 Hello patrons, friends of the show and random people who stumbled across this accidentally in a referral link. I'm Tom Merritt. This is the DTNS quarterly hangout where our main purpose is just discuss how the show's going. Of course, with me are my co-hosts and producer Sarah Lane. Hello. And Roger Chang. Also, hello. Well, this went well. It's smooth. Super smooth. This is why we have a rundown for other things. No, hey, this is raw. That's what I like to call it. This is us unfiltered because you never get that in the show. We have people who support us on Patreon at the $20 a month level. Y'all are incredibly generous. You power the show. And if you are at that level, you get to be in our slack. And in our slack, we have a questions channel. And in that questions channel, you can talk to us. You can ask us questions. And we will answer them in the course of the show. Now, if you're at the advisor level, which is $30 a month, you actually have an opportunity to join us on the hangout. Only one person usually does, Paul. He was going to today, and he might still, but there was a work thing, and he's not sure he's going to be able to make it. So we may or may not have any other listeners on the show this time. But if you're at that advisor level, and maybe you're like, no, not for me. It's fine. But keep an eye out on Patreon for, or in the Slack or in the Discord, even for that invitation. Our first question today, Sarah, are you ready? I'm ready. It comes from Big Jim, who asks, at what Patreon level do we need to have, I'm sorry, what Patreon level do we need to achieve in which you will buy me a pony? But I will buy him a pony. Yeah. Or, well, like, I don't know, 50 bucks a month? I don't know. That's pretty inexpensive. That seems low to me. I always say the cost of pony. That's just a pony. I've never had one before. Ponies are a lot. But also, you have to understand, we're getting only Big Jim a pony. So I'm not sure how that would work as a Patreon. I feel like, yeah, I feel like it has to be a milestone of like, we hit a certain amount of month, and then we can afford to support Big Jim's pony. I would say maybe 500,000. What? If we need to have a pony milestone where everyone gets a pony. That was like 500,000. No, no, no, no. He just wants to live for himself. No, no, something more like 500,000. But I mean, would that fly as a Patreon level where only Big Jim gets a pony? Well, I mean, that's the real question here with this upset the other patrons. Yeah. I don't know. I think you've hit on it, Roger. I don't know that providing ponies to Big Jim or other patrons is in our core mission. It seems like mission creep to me. Unless he's talking about the audio player. Oh, that's easier. Okay. Thank you, Big Jim, for your very sincere question. I want you to have a pony. I mean, we really do. Yeah. That would be nice. Anne C.B. writes, any tech trends or gadgets exciting you? Phones, IoT, home automation, drones, 3D printers. None of that feels exciting anymore. No. I'm just kidding. The smart speakers, I love the smart speakers. I would have to say digital imaging in phones. I'm excited as they get better higher quality sensors and lenses into a smartphone. It just makes it easier, but it also makes it a lot more natural to take photos because the old photographers rule of thumb, the best camera is the one you always have with you. Is that the old saw? Well, yeah. The idea behind it is, unless you're a photo journalist, where you're carrying around three different cameras with you at all times, people will take pictures with what they have available, which is 99 out of 100 times a smartphone. That saying has been beaten to death so much that I now find it not annoying, but it's just like, okay, yes, I know. I only have one camera, but I'm also not into photography, so that's probably the reason. Yeah. You're probably not the target audience. No. Because what did you think of the Huawei, the P20 camera? That one looked pretty cool. I think my bigger question is, yeah, you can do all those bits to improve the quality, but really, you want a larger sensor and there's only so much you can pack in into that particular smartphone shape. I am looking forward to when they can cram a bigger sensor, but have a collapsible telescopic lens, which I'm sure will cost a lot of cash extra, but it would be kind of neat to have. I'm really into social networks. I think they're the future. Sharing, I think everybody should be more, just kidding. The things that I have answered this question with in the past are starting to feel old already. Blockchain stuff is already facing the buzzword backlash. I think there is still much to be developed with that kind of technology that we don't understand or even know. I think people are going to do really interesting things with that that we haven't seen yet. It sucks that people are using it to say they're doing things that aren't that interesting that they really aren't. It's sometimes bankrupted as a buzzword. I think machine learning is kind of in the same position. There are some amazing developments coming with machine learning, but there's also a bunch of people who promise you things with machine learning that they can't deliver, and that's causing people to get frustrated. People are calling things AI that aren't AI. It's just sad that those messages get muddy because I think machine learning can't solve all our ills. Pull back from that, but can it do some really interesting things? Smart speakers are an example of something that would have been impossible before machine learning. No, it's not perfect, but it's made a huge advance. We used to not really be able to speak to anything without training it. We used to not be able to speak to anything, then we couldn't speak without training it. Now the fact that it can recognize most people's voices at all is amazing. Of course, we've already leapfrogged to complaining about, well, it doesn't recognize all the voices, and it doesn't recognize everything I say. That's how innovation is pushed, Tom, through gentle and consistent nagging. That is our job as tech fans. What I really look forward to is all these technologies being implemented in ways that really do alleviate some of the legacy bureaucratic stuff for medical. If we can have something where, even just having a network database, so the information you get from one doctor gets sent to the other without having to go through intermediary. That already exists, but you don't have access to it. Not every doctor has access to the same database. Just simplifying that so that I have my health records, and I can authorize my doctor to look at them, and then everybody sees the same thing, and we're all on the same page. Really, it's like the technology implementation, being able to leverage that promise over a wider range of things. I would love to see if they could do... Telemedicine was going to be the future, like that was the thing 10 years ago. I would really like to see that, be able to have maybe not a doctor there, but you have a nurse or something, and then you have a doctor telemedicine saying, hey, nurse, can you do this? What does it say? Give me the reason. In that way, you know... A lot of that has been tied up in the carriers and the ISPs saying, we can't do this until you get rid of net neutrality, and honestly, what you really need is speed. I think 5G is going to help make a lot of that stuff more possible already. 5G is another technology, and I know it's been beaten to death probably, but that is another technology that makes me excited, because... I mean, what's 5G, Tom? Yeah. Wow, true. Okay. It's another one of those like, we're going to bankrupt the term before we start using it, but for now, it means, the gigabit wireless, roughly. Let's just simplify it to say that. What's that? Is it Wi-Fi? No, it's not Wi-Fi. Yeah, gigabit wireless internet and is achievable easily under 5G. There's all these caveats of like, well, with LTE, you can achieve this and that, but think about what you can do on your mobile phone and your tablet now that you couldn't do on 3G, or that was painful on 3G. I mean, people have streamed to this show from their phone because they have an LTE connection. It was something that maybe they could do in the right conditions under 3G. That kind of stuff is going to be no-brainer. It's going to unlock a lot of features that right now are difficult and make them easy. I remember trying out Ricochet. Remember that? Yeah. Oh, my God. That was only what? That was only like 156 kilobits per second, and it felt so fast. It's like, look, I can send video. Granted, it's like a frame a second, but... Yeah. Ricochet was a USB dongle that attached to a dedicated network that provided DSL speeds in like, I don't know, 2000, I think? Yeah. It was a very limited set of metro areas, very limited. Yeah, they had it in San Francisco. I remember, Jim Lauterbach gave Eileen one to take home because she was doing a package on it for TechLive, and so we got to play with it. It was pretty cool. TechLive. I know, right? Ricochet, Lauterbach, TechLive. I can almost smell the filter-fresh coffee from here. All right. Teaglass1976 says, what's the Monday plan? Are you keeping it open for rotating co-hosts? Are you going to get a regular Monday contributor? Of course, Teaglass, one of the people who read our notice or heard me talk about the fact that Veronica just can't accommodate the 1.30 pm Pacific appearance with her day job. It's just too difficult, and we get that. She's going to do a regular labs episode on bots. She's put out the first one already. She'd like to do it more often, but she's going to at least do it once a month. Hopefully, we'll be able to get her back from time to time on the regular show. In the meantime, Roger, where are we with Mondays? Mondays will have rotating regular hosts. We'll have Lamar Wilson and Justin Robert Young swapping out Mondays. Although, this coming Monday, it will be Rob Reed. We'll probably, it'll be pretty fast and loose. Let's put it that way. Yeah, but expect to see, as a rule of thumb, it'll be either Lamar or Justin. More often than not. We're really sorry that Veronica, I almost want to change the time of the show, because it's not that she doesn't want to do it, but we're not going to change the time of the show. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing that happens when you do a show for four years. This show is not new. It's hard for me to wrap my head around that, but we've been doing the show for a while, and people's lives change, schedules change, conditions change. Well, in the show, as the years go on, it cements itself into that kind of routine that everyone builds around. So it becomes even more difficult to kind of alter things on that, like changing schedules like that, because so many people have an expectation now that the show comes out when it does, and it streams live when it does, and the guests that we do have and the contributors that we do have already have that time blocked out in their day to accommodate the show. Yeah, I mean, look at Patrick Beja. You're seeing less of Patrick these days, not because he's unwilling to do the show, because he has a baby, and eventually... He's unwilling to do the show. Yeah, a baby is unwilling to do a lot of things, apparently. That's very unwilling, yeah, I know, but he's so apologetic about it. It's like, we get it. Life happens, right? Yeah, so that frees us up to bring some cool guests onto the show that we wouldn't maybe have enough room in the schedule for, and Patrick's baby will eventually, as if Roger knows all too well, will be able to get up and walk around on its own. I don't know if that will make it easier for him or not, but... Yeah, but you start to fall into routines eventually after that. I don't know how long it takes, but those first few months particularly are the... Yeah, kids don't work on dog ears. It's not like after seven, oh, they're an old baby. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Scott is still on at least three times a month, but he takes Wednesday off to do the labs episodes, so if he missed it, he has one on Affinity and photo editors that's in the feed, both the Patreon feed and the regular feed now. So we love that, and we love to hear more feedback from you guys on it. We got a couple of emails about it, but don't be shy in going into the Patreon and leaving comments directly on those episodes. Labs is an interesting thing because we're putting a bunch of them out there, and now it's going to be the time to evaluate, not yet, I guess, but pretty soon, probably by the next one of these quarterlies that we do, it's going to be time to evaluate which ones are working, which ones should we keep doing, which one should we tweak. I did an episode with Scott yesterday just on a whim. This was not a pre-planned one. It just sort of happened because we talked about him having a Raspberry Pi on the show, asked for people to send in the Raspberry Pi emails, and we got more than we could even fit in a mailbag episode, and particularly Scott wanted to tell you what he's going to do with it. So, okay. If nobody has listened to the episode yet, what was the most, I don't know, biggest takeaway that you got? Well, I think the cool thing about that episode, which is up for patrons now, and if you're not a patron, it will be up on Saturday, is a bunch of ideas if you're into Raspberry Pi. You get to hear all of the other ideas from people who say, oh, I use it for this or I like this project. So, it's a great resource just in that sense. And then at the end, Scott talks about like, okay, here's what I'm going to do and the fact that us having this conversation has motivated him to finally make a plan and do something, and he's got a whole deal. He's going to document it and talk about it on his shows and everything. It sounds really fun. I don't want to spoil it because it's the big reveal at the end of the episode. Big reveal. That's what Labs is about. Labs is about just trying stuff. So, that episode was outsized because we got so many Raspberry Pi emails and I felt like, oh, that could be a resource on its own. But Brandon was asking about certifications. We've had a few emails helping him that we forwarded on to Brandon and I'm sure that's going to make a segment of the mailbag. Sarah is like, yes, it is indeed. I have started. So, let us know what you think of these and if you have ideas. We've actually had a few of those kinds of emails from people saying, hey, I've got an idea for an interview. I've got an idea for a segment. I'd like you to do an explainer about this. And some of those things take longer for us to get to than others, but we hear them all. So, keep them coming. Carl says, Tom, you are really good at doing interviews. Could there be a labs test where you do such? I do an interview a month, Carl. Something tells me I need to promote these better. Tom, do more interviews. Yeah, I do one a month. I did one with the CISO of Lyft and David Spark. It was a double interview. Carl's just typing more. Is the person the interview or more of the interviews? I think he wants, he's saying, could you do interviews? And then he's saying more. I think he wants more interviews than just one a month. Yeah, okay. That's an interesting question because having Sarah as part of the team has freed me up a little bit to be able to do more of this kind of stuff. But there are only so many hours in the day. So, at what point, because I know people really don't like it if we don't do all the top stories, like when we did the first roundtable, we didn't do top stories. There was a segment of people who really didn't like that. But we do have daily tech headlines picking up that side of things. So, at what point is it okay to shake up the regular show to accommodate more of these kinds of things? I don't know. Yeah, I'll be... Chris Charlton says, Tom, should interview Mirror Tom where he shaved? Oh, I see, like the Star Trek universe where the ultimate universe will be clean, shaven, but evil. Actually, Carl says both on the more. He would like more of the interview. I don't know if you really want more. Always leave you wanting more. Which is why we haven't had more on before. What is the goal for the interviews? Introduce a topic or a person? Depends. Most of the time, it's a topic. With the Lyft interview, we were talking specifically about things that security vendors do that bug CISOs. But with Andrew Allen, we just talked about how does tech work with music and crowdfunding and all of that. It's fun to have conversations like that. Do y'all have any ideas or things that have been kicking around that you want to share with folks? You're talking about us. Well, besides Carl's Jr., no, I'm just kidding. You're going to talk Carl's Jr. Labs. What's your favorite fast food joint? I don't know, Rush. What do you think? Well, seeing how well the roundtable goes today, I would like to do more themed roundtables for surrounding a subject. That's a great idea. I love that. Instead of just putting together just a bunch of people who want to talk, which is not bad, which is what we want, but let's see if we can centralize it around the theme. We can do the... Here are four people who are good at talking and do a great show. We know we can do that and we can always do that again. It's not that we're never going to do that again. But this space roundtable is another way to keep it interesting and focused. I had the idea, Eric Olander, who's been on the show before, and we probably should get him back. We have so many good people that we want to have back. We never have enough space. But Eric Olander was on the Phileus Club this week and he specializes in China and Africa. He's based in China right now. He's American, but he's based in China. He does the China Africa podcast. He does a China Africa Facebook group. I was like, wouldn't it be cool if we could get Eric to recommend a couple people and we do China Africa Tech as a roundtable? Whether we do that exact idea or whether we do something that spins out of that. I love that idea of coming up with kind of interesting and less covered topics that we can build roundtables around. Yeah. I mean, one of the ones I would like to cover in the future. Ideally, this year is e-waste. What are the current... What are we currently doing about e-waste in terms of disposal but also recycling? That's a good one. What are manufacturers doing to make it easier to recycle in the rest of it? Because we always hear bits and pieces. We hear about plastics in the Great Pacific Swirl, but we don't really get an idea of what exactly is that waste composed of, but more importantly, how much of it is e-waste. And as e-waste has traditionally just kind of been shipped off to developing countries where people can try to extract precious metals out of it, whether it's like tin, copper, gold out of the circuit tracings and stuff like that. How do we move forward from here? So when we get rid of our old smartphone from five years ago, it just doesn't end up in a landfill. There's a way to reuse the glass, the plastics and stuff like that. Even recover some of the trace minerals, the rare earths and stuff. Yeah. But something... In a way that recovery doesn't require heavy solvents, that you also now need to figure out how to remediate once it's out in the environment. That says, how about a pretend I'm dumb about tech roundtable? Well, I do a pretend I'm dumb about Star Wars series that if people aren't familiar out there, where I pretend like I've never seen anything but Star Wars and I've never talked about it to anybody. And it's fun to do. I'm wondering if we just get a bunch of people on who really aren't that familiar with tech and they just ask you us questions. And we try to explain it with a clock. Right. Like Bitcoin, what's that about? Well, okay. You know, in five minutes, right? Like, that's actually a challenge. It's... I mean, there's so many topics out there and really it's just trying to get a whole of the guests and getting their schedules to a line. That's one of the trickier things. Everyone has their own thing going on, their lives and stuff. And trying to get one person is not hard. Getting two people can be a juggle, trying to get three or more. It's... That's why some guest bookings take forever. Because we... It's just nailing down that last person. Yeah. Enth Mike says, any plans to redesign dailytechnewshow.com? No. It's not a priority. It takes more time than you think to redesign things. And unless something's broken, I don't feel like I need to spend a lot of time. I don't know. What do you guys think? I know it's not super pretty. I don't have anything against it. My biggest was what we were doing a couple of weeks ago where you moved the live button at the top a little bit to the left, where it's just easier to find. For me, it functions well for what it needs to do. Really, it's just finding what to click on on the page. And I think we solved a lot of that last month. I mean, also like... I mean, I would love everybody to be going to dailytechnewshow on a daily basis. But how often is that happening? Subscribe to the show. Does the design really matter? I mean, it matters if people can't use it. I feel like it's usable right now. And that's where Roger was just talking about. I know it doesn't look nice. And I realize that that is more important to some people than it is to me in a legitimate way. If you're a listener of DTNS and you're proud of it and you want to tell someone about it and then you point up to the website and they're like, that's the default WordPress template from three years ago. You'd be like, yeah, yeah. But still, it's really good. It's a really good show. Yeah, I don't know. We could probably spruce it up a little bit. But it takes work. Carl added another one, a DTNS time travel running. Time travel running a show at interesting times in history as there's fewer there. We kind of did that with the 80s bit. And I wouldn't mind doing that again in the future. Yeah, that was fun. Where we would kind of drop ourselves at some point. We're either in the 80s, 90s, 70s, or whatever. Hey, look at my Altair kit that I got. It's going to be awesome. It's going to take me half a year to wire this up to blank flights in the sequential order. That's going to be cool. It's funny because it's fun to do, but it's also very illuminating to see how far we've come in 30 years. Before the mid to late 70s, home computers were kind of a fictional thing. It wasn't a thing you were going to have in your home unless you were like far in the future where the refrigerator cooks your food and you have a robot servant to the point where my phone was more capable than the 486 I had back in college. It could do infinitely, I should say infinitely, it could do tremendously more stuff from video to mapping to all these things that just ward around. Or we didn't have the infrastructure for it. We didn't have cell phone data networks to that extent back in the late 80s. We didn't have GPS available to consumers at the rate that we do. We don't have the mapping software. There's an entire growth of infrastructure, as well as the actual technology that has to go in hand and hand with consumer adoption for all the stuff to take off. Back in the 80s, I remember there was a discussion going on through a lot of the hobbyist computer magazines, wondering why personal computers hadn't taken off the same way that stereos, TVs, VCRs, microwaves have, right? It's advanced technology, but not everyone has one. Why not? We were saying, well, it's complicated to use and a lot of stuff. What do you do with it? That PC, what are you going to do with it? What you have the internet that literally gives everyone a reason to go on. I don't really like computers, but I really need to get to the internet. Being able to do that, to do a show around that, awesome. Dr. suggests food labs and creative-ass art says food labs. Does that mean we eat? I don't know. It seems a little weird to do a show about I like sandwiches. Here's a sandwich I made. Here's my meatloaf recipe would be odd, but I guess we could do it. It's no secret. I love the tovala oven. In fact, I'll tell the story here. I've been meaning to tell. My tovala oven stopped working last Wednesday. It just stopped. I've had it for more than a year. I use it a lot and I was very bereft. I went on to their support and I was like, hey, my oven stopped next morning. It stopped at like nine at night, which is after their service was closed. Next morning, first thing, they're like, we're so sorry to hear that. We're going to credit you all the meals that just shipped to you. You don't have to pay for them. Freeze them. You can thaw them and use them. We're going to send you a replacement tovala immediately and just pack up the tovala. Here's a shipping label and send us the old one because we want to see what went wrong with it. They were so good, so good with the support. I already love that product and they were super good with support. I don't know. I could almost see just doing a tovala. I'm sure I'd be the one that would enjoy that. Food tech is very interesting because a lot of the technology in food tech is actually in the processing and packaging of food. There is a lot of food tech in processing and packaging. Especially the way we have moved from, before canned foods were kind of the idealized, this is how you preserve food far. How do we do a labs about that though? We could definitely discuss the shift for, especially how do you package and secure food that you want to keep relative fresh? We had to bring on guests for that. Yeah, maybe. That might be a guest bit. I don't know if you could do a series out of that, but that would be a cool guess. There's definitely a lengthy history. Napoleon was credited. There's a lot of tech in preparation that I think we could do too. In personal preparation, that seems more sustainable. And also, we could just talk about the foods that you can eat when you're just running low on stuff so you can eat something where you're doing another binge. Like food hacks? Yeah. My favorite is mac and cheese and a can of chili with no beans. I ate mac and cheese last night. We do talk about food a lot on the pre-empo show. There's something there. It's one of the fun things we do, and we also know we won't get into any kind of political, cultural, or ethical issues talking about food. You say that, but there's always a way to get into those issues, no matter what you're talking about. Yeah. And people universally do. They eat. I don't know anybody who doesn't eat. At least not for long. Carl says, sometimes the audio has been a bit so-so with dropouts due to lag. I tried Zencaster recently, and it worked like a charm. Have you tried such a product? Yes. I've tried Zencaster and a bunch of others like it, and sometimes they have dropouts and lag. That's the internet. It's one of the things that I think when we get faster broadband, fiber everywhere, 5G everywhere, we will have fewer of those things. But it's always going to happen until we have more robust and pervasive broadband, unless we require people to be in studio to be on the show, which would severely limit our ability to do this show. My trade-off has always been, every once in a while, we're going to have internet choppiness. Every once in a while, we're going to have a guest whose audio isn't great. But as long as you can understand them, the important thing in the show is the ideas. And the other problem with doing things like Zencaster is that there's no video solution there. So as long as people want to watch us do the show, I'm not saying this is the only way to do it the way we do it, but it limits a lot of these other options. Chris Charlton says, the term used yesterday, intelligent edge, reminded me how the cycle of server client has played out over and over again. I love those golden nuggets in each episode. Brought to you by golden girl. But maybe. Teaglass once our food labs theme to be performed by Matthew McConaughey, I'm not sure Sarah would be into that. What if we had Matthew McConaughey like? What do you mean Matthew McConaughey like? I don't know. Like like a like a personator? Like, can you hire Matthew McConaughey? No. I mean, probably. But yeah, probably. We're not going to do. No. Carl says on the topic of food for the coming elections in Sweden, we're planning to 3D scan and then print the heads of our party leaders in chocolate with a filling that tastes in such a way that the given party perceives. I'll post you a food tech minute from that experiment. Please do. What does a conservative versus a liberal taste like? But that's the thing in such a way that the given party perceives. But wouldn't all the parties consider themselves to be sweet? Or well, no, I think some people might be like a validly and proudly bitter. It's quite possible. But they don't. Yeah, they don't want to taste good. Yeah, like, you know what would want to taste like, you know, sewage. No, of course not. But there's there's a variety. You know, you could be savory versus sweet. Chris wants to know what element of the show each of us has wanted to add that isn't in yet. Is there is there such a thing that's like, it's a little presumption. There's a little presumption in your question that we all have one of those things. Maybe everything we want is in. But is there are there elements of the show that you guys have been thinking about that we could add? You know, I'm always wanting to add stuff, but I'm also cognizant of like the practical realities, right? Like, you know, we could do an animated opening. We could do lower thirds, but just but those are the things that are just like just our current setup wouldn't allow for it. And if we were to move to something else would require an extra body to handle. Yeah, that's another limiting factor is I want everything that we do on the show to be able to be done by any of us, which limits, which admittedly limits what we can do. We can't have a tricaster unless we buy everybody a tricaster, which is expensive. And also, I mean, obviously, the fact that we put out a video version of the show is great, but like the show is an audio show at the end of the day. So it's like, okay, well, you know, how much do we want to like, you know, do that TV thing? I mean, I'm like always of the mind of like the, you know, the more professional, the better. But who's going to watch it? D-Glass says, DTNS on the road, hop in an RV and go remote for a week or two. One of the things that our current setup gives us the flexibility to do is just that there is a milestone. There has been a milestone for that since the beginning of the Patreon. Which is we come to your, your home. It's a very expensive milestone, though, because it's a very expensive proposition to do right. But the RV would supply its own power. So you wouldn't have to worry about us, worry about us bow guarding your personal space too much. Oh, if we, if we got an RV, that's yeah. We're with someone worried about us taking their personal coffee. I figured, I figured we'd just get, when I said come to you, I meant to your town, not to your actual house. It's like, honey, why is there an RV in our driveway? We'll get a hotel room if we don't get an RV. It's fine. We'll be fine. Yeah, but I've been attracted to that idea for a long time of, you know, we just roll up in Kansas City or Omaha or something and be like, all right, y'all have a tech scene here. Nobody knows about it or people don't talk about it enough. Maybe let's find out what it is. I've got a controversial topic. Are you guys ready? I'm ready. All right. So here's one of the things, as I mentioned earlier in this conversation, we're four years old now. And one of the things that happens over time is we're learning about Patreon funding. Patreon funding is brand new. One of the things that seems to be true is you can increase the Patreon if you have a reason. For the most recent reason, we're bringing Sarah on the show, right? I don't know how much you can increase it. Like, I can't, I don't know if we had a second, Sarah, if that would work again. I did not that there could ever be another second. There is no second. Exactly. Not that that's even possible. But I do know that when we get to a milestone, we usually just kind of hang out around that milestone until we get another really compelling milestone. And for a really compelling milestone to be compelling, it usually costs money. And so, unlike most companies, we're sort of stuck in this, we can't really do anything except what we do unless it's free. We don't have a lot of extra income. What most companies do is, like, you don't know how much they're making, they're pushing things out, they're driving up their revenue, and then they take that extra revenue and they plow it into new stuff, or they borrow, right? Actually, more companies just go into debt. That's how startups work, right? I don't want to borrow. That's off the table. But I also don't want to be locked into having to commit to something every time I want to try it. Like, if we get the Patreon up another $5,000, we'll buy an RV or whatever. I don't want to be able to experiment. So to do that, my idea has always been, well, that's what PayPal donations and the store are for. And I definitely believe we could do more with the store, and we're talking about that and we're working on that all the time. And that can bring in some extra money to try things for flexibility. I am committed to the show being ad-free as far as our production and delivery to the patrons. What I'm toying with is there are services that you can put your feet into. They make it simpler to publish, and then they add ads in and you get a revenue share. This is something text message does. So the way those work is only people who don't get the show through Patreon would ever hear the ads. The ads get put in in the feed, so we never know what they are. We don't have any relationship. They're sold by the company. I suspect a lot of people consider that a violation of the premise of DTNS, but I'm wondering how many people would say that's horrible. There's going to be different opinions amongst the people who support us on Patreon and the people who don't, I'm sure, as well. But if you've listened to the text message, the way that works is they just tack it on at the beginning. It's a pre-roll, and then it goes into the show. And it's not host-read. I would never do host-read on the show, because that is when you really introduce, like, I'm talking about this thing, and it's influencing the news. By the way, I'm springing this on Sarah and Roger. I've never mentioned this before. I'm just brainstorming here. This is not a plan. This is a thing where I'm like, maybe this is a horrible idea. Should I even consider it? Yeah, I mean, I don't know, to be honest. I think, I mean, I don't know. Sounds great. That's the fact of me. If you watch on YouTube for long enough, it's going to stop and throw you an ad anyway mid-roll. Well, but like, I mean, the whole idea behind DTNS not having ads and being, you know, basically powered by you, that's very powerful. So I understand that, you know, the thought of like, well, you know, I might be able to get like a little bit of like, you know, residual revenue, you know, on the side. But does that somehow taint the message of the show? And here's where I know it causes a problem. And this is one of the reasons it gives me pause is, yes, patrons can get a feed through Patreon, but it's the full pre and post show feed. And I know there are a lot of people who support us on Patreon just because they want the show and they get the regular feed and they would be annoyed if they're like, hey, I'm supporting the show and I just want the regular feed. And now you're putting an ad in it. Like, I know, I know some people wouldn't like that. Teaglass also brings up an interesting point. Like, if you don't have control of the ad, what the ads are, something could be seen as being endorsed by the show, even though. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's true of anything though. I mean, you have to pick a service that you know is not going to put like some horrible ad in there. That's, that's fair. What's a horrible ad? I, and I think the way the service that, well, like scams, fraud, you know, stuff like that, the kind of stuff that YouTube gets in trouble for, for having to show up. You know, everybody's banning ICO ads now. I think the service that Nate uses allows him to decide whether a certain guy, maybe it's category at a categorical level, but like he can say like, I never want to take an ad from this kind of situation. I'd have to find out more about it. Yeah. And then Carl says three feeds, starts to make it take away one of the advantages of doing it that way is to reduce complexity. That increases complexity. But yeah. Hmm. I don't know. Not something we're going to do anytime soon, but definitely something I've been, I've been kicking around. And, and actually, who was it said that Chris Charlton, I think, maybe said it? Oh, no, it's Carl. Carl says, perhaps test it on a labs episode or for the headline show. I think, I think testing it on head on the headline show might, might be acceptable, maybe, because that's not main DTNS. That's a different thing. That could cause problems with the Amazon feed, because I don't think you're allowed to put feeds into the Amazon feed. So that'd have to be a separate feed. But anyway, nothing's ever super simple, is it? No, Tom. Thank you. No, it isn't. Thank you for affirming that. Sorry. I haven't had my coffee today. Oh, well, my goodness. What are you doing here? I don't know. Go get some coffee. Well, no, no, I'm, I'm happy. I'm just sort of like, oh, mm-hmm. Yeah. Things, things, things to talk about without coffee. Oh, man. That's just not, that's just not done. People who like, get rid of coffee like, why, why, why do it? I don't understand. Did you see that there's a group in California that want a court case saying that California, California, you have to label coffee as potentially containing a carcinogen? Yeah, I did see that. I mean, okay. So does toast. All, you know, all of my red wine vinegar also has those, you know. Yeah. Well, alcohol, sure. But like, you know, if I'm like, oh, this recipe calls for like a good, a good red wine vinegar. And it's like, this has been known to cause cancer in the state of California where I'm like, still buying it. You're like, great recipe calls. I got that on my car. I said, yeah, I know things that this car is going to cause me. Every parking garage in California has that. It gets to the point where you start to not pay attention to those things because they're everywhere. You're like, well, I guess everything is a problem. So. Right. Cancer. Why don't go outside anymore? That's really the moral of the story, guys. Don't go outside. It's bad out there. Sunny, warm, who's raised or deadly. Sunny and warm here. I don't know. Is it, is it warmed up on the east coast yet? Probably not. A friend of mine in New York was like, snowing really badly. That was yesterday. Well, Roger, do we have any insight in the future? Like you said, we've got Rob Reed coming on the show on Monday. We're going to be talking robots with him, I think. The floor is on the show on Tuesday. I got a slot in a few people throughout the month working on the roundtable for the end of April. So far, I have Amber Mack and Jen Cutter. I'm trying to score a third body. Cool. So that'll be a general roundtable, but good people. See, when you get good people, it's always fun. That is the day I leave after the show to go to Las Vegas for the frog pants thing. Brian ended in Scott Johnson. That's going to be fun. I can't believe that's a month away. Amphibian outfitters. Can I be the guy? Can I be the old man that's like, I can't believe we're already a third of the way through the year. I can't believe it. I cannot believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe I have to go to Vegas today. Today. After TGS, I have to go to Vegas today. It's a celebration. Fun time. It is. No, it is. No, it'll be lovely, but like... Just a lot. It's a lot, guys. By the way, Chris Charlton says, how about you just sell our data to third-party companies? All fixed. Rather not do that. If we're not to do that. But we will. Pretty sure we won't. Pretty sure we won't, Sarah. But if we... Pre-coffee, Sarah. Let's talk gravy. Oh, Anne C. Bayee says, why is the audio more consistent for shows like Cord Killers, Sword Laser, and East Meets West? Good question. That's a fair question. Because those are fewer variables and they're not daily. You're going to notice just statistically more problems with the ETS because there are more episodes. If you listen to it every day, there's just more of a chance for something to go wrong because there's more show. We also have more people. Cord Killers is always me, Brian and Bryce, and then most of the time, one other person. Sword and Laser is always just me and Veronica. East Meets West is always just me and Roger. So you've got more variables in DTNS for things to go wrong. I don't think they go wrong so badly, personally. Well, for a while, my Wi-Fi was giving me grief after I moved my interview into... But now that I'm... We found the culprit. Exactly, which was Wi-Fi. But hopefully the problem has been solved. I always hated to have people be like, Sarah's great, but her internet is the worst. People jump to conclusions about what's wrong and aren't always correct. A lot of times we don't know what's wrong. And again, most of the time, it's just computer and internet stuff that happens. And when you do as many hours of programming a month as we do, you're going to run into that. NCB, the shows are all recorded the same, roughly speaking. I mean, Sword and Laser is done on Skype and is recorded, is not live. Add live to the equation, too. And that makes things more difficult because you're streaming out on the internet. On the internet? Yeah. I mean, we can fix problems, but we'll introduce others. That's always the issue. Hey, we could absolutely fix the audio problem right now today by never having guests and not being live. 100% going to fix it. Yeah, because Sword and Laser, we record the audio because it's not live. We record the audio locally and then put it out. That's the other thing is I prioritize speed. Daily Tech News show is a news show. I wanted to go out fast. So rather than have everybody on the show record their audio locally and then having an editor mix it all together, which would take an hour or two, I put it out while we're still talking in the post show. Any other thoughts other than we need to get Sarah coffee? Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I am very tired. I don't want you to get coffee. Well, I know. I mean, now it's the end of the show. All right. Anything else, Roger? No, but thank you for supporting us. I mean, it really is a keystone of how DTNS operates and the foundation in which we want to push forward from where we can build more of the content that I think the listeners and would love to listen to and stuff we would love to cover. Yeah. And if you would like to continue to be a part of it, patreon.com slash DTNS, I think we are above still the number of patrons we had last month. So thank you for that. And we will leave you with our favorite song.