011 Rich on Tech Radio Show - March 18, 2023 - Rich On Tech

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Big Mobile sells out to T Mobile, YouTube TV hikes prices,
the FCC fights to stop robotexts, plus your tech questions answered.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
What's going on.

Speaker 1 (00:13):
I'm Rich Dmiro and this is Rich on Tech, the
show where I talk about the tech stuff I think
you should know about and answer 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 one
eight eight eight Rich one oh one. That's eight eight

(00:35):
eight seven four to two four one zero one. Give
me a call if you have a question about technology
or otherwise just want to chat.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
A big news this week.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
Two big stories, actually a lot of big stories, but
two that really resonated on my Twitter, and that's usually
where I figure out what people care about, for better
or for worse. But T Mobile is buying mint Mobile,
which the irony is so strong here because Mint Mobile
was for folks who wanted to stick it to the

(01:07):
man by not subscribing to a big wireless company. And
now Mint Mobile sells out to the man. So Mint Mobile,
which you know, you know them for their quirky advertising.
Ryan Reynolds is an owner. They had these plans that
were kind of like Costco. The more you bought in advance,
the cheaper it was. So if you bought three months

(01:28):
of service, six months of service, you paid for a
year in advance. That's how you saved money. They had
plans as low as fifteen bucks a month. It was
a good value. In fact, I have a Mint line
as a tester line, not my main line, and I've
got a family member that has been on Mint for
many years. And they would tell a lot of people
about Mint saying I pay fifteen bucks a month, and

(01:48):
you know, I get everything I need And people would
be like, how do you do that? I don't understand.
That's of course with some limited data. But T Mobile
why did they buy Mint Mobile? Well, they want their marketing.
They want the way that they market things. That's really
what they purchased here for oh a cool one point
three five billion dollars.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
So Ryan Reynolds made out in this deal.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
They also get two other companies that this two other
brands that this company owns. Kayena Corporation is the is
the parent company. They get Mint Mobile, Ultramobile, and then
a wholesaler called Plum. So this is the quote that
really stuck with me over the long term will benefit
from applying the marketing formula Mint has become famous for
across more parts of T Mobile, so that's what they want.

(02:36):
They want the marketing, they want the way that Mint
Mobile does business, and they're going to keep the Mint
Mobile brands around. But realistically, the way I see this
not good for consumers. It's never good for consumers when
a big company gobbles up a competitor, small company because
people went to that small company. They didn't want to
be with the big company, and now they have no choice.

(02:58):
They are folded into them, and many people probably wondering
do I stick with Mint Mobile. Nothing's going to change overnight,
but over time realistically T Mobile are they going to
compete with themselves? I mean, these are two different kind
of segments. T Mobile trying to push the ultra premium
you know, eighty dollars a month plans for unlimited everything,
whereas Mint Mobile is pushing the lower end plans for

(03:21):
the value oriented consumer. So, if you're with Mint Mobile,
do you need to switch right now? Probably not, but
you might have your eye on a different carrier, a
more independent brand. Even though we all know that all
of these brands are the same. They all run on
one of three networks in America, which is T Mobile,
Verizon or AT and T. I've got a guest coming

(03:43):
on the show from whistle Out, Sherry Riggs.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
She is going to talk more about this. It's not
really a merger.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
I guess it's a purchase and some of the alternative
plans out there, and just kind of get her take
on this whole thing. She covers wireless all day long,
so we'll hear what she has to say. The other
big story is a price increase, and we've gotten a
lot of these price increases. YouTube TV now the latest
to raise their prices. I was very excited about YouTube TV.

(04:10):
I'm a subscriber there as well, and it was very
exciting because the other company I work for, KTLA in
Los Angeles, they announced that they are coming to YouTube tv,
so the channel I work for on TV would be
available streaming first time ever, and that was exciting. At
sixty five dollars a month, now it's going to seventy

(04:32):
two to ninety nine a month, So we take the good,
we take the bad. Eight extra dollars a month not
make or break for a lot of folks, but it's
the principle of things, you're getting more and are you
really watching eight more dollars worth of stuff?

Speaker 2 (04:45):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
Current subscribers will see this new update on April eighteenth.
That's when the price change kicks in to soften the
blow a little bit. The four K add on, which
used to be twenty dollars a month, which is wild,
is only nine to ninety nine now. So realistically, if
you're subscribing to YouTube TV, you're now paying seventy three

(05:08):
dollars a month for one hundred channels you don't watch
and three channels that you actually watch. And YouTube TV
is fantastic, don't get me wrong. They give you unlimited DVR.
They just gave you the new feature where I can
watch four different things at once, which is perfect timing
with the final four happening March Madness.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
So it's cool, but is it worth seventy three dollars
a month?

Speaker 1 (05:30):
I mean, we all canceled cable because we wanted to
get away from these giant cable prices, and now here
they are again. So I don't know, but this made
me think about the idea of the bundle.

Speaker 3 (05:41):
Right.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
Companies love bundling because math is hard for us. We
all wanted a la carte, right, this is what we
all went to streaming for. But now, as we've all realized,
you start subscribing to all these individual streaming services and
they add up really fast. See, you get more money
for a bundle, but you also get stuff that you
don't need. For example, the Triple Play. How many people

(06:07):
have paid for phone lines they don't need, just to
get that deal on cable TV and Internet. I know
many many people, including myself, did this. The Triple Play
was like ninety nine bucks for everything you needed Internet,
cable TV, your phone line that you never needed, and
if you bought them separately, it'd be way more. YouTube Premium.
I've got a subscription to that. I get YouTube music included.

(06:30):
I don't need YouTube music. I already pay for another
music service, but yet there it is, and I feel
guilty because I need to stream on it, because I
need to pay, you know, get my money's worth YouTube Premium.
By the way, price for that just went up. Apple One,
I'm a subscriber there. I pay like thirty three dollars
a month. I know it's absolutely insane how much I
pay for Apple One, but I need two out of

(06:53):
these seven things I get included there, I get two
terabytes of storage, which I love because my kids have
their iPads and they're recording things all the time. And
you know, you get that message on your iPhone that
you're out of iCloud storage. And we had that for
many years because I resisted, and now I finally gave in.
We don't get the message anymore. But now we have
Apple News. We have Apple Fitness, which I do like.

(07:14):
We have Apple Music, which again don't really want, but
I have and I use it. Nothing against Apple Music,
but it's just one of these things that I feel
guilty because I pay for it that I want to
use it.

Speaker 2 (07:26):
What else do I get with Apple One?

Speaker 1 (07:28):
I get like, a, oh, there's so many things Apple
News I mentioned that I get.

Speaker 2 (07:33):
Let me let me look down the list here.

Speaker 1 (07:34):
Oh, Apple TV. My wife watches one show on there,
so we get that Apple Arcade. My kids used to
play games on that iCloud. Okay, we use that Apple
News plus three hundred newspapers and magazines. I haven't looked
at one of them. Apple Fitness plus I do like
and I do use. So again, a couple of things
I like, but I don't need it all. Verizon now

(07:55):
they're doing a bundle. They're giving people Netflix free for
a year, but you have to described to something else
to get that.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
Disney Plus.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
I subscribe to Disney plus, Hulu plus, ESPN plus, so
many pluses in these things. It's cheaper to get them
together than to get them separate. Bundles are sticky. Companies
know this. They know we love the bundle because it
feels like we're getting a value. T Mobile plans, they
include Netflix, they include Major League Soccer. Airlines they offer
a bundle. You buy a ticket. They say, hey, for

(08:25):
an extra sixty bucks, you can board the plane faster,
you can get a better seat. In the end, we
are spending more, but we're probably using less. But yet,
as consumers, we have these brains that are just wired
a certain way. You feel good when you're getting a value.
You go to a fast food place. It's cheaper to
buy the value meal than it is to buy the

(08:46):
fries and the burger by themselves.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
It's just the way it works.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
It's marketing one oh one, and we fall hook line
and sinker. So YouTube TV, yes, what I like to
just choose the fifteen channels that I might actually watch
on YouTube TV for ten fifteen twenty dollars a month. Absolutely,
will they ever let me do that? No, nobody lets
you do that. You always have to buy a bundle.

(09:11):
All right, Well, this show is a package deal. We've
got three hours of tech to talk about coming up
on today's show. We've got so much great stuff to
talk about. The FCC has new rules to help stop robotexts.
We'll see if those are gonna work. I've got three
great guests this week. Ben Parr is gonna join us.
He's gonna talk AI and the impact on your job. Yes,

(09:32):
it's gonna affect me, it's gonna affect you, It's gonna
affect everyone this week alone, Microsoft, Google, and Chat GPT
all have brand new developments when it comes to AI.
Like I mentioned, Sherry Riggs from Whistle Out, She's gonna
join us to talk alternatives to mint Mobile and just
talk about the state of the wireless industry in general.

(09:53):
And then later Ember CEO Klay Alexander is gonna join us.
He's gonna talk about their new self warming baby bottle. Now,
thankfully I am out of that stage with the whole
baby bottle thing. But I remember warming these things up.
They're like a gremlin. The baby bottle you can't you
can't put it in the microwave. There's so many rules
about the baby bottle. So we're going to talk about
that as well. You are listening to Rich on Tech.

(10:16):
Your calls at triple eight Rich.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
One oh one.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
The phone lines are open right now. Give me a
call eight eight eight seven four to two four one
zero one. If you have a question, you've got a
thought about technology, I want to hear from you. We've
got so much more to talk about in this show. Ah,
can you tell them fired up today? Yes, that's the
energy I want on this show. Give me a call
if you share that enthusiasm. You're listening to rich on Tech.

(10:45):
Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name is Rich
dmiro online at richontech dot tv. You can find me
on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all the regular places. Taking your
calls right now at triple eight Rich one O one.
That's eight eight eight seven four two four one zero one.

(11:05):
Gilda is in La Mesa, California. Gilda, you are on
with Rich How you doing?

Speaker 4 (11:11):
Excuse me? Hi, Thank you for taking my call. I
need to purchase a new modem, and I'm wondering if
a separate router is better or just a combo of
a modem and router together and it whichever, And also
if you could recommend a brand to me?

Speaker 2 (11:32):
Okay, So what company are you going?

Speaker 5 (11:35):
With?

Speaker 4 (11:36):
Cox? From my internet service?

Speaker 1 (11:37):
And so they offer you, pardon me, they offer you
a selection of Is it a rental fee every.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
Month or what?

Speaker 5 (11:45):
No?

Speaker 4 (11:46):
I buy my own?

Speaker 2 (11:47):
Oh so you have to buy your own?

Speaker 4 (11:49):
No, I don't have to, but I prefer to buy
my own.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
Why And they.

Speaker 4 (11:53):
Did send me a list of all the compatible products
is quite a huge list.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
Yeah, well, why do you want to buy your own?
I'm just curious.

Speaker 4 (12:02):
Mine is about fifteen years old and it's been kind
of slowing down. So when I contacted them, they could
tell on my end that my router is making my
internet flow. And I don't have cable, I just stream everything.
I have Roku, right.

Speaker 2 (12:19):
And so, how you've been with this company for how
many years? Fifteen?

Speaker 1 (12:21):
You said?

Speaker 4 (12:22):
Oh, my router, I mean my modem is about fifteen,
but I've been with cos for probably like twenty five years.

Speaker 1 (12:30):
Oh wow, okay, So, and do they charge a rental fee?
I don't know, because every company's a little differ.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
They do. How much is that do?

Speaker 4 (12:38):
I really don't know. I would imagine about fifteen dollars
a month.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
Okay, Well, at fifteen dollars a month, you should probably
purchase because.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
You'll break you.

Speaker 4 (12:45):
I would rather do the math.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
So okay.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
So the question is do you get an all in
one or do you get you know, two separate devices.
I personally would get one that's all in one. I
mean that isn't that just a little bit easier?

Speaker 4 (12:59):
Oh? Yeah, I prefer to have an all in one.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
The question is if you get in all in one.
There's a list that they have on their website, so
I mean, you know, you can't. It depends like kind
of what you want out of this. Do you have
like a mesh network already? Like are you using how
like how many rooms are you trying to get this in?

Speaker 4 (13:21):
Oh? Just in one room?

Speaker 2 (13:23):
Oh? Okay, just in one room?

Speaker 4 (13:24):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (13:25):
In that case you can go with one room. Okay.

Speaker 1 (13:28):
In that case, you can go with a very simple router.
I mean I'm looking at their list that they have
on here of the combo ones, and I mean any
of these will work. You probably want a Doosis three
point oh. Have they mentioned that because that gives you
the highest speeds?

Speaker 4 (13:42):
No, they did, but yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
So there's different levels of modems, and the three point
zero is the most recent one, So that's the one
that I would recommend getting. As for the specific brand,
I mean there's really any of these are going to work.
A linksis you know, rus is the brand that they
use that most of the time they give out, But realistically,
any of these are going to work. I would just

(14:05):
kind of see which one's available on Amazon, like just
look down their list. I mean Cox has it on
their website of all the different cable modems that they certify. Okay,
but I would definitely go with a three point zero
to get the fastest speed, and that'll keep. Yeah, it's
if it's fifteen years old, it's it's it doesn't. It
just doesn't accommodate the faster speed. So you may upgrade

(14:26):
to the one. What internet speed are you getting? What
are you paying for?

Speaker 4 (14:32):
I think is I have the lowest one. I think
it's fifty fifty.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
Okay, Well, I mean you don't need the three point
oh to get the fifty, but I'm just future proofing things.
If you ever feel like you want to upgrade to
a faster speed, you'll want that faster modem.

Speaker 4 (14:47):
But okay, excellent, But.

Speaker 1 (14:49):
Yeah, I would just do a little quick price comparison
of a couple of brands. You're when you start searching
down the list of the ones that are available, you're
going to see very quickly, like which one is on Amazon,
quickly and easily, Like if it's Prime next day, that's
a pretty popular one.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
I just go with that.

Speaker 1 (15:03):
I would stick to like the main brands, whether it's
net Gear or I mean they have a TP link
on here. I mean, there's so many that they give you.
There's probably the list of like fifteen of them.

Speaker 4 (15:13):
Okay, wonderful, Thank you so much for your health.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
All right, Gilda, enjoy the new modem.

Speaker 4 (15:20):
Okay, thank you.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
All right, take care. All right.

Speaker 1 (15:24):
Let me talk about the FCC with its new rules
on scam text. This is such a problem that I
don't know if the FCC is going to solve them
with these new rules, but they are working to do it,
and we've seen the amazing progress they've made with spam calls.
Kind of kidding, we still get those two. But they
do have new rules so these new rules are going

(15:46):
to require mobile service providers to block certain robotext messages
that are highly likely to be illegal. They say illegal.
I don't think anyone's gone to jail for setting a robotext.
But you know, legitimate companies do by these rules. The
problem is it's folks that are not legitimate that are
sending these things.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
They don't really care about the rules. The FCC says that.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
Robotechs pose a unique threat to consumers because they are
hard to ignore. That is very true. They also contain
links to phishing websites or websites that inn install that
can install malware, and of course we're tempted to click
these links even though we know many of them are fake.
The FCC the new rule requires blocking of text messages
that appear to come from phone numbers that are unlikely

(16:32):
to transmit text messages. This includes invalid, unallocated or unused numbers.
So they're going to go through sort of a process
to figure out, Okay, is this number legitimate?

Speaker 2 (16:43):
Should it be setting a text?

Speaker 1 (16:44):
No, okay, We're going to criticize and look at this
number a little bit closer and hopefully block those texts.
And that's of course on the provider, so these providers
have to start doing this. The FCC recommends that consumers
take steps to protect themselves, and I would recommend this
as well. Do not interact in any way with suspicious texts,
do not click on the links, or do not write

(17:06):
back to them.

Speaker 2 (17:07):
That's the best thing you can do.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
You can also forward unwanted spams to our spam texts
to spam spam seven seven two six, and just delete
suspicious texts. I know a lot of these things are
going around right now because it says you've got a
package delivery or your Netflix account is canceled.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
You got to take action right now. Just ignore them.

Speaker 1 (17:26):
The best thing to do is not to reply because,
just like a spam email, the second you reply to
these messages is sends a signal to these spammers that
this is a good phone number. And you do not
want them to know that your number is good because
guess what they're going to send more?

Speaker 2 (17:41):
All right, Coming up.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
Next, we're going to talk to Ben Parr about AI
and the impact on your job. Plus your calls triple
eight Rich one oh one. You are listening to Rich
on tech more or right after this welcome back to
Rich on tech. My name is Rich DeMuro and another

(18:04):
week in the tech world, and just another major announcement
by tech companies when it comes to AI. In fact,
three major announcements. Google they embedded AI into Docs and Gmail.
Microsoft put AI into Office three six or now they
call it Microsoft three sixty five. We're talking word Excel,

(18:26):
PowerPoint outlook, teams, all those good things. And then open
Ai released GPT four, the next version of their AI,
just as we're getting used to the old version. Let
me let me tell you about some of these some
of these developments here. Okay, So Google first off says
that they are embedding generative AI into Google Docs and

(18:49):
into Gmail. So, like I've mentioned on the show before,
you no longer need to do a first draft of
anything AI is going to write that first draft. Then
you've got Microsoft three sixty five. They're calling it Copilot,
so they're embedding this in word Excel, PowerPoint Outlook, and
teams and in teams specifically. This is how wild it is.

(19:12):
The Copilot, which is their AI name, is gonna listen
to what everyone's saying on that team's call and teams
is kind of like zoom if you're not familiar with it.
They're gonna listen to what everyone's saying and discussing. Then
if you come to the meeting late, the AI will
just summarize what everyone's saying, and not just summarize, but
also give you kind of an update. How are people
feeling about this? Here to talk about all these developments

(19:35):
is Ben Parr, journalist and author of The Social Analyst,
a newsletter available on substack at benpar dot subsack dot com.
I'll put the link on my website. Rich on tech
dot TV. All right, I think we got Ben here.

Speaker 6 (19:50):
Ben?

Speaker 2 (19:50):
Are you there? Yeah, okay, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1 (19:54):
And congratulations, I heard that you just got engaged, faccurate.

Speaker 7 (20:00):
Thank you really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
That's the start of a whole new journey and very exciting.
So congrats on that. Let's talk about AI. So these
announcements by Google, Microsoft and Chat GPT to GPT four
this week, which one struck you as the most interesting?

Speaker 7 (20:22):
So GPT four is a fundamental change to the large
language models that are powering this big raws and AI.
So for everyone out there, GPT is the technology behind Chat.
GPT the fastest growing tech product in human history. Which
is crazy when you think about it. Oh yeah, and

(20:44):
it was run on a product called GPT three and
GPT three point five. So this week the company behind
chat GPT released GPT four and it is significantly better
at sounding humans, at giving more detailed results, at not
making mistakes and errors as often, at speaking other languages,

(21:04):
and to do it can see And what that means
is if you uploaded a picture to GPT four, as
you asked what was going on in the picture.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
It could tell you, which is incredible.

Speaker 1 (21:16):
And you know, I kind of tweeted about this, but
this whole reality of kind of implications of this, there's
just so many. But I'm sure that like the social
media networks like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok are all using AI
to scan what we upload, especially images. You know, it's
like we've used hashtags in the past, but do you

(21:37):
think there will be a need for those in the future.

Speaker 7 (21:41):
It's going in a crazy direction so fast it's hard
to tell what will exactly happen. So let's break down
a little bit. Both Google and Microsoft announced tools that
will automatically help you write your documents and turn those
documents into presentations and help you write your email. If

(22:01):
it's in all of your Gmail, for example, a lot
of your emails back and forth, you might be AI
generated or at least partially AI generated. You're going to
see a whole different way in which people are doing productivity.
I saw, for example, somebody earlier this week who asked
GPT four or advice on how to make the most

(22:21):
money possible and started following it's advice and started making money.
I'm actually going to ask it to tell me how
to triple my newsletter subscribers, and it gave really good advice.
There's like a lot of crazy things that are happening
all at once.

Speaker 1 (22:36):
What's wild about this is it's so much more natural
than the previous way of searching. Right if you wanted
to look to see how to increase your newsletter subscribers,
there's a million websites that can tell you little tips
and things. But the way that this sort of summarizes
and just makes it so clear is really what's most
interesting to me. Like, for instance, i wanted to cook

(22:59):
a dinner, a corn beef dinner right for Saint Patrick's Day,
and I just asked the chat GPT and also being AI,
I just wanted to try them both. I said, hey,
make me a shopping list for a traditional corn beef dinner,
and sure enough, they both did it in different ways.
But it's just that kind of idea of just asking
our computers to do stuff and they really give us

(23:22):
the results that we're kind of looking for very quickly
and easily.

Speaker 7 (23:26):
The chat is the most natural interface that we are
used to and that we as humans used, and so
it makes sense to have this go give me back
and forth in chat, and I kind of think of
chat GPT and some of the AI to was kind
of like a brainstorming buddy, somebody who is not going
to judge you, somebody who has access to the Internet
and can give you lots of advice, will not always

(23:48):
be right, but will often be correct. And I think
that's how a lot more people are starting to use
it to boot too as well. It's just really smart
at a lot of things. So GPT three point five
it tested in the Mottom ten percent of test takers
for the bar exam, GPT four tested in the top
ten percent. That's how quickly this technology is advancing month

(24:09):
by month.

Speaker 1 (24:11):
It can also do ap calculus. According to your newsletter,
the Social analyst. It can do AP calculus, AP chemistry,
AP physics better. Like you said, it does the visual inputs,
So now you can pop a picture into this and
it can describe what's happening in that picture. My kid
watched the video about Google Docs and how it was
doing AI in there, and he was like, this is incredible, Dad,

(24:34):
this is just wild what it's going to be able
to do. So what I've been saying is the first
draft is pretty much always going to be AI at
this point, and then we're going to be, as humans
the ones to to sort of figure out, you know,
how do we polish this, Which brings me to the
job situation.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
What is the impact on jobs when it comes to AI.

Speaker 7 (24:56):
This is one of the big debates that we are
all having right now. And the founder of Open AI,
his name is Sam Maltman. He also founded an incubator
called by Combinator. He's said before that he believes when
there's this thing called AGI artificial general intelligence basically an
AI where you could it's like a human, that the

(25:19):
idea of capitalism itself will will be obsolete. I'm not
sure where I fall on that debate, but what I
will say is that you can be two or four
times as productive as you were before as a writer
or a presentation maker or as an artist with AI.
And the results may very well be that, while we're

(25:40):
not going to eliminate all jaw that a company could
be built with a lot less people, it's entirely plausible
that someone builds a billion dollar company with just a
small handful of people as a result of AI. So
there's real questions to be asked. Politicians and epsids are

(26:00):
asking those questions. It's not like past times, in my opinion,
where we were able to immediately find a whole brand
new set of jobs.

Speaker 8 (26:10):
We are going to.

Speaker 7 (26:11):
Be navigating this in real time. It's going to be both.
I was writing this in my newsletter. It's both bogs
firing and a little scary.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
Yeah, it's scary.

Speaker 1 (26:20):
It's also scary how fast it's all changed and how
and how right on it is. So, just for one example,
so I write scripts for TV. I write like my
little script of my we call it a package. It's
a story that I air on TV, and it's written
in a certain way for TV. Right, it's short, it's sweet,
it's got sound bites. And then I asked chat ebt

(26:40):
or rewrite this as a blog post yesterday, because then
I post it to the website. But you know, you
can't write a script on the website because it's just
it's not the way you read stuff. And so I
watched this transform what I had written into something that
was much more a blog post, and it was It
was interesting to me because I'm sitting there going hmmm,
this is like ready to go, but I didn't feel
right using it because the AI wrote it. And so

(27:03):
it's like these little questions we're going to have along
the way of how do we navigate this new landscape?

Speaker 8 (27:10):
Oh?

Speaker 7 (27:10):
Absolutely, and look, you know, the AI does not understand
human condition. There are certain things like writing the you know,
a super amazing script that people will love that the
AI probably can't get to. It's still too generic, but
it's getting more advanced, and if someone really knows how
to talk to an AI like chow ChiPT, they can

(27:31):
get a really strong first result and start moving from there.
And yes, transforming content from one type to another is
a real strength of AI. I feel like in the
next year, the idea that you would build a presentation
from scratch, like a PowerPoint will not exist anymore. You
will literally just type in some notes in a doc,
ask it to translate into a presentation, and it's going

(27:52):
to make that. And that's in the next couple months
with both Microsoft and Google. Who knows what will happened
three months from now.

Speaker 2 (27:58):
Absolutely well, I think we're gonna leave it there.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
I think a lot of people will be happy to
not have to do a presentation ever. Again, well, this
still have to make the presentation, they just won't have
to build it. Ben Par, thanks so much for joining
me today. I appreciate it.

Speaker 7 (28:11):
Thank you and everyone.

Speaker 8 (28:12):
It will be only right, I promise.

Speaker 2 (28:14):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (28:15):
I'm glad we need that reassurance, all right, Benpar dot
substack dot com. The newsletter is the Social Analyst. I'll
put a link there on my website. Rich on tech
dot TV.

Speaker 2 (28:26):
All right, coming up.

Speaker 1 (28:27):
If you have a comment or a question about technology,
give me a call at triple eight rich.

Speaker 2 (28:32):
One oh one.

Speaker 1 (28:32):
That's eight eight eight seven four to two four one
zero one. If you've got a Samsung or a Pixel phone,
you want to hear about how hackers might be able
to take control with just your phone number, I'll tell
you about that and how to protect yourself. All coming
up here. You are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome

(28:55):
back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro hanging out with
you here talking technology. Let's see we got Ryan and
North Hollywood. Ryan, you have a comment about the T
mobile acquisition.

Speaker 9 (29:08):
All right, Well, I'm a met Mobile customer and I'm
gonna keep using online prepaid through October of twenty twenty three.

Speaker 5 (29:17):
But I'm on Apple now.

Speaker 9 (29:20):
But I kind of soured on them for security reasons
about a month ago. Based on the custom APN. They
have Android users user, they direct Android users use.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
Oh what, well, what, what's what's wrong with that?

Speaker 5 (29:34):
Well, there's stop instructions directly to an APN where if
like if you just pop the sin cardon and go,
or if you're using Apple that you know Apple's walled
garden doesn't let you do that. But T Mobile by
default forces you to connect using IBV six and the

(29:55):
mobile custom APM has a i TV four connections that
it shoots you to almost every time. And if you
check like your IP address using third party site, that
shows the carrier. But if you look on internal Android settings,
that APN redirects to IP addresses that four out of

(30:15):
five times will show up as the Department of the Fense,
and like that fifth or sixth time will show up
as a Ministry.

Speaker 3 (30:20):
Of Defense in the UK.

Speaker 9 (30:22):
And if you who is query those IP addresses, like
mornings come up saying you're not allowed to query this
except for certain legal reasons. And I think it's because
all these MVNOs there, a lot of them are sold
to people traveling to the US that are not registering
them or therefore GPS tracking the quip more alarm systems.

(30:45):
But from a security standpoint, I don't think it's good.
I think, you know, I'm not overly word. I'm going
to keep using them. I have private d DNS, I
use encrypted chat, I'm on Apple.

Speaker 8 (30:56):
You know, I feel.

Speaker 9 (30:57):
Okay about it, but I think ultimately and the enos
are not a good way to go forward with the.

Speaker 1 (31:03):
Consumer Interesting, all right, well, that's uh, you got a
lot packed in there, and I see wow. I mean
there's a little bit of a conspiracy theory in there.
I understand that, and I think that for most people
it's probably you know, maybe not a consideration, but I
would agree that if you feel like this is redirecting

(31:23):
to places that may be monitoring your traffic. Then yeah,
I would definitely use a VPN or use some sort
of cloaking mechanism if you're worried about that. But that's
that's an interesting point, Ryan, and thank you for bringing
that up. Just one more thing to think about when
we when we make these decisions. All right, let's go
to Dennis in Marina del Rey. Dennis, you're on with Rich.

Speaker 3 (31:46):
Hey, Rich, I appreciate your program. You're doing a great job,
my friend.

Speaker 2 (31:49):
Oh, thank you.

Speaker 3 (31:50):
Hey. I've got a Windows ten machine. It's a desktop machine,
and it's a four K monitor, an LG monitor, and
I but older guys seventy eight head cataract surgery, so
I don't see things quite as clearly, even with corrective classes.
But when I go in and I see the list.
In other words, if I open a drive, I see

(32:13):
the list of everything on the left hand side, and
then if I click on a folder on the left
hand side, it opens it on the right and you
can adjust the size from small icons the larger icons
to a list. That's not a problem. How do I
adjust the list on the left hand side so that
it's much larger.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
So you're talking when you're inside a folder, right Okay,
well I think at this point you so, have you
gone through the standard kind of right click the desktop
going into view.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
Have you done that?

Speaker 4 (32:45):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (32:45):
Yeah, I have it, and it will work on the
right hand side. It'll make the folders larger. But the
list on the left hand side, the list all of
the files on the drive, it's just too small.

Speaker 2 (32:58):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
It sounds like this point you might want to go
into the accessibility settings.

Speaker 2 (33:02):
Have you gone into there? Okay?

Speaker 1 (33:05):
So, uh, Windows Icon plus, set Windows icon settings, and
then ease of access and I believe, I believe you
can press Windows key plus you to get there directly.
Uh you know the Windows key right, the little one
next to the keyboard. So that is where you're going
to find all of the bigger I should say, the

(33:26):
deeper settings for specifically for accessibility. So we're talking ways
to make the text bigger across everything, make everything bigger.
If you just want to make everything bigger on the screen,
you can do that. If you want to change the
size of the mouse pointer, the colors, the contrast, all
that stuff. The main settings that you're seeing when you
go into the view is just the standard kind of

(33:48):
you know, do you want your icons bigger, smaller, whatever.
But accessibility is really where you're going to get those
those fine controls, and I think that's what you're looking
for at this point because that's going to make everything
bigger on the screen, which is what you're saying right
you need you need right now.

Speaker 3 (34:00):
I appreciate that. And a great shout out to your
screender at Kim chapter. She's still there, so she's doing
a great job for you. Really love your program. Just
wish you guys growing on Sunday too. I miss you on.

Speaker 1 (34:12):
Sunday, man, I know, but you know I do work
five days a week at my other job. So as
much as my wife was excited to have me gone
both days on the weekend, I said, I think one
day is enough for three hours.

Speaker 3 (34:24):
So absolutely all righty God bless you have a great day.

Speaker 1 (34:26):
All right, Dennis, appreciate the call, Thank you, and thanks
for the kind words.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
So many things.

Speaker 1 (34:33):
So what I love about this show is the unique
aspect of what everyone everyone has different sort of like
wants and needs when it comes to tech, and that's
you know, we all come from this certain perspective that
we have in our world. Because let's be honest, our
world revolves around us. And so what I love, and
I also love this as a journalist is I get

(34:53):
to see the world from so many different perspectives, and
I love that aspect of things because if you're just
involved in yourself, there's a whole nother world out there.
Believe me, it's not just all about you. I mean
sometimes it feels like it is, and in your life
it is, but there's so much more out there. All right,

(35:14):
let me tell you about this story, the Samsungs and
the Pixels. Okay, so there is a security issue that
a lot of phones have already gotten an update, but
some have not. So if you have a Google Pixel
or a Samsung phone, Google has said hold on, there's
a little bit of a problem. Hackers could take over
your phone without you knowing. So there's a couple of vulnerabilities.

(35:36):
If you have a Samsung device S twenty two, the
M thirty three, whole bunch of these M lines and
the A lines, a Vivo device, or a Pixel six
or a Pixel seven, or pretty much any phone that
uses the Xenos Auto T five to one twenty three chipset.
This is a motem inside the phone. Now, this bug
lets hackers take over your phone. Pixel seven series already

(35:59):
got thisecurity update to fix it. That's the March security update.
Pixel six series doesn't have it yet. Google says if
you have that phone, you should disable voice over LTE
and void and Wi Fi calling. So do that for
the time being until you get your security updates. And
do your security updates. This is why we do them.
We don't want hackers to take over our phone, all right,

(36:21):
more of your calls Triple eight rich one O one.
That's eight eight eight seven four to two four to
one zero one. You are listening to Rich on tech
more after this, Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich
DeMuro here hanging out with you. Uh our number two
taking your calls at triple eight rich one oh one.

(36:43):
That's eight eight eight seven four to two four.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
One zero one.

Speaker 1 (36:49):
You know I love telling you about when I find
good new apps, right, so I'm gonna go over a
couple of apps.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
Kind of thought about this.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
Last weekend was the Academy Awards, And I've talked about
this before, but it's really tough to find things to watch,
even if you subscribe to a bunch of streaming services.
It's really really tricky because what you end up doing
is going to Netflix checking to see if there's anything
on there. Then you go to Hulu you see if
there's anything on there. Then you go to HBO you

(37:18):
see if there's anything on there. And I hate that method.
I hate like sitting down with you know, at the
TV and trying to figure out something to watch at
that moment. I want to have this all figured out before.
So with that in mind, I did find my new
absolute favorite, but I'm gonna save that for the last one.
But I'm gonna tell you all the different solutions that

(37:38):
you have. Okay, So number one and by the way,
this all comes down to like making the most out
of the streaming services that you already pay for.

Speaker 2 (37:48):
That's what it's really about.

Speaker 1 (37:49):
So the app that I've liked in the past that
I've used is called Real Good ore e E l
g oo D Real Good Get It Movie, Real Real Good.
So what I like about this one is it's clean,
it's modern, it's up to date. It works with over
three hundred streaming services according to them. I mean, I
hope you don't pay for that many, but it's really

(38:10):
nice because you can keep a watch list and it
divides your watch list into two things, stuff that's on
your streaming services and stuff that's not on them, and
anything that becomes available, they'll move it to the other one.
So what I like about that is you can save
any movie, whether it's on your streaming services or not,
and then when it comes time to watch a movie,

(38:31):
you just go to this little list you have and
the ones that you want to watch that are on
your services are at the top, and then you can
sort them. You can sort them by your favor you know,
the top rated, the most popular, however you want to sort.
I usually do either top rated or most popular, and
then you can decide what to watch. And of course
the movie that pops up at the top is never

(38:51):
the thing I want to watch when when I sit
down on the couch and watch TV. So that's real good.
That's available for iOS and Android. Next up is this
service called just Watch, and just Watch is another one
that I've used in the past that's pretty good. What's
neat about this one is it shows you this matrix
of streaming, rental and purchase options, so you can see

(39:16):
how much this movie rents or is available for purchase
on different services. So it's almost like buying a plane ticket,
you know the dates and everything, but it shows you
the price. So what I've noticed is most of the
time the prices these days are the same, but sometimes
they could be different, like it might be on sale
on YouTube or on sale and iTunes whatever. So that's

(39:38):
just watch that's also available for iOS and Android. The
neat thing about this, if you have caught up to
all of your different services, you can see a timeline
of new releases, so it literally shows you as you
scroll down. Yesterday, these three movies were released on Netflix.
These two movies were released on HBO Max, and so

(39:58):
if you really want to up to this stuff, you
can see that timeline. It also tracks sports if you're
into that. There's this app called ydeo y idio. Now,
this is one of the early apps that track the
streaming stuff, and I used to use it. When I
revisited it for this comparison, not so great. The neat

(40:21):
thing about this it does have preset filter, so if
you're searching for the same sort of thing over and over,
you can save that as a filter and then you
can just tap that filter and.

Speaker 2 (40:31):
It will show you those items.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
So if you want to see new movies that are
streaming on Netflix that are you know, indie films that
are thrillers. You can save that and then you can
just tap and see what's new in that preset filter.
I feel like the interface on this app is a
little confusing, so not the best one. I gave that
one two stars out of five. And by the way,

(40:55):
I put all of this on my Instagram at rich
On Tech. I did a little swipe through, so you
can go to my Instagram profile and look for the
movie Night, Popcorn and all these apps I'm talking about
are there all right?

Speaker 2 (41:07):
Apple TV app.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
You might not realize, but you can actually use the
Apple TV app to not only see where things are streaming,
but also save those items in sort of a watch list. Now,
of course this is Apple, so it only works on
Apple devices, and it works best if you have an
Apple TV as well. So Apple is really confusing at

(41:28):
this point with the streaming because you've got the Apple
TV box, which has been around forever. Then you have
the Apple TV app, which is available across the iPhone
and the tablets that they have. But then you have
Apple TV Plus, which is a streaming service, and that's

(41:48):
available across a whole bunch of different platforms, not just
Apple devices. Gets really really confusing with Apple. They need
to sort of figure this stuff out. About the Apple
TV app is, if you're totally invested in the Apple ecosystem,
this is going to be a great way to keep
track of things that you want to watch because you
can go on your phone. It's beautifully designed, as many

(42:11):
Apple things are, and it will show you where that
item is playing. So if you search for a movie
in the Apple TV app, it'll tell you, oh, this
is streaming on HBO Max and you can just open
it up in HBO. The only streaming service that is
really not there is Netflix, and that's a pretty big one.
So I don't know what the war is between Apple

(42:31):
and Netflix, but it seems like it's Apple against the world.
Sometimes it's like, Okay, you're either going to do it
our way or you're not included in this. And Netflix
has been out of this process since day one, so clearly,
again frenemies, this is iOS only. So the Apple TV
app is pretty handy. And the other cool thing is
that if you add something to your what's called it

(42:53):
up next list, which is sort of your watch list
when you sit down at your Apple TV. On your
Apple TV home screen, you'll see the stuff that you
want to watch and you can just click into it
and watch it. Then you've got Google TV. Their app
is very similar to Apple TV, except it's available across
iOS and Android. It is one of the few apps
that includes Rotten Tomatoes scores, so if you live and

(43:14):
die by Rotten Tomatoes scores, which a lot of people like,
those are included in the Google TV ratings, which is
kind of cool. Obviously it's Google. It's going to give
you really good personalized recommendations. It's very easy to see
what's free and what's paid. One more time, Netflix is
notably absent, So I guess maybe it's not Apple. I
take it back, it's really Netflix. That is kind of

(43:37):
the person that's the problem here. What is a Taylor
Swift song?

Speaker 2 (43:41):
It's me? No, wait, what is it? It's me? It's
no whatever, I can it's me. You, I'm the problem.
It's me. That's it.

Speaker 1 (43:49):
Okay, so Netflix should be singing that song from Taylor.
And then the cool thing about this, kind of like Apple,
the watch list sinks with chrome casts, so if you're
a big chrome cast person, you can see.

Speaker 2 (43:59):
All the stuff there.

Speaker 1 (44:00):
Then of course Roku has their own app, so this
is a great companion to Roku hardware. Their interface is okay,
it's really focused on just getting you to watch stuff fast.
Their search is good, it'll go across all the different
providers and tell you where something is streaming, but they
don't have many filters to narrow down all. Right, Now
we get to the one that I've discovered doing this research,

(44:23):
and I absolutely love it and this is my new favorite.
It is not an app, it's only a website, but
it is called flick Metrics flick me t Rix, and
this is I'm giving five stars to this website. It
is the best that I've seen. What's great about this
website is that it is fast, it's simple, it's easy,

(44:47):
and it works across all the major providers, all the
big ones Netflix, Amazon, Disney Plus, BritBox, Hulu, Paramount, Peacock,
Showtime Stars, Hbo, iTunes, Apple TV, and Movie. And what's
great about this is it's just very simple. You can
choose you want movies, you want TV shows. You can

(45:10):
do the different categories, so if you want action, adventure,
documentary and then so basically there's three things to do.
You choose what you want to watch, then you choose
the services that you want it on, and then you
can choose the year and the rating, and it does
an average rating among Metacritic, IMDb, Letterboxed, and critics and

(45:32):
so it is super easy. It has found so many
great movies on the services that I subscribe to. You
can also do a list like a watch list if
you want. You can favorite things, you can mark things.
This scene doesn't really give recommendations as far as I
can tell, but you don't need them because now you
can just sort by like all the stuff you want
to watch again. The website is flick Metrics flick met

(45:56):
ri i X. So far this has served me up
two really good good movies. Well, i'd say one and
a half. My wife didn't like the movie you watched
last night.

Speaker 2 (46:04):
It was weird.

Speaker 1 (46:06):
She's not really into weird movies. It was called Black
Bear and it's starring what's her name. I keep forgetting
her name, even though we've watched so many things with her.
Aubrey Plaza. She's the actress from White Lotus and of
course Parks and rec back in the day. But she
was in this movie that was pretty quirky, very odd,

(46:28):
and it's one of those movies that you kind of
like you're watching and it's kind of like White Lotus
where you're just you're watching because you're not sure if
it's gonna get good. It's like, but then you've gone
the whole movie and you're like, Okay, I just watched
that whole movie. I'm not sure if that's good, even
though I watched the whole thing. So but the other
movie it helped me find was called Vengeance, and this
was a movie Oh gosh, how do you say it?

(46:50):
Oh gosh, how you say it? Maybe it's maybe it's not. Anyway,
it was. It takes place in Texas and it stars
the guy from bj Novak, which is you know, from
the office. And I thought this was a great movie
and I hadn't known about it, and this flick metrics
helped me find it. Anyway, flick metrics is that my

(47:11):
new top pick for finding movies. I think you'll like it.
Let me know if you find a movie that you like.
Through it again on Instagram at rich on Tech. Look
for the movie logo on my profile and you can
swipe through all those movie services that I just mentioned
I'm all about finding the stuff that I'm paying for.
My kids are like, Dad, will you rent a movie?
I said, no, I'm paying for all these services. I'm

(47:31):
not paying six ninety nine to rent a movie. I
barely want to go to the movie theater because I'm
paying so much for these streaming services that when I
when I watch a movie on one of these services,
even if I watched just one a month, I am
happy that.

Speaker 2 (47:44):
I'm totally good.

Speaker 1 (47:45):
Like if I got one good movie out of these
services I pay for, I'm like, Okay, I'm good.

Speaker 2 (47:49):
I made it.

Speaker 1 (47:50):
Triple eight rich one oh one phone number to call
eight eight eight seven four to two four to one
zero one. Coming up, we're going to talk to Sherry
Riggs of Allout. She's going to talk about some of
the alternatives to mint Mobile and just kind of some
of these low cost carriers in general, the pros, the cons,
all that good stuff. Plus more of your calls. I'm
gonna tell you about ways's new feature. If you have

(48:15):
an EV you'll probably like it. You're listening to rich
on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. There's the
song I was trying to think of the lyrics to
how do I not know anti hero? My kids are
singing this NonStop. My wife is singing it. I mean,
if I admit it, I yes, I'm going to the

(48:37):
Taylor Swift concert. You know, look, what can I say?
My wife's a fan. I mean, I don't mind the music.
I'm not gonna say.

Speaker 4 (48:46):
No.

Speaker 1 (48:47):
I think my wife wasted like two hours at work
getting those tickets. You know, is that day when everyone
was having trouble with ticket masters, somehow she got in.
She only got two tickets, and then my kids are like, oh,
we're not going. She's like, no, I didn't of you.
When you have kids, everything is more expensive. It's like
times four. Like when I used to fly by myself
back home to New Jersey, it was like one ticket. Sure,

(49:10):
it's you know, a couple hundred bucks. Now it's like
anywhere I go it is times that by four. And
that's just the price of admission for anything. Yeah, kids
are expensive. Eight eight eight rich one o one eight
eight eight seven four to two four to one zero one.
Michael is in Livermore, California. You didn't call to hear

(49:30):
me complain, did you?

Speaker 4 (49:33):
No? No, I didn't.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
Well, how can I help?

Speaker 8 (49:37):
I'm having an issue logging into my mode. I put
in the user name, I put in the password, and
when whenever I clicked the login button or even the
enter button on my keyboard, it adds three extra characters
to the password.

Speaker 1 (49:53):
M like little asterisk or what? Okay, yeah, because it's
it's not showing you what you're typing right.

Speaker 7 (50:01):
Right?

Speaker 1 (50:02):
So what why are you trying to log in just
out of curiosity? Trying to change some settings or something?

Speaker 8 (50:08):
The IP address on my devices?

Speaker 2 (50:10):
Okay?

Speaker 1 (50:12):
So, uh, there's apps that can do that, by the way,
that can help. I can't remember the one I used
off the top of my head, but there are some
apps that can do that, like a network kind of
sniffer app. Okay, So have you set the password on
this modem or using the one that's built in?

Speaker 8 (50:31):
I believe this one that's built in. It's been a
long time since I've logged in. I don't think I've
changed it from the basic one.

Speaker 1 (50:38):
And is the motive is the password on the bottom
of the modem and that's the one that you're trying
to type in right. Interesting, now, when you type on
your computer in general, are there extra characters kind of
happening anywhere else.

Speaker 8 (50:55):
No, And the thing is even if I've tried it
on my phone also and it does the same thing.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
Now, the password that you're entering, is it a small
number of characters?

Speaker 2 (51:07):
Like, is it like only like five digits or something.

Speaker 8 (51:10):
Well, it's it's a Motorola modem and the password is Motorola.

Speaker 1 (51:14):
Oh well, that's that's a great password.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
So what I would do in this case, and it's
probably not I mean, it's probably not the easiest thing
to do, But are you okay with trying to reset
this modem to factory?

Speaker 8 (51:34):
That wouldn't involve me having to call up my provider
or anything.

Speaker 1 (51:37):
No. There there's basically a little tiny pinhole on the
back that you can press, you know, put like a
paper clip into and press and hold for like thirty seconds,
and it would bring it back to factory. That's probably
the thing that I would do with this situation, because
there's only so many times I could enter the same
exact password and it's not working, and it just keeps
giving me this page. Have you tried a different web browser?

(51:58):
You said you try it on your phone?

Speaker 3 (52:00):
I have, Yes, I have yet.

Speaker 2 (52:02):
And the same thing every time. Huh.

Speaker 4 (52:05):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
That's really frustrating. Hmm.

Speaker 3 (52:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
And were you ever able to log into this when
I first got it.

Speaker 8 (52:14):
I've had it for probably close to two years now.

Speaker 2 (52:17):
Hm.

Speaker 1 (52:18):
Now the other I mean, because the problem is once
you reset this to factory, now, have you changed the
the Wi Fi network that this puts out? Have you
changed that to it's something custom?

Speaker 2 (52:32):
Okay? You haven't, Okay. So the good news is when you.

Speaker 1 (52:35):
Reset this fact to factory, it's going to put out
the same Wi Fi password like SSI D and password
for your for your devices, so those are going to.

Speaker 2 (52:44):
Still connect to this.

Speaker 1 (52:45):
So that's what I would do, and I would see
if that works, because it seems like there's something going
on here. Once you do that, by the way, and
once you log in, I would also look to see
if there's a software update for this modem because it
might be that there's some sort of security thing going
on here.

Speaker 2 (53:02):
All right, Michael, all right, keep me posted.

Speaker 1 (53:05):
Let me know, all right, thanks, alrighty, all right, Uh,
that's that's an odd one. I've seen that I've seen
that happen when I copy and paste a password into
a field, and I've seen where I copy and paste
one thing, but then it becomes like much longer and
clearly whenever that happens, there's something wrong. The other thing, Michael,
you might want to try, and this could this could

(53:27):
be a solution to to try is try typing out
motorola on a on a website, like on a different page,
copy it and then paste it into that field and
see if that works. And maybe the act of pasting
it will will work to get that password in it
correctly and kind of trigger things to to log you in.

(53:48):
All right, I said, I was gonna mention this new
feature on Ways, pretty simple feature but one that if
you drive an EV you're gonna love. You can now
put in your EV car type and plug type into
the Ways app and it will find EV charging stations
along your route that are compatible with your car. Now,
you may not have this feature immediately. It is rolling out,
which are my two most hated words in the tech world,

(54:10):
because you never know when you're gonna get it. But
Ways is crowdsourced, so they're saying the information in there
hopefully is more up to date, more comprehensive. And if
you drive a non Tesla EV, the whole thing is
that you want to find compatible charging stations along your route,
which is different than just finding one somewhere that's where

(54:31):
you're going. So update the ways app look for the
EV charging information inside your app. More calls a Triple
eight rich one on one and we're gonna talk to
Sherry Riggs of whistle Out about cheap cell phone provider plans.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
Coming up next.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
Welcome back to rich on Tech, rich DeMuro here hanging
out with you talking technology. Phone lines are open Triple
eight Rich one O one eight eight eight seven four
to two four one zero one. My next guest is
Sherry Riggs. She works for a website called whistle Out.
This is a great website if you are looking to

(55:10):
compare cell phone plans, internet plans, all that good stuff.

Speaker 2 (55:16):
Sherry, Welcome to the show.

Speaker 6 (55:19):
Hi, Yeah, I'm happy to be here.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
So the mint Mobile news this week. It did you
see that coming? Yeah?

Speaker 5 (55:29):
Yeah, you know it.

Speaker 6 (55:30):
There had been whispers of it, and I think it
was only a matter of time before T Mobile was like, Ah,
these guys are getting too big. We need to help them.

Speaker 1 (55:38):
I mean, isn't it frustrating for folks that picked mint
Mobile as an alternative to the big mobile companies and
then they get purchased by the big mobile company even
though the service always ran on the big mobile companies network, right.

Speaker 6 (55:53):
So it's kind of a complicated relationship, I would say,
because yeah, mint Mobile was a separate entity although it
ran on T mobiles infrastructure. And I think the big
worry for most people is that, Okay, now that one
of the big three has acquired mint Mobile.

Speaker 7 (56:10):
What's going to change?

Speaker 6 (56:11):
And don't I don't think much is going to change.
I think T Mobile is just still going to give
the reins, mainly to mint Mobile to handle everything, and
I think T Mobile just wanted a piece of the pie, really.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
So explain the concept of an mv and O. This
is what mint Mobile is pretty much. If you're not
using T Mobile, Verizon or AT and T, if you
have another company that's providing your service, it's an mv
and O. Because we only have three networks here in
the US. I think Dish is building their own, right.

Speaker 6 (56:42):
Dish is trying, and you know, if that works out,
then we'll have four again. But but yeah, So an
MVNA is a mobile virtual network operator, basically meaning a
smaller carrier rent space on a major carrier network. So
mobile is a perfect example of that kind of because

(57:04):
they aren't T Mobile. And then Visible Mobile is another
good example of an MVNL and they rent space on
Verizons network. So yeah, it's really like buying a generic
cereal at a grocery store or something like that.

Speaker 1 (57:19):
But the interesting thing is that Visible has always been
owned by Verizon. And then you've got Cricket, which is
I think AT and T purchased them, right, They weren't
always AT and T.

Speaker 6 (57:31):
Right, right, Yeah, Cricket was purchased by AT and T
most recently. But yeah, so I think what's happening is
the major carriers are seeing how much success can come
with these smaller carriers offering lower prices, and they still
just want a little bit more money, so they're they're
dishing out and buying up these smaller guys and hopes

(57:51):
of pumping up their own numbers.

Speaker 1 (57:54):
So why do people go with one of these alternative
carriers versus the big carriers?

Speaker 4 (58:00):
Yeah, so, I.

Speaker 6 (58:01):
Think mainly it is its costs. So all of these
smaller carriers come at a cheaper price, and that's mainly.
They offer the same service as the main carriers. It's
the exact same coverage, So how do they keep it
lower while with smaller carriers come less a customer service
and potentially less help if you run into a problem.

(58:22):
Most of these smaller guys all of it's run online
and you kind of have to troubleshoot yourself if you
run into problems. So that's where you pay more money
is generally the customer service with the big carriers, and
even that doesn't go well people.

Speaker 1 (58:38):
So the fact that I can walk into a Verizon
store is to justifying the extra fifty bucks a month
that you pay for a Verizon plan pretty much.

Speaker 4 (58:46):
Yeah, yeah, that.

Speaker 6 (58:47):
And generally the main carriers offer a bit more in
terms of turks, like Verizon will give you the Disney
Bundle and then T Mobile will offer Netflix, and so
you do get a few other per along with those
bigger cell phone plans. But but yeah, the big, in
my opinion, the really big difference here is a is

(59:09):
a brick and mortar store, a person to talk to.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
Yeah, that was a big when I did a story.
So the first like MV and O that I did
a story with at KTLA was Visible, and I mean
I'd heard of them, but Visible was very appealing because
it was so cheap, and it was on Verizon's network,
and I was like, and it was unlimited. So I'm like, wait,
what's the catch here? And sure enough that you know,
a lot of people did switch after our story. But

(59:33):
the biggest feedback I got is that when they had
any sort of problem, it was tough to you know,
you couldn't walk into a store. You had to do
you had to troubleshoot everything, either online on the phone
or through chat that you know which people if you're
used to that hands on service at like a Verizon store,
at and T store, it's like, uh, sorry.

Speaker 2 (59:52):
Can't go. You can't get help with that inside the store.

Speaker 1 (59:56):
All right, I'm looking at I'm looking at some of
these whistle Out expert picks on the website. So can
you explain what whistle out does, by the way, like
how the website works.

Speaker 5 (01:00:05):
Yeah?

Speaker 6 (01:00:06):
Absolutely, So the best way to describe it is whistle
Out compares cell phone plans and internet plans like Expedia
can compare flights. So you can put in all of
the requirements you want in a cell phone plan, and
we have a database that will list out every single
option for you, and you can sort it by price.

(01:00:26):
You can sort it by carrier. It really helps simplify
the process of either switching carriers or finding a new carrier.

Speaker 1 (01:00:35):
Whistleout dot com is the website, so I'm going through
some of your expert picture. Best unlimited phone plan is
Visible by Verizon. Why does whistle out like that one?

Speaker 6 (01:00:46):
So this is a new one. We recently changed this one,
but we do love Visible because a it runs on
Verizon's network and they have the most for GLT coverage
in the country, so you'll pretty much always have coverage
wherever you are. And then Visible's new cell phone plan
options of Visible Plus offers some incredible perks in terms

(01:01:09):
of data allotments and a gig a hotspot alignment as well,
so you get a lot for the cost which is
really low. I believe thirty five dollars a month.

Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
Now, this one the best cheap phone plan. US Mobile.

Speaker 1 (01:01:23):
I actually really like this company because it's all online.
Obviously they rent from Verizon and T Mobile, but it's
really good and it's like very customizable. So for five
gigs of data it's just ten bucks a month. That's
I mean, should we feel concerned going to US Mobile
because we haven't heard of them before?

Speaker 6 (01:01:43):
No, not at all. You know, US Mobile is one
of those hidden gems. I like to call it. It's
a unicorn cell phone carrier because their prices are so
low and incredibly customizable, and on top of that, you
get to choose which carrier you want to be with,
either T Mobile or Verizon, and it's the same price
across the board. So yeah, it can be scary going
with a name you don't know, but it doesn't take

(01:02:05):
away from how good they are as a carrier, and.

Speaker 1 (01:02:10):
I've personally tested them and they were excellent. I've talked
to the CEO of this company and it's just one
of those companies that literally I never heard of because
they don't advertise as far as I can tell, maybe
online or something that I just haven't seen.

Speaker 6 (01:02:21):
Yeah, they don't do a whole lot of advertising, I
think mainly because the proof is in the pudding, as
they say, once you've tested it out and looked at
the prices and you make the switch, it's it's pretty
incredible to see how much money you can save and
still get incredible quality service. And in fact, US mobiles
new Unlimited plan is one of my favorites at forty

(01:02:43):
five dollars a month. You get premium data at one
hundred gigabytes, a giant hotspot, a lotminut fifty and it's
one of the best deals out there. It's quickly going
to the top of my list as most recommended unlimited plan.

Speaker 1 (01:02:58):
Wow, okay, best fan plan. Reach Mobile. I've never heard
of them.

Speaker 6 (01:03:04):
Yeah, Reach is a small one, but Reach does some
really great work. And they also have family pricing, which
is which is awesome, and you don't often get that
with MBN out so keeping that in mind, you don't
with the major carriers. You generally get a discount for
multiple lines. With many nbnos they don't do multi line discounts,

(01:03:25):
but some do and that is an awesome perk.

Speaker 1 (01:03:29):
And finally, the best prepaid phone plan, Mint Mobile, still
has it right now, unlimited data. So I have a
family member that has Mint and they've been telling all
their friends about it because they've had it for years.
And they pay once a year, so it's a one
time fee. They pay for the whole year at once,
and they love it because they don't have to think
about their bill.

Speaker 2 (01:03:48):
And people are like, I don't believe you.

Speaker 1 (01:03:49):
I don't see how you can have the same service
that I have for paying one bill a month, it's
like three hundred bucks or whatever it is.

Speaker 6 (01:03:55):
Right, Yeah, it's there. That can be an upside and
a downside. Right, paying for service for one year might
seem like a big bill at one point, but it
is incredibly cheap. And once you just pay it, you
set it aside for one year and you're good to go.
That's one of the best things that I appreciate about
mint Mobile is that you are able to buy in

(01:04:16):
bulk and so far in advance, and if you love
the service, it makes it that much easier and that
much better.

Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
In fact, I got an email for I have a
mint Mobile test line, and I've got an email today.
How funny is this that my three months? I guess
I had three months that I bought and I got
three months free and today is the anniversary of that date.

Speaker 10 (01:04:35):
I don't know, so funny.

Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
Thank you, so exciting.

Speaker 1 (01:04:40):
And I've used an average of three point nine gigs
a month on this test line, so anyway, Wow, I know,
all right, Cherry, tell folks how they can find you.
I know you do a lot of YouTube videos. Tell
folks how they can find you on there?

Speaker 6 (01:04:53):
Yeah, so we're on YouTube on the internet. You just
need to search whistle Out USA and you will find
us and you will hopefully find a better deal than
you have right now. I promise we'se save you some money.

Speaker 1 (01:05:06):
All right, Sherry Riggs of whistle Out, thanks so much
for joining me today on the show.

Speaker 2 (01:05:09):
Appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:05:10):
All right, Coming up, I'm gonna tell you about a
new podcast app that I really like. Plus, I'm going
to dive into that Verizon deal where they're giving you
like a free year of Netflix. I'm gonna explain what
the catch is there, and we'll have more of your calls.

Speaker 2 (01:05:22):
Give me a call.

Speaker 1 (01:05:23):
Phone lines are opens triple eight rich one O one
eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one.
You're listening to Rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich
on Tech. Rich Timuro here hanging out with you, talking technology.
I'm the tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles.

(01:05:44):
All right, DK Wrights, Hey, Rich, I hope you read this.
My niece accidentally deleted all thirteen thousand pictures on her phone.
She has a Galaxy S twenty two Ultra. She has
tried everything she can to restore the photos. They were
backed up to Google one eighteen hours ago, but when
she checked there was nothing there. I'm hoping you might

(01:06:06):
be able to help. Would greatly appreciate any suggestion. Thank
you kindly, Debbie Huh. Okay, So first off, I'm very
curious how thirteen thousand pictures were deleted because you got
to work really hard to delete that many pictures off
of your phone, and also it takes a while to
delete thirteen thousand pictures. So my first question is how

(01:06:29):
did this happen because that's nearly impossible to I mean
on the iPhone, you know, and all these phones, you
basically have to go in, select all your photos and
then say delete all. And there's like a couple of
steps to do that. It doesn't just say like delete everything.
So okay, that aside, I'm just curious about that. So

(01:06:52):
what I would do is a couple of places. Number One,
you said that they were backed up in Google one.
The good news about it an Android phone is that
typically things are backed up automatically like it's it's pretty
rare that they're not. So the first place I would
go is one dot Google dot com, and once you
go there, you can check to see your different devices.

(01:07:15):
So go to storage and you have different It says
your device backups and you should see the Galaxy S
twenty two Ultra in there, and mine says backup incomplete.
So if you see backup incomplete, that means that things
are not.

Speaker 2 (01:07:31):
Backed up properly.

Speaker 1 (01:07:32):
So that's the first place I'd look and see if
that backup is in there, and then you can click
see details and it will show you photos and videos.
In my case, it says they're in Google Photos. Now
on the Samsungs, they have a thing where they also
sync to one drive. Samsung has a deal with Microsoft,

(01:07:53):
so your photos may be in one drive, and so
that's what I would check as well, and look in
one drive and see if your photo's there.

Speaker 2 (01:08:01):
And that's one edrive.

Speaker 1 (01:08:03):
Dot Microsoft dot com and you can log in there
and it might be your Samsung log in. You might
have a link to your Microsoft login, so check there.
The other thing I would do is go to photos
dot Google dot com and if these were backing up
to Google Photos, they should still be in there, because

(01:08:23):
even if you deleted them, they would be in the trash.
And so you can go to photos dot Google dot com,
click the trash and items in the trash are deleted
after sixty days, so all these thirteen thousand pictures should
be in there now. If she went through and emptied
the trash, that's a whole nother problem. And again, you know,

(01:08:44):
these tech companies try to do their best to protect
us from ourselves. And again there's a lot of steps
involved in deleting thirteen thousand pictures. That process physically takes
a little bit of time. So hopefully it's in one
of those places, Debbie. And once you find these pictures
and recover them, please back up your photos. I know

(01:09:05):
there's a lot of confusion when it comes to photos,
but I'm just gonna give you my advice. On your phone,
you want your photos backed up somewhere, choose a program
to back them up. If you're on the iPhone, you
can use iCloud. It's not my favorite, but you can
use it. And just remember, if you delete a picture
off your phone on your iPhone, it mirrors iicloud, so
it will delete it off iCloud as well. I personally

(01:09:28):
like Google Photos. I think it's the best easiest way
to figure out where your photos are. Yes, you might
have to pay for a little bit of storage, but
that to me is the best one. The other thing
you can do is if you're an Amazon Prime member,
you can use this as a secondary backup Amazon Photos.
Download it, sign in with your Amazon account. As long
as you have an Amazon membership, that's a secondary place

(01:09:49):
to do it. The only thing is on the iPhone,
if you're using Amazon Photos, it doesn't automatically back up
in the background necessarily. You do have to you open
up the app every once in a while to back
it up. Just remember that on the iPhone you have
to open up the app. You can use one drive.
I don't care if you use, you know, whatever app

(01:10:10):
you want to use. Just make sure that you open
it up and check to make sure your stuff is
backed up every once in a while.

Speaker 2 (01:10:16):
All right.

Speaker 1 (01:10:17):
I said that Verizon was giving away a free year
of Netflix Premium twenty dollars a month value if you
have a Verizon Unlimited plan. They're trying to promote this
new Verizon Plus Play program that they have, which is
a hub for all of your streaming subscriptions. So if
you want to get free Netflix, the catch is that
you have to subscribe to some other service. Those services

(01:10:39):
include AMC Plus, Stars, Paramount Peloton. Subscribe to one of
those services, you'll get Netflix for free. The tricky part
is the timing getting it all right. But if you
want to save two hundred and forty bucks a year
on Netflix, try it out. Go to the website. If
you've got one of these other services anyway, you might
as well. I'm gonna try it out. We'll see I
do Peloton all right. Eight eight eight rich one on

(01:11:02):
one eight eight eight seven four to two, four to
one zero one. Give me a call if you got
a tech question. More of your calls coming up next.
Welcome back to rich on Tech Rich DeMuro hanging out
with you, talking technology. Eight eight eight rich one oh
one eight eight eight seven four to two four one

(01:11:23):
zero one. Got a couple of guests coming up later
this hour. Xavier Journ again. This is a really cool interview.
Xavier is the Spotify's first AI DJ. So if you've
got Spotify, you might have seen this new little feature.
It's an AI DJ. It's a DJ that's personalized just

(01:11:44):
for you. Kind of interesting. So I talked to him
about being that voice and what's that like and how
they do it. Then I've got Clay Alexander He is
the CEO and founder of Ember. You might know Ember
as the company that the temperature controlled mug keeps your
coffee or your tea at the same temperature the whole time. Well,

(01:12:07):
now they have a new product. It's for babies, a
baby bottle. So I'll talk about that. Ember, by the way,
Westlake Village, California company.

Speaker 2 (01:12:19):
They just moved to new offices and.

Speaker 1 (01:12:21):
Wow, it reminded me of that movie or that TV
show Severance on Apple TV.

Speaker 2 (01:12:26):
I don't know if you saw it.

Speaker 1 (01:12:28):
Very like futuristic like it just it looked like the
headquarters of a tech company. It was just really cool
lines and stuff. I put out my Instagram at rich
on Tech if you want to see it. Apple this
week introduced a new feature called Specialist Shop with a
Specialist over Video. Say that ten times fast Shop with

(01:12:50):
a Specialist over Video. This is a feature that's kind
of like a video chat, but it's a one way
video chat. They can't see you, but you can see them.
So the idea is you're on the Apple website or
on your phone and you want to shop for a
new phone. You don't feel like going into the store,
so you can fire up one of these retail specialists.

(01:13:12):
Their video pops up on your screen while you're browsing
the website. It's a one way video shopping session. You
can ask them to do things like, Hey, can you
show me the difference between the iPhone fourteen and the
fourteen plus? Hey? Can you show me the different colors
of the phones? Can I see them in hand so
I can decide which one I want?

Speaker 3 (01:13:34):
Hey?

Speaker 1 (01:13:34):
Can you tell me about trade and offers different deals?
And it's interesting A lot of people don't realize this,
but you can go to the Apple Store and they
can help you no matter which carrier you have, whether
you have AT and T, Verizon, T Mobile, whatever. They
can help you switch plans, switch to a new phone.
You don't have to go to your carrier store. My

(01:13:55):
sister was shopping for a phone and I told her that.
She's like, wait, what, I don't have to go to
whatever come because she has so Yeah, you could just
go to the Apple Store. And I think it's almost
better because their retail associates kind of know the different
plans and the different deals from all the different carriers,
so they might be able to help you. So this
shop with a specialist over video is available to customers

(01:14:17):
in the US seven am to seven pm Pacific every day. Again,
they can't see you, you can see them, and it's
all about just making things.

Speaker 2 (01:14:27):
Easier to shop. It's interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:14:32):
I mean, I wonder. I asked them, I said, hey,
were these people located? Like where are they in the stores?
And they didn't really answer the question. But it seems
like it's a It seems like the retail associates are
in stores and they're just you know, hey, can you go?

Speaker 3 (01:14:49):
Man?

Speaker 1 (01:14:49):
The website phone calls for an hour, but I guess
video calls in this case. Minecraft is coming to the Chromebook.
This is a long time coming for kids that have
a Chrome Book, and this is an early access version
of Minecraft. Minecraft is available in a lot of different places,
but the Chromebook is not one of them historically. So

(01:15:11):
the Minecraft Bedrock Edition releasing on Chromebook. It'll give you
access to cross device play with friends, the Minecraft marketplace,
the ability to play on realms, and it's not going
to be on all the chromebooks. I did check on
my kids chromebook and it was available, so he's going
to test it out for me. You can go to
the Google Play Store and type in Minecraft. If you

(01:15:33):
have a Chromebook and it will let you know if
it's available to you. It has to have a certain
spec count on your Chromebook, so it's not all of them,
and you can go to the Minecraft website and tell
you it'll tell you exactly what.

Speaker 2 (01:15:51):
The requirements are.

Speaker 1 (01:15:52):
Let me look them up here, Chrome OS one eleven
sixty four bit system architecture. You've got to have a
certain process or Intel cleron Media Tech Qualcom, four gigs
of RAM and one gig for game installation. So I
know that doesn't sound like very high end specs, but
chromebooks are known for having notoriously low end specs. It

(01:16:15):
doesn't make them a bad machine. It's just chromebooks don't
require too much to run, but you do need four
I mean, those specs aren't totally wild, but you do
need those to run this. And the whole idea here
is that they're going to test to see how the
game performs on the chromebooks before they expand it to more.

Speaker 2 (01:16:34):
So expect some bugs.

Speaker 1 (01:16:36):
But if your kid is a fan of Minecraft and
so far they have not been able to play it
on their chromebook, it's kind of cool and some of
the kids like having the keyboard because it's easier to
play these games with a keyboard versus just having the
touch screen on the iPad. So there you go. And
then I told you that I found a new podcast
app that's kind of cool. It's called Wonder This is

(01:16:59):
from a of newsletter called Wonder Tools, and I suggest
you subscribe to it. It's really good. It's a substack snipped.
It's called snipd snipd. What's cool about this podcast app
is that it allows you to snip little interesting parts
of the shows that you watch and either save them

(01:17:21):
for later or you can share them out to social
media so you can build. And I always love this
idea because when I'm listening in my car to like
an audiobook or something, sometimes I want to bookmark a
place for later to like listen, and it's really tricky.
On the audiobook apps, you can do it, but it's
not very easy. So same thing with podcasts. Like you
hear something interesting, you're like, oh, I want to bookmark

(01:17:41):
that for later, you can't.

Speaker 2 (01:17:43):
Well, this lets you do it. So the app is
called snipd.

Speaker 1 (01:17:48):
What's also neat is that it actually does a transcript
of the podcast, so you can kind of scour around
and see if there's something interesting that the person talked
about in the pot. So it seems to be free.
I didn't take a deep dive into it, but I
just kind of looked at it and tried it out
and it was pretty cool. So SNIPD is the podcast.

(01:18:13):
All right, let's get to a question here. Tom writes
in hey Rich, I'm looking to buy a Windows eleven
Dell XPS laptop and wondering if it's better to buy
it without the bloatwear for an additional charge or just
remove it once I get it. Mainly it's the av software, Norton, etc.

Speaker 2 (01:18:31):
That I do not need.

Speaker 1 (01:18:32):
Thank you, good question. And the bloatwear on computers is
out of control. I remember when I did a story
with the Microsoft Store. They said, hey, by the way,
you know, if you buy a computer here, we do
not allow bloatwear to be pre installed. So if you
want a good place to buy a computer, it's probably

(01:18:53):
best to buy it for the Microsoft Store.

Speaker 2 (01:18:55):
I said, wow, that's interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:18:57):
And so the Microsoft stores, of course, have mostly gone
out of business. They mostly just do their stuff online. Now.
They might have a couple of them here and there,
but they're not as elaborate as they used to be
with their locations. So would I pay extra to get
rid of the stuff I don't need? Absolutely, so I
don't know how much. I didn't even know this was

(01:19:18):
an option on Dell that you can say, hey, I
don't want all this garbage on my computer. I mean,
that's interesting if they even give you that option. It's
sad that all this stuff is included on these computers.
Sometimes people might call it helpful, but no. This was
a big problem on cell phones as well, especially the
Samsungs of the world. They would come pre installed. Not

(01:19:39):
just Samsung, almost every phone except the Pixel would come
pre installed with all this junkie software that you didn't need.
Why because these companies pay to put it on there.
So Facebook at some point would be pre installed on
the Samsungs, they'd have LinkedIn Microsoft apps, whatever. And it's
all because these companies pay for that placement, and as

(01:20:01):
the end user, you're left with disabling it or trying
to uninstall it. With the Samsung, I've noticed a lot
of it's easily uninstalled nowadays. In fact, I don't think
that there's a lot that comes on there if you
get it from your carrier. Yeah, there's probably a lot
of like AT and T, T Mobile Verizon software that
comes pre installed that they do deals to get this
stuff on there, but most of the time you can

(01:20:21):
uninstall it. But yes, I would pay the extra money
to not have this stuff pre installed. There's a feature
on Windows machines called fresh Start that will let you
reset your computer and do a clean installation of Windows.
But do you really want to do that right when

(01:20:42):
you get your computer.

Speaker 2 (01:20:44):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:20:44):
It seems like a lot, so it will get rid
of most of the stuff on your computer that's not
supposed to be there. If you do this clean Start,
it's basically inside Windows eleven, Windows ten you can go
to settings, System Recovery and reset the PC. But I
don't know that that's like icky to have to do

(01:21:06):
that right when you get a new computer. So if
Delle's giving you the option, yeah, I would say definitely
take the option, because that's the other thing about the
Chromebooks that people like is that they don't come installed.
There's really no malware or viruses or things for these
kind of computers because they don't come with stuff pre installed.
It's just basically a Chrome web browser. But yeah, My

(01:21:28):
favorite thing to do is a clean install. Mac computers
don't really come with a lot of bloatwear. I mean
it comes with a lot of Mac software pre installed,
like numbers, pages, iMovie, keynote, garage band. I don't really
use any of that stuff, news books, I don't use
any of that stuff stocks, iMovie. Maybe if you need

(01:21:48):
a video editing program, but anyway, yes, I would do that.

Speaker 2 (01:21:53):
Tom. Probably a good idea to just pay the extra
money to do that. All right.

Speaker 1 (01:21:57):
Coming up, we're gonna talk to Xavier Journ again. He's
gonna tell us what it's like to be Spotify's first
AI DJ Plus, we'll talk about the new Ember product
for babies, and yet another Google product is going away,
one that I used personally. I'll tell you which one
they're sending to the trash can. Coming up, you got

(01:22:20):
a question, Give me a call Triple eight rich one
on one eight eight eight seven four two four one
zero one, or give me an email Hello at Richontech
dot tv is the email address, or find me on
social media at rich on Tech. You are listening to
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro Here at
Triple eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven

(01:22:41):
four two four one zero one. Now you know, I'm
a real person sitting behind this microphone. But in the future,
you might be listening to someone that is AI inn
AI voice. In fact, Spotify recently announced that they have
a new feature called ai DJ on their app.

Speaker 2 (01:23:00):
I just got access to it this week.

Speaker 1 (01:23:02):
And when you press it, the person that comes on
sounds like they're talking to you. They say your name,
they say, Hey, we know you've been listening to this lately.
Let's give you more of this, or let's introduce you
to this song. It's all AI. It's an AI voice model.
And recently I talked to the person that served as
the model for the voice, Xavier x journ Again. He

(01:23:27):
did a podcast and a morning show over at Spotify.
He's also the head of Cultural Partnerships there, and he
explained all about what it's like to be the voice
of AIDJ.

Speaker 2 (01:23:38):
Take a listen, So tell me about being the voice
of AIDJ. What does that entail?

Speaker 11 (01:23:43):
What entails in terms of how it works or how
it came together. Let's start with how it came together,
the way it came together. I've been at Spotify for
six and a half years. I started out as the
head of music editorial for play Listening.

Speaker 10 (01:23:56):
So I did that for a while and then one day.

Speaker 11 (01:23:57):
I got asked to host a podcast. Then that led
to me getting as the host internal and external Spotify events,
and then this came along and they said you're the
perfect voice. It was a list of one they said
you're the list, which is super flattering, and they said
we're coming out with this thing. It's AIDJ and I
had to wrap my mind around it, which was hard
to because they're like, it's not voice recordings, it's text

(01:24:21):
to voice and it's going to talk exactly like you.

Speaker 2 (01:24:25):
Are you in Yes, Oh, you have a great voice.

Speaker 10 (01:24:28):
Thank you. I have heard that for a while.

Speaker 11 (01:24:30):
I heard that a few times, but you know what
it was like, not just my voice, but my personality
and the fact that I'm rooted in the music industry
and entertainment. It gave it a sense of authenticity, you
know what I mean that I'm really in an industry
and not just a voice actor.

Speaker 10 (01:24:44):
So it's really about.

Speaker 11 (01:24:46):
Going into the booth, training the voice model pow to
sound like me. What does a period sound like? What
does a comma sound like? What do I sound like?

Speaker 10 (01:24:53):
Excited? What I sound like calm.

Speaker 11 (01:24:56):
So we had to train it and that was a lot,
you know, a lot of different sessions that we did
training the model. They took a lot of audio from
other podcasts ideas and then they took all of that
they fed it into the voice model and that's how
it came into being.

Speaker 10 (01:25:08):
And once my mama said it sounded like me, I
knew it was legit.

Speaker 2 (01:25:12):
So okay, your mom said it sounded like you, What
do you think?

Speaker 11 (01:25:15):
It sounds exactly like me. It blew me away. When
we got to the final version, even the first version,
we all thought, like everybody was like, don't head your beads,
it's gonna be okay.

Speaker 10 (01:25:27):
We were like, this is crazy, Like this is unreal.

Speaker 1 (01:25:32):
Okay, So explain to me when you're introduced, Well, first off,
what is the DJ doing?

Speaker 10 (01:25:37):
Yes, so you get segments of five songs. I'll welcome you.

Speaker 11 (01:25:40):
I'm your friend writing along with you. I may be
slightly cooler than you because I know a little bit
like a fun facts, know a little bit about the artists.
It was very much built on my personality. So I'm
giving you fun facts about the music. I'm giving you
fun facts about how you listen. I'm giving you context
because Spotify has been great in personalization for a long time.
We're known for that. That's one of our hall But

(01:26:00):
now you get the context. This is why you're getting
this song. I'm gonna take you back to twenty sixteen. Now,
I'm gonna tell you about twenty sixteen and when you're
gonna get what you listen to and when that comes together,
magic happens. And we also introduce you to new artists,
new music based on your listening habits. So we're gonna
introduce you to that with the context, and we know

(01:26:21):
through our data, through our history, when you have that context,
you're most likely to check it out, follow that artist,
and then become a fan.

Speaker 1 (01:26:30):
Do you have to go in every day to say
new things? Are you saying these artists names? Are you
saying where they grew up, all these cities? You know
what they're doing, who they collabed with? Did you have
to say ten thousand words for all this suffer? Is
it generating this based on new text?

Speaker 10 (01:26:44):
That's what it is. It's generating it now.

Speaker 11 (01:26:46):
I said a lot of different words, like when I
was training the model, Like we said a lot of
the artists names because they had to learn my intonation,
my cadence, teach the voice model to learn all of that.
But then once they learned it, Nope, it's a whole
writer's room. Is generative AI that we use. We put
in the hands of our music editors. So we put
in the hands of our experts. I'm a part of
a writer's room and we write. We have cultural experts,

(01:27:09):
we have data curators, we have a whole ux writing team,
we have actual script writers, and we put that into
the AI as well.

Speaker 2 (01:27:17):
And as I get it, I'm just like my mind,
I see it.

Speaker 10 (01:27:20):
I see a lot like you're trying to process.

Speaker 1 (01:27:23):
So have you had to go back in to re
record like let's say a new artist comes out.

Speaker 2 (01:27:27):
No, do you have to re record their name?

Speaker 7 (01:27:29):
I do not.

Speaker 11 (01:27:30):
We can do it on the back end. The AI
knows how to do it. So if there's something like
we can train it on the back end. Now, so
there's enough data that we put in, okay, and then
so if.

Speaker 1 (01:27:41):
A name is pronounced a certain way, it puts the
intonation somewhere else. If they can go in on the
back end and tweak it and say, now that's.

Speaker 11 (01:27:46):
Where you put the intonation that's exactly right, and and
we want to be authentic.

Speaker 10 (01:27:50):
We want to pronounce the names properly.

Speaker 2 (01:27:54):
This is really new to a lot of people. They're
going to feel like they know you.

Speaker 10 (01:27:58):
Yes, I'm your friends.

Speaker 11 (01:28:00):
That's what Like when I was recording, I thought about
one person, not a group of people. I'm talking to
one person. I want to connect with that one person.
This is about connection. So I feel the sense of
purpose in doing this work because if somebody feels this connection,
they'll feel seen, they'll feel value, they'll feel heard, and
that's what magic happens. So I feel purpose in it.

(01:28:20):
It's a little wild because it's so big and like
it's blowing up. But I'm honored and humble to be
the voice like around the World X, Around the World,
X around the World.

Speaker 10 (01:28:33):
US and Canada.

Speaker 2 (01:28:34):
Start there, you go right.

Speaker 1 (01:28:37):
There, you have it, Xavier a Journeygain voice of dj
X on Spotify AI DJs. It's so weird to think
about that that's happening in our world when here I
am lending my voice for three hours to this show.
I understand why Spotify is doing it, but as a

(01:28:59):
radio lover, I really appreciate the sound of someone that's
telling me the songs, the you know, the artists, they're
giving me the background. Like I get that we live
in this world of streaming music where there's just random
songs next to each other that play forever. But there's
something so nice about someone behind the microphone that actually

(01:29:21):
knows what that song is and introduces it for me.
You're listening to rich on Tech. Coming up next, we're
going to talk about Ember's new product for babies. Yes,
the world's first self warming baby bottle. You're listening to
rich on Tech. More of your calls and interviews after this.

(01:29:41):
Rich Demiro here rich on Tech, Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 2 (01:29:44):
I'm here in.

Speaker 1 (01:29:45):
Westlake Village, California with Clay Alexander, CEO of Ember. You
may know this company for its temperature controlled mugs, but
now they are branching out into all kinds of temperature
control systems. The latest product is a self warming baby
bottle system.

Speaker 2 (01:30:02):
Clay, welcome to the show.

Speaker 12 (01:30:04):
Thank you for having me.

Speaker 7 (01:30:05):
Rich.

Speaker 2 (01:30:06):
I'm happy to be here. So a lot of folks
may know Ember for the mugs.

Speaker 1 (01:30:11):
This is the first product that I tried from Ember,
and it's a temperature controlled mug, tell me the idea
behind that.

Speaker 12 (01:30:18):
So actually it started with scrambled eggs.

Speaker 10 (01:30:22):
Okay.

Speaker 12 (01:30:23):
So in two thousand and nine, I had just sold
my light bulb to GE. It was the world's large,
brightest led light bulb, and GE had bought the rights
to it. And I was sitting there, you know, thinking, Okay,
what am I going to do next with my life?

Speaker 7 (01:30:39):
Right?

Speaker 12 (01:30:39):
And I was eating scrambled eggs with my wife in
the kitchen. I get about halfway through my eggs and
my eggs get cold on my plate. This happens every
time I eat scrambled eggs, so I thought. I remember
looking down and thinking, okay, this is the twenty first century.
At a bare minimum, my dinner plate should be able
to keep my food at a decent eating temperature. So

(01:31:00):
I've been an inventor since Berth and I thought, okay,
let me make I started strapping RC car batteries and
temperature control circuitry to the bottom of the dinner plates
in my kitchen.

Speaker 2 (01:31:11):
I'm sure, I'm sure your wife loved you.

Speaker 12 (01:31:13):
No, I was making a big giant mass in the
kitchen with electronics and wires and benchtop powers supplies and
all that good stuff. So I created the world's first
self warming interplay, and I started eating my meals off
of at steaks, salmon, etc. You get halfway through the meal,
thirty minutes later, you're taking your time. You cut into
the salmon, steam still comes out. It's the perfect temperature,

(01:31:35):
perfect bike. So I had invented this, and I remember
thinking to myself looking around the kitchen going gosh, coffee mugs,
soup bowls, shafing dishes, baby bottles, all the things that
can benefit from temperature control. And the real question was, well,
where do we start right And at that time, this

(01:31:56):
is back in twenty fourteen fifteen when I was making
this decision, coffee, high end coffee was on the rise
big time. So we created the world's first self warming
coffee cup, and we made prototypes and I remember drinking
out of it, carrying it around town, and it looked
like a crazy invention. It had batteries strapped to the

(01:32:18):
side and wires and circuitry, but the user experience was
phenomenal because you know, you got thermusigetti and all these others,
and those are dual wall vacuum insulation. The temperature that
you pour in is what it holds it at If
you pour hot coffee, brood coffee comes out at one
hundred and eighty degrees, burns your mouth, or you wait
for a very long period of time for tacool, you

(01:32:40):
get distracted, you go back, and now it's too cool cold.
So I thought, gosh, what if I could What if
we could create technology that actually locks your drinking temperature
in whatever your preferred specific drinking temperature is. You set
it in a number mug one thirty five for instances mine,
and every time I pour a cup of coffee, no

(01:33:01):
matter where I am, and I poured a number mug,
it goes to one hundred and thirty five degrees on
the nose. And every sip, every sip, no matter where
I go. It's battery powered, carried around the meetings, et cetera.
Is at one hundred and thirty five degrees.

Speaker 1 (01:33:15):
Okay, so let's talk about the self warming baby bottle system.
This is brand new from Ember, over ten years in
the making. Where did the idea for this come from?

Speaker 4 (01:33:23):
Okay, this is a great story.

Speaker 12 (01:33:24):
So my beautiful daughter Charlotte was born eleven years ago
and my wife did most of the feedings. Every once
in a while. It was Dad's turn, and I remember
Charlotte waking up in the middle of the night crying,
you know, starving. It's like I'm carrying her downstairs, going
into the kitchen, getting a bowl of water, running the

(01:33:45):
water in the sink, warming up the water, putting the
baby bottle in the water. It's bobbing around because you know,
my wife didn't want me to use the microwave. And
then you're like squirting milk on your wrists and you're going,
I'm a new parent, I have all these other anxieties
about parenthood, and I don't know if this temperature is right.

Speaker 2 (01:34:01):
I'm just trying to sense it on my wrist.

Speaker 12 (01:34:03):
So it was a very honestly, the anxiety level was
very high at that time for me as a parent,
and I thought, there's got to be a better way.
And I thought, gosh, what if the baby bottle could
warm the milk itself right up to the perfect body
temperature and let you know when it's ready. And that
was kind of the origin idea.

Speaker 1 (01:34:23):
And so now we've got the baby bottle. It comes
with this sort of warming puck on the bottom. Can
you explain how it works?

Speaker 12 (01:34:30):
There's a puck that you can throw in your back
pocket or anywhere, and you can basically throw the bottle
on the puck and it warms milk or formula up
to body temperature within less than five minutes. And part
of the beauty of it is if you want to
keep the milk cold for on the go, we also
have that comes in the kit that we just launched,

(01:34:50):
a what we call a thermal dome. So the cold
milk comes out of the fridge with the bottle and
you throw it on the puck, you throw the thermal
dome over it. It's all magnetic sucks together. The thermal
dome will keep the milk in the bottle cold for
up to four hours on the go. So you have
this little like we call it like an infant feeding kit,

(01:35:12):
throw in your diaper bag, throw it in your backpack
on the go, and when your baby is hungry, you
just open up your iPhone or Android device and you
go to the Amber Baby app, you click warm Milk.
It actually warms the milk while the baby bottle is
in your bag, and then it just notifies you when
you're ready on either your connected watch or on your phone.

Speaker 1 (01:35:33):
And if you don't want to necessarily use the app,
which you probably want to because if you have something
like this, you're into apps and phones and stuff. But
there's also a physical button on the bottom of the
puck that you can just.

Speaker 10 (01:35:42):
Press five lights.

Speaker 1 (01:35:44):
When they all light up, it lets you know that
the milk is at the right temperature. The baby bottle
is super lightweight, lighter than you would think.

Speaker 10 (01:35:53):
It is all dishwashers safe.

Speaker 1 (01:35:54):
All of the parts that touch the milk the puck
obviously is the electronics, and you also the bulk of
the electronics in the bottom, like the Bluetooth is not
near the baby bottle itself.

Speaker 12 (01:36:05):
That's right. So in early in the early days, in
our first version of the Umber baby bottle, we put
the battery technology and the Bluetooth radio and such in
the bottom of the bottle is part of the bottle,
just like an Emmer mug. Right, And in a lot
of early focus groups, parents said, you know, I don't
really want a Bluetooth radio near my baby's face. I

(01:36:26):
don't really want a batteries. So we pivoted and we
re engineered the product so that we put the Bluetooth
radio and the batteries and all that stuff into a
little kind of hockey puck that you throw in your
back pocket that's magnetic to the bottle. That way the bottle.
The bottle has you know, a microprocessor, heaters and temperature
control sensors all kind of embedded in there safely. But

(01:36:48):
there's no you know, batteries or bluetooth radio or any
of that kind of stuff. So it's it's all solid
state electronics in there.

Speaker 1 (01:36:55):
And safety for this. This is something that you know,
babies are going to be holding.

Speaker 12 (01:36:59):
Yeah, So safety has been a number one priority for
us from the very very beginning. And one of the
things that we really wanted to make sure we got
right is the heating.

Speaker 10 (01:37:10):
Right.

Speaker 12 (01:37:10):
We never wanted to be over body temperature, so you know,
ninety eight point five degrees in this case. And so
we actually designed the ember Baby bottle with three independent
circuits that run inside the bottle. If the first circuit fails, right,
if the milk goes up, you know, ninety eight point

(01:37:30):
six boom, the second circuit kicks in senses that it
went a point of a degree up and then opens
the circuit, essentially killing heating. If the second circuit fails,
there is a third circuit that can then catch it,
so it is absolutely bomb proof, never go it will
never go above that body temperature. And so that took

(01:37:53):
us actually probably almost two years to engineer just what
I was saying right there, this triple redundancy.

Speaker 1 (01:37:59):
The self forming baby bottle system from ember Cells for
four hundred dollars.

Speaker 2 (01:38:02):
Some people may balk at that price.

Speaker 12 (01:38:04):
So in the future we'll launch less expensive versions that
just have maybe one bottle and one puck, but at launch,
we want to have an entire system that really takes
care of you, and it's an infant feeding system.

Speaker 2 (01:38:17):
Any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Speaker 12 (01:38:19):
I would say, honestly, grit to go from an idea
in your mind to building a global brand. It's definitely
the hardest thing I've ever done in my life X ten.
And I would just say, you, like, the reason that
I like can't sleep at night, work seven days a week,

(01:38:40):
et cetera, is because of my passion of what I'm
doing right Like, I'm so excited about every product that
we create and launch. And if you don't have that passion,
you're not going to have the grit and the determination
to actually pull it off. And especially when you go
through tough times, you just got to keep pushing that

(01:39:00):
big giant boulder up the hill.

Speaker 1 (01:39:03):
Clay Alexander, CEO of EMBER and founder, thanks so much
for joining me today.

Speaker 12 (01:39:08):
Thank you, Rich It was great to have you all right.

Speaker 1 (01:39:11):
If you want to learn more about what Ember's doing,
check out the website. Just go to rich on Tech
dot TV. I'm rich Tibureau more of rich on Tech
after this welcome back to rich on Tech. I mentioned
that a feature Google loves to just kill things. Google

(01:39:31):
loves to kill products. Now they've got a new product
they're killing Google trip summaries. This is a feature that
I really liked. I thought it was kind of a
fun hidden feature on Google. And I guess it was
too hidden, so either people aren't using it or they
just couldn't make money off of it.

Speaker 2 (01:39:48):
I don't know, but I like it.

Speaker 1 (01:39:50):
I mean, I'm looking at my upcoming trip to Nashville,
and what's cool about this is Google as long as
you're getting your travel itineraries in your Gmail, it kind
of parses the information and puts it into an itinerary
on Google Travel. So if you go to let's see
what the website is here, Google dot com slash travel,

(01:40:14):
and you know, you'll see the different places that you're
going to, so I can see my flights here to Nashville,
I can see where I'm staying. And then at the
end it says discover Nashville. So it's using the you know,
the itinerary information to give you ideas and what to
see while you're there. And then it gives you what
people ask see popular questions from Google search. Is Nashville
worth visiting? What's the best best month to visit? What's

(01:40:36):
the number one thing to do? Is three days enough?
And then it gives you.

Speaker 2 (01:40:41):
Top travel articles.

Speaker 1 (01:40:43):
And I thought this was a really cool little feature,
but apparently it's just not going to continue.

Speaker 2 (01:40:48):
So as of May.

Speaker 1 (01:40:49):
First, Google trip summaries are going away, and it's got
this little message at the top of the screen that
explains it says trip summaries won't be available anymore beginning
May first, though, your travel reservations may still appear in
other Google services, so that means that, in another word,
they're scanning your Gmail travel reservations to still serve up

(01:41:13):
ads based on where you might be going.

Speaker 2 (01:41:15):
That's the way I interpret that.

Speaker 1 (01:41:17):
To save a trip summary, click or tap on the
share button, but you can only do that, by the way,
if you put restaurant reservations, car travel, anything, it would
just all go into there. It was really really a
neat little feature. The other thing I would do, I guess,
is just use an app like Tripsy trips Y, the
one that I really like that I use. And this

(01:41:38):
is probably why Google's going being done with this is
because I switched to a ward wallet. So a ward
wallet has this great thing called Timeline and if you
give it access to your Gmail, which I know there
is a security risk there, but you have to figure
out if you want to do that or not. And
once you do that, it can scan your Gmail for

(01:41:59):
any confirmations you get and it will put this all
on one big timeline. I love this. I even have
my ticket Master tickets in here. It'll even find those.
It's got hotel rooms, it's got car rentals, it's got
car restaurant reservations, everything. Anything that gets sort of a
confirmation email, Award Wallet will suck it up and put

(01:42:22):
it into this great little timeline. It's really really convenient.
So it's a good alternative as well. So Tripsy award Wallet,
I mean, you can use tripe it as well. That'll
do the same thing. Amazon this week showed off its
new project Kuiper. This is their competition for Starlink. So

(01:42:47):
Amazon is putting into low or orbit orbit orbit orbitbit
a satellite network so they will be able to deliver
a broadband across the globe. So this is starting now.
I mean they're just gonna start kind of working on this.
This is not going to happen for another couple of years.

(01:43:10):
First sort of customers looks like twenty twenty four, so
next year, so it's not we got a while. But
they showed off their satellite I guess receivers for the
home and so there's three different ones. Actually it's residential
and small business, so there's three different receivers they have.
So they've got this really high performance one that's the

(01:43:32):
biggest one. They have five pounds without its bracking mounting bracket.
It's one of the most powerful commercially available customer terminals
of its size, delivering speeds up to four hundred megabits
per second. That's really fast for space internet. Amazon says
they're going to produce these terminals for less than four
hundred dollars each I don't know if that means they're
going to sell it for that price or that's how

(01:43:52):
much's going to cost them. Then they've got this ultra
compact design. This is really cool. This is a seven
inch square So this is Project Kuiper's smallest and most
affordable customer terminal. It weighs just a pound. It will
give you speeds up to one hundred megabits per second.
It's portability and affordability will create opportunities to serve even

(01:44:13):
more customers around the world. This is for residential customers
who want a low cost model.

Speaker 2 (01:44:19):
So cool.

Speaker 1 (01:44:19):
I mean, you could bring this thing anywhere, get speeds
up to one hundred megabits anywhere you can see a satellite.
That's really really cool. The fact that it's portable is fun.
Then they've got this high bandwidth design. This is the
biggest one they have. This measures nineteen inches by thirty inches.
It will deliver speeds up to one gigabit per second

(01:44:40):
for space Internet.

Speaker 2 (01:44:42):
I love this.

Speaker 1 (01:44:43):
I love the fact that Starlink is doing this. I
love the fact that now Amazon is doing it, although
I'm a little concerned about Amazon's following through with this.
You know, Amazon likes to start a lot of things,
but maybe not finish them, so I hope that they
finished this. I think this is in their best interest
because the more people that can get online around the world,
the more people that can use Amazon products and services.

(01:45:04):
So it's in their best interest to see this through.
And launching satellite internet is not cheap, so once they
get those satellites up in space, it's probably something they
want to continue doing. Amazon says we have built and
shipped hundreds of millions of devices for customers, including low
cost products like the Echo Dot and the Fire TV stick.

(01:45:25):
Project Kiper is applying that experience to its customer terminal
design and production process. They are so excited to build
tens of millions of units for customers. I'm excited for this.
I mean, at this point, when it comes to home internet,
you really have a couple of options. You've got the
wired internet from the local providers, then you've got the
five G Internet from the cellular providers. That's just sort

(01:45:47):
of starting. It's not even available where I live, and
now you're going to have space Internet, and space internet
typically is more expensive, so it's been reserved for people
that live in sort of rural areas or underserved areas
by tradition means so the fact that now we have
Amazon and starlink as an alternative, it's just it's letting

(01:46:07):
more people live wherever they want, and work wherever they want,
and do whatever they want in those places. You're no
longer needing to run a line for something that's really cool.

Speaker 2 (01:46:21):
So thank you Amazon. All right.

Speaker 1 (01:46:24):
Final story Samsung this week, big brew haha about how
Samsung phones take really good pictures of the moon, and
a Reddit user said, not.

Speaker 2 (01:46:37):
So fast, this is fake.

Speaker 1 (01:46:39):
So what this user did is they took a picture
of a moon picture on their computer screen from across
the dark room and lo and behold the moon that
they took a picture of looked amazing. All the details
were there, even though it was a tiny picture to start,
and so this of course made the rounds. Everyone was
debating whether the samsungung photos are fake. So Samsum came

(01:47:02):
out with a blog post and they explained how this
is happening. They said, okay, ever since the S twenty
one series, we've used this scene optimizer to recognize the
moon and take a good picture of it. They apply
detail enhancement so to explain how it works. They said, look,
we take ten images at a twenty five times zoom

(01:47:25):
or higher, and it needs all those images to enhance
the clarity and other details. When the moon is recognized,
this goes into effect. And they say they built their
model on a whole bunch of shapes and sizes of moons,
and they will actually at the last line they say,
we're going to continue to make this better to reduce
any potential confusion that may occur between the act of

(01:47:47):
taking a picture of a real moon and an image
of the moon. A reference to that Reddit thing. But yes,
these Samsung phones do take really good pictures of the moon.
They look very clear and very nice. I've done it.
I don't know how many images of a moon you need.
All Right, that's gonna do it for this episode of
the show. Thanks so much for listening. Next week we're
gonna talk NFTs. I'm headed to the NFT Expo in

(01:48:10):
Los Angeles. It's NFT LA. It's called Outer Edge LA
this year. It's happening this week in Los Angeles. So
I'm gonna hear about what the state of affairs is
when it comes to NFTs. You can find me on
social media. I am at rich on tech my website
richontech dot TV. There you can see all the stuff
I talked about here, watch my TV segments. Find me

(01:48:31):
on social media. My name is Richdmiro. Thanks so much
for listening. There are so many ways you can spend
your time. I do appreciate you spending it right here
with me. I'll talk to you real soon.

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011 Rich on Tech Radio Show - March 18, 2023

Episode Transcript

Host

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;}011 Rich on Tech Radio Show - March 18, 2023