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Disc Golf Daily

A DGPT History - Terry Miller & Jonny V - S0E5

Summary In this episode of Disc Golf Daily, Seth Bindley interviews JVD and Terry Miller of Smashboxx TV. They discuss how they got into disc golf, the origins of Smashboxx TV, and the transition to the Disc Golf Pro Tour. They talk about the challenges of live broadcasting and the technological advancements that made it possible. They also express their gratitude to the supporters and sponsors who helped them along the way.

Keywords disc golf, Smashbox TV, live broadcasting, Disc Golf Pro Tour, technology, supporters, sponsors   Takeaways JVD and Terry Miller got into disc golf in high school and college respectively. Smashboxx TV started as a way to provide live disc golf coverage using affordable technology. The transition to the Disc Golf Pro Tour was made possible by the support of Steve Dodge and other sponsors. Live broadcasting in the early days was challenging due to limited technology and resources. The generosity and belief of supporters and sponsors played a crucial role in the success of Smashboxx TV.

Chapters 00:00 Introduction 00:04 Getting into Disc Golf 05:58 The Challenges of Live Broadcasting 35:00 The Birth of the Smashboxx Podcast 37:34 Conclusion   Music by contreloup

Duration:
38m
Broadcast on:
12 Jul 2024
Audio Format:
mp3
Summary In this episode of Disc Golf Daily, Seth Bindley interviews JVD and Terry Miller of Smashboxx TV. They discuss how they got into disc golf, the origins of Smashboxx TV, and the transition to the Disc Golf Pro Tour. They talk about the challenges of live broadcasting and the technological advancements that made it possible. They also express their gratitude to the supporters and sponsors who helped them along the way.   Keywords disc golf, Smashbox TV, live broadcasting, Disc Golf Pro Tour, technology, supporters, sponsors   Takeaways
  • JVD and Terry Miller got into disc golf in high school and college respectively.
  • Smashboxx TV started as a way to provide live disc golf coverage using affordable technology.
  • The transition to the Disc Golf Pro Tour was made possible by the support of Steve Dodge and other sponsors.
  • Live broadcasting in the early days was challenging due to limited technology and resources.
  • The generosity and belief of supporters and sponsors played a crucial role in the success of Smashboxx TV.
Chapters 00:00 Introduction 00:04 Getting into Disc Golf 05:58 The Challenges of Live Broadcasting 35:00 The Birth of the Smashboxx Podcast 37:34 Conclusion   Music by contreloup
(upbeat music) - Hello everyone, welcome to Disc Golf Daily, a Disc Golf Pro Tour history. I'm your host Seth Mindley and this week, we're joined by two guys that you probably know pretty well, JVD and Terry Miller of Smashbox TV. Welcome guys. - Thanks for having us. - Hello. - Since this is sort of the first iteration of the podcast, The First Season, so to speak. I like to start off by asking people just a generic question. How did you guys get into Disc Golf? - Well, I think both of us got into Disc Golf when we were in high school, which was a long, long time ago. Myself, I had some friends that just brought me out to one of the local courses and handed me, I believe it was, gosh, I think it was an old AVR. And no, I'm sorry, it was an eclipse. The first one I got was in a eclipse. That was what I was handed. And we used to just play around Ploman Park, which was just a few miles from my house. And I probably played maybe 10 times in high school. - Yeah, and mine was a little earlier than that. It was between seventh and eighth grade. When I was at camp, I was given a regular Frisbee and told to throw it into a grocery basket, just like you walk around and you're only getting a couple of items. And that was at camp. And then when I got back from camp, I found out there was a course that had actual baskets at it. Well, actually, first I found out about an object course where you had to go hit posts and I'm like, this is stupid. And then I found out about the exact same course that Johnny's referencing in Ploman Park. And then I just got hooked on it and started bringing more and more friends out there. And fun fact, Johnny and I went to school together, but at that time, we weren't very close. We weren't hanging out. We didn't roll in the same circles or anything like that. And so he had a different set of friends that introduced him. I kind of found it on my own and then continued to bring more and more friends into it. And it wasn't until four or five years later that we were a year or so into college when we had this mutual thing that brought us together where we just happened to go to the same college together as well. So yeah, mid to early '90s for me and then a year or two later for Johnny. - That's awesome. And it's, well, I think one of the things that I find sort of across the board as we've been going through these first initial set of interviews is that most people they have been playing disc golf longer than you'd think they have been playing. And I mean, obviously people know you guys pretty well. So they know the story and we end up getting more involved in playing disc golf together as you're in college. You start going around to bigger tournaments, et cetera. But one of the things that people maybe, especially people post pandemic, aren't really aware of is sort of how Smashbox TV as an entity came about. So I'd love to hear just a story about like how you guys decided to start Smashbox TV, what its first iteration looked like. And then sort of we can talk through the transition as it grew to what it was right before the tour started. - Terry and I both had a little bit of experience with live broadcasting because of disc golf planet. And we were friends with John Doosler, who I always had a tech background. Terry's kind of always been, had this interpersonal communications background. And he was doing some live broadcasting. And so in the early 2010s, we joined him. We kind of did volunteered our time and effort. And when that started to kind of scale down, Terry had an idea for what he wanted to, kind of similar to we're gonna go back USDGC dots with radio. And we kind of bounced some ideas off on how we could do this technology-wise and whatnot. And originally it was just gonna be Terry. But at some point, we kind of just sat down and talked about how we would like to do, there should be more live broadcasting, honestly. And that's where Smashbox started. - Yeah, and to maybe expand a little bit on his, what he was just saying is, I remember designing or talking about a website that was really populated with a bunch of multimedia, and it was everything but video. Because video was so expensive to possibly transmit or somehow get onto the internet in terms of uploading with cell signal or whatever. So I remember that was like, oh, let's take pictures and you could have it automatically feed in, you know, kind of like your Instagram style. And then there was live scorekeeping was just becoming a thing. And then there was a live broadcasting for just radio and doing audio only. So I figured, hey, if we had tweets, if we had live scoring and if we had pictures, and then we put that all together and then I could just do a relatively simple live shot by shot broadcast with just audio only, all of those things combined. Kind of made, you know, if we smashed them all together and a one screen for you, it was like this, you know, multimedia experience, which today you could go out and probably make happen in 10 minutes. But at that time, I was trying to kind of mash all these technologies together and put them in one spot. Because I remember saying and having the conversation with Johnny of like, there's no, we see that they're spending tens of thousands of dollars to rent a, you know, a satellite dish and do all this stuff over at discoffplanet.tv. And we're like, there's no way that's a viable business model. That's just way too expensive. And so we were trying to do everything but video because it was, it was prohibitive. There was just no way to do it. And then the, you know, the CDNs, the delivery networks were charging you for the amount of people that were watching. They were charging us. And it wasn't until YouTube came along and said, Hey, if you have a certain style of account that's had enough views on it, then you can broadcast for free. And we could put it on YouTube at no cost. And that was honestly one of the biggest game changers in all of live disc golf is the fact that it went from a model of us paying someone to host it versus YouTube saying, hey, you can just put it here for free and the whole world can access it. And it can be as many people as you want at no additional cost. So that was, that was 2013 was the conversation. 2014 was kind of our breakout year of actually broadcasting to the world a number of events. - Yeah. And I think that's something that I sort of glossed over and jumped into, which obviously this episode's more about Smashbox than it is about Disc Golf Planet. But there was an iteration of live disc golf pre Smashbox TV. It was called Disc Golf Planet.TV. They sold yearly memberships, I think. And then also lifetime memberships of some sort. And you could watch on the internet. It wasn't the greatest, but you could watch. And so it, but it didn't ultimately, it was so cost prohibitive, as Terry said, that it became obsolete. And so 2014, you guys, I remember watching the Bowling Green Am broadcast, but that one wasn't the first one. You guys did a few different broadcasts. Tell us a little bit about that story. I know you've just told the story a hundred times at this point, but a little bit about what started and then we'll sort of transition into talking about the Pro Tour some. - Sure, a couple, like a year or two prior, we had been talking, working with Disc Golf Planet about how other ways we can broadcast. And I happened to stumble upon something called, what was called a live view. And they were broadcasting with 3G cell signal. And at the time, none of the guys at the planet thought it would work out. We did a little trial at the 2012 worlds in Santa Cruz. 2011. - 2011. - And it ended up working relatively well for what we wanted. And so come 2014, or probably end of 2013, we started reaching out to live view and said, "Hey, what would it take for us to get one of these?" And we started looking at some of the events and it was gonna be about $2,500 for a month. And more or less, all you could eat data, give or take a little bit. And so we worked with our friends over at Legacy, Stevie and Bomba Rico. And they said, "Hey, guess what? "We'll help cover some of those costs "if you come out to Silmar and fill the Silmar open." Which was our first event. So sure enough, thanks to Legacy, they footed a lot of that bill. We were at Terry, was able to travel to Silmar, where I don't know if you met AJ there or if you already knew him, AJ Risley was a current pro tour cameraman and he actually was one of our first camera ops. He kind of lugged the camera around. Well, Terry did commentary on the course at Silmar. We got our first ace on camera there at our first event. And then at that point, we thought, "Well, it went okay. "We actually ran out of batteries with holes to go. "We didn't have enough equipment. "It was part mostly due to cost, "some dude not really thinking that much ahead of time. "But then we thought, we have this thing for a month. "Let's just blow it out. "Let's see how many events we can get to in a month." And then from there, Terry, after Silmar, I believe it might have been even the next weekend when I took a bus, that's the budget we were operating on. I took a bus 13 hours or so to go down to Bowling Green to an amateur event. We had, just to put it in perspective quickly, we had Simon Lazat doing some whole previews, myself and Avery Jenkins on the mic and Jamie Thomas doing some camera work. I mean, that was our media crew, was just a handful of us Yahoo's doing that. We broadcast the final nine live for the Bowling Green. And then we also did the Quad Cities, in the Quad Cities we went there for the Rumble. We ended up doing that where I knew Ben Callaway and a bunch of the other players at the Rumble. And then a week or two later is when I really got to meet Jordan Castro and a bunch of other guys who became staples in the Minnesota disc golf scene where we did the Minnesota Amateur Championships. So in four or five consecutive weekends, we had done all of these broadcasts and it was just a matter of utilizing every ounce of the data we could and getting as many reps in as we could. And it was as raw as you could possibly imagine and especially by today's standards, I mean, it's unbearable, unwatchable, single camera, us walking down fairways, like all the no commercials, no replays really, one or two commercials, all legacy commercials. And then one or, you know, no replays and no graphics. I mean, what we were doing-- - We were doing there graphics, there were some brutal ones. - What we were doing then is now overall taken by about 40 or 50 people, but it was a crew of like three for a good month or so. - Yeah, yeah, I remember watching Bowling Green Am's because one of our locals, Johnny Raiden was in the final night. And so it was an opportunity. I'm sitting in Jonesboro at the time and I'm like, oh, I can watch this live. And yeah, I remember Avery being there and whatnot. So the live use though, ultimately, and I guess this is me knowing a whole lot more than even the general consumer knows, the live use ultimately didn't end up being what you guys went with as far as like broadcast technology, but you've done this in 2014, 2015 is sort of the idea of the tour. And so you end up changing some of your technology. And then I guess somewhere around that time, you have Steve Dodge reaching out to you with his idea of the tour. So how did that conversation come about? - Yeah, as far as the tech goes, I'll touch on that and we'll let Terry talk about the communications. Those live U units are, I mean, if we wanted to rent them, as I said, $2,500 a month or $1,500 for a weekend at the time, or I believe it was like 12 or 14 grand to buy one. And then you had to pay for all your own data. So that was just out of reach. So we started looking at other options and we found some equipment called Teradax, which kind of did the same thing. You could plug your own modems and they were a fraction of the cost. I think we bought them for like four grand. And so we had one or two that we put out that we purchased and went from there. And just to kind of get the technology under our belt, so we weren't renting this live U, the entire time. And then, you know, then came Steve Dodge. - Yeah, and I was actually just looking for some old emails going back. And Steve had really loved the idea of live and he had his own iteration of a live attempt with modems and wifi and all sorts of other things, even years before that. And so in practicing and playing around with the Maple Hill Open or the Vibrum or whatever he called it that year, 'cause he switched names every year. I see a document right now that's from 2014 talking about the live schedule and how we would break it down and what could be live for it. But basically, once we were getting some traction there, in terms of practicing and doing some other events throughout 2014 and then into 2015, Steve said, well, first he sent me the proposal of the tour. I'm like, this is insane, this is crazy. You know, all these events, what you want to try and do. And right there, he made it very clear that one way this would differentiate from the national tour at the time is that this would have live coverage at every event. And with that, would we be interested in essentially having our first contractor agreement or consistency instead of not knowing who might be able to get us somewhere at some point, he was saying, I'd like to commit all of these events to being live. And that's when our eyes really opened as like, wow, this is getting serious. We took it serious, but this is like, that's a real obligation and commitment. And like to his credit, of course, he was so steadfast that all of the tour events would be live, like that was a given and just not non-negotiable. And that meant us 'cause we were pretty much the only remaining live entity at that time because I think Disc Golf Planet was seeing that there was other hurdles and obstacles that they may or may not wanted to overcome. And we were charging forward kind of hell or high water, so to speak. And we were trying to give it our best go. So that was a pivotal moment in, I'll say, our career, our relationship with Steve, our relationship with the tour, the fact that I knew about what the tour was as a proposal and then for him to say, part of this includes live, that was a really big moment. And ultimately, I think overall in just Disc Golf history kind of a big moment. - Yeah, I think it's interesting because one of the goals of this sort of season of the podcast is to show really sort of how few people helped start the tour, right? Like when you think back to it, there's not a very long list of people who were actually 100% on board going to be at every event. And really, if you take that into consideration, the list is actually probably the players who decided to sign up and commit to all of them and Terry. I think that there was a time we got to, at the risk of schooling things, I think we got to like 2018, maybe even 2019. And by that point, there were only like two players and Terry who had been to every single pro tour event. And like, that's obviously something that's of the past now because we have so many other avenues that we've taken with the tour, but it really is a sort of a testament, I think to how few people, and really like in the instance of the tour and what Steve was proposing, live was the crux, right? Like when it came to the differentiation between the national tour and what the pro tour is going to be, one of the key tenets of it was live disc golf. And so, yeah, so I appreciate, I guess, you guys sort of stepping up but also understanding a little bit of the gravity of that. So at this point, this is sometime in 2015 where this is taking place. You guys are also though producing some live broadcast. What did the live broadcast slate sort of look like for you guys in 2015? And what were some of the things that you were starting to learn about live broadcasting that helped you sort of feel more confident going into the pro tour agreement? - I think just the fact that it was still, even though we were considerably and willing to be considerably more or less expensive than what disc golf planet had previously been able to operate at. Again, largely like YouTube alone was such a massive game changer. Something that was costing the planet thousands of dollars on a given event, we were now getting for free with as good or better results simply because it was all on the YouTube and therefore Google platform and backbone. But really the big question was who else could afford it? Who else would dare commit to having live? And there was a few events that would reach out and some early adopters were the likes of Roscoe and Dynamic Desk where they said, "Hey, we're really interested in it. We feel like this is cutting edge and we really wanna be on board with it and support this." They thought that was really like I said, cutting edge. Also then just the idea of the world championships potentially. And if we were suited or capable of handling the world championships and it was still in 2014 when we had disc golf planet and doing out in Portland, which was the crazy finish and the tie and all that stuff, of course, with Ricky and Paul. But then 2015, they still had a good foothold on having that large-scale event and they might have even done Japan that year and were attempted to, but Worlds was kind of the last one. And then there was a conversation about USDGC and could USDGC, who was always trying to come up with a different way of making their event stand out, live being, again, one of those possibilities. So 2015 Worlds was in Pittsburgh and the planet was live with that. And if I recall that might have been the last time they had gone live with any event and it just seemed like with them doing it sporadically, it wasn't viable. And we were in a similar position, but we were trying to come up so much harder in the sense that we were gonna give up at nothing and we were willing probably to take financial sacrifices that they were probably sick of already doing. I mean, they were paying tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to be able to pull it off and they weren't seeing the return on it, nor were we, but we, I guess we were okay with the loss a little bit better. - Our losses were much smaller. - They were much smaller. - We were such a smaller scaled system. - So also 2015 really showed us that it was Dodge, Steve Dodge and having us at the Maple Hill event, but also Vyram Bertie Bash was another big one. Of course, the brainchild of again, Steve and his crazy thinking, but the Bertie Bash, he was trying to put on an international scale. And he knew that if you offered something different than any other, there was only a couple of us doing post-production myself. Joe Mez, Central Coast, and McFly were really the only four post-production companies on the planet. And there too was like, I'm gonna sell the Bertie Bash experience as if you get to the championship, you're gonna be live as well, which was a sought after thing to earn that positioning for. So we had that as a conversation. And then like I said, things like the USDGC conversations kind of circulated, some worked out, some didn't. So it's just a mixture of all of those things that continued to let us build momentum. And then we tried to get creative with having the, the battle at Blue Lake right before the 2014 worlds, having a battle at the memorial right before the memorial started. So think of like present day GK skins matches and us trying to do something just like that, but live on a less fancy scale, but it would still be live. And so, you know, we see all these things continue to come about and they're awesome. When people yell and scream sometimes, we're like, yeah, we've been there, we tried that, or we had less resources and less success at the time. But a lot of stuff that's happening today is some variation or continuation of other things that, you know, have been tried. So it, yeah, any opportunity we could, where if somebody was willing to pay that much extra money, we were more than anxious to jump on the opportunity. - Well, and I think that one of the, one of the interesting things that you did sort of say was that in 2015, we went from 2014 where Disc Golf Planet like kind of put out a schedule and we knew where they were going to be. And then 2015, it really did become sporadic. Like it wasn't, it was like this shift and you didn't know when they were going to be live next, but you were, they were wanting you to pay money to be able to watch them live. Whereas at least to you guys' point about YouTube, like with YouTube, you didn't have to worry about cost. Like there was no cost there. And so it made it a whole lot easier, I think, even for people to just adopt it. I think it's the reason why probably we still see people pushing so hard for post-production and what we're seeing on Jomez is because the acceptance rate of just going to YouTube and watching something is so much easier than having to subscribe to something. - Subscribe or have a separate paywall or find a brand new website, all of those things. We know YouTube is, you know, one of the world's greatest search engines as well. So if you go out there and just search for it, you would probably find it rather than, you know, discoffplanet.tv, which was their website, but you had to know that and in order to ultimately get there. - So one of the things that we haven't really touched on is your guys' relationship with Steve, I think which is probably pivotal in making the decision to sort of commit to the tour. People, I think, hopefully know, if they follow Smashbox, they know that Steve was the first guest that you guys had on Smashbox. He famously will get to that story in a future season, also came on Smashbox and fired you guys. But in the grand scheme of things, you guys have known Steve for well before, you know, the live side of Smashbox had gotten going. And then he's coming to you with this idea. What was it about sort of knowing Steve, knowing where you guys are with your technology that gave you sort of the willingness, I guess, to commit to going live at all of those events? - I mean, for me personally, I trust Terry. Usually he doesn't lead me wrong. And he'd known Steve for a few years prior to that. And I'd never really met Steve. I don't think I met Steve maybe until the first week we were live. I couldn't remember, I don't remember if I went to Maple Hill a year before that, but after meeting Steve, you can tell he's just a spirit. He's a personality. He is so energetic and he's got so many ideas. And I felt like I didn't know after the, even after the very first Maple Hill, even before we signed on for, you know, signed on for the first, I think, six events that year, we didn't know what was gonna happen if it was gonna go one year and fizzle out or what. But, you know, I trusted Terry and Terry, you know, had a great relationship with Steve. - Yeah, and I would just, I mean, to really oversimplify it. If Steve's there and part of it and is involved, like, sign me up. You know, I've told him this before, when I get a phone call even to this day from Steve and it says Steve Dodge on my phone, I immediately smile or chuckle because I'm like, all right, buckle up. This is gonna be a fun conversation. And I have no idea why he's calling me, but I know it's gonna be a great conversation. And so I was everything Johnny said and just his infectious personality and then knowing he's so good at heart and he has so many of these incredible qualities besides all the storytelling that he does to keep you entertained, it just, it became very clear after my first time visiting Maple Hill around 2010, it became very clear that if this guy's involved with something, I want to be attached as well. I would love to be along for the ride. And so all of that said, yeah, you've got some crazy ideas and yes, we need to like either push back and or like rein you in a little bit from our side. But overall, if you're involved, we're on board and that remains true, you know, more than a decade later. - Yeah, yeah, I think it's really wild because sometime around this year, I know, or this time last year, I was working on preparing some stuff for Pro Worlds and I was talking to Miles Park Hill and I said, we were talking, you know, reminiscing. And I said, you know, it would be really great. One of the things I'd love to do is sort of tell the history of the Pro Tour because people don't, you know, get the whole story, you know, especially anyone sort of joining us after the pandemic, they get what we refer to as Pro Tour 2.0 and they don't really know all about 1.0. And so, you know, I told him all that and he goes, well, he goes, you know, you should really talk to Steve. Steve has an idea too about creating a podcast. And so what you just said, Terry, I'm very much the same way, right? Like, I joined the Pro Tour in year two, but the moment that Miles said, hey, Steve has something and Steve and I got on the phone and started planning out what Disc Golf Daily would look like, I can say sort of definitively that I would not be doing this if it also wasn't something that Steve was doing because as much as it's something that I can support and something that I want to do, it also takes that accountability, I think, and knowing that there's someone there who, you know, pardon my French, Haller High Water is going to be there and be there for it. I mean, it's, we spent literally before I started work for a couple of weeks meeting every day to plan out what Disc Golf Daily could look like and how we wanted it to go. And then we just sort of dropped it for the holidays and he messaged me and he said, okay, I'm going to start recording now. And if you know Steve, that's very much true to his nature. And so I guess the only other question because I do really sort of want to keep us focused on like going into the 2016 season, not really getting into it and talking about that season 'cause I think that we can take up a whole other podcast and that's really the goal is to sort of split this up into years, but one of the things that did come out and I feel like it came out a little bit before the tour started, but maybe it was as the tour was starting with Steve was offering these different sort of fundraising campaigns to help scale the live broadcast. And so I wanted to hear sort of like you guys' perspective. I mean, like you're talking about like being willing to take losses, being willing to sort of not, like the cost is still a cost, but it wasn't like you guys were making money and over fist for this. So sort of just like what it was like to decide how many cameras we're going to have and then that look of like what would it look like to scale if we could. - Wow, that's going back, trying to remember what I was thinking back then. I mean, we started out with two cameras, the first year of the Pro Tour 'cause we'd only done one camera previous to that. And so we had a camera guy who was also gonna do editing for the tour. And then we also brought on a guy that we know from here in Wisconsin to kind of help us out and do some things. And at the time, a lot of our constraints were strictly technology, you know? The home streaming systems now are amazing compared to what they were back then. I was running off of like a single MacBook and a program called Wirecast. And we had, you know, I was so happy one day when fiber came to my house 'cause I knew I could just, I could be doing broadcasts from my house finally. And, you know, then we had, you know, we brought Gary in pretty early on who's integral to Smashbox. Honestly, I don't think he gets enough credit for what he, the time that he close to volunteered to sit down next to me for hours every weekend and just sit and hope things don't burn down. - Well, and the backtrack, that was even before Gary was in that role. He didn't even transition until a couple of years later. He was one of our underpaid cameramen who would largely travel with me. You know, we're sleeping, you know, sharing a bed, eating, you know, the same peanut butter sandwiches. And he's taking off work at his regular nine to five job. He's taking vacation days to actually then come and assist and work for us, just as Johnny was largely doing, either taking a vacation day or taking an afternoon to, you know, go hide. - It won't work before it was cool. - Yeah, or to go hide in a closet at, you know, another location that had better internet. And Johnny was doing some of that. So there was still a lot of, this was not a full-time commitment in the sense that we were mentally dedicated to a full-time, but physically, it just, for a few weekends out of the year, it wasn't enough to, you know, quit your day job, so to speak. And obviously I have, I've always had a slightly different lifestyle where I was more flexible, but it was far from a lucrative option to be there. And to this day, I remain as cheap today as I was, you know, 10 years ago, in that we were always trying to save the money and, you know, conserve data that we were paying for, for every megabit that got uploaded. And what our best bets were, and what our best, you know, accounts and swapping accounts and all of those resources. So I'm glad I built on the back of Frugality, because that also was a key component to us getting by. You know, I kind of make the joke that at one point, we went from regular ramen to then flavored ramen, like that was the glow-up, as they say. But everything was done as cheap as possible, which was the only reason, conceptually, we had any success, because if we were in that 20 and 30 and $40,000 per weekend rate, that everybody else would have wanted, you know, from the industry, from outside of our industry, it clearly wasn't viable. And we're coming in literally a fraction of that. And that was tough to still fundraise and get money for. So big thanks to everyone that found any, both value and or, you know, kind of saw a vision of, hey, I want to support where this is heading in the future, because those, my stomach didn't show, but those were some lean years, needless to say. - Yeah, it's wild and definitely once the tour gets going, there's, I mean, even more stories about sharing places and sharing meals and whatnot. But it really was sort of a bootstrapped operation, I guess, for lack of a better way to put it. So that's really, I think everything that I wanted to cover today in the podcast, is there anything else that we didn't talk about as we go into sort of the start of the pro tour that you guys maybe want to mention or sort of cover before we dive into what will soon to be the first season of the tour? - I just want to echo, I know we said it a lot here, but I want to echo the sheer generosity and belief of the Ricos, you know, Steve and Bamba Rico. Again, we may not be sitting here having any of this conversation if they didn't say way back in those early days. Hey, bro, you know, what would it cost for us to kind of be your title sponsor of the live broadcast for that first month and putting up that money to rent the live view for that entire month. And live view, I think we're, you know, we technically got an extra like three days out of them and it included in a whole extra weekend. So it's funny how it worked out, but just any and all of those people, yes, of course it was rough and it looks a hundred times more rough today than it did, you know, back then. But the fact that a couple of us yahoos could learn and have the experience that we did with Terry Radian, with John Doosler and Crazy John and all of those guys to see that, hey, we think there could be a slightly better built mouse trap here and for us to try and improve on the process and some things kind of serendipitously coming together with, you know, Google and everything else to give us some of these opportunities. It's been a wild ride and to think of where we are now, you know, in general, as an overall live broadcast experience, some people have just no idea. And hopefully this gave them some idea, but it's been a long time coming and we're just incredibly proud to have any part of that. You know, there's people doing live broadcasts before us and it's only gonna get better after this, but to know that we had some part in the development and continuing to support Steve and Steve on the other hand, supporting us. It's been a wild ride that I wouldn't trade for anything. - And it's funny 'cause I don't even know if we would be here tonight without Steve. Like literally every Tuesday night, which is when we're recording this, we do our podcast and we started the podcast because we wanted something to do during what we called considered the off-season. You know, that was one of the reasons like, well, you know, we can only do live broadcasts a couple of weekends a year, but what are we gonna do on those other nights? What are we gonna do with those other things? Johnny, you've got the equipment now. Let's figure something out. And that's when we started like Smashbox podcast is because we wanted something to do in the off-season. 2014, we knew we were gonna start doing some broadcasting and that's where it is. And we're, what, 513 episodes later. - Yeah, the fact that really 2014 was that year where we got all, you know, all those events in, USDGC was done and it came November and that's when, and as we know, there was only really one other podcast in all of Disc Golf in the Disc Golf Answer Man. And we had obviously a different philosophy and opinion and the way in which we did it. And we had said, let's do this podcast thing and November of 2014, with full intentions of when the season started back up in March and we went to either Las Vegas or the Memorial, we'd end the podcast and then take the next six months off and it would only continually be an off-season thing. And, you know, of course, things just kept on rolling. And as we said, 500 episodes later, we're still around for better or worse. - Awesome. Well, thank you guys both for taking the time. Looking forward to having you guys on in future seasons as we sort of discuss the changing of live technology, the changing of both of your roles. I mean, as things grow and as we do convince Gary to not carry a camera and start sitting in the booth, I mean, there's a lot of different things that come along and I can't wait to continue to tell those stories. So thanks for being here tonight. - Thanks a lot. - Yeah, thank you. Thanks for sharing these stories and getting them documented and archived because as we already saw it tonight, it's easy to forget what was happening and good times are bad. It doesn't matter, you know, 10 years go by and all of a sudden a few of the details get hazy. So we're glad you're catching up with everybody now and appreciate all the hard work and effort. Obviously as you played an integral role in all of the Disc Golf Pro Tour as well. So thanks for having us, Seth. - Yeah, thank you guys. - See ya. (upbeat music) - Thank you so much for watching. Please like, subscribe, comment and share. It really does help us grow. (upbeat music) (gentle music)