Good morning. I'm Sharon Farb, and we are so excited to be at CNI and present the preliminary results from our research study. I'd like to introduce the research team. There's Peter Broadwell, Martin Klein, Todd Grapone, and myself, all from the UCLA Library. Let me tell you just a little bit about the format of our presentation this morning. I will give a few introductory remarks. Just kind of situate the context of the research. We really want to spend most of the time on exploring and exposing with you the research findings so far. And then Pete will describe the methodology of the research. Martin will give some highlights of the preliminary findings. Todd will have some concluding remarks, and we've tried to save time for some questions and discussions, including how we might collaborate with interested CNI members to do some further research on aspects of this together. So I'd just like to highlight a couple trends that provide context and kind of situate the research. So as everyone knows, there's rising costs. There's a growing, a significantly growing research corpus, particularly with respect to the sciences. There's an increase as well in research funding. Let me pause for a minute and just highlight what's on the slide about the the cost, the revenue with respect to STM, and in particular journals, because journals are the focus of our study, and journals are about 40% of the STM market, and of that 68 to 75% is coming directly from subscriptions that libraries have. Another trend that is just particularly in the last few years important to highlight is the significant increase, in particular in open access journals in the sciences, and we'll talk some more about that in a minute. And then the other one I want to highlight that isn't new, it's in fact been a constant in scholarly publishing, is the critical contribution of our faculty and researchers in the production of the scholarly literature. Elsevier conducted a study using University of California data, and this chart comes from the UC University of California impact. This is a chapter from the impact report on publications, and the Elsevier study found that one out of every 12 research publications published in the US were created by University of California faculty. It would be fascinating to do a study and explore what the contribution of CNI members, faculty and researchers are in the production of scholarly literature. One might imagine the results of that study may show something like 10 out of every 12 publications. Everyone is familiar with this chart that shows the correlation in some ways the gap between the steady increase in the rise again of journal publications as well as book publications with respect to the consumer price index. What people may not be as aware of is the study that was conducted in 2013 by the National Association of State Budget Officers. That found that just under half the states in the United States, so 24 states were operating with general fund expenditures at the 2008 level, so that means those of us that are tied, universities that are tied to public funding and state funding, may likely leave some of us not even be at flat budgets, but budgets that are skewed to 2008 levels. This chart comes from a study that was published in class entitled Open Access of the Scientific Journal of Literature, Situation 2009. In 2009, the authors found that approximately 25% of the research publications in the sciences were at that point open access and the chart is, you know, you can see the green and you can see the gold, but collectively it was around that much. In 2015, there was a study where the authors found, sorry, I have the title of it, but that study found that 61.1% at this point of the journal literature is now freely available online. Our study looks specifically at the contents of the archive, the physics and math focused institutional, sorry, repository that's hosted by Cornell and their operating budget, including everything, was just over $800,000 for the period from 2013 to 2017. In contrast, we can't tell you specifically what the corresponding cost is of those final published, but we do know that, you know, the STM US is about $10 million, so somewhere between 1% and maybe 15% is what that number likely is. In any case, we can say that it is likely 10 to 15 plus times the price of archive. In the STM report 2015 that was authored by Michael Ware and Michael Maid, they described the value added roles of publishers. The one we focused on for this study, it is a content analysis, is the copy edit. We have two working assumptions to briefly highlight. They are that if that publisher's claim with respect to copy editing is valid, then the text of the preprint should differ in some form from the corresponding post or final, and that by applying measures of similarity, we should be able to detect and quantify such differences. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Peter who's going to describe the research methodology and data collection. Thanks Sharon. So I'll just jump right into our first methodology slide. So as you can see, we assembled two different corpora. If you're going to compare pre and post prints, then you need to have a good number of both of those categories. So when we were collecting our preprint corpus, as Sharon mentioned, we focused on archive.org, so most of the papers we collected have something to do with physics and math primarily. And so we actually ended up downloading pretty much everything, at least all of the PDF papers that are in our archive and also the metadata associated with them. The metadata is available through an OAIPMH interface. The PDFs you can download through Amazon's S3 service. Archive has an account. They have a requester pays setup where we pay to download them. It cost us about $60 to download all 500 gigabytes of archive papers. This is totally above board. It's all on the website. They say you can do it. And we paid for it, so we didn't cut into their $800,000 budget at all. And archive also keeps versions of preprints. We used the latest available if there were multiple versions. And as Martin will explain later, using the latest version was okay. We were able to ascertain that we were still working with preprints, not preprints that ended up being postprints. To gather the matching postprint corpus, we expected the DOIs from the metadata that was available through archive. They don't actually assign DOIs, but authors can go in and add the DOIs later. So about 44.5% of the articles in an archive have these DOIs. And then we used those to look up the same articles in their final or postprint version through the Crossref API. And Crossref for some articles allows you to download the full text in XML and also the metadata for the articles. Assuming your institution has subscriptions to those journals, so we were able to take advantage of UCLA's wide range of serial subscriptions to access a large number of papers that way for the comparison. Once we had both sets of papers, we did some processing to get them ready for the actual text comparisons. We converted the PDFs to XML when we could, using fairly standard open source tools for PDF to XML conversion. We suspect they might be the same ones that publishers actually use when they're submitting their papers to Crossref. We don't know about that for sure, though. And then we extracted the various sections of the articles from the XML. The XML does a pretty good job of us delineating those sections for us. Occasionally, though, some are missing. We found that this was a fairly insignificant statistical noise in our overall analysis. But certainly, there is, when you're working with a large, when you're automatically processing a large quantity of text. So there's going to always going to be a little bit of slop. We also extracted metadata and some contents of the papers from archives, OAPMH interface, which gives you access to the metadata. But that also includes the titles and abstracts. One issue with this is that archive allows because it's primarily a science and math or physics, yeah, physics math archive. They allow authors to upload these sections with the law tech markup still in them. And that causes some problems for comparison. So we actually favored the versions of the titles and abstracts we could get from the PDFs instead for that reason. Then we just applied some basic text comparison algorithms to these sections of the papers that we're comparing directly to each other. There's six listed here. I'm only going to talk about the top three. The results from the bottom three are actually quite similar to the results from the other algorithms in red. But we do we do have a web interface that will provide the aura later that you can go to to browse the results from all of the comparisons. So these are fairly straightforward text comparison algorithms. So I'll just outline them very, very quickly here. We'll try to make it as painless as possible. So the first comparison is just the length competing the length ratio between say, the preprint abstract and the postprint abstract, which is just as it says here, it's a ratio of the shorter text to the longer text. We have an example here. So you get a nice number. And if you get a number for all a whole bunch of abstracts, you can start to generate some some good results graphs from from those. As with all of these other similarity metrics, any, you know, the closer you are to one, the more similar the text that you're comparing. So our second method was a fairly well known Levenstein edit distance algorithm, which is a number of edit operations necessary to turn one text into the other text. We have an example here showing that it takes three, three edits, either insertions, deletions or substitutions to transform the left string into the right string. This this algorithm is often used in us, like spell checking, spell checking functions on word processors to say, Oh, did you mean this word? Particularly when the word doesn't show up in the dictionary. And so we actually used to compare the papers we use the ratio, which is a slightly more complicated formula, where you add in where you, you know, you add together the links of the of the text and then subtract the edit distance in the numerator and not in the denominator. So you can kind of intuitively see here, if the edit distance is zero, then the numerator numerator and denominator are the same. So the similarity would be one, which is very similar. But the the more the edit distance increases, then your similarity score will go down. So Levenstein is good at sort of quantifying editorial changes, you know, it catches anything, including changes in capitalization, punctuation, that kind of thing. So which which is useful because this is one of the one of the areas in which publishers can contribute value to the postcards. And our third method was a contrast to to Levenstein edit distance. This is cosine similarity, which is slightly more complicated to to explain in full. But all we really need to know is that it tends to ignore superficial editorial changes, and instead focuses on significant words within the text, and is more sensitive to changes to words that are actually characteristic of a given text. So as it says here, you know, common stop words are ignored, words that are more characteristic within the whole corpus, more characteristic of a particular text within the whole corpus get greater value. So we have our I have an example here, these are actually the preprint and postprint titles of a particular paper in our data set. You can see as we as we begin to run cosine similarity does some normalization gets rid of the capitalization, ignores the stop words. And then just I did some syntax highlighting the show sort of intuitively which words are more characteristic of these texts and we'll get more weight. The word light is not all that characteristic, but it's also not a completely unimportant word. And so that the addition of that word is actually what changes what makes the cosine similarity not one and drops it down a little bit. So just to give you a visual overview of the sections that we compared, we have we have a paper here written by some people in this room that just just really briefly will show you the sections that we were able to parse out of the preprint and postprint. So we there's a title and the abstract. And then after that we grabbed all the text in the body of of the of the article, not including the title and the abstract or in the end here, the references. Oh, there's also the authors, which both the authors and the references are fairly difficult to parse. So the comparison of those sections between the preprint and postprint we've mostly left for for future work. But breaking out these sections gives us let's examine more closely the differences and the character of the differences between preprint and postprint compared to relative to if we were just to look at the raw text only. And so now Martin will talk about what we actually found when we did this. Thank you, Pete. I need to apologize for my voice. I'm getting over a cold. So if I sound like Joe Cocker, this is not a purpose. I apologize. So some preliminary findings. And as mentioned before, this is in a study in its very early stages. So while we're confident that what we are going to share with you today is true, there's still much more work to be done, right? So maybe a couple more slides about insights into the corpora that we have generated. Pete mentioned that we downloaded all of archives at work. This is roughly 1.1 million articles. Half of that give or take had DOIs that we could use to match their postprint version to. And we came up with a total of 11,000 articles. The ratio is pretty bad, you know, but it's still, we felt it's still a good enough size corpus to go ahead with our study. So starting with 1.1 million and up to 10,000. That's not all that great. But it's still good enough for, you know, a preliminary study. Most of the papers that we matched were published somewhere between 2003 and 2015. Which in two degrees makes sense if you consider when a publisher started assigning DOIs to their scholarly work and be even, you know, the use of DOIs really became more ubiquitous, let's say. Authors became aware of DOIs, went back maybe to archive and put their DOIs in their metadata set. So that date range is not particularly surprising. What was a little bit surprising, however, is that the vast majority of the postprint papers that we found were published by Elsevier. Granted, this is an SDM corpus. And Elsevier, and that's probably the reason for this high percentage that Elsevier was, as far as I know, the first partner for Crosstra for their API to provide the full text of the articles. So the vast majority of postprint articles that the Crosse API will provide is actually Elsevier content. So these are, you know, a few dimensions of how our dataset is specific, let's say. I don't want to say biased but specific. The journal that had the most papers represented in our corpus was Physics, Letters, B, had no clue that exists, but apparently it does. So just, you know, if you know what that is, good. All right. Another histogram showing you the distribution of categories in our archive corpus. So archive gives you the nice categories, right, where your papers are submitted to. And everything in red is physics specific. Everything is blue. In blue is not physics. So again, a certain specificity of our corpus, the vast majority of papers are from high energy physics. There's a little bit of math, the second column there. And the other non-physics categories is computer science, quantitative biology, statistics and quantitative finance, I believe. But that's the long tail there. Again, a corpus focused on STM, in particular, your physics C articles. All right. Results, right? Finally, we get to the results. So the next three slides that I'm going to show you have a graph on it that look very, very similar. As Pete mentioned, our similarity measures are normalized. So you get values between zero and one, whereas zero on the right hand side indicates a very, very low similarity and the value of one indicates a very, very high similarity. So left is high, right is low. The height of the bars represents the total number of papers referencing to the left y-axis and the red dot on those bars represents the relative number in percentage of papers referencing to the right y-axis, right? Makes sense? Good. Here in this, what this slide shows you is, oh, and to make this graph a little bit more readable, we bend those values into categories. So values that fall between zero and 0.1 are in the first bin, 0.1 to 0.2 in the second bin and so on to fourth and the last bin on the far left values that fall between 0.9 and 1, right? So what this graph shows you is the similarity of the titles. Pete mentioned that we extracted different sections from those articles. This is the title only. So for example, the length ratio of the titles, more than roughly 10,000 articles had a length ratio very, very close to one or somewhere between 0.9 and 1, meaning the length is almost identical for roughly 90% of all titles. Well, oh, that was not the plan. This is the Wi-Fi kick in and doing something. Just sorry about that. Where's my cursor? No, that was. All right, here we go. What was that? Oh, so that the length of the titles is very, very similar. Now you can of course say, you know, the terms cat and dog have the same length. However, they are very dissimilar, granted, hence we do the other metrics, right? So Levenstein and Colesign give you the notion of how significant the changes were. And since these values are again, very, very high for the top bin for the 0.921 bin, that indicates that there's no significant changes in the in the titles there either. So for example, Levenstein comes in at roughly 70% in the top bin and the remaining 20 something percent distributed over the second from top bin, somewhere between 0.8 and 0.9, and a little bit curious enough, roughly 10% in the bin of values between 0.1 and 0.2, so that demands for further investigation while that is, but Levenstein was on. All right, so that was the title comparison. Now we know that titles are fairly similar. Well, this may or may not be surprising. So we looked at the abstracts as well. Again, as Pete mentioned, we extracted the abstracts too and looked at why would you do that to me, Wi-Fi? All right, here we go. The abstract comparison and the picture there, as you'll see, is fairly, fairly similar. The length ratio and the Levenstein distance is dominated by the top bin. So the vast majority of those values, more than 80% fall into the bin that holds values between 0.9 and 1. So again, indicators, strong indicators that the abstracts are very, very similar. You also note that the cosine similarity ranges in about 60%. So that's a bit lower. And the only explanation, the only reasonable explanation that you have for that is there are not a lot of character-wise changes in those abstracts, but the view that there are maybe entire terms that somehow change the, you know, maybe slightly change the semantics of the abstract, hence the cosine is a little bit lower than the Levenstein distance. But you'll also notice that the remaining 40% of cosine come in in the second to top and third top. So it's still very, very left heavy, right, even though it's not as dominated by the top bin as length and Levenstein is. All right. Then we did the comparison of the entire body. So not the title, not the authors, not the abstract, not the references, everything between, basically, and come up with those results. Very interesting as well. Maybe you know that cosine similarity works fairly well or works better on longer texts than it does on shorter texts, hence the whole notion of contextual, salient terms that it catches up. And if it's the 80% of our articles come in with the cosine similarity somewhere between 0.9 and 1. So that should drive it home, right? The body of those articles is contextually speaking, very, very, very similar. You'll also notice that, excuse me, the Levenstein distance is higher for the second to top bin. So somewhere between 0.8 and 0.9. Examples for that, I'll show you in a second. One example was that we found a lot of preprint papers would have a different way of referencing papers. So you would see, as has been shown in related work, reference one, reference two, reference three, reference four. And in the postprint corresponding version of that article would be, as has been shown in related work, reference one dash four. So one through four, right? Levenstein picks up because it's character-wise and a substitution. Cosine doesn't pick up on that because it's the same thing. So that's the point. Yeah, maybe one example really quickly. This is the abstract of a paper published in physics, let it be, that highlights the differences that we found that our tool picked up on. And this might be hard to read, so let me really quickly point out what particularly Levenstein here picked up on. So forming a color, glass, condensate, whatever that is, is capitalized in the preprint version. It's lowercase in the postprint version. So again, Levenstein picks up on that because it's not the same. Cosine says this is the same thing. There is a capitalization in the term letter for postprint, but not for preprint. And interestingly enough, on the bottom right, if you can see this, in the postprint version, or no, rather in the preprint version, there's the term parametrization. And in the postprint version, it's parametrization. So they're inserted in E because this seems more correct or whatever that is. But, you know, those are the sort of differences that we did find that our Levenstein similarity matrix picks up on. So this was a lot, this was very fast. I realized that, so we made it a bit more convenient for you and built a website that contains all those histograms. So if you fancy, you can go to solarglow.library.ucli.eu slash prepost. I just tweeted this link as well, because we're in this time of the year, right? So I tweeted about this. You can go to this website. You can where's my cursor now? Again, here you go. You can say, give me all the cosine similarity values for titles. And I also want the Levenstein ratio for titles. So you get the Levenstein ratio for titles. And if you scroll down, the cosine titles. So this is for you. You know, a takeaway message. If you go home, if you need some homework, go there at home and check this out. All right. So now, you often hear the argument, well, is this a physics preprint? And I've actually done it myself that I had a paper accepted at a commercial publisher. And then I uploaded it to archive for, you know, a good measure. And the other way around as well, of course works as well. I've done this too. I have a tech report somewhere. There's a long version that no one wants to read. So I put it up on archive. Later on, this was actually not too bad. I submitted somewhere, maybe a shorter version of that. And it gets accepted. So the notion of sequentiality, what comes first is, I think, important here to consider. And so we extracted the publication dates, the reported publication dates of those articles as well. And here's the distribution of that. Everything in red was published on archive.org first. Binned again into date ranges. The black line there is to distinguish because the size of the bins are a bit misleading. Everything right of the black line is a bin size of 100 days. Everything left is a bin size of 10 days. So we have roughly, let's say, 1,000 papers that were published on archive.org first between 40 and 50 days prior to its postprint corresponding version. Right? So at least, at the very least gives you a notion that there's no, it's not necessarily true that archive only holds, you know, the open access version of your postprint article. Right? Because the sequentiality is at least distributed, let's say. All right. One more slide. Excuse me. And Pete hinted on that the author similarity that was really intriguing to us. However, it's not trivial to do that. If everything had orchids, this would be cool, but unfortunately we're not there yet. So extracting authors is not that hard interpreting the names is hard because the concept of a first name and last name is not unique across the world, right? Metadata is messy as we all know. So we have examples where the first name and the middle name are labeled as first and last and then the actual last name is labeled as the first name of the next author. So all kinds of crazy things happening again, right?  So here's well, however, what we are able to do with some heuristics, we can make a safe statement saying that we found roughly 80% of the author lists are identical, meaning the length of the number of the author is the same and also the order of the author is the same. That's for 78%, however, that leaves 22%, right? What's up for those articles? So that's an aspect for future work. We'll need to look further into this. But that's as far as we want to go with the state of the results we have to date. All right, that was it for the preliminary results. I'll hand over to Todd, who will cover a few aspects of future work and spark a discussion. Thanks, guys. Yeah, so this is obviously pretty preliminary work. There's more to do. Martin Pete hit on some some aspects of the work that need to be refined. And we'd like to get, I think, to different kinds of content as well. And also use this work to overlay with other impact factors to see if we can spark some discussion and ask some questions about those other measurements as well. We'd obviously like to move into different disciplines. We feel like what we've done so far is pretty good. But, you know, there's a really a pretty good chance once we get into other disciplines that we're going to see these changes that we can measure move a lot differently when it comes to different disciplines. And we also are interested in collaborators. So one of the things we're trying to do and we're going to do in the future is put a web API up so that you can compare your own content and the way we've done it and your own corpus and come up with your own results. I'm curious what you guys think that you'd be interested. We have our own ideas about next steps. So we want to look at some other disciplines. We want to do some qualitative work. This is obviously all quantitative work. But we would be curious what folks that are hearing about this might be interested in and how we might collaborate together. So we did save time for that. People have any questions or would like to talk about areas that you're particularly interested in then that would be really useful to us because this is just thanks so much for coming.


This is Gabrielle with Oxmoor Auto Group here at Oxmoor Toyota Say with Chuck Schuman. Hi guys. We're going to be talking about a 2017 Corolla 50th edition and we just had a couple of questions we were going to go over that we've gotten from our customers. So the first question is, we had someone call in and they asked about, they're considering the Corolla over the Nissan Sentra, just wanted to kind of see why they should pick the Corolla. Well the Corolla is the best selling car in the world. This car has been in production for 50 years, this is actually the 50th anniversary. Right. Like I said, best selling car in the world and this one also comes standard with safety features. If you see right there, Gabrielle in the center, there's an in-dash camera and on the front here you got a multi-millimeter wave radar that gives you Toyota Safety Sense P that includes pre-collision, pedestrian detection, lane departure, sway alert, auto high beams, all kinds of cool safety features that are standard on, again, the best selling car in the world which is at a great price point and they've made it sporty this year too. Right. There's a new grille design on this and so you got the cool honeycomb grille on this particular model with the daytime running lights and all of that and so, sportier wheels if you look right here and also they've simplified the Corolla as far as the packages. So it follows the, it mimics the Camry. So there's the LE, the XLE, the SE and the XSE and then the special edition 50th anniversary. Okay, perfect. Okay, well awesome. And the other question we have is, I had a customer call in about, they're like a family of three, family of four and they wanted to know if the Corolla would be enough like room for their whole family. Oh yeah. Can you kind of just go over that about the interior space? Oh yeah, yeah. So they're like family three, think about family four, that kind of thing. Yeah, I believe so. Let me show you the back seat first. Okay. So if you want to come back here, you've actually got two spots where you could put a childcare, or a child seat. Oh, okay. So the rear facing and then also the front facing as well. So there's room for the family to grow. And if you look, this is actually a really big space for a compact, you know, vehicle of compact sedan. Yeah. This is about the size of like the Camry's in the early 2000s. I mean, it's a lot bigger than this used to be. Okay. In the 50th, you know, years of developing these, they've made them bigger and all that as well. Right.  You like heated seats, you like leather, you like the XM radio navigation, all of the great stuff. Let me show you here. This one's got a sunroof on it.  You can have all kinds of cool features. There's a sport driving mode where this is actually a very fun car to drive. And this is a true story. I have a Corolla, Gabby, and my wife, she has a RAV4 and she was driving the Corolla and she was like, that's a zippy little car. Like she was actually impressed at like how it got around and got up. Yeah. Still has the CD player in this one, hands-free phone, Bluetooth navigation, all that fun stuff and this. I mean, these really are great cars at their price point. We sell a ton of them like it's a best-selling car in the world over the past 50 years. I love the Corolla. Thank you, Chuck. Yeah. If you guys, if you saw those images, I mean, there really is a lot of space in the Corolla. So that's great. If you guys have any questions, please feel free to give us a call. You can reach us at<PHONE_NUMBER> or you can visit our website at oxmortoyota.com. Thanks, you guys. Thanks, guys.


Everybody is looking for one ring. You know, it's I created this challenge based on there are a few movies that I'm just like the last song is the most iconic part of the movie to me. And they're not necessarily all really old nostalgic movies. There's there's I have three in our game. One is from the 80s two are from the 90s. No, actually that's not true. One is from the 90s and one is barely in the 2000s. But they all like resonated with me. I remember how the movie ends because of the song. What about Karate Kid? Damn it. I want to destroy it. Your rhythm makes things jacking me up. No. Is it a Peter Satara song like a Chicago song? Or is it the one where he does the mind? No, the Peter Satara song is again. I am the man. But that's not the end of the movie. Oh, and the one you're thinking of is he's the best. That one. Yeah, that's the montage song. That's what he's like doing the competition and like kicking everyone's butt. Well, I hope everybody thinks a little bit more about this. About Rocky Four. It's a fun game. I like it there. It's good. I'm trying to love this game and he probably win and beat everybody. He probably would. We should never let him play. No, he can't play. He's disqualified. He can host it, though. We ever do another All Stars? That's a category, I guarantee it. All right. You guys ready? Yeah, we're ready. Here we go. Three, two. Thanks to everyone who supports Daily Tech News Show directly. To find out more, head to DailyTechNewsShow.com. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, August 8, 2018 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. And from Studio, everybody I'm related to is in town right now. I'm Scott Johnson. Oh, Long Johnson. Having family. Having all the family in town. Yeah. That's a thing. It's only a week. It'll be over soon. I'm really happy to be here, though. There will be highlights, though. Trust me. When you say your whole family, what are we talking? How many people? 50 people. Closer to, it's probably closer to 50. A lot of extended family. It's my mom's 80th birthday. Happy birthday. Oh, happy birthday, Scott's mom. That's great. We have to celebrate such things, but it's a little hairy for a few days. I remember Eileen's grandma had her 80th birthday a while back, and we came down to LA before we lived here. And it was a blast. It was really fun. So maybe it'll turn out great. Yeah, you never know. Roger Chang is here as well. Roger, how are you? I'm good. Excellent. We'll show you a great 80th birthday someday, Roger. Someday. 70 years from now. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Actually, wait, now. The Magic Leap 1 Creator Edition Augmented Reality headset for developers has been shipping two select areas in the U.S. for $2,295. Developers can go to MagicLeap.com and enter their shipping zip code to see if it's available in their area. If it's not, you can sign up for a wait list, and we're going to talk a little bit more about this or maybe a lot more later in the show. I'm very excited about this. Facebook introduced two new augmented reality games, speaking of AR, for Messenger's live video group chat that can be played with up to six friends. Don't Smile. It's the name of one of them, not a command from me. It's a challenge not to smile, and Asteroids attack.  Ah, they're naming a tech news show, Daily Tech News Show. Someone shared pictures on a telegram channel called Canal Luchkova, which at first I was thinking, does that mean happy channel? But it just means Luchkova's channel. It purports to be a pre-release version of the Google Pixel 3 XL. It's the biggest so-called leak that we've had so far and even places like ours Technicore picking it up because it looks pretty legit. Pictures show USB-C earbuds in the pack. It does still have a headphone jack in these pictures. The screenshots indicated has an eight-core quantum processor and Adreno 630 GPU, four gigabytes of RAM, and screen resolution at 2960 by 1440. There's also a huge notch. And it does what the essential phone does and squeezes those notifications and stretches them. So you really only see about three at a time. Apple sent a letter to the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce in response to a request for details on how it protects user privacy. The company says it does not associate location information with user IDs and permanently deletes data from iPhones if it doesn't connect to Wi-Fi or power for seven days. Apple also denied that it listens to customers through iPhone microphones. Well, that's a relief. It's just so sad that we had to do that. Let's talk a little more about charging. Yeah, let's talk about charging. EU Commissioner for Competition Marguerite Vestiger said the commission is assessing options to address the problem with incompatible phone chargers. Oh, yes, this old chestnut. In 2009, manufacturers including Apple, Samsung, and Nokia signed a memorandum of understanding to voluntarily standardize the micro USB connector. Apple did so by providing an adapter to Lightning, which is what they currently use. Most phones use USB-A or USB-C, though Apple still uses its proprietary Lightning connector. The EU would like to encourage a situation where phones and chargers are bought separately and can be reused across multiple devices. If I were to throw my own hat into this ring, it would be, could we all just go USB-C and quit it and knock it off with all the different things? That'd be great. I'm all for the goal here, right? One of the goals is cut down on waste. There's a lot of wall warts out there that don't get used and shouldn't need to have been made, and that's just a waste of materials. There's a great, great convenience to just having a couple of chargers and being able to use them with anything. I'm very, very much against the idea of the government mandating this because of the fact that, hey, guess what? They all agreed voluntarily to use micro USB, and what do we want them to use now? Not micro USB, USB-C. Companies need to be free to be able to improve the charging experience. I think there are other things the EU can do to continue to encourage voluntary compliance, but personally, I just think it will end up being a problem and people overemphasize that it'll slow down innovation, but if a company really could do something cool, but they're like, ah, but we'd have to use a different charging port and we're not allowed to do that, that could become an issue. Well, imagine a world where we're stuck forever with micro USB, which turned out, in my opinion, I don't want to speak for everybody here, to be kind of crappy. They break, they bend, they short out easy. It's not a great solution. It's nice and small and tiny, but it turned out not to be that great in the long run. Imagine having to be stuck with something like that for a really long time because of some mandate. So in that regard, I agree with you. I wish that the companies would do more to work together toward these standards, but I don't need lack of a better term, dumb government telling me which standard is best. Yeah, no. And granted, there are lots of benefits to that, and I would encourage the EU to do lots of things short of mandating because even if they like, oh, well, we'll just change the USBC when that becomes the standard, you know governments don't move fast. Yeah, there are so many consortiums that are focused on creating unified standards because it's in the best interest of businesses. However, and Apple's just one example, but it's a big one of a company who's like, yeah, we're doing it our way and we want to sell as many things as possible. And if the government doesn't mandate and a consortium doesn't agree on a standard, then, you know, we're still stuck with, I mean, I have like Lightning and USBC, you know, a million of them where I'm like, which one is this? I'll put it in my laptop. Oh, no, that's the wrong one. Looks the same. All right, moving on to food. UberEATS, the food delivery branch of Uber is rolling out a new price tool that will vary the booking fee primarily based on your distance from the restaurant that the food is coming from and allow you to choose your maximum booking fee within the app. For example, you don't want a booking fee that's over 10 bucks, for example. The closer you are, the cheaper it will be, at least in theory. The further you are away, the more expensive it gets. Sort of like surge pricing for food, even though Uber does this now, but this is sort of different. The fee varies per city, but is currently between about $2 and $8. So, depending on what you're getting, going closer to the $2 is advantageous. UberEATS first launched in LA back in 2014 under the moniker Uber Fresh, if you remember it back then. Today, it's in more than 293 cities in 35 countries. A few of those countries, by the way, Uber, the car service doesn't even operate it in. We used them the other day and got this burger place that's not far from us. Actually, Tom, you and I have eaten there before. Do you remember? Oh, that place. Yeah, I know. It was $2. It was the best, cheapest thing. So, you've already got this. It sounds like. Yeah, it was awesome. And we didn't even know it. We weren't trying to find out if we had anything new. I didn't even honestly, until this article happened, I figured this stuff was just standard stuff. We just did it and we went $2. Of course, we're doing this and got everybody food that night. And it was ridiculous. Like, we'll never not do that. So it's great. I love it. Yeah. Making it a little cheaper, right? To deliver, but it's still expensive. It also makes. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Just because I use Uber Eats four nights a week. So I have lots of feelings about this. It actually, it makes a lot of sense because every once in a while, if I say, I want a burrito and, you know, there's a burrito place that's like close to me, but maybe not my favorite burrito place. And there's a further one away that's the better burrito, but it's going to be $20 at the end of the, at that trip. That gives me a little bit more to say, all right, well, how much do I want that far away burrito? Because Uber Eats, at least for me, never really laid that out. I don't know. You're just making up numbers, but it's only between $2 and $8. So it's not even going to be 20 bucks. It's going to be eight, but you may be like, man. I mean 20 bucks for the burrito and the delivery. Oh, for the total. And the service fee, you know, $20. I don't want the burrito that bad. Fifth Domain reports that research from Cryptowire, funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, found several OS level vulnerabilities in mobile devices offered by Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint. Keep in mind Cryptowire, funded by DARPA and the Department of Homeland Security at the beginning. So these, these, these are bedfellows. Vulnerabilities were described as privilege escalations, which is a common vulnerability type in all kinds of computing. Manufacturers were notified of the flaws in February. Cryptowire found vulnerabilities in the blue phone in November, 2016, which spurred the funding for this further research. The thing that's bothering me about the story is, the quotes from the Department of Homeland Security, and therefore a lot of the headlines and a lot of the reporting are making it sound like this is a surprise. They're like, and they way found something called a privilege escalation. And that could allow somebody to do anything to your phone. Like, yeah, if you haven't followed security ever, that's going to sound really scary. And it is really scary and it should be patched. But what I think is positive and what they should be emphasizing is, hey, the DHS funded some research. We found some vulnerabilities and we told the manufacturers and now they're not vulnerabilities anymore. Isn't that great? This should be a positive story, not a scare story. Yeah, I agree. That's going to get, I have bad news from all though. When Fortnite is available for Android and you can only get it through the official site, they're going to be all kinds of people side loading things that they are told is official Fortnite or told our extra V bucks or free skins that are really stuff looking for access to your phone that will cause all kinds of problems. So whole separate issue. I don't want to create a whole nother article about it. I just want to put it out there that they should just, if they're worried, they should keep looking because that's going to be a mess in the next few months. This is a good use of government money. And my opinion is fund some reputable researchers. I don't know that much about crypto wire, but what I do know, they seem okay, but fund reputable experienced security researchers to find vulnerabilities and get them patched before people who want to take malicious advantage of them do. There you go. Someone posted source code from Snapchat on Microsoft own GitHub. Snap responded with a DMCA takedown notice and the code is removed. All right. I've set the stage. User account used to upload the code has no other projects and nothing certain is known about these people or this person. The user's profile link links to a website offering phone programming services and what appears to be modified software. As we mentioned yesterday, Snap reported higher revenues than expected, but it's first quarterly decline in users in history. In addition, Saudi Arabia Prince, Alouid bin Talal announced he is buying a 2.3% stake in the company. Lot going on with Snapchat. I don't know why I'm being so serious. So the DMCA takedown notice and code being removed is of course that, you know, that makes sense, but it was obviously not before it was grabbed. Right? That's... Oh yeah. It's out there. People have copies of it. It's out there. So source code being out there is a good security measure. It may be bad for Snap if people rip off their intellectual property, but security-wise it's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't know that this has anything to do with any recent earnings report, but to me this sort of screams disgruntled employee, especially because Snap laid off some people recently. I have no knowledge of that, but that would be my guess because it seems so sort of passive aggressive. Yeah. Also, I wonder, I mean, I think everybody who makes their own code base and they're building their own products, their stuff should, you know, they should be able to protect that stuff. They should be able to go after those who leak it or steal it or, you know, this isn't me saying the opposite of that, but I have to wonder what is so big in that code? Like, I understand they've got a platform and it does some stuff, but we're not talking about, you know, we're not talking about crazy features or functionality in that software that you just couldn't wait to get your hands on. Maybe I am naive to what, you know, certain bad actors who would want it. Well, I mean, when you think about the, some of the filters that Snap Check has come up with, even though, yes, this is something that could be replicated with Instagram stories and other apps. A filter that responds to sound, for example, or, you know, you know, I don't know, changes the photo or video in some sort of a way that nobody else is doing. I can see where there are parts of Snap's code, wherever they may be, that somebody would be really interesting in replicating or at least digging through. Yeah, I think it's admirable that you're looking for motivation beyond people just wanting to do it to mess with these companies because that is likely the major point of this. This happened to Apple back in February. If you don't remember, there was a core component of iOS that was posted to GitHub. It's meant to embarrass Apple. And possibly there are people who think it's a way to, you know, make these companies shape up and take security more seriously, which is sometimes true. But honestly, it really doesn't have to necessarily have any kind of motivation except someone being willing to say not only was I able to do it, but here's the proof. And I'm posting it publicly for everybody to see. And I like that it caused Arrakis. That's true. Well, mission accomplished, I say. Speaking of causing Arrakis on yesterday's show, we mentioned that Elon Musk had tweeted, quote, I'm considering taking Tesla private at $420. End quote. He eventually followed that up with a letter to employees at Tesla on the company's blog saying such a move would be the best path forward. You might recall Michael Dell did a similar thing with Dell back in 2013 to avoid the pressures of public investors. However, Tesla has $1.9 billion in debt and loses money making financing the move more challenging. However, it's Elon Musk. He says investor support is confirmed and the move is contingent on a shareholder vote. Six of Tesla's nine directors said Wednesday that the board had met several investors in the last week to discuss the idea. Sounds like they're curious about it. It wasn't just a tweet. Current investors could sell shares or opt our main investors in the private verge of Tesla. So I'll admit 50% chance, I thought yesterday that this was a weed joke because it was 420. And it turns out, no, they've been talking about this for weeks. It was just one of those weird Elon Musk things where he decides to make something public on Twitter out of nowhere. And that was just a tweet.  But if he can swing it, it really worked for Dell and Dell is going back public now. So it could be exactly the thing Tesla needs to escape some of that investor pressure. I think there's an argument to be made that the investor pressure is keeping them honest in some cases and that could be a problem if Elon Musk is allowed to do whatever he wants. public again when they get stuff worked out. But I don't know. The whole thing just feels a little weird, but then it's Elon Musk. So I bought in for the weird. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. All right. As we mentioned, Magic Leap 1 Creator Edition augmented reality headset for developers shipping for $2,300 if you're in the right zip code. Although Magic Leap says that it will roll out more areas that it will ship to as the year goes along. If you can order one, it includes free shipping and set up. They'll help you set it up. And if you want to spend an additional $500, you can get 24-hour replacement if it breaks, so kind of a warranty-type situation. If it's not available to you yet, you can sign up for a wait list and they'll let you know when it becomes available for you. If you've seen it, you know that it's a big old goggle-like headset and then there's something called the light pack that you clip on a pocket or clip on your belt. It's fairly small, but that's where all of the internals are. That's where the NVIDIA Tegra X2 mobile chipset and everything is. And there's a handheld controller. Now, all the reviewers admit that it's actually really comfortable on your head even though it looks bulky. It's not heavy and that they forget that the light pack is even attached to them. It has a 50-degree field of view, which is a bit wider than the HoloLens 35 degrees, but still much smaller than any virtual reality headset. But again, remember, you're able to see the real world around you, so there's a different challenge going on here. Other specs, if you're interested, 8 gigabytes of memory, 128 gigabytes of storage. Battery life is supposed to be about three hours. Charges over USB-C, so all those universal chargers that the EU will mandate will work with it. There's a headphone jack, but you can also use the built-in speakers, like kind of like the Oculus Go. They have a deal with AT&T to provide wireless data, but it's not in this edition. This edition only has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And then there's the apps. There's a web browser, a social suite, a few kind of tool things for making virtual objects. Dr. Gord Bortzen-Vaters, an art tool called Create, an MBA app, musical, a Cigaross collaboration to Nandi app. So there you go. It's real, folks. The magic leap, which I have been skeptical about for years and said, call me when they ship. Somebody call me. They're shipping. Tom, they're totally shipping. I mean, they're not shipping in the way that I want yet, but that's okay. I mean, this is what this takes. And I think this is probably the next logical stage in the rollout. It is a little weird to actually think this is not vapor. I'm not that we all thought it was vaporware. And you and I saw some recent stuff on a stream where we went, oh, look, there's an actual unit.  It's not like we don't have some proof that they've been making something. And certainly investors have been piling money on them knowing that they're making something, but it always felt a little vapor-y to me. And finally, here it is. If I was a developer and it made sense, I would be super stoked about this. I feel like, you know, magic leap is in the forefront of AR, whether they have proven themselves to be in the forefront or not, they are at least in a PR way. And so we are going to very quickly find out what's what it's all about. And there were reviews out today of developers are getting up, getting online and they're talking about what they've seen and they're showing stuff on YouTube and talking about how they feel about it. And it feels like people are, they're okay with it.  And you'll barely even know they're there and didn't show anything for years. And now we know why because they've shown some of the early prototypes, which were like gigantic headsets and refrigerator size processors. So they've come a long way. But in the process, I remember the CEO saying they weren't going to ship until they had a consumer product. Now they've backpedaled to say, well, it is a consumer grade product, even though we're only shipping it to developers. And it really feels like it's slightly more comfortable, slightly wider field of view version of the HoloLens. As somebody who I put in my zip code earlier, and it is shipping to my area, if I had $2,300, it'd be right on that. But I guess my initial question is, okay, well, assuming there's limited availability, what is the reason behind the regional areas that could get it now rather than, you know, other regional areas full of developers who are really interested that don't? And what does that do for sort of that second marketplace? Yeah. I mean, my guess is they only have so many of these things they can afford to make for whatever reason, whether it's capacity or cost. And so they're targeting like, well, we know that there's developers in the Bay Area. So we're going to include the Bay Area and Seattle. Yep, Seattle's in. Oh, LA, Silicon Beach. Yeah. Okay. LA. Oh, New York City. Absolutely. Got to include New York City. And they go down the list from there, where it's most likely that they'll hit a lot of developers who will come up with something good, because this is what they're after. They're after like, okay, what is Magic Leap good for in its current form? Ronnie Abavitz has said a lot of great things about what it could be good for if it ever gets to that final non-invasive form where you barely even notice it's there. But what is going to make people put on these crazy goggles and use it is a whole different question. Yeah. I mean, I also think that they can't ignore the existing numbers for VR headsets sold. And I understand that that's a very different business. It's a very different approach. Not really speaking to the technology so much, but the adoption while growing is small. It's like four or five million headsets out there that are broken up between various Oculus and gear variations. And then the desktop stuff Oculus and five and so on. This doesn't include mixed reality headsets coming from Microsoft Dell and everybody else. So they have to look at those numbers and go, well, you know, we need to, how are we feeling about the initial adoption if we were to go public with this? If this thing was a $300 or $400 device, like what are our expectations based on some of that performance? I know that plays a role in this. And so I think this is the smartest thing to do. Get into the hands of very creative, very technically proficient people who can make rad stuff happen and then show that off. And then suddenly maybe you've got yourself a platform, but this is a real make or break moment. I think this is going to be really important to them. They can't do like Google and just go, ah, send all your glasses back. We're done with that for now. We're going to maybe work on something later. Like this is also not done with it. Just moved it to enterprise where it's very successful. Well, you know what I mean though? Like they have the option to do that, to move it around. Magic Leap is not going to do that. This is their product. This is their number one thing. They're not going to suddenly go, eh, back burner that one. We'll work on something else. Maybe move it to a different apartment. Like this is the department. This is the department. This is all they got. I mean, they have a lot of investment from Google and others, but it's just them and this is their thing. This is the one thing. And they've got thousands of employees. I mean, this is not a small startup. This is a huge venture. They are gambling a lot. I mean, people complain about MoviePass and the burn rate of MoviePass as they tried to build up enough users to make it. And who knows? Maybe MoviePass will still make it. It doesn't look good, but who knows? Magic Leap is burning way more money. It just isn't in the public eye or affecting you directly right now. Magic Leap also raised over $2 billion. That's the money I'm talking about that they're burning. They're burning it, but it's also, if they had raised $2 million, the sort of thing, we've seen companies crash and burn very early on or earlier than the company was certainly hoping for this very reason. So that kind of R&D phase, Magic Leap has had a bit of a pass just because so much money was raised initially. Well, they are able to convince people that it was worth it, right?  I mean, to me, it's like, that's a crazy sticker price. I don't know who has that money.  Well, but the HoloLens is more expensive. Exactly. I'm a small start-up with a little bit of seed funding. I can afford one of these. Sure. Sure. One, perhaps. And if you had a business that was looking for the AR as being part of whatever you had in mind for whatever your little, you know, some business was going to be, and you need AR to make it happen, this is a perfect investment for you. But all of those parties are having to think about adoption, and that initial adoption rate has not been great for VR. As cool as VR is and as great as it's advancing, and there is growth. It's just a little disappointing. So there are entire studios, for example, in the video game world who have stopped working entirely on VR-only focused products and said, we're making a 2D version. You can just play on your monitor and your mouse and keyboard. And that will help supplement them through this period, because they have to. And I think AR is looking at a similar initial launch and rollout. It's not as good as Ronnie Abavitz led us to believe. It's not as good as that sticker price Sarah's mentioning would make you think. But it's still pretty good. Right. You know what else is good? Everybody who participates in our subreddit, God love you. Submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechNewShow.Reddit.com. We're also on Facebook if you want to hang out with us over there. Come on over, Facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech New Show.  What about electronic mail, Sarah? Oh, funny you asked, Tom, because we got an email from Jude who says, just following up on your conversation from Tuesday Show, episode 3341 regarding ordering products using Amazon's assistant. We all know her name. Jude says, I was having a conversation with my wife about needing protein mix. She interrupted our conversation and asked if she should place an order for that item. I believe I was saying something with the keyword, but it was too cool to have a conversation in normal language, trigger and activity. I actually wanted. So I did go ahead with the order, since she also stated the price of the item and said that I had ordered it previously. I love this email because normally the kind of email we get is someone saying that this kind of thing happened and how angry they are and how awful the echo is. But I love that Jude's like, well, we actually needed the protein powder. So it was kind of cool. Like, yeah, yeah, no, you're right. She interrupted me, but I have bought this before and that's a good price. Go for it. Yeah, why not? That was great. I love that email. Also, Sakeeb wrote in and said on Tuesday's show, Thomas wrote in saying that it feels as if assistive tech is 20 years behind the rest of the world. While this may be true in some cases, in several areas, people with disabilities are way ahead of the technology adoption curve, I'm a blind software engineer at Microsoft and shameless plug lead a team working on an iOS app called Seeing AI, which is mentioned on DTS a couple of times. It's a talking camera app which describes the text, people and objects around you. Thomas should give it a go. Love the show. Keep up the great work. Thank you, Sakeeb. Yeah, we have talked about it and it does work. I've tried it out. So that's a good one to remind us of. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sakeeb. And also Jude and also Scott Johnson for being with us this fine Wednesday. Scott, I know you got a full house in the old Salt Lake Valley this week. What else has been going on? The whole valley is full this week. There's a lot going on, as always, around here. We are just about ready to fulfill this playing card kickstarter. I started back in the early summer. We're completing it. I guess it was late spring. And it will be shipping soon. So if any of you are listening and you are part of that, good news, that stuff's coming soon. You will have your decks. They are in the printer's hands and we are moving right along. But for that and all other active projects I have going on, be that shows, art, illustration, whatever it may be, head on over to frogpants.com. And as always, catch my intermittent ramblings at Twitter. I'm at Scott Johnson. Don't forget, folks, I'm headed to St. Louis sometime in September that I really need to remember to add the date to before we do the next show, which I believe is something like September 6th. I don't know. Something like that. I've only written it down. Oh, 67. I will be in the St. Louis area, mostly in the Metro East area in Illinois. So I'm looking for places to host the show. I've got a few leads. And I think I'm taking care of on Thursday, but I'm still looking for a place in Illinois on Friday. And once I get that down, I'll be scheduling a meetup. So keep tuned for that if you're in the St. Louis area. And if you have suggestions for places, do the show feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Thanks to everybody who supports this show and is able to communicate with us through the Discord, through the Slack. We have great conversations going on in both of those places right now. And you should join them if you haven't already at patreon.com slash dtns. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. If you've got St. Louis recommendations for Tom or anything that you'd like us to know about you, get it off your chest. Write us. It's good stuff. We're also live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Justin, Robert Young. Talk to you then. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to stand and applaud Roger Chang on a masterful timing of the show. Yeah, well done. That was crazy good. Suggesting the previous ones weren't good. Yes, exactly. This is a slam on you for previous. No, no, it just worked really well. You look so thin today. It's like what you said it was fat before. No applause for Roger's ability to take a compliment. No, it's Roger's shares. I have the same affliction where someone's like, your hair looks so good. I'm like, did it not yesterday? Oh, you look nice today.  I get it. I love that. Those compliments become suspicious, like, wait. Well, this one was only met with love. Well, my favorite burger place down the street, which I talk about with regularity, I was in there the other day. And one of the bartenders who's I mean, she's been there as long as I've lived here. I think she's a bit of a lifer. She was like, you look so good. Did you just come from a job interview? And here I am, like, eating a cheeseburger alone, watching it like baseball. And I'm like, Parks a lot. Yeah. Thank you. So it means that, like, she was so shocked at how put together I was, which to me, I'm like, I don't know, I look like the same every day. I'm like, I must look pretty bad the rest of the time. Well, let me let me rush to reassure Roger and everyone else that you do a great job of timing the show. But today was especially good. Yes, especially, especially. Yeah, especially. Oh, speaking of especially, what is Justin. Oh, that's right. He was an especial. Yeah. Yes. We were talking about the, you know, people sort of pronouncing things wrong.  I'll go nuclear on you. Yeah. A real mischievous one that Justin. He's, uh, whenever we have a weird word on unfriend me, he's, uh, he's really fun to hear. But then I can't say much because I'm terrible with pronunciations of like hard names. I can't do it. You're Prowley, right? Yeah, Prowley. No, I think Prowley is like, that's a pass because you're not. Is it? Is Prowley a pass now? I think I do. Well, it's probably to me is SMS speak. When someone says Prowley, I know they mean probably. It's not that they actually think the word is Prowley. No, it's, that's true. It still bugs me though. Yeah. Library, library, library is just from the Simpsons because there's the episode of where Lisa Simpson thought she would become fat and unsuccessful. Wait, he's created library. How do you feel about weight instead of weight? Oh, I've never heard of that. That's not, that's not a thing. I do that totally by accident. It's because my dad used to do it and I remember hearing it all the time, but he would say weight like with an N instead of weight. Oh, I've never heard that. I've never heard that. Yeah. I'm going to say both instead of both. So BOL. Both? Both. Oh, I've heard both. That one, that one kind of, I hear myself saying that sometimes, right? I don't know. Those don't rank up there with worse for me. Yeah, those sound like accents. Wait, let me ask you a question, Scott. Did your dad have all his teeth? Yeah, he did. He had them all. I mean, let's not be rude to people without all their teeth. Sounds like something you would say if you like didn't, like we're missing maybe a different teeth. Both? Oh, see, I, I, both is more of like, that's just like a lazy thing that like I say sometimes. Same here. I know what I'm doing it to. Yeah, yeah. It reminds me of Southern Illinois. It feels like an accent related thing. Yeah, if you, if you say ice cream and vanilla, they both. That wouldn't even, that sounds normal to me. You like, do you like didn't? How about didn't? I didn't, I didn't do it. I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't either, but I like that. Do you believe in Magic Leap? Yes, I love it. Or do you like calling Tom Magic Leap a ship? That's good too. I like, do you believe in Magic Leap though? That's perfect. You can do Magic Leap. I don't have the rest of it. I love that song. You desire. Who's saying that? Was that, was that, was that old Steve Miller? Am I getting that right? That might be Steve Miller, man. Yeah. Because you think of Steve Miller as like the, you know, space cannibal, right? Wait, was it, was it a short name or was it just a name? You can do Magic as America. Oh, it's America. Steve Miller had something magic-ish. Like, do you believe in Magic? Well, I don't know. Let's look up there. That was not Steve Miller. Do you believe in Magic? Cool Magic is Steve Miller band. Oh, okay. All right. So I was- I can just say it. Don't feel bad. Do you believe in Magic is the lovin' spoonful? No, I know what it was. I know what it was. It wasn't, it wasn't anything of Magic. It was Abracadabra. Abracadabra. Abracadabra. That was Steve Miller. You can do Magic by Abracadabra. Yeah, exactly. Right. It was both like Magic stuff. So as a kid, I was like, oh. We called that Magic Rock. Did you not? He didn't. He did not. We never did. I just made it. Come to my mystical custom painted van with the carpet. We called that Satan's Rock. I do, my mom reminded me recently that when I was very young that the band Kiss scared me. Because it was all the makeup and it wasn't the music. We weren't listening to Kiss at home, really. But you know, I was like, those are like late 70s. But you know, it would be like, oh, it's the scary double band. Because- Oh, I love it. Yeah. Because it was sort of like Halloween, but all the time. I never got into Kiss. I didn't either. Couldn't even tell you one song. I actually didn't really, like, it's not like I hated the music. It's just like, never clicked. Not great. It was all about the gimmick. And the best thing they ever did was- Beth, what can I do? You know, but so this is the thing about Kiss. Kiss is more memorable for their fans. I think it's more of an actual- It's like, y'all are wrong. Like the Grateful Dead. Like, you know more about them because they're the fans. Right, right, yeah. That TV show they made was awesome. That weird TV special, the demon one. That was awesome. What? The Kiss too? I haven't seen that before. I haven't seen that before. Oh, it's so good. I haven't seen that. It's kind of like a haunted old amusement park or something. Wait, was this an episode of Scooby-Doo? One of rock and roll. Oh, oh, I know that one. They all had powers and stuff and all that. That's a good one. Wait, who was this? Yes. Oh, I think- was this in the 80s? Yes. I vaguely remember that.  You just thought they were tall? Yeah, I thought they were just really tall shoes. Sorry, Kiss meets Phantom in the Park, 1978. So good. I remember watching that on a Zenith television. Yeah, it's so good. Who didn't have a Zenith television? Pretty much, yeah. Like everyone had a Zenith. We had an RCA and a Zenith. Those were our two new plans. Zenith and a Mitsubishi, which was our first color TV that I got it. I don't think my dad thought of Mitsubishi. He got over that eventually, but- Date Matthew. Date Matthew. That's sort of like my dad. We're getting a Ford. That's what we're getting. Not buying a Japanese car. Then we had Fords for many years, in fact. Mom, if you're listening, tell me what that black and white TV was. Maybe it was a Zenith and I'm just wrong. It was like our first TV that eventually I got, that I got to put in my bedroom, but it was black and white and only had 13 channels. I remember TVs being so expensive. You took it to a place to get fixed instead of buying a new one. Sure, it doesn't work like that. I remember that. I have to figure out how to get my vacuum cleaner repaired. What kind of vacuum is it? Is it like an upright, or is it a canister? It's an upright. Is the motor running or and the belt not turning? No, I know what happened.   And so now the thing that does this doesn't work because that's in there. And I don't know how to fix it. It was like an expensive vacuum cleaner. I don't want to just get it. Yeah, that should be an easy fix. They should be able to just take it apart and pull it out. I mean, I try, but I was like, I don't want to break it. But it's like, yeah, where do you go to get a vacuum cleaner repaired these days? There are some vacuum cleaner stores. I'm still around. Yeah, sure. I thought they would do it.  She says, she says, Melanel says, the black and white TV was probably a zenith. We got our first color TV at Kmart. Oh, Kmart, which is weird because I'm like, I don't remember us ever going to Kmart. All I remember from Kmart was the light special. And the George, not George, was it George Ash? I remember George Ash jeans being a big thing when it came. Oh, yeah. I remember that we always get icies. At the, uh, yes, icies. Yeah. Carbonated frozen beverage. You can get those different places now, but at the time Kmart was like your only shop for that stuff. Can you get those at Target? Yeah. And I remember Christmas music every year was a big deal. In fact, I have that somewhere in MP34. What, the Kmart Christmas music? Kmart produced its own Christmas album. Was it like related to a certain artist or? Nope. They would just play it. Kmart didn't go out of business. They'd play it during, you know, store hours, and it would just be on repeat all the time. And I loved it when I was a kid and somebody recently sent me the whole thing on MP3 and I've got it. That's like, was it the, was it the same soundtrack year after year? Yeah. You are right to be, you're right to have these questions. What are the copyright issues? I mean, they were all traditional songs, except they had one or two Kmart jingle-y songs that were Kmart ads, basically, but they sounded Christmas-y except bells. Of course. Of course. Yeah. They were super dumb. Kmart is your Christmas place. Oh, Tom, speaking of Christmas, I had a question for you because I know you saw Mariah Carey in concert recently. I did, yeah.  Did she sing that considering that it's off-season? Nope, she did not. Now, keep in mind that I don't really know what I'm talking about in these next few sentences, but if I understand things correctly, she had a Vegas show that was all of her number one hits. Okay. And then she wound that one up, and this one, whose name I can't recall, is sort of based around her original album, her first album. Like Vision of Love stuff. That was her first number one hit. It's based around, I'm positive about that. This particular show is based around an album and the 20th anniversary of that album, and it's avoiding a lot of the number one hits because she had a whole show of those and giving some love to the number two hits and the other stuff. Great. The Mariah Carey B-sides, if you will. Not even B-sides.  Like, these are all top hits. Yeah, one Mariah Carey song like wasn't a top 40 song. No, exactly. Well, I don't know. As time goes on, I find myself liking her more and more. It's inexplicable. I don't know what's going on. Oh, now I know who to go to and I need my Mariah Carey information. Yes, Eileen Rivera is the one to go to. Right. Because we saw Jennifer Lopez for Eileen's birthday a couple of years ago in Las Vegas. She I knew more about for whatever we are. Sure. But she has the last number one hits, too. I've heard most of these songs, like, yeah. Yeah, Mariah Carey was, we've talked about this before, but I actually had a song of hers in my head, like, weirdly for like a month recently where it's like, this must mean something. You know, why is this earworm coming out of 1997 just part of my, you know, all being? Yeah, yeah. For no reason. I mean, it wasn't because you said you were going to see her show, or I don't know, maybe. Or did it work its way through your subconscious? Yeah. Who knows? Who knows? Yeah. A human loving. Going back to Kmart is difficult if you don't have one. If you don't have one. I go to one every other weekend. Do you really? There's one here. There's a one next to a Chuck E. Cheese. Why are you going there? Because they have stuff in the 1980s. I don't know if people realize this. He has a Kmart and a Chuck E. Cheese. I don't know why people give Kmart a hard time for a lot of valid reasons. It went out of business in a lot of places. I get that. And I think someone says it's owned by Sears now? I don't know if that's right. Yeah. And there are very few left. Like ours are all shut down. The reason I brought it back up is when I was a kid, we would go to Kmart in the, you know, suburban St. Louis. There, you know, we'd drive towards St. Louis. And there'd be like St. Round St. Clair Square. There's a Kmart. We'd go to Kmart, right? No big deal. Kmart's were big back then. One day when I was young, we went to Vandelia Illinois, which is actually east of us, so farther away from St. Louis. And downtown in their little square, downtown Vandelia, which is only a few thousand, just like Greenville, they had a shop called Creskies. And I was inside, we're looking around. It just looked like the dime store that we had in Greenville. But the tags all said Kmart. And I asked my mom, I was like, why are they pretending to be Kmart? Like, she's like, no, this is what Kmart grew out of. It was a chain of dime stores called Creskies. And then they opened the big stores called Kmart. And it blew my mind that I was like, I'm in history. I'm in an original prototype of Kmart. I love that your first assumption was that Kmart was, that they were pretending to be Kmart. Well, yeah, because I'm like, no, the place is called Creskies, not Kmart. What are they trying to pull here? Good logic. That's logic. I love it. The right thing. I don't know. I have a special place in my heart. And Jemco and Best. Hey, look, back when the SEGA Dreamcast came out, it was the only place I could get one. So I'll give them credit for that, I guess. Oh, yeah. So the fixer sent a USA Today link confirming Sears Kmart stores set to close in January. Another 60 plus Sears Kmart stores. And Sears does own Kmart. Yeah, your time is limited at Kmart. I mean, I'm not married to it. It's not like you've got to step on it or something. Oh, a good thing. Good thing. No, I just have like, I don't know. It's, it is what it is. It's good.  That's what I go there for. And shades. I have to pass this along because it's too funny. But we have to wrap up our video. So if you think it sounds like it's really funny, become a patron. Or check out the end of the good day internet, patreon.com video. People, thanks everybody for watching. We will see you tomorrow. Bye.


Also a case of knowing your customers. Yeah.  It's about communication, right? So if you communicate it in a way and Talk to them, you know, get on that call speak to them Then you can that could be the difference of of them leaving. Yeah and of them staying because You know something something that you're very good at and I've been working with you for a while He's obviously having different payment options So essentially it's not like the customers paying less Right, it's just you're spreading out the cost. They're still paying what they're supposed to pay But it's helping them With a payment plan, right? Yeah Yeah That's that that's where too like if you let's say you've had a customer for three years and They're on that loyalty package where like they they're still paying less than everyone else and and you want to Tell them about the new price like I feel like a lot of coaches are They're so uncomfortable Just telling people how it is and like if someone is that scared to approach a parent It's like cool. Maybe you still give them the old price But like they have to be more committed like they need to sign like a 12 month agreement Not this like pay whenever you want type of thing and That's where I think I mean, I when I think of the most successful coaches I've ever worked with the one thing that they all do is like When they make a change they just confront it head on like they don't They don't take forever. They don't dilly-dally with parents. They don't text and and send these weird emails that have the updates It's like they're just very upfront with their customers And they don't back away from it and that's that to me is the difference between someone that like It's fully committing to make make like a real change in their business versus someone who just kind of wants to do it And they just want to float by with an email and I don't know man I see people get penalized when they do things halfway. That's why It's why it's like I would rather you not do it if you're gonna do it halfway then Because like you're gonna be better off not doing it. There's just trying to halfway