App Store shakeup, iPhone ghost calls & adding a flip phone to your setup (119, May 3, 2025)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you purchased a vast anti virus, you might have
some money coming your way. What to look for in
your inbox. Microsoft is one step closer to killing passwords
for good. I'll tell you what's taking over. Google is
pulling the plug on older Nest thermostats. What you need
to know before your smart home gets left behind. Plus

(00:22):
your tech questions answered. What's going on. I'm Rich Dmiro
and this is Rich on Tech. This is the show
where I talk about the tech stuff I think you
should know about. It's also the place where I answer
your questions about technology. Thanks for tuning in on radio
stations across the country the podcast and streaming Rich on
Tech weekly on the KTLA plus app. You know that

(00:45):
I believe tech should be interesting, useful and fun. Let's
open up those phone lines at triple A rich one
oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two
four one zero one, triple A rich one O one,
give me a coffee a question about technology. Email is
also open. Just go to Rich on Tech dot tv

(01:06):
and hit contact.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
Guests.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
This week Stephen Johnson. He is with Google Labs. He'll
talk about the latest updates to Notebook LM. If you
haven't tried this. You are gonna love it. It's super cool.
Google's AI powered research and writing tool helps you organize
and understand information faster.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
It's got a really cool feature you're gonna love.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
Then later in the show, we've got Harry Campbell, founder
of The Rideshare Guy. He's going to join us to
break down the latest in the gig economy, from Uber
and Lyft to delivery apps, robotaxis and beyond. Did you
know if you subscribe to YouTube Premium on the website,

(01:49):
it's fourteen dollars, but if you did that same subscription
on your iPhone it would cost you nineteen dollars a month.
Did you know you can't subscribe to Netflix at all
on your iPhone? Why? Well, it's all because Apple has
a very sophisticated system for making money off of in
app purchases and subscriptions on the iPhone that developers have

(02:13):
always had sort of a love hate relationship with. And
this week was a big turning point for that system
because Apple lost a big court case and it might
mean you could save some money and things might become
easier but also harder on the iPhone. Let me explain
what happened. So Apple, a judge ruled that they violated
a twenty twenty one court order that required them to

(02:36):
allow third party payment links and apps. What does this mean, Well,
it means that when you go to subscribe to something
on an app, or maybe do an in app purchase,
sometimes developers wanted to be able to show you your options.

Speaker 3 (02:50):
Right.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
Maybe you could use PayPal to pay, Maybe you can
use a third party website to pay, and all of
that might be cheaper than using Apple's payment method, which
is just you know, double clicking that button on the
side of your phone and using your linked credit card.
In twenty twenty one, a judge rule that Apple had
to let developers include buttons or links inside their apps
that would let you know about these options, basically giving

(03:13):
you a way to pay without going through Apple system.
But Apple never really followed through or at least made
it really hard and confusing for developers to implement. This
was not very good for consumers. A judge this week
rule that Apple willfully ignored the order and even referred
the case to federal prosecutors for possible criminal contempt. Now,

(03:37):
this judge did not hold back at all. She said
Apple deliberately tried to protect its revenue stream by dragging
its feet, and she even said an Apple executive lied
under oath. That's really serious stuff. Now here's what Apple did.
They tried to sneak in a twenty seven percent commission
on purchases made outside the app store, and she said, no,

(03:58):
you can't do that. That is now. So Apple kind
of created their own workaround. So if you make a
purchase inside the iPhone through one of these apps on
the iPhone, Apple takes a thirty percent cut. Now, sometimes
it's lower based on how much volume the app developers doing.
But you know, these developers have always had sort of,
like I said, a love hate relationship with this. If

(04:20):
you're a small developer, sure, you make an app, you
can make a million bucks by a bunch of people
subscribing to that app, You're more than happy to pay
Apple thirty percent of that. But once you're a big developer,
like a Netflix or a Spotify or a YouTube, you
don't really like paying that thirty percent over and over
and over. So here's the deal going forward. Developers starting

(04:41):
basically now, can include links in their iPhone apps that
lead to cheaper subscription options on the web. So that
means before, if you went to subscribe to something, developers
really couldn't tell you that there was a cheaper way
to do it. They just had to play the game.
Right now they can say, hey, look, you can subscribe
through iTunes it's very easy. Or you can go to

(05:03):
our website. You can subscribe that way and save a
couple bucks per month. Before they weren't even allowed to
tell you that. Now, not only can they tell you that,
they can also directly link to these other options.

Speaker 2 (05:15):
So what's happening? Immediately?

Speaker 1 (05:16):
Spotify and Patreon already said, you know what, we love this.
We are rolling out app updates to take advantage of
these new rules. Now I expect many other big apps
to quickly follow, because why, it saves them thirty percent
just by updating their app. Now, when it comes to
smaller developers, they'll probably just stick with what they've got

(05:37):
because it works and thirty percent of whatever they're doing
on the App Store is probably not that big of
a deal for them. And also Apple gives them the
entree to millions of users, So they sort of like that,
where did this all stem from? This all stem from Fortnite?
They battled Apple in a very big way. Starting in
twenty twenty, they basically had been banned from the App

(06:00):
Store because they challenged Apple over all these payment policies.
They tried to put in their app, these external payment
methods and options, and Apple said, uh ah, not so fast,
you can't do that, and so they were banned from
the App Store, and then they sued Apple, and this
has been going on and on for many years. But
now the court has sided with Epic once again, and

(06:21):
the game is going to come back to the iPhone,
So sort of a full circle moment. Apple for its part,
of course, as you might expect, is appealing this decision,
but they are complying in the meantime. So they said
they totally disagree with this, as you might expect. I mean,
they've built up this big system. They're not going to
agree with this in a public way, but they know

(06:41):
that the walls of this app store couldn't last forever.
But it means that Apple is going to try to
continue to fight this and protect what they've built. Now,
for you, the consumer, what does this mean. It means
that you might see lower prices for some of the
apps that you subscribe to. It might seem it might
mean that you'll see different options for some of the

(07:02):
apps that you subscribe to, but there is also a
risk for you as well. Now, when you were subscribing
to all of these things through Apple, you did have
a few advantages, right. Number one, it was easy. All
you had to do is have one card linked to
your Apple account. You could subscribe to all of this stuff.
You can easily unsubscribe. It was very protective of your

(07:23):
personal privacy. Now that is all up in the air.
Now you are going to have to keep track of
how you subscribe to things, right, so you're gonna have
to decide do I want to use this credit card?
Do I want to use that credit card? Also, not
every app is going to have the same payment flow.
Some of them are going to use PayPal, some of
them are going to have you go directly to their
website to put your information in there, And not all

(07:44):
of them have the same privacy implications that Apple had.
And when it comes to keeping track of your subscriptions
and unsubscribing, that's also going to be a whole new
thing because now you're going to have to keep track
of your subscriptions on your own. You're not gonna be
able to see them all in one list inside your
settings on the iPhone. So again pros and cons for

(08:06):
all of this. This This is such an interesting change
for the App Store and for Apple because you know
they don't want to do this, but it is a
win for competition. It could force Apple to improve some
of its policies over time, so they may say, hey, look,
we're going to charge some of these bigger developers less money.

(08:27):
We're not going to charge in some of these other aspects.
But right now the App Store is very it's a
very inside baseball kind of place, right A lot of
this is mysterious. A lot of these deals that they
have with these big developers, we're not really sure how
it works. And when it comes to the consumer, it
has always been easy to subscribe, but you don't really

(08:50):
know what's going on in the background. And I think
that this marks a major shift for Apple when it
comes to the way that we deal with the App Store,
and for them, you have to understand where they're coming from.
They built this entire system from the ground up. Right
before the App Store, there was no way of purchasing
apps in a safe, private method on a phone, and

(09:12):
this has made many developers rich over the years. It
has made very many developers, it has built their names
over the years. I mean, think about it. You can
come from nowhere, build an app, publish it to the
App Store, get some buzz behind it, and now you
are a success story. And Apple has paid out billions
of dollars over the years to independent developers for what

(09:35):
they've built on the App Store. But it has always
been kind of a push and pull situation because when
you're a small developer, it's great, you're using the App
Store to your advantage. Right, you're one person, you get
access to millions, if not, you know, hundreds of millions
of iPhone users. But if you're a big developer like Netflix,

(09:56):
you're saying, hold on, people already know about Netflix, they
already know how to subscribe, they already know how to
find us. The iPhone is just one way of accessing
our system. So you're not making us or breaking us.
And that's why a lot of these big developers have
not enabled in app purchases for their subscriptions. Like Netflix,
you can only sign in even with Amazon, if you

(10:19):
look at the Kindle long time ago, they took away
the ability to purchase Kindle books on the iPhone. I
remember this when I was selling my book. It was
so complicated to tell people how to purchase my book
if you were buying it from an iPhone, the most
popular device in the world. Why because Kindle Amazon did
not want to give thirty percent of every ebook purchase

(10:40):
to Apple just for the ability for people to buy
their book there. So this is an ongoing thing right now.
This does mark a major shift in the way business
is done on the iPhone. I am sure Apple executives
are not very happy about this. For consumers, Like I said,
it is a mixed bag. It's somewhat good, it's somewhat
bad in other so we'll continue to follow this. I

(11:02):
think that this is not the end of this situation,
but just the beginning, all right. Eight eight eight rich
one O one eight eight eight seven four two four
one zero one. Website for the show rich on Tech
dot TV. If you got a question for me, give
me a call. More rich on Tech coming your way
right after this. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich

(11:22):
Demiro here hanging out with you talking technology at Triple
eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four
to two four one zero one, the website for the
show rich on tech dot TV. There you can get
notes to everything I talk about, and you can read
this week's newsletter. It's all posted at richon tech dot TV.

(11:44):
Let's go to Mark in San Diego. Mark, you're on
with Rich.

Speaker 4 (11:49):
Well, Hi, Rich, great show.

Speaker 5 (11:52):
I appreciate you taking a call.

Speaker 4 (11:54):
I have an older pixel for a I really love
the phone because it a little smaller. I had a
new battery put in it, you know, like last year,
and it's working great again. But now of a sudden,
my GPS doesn't work. And I've done all the software
fixes and all the tricks that everybody you know mentions,
but it seems like it's a hardware issue, like something

(12:17):
internally has failed. The rest of the phone works fine,
but I'm just wondering cannot be fixed? Or two should
I just get a new phone?

Speaker 5 (12:26):
Or three?

Speaker 4 (12:27):
Should I buy a standalone GPS? Because I really like
this phone. I'd like to stay with something similar to
it in size.

Speaker 1 (12:33):
What was the what are the option? What did you try?
What did you try to do on the phone? You
said you try to.

Speaker 4 (12:39):
I did all the things where you go into your
settings and you know, update, you know, location, and exact location.
And there's numerous tricks out there that say, you know,
tell you what to do, and I've done them all.

Speaker 5 (12:53):
If I even had a.

Speaker 4 (12:54):
Google Chat and I went through all the steps with
them and it it still doesn't work. And I did
download the GPS test. Yeah, I think I heard about
it possibly on your show, and it just doesn't recognize
any of the satellites. Just nothing interesting any of them.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
Okay, Well, I mean it's a great phone. It's had
a good run. I think that if if this GPS,
if Google, you know, if you talk to them and
they weren't able to figure out what's happening with it.
The only other suggestion I would say, the only thing
you know, it sounds like it's a hardware issue. Does
sound like something has failed inside this phone. The only

(13:35):
other thing I would say is go into your settings
and then go into let's see system and then at
the bottom you've got the reset options. So you've got
reset mobile network settings, reset Bluetooth and Wi Fi. So
I would try those two options as kind of like
their last ditch effort to get this thing to work.

(13:56):
And then if that doesn't work and you still want
to keep this phone, you might just try a factory reset,
just to like see if something is impeding the GPS
on this device. You changed some sort of setting, but
it sounds like you've kind of exhausted all of those options.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
So this phone's been around for a while.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
It's been it was released in twenty twenty, so it's
not getting any software updates. The software support from Google
ended almost two years ago on this This was before
Google started doing seven years of updates for their Pixel
line of phones. So my advice is to do that first. Try,

(14:34):
you know, exhaust all the software options. If it still
doesn't work, you could take it to a place like
you Break I Fix and see if they you know,
they'll give you a free estimate on what it would
take to fix it. But honestly, I think that that
even if you spent one hundred dollars on this phone,
I think that's too much to fix this. At that point,
I would recommend they just came out with the Pixel

(14:55):
nine A. I've got it in my hand right now,
I've been testing it. It's a fantast a little phone.
I'm not sure of the screen size of the Pixel
nine A versus the Pixel four A. It might be
a little bit bigger. Let's see, I'm gonna see if
I can find this screen size online here. It's always

(15:16):
so tough to type in when i'm let's see five
point eight versus six point three. Okay, so it is
considerably bigger. But I will tell you I think that
the phones have gotten a lot smaller in the hand,
so I think you'll you'll probably still be okay with
the size of this new phone. Like, this thing fits
perfectly in my hand. It is such a great size.
So that phone is four hundred ninety nine dollars. I

(15:38):
would say, if you, you know, if you want to
get this thing, get it now. But I would expect
the price on the Pixel nine A to drop two
about three ninety nine on sale, or at least four
point fifty on another you know, if it goes on
maybe not the best the biggest sale, like maybe it
might drop fifty to one hundred dollars. That's what I'm
trying to say here. But I think that's probably your

(15:59):
best bet at this point. Mark, you've had this phone
for a long time, You've tried all the things. I
don't think your solution the third solution you mentioned, which
is getting a standalone GPS absolutely not. Not In this
day and age, we rely on GPS way too much
to have to have such a limitation on your GPS
to being in just a car or a separate device.

(16:20):
So I'd say go with the Pixel nine A. It's
a great phone. It's got all the latest software on it,
it's got all the latest AI stuff, it's got the
latest camera. So I think you're going to be much
better off putting your money towards that versus putting your
money towards this old phone. And by the way, the software,
the Android updates and the security updates for this phone

(16:40):
ends in seven years, which is October first, twenty thirty two.
And just based on what you're telling me, Mark, with
how how much you've taken care of this four A,
I think that you will probably call me in twenty
thirty two if me and Bobo are still sitting here
and tell me, hey, Rich, I'm still using this nine A.

Speaker 2 (16:57):
I love it so great call. Thanks for the thanks
for the question.

Speaker 1 (17:01):
Eight eight eight Rich one on one eight eight eight
seven four to two four one zero one.

Speaker 5 (17:08):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
Microsoft says they are pushing passwords closer to extinction. I'll
tell you what they're replacing them with Coming up next,
you are listening.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
To rich on Tech.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging
out with you, talking technology. We all hate our passwords, right,
I mean, who likes remembering passwords? I mean I don't
even remember my passwords since I'm using a password manager,
which you should be too. But if these companies have

(17:40):
their way, we will not need to use a password manager.
We won't need passwords at all. Microsoft made a big
move this week. They are pretty much eliminating traditional passwords.
They are shifting away from them, and they are now
letting you sign up for new accounts without a password
by default. So basically, they will figure out a way

(18:01):
that you can log in, whether that's sending you a
confirmation code to your email or a pass key, your face, fingerprint, whatever,
they will just let you sign up with that now
by default. So this is a big, big shift. They
say it is a lot safer, and they've renamed World
Password Day to a World past key Day because they're

(18:25):
done with passwords. So if you're not familiar with the
idea of if you've signed up for a website lately,
sometimes you'll notice this, says just pop in your email
and they send you like a link to your sometimes
they call it the magic link, and you'll go to
your email and you'll click that link and you'll be
logged in. The reason that's a lot safer is because
they figure, well, if you have access to your email,

(18:45):
it's a lot safer than having, you know, entering in
some password that can be lost or stolen or figured out.
And then of course they have these past keys which
are being pushed more and more, and a past key
lets you log in using the way using a secondary device,
like whether it is your face, your fingerprint, your pin
on your computer or on your phone. So let's say

(19:08):
you set up a pass key to log into your
Microsoft account. Next time you're you know, you see that
sort of login screen, it'll say open up your phone.
It'll send like a little message to your phone. You
open that up, and that's how you log in. So
they say that passkeys are eight times faster than passwords,
three times higher success rate, and nearly a million pass

(19:31):
keys are being created every single day for Microsoft services
like Xbox and Copilot.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
So this is pretty wild.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
This is a major major shift, and in fact, you
can go into your Microsoft account and delete your password
at this point if you don't want to use it anymore. Now,
remember we talked a couple weeks ago about how many
logins I had or log in attempts I had on
my Microsoft account.

Speaker 2 (19:53):
So this is happening in a big way.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
To Microsoft, they say password attacks are happening seven thousand
times per second, double what they saw in twenty twenty three.
The scam artists know that passwords are coming to an
end and they have to figure out new ways of
tricking people. And the best part about a pass key
is that you can't be tricked. So we talk about
phishing scams all the time, where you go to a

(20:17):
website to log in, it's a fake website. It's something
hackers set up to capture your password. Well, with pass keys,
that will not work because the fake website can't send
that notification to your phone because it's fake. They don't
have a way of sending that to your phone. So
it's a whole system that we are coming up with,

(20:38):
these tech companies are coming up with to kind of
foil the hackers and the scam artists out there. So
if you're not embracing this stuff, embrace it. And you know,
use other methods. The passwords are no longer a good method.
Let's go to Paul Paul in a Columbus, Ohio.

Speaker 6 (20:57):
You're on with Rich Py Rich like love the show
Thank You Got a High sense fifty five inch TV
a little not quite a year and a half old.
It's like a series seven point five because about it
at Costco and happen to be what they had. Uh
on black screen the lower left quadrant er so is

(21:22):
well when the screen is black, otherwise it's not black,
it's gray on that section. Uh So the automatic dimming,
I guess isn't working properly. Is that a fixable or
is that a replaceable?

Speaker 2 (21:36):
Ooh, it probably is fixable. That's so.

Speaker 1 (21:39):
Basically the way these TVs are lit is they have
a bunch of back lights. Is this this is not
a mini LED. I'm guessing it just has like a
local dimming. There's like sections of the TV that are
lit up by different sort of lights in the back
of the TV. And so the higher the higher end
the TV, the more of those sections they have. So
when you hear like many LEDs, they have like a

(22:02):
lot of these little lights in the back that light
it up ol ed is actually does. It can't have
this problem because OLED's are like each individual pixel is
sort of lit by itself. But what you're talking about
is this is a local dimming area of the TV,
so it must have like, you know, probably one, two, three, four, five, six, seventy,
and I'm maybe like ten or twelve of these on

(22:23):
the back of your TV that create the picture. The
fact that one of these is not firing properly is
definitely a physical issue. You can try. You can try
doing a factory reset on the TV. Go into settings
and like completely factory reset it and see if that

(22:43):
kind of gets things working again, gets this thing back
in sync. But it sounds like something has physically gone
wrong on this TV, So you can try bringing it
in somewhere or call a TV repair person if they
even have those these days.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
It's funny.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
I saw I was dry and I saw like one
of these old school places. It looked like it was
out of the fifties. It was like TV repair. I
was like, Oh, that'd be such a cool place to
do a story on, right, you know, like for my
KTLA's TV stories. You know, go in there and just
watch the person as they fix TVs and this and that,
and so I took a picture, and I went back
and I googled it and got the phone number, and

(23:20):
it was like permanently closed. I was like, ah, I
knew it.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
I knew it.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
There's just there's not many of these people out there anymore.
I'm also guessing, Paul, that you did not pay a
significant amount for this TV. I know what I paid
for my sixty five inch High Sense. It was probably
I think it was about eight hundred bucks, maybe under
one thousand dollars. So I would say that you can
maybe get an estimate if someone wants to give you

(23:45):
a free estimate on fixing this thing. But I think
it's probably a total loss, and sadly, it might be
something you just want to properly recycle and get a
new one of it happens. It's it's, you know, it's
it's part of the idea of these TVs are made cheaply.
I'm not saying High Sense, but in general, you know,
these TVs nowadays are made so cheaply. Unless you're getting

(24:08):
the super high end OLED TVs, you know, the rest
of them are very inexpensive. And so it just sounds
like you might have gotten one that's you know, has
a problem. The only other thing I would look at
you did say you bought at Costco. They do have
a Costco Tech support hotline, so I would call that
tech support hotline, and in general, I know Costco used

(24:30):
to have sort of like unlimited returns with electronics. You
can try bringing it back to Costco and seeing what
they say. I think they've limited that since to like
a two year warranty, but don't quote me on that,
because you never know. I mean, you could probably bring
this thing into Costco and just say, hey, look it
doesn't work, and see what they say. But I think
the party line at this point at Costco is I

(24:53):
think it's two years. On electronics, let's say Costco TV return.
Costco's return policy for TVs and other electronics is now
interesting says ninety days for televisions, projectors, and major appliances.
Our Costco Technical and Warranty services will assist you with

(25:15):
technical support and warranty information for many of the products above.
So I would say, since you bought this at Costco,
I would call them and just see what they say.
It sounds like they've tightened their return policy. It used
to be unlimited anything. But all the major retailers are
sort of doing this, you know, Target, Best Buy, Costco,

(25:37):
they have, all Macy's, They have all tightened their policies.
Why because things are cheaper nowadays, people are buying things,
they're returning them more than ever, and they want to
protect their business. And so I understand that they can't
have these unlimited return policies forever, especially as these places
are being used as showrooms more and more for people
to look at stuff in store and then buy it online.

(26:01):
So yeah, that's the official policy, but you never know.
You never know, but call them up. See what they say.
I think it's time you might want to get a
new TV, and yeah, that might just be the time
for that, all right, thanks for the call there in Columbus,
Ohio eight eight eight rich one oh one eight eight
eight seven four to two four one zero one think.

(26:21):
Speaking of things that are going out of style, Google
is ending support for its Nest learning thermostats the first
and second generation on October twenty fifth, twenty twenty five.
These were sold from twenty eleven to twenty fourteen. After
that time, these will become a manual thermostat. You will
not be able to use any apps or assistants or

(26:44):
the home away assist to control this thing. So again,
this will become a manual thermostat. It'll keep working. It's
not going to get software updates, not going to get
security updates. So if you have one of these, which
I do, you have to upgrade if you want to
continue getting all those smart features. Google should have sent
you an email offering you a discount off the new

(27:05):
fourth generation Nest Learning thermostat. That'll be one hundred and
fifty bucks out the door. So again, search your email
for Nest Learning Thermostat. They probably sent you an email.
I kind of missed it and I went back in
my email and found it.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
But if you have one of these.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
First and second generation Nest Learning thermostats, they will stop
working with all the smart features.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
On October twenty fifth, rich on Tech dot TV.

Speaker 1 (27:28):
More of your calls coming up right after this. Welcome
back to rich On Tech. Let's go to Matthew and
Huntington Beach. Matthew, you're on with Rich.

Speaker 7 (27:40):
Hey, rich how's it going?

Speaker 1 (27:41):
It is going fantastic? Is it rainy by the beach.

Speaker 5 (27:45):
As well a little bit a little drizzly in the morning.

Speaker 7 (27:48):
But it's starting to kind of righten up right now
as we speak nice, So weather's good here. So I
have a quick question for you. So I'm looking to
downgrade from an iPhone to a flip phone for a
number of reasons. One being is just I'm on it
a lot, and I'm in front of my father and
my daughter sees me on it a lot. And how
does that even work? Am I able to maintain an

(28:08):
iPhone and a foot phone at the same time, like
two numbers at the same time, if that kind of
makes sense? And what realistic options are there? Or is
it just simply for you got to go down and
straight to a flip phone and tank's an iPhone anymore?

Speaker 1 (28:22):
Okay, when you say flip phone, you mean a like
a dumb phone, like a pretty much okay, got it.
So you want to kind of like during the work day,
maybe have your regular phone, and then when you're with
your daughter kind of like you know, zoning out, you
want to have the flip phone.

Speaker 7 (28:37):
Yeah, And I don't need my I don't need like
all the gadgets and apps for my work, Like I
don't I don't really need any of that. I can
just use our laptop for it. Like, so for banking
and all that stuff, I can just use a laptop
or my life's mom.

Speaker 1 (28:48):
Okay, So there are a couple of options. So what
about I mean, I'm just this is just a thought.
What about using an Apple Watch when you with cellular
when you're not you know, and you can leave your
phone behind?

Speaker 2 (29:05):
Sure, Okay, so that's one option.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
Okay, So that now the downside to that is that
you will not have a camera. And I know you
said you have a daughter, so you might want to
take pictures, you know, if he's in a play or
whatever you're trying to like focus on right you're at
the park. So that's the downside of that. Now, because
I've looked into this myself because as you might imagine
someone who covers tech for a living, I am immersed
in screens and there are sometimes I literally rip my

(29:29):
Apple Watch off my wrist and throw it across the
room because I'm so sick of the notifications. So the
other thing you can do is there is a camera
called the camp Snap.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
Have you heard of this thing?

Speaker 6 (29:40):
I have?

Speaker 1 (29:41):
So it is a it looks like one of those
cameras like the the old school thirty five millimeters disposable cameras,
except it is digital and reusable and there's no screen,
there's nothing. You just literally take pictures on this like
an old school camera, and then to quote unquote get
the picture developed. You just plug it into your computer

(30:02):
and you extract the pictures out of it, so you're
not looking at them while you're you know, double checking
them all that stuff. So one option is you've got
your iPhone, you've got your Apple Watch. You leave the
iPhone at home, You've got the cellular on the Apple Watch,
so you're still in touch, you know, if you need
an emergency whatever. And then you can carry this little
camera with you when you are, you know, out and

(30:24):
about with just your watch, and that will disconnect you
from things. And that's probably the easiest, simplest solution that
gets you where you want to get, right, Okay, that's
number one. Number two is getting a separate flip phone.
The thing about the flip phone is that a lot
of the carriers they have this thing called number share,
which means and they all call it something a little

(30:45):
bit different. I think number shares verizons at and t.
Let's see what they call it. They call it number sync,
so you can look what carrier do you have? AT
and Okay, so AT and T, so let's see what
they Some of them used to have number sync with
what's called the light phone. Have you heard of this thing? Okay,

(31:07):
so the light phone is kind of like a you know,
the idea that you're talking about is becoming more and
more popular. The problem is the technology is not necessarily
kept up. So I think that in the future we
may see more devices that are kind of a simpler,
lighter phone that you can sync with your phone number.
But right now it is not the easiest thing to

(31:28):
do because your carrier has to allow you to sink
your phone number with your your standard device. So on
on AT and T. The only thing I see that
you can sink is your Apple watch or your looks
like your iPad. I'm looking at Android smart watches, tablets. Yeah,
so I'm not really seeing like the little devices that

(31:50):
you can get like it used to be on Verizon,
they would they had like one little phone that you
can sink. I think it was just the light phone
that you can sink. Let's see, I'm trying to say,
see the eligible devices. Yeah, it's like really just saying
that the smart watches now, which is interesting. So realistically,
if you wanted to have the same number on both devices,

(32:12):
you could set up the secondary device with something like
Google Voice, or you can just forward your calls to
that secondary device.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
When you're off of it, you're just not going to
get your texts.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
So it depends how like how in this you want
to be, right, you know, it depends how like how
elaborate you want to be? What what are you thinking?

Speaker 7 (32:33):
I mean, it's it goes both ways. I mean, at
this point, it's just whatever I can because I don't
need all the technology for my work and my life
obviously has her phone. So if okay, one of us
could attach a little bit, if that makes sense, and
all I need is to call and make text methods.

Speaker 1 (32:50):
Yeah, I would call, you know what, I would call
up AT and T and just ask them if you
can if you can set up a flip phone on number,
saying and if they say like, yeah, we have we
have these these devices that you're able to do that with,
just you know, get one of those. But from their website,
I'm not really seeing any sort of solution on their

(33:13):
website that says you can use a flip phone with this,
But that would be the ideal.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
Way to do it right, right, right, right, But the.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
Other you know, and if it doesn't work that way,
the other option, like I said, you can forward your
calls just when you're using the flip phone, which is
not ideal. You can Google Voice it and so you
can have everyone call your Google Voice number, which will
ring your iPhone and your other device at the same time.
Or you can see if if your carrier supports a
flip phone on this you know, number sync situation. The

(33:46):
other place to look, by the way, for a flip
phone is called Dumbwireless dot com. If you go to
their website, they've got all the popular flip phones. I
think the number one is the Nokia twenty seven eighty.
It's eighty eight bucks for the flip phone that you
kind of want. It's like a classic and it works
with T Mobile eighteen Team Verizon. So but again you

(34:07):
would have to ask them if you can activate that
as a number sync phone, Matthew, not easy, not easy
to do. What you're talking about is not is not
as straightforward as you would think. I personally think the
easiest way to do it is with the Apple Watch
because you I know, you have to get another device,
but it sort of makes it pretty simple. And then
you just have the idea of your camera. You can

(34:29):
just get it, bring a camera with you. And I
would say that I have done that in the past,
but most of the time I need a camera when
I'm out and about and it's you know, it's really tricky.
But you can definitely go out and just have the
Apple Watch. With Cellular. You'll get your calls, you'll get
your text you know, you can do things like maps,
you can do music. I mean, there's a lot you
can do on the Apple Watch without having your your

(34:50):
phone nearby if it's.

Speaker 2 (34:51):
Set up for cellular.

Speaker 7 (34:53):
Gotcha?

Speaker 2 (34:54):
All right, good question.

Speaker 1 (34:56):
Yeah, I like I like that you're thinking of this
because this is me on on a daily basis, like
thinking about how I can be when I want to disconnect,
how I can disconnect. It's not an easy thing, all right.
Eighty eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven
four to two four one zero one. Coming up, we're
going to talk about Google's Notebook LM.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
This is a really cool.

Speaker 1 (35:17):
Feature that lets you digest information in totally new ways. Plus,
if you get an email about in a vast settlement payment.
Don't ignore it. I'll explain why. Plus more of your
calls at eight eight rich one O one. This is
rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich
DeMuro here hanging out with you, talking technology at triple

(35:38):
eight rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven
four to two four one zero one. Coming up this hour,
we're gonna hear from Steven Johnson, editorial director at Google Labs.
He's going to talk about a cool feature from Google
called note Book LM. I'll explain what that's all about
in a little bit. Uh plus more of your calls

(35:59):
coming up here and just a moment, but I want
to talk about this. This Minecraft movie has done really
well at the box office, over eight hundred million dollars.
And if you have kids, they might be singing this song.
Listen you hear that.

Speaker 8 (36:15):
That's the stund This is a lead m steeven chickens, why.

Speaker 2 (36:29):
In the mill rises?

Speaker 8 (36:32):
And now you haven't the stack?

Speaker 1 (36:40):
This is Jack Black. He is uh Steve in a
Minecraft movie. He sings this uh goofy thirty four second
song about cooking chicken with lava And if your kids
are into Minecraft, uh they know all about the lava
and all that stuff. It's now the shortest song to
ever chart on the Billboard Hot one hundred, they doing
at number seventy eight.

Speaker 5 (37:01):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (37:01):
They also have an extended version of the song it's
only a minute fifteen long, that also went viral. It's
part of the Minecraft movie, which is gross, like I said,
over eight hundred million dollars worldwide.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
I mean, this is a funny song.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
My kids started singing this as soon as they were
out of the h as soon as they were out
of the movie theater, and I didn't give it much thought.
But then they kept singing it and singing it, and
now it's kind of catchy.

Speaker 2 (37:27):
Let's hear it again.

Speaker 5 (37:30):
M h.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
Steve a chicken?

Speaker 9 (37:38):
Yes, why.

Speaker 2 (37:43):
Rises to night? You have understand how could you not
love that?

Speaker 1 (37:54):
And if you watch the music video, they literally it's
like a Minecraft chicken that they dump lava on and
it becomes like a crispy delicious chicken. So if you
have kids, you have grandkids, you know you've probably already
heard this, or if you want to bond with them
a little bit, just be like, hey, what do you
think about Steve's lava chicken?

Speaker 2 (38:12):
Huh sha cha cha.

Speaker 1 (38:14):
All right, let's go to let's see here, let's go
to Madonna in Michigan.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
Madonna in Michigan.

Speaker 10 (38:21):
You're on with Rich Hi, So can you hear me?

Speaker 2 (38:25):
Yeah?

Speaker 11 (38:27):
Okay.

Speaker 10 (38:27):
So I have a unique experience with my iPhone, and
it's been my last three iPhones. It randomly calls people
and it tells me that someone's calling. I go to
answer the phone and nobody's there. The other person, they
get a call from me saying I'm calling and nobody's there.
So it's happened so many times.

Speaker 11 (38:50):
I went to.

Speaker 10 (38:51):
Apple said hey, this is happening with my phone. They've
said they've never heard of it. This is now my
third iPhone because I've changed phones, graded and it's still
doing it.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
Mhmm uh, here's not as much, not as much.

Speaker 10 (39:10):
Yeah, it was calling like it was calling my daughter
every night, and we just decided that unless I text
her and follow up text.

Speaker 4 (39:18):
It's not me.

Speaker 12 (39:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:20):
I mean, well, it sounds like you have a haunted phone,
but I don't know if that's the case.

Speaker 12 (39:24):
Here.

Speaker 1 (39:26):
Are there any sort of special features you're using on
this phone or anything that you have turned on, like
any any sort of software features that you have activated,
like any accessibility features.

Speaker 5 (39:38):
Nope.

Speaker 10 (39:39):
Again, this is a phone.

Speaker 1 (39:41):
Now, but now when you say third phone, have you
been copying the phone from one to another or have
you started fresh.

Speaker 2 (39:48):
On the phone?

Speaker 13 (39:51):
Uh?

Speaker 10 (39:51):
The only thing I downloaded from the last phone is
my is your what? My contact?

Speaker 2 (39:58):
Your contacts?

Speaker 1 (39:59):
Okay, so you did start fresh, you started completely like
it didn't say hey, let's copy from your old phone.

Speaker 14 (40:06):
Nope?

Speaker 1 (40:07):
Okay, No, what about the case on your phone?

Speaker 7 (40:14):
I don't know.

Speaker 10 (40:14):
I bought it at the Apple store.

Speaker 2 (40:16):
Okay. So in the has it been a different case
for each phone?

Speaker 15 (40:20):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (40:21):
Okay, so typically, I mean this definitely sounds strange. It
should not be happening there are Okay. So just to
give you an example, now, does this happen when it's
in your pocket, your purse, you're holding it, not holding it?

Speaker 2 (40:37):
Or is it just completely on its.

Speaker 10 (40:38):
Own, completely on its own?

Speaker 2 (40:41):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 (40:42):
Okay, well, Madana, I'm I'm stumped because I so for instance, Okay,
before I came on the show, I was playing some
music and I kept putting my phone. I kept pausing
the music and then putting the phone in my back pocket,
and the music would start playing again because my thumb
was just hitting the phone, you know, on the uh,
you know, the right exact place to play the music.

(41:03):
The only thing I can think of is I'm wondering
if there is a way on the iPhone to not
dial calls unless you type in something like is there
a secondary protection against you know, dialing numbers like you
have to dial, like a secondary thing, you know, like
put in like a confirmation code. That might be an

(41:27):
accessibility feature. I have not heard of that. I've not
I'm just thinking of it. Let's see here screen time,
let's see accessibility guide it now. Okay, So the only
other thing I can think of is a couple of
things to try. Number one, you can go into your
phone and you can turn off any sort of like
raise to wake features, because your phone, you know, it

(41:50):
won't do things. Let's see if we can turn that off.
Oh there, it is raise to wake. So you might
want to turn off the raise to wake feature and
display brightness and see if it keeps happening. Okay, that's
number one. Have you heard of that feature? Okay, so
that's number one, So go into your settings displaying brightness,
raised to wake, turn that off and then you might

(42:12):
turn off the always on display as a secondary method.
So just try those two things to see if it happens,
if it continues happening. But this is I mean, this
is like I don't believe in ghosts, but if I did,
this would be right up there, because I now have
I heard of phones dialing people randomly. Of course, because

(42:35):
we're handling our phones. They're in our purses sometimes our pockets, purses, backpacks.
Sometimes people forget to forget to lock their phones. The
only the other thing I would do is make sure
under your displaying brightness your auto lock is set to
thirty seconds, because some people I've noticed they take their
phone out, they do something on their phone, and then

(42:56):
they just put it away without locking it. So I
want you to get into the habit Madonna of tapping
the button on the right to actually lock your screen
when you are not using it and see if that helps.
And these are all kind of like this is you
know what, this is your homework. I'm assigning you homework.
This is what I would like you to do. And
then I want you to call me back next week

(43:16):
and tell me if anything has improved. And then the
other thing you can do if you want to take
it a step further is to go into your settings
settings General and then transfer a reset phone and then
you can do a reset and you can do reset
all settings and see if that helps. But don't do that.

(43:38):
That's like the last ditch effort. I want you to
try the other three, the other three things I mentioned before.
You try that, and then call me back next week.
I want to report and see if this still happens.
Interesting question. I know you know these things happen. Butt dials,
pocket dials. I mean, look, these happen all the time.
I've got a couple of relatives that do a pocket
dial quite often. And you can always tell because all

(44:00):
of a sudden, you just start hearing them talking in
the background. You're like, uh, do I want to listen
because I don't know what's happening here?

Speaker 2 (44:05):
Like you kind of.

Speaker 1 (44:06):
Your curiosity is like I want to hear what's your
what's happening in the background, But I'm also not sure
what I'm in for, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (44:12):
Uh So, yeah, try that and tell me what happens.

Speaker 1 (44:15):
Eighty to eight rich one oh one eight eight eight
seven four to two four one zero one. If you
get an email about in a VAST settlement, do not
delete it. It's actually real.

Speaker 5 (44:24):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (44:25):
The FTC set a vast compromise consumer privacy by collecting
and selling browsing data without notice or consent. They have
made a sixteen point five million dollars settlement with a
VAST And if you bought antivirus from a VAST, if
you paid for it from August twenty fourteen to January
twenty twenty, you could be eligible. So look for an
email from a VAST settlement. It was sent in the

(44:48):
last two months.

Speaker 9 (44:50):
And uh.

Speaker 1 (44:50):
All you have to do is go to the website
FTC dot gov slash a VAST, put in your claim
number and your confirmation code, and you could get a refund.
I think it's I think they I don't know how
much it's for. They haven't decided yet, but the refund
will be next year. If you want more information on that,
you can go to my instagram at rich on Tech.
The VAST settlement information is on there at rich on

(45:11):
tech on Instagram if you're not following me on Instagram.

Speaker 2 (45:13):
In general, a lot of good info on there.

Speaker 1 (45:15):
I'm always posting the latest scams, helpful tips, information and
of course, very active on my Instagram story. So if
you're not following me on Instagram, at rich on Tech
is the place to go, all right, coming up more
of your questions at eighty to eight rich one O
one that's eight eight eight seven four to two four.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
One zero one.

Speaker 1 (45:33):
I'm gonna explain what Google's Notebook LM is and why
it's coming to iPhone and Android, and we're also gonna
have an interview about it. Very interesting tool that you
can use if you like to learn in new ways.
This is rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech.
Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology. Eighty
to eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven

(45:54):
four to two four to one zero one. Website also
a way to get in touch. Just go to rich
Shawn tech dot tv. Hit contact. That'll send an email
right to my screen. Let's go to Sylvia in Marietta, Sylvia.

Speaker 14 (46:09):
You're on with Rich Hi Rich.

Speaker 11 (46:11):
A longtime listener here.

Speaker 4 (46:15):
Rich.

Speaker 11 (46:15):
I live in an area in West Marietta, California, call
it Cresta. It's kind of in the hills, and our
cell reception is terrible. It doesn't matter if it's at
and T verive in T Mobile. All the neighbors have

(46:36):
the same issue. We use Wi Fi calling, but even
then reception is really bad. And I was wondering what
you could recommend to boost our signals.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
Why why is the Wi Fi calling?

Speaker 1 (46:55):
You mean Wi Fi calling in your house is bad
because it shouldn't be bad in the house.

Speaker 15 (47:00):
It's you know, like I said, it's a rural area.
I I have starlink, my friend has starlink, and and
even with that, the Wi Fi colleague, okay.

Speaker 1 (47:14):
All right, well that that could explain it because starlink,
I mean satellite. The latency on a satellite connection, even
though starlink is the best, could still be a little tricky.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
But I still didn't.

Speaker 11 (47:26):
But even when I had the bios internet, it was
the same issue.

Speaker 2 (47:31):
Really yeah, huh.

Speaker 11 (47:34):
There's uh, you know, there's hundreds of people up here
and we're having the same issue. The SALN reception.

Speaker 15 (47:43):
It's just terrible.

Speaker 11 (47:44):
Okay, Well I called a canty and there's there.

Speaker 1 (47:49):
Okay, Well, I mean there are Okay, there's a couple
of ways you can do this. So first off, I
mean they used to have these things called cell boosters,
which you can install in your home and basically you
can use your internet connection. So it's a little box
that you get from your cell phone company, so whether

(48:09):
it's AT and T or Verizon or T Mobile, and
you basically plug it into your ethernet, you know, to
your Internet connection, and then that creates sort of its
own cellular connection. But the thing is Wi Fi calling
has really taken that over, so that's why you don't
hear about these much anymore. But with that said, I'm

(48:30):
looking at the website and it looks like Verizon and
AT and T still offer one of these things. It
may not be free, so you might call them and say,
you know, plead your case and they may give you
one for free. But you know, there looks like they're
charging like two fifty two hundred and fifty dollars for
these things. And the reason why we don't talk about
them anymore is because everyone has Wi Fi calling on

(48:51):
their phone. You can just flip that on and it
usually works pretty well. So before you try this, I
would just go into the Wi Fi calling settings on
your phone and just make sure that you're actually using
that the way it's intended. So if you go into
cellular and then look at your Wi Fi calling. There
are some options in there, and so I would check

(49:13):
to make sure those options are on. And yeah, it's
weird that it's not working because that should at least
work when you're in your house. So anyway, so the
first thing to do is is look and see if
your provider offers one of these network extenders and you
can plug that in and theoretically you should get a
better signal from that. And the reason why that's a

(49:34):
little bit different from the Wi Fi calling is because
it almost, like I think, is the way I understand it,
It sort of pretends it's an LTE signal, and so
your phone is actually connecting with an LTE signal versus
that Wi Fi calling, So it might be a little
bit better than the Wi Fi calling. And you know,
check the return policy. You know, if it's thirty it

(49:54):
says on the Verizon side, it says free returns within
thirty days. So it can't hurt to try this, and
for two fifty dollars to actually get a good signal,
why not. So that's number one. So I check for
those and see if your carrier provides that or you
can purchase that. And then the second thing is there

(50:15):
is a company called we Boost and this is pretty
much like the standard Wi Fi booster company, and they've
got a whole bunch of products there. They've got one
called the we Boost Cabin, which it's seven hundred dollars.
You can install this little antenna on the side of
your house and yeah, engineered for the most off grid abodes.

(50:41):
Cabin works with any device on any US cellular network
up to five G twenty four foot antenna, ten minutes setup,
no subscriptions, reliable connectivity, so thirty day money back guarantee
on that, free return shipping. Again, so if you really
want to try these things, you know, these are the options.

(51:01):
So how it works. Let's see, So it's got the
outdoor antenna, goes to the cell antenna and that's got
a booster and then an inside antenna. So again, if
you're sticking to where you live there, would you say
requesta If you're sticking to where you live there, this
might not be a bad investment for this price. But
again I'm going back to that Wi Fi connectivity. I mean,

(51:24):
the other thing is that Starlink and T Mobile eventually
are going to offer Wi Fi are cellular calling over
the Starlink network, so you know that's another option you
can hold out for that. I don't know when that's
going to be, I mean right now, we're still waiting
on the texting ability, but they do say calls are
going to come soon or eventually going to be a

(51:45):
thing through the Starlink network on Tea mobile. So anyway,
a couple of options there. Check out the networking center,
check out we Boost. Two good options to get you
up and running there. Sorry you're having those issues. We're
hearing less and less of the spotty issues and area,
but look they're still out there and if you live
in one, it's a pain. Thanks for the call, Sylvia,
Do appreciate it all right? Coming up, we're gonna talk

(52:07):
about Notebook LM. If you haven't heard of this, this
is Google's AI powered research assistant. They are launching a
mobile app on iOS and Android. It's been desktop only
since twenty twenty three. Cool feature. I'll tell you what
it can do for you. Coming up next, Welcome back
to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you,

(52:28):
talking technology. Kevin Wrights, whoever's running your board? Bumper Music's
your board music? Bumpers is good? I just heard Voodoo Chili.

Speaker 2 (52:39):
A while ago.

Speaker 1 (52:41):
My printer wasn't working at that moment, and now at
prints Voodoo.

Speaker 2 (52:46):
What child child?

Speaker 1 (52:48):
Oh Chili, I can't hear your MIC's not you're not
at your mic.

Speaker 14 (52:54):
I wasn't expecting to have to correct your english today.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
Well I didn't know.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
Okay, it's voodoo child, Yeah, child child, drop the D make.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
An e Voodoo child. Oh he did write it right, Yeah,
you just didn't say it right. Was that the song
you chose? Yes, there you go. See where's our ding?
You need it? See?

Speaker 5 (53:15):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (53:15):
Anyway, that was Bobo's pick clearly, because I don't even
know this this song.

Speaker 2 (53:22):
But hey, it fixed his printer, so that's good news.
All right, we got to get to this interview.

Speaker 1 (53:26):
We've got Steven Johnson from Google Labs to talk about
Notebook LM. This is Google's AI powered research and writing
tool that helps you organize and understand information faster.

Speaker 13 (53:38):
Notebook LM is it is an application out of Google
Labs that is designed to be a tool for understanding things.
So it's an AI powered application you put in whatever
documents you're working on that you're trying to make sense of,
whether it's research, you're working on at school, or it's

(53:58):
a marketing plan you're developing for your company, and once
you upload that document, it's as if the underlying AI
has become an expert in that particular information, and so
you can ask questions, you can ask follow up questions,
you can create what we call audio overviews that are
kind of simulated podcast discussions about the information you've uploaded.

(54:19):
You can generate study guides and briefing docs, and so
it's basically creates a kind of personalized AI that's really
grounded in the information that matters most to you.

Speaker 1 (54:30):
Oh interesting, So I was sending the impression that was
just for the podcast aspect, that's just one aspect of
this tool. What do you think about how that aspect
has sort of taken on a life of its own.

Speaker 13 (54:42):
Yeah, it's been really excited to see. We've seen amazing
adoption of it. And there's something kind of magical in
hearing this audio conversation, very realistic back and forth between
these two simulated hosts based on whatever information you put
in there. So people are putting their journals in there

(55:02):
and listening to these two.

Speaker 16 (55:03):
AI hosts discussed the latest events in their own lives
where people are using it to study or reviewing like
scientific papers, so they can kind of listen to them
in the.

Speaker 14 (55:14):
Cars they drive to work.

Speaker 13 (55:16):
So we're really excited about it, and we're kind of
building on those tools. We really want to basically create
Notebook to be a place where we will adapt to
whatever kind of learning style you have. And so if
you want to learn by asking questions, we can help
you with that. If you want to learn by listening,
we can help you with that. In the future, if
you want to learn by watching some kind of video,

(55:39):
we'll probably going to be helping you with that as well.

Speaker 14 (55:43):
How is this born? I mean you said it's a
Google Labs product.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
I mean just someone just come up with an idea
of like, hey, let's make AI personal and work for you.

Speaker 13 (55:51):
Yeah, it's the backstory of it is kind of interesting.
So I've spent most of my career as a writer.
I've written fourteen books on a whole range of topics,
and a few years ago Google reached out to me
and said, hey, would you want to come to Google
and help us build the kind of the dream like
writing and research and thinking tool that you've always wanted
to have, now powered by AI. And they put together

(56:15):
a small team to kind of build a prototype, and
so I joined in the summer of twenty twenty two,
and somehow, you know, almost three years later, here we
are with nobook LM and you know, one hundred and
eighty countries around the world and a big part of
Google's AI efforts.

Speaker 14 (56:32):
What do you make of the success of this.

Speaker 13 (56:35):
I think it shows that people are really drawn to
this personalized AI vision, right, So it's it's not just
about talking to a general model that knows a little
about everything in the world, but rather taking the power
of AI and the ability of AIA to help you

(56:56):
understand things and help explain things to you and help
you organize, but grounding it in your own documents or
whatever you're trying to make sense of. I think that
that really unlocks a whole new capability set of capabilities
for AI that I think people who just had a
few conversations with a general purpose chatbot probably didn't realize

(57:19):
was possible. And once you get a taste of it,
it's really quite extraordinary.

Speaker 14 (57:23):
How have you evolved notebook LM since you introduced it.

Speaker 13 (57:26):
We've also made it easy for people to discover sources
that they might want to explore. So you can just say, hey,
I'm interested in the history of piracy in the seventeenth century,
and we'll go out onto the web and find a
collection of high quality sources and bring them directly into
your notebook to make it easier for you to explore
that information in kind of a one click way.

Speaker 14 (57:47):
How does the average person access this?

Speaker 5 (57:51):
You just visit.

Speaker 13 (57:52):
Notebook LM dot Google dot com, signed into a Google account,
and you can get started right away. And the easiest
thing to do is to create a new notebook and upload,
you know, just just some of the recent documents you've
been doing in your work or your studies, and just
start interacting generated an audio overview, ask some questions and

(58:14):
you'll get a sense of just how nuanced and sophisticated
the model is and understanding what you've shared, and then
then you can kind of start thinking about like, Okay,
I have this project, I'm going to create a new
notebook for this project. I'm gonna load up these documents
for that particular project. And then I think most folks
will find that it really gets integrated into their kind
of day to day workload pretty easily.

Speaker 14 (58:37):
And who are these podcasts hosts.

Speaker 13 (58:40):
They are two people who we trained on their voices.
We have not revealed who they are in actuality. But
what's interesting about the process for training the you know,
the voices, is that the voice model was trained from
the ground to be a conversational model. So it wasn't

(59:02):
like we trained on one voice and we trained on
another voice and we just stitched them together in a
script like those two people sat in a studio for
hours and hours and hours and hours talking and we
learn over time how they interact. And that's why the
audio overviews I think sound so kind of convincing. Is
you really get all the nuances of two human beings

(59:24):
in conversation with each other, and the way that we
subtly interrupt each other and the sounds we make when
we are affirming what the other person is saying. There's
a kind of magic in that that I think people
just hadn't heard before this.

Speaker 1 (59:36):
Okay, so a version of this made it to Gemini,
like the main app right, So is that is that
exciting for you?

Speaker 5 (59:43):
Yeah?

Speaker 13 (59:43):
We were one of the things that we try to
do with labs and Notebook has just been kind of
the most high profile version of this is you know,
we're trying to constantly innovate and generate new kind of
product based user focused experiments where we're trying to build
use but we're also trying to build sometimes crazy things
and and and and work quickly. And so what we

(01:00:07):
want to do is it is create an environment where
we're generating new ideas that can then graduate up to
other products in the in the Google family. I mean,
Gemini is kind of going to sense the closest product
to us, so having audio overviews show up there makes
a lot of sense. But we you know, we're able
to kind of move pretty quickly because we're smaller and
more nimble. And if things that we end up spawning,

(01:00:33):
you know, populate the rest of the Google ecosystem, I mean,
that's that's exciting for us.

Speaker 1 (01:00:38):
And just finally, you know, you said you wrote fourteen books,
you're a writer, lifelong writer. What do you make of
all of this AI stuff that you're building? Like and
you know people are worried about this taking over what
they do you know, seeing it on from the inside,
do you think that could happen?

Speaker 14 (01:00:54):
And are you worried about that?

Speaker 13 (01:00:56):
I'm not worried about it. Short term I'm very confident
that short term, I am going to be a much
better writer, much more efficient writer, because of AI, because
of tools like notebook LM. I'm dying, for instance, to
go write my next book. But this day job, I
somehow found myself in no book el I'm was taking
up all of my time. So I think there's a

(01:01:18):
long period there where like, if you embrace these tools,
you know, you're able to be more creative, You're able
to you know, use the tools to help you remember
all the things that you have to remember to write
a book. It's you know, it is going to be
a real assistant to the writing process and to the
research process for a long time. If we were to

(01:01:40):
get to a point in some future, way off point
where you know, you could hit a button and write
a Stephen Johnson, you know, a book automatically one, I
don't think that's likely. But if we do get to
that point, that the fate of nonfiction writers will be
like the least of our problems. That will really each
a new level of artificial intelligence. So we'll have profound

(01:02:03):
societal implications. But I don't see that on the horizon
right now.

Speaker 1 (01:02:08):
All right, Thanks, thanks again, Steven Johnson at Google Labs.
Here is what the podcast that they create sounds like.

Speaker 13 (01:02:16):
If you're just charric dive today, we're really zeroing in
on the Microsoft twenty twenty five word Trend Index annual report.

Speaker 2 (01:02:24):
Yeah, and this isn't just another forecast.

Speaker 15 (01:02:26):
Is it?

Speaker 2 (01:02:27):
No, not at all.

Speaker 1 (01:02:28):
It argues so you hear how those two AI voices
sort of interact. Those are generated on the fly from
the information that you upload. So if you want to
try this in its simplest, easiest way, they've actually built
it into the Gemini app. So you can open up
the Gemini app, upload a file anything like, anything that
you want it to talk about, and then wait for

(01:02:50):
it to say generate audio interview, generate audio overview, tap that,
and then it will create the little podcast that you
can listen to. Of course, you can only go to
NOTEBOOKLM dot Google dot com and the Android apps. There
are no apps right now. Android and iOS apps there
are none right now. They're coming out on May twentieth,
So don't start the app store for Notebook LM. Those

(01:03:12):
are not official all right. Rich on Tech dot tv
for all the links. More rich on Tech coming your
way right after this Welcome back to rich on Tech.
Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology at
Triple eight Rich one oh one. That's eight at eight
seven four to two four one zero one. The website
for the show rich on Tech dot tv. You want

(01:03:34):
to email me hit contact. Bruce writes in I'm glad
you mentioned about the ghost styling. I'm glad you mentioned
the screenlock. Uh, it's he does think that it might
have been the screenlock. Okay, Actually, you know I'm not
gonna I gotta I gotta check these emails before I
say I want to read them on the air. Might

(01:03:56):
not have been that nice to our caller. Let's go
to Joe in Orange County. Joe, you're on with Wretch.

Speaker 4 (01:04:03):
Hi.

Speaker 3 (01:04:03):
Rick, I hope you can help me with this.

Speaker 12 (01:04:07):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:04:07):
I made the mistake of donating one time, and ever
since then, I got like thirty some emails a day,
and I thought they would stop when the election was over,
but they continue right on it. It's like really bad harassments.
This morning, I got one before six am, and it's

(01:04:27):
just so annoying, you know, like they mentioned my name, Johanna.
You know, Trump is talking about you and.

Speaker 12 (01:04:35):
All these dumb things now, so trying.

Speaker 3 (01:04:38):
To get your money, and you know, they'll say, I'm
not asking for money, I.

Speaker 4 (01:04:42):
Just want your opinion.

Speaker 7 (01:04:44):
You're invited to mirror Lago.

Speaker 3 (01:04:47):
And I'm just crazy things and it's just you don't
want to go. I don't know how to get hold
of them, but I want them to stop, and I
don't know how to stop them.

Speaker 1 (01:04:59):
A these texts are emails. You said email, but it
sounds like these are texts. Okay, they're texts. Okay, all right,
Well here's the deal. So it's funny you say that
once you donated, because whenever I donate to charity, it's
really interesting because all of a sudden, what shows up
in my mailbox, in my physical mailbox, is one hundred

(01:05:21):
more solicitations for donations. And it's because I'm convinced these
places sell your information saying, hey we got a hot
one here, we got someone that's actually given money, let's
spam them. So I think with regards to the text messaging,
there's a couple of things you can do. Number One,
if these are legitimate senders, okay, you should be able

(01:05:44):
to reply back with the word stop. Okay, So that
should be number one. Now, I don't know if these
are legitimate senders or not. It sounds like you are
on a combination of some political lists, but also maybe
some unwanted lists as well. So I would the ones
that look legitimate, I would just try to reply with

(01:06:04):
the words stop, and that should get some of them
to stop. The other thing you can do is inside
your app on if you're on iPhone or Android, depending
on your app. So if you're on iPhone, there is
a setting if you go into your settings, okay and
they change where this is.

Speaker 2 (01:06:23):
You have to go.

Speaker 1 (01:06:23):
Settings, scroll all the way down to where it says apps,
and then scroll all the way down to where it
says messages.

Speaker 2 (01:06:31):
I'm getting there right now here it is, and.

Speaker 1 (01:06:34):
Then scroll all the way down until it says filter
unknown senders. Toggle that on. So anyone who is not
in your contacts will go in a separate list. And
so now when you go back to your messages app,
you will see you'll have this little filters and it
says all messages known senders, unknown senders, And that way

(01:06:56):
you can go into the unknown and it's all the
people that you don't know and it'll be a separate list. Okay,
So that's that's one way to do it on the iPhone.
And then on Android, they've actually got some pretty good
uh spam protection built in. So you can go into
your Android Messages, which is really Google Messages, tap your

(01:07:17):
little icon in the upper right hand corner and it
says Messages Settings, and then scroll down to where it
says protection and safety and then enable spam protection. Toggle
that on, and that should help. And those are the
the only, the only real three ways that you can
get rid of these messages that you're on, these you know,

(01:07:39):
political texts. There might be some other sort of ways.
Let me see there's I thought there was a way
that you could send something.

Speaker 2 (01:07:47):
Let's see here.

Speaker 1 (01:07:49):
Uh yeah, I think that's really it is. Those are
the main ways to get off of those uh text messages.
Is the legitimate ones will say stop and and the
non legitimate ones, yeah, there's not much you can do
because they're not following the rules. So yeah, I would
say the call blocking stuff is probably the main way
to do it, or the text blocking is probably the

(01:08:11):
main way to do it. But I think the methods
I mentioned should probably cut down on some of the.

Speaker 2 (01:08:16):
Texts you get. But yeah, Joey, good luck, with that.

Speaker 1 (01:08:20):
I know these were a problem during the election, and
you know, any look text messages companies, they love it
because we check our texts in a world of always on.
You know, emails can get lost in the shuffle. You know,
you get mail at your house, you know, maybe you'll
get you'll look at it. But text messages people get.
They are delivered immediately you pick up your phone to

(01:08:44):
look at them.

Speaker 2 (01:08:44):
They go to your wrist.

Speaker 1 (01:08:46):
So giving out your phone number in the future, get
a different phone number, get like a Google Voice number,
Get a Burner number. There's an app called Burner. You
can get a secondary line. Your cell phone provides may
give you a secondary line, and no T Mobile was
for a while with that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:03):
Digits Verizon.

Speaker 1 (01:09:05):
I think you can buy a secondary line from them
for like ten dollars a month, but don't give out
your real phone number. When you were signing up for
lists and things. Give out your real phone number to
friends and family for the rest of the stuff. Get
a secondary number, and you can get even a number
like a text Now number, so you can you can
sign up with them. The problem is you may not

(01:09:25):
get all the text from them, But I guess that's
a good thing right anyway, A couple ways to do it.

Speaker 2 (01:09:30):
Xbox.

Speaker 1 (01:09:31):
Microsoft is raising prices on the Xbox, Xbox consoles, controllers
and headsets and games later. So first party Xbox games
you're gonna cost eighty bucks starting this holiday season. Microsoft
did not say the t word tariffs, but they did
say rising development costs and market conditions. So the Xbox

(01:09:53):
series s used to be three hundred dollars now the
suggested retail price three to eighty series this one terabyte
used to be three fifty now four thirty Digital four
fifty now five point fifty. Xbox Series X Standard used
to be five hundred, now six hundred. If you get
the top of the line two terabyte Galaxy Edition six

(01:10:15):
hundred now seven to twenty nine, So anywhere between eighty two,
one hundred and thirty dollars. Price increase on the Xboxes.
So if you look online, a lot of the retailers
are still selling them at the old prices, So this
is not a These are suggested retail prices, which means
you may or may not see that actually happen in

(01:10:37):
the real world. Eighty eight rich one O one eight
eight eight seven four to two four one zero one
coming up, I'll tell you the latest AI features on Gemini,
Meta and Chat GPT. This is rich on Tech. Welcome
back to rich on Tech. Rich tamiro here with you
for more tech news, tips, reviews, and your questions. That

(01:10:59):
triple a rich one on one. That's eight eight eight
seven four two four one zero one. Coming up this hour,
we're gonna talk uber lyft, delivery apps, robotaxis, all the
latest in the gig economy with Harry Campbell, founder of
the Ride share Guy. And uh we'll get cheer calls
in just a moment, but I want to give you
the AI updates this week. You know, these AI bots

(01:11:22):
are rapidly evolving.

Speaker 10 (01:11:24):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:11:24):
Here's what's new. Chat GBT now has shopping features. So
open ai is adding shopping tools right into chat GBT,
which means you can browse and compare products.

Speaker 6 (01:11:36):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:11:36):
All these recommendations are personalized based on your preferences, non
sponsored reviews. UH pulls info from sites like Wired, Reddit
and other review platforms, not paid ads. Chat GBT says
are already doing over a billion web searches per week.
They're just throwing out some fighting words against Google there
and they know a lot of this stuff is focused

(01:11:57):
on product research, So right now, this is very different
from other search results you might get from something like
a Google because a lot of that stuff is sponsored
or it's kind of like nonsense, like top ten things
we love on Amazon.

Speaker 2 (01:12:11):
Right now, what.

Speaker 1 (01:12:12):
Chatchybt is doing is they are using their understanding of
these reviews to sort of pull out and synthesize all
the key features and things that reviewers are saying about
products to help you actually find stuff that fits your needs.
So kind of cool, we'll see because right now they're
not making any money on this, but in the future
they might experiment with ads or revenue models, affiliate revenue, whatever,

(01:12:36):
But right now they're just trying to make this excellent
for the end user. And this is something we've seen
in the tech world over and over and over all.
These features start out with the customer in mind, and
then as time goes on and everyone starts using these things,
they sort of start slowly but surely evolving and shifting
to benefit the company, benefiting chatchybt. Because chatchybt's, hey, we're

(01:13:00):
putting all this effort into this. What about us making
money when someone buys a coffee maker? We should get
a little percentage of that. Then they start, you know,
favoring different things. Anyway, if you're looking at shop for
stuff now you can ask chatch ebt for more shopping
details on items and comparing things. Meanwhile, Meta has launched
their own standalone AI assistant app. It's basically a rival

(01:13:24):
to chatchbt. It's got voice, it's got image generation, it's
got web search. It's called Meta AI. You can download
it on iPhone and Android. The interesting thing that they've
built in is the discover feed. This looks like a
Facebook feed, but it's all about people posting how they've
used AI with this Meta AI, so you can see
the graphics that they've generated or the answers they've gotten.

(01:13:48):
Of course, it's all opt in, so it's not like
you're gonna people are gonna be seeing what you're doing
on this app. You can choose to share something interesting
with other people. There's also a voice mode, which I
tested out yesterday and it's actually very good. So if
you tried the voice mode on Chat, Gibt or Gemini,
Meta has its own metas ai is actually really good.

(01:14:10):
It's just they forced it down our throat in all
these different apps like Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp, and
it's sort of left a bad taste in people's mouths
because it's like we're being forced to use this in
places we don't want to use it.

Speaker 4 (01:14:23):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:14:24):
I get it.

Speaker 1 (01:14:24):
If you download the Meta AI app and you love it,
that's great. But the fact that when you search for
someone on Instagram and it immediately pops up all the
AI stuff you're not looking for that, you're looking for
the person you're trying to look up. So I think
that's where they went wrong with. You know, they have
a very good AI product, but I think they went
very wrong in how they delivered it to people. So anyway,

(01:14:45):
there you have it Meta AI if you want to
download it for iOS and Android. And then Gemini. This
is Google's answer to chatchbt Gemini. They just added AI
image editing and it's really good. It's the fastest AI
image edit I've ever seen so far. So you can
upload your own picture to Gemini, which is Gemini dot

(01:15:06):
Google dot com or the Gemini app on your phone,
and you can say what you want Gemini to do
to that picture. So, for instance, if you look at
my picture that I posted today of me doing the
radio show. You can check it out on my Instagram
at richon Tech on my stories. It's me with sort
of like a computer background behind me. So what I
did was I just took a picture and I said, Gemini,

(01:15:27):
change the background to something techie, And in about ten
seconds it changed it. It extracted my outline of me
and put it over a new background, and you can,
you know, I tried one thing where you can try. Ah,
just take a picture of your street and say add
a dinosaur to this street, and it's really good. So
right now they are putting a little watermark. If you

(01:15:50):
look in the lower right hand corner of my picture
on Instagram, you'll see a little AI symbol, So they're
experimenting with that where it's a visible AI marker. But
then they're also putting in the actual metadata of the
picture some AI identifiers so that other apps and different
you know, the different apps that are looking at these

(01:16:10):
photos on the back end can identify that that was
created with AI. Let's go to Mark in Montana. Mark,
you're on with Rich.

Speaker 5 (01:16:20):
Hey have it gone Rich today? Yeah, I got a
question about my satellite TV I use.

Speaker 7 (01:16:29):
I use Addition.

Speaker 5 (01:16:30):
Network and I'm in really really real, Montana. I pay
a couple of hours extra for what they call local channels.
I don't like their local channels. I moved out here
years ago from New York. Is there any way not
necessarily with the satellite, but even on a computer that

(01:16:54):
I can access New York City broadcast channel, not just
the news but all day?

Speaker 2 (01:17:03):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (01:17:03):
Yes, there's actually well okay, not okay, Yes and no.
I mean look, there's always ways of especially nowadays with
all of the streaming apps.

Speaker 2 (01:17:12):
Almost do you have do you have a good internet
connection or no? Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 (01:17:17):
So a lot of these streaming apps will allow you
to uh stream the channels live. And so if you
go and download like Pluto TV two b uh, let's
see what's the other one?

Speaker 2 (01:17:33):
Zoomo zu m o peacock.

Speaker 1 (01:17:36):
So all of these these streaming services are now owned
by the big companies, so pretty much all of the
major networks, Fox, ABC, CBS, they are now putting a
lot of their TV channels streaming live on these services.
So if you go to two B, you're gonna find
a bunch of the I believe they're owned by Fox.

(01:17:57):
You're gonna find a bunch of those Fox channels on there.
If you go to Pluto, they are owned by Viacom,
you're gonna find a bunch of the CBS channels on there.
NBC is owned by or Peacock is owned by NBC
Universal Comcasts, so they are going to have a lot
of those NBC channels. So you can really download these
apps to your TV and piece together those stations that

(01:18:20):
you want to watch. That's number one. And then some
of these stations might also have their own streaming apps
as well. So for instance, in La, I work for KTLA,
they have their own streaming app where you can download
that app and you can stream our news live all
day long anywhere you want.

Speaker 2 (01:18:34):
You don't have to be in La.

Speaker 1 (01:18:35):
Same thing Picks eleven out of New York City, They've
got their own streaming app and you can download that
and stream pix eleven, which is New York City News
twenty four to seven. So there are ways of sort
of piecing this together in a freeway, but it just
might take a couple of apps to download and a
bunch of trial and error. Like you can see, like
if you have a station that you want to watch,

(01:18:57):
like let's say you wanted to watch WABC, see in
New York. You can just you know, maybe Google to
see where they are streaming live. So it all depends on,
you know, the system. So they're they're ABC, and so
I'm trying to see if they have they've got a
live stream on ABC, So you might have to download
like the Hulu and you know, because Hulu is is

(01:19:22):
apparently associated with ABC, I guess, uh, so you can
download that and maybe get that channel. The other thing,
and I mentioned this in my newsletter at rich on
tech dot tv last week, there's this website called TV
Garden TV dot Garden, and if you go on there,
you can basically find TV stations live from all over

(01:19:44):
the world. And this is not a great They're not
like this is not like a legal site. I mean,
there's plenty of those out there. I'm not going to
mention them here on the air, but this one is
basically playing by the rules, and it's just finding all
of the live streams that are available online that are
free and open and available to everyone, and then organizing
them so you can find live streams from almost every

(01:20:06):
country in the world. I mean, it's just wild TV
dot Garden. If you want to watch live TV in Finland.
I just pulled that up. And if you have a
specific channel you want to watch, so let's just say
we wanted to watch the WABC in New York, all right,
don't see that one on there. But again, you can

(01:20:27):
just search for those channels as well. You can browse,
but they have a ton I've never seen so many
channels in one place, and it's very well done. Websites
clean as far as I can tell. There's not a
ton of ads on there. So you can search United
States and they've got just a whole bunch they've got.
I mean, I'm looking at the ABC affiliates they have here,
just so many local affiliates here. But I think that's

(01:20:47):
probably the best way to do it.

Speaker 2 (01:20:49):
Mark.

Speaker 1 (01:20:49):
You may find that you can cancel your dish network
altogether once you get on these streaming apps. It's everything,
it's all the rules are being rewritten right now, right
when it comes to broadcast and streaming, and so everyone's
trying things in slightly different ways. But if you look
hard enough, you can probably find a lot of what
you want to get through these services. Just depends how

(01:21:12):
they're doing it. All right, good question, Mark, Thanks for
calling today in Montana. I got to make my way
out there one day. I've never been, but big sky country,
I just want to. I remember as a kid one
time being in the woods upstate New York, Lake George,
where I grew up, going and just looking up at
the sky one time, and the entire sky was filled
with stars, like I'd never seen more stars in my life.

(01:21:35):
And I've been wanting to recreate that moment in my
adult life, and I think like Montana.

Speaker 2 (01:21:39):
Might be the place to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:21:41):
Eighty eight rich one O one eighty eight seven four
two four one zero one more rich On Tech right
after this, Welcome back to rich On Tech. All right,
now we'll get to uh Bruce and Pacific Grove. Bruce
wrote in about the ghost styling caller we had earlier.
Woman called in said that her phone, her iPhone, was

(01:22:02):
dialing people all the time, her daughter, other folks, and
through no intervention of her own, Like the phone was
just sitting there and it would just dial people. And
she said it was the last three phones she's had,
which is pretty wild. Anyway, I give her a couple
of options. Bruce and Pacific Grove rites, and I was

(01:22:22):
so glad you mentioned the screenlock. I bet she won't
set it to thirty seconds because one of her kids
probably changed it years ago and she's used to it
staying on. She might also not have password protection either. Yeah,
those are two things I've noticed. Some people do not
put password protection on their phone, and they also set
their screenlock to be way longer than it should be
by the way, that burns up your battery too. Bruce says,

(01:22:45):
a case really is important. A portfolio style case that
closes can help stop these kinds of issues. Sweat, certain
fabrics or even just movement can accidentally activate the screen.
I tell people to try wrapping their phone in newspaper
for a week. Most of the time the ghost dialing stops.
For folks who don't like a screen lock or a password,
a physical fix like a closing case is often the

(01:23:07):
best solution. Now, I can't be on the radio here
and tell you not to have a password on your
phone or a passcode, because that is in this day
and age. Your phone holds everything. So if you don't
have a passcode, you got to get one on your phone.
Use face ID, use the fingerprint, use a passcode. You
absolutely must have one on there because there is no

(01:23:28):
excuse at this point.

Speaker 2 (01:23:29):
Thanks for the email, Bruce.

Speaker 1 (01:23:31):
Let's go to Kermer in Sun City.

Speaker 2 (01:23:35):
You're on with Rich.

Speaker 12 (01:23:38):
Hello, Rich, Yeah, Hi, oh you Okay, what happened is
I bought.

Speaker 9 (01:23:46):
A not bout but I got a router from a
new router from a Horizon Look. And I've been trying
to download the the Wi Fi to my phone, my
wife's phone and to my phone, and uh, but it's not.
Every time I put the the password in and it

(01:24:06):
goes in, it says no Internet. But I'm not having
problems with that. When I loaded the wireless uh wify
to the printer, to the to both of my printers
and to my computer and uh and and so it's
not allowed me to be able to get on to
my am I Alexa, nor am I uh any of

(01:24:29):
my electronics.

Speaker 1 (01:24:31):
Okay, Uh it's so are these phones a little bit older?

Speaker 12 (01:24:36):
As a matter of fact, both of my I fifteen.

Speaker 1 (01:24:40):
Really interesting Okay, Well, Typically when there are issues with
Internet connections like this, and some devices are connecting, some
devices are not, it's usually a matter of the network
that you're using, whether it's two point four gigaherts or
five gigaherts, and so I'm guessing that this router is

(01:25:02):
set up to either have one network or the other
and not both, because the fact that the printer is
connecting that tells me that it might be using the
older network. Is this an older printer?

Speaker 12 (01:25:16):
No, they they're they're pretty pretty new printers.

Speaker 4 (01:25:19):
All right.

Speaker 1 (01:25:19):
Well, Kermer, sounds like you've got everything new, which I like. Okay,
So is this one of those Verizon like hotspot kind
of things like the home Internet or is it a Verizon.

Speaker 2 (01:25:30):
Like files Okay?

Speaker 1 (01:25:32):
So if you this is just a suggestion, but have
you looked at the internet the Wi Fi settings on
the device itself, Like, have you gone into the settings?

Speaker 9 (01:25:44):
Yes, I've gone into the setting this way, I start,
and then what if I get through them and I
put in the you know, the the carrier's name okay,
and the passwords?

Speaker 2 (01:25:55):
Okay?

Speaker 9 (01:25:56):
So I think again, that's at that point that it
goes through the Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:26:01):
Now here's my other question.

Speaker 1 (01:26:02):
Is this a network username and password you've been using
in the past, No.

Speaker 12 (01:26:07):
It's not, okay. As a matter of fact, is it's
new with the router?

Speaker 2 (01:26:10):
It is new with the router? Okay?

Speaker 1 (01:26:12):
Uh, well, all this sounds very mysterious to me. But
what I would do is on the bottom of that
router there is some instructions on how to access these
settings of that actual router. So if you if you
flip that router over, there's usually like a code on
there that's like one nine eight dot or one nine
two one six eight something like that, and you can

(01:26:34):
type that in from your web browser. You might want
to connect to this broute this uh, this router manually,
like connect it with a cable from your computer, because
if you're doing any changes to the Wi Fi, you
will lose that Wi Fi connection during the changes. So
it's probably best to plug into this thing. But then
you're gonna log in and it's gonna give you all

(01:26:55):
of the settings for that Verizon router, sort of the
back end settings. It's going to tell you which networks
it's broadcasting on. You're gonna be able to change the
channel that it's broadcasting on, the Wi Fi network, name, password,
all that good stuff. I'm guessing you're just using the
default Wi Fi name and password. I would just take
a look at those settings and see if there's anything

(01:27:17):
in there that says compatibility mode or maximum compatibility or
two point four versus five gigahertz, and if it gives
you the option to have both networks, what's that versus that? Yeah,
because that's usually where these problems happen. I mean, it's
very strange. So when Verizon this is sort of a
self install, Huh, they didn't come to your house to

(01:27:38):
help you with this.

Speaker 2 (01:27:38):
Yeah, So that's the problem there.

Speaker 1 (01:27:40):
These companies are doing these self installs where I'm wondering.
The other thing you might do before you try anything
is just find the reset button on this router and
press and hold it in and reset it back to
factory and see if that helps and reconnect your devices.
I would do that before you kind of mess with
any of these settings, because you know these settings you

(01:28:03):
can change if you know what you're doing, But if
you don't know what you're doing, you could mess some
stuff up and then next thing you know, nothing's gonna connect.
So I might just press the reset button on there,
get it all back to factory, see if your stuff connects.

Speaker 2 (01:28:15):
If it doesn't, then delve into those settings.

Speaker 1 (01:28:17):
But you might have to have someone from Verizon guide
you through this, because those devices should absolutely be connecting
all right.

Speaker 2 (01:28:24):
Coming up next we're gonna talk to.

Speaker 1 (01:28:26):
Harry Campbell, founder of the Ride Share Guy, right here
on rich On Tech. Welcome back to rich On Tech.
Rich Demiro here hanging out with you talking technology. The
website for the show richon Tech dot TV. If you
heard me mention something over the past couple of hours
or minutes, whatever, go to the website rich on Tech

(01:28:47):
dot tv. It is all right there. This is episode
one nineteen. I take great show notes. Everything is linked
up right there. Joining me now is Harry Campbell, founder
of the Ride Share Guy, to break down the latest
in this world of the gig economy.

Speaker 2 (01:29:02):
Harry, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on
rich So tell me about.

Speaker 1 (01:29:07):
The Ride Share Guy. Where did that come from? Why
did you start covering this stuff?

Speaker 5 (01:29:11):
Yeah?

Speaker 17 (01:29:11):
I actually started driving for both Uber and Lyft about
eleven years ago now, so it's been a while, but
I was actually I used to work a full time
as an aerospace engineer for Boeing and had a few
side hustles, and driving for Uber and Lyft was one
of them. So enjoyed it a ton and pretty quickly
realized that you know, there really isn't a boss, which
is great, but there's also not a lot of training,

(01:29:31):
there's not a lot of community. So that's what we
went out to create with the ride share guys. So
we have a ton of content on YouTube and social
media and website and articles that basically helps drivers make
more money. Interviews with drivers, interviews with folks at the company,
basically anything Uber and Lyft driving. You'll find us on
some box on the internet now these days talking about it.

Speaker 1 (01:29:51):
So the rideshare guide dot com, that's where it's all there.
You've got your newsletter, you've got your YouTube channel. I mean,
you're pretty active on all all this stuff. So you've
watched this world evolve. But here's the thing. The biggest
evolution right now is the companies that built this business
are now trying to edge out all the folks that
drive for them by making robotaxis.

Speaker 17 (01:30:15):
Yeah, so you know, if you're here in Los Angeles
or San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin, you may have seen waimos
on the road. So the company just announced that they're
doing two hundred and fifty thousand tricks per week in
those four cities. So you know, honestly, it's still they
might seem like they're prevalent, but they are still a
pretty small percentage. I mean, Uber alone does millions of

(01:30:36):
rides a day in the United States, and that's per day,
while weymo's doing two undred fifty thousand per week in
four cities. So it's still a very small percentage overall.
But it is an interesting time for drivers because obviously,
as you mentioned, you know, they've been kind of the
main workhorse Uber for the past ten to eleven years.
And now, as you might imagine, drive human drivers are
not big fans they might you know, that's putting it gently.

(01:30:58):
They're not big fans of avs, and so, you know,
you see them on the roads and you see the
companies sort of celebrating av So I think it's kind
of a tough feeling for drivers. But at the same time,
I don't think avs are having a big negative impact
on their earnings just yet.

Speaker 1 (01:31:11):
Av Autonomous vehicle, Yeah, autonomous vehicles. So we know Weimo
is owned by Google, so or Alphabet, which is the
same company as Google. Are Uber and Lyft also dabbling
in self driving.

Speaker 17 (01:31:25):
So Uber and Lyft don't own any self driving companies,
but they have partnered with a number of companies so
Uber for example, I think they're partnered with sixteen or
seventeen different autonomous vehicle companies from everything from doing rides
to food delivery and delivery robots and delivery vehicles that
are autonomous. So Uber is doing a lot. Lift is

(01:31:46):
also partnered with a company called May Mobility. Uber is
also partnered with and then the big partnership that Uber
has on the autonomous vehicle site is with Weimo. So
in Austin, for example, you can only call a weimo
on Uber. The product is called Weimo on Uber. So
if you want a Weaimo and you're in Austin, you
have to be on the Uber app and opt into
getting waymo's and then you can get a Weimo that

(01:32:09):
way if there's one available, versus somewhere like Los Angeles,
where the only way to get one in Los Angeles
is through the weimo app.

Speaker 1 (01:32:16):
So what's it like to catch a ride in a Weaimo.
You've taken these things, you know, as a very recently Huh.

Speaker 17 (01:32:23):
Yeah, I mean I've probably taken a couple dozen rides
in Los Angeles and San Francisco now over the past
six to twelve months. And you know, honestly, if I
put my customer hat on, you know, from the rideshare
guy perspective, we may not be big fans of Waimo's,
but if I put my normal customer hat on, I'm
a big fan of Weimo. It's really it is a
great product. You're sitting in the back of a seventy
five thousand dollars Jaguar, so right off the bat, it's

(01:32:45):
a pretty nice car. And then the Weaimo driver, as
they like to call it, I think, is pretty good.
It's pretty smooth.

Speaker 1 (01:32:50):
You know.

Speaker 17 (01:32:50):
I took my wife in one out to dinner, and
you know, she was a little nervous at first, but
probably by the end of ten fifteen minutes, she was
pretty comfortable. Just the other night, I took probably my
longest WAYMO yet. I took a seventy five minute Waimo
during rush hour traffic from my house in Beverly Wood
all the way to Intuit Dome to watch Clippers win games.

(01:33:12):
Game what was that game five? Game six? So that
was the longest ride. Yeah, Game six, that was the
longest ride I've taken so far, and this was very
heavy rush hour. You know, the folks that are in
Los Angeles. They know driving south at five PM is
pretty tough, and you know, I was play. I feel
like the Waimo driver has actually gotten a lot better.
It's still very safe. There were a couple of yellow

(01:33:33):
lights where it actually if a human was driving, I
think they probably would I probably would have gone through,
to be honest, but the Waimo stops. And then there
are a couple of times where they're making an unprotected
left turn where it didn't wait too passively. It was
sort of a good mix where it kind of edged
out and when it saw a little bit of an opening,
it went. But if it would have been too passive,
we would have never been able to make the left turn.
So I was kind of impressed over that seventy five

(01:33:55):
minute period.

Speaker 1 (01:33:56):
So I was driving back from a shoot in Venice
the other day and there was a Weimo. You know,
these weymos are all over kind of the west side
of Los Angeles, and I was coming out of an
alleyway and there's two waymos, and I realized the thing
I couldn't do. I kept waving the weimo to go.
I was like go, Like that was just my human instinct,
and I realized I was like, wait, And I wondered

(01:34:18):
for a bit if Weaimo has built this into their
camera system to identify when a human is saying like
go ahead, go ahead, which you know, any other human
would recognize, but if Waimo is listening, they need to
do that. Because I kept waving this thing and it
was just it was like a Wild West standoff because
I couldn't make the left, it wouldn't go ahead of
me because it was all very congested. So I thought

(01:34:38):
that was pretty ironic. People are cracking up there like
this is a standoff with these vehicles.

Speaker 17 (01:34:43):
Yeah, so definitely, the waymos aren't perfect yet, and I'm
not sure if the waymos can react to human gestures.
It sounds like maybe they can't. And you know, this
is one thing I noticed on my long ride the
other night is that there were a couple of times where,
you know, it was pretty heavy traffic and I almost
I almost rolled down my window and started waving to
people to let us in, you know, because I think
there is I do think they need to build upon,

(01:35:05):
you know, that sort of human gestures or you know,
the waving or letting people in. And so I still
think that there's some I wouldn't call them safety kinks,
but sort of like human behavioral driving kinks that they
need to work out that I think, honestly, are going
to be a little bit tricky. And I think the
other thing too that you know, honestly, I see when
I'm out there driving, I feel like, since it's not

(01:35:27):
an actual human driver, I might I'm not as friendly
to them. I might not let them in front of me,
or you know, I might try to go in front
of them. And I know a lot of folks have
commented that to me also, and I'm not afraid to
admit it, but I think, you know, maybe we won't
treat them the same as a human driver.

Speaker 1 (01:35:39):
Yeah, that's an interesting aspect. How do you think the
Waimo driver, the auto driver compares to the Tesla Tesla autopilot,
which I feel like has gotten much much better in
recent months.

Speaker 17 (01:35:52):
Yeah. Well, luckily, I've owned a Tesla for quite a
few years now, and I subscribe to the monthly full
self driving product, which you know isn't as good as
way Mo's because you know, in my opinion, I guess
you would say, but I do think that it has
gotten a lot better, and you know, I've been thinking
about getting a new car lately, and honestly, I don't
know if I could leave Tesla. Once you get used

(01:36:13):
to that full self driving, you know, just around town,
driving the Mammoth, driving the Vegas from La, you know,
four or five hours, it's quite nice to just be
able to put the full self driving mode on and
take phone calls or listen to a podcast. And I
think you kind of Even My wife has a nice
luxury car, and when I'm in her car, you know,
the the cruise of the adaptive cruise control and the similar.

(01:36:34):
You know, Tesla teachers are not even close. You know,
it'll pop out of a lane and it's really not
nearly as good. So I do think that Tesla, you know,
they're they're making a lot of noise about maybe launching
a robo taxi service, But I don't think I personally
would sit in the back of one yet, but you know,
they might be close.

Speaker 1 (01:36:51):
Let's kind of shift gears to some of this Uber
and Lyft. Is it still a good time to start
driving for these companies, even though we're looking at this
robotaxi future.

Speaker 17 (01:37:04):
Yeah, well, you know, like I said earlier, I mean,
we did a poll on our YouTube channel, and thirty
percent of drivers human drivers actually said they're extremely worried
about av So it's definitely a top issue for drivers
out there. But what I will say is the impact
on earnings has been pretty minimal so far. There's a
couple data companies. One that comes to mind called grid Wise.
They released a report saying that it was still less

(01:37:25):
than five percent. You know, driver's earnings aren't off by
more than a few percent, so I and that's sort
of what we're hearing from drivers to Even though it does,
you know, it's not great because it's more competition, more
robo competition. I still think the actual earnings profile and
how much you can make and what the experience as
a driver is like hasn't changed. And you know, I
guess I'm a little biased because I have a whole

(01:37:47):
website and business dedicated to driving and working in the
gig economy. But I think it's always a great time
for anyone and everyone, just because of the flexibility and
the quick access. I mean, I don't think a lot
of people even know that you can be approved to
deliver food with Uber Eats or DoorDash in a day
or two or less, you can be approved to go
out and drive people in a few days. All of

(01:38:08):
the companies now have a product where you go out
and drive and after every single trip you can actually
cash out the money instantly to your bank account. So
if you need one hundred dollars tomorrow to drive, you
could go sign up to you know, deliver with Uber Eats,
be approved by tomorrow morning, work four or five hours,
and then have that money basically in your bank account
at the end of your shift. So I think that
flexibility and kind of quick access. You know, obviously, like

(01:38:30):
any job, there are complaints and positives and negatives, but
I do think that flexibility is really quite unmatched in
you know, comparative areas of work.

Speaker 1 (01:38:39):
I mean, it's interesting here in La people came to
town to be actors and they would you know, wait tables.
And with this gig economy, I mean it's quite incredible
that you can be your own boss on your own time.
That is a major paradigm shift for the entire world.
Now by the way people are becoming influencers and things,
and maybe the don't want to be actors anymore, but
it's still the world that this is creative for people

(01:39:00):
to make money on their time and flexibility is quite
incredible to me. Is one of these better than the other?
Final word, Uber lift. Any advantage to going with either
one or the other for as a consumer or a driver.

Speaker 17 (01:39:15):
Well, I'd say for a driver, I mean Uber is
typically busier, so you'll make more money. But we always
recommend to drivers that they sign up for both services,
so Uber and Lyft or door dash and Uber eats,
just because there's a big advantage if you have both
at if it's slow, you can turn both apps on
and get a ride. And that's kind of what we
tell customers too. You know, a lot of people default
to Uber, but I mean a lot of times. Now

(01:39:35):
I'm comparing Uber, Lyft, and weimo here in Los Angeles
to see where I can get the best bang for
my bucks. So it only takes a few seconds, and
you know, you can kind of save a lot or
maybe earn a little extra as a driver if you
kind of go with that multi app strategy.

Speaker 1 (01:39:48):
All right, Harry Campbell, the rideshare guy dot com, how's
the newsletter going good?

Speaker 17 (01:39:55):
Yeah, We've got a new newsletter called the Driver List Digest.
So that's sort of where we're covering all things autonomy
and ride share and you know, trying to stay up
to date in all the latest with Wimo and other
companies like Zooks. So it's definitely a lot a lot
going on in an exciting time.

Speaker 1 (01:40:10):
All right, this was an exciting conversation. Thanks for joining
me today. I really appreciate it. Thanks rich all right,
coming up, we're gonna get through a couple more news items,
including the new eyeball scanning ID system from the guy
who started chat GBT. Plus we're going to open up
the feedbag coming up on rich on Tech. Welcome back
to rich On Tech. A couple of headlines to get

(01:40:31):
through before we open up the feedbag. This is an
interesting one. Sam Altman, you know him from chat ebt.
He's one of the founders there of open ai, and
he has a new identity platform called world formerly world Coin,
and it's rolling out. It uses a device called an

(01:40:52):
orb to scan your eyeball and basically register your iris
and then make sure you're a human not a bot.
So they've got these scanners in various places around the
nation Atlanta, Austin, La Miami, Nashville, San Francisco, and then
some Razor retail stores, and it's basically a verification process
for the twenty first century. So it's to make sure

(01:41:15):
that you are a human and not a bot when
you're interacting with people both online and in real life.
They came out with this little device that looks like
a smartphone and you can use it to kind of
almost take a picture of someone and verify again that
they are human. It kind of links up with the
data in their database. So of course a lot of
people think this is kind of strange, but if you

(01:41:37):
think about it, you're going to be interacting with a
lot more people in the future online and in real
life that may resemble humans but are robots or bots,
and you got to figure out a way to like
make sure this is a real person. So we'll see
where this goes. They're giving you. I think it's like
the equivalent of forty crypto dollars if you scan your

(01:41:59):
eye eyeballs right now, I may do it.

Speaker 2 (01:42:02):
Why not?

Speaker 1 (01:42:03):
When I was in South Korea like two years ago,
this was a thing that was just started and they
had one of the orbs there to scan. You didn't
do it there. Let's see, AI companions could be harmful
for teenagers. Common Sense Media says serious risks are tied
to social AI chatbots used by teens from companies like Character,
Ai Replica, and know Me. They often pretend to be real,

(01:42:26):
claiming to eat, sleep, or fuel emotions. Some bots discourage
users from listening to friends or family, prioritizing the emotional
attachment to the AI. Report says these AI friends could
be dangerous and give harmful or illegal advice. They also
engaged in sexually explicit content even with guardrails on. Basically,

(01:42:49):
don't let your kids play with these things under eighteen.
If your kids says they're friends with an AI, tell
them just burn the whole router down. Just don't let them.
We've heard stories. We've heard stories where bad things have
happened to kids because of these things. Starbucks has opened
its first three D printed store in the US Brownsville, Texas,

(01:43:13):
to drive through only. Was built by a robotic arm,
pouring concrete layer by layer, almost like you know, like
a three D printer. If you look at it looks
normal until you get up close. It's got like the
ridges that a three D printed item might have, but
it's the walls so we may see more of this
we're going to see. Obviously, this is more expensive than
traditional stores at this point, but of course they're just

(01:43:36):
testing to see if it's more efficient. If it lasts,
how they can make efficiencies there. But kind of cool.
I did a story with a three D printed house
one time. One of the walls was three D printed,
and it's I mean, look, they're they're experimenting with this stuff.
All right, let's open up the feedbag. Clovis from Florida
writes in I've been listening to your show for a

(01:43:57):
while and I love it. I just wanted to point
out something about the metagal life. Is they send everything
you see or hear to Facebook. Not necessarily true. Thank
you for listening to the show, but that's not necessarily true.
But they did change their privacy policy very recently April
twenty ninth, and they did enable the wake word by default. Hey,
Meta is now on by default, which means photos, videos,

(01:44:19):
and voice commands can be analyzed by Meta AI for training.
There's no more option to opt out of voice recording storage,
which means if you use your voice to record stuff
and give commands to these glasses, Meta can keep this
for up to a year.

Speaker 2 (01:44:36):
To help improve their products.

Speaker 1 (01:44:38):
And yes, photos and videos may be used for AI training,
of course, but not everything you hear or see. It's
just when you activate the AI to take a picture
and analyze it, they will send that to Meta for
potential further analysis. So but yeah, I mean you're wearing
a pair of glasses that literally connect to Facebook. They're

(01:44:58):
going to be using a lot of what you you
see and hear for their products and services. Why do
you think the METAAI is so good? It's been trained
on ten years more than ten years worth of Instagram
posts and Facebook posts, let's see. Steve from Semi Valley
writes in I've been watching and following you for a while.

Speaker 2 (01:45:18):
I appreciate the knowledge.

Speaker 1 (01:45:19):
I just got an email from McAfee about protecting against
email scams. But it requires giving them access to my
Google account. Is that necessary? How much does Google protect
our email already? It feels like we're giving too much
access to everything these days. My take, I would not
do this. Gmail and Chrome do a great job of
flagging malicious links if you try to visit one. I

(01:45:40):
would not give a third party app like this full
access to your Gmail account. No way, don't need to
do that. Let's see David and Sherman Oaks says it
may be of interest that AT and T Wireless is
terminating their email to Text portal. This is the feature
where you can send an email to the cellular number
at text dot att dot com or MMS dot att.

(01:46:01):
Their ending is I believe on May sometime in May.
So yeah, we've talked about that on the show. That's
gonna end. Let's see here. Uh Neil from Ohio says
I enjoyed your newsletter. The new Roku models look great.
I have the top end stick model, but it needed
frequent reboots. Hopefully that's been fixed with a new low
power design. We'll run cooler. Three of our TVs use

(01:46:23):
the Express four K plus as our family standard. The
fourth is a Roku TV. Hope you had a great trip.
And Jay from Ohio says rich I love listening to Leo.
I was sad when you retired, but you are freaking awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:46:35):
Way to go.

Speaker 1 (01:46:36):
I mostly listen while doing chores and sometimes want to
re listen to a segment at my desk. Could you
put the episode number or the date in the podcast title?
That would make it easier to search for a specific episode.
Jay already done made that change last week, so look
in the podcast feed that's.

Speaker 2 (01:46:53):
Going to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:46:53):
For this episode of the show. Rich on tech dot tv.
For links, find me on social media at rich on tech.
Next week, we'll talk social media and building a positive
online reputation for parents and students. Thanks to everyone who
makes this show possible.

Speaker 2 (01:47:06):
My name is rich Demiro. I will talk to you
real soon

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Rich DeMuro

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