 Okay, gives us a chance to make sure everything's working before we actually start the show. And so far so good. Laura, you're in San Francisco, right? Yeah, Bay Area. Nice. And you guys are in LA? Yeah, all three of us are. Yeah. I was just telling somebody my last three years in San Francisco because I lived there for a million years. We're right next to Sightglass Coffee and Soma. And I was explaining to a friend here in LA, Sightglass, because it's like hard to get in LA for whatever reason. And he was like, yeah, that sounds nice. And I'm like, you don't know how nice it was. It's like the one thing about San Francisco besides beloved friends, I truly mess on a daily basis. I don't remember if it was Sightglass or if it was a different one that I found in Montreal and I couldn't find it in LA. Okay. Yeah, somebody claims that they found somebody who carries Sightglass Coffee like on the West Side somewhere, I don't know, some rando cafe I've never heard of. But I'm like, I'm not going to disrupt my life for it, but I am going to miss it. Is it something you can order? No. Oh, okay. Although, I don't know. You could probably figure something out, but... Yeah, because you can order Blue Bottle. But there's a Blue Bottle near me. Like, I don't know. I'm just saying. I wonder, because Blue Bottle bought Tonks, which was an LA company that delivered. And now they do this. Actually, I didn't know that. Well, yeah, I have plenty of coffee nearby. It's all be okay. But I just miss going to Sightglass. The coffee's good, but I also liked, it was just one of my little favorite San Francisco experiences. I lived in LA for a while. It wasn't my favorite place. I'm not a big car person. Even though I moved up here, and so I moved back to New York after LA, but now that I moved back here, I didn't buy a car again because I was like, oh, my God, that was so horrific in LA. I would rather. So I live near a bar, and I ride my bike mostly, or I live, and it's fine. I actually drive my car less in LA than I did in San Francisco when I lived up there. Oh, really? It's just all about where you live and what you need to do. Because I happened to find a nice walkable neighborhood, and now I work from home. So, you know... Well, I was actually working from home when I lived there, but it's still, I don't know. If you're used to New York, it's like a big, nothing's the same as New York. Well, it's weird because we drive, but I drive shorter distances because we live so close to everything, which was unlike when I lived in San Francisco, I would need to drive a good, you know, eight to 10 miles to get somewhere, like a Costco or something. Here, there's like two Costco's within a five mile radius of me. Yeah, well, LA's just a bigger city, obviously. Yeah. All right, you guys ready? I'm ready. All right. Here we go. The Daily Tech News show is powered by its listeners, not outside organizations. If you get value from the show, consider giving a little back. As little as a dollar a month keeps great tech news and analysis coming your way commercial-free. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, March 26, 2018 from DTNS headquarters in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline. I'm Sarah Lane. Joining us today, very happy to have the host of the Unchained and Unconfirmed podcast, Laura Shitens with us. Welcome, Laura. Hi. Thanks for having me. Thank you for joining us. We're going to talk, of course, a little bit about cryptocurrency here in a little bit, which is, it sounds like something you're constantly talking about. Constantly talking and thinking about and, yes, dreaming about it seriously. Oh, good. The blockchain of dreams. I can already see it. That would be scary. I've never talked about licensing Unchained Melody for your show, because that would just be amazing. I've actually never thought of that, but I will look into that. Yeah, free advice. Our producer, Roger Chang, is here as well. Roger, how are you feeling? Much better. Much better. Good to have you back. Yay. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Uber agreed to sell its Southeast Asian ride-hailing business to Singapore-based Grab, which leaves Indonesia's Gojek backed by Google Intensent as the only other major ride-hailing and meal delivery competition in that region. Uber will take 27.5 stake in Grab as part of the deal. The competition commission of Singapore still has to approve the acquisition for it to go through. XTA Developers reports that Google logins on unlicensed devices now fail. You get a device not certified by Google Message. This is likely to stop official Google Android apps from being distributed without Google's permission outside of the Play Store. There's a lot of knockoffs. They use Android, don't have the license, but sideload the Google apps anyway. If you're a user of a custom ROM, there is a workaround. You have to register your Android ID with the Google account. That generally requires hooking it up to a PC and running some Dev software, but it can be done if you need to get around that restriction. Microsoft released a public version of its Edge browser for iPad and Android tablets today, Monday. The browser has a continue-on-PC function, very helpful, and scales the Edge interface for tablet screens. New York Times says entertainment executives told that Apple plans to roll out its new TV programming next year, between March and summer 2019. Apple currently has 12 TV projects that we know of in the works. All right, let's talk a little bit more about Facebook. I know we talked a lot about it last week, but there's something else going on. Something new, right? Yeah, because there always is. This weekend, Dylan McKay, who's not fictional person on Beverly Hills 90210, real person, and a few other folks found that their call history up to mid last year, so 2017, mid 2017, was stored in their Facebook data prior to Android 4.1, giving permission to Facebook's Android app to access contacts also gave it access to your call history. That API was depreciated in October of 2017, when most of the collection seems to have stopped, seems to anyway. Facebook Lite and Messenger may still ask explicitly for call and text logs. However, requesting a purge of contacts doesn't seem to successfully delete the call history. Facebook now says the feature was used only to find friends and that users always had control over the data. In related news, the FTC confirmed Monday its investigating Facebook and its data practices in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Yeah, so this is again, much like Cambridge Analytica, an example of Facebook being bit by its past permissions. They've changed the way this API works. It doesn't do this anymore, but everybody's sniffing around to find out what Facebook has been up to. And so when people found this in there, they're getting upset. Facebook's saying, hey, we always ask for your permission and we ask even better now that we used to, but Laura, what do you make of this? Well, there was a lot of chatter in the crypto community about how blockchains will enable us to manage our privacy. And so in the future, we should have a crypto based social network where we would be in control of our privacy and the use of cryptographic private public keys would enable us to reveal whatever we wanted to whoever we wanted. And so things like this wouldn't happen. But as I was talking about in the pre-show, I think a lot of people get really scandalized when news like this breaks. And then afterward, it just sort of blows over and people keep signing away their privacy. It's going to continue. I imagine we're going to have a few more revelations like this, especially of what Facebook used to do. Facebook changing policies, as you mentioned, Tom, is one thing. Knowing that somebody might look back on how the policy used to be and be like, well, that doesn't seem right. What's going on here? And then having the purging of data not be successful, that's the thing is if you were to put it all together, Facebook saying, changing policies, want to purge your data, here's how to do it, it will work. And we're very clear and communicative about this. Probably would have been a different story altogether. Well, and maybe it'll take a day. Sometimes when you press delete on stuff, data takes a while to clear out of the cached servers and all of that. Well, it's for a few days into this now. Fortune's Grace Donnelly has a great explainer of how SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch last August 24th tore a hole in the ionosphere big enough to reduce GPS accuracy. Now, usually, rockets take a curving trajectory and they don't tear up the ionosphere as much because they have heavy payloads and they don't want to go straight up. But since the Falcon 9's payload was light, it took a nearly vertical path that caused circular shock waves that punched a 559 mile hole in the ionosphere for about three hours. A paper in the journal Space Weather estimates that about a one meter error in GPS could have resulted, though no errors were detected. The point of the paper was to say if we get more of these rockets taking light payloads up and going straight through and we start to punch holes regularly in the ionosphere, this could cause issues. So these holes are not permanent, if I understand the story correctly. Right. No, it only lasted for about three hours. Three hours. Okay. And one meter, if you were to say, okay, well, we don't want two rockets to crash into each other, right? They're probably going to win. It's changing it for us on the ground. It's like suddenly your GPS downstairs don't work as accurately. Oh, well, yeah. I mean, a meter is not the end of the world, but if it were any more than that. What if we have 20 different private space agencies around the world punching holes in the ionosphere and we get a 20-meter error, which is one of the scenarios speculated on in this paper? Yeah, then my Uber Eats is not going to come to the right address. Well, you mean your grab, because you live in Singapore now. Right. This is where you, Laura. A day area. No, you're fine. She's like, they're like 40 companies with better solutions already. Ionosphere. Myonosphere. I've never even heard of the ionosphere. I've learned something new today. There you go. Yeah, I know. Yeah. It's a weird truth. Forging new ground. Usually what keeps radio waves bouncing back. So it's one of the reasons we're able to do global broadcasts, which is one of the problems of a bunch of hole in it. Suddenly, things don't work the same way. Ford and Alibaba are partnering on a car vending machine in Guangzhou, China. We talked about the fact that this was happening. Oh, it's happened. Now, the multi-story super test drive center, as it's called, has dozens of Ford vehicles. It looks like about 20 or so. If you haven't seen pictures of it, it's, I don't know, pretty impressive. Mechanical system lowers the selected car to the street because they're kind of stacked on top of each other. Users select a car they want from the Team All app, and then they have an option to take it for a three-day test drive. Now, maybe I'm just the kind of person who abuses things like this, but I mean, isn't this just getting a free rental car for three days? Sort of. Yeah, it is. Also, I never parked my car in that mechanical thing across the street from CNET because I was afraid it was going to get stuck. And we all know vending machines get stuck. I mean, you can't just kick this one and get your car to come out if you want it. I was also talking to a couple of friends about the story this morning. And one of the friends was like, well, hold on though, if you're buying a car, right? This isn't a car rental. It's supposed to be about buying and purchasing a vehicle. Isn't haggling part of the deal? You know, you're going to get a better rate. Like if there's nobody to haggle with and they're not paying sales agents. Really? Your friend was going to miss that? I think our whole car industry has been moving against that. Like all the online car dealers are like, no haggle pricing. We give you the best price right up front. I would think that'd be one of the benefits of this. Okay. Maybe she wasn't going to miss haggling as much as know that whatever the sticker price was, it would be negotiable. If you're at a vending machine and there's nobody to talk to, I mean, sticker price is sticker price. You buy the car, you don't. Yeah, I don't know. I see that as a positive. Laura, would you buy a car from a vending machine? Well, as you know, I don't want to buy a car so vending machine or no. You like no car anyway. It sort of out of that market. Yes. I would buy a bike from one. Acer introduced the Chromebook Tab 10 Monday, the first tablet to run Chrome OS. It has a 9.7 inch 2048 by 1536 display, an estimated nine hours of battery, four gigabytes of RAM, 32 gigabytes of storage, a micro SD card slot, headphone jack and USB C port, and it's big differentiator from the iPod is it has a Wacom branded stylus built in as well that doesn't require charging. So you can just pull it out, put it right back in the tablet, and it's bundled in at the $329 price. That is the same price as Apple's current entry level iPad. If you want a stylus, you have to pay separately with Apple 99 bucks. So this is theoretically cheaper than even a cheaper iPad that Apple is suspected of announcing tomorrow. They're both focused on the education market. We know Apple's going to announce something for the education market tomorrow. The Acer Tab 10 goes on sale in North America in April worldwide in May. Really, really trying to steal the thunder from Apple by doing this, I think. Well, also, you know, the $100 stylus, which I don't have, I never got one for my iPad, but I mean, it was such sticker shock when that was first announced like, what $100 for a stylus? So if you're really looking for something comparable and that's bundled into the same price, that's for an entry level iPad, right? Then this is really attractive. Yeah. And Chrome OS is already dominant in schools along with Windows. So if Apple's trying to make their way in, this is going to make it even more expensive. In fact, Chrome OS laptops with keyboards are less expensive than this tablet. So if you're like, I just have to have a tablet, this is going to be a more affordable tablet, one would think even if the Apple one has a lower price because of that stylus. Twitter announced it will no longer accept ads for initial coin offerings or crypto wallets or token sales or most exchanges, although the company did not disclose a time when these restrictions would begin, not specifically. Google and Facebook have previously restricted such ads as well, which leads us nicely into our discussion today, doesn't it, Tom? Yeah. Before we get into the main discussion, how do you feel about all of these restrictions, Laura? And how do you feel like the industry is taking it? So there has been quite a bit of chatter around this. I was talking with someone and she was saying that for their company, they are just changing their ads, so that way the ads don't have specifics of the sales. But then I read something else. I don't remember where I read it, but it was saying that an analysis showed that only 1% of all traffic to initial coin offering pages actually come from Google and Facebook, so they don't think it's going to change things very much. And CoinMarketCap is apparently the biggest driver of traffic, but even then it only accounts for 8.5% of all traffic to these sites. So I don't know how much of an impact it will have on those token sales. I do think though that one thing that's just nice, if you're the kind of person who browses the web a lot in the crypto world, is that you all have a much nicer experience and you won't be getting all these scammy ads directed at you. So I personally am pretty excited about it. For a while when it was like James Altucher all the time, I was like, oh my God, please stop. So now that I don't see his face anymore, my everyday existence is a little bit more pleasant. Well, and it does seem like it's just a defensive measure on the part of all of these companies to say, you know what? We don't want to get busted for having an advertisement that was fraudulent. We'll just throw them all out. And it doesn't sound like they're losing out on much revenue anyway, since not that many ads were coming in. Yeah. And the thing is that actually a lot of these weren't even legitimate ads, but like for instance the other day I was on LinkedIn, I even tweeted about this at the top, like right under the link. It had an ad and it said like, oh, send, you know, like point one ether, you'll get a full ether back. Which of course, like every crypto person, at least the smart ones knows that that's a scam, right? And so I immediately screenshot it. It's just said to my followers like, please don't you ever click on anything like this. But you know, even on LinkedIn, we were getting these sort of like scammy ads. So I do think like, you know, whatever harm there was being done, at least like now that will be mitigated. Folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, subscribe to Daily Tech Headlines available on the Amazon Echo, Google Home, the Anchor app, and of course, at DailyTechHeadlines.com. Last Friday, the US Internal Revenue Service, you know, as the IRS released a memo reminding citizens, you got to report your cryptocurrency earnings on your income tax filings. Now, there's a long list of questions and answers about that. But for now, cryptocurrency falls under federal property taxes. Laura, help us make some sense of this. Let's start with the IRS. What's going on beyond this memo? So the backstory of this is that about, let's say, a year and a half ago in late 2016, the IRS issued what was called a John Doe summons to Coinbase, which was pretty broad in its scope. They wanted the information on every single user over a three year time period. And they wanted all the information, including things down to like chat logs. And at the time, there was a big outcry about this in terms of privacy and Coinbase fought it in court. And a year later, so here we are now again in November 2017, there finally was a decision in a court order that Coinbase should hand over the data. But it was restricted only to people who had had transactions exceeding $20,000 in one year. And the company determined that I think that was limited to something like 14,000 users, whereas like Coinbase total, at least by the end of 2017, obviously, I'm sure this is a much bigger number than just the customers affected by those three tax years. But by the end of 2017, they had more than 10 million users. So who knows, I don't remember how much the initial John Doe summons might have affected, maybe it would have been $5 million or something. But obviously down to in the tens of thousands is much restricted. But the point is that the IRS did this because they were trying to catch tax evaders and they contended that a lot of people were trying to evade their taxes by putting your money in cryptocurrencies and then not paying taxes on whatever gains they were making there. And cryptocurrency is actually taxed like property. It's subject to capital gains tax. So if you have a long term capital gain, then you pay, I guess, what is it 15% or something, if it's long term or short term, then it's 20%. And so people, some in the industry say that this is actually kind of hindered the ability for cryptocurrency to take off as a payment system because then you would need to record how much you bought every Bitcoin for and then record how much you kind of quote unquote sold it for even when you sold even when you bought a coffee with Bitcoin. And so people are saying that that kind of pushes people to treat a little bit more like investment. But anyway, I think the reason why the IRS did this announcement recently is probably because as we all know, 2017 was a huge year for crypto and a whole bunch of people came into the space. I was actually talking with one of the top sources in this case and he contended and he's been in this since 2011 and he was like, oh, I imagine now that the median users he was calling it came in 2017. Just like so many people came into the space in 2017 that like more than half of all crypto users probably came in in that year. So he, I'm sure that a lot of those people probably were trading and so therefore may have some gains to report or losses, although that would be a little bit difficult in 2017 that losses. So they probably want to make sure that everybody is paying their taxes on that. Yeah. I mean, the coffee shop is pretty interesting there because not only do you have to, it'd be like paying for your coffee with an antique car, right? You'd have to be like, well, I bought the car for $500 but I'm giving it to the coffee shop for a thousand. And then the coffee shop has to say, I got this car in payment for coffee. So now I have to declare that because it's an asset that was given to me in exchange for the coffee. It's just so weird. Yeah. It's so cumbersome. And so there is an industry proposal to tax it a different way. But I actually have been working on this other story. It isn't out yet and it won't be out for, I guess, another couple of weeks. But as far as I can tell, even though they have identified this problem or at least the industry has, I don't know if the government would say it's a quote unquote problem. But there are no kind of real proposals to tax it differently. So I think we are kind of stuck with this system for a while. Now, the other side of this is coins can be used as currency or coins can be used as security with initial coin offerings. And the SEC is looking into whether they should ever be defined as securities, right? Yeah. So I actually think that definitely as tokens kind of continue to develop, we will certainly see a category of tokens that are just securities. They're what anybody would recognize as security right now, just a tokenized format. So like a stock that can be traded on a blockchain or maybe a share of some real estate share or something like that. Again, that can be put on a blockchain and traded. However, there are these other classes of tokens that function differently from how we might recognize the security today. And for that reason, there's a lot of questions around whether or not the IRS will call the securities. And one of the very interesting things that's going on right now, which is sort of the big question and sort of the cloud, frankly, hanging over the space, is that it was discovered recently that the IRS has been issuing a lot of subpoenas to token issuers, to their lawyers, to their advisors. And they apparently are trying to work this question out. And last summer, they issued their very first report on the subject. And in that report, it sort of seemed to indicate that they were saying things like Bitcoin and Ether are not securities, but that this other type of token called the DAO token, which you may remember that it was a decentralized venture fund that raised $150 million in a month and then promptly lost a third of it because there was a bug in the code and a hacker exploited that bug. Anyway, the SEC should report last summer saying that DAO tokens were securities, but they seem to kind of imply that something like Ether wasn't. However, Ethereum did have what we would recognize today as an initial coin offering. And since then, the chairman of the SEC has made some statements where he says things like, oh, every token I've seen or every ICO I've seen is I would recognize this as security or I would call it security. So suddenly we're in this phase of like, oh, my gosh, are they going to call all token securities? And if so, then that kind of raises a whole nother can of worms. So basically right now, we know they've issued subpoenas, which is kind of like a fact finding operation. And so I imagine out of that, there will be a little bit more clarity, but I don't know how soon it will happen. So you'll need to bring your broker when you buy the coffee, if this happens. Right. And that's why actually, so on one of my podcasts, Unconfirmed, this woman who helped push through a few laws in Wyoming that actually create a new type of token called actually, they don't name it a utility token, but that's what in the crypto space we would call a utility token. Because it basically carves out a category of tokens that would not be classified as security, at least in the state of Wyoming. And so some people are saying that this indicates a way that the federal government could move forward. But obviously the chairman's statements conflict with that. So I don't know if that will come to pass. Everybody's still figuring all this all out because, you know, a token used to mean Bitcoin, right? And then it began to mean Ethereum and Bitcoin. And then it began to mean thousands of different types. A token doesn't tell you enough. You need to know what it's meant for and how it's used, I think. Exactly. And I think by the end of it, there will be different classifications. That's my personal take. Yeah, that seems likely. Well, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com and facebook.com slash groups slash daily tech news show onward to the thing of the day. Let's check in with Chris Christensen on the travel industry stands on artificial intelligence. This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler with another Tech in Travel Minute. There's some interesting feedback coming out about AI, perhaps a little ahead of its time, but coming out of the travel industry. And that's from the American Society of Travel Agents. They are saying that maybe we should start thinking about regulation. Specifically, one of their spokespeople is saying, I firmly believe that when you're talking to a piece of software, you should know that it's a piece of software. And I don't think that's a whole lot to ask. That's Zane Kirby, the president of ASTA and the CEO. And that seems a little funny because that is certainly not a problem that we're running into right now, certainly with anything voice related. But even with chatbots, I think it's still relatively easy to tell. I don't think we're passing the touring test just yet. But the question is, is it time to start thinking about regulations? In the US, that has started happening. There is now an AI caucus that has been established in Congress and a bill introduced in December would create a federal advisory committee on AI. Is it too soon to regulate? Or is this just the perfect time? What do you think? This is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Certainly a good time to start thinking about the effects of it. I don't know that I particularly need a warning that I'm talking to an AI or not. I don't know that it makes any difference. Does it matter to either of you? It doesn't. I also like to think, oh, I can tell the difference. Those lines will become more and more blurred. I'm not sure how much that's something I need to be disclosed if I'm getting the information that I seek. There's probably instances I'm not thinking of where I'd be like, oh, yeah, it should have. But no, this wouldn't bother me, I don't think. I think I would want to know actually because if it's an AI, then it's probably collecting data on you. Although I guess they're already doing that because every time you talk with the customer service rep, it always says this call may be recorded. For instance, I don't want to buy one of those home assistants because it's constantly listening to you. That just freaks me out. So I guess I personally would want to know if I was talking to an AI. It's sort of like having that customer service rep on the line recording all the time, but that's your Alexa or whatever. I think that's an excellent point. It's not that you need to know that it's an AI, per se. It's that you need to know what it's doing. Like being told your call will be recorded. This AI will be using your conversation to train itself. But yeah, that'd be something I'd like to know. That's a really good point. All right, let's check the mailbag. What do we got, Sarah? Well, we got an email from Brandon and I know we don't have a ton of time on this particular show to get into all of the responses that people would have. But you know when we would, our monthly mailbag episode, which is where we try to take some of your feedback, your questions, your comments, and unpack it a little bit more. Brandon's question is, I've been in technical support for over 10 years. In that time, I've had to keep up with updates and trends and technology on my own. Thanks to buzz out loud and TNT and now DTNS for making that much easier. Good to hear that, Brandon. I've only taken one class that led to a certification. I find myself needing more training, but I don't want to bankrupt myself trying to pay for all of this training. I'd like to know how my fellow techs in the community deal with keeping up. Thanks in advance. Keep up the good work. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. And I know a lot of you have responses for where you think Brandon might be able to get some updates, perhaps free or certainly not something that would break the bank. All feedback, welcome. Yeah, and we'll pass them along to Brandon and read some of the best ones out on the show. I've known Brandon forever. I've got pictures of him from buzz out loud meetups on my phone, like from back in 2008 and stuff. That's crazy. Hey, how about that? Ten years in the making. Yeah. Thank you, Brandon. Thanks also to Laura Shin for being on Daily Tech News Show. Laura, it was great having you. Excellent information and let folks know where they can keep up with everything that you do. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me. It's been super fun. My Twitter account is just my name, Laura Shin, and that's S-H-I-N. And that's really the best place to keep up on everything I'm up to. Excellent. Of course, the Unchained Podcast at UnchainedPodcast.com and UnconfirmedPodcast.com. If you want to check those out as well. Thanks to everybody who supports our Patreon and keeps us going. We are about 15 fewer patrons than last month. So we just need that push over the last few days to get us up to one more patron at least than last month. So please help us out Patreon.com slash D-T-N-S. Our email addresses feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com, just one of the ways you can talk to us, but we love to hear your feedback. We're also live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. If you can join us live, we'd love to have you there too. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with Allison Sheridan. Talk to you then. Thanks so much for having me. You guys were a very well-oiled machine. Thank you. It's nice to hear, especially on a Monday. Yeah, it's good to have outside confirmation. Well, it just makes me realize minus so fly by night and it's literally like just me and then my sound engineer. So... Yeah, I feel pretty fly by night still myself. Well, I mean, part of the reason the structure works so well is because we try to keep it always to that 30 minutes. And so you just have to do that or it won't work. But I mean, the fly by night approach, those are some of my favorite podcasts. Yeah, I don't think people can tell that I'm kind of stressing out the whole time about whether or not I'm going to hit my marks or whatever. But yes, I am. Yeah. No, you've got a very calm appearance. Okay, thank you very much. Now, this is the part of the show where we talk, but also pick a title or rather I pick a title and Tom agrees or not. All right, I would use myself from this then, Roger. Yeah, seriously. Oh, no, Sarah is well, Sarah is well. The Daily Token News Show, which I think is quite funny. That's funny. And then there was another one I saw at the bottom. Why am I missing it? This show is off the chain, isn't bad. The blockchain of dreams and the IRS wants its crypto cut. No, IRS wants its crypto cuts. Not bad. I don't know. We should ask our guests. Laura, do any of these titles of the show appeal to you? I think maybe I like the first one. Daily Token News Show? Yeah. The one thing about the IRS bit is, so first of all, I don't know if people will find taxes boring. Oh gosh, no, yes they do. So I worry about that. And then the second thing is that in a way that news is a little old. I mean, it's obviously pegged to this reminder that they made, but as I mentioned, this story has been going on for a year and a half now. So, yeah. Daily Token News Show. And then we, I don't remember, what was the middle one? The show is off the chain was the one I mentioned. Oh yeah. And that and the blockchain of dreams. Oh yeah. I know. I feel like Daily Token News Show. Yeah. Sarah, what do you think? Like it. Yeah. Everybody's in. Like it. Yay. It all works. We can't agree. No, I like that one too. All right. Done. Well, Laura, I know you probably need to get going, but thanks so much again for joining us. Oh yeah. Thanks. It's been super fun. And then I guess I'll see you guys around on various podcasts. Yeah. Or yeah. And if you have any new stuff, just ping me on email and we can schedule like a revisit. Okay. And this show should be live by like or should be up on the page by early afternoon today and then you can share it or... Oh yeah. No, the audio is going to be up in 20 minutes. Okay. Perfect. I will tweet it out. All right. Thank you so much. Thanks Laura. It was great having you. Come back soon. Yeah. So nice meeting you. And you're all the way in Singapore. I was like surprised by that. No, that was a joke. She's in LA with the rest of us. We're just in different parts of LA. Trying to be funny about the fact that I order on Uber Eats quite a bit and now it's Singapore based, the next time I'm in Southeast Asia. Oh, now I got it. Okay. Yeah. All right. Like I would laugh more but I like ordered Uber Eats for breakfast. Oh, oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. I was kind of like, isn't it like 2 a.m. there? Still sunny. Super dedicated. I know like I've got like the fakes on and everything. Okay. Glad that we cleared that up before I left thinking that you were just like the world's most dedicated employee ever. No, it was the worst joke in the world. That was entirely my fault. And yet I fell for it. So, no, that's what happened. That's how I know it wasn't very good because it's like, well, it can't be a joke. He must be serious. Right. Oh, she's in Singapore. She must be very dedicated. Oh, Laura, that's not it. It makes me feel better. I was voted amongst other things. I was voted most available in high school. So, oh, I know. That and smartest, both. Which is a weird contradiction. But you're so focused on being smart that you just don't care about bad jokes. Good thing, actually. Yeah, maybe, maybe. Or I'm like, stupid at the same time. I'm smart. Anyway, okay. Well, thanks guys. It was super fun being on the show. Yeah, good talking with you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Yeah, Laura was great. Yeah. Excellent. I just, I love, I mean, I love every guest we have always. But when somebody knows a lot about something that I struggle to, like, get my head around constantly, it's just so great. It's like free school. Yeah. No, she's obviously way up on this beat. Yeah. Which is fantastic. So. Yeah, we didn't really even get into like the state legislator, legislature stuff. But, you know, that's another where I'm like, I understand that it would be complicated, but like, you know, what do we do? What do we do? Well, next time we get a big crypto story, we should see if she's free. Absolutely. She knows her stuff. I am not surprised she was voted smartest in her class. So wait, is she in New York now? No, she's in San Francisco. No, she's in Singapore, Roger. We're all in Singapore. Everything's in Singapore. Please keep up. In high school, there was, you know, you like, I don't really know how the stuff works, but like somebody from the yearbook staff, I guess, like, you know, like decided to choose like, you know, of the three people to be like most likely to succeed or whatever. Yeah. You know, and you like voted at some point, you know, and somebody that was on the yearbook staff to be mean to me would be in the category of most confused as an option. I was a most confused nominee. I did not win because the rest of the school knew better. But yeah, most, can you imagine if that was in the yearbook? Like that's like, I mean, that's real. That's that's like the worst thing to get voted in, I think. We did not. Why did your school even allow that as a category? Who knows? I mean, it was it was that in yearbooks like 10 years before my time. It was just one of these things that my high school, that was one of their categories. Most confused basically means dumbest. That was the basically the same thing. You're the dumbest. It was a night trying to be nice about calling someone dumb. Well, or just trying to be able to be like, we have a dumbest category and like the teachers like, let us do it because we called it most confused. Anyway, I didn't win. But I will always remember being a most confused nominee senior year of high school. Well, we didn't even do them. I was just looking because I have a copy of my yearbook right here. Late night. Late night with Greenville High. We didn't do that. We did some some people got nicknames in their index entry. That's the closest they are to find. We also had senior quotes, right? So you'd have like a quote next to your senior portrait. It was voluntary. So you didn't have to have one. But I do remember, this is probably why somebody at the yearbook staff did not like me, is I submitted the fire walk with me quote from Twin Peaks, which is like a really psycho. One chance out between two worlds. Fire walk with me. Yeah. Yeah. Catch you with my death bag. You went the whole way. I had the whole thing written out. Yeah, because there was quite a bit of space and like someone was like, we're not printing that. And I was like, okay, well, I won't have a quote then. Then I got voted most confused, which actually in hindsight makes a lot of sense. You're most confused about my quote. Harris seems really crazy. That's her senior quote. The magician longs to see my quote. Oh, memories, you know, memories. So in the ongoing saga of, well, some of you, at least in the pre or post show from a couple of weeks ago, know that I got that call where they pretended to be the IRS taking me to jail unless I paid them. So there's a new thing. And I'm not sure if this is a scam or just total mistaken identity. But a very nice woman has called me now three times. And her initial phone call was at voicemail. And in the voicemail, she said, you were involved in a vehicular accident on, it was, you know, November, something 2015. And, you know, we just wanted to, you know, we needed to know because there's a personal injury report. Did you, you know, consult an attorney or whatever? I didn't actually have a car at that time. I did not, because I was still in San Francisco and I had gotten rid of a lease and I didn't have a car. Like there was no accident that I was in. So I called her back and I said, hey, I don't know what you're talking about. And she kept saying like, well, what's the case number? And I was like, I don't know, man, you called me. Can't you like look at my name? Like I'm just telling you, like I wasn't in an accident at that time. And she was sort of just like, well, I'll just have to figure this out. And I said, okay, that was about a week ago. And she just called me right before the show again. I didn't answer because I didn't see that. I didn't recognize the phone number and left another long message about this 2015 accident. Does that seem scammy or is it just like? No, it's a scam because they would send you a legal document in the mail first. Why? Why must I be targeted? Roger may be right, but it also sounds like an overworked police officer who's trying to just wrap up a bunch of cases and is like, well, let me just look up her name and I'll call her. And then when you call her back, she's like, I don't know, which case number was it? Like I've got 50 of these things. If it was a scam, I feel like your call back would have been more like, oh, well, Ms. Lane, you need to pay. You know what I mean? That's the thing is like, she'd like, I called back, I got her on the phone, it was the same person who left a message and she was just like, couldn't find me. And so I was like, well, sorry. Wish I could be of more help, but gotta go. And that sounds like, that sounds like a public official, like a public employee. Because like, I don't know either, but you know, these are the sorts of things where she worked back through her pile of cases and got back to your names like, oh, this lady, I'll call her again. See what happens. Yeah. Well, because every time I've ever dealt with the police in some, I've always gotten physical mail from them. She's not part of the police department. Oh, she is. From some like insurance company. Oh, well there, that would be why then. Okay, that resolves that part. Right. I don't know. I'm just like, I'll call her back again. Cause I don't, you know, I don't want that, you know, my name to be associated with some accident, but I'm like, okay, I just don't want to waste time if this is just some scam that I can't figure out what it is. And it might still be a scam. I'm not saying it's not, but. Yeah, I know. I've always wondered about that. Remember Spookio when you were able to find out all this information? Like I used to do run searches on myself all the time. It would generally be 50-50. They would give, they would either apply the wrong career and place of business to me or where I lived or like a bunch of other stuff. And I've always wondered, because there's frankly a lot of Roger Chang's in the US. And you know, what if someone just makes a mistake that somehow implicates me into something I was never involved in? Like that, we'll see. That's my thing. It's like, as soon as she said something like, oh, did you, you know, console or retain the rights of an attorney or something where I'm like, listen, I was not in an accident. I mean, I wasn't in someone else's accident even. You know what I mean? Just didn't happen. I know exactly the time period. But if for some reason, there's some record linking me with something where, you know, I did something legally wrong, like that can't fly. That's the whole Brazil thing, right? You know, in the movie Brazil. It's been a while. It's all because of a clerical error. Right, right. Yeah. Well, I'll just have to call her back when we're done here. When I was in San Rafael, where somehow my insurance company, my car insurance company, just decided that the Tom Merritt that lived in Florida was me and sent me his bill. And I was like, wait, this isn't my car. But thankfully I looked at it and I was like, so I went online and paid my bill online where they had the correct information, but I got mailed this other guy's bill. So I sent it back to them and then I called them and they're like, oh, okay, sorry for the error. Then like six months later, I got a collection agency asking for Tom Merritt because he didn't pay his insurance bill and I had to send them the incorrect bill, the receipt that I had paid my own bill and a certification that that wasn't me. It was so ridiculous. When I first got my driver's license, please stop me if I've told you the story before, just one of the weirdest things. 16 years old, it's my birthday. I'm at the DMV. I'm getting my driver's license. And the woman, I already had my learner's permit, right? You know, and I'm ready to just kind of do everything else. And the woman behind the counter is like, well, I'm sorry, we've already issued you a driver's license. I was like, there's no way. It's not possible. There was another Sarah Lane with my same birthday from the same county, which was Sonoma County at the time, who had gotten a driver's license. She was older than me, but the system couldn't handle it. And they were just like, no, you're already in the system. Wait, when you put your name in, do they also take your middle name or initial? Well, it's on my driver's license now. I don't remember, you know, in 1992, whenever this was exactly what was going on, but it was like, I mean, we got through it. I was like, I'm not her. Promise you, you know, my mom's here, like what proof do you need? But it was, yeah, it was something where it's like the system was like, everyone was just sort of like, what do we do? What do we do? She's already in the system, you know? Yeah, it was really funny. Sarah Lanes are prominent. Yeah. Like, they're just, you know, they're black swan. They're in the driver's license database already. They're all sorts of, yeah, yeah, they're everywhere. Every once in a while, someone, a Sarah Lanes will friend me on Facebook, and I always say yes, because I'm just like, oh, you know. Do you guys have a group for all of the Sarah Lanes? We don't. You should. I don't think we have enough in common. There was a Tom Merritt who listened to Buzz Out Loud who lived in Texas and then moved to England. And I think he lived in Oxford last I knew. I got to meet him in England at a meetup. He came, he took the train down. I got an email recently from, with a receipt for me. It said to Tom Merritt, here's a receipt for, you know, like five pounds something at some store in Oxford. And I'm like, swear to God, it must have been that Tom Merritt bought it and they just typed the email in wrong and sent the receipt to me. So, yeah. He needs the receipt. I've got it. Casey needs to return it. Other Tom Merritt, don't worry. Don't worry, Tom Merritt from Oxford. We have kept you receipts. Yeah, good stuff. Well, I changed my desktop wallpaper. I know you guys were. Someone on Twitter. Very curious to know why I would do this. Someone on Twitter four minutes ago said, Tom, that is a scam listed on our sheriff's list. I'm going to assume that they're talking about your story. It must be. I don't know why they wouldn't at me or give me a little more context, but there you go. It'd be nice if there was a list, if there was a link to that list. So, okay. So let's just say this is a scam. And as soon as we're done here, I'm going to call her back. So I'll have more to tell you all about this tomorrow. But how does it work? Let's just say it was a scam. Like she left a very nice voicemail. When I called her back, she was very nice, however confused or pretended to be. Or maybe she was just like a really bad scammer and like doesn't have the hang of this yet. But I mean, there was no sort of like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, before you get off the phone, just like, just, you know, because that's what usually happens, right? Because they feel like they'll never get you again. There wasn't any of that. She was sort of my thing is like, what are they trying to get out of you? Just like money by like, I don't know. I don't know. Well, as soon as they said, if you'd like to settle this matter, send a check, I'd be like, ah, scam, right? Like the fact that they never asked you for money, that's either a very subtle scam, which- Right, and an entire week went by before she ever called me back. So I kind of expected to get another call back right away, like from another angle. Yeah. It's weird when you're a homeowner, you get a lot of those. They keep telling you, well, you're not up to code. You need to pay for blah, blah, blah service or you need this insurance. It's like, I don't need a gas line insurance. All right? Well, the guy that told me that I was facing eight to 10 years behind bars, and that's exactly the words that he used. You know, okay. He did end up calling me back again because on the phone that day, that initial day, once I was like, okay, got it, scam, got it. I kept him on the phone for a while, just getting information and just, he was very frustrated with me by the end of it. Um, but somehow I never really said like, I know this is a scam, right? So I was still like a person to call back because I was just sort of like, okay, if the sheriff's coming to my house, that's cool. Like I'll just get dressed and they'll come to my house. Do you think they'll want coffee? Yeah, like sure. Okay. I'll just, I'll just wait. Like I'll just, they'll bring the buzzer. I've seen Twin Peaks. I'll have donuts ready for that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Piping hot coffee. I don't know how sheriffs work. Right. I know. Exactly. You know, and then it was just sort of like, and he was just sort of like, ah, God, he's psycho. And then he called back and the next one was, we need you to go to your local IRS office immediately. And it was the same guy, same voice. Do you think they had like a front, like a location set up? No. I think that what they wanted me to say is like, well, I don't know where that is. How much money do you need? You know what I mean? But I, but at that point I was like, I can't keep up the charade anymore. I know this is a scam and he hung up right away and that was the end of it. And he said, you were voted most confused. We were told to it and understand that. You're not confused at all. You're confusing me. You've been misrepresenting. Your book misrepresented you. I'm just a lowly scammer trying to make it in the world. Trying to get you to go to a local IRS office that does not exist. Oh, man. Oh, good stuff. Well, so on that note, I'm going to call this gal back if we feel like we're, we haven't said bye to everybody. I'm sorry. We should say goodbye. Thanks everybody for watching and we will talk to you tomorrow. Beware of scams. Bye everyone. See you tomorrow.