 Oh, you want to hurry up? Hurry up? Yeah. All right. I have two minutes. I'll be right back. I won't take it. We will now time how long it takes Scott Johnson to run to the restroom. Live on video, ladies and gentlemen, for the first time, oh yeah, we're going to talk about Pebble. W Scott has won. It's already submitting titles for the show. The Pebble ran out of time, but I don't know if it ran out. It stopped making them. So therefore it ran out. But I like it. It's good. Yeah. We have quite a rollicking discussion led by S. Snapear in our analysts' slack today about Pebble and its problems. I just popped into the slack and I see Michael Keper. I think it sucks big time and I thought he was making another pung about Pebble. Talking about something entirely different, it was in the spoilers channel. Keper is making a Chrome extension that replaces Ibit with Rabbit. He's a full-stack web developer. Oh, he's the guy actually, now I connected it. It's Matt. I talked to him yesterday. He's working on a side project and he needs some people to test out some features. So if you're in the analysts' slack, respond to Mr. Coker. Scott Johnson and Brian Rabbit, it was an accidental spelling in our slack. So he has made an extension that replaces Ibit with Rabbit. This is great. Testing grounds afoot in the DTS slack. They didn't even buy Pebble for the brand. They bought it for the developers. Developers are happy about that, I guess. They get to keep a job. Yes. All right. So we are waiting for Scott Johnson coming back. Look at that. Less than two minutes. We're at Olympian. A run-up there. Had to pee. Had to flush it. Well, it's good. Everything come out all right, I guess. A warm-me-out run-up upstairs. Yeah. You need to put it in a bathroom downstairs, I think. I want to. I told Kim I wanted to look like a prison toilet. So we have, like, Jades granced out on the wall. No seat. Yeah. Like a fade-down-a-wave poster up a little hole. Shawshank. I totally want to, but she's like, I don't know. I can't understand. I would imagine that maybe she would say that she was not as enthusiastic about that as you are. Weird, right? Yeah. All right. You ready? I am so ready. Here we go. Quality content thrives for the support of those who benefit from its creation. If you gain value from the Daily Tech News Show, consider joining others like me who provide support. Learn how to help at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, December 7th, 2016. I'm Tom Marry, joined by Scott Johnson in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America Planet Earth Virgo Supercluster. Whoa. I didn't know we were going that far. Yeah. Maybe as far as we can go until we're into the unknown. Into the black. As always, I love Wednesdays. Wednesdays are my days. Here I am to make my mark plant my flag and to let the world know that I too love technology. I have made it a personal mission to try to get you to understand Bitcoin, which by the way, this is not a diss on Scott. It's hard for people to understand. But I feel like what gets in the way of your understanding of Bitcoin is the idea of fake money. Right? Wait a minute. Who gets to decide this is money? And why do we take it? You can just come up with anything and make it money, and that's a whole separate conversation. So today, I want to narrow it because this isn't even just about Bitcoin anymore. And I want to try, Scott, with your permission to try to explain the blockchain. Right. Because you've been hearing about that, right? And we're talking about the nuts and bolts of why Bitcoin works. That will give me a way better foundation of understanding than my previous attempts, which were usually just me going, how can you just make up money? By the way, the biggest lesson I learned from this is you at the end of most of those conversations remind me that all money is made up money. Yeah. When I realized that, I am both depressed and forlorn, but also it makes sense. I'm like, oh, all right. I guess you're right. So that is just the matter of where are we putting value. So I kind of get that. But I'm excited to learn. The other thing is what matters here. The blockchain has a more substantive base of understanding, I think, and it applies to more than just Bitcoin. And I think it's going to be used in more things than just Bitcoin. So we'll do our best. It's going to be ultra simplistic. Those of you who actually really understand the blockchain are probably going to be taking potshots at us because we're going to try to keep it real basic. But that's coming up. First we got some news for you, though. In competition for Microsoft and Facebook, Slack announced deeper integration with Google Cloud, including support for Google's team drives, document previews, permissioning, and more. Scott, this is a big deal for Slack. It's a huge deal for Slack. It's also interesting because it says to me that Google has an interest in Slack in terms of integration, but does not have an interest in looking at what Slack is doing and saying, you know, we can do that. So unlike Microsoft, who's trying to do Skype for Business, which is essentially an entirely new project, and others, there are among others who are all trying to do Slack competitors now, to see Google say, well, we already have some pretty rad stuff, and it makes Slack better, and Slack is pretty good, and this is probably mutually beneficial. I think that's awesome. I love that. So integrate. Microsoft announced its next build conference will take place in Seattle, May 10th through the 12th. Just a note for anybody who's interested in that. Niantic announced that new Pokemon are coming Monday, December 12th, plus Sprint is turning 10,500 of its locations into Poke stops. Are you still playing Pokemon? Go. No, but I might. If there's, you know, I don't know. Whenever something new happens, I like to take it out, brush it off, see what's up, and I'll do that again. Apple announced it now has 20 million paid subscribers to Apple Music. That's up 15% for three months ago, and it's about half the Spotify subscriber number. Yeah, they're working their way slowly. I really like Apple Music, I'm a big fan of it, and I think they have real potential with that thing. If there's anything holding them back, it's that they're Apple and half of the mobile world either doesn't like them or doesn't want to use them. So Spotify is everywhere because everyone can have it. Now here are some more top stories. And this is the biggest one of the day. Pebble CEO Eric Mijikowski posted that Fitbit has, in fact, acquired Pebble. And not only that, but Pebble's going to shut down cease manufacturing products. Many of its employees will join Fitbit's wearable software teams. Most of them, it sounds like. Existing Pebble devices will continue to work. The warranty support has been withdrawn and APIs and SDKs will continue to operate, but cloud services are going to be phased out. They're going to try to hand it over to the community. It sounds like they'll try to get some open source project to take it over and keep it running for the existing users. The Pebble too has been canceled and Kickstarter backers who have not received a reward will get a full refund. I want to say on the one hand, I believe Pebble is doing it right. On the other hand, I get why a lot of people are very disappointed, even upset about this. Yeah. I mean, we broached this a bit on TMS this morning in your tech segment, and I think it bears repeating, Pebble is this really interesting point of light in wearables, and certainly in the smartwatch field. It kind of came out of nowhere, took the world by storm, still sits atop some of the best performing Kickstarter projects in the history of the platform, and really ignited a portion of the market that nobody really knew anyone wanted. You very quickly saw both Android Wear and you saw Apple with their watch initiative kind of jump on board and take the limelight, but they deserve so much credit for beginning all of that. What happens when something like that happens? You have a lot of loyalty from a lot of people that were there on the ground floor, and to see this thing that they supported and enjoyed and loved for all this time gets sort of chewed up and spit out by another entity in their minds is kind of sad. I'm sad about it and I don't have a Pebble. Don't really have a fit there right now either, although that may have changed today, but they, you know, this is a sad day for fans of the Pebble. And since we get so tribal about our technology, I think it has to be acknowledged that there was a healthy, happy, maybe smaller by comparison tribe of Pebble loyalists who now don't have their, you know, they don't have their hero anymore. Yeah. And I think that's why you're seeing the reaction because the most loyal and, I don't want to say fanatical, but the most excited people about Pebble were the ones who backed the Kickstarter. And when you back a Kickstarter, even if they give you your money back, if you don't get the thing that you were so excited to back and try to make happen, you get angry. And in our analyst slack, a lot of it was saying, why didn't Pebble forecast their costs better? Why didn't they charge the right amount? Why didn't they make a successful product run? And then the only thing I could think of in response, you know, and this is me just trying to think, okay, well, why did they? I'm sure it's not because they're evil or that they're all stupid. So in between those two, what is the real reason? My guess is they, most people look at Kickstarter as a way to get a product off the ground, but hope that others will buy it after it's launched, right? So the Pebble isn't, we're going to use Kickstarter to make the entire product run. The Pebble is we're going to use Kickstarter to get preorders. And then hopefully that will generate enough buzz and enough people will want this thing that it will sell at retail and we'll make all our money there. And it sounds like that didn't happen in a large enough amount. And so Pebble ran into financial difficulties. And then the other side of it is, why is Fitbit not want to keep it around? Well, wearables is not a for sure profitable enterprise. We've been talking about that for the past week. Go to Thursday's show with Justin and Robert Young. We really get into that. And so Fitbit looks at it and says, you know, the smart watches is not where it's at. We would like to have your intellectual property. We would like to have your software. And we would like to have your developer's expertise, but we don't want to try to make the smart watch successful. Even if maybe there is a way to do that, we just, we just don't think that is, uh, is something we want to sink some money in. So we're, we're just going to cut our losses. Yeah. There's an instinct for some to see this and go, well, this is just a competitor buying up their competition so that they don't have competition anymore. I absolutely don't think it's that simple. I think it's just the way you described it and they get just those benefits out of it. Um, a weird twist of fate though, just to kind of throw this out there anecdotally, I haven't really looked in a Fitbit since they did the old clip on ones. Yeah, I watched it a couple of times. They were really cool about sending me a replacement. Um, they were pretty awesome that way. But I saw a good experience with the company, but yeah, those things weren't really working for me. And the long come, you know, the Nike band and along come smart watches and all this stuff starts to happen. I haven't really looked at Fitbit in a while. So talking to you today about this story and knowing that Fitbit seems to be, this seems to be a very forward thinking move on their part. One that takes a bit of investment to sort of buy it out, but have a clear idea of what to do with that property made me curious. So I went and ordered a new Fitbit because I want to try these new bands out and I'll let everybody know next week what I think. Well, and they're as angry as many of the pebble faithful are, this may actually cause a lot of people to pay attention and say, Oh, what is Fitbit doing that they would want all this stuff for? Tindex makes a very apt point here. He says pebbles business practices starting from the beginning were odd. They got the pebbles in best buys before fulfilling all the Kickstarter orders. That is something that Oculus had to be very careful about communicating around. I just got an Ember coffee thermos that's supposed to keep everything at exactly the right temperature after it appeared in Starbucks, even though I back their Kickstarter. And I think that bears out this idea that these companies are planning to make most of their money at retail. The Kickstarter just gets them off the ground. And so they're not going to sacrifice that retail outlet if they can. And that's why you saw things like it is not unique to pebble showing up at retail before the Kickstarter backers all get their stuff. Well, it's especially true of electronics on Kickstarter. Literally the name of that service is Kickstarter. You're a kickstarting a product and they take that stuff literally if you strike a deal with Best Buy and they say, Well, we needed in by then and you're thinking, Well, shoot, that's going to put us back on how we get our our backers fulfilled. Really kind of hard to blame them from a financial point of view. And they're not Apple. They're not Google. They can't make this a lost leader division where it's just a small thing they do. And even if it loses money in the short term, they can make up for it with the rest of their business. This is something that would take a ton of investment in time. So we've seen this happen with the Ooya. We saw this happen now with pebble. Big successes on Kickstarter can't quite figure out how to claw into the market and make a big enough splash to survive and end up having to sell themselves off to somebody else. It's kind of the story that keeps happening with these guys. Yeah. Sony says, speaking of a big company with a lot of money and a lot of lost leading, Sony says it's working on 11 mobile titles with the aim of releasing up to six smartphone games in the next year. Geez, I wonder if there was somebody on DTNS last Wednesday that brought up this idea and was wondering where Sony was among all this, all this mobile movement. Anyway, among the titles are Hot Chots Golf. Great series. Parappa the Rapper, which is also a great game, and Ark the Lad. These may sound familiar to any long time Sony players all the way back to PS1. Sony also announced Project Field. It's a cutting board sized device that allows real world objects with embedded chips to be used with smartphones and tablets. Kind of an AR solution to sort of car games and interactive stuff. The OK Watch is the first title announced for the system and no release date or price was announced. Separately, Sony announced it now has sold more than 50 million PlayStation 4 consoles and it last announced sales of 40 million in May. So that is a pretty big growth period from May till now. Real quick on the mobile thing, I had just said it in passing last week, you know, with Nintendo getting into mobile in a fairly major way with an original title, among other projects, some of which they're in charge of and others are not like Pokemon Go. That seemed like just riding on the wall and why isn't Sony following suits, especially given their weaker position in the market of mobile gaming and boom, a week later, here we have it. And I'm not surprised by this. I just I'm a little surprised how long it took them to get on board. But it sounds like that stuff's coming. And that's all good. Hot Shots Golf, one of my favorite golf games of the day. So I'm just I mean, do you think it's a problem that they're using these older titles? I understand that Nintendo can get away with that because they have Mario. So even if it's an older version of Mario, nobody cares. It's Mario, you know, if you can get a link on there, everybody's going to be like, ooh, Zelda stuff. This is great. I don't know that Sony has quite the following for Parappa the Rapper. Maybe it should, but I just don't think it does compared to that. Yeah, you're not wrong about actually any of these titles. These are these are all games that, you know, none of these are ones you're jumping out and going, oh, the top 100 video games of all time. These three are surely on the list. I know that's a relative thing or, you know, subjective thing. But Parappa the Rapper probably got chosen for two reasons. One that's getting a huge facelift for PS4. So that thing's getting a redo anyway. Secondly, perfect for touch screen devices. The gameplay in that game is literally keep up with the beat and tap when you need to tap on the right thing. It's literally like a touch screen game. It always was how we use controllers for that, who the heck knows. But now finally it can be unleashed onto the proper format. Hot Shots Golf, you can do a golf game with a touch screen like that. It feels like that's what they're going for. So it is still the low hanging fruit for sure. Yeah, it's more probably like, Hey, we've got the rights to this IP. Let's make some good touch screen games and figure out which stuff we have the rights to that we can use as that as the story lining character. And if it goes well, and I think it will, if it goes well, well, then they can make decisions. They can say, All right, how about a new original ratchet and clink game for mobile? How about it? Whatever. One of their bigger IPs do something with the Uncharted series or something. They have all of those options, certainly. And it's funny, as we say this, I just realized there is an Uncharted game. It was a puzzle game that came out a couple of years ago, and I'd forgotten all about it. And that is not necessarily a straight up Sony IP, but they have a contract to only have it on Sony devices. So it's as close as you get to a Sony IP pretty much as you can. So I forgot about that. And I even forgot what it's called Uncharted, some something. But yeah, like this is this could mark a new era for them, certainly in the wake of the Vita not being really a player anymore. It'd be nice to see them do something on mobile where they can, you know, make some money and do well. T-Mobile announced digits, a service similar to AT&T's number sync, or probably more familiar to a lot of you guys, Google Voice, let you use one phone number across multiple devices. It can also use a number to ring multiple people and let you manage multiple numbers on one device, including temporary numbers. So if you don't want to give someone your actual number, you can give them a temporary number through this service. A beta version has launched for postpaid T-Mobile USA account holders. It works on Android 5.0 and up, iOS 9 and up, and desktop versions of Chrome and Firefox. It does not work with Apple's iMessage. So T-Mobile advises its beta testers to turn iMessage off. You got to use one or the other. T-Mobile built its own IP Multimedia subsystem, so it bypasses SIM and they believe it could potentially work on any device. It doesn't matter. It can even be used on a phone from another carrier if T-Mobile has an account relationship with them. So this, if you have a T-Mobile account on one phone and an AT&T on another, you can use it on both because T-Mobile has a relationship with AT&T. This is not a new thing, but it's all about the features and marketing and eventually the price. It's free for beta. We don't know how much it's going to be a month once they start charging. Yeah, I'm a little bummed out about the iMessage integration. That would be nice. I'm sure that that's a, that's not a T-Mobile thing. That's an Apple thing. Maybe that, maybe that can loosen up down the road or something because the idea of this kind of ubiquity across platforms is the goal, right? Well, I had the same reaction to the iMessage stuff, but then when you think about it, if, if, if Digit, and this is a big if, if Digit's works, you don't need iMessage. It's a good point. Because it will do the same thing. How will I draw a stupid smiley face insanity, though? How will I do that? Yeah, you won't, you won't be able to send me a Cookie Monster sticker. That's all. Well, okay, not yet. Anyway, maybe Digit's will maybe digits will have its own stickers. AAPI and you can develop for it and it's more open source. Well, then I'm all for it. I mean, I'm talking to more and more friends via WhatsApp and things like that. Anyway, yeah, it's this isn't too crazy or two off the wall. It's just always kind of a bummer to hear that. Oh, well, Apple's not on board with this or maybe Apple doesn't even know about this. I don't know. But well, it's not, I don't know that this is anything to do with Apple being on board or not being on board. I think it's technology. Apple has its own technology for translating your SMS messages into iMessage and back again. And T-Mobile now has their own technology for doing that. It's not surprising to me that those two technologies don't naturally work together. It would probably take a lot of work to make them work together. And since they replicate functionality, you probably just need to use one or the other. Yeah, well, get on it, everybody. Nostralis may have heard of it before. Is that a weird word? Well, it sure is. It's a it's if it rings a bell, it's because it says old version of World of Warcraft that you can play. And it was kind of tricky how you found it and you even knew about it. But the game on those servers ran old versions of World of Warcraft. But Blizzard said, yo, you can't do that. Cease operations. We will legally bombard you if you do this. But they're also pretty open to talking to those who are running Nostralis and talking about what that that service was for people and why they wanted to have it. And maybe what Blizzard could do as an answer to that was a lot of stuff up in the air. And they were very willing to do that. They paid and flew these people in from all over the world, had them all meet up there at Blizzard to, you know, not much fanfare, but in closed door meetings, they sat with the CEO of Blizzard and others in attendance and talked about what they wanted to do. Well, Blizzard to then met with them and said they promised to work out an official alternative that's still not come to light, nor has it become anything truly official. Nostralis seemed positive about it, but then heard nothing from Blizzard after June they claim. So the folks behind the servers have decided to get behind a new unofficial server called Elysium, which will now run version 1.12 and will feature Matt Damon. Just kidding. Of Warcraft, Nostralis has decided to release its source code that's allows other people to run older, the older version of the software as well. Elysium says it's ready to launch publicly December 19th will allow accounts from Nostralis servers to be revived. What that's election day. What this probably yeah, what this probably means is a fresh rumors and conversation about Blizzard whipping out the lawyers and going after these guys because they really don't want them to do this independently. On the other hand, there are plenty of grievances these guys have about wanting to play old versions of the game, which has opened up a whole philosophical conversation about about archival game content that was part of an existing service that's still running that nobody's really talked about before at this level. And of course, the biggest game on the market in that area would be the one to talk about it around. I don't know how this is all going to turn out. I really dislike from my own opinion standpoint, I come from a bit of a bias position on Blizzard stuff, but I don't love how the community handled this originally. And I really liked how Blizzard handle it initially, but then I don't like so much how they went quiet a little bit later and how these guys are being feeling like they've been forced to do something without their without their blessing again. So it's just by the way Nostralis isn't being you know, bitchy about this in their statement. They said, we're doing this because we've waited this long and we haven't heard anything from Blizzard. And so we want the community to be able to move forward. I'm going to try to find their actual words here. And they they basically said, we want to do this until such time as Blizzard figures out what they want to do. They're not saying we don't want to work with Blizzard, they're just kind of tired of waiting. Yeah, it's still they're still on very dubious legal ground regardless of how you interpret any of this. I actually would think it'd be really cool if Blizzard figured out a way to have official servers that ran old versions of the software and people could play those. I don't think it's really in the cards. I don't think it's really going to happen from an official standpoint. But I totally get where these guys are coming from and why they want it. There's still just so much legal precedence as to why they shouldn't be able to do it. So I don't know, this is now a PR thing. Well, should Blizzard go after them? Should they sue them? Yeah, this is not a legal issue. This this is definitely not on. Blizzard has the legal right to say, Hey, that's our intellectual property. We own that we get to decide who gets to use it and in what ways. This is a question of how should Blizzard allow people to use their intellectual property? This doesn't threaten Blizzard's bottom line in any way at this point. If anything, it only gets people more excited about World of Warcraft and maybe likely to play the the official game more. And I think, I think we have a priority mismatch, right? Because when Nistralius met with Blizzard, they said, Hey, it turns out these guys are as excited about, you know, being able to play vanilla servers as we are. We get it. Not everybody wants that because it's very grindy. And there's a reason that Blizzard changed the game over the years because most people prefer the game they're putting out. But some of us just really like this old version and we want the right to be able to play that. And Blizzard seemed like you said to be taking that and saying, OK, we want to work with you. We have the right to bludgeon you. We don't want to bludgeon you. Let's figure this out. The problem is they then started to go laser focused as they said on their latest expansion. They started to launch Overwatch League. They lost some personnel. And when you're a big company, suddenly this small group of people that wants to play an old version of your game falls down the priority list and you need a consensus and momentum in a company like that to make something like this happen. So I don't get that Blizzard doesn't want it to happen. I just don't think Blizzard has considers it a priority enough to make it happen. And that's why when this first came out a long time ago, I said, you just need to put it under some kind of Creative Commons license. Just put it out there under under an amenable license that's preexisting. Don't overthink it legally, you know, and just let it keep all your rights and let people do what they want with it for now. And I know that might cause problems with perceptions and support and things like that. But it would be a better situation than having someone go entirely rogue with it. I completely agree. I think that is actually the only answer here. If I'm if I'm to if I'm to pick what comes up, if it isn't a lawsuit or it isn't full on Blizzard running old servers, which means they have to have basically double the support, double the maybe not double, but double they everything to sort of manage to two of these very disparate versions of the game. The only real solution is something in the middle there. It's a PR nightmare. If they go after them, it's already kind of a nightmare, to be honest, the community tends to get really fired up about stuff like this, even if they never intend to play on that server. They think there's some justice to be done here. So they have that to fight. And I agree with you 100 percent. You really you really illustrated it well. They don't have time for this. And what I mean is they have not made time for it. I'm not sure they want to make time for it. That's a lot of resources. I mean, dude, putting three executives in a room talking to these guys about their server for more than three hours that day was a big commitment of money. You don't think of it that way. It's not like it costs direct cash, but it costs money to have these very high position executives sit around talking about, you know, vanilla servers and how we should run them. So I just don't think Blizzard, not that they don't care. That sounds callous. They just don't have the bandwidth for it. And or don't want to make them with. And there's probably one person who doesn't want to make it easy legally. Often legal teams have people who want to help communities and others who don't give a rat's ass about communities because they're not on the community team. They're on the legal team, right? And they just want to protect legal rights at all costs. So I bet that that plays into a real quick, a good gold or a good example to follow might be what id software did with doom. They released the original doom source code and the original quake source code to the community after a certain amount of time about the same amount of time actually that we're talking about. And they've done people done really cool stuff with that has zero impact on the sales of the new doom game or what they may do with quake in the future. I think Blizzard might do well to consider that. The Shanghai Consumer Council released a report on Friday detailing battery fires in eight iPhone six handsets. And Apple has investigated and on Wednesday announced that they believe the fires were caused by external physical damage. In other words, the cases were damaged and the battery was damaged and that caused the fire. The Shanghai Consumer Council also detailed reports of iPhone six battery issues from devices outside the recall range. This is a different problem with batteries losing power. This is something Apple has said. Yes, we found a problem. It was with batteries made in this particular time period. Well, now it turns out that that time period that they announced back on November 28th, 20th is larger than what they first thought that Apple posted on its Chinese support page that a small number of customers outside of the affected range have also reported unexpected shutdowns and battery power loss. So they're investigating that as well. So physical damage could be a drop could be smacked in the door. Oh, yeah. Anything like that's things like that. Yeah, for me, it's playing Deus Ex go. That's the physical damage that causes my battery to get really hot. I don't know why that gameplay so hot. Just putting it out there. Hot game. And also, please don't have any more of these things because I do not want to not have my phone on planes. I feel so bad every time I see. Yeah, this is exactly the same thing Samsung said after the first round of recalls like, oh, these these fires are being caused by physical damage. So it does make our human brains want to see a pattern goal. Apple's doing the same thing. The fact of the matter is these were happening before Samsung ever recalled the note seven. And they were often because of physical damage. So fingers crossed, that's really what's happening this time. I hope so. I really don't want to go to that kiosk and turn my phoneme before I get on my flight. Finally, Google announced its upcoming Chrome for Android will come with the ability to download music videos and web pages for you guessed it offline viewing. It's the hot new thing. Get online to get offline. Users can also share downloads from within Chrome. It also highlights misspelled words and text fields. So it'll be like you're using it for reels on while you're online. It'll all seem very active and cool, but all offline. This is this is awesome. This right behind the the wake left by Netflix last week with their decision to do that as well with their content. And I think more is coming. People like this idea of being unconnected and having their content and not using their bandwidth. I honestly think it has to do with more developing countries getting a larger base of users on mobile and on mobile. You don't have great connections all the time, even in the developed countries. So you have more need for offline access, especially if you're in a situation where you're paying a lot for the data you get. So even if you have good connectivity, you might not want to afford to stream things all the time. So well, even even you and I we have situations where we have fine connectivity, but we have data caps that are cost prohibitive. It's nice to be able to use your home internet to get a bunch of stuff there and take it packing with you or you're on a flight and you just need to be able to work on this stuff while you're there and not worry about it. That seems like a very valuable thing to a lot of people in very different situations. Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at daily technewshow.reddit.com. All right. Payments company Circle has stopped letting its customers buy and sell Bitcoin because it says it has failed to become a meaningful part of its business. They look at it as kind of speculative or fun. And they're not into that. They're into payments. Instead, Circle has launched Spark, an open source way of using the blockchain to exchange other money in digital wallets. Meanwhile, the R3 blockchain we've talked about them on Daily Tech headlines and right here on Daily Tech News Show launched Corda, an open source blockchain based platform to record, manage and automate legal agreements between business partners. And I know anybody who's followed this show has noticed blockchain coming up more and more. I'm going to try to explain it, Scott. Oh, man. Let's let's start with the simple version. Do you have any what is your understanding of what the blockchain is? All right. So my limited understanding of the blockchain is it is a a mechanism by which things can be verified as being a real thing. So it's not bad. That's not that is that is very that is not wrong, actually, it leaves out some important details, but nothing you've said is wrong in that as far as I understand it. All right. All right. So the way we let's let's stick with money because I think money is the easiest one to wrap your head around and it can apply to things like contracts and things later. If I want to send you a dollar right now, even through PayPal. Well, if I'm sending within PayPal, it's not this way. But let's say, you know, you need to pull a dollar out of your bank account and send it to me. A central clearing house has to validate that transfer. So it makes sure like, OK, Tom has a dollar. He's not pretending he has a dollar. That is exact. That is Scott Johnson's account that this dollar is going to. It's not somebody intercepting the dollar. We're going to validate that. We're going to log that transaction. So if anybody needs to check and make sure that it happened, we can know it happened. But that third party can be corrupted. Somebody could could start, you know, get they could get hacked. It can cause problems, plus even more so than that. It takes three days. If you've ever added or removed money from a PayPal account, it takes three days. The reason it takes three days to do a transaction like that is this third party clearing house. And that clearing house charges a fee. So forget any other fees that are involved. There's another cost to doing that way. The blockchain changes that. If I want to send a dollar to you, Scott, a transaction is published on the network that says Tom send it a dollar to Scott. And we want to add that to the blockchain. All right. And then you have all these nodes, which are essentially the computers added to the network. Now in Bitcoin, anybody can be a node. But you'll hear about these consortiums in these financial tech places doing their own what's called permissioned networks, which means they control the nodes. They decide what does. But it's just computers that are looking at this on the network and saying, OK, let's validate this transaction. We all have a copy of a ledger of all the transactions on the network. So if Tom doesn't have a dollar in his account, I can tell that by looking at this ledger. And if and if Scott isn't actually Scott or there isn't any Scott, I can tell that by looking at this ledger. So there are two things that has to happen. One is validate that transaction. And then the other is create an encryption key that binds it to the previous transaction. This is all making sense so far. It is so far. Yeah. I mean, what you just said, though, what's that? Because one of the big holdouts on this stuff for me, at least my grasp of it, has always been, especially with Bitcoin. Well, if everyone controls it, then nobody controls it. You know what I mean? Like this feeling of I'm a big open source guy. I love the idea that everybody is working on stuff and then we're all freely just making software about like a bunch of hippies. But occasionally something like this with deals with money, which deals with people's livelihoods, which deals with their ability to survive and so on. It kind of freaks me out to think that well, just any computer can be a Bitcoin node or any computer can be part of the blockchain. And and and that's that just immediately gives me just a little bit of pause, like, whoa, well, then who's control? Who's watching the watchers? Like, is that whole thing? Like, how do I know any of this is legit when I when it's everyone can be a thing and no one can be a thing? And so the encryption part seems key to this. Well, the encryption part is really not as key as you think it is. The key isn't so much like locking the encryption, keeping someone from changing things. The key says we are making sure that this transaction follows the previous one. So let's say the previous transaction was Tom got $10 into his account, right? That's a real simple one that you can check and look in the ledger like, oh, Tom had $10 put in his account. So he can give a dollar to Scott because he's got 10 there and he'll have nine after that. You go through it's much more complicated than that, obviously, but it goes through and it calculates all of that ledger information. It's software. It does it fast and it says, all right, we're going to link this so that it can't be removed. You're going to make sure that there's a key that connects this transaction to that. So you can't easily change it and go, oh, no, this transaction happened before that. So now Tom owes us money. No. And the other reason you can't do that is you have multiple nodes. So each block is not just recorded in one place. Multiple users on the system copy the block and software checks the blocks against others to ensure they're right. If one block is changed by Scott, let's say you're what your worry happens. And Scott, you go in and say, haha, I'm going to change this dollar that Tom's given me to five dollars on my ledger. A thousand other users will look at that and go, no, that that block's corrupted. That's not what we have. We have one dollar and it gets kicked out. What if me and eight other friends that are nodes all collude and do it? Does that change? OK, not eight other friends because you've got thousands of nodes, right? You have you have way more nodes than that. But that is a concern with Bitcoin because the validation is conducted by miners. And one of the concerns is if the miners go above 50 percent, like if everybody gets all the mining resources above 50 percent, they could control the network and it would become centralized. But that that's the issue. As long as you keep it uncentralized, then you don't have that intro. That if you if you get enough people to collude, then yes, suddenly you have a centralized system de facto. And that is a weakness to it. So there's lots of arguments in the Bitcoin community about how to make sure that you don't get all of those resources centralized with permissioned systems like they want to use for things like contracts and and Big Jim is talking about import and export. You you have you have an organization running the entire network. And so they basically say we're not going to let anybody in here to run a node. We make sure that the people running the node are trustworthy. And we still it's mostly in numbers. You make it very difficult for someone to run enough nodes to be able to change that system. Well, plus, I mean, and I and I even knew it when I said it, but the entire point of the technologies surrounding the creation of Bitcoin and how blockchains work and all of that, the entire idea is decentralization. So me colluding to a point of greater than 50 percent control. Would probably a would probably never get to that point and be if it ever did. I mean, the entire thing exists as an antithesis to control. So so that makes sense to me that that there's not the security is by diversity, not by control. And that's that's a really unique idea when it comes to money. And that's the only reason I think it throws people. I know that's why it throws me because it's just it's about money. It's about goods and its services and and it and applying my brain to it being transacted, verified and and linked and chained in this way. It's just such a new bit of thinking, even though I guess banks have done this exact thing or the results of the same. It's just been controlled by the banks or the banking system. Well, yeah. And this is and you're like, what if we what if we get eight people to collude? It's like those eight people will all be invalidated. Right. If you got eight people in a central clearinghouse to collude, you could do some damage. Yeah. Right. So first of all, getting eight people to collude is more difficult than it sounds, especially if they get caught. And you also have you make it way harder because you need way more than eight people. In fact, you don't need people. You need resources. You need to own nodes. So so you need to either flood the thing with nodes, which means you have to own a lot of machines. It's it's just very difficult. It's not impossible. And Bitcoin has had some fears that they were getting close to it happening. But it's a it's a trick to pull off. And and if you are controlling the network more, it makes it even more difficult. Now, if you're controlling the network, obviously the organization that controls the network is the weak point there. But it's still way faster because you don't have a central clearinghouse. Everything just happens in software and it happens distributed and automatically. And it doesn't cost because you don't have someone running a server in a central area saying, OK, I am going to process this now. And you owe me $49 for that. You have everyone who wants to participate in the system adding nodes to it, which makes it better and faster for everyone. And and so they don't mind contributing the low cost of running those nodes because it pays off in the end. All right. So that all makes sense to me and it makes makes perfect sense. If one of the one of the factors in here always and I'm probably wrong in this assumption, but it it's a very, you know, everybody on the dark web is using Bitcoin. Everybody in places that are a little sneaky and dark on the internet, they're using Bitcoin for transactions. It is the currency used to hold people's computers hostage when they run some sort of encryption thing, lock your computer down and say, well, we're going to, you know, we're basically kidnapping your data unless you pay us $500 in Bitcoin or whatever. So it has that kind of reputation. My my feeling has always been, well, that's because it's just not regulated in a way that traditional banking is if eight people collude in a company and a banking system, they are committing federal crimes and will be, you know, justly dealt with if they're caught. If somebody does this in the blockchain or in Bitcoin or something like that is are the are the stakes the same? And so couldn't couldn't somebody as big as an ISP who would suddenly be able to seize 50 percent because they happen to be the ISP through which all these nodes have to communicate through. Could they do some sort of hostile takeover of control and not be held in any sort of account? That sounds extreme, but you don't know what I'm saying. I think you're answering your own question because the efforts that you would have to go to to do that were are going to be so noticeable that that people are going to going to step up and say, well, hold on. You are violating several antitrust laws by doing that you're violating money laundering laws for doing that. And it's it's not about Bitcoin. Again, you're you're conflating Bitcoin and blockchain in your objection because you're saying Bitcoin is used to ransom people. The only reason Bitcoin is used to ransom people is that's a less traceable way because it doesn't go through a central server right now. But that doesn't mean blockchain has to work that way. Blockchain is a public ledger and blockchain can say, OK, we're going to have a blockchain that's run by R3, which means we know who runs the nodes. So if anyone did something weird on our blockchain, we'd know exactly who did it. The the issue with Bitcoin is it's so decentralized and open that somebody can anonymously run a node and create an account on it. But that's a Bitcoin issue, not a blockchain issue. Yeah. And the Bitcoin, there's obviously plenty of conversation can happen around why that's an issue on the Bitcoin side. On on the blockchain side, I totally get it. This could be this like it's like BitTorrent in a weird way. It's like BitTorrent can be used to download some illegal movies or that really rad technology is used in tons of ways. I won't even know about because it's already doing great things on the Internet is just working for us. So I totally get that. But what is then what is to stop like Wells Fargo or the World Bank or anyone else with a big organized, you know, system of validation that they currently have in place? Why why not? Why won't they move to this? Or maybe they are in will. They are. They want to that, you know, the R3 consortium is having some people leave it because folks are like, I don't really like the way it's run. That's good. That's what you want to happen is you want to have some conflict around how it's run so that you get a really good running blockchain for whatever it is you're developing it for. So yeah, Wells Wells Fargo is investigating this city is invest everybody's investigating it. They want to make sure they've got it right before they switch from a system. They all know how it runs to something new because as soon as they switch to the blockchain, all of us are going to go, hey, this didn't work. And it's because you didn't properly prepare. So right now we're in that system of them saying, OK, we know theoretically this is going to work. How do we make it work in practice? Is it is a is there any worry that this is a profit center for them these fees? The the way that it's it's the opposite. It gets you know, if I if anyone's against this, it's the clearing houses because suddenly they don't get to charge. It's it's going to be a profit center because it will reduce costs for companies. And yeah, they might not pass all those savings along to you because they're banks and that's what they do. But it should still bring down costs for everybody. OK, all right. Well, I think I feel like I know more about it than I did before. Yeah. If your goal today was to give Scott some enlightenment in the ways of the blockchain, I feel like it's happened. It's super fascinating to me that what may end up I mean, as you spoke, it hit me that one day you could see a future in 50 years where the impact of the Internet can truly be studied because we've had enough time to think about everything that's come and gone. This sounds like the kind of thing if widely adopted could be the most impactful thing the Internet ever did because it involves money and money involves everyday life and every way in every corner of the world. And we didn't even get to that. It doesn't just involve money. It involves the supply chain. So IBM uses the example of diamond mining. When you when you mine a diamond, you want to know, OK, this is the right diamond and it was mined here and it went through these hands. And we have a certification of the clarity and the color and the cut that goes along with this diamond and who's had it and and and all the way through the supply chain from end to end. And the blockchain can do that too because that ledger that says, oh, Tom sent a dollar to Scott can say this diamond with this cut clarity and color from this mine went through these hands and the same thing can happen when nobody can go and alter those records to embezzle some diamonds. Could you be a node today if you wanted? Could you be a I am a note on the Bitcoin blockchain? Yeah, OK, I don't I don't run very often and I don't have enough CPUs to really gain any free bitcoins from mining. But yeah, I've got the entire block Bitcoin public ledger on my laptop. All right. I think I think that's the other thing is we we have to explain this in human terms of like so and so does this and then adds it to the letter ledger. And what we forget is this is all happening by software in nanoseconds. Yeah. And it's not taking up a lot of data. That's the difference. And it's also not replicable by humans. Humans can't do this level of whatever it is it's doing. So it's it's a really hard comparison. I I I take some comfort in in knowing that a lot of people are like me. So they scratch their head at this and and feel like everything they've ever known about money is a lie because this this seems like this crazy way advanced way of looking at it. We're just not used to. So maybe the long tail on this is education and people get the idea and figuring it out. Another Jay Martin in our chat room has a story about a farm in Provo, Utah, using blockchain. A farm. Yeah. Well, I got to look that up. Yeah. It's loading slowly for me. Merchant spotlight. The Linnae Fairmay, apparently, is using Bitcoin and blockchain. You can find it on blockchain.com. Throw it in the show notes as well. Please. All right. Real quickly before we get out of here, pick of the day from Josh M. Freeyourmusic.com is a place that makes it easy to move your playlists from one service to the other. He says it's an app that helps migrate your playlists from one service to the other called Stamp, but it's at freeyourmusic.com. It is a freemium app which lets you try for 10 songs per session and then charges about nine euros one time to unlock unlimited use. This has been a lifesaver for me as I jumped between services and finally landed on Google Play Music. Hope this is helpful to others. So if you've been thinking about music, moving from Apple Music to Spotify or back or to Google Music or whatever, you might want to check this out. Freeyourmusic.com. Wow, I haven't even heard of that. It's a great name too. Yeah, Lifehacker gave it a write-up as well. So thank you, Josh, for sending that along. Send your picks to us, folks. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can find more picks at dailytechnewshow.com slash picks. Longer episode today because we had to talk about the blockchain and we also had to talk about vanilla wow servers. But these things happen. Thank you, Scott Johnson, for joining us. What have you got going on? Well, mostly just bracing for the holidays, trying to get things caught up, finishing things out before the end of the year. Best way to follow me and all the things I have going on, frogpants.com has links to all of it and you can follow me on Twitter at Scott Johnson. And soon I'll be a node in the world of block chaining. You're our favorite node, Scott Johnson. Big thanks to all our patrons at patreon.com slash DTNS, including Joe Coucher, VJ Mennon, Tom Mango. Big thanks to Glenn Keeler, Rich from Lovely Cleveland, and Supergeek13579. They all raised their pledges, supporting more. We can't do it without you folks, dailytechnewshow.com slash support to find out all the different ways that you can support the show. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern at alphageekradio.com and diamondclub.tv and our website's dailytechnewshow.com. Tomorrow's guest host is Darren Kitchen, Justin Robert Young will be on Friday this week. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. I like that plane is the node on your face. That's pretty good. Yeah. I'm reading this interview with this farmer and it's fascinating. He was a computer science, study computer science at BYU and then decided to start this farm and decided to just apply the thinking he learned in his computer science degree to farming. It's fascinating, actually. That is a lesson in interdisciplinary study, right? Like when you become cognizant and knowledgeable about one topic and then go to a different one, you bring all kinds of different perspectives to it. I think that's important. I hate the number. I hate the top vote-getter is Tom explains Bitcoin to Scott again. I hate that one. That's not what I did. We talked blockchain. Blockchain for blockheads. That's not bad. It's worse. Yeah, but it doesn't target you. I like the poeticism of Hebel sinks, but its ripples remain. I don't know if that's the one. It's very poetic. Yeah. Blockchain is Minecraft for money. Wee. It's good. I don't know if it's apt. That's a Google Slack references. Let's see. This block is off the chain. I like block is off the chain. That's not bad. I like plain as the note on your face too. That's pretty good. That's probably my favorite. Plain as the note on your face is pretty good. Bitcoin miners get gold lung. I need a better batteries. That's so true. How about just the blockchain explained? I know it's blocked. Blockchain explained is a pretty good little phrase. I like it. Rolls off the tongue. Rolls right off your tongue. Well, thank you bio cow. Oh, where did that? I want to make sure I put that merchant spotlight in our show notes. You really feel like you have a better understanding of it? Totally I do. Oh, good. I didn't understand blockchains at all. I knew it was something about verification and making sure. But I thought it was so inexorably tied to Bitcoin that I couldn't see past that. Yeah. That's why I wanted to talk about it instead of Bitcoin because it gets rid of it. It's very fundamental. When you want to get into how it really works and the math behind it and how you determine who really gets to validate which node actually publishes first in the reward. Like on Bitcoin, you get to make Bitcoins by doing validation. But in a permissioned node, the node doesn't need motivation like that. So it works differently. But you can still understand it without getting into that level of everything. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I knew enough to be able to say to somebody if they said what's blockchain. It's just the way it verifies everything's on the level. And I could get away with it with certain people. But obviously, it's more to it than that. Oh, Shane, that is the biggest compliment you could have given us. He says, I now know it well enough to explain it to someone else. Yeah. That's exactly where you want to be. Yeah. That was our goal today. And then Scott playing the part of the person who's making sure that I'm explaining it right is incredibly important to me. Right. And those questions, the questions I asked, I tried to make meaningful ones. It wasn't just, dude, tell me about Bitcoin. It wasn't like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hopefully. No, totally not. And I feel like blockchain is a more important thing to understand than Bitcoin. Bitcoin in and of itself is an interesting phenomenon, but it's more of a social phenomenon. Blockchain is the technology here. And that can be applied to other things. If we shorted any part of this conversation, it was discussing how it can work for contracts or other kinds of transactional natures to have a record that is verified that everyone can trust. And it's, you know, I mean, notarization itself is just this concept of like, we need to bring in a third party so that everybody agrees, you know, that this happened and I witnessed the signing and all of that. Yeah. It's just such a, I don't know. It's like, to me, it reminds me of the self-driving car thing. It's so sensible and makes so much sense on paper and in data and everything else. But then you try to introduce it to a socially or politically reactive society and say, you know how we've done money for the last 200, 300 years? Well, look at this. Like it just seems like it's a hard sell. Well, Bitcoin is, but I don't think blockchain is a hard sell. It feels to me like the financial community is like, oh, yeah, if we can make that work, that sounds like a dream. Because nobody likes the system the way it works, but they couldn't imagine it working any other way. And this is the first time that people are looking at it saying, hey, that actually solves a lot of problems for us and saves us money. Once you start talking to bankers about saving money, you've gotten their interest. Yeah, you have their ear. I wish I'd asked this on the show, but I guess the post-show people get this. What's the threshold? How many nodes is enough? Is there a upper limit or a lower limit of? There's certainly no upper limit other than you can't have more than there are computers on Earth. I don't think there's a theoretical maximum to the networks. I'm sure there's arguments about what the minimum number of nodes you need is. And that's probably one of the things that is going on in these consortiums and these experiments is trying to figure out, okay, how many do we really need? What is the optimum number of nodes on a permissioned network? But it's easy. And I mean, once you get into the thousands, you're starting to talk about percentage, small percentage differences. So yeah, it's not difficult to achieve a really robust system. I imagine the discussions are more about what is optimum? What is spending too much because it really doesn't add any robustness to the system? And what's like, that's 98%, but tell you what, 99.9 is a lot better. Let's get to there. Well, it's funny because all these other questions pop up in my head. Like, well, if there is a lower limit, is it like bit torrent in that if only two or three people have the seed, it's kind of useless anyway. Yeah, but you never have that problem. So you'll always, okay, here's another hypothetical point. The only way you have that problem is if you're dealing with a blockchain that no one is interested in using. Okay. So if you and I, let's say in 10 years, this is just a hypothetical. In 10 years, it's all mobile computing, desktops are a thing of the past. We're done. The most desktop that we get is we plug a phone into a dock and it's powerful enough to do desktop things, but all of our, it's all mobile all the time. Sure. Are we running blockchain nodes on our mobile devices at that point? I mean, you don't need to. You never needed to. You don't need to run a node to use Bitcoin. Sure, but to sustain the numbers needed, whatever the, again, the lower limit is. Which are you talking about? You're talking about a financial system that is the clearinghouse for transactions. Then none of you with phones need to be nodes. Okay. That is totally unnecessary. Okay. The 15 banks that are involved in the consortium that runs that system, and probably it'll be hundreds of banks, will all provide a couple thousand instances of servers and it'll be totally fine. Okay. If you're talking about Bitcoin, which is an entirely different question, and like, hey, how do we make sure we have enough nodes running on Bitcoin? Then maybe the move to mobile causes an issue, but also really the problem with mobile right now is, are the CPUs powerful enough? Is the battery life good enough? And is the connectivity there? And in the future where you're trying to use some kind of blockchain based system with smartphone users, my guess is smartphones are going to get to the point where they'll have all of those things. They'll have better battery life, better CPUs, and better connectivity. All right. That makes sense. But that's honestly not, the major use cases for blockchain right now have nothing to do with making sure the average user on their smartphone has access to it. It's all about, hey, we've got, you know, 300 banks around the world who want to create this system of transferring money, and they'll each spin up a couple thousand servers out of their data centers that they already have to act as nodes for this. Interesting. Interesting. Well, hopefully what doesn't happen is you end up with a single bank saying, well, you know, we only need 100 machines or whatever it is, 100 servers. Yeah. But again, it's kind of an irrelevant thing because if that's the case, then the other consortium members are going to go fine. Then you're not part of the consortium anymore. You don't get the benefit of that by having all of that. Because the more numbers you have, the more... And it's really not worth, like, why would a bank do that? It doesn't save them enough money to make a difference. Yeah, that makes sense. And it's more costly for them to run the system the way it's running now. To have to have to pay a third party to do all these clearinghouse transactions. Yeah, that's what they're trying to get away from, right? Yeah. So, they're looking at it as like, you mean really all we have to do is have a thousand nodes running out of our data center? That cost is so much lower than paying the clearinghouse. Yeah. And knowing that you're part of a much larger, more verifiable standard system that isn't... Yeah, it's more resistant to attack. It's not entirely resistant to attack, but it's more resistant. What all those third parties do? New business model or what? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I don't think it's a situation where there is a company that is just third party clearinghouse. But yeah, the companies that do run the clearinghouses, you know, I don't know. I don't know enough about how clearinghouses work to accurately answer that. I don't know if that's just a consortium thing that they're like, ah, thankfully this will just be cheaper and we can get rid of it. Yeah. Yeah, that's hard to say. By the way, just an honorable mention to the title. Pebbles left with a Bam Bam. That's pretty funny from a... Bam Bam on the head. Yeah. Thanks, Web 7, 7, 8, 7, 9. Yeah. That was pretty good. Now, it'll be harder to have two sets of books with a public ledger, right? Yeah. That's true. You can't hide a set of books in the safe behind the bookcase with a blockchain. Oh, speaking of books, did your book ship yet? No, March 14th is when my book comes out. That's right. It's next... Well, I guess that's not that far off now, but... I keep thinking it was before Christmas for some reason. Shane says, is a node like DNS? Not really. There are some similarities. I get why he's asking that because the domain name system, you know, cascades down, right? It says, oh, we have the directory, the table of directories of what domains go where. But actually, the blockchain is a lot more resilient and redundant than the DNS. So a node on the DNS is more like a BitTorrent server. So would this sort of thing be as susceptible to, say, denial of service attacks? No, it would be less susceptible. And in fact, that's one of the big advantages of it. There was this attack against the payment transfer system that involved the New York Federal Reserve, a Filipino bank, and the Bangladeshi central bank that could not have happened. At least it couldn't have happened the way they attacked it. But they were able to fool the system into transferring money to a Filipino bank account that was then immediately withdrawn and closed, and they lost a bunch of money. This would have stopped that from happening because they would have seen that that transaction should not have happened. The blockchain would have caught it and said, well, wait a minute, that's not Scott. That dollar shouldn't go to Scott. And so, you know, it's more resistant to that kind of thing. Yeah. Wow. No, I have learned a lot. This was like maturation class in 7th grade, except... Is that a good thing? I don't know, maybe. Maybe. We're being weirded out. I don't feel weirded out now, so that's good. Oh, I remembered. You didn't have to remind me. So I have an idea for a podcast that you and I will never have time to do. Oh, yeah. But maybe. So I'm going to throw it out there just in case there ever is time. It's the opposite of Filmsack. Okay. We start going through the top movies of all time. And of course, we'd have to agree on which list to follow, but there's tons of lists out there. And we watch them and comment on them. But they're good movies. Like the best movies. And some of them are movies that like nobody's seen. Nobody... How many people watch Rashomon, right? Yeah. It's one of the top 10 movies of all time. Interesting. I actually like that. It's a little forecasty, too. It brings that back a little bit. I mean, not quite the same. No, not forecast. Sorry. Autopilot. Oh, yeah, yeah. I was like... Forecast? Yeah, my brain went to forecast for some reason. But no, absolutely. And we could do these as... I mean, you could just do it as a 10 episode series. It's not like this thing that would have to be this huge commitment forever. Well, yeah. I mean, it doesn't even... Because it's a list, I think this is part of what's attracting me to the idea and why I even bothered to bring it up. Because I think of these ideas all the time. I don't bring most of them up. But I think the idea is like, hey, you know, you could just... We could just get together and knock a few out. And part of me is like, maybe we just do real-time commentary, you know? Or maybe that's a Patreon thing where you get the real-time commentary if you're a patron and you just get the consolidated wrap-up for everybody else. But we get together. We watch these movies. We do the commentary. We do the summaries. And then we just... The next time we can get together and record some, we put more out. It's almost not even seasonal. It's just we're working our way through the list. Yeah, I kind of like that idea a lot. And I love the idea of... I mean, I've seen a lot of old movies that you would consider to be classics or whatever. But this isn't limited by what streaming. It's maybe just limited by just straight-up availability wherever we can get it. And there's a lot of old movies I've never seen. Like, I've never seen... What's the Rosebud movie? Oh, Citizen Kane. I've never seen Citizen Kane. Spoiler alert, geez. Or either of the Godfather movies. And I love mobster movies. Right? So there's a whole list of stuff that was probably on that list. Rotten Tomatoes. The list I was looking at when I was thinking about this last night was the Rotten Tomatoes list. They have a list where they weighted things with the tomatoes. So it's not just all 100% tomato movies. They also weighted against when it was released and all this sort of thing. Inside Out is on that list, by the way. Is it really? Yeah. Oh, wow. I love Inside Out. That's a really good movie, yeah. Yeah, I think that probably ought to be there. But that's interesting. It looks like above Rashomon. Best films of all time list on IMDB, I think. But I sometimes look at, let's see. Is that still there? Oh, no. That one had some manipulation done against it a while back. So I wasn't sure if it was back to being reliable or... You know what I'm thinking of is the American film Institute list. Oh, that's a good one. That's a good one. Still speaking of Citizen Kane has that at number one. So their top 10 is Citizen Kane, Casa Blanca, The Godfather Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Wizard of Oz, Graduate on the Waterfront, Schindler's List and Seeing in the Rain. A lot old. That's pretty, yeah. That's pretty leaning old. Very leaning. In fact, this whole hundred list, if you ask me, is leaning pretty old. Yeah. That's why I liked the Rotten Tomatoes List when I was poking around, because it had a mix. It was in all old movies. Oh, by the way, this is as of 1998. Oh, well, that explains a lot right there. Schindler's List was only a few years old at that point. What are they going to update this? Schindler's List? No, this list in general. No, the American Film Institute's List. Not Schindler's. Let's see. Updated 10th anniversary edition. Oh, maybe they have... Oh, they've got Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, Raging Bull in that one. Yeah, Raging Bull's a good one. I'm trying to find something that's newer than... Oh, Shane suggests Roger Ebert's List. That's another good one. The 10-year anniversary. Although that one will not be updated. Oh, yeah. That's true. Yeah. Well, maybe somebody might do it in his stead. Yeah, but we could come up with something and maybe from those come up with a list of 10 that seem to share spots on each list or, you know... Here, I'm going to... You're in chat, right? I'm not in chat at the moment. Oh, okay. I'll put it in Slack. Here's that Rotten Tomatoes list. Yes, my wife works at Rotten Tomatoes. She does. They don't want a fan day going. I like this one because it's a little more varied than some of the other lists. Like, ET is number 10. Oh, yeah, here we go. Sure. So, it's not necessarily... It's definitely not highest tomato rating, obviously, because Wizard of Oz has 99, third man has 100, but it's below it. So, you're waiting... Your theory about them waiting it makes sense. Yeah, they say the adjusted score comes from a weighted formula that we use that accounts for variation in the number of reviews per movie. Leviathan? Oh. Not Leviathan Wakes. No, I saw Leviathan. I thought they meant the crappy early 90s, like Jurassic Park ripoff. I see Kroll on there. Like, that can't be on here. Yeah, like Kroll or something. Yeah, there's a lot of good movies on here. Wizard of Oz, third man, Citizen Kane. Toy Story 3 is in front of Toy Story 2. Oh, wow. Yeah, people really like 3. Zootopia is up there. Is it? Wow. Metropolis. I've never seen Metropolis, the 27 silent movie thing. Never saw it. I've seen it. Good. Yeah. Yeah. Although parts of it feel, what's weird about Metropolis, and I watched it a long time ago, it felt cliche because so many movies have imitated it. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, oh, they're doing, that's totally C3PO, except, oh, wait a minute. C3PO was mimic. There's a lot of movies on here I really like. I loved Mud. That's number 81. Heller Highwater. I'm about to watch that. I rented it just to watch. Come Heller Highwater. You're going to watch that. Yeah, I'm watching that thing. Hell or Highwater. Doesn't matter. There's a lot of Westerns on here. This is good. So you could do this like, trying to think, if you did it as a series, you have the window open to do, all right, we're doing the top 10. Then we're going to do 10 through 20. Then we're going to do, I mean, you could do that. Yeah. Well, and they never, they never go bad. Yeah. They'll always be worth, you know, someone picking up. So even if you only have six out at some point, that's, that's six that everybody can, you know, new people can come along and still watch all six and enjoy them. There's a lot of high range. It's timeless. See. You see a rival. You saw a rival. I did. I liked it. Freaking loved it. I loved that. And then there was something else I saw. I really liked. What was it? I was trying to compile my best movies of the year. And I had a hard time doing it. Dr. strange. I liked that a lot. If I'm going to go order probably so far, our rivals at the top spot for me, at least for now. It's utopia. Oana is right up there. It's utopia up there. I got to, I got to put the two strings movie way up there. Freaking love that. What was that called to Kobe? Not Kobe. Tope. Was it called Kubo? Kubo. But Kubo and the two strings is amazing. Oh, I really liked that a lot. Back. That's probably number two tie. It's right around where, I mean, it's all animated movies this year. I don't have, there's no, I don't have a Mad Max Fury Road this year yet. Star Wars might be it. I don't know. Yeah. I'm going to have to go back through my, my ticket stubs. Do you keep them all? I do. I actually, we have a little place where we keep our keys. Yeah. And right next to it, I just throw my ticket stubs. And then at the end of the year, I kind of gather them all up. I, there's probably some sort of blockchain story we can tell about keeping track of your tickets. I mean, I use Fandango to buy all my tickets. And I just look at the history of, that's actually true. Before Eileen even worked there, I pretty much did. All right. I am published. The blockchain has been explained. Sweet. We're all enlightened. Roger will not be back tomorrow because the internet will be installed in time. But he should be back on Friday. See you later folks. Bye.