Warning, the following episode contains adult language and screaming goats. Listener discretion is advised. The Pinball Network is online. Launching The Pinball Show. Hey everybody, it's me, Zach, with The Pinball Show. This week, I've got something very special for many of you. You guys ever heard of Deep Root? Well, we're going to talk all about it, get very in-depth, because this week we have a special guest that was willing to come on. They are, I don't, honestly, I don't know much about this individual. Based on the information that I've been sifting through and researching through that I've been sent, they know very much, very much about Deep Root, and they're here to talk about it, alongside other information that they've received from other previous employees of the Quasi Company. So we're going to jump into it right now. You probably have heard this person. If you follow Deep Root at all, whether it's through social media, through the forums on Pinside and whatnot, it's the one, it's the only, Blueberry Johnson. BJ, what's going on? Zach, hey, awesome to be on the show. Glad to be here. Glad to talk Deep Root. I am not a former employee. I actually have no connection whatsoever to Deep Root, except maybe I'm a little too interested in its ongoings and doings. Oh, I see. So you're like a undercover reporter. Yeah. This is the first time coming not under the cover. And your real name is Blueberry Johnson. Correct. That's cool. It is my name. Do you care if I call you BJ? I would be honored. Oh, man. So before we jump into this, are you into pinball? What got you? Like, when did this all start for you? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, good God. If I weren't into pinball, what the hell would I be doing? But yes, into the pinball. I was on the pin side because of it. And what got me into it was just I was following enough of what was going on with the pinball news and such to catch wind of Deep Root. and instantly it was my favorite thing um because i always loved like cringe comedy i remember i would watch like ricky gervais on the office and like hold my hands over my eyes like to try to block out because it was so painful and that's like what it was like uh hearing robert talk and so i love it and it was just like the most ridiculous saying the craziest stuff and i thought it was fantastic and so i really wanted to follow that because as much as i found that interesting I don't kind of like people who talk shit about everyone else and who talk about how they're the greatest. And Robert definitely did that. And then add on when they don't deliver, then that's both kind of funny and sad. And then when they start actually causing harm to people, then I, you know, had ticked all the boxes of interest. So then you get passionate about it. Yeah, exactly. So I like finding things on the Internet. Maybe I have some talent for it. And so I just started doing my little Googling and started turning up some fun finds and posting it to the thread or the sewer of Pinside, as Robert calls it. And over time, I guess I started finding some good stuff. And then within the past year, former Deep Root people started reaching out and sending me more good stuff because they had a lot they wanted to share with the world. But Robert has the litigious reputation and they didn't feel comfortable sharing it themselves. So I thought if I can get this out to kind of tell the world about what's going on, then that would be a good service. Plus, it's kind of fun. Yeah, absolutely. So you've been doing this for a couple of years then. We know that Deep Root started back in, what, early 2015 with everything. So you've been following for quite some time. And I don't know, between you, Ben Heck, there's a lot of constants in that pin side thread. You're pretty privy to a ton of information that is not publicly out there. about Deep Root and those things that occurred over the last six, seven years? Yeah, I didn't catch on from 2015. I guess if we went back to the thread, we could find out when I started, but it's definitely been a few years now. And that's actually a great kind of transition to saying, I wanted to say at the top of this podcast that I have no direct info about Deep Root. It's all secondhand from about six or seven employees. So it would be great if we just pretend, because otherwise it'd be really tedious to actually do this, that I say allegedly or reportedly before every sentence. So just that's the case. This is all alleged and reported. You know, I think it's pretty good reporting. And then public information. So yeah, it's been three years or so, but then it's really, you know, picked up steam over the past one when both the cracks start to show more on the outside of Deep Root because initially it was just, this is crazy. How is he going to do it? And then it started to become more, oh, he can't do it. This is crazy and he can't do it. And then of course, we found out how he was funding these operations, which is a whole other can of worms. And we're going to jump into a quick timeline, but before doing so, can I ask BJ, what is your history? What do you do for a living? I need to know more about you. Yeah, Yeah, I know. A lot of people do. Well, I mean, the thing is that people think I'm kind of like an unknown. But if you Google me, I mean, you can find out. I kind of like to keep it separate. But I have a long history of working in children's television, primarily behind the scenes, editing and production. But my passion. For real? Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. No, no. Give me a Google. Yeah. I mean, but the thing is, like, it's kind of dissatisfying because I think I could be great in front of the camera. And I've made some efforts in the past to get there, and it hasn't happened. So, you know, it's good that I have a good living. But honestly, I kind of like, you know, wish sometimes that I could be the star because I think I'm made for it. So maybe even in this being here on the microphone is kind of a little bit of being, if not in front of the camera, in front of the microphone. But, yeah, I can't complain. Well, absolutely. This is the pinball show. Oh, yeah. This is a big, big deal. any legal background any engineering background any manufacturing any of that yeah no but i gotta tell you like it seems like uh extended learning here because i'm i now know a fair bit about the legal system because i had to to even understand how this pacer system works it can be a nightmare and now i know about difference from like stays and motions and 341 hearings and all this stuff I never would have imagined just because I want to get those court documents and know what the hell to do with it. And then engineering, I don't know, but the kind of volume of stuff I'm being sent about building materials and the stuff these people tell me, I flag for them. I really don't know what the hell they're talking about, but I now have hundreds of photos and videos and documents that if I wanted to get a degree in that, I probably could. You're a hell of a researcher. That's for sure. Yeah, that's my thing. Jack of all trades, master of none. So, listener, we've got Blueberry Johnson sitting co-pilot as we go through the mess that is and was Deep Root. I only said Deep Root Pinball because things go back way deeper, pun intended, than just the pinball stuff. So I think we take us back very quickly. For those of you maybe that don't know much about this, this is essentially a company that opened up from a wealthy or assumed wealthy hobbyist wanted to create his own manufacturing company for pinball machines. Back in early 2015, Deep Root Tech started a pinball division. Deep Root Tech was a prior company. They contacted several pinball designers and manufacturers. A lot of this is coming from this timeline. It's coming from This Week in Pinball dating back this far. Summer 2015, Deep Root team decides to shelve the pinball project until a later date, October 2016. Deep Root begins implementing their internal plan of action to start down the road to become a pinball manufacturer. Then late 2016 into 2017, they began reaching out to several pinball designers. That was a big thing as hobbyists. We were observing, holy shit, there's going to be a new pinball company. And this pinball company has the likes of so many different people that we've become accustomed to. We know these names. If you're nerds and pinball nerds like us, they're household names. One, the biggest one that people kind of turned their head to was they decided that pinball designer John Papadiuk, also known as J-Pop, was coming aboard this company. And everybody was like, what the hell? He's already screwed people out of money in the past with his company, Zidware. We had the likes of Barry Oursler and Dennis Nordman. We had, was it Jon Norris? Jon Norris, yep. There's a lot of them. So that was kind of a shock and awe. It got everybody's attention. 2017, later on, summer, they began to move forward with their plan on J-POP's Zidware customers. There was lawsuits, and Deep Root actually agreed in September 2017, agreed to terms on the settlement to help these Zidware customers out. my guess is that he was trying to have a better look for J-Pop being part of his company so they were reportedly going to take care of these individuals that bought pre-purchased Zidware games and didn't get them so J-Pop resurfaces and everybody was like well Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti) who we know as Zombie Yeti he was doing all the art for the Retro Atomic Zombie Adventure Land that Zidware was working on or the Magic Girl so what is going down there to be continued. This Week in Pinball speaks with Robert Mueller in 2017 as well, talking about the plans that Deep Root has. They didn't plan to take any pre-order money or deposits for machines. Everything sounded good. It sounded like it was a pie in the sky thought, but it sounded good. As long as you're not taking our money, we don't get too mad, but we will soon find out that that wasn't the case. Money was being taken. They wanted to make a public announcement, and then in October, October 13, 2017, Deep Root retracts its settlement offer to the plaintiffs for reasons that are going to be disclosed at a later point in time, later on that month. Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti) finally signs off on the rights to the game in exchange for some undisclosed consideration. And then they try to make this full-fledged pinball company. A lot happened between 2017 and 2019. But late in 2019, we finally get at the Houston Expo a demo of Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland. Everybody gets to finally see what it is. The prototype version, we'll talk more about that in depth with BJ here. But then in September 2020, there are plans to launch. September 21st, 2020, that was going to be the day, the five days of Deep Root or whatever the hell it was. I think it was supposed to be earlier that year, but then they changed it numerous times. I'm a little blurry because this shit has changed so many times. But plans to launch, but it was canceled the very next day, September, I believe, 22nd, 2020. I could be wrong. That was the Deep Six event that many of us have heard about. The Deep Six event was media from pinball being flown in or drove in, expenses paid to come here to do a tour of the facility. And it served as like a media opener reveal for this company. Included in the Deep Six were the likes of Kerry Hardy, a pinball personality, Chris Chandler, Colin MacAlpine, a competitive pinball player, Jeff Patterson, owner-operator of This Week in Pinball, Crystal Gimnich with Marco Specialties, lauren gray with the backbox pinball podcast and that was the those were the six individuals that came after the deep six we'll talk about that there was kind of a mess and things changed but in november 2020 there was a live streaming an airing of gameplay for retro atomic zombie adventure land also known as raza done by flip tronic fast forward excuse after excuses to why these games are not being built there was pre-orders that then were taken money was then exchanged okay does the game come out still doesn't come out what happens there's delays there's excuses and then boom on august 20th 2021 the sec enters the picture september 2015 this is from the sec quote from at least september 2015 to at least february 2021 robert j Sébastien Muller and deep root both investment advisors defrauded two investment funds they advise and nearly 300 people who invested roughly $58 million in the funds. So once the SEC enters, all shit hits the fan, of course. People are out of money, not only in pinball, but we find out that many retirement plans, senior citizens are out, sums upwards of, if not more, $58 million. And everything is over. Everything is done. Or was it? all right bj what do you think about that timeline not too bad right no i mean it's it's good just hearing you go through and this is just top level yeah how much ridiculous this has happened for a company that never made a single game is impressive in itself yeah absolutely and uh one one thing people might not know is that you know because we talked about now the connection of how where that the money allegedly came from uh all of robert's actual like investment companies uh for the life insurance policies. In 2015, he issued a stock for people to try to invest in Deep Root Pinball and nobody bit. And so then it was later after that, that all the other investments for the life insurance policies came from. And then according to the SEC, that's what paid for Deep Root Pinball. So it's kind of funny when people think about like, oh, like, did these people know that their money was being used other ways? When he straight up said, I want to get money to build a pinball company nobody was interested so it seems that you know he was fortunate to find another way to fund it i'm going to ask you a very we'll start with this why didn't deep root pinball work all right if you had to just answer in one word yeah if you're if you're throwing things on a wall what are some of the big reasons in your opinion after some research and talking to previous employees why didn't it work yeah well you could answer with one word and say Robert. That wouldn't be an exaggeration. I mean, it wouldn't give you the whole picture, but yeah, this was doomed to failure because of the guy who's in charge. This is a guy who thinks that he's a super genius in everything. He's never done any manufacturing. He liked to play pinball a bit and he bought some machines. So he's going to create the world's greatest company and he's got the money to do it. I guess it's a good lesson that you can have all the money in the world, but if the person in charge at the top doesn't know how to use it, it's going to result in this. And so just by virtue of being him, he knew everything that was right. And so even when you would have the people who did know, they hired a lot of people, right, who had experience and come to him and say, this stuff's impossible. You need to stop, you know, every time you swing by the office and play the game, like telling us how to change everything, you need to stop giving us deadlines that are ridiculous. You need to give us the money to buy the parts that we actually need rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy machinery. We don't, that you have somebody who doesn't know anything about machinery purchase. It's just all about this guy. So I think that's it. And Robert Mueller wanted to go, he wanted to go big. Oh, yeah. Most pinball companies start out as a little mom and pop or a little boutique where, look at Spooky Pinball. They had one game and can we make 10 games? Can we make 50 games? Robert came out of the gate saying, I've got money, and not only are we going to make a game, we're going to make more games in one year than all of the pinball companies combined. We're going to release at one time up to like five pinball, new pinball titles, all different rules, all different layouts. And not only are we going to do that, we're going to have more innovations and patents than anybody in the entire industry or the history, and we've got the big guns to do it. Here are the names of individuals. They even brought in Steven Bowden, who at that point in time was a competitive pinball player, well-loved within the community. So it got behind a lot of people that the hobbyists respected, wasn't taking money, but had these outlandish ideas as to how it was going to happen. Octo-manufacturing, all kinds of catchphrases that we've used over the last couple of years to describe how in the hell is all of this going to work. and ultimately it did not work, but you're saying Robert Mueller, based on who you've spoke with in the past, it was a big Robert Mueller. Oh, yeah. He was in over his head, didn't know what the hell he was doing. Now, here's a question I do have. Some people do think very strongly that this was all a ploy. $58 million? This was just, this is nothing but, you know, smoke and mirrors in order to get money for other endeavors. and your opinion based on what you've heard, BJ, is was Robert Mueller, did he really think this could work or was this all bullshit? And was this just a big con? Okay, well, I was going to say it was all bullshit, but he also legitimately thought it could work. No, like he wanted to make pinball machines. Some of the stuff we've seen from the auction and then a lot of the stuff that maybe TPN will publish that I can send your way, videos and photos. We've got a lot. documentation and stuff. There were a lot of people working a lot of years really hard on making pinball stuff. They had the equipment. They didn't have the right equipment or they didn't have the equipment they needed, but they had ridiculous amount of equipment. Robert rented a giant facility. And I was just told that the reason they picked the facility was because it was near his house. Forty seven thousand square feet without checking, like, could it support manufacturing and spoiler alert, it couldn't. And so he was bringing in demolitionist electricians. He hired a full time electrician just to try to rig the place to be able to. They had guys coming in with sledgehammers knocking out walls like this poor landlord who I don't know, like if he got some compensation to let Robert come in and probably turn his like lovely, like normal office building into a giant like hole in the middle, plus also the like 40 whatever person auditorium. But he was just going in there, smashing everything up to try to retrofit this place that they never should have rented in the first place and was so expensive. But you don't do that unless you if you're if you're trying to do smoke and mirrors. Right. You don't you don't spend millions of dollars potentially on equipment, equipment that, you know, didn't work that well. But equipment, if you're just like I'm trying to get money and make it look like I'm trying, you don't have staff of, you know, 40, 50 people being paid before they stop being paid full time to do this. And so it was really unfortunate because there are a lot of talented people working there that would try to do what Robert wanted and even had a good level of success, though it wouldn't be the right things to do. And then he'd just come in and just almost like a tornado, change everything and now put him on something else. And that's why you see Robert used to tout that, I don't know, it was like three or four years ago that they had like 13 Whitewoods more than 50% done or games more than 50% done. You can see from the auction there are a lot of different play field ideas, and there were a lot of people working on a lot of stuff, but it just wasn't useful. So, yeah, absolutely he wanted to make pinball machines. He just had no fucking idea what he was doing, and he didn't want anyone to tell him how to do it because he's him, and so he knows best. And as I'm going over this information, same goes for, as Blueberry was saying, for myself as well. I'm not well-versed into this. I don't know as much as I should know. None of this is fact-based. This is only based on the information that's given to me. It is all alleged. It is all just reportedly on my end as well. I'm just reporting to you guys what, you know, the conjecture and stuff that I've been given as well. My own opinions you guys have heard already. So I'm just presenting information to you as an entertainment piece here. Okay. The quick and easy was just saying the issue, why this didn't work, was Robert Mueller. It sounds like the facility itself wasn't equipped. I don't know why they needed gym equipment or a huge-ass auditorium. They had an animation studio that was going on. He was trying to create another Disney empire, it sounded like to me. What else besides Robert Mueller? Why else did this whole endeavor fall so flat? Yeah, some employees thought he fancied himself as Elon Musk. and whatever you think of Elon Musk, he's actually, I think, producing stuff. He's a visionary here, this Robert. So, yeah, the facility, just a few more things on that. So, yeah, it didn't support manufacturing. It didn't have even the power to be able to run the machines they purchased, and that's why it's funny that now that the facility is back on the market for sale, they have new things in the offering memorandum that weren't in it when Robert had it, which are stating like the power levels that it can support and saying like what it can be used for. And it's not heavy manufacturing. So something a lot of people don't realize is, you know, this is a 47,000 square foot facility, which I understand is much, much bigger than any, you know, little pinball company needs or even midsize. They they rented another building right down the street from the headquarters. I didn't know that. Yeah. And that was just to be able to fit the machinery that couldn't fit or couldn't be run in the place, in the main facility. And at least dating a year back, they started renting and paying rent on this place, or at least didn't start paying rent. But even this, they couldn't do right because Robert wanted a forklift to move the things. And they bought this forklift. We'd actually sold it in the auction. I think it was one of the higher ticket items. And people were saying that it's too big to even turn around in the other facility they rented. So it was kind of a comedy of errors that they would constantly, you know, the original purpose of the forklift was they were going to hire someone and pay him $60,000 to like smash a new hole through the wall. Because they only had one loading dock, which as I understand it, if you want to manufacture, you should have more than one of those. So that was the original plan. But I think finally the landlord was like, you have to stop destroying my building. So that didn't happen. So that was the the move to the second facility. And then you mentioned Deep Root Studios, just that they were renting very expensive property in Utah. Apparently, the Utah connection was that, you know, Robert is a Mormon. And so he was interested in having business in Utah beyond also that. I guess there was a lot of talent already there. And and sort of the the folks in the Deep Root Tech or headquarters side were, you know, completely befuddled of how and why are we spending, you know, all these millions of dollars on Utah. It eventually shut down. Actually, something people don't realize is that and these could have been red flags. If we had been looking earlier in 2018, the Utah Department of Labor find deeper studios over a million dollars for like workplace labor violations. I assume about not paying people back then because we know I don't even know. You have to say allegedly, if enough people have said that getting paid was a problem at Deep Root regularly. And the excuses would be that the investors were trying to work on getting more funds in the pipeline. But, of course, we know the only investments were these insurance policies. So, OK, so hold on. I'll apologize there. Yeah, as you've been sending information, people have been sending information to me. But one of the things that just continues to pop up and slap me in the face was the fact that he had so many employees working for Deep Root. Oh, yeah. And they were not being paid over time, over time again. And then they would be given an excuse, hey, we're not getting paid because we're looking for these investors. We're looking for these investments. They're dried up right now. You know, hashtag COVID. And then they would hire people during these times. Nobody was getting paid. So that was a big thing. So you're telling me now that a lot of people don't know is they were fined a million dollars in Utah. So this was going on not only at Deep Root Pinball. It was going on elsewhere that people potentially may not have been getting paid. They shut it down. Oh, 100%. And, I mean, even more to that point was I think it speaks to how Robert kind of, like, prioritized or made purchasing decisions. So hearing from some of the people who actually do what was needed to try to build these machines, that he would front on approving a $15 purchase price for some part that was needed. But then one of his right-hand men would be like, let's go buy this $350,000 machine that doesn't even work properly. I mean, that's not how he pitched it, I assume. But he would say, we need to go get this thing. And they would. Down to the last week before the doors shut, Robert had, I think, signed a contract, if not he was planning to, to redo all the external lighting to the cost of tens of thousands of dollars because they were so concerned with security. So they wanted to be able to improve the lights outside. And this is when people have been furloughed. People keep not getting paid. And he's still spending money on these things. But then when you have the engineers or whoever, like the supply chain people coming and saying, oh, hey, we actually need to go buy in volume these parts because everything in the current building materials was based on years ago prototypes and they're not available or they're too expensive. Then he would resist that. But he would buy that, who knows, hundreds of thousands of dollars of gym equipment. It just seems like his priorities, I don't know. I think he was mostly interested in looking great and having a great office and not necessarily listening to anyone telling him what he actually needed to succeed. We'll get to the casting couch soon enough. What was up with the – I was sent information. BJ, you sent me documentation. Oh, my gosh. Just the documentation. I've been overwhelmed with this. So sorry if it's a little scattered, but we'll get all the info out here. You sent me a lot of information. some of which was bill of materials stuff, some of which was, I going to say it like receipts credit card receipts and stuff there What the hell was up with all of the money being funded into some soccer club Oh yeah yeah There was a lot of money going to that soccer club because I was like, what the hell is this? Oh, see, you looked at something more. That's the thing. I've gotten so much stuff recently that I haven't even been able to sort through it. So, okay, lots of money on the soccer club. Oh, yeah, that was like, Robert, you know, when you're a mogul, You can't just conquer selling insurance and you can't just conquer gold mining in Africa and you can't just conquer pinball. You also have to, you know, bring semi-pro or like minor league soccer to the Texas area. So, yeah, they had the Deep Roots. Deep Root Funds was sponsoring the Scorpions or something. Their cup. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, unfortunately, then like they pulled their funding at some point and the team collapsed. For a while there, Robert was very excited to make quotes and stories about how he's going to bring Major League Soccer, I think, to the area of San Antonio. Yeah, he had his finger in a bunch of pies. I mean, I'm looking at documentation showing how many times he liked to go into the country club here. This is an expense sheet. I'll say that. Okay. And a lot of this information, as you've said, BJ, is coming from previous employees, right? Previous employees. A lot of the photos were from the auction day inspection. All right. So this was actually a great source of new content. So, yeah. So we have a few hundred photos there of whiteboards, schematics. Yeah. Like you said, like credit card receipts. You can see in the photos, once they get put online, just giant stacks of paychecks envelopes, which was the payroll system. Yes. Unopened. All of the paychecks just stacked up. Oh, yeah. It's still there. Actually, some other folks told me they went and once they started seeing what was going on, they asked the auctioneer, hey, can you please like lock this room or something? Because this stuff's just sitting around. So there was just a lot of great stuff sitting around there. And what I want to do with some of it is especially like the whiteboard still had information on it. You know, one thing that's on the whiteboards is something like about buying pinballs, which I have a little story about later. And then also one of them is something like figure out bill of materials, question mark. So we have some good artifacts there. But I would just love to really dig through this stuff with people who understand just the level of technical knowledge you need to enjoy how terrible it all was. Because they didn't have an inventory system. They managed everything through Google Sheets, but the biggest Google Sheets you would ever imagine, like the same ones that maybe you'd use at your regular office where if somebody deletes something, you've got to try to figure out what was going. where they're talking about the hundreds of thousands of dollars they owe contractors, where things haven't been updated in years, and when it comes time to actually try to make a machine, you realize that the parts that you thought you were going to purchase don't exist anymore, or you have to buy for five times the price, or they're just not available. It's absurd. What I want a lot of listeners to understand is the reason the information is coming out now, remember, Robert Mueller was a lawyer, is a lawyer. litigious. Everybody was scared that they were going to get sued. So now that he's got his own fish to fry and he's looking at all types of cases from the SEC to all kinds of stuff that he's dealing with, these previous employees are more open now. They're still probably afraid, but a lot of them are open to send stuff. We've got some information. I was sent from you some documentation here from a previous employee. I'm going to read what this employee was talking about when we're talking about how much expenses and how much money was being spent that nobody knew where it was coming from. So talking about the equipment, the employee said, quote, I was pretty impressed how messy the whole place was. Even after failing to pay their employees the first go around, April 1st, 2018, and many times after that, they continued to purchase $2,000 standing and sitting desks, $50,000 plus dollars worth of cnc routers 300 000 plus sanding paint booth automated equipment hundreds of thousands of dollars on cpus psus roms pinball parts i wonder if all of that came from the ppp loans it's again as i remind you this is from a previous employee i'm just reading this verbatim from what i received it says uh continuing says quote i know a lot of people blame robert for everything but i'm starting to suspect robert got help someone had to advise him where to find the most expensive equipment there are some things to be said about the ppp loans i know that they were not spent properly but with robert's lack of bookkeeping paper trail it may be nearly impossible to prove this is coming from an alleged previous employee that just shows you the tip of the iceberg of how much money was being blown robert believed that on a lot of these things he didn't want to source them out. So he was trying to create, he had all this machinery, millions of dollars worth of machinery to create their own circuit boards, to create their own light boards, to create their own, every damn thing possible they were trying to create themselves to save a buck, but they had so much expenditures in the equipment that they weren't even making payroll consistently for a long, long time. Yeah, 100%. And in terms of the money too, the thing is they attracted a lot of the folks by offering apparently really good salaries. So for a while, it's like a tale of like two eras. Like they were getting paid a lot and not producing, probably not mostly because of their fault. Right. Like when the boss says you have to do some ridiculous thing, I guess you have to do it. But for a long time, that's where so much money was being burned. Then you get to, oh, the money's drying up. And now, yeah, we're missing payroll. Like I posted to Pinside just kind of like a compendium of like Robert's internal Slack messages all about explanations for why payroll wasn't being made. You know, that might be something of interest to one of these court cases because a lot of the explanations, it turns out, you know, allegedly aren't accurate. But, yeah, it was even up to the end spending money on ridiculous stuff and not, you know, paying people. And even some of that equipment you talked about, like that's where the detail level of it, like the sander apparently was like the wrong kind of sander. And I could look up the details about it, but like that you would use it to like, I don't know, like finish a table or something. And then but like it was completely unsuited for doing these playfields that they would have like the CNC thing, which I guess is for for cutting stuff. It was off by like some like eighth of an inch, which is like an eighth of fatal to it. And so it was like raggedy and all over the place. It's just, oh, another funny thing is they would get all these parts from Pinball Life. But because Robert had this big thing, one of his things was either, I've heard it called a 90-pound soccer mom or a 100-pound soccer mom. But the idea was we need to make stuff so that that type of person can service our machine with no technically able man to help her. These, again, are not my words. And so the idea was no soldering. We have to just use, you know, like Molex connectors. So Pinball Life products would come in and they'd have to like rip off the part that didn't apply. And they had entire like all these people working to then just put on the Molex end or something. Just speaks to like the absurdity of like these. We have to do everything ourselves. And yeah, just like they had stuff that apparently Stern doesn't even have. Oh, I don't doubt it. I remember reading the information you sent me. Some of this equipment they were creating and it had like too much moisture in it. So these LED light boards would never work anyway. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, like just the amount of incompetency that came behind all this. There's no wonder none of this worked. It didn't seem like a lot of people knew what they were doing there when it came to the actual manufacturing of any products. Yeah. So when you talk about like, why did it fail? So kind of Robert, apparently, you know, the core group from the beginning, the people that was told to me that like the people there from the beginning and almost only these people, there might have been one or two others, were Robert J. Pop and Chris Turner, which is Turner Logic, which is another interesting story. Tell us a little bit about Turner Logic. Okay, so Turner Logic. Because this is a name that maybe not a lot of people know. Yeah, yeah, no, it's a good point. So in interviews back, you know, 2018 or earlier, I don't know, on Pinside I inventoried every This Week in Pinball link of coverage for Deep Root, which is, you know, useful if you want to go through because there's probably like 40. But Robert, you know, announced that when they asked who's going to do the programming, they're like, oh, Turner Logic. They did our financial systems and they did his like websites like before the pinball days. They're going to program all the games. They don't have any experience in programming games at all. But, you know, let alone pinball. But Robert wasn't that concerned. They can kind of handle it. So apparently, you know, hearing recently that, yeah, Turner was there at the beginning with J-Pop and Robert. And that's, you know, from there they hired, you know, a million people. But what's really interesting about him recently is that right now, kind of like the most recent thing, is that these insurance policies that Robert had, these life insurance policies, which was the basis of where the actual money came from. Right. So that was the Deep Root Funds, Deep Root Capital Management. They're like five other LLCs, Ryan Policky Services, Inc., on and on. But they were in the business of buying these life insurance policies from people who were looking to be able to get a return while they were still alive rather than just for the folks after they check out. But he wasn't even paying the premiums on all these. So a bunch of million-dollar policies lapsed, but not all of them did. And so when the bankruptcy has come up – and by the way, another misconception is people think that the auction was like all the deep root assets have been liquidated. Not at all. It was just the auction was anything that was in that building because the landlord was like, I need this shit out of my building so I can like rent it or actually sell it to someone else. So he had to get a court order. He or she actually, I don't know, to be able to be able to access that stuff since like the SEC said, don't touch anything. So so the landlord did. But just just to be clear, we still don't know where lots of the assets are. We don't know where the IP is, though. Some people have some ideas I can share. But it was only the stuff that was in that building. But now the one other thing that has been addressed are these life insurance policies, because some of them are still due. And about a month ago, a group called Tuyo LLC petitioned the trustee who's managing the bankruptcy stuff to say, hey, we want to buy these policies. Here's a whole proposal of how you can do a sale. It's called like a stalking horse agreement. It was I had to learn about all this stuff. I won't go into the boring details of it. But basically, here's a proposal for fast tracking, selling this to us. And but like still having like a tiny window of time that other groups could bid on them. The problem is like who would bid on these things? Because you're depending on Robert's accounting, which was basically non-existent. These books, they didn't have an accountant. They would occasionally contract the SEC and the bankruptcy lawyers aren't even able to like get much information yet. They're trying. So how's the public going to? So it was set up and in the span of like less than a month, basically, they put forward this proposal. And now, most recently, like a week ago, had a whole hearing where there are some objectors who are like, this seems shysty. And those objectors did not prosper. So Tuyo was able to buy all of the enforced, meaning like not lapsed policies and all the other lapsed ones for like 25 cents on a dollar. And the two TU in Tuyo is for Turner, Chris Turner, who was this third-party contractor who did all their tech stuff and all of a sudden became interested in buying life insurance policies and won. And the yo was like the lawyer he hired to do it. So that's it. So people wonder, oh, did this guy, because his team designed the Deep Root Funds investment portal and he worked with Robert for years and actually he sublet space in multiple different Robert offices, he ran his business out of it. So they use the same address. And by the way, none of these things were disclosed in the two years initial application, but came out when the creditors objected. Then it came out during the hearing. But even still, the judge was basically like, we need to get some money for these creditors because like the trustee who's running the whole thing is the one who wants the money because there's like nothing in the bank. And so it went forward. So so Chris Turner, who might be clean as a whistle, I have no idea, is now going to soon be the owner of four million dollars worth of insurance policies, plus however much they can get for the lapsed ones. So now I guess I don't know, maybe he'll still keep doing tech stuff, but he's also like basically become a Robert's business because that's what Robert was. Wow. That's a big one there. So on the on the PPP fund that that person mentioned, I think it's a really interesting one because I kind of you know, this is stuff that is it firsthand if you find it, you know, reported on the Internet from like the government. I guess. I don't know. But basically, so Paycheck Protection Program loans during COVID was like, hey, all, if you have employees and you don't want to lose them and you want to keep paying them, then you can apply for, you know, what might be free money from the government. And so Robert was like, yeah, I want to do that. I mean, lots of businesses did. Right. And so he got six PPP loans, three each for Ryan Policky Services, Inc., which was sort of the catch all like financial stuff when we talk about the life insurance. One for Deep Root Tech, which was the headquarters, and then one for Deep Root Studios. And he got one each of them in 2020 and then also one each of them in 2021. And the good news for Robert is like almost all of them have already been forgiven. meaning you don't have to pay back the government just like it's cool, because these were loans, but he got it. So totaling about $2.5 million of government money, which, by the way, is significantly more than Stern got, than JJP, probably than all the other pinball manufacturers combined, because I went there and found every record I could. But that money has very specific ways you need to use it. It's for payroll, and it's kind of odd that this is happening when we hear all these accounts of people being furloughed people missing payments. And then, of course, you know, all alleged, you know, the SEC alleges that Robert wasn't using investment money in the proper way. So maybe one might imagine that he might not use PPP money in the right way. And in fact, an employee has said that Robert knowingly used PPP money, not in the correct way. I don't know. But the thing I would say is that the Small Business Administration is very interested in anyone who has information on PPP funds not being used correctly. And you can just search that out and submit online either anonymously or not if you, you know, have any knowledge of companies that, you know, took this money that was used to try to keep things going during this horrible pandemic and didn't use it the proper way. So, you know, just throwing that out there. And if we're jumping back to the Turner thing, Turner Logic interests me because they were basically paying Turner Logic to do the code of their games. This information you gave me from this alleged previous employee said the following, said, we were finding that the code for the games had huge issues. There were so many things that worked mechanically, electrically, but didn't function correctly because of code, and it was starting to get scary. They would push an update and fix one problem only to create five more over and over again. Turner and Robert got into some kind of argument about this, and we started seeing large amounts of time without anybody in the building to write or repair code. Their relationship seemed to be strained, but larger than the typical contractor-customer relationship. This alleged previous employee went on to say, I've been curious about the code as well. The only two computers in the auction, when they auctioned everything off, have now been removed. Those were assets of the company, so they should have been included in the sale. I spoke to the auctioneer about this, and he told me that he was instructed not to put computers in the sale at the last moment. he'd plan on just wiping the hard drives. And to continue, talking about that relationship between Robert and Chris, this alleged employee says in this document, quote, I also know that Chris and Robert butted heads very often. There would be times when they weren't being paid, so Chris told his guys to stop doing pinball work, and it would basically stop us in our tracks. So we'd have to wait for Chris and Robert to work things out before we could continue making progress. And there were rumors of Robert having prepaid Turner for the entirety of the code for the game. I'm assuming talking about Raza. And that the amount paid was really, really large. That transaction predates me, but it can't be completely true. During one of the unpaid times, Turner removed all of his crew from the building. That went on for a while until the pay resumed. And the other interesting thing, there's all this documentation research that I'm doing that you gave me, was that the code was on a server. It wasn't anything physical. You had to get it from a server from, I guess, Turner, and they just turn it off if they wanted to and not let any of the employees access any of this working code. So they were kind of strapped here, and I don't know how that would have ever worked. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure 100% of the details. You can have a local server. It might just be that you don't have direct access. And, again, I would assume it probably would be Turner or something, But, you know, I don't want to say like for sure something was that situation. But, yeah, Turner operated out of the ever since they, you know, Turner was at Robert's previous building before moving to this one. Like when Robert moved, he sorry, not just he, but his his team moved because he, you know, he would host local web dev meetups back in 2018 at Deep Root headquarters. Like if you go to the archives of Turner Logic Sites, their their addresses is the Deep Root address. So, you know, they had this this long history, but but their stuff definitely got cleared out before the auction happened, which, you know, makes sense if it's their own property. But I was talking to one employee when you mentioned there, like the two machines that were there, there were at least like 20 computers at, you know, when DeepRoot was still, if you call it, humming along. And obviously those got cleared out beforehand. hand. So again, when I say that only what was in the building was liquidated, there's still a lot to liquidate. The question is finding it. One of the things people often wonder is that there were like the Raza's that were in the auction weren't like the nicest version, and people wonder where to go. And so enough people have told me that I think it's probably the case is that, you know, the ul certification story was something uh in in the the end days or i guess leading up to them where robert would do his uh monthly updates about why you know he was missing all their deadlines and it was we need this ul certification and there's some funny stories about that too but the short of it is that he owed the ul certification uh company money maybe like 10 000 And so people think that's where the machine still is at their office. It's called like Internet, I think. So that's fair. So that's very interesting. Looking at some documentation here from, again, an alleged employee, whether you know how many they were. You said like you've spoke with with several here. This individual was saying it's worth noting that, quote, Turner and his guys were awful at writing websites and created some really large issues for Deep Root. when Robert opened up orders for Rasa. It literally took three and a half months for us to get the data on options upgrades that people purchased. The website was written so poorly that the data was considered lost for at least eight weeks of that time. They go on to say Turner Logic would have the source code to the machines. It's the consensus that, you know, hopefully there are other places that have the code too, but basically it would be shocking if Turner doesn't have the code, which makes sense. if they were like responsible for it. But, you know, obviously... It brings a whole new meaning to where's the code. Yeah, and I just want to say for the Turner logic stuff, you know, these are different comments assembled from, you know, up to six or seven different people. And, you know, not here to malign the quality of Turner's code. I can't know. So you're just kind of reading off what people have shared. So, you know, the website... Just these alleged people's opinions of them. That's true. Yeah, exactly. You know, there's, you know, this all could be bullshit. Well, I don't think it's bullshit, but I think it's that, you know, there can be like what happened and there can be the opinions. Right. So you could say there are all sorts of problems. Right. And it could be because Turner code sucked. But it also, you know, given how Robert managed, there could be other explanations. So I just want to throw that out that like I kind of like account for what happened. And then, look, employees who are there have opinions on that. But like mostly I'm interested in I think of Robert as the public figure and to a lesser degree others. So, yeah, those are what people shared. But, you know, people have opinions there. There's even diverse opinions about J-pop, for example. Well, getting a pretty clear picture as to not just one issue, not just two issues, but the possibility for just a cavalcade of different issues and incompetencies that work together to. I don't know what management was thinking and why this would work. One of the previous employees was talking in some of this documentation about, you know, it may have actually worked if they built one machine, one title. but this grandiosity of thinking that you were going to create not only multiple machines, but animations and different offshoots of, of branding. Like there's just no way. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's one, you know, people just to give some of the motivations for why folks want to share information and why they share it through me. I think you already do a good job of that because of the litigiousness, uh, with Robert, but you know, why, okay. So that's why they have to pass it along through me, but why do they want to? And there, there's some key areas that people would say time again. And maybe the number one one was like, there were a lot of talented people doing really hard work. They're doing like as good a job as they could based on what they were told to do. And it's a shame. And they developed some stuff that could have been cool. And, you know, we can show some of those videos and stuff of things that look pretty neat. um and but they just it never is going to come out because the company crashed and burned right and it's a shame that all that work can't be shown and that like you know people from the outside can be like you know what the fuck were all these folks doing just you know dicking around for four years and like creating all these white woods and all this kind of stuff and it's because like they the the boss set the tone the boss made all the calls the boss would say change this or that. The boss would come in after you're working on something forever and say, we got to scrap it. And so I think that's a major motivation that like some of these folks just, you know, it hurt if you're working this hard. Now, some people said other were just collecting a paycheck, right? There was a lot of talent, there was a lot of effort, and it was all for naught. And so they want to share that. Another motivation is just the nightmare of like what was going on, both like, the hilarity, the tragedy. And as much as we are interested from the outside, imagine if you were living it and you couldn't say it. And so many employees have said they've read the thread and they were kind of impressed by how much the Pinside Sewer was able to figure out of what was going on early. But it's just like the hugest soap opera. Hopefully it'll be a documentary someday because it's just got it all. And it's just like, you know, people use the word unbelievable, but like it kind of works for this. Because if you just had a guy who, you know, let's pretend the money came from a legitimate source and just said, hey, pinball people, here's the money. Like make some games. Then they would have like put out some games. But because he had to decide everything, that's why no games. And listener, we're going to move on to some more very interesting things, such as the launch, the rollout, the deep six. We've got all kinds of stuff to cover here, but to piggyback off what we were talking about, UL certification, I just want to talk more about what these alleged previous employees, how they were describing some of the incompetencies in manufacturing. We're talking about UL certification. They said, quote, the game had massive EMI issues. Side note, I think that's electromagnetic interference issues. They went on to say near the end there were some really crazy ideas hatched in desperation to fix the EMI leaks by using DOD-sourced EMI-blocking blankets inside the cabinets. They were talking about all of the UL certification issues. They were even talking about the CNC machines and the equipment being used. You were alluding to that earlier, like the 1-8 inch and stuff like that. They were talking about an SMT line. it says one day Robert went to electrical engineers and asked if we wanted a pick and place game. Fast forward a year later we started populating LED boards in house because we couldn't afford to have a SMT house do it. We started to reject more than 50% of the boards due to defects from LEDs not turning on to one of the four LEDs in the package weren't working. Turns out that as soon as you open the package of a thousand LEDs they should be kept desert dry. Being San Antonio, we had more humid days than the desert. The little LEDs would absorb moisture, and when heated, the moisture would explode out of the package, often killing the LED. After explaining to management that we needed to build the LED 1000 at a time to increase yield, the SMT talk came back. The only difference was that the electrical engineers were ignored, and they bought a used assembly line from GeForce. Upon installing the machines. We received training on how to operate the equipment. We probably used the machines to make a couple hundred boards and then they kept failing Turns out there was too much water in the lines from the air compressor damaging the machines The company came out to service them They were working again, but then the water issue damaged the machines again. There was a bunch of mess there. Robert Mueller insisted that these engineers and production individuals get rid of all mechanical switches. You were talking about the ease of operation. And even in places, they said, where they make sense, such as a ball holder or where the ball sits the trough area. So they couldn't figure out the manufacturing issue. Yeah. And I mean, just broadly, I get the impression that there's kind of like two eras of attempting to manufacture at Deep Root because people would come and go. And so there was kind of just the engineer group who was given these like you were just mentioning that, like, we have to get rid of all connectors or just, you know, whatever absurd things they want. And they would keep working and working and working on it, like to make it function. And maybe, you know, to whatever degree they get it going or they don't. Like they made some interesting boards and things like that. But none of it was done in a way to manufacture. And so then later, like I have some documents from years past that are like build of materials for back then. But then by the time that it came to be like now it's manufactured, let's not just if we can get one to work or something like that. Well, like it turns out that like the stuff that was used like isn't available anymore or is too expensive or there's like, you know, five different like variants in there as opposed to any consistency or it's like custom done at a prototyping shop or it'd be like ridiculously expensive to try to purchase it. And if you if they were even available, like you think about supply chain issues that like Stern has and they're like a legit company that like knows what they're doing. Imagine then if you're a company that doesn't even establish lines of credit with businesses like buy stuff on credit card and things like that, or maybe just informal agreements, because if they do a background check allegedly on the credit, then nobody's going to give you their business. Plus, you've never made purchases before. Plus, you're like asking for like we need in two weeks, all this kind of stuff. Right. Like where you should or like even without COVID, like months in advance, it's not going to work. And so when they were trying to sort through, OK, we have the stuff that was like it was described Raza as like the like the world's most expensive homebrew. because surprisingly enough, even though it was started like 11 years ago, that they were just even trying to like get it figured out weeks before the deep six because it was like stuck together with like bubble gum and, you know, things like that. Just like it had to just like function, but it wasn't made for manufacturing. So it was like basically starting from scratch when it was time to actually get the stuff going to sell. and then the the the bomb you know documents from years back were useless and trying to then figure out like okay so how are we going to build it look let's look what's in it and like the different pieces that were used are just completely impractical or they've changed over time or the solidworks drawings or like designs the cad stuff doesn't match what's actually done because people were like updating it locally rather than on the server so that like nobody knew of changes. And so there's just a lot of, when you try to piece it together, oh, it doesn't work. And we have a boss that says you have to get this ready in like four weeks or whatever. Yeah. I mean, even down to the CNC stuff, like they were talking about CNC machines that took months of trial and error just to figure out how to use the damn thing. It wasn't going to work because of the wrong sizing and stuff. And it said, even though it had four heads, I think we only ever used two at a time. Like it just seemed like nobody knew they didn't have the right type of people. They had the right equipment, even though they didn't have the money to buy it. People weren't getting paid, and it was a mess. Their product that they tried to launch was Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland, originally designed by John Papadiuk. Failed on several attempts through several companies, but that was their launch game. They delayed that launch I don't know how many damn times, but when it comes to Riles, let's talk a little bit about their, I guess we're going to call it their premier product that is the Rasa pinball machine. We know that when it was announced, they had a couple different types that you could buy an arcade edition or an extreme edition XE or whatever that the case may be when it comes to that. And when they announced it, you know, you said the premier and it's like, which one? Right. Because there's Houston that was showing up at this brewery one time. And then, yeah, it was finally going on sale. But even when they announced it would be going on sale, there were three additions. And by the time it went for sale, there were two, which people tell me just speaks to how often Robert would just like change something that, you know, is fairly important. And that's not like the most extreme example, but it was, it was just that looking from the outside, you go, how in the world could any of this happen? If you have a guy that, you know, is often absentee, swoops in for a bit, looks at stuff, gives something a few flips, says, oh, you need to change this or that. I mean, that's how you get version 12 of the layout of fire and brimstone. But what was the estimated bill of material? Because they didn't really have a clear bill of materials based on the spreadsheets and stuff that I have here. Correct. They had it on a whiteboard. Yeah, yeah. I was trying to guess how much everything would cost. Yeah, which generally you probably don't. We know how recent that was that it didn't get wiped by the time the auction happened. And I think the quote is something like figure out BOM question mark. But that was like a legitimate like thing that you'd have to work on at Deep Root apparently because the there was never a fully figured out BOM. But even the one that was figured out to like didn't include electronics, I think, didn't include metal. Like it was still like just so much that you would take a huge loss on selling any of it. And then when I asked for, again, because there never was a final, like, could you ballpark what the actual cost to make each of the two editions was without telling that person, you know, reminding them of what it went on sale for? It was each was slightly more than the sale price just of the materials. I'm looking at a whiteboard that was in the offices of Deep Root here. And this whiteboard looks like that's what they're trying to configure. It says big ticket items for a thousand games. That was the thing that this documentation listener I'm reading here. Robert, instead of just building little batches here and there, he was aiming for the whole damn kit and caboodle, like a whole thousand games. So they have LCD screens, 750 of them, $294,000. PCB boards, CPUs, cabinets, wiring harness. Wiring harnesses, $450,000. Power supplies, $213,000 for 750 of them. amps 27 500 gear motors metal package 784 000 plus dollars coin doors 101 000 plus for coin doors and then some of these check boxes weren't even filled like how many games total they had that check box filled on the whiteboard 125 oh boy so they all overshot it there yeah in terms of the the amount So that was like a thousand games, right? Which, you know, some might consider ambitious. I think, you know, when Robert earlier in the Deep Root Saga probably would have been disappointed that they were only planning to sell a thousand. I think we recall that when they actually did go on sale, it was more like a hundred something. But a bunch of those were people using their Zidware credit. So did they even sell a hundred new? I don't know. So I could tell you a bit about the launch that happened. I do want to call your attention to that whiteboard to the in orange. We have look and the O's are like little eyeballs and then there's arrows and then there's stars around it. And then there is in a different thing. It says someone needs to order and then, quote, pinballs, quote, end quote, get with John equals J-pop. so apparently like months and months earlier that was like the thing because i've heard been told that john kind of was like not around much during the the the lead up to like trying to get the the ready for the uh the deep six folks j-pop kind of a wall there okay well i mean you know that's what people say um you know maybe that's good that he's a good manager who doesn't want to like micromanage at the end or something but anyway you you know maybe maybe when it's all hands on deck and you're working some people say like up to 40 hour days which i guess is more than a day to try to get this nightmare together you'd want to have them around but something that was done before we went to you know figuring out the final bomb was like months earlier like asked uh j-pop which which pinballs to buy because when you ship a game you should have pinballs and there were pinballs in the building because they had a couple games there you know then they would have like up to 66 balls in it, I guess, and they had some tests. But, yeah, no one had – they hadn't ordered, like, pinballs for, like, all the machines that they were going to ship. And that, you know, if they had shipped, then maybe that would have been, like, a bummer to not ship the game with any balls. But they're spending half a million dollars on wiring. Oh, my God. All right, so here's what we're going to do, BJ. We're going to talk about the launch and the reception and all of that. But first, there were some media members that came into that building for a very formal look behind the scenes and to report back what was going on known now as the deep six what do you know about the deep six and that visit oh my well you know this is uh some of the information has come out uh from the the members of the deep six but you know what not all of it that's been shared with me and then the stuff they couldn't know like what was going on before they arrived and what happened after it. And it might not surprise you to learn that it was a shit show, but kind of like next level. An employee has kind of given a whole account of what happened. I'm going to do my best to read a previous employee's remarks regarding the Deep Six visit. This is what you sent me. I'm going to read it verbatim here. It says, quote, Robert liked to use the auditorium as a place to hold company meetings. In one of these meetings, Robert announced that there would be an unveiling coming up in about four weeks that had to make four machines ready for, quote, prime time. At the time, there were only two machines in existence, and only one of those was in the building. The one that was in the building was consistently called the, quote, Houston game, as it had gone to the trade show in Houston the year prior. There was a sincere feeling of dread inside the room when Robert announced his plans, but nobody argued to the point. Immediately following the meeting, the majority of the engineers and a few techs held an impromptu meeting in the hallway. Rather than compose a plan, which I'd expect, they all started talking about how crazy this is and how it couldn't be done. Efforts were made to explain the impossible situation to Robert, but he said they were just, quote, crying wolf. Here's how bad things were. None of the mechs had been fully tested. The glass mechanism didn't exist in anything close to its final form. The SOLIDWORKS model wasn't complete. and the final straw was that there wasn't anything even remotely resembling a bomb for the games. There was no reasonable way to meet the goal in this timeline. There was almost nothing in-house for final sheet metal, little to no plastics. The cabinets hadn't even been tested with the newer versions of hardware. The backbox had never been tested, and there weren't any graphics to put onto the cabinets. The list goes on and on, and the Raza project was basically started in Ernst about four weeks prior to the event. This information was brought to Robert and he reacted intensely, insisting that this goal would indeed be met at any cost, as he'd already announced it he wouldn't be made a fool of. He went on to say, We know that the Raza project had been started many years prior, but it was at this point a high-end homebrew project. Maybe at best it's understood that homebrew projects are that they at least generally work. This game was not ready for serious testing, let alone a public release. It was a downright deception to tell people that this game was production ready. Every part of it had been manually changed or modified at the last second to make it to the Houston Expo, and none of these changes were recorded. Wow. Side. None of these changes were recorded. That's unbelievable if true. Again, all allegations. Continuing on to this alleged previous employee's quote. Quote, even better, some of the key players who made those changes left the company the last time that Paycheck stopped coming in. So, for the next four weeks, there were daily meetings in an attempt to keep the team on track to complete this massive goal. But everyone just kept saying it couldn't be done and kind of left it at that. With one week to go, they started pulling a long day trying to manually build at least two games. There were far too few parts to finish four games. Without a bomb, they found out that they didn't have proper hardware at every turn. They found out that the LEDs didn't work as planned. They found out that the plastics didn't fit with the mechs. They found out that there was a lot of things that had been given to a game designer, and he'd not done anything with them for years. They found out that the backbox was drawn so poorly that it couldn't even be built as drawn. They found out that the CNC machine they bought was off by over an eighth inch, over 60 inches of travel, which meant that nothing fit together properly. The cobbled-together glass mech didn't work correctly, and the service mech was downright dangerous. The wires were a rat's nest and were almost impossible to work around. Every part that went onto these games required copious amounts of manual rework with inferior machinery and equipment. It was madness. People worked 12 to 14 hours a day the weekend prior to the launch through the Thursday before, and when they'd come to work on Friday, they didn't even leave the office until late in the day Saturday. A lot of people worked 36 straight hours in an attempt to make the launch happen and save their jobs. Robert wasn't there for it. One of his managers was sleeping in his office for most of it. The other just paced around the entire time, but none of them helped. In the last moments, with the Deep Root 6 in the building, they cobbled together a machine in an attempt to save face. Exhausted and utterly defeated, the game was plugged in and it didn't work. Then, it actually caught fire for a moment. After all of that work, it turns out that the electrical system had never been tested in its current form. Hours and hours more time was spent, and finally, a reversed power negative lead in the pin bar was discovered, and the game was able to function, albeit very poorly. The individual that stayed to make the fix put in over 40 straight hours to get it done. This failure should have opened some eyes inside that building, but it didn't. It's worth mentioning that Robert wasn't around for the majority of the day-to-day goings-on. His office was in a part of the building that only a few people had access to. Employees had security fobs, and each was programmed differently so that they could control where we went in the building. He would come down and make last-second changes as if we were feverishly trying to put the cabinets together. Why is the artwork trimmed that way? Or why is this raw plywood? It should be painted. He was kicking the tires of the proverbial car while it was completely engulfed in flames. The backlash of the Deep Six event was pretty harsh. They were called into a meeting and told how much they'd embarrassed Robert. They'll never forget him looking at them and asking, Why didn't anyone tell me we weren't ready? He played the victim very consistently. Employees were half-heartedly thanked for making such an effort. Threats of termination were made, and that was it. The remainder of the Monday after the event was spent with the teams trying to create a strategy for righting the ship. There was oddly a sense of enthusiasm within the ranks too, although technically a failure, they'd made a game playable and by the end of the day, Monday or Tuesday, it was mechanically decent. They quickly found that the game's code was at fault for a lot of the issues they were finding. That is a whole other story, but this problem persisted until the day everyone was sent home last July. Also worth mentioning that a certain infamous pinball game designer was not present for any of the long hours leading up to that release event. Neither was the team's senior engineer or any of the code writing team. This was the start of a very big rift between the people who were simply collecting paychecks and those that were trying to get a failing startup on the right track. Oh, and the week following the failed event is when they stopped getting paid. It lasted through the new year. Employees were told at the time that they've exhausted their savings in preparation for the Deep Six event. The auditorium was ridiculously expensive and had planned on paying us using pre-order funds. Then they were told that the guys in, quote, funds were working tirelessly to get more investors so employees could be paid. Employees were consistently told that Deep Root was funded by investors and that the, quote, pipeline was full. But there had been a hiccup in the process of getting the money. yeah okay that was a hell of a story allegedly that was a hell of an alleged story there what do you make of that uh i mean it's like you expect it to be bad but the the the details and the color just makes it worse it's not surprising but yeah just just hearing how it goes uh it sucks And it's funny and it's tragic. And I feel for the people busting their ass in an impossible situation. And like to me, the greatest is that, you know, after this is all caused more or less by Robert, then he'll he'll ream them out for disappointing him. And if only they had let him know. And of course, I think he had been let know many times. This was a bad idea, but he wasn't interested in taking on new data because he knew best because he was Robert. Then they launched this game, and we talked about it a little bit, not selling probably as many as they thought they would. They had a lot of parts probably coming in, but not all the parts they needed. They had a lot of machinery, but not the right machinery. This was doomed. Yeah. This was all doomed. Well, and parts were coming in. Like, that's why some of the lots in the auction kind of looked like untouched because stuff was being delivered like right up until the doors were closed. So again, it wasn't they weren't trying to make it make machines. They just and I say they, you know, because I guess, you know, Robert wasn't making all the decisions, but like they they just had no idea how to do it. Um, but yeah, up until the end stuff was getting ordered because everything was rushed last minute. Everything was, you got to figure this out. I need this or that, you know, originally thinking like sell a thousand as looking at the, the, the whiteboard for that. They sold whatever a hundred, but then even funny at the end, like after it had been explained over and over that, like, you know, everyone you sell is going to cost you more money because the, the literal building materials might be more. if you ever built them, then you're selling the machine for, which, of course, then doesn't account for, you know, overhead, labor, profit, those kind of like, you know, business things. Then he was kind of relieved and kind of like half joke about like glad it wasn't more. In the end, you'd think there, well, maybe you wouldn't think there'd be any reflection. But, you know, he was disappointed with the sales, but he was mostly, I guess, disappointed for everyone who failed him because it was their failure that kept millions and millions of dollars of being made. If only they could have executed under his genius leadership, then it would have been a success. But they dropped the ball, and that was, I think, Robert's takeaway from the whole Raza sale. They didn't have the ball to drop. well they didn't they didn't have many pinballs at least in the building it sounds like but yeah yeah and and the funny other part where there's a tiny intersection with me personally uh that that i got to hear about which was fun was so like on my greatest hits of like why i guess i'm on this show for finding stuff was one of them was when they they did that they took the the raza just to that brewery and it was streamed once and and yeah it didn't it didn't stream very well and And that's not about the quality of the streaming. It just wasn't ready for prime time. But it was funny because one of the photos I saw of it had on the pin bar, which, if you didn't know, is the most innovative development in pinball history. It had like a URL there. And it was something like pinapi.turnerlogic.com or something. And maybe there was a QR code that I scanned and got it. And I was like, what's that? Because I'm a Googler. I did my Googling and I went to that and there wasn't anything there. But I'm like, oh, let me do like a site search and see what else. And lo and behold, there was this entire what's called like a staging website for because at this point, the, you know, DeepRootPinball.com had launched. But they were working on a big, you know, updated launch when the game was actually available for order. And a staging site was where like all that stuff was. And it was it was on the Internet. You wouldn't find it, you know, if you Googled searched it. But if you had that one URL, you could. And so that's where I found like all this information about like how much was it going to sell for? Like what were all the customizable components, the whole thing about the plans for root access, which was going to be the fifty dollar a month DLC program. And so, yeah, so I published all that. And and I was always curious, like, oh, like, you know, did you folks inside see that? And apparently they did because Robert, when he like had a meeting with folks, he said that I had hacked them and that and this actually like made people worry. It's like, oh, this this guy hacked into our system. And as I mentioned, they kept every little bit of like attempted information on like the building materials or like the 42 step process to assemble it or like all the parts orders and stuff in like Google Sheets. And so that was like the company. And look, that's not the ideal way to keep it. But like if that's how you keep it, then you have a lot in there. And they were like, oh, crap, you know, is this guy going to get access to all of our everything about the company? And I wasn't because I didn't hack it, because unless hacking is, you know, going to a publicly available Web site, even if, you know, like you wouldn't find it except that they did this little streaming. So I thought that was funny. And then the bonus little cherry on that was apparently that some of the changes of, like, how the pricing was or, like, some of the stuff about the DLC or the components was done just to prove that the correct information hadn't been exposed. So out of pride that Robert didn't want it allegedly to be that the secret had been revealed, then that's why, like, some of the information was different when it came time to publish. which, you know, some of it might have changed because they thought better of it. But, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if Robert didn't want to look the fool, so to speak. Additional documentation you sent me from an alleged previous employee said, internally, I think most of us didn't like playing Raza, at least with the few individuals that they were talking to that lacked flow. Some of these documents talked about conflicts with designers that Robert had. They remembered a time that one of the main namesake designers, they got into some type of heated argument. Another designer insisted on having their own engineers. They came and, you know, designed their playfields, added on the modular electronics, flipping within days. However, I'm reading now, however, that was all that came from it based on the playfields in the auction. and never quite sure why Robert was more interested in getting the pin pod and the cabinet made than just selling games. They said as far as Robert and this designer went, similar to the other designers, they came down to Deep Root headquarters a couple times, check on their progress. They'd ask Robert and why nothing was being worked on. Usually most of the employees there were busy working on making a Lego-like pinball system and didn't get much work done on those specific games. The logic was, based on this alleged employee, that they designed the boards once. They can be reused on all the machines. But the same wasn't true for the mechs. They wanted their own engineering teams. And this person said they probably could have made some great pins, but they got sidetracked with all of Robert's different projects and all of these big, grand, big-picture ideas. But if you don't get stuff out, you don't get money coming in. And it was a mess. All right, now, BJ, I want to, for the listener, I'm just going to ask you some questions, kind of get your feedback based on the experience and the research you've done, okay? Sure. When do you think that employees realize the goals of manufacturing machines just wasn't going to work out? Oof, good God. I think it varies because people would be there for a while and then they would leave. So if you were a newbie coming in and some newbies coming in were like, I realize they made a mistake five minutes into the process, Or some might be like, oh, this seems pretty wild. I wonder how it's all going to work out. But obviously, you know, there must be a plan and then realize not. So I think it's tough because I've heard different accounts of when people were like, that's when I knew I had to get out. And so people got out of different times. So I don't know because, you know, there were some people who never either realized it or never communicated that, which is interesting. And I don't you know, I think it's a positive thing. Like when I hear from people about some of their coworkers and, you know, only talk about like the names that people would know one, I want to I want to lay this out is like Barry was the most beloved person there. Apparently, I've never met the guy, but everything I read is awesome. You know, it's tragic what happened. It's tragic if you he was like the hero there. right he was he was the hero because he was he was uniformly positive he tried his damnedest and uh and he never complained and he and apparently he was just a true believer that it was going to work now because i know he hadn't you know he hadn't done a game since one junkyard he had all these like fits and starts and it's like a bummer and sure and then here's another time that you you think it's going to happen and then maybe with american it was going to and unfortunately he passed and of course i don't know if you know it's been noted that like he had cancer, he had cancer treatments, he lost his insurance because of Deep Root, and there was kind of a lapse period where he wasn receiving treatment so obviously that probably wouldn help But yeah Barry um Barry was somebody who I don know if he ever thought it wasn going to work from what I hear because he was always operating as if it would. Um, you know, there's this, uh, on the pin side thread, there was this, this sign, which was funny in the parking lot, which was like, uh, a special parking sign that was like for like famous pinball designer. Right. No. Yeah. Yeah. And so everyone thought that was J-pop because of what people think of J-pop and J-pop's ego. And it wasn't. It was made for Barry. And even more is like there was a gotcha moment, you know, and I'm not blaming anyone in the sewer because we operate without the info. But they're like and notice that it's in the the the handicap parking spot. Right. So that would be even more ridiculous that J-pop was there. But no, because I guess probably Barry had, you know, was like certified, like, you know, handicap parking permit. So that's where it was. So he was beloved. it. Some of his personal items were still in the building. Actually, one of the lots in the auction, lot 50, I was told, was like Barry's own toolbox. And so, yeah. So one thing I wanted to flag on the show was that if someone bought that lot, it would be really great. That's Barry's stuff. That's personal items. You wouldn't know from the lot because the auction house didn't know any of this history. They were just putting up the stuff that was there. But that was Barry's stuff. now i'm so if you bought it and you could get in touch with his family or if you don't know like how to do that zach i'm sure it would be great to do it maybe reach out i do notice that now after the fact that lot is no longer listed on the auction and there were a few other like i would say like up to 12 or 13 items that were like originally listed and then pulled and my hope is it was pulled because it was recognized as a personal item and so it wasn't sold but if it was if you if you want the lot 50 that's that's barry's toolbox so if you get back to his family that would be great then if you guys need help with that you can email me at the pinball network at gmail.com yeah but some of the like kind of like nice photos i have from the inside would be like you know like a fun little photo of like barry like our hero or like they would put barry's face on a lot of the white woods you know even you know if it wasn't his game or i don't know his game like the who or like you know food truck was and um and they and there was even a shot of like his like homemade dandelion wine uh that was at that scene of the day ox and so yeah it makes me feel like you know you know without knowing the guy whatsoever you know i feel warmth uh to him and and i understand that he was somebody who maybe never realized it wasn't going to work because he was so positive and i i classed from what i've heard from other people So Quinn Johnson, I don't know. I guess you wouldn't know what he thought because every single person says Quinn's like the greatest guy. So this was the one who was like hired to be like the storyteller, like writer. Yeah, he was a storyteller. I want to know where these people went. Yeah, yeah. Where's Quinn? I can give you a bit on that. Right. Because we had never heard that name before pinball. And this was his first bit of being in pinball. And now he's probably out of it. And who could blame him? But yeah, Quinn, apparently just everybody loved Quinn. He was just such a great guy. And so, you know, it sucks that, you know, he was there for years. I mean, think about it. If your job is just to write, like, the stories for pinball games and you never make a pinball game and you're there for, like, almost four years, like, that's rough. But apparently what I've been told, maybe it's a little dated in for he's putting out a book of his own, like, comic art. And so if we get info on that, you know, or when it comes out, you know, people might be interested. My thought is that because he's a storyteller and a comic artist and we have more Deep Root content than we'd ever be able to talk about today, but also that we talk about how this should be a documentary. I'm sure there's more to come. And he was there inside. I think Quinn Johnson should do a series of graphic novels that tell the story of Deep Root, and I would buy that if that happened. Or at least write the screenplay to the made-for-television video of this. A hundred percent. What about Steven Bowden? Yeah. We know that he's at American Pinball now. Right. And I was going to say, as if reading my mind or maybe reading my notes, I put Steve in that same category, too, from what I've heard, is that everyone always said, you know, before he was even, you know, working in the industry, he's the nicest guy. He's so positive. And so he was there for a while. And, you know, some people get on him for not speaking up or something. So I don't know the degree to which like he could have seen the writing on the wall or not. But like, you know, benefit of the doubt, if this is a guy who's just all about positivity, then maybe even when it feels like what, you know, other people might look at as like an impossible situation, you just kind of go, OK, well, you know, like, what's the point of focusing on the 10,000 challenges? Let's try to do our best. And so that that's my own. Well, Dennis Nordman said the hell with it. Yeah, no, exactly. So then, yeah, then there's a different category of folks who said, I'm going to nope out of there. And Dennis Nordman was definitely one of those. David Thiel, too. Okay, David Thiel, too. Jon Norris. Jon Norris, I think he had challenges with it, but he didn't leave. But John actually, you know, anybody listening to this, as I understand it, is looking for opportunities. And he shared to Facebook, you know, he started to publish some of, like, his own, like, concepts for things. and so I think that's a person who is definitely still looking to has a lot to give to the industry and is looking for places to apply it. Jon Norris, John if you're listening to this I'd love you to reach out to myself and see if we can't get you on the show as well and talk about your experience in the past as well as your experience moving forward in pinball. I haven't heard from you audience hasn't heard from you in quite some time we'd love to hear from you because a lot of people really love some Jon Norris stuff and what he was working on. I mean, we were talking about Barry there for a little bit, BJ, and I will say that, you know, again, information you've sent me, I'm looking at it right here, talking about food truck. They call it a blazing hot dumpster fire. And they go on to say, I'm going to be fair here, they go on to say that it wasn't so much the game, but the engineer that was tied to this particular game, they showcased, again, a senior engineer, some incompetence there, continuing incompetence to the point that allegedly they had to bring in a junior engineer to help out, to try to get it going. But altogether, mechanically, when it came to the engineering behind it, this alleged previous employee said the designs were awful, unnecessary, complex, and they said that Barry was great during the process. It wasn't his fault that his game had been handled by an incompetent engineer. They went on to say one thing should be noted that he was willing to make changes when his design ideas didn't work. This wasn't the case, though, with John Papadiuk, whose reputation for being difficult to work with is truly understated. In the end, after the play field was put together in the biggest hack session ever, It didn't even fit into the cabinet. Classic deep root. Well, so food truck is interesting because, you know, it became, I don't know if it's how these things happen, right? But everyone, you know, ironically, unironically, ironically, became so jazzed about food truck, right? Because if you're just thinking of a theme, you don't go, oh, my God, I want a food truck, right? No, and after you hear the theme food truck, you say, oh, you guys are wanting to make money in pinball. okay right well okay so yeah so that's that's that's the starting point right and so you go that's you know someone might say stupid but and by the way uh something i still need to find out is where these themes come from which which i can follow up with my folks to know like how much was j-pop how much was mueller i bet we gotta find out because some of this is oh i can find out questionable um but here's the thing then somehow the narrative shifted over time again just externally that like oh food truck's actually kind of cool and like oh food truck you know you know consider it a lame theme but it's got some some cool mix and i had heard from folks that said like one that was the one that was furthest along other than raza which is 100 true and two like it had some cool stuff so i think that could be true from the perspective of like maybe from like barry's design right but the interesting thing and then and then somebody even gave robert credit imagine that who was like the plan after raza was to like have a hundred food trucks ready to like move into ordering and not this like let's figure out how to make the game like after we start selling it to have them ready to go but and that's a good idea you know you know tip to other pinball companies that's probably a good way to go it couldn't it couldn't happen um because what somebody said was like if raza didn't bankrupt the company then food truck would because it was world as as as bad as uh raza was in terms of being ready for prime time from like a you know a homebrew project apparently deep root was further away and a lot of this again different people's accounts but with something about like the engineer who was like charged with it like it hadn't like been updating their work in years like kept it like on their private computer when they finally like saw it it was just like so far away from like where things currently would which is kind of a thing we've heard in the past and that like the bill of materials was impossible. Nobody do a thing. And so it's not that if only Raza, you know, if only they had gotten past Raza, then, then food truck. Sorry, it sounds ridiculous. Would have saved the company. Apparently, like if they had gotten past Raza, then, then food truck would have sunk the company, which again sucks because, you know, it sounds like it, you know, like whatever, it's like quirky fun and, and, and Barry had good ideas and stuff, But, I mean, if there's – well, there's probably 500 lessons from this. But, like, one of them is, like, having, like, neat ideas and design concepts doesn't matter if it's all just, like, you know, pieced together, like, with chewing gum or, you know, whatever, like, random little bits that you grab out of, like, the alley. And then when you go to try to, like, make more than one, you realize you have no idea where to begin. I know what would have saved them. It was that damn Goonies license. Tell me this, BJ. Did they have the Goonies license? Okay. Robert said he did. Listen, with Robert's stuff, especially with the keeping close to the vest, and here's another thing I should throw out. A lot of people go, how could anyone not have known this was all a big, you know, alleged fraud situation? He kept the financials really close to the vest, so I would assume that he also kept, you know, the licensing, because that stuff's way too important to let somebody else deal with these important companies. Again, my own commentary. So allegedly had the license. Actually, I don't know if this makes you feel better or worse because I know your heart beats faster when you say the word Goonies, but that was going to be the next title after Food Truck. And then the fourth was either going to be Machine Age or the Lucha game, which we had never actually even heard about until we saw the auction. And that was going to be a licensed one. The minor funny thing I heard about that was that, yeah, it was with actual Lucha people. And that J-Pop went and hung out with the Lucha folks, which, God, I would pay money to watch this. Of course you do. And some people at the office were really into these wrestlers and thought it was so cool that J-Pop got to go and hang with these folks. So that's what I've heard is the first four titles with that, like, TBD. Well, we heard Barry Ousler say on Pinball Profile that he was designing Goonies and the Who. Oh, yeah, yeah. And, I mean, look, we have play field shots of both of them. Some of them have been posted already. I have a bunch more, you know, different levels of complete. I would love, again, you know, just kind of like putting my pitch out here. I would love people who know this stuff better to look through this because a lot of it's grief to me. you know but yeah they worked on this stuff but most of it only the only ones that were like in a okay let's actually try to like next step is to like manufacture and again they were many steps away were Raza and then Food Truck and we didn't well I was going to say we did get the Food Truck I don't know if we got to Raza but they definitely didn't get to any of the others they didn't get to any of the others if we're talking about some of the games that were going to be made I'm looking in a video right now of a of them flipping around on i don't i don't know what game this is but in my opinion this is a really poorly designed game i know the employees here were ranting and raving about it being fun but it looks really bad um there there's not much going on they have this big old feature in the middle that you hit balls captive balls back and forth to another like a fishtails kind of ramp looking it looks bad and the ferris wheel just like 20 other barry oustler games with i mean what is going on here i guess j-pop had a yeah i mean what's going on i'm still trying to get confirmation on what which game that was because that's footage you know So hopefully, you know, if TPM puts it out, maybe get some more eyeballs on it. It's like one of the other few games that we've seen flipping, but I'm not sure. So one person said they, yeah, you said like they were raving of it. Somebody said they thought it might be Machine Age. But the interesting thing is like some of the folks were so kind of like siloed that they were like just focused on like we got to get, you know, especially when your boss is saying like in two weeks, make Raza or whatever, focused on that. The engineering people, you know, they mentioned the Lego thing. We're just like constantly about like try to make these boards, try to like everything that you get in, like, you know, make it simpler, better and so that like there is sort of a gap of like maybe intellectual knowledge about even some of the most basic things of like what which game is this. so if we put it out maybe somebody you know can reach out and identify for sure which it is but you know i thought it was still interesting that we can see some other mech we hadn't seen some other play field that's flipping the other interesting video that you sent me was oh this is this is made for the internet 28 seconds of robert Sébastien Muller with an early prototype of this play field that pulls out all the way so you can service it turns around like a rotisserie and then goes back in kind of thing that i almost want to play like the benny hill theme behind it because oh this poor group they were showing off this prototype and robert was checking it out and he was pulling it out and it looked janky as all get out and then he was smiling because it was supposed to be like a video to show it all realized how shitty it was and then couldn't get it back in the cabinet it was janking everywhere and then he just looks at the camera just like cut this like we can't use this oh yeah and i mean a bonus thing that uh you know somebody who sees more obvious things than me with engineering is uh you'll notice with this sorry i'm watching the video it's so funny actually somebody's raising their hands in victory in the background now and then the zoom in on his face you got to put this out so people know what the hell we're talking about but um oh but there's nothing connected he says bad stop there's nothing connected to the forward so you're rotating it but you know pinball machines have like lots of things connected so you can't rotate it unless you disconnect all this stuff and then you've kind of gotten rid of the like benefit think about the weight though the weight that was going to be placed on that with all these mechs and everything on it this thing barely looks like it's standing up now well yo the weight is another thing is that you know these are the minor details of like why this building wasn't made for manufacturing it had like this epoxy like uh coating on it where like if you dropped i don't remember like a pinball somebody said it would like maybe get like absorbed into the ground almost and then they're talking about bringing in this like super heavy equipment and stuff like that it's just like every little tidbit there's just it's all it's a mosaic of ridiculousness that adds up to the picture of when you say why did deeproot fail and um it all starts at the top. At the beginning of the show, I asked you that. We're clearly seeing why there's so much more information that we haven't even expanded or touched on, one of which needs to be answered before we leave. A couple of things, really. First off, do you know what went down on those casting couches that were in the auction? Because those didn't look sanitary. Yeah, no, I don't know. Well, I think the thing that's interesting about the casting couch is it was actually sold. So So maybe whoever bought it could get out a blue light or do some CSI to figure out what's going on. But some of the items that were posted were pulled. And my theory, like the Jesus painting, everyone wants to know about where the Jesus painting goes. Yes. I bid on that, damn it. I was a high bidder whenever they pulled it. How high were you willing to go? I would have paid a couple hundred for that Jesus painting. Okay, so my theory, and it's backed up not just by conjecture, is that the items that got pulled were pulled because they were personal items. Like, this wasn't paid for with company money. Like, I know different people, and we already talked about Barry's stuff, who's, like, had left, you know, because, like, you go to work and maybe you have some stuff there that's your property. And then you don't expect, like, not to be able to get back into the building because the SEC, like, you know, has the judge filing, like, a thing that says you can't, right? Right. So, Robert, it was funny. One of the first hearings I like, you know, again, Robert's in a heap of trouble. He's got the SEC that we keep hearing in the SEC about the pending criminal cases and and like charges coming. You know, he had to. Have you heard anything about that? No. I mean, that's the thing. We keep hearing. Here's the thing, how that how it's being played out is they're doing this dance with the SEC, which is like a civil thing, just to be clear. So when people say, how long is Robert going to go to jail for this? Zero days for that. You can't go to jail for that. But, you know, if they're a criminal, but, you know, Robert's lawyer keeps using the argument that we know there's a criminal case coming. And that's why Robert has to plead the fifth, you know, 250 times in a hearing. Right. So I don't know what's going on with that, but I think they're trying to, like, navigate how far they can get with the SEC, with Robert kind of like cooperating before maybe dropping, you know, like the next part. And then that could impact like how the charging is. Again, I'm not a lawyer, but again, I've learned a lot about things I never thought I would because of this. So maybe that's what's going on with all this stuff going on. Pre-hearing the lawyers are like, we got to really figure out how Robert can get in there and get his personal items. Like that was the concern. Right. And the judge was like, I forget. You know, it's like that's not what we're focused on. But that's what I think he did, because I know people who saw Robert at the auction inspection day. and apparently he had to downgrade his car I forget what it was like a Lexus to an Infiniti or something I don't know anything about cars and they said and not my opinion just with someone else that it looked like he missed the exercise equipment at the facility because he wouldn't have had access there like Robert loves buzzwords so he would talk about having like lean and agile development and octo yeah well and lean and agile It was probably because he wanted development that's very much like him. So I think that he went and got the Jesus painting, got some of the other paintings because they were personal. Robert, I want that Jesus painting. I know. Well, that's the thing. Well, if he's really hard up for money, maybe he'd be willing to. Real quick idea I'd throw out that even before maybe the SEC stuff when Deep Root wasn't happening, I don't need Robert to run a pinball company to be entertaining. like i in fact think he shouldn't because then you know like the stuff about allegedly like harming people and stealing people's investments i just love the content of him going out at pinball expo and making these like speeches and like doing these interviews like i love it and i think he should do a patreon just play play a ceo of a pinball company don't have a pinball company just do interviews do ted talks you know give me the powerpoints i and i'm i'm not bullshitting i would pay a fair amount of money if I could subscribe to Robert keep doing his thing just without any of the actual like you know like ruining people's lives stuff you edgy little blueberry you this has been a lot of fun we didn't uncover some of the things like where Jesus went we uncovered a lot of stuff there's so much more we're just scraping the surface here but what I would like to do would you be open to getting some feedback from this interview and episode it's going to raise some more questions that people have and maybe come back and we do a part two to this oh 100 i am i am here for it people are sending me an absurd amount of stuff that it like getting it the day before that's where i'm like how do we even talk about this by the way yeah if anyone wants to reach me i now have a gmail account oh let's let's give it right now as we're closing out. Yeah, yeah. It's Dr. Blueberry Johnson, not doctor spelled out, but D-R. And only now do I realize people might think that's deeper. It's not. It's because Blueberry Johnson at gmail.com was already taken. And just like with Twitch, when I have to modify the username, I put the doctor in front because it's stupid. Okay. So yeah, so anybody reach it out. If you had any questions about this, if I said anything wrong, for sure, I don't want to do that. I'm just basing it off of what I hear. If you're also someone who's been aggrieved by the process or if there are, you know, there's a lot of vendors who got screwed over. I want to give a quick shout out if people are interested, because I know there are folks out there like basically who bought up all this stuff at the auction and are trying to like build their own Raza's. One person that was mentioned to me, there were a lot of people who got stuck holding the bag vendors from Deep Root, a lot of folks that weren't paid. You know, Pinball Life was able to actually buy back some of the stuff it sold at auction and then sell it forward to the community, which is great. But there's others who weren't so lucky. So Ron at Elite Manufacturing was a guy who in the very end days had a big order of like metal stuff for Raza and he's probably still got it. And so apparently he's a good guy and he was taking a risk on this. You could reach out if you're trying to do that. there's going to probably be a company that has a bunch of like Raza toys that were made because apparently what I was told was that the toys for the first five games of Raza cost $10,000 and they were gorgeous. They were like works of art because only the best, right? And so, you know, that's kind of like more expensive than you want. But when they were getting ready to make the Raza's, they got them down to not that expensive and not that nice, but apparently still really nice and still expensive. And there's somebody out there, a company that made them that probably has a bunch. And I can I can find the name of it. But that's yet another one where there are folks out there who got stuck with like thousands of like speakers that were custom designed for us, which is a whole nother story we could get into. So basically trying to find the way that, you know, we can't right all the wrongs, but there are a lot of people who were taken by this whole enterprise, not even just the investors and not even just the people that work there. so if you're an enthusiast or a deep root enthusiast or you're trying to make your dream Ziggler games maybe we'll be able to identify folks who could help you out with that and then help cut into their losses a little Absolutely and if you listeners would like to hear part 2 of Blueberry Johnson and the deep root debacle email us at thepinballnetwork at gmail.com give us some feedback there you can also give us some feedback on the pin side thread I'm sure that deep root thread is going to be buzzing now thank you so much BJ that wasn't too bad it was pretty fun right oh my god it's so fun I mean that's the problem you know we could talk for 10 hours about this stuff but you gave me so much information all I know it's I'm drowning I haven't even gone through it and fit that's what I was saying to you I was like it feels like it feels like I took a whole semester you know in deep root education right which was like everything before you reached out to me the stuff I knew. And then in the past month when I decided to start collecting and not just publishing to the thread for like a big deal, I've gotten like twice as much and it's too much to go through. So yeah. We haven't talked about the magnetic chamber. We haven't talked about the rotating play field. We haven't talked. There's so much that we can go over in these prototypes and how awesome Yukon Yeti actually looked. Shout out to Dennis Nord. Gladiator? There's so much here. So give us some feedback. If we want to hear BJ again and myself talk about this kind of stuff, he'd be happy to do it. I'd be happy to jump back in. And if you have any inside information, reach out to Blueberry Johnson as he gave you. It is drblueberryjohnson at gmail.com. Correct. Doctor again, but DR is an abbreviation. You can also hear other episodes of the Pinball Show by going to TPN, following, subscribing, watching, straight down the middle. Recent videos coming out of that. I'm cut short for time, uh, but it's been fun. BJ. We'll talk to you soon. Yes, sir. Hey, it was my pleasure. Thanks a lot. That's what we're about here. Speaking some truth and getting some information to the people that we love. And that is fellow pinball enthusiasts. Thanks for listening. Everybody. Should I do that? Kind of like throaty voice. I don't want to come off as nasal. Yeah, no, you're, you've been fine so far. Oh no. Just when you heard, when you come back and you're like, all right, I'm back. And I was like, oh shit. Yeah. maybe I should sound like that. Hello. By the way, did you watch the video of this, that Robert, one of the dumbest concepts ever thought of? Oh, fuck me. It's so good. And his shit-eating grin on his face, but also how much he's struggling with it. He was so mad at the end, and like, fucking cut it.