You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Bill Handle here on a Taco Tuesday, October seventh. Some of the stories we are looking at and there's a lot going on. Government shutdowns still happening, and we don't know when it's going to end. Both sides are intransigent about it. And it's been two years since the war in Gaza has started, and the talks are actually at the closest point, and you've got Hamas and the US and Israel in Cairo negotiating at least the release of the hostages. It is time for Rich to morrow and
our tech segment Tech Tuesday. Rich is here every Saturday from eleven am to two pm. He's on KTLA every day and you can follow on Instagram at Rich on Tech and his website is rich on Tech dot TV.
And good morning Rich, Good morning to you. Bill.
Okay, we are in the middle of pro days at on the website. And I took advantage yesterday already, yep, yep, I took advantage yesterday.
This is true. By the way, I'm not this is not a joke.
I bought a bagel cutter, bagel slicer for sixteen dollars normally sixteen dollars and seventy four cents. Oh wow, yeah, no, it's impressive. And now I use it this morning. And here's something about the bagel cutters, not that you know, but I'm going to give everybody an inside scoop here, and that is, you can't have real soft bagels because if you have soft bagels, they sort of crunch. You need a little bit hard bagels when using a bagel cutter.
But that's neither here nor there. Let's talk about the big deal days. What are we looking at deal wise?
Yeah, so I've been scouring Amazon all morning and the deals are there. So everyone says, hey, you know, rich, what should I buy? How should I buy it? My advice is this, if you need a bagel slicer, go for it. If you don't, don't be searching Amazon all day just aimlessly for stuff to spend your money on, because it's just not going to work out for you. So again, if you followed my advice before, I always say, put the stuff you need in your cart. So I had all my stuff in my cart this morning, and
I looked at it. A lot of the prices dropped, and so I purchased a bunch of stuff that I was going to get anyway, and it was on my list. But it's just stuff that I was watching. So that's my number one advice. Look for the things that you need around the house, the stuff you reorder, even if it's lame, just you know today it's probably on sale, so go ahead and get it. With that said, I have been compiling a list of stuff that I would
buy on Prime Day. I put out my website rich on tech dot TV, and you know, I'm looking at the electronics. So most of the products that I'm posting on there, actually all of them are at their lowest prices ever. Now when I say that, that doesn't mean
they've never been that price before. But Amazon, if you look at the price history on these products, which every single one of them, I go through and make sure I look at the price history, it typically has gone on sale to the lowest price just one time before, and that is in July during their previous Prime Day.
So the prices are really good today. Air Pods ninety bucks, iPad two hundred and eighty dollars, tiny bluetooth speaker from JBL that I like twenty five dollars, Apple Watch two hundred and seventy nine dollars, air Tag some of the lowest prices ever. Right now, let's see what else do I have here. Belkan's portable charger, lowest price ever, twenty seven bucks. You gotta have one of those in your bag so that you can charge your phone on the go.
I've got another. Let's see beach USBC cables. They just came out with these. They come in great colors. They're usually nineteen bucks, rare sale on a beach product twelve dollars. My favorite earbuds under fifty dollars. They usually sell for seventy three. So forty seven bucks for cheap earbuds is a great deal. I've got some laptops. People are asking about laptops. Those are a fantastic deal. We're talking in a Lenovo for five hundred bucks and HP for five
point fifty. So again, it really comes down to do you need these things? But if you do, they are at some of their lowest prices of the season, and that's a good thing.
All right. So two questions. Question number one, I look at TVs.
The price of TVs sort of the bell weather of prices in general, and of course the price of TVs. I mean, you can get a what eighty five inch TV today for six hundred bucks? Has the price of the Imax TV gone down to under fifty dollars?
Yet TVs keep getting cheaper. But here's the thing. These manufacturers are smart because what they do is they keep adding new display technologies. So although you can get a TV for very cheap, you can go to your best buy and it's super duper cheap. They are usually using the older display technologies on those screens. What does that mean? That screen's not going to be as bright, are not going to pop as much, You're not going to have
as many viewing angles from the sides. All that really doesn't matter because a lot of people are upgrading from an older TV anyway, so everything is going to look better. But if if you're looking at the high end TVs, those are going to have the best displays. And right now, the name of the game is that each individual pixel is lit by itself, which means colors just look way better. They can control the brightness and the contrast and all that good stuff.
Yeah, when you bring up you know, when you bring a TV home, you're not comparing it to other TVs. I mean, you know, I don't buy expensive TVs. I sort of buy middle of the road TVs. I'm not going to spend two thousand dollars for sixty five inch TV, and I'm not going to spend two hundred dollars for it. But in reality, you go home and you sort of that's your TV. I mean, you're you're not comparing TV
to TV. So that's that's one. The other thing is, as I'm joking about the Imax TVs, have those big, big TVs, are they dropping in price and how big are they getting?
They are dropping in price. I mean I'm seeing over one hundred inch TVs at the shows that I've been to lately, so those are still very expensive. But considering I mean, you can get one hundred inch the TV. I have the U eight from High Sense, which is a fantastic value. You can get a one hundred inch TV deliver it's your home for thirty five hundred dollars. That is unheard of. You know, a couple of years ago, you can get a much more reasonable sixty five inch
for under one thousand. So I think TVs when it comes to pursing those They are definitely a better price during Black Friday and.
When's it Super Bowl?
So if you're on the fence about a TV, probably wait just a little bit till Black Friday for better deals.
All right, Rich, some news on chat GPT you want to share.
Yeah, this is actually really cool. I know that all this AI stuff is a lot. We've been hearing so much about it and it just continues to change on a daily basis, But this is actually really neat. So chatbt is now interacting with various apps that we know and love. So we're talking Booking dot Com, Canva, Coursera, Expedia, Zillow.
And what does that mean.
It means that think about chat gybt as now a front end way to ask questions of these other apps. So, for instance, Zillow, what would you do. You'd go to zilo dot com, You'd select the sliders. You'd say, I want a house for under this price with this many bedrooms in this neighborhood, and then you look at the schools, and then you'd further, you know, refine your filtering and
look at the houses. With this, you can now just stay inside the chat GBT chatbox and just say, hey, go search Zilo for homes under this price, walkable to restaurants five you know, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and I want it in a place that as a ten out of ten school. WHOA wait, what all that? And yes, chat gbt will return you the answers because it's doing
the search on your behalf. So why I think this is so amazing is because it is getting to the future that we were promised, which is talking to computers in natural language and having them tell us the right answer back. We've already seen that with chat gybt and information. Now we're getting even further into that.
We've already seen that in two thousand and one a Space Odyssey, and it's pretty scary stuff. So do you have to have the chat GPT app? You download that, then what do you do is go to the app and ask the question.
Yeah, so you can have the app? I don't. Yeah, it's working on the app on my phone, it's working on the desktop chat gbt dot com. But you can also basically, if you want to start this, you have to say one of the names of the app, So just say something like hey, check Zillow four or make me an Instagram post in Canva that does this, or Hey, find me hotels in Montreal that fit these criteria. So and then it basically will ask you that first time
you mentioned that that term by name. It will say, okay, do you want us to connect to your Canva account or your Expedia account or your Zilo account. And they're also adding other properties as well, so we're talking Uber, we're talking Target DoorDash, so you're gonna be able to
order you know, different items just by asking chatchybt. I mean, this is really transformational when it comes to not just the average person like me and you that think it's interesting, but I think for accessibility reasons, this is going to be huge that people that may not be able to type as easily or may not be able to speak easily can now actually go into chatchybt and make these commands in the natural language and get a response, and not just a response, but also get action.
So at this point, for example, when I want information, it's a Hey Siri question, and then I asked the question whatever it is, so this would just be just hace chat GPT or I just go on the app and just ask the question.
Curious as to how it works.
Yeah, So I mean Siri is it's similar, but Siri is very basic. If you said, hey, Siri, go out and find me homes in Michigan with five stars school and uh, you know a Michelin star restaurant within walking distance of my front yard, Siri's gonna just your phone's just going to blow up in your hands. You know,
like nothing's going to happen. Now, you do that same query on Chat GBT with you know, the addition of Zillo now and all these things that they've got built in, and it's actually getting it's taking all that rich information that Zillo has in its database and it's now tapping into that and not just tapping into it, but it's slicing and dicing and understanding it in a way that's much smarter than just responding with thirty five times seven
is whatever the answer is. So it's just a it's kind of a fundamental shift in the way we think about computing, and it's a it's a future that many people have always wanted, where we just ask these machines to do stuff and they do it. We don't have to think about when we first got smart homes, it would be like Alexa, please turn on the lights in you know, bedroom two, right, you had to do it in a very standard, strict syntax that the whatever way
you programmed it. Now it's just like, hey, turn on the lights in the bedroom and turn them off at nine pm if you can, you know, like that kind of thing. So it's much more natural conversation. I can't wait to see where this goes.
Okay, Ways, and it's it's conversational reporting.
Now. I'm a big fan of Ways, and I love the fact that I can select which language or which accent is coming off it.
My favorite is Scooby Doo. It's true.
I mean they have a Scooby do directional you know, voice instruction.
Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead.
No, no of me. I mean I think Amy King, I think also does one of the voices on there.
I mean it's you can.
Choose a bunch of Yeah, it's a bunch of fun voices. They have Santa, They've got you know, they've done a bunch over the years. But in Ways is great because what is It's community oriented, So when you report something, it helps other drivers behind you. And one of those things is accidents and road hazards. And this is a demo I saw last year at Google in New York City.
It's finally coming out. But now when you go to report something, so you still have to tap the screen, but when you go to tap the screen, now you can just say something naturally like hey, there's a mattress in the road, or there's a speed trap, or there's construction on the road, or there's traffic right now, and AI will interpret what you're saying and now feed that into the app and alert the other drivers behind you. So I think it's a win win for safety and
it just makes life a whole lot easier. You have to sit there and look at the screen thinking what am I trying to report here?
Just say it?
Yeah. But my question is with ways because it'll report police car ahead, or traffic signal or.
A car on the road. Is it still there? Is it not there?
I ignore that because I'm past that and I don't care about anybody else driving. But it goes beyond that, right do you simply sell my kids?
Yeah, my kids love doing the reports when we're driving. They're like, Dad, Dad, Okay, let's see in three hundred feet, two hundred feet, pet fifty is it there?
No, it's not there? Press the button. So there are a lot of people that like this.
And by the way, Ways started out as a gamified system, so it used to be when you drove streets, you earned like coins, like virtual coins. But the whole thing about Ways is that this was built from the ground up. They had none of their own maps, so they would literally enlist people to drive neighborhoods, and by you driving that neighborhood and collecting those little coins, you are helping
them build their mapping system. And of course then Google bought them for billions of dollars and the rest is history. But it's just it's a very community based driving app, and I think that's what people still like about it.
Yeah, a couple of crazy as Raelies conceived of it, and now there are a couple of very wealthy, crazy Israelis to say the least.
All right, I love that you have the knowledge, Bill. You have the knowledge, Bill, which I love, but you also present it in a very different manner than I would like. I yes, like, I know the Israelies came up with it, but I probably would not have said to put you said all right?
Saturday morning, eleven to two pm, Rich is live here on KFI on KTLA every single day, Instagram at rich on Tech website, rich on Tech dot TV, catch over the weekend, rich take.
Care, thanks, Bill, appreciate it.
Okay, now I want to talk about your human your human brain, assuming that it's human, and there's an old a there's an old adage and that is human beings they walk with their feet, they stick with their face. No, no, that's not right. Okay, it was right. No, no, it's it's not right. I don't remember. I don't remember it correctly. In any case, there are some studies that have been done on brains.
What a shocker that one is. And we start with let's talk about the brain itself.
Pound for pound, the brain consumes twenty percent of all of our energy.
That is a small amount of matter using a whole lot of our energy.
The amount of for example, the amount of blood that goes to your brain is enormous relative the rest of your body, which is why head wounds heals so quickly, because the blood just flows through like crazy.
And the reason all this is this is a study that was done.
Our neural network and this, according to one hypothesis done based on studies, evolved so we could juggle social network works. They've connected the two social networks. Brain size. Bottom line, humans are built to schmooze. That's what the studies show. We're just built that way. So three pounds the brain makes up twenty two percent of our body weight, and
three quarters of this three pounds is the neocortex. Cognitive functions, memory, language, problem solving, self awareness, and these abilities enable people to navigate the relationships of families and friend groups and sports
teams and workplaces, and it goes on and on. So there is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham young woman by the name of Julianne Holt Lundstad, who has done a lot of studies in this, and she says when people are more socially connected, they have increased survival rates. There's a redisc reduced risks for cardiovascular disease and stroke and type two diabetes and depression and dementia.
Which is why I'm probably gonna die next week and not even know that I'm going to die, because I don't have much of a social network. But here is the premise, and it is really interesting. The high cognitive demands of maintaining these social bonds places a limit on the number of relationships stable relationships, which makes sense that we can maintain. And this is according to another psychologist, Robin Dunbar, who's also done studies on this.
And so here's what he did.
Dunbar to understand the limitations of social networking because there's only so many social groups you can deal with that our brain actually is built to deal with. He examined monkeys and lemurs and apes, and he found a connection between the size of the neocortics that part of the brain, and the size of the social groups. Now that hasn't been studied before. The size of the brain, that area
that with the memory, et cetera. It is directly, it directly correlates to the size of your social of your social group.
So he came he took a look into primate brains.
He looked at neuroimaging and reviewing studies that documented the grooming practices, for example, that enable primates to cultivate relationships.
You can see it by the grooming which they do.
They picket little knits like I do from my hair where I used to do it from my hair, and these bonds that are created. What they do is create security. They facilitate social hierarchies. They forge alliances, which is then connected.
To higher survival rates.
So the bigger the brain means that the bigger the social networking platforms you have, the longer you live, and the healthier you are. That is the connection. So how big are these social groups? I'll tell you when we come back, because that's kind of interesting. Wow, yeah, yeah, will very how big? And we're gonna get away and we're giving away new Mercedes Benz to the fifth color when we come back.
How's that for, Ryan Seacrest? Well done? All right, Back, we go to the study of brains.
And I love these, uh, these studies because first of all, they're real studies and the stuff that comes out of them are absolutely fascinating. And so, uh, there are several studies that I'm referring to, and it has to do with the size of your brain, that is, human beings brains and the neo coortix, which is three quarters of the brain, cognitive functions, memory, language problem solving, et cetera.
And here is what the science says that there is a direct correalition correlation between brain size, social networking, and how big your social network is.
What are the numbers. Okay, one of the science looked at chimps because they're the closest to us.
The average social group size of chimps was around fifty fifty eight chimps around them. That was their social their platform, and the number of chimps they hung around all right. So based on that and based on how close the genetic connection is, one of these sciences, Dunbar extrapolated and he talked about the likely size of human social groups and he came up with one.
Hundred and fifty.
Chimps are fifty one hundred and fifty for humans and beyond that that has held steady since the advent of human beings, unchanged in the digital age, unchanged through history.
And he tested his theory, went to historic texts, archaeological data, church congregation, and he found one fifty was the magic number, including hunter gatherer kinship networks back in the Caveman days, Bronze Age communities, Anglo Saxon villages, and medieval Europe, Mormon wagon trains in the nineteenth century, German trailer parks that exist today. So how does this boil down? The innermost
circle is just five people. Friends are family members, you feel emotionally connected to the closest to these are people you talk to or connect at least once a week. Then comes a layer with ten additional good friends you see at least once a month. So add ten to that, and about sixty percent of your social attention goes to these fifteen people, the five plus ten. Farther out there is your weekend backyard barbecue party group. That's about fifty people,
including the fifteen you already see. Finally, there's an outer ring about one point fifty, and that includes one hundred people that, for example, you would invite to your once in lifetime big events like a wedding or a funeral. You wouldn't feel embarrassed about going up to them in the lounge of an airport and smashing them on.
The back and going hey.
And if contact becomes less frequent, as you would imagine, down they slide through the layers and after a few years they're out of your solar system and simply become acquaintances.
Okay, Then it goes on.
You have about three hundred and fifty acquaintances on top of your one hundred and fifty person network. And he says beyond that, most of us can recognize an additional one thousand people. Now it seems like a lot, but for example, he uses President Trump, you would instantly recognize President Trump, and you would recognize about a thousand other people. And some researchers looking at this say the number is
even bigger. There's a group of Swedish researchers. They published a paper saying one hundred and fifty is way underpredictable or way underpredicted, and there's no upper limit can be calculated at all. So it's the same evolutionary pressures for primates for all of us.
That's kind of interesting.
So if you look at we'll think about this and you look at the numbers, who are the closest people to you? Then who is the next lay? Then who's a layer after that? I only have one layer, thank you. So it's easy for me. I'm at the I'm at the far farther edge of the solar system.
Are we done?
Tiny brain, no big brain, just no neuro connection to my cortex, my neuro cortex or my nuko neko.
It sounds like a huge brain from here.
It's a neo cortex, it's an almost cortex. It's a newer Cortex, and we're done Cortex and all Gary and Shannon up next tomorrow the Ignoble prizes. You will die after seven o'clock. It is just hilarious and it's real sort of science. And then coming up tomorrow it starts all over again. It's Amy and Cono and I think Mike Morris is still there, and then of course and Neil and I jump aboard Cono and Ann all over the place.
Gee, do we really do this again?
My neo cortex says, yes, this is KFI AM six forty.
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