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I'm Rich Demiro and this is Rich on Tech broadcasting live from Los Angeles.
Coast to coast.
This is 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 believe that tech should be interesting, useful, and fun. Let's open up those phone lines triple eight Rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Give me a call if you have a question about technology. Email also an option. Just go to
rich on tech dot tv hit contact. Guests on this week's show will include folks from the Chicago Auto Show.
Was just in Chicago for that and talk to a.
Couple of great people about the show. Doctor Chris Pearson, cyber security expert with Black Cloak dot io, is going to talk romance scams. Yeah, it is Valentine's Day week, stay away from these. He'll talk about how they work and how to avoid them, and later Kyle Voorbach, filmmaker of How I Faked My Life with AI. We'll talk about the history, benefits and dangers of the AI Revolution. We are all living in Well. I hope you're having
a fantastic day. I am just got back from Chicago for the Chicago Auto Show.
Chicago what a great city.
Even though I did not leave the complex I was in, I was only there for like one what was it, forty eight hours? But Chicago is like a real I don't know, like there's just some buzz in that city. Like people just really take life seriously. In Chicago. It was not cold when I went, which everyone was talking about. Although it did thunder and lightning, it was not that windy and it was great. I went to the auto show, which is one of the most traditional things you can
do here in America, and it was fun. And that show is the largest in North America. It's been going on for over one hundred years. They brought me out there to experience it, and I'm glad I went. Now, all the journalists there were talking about how the auto show is dead, and I will tell you it is
not dead. In fact, if you have one in your city, go and take your kids, if you have kids, because it really brought back some strong memories growing up in the New York City area and going to the Jacob Javits Center with my dad and just sitting in all those cars and dreaming and having a great time and seeing what these car companies are doing. It was also great to witness the revolution that's happening in the auto industry,
which is of course electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles. And I love going to things like this because it gives me perspective. That is why I take the time away from my family to go to these events, to be there in person and to actually be on the ground, because you gain perspective, and that's what I got here in Los Angeles.
Evs are everywhere you go.
To Chicago, people are like, oh no, I don't want an EV why cold weather? Did you see the news about the teslas that were frozen to the ground in Chicago because there's only one supercharger station or two and people are in line and the line was so long their cars just seized up and they had like tow them out of there. So again, hearing those stories from people on the ground in Chicago gives me perspective. Hot
weather changes the battery charging infrastructure. We take it for granted here, but in other parts of the nation it's just.
Not the same. And not only that, but just sitting in a car.
You can watch all the YouTube videos in the world and think you know a car, but when you sit in that car for exactly a minute, you understand that car instantly. That's what happened with me with a cyber truck, which was there. With the new Tesla that was revamped. Let's see, there was, I mean just so many cars I got to sit in, I got to test drive.
It was great. One thing I saw that.
Was pretty cool at the show is this thing called Emergency Safety Solutions.
This is a company that is trying to.
Basically put a new protocol into cars when they're disabled, when there's a crash or they're disabled, the back lights blink really fast, like a certain cadence, and that is to help eliminate disabled vehicle crashes. And this happens a lot in Los Angeles. Cars are on the side of the road, people don't notice them, they slam right into them. People are on their phone, they're texting, they're not looking up, which, by the way, you should not be doing in general,
but it happens. And so this system is basically something that could be built into cars and the lights flash at a certain cadence and it helps drivers behind those cars understand that this car is stopped. And it takes a little bit.
Too.
It's two sided, so you have the lights that flash a certain cadence when the car is disabled, but you also have these digital alerts that are sent to your dashboard about a car up ahead that may be disabled, kind of similar to what you might experience with ways that tells you that there's a cop up ahead or a disabled vehicle. But this is kind of like across all cars right now. It's in Tesla's, not every tesla
but it's in a bunch of Tesla's. They're working with Volkswagen, Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep, and Ram. Of course that's all one company except for Volkswagen, so they're trying to get there.
I don't know.
It was an interesting concept and I think it would help, but again, it probably costs more for the manufacturers. They need to do a concerted effort to get this all working. But I'll have more from the auto show in just a little bit. Here on the show. Okay, officially, I am one of those people. I upgraded my TV for the Super Bowl. Yes, I am now one of those people that said let's do this, and so I will tell you it was the easiest thing I've ever done
in my life. So Number one, I ordered so we had an expert on a couple of weeks ago, so I knew all the TVs that I wanted. I ended up ordering a lesser TV than I wanted. I should have gone with a better one, but I didn't. But you know, I like to save money, so I went with the cheaper TV. I ordered it on the best
Buy app from my phone and it went through. It took me two tries because my credit card actually said you don't usually buy stuff this expensive, so we're going to decline that charge, and so I had to do it twice.
The second time it went through.
Anyway, ordered it on the best Buy app was ready for pick up within it must have been an hour, not even I got it delivered to my house via the service called lug where it's kind of like an Uber but for anything. They will pick up furniture. They go to the place with a van, the people pick it up and they bring it to your house. That happened within another hour. So I had this thing in my house within two hours after placing order. I couldn't believe it. Then I texted the guy who hung my
TVs the last time. This is probably ten years ago. I said, Hey, you still hanging TVs? Can you hang one more in my house? And he said sure, and he pretended he remembered me. Of course you didn't, but he gave me a great deal. Came to the house and boom, the TV was mounted. So I will tell you my advice on the TV. Number one, The TV looks great. Bigger screens definitely highlight the streaming quality of
the content that you are watching. So immediately we put on a basketball game and we're like, eh, this doesn't look very good. I did some research. It turns out that that service I was using streams in like seven twenty. The bigger the TV screen, the more resolution you need. So now I'm like, Okay, Now I understand why four K is a thing. I understand why people like ten eighty versus seven twenty, and of course eight K is
still a ways off. There are TVs that can handle it, but there's really no content for that maybe maybe on YouTube you might find something, but really not.
My advice also, go o LED. I went with Mini LED.
It is very apparent when I look at my OLED screen on my phone versus the Mini LED screen on TV, very very different. I watched a movie on the Samsung Galaxy S twenty four yesterday on the plane.
It's called Lift. It's on Netflix. It was very good. By the way, I could not.
Believe how good that movie looked on a smartphone screen. I mean, I'm talking, it was just incredible. I actually brought up the movie to my wife this morning. I said, you got to watch this. Just check out this scene and see how crisp the colors are and just the contrast everything. So go OLED if you can. It's a little bit more expensive. I wish I did, but I can always bring this TV to a different room. The other thing I noticed, and this is my takeaway for
you, your TV is spying on you. If you have a smart TV, it is spying on everything you are doing, everything you are watching. It is making a log of what you are watching, the commercials you see, the stuff you're streaming, the channels, you're watching everything, no matter what input it is on it is doing something called automatic content recognition ACR. This is technology that recognizes the content
on your TV screen. They use this data, they categorize it, and then they sell it so they know exactly when you buy a pack of Dorito's at the store in that new flavor. They can go back and look at the data from your TV and see if you saw a commercial and tell the advertiser, yeah, that worked. And if you think this isn't happening, it absolutely is. So
here's my advice to you. Google your TV brand along with turn ACR off, and you will find the directions on how to turn off automatic content recognition on your TV. There is no reason why you already paid for the TV. You're not getting any benefit out of this feature. Your TV manufacturer is making extra money on top of the money you already paid them for your TV. So again, google your TV brand and along with turn ACR off
automatic content recognition. Or you can just go in your settings if you're a little if you're a little techy, just go through the settings. You will find it buried under privacy or some sort of thing. That doesn't sound like it is a negative. It sounds like it's a positive. It says we will use this information to make your experience better. No they won't. They are just using it to make money off of you. All right, Coming up, I'm going to talk about the Super Bowl. I know
it's this weekend. It is the first time it's in four K. I'll tell you how to access that, how to place your Wi Fi router in the right place if you're streaming the game. And coming up, we're going to talk about Google's AI. It has a new name and a new price tag. But first it is your turn. Your calls coming up next at triple eight Rich one oh one, that's eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Give me a call if you
have a question about technology. My name is Rich Demiro and you are listening to Rich on Tech Angie and Riverside.
You're on with Rich. Hey, Rich, good morning, Good morning.
I get a quick question for you.
I don't know if it be quick or not. Everyone's all about Wi Fi and having that in the house making it really easy to connect and everything. But my problem is is our WiFi is very spotty and it's not always reliant, and I want to look for hard wirings like Ethernet, cables through the house to like our
smart TVs and other like our computers and laptops. Is there certain kind of company I would look forward specifically to do that, because I wouldn't be able to technically drill holes through the wall to fish these cables through to be able to install the outlets myself.
No, no, no, you would.
You would just go on Yelp, and I think an electrician can handle this. You can type electrician. You can type like the same person that like hung my TV I just talked about. They will do stuff like that, and so if you type in like a TV mounting, they will. I mean you could just go on Yelp and literally just type in there's like security network, cabling, network installation. I mean, there's so many people that will do this.
Kind of stuff.
I don't think you need it, to be honest, Like, I am running a lot of tech in my house and I don't have anything that is wired up. So I think what I would recommend before you try this is to get a mesh network. And a mesh network is kind of like the new thing in the tech world that's been around for you know, many years now, but it uses several access points around your house to create a network. And the big companies that make it Eero, you've got ORB. If you want something cheaper, there's a
company called Villo Vilo. But if you go to the store, you can check these things out. And it's basically a three pack. So you start with a three pack. You put one by your modem where your internet comes into your house, and then you kind of put the rest around your house in two different other places, depending on how big your house is.
You know, one or two or three may cover it.
But if you still want to do this, I mean, there's so many people on.
Yelp that will do this.
So if you just put in even the ethernet Ethernet installation, you can type that in. And what I would do for the guidance on who to pick is to kind of talk to. I would call. So Yelp is going to try to sort by recommended. You can change that sort to either most reviewed or highest rated, whatever you want. But I would call the first couple of people, so maybe like the first three people and just get a
feel for them and just talk to them. And if they're really quick on the phone, they don't really care to talk to you, then you know, I think you go with the next person and see what they do. That's how I got the TV installer that I like. That is, you know, I called again after ten years because he was really great on the phone. He explain things to me, Hey, how does this process work?
What do you need?
You know?
Do you do this? Do you do that?
And instead of some people, you get on the phone with YELP and they literally are trying to get you off the phone as soon as possible, or you can't even get person on the phone. So if you can't get a hold of them when you're trying to hire them, imagine what it's going to be like when you're done with the job and you've already paid them. You're never going to hear from them again. So that would be my advice if you need to go the wired route. Also,
it depends on the speed that you have. I mean, if you're talking a standard Internet speed from you know, Spectrum or something that's two three hundred megabits per second. I mean, most people are just using why find nowadays, But if you feel the need that you want to wire everything up just to make sure, then that's what I would do. Find someone on YELP and you'll you'll find someone that's that's going to do that. It's going to cost a lot though, that's not going to be
cheap to do. I think it'd be cheaper to buy the router first, you know, the Mesh network, and then go with you know, if that doesn't work, you can return that and then go with someone to install it. But thanks Ange Riverside, appreciate the call today. Speaking of wi fi, if you are watching the super Bowl, you are gonna want to make sure that your WiFi is really good because many of us are streaming nowadays. So number one, how to watch the super Bowl forty nine
Ers versus Chiefs. I would do the math, but I don't know it is this super Bowl fifty eight. It looks like this is gonna be on CBS. You can watch it, of course, over the air on the CBS network that's local to where you live. Paramount plus is also going to be streaming it.
Now. I will tell you if you have Paramount Plus.
I've had many issues with them, like just watching a movie on Paramount Plus is kind of tough sometimes. So for this, this is probably their biggest event they've ever done. I would have a backup just in case. Kickoff is at six thirty pm Eastern. They're also going to be showing it on Nickelodeon, but that's gonna be like kind of a kids version of the broadcast. I think there's gonna be slime involved. So the main way CBS, nickelode in,
Paramount plus. The other thing is if you want four K, there's a great article I'll link up from the TV answer Man about the about the Super Bowl in four K, But basically it will be in four K this year, but it's going to be an upscaled feed, so it's not necessarily going to be true four K, even though they are using four K cameras. But I don't know what the hesitation is with this whole four K revolution
on streaming, but it's it's very, very slow. And the other thing is place your Wi Fi router, take it off the ground, and get things away from it so this signal can get.
Through your entire house. That's my advice.
Coming up, we are going to talk about the Chicago Auto Show, what I saw, what was cool, and some of the key takeaways. You are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you talking technology at Triple eight Rich one one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. I'm on location in Chicago, site of the Chicago Auto Show. This is North America's largest auto show. It's been going on for like over one hundred years.
The Chicago Auto Show, along with Nissan was kind enough to bring me here to experience it, which is my first time. I talked to several journalists on the floor, including Emily dry Belbis. She is the EV reporter for PCMag dot com. She actually lives in Chicago and gave me some history of the show.
So Chicago Auto Show has kind of a family atmosphere. People in the city talk about going here when they grew up and now they're coming back with their kids. It'll be flooded with people. There'll be an hour to get on certain cars and see different cars with people everywhere. So it's a really popular community event. This is kind of like an amazing, low pressure dealer where you can see all of the latest models from all of the best brands, and they're not gonna sell you on them.
You can look in them and see what the dash is like. And compare them really easily. I mean, you can walk right next to each other all the cars you want to see instead of having to drive to dealerships. So I think there's a lot of uses. That's the most practical one. It's also just fun, like you can drive a car up a huge mountain and down and kids love that, and there's lots of things you could do here.
Now.
I live in California, where evs are everywhere, but it was interesting to get the different perspective of EV drivers in Chicago, a place where the cold definitely takes a toll on the battery, so people here have sort of a different outlook on buying an EV.
So I live in Chicago, and I'm an EV journalist, so I test drive evs all the time. But it's interesting I wouldn't buy one living in the city as my only vehicle because the range really does plummet in the cold. So I test drove a Tesla a couple of years ago in the winter, and it advertises two hundred and seventy miles of range in the cold. The dash screens that I was getting one to eighty. So if you're paying a premium for that product and you're not getting the value out of it. It really is
kind of hard for me to rationalize buying it. But in Chicago, on my street, there are EV's everywhere, all the latest models. Riviana is located nearby. There are factors two hours from here, so tons of evs. If you have a single family home, no worries. But if you're like me in an apartment, it's probably not a great idea. What the EV revolution exposes is how many different types of driving there is, I mean different types of climates and use cases, road trip in the city and the highway.
So it's a very complex problem. It's very hard to speak to what everybody wants.
Next up, I talked to Sam abullas Samid. He is a automotive analyst at guide House Insights, and a lot of journalists on site. We're talking about the death of the auto show, how there's no major announcements at these events, But Sam takes kind of a different approach. These auto shows are really for consumers now well.
One of the big trends with auto shows in general over the past decade is they've kind of followed the same trend as the technology industry, where most big companies have moved away from doing big press announcements at the auto shows and doing standalone announcements where they.
Can get the entire news cycle.
It's really expensive to do a press announcement at an auto show, so we've got fewer of those kinds of announcements, going back to more the traditional auto shows. As a consumer event, it's a great place for people that are interested in buying a vehicle to come out and check out a whole bunch of different brands. Right across the aisle from US here as the Ford booth where they're doing test drives, so you can actually come out and
test drive some of the vehicles. You can check out different brands side by side, you know, as they get into the traditional spring buying season. You know, it's a good, good opportunity for consumers to see what's in the market.
And even though EV's are front and center at the show, there are still plenty of hybrids in the conversation and even gas vehicles, so you know, we still.
Got a lot of electrification.
Right behind me here, it's the Subaru Saltera, which is their first EV that launched last year, and we're still seeing a lot of interesting introductions of new EVS. VW is showing they for the first time at an auto show, the three row version of the I D Buzz electric minivan that's coming here later this year to North America. It's a longer version than the version that they sell in Europe right now, the v W I D seven
sedan that's coming this summer. There's there's more more electrics, but also there's also a lot a lot of conversation around hybrids. You know, with EV's EV adoption not really hitting that hockey stick. It's still growing, but it hasn't hit that hockey stick part of the curve yet, and so there's and affordability is still a challenge. So there's a lot more interest in hybrids. GM last week an now, so they're going to bring plug in hybrids back into
their lineup in the next few years. Volkswagen Group of President Pablo de ce just at a at a press event just now, talked about bringing hybrids back to the Volkswagen lineup in the coming year. So we will continue to see more more growth of electrification in all its forms, hybrid, plug in hybrid and battery electric. We've got two hundred and ninety million registered vehicles in the United States, barely two million of those in total. Less than two million
of those in total right now are electric. So there's gonna be internal combustion cars, gas and even diesel powered vehicles on the road for decades to come, and even new vehicles. We will still have vehicles that are powered by liquid fuels well into the twenty thirties. You may not be able to buy a new one in California in twenty thirty six, but there'll still be around.
One mini surprise at the show, Tesla was on the show floor. They typically don't attend events like this. They had the refreshed Model three on display. The main thing I could tell that was different right off the bat was the addition of a display in the back seat. But the thing that everyone was looking at was the Cyberchuck, And I will say I was actually much more impressed with it than I imagined I would be. But this might be a turning point for Tesla.
But Tesla traditionally, you know, at least for the past decade, has not really participated in auto shows. The fact that they're here again, I think fits in with what we've seen from Tesla over the past year. With some of the demand. You know, where Elon Musk used to talk about infinite demand for Tesla vehicles, Well it's not so infinite anymore. You know, they've had to cut prices in the past year by more than twenty percent on most
of the models. And the fact that they're here at the auto show wanting to have a presence where consumers are going to be Lucid as well. You know, Lucid has struggled to really gain traction and grow their sales, and you know, they're they're still very much in the
premium end of the market. But the fact that they're here in a market like Chicago where you know, there's quite a few premium buyers the I think that shows that they you know, they're having to market a little more aggressively than they have.
In the past.
Sam is kind of the guy when it comes to cars when you're at these parties that surround the events, when everyone gets together, he's the guy that everyone wants to talk to.
So what is he like at this year's show.
I'm a big fan of the the EV's from Hyundai at Kia, so cars like the Ionic five and Ionic six from Hyundai. Uh the Kia EV six and EV nine are great. You know, the some of the hybrids from Toyota are really fantastic vehicles. The Broncos that are driving around this course here, you know, the Mustang dark Horse is always a favorite for me. You know, I've been a Mustang fan since I was a little kid. Uh So, lots of lots of fun stuff to see here if you have any interest in vehicles at all.
Finally, for an opinion from the TikTok generation, I consulted with Drake Moscow. He does content for TikTok surrounding cars. It was also his first time at the Chicago Auto Show.
It's awesome.
It's cool to see all these cars back to back and to see kind of a company's whole lineup all right next to each other. And you can see the product cycles, the newer vehicles, how they are updated and a little differentiated from the older vehicle. And I really like seeing all.
Of that stuff.
So there's a large spectrum of companies here, and it's cool to see how every brand is taking.
A different approach.
Like I was looking at the new Hyundai Santa Fe hybrid and there's no hybrid badging on it.
It looks just like a normal gas car.
The only way you can really tell is like the exhausts are a little different, but they're not branding it as a hybrid, which I think is super interesting. All auto shows nowadays have these awesome like experiential elements, which is really cool and allows people to like get into cars and feel what they're like while driving, not just static,
which I think is really important. And the Chicago Auto Show in particular, it's it's awesome to be like in this massive venue, there's like so much space around, so you kind of don't feel too claustrophobic around all the cars because there is so much space to kind of hang out and experience the vehicles.
There you have it from the Chicago Auto Show.
If you want to see some of the cars that caught my eye, check out my instagram at rich on Tech. All right, coming up next, more of your calls at Triple eight Rich one O one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. My name is rich Damiro and you are listening to rich on Tech.
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you talking technology at Triple eight Rich one o one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one the website rich on tech dot TV. You could also submit your question there. Ralph on x formerly Twitter says, Hey, Rich, I never heard of ACR until today on your show.
Thanks for the heads up, And Chuck.
Wrote in on email he said, I left mine on because I want them to know what channels I'm watching so they can provide better service or reward the channel that's giving me the content. I like, there's about seventy three channels I never watch. I hope they realize that and change it up A couple of perspectives there.
I like that. Let's go to Dan in Carpenteria. Dan, you're on with Rich.
Hey, good morning, Rich, thank you very much for taking my call.
Good morning, Yeah, welcome, Yeah, gonna help.
So here's a little background. Unfortunately, my wife has a neuro degenitive disease called ALS.
Okay, sorry to hear that.
Yeah, really tough stuff. But because of that, she's not able to use her hands. So in the morning, I get her up, and I get her ready and I put her in her chair and then she pretty much
watches TV all day. Question I have for you, is there a programmable remote TV remote control that would say, like between eight and nine in the morning, she'd be watching news on channel seven oh seven, and then at nine o'clock would automatically click over between nine and ten to channel seven eleven, so she'd watch maybe the Talk or something, and then at between you know, eleven and twelve,
it would change channels again. But I could just program for the course of the day, so that The problem I'm having now is is that if I don't get in there in time, I know you're a little frustrated if she's watching her program she doesn't want to.
Yeah, so is she able to change the like press the button on the remote or no?
No?
Okay, So so it would be a remote that like kind of you set it and forget it kind of thing.
What about voice? Can she use voice?
Unfortunately? Yes and no. Unfortunately. She has a stage also, which means she a lot of times she uses word substitution. She may say cat whenever she really needs to say dogs. So I don't see that as an option.
Oh Dan, I'm sorry to hear this. Wow.
Yeah, that's really tough stuff.
Oh man, Well, so I'm thinking for a tech solution. It reminds me of the old days when you used to like program the VCR and it would change to the channel and like record the show. But I think we're beyond that. I think that the maybe the best thing you might be able to do. There's two things
I'm thinking. Number One, some of these like cable boxes have like a way like a timer that will change the channel, but I'm not really sure like if that's a thing anymore, Like if they have a DVR built in, that may be one way to do it, where you program the DVR to change to the channel that you want to record, but it's actually changing to that channel just to watch it too. Do you have traditional cable TV or do you have like streaming.
I have a just I have a Spectrum cable right now. It ties into a Sony So they have their cable box.
And does that cable box have the DVR built in?
You know, that's something I don't know how to check that out.
Okay, because that's one way is if it's a So what I would do is, you know, usually these cable boxes have like a couple of tuners in them so that they can record a couple of things at once. But you can almost like hack it where you set all of the timers to record the same channel at the you know, like if you want this channel at nine set both timers to record that channel at nine am, so it's forced to change to that channel on the screen.
So that's one way that you might be able to do it, and that doesn't really take any additional equipment than what you already have. It's been a while since I used one of those boxes, so I don't know if that's how they work anymore, but I think that's well, that's the way they used to work, and so that may be one way to do it.
That's pretty simple.
When I used to have TVO, it would it would change the channel automatically, and if you max out the tuners, it would say, sorry, you can't change the channel anymore. Like we're recording on two channels, and you got to stick with one of these. You got to watch one thing or the other. So that's one way. The other thing you could do, and this takes a little bit more work, but you could use like a Google Home
or an Alexa speaker and you can program routines into those. Now, this is not going to be full proof in my experience. Half the time routines work. Half the time they don't work, But that could be another way of doing it. And I'm actually I found a thread on Reddit where people have come up with routines where it will turn on the TV, it will set the volume to a certain percentage, and then it will play the channel that it wants
to play on that TV. And so now that's a little complicated because you need everything to work with Google or Alexa, but you can definitely do that. It would take a little bit of know how though, and it, like I said, it wouldn't always work. Like I have a couple things in my house that are routines. Most of the time they work, sometimes they don't. But that is something you can definitely and it's not that expensive to do.
You can get.
The best box that I would recommend is probably the Fire TV Cube because it has an IR blaster in it and so you can actually hook that up to work with your cable box. And it's actually pretty slick because your cable box plugs into it. And so what that means is that everything on the fire TV overlays on top of your cable box, so your wife actually wouldn't really notice a huge difference because everything would kind
of look the same. So those are kind of fire TV yeah, fire TV cube and that's and it's also going to give you voice. So basically what you're doing is instead of doing instead of saying a voice command to it, you're just programming a voice command as a routine. So you're saying, Hey, at two o'clock, tune into this channel. So instead of you saying that verbally, you would just
write that. You would type that in as a routine and it would do it would fire off that routine at two pm every day, and then you know, you can layer on the top, you know, turn on the TV, turn off the TV. But again, not guaranteed to work exactly, but it's I think that's going to be a pretty good solution. But try the DVR setting first, see if that works, Like, just try to set the DVR to
change to the channel at those times. And the best part about this show is that now that we talked about this on the air, I will probably get some emails from folks saying, Rich, you know, what about this solution? What about that solution? So there are different ways of doing this. Those are the couple that I can think of off the top of my head. But maybe we'll get some other you know, other suggestions.
As well, be posted on your website.
Yeah, or I'll mention.
Them on the show in the future, and maybe, you know, if we get some by next week I'll mention them in the feedback segment at the end of the show.
Sounds great, Thank you so much, all right.
Dan, appreciate the call up there in a carpenteria today. Triple eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Let's see a couple questions we got on email. Louise says, you have any suggestions for outdoor TV. We live in Colorado, it gets cold. The two big brands Louise for outdoor TVs are Sunbright or the Samsung Terrace. Sunbright sort of owned the market here for many years. That's in the premium TVs. Samsung Terras is the other brand that sort of is coming up.
Uh.
And these TVs, you know, they're they're brighter than your standard TV because you're outside. There's less glare on the screen because you're outside. And also their weather proof so that they can deal with the rain, they can deal with the cold, they can deal with the heat.
Now. I will tell you.
When I was getting my TV installed by the installer, he said, what are you going to do with this whole TV? I said, I don't know, probably just recycling. He said, why don't you put it outside? I said, outside? This is a regular TV. And even though we live in California where people basically set up things that shouldn't be set up outside outside all the time, because it you know, it doesn't rain much except in the last couple of weeks, I was like, isn't that going to
short circuit? Isn't that going to be a problem. He said, Nah, just get a cover off Amazon.
It's cheap.
I'll mount it out there, and you know, you put the cover on when it's raining, it'll be fine. I can't say I recommend that because I haven't tried it personally, but I'm probably going to try it.
As long as you keep things dry, maybe it's okay.
But if you want a solution that's truly going to work, that is meant to be the way it is engineered, I would go with an outdoor TV. Also, if you look up on Amazon, there are much cheaper outdoor TVs than the Sunbrights of the World or the Samsung's.
But those are two places to start quickly before. Oh, I don't guess we're going a break never mind?
Uh eight eight eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four to one zero one. Coming up, Disney Plus is the latest to crack down on password sharing. I will tell you the details of when that is scheduled to start. Tell your family members. Now you are listening to rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you talking technology at triple eight rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two four one
zero one. Well my theory was correct. Steve has written in through the website rich on Tech dot TV. He said, Uh, to the man with the question about the ALS situation, I have Direct TV. If he adds the same programs fully on their DVR, it will switch to the new station automatically. It's important to program the same program on all slots for each hour. That's exactly what I said, So I think that will be your solution. That was Dan and Carpenteria. So Dan, I hope you're still listening.
That is the way to do it. It won't cost you anything. It's using the DVR that you already have.
So I like that. Let's see.
Let's see d says, what's the best antennae antenna to get to access local channels. I feel like antennae are the things that come out of the ants you know. But like antenna, if you're looking for for your DV I like anything from Antenna's Direct, A, N T, E, NNA, Antenna's Direct, and they make something called the Mohu and they're they're famous for the Mohu leaf, but they also have new ones, the Mohu Versa. But I would pop in your zip code, see what you can get and
get the recommendation for what you need. So it really depends on where you live, what kind of antenna you need. You might need something that's powered, you might need something that's small. It just really depends. So just pop in your zip code on Antennasdirect dot com and it will tell you what you can get and also the types of antennas that you should get, so it'll tell you exactly what you need, suggest an Antenna's fear zip code. It also tell you the channels that you can get
and you'll be surprised. I mean, I don't know what the deal is with antennas. I feel like they've come a long way. But I can plug one into the back of my TV in the office and I get like every channel like almost crystal Well, the ones I get are crystal clear, and I get a lot of them. A lot of them are, you know, kind of nonsensy, but you know, the big ones are there. Disney Plus
is going to start cracking down on passwords sharing. They sent out a new terms of service to their subscribers, and anyone suspected of improper sharing may have some ramifications. They could even cancel your account. This will begin summer twenty twenty four, so Disney of course hopes to convert some passwords sharing folks to paid subscribers. They will have some sort of message they will send you saying, hey, we notice you're trying to share someone else's password. You
want to subscribe yourself. But again, that happened summer twenty twenty four. There's going to be a lot of sad people on my account. Every time I log in, there's another profile added to my Disney Plus page.
I can't say that.
You should be sharing your password right now, but I know people do, and so far these streaming companies have not cracked down on it, but that is changing in a very, very big way. If you check out my Instagram at rich on Tech, like I said, I just got back from the Chicago Auto Show, you can check out the various posts I put on there, and I was noticing I actually forgot about this. But yesterday I was on the plane flying back and I got an
earthquake alert. How scary is that. I'm just sitting there on my phone before the plane took off. We were actually delayed a little bit because they're repairing something, and I get this critical notification that says earthquake drop cover hold on shaking expected magnitude four point seven in La County. And I was in Chicago, and so I immediately text my wife and said, Lindsey, did you are you filling an earthquake or what?
She said, Yeah, had you know?
I said, well, I just got the alert on my phone. And so my advice, because I posted this, of course, is to download this app.
It's called my Shake.
So if you live in the LA area, it only works in Los Angeles or sorry, California, Washington, and Orion. But if you live in one of those places. It uses that network they set up of the little sensors in the ground and it will tell you a couple of seconds before the earthquake, or at least that's what's supposed to do. And of course, based on all the feedback I got, a lot of people did get it. A lot of people said they had an old app
that's been decommissioned. The main app, I think the only app you can do at this point is called my Shake. Now that's for Android and iOS. If you have Android, you can go into your settings under Safety Emergency. There is an earthquake alert system built into the Android operating system. So either way, I recommend getting it. My kids were really shaken up. They said, oh Dad, it was the first time we had an earthquake at school and the whole room shot, you know, shook, and we had to
get under our desks. Reminds me of back in the day when I was a kid. We used to like what we learned, like stop, drop and roll for like fires. But now I guess with earthquakes it's like stop and take cover or something. I didn't grow up an earthquake country, so I didn't really learn that stuff growing up and in fact, my inkling was to run outside. And when I interviewed an expert in earthquakes, he's like, no, no,
that is the last thing you want to do. That's how people get hurt because things fall on top of their head.
So be safe. And if you're not from the area that has.
Earthquakes or any natural disaster that you get in your area, educate yourself. Because that was an eye opening thing for me. I was like, oh, that would be bad.
Let's go to Judy and ya kaipa, Judy, you're on with Rich?
Hi.
Rich.
I keep doing this message on my iPhone and I don't know whether to do anything or just to delete it. And I told you, screener, what it says. Do you want me to.
Yeah, read it to me. Let's hear it.
Urgent service reactivation. Your services have been pause. And then it says it has a phone number, and then it has a website, which is that's not it?
How are you getting this notification? How's it? Where's it coming through?
Like it?
Oh, it's a text? Okay, what do you think about this, Judy?
Well, I've never heard of this.
Ray.
I don't know what to do.
What service do you think they're pausing.
I don't know.
Yeah, this is the problem. These things, these these people are this is a this is a scam, and this is you know, I'm assuming the web address is some sort of like it's not like Google dot com, right, it's it's something.
Yeah, don't don't even give it to us. What is it?
Yeah, we don't want don't don't even say it on air because I don't want people to go to it because this is totally you know, they're going to try to either get your personal information, your credit card number. This is you know, this is totally a scam.
Okay, Yeah, appreciate your.
Show, Thank you, thank you, Judy, appreciate it. The main, the main takeaway here is that you do not want to click on the links in these texts that you get. You do not want to call the phone number. You do not want to respond because the more you respond to these things or interact with them, it verifies your number. And I will tell you now probably now's a good time talking about this. Hang on, let me grab my
notes on this thing. So I was talking to my wife about the information that is that is on all of us on the internet, and these uh, the idea of your data is out there right through data breaches. Your phone number, your email address, your data birth, your social Security number, it is all out there. And the way that this gets out there is that there are data breaches on the websites that you give this information to, and so once those sites get hacked, they that information
is out there online for anyone to find. And so with that said, couple things you can do. I've talked about this before, but you can manually go through and try to request a takedown of your information. But first you have to see where that information is. And so Mozilla this week came out with the new thing called Mozilla Monitor Plus. And if you're familiar with Mozilla, that's the company that makes the Firefox web browser.
And this is not new.
This is something that a lot of companies offer, but I do trust Mozilla and they actually gave me a test account to try this out, and I'm very impressed. So it found like one hundred and thirty nine instances of my information online and it fixed eleven manually, it removed five of them automatically, and seventy one are in progress.
And so what it does is it scans the information about you you put in your name, your phone number, your email address, maybe your data birth and then it goes out online and it looks for the places that have that information and so it found it on all these different websites been verified, people Wizard, Gosh, there's ten variations of that one. Search Systems, Bumper dot com, whatever, that is, free People, Directory, Number, Guru, Ownerly, People Smart
and so Spokio. You know you've heard of that one. And it goes through and it shows you the information on the page. It gives you a link of that and then it tells you what you can do about it, so whether you can manually take that down or they can do it. So for free, they will do a one time scan of your information and just kind of reveal where it is and show you what you can do. But if you pay them a couple bucks a month, they will do all of this for you and automatically
and continue to do it. So they scan like one hundred and ninety different broker sites. But if you want to do this for a free one time scan, which I think you should probably do, just check out monitor dot Mozilla dot org. Monitor dot mozilla dot org and it's pretty incredible it's very eye opening. Now, if you are a Google subscriber, if you pay for anything from Google one, they have what's called a dark Web scanner, and so they will email you when your results show up on the dark web.
That's if you're paid. And I've got all that monitor too.
Your email address, my data birth, my phone number, my usernames, my passwords. It's pretty wild what is out there, and so they will email you that as well. That's if
you're a paid subscriber. If you're not paid, Google has a free thing called Google Results about You, and so if you go there, you put in your information again and they will scan the web for any website that has the information that you put in, whether it's your data, birth, your phone number, your address, whatever it is, and they will tell you where that is. Now, Google will not take down that website, but they will take down the
link to that website on their search results. So if someone's looking for you, it takes a little bit of a deeper dive for them to actually find you than going on Google. So if you just typed in someone's name and address you know, and or phone number or date of birth, you won't see those results on Google search if you want to go through and actually get rid of those. That's why you have to actually go through to these companies and get rid of this yourself.
But I highly recommend you do a search for yourself and just see what's out there and try to remove some of this information.
It will definitely come in handy.
All right, Coming up, we're going to talk to doctor Chris Pearson, cybersecurity expert. He's going to talk about romance scams and Google's AI has a new name. I'll tell you all about that, plus more of your questions and calls at eight eight eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. You are listening to Rich on tech. Guy Moore Park has some suggestions on the outdoor TV situation.
What's up, guy?
Oh, hi, Rich, thanks for taking my call. Yeah, there's a company here in more Park that manufactures enclosures for TV sets. Ah, it's called Apollo Enclosures.
Okay.
They make a whole line of different sized boxes and ways that you can mount your TV and keep it put it outside.
And what about like humidity and all that stuff? Does it kind of keep that way? I see, it's got some like fans and things make any TV and outdoor TV there you go.
Yeah, they're all there, They're all well engineered. The company's been around for a while.
Oh wow, my.
Brother has a couple of them in his man caves out which is kind of an outdoor patio.
Okay, so I mean, yeah, they're not cheap fifty five inch thirteen seventy five. So it's you know, it's I guess it depends if you already have a nice TV that you want to put out there or repurpose. It's one way of doing it, for sure, but that's another option. I like that option. Interesting.
Good to know. That's what I love about this show.
We get people like Guy to tell us things that maybe I'm not aware of.
Let's see, let's go to let's go to.
Let's go to an email. We've got so many emails, so I'm trying to get through some of these.
Here.
Let's see here. Maria says, I've got an iPhone twelve Pro Max. It's completely paid off, but I'm getting sick of Apple. I'm really leaning towards getting an Android as far as picture quality goes, mainly from Droid to Apple not having it look pixelated. What, in your opinion, is the best Android phone to get. I'd like to say money is no issue, but I'm a single mom, so I can't say that. Picture quality and reliability are two
of my biggest issues. I trust and respect your opinion, so I'd like to ask before throwing caution to the wind and ordering the first Android ICEE. Thank you Maria, Well Maria number one. The whole sending a photo from Android to Apple and looking pixelated has really nothing to do with the phone. The phone is trying to send a good picture and it's taken a nice picture. The
problem is the way that Apple receives the picture. They are using an older version of texting that does not support high quality pictures, and so later this year they will support what's called RCS Rich Communication Services, and pictures from Samsung or any sort of Android to the iPhone
will actually look perfect and vice versa. And so that's going to be a huge change because right now, iPhone to iPhone looks great, Android to Android looks great, but when you go from Android to iPhone or iPhone to Android, pictures could look really bad. And videos don't even try to send one of those those are horrible. So With that said, to answer your question, I think the best phone for you would probably be a Pixel. I think pixels take great pictures, they are easy to use, their reliable,
and the price is great. I'd go with the Pixel seven A if you want a budget phone, or I'd go the Pixel eight if you want a nice kind of all around phone, And the price on those are going to be a little bit more, anywhere from like five hundred to eight hundred dollars. So, oh wow, it looks like the Pixel eight is on sale right now. That's actually a pretty good deal. If it's five hundred and fifty bucks, that's a great deal because it launched
at like seven hundred. So anyway, I really like the Pixels. I think they are very liable, they'll take great pictures. Yeah, five hundred and fifty bucks right now, And the Pixel seven eight is going to be a little bit cheaper, but the Pixel eight is going to have overall, it's going to be faster and better specs. So if you can, if you can do it, I'd go Pixel eight. Great question, Thanks for that.
Uh Ring.
Is going to raise prices starting March eleventh, twenty twenty four. The Ring Protect Basic subscription price will increase from three ninety nine a month or forty dollars a year to five dollars a month or fifty dollars a year. This is if your subscription renews on or after March eleventh, twenty twenty four. So if you're on a subscription date that's before March eleventh, you're gonna get one more year of the cheaper service. You can change this, do whatever
you need to do. I asked Ring about this, and they said, you know what, we believe that Ring protect still offers some of the best value in the industry. I would probably agree with that. Fifty bucks a year for your video doorbell. I know everything is a subscription these days, and all these subscriptions continue to go up in price, but I still think it's a pretty good value if you want to make your doorbell record the
events that it does. Otherwise, if you get a Ring doorbell, you can just live stream it.
That's it.
You can't really see the recordings of what happens outside the front of your house. So I would recommend if you have a video doorbell, you got to pay for that because you really want those events. And finally, Ring has a new battery Doorbell Pro. This is now their best battery doorbell. Ring says seventy eight percent of customers
use a battery power doorbell. Previously, you had to go wired to get all of Ring's best features like three D motion detection, bird's eye view, all these cool things, the HD plus video, low light video. Now you can get it in a battery doorbell. It's called the Ring Battery Doorbell Pro. It chips on March sixth. It will cost two.
Hundred and thirty dollars.
That is very pricey for a Ring doorbell, but you're gonna get the best, the best.
Quality out of that one.
Coming up, we're gonna talk romance scams with doctor Chris Pearson, cyber security expert. I was intrigued at this conversation. I learned some new things, and I hope you will too. Coming up right after this, joining me now, friend of the show, doctor Chris Pearson of black Cloak dot Io.
Chris, thanks so much for joining me.
Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks Rich.
So let's talk about what's happening in the h Well, it's happening all the time, but it is Valentine's Day, so let's talk talk about these romance scams. So what are some of the most common techniques that romance scammers try to use to exploit folks?
Yeah, I mean this scam is always a good one. It's on the rise.
Last year there were ten point three billion reported scams is twenty twenty two data to the FBI's ICE three.
And so those.
Scams that we see that fall into romance scam bucket usually fall into a you know, somebody becoming friends with someone else online. It moves from a normal channel, one of the normal social media channels, into private discussions, private chats, private areas where there's less monitoring, less control, and then it evolves into in some form of fashion, a hey, I'm so sorry I wasn't talking to you for two weeks.
I actually hit it big, did great stuff. You know, I'll be traveling a lot, but I hope I see it, And then that gets your interest in. You then end up joining them in a investing in a crypto, which of course is all fake, and write them and the other organized criminal syndicate gang take your money. That's a big, big one. The other one is any type of man scam where they're able to get direct funds from you. It might be via gift cards, it might be very
all wire, might be via some other payment method. But they're able to go ahead and convince you that they need travel money, trail funds.
They're stuck at the border.
They were on the way to go see you, but then they ended up in the hospital and the bills too much as five thousand dollars And could you possibly help them? Of course yes, because your heart is wanting them to come in to see them.
Hence the romance scam. So those are the most common ones.
We can talk a little bit more about some other ones, but I mean those are the big common ones.
Okay, so you've got the common ones. What if you think you're getting scammed in this way? What if you suspect it? What should you do? Do you just ghost this person?
So I mean, if you if you want to dive a little bit deeper, right, really find out right who they are? You know, hey, want to be careful, want to want to maybe stay on that main channel, right, the main social media items, you know, get a driver's license, get a passport, gets something, actually proves that they are who they say they are. If their excuses like oh I don't have it or I lost it, oh this that whatever other thing is that you know. So that's
always a good a good first thing. But I mean second, if you feel like it might be some part of a scam, egress, Right, they're gonna want time to move forward really really quickly, and spotting that is really imperative. If they seem like they are always far away, always traveling, might be a romance scam. If they claim they're in the military and always traveling. Once again, it could be a romance scam.
If the profile match.
Is too closely something you like as well, Right, Hey I'm anaquestrian champion.
Oh will so my love horses have them?
Whatever speed or continued excuses of hey I can't see you for some reason, the border, whether whatever it might be.
There's always a way to get together in person.
And if they're always excuses over an extended period of time, these are the big warning science egress, stop close down your communications with that person.
What if you actually sent money to one of these people, because that sounds like what they want.
Is there any recourse?
Well, first thing is if you say, if you think that anything.
Is wrong, speed is your friend in terms of stopping those funds. So Usually it's going to be sent via a wire which is very very fast, or some type of other fast transmission.
It can be ach or like a zell or a Venmo.
Look, the bottom line is contact your bank immediately and get that wire or payment stop.
That's first and foremost. Second, if you did send.
Something, you're gonna really want to go ahead and change those account numbers just to make sure that there's no trace back to you in terms of them being able to try to further scam you. And then third, you're going to be need some type of remediation. It may be that during the scam you downloaded, you know, screen messaging software or video messaging software so you can have one to one chats.
You're gonna want to scrub that from your machine.
If you ever downloaded any programs that they sent you, you're gonna want to remove those from your machine as well and kind of delete your tracks. But getting funds back, you get to get with the bank report that. Of course, you can report scams frauds that have happened to the IC three Internet Crime Complaint Center of the FBI, but that's not an arm of the FBI that gets back
your money. They simply taken the intelligence and aggregate it so that they know what the latest and greatest scams are and can build cases that are large.
I think I know the answer to this, but why are we seeing more of these romance scams now than we were, you know, five or ten years ago.
Well, so, simply put, I mean, Number one, the technology is easier for everyone to use. Everyone has in some form of fashions, some type of social media platform, communication platform that's on their devices, cell phone, tablet, computer, COVID really accelerated that. Everyone got used to Zoom, everyone got used to video chat, and got used to all those different types of programs.
That's number one.
Number two, payments and the speed of payments has massively increased. The availability send a wire from an app on your phone is really something that's been in everyone's power.
The ability to send a one.
Time payment via something like a zell or a Venmo or some other type of messaging app is extremely high. Everyone has those and so that really does break down the walls in terms of the speed of getting that. And then three look right now, I think the Surgeon General had released the last year it was was like the loneliest time in America and a lot of people,
more people dealing with depression and loneliness. The fact of the matter is is that being romantically involved with someone and really like being excited about this person, it's fun, it's exciting, and sometimes when those things happen, your brain shuts down and you move more over to that kind of like you're leading with your heart a suppose your mind, and you're more likely to be able to be victimized.
I imagine that some of these scams turn into like threats, all out threats, or even blackmail.
Does that happen?
It does?
It does.
Let's talk about Let's talk about two different types there. So first one is going to be your extortion or extortion scams. So you're having a long distance relationship, you think, with somebody else and they decide to kind of take.
Off their clothes and do things, and you take off your clothes and do things.
The fact of the matter is is that they may be recording or the other folks that are part of the organized criminal syndicate may be recording you on their screen, and as a result, they then use that as a We're going to message your parents, your family members, a school board, The PTA you're our children's friends, because we know who you are, we see your social media profile.
And if you don't do that, we're going to go ahead, and if you don't give us money, we're going to go ahead and send these messages out.
And of course that's straight up extortion, extortion.
There have been people that have committed suicide over this, and this is especially specially susceptible in terms of you know, teenagers and young adults really susceptible to this type of harm.
Think that the world is.
Over, so you gotta be really really really careful here, very very careful. A.
The other one is, you know.
More extortion that goes into the physical realm, where there is something of a you know, romantic scam and then somebody actually comes over to your home to collect the money or the funds on behalf of someone else. We've seen that, and there's an FBI warning on that about two weeks ago. We've been seeing that for about two months now. That physical component of somebody actually coming called a mule or a carrier, that carrier.
Coming over to your home or that muele coming over to your home.
That adds a new level of complexity in this that actually creates a physical risk to you.
With all of this happening online, are there legitimate relationships that can still happen? Because I feel like every wedding I go to that people meet online, So this must be working in some way, I might look.
You know, dating online can be fun, can be safe, can be something that you know leads to.
Other things, which is great.
Stick to the mainstream online dating platforms. Try to stick to platforms that have some type of member verification to them. Do your own due diligence on the individual you know LinkedIn Facebook, et cetera, trying to really suss out who they are and making sure you know who you're dealing with. Keep your personal private details private.
Don't give them your personal cell phone number, don't give them your personal email address. Have everything go through the platform. That's really really important.
Whenever you get things taken off of that platform environment, it does increase the risks of somebody coming after you, increase the risk of someone coming after you digitally and physically. But it's really not necessary, especially in the early days of our relationship. And then of course, if you're gonna meet up in person, make sure you know you're sending your location to you know, your best friend, your parents, so to speak.
That somebody knows.
Where you are, who you're gonna be with, they have your phone number, they have the contact information that individual in your meeting in a public place and location.
Doctor Chris Pearson of black Cloak dot io. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Hey, thanks so much, Rich, appreciate it.
Thanks so much for joining me today. More of your calls coming up next Triple eight rich one oh one.
That's eight eight eight.
Seven four two four one zero one. My name is Rich Dmiro and you are listening to Rich on tech.
My name is Rich DeMuro hanging out with you talking technology at Triple eight rich one on one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Give me a call if you have a question about technology. Although it looks like we're pretty filled up here, I don't even know if I can get to everyone that we have.
UH.
Email is also an option, many of you taking advantage of that. Just go to Rich on tech dot tv hit the contact button. And also, if I mentioned something on this show, you can easily find a link in real time. Just go to rich on tech dot tv at the top. There's a big red banner it says heard it mentioned on the radio show. Links here, click there and you will find everything that I talk about in real time.
And by the way, if.
You want to learn more about me or follow me on social media, I am at rich on Tech. Got a lot of folks that interact with me there and you'll be surprised. I answer a lot of my dms. So believe me, it doesn't your your messages do not go on read Let's go to Patty, Patty and Palmdale.
You're on with rich which I have two problems. I've got a TV about a year ago. It's an LG O L ED got a sown bar and then in December, just a few months ago, I bought another, uh well three TVs and the one that I'm talking about now is is a Samsung. And when I had the last three installed in December by best Buy, that came in geek Squad came in and installed everything, and the one in the back room, which is not the one I'm going to talk about, the one in the back room wouldn't connected.
So they said, well, you need a wire mesh system. So I got the euro wire Mesh system. So I have that now. And so Spectrum took their you know, was it router away. And so now I have my TV that I've had for a year. It's the LG fuzzy. The screen is not looking nice at all. And it's a high TV my, So that's the LG problem. My Samsung with the soundbar is crystal clear, beautiful. Yeah, but the sink is off on that. So when I and but it's only when I have the soundbar on. When
I have the soundbar on, it's a little off. And I turn the sound bar off, the think is fine.
So yeah, well okay, so a couple of things.
Number one, uh, these are not this has nothing to do with your eurosystem. This is these are these are situations that are local to the TV. So the fuzzy screen on this on the LG. You didn't change anything, and that just happened.
Yeah.
Does it look like a defect with the TV screen? And is it on everything or is it just on certain things?
Everything? Okay, whether I'm on Netflix or regular TV. And it was raining a lot lately, of course, so I thought maybe it had to do with that.
So it looks like.
The actual TV screen is affected, like there's something wrong with the actual screen itself, not the content that's playing on the screen.
Yeah, because no matter what I have on, it's just not that crystal clear. Okay, you know the letters are fuzzy and hard to read.
Interesting, Okay, Well, first off, what I would do for that TV is I would you know, it could be it could be a defect that happened, and so that could be something that you know, you might need to get someone out there to like look at. But if I were you, what I would do immediately is just I would disconnect all of my inputs on the back and I would do a.
Full reset of that TV.
So go into settings and look for sort of a factory reset and that will at least bring the TV back to the out of the box experience, and then plug in you know, your fire TV box or whatever you have connected to that and see if that helps. If that doesn't help and it looks like the TV is actually just the screen is just something's wrong with it, then I would probably call LG and see if you can get.
A service person out there for that.
Yeah.
Uh, the sound bar, that's just a sink issue. So you got to go into your settings on whatever you're using to to do that TV to, you know, to put the sound onto that soundbar, whether it's a streaming device or the TV itself, and you have to adjust the sink and so usually there the soundbar may have an option itself to do that, but it's typically a little setting on either your TV or the soundbar itself and there's a sink setting.
It's also I'm not sure how you have.
That connected, but it could be depending on how you have that connected, the sink could be better or worse based on you know, the type of connection. And if you're using the HDMI input on your TV or output on your TV, I would look for the one that says ARC. That's the ones you want for the best for the best connection between those two. So that's that's
what i'd recommend. But look for the sink on the audio bar and also ARC look on the back of your TV and make sure you're using the output that's labeled HDMI with e ERC and that will give you the highest quality connection between those two things. So that's why I recommend, Patty, and hopefully that will work. Report back please thanks a lot. Eighty eight rich one on one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Let's go to stand in Oxnard.
Stand you're on with Rich?
Hey?
Rich? How you doing today?
I'm doing excellent? What can I help you with?
Hey?
I was just wondering when you were at the Chicago Car Show, did you get a chance to speak with any of the developers on all the automations are thrown in cars and that affects the skill level of the drivers, like a degradation because of the automation. Is that a concern to them?
That's a great question. I did not ask any of them that, but that's a great question. And I think. I mean, my kids will tell you that I'm yelling at drivers all day long. So I don't know if it's an automated thing or just a human thing. But I do think that there are some cars have become so automated that there's a lot of things we're forgetting.
Like I was thinking about this the other day. Whenever I rent a car, you know, you have to remember to turn on the lights, you got to remember to do this, you got to do that, lock the doors, put it into park. But if you have some of these newer cars, a lot of that stuff is automated. So I do think that we're kind of forgetting some
of that skill level. When it comes to the automation, people are just being stupid, and you know, they're doing stuff they shouldn't be doing and pushing the limits of these systems in a way that they are not intended. And so I think that that's a great question for the next time I talk to someone with these automated systems.
But I think that they will throw a lot of that.
A lot of that burden back on the human driver because these systems do have a lot of safety, you know, safety built into them, but they can only do so much. You know, when the Tesla first came out, people figured out how you can like put a weight on the wheel to like make it autopilot when it wasn't supposed to be doing that. Actually have a story today that I was going to tell you about. I'll do it right now. Toyota. This happened in Massachusetts. This guy was driving a person.
I don't know if it's guy or female. Toyota BZ four X.
I don't even know how to say the name of this car, but this is Toyota's ev It's called the BZ four X. Might have seen it advertised, and the driver got out of the car without putting it into park, probably because the car is so silent, and it began rolling off the pier he was on and he had to escape through a window on his car, and the ev rolled right into the ocean.
The car was a total loss.
And this was the twenty twenty four Toyota BZ four X, and they were saying that this probably suggests the need for a warning if the driver gets out of the car without putting it into park. Now I've got a Tesla, and I've got the situation where when I'm at a low speed and I'm doing something, my car will will shift into park by itself, and I'll say, oh, we wanted to prevent a roll away. So the Tesla does
have that system in place, that safety system. And so this apparently happens when you connect a charging cable, unbuckle your seatbelt or open the door while and drive or neutral.
I don't know.
It just seems to do it on my car when I'm like at a low speed and I kind of just like it just stops and it says, we're putting it into bark for your safety.
So I think the Toyota should have that.
In fact, I left when I was testing a car a long time ago, I left it running the entire time I went inside because it was so silent that I didn't even realize the thing was on. And I just walked away from this car. When I came back, it was still running. So yeah, these systems, they're not fool proof, and we're all human and so we make mistakes and hopefully they can build them where they are full proof to a certain extent, but there's always going
to be that human element we need to address. Listening to rich on Tech, Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Tamuro here hanging out talking technology with you at triple eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one the website rich on tech dot tv. You can find more information about me there, watch the TV segments that I do, see past show, subscribe to the podcast, send me an email, or get a link to something I mentioned using the link.
At the top of the page. Let's go to Dan in New Hampshire. Dan, you're on with.
Rich Get out, sir, Hi, I'm wondering what would be your recommendation for for LTV security camera. I don't have life FLI. Oh there's like ten different companies that make them and compeers and going on. But what the details are. But it has to be linked through the cellular network, not Wi Fi.
Okay, so you want cellular you want a camera that's basically self contained?
Yeah, okay.
Do you have a place to plug it in or is it going to be battery it's going to beat Okay, battery or solar?
Okay? Perfect?
Well, I mean, you know, the most of my cameras that I have are all plug in or Wi Fi with solar or plugged in whatever. But I did test a while back a Canary camera which had LTE, so they did make them. It's been a while since I tried one. But the two popular cameras from what I can tell, are from Rlow and UFE. These are two pretty big brands, so it kind of comes down to which camera has the features that you want between these two. But that those are the two brands that I would
narrow down to. You're probably gonna find if you go on Amazon, you're probably gonna find a hundre different of these types of cameras. But these brands are brands that I know brands.
That I trust.
So when it comes to Arlow versus UFIE, you know, the thing that you want to look for is the pricing and also what you know, do they make you pay for the subscription for the LTE the cellular or can you bring your own cellular? That may be important to you. Of course, the monthly fees is something you want to look at. And also the cloud backup, so you want to see these things back up to the cloud immediately or do they back up to an SD card that's on board and you can only access it
from there. So the reason why the cloud is important is because if someone takes one of these cameras, you will not have any of the video footage. So if it's backing up to the cloud, you know, that's another way of having that footage. But those are the two brands that I would take a look at, ARLOW or UFEE. I think the jury's out on which one is better.
I think that it comes down to personal preference. Like I said, with the different things that I mentioned, but those are the cameras that I think are the most popular. The other thing you might want to look at is what's called a trail cam This was actually one of the first questions we ever got in this show, and someone wanted a camera that was sort of just out
there without anything. And I was not aware of the trail cams at the time, but something like a trailcam might be good in this situation that has an LTE connection as well, and those are going to probably be a little bit more rugged and a little bit more you know, made for the outdoors, so it depends. I mean, again, those are the brands i'd recommend. Those are the brands that I check out see if those do what you need.
And that's a good question. You know, we always think of Wi Fi and we always think of wired Internet because sometimes you just want to put a camera somewhere that doesn't have either of those things. And LT gets expensive because you got to pay that monthly fee and you're talking about streaming and so you need more data.
So it's not there's not.
A whole lot of options there that are good, but it's something that you got to think about sometimes.
Thanks for the question there.
In New Hampshire, Hawaiian Airlines, speaking of internet, the first major air carrier in the US to offer high speed starlink in flight, Wi FI now before I get the angry emails. Yes, I know that Jet sweet X does this, but they are not a major carrier. They are a smaller carrier that just does smaller flights. This is the first like big airline to do this, and so they are debuting this service which provides fast streaming gaming downloads. It's gonna be wild what you can do on these
aircraft now compared to before. I was just on a couple of flights and the Internet is amazing. The fact that we have internet on planes now is so nice compared to years past, but it's still pretty slow and unreliable. I will say my Internet on both of my flights was pretty darn good actually, but it wasn't this fast. This is going to be much faster. So Hawaiian's been
testing this with their employees. They say it's safe. They say it's going to roll out across their A three twenty one neo fleet and you're going to see it on the door. So they're not letting you select a flight that has this just yet because I think they're still rolling it out. But when you get on board the Hawaiian Airlines plane, there'll be a little starlink decal on the door, and so if you're on that flight, you're like, yes, I just got great Internet from my
entire flight to Hawaii. So I have been in touch with Hawaiian I'm hoping to get on a flight to Hawaii to test this out. I cannot wait. I am very excited to see just how fast this is. And now when people are going to Hawaii, they're not really thinking about doing work. You know, it's a very leisure kind of oriented trip. But it will still be nice for family and kids especially that want to do gaming
and downloads and streaming and all that stuff. You'll be able to do all the stuff that they don't typically let you do on the slower connections that are on the standard flights. So I'm not sure if I talked about it last week, but in California, AT and T is trying to get rid of its obligations to provide landline service, and so that is going to leave a lot of people without a telephone line in their home, especially in rural areas places that don't have good cellular connections.
And so I mentioned this on the news and Amazon emailed me and said, hey, Rich, don't forget about this service. That we offer called Alexa Emergency Assist, and they said, you know, it might be a good thing in place of a landline, because the thing about a landline when you have kids, well, there's a couple use cases. You know, some people like it as a security in the event of like an emergency, right if there's an earthquake or
some sort of natural disaster. The landlines are a little bit more, you know, they work a little bit more than the cellular networks. Although that's probably debatable at this point, but some people think that they do, so you know, maybe they do. But you know, also when you have kids or elderly, So if you have someone elderly that may not have a cell phone or may not want to use a cell phone, a landline could be easy.
They know how to use it, it's been around forever.
And then with kids, they may not have access to a cell phone because mom and dad have the phone and they leave the house, or you know, the kid doesn't know how to use a cell phone and they don't have a way to call for help. So this Alexa Emergency Assist is a service you can pay for.
It is six dollars a month or sixty dollars for the year, and all it requires is one of the Amazon speakers, so like some sort of echo device, right, and all you have to say to it, and I probably shouldn't say this because I don't want to trigger yours, but you just say alex A call for help, and it will call through your Echo device to a trained agent that can request the dispatch of police, fire or ambulance without waiting on hold. They say it's faster than
industry standards called directly. Then they also have smart alerts, so your alex A can detect your smoke alarm or CO two alarm or carbon monoxide alarm is ringing the sound of glass breaking, it will notify you on your phone. So basically, your your speaker listens for that sound, that actual frequency, and if it hears it, it will text
you and then you can take action. And that's very important because long story short, my wife and I just flew to New Jersey one day and all of a sudden, we get a text on my phone that my alarm is going off at my house.
I'm like, wait, what how do I what do I do?
Like?
It was the most helpless I ever felt, and back then I didn't have any cameras, so I couldn't see what was going on at my house. I had to call my friend and he had to drive over, and he said, the fire people, firefighters were literally outside my house ready to break in the door because they were going to see what was going on in there. Maybe he was exaggerating, but he said he the way he described it, they were literally like an axe to my door.
And like I was like, all right, he said, no, stop, my friend.
You know.
Anyway, then you can also have up to twenty five emergency contacts automatically notified if a call is placed, which is interesting. And then of course they have the glass breaking smart alerts and you can drop in and listen to the sound inside your house.
So anyway, I.
Just telling you about it because it's kind of an interesting alternative, you know, and if you have kids, it might be a good thing to have. I told my wife about this and she said, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. And I said to Amazon, I said, wait a second, I thought this went away. Well, the thing that went away was called Alexa Guard and Guard Plus, and I don't know if those were free, but I have a feeling they were either free or less cost than this. I'm not sure. Let me say Alexa guard.
I don't know what the pricing was of that. Yeah, it was free. Yeah, and so now of course this costs money, and so that's why people were up in arms about it. But again it's called Alexa Emergency Assist. Maybe something I'll look into if you want that alternative to dialing nine to one one. But again I think that at the end of the day, I can't tell you that this can replace nine one one. But it's a nice thing because some of these smart home systems
do not dial nine one one. People think they do, and they don't. So you need to know before an emergency happens what the capability is of your system. All right, triple eight rich one on one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Coming up later this hour, we are going to talk to Kyle Vorbach. He is a filmmaker who did a documentary called How I Faked My Life with AI.
He's going to talk.
About the benefits and dangers of this AI revolution. We are in looking forward to that conversation a little bit later on.
My name is Rich d'miro. You are listening to Rich on Tech.
Welcome back to Rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here talking technology. Maybe I'll do a little lightning round here. I come in here with like dozens of stories I want to tell you about. I don't get to all of them because we get a lot of calls and emails, so I try to get to those as well. But I like to tell you this stuff because the show in the beginning, i'd say it's the tech stuff that I think you should know about. And if I'm not telling
you that stuff, then I'm not doing my job. So I want to balance the calls with also the news that I tell you. So let me get through some of these iTunes on Windows end of the line.
So Apple has.
Launched separate apps for managing the iPhone and different things on the Windows computer side of things. This happened on Mac a while ago, but there's now a separate Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Devices apps for Windows. So basically all the stuff that iTunes used to do is now split up. You can get this on Windows ten and later devices. iTunes will remain for podcast and audiobook access, but the new apps will give you more of kind of an experience that's similar to the Mac so again,
Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Devices. You have to install all three new apps and keep the existing iTunes library, So don't delete your iTunes before you install these apps.
You will need. That sounds very complicated to me.
I think it's just a ploy to get people on Windows to install Apple Music and Apple TV.
But that's just me. What do I know.
But now, if you want to manage your iPhone, you can use this new Apple Devices app, which I think will hopefully be a better situation the other app I like, if you want to just shortcut all that stuff is called I Amazing Imazing. That'll just shortcut all the Apple stuff. You don't have to deal with their software. You can just use your own and it does a lot more than what iTunes can do.
It's also going to cost some money too.
The information reporting that Apple is developing a foldable clamshell iPhone, OMG. Really I could have told you this news two years ago. Of course they're developing a clamshell iPhone. Yes, I mean, that's it. There's nothing more to the story. That's it. This is something Samsung did back in twenty nineteen they came out with their first foldable phone. Of course, when Apple comes out with it, it will be oh, foldable phones, what is that?
Explain? Yes, we've had foldable phones. There are many on the market.
Google has one, Samsung has one, one Plus has one. The only game in town that does not have one is Apple. So I would be surprised if they do not come out with a foldable phone.
Do I think it's gonna be really good? Absolutely?
Do.
I think they're gonna sell millions upon millions of them. Absolutely do. I think it'll have a halo effect on the other foldables. Absolutely.
Google is now calling Bard Gemini. So Bard is Google's answer to Chat GPT. They came out with it last year around this time, I think it was March, and already they're renaming it to Gemini, so it's very comple. I don't want to get into all of that because you don't really need to know, but if you go to the Barred website, it will now redirect to Gemini. They're also offering Gemini Advanced, just like Chat GPT, where you can pay twenty dollars a month to get the
absolute best version of their AI. Now you can pay twenty dollars a month to get Google's absolute best version of their AI. You can get two months free trial. It's called the Google one AI Premium Plan twenty bucks a month. It gets you the AI, but it also gets you some other things as well. So I personally will tell you I think Bard is great. Sorry Gemini, you know there's all these things. Is it better than chat GPT? But I will tell you my things, Okay.
Number one, I think chat GPT overall is a very good kind of like introduction to AI. It's just a great thing to kind of play with.
Gemini.
I will say it's great for access to current events. So if you want the absolute latest, like the mix of Google Search but also AI, I think Gemini is really good for that. And then if you want something that's really good with data and handling large amounts of data and summaries, I think claud Ai is the best for that. That's from a company called Anthropic. And if you want to put AI on your phone, my favorite
app for that is called Perplexity AI. So if you are looking for say a little history lesson on something or an explanation on a question, Perplexity is really good at coming up with kind of answer on that. But Gemini is really good at that too. And by the way, if you have an Android phone, you can replace the Google Assistant now with Gemini, which is what I did on my phone. So now when I swipe or use the Voice Assistant, it will come up with Gemini, which
is much smarter than Google Assistant in some ways. It doesn't have all the functionality in other ways. And if you're on iPhone, it's inside the Google app, so you have to access Gemini inside the Google app.
There you have it.
Rivian Electric Car Company will unveil a new car on March seventh, the Rivian R two. This will be a cheaper and more efficient version of their suv. The event's going to take place at the Rivian has like a theater that they have their name on in Laguna Beach. Yes, I will be there. I can't wait. I think Rivian is doing some really cool things. Their cars are just very expensive right now. Hopefully this will be cheaper they're thinking. You know, the rumor says cheaper suv likely priced between
forty and sixty thousand dollars. But you're not gonna be able to get this until twenty twenty six. And right now, Rivian loses money on all of their cars. That they sell. Hopefully that will change with a car that will be cheaper, but they'll it will cost less to make and TEA Mobile customers. You already know I tweeted about this, but I was on the plane and I got free Wi Fi because of a Team Mobile test line that I have that I'm using, and you get free Wi Fi on the plane.
I was like, A, this is so cool.
What a great perk for T Mobile customers. Well, now they're doing something called Magenta Status. You get all these VIP benefits and deals. So this includes fifteen percent off Hilton Hotels, free upgrades, and this I think is the best feature. If you rent from Dollar or Hurts. At Dollar you'll get free gas so you don't have to return the car with a full tank. And at Hurts you can return an EV without charging it. You remember when I rented my EV from Hurts, they charged me
like twenty five bucks to return it. Not full movie tickets at cheap prices. They say this is a fifteen hundred dollars value for the typical customer. What's it trying to do get more people to stick with T Mobile? Coming up next, we'll talk about the benefits and dangers of AI. You are listening to Rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you, talking technology and AI is in the news. It is one of the hottest topics on this show
and pretty much everywhere at this point. And joining me now to talk about it is Kyle Vorbach. He is a filmmaker who did How I Faked My Life with AI, and he also has a book called Pandora's Code, which explains the history, benefits, and dangers of the AI revolution. Welcome to the show, Kyle, rich Thank you so much for having me. So I watched your upcoming TED talk on the plane yesterday and I have some questions.
Sure, what do we believe anymore?
I mean, you took us in so many directions on the TED Talk and surprised and faked us out that I'm not even sure you're real anymore. Tell me how you got involved in this whole idea of AI and kind of trickery because of it.
Absolutely. Yeah, So it's so dumb, but I was. I just needed a new profile. Pictures where it started. And this is when these generative AIS started to come out, where you could make an image out of anything and I, you know, figured when I could miss a shot and I posted an image of me. I made a whole, very realistic image of me, and no one called me on it. So I just kept going until someone did, and then no one did, so I just was like, I need to up the ante here.
And I started to change my life. You know.
I got into a brand new apartment, I bought a sports car, I met Ryan Gosling.
At that point, people started to get a little suspicious.
But this went on for over a month, and I thought it would just be like a funny prank. But when I revealed this, the reaction was so profound that people had to it both about the AI side and also our relationship with social media and the disparity there. That I figured, you know, I need to get to the bottom of this. I need to understand this AI thing more. And that's the genesis of this book, was figuring out how do we get here and where's this going?
What do you make of AI? I mean, it's become very popular. People are using it for all kinds of things. Do you think it's a good thing or do you think it's dangerous?
It's a little bit of both.
Really, AI is ultimately a tool that if I had to put it one way, it sort of accelerates human capability. It is mental labor at the press of a button, so we're able to do so much more, so much faster. This is a good thing and a bad thing because it comes down to the user and what they're doing with it in terms of you know, what you can make with it. I made that whole short film that reached out to people and touched a lot of people with AI.
There's applications with cancer. We're mapping the genome.
I just heard something about people in California actually locating wildfires using AI that is trained to locate and recognize wildfires. But on the other side, bad actors can use these same exact things to cause a great deal of harm. And I don't think society is quite equipped for that sort of scam or misinformation.
Yet it's your takeaway from you know, faking it out on Instagram, Like, did your real friends take issue with that?
It's funny to this day, people don't believe anything I post. And I made this video over a year ago in the Ted Talk. In fact, I mention that when I posted I'm doing a Ted Talk, people were like, is this AI? You said at the top of the call, Is this AI? Wherever I go, I get the question is this AI? And I think my life has sort of become a microcosm of what is going to happen
to the world at large society moving forward. We are in a post truth era right now, but I think we're going to sort of get into a post evidence era where not only are we not seeking the truth, there's going to be no way to categorically and quantifiably prove something to be real for a while at least.
That's really scary.
And I often talk about kind of something similar where you know, these AI systems right now are being fed data from things that we've done, right, books, people have written, articles,
people have written. But then all of a sudden, we're gonna start They're gonna like feed upon themselves because half the pictures are going to be generated by AI, and they're looking at those pictures and it becomes like, you know, and you saw that meme online where people were saying, like make it bigger or make it more, you know, and they just kept feeding the same picture into AI, saying make it more, make it more, make it the
best pizza make it even better. And that's kind of what's going to happen with like everything online, because these systems are just being fed themselves.
These systems are already being trained on themselves. Researchers have realized that, especially for things like llms, that the amount of data you need to train AI, which the way AI learns.
Is the brute force method.
It's not like a kid who touches a stove and learns, oh, stove hot. AI has to learn every type of image of a stove, every angle of a stove, and every type of temperature to understand that stove hot. So to generate that much data, you can't even scrape it. So they're feeding that them already back into themselves already. And I don't know what the ramifications so that are going to be.
So how do you prove that you're real? Now that people are wondering.
Well, I know that there are people currently working on tokenizing images, and Canon I believe is working on this. There's a few companies working on being like this is an image taken on a physical camera.
I'm not sure what happens once that gets off the camera.
If there's going to be software on the computers that continue to say and this was edited by a human and what have you. And I'm sure that will be faked at some point, but there are people trying to crack this right now. The only thing that you can
prove is in person human human interaction. We our lives are so online already and so digital already that they are going to become so embedded with fake things that you know, it doesn't it's going to sort of just become a different but fully realized reality.
You could choose to live there if you want.
It's so weird now that you say that, Like, I'm looking at you right now. You're on video chat with me on the back end of the radio show.
But you know, I don't know if you're real.
Like if I think about it with this whole Apple Vision pro you know, they have those things called personas, which is like a digital version of you that you can FaceTime with someone because you're wearing a headset, so it can't you know, it can't see you. The person doesn't want to look at you in a headset, so it makes up this digital version of you. But if you think about that, in the future, anyone could be
behind that. I mean, it's almost like the old days of chat where you didn't really know if you're chatting with your friend or like, you know, someone random.
What people need to realize is because AI can so drastically accelerate human work. This applies to scams as well, and the same sort of scams that you can imagine happened prior to AI are still going on.
They're just a lot better.
People have had disguises before, but you know, nowadays, some sick individual could deep fake themselves or deep bake a different person on a zoom call. Hey Mom, I need to borrow one hundred dollars or more than that. I'm
you know, I'm in prison right now. I need you to pay my bail whatever wire it to this and these same things could have worked before, but now they are going to become so much more convincing, and the targets are going to be able to be random Grandma's in the middle of America because these can be done at scale. Now it's not manual labor like photoshop. You could have scripts that are doing this training by themselves.
What about Hollywood, I mean, already, you know we've seen movies where they affect actors' faces and they change them. And obviously makeup has always been effects have always been a part of that. But with AI, it's just going to be a whole new world for Hollywood.
That's another double edged sword, right, because what's going to happen is, like with CGI, it's going to raise the bar of production what you're able to attain. It's also going to lower the cost of certain things, so smaller crews can get away with better quality things. Nowadays, a kid in his garage can, using free tools and a few lights and a green screen and her phone can make a fantasy epic where they are in knight with
you know, and they're fighting a big CGI dragon. They can do this already, So the way it's going to work in Hollywood, it's going to be great. I mean, especially for people on the post side, there is a world where this does make their lives a lot easier because they're already overworked. On the flip side of that, when you start to replace people with AI, that's when you start to get into the weeds. Humans have been
telling stories around campfires for thousands of years. Storytelling is intrinsic to human nature, So why would you want to replace that with a computer in a writer's room, or you know, just with a generated video. Why would you want to replace that at that point? Just have AI raise your kid or have dinner with your wife.
You're not a human anymore, you know. These are the joys we have.
Should we be excited about this? Scared about it? A combination of both? What's your guidance after going through this side writing this book and also the documentary.
I think that there is a path forward for this to be a very optimistic future. I think there's going to be a rough adjustment period here. There is a universe where a lot of people online you may have heard of this phrase of the singularity. I mean, it's all it's practically its own religion online of people saying, you know, there's going to become a time where these ais are going to be able to do so many different things and do so so fast that it's going
to solve all the world's problems. I think that's a bit sunny of a view towards the future. But I think a lot of problems will be cracked by these because these things can think faster than us and can do incredibly boring jobs for quite long.
Periods of time.
But on the flip side, realistically, in the very near future, until we're all up to speed on this, it's going to be like the early days of the internet. We're going to be trying to weed out disinformation. This is an election year and we are not equipped for what's coming down the pike.
Yeah, I mean we already saw the fake AI Biden call in New Hampshire and you know it was telling people not to vote. But do you think we're going to see I mean, I know we're going to see a ton of stuff online that you just you just don't know what to trust anymore. Is that is that the future we're heading to, or we just see an image and unless that person, like you said, is right in front of us as a human, we will not be able to tell if it's real or fake.
Right. I think it's going to be pretty tough.
I think what people need to prepare themselves, especially in this election year, is, yeah, you know.
These these things like that, these one off things.
I think people are getting a little bit more privy to They're able to debunk them a little bit more effectively. I think what where you see a lot of issue is rapidly developing situations. I have already seen so much AI disinformation coming out of what's going on in Gaza, and I'm not sure who's behind it, honestly, because it could be either party, it could be a third party.
Who has their own agenda.
There is just a lot of things where there is straight up AI generated images that all this informations coming from socials when rapidly developing situations, and you can't as easily vet these things as a user as maybe a news network might be able to over a longer period of time.
Imagine we're gonna have to leave it there, Kyle, We're gonna have to do it there because I want to get your information before we have to go to break. What's the best way for folks to follow what you do?
Thanks for cutting me off to plug myself.
Yeah, you can find me at Kyle Vorbach online on everything that's it.
It's a little top to spell.
But if you can't find it, look up how I Faked my Life with AI on YouTube.
You'll find all of my stuff there.
Okay, Kyle vorboch vo r Bach How I Faked my Life with AI? Sounds like we are all going to have to be editors in the future, just sourcing everything that we see. Fascinating conversation. Thanks so much. The book is called Pandora's Code. You can find it on Amazon. Coming up, we are going to do the feedback segment. I got lots of emails throughout the show, so we'll read some of.
Those and we'll talk more tech. You're listening to Rich on tech.
It is time to close out the show. We got a lot of emails today, so we'll get right to the feedback segment, which is a combination of your feedback and the questions that you send me. Annett says, Hey, Rich I have some of my passwords password protected in word. Do you think this is a good slash safe idea? Thank you, Annette. No, I don't. I don't think that's a good idea.
I know it's.
Password protected, but I still don't think that's a very good idea to keep them in there. I would recommend a password manager because unless you're generating really strong, unique passwords, it sounds like you're making them up yourself, and that can only go so far. Hackers can crack even pretty long passwords that you come up with in seconds using software you really need like a fourteen to sixteen random character password for it to be uncrackable, at least by
today's standards. So for a free program, I would recommend Bitwarden, or you can use what's built into Google or iPhone.
They both work pretty well.
The iPhone one, I'd only recommend if you're only using Apple products. Coleman says, hey, Rich, my iPhone seven has a logjam for my AOL emails. I cannot send or receive. Texting works great, Facebook and Google work. How do I unblock it? Coleman, I'd recommend going to the AOL website. It sounds like you are over your allotment for your emails, so go to the AOL website and free up some space. So go to aol dot com instead of accessing it through your phone and see what the hold up is.
There's probably the storage is probably full, so delete some old emails, especially the large ones with attachments, and.
You should be good to go there.
Fred says, hey Rich, If the soundbar, this is in reference to something we talked about today. If the soundbar is connected to the TV with fiber optic, most likely the sound and video out of sync. If it's connected via HDMI or good old fashioned red and white RCA cable. There should be nothing out of sync. That is true because mine is connected by fiber optics still, and I do have to adjust the sink. Bill says on today's show, you mentioned ring and the value of the subscription for
storing recordings in the cloud. Note that second tiered doorbell camera vendors often offer limited storage for free, such as the UFI system I have. Having the cloud storage included and avoiding subscription fees was the main reason I went UFI.
That is true, Bill, A lot of people like UFI for that.
Reason, but I do weren't there some recent changes with UFI where people get all up in arms, But I think that that's the main reason people like Ufe's because you don't necessarily have to have a subscription to use that. Whys is similar. A lot of people went Wise. But again, all of these companies are pushing people towards subscription, so they're making the features that you get without a subscription less and less every single day. So you can chew
that now, but that could change. Looks like another another one from Fred. Fred says antennae is plural for antenna. Oh, there you go, Rich. Cindy says, I love your broadcast. A comment in regards to your TVs watching you. We read the book Fahrenheit four fifty one. It'll scare the beep out of you. I had to read it in high school, so did my kids. TVs will still watch you even when they have them turned off. I think you can check before you buy if your TVs cameras
or camera capabilities. Don't even think about that kind of TV, Cindy, I would agree with that. I read Fahrenheit four to fifty one, and all the stuff that I read in these books that were written years and years ago all.
End up coming true.
I don't know how these people figured it out in the past, but yes, your TV is watching you, your phone is watching you, your computer is watching you right now.
They say that those cameras.
Are not in use when they are off, and most of these systems have some sort of physical shut off when the lid is closed or you're not using an or they have a light that lets you know. But it is scary and you have to take your own precautions.
Let's see.
M says, thanks for the my shake tips because in my office my phone was the only one that made the audible alert where the phone actually said earthquake out loud even though my phone was on silent mode. Yes, I did share that tip about the my Shake app, and it does. It taps into what's called a critical alert system on the iPhone and that means that it can still make a noise on your phone even if it's on silent and only certain apps can do that and you have to give it permission to do that,
but my Shake is one of them. That's how my phone went off because my phone was on silent as well, and the earthquake alert still came through. So my Shake again, iOS and Android. If you're an earthquake country like we are, Oscar says, just a heads up. I bought a Samsung seventy five inch seventy five inch at best Buy in January. They had forty of them. I got it for five hundred and ninety eight dollars. What a world we live in? A seventy five inch TV for five hundred and ninety
eight dollars. That is incredible. While enjoy the new TV, I will certainly enjoy mine watching the Super Bowl in four K tomorrow, even if it's upscaled.
I'm not going to complain.
If you can believe it, that is going to do it for this episode of the show. I tell you, if you want time to go by fast, just get a radio show, because I don't know how three hours goes by this quickly every single week. If you want links everything I mentioned, you can find it on my website. Just go to rich on tech dot tv for the show notes. You can find me on social media. I am at rich on Tech. I am active on Instagram, I'm active on Twitter, I'm active on Facebook, So find
me there. Engage next week? What am I doing next week? Do I have time to find out? Let's see, let's look at the schedule. Oh oh yeah, we've got some you know what, We'll just have some fun. Next week we'll answer more of your question. Thanks to everyone who makes this show possible.
Adam and for Bobo today, thanks for doing a great job. My name is Archdmiro. I will talk to you real soon.