#271 – Amazon Moves In, Dave Says Run

Dave Jones: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded October 14th, 2015. Episode 271. Amazon moves in. Dave says run.

Chris Gammell: Welcome to the Amp Hour.

Dave Jones: I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog. And I'm Chris Campbell of Contextual Electronics. What's up, nerd? Ooh, getting colder around here. Colder? Colder, yeah. You know, you get warmer. How does that work? It's coming into summer. Right, yes. See the earth that tilts in the one direction.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that thing. Right, yeah. Right, yeah. Just like we're on daylight saving time now.

Dave Jones: Yes, we are. But yeah, what's new? I've seen stuff on your forum. That's good. What's a couple of Kickstarter silliness? That's fun. I'm sure we'll talk about all this stuff. You've got a whole bunch of stuff to talk about. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And we're just waffling on. Because we're such professionals.

Dave Jones: Speaking of waffling, you now have how many millions of minutes in the world?

Chris Gammell: I think it's 460. 460 million minutes watched on my YouTube channel.

Dave Jones: Good Lord, people.

Chris Gammell: But that's only since, according to the graph, that's only since they started actually recording that. Right, right, right. Which was like three years ago. So like there's, yeah, it's probably like 600 or 700 million really or something.

Dave Jones: Either way, that's way too much.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. Sorry world for wasting your life watching my videos. But yeah, like half a billion minutes watched. That's just nuts.

Dave Jones: That's a lot of stuff.

Chris Gammell: The power of accumulative math, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, and freeness. That helps too. Freeness always helps. Right. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Statistics, numbers, all that sort of jazz.

Dave Jones: Yeah, right, right. People. Right. People with time.

Chris Gammell: Yep. All right, come on. Yes. Let's get into it. We have a whole bunch of stuff to talk about.

Dave Jones: There's a ton of stuff on here. I don't know where to start, honestly.

Chris Gammell: No, neither do I.

Dave Jones: Should we start with software or hardware or?

Chris Gammell: We're hardware guys, aren't we?

Dave Jones: Yeah, I don't know. So that's the thing. So some of this stuff, yes, we are. Thanks for clarifying that. It keeps creeping in. That's what I mean. Like it keeps creeping up on us.

Chris Gammell: Pesky software, huh? Well, and like the thin edge of the wedge, is it? And we're starting to get wedgied.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Sorry. You're going to write the elastic.

Dave Jones: Well, I think, so the thing that I think is interesting is the, so the Amazon, that's obviously a big thing that just got announced, right? We've known that for a long time. I haven't heard about that. Okay. So like a lot of people, like, so Google a while back announced that they want to be like the solution provider for IoT, right? Everyone's around IoT. Oh, God. I know. But I think, so you know like that, I forget what it's called, the hype curve. Is that right? Oh, yes. Right. Yeah. There's that big pit of despair, like middle section. I think we're out of that, to be honest. Like we're at the point where things actually are getting adopted. And it's actually the point where it's like, okay, battery life's good enough. Processors are super cheap. Software's pretty, you know, advanced on a lot of fronts. Maybe not here, but I think, you know, in terms of like the supporting structure around it, you know, I'm not going to say it's time, but it's getting there. And I think it's also that people are running out of other things to do.

Chris Gammell: People are also running out of titles for their blogs. Amazon, AWS Internet of Things, Amazon's knockout punch to the competition. Yeah, right. Yeah, come on. Is it? I don't know. Tell me the details.

Dave Jones: So what the idea is basically that- What are they doing? So, you know, AWS is Amazon Web Services, right? And that- I use it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I use it for my backups and stuff.

Dave Jones: Oh, you do. Okay, yeah. So it has a lot of functions. And, you know- Oh, yeah, yeah. Tons. It's what a lot of the internet runs on. It's really funny, actually, when you see AWS goes down for a day, which is not that often, but it does happen. You can tell everyone who's using it because then all these other sides are like, oh, we're sorry, we're down right now.

Chris Gammell: And it's like any web provider. I think, like, you know, Altium's cloud, for example, runs on, you know, the Amazon Web Service or it did at one point or something. You know, like, you have no idea who's running on that. Right.

Dave Jones: EC2 is Elastic Cloud Computing. And that's basically like you can spin up a server at any time. This is not new stuff. It's just that it's at a scale where people are using it pretty significantly. I mean, like, in, like, big services, like, much bigger than Altium even, like web services.

Chris Gammell: Because your average Joe is not using it because it's not easy to use. All these Amazon services are not easy to implement. They're not like, you know, real jazzy interface.

Dave Jones: You know, you've got to know what you're doing. Yeah, it's not meant for beginners. Yeah, that's true. I mean, it is. It's a little bit more in depth. But I think, yeah, it's more for power users. Yeah, I agree with that. That's true. It's not, like, impossible. But it's not, like, all bubbly looking.

Chris Gammell: You can't just get a link from somebody, oh, use AWS and walk up to it and just use it. Like, it's not, you know, you've got to, yeah, you've got to learn.

Dave Jones: Yes, that's true. And it's going to spin up, you know, some kind of server somewhere. It's going to be like, you know, a virtual server, that kind of thing. So now the idea is, okay, so that runs a lot of the web already. And it's basically a lot of people use it because it's really flexible. And you can spin it up or down. You just pay for what you use. That's great.

Chris Gammell: Which I like that concept, you know. I do, too.

Dave Jones: I mean, like, and honestly, that enables a lot of, you know, small companies to do a lot of cool things. Comparing it to, like, the old times when it would be, like, you had to buy a server and then go buy sharing. Or what's it called? Co-hosting space. And then you had to go put your server into that rack. And then, you know, it lived there and you had that one server. Now you can have, you can be spread out. You can do, you can spin it up and down. Like, if you put a link onto Reddit and you know it's going to do really well, you could spin up two more servers. And be like, just in case. So I don't get, I don't get, whatever they used to call it.

Chris Gammell: And it's good for backups. Like, I use it for. I, my website and forum automatically backed up daily, weekly, monthly to the Amazon web service. And I only pay for the amount of space I need. So, you know, as my forum grows, people had more and more attachments and things like that. You know, my backups slowly get bigger and bigger. But, you know, I only pay for what I use. Right.

Dave Jones: And there's also, you know, there's, there's usually like, uh, uh, what's that called? The distributed, whatever it's called. The distributed service where it actually copies on a different server. You can buy that kind of thing too.

Chris Gammell: They have a ridiculous number of services. If you go to Amazon web services, I mean, oh, it's like mind boggling. The amount of like, there's dozens and dozens and dozens of different services they offer.

Dave Jones: Right. Right. And so. It's crazy. So as far as I can see it, the idea is that they're trying to do the same kind of thing now for small devices. So, right. So now you need, you know, if you think about a lot of the players that we've talked about in the past. So like the electric imps and like Adafruit has a service now. Spark has a service. Um, uh, spark your particles kind of like that too, but usually that's, I think that's less on the, it basically it's like server side client side. As far as I understand it, please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm sure there's people out there. I'll speak from the electric imp because I've used that. Right. So on the electric imp and because we have a brand on the show, um, for the electric imp, it's basically like there's a server running on the cloud and it's sitting there and it's just spinning its wheel. You know, you could write code for the server and then you also write scripting code for your device. And then basically there's, you know, handling between them. And now if I go to a, so actually, so I have a project sitting in front of me on my bench where when my wife needs to call me up from the basement and, you know, not interrupt my recordings, she goes to a link that I send her, that I gave her. There's a couple of different links. And if it's one color, it's green and other color, or sorry, another link is red. Another color, another link is yellow. And basically, you know, like the dog needs to go out, then I'll, she'll hit the green link. Then the, that goes out to the, that goes to the electric imp servers, right? So there's software running there that I wrote. And then what that does is there's a handler there and then it sends code down to the device. The device is checking in over wifi and it's got code written on there as well. And then it says, as soon as you receive this, this ping effectively, then you execute some, some code on the little piece of hardware here. And then it does something. And in this case, it just, you know, talks to a bunch of strips of LEDs and it blinks a certain color. And then, hang on. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That was a double face palm. Why? This folks represents everything that is wrong with the internet of things.

Dave Jones: This is a very silly example, but it's very. Dave, I'm not saying this is like.

Chris Gammell: Why can't you just open the door and shout down and say the dog needs a walk? Because, well, that's the point. Why all this technology? Yeah, I know it's stupid. It's technology for the sake of technology.

Dave Jones: Because when I'm recording, of course, I get it. It's a silly thing, but you're focusing on the wrong thing here, right? This was actually, you know, an implementation, albeit silly. And there's much sillier out there, right?

Chris Gammell: And lights come on. Yeah, but you can also just run a wire down to a light bulb that turns on.

Dave Jones: This is not because like it was like a need. I'm saying this is because.

Chris Gammell: It's because you can do it.

Dave Jones: Yeah, that's exactly right. That is a reason to do projects sometimes. You're focusing on the wrong thing, though. So that's just the. I'm just trying to explain the layers there, right? So the layer that Amazon, as far as I understand, the layer that Amazon would be working at would be the basically similar to that electric imp service where it's just kind of sitting there spinning, spinning, spinning. And it's not always going to be, you know, from a website pushing a notification down to a device. It might be a device. And I've done this with analog.io, which used to be, shoot, imp.guru. And that goes the other direction where it's basically taking a small temperature sensor. And this is like you've talked about. So it's got a small temperature sensor. It went on to the electric imp. There was some code running on the imp. It handed the temperature reading up to the server. And then the server then talked to a data logging program. And it just mapped out the temperature on a graph. Again, simple example. Not like it's needed, but just kind of trying to understand those layers. Now, as far as I understand it, the Amazon part is going to be like that handling that electric imp does, right? So just kind of taking in, talking to all these different devices, and then pushing it elsewhere, right? So pushing to a web interface, pushing it to a logging interface, that kind of thing. Or really just doing whatever you want to because you think about it now. And when Brandon was on the show, he talked about this. The span of how much you need to do can expand pretty quickly, right? Remember, he talked about the hockey goal thing and how they had to handle, when a goal was scored, every light. Oh, I remember that. Yeah, you remember that? And I'll link in Brandon's show as well. But he talked about how every light in every house who had one of these devices had to go off almost simultaneously.

Chris Gammell: So that could, in theory, be millions.

Dave Jones: That could be. Yeah, exactly. At 10,000, that's not a big deal. If you sold a million of these. But if you're on a single server and then you have to send out a million or a billion, right? That scales. Straight away. Yeah, exactly. And that's the kind of thing where it's pretty, the scale can spin up pretty quickly. Yep. And then there's also security layers and all that other stuff that is, you know, it's important. So I think, I mean, I think that's why everybody wants to get into it.

Chris Gammell: Well, of course. Because everyone wants to be the one who has the internet of the de facto standard internet of things cloud service. And so many have gone by the wayside because they're not Amazon. Right. If I was going to pick, if I had to bet which one is going to be around in 10 years' time, I'd be betting on freaking Amazon. Right. Because they'll burn money in anything. I used to have a temperature sensor here, right? Yeah, you talked about this. In the mailbag, right? A couple of years back. You know, and it hooked up to what was one of the biggest internet of things servers in the world at the time. And now it's just, it's vanished. It doesn't work anymore. It's gone. I don't know who they sold it to and it just vanished. The protocol changed. You know what? Well, that's the thing.

Dave Jones: So it's all these different layers of protocol and understand, and even like services, right? So you could buy an off the shelf thing, right? So we've talked to Bunny before and what was his thing called? The Chumbie, right? And that's like, that's you going through a single provider and then if that provider goes away, you're kind of up a creek, right? And now there's kind of, it's starting to spread out where it's not like vertically integrated, like, okay, you have to go to one provider so that, you know, if you want to find out the weather from weather.com, weather.com has to be talking to Chumbie so that it can display it on your Chumbie device. Now it's weather.com or whoever is, or maybe there's even just a sensor in a field somewhere that's publishing through an Amazon cloud type of thing or whatever kind of, you know, device handler like that. And then you just go and read the stream from that. You're not going to be talking directly to that device. It's going to be logged somewhere. And so everyone wants to be that layer because if you control that layer, not only do you control the revenue stream of people that want to subscribe to it or, you know, provide it as a service kind of thing.

Chris Gammell: Is this thing free or is it, or do you pay per, you know, data chunk or something?

Dave Jones: I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Right. It's only a beta at the moment.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's really.

Chris Gammell: As a lot of Amazon web services are, they're in beta.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, a few of them are. Sure. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Actually, I'm looking at the whole list now. Yeah, there's only one other in beta, mobile hub.

Dave Jones: Okay.

Chris Gammell: Anyway.

Dave Jones: Well, so speaking of beta, so that's like the layer there, right? The interesting thing to me was that they've already got, you can go look at the getting started kits. And these are names that are very familiar. But basically, they're kind of like they've got tutorials already built around this stuff. They've got kits? Yeah. Well, it's not Amazon kits. They're partner kits, right? Right.

Chris Gammell: But people have already partnered up with them.

Dave Jones: Right. So one of them is like Seed Studio. So they've got the BeagleBone Green, which is what they make.

Chris Gammell: I assume it's not Artifruit or SparkFun because they've got their own, right? They're trying to push their own. They want to be the Internet of Things service, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Well, right now, let's see. It's Seed Studio, TI Launchpad, Microchip, Marvell, Renaissance, Avnet, one another with Broadcom chip on it, Intel Edison, Dragon Board, which is Qualcomm.

Chris Gammell: That's a pretty decent list.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I mean, these are really- I'll tell you what.

Chris Gammell: If I was SparkFun and Artifruit, I would instantly go- Yep, this is done. We give up. We just give up. I mean- Like, don't even bother. We'll just like on a dime, turn around and go, right, we're going to do Amazon. Because they will lose. They will lose. Anyone will lose. Assuming that the Amazon thing works. Right.

Dave Jones: Well, no, I don't necessarily agree with that. I don't necessarily agree with that. No, you don't? Because if-

Chris Gammell: Well, you can still make a business from it, but long-term, you are going to lose.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but Dave, if people always said that, there would never be any new companies.

Chris Gammell: I know, but it's like-

Dave Jones: Oh, Ask Jeeves is so big, Google will never win.

Chris Gammell: It's like trying to compete against Gmail. Yeah, but- Right?

Dave Jones: But someone eventually will, and someone eventually will overcome it. Maybe, yeah, have a go. That's just how it all works. I mean, this is company.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but if you're smart, you're going to realize, well, you know, the list of dead Internet of Things servers, or whatever you call them, backbones or whatever, is long and distinguished.

Dave Jones: That's true, but I think it's kind of one of those things that, like, nothing, douchey quote time, nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.

Chris Gammell: I mean, that's honestly what it comes down to, right? But it's the same idea. It's the same idea.

Dave Jones: Of course it is. I mean, even these ideas are just replications of other, you know, wired versions. Like you said, the wired version of the temperature sensor. But it's not about that.

Chris Gammell: I'll give you a classic example, right?

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: My videos are now available on the Daily Motion website, right? All of my videos, all 912 of them or something, right? They're available on the Daily Motion website. I know I said I probably wouldn't do this because it doesn't make sense financially or to try and build up an audience on that site. And that's still true. I still think that, right? I don't want to ditch YouTube. I don't want to build up an audience on Daily Motion, right? But my videos are there for, A, a backup. And, B, I'm technically supporting competition to YouTube, right? Because competition is a good thing. Sure. Right? But I totally expect them to fail, right? Nobody can compete against YouTube.

Dave Jones: Right now. Sure.

Chris Gammell: Right? Yeah. And everyone keeps saying it, right? And, oh, but yeah, I'll start it up. And, yeah, let's go support this new competition against YouTube. And you're just going to lose.

Dave Jones: You're...

Chris Gammell: I appreciate the sentiment.

Dave Jones: Your argument is falling on deaf ears here, Dave. I mean, like, I get it that it's like a power law thing.

Chris Gammell: I'll support you for doing it. I'm just saying you are going to lose. 99.99% sure you are going to lose.

Dave Jones: Sure. But that has never stopped... If that stops people from trying, that's the problem. Sure.

Chris Gammell: If that doesn't stop you, that's fine. I'm just being realistic.

Dave Jones: If it does stop you, that's the problem, right? I mean, you... That's... There's always something out there. I don't know. I think that you're being extra cynical today. I mean, like, honestly, like, I understand that, like, big services are big.

Chris Gammell: No, I'm being practical. Yeah, I'm being practical.

Dave Jones: That's okay. I don't think you're going to be putting up a new search engine against Google or an email service against Gmail or a... No, because I'm not dumb enough. ...shopping service against Amazon.

Chris Gammell: And, no, look, my hat's off to anyone who tries. Okay? Well, I think...

Dave Jones: I think what you're saying... ...big players. I think what you're saying, and what I actually do agree with, is there's no second place online. Like, that's... That's a recurring theme. There isn't.

Chris Gammell: It's the old, almost like the 80-20 rule, except it's even worse, online. Yeah, it's a power law. You know, usually there's one company that dominates 80%. There's another company that dominate, you know, maybe 15-20%, and the rest are just dregs. You know, that's usually how it works. Like, Google search, right? Owns most of the market, and the rest are just, you know... But not forever. ...10% tops.

Dave Jones: That's what I'm getting at. It's not forever.

Chris Gammell: No, well, sure. Not forever, but...

Dave Jones: And this hasn't been decided yet. So the Amazon thing is not decided yet. It's a big deal, but it's not decided yet. So, I mean, I can understand why...

Chris Gammell: It could suck. It could suck ass, right? Yeah, I can understand why all these people would want to... I can understand why all these people would want to... ...would want to, like, partner with it for sure.

Dave Jones: I mean, like, that makes sense. Like, seed smart to partner with them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, because if I was designing an Internet of Things product that had to use a backbone service, hell yes, I'd be picking the Amazon web service. You bet your ass I would. I probably would as well. I'd be like, go use an Artifruit or SparkFun's one. Well, here's the thing, though. Sorry, guys. Sorry, guys, but, you know, like... I think the difference is you can... I have to be a practical engineer here, right?

Dave Jones: You can offer an experience that's outside of just that it's Amazon, right? So you can... So, I mean, we're talking about, you know, SparkFun and Artifruit type here and similar situations. You can offer... That's like saying, oh, well, who would ever use, you know, an Atmega 328? And yet, people still use the Arduino and stuff around that for a long... You know, they still have for a long time, even though the chip itself is not...

Chris Gammell: I mean, the other ones could offer something compelling.

Dave Jones: But what I'm saying is that the experience can be just as important as anything else for all this stuff, right? So...

Chris Gammell: Yes, but I thought the idea of these Internet of Things services and backbones is that you don't see them. The user doesn't care.

Dave Jones: Oh, at the... Well... Right? At the beginning, you're going to them.

Chris Gammell: I thought that's the whole idea of them. They're a service that you use, and yes, you add your front-end interface, and then you add your hardware or whatever, and then the web service just does that. You know, it just does its thing silently in the background. I thought that's how it worked.

Dave Jones: I know. I'm talking about from the device maker side of things, right? So, if you offer a service to the device maker, right? So now, okay, Dave, you want to build an Internet-connected bicycle. Right. Okay. And you have four choices, right? You have three different kits from this AWS Getting Started kit things, and you can have connection to the cloud type of thing, or you can go to someone who offers not only the backbone services, but also great guides on how to do it, and easy-to-use hardware and get started with. Like, that is basically a lot of these, you know, like the Spark Funds and Native Fruits of the world. That is their compelling sales point in the first place.

Chris Gammell: Yes, because that's why they're successful, is because they sell the education behind it as well. Or they don't sell it. They offer the education behind it.

Dave Jones: Right. Right? Yeah. And I'm saying that that could compete. Yes, I'm sure. That could compete. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, totally. Totally. But, what I'm saying, granted, off the top of that, I have not seen nor heard of before this the Art of Fruit or Spark Fund Internet of Things services. You just raised it here, and I-

Dave Jones: Nor have you seen the Electric Imp or anyone else that's doing it?

Chris Gammell: No. Well, no, I've used the Electric Imp one.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay.

Chris Gammell: All right. But, well, maybe I haven't seen the latest one. Anyway, right? So, I'm not talking about specific details here. Okay. No. Where was I? Okay.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Chris Gammell: Um, shit. Now, I've completely lost it.

Dave Jones: So, you say you haven't seen these things, but the new ones. No? Mm. He's getting older, folks. Yeah. We're going to have to put him out the pasture soon.

Chris Gammell: Perhaps I'm not going to talk about, but, like, yeah, I mean, you've got a way up, right? You've got a way up. Perhaps, in this case, right, what you're talking about is perhaps ease of use and getting started with long-term viability of your project. Now, if I was forming a startup company, right, with some internet of things gadget, right? Right. Right? And, like, I'm trying to build a company. I'm trying to build a business based on this, right? I am going to go. So, even if it's much harder work, you'd be foolish not to go for the most viable long-term platform.

Dave Jones: Well, I don't think that all people are always rational, but I tend to agree with you. I would probably look at the marketplace, you know?

Chris Gammell: I'm like, I don't know about you. Come on, we've got to talk about good design practice here. It's like picking a long-term part.

Dave Jones: Sure, sure. But I've gotten taken in before by a good reference kit. I don't know about you. So have I. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: It doesn't make it right. It doesn't mean we should encourage all of our listeners to do the same thing.

Dave Jones: Maybe that is a good point of conversation. I mean, it can get you, right? I mean, like, you're like, oh, well, all the examples are here and blah, blah, blah. And then you get to the final flow where it's like, oh, this next thing isn't written for me. I guess I have to do it myself. And this is terrible. So, yeah, I mean, that is, that can be tough. But I think that's a different thing. So I'm talking about an FPGA kit that I was using. It had an exact similar, I actually targeted the kit because it had a very close, you know, software setup that all the demo was very similar to what I needed to be doing. And I was like.

Chris Gammell: I've done exactly the same thing. And that's common. Yes. Yeah. But you can come a gutter doing that.

Dave Jones: Can you, what is that?

Chris Gammell: You can come a gutter. Okay. That's an Aussie term. Yeah. It means you can get tripped up. You can fail because of that. You can, you know, it can screw you in the end. Right. Right. Because of that. Right. It's like, it's like the old, you know, the Altium FPGA development board. Right. Because I'm so intimately familiar with that damn thing. Right. It was like, yeah, look, here it is. Yeah. You can like, it's the world's easiest way to develop with FPGAs. And flash a lead. Right. And, or talk to an LCD or do whatever. Right. And it's great. And, you know, and you might get sucked in by that. But when you want to do something real with it, something really hard. Yeah. The custom stuff. It just falls apart. Right.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: It completely falls apart. And, you know, that, that is not good design practice. Okay. Like it or not. That is, you know, if you did that, right. At a company, if you, you know, if you were an engineer at a company and they said, right, we want you to design this product. Can you target this development board because it allowed you to get something up and running really quickly. Right. And then, so you'd have something to show. Oh, look how fantastic I am. I developed this really quickly. And then, you know, that's great. So it looks good for a couple of months. You're a hero. And then in the long run, you're screwed because of, you know, whatever.

Dave Jones: You're using a part that's really expensive or hard to get or hard to solder or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not holistic design. Yeah. I agree with you. I agree with you on that. Holistic.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wank word. Yes.

Dave Jones: The holistic, yeah. Spiritual. Spiritual design day. Right. There was actually, there was a post that I saw. So there's a little company that's kind of doing like education around electronics. It's actually an Aussie company. And I really like what they're doing. Actually, they're called Pirate Electronics. They did a Kickstarter, I think. But they wrote a post about microcontrollers and why they're betting on Python. And I get why they're doing it, right? They're kind of talking about getting started quickly and that kind of thing. But it's in the same thing where it's like, it's optimizing for the wrong thing. It's optimizing for the beginning. Like if you decide that you're going to write Python as something, like the amount of overhead and stack that you need in order to actually, you know, compile all that code and get it all to the point where it's running. And then when you do get it running and you do get it out in the world, it's not going to have as good battery performance. It's not going to have, you know, all of that kind of stuff. But it kind of feels the same where it's like, it's optimizing for the beginning versus optimizing for the long term.

Chris Gammell: It's like using an Arduino in your commercial product. Yeah, exactly. You might be able to get up and running really easy, but hey, it's not going to be cost effective.

Dave Jones: Yeah, and it might even work if you're going to make 10 or 100 or something, or if you have really large margins. But if you want to get to the point where you're, you know, you're going big time, and maybe not everybody is, right? But if you even have the potential for it, you should at least plan to be like, well, maybe I should consider, you know, different micros, different topology, that kind of thing. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: That's why I'm saying, last word, if I'm developing an Internet of Things thing, I would, if I had to bet money right now, even though I have not seen it, okay, if I had to bet money, I would be betting on Amazon. Dave's a blind bettor.

Dave Jones: That's right. He's...

Chris Gammell: Internet of Things will still be around in 10 years and still be a workable platform. He's putting it all on black, and black is Amazon. That's it. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Do you disagree?

Dave Jones: I can't say I do, to be honest, but I mean...

Dave Jones: Exactly.

Chris Gammell: That's just my first gut reaction upon... I have not seen this. I've just, like, literally seen it in the last 20 minutes, and, like, I have no idea what it does, but it's Amazon service. They usually don't screw things up.

Dave Jones: Right. Well, it's not a problem. I could be wrong.

Chris Gammell: There could be a lot of Amazon service haters out there that will say we're completely wrong.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: But anyway, yep. So, right. Segway in about choosing the right part.

Dave Jones: I was going to say long-term choosing and maybe picking the wrong part. So, what's going on with this?

Chris Gammell: Well, granted, if you pick one of these parts 20, 30 years ago, you've had a pretty good run. Yeah, that's true. TI have discontinued, or they're calling... They're going, last buys, last buys. You know, the famous last buy call for all chips that are... They have, you know, probably 100 chips or so that are manufactured in some specific old national semiconductor plant somewhere. Right. Yes. And there's a list. We will link to it. And lots of, like, audio chips, like the LM386. You know, it's been around forever.

Dave Jones: They're getting rid of it? Sorry. I didn't see that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, the LM386. I don't know if it's... It's weird, because, like, some of them are... They're just getting rid of the dip version. So, they must be manufacturing the SOs in some other planet. Yeah, that doesn't count. Which is... Okay. But, no, there's, you know... So, the LM386... People outside of TI make it. People outside of TI make it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. People outside of TI make the 386. I mean, like, that's not...

Chris Gammell: Yep. It's... No. It's, you know... But, yeah, there's a lot of parts that are still used in specifically the audio industry. Yeah. There's lots of people on the forum talking about that. Yeah. Yeah. People going, oh, no, I'm going to stock up, you know? Well, and that's the same...

Dave Jones: So, we've talked about that in the past with, like, a lot of the... You know, like, those class... What was that one? Was it Fran who was talking about that one synthesizer? It was a synthesizer chip or something like that, where she was replicating... She's going to try and replicate the functionality on something else. You remember what I'm talking about? No. It seems like there's always synthesizer chips and similar things like that, where people kind of design projects around them.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yes, yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're talking about the 038, was it? The function-generated chip.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I think that was it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and that's the thing. Like, where they get... Especially the ones that are, like, into these really classic projects, and then people are built around them, and they're... You know, they kind of has that fringing effect where it's like, oh, well, yeah, it started this one big popular project, and then people are like, oh, I'll just use this for the next thing that I'm doing. And then there's just kind of these... A lot of derivatives. Yeah, yeah. And then it becomes popular because of that. And then... But, you know, it's 20-year-old designs, 30-year-old designs. So... Yeah, I'm not, like, super outraged about this.

Chris Gammell: I think they've discontinued the LMC567 tone decoder. Oh!

Dave Jones: Can't say I've used that one.

Chris Gammell: Classic part.

Dave Jones: Is that for, like, telephones?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's like a touch-tone decoder chip.

Dave Jones: Wow, a lot of touch-tone phones out there these days, Dave.

Chris Gammell: But if you have to, you know, I mean...

Dave Jones: What, is it just got, like, notch filters at all the different, like, crossover frequency things?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah, something like that, yeah. Yeah, it's got the, yeah, all the different filters that recognizes all the different tones for your keypads. Oh, yeah, no, it's cool. It was the art for, like, 30 years or whatever, however long it's been out. It was, like, you know... And you think we like it.

Dave Jones: Imagine how much money they made off of it.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. It was built into a ton of stuff. Yeah. That's pretty cool.

Dave Jones: Anyway, so... Yeah, we'll have to have, like...

Chris Gammell: So, there you go. But that, you know, I think it's all the chips based on the 6-inch fab. So... Oh, yeah. And some old national 6-inch wafer fab they're shutting down. And, yep. If that part happened to be made on that 6-inch wafer and it's not already on an 8-inch wafer design, boom, you know.

Dave Jones: Yeah, right. Yeah, that's pretty disruptive when you think about... I mean, like, even when they do that within a fab, they'll, you know, they'll do a die shrink or something like that. They'll often notify you...

Chris Gammell: A die shrink. What's a die shrink?

Dave Jones: So, like...

Chris Gammell: For us who aren't in the semiconductor business.

Dave Jones: So, like, if before the... Because of the process it was on, it was, you know, maybe, you know, 4x4 millimeters, the actual silicon, the finished silicon piece.

Speaker ?: Right, yeah.

Dave Jones: And then they'll actually... They'll switch it to a new process and they'll make it smaller so they can fit more of them on a wafer. So, they basically...

Chris Gammell: How do they do that? Is that just take the mask and do a photo reduction or is it not that simple?

Dave Jones: No. Usually, as far as I know, it's usually like a full redesign. You know, it's like a redesign like a... Yeah, yeah. Of course. Like a maintaining engineer would do kind of thing. Like, you'd give it to the new guy.

Chris Gammell: But if it's exactly the same process, like exactly the same silicon process but just smaller, you still need to redesign it.

Dave Jones: Well, I guess they... No, I think they usually do switch the process, right? So, you can imagine within a fab even. So, like, the fab I was at was... Had two or three different processes going at once, right? You know, because you're always working on the new thing but it's not fully qualified yet. So, I was there for 51 nanometer and they were already working whatever the next one was, 32 or something. And, you know, and there were still all the old 90 nanometer and 68. I don't remember the numbers. The numbers are always weird. But, you know, there's always different ones going on because by the time you're working on the newest one, the oldest one that you still have in the fab is just cranking. You know, like it's not like... Right. There's nothing hard about it at all. And they're just super dialed in on everything. When you think about manufacturing processes, it's just super dialed in. They know exactly when the kits need to be changed out. They know exactly when, you know, the... Everything's just on autopilot effectively. And that's how you make the most money, basically. And... Because you're just cranking out that stuff. Of course. Yep. So, then you switch it down to the new process. Right. Well, not even jelly beans. I mean, well, I guess... Yeah, I guess it is, but...

Chris Gammell: Well, yeah. They become jelly beans. Once you've perfected your process, you know, bam.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I guess if you flood the market with parts, it's going to become easier to buy it. So, but, you know, and then it gets designed down to the new one. And then, you know, it's the same part. Usually, it's going to have the same pinout, stuff like that. And even to the user, to the end user, you know, you and I might see a TSOP 20, but the piece of silicon in there might be, you know, a quarter of the size of the original. Oh, yeah. And they'll tell you it's like a die reduction. And they're making way more money on that because the packaging costs the same. And so, basically, the silicon is the main thing that's expensive.

Chris Gammell: They can fit... Yeah, they can fit more wafers on a... They can fit more die on a single wafer. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: So... Yeah. I mean, when I think about, like, you know, like you pick up, like, a LED or something like that, you look at, like, the die that are in there, you're just like, who the hell made this thing? Like, just how tiny the die are. It's just so crazy to me.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, because they make 20,000 on one 8-inch wafer or something.

Dave Jones: No, well, but it's not even the... It's the cutting that shocks me the most. Yeah, I know.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's crazy.

Dave Jones: Yeah, like, how do you cut something that small? It's just... Oh, well, we just sweep the dust off the floor and we figure there's got to be a couple LEDs in there somewhere. So... You just keep putting, like, current into the dust and when something lights up, you grab that bit. Right.

Chris Gammell: That one... Oh, shit, there's light there. Okay. Yeah, right, right, right. You know, we'll pick it up. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: Well, and you think about that, too. Like, as processes get older and you, like, as, you know, like, throughout time, you basically, you just keep turning off testing as well, right? At the beginning, you're testing 100% of every lot. And then over time, you're testing less and less and less because testing is expensive, too. And then by the time something's, you know, two or three processes back, you're basically like, well, we just check every, you know, 100th wafer or something like that just to make sure. And you're not even really checking that much anymore. You're just assuming that the process is good enough. And then you have, you know, statistical, like, okay, well, this is 95% yield. So, you know, we're okay with that, that kind of thing.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: It's a weird business. All right. I don't miss it at all.

Chris Gammell: Breaking news. Breaking news. Okay. Straight off the teletype.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yes. And yes, what is the inverse Moore's law is in effect again?

Dave Jones: Oh, this isn't, this isn't decided yet. This isn't decided yet.

Chris Gammell: No, it's not, but it's a rumor. But hey, come on. We do love rumors. This is huge. This is as big as the TI National merger.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I don't get it though. So, Analog Devices and Maxim are supposed to be a merger. Torts.

Chris Gammell: I mean, there's lots, there's got to be overlap there. Like, if there's overlap in any two companies, well, TI and National were the, I guess, similar, right? There was a lot of overlap, but.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Analog and Maxim, like fierce rivals for, you know, decades.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. They're in merger talks. Who would.

Dave Jones: I will remind people that you. I was going to do that too. Maximal Analog.

Chris Gammell: Analog Max.

Dave Jones: Maximolog. Maximolog. I like that. Maximolog. Maximolog. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh dear. If anyone's got a better name. Anyway, merger talks apparently. National, Analog Devices are a $19 billion market cap company. Maxim, poor cousins are only $11 billion market cap.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I guess you kind of have to at that point. I was really disappointed when Analog, I don't know about what Maxim was doing on the fab side, but Analog was moving.

Chris Gammell: Maxim were in trouble. Maxim, like it's apparently Analog Devices who approached them, which means, you know, Maxim were in trouble and the sharks were coming in.

Dave Jones: Gotcha. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So I think Analog Devices, the shark and Maxim are the.

Dave Jones: The guppy.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Party. I know Analog always kept a lot of cash on hand. They're very, they're a very conservative. Oh, did they?

Chris Gammell: They're a very good cash cow company. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Fiscally very good. Like to the point where a bunch of my friends got laid off because they got a little jumpy and they laid off a bunch of the FAEs.

Chris Gammell: No, because they only had a 10 billion in cash or something. Yeah, exactly. Like that kind of thing. You're all getting a bit nervous.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I was predicting.

Chris Gammell: I love companies like that. I respect a company who has a huge cash back in and no debt. That's like, I'm going to invest in you. You know, that's like.

Dave Jones: It depends on how big the company is though, too. Like at the beginning, that's not the right move usually, right? Because you usually need to be growing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But, and mature companies like this, like, especially ones that run fabs. But that's what I was saying is like the Analog, they, I don't know if you remember, but like they announced a while back that they were not going to pursue a new process of their own. They were going to basically be like, TSMC, you're going to do all the analog. The process. Yep. Stuff. Process stuff. And then you get to keep all the process stuff. But that's the thing. Like with analog companies, like so much of it is like the secret sauce in the process. And if you're like, oh, well, TSMC, you get it. It's not exclusive to us. It's like, well. Well, anyone can come in. What are you really? Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: Analog startup can come in and take on analog devices.

Dave Jones: Oh, I don't think that'll actually happen. Right. But, you know, it's just competitors. Hey, come on.

Chris Gammell: I thought you were, half an hour ago, you were all bloody encouraging people to take on the big boys. Right? And now you're saying, oh, no, don't bother.

Dave Jones: Right. Right. I guess I have to say that now. I'll say Silicon's different. Silicon's different. I mean, like, honestly, like, like starting up a search engine is, you know, buying some servers and trying it out. It's code.

Chris Gammell: It's code in a basement. It's something, you know.

Dave Jones: Versus.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Buying a $500,000 seat of cadence and like. Five grand? 500 grand. Oh, sorry.

Chris Gammell: I thought you said five grand. Jeez, that bargain. I'll take one.

Dave Jones: Yeah, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. So I don't. No.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And it's not like you can just go to, you know, download that on, you know, download that from Pirate Bay or something. Yeah. Right. Right.

Dave Jones: There is no AWS for chip. I guess actually TSMC kind of is like that, but it's like, it would be like, oh, well, our starter tier is $300,000 for a lot of wafers, you know. Oh, okay. Well, I guess I'm not starting that company after all.

Chris Gammell: And even then, they only get the work experience person to talk to you, you know, because. Oh, right, right, right, right. Just three out of K. Yeah. Right. Give that account to the work experience team, you know. Yeah, exactly. You get the intern.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So big changes coming for sure. I don't know what it's going to do to us. I know you don't really make electronics anymore. Oh, come on. I'm pretty sure your channel switched over to being a repair guy. Is that right? I'm wrong. You're a trash man and repair guy. Is that right? But, I mean, just in general, the market, too. I mean, like, I don't know what all this big stuff does. I mean, obviously it opens some things up, but it'll be interesting to see how.

Chris Gammell: There has been $110 billion in deals in the semiconductor industry this year. Geez. In terms of mergers and buys.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's a lot.

Chris Gammell: That's a lot of doge.

Dave Jones: That's a lot of clams. Maxim's. Yeah. Well, I don't think. Well, I mean, obviously there's the, you know, there's potential for EOL, right? Like the, you know, the merger stuff that might have killed these old national parts. But, you know, maybe not. Yep. I'm sure there's some benefits as well. We've complained about Maxim in the past.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Well, Maxim.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Maxim used to, if people weren't aware, they were the world leaders in releasing new parts every year. You would get a new national, a new Maxim data book, you know. Like, so looking forward to every, was it every year or was it every six months or something? They'll bring out a new data book, which was like four inches thick of the new parts they had released that year. Right. And they're always like these really custom parts, too, right? 1990. Yeah. Yeah. It was like all these, you know, specific application parts. And they released the 1990 data book. And I can remember having my data book shelf, you know. There's the 1990, the 1991, the 1992. And they wouldn't duplicate parts in those data sheets, in those data books. Right, right, right. That would just be the new parts for that year. That's nutty.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And then you keep that as your library.

Chris Gammell: So if you wanted to go find a part pre-internet, you know, you would have to go look through every year's Maxim data book. Right? Well, I think they had cross-reference tables in there so that you could actually, in the later ones, they'd cross-reference ones from previous years, but you wouldn't get the data sheets. But at least you could, so you might go to the latest one and look through the index table and, oh, that chip sounds like it can do the job. And then you'd go to your 1992 data book and, you know.

Dave Jones: Gather around, kiddos, and I'll tell you a story about the Dewey Decimal System. Ah, those were the days. Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, okay, so you mentioned, like. Now you bloody parametric searches.

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah. We can talk about that if you want. No. But you mentioned the, like, the startup idea for Silicon, right? And that doesn't really exist anymore. But then you also think about, like, okay, so now you have, all right, so now we have people that are moving into the space, right, kind of pulling it all together of, like, okay, you might have people moving into the space trying to do an IoT startup using this Amazon cloud, using some new hardware or something like that. Oh, I'll be back on here again. No, no, no. Hear me out. But the idea is how, like, the idea is what actually would end up affecting you and me and people in companies that, like, similar we've worked in and we work in now, you know, smaller companies, right, that kind of thing. How do you actually get any attention now, right? Because the idea that I, the thing that I see with this consolidation is that.

Chris Gammell: Attention, oh, from the public.

Dave Jones: Right. No, no, no. Sorry. From the manufacturer, right? So now. Oh, from the manufacturer. I'm a three-person design firm. I need, I'm going to choose to put in a new ADI part or a new Maxim part or a TI part or something like that. How do I actually go and get attention from them, right? And it's like, I need help with this. I need to figure it out.

Chris Gammell: Why do you need attention? Why do you need help? Quite frankly, I'm, that's a big selling point for me. I'm going to use a part where I don't need a human to help me, right? All the information's there. Everything I need is on tap for me.

Dave Jones: I agree with you in principle. Right. But to be honest, Dave, not everyone's a Dave Jones. Like, honestly, that's what it comes down to. Like, not everybody wants that. I mean, like, some people need help, especially people coming in from the, you know, like, there's a lot of people coming in from the software side that are going to try the hardware stuff on their own.

Chris Gammell: Not experienced enough to solve problems on their own, right? Right.

Dave Jones: I mean, and not only that, this is how the sales model is built, right? It's the current way that the, you know, the electronics sales model is built is top down. It's pushing parts from a manufacturer trying to convince an engineer to use a part, right? And...

Chris Gammell: Well, you go to a forum. Who says you have to, often you get quicker and better support from a technical forum somewhere rather than... Yes, I agree. If the manufacturer's got a, like, you know, TI talked about it last week. Right. Now TI has that forum. Right.

Dave Jones: The ETE is a great, it's a great forum. And I remember over on Embedded, they had one of the people from, that was not for ST, but the ST forum is supposed to be pretty good because a lot of the users that help out are on there, that kind of thing. And you're right. Forums are definitely a piece of that.

Chris Gammell: And people don't know how big you are on a forum. You're just another forum guy, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's true. Right. So what I wanted to bring up, though, is interesting, is Aero. So Aero's a distributor. Yeah. And I tried this out. You can go click on the Aero site now and directly chat to a factory FAE at Aero, one of the distributor FAEs.

Chris Gammell: Nice.

Dave Jones: Yeah. It was weird. I don't know if it's going to be successful because I imagine that eventually...

Chris Gammell: Oh, it's an online chat. I'm an Aries and 32 years old. It's a sequel.

Dave Jones: Yeah, no, I mean, but honestly, some people do need help like that. And I think that this is actually, especially as these companies get bigger and bigger and bigger, you see this actually with car rental agencies now, too. Right? I travel more now, so I see more car rental agencies. But like Hertz, which is the car rental agency I use, they'll have like two people at the desk. But if there's a huge line, they're like, oh, just go over to that photo booth over there. And you pick up the phone. And then there's like someone at their centralized center who's doing video chat and basically gives you a car from a thousand miles away.

Chris Gammell: Well, they're smart companies because it makes you want to go back to them.

Dave Jones: Right. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: But distributors like Aero, that's hard, right? Because you might go in and leech their technical services, right? And then just go buy from DigiKey, right?

Dave Jones: That's what I wonder about. Right. Exactly. And I think that'll be interesting to see how it changes. I think this is, honestly, so like especially talking about like as companies get bigger and bigger and bigger, forums are definitely one way. I think this is definitely one way, right? You know, this is direct interaction. But a lot of times, like so in the past, I've gotten through their filters because I worked for big companies. If I did it now as contextual electronics, it's like whose little contextual electronics? There's no, you know, there's no, what's it called? EAU, estimated average annual usage, right? It's like, how many am I going to use in a year?

Chris Gammell: How many are you going to give me? I've done that. All you have to do is say I'm from, you know, I'm from Serso. I'm from, you know, I work for GC McHoney. I work for Tally's, you know? Right. And they go, whey. Yeah, exactly.

Dave Jones: You represent business that they can then report on and that kind of thing. And it's interesting. But now this is now a new piece that you could kind of jump the line a little bit, at least for now. So I thought that was really interesting. Like I said, I tried it and I talked to a guy in, I think, the Colorado office. And we video chatted and he helped me look at new boost converters. And now they're dating. Now we're dating. That's right. Now we talk once a week and we love everything. We talk about boost converters and buck converters and sepid converters. And the difference from Dave's experience, I'm talking to people about electronics. I'm going to keep bringing that up until you show me a new board.

Chris Gammell: Thank you very much.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, yeah, I think that is interesting. Interesting new development. We'll see. I don't know. Especially as big companies get bigger. Because you need, like you think about it, like, you know, there's going to be upstarts in every, you know, there's upstarts that are trying to take over Gmail and Google and everything like that. But someone wants to know, you know, who those people are in case they hit it big. I'm sure the same thing happens in hardware. It's not likely, but they still want to know in case it happens. Right? So.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Next. Do we care about the real reason Quirky failed?

Dave Jones: I thought we talked about that last week.

Chris Gammell: Did we? Well, I thought this was when we link.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh, hey, you were right. Do you want to talk about that?

Chris Gammell: I always want to talk about when I'm right.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Which is the majority of the time.

Dave Jones: No, it's not.

Chris Gammell: Ha!

Dave Jones: But, no, we opened up Parts.io, so that's a new thing. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Told you so. Told you it never worked. No one would take it up. No one wants to sign up to use your search engine.

Dave Jones: Well, we still allow signups, so you get benefits. But, yes, we're now open in public, and so that's exciting. And, you know, if people tried it in the past, they got frustrated like Dave did. Dave still hasn't tried it, I'm pretty sure.

Chris Gammell: Well, according to you, I don't do any electronics. Right.

Dave Jones: That would help. You know, if we could somehow get it to, like, if I wrote, like, a bot for your forum that was, like, a part search thing, then maybe you'd use it, right? It's like Dave mentions the part, and it's like, oh, I'll go search that for you, sir. Now, that's service.

Chris Gammell: There you go. There's an idea for you. Get your coder monkeys at Parts.io to write a simple machines forum plugin that searches for part numbers and automatically provides a hyperlink. Automatically hyperlinks it. I don't know.

Dave Jones: I've seen those in forums before. Those usually look pretty spammy to me. You ever seen those where you, like, mouse over something in a forum? Yeah, I see.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, they highlight words, and, yeah, it pops up. Highlight the word. It's like dog, and then it's like taking you to nude girls.

Dave Jones: It's always, like, the same link, you know?

Chris Gammell: All right, okay.

Dave Jones: It's like anything potentially relevant, but. Right. So maybe that's not a good idea, but. But, yeah, so Parts.io's open, and, you know, I'm always looking for feedback. Well, I just gave you feedback. Write a plugin. Write a plugin, right. The thing that I said first, and then you said, yeah, you should do that, that's your feedback? Yeah. Yeah, so I was on the Spark Gap as well, talking about that, so people should listen to that. Always a good time talking to Carl and Corey, so if you like podcasts and stuff.

Chris Gammell: And if you like Chris flogging his company like Dead Horse. Ah, actually, I talk mostly about Op-Ams.

Dave Jones: Mostly about Op-Ams. Oh, really? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Excellent.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I'm going to be doing the same. Speaking of the last thing I'll be flogging, that conference I'm helping set up in San Francisco. How's that going? It's going good. We've got a bunch of speakers, some former Amp Hour people. I don't think I can say who they are yet. They'll be announced in the next couple days. But yeah, it'll be good people, and there's sign-ups for the tickets now too. So it'll be cheap, like $64 for the first round of people. So super cheap, food included. Oh, free food. Hardware-like hands-on stuff too. You pay for the food. So yeah. Awesome. It'll be a good time.

Chris Gammell: Do you have any idea of numbers you're expecting?

Dave Jones: I think we can only do 200 at the place. Oh, okay, right. Yeah, because it is San Francisco. So for this year, it'll be just 200.

Chris Gammell: Why is there no good cheap conference spaces in San Francisco? What's the deal?

Dave Jones: It's just everything is so compact in cities. When you think about how big... So when you think about the scale of conference centers, there's the Moscone Center, which is the huge one, but you'd have to go so big that it's like, ugh, and then you have to pay so much money.

Chris Gammell: Right. You'd have to rent a stadium or something.

Dave Jones: And so I compare it too to the ESCs of the world, right? Like those are pretty expensive and they're still going on. And there's usually good content there, but like the scale difference, like oftentimes a lot of that ticket price is because they're renting these huge centers, you know? And like, so you kind of have to charge that much money. So hopefully this will keep it down and we're going to try some new things. So it should be good. I'm excited. And maybe we'll get Dave there some year, some point. We'll see.

Chris Gammell: No thanks.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I just can't handle the 14 hour plane trip.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Just can't. No.

Dave Jones: No? What about the Perth to London? I saw you tweet about that one. Don't get me started. Oh my God. How long was that?

Chris Gammell: 19 hours or something. 18 or 19 hours. Direct flight from Perth to London. That's a long... It'll be the longest flight in the world. That's right. In a year or something, they're getting some new plane that can do it.

Dave Jones: Yeah. How long is it from Sydney to Perth? Isn't it like a pretty good chunk of distance?

Chris Gammell: Sydney to Perth is about five hours. Oh wow. Depends on the direction. I think it's four hours back or something.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh, so it's like Cleveland to San Francisco, basically. Like that kind of distance.

Chris Gammell: Well, Australia is the same distance. Oh it is? Oh okay. It's the same width as the US. So it's like going from London... Oh yeah. It's like going from San Francisco to New York. Oh wow. It's basically the same. However many hours that is. Six hours or something. Yeah, that's usually like six on the way out to San Francisco. Yeah, it's the same.

Dave Jones: Wow.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Whoa.

Chris Gammell: It's the same. So yeah, people don't realize this. For me, people say, oh why don't you just go to a thing in, you know, some conference in Europe. It is 24 hours one way on the plane. Right? That is just flight time. That is just flight time. That doesn't include many hours. Yeah, it doesn't include the time zones. It doesn't include the couple of many hours layover at the airport in between. It doesn't include, you know, you've got to get there two hours early at the start. Otherwise, they won't book your bags on. Right? Yep, yep, yep. Yeah, that's nutty. Like for an international flight, it's like, it's 48 hours. It's like 48 hours just on the plane. That's more than an entire working week.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Just to get there and back.

Dave Jones: That's crazy.

Chris Gammell: Like people don't realize how far it is. And, you know, I say that, you know, people say that all the time. Why don't I do that? You know, or why don't I go to the US? It's 14 hours each way. 16, just to get to San Fran. If I were to get to New York, add another six or eight with a layover. Yeah. At least.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Right? It's like, yeah, 20 plus hours each way. So a working week just to get to New York, for example. Full working week.

Dave Jones: Right. And then you've got to stay there for two weeks or three weeks in order to make it worthwhile.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, to make it worthwhile. I'm not going to, I'm not flying there for a couple of days conference and then coming back.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Jeez. You know?

Dave Jones: Yeah, I've been saying, I think that by the time, I think the only way that Dave's coming back over here is when the kiddos are finally ready to go to Disney World. That's what I'm calling it.

Chris Gammell: That's pretty, yeah. Yeah, no, I've been saying that for years. Yeah, that's probably when it's going to happen.

Dave Jones: Right? So we've got a couple more years. I'll probably be in Australia first, to be honest.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. No, well, Huxley, right? Huxley's only five months old. Yeah. Right? It'll be another four years before we can probably take him, you know? Wow. Well, you know, look, yeah, we could take him now, sure. But, you know, it's just, yeah, it's, no, it's better if they can, you know, at least wipe their own bottom. Right. Yeah. Right, right.

Dave Jones: At least make them coherent when they're crying nonstop from being on a plane for so long. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, dear. Yep. So, you know, yeah, no, it'll be another good four or five years, unless there's some other, you know, unless I go on my own. Right, of course. Unless I get, yep, yep.

Dave Jones: Hmm. Dang, that's crazy.

Chris Gammell: It is, I know. That's what you get for living in Australia.

Dave Jones: Yeah, man. That and spiders.

Chris Gammell: Well, the U.S. isn't that much different. Where can you go, right? Canada. You can go to Canada or Mexico. That's about it, right? Apart from that.

Dave Jones: From New York, it's like six or seven to London, so it's not too bad.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's not too bad. Yeah. That's not too bad. That's like going from here to Singapore or something.

Dave Jones: Yeah, right, right, right.

Chris Gammell: That's not too bad. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah, from L.A., it's like six or seven to Hawaii. Right. Or maybe less than that.

Chris Gammell: No, sorry, I think it's about eight to Singapore.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Which is kind of like the nearest Asian port to here.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I think. Hmm.

Dave Jones: So I didn't put this on the list, but someone has been tweeting this to me. It's actually Bryce, who helped me get a tour of SpaceX. There is a new... Here, I'll send you the link, Dave, if I could find it. Shoot. Maybe I won't. There's a new AMSAT. So it's called the Fox 1A satellite. And basically, it's up. It's up there now. But basically...

Chris Gammell: Is this like a CubeSat thing, or is it a big...

Dave Jones: I think, yeah, I think it's like that size. But basically, there's... Anyone can decode the telemetry now. So it's Fox 10 software for like... And it's cross-platform and stuff like that. Right. And you can basically get the downlink and then decode it and actually look at all the stuff that's happening up there. Which seems pretty cool. So, I don't know.

Chris Gammell: What data can you get? What can you...

Dave Jones: Probably...

Chris Gammell: Hey, I pinged a satellite.

Dave Jones: Direction it's facing. Wow. Okay. Yeah. I mean, telemetry stuff. I mean, right? I mean, like...

Chris Gammell: Right. Okay. So it's telemetry stuff. I honestly just looked at this. I'm sorry about that. But it's... You can talk to it and you can get some ASCII techs back. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: It reminds me of the Big Bang Theory episode where they're up on top of the roof and they're shooting the laser at the moon, you know? Yeah. And they... And so they shoot the laser at the moon and it comes back and they get the little ping on the screen that the data says, oh, yeah, we did it. And, you know, they go, is that it? Yeah. And it's like, yeah, it's a little blip on a thing, you know?

Dave Jones: Oh. Okay. Yeah. Is that it? Right.

Chris Gammell: Oh, dear. Yep. That's kind of the same thing. It's like, yay, we did it. We talked on satellite. Which I can appreciate. Hey, it's fun. I've done stuff like that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's like... Just for the sake of it. You know? Moon bounce, stuff like that. Just because you can. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Just because you can. That's what we do.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Because we're a sad bunch, aren't we? And you guys...

Dave Jones: No. It's just, you know, it's a technically challenging thing that you want to do. I mean... Some of us want to.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, we're sad in the eyes of most of the world. Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah. I wanted to talk about robots a little bit. I know that we usually get into an argument about robots, but... Talk about robots. Go on. Go on. Oh, robots. I was starting to imagine some of the things... I know we've talked about the list before of, like, things that can be replaced by robots. And really, I should say robotics and automation. But I was kind of... I was out doing errands today, and I, like, got my hair cut, and then I got a coffee, and I... You know, then I got a sandwich somewhere. And, like... Like, I started to think about, like, what... What can't be done by robots or automation in the future? You know what I mean? Like, I feel like there's so much stuff out there. Like, I was... What I was really imagining was a robot cutting my hair. Kind of going, like, Garth and the suck and cut in Wayne's World kind of style. But I don't know. Like, I was just kind of imagining what...

Chris Gammell: Well, that's the thing. It was probably possible 50 years ago to do that, right? Robots have been taking over people's things since the days of Henry Ford, right? I mean...

Dave Jones: Yeah, I mean, I guess you could say an assembly line is... Not smart robots as we know them these days, but automation, right? Yeah, automation, for sure.

Chris Gammell: Automation has been, you know, has been taking over jobs since, like, for the last 100 years almost, right? 80, 90 years, right? A long time. When did Henry Ford start these automations? You know, it would have been...

Dave Jones: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: It's close to it.

Dave Jones: Probably, yeah.

Chris Gammell: It's getting close to a century, right?

Dave Jones: I've been to the Ford Museum.

Chris Gammell: And even before that, even before that, machines have been taking jobs way back. You know, the Industrial Revolution, for goodness sake, right?

Dave Jones: Right, like the Mennonites. Sorry, the Luddites. Mennonites skip technology, too.

Chris Gammell: So, you know, there's nothing new here. I mean, it's just, you know...

Dave Jones: Right, right. I was just kind of more imagining... I guess we've talked about the jobs a whole bunch in the past.

Chris Gammell: You're imagining what could be taken over by...

Dave Jones: Well, and more just, like, you know, I had a nice haircut person today, and she was very nice, and like, I don't know, I have nice Uber drivers, and, you know, I'm like, oh, well, your job's going to be gone. More Uber than haircut, hopefully, but, you know, like, it's... I guess it's empathy? I don't know. I guess?

Chris Gammell: I, yeah, but...

Dave Jones: Well, I don't know. I guess I'll just repeat my refrain from before, is it's better to be the robot builder than the person whose job is taken by a robot, so... Yep. I guess we're on the right path there.

Chris Gammell: Definitely.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Hmm. Robots and stuff. I still need to get better with robots, but we're getting there. What else should we talk about? We're almost out of time.

Chris Gammell: Maybe we'll be visiting Cafe 80s, you know, in...

Dave Jones: Oh, yeah, right.

Chris Gammell: From Back to the Future. Yep.

Dave Jones: Pepsi. What's it called? Pepsi... It wasn't Pepsi Max. That actually exists now. The $50 Pepsi. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, yeah, the $50 Pepsi, yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: All right, well, do we have anything else to talk about? I don't know.

Chris Gammell: No. We're over. Or we're just on time. Just on time.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: There's other good links on the... The subreddit's always good for checking out new links or bad links or...

Chris Gammell: It is. It's not a bad repository of new stuff.

Dave Jones: I like that it's... Honestly, it's nice that it's public because then people see it on Twitter. You can watch it on Twitter. You can see it. Um... On the actual... If you're a Reddit person, you can see it there. It's just, you know...

Chris Gammell: I was just lamenting before this. Why doesn't Reddit auto-update? It's supposed to be like a news... Like a thing where you get your latest stuff. Why doesn't it, like, auto-update? Yeah. Why do I have to hit the refresh button?

Dave Jones: I think the idea is that there's... Why? You know, right now on this page, and the page I'm looking at, there's 100 links. If that's not enough to you to, you know... Right. ...satiate your need for constant stimulation, and that refresh is such a difficult thing, maybe... Maybe you should use a different site, Dave. Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, I don't use Reddit anyway, so... Apart from this show, so... Yeah. Okay. Yeah, but it's nice. People say Reddit's a duck's guts. Meh.

Dave Jones: Yeah, it's okay. But it's nice, because, you know, we always love when people submit stuff. You know, you have to be a... You have to have a login, but it doesn't matter what your login is. We should see everything, so... It's a good place to post links, let us know. Most of them are me, but that's okay. You posted one about the scarp. Stupid scarp. Oh, yes, yes.

Chris Gammell: No, we have to talk about it. We have to. Otherwise, it's... Yep. It's... Sorry. Okay. Yes. Okay, so we're going to go 20 minutes over.

Dave Jones: Well, that much? Yes. Maybe we should limit it a little bit.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, we have to, because it's relevant, because it brings up an important point, right? If people don't know, there's a... Sorry, you wanted to talk about stupid robots again, right? I'm going to talk about scarp, okay?

Dave Jones: Okay. Crowdfunding again.

Chris Gammell: If people... Yes, it's crowdfunding, so bingo. Now, scarp is a... If you haven't heard, it's a razor, like a, you know, razor blade, shaver, razor thing, that uses a laser beam. To cut your hair instead of a blade. Allegedly. Allegedly. Right? And they raised 4 million bucks on Kickstarter, and they hadn't finished yet. I think they had like a week or two left, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah, something like that.

Chris Gammell: They raised 4 million bucks. You know, everyone was raving about it, like it's going to be the greatest revolution in the history of the world, you know, since sliced bread. And, you know, and of course all us engineers just went, yeah, okay, sounds like bullshit, you know, to us. And... Yep. Yep. Sure enough, so did Kickstarter. They canned it. After it, it was like one of the top 20 projects of all time in terms of funding. It got to 4 million bucks and they suspended it. They suspended it based on the fact that it didn't have a working prototype. That was that, you know, it didn't meet their rules. The famous rule for Kickstarter that didn't have a working prototype. Well, A, how did it get on Kickstarter to begin with if it didn't have a working prototype, right? Why only can it after 4 million bucks? But, hey, my hat's off to Kickstarter for actually having the guts to suspend one of the most successful and popular campaigns and publicly visible campaigns on there. Right.

Dave Jones: That's a pretty big chunk of change that they're missing out on. That's a pretty ballsy move. Right? Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: How, what, they get, what, 6%, 7%, 8% or something of the 4 million bucks? Yeah, I don't know. You know. But, yeah, so they've come out and suspended it. And within, like, less than a day, they were on Indiegogo with flexible funding. Yes, the crowdfunding campaign of champion scammers everywhere. Yeah. I think Indiegogo courted them. I think Indiegogo actively target these companies. Like, as soon as they find out you've been canned from whatever, they'll target you. Hey, come on, Indiegogo. It's our growth model. Because they actually mentioned it. They mentioned it on their Facebook page. They said, oh, yeah, Indiegogo is supporting us. Blah, blah, blah. You know. It's like, I think they were actively, yeah. They happily accepted them.

Dave Jones: So what is the point you want to make about this, though? Like, the fact that it's a sham?

Chris Gammell: Oh, yes, yes. The point is, what constitutes a working prototype for Kickstarter? Because it's an interesting question. Because, like, they, you know, these guys look like the real deal, right? They aren't scammers, right? I don't think they're deliberate scammers. They're, you know, they're fully kitted out to do the research on this. They've done, you know, done the research. They actually have a prototype, you know, they showed some videos of lasers going through a fiber. It's not actually a laser beam. It's, like, you know, through the air. It's actually through, like, a fiber. And it's, like, the leakage of the laser radiation from the fiber itself is what does the actual cut in of the hairs, right? So it has this thin string.

Dave Jones: What, like, from heating up, basically? Is that, I mean, that's the idea? Yeah, yeah. Basically, it heats it up.

Chris Gammell: You can actually see little, yeah, it burns them. It burns the hairs and, choo, cuts through them, right? So they've actually done photos, you know, they've actually done videos of a working prototype. But it is, like, it's, like, the worst demo I've ever seen. Like, it is slow. It's horribly shot. It's inefficient. It's, you know, they take 10 seconds to cut one hair. You know, it's excruciating to watch. So it's a very poor demo. But it is a demo of a working prototype. So it's, you know, it's interesting. What constitutes a working prototype? Because this company, SCARP, claimed that they needed. Is it effective as a solution? It works, but they need, yeah, they need the money. Yeah, they need the money to do a real, to develop a real industrial strength, you know, fiber that will just, you know, slice straight through.

Dave Jones: Right. So that would be, like, so it would be akin to, like, when we see stuff where it's, like, successful fusion reaction. And then you go read the article and it's, like, well, we almost got the amount of energy back out that we put into it. And they call it successful.

Chris Gammell: We got 10 picowatts out. Right, right. All we have to do is put in money and we'll get one that pumps out 100 watts.

Dave Jones: All we need is, you know, a couple billion more dollars and a couple miracles and, you know, some Tony Stark magic. I don't know.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah, so, like, they do have a real prototype and they have, you know, a real lab where they're developing this stuff. So the guys aren't, you know, some scammers with a 3D render. Although that, at first, they did not have this video at first. Like, when they first, I don't think, anyway, when they first put the campaign up. They sort of had, you know, 3D printed, you know, 3D printed, you know, shaver handles and stuff like that. And, you know, no actual, and they had a fiber that wasn't embedded in the razor itself. And, you know, like, yeah, so it wasn't really a, but they have since shown a working prototype. So, but they still got canned, which is interesting. So, you know, I've seen a lot worse projects on Kickstarter that have, you know, gone through that have had less of a prototype than this thing.

Dave Jones: Right, so I would think the question would be what kind of role does Kickstarter have in protecting consumers? Or what does any crowdfunding have in protecting consumers? Right, yes.

Chris Gammell: Oh, it opens up a whole big can of worms.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I mean, like, then is every campaign that fails ever, are they liable for that kind of thing? Where it's like, oh, well, who's making the decisions there? But that's also the business turn, and they're making money on it, so they get to decide.

Chris Gammell: Do they have to protect the claims of the product? Yeah, it's like a consumer confidence type thing. Yeah, yeah, they, you know, Scarp claim that this will revolutionize shaving, and it'll just chew, you know, it'll be the cleanest shave ever, and it'll just shave through all your hairs. Well, you know, fantastic, right? Well, it did, but it also took my skin off. Is it Kickstarter's place? Right, yeah, I know. Like, if you just, any practical engineer looks at this and goes, nah, this is just going to be a complete and utter practical foyer. Yes, it's possible, right? Everyone, no one doubts it works, right? But it's just going to be so inefficiently horrible and impractical. It's just, yeah, it's just, you know, it's going to be a foyer. But, hey, is that Kickstarter's job to protect the bold consumer claims of products, like getting 800% battery life or something like that when, you know, engineers know it's only 20, you know, like, it's bugger all. Right? Like, is that reason enough to... Right, well, yeah, that's the point. Like, does it work at all? Who at Kickstarter gets to decide that? Right, when does it work? That gets to decide technically.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yes, yes, technically, is this thing going to be viable? I'm wondering if they had any technical input into this.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Actual decision.

Dave Jones: Well, like, at a certain point, it's like, oh, well, the battery life isn't quite what they claimed. Oh, well.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly. It's, you know, or it's not as fast or a product's not as fast as it claims or it's not as, you know, powerful as it claims or whatever.

Dave Jones: Or the firmware isn't loaded when the watch arrives, right?

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it's not as easy to use as they claim, you know.

Dave Jones: Digging out old wounds, huh?

Chris Gammell: Right? Insert. I'm right, damn it.

Dave Jones: Sure. Sure you are, Dave. Keep thinking that.

Chris Gammell: Anyway, yeah. So, it's just a fascinating case, this one, I think.

Dave Jones: Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're right because it's close enough to legit that it's like, oh, well.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Who decides? Just because it might be impractical, well, who was to decide that, okay? I mean, that's what the company want the money for so that they can produce, they freely admit it's not practical at the moment, but that's what they need the money for to make it practical. Right. And that's kind of the idea behind Kickstarter, is it not? I don't know. And the idea of a prototype in quotation marks. Does a prototype have to perform as good as your claims?

Dave Jones: Do you say, I mean, it's all scale, right? But like, it's not like, okay, so let me give you an extreme example here, right? I put up a thing on Kickstarter and I play a guitar riff poorly, right? And I say, all right, so now you should fund me and I'm going to go take guitar lessons and I'm going to record a hit rock album. And then you get that album.

Chris Gammell: Right. Okay. I can give you a more practical example. Okay. Let's say you develop one of the classic staples of any crowdfunding site, a 3D printer. You develop this 3D printer and you demo it. You've got a prototype, but it's as slow as a wet week, right? It's as slow as a wet week. But your claim is, oh, we need the money to buy all these really super high torque motors and everything else. Trust us. It'll be really, really fast. Right. We have to get volume and that'll get the price down. Or you've got a pick and place machine. Right. You've got a pick and place machine. It only does, you know, 10 components an hour, right? It's as slow as a wet week. But hey, once we get that money, it'll be, you know, 5,000 components an hour. Trust us.

Dave Jones: Right. It's almost going to like approach the point where it's like Kickstarter owners need to write business cases for Kickstarter, right? If that was like the ad absurdum kind of step of like deciding and it almost goes back towards the old model of like.

Chris Gammell: But you've got to prove it. Like, because basically, I think what Kickstarter have done here is they're going, well, your prototype does not match your claims. Therefore, you're out. I mean, I think you might lose count of the number of Kickstarter projects that are like that.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That is interesting. Yeah. I think, well, I think you need two to make it a trend, right? Right. Okay. I think the key thing would be, you know, finding other similar cases or seeing similar cases in the future.

Chris Gammell: This might be entirely political because, you know. Yeah. It's the razor lobby. I don't follow Kickstarter that closely, right? But maybe they've come under a lot of fire recently for a lot of failed projects and they want to make a statement. Well, what better statement.

Dave Jones: It's the Dollar Shave Club. They're paying them off one dollar at a time.

Chris Gammell: It's big. It's big razor. Big razor. Big razor. Big razor.

Dave Jones: Oh, my God. I hope so.

Chris Gammell: And the air power is sponsored by Gillette. That's right. Right. Right. Right. And.

Dave Jones: Oh, my God.

Chris Gammell: And. Oh, my God. What was I going to say? Yes. It could be entirely political. What better statement to make than take one of the biggest funding and highest profile products on there that has a prototype, but they're going to can it because, you know, just to show that they can and they're responsible could be entirely political. That wouldn't surprise me at all.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And, well, maybe I can't blame them for that, actually. You know, they've got to, you know, a lot of, like, a lot of these crowdfunding companies, you know, really need to up their credibility. Right. Because it's a lot of, a lot of the time it's in the toilet.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: For allowing various things through. So, you know.

Dave Jones: They're just collateral damage, man. Collateral damage.

Chris Gammell: I mean, Mike, Mike from Mike's Electric Stuff tweeted a thing saying, oh, you can, you know, like this, but you let this project through. And he pointed to some bloody, oh, was it like, yeah, it was charger UPS from Wi-Fi signals. Like, it was, it was just like so bad. It was so, you know, and yet it got approved on Kickstarter, you know. Right, but it also didn't raise $4 million. No, exactly. It's, you know, it's so under the radar. It's just one of, you know, 10,000 different projects on there.

Dave Jones: You're going to make a big deal out of the mobster when you lock him away. But, you know. Right. When you arrest some of his underlings and then they, they get out on bail. There's no news story about that. Right.

Chris Gammell: Is there, here's how you can compete, you know, potentially compete against the biggies. Taking it full circle back to the beginning of the show. So, somebody, you know, start a crowdfunding site like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Oh, thank God. Another one. But one that's technically vetted.

Dave Jones: Oh, interesting. You know.

Chris Gammell: Heavily technically vetted, you know, by experts, you know. Like, it's founded by experts. It has a team of, you know, maybe, you know, volunteers or whatever. EEV starter. There you go, Dave. You should start that. EEV start. Yeah. Yes, EEV start. And, you know, it's like a badge of honor if you've been approved on this site, you know. And they don't have 10,000 different campaigns on there. They have like 10. And these have been vetted.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Sorry, man. That would not work. The power of these platforms is how many eyeballs are looking.

Chris Gammell: Bums on seats. Yeah. Bums on seats.

Dave Jones: That's right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. People just spend their day, you know, trawling through Kickstarter, looking for projects to back. I mean, to throw their money at.

Dave Jones: Don't you guys know that you could be throwing your money at things like Dave and me? Come on. Which we should close with. We always appreciate our Patreon donations. So, thank you to everyone who does that.

Dave Jones: Thank you very much. It allows us to send microphones to our next guest.

Chris Gammell: Yes. I think we're up to 150 an episode or something. Something like that. So, that more than pays for the mics. Yeah. And I think the next.

Dave Jones: And the server, too. And the next thing is going to be paying for. We're going to get back into transcriptions as that, you know, keeps going up. So, we should set some more goals, that kind of thing. Because I think transcripts are great. I don't know what the next step after that would be.

Chris Gammell: And in a couple of weeks, we will be releasing a Kickstarter where we want to take your money to improve our podcast. We've got a working prototype. That's right. We promise to develop a bigger and bigger and higher quality podcast.

Dave Jones: We have 271 revisions of a prototype so far.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It's shit quality at the moment. But trust us. You just back us for a couple of million bucks on Kickstarter.

Dave Jones: We'll just take some voice lessons and stand-up comedy lessons.

Chris Gammell: I will personally take. Yes. If we get. That'll be the stretch goal. If we reach a million bucks on Kickstarter, I will personally take voice lessons.

Dave Jones: There we go.

Chris Gammell: And learn how to. Dave will learn how to talk like an Ohioan. And learn how to pronounce. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep. Or a Texan.

Chris Gammell: Bye, y'all.

Dave Jones: See ya. Outro Music