Radio Chatter’s Evolution: Cards to iOS & Android
Paul from **Radio Chatter** is back!
Since his last appearance, he quit corporate America, went all-in on the business, and just dropped a brand-new **mobile app** version of the game we all love.
In this fun, laid-back interview we cover:
– How Radio Chatter grew from a side-hustle deck of cards into a full app on iOS & Android
– The brand-new **$4.99 one-time-purchase app** (with a free trial coming this week)
– Offline-first design — perfect for no-signal trails
– Custom questions, future community cards, cloud sync, expansion packs, and event-specific sponsored cards
– The hilarious **“After Dark” 18-card expansion pack** for campfire nights
– Why the physical deck is still awesome (dual-purpose playing cards — no dead phone = no problem)
– Paul & his wife’s real stories from Windrock, Drummond Island, Moab, and beyond
– Sample questions read on-air (you’ll want these on your next trip)
Whether you’re wheeling in a big convoy, overlanding with the family, or just bored on a long highway stretch, Radio Chatter turns dead air into epic stories, laughs, and new friendships.
👉 **Get the physical deck ($15):** [https://radiotrgame.com](https://radiotrgame.com)
👉 **Get the mobile app ($4.99 one-time):** Search “Radio Chatter” on the App Store or Google Play
📸 Instagram: @radiochattergame
Drop your favorite Radio Chatter moment or question idea in the comments — Paul reads every single one!
#JeepTalkShow #RadioChatter #Overlanding #JeepLife #OffRoadGames #TrailConversations #JeepWrangler #GMRS #CampfireGames #JeepAdventure
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00:10 – 00:00:02:29]
Adios, boys and girls. It’s time for another Jeep Talk Show
[00:00:02:29 – 00:00:04:26]
(Explosion)
[00:00:04:26 – 00:00:55:00]
and not aware of this. I was actually, I went into the hospital on my birthday in September and had surgery the very next day, it was a gallbladder. And of course, everybody, I think everybody knows somebody that’s had a gallbladder removed. Unfortunately, mines need to be tended to since 2013, I think. So it finally said, “Hey man, I’m outta here.” And it literally died, got gangrene and sepsis. So if you’ve got a gallbladder that you know you’re having a problem with, you know, you got a little pain every so often, not real bad, this little pain every so often, it goes away. Why do I wanna go to the hospital and spend all that much money? Well, after a week in the hospital, and minus one organ, didn’t change my weight though. I mean, if you’re gonna have removed stuff from your body, like where you’d be way a little less, right?
[00:00:56:22 – 00:01:06:22]
So we’ve been amiss on getting interviews. Paul, I certainly appreciate you being here for us so we can get back at these interviews. Interviews are always fun for me. I get to ask a bunch of questions.
[00:01:08:01 – 00:02:20:20]
So hopefully this’ll be a good one for you. And of course you’ve been on the show once before, so I appreciate you being back. So Paul has been an outdoor enthusiast his whole life. And in 2023, he and his wife co-founded Radio Chatter, a conversation starter game for adventurers. Radio Chatter remained a side hustle while they both held down full-time jobs. That was until spring of 2025 when Paul decided to leave corporate America to pursue entrepreneurship. After exploring several opportunities, Paul has focused on his efforts to continuing to build Radio Chatter and supporting the community. Since Paul was on the podcast last, Radio Chatter has launched a mobile app version of their game for both Apple and Android. You know, that just sounds like to me the thing that you would do. I mean, having the paper cards and stuff is nice and you can store them in your Jeep in the glove compartment or really any vehicle that you take trips on with another person. And I guess you don’t even have to have another person. If you use GMRS radios in your, I can well imagine that, and we may have talked about this last time, that if you’re, you know, two, three, five Jeeps, motoring along, and especially if it’s a brand new GMRS radio, you want to use the thing.
[00:02:21:20 – 00:02:33:22]
Absolutely, yeah, you got it. So give the folks the Reader’s Digest summary of Radio Chatter that are not aware of it. What is it and what do you do with it? Yeah, absolutely. So the concept is simple.
[00:02:34:25 – 00:03:10:07]
You know, we found that when we would go on group trips, we’d spend a lot of time in the vehicle to get to the place we wanted to meet with friends or maybe strangers, and then you jump back in your vehicle and you go wheeling. And it’s like, well, we came all this way down here to be with people, and then we jumped back in our vehicle, which is great, that’s part of the hobby, whether you’re, you know, hitting the trails, rock crawling, overlanding, camping, whatever it may be. And, but there’s always downtime on these trips, whether you’re on a long stretch of gravel or pavement or whatever, and we just found that the trips were more enjoyable when people were chatting on the radios.
[00:03:11:19 – 00:03:40:17]
But you don’t always know what to say, or maybe you just, I don’t know, maybe you’re just kind of zoning out or what have you. And so my wife Bethany started writing down some questions to start asking on the radio, and we just found it really engaged the groups much better. And so people said, you should, you know, make something out of this. So we made a game. And when we say game, it’s just a deck of playing cards, normal playing cards with conversation starter questions that are all related to, we call it adventuring. It could be off-roading, camping, overlanding, et cetera.
[00:03:41:21 – 00:04:30:17]
So are you familiar, what is it, the Cricut phone that they make for old people? Where the buttons are really big and everything on the screen is really big? Are you guys gonna come up with a Cricut-ish cards? Well, so, okay, so with the launch of the mobile app, I have my tablet here, it’s pretty big. Oh, nice. So if you got that, I mean, you don’t have to mount that, but yeah, that’s pretty big on a tablet. Yeah, because you know, the older folks like myself, you have a wreck that’s trying to read the question and people are saying, get to it, man. So now these are questions that your wife came up with, but you have different categories of questions, don’t you? Yeah, so within the game, so we really have two products. The one is just, we call radio chatter, it’s just the normal deck of playing cards.
[00:04:31:22 – 00:04:36:23]
We focused a lot on storytelling and advice.
[00:04:38:23 – 00:05:19:19]
Mainly that was kind of a balance between the questions that my wife likes. She kind of likes the challenging questions to make you think, would you rather do this or this? I like the learning or storytelling, and so we kind of blended those within the game. And then we had a lot of people ask us, hey, could you create like a adult-only version? And that’s where we talked. I think we were talking about this last time, but that’s where we came up with After Dark. So we call this an expansion pack, but there’s no actual cards on it, like a deck of playing cards. But this is just 18 cards really intended for the campfire, supposed to get people really loose.
[00:05:20:21 – 00:05:22:22]
How many people can you fit in a tent, by the way?
[00:05:23:22 – 00:05:31:12]
In a tent? I don’t know the answer to that question. Well, you know, you’re asking these questions. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, how many people have you fit in your tent?
[00:05:33:22 – 00:05:43:05]
So let me ask you this, and I think you’re sharp enough to understand why this would be a warning sign, but was one of the questions your wife came up with,
[00:05:44:11 – 00:05:58:03]
“If your wife died, how long would it be before you remarried?” No, I think it was– You could use that one. I think her question was more, if I pushed my husband out of the door of the vehicle,
[00:05:59:07 – 00:06:28:13]
how quickly could I find someone to take over his role and put him in the passenger seat? Because she’d probably start driving, she’d drive more. Oh, would she? Oh, yeah, she loves driving. Do you charge the cards sometimes? I mean, I think of the spouse, your wife is the one reading the cards. Yeah, so I would say we do, we’re probably 50-50 more when it comes to trail driving. If it’s like long pavement, like I don’t mind driving, like I’ll listen to radio and she’ll do other things. But when it comes to actually hitting the trails,
[00:06:29:16 – 00:06:31:00]
we have a pretty good balance.
[00:06:32:10 – 00:07:23:07]
I think when we started in this hobby, I had the interest in this, even though she grew up camping just like me, I had more of the off-roading interest. And so as we were kind of getting into it and learning, I think she just let me kind of do it. But as we got comfortable with it, she was like, “Okay, my turn.” And we have Drummond Island here in Michigan, it’s a good technical trails throughout the island. So we’ve gone up there and she’s done all day there. We went to Windrock to again, to like let her kind of experience the vehicle. I bet you Windrock was scary for her. I think Drummond Island is a little less technical from what I’ve heard. Because we’ve got several guys in the Jeep Talk Show family that talk about Drummond and go to Drummond. I think it was just a few months ago when they went. Yeah, Drummond, I think it’s more
[00:07:24:11 – 00:09:08:08]
depending on your vehicle, there could be more risk to your vehicle. But like Windrock, I was surprised not only risk to your vehicle in terms of some of the obstacles, but there were some obstacles right on the side of cliffs, that you just didn’t expect there. Like I did not expect that going there. You’re like, I expect that in Colorado and Utah and things like that, but not, I didn’t expect it there. And so I think we did get to a point where she’s like, we were really off gamer and she’s like, I’m ready to hand it off to you. You have to take a break sometimes too, because it’s just like you’re hanging on for dear life in your head. And it’s just like, you just really have to just relax. And I don’t know that me driving relaxes my wife. Actually, I think that hard driving is more relaxing to her than me. And we found too, I mean, I think most people figure this like, it’s always worse being the passenger. You’re the closest to the edge. No control. You’re out of control, right? As the driver, you’re always more calm. Cause you’re like, I feel, I know what I’m doing. I feel like I’m in control. So, but yeah, it’s like anything. Sometimes you get in your head and you need to take a break and get out of your head. Otherwise you start making mistakes. So it’s good to have her as a driver too, cause then we can bounce back and forth as we’re comfortable and it’s been good. So you have the radio chatter cards, the physical cards on the main ones, not the adult ones, but the main ones. You can use those as playing cards as well. Correct, yeah, absolutely. So is there more than 52 or is it that you keep that to a 52 deck? So right now we just have it for 52 and then the Joker cards are just like plain. You can write your own cards if you wanted to, but we started with just like the deck of playing cards, 52.
[00:09:09:28 – 00:10:16:16]
You know, like there’s so much equipment already in our setups, you know, our rigs. And so we wanted to be conscientious of space and weight. So we know a lot of people do carry cards with them, you know, they play at night or what have you. So like, well, we want to make sure we have dual purpose for our game. Now with the expansion of the mobile app and getting into the mobile app space, there’s a lot more opportunity to add way more cards cause now you’re not physically playing cards with the mobile app. So it’s still have the, you know, the conversation starter questions on them, but the possibilities now to add to the questions are endless. So like our mobile app, you know, right now, the physical cards, yeah, sure. You could write, you know, a question on it, but now our mobile app allows you to create your own questions and save them. And then when we go into the future, we’re looking at community cards. So we’ll be able to store them on the cloud. We’ll be able to see people’s cards and then we can actually launch those cards, you know, broadly to other players as well. So there’s a technology with technology in the mobile space, you know, the opportunity for this conversation starters is just getting started for us.
[00:10:17:23 – 00:10:21:24]
So I would think that coming up with just 52 questions
[00:10:23:07 – 00:12:32:04]
on cards would be rather difficult to do. I mean, you get started well, then you start coming up with some really crap-tastic questions. Yeah, so when we first came up with the idea, we, you know, we probably came up with a dozen questions and then we were a good eight to 10 hours away when we, from our house, when we came up with this concept. So the whole- Oh, that was lucky. Yeah, so we, the whole drive home, this was like, it kept us awake, it kept us engaged. And I think we got over 200 ideas for questions. Wow. So now- Who was the one coming up with them? Was it you and her? I mean, the majority. It was a big one. Yeah, so I would say she started probably with the most. Like she just really kept going and kept going. And I just kept, she was just writing them down. She’s doing her thing. And then I started asking questions. And then all of a sudden my mind started rolling. As soon as she started- You get into that groove. Yeah, exactly. So then what really became hard was now narrowing that back down to 52. Oh yeah. And so that was a challenge. But now, so, you know, we talked a little bit about expansion packs or where we can go with this. We started grouping some cards into different themes, like these would you rather cards or gear head specific cards, you know? Like, so we’re like, okay, we can start pulling some of these out and create just expansion packs on that topic, that theme. So that’s what we’re looking to do. And the mobile app will probably be a good platform for that because you can say, hey, I’m interested in these 20, you know, more technical questions about gear and the mechanics of the vehicle, et cetera. Or I want some about books or, you know, travel or whatever it may be. Right. So on the app, obviously the app is not free because that would kind of kill the business. Yeah, exactly. But it is available on both Android and Apple, the iOS stuff. So I would assume it’s just in the appropriate Google store, Apple store. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You search radio chatter now, you’ll find it. Right now what we have it is it’s a simple one time, 4.99 to purchase the app.
[00:12:33:11 – 00:13:17:22]
And so what I’m gonna be releasing here within the next week is a new update to allow you to try it before you buy it. Nice. You know, that’s a very common thing. It’s not intended to be, I’ll say a very useful app in the trial. You know, you just get a couple of cards, you can create a couple of your own just to kind of get a feel for it, right? Like, yes, we provide screenshots and things like that, but you’re like, well, is it really worth the 4.99 or am I gonna waste my money? Right. You know, it’s not a huge steep, but you know, we’ve all bought things that are useless. So I wanted to, at least people will be able to thumb through it, see the interface, know that it actually works. It’s a nice, clean app. So that’ll be launching here soon so people can try it for free and then just in-app purchase for 4.99. What we’re looking to do in the future,
[00:13:18:28 – 00:14:43:02]
and we haven’t figured this all out, so I’m open for people’s feedback, is probably have two different models. You can either just buy the flat game, maybe you can buy some in-app expansion packs. Just, you know, you just wanna kinda, not everybody’s a subscription-based person, you just wanna kinda own it. Or we may offer like a subscription-based, again, cheap fee for the year. So then we’ll cloud store all your custom questions. You’ll have access to all the, you know, available expansion packs, et cetera. So we’re looking at kinda doing the dual model for whatever works best for people. I can see some people might like to have, especially when you’re not in range of, I mean, you may have all the questions loaded in the app. I don’t know if it’s internet connected or not. But I can- It’s very, just to answer that real quick, because that’s an important piece for like what we do, right? So the architecture of the app is very much offline, use favored. Oh, good. And so everything stored on the app, right now, because there’s not, you know, it’s 52 questions plus whatever you create, it’s pretty low from a storage perspective. So then the goal architecture, even with cloud in the future, it will still be everything remains on the physical device, and then it just syncs when there is an internet connectivity. So it’s always gonna be offline first. That’s very important in our space. So the direction I was going here was, I can see, especially if you wanna play cards, that it might be to your advantage to have not only the app, but also to the cards.
[00:14:44:06 – 00:15:20:20]
Are you looking at something where, when you go to buy the app, you can also purchase the cards and capture the name and address, and then you get instant gratification, but now you got a set of cards coming in, or two sets, or depending on how many vehicles you have. Yeah, you got it. So we have two different things that we’re working on. So right now, if you buy the physical game, you’ll get an email from us. And how we’re doing right now is we’re just trying to get more people to review our products, because reviews go a long ways with small businesses. So if you get a review, if you buy our physical product and do a review, we’ll send you a free version of the mobile app.
[00:15:21:27 – 00:16:00:23]
And so the mobile app, so we don’t have the reciprocal right now, but what we do is in the mobile app, it looks like the card still. Oh, that’s good. And so that way it’s kind of like, oh, that’s interesting. And recognition too. Yeah, and when you go through all the cards, there’s like one little notification that says, you know, you’ve made it through all the cards, check out our website for the physical product, or click here to recycle through the cards, and then randomly go through again. So every single thing, You’ve reached the end of the internet. So you get a little reminder that we have a physical product we’d love to have you purchase as well. Right, yeah. So, and I can see there did be a big advantage to that. Also too, because I mean, batteries on phones get low.
[00:16:01:29 – 00:17:04:01]
Everybody charges in the vehicle, but sometimes things happen, it would still be nice. And also too, it’d be nice when you’re charging your phone at night, you know, sitting around the campfire that you can always use the cards. So let me ask you this, you mentioned about custom questions and stuff that people use on the app. Is there a thing in there where there’s a check box or something that says, these can be used by radio chatter for cards and questions and stuff? Because I could think that would be a wonderful way, not only for you guys to come up with questions you wouldn’t normally think about, but also too, a way to kind of people going, ooh, that’s my question, you know? Exactly, you got it. So we will, that’s not an option yet. The questions on the current app are only stored on your physical device. There’s actually no cloud backup. So if you’ve got a new phone and you wiped it, you’re gonna lose your custom questions. You’d only have ours. So that’s definitely in the works to get that. I’ll say it fixed, but yeah, community-based cards, allowing cards to be shared with the community,
[00:17:05:06 – 00:18:53:06]
and how we do that, we’re trying to figure that out, but that’s a big one. Just thumbing up and thumbing down cards, like you’re listening to a song, that’s huge for us to see, like we read these questions all the time. So there’s definitely questions in here that are our least favorite because we’re like, that just doesn’t resonate with us anymore or whatever. So we’d like to see that from people as well. So if we see someone thumbing down a card, well, then maybe we’ll take it out of the app, and the next time we physically print a product, maybe we’ll change the question on that card. So it’s just amazing the feedback you can get when you have the digital option, because the physical option, especially at the events we go to and we physically sell it to someone, we may never talk to them again. We don’t have their contact information. We don’t know who they are. So we only know when we get the website orders, can we actually engage with people. So it’s an interesting time to be able to allow that and do the things just like you’re suggesting. So on the stock, talking about interaction, do you guys accept questions for cards? And if so, how do they do that? Yeah, so most people have just done it at physical events. They’ve talked to us. I don’t think anyone submitted on our website. Do you have to write down everything they say? I mean, you don’t wanna appear like, now that’s bullshit, I don’t need that question. Yeah, that’s a good question. I think we wrote them down. I actually just, I had some sticky notes sitting on my cork board right here from an event last year, we went to where people were writing some stuff down. I think we had like a giveaway, like give us some questions you like. And so I was actually going through, we have a list of potential questions in the future. And I was writing them down and like– It’s so cool, not only to have somebody come up and talk to you, but to give you suggestions. I mean, it’s not just like the crap I come up with. I mean, literal, actually good questions.
[00:18:54:14 – 00:19:05:12]
It’s so neat that you’re getting lots of them. So what events have you been to? I mean, did you go to Great Smoky? You mentioned, God, what was it? Wind thinking?
[00:19:06:15 – 00:19:57:12]
The Wind Rock. I figured you went there. That’s where you went. We just went there, yeah. And they did carry, they actually carried our product for a short time. I don’t think they’re, I think they’re out of inventory now. But so what’s funny is we started, so like last year around the time that we were on the podcast, we went to More Expo and that was last April. And then soon after that, our lives and works just got busy and we really, Radio Chatter took a back seat. So we didn’t do a ton of events last year in terms of being a vendor. And we didn’t wanna spend our time off from our vacation time going and standing on concrete, trying to sell a game. Like that defeated the purpose, right? So now with me stepping out of a normal nine to five and being able to do this, we’re looking next year into some more potential events to go to.
[00:19:58:16 – 00:22:27:02]
We won’t be able to make it to more this year, but there’s definitely some more events we’re looking at. Most of the time, just because travel is hard being from Michigan to get to all these events, we provide products as giveaways and raffles to try to get our name out there and not physically sell. But we have partners that sell our product, like all roads taken as a partner of ours and they sell our product as a wholesaler at some of the events. So trying to reach out and make partnerships too, where our product kind of fits with the theme of another vendor is always of interest to us because we don’t have enough product to go and be a whole booth of games. It’s one or two products and some merch like hats. So I forgot to mention early in the interview, the website is radiotrgame.com. Did I get that right? That is correct. I don’t have my glasses on, so it’s a little blurry. Radiotrgame.com, go over there and check it out. You can see more about what we’re talking about. Of course, if you’re watching this interview on YouTube, Rumble or Spotify, then you can see because you’ve held the cards and stuff up several times. All right, so that sounds really good. I think the app is just a no brainer. Was the app something that you had thought of prior or did it come to you after doing the cards? Yeah, it came to us after doing the cards, I think because the, actually I can’t actually say why. I think it was more like we just, for physically writing the cards down, we’re like, well, if we make this a game, and you think, I know we talked before this about gaming, but we thought of physical games. And so I think it was natural for us to just go to a physical game. And also like my wife and I, we’ve always had conversation starters with us. We’ve traveled with them before this, like to us, this wasn’t a new idea. Like conversation starters are out there. Now ours are specific to off-roading and over-landing specific, but so we just in our head had the physical. Now what’s funny is as soon as we had the physical product, one of the first partners of ours was Midland because they make radios. And they love our product, we love theirs, it works really well together. And we had sent out some demos to them. And the first event one of them went to, they left it at home and they said, do you have a mobile app version? Because I forgot the game.
[00:22:28:05 – 00:23:07:27]
And so we’ve had that, we’ve had different people that have had different reasons. They said, you should make this a mobile app. And so a combination of me leaving my job to work on this full time, and the advancement of AI to help. So I’ve been in software much of my career, but I haven’t really coded in 15, 20 years myself. I’ve been around it, I’ve had software developers work for me, so I’ve seen it, but I haven’t literally coded in a long time. And so with AI advancement, I’ve been able to develop this all by myself. So I think it’s a kind of combination of time and technology and the need has all kind of came together. And it’s been a good experience.
[00:23:09:09 – 00:23:20:05]
So the, yeah, I mean, the application just sounds like a no brainer. And that’s one, I was thinking maybe you were doing the handhelds because that’s what you had in mind.
[00:23:21:09 – 00:24:04:02]
So Radio Chatter, it’s basically a game that you take with you, whether it’s on the app or a box of cards in your vehicle. And I like the idea of actually having the physical cards because you can, it’s more than just asking questions. I guess you could come up with some variation of Go Fish based on if you answer the question correctly or not. And are these questions, some are all these questions, I write a wrong answer, or is it just conversation? Yeah, you got it. Yeah, it’s intended to be a conversation. And so we actually, the questions don’t say and why on them, we just assume you’re gonna explain your answer.
[00:24:05:02 – 00:25:43:04]
And so it’s really to create conversation. So one card can easily drive 20 to 30 minutes of conversation because it spins the conversation. So if we talk about like, what has been your longest road trip you’ve ever taken? Well, you’re gonna hear about everybody’s road trip. And then someone’s gonna say they went to Denali and you’re like, oh, I’ve always wanted to go there, tell me more about that. So like, it can really stem. Now, the other benefit that we’ve heard of like the physical cards, we’ve had people say like, kids love it. So the kids in the backseat, you hand them the deck of cards and they wanna get engaged on the radio as well and talk to people. And so now you’re not handing them the phone and then all of a sudden they’re grabbing YouTube or whatever on your phone, right? You’re giving them a physical card and they can ask questions. And then we’ve seen someone just tagged us on Instagram that they had a passenger plane, go fish with them or they might’ve been playing war too with a kid in the backseat. So like, that’s part of the fun of it is the multi-use of like any deck of cards. Yep, so I don’t know where you were in, I mean, let me face it, we never get exactly what we think we should be getting. I mean, for many years I’ve said we should have 10,000 downloads per episode and this is what you have in your head. But from when we last did the interview with you to now, have things gotten bigger? Are they getting more along the lines? I mean, you quit your job. So either you did a dumb thing or things have gotten better. Yeah, it’s closer to the dumb thing, to be honest.
[00:25:44:13 – 00:27:52:10]
So what it comes down to is like, and this is like advice for anyone that wants to start a company or whatnot, right? It’s a side hustle for a reason, it’s a hustle. And so we found that the business always ebbed and flowed with the time that we had to put into it. Now, what has happened since like being on the podcast and being on our other podcasts is the customer feedback continues to be really strong. So when we go to events, we sell a lot of product, we get a lot of good feedback, but we just couldn’t go to many events and we couldn’t do much advertising or afford much advertising. So essentially what happened was we started saving for me to go into entrepreneurship, but we didn’t know what that was gonna be. We actually didn’t plan, when I left my job back in April, I did not plan to work on Radio Chatter full time. I was looking at acquiring a different small business. And through that exercise over a few months, I was like, well, I’m trying to buy a small business and be an entrepreneur to create more time and freedom to do more of what I want to do, which I happen to own a company in that space of what I like to do. So why don’t I just go spend the time and money I was gonna use to buy a business and just put it into the business. And so that’s what I’m doing. Now, we’re not really putting all that money into the business, that would be foolish, but it’s affording us the ability to only have one income versus a dual income family. And so it’s just kind of extending our lifestyle so that way I can try to build this into a company. So next year is gonna be a good year for us because we have the time, we have the energy to put into it. So I can well imagine that this is exciting for you, not going to the job that you’ve been at and doing the thing you’ve been doing. But whenever you have a job that you go to, there’s that time killing where I’m gonna go get me some coffee and then I’m gonna talk to these guys. And then I’m gonna talk to these guys and now I’m gonna get some work done. And oh my God, it’s two o’clock in the afternoon. It’s time for me to zone out. You don’t get that whenever you’re doing your own business. No, you don’t. But like what you get is,
[00:27:53:11 – 00:29:42:19]
it’s just a different experience. Oh yeah, it’s yours. I definitely like, instead of going off and talking to somebody, well, that actually does happen. The other day I was dropped my son off at school. So I’m now the primary drop off and pick up a school, primary person to run the errands and pick up the groceries and all that stuff, right? Well, that’s research on your IRS taxes and stuff. That’s product research. That’s right. I’ve listened to podcasts during that time and learned about how to run a business. I was raking the yard at nine in the morning because I forgot they were coming to pick up our leaves and the neighbor came over and we’re helping and we’re talking about our businesses and different things like that. So it’s just different than anything. But it’s a different that I like. When I left the corporate job, there’s definitely a lot of people that were like, I could never do that. I like the safety of knowing where I’m going every day, what I’m working on, the targets, the deadlines, et cetera. It’s different doing it full time by yourself because there’s no one holding me accountable. I have to decide what I’m doing today versus tomorrow. What are our goals? All that kind of stuff. And you have to be motivated. Otherwise you just go Netflix and chill all day. So it’s different, but I enjoy it. This is why I saved up to do this is this is what I’ve always wanted to do and I’m gonna give it a shot. So I don’t know you that well. We’ve talked a couple of times now, but I suspect you’re a little shy in asking because I’m sure what you would like to do is have some cards that were specific Jeep talk show questions. Ah, that’s a good one. What’s the best Jeep talk show, for example? (Laughing) You know, with the mobile app, we’re talking about sponsored cards as well or that specific card. So like, yeah, that’s what another one we’re working on is for specific events,
[00:29:43:22 – 00:30:13:28]
maybe it’s a Jeep Jamboree or something. If a sponsor wanted to sponsor some cards, we could have an event code that you could enter into the app and it would unlock event specific cards and it could be, you know, Jeep talk show, you know, cards and you unlocked 15 cards for that specific event or something like that. So, I’ll note that down. I already got you on the hook. That’s really cool. That’s really cool. I mean, there’s a wealth of ideas that you could do with these cards. Absolutely.
[00:30:15:00 – 00:30:16:11]
So are you familiar with ham radio?
[00:30:17:17 – 00:31:31:00]
I am, I’ve never done it, but I’m familiar, yeah. So I’m thinking, now this might be, go against the conversation starter aspect things, but a lot of people want to study for the test and especially if you’re traveling across country, what better place to do it? Now the spouse may not care for ham radio questions and the FCC questions change like every six months or something, so this might be just for app, but that might be a cool thing to do where people could, and they don’t have to do it the entire trip. You could study a few questions and then get back to the fun side of things. Yeah, I haven’t thought about it from the study and perspective. We’ve had a few people buy it that are also ham radio operators that have said like this would actually be interesting because, you know, like that, I’m not a ham operator, so maybe I’ll get this wrong, but my understanding and talking to them is a lot of them just enjoy the conversation. You’re talking into the International Space Station or you’re talking to someone in California or Europe or wherever you may be, and so that is the point, to have a conversation. Yeah, absolutely. And you could use your cards while you’re talking to people on ham radio. Yeah, exactly. I don’t want to bore everybody with this, but I think it’s really funny.
[00:31:32:01 – 00:33:49:17]
This is back in 2005 or something, and my Bajeep Cherokee, I’ve got a ham radio in it for HF. HF is the frequency range that you use to talk long distances, and I want to say, I think it was the Ukraine. It was all before the trouble started, but I had a very brief conversation from my Cherokee driving to work from Houston to the Ukraine, and I was telling my youngest son, because I was trying to get him interested in ham radio, and I told him, I said I spoke with somebody in the Ukraine today from the Jeep, and he kind of blinks a couple of times, and he goes, through the internet? I said, no, from my Jeep to his radio in the Ukraine and back, and it was like a concept like, vv, so yeah, that’d be pretty cool though. That would be neat, and I bet you somebody’s already used your cards in having one of these conversations. Yeah, I bet. We haven’t heard that someone has, but I’ve heard of people saying, oh, this might be cool for my ham group, or something like that. Yeah, they have nets, which is a collection of hams that get on a certain frequency at a certain time, and I could well see that the net control operator might actually start the net with, let’s ask a radio chatter question. I mean, it lends into itself too, because it’s a radio chatter. Yeah, yeah, exactly, you got it, you got it. All right, so you got the cards, you got lots of ideas as far as adding not only different cards to the set, but also to the app, which I think the app is a great idea, and I think that one will probably be the best for you, because it gives that instant, oh, I wanna get this, and maybe I’ll get the cards later, but, and also too, from a manufacturing standpoint, I mean, how nice is it to just to rubber stamp the app, because it’s not like something you have to do that you have to update, but I would assume you do do updates, and I can see that maybe for, I don’t know, 50 cents a dollar or something, you could do add-on packs. Yep, exactly. Where people could do that. And the mobile app, so we’ve shipped our physical product to South Africa, the UK, Canada, and Australia.
[00:33:50:23 – 00:35:12:19]
Now, that shipping’s expensive. Some of the orders, like from Australia, we’ve had people order a $15 deck of cards with $30 shipment. Yeah, that’s insane. It’s insane, right? But it’s unique, and so people are willing to do certain unique things. But the mobile app, now it has been downloaded in Australia a few times, and so the international is what the app also really opens up for us, because there’s no shipping. So I’m excited about that, and moving some of our questions to regional-specific questions. So one of the things we didn’t think of when we created the game was, one of the questions is, is like, what’s your favorite place to travel in your home state? Well, we use the term state. And so it’s like, oh, well, we could change that card regionally now on the app and say, if the region of download is Canada, it’s gonna say Providence now, or something like that. So I think that, I don’t know, as a software guy myself, I get excited over that kind of stuff. So I think it’s cool, and it unlocks a lot of potential globally. So again, kind of getting back to the situation where, I mean, you can always, everybody’s got a phone, so you can use a phone, but like your, whether it’s a ham radio thing, or any kind of communication things you have going on, you may be sitting at your desk, at your house.
[00:35:13:29 – 00:36:13:00]
Have you considered making an app for a PC, or an Apple laptop, or whatever, so that you could actually call it up? And it kind of goes back to that same thing with being able to read the things as you get older. Yeah, no, I have not that. Now, we did make it on the iPad, which gives you, like if you have dual devices, but not a physical website, or things like that, that’s an interesting one we haven’t thought about yet. Well, it could just be an actual program, you know, the thing that everybody called it before, the app thing got, the thing that pisses me off, they call it apps on the PC. It’s not a stinking app, it’s a program, damn it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone got used to the app term, so everyone needs apps now. Yeah, and then they came out with, you know, Windows was neat because you had multiple windows, you could have multiple things up on the screen at the same time, and then they started coming out with full screen everything, and it’s like, I don’t want full screen, why, but anyway, so I started the computer stuff like in 1981,
[00:36:14:03 – 00:39:13:25]
TRS-80 Model 1 was my first computer, so I’ve gone through a lot of computer changes in that timeframe, so there’s a lot of things, like you kids today, you don’t know. Yeah. All right, so let’s see, is there anything that you can think of that we haven’t touched on as far as the cards go? You have the cards, they’ve got questions, oh, I don’t want to reiterate this, they’re meant as conversation starters, they’re not meant to punish you by asking you questions and you haven’t remembered the answers, it’s just a conversation starter, and they also, there’s 52 of them on the deck that you could buy, so you can also use these, well, not 52, there’s the Joker cards. It’s like a regular deck of playing cards, but they have questions on them, and you can use this, I think the primary purpose was to use it on the radio, or is it two people in the vehicle that way or maybe both? Yeah, exactly, and so what we found is, we call these questions very approachable, like when we all get together, we’re always talking about what’s the last upgrade you did or what’s the last thing you broke or whatever, right? So these are much more broader in the questions and the storytelling and thing, and so we’ve had multiple people reach out and say, I’ve been traveling with these people for years, and I’ve learned so much from them from these questions, because it’s about things that we don’t normally talk to, it’s related to what we do, but it’s phrased in a way that is more approachable and opens up different conversations, so that’s what we went for and that’s what we’re shooting for, and we found that over the radio, while driving in a convoy to and from trails or where have you seems to be the opportunity, because once you’re on the trails, you’re focused on the trails, you might be on the radio, but you’re not like, hey, I’m bored, someone asked me a question, and then we also found too, it’s really good, it is good for solo travelers, because then you’re in your vehicle by yourself and you can talk to people, I had her behind you, but if you have a passenger, and so does the other people in your group, it gets them more engaged too, so that way you’re just not talking to the people in your vehicle, it allows everyone to get involved in the conversation, so that was the goal, but we know people use them around the campfire, they’ll play cards, they’ll ask questions, we’ve seen multiple different uses. And so this, and it’s like you were saying earlier, you were talking about, I did this, yeah, that reminds me, I did this when I went to Denali, and oh, you’ve been to Denali, and now you’re not on the cards. Exactly. It got the conversation going, it makes the trip shorter, basically. 100%, yep. All right, so yeah, I mean, I see just a feature-rich environment here, we’re doing this, how long have you been doing the Radio Chatter stuff? When was the first time you came up with the cards? Yeah, it would have been, we came up with the idea in 2022, that was when it was on paper, and then 2023, May of 2023, is when we physically launched the product, and it’s just kind of been a fun side hustle sense,
[00:39:14:29 – 00:39:25:20]
but now with adding the mobile app, and we have some other products that we’re looking at doing other games that aren’t just conversation games, but are more adventure, off-road-y themed games,
[00:39:26:24 – 00:40:19:29]
we’re looking to kind of expand the brand, in more of a, I’ll say a more community-enriching company. Like, everybody has their own communities, you have Jeep communities, you have off-road, you have Rock Crawlers, you got Overlanders, Campers, RVers, everybody’s got different communities, or sub-communities, and so what we wanna do is help enrich the communities you already have, by providing other sources of entertainment for when you’re not wheeling, is really what we’re going for. So I didn’t mention this to you before we got started, so if you need to take a moment, and you wanna do this, could you read us a couple of the questions? Oh, absolutely, yeah. A couple of the conversation starters? Yeah. So it just dawned on me that people, you’re like, okay Tony, why don’t you ask what one of the questions are, so we can get a little more information here. Yep, you got it. So let’s see here, because I know I mentioned a few, so let’s see here.
[00:40:21:02 – 00:40:21:27]
And really, take your time.
[00:40:22:28 – 00:40:23:04]
Yeah.
[00:40:25:19 – 00:40:33:02]
So we have, I’ll give, I’m trying to pick out different types of questions,
[00:40:34:04 – 00:41:43:13]
because we talked about this one a little bit earlier, about how we have different types of questions. So one would be, I’d call this the more technical of our questions. So what was your first upgrade to your vehicle or your rig, and would you do it again? Oh yeah, that’s a good one. I think we’ve used that on our round table episodes, because it’s a good one, because sometimes people get off doing something, simply because they saw it in social media or whatever, and they go, well that was a bonehead move, I didn’t need that. Yeah, exactly. So you have those, then we have just more fun, and these are probably what the kids like, but what’s your favorite road trip snack? Oh yeah. Right? And then what this always leads to, and all my experience is, the next gas station is a ton of junk food. Oh yeah, of course. Somebody mentions oatmeal cream pies or Twinkies, and people are like, oh my God, we gotta stop. Let’s stop and let’s get them. Or nerd clusters now, everyone’s getting into nerd clusters, and that gets brought up, and then the next thing you know, I got a five pound bag of nerd clusters in the truck. So you’re up in Michigan, so this probably means nothing to you, Beaver Nuggets.
[00:41:44:28 – 00:42:33:13]
Is that from Bucky’s? Yes it is. Yeah, see, I do travel, so I’ve been there. I don’t know that I’ve had them though, but I’m familiar, yeah. They have good barbecue sandwiches, they’re not great, but they are great gas station barbecue sandwiches. Yeah, I think I had one of their chicken breakfast sandwiches, because I was there at like 9 a.m. or something. So I think I had like the chicken, I don’t know. One of my daughters was pointing out, because they were getting ready to leave to go on a trip, and I said, so if it was me, I would stop early in the morning, it was like six o’clock in the morning, and I said, I would stop at Bucky’s and get me a barbecue sandwich, and I’d be very proud of you if you get a barbecue sandwich and go, dad, it’s 6 a.m., I don’t think they have barbecue sandwiches. I’m like, oh, those bastards, they should have 24-7 barbecue sandwiches, I’ll always get one.
[00:42:34:14 – 00:43:00:22]
So any other questions come to mind there? Yeah, so another one I just kind of grabbed, this goes more to the more storytelling, so what has been your favorite adventure? Oh, that’s a good one. So again, when you read the cards, we’re very purposeful on our words. So like favorite, it doesn’t mean biggest, it doesn’t necessarily mean longest. Adventure, one of ours, the recent one that my wife and I always talk about is, we went to Bora Bora last November.
[00:43:01:23 – 00:43:35:14]
That was not overlanding, it wasn’t off-roading, but it’s one of the most beautiful places we’ve been to. And so we talk about that, and then it turns out there’s a lot of people like, oh, I’ve thought about that before, and how was that? Oh, absolutely. But you know, so– So I guess you would stay away from some negative questions, like what’s the most expensive thing that you’ve purchased, or what was the worst trip that you ever went on, and how did you get out of jail? I think we did, so we did not do anything, we called them like kind of the bad luck questions, meaning we didn’t do like a break, broken down, or things like that.
[00:43:36:29 – 00:44:24:17]
We have said like, what piece of gear has been the biggest disappointment to you? Yeah, that’s a good one, I like that one. Because also it’s about learning, like what works and doesn’t work. Well, you’re saving people money potentially, whenever you ask those questions. You got it. So, but yeah, nothing, like no bad karma questions. That’s actually a potential expansion pack we’ve talked about, is a bad karma. And if you wanna play it, go for it, but we hold no responsibility. Some people like hearing about bad things, and not because they want bad things to happen to people, they wanna learn and not have bad things happen to them. Any weather related questions? So we have not done weather related, I don’t think, I don’t recall a weather related, although some of these, they could turn to weather related. Sure, bring in the conversation. We have some questions about safe travel,
[00:44:26:06 – 00:46:31:23]
things like that. We do have, like we’ve had, some of these are like more trip specific questions, meaning if you’re on a trip with people, this is like, what do you wish you would have brought with you? It’s like right now, what do you wish? So we’ve had rain jackets, when it’s been down pouring, it wasn’t supposed to, or winter hat, when the mountains are colder than we expected, you know, it’s like that. So some are trip specific. You can’t pack for a trip, because if you do, you’re basically loading the house into your Jeep. Exactly. You got to balance it. And then, you know, we have a similar question that says, what do you always bring with you, but never use. Oh, perfect. There’s some obvious stuff, like there’s some pieces of recovery gear that, maybe I haven’t used, or it’s been a long time since I’ve used, but it’s like, you’re gonna still wanna bring that. We’re like my hammocks, that we bring every time, but we never can find two trees at the right spot to mount it, so it’s like, we went from like carrying two hammocks down to one hammock, and actually we downgraded the hammocks because of that question, I kept answering it the same time, like my hammocks, my hammocks, I was like, I should stop bringing my hammocks, at some point. Here’s an advertising type thing you could do, best places to eat, this would be a regional thing. Yeah, oh, got one. Because you could actually reach out to the restaurants and say, you know, hey, you could help a fella out, we’re happy to direct people over there, you know, that type of thing. Because, I mean, that’s one of the wonderful things about doing a trip is finding great places to eat, and I’m gonna throw Moab under the bus, they do not have good restaurants in Moab. And that’s a pisser, because it’s such a wonderful, oh, and I’m sorry, I just figured it out, it’s so nice and wonderful there, they don’t have to have good food, because you’re here to come for the scenery and buy their crap. It’s okay, it’s just not like real, real good food type situation. And that’s the way I am, is if I go someplace, I wanna know where to go, this is where is the place that people say you need to eat, and what’s the best thing to get? And of course, somebody’s gonna come in, I mean, that’s a hell of a conversation, because everybody’s interested in food.
[00:46:33:04 – 00:47:16:06]
And they’re just gonna, oh my God, I had this hot dog, blah, blah, blah, and yeah, I can well imagine. Yeah, exactly, yeah. You did ask about foods, we do have one that’s about like tips and tricks for kind of meal planning and prep. Oh, that’s good. So yeah, and we talked about that one, we were just out in Utah, what my wife did on that trip that I was really good with, she pre measured a lot of the seasoning and oils we were gonna use for the trip. So that way we didn’t have to take a bunch of oil and a bunch of salt and a bunch of this. So she kind of pre-made it and labeled it for each meal. And man, the packing was so much like more focused because of that. And there’s less thinking, you know, you can enjoy yourself instead of grabbing one of the 10 cameras hanging around your neck and taking pictures.
[00:47:17:08 – 00:47:40:03]
Exactly, so that worked out great. Yeah, less mental load because some of these days that were on the trails, it’s exhausting and mentally straining. And then the last thing you wanna do is try to figure out dinner when you get to camp. So whatever you could do to streamline it. You could really go to town with the app because there’s all kinds of things you could do and not have to print up cards and stuff. I mean, the printed cards, I think they have a good place.
[00:47:41:03 – 00:49:45:23]
But yeah, the app I think is a wonderful idea. It really opens it up. The only problem is that at some point you load up enough crap there, some of it has to go to the internet or has to swap. Exactly, yeah, you got it. Yeah, no, I think there’s always gonna be a, I think there’ll always be a place for like a deck of cards like we have. Yes. I think like the expansion packs that we were working on originally, I think that has a set useful life because I think that’s where the mobile app comes in. Because why do you wanna keep buying 15 of these cards and 18 of these cards? Like, I think it’s like, I wanna buy a deck of cards, that’s my core thing. And then maybe the mobile app has a lot of these one-off kind of expansion packs that you can subscribe to. So we’ll see, that’s kind of where my mind’s at right now. But as we get bigger and we learn from the customers, we’ll adapt to what works for people. Yeah, it’s great getting feedback. Oh, that was the other thing. How do people reach out to you and give you ideas for questions and so on and so forth? Yeah, so we’re, I’d say we’re most engaged on Instagram. That’s where we have a lot of questions. So people send us ideas via Instagram, they’ll just like message us, especially with the mobile app right now that we’re being new. We’ve had lots of people sending us feedback. So I love engaging with people via Instagram. You can definitely email us. It’s just hello at radiotrgame.com. You know, it’s me, so you’re gonna get a response from me, whether it’s Instagram or whatever. So yeah, radiotrgame.com. Instagram is at radiotrgame. We’re on some of the other socials, but Instagram right now is kind of the easiest to be on. So have you grown in popularity enough that where you, don’t name anybody. I know you’re smart enough not to, but have you grown in popularity enough where there’s one or two people that’s interacting with you all the time and you go, oh my God, it’s, I’m just gonna say it, Nicky G. Cause Nicky G is a popular figure here and I can well imagine him just driving you nuts. Have you grown in popularity where you just get some of these people that are like, dude, get a friend in person. Yeah, no, I mean, I definitely have a handful of people that send me regular feedback.
[00:49:47:06 – 00:49:53:06]
It’s been, I think all on the mobile app though. So like I’m into that and like logging all these ideas.
[00:49:54:15 – 00:51:34:01]
So I think that’s, I mean, it’s been great. Like I love it. And even if there is somebody irritating you, that’s the best answer you could give. We love everybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve had more people in corporate America bother the shit out of me than I do, running my own company. So like when you build something yourself and this is part of why it was just a side hustle was in all honesty, it’s a confidence thing. When you create something and you put it out there in the world, I mean, you know this, when you probably first launched the podcast, you’re like, who am I talking to? Do they care? Who am I? Who am I to do this? Yeah, who am I to do this? All these people that do stuff like this that are making millions of dollars. You got it. So like, who am I to create this small little card game and that’s how we treated it. But like the more people that give feedback and say, it’d be great if you could do this or whatever you’ve offered this, it’s like, well, that’s a real person. Like it took time out of your day to think of that idea, to sit down, write it to me and then engage back and forth. Like to me, that’s like feedback that what we’re doing, people enjoy and it just makes a lot of our time. You’ve done something to somebody’s life, enough where they want to reach out, type something in or direct message you. And it’s amazing. I think that is probably the best thing about going off and doing something is that your idea has made people happy. It’s given them something to do. It may have saved lives simply because they were more attentive because they were interacting while they were driving. So just a wonderful deal. Well, you know how the kids love the social media. You already mentioned Instagram. Where can they find you on the social media stuff? Yep. So it’s at Radio Chatter Game is where you’ll find us. That’s our handle on all the social medias that we’re on.
[00:51:35:09 – 00:51:36:23]
We don’t really have much on YouTube yet.
[00:51:37:23 – 00:52:42:15]
A little bit on threads, definitely on Instagram, a little bit on Facebook is where you’ll find us. Excellent. Wonderful. Thank you so much for being with us here today. Continued success with the Radio Chatter. It’s a card set or an application that lets you get the conversation going. Just go to RadioChatterGame.com and or you can go to the Apple store or the Google Play store and just search for Radio Chatter. That’ll find you. And how much was it again on the places? I mean, does it have to be more on Apple because those bastards take more money than what they handle. Yeah, they take quite a bit, but we just want to get out there right now. So yeah, right now on both platforms for the mobile app, it’s $4.99. Our physical product is $15 plus shipping and handling. And the $4.99, at least right now, no changes. It’s not like $4.99 a year or a month. You buy it, you got the app, but there may be some add-ons coming up. Exactly, so yeah, there’ll be some add-ons coming.
[00:52:43:19 – 00:53:20:17]
We’re looking into a subscription model in the future, which would give more features, but we want to make it affordable and reachable for everybody. Yep, all right, man, Paul, thank you so much for being here. We had a little bit slow start getting going because I had some equipment issues. I appreciate you hanging in there and getting this recorded. At least I know you’re not off of work other than RadioChatter. It’s all like you’re in the corporate environment that I had to slow down, because I always hate either missing an interview, which happens very rarely, or keeping it from starting. So I’m glad you made time for us and we’ll have to get you back on in the future. Yeah, thanks so much, Tony, really appreciate it.
[00:53:22:18 – 00:53:24:15]
You’re my friend, you’re my new friend.