to stay relevant like that. And, you know, I'm always on Facebook or Instagram and kind of following these people and the media makers. And now I just kind of move right into that same space. And what I hear back from people that travel, you know, I was far away from the frigid north of Canada to come visit me. They like that consistent exposure, you know. Attention spans are short, and there's always something to turn to rather than wait, you know, for a monthly update to try to recap everything that happened during that month. So, you know, it doesn't have to be a lot, but it just has to be somewhat consistent to stay in that zeitgeist space. Yeah, Don's absolutely right. Consistency is key. People have an expectation of being able to see your content on a regular basis, interact with you. If they are commenting, you're responding. All of those things make people feel like they are a part of the community that we're building. So Corbin, Zach, Kyle, and I, a big portion of what we did early on were pop-up events, literally pinball-adjacent spaces. So not these places where you would expect pinball to be, but places where we think that people who will love pinball will be. Is that a brewery? Is that a comic book shop? Is it a record store? Is it a music venue? And we started doing interesting things. Hey, James Bond is coming out. Let's get every version of James Bond together and do a Bond party. Hey, costumes? All of them. Everything from the Gottlieb timed version to the GoldenEye Sega, all the way through to the Bond 60th, we put them all together. And you got people coming out that were James Bond fans, and now they're engaging with pinball. So that's what we're looking to accomplish in those spaces. We're looking to bring people into it who we think will have a possible future interest in pinball. So we did another one at a music venue. Corbin's family has – what's the name of the venue, Corbin? The Oracle? I think it's this one. Yeah, The Oracle. It's a music venue in our town, local hometown. and we did a pop-up event there and now we actually have, there's two permanent pinballs that are there all the time and people follow it, you know, they find out, oh, there's an Elvira there, there's a getaway, let's go play it. Oh, there's three Elvira's there. Yeah, I mean, absolutely, these opportunities to then not only do the pop event but then the venues recognize oh there are a bunch of people out there who are interested in playing these games Let talk to the operators or maybe buy some of our own machines to put in here and then you just growing pinball You're just constantly, constantly growing. But music venues, breweries, festivals, we did the Cleveland Gaming Convention. You want to talk about? Tattoo conventions, too. Tattoo conventions. Tattoo conventions where we've done pop-up arcades, arcade games and pinballs. Yep. Tattoo conventions, other things like that. Comic-Cons, anywhere, yeah. Yeah, I mean, my wife runs a hospital, and they were doing an employee event, and Corbin's family brought down a bunch of pinball machines and arcade games. And again, it's just getting these games out in front of people and making them realize, or having them realize, these are still being produced. These are out there. These are to be enjoyed. Yeah, weddings, too. We've done a lot of weddings. anything like that weddings bridal showers anything that you know there's people there and they want to play pinball let's let's get the pinball there absolutely it's it's that you just have to be willing to move pinballs i think that's the key yeah more not enough sense and uh truck so you'll be good to go so how did we all come together i mean pinball can be a community it can also be very divisive there are some personalities and some people out there distributors, podcasters, YouTube content creators that are just in it for themselves and they're not interested in really the growth of our awesome hobby. That's the opposite of who the five of us are. We are all about collaborating. More pinball is good for everyone. So we've collaborated together. In addition to that, we've worked with the Electric Playground who builds toppers for events. We've worked with other distributors. Oh, I know that's like the dirty word. Like, why would you guys are competition? Why would you ever work together? We work together for the good of everyone. It's all about collaboration. Yes. I mean, Zach and Corbin can tell you, I mean, the operator perspective a lot of times for years and years and years was, hey, you know, it's only good for me. Only what's good for me. and they've been so awesome about working with other operators, splitting locations and working together with a lot of those things. I mean, Rob Fowler from 216 Pinball, you guys share some space and do some things, and it's good for everyone. Shout out to 216. Yeah, definitely shout out to 216. I mean, Darkroom Pinball photographer and video comes out and shoots our events. Look up Darkroom Pinball. You won't be sorry. Oh, my gosh. If you're on Instagram, Darkroom Pinball, John, he is unbelievably talented. So other partners, obviously Mr. Burke. He has Pinball Expo. He has the amazing in Girard, Ohio, Past Times Arcade. He's been a huge supporter of everything pinball before it was cool and before it was popular. Yes, absolutely. I mean, that is, and that's the thing is when you're at the top of the mountain, when things are going well, everyone wants to be a part of it. But the people like Mr. Burke who were, you know, keeping things on life support for so many years, That's what gets us where we are today. So community, Corbin already hit on a little bit talking about weddings, receptions. I mean, we'll travel to, we went to the Vintage Flipper World in Ann Arbor. Zach, you want to talk a little bit about the bus trip up there? Because that was definitely a huge impression to everyone. You can see in the bottom left-hand corner there, the big green school bus, we can fit three or four pinballs in there pretty comfortably, and we haul them in and we take it wherever we need to take it. Ann Arbor, VFW, where we got an Airbnb afterwards and just played pinball pretty much all night after playing pinball all day. We've gone to a couple of weddings and just load pinballs in the back of the bus, take them with us. They're easy to get in and out. Everybody always has a good time with it. And then we also have a friend locally, Nick, who does Northeast Ohio Pinball Network, and that's the streaming side of it. And I came to an epiphany a little bit at the Ohio Championships last year where I'm watching it on my phone while someone else is trying to stream it through their phone. And these epic things are happening, like this battle back and forth, David versus Goliath sort of situation. I'm going, there has to be better ways to do this. And there's so many great streamers out there. and Nick has picked up the baton in Ohio and just on his own dime built this rig and has been everywhere streaming pinball, and it's just so much better. Ohio State champion Steve Prusa. But these are just a few photos here of our events. Obviously, as with anything, you want kids to be involved whenever possible because that's the next generation that's on the way, so getting kids involved in community events. I'm heavily involved locally, Hoover Pinball League. and things like that to get people involved. We also do things in schools, STEM events, science, things like that. A lot of the times people come out not only just to play the unique games or the weird games that we're bringing out or putting together. It's also just partially to come out and hang out with other like-minded people and talk about what's going on. You know, you can't just go out and play. It's to build, find like-minded people and hang out together. I think that is just as powerful as the game. Sure, you've got to bring the games. You've got to bring some unique stuff. But you also have to have a personality and want to interact with people and talk to them. I think that's a big part of it is just the people want to get out and talk to other weirdos. I mean, we're all weird, so let's all hang out together and be weird. No, absolutely. I mean, Corbin is nailing it there. So when Corbin and I first started to collaborate on a lot of this stuff, we met through a location Rack It Up Arcade It was a new venue You guys had 20 pins in there And they were doing a Wednesday league Now a lot of what we do isn IFPA and like cutthroat tournaments and whatever else it literally a pinball club. It's school teachers and plumbers and architects and... Right, but just every walk, anybody from every background, different backgrounds, I enjoy seeing everybody come together for a common, like, you know, people that wouldn't normally hang out together. We're all together now playing pinball. It's great. We're not talking religion. We're not talking politics. We're just having a couple drinks. I've got some opinions. We're just all around and it's just the absolute best. I think we're moving from a spot where everybody was, from the general public, was saying pinball, that's something they still make to pinball podcast, what do you talk about? The door's already kind of opening now more, just among normal people in society. The more people collectively we can bring in, I mean, the rising weird tide is going to lift all of our ships, you know. So I'm not competing myself with other podcasters. I listen to them, too. You know, listen to all of us. You know, the more listeners we have, the more we all benefit, too. Yeah, I mean, Don's absolutely nailing it. I mean, I could not have said it better. We should all be in this together, and that's part of what we do, part of what you guys do. I mean, we have Andrew McBain in the audience now with Sasha, and they are behind Pinball Adventures. And literally, he's just, oh, hey, you know, I love pinball. I'm an enthusiast. And here we go. Let's build a pinball machine. And his proof of concept is out there in the wild. We had one of the first machines, a Punny Factory engraved edition. And Corbin and his family were nice enough to allow me to tour it around Ohio and put it in their quarter-up location. Nobody else is doing interior graphics, interior cabinet graphics. Full, dripping. Love it. So definitely, this will be like my social media spiel for a minute is, Follow Don's Pinball Podcast. Follow Pinball Adventures. Follow Anjali Zac Stark Novelty. Like, get ingrained in this stuff because that's where all of the interesting content is, where you can find out about these weird things like Puny Factory to where you open the coin door and you look inside and you see there's an entire warehouse going on down here. The art doesn't end inside the game. It goes throughout the entire thing. We're just really, really fortunate to have gotten together. I mean, the way that, Don, talk a little bit about how you and I kind of first connected, because that's an absolute wild story. Okay, so I saw this game called Godzilla Premium. It was about a year and a half ago, and it was back in the time when every distributor had a year-long waiting list for this game. The price increase was coming up. The premiums were still like $8,500 back then. And, you know, I'm looking everywhere for them, and then all of a sudden this guy enters the chat on Facebook, And he's like, if anybody wants a Godzilla Premium new in box for MSRP, let me know. And I'm thinking immediately this has got to be a scam. Scam, scam alert, scam alert. I put this guy through the ringer, grilling him on questions. I checked with Stern to make sure he was a listed distributor. And then I still was a little bit uneasy. But sure enough, I put my deposit in. We did the balance transfer. And then the thing showed up in my driveway. So literally I think it was right before Expo last year because it may have been being delivered or arriving to your place like as you were coming to the show or something wild. Yeah, so that was – so he got me my Godzilla premium. And that was just through chance on Facebook. I've been cut off. Oh, there, I'm back. Yeah, and so since then, in concert I was also developing my podcast idea. Now that's going. And then I would just let people know when they're listening where I got my games from, and then that was benefiting him. and then he kindly started sending me T-shirts to give away. Now I do Friday live streams on Facebook and I give two to three shirts away to just random people that are in the chat. And people love that. I love getting stuff for free. Who doesn't love free T-shirts? Speaking of which, if you don't already have one, there we go. We've got some shirts in the audience. We brought like a hundred of the shirts that I'm wearing. So if you don't already have one before you leave, I have – Don doesn't get one. Don gets two probably because he's got to give some away on his Friday giveaways. I want to do a product toss at the end of this. We were talking about having a T-shirt launcher, but Mr. Burke said that there were some liability issues and we might take out some people. So we didn't do it after all. Next year, T-shirt catapult. T-shirt catapult, yes, absolutely. So I guess we'll wrap things up, but I definitely want to reemphasize our goal of positivity in pinball. It's a community. It's something that we can all get on board with. But before I take any questions coming down the line, do you guys have any additional notes or things that you want to get out there to the people? For the pop-up stuff, we just like to do the weirdest stuff possible. Like, you know, all the bonds is a cool one. We're going to try to get all the Capcons together next. That's on the list. Midnight Madness. I'm a crazy Midnight Madness fan. We've got a lot of Halloween pop-up events coming up. Just bringing, like, Frankenstein, Scared Stiffs. We did all three Elvira's, the Unholy Trinity. I think the NBA fast break may have been one of our most successful ones as well as one of the ones that we had people who had no idea what pinball was that absolutely had a blast. We've been touring linked fast breaks because you can link them and play against each other. And so we, of course, found two and we're like, let's take them around and go head-to-head. It's so much fun. If you guys haven't seen it, definitely check it out online. It's 1997 NBA fast break. You can link the two together and go head-to-head, but it's not who's trying to get the high score. It's literally total number of points, four quarters, can go into overtime. Oh, George Gomez, my man. Linked and Midnight Madness, what? My goodness. Yeah, but if you're not aware of Midnight Madness, check out latest episode, Fresh Pinball Podcast. We take a deep dive into that. We actually talked a little bit to John Borg today about Munsters and Midnight Madness and all of that so we hope to even get some more information Anything for you to add there Zach I think we have really covered anything Any questions All right right here So you began by talking about how you could tie in to adjacent spaces through the game team, and then you just now mentioned NBA Fast Trade, which reminds me that we haven't had a sports team in a long time. Is that something that we're missing out on? I mean, what's bigger right now than the NFL? I mean, billions of people and billions of people watch it, consume it, fantasy football, ESPN, you name it. I mean, even soccer. I mean, European football. There are opportunities there. Flipper football, FIFA. I mean, the FIFA video game on PS5 and things like that are just, yeah, those are enormous. I think, you know, I don't want to speak out of school, but I would think the struggle on that would be the license on that would be probably pretty costly, but maybe worth it. But that's absolutely, you are, we are missing out on some of those things, but there are definitely some opportunities there. And if we have to dig things out from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, whatever we have to find in the archives, we have great resources, great people who have worked together with us. when we don't personally own the games, have loaned us games. When we did the Bond event, we didn't own the Gottlieb version or the LE, so an operator out of Pittsburgh kindly lent us the games. Who does that? That's amazing. We had a question over here. Is that a Loser Kids podcast? Oh, I like it. I've heard of them. Very cool. Spotify. Once we get six episodes in, we'll go over to other platforms as well, but some of the platforms do have some requirements for content before we can proliferate to the others. But it's just a good time with some friends getting together, talking about pinball and anything else that we may think of at the time. I think we – was there a question right here? Yeah. You said pinballs are at an all-time peak. How do you measure that? So we measure that in a couple different ways. The biggest way is, you know, the sales for Stern and our other manufacturing partners. Whenever they're expanding their production facilities, hiring at rates that they've never hired, I shouldn't say never, but haven't hired at for decades, that's how we measure it. I mean, from an operator standpoint, through the, I mean, our family's been doing it for over 100 years. Four generations. Four generations. And it's like, you know, late 90s, early 2000s, down. I mean, 2010, we got like laundromats. We got a couple dive bars and some stuff in it. We got a warehouse filled with pinballs just sitting on them all. there was a time where people would ask what do you do? I operate arcade games it's kind of a dying business but then towards the late 2015 and on the rise in it all has been crazy it was going up up up yeah we have too many games on probably but from an operator perspective it absolutely is the retro is cool again everybody loves it you're seeing it in normal TV shows and movies I mean, it's all – it's – It's back in popular culture in a way that it hasn't been for a long time. And I think the operator perspective, the distributor perspective, the manufacturer perspective, and then the media side of it, I mean, there's an appetite out there, and that's our barometer for it. Unfortunately, Stern is a privately held company, so they don't share their production numbers. Release production numbers. But I can tell you they're cranking them out. So is it a trend or a pass? I'd like to think that it's a trend because what we're seeing and what we are trying to develop is not just 40-year-old and 50-year-old dudes like me that are reliving their childhood but are passing it on to our kids, our teenagers, and things like that. So whenever they're making the leap then to having their own families, it's just a cycle. But it really comes down to people like Mr. Burke, myself, the Angelis, everyone to get out there and not just sell to the people who are already into it. It's growing. It's constantly growing. It's engaging people into it. And I think the sky's the limit. It really is. Do we have a question over here in the Rush shirt? No? Are you excited for the 2012 to be on all the games now? You can play that wizard mode? Man, I love it. I love it. I just played it the other day. It's fantastic. So you have a Rush L.E. with the topper? With the topper. Thank you. Courtesy. So if you're not a subscriber of Don's, Like, not only is he a podcaster, a content creator, he creates his own mods. I mean, you did a topper for Elvira. That's insane. When are we buying the black and white? Oh, the black and white Elvira. I saw that this morning. I thought that was a terrible idea until I saw it, and now I want two of them. I bought an Elvira Premium, and I re-skinned it to look like a 40th anniversary edition, which gained mixed reactions online, mostly positive. but some people took it as a personal affront. Right, yeah. I want to link them together so we can go head-to-head. Oh. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely opportunities like that. Well, I think we're probably about at our time. Oh, we've got one back here, the young lady in the hat. Are there any pinballs you're looking to buy? Oh, that is a fantastic question. So one of the things that we always talk about on the podcast is Big Bang Bar. we're looking for, email freshpinball at gmail.com. Maybe a Congo would be a nice one. That's the final Midnight Madness game that Corbin and his family are looking at. Congo's fantastic. Oh, my gosh. Those would probably be the top two, but, yeah, absolutely. We're always looking, you know, basements, warehouses, you name it. We're looking for some pinball. But, all, thank you. Thank you all so much for the time. Again, if you haven't already gotten a shirt, meet me at the doorway, and I'll be happy to get you guys some shirts. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you.