You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
KFI AM six forty Bill Handle Here. It is a Tuesday morning, November twenty six, two day before Thanksgiving. Neil Savedra every Thanksgiving does the show and it's not filling in. He does his show and gives tips about cooking for Thanksgiving and it's a call in show. Well, it is Tuesday, which means it is time for our tech segment with Rich Demurrow, kfi's tech reporter, also a host of Well. He is host of rich on Tech Saturdays eleven to two pm every day on KTLA right Instagram at rich
on Tech website, rich on Tech dot TV. And we're gonna talk a little bit later on about his holiday gift guide and Rich I will definitely deal with that some of the fun stuff that's out there. Anyways.
Good morning, good morning.
Okay, you know this was going to happen all right because you sent this to me. There's a new AI feature bringing old photos to life as a video. Okay, what do you do with those crazy guys that send those How do I put it?
Richard Picks? Oh my gosh, no.
What do you do? What happens with those.
That's not what we're talking about here.
This is this is for old family photosh got it.
Well, you should see my old family photos with those, but let's talk about that for a moment.
Yeah, So this is a feature from my Heritage.
That's one of those you know DNA apps that helps you build your family history.
They've been coming out.
With these AI tools over the years to kind of bring back old old photos to life, so you can do simple things in the photos, like convert a black and white photo to color, you can restore a photo. But now they're starting to used A and I A A and I AI more and more, and their new feature is called live Memory.
So you take an old photo. Let's take an old photo.
Of grandma and grandpa, right, you put it into this app. It takes a bit, it will animate the photo. It will literally create a five second video even with your grandparents moving and like having, you know, smiling, whatever the gestures they're making, and it's all AI. So it kind of makes everything up. But it looks at the scene to figure out what.
It might be doing.
So keet on a bicycle might be riding the bicycle, you know, even though that picture was taken in nineteen twenty, nineteen thirty, and so you get to do this for free. You get three of them for free, and you can do more for paid. But I tested this out with an old picture of me and my wife, and you know, it's interesting. It's it's going to get better. It's very very interesting. I think if you have an old picture of a family member you want to try it on, I would say give it a try.
So how's this going to affect the businesses that digitize old photos and old videos and super eight film if you remember when those were around. Is it going to take over that business?
I don't think so, because this is more taking a photo that you have that's not a video and saying, you know what, this is an old picture of my grandpa, grandma, military, whatever, and it's a it's it's creating something out of nothing.
Basically.
All right, let's move over to Instagram. Let's you temporarily share your location with friends. What's the difference between that and turning off and on?
Where what's that called my find my find my friends.
Find my or whatever the hell it is? Because I have that because I always get lost. I think it's fine. My isn't it.
Yeah, find my well used to be called find my Friends back in the day. Now it's just find my. But yeah, you know, look this is nothing new. There's many ways you can share a location with friends. Find My is obviously very popular because it's built into the iPhone. Snapchat is probably the most popular with the with the young EN's bill. You know, these are the kids that share everything. They don't really care about their privacy. And so there's actually a map on Snapchat that will show
you your friends are. And people love it because they can see they're friends at school, they're friends at home, or their friends out with their other friends, friends on friends, whatever. And so I think Instagram wants to be in on that. And so you can share live location with your friends or a group for up to one hour, and so their ideas that you can meet up with friends if you're at a park or something, finding them at a
baseball game, whatever. And again it's only for one hour, so it doesn't feel as privacy invasive as some other ways of doing this.
Yeah, I'm a huge fan of find my for a couple of reasons. First of all, I'd like to know where everybody is because I'm nosy as hell, But more importantly, the safety aspect of this, particularly with your kids. It's to me it's invaluable to have this.
Oh you have them all on a little map.
Yeah, I have the little map, Michael.
Let's do that with me and my wife. They'll check to see if we're like coming to get them at school. They'll be like, how come you're at the gym for so long? And I'm like, okay, stop looking at my location.
Kid.
Yeah, I mean, you can turn that off, but it's pretty important. I think. All right, you know what, let's take an early break because I want to come back and talk about a couple of things, and also I want to talk about your holiday gift guide on your website. What's going on out there? All right? Now? This is kind of a neat one. The Ritz Carlton Santa Barbara is adding a robotic messuse. So I have a question. What if there's a glitch and it punches through your sternum? What the hell do you do?
Well, you call a good lawyer, I guess, But hopefully that does not happen, because you know they've.
Done their research.
There is an emergency stop button though, so it tells me that they're not one hundred percent certain that that can't happen. So this is a robotic messeuse called Escape. It's spelled A escape like the letter A and then escape, but it's pronounced escape. And this is going in at the Rich Carlton Santa Barbara. The bookar there and and it is high end. It's going to be self service twenty four to seven. Well I don't know if it's twenty four to seven. They didn't say that, but it's
going to be self service. And it's a massage system, so it uses AI to scan your body, figures out all like to say, over a million three D data points, and then it comes up with a custom massage. So from this touch screen you can choose the focus areas, how much pressure you want, the music, and it remembers all of it for next time. So I think this sounds really interesting. Of course, people are going to say, oh, this is taken away jobs. It's taken away jobs probably you know.
It's it's changing the nature of work. I guess I can say.
So number one, this is probably going to run without a lot of people, which means hotels that when it normally have a Masseuse could have a massage system number two. The company says there is a twenty nine thousand, twenty nine thousand gap in the therapist need in the massage industry, which means there's less people than to fill jobs.
So you have that.
Since it's replacing so many Philippine messuses. Does it also sing karaoke?
I'm not sure on that one.
All I know is that a thirty minute massage is about seventy five dollars at a location in New York City, and I'm exciting bad.
That's not bad because if you're going to a Rich Carlton, a sixty minute massage is it could be one hundred and thirty hundred and fifty dollars, and that's with karaoke.
Oh wow, Well, I don't know if I assume it's not going to be seventy five bucks. I don't think you can walk into a Rich Carlton and sniff without spending seventy five dollars. So there's no way this massage is going to be that cheap.
Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people will do it just for sort of the joys of doing it, just to experiment, just to try something new. And so I'll bet you it does really well, and I'll bet you that it costs a fortune to buy. Oh yeah, for the facility. Okay, let's do it. We're gonna spend a few minutes talking about your holiday gift guide, which you do every year. It's on your website, rich on tech
dot TV. And I know we're getting plenty of time to this, so if we run out of time, we'll go if we have too much information, we'll go to a couple of other topics. So what I want to do is ask what's hot, what's not, and how much money are we going to spend for insert name a product here.
Well, I think, look, this holiday number one, this holiday shopping season is shorter than years past because if you do the math, there's like a couple less days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. So I think there's twenty six days between those two holidays, which in many years it's like closer to thirty thirty one something like that. So there's
less time. And already, I mean you're talking, we're getting to Thanksgiving, we're getting to Black Friday, and that's kind of like when the deals start and when you have to start buying stuff because you're getting this stuff shipped to our house in many instances, and you want to make sure you're getting that earlier then later. Right, And by the way, one pro tip Bill I learned this the hard way. Open up your boxes as they arrive to your house. Do not wait until the night before
you give them as gifts, because guess what. One time I ordered something and I didn't open the box until, you know, the holidays I was going to give it. I opened it up the night before, and next thing you know, it was the wrong thing in the box. So do not wait to open these boxes that you get from any retailer. All right, With that said. On my list, I put a lot of stuff. I like to find useful stuff. I like to find interesting stuff, and this is all stuff that I've personally tested, things
like earbuds, things like power banks. My number one pick is always the same every year. It's the Aura Digital picture frame. Every single person that has gotten one of these, not all of them have emailed me, but the ones who have just say, this is the most incredible gift because everyone likes seeing pictures, and so that unlocks those pictures from your onto a digital picture frame. And the best part with the aura is that as a kid
that gives it to your parents or loved one. You can actually update the photos on that frame from your phone, like you can submit photos right from your phone and it will show up on their frame no matter where it is, which is really cool.
So you're canna be in. You can be an eighty five year old grandma and instead of having thirty five pictures across every counter, there's just one and it's rotating the pictures through. Do I have that right?
Yes?
And you're not just rotating. You know, back in the day you had the old photo frames, you would upload the pictures once, you know, Christmas Day or the day after whatever, and you would never update them. This you can constantly update them because it's going from your phone, which is really nice as well. So I love that. Let's see what else do we have here? A lot of travel stuff. I talked about the self cleaning kitty
litter box. I still think that's life changing. A lot of people have been emailing me about that smart rings there. I would say they're popular, but they're too expensive right now for most people. But that's a that's a gift. If someone has everything they need. Headphones I've always said.
Those are a great gift to a couple that I like. The noise cancelation.
Obviously those are very popular, but if you've got a runner in your life, I've been testing these shocks open run headphones, which in LA especially, you know, you want to be aware of your surroundings while you're running outside. These are great because they don't seal up your ear drums, so they actually use bone conduction technology, so you actually kind of hear what's happening. Yeah, it's really great. And you can also swim with them too, which a lot
of people like you. How much are those those are on sale? Those are a great deal right now ninety bucks and they're typically a lot more. So those are great and wooll.
Because I just ordered some very expensive headsets, which hopefully I'm going to cancel immediately because you'd say they're yeah, well, it's just crazy. I can't believe how much I spent.
What do they call you spend? What did you get bows? No, I got beats Beat Beat.
Yeah, you know, those are highly ranked and they're highly rated, and.
Yeah they're highly expensive, they are.
But they actually have a pair right now. That's a great deal for two hundred and fifty bucks.
Yeah, I think I paid. I think I paid for that much, and mainly because I do phone calls and I listened to books on tape. I'm not a big music guy, so id they're overpriced for me, but they're just so damn comfortable on my ears. That's what works for.
This is this is literally what we're saying on our segment tomorrow.
That's so weird because we had we had this guy in from another reviews website and he said, you know, look all these noise canceling the bows, the Sony. I like the ones from Sonos as well. They're all great, but the beats are literally the most comfortable.
Out of the entire bunch. So it's funny you said that.
Yeah, And so I mean that's exactly you know what I'm spending.
I had a pair.
Are you ready for this? They were stolen?
Oh wow?
So this is my second go round? Yeah, okay, I don't know if they were stolen them where. I have no idea where they were stolen. I have. I used to have friends, which by mistake, I actually invited someone over and cleaned out completely.
Oh wow, your friends are stealing from you?
That Oh yeah, of course they are, of course friends. What I did, well, let me put it this way. I had acquaintances because I don't have friends.
This is getting weird. Who are you inviting over? That's well, I'll tell you one thing.
They're not coming back. Uh and if I see them with a pair of Beats headphones on while they're driving along, that's going to be problematic. Okay, Rich the website. You can find all these holiday gifts on Rich's website at rich on tech dot TV. Do I have that right?
That is Rich on tech dot tv, Front, front and center.
Okay, Rich, thank you. We will talk next Tuesday. All right, got it? All right? Uh? Now I want to tell you a little bit about how I used to do business. I've been a business person since my twenties, most of my business being spectacular failures, I might add, but occasionally
one or two of them working. When I had to fire somebody, I would line up my employees and I would say, for both, for those of you that think they still have a job, here, take a step forward, and then I'd point to someone and.
Go, what you not so fast?
Now? For those of you that think that brick and mortar stores are dead, or dying because of internet sales. Online sales not so fast. And why is that? Well? Because are there plenty of stores that have gone under? Plenty of them. However, well managed stores do just fine. Target absolutely on top of it, certainly costco. I mean, they've us done. They always do well. So let me tell you about TJX. TJX is a holding company of discount chains like TJ Max. They also own what else
do they own? They own Rosses Marshals, So how do they get away with it? How are they doing well? Just to give you an idea, the market capitalization of TJX, which owns these discount chains is up one hundred and ninety four percent over the past decade. Basically has tripled in value over the last ten years, and that includes the pandemic. So why is that? And online shopping is at a record high and you know, not only for a change, but for well managed stores. Shopping center owners
aren't threatened at all. And we thought, wait a minute, shopping center are gone. A lot of them closed down. Americans bought three hundred billion dollars in retail goods online last quarter. Now e commerce okay, out of the three hundred billion dollars in online last year, the e commerce part of it. No, let me do this, three hundred billion dollars in retail goods last year. So Amy, real quickly.
I want to ask you a question, okay, and that is, of the three hundred billion dollars in retail that was sold last year, how much of it you think was e commerce? If you had to guess, oh.
I would say at least half, but probably more sixteen percent. Oh, probably a lot less than half. That's exactly correct.
And therein lies my story because retailers, mortar and brick stores shouldn't have to worry, and well managed ones don't have to worry. A couple of reasons. One, the retail construction is way down, so those that have space for the most part vacant. See our to near record lows. Now, while Americans stayed at home during the height of the pandemic, we had no choice, of course, we had to stay at home during the pandemic. Once the pandemic is over,
we flocked to stores and restaurants. Now, Unfortunately, a lot of restaurants closed down because they couldn't take what happened during the pandemic, and a lot of stores closed because they were effectively closed. But those that survived, and again we go back to well managed stores. The other thing, you know what, I'm going to take a break and come back and tell you the other reason that brick and mortar stores are doing so well, and they're doing
something that online shopping that online retailers can't do. Now, I just asked Amy, of the three hundred billion dollars that was sold on in retail last year, how much do you think was e commerce? And she said over fifty percent. In reality, it's sixteen percent. The vast majority of goods are still at brick and mortar stores and there is a primary reason, and the success of stores that are doing just dynamite. Actually, there are a couple
of reasons. One very well managed stores like Target, although yeah, I'll just say they're well managed. But let me give you an example why Marshalls does as well as it does. And the company TJX which owns tj Max and other companies, what they do is attract customer shoppers across the income spectrum because what they've done is created and this is brilliant, what's called a treasure hunt experience. Right it sources merchandise and limited quantities from over twenty one thousand vendors in
more than one hundred countries. That's a lot of buyers. And what ends up happening hardcore shoppers, my daughter is one. They go there just to see what's on sale, what do they have, because you never know, and when there is something there that you want, it's ridiculously cheap. So the potential for these deals attracts even millionaires, people that
have all the money in the world. They can go to major stores, they can go to Nordstroms, they go to Marshals because they just don't know what they want. That is something and what that does is translate into what the Internet will never be able to do. And those are customer experiances. You go to a Dick's Sporting Goods, for example, there's a climbing wall in there. Now try
doing that on the internet. Well, theoretically you could. You take your laptop and you go to a climbing wall facility and you go up doing some kind of purchase on your laptop. That gets a little more difficult. Most retailers, by the way of accepted that customers want to buy items online. Okay, that's simply part of life. So here's
what they do. They delivered them very quickly, and people return what they don't want, and sometimes it's easier just driving to the store, especially when you have a fairly big item. Pet Smart, for example, seventeen hundred locations across the US and Canada, ships more than ninety percent of the online orders from its stores to save money, and they're able to compete, and they have partnerships with door Dash and Uber Eats. Both of those platforms are in
fact partnering up. DoorDash has one hundred and fifteen thousand non restaurant retailers on the platform, including best Buy and lows So Sephora for example. I think they do waxing of some kind. I mean, I just don't understand that. I've never waxed. But it is not the demise of the brick and mortar. And you've got a lot of e retailers that have to have brick and mortar stores because that opens up new a whole line of new customers. For example, Warbis glasses, it started off as just online.
The only way you could buy Warbies was online. Well, their customer based sort of okay, it flattened out, so they start opening brick and mortar stores and their customer base now explodes. So those are the reasons that brick and mortar stores are still here. Just wanted to give you a heads up love business topics, all right, before we go a couple things. Next Tuesday is Pastapon and this is going to happen at the Anaheim White House. KFI is broadcasting all day at the Anaheim White House,
starting with Amy wake up Call. During Amy's five o'clock hour, stop by coffee fruit no not fruit, fruit, juice, pastries, six o'clock, all of that plus real jew bagels and cream cheese, and at nine o'clock that ends. As I said, if you walk in at nine oh one and there is a bagel left, you're not getting it. I'm yanking it from your cold dead hands. So we invite you to come by from five to nine and just to
get the food part. We're there all day, and it's about donating to Katerina's Club, where we help Bruno feed five thousand kids every day with pasta meals. So drop off your pasta and sauce there at the Anaheim White House. You can donate any of three ways, any smart and
Final Store. Any amount of check out any Wendy's restaurant in southern California five dollars or more, you get a coupon book for Wendy's goodies worth far more than five dollars, and one hundred percent of your donation goes to Katerina's Club, no administrative charge. None of that. One hundred percent goes to Katerina's Club. And if you want to stop by and yell at us, which I'd love to do because I love people screaming at me. By the way, there
is armed security there. I just want to let you know. So if you come up to say hello or take a picture, do it very slowly. Don't make any quick furtive moves, because you will get shot in the heart. Said Dana is very very good at what he does.
Okay, that's it.
Phone calls for Handle on the Laws starting in just a few moments, Marginal Legal Advice off the air, and the number is eight seven seven five two zero eleven fifty. I'm starting just as I say goodbye eight seven seven five two zero eleven fifty. Goodbye KFI AM six forty live everywhere on the iHeartRadio app. You've been listening to the Bill Handle Show, Catch My Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app