You have a fascinating story of reinvention. You came out of tech broadcasting. How did you decide to make the pivot into the gaming world?

2:29I had been doing live broadcasting for almost 20 years now. and the tech and I pivoted to the broadcast space. And then it just kind of got oversaturated. I was kind of getting bored with it. And I took about a year or two hiatus from it, not doing any shows live, not doing anything, trying to figure out what I wanted to do

2:52and how I wanted to reinvent my studio. And my kids, they were the ones, as they started getting old enough to play video games, were the ones that kind of got me to do some YouTube in the space. It is such a huge thing. I mean, I'm looking back, having been in this business a long time and how fast gaming took over. And then all of a sudden we were seeing more money spent on gaming than any movie from Hollywood or any other television show or whatever. I mean, it really did take over.

3:24And I know it shocked me when I saw the rapidity of growth and how high end computers were really enabling so much development we had never seen before. Are those some of the things your kids got excited about that caused them to say, hey, do this? Well, yeah. And they were doing a lot with cell phones, as you as you mentioned earlier in the top of the show, you know, playing Minecraft.

3:49And I'm sure everybody knows what Minecraft is. I don't play that. that uh but they they had been doing that with just you know your your iphone my kids had iphones at early age and they were doing that but i sucked them into the retro side of things um as you see behind me i've got like these digital pinball machines which are oh nice modern but they're

4:09but they're digital right so yeah um i started getting those three-quarter scale arcade or in the game room like to my left which i could show you here in a little bit i have a a full-blown arcade to my life. Nice. So it's a lot of retro games that we all grew up with. Hey, I'll never forget walking into the bar when I was working in one in my, gosh, I think it was

4:32in my 20s, early 20s. And seeing this table, they just dropped on the floor for Space Invaders. And the funny thing was, I looked at it about a week later, and as many of our employees were playing it as customers, I think it just swept through the world. So there's a lot of stuff that this has, it's developed super fast. It's become a huge thing. And so now we have all these

4:56disciplines, right? We got e-sports, we have those multiplayer online role-playing games, virtual world exploration things, team building games, solo player games. There's just so much variety. How do you figure out kind of what's on the rise and what games maybe, do games wane in popularity and people leave them and behind and the communities that formed around them? it's it's really interesting like this has probably been the most interesting community

5:22i've been a part of you know you've been a part of you know the tech communities where they have their favorite tech brand that they stick with and then you you know go to the broadcasters and broadcasters are buying tools to make their broadcast better the gaming world's a little bit weird uh it's it's it's different it's there's different genres of games where those guys just

5:40kind of cling to like you have your fighting game guys where they just play fighting games right Right. Right. And the cool part is the mix of modern versus retro. Right. Where some of the games that I grew up playing, you know, 40 years ago, the Street Fighters, the Mortal Kombat says I'm using these regular games that everybody knows are now being able to be played online.

6:03Where if you have a cabinet or if you're playing it on a retro device outside of the modern or outside of the regular retro ones that we grew up with, you can now play them online, play against your friends. Well, that brings up the whole idea of there's so much cloud compute possibility that it doesn't surprise me that is there. Are there large communities of people who are looking for classic?

6:25I mean, are there people playing Frogger right now? There are. Believe it or not, like I kind of started into collecting these. I'm going to pull up a switch to my camera here. You guys. Oh, cool. This is my this is my whole arcade game room. I've got Frogger. I've got Space Invaders. Bill, you talked about. I have Centipede. I have asteroids.