 Oh my goodness. If you're wondering where Brian Brushwood is, he is not here. He had to cancel at the last minute. We will reschedule him. Roger is going to absolutely reschedule him, aren't you, Roger? Yeah, I'm sure. No, but he was sad. He wanted to be on the show, so we will miss him. But it's just us today. A good old-fashioned DTNS. Like a good old-fashioned doughnut. Or a good old-fashioned old-fashioned. Those are the best doughnuts. I actually don't like old-fashioned. It's too sweet. I don't like them if whoever makes them uses, some of them either leave them in the oil too long or something, but they're really oily. I don't like those. I love that you're both talking about an entire old-fashioned, but conversation was still working. I was like, too much oil in an old-fashioned cocktail. That would wrote a cocktail. It really would. Chocolate old-fashioned would be good right now. Eileen likes the old-fashioned doughnuts. There's something about it. There's a firmness to the bite. They are very cakey. They're baked, not fried. That makes them crackers. Yes. Oh, interesting. Fried doughnuts are chips. I don't like the ones that get filled with jelly or put. Oh, I like filled. Yeah, me too. I like both those. So. I like filled doughnuts. So bad for you. No hole. Just use that space for something delicious. Yeah, doughnuts don't need holes. Remember when they started doing that? Donut holes? No, they still do. No, like they were like a big... You make it sound like it was a recent innovation. No, it was a recent innovation in the early 90s. No, they did donut holes long before that. Did they? Yes. Donut holes have been around a long time. Yeah, there is oldest time. It's a smaller donut designed to help you buy to reduce waste. Great. Reduced holes. I think I know what you mean, Roger. Like they made a big push, maybe a Duncan or one of the chains, you know, about rolling pin, I think. A bunch of commercials about it. Rolling pin. Winch holes. Winch holes by you. Winch holes. Is there, is Winch holes still around or? There's one in LA. But it's okay in Hollywood. It's all right. There's a couple around. I've seen them. I saw one when I was driving around this weekend, up in the valley. Doing your valley... Because I'm a valley girl, yeah. Right. I know where you're going with that. Take me away in your arms, Nicholas Cage. Well, shall we do our show then? I mean, okay, we're all here. Seems the proper thing to do. Will you, will you kick us off, Ms. Lane? I will. All right. Here we go. Three, two... Thanks to everyone who supports Daily Tech News Show directly. To find out more, head to dailytechnewshow.com slash supports. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, July 31st, 2018 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Meredith. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. Also with us, our producer, Roger Chang. How do you do, everyone? We were supposed to have Brian Brushwood today, but he was unavoidably detained aboard an airplane at the time. We're recording. And he sends his regrets, but we'll get him back on the show. So it's just going to be us today. I'm good with that. Are you guys good with that? Well, Ms. Brian. Yeah, I mean, you know, I like you guys, thankfully. Yeah. It's a good old-fashioned DTNS. Just the family. I don't know why. I don't know why I said that. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Oh, speaking of families, Logitech has a new addition. Logitech has agreed to acquire blue microphones. Blue is known for mics that range in price from $60 to over $4,000. One of their most popular mics is the Yeti Mic, USB1. Logitech already owns Astro Gaming, Jaybird, and Ultimate Ears as well. Logitech, are you pregnant? No, I'm just getting blue. Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Glyker, said the company identified coordinated inauthentic behavior designed to influence the US politics and upcoming elections, and has therefore suspended eight Facebook pages, 17 Facebook profiles, and seven Instagram accounts. Facebook says the account spent $11,000 to run 150 ads between April and June. The accounts used VPN and internet phone services and paid third parties to run the ads on their behalf. A little more sophisticated than the behavior that we've been hearing about from 2016. Facebook says it cannot determine who is behind the accounts. MoviePass shut down for a night last week. We talked about this on the show over financial woes, and now the company says it will increase its price to $14.95 per month within the next 30 days. First-run movies will only be viewable on a limited basis during the first two weeks of release outside of specific promotional deals. People starting to emphasize the pass in MoviePass. Dual Sim is a requirement for a lot of users in the world who face either strict data caps and they want to flip back and forth, or maybe they're traveling between markets, so they'll have a Sim for the home market and a Sim when they're abroad. Dual Sim lets you have two Sims in a phone if you didn't realize that, so you can switch between those two carriers. 9to5Mac reports evidence in iOS 12 that developer beta 5 shows dual Sim support in a couple of places with references to second Sim status, second Sim tray status, and dual Sim device. All right, let's talk about what Yahoo is up to. We haven't done that in a while. We haven't. Sources tell Axios that Yahoo Finance will launch a full-day live video streaming network by the end of this year. The network would reportedly include eight hours of live market and global financial news, as some competitors are already doing, updates and sources say that the company is in talks with OTT providers and bundles about getting the content on platform other than Yahoo's own distribution channels, of which they have many. Eight hours market coverage open and close. What does that remind you? Here's TechLive. Oh, right. TechTV kind of tried that just in the tech circuit back in... Well, in all fairness, Yahoo has seen that this always succeeds. Yes, it's never failed. Well, CMBC has made a decent go, I suppose. And they're going up. They're looking at Cheddar, which has made a lot of strides and gained a lot of audience, especially among the younger demographics, and obviously CMBC. Bloomberg has their own live stream, which is doing quite well. Twitter uses it as a default stream. So why wouldn't OTT want to get their Yahoo Finance product in line as well? And I think it's significant in another way, not just from the Yahoo side of things, but in the general idea of you used to launch a channel on cable. And it's now, especially in the finance news world, becoming standard to launch a channel on your own site and then look for other places. Can we get it on Sling TV? Can we get it on Hulu? Can we add it to PlayStation View? There's talk that maybe it might get on Verizon Fios because Verizon owns OTH, which runs Yahoo. But yeah, that's not the primary outlet that they're looking at. Well, it's interesting because if you compare it to a network like Cheddar, which is very millennial-based, but is popular, Yahoo Financial videos are for an older audience, at least the shows that they have at this time, which they already have shows. And the idea that they would say, well, you know, live streaming, why not put them in sequential order and give this a try and see who's tuning in? That makes a lot of sense to me. The fact that it would not be on a cable news network, which again, traditionally appeals to older audiences, but also not really be competing with the Cheddar audience. Because, you know, when I watch coverage from both networks on the same story, it is very different. I wonder who the demographic is, especially because Yahoo has been trying out stuff on Facebook as well. Yeah. And I think it's smart to say, okay, we've got a couple of shows, and I'm assuming those shows are doing well enough on Yahoo Finance. And actually, one of their shows is available on Verizon Fios, on demand. Maybe they're doing well enough that they see a demo they can sell to. And so they're looking for places off the platform. And I think that's smart. You don't just say, hey, we're Yahoo Finance TV. You can get us at Yahoo Finance and leave it at that when you have these other distribution channels to consider. I'm curious if they'll go on to YouTube. Not YouTube TV, obviously. That would be a potential over-the-top situation. But would they put up a YouTube channel to carry segments from this? Maybe they have one already. I actually didn't look. I shouldn't. Hey, it's one of those things, especially with finance. It's a channel or a stream that you leave up running while you work in the office. So they might see an opening of, you know, there might be an office demographic that we're not aware of that literally just leaves a little window open with live finance streaming while they do related, but not necessarily the same style of work. One of the things that I glommed on, too, was a lot of people in the State Department, at the time, before streaming video was a thing, they all had cable tuner cards installed in their PC because one of the things they did was leave a little window open that would run with a constant CNN or whatever, BBC or whatever channel running, because that was related to what they were doing, but something they didn't need to constantly be staring at. But if they heard something, they could turn their eye and bring the screen full screen to pay closer attention. But Yahoo Finance does have a YouTube channel, has 125,000 subscribers, and the videos are all two minutes long around there. They're basically segments seem to be kind of consumer related, like Apple's new features, five car insurance myths, something like that. So curious if that changes when they launch this new network. All right, Samsung posted its slowest quarterly profit growth yet. Chip sales returned record profits, though. The problem is mobile. Samsung's making plenty of money elsewhere in their other bets, but mobile is about 40% of their revenue and the Samsung Galaxy S9 sales fell short of targets. Mobile showed its steepest operating profit decline since Q1 2017. They made money on mobile. Don't get me wrong, but it fell off 34% year over year. Sony tells a similar story. It's PS4 consoles brought in more than twice as much money as any other department. Sony Music, Home Entertainment, Sound and Image Sensors all did well, though. They all turned to profit. Sony Pictures didn't turn to profit, but it kind of wasn't expected to. They only put out two movies. One was right at the end of the quarter. Smartphones, however, lost Sony $97 million, and it's not expected to get better. On the other hand, Huawei posted a revenue rise of 15% on the half-year, they report in six-month increments, and operating profit rose 14%. While that's the slowest growth in first-half sales since 2013, it came while being pushed out of the US and Australia markets while expanding its market share in China to a record 27%. These earnings reports are all kind of tied together into the current mobile trend that more affordable Chinese phones, not necessarily from Huawei, ZTE, and others, are pressuring margins. Xiaomi is a big part of that as well. Cheaper phones have better design. They have better hardware than they ever have. So a lot of times, the price difference is still big between a flagship phone and a mid-range phone, but the feature set may not be that much different. Samsung seems to be pinning its hopes on foldable phones. That's kind of the word on the street that we've been seeing. I don't know that foldable phones sound like the thing that will make people flock back to flagship phones, and these lower-priced phones are becoming more and more compelling, don't you think? Well, I mean, that's the thing. If a foldable phone creates some sort of a solution for a problem that I don't realize I have, great! But if a huge, huge market, particularly in China, but in other markets as well, are interested in lower-priced phones and Samsung has plenty of competitors in that market and they're doing well in eating into Samsung's market share, well, a gimmicky phone that is higher priced is going to work for a few people, but that's not really going to gain back market share, right? I don't think so, and I could be entirely wrong, but usually what keeps a flagship phone ahead is a compelling feature that makes it really easy to use your flagship phone versus a less affordable or a more affordable phone. So you give up, oh, well, I guess I'll type in a password instead of put in a fingerprint sensor, or you're like, well, it'll run a little slower, but I'll save some money. And those mid-range phones are now coming with fingerprint sensors. They now have great processors. So the idea of like, well, I guess I won't have a foldable phone that can fold out as a tablet doesn't strike me as something that will concern anyone yet. And again, maybe I'll get proved wrong. Sometimes these features you really don't realize how valuable are until they're out in the marketplace, but it is starting to look like Samsung is looking like Nokia looked in 2008. It's definitely something that a lot of industries have kind of come across where you concentrate so much on the upper end that as the market matures, you realize everyone shifts down a notch based on value. What they assume is, hey, for every X amount of dollar I get, I get how much phone and that value proposition tends to be toward the middle, the upper middle, but never at the high end. Those are your halo products, so the things that people want to aspire to, but their wallets will say, no, I'm going to go with the next best thing because it's affordable and does most of the stuff that the high end phone does, but I don't need to sell an arm to do it. And that margin of difference in features is getting smaller and smaller. What'sapp for iOS and Android now supports voice and video group calling for up to four people worldwide, previously announced at F8 back in May. What'sapp says the app is designed to send video even on very slow network connections and calls are end to end encrypted just like chats are. What'sapp first launched video chatting back in 2016, it launched voice calling back in 2014 and the company now says that users spend a total of 2 billion minutes per day talking within the app. So this is one of those strange stories where we've gotten in the lineup because it was everywhere. Everyone's very excited about this and I am racking my brain to figure out why people are so excited, but I'm also the person who's never made a video call on WhatsApp, so I'm absolutely the wrong person to evaluate this. Have either of you guys... Have you done a group video call within Facebook Messenger? I think that the shared number of people who are using WhatsApp to communicate, whether it's voice or video, one to one is very high. Being able to get up to four people at once is, I don't know, I mean, I guess that's kind of family chats, people who are in different regions and are using the app already. Obviously, WhatsApp has a huge user base. I don't do group chats ever, either. I can't remember the last time I did, but maybe we're an anomaly. The only time I've done a group video chat that wasn't podcast related was for family and that's because family would be located in three different parts of the globe and it's easier to get everyone together on the screen than to send out plane tickets. It definitely could be, especially for areas where transportation is difficult or expensive. This is a way for people to kind of get the family together, whether it's something important or it's a celebration, like, oh, it's your grandma's birthday. Let's all be around at the same time. Why WhatsApp over existing ways to do this, right? Google has their own way. Skype exists. There's lots of way to group video chats right now, but people have been like, yeah, I don't want to do it on those. I want to wait for WhatsApp to roll it out and then I'll get really excited about it. It could be like... If you have a bunch of people in a friend group or a family again, especially if they're not all in the same area of the world and everybody's using WhatsApp and nobody could do group chatting or group calling before, especially video, and especially if WhatsApp is correct and saying, hey, we've made really big strides to make sure that even if you're in a bad network area, your video is going to be good. It's for everybody. Then that makes a lot of sense. Well, there's your answer, then. That cracks it for me. We were all on WhatsApp chatting, so we didn't want to have to get a new thing because we were already there and be... Uncle Patrick has really bad connection where he lives, but now he can actually be on the video chat. Sorry about that. May, Ryan, Cade Metz, and Runzie Taylor from the New York Times have a feature on robotic hands that's definitely worth a read. We have a link to it in the show notes. It describes several different projects at OpenAI, a couple of labs at the University of California, Berkeley, a lab up in Washington that really give you a sense of where the state of machine learning and robotic limbs, particularly hands and graspers, are. OpenAI and Washington have even been using simulations to train hands that have five fingers just like us in the same articulation to manipulate objects. The one at OpenAI can move a cube in its hand that has letters on it until the letter you request comes up. Sounds easy for us to do, right? But that's actually incredibly difficult for a robotic hand to do. It takes some subtle manipulation. The fact that it was trained on simulations that were useful in the real world is something a lot of people were skeptical would work. These two labs have shown that that can be done. The other examples in the article are all how using machine learning to train grippers is working to be able to pick up any object. You train this sort of pincer to be able to put the right amount of pressure and the right amount of gauge opening to pick up any object, even if it's not previously encountered that object, as well as move objects around on a surface and be able to predict what will happen when you slide them around. Well, obviously, when you think of the five finger being able to pick up stuff model, if you're talking about humans or primates, it's the opposable thumb, right? That's part of the big gripping. What is the latest technology that obviously they've been trying to work on that before? This wouldn't be the first time someone said, oh, let's make robotic hands act more like human hands. I mean, no, but they couldn't do it very well. That's all it is. I mean, this is just the advances are amazing. And the dexterity is there. Whereas before, even if you had the joints right, coordinating the movements so that they could do subtle things on their own, mind you, without a human controlling them has been a huge challenge and one that they seem to have met. There's some really good animations and videos in the New York Times story, but I like this story, I guess for a couple reasons. One, all the things we've been talking about, like it shows the progress they've made. But the other is it shows just how hard this stuff is. If in the back of your mind, you're thinking like, well, robots will take all my jobs, watch how clumsy these grippers are moving things around. It's impressive to roboticists that they can do this at all unsupervised, but it's not going to be going and taking away a watchmaker's job anytime soon. And, you know, one of the issues was always pressure sensitivity and how to know to tell the hand when to quit squeezing, right? Imagine like I had a squeeze bottle. Imagine it was filled with ketchup. When you grab one of those bottles to load up your hot dog with ketchup, you know, when you grab it, you just don't do a kung fu grip on it because then the ketchup would all squirt out. You grip it with enough to lift it and then when you bring it over the hot dog, you squeeze it a little more to get the ketchup out. And that was one of the biggest hurdles that they had to overcome is like, how much pressure do you add? Just, you know, there's a limit where you sense in your nerve bundle how much pressure you're putting on that bottle and knowing when to stop squeezing. And that's kind of the, you know, that's one of the hurdles that's always been stymied, you know, kind of like the Robocop press too hard, you crush every wound in your hand, kind of thing. All right, moving on to Nintendo earnings. The company reported net sales up 9% from last year and profit up 42%. Wow. Nintendo says it sold 19.67 million Switch consoles to date 86.9 million games for that console. Nintendo also sold 17.79 million consoles as of March 31st. So if you look at the numbers, the rate seems to be slowing a bit. The company plans to launch quite a few new games in its next quarter, including Super Mario Party, that's October 5th, Pokemon Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee on November 16th and Super Smash Brothers Ultimate, which I know a lot of people are excited about on December 7th. And maybe no one here is. Well, no, no, I actually had to cough right when you were talking about that. But Nintendo Switch slowing down is concerning. It obviously has sold way better than the way you did through its entire life cycle. That's fine. It's not near selling as well as the DS, but the DS is sort of an aberration in many ways. It's a success for Nintendo. And I'm not saying that. The question that I have is, are we seeing a seasonal slow because it's the summer and it's the first time because the Switch was so hot that seasonal change affects it? Or is this the saturation of the market? Have Nintendo sold the Switches to all the people who are interested in Switches? And from here on out, they're now in the same position Sony is because PlayStation sales have also flattened, where Sony is expecting to make its money in this unit for the time being off of game sales. I mean, Nintendo can do quite well selling all those games that you just mentioned to Switch users. They'll do even better if the Switches continue to sell. And it's not unusual, but Nintendo has always been a standout in that they've always made money on hardware. Now, they didn't make a lot of money compared to software sales, but they made enough as opposed to Sony and Microsoft where they would sell the hardware at a loss in order to get you as a customer to buy their game services down the road. And I'm wondering if there's a point where a company just says, well, now we need to treat this kind of with the razor blade model or the printer model where we sell the hardware at a loss, but we make it up in repeated sales, something that Nintendo has kind of vehemently avoid doing for the longest time. All right. Time to check in on a few earnings. Now, it's important to note the earnings in relation to the Facebook news because one of the things we've been tracking is, is it just a time where tech companies are running into problems, especially advertising-based tech companies? So we're sort of looking at it in that light, as well as the normal light. A couple of things I might not have normally mentioned. Akamai beat expectations on strength and cloud security. That's interesting. Pandora, which a lot of people I think have counted out of the streaming race, got more paid subscribers and posted a smaller quarterly loss than expected. They're still in the growth phase where they're expected to lose some money, but they're losing less money than people expected. That's really good. And they grew their users about 351,000 more than three months earlier. So good news for Pandora. But the big one everybody cares about is Apple. Apple posted quarterly results that topped targets and forecast revenue above expectations driven by sales of the iPhone and revenue from the App Store, Apple Music, and iCloud beat sales estimates by selling fewer but pricier iPhones than analysts expected. So I don't know, Sarah, a lot of the rhetoric has been like, iPhone 10s aren't selling and this sort of bears that out, but also shows like, but $1,000 a pop, who cares? They're making the money. Yeah. I mean, Apple has, you know, over the last couple of cycles of the iPhone, but it seems to have been understanding more like, not everybody can get an iPhone 10, but you got the iPhone 8. And even that said, there are still the faithful out there who are going to spend more money for the nicest Apple units. I'm not alone in that. And sure, I mean, listen, it's a matter of adding up numbers if you sell fewer phones, but they're more expensive than that works out fine. And if you have lower priced phones for everybody who kind of wants to get on the ecosystem and just doesn't have the money and you offer that or older phones as well at a discounted price, then yes, Apple. I'm kind of surprised by these earnings. I thought it was going to be a bit of a down quarter. Fewer than expected, but still up 1% year over year for iPhones. So, you know, it's not like iPhone sales declined. They just didn't rise as fast as everybody thought. iPhone revenue grew 20% thanks to that average selling price. And iPad revenue fell off 5%. Mac revenue fell off 5%. Services revenue, as I mentioned, grew 31%. Other products, that's things like AirPods and Apple Watch up 37%. So, that starts to look like a number that we may start to see broken out. You may see some of these products that are doing so well, maybe the Apple Watch perhaps, be broken out and do its own subcategory. Revenue by geography is interesting to look at too. In the Americas, revenue up 20%. Europe up 14%. Greater China up 19%. Japan up 7%. The rest of Asia Pacific up 16%. So, a very, very positive earnings quarter for Apple. Like you say, Sarah, a lot of you, you weren't alone. A lot of people did not expect it to be that way. No, the services revenue, which of course includes, you know, everything in the app store and stuff that's for sale. That isn't surprising to me. The other products, which of course, include the Apple Watch and others, it would have surprised me, except that just last week, I believe, we talked about the fact that the Apple Watch was a runaway hit in certain markets in Asia. Even though the total shipped units were not even a million, they were, you know, 350,000 or, you know, a number that isn't, you know, it has room to grow, but was so far ahead of the competition in that region. Interesting. Well, thanks to Amos for popping these numbers in. He's the guy who fills out the show notes if you go to the website, DailyTechNewsShow.com. Folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Also, thanks to everybody who supports our subreddit. Get in there, submit stories, vote on others. DailyTechNewsShow.Reddit.com. It's a lot of fun. Also a lot of fun is our Facebook group, facebook.com, slash groups, slash DailyTechNewsShow. All right. Let's check in with Big Jim, who has a little bit of a tip about the blockchain being used for shipping. Hey, Tom, Roger Scooter. It is I, Big Jim, and I am calling in today to talk about an article you guys discussed yesterday about blockchain and the supply chain. And most importantly, what I want to talk about is all of those features that you mentioned, be it humidity or even light sensitivity, location, or even you can even get as far as smell and scent. All of these are available to you now. You can get all these things as long as you're waiting to pay for them. The difference is you have to go into a secure portal and look at the information. It's not piped to you. Whereas with blockchain, the beautiful thing about blockchain is everything will be pumped to you. All that data will be sent to you in a secure manner. It can go into your ERP systems and you can see where they are real time. This is a huge benefit to carriers who have to manage the cargo freight forwarders who have to book and maintain the shipment. Shippers and receivers, obviously, as well as financial institutions because they want to ensure that those goods are actually being moved where they say they're supposed to be moved. And the biggest beneficiary, more than anything else, of course, comes back down to insurance. Because if an insurance company is able to turn around and verify that those goods are good and there's no damage to the goods, then that stops the liability and problems there is with a shipment. But that's just my two cents for tech and trade. And of course, Daily Tech News Show's trade advisor, I'm Big Jim. Thanks for fighting through the bronchitis there, Big Jim. I can hear it a little bit. Not too bad, though, in his voice and very insightful. I mean, that is the promise of blockchain, more efficient, but not less secure. All right, let's check the mailbags there. David, the software engineer had a thought on our roundtable show from last Friday. If you missed it, we had a great conversation about lots of stuff. But one of them was talking about the idea of two-factor authentication devices that use Bluetooth rather than USB and NFC. And what is more secure? Much of the criticism of Bluetooth, Dave says, was super insightful, specifically the concerns that you raised regarding placing your security and device that can run out of batteries, for example. But I believe you may have overstated the insecurity of Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a transport mechanism like Wi-Fi or Ethernet or NFC. Some transport mechanisms are more secure than others, but protocols that run over those transports can still be equally secure. An example, HTTPS on VPN traffic over Bluetooth is just as safe as Ethernet or NFC, or even a carrier pigeon. Oh, I think VPN run on a carrier pigeon. Yeah, all right. Yeah, this is spending a little disbelief here, David. David says, until we've seen what software Google is using between the computer and their device, because they're launching their own device as well, which we talked about, Dave says, it's far too soon to make any real claims about how secure it is compared to the competition. No, that's fair to say. And I don't think Shannon would disagree with you, and I certainly don't. And I tried to make the point that Shannon lives in a different world of the smallest infinitesimal risk to the rest of us looks big. And so you're talking in the trust no one sort of situation there. But, David, it's not wrong. There's no reason for the average person to jump to the conclusion that just because it's Bluetooth, it would be insecure, certainly more secure than carrier pigeon. Give them that. So thank you, David, for that. Appreciate the... What do you have against pigeons? I just don't think that they are end-to-end encrypted. From what I've seen, there's leakage in there. I'm just saying. Yeah, absolutely. Hey, you know what tomorrow is, Sarah? What? August 1st. Oh my gosh, what the heck has that happened? I don't have a clue. Time just keeps on ticking. It's closer to Christmas than last Christmas. I know. But I bring it up specifically right now because it is the day that our Patreon charges get collected. So big thank you to everybody who supports us on Patreon. And it's a good day to start supporting us on Patreon now because if you get in on August 1st, you get all the posts with all the perks. It's also a reminder to people who've been like, where's that ad-free feed? How do I get my business card? How do you hook up to Discord? All of that information will be posted again, as it is every month, on Patreon.com slash DTNS. If you would like to get ahold of us, well, carrier pigeon is an option, but email might be better. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is what we suggest at least to start. We're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. If you can join us live, we'd love to have you. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll see you tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. Well, there's Brian. Yeah. Here in spirit. Laughing away. Oh, that brushwood. He's a clam. Did you know that clams were very high in iron? I don't know that I did know that. I learned that today. So, clam chowder for everyone. Yay, but your iron level is too high. Because we were talking about iron yesterday. So, I was like, well, I know that it's red meat and spinach. What else has iron? I don't know. I should know that. So, I did a little digging. One thing Eileen likes to eat is fruity dimari, which has clams and lots of shellfish. So, I wonder if that's true of other shellfish. Linguine vangoli. Although I'm not a big fan where they leave the shells on. Well, that's the traditional way, though. That's how you know it's fresh. I'm not trying to fool you. I don't mind getting a little clam out of a shell the way that I don't really like cracking crab. Yeah, I don't like having to crack the crabs. I mean, I know it's the same thing. It's just more annoying. Getting it out of the shell is not as bad, especially if they give you the nice big bowl to throw the empty shells in. I mean, I'm cool with making shrimp at home or prawns. Clams. I've never done in my own house. They're not that hard. I start to get frightened about the ones that don't open and whether I'm doing it right. But I just don't eat the ones that don't open. Yeah, yeah. Just got to cook them long enough. I know what you mean, Roger, though. Sometimes I just wish they would serve it with the clams already taken out because it's easier. But they don't look that cool. They look cool. The shell thing is like clams don't look great without their shells. Half the plate is shell. Don't you listen to her clams? You guys look great. What's that? What's that? Up. Stop. Shell shaming the clams. Shell shaming. Chapino. That's what I was trying to think of. Chapino is great. The big seafood soup. What are we actually calling this episode, Roger? Chapino. Chapino. I'm just kidding. VPN Virtual Pigeon Network. That's funny. There's also... I like that one. Yeah, I like that one. Yeah, you can mention some others if you want. The secret to work lies in thumbs. Bought to the hand. Squeezing ketchup. The secret to work lies in thumbs. Pretty good, too, I have to say. Yeah. Robots get a grip on AI. Virtual Pigeon Network is pretty great. All right, let it be done. Good ones today, you guys. Thank you for that. Yeah, very clever. Some looking at... Some might say too clever. If we were in San Francisco, I would know exactly where to get Chapino. But in LA, I don't know. Were you going to say Tarantino's? I was going to say Soudini's. They have a good Chapino there. I think Cieno-Casino has it. Which casino? No, it's an Italian restaurant super close to where I live, but... And you might be right. I've never tried it. It seems more style than like... No, Eileen's got the... Frutti de Mare there. So I don't know why they wouldn't have Chapino. And when you're there, you're family. Are you? Do they tell you to clean up your room and move your car? Exactly, they guilt you. You come by only once a month. You don't like me? I go to the Olive Garden and they just start guilting me about how I never call. Because when I'm there, I'm family. You never call, you never write. You're wasting away. What are you doing? That's not a job. Get a real job. Yeah, so when I Google it, it's Siano and then like Venice Ale House, which is like a brewery. I don't think I would probably get Chapino there, but who knows? Could be. It's probably a bistro. We're like, you know, what is that called? Bistro. You know how? I mean, it's right on the boardwalk. Bistro pub. Yeah, bistro pub. See, now I got a habit. Chapino. Well, you go into what you do is you go into Foursquare. Hell, I'll still use Foursquare, right? I do. I do in moments like this. Chapino. How do you spell Chapino? P-I-P-I-N-N. Oh, P-P-I-N-N. The warehouse restaurant. The Wood Café. Okay. Wait, the warehouse like... Santa Monica Seafood. That's the one you want to go to. Really? Yeah. Although, C&O gets an 8.8. Okay. I mean, but people love C&O for like reasons beyond like the quality of foods. It's the one place the people love coming. We get C&O delivered. Really? Yeah. I love their chicken piccata. I have eaten there exactly once. Because it's, again, very close to me. So I don't really know what I'm talking about. I liked the pasta, though. Got a big old bowl of spaghetti and loved it. Eileen is very picky about bolognese. And she likes their bolognese. Okay. All right. What does it have to do with the sauce or the pasta? It has to do with the sauce. Yeah, for sure. Gastropub. Thank you, Fred. That was what I was looking for. Gastropub. Sounds like a... Sounds like a keystone. P.I. condition. It was a bistro math in the gastropub. I got a gastropub. I need some medicine. I just want... I want a little Italy of LA. That's what I want, you know? You go. Yeah, there's no North Beach of LA. Yeah, exactly. I mean, Hollywood has some real old school... That's true. You know, like, Dantanas and places like that. That's true. That's true. But you get some good chapino in there. Chapino. That's kind of the... Hollywood's kind of the North Beach. It's also many other things. But that's where all the old school Italian restaurants are. I feel like... Yeah. I mean, there's nothing that I can think of that's truly... There's a nice Italian place nearby on Washington, but it's not old. It's like, you know, it's new Italian. Such a nice Italian place. I just want to settle down with a nice Italian place and eat... And eat some iron. Via clams. Clams. Iron delivery. Just make sure you don't have red tide and you'll be okay. Yeah. Well, I mean... There's always something. Show us something. Red tide, green tide. Make sure they don't roll tide. We're going to give it all to the football fans. Maddie. Roger, remind me the difference. I know what red tide is, but green tide... Oh, no, I'm just making... Oh, okay. I'm like, that one I don't know. If there's an algae bloom, it usually turns the water green, but red tide is definitely worse. Yeah. You know, now that I'm looking at Virtual Pigeon Network, I'm having deja vu. Do you think you've done it before? I used this title before, since, you know, sometimes between 2005 and now, probably. But was it at Buzz Out Loud, Tech News Today, or Daily Tech News Show? Who can say? I know see nothing for DTNS. All right. That's fair, then. Sounds like a Buzz Out Loud title. I mean, it's... I can see that having come through before. Like, oh, because it's, you know, data transfer, but via Pigeon. Power Pigeons. Yeah. Doing the Pigeon. Pigeon collision. I have never been to Santa Monica Seafood. I have. It's very small and sometimes overcrowded, but they do a good job. That's how you know it's good, right? If it's just demand. I just want some soup. Like, if you go to a restaurant that's totally empty while all the other restaurants around it are, like, packed, do you ever, like, well, maybe it's not that good? No, but then there's the tourist areas where places are packed, but you don't know if it's... For all the wrong reasons. ...happened to be there, you know? I will say I have had a desire to go to Bubba Gumps, even though I've never been. I've never been. Just to go once to see what it's like. I've been. If you feel you must go, but you're probably not missing what you think you might be missing. Well, that was... I remember going to Pier 39. The TGI Fridays of seafood. Like, it's not even Red Lobster level. Oh, really? Wow. That's an indictment. But is it good? It's fine. Yeah. Yeah. It satisfies the need. Sure. I ate at a Bubba Gumps. I've eaten twice at Bubba Gumps, one time in San Francisco when we were pretending to be tourists. So, we were like, well, we should eat at Bubba Gumps then. And then the other time was down in Long Beach, because it was the only place we were really hungry. Would Bubba Gumps be like Joe's Crab Shack? We've never eaten at Joe's Crab Shack, but I feel like that's probably a pretty good analog. Yeah. I ate there once. We put on bibs. It was really fun. But yeah, it was like, let's do this, and then we never went again. My experiences at Bubba Gumps have not been fun. It was just like... You became full. The big, heavily laminated, huge menu, they bring you your food and your drinks. It tastes fine. Nothing is outstanding or surprising, which is... I mean, that's what a lot of people eat there for. They're like, I don't want to be surprised. Dumb luck coconut shrimp. Served with Cajun marmalade and fries. Yeah. Of course, we have skewers. Hold the fries. Who needs fries? You're eating fried shrimp. So much fried food in here. Fried food. Accidental fish and shrimp. So is that making like bycatch, blue-paid special? Captain's Fish and Chips. 17, 1639. It's a lot for fish and chips. Captain Morgan's Fish and Chips. Probably like Pollock or something. I mean, Fish and Chips, which is funny because potatoes, but that's a fun... If you're in the UK and you get it in the newspaper with vinegar on... Like that's... I love those. That's delicious. Shouldn't be $16 though. That's what I'm saying. It's like 1639. It's like that's a little bit much. Should be like 12 months. Yeah. I don't know. That's starting to be typical around these parts. Yeah. Part of my thing is not the expense of food is when you go to a restaurant. My problem is for what you pay, you get awfully mediocre quality food. It's like... Well, that happens sometimes. For me, it's just a hallmark of chain restaurants. Pins on the chain. Yeah. I mean, I think you're right that it's mostly true, but there are a few exceptions. Well, and it's also... I've been to a steakhouse that's nice. And someone's sort of like, oh, that's not a very big cut that I just ordered. But I'm like, but it's supposed to be the best. And they're like, I just rather have more. So there's that whole thing too. Like this dish is small. I wanted a huge steak on my plate. For me, it's not even size of portions. It's just like the quality of not just the ingredients, but just of actually the cooking. A lot of chain restaurants have to... They don't send everyone to the same location to train up. I don't know. It's not wrong. I'm not saying that all of them are bad. It's not wrong to generalize that that's true, because I think you're probably right on the majority. But I always hesitate because I'm like, yeah, but there's also ones that actually have really good managers. And I know they may be the exception, not the rule, but... I will say that there's that one Denny's downtown over by the Staple Center that has done, at least for Denny's, a really good breakfast. Yeah, this isn't a restaurant example. But one example I would give is my UPS store, where I have the P.O. box. The woman who manages it is exceptional. She is so good. I fear the day I will have to change to a different store because I moved too far away, because she's fantastic. The other UPS stores around here are not that great. So, you know, they're all part of the chain, but every once in a while you get somebody who really cares running it. Yeah, Nick with a C was like, fish and chips shouldn't cost you more than five bucks. I'm like, man, there ain't nothing in LA to enter wise, though. Five bucks. I don't run five bucks anymore. Yeah, there was... I mean, even Taco Bell is more than five bucks, usually. Yeah, I know. The five dollar or anything is... I just looked up a Chippino on Yelp, and the going rate average is like $30. For a Chippino? Wow. I should have told my dad. My dad used to sell it. And it was like in the high teens. Well, that was a long time ago, too. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of... I get it, but a lot of fresh ingredients involved, but that's a state dinner. Yeah. Well, hey, we're going to say goodbye to the video, folks. Thanks for watching, and we love you and give you our hugs through the internet. And... Clam hugs. Audio folks, stick around. There's more to come. Woo-hoo!