Saving the World with Datayo

Jeffrey Lewis 0:05

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, a podcast on arms control disarmament and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Scott LaFoy 0:23

And I am Scott LaFoy, super producer of the Arms Control Wonk pod and a consultant.

Melissa Hanham 0:29

And I am Melissa Hanham, joining for the first time ever from Open Nuclear Network in Vienna, Austria.

Jeffrey 0:37

I was going to introduce you, but Melissa, you have learned not to wait for other people. I have.

Melissa 0:45

I got to get my words in edgewise with Professor Lewis.

Jeffrey 0:49

So Melissa runs, yes, it is the Open Nuclear Network, but what we are excited about is a part of the Open Nuclear Network. I guess it's Datayo, but I call it Datayo.

Melissa 1:04

Everyone does. I can tell you the origin of the name, but it's actually not that funny. It's just sort of sad now that everyone calls it Datayo, but it is Datayo.

Jeffrey 1:12

Why don't you tell people what this thing is, Datayo?

Melissa 1:17

I feel like we need air horns every time you say that.

Jeffrey 1:19

Scott can add those when appropriate.

Melissa 1:24

So Dateo is a browser-based software platform that people from all over the world can Join in and talk to each other about data with a few caveats. We have to follow U.S. laws, unfortunately, so certain people and certain countries cannot actually join DTEO, unfortunately, due to export control regulations primarily on geospatial data sets. So basically you log in, and I like to think of it as like a Google Docs for information.

And in Dateo, you will have geospatial data, you'll have ground photos, you'll have videos, you'll have text, and you'll have a graphing workspace. And all of these things are interconnected. So we try to ingest data and tag it in a way that means if you can make a graph, you are allowed to make a graph. If you can make a map, you're allowed to make a map and so on and so forth.

For now, it's really limited participation just because we're still working the kinks out and it's very expensive. So we're trying to Keep it affordable for our foundation.

Jeffrey 2:45

Yeah, I can't imagine the bills you run up on the satellite imagery side of things.

Melissa 2:52

Well, there was a spike the day I gave you a login and password. Yeah.

Scott 3:00

Yeah.

Jeffrey 3:01

We can actually see the Jeffrey Lewis effect on detail. It's funny you say that. I did say, are you sure I should look around? And I knew this was a problem because when I got my Planet account, I immediately became their single largest individual user. And it was like a joke, like Trevor just was like, ah, we're going to have to take all the restrictions off that account because I would hit them every day.

I do a lot of work. I work hard. I look at a lot of places and I like to compare images.

Melissa 3:38

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey 3:41

Yeah, we can get that slapped in there, too, and then get, what is it, a digital media copyright takedown.

Melissa 3:49

I give you consent to have my horrific voice singing 80s tunes to you.

Scott 3:55

That's a licensed cover, as far as I'm concerned.

Jeffrey 3:59

So just for listeners, I mean, it is a really cool platform where there are not just access to satellite images, but you've got a bunch of pictures from a North Korean military parade. You've got a bunch of text versions of North Korean statements. And also on the platform, you've got a notam. You're scraping some notams. And so it's really nice that...

You've built this place where this data is beginning to get fused and can allow an analyst to sort of branch out.

Melissa 4:34

Yeah. I mean, we're really excited. I have a couple of new things I think, Jeffrey, you probably haven't seen yet because we haven't made them available yet. So in the geographic space, we are now adding vessel traffic. So you'll be able to follow vessels and it seems like unfortunately only our internal analysts will also be able to track radio frequency emitters from ships, other types of devices.

Around the world. And we're still, I mean, mostly it's a licensing issue. I wish everyone could do this, but we just, we can't afford it or the company is prohibiting it. But very soon we will have a specific brand name company to tell you we have vessel data from. And so you'll be able to track all the sort of activity in and around Northeast Asia, which should be good.

And we're also looking to do the same with plane traffic. And we're going to have multiple satellite providers, I think, in the medium term, I'm hoping for.

Jeffrey 5:50

Well, I have to say I'm a big fan because, you know, we have those things sometimes, even at a place like CNS where we have a lot of those things. Yeah. They are extraordinarily expensive, so particularly if you are not affiliated with a university that's buying you this stuff, it's really the only way you're gonna get it.

And even if you do have access in other ways, to have it kind of in one place where you can fuse it together, I think is just incredibly cool. You're also hosting Scott's collection of North Korean videos.

Melissa 6:29

Yeah, we're really, really grateful to Scott. So we have over 40,000 videos now from North Korea in particular. And you're able to do a lot of things with them. So I think we announced a few weeks ago that you can now generate a transcript from any video in there. So it basically takes the audio transcript and generates a text readout from it in Korean.

And then we can now pull that data and put it into our text analysis tools. So very shortly, not only will you have the transcript for your own reference, but you'll start being able to do sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and other types of natural language processing on the audio of the videos. And I see Scott smiling already.

But that's actually not the announcement. The one I was teasing him about is in the next few days, we're going to be able to have annotations on videos. So you will be able to draw a circle around that red truck and then watch that circle drive across the screen as the truck goes with it.

Jeffrey 7:48

That's cool.

Scott 7:50

I cannot underline enough how excited I am about the idea of essentially an open source data fusion video editing platform. As someone who's done video editing and imagery analysis for years, focusing on ground truth imagery and trying to grab little scraps of data from videos, the idea of being able to finally easily annotate Videos for like very small minute details, person tracking, missile, you know, hardware tracking like we all do without having to buy some ludicrously expensive like software suite or get trained in some sort of complicated software.

And then does that feed into y'all's fancy universal backbone thing that I'm always so excited about?

Melissa 8:38

Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, there's two goals. The crowdsourcing is good for us because we only have six analysts. And so having the whole world help us definitely is a win for our analytical products. But we're also a foundation, and not to sound too mushy and squishy, the One Earth Future Foundation is about doing social good.

I mean, it's not an exaggeration to say the founder's goal is to create world peace by 2020. And that's, you know, that on the surface, that's insane. So what he's trying to leverage are ways of scaling up the work. So if I can turn my six analysts into hundreds or thousands of analysts around the world who are working towards Understanding these problems in real time, then I'm helping scale the team up.

And so it's not just about the rich expertise of different people from different places, but also just the man hours. I mean, just the time that people can contribute together to solve a problem.

Jeffrey 9:50

Yeah, when you're doing that calculation, How many man hours are one woman hour? Because I recall when you were at CNS, it was like three man hours per Melissa hour.

Melissa 10:02

Oh, thank you. Well, we are, I mean, to be frank, we are having a, we're not collecting data on users because we don't want to freak them out. But I suspect that we have very few women working on Detail, which is sad because it was, I mean, it was... Developed with a lot of women involved. So if you're a lady listener of Arms Control Wonk, I hope you will send us a little message and join up onto TEO.

Jeffrey 10:34

That's actually a nice transition because one of the things for the two little projects I've done with Diteo, I have really enjoyed working with your analysts. And we can't have everybody on, but this would be a good time for you to mention who some of those people are. Because I think we all know them on Twitter. But we don't necessarily connect the humans on Twitter with the effort.

And I think if people realize like who actually that crowd was, they would be even more impressed.

Melissa 11:08

Yeah. So, I mean, we're really, I feel so lucky that the, That the director of ONN, Laura Rockwood, really let us do a global search for talent. And we got a lot of really fantastic applications. But we have a senior analyst from Japan named Dr. Furukawa Katsuhisa. He, as Jeffrey knows, is Katsusan of the famed panel of experts.

This guy, you know, this guy, Is like Sherlock Holmes, I mean, or a dog with a bone. Like he is relentless in his search for open source information to solve a case.

Jeffrey 11:57

I actually met him before he joined the UN panel of experts. He is something else.

Melissa 12:05

He is. No, he's a legend. And I'm so honored that he would join us. I mean, because of COVID, he isn't here in Vienna yet, unfortunately. But we're really excited to have him. We also have an analyst from South Korea named Jaewoo Shin. And he, you know, was an intern for CSIS where he worked with Victor Cha and elsewhere doing open source analysis on fishing and other sort of disputed territorial issues and so on.

Really excellent Analyst for security issues but also a linguist and he's really helped us improve our ability to do text analysis in Korean, which is not easy. So South Korean and North Korean dialects are, as everyone knows, different and the libraries that are available for doing natural language processing are The same. So we're sort of working inch by inch, try to differentiate and catch those nuances.

Definitely some other names to call out are Mr. Xu Tianran. He's a fantastic analyst, a missile nerd extraordinaire. I have had to check myself several times thinking I knew more about missiles than him, and then humbly had to acknowledge that I was wrong. He's great to work with, great to write with. And he comes from a journalism background, so open source is self-taught and really exciting to see what he's doing.

And last but certainly not least is Veronica Bedenko, who is a Monterey Mafia alum and has dual degrees from Middlebury, as well as Meghimo. And she's really interested into the peaceful uses of nuclear technology. So she's our science nerd who's always helping us understand the reactor, how it works, where it's floating sometimes, that kind of thing.

Jeffrey 14:25

And is your goal ultimately to get all of these people in Vienna?

Melissa 14:29

All of them are in Vienna, except for Katsu. So we're still working on Katsusan. We are hiring, but not for the research side, for the engagement side of our work. So our approach outside of DATEIO, Open Nuclear Network, has got the mission of reducing the risk that nuclear weapons are used in response to error, uncertainty, or misdirection.

So we're really trying to collect as much open source data to create a baseline of what is a normal time, what is an increased stressful time, when is it ripe for an accident or someone to make a calculation very much like Jeffrey's book. That's not something I don't think about at all. And then in a few cases, we're actually worried about intentional misdirection by a state or a non-state actor who wants to put some chaos into the system.

And but on the other side, we actually need to get these open source products into the hands of people who can do something about it. So we have we're hiring for engagement network manager and team. So those people will be the people who actually put together the Really iconic bigwigs who can put these reports in the hands of decision makers or interpret them locally in order to tell us if we need to correct or convene a meeting if we're close to nuclear apocalypse, those kinds of things.

Scott 16:03

That's a terrifying job description.

Melissa 16:05

I know, it's really hard to capture.

Scott 16:07

That escalated very seriously at the end there.

Melissa 16:10

You know, be creative, a self-starter, stop the apocalypse.

Scott 16:16

So can you tell us more about the engagement network and like whose hands you're trying to put this information products into? Like who is the audience for Dateu's like ultimate and One Earth Network's ultimate products?

Melissa 16:32

Yeah, so, I mean, it's not an easy answer, and I think we've probably spent a better part of the year trying to figure this out. There's a balance between access and influence for a new group like us that's really hard to figure out. We've been recruiting candidates from the six countries that were involved in the Six-Party Talks because the Korean Peninsula is the first conflict context that we're going to focus on.

However, we will scale up. If we're proving that we're able to make a difference, we will scale up to basically all the nuclear weapons states and their related conflicts. For now, what we're really looking for is a balance of diplomatic or military capability and the ability to think, I want to say, think broadly. So not just in your own national identity, but also willing to work across national boundaries with other countries.

So while we're open to a diverse political Spectrum. And in fact, we want that so that our network is resilient no matter what kind of administration is in office in the various six countries. But also we want people to be able to be open-minded enough to talk to their hawkish, you know, member from another country that they may not be so familiar with.

So far, we've extended invitations and had a pretty good response. It's not announced yet who the members are, so I'll leave it at that now, but we have members from five of the six countries. Sadly, North Korea has not yet accepted our invitation to join the engagement network, but my colleague Marian Linger walked over to the DPRK embassy in Vienna several days ago and put that invitation in the hands of the third secretary.

We have also sent emails and faxes, but it's good to know that at least we've made the official invitation. And here's hoping that that and OFAC license will get us a cup of coffee.

Scott 19:02

That's phenomenal. Direct engagement. It's so rare to get direct engagement, let alone a direct engagement and analytic capability. That's incredible that you're actually reaching out truly to all Members of the Six Party Talks and all like representative interested parties, I feel like so many organizations tend to focus on the same three to four actors when they're actually, you know, quote unquote, reaching out to build like a multilateral coalition. That's very incredible to me.

Melissa 19:31

Yeah, I mean, it's not easy. I mean, usually when we give our little song and dance, people are like, that's very long pause, ambitious. And we know it is. And I mean, there's a lot of reasons to think that North Korea won't trust us, maybe even won't trust me in particular. But I hope that in time we can earn enough trust that they see that there is a value in this second tier level of communication, that perhaps there are times when there is not a good relationship with the US administration or with the South Korean administration or so on and so forth, but that perhaps these individuals can form a More casual bond that will withstand those times of government inaction due to tension.

Because those are really the most risky times. I mean, those are the times when, as Jeffrey's book describes, a tweet or an accident can really escalate. And we're hoping that we can be like a kind of safety net for those times.

Jeffrey 20:52

So just stepping back, I mean, just to kind of take in the breadth of it and tell me if I have this right. So if you're a person who's new to open source investigations, a Tateo account is a ticket to all kinds of data that otherwise would be extremely difficult or expensive for you to acquire. And if you are...

Maybe a little more experienced in this field, then the real value there are all the tools you're putting in detail. So maybe you have access to the videos, although Scott's library is something, but you're getting these tools that allow you to translate, sentiment, analyze, annotate. And even if you're a muckety-muck and you don't sully yourself with day-to-day analysis, there's even then the opportunity to be involved through an engagement network where these analysts who are both using these tools but then also engaging with this crowd can take those insights and provide them in a way that's actionable and useful.

Is that about the right scope of the endeavor?

Melissa 22:06

Yeah, absolutely.

Jeffrey 22:07

Not very ambitious, Melissa.

Melissa 22:11

I know. And on my weekends.

Jeffrey 22:15

That's just what she does on Monday.

Melissa 22:17

Yeah. No, I mean, you've got it just right. It's, I mean, we're trying to do traditional diplomacy plus cutting edge, at least in the open source, cutting edge intelligence. And we're trying to mush them together. And it is scary, but I also see this as a long-term goal. I mean, perhaps a little too long-term for our founder.

I hope not, but... But I'm trying to build human capacity. I mean, I'm not just handing out data because I have money to set on fire, but we really want to build the human capacity to understand this information and keep up with this information. I used to be able to teach 60 students at a time kind of thing, but now I hope we can put tools to enable hundreds of people.

I hope that this will help people feel confident and empowered to look at information and know what is Accurate and what is disinformation. I hope that people will feel safer and feel like they can check information that governments are telling them. I hope other governments will feel safer and more stable knowing that sometimes an accident is really an accident or some misinformation is not the fault of their adversary.

And that we can catch those early so that we never get to the last five minutes of the conflict, which we can do absolutely nothing about.

Jeffrey 24:01

Well, you know, it makes a lot of sense to me because I think that, you know, one of the big misconceptions, in my opinion, that people have is that policymakers have much better information than the rest of us and they only get it from their intelligence communities. And like both of those things are wrong, that sometimes the stuff they get from their intelligence community is not great.

And then even when they are getting good stuff from their intelligence community, they're also reading the news. And as we've painfully discovered, visiting disreputable websites. I mean, I can't think of the number of times where we've seen disinformation that shows up on very sketchy websites, find its way into the mouth of members of Congress, cabinet officials, and even the president.

And so from my perspective, there's always been this effort to shape those people's information environment. And what you're doing is you're replacing the front end with something that might have traditionally been rumor, innuendo, some stuff I heard with really high quality open source information that is built around a team of really great analysts who then also have this connection to a crowd.

And so you're getting this better, you know, it's the opposite of the garbage in, garbage out problem, right? You're improving the information flow in and then hoping, and, you know, I hope too, that people in a position to make a decision are going to appreciate the fact that the quality is better.

Melissa 25:30

I hope so too. And I think on the end, you've intellectually caught on to one of our biggest concerns is Maybe it doesn't matter. I mean, one of the things I really hope is that better information is better policies. There's certainly evidence to suggest that some people just want to be antagonistic and they want the data to fit their antagonistic model and In that situation, all we can hope is that there are enough other voices in the open source, a chorus to correct that.

Jeffrey 26:08

Yeah, I think that's an easy objection to rebut because at the end of the day, it's exactly what you say, right? That there are different voices and there are always going to be people who are looking to hear what they want to hear. And then there are always going to be people who care about getting it right and care about doing a good job.

And I think you have to decide, do you want to be part of the problem or part of the solution? And so I commend you for saying, we're going to be part of the solution. We're going to try to improve the quality of information that's going in. Because win or lose, and this is certainly how I feel about the work we do, I'd rather be on the side of people who are trying to get good information into the hands of policymakers rather than the people who are happily churning out for clicks.

Melissa 27:03

I hear you. To that end, we actually joined forces with the Stanley Center last year to have a workshop with a lot of people from CNS and CSIS and 38 North and Bellingcat and a lot of different institutions. To try to get a grip on the code of ethics for open source, because there is no code of ethics for open source.

And people who learn tradecraft from inside an intelligence agency, they have a lot of regulations and training and restriction. But with the boom in open source information and the boom in people who say they use it, there's also potentially a boom of total crap. And, you know, there's a lot of pressure, you know, to impress your grant giver, to get a click from the New York Times, or to, you know, be the first one to find something.

So, yeah. You know, that gave, that meeting gave us so much food for thought that our organization, ONN, started writing a code of ethics for our analysts. And that should be on our website very soon, if it's not already. And, you know, some of the decisions we struggle with are, you know, when are we escalating conflict instead of de-escalating conflict?

Because our mission isn't just Truth, it's actually to deescalate conflict. So we have a very tough time trying to decide like, okay, it's true, it's newsworthy, but we're also not journalists that are ready to light, you know, half of Northeast Asia on fire. So do we make this information public? Do we make this information available only to our engagement network?

And we actually drill on it. So we had a drill a few weeks ago when rumors about Kim Jong-un's health really hit a peak in April. And we had, you know, correspondence from CNN and elsewhere saying he's dead. He's in a coma. And so we were like, okay, this is a really ripe opportunity for us to test ourselves.

Can we collectively get together and put out an information product? Did we remove biases we have? Did we use accurate sources? Did we use all the languages in our work? Did we, you know, some of the, some of the, you know, research that gets put out there is really just by, you know, old white guys. And I want to make sure that I'm not getting what an old white guy thinks is happening.

I'm trying to find out what the person on the ground local to the situation thinks is happening. And we have to really critically assess our hypotheses and make sure our data is accurate, our sources are local. And it's not easy, especially when you're under time pressure. So we drilled. We literally had a fire drill, 24 hours, get up the best brief you can.

And then we, you know, we assessed it and we painfully went through all the problems and we'll test it again.

Scott 30:29

Yeah. And from the like tech side of it, that's something that's really struck me about your platform is that Dateo has almost like a tech enforced policy in terms of like transparency and making sure whoever puts a piece of information up is simultaneously credited, but also, you know, marked as that information's theirs. And you can create this sort of Transparent chain of custody for information so that when you are producing these information products and whatnot, you can figure out how it was put together and could isolate, for example, vectors of misinformation, as well as vectors of Good information, how it was fused together and keeping the proper people in the loop and understanding sort of the provenance of your own products in a way that is very complicated otherwise to actually discern sort of the nature of a report.

And that was something that struck me as a very strong capability of the platform that clearly is arising from that like ethical framework that's working at the human level within the group.

Melissa 31:35

Oh, thanks. I'll pay you your five bucks later.

Jeffrey 31:39

Hey, sorry, what did you guys say? I got distracted. I was tweeting out some nude pics of a Miss Aaliyah I found online.

Melissa 31:45

Oh, God. That is another problem. I'm actually trying to figure out how to keep out of detail is nude pics. No, I mean... Yeah, so there is a chain of custody of the data. So, I mean, you have to trust that we took the data from the original source, but you can compare it painfully and verify it if you want to.

But then once the data is in Dateo, every user who comments or creates a graphic out of it, they're credited for it. Any algorithm that is applied is sourced. Any underlying data provider is sourced so that when you have a visualization that you're satisfied with and you put it in our gallery, then all of that data comes with it.

And, you know, part of it is because we want to be fair and give credit where credit is due. But another part of it is we just want to be able to, when someone challenges the work that has been done there, we can say, okay, here's the original data, here are the algorithms that were applied, and here are the humans who contributed.

And then we can unpack it all if someone ever challenges a finding. Yeah.

Scott 33:05

I think just to add on to that just a little bit, I think that's such an incredible value added just because so many times when I'm handling reports that are questionable, like for example, we're looking at this new China mill power report for 2020, and there's a couple sentences in that that Are worth further inspection and unpacking.

We don't know the provenance of them. We don't know why they're inconsistent with the rest of the report, but the idea that you can create essentially inherently with the platform and the way you're structured, you can create sort of almost a chain of custody for every single piece of information in it allows such a rigorous analysis by external actors as well when they're trying to look and vet your data.

That's just a very like, Trying to not do this in the way where I'm just excited about every day.

Melissa 33:52

Well, I have to. I mean, I'd like to say I'm honorable enough to just do it for the sake of doing it because I'm a good person. But at the end of the day, I have to get North Koreans to trust me. And they absolutely won't just trust me because I said so. They absolutely will want to know every single method we used.

Then they will hand it over to their own intelligence people who will rip it to shreds, test every single hypothesis, And if they don't like it, come up with dozens of reasons why it's wrong. So I have to be able to say, hey, this is how we came to these terms. But the really great thing about being a non-governmental organization as opposed to a government is when I screw up, I can say I screw up.

I publicly declare I screwed up. I screwed up between point A and point B. Here is the mistake. And my honor as an individual is on the line, but I'm not going to lose any like points for my government in doing that.

Jeffrey 34:57

Well, and I think you don't, you don't have to be perfect. You just have to be perfect. Better than the information that people have access to now. And I have always discovered that the joy of following footnotes is the Circular descent in to obscurity where the actual original particular piece of information is buried so that you can't usually can't actually get to it, and and often when you do get to it, it's deeply disappointing. And so you know, when you, when you're constructing.

An open source analysis. I mean, the advantage from my perspective has always been you show your work. And we are all gonna be wrong from time to time, but the philosophy major in me thinks it is important to be wrong for the right reasons, right? That when you are making analytic judgments, if you are doing it correctly, Life will be full of surprises and there's nothing wrong with being wrong if someone can recreate the chain of logic and say like, yeah, hey, I see why that evidence said A was more likely than B, but you know, then B turned out.

And even to me, even when that is occasionally wrong, that is, Completely different and superior to the situation we live in now, where it's competing opinions that ultimately are impossible to resolve. Alternative facts, I believe. And don't really allow you to have a progressive accumulation of knowledge, right? You can't really build on someone's random ass opinion that just happened to be right.

You actually need to root this in a solid factual understanding of the world. And, you know, whether that's the videos or the text or the satellite photographs, you know, having that in one place, you know, I think is just an incredibly powerful tool.

Melissa 37:05

Yeah, I hope, I mean, I hope everyone will use it. We can sort of- Well, tell people how they can. So right now you cannot actually sign up in order to do. We had it open for a little while while we were testing things out and we've been building It's got about 300 users inside who can still use it.

But I think we're going to be opening it up again in the next few days, especially with the new tools I just mentioned earlier. And so essentially what happens is you go to Datayo, D-A-T-A-Y-O, or Datayo, as Jeffrey says, .org, and you'll see in the top right corner there will be a sign up button. And the rule is though, I mean, because of transparency and because of our ethical need and because of our licensing and export control responsibilities, you must use your real name.

You must use your real occupation and you must use your real country. And I'm not going to tell you how we're checking, but we are checking that those things are true. And that's because we cannot violate our export control responsibilities and our licensing agreements. So if you want... Free data, you must own up. And when you comment and behave inside the TAO, you must have your real name next to it as well.

That's how you sign up.

Scott 38:40

It's good. I mean, the flip side of that is it's transparency all the way down that extends to the users. The users are going to get, you know, an infinite amount of data sets that essentially they don't have access to. And in exchange, they just have to be transparent about who they are.

Melissa 38:54

Yeah, but it's not trivial. The thing I'm now learning about the open source community is they like being creepy and they like being anonymous and they really don't want to. So I've had several email battles where I was eventually like, sorry, you can't be in here.

Jeffrey 39:14

But not every platform is for every analyst.

Melissa 39:21

I know, but some of these people are great. I mean, some of these people are I mean, it's not it's not I understand where they're coming from. Some of these people do work for government. Some of these people do work for international organizations and they are not allowed to declare You know, who they are or where they work.

And some people sign up not realizing that. And then as soon as they, you know, make a comment and realize their name and organization there, they're like, no, please remove me from your system.

Jeffrey 39:52

So it has to be real name, real job, real country. Yep. How come real job? I'm curious.

Melissa 39:58

End user, end use.

Jeffrey 40:02

Oh, so if your real job is the People's Liberation Army Missile Brigade.

Melissa 40:08

Yeah, in fact, I believe they signed up. And I was like, I do keep a little list of the most hilarious people who tried to sign up and then were kicked out. We did have People's Liberation Air Force was someone who signed up. We were like, yeah, didn't make the cut. Yeah, no, but I mean, they mean well, and they have big, perhaps, Twitter personalities, but when they explain where they work, and I'm like, hey, I feel you, man.

I get that you don't want anyone to know that you work or could even get in trouble, but them's the breaks.

Jeffrey 40:49

Yeah, what are you going to do?

Scott 40:51

So thank you very much, Melissa, for joining us today and talking to us about data, comma, yo.

Melissa 40:57

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Never going to get my name back.

Jeffrey 41:03

It answers the question, why would you be interested in this platform? And the answer is, data, yo.

Scott 41:10

Data, yo. The commercials write themselves, the YouTube jingles. I'm not going to be able to say it right now.

Jeffrey 41:16

I've poised it for myself. Data, yo.

Scott 41:19

Data, yo.

Melissa 41:21

It's like MTV raps, you know? It's a lot hipper than that.

Scott 41:30

Oh, and we can make, if we're making MTV jokes with the new annotation materials, you can do pop-up video.

Melissa 41:35

That's exactly how I describe it. And that's VHS. VHS is our tapes that go in a... No, I was actually thinking of radio frequencies because I've been thinking a lot about radio emitters lately.

Jeffrey 41:51

Oh man. That's V-H-F.

Scott 41:54

So thank you very much, Melissa, for joining us. Again, if you want to join, oh my God, I can't do it now.

Melissa 42:02

We're going to have to have some sort of joke reel on pronouncing it. Oh my God, no.

Jeffrey 42:07

Let me do it. Hey, Melissa, thanks for joining us. Oh, wait, actually, you don't have to do the thanks for, wait, wait.

Melissa 42:15

Not so easy. How about this? How about this? No, I got you both covered. Jeffrey, Scott, thank you so much for having me on. It's been a pleasure. Anyone wants to sign up for Deteo, please go to deteo.org and download your podcast from your favorite podcast provider,

Jeffrey 42:36

You shouldn't do it either. All right, let me do this. Melissa, correct me if I'm wrong, but if people want to sign up for Datayo, they go to Datayo, spelled like Datayo, dot com? Dot O-R-G. Dot O-R-G. Sign up. You have to give your real name, your real organization, your real country. You can have access to all kinds of stuff.

And if you like the podcast... That's a whole separate process. You can support us for just $5 a month. You can support us and gain access to our members-only Slack channel, $3 a month if you are a student. And that is patreon.com forward slash ACW podcast. Is that right, Scott? Yeah, that's good enough. And as they say in the videos my kids watch, smash that subscribe button.

Melissa 43:32

All our ONN analysts have accounts to the Patreon access to the Slack channel. That's true. Y'all are hanging around in there. We see it as a perk of the job and a tool, just like we pay for other tools. We pay for access to the Arms Control Wonk Slack channel open source community.

Jeffrey 43:55

We get journalists who just troll the community looking for stories.

Melissa 43:58

No, but seriously, I mean, I'm lucky I work at a foundation, but other foundations should consider supporting subscriptions because it is where people go talk about open source and learn. Melissa, thanks for joining us.

Scott 44:15

You can pay me my five bucks later. A month of Patreon comped, courtesy of the pod.

Jeffrey 44:23

And thank you for listening.

Melissa 44:27

Is now a good time to tell you have food on your face, Jeffrey?