A major lifeline bank to the tech industry fails. Ring launches its best video doorbell yet, spring Break, travel apps plus your tech questions answered. What is going on? I'm Rich Demiro and this is Rich on Tech, the show where I talk about the tech stuff I think you should know about. It's also the place where I answer your questions about technology. I'm the tech reporter at KTLA
Channel five in Los Angeles. Welcome to the show. Phone lines are now open at one eight eight eight Rich one oh one, that's triple eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. Give me a call if you have a question about technology. I will do my best to answer it.
Well.
It is a really big day in the tech world. Not for a good reason, but for a pretty bad reason. A major bank that provides a lot of banking services to Silicon Valley has collapsed. It's Silicon Valley Bank. That's the name of the bank. You probably haven't heard of it. It's a regional bank, but it is very popular among
the tech community. We're talking VC funds. These are the people that hand out money to startups to help them create new businesses that might one day become an uber or a Twitter or a square or anything else we've heard of. They all started with VC funds. Founders do business here. Tech industry employees do business at this bank. Imagine you going to your bank and it's closed, and they say you can't transfer money out, you can't use your online banking app, you can't do anything. Your money's
just stuck. Imagine that feeling. That is the feeling right now among thousands of people in the tech industry right now, that uncertainty where is my money going to come from? How am I going to access this? Am I going to get it? This bank is now under the protection of the US government. Now I've said in the past that this is a tech show for the average consumer. So you might be wondering, well, Rich, how does this
really affect me? Well, in a lot of different ways, Because number one, this is something we haven't seen in a very long time. A bank of this stature, a bank this big, has not failed since two thousand and eight with Washington Mutual, remember that bank. So we haven't seen something of this magnitude in a very long time. Plus the repercussions of just how this will sort of go through the tech industry. So I mentioned these startups
that rely on this bank. So many of these startups now may just not be able to make payroll or not be able to pay their employees, or the people that work at these companies can't do anything.
Their hands are tied. So how did this all happen?
Well, I'm not an expert in financials, but basically people lost confidence in this bank for no really good reason.
The actually put out a press.
Release saying what they were going to do, how they were going to raise money, what they were doing to kind of, you know, even shore up their financials, and people saw that as a signal to say, ooh, I'm not really sure. I like what's happening here, let's go And so the stock price plunged. Then people did a run on deposits, so old fashioned bank run. People just said hey, I want my money, I want out. And then when people started doing that, it's snowballed until everyone
had to say, okay, stop, stop stop. Government stepped in, FDIC takes over, and now this bank is under the power of the US government. Now for all we know, the bank's financials were actually very sound. So that's what's scary here is that this was an old fashioned bank run where people just said, you know what, I want out and I'm done. And now this bank is just affecting so many people's livelihoods. Like I said, the big
issue here, so many startups rely on this bank. So for all these people that had their banking here, this is a big period of uncertainty. This is going to impact startups, founders, employees, payrolls probably will not.
Be met this week.
So I'm looking at this press release from the FDIC and this is like when you realize that government is you know, there's a reason why some of these things are in place. So to protect insured depositors, the FDIC has created the Deposit Insurance National Bank of Santa Clara DNB. SO at the time of closing, this was on Friday afternoon, the FDIC has now received transfership of all insured deposits at Silicon Valley Bank. Now insured deposits is the keyword here.
All insured depositors will have full access to their insured deposits no later than Monday morning, March thirteenth. But here's the thing. If you know that insured deposit, that number is not very high when it comes to how much money some people may have had in this bank. Especial if you're a small business, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
That's the standard insurance among any bank in America. So when you have a bank account somewhere or multiple bank accounts, you are insured up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Anything after that, there's really no saying you're not necessarily guaranteed that money in the case of something like this happening. So uninsured depositors are going to get so after their two hundred and fifty thousand, a receivership certificate for the
remaining amount of their uninsured funds. So what does that mean. That means you get a little certificate that says, uh, yeah, we know you had a lot of money at this bank, but we're just gonna give you this little piece of paper that says we're going to try to get your money back to you. But there's no guarantees. So as the FDIC sells the assets of this Silicon Valley Bank,
future dividend payments may be made to uninsured depositors. How would you feel if if you were a startup and you had, you know, you went through this whole process of going to these vcs getting a couple of million dollars to art your company. Maybe it's not a ton of money in the scheme of things, but you know, to you it is a couple million to start your new business. And next thing you know, you've got two fifty and that's it. And the rest of this money
is just who knows when it may come. Silicon Valley Bank had seventeen branches in California and Massachusetts. The main office and all branches will reopen on Monday, March thirteenth. They're going to maintain their normal business hours, but again under the guise of the government, and banking activities will resume no later than Monday, March thirteenth, including online banking and other services. So you can bet when this online banking fires up again on Monday, what do you think
people are going to do immediately? They're going to try to get as much funds out of this bank as humanly possible in the shortest amount of time. Official checks will continue to clear. As of December thirty first, Silicon Valley Bank had approximately two hundred and nine billion dollars in total assets and about one hundred and seventy five billion in deposit. Now I'm no math whiz, but I'm just doing the math right there, two nine minus one
seventy five. That leaves about thirty five million dollars on accounted. So right there, there's a problem. And that's typically you know, banks operate this way. When you put your money in a bank, it's not sitting there. I mean I learned this in like first grade.
They don't just sit.
They don't just take your dollar bill and put it in a safe and it stays there until you request it. Again, no, no, no, they take that dollar bill and they loan it out to people, and in that loan they make, you know, millions upon millions of loans. They make money on the loans, and that's how they're able to pay you that paltry interest rate that you get on your savings account. So they're gonna have to figure that part out as well. Now, again I am reading a press release from the government.
What do you think the government's role in this is? They want people to think that everything's going to be okay, and this is just very simple. This is a very easy process. Obviously that is not the case. The repercussions of this are still very undetermined. We don't know how people are going to react. We don't know what people are going to do. In fact, I would gather that even folks that have business at other banks are going to say, Hey, I want some of my money back
right now. I want to take some of that money out because I just I'm losing confidence now, especially when it comes to banks that might be a bit smaller than the big banks. The big banks, yeah, they'll probably be okay. The smaller banks, which people favor because of their service, because of the loans they can get, because of the hands on approach. That's where we may be in trouble because again I mentioned earlier that you probably
never heard of this bank. But if you're in Silicon Valley, there are banks that people do business with regularly because they understand the startup world. They understand what it's like to start a company. They understand the term bootstrapped, and they understand, you know, having employees and making payroll and this is not Facebooks of the world. They're going to be just fine. The Googles of the world, they'll be
just fine. These are all the apps that you might have on your phone that are brand new, that are small. I can think of several on my phone right now that I'm like, hmm, what's going to happen when this company can't continue to operate because their money is just held up or not there. And so again, the repercussions of this will be felt by consumers, by you and me. It's a scary thing. I mean, you know, I've gone through this once in my life, with this whole bust,
actually twice now. I remember specifically the bust of you know, about nineteen ninety nine, two thousand and you know, we saw all these tech companies just implode. And it was the wild part was that the Super Bowl, I believe it was probably nineteen ninety six, ninety seven something like that. All of the commercials in the Super Bowl were startups you'd never heard of in your life, pets dot Com
and all these different companies. And you sat there and he said, how did they afford super Bowl commercials?
Howdid this pets dot Com I've never heard of?
How can they go up against all these pet companies that we know and love, like a pet Co or something. And sure enough, yeah, it was it was all just you know, it was all before its time. Now, tech companies have taken ten years to recover from that moment, and they've learned a lot from that. And then of course we saw the housing bust in two thousand and eight and that was a big deal, and of course the government bailed out a lot of big financial firms
during that time. So this will be another lesson learned. It's not over yet.
I know.
It's not the exciting way to start the show that I typically do, and you know, I feel like it's important just because we need to understand that when one thing unravels, it has effects on the rest of our world, whether it's you, whether it's me, whether these startups, and as just a human I feel for these people that are sitting there just very uncertain right now. I mean, we're only twenty four forty eight seventy two hours into this and there's still a lot ahead, all Right, we
got a lot more coming up on the show. We're going to talk about that a little bit more later on in the show. I've got kaya Yurief in south By Southwest and Austin, Texas. She said that already that is the talk of the town. So we're going to talk to her about what founders are saying down there. Also, we're gonna talk about the yellow iPhone. Yes, this week Apple released a new iPhone that's just a different color,
so we'll talk about that. Facebook is making a big change to Facebook Messenger, kind of doing it about face, so we'll talk about that.
Plus.
My other guests this week include John Faulkner from Clean Fleet Report, We're gonna talk evs, and Jefferson.
Graham Live in studio.
You may know him as the former editor at USA Today Talking Tech. He's going to join me here live plus your calls at triple eight Rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. My name is rich DeMuro. You are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name is rich de Muro, sitting here talk looking technology with you. You can find me online on all social media at rich on Tech.
What a week. This was a this was a this was a week for me man.
I mean, it's so interesting that so many of these tech events and things were sort of sidelined for many, many years, like three years. I'm talking virtual events with Google, Apple, you know, Facebook, whatever you name it. These companies all just you know, went to hibernation for a couple of years, and so all these events that I would go to and all these things I get invited to just kind of stopped. And it was nice because it was relaxing.
The bad side is that now everything's starting up again. I guess it's not bad, it's just it went from like zero to one hundred. So I just rattle off to my wife every week, like how many things I'm getting invited to that either I can't go to or it's just conflicting or whatever. And you got to pick and choose because it's a lot of travel. I got two kids. Can't go to everything, right, But I did
go to a couple of things this week. First off, Vegas, so this was I was actually supposed to shoot a story there on Monday, but at the last minute it got kind of canceled.
And the story is really cool. It's can I talk about it? Maybe I shouldn't.
It's a company that's starting up that's uh, they're remote remote driving cars. Let's put it that way. So this car that's driving you is actually remotely driven. So it's it's I don't want to give the whole thing away right now, because I do want to do a story
with them, and it's just so super super cool. But if you like, let's just put it this way, if your kid is playing video games with one of those like you know, steering wheel controllers at this point, they may have a future with this startup because that's basically what they're doing, except they're driving real cars on real streets from a remote place. So anyway, that got canceled.
So my wife and I were supposed to go to Vegas anyway and pick up this story, and so we're like, you know what, let's just go.
So we be lined it to Vegas.
And as a tech person, I am always interested in seeing sort of tech in action, right, So no matter what I mean, I think there's this like term for like people always be closing, for like a you know, salesperson. For me, it's ABT always be testing. So when I'm doing something, and I mentioned this last time, how I went to the airport and I charged my cars and wanted to see how the charging works, the EV charging
at the airport. So you know, it takes a little bit longer, and it takes it's a little bit more in depth for me, you know, involved I should say, bringing multiple phones, trying out multiple apps. But anyway, let me go through the different things that I was sort of testing along the way, just on a regular trip to Vegas. And I know people love or hate Vegas.
I'm one of those people that I love it when I am anticipating going there, and I hate the drive home or I hate coming home because you're not feeling so good, you know what I mean. So let's start with the parking. So at Lax, reserve the parking online, which they they just readed all the parking at Lax and so it's all high tech, it's all new. Of course they increased the price, but I reserve my parking online, and there isn't a thing that I'm there's always a
lesson in all this stuff. But the reason why I mentioned this is because you should always try to do stuff online or through the app as much as possible right now, because this is where all the companies are trying to get you to go, and so they're giving you some discounts. So by booking my parking online, it was cheaper than driving up and booking it in person or just taking a ticket, So I saved like twenty
thirty bucks. The thing I thought was cool about it, and I wondered if they did this, But they asked me to put my license plate in the account when I paid for my parking, and I was like, I wonder if they're going to like automatically let me into the parking lot when it does a read of my license plate. And sure enough, I've drove up to the little guard rail and the thing just rose when it saw my license plate. So I thought that was pretty cool. And then I was like, all right, let's see if
they're really good. Let's see if this works on the exit. And sure enough I didn't have to pull out a ticket. I didn't have to do anything. I just drove to the exit of the parking garage. It recognized my license plate once again, the little pole lifted, and it was great. At the airport, I got a salad from this vending machine they call Farmer's Fridge, but I thought was pretty cool. So it's a high tech vending machine that has fresh salads in there. And what's neat about this is that
it's just neat. I mean to have They emailed me because once I tweeted about they have six hundred fridge and wholesale locations nationwide. I had no idea. This is like a logistical nightmare to get these fresh salads across the nation to all of these different vending machines, but it was excellent on my way. I use this app called Flighty if you want a really good flight tracking app. But I'm gonna talk more about spring break apps and
a little bit, but this one is called Flighty. It's really the most beautiful tracking app for flights you could ever imagine on iOS. And yes, you're gonna have to pay if you really want the best features. But what I love about this app is that it looks back through all of your previous flights and it will show you how many miles you've flown and how many different
times you've gone to different places. So I can look at my lifetime miles and see that I've gone five hundred and thirty one thousand miles two hundred and forty eight twenty one point three times around the world, and I've been to forty six airports twelve countries, and I've flown for fifty one days.
Now.
This is all just what they found in my email, and it only goes back to uh well, twenty thirteen according to them. But anyway, that's the kind of cool stuff. And then when you're in Vegas, Oh my gosh, has tech taken over? I remember when there were little change carts and buckets for coins, and now it is all cash less. I mean, I guess it's not cashless, it's just cash. And those cash machines, by the way, they
don't even give you change. When you've got, like, you know, twenty one dollars and twenty two cents to cash out, they just give you the twenty one bucks and then you could donate the rest of charity, many many more things. I'll talk more about Vegas after the break. Phone lines are open triple eight rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. If you got voicemail, give me a call again. Phone
lines are open. Welcome back to rich On Tech. Phone lines are open at triple eight rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. If you get the voice, bail on the first try. Try calling again. All right, So south By Southwest is happening in Austin, Texas. It is one of my favorite things to go to, even though I
have not been there in a while. It's just it's it's always just right after CS and you know, I'm anyway, so uh Kaya Yuif is a reporter for the Information and she is down there, and Kaya, how is it Welcome.
To the show, Hi Rich, thanks for having me. I mean, it feels like it's back. I was here last year and it was firstly attended. We were coming out of Omicron. Still there were all sorts of restrictions, so there's tons of hus one bustle. The events are very busy, so it does feel like we're.
Back in action here now.
South By Southwest IF for the uninitiated, is kind of it started out as like a music festival and then it was music interactive and oh film, So there's like three kind of tracks at this festival, and tech is a big part of it, and a lot of tech folks go there to talk about stuff and to discuss kind of the issues or things that are happening in the industry. But it's also a place where many startups have gotten their start, Like I mean, I think Twitter, Kaya, can you help me out here?
Was it Twitter? Like yep?
Twitter, Fourth Square? There were a few really big ones that came out of it.
Yeah, so every year I would go and I would just kind of walk around and see what the startups were, which ones looked cool, and of course they were always giving out like little swag. And you know, the thing is everyone's trying to get your attention. That's really what it comes down to. If you're a startup, they're all just trying to get your attention. So kaya, first off, the big news of the day this SVB, this Silicon Valley Bank.
I assume that's just what everyone talking about.
Yeah, I mean absolutely, you have you know, on one hand, you have the festival attack, people are excited, but you do have this news of Fulican Valley Bank's implosion hanging over the kickoffs, you know, as founders and vcs descended on Austin yesterday. So we're telling me they were scrapping their evening plans or you know, trying to just navigate the unfolding situation. So pretty much every conversation that, every conversation I've had with people has touched on a sub.
And so my sort of thought is that this is obviously just starting. This is just the beginning. I'm not saying other banks will fail. I mean, we don't know if that's going to happen or not, but it does have repercussions throughout the industry that we may not understand just yet. I mean, a lot of these startups use this bank and may not have access to their capital at this point, right.
Yeah, definitely, The Information has done a ton of reporting on this. I Mean, the big issue immedia issue is making payroll, so startups are really trying to figure that out. You know, it's possible a buyer will come in as well. So this is really unfolding and could change by the minute, or the day or the hour.
So besides that, what is kind of what is some of the main themes you're seeing this year? I mean, obviously crypto is always kind of a lingering in the tech world.
Is that a big thought this year?
So it's funny because last year it was you could not escape crypto. There were flyers everywhere for crypto projects. One of the most popular activations was from Doodles, which was an NFT project that's very pastel you pastel themes, there were long lines to get into it. This year it's pretty much crickets. I mean, there are still webs three and crypto panels going on, but the big scene is definitely AI. So we've done this, this pivot from
crypto to AI. Last year I went to a brunch for women in Websterree and this year I was invited to an AI brunch, So you're really seeing kind of the sharp move to AI here this year.
I feel like with the tech industry at this point, it is like just imagine a bunch of people like sitting in a in an auditorium and just looking over the left ah, looking over to the right, ah, looking over to the middle AH. So it's like all these different things that the industry kind of fixates on. Crypto definitely had its time. It seems like there's less interest these days, clearly because of what happened with FTX and all the collapse of that. But now AI, I don't
see the same future for that like AI. Well, there's also VR was in there where people were all excited about VR, which I still think is gonna happen, but it's AI has seemed to happen the fastest out of anything we've seen so far.
Would that be kind of accurate?
Yeah, definitely, And I think the focus is really on generative AI so we've seen obviously open ais chat GBT takes the world by storm over the past few weeks and months. So it's not even it's AI, but it's also generative AI and kind of what the applications can look like.
Yeah, explain can you explain that a little bit? What does that mean?
Yeah?
I think the difference is it's tangible, right, you can go into this chat box and ask it to write something for you and it does it. Whereas I think with a lot of these webs free and crypto applications, it was still, you know, very much still an idea versus the tech wasn't totally there yet. So I think that's part of the reason. But I think it's also really useful and has really strong consumer application.
I mean, I know personally, I've been using the bing ai since I got access to the wait list feature, you know, like the bing dot com slash new, and I've now been using it on a daily basis because
it's so interesting, especially having it on my phone. Like the other night, I was at a concert and there was three artists, and typically I would look up those artists on Google and just get like a little background of them, and you know, Google has its way of kind of putting different information front and center when you Google someone, but with this being AI, it pretty much gives me like a biography of them that's sort of written up just for me, And it's just a whole
different way of thinking about getting information, which I think is really fascinating to me.
Yeah, definitely. So we've we've seen a lot of that. I haven't got for a ton of sessions yet on jener to AI, but it's very hard to escape this year now.
You cover creator economy in.
A big way.
Yes, I do, So tell me about that. I mean, what's what's going on with that? Especially at south By and are we seeing anything new with that?
Yeah?
I think with the Creator company. The main event that I went to yesterday was an event thrown by Doing Things Media. It's a meme account that raised over twenty million dollars in VC funding last year. They're behind popular Meana accounts, and they actually acquired another meme account called Overheard. I don't know if you know overheard La, but it's a pretty funny account. So they threw a big party yesterday. It's interesting because last year there were companies like Patreon.
The membership platform for fans and creators who had a big event. I don't think they have a big presence this year. So I think a lot of startups are just feeling kind of the change in the economy and they're they're not really spending the dollars as much as last year, but they're certainly our creators here.
Did you just say that a meme account raised twenty how.
Much more than twenty million dollars last year?
Correct?
Twenty million dollars for memes. This is the stuff that we're talking about that you scroll through on Instagram and it looks like it's sort of hacked together by someone, and these are these are business. This is a big business behind this. I've never heard of this company doingthings dot com this.
Is media, yeah, oh doing things? Yeah, this is wild. Oh my gosh.
Yes, there was an Instagram fame. It's Corky at the event yesterday as well. Who has one million followers on Instagram name vaccine. So okay, well that celebrity.
Sighting that I get.
I mean, I get the fact that these animals on Instagram. I mean, look Instagram. Now hold on about this whole thing, though, I've got this article about about Instagram pausing their reels play bonus.
So have you heard that?
And you know this is basically if you've saw a lot of reels on your Instagram feed, it's because they were paying creators a bonus for doing these things. And that bonus at the beginning was a lot, and then of course it became less and less as we went on. But now they're going to say they're not going to do this anymore over the next thirty days are kind of like sunsetting it.
Do you think that will have an impact at all?
Yeah, I mean we've seen this kind of pull back across the board. I mean, these tech companies saw such rich engagement during pandemic lockdowns. They were trying to rival the rise of TikTok. So a lot of these platforms, not just Instagram, rolled out all sorts of cash incentives for creators. But you know, now these companies are laying off workers and they're not as flush with cast they're
not able to make those investments. So, you know, I think these programs were always a nice bonus for creators and it was nice to be able to get that cash, but creators know that they can't rely on those programs because they come and go. I think what's been most reliable is partnerships with brands as well as YouTube has you know, long been kind of the leader in terms of directly making money from a platform through their ad
revenue sharing. So I do think it's it's obviously going to have a hit on creators' earnings, but I think the creators who are really savvy know that they have to just take adage of the cash when it's there.
And at the same time, YouTube just unleashed shorts revenue, so you creators for the first time are making money based on ads on their shorts. So that's a good thing there.
Yeah, and YouTube actually used to have a fund for sports and they moved to the ad revenue sharing model, so we make the Instagram go that route as well.
All right, Kaya Yurif. How can folks find you?
You can find me on Twitter at k Urif and you can also subscribe to my newsletter at the Information about the Creator Economy.
All right, you're gonna get some barbecue while you're down there.
Oh absolutely.
I wonder if they're doing like vegan barbecue. I mean, you get to you know, you gotta please everyone.
Right, totally. I'm further.
But you're not doing that one. That's I just be curious. I'm not that I'm vegan, but I just be curious, you know.
Yeah, barbecue for me, all.
Right, get some good stuff, all right, Thanks so much for joining me here on the show. All right, coming up Southwest, south by Southwest just one of my favorite Austin in general, just one of my favorite cities.
I don't even know why I said the vegan thing.
I probably just upset a lot of people because when you're going to Austin barbecue, you're not really thinking about getting vegan barbecue. But I'm just saying I'm curious. I you know, there's so many new things happening. I mean, look at the like the milks that you can get in your coffee. Right you go there and there's like a list of like one hundred different milks you can get now, made from everything from oats to almonds and bananas. So anyway, I was just curious. Don't don't send me
the hate mail, all right. Phone lines are open at triple eight Rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two four to one zero one.
My name is rich Dmiro.
You are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name is rich Dmiro, tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles.
Every week in the show, I talk.
About some of the things that I've posted to my social media and this.
Week, let's see did I do a lot?
Oh? Yeah, I did so I posted, Uh, let's see I've got at rich on Tech is where you can find me on Instagram. Posted some pictures from my trip to Vegas I talked about earlier. Oh you gotta see this, I posted. I'm We're gonna talk a little bit later about this car, but the Lucid Air EV. So this Lucid car you've probably started just started seeing them on the streets if you live anywhere in California. Maybe not elsewhere, but it is an incredible EV that's very high end.
So this one I drove was like over one hundred thousand dollars, So we're talking luxury EV. This is not for everyone, believe me, but it'd be nice, that's for sure.
So I've got a video.
They took us in this car and we went zero to sixty in about three zero point four seconds. And I'm not kidding. I was not prepared for that at all, like really not prepared, and so this captures the reality of my reaction, which I've never seen me react like this to anything, so you can check that out. I also every time it rains in Los Angeles, I post the same exact video of me in this get up.
It's a pod.
It's called the walking Pod, and it looks like a giant wearable hamper. And we recorded this video three years ago at this point, maybe four years ago at this point, and it went viral and every time I post it, it still goes again, every single time. So I posted a new kind of clip of just me walking down the street in this thing, so you can see how silly I look. And then of course I posted some pictures from the week in review. Let me tell you
about Facebook. By the way, if you're trying to call in, I believe it looks like we had a little bit of an issue with that in case you couldn't tell. But if you're trying to call in, I think it all seems to be resolved at this point. Kim is standing by waiting for your call at triple eight rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. I'd blame it on the time change, but that hasn't happened yet, so we'll see
what happens next week. I know I'm always a little off with that time change, so maybe the lines we're just sleepy today. Facebook making a major change. They put out this blog post this week saying, hey, contrary to popular reports, we're not dying.
We're not dead.
In fact, we've got two billion people using our service every single day. People are using Facebook for more than just connecting with friends and family, but also to discover and engage what's important to them, which is true. I'd probably agree with that. I think that I've seen even on my Facebook feed that they are using a lot more AI to kind of figure out what goes in that feed. You don't realize that these tech companies are
scanning everything you're uploading. So even you know, back in the day of Instagram, you would put hashtags on things, those are almost not even necessary because Facebook and Instagram know more about what you're in TikTok and Twitter. They know more about what you're posting about than we do. They're scanning your images, they're scanning your videos, They're slicing and dicing to figure out exactly what content is in there and then using that information to serve this up
to other people. They're not doing it to be nice to you. They're doing it for the benefit of their platform, because the more people that interact with things that people post, the better. And if you post something really interesting it just happens to be a video of a waterfall and you don't say anything about it, they know, okay, we're going to show this to people that like pictures of waterfalls in Hawaii and you didn't even have to say anything.
So Facebook is kind of doing it about face. I don't know if you remember this a couple of years ago, so back I had to look this up. It was like in two thousand. It was a while ago. I can't remember. It's twenty fourteen maybe that they said, you know what, We're gonna split off Facebook Messenger from the main Facebook app. And people went nuts, myself included, because I said, why why do we need a separate app for Facebook Messenger. It's so much easier to have it
all built into one thing, And they did it. People downloaded Facebook Messenger. Facebook Messengers become very popular, but now Facebook is saying, you know what, We're going to rethink that little decision. We're now going to build messaging back into the main Facebook app. Wait what, why are they doing this? Well, they're doing this because of a little
app called TikTok. And the reason they're doing this is because TikTok's really good at showing you stuff, videos that you want to see, or maybe you didn't want to see, or you just didn't even know existed. But the problem is, TikTok is not a very good social network. You may send those videos to your friends, but it's not in the same way that you can post it to your
Facebook or to share it on Instagram. And so now Facebook is thinking, okay, this might be a pretty killer solution we have where people can watch stuff on our platform and also share it to their friends on our platform. And that is why they are now testing building messaging back into Instagram. So are back into Facebook. So don't be surprised if you log into Facebook and you get this little window that says, hey, did you know you
can message in Facebook again? You're gonna say, wait, I'm confused. I thought I need a Facebook Messenger to do that. I thought they took it out of Facebook. Now they're putting it back in, So it's been long enough. I think it was twenty fourteen when they did that, so it's been a while. All right, let's take our first call. John is in mission viah John, you're on with.
Rich Okay, thank you. I've got to go from Windows eight point one because it's at its EOL, so I'm going to have to go to either Windows ten or Windows eleven. I do very basic stuff on my computer, mostly financial stuff, and I was wondering which is going to be the easier operating system to use, either ten or eleven? Which one do you think is going to be better for me to use long term?
What do you do on your computer?
Mainly just email and then online access to my different accounts, and I'd like to do some scanning.
Okay, oh scanning? Interesting? Okay?
What about so you're most of what you're doing is happening inside a web browser, like email and all that.
Kind of stuff and connecting tier counts.
So I mean I've been running the Windows Live email program.
Okay, So you're using that, okay, which is a nice email program. I think that's fine. It'll change a little bit when you get to new version of Windows. But here's what I'd recommend, So I'd say just skip over to Windows eleven. Windows eleven is pretty much a version of Windows ten. I think the biggest leap is going to this new software in general from Windows eight. I mean, Windows ten is a whole different kind of look and feel. So why go to Windows ten when it's going to
be supported for a couple more years. You mentioned EOL that means end of life, so Windows eight means it's it's not getting active software updates. Windows ten will get software updates until October fourteenth, twenty twenty five. Windows eleven is pretty much the operating system, which is the one I'd go with. They just came out the big ol' update for it, so I say take the plunge, do
the big update to Windows eleven. Learn the system, and it's gonna last for a long time because Windows eleven is very very new. So I would just skip to the eleven and not worry about the ten portion, because why learn something twice? Just learn it once? All right, John and Mission Viejo, thanks so much for calling today. Do appreciate it. Phone lines are open at Triple eight rich one on one eight eight eight seven four to
two four one zero one. Coming up in the show, we're going to talk to John Faulkner of Clean Fleet Report. We're gonna talk EV's and his favorite evs right now, Plus in studio guest Jefferson.
Graham is going to join me formerly of USA Today.
He's going to talk about taking better pictures with your iPhone and all kinds of other stuff you're.
Listening to rich on Tech. More of the show coming up after this.
Welcome back to rich on Tech. My name is rich DeMuro, hanging out here talking technology with you at Triple eight rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four two four.
To one zero one.
I'll tell you about the new ring video doorbell in just a little bit, but first let's get to Richard in Georgia.
Richard, I like your name.
You're on with rich Hey, Rich great job. By the way, I've been listening to you since you took over for Leo.
No thank you. Appreciate that.
I've got a home studio and I'm looking to move my control room from the same room into another room for better sound isolation. That way I can hear the audio coming through the gear and not you know, physically in person. But obviously I don't want to cut a hole in the wall between the two bedrooms. That's not very good for reseal all that, you know, resell of the house.
But well, how long are you gonna stay here? I mean maybe maybe this is a long term plan, right.
Well, at least a few years. But I was wondering if if there's like a digital solution for that. Maybe I was thinking maybe a march or on one side, monitor on the other in a camera.
Yeah, that's one of them. That's that's that's a start.
It's funny you say this because I went to my friend's house in the Las Vegas area, he's a musician, and he showed me he had done exactly what you're talking about, but he cut the hole in the wall. So he had a great setup. I mean it was a whole studio. He had all the little streaming cameras set up. Everything was was really really like slick. So I get it. The window is probably the best way to go. But if you don't want to do that, and you know the best the next best thing is to probably.
Do some webcams.
Okay, Yeah, it's funny because when I when I first got into the not radio business, but TV back in the day when I was a journalism student. I will never forget when they told us that the control room is not overlooking the studio. It was like, you know where I work at Katla, it's a whole different area. I mean, it's not in the same building. Well it used to not be, now it iss But the reality is that, yeah, you can do all kinds of stuff
from anywhere now because of how good technology's gotten. So I just happened to be at the Spotify. I took a big, a big tour of the Spotify studios here in Los Angeles. They have an incredible facility and Richard, you would be you would love to see.
These things, have to check that out.
Awesome.
But they showed me the studio where they do all the recordings for sort of like you know where artists come in. So I'm looking at some of my pictures here. They just have a whole bunch of instruments, just tons of instruments that people can choose from. So they come in there and they just pick something and they want them to be They actually said they want them to be different than what they typically use because that feeds the curiosity or the sorry, the creativity, right.
Absolutely yeah, they get your brain going, it makes you think out of the box. Yeah, absolutely right.
And now I'm looking, I'm looking at their studio and their control room does have windows overlooking the studio. Uh, they've got probably a giant panel of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, Oh, probably about forty five what do they call mixer pots or something whatever boards?
Yeah, the headphone mixers.
Yeah, there's a lot of them there, so I don't know how extended. But but here's my point about all this is because here's what I learned. The term that I learned when I was there is called PTZ.
Have you heard of that term?
No?
Okay, So that is a pan tilt and zoom. So a PTZ camera. As soon as you look this thing up, you will recognize it. This is pretty much what these studios are using, not only to live stream, but also you can use it to sort of monitor what's happening in there. So I think you can do dual use with this. But I would recommend taking a look at a couple of those and installing them very good.
I didn't think about. Yeah, a control in the pan and zoom in in the tilt. That's great, that's a great idea.
Yeah, because you could go you can go with a standard camera, but you know, without that move and it's just one big wide angle. But you know, why not, if you're gonna be building this thing out, why not spend a little bit more and get something that's more flexible that will enable you to either connect with the people that are in this studio a little bit more monitor them. If you want a really cheap solution, have you heard of the company whys Yes, So Whise makes
a pan and tilt camera that's very inexpensive. I mean, let's let's see how much theirs is. It is there on version three of it. It is thirty three dollars and ninety nine cents. So if you want something very inexpensive, that's one way to go. But if you want to get one of the more expensive PTZ cameras, you know, I'm seeing them on I was just looking them up quickly, and there's you know, Best Buys got some for about four hundred bucks.
But they go up.
They can get up pretty expensive, so they can go up to a couple thousand. But that's that's probably what I recommend and maybe get like a you know, while you're while you're at it, get you know, like a zoom set up, Like maybe put one of these monitors in the corner that people can zoom in so that way you can just connect they can see your face, you know, over the zoom. But there's a lot you
can do here. I mean, all this stuff is off the shelf and very much doable, and people are doing this every day, So I think that it's just a matter of kind of figuring out what you want the capabilities, and just having fun with it.
Very cool. I appreciate that it's a lot of great information and I look forward to checking out some more out in the LA area once I get back out to California. Awesome and to longin it's been out there.
Yeah, ring me up and we'll see if we can get back into the Spotify studios, see if they'll let me back in once. Once these companies, once they let you out, they kind of like close the door behind you and they're like, Okay, we'll see you never again. No, I'm just kidding, right, especially since I worked for iHeart, So we'll see anyway, all right, Richard, thanks so much for joining me today.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right, have a good one.
All right, let me tell you about the speaking of video cameras, let me tell you about the new Ring Video doorbell, so brand new battery doorbell Plus. It's called I think Ring has way too many video doorbells at this point. You go to their website and you're just like, which one do I get? Because there are so many. There used to be one Ring video doorbell. Now there is a lineup of all different types, some plug in, some are battery, some are new, some have higher resolution.
But the battery doorbell Plus is pretty much their standard selection video doorbell. It's a little higher end, so it gives you some new features. The number one feature I think you're gonna like is that the battery life is up to three times better than the standard Ring video doorbell. Now they say the original, So now does that mean when the original came out like ten years ago? What do they mean by that? So I'm gonna have to
test this and see just how much battery. I've got a Ring video doorbell with the battery, and I'm replacing the battery probably every I'd say, maybe every four months, and it doesn't lie as long as i'd like, but I do have two batteries, so I just swap them out and that makes life. By the way, a little pro tip, just swap them out so much easier. Just
go on the Ring website. If you've got one of these video doorbells that you're swapping the battery and you're taking the battery out and you're charging it and you're putting it back in, just just buy a secondary battery and keep that one charging and then you can just swap them out and that way you're never without your your video doorbell. So this is their first doorbell launch
in two years. The biggest difference you're gonna notice with the video is that it has a brand new viewing angle one hundred and fifty degrees by one hundred and fifty degrees field of view, so it's a one to one aspect ratio, so it's not like sixteen by nine. I think the Google one is more like that. But this will give you a head to toe view of your visitors, which is kind of cool. Then also you can see if you have a package at your front door.
Because the field of view is so wide, up and down and left and right, you can see the floor, so that's really handy because that's something that was greatly missing in the Ring video doorbells from yesteryear. The resolution is also better. It's got the highest HD resolution of any battery doorbell at fifteen thirty six p, so it's a decent resolution. It's probably you know, it's pretty reasonable.
So that's that's very good because sometimes people talk about how the resolution of these video doorbells just isn't very good. So fifteen thirty six will will provide a pretty good view of what's happening there. And it does have color night vision as well. So how much this is one hundred and seventy nine dollars. It will start shipping on April fifth. I will tell you this may be enough
for me to update my Ring video doorbell. It's been been a while since I got one, and so I think that this is probably about time to do it. One hundred and eighty dollars. The only thing I would caution you on is paying full price. Ring products like Amazon products, because they're owned by Amazon, they do typically go on sale one, two, maybe three times a year, so I would wait until one of those things goes
on sale. One of those special days they have. Usually it's around a holiday, obviously during Prime Day, but I would wait one hundred and eighty bucks. Still decent deal, but I think you can get it for cheaper. I think you could probably get that price down to maybe fifty dollars less than that. So something'll look out for for sure. Google Io happening in person May tenth.
What does that mean?
Google Io is Google's big, big developers conference. I've been to this many many times. It's one of my favorites of the year because they pretty much show you all the cool stuff they've been working on at Google. And this year should be very exciting because we're going to see their new AI. I think they're gonna wait to show us barred in a big way until Google Io comes out on May tenth, so I.
Will be there.
This is happening in Mountain View, California, Shoreline Amphitheater. It's a limited live audience, but I was lucky and I got an invite from Google, so I will definitely be taking advantage of that. Love I'd love the Google stuff. These Googlers are just so nerdy and fun. They're like my people, you know. I just love chatting with them, I can be like, hey, answer me this question about how Android auto works. Like you get to talk to
the actual engineers that program this stuff. And so for me that's always a delight because there's only so much you can get by looking at the stuff they put online or playing with yourself.
Other things expected.
To be seen at Google Io twenty twenty three Pixel seven a that is going to be an inexpensive pixel device. Also the Pixel tablet, that's exciting because we haven't seen a good Android tablet in a while. And maybe even the Pixel fold their foldable phone, and maybe a pixel tracker as well. And of course Android fourteen they'll probably show off that too.
All right, coming up on.
The show, we're going to talk about evs. Plus what else do I have going on here? Oh, we're gonna talk about spring break apps. I've been testing a bunch of them. So I told you about flighty earlier. I've got plenty more where that came from. Be a call triple eight rich one on one eight eight eight seven four to two four to one zero one.
You're listening to rich on Tech.
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you on a well, you know, some of you are listening live, some of your listening later. So I'm just hanging out with you eight eight eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two,
four to one zero one. I usually do some feedback at the end of the show, but since Bob just emailed me and said, great job on your show, but one suggestion, since you're broadcasting nationwide to people who may or may not know California cities, instead of saying Chatsworth or call from Northridge, you might want to add California.
Just a suggestion. Thanks for all you do fun stuff.
Uh, you know this is so interesting, Bob, because this is I struggle with this also on KTLA because I'm i mean very LA centric, right, like I am located in Los Angeles. The show broadcast Los Angeles, both KTLA
and this show. But you're right, my KTLA segment goes nationwide, and so does this show, and so there's always that line of making sure people are comfortable understanding what you're talking about, where you're coming from, what you're doing, and so on KTLA it's become you know, sometimes if there's a city I'm referencing in a story that people outside
Los Angeles may not know. I say we went to San Bernardino, California, and people in Los Angeles are watching my story saying, wait, why is Rich saying.
San Bernardino, California?
Like, I know San Bernardino, I live right here, but people that are watching in other cities like Chicago or Honolulu may not know those places. So I agree that is definitely something I need to get better at, and I will do that for sure, because I take for granted I think if I say Phoenix, I don't know if I need to say Arizona. But if it's a
smaller city somewhere, maybe I'll just do that anyway. All right, So I was only about Vegas earlier, and I kind of want to continue that conversation because there was more I had, more I had thoughts on. So I was talking about how my wife and I went to Vegas over the weekend. We didn't really do much except just kind of enjoy you know, eating out, dinner and just kind of shopping whatever. Not a huge gambler, but you know, I do like playing some of these machines the kind
of fun. Sometimes I'm not going to spend a lot of money on them because to me, it's you know, I'd rather buy something with my money, but it's still fun. But one thing I noticed is that the digitizing of Vegas is really happening in a very fast way. And I mentioned earlier how when I first started going to Vegas, they actually had people that would give out change. There'd be people walking around these little carts that would change
your money. You would take a twenty dollars bill and you'd get nickels in a role.
I mean this is going back many many.
Years, but used to actually put coins in a machine in Las Vegas, which nowadays is just so not the thing you put money in. And we used to sit there and play a nickel slot for an hour on five ten bucks. And now, of course people feed twenties and hundreds into these machines. But the slot machines are really getting high tech. I mean bigger and bigger and bigger.
Every time I go. I think at the Venetian wherever I was, they're gonna have to open up the ceiling because some of these machines are getting so large three D screens, the sound effects. The other thing I noticed is that all of these table games that used to have dealers sitting there are now digital And so we went to the Paris Casino in Las Vegas and they had this entire almost it looked like a nightclub area
where it was three dealers on a stage. One was doing craps, one was doing blackjack, one was doing roulette, but they were also sort of dancers and DJs at the same time. So they're literally spinning music, spinning the roulette table, and everyone that's playing is playing on a digital screen at a seat in front of them. So imagine a little mini auditorium where it's kind of real and kind of digital.
It was a mix.
That was the first time I've ever seen that, and I saw that theme at various other hotels. It wasn't just the Paris. I also saw that happening at Caesar's and in general, I've just seen a lot more of these games that were traditionally table games becoming digital.
Now.
As a tech person, I thought when they had USB charging ports on the slot machines, that was cool until I realized the security implications of that, and I'm not a big fan. So now they have switched to wireless charging, so while you're sitting there at a slot machine, you can just put your phone down and it will wirelessly charge. The other thing that I'm seeing is the idea of back in the day, you were not allowed to take
pictures in a casino, or it was frowned upon. Like I specifically remember when we first started having cell phones and casinos, they were just like no, no, no, can't take pictures. And now, of course there's selfie stations, which is a whole other thing. So it's just the changes that are happening are happening rapidly, and if you're not watching them, you may not realize just how much of these things are changing.
Now.
As a tech person, I find it very fascinating to just watch this digital transformation of almost every industry and in Vegas and almost everywhere. It's like we are doing more and more on our own. It's much more self service no matter what you're doing these days, and it's almost like tech creep right where it's just it's creeping up on us and we don't really realize that it's all just changing very quickly. So I mentioned these spring Break travel apps. I tested a bunch. I put a
piece on KTLA last week. I tested a whole bunch of apps and here's the ones that I would recommend. All right, So first off, if you need some help with packing, the app is called pack point, So you put in some details about your trip, where you're going, It looks at the weather and it just a list based on the activities and whether where you're going. And so that's called packpoint, and it's just a nice thing
if you're always forgetting something when you pack. Tripsy so a lot of people like this app called trip it, which puts an itinerate together for your travel. Tripsy is a little bit more consumer oriented, and what I love about it is once you put everything in there, then you can share it with friends and families. You can share your whole itinerary. Now, when it comes to hotels, you got to check out Google Hotels to see if
there's any cheap dates for where you're going. They will mark things as deals because Google has so much data. So definitely go to Google Hotels if you have not done that. You gotta be careful though, because sometimes they will lead you to some sort of random hotel sites that you don't want to book on, so just be careful. And I also mentioned Flighty that is a beautiful flight tracking app.
On iOS.
But if you're on Android, check out an app called flight Aware. I love flight Aware because it gives you really good flight alerts, especially if you have someone that's coming into town. Flight Aware will help you know when they take off, when they land, baggage, all that good stuff. I've got this all linked up on my website at Richontech dot TV. Coming up, we're gonna talk evs. You're listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech.
Rich DeMuro here talkin technology at triple eight Rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. So this week had a little fun with a EV called the Lucid. Lucid is a new car company that is building luxury evs, and the one that I testdrove is the Lucid Air. And this isn't a car that's very expensive. Let me let me get the specs up here. We did the Touring edition.
So this one hundred and seven thousand dollars, dual motor, six hundred and twenty horsepower, three point four seconds zero to sixty and by the way, the top of the line goes zero to sixty in two point six seconds with over a thousand horsepower. I am not a car guy, but a thousand horsepower seems pretty pretty intense. Even this six hundred and twenty was pretty intense. Battery is the thing about this company, and I think they're trying to
take that Apple model is efficiency. So the battery compared to the software, they get about four hundred and twenty five miles to the charge and that's the big lead here.
All right.
So while I was up in Ventura, I talked to John Faulkner. He's a senior editor at clean Fleet Report. They talk all about EV's. Enjoy our conversation, Rich DeMuro here in Ventura, California, actually on a Lucid EV drive. So I'm testing out a new car called the Lucid Air.
This is a very high end EV. Expensive but it's.
Got a long range and it's really a luxury vehicle. Joining me on the trip is John Faulkner. He is the senior writer at cleanfleet Report dot com.
He tests a lot of evs. John, thanks so much for joining me.
Hey, Rich, fantastic all right, So what are your impressions of this Lucid First off, the first.
Thing is that it's one of four models that they have, and they began with their first two models that were over one hundred thousand dollars and this one is at ninety two thousand dollars. Yes, it has a smaller battery, but you're still going to be getting several hundred miles in range. And we just drove it from Malibu through the mountains down here to Ventura and it handled extremely well on the on the twisties and using regenitive braking.
I didn't touch the brakes on the whole time I went through the mountains.
Oh wow, so you were just letting it kind of it kind of slows down. That's a new experience for a lot of folks if you haven't driven an EV. What's happening in that In that scenario.
Whenever you lift off the accelerator, and with an EV you don't call it the gas pedal, it slows the motors. And when the motors are slowing or it comes to a stop, you are regenerating kinetic energy heat from the motor back into the battery. You can actually watch on the battery gauge. You can watch the you can watch the amount of charge rise.
So you've been reviewing evs for a long time.
Is there increased interest or is it at interest at all time highs at this point?
Well, it certainly is. And I live in California, and California is the center for electric vehicles in the United States. And we have in this state the most robust built out charging network and then people are doing solar panels, people are putting level two chargers in their house, and so this state has really adopted electric vehicle propulsion.
What if I live in another state, what what's the state of affairs there?
Several states are getting into building out their infrastructure also, and the the current Inflation Reduction Act also called ira A, billions are going into building out the the electric charging infrastructure around the United States. But as far as individual states go, it really comes down to and I hate to say it, but it's politics, and some states don't want to believe in electric.
Vehicles.
There are actually a couple of states that say that they want to ban electric vehicles from being sold there. And so this is this is not a nationwide grasping of the technology. It certainly is along the coasts Oregon, Washington, California, Arizona, Texas has a has a large ev population U as as does the Northeast.
So what are some of the benefits to evs versus the challenge of owning an EV.
Well, the benefit is that every single time that you drive down the street, you drive by a gasoline station that has assigned five twenty five for gasoline, you can just say oh and off you go, so you don't stop. That's that's what's nice about that. The also owning an EV versus a conventional internal combustion engine car is that you don't have tune ups. You you don't have there's no fluids changed, there's no belts there the brakes I
mentioned regenerative braking. Actually what that is is that's the motor slowing the vehicle. That means that the brakes, the brake pads are not being used as much. There are stories of people in some EV's going over one hundred thousand miles before they change their brake pads. So the cost of maintenance is a serious consideration when it comes down to owning an electric fevehicle. Since the average that a person drives every day is forty five miles round trip.
If you have a vehicle that gets one hundred and fifty to three hundred miles on a charge. You can figure out how you only have to do that. Vehicle may charge it once once a week. But if you're plugging it in every night, just like you would your mobile phone every night, plug in your car at home, you top off the battery and we're back to the beginning of what we said. You drive by the gas stations and you get that kind of a nice feeling.
Now, whenever I do a story about EVS and post it to my social media, I get the folks saying.
Well, what about these batteries.
They're dirty, they can't be recycled, you can't do anything with them.
What can you speak to that at all? The battery does it have a life after the car batteries?
Absolutely do. They are being recycled in a way that people probably didn't think several years ago they could be. There are companies that are completely dedicated to recycling the batteries. But it's it's not just recycling the components, which you've heard the term rare earth metals. What they're doing is they're taking these and there and they're making battery walls out of them, so you get solar panels on your roof. Well, that's good, But overnight, when the sun's not hitting your panels,
you're now on the grid. Well, you have a battery set up in your house, and now you can run your battery. You can run off of the batteries from the electric that you've created from the solar panels during the day, so they're being repopulated for that. They're also there's the battery technology is increasing every single day. The batteries we're using now in twenty twenty three, this will not be the technology we're using five to ten years from now.
What are some of your favorite or most exciting evs out there?
Besides the Lucid of course, I.
Really like the Kia EV six or the performance version of the.
EV six GT.
I like the Genesis GV sixty. I like the Hyundai Ionic five. The common thread running through all those is they're all they're all produced by the Hyundai Group, and somehow Hundai has electric compulsion figured out. I like the Machi from Ford. It's a very nice vehicle. I think they're probably the best value on the market. Is the Bolt, whether you get the bolt or you get the one called the EUV, which stands for Electric Utility Vehicle wonderful vehicle,
almost three hundred miles in range. The vehicle costs, you know, around thirty thousand dollars, and it qualifies for all of the all of the tax rebates for the Feds and state rebates also. So those are some of them, but there are. Every single day, it seems a manufacturer is announcing they're coming out with electric vehicle. Now some of them are quite exotic, and some of them are going to be hopefully on the on the lower end, and so that that's going to be the shakeout is an
EV for everybody. They're not for everybody, and we need to we need to stress that that's either because of their driving lifestyle, what they do, their vocation. And another thing is going to be the charging situation, and that is that here in California, where it's temperate, you plug in your vehicle and you're going to get a maximum charge.
When you go into a climate that is cold, and I don't mean fifty degrees, I mean maybe you know, thirty or thirty below, that vehicle is going to have a reduction in the amount that the battery can charge and also the range that you can drive the vehicle. So most evs are coming out now with what are called battery conditioners. They raise the battery before you charge it. They raise the battery up to the proper temperature so
they can accept a full charge. So the technology is changing every single day and it's exciting.
And if.
You pay attention to ads almost Super Bowl, you will see that everything advertised there was an electric vehicle, all right.
John Faulkner of the Clean Fleet Report, tell folks how to find.
You cleanfourport dot com. And what you'll find there is that we cover what we consider what we consider alternative fuel vehicles, and so that's anything that's electrified natural gas, hydrogen fuel cell, which is another form of electricity powered vehicles which we did not discuss, and that would also include diesel.
All right, thanks for joining me today.
It's been my pleasure.
All right.
If you want to see a little video from my test drive of the Lucid, we did a zero to sixteen about three point four seconds. I was not exactly prepared for it.
It's pretty wild.
You can find that on my Instagram at rich On Tech. I'm Rich Dumuro more of rich On Tech. After this, welcome back to rich On Tech. Rich DeMuro here plus your calls at eight eight eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. I finished that Elvis movie last night. I don't know if you've seen this, but it's the one it's I called it, and I I called it the Tom Hanks Elvis movie, and I realized that I was wrong because this was before I saw it. It's really the Austin
Butler Elvis movie. But I wasn't familiar with this actor before I watched it, and wow, he did a great job. I know I'm very late on this movie because I see things sometimes with movies. It takes me a long time, and it took me two weeks to finish this movie, but it was. It was really good, and I tweeted yesterday saying, I hope it's accurate because almost all of my knowledge of Elvis now is from this movie, and so I hope that it was at least somewhat accurate
because that's all I know about Elvis. And wow, I mean just such just a visually stunning movie. So if you haven't seen it, definitely check it out. Took me a bit to get on board with it, but I did.
All right.
Phone lines are open at triple eight Rich one one eight eight eight seven four to two four to one zero one.
Let me do a question.
I get a lot of questions via email, so let me do a question I got from Roslind. She says, Hey, Rich, what are your recommendations regarding a laptop versus an iPad from Microsoft Office? I use it for personal nothing too fancy. Thanks in advance, Roz Roz. Here is my thought about a laptop versus an iPad. Okay, laptop is great if you are getting work done. It is a phenomenal work
device you want to do You mentioned Microsoft Office. That leads me to believe that you want to do work on this device, whether it is email, whether it is writing documents, whether it is creating something anything. That's what I think a laptop is best for. The iPad is a phenomenal device, But the iPad is more of a content consumption device. And don't get me wrong, people do plenty of content creation on iPads. It can be used
in many, many different ways. But I would say a majority of the people who are using an iPad are using it to consume content, whether that's Netflix, whether that is just reading their email, whether that's Web browsing, whether that's reading a book. You can do a lot of stuff on an iPad. It is an incredible device. But you mentioned Microsoft Office specifically, and so in that case,
I would say you probably want a laptop. A laptop is going to be much more suited because of that keyboard that's built in, because of the screen, because of the ports.
It's just going to be easy to use.
Now, I will say I wish that Apple would get on board with a touch screen laptop, which my kids don't understand when they see me using the iPad or they use their iPad and then they go to their laptop. They say, I don't understand why Apple doesn't just have a touch screen, And I say, I don't know, and I think I do know. The answer is that they want you to buy the iPad in addition to the laptop. That's probably why they don't have the touch screen on
the laptops. But all the other major companies have moved to a touchscreen laptop for the most part, and so you can have the best of both worlds. Where you see something on the screen, you want to tap a box or whatever you need to do, just tap the screen. That's not the case on the Microsoft or the MacBook computers.
I will say that if you are thinking of getting the iPad with the keyboard case and maybe you're just doing light email, maybe you're just doing light work on the iPad, that's another solution because then you truly get the best of both worlds, especially if you're traveling a lot, because then you can have the iPad on the plane and when you get back to the hotel, you can actually do your work and email with that little keyboard. Those keyboards are never as good though, That's the bottom
line with that. Susan wrote in and said, my nephew suggested I start using duck duck goo to search and duck for my emails.
What are your thoughts, Sue? Okay.
Duck Duckgo is a search engine that prides itself on privacy. That is the main thing. And you've probably seen the ads if you go to their website duck duckgo dot com, it says, tired of being tracked online?
We can help.
We don't store your personal information, we don't follow you around with ads, we don't track you.
Ever, there's no sign up for this.
You don't need an account to search, and their big thing is that it is private compared to Google, that as soon as you start searching, they're recording everything you're doing and putting it into a profile of who you are and what you're searching for, so that they can sell ads against that. So duc Ducco still has ads, but I think they're sold on a more broad level and they're not necessarily targeted towards you. They're targeted towards
what you might be searching for. So if you search for kayaks, you're gonna get ads for kayaks, but the kayak company does not remember that you were searching for kayaks specifically. They just know that you happen to be
searching for kayaks at that time. There's a difference there, and that's the reason why you get those follow follow me around ads where you search for a pair of shoes on one website or sneakers, and next thing you know, they're following you around to every other website because those shoe sellers have gotten information from Google that say, oh, you visited this website. In fact, they're getting the information from the website that you first visit. So let me
explain how that works. You go to a website, let's say you go to a shoe website. That shoe website has a little tracking pixel in it from Facebook, from Google, from Microsoft, from other companies that serve up ads, and every time once you go to that website, it says, oh, Rich Demiro visited here. Now it may not have my name per se, but it has a link to who I am online, And so that website says, all right,
Rich visited here. He looked at these sneakers and that's what he's interested in, and that information now goes into this little database. And then when I go to a different website, it says, oh, by the way, Rich was looking for these sneakers before, so you should show him these sneakers up higher on our search results because he's probably looking for those. And by the way, you might want to send him a deal for those sneakers because he's looking for those sneakers. Let's get him to make
that purchase. Let's convert him, as they say. And so that's really what's happening. And the more that you search, the more information they get about you, the more they realize that you like to do outdoor stuff, you have a boat, you make a certain amount of money, you go to this place. You're looking at that place for a vacation, And all these websites that you visit sort of aang their information to prioritize the things that they think you like. And when you search on Google, same
thing happens. It kind of knows what you're looking for. It prioritizes ads, and they sell ads at a higher cost based on knowing more about you. So it's a big business. So what I recommend Duck doc go Yes, if you like your privacy. I'm not a personally the biggest fan of the search results that you get, but I will recommend getting the Duck email address. In fact,
I have that email address. It's at Duck dot com and it's a privacy centric email address that does not track you, and so it strips all the trackers out
of your email when someone sends you something. So I use that when I sign up for websites that I may be shopping on or something like that, or maybe just one time things where I just you know, if I'm signing up for Wi Fi at a Starbucks, I'll just give out my Duck dot com email address so that way I can just turn off that email and it's not tracking me and they don't know what's going on. They don't get my real email address. So yeah, sure, as a secondary email address, it's free.
Why not sign up for that?
But as for Duck Duco, you know, it's fine. I think that you know, if you like the search results and it's working for you, go for it. Coming up next on the show, we've got Jefferson Graham joining me, tech guy extraordinaire. He's going to talk about getting better pictures with your iPhone plus. Your call is a triple eight rich one oh one. You're listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to the third hour of rich on Tech. My name is rich DeMuro, hanging out talking technology with you,
waiting for Jefferson Graham to arrive. He's going to join me former USA Today Talking Tech reporter. He's gonna join me in studio. We're gonna chat about the new yellow iPhone taking pictures.
Let's see what else do I have for him. Let's see.
Oh, Apple's new classical music app. That's interesting, So I'm gonna get his take on that. Why he thinks they did a separate app just for classical music. You can find me online at rich on Tech. My website is rich on tech dot tv. If you want to prove the links I've got on there. It's all the stuff I talk about on TV, my newsletter and all of my social media links and a link to a podcast version of this show. Jesse is in Brooksville, Florida. Jesse, you're on with Rich.
Hey Rich, how's it going?
Man?
Everything's going well? How about you?
Awesome? Pretty awesome? Yeah, just a quick question. Basically, I just switched over to my carrier, my cell phone carrier, to be my internet provided or at my home. So basically just a few months, I want to say, maybe like in summer, like June July, I went to do some upgrades on my cell phones and then you know, they they made us the offer of doing that. I thought it was too good to be true, actually, just because I'm actually saving money on what I was paying
my cable company for Internet. Sure, that was pretty skeptical, pretty skeptical as to, you know, is this going to be as good? You know, we stream HD, we do you know the works, you know Netflix, there's a thousand devices, you know, all that kind of stuff. So I guess they gave me a money back guarantee. You know that if I didn't like it, I could return it, but
I'm gonna go for it. Well, lo and behold. I mean I started connecting one thing after the others, my security system and everything little by literal was holding, holding, holding, and it's still holding. But I've been wondering, you know, the other day, I was just thinking about that. As we hear about so much hacking and stuff and craziness out there, I was wondering, I wonder how.
Secure is this?
You know?
Is it as secure as what I had with.
My cable company.
I've been meaning to call for a while now, and I finally got around to it today.
Good question.
So you're wondering if the home internet because you're you're basically getting home Internet through your cable or through your cellular provider, which I'm guessing is either T Mobile or Verizon.
Right, it is T Mobile.
And it's like this device that you put in your house. It's like a little power that you sit there and it basically just starts to you know, it is the one that sends out that signal and everything just connects to it. It behaves like Wi Fi if everything recognizes it like Wi Fi.
Yeah, and so what it's doing.
Is it's basically a capturing a signal, a cellular signal from outside. Typically they want you to put these little routers near a window. It captures the cellular signal and then it broadcasts that cellular signal out as a Wi Fi signal in your home. So, for all intents and purposes, it functions exactly the same as your wired internet box that you typically have from your cable company or a fiber company, or back in the day you know a company that would provide just phone service, right like an
AT and T or something. So it's it's very similar, except the cable that connects this box is no longer a cable. It's just wireless, so it's a five G signal. So is it as secure that's a great question. I actually think that it is very secure. I think that the problems that happen with hacking ninety nine percent of the time have to do with the network itself and the devices themselves, and actually the people that are accessing
these things on the network. So I'm going to tweet out this PDF that actually the National Security Agency recently put out. This was in February. It's a best practices for securing your home network. And the bottom line is that people may get on your home network to get access to your devices. And the reality is once someone's inside your home, if they are connecting on your network, that's when they can do the most damage because they are on the inside. From the outside, it's a little
bit tougher. You have to have an open port. You have to Most of these routers come come to you in a way that it's pretty much locked down and unless you do something, unless you go into these settings and you change something, they're going to be locked down from outside folks getting access to the inside of your network.
So that's typically how it's done.
With that said, a couple of recommendations and going off this executive summary here, So you got to update your devices. Those always have to be up to date, and that includes this router that T Mobile gave you. You can log in if you look on the bottom of this router, there is a little log in information. You can access the software on that router and there may be a firmware update or a software update for that router. So I would check to see that would be my first
line of defense. Then I would one hundred percent have a guest network. So if the router supports it, and many routers, do you want a secondary network that is just for guests when they come to your home. And I know it feels weird. I have it on my refrigerator. I've got a little QR code that people can scan, and it feels odd giving guests this kind of like secondary network. But the reality is it is protecting your
network from them. And I'm not saying your friends are going to do anything on your network, but you never know. One of the kids friends may come over with a virus on their computer and it may somehow make its way onto your network. So you don't want to do you don't want to have people connecting to your standard network. I know it seems odd to make them connect to a secondary but just make a guest network. Definitely, definitely
do that. That's a very smart thing to do. And then when it comes to the people that are on your network, you want to remind them about standard security, which is clicking links today is pretty much the main delivery mechanism for all malware that people are getting attacked by. And so when you're clicking that link that you get in an email or a text, message, and then you're getting some sort of software that's installed in your device that is where the problems happen. And so most of
the time it's just human error. We're just clicking something without thinking about it, and that gives the bad actors a method to access our devices and so, and they're always looking for these exploits, and that's the reason why you also want to make sure all of your software is updated on the devices that are connecting to this network. Now, if you want to be really secure, there are devices out there that can help you secure your network. And
one of them. I have not personally tested this, but I know about it. I know it's been out there for a long time. It's called the FIREWALLA. And so a firewall is basically a mechanism that keeps you secure from the outside of the network. And so FIREWALLA is a little device that you plug in to your network and it will block it will basically try to safeguard you as much as possible from anything that might happen
to your network. Now, some routers have these features built in, but this is a third party device that you can get. It's a little expensive. The cheapest one, I believe is one hundred and eighty nine dollars. But it's one of these set and forget type of things. You plug it into your network and you maybe you know, tweak some of the settings, but it does a lot of things. So not only does it protect your network from cyber attacks,
it's got content filtering. So if you have kids and you want to take advantage of some of those things, you can do that. You can block ads across your entire network. So I've got my router set up where it will block all the ads on the network, much to my kids dislike because some of these games they play rely on ads to serve up and they don't like that feature of what I do built in VPN, so you can also have a VPN that's built into this. And there's no monthly fee on this, so that's kind
of nice as well. It's kind of one of those things where you buy it once and it's going to last you for a long time. So again that's FIREWALLA. I don't know if you need this per se on your network. I think that I would do all the things that I mentioned first and just make sure that folks on your network know what's happening. Make sure you don't have any ports open for any gaming or anything
that people are doing. But that's really what you want to do, is just make sure things are locked down and make sure you have that separate guest network, make sure everything up to date. And I think that's really the best way to protect yourself in a very convenient way. And if you want to take things to the next level with this with a physical device like the firewall,
and then sure go with something like that. But as for the actual wireless being any more insecure than the wired, I don't think so.
I think you're going to be just fine. So Jesse, good.
Question, Thanks for calling in, appreciate it, and thanks for listening. All right, before we have our guest, Jefferson Graham come into the studio, let me tell you about a new game from the makers of Pokemon Go. So it's called Paradot. So Paradot is launching on May ninth, and this is a new game that is sort of like Pokemon Go.
So think these whimsical little creatures, but these are as they describe amazing magical creatures that eat, sleep, play with toys, explore their environment, get bored, develop unique personalities, and are always in need of a loving adopter like you. They're all unique, and it's your job to feed these things, keep them healthy, keep them love.
They're called Dots.
They start out as a little baby, and basically they say this is a game that delivers all the joy of raising a pet without the mess. Kind of reminds me of these Tamagatchi games. Over the years, there's been a lot of games like this. I think that obviously with Niantic and Pokemon Go, it's all about the real world meeting the virtual world, and so I think we're
going to see some unique plays there. So if you want to get this new Paradot p E R I d O T. If you want to get this game on your phone, as soon as it launches, you can go search it in the App Store or Google Play search Paradot, and you can sign up for what's called a pre registration and you'll get a notification as soon as the app is available. Coming out May ninth. I'll
play this, I'll try it out. It's been since twenty sixteen when Pokemon Go came out, and that game really changed things with how they mix the real world and the augmented reality world and people are still having fun playing that. All right, Coming up, Jefferson Graham is going to join me. We're going to talk about the new yellow iPhone, which I have in my hand right here. I'm gonna get some thoughts on from him about what he thinks of this color, which I'll describe it when
he gets back in here. Plus, we will talk about taking better pictures on the iPhone, and we'll talk about Apple's new app just for classical music. You're listening to rich on tech. Give me a call triple eight rich one on one eight eight eight seven four to two four.
One zero one.
Let me tell folks about Jefferson so big into photography, getting the best pictures out of the iPhone, and what have you been up to? Come over to my microphone. We can share a microphone here.
Let's do that. Oh there you go, look at that.
Yeah, okay, sounds good now, alrighty. I do a video series on YouTube called Photo Walks TV. I take people with me to great places and show them how to get better photos, better travel photos on their smartphone. We've got a newsletter comes out every weekend called the Photo Walks TV newsletter. Photography meets Technology meets travel.
And I think we just got your mic. The mic was actually unplugged. You know what I want for this show. I want to soundboard because I want to be able to do like the different, like the and so now can.
We hear you? Let's say, now you know so much better? I love it.
Okay, So you're doing photo walks. You've been traveling a lot with this show. Huh, yes, I have. Where we've been. We've been to Solving. Yes, I love Solving. Yes, it's one of my favorite places. It's this Solving is a city that's about what an hour and a half two hours north.
Of a half hours an hour. It's seven thousand people, but they get a million visitors a year.
Yeah, it's it's in credible. It's like a little it's really like a Hallmark movie twenty four to seven.
It's a Danish town that was developed by Danish immigrants and they kept all the architecture is incredible. But the surrounding community is you know, Sandy Inns Valley is out of this world.
Beautiful, beautiful place, great wine tasting up there. They just had a couple of really high end places open up it. For many, many years, it was very much like kind of a three star hotel town. Now they've got this place that is Hotel talk that's really nice, but no even nicer. I'm not even sure what the name is,
but it's this hotel that just opened by Loso Livos. Anyway, it's like more than five star because I know because my wife is planning some sort of like party up there and she has to stay there, and it's very expensive, so we've been debating whether it's worth it.
Anybody listening, this is the time to go. Your best time is before spring break. We have a few more weeks. Winner is just gorgeous and it's not jammed, so it's a really good time. And I was in Las Vegas this week as as you were as I was yet and I think we were at different events.
I was at no event. I was at my own event, the Rich DeMuro enjoying Las Vegas. I was supposed to a story there and then that didn't work out. By the way, we're talking with Jefferson Graham, tech Extraordinaire. He is formerly of USA Today and now with Photo Walks TV. Give us a call if you want to talk about tech eight eight eight Rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one.
You want to take a call?
Sure, all right, let's see what Tim in uh Oak Hills, California is asking about?
Tim? What's on your mind? Welcome to the show.
Good afternoon, Rich, Thanks so much. I have a little device. It's kind of cool. It's a little things in China, like seven or eight blocks, and it's a Bluetooth receiver to plunge into a cigarette lighter of the car. I actually have one of the house, and it turns the Bluetooth signal to my cell phone into an FM signal, So no matter where I go on my property, I can have different radios on and always hear iHeartRadio. It's kind of cool to have, you know, multiple radio stations
receivers all around the house from the little thing. It works perfectly with my little Android phone. But when I just got a tablet about two or three weeks ago, it seemed to work fine the first time. But today I actually noticed it yesterday when I trans When I listened to iHeartRadio on the tablet itself, it sounds fine, but when I transmit Bluetooth to this little transceiver, that turns it into an FM signal. It's all garbled and distorted,
and I thought, well, maybe it's the iHeart app. But it does it with my local radio station app as well, and that's where I'm at.
So you've got a device that is maybe I'm not understanding this. It's a device that's sending a FM signal through your house or a Bluetooth signal.
Through your house.
It receives the Bluetooth signal. It's looks look like a little dongle that plugs into a cigarette lighter. Your car has a little boltmeter on it in the USB charging things. But yeah, it receives a Bluetooth signal from my phone, and then you can adjust which frequency you know, you get to a frequency nobody else is transmitting on. Okay, zero or eighty nine point seven? I think I use up here, okay, And then it's a nice FM signal that I can listen to radio all over my got it?
Okay, So I'm actually surprised this works that well. But are you is are you sort of in a more rural area.
Oh yeah, I mean I'm in the high desert.
Here at Old Kills, Okay, got it? So?
So it so certain stations work, Certain stations don't work. That's what I'm getting from this.
Well, the thing is my with my cell phone, everything works perfect, no matter what app I use, whether it's iHeart, I heard, I pretty much only use a KFI And I have a local radio station up here called Talk nine to sixty that I listened to occasionally, and that's they have their own private El Dorado app. That all sounds fine. So it's not the station, it's just whether it's iHeart app or my local radio station app. My cell phone seems to work perfectly. It's worked two or
three years I've been doing. This works great. But with the with the tablet when it connected by Bluetooth, it's garbled and cuts out too as well.
What kind of tablet is this?
It is a Blue Phones. Yeah, that's b l u okay. You smartphones?
That might be it right there. That might model number is M eight l M A l okay.
So that might be the reason Blue Blue products are traditionally inexpensive, and they may not have the best Bluetooth in that product, like the the Bluetooth. Yeah, there's different versions of Bluetooth, and so it may be that the version they're using is just a very inexpensive version is that.
Tried it on iPad?
Yeah, I was gonna say that's what I would do.
Get a friend over there, try it on an iPad and see if that works.
But well, it works, it works on my cell phone. I've already I know that the receiver thing works fine, and it works my cell phone is no problem. But the thing is, it worked two weeks ago, it seemed to work fine. It seems to be just this weekend when I started up.
It's just doing it well.
I was thinking, would it would it do any good to do a full factory reset, so to speak on Android?
Now you're speaking my line. I love doing that. That's my favorite thing to do on any device.
I love.
Three months.
Well, that's that's a lot. That's that's a lot.
But I love well I I yeah, I would do the I would do the the full reset. I love doing that. It's you know, you do a factory reset. It gets everything back to the standard the way it was from the factory. Maybe you installed something on this device that just isn't working properly, or it just isn't playing nice with this receiver. I'm still not understanding why you wouldn't just use the app to stream the station.
I would just test it on another another person's device and see what happens.
Yeah, that's that's what I would do. But Tim, it sounds like you've got it figured out. This reminds me of when I first had, like back in the car, Like when you would use like your your iPod and you didn't have like a connection, right, You'd use like an FM transmitter to get your signal, and it never worked, right. I ended up having to get it like factory installed. All right, more of rich on tech coming up after this. I've got Jefferson Graham in studio. Give us a call
at Triple eight Rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. We'll talk about the yellow iPhone.
Coming up next Jefferson Graham dot nettwalkstv dot com or two great places. And I've got my newsletter Jefferson Graham dot substack dot com comes out every Saturday and Sunday.
You told me about substack.
I signed up and I did it for a bit and I still have my newsletter.
Uh, I guess which list.
But I don't actively do it, but one of these days I will because I love the newsletter.
Best journalism experience I've ever had, and I've been around for a while.
Because the feedback it's so it's so direct to your fans.
Yes, and they feel you know, you're going into their email box, and like there's always a question, well, what time should I send it? When's a good day to send It doesn't matter. People are happy to get an email that's not a sales email at any time of the day.
And also, you're in is your inbox like the way I see my email inboxes.
It's all the tasks.
So if I get it no matter what time of day and I'm going through my emails, I will save it for later and I will get to it when I get to it. I don't delete things out of my inbox until I'm done with them, and it's almost like.
A little to do list. All right, let's talk about two things.
We've got the new in my hand, the new iPhone fourteen and fourteen plus. This is the fourteen in yellow, yes, end of sentence. There's really nothing else except it's a color, and it's only on the fourteen and plus. It's not on the Pro or Promax. It's yellow yellow like a bowl of Trix or like Pikachu from Pokemon. That's about as close. It's Would you call it banana yellow or no?
No, it's yellower. It's yellower than a banana. It's brighter yellow, it's bright. Yeah, the question I had. I understand why Apple does it because it looks good in an ad And they may sell a few one hundred thousand copies, I don't know whatever.
They'll sell millions. So they'll sell millions.
Okay, they'll sell millions. But who do you know who doesn't have a case.
That's my question.
Okay, and my wife has a case and it happens.
To be yellow.
Oh so it's like Hlity has a yellow phone. She was ahead of twenty dollars case or whatever we paid for it, you know, and there was no need to have this yellow phone. None.
I don't understand the phone colors because it's always the same you put a case on.
Now, I do have a clear case.
Yeah, some people have clear cases.
But if you're gonna, I mean, I don't know. And I've been wanting to go caseless, but I actually think my phone is grippier with the case.
I like the case on it. And are you caseless. You have the big case.
I have the wallet.
You have the wallet case. So you can't do that.
I don't. I haven't had a wallet for years, so this is my wallet. And then it's been fantastic. And then I have a cage. I have a cage on my other iPhone. A photographer, I'm always going around with multiple iPhones.
All right.
So seven hundred and ninety nine dollars for the one hundred and twenty eight gigabyte version of this phone, the iPhone fourteen plus and yellow starts at eight ninety nine.
It is going to be available. Let's see.
I think yesterdaek Yes, wasn't it yesterday? Availability Tuesday, March fourteenth. Pre Orders were on Friday. So if you are looking to get a yellow phone, there you go, or by yourself.
It's twenty dollars case.
Or buy a case. And you know, but here's the thing, people. Apple has gotten on this cadence where now they come out with a spring color of the iPhone and it's always this. You know, it was purple, then it was blue, red, now it's yellow. So it just it's just the way Apple operates. And I really struggled with this on KTLA because I was like, do I mention like, is this one? I get three news stories a day? Is that one of my news updates?
I don't know.
It's just to justify you know it is. Okay, let's let's go to Austin in San Diego.
Austin. You're on with Rich and Jefferson.
Hey, how's it going?
That's going great? How about you? Good?
Great?
What can we help you with?
Hey?
So I was just asking about I've always used Chrome as my internet browser, and lately I've been having a lot of issues where it keeps popping up saying I need to updateate web pages, like for banking. I'll open one tab and it loads, you know, six pages, and half the pages don't fully load, or it looks like, you know, it's an HML HTML page without any kind
of like anything to it. So question being what would be your recommendation for it internet browser if I still want the conveniences of Google integration with Chrome.
Are you running on Windows or Mac Windows? Okay, I think you've got some malware on your computer. I think that's what's happening. And I will tell you that Chrome definitely slows down after a while. So what I would do is I've been using actually Edge for a bit, which is Microsoft's version of Chrome.
I don't like it as much as Chrome. I think Chrome is better.
The fact that you're saying you're getting update notifications on Chrome, I don't think that's a big deal.
All you need to do is reopen the app and it updates.
So in fact, I just opened my Chrome and I said relaunch Chrome to finish updating.
So uninstall very simply picking off and reinstall.
You don't even have to do that. On Windows. There's actually a built in they're taking it away, but there's a built in reset button on Chrome. Okay, and I will tell you where it is. Okay, you go here. I have this written down because I actually was going to talk about this, but then Google mentioned that they're getting rid of it because they said that this sort of malware is getting less and less on Chrome, which
I don't believe. But okay, if you go into menu and then settings and then reset and it says reset, boom, it will reset all of your values back to zero. It will get rid of all any malware that you have on your device. It will try to clear that out. I would also uninstall any extensions that you have on there get rid of those, or if you don't want to do that, like Jefferson said, you can just uninstall
the program reinstall it. But I would do all the software updates as well, So if your Windows is not up to date, I would do that. You might have malware at large on your computer. So if you want to run like something like malware bites, do you have a preferred program that you like to run for malware on Max.
We don't tend to have problems with malware.
Yeah, I know that's but there are ways.
On Mac you can use something like app cleaner to get rid of any fragments of programs or things that you may not want on there if you're trying to uninstall.
But that's what I would do. I like Edged.
I think it works nicely, but I don't like it more than Chrome. I think Chrome just recently got faster. They just figured out how to optimize the memory for the different tabs you have open. They just figured out
how to do the energy savings on it. So I think Chrome is still pretty good for a free web browser, and I think it's secure, it's safe, it has all the programs you need and you mentioned that you want to keep your Google integrations, and Chrome is still the best at when you're using Google products like Drive and Gmail. It's very good at all the making sure that all the features of those programs work in a good way.
So, Austin, does that answer your question? You're going to stick with it?
Yeah?
I actually had in your mention of malware, so I actually have like a lifetime membership for malware bites. I also use Norton and the only extensions on Chrome is last Pass, and I think it's like Adobe pdf reader. Okay, do you still think Do you still think I could have like malware on you could?
It sounds like something some of the settings. If you're opening up like a banking page and six pages are opening that are doing different things, that's typically a sign of malware. So I would also go through and erase all history. So I would go into the history and it's there's an option for to erase all of your history for for you know, forever and ever, so I would do that as well, just to make sure that you have nothing on there that's you know, cookie oriented,
that's messing up things. I would also ditch last Pass, honestly because at this point, they've had too many security issues. You might want to look into switching to a different password manager as well. So basically, Austin, you just have to change your entire, your entire operating operators right now.
So it shouldn't be too tough, though. I think those are the things you want to do.
All right, let me know if that works for you with the reset on Chrome before it goes away. Okay, all right, I think it's gonna work. Thanks for calling from San Diego. Is it raining down there like it is up here?
It's it's on and off.
Okay, all right, we'll stay dry, all right, thank you? All right, all right, let's see do we have time to talk about this Apple Classical. They have new Apple Music Classical app. Jefferson, Why is Apple making a new app? Standalone app designed specifically for classical music? Five million tracks from new releases to celebrated masterpieces, thousands of exclusive albums, the highest audio quality up to one hundred and ninety two.
Killer hurts, per Killer hurts? Is that what you say?
Sure?
I guess.
It will launch on March twenty eighth, requires an Apple Music subscription. It'll be available everywhere except China. Japan, Korea and Taiwan and uh Android version is coming soon. And to listen to music on Apple Music Classical you must have an Internet connection.
That's odd. You can't download the music. So why are they doing this? I don't understand. Why wouldn't they just put this in the Apple Music app.
Believe you need an Internet connection to listen to Apple Music as well.
You can download the music, yeah, but you have to start. I know that's why. But why would they say that specifically?
Like I get that you need an internet connection to Like, it doesn't come with five million songs you just download, right.
I think they're very smart to do this. I know you disagree, but I think it's a very very smart move. Now, first of all, remember they bought this classical scription service already, so they already own it, so they're just putting their name on it. So Spotify is spotty when it comes to classical music. They've got some stuff they don't have other stuff. YouTube music is spotty. Classical music fans go downtown sometime, go stand at Disney Hall. You will see
some very dedicated classical music lovers. They are really you know, but you know, if the grateful dead fans were enthusiastic. Classical music fans are incredibly enthusiastic, right, So by targeting this audience, they finally have a differentiation for Apple Music. It's different from Spotify. Now they have music that the other people don't have. They've never had that before. But you have to download a separate app.
I don't know.
I just don't I get it that they have people that are very into this. I don't understand why they couldn't just blend it into Apple Music and make it a separate area of the app. But to have a different app. Maybe if you're into classical, you feel like they are speaking to you.
Do you remember in a more direct way? Do you remember once upon a time Tower Records. Yes, there were a big, huge, biggest record store and they had a separate classical store across the street. Do you remember that.
I do not remember the classical store, but at store. All right, we've got less than a minute. Tell folks where they can.
Find you, photowokstv dot com, Jefferson Graham dot net, look for me on YouTube, YouTube dot com, slash Photo, Walks TV. Our latest episode just debut today from Clearwater, Florida, and I'm working on an episode, thanking viewers for helping me cross one million views, which happened this week.
Amazing, I see I need the little congrats. All right, thanks so much for joining me in the studio today. I appreciate it. We had some fun here with the callers. We're going to wrap up the show coming up next. More of your calls if I can fit one more in at triple eight Rich one O one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two, four to one zero one. You are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here talking technology online.
Rich on Tech.
That's all of my social media is under that so if you want to find me online, that's where you can do it. Tony is in Daytona Beach, Florida. Tony, you're on with Rich. Hey, Rich's great.
What can I help you with?
Okay? I write copies sometimes for a radio talk show like uh, you guys should do sure and uh sometimes they run. It's like writing a long letter and I'm looking for the best format, in the easiest format to write a letter like that and easy to control, like h Yahoo or Google or your Facebook or what's what site I should go to Okay, it's the best email format.
Like that email. Oh email program? Okay, got it? Okay, email. Well, I mean I think that, uh Google, I use Google Docs for everything. I use Gmail for everything, and I would say those are probably your best combination. I also wrote a book, and I wrote the entire book in a combination of Apple Notes and then Google Docs, so
I've written large amounts of text. I do the entire planning of this show on Google Docs and also through my email program as well, So I don't think you need anything special.
Those are all free.
And the one trick I would tell you with Google Docs is if you type in your once you sign up for g you know, Google, and have all your stuff figured out and you're logged in, if you type in doc dot new on your web browser, that will open up a new document. So if you're trying to just do something fast and quick and easy and you don't want to have to go through, just type in doct new and that will open up a fresh document for you on your on your web browser. So that's
the way I do it. I organize everything through there. Now, when I wrote my book, I use a program to publish it. It was called Vellum v E L l U M. But that's really a book publishing app. And I also tested out another app. It was called I believe it was Scrivener, But it doesn't sound like you wanted to write a book. It sounds like you're just writing scripts and things like that. And with the scripts if you want, you know, I know, for radio and
TV sometimes scripts need to fit a certain format. So in that case, I actually make a template of what a script typically looks like, which is two columns and one side is bigger than the other, and just large text on there as well, so you can do that too. The other program I really like for writing is called Bear B E A R. And what's great about this, and Tony, this may work for you since you're doing stuff that's for radio and you might need to time stuff out. What I love about Bear is that it
times out what you write. So if you go into something that you wrote in Bear, there's a little icon and it tells you how many words, how many characters, how many paragraphs. But the best part is it tells you how long it takes to read that. And for me, that is very very handy when I'm writing things for this show when I want to hit a certain amount of time. In this case, I'm trying to hit a
thirty second commercial. And so if I'm writing something that's a promotion for my show, I want to hit that twenty nine seconds. So Bear that is only available on iOS, So that is something that is on iOS and Mac only. They do not have a version that is available to the Windows platform. But that's a really handy program. I use a lot of programs actually to write stuff, now that I think about it.
So I also use.
Another app that is the Apple Notes app, but that's really just for more like notes.
I also use Google Keep.
I mean, there's so many ways you can do this that it really just comes down to what you use the most. And that's what I found is that you just have to use and keep using it and have your system down and that's the.
Best way to do it. All right.
Let me tell you about this scam real quick before we go, because I think it's important for you to know that we've heard so much about AI, but now scammers are already using AI to impersonate people that we know family members to call us and try to scam us out of money. So they have these very sophisticated programs that are off the shelf. You feed some audio into them, and now you can sound like that person just by typing out those words. And so this is AI that is being used in a very mean way
against us. So if you get a phone call that purports to be from a loved one that needs money, that's in jail, that's whatever. It may just be an AI voice that sounds like that loved one. So when in doubt, call them up, call someone check on them,
text them. Do not just go to the bank and try to withdraw money and send it to this person that's asking you for the money, because it's probably not I'll put the link to the Washington Post article about these new AI voice scams in the show notes as well. And finally, Vinyl overtook CD sales for the first time since nineteen eighty seven. I've been talking about Vinyl in my KTLA reports, how people seem to like it. Forty one million units they sold against thirty three million for
CDs in the past year. Vinyl sales have increased over the past sixteen years. They're now seventy one percent of all physical music. Taylor Swift, of course, highest selling vinyl artists. She sold some one point seven million records. Harry Styles sold seven hundred and nineteen thousand, The Beatles still kicking five hundred and fifty three thousand sales. Of course, Spotify and Apple Music and streaming is still the most popular way to listen to music.
All right, that is going to do it for this show.
Thanks so much for listening. Thanks to all of my guests today. We had so many great guests. I know there's a little problem with the phone lines, so apologies for that, and thanks for working through that. You know, this is a growing show. This is only episode number ten, so we're still learning. I'm still learning how to do this whole radio thing, so I do appreciate you hanging out with me. Next week, we are going to talk
to Ember about their self heating baby bottle. No longer is it good to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth. Now you can be born with a four hundred dollars self heating baby bottle in your mouth, and we're going to talk to the company that makes that. You can find me on social media at rich on tech, my website, richontech dot tv. My name is rich Dmiro. Thanks so much for listening. There are so many ways you can spend your time. I do appreciate you spending
it right here with me. I'll talk to you real soon