Generationally, there's always something exciting going on in technology. Personally, for me, back to kindergarten, like that first Apple II Plus, which I still have, you know, opened doors to me. And each technology continues to open those doors wider.

This is the Techsploder podcast. Conversations with tech professionals about being human in a binary world. Episode 4, Ron Richards. Hello, and welcome to the Techsploder podcast. I'm Jason Howell, and this week's guest is Ron Richards, my good friend, podcaster, pinball lover, and tech enthusiast. Once a host and marketing director at Revision3, Ron co-founded iFanboy in 2001, as well as the pinball tech company Scorbit in 2015 with Jay Adelson. He's also worked for major comic book publishers like Image Comics and Marvel. Ron was the co-founder and co-host of the original All About Android podcast for Twit, along with me, and now co-hosts the Android Faithful podcast for the DTNS podcast network.

All right, without further ado, let's get into it. Mr. Ron Richards, my good friend on the internet for so, so many years. It's good to have you here on Techsploder podcast.

Thanks. Great to be here. My brother in podcasting. That's right. One of my brothers in podcasting. I have such a great podcasting family, and I'm honored to have you part of it.

Yeah, man, I so appreciate you in my life, both on a professional level and on a personal level. You have just been such a wonderful, constant friend starting with my career, but then branching out of that and everything. I only wish that we lived in the same geographical area so we could see each other more.

Yeah, I totally agreed. And it's funny because I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about the adult friends conundrum, especially when you have kids and your parents and stuff like that. And ever since I moved from New York City out to Long Island, where I am currently, I literally do not have a single friend in my zip code.

That's hard. But no, but it's okay, though, because we live in 2024, and I've got this amazing group of friends that stretch out across the country. And thanks to technology, and thanks to the internet, I'm in probably more contact with than if we lived in the same city, right? Imagine our lives without texting and without Slack or Discord and WhatsApp and all the various things, and I'm able to have really strong, healthy, really fulfilling friendships with you in North Bay, north of the Bay Area, friends in LA, friends in New Hampshire, friends in Michigan, friends in Chicago. It's lucky that we can stay connected in this way, because 20 years ago, 30 years ago, we're writing letters, or we're paying long distance phone charges to stay in touch.

Yeah, we're picking up the phone and having a conversation on a call where we can't see the person on the other side.

Or we're connecting on a bulletin board system or something. But yeah, but no. So I mean, in the spirit of Techsploder here, it's like, I'm thankful for you, and I'm thankful for the technology that keeps us and our friendship alive.

Yeah, absolutely. I was thinking about this leading up to this conversation, trying to think about the first time you and I met. And would that be face-to-face, would that be South by Southwest?

I think it was Diggnation and South by Southwest, maybe 08 or 09 or so. I might even have a picture of that in my notes. The picture exists. It's a picture of you, me, and Tom Merritt. And at the time, I was working at Revision3, and I was on the Diggnation train. I was running marketing for Revision3. And you could tell the pic, because we had all these wristbands for different levels of access, right?

Like you get it 21 and over, or you get backstage or whatever. And I had every wristband on my wrist. We were at Stubbs in Austin. And that was after really years of listening to you and Tom on Buzz Out Loud. I think that was ironically, both living in San Francisco, that was the first time we met in Austin in person. And I was taken aback by how tall you were.

As everyone seems to be. When I meet people who listen to our shows, it's probably the same for you, right? When you meet someone in person, they've always got a comment. They've always got some sort of idea of who you are based on the voice that they've heard. They may have never even seen you until they do one day. And they're like, wow, you look nothing like the person I thought you look like based on your voice. But for me, it's always the height.

It's always the height. It's the height. And for me, it's the sideburns. It's always the sideburns.

Which are characteristic. I think you've had the sideburns for as long as I've known you. Since high school.

I grew up in high school and have had them ever since.

Ah, you were one of those. I had a good friend in high school that was the sideburn guy.

You can blame Luke Perry and 90210 on my sideburn choice.

Well, yes. So anyone who watches or listens to Android Faithful slash all about Android over the years knows that you are a big 90210 fan. And that's where the sideburns kind of came from, for the most part.

I just want to look cool. Honestly, I retroactively blame 90210 for it. But honestly, once I was in high school and started shaving, I didn't know you had to shave that far back. I just always shaved the front. And then next thing I knew, I had grown these things down the side. And at the same time, everyone on 90210 had sideburns.

So I'm like, oh, I'll just go with it. But it was purely from my ignorance of my father never taught me how to shave. And so I just thought you just did the front and didn't go all the way up my ear.

And we didn't have the internet back when you were in high school. I can only point that out because I think you and I are pretty much the same age. So we're equally as old as each other.

So the first time I got on the internet was in high school. It was in 94, maybe. It was right when the consumer internet, kind of like the very early days, it was on Mosaic. It was pre Netscape. And so yeah, so I technically was on the internet in high school, didn't know what to do with it. And it was just this neat thing, a different way to connect.

I was already very active in the BBS scene, the board system scene. So the idea of connecting to another computer in the world wasn't foreign to me. But the idea of an always on connection, or not one that you dialed to an ISP, and then that was a gateway to go via this browser to go all these other places, that was, like everyone at the time was mind blowing. So yeah, indeed.

So that's kind of like your earliest internet memory. Are there early internet memories that you can think of that are like pinnacle moments for you? Or maybe they were eye opening, or maybe they were just like, oh my goodness, this is so much greater, so much bigger than I ever thought was even possible.

Well, yeah. And honestly, for me, that was pre internet. So I was very, very lucky and benefited from the fact that I am the son of a computer engineer. My dad had an affinity for technology and engineering. Coming out of the Vietnam War, he got drafted, and quickly realized that, you know, they identified he had engineering capability. And he thought, well, hey, if I fix radios, they will keep me as far away from the front, versus if I fix guns, where I'll be up at the front. So he spent the Vietnam War in Georgia, and in South Carolina, and I think the furthest he got abroad was like the Canary Islands and the Azores and things like that.

But he that combined with the fact that he got a perfect on the SATs parlayed like literally a perfect literally got a got a 1600 on the SATs like didn't get a question wrong. Oh, my goodness. Wow. Try growing up with that above you. Yeah, I did.

Yeah, no kidding. I did not. But um, but so that that coming out of the service, he was able to parlay that into a full ride scholarship to wherever where he wanted to go. And he went to Polytech here in New York. And then that then transitioned into computers. And he actually worked at a he was at a company that was in the race for the personal computer in the late 70s.

They were called Ontel, O N T E L, not Intel, Ontel. And the other tell Yeah, exactly. They were based or blank tell. Yeah, they were based here. They're based here in the in the tech hub of Long Island, New York, where but they were trying to, you know, they had a PC, you know, CRT and a CPU and everything. And they were going to the shows like if you ever watch Halt and Catch Fire, that TV show, the first season of that TV show was very echoing. Like that could have been my dad, like the company that like had a computer and was going to Comdex and things like that.

Like it was very kind of thing. But so I just grew up with technology all around me. You know, my still to this day, my parents basement is full of eight inch drives and eight inch floppy disks and big old hard drive platters that hold five megabyte of data.

So like I always had always had computers around me. My dad put me in front of an Apple two plus at four years old, five years old, maybe like kindergarten, so very, very early. And then at some point between kindergarten and middle school, he brought home a deck vax.

And this is, you know, this is really dating myself, but you know, the Digital Electronics Corporation, and they had a they had a PC called a vax. And my mom was active in education. And there was some, it was a moment in time where they were connecting me and other kids I went to school with via the computer with kids in Australia. And we were a lot we were chatting. And so like, here I am in the mid 80s, typing on a computer and like, Hi, where are you? And they're like, we're in Sydney.

Where are you? That's mind blowing. So yeah, so that was really the first kind of like, oh, wow, like this is this is a technology that can connect people and can do things with it. And it was just a chat. It was just a back and forth chat. But it really felt like it felt like at a Star Trek.

It's like I'm talking to someone in Australia, like this is insane. And so then that led me into getting into bulletin board systems. And to BBS is because the idea because we had a modem. And I was like, well, dad, we have this modem. What can I do?

Like, we can't connect to Australia all the time. What can I do with it? So there was a couple of like local Long Island based, you know, BBS is that were, I don't even know what they what they were what they did. But it was cool because you dialed into and there was message boards and things like that. And then I discovered more and more. And at the same time, I'm playing PC games. And then discovered that there's a vibrant pirate community amongst bulletin board systems. So, you know, when I find out I can get any computer game I want without paying for it, I'm in.

So and at that point, were you sticking to your local kind of BBS offerings or were you expanding out?

I expanded a little because the good BBS weren't in your area. Of course. Of course. So so there was a lot of like, wait until I forget what time the cutoff was, but wait until long distance calling was cheaper, and connect to the BBS.

And then start downloading your zip files of the latest King's Quest game or whatever it is and do it overnight. The BBS it was insane, because I remember the BBS is, you know, they were they were limited by how many phone lines they had coming in for your listeners for you, you know, not old people like us. bulletin board system was a PC connected via modem to a phone line. And someone else on a computer with a modem could dial your phone number and connect and the modems would talk to each other. So any computer, so any BBS was only limited by the number of connections it had by the number of phone lines. So the BBS was on one phone line, one person was on at a time. So I would spend call and you get the busy

line and all that was

the worst spend hours, you know, hours just trying, you know, I had my list of BBS is let me see if I can get in this one. Let me see if I can get into this one, right. And then I was able to write scripts to just keep dialing until one connected and then do an alarm and run back to the computer. And then once you got connected, there were message boards, there was active conversations, which that was another pre internet, but there was a syndicated network of message boards where if you wrote a message on one BBS, it went out to all the other participating ones. So you could talk to more people than just on the BBS.

But so I got really into that I hosted my own BBS for a while, which was fun. I may or may not have been involved in some illegal computer game pirating, which I won't, I won't. And is the statute of limitations over from things you did when you were 10? I think so.

I talked about my history and I'm sure I'll talk about

it at some point on text later. I was, I was, I was a courier for one of the, the cracking groups. And so I would get the game and then upload it to do all that sort of stuff. Yeah. So I was fascinating and I was like 11. So like, yes.

Yeah. Right. Well, this is what, this is what kind of blows my mind, man, is that of all the people, all walks of life online and everything that you and I are paths crossed when they did. And, you know, we've become such a, an integral part of each other's lives in this very, you know, specific part of our lives, which is, you know, podcasting and technology and even more specific Android and everything.

Yep. Yet, you know, similar to, you know, episode one, I talked with Tom Merritt, similar to Tom, like all these people that crossed my path, the more I get to know you and Tom and everybody, the more I realized our stories are so similar because, I mean, you're basically telling the story of, you know, telling my story as well, when you're talking about that, you know, maybe different facets, but and I suppose part of that is just, you know, we're very similar ages. We were, had a very similar passion in technology at the same time. So the same things kind of bubble up for us, but a courier for the cracking groups, that is fascinating.

That's an aspect of it that I was not close to. Oh yeah. No, it was, and it was funny because I was such a stupid kid. Like it was just so like, well, yeah, like absolutely illegal. And like, and I'm also like, I'm meeting other people on these bulletin board systems and we all have these dumb handles, right? So you don't know anyone's actual real names. And I remember like one guy, there was another guy on Long Island who gave me his phone number and I called his house and I realized I didn't know his name.

So I'm like, is Shadow Demon there? And like, and then like, and whoever answered the phone, like exhaled and they're like, Sanjeev, you have a phone call. And it was like, he's like, dude, why'd you use my handle?

I'm like, I didn't know your name. And like, it was just definitely, it was, it was a weird, weird time. It was a weird experience, but it really, it really continued to lay the groundwork. And I owe it all, everything I've done in my career and everything I've done in adulthood, I owe it to those experiences because it built a sensibility in me that like the computer is a tool to do things with, right? And that, and like the one through line through my entire career and through my personal interests and things like that has been the computer as a tool for publishing and a computer as a tool for connecting with people, right?

And so, you know, so being able to, you know, that beat that early BBS systems was like the idea of set, the idea of setting up a BBS and you come up with a name and you did all your ASCII art and you had your handle and all this sort of stuff that you wanted people to come join your BBS. That's, that's starting a website. That's starting a podcast.

That's publishing a magazine that the, all things I've done in, in my life after that, it's all the same of how can you use this tool and this computer tool to connect with other people.

Yeah. And the eyeopening kind of recognition that we now definitely take for granted, back then was like, Oh, wait a minute. I can do this now because I have this thing.

Yep. And it seemed so unattainable and man, that is, that is just a theme that has been repeated throughout my lifetime in technology is something seems unattainable. And then I realized that the technology that I use or that I'm have within reach becomes better, more powerful, more capable to where suddenly that barrier is broken down and now it's been totally democratized. I mean, we're seeing that insanely now.

That's so fun. That's true. And that's so funny that you just said those exact words because do you want to know what the name of my BBS was? What's that? Barrier Breakers. Barrier Breakers. And like when I was like 11 or 12, it was the Barrier Breakers BBS, right?

Like that was, you know, and but yeah, that's totally, that's totally true. And like, at least for me and I was, you know, going into this interview, I was thinking about like, how do I use technology and things like that? I can't say that I've ever been in a spot where like, I have a vision of this thing I want to do.

And the computer is enabling me to do it for me was always the other way around of like, Oh, wow, look at what I can do. What can I do? How can I use this? What can I do with it? Right? And so like, all of my own like entrepreneurial initiatives and stuff like that have purely come out of a little bit of boredom, a lot of curiosity and a lot of like, trying to find an application because I know, I know, this mouse and keyboard give me power can let me do something with it.

What can I do? And then I craft what I what I did based off what I would want to see. So like going back to the internet, I remember getting on Mosaic. And the first website I went on was at the University of Pennsylvania, upenn.edu. Somebody had put up a page dedicated to Star Wars. And it was all it had a Starfield background and it had the yellow Star Wars logo on black, right?

Rude Mary. I thought it was crazy that it wasn't a gray background because every web page I had had the transparent gray Mosaic background. And they just had a bunch of sound files of like recordings from the movies and like, and I thought it was the greatest thing ever.

Right? And it took me several years to come up with my own application of what I would want to do on the web. But it was, you know, watching the web grow from that point in 1994, until, you know, 2000, when I built my first website and started getting into web publishing, those five years of being a consumer of seeing it evolve, seeing HTML evolve into JavaScript and evolve, you know, like, you know, keep in mind, like, there's no Ajax, there was no server side calls, it was all push, push, push.

And really trying to wrap my head around and understand I taught myself HTML in college, again, because I was bored, you know, taught myself JavaScript, you know, just because I wanted to be involved in it, but I didn't have a reason to write so. But yes, it was wild. I do remember, my entire life is littered by missed opportunities in technology also. And the first one was when Netscape went public. When Netscape IPO'd, I remember because I'd used Mosaic and when Netscape came out, and, you know, I was like the only person in my peer group in high school that was active on the internet and active in, you know, I was in the computer lab, and they're like, what the hell? You had an email address and all this stuff. Like when my older friends went to college in 1994, they all got email addresses from their college. And I signed up with an ISP to get an email address so I could email them. And they all thought I was like, you already have an email address? Like it was, yeah, it was great.

I mean, 94 was early.

Yeah, 94 was early. But then summer of 95, I was actually on tour, roadie-ing for a band. And I remember being somewhere in the Midwest and getting the paper at the McDonald's and seeing the front page news that Netscape had gone IPO. And I remembered a couple of weeks before the tour saying to my dad, I'm like, this Netscape company is going to go public and people are gonna make a lot of money. And gee, you know, like at 17 or 18, having my first like stock market miss, I was like, I knew it, I knew it was going to happen, but I didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to capitalize on it.

Right, right. Yeah, I should remember this for the next time I have a great idea like this and actually do it.

And then here we are. I thought I could buy the stock and make millions and like that. But yeah, but I just Googled it, August 9th, 1995, Netscape goes IPO. Yep. So. Wow.

When you're talking about desktop publishing, because publishing, I know that you had a zine back when you were younger, right? That's another one of the strange kind of synergies between you and me. How did you do publishing on that? Was that with your computer? Or were you doing it, you know, kind of old school, you know, taping pieces of art to paper and... A little bit of both.

So basically what happened was, is that I was very lucky to go to a high school that was well funded. We had in my town... And you just said you had internet at that high school, right? Yeah, so yes, yeah.

So I went to... I don't remember having access to that that early. So I went to public school.

And there's the Long Island Power Company, at the time it was called Lilco. In the 50s, they built a plant on the shore. I'm on the water in Long Island. There are four stacks, I can see them from my window right now.

There are four smokestacks. And part of the deal in the 50s, when they built this was that they would pay a ridiculous amount of taxes for the land that they used. And the town decided to funnel that all into the schools. So going to high school in the 90s, I had a film class, we had a computer lab that had, you know, that had complete internet access and all the stuff like that. There also was a class you could take for journalism, and the journalism class produced the school paper. And so this is, you know, and you can only take it junior and senior year.

And so junior year, I took it and I fell in love because it was like, this is so cool. This is using the computer to publish and it was using Aldus PageMaker. And that's where I learned publishing for the first time with a WYSIWYG kind of, you know, interface. And I just, I fell in love with the concept of publishing. At the time, I was already a big magazine nerd. I subscribed to Entertainment Weekly in its first year. I hadn't subscribed to Wired yet.

I remember when I was on that tour, we stayed at somebody's apartment in Ohio, and the girl's boyfriend was a computer programmer. And on the shelf, he had every issue of Wired on the shelf. And like, remember how Wired had like that, the colored spine.

So it just looked like the coolest thing. I was like, what is this? He's like, oh, it's a computer. It's a magazine about technology. And I just flipped through all the magazines.

I thought they, I thought Wired was like the greatest thing in the world in 1995. But in doing the school paper, I fell in love with the concept of publishing. And so I was able, you know, I got the, through my dad, I got the software on my own computer. And then I go to college. And at the same time, I'm active in the underground punk and hardcore scene. You know, on Long Island, I, you know, I, all my friends were in bands, I used to go to shows for a little bit, I book shows, I'm not musical, like, I'm not like you, Jason, like, I can't, I tried to play guitar, I tried to sing, I can't do it, try to play drums, I can't do any of it.

But I just wanted to be involved in the scene in some way, shape or form. And in high school, I did that by booking shows, there was a skate park here where we built a stage. And then I booked the Bouncing Souls and Seven Seconds and some really cool punk bands and stuff like that.

Helped to get Fugazi, not at my venue, but at another venue. And so like, that was cool times. And then I get to college and I'm in a new town.

I don't really know anybody. You know, there's, there are other punk and hardcore kids there that I'm starting to learn. But there's already one venue and one kid was booking it. So I didn't want to like horn in on that. So I didn't decide not to book and I'm like, well, let me do a zine. Like zine, I was getting Maximum Rock and Roll. I don't think Punk Planet had come out, Punk Planet was just starting to come out. Heart Attack was another zine, Under the Volcanoes, getting my news about bands and music from zines.

I was like, well, I have the tools, I have the computer, let me do that. And one of my friends worked at Kinko's in the overnight shift. And so me and another friend of mine, we used to hang out at Kinko's and we'd make flyers there and all this sort of stuff. And my other friend, Dave, was already doing a zine. He had done six issues of his zine already.

And he was saying how he wanted to do more of it. And I was like, yeah, I want to do a zine, but I don't want to do photocopied. I want to get it printed on newsprint. I want to make a real magazine. And he's like, cool, let's do a flip zine where that way we can save on costs where one side will be mine, one side will be yours.

And if you flip it upside out, that sort of thing. But as we started doing it, we're like, hey, man, let's just join forces. And so we joined forces and we created a zine called Muddle. And we picked up his numbering. So he was on a seventh issue.

So my first issue was issue number seven, because that way it looks like we've been around. Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah. It helped with advertisers.

Yeah. And we found... I found a local... The people who printed the local paper in Ithaca, the Ithaca News, I was like... I figured out how much it was to pay to get it printed. And we did a 32-page print zine. And I interviewed the singer Jawbreaker and a whole bunch of other bands.

And it was off to the races. And we ended up doing... We would do maybe one or two issues a year, because we're also in school. But the big factor for me was that I was straight edge. So I didn't drink or I didn't party. So if I wasn't at a show in Ithaca, or driving to New York City to go see shows, I was just in my dorm room bored.

And that's why I want to do zine. And so I had my PC, I had a flatbed scanner. I saved up my money to get a big monitor. And using the computer as a tool, I was able to create this zine that turned into a magazine. And by the time we stopped doing it, it was like 200 pages, full color cover, distributed in Barnes & Noble and Tower Records and all that fun stuff.

So it was a fun... No kidding. I didn't know. I didn't realize that yours had become such a success. How many issues beyond the starting point of seven did you get?

I think I always forget. I think we did about 10 or so. I think we stopped around issue 15 or 16. So around there. That's a big accomplishment. Yeah, yeah. Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie used to write for us before Death Cab was anything.

Issues of the zine where Ben interviewed other bands. So it was definitely cool. It was a definitely cool community thing. And it was also... What was funny was that the first website I built was for that zine, but I wasn't publishing articles. It was totally like... It was brochure wear. It was like, here's where the zine is. Here's the latest information about the new issue.

Here's the address to send your money to get a copy. And I didn't think like, oh, I could also be publishing to the web until after college, until after 2000.

Right. Well, that was also during a time where everybody was really also figuring that out as it went along. Does it make sense for us to put all of this online or do we stick with the traditional model that we've been doing for many decades at this point? Those kind of shifts in thinking and that paradigm shift takes time.

And so... And again, then my second missed opportunity was that we were basically doing what Pitchfork was doing before Pitchfork. And had I just... Right. Had I not focused on the print element and focused on the web, who knows what that could have been, right?

So that was missed opportunity number two. But... And I've been flirting with scanning all the zines and trying to do a book of it or something like that. But a lot of it is pretty cringe.

We used to ask guys in bands how to ask girls out and it was just really just not good. But it was fun. And it gave me a way to participate in that scene and also to use technology. So...

Yeah. Yeah, indeed. Well, you said flatbed scanner and that just immediately took me back to the time when I got my full color flatbed scanner. That was magical.

Again, it was one of those things that we take for granted. I worked my ass off to set... I think it was like $700. Yeah. But once I had that flatbed... The thing was, we used to go to... I went to Ithaca College and there was a flatbed scanner in a library at Cornell that one of our friends from the punk scene worked at. This guy, he ran a record label. He did a record label called Immigrant Son Records. This guy, Sean. To give you context, his nickname was Old Man Sean because he was 24.

Right? Oh, boy. But he worked at the library and he was like, yeah, when I'm at work, you can come in and use the scanner here. So I would come in with my stack of photos. I'd go see bands and take pictures with a disposable camera and make the prints and scan each picture and then save them to a zip drive and then bring the zip disk home and plug it into my zip drive and then bring them into PageMaker and then eventually Quark and start doing the layout. I taught myself design. I taught myself fontography. I mean, some of the layouts are just awful. Some of them I'm pretty proud of, to be honest. It took a while for me to learn the rule of don't use more than two fonts on a page, right?

Like a headline font, body font. Oh, man. Especially in those days, man. I remember I had an old Apple Mac computer or Apple computer and I remember just seeing the whole list of fonts when I was doing my zine and just wanting to use them all and just not knowing like, maybe you don't want to do that.

Well, there's an important lesson that I did learn in doing that is that just because you can doesn't mean you should, right? And so I evolved my own design sensibility. And like I mentioned Wired, when I saw the magazine Ray Gun, which I don't know if that's in relation to your nickname, your Ray Gun nickname.

No, but it would always come up when I was wanting to buy a URL or doing a search for when my DJ name was Ray Gun. It was always there.

But yeah, there was a magazine called Ray Gun that was just like bonkers design, visual design. If you ever want to Google Ray Gun magazine, you can see what I'm looking at. So that was really like a foil of what could be done. I'm like, oh, what if I put the name of the band sideways or whatever? And we did one full issue, parodying Seventeen and Sassy. We did a girl's teen magazine. Yeah, it was fun. It was definitely one of my favorite things I've ever done. And what was great was that I went from being very active in a local music scene on Long Island to then moving to upstate New York and doing the zine. And because I was disconnected from my local scene and we were dependent on touring bands coming through because Ithaca had a small scene as well, the zine basically became a national zine where I'm covering bands from all around the country.

We're covering what was going on. And at any given point, really, by the time I graduated, we plotted it out. Based on all of our contacts we made from doing the zine, we probably could have driven across country and had a place to stay along the way, known someone in every city. And also some of the stuff that very early on Jimmy Eat World, I saw Jimmy Eat World play at a VFW hall in Ypsilanti, Michigan in 1997. They had just been dropped from their first label and it was before Clarity came out. So I was friends with them, got a taped copy of Clarity before it came out, like a dub, like,

here's our new record, what do you think? Oh man, that feels so special. Yeah. It was definitely those moments of being like, it was a great moment in time where the internet was small enough that it was like this Venn diagram between the past 20 years of the underground music scene in the United States, which is built around touring bands and a touring network where you literally would get like, you know someone who knew people and you'd get a sheet of paper of names and phone numbers. And you're like, oh, so if a band was touring and they wanted to play Reno, we'll call this guy and he can make you like that sort of thing. So you had that network, but then layering the internet starting to emerge in there

and the ability to email and the ability to talk to record labels, you know, via the phone and via email. But then also you had the Usenet was very active, the alt.music .hardcore was where a lot of it. And so it was a time period where everyone in the country was connected more than they'd ever been, but it still felt small and felt interconnected and felt personal and that you were talking to people in Seattle who knew you knew the same people and now it's just so broken and disenfranchised and scattered and micro, you know, micro communities. But at the time, it was a great moment in time where we were starting to leverage technology to do what had been done before us for 20 years. So, yeah.

Yeah. Again, having the ability with the tools that you had to kind of take something to the next level that may have seemed unattainable prior to that. We're going to take a quick break and then there are other aspects of your life that I want to ask you about that I'm super curious about, you know, in regards to technology. Don't worry, Ron, in a second.

All right. So, Ron, in my time being your friend, I have learned that you are, well, I mean, obviously you're a huge fan of Android because we've been doing an Android show for together for 14-ish years and counting. Also that you have a fascination for pinball, which actually ties into something that you're very actively creating right now. Tell me a little bit about where that kind of fascination with pinball started. What is the birth of that story? And then we can talk a little bit about Scorbit. Yeah.

Well, so from a pinball standpoint, that's actually more relatively new in terms of my life, you know, as it is. And by new, for the past 15 years, not 20, like podcasting and all these other things. But yeah, but so I remember the first time I played pinball was ironically at Comdex in 1987 when my dad was attending the conference.

And this is how different the world is. My dad would go to these trade shows and bring me and leave me in the hotel while he went to the trade show and did his stuff. And like oftentimes it was the same hotel as the trade show. And I have many, many memories of like sneaking onto the exhibit floor at Comdex and like being chased by security because no kids were allowed like that sort of thing. But inevitably, I would always get the hotel and I'd find the game room.

Right. And I remember being in Atlanta for Comdex in that game room. I don't remember the hotel and playing Gauntlet and playing like whatever arcade games were there. And there was a Cyclone pinball machine. And if you're familiar with Cyclone, that's the one that's kind of themed after like an old time, not carnival, but like amusement park. And it's one of the early mid 80s pinball machines that actually had a voice synthesizer in it. And every couple of minutes when it wasn't being played, a voice would go, ride the Ferris wheel.

Oh, yes. I know that. Oh, yes. Okay. Okay. So I used to manage a movie theater way back when. And we had that pinball machine in the movie theater because I always heard that. And I played it many, many times. Now I know exactly what you're talking about.

Ride the Ferris wheel. Ride the Ferris wheel. And so I played it there, but I was 10 and I didn't know what I was doing. And it's pinball is actually hard unless you know what you're doing.

Um, and that was my earliest memory of pinball. Um, and then honestly, never really got into it until when I was living in San Francisco, I lived in the lower hate back when I was working revision three. And anybody who's familiar with San Francisco in the lower hate, there's a institution dive bar there called Molotovs which was my local bar. It was right across the street from my apartment. And they had two pinball machines in the front of the bar. And I never really paid much mind to it. And then one night, one of my buddies who, who worked at dig at the time, dig.com at the time he, he and his wife and girlfriend at the time and me were just there drinking and there was a medieval madness pinball machine, which was made in 1995.

Um, that was there. And we just like, well, let's let's play pinball. So we're hitting around and now I'm able to like, realize the kinetic movement of pinball. And, you know, like I played video games. I play, obviously I play computer games, played video games, but at this point I'm trailing off. Like I, I had an Xbox, Xbox 360 and we, and all that sort of stuff, but I'm, I'm trailing, I'm, I'm aging out of the gamer mindset.

Right. But I still love games. And the great thing about pinball is you put in a quarter, you put in a dollar and you've got three or five balls and that's the game, like it's contained.

You don't have to spend 24 hours you know, attached to a console to play through every moment of the game. Um, and realizing the physics of it, the physicality of it. And that, Oh, if you hit the ball, this angle and bounce it off this thing, it goes in there. And then in that one night, we'd happened to do the things to trigger multiball, which is the, the, the, the, the game mode where instead of one ball, you get three balls and it's, and it's chaos. We're like, Oh my God, there's so many balls.

And because of the internet, now we're on our phones and I'm looking up the rules. And I was like, Oh, wait, wait. And I'm telling my buddy, Brian, I'm like, if you hit that target and then hit that ramp, this will happen and see.

So it's doing the cause and effect. And we really, really kind of fell in love with it. Um, then, and so we, so we kept on going back to the bar playing pinball, trying to figure it out at the same time, one night, a guy moseyed in and just blew the machine up, got like a hundred billion points. And we're like, who is this guy? And we met him, we talked to him, turns out he was a, a former world champion pinball player, like in the PGA tour equivalent of pinball you know, in 2011 or whatever, he won the world champions, this guy, Andre, who's amazing.

And it was a friend of mine now. Um, and so then that made us realize, Oh, there's a competitive aspect to this. There are people who play in tournaments and go do things. And then at the same time, I don't know how we found out, but we found out that there was a pinball league forming in the upper hate. Um, there's a place called Free Gold Watch, which is a silk screening store silk screening, like a t-shirt not factory, but like a place where a guy still screen t-shirts and the owner was really into arcade games and had five pinball machines of his own that he put in there.

And the local pinball community was getting together and starting a weekly league, kind of like a bowling league where every Wednesday night we go to free gold watch from seven 30 until 11 and play pinball with each other. And, and you know, you got points and all this sort of stuff. And little did I know I was stepping much like the music scene. I was stepping into a community and a scene that had local city-based scenes, as well as a national, you know, kind of a tour that was happening. Um, and just open, open, open my eyes to this world of, you know, this guy, Andre, who was a world championships, pinball player, the world championships happened in Pittsburgh. And every year in Pittsburgh, there's an enormous tournament called Pinberg and, and it's like all these kinds of things and just got more and more into it and more and more having more fun learning the rules of every game, the different errors, how stuff works. Um, and just really just falling in love with it as a hobby. And so for years, I just played in the league just for fun.

Um, but then much like, as my wife likes to point out, my, my I have a very bad history of turning my hobbies into work. Um, and so one day I was in free gold watch and I was playing my buddy Russ on, on Star Trek pinball machine based on the Chris Pine, Star Trek movies. And my buddy Russ beat me and he got a really high score and he goes, Oh, wow.

Awesome. And he pulls that. I'll never forget. He pulls out his phone. It was a Samsung it was a Samsung galaxy, by the way.

I'll never forget it. Cause he was my Android buddy. Um, and he pulls out his phone and he opens up a text file where he has a list of the names of games and a number next to them. And he was manually keeping track of his high scores on every game he played. And he had just beaten his high score on Star Trek. And I watched him do this.

I'm like, what are you doing? And he explained to me. And in my head, I went, ah, shit, that's an idea.

Right. So, so then at that point, at that point, I really, I was like, I want to make an app where you can keep track of your pinball scores. Like that, that was the, that was the germ of the idea. Um, and so I talked to my buddy, Brian O'Neill, who worked at dig and the guy that was at Molotovs with me. Um, he didn't want to do it.

Um, but I was like, dragged him kicking and screaming. I worked with a couple of developers trying to get it done because again, I love technology, much like music. I can tinker with HTML. I can take her JavaScript. I can tinker with, with, with, with Python. I'm not a developer. Like I'm not, I'm not a designer.

So I needed people to help me do it. Um, and then I happened to be hanging out with Jay Adelson, who was the CEO of dig and this, and the, the CEO or the founder of revision three. Um, and he and I were hanging out and he was, it was after he had left dig and he was thinking of his next thing. And he had a bunch of startup ideas that had, and he had an idea of like a global leaderboard, kind of like a Strava for video games kind of thing.

And I was like, well, I haven't got this idea about pinball. And he's like, Oh, that's cool. And then we just kind of went our separate ways.

And then I dragged him to California extreme, which is a art retro arcade pinball show in San Jose, because I knew he liked retro video games and he wasn't really in the pinball time. And I'm like, you gotta come check this out. I'm like, you gotta come check this out. And so he loved it, fell in love with the scene the way I did. And as we're walking around, I'm like trying to get his advice and like, see if he can open some doors to me and to get this app made. And he's like, yeah, no, he's like, I know you want to do that, but apps are boring.

Everybody has an app. He's like, what would be cooler is if we could, he was getting into IOT at the time, like internet of things, like what would be cooler is if we, if you could make a device that went in the pinball machine to connect it to the internet, so you didn't have to type in your score. And then that was the aha moment.

And you were like, yeah, that would be cooler.

And then he was like, Oh, well now we need to do, we need to build this. And then so, so Scorbit was born and that was 2015. Um, and so here we are.

I can't believe that it's already almost 10 years.

That's crazy. Well, the first, we didn't launch publicly until 2020. So for five years, we spent researching and working with electrical engineers. There's a, actually a guy on our board of advisors who was an early contributor to the project. Um, we found this guy who was an electrical engineer who had built an an interface for pinball machines to change the displays, like whatever.

So really knew the inside of pinball machines. Turns out he works at NASA and is like a, literally a rocket scientist, like literally a NASA engineer. And so he helped us, you know, kind of figure out some of the stuff that we needed to do to figure out how we wanted to do. So we spent five years, we got the patent for what we did.

I have a patent in my name and Jay's name for, for this work which is pretty cool. Um, and then we, then we finished, we did the first run of the app and then we launched, we were actually going to launch a week before the pandemic started. And so we stopped because people, people stopped going to play pinball. And so we held back.

That would have been a horrible time. Yeah, absolutely. We launched mid pandemic. Um, and then we've spent the past, you know, three years learning and testing.

And now we're working on kind of like the next phase of the, of the company, like the next big plan of what to do with it. But it's just, it's just, it's just fun. And again, it's another case of me having an interest in something and using, and the technology being available and the technology unlocking the ability to do something with it.

So, yeah, well, I, I give you so, so many props for taking this idea and go and going headfirst into hardware. Now, granted, you have a wonderful partner to do this with.

Um, and that's, that's really important. I think, you know, I've had a lot of ideas and it's like, I, God, I have no idea where to begin. And I know if I just do this myself, it's going to fail. So the value of pulling people in to, to be your support mechanism, to be your team is, is huge on something like this. And I mean, you know, you're almost 10 years later and I mean, you have an actual hardware product. It works with pinball machines. Like it's a huge accomplishment.

Yeah, I know. It's pretty cool. Every time we, we've, we've made you know, several, made a few hundred, more than a few hundred of the devices manufactured, you know, did the design China, send them off to China, get back to the boards and all this stuff like that. Every time we get more in stock, we sell out. So clearly we're doing something right. Um, you know, we've got, we've, we've got a great community of using the app. Um, there's a thing called virtual pinball. I don't know if you've ever heard of this, but people have, have coded pinball machines in an emulator. And then they build a pinball machine where the, the play field is a, is a screen and you can play any pinball game in the world. So we built an API to connect to virtual pinball. And so virtual pinball has embraced us. So we, that even like opened up our community, even larger. And we've got some really, really cool stuff coming, you know, in, in the works that I think is going to make this, you know, knock on wood, blow up and be like a nice, you know, really nice, nice little business that we created that is mainly rooted in the love of playing pinball and promoting people playing pinball. Like that, that's, that's the whole mission statement is to get more people playing pinball.

So, yeah, I absolutely love it. And like you said turning your, your passions and your, your, the things that fire you up into, yeah, that's, that's what it is.

I mean, like, I mean, I've worked, I, you know, I've had the, I've, I've been very lucky to be employed since college, like to have jobs. Um, I've worked jobs that are just like jobs, right. Where it's like, oh, you know, I spent seven years working for a hotel company, working in marketing, right.

And that sort of thing. I didn't love it. I wasn't passionate about it. It paid the bills, but ultimately it became suffocating. And I realized that the times I was happiest was like when I was in my dorm room making my zine or when I was, you know, working on my web, my other, we didn't even get a chance to talk about, but the other website, iFanboy all about comic books.

Like I built that website with my buddies cause I love comic books. Um, and what I found is that when you're working with something you're passionate about, it doesn't feel like work. You're excited to do it.

And the, the, the results are that much better. So I feel infinitely very lucky that I'm able to take pinball and make something work. Even my wife makes fun of me, but like turn it into work because like at the end of the day, it'd be like, ah, it's pinball. Like I can't, I can't get too upset, you know?

Well, but you're, but I, but I should also say you're, you're lucky in that when you've done that with iFanboy and comics, when you've done that with Scorbit and pinball Android and Android faithful, you know, cause I suppose that is a business as well or podcasting about technology in general. You haven't encountered what some people do when they take their passion and turn it into work, which is it turns them off of their passion. It kind of unplugs them and detaches them from that passion that existed before the war, it becomes work and, you know, detaches. I mean, how, how have you been able to avoid that?

I think a couple of things. I think I think definitely mature emotional maturity is a big part of it. Um, I joked, you know, like, you know, for, you know, for example, I've worked in comic books, I've worked for image comics and Marvel and stuff like that. Um, I always said that at the point I had those jobs, if I'd gotten those jobs five years earlier, I wouldn't be emotionally ready to do them because I needed to split and you need to compartmentalize your love for your love for the thing with the realities of a business and recognizing that even though you love that comic book, it's still a widget, it's still a cog and it's got to sell and it's got to have, you know, a strategy behind it.

Um, and so like, I don't know if it's healthy or unhealthy, a mental health practitioner practitioner could tell me if compartmentalization is good or bad, but that's what I've been able to do. Like you kind of put the love over here and you put business over here. Um, and then at the same time, all remembering, again, like I said, remembering why you're in it, you know, that, that, you know, we're like having pinball be a part of my work is at the, it's so, I'm so lucky to be able to play pinball and say it's work and be able to do it and, and being aware of that and not letting it grind you down. Um, and so sometimes that means taking a break and stepping away and like going back and say, okay, I'm not going to think about the work.

I'm just going to play this game and remember what I love about this this technology. So it's definitely mental gymnastics but I seem to have figured out the balance. I think so.

Well, that's important. Balance is a, is a key component. Um, I know that we only have a few more minutes here, but I did want to ask you, and I think it's kind of a good ending to the interview is that another thing that you are very passionate about is Disney and Disneyland and going to the resorts, Disney world and everything. And so specifically related to technology, I guess the question that I want to ask you on this is, is there a technology that you see, that you interact with, that you that you appreciate on a certain level when you go to these places?

Cause I know they have like the wristbands that kind of track where you are. And I mean, Disney is a, it's, you know, it's a fun experience, but there's a ton of technology that drives that experience and it keeps getting more and more complex as the years go on. What, what do you think about that? When you go there, are there things that you marvel at from a technological perspective?

Absolutely. I mean, the, the, the great thing, what I love about Disney from an amusement park standpoint is the the separation from reality and the created environment that you're walking into, right? The idea of escapism and the idea of the, from the moment you walk the moment you get off the parkway or the expressway to the moment that you go to the hotel, that you go to the amusement park, it is a completely thought through and crafted experience focused purely on joy, right?

Which is so, which is so great. I, I, you know, I think back to the first time I went to Disney in the eighties and just being baffled, walking through Epcot and not understanding how there's music everywhere, but I don't see any speakers. Right. And I remember being a kid, I was like 10 years old, rooting around in the landscaping at Epcot to find the speaker that was embedded in the bush that you're not supposed to see, but the music is just present. And then like, Oh, okay. I see someone put that there. And the idea of crafting

and the curation of the experience and the way they transition, the way you walk through each of the different lands and like how the pavement changes and stuff like that whole, that whole, the, the creativity that goes in that just, just really sparked so much of my imagination. And then you're right. Disney, the Disney park side of their business is a very technology can be a very technology forward company at times. They can be very technology backward at times too, but that's another conversation. But and it's great now having children of my own and taking them to Disney. And then now like they have the magic band plus, which, you know, uses RFID. And, you know, the first magic band was just like, you use it to tap in, you know, someone, how I pay for the subway. Now you just, that's how you got into the park. Like your, your admission, your, your ticket was tied to your, your bracelet at the turnstile. You tap your bracelet, green light goes, you can walk in.

That's cool. But now they've got it so that there's lights and location tracking. So, you know, I got my kids a little bracelet. So we go on pirates of the Caribbean and after the drop, you know, after the boat goes down and the thing, and then you go into that scene of the pirate of the pirate ship attacking the town and shooting cannonballs. Every time a cannonball hit and blew up in the water, their magic bands lit up orange and yellow and vibrated and they just lost it. They were just like, whoa, because it brought what you're seeing to this, you know, kind of feedback, right.

Even more immersive.

Right. And, and, and my daughter was like, how did that do that? Like, like that idea of how did they do that? That's what I love. And that, and, and they are always pushing that and I may know how they do it, but like, whether it's a, something as simple as the pepper's ghost effect on the haunted mansion that had, you know, how, how are their ghosts here?

Right. Whether you know how it is or whether, you know, the magician trick or not the magician trip, it's still a wondrous experience and there's always something to drive that curiosity. And that's kind of why I love it. So.

Yeah. Yeah. That, that experience is definitely driven by curiosity and especially when, you know, when you're there as a young mind, oh man, it's so overwhelming, but the, the amount of, of detail that they go into to make that such a convincing otherworldly experience is so respectable. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. I need, I need to go back.

It's, it's been a while. It's fun. I mean, unfortunately there are pros and cons. I mean, it is very, it's prohibitively expensive now, so. It is. Yeah. But, but if you can afford it now and you enjoy it, it's fun. It's definitely, it's definitely, I made the mistake of taking my kids a couple of times and now they want to go all the time. So I'm trying to like pump the brakes. I want them to recognize how special it is, you know, so. Yeah.

Yeah. But at the same time you enjoy it so much, it's kind of like, okay, well, you know what? I could go again. Yeah. Yeah. I could be convinced. Yeah. Well, one thing that I love about you, Ron, is you still have a lot of like childlike, wonder, interest and wonder. And I don't know, you're just a fun person to, to be a friend with and to work with as, as much as, as I do. So I appreciate you in my life and I'm so happy that you got to come on here and tell me a little bit more about you. I've learned, this is what I love about this is that I get to learn even more about the people I care about through this show.

So I'm honored to, I'm honored to be a guest and an early guest and I'm so excited you're doing this. You know, I've been cheering you on for well before, you know, this even came, you know, started coming out. So honored to be here. And yeah. And just like, you know, that childlike wonder I get from Disney, I try to have technology, something that makes me excited, no matter whether it's something as dumb as the rabbit R1 or, or as exciting as the next Android phone or whatever open AI is doing.

Like there's just so much, there's all generationally, there's always something exciting going on in technology for personally, for me back to kindergarten, like that first Apple two plus, which I still have, you know, open doors to me and each technology continues to open those doors wider. So. Yeah. Yeah, indeed.

Well, thank you, Ron. Always a pleasure. And yeah, I'll see you on the next Android faithful episode here in less than a week.

Every Tuesday, we're here talking Android, never going to stop. So thank you, Jason. Thank you, Ron.

Big, thank you to my friend, our guest, Ron Richards. And as for you watching and listening, we could not do this podcast without your support. The most direct way to support us right now is at our Patreon at patreon.com/JasonHowell. There we offer ad-free shows, exclusive access to the interview live stream, the recording of the interview that you just saw, early access to videos, a discord community, regular hangouts with me and the extended Techsploder family, and a whole lot more. We also offer the chance to be an executive producer of this show.

And you know what? You can like put that on your Twitter bio, do whatever you want with that information. You can do that just like this week's executive producers, Jeffrey Marriccini, John Kuehne, Catie Lake, and Bill Rudder. Thank you for supporting this independent podcast. Techsploder podcast premieres every Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern on the @Techsploder YouTube channel with the audio podcast publishing to the feeds later that day. And really, you can find everything you need to know about the show at Techsploder.com. I'm Jason Howell. We'll see you next week on another episode of the Techsploder podcast. Bye, everybody.

Ron Richards

Scorbit

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