Helping my dad untangle his tech, Galaxy A17 & removing people from photos (155, January 3, 2026)

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. You know Roald Dahl. He fought up Willy Wonka in the BFG. But did you know he was a spy? In the new podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, I'll tell you that story and much, much more. What? You probably won't believe it either. Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. I was a spy. Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. pretty entertaining episodes. Listen to Legally Brunette on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. In 1995, my neighbor, Anna Traynor, disappeared from a commune. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. No, I am not your guru. Back then, I lied to everybody. They have had this case for 30 years. I'm going back to my hometown to uncover the truth. Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Everyone needs to take care of their mental health, even running back B. John Robinson. When I'm on the field and feeling the pressure, I usually just take a deep breath. When I'm just breathing and seeing what's in front of me, everything just slows down. It just makes me feel great before I run the play. Just like B. John, we all need a strong mental game on and off the field. Make a game plan for your mental health at loveyourmindplaybook.org. Love your mind. Brought to you by the Huntsman Mental Health Foundation, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, and the Ad Council. This is the biggest night in podcasting. The countdown is on to our 2026 iHeart Podcast Awards. Live from South by Southwest, March 16th, we'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative, talented creators in the industry. It's truly a who's who of the podcasting world. creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be on full display. And the winner of the iHeart Podcast Award is... See all the nominees now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Audible is a proud sponsor of the Audible Audio Pioneer Award. Explore the best selection of audiobooks, podcasts, and originals all in one easy app. Audible. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free trial at audible.com. 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? I'm Rich DeMuro, 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 2026. Here we go. Ready? 888-RICH-101-888-742-4101. 888-RICH-101. Give me a call if you have a question about technology. You like to email. Email is also an option. Just go to richontech.tv and hit contact. richontech.tv, hit contact. Well, like I said, this is the first show of 2026. Welcome, if you are listening for the very first time. If you're listening for the 155th 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 CES in Las Vegas. Kicks off this weekend. And if you're not sure what that is, CES 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 TiVo, the flat screen TV. All this stuff got its start at CES when it was the Consumer Electronics Show. Now it is just CES 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 15 years now. And I remember, yes, my very first CES, I was with CNET back in the day. And I remember staying at the Palms Hotel for 11 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 kind of catch up with them as well. So stay tuned. I've got a lot coming from CES 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 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. It was like a foghorn or something. And that's how you knew there was no school. And then you'd go outside, you'd play, you'd shovel your neighbors, 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 5G. 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 that 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 his 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 Eero system. Eero is a 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&T, they all name their Wi-Fi 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 LG TV 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 LG TV 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, do 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 it. 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 24 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 to log into your Netflix. What's your account? Oh, I have no idea. Okay. What about your password? 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 login screens. So they'd all pop up at the same time. Now, that is confusing. Even for me, who's sitting there going, okay, why are these all popping up at the same time? I just had to go in, go into the settings, and cancel them out and just keep one, which was Bitwarden, which I really like because it's free and it's 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 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 login, 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 it on my computer? These are things that 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 passcode? 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 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, 888-RICH-101, 888-742-4101. We've 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 richontech.tv. There you can get links to anything that I mention on the show, learn more about the show, follow me on Instagram, all that good stuff. It's right there, richontech.tv. This is episode 155, so click that if you want the exact links that I mention here on this show. Let's go to Mike in Mankato, Minnesota. You're on with Rich. Hey, Rich. It's Mike in Minnesota. Hey, so I have a Netgear Wi-Fi cable modem router that I purchased at Newegg. And it says to, because I forgot the password for the admin. Okay. So I don't know, because I'm visually impaired. I use a screen reader called Josh for Windows. It's a screen reader. and I can't read the label on the – because it says to enter the password three times wrong when I go to, you know, user.login. And so I do that, and then it says to enter the serial number, but I can't read the label on the router. Ah, okay. So the serial number. Well, here's an easier way to do this. There is a tiny hole on the back of the router that you can press a paperclip into, and that will reset it to factory. And then once it's reset to factory that way, you should be able to just go onto your computer and type in, it's typically 198.162.1.1 or something like that. And then 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 that's printed on the bottom of the router? Is that what you're saying? No. Well, when I go and click the forgot password button, it says to enter the wrong password three times when I'm on router.login.net. Okay, that's what they use. So it says that. Yeah, and then it says enter the serial number of your product, but I can't read the serial number. Is it scratched out? No, I'm visually impaired, so my eyes don't work. Okay. So 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 that would work. Because this is an app that basically, you know, if you're familiar with it, you download it. It works two ways. visually impaired, download it to their phone, and it's kind of like a FaceTime with someone, and so when they need help seeing something, they can say, hey, let me reach out. And then me on the other end, who can see, I can log on to the app and say, oh, let me help this person. I look at whatever's on my screen, and I can read it out or whatever. So why don't you try that? Oh, sure. Yeah, and do that. Yeah, I love this show. This thing is so cool. Oh, thank you. Yeah, yeah, because what's that Bitwarden you were talking about? Yeah, 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 download it to your computer, you can download it to your phone, you can download it to your iPad, and it's going to work the same way across all of those, and they're not going to charge you for it either. Now, there is, of course, 99% of free apps have some sort of paid level. that you can step up to, but I use this. I've been using it for the past 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 $60 a year for my old one. Right, right. But, Mike, what station do you listen on over there? KOA out of Colorado. Awesome. All right, well, thanks for the call today, and keep me posted. Let me know if you figure this out, okay? Yeah, I will. All right, thanks, man. Have a great one. All right, 888-RICH-101, 888-742-4101. We'll get to more calls after the break. CES, 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 CES 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 get the headlines. So a couple of 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 2026. 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 Samsung does this, the frame. I saw it at Costco yesterday. All the TV makers have some sort of 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 matte and not reflective, and it just looks not 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 screensaver 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 it 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. 888-RICH-101, 888-742-4101. More of your calls coming up on Rich on Tech right after this. Welcome back to Rich on Tech. Let's go to Jamie in Tampa. You're on with Rich. Hey, Rich. How are you doing today, man? I'm doing well. What's up? First off, I love your musical selection choices. You go from Little Darling by, I think it's the Beatles, to Brandon K. by Stevie Wonder. You know, I pick everything myself, Jamie. Really? Yes. Good to know. There is a theme today. The theme is sort of a rebirth, a fresh, you know, new year. You know, I'm trying to keep with the new year stuff. Even though I have not heard one person, not one person talk about resolutions, not even in the news, nowhere. Nobody talks about resolutions anymore because I think we've all decided that nobody keeps them anyway. So 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. I called you, I think it was either last year or the year before last, asking about how to cut my streaming bill because, man, I was paying where the freaking sun didn't shine for streaming television. And you said, hey, get an antenna. Well, I got one, and I got the amplifier for it. I bought a separate amplifier because the one big antenna can come with, which is going to be basically just cheap crap anyway. So 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 has to be the local CBS affiliate for some reason. CBS? Which one? CBS. CBS. You know, the thing, that one. Okay. And for some of the, I cannot get it. I live near the towers. I'm like 15 miles from the broadcast towers. I get everything else except that one. And I don't want to have to go, I should also point out, too, I'm visually impaired just as my kids. Oh, wow. And I love it when I follow Blind Community to reach out to your show, by the way. Oh, yeah, me too. We talked about those metaglasses last year. It's eye-opening. No pun intended. I hate that I just said that. But it's really been interesting to see 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, okay, the issue I have with that is the app is good for news. Yeah, oh, but not programming. But if I want to watch, say, network programs, that can be a little bit of a problem. Okay. Luckily, the only thing I really like to see this is The Price is Right. Oh, you and my kids, they watch that every day. Well, okay, here's a couple things. So have you 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'm like i put four be careful jamie i don't want you falling off a stool to get to prices right well i try listen the funny thing is my girlfriend saw me up there one day she goes oh my god my boyfriend's gonna trouble himself oh oh all in the name of drew carey no i'm just kidding right okay well here's what i think you should do have you checked out an app called antenna point Is that accessible for the blind? Well, you may have to have someone help you. But, you know, what it does is 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 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 Antennas 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 going to 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 Gen TV. Yes. You know, my concern is because I keep hearing they have all these APS-C3 boxes you can get. I'm going to have to get a new TV down the road anyway. But, like, do they make accessible, like, APS-C3 boxes? Like, because my Roku TV, it talks. 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 be able to watch TV independently without needing to have my girlfriend or 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 meant for sight people. 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 said I'll be at CES 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 as 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, 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 U.S. here. Deborah writes in, listening on the podcast. Hey, I've got a few old printed wedding photos, 4x6, 5x7. 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 of 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.google.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, yeah, 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 erased from the picture instantly. Again, so scan your photo. You can use the free Google Photo Scan app. It's quick. It'll remove glare. 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 ex that I hate. No, 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. It 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 ChatGPT, 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, 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. They were going to launch this, and they said, oh, this is called 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 been like oh like okay here 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 got to match the background. You got to match everything. I tried this in Nano Banana yesterday. I just went through probably a hundred signs in my, 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.google.com. Put a photo in there. Ask to edit it. Super, super simple. By the way, not to be outdone, ChatGBT 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 learn Photoshop. But, I mean, I didn't invent it. This is just how we're moving forward, and it's wild. So you've got to try this stuff. 888-RICH-101, 888-742-4101. 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, 888-RICH-101, 888-742-4101. 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? Pretty good. I'm glad I finally got through to you because this has been an ongoing problem that I'm hoping Apple's got a solution for, but maybe not. So I have an iPhone 12, soon to upgrade to a 15. 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 closed. But what I do is, and this is a thing that a lot of people just forget to do, but I just press the lock button on the side. Yeah, I know. My son tells me that all the time. Just turn the phone off. 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 going to dial my wife real quick. She'll probably call me back and be like, what's happening? Okay, so I press end. and then it ends and then it goes right to that favorite screen. Exactly. Yeah. And I have a tendency when I'm trying to hit end, if it doesn't end right away, my finger is in the process of trying to hit end again, and then I'm back to the favorite. Right. 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 hangs up for some reason really quickly, and I'm like, wait, what? and I press something and it immediately dials the next person. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, this is definitely an issue. I mean, it's really, yeah, there's not really a way to do that. I don't think there's a... I just have to get into muscle memory of turning off the phone. Yeah, I mean, that's really the best way to do it, the muscle memory. Now, I'm going to 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 problem. People do it all the time. I mean, it's just here we are in 2026, and we're still, it's like a problem that's been 15 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. If 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 iPhone so 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, 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 ID to work. So you can go into settings and turn that 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 that off. The other thing you can do, by the way, Jamie, is turn the auto lock to like 30 seconds instead of a couple of minutes. I have mine on five minutes. Auto-lock 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 unlocked 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 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 option 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 missed calls. So if you're always, if you have those missed calls on your lock screen and you put your phone in your pocket or your gym 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 looking at 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 it gets too 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 a, 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, uh, if someone found me in this, let's say in Tokyo, right. Oh, 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 in 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 a date, 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. 888-RICH-101, 888-742-4101. Jamie, thanks for the call in San Dimas. The website for the show, richontech.tv. 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 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 to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated. And black America was at a breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea. In 1995, my neighbor, Anna Trainor, disappeared from a commune. It was hard to wrap your head around. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. So no, I am not your guru. And back then, I lied to my parents, I lied to police, I lied to everybody. There were years, right, where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can, to try to find out what actually happened. Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of s**t to come around here and my wife. Boom, boom. This is The Red Weather. Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. It's Emily Simpson and Shane Simpson from the Legally Brunette podcast. Each week, we're bringing you true crime through a legal lens. Whether you want all the facts on the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie or you still need to wrap your head around the ditty verdict, we're breaking it all down step by step. And we're not just lawyers, we're also husband and wife. It makes for some pretty entertaining episodes. Listen to Legally Brunette on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought of Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. The guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's? Played poker with Harry Truman and had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, before writing a hit James Bond film. How did The Secret Agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? and what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids. The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 14 years in prison for killing a young woman. A 15-year sentence for a crash that caused three deaths. 12 1⁄2 years for killing a child and critically injuring her mother. All true stories, all caused by marijuana-impaired drivers. No matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different. So, if you're high, just don't drive. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. Welcome back to Rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here, hanging out with you, talking technology at 888-RICH-101-888-742-4123. 0 1. 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 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 CES. One of them is pretty interesting. We've actually talked to Clix. 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 Clix Communicator. And if you go to their website, Clix.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 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 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 eSIM, tactile kill switch. So you can map that to airplane mode or notifications, whatever you want, kind of like the action button on the iPhone, but it's actually a real switch. It's got Android 16, five years of security update, 4,000 milliamp battery, wireless charging, 50 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. $500. You can get that price down to $399 if you reserve it now. You can put $200 down to reserve it for $399. I know. It's confusing. So if you don't do anything, you're going to pay $500. But if you reserve it for $200, you'll pay $400. Shipping expected later this year. I don't know. Kind of interesting. thing, check it out, clicks.tech. This will be at CES, 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. Because 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 hide it under a a pillow when you get home, but it's still there for when you need it. So anyway, kind of a neat idea, clicks.tech. Let's go to Brian, line four. Brian in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. You're on with Rich. Hey, Rich. Thanks for taking my call. Hopefully, quick question here. I think I know the answer, but over the holidays, you usually get an Amazon gift card, and I'm not a huge online shopper, so I usually use that to purchase my TurboTax for the year. Sure. And I went to do that this year, and I was about to download it when I realized kind of in fine print there that it says now it's only for Windows 11 and newer. And I'm running Windows 10 on my HP Pavilion X360. 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 I were to download it on Windows 10, 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 desktop or download the version on my HP Pavilion? Yeah, great question. Actually, I think someone emailed me this question late last year and said, hey, for the next upcoming year, you're not going to be able to run TurboTax on Windows 10. And so, yeah, the company has said that the TurboTax desktop program 2025 will require Windows 11 because there's no more. Now, this is the interesting thing. They say this because of security reasons, right, because Windows 10 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 10 is not supported in a big way anymore, so we're just going to move forward with Windows 11. So that is the company line, what they're saying, is this software will not run on 10. And they did say that security was the main reason. So what are your options? Now, is there some sort of hack or workaround? 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 the most personal and private and secure information you're working with as a person. So I can't really say like, oh, yeah, just do this and get around that. So I think your best option is if you can upgrade your computer, Windows 11, if that supports it. If it doesn't, then, of course, or if you don't want to, that's a whole other thing. But why do you not want to use the online thing? I know a lot of people like this desktop software. Is it just because it's offline? What's the reason for that? I was poking around a little bit yesterday, and it just seemed not, I want to say glitchy, but it was a little bit harder to read than the desktop version and a little bit more difficult to copy and paste from a W-2 and from bank statements and that sort of thing. Okay. And it wasn't terrible by any means, but 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 until October 2026, why can't they support it? Like, come on. People are, you know, 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 upload the file from the browser and you can transfer it over, yes. Okay. Okay, so that's probably what you're going to be stuck with doing, Brian. I know you said you thought you knew the answer before you called. I think that's really, you know, the only other thing that would be, yeah, there is a thing where you can, like, right-click on an app on Windows and do, like, compatibility mode, but I think that's only for backwards compatibility. So if you were running it, you know, if you wanted to run it on an older version or something like that, but I don't think you're going to 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. We're 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 used TurboTax for a long time. I now use this app called Flyfin, which I'm not saying you have to change what you use, but I love this app. And I already got assigned my CPA to do my taxes. And I used it last year. I used it the year before. It's incredible. 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 $30,000 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 CPA is overseas. Like they're not based in the U.S. 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 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. And I've tried the live CPA assist on TurboTax, and I'll be honest, I wasn't as impressed with that. But who likes taxes anyway? No one I've ever met, except CPAs. They kind of like them, but they're making a lot of money off of them. 888-RICH-101-888-742-4101. 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 Halen? Okay. Yeah. 1992. 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, how do they make Pepsi clear? Oh, because it's all chemicals and fake. That's how. 888-RICH-101-888-742-4101. Christina has been waiting patiently in Huntington Beach with her question. And I don't know if I can help because I don't understand what it says on my screen here, but I will attempt. What can I help you with? Oh, hi. Happy New Year, Rich and Bobo. And thank you for taking my call. And I just want to tell you, I'm always learning from you. And I'm always replaying your podcast to learn more all the time. 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 learn 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. Sure. You put your password in. Well, I put it in, and it kept saying, Microsoft, you're offline with Microsoft. So I thought, well, that's really weird. So maybe I didn't type it right. 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 start typing this in to figure out what's wrong with my Microsoft or 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 passkey. I couldn't get around that. Anyways, because I think I remember you saying something like, don't take a passkey because I can goof you up or something, but I have to go back and listen to that podcast. So anyways, after trying to figure this out for a couple 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 30 years and always dealing with Microsoft. So have you ever heard of this happening before? Well, 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 hasn't 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 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, either your Wi-Fi was fine there or the connection was there or 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 were you able to log into your computer the regular way at the end? Yeah, I was. At the end, I was able to do it. And I kept checking my, because I have a Euro Wi-Fi system in my house based on your recommendations. And so I kept looking at it, and it was lit. It wasn't offline or anything. 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've never had that happen before. Okay, well, 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 either turn off your Wi-Fi, or 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 it was just a one-time thing because your phone wasn't online. So that's one way. But I don't know if you want to do that because 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 a local login for this computer just to still get in, even if you can't get in 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 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 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 even get into my laptop. Just I was thinking that. I don't recommend that. No, you don't. I 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 travel. 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, just too much stuff on there. And, you know, you just don't want this to get into the wrong hands. Thanks for the call, Christine. Really appreciate the kind words there in Huntington Beach. 888-RICH-101. Coming up, we're going to talk with the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a You-Know-What, right here on Rich on Tech. Welcome back to Rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here, hanging out with you talking technology, 888-RICH-101-888-742-4101. Some more news trickling out of the prelude to CES 2026. Samsung is bringing Google Photos to its Samsung TVs in 2026 which is interesting and that great But hey Google let 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 them 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. 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 TVs, 2026 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 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. To be here. Thanks for having me. So was it really released in 2016? I know, man. We're coming up, it's going to be 10 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. Yep. Those were the days. Simpler days. So how has life changed in the wake of this book? So you wrote this, obviously, bestseller. 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 it looking back you know 10 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 uh something that everybody was experiencing so if you think about the early 2010s uh Facebook released its news feed I believe in 2012 um social media, Instagram came out 2011, like social media really started to take off like 2013, 2014. And, and so that's when you start getting this, like these ideas of FOMO and, uh, social media induced anxiety and all this stuff. And, and so I, I think the, just the message of the book about being, noticing what is worth caring about and what's not worth caring about. Um, I think it, it caught really the struggle of our generation very, very early. And so when I look back over those 10 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 if you've done this, but the recent surveys show that almost 50% of ChatGPT users use ChatGPT for life advice. They ask 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 starting to use AI for these sorts of questions. I've heard people gotten divorced because of it. They're like, hey, you should divorce your wife. And they're like, okay, sure, I'll do it. It's actually crazy. There's some crazy stuff that's been happening around this. And 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 ChatGPT 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, they're psychophantic. They kiss your butt. They don't challenge you. They don't disagree with you. If I go to ChatGPT and I tell it that I'm the queen of England and I should conquer the world, it's probably not going to push back. It's probably just going to start helping me come up with whatever. 100%. My wife and I joke about this all the time. It's like any idea you have, oh, that's a great idea. Oh, I just thought I was going to mix vinegar and whatever. It doesn't even matter. It's like, yes, this is great. It's like, okay, can I get a real independent perspective here? Okay, so we know the problem. That's the problem. These things are just kissing up to everyone. Yeah, and the issue is that ultimately these AI models, they're designed to be assistants. 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 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 you 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 10 years and we just said screw it 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 ChatGPT for like everything you know questions answers what does Purpose do differently like what is it what does it bring to the table that Chachibut heat 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 10 pounds, you know, Chachibut will, will give you like a diet plan and a workout routine. Purpose will say, why do you want to lose 10 pounds? What is it about the 10 pounds that you think is going to make you happy? Right. 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 ChatGPT knows that you're probably your mother's name and the city you grew up in. It also knows what TV stand you bought last month or 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 understands that it won't get fixated on some random detail of your life and start over-indexing on the advice that it gives. And then the last thing that we've really focused on is just personality. I've been writing in this space for 20 years. I've been very successful 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 like 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.app if you want to see what we're talking about here, purpose.app. So would you consider this therapy? Is it a journal? Is it something in between? Like, who do you think needs this and why? We're definitely not going after therapy We actually consciously chose to kind of Stay out of the therapy world for a couple 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 want to be making these Grand tests on people who are very psychologically vulnerable I think that the technology really just needs to be worked on quite a bit more before we put it in these high-stakes 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 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. Um, it, it's basically problems that normal, well-functioning adults, everyday people, um, struggle with. Um, 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, purpose is, if, is trained to tell you to go seek a professional. Interesting. So, um, would you, is it almost, it's not really life coach or it almost is like life coaching, but you don't want to, I, you don't want to frame it in these things. It's more of like a helpful app. Yeah, 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 get people who, 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 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 $20 a month or $150 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 signal to noise ratio and you're going to get it much faster. I always encourage people, just download it, try it for like 20 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 let us know what you think. They're playing me off. Purpose.app, Mark Manson. Thanks so much for joining me today. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Rich. All right. Purpose.app. Hey, you heard him. Download it. Try it. See what you think. Get some life-changing insights. 888-RICH-101, 888-742-4101. Welcome back to Rich on Tech. Rich DeMiro here hanging out with you talking technology. Technology, 888-742-4101. The website for the show is richontech.tv. If you're going there to grab that app we were just talking about, Purpose, I was able to find the official TurboTax letter from, let's see, who was it? The vice president of TurboTax that talked about their decision to not support Windows 10. 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, richontech.tv. Again, the whole TurboTax, the new TurboTax software is not going to work on a Windows 10 computer this year. So if you didn't upgrade or you're not using Windows 11, you're not going to be able to run that. You've got to use the online software. Let's go to Vivian. And Menifee, you're on with Rich. Yes, I enjoy listening to your show on Saturday. But I have a very serious problem with my email. It's an email I don't like. and it seems like it's a phishing one because it has all these giggles on it, you know, where you can't read nothing. And every time I try to delete it, it comes back. So you're trying to get rid of this. So you're getting a phishing email and you're deleting it and it's coming back. Is it the same exact sender or is it different senders? It's the same sender. Okay, same sender. 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 block email sender. And 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're using Gmail, 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, we 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 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 a 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 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 plus 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 not get their emails once you're done. But the phishing emails are different because 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're 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, you know, sent to 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, it 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. He 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 on my website, richontech.tv. 888-RICH-101, 888-742-4101. Back after this. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. Black America is at a breaking point. Riding and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. It's Emily Simpson and Shane Simpson from the Legally Brunette podcast. Each week, we're bringing you true crime through a legal lens. Whether you want all the facts on the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie or you still need to wrap your head around the ditty verdict, we're breaking it all down step by step. And we're not just lawyers. We're also husband and wife. It makes for some pretty entertaining episodes. Listen to Legally Brunette on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea. In 1995, my neighbor, Anna Trainor, disappeared from a commune. It was hard to wrap your head around. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. No, I am not your guru. And back then, I lied to my parents, I lied to police, I lied to everybody. There were years right where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can, to try to find out what actually happened. Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of bitches to come around here and my wife. Boom, boom. This is The Red Weather. Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. The guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's? Played poker with Harry Truman. And had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, before writing a hit James Bond film. How did The Secret Agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? and what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids. The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The more you listen to your kids, the closer you'll be. So we asked kids, what do you want your parents to hear? I feel sometimes that I'm not listened to. I would just want you to listen to me more often and evaluate situations with me and lead me towards success. Listening is a form of love. Find resources to help you support your kids and their emotional well-being at SoundItOutTogether.org. That's SoundItOutTogether.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council and Pivotal. Welcome back to Rich on Tech. Rich Camero here hanging out with you talking technology. 888-RICH-101, 888-742-4101. The website for the show is richontech.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, richontech.tv. Sign up for the newsletter. It's right there. Follow me on Instagram, at richontech. 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, 888-RICH-101-888-742-4101. Also, at the website, you can email me. Just go to richontech.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 mailbag, 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 going to come out with a $200 smartphone. phone. It's called the Galaxy A17 5G, affordable 5G smartphone, big screen, 6.7 inch AMOLED display. It's got a smooth refresh rate, 90 hertz, which is not the highest, but it's not the lowest. So that's good. It's a good middle ground. So good for scrolling, good for video. It's got a 50 megapixel camera with better low light photos than a lot of other budget phones, apparently, according to Samsung. I haven't tested this personally yet. Battery is 5,000 milliamp hours. That's huge. It'll recharge 50% in 30 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 200 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 $1,000 phone. Some people just want a good phone for a couple hundred dollars. This is something that you can 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 $100 unlocked on Amazon, and guess what? It's going to be terrible. It's going to be bloatware city. The screen's not going to be good. The camera is going to be all cloudy and nasty. So I love that these companies, and I include Apple in 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 A17 5G and come out with it at $200. 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 or out of reach for a lot of people. So that's coming out on January 7th. 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 disks. Okay. Because they're obsolete now. Where can I go? Because I have certain family photos in there and certain documents that I want to transfer to my computer. So do you know where I can go to have that done? Because I don't have any more, a way, I don't know a way how to, because they're so obsolete. What kind of disks are we talking? Are we talking like a five and a quarter inch floppy or three and a half inch? 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... No, they're small. Okay, so this is... They were used like in the 70s up to the late 90s. Okay, so it's the smaller ones, but they're hard shell kind of? Like they're not flexible. No, they're not flexible and they're small square. Got it. Okay, so that's a three and a half inch floppy disc. 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 Mac Air. 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 $20. What do you call it? Floppy disk drive? Yeah, so look on Amazon for something. look for a 3.5-inch USB floppy disk drive. Or you just say, just take, here, let me see if I type in 3.5-inch USB disk drive. Let me see if that brings it up. I would also need, what do you call that, a cable, right, to hook it up. Yeah, 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 comes with a USB-A, but it looks like it comes with a connector. So you basically, and the beauty of Amazon is that you can try this, put your disk in there. I can't guarantee that your computer is going to read this disk, but if it does, you just copy these over to a cloud drive. or, you know, 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 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. I'm sorry, V-E-R-T. Yeah, 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 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, even if it sees it but it can't open it, just copy them over to 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 JPEG, or if it's a document, you know, can convert them into a Word doc or 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 3.5, 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 still anyone around. Well, if you're in Los Angeles, there's a lot of people that can do this. So if you do like a data recovery or something like that, a specialist, they should have a computer that they can use to get these things. And if they don't, they'll know how to do it at least. Now, of course, you're going to have to pay someone to do that, which is not ideal because you can do all this yourself. Hopefully you know the modern computers these days they don have any of these connectors You know we used to have a floppy drive We used to have a DVD drive a CD drive None of that stuff is on today most of the laptops for sure Some of the desktops have them but it just getting rarer and rarer because everything's done with the cloud. And 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. Even that 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? It's better for security on the pro side. On the flip side, it's better for their business, because guess what? Now you've got to use their software to transfer things to your phone. You've got to store stuff in their cloud, and it's just one less way for you to open up the possibilities on this phone with a connector cable. It's just one less thing to break. 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 familiar with Shutterfly? Yeah, I personally wouldn't recommend Shutterfly. I mean, nothing against Shutterfly. It's fine, but 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 used them in a while. 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 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. Dropbox, OneDrive. I mean, there's so many ways to do this, Melissa. But the main thing is get those things off the disks, 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 mean, I think that a lot of the – 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 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 just giving you what I like. I'm good. 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 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 just telling you to try to get it into the cloud just for safekeeping. Right. Right. But do as you like. One more quick question. Hold on. We're going to have to take it off the air. Hang on, hang on, because I've got to go to break. 888-RICH-101, 888-742-4101. The website, richontech.tv. I'll link up that floppy disk reader, richontech.tv. Welcome back to Rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here, hanging out with you talking technology. at 888-RICH-101-888-742-4101. 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 and intelligent I used to be. They're just coming up in this world. I'm, like, coming down. Quick question. What was the name of the website you mentioned a few weeks ago for getting discounts on shopping sites? It was Simply Codes, simplycodes.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 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 going to find them, guaranteed. I don't know what the secret sauce is. 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 plug something in. I don't have something to plug into here right now. I mean, I do, but it's, well, let me see. 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. Yeah, I do. So I'm going to 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 different. Everything's there. It's just, 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 got to be. Okay, hold on, hold on. I'm looking at utilities. Hold on. Let's see utilities. Oh, 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 mean, I know you can import into the Files app, like copy things over, but I've got to look to see how to do that. But in general, a couple ways to get photos from your computer to your iPhone. Number one, if you have a Mac computer, just airdrop them. They'll go right into the Photos app. You can 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 wireless options. If you have a cross-platform, like if you have a Windows computer, you can use the app called LocalSend. 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 used this today. This is basically like an airdrop, 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 drag and drop or your iPad. So if you've been struggling, you've got an e-book or something, a lot of this 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 app is like it's in my toolkit, and I just love it. Walter Pro, W-A-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. It 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 so – it's like 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 see. One more before we get to the break here. Darren says, hey, Rich, is the website missingmoney.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 do 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 just links to them but yes it is legit you just have to decide if the money is worth it 888-RICH-101 richontech.tv more after this welcome back to Rich on Tech Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you talking technology. 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, 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 26, it seems like it's changed. So 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. 888-RICH-101, 888-742-4101, the website richontech.tv. It's updated with everything that we've mentioned so far. My next guest is someone who I interviewed for KTLA, a story about EXIF data, metadata on your phone. uh ramish srinivasan is a ucla professor and director of the uc digital cultures lab uh ramish 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 is a long time coming we're uh 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. Yeah. But let me just ask you, it's 2026. 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 and 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 these forces that make many people feel insecure, not sure if they can trust what they see or who they're engaging with online, these forces are all built upon the collection, the aggregation, The aggregation and the retention of our lives, our intimate personal lives. And if you just think about it, even like social media itself, I don't really go onto social media to see what Mark Zuckerberg is up to. 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. It was 10 years ago. Oh, wow. Yeah. All these tech bros bulk up. Right? Or I go onto social media, maybe if I'm voyeuristic, to see what an ex-girlfriend is up to. That's why I go on 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 in the u.s at least the the company is king right like the the tech companies are the ones who are writing the rules um 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 these these tech companies fight it of course they don't want any rules around what they do, right? Is that fair to say? Absolutely. We had a woman, a caller, who I recommended Google Photos to her, and she said, I don't want to put my stuff in Google. 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 person to say that. It's all built on terms of service that we all sign on to, or we just hit a checkbox on that are totally designed to be unintelligible, meaning like they're not just legal speak, but it's like extremely impossible to understand it. And the default, 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 is data collection about everything and anything. Let me just give you an example. It's not just on a platform, Rich. It's, as I said, the aggregation of data. So an example I like to always tell people or 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 parent company. But it's another for that, you know, we're on Instagram. I'm always having a good time. I'm just too cool for school. So what if that data was aggregated with my 7-Eleven data going there last night at midnight and buying 40s 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-all 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 have taken over everything and anything, monetizing our data with these little gremlins in the middle that we call, I'm just joking about that, which we call algorithms. But it's true. What we see and 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, Richard, like brothers from another mother, same demographic, same 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. That's why at scale we get fragmented and polarized. This is, I talk about this all the time. We used to have shared values in this world, by the way, and country. Yes. And we also used to all watch the same thing. 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? Yeah. 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 sitting there, you watch one video about something, and now you're suddenly seeing 1,000 videos about an eating disorder or something like that. It's never hardcore enough, you know, for these platforms. It just makes you more and more and more hardcore because it's predicting, it's 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. 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. 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 hound, so to speak. So this is why we are being fragmented, because if you actually look at Americans or Californians or Angelenos like us, we have remarkable, actually, agreements in a lot of different things. If you just polled this country 70%, there's widespread consensus on many issues politically, economically, if you just do a poll outside of this category of political party or what have you. 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 50, now 56 years ago, that we paid for U.S. 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, his tech CEO, Rich, that, you know, that I know we're doing this audio, let's say we even video that an AI could do this interview for me within six months to one year. Oh, wow. I could just do whatever I want and send my AI to do that. Right. Can you believe that? I do believe it. It's wild because these things have taken on a life of their own, and they absorb so much information quickly and regurgitate it that it's unlike anything we've ever seen before. Real quick, we've got to run in a minute, but what's the solution? You've talked about this idea of a more democratic Internet. What do you think? I mean, what's the solution here? Do we have one? It involves 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 have, 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, you know, divulging the source code. So the cool thing about this all is as fun as engineering is, 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 interest rather than the very, very, very few pitted against the rest of us. And that just creates division, and that's what we need to change right now in this country, I believe. Agreed. Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, thanks so much for joining me today. professor at UCLA. I'll put a link to all of his books and website and podcasts online, richontech.tv. Coming up. Thank you, Rich. Yeah, thank you. We are going to open up the feedback to hear from you. Coming up next on Rich on Tech. Welcome back to Rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you. We're going to get to the feedback. I want to share my in-flight texting hack that I used on my last flight, which I cannot take credit for this. Android Authority clued me into this last year. And I did it last year, and I might have mentioned it, but I love it because it's so great. If you're on the plane, and you've got an Android phone, and 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 is giving you free texting, 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 cringeworthy. Let's put it that way. Anyway, yeah, it's such a, I'll link up the article in the show notes, but it's such a cool way to kind of hack the system. And it's great. The other thing, this is 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 is another thing where you can basically share your Wi-Fi. If you log into a Wi-Fi network, you want to share it with your friends. I know people do this on a plane as well. You don't need a 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 a watch it consumer alert. I paid what looked like a simple $5 fee on a website to get help with an old laptop issue. I only needed a quick answer. What I didn't realize is that the $5 question quietly signed me up for a $65 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 it would 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 99 cents for a one-week trial or 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. And 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 27th. At least give us a best of. You're slacking, Rich. Well, 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 slack. It's like, I got to 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 NAPS2, not another PDF scanner. It's open source. It's free. It works on Mac Windows and is compatible with most scanners like Canon Brother HP, built-in scanning, OCR, searchable PDFs. It's great, NAPS2.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 $39 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 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 $10 a month, $60 a month. 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. 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 work 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, 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 10 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 11 a.m. They're on demand anytime. Let's see. Did you say one minute or did 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 mention on my website just go to richontech.tv you can find me on social media at richontech this is the best time to follow me on Instagram because guess what I'm going to be flooding you with content from CES 2026 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 2026. 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 Rich DeMuro. I will talk to you real soon. You know Roald Dahl. He fought up Willy Wonka and the BFG. But did you know he was a spy? In the new podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, I'll tell you that story and much, much more. What? You probably won't believe it either. Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. I was a spy. Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. It's Emily Simpson and Shane Simpson from the Legally Brunette podcast. Each week, we're bringing you true crime through a legal lens. Whether you want all the facts on the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie or you still need to wrap your head around the ditty verdict, we're breaking it all down step by step. And we're not just lawyers. We're also husband and wife. It makes for some pretty entertaining episodes. Listen to Legally Brunette on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The more you listen to your kids, the closer you'll be. So we asked kids, what do you want your parents to hear? I feel sometimes that I'm not listened to. I would just want you to listen to me more often and evaluate situations with me and lead me towards success. Listening is a form of love. Find resources to help you support your kids and their emotional well-being at SoundItOutTogether.org. That's SoundItOutTogether.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council and Pivotal. Saturday, May 2nd, country's biggest stars will be in Austin, Texas. At our 2026 iHeart Country Festival presented by Capital One. See Kane Brown. Parker McCollum. Riley Green. Shabuzi. Dylan Scott Russell Dickerson Gretchen Wilson Chase Matthew Lauren Alaina Tickets are on sale now. Get yours before they sell out at Ticketmaster.com This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.