Samsung launching a budget phone with useful features at a great price. That Amazon Prime refund check is actually real. I'll tell you why some people are getting it. A warning about crypto ATMs before you get scammed. Plus your tech questions answered. What's going on Rich Demiro And this is Rich on Tech. 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 the tech should be interesting, useful and fun. All right, let's open up those phone lines for the first time in twenty twenty six. Here we go, Ready triple eight Rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one eight eight eight rich one O one give me a call. If you have a question about technology, you'll like to email emails also an option just go to Rich on tech dot
tv and hit contact Rich on tech dot tv hit contact. Well, like I said, this is the first show of twenty twenty six. Welcome. If you are listening for the very first time. If you're listening for the one hundred and fifty fifth time, well you get a gold star for today. Yes, that's how many shows we have done. So far right here on rich On Tech. I can't believe it either. This is year number four. How is that possible? Year number four? I remember starting this like it was yesterday.
I mean I really do. I had Bill standing right there watching every word I said. And now he'll just show up. You know, I can't remember the last time he was here. We love you anyway, Bill. We got Bobo here, we got me, we got Kim on the phones. And I call this the shoulder season in technology. We are just moments away from CS in Las Vegas, kicks off this weekend. And if you're not sure what that is, CS used to stand for Consumer Electronics Show. It does
not stand for that anymore. It is now just CES because it's way bigger than just gadgets, because there is everything on display. You know, this was the start of the DVD player, the TVO, the flat screen TV. All this stuff got it started at CES when it was the Consumer Electronics Show. Now it is just CS because we have health tech, AI, wearables, car tech, data security, and all kinds of stuff that's getting not only an Internet connection this year, but also AI. This is one
of my biggest weeks of the year. I always love bringing back the information to you that I find the coolest, the weirdest, the most useful things that I see out there. I've been covering that show for more than fifteen years now, and I remember, yes, my very first CS. I was with CNET back in the day, and I remember staying at the Palms Hotel for eleven days straight. I mean that was a marathon. I was a lot younger back then. But I'll be there for the whole week endless rows
of exhibitors all across the convention center. Basically every hotel on the strip also has some sort of exhibitor there on display. There's no way to see it all, but I do my best. And the cool thing is you get to see every single person you've ever met in the tech world, and the people you email with on a daily basis, walking and talking, and you know you kind of catch up with them as well. So stay tuned. I've got a lot coming from seats next week. Can't
wait for that. We've got a lot of news on the show today. But I have to tell you about my trip back to New Jersey. My kids hit the vacation lottery because it snowed, not just not once, but twice while we were there. And yes, I know you could see snow in California, but we don't go to the mountains that much, so for my kids this was a huge deal. My kid literally ran outside in his
pajamas and started throwing snowballs. It was so cute. It reminded me of waking up back in the day growing up in New Jersey checking the window and hoping for a snow day because that was the best. You didn't have to go to school, and back then they would literally sound this loud alarm. I don't know how they did. It was like a foghorn or something, and that's how you knew there was no school. And then you go outside, you play, you know, shovel your neighbor's sidewalks for some
extra money. It was great. I did stay at my dad's house in New Jersey, and I didn't expect to be the geek squad as much as I was, But yes, I was the geek squad for my dad. And what I loved about this is that every time I go home or just being like another person's home, I realized what the average person deals with when it comes to technology. So, first off, he had switched his Internet to T Mobile five g. He switched all of his Internet and his
phones to T Mobile without asking me. He was like, hey, they gave me a great deal. I was like, all right, So of course I ran a speed test to see how that was functioning, and I was very impressed. He got like a pretty good speed there. You place this if you're not familiar, you place this router near a window. It pulls in a cellular signal and turns it into Wi Fi for the house. My friend gave me this
great analogy. It's almost like a hose. The hose is the Internet connection, and then the sprinkler is the router that kind of sprinkles the signal throughout the house. Problem was that signal did not reach everywhere, so as TV kept buffering, and he said, Rich, I'm dealing with this every single night. The TV just buffers. So I had anticipated this idea, and so I brought my old euro system.
EUO is a Wi Fi mesh Wi Fi system. You put a bunch of these little leafs around the house and they all work together to give you a nice blanket of Internet. Imagine different sprinklers all over your lawn, right instead of just one sprinkler in the middle, so I set it up. It took just a few minutes,
and everything was faster and more reliable instantly. Now the funny thing is he used to have Euro before he switched to T Mobile, so I just reused his old Wi Fi network name so all his devices would reconnect automatically, which sounds very simple, but he kept saying to me Rich, I don't understand I canceled that internet. How do I have it back? I don't have that anymore. And that kind of sums up how confusing this stuff can be because he didn't understand that the pipe is different from
the Wi Fi signal. Right, even though it is confusing, because T Mobile and Spectrum and AT and T they all name their WiFi after the connection, which you can make that any name you want, so I always come up with something really fun. So next up was the TV. He was using an LGTV with the built in software, which I tried for like one second and I hated it instantly. Now, don't write me angry letters. If you have an LGTV and you love the webOS stuff, sure,
if it works for you, that's great. For me, it did not, and I asked him. I said, Dad, you like this remote? Do you like how it waves around like a pointer on the screen. He goes, no, I hate it. I thought that's the only thing I could have, and I was like no, So I ordered him a fire TV stick. It arrived the next day. I plugged it in. I cleaned up all the cables behind the TV because he had like everything that used to be
plugged in still there but not plugged in. Put it all into the soundbar and I said, Okay, here's your new remote. Just use this. And he loved. He's like, oh my gosh, this is so much easier. I said, yeah, so just by swapping out the streaming stick that you have or the streaming platform that you have on your smart TV, you can have an entirely different experience with the same exact device. And just in that twenty four hours that I switched this all over, everything was just
so much better. But the real headache was his logins and passwords. Hey Dad, I got a log into your Netflix. What's your account? Oh, I have no idea. Okay, what about your password? No, no idea. I don't even know I had Netflix. I mean it's just on there. Okay, Dad, well, you must pay for it. Somehow, turns out it was included with his T mobile subscription. So I said, remember that app we set you up with Bitwarden. Let's figure that out again. So I went on his computer and
this is so wild. He had Bitwarden, Apple passwords, and Google passwords all competing for his attention when I would click one of the logins screens, so they'd all pop up at the same time. Now that is confusing, even for me who's sitting there going okay, these all popping up at the same time. So I had to go in, go into the settings and cancel them out and just keep one, which was Bitworten, which I really like because it's free in a cross platform. Google was the trickiest,
by the way. It kept popping up for a very long time, even after I turned it off, and I had to really do some little things on Chrome to get it to stop doing that. So Google, come on, make it a little easier for us. But I got it all figured out. We went through all of his main logins and I said, all right, Dad, we've got
to fix these. We've got to clean them up. We can't use the same words over and over and then when you show someone that doesn't use a password manager the wild passwords that it generates, they get very intimidated. And I understand that because everyone's like, well, I'm never going to be able to remember that. You don't have to remember it because your password manager will remember it. So I got that all figured out. We went through the main passwords, we consolidated all of it, and we
got most of it working. And it's been about I don't know, a week and a half since I've been not there, so I have not gotten that phone call yet that says, hey, I I can't do this. What's happening? I can't access something I used to be able to access. So clearly things are working. It's better. The sound is improved, the log just everything. So what is my takeaway here? I tell you this because this stuff is not always easy, especially if you're not a digital native, especially if you
don't understand basic concepts. Hey click that icon? What's an icon? You know? Hey? Open that program? What's that program? Do I do it on my phone? Do I do on my computer? These are things that you know, I take for granted because I've been covering this stuff forever. But when I talk to regular people, and a lot of them call this show. I realize that this stuff is complicated, even for people like me. So I tell you this because I want you to relax. I want you to
take a deep breath. I want you to understand that you're not going to understand this stuff instantly. It may not come naturally, but you can figure it out if you take the time and you get organized from the start. So when you do things, just take that extra minute to create a strong password, Take the extra minute to save that password, Take the extra minute to turn on two factor authentication. Write things down, Write down your process, keep notes. I will tell you you will not remember
this stuff later off the top of your head. You just won't. Like for instance, I set up bitwarden with a passcode on his computer. He said, oh, what's the pass code? And I instantly forgot about it. I was like, oh, wait, which one was it? And of course it took me a minute to remember, but it was like something that I thought i'd remember instantly. No, you won't. But it's a new year, perfect time to go through clean up the apps that you use. Go ahead, delete stuff that
you're no longer using. Look at the services that you have, the subscriptions, go through, cancel, delete, upgrade, whatever you need to do, downgrade, check out the tech you're using, and get it all up and running. I did that over the past week. I've got my systems in place and it feels so much better. Cleaning up your tech world is worth it. You will breathe a sigh of relief,
and yes it can be done. And no, you're probably not going to break anything, so enjoy all right eight eight eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. We got a great show planned for you today. We'll take some of your calls coming up next, plus news, opinions, all kinds of stuff right here on rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you, talking technology. The website for the show is rich on
tech dot tv. There you can get links to anything that I mentioned on the show, learn more about the show, follow me on Instagram, all that good stuff. It's right there rich on tech dot tv. This is episode one fifty five, so click that if you want the exact links that I mentioned here on this show. So go to Mike in Mankato Minnesota. You're on with Rich.
Hey, Hey, Rich, it's Mike in Minnesota. Hey. So, I have a nept geary.
By cable modem router that I purchased at a new Egg.
And it says too because I.
I forgot the uh the user or the password for the admin.
So I don't know. I don't know because.
I'm visually impaired and I can't. I use a screen it called Josh the Windows. It's a screenerader, and I can't read the label on the because it says to enter the It says to enter the uh the the password three times wrong when I go to you know, user dot log in, and.
So I do that and then it says to enter the serial number. But I can't read the label on the on the router.
Well, here, here's an easier way to do this. There is a tiny hole on the back of the router that you can press, uh press a paper up into and that will reset it to factory. And then once it's going to reset to factory, that way, you should be able to just go onto your computer and type in it. It's typically one nine to eight dot one six two dot one dot one or something like that. And then once once you go there, it should give
you the ability to get back into this router. But you're saying, if you do that, it's going to give you the factory information from the that's printed on the bottom of the router. Is that what you're saying.
No, Well, when I go, because when I go and puts.
The forgot password button, it says to It says to enter the wrong password three times when I'm on uh router dot log in dot.
Okay, that's what they use.
It says that, Yeah, and then it says, enter the.
Cereal number of your product. But I can't read the serial number.
Is it scratched out?
No, I'm visually impaired, so I can't. My eyes don't work.
Okay, Well I can't.
I can't see anything.
Okay, Well why don't you do this? Have you heard of the app be my Eyes?
Yeah?
Okay, Well, why don't you just use that to connect with someone that can read the number for you off the bottom of it?
Okay, that would work?
Yeah, I think I think that would work. Because this is an app that basically, you know, if you're familiar with it, you download it. It's it works two ways. Visually, impaired download it to their phone and it's kind of like a FaceTime with someone, and so they can when they need help seeing something, they can say, hey, you know, let me reach out, and then me on the other end, who can see I can log onto the app and say, oh, let me help this person. I look at whatever's on
my screen. I can read it out or whatever. So why don't you try that? Yeah and do that?
Yeah, I love this show. This thing is so cool.
Oh oh thank you?
Yeah.
Yeah, because because what's that bit bitwarden you were talking about.
Yeah, bitwarden. So bitwarden is the password manager that I like. And the reason I like it is because it's free and it's open source, so you can you can download it to your computer, you can download your phone, you can download your iPad, and it's going to work the same way across all those and they're not going to charge you for it either. Now there is, of course, ninety nine percent of free apps have some sort of paid level, you know, that you can step up to.
But I use this. I've been using it for the past, you know, eight months or whatever when I switched over, and it works great, and I haven't paid a dime. I want to pay them because I love it so much and I was paying sixty dollars a year for my old one, right right, But Mike, what what station do you listen on over there?
KA way out of Colorado?
Awesome? All right, Well, thanks for thanks for the call today, and keep me posted. Let me know if you figure this out.
Okay, yeah, I.
Will, all rights, have a great one, all right? Eight eight eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. We'll get to more calls after the break. CS, like I mentioned, is happening next week in Las Vegas, but already some companies, you know, the whole name of the game is trying to capture the attention of the journalists that go to
CS or the media in general. So some companies will kind of put out a couple of little announcements before the actual event happens so that they can kind of capture this slow time of news to you know, get the headline. So a couple things trickled out this week. Number one, LG is going to make a gallery TV. So if you're familiar with Samsung, they've got that frame TV that they've been doing forever. Well, LG is now unveiling a new art TV at CES twenty twenty six.
It's called the LG Gallery TV. The idea is that your TV doubles as artwork when you're not using it, So it's got a screen that looks more like art. Now, I will tell you that, you know, Samsung does this the frame I saw at Costco yesterday. They all all the TV makers have some sort of like ambient art. But if you truly want it to look like art when it's not in use, obviously you need a certain screen that is matt and not reflective and it just
looks not, you know, like super bright. But you can do this, by the way, if you have a fire TV stick, there's an ambient mode on it and so you can use that. It's kind of like the screen saver on your TV, except it just looks much more like art. So the lighting of the TV sort of changes to make it blend in with the room, so that doesn't look like this big bright screen. It almost like if you just walked into that room, you'd say, wait, is that a piece of art on the wall. Oh no,
it's a TV. So it's very popular. People love these that have them and so of course that will be one of the things I'm checking out the LG Gallery TV eighty eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four two four one zero one. More of your calls coming up on rich On Tech right after this. Welcome back to rich On Tech. Let's go to Jamie and Tampa.
You're on with rich Hey, how you doing today, man?
I'm doing well? What's up?
First off?
I love your musical selection choice you go from you go from Little Darling By. I think it's the Beatles, Brad.
What you know?
I pick everything myself, Jamie, So yes, these are these are There is a theme today. The theme is sort of a rebirth of fresh you know, new Year. You know, I'm trying to keep with the New Year's stuff, you know, even though I have not heard one person, not one person talk about resolutions, not even in the news nowhere, Like nobody talks about resolutions anymore, because I think we've all decided that nobody keeps them anyway. So what can I what can I help you with? Today?
Well?
Bro, I got two questions. First of all, I want to thank you for your advice. You gave me what I called you just think was either last year the year before last, asking about how to cut my swimming bill because man, I was paying where the freaking sun didn't for three and television, and you said, hey, getnintenna. Well I got one, and I got the amplifier for it I bought. I bought a separate amplifier because the one that they can be intended intendant come with team
to be basically just cheap crap. Anyway, I bought a better amplifier for it, and I love it for the most part. But I want to know how do I get I mean, is there a way? Because there's that one channel and it just happen to be the local CBS Facilia for some.
Reason, CBS which one CBS CBS.
You know that you know that there is that one?
Okay, I have and for some of it.
I cannot get it. I live near the towers. I'm like fifteen miles from the broadcast towers. I get everything else except that one, and I don't want to.
Have to go.
And I also went out too. I'm visually impaired just as Mike is.
Oh wow, and I love it.
I love it when I saw a blank community reach out to your show.
By the way, Oh, yeah, me too. It's it's it's you know, we talked about those meta glasses last year. It's you know, it's eye opening, no pun intended. I hate I hate that I just said that, but it's, uh, you know, it's really been interesting to see, you know, how technology is used and how it is opening up the world for people of all different abilities. But here's my solution for you. Why not just download their free streaming app.
Well it's well, okay, okay, the I have them is the app. It's good for new.
Yeah, oh, but not programming.
But if I want to watch stay yes, yes, I yep.
That can that can be a little bit of a okay.
Luckily, the only thing I really watched it on TVs is the Price is right?
You and my kids they watched it every day. Uh well okay, but here here's a couple of things. So have you you've tried putting the antenna in different locations of your home?
That I tried, And it's funny how I have to do it. I literally have to stand on a stool because I put four.
Be careful, Jamie, I don't want you fallen off a stool to get to prices right, Well, I tried listen.
The funny thing is my girlfriend saw me up there one day says, oh my god, my boyfriend got.
To kill hmself.
All the name of Drew Carey. Now I'm just kidding, right, Okay, Well, here's what I think you should do. Have you checked out an app called Antenna Point that well, I you may have to have someone help you, but you know what it does. Is it you put in your you know, basically based on where your phone is, it will show you where to point your antenna to get the reception
of the channel that you want. So if you're looking at this thing, and I've done this in my home, you know, most of the channels come from a certain tower right like here in where I live. They all come from the same mountain pretty much in your area. That may be the same case, but you won't know until you open up this app and look. So I would get that app. It's called Antenna Point. It comes from Antenna's Direct and you basically can look at that and see where this antenna needs to be aimed for
the maximum reception. And it may be that you know, you change it to one side, it's going to get CBS. You change it to the other. It's not gonna get anything else, so you have to you know, the whole antenna thing is not a perfect system. Let's put it that way.
It's just not another thing. Rich I keep hearing about, is this whole next in TV?
Yes, you know.
My concern is because I keep hearing that they have all these APSP three boxes you can get. I'm gonna have to get a new TV down the road anyway, but like, do they make accessible like ATSD three boxes? Like because my Rowcup TV it's talked, So that's why I know what I'm doing, right, But I don't want to have to pay money through the nose for a box that I need somebody here to help me use.
I want to go to watch TV independently without needing to have my goal friend whoever in the house with me be like, Hey, okay, Jamie, you got to click on this thing and do this thing. And I'm like, I'm very impatient with stuff that is mostly.
The preciety, right, Oh, I totally get that. I mean, I would say because the next gen TV stuff is so new, and by the way, I'd said, I'll be at CS next week They're going to have this on
display like they always do. This has taken a lot longer to mature than I think these broadcast companies wanted, and I think the take up is not as high because people, you know, I don't know if you remember, we all went through that digital transition with the channels, so that was a big thing, and now they want people to buy a different box to go to this next gen TV, which is great and it has a lot of cool features. I mean, they've got all these
enhanced features. It's almost like a mix of streaming and over the air, right like it brings interactive features to standard broadcast channels. And I'm sure the TV companies love it because I bet I just have a feeling that they probably get a lot more analytics from the people that tune in, so like for things like ratings and stuff. It's probably really good. They can also deliver data alongside
the programming and that kind of stuff. But I would say these boxes are very immature, and so I don't know if they have all those accessibility features. But you know what, I will definitely ask when I'm there and at CES and meet with these folks and see where they're at with accessibility. But Jamie in the meantime, I would definitely check out, you know, see if you can get that antenna app again, it's called Antenna Point. It's
available for iOS and Android. See if that helps you figure out if you can even receive the CBS channel in your area, like you may not even Let's say you point your antenna towards the mountain where it says you still may not get it. I mean, and you know antenna signals are you know, they can be finicky. So great question. Thanks for the call, Really appreciate it, Jamie listening in Tampa, and thanks so much today. It's just so nice to hear from folks all over the US.
Here Debora rights in listening on the podcast. Hey, I've got a few old printed wedding photos four by six five x seven. I'd love to remove just my ex from them. I've tried some free editing software. The trials are super limited, and I don't want to sign up or pay for anything. That's the best question. I don't want to pay for anything or sign up for anything, but I still want to be able to do this.
I hear you, Deborah. The tricky part is he has his hand around the arm of the person next to him, so when I remove him, it looks like her arm is cut off. I know there's a way to use layers and patch in some skin area, but that's way too complicated for me. Do you know if a simple website or company that can handle this. Thanks for any advice. I'm always listening to you. You're everywhere, Deborah. Thank you. The good news is you do not need to pay
a dime to do this. You will not believe how easy this is to do with Google's Gemini AI Gemini dot Google dot com.
It is free.
It will do an amazing job with this. I showed my wife yesterday. I was doing a picture for the newsletter. I said, ah, I don't want to have you in this picture, so watch me remove you. And she goes, wait what And it was like watching like Back to the Future, where it's just like you just get a race from the picture instantly. Again, So scan your photo. You can use the free Google Photo Scan app. It's quick,
it'll remove Claire. Then go to Gemini on the web or on the app, upload the photo and all you have to do is type something in like remove the man, remove this guy that crossed me, remove this X that I hate now, I'm just kidding. Google may respond with that remove the guy with his hand on her arm, or you can just say remove the guy from the picture. Whatever it is. Try it. It will do it so easily,
and I'm not kidding. You will even recreate whatever parts of the body that it's covering that you know gets erased. I mean, it's pretty pretty amazing. So try that, Deborah, thanks for listening. Really appreciate the kind words. Super super simple. You will not believe. You know, you've probably heard me talk about this Google Nano Banana that is just a nice funny name for Gemini, which is okay, let me start at the beginning. So you've got different flavors of
AI out there. You've got Chat GBT that's an AI, You've got Gemini, which is an AI that's from Google, and then nano Banana pro is just a fancy way of referring to the image editing technology that is built into Google Gemini AI. And the way they got that name, they didn't even it wasn't even supposed to be named that. Basically, an engineer just put that in as like a placeholder
when they were coming up with something with this. They were going to launch this and they said, oh this is call it Nano Banana, and it stuck and people started loving it. They love the name and it's really given branding to this image generator and photo editor. So if you have not tried this, if you have ever used photoshop in your entire life and you've been like, oh, like okay, here's a great example. I have had this
dream of changing signs. You know, when you see a street sign or a sign on the side of the road, or an exit sign, whatever you see a sign. I always love in my head thinking how silly those signs would be if they said something silly, right, almost like that La movie What was it? What was the one with Steve Martin La Story? Yeah, where like the signs on the freeway had like funny things that they said to him, Like I've always thought that was really interesting.
Now you have to match the font, you gotta match the background, you gotta match everything. I tried this in Nano Banana yesterday. I just went through probably one hundred signs in my photo album and just changed them all to silly stuff just for my own laughter. And you can do this now, so try it. Gemini dot Google dot com put a photo in there, ask to edit
super super simple. By the way, not to be outdone, chatch Ebt also upgraded their image generation tool a couple of weeks ago, and it's also gotten very good, So you can't go wrong with either of these. I understand it's impacting jobs, it's impacting all these people that learned photoshop, but I mean, I didn't invent it. This is just how we're moving forward, and it's wild. So you got to try this stuff. Eighty eight Rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four to one
zero one. More rich on Tech coming your way right after this. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you, talking technology. Eight eight eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Let's let's go to Jamie in San Dimas. Jamie, you're on with Rich.
Hey, how's it going, Rich?
It is going fantastic. How are you doing on this new year?
I'm pretty good.
I'm glad I finally got through to you because this has been an ongoing problem that I'm hoping Apple has got a solution for, but maybe not. So I have an iPhone twelve soon to upgrade through A fifteen. But I constantly when I make a phone call, if I try to click out of the phone or something like that, I end up hitting somebody else in my favorite contact list and make another phone call. Is there any way to set it up to where when a call ends, that screen closes automatically.
I don't think there's a way to have that screen close. But what I do is and this is the thing that a lot of people just forget to do. But you know, I just press the lock button on the side.
Yeah.
I know that.
My son tells me that all the time. Just turn the phone.
Yeah, and I yell at my mom. I don't yell. I'm very nice. But there's certain people that like to leave their screen on all the time, and they put it in their pocket or their purse with the screen on, and then they say, oh, my app's moved around, or my home screen got rearranged, or I called someone. It's all because the phone is still on. So there's really you know, so when you're talking you dial a person. Let's say you dial someone right and then that end screen.
I'm gonna I'm gonna dial my wife real quick. She'll probably call me back and be like, what's happening? Uh okay, So I press end and then you're okay, it ends, and then it goes right to that favorite screen exactly. Yeah.
And I have a tendency when I'm trying to hit and if it doesn't end right away, right my fingers on there is in the process of trying to hit end again and then I'm back to the favorite.
Right and I and I've done that. I've done that where I dial someone else or you know what happens Sometimes you dial someone and it like hangs up for some reason really quickly, and I'm like, wait what and I press something and it immediately dials the next person.
So exactly.
Yeah, I mean this is definitely an issue. I mean it's really Yeah, there's there's not really a way to do that.
I don't think there's I just have to get into muscle memory of turning off the phone.
Yeah, that's I mean, that's really that's that's the best way to do with the muscle memory. Now I'm gonna run through a couple other ways just to kind of set up your phone if this is always happening to you. So number one, you know, because butt dialing is a is a problem. People do it all the time. I mean, it's it's just here we are in twenty twenty six and we're still it's a It's like a problem that's
been you know, fifteen years old. So Number one, you have to get into the habit of when you're done with your phone, just press that lock button on the side of it, the power button, whatever it does to lock your phone. That's it. So that's number one. Some people set their phones up. You have Android, you could like double tap the screen to lock it. Whatever you do, just turn it off. That's number one. A couple other ways to make it on the iPhones that you don't
misdial someone by accident. You can disable raise to wake, So if you you know, when you raise your iPhone, it kind of on. It doesn't unlock it, but it will wake it up. And when your phone's in a wake up state, it's easier to unlock, and it's easier for the face i D to work. So you can go into settings and turn it off if you want to kind of be in control. So you go to settings and then display and brightness, and there's an option for raise to wake turn it off. The other thing
you do. By the way, Jamie is turned the auto lock to like thirty seconds instead of a couple of minutes. I have mine on five minutes. Autolock is how long your phone automatically locks, and I always recommend, by the way, keeping that to a lower number in general because of security reasons. You don't want someone to come over and grab your phone and it's on lock for five minutes. That would be a privacy nightmare, all right, So that's
number two. Then you've got tap to wake, so in accessibility, you can go into settings Accessibility and then touch and there's a tap to wake, so it says tap or swipe to wake. You can turn that off so that'll make your phone not wake up as much. And then if you have a passcode, you can let's see, well, obviously you should set a passcode. But the other one, the other one that you may not know about, is in settings under face ID and passcode. Let's see where
that is. That's going to ask for your passcode, So put that in. And then there's an op shin that says return missed calls. And see if you go in here it says allow access while locked. There's a whole bunch of things that your phone can actually do when it's locked if you have these turned on, and one
of them is return miss calls. So if you're always if you have those miss calls on your lock screen and you put your phone in your pocket or your jim bag or you're pressing your phone and your screen touches your finger touches one of those missed calls, it
will dial that number. So even if your phone is locked, because you know, Apple is trying to make things easier for you, so you can go in and turn that off so that you know, now, I hate to be like a kind of like look into the dark side of things, but there's always, you know, there's a reason why you might want to keep that on. Let's say I don't know, I don't want to. It gets too tough.
I run a lot, and so I'm always thinking if I'm just left dead in a ditch somewhere, if someone has to like pick up my phone and like dial a number from it to like call my loved ones. I mean, I don't know why I think that way, but it's like good, you know, it's something you kind
of have to think about sometimes. But anyway, so I always think about that, like if someone found me, like when I go running like a foreign city, I'm like, if someone found me in this, let's say in Tokyo, right in Japan, someone found me here on a run, Like literally, what would they do? They'd have to like put my picture on TV and be like who is this guy?
Right?
So I'm always like, Okay, I have to put my my ID in my pocket because I need something that like they can go through my pocket and be like, all right, we found this guy. I mean, it's sad and it's kind of weird to think that way, but
that's how my brain works. So anyway, if you find me running, just look at my pocket, because yes, my ID will be in there, and you'll be able to tell who I am now getting in touch with someone on that D I don't know how that would work where they got to like go to the embassy and be like, hey, can you look up the phone number for this guy?
I don't know.
These are things I never want to find out, but it's like things I think about. Eight to eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Jamie, thanks for the calling demus the website for the show rich on Tech dot T while you're there, Definitely check out my newsletter today. I had my first newsletter of the new year. I loved
writing it. I love writing this every week. It's it's kind of like all the stuff I talk about in this show, but in a newsletter, So sign up for that. It is free. More rich on Tech coming your way right after this. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you talking technology at Triple eight rich one oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Welcome to another year. Welcome to another year of this show. It has been
quite the ride. It's been so much fun to do this, coming in every weekend, talking with you, going over the news of the week. My favorite thing though is really, you know, anyone can tell you the news in the tech world, but my favorite thing is when I find the little tidbits that I tell you that are interesting and useful and helpful. And we've had a bunch of them over the years, so that is really what keeps
me going. And of course the feedback when I tell you, when I tell you I can do email for an unlimited amount of time, that is not a joke. It is not a joke. I will send I will, I will look at my email as soon as I do a show, as soon as I do a newsletter, as soon as I do a TV segment. The emails come in, and then I reply to those emails as much as I can, and more come in. But I love it because you know, this would not be anything if it wasn't for you. So thank you for that, and I
appreciate it. I'm honored that you trust what I say and you like my recommendations. It is not lost on me in any way. So I was saying that some of this technology for thank you Bobo, Thank you Bobo.
Some of this.
Technology they're trying to get ahead of at CS. One of them is pretty interesting. We've actually talked to Clicks. They're the company that makes those physical keyboard cases. They just unveiled their first phone and it kind of looks like where BlackBerry left off. So it's called the Clicks Communicator, And if you go to their website Clicks dot tech, I mean, this thing looks like a BlackBerry and it's got a screen. Let's see the specs here. It runs Android.
So the idea is that this is your second phone. So people that are juggling like a work and personal device, you can have this secondary device that's just focused on messaging, email and getting things done. So it's got software that you can have you know, Gmail on there, WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram, in a message hub. It's got this signal light on
the side that glows different colors. Remember those Remember when phones used to have a physical light like an led on them that would light up when you had a message that was the best. No, no phone has it anymore as far as I know, So VIPs can have a different color than your group chat. It's got a real physical keyboard so you can type faster, and you can also scroll. So there's a little let's see, is there a little scroll wheel on the side. No, I don't know if I can't see the left side of
this thing, but maybe there's a scroll wheel. Let's see what else. So the hardware has things that people I mean, this is just wild. They put a headphone jack, micro SD card, physical SIM plus E SIM tactical tactile tactical tactile kill switch, so you can map that to airplane mode or notifications whatever you want. Kind of like kind of like the button on the the action button on
the iPhone, but it's actually a real switch. It's got Android sixteen, five years of security update, four thousand million battery, wireless charging, fifty megapixel main camera. I'm guessing the camera is going to be the sore spot here, but you're not getting this for the camera.
I don't know.
I'm kind of intrigued. I'm really intrigued. Five hundred dollars. You can get that price down to three ninety nine, and if you reserve it now, you can put two hundred dollars down to reserve it for three ninety nine. I know it's confusing, so if you don't do anything, you're gonna pay five hundred, but if you reserve it for two hundred dollars, you'll pay four hundred. Shipping expected later this year, I don't know. Kind of interesting. Check it out clicks dot Tech. This will be at CS
of course. I don't know. I've kind of gotten over the physical buttons on my phone, so I don't know if I need this, but I think that they definitely are coming out the product that people that have a work phone and a personal phone could enjoy, Cause if you just want to throw away your work phone when you get done with work and you don't want to deal with all the emails that come in and the
messages and things like that. You just get this phone, put all your work stuff on it, and then you know, hide it under a pillow when you get home, but it's still there for when you need it. So anyway, kind of a neat idea. Clicks dot tech. Let's go to let's go to Brian line for Brian in uh oh Claire with constant.
You're on with Rich, Hey, Rich, thanks for taking my call. Hopefully quick question here. I think I know the answer, but uh, you know, over the holidays, usually get an Amazon gift card and I'm not a huge online chopper, so I usually use that to purchase my TurboTax for
the for the year. Sure, and I went to do that this year, and I was about to download it when I realized it's kind of in fine print there that it says now it's only for Windows eleven and newer, and I'm I'm running Windows ten on my on my HP Pavilion X three sixty. They do offer an online option, and I kind of poked around in there and I thought it was a little bit cumbersome. I guess a couple questions if if I were to download it on Windows ten, woul would nothing happen? Or would it just
be a security risk? Or is there kind of a workaround that I'd still be able to use it on my the desktop or a downloaded version on my on my HP pavilion.
Yeah, great, great question. Actually, I think someone emailed me this question late last year and said, hey, for the next upcoming year, you know you're not gonna be able to run TurboTax on Windows ten. And so yeah, the company has said that the TurboTax desktop program twenty twenty five will require Windows eleven because there's no more. Now, this is the interesting thing. They say this because of security reasons, right, because Windows ten is no longer actively supported.
But the funny thing is it is sort of actively supported by Microsoft for security updates. But I think the problem is they can't guarantee that everyone has those updates. So I'm not sure what the reasoning is, like why they said you can't do this anymore. I think it's just because they want to make a blanket. You know, Okay, we know Windows ten is not supported in a big way anymore. So we're just going to move forward with Windows eleven. So that is the company line. What they're
saying is this software will not run on ten. So and they did say that, you know, security was the main reason. So what are your options now? Is there some sort of hack or work around. I'm sure there is, but I don't know of that hack, nor can I recommend that because you're talking about your taxes, you're talking about your personal information, talking about you know, the most personal and private and secure information you're working with as a person. So I can't really say like, oh yeah,
I just do this and and get around that. So I think your best option is if you you know, you can upgrade your computer Windows eleven if that supports it. If it doesn't, then of course, or if you don't want to, that's a whole nother thing. But why do you not want to use the online thing? And I know a lot of people like this desktop software. Is it just because it's offline? Like, what's the reason for that.
I was poking around a little bit yesterday and it just seemed that, I want to say glitchy, but it was it was a little bit harder to read the best stop version and a little bit more difficult to you know, to copy and paste from like a you know, a W two and from bank statements and that sort of thing.
Okay, and it was it.
Wasn't terrible but any means, but not not as streamlined as the desktop version that I was used to.
I guess, okay, I mean I understand that I'm trying to see here, So yeah, I mean that's okay. I'm looking at Reddit right now, and you know, some people are discussing this, of course, and it is interesting because people said, well, hold on, now that we have these security updates to October twenty twenty six, why can't they support it? Like, come on, people are you know, if you if you're doing that extension. So I would say you're probably going to be unless TurboTax changes their mind.
You're probably stuck using the online system. You can also switch to a different app, but of course that's a pain because I'm sure all your data is in this app, right.
That's correct.
Yeah, So I would say, now here's my other question. If you're using the desktop app, does your data follow through to the online app?
You can you can upload the you know, the file from your from your from your from the browser and it will you can you can transfer it over.
Yeah, okay, so that's probably what you're gonna be stuck with doing, Brian. I know you said you thought you knew the answer before you call it. I think that's really you know, the only other thing that would be Yeah, there is a thing where you can like write click on an app on Windows and do like compatibility mode, but I think that's only for backwards compatibility, so if you're running it, you know, if you wanted to run
on an older version or something like that. But I don't think you're gonna be able to get around this unless TurboTax changes something. I will keep an eye on this. It's definitely something that a lot of people are chatting about, and I think it's going to impact more people. Were only a couple of days into January, so I think people are going to be discovering this as we move into January, and maybe the more people that are vocal about it, the more that TurboTax into it might have
a change of heart. But right now, that is what the company says, that's what they're doing. I'll be honest. I use TurboTax for a long time. I now use this app called fly fin, which you know I don't. I'm not saying you have to change what you use, but I love this app and I already got to sign my CPA to do my taxes and it's I used it last year, I used it the year before. It's incredible. If you are even if you are not a person that is a freelancer or whatever, you have
a lot of deductions. This app is just so cool. I love it because it's like high tech. So basically, you connect all of your accounts. It looks at all of your transactions and you classify them. It helps with AI. It'll say like, oh, we think this is a business expense or even a you know, if you don't have a business, just your personal expense, you know, But you have to get past that whatever it is, like the
thirty thousand dollars that you get. You know, I'm not a tax expert, but I know there's like some sort of threshold for your deductions. But anyway, it's really good. And then at the end of the year, you literally just someone they assign you a CPA and then they just do your taxes for you. And I will tell you that last year, I did get like a disclaimer that said, you know, just so you know your your CPA is overseas, like they're not based in the US.
I was like, well, I don't know. I mean everything is overseas now, right. I mean, it doesn't mean that this person is not any more qualified or less qualified to do this, but you know that that was a reality. I think that was the only warning I saw. I don't know if that's the same as this year. I didn't see that warning, but just so you know, you know, that's probably how they're doing it for a much better
price tag than some of these other things. But and I've tried the live CPA assist on Turbo tax and I'll be honest, I wasn't as impressed with that. But anyway, by you know who likes taxes anyway, not no one I've ever met except CPA's. They kind of like them, but they're making a lot of money off of them. Eighty to eight rich one on one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one back after this, Oh, this one's a slow burn. Okay, wait for it? Is
this the right now song? Okay? This will forever? Is this right here? Right now, right, Okay, I think this was the Crystal Pepsi song. Look up on YouTube Crystal Pepsi? Is this van Helen?
Okay?
Yeah, nineteen ninety two Crystal Pepsi Van Halen. They did a commercial I think it was on Saturday Night Live and it was like, oh gosh, now I'm forgetting if it was the actual commercial or just the Saturday Night Live version. Anyway, they did a version on Saturday Night Live that was Crystal gravy. I will never forget as a kid just seeing that, and I love Crystal pepsi. It was like the clear Pepsi. I was like, hey, how did they make pepsi clear?
Oh?
Because it's all chemicals and fake That's how eight to eight rich one oh one eighty eight seven four to two four one zero one. Christine has been waiting patiently at Huntington Beach with her question. I don't know if I can help, because I can't. I don't understand what it says on my screen here, But I will, I will, I will attempt. What can I help you with?
Oh?
Hi, happy to be here, rich and Bobo, and thank you for taking my calm. And I just want to tell you I'm always learning from you, and I'm always replaying your podcast to learn to learn more all the time.
So oh my gosh, I feel so bad for you replaying. I mean, listening to it once is worse enough for some people.
No, no, it's good.
I learned a lot. So okay, So I have never had this happen to me before. So last week I have a laptop and it's Microsoft based, and I went to restart my computer and then when the screen came up, you know you put in your credentials, like you put your password in. Well I put it in, and it kept saying Microsoft, your log off of your offline with Microsoft. So I thought, well, that's really weird. So maybe I didn't type it right.
So I typed it.
I typed it several times, constantly just kept telling me I was offline with Microsoft. I couldn't open up. It literally locked me out of my computer. I couldn't open up any screens. I couldn't go to Google to like start typing the thin to figure out what it's wrong with my right whatever. So I thought, okay, well, let
me just go to my phone. So I went to my phone, I typed in Microsoft, went in there found it, put my credentials in, and then it started asking me a series of questions and one thing I couldn't get around. And I don't know if you call it a it gave me a single use code or maybe you call it a pass key. I couldn't get around that because anyways, because I think I remember you saying something like don't don't take a pass key because I could.
Goof you up or something.
But I have to go back and listen to that podcast. So anyways, after like trying to figure this out for a couple of hours, I ended up logging in on my phone with Microsoft directly, and it ended up I was able to get into my computer. It was the strangest thing I've never had this happen. And I've you know, been having computers for over thirty years and always dealing with Microsoft. So have you ever heard of this happening before?
Well, I think what I think what it sounds to me that you basically so Microsoft, for some reason, they really like an internet connection when you're logging on to like verify the account unless you're using a local account. So and some people kind of have a work like Basically, Microsoft wants everything to be done online at this point, right, like they want everything to be you know, a Microsoft account and when you sign in, it's checking against the
online account. So that sounds like it sounds like two things were happening. Number one, it could have been a coincidence. Has this happened again, No, it happened.
Happened since last week.
So I'm wondering if when you logged in, your computer was offline, like it just you know, sometimes these things happen, and your computer was just happened to be offline at that moment and it couldn't log in, and then when you went to your phone, it did log in because your phone, you know, either your WiFi was fine there or the connection was there, or you're you know, you're on cellular whatever, and you're able to log in there. The thing that's confusing to me is the one time passcode.
So did you were you able to log into your computer the regular way at the end?
Yeah?
I was, and I was able to do it. And I kept checking my because I have a euro Wi Fi or system in my house based on your recommendations, so I kept looking at it.
It was lit.
It wasn't offline or anything. It was and I kept looking at my computer to see that the Wi Fi signal was up and I was connected. It was just the strangest thing, and I can never.
Have that happen.
Okay, Well, here's here's an easy way to try this again. And I don't know if you want to put yourself through this pain again, but you could, uh, you know, either turn off your Wi Fi or if your if your computer is connected via Ethernet, you can just pull that cable and see if you get that same error and then you know that like it was just a one time thing because your phone wasn't online. So that's
one way. But but I don't know if you want to do that, because you know, I know, once things are working in the tech world, you don't really want to mess them up again. But in the future, if this happens again, you might be able to do what's called a local account and set up like a local login for this computer just to still get in even if you you know, can't get in with the with
the Wi Fi situation. And then at the end of the day, there's something called safe mode which you can boot into that and you can see, you know, if that if that can help you at least get into your computer. But it sounds like this was just a fluke to me. Yeah, and the one time code and all that stuff, I think was just I don't think
anyone hacked you. I don't. I think that this was a fluke and it just maybe at the moment your computer was not connected, at the second it logged on or something like that.
Well, And I was also thinking, like not to even have a password to even get into my laptop.
Just I was thinking that, like, I don't.
I don't recommend that, dog you down. Do not recommend that, no, because I mean, it's just too you know, with everything we store on these computers. Even if you say, oh, I just leave my computer at home, it's not a big deal. I don't try. I just I can't in good faith tell people to not have a passcode on their computer or password on you know, passcode on their phone, password on their computer. There's too much stuff on there, and you know, you just don't want this to get
into the wrong hands. Thanks to the call, Christine, really appreciate the kind words there and huntingdon be eighty eight rich one on one. Coming up, we're gonna talk with the author of the subtle art of not giving a you know what? Right here, I'm rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech, rich DeMuro here hanging out with you, Talking technology triple eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Some more news trickling out of the prelude to CS
twenty twenty six. Samsung is bringing Google Photos to its Samsung TVs and twenty twenty six, which is interesting and that's great, But hey, Google, let's make a Google Photos app for all TVs, right, Samsung, Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, where is the app? Come on, I got all my photos in there. I want to see him on my big screen. And now I can call it Apple too, because they don't have an Apple Photos app for anything
except Apple TV. But you know, and yes, you can cast your photos, but I want a native app that I can just have on my screen anyway. So that's something we'll be checking out. Samsung bringing Google Photos to Samsung TV's twenty twenty six models first, and then some of the older devices will get them as well. Here's what I love about my job, Here's what I love
about my shows. I've read this book when it came out and I can't believe it's been this long, by the way, and I never thought I'd actually interview the author of this book, but yet here we are Mark Manson on the phone. He's got a new app called Purpose. He's the author of the I got to figure out how to say this on the radio, the subtle art of not giving. Can I say an F I guess I just did Mark, Welcome to the show, be here, thanks for having me. So was it really released in
twenty sixteen? I know, man, we're coming up. It's going to be ten years this year. That's wild. I mean, this was so I'll never forget reading this book. And I had like a little and I'm sure you've heard many, many stories about how this affected people's lives, but I had a little extra swagger in my step after reading this book. I'm like, you know what, I don't care about anything anymore. Yeah, yeah, those were the days. Similar days. So how has life changed in the wake of this book?
So you wrote this obviously bestseller, did anything you know? Did your perspective change on anything? Because so many people are now suddenly coming to you for this type of advice. I it's interesting because in hindsight.
I didn't think about this at the time, but looking back, you know, ten years into the past, I do think one of the reasons it did so well is that it was one of the first books to name something that everybody was experiencing. So if you think about the early twenty tens, Facebook released its newsfeed.
I believe in twenty twelve.
Social media Instagram came out twenty eleven, like social media really started to take off, like twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, and and so that's when you start getting this like these ideas of fomo and social media and douced anxiety and all this stuff. And so I think the just the message of the book about being noticing what is
worth caring about and what's not worth caring about. I think it caught really the struggle of our generation at a very very early And so when I when I look back over those ten years, I'm like, Okay, now it kind of makes sense why it did so well. But at the time I was just like, oh my god, that's a lot of book sales. Yeah, you've got a new app called Purpose. It's an AI coaching app. Explain
what this app is all about. So the app is designed to help people find direction and clarity in their life. The best way to describe it is, I don't.
Know about if you've done this, but.
The recent survey show that almost fifty percent of chat GBT users use chat GPT for life advice. They asked personal questions they give them, you know, I'm having an argument with my spouse or I want to make a career change, and they're using They're starting to use AI.
For these sorts of questions. I've heard people gotten divorced because of it, Like they're like, oh, you should divorce your wife and they're like, okay, sure, I'll do.
It's it's actually crazy, Like there's some crazy stuff that's been happening around this.
And I first this landed on my radar about a year ago.
I started running into a number of people in my personal life who are like, hey, I'm using chat GPT as a therapist. And I was like, huh, So I went to it and I started testing it out. And the problem, which is pretty well documented at this point, is that the foundational AI models like they don't they're psycho fantic. They kiss your butt, they don't challenge you,
they don't disagree with you. You know, if I go to chat GPT and I tell it that I'm the Queen of England and I should conquer the world, like, it's probably not going to push back. It's probably just going to start helping me come up with, you know, whatever I want to come with.
My wife, and my wife and I joke about this all the time, so like any idea you have, Oh, that's a great idea. Oh I just said it's going to mix you know, vinegar and whatever. It doesn't even matter. It's like, yes, this is great. It's like okay, yeah, can I get a real independent perspective here? Okay, So we know the problem. That's that's the problem. These things are just kissing up to everyone.
Yeah.
And the issue is that ultimately, these these AI models, they're designed to be assistance. And what does an assistant do. An assistant says yes to everything anything you ask. Yeah, I can do that anything you want. Yeah, sure you
should have that. So I started thinking of like, okay, they're really if people are already going to be doing this, then there needs to be some sort of AI on the market that that is at least going to challenge your assumptions, question your beliefs, you know, kind of poke at some blind spots because ultimately, like that is what good coaching or therapy is. Is it somebody who can reflect back to the things that you're missing or not seeing. So I met my co founder.
I was looking to.
Like invest in a startup that was working on something like this, and that's when I met my co founder about a year ago, and he's been building AI products for over ten years, and we just said, screw it, why don't why don't we make it?
And so okay, so you've got this app, So explain kind of like if you're using let's say you're already using chatchybt for like everything, you know, questions answers. What does purpose do differently, like what is it? What does it bring to the table that chatchybe doesn't. I would say the first thing it does is that it is it is designed to be challenging. It's designed to question
your assumptions. One of the things that people notice right away with it is that it if you go to it and you say, like I want to lose ten pounds, you know, chatchybt will will give you like a die, a plan and a workout routine purpose will say, why do you want to lose ten pounds? What is it about the ten pounds that you think is going to make you happy?
Right?
It's there?
Is there another is this being motivated by something that's healthy? Or are you like feeling insecure for some reason? And so it looks it always tries to look a layer deeper. The second thing that it does is that it has I mean, we've worked really hard on the memory system. Like the problem with the memory of most AI models at the moment is that they can't sort by importance. Right, so chat GBT knows that you you know, your probably your mother's name, and the city you grew up in.
It also knows what TV stand you bought last month or the the issue you had with your car last week. It doesn't understand that those are two completely different things. That one memory, your memory of your mother, is far more important and close to your identity than what TV
stand you bought last month. And so we've tried to build a memory that will rank and prioritize the importance of memory so that it like understands that you know, it won't get fixated on some like random detail of your life and and start to start over indexing on the advice that it gives. And then the last thing that we've really focused on is just personality, Like it's
I've been writing in this space for twenty years. I've been very successful, you know, communicating a lot of these ideas to people, and so the goal was to really just like give it a little bit of flavor, personality, some fun like a make it tonally and stylistically a little bit different.
Than a normal AI that you would talk to. So the website for the app is purpose dot app. If you want to see what we're talking about here, Purpose dot app. So would you consider this therapy?
Is it a journal? Is it something in between? Like who do you think need this? And why it's not We're definitely not going after therapy. We actually consciously chose to kind of stay out of the therapy world for a couple of reasons. One is just I think it's higher stakes and I think this technology is still.
So new that it's not.
I don't like, I don't want to be making these grand tests on people who are very psychologically vulnerable. I think that that the technology really just needs to be worked on quite a bit more before we like put it in these high stake situations, so we're more focused on kind of the coaching mentorship side of things, more of the personal growth, personal development. I jokingly call it
the high quality problems. It's it's like if you want to get a raise at work this year, or if you're struggling to figure out whether you should stay in a relationship or not. It's basically problems that normal, well functioning adults, everyday people struggle with. But it's not like a major emotional crisis. It's not like a psychiatric issue.
Anything like that.
For those things and and for those things purposes, it is trained to tell you to go seek a professional.
Interesting, So would you is it almost it's not really life coaching or it almost is like life coaching, but you don't want to you don't want to frame it in these things. It's more of like a helpful app.
Yeah, it's it is weird because it is new territory, right, So on the one hand, it is I think probably the closest thing in the human world that it would compare to is life coaching. But on the other hand, like I mean, you can use it for all sorts of different things. I mean it's we we get people who uh, you know, use it to just bounce ideas off of as they're going throughout their day. We get people who are like, if they're bored on their commute,
they just pull it up and talk to it. So like it is, I do feel like AI is going to inhabit a lot of different categories that like we haven't really that don't don't exist.
Among humans, and I imagine that this product is no different. So you've got the app, You've got a seven day free trial. It's twenty dollars a month or one hundred and fifty for the year. The question that I think people are going to be asking themselves is, hey, how is this better than my chat GBT or how is this better than chatting with Gemini or whoever they're using? And what's your answer to that? What are they going to get out of this that they don't get.
You're going to get a higher, higher signal to noise ratio, and you're going to get it much faster. I would just I always encourage people and like, just download it, try it for like twenty minutes. Generally speaking, people are blown away within the first conversation.
It is.
It is it's eerie.
How like we've got an onboarding process where we kind of pull some personality traits and learn a little bit about you. And it is shocking sometimes how dead on the AI is in that first conversation. So I would just encourage people to give it a shot, and if it feels weird or it's not for you, that's totally fine.
But he there, let us know what you think. They're playing me off purpose dot app. Mark Manson, thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Rich all right, purpose dot app. Hey you heard them? Download it? Try it, see what you think you know, get some life changing insights. Eight eight eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology. Eight eight
eight seven four to two four one zero one. The website for the show is rich on Tech dot tv if you're going there to grab that app. We were just talking about purpose or I was able to find the official TurboTax letter from let's see who was it?
The vice president of Turbo Tax that talked about their decision to not support Windows ten and They do address the fact that a lot of people are getting the extended software updates, and they understand that, but they still say that, you know what, it's just too risky to use this system. So they've got a whole letter if you want to read all about that. Rich on tech dot tv again the whole turbo tax. The new TurboTax software is not going to work on a Windows ten
computer this year. So if you did an upgrade or you didn't, you know, you're not using Windows eleven, You're not gonna be able to run that. You got to use the online software. Let's go to Vivian in Menefee. You're on with Rich.
Yes, I enjoy listening to your show, Thank you, but I have a very serious.
With my email.
It's an email I don't like and it seems like it's sub fixed in one because it has all these giggles on it to your amount where you can't read nothing, and every time I tried to delete it, it comes back.
So you're trying to get rid of this this So you're you're getting a phishing email and it's you're deleting it and it's coming back. Is it the same exact sender? Or is it different senders it's the same okay, same center. Uh, you can. If it's the same sender, I would recommend blocking the sender. So on whatever email app you have, there is typically a way to block a sender with a specific email address. Now you have to understand that most of the time when you're getting spam emails or
a phishing email, they are coming from different addresses. But if this email keeps coming back from the same person with the same address, you can block that. And the way to do that is just Google, Yahoo, you know, block email sender and you know it'll give you the directions for whatever your email address is. So if you're using Outlook, just say Outlook block email sender. If you using Gmail, block out block sender. Apple lets you do
it on their phone. But whatever software you're using, you either have to use the block or you can create a filter that will just automatically filter that message into oblivion. But Vivian, I would be careful. You know, if this phishing email, I mean they're very common, so if you're getting this, it's no real indication of your security. But if they're using anything or they include anything in that
email that is personal, that you're still using. Like let's say they say, oh, you have your password, and they tell you what it is. A lot of times these emails will scrape data that they find on the web, especially from data breaches, and they will include that information in the email to make it seem more legitimate. But do not be swayed by that. These people, you know, they're just phishing. That's where this term phishing email came from.
They're literally just throwing casting a wide net and hoping to catch folks in it that are, you know, not reading closely or not reading carefully, or they're scared, or they're worried and they click a link, or they give over their information, whatever it is. So that's the best way to do it. You can also report as spam in your email program and that will help you as well. Now, additionally, I would do some things to keep your information from
getting out there. So, for instance, when you sign up on websites you know that are just for advertising emails and things like that, use the different email address. I mentioned bitwarden a bunch on this show. One of the other things I like about them is that you can use it to generate usernames that still send to your email.
So if you have Gmail, you know, Gmail lets you do this thing where you can say your Gmail address plus and put a plus sign there and then at the end put a bunch of random letters, and whatever that email address is, it will still come to your email, so you can use that as a first line of defense. And when you sign up for a website, you can just sign up with a with a plus to email address, and that way you can just filter that email address to the trash when you don't want to get that
email anymore. Most of the big companies will respect your wishes to to not get their emails once you're done. But the phishing emails are different because they're not These are not like a legitimate company that's sending you this. These are just scam artists, so be very careful. I also do a thing where I do not load the images on my email program. So if you go into your settings, you might see a setting that says remote
image loading, so you can turn that off. And what that does is anyone that's using a system to track when you open your email, they will not be able to tell that you open that email. And I tested this out with my friend the other day, we were out to lunch and he said, oh, you superhuman. I can tell when you open my email. I said, not mine. I said, let's try it. He sent an email and it said, uh, you know, sent a rich And then
he said, did you open it yet? And I showed him on my phone, Yeah, it's open, and on his thing is still said not opened. Because these email programs that people use to track you, they've got a little tiny tracking pixel and the way they can track that you've opened their email is that image loads on your end and as soon as it loads, their server says, oh he just loaded that image. You opened the email. When you turn off external images, that can't happen. So
that's another line of defense. I'll link that up in my website. Richontech dot tv eighty eight rich one O one eighty eight seven four two four one zero one. Back after this, Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you Talking technology eight eight A rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one. The website for the show is rich on tech dot TV. Three things you need to do If you like what I talk about, you follow me or you want to follow me you're
hearing this for the first time. Three things website rich on Tech dot tv. Sign up for the newsletter. It's right there. Uh, follow me on Instagram at rich on tech, and then follow the podcast so that you never miss an episode of this. So if you like what you're hearing, obviously listening on the radio or listening live is the
best way to experience it. But if you miss an episode or you want to re listen to it, like our friend Michelle earlier in Huntington Beach, you can just get the podcast search rich on Tech in your favorite podcast app. We'll get to calls in a moment eighty eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four two four one zero one. Also at the website, you can email me. Just go to rich on tech dot tv, hit contact up at the top, and your email makes
it right to my screen. We do something at the end of the show called Feedbag, which is a combination of feedback and the mail bag, where I kind of read all the things that you email me throughout the week, all the different little topics and things, and then of course the questions that you email me. Some of those become topics for this show as well, Samsung is gonna come out with a two hundred dollars, a two hundred
dollars smartphone. It's called the Galaxy, a seventeen to five G affordable five G smartphone, big screen six point seven inch ammal ed display. It's got a smooth refresh rate ninety hertz, which is not the highest, but it's not the lowest. That's good. It's a good middle ground, so good for scrolling, good for video. It's got a you know, fifty megapixel camera with better low light photos, and a lot of other budget phones apparently according to Samsung. I
haven't tested this personally yet. Battery is five thousand million amp hours. That's huge. It'll recharge fifty percent in thirty minutes. And here is the best part. Samsung is promising six years of security updates and Android updates. So you're talking six years for a budget phone that costs just two hundred bucks. That's incredible. And it's got some AI features. So I have not tested this phone, but I love the fact that we have choices. Not everyone wants a
thousand dollars phone. Some people just want a good phone for a couple hundred dollars. This is something that you could buy unlocked and use without a monthly payment and use and it's cheap and it gets the job done, and it's not a lot of times these budget basic phones are horrible. Yeah, you can get a phone for one hundred bucks unlocked on Amazon and guess what, it's gonna be terrible. It's gonna be bloatwear city. The screen's not gonna be good, the camera's gonna all cloudy and nasty.
So I love that these companies, and I include Apple and this as well, they're using their size to their advantage at this point because they're coming out with these high end technologies that two or three years later are still really good, but the price has come down on them, and so they could put them in a phone like the A seventeen to five G and come out with
it at two hundred bucks. And I love it because now you can have a phone that actually works and it's really good for a price that is not extravagant for you know, or out of reach for a lot of people. So that's coming out on January seventh. Hopefully I'll get a review unit on that one. I have to because I want to try that out. Let's go to Melissa in Los Angeles. Melissa, you're on with Rich?
Yes, thank you for taking my call. I have a question regarding the floppy beast okay, because they're absolutely.
Now where can it go?
Because I have certain family photos in there and certain documents that I want to transfer to my computer? So where do you know where I can go to have that done? Because I don't have anymore away, I don't know a way how to.
They're so obsolete, what they don't What kind of discs are we talking? Are we talking like a five and a quarter inch floppy or three and a half inch?
Like?
How what kind of discs are we talking about here?
Remember those square ones the floppy discs?
Yeah, like the true floppy like it's big and like it's just it's just no.
They're small.
Okay, So this is so it's okay.
Like in the seventies up to the late nineties.
Okay, so it's the smaller ones, but they're they're hardshell kind of like they're they're not flexible.
No, they're not flexible. And then there's small square got it?
Okay, so that's a three and a half inch floppy disk? Okay, I mean you call it a floppy even though it's not, but technically it's. Yeah. Do you have a computer, yeah, but it's.
Macair.
Okay, well, I know it doesn't have a drive on it. But you can order a floppy drive on Amazon, like a USB one for about twenty bucks.
What do you call it?
Floppy disk drive?
Yeah, so look on Amazon for something, look for a three point five inch USB floppy disk drive, or you just say, just say here, let me just see if I type in three point five inch USB disk drive, let me see if that brings it up.
We would I would also need what do you call that a cable right to cook it up.
Yeah, it'll it'll come with a cable. The only thing that you may need is and it looks like it comes with it, so your computer may have USB C it's called this. This comes with a U B A, but it looks like it comes with a connector, so you basically and and the beauty of Amazon is that you can try this put your disc in there. I can't guarantee that your your computer is going to read this disc, but if it does, you know, you just copy these over to a cloud drive or you know,
at the very if it's a jpeg. Obviously it's going to be fine because that's a universal format. But if it's in some funky format from the the earlier days of things, you may have to convert it. And there's a million websites that can help you do that as well. One of them is called vert v e r T dot s H vert dot r T. Yeah, V like convert, you know, but v e r T dot s H. And so if you run into a document or a
file that I mean this one. When I'm looking at these the image files that it can convert, it's like, I've never even heard of half of these, So you
should be good there. So if these come up in some kind of weird format, even if your computer won't read them, uh even if it sees it but it can't open it, just copy them over to your your hard drive, and then you can upload them to this website and it will convert them into a format that a modern computer can see, like a JPEG, or if it's a document, you know, it can convert them into a word doc or a whatever you need, and then
you can save them. And I would of course recommend saving them to the cloud so that you don't lose them in the future. But I would just look on Amazon for a USB floppy disk drive three point five and that should get you there. If not, if you don't feel comfortable doing this, you could just go on Yelp and look for something like a data doctor or something like that in your area and they may have a computer or a system that can accommodate these old media formats.
I don't know if there's anyone.
Around, well you're in Lost, Well, if you're in Los Angeles, there definitely there's a lot of people can do this. So if you do, like a data recovery or something like that, specialist, they should have a computer that they can that they can use to get these things. And if they don't, they they'll know how to do it. At least. Now, of course, you're gonna have to pay someone to do that, which is, you know, not ideal
because you can do all this yourself hopefully. You know, the modern computers these days, they don't have any of these connectors. You know, we used to have a floppy drive. We used to have a DV drive, a DVD drive, a CD drive. None of that stuff is on today's you know, most of the laptops for sure, some of the desktops have them, but you know, it's just getting rareer and rarer because everything's everything's done with the cloud.
And if if the phone makers had their way, and this may be happening, Melissa, is that they don't want any inputs on these phones whatsoever. You know, even that the thing where you plug in your power cable at the bottom, they want to get rid of that too, because the more we can move people to the cloud. Guess what, the more you know, it's it's better for security on the on the on the pro side, on the flip side, it's better for their business because guess what.
Now you got to use their software to transfer things to your phone. You've got to store stuff in their cloud, and it's you know, it's just one less way for you to kind of open up the possibilities on this phone with a with a connector cable, and it's just one less thing to break. I mean, there's a whole bunch of reasons why they want to get rid of it, and it probably will happen over time, hopefully not in the next year or so.
Eventually, I want to transfer photos also to shutterfly. You're you're familiar with Shutterfly.
Yeah, I personally wouldn't recommend Shutterfly. I mean nothing against Shutterfly. It's fine, but you know, there are there are other services out there that I think are better. I mean, if you're trying to print these, I mean, I personally
like Google Photos. I think that that's a really good place to put these because, Melissa, you'll find that they have amazing AI built in that if you put a bunch of people, you know, old relatives and things in these photos, it will sort them by people, places, things. And Shutterfly may do this. I haven't. I haven't used them in a why well, I used to use them a lot. In fact, that's where I kept all my
pictures for many, many years. But I think that there's just, you know, better thing, better places to store your photos at this point. Shutterfly to me is more a place where you go to print your photos, not necessarily store them for the long term. Amazon Photos is really good and if you're a Prime member, that's completely free to
store unlimited photos. Obviously, if you have an iPhone, iCloud is good, drop Box one edrive, I mean, there's so many ways to do this, Melissa, But the main thing is get those things off the discs, get them onto your computer, get them into the cloud, and then once you have them all converted and figured out, then you can go from there. Are you good on the process? You feel confident?
Yeah, after your explanation. But the one thing I want to tell you is I don't have confidence privacy issues with Google.
Okay, well that's okay, I would. I mean, I I think that you know a lot of that. I think Google is actually a pretty good company when it comes to a lot of this stuff.
But they do.
Look, they've built their business on using you know, people's data. But anytime you're using a free product, that's kind of the agreement you have with them. So I'm fine with that. If you don't want to use Google, you don't have to. I mean, I'm not I'm just giving you what I like. But there's there's yeah exactly. But if you want something that's super private, they're not really trying to do anything with your stuff. I mean, use Dropbox. You know, you
can get a couple gigs on there for free. Amazon obviously. If you don't like Google, they're kind of you know, I mean, they're not really using your data for your photos. But you know it's just if you want something, you use whatever you want. I'm not I'm just telling you to try to get it into the cloud, just for safekeeping.
You know, right, But do as you like.
One more quick question.
Hold on, We're gonna have to take it off the air. Hang on, Hang on because I gotta go to break eighty eight Rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one the website Rich on tech dot TV. I'll link up that floppy disc reader rich on tech dot TV. Welcome back to which on tech Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology at Triple eight Rich one O one eight eight eight seven four to two four to one zero one.
Ellison says, hey, Rich, happy holidays. Oh wow, happy holidays. I guess people are still saying that. I love it when your sons are on the show. They're like young versions of you, so articulate and intelligent.
Yeah.
All I think about is how articulate intelligent I used to be. They're just coming up in this world. I'm like coming down. Quick question, what was on what was the name of the website you mentioned a few weeks ago for getting discounts on shopping sites. It was simply Codes. Simplycodes dot Com. Love that website. It's the only one
I check. I tell you this every single time. If I was shopping on a website the other day and I looked at simply Codes and it was you know, if if you search for the website on there and the word codes is like crossed out, that means there's no codes. And you can go try looking at codes all over the internet. You're not gonna find them, guaranteed. I don't know what the secret sauce is of that. We should have Simply Codes on the show because I've
talked about them so much. Sue says, Hey, Rich, I have one of those flash drives that lets you download pictures from your iPhone to your desktop computer. Can you also go the other way download pictures from the desktop to the iPhone. You could, but most of the way that Apple is sort of like configured is one way. So you could do this, and I believe you can plug that into your iPhone. And I think there's an import functionality on the photos app that shows up when
you are when you plug something in. I don't have something to plug into here right now. I mean I do but it's well, let me say, hang on. This is why I bring my bag of tricks with me everywhere, so I can test this stuff. Let's see if I have a flash drive here. Usually, yeah, I do. So I'm gonna plug this into the bottom of my iPhone and see if it has an import. Now, if you said Android, yeah, simple, but iPhone, you know they're a little bit a little bit different. Everything's there, it's just
in you know, sometimes not necessarily where you think. Okay, so I've got I went here, let's see. Okay, I'm not seeing an import. There's gotta be okay, hold on, hold on, I'm looking at utilities. Hold on, let's see utilities. Uh it says imports. Let's see. Now those are the things I have imported. Okay, I'll have to look at this. But in general, I'm gonna know you can import into the files app like copy things over, but I got to look to see how to do that with them.
But in general, a couple of ways to get photos from your computer to your iPhone. Number one, if you have a Mac computer, just air drop them. They'll go right into the photos app. You could turn on iCloud photos on both devices, so you can drag and drop on your photos app on the desktop and they'll sync
right to your phone. There's some wire options if you have a cross platform, like if you have a Windows computer, you can use the app called local Send, and basically if you're on the same Wi Fi network, you can just transfer large files anything from your phone or your computer to your phone. And then another one is called Blip. I just use this today. This one's this is basically like an air drop, but it does work over the Internet. But once you install it on your computer, like it's
really cool. Like let's say you have a computer, a Windows computer and an iPhone. You can install Blip on both of those devices, and then everything gets a name, so when you want to share a picture from one thing to another, you just literally tap the name of the product like your phone, and it will send it to it. So it's kind of like Local Send, but
like less geeky. And then if you want something that's really good, I love this app called Walter Pro and this is really cool because it does more than just photos. It basically lets you transfer any file onto your phone like Dragon drop or your iPad. So if you've been struggling, you got an ebook or something. You know, a lot of the stuff has gotten easier thanks to the Internet, but you know, before when it was all cables and stuff, it was really tough to move things to your iPhone.
But this is this app is like it's in my toolkit and I just love it. Walter Pro wa l t r Pro and you just drag and drop any file, so it figures out what the file is, it converts it if your iPhone can't play it, and it will put it into the right app. So all of these things. It's really really good at that stuff. So it's called Walter Pro works on Mac and Windows, and I love
it because you can just drag and drop anything. And so I mean you can do files, you can do photos, you can do music, you can do any video, and it's just it's just so it's like what it's what Apple should give you, but they don't. And I'm not sure why they don't give us that, but they don't. Let's say one more before we get to the break here, Darren says, hey, Rich, is the website missing money dot com legit. I heard it's for government for finding old
lost money. I went there, found some started filling out the form and asked for my social Should I give it? Merry Christmas? It is legit, so it's run on behalf of state governments to help. You know, these reunite people with unclaimed funds. But I agree. I did the same thing. I went there and I started doing the claim. Then I asked for my social I was like, ah, I really want to give that. But anyway, all the states run their own sites as well, so you can go there.
I think this's just links to them. But yes, it is legit. You just have to decide if the money's worth it. Eighty to eight rich one oh one rich on tech Dot TV more after this, Welcome back to rich on tech rich DeMuro here hanging out with you, talking technology. We got a call. We got a question about importing photos onto the iPhone. It is possible. I'm just trying to find where the import they've moved. It looks like on the iPhone, so I'm trying to find
where to import those. I know you can do it in the photos app somehow. I just with iOS twenty six it seems like it's changed. So there I see the imports, but I just can't seem to get it to find the photo on my flash drive, but it is possible. Eighty eight rich one on one eighty eight seven four two four one zero one. The website richon tech dot tv. It's updated with everything that we've mentioned so far. My next guest is someone who I interviewed for KTLA, a web a story about EXIF data metadata
on your phone. Remish Strina of Austin is a UCLA professor and director of the uc Digital Culture's Lab Ramess you there.
I'm here.
Hi, Welcome to the show.
Oh, I'm so glad to join you. Thank you for having me, Thank.
Thanks for being here. I know this a long time coming. We're we're trying to figure out the best date and time. But I'm glad you're here because you said some great stuff in the interview we do with KTLA about privacy. But let me just ask you, it's twenty twenty six. What's top of mind when it comes to you know, what people are up against this year when it comes to their digital life.
Yeah, I mean the gateway to so many anxieties we have about technology today, Rich, is the reality that almost as we discussed in the story, the great story you did for KTLA, is that almost anything in everything we do is surveilled rich basically almost anything and everything we do is turned into data, and that data is captured. That data is being used to train AI systems that in many cases are displacing, if not replacing work. That data is being used to prop up the most powerful
companies in the history of the world. That data is being used, you know, combined with particular algorithms to have polarizing effects on the American population. So I hate to be a doom and gloomer because I think we can do a ton to transform the status quo. But the reality is is these forces that make many people feel insecure. You know, I'm not sure if they can trust what
they see or who they're engaging with online. These forces are all built upon the collection, uh the aggregation and the retention of our our lives, our intimate personal lives. And if you just think about it, even like social media itself, I don't really go on to social media to see what Mark Zuckerberg is up to.
You know, No, you don't care that he's body surfing or whatever he's doing.
I mean, just a little it's funny. It's a little funny, and I've actually met him before, so he looked very different when I met him those ten years ago.
Oh wow, yeah, the.
Up right, Or I go into social media maybe if I'm voyeuristic to see what an ex girlfriend is up to. That's why I go in social media. Right. So we are the product and the customer, right, But it's all our data that is being monetized for these third parties, which is these insanely wealthy evaluated companies that are dominating the stock market. So that's why there's concern and anxiety today.
But this digital world could serve all of us if we put in particular reforms, and I truly believe we can do that, but it might take some time and the political will as well. Well.
I mean in the US, at least, the company is king, right, like the tech companies are the ones who are writing the rules. There's really not a lot of laws around this stuff. Now we're seeing some, but it's all very much. Uh you know, the these tech companies fight it. Of course, they don't want any rules around what they do.
Right.
Is that is that fair to say?
Absolutely? Yeah.
We had we had a woman who I a caller who was I recommended Google Photos to her and she said, I don't want to put my stuff into role. I don't trust it. I don't like the privacy aspect. And I said, you know, we have this agreement with these companies that we are the data and so they're monetized. If it's free, we are the product, right, isn't that you know, I'm not the first process.
It's all built on terms of service that we all sign on to or we just you know, hit a checkbox on that are totally designed to be unintelligible, meaning like I mean, they're not just legal speak, but it's like extremely impossible to understand it. And the default that the real problem is, the default is warrantless data collection. The default should be, you know that we opt in maybe with particular services or perks offered to us to certain types of data collection. But now the status quo
data is data collection about everything and anything. Let me just give you an example. It's not just on a platform rich as I said, the aggregation and data. So an example I like to say, always tell people are my students, you know, we're starting term at UCLA on Monday, is okay, it's one thing for you know, my Instagram data to be you know available to Meta, the holding you know, the big com the parent company, but it's another for that. You know, we're in Instagram, I'm always
having a good time. I'm just too cool for school. But what if that data was aggregated with my seven to eleven data going there last night at midnight and buying forties and cigarettes and I didn't do either of those things. But think about that that part of my There are different parts of our lives. So privacy is not just a one size fits ault thing. It's certain things in certain contexts, right, and so that is being violated right now. And what you call tech companies rich
are not just tech companies. The biggest taxi company in the history of the world is a tech company Uber, the biggest hotel company in the history of the world accommodation company is a tech company Airbnb. The biggest media company in the history of the world is Meta slash Facebook. Right, So they've taken over everything in anything, monetizing our data with these little gremlins in the middle that we call I'm just joking about the which we call algorithms.
But it's true.
We see in what we don't see, all based on surveillance of us. So people are being individually micro targeted with content. And that's why maybe you and I rich are like brothers from another mother, same demographic, SA, this, same, that, same everything. But you and I could both be on Twitter slash x and be presented with visions of the world and the nation that have no overlap whatsoever with one another.
That's wild Why.
At scale we get fragmentsed in polarized.
This is I talk about this all the time. We used to have shared values in this world, by the way, and country, yeah, and we also have. We also have. We also used to all watch the same thing, like we used to sit down for better or for worse. Wizard of Oz came on once a year, you sat down. It was that shared experience. Right now everyone has their own individual experience and it's run, like you said, by an algorithm that, by the way, is leading people down
paths that have never been done before. Right Like you're you're sitting there, you watch one video about something, and now you're suddenly seeing a thousand videos about an eating disorder or something like that.
Never hardcore en us, you know, for these platforms, it just makes you more and more and more hardcore because it's predicting, computationally predicting content that is likely to grab our attention, which is extracting dopamine. It's usually these three hormones are part of the process. Dopamine, cortisol, and adrenaline. I mean, I am an adrenaline junkie, I'll be honest, you know. But at the same time, I also know that too much adrenaline firing in my brain could actually
imbalance me. Same thing with dopamine and cortisol. Right, dopamine, we get a dopamine rush when we get maybe ding ding ding at a slot machine. But then we know you get strung out if you just become a dopamine hounds, so to speak. So this is why we are, you know, being fragmented, because if you actually look at Americans or Californians or Angelino's like us, we have remarkable actually agreements
in a lot of different things. If you just pull this country seven percent, you know what, there's widespread consensus on many issues politically, economically if you just do a wide poll outside of this category of political party or
what have you. And the and the reason the engines that individualize us and separate us are really part of this technology world, and the sad part of it for me is not that it's all only that it's built upon data collection and micro targeting through these algorithms, but it's also built on an Internet that started at UCLA where I work fifty now fifty six years ago that
we paid for US taxpayers. So if you compound these issues and then you look at the emergence of AI, which is creating content that's indistinguishable, you know, like fake human beings.
You know.
I was even told by a friend of mine who is tech CEO rich that you know that I know we're doing this audio, but say we even video that an AI could do this interview for me within you know, six months to one year. And I don't know, I could just you know whatever, it's just whatever you want your.
Data than my AI to do that, right, I do believe it. It's it's wild because it's these things have taken on a life of their own, and they kind of they absorb so much information quickly and regurgitate it that it's unlike anything we've ever seen before. Real quick. We got to run in a in a minute. But I want to what's the solution you've talked about this idea of you know, a more democratic internet. What do you think?
I mean, what?
What?
What's the solution here? Do we have one?
It involves, you know, harnessing the kinds of political forces to set up checks and balances in our system. And that's not going to be anti tech innovation. It's going to direct it in a way that continues to amass astronomical profits and valuations for these companies, but not at the cost of workers, consumers, citizens, even people of the planet, given the disastrous effects of AI on energy, water, and
rare earth minerals. So instead, what we can do is how, as I alluded to earlier, have the default being not the surveillance and capture of our data, and actually create regulations that ensure that people have certain levels of power and transparency and the ability to have greater accountability. So we can create things like data unions that represent us for our data. We can create mechanisms where people have you know, job security and economic security as jobs get
automated out. We can regulate the algorithms that actually do the dividing on social media platforms to ensure that there's third party audit without divulging the source code so they're the cool thing about this all is as fun as engineering. As I'm a former engineer. There are even more sort of solutions to guide and redirect this digital world so it actually supports everybody's interests rather than the very very very few at you know, pitted against the rest of us,
you know, and that just creates division. And that's what we need to change right now in this country.
I believe greed. Ramesh, doctor Ramesh shrina Vast and thanks so much for joining me today, professor at UCLA. I'll put a link to all of his books and website and podcast online. Rich On Tech dot TV coming up, Yeah, thank you. We are going to open up the feedbag to hear from you. Coming up next on rich On Tech. Welcome back to rich On Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging
out with you. We're gonna get to the feedbag. I want to share my inflight texting hack that I used on my last flight, which I cannot take credit for this Android authority in clude me into this last year and I was I did it last year and I might have mentioned it, but I just I love it because it's so great if you're on the plane and you've got an Android phone and you've got you don't want to pay for Wi Fi, but they give you
messaging for free. If you open up the Google Messages app, you can chat with Google Gemini for free, just like you would text someone. So if the airline has given you free texting, and instead of texting another person, you're just texting AI. And so I did this all flight long. I finished a book, I watched a movie, and I had the you know, the book. I said, okay, explain me this in the book. And then the movie, I just you know, asked. I watched this movie called Friendship,
which was, oh my gosh. I mean it's like whoa, it was a. It was just it was it's about guys trying to make friends with other guys, and it's like very real about how tough it is, Like women seem to make friends, no problem, guys a little bit trickier anyway. So it was like it was cringe worthy, let's put it that way. Anyway. Uh yeah, it's such a I'll link up the article in the show notes. But it's such a cool way to uh kind of hack the system. And it's great. The other thing this
another article is let's see where is it. Oh gosh, I'm trying to find it. Oh yeah. Android Wi Fi sharing So this another thing where you can basically share your Wi Fi. Uh if you log into a Wi Fi network you want to share it with your friends. I know people do this on the plane as well. You don't need to travel router, you can just share it using an Android phone. So both of these things are Android specific because iPhone has different rules and regulations
with their phone. But anyway, I thought they were both really interesting. I'll link them up on the show notes. All right, let's get to the feedback. Bruce in southern California says Rich, I've got to watch it. Consumer alert. I paid what looked like a simple five dollars fee on a website to get help with an old laptop issue. I only need a quick answer. What I didn't realize is that the five dollars question quietly signed me up
for a sixty five dollars a month subscription. I skipped the fine print while chatting with their bot, which was my mistake, but the way it's presented is not clear at all. I caught it quickly and canceled, but it still showed up as a pending charge. My credit card company told me to wait. Anyway, I found lots of lawsuits and settlements over this exact issue with this company, single question fees turning to expensive monthly subscriptions without clear disclosure.
I'm usually careful about this stuff, so this one caught me off guard. Just wanted to flag it for others. I appreciate the work you do, Bruce. This leads me to advice that I always give. You have to look for the fine print. And I know you sound like
you do, but look, look look again. Anything that you're getting for like ninety nine cents for a one week trial or you know, whatever it is, there's going to be a big payment that comes after that, and that's the reason they're giving you that dollar trial or whatever.
So always look in. My other pro tip is you can cancel the subscription as soon as you sign up for it, and you'll still usually get to use it until the free trial runs out, whether you're on Android, iPhone or even with any sort of subscription you sign up for. So just remember that. Dennis in Florida says, what the heck Man no Show on December twenty seventh, at least give us a best of you're slacking, Rich. Oh, we did have a show. It was a best of show and we did give it to you. Maybe he
sent this before the podcast came out. But you know, no matter what, we only do a tape show like a couple times a year, and no matter what, I get emails from people saying Rich, I can't believe you're slacking. It is like I gotta take a break once in a while. Come on, cut me some slack jack. Let's see here. PJ says someone asked you about scanning programs recently. One I like a lot is a free program called
NAPS two. Not another PDF scanner. It's open source, it's free, works on Mac, Windows, and it's compatible with most scanners like Cannon brother HP built in scanning ocr searchable PDFs. It's great NAPS two dot com. All right, that's a good one to add to the list. I'll put that on the website. John says, I tried downloading that Glimpse notifications app you recommended, but I ended up with the
wrong one called Easy home Screen. It tried to charge me thirty nine dollars and took over my home screen. Turns out, when I searched for a glimpse in the play Store. The first one that popped up was not the real glimpse. This time I used your direct link. I got the free the right free app installed. From now on, I'll be more careful and check the details before downloading, or better yet, use the links you provide. Absolutely, this happens all the time. I recommend an app on
TV or the radio. People download whatever they find when they search for it, and they blame me and they say, Rich, you just recommended this app. They're charging me ten dollars a month, sixty dollars a month, and that's not the app I recommended. Look closely when you search something on Google Play. The first link that comes up is not always the link to the direct app. It's probably an ad. Same thing goes on iPhone, same thing goes on Google.
So be careful, use direct links when possible, and double check the names. A lot of these apps they sound similar, but they're not the same spelling.
You know.
They They're said one way, but it's spelled another way. Let's see here. Cecilia says, Hey, Rich, I just saw your Rich on Tech Weekly show on KTLA for the first time, and I love it. Keep it going. This was so funny. This happened over the break. KTLA, the TV station I worked for, showed my TV show that we've been doing for two years now on streaming. They showed it over the air. Usually it's just on streaming, so all these people were like, wait, what you have
a show? Oh my gosh, this is so exciting. It's been out there for two years. But because it's on streaming, you know, the audience was much bigger when they put it on TV. So KTLA plus app you can download it no matter where you live. In fact, we show ten minutes of this radio show on this show on TV, so if you want to see some behind the scenes you can do that. Ktla Plus available for Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV. New episodes premiere every Sunday at eleven am.
They're on demand anytime. Let's see do you say one minute? Or do you say? We got to go? Ed says On Christmas Day? Instead of that burning log on TV, they should run a rich On Tech marathon with all your segments from the year. I like the way you guys think. You guys are funny. I love it. Let's see, do we have time for one more? Probably not? I think that's going to do it for this episode of the show. You can find links to everything I mentioned on my website. Just go to rich on Tech dot tv.
You can find me on social media at rich on Tech. This is the best time to follow me on Instagram because guess what, I'm going to be flooding you with content from CS twenty twenty six in Las Vegas. I cannot wait to show you all of the cool stuff that I see there. Thank you so much for listening to this first show of twenty twenty six. There are so many ways you can spend your time. I do appreciate you spending it right here with me. Please do
not drive distracted. Those texts can wait. Thanks to everyone who makes this show possible, Bobo, Kim, Bill, Julie everyone. My name is Richdmiro. I will talk to you real soon