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A sign on the wall of Jeremy's old office and it says, let's make better mistakes tomorrow. And so, like Starbucks.

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Welcome to the exploring Washington State podcast. Here's your host, Scott Cowan. Welcome back to this episode of the Exploring Washington State Podcast. I'm joined today by Bryan Roth, who is co founder and CEO of Geocaching. I may be the only person in the world who's not really up to speed as to what Geocaching is.

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So by the time we're done today, I'm going to know more about it. Bryan, thanks for making the time. And why don't you tell our audience a little bit of your backstory? Sure. Well, it's great to be here.

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Thank you so much for having me on the show, Scott. Let's see, I've been out in Seattle now for about 23 years and I used to be sort of in a former life and attorney handling real estate matters in Manhattan. And I moved out to Seattle for a change of lifestyle. So I quit my job December 31 of 1998 and got in a car and drove out here and spent about eight months looking for something that I would want to do. I decided I didn't want to go back to law firm style work.

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And then I went to work for a.com where I met Jeremy Irish and Elias Albord. And a little over 23 years ago we launched Geocaching.com, which is a website, and it's grown quite a bit since then, but the goal was to support the hobby of Geocaching, which had just gotten started earlier that year. And, yeah, I've been one of the co founders. We've got about 95 full time employees here working to support the global community. And the game has changed a lot of lives, including my own.

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Well, I got to ask you, so you were a real estate attorney in Manhattan. Had you been out to the Seattle area before or why did you pick the Northwest versus, say, California? Well, I had come out to visit on two successive Thanksgivings with an ex, and we came out to visit her sister and we were out here and I just, I loved all of the water and access to nature and the green, you know, the, the Emerald City sort of in its, in its true colors. And this is in November. And so you can imagine I hadn't even seen it in the springtime or summer or even the early fall.

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And so what I really liked about it, one of the things that hit me pretty early on is when I was in Manhattan, and I think, like living in Manhattan, you will get asked from time to time by people you meet, sort of what do you do? And the question is really directed, oh, I'm an attorney, I'm an accountant, this is what I do for work. And I got asked that question one of the times when I was out here. What do you do. And it became very quickly clear to me that they weren't asking about my work.

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They were asking like, what do you do for fun? Are you a mountain biker? Are you a hiker? Do you like to swim? Whatever it is.

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And it was about the activity, and I said, okay, that feels different. And then also the pace of the city. Manhattan is this massive concrete jungle, and it's absolutely wonderful. As a young attorney, I spent a lot of time doing the least expensive things I could. So walking around Central Park and rollerblade.

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I used to rollerblade to work with a full suit and tie and a briefcase, which was kind of fun, but it was a little bit of exercise. And it got to the point where I was going on the weekends when I was living in Manhattan. I was driving to Vermont to go camping or to go mountain biking or I was driving somewhere else. And I said to myself, why am I spending so much time trying to recreate in a place where I don't live? And so all this driving just to get out of the city, I'm like, Why don't I move out of the city?

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And so I had visited Seattle a couple of times, and then I looked, and on the way out here, I got in touch with somebody who knew somebody, and they said, oh, we have this little house. It's in a neighborhood called Queen Anne, and here's the rent. And when I saw the rent, I was like, okay, this is a house, and there's a backyard, and this is less than what I'm paying for a very small box to live in in Manhattan. And so, sight on scene, I signed a lease agreement and moved out here with no job, a little bit of savings, and lived in that house, rented that house for about five years. And then in four, I was able to buy a house on Queen Anne, where I've now been ever since.

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And obviously the house was quite a bit more affordable back then. But I love it. I love being in Seattle. I love being close to the mountains and close to the water, and it's just so beautiful and the pace and the people.

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In the first couple of years, my mom would say, like, when are you moving back? And of course, it was hard to leave my family's all on the East Coast. My mom would say, when are you moving back? And I said, Well, I'm not really planning on it, but let's see. And at some point after I met my wife and my adopted son Bryan, and I got involved with this job, and she saw just how much I was enjoying myself out here, she kind of stopped asking.

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And now they'll come out to visit every so often, and they love it when they come out to visit. They'll walk to the coffee shop and just have some casual weekends, so I think they understand some of the aspects of what I love about being out here in Washington State. All right, so we'll wrap up the New York section of our show with this question are you a baseball fan? I am a baseball fan, although I don't follow it. All right.

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I just lump everybody from New York into you're either a Yankees fan or a Mets fan very carefully. What is the correct answer? Well, I'm not sure what the correct answer is from your perspective, but I was born and raised the Yankees fan. Oh, really? I was.

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I remember watching TV as a kid, watching the old Yankees with Reggie Jackson and Thurman Munson and Billy Martin and Greg Nettles. All the Bucky Dent, all those guys. And I remember when I moved to Atlanta for law school, and I was following the Braves, and the Braves were doing well. But it was sort of interesting to realize that when I grew up, the Yankees were winning all the time, the Islanders in the winning all the local teams, and New York, as such a sports kind of powerhouse with two and three teams per sport, there was always this winning. And coming out here like, I want the Mariners to make the playoffs.

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I'd love to see the Mariners win the World Series. But knowing that maybe fans out here, baseball fans, had a different experience, a different childhood experience than I did with baseball, it felt like they were winning the World Series every year or every couple of years. So, yes, I've been a Yankees fan. I will admit at a Yankees fan, as a Yankees fan, that they've had more than their fair share of victories, but it is what it is. Without going into too much detail.

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Hate. Is a really strong word, and I don't really mean the word hate, but I really dislike the Yankees. But without the Yankees, without the Yankees to chase, baseball would be a boring sport. I mean, you don't seem to be buying players like you used to. Right.

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This seems like the team is settled into a little bit different. I mean, I say that, but they're going to go give Aaron Judge half a billion dollars, pRothably. But the point is, the Yankees raise the bar for everybody. If you want to compete, you got to figure out how to beat the Yankees. Everything goes through the Yankees.

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And so I love that. I just wish just once, just once in my lifetime, that the Mariners make it to the World Series. I'd love for them to win, but just for Seattle to get the opportunity to play on that stage, I would. Love to see it as well. Yeah, go ahead.

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I've watched the marriage for a long, long time, and I grew up being a San Francisco Giants fan because we didn't have the Seattle team at that time. Right. And Pittsburgh Pirates and San Francisco Giants. Don't ask me why, because I don't know. But as a longtime, long suffering Mariners fan, I take it one day at a time, one game at a time.

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I can't get excited. It'll break my heart. All right, you're a Yankees fan. We'll move on. That's true.

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You moved out here, you met your co founders at a different company. And. You started Geocaching to support a hobby. So was it your hobby? Was it one of your partner?

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I mean, let's talk about how did the company come about out of the kernel of a hobby. Sure. So in early May of the year 2000, the US. Government changed the GPS satellite signals for recreational users. So prior to May of 2000, the accuracy if you owned a garmin, GPS, say you were a fisher or a fisherman or something like that, if you owned a garmin, the accuracy was about 300ft.

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So the device could tell you where you are in the world with a radius of about 300ft. Well, in May of 2000, in the interest of transportation and navigation and so many public benefits, they changed it to approximately 30ft. And that was called it was called selective availability, and they removed selective availability from the signal. So military has precise accuracy, but recreational users got a drastic increase in accuracy. And so a guy who lives in Oregon, his name is Dave Omer, he posted to a satellite news group online, basically this idea saying, now that we know where we are with this degree of accuracy anywhere in the world, I have this idea for a game.

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I'm going to hide a bucket, and here's some items I'm going to put in it, and I'm going to post the coordinates, and let's see who can find it. And so he did that, and it was found within three days by a guy named Mike Teague. Let me interrupt you. Where did he hide the bucket? It's just outside of just outside of Portland.

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It's now known as the original stash. Okay. There's a plaque at the location. The original bucket is long gone, but there's a plaque at the location. And people travel from all over the world to go find that plaque.

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And there's another cache there outside of Portland. Okay. I can reference the geocaching code at some point, but I have to look it up. I don't know. It offhand.

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Okay. All right. So anyway, Dave Omer hides this box. It's found by Mike Teague. They basically say to everybody, hey, if anybody else hides a box, let Mike know.

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And Mike had a little website where he would just list them in order, and you could go to the website and you can scroll through, and you could see, oh, there's a cash here, there's a cash here, and so on. And so I was working@a.com at that time. It was my first job out here. And it was a men's clothing store that was trying to build a web presence to sell retail online. Back at a time when people weren't really ordering clothing on the internet.

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In the late ninety s. And a buddy of ours named Michael Schmidt brought a yellow garmin etrex into the office that he had gotten for his birthday. And he's like, look, I got this GPS receiver. Here's how cool it is. And so Jeremy took it and went outside.

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And there's a little man and breadcrumbs where you move on the screen. It was a basic unit. And he said, oh, what cool technology. I'm accessing a multibillion dollar satellite system to know where I am. I wonder what else we can do with this.

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Okay. And so he went online and he found Mike Teague's website and Dave omer's post. And he said, oh, look at this game. And at the time they named the game. I think Dave named it, I'm not 100% sure, but they named it the great American GPS stash hunt.

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That was the name of the game. And so he went online. It's a mouthful. And ultimately it was changed because it's not limited to America. And stash has some negative connotations.

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They don't want to attract any negative attention. And so a guy who is part of the community named Matt stumb, he came up with the idea to call it geocaching. Geo for global and caching, like a stockpile of goods that you do if you're on a Pacific crest trail or through hiking or something like that. So Jeremy bought a GPS unit, and he went out with a friend, and he had a puppy dog, and he took his Saturn car, and he ended up, he drove 3 hours, and he ended up on these logging roads that were completely inappropriate for his car. Ran out of water and got attacked by bugs, but ended up in this clear cut area.

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And he found this card box. And when he found it, he said, how cool is this? Like I'm part of this secret club. Nobody would ever know this is here. And so on his way back to Seattle, he thought about, he was a web developer.

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He is a web developer. He thought about, I think I can build a website to make this easier for people to play, rather than having to scroll through a whole page just to find something in your area. Maybe there's a zip code. Lookup, I should tell people, bring water, be prepared. This is outdoor recreation.

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Like, don't take chances. And so he got back to the.com and he talked to Elias and I, and he's like, hey, here's this game. It was really fun. I'm going to build a website. We were like, hey, that sounds awesome, really cool.

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And so he went and he did it. And I know he was talking to Elias about some of the technical functions. And basically 23 years ago, on September 2, he launched geocaching.com. And what had happened was, wow, mike Teague's website went down. There was some issue with it and Mike and Jeremy had been talking about how to best support the hobby.

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And Mike basically came out and said, hey everybody, my website's down. This is not what I'm interested in doing, please go to Jeremy's website, Geocaching.com. So that was the start of the Geocaching.com website and soon after Jeremy approached Elias and said, hey, I could use some help. I'm a web developer. Elias handles network infrastructure and hardware and I mean, they're both wicked smart guys and they said we can handle the technology.

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And I was doing legal business development, HR, all the non technical things. So they approached me and said, hey, here's this game. Like, what do you say we start a company to support this hobby? There's no money in it, but it's outdoor recreation and technology. We're all passionate about those things.

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And really knowing those guys, what I said to them is, I would love to work with you guys. Let's do it. And so I drew up the articles of incorporation and the bylaws and we officially became a company on November 3. But on October 20 the New York Times did a front page circuit section article on Geocaching and I think the title was like, what else is GPS Good for? Or something like that.

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And we have it framed somewhere in the office, you'd think I might know what it says. But anyway, so it got a lot of attention and we got picked up by Slash Dot, which at the time was sort of like a reddit.

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So it started to get a lot of attention and basically we worked for free. So the.com crashed and burned soon after that with the rest of them in the late ninety s. And the three of us all went to work for a promotional marketing company called Sunrise Creative Group out in Woodenville. And what we were doing was they were building websites for companies like bigger companies or bigger brands who needed their shirts and their hats and their desk sets and cycling jerseys and things like that. And so they were doing one for Xbox and they did one for Windows XP when it came out.

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But they needed sort of so they hired a few of us that were@this.com, that failed. Jeremy came in as the web developer, elias was handling it. I became general counsel and sort of supported HR and things like that. And we had some other people come over as well for the warehouse and whatever. Jeremy was there for, I think about a year, maybe a year and a half.

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And he came to us and he's like, listen, this working two job stuff is really kind of difficult. We either need to go and just sell this and focus on our day job or we need to find a way to generate revenue, right? And we started out selling because we're working for a promotional marketing company. We had 144 Geocaching T shirts made and we sold those. And that was the first revenue that we had as a company, was the T shirts.

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And so we went out to the community and we said, hey folks, we're doing this. We really want to support this game. We have some ideas of things that we can build, but we don't have any money. Please consider. We're going to launch a charter membership at $30 a year.

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And if you pay $30 a year, we're going to give you access to the new features first. And we're going to give you access to sort of charter member or premium member only features. And by the way, none of those exist now, but we kind of need money to make it happen. And so that month, I want to say we got about $28,000 in memberships. And we said, oh my goodness, there's people out there who want more of this.

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And that was really cool. And the next month was like $2,000 because everybody who was sort of on board came in immediately and it was like $2,000 after that for quite some time. But anyway, we realized we now had some money and so we hired Jeremy full time to come work on building the site and building the functionality and I don't know how long after, maybe a year after we hired Elias. And then we went and we realized, like, we didn't need a full time attorney. We were a very small company.

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And so we hired an Illustrator. I think we hired one or two more engineers. We hired some customer service. And then after five years, I was able to leave my day job and go work for this company. And now here we are quite a few years later, and we've got, as I said, 95 full time employees.

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And it's crazy. We're a bootstrap company, which is really interesting because I think it's interesting. Anyway, over time, we've looked at the way that startups move forward. And so many of them are like, looking to be acquired or looking to be funded. And those are viable paths where you take money from outside investors and deliver ten X, five X, whatever the X return is.

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But we always felt like it was nice to not have to answer to anybody except ourselves and the community. And so as long as the community was willing to support us, we could keep doing what we feel is in the best interest of the community. And so here we are, 23 years later, since the website launched anyway, and we've never taken any outside funding, we don't have any debt, and we believe it's our responsibility to keep this company functioning as a going concern for years to come. Because there are millions of people around the world who are depending on us to provide access to this hobby that they love. So on my other monitor here, so no one else but you understands that I'm looking over at another screen.

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I'm on your Facebook page. Normally, I like to talk to guests that have large social media followings. I'm kidding. At the moment that we're recording this, the thumb up says 608,271 people. I go over to your Instagram page with 238,000 followers.

00:22:19

But wait. Twitter. Where did Twitter go? Twitter is like 81,000 followers. But the stat that blows my mind is I'm on your website.

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And without getting too geeky, because I kind of understand the tech here, but right now I'm looking at the hero image. Join the world's largest treasure hunt. There's a video playing. You know what your website looks like, right? But right below that, it tells me that there's 241 geocaches around shelan.

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You went from a bucket in the ground near Portland to 23 years later, you've got somebody's hidden approximately 250 things in the greater Shelan Winachi area, right? Yeah. I want to jump ahead and ask a question because your social media is that's incredibly powerful. You've got that much traction online?

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I don't know. You're going to know the answer, but you might. Approximately how many geocaches are currently hid worldwide? Geocaches like the physical boxes. Yeah, I know.

00:23:28

Almost exactly. And in fact, I'm going to tell you right now how many geocaches last I checked, it was, I want to say 3.2 million geocaches worldwide. 3.2 million, okay. And there are, as of today, 3.36. 2 million geocaches.

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3.362 million with that data that you have there. And you have access to this, by the way. Okay. So you need a geocaching account to log in. It's free to create one, but then there's a search box where I can search anywhere in the world, and it will tell you how many geocaches are there.

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It's kind of fun because you search Cape Town, South Africa, and you get X number of caches. Search Amsterdam. You get X number. It's kind of a fun tool just to see and for travel planning, of course. So I'm going to ask you to do my research for me.

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Can you answer two questions for me? How many in the United States and then how many in Washington State? Let's see what we get for the United States. United States regional search, 1,006,974 cache results in the United States. Those are active caches in existence.

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And then let's see. Washington state. Let's go look. Washington, United States, 28,183 caches in Washington state, which, if you think about it, that's 28,000 mini adventures that people can go do and really for just a lot of effort to go find that many. We have people who work here at HQ who have found over 40,000 caches in their lifetime.

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And there are people out in the global community who have found over 100,000 caches in their lifetime. There are people who do this every day. There are people who are doing what's called streaks. How many days in a row can you do and we're talking multiple years, five years, seven years that people have been on a streak. Even more than that.

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That's crazy. There are some very passionate players of this game in this community. It's astounding, even after so many years of seeing it grow, I hear stats all the time where I'm like, you got to be kidding me. That is just unbelievable. And the cool thing is, when I get to talk to some of these folks, I got to talk to a woman.

00:26:17

There was an event in Canada a couple of weeks ago called Geo Woodstock, and they had thousands of people who attended this event. It was the biggest event in Canada in history so far. And there was a woman who, I've known her, I've met her at events before, her and her husband. I see them on social media celebrating Geocaching milestones all the time. And she had just hit 69,000, Geocaches found.

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And I said to her, I was like, that's so much time that's so many experiences that you've enjoyed. I cannot even begin to imagine how the richness of your life experience when combined with Geocaching in this way, it's just remarkable. And so for me to see people who have been positively impacted by the game in such a variety of ways, it's such an interesting form of success. We talk about it here, like measure success through impact. We've got jobs, we have a business, I can pay my mortgage and whatever.

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But at the same time, as a company, we're having an impact on people's lives all over the world. And because it's a community, we actually get to meet so many of those people when we travel to Geocaching events around the world, or when they travel to come see us here in Seattle, at our headquarters, in our visitors center, or some of the other events that take place. Okay, so earlier on we started talking about the changes in GPS technology from a 300 foot radius to a 30 foot radius. And I seem to remember there was some discussion back then about privacy. And I think the military I want to remember that the military wasn't real crazy about allowing civilians to have that degree of accuracy.

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I don't remember if that's accurate. That's just what my brain is saying. But in 23 years, has the GPS technology improved as far as games the game goes, or has it stayed relatively static? I think that in the first I don't know, I'm speculating about the time frame, but in the first, pRothably ten years or so, they had not just straight GPS, which is using the signals from the satellites, but they also have a system, it's called Wide Area Augmentation System. And there's some other like, I think that there are broadcast stations in different places on the planet.

00:28:59

And if you're receiving those signals, you're not going to get it in tree cover or in sort of a Manhattan skyline, if you're downtown, you're not going to get access to this accuracy. And 30ft is almost best case when you're out there. If you've got an augmentation system, you can get down to like 6ft, 7ft, something like that. I've seen estimates of 3ft, and then you've seen GPS antennas have improved and so you can get better reception in sort of high, dense coverage areas. So there have been improvements.

00:29:38

But it's interesting because for geocaching, we actually don't want we don't want it to be 1 CM accuracy because it would take half the fun out of it. Because a good part of the fun is when you get to the location, how difficult is it to find the box? And some of these I haven't talked about it yet, but every geocache has a difficulty rating and a terrain rating associated with it. The terrain rating is one to five. With half steps, you could have one and a half, two and a half.

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And so.

00:30:12

Terrain rating of one means that the cash should be accessible from a wheelchair. 1.5 means it's pRothably just out of reach. Three could be a decent hike. Four, four and a half, like four and a half is a difficult terrain to navigate. To get to the cash location, a terrain five means that special equipment is required, whether that's rock climbing gear, scuba gear, a boat, a kayak, a paddle board, in one case a helicopter, stuff like that.

00:30:49

The difficulty rating is, when you get to the location, how hard is it to find the cache? And so what you've got is you have a D. One could mean, all right, you're out in the middle of an open field. There's one tree and there's a little box next to the tree. No trouble at all to find that.

00:31:12

Maybe you're sitting at a picnic bench and one of the bolts on the bottom of the picnic bench is hollowed out and filled with a logbook. We sell them in our shop. They're like specially made hidden containers. Then there's other things that are like literally field puzzles. Some of them involve electronics or levers or mechanical movement of things like a labyrinth out in the woods that you have to solve in order to unlock the cache box.

00:31:44

And there's many creative cache hiders who have spent so much time building incredible geocaching experiences combining either difficulty or terrain. There are puzzle caches where in order to get the coordinates, you have to solve a puzzle. And maybe it's a complicated math puzzle or maybe it's an image that has clues. You have to like a hidden word kind of puzzle.

00:32:16

The creativity that the community has brought to this platform is really what makes it so special. So there are people who really focus on like, I want to get as many of these as I can. I want to find the easiest ones possible. There are other people who are out there saying like, I want. To find the hardest puzzles.

00:32:33

I want to find the five five s. I want to, you know, out in Germany, I want to have climbing ropes and be 150ft up in a tree finding a cache that was placed up there because somebody wanted to challenge me. I want to be repelling down a cliff in Austria because there's a cave halfway down the cliff that has a geocache in it. So for a long time ago now, and I would say it's got to be at least 15 years ago, CNN did a piece on geocaching and they've pRothably done other pieces since. There's some good media around it.

00:33:08

But anyway, they had two groups that they interviewed and one was a mom with kids and they were out following the mom with kids around and the kids were pRothably like between five and ten years old. And the mom was saying like, this is how I get the kids away from the television. We're going out, we're taking them treasure hunting. And there's good lessons when they find the big boxes that have trinkets and toys. The rule is you can take something out as long as you leave something for the next person to find.

00:33:37

And there's some good lessons in there because you teach the kids about, hey, you don't want the next person to be disappointed you found something cool. Like you have to trade even or trade up, like make it a good experience. So the mom was talking about how cool it is that I can get my kids outside in a way where they're engaged, they're excited, and I'm also able to share these lessons in courtesy with them. And then the next group they had was a couple, it was an older gentleman and his wife who were both in their mid eighty s and they were out and they had found almost 2000 caches and they showed them walking around with a cane just looking for caches in different areas. And they were saying, this is something that's keeping us feeling young.

00:34:21

We're getting out of the house. It's a reason to go outside. It's a reason for us to walk around and travel and be active. And I said, hey, we hope to live long enough to find 3000 of these in a few years. So you get such a variety for older people, for families with kids, absolutely.

00:34:42

But then for people who really want to challenge themselves with an adventure, I mean, there's, there's caches that I have no interest in doing personally because I'm, you know, either concerned for my own safety or, you know, don't put me anywhere where there might be snakes or whatever. But there's just a large variety. And people are going through swamps in the Everglades to find caches and, and climbing up on old bridge decks that, you know, the bridge no longer exists. And, you know, the cache was actually placed with a helicopter in West Virginia and another interesting aspect of it is that the people who are creatively putting out exceptional geocaches become heroes in the community, become folk heroes, especially celebrities. Celebrities, precisely.

00:35:32

Like, have you heard about goblin dust? There's somebody out here in Washington state who places some really cool caches. There was out on, I think it's on Bainbridge, there's like a garden center and there's like a phone booth that has a video screen and you have to like it's like superhero related and it's just like so much time and effort. We have in our visitor center, we have an old dial up phone. We have to figure out the right number to dial and the little thing where the money used to go pops out and the logbook is inside that he built that one.

00:36:08

And there's a geocacher called Bounce. Bounce who makes some really creative caches in Washington state. And that's just in this little area here, every area in the world. The active geocachers could tell you who hides the best caches in this area. What's been remarkable about what they've created, I'm trying to remember in Long Island there's a group and they created like it's an ATM that used to be an ATM and it doesn't function as an ATM anymore, but it's a puzzle geocache that you have to push buttons and solve to get the cache to come out.

00:36:49

Anyway, it's been fascinating to see how the game has evolved in so many years and just how much fun people are having with all of the different facets of the game. Well, one of the things you're sharing here that I was going to ask you kind of the age range, but you basically said young children into people in their eighty s and there's pRothably younger and older on that. So it really is, I can't remember what board game company they're slowing. It's fun for eight to 80. It's kind of the same thing here.

00:37:20

You alluded to difficulty and you mentioned five of five. So I guess the question I'd like to ask is these super complicated, these super hard caches, are there a lot of them or is it a very small number? There are a lot of them. I mean, if you consider that there's 3.3 something million caches worldwide. If I said that there are 400,000 really hard caches, it seems like a lot to me.

00:37:58

Percentage wise, that's the number. Yeah, I don't know exactly, but there's a lot. I'm going to put you on the spot. This is a lot like asking a parent what their favorite child is, but go for it. What pops into your head is like the most creative.

00:38:15

Like you were like when you heard about this cash, you're like, oh wow, that's crazy. I mean, what pops in my head are quite a few of them and they pop in my head because I've had the good fortune to actually get to go do them. And so I'll give you an example. This is an older cache. I don't think it's active anymore, but it used to be called Operation Crocodile with a K.

00:38:41

It was located in a wooded area outside of Frankfurt in Germany. And we were out there for a business meeting at one point and I had our VP of marketing, he was out there with me and we met up with these geocachers and I said, hey, we're going to go do this cache. And it could only be done at night and there was a waiting list to do it, of months long waiting list to do it, because there were it involved keys that you had to take from one location to others. And I'll tell you a little bit about it, but because we were coming from Geocaching HQ, they invited us to join them on their sort of pre calendars. It was arranged that we would get to do this cache with a group of caches.

00:39:25

But it started out where you had to use a flashlight. Starting from the starting coordinates, you used a flashlight and you flashed it into the woods and you get these little fire tax that would light up and you had to follow a path through the woods. And we found in the middle of this clearing there was almost like a flower that was just sitting there and the flower was hinged and you could open it up and inside was a key and a set of coordinates. And basically the coordinates were this old like it was an old World War II bunker that we had to unlock and go in. And using black lights that the German geocachers had with them, there was information written on the walls that would only be illuminated by the black light.

00:40:21

It actually gets even crazier. So we go out and we follow the next set of clues and we got and this thing took, I want to say it took four and a half hours for us to finish it. And we wouldn't have finished it if we weren't with the German geocachers who really knew what they were doing. But anyway, at one point we found a tree stump also with a hinge. And you open the tree stump and there was an old video camera in there.

00:40:44

It almost looked like an old VHS like filming camera. And there was in German it said something like start recording and pay attention to what you hear and not what you see. And so, okay, we press record and you hear like a little chirp in the woods. What are you talking about? Press it again.

00:41:03

There's a birdhouse on a tree, I don't know, 40ft away. And we get there and you shine a light on it and there was a light receptor or whatever. And in the little window where the bird would go was a little Led that gave us a frequency that they tuned to with radios, with FRS, radios, and there was a little broadcast saying you have to go to the next coordinates. So just the electronics and how the whole thing is integrated. So anyway, during the course of this experience, we found a helicopter hanging from a tree that when you shine the light on it, a laser came out of the front and pointed to the next location, which happened to be another bunker.

00:41:47

When we walked into the bunker, there was a suitcase with a video screen, and you had to hold the button down, and it played this message. And the whole story is operation Crocodile was fictitious story about two missiles had been stolen. You are trying to recover the missiles. And so the video screen is like one of the missiles was detonated, no damage, whatever. We've got coordinates for the next set of missiles.

00:42:11

You got to go here. We unlock the final bunker, world War II bunkers. Mind you, they said these massive cavernous things in the side of hills. Anyway, takes two people to slide the doors open. We walk in and there is a three foot long, like, styrofoam painted green missile with four dip switches on it and a little Led screen.

00:42:34

And sitting next to it is an original newspaper from, like, 1951. And you had to read some of the paragraphs to figure out what you needed to do to set the dip switches in order to disarm, quote unquote, dismissal and complete the cash find, which we did. And so you think about something like that. It's almost like an escape room without the room.

00:43:01

In other places, particularly in Germany, I've seen a lot of these, but a bunch of geocachers rent an entire house out in the woods that used to be an old orphanage, and they create this story driven adventure where you're going through the entire house and you're climbing through the dumb waiter shaft to get to another area of the house because things are locked and you're playing a tape recording to get information on the next clues. And you find a mannequin of, like, a dead body in the attic. And it's just fascinating. Fast. And these are cash hides that people are again waiting for months and months to do.

00:43:43

It's just remarkable. And people putting in that time and creativity to create experiences for other people that they generally don't know.

00:43:53

Those are some examples of super creative difficulty. Five, without a doubt. Wow.

00:44:03

I had no idea, zero idea of the complexity. I was thinking while you were describing the Crocodile that it sounded like an escape room. It sounded like the experience that you can have in an escape room, but yet it's not within a room. You're out in the wild. To be fair, most caches are not like that.

00:44:29

Most caches are a box in the woods or a box under a tree, but they're out. The creativity that the community is bringing is this is kind of mind boggling to me.

00:44:46

Because we have a global community, because we've got access to people throughout the world. It's like hive mind concept. Put the minds of millions of people together, and you're going to get really cool things. You're going to get access to creativity. It's part of the beauty of Reddit, quite honestly, which I'm a fan.

00:45:06

But you go to Reddit and what do they say? They say they're the front page of the Internet. That's because there's people all over the world who are sort of mining the world for interesting stories relating to specific topics. So if you want to know what's going on in an area, the collective mind will tell you. And so I think as a platform, we share and experience the benefit of that with millions of people.

00:45:34

Approximately how many members are there in your community? We don't know. So what I can tell you is that in 23 years, there have been tens of millions of geocaching accounts created.

00:45:53

I think that we estimate in primarily Northern Hemisphere summer months, we pRothably have between three and 4 million people that will play during that during that kind of time period. So it's a lot I tend to think about it often in terms of, like, I don't know, I've gone to a Seahawks game in the past, and you figure, all right, that place is going to hold 70,000 people, or whatever. And you look around and it's like, man, that is a lot of people. Well, when you think 30, 40 times that in a month around the world out playing this game again, it's staggering. It's impact.

00:46:34

It's people who are it's interesting. I say impact, but most people spend too much time inside. As a species, I think we've grown accustomed to spending a lot of times in our caves, too much time inside. And so to know that people are leaving their homes to get outside to go play this game, that's good for the world, it's good for people. There's nature deficit disorder and all that, but the more time that we could spend outside among the trees, among other people, I think it's good for individuals, which becomes good for society, and overall, good for the world.

00:47:19

But then when you combine the fact that it's not just people from one location, these events taking place, the really big geocaching events are attracting people from all over the world. We just had our event in Seattle two weekends ago, and we had geocachers from Singapore and South Africa and Australia and New Zealand and throughout Scandinavian countries and eastern Western Europe, and everybody's there. And the cool thing was, people are talking to each other. They're hugging, they're sharing their love of the game with each other, and they have stuff to talk about and to see. They're not talking politics, they're not talking religion, they're not talking economics.

00:48:02

For the most part, they're getting together, and they're sharing the love for the game. And so to see these sort of cross border communities being built with strength and with sharing people, doing stuff in the interest of making other people happy or getting other people outside, it's just something that's so positive. So when we think about, all right, even if it's 1 million people that played the game in a month, that's 1 million people that left their homes and went out and did something that hopefully they really enjoyed, yes, the numbers are big. And it's funny because in this day and age, you think about, oh, Facebook, and pRothably not anymore. Facebook has a billion people on their platform.

00:48:46

That's a staggering I don't know where you go from there. I mean, maybe down a little bit, certainly, but to think like, okay, it's a few million people are playing this game, and we know how good it is as a company and even as a community, we'd love to share it with more people. We'd love for people to check it out and try going outside and finding a treasure, whether it's with your kids. For me, what I really like to do is I travel somewhat frequently, and when you go to a new city, look up in the mobile apps, it'll show you the geocaches that have the most favorite points. And so favorite points, this is a premium member feature.

00:49:29

As a premium member, when you go find a cache, for every ten caches you find, you could designate one as a favorite. And so good caches will get a lot of sort of hearts on them, a lot of favorites on them. And then whether you're a premium user or a basic user, you can look at the map and it will show you the most favorited caches in the area. So to go to a new city, caches will take you to unique locations and you can read about them. If you click on a cache, you can read the description.

00:50:00

It'll often tell you, here's a little about the cache, here's a little bit about the area where the cash is placed. It's a lovely view, it's the things like that. But you can also read the logs of everybody who's found the cash. And you could say, oh, this family went out and little Susie found the cash, and everybody had a good time, or somebody's visiting from Sweden, and this is the first cash that they found in Washington state or something like that. So there's a lot of detail available for each of these cash hives, a lot of statistics, and by looking at the favorite points, you kind of get a clue of what are the best experiences out there to participate in.

00:50:43

Wow. So like I said, your numbers kind of back up my statement that I may be the only person didn't know the game before. And one of the things that I think I told you this when we talked on the phone, I don't do a lot of prep because I like to be surprised, and you've surprised me for 50 minutes. Now, the idea of a Styrofoam rocket or missile that's painted and you've got to read a newspaper, and the amount of creativity and attention to detail is staggeringly cool. It's really cool.

00:51:18

And for us, we're building a platform. We want people to create, share, and play. And so we're trying to put the tools in the hands of the creators and in the hands of the players so that they can do these kind of things. And we've made a lot of progress over 23 years. There's certainly more progress to be made.

00:51:39

So that leads me to a question I'd like to ask, and it's a two part question. Part number one is over the last 23 years, if we could roll back in time and you and I met 23 years ago, right when you decided to launch this thing, would you have envisioned it being where it's at today? No way. Okay. In fact, if you ask me to envision where it's going to be five years from now, I'm not quite sure.

00:52:09

What I would say is that it's grown organically. Historically, we've never done the kind of marketing where it's like, hey, you're looking for something fun to do? Come check out Geocache. We don't do that kind of marketing. It's almost entirely word of mouth.

00:52:28

So people will go out and play and they'll say, wow, I didn't know this game existed. This is really fun. My friends took me, and now I'm going to bring other friends, hey, look at what me and my family are doing. You guys should try this. And so all of a sudden, what we see here is just a product of people enjoying it enough to tell.

00:52:45

Other people, yeah, the organic growth. All right. So one of the questions I love to ask people, and I always have to really set the stage so you don't take it the wrong way. In 23 years, has there ever been an idea that you as a company, thought was going to be like, you're like, oh, this is really cool, this should work, and it didn't.

00:53:10

For example, I'll set the stage. There's a little coffee company in Seattle called Starbucks, and in the mid 90s, they had a coffee soda called Mazegron, and it was a retail flop. It was I actually really liked it, but it was a retail flop. But out of it came the process for creating the coffee syrup that they were able to then put into the bottled Frappuccinos and for Starbucks ice cream and things like that. So Mazegran was a failure, but there was a lot of cool that came out of it.

00:53:45

Same sort of scenario here. Did you guys have an idea, a concept, and it just didn't pencil out? Yes, we did. In fact, we've had more than a few of those. Like, we've spent quite a bit of time, effort and money to build applications that we released and shut down in two months, three months, because it just wasn't doing what we thought it would be doing.

00:54:12

And or we discovered issues with the nature of the platform that made it almost untenable. Like, oh, had we known this would be happening, we wouldn't have even started this. But we like to say, and I'm sure it's a common phrase, like we can only make decisions based on the available knowledge at the time. And sometimes when you start walking down that path, you find other issues and that require you to either adjust your sales or push on forward. And I would say there have been cases where we pushed through some adversity and felt like we were making progress and then we had the next aspect of adversity.

00:54:54

There have been projects that have not seen a light of day because we've put a year and a half worth of work into them, but we just can't get it across the finish line because there's a fundamental challenge or resource constraints or whatever. So we've made mistakes. One of the things that I like to tell new employees here, and I meet with every new employee, normally it's scheduled at about a half an hour and it'll normally last for a bit more than a half hour if we're having a good conversation to talk about just about anything. But one of the things that I'll say is what you see here is the product of hundreds of decisions made over a lot of years. Hundreds of decisions made with a certain set of values and principles.

00:55:45

And the fact is we've made more than a few mistakes. It's inevitable. Absolutely. We have a mistake. We have a sign on the wall of Jeremy's old office and it says, let's make better mistakes tomorrow.

00:55:59

And so, like Starbucks, we've learned things, we've learned what not to do. And I think that there's certainly going to be more lessons out there for us to learn, no doubt. But if we approach it from the standpoint of we can't sit still, we want to keep experimenting and if we learn a little bit from each of those lessons, well, then we're stronger company tomorrow than we are today, right? No, because I'm sure out of a project that didn't see the light of day, things were learned that could be applied elsewhere down the road. Those Lego pieces get reassembled somewhere else down the road.

00:56:40

And I think if you don't take risks, you don't grow and your growth is I'm kind of blown away, frankly, that it's this organic nature over 23 years and you're multi millions of users. Thanks. I really like the Lego analogy. I'm going to borrow that one. But it's very true.

00:57:03

It's not like these projects become a complete loss. The reality is they're far from a complete loss because teams learn to work together, teams learn to solve novel pRothlems. Those building blocks, those Lego pieces do get reassembled in new ways. Yeah, it's like if you go to a garage sale let's just say you go to garage sale in the Queen Anne area of Seattle and they've got this box full of Lego and they say it's the complete Death Star, right? And you believe the person and so you buy the box, but the instructions aren't there and now you're trying to put together who knows what else you're going to build out of those.

00:57:46

It's supposed to be this giant sphere, but maybe you built the Eiffel Tower out of it. Who knows? Doesn't mean it's kind of fun to fiddle if you can have a longer term attitude. But to shift this to Washington because we've talked about your company in general and the global impact of it, in your opinion. Let me ask you this question.

00:58:07

I don't know if you're going to know these answers, but are there any cashes? Could there be a cash on Mount Rainier or because it's a national park, would that not be allowed? Because it's a national park, it's not allowed. However, there is a type of cash that we have. It's called an earth cash.

00:58:24

And we started this program many years ago with the Geological Society of America. And the basic concept is in places of geological significance, rather than place a physical box, you can create a basically Earth caches are geology lessons. And so you go to a location and you could read the page that'll tell you about the massive glacial erratic rock that you're standing in front of or basalt cliffs or an undersea cavern or something like that, and they'll give you information about it. So you learn this geology lesson and understand what it is you're seeing and then you get asked questions that you have to answer correctly in order to get credit for the cash find. This is starting to sound like school, man.

00:59:19

I got to say. This is starting to sound like a lot like I'm kidding. What's interesting is here we have people who are willing to go through this educational experience in order to get a cash find, which is kind of funny to think about, but there are people out there who really live for Earth cashes and there's a different badge program. You can become like to earn your way to become an Earth cache master, you have to have found a certain number of Earth caches. And it's a program within the program.

00:59:51

I mean, again, it's one of those facets that we could easily not talk about because there's so many other things to talk about. But Earth caching in itself is this they're all over the world. There's geology lessons all over the world. And so if you're passionate about geology and you're going to travel, go look for highly favorited Earth caches and it'll give you some idea of some things that you might want to see, and it is what it is. All right, so let's go back.

01:00:20

Wow, that's pretty cool. Let's go. Washington State. Cashes, off the top of your head.

01:00:28

When we talked on the phone, you mentioned one over by Hayak, so let's talk about that one first. That was a collaboration with a movie, correct? Correct. Okay.

01:00:43

Sorry. In 2001, really, in the very early days of geocaching, 20th Century Fox reached out to us. They were doing the Planet of the Apes movie, the old, obviously, the the 2001 version of that movie. And they were wondering how we can do how we can help get the word out about the movie using geocaching. And so the basic concept was they wrote a storyline about alternative primate evolution on Earth, and clues to this evolution were going to be hidden in 13 geocaches in different places around the world.

01:01:26

And so we worked with Geocache Hiders in Washington state, a pretty famous geocacher known as mountain bike, and then cashers in Japan and London and Brazil, I think, los Angeles.

01:01:43

Anyway, 13 caches in different places in the world, and we put them out, and each of the caches had props from the movie. So, like actual props that they took from the studio and they put in the caches. And that was the first to find prize. So whoever finds it gets to keep that prize. Okay?

01:02:02

And basically the caches were placed. I think one of them was never found, and it's a little bit of geocaching lore, but nobody really knows what happened to it. But over time, over the 20 or so years, those caches went missing, either they got stolen, they got removed, permission was no longer available for placing it at that specific area. And so when they went away let me take a step back. When you find different types of caches, a traditional cache, a multistage cache, an Earth cache, an event cache, you get different icons on your profile, and the website will keep track of all the different types of caches that you found.

01:02:44

And so there are a lot of people who are interested in the stats, and they want to have the most Earth caches, the most traditional caches, or they want to fill their grid of I want traditional caches that's a one one, a one and a half one, a two one, a two and a half one. Like, fill the entire difficulty terrain grid by finding a cache in each of those. So there's all these mini games within the games, but anyway, these Ape caches had a separate icon. And so in the early days, if you were willing to really travel, I don't know who has found the most Ape caches. The max would be 13, and I think the practical max is twelve.

01:03:26

Nobody found all twelve. So there are people that found three, four, five, but over time, those caches went missing. And once they're missing, they don't get. Replaced. If you don't have the cash box, it doesn't get replaced.

01:03:40

And so what happened was there are two remaining caches, two remaining Ape caches. One of them is in Brazil, and one of them is in Hayek. It's actually not on hayek. It's on the other side of the Snow qualmy tunnel. And it's called Project Ape because they were all called Project Ape.

01:04:00

And that one is called Tunnel of Light because you walk through the tunnel to go get it. And people travel from all over the world to find those two caches. I know a number of people who have gone to Brazil solely for the purpose of finding that cache. And I can tell you I have plans to go. I have aspirations of doing that myself.

01:04:21

I would like to go find the Brazil Ape cash, because I have only found one here in Washington. There was one in New York, there was one in Chicago. I just never had a chance to find them in the early days. And so now people travel from all over the world to go find those Ape caches here in the Pacific Northwest. That is a very famous cache.

01:04:44

In fact, on Saturday, this Saturday, the Washington State Geocaching Association let me interrupt. You, because this will pRothably come out after that. So let's give the audience the date. That'll be September 10. 10th.

01:05:01

Yeah. So we're referencing September 10, 2022. If you're listening to this, afterwards, the events happened. Okay, so WSGA washington state geocaching association is holding an event. It's called going ape.

01:05:15

And this is the 11th year in a row that they've held this event. And they basically gather hundreds of people in the parking lot at Hayak. And there's food and games and things like that. There's somebody in an Ape costume, and then everybody essentially not all at once, but people will hike through the tunnel, go find the Project Ape cache, and then come back. And it's a big event for the Geocaching community.

01:05:41

And in years past, they've had 500,000 people at this event. This year, I think it'll be a little bit smaller because normally it coincides with Midsummer, but I'm planning on going this Saturday. And anyway, so the Ape event is a very famous cache. Another very famous cache is the Geocaching headquarters cache. So here at our office, we have a visitor center.

01:06:07

People come from all over the world. And the GC code for Geocachers out there who pRothably know about the cache already is GCK 25 B. And if you enter that into the search results on our website or in the mobile app, it will show you the Geocaching headquarters visitor center. Geocache, which looks like a big treasure box. It's got a big logbook that's been signed by thousands of people from all over the world.

01:06:32

And there's curiosities, there's trinkets, there's things to see in the HQ visitor center. So people, we talked about the original stash earlier. There's something. It's called the triad. And so this is a Triad GeoCoin I'm showing now.

01:06:53

It's a triangular GeoCoin. It's got the original Stash, it's got HQ, and then it has the Ape. And those are the three caches where they'll say there are three of the most famous caches in the world, if not the most famous caches in the world. And people will come to complete the Triad. So they'll travel down to Oregon to find the original Stash, they'll come to headquarters, and then they go out to Hayek to find the Project Ape Tunnel of Light geocache.

01:07:21

All right, that's crazy. Can you share with us a couple of other Washington State locate not necessarily locations, but caches that are of notoriety? Sure. There is something to mention. Let me see if I have the page for it.

01:07:42

We did a promotion with Washington State parks a few years ago, and we created what's called the GeoTour. And basically what what Washington State parks did is they worked with us to place 100 caches in 100 state parks across the entire state. And they worked with local cachers, and everybody made a special effort to make it a nice series of caches. Now the official GeoTour program, and it was once you find 50 of them, you could turn in your passport and get a special GeoCoin, like a commemorative coin from Washington State parks if you find all hundred of them. They had these rare gold GeoCoins.

01:08:29

Only 30 of them were available at the time.

01:08:34

It was just a fun way to partner with parks to have people explore Washington State. So many of those caches still exist. And if your listeners look up Washington State Park Centennial Geo tour, they could find a list to where all the parks are and access to see where all of those geocaches are. So those are some of the famous ones. I'm trying to think where else there's 28,000 caches in Washington State in different areas.

01:09:09

There's crazy ancient Lakes has a bit of a power trail. The ancient lakes trail out near Winachi. I think it is. Has a power trail. And power trails are series of caches that are about generally a 10th of a mile apart.

01:09:25

And so it's for people who are trying to, like, they want their numbers up, so they're going to go find a cash, go a 10th of a mile, find another cash, buy. I'll tell you, I know we're talking about Washington State, but in near Roswell there is what's called the Et Highway series, where along this highway there are over 2000 geocaches placed a 10th of a mile apart. And what people will do is they'll get a team together with a van and they'll drive this, and they have the van door open and one person's driving, one person grabs the logbook, one person signs it, and they do this like choreograph dance for 24 hours to see how many they can find in 24 hours. One of my coworkers here, they set out they found 1234 caches in 24 hours. And they're all expert cachers, but those are called power trails.

01:10:23

They're not for everybody. But again, it's a different kind of unbelievable experience. I'll tell you one more thing that's interesting is there's a concept called geoart where people will hide caches in such a way that on the map, when you look at the caches, it creates art. So in Nevada, there's an F 16. In Long Island.

01:10:48

There's a lighthouse. I'm trying to remember what we have. I should really know what we have in Washington State. But if your users look up, like on Google Geoart, and then click on the image search, you'll see just countless images that have been created by people using actual geocaches. And what people try and do is they'll go out and they'll say instead of having it all be the icons for the cache boxes, when you convert a cache, when you find a cache and you log it on the website or the mobile app, it becomes a smiley face in the app.

01:11:23

And so they try and convert the art into art made out of smiley faces. And it's another aspect of this that's crazy. All right, so one of the things that we were going to talk about is your Adventure Lab. Yes. Okay, what is the adventure lab?

01:11:43

So, Adventure Lab is a relatively new platform. It's a couple of years old. And basically what we did was we said, if you've ever gone to a new city, you can download tours on your mobile phone, like go to Central Park, and you can do a Central Park History tour or Alison Wonderland tour or whatever. And it's 24 99 for you and your family to go and do this tour. And it's interactive and things like that.

01:12:12

And what we recognize is that geocachers were using geocaching physical boxes to sort of bring people to special places. And wouldn't it be interesting if we created a platform to allow geocachers to create their own, and not just geocachers, but anybody to create a multimedia multistage experience in the real world? So what we did is we added the ability for people to using a builder app that's web based for today. You could go in and you could say, at this place, and you take a picture of the place. The Sword of Excalibur has been stolen in downtown Seattle.

01:12:53

We need you to go to the Space Needle as quick as possible. And you get to the Space Needle and it says, hey, the Sword of Excalibur has been stolen. Like, here's some information about the sword, here's some information about the Space Needle. How many concrete blocks are surround the Space Needle? And I think it's 21 or 24.

01:13:10

And if you get the answer right, it says, great, you got credit for this stage. Now we need you to go to CenturyLink sorry, climate pledge arena. And as you go to climate pledge arena, the device knows where you are, and when you get close enough, it says, okay, here's a little history of climate pledge. Not so much history because it's brand new. It used to be the key arena, whatever.

01:13:32

There's somebody waiting for you at climate pledge, virtually, of course, right? We need you to answer this question to prove that you're there. And if you answer the question, we're going to give you the next clue. So you can marry media, text, images, video, combined with questions and answers and location to create almost like a multistaged scavenger hunt. And as a creator, I can choose to require it to be linear, or it can be nonlinear.

01:13:59

So you can find them in any order, or I have to find them in order. So for a story driven adventure, maybe the creator wants me to find them in order for, say, an art history tour of the UW campus. Or there's a tour on UW in Seattle, the special trees of the UW campus. And it takes you to five, like a giant sequoia in the middle of campus, and it tells you about the tree. You can learn something, but you have to answer a question based on the location.

01:14:30

And so we put this tool we started by saying, all right, we know geocachers can do this, but we really want to give access to everybody, like, who has a story to tell, who wants to share their hometown history or special places where they grew up anyway. So the options are kind of endless. So we gave geocachers to start the ability to go create these experiences. And as of today, I think I looked yesterday, there's 48,000 of these worldwide. So if you download the app on iOS or Android, it's called adventure Lab.

01:15:11

You can create a free account. And almost every major city in the world has these now, because, again, it's a globally distributed community. They're comfortable with the tool set. And so they've built these multistage experiences for people to go out and enjoy. And you don't have to find a box.

01:15:31

You're not finding physical items. You are going to locations. You're consuming media. And then you have to answer a question, either a multiple choice question, a fill in the blank question in order to get credit. And what's interesting is for the people for whom stats are important, every stage of these experiences counts as a point within geocaching, they count as lab caches.

01:15:56

And so it was a way to engage geocaches with the platform. But we're hoping to have 50,000 of these worldwide before the end of this year, and they're free to play. So anybody can go and download the app and go see what experiences there are nearby.

01:16:18

It's a little bit more accessible, I think, than traditional geocaching, because you don't have the challenge of finding something or whatever, but you're having to answer questions, and it's based on location, and there is some navigation that's involved, but we're seeing quite a bit of adoption and people are really enjoying the platform. And I've seen people creating absolutely incredible things with it. There's the antietam battlefield in I think it's in Virginia or West Virginia, I'm not 100% sure. But they created this adventure where it was the site of this old Civil War battlefield, and they dressed in Civil War costumes, and they videoed themselves saying, like, hey, you're at this location. You're a spy, and you're, like, crossing enemy lines, and we need you to go to this location next and solve this.

01:17:08

And so it's this interactive, like they put so much time and effort into it. They're not getting paid to do this, but they're bringing people to this battlefield and they're giving them a cool experience. And so I was in Prague earlier this year and I went to look and say, hey, I wonder how many adventures are here in Prague? And Prague, the Czech Republic or Chechia now is a very active country for geocaching. And so I knew I was going to find some.

01:17:36

But if I tell you that the default view of the map. I couldn't see the map because it was covered with adventure lab pins on the map. It was that many that were available. And there were some cool tours. There was some learn about the architecture in Prague.

01:17:54

There's some story driven adventures there. But now pick a city and for the most part, there are adventures. I want to say there's six or seven, maybe four or five in Cape Town, in South Africa. They're so cool. They're all over Germany.

01:18:12

I'm sure there's one in Shellan. There has to be at least one. In Shellan, but I'm going to go check this out.

01:18:21

So we're going to shift gears away from geocaching to jokingly, the important things of the Kyle. Just kidding. Coffee. Well, you've been drinking coffee during this recording, right? I have been drinking coffee during this recording.

01:18:35

It's my first cup in the morning, and then I allow myself one cup in the afternoon or evening, depending on how caffeinated I'd like to be. Where do you like to go? Where's your go to place for coffee? I'll tell you, there's three go to places for coffee. There's the one that you mentioned earlier, which we don't have to focus on, but I can tell you that here in Fremont we have a coffee shop named Millstead that is very highly regarded.

01:19:10

They do a wonderful job. They take their coffee extremely seriously. They've been in this neighborhood for many years now and yeah, it's just wonderful. I know we have this thing, it's called Signal Awards. Signal is a frog.

01:19:28

It's our mascot. And he's got an antenna. And I want to say we have eight or nine mascot costumes that are in different locations around the world for all the big events and people put the costume on and they go and they take pictures with Signal and families and kids like them. And we have stuffed animals that people will dress up and attach to their backpack. Anyway, we have the Signal Awards here at headquarters, where if one of your coworkers does something sort of extra special, helps you out with a project, goes above and beyond the normal day, you fill out a form and you say, hey, I want to acknowledge this person for doing this thing.

01:20:07

And every month we have an all company meeting and we draw three names, three Signal Awards, and we read them aloud to the company just as a share. Here's this Goodwill that's being exchanged, and the sender and the recipient both get a gift card to Millstead. And I can tell you they're highly coveted because the coffee is really fantastic. And then the other place that I go, it's Queen Anne Coffee Co and it's up on Queen Anne. And I like that place because they have really good sandwiches.

01:20:39

The coffee is great, and it's just a few blocks from my house, so it's very accessible. So what's your coffee drink of choice?

01:20:51

Normally I would say I will do a non fat mocha. However, I really try and make that a special treat because it's a lot of calories and a lot of sugar. And so what I will normally have is like an Americano with a little bit of 2% milk. Okay, that's kind of where I go. Nothing too fancy.

01:21:13

How about you? What's your drink of choice? I'm black coffee or espresso?

01:21:22

Black coffee is pRothably my go to. I did a series of articles, 100 Cups of Coffee in 100 Days across the State. And I just went to coffee shops and had black coffee and talked about the shop. For I didn't complete the series. I burned out and I need to go back and recomplete it.

01:21:39

But it was a lot of fun to go and just try a coffee shop. And I wouldn't go through. This was not drive throughs. This was coffee shops where I could go in and sit down, not excluding drive throughs, but just sitting in a coffee shop. So it's funny, we have another project that has been out, I don't know, for 15 years now.

01:21:59

It's called waymarking. Waymarking. Waymarking.com is the website, and the concept is users will create categories of locations and then other players around the world will fill in specific instances of that category. And so what I mean is, there's a category called independent coffee shops, and it's coffee shops that are not Starbucks or the main brand. It's literally.

01:22:29

Maybe not. Dunkin Donuts. It's maybe they have one or two coffee shops. There's a category for dog friendly restaurants. There's a category for independent food chains, there's a category.

01:22:42

So there's over 1000 categories of locations. There are over 1 million way marks that have been submitted by the community over the years, but very early on people decided to become administrators of categories. And so I have been the administrator of the independent coffee shops category, I don't know, for twelve years or so. And what's really cool is that people are submitting their independent coffee shops from Slovenia or from Finland or from all these countries. And if you go into the Way marking website, you can see all of these coffee shops on the map around the world.

01:23:22

You can read about them. It's got metadata, so it'll say, what are the hours of operation? So anybody who submits a coffee shop has to submit a picture, the name, the coordinates, what are the hours of operation, what type of coffee do they serve, do they allow pets, things like that. Is there a drive through? And then those submissions get reviewed by the administrators to say, does this meet our category requirements?

01:23:45

And if it does, it gets published. There's a category for haunted attractions. There's a category for locations that books have been written about. Anyway, that's crazy. It's pretty crazy.

01:24:00

I'm a huge baseball fan, and there's a summer league collegiate player league here in Oregon, Washington and Alberta and British Columbia. There are 16 teams in the league, and the commissioner of the league, his name is Roth Nyer. Roth is based out of Portland. You may have heard of him if you're a sports guy at all. Roth was a writer for ESPN for a number of years, published book author and all this stuff.

01:24:23

Anyway, Roth was a guest on the show, we're talking about coffee. And I said, Roth so coffee? And he goes, Well, Portland. He goes, I'm a Portland guy, I'll send you my spreadsheet. And I just started thinking, what?

01:24:37

So about a week later he sent me a spreadsheet of approximately 350 Portland area coffee shops with his notes. And I'm just thinking, you just described Roth Nyer, but the guy's got 350 Portland. Something like nice ambiance the latte was. I'm like, I love coffee and I don't document it, but this guy's gone and he's got a Google sheet that he takes with him everywhere. He fills it out.

01:25:03

So that's kind of a kick on this last question. I'm going to let you go when you're not involved in the geocaching world, what do you and the family like to do for fun and excitement as it pertains to say, around Seattle area Washington State? Well, we have a dog, she's a nine and a half year old Portuguese water dog. And we like to go for a lot of walks. We walk around, I walk to and from work, and so we really try not to drive a lot.

01:25:33

And we'll go down to the Seattle waterfront and walk along Centennial Park. It's just so beautiful down there. Or we'll walk around Queen Anne or we'll go to Green Lake or Gasworks Park. There's just so much wonderful nature around to experience. So trying to get outside and just enjoy time outside is really one of the biggest pastimes that we have.

01:25:59

Awesome. Speaking of dogs, my 7th, he's seven months old as of today. Now are hearing him is telling me it's time to go outside. So, Bryan, I'm going to let you go because we've taken a lot of your time and this has been amazing. And I know we haven't even really scratched the surface, but where can my audience go?

01:26:17

To find out more about geocaching and all that you guys are doing? Your audience is welcome to visit us@geocaching.com. You can download the geocaching app to get started, or you can also download the adventure lab app to get started. And it's all free. You do not have to pay for a premium membership if you don't want one.

01:26:37

As you get into it. There's plenty of reasons to do that. And what I could say is I mentioned earlier we started, it was $30 a year for a premium membership. Here we are 20 something years later, and it's still $30 a year. So anybody?

01:26:53

That's great. Not necessary. Feel free to try it out. And whatever you do, find a reason to get outside and enjoy the world around us. Bryan, thank you so much for taking the time to sit with me today.

01:27:05

I appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on the show, Scott. I really appreciate that as well.

01:27:22

Join us next time for another episode of the exploring Washington state podcast. You.