Can We Stop GPU and Console Scalpers?

Oh right, Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Elder Trolls Gaming Podcast. If you are new and joining us, we are three brothers who get together and talk about gaming. We may also talk tech, TV, movies, and other nerdy geeky stuff too. But first, I'm Nasty Night and I'm taking John. And today we have two guests with us, Snake Factory, a long long term friend and old boss, and Nick from Friday Night Game Cast. What's up? Boys? Happy to be back? Hey, welcome, Wow, we're having two Yeah, welcome back. Both of you return. Both of you guys are the most returning guests. That's awesome. Most featured on the show twice. I guess twice and three times for Nick was probably like five. This is my third Chris. You are now known as snakes. Snakes snakes all right, oh all right, snakes. Don't have to know where Snake Factory came from. The Well, it's it's interesting that you asked that. So other than computer games, I play foosball like table soccer, and there's a type of shot in the the game called a snake shot, and it's uh, I'm pretty good at it, but I'm very mechanical when I do it, and like when I first started playing, I'm like, I want to. I want to shoot snakes all day every day. I want to produce them. I want to. I want to produce them like a factor, like a snake factory. And and that was it. I had to make I was posting I think my first on like the foosball news group or or the old message board, and that's exactly nice. I had to make up a name like I don't know, hell yeah, like my old name before that was like killer Angel from like when I was thirteen, righteling on my book, since I'm going to do a font and it's going to be crazy, scary and whatever. Right, But then, right, that's funny. I went in, I went and visited snakes at the the old tournament he was hosted. Were you putting it on? Well, I'm on was one of the tournament directors. I mean yeah, it was like three of us that were putting it on. Yeah, it was fiats on last last weekends. Dropping off I dropping off Leo's birthday gift. Yeah right, because yeah, yeah he was very happy. So thank you for that, and shout out to Leo. Happy birthday, Happy seventeenth flood. Yeah, I imagine I didn't have a kid when you met me. Yeah, that's weird, isn't it. I remember, I remember when he was just a little baby. Yeah, he was a little lion outfit. Yeah, what's going on with you, man? Man? Not much just same old, same old. We actually just recorded a first episode. Of season four. Yeah. Yeah, we went to pack so we were there and we did the whole thing. So we just recorded our episode for us coming back, covering everything that we saw at packs, which is awesome. So yeah, nice, that's gonna be sweet. Look out for that, everybody. Friday night game cast. They made it a little bit later this year, so it was the weather was much better this year, or. No, it was. It was nice on the day we arrived and then the day we fucking left. But the two days, you know, Friday, the bulk day, it's Friday and Saturday, miserable, raining, nasty, also slightly cold. You had to be outside of the hoodie. But that's Boston for you. Yeah that happened to speak right now? Yeah, right now. Outside and you want to race next week? What is that? It's like we're averaging in North Carolina, Like seventy five eighty degrees. Now, so it's like knights and balmy you got outside it's shortened T shirt weather. Here and and real human cells and real human degrees. That's twenty three degrees. Yes, correct, that's nice. We had like three days like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was roasting me though out there my head. I had already had sunburn on my on my head. Man, you gotta put that sunscreen on. You get those like palmers. Due probably blind people while you're people going off the road. You gotta get a farmer. While you're out there, you defend yourself, like your head down. Crashing other cars. Really chill, all right, all right, let's get to uh, what are we playing here? What are we playing? What are you playing? Guys? What are you Let's go over to you what are you doing? Yeah? Man, So obviously there was a handful of stuff that I was playing in pass. We're gonna go into that in our episode. To just keep an eye out on your feeds for you know, Frinday night gamecast and we'll review that stuff. But for the stuff that I have been like seriously playing, of course, as is everyone else right now, I'm playing the hell out of Expedition thirty three. Oh yes, I'm in Act three. I'm basically cleaning up the world. I want to get the thousand God. So it's gonna be Yeah, it's gonna be some work, but I'm just having so much fun with it. It's become like a like a comfort food to play. Honestly, it's it's a great game. It's a great game, and it's just you know, love later JRPGs of your. What is that? What are you playing on? Five? I'm playing it on basically my Xbox Series X and then just the PC game pass SOSS save on there. Mainly playing it on PC just because my mom has way better refrishrated than my TV so I can get those Perry windows down better. Oh yeah, yeah, it's nice. Just put it on. Easy now. I can't do that. I can't do that. Will won't let me do that? You will will throw me under the buzz for a second. But probably where you are, or just if you if you're like just cleaning up the map, like are you headed to the last boss? Yeah? I mean I think like because in Act three, like a lot of the big stuff happened, and if I'm not mistaken, there's only like one objective and it's going back to Lory. Cut that out, cut it out, could have cut it out. We'd like that's fine, that's fine. But before that, there was a when you're going up the spire or whatever, the one level, there's just the same enemy over and over and over and over again, like the two Halves, the obscur Yeah. Yeah, the two h and their animations were so long. I was like, oh my god, and the wind up for the hits on just fitting me off. Yeah. Then I just put it down easy to get through that that spot because it was just I just needed to lazy hit the perry and just get through it. No man I I I griped my teeth and I slam ahead against the wall. I beat like some Open World bosses like while I was super under leveled, like the the Tete Grosso, the rock that just slams down. I beat him. I was way under leveled for that, and it was just like as soon as I figured out, it's. Just like, yeah, he just yeah, so I thought, because you do no damage to him, and you're like, what the fuck was yeah exactly? I was like no, then I just left. But right now I'm fighting an open world boss that's in the sky, and that's all I'll say. If you know, you know, pissing me off. Yeah, so nice. That game is fantastic. It's great. Also, I still have to beat DEAs stranding, but other than that, I'm not. Do that. Do that. It's right around the corner. It's round around the corner. When's the it comes out in June. If I'm at like early June, all right, I'll have a game to play. Then I'm kind of like, I'm kind of like in between games here, like yeah, like I beat Claire Obscure Expedition thirty three. I beat it. It was good. Like everyone like, what what is the rating on this? What did it get on an open critic. Or it'd be pretty high. I think I think it's like in the nineties. If I'm not mistaken, Okay, well, it's not as good as Kingdom Come Deliverance too. I'll tell you that. I don't know. I'll tell you that you are, especially if you're playing AMD like am D Hardware. It's awful. It's horrible, horrible. So I wish they would have made more time and made the port or whatever the fuck they were doing better. Because maybe Nvidia just filled their. Pockets really bad, really bad, and they patched it, so my sharpening fix that I was using stopped working so that it reverted back to the like original really over sharpened this weird feel. To that super gross. So I had to play for like five or six hours until I beat it on that weird effect, which I hated. But so unfortunate that we're seeing this more and more with these PC games from so weird. It happened in other Unreal Engine five games. I don't know if it's just the thing that people forget to shut off before they ship it out. But. Do you not use your eyeballs and look on like honestly, I mean. Hey man, people like people complain about store games coming out late or be getting delayed, and then they also complain about this, like which one do you want? You wanted good, faster or cheap? Like you can't have only two are allowed? Were really curious to see what looks like good? Maybe good a year and a half from now if they continue doing like support for it and like bug fixes and patches and stuff, I think it would look freaking spectacular. Looks great to me, I'm sure that I'll eventually see it, because I think half the Steam reviews are fucking talking about it and like yeah, yeah, like a. Lot of players. But you know, you know what came out perfectly fine shipped ready is great? Ninety six you know eight came to come Deliverance too. Yeah right, yes, so everyone needs true to play that game. That's true, That is true. Yeah, I agree that that is the next game that I plan on playing. I haven't. I haven't played it yet because I just I have too many things happening before June. But yeah, it looks great. I have older AD hardware. I have a six and nine hundred tea, which is whatever. But it's connected to my TV downstairs. Should be fine. I don't do one hundred hour games anymore. I don't do you know, four thousand hour games anymore. I don't do it. I don't have that many hours left, you know. Yeahs like. Shit, but it's uh, yeah, I can come to Deliverance. You guys played blue Prints yet? Yeah? I actually forgot which and I've been playing that. Yeah, I love that game like that? What the hell was it like an next Escape Room? It looked like yeah, but it's but it's like like a rogue light. It's like a rogue lake house paper. Yeah, I did an escape this weekend. Actually did We got out with ten seconds left? Amazing? Mm hmmm did you need hints? Oh? Yeah, we needed like two were you. Were you the leader or were you a passenger? There was like eight people. It was so much chaos. It was chaos speaking of passengers. Sorry, but the Leafs guys, Oh wow, did I get to talk to you about public We're. Not talking about that, John, Did your party hit? What happened with that? No? I didn't have a party. I just won, Like I didn't win much because the odds are horrible, Okay, I won like a hundred bucks or something? Oh did you did? You? You hedge your emotions against money and bet against the Leafs? You did? Yes? You are the coldest human being I know. Unbelievable. Why correctly, Like, listen, either way, I'm gonna be happy money whatever. I'm not that happy. It was only one hundred bucks because the odds are shipped because everyone knew Florida would wins, so like they were like blinds too, Yeah they were, and it's too summer. I was like, what the hell? Even when the leaves were up to one in the fucking series. How How did some Canadians get beat by some fucking Floridians? How Florida has it's all Canadians. So they fled. They fled to America. I see you got it. Yeah, they to Miami. They were like, no state tax, can frost appear? No state tax? Dude, fucking pure profit imagine that. Oh yeah, it'd be great. You should go live there. Yeah, you know, fucking hell state. People. My sister moved there. How long ago, three years ago? I still have not step foot. No chance I didn't. Didn't Daniel go down to see them, Ye, like I didn't. Okay, here anymore, there's there's Yeah. They got eaten by an alligator. The crocs got him, the crooks. Uh snakes. What do you play here? Yeah? So I'm playing Uh, I'm playing Blueprints. I'm playing another game called Inscription. That's a good one, which is really good. It's slow, like I don't know, like I play a lot of a lot of rogue lights, like a lot. Okay, I mean all the big ones, you know, Sleigh and and that Zel called to the Lamb and binding of Isaac, all that and finding inscription is really cool. I love the mechanics. I love the so I. Want to get through, like like all the animations and everything. If you play Bilatro or you play Sligh, you. Can increase the animation speed because it's just a calculation game. It's like one plus two plus five this and then you get the answer. You either go or you don't. And in this I want to go, like I already know the answer here, I don't want to watch I went next. So that's the only kind of criticism I have for it. But otherwise, you know, the other games like FTL. I don't know if you ever played FTL. I've been playing a few hours of that lately, and that has like a real time component, but you can pose it, so like if you're like running out of oxygen or something, you have to run around and you can, but you can pose it and plan your moves. It's different. But with Rogue Lights, I prefer to get through as many runs as possible because that's the point of the game is to run it as often as you can, not to watch it. Yeah, animated, so that's what I'm playing. Yeah, I do. I want to ask you really quick before we move on. Chris, what day are you on in Blueprints three? Oh? Okay, so you just started, guys, Yeah, I just started. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. It's interesting because you look at it and you look at like, okay. So this is a dead end. This has got this many exits, and then you're like, is this like a graph? Like this is this? Like can I math this? If I look and be like, okay, this point, this can create this many points and then you just start doing probabilistic. You kind of right. But I really like theme games. I prefer to select something based on a theme, like especially like in a board game. If I'm playing a board game, sometimes you can figure out the math of it, but other times you just need to play like the the guys that made it intended r this is that kind of character. This is this kind of character. Yeah. So yeah, if I could say anything, I mean, there's there's some crucial tips out there, and I won't spoil anything for you. But in terms of like the play through, the like optimal way to do your runs is like whatever you do, don't go vertical, like, do not try to shoot for the end. You want to like basically build up all of your resources in the first to two levels, probably three levels if you have to, and then you choose a side. Basically, that's all I'll say. Yeah, yeah, so so it's worth investing at the beginning. Yes, very much. Okay, yeah, don't don't spend any of your your gems or your keys early on. Just fucking pick whatever it is free and then go from there. Right, okay, thank you? Yeah, well there we go. We got some pro tips for blue prints. Yeah. I don't even know what it is. You should try it out. It's like you'd like it. John more Cartoony. Is that on game Pass on game Pass. That's why it's getting so much press because it's so awesome, And like inscription was the same. I only have like on Steam and. It's ten days, five days left them game Pass. Mine just renewed. I just got an email, damn it. Sixteen dollars. Oh so I tried to get I tried to get game pass for super duper cheap, but they patched it in November and I didn't know this, but like you could go to their website, are connect to a VPN, go to their website in like India or whatever, right, buy ruples or whatever their fucking currency is then. Like conflated rubles and rupees. Yeah, so they're like Russian Indians. Yeah, yeah, so I went there. You used to be able to buy actually up to like twelve months of Core game Pass Core for Dirt cheap, right because of the conversion, and then you apply it to your account, take off your VPNs, go back to Canada, and then buy one month of Ultimate and it switches it over. It brings it down to like six months of Ultimate. But the amount you paid for your Core subscription is like a dollar a month or something two dollars a month, so like you'd end up getting six months of Ultimate for like three bucks a month or whatever it was. Yeah, and they patched it in November, but that's how I did it. Before. I was like oh, and I was trying to get through and then I ended up actually wasting fifty bucks by buying these fucking Core the Indian Corps. I didn't say, you're region this subction. The websites don't load. It must have memorized your like mac address or whatever, that's my Windows language, region language, everything, VPN everything. How will they know? I don't know, man, It's crazy, I don't know. How would they know Chris Well private browser on. So part of what Microsoft's like a whole Azure log in intro id they call it now instead of actor directory. What they have is like. Risky signings, So there's like assessment of the signings that are there depending on what level you allow. And it's Microsoft, so I'm sure they have the best licenses for every person in their database, and they know exactly where you lugged in from when blah blah blah, And if they wanted to, they could simply say any you know, licenses that are purchased in this region, they'd have to region lock it. I guess yeah, And I mean that would take time to implement, but it wouldn't be so if they will, then it's about right that this is when it comes out to fix it. Yeah, Like if they know that the VPN server like ip pools in that. They currently host the VPNs, these guys are using Azure to listen, but we know where you. Are, so it doesn't work anymore. So I had to pay like a chump twelve dollars a month. Game they bring more. Yeah, now I have to work that fifty. Yeah, but you gained a lot. Yes, that's fine, don't work. I like evened out now, yeah, right kind of ship? What else happened to me? Uh? I jump back into Overwatch too? Oh god, Nate, why what's wrong with you? Did you want to play the mech? Is that what you wanted to do? I don't judge you at all. I won't judge it all for it. I'm sure you wouldn't, mister legends. Back back to play some Gundams, and I missed the skins, like they're gone by the time when I was like, didn't this event just start? And then there's no Gundam skins. That's what happened to me when I jumped into Fortnite because of Goku and oh yeah, and they were just finking just too late. Show up. It's every twenty four hours that your store changes or something, isn't it forty eight hours? But I logged and Overwatch too, and I see my coins right? Nine nine nine? I'm like, what I mean, how do I have one less coin? Like usually they'll give you a two hundred coins at a time, right, and you can only buy coins in one increments? Yeah, how do you have How the hell do I have. One less coin? I have no idea some googling. I'm like, how the fuck the one coin go missing? And some some guy I know, they fucked you. They fucked me hard, those Blizzard bastards. So they put out a skin for one coin. Oh man, it was like a gingerbread fucking skin for a guy. I don't even play it. And I was like, oh sweet, one coin and I and the moment I clicked that, I fucked myself. Yep, because you remember doing this? Yeah, costs one thousand. Yes, you have nine Yeah, the oldest trick in the book. Oh my brain. And every time every time I look, every time I look at the nine nine nine, my brain goes crazy. And it's all email them their tech support. Can I have a coin? Give me a coin, give me one please. I'm like, I'm like, how did you guys fuck me here? Can you just can you just give me one coin? Just take one skin back take. I can't buy your battle pass because I'm missing a coin, so if you give me a coin, I'll buy your battle pass or. You can't buy a thousand And then the response. Yes, but they're just like, sorry, we do not hand out our currencies. Is like fucker sons of bitches and now it's going to bother me for the rest of my life. I'm gonna die on my deathbed. I be like. And I was gonna be like that. They came out with one coin. You can sell one, you can sell his skin for one. You have like pieces. You basically spent You basically spent fifteen bucks on that gingerbread thing, because spending one coin, yeah, pretty much is spending a thousand. The same amount is the same amount because it's equal. Yeah, that's craziness. That is wild, actually insane. I hate them. I hate them so much, but their stadium mode is really good and I'm enjoying it. That's it, that's all I'm playing. Oh, I jumped into Oblivion remastered as well and modeled the ship out of it is. Sick, which months just more like election of three hundred four hundred of them. No, no, no you can't. It's just to clean up the unreal Engine five settings, just to get it running properly. Yeah, that's mainly at that in some nude months. Yeah, it's pretty a big deal that in some nude mods big cock mods super bad. Ye. No, but the nude the nude mods are for your character. Clo female dude, man, this is you're signed to let Chris from the groof Troop. You know from one twenty Chris know that if you do that you can see your feet. Yeah, because you gotta learn down more than your feet. But they did such a fantastic job with that game, like going through the caves. Going through the caves unbelievable. It just looks so unbelievable. It looks unreal. And turned the rad tracing. I turned the ra chracing hardware onto like low and had to lower the resolution to like I don't know, just above two k Oh, did you get it for PC? I thought you had it on? No, I have game pass. Oh, there's just a mod that turns off lumen ray tracing and the outside open world and turns it on and go into the dungeons. So like evens out the fps, like in the dungeons at sixty fps with lumin on, and it looks unbelievable. I don't get a lot of frame it's like forty five fifty fps even at crazy just above two kuh. Hate Unreal Engine five so much. They should all just use Henry's mod or Henry's engine, you know, just use Kingdom come deliverance. Two engine war horse. Just reach out to a war horse, their custom their custom engine. Selling it's on was it it was built on cry Engine? There's cry engine? Was it? It's like a modern cry engine yet, mm hmm. That'd interesting. But that's it. That's it, that's it. All right, we're gonna head into the main meat. We're gonna beat the main meat. 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You can head over to vr dash rock dot com that's vr hyphen rock dot com and by using the coupon code elder Trolls on checkout, you'll enjoy an exclusive ten percent discount on your order. Vr rock dot com ships worldwide, and all their products are tax free. We extend our sinceregraph to do vr rock dot com for supporting us and making our VR experiences safer and more enjoyable. So don't miss out, Grab your vr rock lenses and get ready for an unforgettable gaming journey. I wish I could do like a like a unhinged vr rock like at read for you guys one of these days and just be like super fucking insane about it and be like, you have. To buy this v. It's taking VR rock. I cannot get in my top tens anymore. Boys getting old, I'm getting old. Oh you're getting old? Yeah yeah, my wrists start hurting. Damn. I hate that. But we've been making money on those VR rock yeah. Oh yeah, that's great. I'm really happy to hear that. It's been pretty good. I think I might buy something from my Quest too as well. M M, just because I like playing Ragnarrock. It's fun. I love it. I'm not a drummer. I don't really have that much rhythm, but I can. Yeah, I really get sweat when you get it. It's pretty good. There's like two games that would make makes me wish I could play VR, because I can't play VR. If I put a head set on my face, I just get a massive, like headache in a migrant It's it's awful. But I really really want to play Half Life Alex, and then I really want to play There's like an Alien it's not Alien Isolation, but it's like alien like something Alien Specter or something like that. And it's literally just like an alien isolation thing in VR, which just like man, that's like my that's like my experience. I couldn't play Alien. I actually I played it for a couple hours and I was just like, this is too much. It's a lot. It's definitely a lot. It's so fucking scary. Oh it was. It's like there's just too many jump scares, too many. It's so tense. It's always tension, tension, like great sound design. Yeah, sound is insane and you cannot fight the aliens right, and you are You have to run and running. It's just you running and hiding the whole game. In VR. Yeah, they have it. They have a VR mod for it. I think your isolation. Yeah, I wasn't in VR, but I wasn't playing in VR. Yeah. The game itself. Yeah, Doom three was my last horror game that I played it. I haven't played anything since the score when I built that gray machine and I was sitting in the front and I just tried it one night and I fell off my chair on the first jump scare. I'm like, nope, I'm not no more scary. Games for Chris. Play road Lights. No, it's one plus one equals two and. That's enough, Chris. We got to get you to play the Dead Space remaster. They just came out with three. So the podcast there's like I listened to I listened to horror podcasts, okay, and and the guys that do uh. I think it's called SEP Archives. They did a dead Space fiction podcast that's up for a webbe which is pretty cool. Like, I don't know them or anything, so I'm not shutting them out, but it is content that I consume and I really enjoy it. And uh and they did it. If you like dead space, there's a full thing. I'm a dead space nut. I'm gonna have to find that. Yeah, let me the link. All right, we're done about that. We're done about that. Let's talk about what are you about scalpers. We're gonna be talking about scalping in the gaming market and industry today. Ah boys, big size. Yeah. So this was like a big prevalent thing for sneakers and tickets, you know, like ticket masters and all this shit, and then it started creepy. I don't know if it was the first time, but the first time I experienced it was three thousand series graphics cards. That's when I. Really experienced really mess thirty series. Yeah, yeah, yep, but it. Was four years ago. Is it during COVID. It was during COVID yep, yeah. Yes, it was during COVID, So that may have started this whole fucking thing. Yeah, when ethereum could still be hashed via in video cards as well. Yes, that was the thing, right, like the the the algorithms are being used for both. Oh god, so for. Me, the first time that I'm sorry if I'm jumping the gun there on the date. But the first time that I was exposed to like the online like digital scalping was with the PS five launch, and I got lucky enough because you know, we were obviously I was paying very close attention. I was watching the Game Awards, and it was a thing where Walmart actually launched their pre orders ahead of release date, effective like immediately when they announced like the PS five like release date at at the Game Awards that you're like, I guess twenty nineteen, December twenty nineteen, and they said, like, you know, oopsie, pre orders are up now on Twitter. I was like, oh shit, and I just went there and I bought it when I was in my apartment, and then I just really I realized, like shortly thereafter everybody who didn't see that tweet afterwards, it was next to iimpo possible to get the PS five back then, and I'm sure, like obviously this has been going on before that point, but it was just like that was my first experience of being like, oh shit, this is going to be a problem. And then every single launch for a high demand digital item from that point onward has just been a nightmare. It was since I don't know if it was COVID specifically or because of the timing of it and AI coming up and the coins are mining as well during that time, was all kind of coming up, you know what I mean. So it was like a perfect shortage as well, shortage if you want to, but because of COVID or whatever. But like this is only stuff, like normal people aren't likely seeing this, you know what I mean, because this is kind of. Like it is now because it's crept into like. For the switch to yeah for this well no, but I mean like fives yeah PS five. Not everyone's going out saying yep, I'm buying. It's a pretty low percentage I feel of the general gaming you know pop population, people still using PS four. Yeah, I'll keep my PS four for a couple of years. You know, people who want the newest ship right away, yea, yeah, that's who power users. You know, people who are living on the edge, the bleeding edge, as I like to say, but like people who get hit hard by fomo, you know. Oh yeah, like this guy, this guy. People who need the latest and greatest Nvidia card on day one. Like, good luck to those people, because it isn't just gamers buying those. Like I said, the cards, we have a huge AI boom now that that's happening, and and the Invida cards are fucking really good for that. So it's two different markets, you know what I mean, competing for a limited amount of like product. So it's tough and. The only thing though, there's also the split engineering effort. Right, So and Video has decided to become a robotics company. Don't they care about pushing pixels out on like like pulling pushing polygons is not the point. The point is like doing matrix math right, and then getting inference models to work and bigger and bigger brains that they can build with these things. So that's I think that's probably why you've seen AMD kind of resurge a little bit. Yeah, at least on the on the consumer side, you know. So they did not have a choice, well I. Know, AMD, AMD was dead in the water for so long. Basically all thirteen generations of Intel Core. They were kicking am D up and down the street, and then like everything, well here you go, here's a reversal. Right, rizins are the best. They destroy everything in every environment, you know, So there's a bit of a pendulum, you know, element of it. And there's geopolitics as well, like COVID and that. So talking about scalpers and what leads to scalping, I mean, it's a matter of economics. So there's demand and there's supply. What is it that we're it needs to be supplied and who's demanding it? And if the market is more than one and they have disparate interests, right, like the crypto community and the gaming community, where one has like literal roi and then the other has simply enjoyment and fun or whatever, then the ROI guys are willing. To pay more. Right, And scalpers come in and they look at this situation and they try and figure out what they're going to do. As you brought up ticket Master before, they went so far as to mechanize their ticket purchasing to allow scalpers to buy bulk tickets. Right. So you take this to the the hardware side, that's not what happens. That's not what happens so much. But what does happen is that supply chains can be influenced and shipments can go places where people that are incentivized or are providing incentives can direct those shipments which end up in scalpers' hands, and then they sell the first wave, right, Like, there's only a certain amount of scalping that's useful before the market collapses. Like there isn't gonna be infinite demand because something else is going to pop up and fill it. Like if it's like three years for a switch, it's okay, Well, somebody else is going to come up with a different device in three years that they can sell to us. So there's only so much this guy, So, how long did it take after the three Like when you started in the three thousand series, Nate, how long did it take you to get one? Oh? I was, well I was gonna talk about that soon. But yeah, okay, sorry, yeah, I'll get into it. Okay, I got them. I got them pretty quickly because of tools I. Used, really scraping tools, I guess, I mean, okay, yeah, but but yeah, but they're just like change monitor tools. Yeah, so scalping botting. Okay, that's all happening. Now. I want to go through certain there's like three or four big bots that a lot of people use. A few here are Stellar, aio, a butt designed to automate purchases across various retail websites. Various retail websites. Code I known for its speed and efficiency and securing limited addition items, so possibly not being used for like I don't know, consoles maybe, but probably could a cyber aio a widely used bought in the sneaker in electronics reselling communities. So this is a whole underground thing. Like it's so crazy people just using these bots just to get that like Air Jordan, you know that's worth ten grand or whatever it is. You know, crazy shit like that. Like that's how I think how it started, like getting those like limited super limited edition stuff that only they drop like ten of them, like twenty versions of these sneakers or something like that. And then the big rappers get the get the sneakers, and then the average Joe can never actually afford these these sneakers. Now they come up with these bots, Let's get those sneakers before the rappers do. Yeah saying the rappers are using bots. No, I'm saying the rappers probably are in. Just talk to manufacturer, yeah exactly, and be like, yo, give me some shoes or whatever. But like, how big can the market be if if there are only twenty or fifty of these whatever items, Like how much am I paying for the software? Then? Am I paying one thousand dollars to use it? Well, i'll tell you. Oh, I would say, I have a point. So we're gonna go. How do these bots work? Simply put, just to keep it simple, scalping bots or automated software programs designed to purchase demand products like GPUs consoles. The moment they become available online, they can complete an entire checkout process from adding an item to the cart to entering payment details in a fraction of a second, Like much faster than any of us we can type or even have it ready, you know what I mean. Inventory monitoring bots constantly monitor retail websites for restocking using scripts at scroll down, using scripts that repeatedly check product pages. APIs the back end systems that track inventory. They can follow those. This allows them to be the first in line when an item becomes available, even the retailer doesn't publicly announce a restock, so you know those virtual lines. Okay, they get in there, and then they can probably have like five hundred bots first. Well, I imagine that they use the API for everything. They're not using the gou ad all, which is why they're so fast, right, Yeah, they're just sending commands to the API of the retailer of the website. Yeah. But so this is this is an important question. Why is there a like remember when I was talking about Ticketmaster, they created this a p I full of knowing full well what it would do. But why why does best Buy need API. Access for purchasing? They are a consumer website. Human being should be going in. It's like saying, okay, you can buy things two ways from my grocery store. You can come in and buy it yourself, or you can hook up a robot the truck and it'll back up and just take everything for you in the mead like get to pick your fruit, and you got this and that, because it creates that like speed bump. But this there's no speed bump here. So I really believe that the retailers are complicity. Complicity they don't. They could stop it by palling their API. Yeah, like interesting, Reddit did this, Red did it? Or at least I didn't at first, and then I realized, Oh, it's because they're stealing literally all of humananity's knowledge is what the API is offering. Yeah, yeah, I think would be a good answer. Like pay the access and implement even and if you want access to it and you're willing to pay, there should still be like it shouldn't just be anyone can pay, like the vetting process or like an application for like a verified person. Thought we're going to get into that a little bit later. So the bots can also bypass common security features like captures Q systems and bought detection software by using sophisticated scripts and rotating their ips. It's easy ship. Capture is images? What is AI good at? Fucking looking at images? Light post looks like it's easy. Ship. I showed the I showed the AI my French homework and I was like, solve this for you. Well, they got a voice. Yeah, I was doing it for I refused. I refuse. So I just take a picture of like my workbook, right and it fucking boom. No problem done. Took a photo of an error message in a Kubernetes cluster and I'm like, debug this for me, wow, Like tell me what to do next. I took a picture with my phone of a screen that wasn't even my computer, and it's like, hey, try this out. I'm like Jesus man, a person sitting there. You know what am I looking at? Oh man? Okay, And my fourth fourth point is scaling and multitasking. These bots can operate dozens and even hundreds of accounts simultaneously, dramatically increasing their chances of securing the items. They can also target multiple websites at once, quickly moving from one store to another as inventory becomes available. Okay, all this stuff, I was gonna say, it sounds very expensive, Like these bots sound expensive if they're if they're doing all this shit. That's why not buying from scalpers is is kind of very important for people to realize to do because they're paying money for these bots and ship to be able to use them to get this stuff. And if it's not just like a one time payment thing, they have to like subscriptions probably and shit, yeah, like stuff's expensive. It sounds well, that's how that's how cheats work, like sheets and video. Last time we came here. These underground communities have, I mean, it's big money. That's why they the underground communities come to exist. Like there are Tarkov cheats that are three hundred dollars a month. The wine is one hundred and twenty dollars. Why would anybody do that. That's just still insane. I don't know whatever, like not real money. Yeah, and they'll they're willing. And now we talk about a tool that will actually give you ro o, I like real ROI that you could like put in a spreadshet' Like Okay, if I invest this, then I get that and then how much money I'm left with the end That's that's a really big deal. So yeah, if we don't buy, like John said, if we don't buy from the scalpers, then we the value drives up. But the problem is people don't care. People are such individualists that they don't. Matter, Like there's no united front against these guys. I think it's I think we're here. Yeah, if I could chime in, I think, like I really like that point, Chris, because I think that a large part is that people don't care. But I also think that there's a huge ignorance factor to a lot of people, Like these people will miss their purchases on Best Buy and game Stop and you know, wherever else they're trying to buy, there's Nintendo switch to and they're like, oh well, let's try some more places. And they go to eBay and they see it, Oh, it's just one hundred dollars more, and they don't realize what this is. They just haven't been educated. I mean, I feel like everybody should know by now, like the common layman should know what scalpers are. But I feel like a lot of people should know a lot of things right now. And I'm constantly, constantly overestimating the general understanding of the average Joe. Out there, so I would say that's correct. So I feel like a lot of them are just like I'm just I can just pay. I think, especially in America, because of the economic situation that's happening here, we probably will see changes on that, especially because like a lot of the you know, this happened like right after COVID. It was especially that twenty twenty two little dip in the recession and economy, like a lot of the consumer spending dried up significantly, and that's when all of these industries started seeing layoff after layoff, just because consumers weren't spending as much, and particularly when the economy gets gets hit as hard as it is, like the discretionary spending that people are buying on their fucking you know, sending their kids to swim team, let alone going out to buy you know, Air Jordan's or xboxes and PlayStations like that's gone. It's zero. So I mean, I hate to say it because I mean that means that everybody is suffering. But also I mean, at the very least, you know they won't be buying from scalpers. But I don't know. I want to do. Switch is going to be a really good litmus test because that's the kind of thing that has like diehards. Nintendo doesn't funk around when it comes to their fan base and people that want to switch. They want to switch. I have a Switch. I haven't played it in like three years. I should probably sell it, right. But I have it. But other people they're waiting for the switch to like it's the next PS five, like the PS six or the the Xbox, and when it comes and they can't get one from Nintendo, they're going to buy it from wherever they can. Yes, so are already sold out? Are gone? Exactly? Now? What what do companies that intentionally limit their stock or initial releases and then also contribute to the scalping environment. I mean, how much are they hurting their people. They're real people, right, Like the pre orders sold out. Okay, why are you making more? Well, because we can't because this that the other thing that's never transparent, right. Yeah, yeah, well that's the thing too. They know exactly how many consumers they have in the market. They can they can probably you know, do an equation that estimates exactly how many current switchholders that love their consoles, that have put X number of hours into their switch today, plus you know, aggregate that over you know, how many of those people have kids and we'll suddenly become new consumers over this like next life cycle. They'll they know exactly how many they need, but they create that demand and. You know how they can't fulfill that's right. Market. Yeah, I'm going to bring it back. You guys asked about the price of these bots. Yeah, you do have some experience trying to get one of these. Bots, get a bot to buy the bots. I think it was stellar aio. I think you try to get that sound familiar. No, no, no, so go in. No, they have a website. You just go to their website, and you know you have to you see, it's like an auction. So you go to this website and the users who have got this bought because there's only X amount of license. Yeah, there's only x amount of licenses for these. Bots by quarterly. It is crazy. So you put your name on a list, and your name, your RS name will show up on a list, and if someone has a bot isn't using it anymore, they can sell it to the highest bidder sell that license. Created a market for these licenses. Even even a market for the bots, like for the bought licensing. And some of these licenses were going two three. Two hundred dollars two hundred three months instellar aioh yeah. And like some people will and that's that's if you could buy right now, but you can't. Pretty good, can you sell a couple of switches for for two hundred over? But you go to if you go to try to do the buying process, it'll say out of licenses or whatever, and then it'll like forward you to uh like this like auction house thing where they sell for thousands. Of dollars the World Warcraft's auction. Yeah, it's crazy, So that's how it is. That's how it works. So there's only x amount of people that hold these licenses until they make more licenses. I think they only output x amount of year and then if you're on like a list, you get invited to buy the license or YadA, YadA, YadA, and it like goes like that. There's it's not like you can't you can't just go buy it like Adobe Photoshop. Right, So again for the normal person, like, it's not worth trying to get this. Yeah, are the cost of the tools that would use to use these spots. These guys are paying for these tools, like yeah, the guys bidding on new licenses and ship like that too, because they're making money off of this ship. So bring it back to makes his question about how I got my three thousand series. We covered it in a long episode long time ago. But I used a lot of browser refreshers, and it would scan the page and tell me if anything changed on the page and notify me. You could even highlight I could highlight what it said sold out. Yeah, I highlight that. And say tell me if this changes, and refresh this page every thirty seconds or whatever it is. And it just refreshes the page and tells me if the sold out button turns to in stock or whatever, and then I go click the link is this. The thing where you're just you're keeping that window open and perpetuity thing sit there and yeah or within the year shot of your speaker because it'll buzz yeah or bing, it'll ing or ing or whatever whatever. You said it to. That's what I did too. You just have them on open like refresh every you do get blocked by some yeah, some websites for refreshing. So so I did because you're doing the poor. Yeah, you're not API, You're exactly the poors that's just refreshed the page loser. No, isn't that ridiculous? Yu, guys, No, no, no, come come in, come in, red carpet open, come buy everything. We don't give a shit. You know. That's it right, Well ship it to one place. It's so much easier for fulfillment. Like, it's ridiculous that they are blocking you and allowing them. That's crazy to me. So my question is is that I think we talked about this earlier about you know, obviously the understanding of the customer base on like like the common band, like wouldn't know what an API is or what these companies are doing on the back end to allow scalping to continue. But like at what point do we think people will become conscious and aware enough to where it's like we see what they're doing and this is no longer becoming acceptable, or it gets regulated so like the government sets in it says, hey, you should sell your product to actual human beings and not businesses, Like do you think anybody. Will carry the law there is a law right for wholesalers versus retailers, Like if you're a distributor, you make a deal with whoever it is that you sell stuff like Nate and I and John know this from you got tech Data, Ingram, Cynics, all these guys that just massive warehouses in Toronto that are full of these things, and you can't buy from them, and you have a business number, right, you can't buy from them unless you're a retailer. For this and some of the stuff, you can't buy it unless you're authorized by the manufacturer to buy it. Like you can't, no one can. Just Ingram has hundreds of thousands of Macintosh products, but not everyone can buy them, yeah, right, Like it's all sitting there for someone else to buy. But to get that ability to buy like a Mac product, you have to go through their Mac loop, like the jump the jumping rope that mac will send you some. That's retailers buying from wholesalers we're talking about. But this is the same thing retailers. But this is the same thing because when you buy something, you control retal. You mean putting controls in place. Yeah, yeah, Because because Nikolay has a good point, it's like, can we regulate this? Well, we all know how much the Americans love regulation, right, not a lot all And literally saying you're not allowed to buy this to sell it to somebody else seems a little bit like you're infringing. Yeah, but the truth is that you're buying it for the express purpose of reselling it. You're never going to yield this thing. So you've taken this thing of value out of the economy and now you're trying to extract wealth from it, yes, right, which is not a good economic thing. Right. And you ask the question, Nicola, like when is this going to change? It's when the economics don't make sense anymore. Right, It's it's an economics problem and it needs an economics solution or regulation. But regulation is a lot harder in this climate. So I don't know if it's solvable until everyone's poor enough to there. Was there was some kind of thing for for scalper specifically, was there not like regulations coming up or I hear about it. We'll get into that, yeah, uh soon, but first, okay, we're gonnaet jump into our segment three. Uh the Nintendo switch to foremost, Like this is just the point. How what kind of brought this idea? And Nikolay kind of sent the idea to us to talk about this. We knew Nintendo switch to was going to be absolute, massive, bonkers, crazy sold out. Right if the switch to came out, I don't know, before COVID, I don't think i'd have an issue getting a switch to, right, I don't think, probably not because the electric electronic boom and the gaming boom of COVID where everyone was at home gaming because they didn't want to do anything else. Right, that's true too. Also, and now we've got we're ahead of COVID, but we're still trying to play catch up. And like everyone's got that new hobby of gaming. I bet you there's so many new gamers, right, Yeah, especially Nintendo, because you buy a Nintendo, everyone just buys a Nintendo. Think think about the kids, that got born in late twenty twenty. You know, they're five years old now, right, going on, we're gonna need. Their switch, They're gonna need their switch. But like, and I was just just in the back of my head, I was like, oh, this is gonna be a fucking nightmare just trying to get one of these. And it's just a pre order, like it's a ticket, right saying Okay, you're gonna get one in six months, yeah, or whenever we ship it to you. That's if you get the pre order. Yeah, that's if you get the pre order. So I was not able to secure a preorder. I know a few of the guys over Gaming Duo. I think they both were. They feel like Onyx did, I think you're right? Yeah, yeah, and Tony actually Tony got it too, I think yeah. But uh, Nintendo had an anti scalping plan, Okay, so fucking ridiculous. According to company president, uh shooting this come. No, no, We'll leave that. Leave it and deal with it. Deal with that, okay, whatever comes from that. This comes in the form of a straightforward intention to produce a sufficient number of units to fulfill all potential orders upon the console's release. Are you insane. Insane. Stock at the beginning switch. Right. That's dumb too, is coming up with all the stock all at once, because then if something's wrong, now you're fucked. Right, A couple of releases is also maybe something that causes a problem. Thought, Yeah, it is, like we we're baiting beta in things on people now, right. And it's been true in the software market for like ever obviously, but now the harbor market is so fast and people need it so quick. Maybe they're releasing stuff and then they're patching from where later or whatever. I mean, you see that happen. You know what that means? What potential for Nintendo to fuck it up and then people hack it and I get my running I'm right? What what you just cut out there? While this might coming back, While this might require a massive investment in terms of having these products pre made, like all these products and adhering to this tactic could lead to drastic decline and resale market, I just can't fathom them even being able to produce that many units. Obviously, not how many, it's just how many switch ones are sold. That's just from the mouth. Did they measure did they say how many they expected they needed? No? So like five million. Oh, okay, you're going to make five million. It cost seven hundred dollars, Like, yeah, how you can do that? Right? Okay? No? For good way. They also came up with a thing where if you're a switch online member that you had been paying twelve months for your switch online service. That's your sticking point, Yeah, that's the real one. And registered at least fifty hours of gameplay on your switch console, you would get an invite to get the pre order. That's pretty cool. I kind of like that. That's not bad. That's like, okay, you're slurious and here's the proof. But you were talking about that earlier, Nickli were like, they know exactly who wants or whatever. And if they're saying they're willing to put the number of hours you have logged in to their account ya a Nintendo switch Online or whatever, and they's a minimum amount of time, that means that. I mean that sounds like a reasonable strategy. Now whether or not they stick to it, yeah, is a different question. Yeah. I just don't know how that how that invite link. I actually I don't know if I've talked to anyone that actually got the invite. Lenk and realistically, I think that twelve months of the s is kind of egregious, first of all, because a Nintendo Switch Online for even their base like mode is like really bad value. The only value that you get out of it is by getting like the ultimate Nintendo Switch Online, which is like fifteen bucks a month. I did not do that. I paid for someone else's family plan on eBay and I got like a year's worth a Nintendo Switch Online and they just added me to the account, so I like backdoored my way in there, and I mean it worked, and that's actually really nice. It's great. There were like, you know, thousands of people on their family account, which was really hilarious that they let that happen. Yeah, yeah, it's it's really interesting. But yeah, no, it's one of those things where it's like, Okay, so I was I was on Nintendo Switch Online, but I wasn't like legitimately paying for it, so I knew at this front I had no chance of doing that. And it's like all the games that you really want to play nowadays you just buy, you just pay for on the e shop, like you just I don't know, I just don't really see the value in the nso, Yeah. That's true because you don't like Yeah, because if you're playing let's say you're playing like the first party titles and like you're not paying, you're not playing those old snets or nests or whatever, the old stuff, Like you're not doing that. You're a Nintendo fan now, especially if they're like younger people that maybe don't want to play those old games. Yeah, there's probably a ton of people who aren't aren't paying for nso. Yeah, so they just get sorry, yeah forget you don't pay for. That could be part of the strategy though, in that they're looking to give to newer fans or people that are the old because those guys they already got them. Yeah, they don't need them. They'll wait because they what else are they going to do. The people that have been like investing in becoming Nintendo fans, they want to reward them. Yeah, give them the new things sooner, and they're like, fucking Nintendo's then they have died, died in the wool. Nintendo fans and the other ones you're like, yeah, yeah, we'll wait. Yeah. Personally, here's my here's my take. I think you if if you really cared about the consumer despite like whether you're a new or old fan, I think you get rid of the Nintendo Switch online requirement and you bump that like fifty hours of gameplay up to one hundred hours over the over the life cycle of the Nintendo Switch. That's like your true core fan base out of a game, out of all games that you've played. And I put one hundred hours into Cheers the Kingdom alone. Yeah right, And this is maybe very much speaking to anecdotal experience for me, But I think if you did that that it would open the door for the people who are actually interested in buying and playing your games at launch, at release, and then it kind of like creates that opportunity for them to get the switch. But I don't know, I don't know. There's definitely a push pull to it. The only problem with that I would foresee is like it works when it's a surprise. Yeah, like you know what, guys, if you've been playing on and sohah blah blah blah blah blah. But if they announced it like okay, everyone needs one hundred hours and the. And everyone's a thousand hours thousand hours, right, do I get it now? Like yeah, then it's all garbage. Right, it'll be bought farms for switch farms be racked, the phone farms playing going forward, playing themselves like playing. I've seen that before. Those those phone farms are legends. Dude hackers. Apex hackers will have switch farms playing Apex on switch like, and there'll be racks of them just botting to get the account to level fifty so that hackers will buy them to play ranked with. That's insane. You have to be level fifty to play ranked. That's crazy. So they just bought so they're exp botting. Yeah, speak another market that is just for them. Here's a bunch of fifties, go fuck around there anyway. How many do we know? How many pre orders have sold so far for the switch to question? I tried to find it, but I didn't. I couldn't. First off, we're talking about numbers. Didn't Nintendo say they have two million switches ready? Yeah? I think I think the pre order numbers I think is that two point two million sold already, so dollars. Bloomberg apparently predicts six to eight million switch twos will be sold at launch, but I do not think that they have manufactured six to eight million switch I. Thought they said two million. They had two million ready, I thought that's what that was. This is off of Reddit too, so. I think they've sold I can't find it, but I'm pretty sure I read two point two million million then sold for the Predorsal. That's insanity already seven FIFTYSD right or cat six seven hundred Canadians. Well, actually, that two point two million number apparently what I'm looking at now says that Nintendo confirmed two point two million people registered for a pre order lottery in Japan. But the six to eight million units sold at launch globally is going to make that the fastest selling console ever, so no doubt. Yeah, so maybe maybe I am underestimating Nintendo. Only have two million made. That's still insane, like there will be ten million people without a switch to who on. Yeah, and it's also crazy. I don't know if we already said this, but like, it's insane how Nintendo is selling the switch to in Japan at like a super deep like loss. It is apparent. I think the Japanese console is going to be like one hundred dollars cheaper fifty, you know, comparative comparatively between the US fifty cheaper yeah, so it's it's significantly drastic, and I don't know why it's so drastically cut because I feel like, I mean, it's the Japanese. Markets subsidizing basically for the Japanese market. Yeah, make the rest of the world pay more. So. I also think that gamers in Japan and China are big, like phone, They're a huge cell phone market, so it might. Maybe penetration might not be good enough to get the attention. Of the mobile gamers. Like I used to play Puzzles and Dragons. You remember that, right, That game is in arcades in Japan, and that's a mobile game, right. You can go and play and people wait around the block waiting to play the arcade version of Puzzles and fucking Dragons. Man. So yeah, it's a it's a it's interesting that the the Japanese market is very different than the North American market. But you can't get Zelda on your cell phone unless it's an emulator, you know what I mean. Like they're also playing an Impact on their phone and playing like Kingdom, what was it? No Great Frontier? Right? That's another like all these gatcha games with these like teams and whatever, and that's all mobile and that's huge money dollars. So it's stell the stelled the nick games from the Stellar Blade developers. You know, basically just like the third person asked, Jiggle physics shooter. Game, it's ridiculous. Yeah, what's that other one? You played in the thing of that? And I played them all star star Tail, ra starrailal. Oh, star Rail played that for good ten hours. Yeah, I got Actually, that's that performs so well on the phone, like Will and I don't play that for our mobile episode, and it's good. I think it's not bad. So like, if that stuff is that popular there, they need to make the switch cheaper so those people attention will kind of drift to. Oh, switch to yeah, because why would I go buy it? Okay it's three fifty dollars only three fifty US there or something. Well, yeah, because they already own a thousand dollars phone and they're already pumping yeah, hundreds of money into these Gatcha games. Right, So it could be that the console itself is a difficult sell because he doesn't have these Gatcha games. They got to buy games for him instead of just the micro transaction like dopamine that they get every time they need to roll a thousand eggs or whatever the especially you know what the currencies are like, you know, whatever they. Are, especially if like the iPhone, because I remember, I think the latest I think it was the sixteen or the fifteen came out and they were like, you can play Resident Evil for remake on this, and it's like, what the fuck are we serious right now? Like and apparently it doesn't look like the worst thing ever, although I really struggle to imagine if that phones. Can perform are insane? The new ones are, Yeah, that's wild insane. I hate my phone. I just don't think that they could come out, come out of the gate with enough systems to flood the market like you said he was gonna or wants to do. And Nintendo is known not to budge, like on the prices as we said, yeah, over on the West side and and even down the road, like look at the games they're selling. For the Switch to launch, right, like the Zelda Rest of the Wild, this full price, you. Know, full price plus ten plus plus. Yeah whatever it is. For the for the Switch to Upgrade graphic and fidelity upgrade. Yeah, for the Switch to Edition, you have to pay twenty. Bucks there. Or is it just like some kind of filter. I imagine that just a patch that. You put in there, Yeah, to like increase resolution, I'm sure. Which is so like, can we talk about how crazy that is the fact that they like wouldn't reward this is sony Like for the PS five. You know, say what you will about the life cycle of the PlayStation five, but when you bought the PS five at launch, as long as you actually I think you have PlayStation Plus. They gave you the PlayStation Plus collection of like all of like the greatest hits of the PlayStation four on the PS five four free and as long as you continue paying for that service, you have access to those games. And it's like the fact that like that we don't get anything on the switch to besides, like, oh, you can buy the same games that you already own plus ten dollars because. They have that power. They have that power where it's like, if you want Zelda and you want to play it at sixty frames per second at four K. That's why they crack down on admisation so much. Yeah, they want them to be the only ones to be able to supply that even though you're playing an old game like when the fucking Breath will get them else twenty seventeen, seventeen, Yeah, you can get You can play it on an emulator for at four K sixty, no fucking problem. You could do that six months after it came out, right, like in twenty seventeen you could do that, So there they know they're gonna be able to do that later with their next console probably. So they're crushing everything they can for switch emulation because they want people to forget it from where they're even going to supply it from. And even look at the power World lawsuits. Right, they're crushing anything that remotely resembles their ips so that you have to go to a switch to get your pocket mad, you know what I mean. Yeah, so they're doing they're doing it's it's smart. If you throw balls in your games now you have to pay Nintendo for exactly. You can't do it. You can't do it. You can't ride your pal, you can't ride animals in an open field. That's the that's the fucking copyright. Yeah dude, Yeah, the eye popy ring, that's it's like the patents that they power. Yeah, the patterns that they put on like their game systems is absolutely insane. You can't ride a monster in an open field, or you can't capture monsters either. Yeah, I can't capture monsters with a ball in an open field. That's the pattern. Wow, it's broad. Oh you can't. Also, you can't fly on your monsters in an open world. Apparently the power world had to change to gliders. You can't rise. What's the difference flapping? Yeah, I don't know, man, that's crazy. Yeah, I'm so glad, law, it's absolutely insane. So I got some questions here. If scalpers scalp the pre orders and already put their pre orders up on eBay and other marketplace shops, could Nintendo somehow play police and revoke this stuff. Jurisdiction revoke what? They could blacklist them, but they'd have to create like serial number blacklists. But then they be creating things. It's like, okay, guys, let's just put the the output of our switch to factory directly into a wood chipper and then that's you know, like that's that's what that would do. So the only thing they could really do is lean on market you know, like like come on, you know, this is obviously scalping can you can you do something here? But yeah, they're like no, fuck. You make so much money for monitoring and and like finding all this stuff and they could just let it all go and it all sells, so they don't care. So and then there was another question is like, oh, Nintendo is pretty slimy legally when combating piracy. This is a form of piracy? Is it not by by scalping preorders? For sure? Really without a doubt, pirate copyright, piratey piracy. Let's define it before they care. About copyright piracy. That's all I care about. Uh, this, what do you want to people are. Making money in this case, Explain to me why you think it is the practice of attacking and robbing ships at sea, robbing people the guys. I have a game for this, it's. Called Yeah, I think like if we're I don't know, I mean, I agree with Nate because of the intent, right, the intention from people. Yeah, they're technically they're stealing it from the consumer, so hypothetically wants to sell their ship to their audience. Hypothetically. Let's just give them the benefit of that doubt, right, But the fact that you have people that have automation in like mechanized constructs in you know, I have act to the APIs to essentially take product away from their consumer base. I feel like you could have an argument that that that could be a form of piracy, Like. What if what if Nintendo's like, oh, We're going to put out some kind of fucking weird shit patent or whatever legal shit they come up with for retailers where you can only buy Nintendo process Nintendo products a certain way. M like go to the official Nintendo website saying they. Say, okay, retailers, this is the only way you can sell our products. Well, I think the manufacturer we have to look at. For the example here is Apple, Yeah, okay, so how much scalping is there? Forget cell phones because they're kind of a different thing. They go through a bunch of different distribution and the thing that they carry cocuters like laptops. If I want a new MacBook, am I going to get? Like is it scalp or they always sold out? I don't know. I don't know. Interesting question because like I feel like Mac in Windows or just just Mac in general specifically, to say on that comes out with their products so quickly, like it's an annualized product base that they come out with that, people are like, they're sitting on their stuff for at least three to five years. And I still have my pro from twenty twenty thirteen, right, and it's gone how many generations since that? So it's not a seven year old machine. That's yeah, freshed. Which would be interesting if they changed they pivoted their model and be like, oh, we don't have to make these every year and we'll still make money, right Yeah. But that's it's just crazy. You know what I should do is we should start learning like API commands and and just I won't even use a web browser anymore. I'll just use command line, dude, browse the web. Sure you can curl everything, yeah, curl get put. Yeah right, but but are you like, are these APIs even documented? Yeah? Like do you have to become friends with Walmart? Yeah? You know you have to. You know what you do how to use their You go to the eye you use if you the source on the website, and it's all there. All the commands are in there that that you're sending by clicking on a button. The command is behind is in the code. So if you view source, highlight everything, put it into fucking chat GBT say, yeah, give me the API calls for each thing, and then we'll just and now create me a program that. Calls this website and yeah, okay. Fair enough. How do you view source on a website? Eleven? Yeah, right, click view source bro view page source control You in uh. Set click this chat and I can see Jonathan talking in text. I see it. Yes, you see my face in the matrix code. Version of what is going on changing on the You're like, oh, no, something I shouldn't have. Oh right, So that's like the main point of why we're talking about this. So the next segment is how we're going to fight back. Boys, if we could change things, Okay, if we could hammer down and actually have the power to change things and tell people to do things and they listen to us, and or yeah, let's hypothetically say we had the power to tell people to do things. Okay. So I'm gonna go over some countermeasures against scalping bots that some companies have tried. Okay, I'm gonna go through this really quick invite only purchase systems. Example, Sony's PlayStation Direct requires customers to register for an opportunity to purchase consoles selected individuals receive exclusive invitations limiting access to genuine customers. When did they do that? Because I don't remember that. I don't remember that shit either, especially for the PS five. I have been. It might have been during like their showcase for like an hour or something. Yes, stupid like that. In store exclusive sales. So Nvidia apparently has partnered with best Buy to offer certain GPU releases exclusive simply in physical stores, so reducing reducing the online bought interference. But like you have to go in. Yeah, I mean physical stores would obviously give you the best shot, but you've got to go line up there. You gotta go line up and they have to get them, like if they if they said no, these products are not to be sold online in store only. Imagine Yeah, like you had to go to a store, that's it. So you that would be the best chance probably for to go get you go line up, and you know what that does. It creates a situation where rural people can't get it. Only city people. You know, people are anyway on the. Launch parties, you know what I mean. Everybody pulls up with a with a grill, yeah, case of beer. Yeah that would be that'd be sweet. But like that would give you the best, Like there's no scop scalp or bots out there lining up store and. Then multiply it's someone else to stand in line for me. Yeah, I just saw that on I saw some news where some new gen x ors is that what they're called. Jen a gen Alpha h kids? These days they're actually selling their time to wait in line for places. That's thirty five bucks an hour, but they'll sit there there. You Well, I was gonna do something going back to the Sony thing like that. It was like, was that like a lottery based system, I guess? Or and is it based on like is it opt in? So like only existing customers if you have a PlayStation account or whatever, you get it now, let's say, and Nintendo was good saying do you want to opt into this lottery? You say yes, and then there's that's how you enter, and like, what's the difference. It's it's a lottery now, it's it's a chance that you're going to get one if you try to buy something on the day of, like launching right now. Or going to the website and freaking refreshing. Every crapshoot anyway, So why not just make it a lottery, but you don't get new customers that way. Yes, true, you got to get routes. We need to get those roots in. The Yeah, so I don't think that would ever happen. Another one is, uh, purchase limitations obviously implemented some of these bullshits, like one per customer, but bots beat that. It seems so easy to very easy, Yeah, very easy. Raffle and lottery systems like Nike's you have to use an app. You can download their app again bots. App dig APIs. Now companies are investing in sophisticated bought mitigation solutions that analyze user behavior i P reputation, and browser fingerprints to identify and block automated purchasing attempts. But can't they just limit the commands per second? Like you can't send me five. The a p I a human can't. Yeah, but a human can't do it that fast. You want to add this to your cart? Oh sorry, you want to call this item add it to your cart, and. You get to a fraction of a second. You did it all in one second. It's like, Okay, that's real, it's real. Human so stupid. A lot of retailers will do some of you have ceased pre announcing product releases. This is more sneaker ship to get to, aiming to give genuine customers a better chance of getting that product. But that doesn't work well. The bought looking for the release. That's actually worse. Yeah, right, because if you don't know what's coming out on you. Know, he's scraping. And but there's bots already scraping the website that they're like, Hey, this new thing came out, I'm just gonna buy it, you know. Yeah, it doesn't advise it anyway. Sure the guy running the bots like, what did I buy today? Yes, I'm sure, I'm sure they do that all the time. Okay, I got this fifteens fives? What did I get? Twenty? Switched to pre awesome? Cool. It's like a fishing net, Facebook marketplace for. Crazy because it's probably some guy who just doesn't it doesn't do anything, season care whatever. Yeah, what do you mean? Another one is enhanced capture systems. I read captures are actually complete bullshit. Yeah, they're like, they don't even cares. Captures are so bad. Now, what they actually detect is how slow you. Are, exactly right. They're like, oh, you're a human. You fast enough on any of this. Yeah, because when you ask an AI, even if you tell it act like a human, it can't not really not in that way, like it gets and immediately responds, Right, that's what it does. I guess it could wait. But even then that's like something that you could other AIS could measure because people are so inconsistent versus. Yes, exactly, because it would probably well maybe not, you would have to specifically tell human and add this to my car in different intervals between how. Many the unretectable to other AI is what you'd have to tell it. And it's like, I don't know, like what, But like I said, like showing something on screen, anything visual, and AI is going to be easy at Like it's going to be good at doing. Like you can recognize characters, recognize anything. You could recognize literally anything, and it will reproduce it and tell you what it is. So it knows what a capture is, It knows what a fucking bicycle is in a street light. Like that's easy. Shit like those are not working so now. Earlier we talked about legislation that they put into CURB, like the Ticketmaster shit that was called the Better Online Ticket Sales Bots Act of twenty sixteen and acted in twenty sixteen. The Bots Act prohibits the use of software to bypass security measures on tickets selling websites, making it illegal to purchase tickets in bulk for resalers. For resale violators can face up to fines of sixteen thousand per offense. Wow, that's crazy. That was in twenty sixteen. That's because the artists were getting fucked right. So artists are out there and most of the money that they make is from the gate. They don't make money off their albums unless the right you guys know this. But Ticketmaster was like, okay, well we're selling all the face value tickets, but the real money is in the resale. And then they also run stub hub, right, so the bots buy it on their website and then immediately transferred over. I would not be surprised if they didn't have like an integration between stuff hub and tickets where they're like, you know, the tickets that are in this database, just copy them into a different table in the same fucking database, and now they're owned by stub hub or whatever. You know. They don't they never left the retailers, so that I think that that law was really important. I just don't know if it has enough teeth. I think it was important to like not let ticketmaster be a fucking monopoly on the entire ticket buying process. But that ship sailed long. Yeah. In March twenty twenty five, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Federal Trade Commission to regulously enforce the Bots Act and collaborate with state attorneys. So more about this ticket ship. But where's our electronic Actstronics? Chips for sure? Right, that's the one act that we have about electronics is they need to be made. Well, no, this is the old one. This is the one where they're we need to subsidized chip manufacture in North America because one's about the get bootfucked by somebody, And then where are we going to get all our chips. We don't have lithograph machine, We don't have all this ultra like high energy ultraviolet lithograph machines. If you guys know anything about how these chips are made, it's really complicated. And like nobody knows it besides. Americans and Dutch and Germans. They don't have the expertise that the Taiwanese have. Period that not only do they not have the equipment, they don't. Have the people. They don't know how to brains, they don't have the knowledge. So that's going to take a long time. Because Nvidia like invests like like almost forty five percent of their revenue into like R and D to like make sure that they're like, like Jonah says, is on the bleeding edge of understanding how those GPUs are actually constructed and made. It's it's crazy, and those machines to actually make the shit cost like billions and millions of dollars to like manufacture in the first place, which is Yeah, it's a. Very interesting topic if you guys are interested in that at all. The machine that creates these chips does the etchings and with UV it was originally a Dutch. Company really yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah, but the technology, uh was American and then they let it go and the Dutch took it and built it because they did the Americans didn't want to do it, and then eventually they ended up in Taiwan until there was a big party. They probably looked at it like, uh, yeah, it's gonna a gift with the math liner, right right. Yeah, that's basically America. This is where it would have to come from. Like you said, like this legislation, If it's legislated to the retailers, then they would have to implement those controls on their PI like by law. And everybody knows that. You know, most of these corporations are fucking pushovers. They're putting cares to legal risk. Well as long as their pockets get filled by a scalper, by a Nintendo fan, Like. Doing that stuff would cost money to implement that ship, why would they do it by the government, Yeah, exactly, But that's the only time. So they're not going to do it unlet because they're selling products there. They don't care. And it would have to come from the top too. That's a decision that would have to come from the top of the company, which they don't care. Yeah, so we would have to be legal. What if Trump's grandson or whatever comes up to daddy, I want to switch to right, and then Trump's like, I'll get you one, and Trump can't get him a switch too. I believe Trump's son is a virgin and he has no grandson. This is what I read in an article. Well, he's got he's got three kids, and each of them are more pathetic than the other. So I saw this, I saw. That says this Trump, What did you get there? It was just some stupid headline. It's like Trump calls his own son a virgin and doesn't think he's ever been with a woman because of some stupid thing he said. He was like, I don't think he's ever had a girlfriend, just like, yeah, son, he doesn't know. He doesn't know his kids? He sure yes. Unfortunately, fortunately that's exactly right. Shit. So creative solutions. Creative solutions, guys. So after what we've talked about today, Okay, uh, did you guys come up with any kind of crazy ideas that could possibly stop this from happening or help gamers get the items that they want. Well, it's not something I don't think that manufacturers can control. I don't think unless they're selling it themselves, like a m D. Like you don't think think about a m D releasing GPUs they have you can buy straight from them right on their website. So not their latest series, right, but before that, so to. Be able to buy reference cards from am. D, yeah, yeah, so they would be able to implement that on their website because they're at first party controlling the website. But like best Buy and like Canada Computers or micro centers and all that shit, like they're probably I mean you would think that they would do it, because those are like micro centers specifically, and like these small guys like Canada Co. Yeah that like you think they would do it. Like put some controls on the API so that you can't do the entire checkout process in a fucking microsecond. Make it so that it maybe has some kind of interval pause check. Yeah, a pause, it's like okay, pause pause there. Or pay well your API access like I said. But even if you pay all the a guy who's like okay, yeah, pay the fifty bucks or whatever, it. Is No, no, no, it would be it's super expensive, like yeah, it's crazy. Access to Ingram and all those guys like for the that's like thousands of dollars a year if you want. But also it requires, like I said, a vetting process and yeah you know what I mean, Like you can't just have beat Joe blow pay the thousand dollars a year and get access. No, you need to have a business number, you need to have whatever. So that would be I think. And then their purchases would end up being tracked for taxes, and then any profit they made on buying and reselling it they would have to to pay, and then that would reduce your overall because a lot of these scalpers they make money because it's reselling. There's no tax, right right, so they have charge whatever they wanted. They keep all the money. Now that does that? I mean in Canada they would be able to like claim the HSD back or whatever if if they for the GC rather if they if they were buying it or reselling it that way, so they could get some money back there. But that's not what they're doing. They're making way too much margin for that. Like the margin on this stuff is like twelve percent. Scare margin is like fifty percent, so you know, or I mean, how much are these scalpings go for? Like what do we expecting a scalped ps or. Going to be thick? They're on eBay right now, the pre orders for like one hundred and fifty. Let's see, that's all. That seems really small. That's what it seems like enough for a real scalping. To me, that's like a convenience fee. And I don't really if it's only on hundred dollars. But what I like is like two, yeah, that's way more. That's fifty percent more, yeah, instead of seven hundred hundreds. So that's the next for three hundred bucks, then that's a lot. There's a thousand here, twelve hundred yeah, yeah, that's yeah. It's hovering between. The thousands, which is where you would expect the economics of it to. Make pay that much for a switch to Oh man, will I. Don't do that? That's damaging to my psyche. I'm not. I mean, just think about it. Think about it. In reference to this, I mean looking at I've been I've been in the market for a fifty series card for a minute, even though JOHNA like he he pooh poohs the fifty I mean, everybody knows they kind of on the fifty series card. But I've been I've been looking at the fifty eighties and these are cards that apparently, if I'm not mistaken, they're supposed to be like six hundred or seven hundred MSRP. And I'm looking like at a goddamn gigabyte fifty eighty editione at fifty eighty for fifteen hundred and seventy nine dollars America. America. They were supposed to be fifty eighties, were supposed to be eleven ninety nine. Something like that. Okay, let's look at it. Fifteen hundred USDs. Well, I buy one thousand bucks, and so so the margin that I'm looking at a new Egg right now, and I imagine this person is probably like a scalper or a large retailer that got a hold of product fifteen fifteen hundred dollars on six six hundred dollars over MSRP. I honestly, and I don't know what the pricing structures are like when it because you're not buying it from in Video, you're not buying it from AMD like. I don't know if the partner retailers like Gigabyte or Aoris like inflate their their card price is because their AORIS or. The thing that is you get a reference card from in Video, right, so they price when they say, oh, this card is going to be a thousand dollars, they're saying the reference card from Nvidia, like the Founder's Edition is going to be the MSRP. Then they ship those their graphics cards plans over to gigabyte and then gigabytes the cooling system their own like whatever, and they all they put it on with bells and whistles on it, and then they can charge whatever the fuck they want. They didn't e well because AMD was urging their board partners to because AMD didn't make reference cards, right, So they did have an MSRP though, which is basically them telling their board partners what to sell it for, right, because if you if you come up with an if AMD's coming up with an MSRP and they're not making cards, who's whose MSRP is that it was? It was a suggested the. Ninety a Sapphire Nitro Radion ninety seven XT nine hundred dollars on New egg right now, Hm, we're. Suppose nine hundred because they suck at inference, Yeah, because they suck at AI ship. You can get them here, you can get I could go get one tomorrow. I could go get one tomorrow. The computer at Canada Computers in Canada, they're pretty widely mailed, like in ninety seventy XT. It's like. Gaming card. So I think this is maybe something that we could do to help our fellow gamers get off in videos dick man, go look around at other things. I stopped. It took me a while to realize. It took me. My face off this thing and figure out what I'm doing. It's a while to realize that ray tracing actually sucks, and it's arguably like one of the worst things for the gaming market. Like oh in general said that for a long time. If we just like fucking stopped like beating our meat collectively over, how many traced raids we can package and game so much more optimized. This is all because of ray tracy. I don't care about light. I don't I don't care about shadows. Give me fucking good resolution. Please, you're not begging you. It is nice sometimes even. Though he has an am D card, So what do you just give it up? You're too I'm getting an NMVDA next time. Are you? And you're going to cause the. Problem because I'm always going to hold up hope that AMD is going to come up with some kind of ray tracing. I'm going to go get a ninety seventy XT tomorrow and get rid of my thirty eighty just because that's because I get rid of you, John smash it. I'm gonna sell it on eBay for twice as much. Obviously you should. You should the thirty eighty. Is that what you said? Yeah, yeah, so I'll put it in PAMs. Yeah, that's that's that's the way it should be. But but don't don't give Nvidia money for a half assed card that they roll. The eighty was a very half You know, what I really wanted for me, I would really buy. I would buy from in Video. The only thing is a new uh shield, a new shield in Video Shield Pro. What's what's that? Oh? Yeah for like the Android box, like the streaming box. Oh okay, because I bought Apple TV's because my Pro is fucking old and the remote suppwork thing, and I was just like, I'm fucking done with this, so I bought Apple TV's. But if they come up with like an upgraded, new. One, nothing that would be sick. Well, they have the Apple TVs, from what I understand, is like the best streaming box you can get on the market right now? Is that? Is that still true? It is? The people still like push the Pro, the in Video Shield Pro from like twenty seventeen. It's it's that good like it is because it's the only box that can through pass through Adobie utmost on the Flex app. Really, yeah, it doesn't do it on it doesn't do it on Apple TV. It's only in Video Shield Pro. It's fucking eight years old now. It's too. And put it in. That's it. They're like, oh, that chip has a Doobie autmost passed through. Great. You know some some engineer made the right choice in that moment. Yes, right, And. Everyone else is like, fuck that, I'm not doing that. Who gives a ship about Albie utmost, you know, John, that's who. Can rightly exactly people care. All right, let's get back into it. Okay. So when I was when I do all these freaking electronic buyings and trying to get in to get something, you know, it's my biggest issue is I get it in my cart and I try to check out. That's the one Okay, I can always get in my cart, like. For the most fucking ships, the ship websites. And then yeah, and then there's like crashes and over again, are fucking kicks it out of my cart? Or like Chris said, they're only paying for a certain amount of what'd you call it per second? Like the access rate rate limiting, like there's only a certain rate limit on those websites, and they're not increased the provider for more for the launch of the switch to. Why why not they don't feel like, I mean, they should care because it bricks the whole website, because they're the. Whole fucking website. The whole website crash. If I want to go buy a vacuum cleaner and a fucking switched to on the day, like I need this on the day, I imagine it goes out you're not getting it. Imagine that it's an operational decision. I imagine it's an operational decision, and like the tech president has to go to the CEO and say, hey, look like we need this much of a budget for the launch of this product, and they're like, i'll give you half that and they're like, okay, I guess that's just fucking what. They need to do. And the website is down. Yeah, exactly. So that's that's the one that just drives me nuts. I'm like, oh, I got in my car, Oh, because I have this. I have the auto fill right, I've got my account settings, my PayPal, autoship address, everything's filled out. I just have to hit order yeah, right, I just have to click that button order now, and it goes through PayPal and it ships to my PayPal address. That's what it does, Okay, Chris, what's a normal rate limit? Like, what's an average rate limit you think for like a for a website. I mean, it depends on the API and how crazy it is, but it would be like many per second. It wouldn't be per minute, right, So, and the rate limiting is more about the back end services that the website is talking to. An aggregate, right, So you have all these people coming in and they're making all these back end calls and the e commerce site itself is under stress, and then him being in there and they're not separated in different parts. So it would be like dozens or even maybe one hundred requests per second is being allowed through or even larger Amazon would be thousands, right, So, I mean they are they could expand on it, but then there's like the the architectural limit of the site itself, maybe just the way that it is building to can't handle so much more. Who knows they should be, but they don't. Right like Amazon, it probably wouldn't be an issue like Amazon's not going down from traffic. I mean no, it can't best bias. Yeah, the source or radio. So send all the switch toes to Amazon. So are those are well? See that's a problem, right. Your infrastructure can handle this. Take all the fucking switch to pre orders please? Yeah, that might be illegal. That might be illegal. That's like I don't know what they call that, but it's like I don't think the government allows that market manipulation. Maybe you know what, never went to Amazon and not been able to buy something? That's true, you know that's true, But nobody. I don't think anybody ever launches anything on Amazon itself besides Amazon, like if they're. Putting out a new like maybe Amazon, which is interesting with an Amazon switched to. They have those? I have those the watch too? What they have those? Nate They're called the retroid Pocket fives come from China. Yeahs all the time. What do you mean Ali Express? You sell it on Ali Express? Then Americans wouldn't buy it because there's like two hundred percent tariffs on it, So there you go. Yeah. So, like my question is, so when we talk about I feel like the big thing is is that people aren't going to soores and I think that the consumer base for the electronic products these days, like it's so large now physically stores cannot hold enough inventory to accommodate everyone, Like even people in my city, every single person in my city if they wanted to like go to best Buy or GameStop to buy the Nintendo. So those stores would not be able to manage that population. I can only imagine, right they just. Down our best Buy. It's not freaking best by Express. Ye, walk in check out. You have to go to the airport to go to best Buy now. But my. Question is, though, is that like when we think about like the end goal for the end goals for these businesses should be, if correct regulatory you know laws were in place, is that to deliver the product to the end user, not to the resellers, but to the end user. And like my thought is that like a way to validate the end user. Besides, like what we talked about with the Nintendo system counting hours and like putting people in a registration base and like setting it up ahead of time. Like what if they were like companies like Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft were able to like partner with people like Apple and say, oh, hey, like if you want this product, We're going to put an app on your phone and then you can do all the stuff that you need to there. Like, do you think is that even feasible for them to like work with somebody like Apple, who has the most phones or just like the most the most common phones that are on the market today to say, hey, like this is let's put this process in place to validate the end users and then then you can buy it from this very specific app on your phone and it's like just an individualized sequence or just an instance on the purchaser's like mobile device, and that's how you get it that way. It's not just like one website that everybody's going to in buying simultaneously. Like is that even possible? Serving it? Right? Like that app isn't isn't a monolith on that person's phone. It's talking to something. It's a client, right something right? YEA server is a server. How you access it might be like limited, that's I think that equates to the limited release or limited quantities or invite only. I mean that, Yeah, it would be the same kind of as only Like if you can get an email, it should be that should be no difference. Yeah, if you get an email saying you were invited like a like a beta invite, same kind of thing, like here is you click on this link. This is your link. You click on it and it will give you But how what what U? But again, like I said, invite only, it's for existing customers. There's no new there's no new player base or customer base being created by invite only stuff, Howard because they don't want that. Yeah, they want new users. Yeah. So that my my idea was when a big ticket item is gaining hype, then the retailer can send out specialized advice like we're talking about here or on their website. The customer can opt in to be notified about the release of these things. But once once you opt in, your account is checked against like transaction history. So like if you have an account and you're like, oh, I opt into that and it checks your history, it's like, oh, he buys vacuum cleaners. He bought a filter for an air purefire. Right, He's obviously not a bot, yeah right? Or then it's like, oh, do you check your credit cards? His name is Nathan Copoli, lives at whatever, right what? And then you can put the address out there the names. Flash it on the screen. But like, I'm sure there's ways to check if this person exists in the world pretty quickly, am I? Am I crazy to think that you want to vet. The existence of people and whether or not they're real. Detection is what you're saying, he's bought detection. The answer, first of all, that's nothing that we can do. The segment was what can we do as people? Right, and we said, get off in videos cock and stop buying their products. If that's what it is, I said, I said, if we had the power to tell people to do something as well, like retailers and ship do this. Well, it's all retailer controls on the on API, that's all it is. Yeah. And then like I'd say history, it's about history. Bots don't have history, right, Human beings have history. We have purchase history of credit card numbers. If to use an account for the bought though, so they will have an account. And even if it's like oh you want yeah, because then when you make a new account, you have no history. Right. You need someone to vouch for you, like here, check out my Amazon purchases. Am I real enough for you? Mister detector? Have you purchased last since then? The last vibrator and uh loube and uh. What this is a blade Runner interview. Yeah, that's right, let's check their pupil dilation for look at the camera. Yeah. I think. I think the bottom line is that these companies they want to push units, They just want they want to sell product, and they don't care at the end of the day, as long as they're not breaking any laws, and then you're not going to be held liable for any for the way that they're selling it. And I think that's where, honestly, if we're going to see change, it has to come from regulatory measures. And we won't we just we straight up we won't see change unless we make a big enough stink to our local congressman. Like every single time we failed to get a product launch, we call up our representatives and be like, what the fuck I didn't give my switch to You need to do something, Do something, Virginia Fox. We'll be like, move to China e communists, Like you want us to take care of the purchasing ability, that's you're barking up the wrong tree. Right yeah, yeah over here. Yeah, whoever has money buys those products. That's how the West World goes round really. The West world. I mean we could learn how to uh, if you were inclined, I'm sure you could create something with AI, an API accessor you know. So yeah. My next question was, in your opinion, would it be better? Would be the better way forward to stop scalp? How how could we stop scolpers with the technologies, like the AI technologies we have, Like you could go in, you know, get the AI to like Jonathan said, read your read your view source on the web page, Like there's a lot of power in AI where we can learn how to find out what these bots are doing and then possibly I don't know. Yeah yeah, so you I mean, can emulate them. I don't know if you can, you can't stop them? Yeah yeah. I think the people who can stop them is the owner of the site, the retailer. They can spots. If we give bots to everybody. I think we have to attack the We need. To all of the e commerce sites on release days, right because that's what happens anyway. So we pool our resources and we just crash all the web. What if you I mean, if you get what if exactly like before launch, we know the day that it's going to launch, on. So even before it happens, we just crash the websites and like we just go fuck their servers over entirely. That way, they can't start running again until like three days later. I feel like that's fair. You have to go coming in that way. You have to know that cyberpunk isn't that far off, right, Like companies are going to start, I mean start, they'll they attack each other, Nation states attack each other all the time, infrastructure like power, infrastructure, it infrastructure, anything that's digital, and companies are doing that too. And eventually the people are going to do it to companies because they want stuff, right, Like I could hack those vending machines and cyberpunk take some you know eddies out of there, no big deal, right. Yeah, yeah, whatever bit. And I don't know like as this, you know, we as as individuals are going to live inside these environments and you know, and I don't know, maybe it is to fight them. There is no fight, Like what are you gonna do crash a site and go to jail? So my I mean, here's here's my here's my take. Boys. So if we just pull our resources and we just go to Stellar ai O and we just say hey, please, can we have a license and then the four of us share a license amongst each other. No, yeah, but we do, car Oh, that's a great idea. Join we give for m s r P. We resell for M s r P. Okay, we use the bot. Okay, Robin Hood, Yeah, Robin Robin Hood rob from the rich to. Make a break, like slightly less rich people that can afford two thousand dollars video cards come on. So what we'll do is we'll start a game chat gamers only. I'll start a new chat in our discord where people can donate to the elder trolls bought. The elder bot, older older AI except and uh what money? Uh mae, where's where's my bought license? So, like my question is is that for okay to even I know we're we're wrapping up the episode here now, but like I do want to ask, like how proficient in Linux and like Selenium in Python do I have to be to even run or understand something like a Stellar AIO or a cyber AOI because I know nothing nothing. No, it's a gooey fucking app. So you literally just pop it open like you would an Adobe product, and it just does it for you? Yep, that's crazy. Yep, it's a you just have to win either the auction or pay whatever the seller is asking. Like you can probably go to the auction to get it for two hundred three hundred bucks and then go back and forth like eBay, right, and then you get the license after you fight some guy back and forth. Or you can biotic. Something open source that does this. So like, but yes, what I was gonna ask, like, how hard would it be to write about, like, is are these like really complex products like pieces. Of if you want to make money off something like this that this is a common problem with any kind of software development. It takes time to make good software and it takes smart people. So you build good software with good ux and all that stuff, and you could like like take something together, but a real product is hard and open source maybe, but open source community is like about sharing, not about sharing the ability to fuck over your fellow man, right, Like that's a different thing, you know, that's like the exploit community, right of the security research community. So I don't think there is a like there used to be for poker. Like these database analysis tools, right, you could go and buy hand histories from people like ten million, twenty million hands and then feed it into the tool that'll like read all their usernames and stuff and then hide it up. There's no open source for that. What are you going to get all this private information? Like it's like a sub world, right like underground. Like guy said. So we get on a tour browser and we go to the black market and we just try we make it an offer. They can't refuse, you know what I mean, how that works. They offer you something you can that's probably that's probably where. You could probably quick and dirty something with the with chat TPT. You think, so AI not to make a to buy something from a website. Probably rely, I'm sure you could probably tell it to. Make make a transaction, feed it the source and the like the info that happened. You can record it like you can record like just screen recorded. TCB, dump it like if you traffic, you need to dump your traffic. Make sure you can decrypt it, and then just look at what the ins and outs of it. Where what was the response? What was this right you feed it to the AI said this was me buying something at this time, so it kind of knows what it's looking at and say I want to create a software that does this passes the website, so I can do this like with command line. Interesting, maybe I don't know, maybe get something. You gotta try it, John, you gotta try it and then come back to us. Claude AI is very expensive, Nikola. Is it? What about deep seek? It's more expensive than Chaga. Way better. Oh yeah, it's so sick. Would use it work all day? So fucking good. Yeah, it's so good. Anyway, we got to wrap this up. Final thoughts and call to action. What if we learned today? I call the retailers to action. Yeah, call the retailers to action, because uh, they don't give a flying fuck. It's all you're gonna all their money gets into their pockets one way or the other. They don't give a shit about us. The only way it needs to be legally buying legally. I call on Trump to make another executive action. Yeah those do lot. Get that fucking sharpie out. Yeah, sign one here for us. Okay. Anyway, Like, all I can say is as long as as long as it's not illegal, all right, they have no constantquence or they're not going to be not doing it if it's not illegal. And it's not illegal to make money, not yet. Not yet, yeah, not yet, depending on how you do it. Yea, but yeah, what's your final take, guys, real quick snakes. I think I agree with you. I think the only way to fight scalping is to learn to be patient and not buy, and not by those guys they need to dry out. The problem is there's always gonna be somebody weak that's gonna go pay, which means go back to step one, learn to be patient, and just like I, don't do something else, go for a walk to the. Nick Lai You, I would say, yeah, exactly just what we've already said. You know, we gotta we gotta engage the retailers. We gotta make it clear to these companies that if they want like continued profits and unprecedented profits over time, that they need to actually sell to their consumer base and not resellers. And in order for that to like make sense, you also have to do everything simptaneous. You have to not buy, you have to drive the scalpers, do all that. I honestly, you know, Trump is a good idea. I think you do. Just harass your fucking local congressman, your local representatives, Like I'm talking call them every week. I do that. I didn't get a fifty seventy t I launched. What the fuck is wrong? What are you doing over there? That's it, that's what you gotta do. So, yeah, that's that's what I'm gonna enact our democratic powers. Yeah, that's it. I agree. I agree. It's the only way that it's gonna happen is bi legally obligating retailers to do it. And the only way to do that is to contact your local MP MP, Member of Parliament, Congress Parliament. Okay, yeah, that's right. Yeah, there you go. That's right. All right, Thanks Nick. We're gonna look forward to that Packs East episode coming out. When that's coming out. Working on it. It should be it should be this Friday. Perfect, all right, Stay tuned for that Snake Factory pleasure. As always. That's it for this week's episode. We want to thank everyone for taking the time to listen, in or watch. Please be sure to like, a subscribe on YouTube and give us a rating and review on Spotify or Apple if you could. It helps us get out there to more listeners who may enjoy the show. Also, we are now part of the super Pod Network and network of podcasts you can find, brows and check out over on superpodntwork dot com. Remember you can always leave us a DM on Blue Sky. 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