 coming up on D T N S Spotify. Can't hear the laughter anymore. Door dash hires employees and how to run an online store in a perpetual supply chain nightmare. This is the Daily Tech news for Monday, December 6th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang, Sarah Lane's out today, but we have Brian brushwood, cohost of cord killers, master of the modern rogue and so much more. How's it going, Brian? I'm doing great. I just feel like I should bring cats or something. Bring cats. Yeah, or some kind of pets. I don't know. Yeah, it's a very pet filled cast we have here, but it's fine. It's fine. You're our guest. You can do whatever you want. If you'd like to hear more of Brian and I talking, there's a longer version of this show called Good Day Internet. You can get that at patreon.com slash D T N S. Big thanks to our top patrons that help make that possible, including Chris Benito, Steve Aderola and Dan Colbeck. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Last week, Twitter updated its privacy information policy to ban sharing photos or videos of private individuals without consent. The company acknowledged since then that it mistakenly suspended about 12 accounts under this policy mistakenly, citing coordinated and malicious reporting targeting anti extremism researchers and journalists. Twitter spokesperson said a dozen erroneous suspensions occurred and that the company launched an internal review to ensure that the rule is used as intended in the future. The US Patent and Trademark Office sent Clearview AI a notice of allowance for its patent on methods of providing information about a person based on facial recognition, including its automated web crawler, which scans the Internet for photos of faces and then tries to match them to a database. This notice means the patent will be approved once Clearview pays the administrative fees to do so, which is expected to do. Ali Baba will reorganize its e-commerce business into two units focused on international and domestic, the Chinese market, respectively. The international digital commerce unit will include Ali Express, alibaba.com and its southeastern Asian e-commerce business, Lazada. The domestic China focused unit will include T-Mall and Taobao. According to documents reviewed by Bloomberg, Sony plans to launch a subscription service code named Spartacus to compete with Xbox Game Pass, expected to launch this spring. The service would merge Sony's existing PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now services with Sony keeping the PlayStation Plus branding. While not finalized, Sony plans three tiers for the service, a base tier with existing PlayStation Plus benefits, a second tier with a larger game catalog that might eventually include access to PS5 games, and a third tier with extended demos, game streaming, and access to a library of classic games that goes all the way back to the first PlayStation. Finally, WhatsApp rolled out support for ephemeral messaging as the default for all conversations. You can switch that now. Up till now, this had to be set for each conversation. Now you can just make it the default every time. Users also have more options for when conversations disappear with 24 hour and 90 day options added to the existing seven day period. All right, let's talk about the laughter going away from Spotify. If you tuned into Spotify today in the mood to laugh from your favorite comedian, you might have been disappointed. Spotify removed the work of hundreds of comedians while it works out a royalty agreement for paying for the writing of jokes on its service. It was already paying for the performances. But this means a lot of big name comedians, John Mulaney, Kevin Hart, Jim Gaffigan, Tiffany Haddish, Martin Berbelia. They're all not on Spotify right now. Global Rights Administration company Spoken Giants is leading the effort to get paid composition rights for jokes, no matter who's telling them, right? This is the writing, not the performance. The heart of the issue is the comedians up till now are paid for performances, but not necessarily for the writing, kind of like they're getting paid to do covers of their own work rather than for the copyright on the jokes themselves. Comedians would rather be treated the same as musicians, where the right for the performance is a separate right from the right of the composition, even if the same person wrote the song and performs it. You got two different rights. While focusing on comedians right now, Spoken Giants hopes to expand this across podcasts, speeches and lectures. Spoken Giants reached out to streaming services as well as radio providers back in the spring of this year. One of the elements to be decided, in Spotify's case anyway, is whether it has to have a new agreement for composition and therefore pay additional money, or whether it can take its existing agreement and what it already pays and say, Oh, a portion of this we were paying for both rights. We just didn't divide the payments. We'll allocate some to writers. Spotify notified Spoken Giants on November 24th that it was going to remove the works. If they couldn't reach an agreement and today is the day they remove them because they couldn't reach an agreement. Brian, you know, from one perspective, it's I think what has happened here is comedians are like, Oh, we didn't used to care because nobody played comedy on radio. But now lots of people are listening to comedy. Well, keep in mind, they always cared and they cared very, very deeply. If there's one group that cares more about theft of the general idea of a thing than comedians, it's magicians. There are stories of magicians who would go on stage and smash the props of other magicians because when it comes to magic and comedy, think about it, the heart of a good joke is surprise. And that is the thing that you can copyright the words. You could trademark a gizmo or a patent. You could patent a gizmo and so on. But you can't capture the heart of a joke. And so instead, both comedians and magicians have had to rely on a form of self policing, basically shaming people who violate that social norm. The most famous example on the internet was when Joe Rogan called out Carlos Mancia for ripping off a bunch of material or whatever. This sounds like trying to take a structure that that maybe made sense in the world of music, but I just don't see it working in the world of comedy. And if it does, prepare for an endless police state of everybody saying like, Yeah, but the joke is that he's really tall. And you know, I kind of made that joke. I took this less as I want to protect others from stealing because you're right, there's already a culture around that to saying there's always been a copyright on the composition of a joke versus the performance, right? And I, Kevin Hart, always get paid for both. And then spoken giants came in and said, I don't know, read that agreement with Spotify closely. I think you're just getting paid for the performance. And comedians were like, huh, I think you're right. We should have a part of that contract that pays me specifically for the writing of the joke, even if I'm the one performing it, just like if I wrote a song, I get paid for the song writing as well as the performance. So it's Kevin Hart saying, I want to be treated like Taylor Swift. I want to get paid for my writing of my joke as well as my performance separately. So here's the deal with the devil that you do not want to make if you are Kevin Hart because Taylor Swift, as we're learning as she rerecords all of her own music, is subject to what's called an automatic copyright, which means that other people are automatically allowed to cover her work as long as the automatic royalty is paid. So you're telling me that Kevin Hart could come out with a brand new special, and I can set up a webcam and say the entire thing word for word, put it up on Spotify, and only pay an automatic royalty. This sounds like a disaster in the making. I understand why they're doing it. I think it's a bad idea. Yeah, I, and I think probably the breakdown with Spotify is Spotify saying, look, in the previous world, recorded comedy was not a big revenue maker. Comedians made most of their money touring. You didn't have a lot of comedy radio stations out there, which is why we didn't have a separate right. That's the world we made this agreement in. We get it that there's a lot more comedy being paid. But I think Spotify's argument is, we're already paying you what it's worth. Now you're trying to squeeze extra money out of it. And I think that's why Spotify is like, we can redefine it. So the same pot is being divided up differently, you know, especially for those cases where there's a rider, which often happens, like, you know, for late night television and stuff, where there's a rider separate from the performer. But Spotify doesn't want to pay any more money. It's not like they're suddenly making more on comedy. So I think that's, that's the disconnect here. And Spotify is trying to call spoken giants bluff on it. I don't even want to contemplate this coming for podcasting. Yeah, from the comedian's perspective, what more money? Yes, double pay for writing and performance. But then I'm telling you the poison pill is now you're subject to automatic royalties. Alright, folks, last week, we gave you the heads up 15 minute delivery, fast delivery of groceries and such coming to the United States, it's big in parts of Asia already, even taking over parts of Europe and South America, Latin America, and New York seems to be the grounds for it reaching the United States. We talked about Instacart last week. And now, DoorDash has announced it's going to hire dozens of full time employees. Actually, some of them are part time, but they're full employees. These are not gig workers to beat Instacart to the punch in New York. DoorDash hired dozens of full time employees as couriers for its 15 minute convenience store item delivery service. So this is Bodega stuff. They're going to start just in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Employees will be stocking and managing DoorDash owned and operated Dash Mart convenience stores. They'll be given eBikes from Zumo for deliveries. And DoorDash is looking into how to possibly offer this service for non DoorDash Bodegas for but right now it's it's for their own stock. Like fast delivery services that already exist in Manhattan, like gorillas, Joker and by K. These DoorDash employees are full time. They get workers compensation and health insurance benefits. And if they're part time, they get offered the same health insurance benefits as as gig workers do DoorDash plans to expand the service to several areas around New York City. Once they get New York City covered, then they might try to expand to other cities. But fast 15 minute or less delivery, Brian, would you like it? Tom, would I be a bad person if I responded by simply saying I don't believe a word of this. I believe that yes, DoorDash wants to know what everybody wants to hear. And I believe that DoorDash yes has hired full, full employees that they intend to send people out. And I believe that yes, there'll be a bunch of stories of things getting there in 15 minutes. Do I believe in the middle of the supply chain crisis that they're going to keep this promise in the long term? I'll give you an answer. Do I believe Domino's is willing to deliver in an hour or less or my pizza is free anymore? No, I do not. That's interesting. Now, I don't have any of these services available here. I know in Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and I'm sure there's a dozen other cities I could mention. If I if I was well more well informed, have had these services for years have had these services. But the key to all of those cities that I just mentioned, they're very dense urban areas, right? Where you can have a location near thousands, if not tens of thousands of people that are legitimately five to 10 minutes away. So 15 minutes is a luxury. I think the supply chain aspect is more about the selection of like, Hey, everything we have is available in 15 minutes. Everything we have is a comb and some listerine, but they're both available is 15 minutes. Like that could that could be a factor here for sure. We're going to talk more about that in a minute. But I do think they can do the 15 minute delivery service. The big question is, can you make it pay? Like you can do it, but can you make it profitable? And also, you know, how quickly do you add that asterisk that says unless there's traffic, unless there's weather, unless there's literally any excuse that you didn't make it in 15 minutes, I that's the part that makes me raise an eyebrow. Well, and especially when you start talking about less dense areas, when you're talking about Austin, when you're talking about Los Angeles, you know, where it's like, well, okay, I now I have the dash convenience store or the Instacart location. And but instead of being near 1000 or 10,000 people, it's near 500 people 300 people. So I either have to expand my radius, and then run into traffic problems, or not offer it. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see our dash. We got Gus, who's Gus? He's my neighbor. You just drones, like what you get zipline involved in this, and they can just deliver your listerine and your burrito by drone, right? And then you don't have to worry about all to hear the doorbell ring and open it up and see somebody covered in sweat exhausted, holding a burrito in some listerine, gasping for air. 14 minutes, 45 seconds. A few weeks ago, you may remember that a group of cryptocurrency enthusiasts tried to band together to buy a copy of the United States Constitution that was on sale. They lost the bid to somebody who was a single bidder and is going to put it in a museum. But what you may or may not have noticed is that the group set up a DAO was called Constitution Dow. DAO Central stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. The Dow's have been around for a few years, and they're very popular in the cryptocurrency world. The idea of a DAO or a Dow is to form an organization with no central leader, no hierarchy, no executives, it just runs on top of cryptocurrency and gives members their rights within the Dow. So the organization could employ people. So I guess you could have executives in a sense, but you're not going to talk about C level executives, you're not talking about board members. You buy tokens in the DAO, which represent your voting rights. One of the promises is that you could then sell those tokens in the future for more than you paid for them, of course, which is why people are very interested in DAOs. But there's also this decentralized aspect of it. Rules aren't forced by smart contracts and decisions are transparently recorded on the blockchain for all to see. That means anybody can join or leave the organization very easily. No third parties are needed for financial transactions, escrow, etc. Like I said, you don't need a board of directors that tries to represent the investor's interest. Every investor can represent their own interest. The most easy to grasp reasons for running a DAO are probably cryptocurrency itself. Members of the DAO get to vote on the direction of the currency, whether it should fork, what the gas fees should be, that kind of thing. But DAOs are also being used for social groups, even some things like bake sales and stuff, media organizations, somebody's trying to talent agency with a DAO, there's plenty of research and investing in other organizations. It does seem like niche organizations are the most common, but it can also work well, where a small group of investors would use a DAO to decide how to invest the pool of money instead of talking it out themselves, they can just do votes on the blockchain. In May, in fact, Jenny DAO acquired the NFT for an original song by Steve Aoki and Threlau, which makes all the members of Jenny DAO co owners of the song. This is one of those NFTs that actually gives you some rights in the song. Proponents say it brings more transparency and inclusiveness than just an LLC. Detractors say, well, there's nothing in a DAO you can't do without a DAO and point out that DAOs might sometimes be illegal, depending on what country you're in. In July, the United States, a state of Wyoming passed a law letting people form an LLC with a DAO, the best of both worlds, although a lot of DAOs in any state register as an LLC anyway, often in Delaware, and just define the LLC as delegating a lot of the coordinating and voting rights to the DAO. Like with most crypto products over the years, they exist in a gray area. They can easily be abused by bad actors, but there's a potential for having tools to make administering organizations large and small a lot easier. Brian, what do you think of this? As a magician, I applaud their squirreliness. I always love Weasley ways to work around heavy handed legislation. You know, let's say the problem in the early 1900s is that everybody got lost their shirt in the stock market. So you decide that only accredited investors people who have a net worth of $1.5 million or make over a quarter million dollars a year are allowed to speculate in certain types of stocks. So what happens? Somebody creates a virtual entity that you're buying into you get to Robin Hood where you're able to trade on margin, even though you don't qualify for all that stuff. What's the problem? We want to have a protectionist racket for a taxi cab. So we're going to sell medallions. How do you get around it? Uber comes along and you just go right around it. So in that regard, I don't know, it just makes me it leaves me feeling like lawyers gonna law and then people are gonna people. And this is yet another case of the same dang thing. I feel like this is a little bit of another one of the I think you're right. It's the same. It's another like, Hey, we're trying to weigh around the law. I do think there's something valuable kind of the way blockchain has proven to be way more valuable to businesses than cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency, the jury still out on seems to be getting a little more viable every day. But lots of people are looking at blockchains and saying, ah, there's something we can use maybe just internally and our in our own organization because of the decentralized, you know, hard to change way that it exists. I think dows right now are in that soup, where we're kind of just seeing what will come out of it. People are trying all kinds of things. Some of them fraudulent, some of them genius, and out of that soup will emerge a few models that people will be able to say like, Oh, we wouldn't change our whole organization to a Dow. But those aspects would be way more efficient. Just the way fintech is saying, gosh, three days to settle a transaction. But if we use a blockchain, it could be instant. Yeah, maybe we should take that part of cryptocurrency. I think that might happen with dows. I mean, which is really an indicator that we just keep seeing the same echoes of the same problems. There's a Wild West is somebody tries to settle it. A new Wild West is invented. Yeah, you get a general store that eventually becomes Amazon. Yes, only it's run by a cursing Shakespearean actor named Al Sweringen. Join in the conversation in our Discord folks. You can join that by linking your Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S. Alright, we talk about supply chain all the time, especially regarding chips, but also the logistics problems of getting things shipped containers. We talked to Big Jim a few months back about this whole thing and why it's causing a problem. We have a good understanding. I think at this point, what and where the problems are. But what about having to run your business in this new world of supply chain and logistics problems? Brian does that and for the past two years has had to deal with these very issues and the constantly changing nature of them, starting with last year's holiday season, because holiday seasons are always where you make or break any kind of store. Really? What happened with your store last year and then take us through what you learned and what you're doing this year? Sure. For those who don't know, I run a little online store called scamstuff.com. We call it gear for the modern rogue. It's a spy gadgets, magic tricks, some puzzle boxes. It's a curated collection of clever stuff. And what that means is some of them are originals that we can go across town and get printed and then made into a booklet or what have you. Others of them, we need ingredients that we ship in either from domestic or international suppliers. And then others are straight up things that we create bundles from international suppliers. And last year was the first year that we kind of got caught on a wares. Every year we come out with a new puzzle box and original deck of cards. And then just for some reason, our puzzle box guy was late, late, late, late, so late that all of a sudden we realized, oh, we're not going to make it in time for Christmas, but we have to make Christmas work for everyone. And so we had the idea of like, okay, why don't we open it up for pre-sales and people can for, you know, check an option of would you like a card saying this is your gift and we have a nice card signed saying you're getting a puzzle box this year for everybody who year after year bought the next in the series. It felt really awful doing that because there's an amount of trust between a consumer and a producer. And I was accustomed to, I don't know, Walmart letting me down or Target letting me down or whatever. I was less accustomed this year when I made it all the way through checkout for I finally, after like three years, I bought a new iPhone and I made it all the way to the end with the impression that Apple was going to ship it in two to three days. And then the receipt comes and it says psych one and a half months. And so it was when that happened that I realized, oh, wait, I believe that a lot of people are about to get very, very angry with this tune. I think we're all tired of that same tune. And we made the very challenging decision to refuse to sell anything that we didn't have in stock, which as I'm saying these words sounds extraordinary and stupid. And I think our bottom line will reflect that it was extraordinary and stupid. But, but man, I found it so painful last year to have to make excuses and keep in mind last year we shut down the store three weeks before Christmas because we didn't want to take orders that we couldn't absolutely guarantee. So this year we have a list called things that are still in stock. And it's truly frightening because there's there's still things that we're waiting on that we had expected to have weeks ago. And so we're trying to we're sort of in a low grade perpetual emergency mode. And the biggest things that we've learned are constant communication, never tell a lie, never, never act like you're going to have something, never make a promise that you can't keep. If you can't keep your promise, then don't tell them how it's going to be. Ask the consumer what will make things right. And for us, part of that has been whenever there's been a preorder, every week we've reached out with like a, Hey, here's the Monday morning mystery memo where we're going to tell you the latest of how many of the mystery box items we got, how many of them are going to go. And in the case of the mystery box, it took like three and a half months to get everybody their stuff. But because it was a constant conversation, a general satisfaction was fantastic. I'm not going to pretend that every store has that as an option. But I know for being a very, very little guy, it's been instrumental to keep us afloat. I think some folks in our audience may may go, Well, hold on, Brian, you you make make it sound like having the thing in stock when I order is a revelation. Shouldn't every store have the thing before they sell it to me? Can you explain a little about why why that flow happens usually? Well, I have been a champion of so called just in time management. I believe that is an efficient and healthy thing to do. When when just in time management supply chains break down as is happening now, when you what you often see is people placing bets and placing bets is always going to be less efficient than than managing the flow of things. And I was shocked there was I think it was a New York Times article talking about a woman who had a small shoe shop and she she had to guess how many shoes she was going to have. So there's a photo in front of her with a bunch of shoes. Top comments were can't believe she's hoarding all these shoes. And it's like, I'm sorry, isn't that what that means to say you have stock in an item? It's it's very it's a peculiar time. And I don't have a strong assessment of whether it's right or wrong. But but boy, the supply chain thing is real. And I can tell you for a fact that nobody should be believing anybody on anything, except for me, except for me. Well, right, because you're only telling them what actually you can ship them right now. But the idea with just in time inventory, though, is it's faster for everybody, right? If I order a thing that you don't have yet, but you know, you'll get it in time to turn around and ship it. That's faster than if I order a thing and you don't have it and you say sorry, I can't take your order or OK, you're ordering it, but I don't have it yet. So I'm going to tell you three weeks and then oh, wait, you'll get it faster, which of course people are happy when you get it faster, but then they might not order it if it's going to take three weeks when they would have if it was going to take two days. So when it works, like you said, it's efficient and great for everybody. But when all the containers back up and it can't work anymore, it causes problems. Well, and it's not a matter of it not working so much as in the long term, it certainly is the most efficient strategy. However, it does mean that in the short terms, you get weird things like everybody gets worried about toilet paper. Remember that moment we had a shortage. I don't have any trouble getting toilet paper now. There are hiccups and bumps along the way. And I still am a champion of it. But boy is it inconvenient to try to run a business that depends on just in time management. Yeah. At this point, but what I've been saying about it is it turns out that just in time management is only good until a once in a century event happens and ruins the entire global shipping chain. So every time that happens, just in time management is going to get thrown out of whack. Yeah, but also, you know, hey, just if you're worried about it, if you want to become a crazy hoarding everything person who lives in the in the the hills of Austin, just remember, there are other things that use just in time management like your liver and heart and lungs and all of your organs rely on just in just in time management. Yeah, it's why you eat, actually, right? Hey, well, good luck. And I think the upside is your your approach this year means that there might always be something new. You never know. There's a it's it's certainly an exciting time because I had hoped that right now I could announce a thing that we would definitely have in our hands by Christmas. It turns out tomorrow might be the day that I can announce a thing. But until then, these lips are sealed. The pain and misery of making a promise I can't keep. Check back tomorrow, folks. Alright, let's check out the mailbag. Eric reported from the front lines of robot delivery. He said you mentioned neuro operating deliveries out of 711 and Mountain View. I happen to live very near there. And upon hearing this, I knew it was clearly slurpy time. Eric says that about 20 minutes after ordering with neuro in the app, the car pulled up slowly. I opened the back passenger side door and there was a cooler bag with the order inside with the safety driver there, which is way they're rolling this out at first. It doesn't feel very real, but you can see how they transition from this normal ish car to something like a larger version of Starship's robo coolers in the future. The car also made the strange decision of going against their stated mode of operation by pulling into my complexes parking lot, which is technically on maps, but rather poorly, and it seemed to get stuck for a few minutes while trying to leave. I'm not sure if the human had to give it a nudge, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume it had the brains to navigate a few hundred feet of clear pavement on its own, and it eventually did go. Thank you, Eric, for the frontline report on neuro last mile deliveries. Keep those emails coming folks feedback at daily tech news show dot com. We got lots of great emails this weekend. Only got time for that one right now, but we read them all and appreciate them. Also thanks to our brand new bosses, Carlos Lasso, Amber Antoinette Ford, Nina and Andrew Bartlett and Norman Lacoste. They all just started backing us on Patreon. So thank you, Carlos Amber Antoinette, Nina, Andrew and Norman. Good to have brand new bosses and now's the time folks join up, get a little holiday cheer in your life because we'll thank you right here on the show. We also want to thank Brian Brushwood man. Thank you so much for helping us kind of understand that end of things. We hear a lot from the other ends, but it was good to hear the boots on the ground report. Yeah, dude, I got religion real fast about under promising and over delivering. Speaking of which I have a gift for everybody. Go find world's greatest con season one. It came out this year. We just found out a few days ago that we were in the top 50 of all most subscribed podcasts on Pocket Casts. We're so, so proud of it. It's me, Dr Robert Young. It's a really, really, really good show. Please give it a listen. Yeah, it's another example of Justin Time inventory. I see this case Justin Robert Young. Yeah, go check it out, folks. It is very, very good. We are live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC. Find out more daily technology show dot com slash live back tomorrow with I as act are talk to you then. I hope you have enjoyed this program.