 Ladies and gentlemen, it's December 28th, at least that's what we're going to pretend, is there a thing about this show? No. So Christmas is over. Yeah. Trump is gone. I don't know if that has happened. No. No. Alright, you guys ready? Here we go. This is The Daily Tech News Show for Wednesday, December 28th, 2016 on Tom Merritt. Joining me today, Roger Chang, our producer. How are you, Roger? I am good. Very good to have you along in this holiday week. Now, listen, we always do this every year. We make jokes about how we're pretending like it's the day. This is the farthest in advance we've ever... This is more than a month before December 28th that we're recording this. So, if you hear an anachronism during this show, where you're like, wait, did that all changed on December 5th? That would be why. But for the sake of you listening on December 28th, we'll do our best to pretend like it's the holiday week. But this is one of my favorite times of the year. We invite listeners from the show on to talk about what interests them about technology, what their experiences are with that, and we get some different insights into the world of technology that way. We've done this at Buzz Out Loud. We did it at Tech News Today, and I love continuing it. This year, we went to the analysts, the folks who support us on Patreon at the analyst level to find out what's up with them. We'll change it up from year to year. So, if you were somebody who was hoping to get a crack at it this year, there's always going to be people left out, apologies for that, but you'll probably have a chance again, so hang in there. This is also serving as our quarterly analysts call as well, where we talk about the state of the show. Roger, there's really not a whole lot going on right now except for holiday planning, scheduling our holiday week, et cetera. That's true. We're essentially at the point where we've already booked and finalized dates to record in the past for the future. Our prediction show, so starting next week, you will be entertained as you find all our contributors basically seeing how well they did and determining how their predictions for 2016. Wait, I think if I've got this right. Are we on the 28th? Starting tomorrow. Tomorrow, yes. You get the predictions results show. Yesterday was the underrated story show and the day before that was the best of show and then of course predictions on Friday. So that's the way that schedule rolls out. Oh man, it's hard. It's hard to look outside of time. The time lords do it quite well and they look rather snappy. Yeah, they make it look easy. Real quickly, the state of the show right now is good. And again, this is based on November. We definitely saw a dip in patronage. It wasn't something that really caused us to take a huge scare, but we've done a lot of things, if you didn't realize it, to sort of bolster what you get for supporting the show, especially if you support through Patreon. So we added a weekly tech update where I send a newsletter through Patreon that kind of summarizes some of the bigger stories of the day and then usually includes some kind of longer column by myself about a particular topic. That's exclusive to folks at the $5 a month level. We also added a monthly update that just says what's going on with the show. That's to anybody at the dollar level or above. We have a fun little hangout half hour show that we keep strictly to 30 minutes that goes once a month to the co-executive producers at the $10 level. And of course we've got the analysts slack for folks at the $20 level. So since we sort of tweaked those rewards, we've seen the Patreon stabilize and start to turn positive, which is good. And we also, as I've mentioned before, are supporting Peter Wells. He's continuing to do day six on Daily Tech News Show, but it's no longer a milestone. And the idea is that eventually he wants to take that and transition it into his own show, which I'm 100% supportive of. Roger, am I forgetting anything else as far as future plans? You also noticed one of the things is that we've had more guests in addition to our regular contributors and that's been a conscious effort to kind of ramp up the amount of third-person voices we have on the show in order to kind of give it a wider, not just appeal, but a vision of like the topics that we cover. And so it's, you know, to mix it up in a short phrase. So you've been probably, if you're watching the video, particularly wondering who those folks hovering around down at the bottom are, we'll introduce them and then talk to each one of them in turn. Starting from the right, Philip Shane, documentary filmmaker, is with us from New York. Thank you, Philip. My pleasure. Great to be here, Tom. Now, I said starting from the right, but farther to the right, and we're not talking politics. This is just the way it shows up on my screen. On the other side of Roger there is Russell Manthe, who runs the Office for IA, Interior Architects in Houston. How's it going, Russell? It's going great, Tom. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Thank you for joining us. Marcus A. Hart gets the BITS Traveling the Longest Award. He is a program manager and strategist for partners in a consulting company in Vienna, Austria. Hi, everybody. Welcome, Marcus. Good to have you. And last but certainly not least, Donald Keele. He's an infrastructure manager for an oil and gas company down Houston way as well. So Houston a little overrepresented on the panel today, Donald. But it's good to have you here. Thank you very much for having me. And let's start talking with Donald. He was the first to get on to the Hangout this morning, so he's most prepared, right? Yeah, we took our time, but yeah, we got there. So let's start by just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got interested in technology and why it interests you now. Oh, well, my aunt actually tells a story that I was taking apart radios and TVs when I was younger. So I've got it going on back then. And my family actually owned an oil and a software company. So I started working there, trying to pay for dates and all of those fun things. And I've just loved it ever since. I went to college and been doing it ever since. IT is what I do now. And it's amazing to see the technology evolve every year. Actually, sometimes every six months. And it's really quite something to behold. VR was something that I dreamed of when I was younger and now it's something that we can play with now. What's your favorite piece of technology that you play with every day? Probably my cell phone. I live and breathe off of it. I mean, sit on the couch. My kids come and steal it from me. My daughter grabs it from me and pretends to be talking on the phone with her grandma. And it's just amazing. It's kind of amazing how, and Roger, we've seen this with your daughter as well, how kids take to touchscreens so quickly. Yes. It's not, it's both amazing, but also a little worrisome for me because it's in some ways being so easy to use and so intuitive. You know, it's one of those things where, yeah, you know, those things are cool, but you don't want to play with it all the time. I want you to do other things like, you know, read a book and perhaps read. It's one of those things where we've made technology the barrier to entry so low. In some cases, it may not be as, at least as apparent, not as awesome as I would hope. Well, we've actually, with my five-year-old, taken away his iPad, only given him like 30 minutes, and we've dramatically seen his attitude improve because he seems like he gets sheltered into that iPad, and then you pull him out of it and you say, you've got to play with Legos, you've got to go outside. I don't want to see you back until the sun comes up or it's going down. We've actually seen a better improvement taking away some technology. Yeah, I totally, I noticed that. She gets, you know, there's some times where she just throws a tantrum and she wants it. It's like, I'll give it to you off and I won't turn it on, but you know, she'll play with it for 10 seconds and move on to something else, like her mega blocks are basically Lego clones, or like we'll take her to the park. You know, stuff that, you know, gets them outside and physical and not necessarily, you know, stooped in the position where they're just kind of looking at a little electronic screen all day. I'm curious to ask you, Dad, do you think it has something to do maybe with the apps? Like maybe they're, if there were different apps or different activities, like what if they were doing a drawing program or reading a book on the iPad or something? Does that change your attitude? Partially, my concern is that, and this is partly due to the fact that I wear prescription eyewear, is that I definitely at a younger age, I would like her eyes to be able to move from both a very close distance to a far distance. So, you know, you can't really get that if they're always indoors looking at the screen that's five inches away from their face. But they definitely do get that exercise, not just, you know, the rest of their body but their eyes and everything else when they're outside running, you know, around the playground or in a park. And also, you know, being around other kids because, you know, right now we only have one kid and my immediate area doesn't have any other children around. So, being at a playground does allow her to sort of, you know, kind of gain some social awareness. I was at Penn's house yesterday with Tom, those are Seraphina, used to be my associate producer at revision three. And she has twins and she picked up on a lot of things that they were doing, whether it was playing with puzzles or playing with their trains or moving around on one of their little parts that she wouldn't have, we tried to get her to do on her own or try to show her as a parent. She wouldn't take to, but now that she's seen someone else in her relative age group do that, then she wants to imitate it, which is good. Yeah. Donal, do you agree? Yeah. So, I mean, I definitely agree, but also when they get older, so my five-year-old and I have a 14-month-old and my five-year-old, I really see that he sticks to those, watching those YouTube videos of people doing video games and then he doesn't really want to go play Minecraft or we have a Lego world and he kind of wants to stay watching other people do it and he kind of gets lazy. So, when I take that stuff away, his creativity comes out and seems more and more. And I think if we, I think we're almost stealing our children's creativity by just giving them so much content. I remember, you know, in the car, we had to figure out what we wanted to do so we played games like I Spy and stuff like that or we just came up with it. Stop touching me. This is a game that my sister and I played quite a bit. Yeah. That game started to become a problem now for me, but, you know, I think that interaction we're missing some technology by giving them all of the stuff and them not being able to come up with their own creativity and play. And I think books, you know, we're a big driver for that and we're kind of missing the boat sometimes. At least I fear as a parent. We got a question from Big Jim in our analyst slack here, which I think I'll probably want everybody to touch on. What's the tech story that surprised you most in the last three months? Oh, in the last three months. Donna? Actually, one today, which was huge for me, Oracle buying DYN is going to be a big thing. That story last month was very surprising. But yeah, definitely has a big sense. That's right. Yeah, I know. Just because, you know, I'm on the enterprise space and so that could make some really big changes. I think a lot of the M&A activity this year has been the biggest story. A lot of changing of the players and the guards has been a big thing. Yeah, no. And in fact, on the day we're recording this, it's no joke. There is a semiconductor consolidation. There's the Oracle one that you're talking about. There's the Solar City Tesla consolidation. Like it's happening in a lot of different verticals. There's a lot of consolidation going on in tech. Anybody else want to weigh in on that before we move on? Oh, well, I just wanted to say that I think that the evolution of Microsoft, especially joining the Linux Foundation and all the other things that Sacha Nadella has done with that company, has been one of the more surprising and in a very good and pleasant way things for the last 12 months in tech. I mean, I think that it's made Microsoft definitely a better company in the public realm in terms of their perception in the market. And it's given a lot of tools to a lot of people who may not have otherwise got to use them. So I've been really like very pleasantly surprised by how that's gone. I would say the Samsung battery the vocal. I mean, that came out of left field because you expect, especially with a large conglomerate that outputs everything from rice cookers to HDTVs and, you know, smart phones that they would have enough of a kind of a control, management control on that stuff that stuff could have been seen ahead of the curve. And I think I think what astonished a lot of people is how poorly it was handled. Aside from the actual battery issue but like just kind of PR and disaster control on that whole thing it seemed a little ad hoc. They were just shifting from one position to another letting events control them instead of trying to control the events as they rolled out. I would say that could be a metaphor for the story I was thinking of which is the explosion of fake news and the discussion now. The explosion of awareness of fake news, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, that is interesting, right? I mean, I don't know that we I'm still a little skeptical on the actual power of it but it's interesting to see it discussed. And a much smaller story but one that I just found fascinating such a sign of the times was this moment where vice president elect Pence went to Broadway to see Hamilton and they, you know, there was booing and stuff like that but at the end of the show the cast called upon the people to take out their cameras and start broadcasting live from a Broadway theater which is kind of the lowest tech kind of energy And in a situation where you're often reprimanded definitely not to take photos or videos, right? Right, that's right, that's right and then, so there was that whole thing played out and then of course Trump, you know being the first president elect and then to be president to use social media, especially Twitter in the way he's been doing. I mean, that's just like enormous sea change. Yeah, no, social media you know, it's not like it's new and it's not like this is the first time it's played a part in national politics but it certainly was at the forefront in a way that it hadn't been in the past this year. Marcus, do you have a thought on this? I think, well I'm following of course the social media part but it's not that strong in Europe. For me it's actually much more interesting to see the combination between what's going on, what you're strongly reporting on in the developments in California in the western side of the US especially with car makers and then to see the difference in what's going on in Europe and how on the one hand I would say the big car makers are recovering now and trying to come up with solutions even beating what Elon Musk is showing or bringing up first but it's this struggle between a little bit between the US and Europe and the old car industry and the new car industry and how they're challenging each other so that's really the interesting part that I found this year, evolving a lot actually. Yeah, that's fascinating. And I would add Asia into that as well by doing self-driving cars and newtonomy in Singapore we see the European and American and Japanese car manufacturers all having to react to a bunch of new players who some want to help someone to harm or maybe not harm but want to compete with them. Yeah, exactly. It's interesting to see on the one hand you have really good foundation engineering that is trying to come up with similar solutions that some others are completely re-engineering for scratch and so this battle is from an engineering side. I found that very interesting and you're doing a good coverage of that so congrats. Thank you. Well, Marcus, let's stick with you for a moment tell us a little bit about yourself and what got you interested in technology? Actually, my parents had a computer company and so I grew up back in the 80s already with computers and I got to play actually with a lot of computers because Ah, and right when you talk about computers your internet connection starts to get crunchy on you. Okay, yeah. So you were saying back before computers you say what? No, I would say I remember back in the 80s there was this show Max Headroom and it had a lot of virtual real and for me this was really the future and where we're going and it's not because at the point we really have it all the odd thing Marcus and I'm sorry to interrupt you there but the odd thing is that your internet connection decided as you were talking about Max Headroom to force you into an unwitting impersonation of Max Headroom. Yeah, exactly. That's how it went. So yeah, I would say what got me into technology is really growing up with computers and I'm following up since ever since I lived in California for a couple of years and I really saw the inspiration and the agility that was there and I moved back to Europe and I see the difference in thinking but also in where we are over here and that's what keeps me driving also to find out what is possible and then probably bring lower developed areas also to this area that's a little bit what keeps me driving in technology there. Okay, ask what was your first computer? We had this old IBM it was like a suitcase with a handle on it and an orange screen and it had about 25 megabytes of RAM or storage at all I think and so that was the first one that we had actually in the company and I used that also for playing well basically. 25 megabytes ought to be enough for anyone, right? Yep. Well, we got a question from TV is my girlfriend kind of a follow up to Big Jim's actually and we'll start, Marcus I'd like you to start with the answer here what are you most surprised hasn't been a big tech story? Cool. Hmm. I really I to be honest and I don't want to I was actually thinking they took time to the next big products step and it's 7 in my hands but it's kind of the big actually there is not really a big moving forward in mobile technology at the moment as you would expect in terms of speed as it was in the previous years. So it's kind of the commodification of smartphones and tablets and that sort of thing. Exactly. Anyone else care to take a stab at the story you are surprised hasn't been bigger in technology? Well one I would say I think it's hard because it's a story that takes time to develop but I think that the impact that it's having on the way people write people communicate or you know we are starting to see the way is it fomenting revolution and stuff like that I think a more serious look at that not just sort of off the cuff like oh it seems to be doing this seems to be doing that I think that being able to look at the real impact would be possible but maybe it's a little too just a little too deep for the broad audience. You mean like a wider view of the potential impact because we obviously saw a lot about it with the Brexit a lot about it with the U.S. election but it's very focused on those events in those cases. Right. I mean if we look back to when electricity was invented or aerospace or something like that I mean enormous electricity more to the point enormous changes that we could look now and see a huge difference between pre-telephone and post-telephone maybe we're still too much in it but I feel like it's been going on now. It's surprising how long it's been going on right since before 94 at least the web and stuff like that. Hmm. I think for me it's probably net neutrality which gets covered extremely well on this show and I think the people who listen to this show are very well aware of it but given how big of an issue it is and how many people it affects it just doesn't it seems under reported in the popular process actually. It got a spike in popularity at the point that the FCC was voting on the new guidelines and it was not reported so much as a technology story as a political story at that point. I don't think people really understand how much it might cost them if net neutrality loses. I mean the end users might have to pay three or four different people to get their content they want. I don't know if they totally understand that. Yeah that's one aspect of it for sure and I have a feeling that the incoming administration may may not decide to change those guidelines. It's a matter of whether they want to fight the battle because once these rules are made which they are then you have to go through another notice for proposed rulemaking and debate the whole thing again but we may see that happen. Yeah and it just feels like it goes against the grain of what the internet was originally supposed to be and it just doesn't feel it just feels like it isn't right. Well that's one of the problems with covering it in the mainstream press is if you've been following technology for a long time there's sort of I don't know what the word is but there's this instinctive appreciation for the way the internet has worked and you want to make sure that that stays but then when you start to try to formalize that into rules like any time you try to formalize a custom into a law you start to realize what the limitations and the effects of that are. That's a good point. Donald and any other surprising stories that you thought should have been covered more or would have been covered more? I mean to me it's all the data breaches and the credit cards. We've had the largest data breaches in November being reported now and then Yahoo and all of that stuff and not not really resonating with people as well has been a big thing and I mean people's credit cards people's passwords, some people's lives I mean we had one where people actually committed suicide from them so those stories never really hit the general public I think was a huge thing a huge loss for them. I'm sure someone out there is reacting like what are you talking about Donald every day they're covering these stupid breaches and making a big but I think what you're saying is very true people don't people are getting tired of them they're getting used to them. It's a case of I would say a little so many that people kind of grow numb like they say oh it's another one and it's really hard to kind of treat each one as an individual case of a broader thing because this word has been used a lot since the campaign but normalized like the state of breaches has been normalized so it's kind of an expected thing and no one's really kind of like well why should this be such a regular occurrence why isn't there more pushback or at least more more safeguards put in place to ensure that you know what medical or financial information is kept secure in these institutions I think I think it should even go further I think at a certain point it should become actually human rights to have a right on your privacy and the problem I see is as you said people are used to it so much and you see bits and pieces but there's not really a lot you can do to prevent it and it's a lot depending on governments and on regulations and on the goodwill at the end of a company to invest in that or not and that's a big issue that I see there but instead of vesting on their goodwill sorry you could put laws in place to at least hold some of those people accountable to say you know if they don't at least follow whatever guidelines you know the government comes up that they can say you're going to go to jail or you're going to have your funds taken away or whatever there needs to be something at that level and I know it's a global issue and it's hard to work at because your data might be in China or it might be in Europe or it might be in the US or whatever but I think it's something that laws could be put in place that at least put penalties to those companies hmm and unfortunately that takes a certain amount of political will to do that I point the finger a little bit too at the media because it's a tough thing and Tom you would appreciate this I have a background in science communication before I sort of did more general stuff and technology is still the vast majority of tech journalism is the gee whiz gadget stuff and then the other side of it like the level you guys are talking about is already two three four levels too deep or just not presented in a way that the average person can grab it and also in the media there's an unfortunate leveling it's a little bit like normalizing but I think even worse than that there's not a distinction between a murder today and this policy problem and you know this hack there's an inability to understand the urgency of any of those things and that being the case then the leads it leads takes attention all right Russell let's shift over to you let folks know a little bit about what you're into and why you're into technology and that sort of thing well it's interesting I grew up I think it's just going to echo a lot my dad was very very big into building I guess Tom and some people you guys might know Heath Kits ever remember that I used to try to get my dad to buy me a Heath Kit and he's like you're not going to put it together I'm not wasting my money on that and my dad and I would do that together and he was more of a maker and a builder and he could repair nearly anything and I kind of grew up that way and always had sort of an interest in it because we would always he would always try and get that we had a VCR in like 1976 and because he would always try and keep that stuff and I've always really liked it and the architecture and design field technology is sort of exploded on us in the last 10 years and it's been really fun it's been really fun part has been that we've gotten into VR here at the firm and presenting to our clients in virtual reality which has been so much fun and such a game changer and I've always just kind of liked tech and I discovered you know you I think I might have listened to the last episode of Buzz Out Loud and I'm like what a good show oh and you know I've been following ever since and one thing I really like is that you can I'm not in technology I don't have a background and I have a green architecture but I really like it and what this show brings is knowledge that you don't need to be an expert you don't need to be an IT person and we have a lot of technology clients and what I really love about Daily Tech New Show is it gets me just fluent enough to be part of a good conversation with them so I really like it. Well I'm always heartened when I hear that and I'm very glad that that's the case because one of the things we want Daily Tech New Show to be is a thing that helps people be able to speak more with more intelligence and a little bit of smarts about technology without having to go get a degree to do it just keeping it at a date so I'll accept the flattery thank you Russell I'm a little past my due date degree so the other thing I've been doing which is really fun is and thank you to Jenny Josephson I guess if she's like what is she now on the date I think we're calling her senior advisor but yeah I'm supposed to meet with her in a couple of weeks actually so when we our office just started a podcast which I've been hosting and this a good recommendation from Jenny so she actually consulted with fun yeah so you're now a podcaster as well goodness gracious yes awesome and with a lot of good coaching from Jenny and Justin because boy it is a lot harder than it looks yeah I mean that's the beauty of podcasting is it's easy to get into especially for audio but it is it's easy to play difficult to master it's definitely something that you can get better at and figure out ways but to me the attraction is it focuses on the content as the way to get better once you're up to a certain level on the technology side the playing grounds fairly even yeah I know it's been great and I've even noticed that as I think we've recorded 30 episodes 25 or 30 at this point and it does get a little easier yeah so it 10,000 hours man once you get that in you're an expert oh my god I know I don't know if I'm going to get there but we're going to go college dry we got another question here from TV is my girlfriend in the slack wondering about how do we get technology into the hands of people who will benefit from it most but can't afford it and I'm not sure that that's something that we all have an answer to necessarily but it is something that I think about a lot does anybody have Russell I'll give you first crack at it if you want do anybody have any ideas on that I guess you know where I would see it is that it has to come in schools in an education and the problem with education in the U.S. and I'm sure in other countries is that it's generally underfunded and it's underfunded for the people who sort of need this the most there's always private institutions and private schools and all that but I think that there needs to be the political will to fund the technology and put this the tech in the hands of the students at a young age who shouldn't family situation whatever it happens to be just can't afford it because you're really disadvantaging them as citizens of the Internet in the future or whatever you want to call it if they're not fluent they're not they need to be competitive and that's what you need to be competitive I always thought that perhaps in kind of speaking to that is not just schools but libraries where you have because libraries serve not just children but they also serve adults who might not have been able to access a lot of those technologies you know in a way that you would have at least in San Francisco when the Internet became public the libraries all implemented basic PC terminals that people could use and surf the web on and I think if you could expand that into something where people would be able to borrow technology even for a short while and having a portable account whether it's a Gmail account or something that you could carry across devices would help in some way because a lot of that technology is expensive and if you can't afford some of the stuff typically it's an older model that might be useful but maybe not as relevant for for example you could always get like a flip phone if you need a cell phone but you won't give you an understanding of apps or how the mobile web works on a smart phone or anything like that I think the Chromebook has been a big really great thing a lot of people I know their kids all have Chromebooks or they get Chromebooks in school and they're relatively inexpensive they're not you know not cheap cheap but they're not as much as say a laptop or an iPad so I think those are great options I actually think this story ties into maybe some of the earlier stuff about big stories that we were talking about I think this is an enormous flood huge transformation in human society that is coming because as we see the mobile devices are getting cheaper things like Raspberry Pi's are getting more capable I think wearables also once they become commodified they're going to make a huge leap forward in in-expansiveness and accessibility from people of all kinds and what's amazing about tech at least in the communication level in terms of the web let's just say get up to the level of the web it's a very finite amount I mean you could get more and more powerful because you want to get Blu-ray quality movies or something like that but for the most part just to get to the level of like it's like getting plumbing you know you've got water now you're there you've got electricity now you're there as long as it's consistent and I think information is the next hookup and I would think in less than a decade I think we're going to see an extraordinary transformation I mean just in terms of movies I keep waiting for the next incredible movie or piece of journalism to come out of someone living in Sudan or someone living in Madagascar you know because we all have the same brains and frankly we all start all of us started in technology at the beginnings of our we were kids and any kid today picking up the same or even more capable stuff than we are they're going to do even as good if not better jobs than we did Tyson a little bit to what Marcus was saying earlier about you know the right to privacy the right to information is something that people discuss a lot and Marcus I'm curious you know in Europe there is a different approach to education there's different approach to the social welfare and the social safety net what's your perspective on how we get technology into the hands of those who can't afford it I think education is definitely an important part and I think a fair tax system that distributes also the money and follows that in and not just philanthropy or you know if the gates of the world start actually distributing I think funneling really a good amount of money into education and to help projects and helping also other countries especially in Africa or the next years to yeah or other third world countries to help really adapting to the technology at least at the lower parts to getting the devices to have access to and I think the internet or all discussed is a good with some perspective also or with with some problems of course but I think it's a good initiative in general to bring technology to these countries and I think the interesting thing is we see that over one generation or maybe two generations we make so big technology steps that actually a lot more people have access to knowledge that was before only available to a very small group and I think that's a very good move forward into the right direction yeah I wonder if it's even equivalent to like books like books whenever books were the printing press and then books were made cheap enough to spread think of it now books are still physical objects and no matter how relatively inexpensive they can be and they can be people all over the world nothing compares with the bang for the buck that you get from a connection to the internet I mean it's sort of the democratization of information I think right in a huge way yeah yeah but the biggest problem is like places like Africa, Papua New Guinea places I've been to for my job they don't even have roads they don't have electricity sometimes they're fighting for just the next meal or whatever and so it's giving them internet access or giving them a device how are they going to power that device are they going to be able to read that device I mean I remember someone thinking I was a medicine man because I gave someone Tylenol and so that you were literally the man with the medicine but yeah I know what you mean you know but the dynamic of what we think is technology and what they're struggling with isn't quite the same thing I actually agree with you because often times I mean it's not to say that these initiatives are bad or that they're ill intent but rather in certain situations you know the people who live in certain regions of the world what they actually need is better governance they need a government that is responsive that isn't corrupt and can at least shepherd a modicum of infrastructure whether it's road portable water electricity because those are the things that people need to deal with on a day to day situation it's not to say that you know technology takes the back seat it doesn't have to but often times all these things need to go hand in hand you can't do one without the other like you need all these all these need to be brought to brought to the fort at the same time and shepherd along at the same time it's not like civilization like the game civilization where you need to build like a pyramid structure first before you can have high rises there are ways that you can do that but at the same time you can't ignore the plight that these people need a means of employment they need a way to provide for their families a way to put a roof over the families heads and all the rest there are programs like I actually have some colleagues who work at a program that comes out of Princeton that going on 20 years now have been increasing the number of science education classes at the college level that they've built all over I think in 15 or 16 different countries in Africa and what they've been doing slowly and now that's been going on long enough that graduates have become the teachers and what they're building is mentors who know who have enough scientific knowledge or any kind of agricultural knowledge whatever it is to become a mentor in their village and they go there and they can start teaching the people there and that becomes a connection between the village which is totally disconnected from roads and communication and the city knowledge as well as the world there's just a one two hop and I think that they're when we say they don't have problems they have problems they don't have roads they don't have this and they don't have that they don't have good governance the people are going to do it themselves you know giving them the information in some cases if the technology can help them overcome the infrastructure problem in some cases it can't so it's identifying you know where those cases where having a relatively affordable feature phone and a money transfer service like M-Pesa solves a bunch of problems and frees us up to focus on the more essential problems like governance you know like security like the economy etc. TV as my girlfriend clarifies two he or she was more thinking along the lines of a nest thermostat for someone that savings could mean a week's worth of groceries over the course of a year so yes we all immediately go to the most needful examples but there's also the folks are like yeah you know I'd love to buy a nest thermostat but that's a couple hundred dollars I can't afford this month even though it could save me over the course of the year. I mean that could be one of those things that's implemented through the utility company like in the same way at least out here through PG&E they they offer stipends or rebates on energy saving technologies for example one of the things you're trying to do is encourage people to move to more water efficient appliances washing machines water heaters and so you will get a rebate or a discount on your bill if you purchase you know one of the listed products that they have and it could very well be something as straightforward as that. I mean again this actually goes back to the whole thing we were talking about earlier where it requires a level of political will and interest. I mean not just will but just interest like people actually think this is something worth pursuing not just kind of a scheme that a couple of college kids think is a real good idea but it doesn't work in the real world kind of thing and it's a lot of things like being able to, this is the one thing I really like that you don't really appreciate until you have kids is being able to like schedule doctors but also to check up on their check up like looking at their stats you can just go through online look at instead of waiting for a nurse or someone to fax you or mail you something you know there's that turnaround time and being able to do that it's like okay but we know this is the case and we don't have to worry about it I mean it means a lot to be able to do that especially when a kid's crying it's like oh that's what's wrong and being able to get that information in such a quick manner like even shooting questions to your doctor like just shoot an email or whatever system a hospital or medical group sets up you just like I email my doctors like oh is this something to worry about you know about six hours or usually about two hours they get a response which is great I mean typically you get a try to make a phone call you have to wait and then they'll get a nurse and then just try to figure out when the doctor is time to talk to you even though it's just a simple yes or no answer all right well let's turn finally to Philip Shane last but not least and Philip's been on the show before so so particularly Philip I'd like you to let folks know not just why you're interested in technology but you as a filmmaker have the entire breadth and depth of the human experience to document what what attracts you to technology among all of those topics it's such a deep connection that I really I'll just say without getting too corny about it I owe I want to say I owe my life to it although it's deeper than that even I owe everything I do all the meaning I get out of the world comes to creativity and the computers I mean I before we had computers you know I still was able to do stuff with audio tape and stuff like that and super 8 film but man it just completely changed everything to the point where now that I can starting in 2005 I started being able to work at home the fact that I can make shoot something edit something hit a button and it's available to the entire world with some advertising needs but it's there is unbelievable and still an earth shattering event every time I do it but I another good example just continuing on the cutting edge I have started filming my movies with my iPhone 6 plus 6s plus whatever the damn thing shoots 4k video so already twice the quality of what you're actually four times the quality or whatever of your most TV's that people have at home the sound on it is incredible anyway just I knew that when cameras came down to the size of DSLRs that was normal I grew up with a DSLR so that seemed you know awesome that it was so light and all that but like I never believed that the next phase would be just a slice of glass and the lightness of that allows us to have so many and put them so many places you're not the first person who's told me recently that they they either couldn't get or didn't need to get a camera because they had an iPhone on them in this case but you know it could be a Samsung Galaxy as well because the cameras are that good now I mean can obviously you're not going to use it for all situations but but can you really you really can rely on it now even with not having optical zoom or things like that yeah although that's come optical zoom and I have Zeiss now make some really beautiful lenses you can attach give me telephoto give me wide angle 7 now has 2 as a telephoto and a wide and you can zoom between them and that'll come that's just probably a year away that'll be totally solved it changed for me when I'm also an editor for 25 years and I'm working on a current film with a great cinematographer who shoots with a big old Sony and a red camera heavy heavy stuff that gets absolutely gorgeous pictures of course but the third or fourth time this happened I got some footage in I put it in I'm sort of looking at it and I knew that he wasn't available to shoot that day and I was like wow who'd you get to shoot this and the sound quality the picture quality and there was like a birthday scene or something he's like oh actually that was just some dad who wanted him to be at the birthday shot it on his iPhone built in stabilizer with the improved microphones I mean you're done it's a storage if there's still some hurdles to get over bigger storage will be nice so you don't need the blue brace packs anymore you don't even need DSLR you just have this little tiny nub on your phone that's right well I do carry I have a little gimbal you know which is another thing that came out of drone technology these little steady cam devices you can put given an added stabilizing and that's just unbelievable and let me just add from a huge again going back to the human story an incredible society changing thing the difference between being able to shoot movie quality stuff on your phone which you already have with it almost and you can edit on the phone and you can upload on the phone I mean it's all there this piece of glass that's going to change everything I mean that anybody can shoot it and with the built in stabilization and whatever it's just going to be good enough and as we know actually the quality doesn't really matter at a certain point the technology is far superseded the level of quality that's actually needed and that's going back to what we were talking earlier about podcasting you know being the thing that's like hey once you have a certain basic level of equipment you can just do it and that basic level of equipment has been getting simpler and it's true for filmmaking it's true for lots of different industries not just media industries either I think it's great that the creative process is opening up through the use of the availability of this technology that more people can be makers and creators and the barrier to entry in that is getting much lower and that just lets more people participate I think it's a sentimental thing but honestly I feel and I'm sure I'm not the only one when you talk about the attachment to tech and why am I interested in tech I am so grateful to the people that make these things I mean when I was a kid all I knew was that it was Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates but of course now I understand the vast amount of people and research that goes into it but I'm hugely grateful I mean so if I'm one of however many hundreds of millions who also appreciate that there's a hope for maybe science and technology going forward with more than just you know there may be things that can push it for good things medicine too what I like a lot is actually that technology allows us to all different kind of groups start working together and bring their knowledge to their best that's I think the most amazing thing that filmmakers suddenly also completely involved in technology is just great right yeah it's actually one of the things that I think is causing such concern over our interactions on social media is all of these groups that used to just ignore each other through ignorance right we just didn't know someone believed that are having their ideas conflict my hope is that that means in the end we all end up in a better place with a better understanding of each other but it's a painful process to go through yeah and I think it's gonna have to go through something really I don't want to say a war or something but like a societal war a culture war I mean I think that to get putting off to another topic here but I think to get to internet civility and just general societal civility using technology it's gonna have to get really bad before it changes itself don't you kind of think this is the wild west of the internet right now and eventually we'll get into the 50s 60s and the 70s and all of that you know type frame I actually think it's past the wild west but it's in like the 19 the early 1900s the 1910s or 20s there's just a lot of debauchery there's still a lot of Pinkerton's have come to town the sheriff has not quite imposed 100% law I think it's Lord of the Flies actually I think it's Lord of the Flies and we're waiting for the adult to show up on the beach alright well that's gonna wrap us up thanks to everybody watching and participating of course huge thanks to our panel normally when we have guests on the show it's maybe a writer or somebody who has something to promote I know not all of you guys have something you need to tell folks about the opportunity for that if you do and if not just any last thoughts about anything in particular and we'll start with you Donald, thank you again no thank you for having me I guess the last thought is technology and changing how archeologists look at us in the past and stuff like that might really change how they think and how they think in the future excellent thank you Donald Keele Marcus Ehart anything to tell folks about before we go thanks a lot for keeping the show up we lost for thinking unfortunately that was the other show that I love but that stopped but thanks a lot for doing that Tom and I think I would really love to see that we get a better understanding and also responsibility on privacy and data leaks that's definitely something we need in order to move a little bit more happy forward and not being scared of getting hacked with our private lives thank you 100% agree with you Marcus, thank you Russell Manthi what have you got to tell folks before we go well it's been a real pleasure to be on thank you so much to be a sort of a non-technology person on here and if you want to follow me you can follow me at Russell Manthi on Twitter and that's two SS2Ls correct Phillip Shane before we go what else do you have to tell folks about well first of all just as I'm grateful to the people who make the technology I'm hugely grateful to people like you who communicate and help us understand the technology what the hell is going on inside those black boxes including the one in our brain so I think that what you do is at a high level of quality that's above and beyond the average in terms of helping people understand thank you for that and I'm glad to support it if people want to reach me I'm on Twitter Phillip A. Shane you can go to my website philipshane.com and the last thing I'll just say is I do make documentaries and I love using technology and I also do a lot of teaching about how to make films to all kinds of ordinary people and as you know all of you are living in some extraordinary world seeing extraordinary changes you have any interest in learning how to just capture that and condense it in a very easy way using tools you already know happy to help excellent thank you Phillip Mr. Chang anything else from you before we go watch Daily Tech News show it's awesome it keeps Roger and I employed so thank you and let me reflect back not only to all four of our guests of course but to every single person out there who supports us whether it's on Patreon, whether it's in our store whether it's through PayPal, whether it's just telling folks about the show it is because of you that we're able to continue to do the show and it's what motivates me to continue to try to do the show at the high level that we do or at least that we try to do so thank you for that as well our email address is feedback dailytechnewshow.com we're live Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern usually we'll be back after the first of the year at alphageekradio.com and diamondclub.tv our website is dailytechnewshow.com tomorrow we look back at our predictions from last year to see how well we did our predictions results show 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 say goodbye to the video folks see you later