 Hey, John and Pete or either one of you guys Swifties, did you did you try and get tickets for Taylor Swift last week? No, okay. I Saw that it just wasn't gonna be possible unless I had 12 large burning a hole in my pocket. Is that all okay? Yeah, I I would go see Taylor Swift live I've heard she's an amazing performer and and I did try to sign up for the pre-sales, but But I didn't even get a I was I was wait listed for the pre-sale I'm sure That if if you are interested at all and probably even if you aren't interested at all in this you've heard all of the stories about how how that pre-sale went super sideways and You know that Ticketmaster and Taylor Swift and there's all that stuff going on and I say I'm sure you've heard all the stories We're not gonna retell those but I think there's probably one You didn't hear and I dug into this because as soon as I heard this story I was like wait a minute. What happened here The whole idea behind the Ticketmaster pre-sale and why you have to sign up for a code in advance and all that stuff and trust me I'm going somewhere nerdy with this to bear with me. I know it's a rabbit hole Sorry, but but we're going somewhere fun The whole idea is because they know that there's gonna be huge demand for this and They want to make sure that the you know the verified fans. That's what they call this the Ticketmaster verified fan pre-sale The verified fans are have a shot at getting tickets And the way this verified fan pre-sale thing works is you buy the tickets and then you have to be the one to use them It you know you whatever like you can be maybe you can buy four tickets You have you you know you have to be one of the people the person that with the credit card It has to be the one that shows up at the at the thing and then and then you can bring You know your three other people with you as as you might expect So You with that in mind and I go to a lot of concerts as many of you know And I'm well aware of how this system works and how it all is and I you know I like that part of the idea a Ticketmaster scammy and and and creepy and they have their own like Hidden secondary resale market, which they probably shouldn't be allowed to have but anyway, they do this which is great So you're saying you can't show up with 300 of your closest friends Yeah, yeah, right nor could I buy in in a normal verified fan pre-sale If I bought tickets, I couldn't even give all of them to you Pete I would have to join you and and attend or Somehow you would have to impersonate me enough to get yourself in the door now What a lot of scalpers scalpers will do is they will buy four tickets and resell three and Literally walk you into the venue and then once you're in they leave and walk the next three people for whom They bought tickets in right like this is a known practice And as long as their markup on it is enough to give them a profit after covering their cost of four tickets Even though they're only selling reselling three fine, right? And okay fine So that's the scalpers way around it all of this is important as background Because when I heard it was on ABC start here, they did a little dive into this which is great podcast Brad Malky's funny and does a good job And they said yeah the big problem the reason people were waiting hours and hours in this Verified fan presale which should have been a managed quantity Was because it wasn't just people it was bots getting through I was like wait a minute wait Wait, the whole idea behind the verified fan presale is that you get a code texted to your phone? Like it it prevents bots from getting through. What do you mean bots got through it? So I dug into it and sure enough like They generally they don't they know how many verified fans they have offered tickets to and That is or offered the opportunity to purchase to right it was just an important distinction they That is how they manage how many tickets are going to be sold through the verified fan presale and and and then they have a General on sale, which should be more tickets. So it's usually somewhere between 20 and maybe 40 percent of the tickets are reserved for the verified fan presale and then the rest are You know out there But they don't know a if those people that that have the verified fan are gonna buy and B They don't know how many tickets they cap them at four But they know that not everybody is gonna buy for and sometimes they cap them at eight Like what you know, whatever the limit for that on sale is but that's how they manage how many tickets are gonna be sold They don't reserve a fixed number of tickets for the verified fan presale And that's an important another important distinction because ABCs start here mentioned the bots and I'm like, okay Bots that's that that's the first little flag that went up for me and the second flag was they said yeah And now they can't do the on sale because 95 percent of all the tickets have already been sold through the presale and what happened was the the bot writers will call them the bot makers Had figured out how to bypass the verified fan presale So not only was it the verified fans trying to get in But it was people who did not even have verified fan codes that somehow had figured out how to get past the system And this comes as absolutely no surprise to us John you and I came up in a time Where people were vendors software vendors were using copy protection on software literally using writing different ways of Preventing people from copying The the bits of the software to another disk right you would get your software on a floppy disk And and they would prevent you from copying that disk even to make your own legitimate backup right that you might want to store at a friend's house That finally ended though Because it was just a game a cat and mouse right like the vendors would come up with a new way of doing things The the people that were breaking the copy protection would figure that out and it would just go back and forth On this one. I think what happened is that the bot makers Suckered Ticketmaster, I think they figured out a while back how to bypass the verified fan presale And I think they waited until they knew they had a Sure thing in terms of being able to sell for those prices like you mentioned Pete 12 grand I saw some for $90,000 right, but people are and I think if you rewind back a couple of months Bruce Springsteen tickets went on sale. There was a minor issue with the verified fan presale I think they used that as a test run This is all my tinfoil had rabbit hole theories here But like I think Ticketmaster got baited into thinking that this Game that they had won this game their brick wall was up an impender. That's right. And as soon as you think that You know, you're wrong. You should know you're wrong. Yeah, right I mean, doesn't this sound like the whole copy protection days John? Just the cat and mouse stuff. I don't know That's I think they figured out the algorithm to generate a useful code. Oh That's one way. I that is not what I thought but there's I mean, I don't know So yeah, that would make sense