Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? I am recovering still little, you know, raspy, But here we go the show. They say it must keep on happening. I think I think that's the saying. And today I thought I would talk Uh, this is kind of a weird mishmash of a show, but I thought I would talk about a few inventors who created stuff. Some of that stuff would become insanely popular, and yet these inventors were never really able to fully capitalize on their innovation for one reason or another. Uh. But the reason why I wanted to do that is because there's this narrative, particularly here in the United States, that if you've got ingenuity and elbow grease, you can work your way to the top. You can smash through economic and social barriers that you know otherwise constrain us. So here in the US, all that gets wrapped up in what we call the American dream. Unfortunately, sometimes you can do everything right and still lose out. And so we're gonna talk about some of those cases. We're also going to talk a lot about patents, and I've talked about patents before, but let's go over it again kind of as a reminder. To receive a patent is to get some authorities assurance that that authority recognizes you as the inventor of something. Typically we're talking about a government office, some office that has been authorized by the government to do this, like the U. S. Patent Office. So to secure a patent, and inventor has to submit a patent application and also pay fees in order to have it considered. The application has to explain at least in some detail what the invention does and how it works, and that description needs to be at least somewhat specific. If you get really vague in general with your patent application, you're less likely to be granted a patent by the office, because if you're not really describing how your invention works, then that creates this this huge bubble you can use to attack anyone who makes anything remotely similar to your invention. Right, Like, the whole idea of a patent is that it protects your idea, your invention. But if you are so vague with the way you word how your invention works, anyone who makes anything even remotely similar you could argue as infringing on your patent, when really the problem is you never explained how your invention works properly. Patent applications and patents themselves are a matter of public record, and that means anyone can pull up your patent and see how your invention works. You can do this right now. You go to the internet, go to a web page, uh, Patent office web page, and start searching patents. You can read all you want. They get pretty technical and filled with like jargon and legal ease, largely too kind of obfu skate what's happening uh, And that does make it a little tricky to read. Uh. You also get a lot of this kind of flowery language that has been adopted as being standard in patents. But you can do it. You can check it out and you can see exactly, or at least generally, how various inventions work. But the patent also grants protection for the invention. So if you discover that some ne'er do well out there has been copying your invention, you can take that person or you know, entity to court and you could say, you know, they sue them for patent infringement. If you can prove that they were using your patented approach without first getting your permission to do it, then you can frequently get some decent damages out of them and shut their illegal operations down. Often these end up going to settlement before it goes all the way through the court system. Court cases are expensive, and if a company is already kind of feeling like they're not gonna win out on a on a case, they might choose to settle rather than draw things out, pay the high price of legal fees on top of whatever damages they end up getting thrown their way as well. Now we're going to get back to this idea about you know, permissions and patents and licensing and all that kind of stuff, because I am oversimplifying here. Now, patents have a shelf life, and here in the United States, a utility patent has twenty years. Uh. There is an asterisk here. However, in order to have the full protection of a patent, then the applicant has to pay occasional fees in order for the patent to be enforceable. So it's really a maximum of twenty years. But that maximum is determined by whether or not the applicant has actually continued to pay uh those those regular fees. So after twenty years, a patent expires, and anyone can make use of that patented technology. However, they like folks can copy your invention and it's totally legal. They can make their own version of whatever invention you created. However, you know, the thought is, after twenty years, whatever the technology is is going to be so out of date, then at that point you will have moved on to other stuff. Meanwhile, some folks might get inspired by your old patented invention and they might use that as a springboard to create something entirely new. So, in other words, patents have an expiration date, both because governments want to strike a balance between protecting inventions and inventors as well as encouraging innovation. That's always like the other side of the coin, right, the idea of protecting ideas can often come at the cost of innovation. If someone else sees an idea someone had and thinks that's great, I know how to make it better, but they're prevented from making it better because there's a patent in the way. That could be a problem. Now, There's also an alternative to patenting your invention, and that's you know, just trying to keep it secret, keep it safe. But that runs a pretty big risk. If someone figures out how you did whatever it was your invention does, and then they copy you and you don't have a patent, well it's gonna be a lot harder for you to stop them from doing that and seeking out damages. If you're super careful and secretive and your invention is not easy to reverse engineer, well you might be able to dominate the market. But if someone does reverse engineer your work, you know that is, if they see what your invention does and then they work backward to figure out how the invention doesn't, well, you could be opening yourself up to unexpected competition. Now I should add that lots of folks will reverse engineer patented inventions even with the patent being publicly available. So a patent is supposed to explain how an invention works, and it's supposed to be specific enough so that it can be an enforceable patent, But that's still not quite the same thing as like having an instruction manual on how to build the darn thing, or a manual explaining how it actually works in practice. So sometimes you'll have competitors who will take a product that someone else made and they will reverse engineer that patented device, And they might do that not just to figure out how the competition is doing what they do, but also to figure out maybe there's an alternative way to get the same end result that doesn't depend upon the patented technology. Let's use an example, because this is getting kind of esoteric, I guess. So let's say that you have invented a machine and that machine makes cookies, and you've created an innovative cookie dough extractor thing about Bob, and you patented it, and your arch nemesis in the cookie world has purchased one of your cookie machines and then taken it apart, and then they build their own cookie machine, and they make sure that they use an alternative approach that accomplishes the same goal. It still makes cookies, but it does it in a way that's fundamentally different from the way your machine makes cookies. And the two cookies that are produced minded up being really really similar, but the processes are different. That means that if you were to take that other you know, arch nemesis to court. The court would say, well, I would probably say anyway, you can never guarantee these things. But the court would probably say, well, yeah, they're using a cookie making machine, but clearly they're using a different process than your cooking making machine does. Therefore, their cooking making machine does not infringe upon your patent. So the alternatives are you either have to purchase stuff from who whoever holds the patent, and that's assuming that the patent holder is actually making the invention they patented in the first place, or you have to license the patented designed from from the patent holder. There are companies out there that hold hundreds or thousands of patents, and these companies make money not by manufacturing something. They're not actually making the inventions that the patents cover. Instead, they license those patents to other companies that do make stuff. So these companies are just making money by licensing out the patented inventions to other companies that make the thing, and that's how they make a profit, and that's perfectly legal. But then there are also patent trolls. All right, I'm gonna talk about patentrols more in just a second, but first let's take a quick break. Okay, before the break, I mentioned patent trolls, and I've done episodes about these as well. But it's important for us to remember what a patent troll is. That is, a person or an entity that holds one or more patents and doesn't make any use of it other than as kind of a weapon. So patent trolls look out for anyone who's making any kind of product or service that could infringe upon a patent that the patent trolls hold. Then they threatened legal action against that that person or company. So the trolls goal ultimately is to coax out a big, juicy settlement payment from that targeted entity. The troll has no intent on making use of the patent, nor is it necessarily even licensing out the patent. It's just lying in wait. It's like a trap that's been set. It's just waiting to spring into action as soon as it detects that someone in fact is making a technology that could conceivably be said to infringe upon a patent that the troll holds. They're generally regarded by the rest of the text sphere as odious entities. Anyway, patents will pop up a couple of times in this episode, so I thought it was a good idea to that quick cliffs notes version of what they are and why they exist. We're gonna be coming back and talking about specific things about patents as well. But before we get into all that, let's start off with an actual inventor who came up with an idea. She filed a patent for this idea, she received a patent for it, and yet failed to be recognized for her work and did not make money off of her idea. And it was an idea that, for a short while, was nothing short of a global sensation. All right, So they aren't really a thing anymore, at least not anything that anyone talks about. It's kind of a thing that, you know, you might joke about if you were, for some reason joking about the year two thousand seventeen. But do you remember fidget spinners? Do you remember when fidget spinners became huge, like unavoidably huge. Everyone was selling different kinds of fidget spinners. You had some that would light up, You had some that were had you know, logos on them. How Stuff Works had a few How stuff Works branded fidget spinners. I actually have a few at my house. Uh. The toys in case you're not familiar with fidget spinners, and it just means that you weren't awake during two thousand and seventeen, if that's the case. But the toys have a ball bearing in the center of them, and around the ball bearing is kind of a lobed structure, and typically you had like three lobes surrounding the ball bearing, and the lobes can spin freely along the axis of the ball bearing with just a little tap and you could spin them. You could flick them and and it would spin around it's it's ball bearing center. And like I said, they became popular and then ultimately became unavoidable in two thousand seventeen. Then not long after that they kind of fizzled out like it was a flash in the pan kind of fad. Uh. No telling if they're ever going to make a comeback. You know, we've seen other toys have this kind of reaction where they get huge and they go away and then years later they come back again. The yo yo, fittingly enough, a toy that goes down on the string and that ultimately comes back up again if you're doing it right. The yo yo does that, it gets really popular, and then it essentially disappears, and then years later it gets really popular again. Well anyway, the genius behind the fidget spinner was Catherine Hettinger, and I think for a lot of people, Hettinger is not the type of person who springs to mind when you use the word inventor, but that's exactly what she is. She is an inventor. She invented the fidget spinner concept back in the nineteen nineties while she was taking care of her daughter. Hettinger had a medical condition that limited her ability to really be active and to actively play with her kid, so she turned her innovation toward finding a toy that could help out, and she designed the fidget spinner and patented her invention back in nine seven, twenty years before the fidget spinner would become a phenomenon. She entered into talks with Hasbro, the toy company, but ultimately those talks didn't go anywhere, and in two thousand five, she was faced with a four hundred dollar renewal fee for her patent and she was strapped for cash. She was, you know, just trying to make ends meet, so she chose to let the patent expire because the one deal she had with a toy company had fallen through, so she didn't have the money to just keep this patent going for no real reason. And then more than a decade after that, the fidget spinner would pop up and become a craze. Hettinger didn't benefit from that at all, although I should say in interviews it seems like she's really pleased that people found her invention interesting and entertaining, like she has a really good attitude about it. Now, many articles point out that even if Hettinger had kept the patent on fidget spinners, and even if the craze had happened before the patent expired, because remember she she filed for the patent in nineties seven. Um, I think she was awarded it a couple of years later, so she was getting real close to that patent expiring just even on its own. Um. You know, the patent expires from the date it was issued, not the date it was applied for, so she still had a little bit of wiggle room. But even with that, she might have still been out of luck and when it came to profiting off her idea. And that's because most fidget spinners were coming out of Chinese manufacturing companies, a small to medium sized companies that aren't particularly concerned about following rules when it comes to patents. The fidget spinner is such a relatively simple design and it's so inexpensive to manufacture that it represented a very low bar to meet in order to get in on the craze. Like if you saw that these were starting to get popular, then it didn't It didn't require much for you to start making them yourself if you had the manufacturing capabilities. And because the company is making these things are in China, it's pretty much impossible for the U. S. Patent Office to enforce any patents that are being violated there, Like it's just there the lad the jurisdiction does not extend all the way out to China. And I don't know about you, but I find Hettinger's story pretty frustrating because I think folks should get compensated for their work and for their ideas. Again, Hettinger herself seems to be, you know, really fine with everything, but I'm I'm of the opinion that someone should at least, you know, send a truckload to cash her way for the fact that her invention became one of the uh iconic things to come out of two thousand and seventeen. Speaking of the threat of Chinese companies, let's talk about another and ventor who was affected by that. I'm talking about Shame Chen, who created another piece of tech that had a heck of a rise to popularity followed by some crash and burns literally though that wasn't necessarily Chen's fault. So Chen was born in China, but he immigrated to the United States back in the nineteen eighties, and he founded a couple of different companies, and he was creating interesting technology in different fields, including tech for the agricultural industry. So he has had a hand in inventing lots of different stuff. However, the invention that he created that the mainstream would really become aware of was the hoverboard. Now not talking about the fictional technology used in Back to the Future too, and to some extent and Back to the Future three, that kind of hoverboard doesn't exist. Despite the fact that Robert Zemeckis shot some cheeky behind the scenes footage that supposed least that that hoverboards do exist, they don't. Now I'm talking about the two wheeled platforms that you stand on and use kind of like a segue in order to roll around. He also patented the solo wheel, which is an electric unicycle that's self balanced. Back when I was walking to the office, I often saw this one dude cruising down the belt Line, which is a big pedestrian and bicycle lane that goes through a lot of Atlanta, and he was on his solo wheel and he looked kind of like a hipster robot. That's not a judgment, it's just kind of a description of what he looked like. For the record, I actually invied his wheeled transportation, but I had a very strong feeling that I probably would wipe out if I were to try it myself. It doesn't matter how self balancing that unicycle is. I will find a way. But anyway, Chen filed a patent for his hoverboard invention, which was actually called the hover tracks t R A x UH. This was back in two thousand twelve when he filed for the patent. He received a patent in two thousand fourteen. Patent office takes a while to process these things because the office gets flooded with patent applications and has to go through them and make you know, careful judgment about whether or not a patent is warranted. Uh. So it does take time for that to happen. So Chen's version of the technology was really expensive. His product was not cheap. Uh. It costs around a thousand dollars to get an official hover tracks device. Meanwhile, you have these Chinese companies that were starting to churn out inexpensive clones of the hover tracks, and consumers started to flock to these cheaper alternatives. It was clear that people found the hover tracks technology really intriguing, but the price tag was too steep for a lot of people, so they turned to the cheaper versions. But cheaper, ironically comes at a cost. The designs weren't necessarily as sophisticated or effective as Chen's was, and certainly the companies were skimping on the batteries, and there were numerous reports of folks discovering that their hoverboard devices were catching on fire like explusively. The problem was serious and bad enough to prompt airlines to make announcements that they would not allow any hoverboard devices on flights. I'll talk a bit more about what was behind the exploding hoverboards after we come back from this quick break. Okay, so why hoverboards explode? Maybe while the issue was with the batteries in these machines. Lithium ion batteries can be extremely dangerous if they are poorly made or if they are damaged. If the various layers inside the battery are made to come into direct contact with one another, then it forms a direct path called a short circuit. Now, normally, the electrons that these batteries generate would have to flow out of the negative terminal of the battery into a circuit. They would then do work along the way of the circuit, and ultimately they would re enter the battery through the positive terminal. But if you were to compress or pierce the battery and cause layers to come into contact to each other, uh, then it creates a shortcut for the electrons. It creates a short circuit. Electrons would flow freely from negative to positive as fast a rate as it could possibly do, as as was physically possible, and the battery would start to heat up and heat up and heat up, and eventually would get hot enough to combust, which could in fact be explosive because the materials inside the battery and the fact that they're under incredible pressure. Um, We've seen these issues with other technologies too, like smartphones, right, We've seen where a poorly made batch of batteries have led to massive fire and recalls and and agencies and UH and organizations like airlines having to respond to it because they represented really massive danger. So Chen's business, remember Chen was the guy who created the hover tracks that kind of spawned all this. His business was undercut by these Chinese companies, and the technology itself got a bad name, mostly due to these cheaper devices that were catching on fire. And it's a real shame because Chen's versions would likely have come down and cost over time, as early adopters would help fund improvements in manufacturing and sourcing, and then folks would actually have access to a more affordable hoverboard that you know, would be less likely to explode because it wasn't being rushed out of uh A manufacturing center in China. Now. Sometimes inventors choose not to patent something, either because they are elnisie guarding their trade secrets and they don't want to let those out because again patents are public, or because they actually want people to go out and make the invention In other words, they don't want to patent it because they don't believe that the invention belongs to them, or sometimes they don't try to file a patent because they figured their chances of getting a patent are slim for whatever reason. For example, let's talk about Jonas Salk, the doctor who came up with a polio vaccine. Often he is lauded as someone who generously gave the the invention of a vaccine for polio to the world in an effort to make the world a better place. Polio was a global problem, and salks vaccine made it possible to all but eradicate the disease. Now, typically we think Salk's decision not to patent his vaccine was done as an altruistic choice that he wanted uh to help the world and he didn't feel it was morally right to patent something and then make people pay for the privilege of not dying a polio Now, in fact, the Salk Institute actually considered filing a patent for the vaccine. It's just that the institute figured that the patent would be denied on the basis of prior art. So I should probably explain what that is really quickly. Prior art means that the invention you're describing already exists. So I couldn't patent a flathead screwdriver because flathead screwdrivers already exist. That is an existing invention. I can't claim it as my idea. It predates my life, not just my application. But if I came up with a crazy new screwdriver invention, I could be able to patent that, but my application would likely reference all the inventions that came before it that inspired or influenced my creation. Like that's typically a good hack is that you acknowledge inventions that came before that resemble or affect your own invention. So prior art is a way to prevent someone from trying to cash in on an idea that already exists. So one patent lawsuit in which prior art played a big role was when a company called Personal Audio ll C was pursuing lawsuits against various podcasts and podcast networks, including how Stuff Works back in the day, and the company was claiming that it held a patent on the distribution of online serialized audio content a k a. What we would call podcasts. So in various lawsuits, defendants attempted to show that there existed examples of such serialized audio content before Personal Audio LLC's patent application, and that would be an example of prior art. If you said, no, wait, people were doing this already before you tried to patent, then you can't claim that you invented it because it existed before you you were even filing a patent for it, So you didn't invent it. It existed already. So that prior art was actually enough for courts to consider the associated patents invalid. They could not be a valid patent because the invention had already existed by the time of the filing. So that's another thing I need to mention. Even if a patent office awards a patent, subsequent legal cases can lead to a court declaring the patent invalid for various reasons. One wicked famous example of that in tech history was the patent for radio. So initially Nicola Tesla received patents relating to radio technology, but then these would be rescinded and the patent office would award patents to Tesla's rival, Marconi. And the story goes that Marconi's influential, so in other words, wealthy and well connected family had had a lot to do with that decision that they were able to kind of grease the wheels and get the patent office to reverse its decision and give the patents to Marconians to have Tesla. Now many years later, in fact, six months after Tesla had died and six years after Marconi had died, the U. S. Supreme Court would rule that Marconi's patents were invalid and that credits should in fact revert to Tesla, which you know, a little late there everyone's dead. Also, that story gets way more complicated. It sounds like, oh, the Supreme Court wanted to address an injustice. No, that's that's not really what that was about. There were other elements at play here, elements like politics and war factoring into the decision to file legal cases and reverse decisions. I should probably do a full episode describing exactly what happened there, because you have the tech on one side, like the actual who was it that came up with the technology? Was there a first? Did that person influence the other? Like would it have been possible for them to both independently come to that invention? And there was no cross contamination that kind of thing, because that does happen, right, Like, there are times where people will invent the same sort of thing in different parts of the world and they have no connection with each other, and that becomes a real headache for patent offices to figure out, well, who do we award the patent to write? If both came up with an invention and the inventions are similar enough, um, and they are independently, you know, have come to these inventions, how do you figure out who gets the patent? So I might have to do a full episode about the Marconi Tesla situation, because it's full of intrigue. It's not just about technology and influence and wealth and all that sort of stuff. It has to do with politics, has to do with spn age, has to do with paranoia. There's so much in that. So I may do an episode about that in the future. I have talked about Marconi and Tesla before, but come on, that story is just a juicy one. It's a really fun one to dive into. Now. Sometimes inventors create something on behalf of a client, and the inventor doesn't patent their invention because the work they're doing is for someone else, not for themselves. Such was the case with Ron Klein, who actually invented lots of different stuff and was quite successful, so successful that he actually retired three different times. He kept the retirement wouldn't stick, and the very first time he retired he was at the tender age of thirty four. So you know someone's really got things going when they can afford to retire at age thirty four. Anyway, Klein's invention that I wanted to talk about this episode was a really useful one. He's the guy who came up with the idea of storing credit card information on a strip of magnetic tape glued to the back of a credit card. So before that, merchants had a devil of a time sussing out if a customer's credit card was linked to them being a credit risk or not. And here's how things used to work back in the day. Credit card companies would maintain a list of card numbers that represented credit risks, and they would send these lists out to various merchants and it would be, you know, the merchants who accepted whatever that credit card was. So customer comes in and wants to purchase something on credit, they hand over their credit card. The merchant would then have to get out this list and cross reference to see if the card on the that the customer had, like if their number was on that list. And that was a tedious and time consuming process, very easy to make mistakes too. So client tapped in with a solution. Now he knew about magnetic tape, like the ability to store information by using an electro magnet to rearrange magnetic uh fibers filaments really um little tiny pieces of material on tape, and by aligning them in one way or another, you could represent different kinds of information. You could make it audio, or you could just make it data. So he knew about this, like real to real tape was a thing at this point. So he figured if you encoded a credit card number onto magnetic tape, and then you attach that to the credit card, and then you also had a database that was filled with credit risk numbers also stored on a magnetic medium, you could compare the two electronically and do it much faster than you would do if you had to do it by hand, and it would be much more reliable, less likely to have errors. It required creating a device that would be able to read the magnetic strip, and he figured that if you just physically inserted and then quickly removed a card from such a device, that motion, that physical motion of pulling the tape across the device was a lot like a real to real tape player moving tape across a red head, you know, a little electro magnetic head that can detect how the magnetic particles are aligned on a piece of magnetic tape. So it's a lot like a cassette player in a way, except it was a stationary device and you were just physically moving the tape past it and it worked. So Klein made this system for his client and didn't patent it, and before you knew it, all these different credit card companies had adopted that technology. Uh so you know, that just became a universal tech without client getting real finance credit for it. Although again, like he did just fine with all of his other inventions, and there are tons of other examples we could talk about, but men to wrap this up with one that's near and dear to my heart, and this comes to us courtesy of a drummer, a guy named Duke in a way, I'll just call him Daisuke, and I'm certain I am butchering the pronunciation of the name, and my sincerest apologies for that. But Duke kind of sort of invented karaoke machines. Now, I say kind of sort of because there appear to at least be a few other examples of early karaoke style machines. But a lot of people credit Daisuke for really getting the ball rolling, for making this something that became a phenomenon. So Daisuke made his living playing drums in bar bands, and one of the things they would do is they would let business folks businessmen. Really, let's be let's face it, its nineteen seven. These japan businessmen get a little inebriated and they'd want to come up on stage and sing songs, and the band would back the person singing them, essentially you know, live karaoke. Now, there are a couple of versions of this story. Some of them say that a customer, maybe it was a bar owner, asked Daisuke to actually record some backing tracks so that they would just have them on tape. Others say that Daisuke more or less came up with this idea on his own, but in any case, the whole idea was record the backing music onto eight track tapes just kind of like a precursor to cassette tapes, and then use an eight track player with a microphone to allow inebriated businessman to sing even if there were no backing band available to play live behind them. And it would also mean ultimately you wouldn't have to pay a band at all, like you would have the benefits of this service without having to pay a band. Sod Suke would rent out the tapes he recorded. He would rent out those tapes to bars, so he was savvy enough to not just hand the tapes over to bars because he would invent his way out of a living. He also created an eight track jukebox player that had a microphone attached to it and it was operated via coin slot, so you had to put money in in order to actually select a song and sing to it, so it was an early standalone karaoke machine. However, he did not patent this idea uh and again that might not have gone over anyway. It does seem like there were a few other people who had made similar types of devices not long before Daisuke did, so you could make a prior art argument that Daisuke would have no right to a patent right, But he was the one who kind of got this moving so that other bars really took notice, and before long you had these bars and other types of companies that were making their own versions of the carry okay machine, and karaoke has a pastime would really take off and become a phenomenon. Now, by the way, in case you're wondering, what are the my go to songs when I'm doing karie okay back when you know I actually have a voice, Those songs include Prince's song seven that's not one of his best known or most popular ones, but it's the one I can do, or Um s O B by Nathaniel Rateliff in the Night Sweats great song Warren Zevans Werewolves of London also a favorite one of my go two's. Uh so, have you ever seen karaoke with me? Chances are you gonna hear me do at least one of those now, Like I said, this was really just a very tiny list of some of the people who invented things but didn't become filthy, stinking rich off those inventions. There are, of course, plenty of other stories that we could talk about. We can even talk about cases in which someone like a business owner, insisted on have their name appended to every patent application, even if the business owner had no direct hand in that invention. That's something that has been part of the tech industry for more than a century. Edison did it all the time. Steve Jobs did it all the time. You know, It's not an uncommon thing to see where you get someone who is essentially the money you know, or the leader, uh, making sure that their name is on the patent even if they had no direct you know, impact on the development of the technology or the invention. However, I feel we can leave all that off for now. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, there are a couple different ways you can reach out to me. One way is you can go download the I Heart radio app, which is free, and you can navigate over to the tech Stuff section. You can use a little microphone icon to record a voice message up to thirty seconds for me. UH. You can do that either just on the tech Stuff general page, or you can go into specific episodes and leave a message on a specific episode if you want to comment on something that I've said and UH, if you let me know that I can use the audio. Maybe I'll use the audio in a future episode. Just let me know when you do that, because I'm all about opt in, not opt out. The other way to reach out to me, of course, is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W. I hope all of you are well. I'm I'm getting there, feeling a whole lot better than I was last week. Thanks again to everyone who kind of reached out and was concerned. I really appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? I am recovering still little, you know, raspy, But here we go the show. They say it must keep on happening. I think I think that's the saying. And today I thought I would talk Uh, this is kind of a weird mishmash of a show, but I thought I would talk about a few inventors who created stuff. Some of that stuff would become insanely popular, and yet these inventors were never really able to fully capitalize on their innovation for one reason or another. Uh. But the reason why I wanted to do that is because there's this narrative, particularly here in the United States, that if you've got ingenuity and elbow grease, you can work your way to the top. You can smash through economic and social barriers that you know otherwise constrain us. So here in the US, all that gets wrapped up in what we call the American dream. Unfortunately, sometimes you can do everything right and still lose out. And so we're gonna talk about some of those cases. We're also going to talk a lot about patents, and I've talked about patents before, but let's go over it again kind of as a reminder. To receive a patent is to get some authorities assurance that that authority recognizes you as the inventor of something. Typically we're talking about a government office, some office that has been authorized by the government to do this, like the U. S. Patent Office. So to secure a patent, and inventor has to submit a patent application and also pay fees in order to have it considered. The application has to explain at least in some detail what the invention does and how it works, and that description needs to be at least somewhat specific. If you get really vague in general with your patent application, you're less likely to be granted a patent by the office, because if you're not really describing how your invention works, then that creates this this huge bubble you can use to attack anyone who makes anything remotely similar to your invention. Right, Like, the whole idea of a patent is that it protects your idea, your invention. But if you are so vague with the way you word how your invention works, anyone who makes anything even remotely similar you could argue as infringing on your patent, when really the problem is you never explained how your invention works properly. Patent applications and patents themselves are a matter of public record, and that means anyone can pull up your patent and see how your invention works. You can do this right now. You go to the internet, go to a web page, uh, Patent office web page, and start searching patents. You can read all you want. They get pretty technical and filled with like jargon and legal ease, largely too kind of obfu skate what's happening uh, And that does make it a little tricky to read. Uh. You also get a lot of this kind of flowery language that has been adopted as being standard in patents. But you can do it. You can check it out and you can see exactly, or at least generally, how various inventions work. But the patent also grants protection for the invention. So if you discover that some ne'er do well out there has been copying your invention, you can take that person or you know, entity to court and you could say, you know, they sue them for patent infringement. If you can prove that they were using your patented approach without first getting your permission to do it, then you can frequently get some decent damages out of them and shut their illegal operations down. Often these end up going to settlement before it goes all the way through the court system. Court cases are expensive, and if a company is already kind of feeling like they're not gonna win out on a on a case, they might choose to settle rather than draw things out, pay the high price of legal fees on top of whatever damages they end up getting thrown their way as well. Now we're going to get back to this idea about you know, permissions and patents and licensing and all that kind of stuff, because I am oversimplifying here. Now, patents have a shelf life, and here in the United States, a utility patent has twenty years. Uh. There is an asterisk here. However, in order to have the full protection of a patent, then the applicant has to pay occasional fees in order for the patent to be enforceable. So it's really a maximum of twenty years. But that maximum is determined by whether or not the applicant has actually continued to pay uh those those regular fees. So after twenty years, a patent expires, and anyone can make use of that patented technology. However, they like folks can copy your invention and it's totally legal. They can make their own version of whatever invention you created. However, you know, the thought is, after twenty years, whatever the technology is is going to be so out of date, then at that point you will have moved on to other stuff. Meanwhile, some folks might get inspired by your old patented invention and they might use that as a springboard to create something entirely new. So, in other words, patents have an expiration date, both because governments want to strike a balance between protecting inventions and inventors as well as encouraging innovation. That's always like the other side of the coin, right, the idea of protecting ideas can often come at the cost of innovation. If someone else sees an idea someone had and thinks that's great, I know how to make it better, but they're prevented from making it better because there's a patent in the way. That could be a problem. Now, There's also an alternative to patenting your invention, and that's you know, just trying to keep it secret, keep it safe. But that runs a pretty big risk. If someone figures out how you did whatever it was your invention does, and then they copy you and you don't have a patent, well it's gonna be a lot harder for you to stop them from doing that and seeking out damages. If you're super careful and secretive and your invention is not easy to reverse engineer, well you might be able to dominate the market. But if someone does reverse engineer your work, you know that is, if they see what your invention does and then they work backward to figure out how the invention doesn't, well, you could be opening yourself up to unexpected competition. Now I should add that lots of folks will reverse engineer patented inventions even with the patent being publicly available. So a patent is supposed to explain how an invention works, and it's supposed to be specific enough so that it can be an enforceable patent, But that's still not quite the same thing as like having an instruction manual on how to build the darn thing, or a manual explaining how it actually works in practice. So sometimes you'll have competitors who will take a product that someone else made and they will reverse engineer that patented device, And they might do that not just to figure out how the competition is doing what they do, but also to figure out maybe there's an alternative way to get the same end result that doesn't depend upon the patented technology. Let's use an example, because this is getting kind of esoteric, I guess. So let's say that you have invented a machine and that machine makes cookies, and you've created an innovative cookie dough extractor thing about Bob, and you patented it, and your arch nemesis in the cookie world has purchased one of your cookie machines and then taken it apart, and then they build their own cookie machine, and they make sure that they use an alternative approach that accomplishes the same goal. It still makes cookies, but it does it in a way that's fundamentally different from the way your machine makes cookies. And the two cookies that are produced minded up being really really similar, but the processes are different. That means that if you were to take that other you know, arch nemesis to court. The court would say, well, I would probably say anyway, you can never guarantee these things. But the court would probably say, well, yeah, they're using a cookie making machine, but clearly they're using a different process than your cooking making machine does. Therefore, their cooking making machine does not infringe upon your patent. So the alternatives are you either have to purchase stuff from who whoever holds the patent, and that's assuming that the patent holder is actually making the invention they patented in the first place, or you have to license the patented designed from from the patent holder. There are companies out there that hold hundreds or thousands of patents, and these companies make money not by manufacturing something. They're not actually making the inventions that the patents cover. Instead, they license those patents to other companies that do make stuff. So these companies are just making money by licensing out the patented inventions to other companies that make the thing, and that's how they make a profit, and that's perfectly legal. But then there are also patent trolls. All right, I'm gonna talk about patentrols more in just a second, but first let's take a quick break. Okay, before the break, I mentioned patent trolls, and I've done episodes about these as well. But it's important for us to remember what a patent troll is. That is, a person or an entity that holds one or more patents and doesn't make any use of it other than as kind of a weapon. So patent trolls look out for anyone who's making any kind of product or service that could infringe upon a patent that the patent trolls hold. Then they threatened legal action against that that person or company. So the trolls goal ultimately is to coax out a big, juicy settlement payment from that targeted entity. The troll has no intent on making use of the patent, nor is it necessarily even licensing out the patent. It's just lying in wait. It's like a trap that's been set. It's just waiting to spring into action as soon as it detects that someone in fact is making a technology that could conceivably be said to infringe upon a patent that the troll holds. They're generally regarded by the rest of the text sphere as odious entities. Anyway, patents will pop up a couple of times in this episode, so I thought it was a good idea to that quick cliffs notes version of what they are and why they exist. We're gonna be coming back and talking about specific things about patents as well. But before we get into all that, let's start off with an actual inventor who came up with an idea. She filed a patent for this idea, she received a patent for it, and yet failed to be recognized for her work and did not make money off of her idea. And it was an idea that, for a short while, was nothing short of a global sensation. All right, So they aren't really a thing anymore, at least not anything that anyone talks about. It's kind of a thing that, you know, you might joke about if you were, for some reason joking about the year two thousand seventeen. But do you remember fidget spinners? Do you remember when fidget spinners became huge, like unavoidably huge. Everyone was selling different kinds of fidget spinners. You had some that would light up, You had some that were had you know, logos on them. How Stuff Works had a few How stuff Works branded fidget spinners. I actually have a few at my house. Uh. The toys in case you're not familiar with fidget spinners, and it just means that you weren't awake during two thousand and seventeen, if that's the case. But the toys have a ball bearing in the center of them, and around the ball bearing is kind of a lobed structure, and typically you had like three lobes surrounding the ball bearing, and the lobes can spin freely along the axis of the ball bearing with just a little tap and you could spin them. You could flick them and and it would spin around it's it's ball bearing center. And like I said, they became popular and then ultimately became unavoidable in two thousand seventeen. Then not long after that they kind of fizzled out like it was a flash in the pan kind of fad. Uh. No telling if they're ever going to make a comeback. You know, we've seen other toys have this kind of reaction where they get huge and they go away and then years later they come back again. The yo yo, fittingly enough, a toy that goes down on the string and that ultimately comes back up again if you're doing it right. The yo yo does that, it gets really popular, and then it essentially disappears, and then years later it gets really popular again. Well anyway, the genius behind the fidget spinner was Catherine Hettinger, and I think for a lot of people, Hettinger is not the type of person who springs to mind when you use the word inventor, but that's exactly what she is. She is an inventor. She invented the fidget spinner concept back in the nineteen nineties while she was taking care of her daughter. Hettinger had a medical condition that limited her ability to really be active and to actively play with her kid, so she turned her innovation toward finding a toy that could help out, and she designed the fidget spinner and patented her invention back in nine seven, twenty years before the fidget spinner would become a phenomenon. She entered into talks with Hasbro, the toy company, but ultimately those talks didn't go anywhere, and in two thousand five, she was faced with a four hundred dollar renewal fee for her patent and she was strapped for cash. She was, you know, just trying to make ends meet, so she chose to let the patent expire because the one deal she had with a toy company had fallen through, so she didn't have the money to just keep this patent going for no real reason. And then more than a decade after that, the fidget spinner would pop up and become a craze. Hettinger didn't benefit from that at all, although I should say in interviews it seems like she's really pleased that people found her invention interesting and entertaining, like she has a really good attitude about it. Now, many articles point out that even if Hettinger had kept the patent on fidget spinners, and even if the craze had happened before the patent expired, because remember she she filed for the patent in nineties seven. Um, I think she was awarded it a couple of years later, so she was getting real close to that patent expiring just even on its own. Um. You know, the patent expires from the date it was issued, not the date it was applied for, so she still had a little bit of wiggle room. But even with that, she might have still been out of luck and when it came to profiting off her idea. And that's because most fidget spinners were coming out of Chinese manufacturing companies, a small to medium sized companies that aren't particularly concerned about following rules when it comes to patents. The fidget spinner is such a relatively simple design and it's so inexpensive to manufacture that it represented a very low bar to meet in order to get in on the craze. Like if you saw that these were starting to get popular, then it didn't It didn't require much for you to start making them yourself if you had the manufacturing capabilities. And because the company is making these things are in China, it's pretty much impossible for the U. S. Patent Office to enforce any patents that are being violated there, Like it's just there the lad the jurisdiction does not extend all the way out to China. And I don't know about you, but I find Hettinger's story pretty frustrating because I think folks should get compensated for their work and for their ideas. Again, Hettinger herself seems to be, you know, really fine with everything, but I'm I'm of the opinion that someone should at least, you know, send a truckload to cash her way for the fact that her invention became one of the uh iconic things to come out of two thousand and seventeen. Speaking of the threat of Chinese companies, let's talk about another and ventor who was affected by that. I'm talking about Shame Chen, who created another piece of tech that had a heck of a rise to popularity followed by some crash and burns literally though that wasn't necessarily Chen's fault. So Chen was born in China, but he immigrated to the United States back in the nineteen eighties, and he founded a couple of different companies, and he was creating interesting technology in different fields, including tech for the agricultural industry. So he has had a hand in inventing lots of different stuff. However, the invention that he created that the mainstream would really become aware of was the hoverboard. Now not talking about the fictional technology used in Back to the Future too, and to some extent and Back to the Future three, that kind of hoverboard doesn't exist. Despite the fact that Robert Zemeckis shot some cheeky behind the scenes footage that supposed least that that hoverboards do exist, they don't. Now I'm talking about the two wheeled platforms that you stand on and use kind of like a segue in order to roll around. He also patented the solo wheel, which is an electric unicycle that's self balanced. Back when I was walking to the office, I often saw this one dude cruising down the belt Line, which is a big pedestrian and bicycle lane that goes through a lot of Atlanta, and he was on his solo wheel and he looked kind of like a hipster robot. That's not a judgment, it's just kind of a description of what he looked like. For the record, I actually invied his wheeled transportation, but I had a very strong feeling that I probably would wipe out if I were to try it myself. It doesn't matter how self balancing that unicycle is. I will find a way. But anyway, Chen filed a patent for his hoverboard invention, which was actually called the hover tracks t R A x UH. This was back in two thousand twelve when he filed for the patent. He received a patent in two thousand fourteen. Patent office takes a while to process these things because the office gets flooded with patent applications and has to go through them and make you know, careful judgment about whether or not a patent is warranted. Uh. So it does take time for that to happen. So Chen's version of the technology was really expensive. His product was not cheap. Uh. It costs around a thousand dollars to get an official hover tracks device. Meanwhile, you have these Chinese companies that were starting to churn out inexpensive clones of the hover tracks, and consumers started to flock to these cheaper alternatives. It was clear that people found the hover tracks technology really intriguing, but the price tag was too steep for a lot of people, so they turned to the cheaper versions. But cheaper, ironically comes at a cost. The designs weren't necessarily as sophisticated or effective as Chen's was, and certainly the companies were skimping on the batteries, and there were numerous reports of folks discovering that their hoverboard devices were catching on fire like explusively. The problem was serious and bad enough to prompt airlines to make announcements that they would not allow any hoverboard devices on flights. I'll talk a bit more about what was behind the exploding hoverboards after we come back from this quick break. Okay, so why hoverboards explode? Maybe while the issue was with the batteries in these machines. Lithium ion batteries can be extremely dangerous if they are poorly made or if they are damaged. If the various layers inside the battery are made to come into direct contact with one another, then it forms a direct path called a short circuit. Now, normally, the electrons that these batteries generate would have to flow out of the negative terminal of the battery into a circuit. They would then do work along the way of the circuit, and ultimately they would re enter the battery through the positive terminal. But if you were to compress or pierce the battery and cause layers to come into contact to each other, uh, then it creates a shortcut for the electrons. It creates a short circuit. Electrons would flow freely from negative to positive as fast a rate as it could possibly do, as as was physically possible, and the battery would start to heat up and heat up and heat up, and eventually would get hot enough to combust, which could in fact be explosive because the materials inside the battery and the fact that they're under incredible pressure. Um, We've seen these issues with other technologies too, like smartphones, right, We've seen where a poorly made batch of batteries have led to massive fire and recalls and and agencies and UH and organizations like airlines having to respond to it because they represented really massive danger. So Chen's business, remember Chen was the guy who created the hover tracks that kind of spawned all this. His business was undercut by these Chinese companies, and the technology itself got a bad name, mostly due to these cheaper devices that were catching on fire. And it's a real shame because Chen's versions would likely have come down and cost over time, as early adopters would help fund improvements in manufacturing and sourcing, and then folks would actually have access to a more affordable hoverboard that you know, would be less likely to explode because it wasn't being rushed out of uh A manufacturing center in China. Now. Sometimes inventors choose not to patent something, either because they are elnisie guarding their trade secrets and they don't want to let those out because again patents are public, or because they actually want people to go out and make the invention In other words, they don't want to patent it because they don't believe that the invention belongs to them, or sometimes they don't try to file a patent because they figured their chances of getting a patent are slim for whatever reason. For example, let's talk about Jonas Salk, the doctor who came up with a polio vaccine. Often he is lauded as someone who generously gave the the invention of a vaccine for polio to the world in an effort to make the world a better place. Polio was a global problem, and salks vaccine made it possible to all but eradicate the disease. Now, typically we think Salk's decision not to patent his vaccine was done as an altruistic choice that he wanted uh to help the world and he didn't feel it was morally right to patent something and then make people pay for the privilege of not dying a polio Now, in fact, the Salk Institute actually considered filing a patent for the vaccine. It's just that the institute figured that the patent would be denied on the basis of prior art. So I should probably explain what that is really quickly. Prior art means that the invention you're describing already exists. So I couldn't patent a flathead screwdriver because flathead screwdrivers already exist. That is an existing invention. I can't claim it as my idea. It predates my life, not just my application. But if I came up with a crazy new screwdriver invention, I could be able to patent that, but my application would likely reference all the inventions that came before it that inspired or influenced my creation. Like that's typically a good hack is that you acknowledge inventions that came before that resemble or affect your own invention. So prior art is a way to prevent someone from trying to cash in on an idea that already exists. So one patent lawsuit in which prior art played a big role was when a company called Personal Audio ll C was pursuing lawsuits against various podcasts and podcast networks, including how Stuff Works back in the day, and the company was claiming that it held a patent on the distribution of online serialized audio content a k a. What we would call podcasts. So in various lawsuits, defendants attempted to show that there existed examples of such serialized audio content before Personal Audio LLC's patent application, and that would be an example of prior art. If you said, no, wait, people were doing this already before you tried to patent, then you can't claim that you invented it because it existed before you you were even filing a patent for it, So you didn't invent it. It existed already. So that prior art was actually enough for courts to consider the associated patents invalid. They could not be a valid patent because the invention had already existed by the time of the filing. So that's another thing I need to mention. Even if a patent office awards a patent, subsequent legal cases can lead to a court declaring the patent invalid for various reasons. One wicked famous example of that in tech history was the patent for radio. So initially Nicola Tesla received patents relating to radio technology, but then these would be rescinded and the patent office would award patents to Tesla's rival, Marconi. And the story goes that Marconi's influential, so in other words, wealthy and well connected family had had a lot to do with that decision that they were able to kind of grease the wheels and get the patent office to reverse its decision and give the patents to Marconians to have Tesla. Now many years later, in fact, six months after Tesla had died and six years after Marconi had died, the U. S. Supreme Court would rule that Marconi's patents were invalid and that credits should in fact revert to Tesla, which you know, a little late there everyone's dead. Also, that story gets way more complicated. It sounds like, oh, the Supreme Court wanted to address an injustice. No, that's that's not really what that was about. There were other elements at play here, elements like politics and war factoring into the decision to file legal cases and reverse decisions. I should probably do a full episode describing exactly what happened there, because you have the tech on one side, like the actual who was it that came up with the technology? Was there a first? Did that person influence the other? Like would it have been possible for them to both independently come to that invention? And there was no cross contamination that kind of thing, because that does happen, right, Like, there are times where people will invent the same sort of thing in different parts of the world and they have no connection with each other, and that becomes a real headache for patent offices to figure out, well, who do we award the patent to write? If both came up with an invention and the inventions are similar enough, um, and they are independently, you know, have come to these inventions, how do you figure out who gets the patent? So I might have to do a full episode about the Marconi Tesla situation, because it's full of intrigue. It's not just about technology and influence and wealth and all that sort of stuff. It has to do with politics, has to do with spn age, has to do with paranoia. There's so much in that. So I may do an episode about that in the future. I have talked about Marconi and Tesla before, but come on, that story is just a juicy one. It's a really fun one to dive into. Now. Sometimes inventors create something on behalf of a client, and the inventor doesn't patent their invention because the work they're doing is for someone else, not for themselves. Such was the case with Ron Klein, who actually invented lots of different stuff and was quite successful, so successful that he actually retired three different times. He kept the retirement wouldn't stick, and the very first time he retired he was at the tender age of thirty four. So you know someone's really got things going when they can afford to retire at age thirty four. Anyway, Klein's invention that I wanted to talk about this episode was a really useful one. He's the guy who came up with the idea of storing credit card information on a strip of magnetic tape glued to the back of a credit card. So before that, merchants had a devil of a time sussing out if a customer's credit card was linked to them being a credit risk or not. And here's how things used to work back in the day. Credit card companies would maintain a list of card numbers that represented credit risks, and they would send these lists out to various merchants and it would be, you know, the merchants who accepted whatever that credit card was. So customer comes in and wants to purchase something on credit, they hand over their credit card. The merchant would then have to get out this list and cross reference to see if the card on the that the customer had, like if their number was on that list. And that was a tedious and time consuming process, very easy to make mistakes too. So client tapped in with a solution. Now he knew about magnetic tape, like the ability to store information by using an electro magnet to rearrange magnetic uh fibers filaments really um little tiny pieces of material on tape, and by aligning them in one way or another, you could represent different kinds of information. You could make it audio, or you could just make it data. So he knew about this, like real to real tape was a thing at this point. So he figured if you encoded a credit card number onto magnetic tape, and then you attach that to the credit card, and then you also had a database that was filled with credit risk numbers also stored on a magnetic medium, you could compare the two electronically and do it much faster than you would do if you had to do it by hand, and it would be much more reliable, less likely to have errors. It required creating a device that would be able to read the magnetic strip, and he figured that if you just physically inserted and then quickly removed a card from such a device, that motion, that physical motion of pulling the tape across the device was a lot like a real to real tape player moving tape across a red head, you know, a little electro magnetic head that can detect how the magnetic particles are aligned on a piece of magnetic tape. So it's a lot like a cassette player in a way, except it was a stationary device and you were just physically moving the tape past it and it worked. So Klein made this system for his client and didn't patent it, and before you knew it, all these different credit card companies had adopted that technology. Uh so you know, that just became a universal tech without client getting real finance credit for it. Although again, like he did just fine with all of his other inventions, and there are tons of other examples we could talk about, but men to wrap this up with one that's near and dear to my heart, and this comes to us courtesy of a drummer, a guy named Duke in a way, I'll just call him Daisuke, and I'm certain I am butchering the pronunciation of the name, and my sincerest apologies for that. But Duke kind of sort of invented karaoke machines. Now, I say kind of sort of because there appear to at least be a few other examples of early karaoke style machines. But a lot of people credit Daisuke for really getting the ball rolling, for making this something that became a phenomenon. So Daisuke made his living playing drums in bar bands, and one of the things they would do is they would let business folks businessmen. Really, let's be let's face it, its nineteen seven. These japan businessmen get a little inebriated and they'd want to come up on stage and sing songs, and the band would back the person singing them, essentially you know, live karaoke. Now, there are a couple of versions of this story. Some of them say that a customer, maybe it was a bar owner, asked Daisuke to actually record some backing tracks so that they would just have them on tape. Others say that Daisuke more or less came up with this idea on his own, but in any case, the whole idea was record the backing music onto eight track tapes just kind of like a precursor to cassette tapes, and then use an eight track player with a microphone to allow inebriated businessman to sing even if there were no backing band available to play live behind them. And it would also mean ultimately you wouldn't have to pay a band at all, like you would have the benefits of this service without having to pay a band. Sod Suke would rent out the tapes he recorded. He would rent out those tapes to bars, so he was savvy enough to not just hand the tapes over to bars because he would invent his way out of a living. He also created an eight track jukebox player that had a microphone attached to it and it was operated via coin slot, so you had to put money in in order to actually select a song and sing to it, so it was an early standalone karaoke machine. However, he did not patent this idea uh and again that might not have gone over anyway. It does seem like there were a few other people who had made similar types of devices not long before Daisuke did, so you could make a prior art argument that Daisuke would have no right to a patent right, But he was the one who kind of got this moving so that other bars really took notice, and before long you had these bars and other types of companies that were making their own versions of the carry okay machine, and karaoke has a pastime would really take off and become a phenomenon. Now, by the way, in case you're wondering, what are the my go to songs when I'm doing karie okay back when you know I actually have a voice, Those songs include Prince's song seven that's not one of his best known or most popular ones, but it's the one I can do, or Um s O B by Nathaniel Rateliff in the Night Sweats great song Warren Zevans Werewolves of London also a favorite one of my go two's. Uh so, have you ever seen karaoke with me? Chances are you gonna hear me do at least one of those now, Like I said, this was really just a very tiny list of some of the people who invented things but didn't become filthy, stinking rich off those inventions. There are, of course, plenty of other stories that we could talk about. We can even talk about cases in which someone like a business owner, insisted on have their name appended to every patent application, even if the business owner had no direct hand in that invention. That's something that has been part of the tech industry for more than a century. Edison did it all the time. Steve Jobs did it all the time. You know, It's not an uncommon thing to see where you get someone who is essentially the money you know, or the leader, uh, making sure that their name is on the patent even if they had no direct you know, impact on the development of the technology or the invention. However, I feel we can leave all that off for now. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, there are a couple different ways you can reach out to me. One way is you can go download the I Heart radio app, which is free, and you can navigate over to the tech Stuff section. You can use a little microphone icon to record a voice message up to thirty seconds for me. UH. You can do that either just on the tech Stuff general page, or you can go into specific episodes and leave a message on a specific episode if you want to comment on something that I've said and UH, if you let me know that I can use the audio. Maybe I'll use the audio in a future episode. Just let me know when you do that, because I'm all about opt in, not opt out. The other way to reach out to me, of course, is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W. I hope all of you are well. I'm I'm getting there, feeling a whole lot better than I was last week. Thanks again to everyone who kind of reached out and was concerned. I really appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.