Speaker 1: GM is dropping car play. Amazon has a new warning
Speaker 1: on certain product listings, and Apple sets a date for
Speaker 1: their next big reveal. Oh plus, your tech questions answered.
Speaker 1: What's going on? I'm rich Demiro and this is rich
Speaker 1: on Tech, the show where I talk about the tech
Speaker 1: stuff I think you should know about. It's also the
Speaker 1: place where I answer your questions about technology. I'm the
Speaker 1: tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the show, and welcome to our new listeners in Boise,
Speaker 1: Welcome to rich on Tech. Phone lines are now open
Speaker 1: at triple eight rich one oh one. That's eight eight
Speaker 1: eight seven four to two four one zero one. Phone
Speaker 1: lines are open. Give me a call if you have
Speaker 1: a question about technology, or if you're too shy you
Speaker 1: don't want to give me a call. Email is also
Speaker 1: an option. Send it to hello at Richontech dot TV.
Speaker 1: I hope you're having a good weekend so far. I am,
Speaker 1: although I got to say I feel kind of silly.
Speaker 1: I got a little story time for you because I
Speaker 1: went to Phoenix, Arizona this week for a car test
Speaker 1: drive testdrove the new Hyundai Ionic six ev I only
Speaker 1: test drive cars that are sort of alternative fuel because
Speaker 1: that's where a lot of the momentum is and so,
Speaker 1: you know, I'll travel for these things once in a while,
Speaker 1: but this was one of the things. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like a junket where they take you out there and
Speaker 1: you know, they you're out there for two days, forty
Speaker 1: eight hours, a whole bunch of other journalists and tech
Speaker 1: folks out there, well maybe not just tech, mostly car people.
Speaker 1: And I love it because, you know, I get to
Speaker 1: hang with all these people that know a lot about cars.
Speaker 1: So for me, it's a great education just to talk
Speaker 1: to all these other people that cover cars about what's
Speaker 1: happening in the industry, what's going on in the world
Speaker 1: of cars, and just their take on everything. And so
Speaker 1: that's like a side note. You know, I get to
Speaker 1: see these cars and test drive them, but I also
Speaker 1: get this whole hand. You know, it's gonna say hands
Speaker 1: on time, but that's maybe with the cars. Uh Anyway,
Speaker 1: So this is just so silly, and I just feel
Speaker 1: like I have to share because I'm so embarrassed what
Speaker 1: happened to me. So this trip has been going on,
Speaker 1: you know, we had a planned for so long. Talk
Speaker 1: to the travel people, they're you know, they're organizing the trip,
Speaker 1: and it's it's in Arizona, Sedona, to be exact, and
Speaker 1: so Sedona is like a two hour drive from Phoenix.
Speaker 1: But you know, you can't really fly into Sedona. So
Speaker 1: I'm scheduling the flight from lax to Phoenix, and I'm
Speaker 1: talking with the person on the other end, the travel people.
Speaker 1: They're giving me some options for flights, and I keep saying,
Speaker 1: you know, back and forth, Okay, well I should probably
Speaker 1: do this flight because it's like a two hour drive
Speaker 1: back to from Sedona or to Sedona, whatever and whatever.
Speaker 1: I get my flights. I get there, I pack, I
Speaker 1: look at the weather for Sedona. I finally land in Phoenix.
Speaker 1: I did not I don't know what was going on
Speaker 1: with me, but I didn't realize how quick the flight
Speaker 1: was from Los Angeles to Phoenix. I was, you know,
Speaker 1: I was getting ready for like a three hour, two
Speaker 1: and a half hour flight. I don't know why. It
Speaker 1: was forty five minutes. So that was number one. We
Speaker 1: land in Phoenix and I get to the person that's
Speaker 1: driving me and I say, oh, we got a long
Speaker 1: drive ahead. Huh, gotta buckle in, And he's like, long
Speaker 1: drive it's like twenty minutes to Scottsdale. I'm like, wait what.
Speaker 1: So my thesis is, my point of this is we
Speaker 1: were going to Scottsdale, Arizona, not Sedona, Arizona. And I
Speaker 1: had told my wife. She I was like, Oh, aren't
Speaker 1: you jealous? I'm going to Sedona. This whole time, I
Speaker 1: think I'm going to Sedona, and I get there and
Speaker 1: this driver's like, no, the whole thing is taking place
Speaker 1: in Scottsdale. Okay, both cities start with an S. I
Speaker 1: get it, but I don't know what to say here.
Speaker 1: My point is, even with the most advanced technology flight
Speaker 1: tracking tools maps, I looked up our hotel on Google Maps,
Speaker 1: and I still didn't realize that it was in Scottsdale
Speaker 1: and not Sedona. So why am I telling you this? Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I feel really dumb. That's why you could have
Speaker 1: all the technology in the world and still if you're
Speaker 1: not paying attention to details, you're going to miss something.
Speaker 1: And the best part was when I was talking to
Speaker 1: some of the other journalists there. One of the guys
Speaker 1: was like, oh, you're the guy that thought he was
Speaker 1: going to Sedona because my driver was telling me that
Speaker 1: there was a guy that he picked up before me,
Speaker 1: that thought he was going to Sodona and he anyway,
Speaker 1: So I figured i'd share that. So don't feel bad
Speaker 1: when you make a mistake in this world, because you
Speaker 1: know what it happens to the best of us. Now,
Speaker 1: I could talk the entire show about AI, because that's
Speaker 1: really what's happening in the tech world. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to talk about a whole bunch of it, but I
Speaker 1: do want to talk a little bit about what's happening here.
Speaker 1: So if you saw that picture of the pope and
Speaker 1: the puffy jacket, that picture fooled the entire world apparently,
Speaker 1: and this was a picture that was made by AI
Speaker 1: and apparently by a Chicago man. This pope in the
Speaker 1: white puffy coat just took over the internet. Everyone was
Speaker 1: retweeting this picture, and of course it looks silly. It
Speaker 1: looked too, you know, kind of looked like it was real.
Speaker 1: But you're also like, oh, maybe he does do that.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but it was fake and it was
Speaker 1: made by AI. And it has made me realize that example.
Speaker 1: And also my sister sent me a link to a
Speaker 1: YouTube video and we were debating whether we trust it,
Speaker 1: whether it's right, whether it's wrong. It has made me
Speaker 1: realize that we are now living in a time when
Speaker 1: you might not be able to believe anything that you
Speaker 1: see or hear. Let me say that again. We're living
Speaker 1: in a time when you may not be able to
Speaker 1: believe anything that you see or hear. I'm not talking
Speaker 1: different opinions. I'm not talking you see someone on the
Speaker 1: news and you don't agree with them, and you don't
Speaker 1: believe what they're saying. I'm talking when you see something
Speaker 1: with your own eyes or hear it with your own ears,
Speaker 1: it may not be real. This is how good AI
Speaker 1: has gotten in just the six months or so that
Speaker 1: we've been seeing it on a big level. So the
Speaker 1: AI that we're using, the AI tools like bard and
Speaker 1: bing and chat GBT, they say right on them, this
Speaker 1: is known to hallucinate. What does that mean? It makes
Speaker 1: stuff up. It just pulls stuff out of thin air.
Speaker 1: It's a computer. It says wrong answers with confidence. It
Speaker 1: says stuff that you think is right and it's not.
Speaker 1: Now today Twitter is supposedly taking away verified badges from
Speaker 1: traditionally verified folks like myself. If you go to my
Speaker 1: Twitter page at rich on Tech, you'll see I've got
Speaker 1: a blue badge, right, That blue badge, for many years
Speaker 1: has meant that, oh Rich is verified, This rich on
Speaker 1: tech is who he says he is. But apparently Twitter
Speaker 1: is taking that away now. They haven't done it just yet,
Speaker 1: but everyone is tweeting now saying, ah, this is the
Speaker 1: end of it. I'm it's over. You know, no one's
Speaker 1: gonna know who I am. There's gonna be a lot
Speaker 1: of people, you know, IMPOSSI faking to be other people?
Speaker 1: What does that mean? Again? Now, when you're on Twitter,
Speaker 1: you may not be able to trust what you're seeing
Speaker 1: from someone that you thought was the person that's tweeting that.
Speaker 1: Someone may register rich on tech with underscores and you
Speaker 1: may go on there and say, oh, this is what
Speaker 1: Rich is saying, but it's not me, And how do
Speaker 1: you know it's me? How do you know which one
Speaker 1: is me? You won't anymore unless I pay eight bucks
Speaker 1: a month, which I'm not going to do. I did
Speaker 1: it for a month and it just I didn't get
Speaker 1: anything out of it, and I'm certainly not paying for
Speaker 1: a blue check mark that I've had for free for
Speaker 1: I don't know how many years, ten years. So this
Speaker 1: is a problem who you trust and why you trust them.
Speaker 1: This is going to become a big problem with the Internet,
Speaker 1: with AI, with all of this stuff that's happening. Anyone
Speaker 1: can create a video that is generated that looks like someone.
Speaker 1: Anyone can create a picture that's generated that looks like something.
Speaker 1: Anyone can create an article and post it and say
Speaker 1: that this is true. Well, that's been going on for
Speaker 1: a long time now. It is getting really tricky out
Speaker 1: there now. If you saw this, if you're following with
Speaker 1: any of this stuff, you saw this AI letter that
Speaker 1: you know is big on the news. Over one thousand people, oh,
Speaker 1: over thirty thousand people signed it, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak,
Speaker 1: leading AI researchers. They all called for a six month
Speaker 1: pause on AI systems more powerful than GPT four, which
Speaker 1: is the latest version of Chat GPT. But apparently a
Speaker 1: lot of these people signing it were fake. People just
Speaker 1: signed for them, and a lot of these people behind
Speaker 1: the signatures, like Elon Musk, he might want to pause
Speaker 1: chat GPT progress because guess what he's got competing AI
Speaker 1: companies he wants to work for. He used to be
Speaker 1: a part of Open Ai, and he kind of left
Speaker 1: that company on bad terms. He didn't want to be
Speaker 1: there anymore because they didn't want to do things his way.
Speaker 1: So even a letter that wants to stop AI is
Speaker 1: kind of a huge mess. It's just something that is
Speaker 1: we can't even trust the letter, the petition about AI.
Speaker 1: I don't know what's going to happen with all this stuff.
Speaker 1: This is really really getting tricky. Now. I'm a journalist,
Speaker 1: classically trained journalist, right, so what do I do. I
Speaker 1: talk about the truth. I put facts in my stories.
Speaker 1: I say stuff that I think is vetted. You know,
Speaker 1: I look and I cross check, if you see, before
Speaker 1: I send out an email with my story that I
Speaker 1: air on TV, I check people's names and spellings and
Speaker 1: facts over and over and over, just to make sure
Speaker 1: everything's right. Guess what, a lot of people don't do
Speaker 1: that anymore. You can be on tiktoking about two seconds.
Speaker 1: You can be on Instagram in two seconds. You can
Speaker 1: be on Twitter in two seconds. So the reality is
Speaker 1: we as people need to start doing a little bit
Speaker 1: more research for ourselves before you just share something. Before
Speaker 1: you just take for granted that something that you're seeing
Speaker 1: online is true, you got to figure out is it.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of work. By the way, it's a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of work for us. It's a
Speaker 1: lot of work for me as a journalist that you know,
Speaker 1: my full time job is to do that. But as
Speaker 1: a regular person, you're flipping through Facebook and you've got
Speaker 1: to figure out, now if is this picture real? If
Speaker 1: you want to see an example of this, go to
Speaker 1: my Instagram at rich on Tech. Check out my stories. Okay,
Speaker 1: and I posted this morning some personal news. After much thought,
Speaker 1: I've traded in my ev for something much more practical,
Speaker 1: and I've got this kind of classic car in the background.
Speaker 1: And the reality is I used an AI program to
Speaker 1: replace the car that I was standing in front of
Speaker 1: with this other car. And now, to let people in
Speaker 1: on the joke, I did a whole bunch of different cars.
Speaker 1: So if you flip through my stories, you'll see how
Speaker 1: many different cars I put in there, And it's all
Speaker 1: kind of a joke, just to let people know that
Speaker 1: this is what's possible, and it's so good, and it's
Speaker 1: with an app that's free. And by the way, I'll
Speaker 1: talk about that app later in the show. Anyway, be
Speaker 1: on your toes with all this AI stuff. You really
Speaker 1: need to be all right. We got a great show
Speaker 1: today coming up. We're gonna talk about GM. I think
Speaker 1: they're making a really bad move. They are dropping car play.
Speaker 1: That is not good when people really seek out cars
Speaker 1: with car play. We'll talk about that. We're going to
Speaker 1: talk about the demise of E three. This is the
Speaker 1: big video game show. It is not happening this year.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about why that is. Later in the show,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about the dos and don'ts of taking a
Speaker 1: vacation spring break for a lot of people. Should you
Speaker 1: work on that trip. We'll talk to an expert who
Speaker 1: has some thoughts on that, and later I'll tell you
Speaker 1: about the best flight tracking app. We're gonna have the
Speaker 1: founder of that app telling why they started flighty. That's
Speaker 1: all coming up, plus your calls at triple eight rich
Speaker 1: one on one. That's eight eight eight seven four to
Speaker 1: two four one zero one. You're listening to rich on Tech.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging
Speaker 1: out with you talking technology. Phone lines are open at
Speaker 1: triple eight rich one oh one that's eight eight eight
Speaker 1: seven four to two four one zero one. You can
Speaker 1: also email hello at rich on Tech dot TV or
Speaker 1: go to the website. Rich on tech dot TV phone
Speaker 1: number is listed right at the top. All right, so
Speaker 1: I mentioned before that GM is planning to phase out
Speaker 1: Apple car Play in their cars. Now apparently, according to Reuters,
Speaker 1: this is in their e So I don't know if
Speaker 1: it's all of the cars, but definitely evs Okay, So
Speaker 1: let's just assume that it's just EV's. But here's a deal.
Speaker 1: The whole world is shifting to EV's now. I will
Speaker 1: tell you as someone who really really enjoys Apple car Play,
Speaker 1: the car I have now does not have it. And
Speaker 1: the cars I did before I purchased them because they
Speaker 1: had car Play and I really wanted that, like that
Speaker 1: was a thing, like it, like there was no I
Speaker 1: was not making a decision on these cars if they
Speaker 1: didn't have car play, like it was just not a thing.
Speaker 1: But then the car I really wanted didn't have it,
Speaker 1: so I had to go with it, and I every
Speaker 1: day I regret it now I don't. I mean, I
Speaker 1: like my car. I just it's one of those things
Speaker 1: that I miss every single day because it's so simple.
Speaker 1: So you and I'm not singling out car play, I
Speaker 1: mean Android Auto is just as good and it's one
Speaker 1: of these things where you already have your phone. You've
Speaker 1: already got your phone figured out, You've got the apps
Speaker 1: you like, You've got the services you like, you've got
Speaker 1: the connection you like. Why should we try something different? Well,
Speaker 1: according to Reuter's General, Motors is going to phase out
Speaker 1: car Play and Android Auto instead shifting to an infotainment
Speaker 1: system developed with Google for their future electric vehicles. Now,
Speaker 1: it's not so bad that it's developed with Google. I've
Speaker 1: seen some of these other cars, like a Pollstar, they
Speaker 1: have Google inside their car. And the reality is it's fine.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing. People that have an iPhone are
Speaker 1: not going to be happy. They're not going to be
Speaker 1: happy because they want to be able to plug in
Speaker 1: their phone and use CarPlay just the way they use
Speaker 1: it in their car today, or use their iPhone or
Speaker 1: set up their screen the way they like it. And
Speaker 1: by the way, they have an iPhone because they don't
Speaker 1: want Google. They don't necessarily like Google, and so they
Speaker 1: don't want to use a separate infotainment system. Let's see. Now,
Speaker 1: here's the other thing. Chevrolet really had a lot of
Speaker 1: emphasis on CarPlay in the past, and when you rented
Speaker 1: a car, it was nice and easy to use when
Speaker 1: you bought a car. It was just super easy because
Speaker 1: you knew it worked in there if you had a GM.
Speaker 1: Here's what my kick Me, executive director of Digital Cockpit
Speaker 1: Experience told Reuters. We have a lot of new driver
Speaker 1: assistance features coming that are more tightly coupled with navigation.
Speaker 1: We don't want to design these features in a way
Speaker 1: that are dependent on a person having a cell phone, really,
Speaker 1: because everyone has a cell phone. I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: think people are really sad that they have to use
Speaker 1: their cell phone for their car. Buyers of new evs
Speaker 1: from GM will get systems with access to Google Maps
Speaker 1: and Google Assistant, a voice command system at no extra
Speaker 1: cost for eight years.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I also learned this at the Hyundai event. I did
Speaker 1: not realize that a lot of these services that you
Speaker 1: have in your car are included for a certain amount
Speaker 1: of time. They're not forever. So if you look at
Speaker 1: these connections, they did this really good slide. So with Chevy,
Speaker 1: let's see you get ten years of remote diagnostics, Ford
Speaker 1: its complementary. Let's see Toyota's ten years, Honda Honda complimentary
Speaker 1: complimentary for Hyundai, and then let's see Nissan three years,
Speaker 1: Kia one to five years, Subaru is three years, and
Speaker 1: then Volkswagen five years in Tesla eight years. So it's
Speaker 1: interesting that you think that these things that you have
Speaker 1: in your car, this connectivity package or whatever, is going
Speaker 1: to last forever. But no, these companies may charge after
Speaker 1: a certain point. And that's one of the things that
Speaker 1: Hyundai's doing is they're actually making it unlimited for the
Speaker 1: lifetime of the first owner, which I think is going
Speaker 1: to force a lot of other car makers to do
Speaker 1: the same. But the thing about all this is that
Speaker 1: you know, what you see on that screen in the
Speaker 1: middle of your car is really starting to change. And
Speaker 1: we saw a lot of progress with Apple car Play
Speaker 1: and what they're doing there, and a lot of progress
Speaker 1: with Google, and I think that this is a step back.
Speaker 1: I really do. I think that many people want CarPlay
Speaker 1: in the center console if they have an iPhone, and
Speaker 1: for GM to just say, now, with our evs, we're
Speaker 1: just going to do our own thing, I'll say that's
Speaker 1: probably one of the biggest complaints I have about the
Speaker 1: Tesla is that it has its own software and it's fine,
Speaker 1: but I don't understand why they don't just use something
Speaker 1: that's better. I mean, I kind of do understand, because
Speaker 1: if you think about it, Tesla. One of the magic
Speaker 1: parts of the Tesla is that they have the automatic
Speaker 1: ev routing, and so if you want to route, you know,
Speaker 1: if you just want to use your GPS, it'll tell
Speaker 1: you when you need to stop to get a charge.
Speaker 1: And so I do understand that if you're using something
Speaker 1: like CarPlay or Android Auto, and these car makers are
Speaker 1: really trying to integrate those systems of when to charge
Speaker 1: in their cars, which is something that a lot of
Speaker 1: these other automakers don't do. Right now, that's a problem
Speaker 1: if you're trying to use you know, Android Auto or CarPlay,
Speaker 1: and so I do understand that aspect of it, but
Speaker 1: I think this is a little near sighted for the amount.
Speaker 1: I just don't think they realize how many people do
Speaker 1: appreciate having that feature. So anyway, one thing I wanted
Speaker 1: to mention. I didn't mention this earlier with the the
Speaker 1: Phoenix stuff, but when I traveled, I noticed I did
Speaker 1: not get my points for my Southwest flight, and so
Speaker 1: I was like, I wonder if I can get them.
Speaker 1: After the fact, I realized my number was not in there,
Speaker 1: and I went on their website and sure enough, there's
Speaker 1: a little space where you can say, hey, give me
Speaker 1: credit for a pass flight. I popped in my confirmation
Speaker 1: number and the points were there within a couple of minutes.
Speaker 1: So if you ever take a flight and you forgot
Speaker 1: to put your frequent flyer number in which it can happen,
Speaker 1: go to the website of the airline and see if
Speaker 1: there's like a place to redeem past flight credits or
Speaker 1: you know, get points for past flights. Because I was
Speaker 1: surprised how easy the process was, because all this stuff
Speaker 1: is online. Don't even need to call someone, and it happened.
Speaker 1: They said, oh, we'll get back to you in like
Speaker 1: forty eight hours. It happened like almost instantly. Coming up
Speaker 1: more rich on Tech. We got your calls at triple
Speaker 1: eight rich one oh one. Give me a call eight
Speaker 1: eight eight seven four to two four to one zero one.
Speaker 1: Coming up, we're going to talk about E three and
Speaker 1: why it's not happening this year. You're listening to rich
Speaker 1: on Tech. Welcome back to rich On Tech. Rich Demiro
Speaker 1: here hanging out with you talking technology at triple eight
Speaker 1: rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four
Speaker 1: to two four one zero one uh give out the
Speaker 1: email address hello at rich On tech dot TV, Mark
Speaker 1: wrote in about my Scottsdale and Sedona story. He said,
Speaker 1: both great places to visit. Years ago, when I worked
Speaker 1: for a commuter airline in the Midwest, we had a
Speaker 1: lady get off the plane in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. She
Speaker 1: looked around, then told the gate agent, this doesn't look
Speaker 1: like Grand Rapids, Michigan, which of course it wasn't. Everyone
Speaker 1: who issued or looked at her ticket did not realize
Speaker 1: that GPZ Minnesota was not GRR Michigan. She was on
Speaker 1: the first flight out the next day, as there are
Speaker 1: no other flights that night. Mark and Phoenix, Arizona. See Now,
Speaker 1: I don't feel that bad. At least I flew to
Speaker 1: the right place. But I've had people. In fact, the
Speaker 1: woman in front of me for the Southwest when I
Speaker 1: was flying out a burbank, she actually she was on this.
Speaker 1: She got to the thing and the person looked at
Speaker 1: her ticket and was like, no, this is not the
Speaker 1: right flight she is. So it happens, and I think
Speaker 1: with Southwest specifically, if you've never flown them, sometimes their
Speaker 1: flights will literally take like three hops like my flight
Speaker 1: was going Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Denver or something like that.
Speaker 1: Like there was three cities packed into one flight. It's
Speaker 1: unique in that way. All right, So E three it's
Speaker 1: been announced that it's not happening this year. This is
Speaker 1: the big video game show that usually happens in downtown
Speaker 1: Los Angeles every year, and it's not happening. This is
Speaker 1: a very popular show but apparently no more. So here
Speaker 1: to talk about it is Rebecca Valentine. She is a
Speaker 1: reporter at IGN. Rebecca, thanks for joining me.
Speaker 3: Hey, Rich, thank you so much for having me correct me.
Speaker 1: If I'm wrong. Did you you guys broke this story?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So what the deal? So E three stands for
Speaker 1: the Electronic Entertainment Expo. I've been many times over the years,
Speaker 1: and it's the show where they kind of show off
Speaker 1: all the new video games people come from all over.
Speaker 1: They opened it up to the public in recent years.
Speaker 1: So tell me what happened this year.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So it's there's like a little bit of history.
Speaker 3: I guess it's sort of helpful contextually, But like the
Speaker 3: show's been in trouble for the last several years. Like
Speaker 3: for years it was just a business conference mainly for
Speaker 3: media and for people to do business deals. Then a
Speaker 3: couple of years back they opened it to the public
Speaker 3: and there was there are some you know, controversies to
Speaker 3: whether that was a good idea or not. It kind
Speaker 3: of changed the form out of the show. And then
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty, COVID nineteen pandemic happened, and they obviously
Speaker 3: canceled as all the events canceled, but there there was
Speaker 3: kind of some reports that things were not going great
Speaker 3: behind the scenes at that point anyway. And so then
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty one they had in all Digital showcase
Speaker 3: that was kind of you know, not not especially well received.
Speaker 3: It was kind of kind of muted, I guess.
Speaker 5: And then in.
Speaker 3: Twenty twenty two they were supposed to have a show
Speaker 3: and they said they were going to have a show,
Speaker 3: and then they canceled again and said they needed time
Speaker 3: to sort of you know, prepare a big comeback for
Speaker 3: E three. And so this year they brought on RePOP
Speaker 3: which usually runs PAX events, which is another consumer focused
Speaker 3: gaming conference that happened in a couple of places across
Speaker 3: the world a couple times a year. And that's a
Speaker 3: successful one, right, Yes, tax the tax is very successful,
Speaker 3: it's very well loved. It's much smaller than E three,
Speaker 3: and it is a consumer show specifically, but yeah, people
Speaker 3: love tax It's a great show. But yeah, they brought
Speaker 3: Redpop on and there at the beginning, there was a
Speaker 3: lot of conversation about how it seemed to be going well.
Speaker 3: People seem to be buying in, but kind of just
Speaker 3: a confluence of crappy things sort of led to a
Speaker 3: lot of publishers dropping out. A lot of companies still
Speaker 3: haven't brought on. You know, they laid off event staff
Speaker 3: when the pandemic happened, or they cut events budgets pretty
Speaker 3: significantly because they didn't need to have in person events,
Speaker 3: and they haven't really fueled those again. Covid disrupt did
Speaker 3: a lot of development cycles for people, and so they
Speaker 3: don't necessarily have big game demos ready to show on
Speaker 3: the show floor. Takes a lot of work to make
Speaker 3: those things. And then just there was just kind of
Speaker 3: a disorganized a little bit of disorganization from what disorganization
Speaker 3: from what I understand, kind of lack of communication is
Speaker 3: what my sources tell me on that, and kind of
Speaker 3: a lack of faith that this show was going to
Speaker 3: be worse, the amount of money that companies would need
Speaker 3: to put into it. So SOLLY has been kind of
Speaker 3: checked out for several years. Nintendo and Xbox found said
Speaker 3: that they were not going to be there, and then
Speaker 3: you'd be Saft, followed suits and then Sega and Tencent,
Speaker 3: and it just there were so many people kind of
Speaker 3: waiting for someone else to jump into the pool and say, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm committed to E three, I'm gonna I'm going to
Speaker 3: be there and make this worth it that you know. No,
Speaker 3: but nobody actually took the leap, and so it was
Speaker 3: two months out of getting more and more expensive to cancel,
Speaker 3: and so they had to bail.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, So what does this mean for the video
Speaker 1: game industry? Aren't there competitor shows that are now sort
Speaker 1: of happening more online or what does this mean for
Speaker 1: the industry.
Speaker 3: I think it's it's less a causal kind of thing
Speaker 3: and more a symptom of the industry slowly changing, sort
Speaker 3: of in response to the pandemic and some other things.
Speaker 3: So kind of one of the things that people discovered
Speaker 3: during the pandemic is that they could successfully have digital showcases.
Speaker 3: You know, at E three, it's a week long thing.
Speaker 3: It's not just a it was not just a floor show.
Speaker 3: It was also a bunch of digital showcases where Xbox
Speaker 3: and Sony and Nintendo and all these other third party
Speaker 3: Triple A publishers were having these big showcases announcing all
Speaker 3: their stuff, and it was all happening at once, So
Speaker 3: there was always kind of this conversation around, oh, who
Speaker 3: want E three? We're all competing here, and if you
Speaker 3: had a big announcement, it kind of got drowned out
Speaker 3: by someone else inevitably, And so everybody discovered that they
Speaker 3: could just successfully do digital showcases at any time of
Speaker 3: the year and speak directly to their audience and take
Speaker 3: up all the spotlights that they wanted. And if they
Speaker 3: wanted to show games to press, they could do that
Speaker 3: at Gamescom, they could do that effectively. At packs they
Speaker 3: could just fly select press outlets out on their their
Speaker 3: own dime and do a little showcase in their office.
Speaker 3: You know, there's all all kinds of different ways they
Speaker 3: can do that. And you know, business deals still happen
Speaker 3: at other shows like Games Common Germany or you know,
Speaker 3: in other places, and so I think there's a lot
Speaker 3: of different factors. But I think I think the industry
Speaker 3: just sort of kind of discovered over time that they
Speaker 3: didn't really need E three. And I think we're still
Speaker 3: going to have sort of a little bonanza of digital showcases,
Speaker 3: and Jeff Keeley's got an event going on in LA
Speaker 3: around that time to show some games for the press
Speaker 3: as well. But I think I think we're just going
Speaker 3: to foresee a dissipation of what E three used to be.
Speaker 2: I don't.
Speaker 3: I don't necessarily feel confident it's going to come back,
Speaker 3: but I also think that maybe the industry has moved
Speaker 3: past it.
Speaker 1: It's kind of sad. I mean, you know, being based
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles, it was always kind of fun to
Speaker 1: go there, you know, once a year in June. I'm
Speaker 1: not a huge gamer, but it was just fun to
Speaker 1: be there with the people and to see what was
Speaker 1: going on and of course play some of the games.
Speaker 1: Do you think that you know, there was a benefit
Speaker 1: to being in person versus you know, virtual.
Speaker 3: Oh, certainly. And I think there's a benefit for certain people,
Speaker 3: right Like, there's plenty of other consumer shows, So I don't.
Speaker 3: I don't necessarily feel like that element is lost, but
Speaker 3: I do feel there was been the media side, certainly,
Speaker 3: there's quite the loss because having literally everybody in one
Speaker 3: spot for a week was super convenient, and it was
Speaker 3: also you know, very very helpful for access, right Like
Speaker 3: companies would offer up you know, executives for interviews, or
Speaker 3: they would have game demos or developers that you could
Speaker 3: talk to, and they were all kind of there in
Speaker 3: a way that they're not necessarily there all year round.
Speaker 3: And so I think the thing that I'm sort of
Speaker 3: afraid of happening is that long term we see kind
Speaker 3: of access dry up and media less and less able
Speaker 3: to actually be able to ask tough questions of companies
Speaker 3: or you know, get get really useful information for players
Speaker 3: about what's going on with games and inside games. I
Speaker 3: hope there are you know, other avenues, and I hope,
Speaker 3: I hope companies continue to provide those opportunities, but E
Speaker 3: three was really sort of a I don't know, a
Speaker 3: leveling of of that level of access for a lot
Speaker 3: of people, and I think I think we'll lose out
Speaker 3: without that all.
Speaker 1: Right, before we go, I'm curious what you're looking forward
Speaker 1: to this year. I mean, we don't have any new
Speaker 1: consoles coming out, right, so is there games that you're
Speaker 1: really looking forward to?
Speaker 3: I feel like this is the easy cop out answer,
Speaker 3: But man, I'm so excited for Tears of the Kingdom.
Speaker 3: My partner's been playing the Champions ballid DLC for Breath
Speaker 3: of the Wild, and I watched the gameplay showcase earlier
Speaker 3: this week and I'm just sort of waiting for that
Speaker 3: to come out. I can't focus on any other game
Speaker 3: until I get my hands on that.
Speaker 1: Okay, And just to explain, that's the new Zelda sequel, right, yes,
Speaker 1: on the Switch and this comes out when.
Speaker 3: Oh, May twelve. Oh I hope that's right.
Speaker 1: Okay, Well it's coming out soon, so in May sometime.
Speaker 1: And this is also the first Switch game that's going
Speaker 1: to be sixty nine ninety nine.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, yeah. A lot of other companies are raising
Speaker 3: their prices to round up to seventy dollars, and this
Speaker 3: is the first one from Nintendo.
Speaker 1: Do you think that's fair? Do you think that's a
Speaker 1: fair price for a Switch game?
Speaker 3: Games are more expensive to make, so I get it, Like,
Speaker 3: I think economically it makes perfect sense given how long
Speaker 3: it takes to make these games and how much person
Speaker 3: power and how much tech and how much everything else
Speaker 3: has to go into them. That's that you know it sucks.
Speaker 3: I'm paying ten more dollars.
Speaker 1: Not fun, Yeah, that's for sure. But you know what,
Speaker 1: people loved Breath of the Wild, and so if this
Speaker 1: is even a fraction of that success, I think Nintendo,
Speaker 1: I think the fans will be willing to pay that price.
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely, I'm not worried about that game selling copy.
Speaker 5: All right.
Speaker 1: Rebecca Valentine Duck Valentine on Twitter, reporter at IGN. Thanks
Speaker 1: so much for joining me today. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: All right, take care. Coming up, we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about an event that is taking place but kind of virtual,
Speaker 1: kind of in person. Apple announces a date for WWDC
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three. I'll tell you when that's happening and
Speaker 1: what we're expecting coming up. Plus your calls at Triple
Speaker 1: eight Rich one on one. That's eight eight eight seven
Speaker 1: four to two, four to one zero one. You're listening
Speaker 1: to Rich on tech. Oh how appropriate. Now, no one
Speaker 1: would call on their cell phone anymore, they would just text.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Rich on tech. My name is Rich Demiro,
Speaker 1: tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles, hanging
Speaker 1: out with you talking technology at Triple eight. Rich one
Speaker 1: oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two
Speaker 1: four to one zero one. You can find me on
Speaker 1: social media. I am at rich on Tech. I'm on Instagram, Facebook,
Speaker 1: and Twitter. You can find me there and tweet it me. Also,
Speaker 1: if you want to email, you can do that. The
Speaker 1: email address is hello at richontech dot TV. Teresa did
Speaker 1: just that. She said, Hey, I got a new phone.
Speaker 1: I went to the AT and T store. They transferred
Speaker 1: my data. Now I don't have my Gmail emails. At
Speaker 1: and T can't help since it's a different carrier. Of
Speaker 1: course they can't. How do I find them? Of course
Speaker 1: some are very important. Please help me. I'm not electronic savvy.
Speaker 1: It frustrates me. Thanks for your help. Candy. Oh interesting,
Speaker 1: I guess she goes by Candy. Email, says Teresa, but
Speaker 1: she signed it Candy. PS. Love your show and appreciate
Speaker 1: all of your knowledge. Well, thank you, Candy. So sweet
Speaker 1: of you. See what I did there, Okay, so very easy.
Speaker 1: If you have Gmail, what's happened is your phone is
Speaker 1: just not logged into Gmail. So you just need to
Speaker 1: sign into your Google account and go to the Gmail
Speaker 1: app on your phone and it will be there. So
Speaker 1: I would go on if you have an iPhone or
Speaker 1: if you have an iPhone, I would you probably hadn't.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing you have an iPhone because Android would automatically
Speaker 1: be logged in, so I'm guessing its iPhone. So in
Speaker 1: the case of iPhone, there's two ways you can do it.
Speaker 1: You can either go to the Mail app, which is
Speaker 1: you know m Ail, open up that app and you
Speaker 1: can add an account. And if you don't want to
Speaker 1: go through the app, you can also go through the
Speaker 1: settings on the iPhone. So if you go to settings,
Speaker 1: scroll down until you see Mail, it's under passwords and
Speaker 1: then it says accounts and then you can say add
Speaker 1: account and it'll say iCloud, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, AOL or Outlook.
Speaker 1: So click Google and then just log in with your
Speaker 1: Google account and it will be all synced up. So
Speaker 1: that's one way of doing it. Personally, I like using
Speaker 1: the Gmail app, so you can just go to the
Speaker 1: app store download the Gmail app and you can sign
Speaker 1: in that way. But either way, your emails are safe
Speaker 1: and sound. Believe me, they are not gone because Gmail
Speaker 1: is one of the best email services and everything is
Speaker 1: stored in the cloud, so you are going to be
Speaker 1: just okay. Candy, good question, thanks for emailing in, Darren
Speaker 1: writes in. Darren writes in, hey, Rich, is it completely
Speaker 1: safe to trade in a phone when resold? Can a
Speaker 1: master hacker get any of my deleted data? Thanks? And
Speaker 1: he sent it from Android, So that is a good question.
Speaker 1: Let me think about that. I mean, there's always a
Speaker 1: potential when you're deleting something on a phone. Most of
Speaker 1: the time it's just getting marked for deletion. It's not
Speaker 1: unless you're over writing that data. It still sort of
Speaker 1: exists on the memory. And so unless you're writing something
Speaker 1: over what you just did, it's still there in some way.
Speaker 1: Most of the time, it's just not accessible from the
Speaker 1: standard means of accessing information. But if someone wanted to
Speaker 1: go in there with some sort of recovery software, they
Speaker 1: could potentially do that. I'm not saying it's a guarantee,
Speaker 1: but yeah, there's a potential of that. So I have
Speaker 1: just to let you know. I've resold many phones over
Speaker 1: the years on eBay and things like that, and I've
Speaker 1: never had a problem with this. But yes, I've thought
Speaker 1: about it. So what I would do personally is you
Speaker 1: can format the phone twice before you send it out.
Speaker 1: That's one way of doing it. That's probably what i'd recommend.
Speaker 1: So if you're not familiar with how to do that
Speaker 1: on the Android, you go into the settings and you're
Speaker 1: going to go into the system and then Advanced, and
Speaker 1: you want to go to reset and you want to
Speaker 1: erase all data factory reset. Now a lot of times
Speaker 1: phones are encrypted these days, so that should probably help
Speaker 1: as well with recovering this stuff, if you know, making
Speaker 1: it tougher to recover. So I think you're probably going
Speaker 1: to be okay. But if you want once you erase
Speaker 1: all the data, it's going to take a little time
Speaker 1: for that to happen. You can set up the phone again.
Speaker 1: Just kind of scroll through all the options to set
Speaker 1: it up. Don't log in, don't log into the phone
Speaker 1: or do anything like that, but just get it to
Speaker 1: the point where you can access the operating system again,
Speaker 1: and then you can do that one more time and
Speaker 1: factory reset it twice. There's another way to factory reset androids,
Speaker 1: and that's through the recovery mode. And every phone is
Speaker 1: a little bit different, but I think most of the
Speaker 1: time it's holding down either like the power and the
Speaker 1: volume button at the same time. For a very long
Speaker 1: time until the Android logo appears, and then sometimes you
Speaker 1: have to like release the power but hold down the volume.
Speaker 1: You can look it up. Just look up like whatever
Speaker 1: model your phone is. If it's a Samsung, say like
Speaker 1: Samsung S twenty one, recovery mode, and it will tell
Speaker 1: you how to access the recovery mode. And there's a
Speaker 1: way to format your phone in recovery mode as well.
Speaker 1: So if you've forgotten the password or you have forgotten
Speaker 1: the pass code on that phone, you can still delete
Speaker 1: everything off of that phone even in that case, so
Speaker 1: if you wanted to sell it or trade it in
Speaker 1: or whatever. Now, most of the time, if I was
Speaker 1: giving a phone for a trade in, I would not
Speaker 1: give it with any information on there. So no matter
Speaker 1: who you're giving this to, I would say, make sure
Speaker 1: that you format this phone, because that's very important to
Speaker 1: make sure that your information is off of there. All right,
Speaker 1: good questions. You have a question, you can email hello
Speaker 1: at richontech dot com TV, or you can call at
Speaker 1: triple eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven
Speaker 1: four to two four one zero one and uh Kim
Speaker 1: our amazing call screener also said, Hey, why don't you
Speaker 1: put your phone number on your website. She like whispered it, Hey, Rich,
Speaker 1: put your phone number on the website, and I said, oh,
Speaker 1: great idea. Why didn't I think of that? So if
Speaker 1: you go to Rich on tech dot TV, you can
Speaker 1: see the phone number there. In case I'm saying it
Speaker 1: too fast, WWDC, this is Apple's big event. We just
Speaker 1: talked about how just talked about how E three is
Speaker 1: not happening. Now. We didn't mention E three twenty twenty
Speaker 1: three is not happening. They never said that E three
Speaker 1: is never happening again. But our guest Rebecca was kind
Speaker 1: of hinting at the fact that it may never come back,
Speaker 1: which is really sad because that's the end of an era,
Speaker 1: especially here in Los Angeles, because that was always a
Speaker 1: show that I look forward to, and I know other
Speaker 1: gaming enthusiasts looked forward to it, especially when they opened
Speaker 1: it up to the public. Anyone can go. I mean,
Speaker 1: they had a certain amount of tickets, but that was
Speaker 1: kind of cool because you felt like an cider. And
Speaker 1: it's it's really interesting because we're seeing kind of like
Speaker 1: these big events like Comic Con just seems to get
Speaker 1: bigger every year. Is south by Southwest e three, Like
Speaker 1: some of these events are really really good, and then
Speaker 1: other events we're seeing just kind of dying over the years,
Speaker 1: which is really sad that it's like, you know, it's
Speaker 1: this divergence, like some things are going really well, other
Speaker 1: things are just dying out. So Apple WWDC is probably
Speaker 1: one of the biggest events of the year other than
Speaker 1: the iPhone launch. Apple has announced it's taking place on
Speaker 1: June fifth. This is not a consumer show. This is
Speaker 1: a show where developers go to see what's next with
Speaker 1: iPhones with all the software. If you can imagine so
Speaker 1: iOS seventeen, iPadOS seventeen, tvOS seventeen, watch os ten, and
Speaker 1: mac os fourteen, that's one, two, three, four, five separate
Speaker 1: software that developers code for for apps for the iPhone,
Speaker 1: for the iPad, for Apple TV, for the watches, for
Speaker 1: Mac computers. Now, typically they don't do a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of hardware announcements at this show, but you never know.
Speaker 1: And this year there's this big rumor that they may
Speaker 1: show off their new AR virtual reality headset. But we've
Speaker 1: been hearing this rumor for so long, I don't know
Speaker 1: if it's going to happen. And also there's also there's
Speaker 1: rumors that this thing is gonna be like three to
Speaker 1: four thousand dollars. Nobody right now is paying three to
Speaker 1: four thousand dollars for a virtual reality headset. I don't
Speaker 1: care what company it comes from, and I think Apple
Speaker 1: will be very successful with this, but it's got to
Speaker 1: be like sub five hundred bucks. This is happening Monday,
Speaker 1: June fifth, that's the big keynote, So I will head well,
Speaker 1: hopefully i'll head up there. They're having a small in
Speaker 1: person event. It's invited folks only. I don't know if
Speaker 1: I'll be invited, but it's going to be an online event.
Speaker 1: So in the past, this has been a show that
Speaker 1: people from all over the world fly in. Developers from
Speaker 1: all over the world come in to do this show,
Speaker 1: and to go to these events, and to go to
Speaker 1: these little seminars and you know speakers that they have
Speaker 1: from Apple. This is not happening this year except online.
Speaker 1: So June fifth, Friday, June ninth, WWDC, that's when it's happening.
Speaker 1: All right, more of your calls coming up next. Plus
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about the dues and don'ts of taking
Speaker 1: a vacation and trying to work at the same time.
Speaker 1: Triple eight Rich one O one give me a call
Speaker 1: if you have a question about tech. All right, welcome
Speaker 1: back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out
Speaker 1: talking technology. I'm the tech reporter at KTLA Channel five
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles. Don't forget to sign up for my newsletter.
Speaker 1: Just go to rich on tech dot tv. It is free.
Speaker 1: It's right there. And one of these days I will
Speaker 1: send out a newsletter. Right now, it's dormant, but you
Speaker 1: know you want to be there in case I have
Speaker 1: a big breaking news I want to share with you.
Speaker 1: So get on the list and uh, one of these
Speaker 1: days I will send it out. Believe me, you'll be
Speaker 1: ready for it. That'll be exciting. Triple eight rich one
Speaker 1: on one is the number. That's eight eight eight seven
Speaker 1: four to one zero one. You can also go to
Speaker 1: the website rich on tech dot TV. Phone number is
Speaker 1: right there. Kevin is in the mountains of Utah. Welcome
Speaker 1: to the show.
Speaker 5: Hey, Rich, thanks a million. Congratulations on the show and
Speaker 5: big fan and I think I speak on behalf of everybody.
Speaker 5: You give it a real community feel.
Speaker 1: Oh, thank you.
Speaker 5: I did that a lot. My question for you, so
Speaker 5: I was listening to your podcast from last week's show,
Speaker 5: and uh so I was setting myself a reminder to
Speaker 5: call you to ask this question. So serendipitously, the next
Speaker 5: topic you mentioned was there was a caller for Google
Speaker 5: Mesh Wi Fi and you recommended the Villo system, which
Speaker 5: I purchased and it's on the way. But my question
Speaker 5: to you is my issue is that Google Mesh doesn't
Speaker 5: you can't separate the bands. And you know, despite popular belief,
Speaker 5: there's still products that we have that are out, like
Speaker 5: say rumbas. There's some laser engravers that I have that
Speaker 5: will only run on two point four gigaherts. There was
Speaker 5: a segment on Leo a long time ago when he
Speaker 5: had a suggestion to get as far away from the
Speaker 5: signal as possible. That way it would only pick up
Speaker 5: two point four gigaherts, which didn't work. By the way,
Speaker 5: now the mailbox holding my rumba. But so before I
Speaker 5: sell this system, because I've built it up over the years,
Speaker 5: all these different mesh pods, is there a hack in
Speaker 5: order to separate that, because yeah, obviously everybody on forums
Speaker 5: say that you can't do it. I even thought about
Speaker 5: maybe getting a network extender that's only two point four gigaherts,
Speaker 5: but that didn't seem to work either. Is there anything
Speaker 5: I can do or should I just stick with the Villa,
Speaker 5: which claims that they can separate.
Speaker 1: So you're okay, So you're on which one right now?
Speaker 5: So I'm on the on Google Mesh.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're on the Google Okay, not the Nest.
Speaker 5: It's not the Nests, the newest, it's the older version
Speaker 5: of it.
Speaker 1: So I know, I okay, So I know the Villo.
Speaker 1: I believe you can say, like, hey, do this, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you how it works for mine. Okay, So and
Speaker 1: let me just explain what you're talking about in case
Speaker 1: you know someone's listening and they're like, wait, what was
Speaker 1: he talking about right now? So a lot of gadgets
Speaker 1: these days are using five gigaherts, which is a band
Speaker 1: of Wi Fi. Most of the time, we don't really
Speaker 1: think about this stuff. You just go on your gadget,
Speaker 1: it connects to your WiFi. You don't think about what
Speaker 1: band it's using. But there's a lot of gadgets that
Speaker 1: use two point four gigaherts, which is a different band,
Speaker 1: and they each have their pros and cons. By the way.
Speaker 1: So you know, when it comes to two point four gigaherts,
Speaker 1: this is a it has a longer range, so it
Speaker 1: goes further. It travels further, but it's slower. Right, five
Speaker 1: gigaherts as a shorter range, but it's faster, And so
Speaker 1: a lot of the new gadgets will use the five gigaherts.
Speaker 1: It's just how it works now. Sometimes gadgets, especially these
Speaker 1: little Internet connected devices, they will use two point four
Speaker 1: even if they're brand new. And that's because I'm guessing
Speaker 1: it's cheaper, just it's a simpler chip. They can build
Speaker 1: it in there. But the problem is when you go
Speaker 1: to connect it to your router. Most of the modern
Speaker 1: routers are doing five gigaherts by default, and that two
Speaker 1: point four device does not find the router. Does that
Speaker 1: kind of all make sense to you, Kevin, sure?
Speaker 5: Absolutely?
Speaker 1: Okay. So on the eurosystem that I have, it's hidden
Speaker 1: in the settings all the way in like advanced settings.
Speaker 1: You would never even find this as the average person,
Speaker 1: except of course I'm a nerd. So I go through
Speaker 1: and look for every single setting on my systems, and
Speaker 1: so I found because I was really having trouble connecting
Speaker 1: this little outdoor Wi Fi plug to my smart home system.
Speaker 1: It just would not find the Wi Fi and I'm like,
Speaker 1: what is going on here? And sure enough I looked
Speaker 1: it up and it was a two point four and
Speaker 1: my system's a five, And so I found in the
Speaker 1: euro settings it will actually if you go to this setting,
Speaker 1: it will flip the network to two point four gigahertz,
Speaker 1: but only for like ten minutes, just to give you
Speaker 1: enough time to connect this gadget, and then it will
Speaker 1: stay on the network on the two point four and
Speaker 1: everything else will to fall back to the five. So
Speaker 1: I don't know. My long answer is, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: if Google has that setting. It's been a while since
Speaker 1: I played with the settings inside the Google network. But
Speaker 1: have you looked through every single setting on that Google
Speaker 1: app and.
Speaker 5: Every Reddit forum, and everybody says it's the only system
Speaker 5: that can't And that's why I thought there might be
Speaker 5: a hack. But then what you mentioned last week where
Speaker 5: you said, you know, Google's just got too much. They
Speaker 5: have too many things going on, Yeah, and they don't
Speaker 5: focus on the details. So my plan at this point,
Speaker 5: especially after hearing what you just said, is to stick
Speaker 5: with the Villo. Give that a ride. And thanks for
Speaker 5: that suggestion about by the way, because that doesn't pop
Speaker 5: up as your you know, ten best options for Mesh systems,
Speaker 5: you know, in twenty twenty three, So that was a
Speaker 5: that was a real pearl, So I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, look, and the stuff I recommend like that
Speaker 1: is stuff that I personally test out, and like I
Speaker 1: tested this system and I thought it was great. I
Speaker 1: mean it really and I've tested. Actually they have a
Speaker 1: new one now, they have a Villo six and it's
Speaker 1: just as good. I mean, I've got euro at home,
Speaker 1: which is is excellent. It's like known to be one
Speaker 1: of the best. I've had it for a long time,
Speaker 1: you know, several different versions actually, and I do like it,
Speaker 1: but I think that there's other options, and Villa is
Speaker 1: also a lot cheaper. Now here's the other thing I'm
Speaker 1: trying to look. I'm looking at this Google see now
Speaker 1: it says how you know have you I'm looking at
Speaker 1: this Nest Wi Fi kind of support form, and it
Speaker 1: looks like it somehow supports this, but I don't.
Speaker 5: Okay, hold on, it has both both two point four
Speaker 5: and five, but you can't create a separate SSID specifically
Speaker 5: for the two point four and that's it just auto assigns.
Speaker 5: That's the problem. So after spending so many years building
Speaker 5: up this mesh system, now just to like, now I
Speaker 5: have to rename the network for every single thing again.
Speaker 5: But you know, if the Villo solves that, which it
Speaker 5: appears it does, then I'll just stick with that. I
Speaker 5: just wanted to double check before I went through the
Speaker 5: hassle where I could still return it to Amazon if
Speaker 5: I needed to.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because the Google stuff says that devices that
Speaker 1: support only the two point four gigahertz band, such as
Speaker 1: an older phone, will automatically connect to the band on
Speaker 1: your system, and it's not doing that.
Speaker 5: Not at all. And even in the home the Google
Speaker 5: Home app, so when they used to have the Wi
Speaker 5: Fi app, there was there there there were two separate SSIDs.
Speaker 5: So by by their way of improving and I do
Speaker 5: air quotes with that their system, they removed some of
Speaker 5: the essentials. So I yeah, that's that's pretty much the case.
Speaker 5: I've spent probably a couple of weeks looking for different options,
Speaker 5: and the best one was, I believe it or not,
Speaker 5: was walking as far away from your house as possible
Speaker 5: with a device.
Speaker 1: And I mean, it's an interesting suggestion. I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess you know that may work, and you have an
Speaker 1: Android Do you have an Android phone that you can
Speaker 1: use to kind of look at what this thing is
Speaker 1: putting out as well? Like what? Yeah?
Speaker 5: And I tried that with my, uh my Galaxy tablet
Speaker 5: or the Samsung tablet that I have. And so that
Speaker 5: leads me to the other part of it. Is the
Speaker 5: device that you're connecting is it being is it connecting
Speaker 5: based on the gigahertz that's on the mobile device that
Speaker 5: you're using to connect it to the network. So if
Speaker 5: my phone, for instance, is on two point four gigaherts
Speaker 5: or the Android at that time, and I'm adding device
Speaker 5: X to the network, is it seeing the gigahertz that
Speaker 5: is on my phone or is it No?
Speaker 1: I don't think so, because I think the device. Most
Speaker 1: of the ways that these devices connect to Wi Fi
Speaker 1: at this point is it sort of hands over the
Speaker 1: information to that device and then that device goes and
Speaker 1: connects on its own. That's how most of the modern devices.
Speaker 1: Maybe the older devices didn't, but that's the way I'm
Speaker 1: seeing a lot of these things working at this point.
Speaker 1: But OK, well, it sounds like you know, I'm hoping
Speaker 1: that all this two point four and five kind of
Speaker 1: goes away in the future, but it's definitely it's still
Speaker 1: like a tricky thing for a lot of people, and
Speaker 1: I believe me, I get a lot of questions about it.
Speaker 1: So it's definitely still a thing that nobody has really
Speaker 1: really figured out. And by the way, with that plug
Speaker 1: that I couldn't figure out, I ended up having just
Speaker 1: I just wrote back to the company, I said, this
Speaker 1: does not work with my network. It still wouldn't connect
Speaker 1: even with all of that stuff, and so I ended
Speaker 1: up getting a different, different plug and it worked just fine.
Speaker 1: Soh gotcha.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Okay, Well I'll try out the villow and I'll
Speaker 5: see if that pans out.
Speaker 1: I'll let you know, all right, Kevin, please report back.
Speaker 1: Thanks for enjoying the show.
Speaker 5: Hey, thanks rich all right, take care.
Speaker 1: All right, If you have a question, give me a call.
Speaker 1: It's triple eight Rich one on one eight eight eight
Speaker 1: seven four to two four to one zero one. If
Speaker 1: you have t mobile, go ahead, open up that Tuesday
Speaker 1: t Mobile Tuesday's app and redeem your free season of
Speaker 1: MLB TV. A lot of people are wondering if they
Speaker 1: would still do this because now they're offering the free
Speaker 1: Apple TV MLS streaming, but yes they are. It's one
Speaker 1: hundred and forty nine dollars value. You can get it
Speaker 1: for free if you are a T mobile customer, So
Speaker 1: open up the t Mobile Tuesday's app. You have until
Speaker 1: I think April fourth, so you have a couple more
Speaker 1: days to redeem this. But if you like baseball, you
Speaker 1: can watch all the games except your local games because
Speaker 1: those are not included, because that's the way these broadcasters
Speaker 1: do it, these old rules that they still play by.
Speaker 1: But I will tell you the MLS streaming because Apple
Speaker 1: did it. They did get all of the games, whether
Speaker 1: they're local or not, it's all the same. So we
Speaker 1: are seeing some progress in the sports world. But believe me,
Speaker 1: it is still sports folks have it tough. You want
Speaker 1: to watch your local team, you want to stream, you
Speaker 1: want to do all this stuff. No, no, no, it's just
Speaker 1: not it's not there yet. It's it's very much, very fragmented,
Speaker 1: all right. But if you have Team Mobile, definitely get that.
Speaker 1: MLB TV. Their Team Mobile Tuesday stuff is pretty good.
Speaker 1: You get a lot of stuff throughout the year for
Speaker 1: that one hundred and forty nine dollars value. All right,
Speaker 1: if you have a phone call, or if you have
Speaker 1: a question, you can give me a call. Phone number
Speaker 1: is eight eight eight rich one O one eight eight
Speaker 1: eight seven four to two four one zero one. I
Speaker 1: know a lot of people are on spring break now,
Speaker 1: are traveling very soon. My guest coming up Alexandra Samuel.
Speaker 1: She wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal that
Speaker 1: I just love. It's the dues and don'ts of combining
Speaker 1: work and play when traveling. And I have a great
Speaker 1: story to tell you about how this affected me personally.
Speaker 1: We're going to hear her tips about how to manage
Speaker 1: work and play on vacation coming up next, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to tell you about the new warning on certain
Speaker 1: Amazon products. You're listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back
Speaker 1: to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out talking technology.
Speaker 1: I just like this song, so all right, phone lines
Speaker 1: are open at eight eight eight rich one O one
Speaker 1: eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one.
Speaker 1: I actually this song mentions Japan, and I actually listened
Speaker 1: to the song many many times when I was in Japan,
Speaker 1: just to kind of, you know, identify with it. All right,
Speaker 1: let's go to am, I saying, is it Elena in
Speaker 1: West Covina? Elena, Hi Elena, Hi Elena. How are you?
Speaker 2: I'm great.
Speaker 4: I love your show. I've never missed you on KCLA ever.
Speaker 1: Oh well, thank you. You are my ideal fan.
Speaker 4: That's why I'm here to call.
Speaker 6: I'll talk to you.
Speaker 1: Well, talk to me. What's going on?
Speaker 4: Well, I have an app idea that hasn't very I haven't.
Speaker 6: It's one of.
Speaker 4: Those share ideas, you know, app share things, but I
Speaker 4: haven't seen my twist of it.
Speaker 1: You mean, share like a sharing economy app.
Speaker 4: Yeah, one of those.
Speaker 1: Okay, sure, but I haven't seen it.
Speaker 4: Because if you don't have it on your show, it's
Speaker 4: either not there yet or maybe somebody has it and
Speaker 4: they haven't produced it. But by the way, your screener
Speaker 4: and producer, Kim is really not We love Kim.
Speaker 1: I know she doesn't get to be on the show
Speaker 1: like she used to be. I mean just yet, I mean,
Speaker 1: we're look, this show is still evolving, so right now
Speaker 1: she's kind of like nameless, faceless just picking up the calls.
Speaker 1: But she is still there. Yes, and she loves each
Speaker 1: and every one of you, and so do I. And
Speaker 1: we love Kim too. So, okay, you have this idea,
Speaker 1: and do you want to share the idea with us
Speaker 1: or do you want to just talk in in abstract here?
Speaker 1: And what do you want to do with this idea?
Speaker 4: Abstract? And I don't mind emailing it to you when
Speaker 4: it gets because you know, you have to write a
Speaker 4: venture capitalist and get a pro prototype video. But I
Speaker 4: do have you know, I have a disability myself, and
Speaker 4: at some point I'm going to probably have to use
Speaker 4: some kind of form of AI just because.
Speaker 1: Well you know, we all will. It's taken over like
Speaker 1: fifty percent of our jobs. So no matter what. Now
Speaker 1: is this saying, is this an app related to a
Speaker 1: disability kind of functionality or.
Speaker 7: What it's It's not?
Speaker 4: Uh not? I mean it it's going to help people
Speaker 4: with disability. Well okay, like a disability centered app.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, but that's that's helpful enough. So that's great.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So and I wrote down I having a braille
Speaker 4: actually before I have it, and spraying because I keep
Speaker 4: adding stuff and then I keep deleating.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, of course, like any good it's evolving.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, but I you know, want to make sure
Speaker 4: I can get it in the right hand, find the
Speaker 4: proper I know I have to get a proto type video.
Speaker 4: I know it has to take one step at a time,
Speaker 4: because if I think of it all in one totality,
Speaker 4: I get one big picture. I get really over oil.
Speaker 1: And we know from watching Shark Tank that good ideas
Speaker 1: take a long time to develop. Sometimes it could take
Speaker 1: years and nothing happens overnight. That's that's good, So we
Speaker 1: have to keep that in mind. It's a very long
Speaker 1: process no matter what, even if you have a hit
Speaker 1: on your hands, you know, overnight sensations take a long time.
Speaker 1: So I think it sounds like this is something that
Speaker 1: you may want to get some resources that are maybe
Speaker 1: free or some people to help you along with this.
Speaker 1: I feel like in this community there are resources that
Speaker 1: you can get and that may involve some programs that
Speaker 1: can help guide you along with this process, or maybe
Speaker 1: some even fun scholarships, you know, grants, all those types
Speaker 1: of things. And so have you told anyone about this,
Speaker 1: Like how far along are you?
Speaker 4: I'm just in the writing process. I did find a
Speaker 4: promising video, like because I'm figuring, I'm just looking up
Speaker 4: with Timbo the app is on our phones and do
Speaker 4: a little prototype by the way, somebody.
Speaker 2: Will really understand it.
Speaker 1: Okay, Well there's a and by the way, one of
Speaker 1: my favorite tools right now is Canva. Have you heard
Speaker 1: of that U c A, n v A, Yeah, Canva
Speaker 1: dot com, So you can you can create really cool
Speaker 1: videos on that and you may be able to kind
Speaker 1: of get your little sizzle real going through there. So
Speaker 1: that's a good way of going about it. But I
Speaker 1: would look, you know, it sounds like you're gonna need
Speaker 1: to get some assistance with this, and that could be
Speaker 1: through you know, a program in your area or you know,
Speaker 1: even I mean, obviously there's freelancers that you can hire
Speaker 1: to kind of code something maybe rudimentary on like Fiver
Speaker 1: or something like that. But it doesn't sound like you're
Speaker 1: going to code this yourself, if I'm understanding. So it
Speaker 1: sounds like you're gonna have to pair up with someone
Speaker 1: at some point that knows a little bit more about
Speaker 1: the inner workings and the VC stuff and all that.
Speaker 1: That may come a little bit later after you have
Speaker 1: something that's a little bit further along, or you can
Speaker 1: just go ahead and pitch it and maybe find some
Speaker 1: local vcs in the LA where you West Covina area.
Speaker 1: That may you know, that may do small you know
Speaker 1: projects like this that may become bigger over time. But
Speaker 1: no matter what, it's it's a very slow process. It's
Speaker 1: a methodical process, and it's like anything else. You're going
Speaker 1: to talk to a lot of people, a lot of
Speaker 1: people are going to say they can help you. Maybe
Speaker 1: one percent of those people actually will, and a lot
Speaker 1: of the resources you look at will turn out to
Speaker 1: be dead ends and things that just don't work. But
Speaker 1: you just got to keep on it. And just from
Speaker 1: hearing what you're telling me in the past couple of minutes,
Speaker 1: I think it sounds like you have something pretty unique
Speaker 1: and something that can help a unique community as well
Speaker 1: and maybe community at large. So stick with it, stay
Speaker 1: on it, and just slowly but surely build up that
Speaker 1: app and the resources around it, and just just stay
Speaker 1: on it. Because I'm excited for you, Elena, I really am.
Speaker 1: Thanks for giving me a call today. Coming up, we're
Speaker 1: going to talk oh one of my favorite topics, the
Speaker 1: dues and don'ts of combining work and play when traveling.
Speaker 1: You're listening to rich on Tech. We'll come right back.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here talking
Speaker 1: technology with you and a great topic right now for
Speaker 1: my next guest. Alexandra Samuel is the author of Remote Inc.
Speaker 1: How to Thrive at Work Wherever you are. Alexandra, Welcome
Speaker 1: to the show. Nice to join you, Thanks for being
Speaker 1: here today. And I saw your article in the Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal about the does and don'ts of combining work
Speaker 1: and play when traveling, and it really resonated with me
Speaker 1: because you know, I've got kids, I've got work, I travel,
Speaker 1: and of course we're all learning this whole working on
Speaker 1: vacation kind of thing. But I have one quick story
Speaker 1: I want to tell before we get into this. Okay,
Speaker 1: you ready. So I was on spring break. This was many,
Speaker 1: many years ago. This was probably ten years ago, and
Speaker 1: you know, I was just starting at my TV job
Speaker 1: and I was so excited to take my first like
Speaker 1: nice vacation and I had my mom there and my
Speaker 1: wife and my kid. I just had a baby, and
Speaker 1: it was great. But I said, I'm turning off my
Speaker 1: phone the entire trip because I am going to disconnect.
Speaker 1: And I literally turned off my phone. I'm a tech person,
Speaker 1: I cover technology. Okay, long story short. When I turn
Speaker 1: on my phone on Sunday when I was returning to work.
Speaker 1: The next day, I got like ten emails for a
Speaker 1: solid freelance job that was paying a decent amount of money,
Speaker 1: by the way, and they were like, Okay, I guess
Speaker 1: we're not hearing from you, so we're going to have
Speaker 1: to move on. And I called them up. I convinced
Speaker 1: them to give me the job. I said, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: and I explained the whole thing. But I almost lost
Speaker 1: a job that was worth a lot of money. And
Speaker 1: by the way, that job continued for like three more years.
Speaker 1: So my point is, I never turn off my phone anymore,
Speaker 1: although I do try to limit my use of it.
Speaker 1: So that was my story. So I've learned kind of
Speaker 1: like this little balance, but I still don't think I
Speaker 1: have it right. So that's why I'm talking to you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so your first tip is to be clear whether it's
Speaker 1: a vacation or business trip. So explain that.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 6: You know, it's funny, I actually learned that lesson in
Speaker 6: California because when my husband and I used to run
Speaker 6: a business together, and when our business was new and
Speaker 6: and our eldest was very young, just a toddler, we
Speaker 6: had this brilliant idea that since we had a number
Speaker 6: of clients and a number of prospective clients in the
Speaker 6: Bay Area. We would take our family vacation in San Francisco,
Speaker 6: and so we found a house for a couple of weeks,
Speaker 6: and we took our kid, and we found, you know,
Speaker 6: a local babysitter who could look after our kid in there,
Speaker 6: and we just kind of went in this lucy goosey
Speaker 6: way with the kind of you know, made a couple
Speaker 6: of meetings with clients and figured we would kind of
Speaker 6: hustle when we got there, and you know, the whole
Speaker 6: time we were there, we just felt like we were
Speaker 6: being pulled because on the one hand, we wanted to
Speaker 6: make the most of this opportunity to book all the
Speaker 6: meetings possible, and on the other hand, you know, we
Speaker 6: wanted to take our kids to the zoo, we wanted
Speaker 6: to go to the Money Aquarium, like all the things
Speaker 6: you want to do when you're on vacation with your
Speaker 6: little toddler for the first time. And so the whole
Speaker 6: trip just felt like a constant hug of war. And
Speaker 6: after that, you know, we got a lot clearer that
Speaker 6: even though one of the joys of running your own
Speaker 6: business is the opportunity to you know, include your family,
Speaker 6: and travel include some work. When you have a family trip,
Speaker 6: you really want to be clear on what your primary
Speaker 6: purpose is in any given circumstance, because that gives you
Speaker 6: a lens of focus in a way of making decisions
Speaker 6: about how you're going to spend your time.
Speaker 1: Very very smart. Now, this is the one, the tip
Speaker 1: that I sort of resonated, you know, because of that
Speaker 1: story I just told, but says, don't pressure yourself to
Speaker 1: stay offline for a multi week vacation. And my wife
Speaker 1: and I were talking about this. She said, yeah, when
Speaker 1: my dad, you know, when we would go on vacation
Speaker 1: as a kid, my dad and mom would spend one
Speaker 1: hour each morning on their computers doing work and then
Speaker 1: that was it. So what is your advice when it
Speaker 1: comes to sort of that balance when you know you
Speaker 1: do have a job, you do have emails that are
Speaker 1: coming in.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, and I think your your story is
Speaker 6: really relatable. And you know, I personally do not find
Speaker 6: it relaxing to turn my phone off for a week
Speaker 6: because I'm worried about what I'm missing. Now, if you
Speaker 6: have the luxury of an assistant, or if you have
Speaker 6: somebody you can deputize in your absence and who you're
Speaker 6: comfortable giving full access to your email. Then you know, honestly,
Speaker 6: the best of those worlds is create a vacation specific
Speaker 6: secret email address you only give to your assistant, and
Speaker 6: set up your primary email to go to your assistant
Speaker 6: so that they look at anything that's coming in and
Speaker 6: they only show you the stuff that you know, like
Speaker 6: your your freelance gig, you know, only show you the
Speaker 6: stuff that's really important. If you don't have an assistant,
Speaker 6: you can kind of do the same thing with a
Speaker 6: second mailbox and some mail rules. So for example, when
Speaker 6: I went on vacation last summer, I set up a
Speaker 6: rule that said, if I get a speaking invitation, forward
Speaker 6: that to my vacation inbox, but don't forward anything else.
Speaker 6: And so you know, you can find a way of
Speaker 6: triaging so that only the stuff that you would really
Speaker 6: be sorry to miss hits your inbox. But if you're
Speaker 6: going to worry about it, it's better to make a
Speaker 6: half an hour an hour in the morning or in
Speaker 6: the evening so that you know you're going to look
Speaker 6: every day. And then the trick is to pick that
Speaker 6: for a time when you really will be able to
Speaker 6: close your computer afterwards and either like go off and
Speaker 6: have a great day or go to sleep. If you
Speaker 6: know that once you look and you see that that
Speaker 6: client is upset about something, you're gonna frint all day.
Speaker 6: That's that's not a recipe for a great vacation.
Speaker 1: Okay. Your next tip, by the way, my guest right
Speaker 1: now is Alexander Samuel. She is the author are of
Speaker 1: Remote ink Cata Thrive at work wherever you are. And
Speaker 1: your next tip is don't read business books on vacation.
Speaker 1: So get your book, but don't read it on your
Speaker 1: trip to the tropics.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: I mean, I'm always amazed when when you go on
Speaker 6: a vacation. You know, we were in Hawaii in the
Speaker 6: summer and you know, somebody's floating in the pool reading.
Speaker 6: I forget what this has looked, but I'm thinking, how
Speaker 6: is that relaxing? And mean, I guess everybody has their jam,
Speaker 6: but you know, you really, if you're taking a vacation
Speaker 6: to recharge, you actually need to give yourself the space
Speaker 6: to unwind. And I can even make a business case
Speaker 6: for that, right, which is part of the value of
Speaker 6: you know, there's the reason so many of us get
Speaker 6: our burst inspiration in the shower, right, It's like when
Speaker 6: you take your attention off of a focused task and
Speaker 6: you give yourself the space to kind of freewheel a bit,
Speaker 6: that's when inspiration strikes. And vacation is kind of like
Speaker 6: that in overdrive. You need to let your brain unwind
Speaker 6: and reset so that you have the opportunity to, you know,
Speaker 6: come back to your work with a fresh perspective. And
Speaker 6: if you don't really turn your work brain off the
Speaker 6: whole time you're on vacation, you don't get that reboot.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And it's so interesting
Speaker 1: about how and when creativity sort of or inspiration hits.
Speaker 1: It is always at the time when you are fully
Speaker 1: not thinking about coming up with an idea or coming
Speaker 1: up with a solution to something, and it just pops
Speaker 1: into your head. That's not we're not new saying that,
Speaker 1: but it's just so fascinating because now doing a weekly
Speaker 1: radio show, I do this thing in the beginning of
Speaker 1: the show where I kind of talk about something. If
Speaker 1: I want to think about what I want to talk about,
Speaker 1: it never comes to me, But all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: in the middle of the night, it's like, oh, it
Speaker 1: just came to me because my brain is just like
Speaker 1: it gives it that downtime to sort of process stuff
Speaker 1: in the background. I guess that's the way I see it.
Speaker 6: You know, it's funny you say that, because I that's
Speaker 6: always been my experience. And I will say, this is
Speaker 6: one of the things where the amount of time I'm
Speaker 6: now spending, you know, working with AI is really starting
Speaker 6: to shift my thinking process because I now often use
Speaker 6: chat GBT, you know, which is the sort of you know,
Speaker 6: really shockingly human like chat interface as a brainstorming partner,
Speaker 6: and I can riff with that and it will shape
Speaker 6: things loose in a way that I would not be
Speaker 6: able to get to on my own without you know,
Speaker 6: stepping away from the computer.
Speaker 1: Oh I love that idea. I mean, we talked about
Speaker 1: AI on this show so much now because by the way,
Speaker 1: you know, it's consumed the entire tech world. Yes, but
Speaker 1: for a reason. It is so fascinating the stuff that
Speaker 1: you can throw at it and just the stuff that
Speaker 1: comes back with you're like wow, like I you know,
Speaker 1: you we don't even know that there's no instruction book
Speaker 1: for chat GPT, and yet we're finding so many uses
Speaker 1: for it, and Google Bard and Microsoft's being AI is
Speaker 1: really phenomenal. Okay, this one in your article in the
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal the see the dos and don'ts of
Speaker 1: combining work and play when traveling, you say, don't broadcast
Speaker 1: your travels on social media. Now, this is kind of
Speaker 1: like now you're getting into like hold on now, because
Speaker 1: people really might offense to that one well.
Speaker 6: And it's funny because, of course, so many people use
Speaker 6: social media to kind of show off their travels and
Speaker 6: share their travels, and I love that. I mean, you know,
Speaker 6: I often will compile a photo book after a family
Speaker 6: vacation just off of what we've posted on social media.
Speaker 6: It's a it's a great way of remembering what you've done.
Speaker 6: But you know, there's a couple of problems with that.
Speaker 6: One is that, you know, when I've done a couple
Speaker 6: of pieces now around social media and be including a
Speaker 6: pretty big survey, and it's very clear that all those
Speaker 6: travel photos may make you feel pretty special, but they
Speaker 6: can make other people feel pretty lousy. And you know,
Speaker 6: that's just it's just tough, right when you're sitting grinding
Speaker 6: away at your desk to see your friend on the beach.
Speaker 1: Let's be honest, most people are bragging when they're pressing.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah. But but the other thing about it that I
Speaker 6: think is tricky when you're combining work and personal time
Speaker 6: is you know, if you're on a three day or
Speaker 6: a four day business trip and you've got you know,
Speaker 6: one day to yourself, maybe you're not even a day,
Speaker 6: maybe you've got a couple of evenings free. You know,
Speaker 6: if you you are in a city where you know
Speaker 6: a lot of people and you've posted about being there,
Speaker 6: those folks are going to be insulted if you didn't
Speaker 6: make time for them. And that I think is, you know,
Speaker 6: it's one of those situations where it's just better to
Speaker 6: be on a quieter mode and not hurt people's feelings.
Speaker 6: And you know, unless there's a specific reason that you
Speaker 6: need to share that you're there, Like maybe you know
Speaker 6: my case, I'm often in town to give a talk,
Speaker 6: and part of my responsibilities as a speaker is to
Speaker 6: publicize the event that I'm at. But unless you have
Speaker 6: a specific reason that you need to share your whereabouts,
Speaker 6: then all you're really doing is essentially sending your friends
Speaker 6: a message saying, you know, hey, I was in town,
Speaker 6: but I didn't care.
Speaker 5: Enough to call.
Speaker 1: Oh gosh, that happens whenever I post being in any city,
Speaker 1: I get, you know, immediately the pings, Hey you're here,
Speaker 1: you're here, let's hang out. And of course, you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes you're on business you don't really have the time,
Speaker 1: and you know, I get it, but very very tricky.
Speaker 1: Social media has added a new element of trickiness to
Speaker 1: our lives. Samuel, we're going to leave it there. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 6: Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1: All right, appreciate it. We're going to put your book
Speaker 1: on my website. Rich on Tech dot TV if you
Speaker 1: want to read more about the dos and don'ts of
Speaker 1: combining work and play when traveling. You're listening to Rich
Speaker 1: on Tech, give you a call Triple eight rich one
Speaker 1: O one eighty eight seven four to two, four to
Speaker 1: one zero one. More rich on Tech coming up right
Speaker 1: after this. Welcome back to Rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro
Speaker 1: here talking technology at Triple eight Rich one on one
Speaker 1: eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one
Speaker 1: zero one. Marie is in Hysperia, California. Marie, you're on
Speaker 1: with Rich.
Speaker 8: Hi, Rich, Thank you.
Speaker 1: Thank you. What's on your mind?
Speaker 8: Well, I was listening to Tim Conway the other day,
Speaker 8: and he said that he heard that one should not
Speaker 8: bad mouth AI, and that it could be more deadly
Speaker 8: and destruct the nuclear warfare, and that in three seconds
Speaker 8: they can they could shut down all of your utilities,
Speaker 8: use your wife's voice or someone's voice to call the
Speaker 8: police saying that you are threatening with weapons. The cops
Speaker 8: can come and shoot you. Could you talk about that?
Speaker 1: Wow, he paints a dark picture.
Speaker 8: It may really freaked me out.
Speaker 1: Well, look, I think I think that there's a lot
Speaker 1: of thought about AI and the good and the bad
Speaker 1: of AI. So we're not there just yet to exactly
Speaker 1: what he's talking about. But I think that there are
Speaker 1: a lot of things we need to be concerned about
Speaker 1: with AI. And I talk a lot about the benefits
Speaker 1: of AI, but there are many many potential dangers of AI,
Speaker 1: And to get an answer, I think it's best to
Speaker 1: ask AI what is the dangers of it? And so
Speaker 1: I've got access to Google, Bard and chat EPT and
Speaker 1: let's just talk about some of these dangers associated with AI.
Speaker 1: Job loss. Yeah, we're going to see jobs replaced by AI.
Speaker 1: Now in the beginning, it's going to be portions of
Speaker 1: jobs that are replaced by AI. For now, it's going
Speaker 1: to be up to fifty percent of job. You know,
Speaker 1: a fifty percent of someone's job is going to be
Speaker 1: replaced by AI, and then eventually there will be entire
Speaker 1: jobs replaced by AI. I'm very confident of that because
Speaker 1: there is so much that AI can do right now
Speaker 1: that when it gets better and built into more things,
Speaker 1: it's going to be incredible. And one of those things
Speaker 1: right now, when you just think of something as simple
Speaker 1: as a phone tree, when you call a company, it's horrific.
Speaker 1: When you're trying to say when they say, you know,
Speaker 1: tell me a little bit about why you're calling. It
Speaker 1: never works right, It's horrible. But when AI gets involved,
Speaker 1: it's going to be a lot better. Ordering at a
Speaker 1: fast food restaurant, I mean, when it can understand exactly
Speaker 1: what you're saying and ask to follow up question if
Speaker 1: you want a medium large cheese on that whatever, that's
Speaker 1: going to be a potential. So it's going to start
Speaker 1: with not just basic jobs, but also higher end jobs
Speaker 1: as well, jobs that are creative. Give me a first
Speaker 1: draft of this, give me a slideshow presentation. I mean,
Speaker 1: all that stuff can be taken over by AI. Another
Speaker 1: dangerous discrimination because AI systems are trained on data that
Speaker 1: humans create, and humans are discriminatory, and it may not
Speaker 1: be something that we think about, but it's there. We
Speaker 1: all bring our own biases to every situation we're in,
Speaker 1: whether we like that or not, it's there. It's programmed
Speaker 1: into our brains. And so these systems, because they're trained
Speaker 1: by humans, will have some of those same biases and
Speaker 1: discriminations built into them, and they will learn from this.
Speaker 1: But they are also programmed by us, by humans, and
Speaker 1: so that will take some time to get through. But
Speaker 1: these things will have a certain level of discriminate. Now
Speaker 1: that may not be the types of discrimination that you're
Speaker 1: thinking about. It could be discrimination of data, it could
Speaker 1: be of places, of things we just don't know. But
Speaker 1: they will not be perfect systems. Let's put it that way. Privacy,
Speaker 1: and this is all according to Google Bard by the
Speaker 1: way AI systems can collect so much information about people now. Already,
Speaker 1: marketing companies love all of the data that they collect
Speaker 1: on us, but imagine when they put AI into the mix,
Speaker 1: and AI can slice and dice that data in ways
Speaker 1: that we have never seen possible before. It is going
Speaker 1: to be really incredible for privacy. It's going to be
Speaker 1: a problem let's put it that way. So right now,
Speaker 1: let's say on your phone, if you go into like
Speaker 1: the deep deep settings, it can show all the places
Speaker 1: that you frequent. That's very basic. It's not even using
Speaker 1: AI for that, it's just using kind of data analysis.
Speaker 1: But when AI can kind of mix different types of data.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, Well, this is a gym he goes to,
Speaker 1: and this is the workplace he goes, and this is
Speaker 1: the fast food place he goes to the most. And
Speaker 1: this is the restaurant he likes, and this is the
Speaker 1: home that he visits the most beside his own. Those
Speaker 1: are all potential privacy concerns, especially when these systems are
Speaker 1: so simple to plug this information into safety. Now, this
Speaker 1: is something that Marie you're kind of getting to, is
Speaker 1: these weapons and not just weapons but systems. So right now,
Speaker 1: we all have these smart speakers in our homes that
Speaker 1: are always listening. What if they're programmed to listen for
Speaker 1: potential conflict, for potential fights in our homes, for potential
Speaker 1: problems in our homes, for people getting really irritated. What
Speaker 1: if they're programmed to know how we're feeling. Oh, Rich
Speaker 1: is really getting on edge here. We better get the
Speaker 1: police on guard here, or actually, in fact, maybe it's
Speaker 1: not even police. Maybe it's police robots. Let's send a
Speaker 1: fleet of police drones to his house just to make
Speaker 1: sure everything's okay. Or let's send a video camera to us.
Speaker 1: I mean, these are all things that it sounds unreal,
Speaker 1: but we don't know. Now when it comes to war,
Speaker 1: of course, they're already we're using autonomous weapons. Now maybe
Speaker 1: those weapons are still controlled by someone, but they're still
Speaker 1: flying by themselves and flying into places that we can't
Speaker 1: typically fly into. But there's someone controlling it. Imagine when
Speaker 1: they're not controlled by anyone and they're making their own
Speaker 1: decisions and they are potentially killing people. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is just stuff that we don't really want to think
Speaker 1: about this, but it's going to happen. And even Google
Speaker 1: says this could lead to a new arms race between
Speaker 1: countries and make war even more deadly. Now we've seen
Speaker 1: that wars become in some ways more precise, you know,
Speaker 1: these targets that we lock onto with these systems, But
Speaker 1: it can also be the opposite. It can also be
Speaker 1: much more deadly with systems. I mean, imagine a swarm
Speaker 1: of tiny insects that someone has programmed to release mass destruction.
Speaker 1: I mean, again, it sounds unreal, but it could be.
Speaker 1: How about the loss of control as these systems become
Speaker 1: more powerful, more powerful and learn from each other. Now
Speaker 1: they start teaching each other how to do things that
Speaker 1: we didn't teach them to do. And now they become
Speaker 1: you know, obviously we've seen this in the movies over
Speaker 1: and over, these systems turn against us. Hopefully that does
Speaker 1: not happen, but we don't know because we've never had
Speaker 1: such systems before. So maybe these systems become unpredictable, they
Speaker 1: become dangerous. There's so many potentially dangerous aspects of AI
Speaker 1: that we're not even privy to think about right now.
Speaker 1: And by the way, all these systems that Google and
Speaker 1: chat gptr are coming up with, they've built so many
Speaker 1: guardrails into those systems. Imagine that these systems get into
Speaker 1: the hands of the wrong people that don't want those guardrails,
Speaker 1: that want them to do bad things like infect our
Speaker 1: phones with malware, or take all of our data and
Speaker 1: figure out our secrets from it, or take our browsing
Speaker 1: data or our computer data, or get in there and
Speaker 1: change things on our systems, or try to hack us.
Speaker 1: There are so many implications of this technology. Again, I
Speaker 1: talk about the good stuff, and I do want to
Speaker 1: get an expert on this show to talk about some
Speaker 1: of the dangers that we are going to face with AI.
Speaker 1: Because this stuff is just at the beginning. You're listening
Speaker 1: to Rich on Tech. We've got another hour of the
Speaker 1: show to talk about all kinds of technology. Give me
Speaker 1: a call Triple eight rich one O one. That's eight
Speaker 1: eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one.
Speaker 1: You're listening to rich on Tech. I'm Rich Dmuro. More
Speaker 1: after this, Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro
Speaker 1: here hanging out talking technology at triple eight rich one
Speaker 1: oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two
Speaker 1: four one zero one. Did you know you can listen
Speaker 1: to this show as a podcast. Be sure to subscribe.
Speaker 1: Just go to rich on tech dot tv click the
Speaker 1: podcast icon. Plus, there are show notes and everything I
Speaker 1: mentioned I've got linked up there. So I've been doing
Speaker 1: a really good job of keeping notes about what I
Speaker 1: talk about because I understand that you're not sitting there
Speaker 1: with the pen and paper, pencil and paper. You know,
Speaker 1: you're busy, You're on the move. And if I mentioned
Speaker 1: something I'll put it in the show notes so you
Speaker 1: can always see that later. Let's go to Deborah in
Speaker 1: Santa Clarita. Debra, you're on with Rich Him Rich.
Speaker 2: It's a pleasure to talk with you. I watch you
Speaker 2: on kg LA every day.
Speaker 1: Oh well, thank you for doing that, and thanks for
Speaker 1: calling in. How are you today?
Speaker 2: I'm great? How are you?
Speaker 1: Oh fantastic? But what can I help you with?
Speaker 2: Well, I'm on a fixed income and I'd like to
Speaker 2: lower my cable bill, so I'd like to look into services,
Speaker 2: streaming services that would provide me with the same kind
Speaker 2: of the same that I'm getting through cable. I don't
Speaker 2: have any premium channels like Showtime or HBO. I do
Speaker 2: have Netflix, and that's all. But I'd like to eliminate
Speaker 2: cable altogether.
Speaker 1: Okay, And you have questions, Well, I guess my first
Speaker 1: question is what what do you watch?
Speaker 2: I watch regular TV like, I like Channel five. I
Speaker 2: watch Channel seven every once in a while.
Speaker 1: I won't hold that against.
Speaker 2: And the Learning Channel, and I like National Geographic.
Speaker 1: Okay, so bravo Learning Channel, National Geographic. So I guess
Speaker 1: the main thing is that if you're looking to, you know,
Speaker 1: to spend less on cable, which I understand how much
Speaker 1: you pay.
Speaker 2: Right now, two hundred and fifteen dollars, but that includes internet.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's a lot. And here's the thing, so
Speaker 1: you can definitely cut that down to just your Internet
Speaker 1: and still get a lot of this stuff. The thing is,
Speaker 1: unless you're willing to pay for some of these services
Speaker 1: on their own, then it's going to be tricky. So
Speaker 1: you said Bravo, you said National Geographic and what was
Speaker 1: the second one.
Speaker 2: Channel?
Speaker 1: Learning channel? Okay, learning? So that's TLC, right, learning channel. Okay,
Speaker 1: So I didn't I didn't hear a lot of sports,
Speaker 1: which is a good thing because sports is where it
Speaker 1: gets really expensive. That's where you're going to pay the premium,
Speaker 1: and that's where cable comes into play, and that's where
Speaker 1: a lot of these streaming services that are like a
Speaker 1: YouTube TV come into play. So for the local stuff,
Speaker 1: the good news is that KTLA has a free app
Speaker 1: that will get you that local channel, so that's nice.
Speaker 1: ABC I believe you can get some of their programming,
Speaker 1: including their newscasts and things like through their app, so
Speaker 1: that might work. The other thing is that there are
Speaker 1: some really inexpensive service that give you some of these channels,
Speaker 1: and there's a service called Friendly TV, which is have
Speaker 1: you heard of that one?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 1: I haven't, Okay, So that's a really inexpensive TV service
Speaker 1: that's like seven dollars a month with that gives you
Speaker 1: forty channels. And so some of those channels include A
Speaker 1: and E, Hallmark Channel, History, Lifetime, let's see what else,
Speaker 1: Weather Channel, FYI. I'm trying to see if some of
Speaker 1: the channels you mentioned around their Bravo I know is NBC,
Speaker 1: so that one might be a little tricky to get.
Speaker 1: Let's see National Geographic. So the other thing you can
Speaker 1: look into is, I know, Discovery has Discovery Plus, which
Speaker 1: will give you a whole bunch of channels with a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff, and that's not too expensive either. That's
Speaker 1: planned starting at five dollars a month, and that gives
Speaker 1: you a whole bunch of channels including HGTV, Food Network,
Speaker 1: TLC is on there. That's one that you mentioned. Let's
Speaker 1: see National Geographic that is not on there. They may
Speaker 1: have their own, but the bottom line is that, look,
Speaker 1: you can get this bill way down I would say,
Speaker 1: under one hundred dollars a month. So don't forget when
Speaker 1: you when you sort of take out that bundle. They're
Speaker 1: going to probably try to charge you more for your internet.
Speaker 1: Do you know how much you're paying for your internet
Speaker 1: right now for okay, So, and that's through Spectrum guessing.
Speaker 2: No, that's through ATT verse.
Speaker 1: Okay, it's through Uverse. Oh interesting, So you verse through
Speaker 1: AT and T is something that they're really not promoting anymore,
Speaker 1: so you may have to They may try to get
Speaker 1: you to go to like AT and T Fiber or
Speaker 1: something like that. But okay, so a couple of things.
Speaker 1: These are my recommendations. Okay, So first off, I would
Speaker 1: say what I would do is look into all of
Speaker 1: your options. Take a fresh look at your options for internet.
Speaker 1: So where you live in Santa Clarita, there may be
Speaker 1: a company that does internet that's not AT and T.
Speaker 1: So I would look at a website called whistle out
Speaker 1: and you can type in your zip code and it
Speaker 1: will tell you the internet plans in your area. So
Speaker 1: you can put in your street address and that will
Speaker 1: look at things like Verizon, AT and T Spectrum and
Speaker 1: also companies like T Mobile and Verizon now have wireless
Speaker 1: internet that's served over five G and so you can
Speaker 1: look into that. And right now, those providers are giving
Speaker 1: a really good deal, like t Mobiles fifty bucks a month.
Speaker 1: Verizon I think is as low as twenty five dollars
Speaker 1: a month, depending on who you have for your wireless carrier.
Speaker 1: But I would look into those, and then i'd also
Speaker 1: look into the cable company in your area that offers
Speaker 1: Internet and see if they're cheaper, because now that you're
Speaker 1: getting Internet by itself, they may try to charge you
Speaker 1: a little bit more. I'd look into getting a streaming stick,
Speaker 1: so I'd probably recommend either a Roku or an Amazon
Speaker 1: streaming stick, and then I would start to layer on
Speaker 1: these services you mentioned. You already have Netflix. Netflix has
Speaker 1: an ad supported plan, so you may want to downgrade
Speaker 1: to that plan, which is six ninety nine a month,
Speaker 1: and that's going to have ads. And if you're really
Speaker 1: trying to save money, think that you're gonna have to
Speaker 1: start watching ads on some of these services. Free ads
Speaker 1: supporting streaming services, it's called they call them fast free
Speaker 1: ad supported streaming television services. That's the fastest growing streaming
Speaker 1: services out there right now. Why because everything has gone
Speaker 1: up in price lately, and so people are very cost
Speaker 1: conscious right now. So if you can get free streaming TV.
Speaker 1: Why would you not. And we're used to ads on TV,
Speaker 1: so it's not that big of a leap to say,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'll watch these shows with a little
Speaker 1: bit of ads, and so I would look into those
Speaker 1: services as well. So Roku has what's called the Roku
Speaker 1: Channel with a whole bunch of free stuff on there
Speaker 1: that has ads. Two b TV they have a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of free stuff. They are owned by Fox, so
Speaker 1: they have a whole bunch of Fox shows on there
Speaker 1: as well. Pluto TV this is the one that started
Speaker 1: at all. They're owned by Paramount. They have a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of channels that you can watch completely free. One
Speaker 1: of my favorites is the Johnny Carson Channel. They have
Speaker 1: a channel that just literally shows Johnny cars and all
Speaker 1: day long. And they have a whole bunch of channels
Speaker 1: like that. Monsters, all these things. Some of it's old,
Speaker 1: some of it's new. Amazon Free V they are owned
Speaker 1: by Amazon obviously, and they have a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff on there that's free. Crackle used to be owned
Speaker 1: by Sony. I'm not sure they are anymore, but they
Speaker 1: have a whole bunch of free stuff, ad supported Zoomo Xumo.
Speaker 1: They're owned by Comcasts, so they have a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of that Comcast programming on there. And then Peacock they
Speaker 1: have I don't know if they're still offering the AD
Speaker 1: supported free version, but they have an AD supported plan
Speaker 1: that you may have to pay a little bit for.
Speaker 1: But they have a bunch of the NBC shows. Sling
Speaker 1: just started. THEIRS. Let me see what this is called.
Speaker 1: Sling is called free stream fr E E S T
Speaker 1: R E A M. They have a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff on there for free. And let's see I'm missing
Speaker 1: any big ones. I think that's about it. There may
Speaker 1: be some others that I'm missing, but I'd look into that.
Speaker 1: And i'd also look into so the things that you mentioned,
Speaker 1: like National Geographic, I would see I would type that
Speaker 1: in and type in streaming and see what their streaming
Speaker 1: service is. So national Geographic, it looks like you'd have
Speaker 1: to get Hulu to get national geographic shows streaming on there.
Speaker 1: And Hulu has AD supported plans that are inexpensive as well. Bravo,
Speaker 1: let's see Bravo streaming. I'm not sure what they're going
Speaker 1: to be on. They are going to be on oh, Peacock,
Speaker 1: so you'd have to go with Peacock. So anyway, as
Speaker 1: you can see, it's kind of like a little puzzle.
Speaker 1: So Deborah, you can do this. You can definitely lower
Speaker 1: your plan. I think the main thing is getting that
Speaker 1: streaming stick, getting the Internet at a pretty good cost,
Speaker 1: and then signing up for just a couple of these
Speaker 1: services that I think will give you the programming that
Speaker 1: you want. So good luck and thanks for watching on KTLA.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate it. And by the way, KTLA this
Speaker 1: week I should mention this. We are now on YouTube
Speaker 1: TV and also streaming on Hulu, so this was a
Speaker 1: big thing if you're in the LA area. A lot
Speaker 1: of people did not have access to KTLA streaming on
Speaker 1: one of these paid services like a YouTube TV or
Speaker 1: a Hulu, and now we are on there. So if
Speaker 1: you are a subscriber to Hulu or YouTube TV and
Speaker 1: you're paying for that streaming service, check it out. KTLA
Speaker 1: is now on there. You may have to go into
Speaker 1: your settings to find the channel. Onmine, it was hidden
Speaker 1: for some reason, but it's there, and so if you're
Speaker 1: paying for that, it's definitely a channel that you want
Speaker 1: to check out because of course I'm a little biased,
Speaker 1: but I think it's one of the better offerings. And
Speaker 1: of course with YouTube TV and even Hulu, they also
Speaker 1: have the DVR functionality, So I personally would ask you
Speaker 1: to DVR my segment which airs at five am, seven AM,
Speaker 1: and nine am, So go ahead and set those DVRs
Speaker 1: for those segments. But again, if you're a subscriber, that's
Speaker 1: a pretty good thing, all right. Coming up next, we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about Amazon's warning on some of it's
Speaker 1: frequently returned products, so we'll tell you about that. Plus
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you the app that I used
Speaker 1: to trick everyone on my Instagram today to convert a
Speaker 1: car into something very different. I'll tell you about the
Speaker 1: AI scenes you can do on that and the AI car,
Speaker 1: so if you're into cars, it's kind of fun. And
Speaker 1: then coming up, we're going to talk to the founder
Speaker 1: of an app that will help you keep track of
Speaker 1: your flights during this spring break travel season. Plus, your
Speaker 1: call is a triple eight rich one on one eight
Speaker 1: eight seven four to two four to one zero one.
Speaker 1: You are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out and Uh,
Speaker 1: producer Aaron doing great on the music today. Thank you
Speaker 1: really get me going today. Okay, So I'm going to
Speaker 1: tell you about a little trick I did on my
Speaker 1: Instagram followers at rich On Tech today. So, uh, I,
Speaker 1: if you look at my stories, I said that I
Speaker 1: traded in my EV for something more prac to call
Speaker 1: and it's like an old school car that I had,
Speaker 1: or like a classic car. So I did this because
Speaker 1: of the whole debate about AI and also you know
Speaker 1: April Fools and all that stuff. But the reality is,
Speaker 1: I want to tell you about the app I use
Speaker 1: to create this because I've been playing with it and
Speaker 1: it's pretty phenomenal. It's called photo Leap, and it's one
Speaker 1: of these AI apps that just does a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1: And so they added a couple of new things that
Speaker 1: are that are really cool that I want to tell
Speaker 1: you about. So the first is called AI Scenes and
Speaker 1: this is on iOS and Android, and this lets you
Speaker 1: upload a photo of your house or a landmark or
Speaker 1: a street and it's converted into sort of a fun
Speaker 1: and creative image, like you know, you can do apocalyptic,
Speaker 1: you can do fantasy, you can do candy, you can
Speaker 1: do cartoon, so it's just kind of a fun little
Speaker 1: feature that is just shows off the power of AI.
Speaker 1: So it's transforming the entire scene into something completely different.
Speaker 1: So if you have a cool like picture that you've
Speaker 1: taken of a scene or something like you know that
Speaker 1: your street or any really anything that's you know, it
Speaker 1: works best with like scenery like a street. You can
Speaker 1: convert that into all kinds of stuff. And right now,
Speaker 1: I just took a picture I took an Arizona of
Speaker 1: some cactus and it's just it's just amazing. It like
Speaker 1: changed it into an abandoned area. They've got snowed in,
Speaker 1: so you can see it transformed into a snowy So
Speaker 1: I'm in Arizona and it made it look like it's
Speaker 1: a snowed in area. It's it's just incredible what these
Speaker 1: AI apps can do. And again in such short time.
Speaker 1: This stuff has not been around that long and we're
Speaker 1: seeing these tools or just leapfrogging every couple of weeks
Speaker 1: into something much much more.
Speaker 9: Now.
Speaker 1: The feature that I used is called AI Cars and
Speaker 1: this is only available on the iOS version of the app.
Speaker 1: It's a very specific situation because you have to have
Speaker 1: a picture of you in front of a car or
Speaker 1: just any old car, and it will use AI to
Speaker 1: change that car into something else. So this uses analyze
Speaker 1: the photo, it recognizes the car and then enables you
Speaker 1: to activate a filter to change that car into several presets,
Speaker 1: which can be luxury. Hold on, I'm changing it right now,
Speaker 1: so I'm seeing it, says, preparing to pimp your ride.
Speaker 1: So I'm changing this car that I took a picture
Speaker 1: of into Oh wow, interesting, I think this looked too
Speaker 1: luxury because it didn't change it into anything. It's got
Speaker 1: off road, sport, electric, vintage, classic Americana icons, concept, and rusty,
Speaker 1: and if you don't like any of those, you can
Speaker 1: actually just type in to the AI engine. Oh interesting,
Speaker 1: it's not working on this car, so it doesn't like
Speaker 1: this car by itself. Apparently you have to be with
Speaker 1: the car, so if you have a picture of yourself
Speaker 1: with the car, that works better. So if you want
Speaker 1: to see what I did with it, you can go
Speaker 1: to my Instagram at rich on Tech, click my stories
Speaker 1: and you can see how good this did of converting
Speaker 1: this car that I took a picture of. I did
Speaker 1: it first with the vintage car. Then I did kind
Speaker 1: of a RUSTI ol car. Then I did a futuristic
Speaker 1: sports car, then I did a classic car, then I
Speaker 1: did a truck, and I said, final, I'll help you
Speaker 1: move your couch because we have a truck. For some reason,
Speaker 1: you are the unofficial couch mover of all of your friends. Hey,
Speaker 1: can you come over and just just really quick. It's
Speaker 1: going to be super easy. It's always super easy to
Speaker 1: move someone's couch anyway. This is the first mobile consumer
Speaker 1: editing tool to combine stable diffusion, proprietary segmentation engines, which
Speaker 1: means it's actually separating that car from the rest of
Speaker 1: the image, and a new control net layer. And this
Speaker 1: was a new open source tech released by computer scientists
Speaker 1: at Stanford University. So it's combining three different AI generative
Speaker 1: art capabilities. And there's much more inside this app. You
Speaker 1: can do AI avatars, AI pets, AI couples, So there
Speaker 1: is a lot in this app. Now some of it
Speaker 1: does cost money because it's not free. There are some
Speaker 1: features that are free. It also transformed you by the
Speaker 1: way that Dungeons and Dragons movie that's coming out. They
Speaker 1: can transform you into a Dungeons and Dragons character like
Speaker 1: those avatars. We saw a couple months ago. Now they
Speaker 1: can do those with dungeons and dragons. And I did
Speaker 1: this for myself, and I don't know much about dungeons
Speaker 1: and dragons, but it's I have those ears, you know,
Speaker 1: like those funny looking years, and then I just you know,
Speaker 1: it just looks like something out of who knows what
Speaker 1: It's fun though, all right, so let me tell you
Speaker 1: how much this costs. Some of this stuff is free.
Speaker 1: Let's see pricing, pricing, pricing, so free features. You can
Speaker 1: do the dungeons and dragons for free, basic use of
Speaker 1: the photo and animation features, some of the instant edits
Speaker 1: like changing the background, replacing the sky in fast filters,
Speaker 1: and then some of the latest AI tools, the AI scenes,
Speaker 1: the AI cars. That's all free to a certain limit.
Speaker 1: And then if you really want to get unlimited access
Speaker 1: to all this stuff and also no watermarks on the
Speaker 1: stuff that you make, you're gonna have to pay. It
Speaker 1: looks like it's six bucks a month or forty dollars
Speaker 1: a year, so yes, not cheap. But I got to
Speaker 1: say this photo leap app is probably one of the
Speaker 1: more impressive apps that I've seen, so at the very least,
Speaker 1: I would say download it and try it out, at
Speaker 1: least try some of the free features and see what's
Speaker 1: happening with it, because it's it's pretty cool. Okay, moving on,
Speaker 1: let me tell you about Amazon. Starting on some product pages,
Speaker 1: you're going to see a warning that says frequently returned item.
Speaker 1: Check the product details and customer reviews to learn more
Speaker 1: about this item. Basically, Amazon is trying to make people
Speaker 1: a buy less stuff that they're going to return, and
Speaker 1: also put these people that are selling this stuff on
Speaker 1: a warning that says, hey, stop trying to sell people
Speaker 1: stuff that they're returning because it costs money for all
Speaker 1: of us. So they've made returns really easy, and Amazon
Speaker 1: is very generous with its return policy, but still it
Speaker 1: costs this company money. And when they're doing the volume
Speaker 1: that Amazon's doing, even if they can affect one percent
Speaker 1: of people returning stuff, that translates into big, big bucks
Speaker 1: for them saved. So again, you might see a warning.
Speaker 1: If you see that warning that says, hey, this has
Speaker 1: returned a lot, you may want to think twice about
Speaker 1: buying it. I know it's so easy to buy and
Speaker 1: return stuff on Amazon, but it does cost a lot
Speaker 1: of money to ship in all that stuff, all right,
Speaker 1: Coming up, we are going to talk about an app
Speaker 1: called Flighty. We're going to have the founder of this
Speaker 1: app that is probably the most beautiful flight tracking app
Speaker 1: I've ever seen. I've used it many times, and we'll
Speaker 1: tell you all about how this came to be coming
Speaker 1: up next. Welcome back to rich on Tech. I'm extremely
Speaker 1: excited for this next segment because I love travel, I
Speaker 1: love flying, and I love apps, So this kind of
Speaker 1: combines all of my loves into one thing. We're talking
Speaker 1: about an app called Flighty, and joining me now is
Speaker 1: Ryan Jones. He is the founder of the app. Ryan,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for joining me today.
Speaker 9: Absolutely, thanks for having me on rich All.
Speaker 1: Right, so you have built an app that so many
Speaker 1: people love. This Flighty app is basically, as you call it,
Speaker 1: pilot grade flight tracking for everyone. So first off, I
Speaker 1: just want to know tell me the story of why
Speaker 1: you came up with this app.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Absolutely, I was actually working on a previous app at
Speaker 9: the time and had just left Apple, and I was
Speaker 9: traveling with my ninety year old grandmother. We ended up
Speaker 9: sitting in the chilis at the Fort Lauderdale Airport for
Speaker 9: about three hours because a Jetboo plane was stuck in Chicago,
Speaker 9: which of course has nothing to do with Fort Lauderdale.
Speaker 9: But the thing that was frustrating me is I was
Speaker 9: nerdy enough and into kind of flying and apps enough
Speaker 9: that I knew all that data for me to know
Speaker 9: this ahead of time was available, and I was just
Speaker 9: not able to do all that research to see that
Speaker 9: my plane was stuck there because I was driving. And
Speaker 9: it was just so frustrating that I had known for
Speaker 9: years that this could be done and nobody was doing it.
Speaker 9: And that was the moment that I said, Okay, I'm
Speaker 9: just going to go for it. Let's build this thing.
Speaker 1: And so how many years ago was that?
Speaker 9: That was New Year's Day, January first, twenty eighteen, So
Speaker 9: we're about five years old.
Speaker 1: Wow, five years old? Okay. And so this app, it's
Speaker 1: called Flighty. It's available on iOS. It is a beautiful
Speaker 1: flight tracking app. There's many ways to track flights, but
Speaker 1: what this app does really well is not only import
Speaker 1: your information from your calendar, but it presents more information
Speaker 1: than you could ever imagine about your flight. So the
Speaker 1: gate departure, the timing, but also stuff like the arrival forecast,
Speaker 1: like the performance over the last sixty days where your
Speaker 1: plane is, so it not only shows you where your
Speaker 1: plane is, but all the cities that it's been to
Speaker 1: before yours, the type of plane, so it looks up
Speaker 1: the tail number and tells you, you know, the age
Speaker 1: of the plane when it first took its flight, the
Speaker 1: cruising speed, and then a detailed timeline and all kinds
Speaker 1: of stuff that Ryan. Do you think most people even
Speaker 1: realize any of this information is out there about their
Speaker 1: flight except the time when it's taking off and landing.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I don't think so. You know, most people are
Speaker 9: used to looking at the boards and the airport or
Speaker 9: just googling it. And you know, the crazy thing is
Speaker 9: all this is out there. You just have to do
Speaker 9: the legwork and the hard work of combining it all.
Speaker 9: And like you said, it all is. You know, we've
Speaker 9: spent a lot of time making the app super user friendly.
Speaker 9: We had one hundred pilots that used it and tested
Speaker 9: the accuracy and the usability for us before we even
Speaker 9: released it to everybody. So all that stuff is in there,
Speaker 9: and it's just in one clean view that's one full page.
Speaker 9: There's no you know, you don't have to navigate in
Speaker 9: and out and go find things. But the even better
Speaker 9: thing than that is, you know, we have I think
Speaker 9: it's up to seventy five different types of push alerts now,
Speaker 9: But if you don't even open the app, really, as
Speaker 9: long as you type in you know AA one oh one,
Speaker 9: so you've got American Airlines one oh one, we'll send
Speaker 9: you a push alert if there's something you need to know,
Speaker 9: you don't really have to even open the app.
Speaker 1: So what do you think are some of the best
Speaker 1: features of the app for the average user.
Speaker 9: Yeah, the one that we hear constantly is people being
Speaker 9: able to predict delays. So, like you mentioned, uh, where
Speaker 9: the plane is coming from is a thing that's really
Speaker 9: present in the UI, and that's actually the number one
Speaker 9: cause of delays if you look like kind of across
Speaker 9: the whole world. Number two is weather, and then number
Speaker 9: three is airspace problems. So airspace meaning like the air
Speaker 9: traffic control needs to space everybody out around Chicago because
Speaker 9: there's a storm or something like that. So we have
Speaker 9: alerts for all three of those things. So we covered,
Speaker 9: you know, the top three in terms of predicting delays,
Speaker 9: So you can be let's say, sitting at home thinking
Speaker 9: I got to go to the airport in two hours
Speaker 9: and you'll get an alert that hey, your plane's in
Speaker 9: Chicago and it's not taken off for three hours. So
Speaker 9: being able to note ahead of time what's going to
Speaker 9: happen is kind of a huge stress reliever for people,
Speaker 9: even if you can't change your flight, but for a
Speaker 9: lot of our kind of pro flyers as we like
Speaker 9: to call them, they have ways to or they have
Speaker 9: you know, status on an airline, and they can actually
Speaker 9: change their flight. But even if you don't, just knowing
Speaker 9: in advance what's going to happen is a massive stress reliever.
Speaker 9: Just there's so many unknowns and so many things that
Speaker 9: can go wrong with travel, but having a heads up
Speaker 9: and being forewarned is super powerful.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite features of this app is the
Speaker 1: flight log, and so when you first log into this app,
Speaker 1: it's getting the information from what your calendar basically, that's correct.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, Some competitive apps will get it from your email,
Speaker 9: which requires you to give your email username and password,
Speaker 9: and we don't really like the privacy aspect of that,
Speaker 9: so we integrate with your calendar and we'll automatically pull
Speaker 9: in any flight that shows up in your calendar, and
Speaker 9: we do all that processing on your device. We never
Speaker 9: send anything to the cloud that's privacy focused, and you
Speaker 9: don't even have your username or a username with us,
Speaker 9: so you're just anonymous to us. Everything's super private.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, we'll pull in any flight that we find. We
Speaker 9: can do upwards of about five hundred in a minute,
Speaker 9: So you connect your calendar and we'll pull in five
Speaker 9: hundred a thousand, as many flights as you have and
Speaker 9: populate this flight log you're talking about for you automatically.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so for travel nerds like myself, and I'm not
Speaker 1: like a real travel nerd. I'm like a basic travel
Speaker 1: nerd that travels a couple times a year. But I
Speaker 1: know there's when I traveled a ton for my job.
Speaker 1: You know, there's people that are really into this stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm like semi there. But it has this kind of
Speaker 1: your passport. It's called the Flighty Passport, and it gives
Speaker 1: you your stats for not only all time, but every year.
Speaker 1: It's broken down that it can find information. So and
Speaker 1: by the way, speaking of privacy, my name is even
Speaker 1: on here so I can type in. It says add
Speaker 1: your name, So I'm going to add my name to
Speaker 1: my little flight passport here because it doesn't even know
Speaker 1: that it's not pulling it from anywhere. So it says
Speaker 1: that I've done five hundred and thirty one nine and
Speaker 1: eighty four miles in my lifetime, twenty one point four
Speaker 1: times around the world, three hundred and twenty seven flights,
Speaker 1: forty six airports, twelve countries, fifty two days in the air.
Speaker 1: And you can go through and literally scroll through all
Speaker 1: of your past flights and when you're taking a flight,
Speaker 1: it will show your history on that route. So I
Speaker 1: fly back to Newark a lot because my family's from
Speaker 1: New Jersey. It will show me how many times I've
Speaker 1: been there. Now, these are things you don't necessarily need,
Speaker 1: but it's really cool to have that if you're into flying.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and people really really love that feature, you know.
Speaker 9: As usual, we see a lot of shares towards the
Speaker 9: end of the year when people are doing kind of
Speaker 9: that Spotify unwrapped and that end of year, here's what
Speaker 9: I did for the year, and people will you know,
Speaker 9: we automatically tally up those miles as you fly for
Speaker 9: you and then put it in that really cool view
Speaker 9: that you can share out to social.
Speaker 5: Media and wherever.
Speaker 9: And one thing we know, we didn't anticipate this at all,
Speaker 9: but we have a lot of business travelers that will
Speaker 9: use that for year end tax reports to know where
Speaker 9: they were, what states, and what trips they took.
Speaker 1: Interesting. Okay, the other thing that I used the other
Speaker 1: day when I flew to I told a story about
Speaker 1: how I thought I was going to Sedona the whole time,
Speaker 1: but I ended up going to Phoenix and Scottsdale and anyway,
Speaker 1: even though I was tracking all my stuff. But I
Speaker 1: use the live share feature. So a lot of times
Speaker 1: when you're picking someone up from the airport, or if
Speaker 1: someone wants to know what flight you're on, like a
Speaker 1: loved one, you can now use this to share it
Speaker 1: with them, and even if they don't have the app,
Speaker 1: it still works in the same beautiful way. Can you
Speaker 1: talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Absolutely. You know, we all have people in our lives
Speaker 9: who are kind of reluctant to download apps or just
Speaker 9: you know, don't really want another app at the moment,
Speaker 9: and we you know, we're super focused on the user experience.
Speaker 9: So what you can do is at any time. It
Speaker 9: can be up to three hundred and sixty five days
Speaker 9: in advance, or it can be when you're walking down
Speaker 9: the jetway. There's a button on each flight that says
Speaker 9: live Share and you can send just a private URL
Speaker 9: to anyone, let's say your spouse or your part and
Speaker 9: when they click that link, they'll see all the basic
Speaker 9: fline information they need just in the normal Safari or
Speaker 9: Chrome web browser. They don't have to download the app,
Speaker 9: they don't have to interview, use their names, there's no ads,
Speaker 9: there's nothing, so they can get like you said, arrival,
Speaker 9: any sort of delays. They can see what time you're landing,
Speaker 9: what time you are actually gonna arrive at the gate,
Speaker 9: and then if they want, they can download the app,
Speaker 9: but they don't have to, you know, they can use
Speaker 9: just that web view right there and constantly see without
Speaker 9: having to download anything.
Speaker 1: All right. My guest is Ryan Jones, founder and CEO
Speaker 1: at Flighty, which is an iOS app. Any plans for
Speaker 1: Android at this point? I know this is a very
Speaker 1: heavy iOS app, especially with the live activities, which you
Speaker 1: are like one of the first to take advantage of,
Speaker 1: so you see your flight tracking right on your home screen.
Speaker 1: If you have a new iPhone, any plans for Android
Speaker 1: at all?
Speaker 9: You know, it's probably a year or two out.
Speaker 5: For us.
Speaker 9: We're just a team of three at the moment, we're
Speaker 9: all self funded, trying to really do this from the
Speaker 9: ground up in a sustainable way where we can have
Speaker 9: you know, decades long, really healthy, kind of profitable business.
Speaker 9: So at the moment, it's not on this.
Speaker 1: Year's calendarly okay, And can you talk about the price
Speaker 1: of the app, what you get for free versus when
Speaker 1: you think someone should subscribe for the pro features?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 9: Absolutely, So you get unlimited flights with live tracking for free.
Speaker 9: Once you start getting into I want to do some
Speaker 9: delay predictions, or I want to do the push alerts,
Speaker 9: or we have a connection assistant so when you land
Speaker 9: in let's say Sedona or that's a bad example, but
Speaker 9: you land in Denver and then you're connecting to New York,
Speaker 9: will tell you what gate you came from and what
Speaker 9: gate you need to go to. Those kind of pro
Speaker 9: features are part of our flight e Pro, which is
Speaker 9: five dollars a month or fifty dollars a year. And
Speaker 9: you asked a great question, when do people need that?
Speaker 9: So your first flight, we give you pro for free.
Speaker 9: You don't have to sign up, you don't have to
Speaker 9: do a trial or anything. It just everyone gets one
Speaker 9: for free to see what it's like, and then if
Speaker 9: you want to upgrade pro later. It's we think tend
Speaker 9: to do that. If you track ten flights a year,
Speaker 9: so maybe you fly on five or six and your
Speaker 9: spouse or kids fly on another five to six, it's
Speaker 9: probably we tend to see people upgrading around that ten
Speaker 9: ten flights a year mark.
Speaker 1: All right, Ryan Jones, We're gonna leave it there. Thanks
Speaker 1: so much for talking about one of the most beautiful
Speaker 1: flight tracking apps that I've ever seen. Flighty is the name.
Speaker 1: I've put a link on my website rich on tech
Speaker 1: dot TV. Ryan. Where are you headed next? Where's your
Speaker 1: next flight?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 9: Where am I going next?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 9: I'm actually going to uh Cooper Tino. So Apple has
Speaker 9: the you know, Ilus seventeen releases. They just announced the
Speaker 9: date June fifth, so we've got all our flight schedules
Speaker 9: for that.
Speaker 1: Nice. I hope to see you up there. I don't
Speaker 1: know if I have an invite just yet. I know
Speaker 1: it's a small invited crowd, but we'll see. I was
Speaker 1: there last year and it was a surprise, so I'm
Speaker 1: looking forward to it this year. All right, Ryan Jones,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for joining me today. Thanks rich all right,
Speaker 1: rich on tech dot TV, if you want a link
Speaker 1: to try out Flighty before your next flight. It is
Speaker 1: such a super cool app. All right, I might have
Speaker 1: time for one more question. Coming back eighty eight Rich
Speaker 1: one on one eight eight eight seven four to four
Speaker 1: to one zero one. You are listening to rich On Tack. Welcome,
Speaker 1: Welcome back to rich on tech rich DeMuro here closing
Speaker 1: out the hour, Let's go to Virgil in Durango, Colorado. Virgil,
Speaker 1: you're on with Rich Hi.
Speaker 7: Rich. The first thing is that I wanted to advise
Speaker 7: you of is this past week, the Denver Police Department
Speaker 7: announced that they were going to be implementing AI to
Speaker 7: review all of the buddy cam footage of their officers.
Speaker 7: They accumulate a vast amount of this, but nobody looks
Speaker 7: at at all, and they only randomly check it.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's wild. Yeah, that's I mean. See, there you go.
Speaker 1: There's an example of a really interesting use of a
Speaker 1: because humans are not going to scan through all that footage,
Speaker 1: but for a computer to do it and in record time,
Speaker 1: and to come up with all, hey, hey, here's ten
Speaker 1: things that you should take another look at. That's really fascinating. Wow,
Speaker 1: thanks for that interesting update. Okay, keep going.
Speaker 7: Okay, the second thing was concerning inevitable built in bias
Speaker 7: in AI. What value systems will I rely upon to
Speaker 7: make recommendations concerning your conduct in the future. For example,
Speaker 7: we have the Ten Commandments, is be kind of a
Speaker 7: basic group for what human conduct should be. But we
Speaker 7: have people that say, well, the rule is what is
Speaker 7: for the better the greater gold, and so these are
Speaker 7: going to be perhaps very different systems evaluation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's it's a great Yeah.
Speaker 7: Let's take you have a disabled ninety year old grandmother
Speaker 7: and the question is whether you should provide continuing medical
Speaker 7: aid for her or encourage her to commit suicide. Essentially,
Speaker 7: how is SAYI going to answer questions that a loud
Speaker 7: moral decisions?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is Look, and this is not a
Speaker 1: new situation. We've been you know, we've talked about this
Speaker 1: with self driving cars. You know, let's say you're in
Speaker 1: a self driving car. You're going around a corner and
Speaker 1: you know there's something in the road that's a person
Speaker 1: and this car has to avoid that, but by avoiding it,
Speaker 1: it has to run you off the road. I mean,
Speaker 1: which decision, which human life, does it save and it
Speaker 1: may not be able to save both or it can't,
Speaker 1: And so these are decisions that I don't have the
Speaker 1: answer to, and I'm not sure anyone does. But again,
Speaker 1: I think that in some cases, when it comes to
Speaker 1: certain decisions, these systems may be better than what humans
Speaker 1: can do. And I think, especially when it comes to
Speaker 1: the medical field, I think AI is going to have
Speaker 1: a huge boost, but also it's gonna it's gonna evidence
Speaker 1: some really sad things as well, when people think, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe they can get through something and the AI says
Speaker 1: they can't, or if insurance companies start using AI and
Speaker 1: they say no, there's just no reason why we should
Speaker 1: do this treatment because it's too cost prohibitive or it's
Speaker 1: just not going to be effective enough. So I think
Speaker 1: that we are just just at the tip of the
Speaker 1: iceberg when it comes to all of the implications in
Speaker 1: our lives that AI will have. And again the fact
Speaker 1: that the you know, the police department is now using
Speaker 1: AI to sift through this footage. I know that police
Speaker 1: departments and cities are already using scanners on the cars
Speaker 1: that are driving around, like some of the city cars,
Speaker 1: to search for cars that are stolen or cars that
Speaker 1: have you know, repo. I mean, there's just so many
Speaker 1: ways that AI can be used for good and also
Speaker 1: for not so good. And when it comes to the
Speaker 1: values of these AI systems right now, this is the
Speaker 1: other thing that the AI community is debating. It's who
Speaker 1: gets to say what these values are. So when these
Speaker 1: when chat GPT comes out, there's no third party review
Speaker 1: of how they're programming this. They may program it to
Speaker 1: say never talk about this topic, and nobody is none
Speaker 1: the wiser because they just can't do anything about that.
Speaker 1: So until people open source these systems or open source
Speaker 1: to programming, we just don't know. And again, a lot
Speaker 1: of these things are being figured out as we go
Speaker 1: along because this is also new. So Virgil, great topic,
Speaker 1: great discussion, and really really just again, this entire show
Speaker 1: could be AI. But let's move on for now. I
Speaker 1: want to tell you two more things before we have
Speaker 1: to go here. First, I thought this was kind of cool.
Speaker 1: Audible is conducting a limited testing, according to Marketing brew
Speaker 1: of ADS in audio books, So I thought this was
Speaker 1: kind of neat because if you're a non member, you
Speaker 1: can get ADS supported access to a limited set of
Speaker 1: Audible titles and you can hear up to eight ads
Speaker 1: in a twenty four hour period. Now you may say, rich,
Speaker 1: I don't want ads in my audio books, But how
Speaker 1: neat is it that you can listen to these books
Speaker 1: for free if you don't mind the ads. And for
Speaker 1: many people, they don't mind listening to these ads. And
Speaker 1: audiobooks we know are very popular, especially since the pandemic,
Speaker 1: their popularity has just grown. So I thought that was neat.
Speaker 1: So there may be a way to listen to audiobooks
Speaker 1: for free. And then life Hacker had a website called
Speaker 1: luggage Hero that they recently featured, and I thought was
Speaker 1: a pretty good idea. If you've ever traveled to a city,
Speaker 1: you landed, your hotel room's not ready, you've got all
Speaker 1: this luggage. Luggage Hero is kind of like an Airbnb,
Speaker 1: but for your luggage, and so you can put your luggage.
Speaker 1: You search for this site. They're in one hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy one cities across the world, and you can find
Speaker 1: a place to store your luggage. It might be a
Speaker 1: coffee house, it might be a small business. These businesses
Speaker 1: sign up. Luggage Hero says they are vetted, and you
Speaker 1: go there, you give them your luggage. They'll give you
Speaker 1: some sort of ticket and then it's ninety five cents
Speaker 1: for an hour for a single bag, or eight bucks
Speaker 1: per day, and you get a guarantee of five hundred
Speaker 1: dollars insurance on your bag, which is probably not enough
Speaker 1: for most people, or maybe it is, who knows. There's
Speaker 1: also an optional insurance that guarantees payback for up to
Speaker 1: three thousand dollars if there is an issue with your
Speaker 1: bag being lost or stolen or anything like that. But again,
Speaker 1: luggage Hero says that they do vet these drop off
Speaker 1: sites and if you're a business, maybe you want to
Speaker 1: sign up with this website make some extra cash if
Speaker 1: you run like a small business and you've got some
Speaker 1: space to keep people's luggage in there. Again, the website
Speaker 1: is called Luggage Hero. It started in Copenhagen and in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, so this has been around for a while.
Speaker 1: But I thought that was kind of neat because when
Speaker 1: we landed in Rome last summer, we had to leave
Speaker 1: our bags. We put them at the hotel. But maybe
Speaker 1: you want to explore the city in a place that's
Speaker 1: not near the hotel, and so you just want to
Speaker 1: drop them off right near a cafe or somewhere you
Speaker 1: want to eat. All right, my name is rich Damiro.
Speaker 1: I cannot believe it. That's going to do it for
Speaker 1: this episode of the show. Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 1: Next week we're going to talk to someone who is
Speaker 1: working on bringing my message to iOS. You can find
Speaker 1: me on social media at rich on tech. The website
Speaker 1: is richontech dot tv. Check it out to watch my
Speaker 1: TV segments. My name is Richardmiro. Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker 1: There are so many ways you can spend your time.
Speaker 1: I do appreciate you spending it right here with me.
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you real soon.