Bad week for Twitter, Meta and FTX

Hope you are having a fantastic day. Ah Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. I've seen nothing absorb the the talk of the town faster than Elon Musk taking over Twitter. And it's been kind of a rough ride. I don't think the media is helping, but it's it's really been interesting, to say

the least. Now, I will say that I feel like my personal experience on Twitter has not changed substantially, and I was kind of holding off on, you know, making any judgments or really you know, getting kind of all bent out of shape with the changes or you know whatever, all the all the kind of chaos that's been happening because a lot of this stuff happens in a vacuum, and you know, I was waiting to see kind of like, what's what's going on here, what's going to change for

the average person. And I feel like we've now surpassed that. It's gotten to the point where I you know, and I've said this before, I don't think the average person uses Twitter. And I think that's the biggest problem with Twitter is that it's not you know, if this kind of stuff was happening with Instagram, I think it would be a big deal if it was happening, you know, with Facebook, probably a big deal. Twitter not so much.

Twitter is a very inside baseball It's like a very clubby place, and so it's used by a lot of journalists, used by a lot of tech people, but it's not used by a lot of regular people. And so all these things, all these growing pains, all these things that you know, Elon's trying to get through. It's like, well, nobody's really seeing that except the inside baseball people. The average person is not, you know, sitting there using it.

But I do feel like there's been some developments in the time that Elon has taken over Twitter that you know, people are leaving, advertisers are pausing, you know, all that kind of stuff, and so I think that the turning point for me was when I started to see these you know, they're having this major issue with number one, how to monetize the website or the social media platform.

Number two, like, what do you do. You've got this legacy kind of verified blue check program that they try to switch over to this pay pay for play program. You know, you pay eight bucks a month, you get a blue check. Well, the problem with that is that people started just paying the eight dollars getting that blue check, which makes you think that someone is verified official, and then they started tweeting all kinds of terrible things, you know.

The main one that I saw was the you know, it was like a drug company and it was like, you know, I don't know if it was Eli Lilly or something like that, but it's like, okay, all insulin is now free. We've made the decision. And it looked very official because maybe one or two letters were off in the name of the company or the Twitter handle, but they had that blue check, so you're like, oh, wow,

that's coming from the actual company. I can't believe that. Now, whether or not anyone believe that, I'm not sure whether or not anyone went to cvs to say, hey, can I get some free insulin? I'm not sure, but it did make a big enough of the rounds and the retweets, and maybe people just thought it was funny so they retweeted it. But the reality is that it made it very clear to me that there is a problem with

with the new system. You can't just give people a blue check based on paying eight dollars, so there has to be something else. So now the Verge is reporting that, and all this stuff keeps changing and changing and changing, but now they basically have There's two things going on. Number One, if you tap the blue check on someone's account, you can see if they paid for that blue check or if it's in a it's kind of a verified account.

So if you look at mine, for instance, and I should bring up my Twitter so I can see what I'm talking about exactly. But if you go to sort of my Twitter and I tweeted about this. Basically, there's two things that happen when you when you tap the blue check, it will either say verified account because it's notable in government, news, entertainment, or another category. It'll say that, and that's kind of like the legacy blue check. Then if you tap the blue check and it says verified account.

This account is verified because it's subscribed to Twitter blue. That's when you put up your sort of like, oh uh oh, what's happening. Let me let me take a closer look at the username, because if you see that, that means that the person has All they've done is paid the eight dollars. They got the blue check, and now you know, they could be whoever they want to be. And so now, according to the Verge, they did what I think they should have done in the first place,

is put an official underneath the person's name. So if you go to like Nintendo, for instance, I saw this one. So if you go to Nintendo of America, it got the blue check, and then underneath it there's now a new thing that like a gray check that says official. And so that's sort of taking the place of the blue check. Very confusing, and I think that this a

very tedious process for Twitter to go through. And the same thing happened with the with the blue check originally back in the day when Twitter was owned by non Elon Musk. You know, they had to go through and manually make people a blue check. People like me, I would submit my information. I would say, hey, here's who I am, here's who I say I am, here's my account,

here's my email, here's my verification whatever. I forget what they asked for, like different things, you know, like a letterhead or whatever it was back in the day I had to submit. And so now we're seeing that you'll see official people. So that is what's happening right now. We will see if this will change. I think this a better system, but I think that an easier system would be just a blue check, or say a gold check. You know, if someone's paying for Twitter blue, make it

one color, make the official check another color. And I think that would just be really simple. You see the two check marks, you realize that someone has paid the money, but then the other check mark just means that that person is verified in a different way. And I think what they're really trying to get out of this is making sure that people like myself, you know, like Pony, up the eight dollars a month to have that blue check, which I'm probably not gonna do. I can't really see

a reason. Now. There is something they're offering on that Twitter blue which I thought was interesting, is that you'll see less ads, which is kind of nice. But your sort of tweets and responses and all that kind of stuff will bubble up to the top of people's feets, which I do think is valuable because you tweet and there is an algorithm at play that puts things in various orders. So I think that having your stuff up at the top could be worth eight dollars a month

so that people see it more. Also, I have lost about three hundred followers on Twitter, so that could be people that have deactivated, people that have left the platform bots, maybe that they got rid of who knows, but I've definitely seen that portion of it change. But to me, you know, the way I've always used Twitter is that it's just kind of one of those things that when I want to tweet something, sort of inside baseball, that's where I go. It's my place where I tweet to

other journalists or just get something out there officially. So we'll see what happens with Twitter moving forward, but it is definitely it is a learning curve for Elon Musk, that is for sure. All right, let's get to the first question of the podcast. Valories says, I have a new computer HP, which I just got installed yesterday, and I was told that it can listen to whatever I'm saying. If this is true, and if so, is there a way that I can stop my computer from hearing everything

I say? Thank you, Valerie. So it took me a second to kind of think about this one because I don't use a Windows computer regularly, although I do have a computer on loan from Microsoft, the new Surface Laptop five. So I said, you know, at last event I went to I said, hey, Microsoft, it's been a while since I've used a Microsoft computer because my day to day

is a Mac. And they said, all right, well, let's get you a Windows computer for a couple months so you can test it out, put it through the paces, try out some of the new features and Windows eleven. And sure enough, it arrived a couple of weeks later, and here it is. So I've been playing with that computer. And by the way, I have to say, I am quite impressed with the state of affairs on the Windows side of things. I think that Windows has come a

really long way. The computer is it's very slick. It very much feels and looks and acts like my MacBook, and some aspects are even better because you don't have to deal with the whole Apple kind of taking a commanding lead in everything you do. There's a lot of things that sort of are easier or simpler or just you know better on the Windows side of things, like number one, Android phones, like they just work with a Windows computer that you know, using a Mac for so long,

it's like an Android computer. An Android just doesn't work, It doesn't play nice with a Mac computer. You plug the thing into a Windows computer and wow, all your pictures are right there. Whatever you want to do, your text messages, you can run Android apps. I mean, it's it's quite impressive. What else that's it for now, but it's it's you know, it's pretty nice to have everything running nicely on there, and it's it's been a it's been good for me because I need that education. So

I can kind of talk about both sides of things. Okay, So back to this whole Quartana thing. So basically, yes, there is a setting on Windows that will allow Kortana to respond to I believe it's hey Kortana, or maybe it's just Kortana and is it Kortana or hey, oh gosh, I should know this now because I was playing with it today. So what's the Kuortana keyword okay? Or co r t A n A keyword. I've got to look this up because yeah, it's just kortana. So you don't

have to you don't have to say, hey, it's hey kuortana. Okay. Anyway, So there is a setting you can go to Settings, Privacy and Security, Voice Activation, and then it's a toggle switch for let Kortana respond to Kortana keyword and a lot of things on Windows pretty easy. You just just press that Windows button and type in Kortana and you should find the thing that you need to do. Like if you need to do a printer thing, just type in printer. If you need to do updates, type in

update anything. It's just one big search for the entire computer and also your programs and also things on the web, and also the weather. But if you want to turn that feature off, go ahead, turn it off. And you know, even when your computer's listening, yes it's listening, but there's a it's kind of not you know, it's not sending

everything somewhere. It's basically listening locally. And then if it hears that word, it will say, oh, I just heard the word so let's now kind of listen to see what they're saying, and then we'll process that audio if

necessary on the cloud. A lot of these systems now have become because of privacy concerns, a lot of this processing is done on device, and so when you hear that term processing done on device, it means that your device is actually doing the processing of you know, what you say and then kind of transcribing it and then figuring out in like a split second, is this something that I need to do on the web or is

this something I need to do locally? And so it's it's really come a long way from the days of you know, everything was sent to the cloud, and you know that that those days are are quickly getting behind us because these devices have gotten so much better. So anyway, good question, and congrats to the new computer. That's always very exciting to have a new computer. All right, what do we want to talk about next? There's there's there

was like three giant stories this week. I mean, you've got the Twitter drama, You've got Meta, which is, you know, cut a bunch of jobs for the first time in history, and then you've got this big cryptocurrency situation going on,

let's talk about the cryptocurrency stuff. So I don't get into crypto a whole bunch on this show, but you know, I feel like when things again bubble up to you know, my my wholem o with with this tech stuff is really trying to give people, you know, give you news that you can use, you know, information that's helpful, you know, not just like the drama or the drama of it

or the celebrity gossip side of things. Although sometimes you know, like I say, it gets to the to the forefront so much you kind of have to and sometimes these things to affect us in pretty big ways. And I think when it comes to this crypto stuff, it's just really kind of like danger, danger, danger. You gotta watch what you do with this crypto stuff. So FTX is a was a big cryptocurrency platform that is now filing

for bankruptcy. And I'm not going to get into the whole nuance of why, but the reality is a lot of people used FTX. This was a very popular cryptocurrency platform in fact, and I can't believe this. Larry David was the commercial during the Super Bowl. He was the commercial for FTX, which is a total like This just goes to show that you can't trust celebrities with your financial decisions or even your product decisions. Because a celebrity

endorses something does not mean it's good. Celebrities get paid a lot of money to talk about stuff, and quite frankly, a lot of times it's just more of like a manager thing, like they say, hey, this that we you know, we've got this really good opportunity for you. You know, you can be in this commercial. They're paying you a million bucks, they're paying you five million bucks. All you got to do is say this and said what is it? Well,

it's crypto. You know a lot of people are using it. Okay, crypto cool, And next thing you know, you know you're in a crypto commercial. I mean there's a lot of celebrities that are doing this stuff. I mean Kim Kardashian, Matt Damon, Larry David, and probably probably many many more. In fact, if you watch TV for five minutes, which you know, I don't see a whole lot of commercials because I don't typically watch regular TV, but yeah, you see a lot of this stuff if you watch for

five minutes. In fact, we just subscribed or resubscribed to YouTube TV and my kids were watching it last night, and you know they were they were really surprised at all the commercials on their Disney channel that they were watching, and it's like, yeah, this is regular TV. This is what it looks like now if you're getting free TV. It's funny to me that you have to pay for YouTube TV and watch commercials because you're paying so much

for the service. Now, if you're watching over the air television, that's sort of the currency, right, You're getting a free channel so that you can, you know, you sit there through ads, you know, a couple of minutes of ads to watch free programming. That's fine, that's kind of like the agreement. But with cable TV, it's kind of like, wait a second, why why am I paying for this and sitting through ads? That makes no sense anyway. At

any rate. FTX has filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy. A lot of people are not happy because if you have crypto in this, in this platform, what's going to happen to it? Do you get your money back? And I think this whole thing happened when people were starting to sort of, you know, try to withdraw their money at a pace faster than FTX could provide it, and that's when the problems happened, you know. So this has happened many,

many times over and over in our history of banking. Now, if you have you know, you know, you have the FDIIC which ensures like something like a savings or a checking account. You know, that's only up to a certain amount of money. I think it's two hundred and fifty grand. So if you've got more money than that in any of these things, it's like, oh, that that could be a problem. All right. So what happened basically filed for bankruptcy.

The rival, which is named Binance. They went and said, okay, we'll actually scoop these people up, we'll help them, and then when they looked at their balance sheet, they said, oh, never mind, this is like way way worse than we could ever imagine. We're not buying this company. And so now, apparently, according to CNBC, in the space of just a couple of days, FTX went from a thirty two billion dollar valuation to bankruptcy. Bankruptcy, thirty two billion to bankruptcy. That

is like just totally unacceptable. So it's also really sad that one of my favorite people Larry David was in the commercial for them, and the commercial was actually ironic because now looking back, Larry David apparently, you know, in the commercial. I remember it briefly in the Super Bowl.

You know, he turned down every time someone asked him to invest in crypto, and you know, he said no, and he said, I don't think so, and I'm never wrong about this stuff, never, And now you know, of course he was right about it once again, even though he took money from them. A GameStop apparently had a partnership with FTX. They sold FTX gift cards. Oh my gosh. So now if you've got money in this company, you know,

on this platform, I'm not sure what happens. And I'm not a huge, huge expert in crypto, but I know there's like this whole thing of like whether you can have your money on a platform or your money in your own wallet. And I think it's somewhat safer to have your money in your own wallet, which is way more complicated to set up, which is why the average person pretty much which puts their money on these platforms.

You know, it's it's just easier because they do all the behind the scenes work of setting up your wallet and holding the crypto, but when they go out, it's like, there goes your crypto. And of course this also has ramifications on the crypto market in general. You know, bitcoin has had you know, bitcoin has just been really, really not good for a while now. So if you look at bitcoin a year to date, down sixty five percent. Twenty twenty two, bitcoin is down sixty five percent, that

is horrendous. Okay, last six months, been down forty percent. Five years, it's still up ninety one percent, So that's it's got that going for it. So maybe we're in this for the long haul. I mean, you've got to really stick with bitcoin for a very long time. We'll see. I mean, I think that the problem with bitcoin is that it's you know, I think the problem is really governments.

Governments don't want this to work, you know, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, like all these companies that you know, banks, Bank of America, Chase, they don't really want bitcoin to work. Why they've got their own system that works really well, and they've got a lock on the financial system. Why would they want this other thing to come along that could be cheaper, that could be easier. They don't want this to work.

So when you don't have governments wanting it to work, when you don't have major banks and financial institutions wanting it to work, it's not going to work. Not easily now, maybe because you know, I do believe that tech people are very smart people, and the people behind this could be very smart and say, look, we've created a better system. But is the general population ready for this better system?

When you can't use bitcoin at any major retailer that I can think of, Amazon, Target, Best Buy, you can't use bitcoin to purchase at these things. You can't use bitcoin to buy a flight, you can't use bitcoin to buy a car. Tesla tried it for a minute, even Tesla Elon Musk, who you know was huge into crypto,

you can't. Yeah, they took away that functionality. So when you've got all these things working against it, it's a tough it's a tough ride for this thing to get into a place where it's part of everyday lives and where it can be more legitimate. I'm not saying I don't like it, like I actually think it's it's kind of cool. I just don't know if it's at where

people want it to be at. You know, other than an investment for the last couple of years, and that investment is not working out very well at this point. I could be wrong in five years. But also the functionality of it would be so much better if you could. You know, I had to pay someone the other day, and I had to pay them, you know, a little bit more than I typically pay for things like Venmo and zel and all that stuff, and it was a

real problem. I mean, just sitting there, you realize the limitations. You know, like something like a wire transfer right that's been around forever. It's bank to bank, it's slow, it's bulky, it's kind of a big deal. You got to fill out a bunch of stuff. I remember doing it for when we bought our house. It's just a not a simple thing to do. And so you think bitcoin you could send as much as you want instantly to anyone you want, which is kind of cool but also kind

of scary. But anyway, I saw I quickly saw the limits of zell and Venmo when I tried to do this, because you know, if you want to use a credit card to send on Venmo, they're going to charge you three percent. If you want to send over a certain amount on zel. It takes a bunch longer my account was locked up. I mean, it's a whole thing. So again, there are many, many kind of things happening in the financial world that bitcoin could solve, but yet many people

don't want it solved. And so when that's happening again, you've got lots of forces against you. So FTX will kind of continue to follow that whole drama, But lots of drama in the tech world this week. All right, let's get to the next question. Very simple question from Gil hey Rich, quick question for you. My wife needs a new iPhone charger cable. She's asking for a fast charge cable. Amazon carries off brand cables, but are they fast charge or do we have to buy the expensive

Apple brand to get a fast charge? Thanks Gil, great question, Gil. There are so many people out there charging their phones at the slowest possible speeds for a variety of reasons. You need a one to two punch to quick charge your iPhone. And the iPhone, by the way, does not quick charge. I mean it does only a name, but compared to most Android phones out there, the iPhone is still very very slow when it comes to charging. Now, the good news is that the iPhone battery lasts a

very long time. But it's it's very apparent to me when I travel or if I'm out on a very long shoot throughout the day. So let's say I go to convention, or let's say I go, you know, out out and about on a vacation. You're out all day, out of your house all day, or out of your hotel room all day. Good example, Hawaii, you know you're out sight seeing, you're hiking, you're taking pictures, you're taking videos. You come back to your hotel room before dinner, your

phone's at fifteen percent. You say, cool, I'll plug in while I go take a shower, get cleaned up, ready for dinner. And you come out in your phones at thirty five percent. It's like, wait, what shouldn't this thing be way more charged? So here's the problem. Number one, if you're using the old brick that you got with your original iPhone, you got to stop doing that. So if you're using the original plug in charger for your iPhone, which is pretty small, it's got a big USB plug

on it. It's basically a five watt charger, and then you're plugging that into a standard USB cable, you know, the big one USBA, and then on the other end of that is lightning. That's going to be the slowest possible charge. That's really a trickle charge at this point. For the modern iPhones, I think it's iPhone eight and up that can handle faster charging. So if you're using that original brick along with that original cable with the original USB plugging into it, that's gonna be really slow.

So here's what you need. You need two things. Number one, you need a lightning to USB C. USBC is that tiny USB connector that you can flip up and down. It goes in either way. That's what you need for your cable. And then you need the plug that goes into the wall that is USB c as well, and not just a you know, you need a faster USBC. Most of them are you know, twenty watts and up. You need a twenty watt charger or you know, maybe a thirty watt charger and that will charge your phone fast.

The fastest ones that I found are I like this one from Spegan. It's like a thirty wat brick and it's really great and it charges the phone very very fast, noticeably fast. So those are the two things. Now, do you need the Apple brand charger? No, you don't. You can just use any brand that you find on Amazon that seems legitimate. I like something like a you can go with Amazon Basics. You can go with a Spegan cable.

You can go with a Belkan cable. You can go with the you know, whatever cable you want that looks reasonable. Look for something that has a lot of reviews. Maybe it says Amazon's choice on there, or just you know, most popular, something like that. So that's it. When I was in China, I remember these cables were about a dollar, and here they sell for twenty thirty bucks for a

nice one, a braided one. But yeah, these things, you know, I wouldn't go for the super super cheap, like the dollar you know, the ones that you see at like the checkout counter at like certain convenience stores or like a quick you know, quick convenience store. I would maybe go with something a little bit more high quality. But really, any of these things will work. But you need that one two punch of USBC and then USBC cable to lightning that will get the fastest possible charge for your phone.

All right, let's get to the third biggest tech story of the week. Meta first time in history, first mass layoffs in the company's eighteen year history. According to Reuters, Meta told employees on Friday that eleven thousand jobs would be cut, thirteen percent of its workforce. And you know this is not something again news you can use, but it just goes to show the current state of affair here. We've seen more tech layoffs in the past couple of weeks than we've seen in all of the past couple

of years combined. I mean, this is a real indicator of things are changing with our economy, things are changing with these companies, that the tech kind of party is over. People are turning on the lights and realizing that there's a big mess to clean up. And that mess is that there's a lot of people that are employed at these companies, that the growth isn't there anymore, the profits aren't there anymore, and so they need to kind of

make some changes in a big way. And when you've got Meta doing this' that's really kind of wild because these companies are just printing money for the past couple of years. But we've seen inflation, we've seen prices rise, we've seen you know, all the revenue of these major tech companies has been clipped not just by the economy,

but also by changes in the greater ad marketplace. And a big part of that change is really, you know, people realizing that their privacy is more important to them, and things like Apple changing the way the iPhone lets these big companies like Google and YouTube and Instagram and Facebook target people and just regular ads. So long story short,

first mass layoffs in the company's eighteen year history. You know, people aren't at home anymore for work from home, so there's just a lot of these things that they thought were going to continue forever. You know, some of these advancements we saw in kind of work from home and how people adopted things and all remember the rush on like webcams and computers and laptops and you know, outfitting

your house. When people had the opportunity to get back to work, a lot of them did and they kind of dropped all these things, like you know, I went from using Zoom every day to using zoom you know, maybe once every other week. So there's a lot of big changes there. Two things in this Reuter's article kind of interesting executives during a town hall meeting with employees, told told employees that the company was going to exit its portal smart display business. Those are the the Facebook

kind of branded smart screens. You know, they had something that would compete with the Echo Show and the Google Nest Hub. So I guess Facebook is getting rid of those. I was at the launch event for that, and those never really took off in a big way because even though there were really good products, I think that people didn't like the privacy aspect of, you know, having a camera and microphone in their home from Facebook. And you know,

it's kind of sad that that is. You know that that kind of was a quick demise for those products. They never really took off in a big way. They weren't so bad, but you know, there you go. And then they're not going to work on smart watches either. I don't think Facebook ever came out with a smart watch that I remember, but I know there's been a lot of rumors about them coming out with a smart watch, so I guess that's not happening. But it says the

wind down work on smart watches. So it's kind of sad that some of these big companies, you know, there's so many like Facebook went from you know, the the real tech darling to kind of now they are in a really tricky place because people just don't trust Facebook like they used to. They've got a lot of good businesses, They've done a lot of interesting things. They connect a lot of people on a daily basis, but people just

don't trust them, and that's a problem. When you have that sort of major barrier in your relationship with customers, that's not a good thing and it's going to take a lot for Facebook to get over that. If they ever do. I'm not sure they can ever recover from kind of that whole situation with the you know what was that company, the Cambridge Analytica, that kind of scandal. I just don't I don't know, We'll see. I mean, I think they have a lot of good things going on.

I mean, Instagram has been tricky lately because it's changed so much to kind of compete with TikTok. Facebook Messenger is still there, but is that really a big growth area for the company. Oculus is a huge growth area, but it's kind of installed the metaverse. You know, they're spending so much money on trying to make the metaverse a thing, But is that gonna happen anytime soon. I'm

not sure. There are many many question marks in Meta's future, and it's gonna be interesting to kind of watch them work through it. Patricia says, we are being charged sixty four ninety nine twice a month on the same visa card, but two different Google accounts since for one twenty twenty two, with two different email addresses my one my husband and

one myself. I've tried everything to contact them to no avail the phone number and they give a phone number is always busy, no answer, please help, and no live chat in my account. Thank you, Pat in Huntington Beach, and I believe uh oh, YouTube TV that's what okay. I was gonna say I knew the price sixty four ninety nine because I just subscribed. Sounds like YouTube TV. Uh Pat, You're not going to reach someone at YouTube TV. You're not gonna any of these things that you subscribe

to online. You know, these new tech forward companies like a YouTube TV, like a Spotify, you know, any app that you subscribe to. It's very rare that you will reach a person to actually cancel these accounts with Now. The good news is that's the bad news, especially if you are of a certain general that remembers that you would subscribe to something and then you'd have to call in to get rid of it. That doesn't happen anymore. Ninety nine point nine percent of companies that you subscribe online,

you're able to cancel online. In fact, that is the way to cancel. Now, there are a few exceptions. You know, gyms, you still got to you know, you can easily sign up online, but oh, you got to come in and you got to fill out paperwork, and you got to do all this stuff. And the whole point with a lot of these things that they don't let you cancel online, like cable companies, let's see what else, a lot of newspapers.

The point is that by the time you finally get around to canceling, they have squeezed an extra three to six months out of you. Now you're talking April first, twenty twenty two. It's now November, So I don't know if you were trying to cancel since April or if you've just been charged since April. But I'll give you a great example. My I'll just I'll leave it at

a family member every time I go home. I would kind of review my family's subscriptions on their iPhone and I'd say, hey, family member, you know you're still paying for Hulu. Oh no, I'm not. I canceled that a long time ago. People think that when they delete the app,

it cancels. No, it does not. Now on Google Play, I know when you cancel an app or delete sorry, when you delete the app, it will say hey, red flag you know that this does not cancel the subscription, or it says would you like us to cancel the subscription as well. I think they do that, so that's good. On iOS, there's no real indication as far as I know. Maybe they have changed that in iOS sixteen. Maybe when you delete something now it says, hey, do you want

to delete the associated subscription? I'm not sure. But I even know myself, and I find myself to be very or I believe myself to be pretty tech savvy, and I will tell you, in the last month or two, I have fallen victim to this. It's not a scam, it's just it's very smart and shrewd business price. Let's put it that way. You know, you subscribe to something, it's so easy, you sign up, you get thirty days free and on the thirty first day up, you forget

to cancel. And so now I do use a website called privacy dot com to help me with one time credit card numbers, so that even if I forget the person on the other side, the company is going to get a decline charge. And so that at least gives me enough time when I get that decline notice saying, oh shoot, I forgot to cancel that, let me go and cancel. And this happened recently with a company, and you know they actually this was a very very aggressive company.

It was something I subscribed to. It was an airline thing where you would actually like alert you when the seat you wanted on the plane would open up. And so it was like a couple bucks a month I subscribe. It was like a month free. Well, sure enough, I forgot to cancel it and on on that first day, boom, they tried to charge me. I got an email from privacy dot com saying, oh, we declined this charge. I got an email from the company saying, oh, you're your

credit cards declined. Please submit a new credit card so we can you know, make sure you have no laps in your subscription. And of course I didn't thinking it would just go away. And I'm not kidding. They tried that credit card pretty much every day for you know, indefinitely, maybe a week before I finally emailed the company and said, hey, I've been getting this charge every single day. Can you

please cancel this completely and please stop charging me? And they said, oh, okay, no problem, We're sorry, like everything's been cleared up, and sure enough it went away. So and don't discount the power of email. By the way, you can many many times email customer service and they will take care of a lot of these things for you, Like if you really can't find a way to cancel something, you know, send an email. The main thing you have to watch out for when you call these phone numbers

is that you need to be very careful. There are many many scams where you google YouTube TV phone number and the first search result maybe a sponsored scam. Literally, scam artists will buy ads on Google with that phone number that seems official or seems you know, or sorry, not the phone number, but they'll buy a keyword YouTube TV customer service phone number. They will literally bid for that keyword their phone number. It'll say call one eight

seven seven whatever. To cancel YouTube TV, you call that number and that's actually a scam artist on the other end, or they're trying to sell you something, a bigger subscription, whatever, So just be very careful calling random numbers. In fact, it's much safer to cancel online. So to answer your question, Pat, because I always like to give you a little bit more more basis for why I tell you the things that I tell you. You can just go into the YouTube app.

Typically if you're on iOS, sometimes a little trickier because iOS is so weird about stuff. But if you're on Android, it'll let you assays sent for my iPad, so I feel like that's you're probably on iPhone. I would go to YouTube tv on the desktop up and literally go into your account, and I guarantee you there's a way to just cancel your account. Now, if you subscribed through iOS,

it's a different process. If you subscribe through iOS, which I'm not sure some companies let you, some companies don't. I'm not sure if YouTube TV lets you subscribe through iOS. But if you anything that you subscribe through iTunes Store, iOS, whatever you call iPhone, you can go into your iCloud and then you go into subscriptions and it will let me see if that's how you do it. Let me check this out here, because they changed it recently. I

think they made it easier to find. So you go into settings, you tap your name at the top or it says iicloud, and then you go subscriptions and it will show you all of the subscriptions that you are currently subscribed to. Many of them have gotten more expensive in the past couple of months. But what you need to do is just you can delete any subscription that

you have in there. Just tap it and just say cancel subscription, and you will be able to cancel that and typically you'll get to use it throughout the end of your subscription. Let me actually have YouTube TV on my iPhone, so let me see if you can cancel it from the iOS app. I doubt you can, but let's see. Let's just see for fun. By the way, YouTube TV is so good. I mean it's really really slick. Okay, Settings, Oh wow, refer a friend, get forty five dollars. That's

quite impressive. All right, Settings, Okay, membership Nope, base plan. Please go to YouTube tv on the web to manage your account. So yep, you gotta do that, So just go to the YouTube TV on the website and literally go to your account press cancel. You should be able to take care of that. No problem. All right, let's get to the next story of the week. What do we want to talk about. Let's talk about Gmail. Gmail is getting a handy feature just in time for the holidays.

It will help you track your orders placed in order today. I don't think my wife listens to this podcast, so I'll tell you what I got, But I got her a pair I am. I'll just be quite honest. I am the worst gift giver in the world. I really am horrible at giving gifts. My wife is amazing at giving gifts. And there are some people that are just really thoughtful gift givers. My wife's mom my mother in law is also and my mom are very thoughtful gift givers.

You know, there's two types of gift givers, right There are the people that just listen in everyday conversations for any clue as to what you might need in your life, and when they hear that, they lock it in their brain and they go rich needs a new belt. Next time there's a holiday, you have a brand new belt. That's amazing. There are other people that do this, Hey, what is your kid like these days? What do you need? Rich? Is there anything you could use? And they do their

gift giving like that. It's almost like a last minute thing. Then there are people like myself who are just completely clueless and I just go to the mall looking for ideas of what to buy. Oh, perfume, that's a gift that a lot of people give during the holidays. Let me give her that. It's terrible. It's a terrible way to give gifts. So I don't know if you can change that about yourself. Maybe you could be a little bit more thoughtful and write things down. That's what I've

tried to start doing. So when I hear a family member or a friend, or my wife or my kids say that they want something, I'm like, oh, a little bell goes off, and I kind of try to write it down. So anyway, my wife has needed new slippers since last Christmas when we bought slippers for each other and she got a hole in it immediately, like her toe popped out of it. Like the first day. We should have returned these things. Actually we probably still can.

They're wellbean now, that I think about it, why not a new pair? Anyway, So today I got a thing like one of those catalogs from Llban in the mail, and I had a fifteen percent off discount, and I said, oh, I am buying It's my first gift of the season. I am purchasing it right now. And so I went to my computer. I purchased a slippers, which, by the way, LLBean slippers. How in the world are they ninety dollars?

I don't know, but I think they're pretty good. I mean, I have a pair might have lasted many years, so I guess maybe they are worth ninety bucks. But I bought them. And anyway, so I was very proud of myself because this is a gift that I know she needs and I know she wants, and it'll probably be something she buys for herself by Christmas, but I may even give it to her early because just to make

sure that she doesn't get it for herself. Anyway, I tell you that story because this will be a very handy feature inside Google, probably be the first time I'll use this. Where now, if you get in order with a tracking number, Gmail will display that status of that tracking number right in your inbox. So for instance, my LLB and email will say congrats, your order has shipped, and right underneath it'll say arriving you know, November twenty second,

and you'll see that live updates. So what they're doing is they're looking in that email, they're seeing the tracking number, they're going out, they're requesting the tracking information from the carrier, and then they're putting that data in the email and they'll probably update that, you know, in live time, so you always see, you know, if there's a delay or whatever.

And in fact, they say if there is a delay, they will actually bring that email back to the top of your inbox with the word you know, delayed, and so that's kind of cool. It'll also say label created arriving tomorrow, delivered today. So it's just very handy. It's very simple. It's a very it's a very basic thing, but pretty handy. Now. I think there's gonna be one big exception because this says it works with all the major US shipping carriers. I don't think that Amazon actually

puts shipping numbers in their orders. Let me see. I don't think they do. So let's see Amazon your Amazon order. Here we go, here's an Amazon order, and yeah, it does not give a tracking number. It gives an order and in fact, it doesn't even tell you, by the way, what you order on Amazon. And the reason they do that,

and again I'll just give you a little background. The reason why Amazon does not put items that you order in your email is because they've gotten hip to so many of these scraper companies that scrape your email inbox. You sign up with a company like I think it's like Raccoton or whatever however you say that name, but what they do is a big part of their business

is like scraping your inbox. I don't know, maybe it's not Rakoton, whatever, but there are companies when you grant them access to your email, which you need to be very careful about, they will scrape your inbox for different things. But part of their business is kind of selling the data of the stuff that you buy, the stuff that you order, how much things can costs. So there's a lot of intelligence companies out there that do this and

it's not a dirty thing. It's it's a business. But you know, you're getting a business, you're getting a product, but they're getting information, they're getting data, and so That's why Amazon doesn't do this, because they've gotten hip to this and they say, you know what, we're just gonna mess with like, you know, we're the biggest retailer out there, biggest online, probably the biggest retailer in general, and we're just gonna mess with everyone. We're just gonna not put

tracking information in your email. And we're also not gonna put order information in your email because we just don't want you know, these scraping companies. You know, if they notice that number one, they can use the data and say, oh, a million people order this product today, or we noticed there is a big price drop, or we notice that the price generally goes up on this product around November. So there's a lot of different reasons why Amazon doesn't

want this order information in their emails. Being the biggest retailer out there anyway, ninety nine point nine percent of other re tailors, when you order something, puts the package information in there, the tracking number, and also what you ordered. So cool, cool new feature by Gmail that you can get. It's rolling out, so you may not have it immediately. I don't have it just yet, but it just came out this week, so you should have it soon. All right,

let's get to the next question of the podcast. All right, Apple TV four K first generation versus third generation. Paul says, I love your show and I listen every week on overcast. Oh that's a great app to listen to. Overcast is a fantastic podcast app. It's only on iOS, but it's it's very thoughtfully designed. I think I think it's Marco ament m A R C O A, M and T overcast. Yeah,

it is so. Marco ament is a is a pretty prominent developer and very very sort of in sort of the iOS like Apple, you know, very what's the word I'm looking for. He doesn't just do stuff like he's very thoughtful about the design of certain things. And that's why overcast is a real good kind of you know, it's a it's a really slick podcast player, probably the best or one of the best that you know anyway. So he's a very prominent, uh you know, iOS developer.

Follow him on social media and you know, you can kind of see what, you know, what he's up to. But he you know, I think it's just is it just overcast? He doesn't even say what he does interesting anyway. Okay, so what is the question. Okay, love your show listen every week in overcast. I currently have a first generation Apple TV four K with the A ten chip and it's used for streaming videos and Apple Arcade games by

the grand kids. In your estimation, what upgrading to the third generation Apple TV with the A teen chip bring a noticeable performance improvement? The first gen is starting to lag a little but still does the job. Okay, thinking more of future proof for iOS upgrade or OS upgrades and head off price increases. Thanks for your help. Paul in Columbus, Indiana. Paul, Yes, I've been testing the Apple TV third generation and I will tell you that it is.

Look I was using the second generation and I'll tell you that. Can I tell a big difference. No? Is it improved? Yes? Do the apps load a little bit faster? I'm not sure. Actually, this weekend I'm going to be testing the second generation versus the third generation, and we're going to open up I told my son we need

to get the stop Watch out. So what we're gonna do is we're going to open up a couple of apps, like the popular apps like Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, you know, close them all out and then open them up and see how long they take to load. Now, there is one defining factor. You know, people really are not very discerning when it comes to a streaming device. They just think like, oh, you buy the cheapest Fire TV stick or you know, whatever's cheap, you know, a cheap rocou stick.

But what they don't realize is that they are really slow when it comes to opening up the apps. And maybe it's not a big deal, you know, it's not something that you notice, but I notice as a reviewer when I test various devices for streaming, there is a big difference in how long it takes different devices to open up these apps. A Netflix app, you know those

little like intros they have on Netflix. You know, that little thing might linger for like five, six, seven seconds on some of these like really substandard and slow devices, whereas on a brand new device like the Apple TV four K third generation, it's super duper fast and it just happens instantly. So anyway, this weekend, I'm going to do a little speed test Where'm going to open up a couple of these apps and then open up a couple of popular games on Arcade and just see how

long it takes to load. I'm assuming the difference is only going to be a matter of seconds from the second to the third. I think on the first of the third there will be a noticeable difference, especially if you're saying it's starting to lack. The other main thing that is changed on the Apple TV third generation is the remote control. So the remote control on the Apple TV the new one is that the remote control is now USB C and so that's the big thing with that.

And then it's also got more base storage. It's got two versions. You've got an Ethernet version and you've got a Wi Fi version. The Ethernet version has support for

what's called Matter. So if you're doing anything with smart home in the near future, I would definitely go with the Ethernet version because Matter is this new standard for home interconnectivity where all of the smart home stuff is going to work together no matter what brand it is, which is it's a pretty big deal actually, So Apple the new Apple TV, the high end one, the Ethernet one has that built in, which is, you know, it's

not that much more than the other one. I think it's like twenty more dollars or something, so go with that, and then it's faster. There's no fan on it. It's a little bit smaller, and you know, Apple says it's twenty percent less in volume side by side. You know, I showed it to my kids. They didn't really notice, Like what's the difference? I said, I know, but the remote has USB C and so maybe it's easier to charge, you know, as Apple makes that move to USBC with everything.

And also Apple says it consumes thirty percent less power. I'm not sure if I said that or not. Anyway, so that is the main difference is for Apple TV four K. But should you upgrade? I mean, look, do you need to upgrade today? Probably? Not. What I would do if I were you is I would set a price alert on the Apple TV four K third generation, and I guarantee you over the holidays here there is going to be some sort of that you can get, not from Apple. I don't think it's gonna go on

sale from Apple, but I would do. What I would do is set either a Google alert on news and I would do like Apple TV four k deal and just make sure that you're getting the you know, the newest model. Because a lot of times, because Apple products in particular are kind of tricky and they all look the same, and they all don't have this, they all have the same name, and it's all about a generation, which I really don't like. It could be very tricky

for purchasing. So a lot of these Black Friday and Holiday deals are going to be for the last generation of Apple products, not the current generation. But sometimes you will find some sort of special off or whatever for the current generation. And that may happen with the Apple TV four K, because you know, they want to move these things, they want to sell them, and so you know retailers like a best Buy might do it. Apple may not do it, but best Buy might or Amazon

someone like that. So you can set up a Google search for Apple TV four K deal in the news and bloggers will always blog about deals, and so you can do that. Or you can go to slick deals, set a set an alert for Apple TV. You know, there's various ways of doing it, so just just or you can even go to a website and use like honey, put it on your watch list and see if the price goes down. Let's see if the if it's going if its Apple TV four K twenty twenty two, let's

see if the new one. Uh yeah, so look at this, it's already a couple bucks off. So the Apple TV four k uh, it's yeah, so it's already five dollars off. So there you go. Oh whoops, wrong one. There you go five bucks. I just saved you five dollars. Okay, so there you go. All right, Uh, let's see what are we doing. Let's get to another story here. Okay, let's talk about Windows eleven. So I told you earlier that I've been playing with when on the laptop and

it's pretty cool. The feature that I was playing with today is the iCloud integration. So there's always been some level of iCloud integration on Windows, but now it's gotten a lot better because I tested this couple weeks ago at the event, but now I got to try it for myself. And basically, if you log into iCloud on Windows, you have to have the iCloud app downloaded, and then the newest version of Windows software, which is Windows eleven,

and the newest version of their Photos software. Now your pictures from iCloud will show up inside the Photos app on Windows. That is pretty cool because it makes it easy to manage. It will show up with all your other pictures they're designated. You can kind of look at just your iCloud photos. You can look at all your photos across various services. It's just this nice, kind of like consolidated place where you can see many of your photos. I say many because I'm not sure that Google Photos

is part of that situation. Google Photos is really really bugging me because they have made themselves such a silo and it's so tough to like manage Google Photos from any other app or any other thing except Google Photos. And maybe Google has a good reason for this, but it's really annoying to me because I've talked about this before. But I want to back up my entire collection somehow, and as far as I know, there is no easy way to do that. Google Photos. You need to be

able to sync to a hard drive. Give me a WiFi hard drive. I don't care if you sell it, Google. I want to be able to plug it in to my house, connect it to Wi Fi, and say, continuously sync my entire Google Photos collection to this hard drive. Please give me that feature, Google Photos. It is a million dollar feature. It is You'll sell millions of hard drives. It'll be peace of mind for people to have a backup, a local backup of your photo collection in case anything

ever goes wrong with Google Photos. Believe me, it'd be very very nice. Anyway, Windows eleven, if you want to try this, just update the Photos app on Windows eleven, make sure all your apps on Windows or your your software on Windows eleven is updated, and then basically just log in and click sync iphot iCloud photos on the iCloud app and boom, all of your photos will start to show up in the app. And it's a two way sink, so if you delete something from the photos app,

it's going to delete off your iCloud. And it's actually kind of cool because I went in there. I don't use iCloud for photos, but I went in and found a whole bunch of old photos that were lingering, and I went in and deleted those. I copied them over to Google Photos and then I deleted them. So it was kind of a nice little housekeeping thing. Kind of cool.

But again another another way, I'm impressed with Windows. And you know, these these tech companies, they could either choose to be silos for everything, or they can choose to kind of be helpful to the consumer and actually do things that are helpful for us, and that's always nice, and it always surprises me when they actually do that. Okay, uh, let's see what else? What else? What else? Let's do this one? Oh, another question here. I got two more

things before I close out the show. Here Instagram. John says, I have an iPad and I lost access to my Instagram account. They asked for a phone number, gave them that. Now they want me to write my name on a piece of paper and take a photo of my face and send it to them. Do you think this is safe? Thanks for any help or advice on this matter. Sent from my iPad. Yes, John, as long as this is

Instagram doing this. This is a major major issue. The amount of emails I get from people that have had their Instagram account hacked or their Facebook account hacked is incredible. It happens. I'm not kidding. I get a dozen emails a week just on this topic. And it's gotten so bad where I really feel bad for the people that are emailing me. But also, hackers are not necessarily hacking

your account. What they're doing is they're just running scripts that find your password that you've reused a thousand times on a different website. And they run it on Instagram and boom it lets them in, and so you don't have two factor authentication turned on. And that's the big problem.

Got to turn on two factor authentication. Now, there are a million other ways that hackers can get in, but nobody is like trying to like, you know, get into your Instagram account to like take it over so that they can tweet things from your account or you know, Instagram things from your account. It's an automated thing. It's because eventually they might try to hit up your followers to scam them, and that's really what they're doing. The way, you know, and the other way that they get in

is for you actually handing over your password. So I've had people tell me stories where they will literally either log into a text message that says, hey, your Instagram account is uh is that risk? Please log in to confirm this was you, and they quickly log in and oh, that's a mistake because the website was a phishing website, or someone texts them something and says, hey, I need help, can you please just some of your password? And people

actually do it. Believe me, they actually do this stuff. So John Facebook, you know, I feel for them. In a little bit because they have to figure out ways of like verifying who people are. And a lot of times they'll ask you to hold up, you know, a newspaper with a date on it, or a picture, or a phone number or an ID or some sort of supporting information. It's really kind of wild sometimes. But I've had people tell me this personally that have gotten access

to their account again, So yes, they do. They do that for sure, So do what they ask. But you know, just be careful because you don't, you know, you want to be careful about what you do. All right, All right, let's get to the final story, because I tease this one, Spotify might finally work properly on the Apple Watch. Now.

I am no longer a subscriber to Spotify. I've actually switched over to a combination of Apple Music and YouTube Music and now Amazon Music because they gave all the songs away for free, even though you have to shuffle them, which is fine for my so nos, you know, it's totally fine. And don't listen to specific music when I come home. I just listened to like a playlist, so I've been I've been almost exclusively listening to Amazon Music, not I mean, I subscribed to other things I pay for,

so I should probably use those. But I just kind of like the playlist. They're basic, they're simple. I've got this like relaxing, you know, modern country that's just like a nice playlist when I come home. It's got easy listening songs. I like it. You know, call me old fashioned whatever. Anyway, I say that all because I got rid of Spotify, because you know, why pay for another thing. Even though I really really liked it. I was very

impressed with Spotify. I think it's probably the best music service out there overall, but I just, you know, I can't justify paying for it when I've got two more that I'm paying for three more if you count Amazon. Anyway, Spotify, the one thing that bugged me about it is that it never properly worked on the Apple Watch. I mean, I'm talking horrible, really really bad. I was basically I was able to download offline music. You know. My whole thing is that, you know, I have an Apple Watch

with cellular, which, by the way, never works. The cellular. I don't know if I live in an area with a bad signal, but the cellular on my Apple Watch never works. It's really annoying. Like I go anywhere and I think, oh, my watch is gonna work. No, it just doesn't. So I've gotten to the point where I don't leave the house without my phone because I can't. I need my phone with me because the cellular on

my Apple Watch is like never guaranteed to work. I don't know why, but it's just it's just really really hit or miss. So with Spotify, you know, I thought maybe you could stream music when you're out and about which you might be able to, but I've never gotten

that to work because again the cellular thing. So I downloaded music for offline listening, but there's so many restrictions on the Apple Watch and iOS and how the architecture of this that basically your phone and your watch never have a chance to download the offline music because like it never triggers it. Like Apple Music. Oh fine, because everything with Apple just seems to work so easily, like

Apple Music never had a problem. You say, hey, download this playlist to my Apple Watch, and the next time you charge your Apple Watch, it's there. Spotify that never seems to work. I think it's because you have to like open the apps, go to deep sleep, you know, the third party apps, and so Spotify just goes to deep sleep and it forgets to actually upload or offline you know, get that music. So anyway, now that's all behind us, because Spotify says they have a new and

improved listening experience on Apple Watch. You can more easily browse and choose your favorite music and podcasts, and more quickly download music to listen offline from the watch itself. There's larger artwork, animations, and added functionality like swiping to like a song. There you go. That is welcome. So if you have an Apple Watch and you haven't used Spotify in a while because it's just been the worst experience in the world, go ahead give it another spin.

Because this is what's so wild to people like me that test stuff for a living. I never know if I'm crazy and just like totally not really understanding this stuff or doing something wrong, or if there's actually a problem with it until something like this comes out and this is your going on like two years or a year after Spotify has been on the Apple Watch for me to say, oh, I was right, it never really worked properly. Did I go off enough on this show?

That's gonna do it? For this episode. If you'd like to spend a question for me to answer, go to my Facebook page, Facebook dot com, slash rich on Tech, hit the big blue send email button, or go to Richontech dot tv and hit the email icon. I would love it if you would rate and review this podcast. Go to the listening app of your choice. Write a quick line about what you like about this show to help other people understand why they should listen. You can

follow me on social media. I am at rich on Tech and no matter where you live in the US, download the free KTLA plus app on Apple, TV, fireTV, and Roku. Once you do, scroll to the tech section and watch all of my TV segments on demand. My name is rich Demiro. I have not given up on Twitter just yet. Thanks so much for listening. There are so many ways you can spend an hour of your time. I do appreciate you spending it with me. I'll talk to you real soon. Tutan Tuta, Tuta, Tuta, Tuta tutt