Hey, everybody. It's your Wicked Wizard Jake, and I hope you enjoyed our episode that we just did on energy drinks, but the whole time I really wanted to know what an insider's perspective was like. It feels like it was such a crazy time in the late 90s, early 2000s, that I really just needed to get some information. And that's when I discovered that Hobart, the man who what invented

Ball's Energy drink, was just hanging out on Instagram, living his best life in Miami.

I reached out to him, and he agreed to do an interview where he would answer some of the

burning questions I had left over from the episode.

And so after some planning, after some arranging, we got to sit down together virtually

and we got to do this interview. You can hear the bulk of it, the entire thing, over on

Patreon. That's patreon.com slash whizbrough. But here's a little chunk of it, because honestly,

this was pretty enlightening. So take a listen.

So, I mean, that's my experience of the product was seeing it on sale at thinkgeek.com. I used to go to tons of fandom conventions and there was like a balls booth there where people

were like handing it out and selling it.

Oh my God. Did you ever do any in the Mid-Atlantic? Ode-Con? Do you ever show up at NecoCon? Anime USA? Any of those guys? Yeah. Oh my god. At some past life. I saw you look for me. Yeah, yeah. I was the sweaty bearded nerd that was like, I like sweet go-go juice. Okay. I was that one. That was me. I remember. Yeah. I remember. Obviously, flavors started coming out like geek beer. Like, it's the comp you know, it was for sale at Comp USA. Yeah, I won't remember. Actually, the Compuose to me is one of those moments. I will never forget. We had talked with them and we had done some stuff.

And I mean, it was probably like 2004 maybe.

But I was walking out and you know, this is also back when like, you know, your cell phones

were still sort of a brick, a small brick, but a brick. And I, uh, I came out of a meeting to me and I had a voicemail and it was the, the buyer from Compuose and he's like, you know, we just had a meeting and we want to put a palette of your product in all 226 of our stores. And I literally remember, I was like, Because, you know, that's a massive order. And I was like, oh, my God. And I will never forget that feeling. Like it was in, it was an incredible moment in when I think about like our story and what we went through. Compi was saying putting us in all their stores because, you know, they didn't really sell any other beverages. So to have, you know, a palette, probably just like 60 cases in every store, it was really, that was a very memorable

moment for us. So, you know, you weren't, you know, you didn't, you weren't playing hours and

hours of quake or StarCraft. That is the best. I would go to tons of land party, but they always wanted me to play, which I did not really.

And I would try and avoid it at all cost because I was horrible at it.

Even when I did try a little bit, it just, they were so far beyond me in skill that it just,

and there were a few like funny moments where they would just convince me to

and i'd be like fine but just expect nothing for me because and i think in many cases it was

worse than they expected uh so at so at this point we're in the early 2000s the the drink has

found its market um you're hustling your butt off,

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