Google's Phishing Quiz; eSIM Support; Nest vs Ring; Facebook Photo App Shuts Down

the week. But these are the things that I identify that I think are important for you to know about. I think are interesting, and of course you can debate that with me. We're all human here. We all have different things that we think are interesting and noteworthy, of course, depending which side of the fence you're on, whether it's Android or iPhone, or Mac or PC, or if you like you know, home audio and video versus computers versus

you know, car tech. There's a lot of stuff happening in the tech world, but the bottom line is it is all a lot of fun. It's happening fast, and this is my attempt at helping you understand at least a little portion of it. Let's start with Moments. This is an app from Facebook that was their photo sharing app. So this was an app that would basically sync with the camera roll on your iPhone or your Android and put all the pictures kind of into a private area

of Facebook. But if you wanted to share those either on Facebook or with friends, this app would make that process easier. But the problem is apparently nobody used it or nobody liked it. I remember for a moment talking about Moments that I actually had. I think my mom using this app and we decided to switch over at a certain point to Google Photos. And I think that's what a lot of people did, because as of February twenty fifth, Facebook is shutting down Moments. But they've done

something nice. They've made it very easy to export any pictures you have saved in Moments. I don't think you're gonna have any pictures in here. I checked and I had exactly two. One was some sort of screenshot, the other one was a picture of me and my mom, So I was probably demoing this app to her, but

you can check. They made it very easy. All you have to do is go to Facebook dot com, slash Moments Underscore app slash export, and of course I'll put all the links that I talk about in the show notes. But if you go there, it will show you how many moments you have, and then it will help you download those moments to a drive or however you want to do it. But after the twenty fifth, that's it. This is all gonna be gone. So it's probably a good idea just to check this website and see if

you have any moments in there. You never know, if you have a picture lingering in there that maybe you lost. Maybe this would be the best case scenario. Maybe you kind of the worst best case scenario. Let's say you lost a whole bunch of pictures last year at some point, right, but you forgot that you installed this app on your phone and it was secretly or you know, in the background,

saving your moments, right, your pictures. Well, let's say you're like, oh my gosh, I look in here, and all of a sudden, next thing, you know, you have all these pictures that you thought were missing inside this Moment's app. I hope that happens for someone. But my recommendation at this point when it comes to pictures, make sure they're

saved in two different places. That is on your phone, also on a separate app like Google Photos, and then another place either a backup hard drive or if you just want to use everything for free, you can use something like Amazon Prime. If you're a Prime member, they have a photos app. You can back up your photos to there as well. But that's what you need to know about moments. It is going away. On February twenty fifth, you're on with Rich. Who is this? Hi? Rich?

S Max, and also the ten Are. But they're doing this kind of on a worldwide basis, so I think what they're the idea is that a lot of the other manufacturers do this. It's popular in certain countries like India, not too popular in the US. But the reality is Apple wants to have this feature in the phone so that they can grow for the future.

once you have it, it's kind of cool. We're already seeing in America they're really not advertising it that heavily, like it's not it's not a thing that they're yet saying, like, hey, you should activate a second line on your phone. But I think that the future is a lot of competition could be had from this service. Right, So if you have one line and you want to have a secondary

line for data or maybe for work or whatever. You're an entrepreneur, whatever you want to do, they can make it so it works for you know, for you to activate this secondary line, it doesn't cost very much. So I think right now we're just at the very early stages, and I think that things will heat up Casher in the future.

buy them third party in the US. In the rest of the world, clearly, Huawei definitely has some you know, especially in China and in Asia, there's a lot of people purchasing their devices. I don't know what the future is because in a Maria they are definitely getting a bad name when it comes to are they spying on you? Are they doing something bad with your device? And like I said, everyone's kind of staying away from them at

this point. When it comes to the main carriers, and it depends where you are in the world, Like in the US, basically people buy their phones through their carriers. Right in the rest of the world, people some day, you know, they mostly buy their phones unlocked or they buy them, you know, through third party channels. But here in the US it's all kind of linked to the carriers. So if the carriers are not accepting Huawei, that means it's going to be a problem for Huawei. So do

I think they're doing something bad? I would hope not, but we just don't know. The evidence is not really clear right now. I don't think in my experience with them, I mean, they've seen like really nice phones with a lot of great features, so I want to like them.

But I just think that this point that we're in right now is kind of very precarious grounds for them, And I think we need competitors like them to shake things up, because Samsung is great, but you need the one Pluses of the world and the Huaweis of the world to actually, you know, come up against Apple and Samsung to innovate and to come out with these devices that are less expensive with more features, and that keeps everyone on their toes.

security concern but everyone was talking about it, you know. Yeah, So because I also do my business, you know, I'm an entrepreneur, so obviously I have a lot of things to do, and I was concerned about my security and privacy, you know, so I had to, you know, skip on this so that Ithi's a very good device, but it's sad that I can't have it, you.

can spot when you're being phished. And this is really neat. I took this quiz and I will say I scored Okay, I got one wrong out of I think it was eight questions. But the website is phishingquiz dot with Google dot com. Now, by the way, even that website doesn't

seem very good, right. If I was Google, I would have put this on my main website so that people didn't think that this website was fake, but it's fishingquiz dot with Google dot com, And so you go to this website and you take a little quiz and it goes through the emails that you might get in your Gmail, what they might look like, and you have to decide if they're real or fake. And what's really neat about this is you may be a pro and still get

caught up in this. And phishing is a real big problem right now because that is how we're giving away our credentials to websites. Right, you think, oh, my gosh, how in the world are you, You know, how in the world are you getting hacked these days? Right? Because who logs into some random website. Well, the reality is what's happening is that we're getting an email, and inside that email, it says, hey, alert, your Facebook account was

just hacked. Please log in here and make sure everything's okay. And you go, oh gosh, let me go change my password, and you log in without thinking because the email looks just like the email you might get from Facebook, and next thing you know, the hackers are off and running with all of your credentials. And I talk about this all the time. The main way to protect yourself is

through what's called two factor authentication. And with two factor authentication, you sign up with your phone number and once you have your phone number in there, it will text you a code that you must enter once you log into a website before that website will allow that login to proceed. And the idea behind this is that you will have the code on your phone. If someone's logging into your website from say, you know, Russia, uh, they won't have

the code because it's going to your phone. So they may have your login and password, your username and password, but they won't have that special code which really gets you in. So take the Google Phishing quiz, definitely learn from it and you will. You will. You will realize just how tricky some of these emails are. And what it really comes down to is looking at the URLs of the links that you're clicking. And to be honest, I would definitely not click any links that you get

it in an email. I mean, you just can't click them unless it's like a YouTube link, you know, but even that can be bad. So if it's asking you to log in, Let's say you get an email from your bank saying, hey, we suspect fraud on your account. Don't ever click the link inside that. Just go to your bank's website, log in, and then that way you can see exactly what's going on from a fresh perspective, and not from a website that someone just happens to be sending you. So good information there.

So that's gonna be something you're have to figure out. But I would try it. I mean, you can see if you want to save these things, you know, just get the I've got an article up if you if you look at the if you look at my website and just search vhy, you should see the article that I did on recently on converting stuff. And I've been doing it for old home movies and it's pretty simple. But the do you have a macro PC? I forget? Okay, So the thing to get is the rock SiO Easy

Easy VHS to DVD I think it's called. And you know, you'll just need to connect your VCR to your computer and you can do it all. It all happens in real time though, so it's gonna take a while for sure.

it holds one package. And when it comes up to your house, I'm guessing it texts you or it somehow alerts you, and then the top pops open when you walk out, and you pick out your package and you go back on your merry way. There's a lot of questions here, So if you're not home, what does it do if you're you know, how does it know you're the person to pick up the package? How does it know you're not just some random stranger that's coming to

pick up every package. But it looks interesting. They're gonna be testing it in this county in northern Washington, and if it works, we may see these devices on sidewalks across America. But the thing is all these companies are really trying to trying to make it cheaper to deliver packages. I mean, if you look around in these neighborhoods, I've got people riding bikes in my neighborhood delivering all these

Amazon packages. I mean, there's so many that they're delivering that it's gotten kind of crazy and just all these trucks they've got so Amazon, you know, obviously we know they're experimenting with the drones. Now they're trying out this little autonomous delivery robot. We'll see how it works in real life though, because it looks all nice. They shot the little promo video on the Universal back lot, you know, unlike that Wisteria Lane road. But we'll see how this

works in the real neighborhood. So that's what I'm curious to see, with real people and real you know, dogs running around and sidewalks that are all messed up. So I'm curious. But if Amazon can deliver me stuff even faster, which they're doing a pretty good job right now, I'm all for it. Now let's take another call. We've got Arturo. What's up.

whatever you want, building a business inside those. But what happens is, just like you said, the bigger you get, the more you're sort of locked in. And I kind of found this out, you know, in various ways. But I mean, if you look at the consumer level, something like Google Photos, people start storing their pictures in there for free. After a while, you're like, oh wait a second, Now that I've got twenty thousand, it's really tough to take those somewhere else, right. They call it locking. Same

things happening here, same thing happens with me. With a lot of these services, they become really easy something as simple as like Mailchimp, you know, a service that lets you manage your mailing address right your mailing list. Well, all of a sudden, you've got eight ten thousand emails in there. You built up, you know, your templates and your emails that you send out regularly, and you've got all your analytics. And what you know is five dollars less a month going to make you switch to a

different service. So this is kind of the way of the world, I think, And I don't know which, which one are you trying to build in and is that your main concern?

You know, Let's say you start using this and it's you know, a couple of people are on board, but then all of a sudden it gets really popular whatever you're building and it's being used by a lot of people. Is that gonna you know, basically, is it gonna break your your budget? You know, if you have a budget at all. So I think those are the questions you kind of have to ask when you're searching these systems. But look in this day and age, it's all the same.

We're getting we're getting faster access to more tools quickly, but the reality is there's always down the road, kind of that downside of the more you lean on something, the more you're kind of in it, and it's tough to get out. And I think, you know, it's just kind of the way we're seeing with all technology. So good question, but I think a lot of it Arturo comes down to just researching and seeing which of these services works the best and which one you think you

can comfortably grow with. So yeah, people commenting inside the podcast on the live stream, Yes, we are the product. In fact, Facebook came out and said that the reason why they exist is because we hand over our data for free and they're able to sell ads across our data. And so that's the reality all this stuff online these days. The stuff that you get for free, you're getting it for free because the business is making money off of you in different ways. So if you're getting Google Photos

for free, there's a reason why. Clearly they're using that to train their machine learning photos whatever. I don't know what they're doing with it, but you know, as long as it's private and your photos are not being shared publicly, hopefully that's that's enough for you to say, Okay, I guess on the backside, if they're using my photos for machine learning, I don't know if they're doing that. I'm assuming they are, but you know, nothing is truly free.

So Apple is releasing new beta of iOS twelve point two, and apparently, according to nine to five Mac, the new AirPods will allow you to use the hot phrase. I don't even want to say it here because I know it's gonna activate everyone. Hey bleary with the device in your ear, so the air pods themselves will do the recognition. So I've noticed when I'm out running, if I've got my phone in my pocket, I can say the hot word and it will actually respond, right because if I

say it loud enough, my phone will hear it. But this will actually be where your AirPods will be able to use this new code word or hot word, whatever you want to call it. And we saw this demode at Apple, like I think it was WWDC or was it for the new phone. I think it was for the new iPhone, the new ten or ten R whatever

phone it was. But they showed this girl running. They always show like a little kind of video before the event, you know, like a fun little video that Apple produces, and it showed a girl running and she had the AirPods in and she just said to them something you know, the code word, and it activated and everyone was like, wait a second, that's not a feature, And clearly it will be a feature in the new AirPods, so we

are very close. They got an email from someone saying, hey, do I wait for the new AirPods because it's been a while. AirPods have been around for a while now. They're fantastic. One hundred and sixty dollars. They're not cheap. But what I like about them is they work very nicely across your iPhone, across your iPad, across the you know, any ecosystem of Apple products. But they also work really

nicely with Android products as well. You're not gonna get as many features as you would on the Apple products, but they work pretty nicely. So I recommend that. My wife and I went after I got them, I said, you have to get these, and we went to the Apple store. We picked them out. She loved them. She we got to the checkout stand and when when my wife saw the thing, it was one hundred and seventy five dollars with tax. He was like, wait, what, you

didn't tell me they cost this much? And I said, you're gonna love them, and sure enough, I don't know, it's been a year, six months, whatever it's been, she absolutely loves them. Wears them at the gym, wears them basically at the gym, but just totally loves them. So I think you'll really like them, but new version coming out, So if you're thinking of buying them, maybe just think about you know, if you can hold off, you know, maybe another three months. I'm thinking March is when they'll

launch the new ones. This story happened this week and the two stories actually two families said their Nest cams were hacked. And what happened was one story was it was the northern California family. They said that they all of a sudden heard through their nestcam reports of missiles being launched from North Korea to the US and to take cover. And so this family was clearly upset and they ran out of the house. They took their dog and their kid, you know, whatever they had, they took everything.

They just went in their car and high tailed it out. Then the other family was in northern I think it was Washington State, and they were in Washington State and the same thing. They all of a sudden heard sounds coming from their camera, and you know, not the missile launch. But they said that the people actually talked to them through their camera and they said, oh, nice laptop. They saw the mom using her laptop, and the mom just freaked out and pulled the camera off. The wall or

whatever pulled the cord out. But how does this happen? You know, we've got a lot of nestcams out there, We've got a lot of security cameras out there in general. But again, this is not so as I understand it, This hack was not at the system level of Nest, right, so nests did not actually kind of Nest did not get hacked. Usually what happens is the person's credentials are stolen. So I'm not gonna say I don't know what happened with both these cases. It seems like their credentials were stolen.

You know, they had an easy username, easy password, and someone could have been a friend, could have been someone who just got a hold of it. It could have been a hacker just guessing. And this is what happened. So the advice I'm leaving you with is you have to again turn on two factor authentication and if you go inside the Nest app, Okay, let me bring it up here and I'll tell you exactly how to do this. So if you go into Nest, you go into settings,

it's a little gear icon in the upper right hand corner. Okay, and you got to turn this on today then go into account and then go into manage account and then it says account security, and if it says password, you need to change it. So it says two step verification. So you tap there and you basically turn on the little flip switch that says two factor and now you

add in your phone number. It will text you a confirmation code, and then every time you log in to your to your Nest app, it will ast for that confirmation code. This is essential. These things are in your house, so you want to make sure that you, you know, have these things protected as much as possible. Philip Brooks here says iPhone ten s Max Bluetooth and car doesn't always pair automatically like my iPhone seven plus did. Is there any fix for this, Philip? I notice in my car,

same thing kind of happens. Sometimes it connects very quickly and automatically. Sometimes it doesn't. So I'm thinking it might be something with the last version of iOS. So they just came out with the new one twelve point one point three, so maybe that fixed it. But I would say the only other thing you can do to make sure that this is working properly is two things. Number One, go into your car and I would delete all the

old phone phones that are paired to your car. So if you have some old phones, like you said, you upgraded a seven plus to a iPhone ten ten max tennis maximum guessing, so I would go in and delete your old phones from your car's bluetooth because those could be messing it up. The secondary thing I would do is you can reset all of your network settings on

your phone. So if you go into general and then you go into reset and then it says reset network settings, And once you do that, it will clear all of your network settings, so your carrier settings, your Wi Fi settings, and your Bluetooth settings will all be taken back to factory, which means you will have to repair your phone to your car, but it may fix that. It may fix that issue. So that's what I usually do. But you know, start with just the car and delete your old phones

that are paired and then see if that helps. And then if that doesn't help, I would reset your network settings, delete your phone off your car, you know, the current one, and then repair everything and see if that works. It should work. Usually the are pretty good these days, and the phones about just kind of It's funny because my brother and I. My brother was out from New Jersey, and we were talking about the differences between Android and iOS. And he had this nice, fancy rental car. He got

a Mercedes. By the way, he rented a Toyota Corolla, and when he got to the rental car place, they gave him a Mercedes. And he's like, ah, are you sure this is my car? And they're like, yeah, this is your car. And so he loved it. He had this great Mercedes. And we were talking about how when he with his OnePlus, it was not automatically connecting to the Bluetooth, like he would have to start his music every time he got into the car and connect the phone.

And I said, that can't be. There's no way. So, of course, being the nerds we are, I took out my iPhone and I said, all right, well let me show you the iPhone. So let's pair that and see what happens. So we paired it, and sure enough, immediately when we turned on the car, the music would start and it would be playing off my phone. And so I said, all right, well something you know clearly this and Android versus iOS thing. And then we realized there was a setting in the car where you can have

two things linked to it. You can have two phones. And so he was setting up his phone as a secondary device, and I said, well, let's try setting it up as the primary device. And sure enough we did, and next thing you knew, the android played the music as students he got into the car. So these cars, especially the newer ones, they have kind of an auto trigger. So when you get into the car, your car is telling the Bluetooth on your phone, hey, we see that

you connected. Now let me give that message to the phone to play music. And my old car did not do this, which drove me nuts because that's the only feature I wanted. I just wanted my phone to play music or a podcast as soon as I got into the car, without all this like you know, moving around and pressing buttons and stuff. And so my new car does it, thankfully, and I really it's one of those like small features that really comes into hand. It really

comes in handy. This was one of the most popular stories of twenty eighteen that I did at KTLA. It's about a new wireless carrier named Visible and this is Verizon's on the limited carrier's kind of a secret I call it this secret Plan. Because Verizon has this carrier it's called Visible. They own them, but they sell a plan. They only have one plan. It's forty bucks for unlimited everything, so you get unlimited data, you get unlimited voice. Basically

it's unlimited. The only caveat is that the speed of your data is limited to just five megabits per second. So yes, Verizon network is super fast. It can handle much faster, but to be honest, most people don't need more than that. I do because I'm uploading, downloading, live streaming, all that good stuff. But for the average person that's just checking their mail, you know, posting stuff to social media, all that stuff, you really don't need this super fast

connection that Verizon offers. So if you want to save a bundle of money every month, definitely check out Visible. And Visible is kind of secretive. There's not much advertising about it. It's kind of word of mouth right now. But let me tell you what's new. So when I did the story, the only thing that Visible had was support for the iPhone. But now they did announce that

they are supporting two Samsung Android devices. So if you have a Galaxy S nine or an S nine plus, you can now consider Visible and so for forty dollars a month, you literally get it all. You get unlimited everything. There's no throttling except like I said, your speed is limited to five, and they do do that like it's not like it's not a threat, like that's the way your speed is limited. I did test this, but it worked. We tried Netflix, we tried YouTube, we tried social media

Instagram stories, we tried phone calls. Everything was great, and you're getting the full Verizon network, which is really cool. So if you're looking to save some money on your wireless bill, this really only works if you have one line, maybe two. I think that if you get into the two lines with Verizon, it's a little it might be cheaper to actually get the full plan from them. But if you're just one line and you want to save, you know, almost fifty dollars a month, I think that

this is something to consider. I would love to have it. I keep wanting to switch my wife over. I keep kind of forgetting or putting it off because you do not get international. So not that we're going international very often, but the one time we do, my wife will be like, oh, I can't use my phone because I don't have the international plan. So I'm basically paying fifty dollars a month extra on my wife's line so that she can one day travel outside the country and use her phone. So, yeah,

it doesn't sound very smart. I'm gonna have to switch over. Uber Rewards is now rolling out. This is Uber's new rewards program. Everyone has one these days. I just got it on my phone here in Los Angeles, but it's rolling out to various cities around the world. And Uber Rewards is your basic frequent flyer program, whatever type of rewards program. It's kind of inspired by the airlines, right. The more you take a ride with Uber, the better perks you get. I personally don't think the perks are

that great, but still I love my loyalty programs. I'm obsessed. So I will play the game, and let me tell you about the different level You've got blue, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond. And so immediately when I joined, I immediately leveled up to gold because they're looking at your last six months of spending, and for gold you have to spend or you have to get five hundred points, and so five hundred points. It's kind of, of course, like

all good frequent flyer programs. You can't just go points to dollars, right, so they make you do a lot of math in your head. But basically to get points, let me see here, one point for every dollar spent on uberpool and Uber eats, two points for every dollar spent on Uber X, and three points for every dollar spent on Premium. So let's say you only took Uber X, you'd have to spend two hundred and fifty dollars to get gold. Let's say you only took Premium, it'd be five.

You know, you'd almost spend like maybe one hundred and seventy five dollars to get to get Uber gold. Now, Platinum is twenty five hundred points. Diamond is seventy five hundred points. So if you look at diamond and you're only taking Uber X, you need to spend on almost four thousand dollars on Uber in six months to get to that Diamond level. And yeah, the points they kind of reset every six months. So what do you get

for gold? Not much? Five dollars rewards cash that's what you get every time you spend five hundred points, flexible cancelations for the gold and priority support. Big deal Platinum, you actually get some pretty good things. The best I see here is that you get price protection between your two favorite places. So let's say you actually use Uber to commute to work. You can say I want price protection on that route, and every time you take that route you will pay the same price, which is kind

of cool. Or I guess maybe not the same exact price, but you won't pay surge pricing. So I like that. Now, if you're Diamond, this is the access, this is the level I want. You get priority pickup at airports, complimentary upgrades. So that's really cool. Let's say you order an Uber X and you get an Uber Black, or you get an Uber Select whatever. But that happens to me sometimes. It used to happen a lot more. It doesn't happen

as often any more. But if you're Diamond, it would happen a lot and then you get special access to highly rated drivers. Now here's where I have a problem with Uber because when I first went to the you know, the first party I ever went to where Uber picked me up, and it was kind of part of the

deal of the party. I remember the Uber folks telling me that part of the magic of Uber was that they were matching the best rated passengers with the best rated drivers, and that makes a lot of sense, right, if you're a great passenger, you deserve the best driver. Well, apparently they've stopped doing that for the average person, and I've definitely noticed that Uber because the rides I've been in have been very hit or miss, and I'm a

big Uber taker. I'm almost exclusively taking Uber on the weekends because I don't like to drive so and I've even taken it to work super early in the morning. It's just amazing how the fabric of our world has changed thanks to Uber. Right, you can go anywhere, and I've taken this in cities around the world and it's

just as easy as it is here. The only time I did run into a problem was in China because I was in a super duper crowded square and they were trying to pick me up and the guy kept calling me speaking Chinese and I could not answer him. I didn't know how to say, like where I was or whatever, and it was too crowded where GPS just would not work. So I did have to take a standard cab at that point because I just you know, hailed one and I took it back to to my

convention center that I was going to. But otherwise Uber has been great. I do think that it is very hit or miss, which is understandable because you know you're talking Uber. They have a lot of drivers out there, a lot of people just trying it out, just doing

it and then stopping. I like when I get the guys that are the what do I call lifetime drivers right that they're they're basically making a living off of it, and they're incentivized to have a nice ride, so they keep their car nice, they keep the little mints in the back, They do a lot of nice stuff to keep everyone happy. Those are the guys I like in gals. I've had a couple of female drivers, but mainly it's men. But there you have it. So Uber rewards beyond the lookout.

When you open up your app, Netflix is now letting you share your favorite shows to Instagram Stories. And this is just a small thing, but I really like it. So Netflix now when you press that little share button on the iOS app will bring up a special share menu, not your standard share menu on the iPhone, but you

can now share it to Instagram Stories. And what's cool about this is you can share let's say you're watching a show on Netflix, and I would mention a show, but to be honest, I don't watch anything on Netflix, so I can't even can't even mention a show that I know of on Netflix right now. But if you were watching a show that you fell in love with, you could share that using the Share menu to your Instagram Stories. And if you've used this functionality on Spotify,

it's very similar. So what they do is they make a beautiful piece of artwork that's shared to your stories that now tells your friends that you're watching this show, and it's really cool. It's a small feature, but it's kind of fun. And Netflix knows clearly. Netflix has the word of mouth down. But I think that if you find a little little nugget on there that you really like,

like a documentary or whatever. I mean, even if you just want to share that you're watching a show, this is the new way to do it because Instagram Stories is where it's at. So try it out. I don't have it on MyPhone just yet, my producer does. But all you have to do is open up the Netflix app on iPhone. Right now, they're saying they're gonna try to do it on Android, but right now it's just iPhone. You press some you know info on the show or you know, just get to the show page that you're on,

and then you'll see my list rate and share. You tap share and when you have it, you'll see a new share screen that will say Instagram Stories. If you see the standard iPhone share screen, you don't have it yet. So I don't have it yet. I can't wait to have this. And let's see, do I recognize The first thing that comes up on mine is the Ted Bundy tapes Friends from college Versace Fire. Oh, that's what I gotta watch. Everyone's talking about this fire Festival documentary. I

gotta watch that on Netflix. So I'll carve out some time one of these days. And finally, let's end with this themacindex dot Com. So I travel around the world for my job, and I'm always wondering, like, is it a better deal to buy an iPhone in Japan or a MacBook in you know, Utah? Oh wait, that's no, that's still here, just kidding, or like a MacBook in Italy. Right, So this is a new website called the macindex dot Com.

And I don't know if you've ever heard of something called the Big Mac Index, but it's kind of like the price of a big Mac around the world, so you can get an idea of different economies. But this guy, this developer, I'm not even gonna try to say his name, Juafique rod Zuwan, Malaysian software developer. It basically just shows you how much the Apple products cost around the world. So if you're interested in an iPhone, it'll say, here's

how much it is in these cities. And if let me just bring up the website real quick, so the Mac index IDx dot com. And so if I look at the main website, you can see kind of the different products that he has. And so for the iPhone tens, the cheapest place to buy is Japan for fifteen hundred and twenty one American dollars. And then if you go down all the way to the end of his list, Brazil is the most expensive at twenty six hundred and

ninety one dollars. So twenty six ninety one. Wow, that's wild. So don't buy an iPhone in Brazil if you can help it. So, now if I was going to Norway, I could get the iPhone TENNS Max smart battery case for the cheapest. It's one hundred and twenty two dollars in Norway and here in the US it is one hundred and forty one dollars, So I'd have to fly to Norway to save twenty bucks, which I'm not gonna do. But hey, I'm just throwing it out there. But this

is a great little website. Just it's just kind of fun to see and if you happen to be in a different country, like it looks like Japan is rocking a lot of these lists. In Japan. AirPods are the cheapest at one hundred and fifty five bucks in the US, like I said, with tax air pods, yep, I was right. See I said earlier, I said one seventy five, one hundred and seventy four dollars with tax, So they're saying an average of ten percent sales tax. So I think

that's yeah, what I about paid for those. But anyway, kind of a fun little website to check out, the macindex dot com since you guys are listening to the podcast and you'd like to hear my little stories about life as a news reporter. So this was kind of fun this week. You know, I wrote the book one hundred and one handy tech tips for the iPhone, and it's been great, It's been fantastic. I thank you all

for purchasing it. I thank you all for actually I thank you all for actually reviewing it now on Amazon. You guys are definitely leaving some great reviews, so thank you for that. But here's the thing. So a lot of people in the past they asked me to like speak at these things, and you know, sometimes I say yes, sometimes they say no. But the other day, you know, I got a question or an email from the Rotary Club over in Camera Rio, California, and they're like, hey,

would you mind speaking to our little club? And I was like, I know, it's only going to be like twenty people or thirty people or maybe fifty. And yeah, when I got there, it was a small group of people. But I will tell you I had so much fun talking to these people and talking about tips from my book and just my career and all this stuff. And then at the end, now that I have a book, I can actually sell it, and I got to say

it was a lot of fun. Of course I want to give my book away, right, but it took a lot of work and to print a physical book. You can't just give it away because I'd be losing money. But it was really fun, So I guess my point is it was great, and I love the fact that I now have something to really talk about, which is the book and some of the tips from the book

and showing people the tips. But also if you want me to speak at your little event, go ahead and call me, email me hello at richontech dot tv and we can talk about getting me there. Obviously, I think at minimum, maybe forty people's probably a good amount. I think they had about forty at the at the event for the Rotary Club. But it's great. I'll do other rotary clubs. And it was just it was very intimate.

You know, I've spoken at like large corporate events. There's no back and forth, right, You're just speaking to a group of maybe five thousand people. That was probably the biggest I ever did. But you know, if you're talking smaller, it's kind of fun because you get to do that back and forth. And I've done a lot of panels, but you know, it's not always about me, it's about just kind of monitoring the panel. So you know, this was definitely a new experience. It was kind of fun,

and I'll do it again. So hello at richon tech dot TV. All right, so I've got some of the folks on the live stream and they're asking me questions. Here. Let's see here, we've got Tracy Cortes saying, next doorbell versus Ring? Do you think Ring will ever pair with the Google Hub? Okay, Nest versus Nest versus Ring. So I like the Ring doorbell. They're kind of the market leader. I still like them for the doorbell because they're so simple.

You can literally connect a ring to any doorbell and door. You don't have to wire if you don't want you. They have obviously different levels. I like that I've got the Ring at home. I do like the Nest because, like you said, the integration with Google. But I still think Nest is not as established as Ring when it comes to their doorbell. So I still think that the Ring is kind of like the gold standard of doorbells. That's their entire business, right, I mean, the number one

part of their business. So if you have to think about they're working on their doorbell and making it better every single day of their life. I think Nest is probably doing similar, you know, but they're a much bigger company. They've got thermostats, they've got other smart home devices, they've got cameras. So the doorbell, I'm sure they have a great team working on it. But Ring, it's like that's their bread and butter. So I say stick with Ring

for now. Yeah, I wish I had the Google Hub integration, but I think it works pretty darn well for what it is. Let's see, do you have to be paid? Oh, Toby says, you have to be paid in order to go to an event and speak. It's different every time. I mean, if here's my rule of thumb. My rule of thumb is if it's a corporate event or someone's making money on the event, you know, I would like a stipend to be there, right because my time is not free. But if it's something like the Rotary Club, No,

they didn't pay me, and I was very happy. Now I did sell my books, which was kind of fun, and I never you know, I never did that before. Usually I speak, you know, But here's the thing everything is is I take it case by case basis right. I've spoken at huge events where they've flown me out to Europe and I've spoken and I've spoken at little, tiny schools, and you know, I don't mind. I love everything that comes my way. I will take a look at see what it's all about, and make a decision

based on what I think. Sometimes I don't want to do it, sometimes I do. Sometimes I really want to do it, And so I don't even care if you pay me. You know nothing, but you know, it all depends. Vicky said, someone told me my Internet is too slow for ring doorbell? Is that correct? Your Internet is probably not too slow, but your Wi Fi is probably really bad. So unless you have DSL or dial up internet, that's

the only thing that's too slow for ring. But Ring can work on a pretty slow connection by today's standards. I mean, Internet connections are pretty good most of the time. The problem that people have with their ring doorbell or anything these security cameras really has to do with their Wi Fi device, so their Wi Fi router. And that's why I recommend these new mesh routers from the likes of you know, from the likes of EO or Google Wi Fi. Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast.

Thanks so much for watching on Facebook Live and chatting with me today. If you want more information, on anything I talked about here, just go to my website rich on Tech dot TV. There is also where I post all of my stories that I do on KTLA, all the things I think are interesting. You can also find me on social media. Find me on Instagram at rich on Tech and on Facebook I am rich on Tech as well. And if you're downloading the podcast, you can just look in the show notes to everything I talk

about here. Thanks so much for everyone, To everyone who has purchased the book. It is called one one hundred and one Handy Tech Tips for the iPhone. It's on Amazon right now. It makes a great gift for yourself. It makes a great gift for someone you know, someone that's hard to shop for. And the best part about this book. When you're an adult, you don't really continue to learn about a ton of stuff, right you don't, especially with this thing in your pocket. You know, this

device you spent so much money on. You really feel out of control with it. Right. Well, when you buy this book and you read the book, you will feel in control of something, and that's your phone. And it's fun. I will tell you. When I spoke to those folks at the Rotary Club just watching their face light up when I show them a few of the tips for my book. We did them in real time, you know, we all demo. We took out our phones and we did it together. It was really cool and it was

so fun to see that reaction. I feel like that reaction is happening in living rooms around the nation right now with my with my book. I just don't get to see because I'm not there. So check out the book on Amazon. Thanks so much for listening. Catch me on KTLA. I'm on every morning five forty five or five thirty five am, seven forty five and nine thirty if you happen to be in the Los Angeles area. If you live in a city like Cleveland, or New Orleans or San Diego, you can catch me as well.

I'm on syndicated and I will see you guys online. Thanks so much for listening. I'll talk to you real soon. By bye.