298: Don't Accidentally Become a Bank

Brad, we survived tsunami 2025. Did we? I think I might have slept through it. I guess that's a form of surviving it. Did you not get a notification? On my phone, like the blaring, like, hey, you might be in danger, get to high ground kind of thing. Well, no, it starts with. Hey, tornado, sorry, not tornado, tsunami warning. Let's not also have tornadoes here, please. I mean, we do have those occasionally now. It's great. Thanks. Thanks, Obama.

The yeah, no, I got a notification last night that was like, hey, there was a giant earthquake in Russia and you're in the tsunami warming zone. More information to come. Dude, that thing was an eight point eight. Yeah, it was a big it was a big boy. That's like historically big. It's the biggest one in a decade. Top 10. It's up there with like the Chile one in 2010 that killed a bunch of people. And the one in the Indian Ocean that caused that big tsunami that they made a bunch of movies about.

like the Christmas day one or Christmas Eve. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, uh, off, off of a rush off of Russia, there was a 8.8 earthquake last night and different parts of the, of the Pacific, the Pacific rim. had different levels of effectiveness. Right. Which is weird about like every time a tsunami warning happens, I have to learn about tsunamis because this is weird, but they didn't teach us about tsunamis in Tennessee elementary school. Like they did tornadoes and hurricanes. Yeah. Weird. Yeah.

So I'm going to say I'm going to say if there's ever a tsunami big enough to reach Tennessee, any level of disaster preparedness is probably inadequate. Look, I've seen deep impact. I know how that goes. But. But yeah, no, the kind of TLDR is that we ended up getting an advisory.

which means don't be in the water and if you have a boat maybe consider taking it out of the harbor because like it'll be fine in the ocean but we'll get jacked up against the dock and the and the jetty and all that stuff And sure enough, I woke up this morning. There's video of Half Moon Bay Harbor, which is like 10, 15 miles south of me. And there's boats going up and down a meter. And yeah, we've got three, two to five feet. It looks like that's pretty substantial.

Everything I have ever read and heard about, not even just tsunamis, but also just incoming water really of any amounts, is that way, way, way less water by volume than you think is extremely dangerous. basically like ankle high water moving fast enough can knock you off your feet. I mean, you've stood in the ocean and you've had, had it had a big wave kind of wobble you. Right. Yeah.

Yeah, it happens. Um, and I'm like, I actually, um, this was, uh, this was during the hurricane in, uh, Southeast last year, Helene. Yeah, I saw I don't know if it was the Weather Channel or somebody did a visualization. It was like they might have been using Unreal Engine for this. It was one of those like real time 3D graphics things like with the meteorologist like standing in the middle of this whirling maelstrom. But they visualized in like an.

standard suburban neighborhood like what rapid water rise would do and it's terrifying to watch like even just a few feet is like picking everything up off the ground and swirling it around and creating like a Reading this like blender effect of debris, like sharp debris, like swirling around, slicing things up like water is scarier than you think. Somebody was sharing. Somebody shared the Japanese weather.

Disaster Preparedness Association's infographic to show why tsunamis are dangerous. And it's because the it was really illustrative because usually you see a tsunami and you think about like the abyss or.

you know, the cartoon big wave that the guy's surfing on. But the thing about the tsunami is the wave's long, right? It's not... it's not like a four foot high wave and then it immediately goes away it just breaks and washes away it's the the wave is like two miles long and it's four feet high so it's an enormous amount of water even if it's not as high as like

the waves are during a big storm at high tide. So anyway, but it was fine here. We, I think the 2007 tsunami, the Fukushima, the one that got... fukushima in japan was that 2011 i think it was 2011 yeah we had enough of a suck out that like we went up to the hill in pacifica and watched it do the little we have a little like horseshoe shaped kind of inlet where the beach is where the main beach is here in lindamar and it made us it made a spiral a swirl

Like a whirlpool on one of the edges where the water was getting pulled out so hard that it made turbulence that made it like make a make make literally like your bathtub drain whirlpool. You saw this with your own eyes. yeah and a scary and most importantly and this is it's funny this is one of those things that i i think one of the tourists that was impacted by that by that tsunami in in um in the indian ocean um said

is that their kid knew that when the waters receded dramatically, you have to run like hell. That's your sign to run as fast as you can to high ground. And literally saved a bunch of people's lives on that beach because they were... They listened to their kid who had apparently learned about tsunamis in elementary school. Hey, public education works. Yeah. But but anyway, we saw that, too. We saw the water go way down in 2011. That's got to be ominous. It was it was was.

ominous is exactly the right word because you saw you saw parts of the water of the beach under the water that you don't normally see like pieces of black rock that are never out of the water even at the lowest of low tides and uh yeah Unsettling. Well, hey, what a cheery thought on which to start this podcast.

Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I'm Brad. Brad, today we're going to talk about something that we are wildly underqualified to talk about. Great. Let's select an M.O. for this podcast. You say, well, kind of, I mean, so I end up doing a lot of research for stuff for different reasons, either because of where I work or a job that I'm doing or something like that. And I say that in the real way, not the pejorative doing my own research way.

um but yeah payment processors have come up and i uh talked to a bunch of people including some people in the discord and in the podcast community about payment processors last year because i was thinking about doing a startup that was going to involve them and then i had two kinds of conversations with people about that. I think I could have stopped you after startup. I was thinking about doing a startup period. Sometimes startups are good. The itch has returned. I mean, maybe.

No pun intended in light of the subject we're about to discuss to be clear. Perhaps I should say the urge to start up has returned. It's too early to be clever at that level. no i was talking to i was talking to some folks about doing a startup that's still maybe maybe something i'll do but when i got to the part about um how payment processing works because it's like

At a certain level these days, if you want to take money from people online for a business, you just sign up for a Stripe account and then they handle all the stuff that used to be a real pain in the ass, including the compliance and regulatory stuff. And we'll talk about that in a minute. But I had two types of conversations with people who've done this before. And one was like, yeah, it's pretty straightforward. Just use Stripe. But also it's, you know, kind of a nightmare.

You know, you're going to lose X percentage of your stuff on transaction fees. But you should also know that if you're big enough, you can kind of negotiate that and get a little bit more from them. And then I talked to some people who had some really wildly successful startups that they ended up selling for.

You know, significant chunks of money who are like, oh, yeah, once you hit scale, you can negotiate a lower percentage and make a bunch more money in your transactions. And you won't even have to worry about that for a while. But when you do, man, it is the real is the real juicy money. And I was like. Oh, OK, I don't think I should do this because then there was also a lot of advice like, hey, don't do anything that's going to accidentally turn you into a bank because then.

then like you just, you know, I don't, you don't need to understand why, but being a bank is really bad. Okay. Are you sure I could say, well, I mean, it's probably got some upsides too, if you're good at it, but, uh, well, yeah like you end up if you accidentally are in a situation this is like this is why when you put money into your xbox account it shows up as points and not money for a long time is because somebody lawyer microsoft was like man we can't be a bank okay

Because once we're a bank, then that means we have to do money laundering rules and we have to do fraud protection rules. And there's a bazillion different legislation requirements for banks in different countries. And you have to know all of them. And then you end up with like. 200 people on your team that are each responsible for one small region of the world. And it's a pain in the butt. Yeah. OK, two points of order here. Number one. Yes. Hi. Hello.

Are you interested in talking about your startup idea? Is this the type of idea? OK, so there are two types of startups. There are the this is an idea that I think nobody else has had and I can make a big impact by doing something new or there's just the disruption type.

Where it's like, hey, this has been done 20 times already, but I think I can do it better and displace the people on top. So it sounds like this is the former and you will not be disclosing your idea. No, this is it's the yeah, I think this is a good idea. I think it's more.

more i ended up waving off on it because it it became clear that the kind of work that was going to be is the kind of work that i actually don't like doing it wasn't about building something it was about establishing a regulatory framework and it was going to take a fairly significant upfront investment which i wasn't interested in because i don't like i think the potential upside is pretty good for

A small scale funded business, but not good for a big funded business there in the current climate. Okay.

And the other point of order is we should we should talk about why we are even discussing payment processors in the first place here. You hit it. We had niche, right? Yes, there's a there's a niche. Everybody has an itch problem occasionally. Yes. Well, it's not not just itch. Just to be clear, it's a steamy itch. Oh, God, that's even worse. I know. We shouldn't. I don't want to single out itch here because I think. Yes. So the thing we're dancing around is that.

A couple of days ago, about a week ago now, I guess both itch and steam itch.io for people who don't know is a incredibly small indie distributor for games, books, comics, audio files. Basically, a nerd a long time ago sat down and was like, hey, I want to make Bandcamp, but for everything else that's kind of just Bandcamp stuff. I hadn't I'd never thought of the Bandcamp comparison, but that's a pretty good. And I actually like.

I guess I knew this because I see people advertise other types of products on itch, but I still think of itch as a video game platform. Like people put board games on it. Like when Austin Walker launched his tabletop game, he sells that on itch and that's like PDFs you can download. It's an easy way to sell your thing.

for people who make things that don't fit into other buckets easily. Right. And now to be clear, I would guess that I would, I would guess the overwhelming majority of their inventory is still video games.

i could be wrong i could be wrong i mean there's a bunch of different ways to slice that right is it like what's the pretentious what's their revenue is it all video games is it other stuff is it i i don't i don't know they don't like it's it's privately held for a long time it was like one or two people running itch uh i think leafo is the is the founder who wrote it in like a

Like as a project for fun, like a programming project for fun, it kind of started out as. Yeah, I think they've said in the course of messaging about this kerfuffle that they're like maybe 20 people now or something. So it has. Super small. Yeah. And for what it's worth, if you're not familiar with it, it's also a platform where you can give things away. You can just post things for free or they also have a pay what you want model. And in contrast to Steam.

The thing that they're famous for, well, okay, you can also pay, you can also determine, like the old Humble Bundle stuff does, you can determine the amount that you want to pay to them, to the creator, to itch, to the creator. So they'll do some stuff without.

taking anything more than just the transaction fees that their credit card processors charge, right? I think they defaulted to charging 10%, but there's a slider that you can use to remove that if you so desire. And like you said, you can-

You can post stuff with a, here's the recommended price. You can pay nothing if you're a creator and you want to do that. So. So, you know, a much a much looser and more open platform than Steam, but Steam and itch both have been equally affected by the thing we're about to talk about. Yeah, so a regulatory, sorry, not a regulatory, an activist group in Australia called? Collective Shout. Collective Shout. Thank you.

Ran an open letter that generated a few thousand emails, it sounds like, and calls to payment processors like MasterCard, Visa, Discover, PayPal about not-safe-for-work games on Steam and itch. Yeah. Or, you know, they might even narrow the scope there like they. Sorry, I had one particular game, right? That they were really. Yes. Yes. But I also I had the language in front of me like it's it's OK, like.

Incest, blackmail, unavoidable, non-consensual sex are terms that they used. I'm sorry. No, I believe those were terms associated with Game No Mercy. I'm looking at a Guardian article here about this, and I'm not clear if that's... collective shouts language or if that is actually language that no mercy itself used to describe its content i'm not quite sure i that i don't i don't i didn't i didn't dig into the specifics of that beyond

The fact that like a tiny number of calls prompted the payment processors to basically threaten to kill steam and itches access to credit cards. through through intermediaries um which is an existential problem so anyway yeah we'll talk about that in a bit yeah like we probably don't need to belabor the the um

The nuances of what type of content we're talking about here, but it's the classic. It's the classic situation of they say they are targeting things like rape and child abuse being depicted in games, but then the net that has been asked. is sweeping up a vastly wider spectrum of types of games than than what they say they're targeting well and we can talk about why that is too because like

People were fairly upset, especially with itch, because it has a reputation of being a place that you can kind of post whatever stuff you make. And there's a lot of games. that are highly personal on on itch right about dealing with trauma and abuse and stuff like that that are Definitely include the themes that these people were targeting and that MasterCard and PayPal and Visa said that they couldn't have anymore. But also are, you know.

creations that have artistic merit and are helping people process trauma and stuff like that. Anyway, before we get to that, though, let's talk about what payment processes are, because this is a thing that I think people don't really understand.

Yeah, and it sounds like it's gotten more stratified over the years. Like, I think back to, I mean, what was using a credit card in the 80s, you know? Like, you have the little physical carbon copy slidey machine, and there was probably, I guess, a transaction happening over a...

own line and that was kind of it. But now now there are a lot of intermediaries, right? So that's the thing that I feel like has changed is that the stripes of the world are like a new layer in this process. Is that accurate? I don't. Yeah. I mean, they're definitely new layers in the eighties before they had the phone line thing. You'd use the little ka-chunk ka-chunk carbon copy machine. And they'd also have a book that came out every week or every month.

with a list of bum credit card numbers in it right okay and at the end of the at the end of the week you'd take those credit card slips to the bank and then the bank Your merchant bank would deal with the transactions on paper. The idea of non-instantaneous, like delayed credit card transactions?

More to the point, credit cards being used in a world without instantaneous telecommunications that can verify transactions, like the idea of a bunch of bad credit card transactions just sitting around in a book that they can't actually. invalidate as bad until sometime later is completely nuts. But I guess that's how the system came about. Right. Yeah. So so then they went to calling when you did a credit card, especially if I think they.

think they probably were profiling people and like if you look shady then you you would get called and if you were like a middle-aged white guy you're probably okay Then they got modems and they had little boxes like the ones we know now, except for they were not always connected and they would dial up into the Internet. So every time, every every single time somebody swiped a credit card, it would do that.

And you'd have to like the transaction would take as long as a modem to connect and then send the numbers and then send the auth back. But but anyway, so in those days, though, mostly. The individual merchants.

had deals with credit card providers. So like if you were a grocery store, you would take Visa and MasterCard, but maybe not Discover and not Diners Club and not. You know, and obviously Square and Venmo and Apple Cash and all of those things didn't exist at that point. How do you reminding me? I had forgotten how much more of a crapshoot it was, say, 30 plus years ago, whether a given store would take a given type of credit card like it was much more.

siloed off you know it's like oh like you said the store only takes visa mastercard discovers no good here or vice versa like it's kind of a thing of the past right you almost never have to think about does this establishment take a specific card anymore

yeah i i had a job once that i had an american express card that was my like like they give me an american express card to do business expenses with because i was traveling a lot and there were places that just you were no the american express wouldn't be accepted period yeah Okay, so now we have these things called payment processors that kind of sit between the credit card companies and the merchants, right?

So instead of you as a grocery store, as a place that sells, you know, games online, making a relationship with Visa and PayPal and and. MasterCard and Discover and American Express and all these other companies. You make a deal with Stripe or actually confusingly PayPal in this case, because they kind of are both of these things. They both do the transaction on the user end.

And then they also will do the intermediary business between the credit card companies and the business. Right. And I think somewhere down the stack, they are also a bank, probably, if you choose to use them that way. PayPal absolutely will let you use them as a bank. Yeah.

You have to opt into that. And when you do that, they collect a bunch of additional personal data about you. And that's, you know, I'm like envisioning the business model here. It's like you come in as a middleman and then you start offering the.

It's the very same service that the company below you in the stack is also offering. Really quietly try to supplant them. I mean, is PayPal going to run Visa out of business next week? Absolutely not. Or Wells Fargo? Absolutely not. But you know what I mean.

Well, but PayPal exists because they were like, hey, what if we did money but on the Internet? Right. Like we've done this multiple times. Square cash is the same deal. Hey, what if we made accepting credit cards for your business a lot easier?

and they they that was a physical a physical dongle that you could plug into your phone's headphone jack remember those yeah are those still out there like that was that was the big bellwether to me was seeing it was it did plug into the headphone jack right like this little little squarish credit card swipe thing like you'd see like street vendors especially in a big city

like this you'd see like street food vendors and stuff like that all of a sudden everybody had an ipad with that little square dongle sticking out of it yeah but the real sauce on their platform was they did all the the back end payment processing stuff for you as well um And yes, Square is still around. They sell they sell things you slam an iPad into it or just a screen that is like those screens that flip around. A lot of those are square screens now. OK, so. OK, so these people.

Instead of being a bank, instead of being a credit card company, they just sit in between the merchant and the credit card company and they do a lot of stuff. When you swipe, like when you tap your card on a square terminal, it does a bunch of stuff. First, it checks to see if it's a fraudulent card. and they have a bunch of heuristics for that um that are different for online transactions and for in-person transactions but they'll they'll even like they'll even query the bank and be like hey

where was the last physical transaction for this card? And if you do something like, we had a question about this last week, if you buy something from Knoxville, And then three minutes later, you buy something from Phoenix that will trigger one of the fraud warnings. Right. There's a there's a bazillion layers of that because those.

those those payment processors get a better deal if their fraud rates are lower oh sure like they pay a lower percentage for each transaction for lower fraud rates which means then they make more money on the flat transaction rate that they charge their customers based on the contracts that sign i wonder um i wonder if the okay let me let me pause for just a second here we're talking about front end processors right like the stripes and squares of the world are

You've got here in the notes, front end processors are the ones that you kind of see at point of sale. Those are the ones we're all familiar with. Right. And then the back end processors are probably names you've never heard of before that are handling the actual transactions. You've heard of the names before, but they're like big merchant banks and they interact like they handle the actual movement of money. So the front end processors move money, move, move numbers in a ledger.

And the backend processors turn those ledger moves into money in a way that only makes sense to people who are really deeply embedded in the financial system. Sure. In the same way that like, if you buy stock from your Merrill Lynch fund. you're not actually getting a certificate of stock. You're getting a divot in your Merrill Lynch account that says, hey, Brad has one share of this stock.

That is in our fund overall, and we will give him we will give him growth represented by this share. Right. Even though you don't actually own those shares for all intents and purposes. It's just layered abstractions all the way down. Yeah, pretty much. OK, so the reason I wanted to define front and back end is because you were talking about front end processors doing fraud checks. I wonder if the back end fraud protection has gotten more lax because they're relying on.

like to perform that kind of thing i got i got to the part where i looked at the back end processor how that how that stuff works and it got to the hey we have to talk to the federal reserve on the regular about how to move money around and i kind of like my eyes glazed over just noped out yeah basically it became a here there be dragons situation and it doesn't apply to normal businesses because the thing is your back-end processors your front-end processors

and your credit card companies and your merchant banks all have deals with these backend processor types. And for the most part, unless you're somebody's CFO, you don't have to understand how this works. Maybe not even then. You probably just pay somebody and then they figure it out. Yeah.

I guess I was just wondering if there are now like onerous fraud checks at every level. Yes. Okay, so it's not just that it's been shifted to the front end ones and the back end ones are kind of relying on that. it's i think it's probably more about money laundering and stuff like that than fraud at the at the higher level but i don't know for sure um so okay so

Your front end processor, you tap your credit card. They check to make sure it's not fraudulent. They're like, OK, this looks good. This is clean. Brad's OK. You're you're there. You have a Snickers bar in your hand. You're waiting. This is all happening in like fractions of a second at this point. And then they say.

hey, I'm going to talk to Brad's bank and see if he can actually afford the snicker bar. And the bank, they hit the bank and the bank is like, hey, how much is the snicker bar? And the man's like, it's like $3. And the bank is like, yeah, Brad's cool for three bucks. Thumbs up.

The the the the payment processor, the front end processor does another like they have secret sauce in here that they don't talk about because it's all proprietary and being three percent better at this is billions of dollars a year in.

in additional revenue and then they approve the transaction or they decline the transaction and if they approve it you get your snickers bar and you walk out of the store and you never think about this again and if they decline it then they say hey man do you have another form of payment something more fungible perhaps cash or bitcoin

And then you give them that and then you take your Snickers bar or you put your Snickers bar down on the counter and walk out or you grab the Snickers bar and run faster than the guy behind the counter. And then, you know, like everybody wins. So that's a kinetic form of payment. Yeah, you're just you're just giving him a good story to tell. So this is where Stripe this is where Stripe lives. This is where Square lives. There's a bazillion other payment processors like like literally there's.

There's meta sites that help you find the perfect payment processor for your business, because if you're doing any kind of volume at all, negotiating a better rate with your payment processor is good for. You know, single digit percentage increase on your sales because it's less less revenue that's taken for you on credit card charges. Yeah, I found just this is just a random site and I can't vouch for it. But stripe alternatives dot com is an aggregator of.

Other payment methods, and there are a lot of them, man. Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad, Payoneer, Fast Spring, Recurly. I mean, some of these you've heard of in other contexts, but Zoho Billing, Braintree. There are a lot of these. Some of them get bought by the payment processors. So that's a fairly common out for that kind of site is that they'll give you a.

They'll give you an overview of the payment thing. And then one of the payment processes is like, hey, we're getting a lot of referrals from these people. It's cheaper for us to just buy them than pay them. So, OK. And this ease of this stuff happening. led to a lot of diversity in payment methods at the at the checkout now. Right. So like this is why a lot of places you can just use Venmo to pay or PayPal when you're at a physical checkout in the real world.

or uh apple cash works everywhere because you know apple became a payment processor right um google is a payment google and samsung are payment processors because they have all these phones and they wanted to get a little little a little bit of this uh

a little taste a little taste of this medicine now you you have these front-end payment processors and they're making money based on a percentage of every transaction And they charge customers a different percentage based on what the business is. They all have a lot of rules. They all have rules about, you know, why then and when I'm talking about payment.

There's two places that have rules, actually. The credit card companies and the people that accept payments like Venmo, like Square Cash and all these have rules. The credit card companies have rules. And it's all tied to the risk of the transaction. So a lot of processors will only accept low risk transactions because they don't want to mess up their percentage because they want to offer the lowest percentages available and on transaction fees.

And that means that they don't want to have broad strikes or declines or disputes, all of which increase their overhead. and increase and decrease their ability to charge the lowest possible rates for these transactions. You're talking about the run in processors charging rates to the merchants.

I'm talking about both the front-end processors and the credit card companies. The credit card companies hate fraud. They hate disputes. They hate... fraudulent transactions that cost those those all cost them money right right so for example if i'm mastercard and i know that stripe is really good their anti-fraud stuff is really good and they have a really low dispute rate

I will give them a 1.5%. These are made up numbers, just for the record. I'll give them a 1.5% transaction rate. So that means 1.5% of every transaction that Stripe passes. through MasterCard generates 1.5% of revenue for MasterCard, right? 1.5% of that transaction. Now, Stripe is charging their customers 4% for that same transaction.

so if stripes fraud and dispute rates stay low and they don't have problems that that increase their cost for their for their upstream partners then then they make two and a half percent on every single one of those transactions now in reality everybody negotiates a different rate with stripe once you get to a certain size and like it's complicated but that's the business right is credit card companies charge this much stripe charges a little bit more

Anything Stripe can do to make that gap bigger means more money for Stripe. And honestly, the same thing on the credit card side. So what that means is... They establish all sorts of rules about what kind of transactions happen on their things. And there are some transactions that are incredibly high risk. For example, digital only goods and services. Credit processing companies do not like those.

Because there's a high recidivism risk on the transactions. Anybody who's ever tried to buy a quantity of virtual Steam gift cards. Yes. And tell you how goddamn difficult it is to do that. And and the weird thing is, if you buy if you go to Amazon and buy a bunch of physical gift cards for steam, no problem. You mean physically isn't as in they will literally ship you a card in the mail. They are printed on a piece of paper with a scratch off thing. That's not an issue. Right.

Adult processing stuff, adult adult services, typically really, really difficult. Now, there's legal stuff as well, but like paying for sex work on credit cards is typically completely impossible in most countries. Because even even where the sex work is actually legal, even where it's legal, because people go have their, you know, have their sex work session and then they dispute the charge. Well, I didn't I clearly wouldn't have hired a prostitute.

And so credit card companies just aren't going to deal with that. That makes sense. I know the marijuana business has also been notoriously cash only or like very difficult to find. institutionalized payment processing and banking that they can work with and even in states where that's been legalized so the marijuana thing is more complicated because while it's legal on a state level in a lot of states in the united states now it's also illegal on a federal level right

And that that adds a level level of complexity that goes beyond like the federal. The fact that it's illegal on a federal level means that he's incredibly conservative. In this case, I mean financially conservative, but I can mean both senses of the word. These conservative credit card processing companies are not going to take the risk that the feds are going to come down on them because they're taking weed money. Right.

So, for example, this is a this is a fun example I found last night because they have all these rules about avoiding contest rates and avoiding disputes and avoiding. fraud and all this stuff. If you have a sex toy store, if you're if you're if you want to make Brad's dildo shop, go on.

And you want not making that title. I'm sorry. No, no, we're not going to. No, don't for the love of God. No. If you want to make your sex toy store and you want to do it online only, it's going to be really hard for you to get. credit card transactions from a lot of payment processors. Even though you're trafficking in physical goods? Yeah, because of high recidivism rate for the transactions. It's specifically because you don't have a physical presence.

If you open a brick and mortar version of Brad's dildo store, then you'll have a much easier time of it coming soon. Yeah. Got it. Interesting. All right. Because that physical location means it's less likely because.

Because they're not just worried about fraud on the consumer side, too. They're worried about you making a fly-by-night operation and then taking a bunch of credit card transactions and then disappearing without filling those transactions. Because they're on the hook for that. That's part of the service the credit card companies provide.

They like physical goods sold. They don't like online-only businesses. They definitely don't like adult stuff. They don't like things that are legal in some places and illegal in others. And they don't like anything that causes them hassle. Now, this is where it gets complicated, right? Because we've been complicated at this point. But these people don't understand feedback online because they don't like feedback online for a credit card company is like.

you know, Hey man, I got a fraudulent charge from a skit from my card being skimmed, not Hey, a thousand people who are cranks about porn. wrote a letter campaign to say, hey, this is bad. So they got more email than they've ever seen, more calls than they've ever seen because of this collective shout campaign. They're not they're not experienced in being on the receiving end of like mass messaging campaigns is what you're saying. They are not equipped to do this.

coordinated campaigns are not something that they receive on the regular. Exactly. And their default response to any feedback is what's the most concern? What's the safest thing we can do right for the business? So they shut it down. um they called steam they called itch actually they didn't call either of those companies they called the people that run the transactions for those and said hey it looks like there's adult stuff on your transactions and

This is speculation, to be clear. It looks like you have adult stuff on these platforms and we're not charging you the adult rate. Because the thing that we haven't talked about yet is that there are a lot of payment processors that specialize in risky transactions.

payment processors that handle adult adult stores. There are payment processors that handle stuff like OnlyFans. There are payment processors that if you want to make your own porn blog and take money from people, you can absolutely do that and they will charge happily charge you. eight or 10 or 12%, some multiple of the normal going market rate for non-pornographic content. And you can absolutely do that. What they're saying is, hey, Steam's using a loophole.

they're they're posting they're running porn on their site but we're giving them the non-porn rate on their transactions and valve likes making money i've heard this you know that that that 30 percent you know it it it didn't happen by accident look gabe can't buy his 60 yachts on on on on hopes and dreams yeah no no no no so um

And itch is the same boat, right? They were on a video game and music and movies probably deal with, I think they said PayPal and Stripe were their payment processors. And so... They had to make they got this note that said, hey, we we've noticed that you're doing this thing you're not supposed to do according to the terms of our agreement. Make it right. And, you know, Valve has hundreds of employees and they went through and pulled out the things that looked like they were obviously.

against the rules and delisted a lot of stuff itch just said hey man there's not that many of us we just turn it off all the not safe for work stuff for a minute and they posted kind of a not great letter just in fairness that said Here's what we're doing. Here's why. And then didn't really talk about what else was going. But but the fact is, for either of these, getting cut off from their payment processor is probably at best an incredible.

disaster for the businesses and worst and existential threat for the business, depending on what their churn is like and stuff like that. So I guess we have no way of knowing unless one of those platforms came out and said explicitly, were they threatening to.

revoke their access to the payment processor entirely or just move them to a much higher rate we don't know based on the content okay yeah my assumption would be that they were threatening to revoke their access to those processors entirely and then they would have to get another

payment processor at a higher rate like that that could lead to like some period of the store is just not operating right now yeah and and even if it comes back for something like itch especially where like the percentage that you pay itch is variable And they have deals and like if they have agreements in place, like it's just a weird example because like it doesn't gate new content on the platform. Right.

it's you anybody can sign up for itch and just start posting stuff on itch immediately it's not like valve where there's a review process and you have to pay a fee to sign up as a developer and all that stuff So the upshot was that when they got the nasty grams that said, hey, we're going to kill your business unless you take this stuff down, their immediate response was we're going to take down all the not safe for work tag stuff.

and then and all everything tagged adult and a certain number of other tags and we're going to review everything manually and it's going to take a little bit um since then they updated their their post to have more information about their strategy and the fact that they're looking at other payment processors, including not safe for work, friendly payment processors, but it wasn't, it wasn't great. And, and like, what are the things that.

I saw people talking about online was why don't they just, you know, why don't they just start taking money directly from credit? Like, why don't they talk directly to the credit card companies? Why don't you change payment processors? It's a. payment processors also do a bunch of regulatory stuff which we kind of touched on a little bit but it's stuff around money laundering and and not becoming a bank and all these other requirements that like the the if you take international money

You take money from international customers, you're subject to the banking and finance laws in all of those countries, which is why a lot of places say, okay, we're only going to take money from people in the United States. It's why Venmo and PayPal and those those services are so valuable is because they let you take money from people anywhere in the world and they handle all the regulatory stuff for you. So so you just have to.

take the money and then you have to talk to your accounts and find out if you've paid taxes in those regions and then but but they do all of the all of the hey is this a money laundering transaction or is this a legitimate transaction stuff which is shockingly onerous

Anyway, so the TLDR is a lot of not safe for work stuff got removed from Steam and itch over the last couple of weeks. And it's kind of uncomfortable to talk about this stuff because I don't like these games, generally speaking. I don't engage. Well. Hold on, that's not fair. I don't engage with the non-consensual sex incest, like the adult tagged games on Steam. I just turned off years ago, so I don't ever see them because there's a lot of kind of skeezy stuff there.

I've thought over and over about turning that off. I made the opposite decision at some point, which was I cover video games professionally. I need to know what these platforms are doing. I need to get the full spectrum of what they are offering and how they are offering it. Yeah. As a result, my kind of new and trending, like the whole recommendation engine on Steam, well, the top carousel is still pretty relevant. That's still like Warhammer and some boomer shooters and stuff.

The full on like the flat top sellers and new and trending and stuff like that is like nothing but like no name asset flip porn games and stuff at this point. Like 80%. Yes, absolutely. See, that seems like a real degradation of service for. Anyway, OK, well, maybe maybe that's a little maybe that's I'm looking. OK, you want to you want me to look right now? It varies by the list. It varies by the day. Actually, OK, looking at new and I've got steam open right now. New and trending.

Only has like two or maybe actually just one. Probably because they took them all down. That's possible. That is certainly possible. Sex house orgy party is the one that really stands out in my new and trending right now as. being of that ilk. Anyway, I've thought many times about turning off or actually, sorry, turning on those filters so I can actually just see stuff.

that i might actually play but a friend of mine uh got real into sex divers a hell divers parody a few months ago wait what yeah we should play that on the stream sometime it's a it's a remarkable It's basically like hell divers but instead of going back to your ship and playing the drop simulator game everybody just has sex. Oh this is wildly

It's pretty ambitious. But then there's a screenshot in here that looks like it could. I mean, it's a very low rent clone of Helldivers, but it's full on just a guy in armor over the shoulder shooting at a big pile of Starship Troopers licking bugs. Yep.

And then but then then then the sexy stuff happens because I have a lot of fornication. Yeah. Getting covered in bug goo makes make soldiers horny, I guess. I don't know. A lot of fornication on a spaceship. Also, one of these shots looks like hell divers, except there's a little inset.

picture in picture of a naked woman on a live cam. Cause apparently the, while they're fighting for Liberty, they need to see some boobs at the same time or I'm not anyway. And the steam is an interesting place. Yeah. So, okay. But.

We should point out, I think I alluded to this earlier, but like a lot of, like you said, a lot of creators that are working in a more like intimate and I guess I would say artsy space have also gotten swept up in this. Like Robert Yang is a well-known developer who has like taught at NYU.

has made a lot of games about like, like gayness and male sexuality and stuff like that, who apparently has been targeted by this example, like, like, like people, you know, like, like you said, people are making games that are much more like. instructive or like you know not necessarily objectionable catering to a more niche audience well and so like the the net was wide especially on itch

because they just turned everything off and kind of didn't communicate that. Their letter was clear, but ambiguous, I guess, is my way of saying it. Consume Me is a game that was marked adult because of adult themes and some light nudity, and it won. this Seamus McNally grand prize at the IGF last year, the year before, um, Nina Freeman, uh, who has made a whole series of autobiographical biographical games that are incredible and very personal and like, definitely.

not porny got caught up in the, in the dragnet. Um, uh, and, and cause her game last call, uh, got, got pulled, which is about domestic violence. Right. So The reason it's important to talk about this stuff is because it's not just about porn games like like the the the people, the collective shout people like to portray this as being about.

Games with no redeeming value that are just about domestic violence and assaulting women. Yeah, that's why I mentioned like rape and child abuse earlier, because those are things that any decent person can get behind opposing. But again, the net that ends up being cast is dramatically wider than those things. You're seeing the same thing with this UK Online Safety Act. It really feels like some dark clouds are swirling.

Recently in regard to kind of online censorship and like onerous authentication requirements. I mean, like various states in the United States have individually been enacting stuff like this for a couple of a few years now. Yeah. But you're seeing defenders of the UK Online Safety Act saying the same thing. The refrain is always, oh, so you support child abuse, huh? If you don't want to have to provide your face and ID to every single site you log into from now on.

So, yeah, the UK Online Safety Act requires age verification for social media and end to end and it requires filtering for end to end encrypted messaging apps and a bunch of other stuff. I don't want to speak out of turn here, but I believe you now have to provide identity and age authentication to Discord in the UK to log into Discord now. Blue Sky, Instagram, all of those.

um which is a both like giving that kind of personally identifiable information is seems bad for a whole host of reasons we that we don't need to get into here but like um and and be you know anonymity online anonymity online is important even if it results in bad stuff sometimes i think this is my my kind of take on that um the the the big thing with the collective i'll also

There's another Children Online Safety Act going through the Senate right now, I believe, that is worth calling your Congress people about and complaining about because it adds similar language here. There's a thing in Australia that passed. One of the people behind collective shout is on the implementation commission for that. That's another age verification gate, which I think it bans social media access for kids under 16, which maybe I don't necessarily disagree with, but.

But the implementation of making everybody verify their age is a is a bad way to do that. The thing I was going to say is that the MO for these kinds of activist groups is often. hey, we just want to get the really dangerous stuff away from people like the incest and child abuse and all that stuff. And and then once it comes to find out that, you know, that.

Those adult content sweeps include all stories of LGBTQ content, all stories about queer gay people, whether they view them as pornographic, whether they're pornographic or not. Right. It never stops with the issues that are listed on the label. Yeah. So the concern is that this is just another way to crack down on LGBT content in general. And yeah.

That's that's pretty much it. Yeah. The yeah, you put a note here that is absolutely correct. The the the libertarian right and the left in game space are pretty united about this being bad. You do not have to hand it to Elon Musk, but he has come out pretty strongly against this. But there are a lot of people on the right because you look at this as a moralizing censorship issue.

The right would be championing, but there are quite a few of the more free speechy libertarian types out there who are coming out pretty strongly against this as well. So a pretty broad spectrum of the game space is pretty vehemently angry and opposed to this right now. And also it's worth mentioning that, that they have targeted Twitter, sorry, 10 as well because of the, of the.

Horrifying swaths of truly nightmarish porn that are hosted on his service post. And we should also mention that he has been pretty explicit about his desire to turn. Twitter or whatever you want to call that business into its own payment processor and bank. So like he's got a vested interest in, in beating that drum for his own business interests. But, but, but a lot of people are very against this right now. So like,

There is a massive ongoing email and phone call campaign. Yeah, I think the payment processors are learning that a few thousand letters maybe isn't as many as they would think it is. There's a there's a big email campaign, a big calling campaign.

There's a lot of stories on Reddit about this specifically. They're like, hey, I called the credit card company and they were like, yeah, we were getting a lot of calls about this. There's we'll put a couple of links in the in the show notes that tell you kind of where to go to find more information. Um, but the, the short version is call your stripes and your master cards and your PayPal's and your, and your visas and let them know that this sucks. Yeah. Um, it's getting rocky on the internet.

I mean, it was always rocky for a lot of reasons, but I mean, in a more institutional governmental sense, like things are getting wild lately. Every time I think things can't get much worse. realize that at some point, 10 years or 12 years in the future, I'm going to look back to the current moment as the good old days and not feeling great about that, Brad. Let's hope not. Let's hope not. I pulled a few supplemental questions from past Q&A's we never got to. Okay. If you'd like to.

Some bangers from the past. We've got a little time left here. If you want to supplement this episode with maybe some slightly more cheerful or at least less depressing. Yes. So just to put a bow on the on the payment processing stuff, it's. I apologize if I got anything wrong. I spent four months digging into this stuff, deciding if I wanted to start a business in this space last year before deciding that, no, maybe the Bitcoin people were right. Oh, boy.

Maybe the Bitcoin people were right. Will Smith. Do not put that as the title for the episode. But just the overhead. In terms of regulation and how hard it is to start a business in this space means that like if you were if you wanted to start Stripe today, because because for all intents and purposes, Stripe is the big.

is the juggernaut here. I've been meaning to ask if you just kept using Stripe as the go-to because it's easy to say or if they are the 800-pound gorilla and it sounds like the latter. They make it very easy to start. So we use Stripe for Patreon. My newsletter uses Stripe. It's like a de facto. You get a good rate. It's going to be easy to set up. It's integrated with everything. So that's the other part is you have to be able to integrate it with your website.

you know because itch is written in weird lua stuff you Brad's making faces. I'm looking at the Stripe Wikipedia page. They listed $1.4 trillion of payment volume processed in 2024. So what's 4% of that? Well, what's two and a half or 3% of that, I guess. They have a $91 billion valuation. Yeah, it's an enormous company. And they got that way because they were the easy one and they were the one that everybody used.

but they're also pretty much the only one that is widely supported across a bunch of different platforms. So like if we wanted to use another payment processor on Patreon to collect fees from our patrons, which you can do at patreon.com slash techpod.

We would have there's no way to do that. We just don't have a choice because that's the only one that Patreon supports. If we had our ghost install, then we could install whatever plugin we wanted or write our own for whatever payment processor we wanted. but that's a big pain in the ass and also then you're going to get when you're when your customers buy something from you they're going to get a credit card transaction from porn masters unlimited the porn uh transaction processor

and that's going to show up on their credit card bill, and then your significant others will be like, hey, why'd you spend $300 on Porn Masters Unlimited this month? That seems like a lot. So anyway, Stripe is... enormous it's not a monopoly but in a lot of ways it is it's not a it's not like the legal definition of a monopoly but in a lot of ways it is that matter to small independent creators that's it all right let's do some questions okay

All right. Why don't we dip into a few Discord questions here? I don't know how we didn't even highlight this one. We have not even flagged this to read, but I feel like we should read it from Mad Cat. Okay. Some neighbors that we know but not that well came around to the house and asked for the Wi-Fi password so that their son could use a tablet. It seemed innocent and I didn't want to be rude, so I gave them the password.

I have a PFSense router and access points, but no guest network yet. The neighbors are close enough that they could probably pick up our Wi-Fi signal. Being paranoid, I have now changed the password and am looking into guest networks and network segregation. How do you deal with people you know? I'm sorry. How do you deal with people you kind of know accessing your network? Is a guest network and cycling passwords after every visit a good idea? VLANs? Any other suggestions?

At one point in the past, I limited the number of IP addresses available. So to add a new device, I would have to increment the available addresses by one manually. But that was a total pain in the ass. So that IP address thing won't actually work if somebody knows what they're doing because they'll just look for an unused number in the available range for some device that's turned off and squad on that.

Yeah, I don't I don't think I don't think you're asking this here, but I would never, ever just let a random person that I don't know well onto my network. Yeah, like family members get access to the real Wi-Fi, right? Yeah. But like, you know, I don't I don't know exactly what all the ins and outs here would be. But like if they do anything like truly illicit on your home Internet, like you're probably liable for that unless.

Unless it works its way through like law enforcement enough that you can prove that it was somebody else that was using your internet access to access something awful. Like.

not not not something awful the forum to be clear but i mean look that should be criminal in a lot of jurisdictions but um that is a very valid point uh so like for example i've known my neighbors for 15 years right and if their cable modem was down they were like hey can can you hit us with wi-fi for a few days while we wait wait for cable to come back up first i would tell them to consider fiber and then i would

run a long ethernet cable over to their house and plug it into their into their business for them i mean if it's somebody really close to it's probably fine but i i still can't my mind can't help playing out all the possible scenarios of like what if that device gets stolen what if somebody

that you don't know is over at their house and starts using it to do something bad. Like it's just, you're, I feel like you're just exposing yourself to unknown risks. That's just not worth it. Well, I was going to say, so we used to like when we had babysitters come over regularly.

They would get the Wi-Fi because cell service is bad in our neighborhood. So I set up a guest network, which is like most routers that do this. You can do it manually with VLANs and all that stuff. But I just had a separate SSID that they were able to log into.

gave them full access to the outside network but they couldn't see anything inside the network and they were getting a different internal ip address range so presumably if they did something gnarly then i could go back and see which device it was based on series of other things but like you know i guess babysitters are relatively trustworthy because we were using a service that did background checks and stuff like that and i i yeah i i don't know about neighbors

Like if the neighbors were moving in and didn't have internet yet, I would probably be okay with that. But like, that would be a short term solution. I'm not interested in funding their internet.

Yeah, I think I think the maximal approach here, short of just a zero tolerance, never letting people on your land, period, is to make a guest network. And even even even people, you know, should just go on the guest network for segregation. And then you don't have to worry about it anymore. Yeah, I think I think if I went over and was like, hey, our Internet. that's down can my kid use your wi-fi and they were like no fuck you i would probably think they were axe murderers um

I guess it seems like I think probably a lot of commercial routers and systems like Ubiquity Unify stuff. Yeah. Have got like relatively easy sort of guest network set up in there. You don't have to. You don't have to know how a VLAN works and how to route between different subnets or anything like that these days. I mean, obviously, if you do know that stuff, you can set more elaborate stuff up.

But I think a lot of the time it's like in a lot of commercial routers, isn't it as simple as just kind of there's a separate dialogue for making a guest network SSID. It literally says, hey, make a guest network here and it partitions them off from the rest of the.

basically all it does is turn off talking to other internal ip addresses right if it's especially if it's that easy just go ahead and so on well and the nice thing about that is like on some of the newer ones newer uh like consumer routers i've used You even manage it with an app and you can hit the button to turn the guest network on and off when somebody's over. So like, yeah. Yes. RK Harris 62. I'm pretty sure we have not answered this question. I apologize if we had. I don't think we have.

Okay, the question is, I'm looking at OLED monitors for my gaming PC. What's the difference between QD OLED and WOLED? Do you have a preference? I love my LG OLED TV, but I wasn't even aware of the distinction when I bought it. I think the short version here is you probably really don't need to worry about the distinction. Yeah, I know.

Rtings.com, I guess. Every time I bring up that website, I question whether I'm saying it right. I think it's ratings. Should you save ratings when there's no A? I'm not sure. Rtings.com, like probably. maybe the most authoritative like display review site on the internet out there. They do good work. Yeah. They've got, they've got a really good explainer article for the difference here. It really, all it, all it really has to do with is the layers of.

technology on the display and how the oled produces color like the w i believe in in woe led stands for white yeah because that's using white oleds um ud oled is using a quantum dot layer which a lot of other non-oled tvs also use uh which enhances color reproduction i believe the the oleds or the leds are blue in that case the quantum dots also improve brightness yeah yes so um

As you kind of alluded to in this question, LG uses white OLED and Samsung uses QD OLED, if that matters to you. And also, I believe the other thing which is mentioned in that article is that they tend to use different subpixel layouts.

Yeah, Samsung's always done their own sub-pixel layouts, which like... causing problems in the early days of phones but it's been pretty okay lately yeah and i like that the only reason that would ever really matter to you is if you're using the display as a computer monitor right because i think that's got some ramifications on like text rendering sharpness and stuff like that

You can typically calibrate the text rendering to the panel. Yeah, but I think probably you shouldn't worry about that level of specifics in the tech of the display. I think you're probably better off just looking at reviews of... displays you're interested in and going on a more like qualitative sort of assessment. You know what I mean? Like read about like what is the real world experience of looking at the screen and like what do they say about the brightness and the color accuracy and.

Don't necessarily worry so much about what tech is driving the display under the hood. I was going to say, for me, it's more the things that matter to me much more are what refresh rates does it support? How does it, which HDR specs does it support? I think Samsung still doesn't support a couple of those.

Then like, this is like a tertiary decider for me. Yeah. Especially since it's usually tied to brand. Yeah. But there are some, some quirks there. Like I believe this is still the case when I was shopping for TVs for my parents a couple of years ago when we talked about that.

At the time, the Samsung OLEDs that use quantum dot layer have a weird quirk where in like very bright light, like sunlight, they have a little bit of like a pinkish purple cast. And I think that's still the case. So like there are some. Maybe a little gotchas there associated with technology to look for. But again, that type of thing should be mentioned in reviews without you having to know like what type of OLED is embedded in the screen.

conclusion of their QD led versus what woe led, um, article basically says if your room's really bright, the woe leds are clear winners and otherwise it doesn't kind of matter. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Fishy J.

which is the smarter move backing up my PCs to my Synology NAS and then backing up my NAS to Backblaze or backing up my PCs and NAS to Backblaze separately. I kind of like doing all at once, but it's a real pain in the butt to restore.

Well, there are a couple of things there. There's like you just mentioned, there's the logistical process of restoring the backup to the NAS and then having to restore the PCs from backups on the NAS. Yeah. But there's also the pricing issue on Backblaze and the way they.

segment backup types and that's backups on back plays are really expensive now so it'll be it'll be far cheaper um basically they're unless something has changed i haven't looked in a couple years but the segmentation they used to have and i assume still do is Kind of client machines can back up to their flat rate service. So like those machines, max, I don't know about Linux. I doubt they include Linux in that to be fair.

I'm looking right now. Maybe they have a way of like kind of detecting desktop Linux, but like what they're trying to do is prevent people from backing up like massive home servers and NASAs and stuff like that to their flat rate service.

It was like, what is the, I haven't looked in a while. I think the flat rate. It's 99 bucks a year. Oh, wow. Okay. So that's, that's even less. I was going to say 10 bucks a month, but that's even less than that. Like if you have Windows Mac machines, you want to back those up directly because it's just that flat rate per month, no matter how big they are.

But they charge by the data. They charge by the gigabyte or terabyte if you're backing up from any kind of server or NAS. So, you know, if you don't have a ton of extra data on those machines, you could... Just back them up to your NAS and then back that up and you wouldn't be paying a lot extra if you're doing small backups from your client machines. But if you're backing up a lot of data from those clients, you should back those up directly because you'll get a cheaper rate.

Yeah, their NAS backup has a start now button that ends with contact sales. Yeah, right. It starts at six bucks per terabyte. Yeah. Is that still that was under the backblaze B2? Yeah, it's the B2 cloud storage. Yeah, I look at that briefly when I was thinking about backing stuff up to the cloud, but I don't have that much on my NAS that's like truly mission critical. I would die if I lost it.

I was going to say, for me, there's a two-tier approach to this. As long as I have two copies of everything, I kind of don't care where the second one is. I back up my local PCs, including my wife's Mac. I need to set it back up on my daughter's computer, actually, when I think about it. to the nas um and that runs automatically every once every you know multiple times a week whatever um then i have a 20 terabyte external drive that just sits in the in that connects to the nas and gets

all the changes dumped it. So I have two copies plugged into the NAS. It's probably not the most secure thing. Cause like if something happens to the NAS and stuff starts getting deleted, it'll replicate those down over the next time the NAS backup runs every week. But. That's probably good enough for me, given what I have on there. Yep. Yep. Anything really important. I don't know. Put it on a USB drive in a safe deposit box. Well, or like I put it on Dropbox.

You know, I put it in an encrypted folder in Dropbox and then it's hard to get rid of. Yeah. I thought about this is beyond the scope of this episode. I thought for a long time about messing with like the. the azure blob storage or like amazon glacier some of those like super duper long-term yeah very cheap um storage options that would be for like that would be for like family photo type stuff or home movies like or you know just like

really important irreplaceable stuff because those services are very cheap to upload and store. Yeah. They only get expensive if you have to retrieve the data. Yeah, it's like you don't want to be pulling data from them on the right. You want to pull it down once after a disaster. Right. It's like it's like a place to put stuff that you don't think you'll ever actually need to retrieve unless.

If you get to the point where you would need to retrieve it and pay their large fee to do so, you would probably be happy to pay the fee because whatever it is you put there was that important. Yeah. Like I wouldn't put my DVD rip and Blu-ray ripped collections on that. No, I'd like to absolutely not because.

Who cares? I just re-rip them. Yes. Again, it's like kind of like family or personal stuff that's like really irreplaceable. Yeah. All right. You want to call it there? We can call it there. Yeah.

I hope folks enjoyed the show. As always, Braden will made a tech pod is a listener supported podcast. That means we wouldn't be here without you, the listener. And if you want to get some firsthand experience with Stripe and use our payment processing process to join the TechPod community, you can do that by going to patreon.com slash techpod where for five, five glorious dollars a month.

minus the Stripe transaction fee and Patreon's fee, which I think actually includes the Stripe transaction. I don't know. I got to look at that. You can gain access to the TechPod Discord and our monthly patron exclusive episode where this month we talked about. Whether we look, we broached new ground in the, is it a sandwich debate? Okay. Yeah. Talked about North Carolina stuff. Yes. We talked about driving old cars. Talked about driving old cars. We talked about Brad's dirty old gas. Whoa.

I'm sorry. I just had to get it out there. Look, the gas is now in the tank. It's getting driven. It's getting burned off. It's fine. And some early feedback on the Discord about the driving old car stuff has kind of put a new fear in me about driving that old car. Like I had forgotten about the problem with steering columns prior to 1967 or whatever it is. Oh, wait, was there like a law passed? I believe so. Oh, my God, because that car is a 66. And like the description.

The description of what the steering column tends to do to the driver in a collision has got me a little spooked. Yeah. Don't go fast. Uh-huh. Got to go slow. But anyway, you can go to patreon.com slash techpod, sign up, get access to the Discord, hang out with a bunch of beautiful nerds. We had several extended conversations. Actually, I got some real good shoe tips from the TechPod Discord this week because my feet have gotten larger as I've gotten older.

So I, some, uh, an older family member on this trip, we were, I bought a pair of shoes while I was out there and I just kind of got talking to them about it. And they told me that same thing that your feet get bigger as you age. And I had no idea and I looked it up and sure enough, it's true. Well, and.

For me, it's a double whammy because when I started working at home, I stopped wearing like normal, you know, going out of the house shoes and started wearing stuff that's more floaty. So I went from a 12 and a half to a 13 and that puts you in a different a. selection of shoes and be price ranges which stinks

I bought a pair of 13s, which I have worn for years on this trip, and they were too small, and apparently I'm now a 14. Hey, what did you get on the 13s? Maybe I'll take them off your hands. Actually, another family member took them off my hands. Damn it!

Cause they saw me wearing the 14s and they liked them and then they tried on the 13s before I sent them back and they fit. So now they are beautiful. Yes. Um, but anyway, so yeah, all sorts of interesting stuff. I learned something new there every day. It's a wonderful, wonderful community full of nerds.

And you can go to patreon.com slash techpod and sign up. As always, thanks to all of our patrons. But a very special thank you goes out to our executive producer, to your patrons, including Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippitt. the bunny fiend is watching oh twinkle twinkie david allen james kamik and pantheon makers of the hs3 high-speed 3d printer thank you all

So, so much. We appreciate each and every one of you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And that'll do it for us this month, this week. We'll be back next week with another episode of the TechPod. As always, please consider the environment for printing this podcast. Thank you.