Aaron: [00:00:00] How would you. Compare the complexity of learning this game to, some other classics that others might have in mind, be it chess or other games as a pretty hard game to really master, or how would you compare it? I would say in terms of complexity,
Brian: it's
Nate: Welcome to the Hey Good Game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day. I'm Nate Cadillac and I'm here with my co host Aaron Cardell. And today we are so excited to speak with Brian Reynolds, the co owner of The Bridge Teachers.
Brian is an actor, writer, director, and teacher who is devoted to making witty and engaging content, whether through his films and productions like Monopoly, An Origin of a Hero, or through teaching people about playing bridge, which is what we're going to be talking about today. The Bridge Teachers is a website tailored to helping beginners understand how to play bridge, like [00:01:00] myself because it's still a game.
As you'll find out, Brian, I don't play bridge a timeless game played with a classic 52 card deck with their website. A complete beginner can learn how to play bridge in just a couple of minutes. And further improve their knowledge with their vast library of con. Brian, we are so excited that you're here today.
Brian: thank you so much for having me. Of course, the moment we start the one phone that I hadn't put on silent goes off, so that's perfect. Yeah, no, I'm super excited to be here. I've loved games since I was a kid. like some of my first memories are playing games with my grandmother. So like talking about games is always like a passion of mine.
So I'm really excited to be here.
Nate: That's great. that's why we started this whole thing just to talk about games and have some fun. With that said, what's your favorite game to play?
Brian: So I can give the easy answer of Bridge, and I definitely do want to talk about Bridge, but I would say the most recent favorite game to play was Division 2, which is a third person isometric loot shooter.
Samantha, who's my wife and co founder of thebridgeteachers. com, we play together. It's interesting because the scaling on it [00:02:00] isn't that great for four people, but it's the scaling is perfect for two people. And we get on headsets, separate rooms, but we really like the tactical nature of it.
We haven't played it a lot recently, and we played it pretty intensely for about two years and got really good. Our communications became very like a cursory because we always knew OK, I know she's going to go to that cover spot. Cover my line of fire here. So really like that game.
I thought it was really in depth and nuanced. I thought that it was fun, running missions with your best friend who happens to be your wife. Who's An amazing gamer. Samantha is an amazing video game player. She actually used to run the healing team for our raid team in world of Warcraft, which we did for years and years.
And she's just an amazing gamer, which is actually one of the first things we bonded over. I would say that was my favorite game. I'm we're definitely looking for a new. We love co op. So it's like a lot of AAA titles [00:03:00] right now are coming out without co op or if they're co op, they're very PVP focused and we're much more cooperative, which I think is.
It's both self selecting into Bridge and also why we like Bridge is because Bridge is, at its core, a cooperative endeavor. You're definitely in competition with opponents, but you're playing with a partner. So I'm always on the lookout, I subscribe to so many YouTube channels which are like, these are the best games coming out and I'm like, does it have co op?
No. Okay. Nevermind. Because if I'm going to spend a significant portion of my time playing a game, I want to play it with my wife. I want to feel like we're a team. I don't really care if I'm running around ganking people doesn't really like interest me that much. I much prefer like the building of a team, the building of a system.
So
Nate: One thing we've learned through this podcast and just chatting with a bunch of people like yourself It's there's a community aspect to gaming and I think [00:04:00] most people seem to have if you can share that experience with someone else that's the best even though my wife and I are We play one of our own games quite a bit every day crossword all even though it's a sink We're always sharing our scores and you know I think that's why Wordle worked it out so well, I think there's just so much of that, that really brings a lot of joy to this whole experience.
Brian: Oh, for sure. Like I was into Wordle for a while and just having conversations about it. I'm not really into sports per se. I like playing them, but I don't really like watching them. So when people want to have conversations about what happened on Monday night or I guess the playoffs are happening right now.
Like everyone's talking about the playoffs and I'm like, Oh, it's not really a conversation that I can have. I've learned to fake it. I think any community, like I have friends who are, directors of photography and they send me, Instagram reels about the new Ari trinity Komodo [00:05:00] dragon camera that came out when the new Oh my God, can you believe the ISO they can do when the sensor is, 60 feet long?
And I'm like, awesome, great, fantastic. And it's they're super excited about it. And I'm just like, yeah. Okay. Can you believe it? Can you? Oh, can you believe it? Yeah, exactly. So yeah, so for me, it's games. If you want to talk about games and see, it doesn't even have to be game. I know, I find myself in social situations talking about games when people don't realize that they're playing a game.
I have a friend of a friend, just became a Delta pilot, and he just had gotten like his first schedule. And he was talking to me about how the schedule happens. It's pretty complicated, all the routes and this and that and the other thing. And he started talking about how. where he is in the order of selection, like a draft.
I was listening to him talk, [00:06:00] and I went, Oh, so the company is incentivizing you to do this and this by gamifying the system in this direction. He just started looking at me is it's not a game. And I'm like, but you literally described the traveling salesman program just mixed with a draft mixed with.
incentivizing your workflow. you're literally talking about a game right now. And I think that and then the conversation got really awkward. So then I asked him about airlines, and he got super happy. But to me, I see the whole world as a game. And again, is that because I've been playing games my whole life?
Or have I been playing games my whole life? Because I see everything as a game, everything. So
Nate: so Brian, Even though we're going to get into bridge and all of this, I've got a, I'm curious, like, how did your wife get you in a bridge when you were in college?
Brian: Yeah, so I knew my wife for about a year before we started dating.
We were friends, we were in the same friends group. And I gradually. I was young. So it's like my brain wasn't fully formed. It took me a while to [00:07:00] figure out like how smart she was. And also the other thing is it wasn't really like a situation where it wasn't a dating situation, right? It was just like, we were friends.
And then she went away for the summer, she came back. And I was like, I really was like, wow, I really actually want to date this person. Like I want to be more than friends. And I just, I'm not good at Subtext or anything. So I'm like, hey, do you want to go out? And she's also very direct. She's you mean like on a date?
And I'm like, yeah, like a date. Like just the two of us. Just, date. And she's okay. But you have to learn to play bridge first. And her incentive was her parents had always played kitchen table bridge, social bridge, but had never taught her. And then the summer before she went to college, they taught her the rules.
And so she really wanted to play the game, but it's a partnership game. You have to have a partner. The joke I always make is that having a good bridge partner is so important that I actually just married mine [00:08:00] just to make sure I'd have one. But, she did want to spend time with me and she was interested in me romantically.
But again, Why not incentivize the situation and get something, get another value add for dating this guy and said, you have to learn to play bridge. And my exact thought was, I will remember this for the rest of my life is, how hard can that be? And the answer was extremely hard. And the reason why was because there weren't the resources that we have now, completely.
Yeah. Different example, for years, I want to learn how to solve a Rubik's Cube. Like when I was a kid, Rubik's Cube became a huge thing. Everyone had a Rubik's Cube. And there were all these people could solve it. People were on television solving Rubik's Cubes, like on Can you believe that? Or you have to see this or whatever it was called.
And I just want to learn, but I never could figure it out. And the books were very confusing. And then, five years ago, there was a Rubik's Cube, [00:09:00] you could get that would literally You could hook it up to your phone and it would teach you the patterns. So I learned to solve a Rubik's cube in under four minutes.
I was like, okay, cool. That's awesome. So when Samantha and I were learning to play the bridge, cause their parents knew the rules, but they, they weren't tournament players or anything like that. It was exceptionally difficult. It was exceptionally hard because there wasn't really an avenue to learn.
So we struggled. We really struggled. We, and I stuck in not just because I wanted a dater. I actually fell in love with the game pretty fast, but yeah, I would say we struggled for two years. Two, maybe three years simply because we didn't even know what books to buy or who to talk to. And nowadays it's nowadays, let's say you really wanted to become an amazing chef.
It's have I got. a YouTube [00:10:00] channel for you, or if I got a Reddit or I've got all this stuff, so the information is there now, but worth it. in so many ways, we're still together. That was 32 years ago and played a lot of bridge since then. And, had a lot of amazing time.
Aaron: like Nate, I really haven't played a whole lot of bridge myself. I think I recall growing up being over at my grandmother's house. And I think she had like occasional bridge club where others would come over and they would play bridge together. So I think that was maybe my. My first exposure to the game, but also a novice to the game.
How would you compare the complexity of learning this game to, some other classics that others might have in mind, be it chess or other games as a pretty hard game to really master? Or how would you compare it? I would say in terms of
Brian: complexity, it's on the level of chess. So this is the whole thing, right?
This is the whole [00:11:00] reason why I like to talk about Bridge. Because Bridge is an older game, I think the average age of a regular Bridge player in the U. S. is 73 years old. So it's definitely an older game. There's a feeling within the community that We want good bridge players. I don't care if you're good at bridge.
Like I literally don't. The only thing I care about is are you having fun? And I think if you look at really successful games, whether it's things like Candy Crush or Pokemon or anything like that, right? These games where people. really enjoy playing them. The game designer, and the game company, and the distributor, they don't care if you're good.
Blizzard doesn't care if you're good at Hearthstone. They don't. They just want you playing, right? And so they make the entry into that world [00:12:00] of playing the game as easy as they possibly can. They want the app to be easy. They want the rules. They guide you through the rules piecemeal. I can't remember the last time a video game shipped without a tutorial.
I'm sure there are some examples, I just don't know of them, but it's like, how many times have you seen a flash up on your screen, use WASD to move, and it's we know, it's 2025, we know we're using WASD to move, but why do they do that, because they don't want you after 5 minutes with their game to get frustrated and be like, I don't want to play this anymore.
And then review bomb you on Steam and all that other stuff, right? Especially because as an older community, it's a community that's been playing bridge for so long. Like they watch a beginner make a mistake, and they want to fix the mistake. I don't care. Bridge is a game of mistakes. the greatest player to ever play the game Bob Hammond been interviewed a bunch of times he was in a doc and all this [00:13:00] stuff.
And he said in the documentary, the best bridge players in the world make a mistake on almost every hand. if your focus is to get people to be good at bridge, I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Aaron, let's say to me, I want to learn to play bridge. I'm like, awesome.
Samantha has a video that's 2 minutes and 2 seconds long on the rules of bridge. Give me 2 minutes of your time. Then she has a slightly longer one that's 10 minutes. So give me 10 minutes of your time. You'll understand the rules. Thanks. And usually what happens with students that become my students don't just go off and play bridge is they say they'll do that for a month or two they'll play bridge they'll go online i mean you can go online and play bridge for free 24 7 365 days a year you could log in right now make an account for free not my website it's called bridge base and you can play bridge you can play with robots you can play with a random partner, you could take your own [00:14:00] partner, whatever.
Usually what happens is after about two or three months of that, people go, man, I want to be better at this. Like I don't really enjoy, I feel like I'm getting my, head beat in. I want to be a little bit better. Now they go looking for information. Whether that's YouTube or books or whatever, and those people, they'll get better on their own.
Like I don't have to, I don't have to incentivize someone or motivate someone to get good at bridge. Just like I don't have to incentivize a director of photography to research a new lens, right? They're already there. But my whole thing is that we should have a huge pool of people who play bridge, I don't know, a couple times a year, or maybe they play, they play once a week with their friends, or they go online, I got an hour to kill, I'm going to go online and play some bridge, and are they going to be good?
No, just if I went online, if I went on chess. com, I used to actually be pretty good at chess when I [00:15:00] was a kid. For my age group, I was good for my age group. I wasn't like Magnus Carlsen or anything, but for my age group, I was pretty good when I was playing regularly. But if I went on chess. com right now and I played once a week, how good would I be?
Eh, not that good. Would I be having fun? That's the only metric that matters. Because why does chess. com have such a huge fan base? Why are we seeing a resurgence on YouTube is because people are, it's easy to do. If you want to learn, they make ease learning easy. And they don't care. They don't care if you're Magnus Carlsen, or somebody who barely knows how the horsies move.
They don't care. They're so welcoming. So that's what we're trying to do with bridge. if you like games, and you haven't tried bridge. I really feel like you're missing out, like Bridge is
Aaron: awesome. And I'm curious, just as we draw some of these parallels with chess, have there been any external factors like, at least in the chess world, Queen's Gambit on [00:16:00] Netflix, it's the COVID pandemic in general.
These are things that sort of drew more interest into learning chess and learning things. Have there been any similar sparks in the Bridge community as of late?
Brian: No, to a certain extent, I, Samantha and I have felt like there are other people who've worked really hard to try and get the game out there, right?
To get people to just see it, just put eyeballs on it. Samantha and I were in a documentary called The Kid's Table about these four millennials learning to play bridge. It's on all different sort of streaming platforms. I don't know where it currently is. It's, it's always in a new place.
It was an amazing experience, like trying to give people an idea of what would it be like to just jump both feet into the tournament world, which is intense. just like anything else you could pick, you could name something. I'm going to really get into Scrabble. It's okay, there's a whole world of tournament Scrabble, right?
Or knitting. It doesn't matter. But there hasn't been, and I think that's another [00:17:00] issue with having not just a smaller community, but an older community is there isn't that person putting together an app that makes bridge feel more like a video game or gets you more connected to the community. To the community and it helps grow and build the community.
That's definitely something we're trying to do. But we're super young for the bridge world, but we're not young people, right? I've been with my wife for 32 years. You can do the math. So it's like there needs to be a whole group of young, I'm talking, the youngest I've ever taught was six, six years old, and they loved the game.
And so just like most schools have a chess club, I would love for, most schools to have a bridge club. And I think that just like chess develops some pretty important life skills, there are so many life [00:18:00] skills that bridge develops. I think it makes people Like, I tell people bridge made me a better husband, no question.
Like I became a much the better a bridge player. I became the better husband I became. And I think there's so much of life baked into bridge. So switching, putting my director, writer, actor, had on Queen's Gambit really isn't about chess. That's what makes it such a cool story and such an amazing story.
It's about. This person who overcomes a very humble childhood, orphan, never knew her parents, became really good at this thing that most people can't, and goes out into the world and tries to overcome the evil Russian Empire to become a world champion. you just described Star Wars. So It doesn't matter if it was chess, it could have been backgammon.
It could have been, I don't [00:19:00] know, tiddlywinks. It could have been not even a game. And the thing is, that is there a story like that about bridge? No, there isn't. And people have always told me you should write a script about bridge. And I'm like, I know. Thank you. I'm good. I have other stories I want to tell that don't involve.
Games at all. I don't think I have any scripts about a game.
Nate: It seems ripe though for Something like that. I mean you think about just romantic. It's nothing about the technology of the game It's like the relationship right so you just package it up in a different way, but it feels like it's Because it's cooperative, because it has all of these pieces that are about relationships and partners and it feels like there's something.
Oh, totally there as a catalyst for this game.
Brian: Yeah. my writer brain kicks in people who go to dinner with me know that if I suddenly start staring at like the dessert menu, I'm not thinking about them anymore. I'm writing, but like already I can just tell you. It's about a girl who wants to be a champion bridge player, but like no one will give her the [00:20:00] time of day because she's a woman.
And there's this guy that she really hates who, is bagging on her, but then they have to become partners to try to win a championship in a mixed pairs event. And then they have to, learn each other's point of view and he has to stop being a misogynist and then she proves her worth. And then there's, second act is she thinks about quitting as dark as before the dawn moment, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
that's where I put
Nate: that in a chat GPT. And then, no, seriously, chat
Brian: GPT, fade in, please. But, yeah, call Mark movie.
Aaron: Totally. Yeah.
Brian: I think we'd go lifetime just so we could go a little darker hallmark. There's a little too much conflict in bridge for, for, maybe at the end, she can open a Christmas tree store and we can pitch it to hallmark.
Nate: so I going to What you've created with your family run business, it sounds like. Tell us about the, where the bridge teachers came about. What was the impetus for creating this? I think we've gleaned a little bit from what you have just [00:21:00] talked about, but it takes some effort to put this into action.
So where did that start?
Brian: Yeah. So we've been teaching for a long time. I think it's 22, 25 years, somewhere in that range. We've been teaching bridge for that amount. Our lessons have always been in person. They've always been, at most five people. Have we ever had more than five? Because Bridge is a game of four people, right?
So if you have a group of five that wants to take a lesson, you just switch person in and out every hand and, they're only sitting out for about seven, eight minutes, maybe ten. But the entire time, Samantha has always been extremely passionate about getting more eyes, getting more awareness of this game.
She has such a deep love for this game that she was like, how do we make it easier for people to play bridge? And I was like, okay, and to give you an idea of how long we've been working at this, our original idea was DVDs. Let's put together a video lesson series of [00:22:00] DVDs. We started going that direction.
Then that, that really wasn't the avenue. And we kept looking and then YouTube came along and we're like, okay, can we do like a video series? And it was just something that was on our radar for a while, but it wasn't didn't really fit into everything else we had going on, whether we were, making a feature film, or we were, we had another business, etc, And then two things happened simultaneously. Number one, the documentary happened, we were invited to be part of this documentary. And then a lot of the technology for having a lesson library that's accessible by subscribers, that technology came a long way. And then the pandemic happened. And when the pandemic happened, we had the technology to teach online for about five years before the pandemic.
We could have, but none [00:23:00] of our clients were interested. Like they were comfortable. It's having someone show up to your house at a regular time every week and teaching you was comfortable. And especially for an older generation, getting on zoom, solving any it problems. That's another entry point. and again, it's something we try to make very easy for people.
But we're trying to solve those problems. So people can either have access to taking with us on zoom or our lesson library. But yeah, so when the pandemic happened, we were able to talk our client base through, this is how it looks virtually. This is how we can still teach you, even though we're not allowed to be in physical contact with you for who knows how long, and then Samantha and I put together a recording studio in our home.
And we started filming videos for a while, I would literally move the cards physically. So I was like, we'd have a [00:24:00] camera pointed down at a bridge table. So she'd be talking and I'd be moving the cards around. So I got to hand act for a while. And that was just us going through iterations, right?
Iterations of what's going to work. And then. And she transitioned to purely virtual. So she'll have BridgeBase up on her screen and she'll be giving a lesson on a particular part of Bridge. And then, so when we've reached a point where we felt like we had a pretty robust library for a beginner, that's when we launched the website and we're like, you can come in and you can literally see every video that she has so far.
I think she's currently got nine in her editing queue. On various topics. And yeah, so the impetus was just like, how can we scale this upward? Especially because like I've said, my goal is to get teenagers to play this game. Yes. I want to support our seasoned citizens in terms of I've just retired and all my friends play bridge and I don't want to be left out.
I want that sense [00:25:00] of community. Great. We're here for you. I'd love to find out that, some school in Indiana purchased a subscription and all their kids watch our videos and the kids, send us editing tips. They can do stuff faster in CapCut than we can. That would be the dream. The dream would be to be getting, all these Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids saying, your videos could be a lot better.
It's cool, keep it coming. you giving me feedback on my video means you watched my video. I'm all about it.
Nate: Which actually is we've seen that happen for a lot of game creators who people are just playing their games and sending them videos or uploading them to TikTok or whatever.
And it's just free distribution and free traffic. So yeah, it's totally a thing that many people rely on.
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'm constantly in my family. I'm the research guy. So I'm constantly trying new software or learning new skills or things like that. And I'm always the person on a zoom with, I was just on a zoom this morning with someone I'm like, so here's the problem with [00:26:00] your software.
And they're like, Oh, tell us. And I'm like, I gave you know, my feature. feature problems and feature requests and all this stuff. I got done and there was just this long, awkward silence. And I said, did you hang up on me? Cause I couldn't see his camera. And I'm like, did you, do you hang up on me?
He's no, I'm just a little overwhelmed. And I'm like, okay, cool. Is everything okay? He's yeah, no, this is all great. I just, we have a meeting with the engineering team tomorrow. I'll tell them all this. I'm like, Okay, great, to me, it's a game. It's all a game. It's I like your software, but your software could be better.
Here's what I think could be better. And I could be wrong. I'm not some genius. But if I'm a customer, and I'm not, that's the thing, right? It's the bridge world thinks of themselves as I don't even know, like some kingdom or something, I don't know. And what we are is we're selling a product. Bridge is a product.
I want to sell you a product. I want you to buy [00:27:00] this moment of dopamine, this moment of problem solving, learning, growing, evolving, communication, social interaction, seven minutes of it. I want you to buy that from me. Now, how do I monetize that? I monetize that through, my website, which is subscription based and my private lessons, if that's something that you want to take from me, but I want you to buy the game of bridge because I want bridge to thrive.
I want it to have a much bigger audience, right? I don't get paid. If you go on BBO and make an account and play bridge all day, I don't get paid. I don't care. I'm still selling you that product. I'm selling you the game of bridge. So that's how we need to think about it as a community. We need to think of, we're selling, we're asking someone for their most precious resource, which is we're asking them for their time.
that's how we need to think about it.
Nate: What's your relationship with BridgeBase online? Is that, is it sounds like there's,
Brian: I'm just a consumer.
Nate: Okay.
Brian: I got to tell you, I have had very little [00:28:00] interaction with them.
Nate: what is your site versus BridgeBase online? that's where you play and that's where you.
Brian: BridgeBase. com is a website where you can go online and play bridge. They have several different ways to play bridge, everything from ACBL tournaments. So that's the American contract bridge league tournaments that you can play in. You can play casually, socially. So you can literally be like, take me to a table and it'll take you to a random table.
Your partner will be random. You can tell it, I have a partner and it'll take you and your partner to a specific table. So you can either play in tournaments, you can play socially, you can play with robots. They do have some pretty cool teaching features, but it's primarily like I want to play bridge. You go to this website.
Nate: So is this kind of the chess. com for bridge?
Brian: Totally. Absolutely. Now I'm not that familiar with chess. com's features, so I [00:29:00] don't know what other features chess. com has that would be correlated with some of the that BridgeBase has. I will say Total, I would love to go on this sidebar if I may. One of the biggest problems facing Bridge, in my opinion, is the rating system.
Now, I don't know how familiar you are with the rating system in chess, but it's like basically every time you win, lose or draw in chess, you're assigned a certain number of points, either positive or negative to your ELO score. And it's a pretty good gauge Of how good you are at chess, right?
So if someone says to me, Hey, Brian, how good are you at chess? I would say I'm probably like a 1400 or 1500. Elo player right now in this moment, right? That's way lower than my top rating when I was a kid. But I haven't played chess in 35 [00:30:00] years, right? So I'm not good. And if someone said to Aaron, what's your Elo score?
It was like, I'm 20 I'm 2097. I'm like, Oh, so you'd like just shy of federal master or whatever. And be like, Yeah, it's Oh, you're in the top 1 percent of people who play chess. Okay, great. And I'm going to lose if I play you. That's a pretty, yeah. I'm going to get my clock clean. If I play you, there's no way I'm going to win.
I think that's important. And the reason I think that's so important and I think why it makes chess. I think it's one of the reasons why chess is having this resurgence is because if I sit down to play chess, And I know my rating is 1450, let's just say, hypothetically, who do I want to play against? I want to play against anyone from, if I'm an average person, I want to play anyone from 1350 to 1550,
Nate: unless I'm having a really bad day and I want to play an 800 player.
Brian: Yeah. If you want to play an 800, [00:31:00] totally. I want to take somebody's lunch money. I want to give them a cookie and a wedgie and take their lunch money. Just like there are top streamers who have Smurf account. You'll see these. I pretended to have never played Hearthstone before, whatever, right?
If you're a 1450 player and you sit down to play, and you're playing against someone with a 2000 rating, like 99 percent of the population, they are now having a negative experience, where and the same thing, if you sit down to play against 800, you're gonna 99 percent of the time, you're gonna feel like it's a waste of your time.
So the rating system in chess does something very important from a neurological standpoint, which is we feel our best and learn our best when we are in a peer group that is closely aligned to our own abilities. I'm a huge neurological geek. I love stuff about neuroscience, especially when it comes to learning.
So what they found is that for you to learn [00:32:00] your optimal experience is to be in a group of people who are slightly better than you. Not way better, slightly better. That's your optimal learning experience is to be with people who are slightly better than you. Bridge has a problem, and the problem is called Master Points.
So Master Points are given to you anytime you do well in an event. I don't know how many I have right now. I have 1600. I think the person with the most right now is something like 45, 000 or something like that. And there's all these different colors. If you play in a regular tournament's black, if you play in a special tournament's red, gold, platinum, etc, right?
It's their way of trying to say that some events are tougher than others, which is fine. But here's the thing. Master points never go away. Ever. They just never go away. And also, you just accrue them. You just get them. it would be like saying, hey Brian, your [00:33:00] Speed Chess rating is 2200. I'm like, why is my speed trace 2200?
because when you played in the high school blitz championships back in 1989, that was your rating. I'm like, but I haven't played chess in 30 years. What are you talking about? 35 years. What are you talking about? Yeah, but that was your rating then. So that's your rating now. And it's We have a huge, problem with that, because number one, Aaron, let's say you decide you want to become a top level bridge player today.
You come to me and say, Brian, I want to be a top level bridge player. I'm going to spend 40 hours a week learning bridge. I'm like, cool, awesome. you can win stuff. You're going to win, but you're not going to see a rating go up. Your rating is going to go up very, slowly. You can play for five years and you'll still have less master points than someone who's been playing for 20 years.
That's number one. And number two, so it's not an accurate gauge of where you are. And number two, you don't, it's very hard to put people in groups where they are. experiencing bridge [00:34:00] at a similar level to their opponents. Now there's plus sides to that, which is I've gotten to play against world champions, which is awesome.
if you're a golfer, you don't get to go around a golf with Tiger Woods. that's not a thing. And I've gotten to play against world champions multiple times, which is cool. And that's great for me. But I'm not sure it's great for the game of bridge. I think there needs to be a rating system that makes sense.
I've talked to people about this. I think most notably, I had a conversation with a guy named Greg Humphries, who's a computer science guy. He's also a big bridge guy. And he was like, yeah, like bridge needs a rating system a lot like League of Legends, where you have a rating system. And it's an individual rating, even though you're operating in groups that a lot of times you don't choose the group.
So I'd love to see bridge. You can't scrap the MasterPoint system. You can't say, Oh, guess what, guys? The MasterPoint system is gone because you've got people who have spent 70 years. Literally 70 years collecting master points, right? You can't take it away from them, but I think you could [00:35:00] add it in.
Aaron: Be like, it sounds like a problem that needs to be solved for sure.
And, hopefully bridge basal partner with somebody along the way or come up with a system themselves, like it's, Broad based adoption. Sounds like that would, that'd be great facilitate things. Brian, one of the things that kind of stands out to me is, it seems like you and your wife, Samantha are multifaceted creators got your toe in filmmaking and just a number of different creative disciplines.
I think that probably resonates a lot with a lot of our listeners who also probably create along multiple disciplines as well. I want to bring that back to the business side a little bit. You talked about the subscription revenue. You've got, Samantha's got books out there. There's one on one lessons.
As you think about monetization of the bridge teachers, is most of that coming from the subscription revenue? Is a lot of it from [00:36:00] books or lessons or What's the composition there.
Brian: Yeah. So I would say that right now the monetization is upside down from where we want it to be. So we're still, most of our revenue is still coming from one on one lessons or group lessons where we're exchanging our time for money.
And I would say that for lots of reasons, that's not our end goal. number one, it's not scalable at all. Like I, there's only one of me when I was, I actually got to be coach of the UCLA bridge team for three years. And there was a young man who wanted to become a bridge teacher. And I was like, okay, you can shadow me for a week and decide if it's what you really want to do.
He quit after three days. And he's how long would it take me to learn to how to do what you do, to learn how to teach people? And I'm like, I don't know, man, if you like went to every lesson I had for two years, maybe, I don't know. So it's I'm not duplicatable. And I'm only the [00:37:00] second best bridge teacher in the world.
Samantha is the best bridge teacher in the world. I'm second best like that's not and it's not close, right? So it's and there are a lot of really good bridge teachers out there. I'm not saying they're not, but we're just really, good at number one beginners who are really hard to teach.
But getting back to the monetization thing, staying on point, I do tend to get passionate about things. So right now, a little bit of money from YouTube. We got a channel. I think we're over a thousand subscribers now, which is super exciting. Samantha works so hard on that stuff. We've got plans to get more quick hits on TikTok to try and or whatever TikTok, whatever happens with TikTok, but more social media engagement.
So a little tiny bit of that. And then a small amount off the subscription site, which is obviously our end goal is for people to be on the subscription site for lots of reasons. Number one, everything we teach is there, right? So Samantha and I aren't [00:38:00] cheap. If you want a private lesson, we're not cheap.
And there are people who are so incentivized to become good at bridge that they're willing to pay that price point. I'm studying singing. I love singing. And there's a teacher who I absolutely am obsessed with. I think he's amazing. And I think he's 750 an hour for a lesson, but I've got his subscription site.
I follow his exercises every day and thinking like, Hey, for my birthday, maybe I'll get a lesson from him. Sure. I know I'm not as expensive as him, but at the same time, If private teaching was his only avenue to his wisdom, I just wouldn't get his wisdom. So we'd like to invert that wedding cake.
We'd like the number one thing to be. We have a student who comes to us, says, Hey, I need you every day. We want. a broad subscriber base. For monetization, it's the most scalable. It's the best way we have to serve our clientele. Most people don't need a private lesson. They don't. Most [00:39:00] people won't want A private lesson.
So how can we serve our client base in that situation? for 10 bucks a month, you have access to our entire video library. And that video library grows every single week, right? And we're big on Subscriber interaction. If someone sends Samantha an email and I didn't understand what you said about stamen, Which is a convention in bridge. She'll do a pickup video and put it up. Here's somebody who said, this is confusing. I want to, I don't understand. She'll break it down another way. That's the other thing is we've been doing this so long that we can. If you pick a topic in bridge, I can probably break it down somewhere between five and seven ways, depending on how you think everyone has a different style of thinking, right?
So if I say, this is saying this and you go, I don't get it. It's okay, I can relinquish it. I can relinquish it. I can relinquish it. So a lot of what we're doing with our video [00:40:00] library is there's only so many topics in bridge, right? I've always said I could teach a parrot to do my job. If it could learn 17 phrases.
It just has to know which phrase to say at which point, but really, I just say the same 17 things all day. And to go back to, way back to the beginning of what you're asking me, like, how long does it take to get good at Bridge? It really depends on how good you are at understanding context. If you can understand context, and the nuances that go into context, and you pay very careful attention to context, you can get good at Bridge pretty fast.
If you either ignore context or I have students who literally don't want to think about context And it's then bridge is gonna be a slog. So monetization, definitely subscriber base wants to be, we want that to be the biggest thing and we want people to log on and learn at their own pace, all that stuff.
Aaron: Maybe two brief followups on that. And [00:41:00] these can be quick answers, but just curious, are you running into any supply demand issues where you're. The demand for lessons is way more than you can provide in terms of supply. So that's, question one. Question two is just
Brian: So to answer your question, so the first thing is, Samantha's always stressed out in terms of is the library base large enough, and also is it advanced enough?
So if you come to me and you say I've never played cards before in my entire life but I want to learn to play bridge. It's okay, I know that our library is probably going to tide you over for a good six months to a year. I just know that our library is that robust that it's going to be at least a year before you're like, I need more info or I want more nuance or I want more advanced topics.
So Samantha is always trying to seek to add more intermediate to advanced topics. because if you come to me and say, I've been playing bridge and tournaments, I know I [00:42:00] probably have about two months. Maybe three before you're looking at my video library going, yeah, this isn't enough for me to keep my subscription.
So then it's a question of how do we value ads? So you still want to have a subscription? And how do we continue to build out our library so that we have a longer life cycle, a subscriber, if I get a new subscriber, I want to keep them for, as long as possible, let's say, I want to keep them for a year and a half, I can probably pull that off today.
But the goal is to keep you for three years, four years, five years. Whereas with a more intermediate player, our life cycle of subscriber right now is too short for our liking. We want it to be longer just in terms of the video library.
Aaron: Cool. And, just back to the kind of multifaceted creator, as you think about the stack of your income as a couple, how much is this able to support and how much is everything you're doing around bridge able [00:43:00] to support the rest of your creative endeavors?
Brian: That's a really good question. Okay, so how bridge funded my first feature film, we shot during COVID crew of eight. I directed Morgan produced Samantha was a CFO, a lot of friend equity, we paid everybody. We were SAG signatory. We did it right. Everything post was professional graded. We had a triple a title composer do with the music.
He did over an hour of music. We got a huge Frid friend discount, actually met him through the bridge documentary, which was cool. Friend of a friend. And luckily he loved thrillers. I wrote a psych thriller called the nanny. We're currently have a sales agent who's trying to find us distribution and sell different markets.
Bridge funded that. Now, as the website currently stands, there's no way Bridge can fund my second film because second film, we want to [00:44:00] attach bigger talent to it. We want a bigger crew. I think my ideal crew for the next one would be like somewhere between 15 to 20 crew. There were definitely some key roles that we I wore a lot of hats.
Some days I was doing crafty. I did all the location scouting for the film. This is a total sideboard. You can edit this or not. But again, going back to games as a first time film director, because I've directed a lot of theater and I've done short films, but as a first time featured film director, I was terrified.
I was absolutely terrified. Ah, I do not want to mess this up. So I was doing all location scouting. I checked out about 1700 properties between Santa Monica and Alabama. And as far North as Montana, one location, thriller, and three people in a house basically, and tried to find this house. And I found this house, it's about a four hour drive from where I live.
And I was like, You know what I'm going to [00:45:00] do when I go down? We're going to check this house out. I'm going to take my iPad and I'm going to scan the entire house grounds garage. It's about five acres. I'm going to scan the entire thing into LIDAR, which I did. Then after we signed the contracts, I had the LIDAR.
I had, there's a architecture company that'll take those LIDAR scans and we'll turn it into a 3d model. That's accurate down to a 16th of an inch. So five acres down to a 16th of an inch. I dropped that into virtual reality. And then I had all the actors get measured. This is COVID. So they had to measure themselves.
And then I had them, our costume designer, Morgan, sent them the shoes. I'm like, put the shoes on. Then I dropped them into virtual reality. And then I storyboarded the entire movie. in virtual reality with the location I knew I was going to use. So by the time we arrived on set, my DP and I had storyboarded the [00:46:00] entire film and exported to QuickTime.
So you could actually watch our movie before we ever got to set. And so we found some fun things like, Oh, I want to do this. I want to pan over here. It's yeah, except they just put the camera through a wall. It's Oh, that shot's not going to work. So we solved all these problems in pre production before we ever arrived at the set, which is why we were able to film almost 10 pages a day, which was insane.
I never want to do that again. Thank you. But that was nuts. Our actors killed it. Wow. Definitely don't want to do that again. So yeah, so bridge can't fund the next one because the next one is, another order of magnitude. In terms of price point. So that's what we're currently doing right now as a production company.
Tubeman. com T U B E M A N. com. We're looking for funding for the next script. I have 12 scripts ready to go in my hard drive of various budget points. I'm always writing new ones. I just finished one a month ago. I got another one about [00:47:00] halfway done. I write. And I love to write. So, yeah, so Bridge, has been incredibly lucrative and it has been sustaining, it's been the ultimate survival job for an actor, writer, director living in Los Angeles.
I fell into it totally by accident, moved out here to be the next big thing, be the next, Matt Damon, whatever. And we were playing at a bridge club. And this woman says to me, I really like how you teach, because she would come up and ask me questions, right? She's Hi, I'm, so and so we, what should I do on this hand?
I'm like, Oh, you should think about this. And she's I really like that. We can teach my friends. And I'm like, sure. And she's we'll pay you. I'm like, then yes. And showed up at this lovely house and taught her friends. And then they told their friends. And within two years, I had a business, it was, [00:48:00] which was weird.
And then Samantha was working this really horrible data entry job. Samantha's amazing writer as well. We write scripts together and she also writes her own stuff. And she was working this terrible data entry job. Horrible. I said, you're better at teaching than I am. Let me get you some clients. And she's I don't think you can do it, but okay.
Within two years, she was booked. So it's been an amazing survival job. Bridge has been an absolute, plus I love doing it. I not only love playing, I love teaching. I love that moment where I'd say something, someone their face goes, Oh, I'm like, yeah. Give me that. Just mainline that into my veins.
I love that moment for people,
Aaron: often has multiple passions, there's always this goal of using games to, to fund life. So that's really great.
Nate: So Brian, thinking about just the bridge teachers and. when chest. com launched, [00:49:00] they couldn't raise any funding. They didn't know what the market was going to be.
They had no, it was, they deemed it very small. And so did all the investors they talked to. And even before the queen's gambit, like they five X their revenue after the series launched overnight. And so there's just a lot of you have a sense of the market. Maybe something changes in the market.
Maybe there's instead of. Magnus Carlsen and Alexandra Botez of chess world. someone comes out and just completely opens up the world for a bridge. How many players are playing today? And I'm curious, like what's the limit for the bridge teachers?
Brian: Yeah, that's a great question. So the last number that I saw, which I can't vet this number.
take it with a massive grain of salt, but was that 37 million people in the U. S. play bridge? There aren't nearly that many tournament players. So when I think about my demo, I [00:50:00] don't think about a tournament player. If you're playing at the bridge club. Our website will help you. If you're playing in tournaments regularly, you will need to take a private lesson from me or Samantha or from another professional, right?
There's a ton of professionals out there who give private lessons who are really great. And most of them, I'd say a lot of them are better players than I am. So if you're a pretty advanced player, I'm probably not the teacher for you. but in terms of our subscription base, the potential is massive.
I mentioned earlier, it should be in schools. 100%. Bridge should be in schools, not just because I would love a subscriber base that involved every single child in America, which I definitely would. And since, it's a global community now, the world is so connected at a level that I've never seen in my lifetime before.
if you want to subscribe to us in Nova Scotia, log on. Anywhere you've got internet access, here we [00:51:00] are. I'd say we probably have two main demos. We have people who are either retiring or find themselves in a position where they have excess time and they want a game that they can really, learn and get passionate about.
And have fun with so that's typically older, let's say 55, whatever. And then you have younger, because, Samantha and I used to play a lot of tournament bridge, and it's a time commitment, right? It's anything else. So if you've got already a life where you have a ton bunch of time commitment, you're probably not going to be able to dedicate a lot of time to bridge now at the same time.
I have friends who they're married, they got kids, and they still manage to get their League of Legends in once a week. So it's still something you can do for fun. And we were great for that. But yeah, I would say, so I'll just share some internal numbers. our goal is to have 10, 000 subscribers by the end of 2025.
If we hit that goal, I would consider us to have an incredibly successful year. Obviously, anything more than that would be [00:52:00] amazing. Anything less than that would not be surprising, simply because it's a newer, It's an old game, but it's a newer sort of like awareness that we're trying to build with people.
So that's our, we had a lot of end of year discussions about where we've been as a company and where we're going. And that was the number we set, which was You know, 5, 000 by end of June and 10, 000 by end of 2025. And I don't think that's unreasonable. I'm not a big fan of sending huge, unreasonable goals, right?
That would be like what 0. 003 percent of all bridge players in the U S or something like that. I didn't do the math, it'd be a drop in the bucket.
Nate: along the way to 10 K too. it's probably other opportunities. I don't know how much we explored sponsorships and things like that, but you probably have some additional revenue streams once you, as you grow outside of the subscription numbers itself.
Brian: that's a whole new world for [00:53:00] us. because I have Samantha and I have been just Going, we've been door to door salesmen, basically. So being on the internet and having a YouTube channel, other stuff, if people are following us, but not subscribing, then there might be other revenue streams available.
I will say that right now at the state of bridge, there just isn't a lot of money in it. The most of the bridge suppliers, right? You want to buy a bridge book. It's been very consolidated down. There aren't a million people offering that. and also there's just not a lot of money in their budgets for that.
but maybe this now that I'm thinking I'm processing in real time, that might be something where we think. we don't have to be sponsored by a bridge company. I'm super people spend money on other things. Yeah, I'm super passionate about nutrition. Like you want to talk about nutrition, you want to talk about complete proteins versus, plant based proteins versus I'll talk [00:54:00] about that all day.
So maybe it can be other things, health, nutrition. Wellness, long term fitness, become
Nate: a better bridge player with this plant based routine, these 10 plant based recipes.
Brian: The thing about bridge and the thing that I really tell people is bridge is like lifting weights for your brain. The old way of thinking of you get a certain number of brain cells, you're done, that's gone.
Like they've done so many studies where you can actually grow parts of your brain, you can grow your memory. There's this really interesting study of London cab drivers, and I don't know how familiar you are with London cab drivers, but they have to take this test called the knowledge. And basically, they have to know the entire map of London in their head, including all the changes because they're changing the streets all the time, the one ways, all this other stuff.
And until they pass the knowledge, they can't become a cab driver in London. And what they found is their hippocampus actually is bigger than most people. It's like they've got like muscles in [00:55:00] their head. There's been a ton of studies where It's
Nate: like they have Google Maps in their head.
Brian: Yeah, their brain literally had to grow to accommodate that knowledge.
And like more mass. I'm not talking like ephemeral, I'm talking like, literally, they have more mass in their hippocampus. Oh, wow. That's crazy. Because what are we taught? We're taught, Oh, you got a brain. Good luck. But what they found is that people who play bridge regularly have 90 percent less Alzheimer's, senility, dementia, all this other stuff.
So If you want to have a healthy brain, I hope you choose bridge because I think bridge is amazing. But crossword puzzles, games, all this kind of stuff actually keeps your brain healthier longer. Like I use my brain so much like the idea of my brain not working anymore is terrifying to me. Like Alzheimer's is like one of the most terrifying things I can think of way more than losing a leg or a foot or something like that if my brain stopped working, ah, gross.
So bridge has been shown to be actually good for your long term mental health in [00:56:00] pretty severe ways.
Nate: Brian, it was such a pleasure having you here today is. People want to find you online, tell them where to go.
Brian: Thebridgeteachers. com and also our YouTube channel. Feel free to shoot us an email. We love to hear from people.
And if you have a specific question, whether it's about the game in general, how to get started, please reach out. Samantha's always creating new videos, but thebridgeteachers, plural, dot com. And we're there.
Nate: Love it. thanks so much for being on the pod. And we appreciate it. And I am going to be learning bridge soon.
Brian: Yay.
Aaron: Aaron,
Brian: you coming along? You're going to, you're gonna learn bridge.
Aaron: I'm so far behind on chess. I got to pick a lane, but,
Brian: I'll just tell you this right now. So they've found that people who do cross disciplines actually improved both quicker.
Aaron: Okay. I'll buy into that. I'll buy into that. Elite athlete.
Yeah. Yeah. A whole multi sport athlete. Yeah. Yeah. Elite athletes don't self select into one particular sport until 17 or
Brian: [00:57:00] 18. So that's right. Yeah. So maybe what we'll do is, you can beat me up at chess and then I can, we can play some Brit. there
Aaron: you go.
Brian: Awesome.
Nate: That was great. Thanks, Brian.
Thanks, Brian.
Brian: Thank you guys. Really appreciate it.
