It's got an upgraded sound system. It's got an upgraded subwoofer. It basically, I know that one of the gentlemen who had it, it only had two previous owners. It only had slightly over 2,000 plays on it. Someone had done some work on the magnet to get the magnet to work really well, and the magnet works great. I don't remember for sure if it was Tim or Glenn who I was chatting with trying to get some advice about buying my first more modern pin in a long time, and they were saying you want to make sure the magnet works really well. that adds a lot to the kind of randomness of the game and the multi-balls when you're playing. And of course, when it's coming out of Orb, it does that and several other times during the game. And the magnet works great. Gruit works great. It had like a protector down in the shooter lane and a couple other places right from the start. So I'm very, very, very happy with the purchase. But of course, me trying to get every single solitary penny out of this game is going to be near impossible. But that's okay. I don't need to get I don't need to I make enough money through other hobbies I always said I don want pinball to be now pinball podcasting is a little bit different because I do put a lot of work into it And certainly not this summer I only done like three shows in the past But let be honest There's hardly been any news. Oh, my gosh. I'm getting close to 45 minutes. You guys want to hear about the proof in the pudding. I'm not going to spend any more time talking about Jurassic Park. But here's what I have to say. Are you listening, Stern? Drew, is it okay if I steal that from you since you're not on the airwaves? Are you listening, Stern? Are you listening? every single time that you tell us you're only going to do 500 of one and then you do 500 more you say it's only going to be 800 ends up being a thousand or there was another time when they said it was going to be 500 I think it ended up being 800 every time that you kind of go back on your word I'm not going to call you a liar Stern I'm not going to call you a liar but every time you kind of like change it up and you kind of do something like that and it lowers confidence of It doesn't just lower confidence for consumer confidence in the future. I have an honors degree in marketing. Okay, I only got honors first semester. But I do have a degree in marketing from Fanshawe College. And I'm telling you right now, you cannot buy for no price of, there's no price on goodwill. Once you've lost it, you've lost it. Like, for instance, I just watched the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard thing on Netflix. It was pretty interesting seeing it from both sides at the same time. if you at all like me were just captivated freaking captivated by that uh that whole thing that happened there go watch that on netflix it's really interesting seeing that he said she said go back and forth for the first time as opposed to listening to them like weeks apart but amber amber heard there's no amount of money she could pay like there's no amount of money she could pay to get her good name back for her to be for her to become like prime beef you know like for her to become like a level celebrita again in hollywood it just ain't gonna happen i mean maybe maybe who knows over the next five to ten years she proves me wrong and slowly climbs her way back up yeah that's possible it's unlikely but it's possible she's just lost so much goodwill and obviously of course you know nothing stern's done is quite that bad but it's just all these little tiny things that they do when they change their mind on something like this. And don't get me wrong, I'm all for, you know, I'm all for them making money. I want Stern to make money, but I want them to make money from kind of, you know, like what I would say not being shady cash grabs. And the two I can think of are the Bond 60th and then the now, of course, this Jurassic Park 30th. and the bond 60th was a straight up cash grab but it wasn't a pure replica of a game we've already seen so in that particular case i was slightly more i mean it was way overpriced at like 20k so that cash grab was worse in a way that you're charging like twice as three times as much as a pro james bond but it wasn't the exact same pin this is the exact same pin if stern had like leftover ramps, leftover playfields, leftover targets, leftover sculpts, leftover T-Rexes, whatever they had left over from Jurassic Park. They're just throwing it in here. This came off their books years and years and years ago, and yet they're charging us. So even though for them, it's literally just getting rid of some amortized goods in there. Now, obviously, they probably had to order, I'm assuming, some new parts. But what I'm saying is like, this didn't cost them maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, percentage-wise, 3% to 5% more than what the old LEs cost. And I could be slightly wrong on that, but it didn't cost that that much more because you don't have to do any R&D. The machine already exists. You don't have to write any code. Of course, you don't have to change the playfield. The playfield is what's the most expensive by far. It's not the cab. It's not the back glass. It's not even the art or the code. it's the playfield. It's everything you see on the playfield. It's the engineering that goes into the playfield. It's paying the designer to design it. The time, the hundreds, if not thousands of hours that go into designing that playfield, and none of that was redone. And so even if they released the Jurassic Park LE at the exact same price as all the other LEs, if it wasn't even cash grabbed, it'd still be a cash grab at that regular price. Because maybe they don't exclusively put it in the contract that when you're buying an LE, like, okay, we'll never make LEs of this ever again. But that's kind of like, let's be honest, that's the good faith. That's the good faith thing that you're telling your customers, you know, like you're buying the premium, the most limited edition of Jurassic Park. Like when we watched the dead flip stream with, uh, Zach Sharp dressed up in the, the, uh, the T-Rex, right. Or wait, was that, was that, I don't, I don't remember. Was that Jack from Deadflip? I don't remember. Someone was dressed up in a T-Rex, and it was highly entertaining, and it was really fun to watch, but when they told you they're only making X number of LEs, and you're a huge Jurassic Park fan, your thought is, okay, I want to get the highest end, the best, the best of the best, the creme de la creme, okay, the cream in your jeans, I want to get like the best version of Jurassic Park for myself, because I love that theme, and I love Keith Elwin and I love the whole team that Keith Elwin works with over there at Stern and I want the best version of this for my arcade. I need this. I don't want this. I need this. But the next time an I need this theme comes out, you're all going to think twice about getting it, especially in the LE version. If you know that, well, just a year or two later, if this machine actually does turn out to be very valuable and holding its value well and people are really, it's doing well in the secondary market then what stern's going to do is just find the excuse oh it's the 17th anniversary of uh aerosmith uh going on tour of uh dude looks like a lady dude dude you know like they're going to come up with an excuse oh mrs doubtfire's uh 25th anniversary there's always going to be a reason to make another version of the pin but the only real reason to do it is so that they can get some extra money and I want Stern to do well and I want them to succeed but I don't want it to be off the coattails of lowering their brand awareness of basically taking what we you know every single time in the future you're gonna have to listen to every other pinball podcast or every other pinball youtuber every other content creator for the rest of Stern's you know I don't know the next five to ten years every time they say oh we're limiting it to 500 you're gonna say yeah and what, two years later, if the machine sells well, you're going to do 500 more, and what, then you're going to do 20 super LEs later after that, and then what, you know, so we're taking the consumer confidence, which is already low on the LE side, and you're flushing it down the drain, and yes, maybe you made a bit more money now from selling those 500 JPs, but the question is, over the next, is it just short-sighted on Stern's behalf, because over the next two, three, four, five years, are they going to see a dip in sales, and they're always going to wonder when, when alleys don't sell out in the future, they're always going to wonder, Hmm. Now, if I had just, uh, you know, if I had just, I would think if you're someone who sits in the stern marketing department, or if you're someone sitting around that table, you're going to go, maybe we should cut it out with these, you know, two or three cash grabs a year because the profit we're making from the cash grabs is not worth the ill will is not worth like think about it from them selling 500 if that is that now going to cause them to have at least 500 if not probably a thousand and maybe more like lost sales in the future well what's worth more the small amount of of money you would make from this one jurassic park sale or losing one le buyer who used to buy every single le and they don't buy the next 5 10 15 or 20 LEs from you because they're so sick and tired of your bullshit where you say we're only going to do a certain number and then you renege on that, right? You basically become an Indian giver. Like you're saying, here I'm giving you, or sorry, I want to state this properly, so I guess a native giver, is that the right term? Maybe we just don't use that term anymore, so I apologize. I hope I didn't offend anybody. But what I'm saying is that if Stern's just going to give it right back every time after they say, no, no, this is the best model you could buy of this one, and then all of a sudden there's always going to be a better one, there's always going to be a better, it's always going to have better art plates, it's always going to have better code, oh, it's going to have Insider Connected, it's going to have more features, you know, it's going to have a different topper, whatever it is they use to get you to buy the new LE, you can be sure as shats that future sales that they've lost from consumer confidence on all levels, not just the LE level, but on all levels. And buying direct from Stern, they're just, people are more so just going to say, I'm going to wait till later because I don't want to buy this LE, then lose two or three grand selling it two years later to try to get the new LE. I'm going to wait two or three years to see if they're actually going to, and then you'd save another two or three grand that way. So you could be saving four or five grand by just not buying the LE for the first year or two, which I get it. If you're an LE buyer, you want it as soon as possible. You want it to get there you want it to be real you want it to be spectacular and you want to be limited or else you wouldn't buy the limited edition so stern are you listening get with it now I promised you guys that the proof was in the pudding and we're going to talk about it I didn't stay under 45 minutes but I think I could still keep this under an hour and uh tell you about the girl that broke my heart okay she didn't break my heart I had a little crush on her when I was younger. And yeah, we're going to talk about that in a sec. But first, let's talk about the proof being in the pudding. I've known for years that the pinball market, and it was, it was, I know a lot of people will tell you, oh, there was no pinball market bubble, so the bubble can't burst. They're wrong. I have studied collectibles markets more than them. I'm here to tell you, the pinball bubble hasn't just burst baby it's imploded it's falling off a tank not only have we seen six to seven months worth of prices prices dropping if not uh flattening out we've seen the flattening of the curve baby oh yeah the top of the c the c curve the bell curve whatever you want to call it it's starting to drop uh the left shoe has dropped uh the canary in the coal mine is here I don't, you know, the pig in the python, whatever expression you want to use, it's happening. And we all see it. I don't give a shit if someone is calling it like, oh, the slowing of the market, we see the slowing of the, no, it is a bubble. It was an artificial bubble. The artificial bubble was caused by COVID. What COVID did, the pandemic did, is it made it harder to get all pinball parts. It also caused people to be stuck in their houses and in their basements. And it caused those people to look for a way, some type of home entertainment, something to do with their money, because they couldn't go on trips anymore, they couldn't go to casinos anymore, they couldn't go out for dinner anymore, they couldn't go do all the things they did to spend their money. So there was an artificial pinball bubble, and what happened during the artificial pinball bubble is a shit ton of people went out and bought pinball machines and wouldn't normally buy them, and all those people buying pinball machines caused, you know, it to be even harder to buy pinball machine and it was an artificial bubble and now all the like i call them the sneaker kids the quick flippers the people who want to come in and buy le's and boxes and sell them for three to five grand those people are long gone see you later buds don't let the door hit you on the way out now we're still left with people who actually genuinely love pinball does that mean that i think we're going to see the numbers of if players drop off a map anytime soon of course not does that mean that i actually believe in my heart that pinball is not as rad as it was a year or two ago because we're seeing prices drop and we're seeing you know uh dealers and distributors finally have inventory no i think pinball is just as rad if not more rad than it was during covid and here's what makes it better is the fact that you can actually go out there as someone who eats sleeps and breathes pinball you can actually go out there and find any pinball machine you want new any pinball machine you want used for significantly less and at this point like Remember during COVID, there was a time where, like, if you even offered someone a couple hundred dollars less, I heard some sick and disgusting, you know, like, people would have their pros listed at, like, you know, 7,900 firm. And someone would be like, okay, like, I'll offer you 7,800. They'd be like, nope, it's 7,900 firm. People would be like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, that pin, like, new in box doesn't even work that much. Right? But of course, at that time, it took so long to get a new inbox pin. So I think that companies like Stern are going to have to be really careful. I don't think they're in jeopardy of losing their crown anytime soon. Now, all the other companies like the boutique companies, they have to be more than careful. They're going to have to be on their game. The proof is in the pudding is not the slowdown in sales. It's not the flattening of the curve of the prices. it's not the fact that if you include inflation most pinball prices have dramatically dropped within the last now year to year and a half when you're looking at inflation being between three to seven percent per year most pinball most almost all pinball machines cost less than they did two years ago 90 of pinball machines cost less than they did even a year and a half ago never mind a year ago, never mind six months ago. And so now, now, are we going to see like pros go down to like four grand or something? No, we're not going to see drastic, drastic drops because, you know, you have to remember inflation's happening between four to 7% each year. So over three years, if a pinball machine goes up, if the price of a pinball machine goes up 20% in three years, it's still gone up less than inflation. That pinball company is still making less money potentially than they did three years before that because with 7% times three is 21%. So I mean, I guess where I'm going with this is for pinball companies to make money anymore, for pinball companies to sell out day one, for pinball companies to continue to ask these crazy high prices that they're asking nowadays, for them to do well and not just to survive. I don't care about talking about, oh, how can I make a pinball company survive? Do you want to just survive in life or do you want to thrive of course you want to thrive you want to sell out day one you want to you want to have good reviews you want your you want your pinball machine to be ranked in the top 25 if not 10 on pin side you want there to be lots of excitement about your next pin you want there to be lots of goodwill about your company but i'm telling you right now the canary in the coal mine is the fact that venom sales have been so low think about it Venom has incredible shots. It has insane flow. Everybody agrees. Everybody who's played it says the flow is just incredible. Everyone who plays it says it's the fastest, if not one of the fastest pins I've ever played. Everyone who's played it says they love the code. They like the rules. They find it interesting. It's unique. It's different, and in a good way. And almost universally, everybody agrees that Zombie Eddie's one of the best, if not the best pinball artist on the planet, as well as they love the artwork on Venom. So if you release a pinball machine that has incredible artwork, and it also has incredible artwork, it has great code and new and unique code, it has four different characters. So if you don't like the sound setting on one of the four different characters, you just don't play that character that often. It's got literally four different soundtracks in it. It's got four different groupings of callouts, from what I can tell, or at least certainly different callouts for different modes, at least a little bit different, right, with the four different characters. And it's got the ability to pause it and replay it later. And I know Venom, a lot of people are saying it's not an A-grade theme, but I want you to be honest with yourselves. And I'm sorry, AP, I don't want to throw you under the bus here. But has American Pinball ever had a theme as good? is Houdini really in the zeitgeist? If I ask both of my sons, a 14-year-old and an 18-year-old, and they've got their ear to the ground, they're on social media, they know what's going on. If I were to ask them about Houdini, I think maybe the 18-year-old would say, well, isn't that that pinball machine we played? And the 14-year-old, Owen, little Orby Jr., wasn't even with me in Charlottetown and playing Houdini. He may have heard of the pin, but neither of them know that this is a magician that's a real person from like a hundred years ago they they don't know any of that they've never heard of that okay and they're both fans of like modern magic they just they don't i might have mentioned them in passing but they both know who the hell venom is if you were to pull a hundred people i will say under 50 and you were to say like you know do you think the theme of venom would be better for pinball or about cows in tanks. Like, they're going to tell you that they're going to want Venom. You're going to ask them, oh, would you like it to be Hot Wheels cars, or do you want it to be Venom? They're going to say Venom. I mean, okay, Hot Wheels is the only one that you could even argue that maybe more men over 50 would enjoy. I think when you get to, like, men over 30, it probably is going to swing to the Venom side for sure, but maybe, maybe, maybe. I don't know. I'm only 43, maybe people seven years to 12 years older than me, Venom isn't their superhero. They're more into Hulk or Spider-Man or Superman, okay? And that makes sense as well, and that's fine. I'm not even a huge Venom fan. I love the artwork, but like, I'm not, I'm more of a Spider-Gwen fan than I am a Venom fan. I was kind of almost getting out of comic books by that mid-90s when Venom kind of took over, and then, you know, me sort of getting back into Venom, or sort of getting back into comic books, Venom isn't just, it's not really in the zeitgeist nowadays. People are more likely to read like Loki or like, you know, Mandalorian comics or Ahsoka. Ahsoka, just the new show came out. I'm about halfway through the first episode, enjoying it. Hopefully you guys are checking it out. But what I was saying is I've known for quite some time that when Stern, you know the biggest pinball company in the world when they come out with a pinball machine as rad as venom and they're not able to sell it out and and not only not sell it out but we hear from several people including numerous distributors that it's not selling that well when you have a pin that comes out by a known and and a known and very well-loved designer like brandon um or sorry brian Brandon. There was a guy in my hometown called Brandon Eadie, and I always confuse him with Brian. They're not the same at all. The one guy ran like punk rock bingo and was like a music producer from my hometown. But anyways, so I encourage everyone to go out there and play Venom. I was, I got to hear Dwight, of course, Blinded by Dwight. I got to hear him over there on the free play pinball podcast um with bill and amanda and it was really interesting hearing them talk about the rules and the code if you haven't listened to that podcast go listen to it i think that maybe some people are hesitant to get it and it's not just because the pinball bubble is bursting but i do think that that is the true canary in the coal mine think about it if venom came out four years ago would have sold out the ellies would have sold out day one three years ago ellies would a solo day one two years ago ellies might have taken like a week or two to sell out but still the sales would have been very strong even think about it this way six or seven months ago like before we had pulp fiction before we had uh galactic tank force before we had uh the total um shoot the new scott denisi one for from p3 and before before we had all of that a total Resurrection? Final Resurrection? Final Resurrection? I think it's something like that. Before we had all these new pins came out, I don't think it would have sold out day one, but I think the sales would have been a lot stronger than they were now. So now we're not only seeing fatigue from the hardcore pinball nerds near the top, but then we're seeing everybody else that owns, like all the people who own locations, they're seeing the values come back to earth of all their pins, which is making it harder for them to go out and buy new pins because they're seeing, oh yeah, I could have sold, I don't know, say like Twilight Zone for like 14k, like two years ago, three years ago, and now it's only worth like eight or nine, like it was pre-pandemic. We're seeing the prices get back to, or if not close to, especially including inflation, what they would have been three, four, five years ago, and that's just happening. But the proof is in the pudding that I think we're about to see a massive fall. So I'm not suggesting like, you know, you don't have to be chicken little and think the world is ending, you don't have to go out there and like start buying gold and silver and making like a doomsday fortress in your basement and buying those like big Costco crates that have like three years worth of freeze-dried food in them. No, you don't have to go that crazy. You don't have to sell your whole pinball collection because the prices are dropping. Orby says the prices are dropping. Sell them now. I would definitely hold off on buying any new in-box pinball machines because I think there is a very, very good chance that we going to see some price reductions in the next year or two Most economists including my favorite boy over there Alpha Investments he mostly talks about Magic the Gathering and Pokemon cards and he talks a little bit about the stock market. He does talk a little bit about some other, well, he kind of makes fun of Funkos. He's been talking about the Funko bubble popping for quite some time and of course, everybody in the Funko game knows prices now are worse than they were even five to eight years ago. And when you look at, again, even say 5% inflation over eight years, they should be worth minimum. Even if they were just being a good hold of money, they would be worth 40% more. And they're just not. So the collectibles market itself is already unsteady and in issues. But Rudy is telling us who I, and it's not just Rudy, but it's a lot of other economists that, you know, that I'm lucky enough to listen to. I know Stephen's channel is one of the biggest investment channels out there. Everybody is saying we are going to see, you know, not necessarily economic collapse, thank God. I don't even want to use the R word, okay, recession, but we're definitely going to see a mad, mad, mad cooling off of, you know, everything from basically everything that you could have made money on during the pandemic. It's kind of everything is slowly floating down to earth, And I do think we are going to see a little bit of bloodshed. Not so much in the EM pinball machines. Those prices never got super high. But everything I'd say 1990 and newer, if you've been waiting a couple years to kind of sell some of those pins, I'd probably sell them now. If you're thinking you might need money between now and 2026, if you're going to need a little bit of extra money in your toy box to play with to buy some of these pins when they're at the bottom, I think my best guess would be the bottom will probably be summer of 2025. I think we've got about two years of bloodshed. I think we're going to see anywhere from three to maybe even 10% drop in pinball prices per year, year over year for the next two summers. Like, I think we will. It doesn't mean that, you know, a certain Keith Ellwin machine's not going to come out and sell day one. Sure, it could. Or sell through. Jersey Jack could come out with a you know a really good theme and it could sell out day one sure but are we going to see these like people hoarding new in box pinball machines to try to make extra money I don't think we're going to see that for a long time if ever again and I'm actually happy about that and that was part of the good thing that did come out of pinball companies raising the prices for a while there but now I think that even Stern's realizing to keep their line going probably past the post-Christmas rush, like January, February, March of next year, I wouldn't be shocked. I would be shocked if we see any price increases over the next two or three years, which means that we're really seeing a price decrease.