- [Liz] So Elon Musk
came out with a limited edition flamethrower in January
and I immediately bought one.
So I wanted it
because I am full of bad ideas and love dangerous things,
but when I went to pick this up
I talked to a bunch of other people
who had ordered flamethrowers also
and most of them just wanted them
as art objects to hang in their house.
So now I own this flamethrower, right?
And then that's when it occurred to me
I had nowhere to use it.
I don't have a backyard,
and finding a location for this
was a lot harder than we thought
because it turns out a lot of people
are not very excited about fire.
- We're trying to do this in a safe fashion.
I've literally just have so many people that I've called.
Gun ranges, police departments, naval bases...
So we started reaching out to hacker spaces
and almost all of them got back to me
with very enthusiastic Yes.
- [Liz] So we're here at San Francisco Metalworks
to use this thing.
We want to use it safely,
so of course we have a fire extinguisher right here,
there's another one off camera just in case.
Please don't be a jerk if you own one of these.
Don't burn anything down, don't put anybody in danger.
Okay, so you may have noticed
the propane tank wasn't screwed in to the regulator.
In order to make this thing work, you've got to do that.
Propane tank's easy, you can just buy
any sort of standard one at your hardware store,
and then you screw it in here and you're ready to rock.
So to turn it on
there's like this labeled switch right here.
Turn it in the On direction,
then you're gonna pull this here,
and that gives you your pilot light,
and then you pull the trigger.
Veeran, you might wanna stand back.
(power chord rock music)
I'm really excited
because we were gonna be doing my very first cooking show.
I've never cooked a steak before,
so we'll be doing that
and then we're gonna have s'mores for dessert.
(power chord rock music)
One of the things that's difficult about covering Elon Musk
is that it's hard to tell when he's joking on Twitter.
I mean, The Boring Company itself
was announced in a tweet, right?
He was like, sick of traffic
and so he was like, I'm gonna form a company
and we were like, is this man serious?
- Yeah.
- The fact of the matter is
The Boring Company doesn't just make merch for Elon Musk,
even though he has enough fans to justify it.
I mean, the flamethrower alone,
20,000 of them were sold, right, limited edition.
That's $10 million in revenue for The Boring Company
and Elon Musk merch isn't even really what they do.
What they actually do is make tunnels.
(steak sizzles)
- When I was seeing you sear it
I didn't think it was gonna be, I was like, hmm,
but actually it's nice.
That's a good flamer.
- Good!
So, that was fun enough
but I actually totally wanna make s'mores,
so we're gonna do that next.
(chunky rock music)
The Boring Company just won a bid
to connect Chicago O'Hare to downtown Chicago,
and LA is looking like it might fast track
some of the approvals for them to start digging there too.
So, does this mean that we should expect more merch
as Elon Musk looks to raise more money
for The Boring Company?
I mean, maybe, he's talked about these Lego-like bricks
that he plans to make out of the stuff
that he digs out of the earth,
so that might be coming.
Anyway, I expect we're gonna find out a lot more soon
and while we're waiting I'm just gonna take this guy,
hang it up at the office.
What kind of Boring Company merchandise would you want?
Let us know in the comments
and while you're here
you should definitely check out my actual job,
which is The Verge Science page on YouTube.
I mean, product reviews are fun
but really I'm a Science Editor
and I would love you to see what we do there.