 Oh I also said that the other day and I was like, ah, I should say that maybe that's why how it got because I'd never I haven't said that a long. It's also like not even funny, but it somehow is funny Yeah, it doesn't really make sense. It's funny if you like really love airplane Roger Roger vector Victor. I threw an extra vector there Roger, huh Airplane 2 was unnecessary, but still kind of funny. There was one great visual joke in airplane 2 other than that I completely agree with you, but when they were doing the sort of like You know kind of like zoom up isn't oh, where does audio go? Oh, what happened Rob? It's a Rob. I think we just lost your audio. Oh, no. Oh wait now there it goes. I think you have a loose cable Oh, yeah, I hear you Me now. Yes. Yeah That was weird. I just muted myself because I had to cough It was like either really good timing or somehow I'm now controlling yours as well Correlation I'm muting again because nothing changed over here. That was weird Okay. All right. Let me try to meet me again and see if I know I am talking can anybody find Weird merely correlation. Yeah, it's it really did sound like a cable was loose cuz It came back in that sort of Well, if we're April 1, you would have to suspect that I'm messing with you, but Didn't suspect that does your cat frequent the top of your desk. I have a dog and she does not That's your dog frequent the top Here's a Ashby the dog Wait, I got a can you see her face there wait Oh, she's so cute Ashby's been with you guys for some time now. Yeah, we we go back. We've had Ashby for almost nine years. Wow That's a lot of Ashby. Yeah, she's a great member of our family Well, I remember when when Ashby first became part of your family. It was a little touch and go, you know She had to chill out a little bit Okay, so you went without again Rob. So I think it's gotta be a Mike thing Cable right there say something Rob. Hello. Hello. Oh, yeah, so don't touch your microphone. Wow That's this blue icicle thing. It's so fancy. I I Won't touch it again. Anyway. Yeah, Ashby has settled right in I I'm a rescue myself So we are very loyal to our rescues around here. Oh, yeah I I'd also have to rescue cats So I'm Sawyer or rescue dogs, right, right solidarity Yeah, it's got to be animate Yeah, also, I don't think just buying a house makes it a rescue Well, you're rescuing it from the worst couple There's no other fates this home will be torn down if no one buys it If I did rescue it all right, are we ready to go? I'm ready Hey, there's a lane You want to do the pre-roll sure do okay? Here we go. All right, three two Daily tech news show is powered by you to find out more head to daily tech news show comm slash supports This is the Daily Tech News for Monday April 2nd 2018 from DTNs headquarters in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt and from studio feline. I'm Sarah Lane We have with us returning guest Rob Reed author of after on and host of the after on podcast as well Rob Good to have you back great to be here. I am a very happy that we have had a couple of years with April 1st On the weekend because it really is disruptive to the news flow But you know next year we'll be back at it I actually really love April Fool's Day, but for for a few years it became a bit much Well, yeah You just get used to you know everything you read being like what kind of a weird thing Are they trying to do them like is this real or not? It's just it's exhausting if you actually have to work that day Austin yesterday because Google Maps started inserting pictures of Waldo everywhere and I as it happened I was in the middle of a bit of a map crisis when it happened and just having that damn face pop in and wave Every time we were trying to do our navigation was was really pretty tiring. Yeah a lot of times people need navigation for very serious reasons Our producer Roger Chang is here as well Roger. How are you? I'm doing fine I'm glad to hear it. No, are you telling the truth? I can't tell Let's start with a few tech things you should know Sources tell Bloomberg's Ian King and Mark Gurman that Apple plans to use its own chips and Macs starting as early as 2020 Project Kalamata, which is a really good name for a project as it's apparently called aims to make all Apple devices work seamlessly together Is that because Kalamata olives have the seed inside and this will have the seed of Apple's processor nevermind Yeah We'll get back to that in the potion Cloudflare launched a consumer DNS service at one dot one dot One dot one and one dot zero dot zero dot one and yes Cloudflare is aware that many of you use that as a garbage address and they're willing to take that no problem Cloudflare also promises it will be the internet's fastest DNS and the company will wipe all logs within 24 hours to ensure privacy All right, let's talk a little bit more about Mark Zuckerberg's campaign of apology this time Who's he talking to sir? Well in an interview with Vox CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his company claiming it makes decisions quote based on what's going to matter to our community He also argued that he is among companies who work hard to change people less and make their product available to more than just the rich Zuckerberg also used the word glib to describe Apple CEO Tim Cook's comment that Apple doesn't sell user data to advertisers I'm not really sure why glib was the word that he used but I guess it was the tone Well, that's what he said after that which is and not at all aligned with the truth Which seemed to be a slightly pro polite way of saying lying also kind of glib to say that Yeah, it is kind of glib. It is kind of glib. I I I really liked this article It gave me the impression and and this could be an impression Right, you may not trust a word that comes out of the man's mouth and that's fine But if you take him as his word it gave me the impression that that Mark Zuckerberg Acknowledges the problems with Facebook that he wants Facebook to emphasize the quality of our interactions with people over everything else Over advertising over time spent viewing. He's like what will make Facebook successful will be the quality of people's Interactions, we're doing a lot to an emphasize that people get meaningful interactions And we're doing research for that and we want to make Facebook a really good place What disappoints me is that he never acknowledges that one of the reasons I think I think and maybe he just does screeds of me Maybe he's not gonna acknowledge it one of the reasons I think Facebook's in the position it is is because it closes itself off At one point one example is in this article He talks about maybe someday having a third-party review panel so people can appeal things that have been blocked That if somebody complains about something and the Facebook staff blocks it you could appeal outside of Facebook and say hey Is this really? Should this really be blocked and to me? I'm like, yeah, that's what an open Platform looks like you you have that happen naturally in an open platform You're just trying to reinvent what you've walled yourself off from I Think it'd be really neat if the appeal route was to like a North Korean court Like so unexpected and kind of cool in a weird way. No, I don't think that would be cool in any way Unexpected I will go for Yeah, definitely very interesting It also the the whole sort of like hey, you know, we don't want to charge people a lot of money Facebook is for you know Not just the rich Okay But one could argue that you know people giving away their data in exchange for not being charged for things Is more expensive in the long run as well. So the you know, if you're going to Compare Apple and Facebook for example, it's like well, okay Yeah, Facebook is not selling a bunch of hardware and Apple sells a lot of expensive hardware But Apple also provides services that aren't always at a cost Apple not selling user data, which is something that obviously Facebook has been accused of and and is well aware of those problems That to some people is worth more even if it's not, you know dollars coming out of your wallet in the long run It's potentially detrimental. So I don't I think it's it's oversimplifying things to say We want the whole world to be on Facebook and we don't want to charge you because there is some cost depending who you are Yeah, there there is and and and It's a it's a good campaign speech I mean, I I don't think Mark Zuckerberg wants to run for president I think he sees Facebook as a government. He basically says so In this interview and he feels that he is acting as if he were a governmental leader and needs to act like one Which is why he goes out pseudo campaigning and meeting people and talking to them Whether that changes down the road and he decides to run for actual public office I don't know but I think he has an inflated sense of what Facebook should be CBRS is a spectrum that will be freed from exclusive military use in the US this year Google is leading a project to make private use of the spectrum without interference Now this would make wireless data cheaper to operate because carriers wouldn't have to own the spectrum Verizon AT&T T-Mobile, Comcast and Charter are all testing CBRS and recommending manufacturers include support in future hardware This would increase coverage possibilities as well because even though if you live in an area with a lot of Military activity it might not work as well in a lot of places. You don't have much military activity at all And so it's just open spectrum Yes, and it's specifically the Navy So I think landlocked states could be facing a bandwidth bonanza here because the Navy doesn't usually haul into I don't know South Dakota That's that's one of those things that I want to agree with you on but I'm always hesitant to say it because as soon as I do Somebody writes in is like well actually the Navy Test its planes in some landlocked area But but I think largely the point is well taken which is you know in in the middle of the country You don't get a lot of Navy planes flying around and if that's who makes the use of CBRS for the most part then Yeah What is I think unarguable is there's a lot of unused spectrum in this space and Google's trying to make a system that will make good use of it and it's a hundred and fifty megahertz, right? I mean, it's a huge it's a big slice of spectrum Yeah, and what they're trying to do is is make it smart so that if Military use is happening that gets prioritized And then second would be Somebody like Verizon who's like oh, I'm gonna use this network And then there would be an open platform It seems like down below it and then squatters get no benefit And so one of the things that the article noted was that if somebody has technically bought the spectrum But they're not using it They're just kind of sitting there then lower priority people can actually use that spectrum as well So it goes Navy official owner and if official owners not using it right down to the next party, which is great Excuse me the Wall Street Journal reports that as Amazon looks for its new second headquarters and is courting cities for that It's asking cities that are in the running to provide SAT and ACT scores You know like like high school students when Amazon first announced its expanded headquarters search It listed education as a very important factor in choosing the city Company also said that it's request for proposals that it would invest five billion dollars over ten years to creating at second headquarters In whatever city is ultimately chosen the project also potentially means up to fifty thousand new employees or new jobs anyway I Think it's an interesting insight into what Amazon's after right they they want not just college educated It looks like they're looking because they're looking at SAT and ACT scores. They're like, what's the funnel into college? You know what do you have a well-developed high school? System that will that will feed these people in I mean they they are very forward to the not forward long-term thinkers at the same time it also puts a lot of emphasis on Certain tests that not everybody believes is the best indicator of like the new smart workforce that might work for Amazon You know, it doesn't I guess if you had a bunch of you know, great SAT scores You might say oh, yeah good schools, but it doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to help Amazon at some new headquarters although when you're looking at fifty thousand potential new positions, I Guess if you're Amazon and you're gonna invest a lot of money into some new place You want or you know workforce that is demonstrated that you know that education base is strong They should make the mayors take the SATs for each of these cities. I think and also fill out maybe an essay test I wonder if they just have a huge amount of intern positions that they're looking to fill as soon as they ramp up No, they don't have fifty thousand intern positions. Oh, no, not fifty thousand I think they're mostly looking like are we gonna have an educated workforce local to this and and and I think I Think they also want it sounds like they want an urban situation They want to put their headquarters in a downtown Which is interesting as well The economic times says its sources say Google presented a mid-range version of the pixel smartphone in Trade meetings held in Malaysia the UK and US last month The device would launch around July or August with the focus on price sensitive markets like India Google is also expected to bring the Google home pixel book and the forthcoming pixel three to India soon Hindi was added to Google Assistant last month So that kind of paves the way for a lot of this pixel three is expected to arrive in October And yeah, Hindi and English you got those on there You can reach a large part not 100% but you can reach a large part of the Indian market And the Indian market scene is an important one to move into by a lot of people. So I you know Would you look at the pixel as a competitor to Samsung or the iPhone? One of the issues is it's available in eight countries Samsung's available in hundred plus countries So you if you really want to be in this game for real, you've got to get into more countries Worldwide and it seems like that's the direction Google is moving Yeah, and India is such a vital market as well in a weird way I don't follow what goes on in the Android platform very closely And so this is probably an ignorant thing to say but I was kind of surprised at The fact that it's taken them this long to try to push their sort of defining Flagship II this is Android done right phone Into a middle price point of the cheapest pixel right now is 649 bucks. That ain't cheap. Yeah Well, they were the middle ground with Nexus phones for the longest time They were and then they dumped that to do the pixel is a very Google thing to do like We'll just throw out everything we did with one project move to a new project and then start to replicate the old project inside the new project Yeah, yeah ESPN announced its standalone sports streaming service called ESPN plus will launch April 12th for $5 a month The service will include live sports not carried on ESPN's main cable networks as well as access to ESPN originals Sports will come with MLB NHL MLS college sports boxing PGA golf tennis and others So I was a surprise to me to see MLB and NHL Listed here. I didn't realize they would they would those are expensive rights Especially the MLB to get and I didn't realize they would put any such games on this service this service Feels like it's a things that are left over because we bought rights to a lot of stuff and couldn't use it on our main channels I don't think it'll be a lot of MLB games to be honest Those will mostly put be put on ESPN and ESPN too, but I don't know Rob. You were at Disney World recently Yes I do feel I have very personal insights into this because I did spend much of the past weekend at Disney World And of course Disney is the owner of ESPN I'm just gonna say it was the talk of the Magic Kingdom this new service I was five years old too, so that was kind of interesting. Oh, wow, that's crazy They they have an ESPN sports zone usually outside of those places. Yeah. Yeah Well, the interesting thing is ESPN has lost almost 13 million Subscribers over the last six years now a lot of that was just people Cutting the cable and as by dint of that losing ESPN and who knows how many of these people were actually watching ESPN to begin With but this is you know They've got to start bobbing and weaving a little bit as cable cutting becomes more and more of a thing and 13 million subscribers is a lot, you know, however you cut them and however you minimize them Yeah, and this is a smart move I mean it feels like the kind of product that you have to really be a sports fanatic You know a fan of the CFL or college softball To really justify five dollars a month to pay for this which isn't that much but it's building the groundwork, right? This I Imagine that this service will continue to grow and it's an add-on to the ESPN app You don't get a separate app It's gonna be one of those things where you're logged in with your PlayStation view account or your Comcast account And then you see something and you're like, oh, I want to watch that and it's like hey great You want to watch this sign up for ESPN plus five dollars a month barely miss it and you'll get access to all this extra stuff Hey folks if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes Be sure to subscribe to Daily Tech headlines at Daily Tech headlines Dot-com still available on the Amazon Echo the Google home and the anchor app as well as as a regular podcast Alright Friday Tesla posted that the Model X car that was involved in a fatal crash in, California Had autopilot active during the crash and that the driver's hands were not on the steering wheel in the six seconds prior to The crash that warnings to put hands on the steering wheel had been delivered a few times prior to the crash The United States National Transportation Safety Board criticized Tesla for releasing the information the investigation is still ongoing I don't like it if people give information partway through So it's it's interesting that Tesla made that because it's not necessarily flattering to Tesla But I think they were trying to show hey, this is not you know, this is not what a lot of people think it is We don't want this to leak out. We want to control the information and tell you yeah autopilot was on No, the guy didn't have his hands on the wheel and he's supposed to with autopilot now one of the reasons we bring this up though is Rob you had the chance to talk with Rodney Brooks on the latest episode of after on Turns out he's an interesting person to talk to about self-driving cars. Why is that? Yeah? Well Rodney is goes back almost to the dawn of two industries robotics and artificial intelligence and Those are the two things that clearly come together when it comes to self-driving So just a quick background about the show So my podcast is called after on the after on podcast and it's long unhurried interviews with thinkers founders and scientists like Rodney and we actually recorded this episode before the two tragedies in self-driving the one in Phoenix and obviously this very very recent one in Mountain View and Rodney Just his to hit his background again when he entered the field of robotics There were literally three mobile robots in the entire world was back in the 70s when he came out to Stanford to study robotics And then he headed MIT's AI lab and he actually studied AI before it was really it was barely even named And he studied it by under the person who named AI So he's been at that intersection all along and he is a little bit of a skeptic when it comes to self-driving He believes it will happen. We'll save lots of lives long-term and it'll be very powerful but he believes that a lot of people in the industry are really Extremely optimistic when they talk about the timeframe of rolling out different services and he's gotten a little bit of pushback from people from that and You know probably less so this week with these you know two terrible accidents coming right on each other's heels Just you know, obviously by coincidence But in our interview we spent about 10 minutes talking about self-driving and he made a lot of really kind of intriguing and to me points I'd never heard before Supporting his sense of skepticism about how quickly it's going to come out. Do we have a range of people in our audience? Some people think that you know the these sorts of setbacks You can you can argue that the Tesla crash may not be an example of a self-driving car This may be just an example of someone, you know, not paying attention while driving which can happen if you have auto assist or not on Certainly the Uber one is is without controversy a setback But we have we have people who say oh, that's just a setback We'll figure it out and we'll move past it and we're gonna get these things soon We have people who ride in and say it's all overhyped It's never gonna happen and you know, and you're irresponsible We're even talking about it. I think the important thing with Rodney Brooks in your interview is he's not a skeptic on everything He is actually oh more optimistic than some people about certain topics. Why is he thinking that this, you know What does he think about auto autonomous cars? Well, I think he focuses on a lot of things that he believes that a lot of the pundits and even some of the people in the Companies are just ignoring to me. Here's one of the really intriguing ones How often when you get picked up by a Lyft or an Uber does that driver? technically violate the law in double parking in crossing over double yellow line, whatever it is I would say when I'm getting picked up and it tends to be in dense urban cores like New York City in San Francisco Where I spend most of the time. It's a pretty high percentage. It may even be a majority that the driver Technically violates the law. They pull into a bus lane. They do whatever it is and both the driver and the passenger No, that's fine. Probably a passing police officer would know that's fine. These are just the things that we do Well, how do you tell a self-driving service? It's fine to violate the law 40 or 50 times a day You kind of can't do that, right? And you've got to figure out how you work around that What happens if a car has to go up a one-way street because a garbage truck or Construction has blocked the street and you your only way out is to cross a double yellow line or go wrong Way on a one-way street or wait six hours There's a lot of these cases which actually are confronted by Uber and Lyft drivers Probably dozens and dozens of times per day that get a little bit trickier when you start doing things Programmatically and then he talks about the social cues that go on between people between drivers and pedestrians And then he came up with I think he just came up with it in the course of the interview He said what about teasing cars and he came up with this idea of like hey, I'm a teenager I'm a little bit bored. I know a self-driving car is never going to run me over for liability reasons And it's really really capable. Why don't I get out and pretend I'm jumping in the middle of the road so car teasing and you know a whole bunch of nuances You know that I hadn't thought of now when we talk about self-driving we often talk about the so-called trolley problem Which is what happens if the car is going down the road and you have to choose between running over a nun and Running over to escaped convicts We talk about that a great deal We don't talk about some of these subtleties and I think that he makes the point It's a strong one that these subtleties particularly when they tangle with legality Are really going to slow down the rollout But long-term he certainly believes we're gonna get there just not as quickly as some of us would hope myself included I like it to be switched on tomorrow. I've never driven a Tesla in autopilot mode but I have a friend who goes back and forth from San Francisco to LA because he's from the Bay Area and he lives down here and He a lot of that part of that road is just sort of going straight not a ton of traffic Whatever, you know, just make sure you don't hit, you know other trucks But it's it's more or less kind of monotonous and you know, he's mentioned like yeah I have a movie on sometimes. Oh, you know, and I'm like wow I mean it seems like it's The drivers is as we get more of this autonomous technology That's even you know, either an Uber or a Tesla or whatever, you know And there's just going to be more of it as you try to figure it out It's like you are encouraged to pay less attention Because that's the point right the car is smart enough that you can pay less attention But then you have stories like this where it's like well, the driver was warned put your hands back on the wheel Well, I don't know what those warnings sound like I've never heard it myself But this is like this funny gray area. We're in now where it's like it won't be great The you know the cars will just drive us and then we have these incidents where it's like hmm Doesn't sound like you were paying enough attention. Well autopilot mode is supposed to make us pay less attention, right? That's the whole point of it. It's just not working that well yet Well Tesla did make the interesting and I think important point and they they're probably going to get a fair amount of Flak for this and they did it carefully where they said that you know We want to point out and we have you know, you know, incredible empathy and sympathy for you know, the victim family friends But there are roughly four times as many miles driven by a Tesla in you know, assist mode They're four times in miles driven perfect fatality the normal human drivers And so let's not lose sight of that and let's not throw the baby out with the bath water It's terrible that this accident happened But we would argue that for this accident three others were prevented that would have lost it resulted in a loss of life and I'm sure that they struggled mightily with should we say that in this press release so soon after the accident But what they said they explicitly put their thinking in the press release They said we don't want the lives that can in future be saved by self-driving to be put in jeopardy because people Overreact to an incident like this and lose sight of the fact that you know arguably by the math We've saved multiple lives for each one that is tragically lost in the circumstance So it's going to be I'm increasingly in agreement with Rodney's points in my interview But it's not going to be as smooth and as fast as we thought because there are these strange agonizing and also, you know legally complex issues They're going to come up again and again and again as we start rolling this stuff out Yeah, and I think that's what's the most interesting about that perspective and it's not just Rodney's I've heard this from other people which is it's yes The technology is there and yes, we can solve all these problems. None of these are our killers even even weather even winter driving none of these are our killers, but We will have to solve them slower than people are expecting because they're not as easily solved as the Optimists would like to imply so and and I think the legality thing is a good one I can think of a million ways we could try to solve that Certainly machine learning is capable of learning when to fudge things, but then it's the liability part Well, okay, if we've taught machine learning when to fudge things when do we punish it for fudging things wrong? We have laws for a reason right or maybe we adapt the laws Maybe we have to change the laws to be more sensible Because we've we were like and we've let it slide because we all figured out how to work it out But now that we have automated systems We need to come up with a more workable system of laws that doesn't require fudging But all of that stuff takes time anytime you're talking about anything involving laws It's going to take a lot of time and that that is a bigger Impedance to the development of autonomous cars I think than the technology itself and it's interesting to hear that coming from Rodney because he's certainly no Luddite I mean, this is the person who invented the Roomba. He invented the Pac-Bot, which you know 6500 of them deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq Diffusing all those IEDs. He is you know, he is no cringing future-fearing Luddite by any stretch of the imagination. So He did this great blog post on January 1st We made dated predictions of lots of things about a third or maybe a quarter Then we're pertaining to self-driving cars And I think it's great that he has the courage to go out and put dates on his predictions and hold himself to account and Be put in a position where he will be either be clearly right or clearly wrong Um, and it is interesting getting these cautionary notes from somebody who is very much a futurist And whose vision has had a lot to do with the fact that we've gotten to this point already Yeah, Rodney Brooks thinks we'll have a labor shortage That the the robots won't take our jobs So go listen to after on to find out a little more about that perspective And thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com and facebook.com slash dailytechnewshow Shall we go across the pond? Let's let's check in across the great wide Atlantic Ocean Otherwise the pond to find out what's been happening in the uk on text message Hey, thanks guys this week We have taken a british look on the latest in the facebook data scandal Specifically discussing the fact that Mark Zuckerberg has said he is not going to appear before a uk Committee of lawmakers to give evidence and this has been seen as a very very bad PR move in britain to say the least We've also got some discussion around how europe is going to potentially dump 300,000 ukowned.eu domains once we leave the european union all that and more at techpodcast.uk Yes That's there's so many things falling out of brexit where the eu is like well if we don't fix this We're just gonna take out here because only people live in the eu can have died eu So unless you want to figure that out i'm certain some of them will be figured out but I wonder uh, so check out tech's message if you'd like to know more Thanks, Nate linkson and thanks to rob reed rob. We were talking about uh after on what is on the next episode So people can look forward to what's coming up. Yeah, actually the next episode goes up tomorrow So depending on when people see this episode of dts. It may already be up So rodney brooks's episode 23 we talked about that the next episode Is going to be a really long interview with george church Who is widely considered to be the leading? But uh bio engineer and probably the top person worldwide in genomics today Uh, he is a co-inventor of crisper his work on the human genome project actually predated The official start of that project and he is one of the most widely cited people and the co-founder Of 22 startups all this while running a very busy and very high profile academic lab at harvard He and I talk all about what's happening in synthetic biology We go through a series of definitions that I think will help people Frame synthetic biology better in their minds and really contextualize this amazing thing that george helped invent called crisper and we talk about a lot of other really cool things and I think that um Life is about to get much more interesting very quickly Due to senbio a lot quicker than I thought going into the interview So that will be up starting tomorrow as we sit here But perhaps today when you dear listener are listening if you are in fact listening on tuesday instead of monday time travel man, just problem with everything Thank you patrons, uh, it is uh the second of the month Which means uh, some of you are are still actually having your pledges processed And we thank every single one of you who keeps this show running. We got seven more patrons than last month So huge thanks to you for that. I want to keep it going to get at least one more Next month, so don't cancel Unless unless you have to we understand uh financial difficulties happen But we've got all kinds of good things coming this month including a round table with amber mac and gen cutter at the end of the month So check out all the new perks are posted up at patreon.com Slash d t n s patrons non patrons and everybody in between We love to get your feedback questions comments ideas all of it our email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com We're live monday through friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 utc And you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with our guest lamar wilson talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frog pants dot com And I know a lot of you guys appreciate the show notes The expanded show notes that are more than just the google doc Big thanks to ethan cayne who's back doing that. He just he just finished today's right now Like the show wasn't even over. He was done with the show notes. Amazing. He lives in the future. He does. Oh my gosh more time travel Time travels the new uh, has the new uh, vampires So I got a I got a question about patreon because i'm brand new to it myself Is the second of the month when people roll off if they've turned off their credit card or whatever it is Like does it all happen on one day? It's the first it's just sort of every month It starts on the first and and for for one as large as us It usually takes a few days for everything to get processed usually it's all done by the fifth Okay, because that that that's interesting because um, I was I went into yesterday the first uh with 204 patrons and I was feeling pretty good about it just started about a month ago Oh, right. Yeah, and then it rolled back. I started back in february So I mean I am experiencing You know, whatever drives this and then I looked I'm like, oh my god I'm down to 202. I see why you're asking this I went backward, but now up to 207. So never Look Never look at your patreon numbers between the first and the fifth. It would drive you crazy Well, they dipped and then they went back up again, but because they're all about 170 since they're in So I'm okay with that, you know They're an estimate Of what they think you'll have at the end of the month And on the first of the month when it's going through and like oh that credit card didn't process Well, hold on we need to reprocess it Uh that number fluctuates wildly Got it because it's it's dealing with all of this change and then by the fifth They've they've reprocessed credit cards that work And they they found which ones are like that. This one just isn't working and then it sort of levels out Well, good. Well, I did see the dip and I I feel the fact that I'm clawing my way past the dip Back to an all-time high. Oh, yeah good about that But it was a little sad yesterday when I saw myself going backward and I was afraid I was going to see that every day But it never really rained that always expected on the first. Yeah Because that's just the way the system works when it's going through and like oh that didn't work that didn't work That didn't work. It's so it artificially drops. Thank you for the the project. Yeah Now I remember the first time that happened. I was like, oh my god, we're losing everybody They hate my show they hate my show Well, you know, it's I mean they do hate my show, but that wasn't people drop off for reasons that are not credit card oriented However, it is interesting because I figured that everybody would just be on their own 30 day cycle That's how it used to be when we were running Rhapsody is like, you know You'd have some people that build on the 17th and some on the 21st And someone went backward yesterday. I was like, oh my god. This is what happens when you've got more than You know a couple hundred patrons. This is going to happen every day. Maybe I've peaked You know, I was like I was talking to Morgan. It's like honey. I think I've peaked No, no, that's all every single day and for the first time I've gotten to the point Where I had what is non euphemistically and without any kind of irony called in business negative gross Uh also notice shrinkage, but okay, so I'll have to do this once week That's great news and like I said I've already clawed myself my way out of that whole And I'll remember this in fact I'm going to put a reminder in my calendar to not freak out Yeah on a first just don't look between the first and the fifth. I'll put a reminder. Don't look at patreon Five days or just you know, don't take those numbers seriously until the fifth. That's what they shake out funny story They wanted to move to a billing system like you're talking about where you just get charged the moment you pledge and you're on You're on 30 day cycle And that caused the whole fiasco in december that they then backed off of what was that? I don't remember that so in december patreon Said we're going to change it to this 30 rolling 30 month thing problem is because of that when we Bill it's going to cost more because right now we can put all of your things through as one transaction And there's certain processing fees that are per transaction So if we're doing it everybody at a different date, you're going to have more transactions So creators to make sure that you don't have to pay that We're going to have that processing fee paid by the supporter Because the supporter will barely notice it because it's a small percentage. Well, yeah, but it's not a round number anymore They'll notice it in a heart. Also, I play five blocks. What am I getting charged 521? That would the supporters definitely noticed it because a lot of them say well, wait a minute I'm supporting 20 different people And now I'm going to have you just raised. Yeah, you only raised me, you know Five cents, but it was across You know five cents per dollar across 30 different supporters. Some of them. I'm supporting at five dollars You just you know, I and so people started canceling their pledges because they couldn't support as many people and they backed off That's why I Fiasco, huh? That's a good name for it. Yeah, I don't remember asking. I get it. Yeah It's an apt description though. Yes, indeed. All right Show tie it all Autonomous road rage and uh car teasing Car teasing I think is I think it's a phrase that roddy just came up with when we were talking and it just tickles me But I'm obviously biased so I shouldn't have a vote in this. Oh, no, it's great. I love it. What do you think, sarah? Uh Sure car teasing It's the new cow tipping, isn't it? Or maybe car teasing colon the new cow tipping question mark We'll can hmm The only my only reservation is that it kind, you know, it's like We were discussing an incident where somebody died. Oh true You know just how about slowing down self-driving? Very apt. Okay. We'll do that descriptive Yeah, it is tricky when you've got fatalities involved the whimsical names become less funny Again, great. Can you guys hear me? Yes, we You're back. You're back though Or are you I'm not looking guys. Luckily this didn't happen during the help problem. I can't I'm not so I still can't hear you Am I audible? Don't touch anything you were just touching. Oh wait. Now I can't hear you Okay, I was holding it. I'm holding the plug into the mic This blue icicle thing is not all that it's cracked up to be. Okay, I'm gonna let go of it now Let's see if I go mute. You can still hear me, right? Yes. Okay, good Now are you using a xlr cable between the icicle and the mic? Yeah, I'm using um, yeah, there's an xlr The icicle is kind of an xlr adapter that goes to uh usb. I believe right? Yeah Yeah, so the the icicle itself is you plug a mic into an xlr And what I've been touching at the bottom of it is just sort of the usb cable that Connects the icicle to my mac so maybe I just should replace that cable and quit blaming blue icicle and the good people there Do you but I think what roger was asking is is there a cable between your mic and the icicle? No I'm wondering if maybe you want because it sounds like you're having a strain cable strain issue where it's pulling on Pulling on it. It was pretty loose over here. It's it's a couple feet of slack Um, but you know, we got through the episode and I'll look at it More significantly, I'll have morgan look at it because she's much smarter about all things technical than I am Well, tell morgan uh that uh my experience with the icicle is it is a little delicate. Yeah so sometimes that Plasticy connection thing starts to to get a little wonky and using a cable between the mic and the icicle We'll obviate that because the mic itself can strain it more than Right. Well, check out. Um when it goes up tomorrow check out the george church episode I think all of you guys will be I was blown away by some of the things that he has in a five-year time frame And I came out of that interview. This is a couple weeks ago kind of walking on air Feeling like there's some really amazing stuff that's around the corner and george is a very Understated he's not a there's not a drop of p.t. Barnum's blood in him. Right. He's a pretty humble understated guy And um and I ran it by uh another uh genomicist Basically, you know, he and I did some sort of color commentary on it and our our extra for patrons thing And this guy's like, yeah, no it's george's is the guy and his predictions have had a habit of being conservative Over the past 25 years that he's been a prominent person on the scene. So Uh the organ shortage may end Zeno transplantation pig organs into Humans, which there's all kinds of cool stuff coming. Anyway, I'm just I'm plathering now, obviously I Okay, so one of the the uh after on episodes when when I was doing them with you for the book That I was so excited about was involving, you know, the programmable dna and all of that So I'm pretty excited to hear more along these lines. It's Yeah, and Andy was one of the people Andy Hessel that that episode. I think it was my Fourth episode He was one of the people uh who introduced me to george and then a later guest also did And in the world of genomics, I mean getting george. It's really strange. It's like There's no other field that I know of Where if you ask like hey, who's the top person in the field normally you'll hear well, there isn't one There's these five or six people, right or five or six names will come up in genomics in synthetic biology It is literally just unanimity. It's always while there's george church And then it's almost like the first one michael jackson with michael jackson Um like michael jordan with basketball in the 80s right is just this Unanimity that you don't get anywhere else. So it was pretty pretty darn exciting. We sat down for over two hours Uh like end of day's weather in boston on a friday afternoon So I was expecting him to say dude. I got five minutes and hop but we really really spent a great deal of time and we structured the conversation in a way To really be very uh explanatory about you know How is genetic sequencing different from editing different from synthesis different from assembly and now that we've got all these baseline terms together Let's go into this sort of the wild blue yonder of the near future And things that are going to be potentially very very transformative. I think all human society in the next five to 10 years So anyway, that was that was fun from the guy who brought you crisper. I mean not the only guy right but still Yeah, he basically is the guy who brought us crisper. I mean there are a lot of there There are a lot of names on the patents as there should be but he did the first work You know he did the first work and probably the most influential work Um, well, I just got a response from this dog fostering organization that I was Yeah, I'm you know, I'm not ready to get a dog. Um, but I like the idea of being part of you know Helping that you know that the system work better. Um, and they just got back to me and said oh got your application Sounds really good. Let's talk Cool It is but it's marlies mutts. Um, marlies mutts is um, I uh, they're in particular I I know some folks who work with incarcerated people and um, One of the programs not the only one but one of the programs with them is That uh, certain dogs are placed with uh, you know a good match Uh, and somebody who's in jail, um helps, uh, you know train them and you know Get them to you know, be more comfortable with the people and you know, it's a temporary situation But um, they've got a really great instagram page and I'm just like Looking at it crying one day like I really want to volunteer these people. They seem like such angels. So maybe I will That's very cool. Yeah, it's hard for me for us to foster dogs because we want to always keep Yeah, exactly It takes it takes a special kind of person and and they exist Yeah to do it on the rotating basis Well, I mean and I'm not totally sure it's like It would depend on the dog, of course, but it's like, you know, I I already have animals You know, I I'm not necessarily the idea isn't just to like get a bunch of dog crates in here and like go nuts But to be able to be part of you know, placing them and and you know, just hanging out with them and I worked at the spca in san francisco years ago and um Eventually I got busy and I couldn't do it anymore on the days that I wanted to but it was very rewarding You know just makes you feel good. Yeah, that's very cool. Yeah Oh Rob your icicle You just went mute you muted yourself in google. No google probably auto muted him when it noticed that his mic wasn't Working properly that happens So you'll need to unmute and hang out there and then No There you are. You're back. Yeah, see it has that telltale crackle Whenever you connect again that really sounds cable based The other solution is to buy a sure There's a sure adapter It's a little more expensive, but it's a little it's a little more durable Could you send me a link because I'm going to do that I think it's time now and certainly the thing I asked I thought I was asking you but I was just asking ashby the dog because I was on mute Does this thing do they literally send dogs into the prisons to be trained? Yes, really So is it minimum security? Like I can't imagine all prisons. I was just at san quentin actually last week literally Doing a visit with last mile, which is one of these groups that works with incarcerated folks And I couldn't imagine dogs at san quintin. So is it is it lower security prisons or? Well, I'm going to have to get back to you on that. But yes, I uh, I'm under the impression that I mean, these are prisons where it's like they've got these whole kind of like it's like it almost looks like I don't know Well, and they just you know, they've got like little things, you know for the dogs to jump over and you know The whole thing is is training. That's cool. It's training. Yeah. So it's like Yeah, not everybody who's you know in prison for whatever reason is is going to be a good match for the sort of thing And I don't know that much about it. But I looked at um I looked at enough for the photos where I was like, wow, you know, if this is something that was it's something I could do in la that was you know, not super time prohibitive or whatever. I I'd I'd like to know more so Can you guys see ashby again? We got hi ashby Oh, buddy Oh What a sweetheart Oh So before we shut down the stream, I want to remind folks that I have a follow-up to pilot x funding on ink shares right now Yeah, it's called Trigor t-r-i-g-o-r And we're just shy of 40 funded. You could be the person who pushes it past the 40 percent mark How does ink share work? I don't even know of this. Is it like a Kickstarter for books? Ink shares is what I did for pilot x and it's exactly that uh, if we get 750 pre-orders it gets published So ink shares works like a normal publisher everywhere except the slush read Uh, the what what the editors and slush readers would normally do is done by the crowd And then once it gets to 750 pre-orders, then it goes to a professional editor and gets a marketing plan and the whole ball of wax So very cool. Yeah So you can go to ink shares dot com search for t-r-i-g-o-r just search for my name And take a look there's a couple sample chapters up there as well And I know a bunch of you guys read pilot x so if you liked that and you would like more ink shares dot com Rob, thanks again for joining us man. That was a really good conversation Thank you as always for having me. I'm always delighted to be on this show And it's very kind of you to put me in my work in front of your substantially vastly larger audience It's very very cool. I really appreciate it. It's easy when you have smart people coming on talking about interesting things Yeah, I get good guests. I've been very blessed in that regard. No, I met you coming on our show Oh, you do the same thing on your show I just come in with a transitive property of smartness of the guests who have hopefully rubbed off Everyone will hug right now and then I'll stop the stream All right, thanks Roger. All right. See you guys tomorrow. See y'all