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How I Got an HBO Show: The Unofficial Born To Bowl Podcast
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Welcome to what I am calling Born to Bowl the Podcast. My name is Jared Polin, AKA Fro Nose Photo. Now, I am an executive producer and the originator of the idea behind the show. Now, my goal with this podcast is to give you some inside baseball on how it all came together, from what sparked the initial interest in the PBA to how it went from an idea to reality and ended up on hbo. Now, there will be episode breakdowns, interviews and and much more. So I invite you to sit back, relax, and enjoy Born to Bowl the Podcast. Now, personally, I love learning inside baseball. I love the behind the scenes of how something gets made. I want to know how the bread is baked or is that. Is that how the donuts are made? I think it was Dunkin Donuts and how the donuts were made. And everybody likes that. Everybody loves how it's made. So I want to take you behind the scenes of how this all came together. And we ended up on HBO with a season one. The goal, more than one season. But we're here, we have a season. So I want to take you back to where the spark initially came from, which gave me my interest in the pba, which led to me going, you know what? There's a here here. So why the pba? What sparked my interest? Well, if we go all the way back to the late 80s and the 90s, as a kid, I used to watch the PBA on ABC and later on on ESPN. But all I knew was that there was a show. I didn't know what led up to the show. I only knew what I saw on tv. I saw the TV matches. I didn't know there was much more beyond that. I thought this was it. These five or six bowlers go head to head and that's it. But it wasn't until I watched a vlog on YouTube from a bunch of YouTubers named Brad and Kyle. And they're not just YouTubers, they are professional bowlers who so happened to take us behind the scenes of. They were part of a group called the House Bowling and they had a channel and the House had a channel, and there are a bunch of younger bowlers who are professionals. But you realize real fast that they're not making a lot of money on the road. So they house together, they travel together, they try to save money, they live together, they do all of these things together and they document it because that's the modern world. You document what you're doing and people get interested. And. And so I got interested. Brad and Kyle have almost 200,000 subscribers on YouTube. And yeah, I have a bigger channel and had a bigger channel, but this is something that I found interesting to watch was what were these guys doing? And the vlog that they were creating or the vlogs they were creating took me to places I didn't know existed. Around bowling. Behind the scenes of qualifying rounds. They would go sit in their car between blocks to discuss how, how good or bad they bold. Now, there might be terms I come up with that you'll hear me say, like blocks that you may not understand. So I'll take a side note and explain to you. A block represents a single uninterrupted session of play. For example, a PBA tournament might feature 18 qualifying games divided into three separate six game blocks. So that means games in a block are bowled in a row with bowlers generally changing lanes after each game. Now, I know in the series we don't dive too deep into terminology and we don't dive too deep into the rules of bowling and how the tournaments work. I would love to go deeper. I love the science and how it's made. We touch on it. But hopefully in future seasons, if we get future seasons, we're going to go even deeper into that. But blocks are things where you could have 50 or 60 lanes across a bowling center and they may use 40 of them and you might have 80 bowlers taking up 40 lanes and everybody bowls and after each game they switch to a different part, they switch to a different lane. It's kind of crazy how it works. It's this dance where you finish a game and then you have to walk your balls down to another lane because, yeah, they're dragging like bags and bags of balls. These are all the things that I saw in these vlogs that Brad and Kyle and the other bowlers were putting out there. So this was my first time seeing that there was a different angle that I didn't see before. I thought bowling was just the show. I didn't know that it was like a week of bowling or four or five days of bowling before you ever get to the TV show. And in the bowling show in Born to Bowl, you hear us say the show or the TV show, which is the main thing. That's where you make your money, right? So you have to make the cut and then you have to make the step ladder and you get to the show. These are all things that we do explain in the show. But what's interesting is in one of the behind the scenes videos that Brad and Kyle did, I saw a guy named Kyle troup And he had a fro. And they call him the pro with the fro. And I'm like, wait a second. I have a fro. It's better than yours. And so I was like, well, you know, I want to do a photo story of this guy. And I'm like, I have an in. I have a fro. He has a fro. I'll just reach out on Instagram. And I'm pretty sure he had, what, like 80,000 followers, which is really good for a bowler. I knew that I had more, and it's not about who has more. The reason I bring that up is because I know that, generally speaking, if I send a message to someone on Instagram, it's going to go to the top of their box, because that's how Instagram works. They'll let you show the highest followed person that messaged you. So there was a pretty good chance that he was gonna see. I reached out to him on Instagram. I told him about a photo project that I have called Six Degrees, where I spend the day in the life of interesting people, or more than one day. And then they get to connect me somewhere else. But really, it's just about doing the photo stories. It's a way that I can get access to things that I might otherwise not have access to. And by doing so, I now officially get access. But I do give these guys photos. I offer to give them their photos. They don't pay me. I don't ask them for money. I. I do it for the access. And also, I can make content out of it. And you never know who you're going to meet. I mean, that is the most incredible thing about networking or just putting yourself out there is you never know who you're going to meet. And that plays true into how Born to Bowl came to life. This is a little foreshadowing how I randomly met someone, and that started the ball rolling to end up at hbo. But we'll get to that in just a minute. So I reached out to Kyle, and Kyle was like, yeah, no problem. Here's a couple of dates coming up for the bowling tournament. You're more than welcome to come here. I'll get you a pass. I mean, I come to find out that, really, you don't need a pass very. You don't really need a. An official pass to show up to the bowling tournaments, because there's maybe 50 or 100 people, max, that might show up to these things. And so if you're into bowling, I do highly recommend you come to a PBA event, the rounds before the TV show. Because you get to. You are literally right there talking to the bowlers. You are. You are sometimes rubbing shoulders with them as they're walking through to get to their lanes. It's kind of crazy because you can't do that in any other sport. You can't just be right there with the pro and literally touch them or talk to them as they're walking by. That is pretty damn crazy. So anyway, I. I told Kyle that I would fly out to one of the Michigan events. It was a smaller tournament, it wasn't one of the. The majors, so it wasn't worth as much. You'll find out that majors are worth a lot more money than just regular tournaments. And this was the first time that I got a firsthand look at what goes on behind the scenes. And it is raw. It is not what I expected. I mean, I've been around professional sports. I've toured with musicians. I've toured with all different types of bands. And they are taken care of and they have a rider and they have unbelievable food and they have great catering. None of that exists on the PBA tour. These guys are all independent contractors. They all work for themselves. They aren't paid by. They don't work for the pba. The PBA is an organization and these are. They're a part of it. But, you know, they put water out on a table, they put basic fruit chews and like Welch's gummies and some bananas and apples. But most of it is not really healthy, good food. And so behind the scenes, there's no massage tables, there's no locker rooms, there's no medical. It's literally sometimes these guys setting up their locker room. And I do air quotes for locker room in the middle of an arcade, a bowling center. Now the arcade is turned off, but everybody just has their balls all over the place. Because guys will travel with, you know, 20 some balls at all times. Right? You never know when. Yeah, it's not just one ball. You don't just have one ball. These guys have 20 of them. And they have access to a ball truck, which you'll see in one of the episodes where you can go on pick a ball and have them drill it. That is one of the coolest things ever is because most people have this idea that they don't even know that balls are blank when you get them, meaning they don't have holes drilled in them. They measure your hand, they measure your span, they measure the width of your thumb and all of these different things. If you're a thumb, if you put your thumb in when you bowl, because you'll see that there's people that bowl without a thumb. And there's a whole science to it and measurements, and it's different for everybody. And then they draw that out on the ball. It's called scribing. They scribe it on the ball, and then they drill the ball, meaning they literally drill holes into the ball to prepare it for you to roll down the lane. It's kind of an unbelievable process. So here I am at this tournament with Kyle, and it's my first introduction to pro bowlers, and he could not have been more welcoming, and everybody on the tour could not have been more welcoming. It was the first time that they were doing a Pro Am. And a Pro Am is where all the pros get assigned to a lane. And then amateurs or kids or different leagues, they've paid money, not a lot of money generally, to bowl with the pros. And it's a fun time. And it's amazing because my dad tells me a story how he went to a Pro Am in, like, the 1960s, or maybe he was younger than that, and he got to bowl with a professional bowler. And it's something that he always remembered. So this is cool. Well, here I am standing next to Jason Belmonte, one of the greatest, if not the greatest bowler of all time in terms of wins. One of the most winningest bowlers of all time, especially when it comes to majors. He has 15 majors, and the closest behind him, I believe, has 10. And that's insane. And that's in less time. There's so many less tournaments today. But that's a story for another day. But I meet Jason, and through meeting Kyle and doing my photo shoot, I then meet Jason, and I'm like, I'll come back next week to the Tournament of Champions and go photograph a day in his life or a couple of days. And that's how connections work. And I know this is a long, convoluted way to getting to how we got to hbo, but I like sharing the story. I like going there, because you're not gonna hear this anywhere else, because this is the story of how I did this and then met the right team or put the right team together. And together we ended up on hbo, because it doesn't end up on HBO unless there's a team of people working together for the common good to get it to where it needs to go. So what I learned on the road is that there's roughly 80, 90 professional bowlers that try to do this week in and week out. Now, not everybody makes the cut or the tournament each week. And there's not a lot of money to be had. Right. There's only a handful of bowlers that make enough money to kind of survive on the road. And it's a short three or four month season. It's been shortened. I mean, it used to be like 37 weeks of professional bowling. They were in a new town every week. Bowling for big money. I mean, if you look back at the prize funds in the 80s and the 70s, they were massive. In fact, the first million dollar athlete was a bowler. I believe it was Don Carter. The first million dollar athlete. Yes. Signed a million dollar deal. Because bowling in the 40s was the largest thing, the largest sport happening in the United States. The 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s into the 80s, it started to lose a little bit of its might. Come the 90s and 2000s, bowling started to really fall off as more choices came about. But for a long While there, for 30 some years, for like 30 years, bowling was big and the money in bowling was big. It kind of equated to more money than exists in bowling now. You know, I'll let you in on a little bit. Here is major tournaments. There's like five majors in a season. Majors are worth $100,000 to the winner. That means the first place bowler who wins the tournament gets $100,000. Now that's great, but remember I said there's 37. There used to be like 37 tournaments in a season. I mean we're down to 12, maybe 15, and only five of them are majors. So there's only five chances to win 100 grand in those tournaments. Whereas the other tournaments are roughly 30 grand to the winner. Not roughly. I believe they are 30 grand to the winner. So in a major, the first place is like 100. Well, is $100,000. Second place, 50,000. Then it drops to like 25 or 30,000 and it goes down from there. The further you go down, you could have finished like 10th or 11th and you may be left with $1,400. Think about that. Are you going to live on $1,400 for that week? When you take into consideration the fact that you had to travel there, you have to pay for hotels, you have to pay for food. There's a lot of expenses that are involved in this sport and a lot of people aren't breaking even. The top of the top can make some money. I believe Kyle troup might still hold the record for the largest wins in a year. He was like 550 some thousand dollars is what he won in a season. And that's pretty massive. He won a bunch of majors. He won some tournament that I believe was worth $200,000. Like there was a really big one. But generally speaking, these guys are bowling to eat. Like they got to make money. And so there's a handful, maybe 10, 12, 13 that can make a living at it. And then some of the other guys have, they work with the ball companies. So the ball companies will give them sponsorship money. So it's like, think of it, it's sponsors like in race cars or in any other sport where they have sponsorship dollars. Well, a lot of these guys say they could be part of storm bowling, where storm will pay them x amount of dollars to be ball reps. And that means that they'll go to different events and they'll do different events in different states to show off the bowling balls. And that the hope is that people that come to these events buy the bowling balls and get involved with it. So yeah, it's a grind. And that's how some of the guys make money. Some even have just general sponsors that will help pay them to be on the road. And then if they do win, the people who help to get them on the road take a cut of their earnings. That's a thing too. They sell sponsorship on their shirts, just like a car company auto racing at F1, except for the fact that they're charging like five or seven thousand dollars for the season for advertising on the shirt. So, yeah, this is a grind. This is a grind. So when I was out there and I was seeing this stuff happen, it just crossed my mind that there is something here worthy of sharing with the world. Whereas we know this isn't reinventing the wheel to do documentaries of sports, but the hardest thing to do is to get the rights to do the documentaries, get the access to do the documentaries, get the respect and adulation or friendship of the athletes. It's a whole. It just doesn't happen overnight. You gotta put in the work. I mean, we're going back over four years when I started the process of befriending these guys without the idea that, oh, we're gon to make an HBO show. But not long after being out there on the road, because I would pay for myself to just fly out to these different places because one, I felt at home hanging out with the guys like Stu Williams and Chris Barnes and Dom Barrett. I just fell in with these guys. I just Got along and it felt great and it felt like a new friend group and I just would fly out and I'd make content, I'd do my YouTube stuff out there. But there's a there, there. Just like, you know, the way that I look at it is F1 is so different because those guys are making 20, 30, 40, 50, $60 million a season. They're making bank and there's, you know, 20 of them making bank. And then these bowlers are struggling to make $50,000 a season, but yet they're out here doing it. Now the difference with F1 and this is where like the idea started to flow in my head is you can't walk down the street and go get in an F1 car and take it for a spin. But at bowling, you can go to the local, local bowling center and you can go bowl. So there is an opportunity here to bring bowling up to raise it because you can never go get in an F1 car. Now you can spend enough money, you can get in an F1 car, but very few people can do that. But the thing with bowling is everybody can go and do it. Now you're probably not going to be good, but there's going to be people that start bowling, they're like, oh, this is fun. I want to do this. Then they go bowl more, then they realize there's leagues, then they get involved with a league and then they're like, well, Kyle Troup's my favorite player, my favorite bowler, and he throws storm bowling balls. So now they go buy a storm bowling ball and they buy the shoes and they buy the accessories and now they get into it. Anybody can bowl. I mean, bowling is, is, is one of those democratized sports where doesn't matter how big you are, doesn't matter if you're too small, doesn't matter if you're overweight. You know, there's a lot of bowlers that are overweight, right? But it doesn't matter in bowling because all that matters is you get the ball down the line, down the, down the lane without crossing the line and you knock down the pins. That's the premise of bowling. Knock down all the pins. However you do, it doesn't matter. And you'll see in the episodes we talk about a two handed bowler versus a more traditional bowler and how that created a major issue in the PBA because people didn't like the fact that a guy like Jason Belmonte was coming up as a two hand bowler. But that's a story for another day. So now I'M out at these tournaments and I'm like, there is something here. And I'm like, you know what? There's a there, there, there's a here, here, there's something here. Now how do we do it? How can we put this together? Well, I reached out to a friend who I knew had made shows in the past, other sports related series is for other channels in the past. And I reached out and I said, hey, his name's Alex, Alex Stevens. And I said, alex, there's something here. I'm out here on the road, there's something here. He's like, well, what do you want to do? He's like, should we put a sizzle reel together? Should we go for it? Should we do something? And I was like, I think we should. And there was one more tournament left in the season. There was one major left and it was a usbc. So you've got the PBA as a professional bowlers association. And as a part of that, there are some other tournaments that are done by the usbc which is the United States Bowling Congress. And those they run the majors for like the US Open. And I believe this was the US Open and it was taking place in Las Vegas. And there is a really good video of my hotel room in Las Vegas. It was a $15,000 a night hotel room. You can look it up on my YouTube channel. Just type in like hotel room or $15,000 hotel room. It's freaking crazy. I didn't spend that money. It was comped to me because I did a trade to get access and oh my God, you got to check out this room. So anyway, we put together a quick team. We've got a shooter who also can do audio, who can also do photos. He could do slow mo, he can do everything. Tommy, he's the DP on season one. Tommy Pittenger. And we had a field producer by the name of Chuck Roseberry. He came out with us as well. And we didn't know. Like all I knew is we're going to document this and we're going to do the best that we could. That means getting stand up talks with guys. That means being on the lanes. That means capturing what's happening and doing it to the best of our ability. Now I'm not a normal video shooter, but I made sure to shoot video here so we could have B roll separate. You know, Tommy's a camera, I'm B camera. That's getting a little bit more into the weeds. But we ended up with some amazing stuff. I mean we had Things that happened on the lanes, like with bowlers crying who are like, I didn't think I was going to make the cut, and here I am going to play for a major. It's just insane that we had the tears, we had the emotions. That is what we were there to capture. I got Kyle Troup spiking a ball after he loses. Yeah, he spiked a bowling ball. So I'm getting all of this stuff. We picked a couple of bowlers to follow. One was Brad from Brad and Kyle. So we followed him, we followed Anthony Simonson, we followed Jason Belmonte, and we followed Kyle Troup. And a lot of the bowlers that I selected to follow made it further along, which was awesome. I mean, we had Simo, we had Brad, and we had. Oh, I forget who else was in there. It might have been Jason, but it was an unbelievable. I think I went 4 for 5 picking the bowlers that ended up being in the show, which was pretty damn crazy for the time. But, yeah, we created a sizzle reel, and then the editor we worked with did a fantastic job putting together the sizzle reel. And then the next step was to hopefully do something. Oh, I should also add, I didn't exactly have permission from anybody to go and do this now. I did have permission from the usbc. They knew I was coming to film. I set all that up beforehand, and we did a bunch of interviews. We had all access to do what we wanted, but I didn't check with the PBA and be like, hey, I'm putting something together. Because I rather ask for forgiveness than the permission. Because I knew that what happens is if you ask, they might tell you no, or they might be like, we're not interested. And if I went that route, it's a very good possibility that I would have been told no. We're already working on something and we don't want you to do this. But I didn't do that. I had an idea, I made some calls, we put it into action. I mean, that's the biggest takeaway is if you have an idea, go, execute, do it. Stop talking about it and figure it out. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. In this case, we made it to hbo. To me, I consider it a win. If we get a second season and a third season, is it still a win to get a first season? 100%, yes. But I'm never satisfied. I always want to go more and I want to keep creating and do more. So I didn't have permission to go out there fully, but all the bowlers bought in, gave me all access, gave us all access, and we created something awesome. So this is where it starts to get good and interesting. Not saying that it hasn't been good up to this point, but this starts the ball rolling to getting to hbo. And it's some roundabout way that you never could have imagined or guessed how this all happened and how this all came together. So we did put together the sizzle reel, and. And a sizzle reel was fantastic. I showed it to people at the pba, I showed it to the bowlers, and everybody loved what was going on. But there were some other things behind the scenes that I can't talk about that didn't allow for us to basically get the rights to the show just yet at that point. But that would obviously happen. But let's start talking about where the ball got rolling, which ended up stopping at hbo. And this is just crazy. So. So, as you know, I'm a YouTuber, and I make. I'm a photographer who makes YouTube videos. I borrowed my niece and nephew, who are, well, four years ago, let's see, 10, like, eight years old, seven years old, a few years ago, and I need to test out some lenses. So I go to the suburbs, take my niece and nephew over to the local park, and I'm photographing them, and I'm taking pictures with different lenses. And there's another guy. There's a bunch of other kids and parents at the park. I'm not a parent. I'm the uncle. And there's a guy that comes over and he goes, hey, what are you doing? Not in a bad way. He's like, what are you shooting? What are you doing? What do you do? I was like, I'm testing out. I make YouTube videos. I'm testing out these cameras and these lenses. And he's like, that's awesome. I'm like, well, what do you do? And I to this day swear. And I'm probably wrong, because he told me I'm wrong, that he said the Last Dance. But he probably went along the lines and said that he's a producer, he does shows, he's a showrunner, he does all these different types of things and, you know, worked on some other projects. And the Last Dance came up for another reason. But I'm like, well, that's pretty cool. That's interesting. And he goes, are you working on any projects right now? I like to talk to people and see what they're working on. I'm like, well, actually, I'm working on this bowling project idea. And before I Finished. I said, but I do have to let you know, I don't have the rights to the league. I don't have the rights to make it. We're not at that point. But we do have a sizzle reel. And he's like, can I see it? I would love to see it. And see, I'm honest to a fault. I like to make sure people understand. I don't like bullshitting. And I know a lot of Hollywood and a lot of people like to bullshit and put lipstick on pigs and just go down a direction where you'll get caught. And I don't like bullshitting. So I like to lead with facts. Like we don't have the rights to it, but I got something really cool. So. So we exchanged information. I gave him a lens cloth, which is basically like my business card. Cause it has my information on it. I send him the sizzle reel and he goes, can I. Can I send this to Mike Tolan, Mandalay? At the time it was called Mandalay Sports Media. And he's like, they did the Last Dance. And if you look up Mike Tolan, he did Arlis on hbo, which is one of the first series on HBO that was incredible. Arlis Michaels, super sports agent, or Arlis Michaels Sports Agent. One of the greatest shows. It was basically ballers, 20 years before ballers was Ballers. So it followed the same method, or Ballers followed the same method as this one. And he sent it to them and they're like, well, we like this. We really like this. What can we do to be involved? So I end up getting everybody on a phone call. We talk about it. I make them aware of, here's where we stand, here's what I have. They're like, can we talk to the PBA people? We talk to the PBA people. They're not ready to do the rights. Just then and there a lot of back and forth. And I'll save you a lot of time because there's so much other stuff that went on that's just not worthy of talking about. But we end up getting the rights to the show or not to the show. But we end up getting the rights to do the PBA and be the production company, the producers behind it, to create something and to shop it around, to hopefully get it on one of the networks. And as you know, we ended up on hbo, but it is a process to get there because we ended up at a 24 with Mandalay Sports because they have a deal, a first look deal with them. And they showed it to them and they loved it. So now A24 gets involved and we work with Jonathan House fodder, who came on board and had a ton of ideas and is definitely energetic. And we figured it out. We work together and we put together another team and we do a little bit more. The season starting, so we cover more of the season and we start to see if we can add to the sizzle reel that we originally created to then create a separate sizzle reel, a new sizzle reel that then could get shopped around. And this is all a process. Right. This takes time. And we've been putting our own money into doing this stuff because you invest in yourself and you never know where it's going to turn out or what's going to happen. But I'd like to say, long story short, but they shop it around 824, takes it out into the world. It ends up at hbo. And we also add Ben Stiller into the mix because Red Hour Productions gets involved. And so now we've got Ben Stiller involved. Yeah, an executive producer. It is just. It's just insane how this all happens. You never know who you're going to end up working with. You know what started with an idea for me to go out and do a photo story of Kyle Troup, because I've seen behind the scenes of this stuff and then had an idea and thoughts, made something happen. And now we've got Ben Stiller involved and we sell to HBO and they're making the show. I mean, it's. It's crazy, but in a good way. You know, I just like to really say this to everybody. You go out and you create. You never know what's gonna happen, but you never get anywhere unless you actually start something. I know this isn't supposed to be motivational. This is just really just the facts for me is that I have an idea. I like to try and execute it. And I really hope that you guys go out there and do the same thing if that's what you want to do. No matter what it is you want to do, it doesn't have to be for a show, but it could just be something basic. But this thing that we put together as a team and took almost four years to the day that I went out with Kyle Troup, which was. I looked at the photos. It was like February 7th of four years ago. So 2021 or 22, I have it right here. It was 2022. So, yeah, so it was 2022 where I went out and photographed Kyle Troup. And here we are, it's currently February 11th when I'm recording this four years later and we are about to have a show come out on hbo. So yeah, it's a long journey to go there and to get it out into the world. Lots of ups, lots of downs, lots of nos. There were times where this was dead in the water, but I didn't give up, the team didn't give up and we ended up persevering. And the next step, the next step is do we get more? Did we do a good enough job as a team to create something on the budgets that we had and the team that we had filming it to create something that resonates with the viewers? Because that's ultimately what it comes down to. If the viewers like it and enjoy it and buy in to what we did, then there's no reason why we wouldn't continue with a second, third, fourth, however many seasons that there possibly could be available. And I think, here's what I think will happen. I think people are going to watch this. And even if you're not into bowling, because I'm not into F1, but I enjoy the stories and I enjoy the people. I enjoy getting to know what makes them tick. This is a show about people. Born to bowl is a show about people who so happen to be bowlers. We are showing you these people on the lanes, but mostly off the lanes, what makes them tick, what goes on in their family, what's happened in their life. And people will watch it and feel for these bowlers. That is the whole point. And people that have seen it already and watched it, friends of mine really look at it and go, I felt for Kyle in that episode. I was really rooting for Kyle there. And that's what we're going for. That's what it's all about. And I really feel that that is what's going to happen. Cuz it's not a show about bowling. I mean, it's a show about bowlers. It's a show about people who so happen to be professional bowlers. And if you are into bowling, I still think you will absolutely enjoy this because you love bowling. It gives you a look inside of something that you may never had a look at before. And that's what drew me to the project in the first place. Or the idea was that this is behind the scenes. I've never seen this. I've never seen this. I want to share this with other people because they need to know even if they're not into bowling, they will enjoy this. And they will feel for the bowlers out here struggling to make a living, to make a paycheck, to bowl, to eat all of these different things. And you will come to like these bowlers and you will come to hate some of the bowlers. I mean, some of their antics. But that's on the lanes. But off the lanes, you're gonna love them all. And that's what this is all about. This is about creating a project that brings light to these guys that are out here driving 30,000 miles a year in their tellurides or their basic cars or their SUVs or minivans, trying to make a living at a professional sport where there's not a lot of money. The ultimate hope, though, is that something like this is successful on HBO and brings up the entire industry. It brings up this. It brings up the industry so that people go to the local bowling center and start to bowl. Some people will just go once or twice a year. Others will start going once a month, once every other week, once every week, maybe more. Get on bowling teams, find a favorite bowler, go watch their bowler, buy their products, and you bring up the entire league. And that way the bowlers will benefit. Because ultimately it has always been about, yes, I want to create something great, but I also want these bowlers to get their just due. I want them to benefit from this. We all can benefit from it. And so we'll get into other episodes and interviews as we move forward. But I wanted to share with you the behind the scenes baseball. I know it's. I could go into even more detail, but that's the story. The short of it, of how it went from hanging out with bowlers and taking photos from a photo story to saying there's a here, here and ending up with a premiere episode on HBO on March 16, 2026, where one, the first episode will go of five for season one. And the hopes is that it takes off and does amazingly well. And we can continue to go on and create a season two, a season three and beyond. And maybe there's other content that we can do into the future. For me personally, I didn't start out this thing going, wow, we're gonna end up on HBO. I mean, HBO's pedigree is insane. HBO has some of the greatest shows in the history of all time. We'll go back to Fraggle Rock. Down at Fraggle Rock. I mean, come on. I mean, obviously you have the Sopranos and the Wire, and then you have the other shows like our lists and Game of Thrones. And there's just so many amazing shows that, that have, that have lived on hbo. And the one thing you can never take away once this airs is that this was on hbo. Hopefully it's a success on hbo because I want to do more. And this is just a start. So I thank you guys for listening to this episode. I'll have follow up episodes where we're going to break down the different, the different shows that come out, episode one through five, interviews with different bowlers, get their thoughts, get their takes, and that's it. So I thank you guys very much for listening. This is Jared Pollan, executive producer on Born to Bowl, and I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you very much. Jared Polin, froknowsphoto.com See ya.