Gadget Prices Are Getting Ridiculous

Summary

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast

Episode: "Gadget Prices Are Getting Ridiculous"

Date: April 17, 2026
Host: Marques Brownlee (MKBHD)
Co-hosts: Andrew Manganelli, David Imel, (with Ellis and Adam)
Theme: Tech industry trends—escalating gadget prices, new product launches, UI quirks, and major industry updates.

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Episode Overview

This episode is a whirlwind tour through new gadgets, price hikes, quirky software bugs, and some important industry updates. Marques Brownlee and the Waveform team dive into Samsung’s rising prices, Google’s long-overdue fix for back button hijacking, GoPro’s ambitious new camera direction, some smartphone oddities, and a flurry of “circle back” stories from previous episodes. Gadget lovers and tech-heads are in for a rapid-fire romp through how price, design, and practicality collide in today’s consumer technology.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. "Did They Even Test This?" — Global Gadget Quirks

• Xiaomi Leicaphone and Untranslated Features
  • The global version weather app's "feels like" temperature is always in Celsius, even when main temperature is switched to Fahrenheit.
  • Similar translation failures exist throughout global model.
  • Quote (05:01)
    David: “You can select the temperature units, select Fahrenheit. But the weather widget will always show the ‘feels like’ in Celsius.”
  • Lack of real-world testing for non-Chinese markets is a persistent problem in global gadgets.

---

2. iPhone Air: Two Weeks In — Is It Worth the Tradeoffs?

• Light, Thin but Not a Camera Powerhouse
  • MKBHD has switched to the black iPhone Air, mainly due to preference for color and for testing.
  • Main positives: Unbelievable thinness and lightness; ease of forgetting the phone is even in your pocket.
  • Major negatives: Weak battery life; missing ultra-wide and telephoto camera versatility.
  • Quote (07:45)
    Marques: "I've gotten really used to the thin and lightness of it. It's not just the thinness, it's the lightness that really gets you."
  • Quote (08:29)
    David: "The battery's so bad. Like, I'm used to a good battery and this one ... at 1pm I was at like 12%."
  • Community data: 50% of listeners prefer telephoto as the secondary lens.
  • Both Marques and David would prefer a telephoto added, but expect Apple to go with an ultra-wide next generation.

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3. Samsung’s Move: New Foldables, Even More Model Creep … and Price Hikes

• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 "Wide" and S27 "Pro"
  • Samsung is racing to pre-empt rumored Apple wide-folding iPhone by pushing their own “wide” foldable.
  • S27 Pro fills the gap between standard and Ultra models, with fewer features (notably missing the S Pen).
  • Marques analogizes this mid-tier model to the Cadillac "Vistiq"—all about catering to every possible price point.
  • Quote (21:17)
    Marques: “That's exactly what this is. S27 Pro. It's going to be the same size as the Ultra. I just don't need to carry around that extra S pen and spend the extra money on it. ... It's such a good analogy.”
• Samsung Quietly Raises Gadget Prices
  • Across phones and tablets, prices have spiked up to $280, with the Z Fold 7 now hitting $2,500 for top models.
  • The official excuse: global memory shortages (though Samsung makes its own memory).
  • Echoes earlier pricing moves by other manufacturers.
  • Quote (22:42)
    David: "Samsung has jacked up the price of almost a dozen Galaxy phones and tablets ... most of their tablets went up in price too..."

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4. Google Finally Fixes "Back Button Hijacking"

• A 10-Year-Old UX Annoyance Gets Addressed
  • Sketchy web pages commonly highjack browser back button functionality, keeping users trapped on junk pages.
  • Google will now treat this as a malicious practice—sites can be down-ranked in search results.
  • Quote (28:06)
    Andrew: "The funniest part of the whole release of this is they said they've noticed a rise in this behavior. This has been going on for like 10 years."
  • Team’s tone is relief mixed with incredulity at how long it took.

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5. GoPro’s Big Pivot: Cinema-Grade Action Cams

• Mission One and the Interchangeable Lens System (ILS)
  • GoPro launches its first non-Hero camera in 22 years: the Mission One.
  • Big features: 1-inch sensor, 8K open gate, interchangeable Micro Four Thirds lens mount, tons of accessories for pro workflows.
  • Limitations: The ILS version lacks autofocus (manual only), making precision use-case dependent.
  • Quote (30:41)
    Marques: “But now with this larger sensor they've made like an interchangeable lens mount version ... everything I ever wanted from a GoPro.”
  • Quote (34:09)
    David: "The sad part about these mics is that they do not do 32 bit float like the DJI ones do."

---

6. Google Releases Spotlight for Windows

• Universal Search and Screen AI
  • New floating window widget for Windows, combines local file search and Google Drive search.
  • Seen as a better hybrid alternative to Microsoft Copilot.
  • Quote (37:00)
    David: "Dare I say this is just a better version of Copilot..."

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7. AI Bubble: Allbirds’ Bizarre AI Pivot

• From Shoes to GPU Cloud Services
  • Failing shoe company Allbirds announces they're selling to focus on “GPU as a service” and will rename as “New Bird AI.”
  • Team calls out the absurdity: classic AI bubble behavior.
  • Quote (39:12)
    Andrew: “Everything I said had to have a line that said this is real. ... [They're] going to pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure with a long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU as a service.”

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‘Circling Back’ — Follow-ups on Earlier Stories

1. Khaby Lame’s “Billion Dollar” AI Likeness Deal

• Paid in stock, which tanked after hype-induced run-up. Structurally similar to crypto rug-pulls.
• Quote (46:53)
  Marques: “It was a rug pull. It’s very similar to what happens in crypto coins.”

---

2. NZXT Flex PC Rentals — Predatory Model Exposed

• Class-action suit settlement for scamming PC renters, especially minors and gamers.
• Some rented PCs had specs quietly downgraded; debt collection issues even for those who had paid.
• Quote (51:01)
  David: "This is extra lame because ... they’re probably kind of targeting 15 year olds."

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3. Pentagon/FCC and the “Router Ban”

• Netgear gets conditional approval to resume selling routers in the US until Oct 2027, despite initial fears that all non-US-made routers would be banned.
• Quote (52:45)
  David: “So I'm not saying this was a bribe, but I'm not saying it wasn’t a bribe."

---

4. Right to Repair: John Deere Settlement

• $99M settlement for farmers: John Deere forced to allow offline diagnostics and access to repair documentation, albeit via subscription/licensing.
• Quote (56:50)
  Andrew: “This still in the right to repair world has got to be one of the biggest wins, whether it’s a perfect win or not.”

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5. Google Gemini on Mac—Hot Off the Press

• Rolling news update: Gemini "Spotlight" equivalent now available for Mac.

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Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

• 05:01 (On Xiaomi Leicaphone bug):
  David: "The weather widget will always show the feels like in Celsius."
• 08:29 (On iPhone Air battery):
  David: "The battery’s so bad. ... At 1pm I was at like 12%."
• 21:17 (On S27 Pro analogy):
  Marques: "That's exactly what this is. S27 Pro. It's going to be the same size as the Ultra. I just don't need to carry around that extra S pen and spend the extra money on it."
• 30:41 (On GoPro Mission 1):
  Marques: "Everything I ever wanted from a GoPro."
• 28:06 (On Google's back button fix):
  Andrew: "This has been going on for like 10 years."
• 46:53 (On Khaby Lame deal):
  Marques: “It was a rug pull. It’s very similar to what happens in crypto coins.”
• 51:01 (On NZXT Flex PC rentals):
  David: "This is extra lame because ... they’re probably kind of targeting 15 year olds."
• 56:50 (On John Deere right to repair):
  Andrew: "This still in the right to repair world has got to be one of the biggest wins, whether it’s a perfect win or not."

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Important Timestamps

• 03:22 – "Did They Even Test This?" Xiaomi Leicaphone bug
• 07:00 – iPhone Air Post-Review Discussion
• 10:18 – Battery life complaints, camera tradeoffs
• 18:00 – Samsung Z Fold 8 Wide and S27 Pro rumors
• 22:42 – Samsung price hikes, memory supply talk
• 26:22 – Google fixes back button hijacking
• 29:17 – GoPro Mission 1 ILS Camera Feature Breakdown
• 37:00 – Google Spotlight for Windows
• 39:12 – Allbirds’ AI pivot
• 45:42 – "Circling Back" (past story updates)
• 53:54 – FCC/Netgear and router imports
• 54:55 – John Deere Right to Repair Settlement

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Closing Segment: Sports/Tech Crossover

Bryson DeChambeau’s 3D-Printed Golf Club Saga

• Uses a custom 3D-printed five iron at The Masters; explained with a techie lens.
• Also discussed: Augusta’s ban on smartphones and cameras—preserving the “OG” experience.

Quote (74:03):
Marques: “When you see photos of the Masters, it is a golfer hitting a shot, and everyone, instead of holding their phones, is just watching. ... Such a blast from the past.”

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Podcast Trivia Segment (Throughout)

• 80:34 — GoPro's non-camera adventure: The GoPro Karma drone (2016-2018)
• 82:00 — 32°C equals 89.6°F

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Summary

"Gadget Prices Are Getting Ridiculous" covers a broad sweep of current tech headaches, from runaway pricing to product confusion and long-overdue software fixes. The team brings expertise, irreverence, and nuanced commentary—helpful data for buyers, plus insight into why some things are just so broken. The episode balances technical breakdowns with user-centric anecdotes and the kind of skepticism only longtime tech reviewers deliver.

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For listeners:
If you want an episode that bounces from critical industry news to the bizarre (Shoes-to-AI pivots!), sprinkles in product impressions and fixes for 10-year-old annoyances, and wraps up with a golf-tech crossover—this one’s for you.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Here you're not the predator, you're the prey.

[A]

Prey, prey, prey, prey, prey. Critics are saying it's epic, stunning and breathtaking. Many have come here, none have survived. Badlands now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney. Rated PG 13.

[C]

You know a good way to tell the difference between.

[D]

Between what?

[C]

Black bear and a grizzly bear?

[D]

If it's alive after 200 cups.

[A]

Yo, what is up, people of the Internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques.

[C]

I'm Andrew.

[B]

I'm David.

[A]

Today feels like a little bit of a. I'm not going to say throwback episode, but like a callback episode because we got a whole bunch of stuff that might sound like it was from months, years ago, but it's all new. For real, for real update. We're gonna talk about Samsung foldables, Google fixing something that should have been fixed 10 years ago, GoPro launching some new cameras, Samsung price hikes, and a bunch of updates from existing previous stories that we've seen and talked about in the past. And also I'm gonna try to explain something that just happened last weekend in tech terms. It's in the sports world though.

[C]

It is.

[A]

It'll be a challenge.

[C]

But first, well, so we actually have something before. Did we even test this? Oh, which is if last week you noticed our audio only episode had four and a half minutes of ads before the episode started playing with like 10 to 15 second giant pauses in between them. That was our fault. If you want to know, we only run two 30 second pre roll ads before the show starts because we have two ad locations for pre rolls. And. And last week when we were cutting the ads out of the episode, accidentally named the full clip of all of the ads together after one of the sponsors, therefore uploading it to the 1/32 ad location. Then giving 4/4 ads in that spot. So that's an oopsie. I wonder who did that. Sorry.

[B]

I got a few messages from people saying what the heck is go. What did you guys do? Why do you have all these ads?

[C]

Got one from someone and every time it's the first person who says it. I go, something must have been wrong with Spotify. And then the second one comes in and I go, I need to investigate.

[E]

My favorite comment was someone commented on Spotify and said, bro is giving us time to reflect after

[C]

I was cracking up.

[B]

That was.

[C]

So, yeah, our bad should be fixed by now. Couple companies got some free promotion, I guess just in the midst of total confusion.

[B]

Yeah, happens.

[C]

But yeah, we're good. And David, you do have a. Did they even taste.

[B]

I do actually have a couple. I'm just gonna do one today. Cause we're gonna save the best for not this week. This one's funny. So as we know, there are many Chinese phone brands, right? And some of them eventually bring some of their phones to the western world, to global markets, you might say. One of these phones is the Xiaomi Leicaphone that you just reviewed, I believe.

[D]

Wait, it's not a phone. You just said it's Leicaphone, but it's not a phone.

[B]

Oh, it's like a Leica phone.

[D]

Damn.

[B]

Anyway, so the Xiaomi Leicaphone, there are two models. There's a Chinese model, which I believe is the one Marquez reviewed. Yeah, there's also a global model. I was hanging out with my friend Michael Fisher, friend of the show. He is also putting out a video about this that should be out by the time the pod goes live. And I think he said he's going to mention this, but. But I just found this so freaking funny when he showed it to me. So you know, clearly when they're making the global software, they don't generally care as much about the global market version of the phone because they sell the most of them in China. So they made the weather app. But I guess during making the weather app they forgot to change the coding of the feels like to be able to reflect Fahrenheit. So on the screen of the phone you'll have the weather widget and it says like 82 Fahrenheit, but it says feels like 28 degrees.

[C]

So. So you can change the weather to be Celsius or Fahrenheit, but then the feels like it's still is unable to be changed.

[B]

So here's a couple screenshots. You can select the temperature units, select Fahrenheit. But the weather widget will always show the feels like in Celsius.

[A]

They absolutely did not test this.

[B]

They did not test this. Definitely did test it because, you know, we use Freedom Units and you wouldn't use Freedom units in honestly, most of the world. So there's very little reason to test this. Yeah.

[C]

And the hotter it gets, the more, the bigger, the bigger discrepancy between if

[B]

it's like really cold, then it's like very small.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And the feels like might be fairly

[C]

accurate and something that's like reasonable.

[A]

Yeah, reasonable. Say like 34. Feels like 24 or whatever.

[C]

You'd be like, oh, wind chill.

[A]

Yeah, that seems about right.

[B]

It's cold. Yeah, but that's this week we had a heat wave and it was 82 Fahrenheit and it says feels like 28.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And if that was. That's. That would be. That'd be crazy. That's like a 60 degree difference. So, yeah, Michael said that there are many, many things in this phone, in the global version that basically this happened to. It's not just the like Celsius Fahrenheit thing. There are a bunch of things where it's like they clearly did not translate this over to the global version.

[A]

So yeah, this happens a lot. We review a lot of phones, phones like this, where you're like, well, this isn't made for this market, but I'm going to test it anyway and review it and you just kind of start ignoring those things. Even though there's a lot of them out the box, you try to change as many of them as you can.

[B]

Yeah, that's hilarious. They need to get testers for like global markets to actually just find all these bugs before they ship them. Yeah, yeah. All right. I have a little segment that I wanted to do with you, Marques, because last week I saw that you were using the iPhone Air again, and I said, why are you doing that? You said, because it's black. Yep.

[A]

Well, it's the only black iPhone they make.

[B]

I have now acquired an iPhone Air.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, but that's not a black phone.

[B]

It's baby blue.

[A]

Barely.

[B]

Barely blue.

[E]

Is that Brandon's?

[A]

It looks.

[B]

No, it's not Brandon's, it's Michael Fisher's. I stole it from him and I just wanted to like, I just wanted us to do a little like, recap thing on it because, you know, the review went out fairly soon after the embargo and then now it's been a while and I've been using it For a few days. So I just wanted to talk about some feelings.

[E]

Sure.

[A]

Well, I can give you my timeline and how it's gone. I reviewed all the phones at the beginning, and when I was done reviewing all the iPhones, I stuck to the 17 Pro as my main iPhone for a while. And that's usually how it goes. I usually have the Pro. I use the cameras a lot. That's the whole point of me carrying an iPhone is the things that the iPhone does well. And so I've just been carrying that phone for a bit, but it's orange and. And I swear to God, that started getting on my nerves faster and faster. And eventually, yeah, I just started testing this other phone that we're actually. I can talk about now. It's The Oppo Find X9 Ultra, and the video on it is coming later, but it's got these incredible cameras and this incredible battery life. So what better time to see if I could use the iPhone with the worst cameras and the worst battery life?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I flipped to the black iPhone air, and it's been, I think, maybe two weeks now since I switched to it. A couple things have happened. One, I've gotten really used to the thin and lightness of it. It's not just the thinness, it's the lightness that really gets you. You put it in your pocket, you forget that there's something in your pocket that never happens with other phones. So that happened quite a few times. The other thing is I just stopped trying to use zoom, like, ultra wide and zoom stuff, which I default do on the pro iPhone all the time. It bummed me out. But I just stopped using zoom, obviously, because there's no ability to zoom out or zoom in with any sort of quality. But I'm using this other incredible camera phone with this huge battery and these amazing cameras, and I'm taking all my pictures and videos on that one. So it's been fine so far, but we'll see how long that lasts.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

My first few days, I was gonna drop it a thousand times because of how thin it is. It's almost hard to grip because of how thin it is.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

It's also hard to get out of my pocket. I have to put it in my pocket like this so that I can grab the camera bar and pull it out.

[C]

Huh.

[B]

You know, maybe I'm doing that weirdly, but that's what I'm doing.

[E]

You don't put crimping your pocket camera face down.

[C]

Well, you know, change his habits so he can have a lip to Pick.

[E]

Well, that's why I'm asking. Did you change it specifically for.

[A]

No, I did not.

[B]

I just kept putting my hand in my pocket and being like, oh, it's face up.

[C]

Oh. So you always have put your phone in your pocket right side up?

[B]

Not usually, but for some reason, apparently this phone has made me start doing that.

[A]

It's the weirdest thing I've ever heard. Never heard that before.

[B]

I don't do it on purpose. It's very weird.

[C]

Huh.

[B]

Other thing, I, you know, I'm plugging it in a lot more, but it hasn't really been bugging me that I'm plugging it in a lot more.

[A]

Oh, yeah. The battery's so bad.

[B]

It's pretty bad.

[A]

Like, I'm used to a good battery and this one, I mean, I'm at 80%. I haven't really done much of anything. I navigated here in the morning and that was the only thing I've done on it.

[B]

But you probably didn't. Did you use your phone to navigate here?

[A]

Yeah.

[E]

Oh.

[A]

So it's been on ways and then on, and usually I'd get here at like 93 or 94% or whatever.

[B]

80? Yeah. I'm at 74. I've done almost nothing with it.

[E]

The other day I asked everyone in the office that uses an air, AKA Marques, Brandon and Rich, what's your battery?

[A]

Yeah, what's your battery?

[E]

And Marques was like, oh, I think I'm at like, 70 something. Rich was like, oh, I just took it off the charger. So I'm pretty much topped off. And Brandon's just staring at me from across the room. And it's like 1:00pm and he's like, I'm at like, 38.

[C]

Yeah, cool, thanks.

[A]

Yeah. And that's about how it feels.

[B]

I was at the gym the other day at 1 per. At 1pm I was at like 12%.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so if you're using a. Multiple apps, like, I was using a couple of like, music apps, podcast apps, you know, the fitness app, it can drain pretty, pretty damn quick.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Um, I have gotten used to the thinness of it now, and I'm not like, you know, dropping it. The main problems, I'm finding one when I'm traveling. I use the 4x telephoto lens a lot of. Because I shoot in like, highlight or the Moment camera pro app. And not having that sucks. Yeah. And I know that most people said that they didn't want to buy this because I didn't have the ultra wide. I never really use the ultra wide so that's not really a problem for me. But the 4x lens trash. And then the second thing is that I use this very specific app called Viewfinder preview that helps me shoot ultra wide panoramas on my phone cameras and that uses the ultra wide camera. So I literally cannot main this if I'm going out to like take pictures with my 3D printed camera. Yep. So yeah, yeah. Kind of a problem.

[A]

Shortcomings. I have a question for you then.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

We all expect the next iPhone air to have a second camera lens. Yeah. Which one do you hope it is

[B]

telephoto but it won't be.

[A]

You think it'll be the ultra wide?

[C]

It's definitely the ultra wide.

[A]

It's probably the ultra wide.

[B]

I'm pretty sure most people said that their main problem was it didn't have an ultra wide. Yeah. Which I don't understand because that camera sucks anyway. It's always sucked. Like it's got.

[A]

It looks terrible. Remember when Apple always goes oh but yeah, you technically have a 2x lens built in with this optical 17 lenses very far.

[B]

Yeah, 17 lenses in here.

[A]

Yeah, they love saying that but it really doesn't translate that well.

[B]

Well, we just saw the Huawei full like wide foldable that's going to be released. Right. And that has three lenses on it. So they can do that in an ultra thin body like come on Apple, please.

[E]

Well, I just want to say a few weeks ago we did a community post on YouTube talking about which secondary lens is everyone's favorite.

[F]

Yeah.

[E]

19% of people said the selfie, 31% of people said the ultra wide and 50% of people said telephoto.

[B]

All right, Apple, you're listening. This is data. You got to use the data to build your phone.

[E]

OK wait, before we move on, question for both of you. Now that you've been using the iPhone

[B]

air for a bit. Yeah.

[E]

Is it worth it? Are the trade offs worth it? Because the the lightness is awesome, the size is awesome.

[B]

Brandon loves it.

[E]

Even though the battery life is trash

[B]

over the Pro or over the standard one.

[A]

Yeah, that's the thing is I would not like normally switch from the Pro to this phone. It is clearly not a better phone. No, it is a bigger screen. It's a totally fine phone.

[B]

I have a Pro max so.

[A]

Oh okay. So I came from the Pro so it's a bigger screen for me, slightly smaller for you. It's just that it just came from the 17 Pro so that's why I'm noticing all the downfalls of it. But if you're coming from any other random older phone and you're thinking about buying an air, it's fine. It's gonna be a totally fine phone. It's only one camera. Fine. The battery life's kind of cheeks fine. Whatever. You can deal with that. But it would be so good with two or three cameras and a silicon carbon battery. That would be a great phone. But it doesn't have that yet. So we're waiting for if Gen 2 Air 2.

[B]

Air 2.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

Can I drop a crazy iPhone camera opinion?

[B]

Sure.

[D]

That I discovered this weekend. I feel I need to let the world know. David, I just sent you two pictures via iMessage.

[B]

Okay.

[D]

That I took on my iPhone. I've discovered. I forgot about blip. I just discovered the. The sauce. Okay. It's the moment. The moment. First, David, tell me that these.

[B]

Didn't you bring this up last week?

[D]

No, no, I've dialed it in even further with a crazy take moment pro camera. You lock the ISO at 640 instead of 800, so you still get the flatness, but it's slightly less noisy. You put it in natural processing mode so it's like almost a single exposure. And then you only use the telephoto lens.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

And it's.

[D]

It's beautiful. It looks amazing.

[C]

Show Mark has you playing disc golf.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

You play disc golf.

[C]

I can tell because he has the pencil in his hat. He has a hat designed to have a pencil in his hat.

[A]

I can tell because it's a guy in the woods.

[B]

That's all you do in the woods. Play disc golf.

[D]

Just looks like the woods. I'm now telephoto superiority gang. Yeah.

[B]

Let's go.

[A]

So you're hoping for a telephoto on the next air.

[D]

I think the telephoto is the only camera you need on an iPhone.

[A]

Well, that's a crazy take. That is the hottest take yet the only camera you need.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

All of those are with the telephoto. I just run really far away to take a picture and run back to my friends.

[A]

What if you can't move further away?

[C]

Else is at that really nice restaurant, just like scoots back, walks over three tables, snaps a picture.

[D]

You're laughing, but I did that. Yeah, I literally did that.

[A]

I mean, you get the portrait. When you go to take a portrait mode photo, it automatically on a lot of phones, switches to the portrait.

[E]

If you need. You have a selfie camera. Just turn it around.

[B]

Honestly. Fair take, fair take.

[A]

It's a technically true statement, but it's the worst. The thing is, the primary camera is always the biggest sensor that gets the most light and takes the best photos, has the fastest shutter speed, et cetera, et cetera. Telephoto cameras are getting better, so you can take better telephotos, but they're never as good as the primary. No.

[B]

Yeah, it's fair.

[E]

Astronauts and Artemis.

[C]

I was gonna say the most popular iPhone picture in the world, arguably, is with this.

[A]

I'm not arguing that it's the most popular picture, but it is definitively not the highest quality picture. Yeah, that's facts.

[B]

Yeah, facts.

[C]

That's the Hasselblad X1D.

[B]

Yeah. When I was in Colorado last week, I was shooting Raw a lot on the phone.

[C]

That was your fault.

[D]

I accidentally blipped into my.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

It's actually crazy how good the main. Oh, my God.

[D]

I'm leaving that in the podcast too. Not deleting it.

[A]

Good.

[B]

It's actually crazy how good the main sensor is. Now, if you, like, shoot in Raw, they're so flexible. I don't really feel like I need to carry around a digital camera anymore, like, almost at all.

[A]

That's where I'm at with this. Well, I can't say too much, but with this Oppo phone, the whole point of me testing it is to be like, all right, it's got these crazy specs. Can it just be as good as a regular camera?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And that's what a lot of people think about with phones with crazy cameras like this.

[B]

Yeah. So, I mean, we talked, like, a little bit off the show about how all of the Chinese manufacturers now. It used to be like they would make a car version of their phone. It was like, oh, this. This company had Ferrari. This company had Lamborghini, Porsche and Lamborghini, Porsche or whatever. And now they're all doing lens manufacturers and camera manufacturers.

[A]

They're like, Yep.

[B]

Zeiss and Leica and Hasselblad. Yeah. Which is funny because I don't think that most people know who these companies are.

[C]

Yeah, agreed. Those companies might just need the extra money from licensing the most.

[E]

They should just go back to anime.

[A]

So they do a Canon collab or something.

[B]

That'd be kind of crazy. Would that be with Canon Color Science? Yeah, I think that's a good. I think that's a better idea than doing, like, Zeiss, to be honest. Like, Zeiss would pull the photographer crowd, but if you want mainstream people, regular people know what Canon is.

[A]

Yeah. It's like, it's not like cars where everyone knows that a Ferrari is good, but not everybody can, like, experience a Ferrari. So they're like, oh, Ferrari. It must be a good collab. But with Zeiss, people don't know that Zeiss is the Ferrari of lenses. So they just kind of go, I don't know what that is.

[C]

Right.

[A]

But if they see. If they see a Canon.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Or Sony sensors, they don't make the sensor. No, that's because then that's the thing.

[E]

Because everyone uses the Sony sensors. They're not allowed to.

[B]

Yeah, but Hasselblad sensors.

[A]

You know what's funny? Sony made phones, and they. They still stamp Zeiss on the back of their phones. So, like, I don't know, they make the sensors for everyone, but they still need that. That clout. That name.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Anyway.

[B]

Anyway, yeah, I think I'm probably gonna go back to the Pro at some point. The main problem is that the Pro feels like 4x bigger than it did before now. Thicker. Yeah, it feels so thick now. And I'm like, damn.

[E]

I was using the S25 Edge for a bit, and then I switched to the S26 Ultra. And this thing feels massive.

[C]

I miss the Edge.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

The Ultra even is thinner than previous Ultras, so I'd pick up that Ultra and think it's. But when you come from a thinner phone, it just changes your life.

[B]

Ruins it for you. Yeah, I never should have tried in the first place.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Speaking of Samsung, since Adam just said Samsung.

[C]

True.

[B]

We now have an alleged date for the Galaxy Z Fold 8 wide event. If you don't know what the wide is, it's basically Samsung trying to get to the wide boy before Apple does.

[A]

Remember how that happened with the thin phone? This is exactly what happened with the S25 Edge.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

There were rumors for an entire year and a half of an upcoming iPhone air. And so months earlier, Samsung went, hey, check it out. We made an ultra thin phone first. We were first. We did it first. And they actually didn't ship it for a little while after that, but they did announce it first and they did ship it first. And now that there's rumors of this wide folding iPhone, guess what? Samsung's about to do b second. The exact same thing. Actually, there's a whole already. We actually used to have a bunch of these. Yeah, we had, like, Oppo.

[C]

It's also just the Pixel fold.

[A]

The original.

[C]

Yeah, I was gonna say this is like peak Google of like, we had the thing everyone liked. And then we're like, no, no, no. Go change what everyone else, okay, cool, we're on the same page.

[B]

And then everyone.

[A]

Yeah, too ahead of their time.

[B]

Google's always ahead of time. Glasses. Anyway, so according to a South Korean publication, the next galaxy unpacked will be July 22nd in London where they will unveil the Z full 8 wide and hopefully it does not get canceled within three months. Like the, you know, the Ultra long one, the Trifold.

[C]

Did you see though that weirdly, apparently you can, you can buy trifolds in the US for a limited time till it like wipes out stock. They're like reintroducing a bunch of ones that weren't for sale yet.

[B]

Oh wow.

[C]

I think it like comes out the day this episode airs. You can buy some or something. I don't know. I saw a Verge article like if you really want the Trifold, here's like the last of the stock that's coming

[B]

to the us they're just re releasing the stock. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[C]

Which is funny that they canceled it and then you could buy it again.

[B]

Yeah. This event will also probably release the standard fold 8, which will, you know, probably be the super thin one, just like we saw with the Fold 7. And then we've also been hearing rumors of an S27 Pro.

[A]

This is hilarious.

[B]

That is supposed to sit between the standard S27 and the S27 Ultra, which is probably coming later.

[C]

Is that not just the plus, but they've oscillated.

[A]

So the plus they've like kind of down tuned a little and the Ultra has, I think it's a high resolution display. It's a little bigger. Bigger battery or. No, it might be the same battery, extra camera for the Ultra and just a couple other smaller things. So the S pen, which kind of made its way into the Ultra when they killed the Note, is not necessarily used by everyone who wants an Ultra. So maybe if you could spend a little less on getting all the same stuff, but not the Pen, it would make sense. And this is classic Samsung. Just like we're gonna offer every phone that possibly could exist. So it's funny, the first thing I thought of when I saw this is this is the Cadillac vistique of smartphones.

[C]

We all agree.

[A]

You know why I said it better myself? Because Cadillac made the Lyriq, which is like the S25 and S25 Plus. They also made the Escalade, which is the Escalade IQ is this enormous 200 kilowatt hour battery, 9,000 pound truck. But they also made the Vistiq, which is the same Size as the Escalade, but only a regular sized battery. So you still get the three row SUV, but you don't have to carry around 3,000 extra pounds of battery and spend the extra however many thousand dollars it costs. So you still get. That's exactly what this is.

[B]

Why didn't they call it a different trim?

[A]

Because the Escalade is the big boy and has a massive battery and it's all about the massive range and all that fun.

[B]

So the floor for that car needs to be high.

[A]

Yes, but like what if you don't need that extra range and all that extra weight and don't want to spend the extra 30 grand, you make a new model. That's where the Vistique is. That's exactly what this phone is. S27 Pro. It's going to be the same size as the Ultra. I just don't need to carry around that extra S pen and spend the extra money on it. It's such a good analogy. You guys aren't expecting this. Great analogy.

[C]

In this moment, I'm confused by the Pro in this lineup.

[A]

Oh, it's just Samsung has a phone at every price and every possible buyer.

[E]

Will it have a bigger battery?

[A]

I wish, but probably not.

[E]

So they're gonna get rid of the S Pen and not give you a bigger.

[A]

Yeah, they're gonna make it cheaper.

[C]

It's so funny. Samsung hasn't done anything cool with their lineup in the last like three years and they're like, we got them this year. Let's put one kind of in between the kind of higher mid range and the really flagship. And now that'll get everyone excited.

[A]

Will it have privacy?

[B]

Display? Probably not. That's probably an Ultra only feature.

[A]

I can see that.

[C]

So then what is this phone cheaper?

[A]

It's an Ultra bit cheaper, which they

[B]

kind of need to do because Ultra

[A]

is $1250 or something.

[B]

Now it's more. Wait, no. Is it? Wait. Oh, I think the higher.

[A]

Doesn't it start at $1200?

[B]

Yeah, something like that.

[E]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah, it's expensive. What if it was gonna be 1100?

[A]

1100.

[B]

I guess. I guess that's all it is.

[A]

It's just a cheaper version. That's crazy.

[B]

Yeah. Well, you know, speaking of that, Samsung has quietly raised their prices across almost all of the mobile devices that they sell. Who?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Which is kind of crazy. Samsung CEO. Co CEO TM Row did say that no company would be immune to the global memory shortage quite a while ago. And it would be inevitable that Samsung would likely have to raise their prices. And now we're seeing the result of that.

[D]

What, Samsung makes the memory.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, yeah, but Samsung has a different.

[C]

They sell to themselves to make money also.

[B]

Yeah, it's like, it's like Samsung Fab is different than like Samsung, the mobile display. I don't know.

[A]

Like, they don't talk.

[B]

Fairly different. They probably.

[A]

This has happened before with like LG and LG Display.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Where I was like, no, but those

[D]

are, Those are actually two separate.

[A]

It's the same. It's the same effect. And they, they negotiate and contract with each other and are suppliers of each other and have relationships.

[C]

Each other.

[D]

Really. Like the Samsung phones and the sam. Like, there's no shared ownership. Like they're two. Because LG and LG Displays are literally two separate companies. No relation.

[B]

Yep. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. It's unfortunate because you'd think that they would talk and you'd think that they would simply make the cheaper memory for themselves.

[B]

You'd think that many of these companies would talk. Yeah, you do think that.

[A]

But they don't. Even if they're not in the same exact way that LG Display and LG aren't, they are effectively separate. A lot of this happens with Google. I'll talk to Google all the time. And people in different buildings at Google and different departments effectively never communicate with each other in weird ways. And I wouldn't be shocked if this is the exact same, which is why,

[B]

like, random apps get updated to support different things and then they just don't have very obvious things with each other.

[E]

It's.

[B]

It's stupid.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Well, regardless, Samsung has jacked up the price of almost a dozen Galaxy phones and tablets to up to $280, from as little as $40 to as high as $280. The Z Fold 7 last week already had its price increased by about $80 across models, which makes the 1 TB model, $2,500 and the 512 gigabyte model, $2,200. But now they're raising the price of pretty much all the models except for the standard S26 series and the Ultra, which so far it seems like. So far I think that they're doing that because they're trying, you know, that's their, their most sold phones in the US besides like the A series are the S20, you know, S26 Ultra and the main S26 series. And also they have those, they have all the carrier partners with, you know, Verizon and AT&T and whatnot. I think they're trying to pad the margin on everything else. So most of their tablets went up

[C]

in price to the S11 Ultra. One terabyte is the 280 jump.

[B]

That's crazy.

[C]

That's three. It went from 1619 to 1899 for S26. No, the S11 Ultra tablet.

[A]

Tablet, yeah. It's one terabyte went from what to

[C]

what, 1619 to 1899. 280 bucks.

[B]

It honestly seems like the things they sell the least amount of, they raised the prices on the most. So I think they're just trying to figure out how to pad the margin on the perimeter.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

It's going to be interesting to see if all the other phone companies start jacking their prices up this year. We haven't really seen that yet. This is kind of the first I

[A]

heard the memory crisis was almost over.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, there was a thing with like OpenAI didn't actually purchase all the memory and it started to go down a little bit. But apparently it's still a major problem.

[A]

It's definitely still a problem, but maybe with a. Maybe with a light at the end of the tunnel.

[C]

Sure. The variability of it is a major problem. Maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel now, but who knows who's going to screw something up any day now?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

By the time between us recording and this coming out, it could be changed dramatically. What could happen? True.

[B]

Speaking of companies not really talking to themselves, Andrew, do you want to take us through this Google back button hijack?

[C]

I am very passionate about this article because it's something that this feels like Google made their own version of. Did they even test this and then realized it? And they were like, we should fix this. So. Do you know what? I've never heard the term before, but back button hijacking is.

[B]

I think I understand it now.

[C]

Yes. I think everyone's dealt with it, whether it's like clicked in your head of what's going on. But essentially I had never heard of

[E]

this before you explained it to me,

[C]

but then I explained it and you can like remember a time.

[B]

It's everyone's experience.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. It's like when you go to usually more sketchy websites, the. If you click in from like a Google search result, you realize that's not the page you want to be on. And you click back and you wind up at the page you were at already and you click back again and you're still at the same page and click back again, you're still at the same page. If you wind up holding that back button, you'll see this big because that's like when you show your whole history of back, you'll notice there are like four or five pages between you and the search result you came from. Yeah. And that's back button hijacking. There's a bunch of different ways to do it. It's a tool that was made for like actually really specific things I think someone described. Like if you're in Gmail and you're inside of a email and you want to click back, it should take you still to the Gmail URL, but in your inbox instead. That's what it's meant to do, but people can do that to bring it to a super fast loading redirect link. So if you're on all recipes and you go back, it's going to just whip you to all recipes again.

[B]

You have to just like mash the back button like seven times or hold

[C]

it down and come up to. I mean, I think most people just close the tab and start Google searching again because that's the easiest way of doing it and it is infuriating.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So finally Google is now going to consider this a malicious practice. And if it finds your website is partaking in those practices, you could be listed as spam, which will impact your performance in search results. The funniest part of the whole release of this is they said they've noticed a rise in this behavior. This has been going on for like 10 years. There's no, there's no way now there's a rise in this behavior. Probably because less people are going to websites because it's all getting scraped from Google.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Honestly, probably Gemini started getting pissed when I was trying to back after scraping all the. It kept scraping the same thing over and over again. But like, I'm not gonna be mad. Late is better than never. But this should have been fixed a really, really long time ago. But thank you for finally fixing.

[B]

I guess they're doing some spring cleaning, you know. Yeah.

[A]

Somebody in like the 70th Google building on the corner logged in one day and was like, I could fix this.

[C]

Or yeah, he found like that post it note that's buried on his desk. That's like fix back button hijacking. When did I write?

[B]

12 years ago. 12 years ago.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah, that's it. But thank you.

[A]

Speaking of something that has gotten an update that I'd hoped got updated a long time ago.

[E]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

Nailed it.

[A]

New GoPros. This is like a blast. You guys remember GoPro?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, they're still around.

[B]

They helped you go pro.

[A]

Well, because they've been. Their lunch has been eaten by Insta360 and DJI in the past couple years. Yeah, but they're still around making action cameras. Making 360 cameras. And they came out with this new camera called the Mission one. It's kind of interesting. We love these tiny action cameras for being in the corner of a car or being in like the mounted on the outside of the car or like a small space where it's kind of a crash cam. If it's falls off it's fine, but it's just sort of an extra angle that you can get because this camera's so small and versatile. But the quality is not that great. Typically it's good enough, but it's not amazing. So the Mission 1 is a new camera that is a larger 1 inch sensor and the entire thing is built around being a cinema grade like proper camera. Now all of this is dependent on the footage actually looking good. But this is everything I ever wanted from a GoPro. It frees them up to keep making the hero. Like an action cam, a crash cam.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But now with this larger sensor they've made like an interchangeable lens mount version. They've made a bunch of accessories where you can plug in extra memory, you can plug in microphones, you can pair all sorts of things to the GoPro. It makes it a much more. I don't want to say RX100 but like a cinema version of an RX100

[C]

it's riggable like you can rig it up to.

[A]

They showed me a bunch of accessories for it, a cage for it, a bunch of underwater shooting accessories. It'll shoot 8K open gate, so 4 but the whole sensor, it's a really convincing set of specs. So I would like to use it and verify that the footage actually looks better. But they showed me some footage that they essentially they've rigged this thing up with huge lenses and a cage and mics and everything and shot like really good looking stuff with it. So I'm curious, they have my attention.

[B]

The one that most people are interested in is the ILS which is interchangeable lens system version. It takes micro 4/3 lenses which is very interesting. Now obviously micro 4/3 lenses are the small, pretty much the smallest lenses that you can get, you know. And so they are, you know, still small but on a GoPro they, they still look huge.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's weird. I don't know when I would want to rig Up My, my example of when this could be awesome is we shoot inside a car and the car windshield has like a super low rake. So you can't fit like a Komodo or something in there. You could fit a little GoPro with like a 70 mil or a 50 mil lens on it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Could be great.

[B]

I guess so maybe. It's interesting. But the weird thing about it is that the lens mount for Micro Four Thirds that they have doesn't have any contacts. So it can't do autofocus. Yes.

[A]

Which is very weird.

[B]

You have to have all the cameras that just focusing at infinity or focusing at a very specific distance.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Which is. That kind of sucks.

[A]

That's true of the Komodo. I mean the Komodo has autofocus, but we always just manual focus.

[B]

Yeah. But at least you're like carrying that camera and you can just like rack focus. But if this is mounted in a car. Mounted inside of a car. Yeah, yeah. In the corner. You have to like set the focus very specifically. And then what happens if it like changes? And I don't know, it's strange.

[D]

Is there focus peaking? Are there like assists in the camera?

[A]

Probably most likely. And they'll. They have like a lot of very capable software things already built in. So I wouldn't be shocked if it added more over time. But like I think it shoots 8k 60 or 4k 240.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which there's not a lot of other cameras that do that, period.

[D]

I'm kind of interested because as someone who really likes shooting vintage like 16 millimeter and 8 millimeter film lenses, like the micro four thirds standard is like really easy to adapt vintage glass to. And if the GoPro has a 1 inch sensor.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

This might actually be like the best vintage glass rig possible. Could be interesting especially if there are focus assist because it's really hard to find.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

Affordable Micro four thirds cameras that have focus assists.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. Pretty different. I. I think I saw something that said like this is the first time in 22 years that they have released a GoPro that is not under the hero line. Yeah. Which is crazy. So it's a big jump for them. They needed it because they were like on the verge of bankruptcy. So hopefully this is successful for them. They're also releasing a new wireless lav mic set that looks almost identical to the DJI ones.

[C]

I think it's necessity they have to do that.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Like that is the best part about the action cam is that you can just plug those DJI mics in like this turns into a camera that you could buy starting out trying to make some sort of a YouTube channel or content.

[A]

This could be an awesome vlog camera. All of this is the asterisk of like does the footage actually look good? But this could be a great vlog camera.

[B]

Yeah, maybe.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The sad part about these mics is that they do not do 32 bit float like the DJI ones do. So.

[C]

Got it.

[D]

So many, so many asterisks necessary there.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

I forget the exact thing, but it's just like all of those wireless mics are like we do 32 bit float if you stand on one leg and put your hand over your head and use them in exactly this workflow. Yeah, it is like.

[A]

Got it.

[D]

Yeah. It's nonsense.

[B]

Okay, well, yeah, that should be interesting. Did you already got them in? Right? I saw you took a photo.

[A]

So they brought them here, they showed them to us. I got to handle them for an hour and then they left and they were like, trust me, we'll send you one. So I'm like, yes, please let me try them. I want to shoot 8k60 log at 30fps open gate in my. In a handheld camera. Like that just sounds awesome. Yeah. So hopefully soon.

[E]

I can't wait for the autofocus video with you using these.

[A]

Yeah, I could shoot an autofocus video with it.

[C]

I can't wait till Ellis is walking around Brooklyn with his vintage glass on the newest GoPro taking photos.

[D]

When you get one in, I'll order a micro 4/3 to C mount adapter and I'll 3D print something goofy and I will make the vintage GoPro camera.

[A]

It seems perfect for that.

[B]

They showed me shutter accessory. Is that what you're going to say?

[A]

Oh no. They showed me they had adapted to PL mount and put the massive cinema lens on it.

[B]

For some reason it's like a 30x

[A]

prop factor some insane.

[D]

What do you mean for some reason? That's awesome.

[C]

It's a tiny showing.

[A]

If you're going to rig that much up, you might as well throw like a Komodo.

[B]

A 28 millimeter is going to be like a 120 equivalent on that thing.

[D]

Do we have the price?

[A]

No, we don't.

[B]

They did not.

[A]

I can do my best guessing job. I think it'll be under 1,000. I think it'll be over the current, current GoPro post tariff pricing is like 400 something dollars. Right.

[D]

This might be the greatest vintage glass camera, dude.

[A]

If.

[D]

If straight up, if there's like focus peaking and Magnification in it for like. Oh my God.

[A]

Yeah, so you don't have to buy.

[B]

Has peaked.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

If you want to do this with an actual micro four Thirds camera, like you don't get those features until you're spending like $900 on a used camera, which is like.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

Kind of defeats the point. Anyway, sorry.

[B]

Another quick story. Google randomly released this new Spotlight for Windows application which is actually quite cool. It's a little floating window that pops up when you use a keyboard shortcut and you can ask it for context about your screen, it can do screen recordings. You can use Google Lens to sort of drag your cursor over something and it'll Google it for you. It can access files on your computer and it can access files on your Google Drive all at once. So it's kind of like this cool hybrid like on device and also in Cloud, little pop up box that you could just call at any time. Dare I say this is just a better version of Copilot Is like what I was thinking.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

I was gonna say this is kind of fire. I don't have a Chromebook, but I want most of the nice parts.

[B]

I mean more people use like Google Drive than use OneDrive.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

And it only works on Windows, so

[E]

there's like Google Cowork, kind of like Claude Cowork.

[B]

But Google, well, it can't really do things for you.

[E]

But you said it could like reach into Drive and local search.

[B]

Yeah, it can search.

[E]

Oh, it can only search. So you can't like copy it from one place to another or like manipulate.

[B]

I think you can.

[E]

Can you tell it to like rename a bunch of files in your downloads folder?

[A]

That's like the classic Cowork example.

[B]

It doesn't have like autonomous like. Oh, it can't do things for you autonomously. When I say like you can access those files, it's like you, you, you do a search and it's like a universal search that goes between your desktop and also your Google Drive. So it's still handy. It's interesting and it's quite cool. And it's cool that just like floats to the side and you can just like invoke it with a keyboard shortcut. So I don't know why they made this or why they made this. Now super random, but it's very cool and I wish they had it.

[D]

Have you ever tried to search for a local file on a Windows computer? That's why they made it.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Just why in 2026 that's been a

[A]

problem for like 30 years.

[E]

Can they make search in Gmail better?

[A]

Yeah, I was gonna say this company is bad at some search and bad at some search.

[B]

Yeah, I. You know what I really want on mobile version of Gmail, there's the all mail function. They do not have that on the desktop. And you have to like keep changing your accounts over and over again. It's so annoying. Anyway, I would love that.

[A]

Unless you have side by side browser windows open.

[B]

Like a king. Like a king.

[C]

I want to hit you with the dumbest headline I saw.

[A]

Hit me.

[C]

You all talked about it before. I was trying to keep this a secret, but it sounds like half you read this. So struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot from shoes to AI. Stock explodes more than 700.

[B]

700.

[C]

Did you hear about this this morning? When they're serious. Okay, cool.

[A]

That is the dumbest thing.

[C]

So Allbirds is pivoting from shoes to AI. They're gonna sell off their shoe assets to American exchange. Wait for $39 million they quote. They are going to pivot its business to AI compute infrastructure with a long term vision to become a fully integrated GPU as a service. GPU aas.

[A]

This is.

[C]

There's more.

[A]

Was this April Fool's Day of this?

[C]

No. Everything I said had to have a line that said this is real. It says an AI native cloud solutions provider. In connection with this pivot, the company entities anticipates changing its names to New Bird AI. New Bird.

[A]

This reads strikingly like an April Fool.

[C]

This really reads like an AI.

[B]

Look at this stock chart. Wow.

[C]

Holy crap. So they also.

[A]

It's not the Onion.

[C]

Because of this, they proposed to their shareholders if they could remove all references to the company being operated for the environmental conservation public benefit.

[D]

Oh my.

[C]

Imagine saying that out loud.

[A]

This reads now, now are you sure it's not the Onion?

[C]

Because that's the Onion's like we're out

[B]

of a shopping crazy. Wait, so they're selling the shoe company.

[C]

They're selling all their shoe assets to who? American Exchange Group.

[A]

The shoe assets, just like the shoes and the designs, I'm assuming the rest

[B]

of the shoes, are they still going to be sold under Allbirds?

[C]

It sounds they're changing their name to New Bird AI.

[D]

Yeah. So their shoes will be old birds.

[A]

This is the biggest game plan I've ever seen. Like they thought that they were going to be a tech company because they were sell products to tech people, but it wasn't really tech. And then they've just been in Silicon Valley so long you're like it?

[C]

From the articles I read, it basically was like our evaluation when we IPO'd was like 4 billion. And now it's so, so, so, so, so much less than that. That they're like, we need to do something else because we're IPO and we have to. Please.

[B]

They IPO'd at 1,000. Wait, that. That can't be right. That's $1 million a share.

[A]

I don't know enough about the stock market, but I do think 4 billion is maybe a little bit silly for a shoe company.

[C]

I mean.

[B]

Well, they're not.

[C]

As you remember when all birds first came out, they were so popular.

[B]

They were so everyone.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Yeah, but they valuation of 2.2 to $4 billion when they IPO in 2021.

[A]

I'm just googling how much Nike is worth right now. 67 billion.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

I guess that is pretty.

[B]

Dude, All Birds are ever so hyped.

[C]

Everyone loves.

[E]

Are the shoes on sale right now?

[C]

Apparently, through American Exchange. Whatever.

[B]

Crazy.

[C]

Well, your new allbirds come with a gp. Actually, they don't. You have to pay with the GPU so they can put it in their infrastructure.

[B]

And people still say, we're not in a bubble. Let's see how this goes. Let's see how this goes for those

[A]

may age incredibly poorly.

[B]

I mean, honestly, maybe GoPro should have done the same thing. You know what I mean? It's like, if you're gonna sink, you might as well become an AI company before you say, I guess so.

[C]

Yeah, Paint AI over your company and hope that it changes.

[D]

They already have the first two letters. They got the G and the P, you know, in GoPro or just the U. GoPro universe.

[B]

GoPro universe. Yeah, that could be their.

[A]

Good for them. They're online, I guess. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah, that's crazy. Get your bag.

[A]

Their company's not going to die.

[C]

The straight up. Just asking if we can remove all references that we care about. The environment is a wild thing to put out in the public.

[B]

You can't really say you do when you just run a GPU farm. It's not really compatible.

[D]

What if you, like, heated your pool with it or something? Then, you know, technically you're removing.

[B]

Isn't that what Linus did in one of his videos?

[D]

I think he. He.

[C]

He. He cooled his Is the other way around. He cooled his computers off with the pool water, Correct?

[D]

Oh, yeah. I mean, it would be crazy to

[C]

heat your pool with the.

[D]

That's. That's the same.

[A]

That's not. Yeah. Then the pool water goes back into the pool and it's warmer.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah. The difference it would make to the pool versus the differences between what we're doing to the ocean temperatures is.

[B]

I don't know, it depends on how many compared computers you got. Damn. Heat, the oceans. All right, we're gonna take a break. We'll be back with some updates from the last year that all have lots of updates that we can tell you about. So it's gonna be fun. But first, you know what doesn't get updated that we do every single week?

[D]

Trivia.

[B]

Dude.

[D]

Guys, we're pivoting the podcast. Guys. We all know GoPro for its hero and now mission line of little tiny cameras. But from 2016 to 2018, GoPro briefly entered this adjacent product category. What is it?

[C]

What?

[B]

What Was your timeline?

[D]

2016-2018. It didn't go well and they stopped.

[A]

Oh, I think I might have had that product.

[C]

GoPro entered.

[D]

GoPro entered and then promptly left.

[C]

Shoes.

[B]

Yeah. Allbirds.

[D]

GPU compute.

[C]

Huh? Okay.

[A]

GPUs. Well, we'll think about it. It's a blast from the past. Kind of like the rest of this episode. Answers will be at the end like usual. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is with the relatively simple question, what if? Given the right tools, I really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e commerce. From businesses just getting started to your favorite name brands, they offer a host of helpful tools you can take advantage of. From payment processing to analytics to website design. Their design studio includes hundreds of templates to help you create the exact website site you've been envisioning for your business. Their email and marketing tools make it easy to get your name out there and stay connected with your customers. If you're thinking, what if I need help? Well, then no worries because you're never left to fend for yourself. Shopify's award winning customer Support is available 24 7. So it's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com waveform. Go to shopify.com waveform. That's shopify.com waveform. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. You know those friends who support your preference for podcasts over music on road trips? That's the energy State Farm brings to insurance with over 19,000 local agents, they help you find the coverage that fits your needs so you can spend less time worrying about insurance and more time enjoying the ride. Download the State Farm app or go [e-mail] like a good neighbor. State Farm is there.

[C]

It's mushrooms with me, Matty Mathison. You know what's better than thinking about dinner too hard not stop that and just choose mushrooms. Five minutes.

[D]

Done.

[C]

Dinner's that easy and you feel like a genius. It's not magic, it's mushrooms.

[E]

Stop [e-mail] all right, welcome back.

[A]

Welcome to this segment where we mostly talk about things that may sound familiar because they're updates to things that we've previously talked about. This segment is called Circling back. Ari, my last conversation.

[C]

We're not even sure if it's going to be a segment, but that's too good of a name. So it's now a segment, even if

[B]

it's just a one time segment, per my last email.

[A]

All right, first up, we talked about Khaby Lame's near billion dollar deal. Something about he was like selling his company and his image for unlimited use to turn into like an AI likeness content generator version of himself or something for a billion dollars. We were a little skeptical because they promised to make like hundreds of millions of dollars off of his likeness in like no time. Turned out we were right to be skeptical. Yeah, they essentially paid him in stock and then obviously all those headlines go out, the stock price goes up and then shortly after crashes and is, I don't want to say worthless now, but I think you understand the risk of a all stock deal when they're promising you billions of dollars like that.

[B]

It was a rug pull. It's very similar to what happens in crypto coins where they basically like IPO'd it and then they merged his image as a new company. And then a ton of fans bought a ton of stock because they're like, oh, they're gonna make hundreds of billions of dollars. And then all of a sudden the price completely collapsed, which means that the company probably had most of the stock

[A]

and probably sold it all.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So.

[A]

And now Kaby Lami doesn't own his likeness or have any of the stock.

[B]

No, but he might have made the money. We're not really sure.

[C]

That's the tough part about this is,

[B]

yeah, he might have been the rug.

[C]

It is a weird thing. There were lots of company. You don't know for sure, but lots of companies tag on to people with a lot of influence and then rug pull under them because then that person with influence as the public facing person gets to they get all they get.

[A]

Nobody's talking about Rich Sparkle Holdings.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Even though they probably should be.

[B]

Everything's a scam these days.

[A]

Pretty much everything's a scam. Someone offers you $1 billion to your likeness. Maybe think a little bit more that

[C]

if you're offered more than the highest contract in the mlb there's probably something wrong with that.

[A]

He does have more followers than that person.

[C]

True.

[B]

Is that Juan Soda? What's this you're thinking?

[C]

Shohei? Yeah.

[B]

Shohei Ohtani.

[C]

It's Juan Soto Sports 765 million. I only know because I reference it every time it gets sold. No no, no. Over 10ish years was show his bigger or but didn't show Hayes have like a bunch. I don't know. Juan Sodas was after Maybe I just use Juan Soto's because there's lots of tech companies that get sold for less money than Juan Soto is making. That's crazy and that's hilarious.

[B]

Wow. Juan. So I should buy Apple. Speaking of scams as you said.

[C]

Yeah. NZXT and their Flex PC rentals. Do you remember that at all?

[B]

Yes.

[C]

That's a fun one.

[B]

Big Gamers Nexus investigation into this.

[C]

Exactly. If you really want everything that happened here. There's about seven hours of footage from Gamers Nexus that is really really interesting but really quick. TLDR 2024 NZXT was renting out computers on a subscription based basis. The weird thing about it was one when you didn't buy the computer outright when you got to the price of the computer. That was crazy. Some of the times you would switch from buying the computer to renting the computer on their website it would change the specs without really noticing. So you'd get a worse computer. And then they had a bunch of promotions and integrations where I don't know if they told the people to say this but somebody was saying something like you could rent this computer and then win a Fortnite tournament and then buy a computer. Like it's. It's like one of those like it's basically making you money.

[B]

You're losing money by not doing it.

[C]

Really, really sketchy, borderline scammy if not a total scam. But they just reached a settlement for $3.4 million. I think $3.45 million essentially in the lawsuit it's saying that people who are getting collected debt from which apparently some of the. Except apparently some of the instances where like people Actually paid. And they still have debt collectors coming at them. So it just sounds like this. The company that they're working with, I forget the name in here, is doing it really poorly. So some people who are paying, they're going to get money back from the settlement. And then some people who were paying for over two years, they're saying get to own the computer outright.

[B]

Yeah, that's good.

[C]

And the weird thing is though, NZXT still offering some rental programs, they've changed a couple things in it, but it still seems really sketchy. Don't rent a computer. It's stupid. It also, if you're renting a computer, the computers change so much. That's going to be like obsolete by the time.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

You don't even get to pay it off. I don't even know what I mean.

[B]

Rent a center's entire, you know, entire point. That's the reason that was basically a scam too.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. Go watch the gamers Nexus video for the whole thing on this. But nzxt, that sucks.

[B]

This is extra lame because they were Target. I mean, if you're talking about you could win a Fortnite tournament and then buy your own computer, they're probably kind of targeting 15 year olds.

[C]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

You know, it's like kids who probably don't have enough money to buy a gaming PC and then they entice you with this idea of like, you could win this thing that you play all the time and then you could buy it yourself and you don't have any money. And like predatory. That's super predatory.

[C]

And also by doing that is like when you look at a computer at first that's maybe close to your price range. Maybe it's like twelve hundred dollars. Then you go to the rental version which is showing a monthly payment. Then you're like, oh, I can bump up the specs on this a little bit. It's only changing my rental price a couple dollars a month. And then it's not that far off from like car payments at this point, like tacking on extra trim levels and stuff. So. But when you're targeting Fortnite players, which we all know is a certain age group.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

You're targeting the most vulnerable part for sure.

[B]

Yeah. Very lame. But good that this lawsuit went through. So I'm glad that people are getting the money back.

[C]

Agreed. Do you want to do the.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Next one.

[A]

We.

[B]

This was only a few weeks ago that this happened, but, you know, things in this administration change very quickly. We didn't know why, but the Pentagon decided to ban all routers from being imported into the US in the future that were not made in America, which is really.

[C]

So all routers.

[B]

So all routers? Yeah, practically. Maybe not Cisco, but they're probably still assembled in Vietnam or something. Yeah. So we don't really know why, but just today the FCC gave Net. Or I guess yesterday the FCC gave Netgear conditional approval to import future routers, modems and gateways into the US through October 1st of 2027. Netgear has not announced any plans to bring its manufacturing to the United States. And the Pentagon has stated that such devices do not pose risk to the US national security. So, Pete Hegseth, why did you ban them in the first place? Tell me that.

[C]

You know what's funny? Netgear was one of the main targets of the. The Chinese hacking group attack.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

That was because a bunch of people did a really bad job of updating the security issues with it. But Netgear is like the whole, the, the router that got hacked in, the whole thing they're referencing for doing the banning list.

[B]

Right. And they said that it wasn't like explicitly Netgear's fault because it was some like ISP firmware thing that happened to go through the router.

[C]

I think it was just a lacking of updating a security measure in the routers.

[B]

Right. So I'm not saying this was a bribe, but I'm not saying it wasn't a bribe. Just gonna say.

[A]

You're not not saying.

[B]

I'm not not saying.

[D]

Allegedly.

[C]

Do you know what email I did get this morning from Netgear? It says Netgear is the first retail consumer router company to receive conditional approval from the fcc. And then a whole thing about how they're the first ever retail customer. First ever with conditional approval.

[B]

Two weeks ago when this first changed.

[C]

Yeah. The FC called for a stronger safety and security standards. This aligns with our security first approach.

[B]

And that's like when businesses like put outside their business established 2026 and you're like, okay, that doesn't really help.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So yeah, the funny thing about that, most people that got that email probably don't even know what happened. They probably don't even know that the routers got banned. Because you've got to be pretty in the weeds to know that the Pentagon decided to ban routers that were coming from not the United States. So we'll see if this extends to more router companies. It would be very strange if Netgear was the only company allowed to sell routers. In the United States in the future, given they are probably one of the larger router manufacturers in the US Unless you're a big gamer that can afford this and can buy like a Asus, you know, whatever. The spider one. Yeah, the one that looks like a spider. So I don't know, it's weird. All right, we got one more. That is a. It's a far callback to a very early episode.

[C]

Yeah. But I think arguably one of the biggest things. Despite it sounding like it has absolutely nothing to do with tech. John Deere just settled for a 99 million dollar lawsuit over right to Repair,

[B]

which was one of our first ever bonus episodes. Was it really Right to repair episode where we talked to John Deere and a couple of Right to repair advocates.

[C]

Yeah. John Deere is like this thing where in the tech world doesn't feel like it has anything to do with us, but they are just right to repair. Hate John Deere because of all the stuff that they do. Yeah. So this is obviously much larger. $99 million to farmers in a class action lawsuit that accuses them of preventing farm mechanics from being able to repair their equipment. With the new lawsuit, John Deere is going to make repair resources. This is where I was a little confused. Available for 10 years based on a license or subscriptions, which what sounds like not the best way of doing this. I'm not totally sure how that's working out. But they have agreed to allow owners and shops to run diagnostics on equipment while in offline mode by the end of the year, which is huge because previously what you had to do if you were a farmer who had a giant tractor break, is bring it to an authorized dealer to get it fixed,

[B]

which is probably very far away from your farm.

[C]

From your farm. And the equipment you're bringing in is

[B]

probably heavy and it has to be during business hours. It has to be like there have to be people that know how to fix it. It's probably going to take them at least a week to fix it. And I remember talking to some farmers about this and they were like, it would just throw like the most basic system error that like I should be able to fix with a wrench. But because I, I can't access the firmware, I can't do anything to it. And it was a. Is a whole thing.

[C]

Yeah. Like towed to the nearest retailer. Yeah. It's kind of crazy. But the lawsuit was filed in 2022 and while the settlement's not perfect, this still in the right to repair world has got to be One of the biggest wins, whether it's a perfect win or not, probably one of the biggest wins in the battle of right to repair.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I'm curious what the details of that like subscription to be able to fix your thing.

[C]

My first thought was do just some different non authorized retailers. Can they like buy a subscription to access different parts if they're not the owner? So like maybe different because it mentions mechanics. So maybe there are mechanics that aren't authorized and maybe they can somehow pay to have subscriptions or licenses for repairing equipment. So it doesn't have to be only specific ones. Yeah, not totally sure but yeah.

[B]

This is one of those things that you don't really realize has been like completely upended by technology. You know, tractors and farming in general have been like, they use a lot of AI stuff now to detect what's a weed and what's a crop. And it's to the point where like you kind of have to use this stuff because if you're using traditional equipment it's going to be, you're going to be way, way, way behind in the amount of stuff that you can harvest. But at the same time you have no control. You're basically selling your soul to like a giant farming company that allows you to use this stuff and you can't fix it yourself. And it's like a catch 22.

[C]

It's very annoying and hopefully fixed soon.

[D]

And I hope the legal precedent extends to other sort of industries. I've been hearing a lot that things like cement mixers or weed whackers are also slightly different because it's not like they're using AI, but it's the same thing where it's like there's no reason these things are not repairable other than the companies who make them refuse to sell spare parts at a fair price.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, sounds about right. I mean we saw a couple years ago Apple started selling like their own parts repair kits and at first it was like a large, large heavy box that like made it very difficult to use. But they've gotten better over time. So we saw a New York laws that were passed a couple years ago about right to repair. So I think we're, we're going, we're getting there.

[C]

Precedent. More precedents that get set, the better.

[B]

Yeah.

[E]

That episode was so long ago. I don't even think Ellis was here yet.

[B]

I don't think so.

[C]

No.

[B]

Retro pair Deep Dive was like episode three of 2021.

[D]

That episode is so. I wasn't even born yet actually.

[B]

That was that even video Waveform. Or was it?

[E]

It was. I went to double check video.

[B]

I think it was the first ever bonus episode.

[D]

You guys published the episode by speaking into a can.

[C]

I just went straight. Yeah, Marquez, you typed breaking news in.

[D]

Breaking news.

[A]

Breaking news. Breaking news. Fish. That's a hilarious reference. I just got an email that Gemini for Mac just got released. It is essentially the same thing that we were talking about earlier for Windows, but it's also now on the Mac. So if you go to gemini.comgemini. google Mac, it's the same thing.

[C]

Such a funny URL.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Gemini.google Mac, but it's pancakes, bacon jam. It's essentially like. It's the same thing. Replaces your keyboard shortcut. So, like, right now, you can replace Spotlight with whatever alternative. You can have this replace Spotlight and then jump in and access your files or your Google Drive or your whatever, and it's your chatbot into your Gemini or desktop.

[C]

Google's gonna Sherlock Spotlight. Oh, my God.

[E]

Well, what is the shortcut to activate this? Do you have it installed yet?

[A]

I do have it installed already. And the shortcut is customizable, but by default, your mini chat shortcut is command is option space, and your full chat shortc shortcut is option shift space. But I think I can change that. Yeah, I can just change that to whatever.

[C]

I just want it to be space.

[E]

I want it crazy. I want to change it to Control, because then I could just use all of them. I'll have command space for Spotlight, option space for Raycast, and then control space for Google Gemini.

[C]

It's also funnier because Control is generally the hotkey for Windows and use a Gemini thing.

[D]

I can't wait to be really old and talking to my great grandkids and say something like. Like, I remember when Google Sherlocked Spotlight and also turned Ray Cast into Clubhouse. I'd be like, oh, man, you really need to be in a home.

[B]

It's time for a nap. All right, Grandpa, back in the AI

[C]

wars, I talked about it on a podcast.

[B]

What's up, dad? What's a podcast?

[A]

Okay, Grandpa, it's time to take a nap.

[D]

It was an audio feed. It was syndicated, really, simply. You joke.

[B]

But you will be telling them about.

[E]

You mean Spotify?

[B]

Yeah. No, they don't. Even. Spotify will be long gone. It'll be. They're gonna rebrand to an AI, a GPU company. At some point, there will just be

[D]

like, one giant data center somewhere in the desert that makes one continuous song with AI, and you just. You just sort of tune in to See what's going on with the song. It's like perpetual stoop music.

[B]

I don't hate that.

[E]

Someone barcode this.

[C]

I want that.

[B]

I'm surprised you haven't already, Alice.

[D]

This is like, I remember, like, so long ago I met someone who was at a VC firm that was like working on this exact project. Or it wasn't this exact project, but the idea was like, what if you could turn one song into an entire day's listening experience with Generative AI? So, like, they would add guitar solos. And then one idea they pitched was they were like, yeah, at one point, like, the music will sort of get really quiet and it'll be like a podcast about the song.

[C]

And it's like, that guy's listening to this episode and he's like, it did sound that stupid.

[D]

I thought it was cool. This was like 2017, like very early before AIs could generate any of these things. So it was very like pie in the sky. And I remember being like, that sounds kind of interesting. And now that they can, I'm like, oh, my God. Before we move on, I just want to say, while we're talking about AI music, I was in a coffee shop.

[B]

That's crazy.

[D]

I know. It was an. It was an. It was an indoor building, I think, but interesting. Listen to a song. I was like, interesting song. Next song, I was like, this coffee shops dude's, you know, pretty middle of the road. And then that song died down. I just heard, okay, Michael, I'm glad you enjoyed that. And I was like, no, they're not. They're using the Spotify DJ in the coffee shop.

[B]

What's up, David?

[E]

That's great.

[A]

Quick update punk. Bring it home.

[E]

You can make control space the shortcut sick. So if you want, you can live this life.

[B]

You got Claude on one, you got Gemini on the other. Tap, tap.

[D]

That was a very Linux coded sentence of you because it's command space on Mac os. Anyway, are we ready for trivia?

[B]

I use arch, by the way.

[A]

I am ready for trivia. Nice.

[D]

Let's get it.

[A]

I need the points.

[E]

Trivia. Question number two earlier. I don't remember what we were talking about. We were talking about temperature and Celsius. Oh, it was the bug.

[B]

It was the bug.

[E]

That's what it was. So here's your question.

[D]

Oh, no.

[E]

32 degrees Celsius is what in Fahrenheit?

[B]

That's so obvious.

[A]

I'm glad I know.

[E]

Is it the nearest tenth of the decimal without going over?

[B]

Oh, wait. Oh, no.

[C]

Yeah, you guys are backwards.

[A]

You said 32 Celsius.

[E]

32 Celsius. Oh, yes.

[A]

Okay, I'll think everyone in other countries

[E]

is yelling at us right now because

[C]

they have to know Fahrenheit. Yeah, it's just the other way around.

[D]

I think 32 Celsius is enough to kill a bear with the amount of caffeine, but maybe. Maybe that's just me.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

How much caffeine would kill a bear? I did do a lot of research into how much caffeine would kill a person Cocaine bear. Because I had a crazy experience.

[D]

Someone asked this question on Reddit word for word four weeks ago. How much caffeine would I need to kill a bear with a heart attack?

[C]

What kind of bear?

[B]

Yeah, brown bear, black bear.

[C]

They're very different bears.

[B]

Or like more polar bear, Like a man.

[D]

The Top comment is 200. They say, first of all, it would die of a seizure, not a heart attack. Second of all, 200 cups for a black bear, 400 cups for a grizzly bear. Assuming this random Reddit comment, do you

[C]

know a good way to tell the difference between.

[D]

Between what?

[C]

Black bear and a grizzly bear?

[D]

If it's alive after 200 cups.

[A]

And that's when we take a break. We'll be right back.

[B]

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[C]

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[C]

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[B]

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[A]

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[C]

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[F]

I'm Mitch Purse, two time IndigoCell champion, championship MVP and forward for the US Women's National Team. Before I went pro, I graduated from Harvard with a degree in psychology, which comes in handy more than you think. Any athlete pursuing greatness knows there's a certain mentality you have to have. What people don't know is what that costs. In my podcast, Confessions of an Elite Athlete, I sit down with the best athletes in the world and explore the psychology, mindset and unseen battles on the path to greatness. So take a seat and learn from the confessions of an elite athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Honest to God, like skinny, I wanna be jacked without context. Tone and sculpt are rooted in diet culture. We're inheriting a lot of nonsense that makes specifically women feel like they have to shrink in order to expand. And I'm just saying, no, let's just like lift heavy and like take up space. That's the expansion. I'm Reben Arson, and this week on Project Swagger, I break down the strategies that helped me build confidence and feel at home in my body, especially after two babies. Listen now at Project Swagger, wherever you get your podcasts.

[C]

All right, welcome back. I have a sports question that Marques is going to explain in tech terms, which is kind of weird because it feels like the basis of the question already kind of is within tech itself.

[A]

Correct.

[C]

There's also a reason in the beginning Marquez said it's a sports related thing and not a golf related thing. Because I'm sure most people wouldn't make it this far into the podcast if they knew it was about golf. Too bad you're here. Don't go away. Okay, so I saw this.

[D]

You mean regular golf or ball golf?

[C]

Ball golf.

[D]

Okay.

[B]

What?

[C]

Not disc golf or wait, not the superior.

[B]

What is regular golf then ball golf?

[A]

The original.

[C]

We're disc golf fans here.

[B]

Oh, I knew that.

[A]

We.

[B]

So. So regular is disk is what you're saying?

[C]

That's the other thing. It's superior.

[D]

Now I feel like this is not even. It's. Please just continue.

[C]

Okay, so, yeah, the original tweet was actually from Andrew Martin Nick, and he said, imagine being this crazy about your custom 3D printed irons and losing in every serious tournament to guys who don't do any of that and just play with normal equipment. And it's referencing a tweet about Bryson DeChambeau and his 3D printed floor 5 iron, where a reporter asked, Are you satisfied with the 5? He said, yeah, I mean, I only hit it once today. And the reporter said, how long does it take to make. Where? He replied, prince in eight hours. Machines there, three or four hours. Then you have to cut grooves in it and a bunch of other stuff so you can have something within a

[A]

day and a half if it's 3D printed.

[B]

Is it still made of iron?

[C]

I'm so confused.

[B]

It's called a five iron.

[C]

About this, I mean, honestly, I am confused about the material of.

[E]

I thought you said this was a golf course.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

This was at the Masters this week.

[A]

The disrespect is crazy. Yeah.

[C]

Which is like the minor league of golf. Yeah. No, it's the one with the really cheap food.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

Yes. Okay. I'm glad you went there. So in order to understand why this is weird, you need to understand A little bit more about golf and about Bryson golf. You have a set of 18 clubs you're allowed to carry, and every club is typically a different loft and different length. So the higher the ball goes, the more lofted it is and the shorter

[C]

the club, which is the angle of the head.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Right. Okay.

[A]

So a nine iron will have a lot of loft and will be shorter. And you go all the way to, like, a four iron, and it will be not very lofted to go farther and the club is longer.

[C]

When you say the club is, you mean the head is shorter or longer or the length of, like, where the

[A]

handle is the length of the club.

[C]

Okay. So every iron has a different angle and has a different physical length from ground to hands.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

And that's to give you this smooth transition from the shortest club all the way to the longest club in the bag, which is the driver, which has the least loft. Longest club goes the farthest, biggest swing.

[E]

Can I ask a stupid question?

[C]

Go ahead.

[E]

Which is the one that I use

[A]

for mini golf, you have a putter for mini golf, which is the shortest club. They're all putters, and it goes the shortest distance. It happens to have basically no loft. Typically actually has one degree of loft, but we'll ignore that. So Bryson is a bit of an unusual golfer. Bryson has this history of the last couple years of really tweaking his clubs and trying to optimize his swing because the best golfers in the world are the most consistent golfers in the world. And he is the only one, as far as I know, who thought, you know, why do all my clubs have to be different lengths? I'm going to have the same grip and the same length on every single one of my irons, which doesn't sound that weird, but when you put the longest and shortest irons next to each other, you'll realize that that's really unusual. His shortest irons are the same length as his longest irons so that he can have the same swing with all of his irons.

[B]

Why are they different lengths in the first place?

[A]

They're all different lengths in the first place because to hit it further, you want a longer lever. So less loft and longer lever, it all just kind of smoothly graduates you to the longest club in the bag. But he's decided to just have the same exact length for all of his irons, which is highly unusual. And he's the only one who would do this kind of thing because he's kind of the mad scientist of the golf world of being willing to try and tinker with new equipment. So he's been one of the best golfers in the world, debatably. But for the last couple of years, the Masters, as you point out, very big tournament, maybe the biggest tournament if you're a golfer. I'm understating this. It is the biggest tournament. Obviously he goes to the Masters and apparently one of this new things he's trying is a 3D printed 5 iron. Specifically what makes it called.

[B]

Why is it called five iron?

[A]

So a nine iron, an eight iron, a seven iron, six iron, five iron are all next to each other in the bag. The five iron is a very specific club that typically goes the same distance every single time. It's slightly shorter than the 4 iron, slightly longer than the 6 iron for some reason, just as 5 iron is the one that 3D printed.

[C]

Do you know the specifics of, like, how.

[A]

I don't. I would imagine it's a lot more complicated than the 3D printers we're picturing, which are like plastic. And this is obviously not. This is definitely still metal. The thing also about making clubs for a tournament like this is every tournament, every club has to be legally allowed and tested. So it has to pass USGA regulations, and so it has to meet a certain set of requirements for that. It has to have grooves. All this stuff assuming well he played with it. So he got this 3D printed club approved to be just special enough for this. The other thing about Bryson is he is he has a YouTube channel, he has big social media presence and I love him, but he's very easy to make fun of because he's always messing with his equipment and have like little tweaks with his driver and little tweaks with these clubs that have never been used before. He goes out to the Masters, he has a 3D printed club, he does not have a good time. He plays two, not that great rounds and doesn't make the cut. So of course they ask him about this club and you know, when he's in a good mood, he's willing to break down all of the fun, interesting things about his clubs. When he just missed the cut at the biggest tournament of the year with the Masters, he's just like, like, ah, yeah, it didn't, didn't work. It wasn't that good. That's really actually the tech angle of this, which is he literally tried to 3D print one of his clubs and make a specialized club just for this one tournament. What I think is even more interesting is the Masters itself is the least tech of any golf tournament in the world. And I wanted to conveniently use this to pivot to that.

[C]

Okay, okay.

[A]

Which is if you actually go to the Masters, it is the one sporting event on earth, as far as I know, where smartphones are banned from the entire grounds the entire time.

[B]

Isn't that the same with chess?

[A]

Is that a sport?

[C]

Well, okay, that was the thing that happened, like, a week or two ago. I don't think they're allowed on stage with the competitors.

[A]

You're saying the entire event, all the audience, the patrons, all of the players, everyone there, Nobody's taking photos with their phones because they're banned on. And so when you see photos of the Masters, it is a golfer hitting a shot, and everyone, instead of holding their phones, is just watching.

[D]

Wow.

[A]

And it is just such a blast from the past and a really refreshing, weird, like, little piece of history. Every time they play the Masters, I

[E]

give it a week until they're all wearing meta glasses.

[A]

So that was one of the things that's actually come up, is people are going to the Masters wearing those smart glasses, and everyone's going, hey, we got to protect Augusta and ban those glasses, too. Like, we really just need it to be as pure as possible. So that did come up quite a bit. But I think they will probably end up banning those glasses, too. It is a little bit scary, slash, possibly cultish, the way they protect that course. Because if you are a YouTuber, for example, YouTube. Golf's gotten really big in the last couple years. You play all the biggest courses in the world, but if you go to play Augusta, no cameras allowed, and you sign an NDA, and you can't talk about it.

[F]

What?

[A]

And it's like, you can't talk about the course. Yeah. You can't talk about the time that you played the course. And so there's no video evidence of it. And you sign these NDA. It's like this really weird thing where you see it on tv.

[B]

People there or something.

[A]

You see it on tv.

[B]

That's what it sounds like to me.

[A]

Every year on tv, this course looks absolutely perfect. The grass is the exact same shade of green as all the chairs that are on the course because they've matched those things. Like, all of the. The scoreboards are in the exact same places every single year. It's this almost mythical course where if you ever do get the chance to go there, you don't have a camera with you. You don't have your phone. You just kind of have to take it in and experience it and go Home and that.

[B]

Like the Stone Ages.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And that's crazy. That's what you leave with.

[E]

What is the benefit of that? Is it, like, to prevent cheating or something? Or they just want to keep this, like, aura?

[A]

It's just.

[B]

Definitely creates.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

There's also, like, just protects the integrity of the historical nature of this. It's just the only original golf event left like that.

[C]

Isn't there extremely minimal ads? Aren't there six sponsors for the whole thing?

[A]

Yes.

[C]

So the whole thing is just og. Og.

[A]

And the thing you brought up about the food, the food is still the same prices that it was 50 years ago. It's still a dollar for a hot dog.

[C]

Like two bucks for an egg salad

[A]

sandwich or something, which is hilarious because people will go straight to the merch shop and spend $1000 on it. Shirts and hats and stuff, because that's super limited. But a $2 hot dog. So it is very much a blast from the past and I appreciate that about it. Even though I'm a tech person, I do want to go to the Masters and just experience that.

[B]

Where is it?

[A]

It's in Georgia.

[B]

Yeah.

[E]

If anyone from there is listening. Your first video was about golf.

[A]

My first ever video was about golf. Fun fact. I did get invited to go to this Masters, and I didn't because I wanted to be here on the podcast with you guys.

[B]

That's not the reason.

[C]

That's that wrong choice.

[A]

I couldn't make it. But I really. I hope I get invited next time because it looks sick.

[C]

Can I go one more step off the rails into the most niche question possible?

[A]

Yes.

[C]

I probably could ask you this off the podcast, but since we're talking about golf. Anyways. I'm currently in a disc golf fantasy league and we had a huge argument over the weekend over how to properly score things.

[A]

So that if you miss the cut by a lot, you're going to have a worse day. Four, if you pick someone who barely misses the cut, then you only get penalized a little bit. That would. That would, like, scale, I think, properly.

[C]

We can talk more about this later because I don't want to.

[B]

Totally.

[C]

But, Bo, you're out there listening.

[A]

There it is.

[C]

Text Marquez and I. I think it's

[E]

so cute you think that's making it onto the pod.

[A]

Anyway, the Masters in the comments. I hope I get to go someday. Bryson is maybe the most unrelatable but also relatable golfer because I'm a tech person and he's also a YouTuber, so it's kind of a small World.

[C]

He's relatable. Because when I do bad at things, I don't want to talk to anyone about it.

[A]

That's facts.

[C]

Yeah, it's totally reasonable.

[A]

Super true.

[D]

We all know that person who's like, you know, participates in a thing, but is actually way more interested in doing some weird, technical, tweaky thing. But when I say we all know that person, I.

[A]

We all know.

[C]

We all know.

[A]

Yeah. Anyway, I think it's time for that last thing we do on every podcast.

[B]

Go to the Masters.

[A]

I wish, but this is actually all

[C]

recorded at the Masters, so it has to be deleted and we signed it at the end.

[A]

That'd be wild.

[E]

Would we be allowed to do a pod from the Masters with no cameras? Like, just audio equipment?

[A]

I don't even.

[E]

Would they allow that?

[A]

I think so.

[D]

Like, this table on the green, like six feet from the hole, and they just have to golf around us while we're talking.

[A]

That would be a live golf event.

[D]

Oh, my gosh, guys. GoPro, between 2016 and 2018, made a thing that was not a little tiny camera. I mean. Yeah, it was not a little. It was not a hero and it was not a mission. I'm so excited for that little thing. What was it?

[A]

I feel like I should know this. What do they mean?

[B]

What did they make?

[C]

I think I have a solid educated guess.

[D]

Not a liquid guess, bro.

[C]

No, this can't. This can't come out of my fingers. Depending on what is, that's gonna be really confusing.

[D]

I mean, we did record that conversation. Andrew's referencing a conversation we had before the podcast where we were discussing what five liquids we would have dispensed from each of our fingers, which you will never hear.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

I have a feeling this is going to make somebody mad. This is probably Ellis or Adam.

[D]

All right, who wants. Who wants to go first?

[A]

Well, they just.

[C]

I'm so mad at Marques's already.

[A]

I picked one. That's probably not the answer you want, but maybe also technically correct. They made an underwater housing for the GoPro.

[D]

Not what I was looking.

[C]

The original GoPros needed waterproof housing, correct?

[A]

Exactly. They sure did.

[D]

This was not the answer.

[C]

So that's just part of the action camera, isn't it?

[A]

Probably a product that GoPro made. That's not the camera. But it is.

[D]

Am I that pedantic with these questions? Have I ever.

[A]

Let's see what the other answers are.

[B]

Yes.

[D]

Really?

[A]

I might be the most correct. Let's see what they say.

[C]

My theory was GoPro makes a bunch of stuff for people who do action sports that generally wear a helmet. So maybe they made some sort of headphones that work well with helmets. Helmets.

[D]

That's really interesting, but I don't think they ever made headphones.

[B]

Mine is obviously not true because I covered phones for, like, 15 years and I don't remember this, but I put phones.

[D]

I don't remember the GoPro phone.

[B]

Look, I don't know. They might have done some weird collab with some. I don't know, my two or three.

[A]

I've seen weirder phones.

[D]

I was referencing the GoPro Karma, which was a drone.

[A]

I did do a video on that. I knew it. We did.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Okay.

[D]

Oh, come on, guys. You can't be mad that I'm not giving.

[B]

A drone is a camera, though.

[D]

That's why I was like. When I was like it wasn't a little tiny camera, then I was like, oh, but it kind of is a little tiny.

[B]

Gotcha.

[E]

Quick update on the score. Marquez with 21 after that incorrect answer. Andrew with 22 after getting that one wrong, and David with 25 after not getting the correct answer.

[A]

Thanks.

[E]

Okay, Mr. Thesaurus, next question. 32 degrees Celsius is what in Fahrenheit? I'm accepting the answer to the nearest tenth of a decimal point without going over.

[C]

Can we just do delta?

[E]

Nope. It's so easy.

[A]

Oh, this is so.

[C]

I never said it was. Both of them were just backwards.

[B]

I was right.

[E]

Wrong. That was my original question.

[C]

Then I'll say it one more time. Now I'm confused.

[E]

32 degrees Celsius is what in Fahrenheit? Okay, do you remember the formula?

[B]

Oh, wait, I don't remember the formula. I remember part of the formula.

[A]

Oh, I wish.

[E]

Flip them and read. What do you got?

[A]

What? Oh, that's a. Is there a decimal in your number?

[C]

Yes. Oh, sorry. That's a decimal you're actually answering in Kelvin.

[E]

Okay, Mark has you first.

[A]

I said 98.6.

[C]

Oh, I was gonna say that's a really good guess because we're talking about body temperature.

[E]

That's a really good guess.

[C]

I wrote 101.5.

[B]

That's like a radio station.

[C]

It is a really bad one in New Jersey. They're all bad losers.

[D]

New Jersey is home to one of the nation's greatest radio stations. I'm talking about WMFU. Okay. Or WFMU. That's it. WFMU. Don't talk smack about New Jersey radio if you're wuph. WFMU.

[C]

Never mind.

[B]

It's okay. I like 96.9. The Eagle out of Sacramento, California. Classic rock.

[D]

All right, David, what'd you put?

[B]

I put 74 degrees wrong, but you

[E]

get the points because you didn't go over.

[C]

Is it just under Marcus? So I wrote in the bottom how previously we talked about how like 94, the 82 degrees Fahrenheit felt like 28 degrees Celsius. So I was trying to go with an approximation with that.

[B]

Well, that was completely wrong.

[C]

Well, I'm assuming basing it off of the 82, maybe not exactly it, but

[B]

slightly different temperature because of the wind factor.

[E]

Marquez had all the right digits just in the wrong order.

[C]

Order.

[E]

It was 89.6.

[C]

Oh, damn, I went high.

[A]

I just thought that strikes again.

[B]

The. Okay, isn't the calculation like times 5, 9 plus 12 or something?

[E]

Degrees in Fahrenheit minus 32 times 5 nights gives you Celsius, so you have to do that backwards to get there.

[A]

So times 9/5 minus 32.

[C]

Just for that, I'm never using WhatsApp.

[B]

Wait, what?

[A]

Why? We should just Google it anyway. Why?

[C]

Yeah, because Celsius people don't.

[A]

Celsius people.

[D]

Celsius people use it.

[A]

Oh, you know, everyone else.

[D]

Thanks for referring to non American. The Celsius people. WhatsApp.

[B]

It's WhatsApp users are.

[C]

Tell me I'm wrong.

[B]

You know, you've never been more right.

[A]

Thank you for watching and listening to this episode of the golf podcast, Ball Golf Podcast. The Ball Golf Podcast. The original golf, obviously. Yeah. We'll be back for more in April.

[B]

Still

[C]

April fools.

[A]

See you. See you next time. Bye.

[C]

Wait for me. Do you do it?

[A]

Nope.

[C]

Here, I'll do it. Like us.

[B]

Produced by Abilene, we're part of the

[C]

Fox Media Podcast Network, and our intro entry music is made by Fate.

[B]

Silver,

[D]

If you could have five liquids come out of each of your fingers,

[C]

which hand does it have to be? Your dominant hand?

[D]

No, non dominant hand. Which five would you pick?

[B]

Water. Coke Zero.

[C]

You get water anywhere?

[A]

Yeah, but any. Any time.

[C]

Water's free.

[A]

Yeah. Water run.

[E]

Where's the water coming?

[C]

Yeah. Is it tap?

[D]

You can't reason with the sun. Trust us, we've tried.

[A]

This summer, it's time to put that

[D]

angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that

[C]

can burn and damage your skin.

[D]

The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your [e-mail] to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe. Lotion. You're welcome. Columbia engineered for whatever.