Welcome to what the F is going on in Latin America and the Caribbean, a popular resistance broadcast of hot news out of the region. In partnership with Black Alliance for Peace, Haiti, America's team, Code Pink, Common Frontiers, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Friends of Latin America, Interreligious Task Force on Central America, Massachusetts Peace Action, and Task Force on the Americas, we broadcast Thursdays at 4.30 p.m. Pacific, 7.30 p.m. Eastern, right here on YouTube Live, including channels for the ConvoCouch, Popular Resistance and Code Pink. Post-broadcast recordings can be found at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Telegram, radindymedia.com, and now under podcasts at popularresistance.org. Today's episode, Alex Sob, three years a kidnapped diplomat, and I'm happy to have as our guest today, so many of you know her, especially those of you watching on the ConvoCouch channel, Fiorella Isabel. She has just returned from Venezuela, where she attended a lawfare forum, specifically focused on what has been happening with diplomat Alex Sob for the past three years. And for some of you in the audience, I will just, you may remember we have done a couple episodes regarding Alex Sob. I will post the links to those episodes in the program notes because they will give you some early background information on the case. But before I ask Fiorella to join the conversation, let me just give all of you a quick update and background before we start our conversation. So what I'm gonna share with you is the introduction to an article written by our good friend Francisco Dominguez. And I wanna share his comments with you. As he says, this case is a terrifying example of the United States continuing commitment to illegal unilateral intervention and regime change where no country is truly safe. On June 12, 2023, we celebrated or recognized the third anniversary of the illegal kidnapping and imprisonment by the United States of Alex Sob. Because the brutality and cruelty of the US blockade was wreaking havoc on the economy and millions of the most vulnerable in Venezuela were being deliberately denied their human rights to the most basic necessities of daily life. President Nicolás Maduro tasked Sob with traveling around the world, procuring food, medicines and fuel for his country, Venezuela. Breaking every treaty, protocol, law and norm of international diplomacy, the United States plotted to have Alex Sob arrested while in transit to Iran to fulfill his diplomatic mission by pressing the Cape Verde government to illegally arrest him on June 12, 2020. The plane Sob was traveling on was denied refueling in Morocco and Senegal, thus being forced to land in Cape Verde. In his book, Never Give an Inch, published in 2023, Donald Trump's Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, admits as much saying, quote, no other nation has the global reach to interrupt an Iran-Venezuela plot in real time and convince a small island nation to hold a wanted man. And then there's a full legal saga that ensued after that. An extradition to the United States, Alex Sob is currently being held in Miami prison. He has no access to healthcare. He is not allowed to see family. He is only allowed to see legal counsel. And it just goes on and on from there. It's a pretty heinous story and it's a hugely important story regarding the extrajudicial reach of the United States. And so with that, I wanna ask Fiorella to join our conversation and share with us. You know, she was last week in Caracas for a lawfare forum and this is such a, the Alex Sob case is significant lawfare. I mean, we've seen a lot of lawfare throughout the hemisphere and preventing candidates for running from office or removing them from law space. But this is just a clear violation of international law, diplomatic law and on and on that's atrocious. Yeah, it absolutely isn't. I don't think it's gotten the attention on at the United States on the Western level that it deserves as a case of lawfare, which is why it was important that so many people came from different parts of the world, particularly Latin America and some of us from the United States of America where we were able to come together to speak on different aspects. My panel was on media and how the media has contributed of course, how they've been framing this case against Alex Sob. They've been framing him as a criminal, as corrupt. This is of course classic as to how they did it. And I'll just start off by saying the guests for all international and also national guests that were in Caracas. And Dan, our Parma, Dan was there in Cavalic and he talked about it from a law perspective and there were other lawyers and other people, there were activists who have been on the ground for the free Alex Sob movement. And there were journalists as well as people who have been following the case throughout the its entire process. As Terry mentioned, she's covered this before. This is now a case that has been ongoing for I believe, is it two years? He was arrested June 12th, 2020. Yeah. 2020, yes, so three years now. Yes. I forget it. So three years. 2023 now. Yeah. I know, I forget you. The last few years have been like, oh, just blur. But yeah. So unfortunately, three years since he hasn't seen his children in the same as a freak man, it's been a time away from his spouse. He's a human being and this is one of the things that I think a lot of the event was also wanting to point out. This isn't just a figure, this is a human being. But I do want to say that what was primarily discussed was the case of lawfare against Alex Sob. And what that is, is just using this idea that there is some sort of corruption associated with him to basically rid him out of any judicial fair process that somebody would normally have and to justify his detainment. And that's putting it nicely. I mean, some people say he was kidnapped. And I'm gonna start off by talking about the fact that he was detained twice by first by Donald Trump and then by Joe Biden. And I start off by talking about that because I do think it's important that this is a case that is setting a precedent for how the United States acts as this arbiter of who is a valid diplomat, who is a valid president, who is a valid leader under this idea that they are the ones in charge and they are the ones that dictate the sovereignty of these nations. And so we've been seeing a lot of pushback against that of course on the world stage when it comes to BRICS, when it comes to the new push for a multi-polar world, we're seeing what's happening in Africa, in the Middle East and the reemergence of cooperation between states that were once enemies like Saudi Arabia and Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria. And then of course, Latin America, we're seeing a push away from the dollar and a push towards building, but in some countries and in some economies, something that is more in cooperative within the nations in South America and Central America. Of course, this is something that's going to be difficult. This is something that isn't just gonna happen overnight, but we do recognize we've been seeing this push. Now, in terms of what that has to do with Alec Saab, the Alec Saab case isn't just a persecution of a political dissident, it very much is.  I believe at worst, somebody that was trying to provide food and medication to a sanctioned country. And if anybody, you know, Terry, you know what you have an understanding of what people went through in Venezuela and just going there and hearing the stories of people and friends that have been there and have survived these different decades and these different times that have been difficult in their own right, depending on the situation for Venezuela really tells you another picture as to how critical it was in the moments where Saab was trying to deliver these things and also oil, where they almost ran out of petrol and Saab was instrumental. He is seen as a hero by the many people in Venezuela for fighting to basically get them needs. Now, the United States, of course, and the media have painted him as a corrupt individual, a political drug dealer of sorts, I've even heard of Venezuela and the Maduro dictatorship. These are the things that have been said about Saab. They cover him as somebody that has done something wrong when in reality, even if he had, he was a diplomat. And that's the thing here that where the law fair case comes in because a diplomat by international law is not supposed to be arrested. He was arrested with a diplomatic passport. He was a diplomat. And that brings me to the other facet of this is, again, that the United States not recognizing Maduro as president of Venezuela is the reason they're using to say Alex Saab was not a diplomat because Maduro wasn't the president that the United States recognized. Therefore, the United States didn't recognize Saab as a diplomat so he could be arrested. And this is what we're talking about here. These are the same excuses. And this was pointed out of corruption, of whatever sort of stripping people of their credentials that has been used on people like Christina Kirchner in Argentina. And you could talk about Pedro Castillo and how he has been imprisoned with no charges that have actually been applied against him. You could talk about also what was mentioned is the case, the persecution of other dissidents in general, I mentioned Julian Assange in the United States, how it wasn't really about him committing a crime against the United States because he was just a publisher but it was about what it exposed. So it was a political persecution. And that's kind of what is involved in the lawfare case. That's kind of what we got to hear from various people in various parts of the world. They also talked about regime change operations led by the United States and the West and how political dissidents whether they be politicians or supporters have been pushed out via these regime changes and interventions. I also mentioned how the United States tried to decide that Juan Guaido was the leader of Venezuela and then how Alexi Navalny was a potential opponent to Vladimir Putin because they simply decided it to be not because the people of the sovereign countries decided it, but because they did. So all of these cases really present this case of lawfare against Solid Sam in terms of the fact that he is merely a victim of the US trying to create this precedent where not even a diplomat is safe if they are enough of a threat or perceived as some sort of threat to the State Department and the establishment.  So one of the things that was said there was if, you know, we are all like sob, this is something I've heard with Julian Assange. We are all these dissidents that are being persecuted for political reasons and political manipulations. You know, what's really horrifying to me and I think the case of Julian Assange and the threat of him being extradited to the United States, he's an Australian citizen. He's not a US citizen, but the US is attempting to have him extradited to the United States and have him stand trial in the US. And it was same and Alex saw the US did successfully have him extradited to the United States. He is Colombian, Colombian with Venezuelan residency or Colombian national or dual residency, but he was extradited and is now sitting in a US prison in Miami. And so it's, I mean, you really see in both those cases and many others, but in those two specifically because they're so high profile in the Alex sub, not quite as high profile as Julian Assange, which we are attempting to lift his story here in this episode, but they're, you know, the US judicial system is, has declared itself the world's judicial system. Yeah, and that is just really horrifying. And so it doesn't matter if you're a US citizen or not, you can still be found guilty in a US court and brought it. Yeah, it's really, I don't think people in the global North really understand that. Maybe in Europe, they understand the Julian Assange case so clearly that way, but I don't think those of us in North America really get that extra judicial reach is. The US has to determine itself to be not just the world's police with his military, but the world's court system as well. And on the background of that Terry, I just wanna say, also there's been a rise in detentions of journalists. Recently journalists, British journalist Vanessa Bealy was detained over her journalism on Syria and her journalism in general, which is completely in opposition of course to the BBC State Department. They've written countless mirrors of her. That one wasn't highly publicized, but she was detained for over five hours, six hours around. And the UK constinction people, several of my colleagues were threatened with sanctions for working at RT as well. And of course recently also Kit Klarenberg was another journalist that was detained for around the same time five or six hours. So this is happening with journalists. And of course I was also detained and questioned for about two hours. And so in the United States, now the United States right now obviously is the one that is going after Julian Assange for the for WikiLeaks and what that exposed. But this is now also we can talk about the FARA Act because on the background of all of this was Alex Saab that the Yuhuru movement, the Yuhuru group, they were a black social- Explain to the audience, FARA, F-A-R-A is Foreign Agent Registration Act. So sorry. Correct. Yeah, no, no, you're right. The Foreign Agent Registration Act, if you haven't heard of it, it's basically, so it's funny because they've criticized Russia for doing something that was based on the FARA Act where if you are actually found to be a foreign agent. Can Nicaragua too? You will be questioned. Add Nicaragua as well and I don't know who else. But so what I was getting at is they have used the FARA Act to extend it, right? Because it was supposed to be a foreign agent, like if you were working at the behest of another government as a foreign agent and providing information, well, they've extended it to people who have merely spoken out against the established narrative. So the Yuhuru movement, which was these are black socialists that were speaking out against the war in Ukraine and speaking out against NATO's accountability, NATO's role in that war were jailed recently and they also had one of the things that they had against them was that they were an organization and that they had a Russian member that was a part of their organization. So that was used to tie them. There really wasn't any evidence of them actually receiving any sort of like direction from the Kremlin, any sort of funds from the Kremlin in any way, shape or form, but that was used to jail them and their case is right now is still an ongoing case and it's really difficult to look at that happening in the United States. So that hasn't gotten that much attention either. And of course, we're talking about these people being arrested and detained for saying, I don't agree with this war, I think the United States is at fault. And then of course, the intricacies of the case, I am gonna have somebody on to talk about that because I do think it's important people know about this because these are all different, but at the same time, they're all stemming from the US hegemonic role in persecuting dissidents. And I think that is increasing in itself. And of course, we recently saw Tara Reed, a Biden accuser say that she does not feel safe in the United States. She was actually told by her lawyer not to return because she was going to testify against Joe Biden that they were going to find a way to arrest her. So she was advised not to return to the United States when she was in Russia. So this is all happening all at the same time and I'm just thinking to myself, it's getting really dangerous to be truthful. It's getting really dangerous to say even what you think, even if you disagree. And this started of course, a few years ago, but it's gotten increasingly worse with time.  And we're going to use all of these things against him to make sure that you don't think anything more of him. And the role of the media has been to portray that image of somebody that isn't a human being, somebody that is just this figure. But in order to talk about Alex Saab, we have to talk about the torture he endured. He endured a torture of all kinds while he has been in prison. Well, I would argue he is still being tortured by being denied medical care. Yes. He has cancer and he's been denied. Yeah, so that is a form of torture too. And yeah, I would, it's just, it's really, it's really horrifying to the point of being almost unbelievable. I would ask you, one of the, this particular diplomatic mission he was on when he was grounded in Cape Verde and then arrested by a request of the United States, he was en route to Iran. And this is, for the United States, he was perceived as a conduit between two heavily sanctioned countries, sanctioned by the United States, unilaterally sanctioned by the United States. And so he was perceived as a conduit for basically helping the Venezuelans principally, but he ran too, through the trade that he was conducting. And it's, you can really see, as you mentioned, when, and really understand, you don't have to agree with it, you don't have to like it, but it brings you a clear understanding why so much of the world is moving away from the West, the United States specifically, they have no choice. Their survival depends on it. They cannot stay tied to the US dollar. It makes them very vulnerable to economic sanctions. They can't stay tied for purposes of trade, for banking, for any of that. Even if they want to, even if their first choice would be to stay close to the United States, you can't any longer. For your own nation's sovereignty, survival, and the survival of its people, certain citizens. Yeah. It's not ideological. Go ahead. Some of it isn't. No, wait, go ahead. I'm sorry. It is beyond ideology in many respects. Yeah. It's survival. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what I wanted to say. It's not just like this idea that all of these countries are becoming super socialized and they're all gonna take over and that sort of thing. It's more of like, economically, it's just not feasible for them to continue this. And I mean, there is some ideological freedom behind it. Some desire to have your sovereign identity, your sovereign right, recognize and seeing the pushback now from Russia, from other countries, from China, from, and then jumping on then and saying, okay, now we're not alone. We have these relationships that we can build on. But it's also about where the world is going and the United States is almost like, it's trying to stay in one spot and everybody is running the other direction.  And so the Western world is also in the same vein, working in the same way with the United States. I mean, recently, I don't know if you saw this, you probably did, but it was the South African delegation that was going to join President Cyril Ramaphosa in Russia to meet who Cyril Ramaphosa was just also meeting, had just met with the Ukrainian president, he was Zelensky and he was going to meet with Putin. And the delegation was supposed to join him and they stopped the plane, the Polish authorities actually detained the plane. They had the plane there for over three days, I think it was like four days total or so or more.  And the journalists that were there and the other members said this has never happened before, that this is absolutely unheard of, that they would treat a diplomat this way. But now that there's been so many precedents set which is violating international law when it comes from the United States, well then, other countries are going to continue following that example. And that group was never allowed to join President Ramaphosa. And so they were sent back. And this is again, this is just an example of just where, if you are perceived as a threat to whatever the establishment or the powers that be, whatever you want to call it, the Western. You go up against the narrative. You go up against what's supposed to be the established narrative. And or worse, and like these, and of course they weren't hurt, but they were, it was completely inconvenient to be in a plane for days and not be able to get out. And the worst part was they were blamed for it. They said that, oh, these people just wanted to sit here and stay there, they weren't being, they were told they just couldn't leave the area, not the airport. And so it was just this whole, not the airplane. And so it was just this whole thing where it was like, no, we're not doing anything wrong. And this is, it's the same attitude that we get when it comes to the U.S.'s persecution of dissidents like Alec Saab. And again, it's important for Venezuelans and you've got the gist that it was so important for Venezuelans. In spite of the fact that so many of me look like it's not that important because, you know, Venezuelans still facing high inflation, they're facing, you know, the consequences of having lived through sanctions, blockade and during the economic ups and downs of this, this is not going to go away right away. This is a country that is still struggling. In spite of that, people were very committed to supporting Alec Saab because they saw him at somebody that was trying to work for Venezuelans, that was trying to get help Venezuelans. And so that is that support he got in the passion he got from a lot of people who see him as somebody that has been trying to help and really, you know, really, it points out, it emphasizes just how much the United States has gone after Venezuela, whether it's through interference, through regime change attempts, anything. And they've endured this time and time and again. And so you can't help but look at the Venezuelan people as being some of these strongest people for having to endure that. It's not easy at all. No, they're incredibly strong and they're incredibly determined to maintain, you know, their nation and their national sovereignty. And they really understand what's happening from the North, you know, focused on them. They really understand it, you know, their followers of Simón Bolivar, they understand what's happening to the, you know, from the North. It's, you know, one of the things you mentioned, Alec Saab, helping them, he was arrested in June of 2020 on his way to Iran. And part of that mission was medical, not just food and other supplies, but medical supplies as well. June of 2020, the world was in, you know, a really strong pandemic mode and very still very heavy lockdown in the United States so this was even more significant that he was trying because of the U.S. sanctions, it's not possible for Venezuela to go out onto the international market and procure almost everything it needs, but it's particularly medicines.  I mean, that's a really harsh thing to see. I know, but I don't, I think those of us who understand what sanctions are and how they're used, they are warfare. They're a silent form of warfare for many of us back in the States, out of sight, out of mind.  There's no boots on the ground in Venezuela. At least not yet. There have been attempts to put boots on the ground in Venezuela from Columbia in the past and more recent years, but the sanctions are really a silent form of genocide, a silent killer. And then it's an out of sight, out of mind thing which makes them particularly insidious.  I guess, maybe I don't even know how to frame it. It's so ugly. Yeah, to use it to manipulate, to suffocate the population to the point of no return. So they could turn against their government and really just open up the, you know, the dam into the United States coming in and rescuing them or some sort of interventionists or color-related. Oh, they would do so. What are they called? The right to the art. What's the human rights intervention? Yeah. Humanitarian for humanitarian. But it is a form of suffocation. It's a form of torture because it is a slow death. And that's what sanctions are. And you're right. People don't understand what sanctions are. Even people who have been living, you know, who are Latin American, who have been living in the United States and say, well, you know, Maduro and this and that. It's like, yeah, but you don't understand what, you can't access your funds. The country can't access funds. The country can't import anything.  Well, you may have money, but you don't have access to it and you can't like function because of the sanctions. I mean, I got a small snippet of that. Imagine that times a thousand and living in a country and not having and then running out of anything and just having that desperation of needing to have food, needing to have water, needing to continue, you know, living like a human being and being suffocated and told no. And it is a form of murder and it's a form of complete and total disregard for actual human life and actual humanitarian cause. So, yeah.  Right. Yeah.  And that's just, that hasn't happened in Venezuela and it's not gonna happen. No, it's not and the world is really coming to understand this. And I hope with this conversation today with you that, you know, we can help influence and educate more of our citizens in North America, the United States particular to really understand what the use of economic sanctions is really about. It is warfare and it is a form of warfare. There's no other way to frame it and more and more and more of the world is recognizing that and responding to it. And so here we, again, see this multipolar world emerging not always in many cases because countries wanna overtly disentangle themselves with the United States, but for many, there's no choice. Yeah, it's about national sovereignty and survival of its people. And, you know, if we could just talk, I know you have more appointments. So maybe if we could just in closing, talk a little bit about national sovereignty because this with Alex Saab, as you mentioned earlier, he is in prison as a diplomat, as a Venezuelan diplomat. He was given Venezuelan diplomatic status at a time when the United States did not recognize Nicolas Maduro as the democratically elected president of Venezuela, even though the majority of Venezuelan citizens who participated in the election process in May of 2018, you know, said, this is who we want. And so that wasn't even recognized by the United States. You and I did a lot of election observation throughout the Americas between October of 2020, which was Bolivia, all the way through Brazil of 2022. And to me, and I think you would agree, the majority of people throughout Latin America and the Caribbean voted for those political candidates who supported national sovereignty, promoted natural resource sovereignty and were proposing economic systems that would benefit the majority of the citizens. And that includes Venezuela, so, and that has been completely, I think, a huge frustration for the United States and perhaps, you know, even has made the United States even more aggressive towards many of these countries, which again, you know, could result in some, in a not very good outcome for Alex Saab. Yeah. I mean, national sovereignty is the number one thing that all of these countries want and have wanted for a long time. Countries like Honduras- Like for five hundred years. Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, and well, that's a whole other show that we did almost like we did it. You know, the Bolivar situation, the freedom from the crowd, now it's turned into, well, the freedom from the US because it's the same apparatus pretty much in power. And so now we, that's still, they're still fighting for that. But the reality is all of these countries have wanted national sovereignty, whether it was from the crown, whether it's now from the United States or Western hegemony.  Nicaragua, you know, Cuba has maintained, has gone. I mean, it's in really critical condition right now because of just the lack of petrol, the lack of tourism, the impact of COVID, but they've managed a 60 plus year blockade. And this isn't easy to do. And I think the American and Western public have no idea what that would even be like for a day. So they completely offset these issue of sanctions as well. Sanctions are bad, but at least this person doesn't wanna nuke somebody. And I think that that understanding is extremely American exceptionalist. And we see this American exceptionalism brooding in the US election. And Venezuela has an upcoming election as well as does Mexico next year along with the United States and, you know, other countries have it this year. And so it's important to really look at how these countries elections will happen and how the United States is responding to them because I think the more these countries try to become independent and build relationships with each other and away from the United States, the more aggressive you will see. And I think right now the focus of the United States is clearly the Troika, the Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela. And we as anti-imperialists have to do everything we can to prevent our government in the United States because it's our government, it's where we're citizens of where we can fully criticize and then fully go after to prevent the intervention in these countries because it would be a detriment to the fight for national sovereignty of the people of the Americas. It would be a detriment for the fight against imperialism and Western hegemony. So I think when it comes to national sovereignty, it is one of the most important things we can support of other people. And I think when people try to say, well, the United States, you know, you can't be proud of being an American. I think it has a completely different context to it. And a lot of people try to equate the two. It's one thing, you know, being a living in the empire and then being under the boot of the empire. So there's a difference.  And that's why that forum was so important because so many different people had so many different stories as to why they were there. And so many different organizations came together to really support Alec Saab and support the people of Venezuela. And there was that sense of, wow, we're all here and we all see what is happening. And, you know, we're going to try to draw more attention to this because it's not just an Alec Saab issue or a Venezuela issue. It is an issue against anybody who is against the established narrative, the established, you know, talking points. And this is a fight for basically the ability for countries to make their own decisions. And if the United States doesn't recognize Maduro as the president is irrelevant, because Venezuela has decided he's the president and it's that simple, you know, it's really that simple. So, Fiorella, in our closing minutes, where can the audience learn more about Alec Saab, the free Alec Saab campaign? Yeah, so. Go ahead. And also, where can we find out more about the forum you attended last week? Yeah, so there is the free Alec Saab movement, free Alec Saab, I believe it was freealecsaab.com when we double-checked that. And also, I will be posting a full edit of my speech. The reason it was in Spanish. It was in Spanish. So I just have to translate it into English, which won't be hard for me, but I had to do it in Spanish. So it was filmed by the local Venezuelan channel and there was another YouTuber. So I will put that on Twitter and I will also do the written out English version on sub-stack for everybody to have it. So that's, yeah, so I will do that. But let me just make sure I give you the right website for the free Alec Saab movement because, let's see, because that one was really, that's, you can find all kinds of information up until the latest, but there's a free Alec Saab movement in Venezuela and then there's the free Alec Saab movement in the United States as well. Yes, it's freealecsaab.org is what it is. Freealecsaab.org. Okay, I'll put that in the program notes as well. And also for the audience, I'll put all of Fiorella's social media handles in the program notes also, so that you can follow her and see that great talk you gave last week in Caracas. It was really good. Oh, thank you. I'm so happy you had time. I know you're just getting back to your work and your life in Moscow and I'm just so thankful you had time to talk to us today. That's really great. Always great to work with you and I always so value what you have to say and share with us. Thank you very much, Terri. And I hope to see you soon on our next adventure. Yep, next month. We'll talk about that. We can share that with the audience next week. Yeah. But anyway, I just want to remind all of you you've been watching what the F is going on in Latin America and the Caribbean we're a popular resistance broadcast. You can find us on YouTube live every Thursday evening, 7.30 p.m. Eastern or 30 p.m. Pacific. We broadcast simultaneously on the Convo couch, Code Pink and popular resistance, post broadcast. Recordings can be found at Apple, Spotify or wherever you find your podcasts. So thank you everyone and we'll talk with you next week.


Yeah, was that a rumor? This is oh, yeah Yeah, he would do a standalone Quentin Tarantino pitched a Star Wars movie to JJ Abrams that is apparently going forward it will be the first R rated star ooh Star Trek movie And a track sorry track not wars track track track. Oh, yeah. Yeah, sorry track JJ he won't write the script Quentin won't write the script Quentin will not write the script What will he do just direct it allegedly just direct, but he has never directed a movie. He has not written. Yeah, it's called Reservoir for Engie the last dog So it'll be Interesting So hello, we are live and If you are a patron and you want to know what DTNS is doing about the whole patreon fee thing read patreon.com slash DTNS or Make sure you get the full audio version off of patreon today where we talked about it in depth And our reasoning for it We'll probably get to it a little bit in the post show as well In the main show today though, we want to talk about it as news not so much how it pertains to us particularly although they come up But there are options everything's gonna be okay. Yes, that's a mistake Mojam Roger you didn't turn off the YouTube chat. Oh Let me turn it. Well, I don't think you get once the I don't think you can turn it off midstream after you've gone live That's all right I just want to put my head in there Tell me about it. I want to start. I just want to go hibernate All right, Raj. How is the air quality? You are closer to all the stuff than we are No, ironically enough, it's blowing away from the city. So I actually don't smell it at the same At the same Level that I did the fires in the summer, which were right in the hill behind me. Well But I'm sneezing a lot more Me too. So I don't smell it, but I it's tickling the nose hairs, I guess Yeah Yeah, that's right doing a lot of nose blowing That's the other thing. I cannot stop blowing my nose and I thought I was getting the cold because I was also getting a sore throat But it just hasn't gone anywhere. It's just a lot of coughing and sneezing but All right, it must be the air because I'm the same way just sneezing and running and I don't feel sick It's just, you know, yeah, exactly All right, you guys ready ready this is gonna be a good time and I'm mostly mean that Here we go three two the daily tech news show is brought to you by people like me not outside organizations To learn more go to daily tech news show dot com slash support This is the daily tech news for thursday december 7th 2017 pearl harbour day, which we still remember from dts headquarters in los angeles. I'm tom merit and from studio feline I am sarah lane moklin california. I'm justin robert young and On the edge of the fire country, but thankfully away from it roger chang Hello, it's Close but not close. We had to come pretty close up here on uh in the overpass Near us yesterday, but that seems to be a little more under control to hit bell air Burned four houses crazy crazy stuff going on here We are going to talk about patreons fee processing changes our main topic today If you are a patron and want to know what dts is doing about it go to patreon.com slash dts look at my post or You can listen to the full audio. We're in the pre-show. We talked about it on the show today Though we're going to talk about what it means for internet and tech in general, but let's start with a few tech things you should know Bitcoin broke through the 15,000 barrier For us dollars today, uh, which is funny because it hit 13,000 yesterday and everybody freaked out Then too at the time of our recording. I just Updated google it is now worth 16,778 dollars and 49 cents wow So if I could have a bitcoin, I could just cover everybody's fees. Yeah, wow Uh, google has shut down the chrome web browser app store for mac linux and windows not for chromo s still there for chromo s google announced in august 2016 the app store would close it says about 1 Of users actively use chrome apps in the browser. Uh, it doesn't affect chrome extensions either Uh, sony announced that it has sold 70 million playstation 4 units worldwide Sony did not break out separate numbers for ps4 pro But it did say that it sold 2 million playstation vr units Hmm Back to some google news the company launched a new search feature to let Celebrities answer commonly searched questions about themselves in the form of selfie videos that show up at the top of mobile search results so Videos live directly in search. So they'll show up on the mobile web and through google owned apps So if you want to know, you know nick Jonas net worth, maybe he'll answer you I'm worth 1,500, you know, they have to dub in his current network Uh, now here are some more top stories. Jerry. Take kick us off Well, valve announced that it is ending support for bitcoin in steam because of the quote high fees and volatility Hey, maybe it's a theme for today Valve says that fees for processing transactions have risen from 20 cents when it launched about 20 dollars per transaction Bitcoin's value has been generally trending up. That's a modest statement But with extreme drops and jumps valve says that sometimes the value of bitcoin changes significantly Even during the time of a single transaction. Yeah, this is jumps. What three thousand dollars Right. I mean you had to like look at it at show time And it's still going to be out of date by the time people most people listen to the show Oh, totally. Yeah. I mean five minutes before the show was under 16. Yeah And and that's really crazy. Uh, I don't think valve is dropping bitcoin Some people are like, ah, see bitcoin's no good. I don't think that's what this means Bitcoin could yet reach stability. It's not at stability. It hasn't been stability for a long time But a lot of people just thought it would crash and go away. Maybe it's in a bubble and it's going to crash Again, that's certainly possible But it's also possible that at some point it finally just evens out and we go, this is what a bitcoin is worth We finally reached the level that's saying whatever that level is valve saying, you know what until we get to that level I'm out because I can't start a transaction Charging people like 0.03 bitcoins for a game and then by the end of the game 0.03 is like charging them double and it just just doesn't make sense. Well and and and also it's a matter of Customer service, right? If people are upset that things are worth more or less than what they initially wanted to pay for it Had a certain point it becomes a hassle I you know, listen bitcoin is one of the like late a charge charging stories for story of the year in my opinion and it is A large I don't think it's going away because right now out here in the bay area It is what you would hear stereotypically in like 80s movies about rich guys talking about stocks People I know are just like where the bitcoin is it's it's insane and it's only getting more popular because of all this press Yeah And and this is not good for bitcoin that it is too volatile for valve to use No, uh, you want stores to be able to use it as a medium of exchange and actually a year ago It was more useful that way. That's why valve implemented in the first place like it rises, but it you know It's stable. It's been skyrocketing so much this year You kind of have to wait for it to burst again before you want to implement it and if somebody's done it once What's that? Let the hysteria die down. Yeah. Yeah But then when the hysteria dies down is valve going to be like, okay, let's do it again They may be less likely to and that's a problem Instagram released a standalone messaging app technically just a test Called direct in Chile is real italy portugal turkey and iraway the instagram inbox This is actually kind of interesting will be replaced for those who install direct So if you install the new app your instagram experience will change You'll do all your private messaging within direct The app opens to the camera the idea is to have all of your private sharing in one app leaving the public stuff to instagram Direct also has four exclusive filters. So, you know, there's a little bit of Instagram like behavior kind of weird though It's interesting. I mean, it's kind of what they did with facebook messenger, right? They took it out of facebook app And made it separate but the implementation is pretty interesting. You swipe right To get to your profile Then if you swipe right again It will show you instagram and allow you to jump right over to instagram and vice versa in instagram You could I think swipe left And then it'll show you a little thing for direct and then you can jump over to direct to kind of give you a Virtual feeling of still being in the same app I mean clearly the company, you know, they've done enough testing to be like There's so much stuff being shared that, you know, we could we could You know make the most of this and and create a standalone app The problem is making sure it's seamless between the two because you don't want people to stop using instagram publicly Just because they're, you know chatting privately with a lot of friends on some other app I mean, obviously this is coming from them seeing activity doing it. It does seem like two different products Uh, uh, you know the instagram chat and messaging features don't really feel like except for the fact that you almost Uh, exclusively use them in my case to share instagram stuff with other people Uh, but you know, it makes sense.  Yeah. Yeah, it's cool Especially if it opens right to a camera. That's new Uh, all right. I'm gonna go through the snapdragon 8 45 specs qualcomm announced it. It's coming in 2018 You guys can just gasp or cheer or groan as I give the specs depending on your feelings 845 is manufactured by samsung on its 10 nanometer process. That's the same as the 8 35 was But there's a boost to the performance core clock of about 19 percent and because of a cpu redesign qualcomm thinks You should see a 25 performance uplift is what they're saying 845 also gets a two megabyte l3 cash three megabytes of system cash The gpu is an adrino 6 30 with 30 faster graphics and built-in support for a bunch of vr and ar stuff eye tracking hand tracking Foveated rendering which renders the part you're looking at So that it doesn't have to work and render all this stuff that you can't see Multi-view rendering six degree of freedom all this stuff Uh positioning it as being the chip if you want to do handheld ar and vr Which means not just phones maybe standalone headsets the image signal processor can capture 4k 60 frame per second video in hdr 10 bit color depth with built-in depth sensing something the 36 the 8 35 could do but not out of the box The x20 lte modem, uh, we mentioned before handles the theoretical max of 1.2 gigabits per second Gigabits per second theoretical and wi-fi supports 60 gigahertz 802 11 ad That's that short range wi-fi that acts as a cable replacement. Uh, it's not the wi-fi you'd necessarily use for your house Finally the hexagon 8 85 dsp works as an ai and imaging co-processor and should be three times faster than the hexagon That was in the 8 35 Need I say more Sounds pretty good to me tom Those that's I mean, it's a it's a beefy little chip. It's not it's not a vast difference from the 8 35 But looks like it's more capable Wired reports that wikipedia co-founder larry sanger has become the chief information officer for ever a pedia A site that wants to do wikipedia like services on the blockchain. Oh good grief Instead of a massive IQ points for edits and article creation Editors would earn a stake in the company editors Must put their own token to submit or edit an article which will be refunded if the submission is accepted It also means ever a pedia has no centralized server costs So maybe personal appeals out the window wired points out that a company like Lanour is also pursuing a blockchain based Encyclopedia, sara. It sounds like this is just a little bit too silicon valley buzzword generator for you Well, I mean my first reaction was like wikipedia on the blockchain. What does that even mean? but I do like the idea of you know, because the wikipedia model and there are others like it, you know, is based on uh community support um and uh, you know truthfulness and and all of that stuff so If you can get like a bigger prize than just like a star Yeah, I get it No, this is this is this is using an ico type approach To reward editors which one of the big problems of wikipedia sometimes is keeping editors around And if they have an actual stake in the company, I don't know how the company's going to make money But assuming they can figure that out having a stake in the company would be a big Uh incentive for people to do this and I like the idea that you have to put up a token to submit Because that's going to stop people from like well, I'm just going to spam a bunch of fake stuff and build up tokens and get rich Uh, because if your submission is not accepted then you lose the token So that should delay that and the fact that it's on the blockchain I think could be huge whether it's ever a pedia or somebody else in Getting rid of centralized systems again one of the big issues with net neutrality With bandwidth caps with all kinds of things is a centralized system If you don't have a centralized system anymore And there's a blockchain pair that up with mesh networks And suddenly nobody's in control of everything and this is how the internet routes around maybe it takes longer this time But we could get to a point where google facebook They don't control the data anymore because the data isn't controlled by anybody Yeah, I'm really excited that now we can have a new class of wikipedia editors that have more to fight over Oh fine It's probably true Uh, a bit of an unlikely pair at least to me sonos and ikea announced a partnership to create products that deliver what they call Future home sound experiences. We don't really have many details beyond that. That's all the both the company said But ikea does already uh sell some smart home products wireless charging solutions for mobile phones smart lighting I mean sonos is is it is a it's a high end brand Ikea is known as a great brand, but you know affordable. You don't need an allen wrench to put together a sonos No, right, but I wonder, you know, is this sonos doing some exclusive ikea you know less expensive speaker Is it Ikea just saying like hey sonos one speaker is now fit in our media center Yeah, it's gotta be a bargain sonos, right? Otherwise, it just doesn't work with ikea But I bet there's some upselling too where sonos can show off their best stuff I mean Ikea is the perfect place, right? You've got all these miniature homes inside of an ikea store What better place to show what a sonos can do than in an actual like fake house that you can walk around in As if the the death march that is an ikea store could get more Irritating would be everybody trying to fiddle with a sonos and all of those little tin can fake apartments Here's my idea What is sonos best at filling your home with sound? What is the biggest problem with sonos? I got to buy multiple sonos speakers to fill my home with sound What if there was maybe not the best sonos speaker but sonos speakers built into some of the furniture And so now that's not the hub, but if you already have a sonos This is another way that you can continue to get bigger richer sound in your home when you're playing Big and rich the country duo I also just wonder what ikea, you know what their grand plans might be ikea When I was in college was like you want the cheapest, uh, you know side table. That's where you get it now people have like custom kitchens made with ikea marble and they're like really beautiful and You know maybe the company wants to Have a higher end part of their store. Yeah Uh, it could it could be a change especially with them getting more into the smart home space It could be a change in that approach Trying to fight that a little bit that would be interesting to watch as well All right, folks if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes Be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines at daily tech headlines dot com It's all part of your support of dts. It makes us able to do this It's actually the bedrock of what we do and it keeps you up to date every day in less than five minutes Go get it as a podcast on the amazon echo Just launched in canada canadians go up to your amazon echo and tell it to add daily tech headlines as a flash briefing It should be able to do it google home has it as well and the anchor app at daily tech headlines dot com All right, so patreon announced uh to creators a couple days ago But but to all of the patrons uh today by email that they're changing their fee structure There's a lot of confusion about this. So we just want to set out what actually is changing right now First of all, we always paid a certain percentage in fact looking over the past three months Patreon always takes five percent out of whatever a creator like daily tech news show makes that's not changing five percent still coming out But up until now Last month they took out six percent for processing fees a couple months ago They took out six point six four percent seems to hover for us around six percent For other creators it can go up to seven and apparently even 14 percent because of how different Different operators work. We don't pay per post We we charge per month and so that changes how this all works out. Anyway Patreon said look if somebody's getting 14 percent taken out one month seven percent the next that's a lot of volatility Let's standardize that let's make it so that patrons patron creators always know they're getting 95 of what was pledged And the way to do that is to take those processing fees Which vary some of them come from paypal some come from stripes some of them come from credit card companies Push those out on the patrons and say this is kind of like a sales tax So if you pledge five dollars, you're now going to pay five dollars Plus the credit card processing fee or the paypal processing fee that way the creator gets 95 of that five dollars gets four 75 To do that though I'm guessing now patreon has not been clear on this and this is one of the questions They decided they needed to standardize it They couldn't have it be 14 percent for one patron and seven percent for another depending on how they paid and what the situations were So my guess is they did some math on the entire patreon universe And said on average each pleasure Would be covered if we charge them 35 cents per pledge Plus 2.9 of the pledge So it's a base of 35 cents for each pleasure Plus an extra percentage based on how big their pledge is That means if you pledge a dollar per creation, you're now spending a dollar 38 per creation But if you're spending 20 dollars, uh, you're you're only spending 21 something. Uh, so The percentage goes down the more you give The idea was the creators get to keep more Uh, the the the processing fees are transparent and pushed out to the patrons and patreon itself doesn't change They still just take their five percent Uh, and this has caused not A small amount of unrest among both creators and patrons So a little historical context to patreon patreon is a company that uh, I think it's not uh, you know A tale we can't tell is is uh, one that tom and i have been Uh involved with from a fairly early age. Uh with with them, uh, uh, obviously d tns was not only uh, Tremendously reliant on the support that was gained through the patreon platform, but patreon itself Uh has been very happy to see more and more podcasts come in to the platform after that point Uh, they have said consistently To publicly and privately that they are always trying to work on that credit card fee The hope was the more and more transactions they could get The more they could negotiate that feed down with all these different places This is them in my mind saying guess what creators? We've solved this forever We you are now not going to have to worry about credit card processing Uh you all you have to do is look at that number and we can probably even have something on your dashboard that automatically takes out 5% It's no longer estimated payout. Now. It's deaf definite payout You know what you are going to get the problem here is twofold in my mind number one Communication on this has not been great And I believe that they did not realize how much of How much turbulence this was going to cause and I think there are big hanging questions here specifically In the idea that this 35 cent charge is per creation So for dts which is a monthly show. That's just once For my patreon. I mean I make my living primarily on two patreon accounts night attack And jury which encompasses both the jury podcast and the politics politics politics podcast Each one of those is a once a week charge That means that despite the fact that we are both doing things that is a slated amount of content for the month Anybody who is on a per post? Patreon will be charged more In those 35 cent fees, right? And 2.9 plus 35 cents sounds very familiar to anybody who's looked at stripe Who's looked at paypal for processing? It's usually around 2.9 percent plus 30 cents My guess is the extra five cents is covering some other fees that That just are part of the chain of processing Uh, you know banking fees or whatever But here's my question that has not been answered and I've put this to patreon. I'm still waiting for them to answer it Uh Why 35 cents per pledge? That 2.9 plus 35 cents for a transaction is almost standard I'm curious what the extra five cents is but 2.9 plus 30 cents. That's what I pay if I do stripe That's what I pay if I do paypal that makes perfect sense to me. It's very transparent But why is it per pledge? Why isn't it because I I get I back people on patreon. I get charged Once for for all of it. Why why is it that I'm not getting charged 35 cents? Once for just that one pledge. I think that's a question a lot of people have to And I don't have the answer for that But but if you're gonna if you're gonna get your nose bent out of shape get it bent out of shape for the right reason I don't think they're double dipping. I don't think that they're trying to secretly make more money It really does feel like an attempt to standardize a fee by averaging it across people And some people probably are gonna pay less in processing fees Although nobody ever paid processing fees but but the processing fee per person for somebody who just does two monthly's might actually end up being less Whereas the person who does lots of pledges on a weekly basis is definitely going to pay more You know, I think the the other thing that you have to look at this and this is Big scale right pull back a little bit The entire history that we have known in and you know the the internet when it came to crowdfunding Was always Everybody kicks in a little and at the end of the day it means a lot this to me feels like Them patreon and crowdfunding in general by the way Coming of age a little bit and understanding that this is not about pay what you want. This is not about tip jar This is not about everybody kick in a dollar and at the end of the day We have 500 dollars. This is about people who are now sans cable company Sands a lot of other traditional media Of you know newspaper subscriptions, although those are kind of on the rise but just in general Saying all right. I'm willing to kick in Netflix level subscription service level money For the programs and personalities that I like I am making this a part of my budget And it's rad that I am giving $30 a month $15 a month $10 a month It's not about the dollar anymore And so they are adjusting their rules in accordance with that which is why people that are giving a dollar for a lot of stuff The budget Contributors which I do think are important to this ecosystem are the ones kind of being given the cold shoulder in general That to me Is more about where we are in crowdfunding as a whole than necessarily patreon trying to be Mean like this is just where things are going as the money has gotten bigger and more consistent You know as as the new kid on the block Of the patreon model you guys have been doing it a lot longer than I have You know just just a couple months now and some change that I've been on d10s, but It's because of the money that was raised on patreon that I am here So I absolutely believed in the structure and the community and it all worked so well So the fact that uh things are changing um You know my first reaction is don't panic. Let's you know rate it out a little bit. Um at the same time. I will say Um while patrons have a very legitimate Concern The whole idea behind this is to help creators But I see a lot of creators saying my patrons are going to leave. Yeah So new creators possibly this is more attractive for existing creators Who you know, they were fueling the whole model as it is It's very problematic Yeah, and it violates the rule of don't take things away from the internet Uh without without peril right when you change things when you take things away Uh people get upset and so you have to have a really really good reason And cover all your bases and dot your eyes and cross your t's And there's a couple eyes that aren't dotted here There's a couple t's that aren't crossed and people are focusing on those And picking on those because they don't like change and not only do they not like change They don't like change that costs them change. Uh, you know, that makes things more expensive That's an insult added to the injury there. So I I Not surprised to see the backlash for a lot of people it doesn't matter I get it if you're a ten dollar a month patreon and you're doing well Adding 2.9 plus 35 cents to your monthly pledge It's not a big deal for other people though who are scraping by But wanting to give a dollar to this person and this person and this person this person It's it's it's catastrophic to that ability to do it because it really limits your choices You're going to have to back out on people and that never feels good. I get that Uh, nor does it feel good for the creators As much as people don't like things getting taken away from them I do like paying rent and I have uh, either wisely or unwisely made my A living on this platform So, uh, I am very invested in it and I implore Patreon to please just answer these questions about per post Creators because I think that that is something that that is Is very important to my life and I know where their offices are So and there and there may be a do it in a blog post There may be a rational explanation that we haven't thought of where it's like, oh, I guess you do have to do 35 cents I get that maybe it's trade secrety. You maybe it's the nda like Uh, but but you got to address it somehow because it it is the the sore thumb that sticks out Hey, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit You can submit stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com In fact, the fact that this story was high on the subreddit day Was one of the things that helped convince me. I was it wasn't just my bubble There's other people who were convinced about it. Uh, and it was also posted in our facebook group facebook.com slash groups Slash daily tech news show. Let's check out the mail bag, sarah All right, this one comes from john. He says it's cold in billions montana john stay warm John says I want to share my experience getting into ethereum mining this year started with a single gpu Now i'm up to eight It's a fun hobby trying to optimize performance and energy use But if I could go back in time probably would have just invested that money in crypto instead It's all kind of finicky. It's about 120 a month in energy costs generates a lot of heat and noise In the back of my head. I'm always thinking about a fire risk Right, you got a lot of stuff going on here You have to be very careful about how you power these things also of note Ether is planning to move from proof of work where you mine blocks to proof of stake Where instead of mining you stake your ether that you won't try to cheat the network the changes For uh, this changes it from solving hard math to distributed verification where you have something to lose Hmm, uh, that's that's interesting. Jai. That's a good way of explaining proof of stake Where it's it's it's saying okay, we're gonna let you prove this But if if someone checks your work and finds out that you uh, you cheated you lose money Which which makes things a little a little more efficient And then uh patron supporter and long time listener wrote in and said hey Uh crash plan it ended unless you converted to business and you talked about that a while ago What'd you end up doing tom? Uh, I'll be honest what I ended up doing for a while Was just kind of relied on Dropbox to to sort of paste me over but I eventually because of this email Uh got my act together and I'm happily on back blaze now That that worked great. It was super simple to download And index and it just automatically takes everything off your hard drive There's some quirks about how it works and how you access things which Some people may or may not want to do But it's all part of what I considered to be now a four-part backup system I've got a local nas that I back up to I've got the devices themselves I've got Dropbox and I've got back blaze which images My laptops hard drive so you can check that out if you want at backblaze.com Thank you to Justin robert young not only a patreon creator And friend to all but he's busy doing other things too.  That is where you can get our new mega pack We're taking all the old stickers that have rotated out of our packs out of the vault That includes artwork from spearmint nitrate carter johnson scott johnson And more as well as a brand new pinset. I think i'm wearing my my please don't die pin Right here all over there at stickers or diaf.com order now Supplies are running low and you want to get it in time for christmas stickers or diaf.com Hey, uh, big thanks to everybody who is still supporting us on patreon We super appreciate you even more right now There are all kinds of perks there. Uh, so so take a moment. Take a deep breath decide Okay, even if it cost me a little bit more is it still worth it to be in this system? We think it is to still be part of this system because it makes things easier I don't have to run the whole thing myself and maintain it and keep the servers up And that does make it worthwhile to me So if that's still your way of supporting us, we appreciate it patreon.com slash dtns Don't forget. There's other ways though. Uh, we just launched, uh a way to support us on memberful We've always taken paypal and you can find all those ways to support us at daily tech news show dot com slash support Keep the feedback coming by the way, uh, really appreciate, uh, everybody who has weighed in about this and other things feedback at daily tech news show dot com We're live monday through friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 utc at alpha geek radio dot com and diamond club dot tv And as tom said our mothership daily tech news show dot com back tomorrow with shannon morse and lenn peralta will be here to illustrate talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frog pants dot com Time and club hopes you have enjoyed this bro I had stopped yet. Oh, sorry. That's great. No, that's gonna be all the recording now. That's great So a little muppet at the end of the show. There's an extra muppet all right uh, so yeah that's uh That's what's going on if if you are a patron and you miss the beginning of this on the full audio Version, we've got some new reward levels that'll cover. We'll compensate. We should say compensate For the increased fee if you really just can't swing it. This is a way to keep whatever reward level you're at Uh, and so check that out at patreon.com slash d tns But uh, that doesn't work at the dollar level because they won't let us go below a dollar. So We've got member fire paypal for those folks. You can still back us is what i'm saying We're trying to make it easy What should we call this show? Ooh good question. We're trying real hard to be the shepherd the large patreon collider Fiasco Fiasco buddy, uh the charge patreon provider Uh, put your best fee forward Still no snow allen wrench required You know that might be a little too early to say Yeah, I I I like I don't where it is on the list but uh sun bun in the chat had patreon off Which I would like to amend With his next line which was hashtag got him You have to say goddamn Ikea plus sonos equals musical chairs um I mean the large patreon collider. It's pretty funny pretty good Herapedia therapedia bitcoin too volatile for valve Snapdragon 845 cheer moan or met your excitement Wiki coin edit your own currency a page patreon problem Patreon podcasters just want to get paid fairly potluckian G's morphe's Sounds like you're calling someone morphe g's morphe's You morphe's And that's morphe's are the drugs that I take because i'm elliot and alderson Uh, I go with the large patreon collider. Yeah I like that one anybody else Yeah, I think that that's that's fine fiasco is pretty funny as a pun was kind of amazing A large I like large patreon collider because it's not as uh charged Yeah, yeah except it is because it's a collider There's like maybe the collision will you know be good. Yeah, maybe we'll detect the The god particle Hey, by the way tom for your uh continuing pop culture education. Yes, we forgot to do that today. Yeah, uh Uh lil b Is now uh now wants to go to college. So he is soliciting colleges Okay to to find out which colleges want to have lil b And now uh college The official college accounts are now coming out of the woodwork to woo Lil b You know how to take lil b in who Berkeley's ha school of business Who's I'm totally Foolish who's who's lil b? Oh, roger. Where do we start? Oh my god? He's a he's a national treasurer. Yeah protect lil b Always always protect lil b should we google it for you? Lil b is a rapper from uh the oakland berkeley area. Um, but he's Perhaps more well known for putting curses on sports figures. Yeah, uh Uh, uh, he also invented the the the eat-em-up dance the cooking dance So you uh, you and a lot of football players did that in the end zone Yeah, so you do like that or like like that. So you're like eating them up Uh, and and he does not take kindly if you use it and then don't credit him Ah, right He also cursed kevin durant for years and it worked Like he wrote a song called f word kevin durant, which is one of my favorite songs of all time. It's so good It's it's pretty wonderful song I listen to it regularly even though kevin durant is now on my team now on the warriors Yeah, I wanted him to do a new version like i'm friends with kevin durant or something Well, he did lift the curse, you know, and so that was he lifted the right Ah That answered your question. You're up to speed. Yeah, I do. I am. Thank you. That was most uh, enlightening Did I do this right? Hold on Uh, when are we doing our coho shoot? Our Three at three. Okay. Yeah, I just have I have to run like a really quick errand, but I should have time between the two Should be on the calendar if they want a quick errand Uh Man today today was rough Today was a weird day Here's the thing for me personally I don't like dealing with this stuff the whole reason I use patreon the whole reason I like This kind of model is that it lets me just do my show Yeah, I don't have to go and maintain things and track ads and Do all that stuff, right? I just have to talk to people about the stuff that I talk about and then it's like hey, I'm supporting the patrons patrons support me It's all good. Yeah, so when this happens outside of my control and I spend the whole morning Talking to people about it asking people what they think finding out explaining things You know correcting the same misapprehension 15 times agreeing that this weird absence of information is frustrating 15 times I'm not doing my show And that's not okay Uh, literally I'm going to put words in Tom's mouth and he can correct, uh, correct the statement as much as he wants Uh Patreon almost made Tom, uh, uh called cnet Here's an actual conversation. I already I already mentioned this in the slack this morning Uh, I told Eileen as I explained all this stuff to her I was like, yeah, I don't have to deal with this and the people, you know I'm losing we're losing patrons and just it's it's just it's not me I'm not able to do what I want and Eileen says well, you know rod tomatoes still looking for an editor-in-chief See you Well, isn't that nice for you tom? Yeah. Yeah There's like great timing. No, it's awesome. That's great. That's great. Um, I'm really excited I don't think that's going to be a less stressful gig Is the no you hate it immediately. No, exactly. Yeah, are you kidding?  Yeah, I'm not kidding every element of my day like every Break out my day into half hours I have had a conversation With somebody in some form or fashion About this patreon thing including patreon, right?  I'm pretty sure Oh, I mean, yeah, I mean the feedback if there's a lot of good feedback. I'm not seeing it I'm seeing a lot of bad feedback. Yeah, and um I I had an email again, like I'm coming into this kind of new, but you know the patreon model I mean, I knew what the company was, but I didn't really look at it with the, you know, you know With a fine-tooth comb until I joined uh DTNS at the beginning of October So if this had always been the case from day one, I mean, okay, whatever whatever works That's just the way the world works.  That's a Huge problem, you know, let's not lose sight of the fact that it's not happening right this second You're not being charged at the moment. Like no, they did give you notice. They said as of December 18th You've got time to take action So I want to give them that credit because it's starting to feel a little bit like oh They just sprung it on us like no they at some point They had to tell you at a time when they hadn't told you before and that's today. That's what today. Yeah uh I had a quick email with somebody at patreon And I did I did it as a creator not a reporter. So I don't want to say exactly what they said It would be safe to categorize it as They understood there would be rumbling. Yeah, I don't Think that they realized what they had what kind of Amplitude I I believe that they have a spreadsheet that says uh Look, this all works out. Don't worry. We've seen into the future We've run test models and and you make more money and and your patrons ultimately really don't care I'm sure they sat down with people and said how many of you would quit How many of you would lower your pledge? How many of you would just leave it as it is? I think didn't they say that they ran it for a little bit? They ran like little test models Oh, did they I didn't hear that I I may have just been inventing that in my head But yeah, I know I I think I think they did their due diligence You know, it's as far as it can be done Uh, it's Just when you roll it out like this Then you find out the real the real reaction to it in the in the wild which can be different well It wouldn't be the first time a company made a change and the community was like wow and then the company was like, whoa Sorry, I don't get the sense that that they're planning to do that. But well, I'm not saying that they're gonna like change course but I think you know Tom you said earlier today like I'm not surprised by this and I was like I'm kind of surprised actually I'm not surprised by the backlash.  Yeah Yeah I am surprised that we're down 49 patrons Because that hurts us wasn't it 15 yesterday? Yeah So after yes after people found out about the creators We went down 15 then today the email went out as soon as the email went out. Boom. We went down 49 That's 1% Yeah, that's and I'm not seeing new paypal subscriptions to match that And the paypal donation seemed to be about normal one person who backed us on paypal Wrote I'm doing this because so I know there was at least one who canceled over here and added over there, but Uh, there's not a there's not any others I would say maybe give it a couple of days because not everyone would yeah Close one and automatically jump like they would like oh, I I I'll close it in the morning and I want to get back from work or You know or the weekend I'm Uh today is just a whole suckball So who knows what's going on From yesterday in my exit surveys. I have one two three four five six seven eight nine 10 Uh 10 canceled pledges All but one of them site patreon fee increase uh, although they are all But two either a dollar or under Two of them are three dollar per creation People though and those are my lifeblood Um, and they site Patreon new fee increases um Yeah, I've got we're down 54 now Uh, there's been a couple of people raised their pledge trying to I think in some cases trying to pick up Uh, the fact that other people are are declining, which is cool. I appreciate that And I think I said I think like one person went from seven to nine dollars Uh, which is definitely taking advantage of the fact that you can get the fee compensation reward tier And get the get the co-executive producer title, which is that's why we do it. That's cool One person went from one to ten dollars. That's great. Thank you Yeah um And in average my processing fee has always been around 3.67 percent percent really On the jury the processing fee column was three 3.67 that's a bargain. It actually has gone been going down It was hovering around four So my take home has been 91 lat around 91 percent. Yeah, my take home has been consistently 88 Throughout the history so I would be getting four percent more in this system Yeah Um Yeah, I will go from 88 percent to well, it's been 89 percent last month to 95 percent But now we'll have a reduced amount And that's probably another thing the patreon doesn't want to say out loud But they're thinking like look creators even if you lose a bunch of people you're gonna make more money So you're my if your money goes up. What do you care? Um, what that happens that could be true Yeah, just wait for that to happen Don't kick me in the shins and telling me you're doing uh nick with a c keeps hearing a windows usb sound I think that's you roger. No, that's it. Oh, is that you right? Justin? That's me. I thought it was coming through roger's little sound No, uh, uh, sorry guys. It's a thing that i'm trying to work. There it is. There it is And it'll be back Wait a minute. Why why did you immediately assume is rod? Well, because you've got the sound capture card and sometimes your system sounds will Yeah, but i muted it I muted it. I know but sometimes it that that that sound thing gives you trouble sometime. That's why I thought it was you Or roger. I wasn't trying to pick on roger. I'm sorry It's okay.  No, that's not that's not what I was going on at all The same thing that allows me to hear amazing radio jingles radio jingles Let's just go show Well hell I wish I could say I was going to take a nap What'd you say sarah? Oh, it's just that we rate dogs, you know, they have those little hats to say ah heck and then they like asterisk The e is the funniest thing in the world That's funny Well, maybe that's Maybe that's how you steer Dtns into like a peril manufacturing with snap equips Well, we're gonna do the listener co-host show that'll be coming in the holidays here in a short while Wonderful timing. I'm also going to talk to a uh, uh, someone's daughter about the future of media for her school project That's my afternoon Don't call me yesterday. It would have been like well the future of media is great There's so many opportunities today. It'll be like stay away. Name old nothing to pain No, I'm I'm kidding, of course. All right, uh, uh, I love you guys.


Hey, I'm hanging out with the sales team. I got some numbers for you. Stay with me. Check these things out. GA is Over-full. You want to go 8% nation? You can't sit in GA. Okay? VIP only 40. That's right. 4-0 seats left. One seat, two seat. Dude, we only got 40. Okay? Premier 37. That isn't very many. That'll probably gone this week. Am I right guys? 37 Premier seats left. That's where you're like, dude, I want to reach out and touch the stage, man I don't have the best seat in the house. I want to meet the speakers. I don't have a table for taking notes I want all the good stuff, right?   There's only 13 seats left for monster Premier. That's where your front row right in the middle Okay? You're pretty much sitting on the stage Get to go to the monster retreat where we talk about recruiting, training, scaling, marketing at Coach Burt's Lodge, landing Coach Burt and myself. You also get to go to a private monster mastermind in my hotel room on Thursday night. Only 13 left. Also, if you want to take the Statler Yeah, you gotta grab a seat. But the Statler Hotel, if you haven't got your hotel, even if you have People are cancelling their hotel rooms. No joke. Am I right, Dylan? People are canceling their hotel rooms to stay with us at the Statler and you should too. Here's why Thursday night 29 rooms left in the whole place. It's a gigantic five-star hotel and we're selling the sucker out. Okay? 46 rooms left on Friday night. The main night. You don't want to stay in another hotel down the street Do you? Let me let me let me paint a picture for you. Do you want to stroll? Do you want to get out of you? Wake up, okay? Friday morning. Get excited for the for the start of the conference. Did you got to go down?   Okay, then you go get in the car.  Why was traffic sucks, man? I'm sitting here for 17 minutes. This is awful. And then you finally get there. You're like I Missed the start of the whole event But instead you could have been staying at the statler Rolling out of bed brushing your teeth combing your hair because you got to look good Okay, walking downstairs and bam sitting in front row monster on my right Dallas. See you Michael Irvin 13 left Statler again 46 Friday night only 24 Saturday night. I got some special stuff for you guys on Saturday night We got some special special stuff for you guys in general This is the event that you don't want to miss. I promise you you will leave with tangible Specific nuggets that you can implement into your business every single day from here on out forever It's priceless and and if you and if you come to the event and you hating I do it sucked I'd learned nothing. I'll give you your money back because it is impossible. Okay, so Passful you can't sit GA. You're not general anyway, right VIP only 46 left from here 37 monster 13 The statler is almost full big five-star hotel Almost sold out your every ticket Don't wait commit the more you think about it the less like you already do it time kills all deals in sales The same thing on coming to conferences. So commit right now Life-changing event the moment is here.


From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are continuing our coverage of VMworld 2018. Day three, I'm Lisa Martin with two very stylish men next to me, I'm quite impressed. Dave Vellante, my esteemed co-host. Oh shucks. Rock and the Salmon, King Salmon Vellante.  Great to have you back. I was looking at you on Twitter and you have been on theCUBE 17 times. Is this 18 or 19? You know, I think Dave said I was on one of the very first Cubes way back in 2010, so I've been on a few. That's a whole other criteria of VIP level. Well thank you for coming back. You have been, not only is he old, you can't do a CUBE without Eric Herzog. You've been everywhere all over VMworld. I saw you're speaking at IBM booth on VMware and IBM. You're at Cisco, you're giving sessions. How do you fit it all in and still have time for us? Well I always make time for theCUBE. I always make time for you guys. Love talking theCUBE. You guys have been very helpful. We appreciate everything that you do. Love doing shows, love them. I may be six years old, but I'm really 18 down underneath, so if I only sleep three hours a night, not a problem. What do you love about them? I mean, is it? Number one is meeting customers. Customers and channel partners, right? Well, all of the employees of all the various companies here get a paycheck from whoever that may be, from the IBM, someone from other companies, people from VMware. That's not who pays your salary. It's the end users and the channel partners if they buy through the channel. They're the ones that really pay your salary. So being close to the customers and the partners is number one. Second thing of course is seeing all the cool technology. They'll see what's going on, what's hot, what can we leverage from our perspective, what can we tire ourselves to? So for example, the hot things that IBM's really been doing from a storage perspective in cloud and modern data protection. Those are the two big things we've been focused on for the last couple of years and how do we integrate our storage solutions and our modern data protection with cloud infrastructure and then also how do we, if you're not in the cloud, how do we help customers protect their data better in a modern way and reuse their secondary data instead of making 27,000 copies of the same data? So when theCUBE first started at the Mworld, modern data protection at the time was dealing with the lack of physical resources because you went from 10 servers down to one and you didn't have all that excess capacity to do a run a backup job anymore. Today, modern data protection's all around cloud and multi-cloud and software defined. So I wonder if you could help us sort of paint a picture of what modern data protection is for IBM. Sure, I think there's a couple aspects to it. So first of all, you have to support the cloud and that's two ways. So for us, several of our backup products are used by cloud service providers. In some cases, they use our name and say, featuring IBM Spectrum Protect or Spectrum Protect for us. Other cases, they have their own brand but it's our software underneath the hood so that if the end user is backing up to their cloud, they're actually using our software. So that's item number one. The second thing is you need to make sure that your traditional storage software can tier to the cloud, can migrate data to the cloud, can transparently move data to the cloud in an automated fashion using AI. So using artificial intelligence when the data's hot, if you canot a target and that target could be a cloud and when the data's hot, it tears the data to the cloud or sorry, when it's cold. When it's hot, it pulls it back in and that needs to be all automated through AI base. So we've done both. We have our backup software which is available from several cloud providers as a backup as a service. We also offer it through the cloud. So IBM cloud actually sells Spectrum Protect as a backup as a service solution. And then all of our primary storage software and even our spectrum scale software can automatically tier data to a cloud target device. You know, Eric, I got to ask you, so tiering used to be predominantly, and correct me if you disagree, but it used to be a one-way trip to the bit bucket and you just described going there and coming back. Has cloud changed that?  So I think of the couple of things. So first of all, there's no doubt that the world is data-driven. The most valuable asset isn't gold, it's not silver, it is absolutely not oil, it's not diamonds, it is data. And it doesn't matter whether you're one of the largest banks in the world, you're in manufacturing, you're in the government, or whether you're Herzog's bar and grill. The data is your most valuable asset.  All of that is the most critical thing that you have. So in a data-driven world, it's critical that you use the data. And that also means that because of the value data, when you back up the data or you snapshot or replicate the data, you've now created a secondary copy. Well, what if you could use it to do test? What if you could use it to do big data analytics? What if you could use it for DevOps? So instead of making one copy for test, one copy for disaster recovery, one copy for this, one copy and have basically a plethora of copies all over the place, with what we provide in modern data protection, you can use a backup, you can use a snap or a replica, and you can use that to do test or development or to do big data analytics, and using that one copy, not making multiple copies. So that's- You know, I just want to pick up something you said.  There's evidence. If you look at the market value of the top five companies, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, they've surpassed the banks, they've surpassed the energy companies, and I would argue it's because of data, right? People are recognizing that they're data companies. But if you look at that name, the only one that actually builds anything of substance at a fair amount of their volume of revenue is Apple. It's Apple, right. Amazon doesn't, they ship stuff, right? Facebook clearly doesn't. Google. You know, Google has a few things, but not really build stuff, it's really about the data. So, absolutely, and if you're a more traditional company like a bank or someone building the table, whoever builds this table, if they have their act together and they're using that data right, they're building the table cheaper than anyone else, they're shipping it to the cube, cheaper than anyone else could ship it to you. They got more colors because they know what they're doing.  So, guess what? The more you do that, the more money you make, even something as simple as a table manufacturer. And that's all about the data and how you use that data. So, Eric, you love talking with customers, which is great as a CMO for IBM storage. Got to talk to those customers. Let's talk about how you're seeing customers take the efficiencies of what IBM is doing with data protection, storage, et cetera, to be able to harness the power of AI, those superpowers that Pat Gelsinger talked about on Monday, and transform their businesses. Give us some of your favorite customer examples where it's really revolutionary. So, we had a great example today. We did a panel with a bunch of end users as part of the show agenda. And one of the customers is a provider of software as a service to universities and school districts. 45,000 customers between universities, junior colleges, school districts, et cetera, in North America, so Canada and the US. And they are doing software as a service. So, for them, performance is critical. They can't go down. So, all of the college bookstores, if you go in a college bookstore, all of the infrastructure behind that is them. So, they're called Follett. So, a couple things. One, because they're doing software as a service and managing all that, it's critical, it can't go down. It's got to be available, it's got to be performant, it's got to be resilient, it's got to be reliable. So, that's how the storage melds in. From modern data protection, the way it melds in is, guess what? How many books did Dave buy? What did Eric buy? Oh, is Dave buying a used book or an Eric buying new books? Okay, so we know that the propensity is certain members of the community at I went to UC Davis, University of California, Davis, are going to buy used books. Dave, whereas Herzog's going to buy new books. They can figure that out. How many used books they need? How many new books they need? That's all about efficiency and how they make more money. What are the store hours? Okay, certain universities, it's this. Other universities, it's that. What do they do in the wintertime? At UC Davis, you can go in the wintertime. I know you went to school in Boston for price snowing. No one's going to the bookstore in the wintertime. Right? Trend toward book rentals. How do we capitalize on that? That's all they do. So, one of the things they talked about was they have to always protect that data and back it up. The other thing they talked about was they have to assume a lot of capacity. So, what they did was they bought assuming they would have to refresh in 18 months. And because our storage arrays have a ton of different data reduction technology, whether it be block, de-dup, compression, et cetera, they actually, and they have petabytes of data. Petabytes, 12 petabytes. They've actually calculated out they won't need to buy new storage for 36 months instead of 18. So, they just saved on CapEx. Through the storage, through the intelligence of the storage. So, in that case, you got both modern data protection and you've got a storage message. One of our other customers, who's a public reference not here at the show, which is a hospital, they were backing up all their data, both cloud and on-premise with our backup software. And they went down and their entire system went down and they didn't lose one stitch of data. And it's a hospital. It's a teaching hospital. I think they're in Pennsylvania. And in the public reference in the video, he said, and we went down and off that backup, we were able to get all of the data back. We didn't lose any patient data. We didn't lose any research data. We didn't lose any billing data. If you break your arm, they do bill you, right? They didn't lose anything. That's not just money, that's lives. So, that's huge. I want to ask you about, you know, that table example you were giving, it made me think about, and we were talking about the big five companies in terms of market cap being data-oriented. There seems to be a gap between those sort of traditional companies and those data companies. And that gap tends to be, the data is often in silos. It's human expertise that, or expertise around a bottling plant or the manufacturing plant or whatever it is, versus a data model with humans who understand how to leverage that data. Do you see whether it's through new data protection techniques or other storage techniques that IBM is working on? Ways to help customers break down those data silos so they can become more digital and be able to take advantage of data. So, I think there's a couple of things. So, first of all, you know, at the very tactical level, we provide this automated IA-based data tiering. We can tier from anything to anything. So, we can take data from an IBM array and tier it to an EMC array. We can take data from an EMC array and tier it to a NetApp array, a NetApp array to a Tatu array, an HP array back to our arrays. We can do this transparent data movement based on hot and cold. So, not only does that allow you to control CAPEX and OPEX, but allows you to move the data from an array to array and once you move that data set, it might be working, that data, that other array, could be hooked up to a different set of servers through the sand that's running a different workload and then takes that data set and use it with that other piece of software out on the server side. So, that's item number one. Item number two is IBM, not just in the storage, but overall has a global program where IBM is promoting through universities, all over the world, data scientists. And part of that is training data scientists, not only how to do the science of data and analyzing data and mining data and doing it, but to break down those walls. The value is more there. And we also have, from a storage perspective, some products are spectrum scale product. One of our customers who's one of the largest banks in the world, they run 300,000 servers attached to a giant spectrum scale repository, the petabytes and petabytes, and they do real time data analytics to see if Dave Vellante or Lisa's credit card was stolen. Thank you. So that's real world analytics being run, but they need petabytes of data, right? And then with our IBM Cloud Object Storage technology, where we have several customers at the exabyte level in production with an exabyte of data, you put the data out when it's cold, but guess what? If you want to mine it, you might want to be able to pull it back and guess what? You can tear data from spectrum scale to IBM Cloud Object Storage, and then spectrum scale can pull it back in to do the big data analytic workloads. And that AI you're using, is it heavy open source? There's a little bit of Watson sprinkled there. It stuffed the storage division developed years ago and then has peppered in the AI based technology into that software to determine when the data set is hot or cold and then move it back or forth. Now, we also do the old style. So if you go back 10 years ago, the automation of storage was policy based. So we had it way back when, which was if the data is 30 days old, move it to this array. The old HSM kind of. Yeah, and it was automated, so once it hit 30 days. But now what we've done is we started with that, what I would call, you know, automation, and now we've moved that to AI. And by the way, if you still want to do it the old way and say move this data when it's 60 days old, you can still do that. But the modern way is let the storage figure out for you and move it back and forth, whether it be to the cloud or whether it be on premise. So it's intelligent hierarchical storage management. So if the characteristics change, the system knows what to do. So when it's hot, it'll pull the data back into flash, for example, when it's cold, it'll put it out to cloud, it'll put it out to tape, or it'll put it out to slow hard drives, either way. All right, Eris, so we're almost out of time here.  IBM's been around a long time. You have, you said you even have customers at exabyte scale. I'm hearing heterogeneity, customer choice. But if I'm a hospital, a small hospital in the middle of America, and I have choice with data protection vendors, storage vendors, some smaller than IBM that that might be able to move faster, what are the top three differentiators of why I would want to go with IBM's storage? Sure, so the first thing is our broad portfolio, whether it be file blocker object, whether it be modern data protection, whether it be archiving, if you still want to use tape, we're the number provider of tape in the world. And we sell gobs of it, by the way, to the web scale guys. Of course you do. They are the guys that buy it. It's cost effective. We've got one throat to choke, all of it talks to each other, and by the way, it happens to work with all the cloud vendors, not just IBM cloud. We work with Amazon, we work with Microsoft, we work with Google, and we work with IBM's own cloud. So we can work with anything, that's how I'm on. Second thing for smaller shops, we have a network of business partners all over the world. Some of them deal with a big global Fortune 500, and others deal with small accounts. And then I think really the third thing is that IBM makes sure that our stuff works with everyone else's stuff, whether it be cloud, our Spectrum Tech software, which has been around for years, and is the leading enterprise backup package, the bulk of what it backs up is not IBM storage. The vast bulk of it is from two of the competitors on the floor of the show, they also back up our stuff too. And we back up everyone's. There's probably 20 storage vendors, we back up every one of their data. So if someone buys storage from XYZ company, we can back it up. If someone buys it from one of the big competitors, we back it up. From us, we back it up. So the fact that our software works with everyone's gear is of an advantage for both a small shop and a big shop. We make sure that our software, whether it's embedded in our arrays, or whether we sell it is just a piece of storage software. And we are the number one storage software provider on the planet as well. We can meet the needs of any company big or small because we have this flexibility of working with our stuff and working with everybody else's stuff. And most of the other guys don't do that. If it's a small shop, their stuff usually only works with their stuff. And from a support perspective, so a lot of you play with everybody. It's a global network. I mean, we're known for our support, whether it be IBM Direct or what we do with our partners. They're all, all the partners are certified. It's a big certification process. And if they can't certify the product, guess what, they can't sell IBM stuff. That's just how we operate. Other people, if they can move a lot of boxes but they don't have anyone pick up the phone or can come out to Dave's house to install, well, they let them sell. We don't do that at IBM. We just, we don't use those box mover types.  Packaging. So beer, soda, milk, and it can figure out if it's full or not full, if the bottle or can or carton is damaged and they used Watson, now they're regular reseller. They resell all the storage, they resell our power, they resell mainframe, but they've gone into the software development side using this Watson thing and they're selling a full solution with the software included to bottling plants all over the world. Wow, Eric, this has been a super-charged conversation. Thanks for stopping by and talking with Dave and me about not just your excitement about talking with customers, but really how IBM is really empowering customers of any size worldwide to succeed. So we know we'll see you again soon, but thanks for stopping by a couple times this week. Great, well, thank you. Thank you, really appreciate the time. And the outfit choices are just on point, guys. You blend well too. For Eric, Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Key of Life from VMworld, 2018, day three, stick around, we'll be back with our next guest after a short break.