Filling the Gap in Disc Golf

Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the Disc Golf Answer Man. I am Bobby Cool Daddy, Slick Breeze, and on this special disc Golf Answer Man interview episode, I have 6 sided disc. Now I've told you guys before on past episodes that when I got back to Dynamic Discs, getting back in the disc golf, I did a deep dive into what's going on as far as content creation and social media because that's kind of my bread and butter, right? It's what I love doing.

And I came across 6 sided disc and the biggest, the one that draw drew my attention was I saw thumbnail that said flight numbers don't matter. And I was like this guy gets it. He knows me, he knows my message. And so I watched a couple of those and it made total sense how he broke down how different how discs work for different levels of players. And so I did some more research watching his videos and I loved his style and I thought man, I

got to get this guy on the show. And of course, he reached out to me and wanted to be on the show. So I was like, let's let's get you on the show. So right now we have Greg.

So Greg, how are you doing? I am doing great, Bobby, Thank you so much for having me. I've watched content, disc golf content for like over five years now. And so I remember like Dynamic Discs had some of the best content out there when I got back into the sport, which I think we'll probably talk about the timing of that as well.

But you know, you guys had some great stuff, enjoyed all the like tutorials and form and unique and just, you know, enjoying nerding out about content, talking about the pro tour, following along with everything. So it's exciting that you're back and thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. Thank you so much for all those kind words. I appreciate that. But I want to use this as a way to explore and for me to get to know a little bit more about

you. And I'm sure some of my listeners, I'm sure they've heard of you, they watch your videos, but I'm selfishly going to learn more about you on because it's my show, you know. So, but tell me, what is your origin story? How did you even get into disc golf? And then how did you get into creating content for disc golf? So I mean, my disc golf origin story goes back pretty far. I just turned 38.

So my origin story goes back over 20 years to when I was in high school and I just happened to be riding my bike around town with a friend of mine. We rode over to this park that we knew that was at a reservoir, which anybody that's familiar with Central Ohio disc golf will know that I'm talking about Brent Hambrick Memorial Disc Golf Course at Hoover Reservoir. We rode across the dam and we're like, what are these? What are these like metal cages? What's going on here?

We didn't really have any idea. And we decided, oh, let's go stop by a nearby gas station and get a drink. And we go in and there's like a rush rack of discs. This is like the end of a marketing strategy, right? And so we, we just stumbled on them and even the old AVR stamp used to show a basket with a disc hitting it. It's sort of like, OK, great. That that's exactly what that's for. Cool. Well, let's try it. So we bought a couple discs and, you know, played casually back then.

And then like so many people just forgot about it, forgot about disc golf, got caught up with college, work, getting married, having a kid, all the stuff you that you do. And then right before COVID, I just went down this like YouTube rabbit hole and found I think I was watching Dude Perfect videos with my son. They had done trick shot videos with Brody. We watched some of those.

And then there was a video that Brody did with Simon Paul and Joe Mez where they were all doing like Frisbee and disc golf trick shots. And I was like, oh, dude, disc golf like forgot all about it. And so I went to my wife. I kept telling my wife and I think I actually like jokingly recreated this in a video, but I'm like sitting in a chair and I'm just like, like, babe, I know the discs are around here somewhere. Like we got to find them. And she's like, what if you looked for him?

Like what? That's so smart. And so I went and found him in the garage and started playing again. And that was January 2020. So you know where this story goes next is COVID shut down, Nothing to do. I worked from home at the time for Apple. And so I didn't work till 10:00 AM because everybody was on central time on my team.

And so I would wake up, play disc golf, go home, shower, work, repeat every day, every day, every because there was nothing else to do. And I was kind of fortunate because in Columbus, OH, which is where I'm originally from, about 40 minutes away, they actually pulled baskets like early COVID, that kind of, you know, period of unknown, like we didn't know what was going to happen. Could you go out and touch something that someone touched? Who knows? Nobody was even playing disc

golf there. So luckily where I live, they left the baskets in and just put like spray bottles of sanitizer under them and be like, please don't hug the basket if you ace it and that kind of thing. And so that was all I did for months and months and months. And then I've kind of figured out really quickly that I wanted to start some kind of business. Like I just knew I wanted to stay connected with disc golf

more than just playing that. And the fact that I picked it up again at like 33, I kind of knew like I wasn't going to go places as a player. So I needed to figure out what

what my space was and here we are. That's awesome man, now where did you come up with the idea? 6 sided. So I think early on, I mean, that sort of business idea started out as mystery boxes, and mystery boxes were nuts at the time. Disk Mania's mystery boxes would sell like crazy. And I just had this idea of like, well, mystery boxes are cool. It's exciting to get a bunch of

stuff that you're not expecting. But you would also hear people complain like I got all this stuff that I don't want or don't need. And so we thought, well, what if we create a bunch of mystery boxes that you that actually set some expectations. So we had one that was over stable discs. We had one that was neutral to under stable discs. We had one that was white dyable discs. And we branded all of those the Crusher box, the technician box, the creative box, respectively.

We had one for glow discs, one for beginners as well. And those did OK, but I think the name related to partly the idea of, of the mystery boxes and partly like the logo that I happened to to make. I just really, I like the logo. I liked the the idea of the business. And I had this like short list of names that I wrote out and

none of them made any sense. And I didn't really want, you know, no disrespect to any of the companies that have names like this, but this like generic disc golf term discs or something. I was like, I don't, I just want to be different. How do we stand out? And six sided discs was the first name I wrote down. The logo had six sides, whether it's a hexagon or a cube. Boxes are cubes, sort of, or at least a non symmetrical cube that has probably a different name that I can't think of.

But anyways, they all had six sides. It rolled off the tongue. That's how we got there. Very cool. That's awesome. Now, from my perspective, but a lot of your videos are very informational, very like you want to teach us something, which I think is fantastic. What? Why was that the direction you took? I think there's two reasons for that. I think one comes from my background. So for nine of the almost 11 years that I was with Apple, I was a trainer. And so that's what I did

everyday. I something very similar to this where I would be on camera with a classroom full of people, virtual classroom and instructing them through, you know, learning a new skill set, supporting customers in a new thing, rolling out some new initiative or whatever. And I just really enjoyed that. I enjoyed the satisfaction of helping somebody learn something new. I think the other side of it was looking at disc golf content at

the time that I was watching. And, and again, this is like, no, no disrespect to the people that do it really well, but most disc golf content is somebody with a phone in a field at a course or whatever doing their thing. And sometimes that's fun and entertaining and maybe, maybe sometimes it's something else. But even when I was watching those videos that were supposed to be informative, I felt like I

was missing something. I was like, I want to see more like show me close-ups of the disk. And and like anyone who knows anything about disc golf knows if you hold up a disk and look at this shape, that profile, that tells you a lot about what you need to know about how that disk is going to fly. How wide is the rim? How deep is it? What's the shape of it? Is it blunt? Is it aerodynamic?

Is it whatever. And so I figured out really quickly that the videos that I wanted to make needed to happen partially out on the course somewhere, because I wanted to compare and learn about discs and see how they flew compared to each other. But I also wanted to have that as close as it could get to the audience, being able to touch

and feel and look at the disc. And so we started combining on course footage in studio, kind of close up, detailed shots, looking at the texture and feel, the plastic, the shape of the rim. And then the other thing that I felt was important was to script out the idea. Now, scripting it doesn't come at the beginning of the process because our videos are documentary sort of content.

I don't decide before I leave that this plastic is going to fly that way or this discs going to be more overstable or whatever. That just happens. And so we go out, we shoot the footage we, we get as we throw it as many times as we need to, to feel like we understand how it flies. And then we come back, go through that footage, trace the shots so that the viewer can see it, which has become kind of like a pet peeve of mine when I

watch. I'm like trying to see a disc flying on camera and it's just this tiny, like two pixels. Where did it go? I don't know. And, and I, I, you know, anyone who wants some pointers on how to trace stuff. I use an app on my phone. Super easy. I will teach anybody how to do it just to make all content a little easier to watch. But once I have all that footage, then the story starts to kind of write itself. What is the, what is the journey

that we're going on? What are we trying to learn about? And so a lot of times I don't even have like a title or a thumbnail or or a like real solid idea of what the video is about until we've already gone and shot a bunch of stuff. I love that. What I love about that is that, you know, you get a lot of people that want to start creating content, whether it's disc golf or any, anything and anything else.

And they're like, in their mind, they're thinking, well, something's like that is already out there.

People already do that. You know, I'm nothing, it's nothing new. Well, now actually your perspective is something new. So like you said, you saw other people doing disc golf, informational type content, instructional type content, but there were for you, there was something missing and you said, I'm going to fill that gap that I see is needed and, and you did it and I think that's fantastic.

What is, I guess what is kind of, you kind of talked a little bit about your process there as far as creating content, but kind of dig a little deeper about what it, how do you even come up with ideas? It's just as you're watching content, you're like, well, maybe this should be talked about or, you know, how do you come up with your ideas? That's a good question. I think there's a couple different ways my wife and I have. My dog is going to come down and visit us.

Everyone's out of town, so I got to let them roam. Don't trip on me, please. The So my wife and I have a meeting every week or two that's just like a creative meeting. We sit down and we look at a calendar of what videos we've done recently. What do we have in the pipeline that we're working on? Our process or you know, my process for a while was just one video at a time, one video at a time because that's all I can really had time for.

And it's all all like the brain space I could provide, I guess. And then a while back we developed a way of kind of breaking down our videos into pieces like, well, one video is 1 video, but I have to do 20 different steps to finish that video, like just from start to finish, all the different things that need done. So selecting, you know, coming up with like a rough concept and idea is part of it. Selecting the discs then based on that concept, what can I get

a hold of now? And from there, the idea usually starts out loosely into one of four series that we do. We have one called Flight Numbers Don't Matter. That's typically larger scale tests and comparisons of disks. It might be choosing a specific flight number, like, you know, whatever disks can we find around 55 negative 11. And we'll take some liberties with that because every company approaches flight numbers differently. So like the buzz is 5/4 negative 11.

So obviously we're going to include it in that video if we can. But one of the most common comments we get is why didn't you include X disc or Y disk? And it's usually just, well, the video needed to get done this week, so couldn't, couldn't get every every disk right. But flight numbers don't matter is one that's probably our most popular series big like, you know, 203040 discs that we're

comparing at a time. We have one called plastic is in the details where we take more of a plastic comparison approach or, or dig into like is glow always moreover stable? What's the most durable plastic? Sometimes it's the idea is as simple as a question, a question that we hear, that we see in the comments, we hear people talk about or something like that. We've tried and I think successfully debunked parting line height as this sort of like perfect always.

If the parting line height is this way, it's always going to be more overstable than another disk. It isn't there. There are so many variables that go into how a disk flies, which is why we kind of never run out of ideas for things we can talk about there. But we also have a series and like this other series, the disc is in the details. I would say it's my catch all for like any idea I have that's like, well, let's get 5 different players of different skill levels and throw the same

disc. How differently does that fly? That fits in in that series. And that series is usually like a narrower focus, one disc, two or three like it or something like that. But I can tell a more detailed story about one specific disc. And then our last 1 is probably my most favorite to do, which is called first impressions. And that is truly like 100% discovery. I've never thrown a certain brand before. I reach out to them and I say, hey, can you send me some discs?

I want to explore them. I want to learn about them. That's what this stack here is on my desk. We've got a Destroyer from Estonia, 4 of their molds, never thrown them until a couple days ago. Nice plastic. That's all. All I've done so far for this video is shoot the video on the course, review those shots and trace the flights. So I haven't figured out what the story is yet. I haven't started writing the script yet because it's not,

it's not this week's video. So, but in that series, we had a video a couple weeks ago with loop discs from Australia. And like every now and then, I never know, I gave up trying to predict like how well a video will do or whether anyone will care or whatever a long time ago. But we we got a hold of their first disc, their only disc they currently make called The Wonder. It's a straight mid range. It has a ton of glide and it does genuinely fly much farther than you would expect.

It just keeps kind of right when you expect it to start fading, it pushes like another 4050 feet. And we tried to capture that as best we could because it did fly like that for us, which was great. But I did a little interview with the owners of the company and put this video out. And it was just like, hey, this is the best disc you've never heard of. And I think it got about 14,000 views in the first week.

And at the time we posted the video, there were because they're a smaller company, they're still relatively new, and they're an import brand. So there were only like 65 Wonders in North America. And within two hours they were sold out in the in in all of North America and we had none. Like I did not financially benefit from that from a from a business perspective. Could I have handled that better? Maybe. But I didn't quit my job at Apple to make money in disc

golf. You know, there were things were

things were financially much more secure at the biggest company in the world. So. I would imagine so. Very cool. OK, so let's talk about flights don't matter, OK? Just because, yeah, this is sure a message I've been preaching for the longest time and that that was really the catalyst for me, for our series that is. Is this right for you?

I remember way, way back in the day, of course, not that long ago, but it is a while back where people were just talking about when we on the discount Fancy Man show here that they were thinking like, we want to see what Bobby thinks, right? I didn't think that when we first started, it was Eric was going to give as a pro world champion. He was going to give the advice and he was going to talk about disk. I was going to be the guy that did all the back and work. I asked the questions.

I was the goofy guy that, you know, was stumbling over his words, you know, all that. But then people would start asking how it threw for me and I thought, wow, people, the casual guy, it makes sense. They can't throw a disc like a pro can. And so how do we just not talk about that? How do we demonstrate that and how do we do a comparison? So that's what that came about was people wanted to see how it threw for me or at the time, Anthony or other people that we recruit in for the videos.

And then it became, and then it was always a thing of like, do you see now that flights don't matter as much as you think they do because these discs will fly differently? What in your mind of doing that series? Obviously the big thing is that flights don't matter, but what are maybe some other things that you've discovered in doing that series that is very much AI? Don't know if the misinformation is the right word, but maybe a misunderstanding of flight

number. What are some of the big bigger ones that come to your mind with doing that series? That's a great question. I like when you hear people talk about discs or, or when you hear two people, let's say they're talking about, you know, like an evader style disk, like, you know, 0202.5, something like that. They they're often using those flight numbers to talk about a disk as if it flies the same for both of them.

You know, they're referring to like, well, you know, I throw, I use it this way or you know, I need, I need AT bird type disk. I need an invader type disk. I need something like in this space. But how that disc flies for me, for you, for anyone that watches our videos, for the the much younger, faster throwers that we use in our videos than me is completely different. And so flight numbers, they tell

you something, right? They tell you how the disc was intended to fly, but then you change the plastic, then you change the weight, then you change the thrower and very quickly it becomes a totally different disc for different

people. So for example, last week our video was on Clash Discs. It was a collaboration with Northeast Women's Disc Golf, who we met at the Disc E Expo, and they got together 6 of their members of varying skill levels, FA 4 to FPO and several divisions in between and through the Clash Discs soda. It's a straight like Orwell. Straight, neutrally rated fairway driver -2 two. But what does that mean to 5 or 6 different people? Well, for an FA4 thrower -2 two actually flies kind of like 02.

That was her sort of evader slot. Reliable, consistent fade. By the time you get to FPO or even some of the FA2 throwers, you have a big turnover bomber disc that's flying, you know, 200 feet farther and 300 feet farther, right? So it's a completely different disk. And I think like, if there's anything I end a lot of the flight numbers don't matter videos by saying you don't know a disk till you throw it.

And I think there's so many great examples of that when it comes to, you know, everybody loves an end of a destroyer, right? Well, throw a destroyer in every single different plastic. Or in this case, another video we're working on soon. These three stacks of your, I don't know if everybody can see all of them, but we've got 8 Mako threes from end of A7 beasts and six rhinos.

Each of those is a different plastic and you better believe they don't fly the same, but they all have the same flight numbers. So really, I, I, if there's anything that I could do any like magic wand that I could wave, it would be that manufacturers figure out a way to give us a little more information, give us a little more like, all right, well, let's say, you know, let's put it, I'll try and pardon, pardon me on this Dynamic Discs channel. I'll try and stay inside your

terminology. How, how different should I expect the disc in Lucid plastic to fly versus fusion versus Supreme, right. And if flight numbers is the way to communicate that, great. Like let's figure out how to incorporate that. MVP does that with some of their plastics. Fission has a different flight number typically than their other premium plastics.

So does electron. I don't know that I always agree with how they change the flight number because a lot of fission discs seem to start out moreover stable, but they beat in faster. So that ends up being correct. But how does it how does it fly like right off the shelf? So I think that's where like a lot of the essence of that comes from. So I think we're also a shop, right?

Like I sell this and if somebody walks up and says, oh, I need another Firebird, I'm like, do you, where's your old, where's

your old Firebird? Show me. And they pull a beat up DX Firebird out of their bag. I'm like, no, you don't. You need something totally different. Yeah, yeah, Cuz I remember, I mean this, I've talked about this situation before where I was out travelling with the RV's a long time ago and people would come up and ask, you know, about certain discs. And I remember them asking about a disk. And I was like, what do you throw now for your distance

driver? And I don't remember exactly what he said, but he told me and I thought, well this dis ain't going to be right for you. And he goes well what are the numbers? And I showed him and he goes yeah, that's what I want. I was like, you probably want something more like this other one. And it was a slower disk and he just would not be just like no. And he just kind of stopped listening to me and moved over

to the high speed drivers. And I thought I, I get it, but it's, it's, and I hate to use the word ignorance, but it is kind of ignorance. They're, they don't understand. They just think that they got to have that high speed driver. And you know, it's not like I don't think you need to understand the, the numbers as a science, but you, you just can't. It's the same sentiment you say, I wanted to just say, dude, just throw it real quick.

I, I promise it's going to be much better for you for what you're looking for. So. It's stuff like, do you give people what they want or what they need? Right. Right. I had, I've had issues with this for years. One of my first jobs I worked retail at like OfficeMax and we sold these huge printers, right? Or well, we sold a bunch of different printers and had a guy come in and he's looking at the most expensive humongous multifunction 4 in one. It's like 400 bucks and he's

kind of checking it out. And I walk over. I'm like, hey man, how's it going? What are you looking for? How can I help? And he explains that he wants something portable. He only needs to print in black and white and he wants to put it in his trunk. He's going to hook it up to his car and print stuff while he's out on the road. I'm like, sweet, you do not need that gigantic printer. You need this little teeny tiny $180 portable black and white printer. And my managers like guy was

going to buy the $400.00 one. All right, what are you doing, man? Like what? He doesn't need it. He doesn't need it. So there's a lot of that that comes from, you know, I just don't like, I don't want that guy's going to come back and he's going to be pissed. Like, why'd you tell me this giant thing? I can't even fit it in my trunk. It's too tall. Like that would suck. I don't want that for anybody. Yeah, it's there's so many

different rabbit holes. I mean, I remember people would say that and I I guess I don't understand the tech. I don't understand it enough, but people would say that West Side discs numbers were terrible. They they aren't right. And I'm like, not right for who? For you. I don't. So my thing is. Tell those people, get in the comments. Let's talk about that.

Yeah, I just, I never understood that people were saying, well, you know, maybe because West Side's in Finland, the elevation's different and the and the, you know, things are different over there that I'm like, you know, that's not and then even sea. Level sea level man.

And then even the understanding of plastics, you know, I, I was watching your, the, your episode where you did a breakdown of a lot of different brands and kind of the, the, you know, the House of discs and the different brands. And then Gateway and the different by the way, I didn't know Gateway had that many different brands. I knew they had a lot, but I didn't know all those. So I learned a lot. So thank you for that video.

Yeah, sure. But but even I've seen on other podcasts, I think it was the Funsie podcast where they went over some survey about plastics and people were actually saying picking like West Side disc plastic is better than Latitude 64 plastic. Within those brands. They are the same. But it's it's a matter of of I don't want to call it loyalty, but a matter of perception that, you know, the people don't understand. They they feel that they're like, well, this is great

plastic. I'm going to rate this higher than Latitudes plastic. It's the same. It's the same plastic. You know, like in this day and age with with misinformation and social media and all this, like, I think we see it even more as saying that we used to say in customer service stuff at Apple, which is perception is reality.

Like people will believe what they want to believe. So if they perceive it's better, I guess it's better. Yeah. So my biggest thing to I guess combat that or at least to help people get understanding is kind of what you're doing is put more information out there so people will learn more. My approach is very much the just I'm the casual guy that just, I'm not that too much into the technical, into the weeds of it. I just like going out and throwing, have a good time

having fun here at work. And so that's kind of the approach I take. Yeah. So what, what, what are kind of your plans for this? How far do you want to take it? I'm assuming you want to take it as far as people will let it go. But like what's kind of looking ahead what, what would you like to see as far as 6 sided and your business? It's a good question. I mean everything we've talked about so far has been revolving around our YouTube channel, but we are also an online store.

We're a traveling pop up shop. We go to a lot of tournaments. We do a lot of like amateur payout stuff around Central Ohio, work with a couple different tournament directors. We currently sponsor the club in Columbus and we handle payouts for them. So that's an important part of our business as well. You know, where like where do we see ourselves going? I think there's a couple different things that we have priorities about.

Our YouTube channel just started out as like, let's make a video, let's make a couple videos, let's see how it goes. I was still working full time at the time and then one of those videos just blew up and and then I was like, oh sweet, like we

could really do this. Anyways, I got to go back to work and like nothing happened with it for a while. Now it's really just about continuing the series that we do. We're always trying to look for new ideas. We've experimented with a lot of different stuff with our podcast at the start of the year, it was a totally different setup. We had like a almost like a late night set looking sort of deal in here with a couch and everything. Those pieces of furniture still

exist, they're just not here. But so I think there's still more to explore with the stuff that we do. There's still tons of brands that I've never thrown. Luckily, there's still new stuff popping up all the time. Hopefully that continues, although I think the market as a whole seems a little bit, let's say like back to normal pre COVID steady, you know, modest growth versus explosive insane,

crazy growth. One of the things like, I would say selfishly for me, what I'm most excited about isn't

something that is going to be as as like wide-ranging and accessible as our YouTube channel. But we've been shopping for property and we want a piece of land that we can live on with a course and a shop. And we want our our friends and our local community and anyone traveling through when our course or our shop is open to be able to come in, play disc golf, shop disc golf, talk disc golf, watch disc golf, whatever and just enjoy it together.

Like that's definitely one thing we're we're excited about. We've looked at a couple properties recently. We made an offer on one that doesn't look like it's going to happen, but I think that's one side of it. You know, this kind of goes back to why, why I left my cushy corporate job with benefits and do this now is that I, I love it. I love doing this.

I love learning about disks. I, I don't, I don't get to play as much as I used to, but I I still love learning about them, finding all the little differences and quirks and

things about them. And like nerding out, I think you mentioned earlier is like a great way to, to explain it because, you know, all the, all the people that were at the Expos that we went to disc East and disc S like, yeah, I was excited to talk to Anthony Barella or Gannon Burr or, you know, anybody else that was there.

Ken Climo was at the Expo. You know, I was checking out all these different discs The, the moment that got me the most, like surprisingly, and I didn't even realize it until it happened. The thing that got me the most excited was when Chad Richardson from MVP walked by my booth and knew who I was and was like, yo, I've seen your videos. I was like, like another, another like elite disc nerd knows that I'm a disc nerd too. And like, that's, that's awesome. You know, that's just like so

hyped about that. So yeah, I mean, where are we going? I'm not like the most business savvy person. I don't make all the best decisions to make as much money as we possibly could. Thankfully we don't have to. My wife has a good job. That's why she's not home right now because she's at a conference in Philadelphia. But, you know, we we got the trade rolls and I took a lot of pressure off of what I could do with six sided discs and what I wanted to work on and learn

about and stuff like that. But I think there is like a little bit of pressure for it to be more than just a hobby, more than just like a side hustle or something like that. And not to say that we aren't like, you know, outside of working on this week's video and talking to you, I had eight bins of discs to get an inventory this week for a tournament that's coming up next week. So, you know, we're still very much working all the time as the business.

And that works really well with the YouTube channel because we're, we buy discs for the channel, we make a video with

them and then, well, we got to do something with them. So we sell them on our website or at at tournaments we go to next. So. Very interesting, tell me what are your thoughts on this is kind of jumping into a whole nother subject but it just popped my head. I watched the video this morning where it was just casually looking through YouTube to see what pop ups pops up on my feed and it was an AI character using an AI voice and using obvious AIB roll and some real B roll.

But you could tell that AI probably put it in there based on the script teaching me how to better use AI. So AI was teaching me how to use AI and I mean, I know I've looked into it. I I just don't like not knowing about things. I like to at least learn about them so that I'm not caught off guard. What are your thoughts on as far as disc golf content? And AII know that infinite discs put out some AI stuff and I thought it was when I first saw, I thought this is a little

risky, but it was clever. I thought it was clever the the use of it. But what are your thoughts on AI and disc golf content creation? So I've always mainly just to keep our channel, you know, accessible to the greatest audience. We don't swear. We try to keep it family friendly. And my genuine honest feelings about AI can't be summarized in a family friendly way. So I'll just tone them down to say that I think AI is like, on the one hand, we can't avoid it

at this point. Like their companies are embracing it. They're selling everything with AI. It's got to have AI, whatever. But I remember TV's before smart TV's and they were great. Smart TV's are garbage. Like my, why does my TV have to update? Why does it have to do that? I never used that function. I don't need it. I turn it on to watch something on my Apple TV and turn on my PlayStation and my TV's like one SEC, I got to update. No, you don't. No, you don't.

So in the, in the same way, I think a lot of companies feel like there's this pressure that they have to utilize some new technology, they have to make their devices smarter. You know, people are now like paying more money for old dumb dryers just so that they don't have to hook up the Wi-Fi or whatever. So I I feel the same way. Like AI has its uses and I want it to make parts of my life better that are annoying and difficult.

Like, you know, I want AI that can scan the stuff in my fridge and be like, yo, this is the stuff you need to buy this week because I don't want to take the time to do that. That would be useful. I'd like it to know how many, how many of my pairs of underwear have holes in them. You should order another package or whatever. Great. Like those sorts of things would be very helpful. I don't need it to think for me.

I don't need it to be creative. I, I left my, my job where AI could, you know, do a lot of those tasks so that I could be creative and, and I find being creative very fulfilling. The idea of asking an AI to be creative for me, like no way, no way. So I I feel like some people use it as a crutch. They lean on it too heavily and pretty soon if you take the crutch away, they're still limping and they don't really know how to walk without it.

So I don't like AII don't want anything to do with it. I asked it. I remember, you know, I messed with it once and was like, tell me everything you know about disc golf. It didn't know. Shit. So. Yeah, I hear you. Yeah, yeah.

I have a feeling that the AI is being pushed so hard that people are going to get sick of it. And so I'm leaning heavy on I'm leaning heavy on still remaining authentic and transparent because I think that is going to be like a welcome reprieve from all the polishedness and perfect perfectness of, of AI for sure.

Well, I will say. If anybody wants to know my very honest feelings about AI, we will be at 4 Disc Golf Pro Tour events this season and you can come to our booth and ask me how how I really feel about it and I'll tell you. Your unfiltered opinion, perfect.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, so I got one more question to ask you, but something I've, I'm in the whole spirit of being transparent, bringing back the transparency here at Dynamic Discs. I've added to the last couple of interviews a segment where you, the guests ask a question.

It could be disc golf related, it could be whatever. And no holds barred, I will give you my thoughts on it and opinions on it and basically just kind of start a conversation on whatever you want to talk about. But before that, tell us real quick, you kind of alluded to some of the projects you have going on, but what's something, what's some projects that people can look forward to coming up on your YouTube channel? Yeah. So, I mean, real quick, I happen to just, you know, conveniently

drop a couple here on my desk. So I mentioned Destroyer. We're checking out their four molds that were available at the time. They're a brand out of Estonia, so that's exciting. And then this is the video that I was editing before, before we got online here, which is partially about the new vessel and turbulence, but a larger conversation about thumb tracked sort of surface technology innovations. You all have the Slammer among

several other discs. You know they got the Berg that's a popular one or the lift discs. Neon has like a full on reverse Dome. Wow, that. There you go. I hadn't seen that one, that's crazy. Pretty funky. So I I love seeing new interesting design and this is I think a space in disc golf that is actually still really pushing the envelope and innovating the turbulence being the latest disc in that in that sort of realm. So that's this week's video to be out by the time this

interview's out. And then these stacks over here. I don't know how many of these are visible, but like I said before, this is like another just kind of comparison like how differently will 6 rhinos fly in, you know, very premium to very base plastic and everything in between a neutral mid range, a neutral driver as well. This is kind of more, I don't know, experimental exploring. So these are the next three

discs in our lineup. Anyways, outside of that, we are going to D Glow, Ledgestone, Idlewild, and the Pro Tour Championship this year. It's the most Pro Tour events we've ever gone to and the farthest we've ever driven for some of them to set up shop. So we'll be at the Fly Marts Friday and Saturday night at Ledgestone, Saturday night at D Glow, all three days of Idlewild, and all four days of the Pro Tour Championship in Virginia. Nice. So if. You want to come see us in person?

Come say hello. Nerd out on disc golf stuff with us. I love it. I'll be at Idlewild, so I'll get the a chance to come over and and talk with you. So that's fantastic. Well, thank you for being on the show. What, what question? What do you want to talk about? What's the topic burning on your on your mind? Let's see. OK, So you weren't there at the time. I'll ask 2 questions you, I don't think you were there at the time, but did anybody else get to ride in Ricky's helicopter?

And then because that was, that was a sweet video that was fantastic, great announcement, social media video.

And then the second question is probably more how different is it now at Dynamic Disks? Because I believe from the time you left to now, the ownership structure has changed. You guys are properly integrated with House of Discs. We've covered and talked about House of Discs and you know the, I think inherent complexity of that kind of umbrella organization and having hands and so many different things. What's different now versus before? So as far as the helicopter, yeah, I wasn't here.

I'd already left before the whole helicopter. But when I saw the video, I laughed because it had been talked about before I left. It started out as an idea where it was like Jeremy was like, wouldn't it be, wouldn't it be great? Like, man, Can you imagine if we had a helicopter come in and and brought like a player? Like that would be their player announcement. And I remember thinking, Oh my God, Jeremy, that is a crazy

idea. But Jeremy just has a way with making connections and getting things happen. So when I saw it, I was like, he got his, he got his helicopter. I thought it was. I thought it was fantastic too. I thought it was well done. What's interesting is the backlash on it now because of everything that's gone down. But when you look at the comments on the video at the time, people thought it was amazing. They thought it was fantastic. It was awesome. It was great marketing. But now, Beth.

Didn't have a helicopter. Yeah, so looking it's, it's interesting how perspectives can change. And maybe it's just the people become louder that want to point fingers when things go wrong. But imagine if if the story was different and disc golf was still on a huge climb from the pandemic, I imagine people would think that was the greatest decisions you've ever made. So that's a whole nother topic

for another show, I guess. As far as your question to how things have changed, yeah, when I first came back to Dynamic Discs about a month and a half ago, I knew I wasn't coming back to the same company. I was coming back to Dynamic Disk, but it's not the same company. They've been through a lot here as far as the different leaderships, some good, some bad, some choices that were made

were good, some were bad. And to me, the biggest difference in my, at my perspective is that everything is at a, it was getting at a bigger scale when I left, like we had just started, Amazon started really taking off, big box stores started really taking off and disc off. When I left, it was like we were trying to figure out how do we get more discs from Sweden to get here because we're just as soon as it when a container got here.

When I say a container, I'm talking 506070, depending on the mold 1000 discs on one container it we would have those gone and like a month or two just gone. So that's when I left. So coming back that's not the case anymore. Now we're like, how are we going to get rid of these discs, all these discs? So so that's kind of been the, the changes that before I left it was like, how do we keep up with demand Now It's like how do we make sure that we still have demand? Now the demand is there.

I I'm with you and it feels like things are sort of leveling out. I still think disc golf is growing, it just I think some people are just so used to how it was growing. It's just not growing as fast. So that to me is the biggest thing. And then of course to answer the question about House of Discs, that of course was the other big thing was seeing the other brands in the warehouse. That was a little like it was different.

I wasn't used to seeing, I was used to seeing Latitude, Westside, Dynamic boxes and discs and to see the other brands here in the warehouse was very different. But you know, we're approaching it as, I mean, just even get into it more. I remember when we said, OK, Latitude 64, we want to be your distributor in the US, so send us your discs. That whole thing was worked out. And then I don't know who started the whole trilogy, but

we got dubbed trilogy. And I'll be honest with you, I hated it. I hated because from a marketing standpoint, it dilutes each of the brands, right? And people we'd even think, are they just going to be, why don't you just quit calling it different names? Just call yourself Trilogy discs, right? And then we had team Trilogy and it was like team Trilogy.

People are going to think that's a brand that's not a brand, but it was a fan base brand that became something amazing and awesome as far as team Trilogy. And it kind of feels like that's happening now with House of Discs where people, I've heard about House of Discs, it was the name was put out there for business reasons. I don't know the particulars about that, but it was. And then people started thinking, oh, is oh, House of discs. Well, now we're going to buy a House of discs discs.

No, you're not going to buy a House of Discs discs. You're still, you're still going to buy Disc Mania discs. You're still going to buy Dynamic Discs discs, you're still going to buy Latitude 64 discs. They just happen to be housed in the same warehouse that now that the employees here now just know that we have some amazing brands here under our House of discs. So it's not going to be a brand,

it's not going to be a company. It's just going to be an entity that, you know, we can kind of get behind and say we we have a lot to offer the disc golf community in all our different brands. And each brand will still maintain their own identity, their own people that want to throw their particular brands and be loyal to their brands. We just happen to have them all here in one warehouse and able to fulfill that for you if you want those brands.

Yeah, I'll admit, our shelves have little magnetic labels for what brand is on that shelf. And I do have Trilogy tags, but I have all three logos on there. I'm just saying all three logos around there. And I do separate the discs by brand within that rack. But yeah, Discmania separate,

Castoplast is separate. But I, I completely understand why people would, would associate stuff like that because it becomes harder to explain like, well, you know, well, I throw this and this and this and they're from different countries and different places, but they're, they're the same, but they're different, you know, it's sort of like, well, I can, I can just batch them all together. It's quicker, it's easier to explain what I'm doing so.

So, yeah, I, I bet, you know, I became, I embraced it and was like, OK, well, if this is the market's going to be the market and the market is Dick, what dictates what's going to work? And so instead of fighting it and, you know, at first I was like, I'm never going to use the word the trilogy and any what I think, what I say or anything I type out or post that I put. But I embraced it and thought, you know what, this is what the people want. This is what they got.

So yes, the Trilogy family of discs is the three discs, but I don't think you'll ever see us say, you know, this is the House of Discs newest release or whatever this is. It's just going to be. House of Discs doesn't have like a logo, doesn't have branding, does it? No, that's and that's on purpose. That's on purpose. That's just in my talks with different stores and different players. I just noticed that people would say, you know, well, the House

of discs brands are doing good. And so then I then I go particular well, how is dynamic just doing? How is these other brands doing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the biggest thing is, is that figuring out how to make all that work. And I mean, I, I think people know this, but we're not this isn't a new concept to disc golf to have all brands under one big entity, right? You know, you've got automotive companies that do it. You've got, you know, what do you got?

Chocolate companies that do it. Oh, you see? The the maps of like who owns what from like General Mills and yeah, Kellogg's and stuff like that. It's just a spider web of companies. It's crazy. Right. Yeah. So, so, yeah. So we're just trying to make that and trying to navigate that within our family of of brands. So yeah, I would say and, and the biggest thing was no one was here telling their story. They were allowing the story to be told with everything that you

saw. You know, I'm not going to deny it. Layoffs happened. Things happened. Did they happen the way they should have happened? No, I disagree with the way certain things happened. But I wasn't here. I wasn't here at the time, so I wasn't living it.

So I can't really speak to it, but the people are still here that the people that are here and not saying that the people that left for whatever reasons didn't feel this, but all I can do is speak to what's here and now, which is there are people that still love disc golf, they still love their job, they love what they do. They're just really beat up. They're beat up over all the, frankly, some of the social media and some of the stuff was that was put out there so their

story wasn't being told. The other side of the story, and that's what I'm trying to do now is be like, OK guys, we get it. That's out there, but there's another part of the story and we're going to move forward by telling that part of the story. So yeah. Yeah, it's great. I mean, take control of your own narrative. You know, there's always, there's always haters on the Internet. You know, I read the comments.

I choose which ones are valid and useful feedback and which ones are somebody having a bad day. Yeah, yeah. Well, Ray, I really, again, I appreciate you being on the show. I learned a lot. I'm going to continue to learn a lot because I'm a subscriber to your YouTube channel and I highly recommend people listening or watching that if they're not subscribed, if you want to learn more about and I

say a nerd out. And it is there is an element to that, but it is really all just great information. That is isn't just nerding out to nerding out. It's learning about the discs that you talk about. And it will help your game because maybe there's a disc you haven't tried, because you have you haven't considered because you didn't like the numbers or your or you heard from your buddy the way it threw. Well, you got to get out and throw for yourself, get more information.

And I believe your YouTube channel is one of those sources of great information that will help people figure out what what discs they need. And yeah, so I appreciate that. Any last words? No, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. And I think all of us here in the content community appreciate you being back as well. I appreciate it. All right, take care. Thank you.