006 Rich on Tech Radio Show - February 11, 2023 - Rich On Tech

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is bing back Baby. Not to be outdone, Google says
we've got AI two how to protect yourself from simswapping,
Plus your tech questions answered? What is going on? I'm
Rich Demiro and this is Rich on Tech, the show
where I talk about the tech stuff I think you
should know about, and it's the place where I answer

(00:22):
your questions about technology. I'm the tech reporter at KTLA
Channel five in Los Angeles. Welcome to the show. Phone
lines are now open at one eight eight eight Rich
one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two,
four to one zero one. Now, this is not a

(00:43):
show for techies. I know that sounds strange, right, not
a show for techies, although I do think that techies
enjoy this show, and if you are a techie, I
think you'll like it. But this is a show for everyone.
Technology affects so many of our lives in everything that
we do. So my job is to help you understand
that technology, stay on top of it, and answer your questions,

(01:03):
whether that's a tech question, whether that's a theoretical question,
whether you just want to say hi, give me a call.
If you have a question about technology, This is the
show for you. Now, if you can't tell already the
show might sound a little bit different. This is another
first for the rich On Tech Show. I am coming
to you live from New Jersey. No, I'm not here

(01:24):
for the super Bowl, although I may watch it while
I'm here. Super Bowl's not happening here. I mean it
is on TVs, I guess. No. I'm here because my
brother is having a housewarming party. I didn't want to
miss it for the world, and so I said, you
know what, I might as well dive off the edge
and just try this whole remote show thing. And so
I am sitting here looking at the hills of New Jersey,

(01:45):
the Garden State. Did you know that New Jersey gets
such a bad rap? But it is such a beautiful place.
So I'm looking at a beautiful hill. It was cold
out this morning. Went for a nice walk here seeing
my family while I'm here as well. So if the
show it sounds a little different, if there's a little
hiccup here there, you know what, it's all learning experience.
I lugged a lot of stuff here to make this

(02:06):
show possible through the airport, so it should be a
lot of fun to do this. And also I'm quite
impressed just how fun it is to be able to
do a show anywhere, well, I guess in the world.
But let's not get let's not get too ahead of
ourselves right now, anywhere in the US. Let's say so,
that's kind of cool. This was a huge week for
artificial intelligence. And this is what I love about hanging

(02:28):
out with people like my family, my friends, who are
not necessarily techies. It's because I live in a world
where I just assume the knowledge base.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
Right.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
I've been hearing about chat GPT now for weeks, I've
been playing with it, I've been talking about it. And
then you sit down to dinner with a bunch of
what I call regular folks, and I break out the
chat GPT talk and next thing you know, the record stops.
It skips everyone at the tables like, what are you
talking about? Rich? And I said, wait, what you don't

(02:58):
know about chat GPT. If this is single handedly turn
the tech world upside down in the span of a
couple of weeks, it is bringing Google to a screeching
halt as well. It's making Microsoft maybe have a chance
to be on top once again with their being search engine.
It is changing everything from love to Snapple I'll explain
the moment. So chat GPT launched a couple of weeks ago.

(03:22):
It's from a company called open Ai. And imagine, instead
of a search engine, you're feeding all of the world's
information into this AI chatbot that can respond to you
in a very human like manner. That's what's happening with
chat GPT. Now, keep in mind, chat gpd is not perfect.
It's not up to date. The last time it was

(03:42):
updated was twenty twenty one. With its knowledge, I mean,
the technology is up to date, but the information that
it's fed is only through twenty twenty one because it's
a research tool. But it's been enough to really make
these big companies think about their future, especially Google. So
this week both Google and micros said, you know what
we've got AI. We're gonna show it off to the world.

(04:04):
Google showed off this thing called Bard, which is its
AI search engine, and they didn't really show too much
of it. They just said, you know, it kind of
has a lot of the same features as chat GPT,
except it's fresher. We've got all the Google information built
into this search engine. And then Bing actually invited journalists
up to their headquarters near Seattle, and they said, we're

(04:25):
gonna show you this, and we're going to show you
what we have, and by the way, we're gonna unveil
this to the world and let actual people use this
like very soon, like now. And so they showed off
the new bing which has chat GPT built in, but
a newer, fresher version of chat GPT built in. I know,
if this all sounds wild, it really is. But if

(04:45):
you use one of these search engines, it's just incredible
what it does. It talks to you like a human
would It talks to you like your friend might. You
can ask it almost anything. You can ask it to
write you an email to your employer saying I'd like
it job, or I'd like to quit my job, or
I'd like a raise, or you can ask it to
write a sales proposal, or you can tell it, hey,

(05:07):
give me ten of the best things to do when
I'm in Italy for a week. It's not just Microsoft
and Google. A search engine named Neiva. They've already got
an AI search result Chinese search engine bay Do. They
are testing their ernie bot Chinese commerce giant Ali Baba.
They're testing AI for shopping, which leads me to think, hey,

(05:29):
where's Amazon in all of this? Imagine, instead of just
searching Amazon for a particular product, you tell the Amazon
AI search bot exactly what you need. You're looking for
a couch that measures this exact dimension you want it,
in this exact color, in this exact fabric, And instead
of shuffling through all kinds of links and products and

(05:51):
seeing what they have to offer, it will give you
the exact couch that meets your specific criteria. This is
where the future is headed. It is quite incredible. Now
I mentioned that even Snapple has AI. Snapple has this
thing called the fact Generator FAI ct generator. Remember if
you I mean, it's funny that I'm in New Jersey

(06:11):
talking about Snapple because growing up that was a very
big part of my childhood. But Snapple is nationwide, of course,
and under the cap they've got those little Snapple facts.
In fact, according to Snaple Information, there have been one thousand,
six hundred and seventy seven Snapple Real facts under the lid.
So now you can type in anything you want in

(06:32):
this Snapple fact generator. It says, write a wild fact.
Let's say a wild fact about blueberries, about blueberries, and
I type this in and within seconds it's doing its
little machine learning. It's AI, and it says snaple fact
number thirteen and thirty four wild blueberries have twice the

(06:53):
antioxidants of cultivated ones, So that's Snapple using AI. Then
there's a website called Flame AI. So you've got this
app called flame Flamme. They've got an AI for relationships.
So they've taken chat GPT and they've narrowed it down
to just love and relationship questions. So you can go

(07:14):
to this website and you can type in a question
about love. If you have a question about your partner
or a question about someone that you're into, and you
want to ask this AI for advice, you can do that,
or you can just say something like best date ideas
involving heights in New York City. Now, if you were
to type that into a typical search engine, you'd get
a whole bunch of results, right. You'd get links from blogs,

(07:36):
you get links from YouTube, you get links from just
random tweets about people saying what they like to do
in New York City on a date. But what this
does is it has all of the Internet's information and
it's thinking about all the different blogs and tweets and
different sources that mention kind of the same things. And
then here's what it comes up with. Answer number one,

(07:57):
take a trip to the Empire State Building Observatory. Number
two head over to the Brooklyn Bridge for romanic stroll
and breathtaking views of the Manhattan skyline. Number three check
out the Highline. Number four, if you're brave, try a
couple skydiving experience over New York City. Not doing that,
that's for sure. Number five, have dinner at a restaurant
with outdoor seating with a skyline view. Number six. Visit

(08:19):
Top of the Rock Observation Center for a three hundred
and sixty degree view of Manhattan. Number seven take a
tour of one of New York City's rooftop bars for
memorable for a memorable night of drinks and food. This
is absolutely incredible. So everything is turning to this new
AI and everyone is leaning on AI to change the world. Now,

(08:42):
this has a lot of implications for not only the
way we search, the way that we get information, the
way that term papers are written. If you're coming up
with a game show, you can ask AI to write
your game show questions for you. Stuff that takes the
jeopardy folks months of research to do. Now you have
to be careful, though, because the one big downside of AIS,
it's not always right. This is not perfect, this is

(09:04):
not an exact science. AI gets it wrong. I just
looked up some information about the Super Bowl, and boy
did have some outdated information and some information that was
just flat out wrong. So if kids are thinking about
using this to write their term papers, which many are, yeah,
you can use it for a rough draft or maybe
some research or talking points, but you better fact checked

(09:25):
almost everything that AI comes up with. Look the bottom
line here, search content and the ad business around search
is going to be forever changed by this technology, and
that has a really big implication for Google. Google, you're wondering,
why didn't you have search AI out of the gate,
Why weren't you first? Well, because this turns their entire

(09:46):
advertising business upside down. When you do a Google search,
what do you see at the top? You see links,
advertising links that pay Google. Google hopes you tap those
links because guess what, it makes them money, and that's
their entire business. They made billions in the last quarter
that way. Now, if you're just tapping something or typing
something into a search engine. You get the exact answer

(10:08):
you need without clicking a whole bunch of links, some
of those links paying Google. Now, what how does Google
make money? It's a really big question. I think they
are really struggling to answer right now. AI is gonna
have a big impact on everything every industry. You can
think about restaurants, clothing, cars, and more. It is going
to be a wild ride. I hope you check out

(10:30):
some of these AI search engines because it is just
quite incredible. And bringing it back to the dinner table
last night, I'm not kidding. Everyone started going on chat
GBT looking up answers and things, and their minds were
just opened up. They just said, Wow, this is incredible
and it's just gonna have so many implications for the
way I do my job, and also my kids and

(10:51):
what they're gonna do. All right, Coming up on today's show,
we've got some great guests this week. I've got Wall
Street Journal columnist Joanna Stern. He's going to join me
to talk about Microsoft's big AI event this week. She's
been playing with the new bings. She's one of the
lucky ones. We are going to get her take on
what it can do. I've got one Carlos Bagnell. He
is some gadget guy on YouTube. He's going to chat

(11:14):
about the new one plus products. They've got a new phone,
new earbuds which I really like, and their first tablet.
And later in the show, did you have a baseball
card collection back in the day. I'm going to talk
to the founder of an app that lets you scan
your card collection, whether it's baseball, basketball, Pokemon or more
to see what it's worth. Plus your calls up next

(11:34):
at Triple eight rich one oh one. If you have
a question about technology, give me a call at Triple
eight seven four to two, four to one zero one.
My name is Rich Dmiro. You are listening to rich
on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name
is Rich Damuro. You can find links to anything I
mentioned on the show at my website Richontech dot tv,

(11:57):
and you can find me on Instagram at rich on Tech.
Phone lines are open. If you have a question about technology,
give me a call. It's one eight eight eight rich
one oh one one eight eight eight seven four to two,
four one zero one. Kathy is in San Bernardino, California. Kathy,
you are on with.

Speaker 3 (12:16):
Rich question about Microsoft's three sixty five, which I understand
is cloud based.

Speaker 1 (12:24):
Is there any risk of.

Speaker 3 (12:25):
Cross migration between my personal office three sixty five account
and my employer's new mandatory Office three sixty five accounts
that we're supposed to use remotely.

Speaker 1 (12:37):
Oh, you sound very excited about this Mandatory Office three
sixty five.

Speaker 3 (12:42):
Well, it's it's because I wouldn't want a any of
my documents to disappear, because I read the fine print
and it says the employer can choose to pull back
any documents that you have created with their account, which
I understand, but also because there's always a risk with
who knows which employees have have permissions and what they

(13:07):
might do with those permissions.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
Yeah. Absolutely, all right, So let's break this down. So,
first off, you can you can definitely use your employer's
three sixty five log in as well as your own.
In fact, I do that on a daily basis. So
I've got my own office three sixty five and then
I've got my corporate three sixty five and I've got
Windows running in the same browser with both instances. Now,

(13:31):
with that said, number one, you have to be careful
because you need to know which account you're working on
at that specific time, so you need to make sure
if you're uploading a document to like one drive, you
need to make sure that that's the correct one. You
don't want to put a personal document in your employer's file,
and you don't want to put your employee file in
your personal stuff more so, you probably want to be

(13:53):
worried about putting your personal stuff into your employee file. Now,
the email is going to be pretty straightforward because you're
gonna recognize your inbox very quickly to see which one's
your corporate inbox, which one's your personal inbox, And there's
no real issue with them cross contaminating each other as
long as you know what you're doing and you know
which account you're using at the right time. Now, with

(14:15):
that said, you will notice that you're going to have
to authorize the accounts more often than you may have
to if you're just using one account, because sometimes the
system does get a little confused and it's like, Okay,
which account is she using right now? Is it her corporate?
Let's just make sure you put your password back in.
And usually the corporate accounts have more requirements for security,

(14:36):
so they're going to ask you for your password more
than say, you know your personal account. Perhaps with all
of that said, you need to be the most careful about,
you know, just knowing that anything you do on your
employee corporate three sixty five account, you know they can see,
so they can see how you're using that account. They
can see where you log in from, they can see

(14:57):
what you're doing, they can see what you're uploading, what
you're downloading, all through the lens of what you're doing
on three sixty five. I'm not saying they have your
entire computer that they can monitor, unless you're using a VPN,
and then that is a very different topic. So that's
really the main thing. You just have to also keep
in mind that at any point they may, like you said,

(15:19):
pull the account so they can go into your account
see what files you have in there. They can look
at your emails, they can scan your emails. They may
even get reports of when you do your emails and
how many emails you send on a daily basis without
specifically looking at your emails, although they reserve that right
as well. So what I'm trying to say is that
when you're using a corporate account, there is really the

(15:41):
only rule is that your employer's eyes can see pretty
much everything that is happening inside that account. But running
the two instances on your computer. I do that on
a daily basis and it works just fine. You just
have to be careful again about what you are doing
in which account. So, Kathy, great, first question for this

(16:01):
this show, and thanks for calling. All right, let's go
to Joyce in San Diego. Joyce, you are on with Rich.
How can I help? Chris is in Temecula.

Speaker 4 (16:15):
Yes, Hi, Hey, Chris, can you So here's my question.
I have a Samsung Smart TV, but it's a lower mode,
lower lower end. Have it in the bedroom, and it
says that it's Bluetooth capable, but it won't connect to
my Samsung airpud.

Speaker 5 (16:33):
So I bought a device and I realized that there
are no ports on the computer. So I'm wondering if
there's some type of wireless transmitter, if you will, that
I could use, you know, from the TV through that
to the air buds. So I consume it in the
bedroom bedroom when other people are outside watching TV. I
don't want to bother them.

Speaker 1 (16:54):
So the TV has Bluetooth, but you're saying there's just
no functionality to connect the AirPods.

Speaker 5 (16:59):
Well, yeah, I have the Samsung here buds okay, okay,
and there's no on the back of the TV. There
are no places to plug anything in other than a
coax cable. Again, it's the lower end TV, but it's
just for the bedroom. I bought a device from best
Buy that plugged in, but again there's no plug ins

(17:20):
on the on the TV. So I'm wondering if there's
a wireless device that.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
I can give in to it. There's no HDMI on
that TV.

Speaker 5 (17:28):
I there may be HDMI, I mean there should be.

Speaker 1 (17:31):
Yes, Okay, So I mean there's really I mean unless
there's an audio out on the TV, which if there is,
if there's like a headphone jack, you can get a
product called airfly and plug that in.

Speaker 5 (17:43):
There is no headphone jack.

Speaker 1 (17:44):
There's no headphone jack. Okay. With no headphone jack and
only coax and maybe HDMI, the best thing I can
do is recommend that you would get some sort of
streaming device, whether it's a Roku stick or a Amazon
Fire TV stick, something really inexpensive, and then you can
connect the Bluetooth earbuds to that. But you're only gonna
be able to listen to things that are streaming through

(18:04):
that device. So if you're connecting like a standard cable
box or something to this TV, that's just not gonna
work because it's not gonna it's not gonna stream the
information from the COAX to the Bluetooth because there's just
not a way that I know to connect that. If
there was something that was sort of an RCA out,
you can definitely go on Amazon and get sort of

(18:25):
an RCA to Bluetooth adapter, a little transmitter that would work,
But without having ports on the back, it's really gonna
be tricky to get that out of COAX. You're listening
to rich on Tech. More of your calls next at
Triple eight rich one oh one, Welcome back to rich
on Tech. This is the show where I talk about
the tech stuff I think you should know about. It's

(18:47):
also the place where I answer the questions you have
about technology. Welcome back to the show. My name is
rich Demiro. On the line is Joanna Stern. She is
a Wall Street Journal columnist and she was at the
Microsoft event this week where they showed off the new
bing infused with artificial intelligence. Joanna, welcome to the show.

Speaker 6 (19:07):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1 (19:10):
So I'm kind of jealous because I've wanted to play
with this bing dot com slash new. I'm on the
waiting list, but you already have access or you had access,
So can you first just explain, Oh, you've got access, okay,
so you're using it on a daily I mean, Number one,
it's wild to think that bing could stage a major comeback.

(19:31):
Is that true? Do you think that could happen at
this point?

Speaker 6 (19:35):
I think it's going to be very hard for being
to capture Google's ninety plus percent of the search engine
market share, but there is a fighting chance. There is
this slight chance that it does capture some of it,
and I think this week. I mean, we don't have
stats yet, but there certainly seems to be a lot
of interest in people saying, hey, I might try out

(19:57):
bing again, which is a pretty big thing.

Speaker 1 (20:01):
I mean, it's words that I didn't think I would say,
and I tweeted those, and I've been, you know, going
just like everyone else, to the waiting list and trying
to get on there and trying to see what they've
shown off. So a couple of things that they showed off,
So Number one, better search so their search has more
relevant results. Because it's infused with this AI. Then they
also have a way that you can use kind of

(20:22):
a chatbot that is a better version of chat gpt.
So can you tell me about that? How did that work?

Speaker 6 (20:28):
Yeah, so anyone who's used chat chpt knows. Great, you
have this search box type of thing. You type in
anything you really want to have this bot generate or
search for you. The issue with chatchept is that it
doesn't really have knowledge of the modern, current live world.
It's based on a model that was stopped being updated
around two thousand and I think it was twenty twenty one.

(20:51):
So what bing is doing here they're bringing some of
that secret sauce from open Ai, right, They've got a
deep partnership with open Ai. But they're putting the bing
search engine in with it. And so that means that
you can ask BIG's chat bot what they just called
chat really anything about current events about the world, and
it will write back to you. And so this idea

(21:12):
of sort of asking search I mean, we all remember
asked Jeeves. You really can just talk to it in
normal sentences and it writes back to you in normal
sentences that you really would think were written by a human.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
I really feel like the Ask Jeeves people are just
sitting there, like every one of those engineers that work
there is just saying, you know, we were onto this
many many years ago. Now. Ask Jeeves was kind of
like to me, like a laugh. It was just, you know,
the answers were not very good, and I had many limitations,
but they were onto the right thing. I mean, if
you look at the Google kind of auto complete, so
many of it or so much of it is like

(21:46):
written in question form. Like people still ask a lot
of questions to search engines.

Speaker 6 (21:51):
Yeah, and I think you sort of think about all
we've learned to sort of hack search engines, right, we
know that this sort of terms the ways we're supposed
to put in things to get the answers we want,
and that's really all trying to just figure out how
do we get the best answer. And so now these
search engines and you're being right now and Google, what
we are promising with bart is that they will have

(22:13):
the natural language processing, the natural language understanding to understand
your deep questions. Really, I mean, I don't know how
deep you want to go on some of these search engines,
but you can kind of just write out that question
and it should respond like you've asked a human for
the answer.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
All right. So Being says since they've applied this AI
to their core search algorithm, they've had the largest jump
in relevance in two decades with their search engine ranking.
So that means that the answers you get in general
are more accurate and more relevant. Then, like we said,
you've got this chat area where you can get you know,
you can ask it things like create me a five

(22:52):
day itinerary for going to Italy or you know, tell
me how to prep for a job interview. I mean
these are examples that being gay. Then you've got the
Edge browser. They built in some new smarts to that,
like it can help you write emails and things like that.

Speaker 6 (23:07):
Yeah, so I actually think this is the biggest announcement
they made because how much time do we spend in
our browser and on different websites and not on the
actual search website. Right, That's probably how we spend most
of our time. And so in the new Microsoft Edge browser,
they have a sidebar. It's called the bing sidebar. You
can click on this and I'm using it right now,
and it has three different tabs. It's got chats so

(23:28):
you can ask sort of the main questions you would
if you went to bing dot com. You can search
through there. You can go to compose, where you can
ask it to compose whatever you wanted to write for you. Really,
if you want to email, a blog, post, social media posts, lists, etc.
And just got a little box in there and you say,
write me an email to my new boss asking I

(23:49):
don't know, for a time to get some coffee. And
then it gives you a little area too, where you
can put in what you want the tone of that
to be. You want it to be professional, you want
it to be funny, you wanted to be enthusiastic, Tell
how long you want it to be short, long, medium,
and hit generate and it's going to write this email
for you, or it's going to write whatever you really
ask it to. And so I think that's sort of

(24:10):
a big game changer here is that you can be
on any website and you can be doing it. Another
really cool trick in this and that I think is
really really useful, though I'm a little bit worried about
my profession, is you can be in an article. You
can say summarize this article, and it will give you
the summary of the article and you can say five
bullet points.

Speaker 7 (24:29):
Now I would want to agree that.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah. Well, I mean, look, we're going to have to,
you know, up our game here and somehow differentiate from
what the AI can do. I mean, it can write scripts,
it can write you know, it can write articles. It
really can do a lot. One of the takeaways from
your video with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, was
that he said, in the future, pretty much everyone is
going to have a working first draft of whatever they need,

(24:52):
whether that's term paper, a letter, anything, because these AI
tools can generate them. What did you think about that.

Speaker 6 (25:01):
I actually wrote about that quote specifically in my newsletter
yesterday because it's the piece that sort of stuck with
me all week as I was talking to other people
about this announcement. I think it's I think it's right.
I think we all are going to start to interact
with computers in a different way, and we may come
to our computers and the computer might have done something
for us that we used to do with our time,
our own time. But I think there are a couple

(25:24):
of ways that that is just not going to be
as good as humans. And I think that's one of
the main ways, and I think I did ask mister
Nadella about this and various other people at Microsoft, which
is accuracy, right of fact checking and knowing not putting
so much trust in these in this AI system that
it's always got it right. And even so far my

(25:44):
experience using Being and many others in the last couple
of days have shown that it has many inaccurate results.
Now Microsoft is doing a good job at sort of
hedging that they'll say this might be the answer, or
this isn't, this isn't the definitive answer. But still, you know,
people are likely to trust what they read here, and
so we have to as humans, as we're using these tools,

(26:06):
really just become hyper aware of is this true? Like
how do we find a secondary source? How do we
find the primary source to prove that what that thing
told me is actually the answer I want?

Speaker 1 (26:17):
Or And one of the things one of the things
that these search engines are doing, like the uh, you know,
the Being, the New Bing and kind of these other
ones that I've talked about, is that they're giving almost
like remember when you wrote like a bibliography or like
the footnotes for your story or a paper you wrote.
It's almost giving you, like the links to where it
found this information.

Speaker 6 (26:36):
But to me giving you citations.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
Citations, that's the word. But if you have to go
through and fact check every single thing that this says,
then isn't that just a lot of work in itself?
Like you might as well just do the work at
the beginning? Or is it? I mean, is there just
easier because it sort of came up with that first
paragraph that you just have to go through and make
sure it's okay. Like what if you ask, like who's
playing in the super Bowl today and it said, here's
the teams, here's the quarterbacks. Now you've got to go

(27:01):
and you know, look at all those things and cross
reference just to make sure it's right.

Speaker 6 (27:06):
And that's so that's actually the second point. So I
think accuracy is number one, and I think number two
is speed. Right it these systems, it takes a bit
of time for the for the AI to gather their
results from the web and then to put it into
its words. So for instance, in the video and my
testing that I did at Microsoft, i said, recap the

(27:26):
top winners of the twenty twenty three Grammys, and it
took about a minute for it to flush out the
entire list of that. It wasn't the entire list, but
you know, it summarized I believe, like seven of the
top winners, right. It gave me a sense of the name,
you know, Beyonce, and then gave me a little paragraphs
and did that all the way through. And that's a minute.
You know, in that amount of time, I could have
clicked one of the top links I believe it was

(27:47):
from CNN gone there, skimmed it and said okay, yeah,
I know what I need to know in less than
a minute. So we're going to have to sort of
think about how are we going to use our time,
How long does it take these things to do it
in there time? And where does that make sense?

Speaker 1 (28:02):
But it's also to that point. It's interesting because right now,
a lot of outlets will write articles saying, here are
the Grammy winners twenty twenty three, knowing that people go
to search to ask who are the winners twenty twenty three.
In the future, they may not write those articles because
they know that they're not going to get that traffic.
So this does bring up a lot of kind of
you know, changes to the way that we think about

(28:22):
search and the way that we think about knowledge and
information and also access to that. I've got to leave
it there, Joanna, tell people how to find you.

Speaker 6 (28:30):
I mean, you could search my name on Bang and
you could do that, but I will just give you
and I have it in my newsletter. Yet it doesn't
have my right age talking about the accuracy, So there
you go. It says, yeah, you know what, go search
on being and you can try to find out how
old I really am. But you could find me on Twitter,
Joanna Stern, pretty much everywhere at Joannastern and the Wall

(28:51):
Street Journal Joanna Stern, So search it in Bang and
you'll find me.

Speaker 8 (28:54):
All right.

Speaker 1 (28:55):
Thanks Joanna. Very entertaining videos as well as the newsletter
and all kinds of other stuff for Wall Street Journal.
Thanks for joining me today. Coming up, more of your
calls at eight eight eight rich one oh one one
eight eight eight seven four to two four to one
zero one. If you have a question about tech, give
me a call. Coming up, I'm gonna tell you about
new features coming soon to Google Maps and Google Translate.

(29:18):
You're listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich
on Tech. My name is rich Demiro. This is the
show where we talk about technology. If you have a
question about tech, give me a call. The phone lines
are open at triple eight rich one oh one. That's
one eight eight eight seven four to two four one
zero one. Let me tell you about some of the
ways that Google made some announcements this week. When it

(29:41):
comes to AI, this is a little bit different than
Search AI, but it kind of all falls into that
kind of same Lens here. So Google announced three major updates.
Something that deals with lens, which is their visual search tool,
something that deals with maps, and something that deals with translation.
So I'm just gonna give you kind of the highlights
of what I think is the most important announcements that

(30:02):
they made. So number one, Lens is a really handy
tool that Google has. It's a visual search tool. So
if you take a picture of a bug, or a leaf,
or a dress, it will find that on the internet
a very similar image and help you, you know, do
some research and figure out what that image is of. So,
for instance, if you want to take a picture of
a dress, you might want to shop that dress at

(30:23):
a local store, so it can do that. But it
can also identify an insect. So in the coming months
they're going to have a new feature with Lens where
you can search your screen if you have an Android.
So let's say someone sends you a picture of where
they are vacationing, and you say, oh, that looks pretty cool.
You can now just search your screen with Google Lens
and it will give you the search results based on

(30:44):
what it sees on your screen. And actually I needed
this feature the other day, Like I literally was trying
to do this because I can't remember what I was searching,
but it was just something on my screen that I
was like, oh, I need to search this. So I
ended up having to take a screenshot and then putting
that into Google Lens to search it. But it was
so much. It'll be so much when you can just
long press your power button on your Android phone and
it will do that search. The other thing is that

(31:07):
Maps is rolling out this new immersive view which is
gonna be really really cool. So imagine street View, but
much more three D, so you'll be able to literally
walk down the streets of a foreign city or you know,
in this case, London, Los Angeles, New York, and San
Francisco and Tokyo. Those are the first months that it's
first cities that it's launching in and then they're going

(31:28):
to roll out to other cities after that. That is
an amazing new feature called Immersive View, which I cannot
wait to get my hands on. And finally, if you
use Google Translate, whenever you translate something on a sign,
they're actually gonna blend the letters into the sign better,
so it literally looks like the sign in front of
you has just morphed into the language that you can
read much more easily. All right, Coming up on the show,

(31:49):
we're going to talk about new OnePlus products with jan
Carlos Bagnell, some gadget guy on YouTube. You're listening to
rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. My
name is rich Timiro, tech reporter at KTLA Channel five
in Los Angeles, sitting here with you talking technology, answering
your questions, and it's basically the show to talk about

(32:09):
the tech stuff I think you should know about. And
this week oh so much between AI and new product launches.
Later in the show, we're gonna talk one new one
plus products with one Carlos Bagnell. He is a youtubeer
viewer and it's got several several products to talk about.
A new phone, a new tablet, new earbuds that I've

(32:32):
been loving from one plus I love now gosh, this
is like the third set of earbuds that they've made
that I really really like, especially if you have an
Android phones. We'll talk about that. I'm gonna talk about
a new way to stream content for free, but first
let's go to LURI in Ventura, California. Louri, you are
on with Rich? Hi?

Speaker 3 (32:53):
Rich?

Speaker 1 (32:53):
How you doing any I am doing fantastic.

Speaker 9 (32:56):
How are you good?

Speaker 8 (32:58):
Good? I'm glad to see you on PLA to great?

Speaker 1 (33:03):
Thank you? Can you tell that I'm broadcasting from a
remote location in New Jersey, the Garden State?

Speaker 9 (33:10):
Seriously?

Speaker 1 (33:13):
Absolutely, I know. It's wild. It's so it's so wild
because I'm so used to TV and there's a lot
of limitations on TV because you basically go live from
a certain place and a certain studio. But with radio,
it kind of is mind boggling because you have the
ability to go live from pretty much anywhere as long
as you have a microphone and a connection. So I'm
still kind of understanding that. But anyway, it's pretty cool

(33:35):
this weekend. So what's on your mind?

Speaker 10 (33:38):
I was wondering what the best shredder is to buy?

Speaker 1 (33:42):
Oh, what are you going to be shredding lots of Uh?
Do you have a lot of classified information at your place?

Speaker 3 (33:47):
Yeah?

Speaker 10 (33:48):
Yeah, you do.

Speaker 1 (33:50):
Okay, So it's funny. I used to be a big
shredder person, and now I just collect my papers and
bring them to like a place to shred every once
in a while. But I do think shredders are great
to have at home there. You know, they could be
a little dicey sometimes, like don't don't put a tie
near this thing, or like you know, kids and all that,
like they are kind of dangerous if they're the heavy
duty ones. Do you need a heavy duty one? Are

(34:11):
you just looking for like a standard one?

Speaker 6 (34:13):
No, a standard one, I think so.

Speaker 1 (34:15):
Just for like personal like credit card offers that come
in the mail and stuff like that.

Speaker 10 (34:19):
Yeah, yeah, okay, okay.

Speaker 1 (34:21):
So I'll tell you the two places that I go. Now.
I like to test products myself, obviously, but when I can't,
I will go to other folks that test products. And
two of the websites that I use to do that.
One is called Wirecutter. Have you heard of that? No? Okay,
So Wirecutter is a great They started out independent many
many years ago, and recently New York Times bought them,

(34:43):
and they kind of absorb them under their wings, which
is a great thing for the folks that work there
because they get more people seeing their stuff. But I
would search wirecutter and Shredder and see what that comes
up with. And I'm looking at their top pick. It's
a Amazon Basics eight sheet high security microcut shredder with
pull out basket. It's seventy bucks on Amazon. That's their

(35:03):
number one top pick, and then they have a couple
other picks there. Now, I also work for a company
that owns a review website called best Reviews dot com.
So KTLA's parent company owns a website called best reviews
dot com, very similar to Wirecutter, where they have a
whole team of experts that review stuff. And so I
will cross reference the devices on both of those pages

(35:25):
and see which one works for me in my price range. So,
according to them, the best of the best is this
Fellow's Power shred ninety nine CI. And if you click
that link, it takes you to Amazon. That is two
hundred and eighty dollars might be more than you want
to spend. The next one on the list, they say
best bang for your book is the Aurora High Security

(35:48):
eight sheet microcut paper credit card Shredder Black. It's got
sixteen thousand reviews, it is rated at four and a
half stars, and it is going for forty eight dollars.
I think that's your winner right there. Does that sound
like a good price. Yeah. So here's the thing. So

(36:10):
the way that these companies make money LORI is that
they get referral links. So every time someone clicks and
buys one of these products from them, that's how they
make their money. And so it's called affiliate linking. On
Amazon or not just Amazon. A lot of major retailers
participate in this, so it's kind of a win win situation.

(36:30):
They're editors and you know, their folks do the work.
They put all these things on the website. They say,
here's the five things we think are the best, and
then when you buy one of those things, they make
a little money. So it's all highly disclosed. It's all
very on the up and up. It's a pretty common
practice actually online. But that's kind of the way I
do it. I will also look at you know, just

(36:51):
I won't just take their word for it. I will
also look on Amazon and see kind of the ratings,
the combination of ratings and stars as well. Looking at
these these three shredders that I mentioned, they all have many,
many ratings. By the way, that Amazon basics one, if
you can believe it, it has twenty two, seven and
thirty three ratings. That's also seventy dollars. So those are

(37:13):
the three that I would look at and see which
one you like the best. And also they go buy
sheets too, like how many sheets do you want to
feed into this thing at once? You may say, oh,
I only need two sheets at a time, but you know,
once you're doing a lot of stuff, you may want
more than that. So does that help you out. I'm
going to put all this information on our website at
richontech dot tv. That's where you can find more information

(37:37):
about anything that I mentioned here. I'm pretty good at
putting the links there. So thanks for your question, Laurie,
go find that shredder all right. Let me tell you
about a new way to stream for free. And it
gets a little confusing with the free streaming because yes,
of course you can find pretty much anything you want
online for free, but not all of it operates in
a illegal zone. But there are many any websites that

(38:02):
let you stream real stuff for free. So Sling TV
is now launching one. It's called free Stream. So Sling TV,
you know, is a paid service and it allows you
to get you know, popular cable channels on your TV.
But now they have a section called free Stream which
lets you access live and on demand TV for free.

(38:22):
And so this joins other free streaming services out there
which allow you to watch a whole bunch of stuff.
And this you can download through the Sling app on Roku,
also Comcast, LG, Samsung, and Visio and Xbox devices. So
right now, this is not on the super big platforms
like the Fire TVs, the Apple TVs, and the Amazon

(38:45):
Fire Sorry Amazon Fire, Apple TV let me think about this,
and Chrome Cast. So right now this is pretty much
limited to Roku, Comcast, LG, Samsung, Visio, and Xbox. But
the cool thing is you don't need a credit card
and you don't have to put any payment in. You
can just watch all this programming. So Sling Free Stream
has more than two hundred and ten channels with forty

(39:06):
one thousand on demand titles for free. They've got news, sports,
game shows, crime dramas, sitcoms, animal stuff, ABC News Live,
Architectural Digest, Family Feud, CBS News, ESPN on Demand, Rick
Steve's Europe. That's kind of cool. And all of this,
again is something that you can experience for free. So
if you want to experience it, you can find the

(39:28):
link on my website, richon Tech dot tv, or just
download the Sling app and look for the free stream. Now,
if you're looking for other ways to stream free stuff,
I mean there's a lot of it. You've got Amazon
free V, which used to be IMDbTV, but that was
kind of a weird name. So is Amazon FREEB free V.
But whatever. Pluto TV they sort of started this entire

(39:49):
trend of free streaming. And I'll never forget having lunch
with a guy who invented Pluto TV and he pitched
it to me and I didn't get it at the time.
I said, I don't understand people are gonna want to
download an app and watch free stuff, like what about
just watching on YouTube? And I didn't understand that. You know,
a couple years later, Viacom would purchase Pluto for many,

(40:09):
many millions of dollars. But you know, I'm not right
about everything. Two B is another one of these free
services where you can watch stuff for free. I believe
it's owned by Fox. And so you've got Pluto, which
is CBS Viacom, You've got two B which is Fox,
and you've got Peacock. They have a free streaming tier
which I think is going to go away for new users,

(40:31):
but existing users will still have access. And that's NBC.
So between all these things, I mean, we're seeing kind
of a backlash with paid streaming services because people are
just saying, you know what, I'm spending too much. Netflix
has gone up in price. YouTube gives me a lot
of stuff for free. I can get stuff there. HBO Max,
You've got that costs money every month. I mean, there's

(40:52):
so many of these streaming services that once you start
paying for all of them, you might as well just
have cable TV once again. So we're seeing, you know,
people were excited about things like Netflix and all these
other streaming services, and now that they've paid the bill
for a couple of years, and the bill just keeps
going up every you know, two years, every year, whatever
it is, people are saying, you know what, I'll stick

(41:13):
with the free stuff. I'll look at ads. I mean,
it's really like broadcast television. I mean for many years
broadcast television, that's what it does. You listen for free,
kind of like the radio that I'm on right now.
I mean, you listen for free, you get the information
you need and then you know a couple of commercials
for your time. So it's the same thing with these
streaming services. They get real video products, you know, real
shows and on demand titles, but they put ads in

(41:36):
them and that's how they make their money. So again,
Sling TV, Free V by Amazon, Pluto, Toby, and Peacock,
those are always that you can watch content for free.
All right, I have to tell you about this before
we go to break here. So don't you love it
when you start a book and you're just captivated by

(41:57):
that book instantly. That's what happened to me recent I
started So I pulled folks on Twitter because I was
reading a book that I didn't really like, and so
I said, I don't know, do I stick with this
book or do I just let it go? And people
were like, just let it go. Don't stick with the
book that you don't like, Like you ever have to
think about opening the book and reading it, and it's
just not fun like reading should not be a chore.

(42:17):
So anyway, I ditched that book. I'm not going to
tell you the title that one, but I found a
new one and it's called Upgrade by Blake Crouch. And
I read one of his other books, which was Dark Matter,
and they're all kind of sci fi. This one is
about like a genetic kind of a genetic mutation of
the human body, and it makes this person. I haven't
finished it yet, but it's already really good, where this

(42:38):
guy just keeps getting more and more superhuman powers, which
you know is a classic story anyway, But the reality
is I can't put this book down. I love it,
so anyway, it's kind of fun. I highly recommend it.
I haven't gotten to the end, so maybe it totally
takes a nose dive after like fifty percent of the book,
but I can't tell you that just yet because so
far I'm loving it. So if you want a good book,
Upgrade by Blake Crouch, if you like the sci fi stuff,

(42:59):
I'm really enjoyed this book. We'll call it Rich's Book Club.
You can read it and tweet me about it, tell
me what you think about it. And by the way,
if you want to get books for free. There's an
app called Libby, which I highly recommend. L Ibby. There's
nothing illegal about it. It is an app that connects
to your local library in your city and you can

(43:20):
check out electronic books ebooks, and you could even read
them on your kindle. It is a pretty phenomenal thing,
all right. Coming up in the show, more of your questions.
If you have a tech question, give me a call
one eight eight eight rich one oh one eight eight
eight seven four to two four one zero one. If
you want links to anything I mentioned, go to my website.
Rich on Tech dot TV. Coming up, we're going to

(43:42):
talk new OnePlus products. My name is rich Dumiro. You
are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich
on Tech. My name is rich Demiro. You are listening
to the show where we talk about the tech stuff
I think you should know about, and it's a place
where I answer your questions. Every week, I sort of
give you a litle update on what I've posted to
my Instagram account because I'm always enjoying posting these reels.

(44:06):
So this week, let's see, I posted my ride in
an electric Oh, this is pretty cool. It's an all
electric semi truck for UPS. So I think I told
you a couple weeks ago that I took a ride
in this thing. Well now the story's up so you
can see what it looks like. It is UPS's first
all electric semi. They're using it in California. They've actually
got an order of ten of these things, but this

(44:28):
is the first and I was one of the first
non employees to ride in it, so that's pretty cool.
You can check that out on my Instagram at rich
on Tech. I also posted a video of this new
game called Hot Wheels rift Rally. And if you remember
the Mario Kart Live game, these were the little cars
that you could drive around your house and play on
your switch and augmented reality. Well that same game developer

(44:51):
has come up with a new Hot Wheels version of that,
so you can check out the video on that. It's
kind of cool. It's basically, you know what I think
is neat about it. And I'm trying to get my
notes here to tell you more about this because I
might as well since I already mentioned it. But I
did a story on KTLA about this this week. But
Rift Rally is kind of a mixed reality racing game,

(45:12):
so It involves a radio controlled car like a physical car,
but it also blends the virtual world. So you play
this car, you kind of set up a course around
your living room, and the car has a camera on top,
so you see your living room on your gaming console,
but you also see like an augmented reality world kind
of virtually laid on top of your living room. So

(45:35):
like just to put that, you know, in an easier
to understand terms. You're driving around your living room, but
it looks like a racetrack with like really cool things
happening all around you, and it's just really fun. So
the game is one hundred and thirty dollars, so I
think is a little pricey. I think they priced it
at one thirty so that maybe by the holidays it'll
go down to like one hundred and that way, you know,

(45:56):
I feel like that's more reasonable because you're getting a
physical toy as well the game, and as far as
I know, they said, there's no in app purchases in
the game, so you can unlock more of these hot
Wheels cars as you play the game. More so it's
a really cool little experience. The other thing to know
about this game is that it's available now on iOS
devices and also PlayStation four and five. So the big

(46:20):
thing about Mario Kart Live is that it was only
available if you had a switch, a Nintendo switch was
you know, that was the only way to play it. Now,
the fact that this can be played on an iPhone
or an iPad or you know, a PlayStation, I think
really opens up this game to many more people experiencing this.
So it's really fun. I had a blast with it.
I think that, you know, it could get a little

(46:43):
repetitive to play this over and over, but there's a
lot of different levels and things that you unlock, so
I think that's kind of the fun of it. Anyway,
Hot Wheels Rift Rally if you want to check it
out on my Instagram at rich on Tech. The game
launches on March fourteenth, twenty twenty three, So I think
that'll be a pretty hot gift this year. All right,
let's go to Chris in West Covina. Chris dialed up

(47:04):
the number at eighty eight Rich one oh one, Chris,
you're on with rich Hey, Rich, how you doing. I'm
doing fantastic.

Speaker 9 (47:11):
How are you I'm doing well?

Speaker 8 (47:13):
Thank you?

Speaker 1 (47:15):
What can I help you out?

Speaker 8 (47:15):
I have a question I'm trying to help my sister.

Speaker 10 (47:21):
She has an older Smart TV and she's trying and.

Speaker 9 (47:26):
She has the Amazon Firestick and.

Speaker 10 (47:28):
I'm trying to get the Spectrum TV app on.

Speaker 9 (47:34):
Her Firestick, but it's not available.

Speaker 1 (47:37):
Is there a workaround it's not supported? Huh no, So
Spectrum TV app, I'm trying to look at the website
here to see. Okay. So it's got Xbox iOS, Roku, Samsung,
Apple TV, Chrome Cast, and Android. Interesting. Okay, so it's
very odd that they don't support fire TV because they

(47:58):
do Roku, they do Apple TV. It seems like fire
TV is a is a major missing piece here, right hmm. Okay,
So I mean there is a way that you you know,
fire TV runs Android, and it looks like they have
an Android app, so you could sideload this. Have you
heard of the term sideloading.

Speaker 9 (48:16):
That's using?

Speaker 11 (48:17):
Is that using the downloaders?

Speaker 10 (48:20):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (48:22):
Yeah, there's like an app you can get called downloader.
Have you tried that?

Speaker 10 (48:26):
Yes?

Speaker 5 (48:27):
So I've done that on my fire Stick, but I
haven't done it on her, so I'll have to get that.

Speaker 1 (48:32):
Okay. So the basic, you know, the basic way you
do it is you download this downloader app that will
enable you to download what's called an APK. So that's
basically just the you know, like you said, you've already
done this, so that's that's kind of the program file
for Android is called APK. It's kind of like if
you have a Windows computer, it's an ex file. If
you're on a Mac, it's a d MG file. It's

(48:53):
just the way the program runs on that computer or
that device. And so this downloader app will allow you
to reach out and grab the APK for the Spectrum app,
and then you have to allow it to install stuff
from unknown sources. So there is a little bit of
a level of security risk here in case you get
an APK that's bad or you know, but this is

(49:15):
a streaming TV stick. I don't think it's gonna be
that big of a deal. But that's the best way.

Speaker 8 (49:19):
Now.

Speaker 1 (49:20):
The other thing to know is that it may not
function properly because it wasn't specifically written for this platform.
So if your sister that you're helping out, you know,
she may experience some issues with this app running, but
I think, you know, it'll probably be fine. So is
that something you think you.

Speaker 9 (49:37):
Could do for Yeah, I think so. Now my other
question regarding that security and pulling that that ATK file.

Speaker 1 (49:47):
I mean, I gotta run, can you hang on?

Speaker 8 (49:51):
Okay?

Speaker 1 (49:51):
I got to run to a commercial break. You're listening
to rich on Tech. We'll have more of the show,
including a talk about new one plus products coming up
after this. Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name
is rich Demiro, and this is the show where we
talk about technology and answer your questions. Phone lines are
open at one eight eight eight rich one oh one

(50:13):
one eight eight eight seven four to two, four to
one zero one. I do my best to post links
to anything I talk about on my website Richontech dot tv,
and of course you can find me on social media
at rich on Tech. That's a lot of rich on
Tech all Right. Before the break, I was talking to Chris.
He was asking about uh putting an app on his

(50:34):
fire TV stick, specifically his sisters that they didn't offer.
So we talked about sideloading, which is putting an app
on there that is not necessarily supported. So there are
some security risks in doing that, and I mentioned that
to him, and his second question before we had to
go to break was that he wanted to know if
there was a safe place to get these programs, and

(50:56):
so the website that I typically use is called ap
k me dot com. Now this is kind of advanced stuff.
I would not recommend doing this if you don't know
what you're doing with your device, because there is always
a security risk when you are installing an app on
your device that is outside of Google Play. So just
be very careful, tread carefully if you know what you're doing. Yeah,

(51:18):
you can trust this stuff, but that's that's probably the
most trusted platform for these APKs if you want to
get him from there, Chris, all right, let's bring on
one Carlos Bagnell. He is some gadget guy on YouTube.
He does fantastic reviews all kinds of stuff, including audio devices, smartphones.
He's a friend of mine as well, and I've been
watching his stuff for a long time because he had

(51:39):
a great attitude about things and he's very fair. One.

Speaker 9 (51:42):
Welcome to the show, Hey, Rich, thanks for having me on.

Speaker 1 (51:46):
Hey, let's talk about these OnePlus devices. OnePlus is a
brand that when they came out, they really made a
mark in this world because they just had such great software.
They had a lot of features at a pretty low price.
And now we are on the one plus eleven smartphone.
They also unveiled one Plus buds Pro two. Those are

(52:07):
earbuds and a one plus pad, which is sort of
their version of an iPad. So let's start with the
one plus eleven smartphone. What are your impressions of this device?

Speaker 9 (52:17):
Yeah, I think this is a very good return to
form for one Plus. They started out sort of developing
this reputation as being a flagship killer, all of this
great performance with a few small compromises, but for much
lower prices. In years past, they've had a split strategy
where they've released sort of a normal phone and then
a more expensive pro phone, and this year I think

(52:38):
they're trying to work back to trying to streamline that
user experience.

Speaker 10 (52:42):
There's only one main premiere model.

Speaker 9 (52:46):
Of the phone coming out, and it's a very high
performance device that I think I think a lot of
the enthusiasts out there are really going to like kind
of undercutting Samsung's base model and an iPhone base model,
but without having to give up too much to get
that performance at a much lower price.

Speaker 1 (53:02):
Yeah, so we're talking to price tag starting at six
ninety nine. Top of the line has sixteen gigs of memory.
They say you can have up to forty four applications
running in the background. It's got a five thousand million
hour battery, which is really nice. It charges super fast
eighty watts of charging. So one plus has always been
known for like really fast and speedy charging. But of course,

(53:24):
like you said, sometimes there are some downsides to these devices,
and with this device, you don't get wireless charging, but
with such fast charging, you probably don't need it. They're
also promising that you're gonna get four major oxygen Os
updates that's their operating system, and five years of security updates.
It's a six point seven inch screen. There's a Dolby
head tracking for you know, at most audio three cameras.

(53:50):
Tell me about the cameras. That's really what everyone wants
to know about.

Speaker 9 (53:53):
I don't want to overlook the charging. This is incredible
charging and it's the fastest charging standard available in North America.
So while I totally appreciate some folks are going to
be frustrated by the lack of wireless charging. Literally, a
couple minutes plugged in will give you eight days worth
of runtime. That's one of the major hallmark features on

(54:17):
the one plus. But the cameras are very competitive. This
is one of the areas where we stepped back from
some of the more exotic features from last year's Premium
one Plus. They had super slow motion four K video
one hundred and twenty frame per second that all of
those really really fancy photography uses. This year, it's a
more mainstream kind of option that's hitting their camera tech

(54:40):
directly against Apple and Samsung. We've got very good camera sensors.
They have a partnership with Hasselblod, the camera manufacturer that
I think has really stepped up their camera game over
the last couple of years and getting great HDR performance
and getting very good video performance. It's an all rounder.
It's a very fun point and shoot solution. And again,

(55:01):
like you were saying, at those prices, we're looking at
something that's undercutting the comparable Galaxy S twenty three plus
by two or three hundred dollars.

Speaker 1 (55:09):
Yeah, And most of the reviews that I saw people
were like, Wow, I'm surprised, like this brings one plus
back to kind of like what we love and I've
always loved the software on the one Plus is is
right up there with the Pixel if not better, because
they add a bunch of like very useful features, kind
of like Samsung, but not as blody, you know what
I mean.

Speaker 9 (55:30):
Yeah, definitely, this is going to be an interesting year
because this is our first full year with this new
skin that they've got running on top of their phone,
and I will be kind of curious to see how
it ages. But I would say this is one of
the most beautifully animated phones, the way that it handles
transitions that moves you between your apps, and then, like
you were saying, we've got a bunch of really interesting

(55:51):
that they're not familiar, like if you're used to a
Samsung or if you're used to a Pixel, these phones
perform in a slightly different way. Things like you do
your ultitasking gesture if you slide towards the top of
the screen, will then immediately take that app into a
mini floating window. If you're not familiar with that, that
can be a little jarring, like oh, what did it
just do to this app? But once you get used

(56:12):
to it, I love it for things like notes. If
I can be in an email, swipe up, have a
little ticker floating window to have that information and get
back into my notes. I really appreciate that at these
lower prices, they're also looking at that longer term commitment,
the multiple operating system updates and then also five years
of security patches. They're trying to put a lot of

(56:33):
base behind this product that they're looking to have a
long term relationship with their customers.

Speaker 1 (56:39):
All right, on sale February sixteenth. Again, we're talking about
the one plus eleven five G smartphone goes on sale
February sixteenth OnePlus dot Com, Amazon and best Buy. Now
we've got to talk about these one plus buds Pro too.
I am in love with the first version of these.
I also like the Nord Buds, which are like forty bucks.
These are one hundred and seventy nine. But they're pretty
much the AirPods Pro for the Android user. Don't would

(57:03):
you not agree with that? I mean, you're much more
of an audio guy than I am.

Speaker 9 (57:07):
Well, hopefully they're doing well in terms of call quality
because I'm using them as we speak.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
Well, there you go. I mean, I think that's a
pretty good indication. That's impressive.

Speaker 9 (57:17):
So I think you're absolutely spot on. One Plus is
definitely drawing some inspiration from the AirPods Pro, but they're
still approaching some novel and unique technology. They've got a
really fun, juicy, vibrant dual driver, the little mechanisms that
actually create the sound.

Speaker 10 (57:38):
They're using these.

Speaker 9 (57:39):
Two little drivers that work together to really flesh out
some base response, some fun troubled response. They're a very
fun ear budd to listen to music and watch movies on.
But they're matching AirPods Pro almost spec for spec per spect.
It's multipairings. You can connect two devices at the same time,
instant quick pairings in the case, and the phone will

(58:01):
automatically see the air the earbuds so that you can
try and connect to them. And not just spatial audio,
but like you mentioned before, support for head tracking. You
can play a piece of music or you can watch
a movie from your phone and the earbuds will remember
your position in space that as you turn it really
feels like you're listening on surround soound speakers. I can't

(58:24):
find any single feature where there isn't a match for
the AirPods Pro two, and they're arriving at sixty dollars
less than what Apple is the selling the AirPods two Core.

Speaker 1 (58:36):
Yeah. Again, these are the one plus buds Pro two
They go on sell February sixteenth at for one hundred
and seventy nine dollars. I've been using them. I've been
using them on the plane and they were fantastic, and
I love the way they fit in my ears. So
there's many earbuds out there that kind of like just
fall out these they feel like they're magnetized into your ears.
They're so good. I really think one plus knocked it

(58:58):
out of the park with these. With this one plus
buds pro too, so I'm glad.

Speaker 9 (59:01):
You What I really like about that is everybody's going
to have different fit, you know, what they're comfortable with.
I think these are one of the best options I've
ever tried that are statlow. So when I'm working on
professional earbudon they like they're practically tickling your brain going
into These fit so well just right at the outer
opening of the year, so I think a lot of

(59:23):
people that are sensitive to that kind of fit are
really going to like these.

Speaker 1 (59:26):
Yeah, they feel really great. All right, one plus pad
We're not going to really have much time to go
into that, but one plus is also doing an Android tablet,
which I think is great because we need more options
for that and this could be pretty amazing. It's got
an eleven almost a twelve inch screen. They have not
mentioned the price. As far as I can tell, twelve
hours of video watching, a month of standby battery life

(59:47):
again fast charging, So that looks pretty strong. If you're
thinking about getting an Android tablet, definitely check out the
one plus pad one. How can folks find you online?

Speaker 9 (59:59):
I'm all over the place, some on social media at
some gadget Guy, some gadget guy dot com. And I'm
also doing some partnerships coming up with split deals to
kind of try and help people save money on some
of their tech purchasing and tech acquisitions.

Speaker 1 (01:00:12):
Awesome, slick Deals one of my favorite websites I check
out every single morning. Gotta go to slick deals dot
com and uh sorry, it's like slick deals dot net. Right,
that's right, I've got it. I've got a bookmark. Just
go to the front page. Just type in slick deals
on your search engine. All right, one, Carlos back now,
thanks so much. Some gadget guy check them out online.
And coming up in the show, We're going to talk

(01:00:32):
about a price hike on a Nintendo game that could
have bigger implications. For Nintendo game pricing in general, plus
more of your calls at triple eight rich one oh
one one eight eight eight seven four to two four
to one zero one. I'm Rich Dimiro. You're listening to
rich on Tech. More after this, Welcome back to rich

(01:00:55):
On Tech. We've been talking about artificial intelligence and how
it's going to just change everything in this world. And
I just went into chat GPT, which is kind of
the market leader right now, and I just said, write
me an intro to the rich On Tech Show, and
here's what it spit out in seconds without missing a beat.

(01:01:15):
Welcome to the rich On Tech Show, where we dive
into the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry
and explore how they're shaping our world. Each episode, we
bring you in depth interviews with top industry leaders, entrepreneurs,
and experts, giving you an inside look at the companies
and technologies driving the future. Whether you're a tech enthusiast
or simply curious about the latest advancements, the rich On

(01:01:36):
Tech Show is your source for all things technology. So
sit back, relax, and get ready to dive into the
exciting world of tech. It is just so incredible and
I didn't even give it any basis for what the
show is or what it's about. It just figured that
out and it's pretty it's pretty incredible if you haven't
tried it. Chat dot OpenAI dot com is the website,

(01:01:59):
and I just got a little note that said you
can upgrade to plus Chat GPT plus for twenty bucks
a month, which gives you available even when demand is high,
faster response speed, and priority access to new features. Twenty
dollars a month. That's how incredible this tool is that
people are willing to pay that much. All right, Gloria

(01:02:22):
is in Pacoima, California. Gloria, you're on with Rich, Welcome
to the show.

Speaker 2 (01:02:28):
Hi.

Speaker 8 (01:02:30):
I'm in Bakorma, California. My sister is over in Port
Saint Lucy, Florida, and all of a sudden, I can't
even call her or get.

Speaker 1 (01:02:41):
Checkt from her, And what's happening? What kind of phone
are you on?

Speaker 8 (01:02:46):
I'm on a Moto G, a.

Speaker 1 (01:02:48):
Moto G and what service provider meant?

Speaker 8 (01:02:53):
And what had been working? I all of a sudden
today is this happened? And I've already talked to the
Mint people and I really don't know what else to do.
I've talked to them three times already and they have
not been able to They tried to readjust things. They

(01:03:14):
had me turn it off and take the SIM out
and kind of dust it off and put it back.

Speaker 1 (01:03:21):
And I did the old dust off the SIM card trick.
Huh didn't work? No, that's wild. Okay, Well, this is
very frustrating. Is that only your sister that it doesn't
work with? Or is it everyone?

Speaker 8 (01:03:34):
It's looking like my sister is the only victim of this.

Speaker 1 (01:03:39):
Okay. Does your sister use an iPhone?

Speaker 7 (01:03:44):
She does?

Speaker 6 (01:03:44):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:03:45):
Okay, Here's what I think is happening. I think that
the somehow I message is messing with this message to you.
Did you ever previously have an iPhone?

Speaker 8 (01:03:56):
Never?

Speaker 1 (01:03:57):
Okay, So here's what I would do too. Okay, So
a couple of things that I would do to figure
this out. Now, if Mint couldn't get this to work,
I'm not sure that I can, but this is how
I would troubleshoo. So did Mint go through and make
sure all the sort of what's called apns are correct?
Did they go through that with you?

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
Uh?

Speaker 8 (01:04:16):
I'm not quite sure what they did. They gave me
a whole bunch of letters, and I read off a
whole bunch of numbers, and they did something that took
fifteen minutes, and I had to turn it up and
put it back on, and I did, but it still
didn't do anything.

Speaker 1 (01:04:32):
Did they have you text set up to sixty seven hundred?

Speaker 8 (01:04:37):
No, No, they do.

Speaker 1 (01:04:38):
So that's the first thing I try. So basically, whenever
you have like an MV and zero on an unlocked phone,
which sounds like you have, sometimes the settings for the
Internet and messaging could get a little messed up. And
so it just depends on how the phone is set
up the SIM card, if it automatically configures or not.
It sounds like in this case it was configured proper

(01:05:00):
and then at some point you lost that proper configuration.
Now the fact that it's only happening with your sister
concerns me because it sounds like it could be an
isolated Android to iPhone issue, which is very frustrating. Of course,
so the steps that I would take, Number one, the
easiest thing to do. If all of your other texts
and your picture messaging and all that is coming through,

(01:05:21):
then I would ask your sister to delete any text
threads that involve you on her phone, and then restart
her phone and then try sending a new text directly
to you. That is the first step I would take.
And the reason is because sometimes the iPhone gets caught
up in just a little weird situation with kind of

(01:05:44):
a challenge between a standard text message and an I message,
and it gets confused sometimes, and so if you delete
that entire thread, that may just trigger Okay, we know
this is an Android phone, we know this as standard SMS.
Let's send it this way and hope it goes through.
So that is the first thing I would try, Okay,
and then yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 8 (01:06:06):
And I couldn't. I just didn't go through. And I
and she had just sent me the text, and I
know she had the phone in her hands, so I'm
not sure what's going on.

Speaker 1 (01:06:18):
And what about the phone call that doesn't go through either?

Speaker 8 (01:06:23):
No, it didn't. Oh, I got her home number, I'll
try that instead, but I couldn't get a hold of
her on her cell phone.

Speaker 1 (01:06:32):
Okay, So what I would do is I would definitely,
you know, do the first step that I mentioned, have
her delete everything, and then after that I would go through.
I would text that set up to sixty seven hundred,
and then once you get that, you'll get a text
back from Mint. You can click that text and it
should automatically configure your phone and that will kind of

(01:06:53):
reset the settings and make sure everything works right. And
then once you do that, I would restart your phone
as well. But the reality is, you know, sometimes these
things happen if for some reason, it seems to happen
with text messaging a lot, especially from iPhone to Android
and sometimes Android to iPhone, but more mostly you know,
it's just it's something that's going on with the configuration

(01:07:14):
of the messages, either on your end or on her
iPhone that's just not recognizing it. So those are the
steps that I would take, Lauria, it's very frustrating. The
other thing you might try to do is go into
your settings and under your connections there should be a
toggle for Wi Fi calling and texting. You might try
toggling that on and off. So I would toggle it

(01:07:34):
on if it's not on, and then try sending her
a text. And then I would toggle it off if
it's on, and then try sending her a text. So again,
these are all of the kind of the methods I
would use to troubleshoot the situation, but again very frustrating.
And I remember my mom had a problem with her
phone where the simcard was saying, you know, like it

(01:07:55):
wasn't seeded properly. And now my mom is not the
type that's gonna sit there and like push a SIM
card with a paper clip. And yet somehow I got
her to do that, and we took out the SIM card,
like you said, we kind of you know, polished it
off a little bit, put it back into the phone,
reseated it, and it seemed to work. But she was
very proud of herself for doing that. I remember specifically

(01:08:16):
being outside on my back patio and just like walking
my mom through this and kind of laughing, just thinking
to myself, like what world am I living in where
I'm walking my mom through taking a SIM card out
of a phone and resetting it. It's just like stuff that,
you know, the average person never really thinks about doing.
And now, of course, many of the new phones have
moved to e sims, which love the mer hatim. I

(01:08:38):
actually think there's a lot of advantages to that because
now the whole sort of SIM situation is much more
digital and electronics. You don't have a physical SIM card
in the new iPhone. It's just not even a thing anymore.
All right, you're listening to rich on Tech. We'll have
more of your calls at Triple eight rich one oh one,
and more of your questions and stories. We'll talk about

(01:08:59):
the price hike for an Tendo games, all coming up
on rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech.
This is the show where we talk about the tech
stuff I think you should know about, and it's the
place where I answer your questions about technology. Thanks for
joining me. Rich Demiro, tech reporter at KTLA Channel five

(01:09:22):
in Los Angeles, coming to you from across the country today. Well,
depending on where you're listening, I guess it could be anywhere.
But I'm in New Jersey here for my brother's housewarming
party and maybe a little Super Bowl celebration as well.
So kind of a fun first remote show. It's the
first time I've done something like this on the radio. Well,

(01:09:42):
I mean it's only been six shows, so I mean, yeah,
it has to start somewhere though, right Anyway, it's been
a lot of fun. I hope there have not been
too many hiccups for you listening. I think It's gone
pretty well and I'm ready to do it again. Where
should I go next? I don't know. Now that I've
unlocked this oyster, it's kind of fun. I'm looking up
some fun facts about New Jersey since I'm here. This

(01:10:02):
is where I grew up, by the way, but uh,
you know, of course I learned about New Jersey as
a kid, but you kind of forget. But I love
this fact. It has seven major shopping malls in a
square mile. I don't know if that's true or not,
but we are as Why is New Jersey known for
shopping malls? There's just like a lot of malls. I
mean growing up as a kid, I went to the mall.
That's where we hung out, you know, as teens, we

(01:10:23):
hung out going to the mall. And I don't know
do you kids still do that? Maybe? Anyway, if you
have a question you want to ask me, my phone
number is one eight eight eight rich one oh one
eight eight eight seven four to two four to one
zero one. By the way. On the way over here,
this is this is just me. But you know, I
I you know, I really think about stuff a lot,

(01:10:45):
like maybe too much. But on the way over here,
I was doing my research on where to sit on
the plane, and of course I go to seakguru dot com.
Have you gone to this website seekguru dot com. It
basically lists a map of your airplane and then it
shows you the best seats to sit in. Now, I'm
not talking like first class, like if you're paying for
first class, you're always getting a good seat. But I'm

(01:11:07):
talking about like the rest of the plane, because some
seats are not as good as others. And so if
you look at just sort of a you know, United
Airlines or American Airlines, there's a bunch of different seats
in there, and some may be good. So let me
just go through here. So like C eight L, which
is in business class. By the way, it's a live
flat seat, but the proximity to the lavatory in galley

(01:11:30):
maybe bothersome, so that's marked as a yellow seat. You
don't want to sit there. Then there's a red seat
in first class. It's a standard business class seat, but
it's missing a window. So if you paid all this
money for a business class seat and then you sit
down and you have no window, you might be upset,
Like my kid wanted a window on the plane. Then

(01:11:51):
you've got some green seats, which are you know, this
is a premium plus seat. It's got more leg room
because it's a bulkhead seat. Bulkhead is when you have
no road in front of you. It's just like that
wall in the plane in front of you. So that's
the bulkhead that used to be one of my favorite
seats on the plane. And then of course you have
just standard seats and yellow and red and green. So anyway,
seatguru dot com if you want to check out where

(01:12:14):
to sit on your next flight. I know some people
might think that's a little bit over the top. I don't.
I've been flying for many years, and you know there
are better seats on the plane. Then you know, some
seats are just better than others. So you look up
your plane that you're gonna be on, or you can
look up your flight. It'll give you the plane number,
and then you can, you know, go to this website
and pop it in and see where to sit. I

(01:12:36):
put way too much work into this, and then they
ended up swapping out the airplane, which is kind of funny.
So after all the work I put in looking up
where to sit on the plane, we got to the airport,
and they said, oh, by the way, we swapped out
the plane for a different one. They ended up switching
it out for a better plane, so I ended up
getting an even better seat than the one that I
had picked. Anyway, none of that matters to you right now,
except to know the website seat guru dot com. All right,

(01:12:59):
Jeff is a truck driver in SoCal. Jeff, you're on
with Rich. What's going on?

Speaker 10 (01:13:05):
Hey?

Speaker 7 (01:13:06):
Rich?

Speaker 10 (01:13:06):
I appreciate taking him a call like in your show.
My issue is I have two Apple TVs with two
Samsung TVs, and when I come home and try to
watch YouTube, I'll watch it, and then when it goes
into a break or an ad or switches videos, it'll
almost crash or tell me that there's no signal now,

(01:13:29):
and then I'll have to go back to the main
TV and then go back to YouTube and you know,
like log back in again a most And I've never
heard something like that.

Speaker 1 (01:13:40):
Are you using YouTube on the Samsung TV, like through
their software or through the Apple TV?

Speaker 10 (01:13:46):
No, through the Apple TV. If I just use YouTube
through the Samsung TV itself, it works perfectly, Okay, So.

Speaker 1 (01:13:51):
It's definitely something with the Apple TV. So how old
is this Apple TV?

Speaker 10 (01:13:56):
It's the new one? And then I have what was
it the one before that.

Speaker 1 (01:13:59):
Also stairs Oh wow, so you've got the Apple TV
maybe four K something like that, and then the new one. Okay,
well it sounds like, you know, it's definitely some sort
of like software issue because it works nicely on the
other side. So on the Samsung side it works perfectly.
So I here's what I would do, and these are
you know, I always give you kind of the the

(01:14:21):
things that I would do, the steps that I would take.
Number one, do you know how to close out an
app on the Apple TV?

Speaker 9 (01:14:27):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (01:14:28):
Okay, so have you tried that? And when you do
that what happens?

Speaker 10 (01:14:31):
Yeah? Close that all the app where you open them
up and swipe up.

Speaker 1 (01:14:34):
Yep. Yeah, So just let me explain just again, let
me just explain how to do that. If you have
an Apple TV, you basically it's like pretty much you
swipe or you double click on like the center of
the of the clickwheel, and then it should like make
all of your apps look a little bit smaller, and
then you can just swipe left or right to select
an app and then swipe up to get rid of

(01:14:55):
that app and that closes it out. Most of the
time you don't have to do that, but sometimes you do. Okay,
So if that's doesn't work to close out the app,
that's called a force quit, and that usually kind of
you know, closes the app out and then you can
open it back up. It kind of restarts it makes
it work properly. Again, if that's not working, have you
tried deleting the YouTube app and reinstalling it?

Speaker 7 (01:15:14):
I have actually in it.

Speaker 10 (01:15:17):
That's the exact same thing.

Speaker 1 (01:15:19):
Are you running some sort of ad blocker on your network?

Speaker 10 (01:15:23):
No, nothing special, no VPN Nope.

Speaker 1 (01:15:29):
Okay, well, hmm, that's a good one. I don't know.
I mean, the thing is it should you know you've
if you've deleted it and reinstalled it. Now, have you
deleted the YouTube app, restarted the Apple TV and then
reinstalled the YouTube app?

Speaker 10 (01:15:45):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (01:15:48):
Okay, That's what I would do, because there are some
remnants to these apps that are left behind when you
uninstall them that if you're just uninstalling and reinstalling, it
may just right over the old app, and so there
could still be some lingering problems. That's what I think,
after hearing all these different things that you've troubleshoot. I
think that that is the last thing to do and

(01:16:09):
figure out. So what I would do is go in
delete the YouTube app and then restart the Apple TV
by pulling the cord or just restarting it however you
do that, and then letting it warn back up, install
the app again, see if it happens, and I would
hope that that would clear out all the fragments and
and you know junk that may be lingering on this
install that is causing it to hiccup like this, and

(01:16:32):
hopefully that will fix it.

Speaker 10 (01:16:34):
Alrighty s, I do appreciate that.

Speaker 1 (01:16:35):
Hope I'll get that try today, all right, Jeff, Hey,
I was talking about the electric semi earlier. Would you
ever drive one?

Speaker 10 (01:16:41):
Or no? I wouldn't mind driving them. I wouldn't want
to be followed by one on the road that doesn't
have a driver in it.

Speaker 1 (01:16:48):
Yeah, that's I guess that's next, right, that's what's that's
what's uh oh man, Well, I don't think it's going
to happen. I think you'll be okay for for a
while because I don't think that's going to happen right way.
And they're doing mostly short distances with that kind of
things that are you know, more like figured out in advance.

Speaker 10 (01:17:05):
Right. Yeah, I've heard rumors that Australia is doing something
like that where the leaf truck has a driver in
it and then the rear truck is just a computer
that follows the front truck. But I haven't seen anything.
I haven't looked for on YouTube or up like that.
But I just heard the driver's talking about it. But
truck drivers like Krisherman, they've all get their stories.

Speaker 1 (01:17:26):
Yeah, I'm sure you have plenty, and now you've got
something to look up on YouTube when you get this
back up and running. Jeff, thanks for calling today. I
appreciate it.

Speaker 10 (01:17:35):
You got it, sir, Thanks for the help.

Speaker 1 (01:17:37):
All right, let me just tell you about this price hike.
Nintendo their next Zelda game, Legends of Zelda Tiers of
the Kingdom, is going to cost sixty nine ninety nine
when it's released on May twelfth. That is ten dollars
more than the typical price for new Nintendo games that
are sort of the top of the line games, right,
They used to be fifty nine to ninety nine. Now

(01:17:58):
we've also seen pricing preases on Sony games for the
PlayStation and also games for the Xbox. So what does
this mean. This means that now that the sort of
barrier has been broken for that sixty nine to ninety
nine price point, you can bet that other big name
games for the Nintendo Switch are now going to cost more.

(01:18:19):
So that's just kind of the way things are right now.
I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm getting
all these emails about prices going up on just about
everything that I've purchased in the past, or subscriptions that
I have, And now the Nintendo Switch games seventy bucks
for a game. And by the way, if you have
two kids with a Switch, you know you gotta buy
double games, so that could be tricky. Breath of the
Wild was the first Zelda game for the Switch that

(01:18:41):
launched the console. Nintendo sold twenty nine million copies of
that game, and they've sold one hundred and twenty three
million Switch consoles. So Nintendo's cleaning up with the Switch
just became I think the third best selling console device
in the world as of last month. All right, thanks
so much for listening rich on Tech. Here, we're gonna

(01:19:03):
have more of the show coming up. We are going
to talk about an app that lets you scan your
baseball card collection to see how much it's worth. It's
really cool. Plus I'm gonna tell you how to avoid
a simcard scam. You're listening to rich on Tech. More
of the show coming up. Welcome back to rich on Tech.
My name is rich Demiro online at rich on Tech.

(01:19:25):
I'm active on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. What else is there?

Speaker 2 (01:19:32):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:19:32):
An app name True? Remember we told you about it
last week, So I've been using the True app as well.
That's at try true dot com. So if you want
to see that's sort of a new social network and
up and coming social network that doesn't sell your personal information,
doesn't track you, it's all private. It's really really kind
of neat. So if you want to check that out,
try True dot com. Slash rich on Tech to find me.

(01:19:55):
I've got a little group called rich on Techies, so
if you want to join that you can. Marshall is
in Recita, California. Marshall, you are on with rich How
can I help?

Speaker 7 (01:20:06):
Wow?

Speaker 11 (01:20:07):
It's good to hear you coming back from my home state. Wow,
part of New Journey.

Speaker 1 (01:20:14):
I am in North Jersey, so right outside New York
City basically, so you're from New Jersey, New York.

Speaker 11 (01:20:19):
I grew I didn't grow up. I'm from part Shippany
and Orange and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 (01:20:24):
But wow, okay, oh wow, Well New Jersey gets such
a bad rap. I don't know why, but people it's
just been like the butt of like every joke for
so many years.

Speaker 11 (01:20:32):
No, no, no, no, I tell people. They tell you they're from
New York. I tell oh, anybody could be from New York.
You have to be special to be from New Jersey.
And then they give me this clayer.

Speaker 1 (01:20:41):
I was looking at my I've flown like almost five
hundred thousand miles on United and I think a majority
that has been landing in New York, so I know
the airport very well. Anyway, what are you going to
help you out?

Speaker 11 (01:20:54):
I got a couple of questions, and if I have
to listen off on the radio, if you want to after,
I tell you, Okay, if you talked about a week
and a half ago you were telling about the Amazon
with the prescription thing, and you said that in California
they don't have it as available in California, but you
didn't tell how come. And then the other thing I
was going to ask you is about the Samsung thing.

(01:21:14):
You told about the phones coming out, and you didn't
happen to tell the prices of them, and I wondered,
how come you didn't tell the prices on that? Okay?
And I was the other part of that question for
the Samsung was I'm looking to get the s twenty three.
But I wanted to know what your opinion is because
I heard you talk about the one plus and how
you compare the two phones which we would get at
Samsung as twenty three or at one plus.

Speaker 1 (01:21:34):
Ooh, good question. All right. Let me let me just
get to the Amazon RX pass I mentioned, is a
new like five dollars a month for unlimited prescriptions. It's
not available in California. I don't know why it's not.
I'm assuming that California has some additional restrictions on online
pharmacies that other states don't. But there's a couple of

(01:21:56):
states that it was not available in, So it wasn't
just California, it was, you know, a couple of other
states as well. I don't have the list of those
states right away. It says available in forty two states,
so let me see if I can find the states
that it's not Okay, it's ourx pass is currently not
available to send medications to California, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Texas,

(01:22:21):
and Washington, So it says Amazon pharmacy is still available
in those states. So clearly there's some kind of extra
rule or regulation that the RX pass just they just
can't do in those states. I think there, if it's Amazon,
they're probably working on it, and I would imagine that
they would bring it to those states eventually if they can.
But that's the answer for that. I'm not sure why

(01:22:42):
it's not there. I think it should be because I
think people in all states should have access to that
five dollars a month for unlimited prescriptions. Now, the question
about the Samsung S twenty three, so the reason I
don't go I kind of mentioned the standard pricing, which
starts at eight hundred dollars for the standard S T
twenty three, and then the S twenty three Ultra, which

(01:23:02):
is the top of the line, starts at twelve hundred dollars.
The reason I don't make a big deal about the
specific pricing is because everyone's situation is so different when
it comes to how they pay for their phone and
how they get a discount on their device. I mean,
I'm looking at the website right now. I mean, Samsung
has so many different sort of offer programs. They've got
discount for education, They've got discounts for government employees, military

(01:23:27):
first responders employees. So I mean those can all factor
into the price of your phone. And then of course
some people have a trade in so you might trade
in your old phone. Maybe I had the S twenty one,
And because Samsung kind of inflates the trade in values
right around the time they launch their new phones, people
will trade in their old phone and get like eight
hundred dollars for it, something unheard of because the phone.

(01:23:49):
You know, Samsung's taking a little bit of a hit
on that trade in value just to get you into
a new phone. So that's the pricing when it comes
to comparing the Samsung versus the one plus eleven. I've
been using the one plus eleven. I used it briefly,
so I haven't really used it as like my daily driver,

(01:24:10):
but I will tell you that it's a really tough one.
I would say the software on the one plus I
really really enjoy. I think that they make their software
super useful. It's handy. It reminds me of the pixel
except more useful. So they add like all these little
features in like a reader mode where it can turn
your screen, like if you can add apps to the

(01:24:31):
reader mode, So if you open up like the Kindle app,
it will turn your screen grayscale or Sepia toned. So
it's like fun little things like that. Or if you
open up a game, it's got like a game mode
on it, so it like you know, boosts the processing
power and makes the screen brighter. So it's little things
like that that I really do appreciate about the one plus.
I always feel like the one plus is good if

(01:24:52):
you're very cost conscious. So if you want to spend
a little bit less then the Samsung, then I'd say
go with the one plus. I think the downside is
the sort of repair and help that you get with
a one plus is going to be a bit more
limited than you would with a Samsung. Samsung's got deals
with all these like little you know, you go into

(01:25:12):
any of those little stores, those repair shops, and they've
got the Samsung parts, they've got the Samsung screens that
people know because they work on a bunch of Samsung phones.
So in that case, I feel like you're going to
get a little bit more support when it comes to
a problem with your phone. Now, the iPhone is sort
of the king of that situation. Where I was in
Japan and I had a problem with my laptop. I

(01:25:35):
made an appointment at the Genius Bar, and without even thinking,
I started walking over and I said, oh, my gosh,
is the person that's a Genius Bar even going to
speak English? And it wasn't even something that occurred to me,
like I just like imagine they would, and sure enough
I get there and they did. And so it was
just an incredible experience where here I was across the
world and I was still able to get my laptop

(01:25:58):
service because Apple just has so many store in so
many places, and you break your iPhone anywhere in the
world and you're gonna be able to get a replacement
like the same day. So I've been using the Samsung
S twenty three Ultra. I think it is a phenomenal device.
It is a powerhouse of a phone. It is every
feature that you can want on a smartphone all in one.

(01:26:20):
And so if you are desiring the absolute best two
hundred megapixel camera, every feature you can ever imagine a stylus.
I mean, this phone is really one to be I've
been super impressed with it. I think the camera is great,
and especially in bright light, it's amazing. In low light
it's amazing. There are some places where it struggles, specifically

(01:26:42):
low light selfies. I've noticed if you're an extremely low
light it can take a little bit longer to take
a picture. And also some of the video is in
low light could struggle a little bit too. But if
you want a great phone, S twenty three Ultra I
think is gonna be a really nice pick. All right,
Coming up, I'm gonna tell you about the app that
lets you scan your baseball cards to see how much

(01:27:04):
they're worth. You're listening to rich on Tech. More of
your calls and an interview coming up next. Rich Demiro here,
rich On Tech, Welcome back to the show. As you
can tell, I am inside somewhere. I'm inside Burbanks Sports Cards,
and I'm here with Ted Mann, the co founder of Collects.
This is an app that I dreamed of having as

(01:27:25):
a kid. It's an app that lets you scan your cards,
your baseball cards, football cards, hockey cards, whatever, and then
see what the value of those cards are and some
other features. So, Ted, thanks for joining me, Thanks for
having me on Rich. So we're inside this baseball card
shop or I guess card store. It's incredible. It's bringing
me back to my childhood when I ripped open those

(01:27:46):
card packs and you know, had a little collection. I
was never too serious, but many people are so. First off,
just tell me kind of the idea behind baseball card
collecting or card collecting.

Speaker 2 (01:27:57):
Well, I think for you know, for a lot of people,
like cards are the first time you really experience doing
a deal, making money right, trying to figure out what
these things are valuable or not. And I started to
see that in my own son. I have a ten
year old son named Charlie who got really into cards
over the pandemic, and just like me when I was
his age, like it became quickly graduated from being like

(01:28:20):
a hobby, you know something I was like interested in
the pretty pictures on the cards, to like really being
serious about I want to be able to find, you know,
the most valuable cards. I want to build a flip cards.
I want to find cards and sell them. My friends
do deals, and so I started to see that with him,
and I think that that's a lot of people kind
of are with this hobby, is it becomes go graduates

(01:28:41):
from like a passion into something of an obsession. And
you know, I have my own son to thank for
bringing me back into that and it's now become something
that we get to do together.

Speaker 1 (01:28:49):
Tell me about coming up with this app? What made
you create it?

Speaker 2 (01:28:54):
So Charlie was having a lot of the same problems
that I had when he got into cards, which was
he couldn't figure out what his cards are worth. He
was googling and getting crazy numbers, and he would frequently
do a deal at school and feel badly about it. Right,
He'd do a dumb deal, and then he would come
to me and say, Dad, can you help me get

(01:29:15):
my card back? And this happened multiple occasions, and I
did the exact same thing with him that my dad
did with me, which is like, I'm not gonna unwind
that trade.

Speaker 1 (01:29:24):
I'm not gonna It's like I can't swoop in and
kind of fix this.

Speaker 2 (01:29:28):
Yeah, as much as I'd like to, like, I'm just
going to teach you to figure out what your cards
are worth so you don't make stupid trades in the future,
and and so I set about trying to help Charlie
with that. At first I bought him a Beckett Guide.

Speaker 1 (01:29:41):
Do you ever, of course I remember, I remember as
a kid like looking in the tiny numbers.

Speaker 2 (01:29:46):
The Beckett Guide would have a price on every card
so you could go through and look it up. But
nowadays there's so many cards out there. We'll talk more
about the collects out in a sec, but like, we
have twenty million cards that we track.

Speaker 1 (01:29:58):
That's a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:29:59):
So that's a prety big phone book. And Charlie the
minute I gave him that that beccacud he was like, Dad,
like this is this is not fun, this is too
much work. So then we went on the Internet and
I tried to We tried to find apps, we tried
to websites that would give us an answer, and honestly,
the best answers we got came from eBay, because that's
where most people buy and sell cards these days. But

(01:30:20):
even on eBay, it was a lot to sort through.
And so Charlie would come and ask me for help
with this every day. And finally, like so many I
think inventions that are startups that get founded, I just
got so frustrated that I wanted to have a better,
easier way to do it, so I made made a
little tool for Charlie to help him figure out the
price of his cards, and that's what gave birth to

(01:30:40):
the idea for Collects.

Speaker 1 (01:30:41):
So Collects is an app that lets you scan the card.
It kind of pulls the you know, the prices across
various platforms and then comes up with a number and
assigns that value to your card. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:30:54):
So we have we have about twenty million cards that
we can match the images to. Right, So you take
a pic, sure, and we use a technology called computer
vision or visual search to match the cards, similar to like,
you know, if you hear about like facial recognition, you know,
it's sort of like the same idea, except in this case,
we're just matching a reference image of a card to
the picture you've just taken. And the technology works really

(01:31:17):
well for that purpose. So we can match with a
very high degree of accuracy and say, okay, this card
matches to this other card. Once we match it to
the card, then you can see what's the current average price.
We average all of the most recent sales on eBay
and other sites to calculate that, so we'll give you
the average price, and then we can also tell you,
you know, what would the card be worth if you

(01:31:38):
if you wanted to sell it, or if you want
to degrade it, if you want to send it off
to a professional grading service. What would that do to
the value of the card.

Speaker 1 (01:31:45):
So that's basically how it works. Yeah, and of course
you can build your collection inside the app. You can
see how much your entire collection is worth, and you
can buy, sell, and trade with other people inside the app.
How has the app been doing well?

Speaker 2 (01:31:58):
So all of that stuff you just mentioned, that all
kind of came probably after you and I first talked.
So when we first launched the app, it was just
a pure utility, just take a picture of the card,
get the value, build your collection. Right, that was the
sort of the initial kind of like maybe not an MVP,
but the initial version of of Collects. And then what
we started to see happening was people were building really
big collections. The average user on the app will add

(01:32:21):
about two hundred cards to their collection, but we have
a ton of users that have thousands, tens of thousands,
hundreds of.

Speaker 1 (01:32:27):
Thousands of cards.

Speaker 2 (01:32:28):
So yeah, so we start to see these people building
bandsive collections, and then the really cool things. They started
to reach out to one another, so like, you know,
your friend might have somebody else that would reach out
to them.

Speaker 1 (01:32:37):
And say, hey, I really like your Jerry Rice card.

Speaker 2 (01:32:39):
I want to buy that from you? Would you take
twenty bucks for it? And so they started doing these
deals and we started to see that happening organically. It
was honestly, like probably not the best experience because they
were just doing it all through private messaging. In the app,
we have a messaging feature, but we you know, luckily
like laid enough of the groundwork that it was all possible.
And so we started to look at how many any

(01:33:00):
cards we're getting sold through the app, and over the
last five months, we've seen fifty million dollars worth of
cards sold on the Collects app. So people are actually
doing some pretty big deals here. I mean it's you know,
this is an eBay yet, but it's it's definitely like
a cool place to be able to you know, buy
or sell or do a trade.

Speaker 1 (01:33:18):
So we're talking with Ted Man, a co founder of Collects,
an app that lets you scan your baseball cards see
their value and also there's a lot of social access
aspects to this app as well. You can buy, sell,
and trade with different people that are using the app.
How do you think this differentiates from just say, scanning
a card with like Google Lens, or just putting the
card into eBay.

Speaker 8 (01:33:39):
Sure?

Speaker 2 (01:33:40):
Well, I mean, you know a bunch of other platforms
exist where you can go and you can do you
can buy or sell a card. I think what makes
Collects different than like say an eBay is it's a
social experience right where you can find the other collectors,
you can see what they've got, you can see if
what your shared interests are. So if you both collect
the Dodgers, we can help surface those cards front and

(01:34:02):
center to make it a little bit easier to find
the cards that you would want to be able to
purchase from that person.

Speaker 1 (01:34:06):
Or do a deal with.

Speaker 2 (01:34:07):
So in that sense, it's like you know, I think
it's it is different from those social marketplaces. Plus, we
have the utility of being able to scan the card
and match it, so Google Lens doesn't really do that
per se. Google lends will allow you to match to
images on the Internet, but none of what Google does
is tied to any kind of what we call canonical
data is not tied to the actual checklist of the
cards versus collects where we're actually going to match it

(01:34:30):
to that exact record so that you get the pricing reliably.

Speaker 1 (01:34:33):
What types of cards do you support?

Speaker 2 (01:34:36):
So we started with just a few sports like football, baseball, basketball,
but now we have like hockey, wrestling, We have all
the trading card games like Pokemon.

Speaker 8 (01:34:43):
Magic Yu Gi.

Speaker 2 (01:34:44):
Oh, and we're going to be adding a bunch more sports,
like we have a lot of demand for racing cards
and MMA and things like that, so we'll be garbage
failed Kids was a passionate mind when I was a kid,
So we'll be adding those other categories in the coming months.

Speaker 1 (01:34:59):
I had kept my original Series one garbage pail Kids
for many years. I came home from college one year
and my brother had taken all the stickers off and
put them on my wall.

Speaker 2 (01:35:08):
Oh yeah, the Series one garbage because they're worth a ton.

Speaker 1 (01:35:11):
Now that's I'm trying not to look up the values
anymore because I don't want to know the idea of
baseball card collecting. We live in such a high tech society.
Everything's digital. These cards are physical, but you're kind of
bridging that physical and digital world. So do you think
this kind of changes the marketplace?

Speaker 2 (01:35:27):
I mean, I think just being able to have your
cards in, like, you know, in a digital collection, whether
or not we're not actually like turning them into n
fts or anything like that, but just being able to
like track the value of your cards over time, to
know when they're going up and down in value, to
have other people be able to kind of like make
an offer when a card is spiking or dropping in value.
I think that's pretty cool, right, And that's that's the thing,

(01:35:49):
like you said, I mean, I don't even think I
could have like comprehended the idea of like smartphones much
less like collects when I was a kid. But the
fact that you can do it now, I think it
is really a cool way to advance the hobby. But
I don't think it it obvigates the need to still
have those physical cards, because actually being able to show
cards to your friends, you know, in the physical world,
I think is still so cool and such a such

(01:36:12):
a neat part of the whole experience of collecting.

Speaker 1 (01:36:14):
All right, thanks so much for joining me. How to
folks find the app?

Speaker 2 (01:36:16):
So Collex app is free. It's in the iOS app
store as well as Google Play. We are going to
be coming out with a web version pretty soon as well,
So just go download the app and hopefully give it
five stars.

Speaker 1 (01:36:29):
All right, Ted, Man of Collects, thanks so much for
joining me. If you want to learn more about the app,
you can find a link on my website. Just go
to rich on Tech dot tv. More of rich on
Tech coming up after this. Welcome back to rich on Tech.
Tom is in San Diego. Tom, You're on with rich
How can I help?

Speaker 8 (01:36:48):
Well?

Speaker 1 (01:36:48):
Thank you rich nice on.

Speaker 7 (01:36:49):
First time I've.

Speaker 1 (01:36:50):
Talked to you. Oh thanks, good to hear thank you.
I hear you loud and clear.

Speaker 10 (01:36:57):
Perfect.

Speaker 7 (01:36:57):
It's a good thing for my hand right out?

Speaker 10 (01:36:59):
All right?

Speaker 7 (01:37:00):
Okay, okay, here's the deal. I'm trying to set up
a golf driving range in my garage and I've hooked
up at TV and I can use my Android Fixel
six phone for a camera. I can get it casted
and all that. But the only thing is I can only,
for example, turn on the camera do what I'm gonna do,

(01:37:24):
and then I have to stop rewind it. What I'm wondering,
is there any way I can turn it into more
like a cam where I can watch it while I'm
doing it.

Speaker 1 (01:37:37):
So you've got picture, so you've got if you're casting,
isn't isn't that live?

Speaker 7 (01:37:44):
Yes? But when I'm going through my phone, I've got
it set up on you know, a photo for a
motion video for BCR or you know movie pictures. Sure,
but it only I only see the picture when it's
actually recording or when it's actually recorded. When I go

(01:38:07):
back and play, then I can watch. Then I can
cast it and watch it. I'm trying to turn it
into like a live cam where I can watch on
the TV while I'm practicing my.

Speaker 1 (01:38:19):
Stroke, and so where it kind of where you're you're
just seeing a live viewfinder of what's happening on your phone.

Speaker 7 (01:38:27):
That's what I want to do, yes, And I don't
know how.

Speaker 1 (01:38:29):
To do that, and Google Cast doesn't let you do.

Speaker 7 (01:38:32):
That, not that I've been able to figure out.

Speaker 1 (01:38:35):
How How are you How are you casting? Are you casting? Okay,
So there's a couple of ways to cast on an Android.
So one of them cast the entire screen. So there's
there's that, and then there's the casting inside the app.
So if you're casting inside, say like Google Photos, that's
different than casting your entire screen. So if you look
on your your settings on your phone, there should be

(01:38:57):
a cast that lets you cast your entire screen versus
just the single app. Is that what you're doing?

Speaker 7 (01:39:04):
And well, would I be able to? Would I set
it up that way? And and it's just basically like
a cam.

Speaker 1 (01:39:14):
Yeah, I mean if now I've not done this personally
in a long time. I know with the iPhone you
can you can mirror it pretty easily to the Apple
TV and see the viewfinder and see a live view.
But I have not done this in a while on
the Android side of things, so I'd have to check
to see. But I don't see why you would not
be able to do that. I mean, if you if
you can cast your screen, anything that's happening on your

(01:39:34):
screen can be cast to another screen, whether that's the
camera or you know, whatever's going on, but you have
to actually go in and cast that versus the in
app casting, which is I know it sounds a little different,
That's that's really what I'm trying to look at. I
don't have a pixel with me right here, but I'm
trying to see if they're if you go into like

(01:39:55):
your quick toggles have you seen those where you like
pull down those buttons that are at the top of
the screen, right, that's where you might find the cast
where it's going to cast your entire screen and not
just the app, and not just.

Speaker 7 (01:40:07):
Not just the camera or not just the video.

Speaker 1 (01:40:11):
Camera exactly like the photos app. So have you ever
gotten to a place where, like when you cast this screen,
you see all your apps and everything like on the
TV screen.

Speaker 7 (01:40:21):
I haven't seen that yet.

Speaker 1 (01:40:22):
Okay, okay, then that's what you need to do. So
that's that's your that's what you need to do on
the on the Android phone. So if you're using a pixel,
swipe down from the top, swipe down again, you get
all those little tiles of different kind of quick toggles.
It looks like you know it says Wi Fi Bluetooth
auto rotate flashlight. If you edit those, there should be
one in there that says cast screen. That's the one

(01:40:44):
that you want to enable, and that's the one that
you want to use to cast your screen while you're
practicing your golf swing and then you know you should
be able to see that on that TV screen at
the same time. So hopefully that'll help.

Speaker 7 (01:40:55):
Thank you, Thank you, sir.

Speaker 10 (01:40:57):
Whish me love. I'll give it a shot.

Speaker 1 (01:40:59):
All right, good luck, Tom, appreciate it, appreciate the call. Okay,
to close out the show, here, let me tell you
about the SIM swapping. I know I talked earlier about
SIM cards and how they've become more electronic, which is
probably a good thing. But SIM swapping doesn't require actually
swapping out a physical SIM. It's actually someone stealing your
SIM card information and activating their phone with your info.

(01:41:22):
So here's how it works. Basically, someone gets your information,
they call up your wireless carrier and they pretend they're
you and they say, oh, I got a new phone.
I'd like to swap my SIM with the new phone.
And the operator says, okay, let me verify you are
who you are. And because of all these data breaches
out there, you know, these hackers can figure out ways

(01:41:44):
of piecing together your identity and so they know that
you know your secret question or secret answer to your
secret question is this. They know what your address is,
they know what your phone number is. We recently saw
big data breaches from T Mobile that exposed like thirty
seven million customers information. And this is a story, by
the way, from ABC seven New York about two people

(01:42:06):
that had gosh, twenty thousand dollars wired out of one
one account and sixty thousand dollars out of another. While
these people keep a lot of money in their their accounts,
and both of these women were victims of a simcard
swap scam. And so basically, these criminals convinced the carrier
to let them activate a new phone. And what's going

(01:42:28):
to happen when that happens. Well, now they've got the
keys to your kingdom. All those little text messages that
come through the two factor authentication codes, all of those
codes are now coming to their phone. So what can
they do. Well, they try to log into your bank account,
and your bank says, huh, this is weird. This is
a new device that we haven't seen before. Let's verify this.

(01:42:48):
Let's send that device a text. They send a text
with that one time code. But now the hacker has
that one time code and they can enter it and
get into your bank account, and they can do this
for a whole bunch of different things. When we've heard this,
this is nothing new. This has been going on for
a long time. But people still, you know, it still
happens to people because their accounts are not properly locked down,

(01:43:10):
and so in one case, this woman said, she goes,
I was on an airplane when this happens, so there's
no way that I could have authorized these transfers, like
here's my plane ticket, Like when this all happened, I
was literally on a plane. And a lot of times
people will see their phones just go dead, like the
signal just goes out because it's been moved to a
different device. So how can you protect yourself from all

(01:43:30):
of this? The big takeaway Number one, you probably want
to use a two factor authentication app. I know, I
talk about two factor authentication all the time. The easiest
way to do that is with a text code. Now,
if you look at Google what they've done, they've gotten
pretty smart. They actually will ask you when you're logging
in from like an unknown device. They'll say, hey, can

(01:43:51):
you open up the YouTube app on your iPad? And
that's how they verify you are who you are because
the hacker typically doesn't have your iPad as well and
access to that. So they've gotten pretty good about that
kind of stuff. Like they've stopped doing like the two
factor code sent to your text, but other apps still
use that, especially bank apps, So use a two factor
authentication app. That means that you won't get texts. It's

(01:44:14):
like an app that relies on generating different codes every
thirty seconds or so, and that's more secure. And also
if your app allows it, like if your banking app
allows a pin code or a fingerprint authentication, definitely use that.
Always change your mobile account pin number and password. Do
not use your pet name, use something strong. And then

(01:44:35):
all of the carriers, whether it's T Mobile, AT and
T or Verizon, they all have a way to lock
down your account so that someone can't simswap you. On
T Mobile it's called takeover protection. Make sure you enable it.
On Verizon it's called number lock, so you can ask
them to enable that. Think you can do it right
from your app. And then on AT and T you

(01:44:55):
can ask them to activate two factor authentication texts. So
no matter what or sorry, authentic a unique passcode for
AT and T if you want any changes. So T
Mobile account takeover protection, Verizon number lock, AT and T
out a unique passcode for any changes that are asked
about your account. Very important stuff. You do not want

(01:45:17):
to lose access to any of your personal information, all right,
if you can believe it, that's gonna do it. For
this episode of the show, first remote rich on Tech
Show in the Can, I love it. Thanks to everyone
who called some great callers this week. Next week, I'm
going to tell you about an app that helps you
find all of your tax deductions and can even help

(01:45:38):
you file your taxes. I've been using this app. It
is quite incredible. It uses a combination of real CPA
help and artificial intelligence. Man, that's a theme through these shows.
You can find me on social media. I am at
rich on Tech. My website is richon Tech dot TV.
Be sure to watch my TV segments there. My name,
once again is rich Demiroks. So much for listening. There

(01:46:01):
are so many ways you can spend your time. I
do appreciate you spending it right here with me live
from New Jersey. I'll talk to you real soon.

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006 Rich on Tech Radio Show - February 11, 2023

Episode Transcript

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Rich DeMuro

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}006 Rich on Tech Radio Show - February 11, 2023