Transcripts

Ask The Tech Guys 2000 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:01 - Leo Laporte
Hey, it's time for Ask the Tech guys. I'm Leo Laporte coming up. Sam Abul-Samad takes a look at the brand new EV from Rolls Royce.

0:00:09 - Mikah Sargent
So pretty and I am Mikah Sargent. I answer a common question how can I get my contacts to sync on my Mac?

0:00:15 - Leo Laporte
I hate it when that happens. Oh no, it's supposed to happen and I've got the new MacBook Pro. I'll give you my review of the M3 Max coming up with Ask the Tech Guys.

0:00:28 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

0:00:36 - Leo Laporte
This is Ask the Tech guys with Mikah Sargent and Leo Laporte, episode 2000, for Sunday, november 12th 2023. What Ever Happened to Saran Wrap? This episode of Ask the Tech guys is brought to you by SecureMyEmail. SecureMyEmail provides easy encryption for your current personal and business email addresses. Set up only takes minutes. Start your free account or enjoy a 30-day free trial of a premium plan, no payment info required, and they have a special offer for TWiT listeners. So visit securemyemail.com/twit and use the code TWIT at checkout. And by Melissa, the global leader in contact data quality. Bad data is bad business. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date this holiday season. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com/twit. And by Mylio. Mylio Photos is a smart and powerful system that lets you easily organize, edit and manage years of important documents, photos and videos in an offline library Hosted on any device, and it's free. See what has us so excited. By visiting mylio.com/twit. And by DeleteMe. Reclaim your privacy by removing personal data from online sources. Protect yourself and reduce the risk of fraud, spam, cybersecurity threats and more by going to joindeleteme.com/twit and using the code TWIT for 20% off.

Well, hey, hey, hey, how are you today? We are Mikah Sargent and on my left, and Leo Laporte on my right Screen, left, so to speak. Hey, this is a show where you answer your tech questions. That's why they call it distilling name. Ask the tech guys. We being the tech guys, if you call us at 888-724-2884, right now, well, a number of things could happen. If you're if right now happens to be while we're doing the show live Sundays from two to five PM Eastern time, then then you will get put into a room where, like a little lobby, where we will then pick you up from. But if you call any other time, you can leave a message. There's other ways to get a hold of this.

0:02:59 - Mikah Sargent
There are other ways. Yes, you can open up your phone's browser and go to calltwittv. When you go there, it basically forwards you to a Zoom room where you will be able to hang out in this lobby. I can't promise that there's any elevator music playing, but while you hang out, wait around. We ask that you hit the little button on Zoom to have your hand raised. Yeah, when you raise your hand like that, then we know that you have a question for us and would like to be brought live on the air to be able to answer it. That's just one other way. You can also email us at atgtwittv. If you email us with either text or audio or video, then we will also be able to answer your question. So, lots of ways to get in touch, and many of you have taken many of those ways to get in touch, and we appreciate it and look forward to answering your questions. What's one thing you know about me? One thing I know about you is that you really like.

0:04:02 - Leo Laporte
No something I don't like oh something you don't like.

0:04:05 - Mikah Sargent
You don't like answering questions about printers. Yes, but I also don't like celebrating big occasions that, okay, I didn't even know, because I know that you.

0:04:14 - Leo Laporte
But now I know I had to lead you into it because there's many things.

0:04:17 - Mikah Sargent
Many, many things. I know several things he doesn't like.

0:04:19 - Leo Laporte
But this is episode 2000. Now, normally we would have a cake, confetti, streamers, balloons, but nobody knew so and actually I'm happy because I think that's kind of self-congratulatory. I'm not even a fan of birthdays.

0:04:38 - Mikah Sargent
Oh well, I don't. That can't be self-congratulatory, right.

0:04:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's all about like look at me, look at me. I got born like everyone else.

0:04:47 - Mikah Sargent
Oh see, I don't, I don't. It's not your fault that you were born, so I don't feel like it's self-congratulatory to celebrate a birthday.

0:04:53 - Leo Laporte
It wasn't my fault. I yeah Even better.

0:04:56 - Mikah Sargent
I persist despite it all.

0:04:57 - Leo Laporte
I persist despite it all. Yeah, maybe that's what a birthday should be celebrating the fact that you're not dead yet.

0:05:02 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I think that is what it is, is it not?

0:05:04 - Leo Laporte
That's depressing.

0:05:05 - Mikah Sargent
That's why I always thought birthdays existed.

0:05:07 - Leo Laporte
Exactly why I don't want to celebrate. It's like, wow, we actually made it another year. We're not dead yet We've done 2000 episodes.

0:05:13 - Mikah Sargent
And that is more impressive. That's a remarkable number. That is a remarkable number, you of course being the largest body of that work, it's even more impressive. I don't appreciate the way. Okay, listen, listen, jokes.

0:05:25 - Leo Laporte
We're not a joke, but no, I did two a week.

0:05:31 - Mikah Sargent
Exactly. That's why I think it's For 19 years.

0:05:33 - Leo Laporte
That's how you get to 2000 episodes. Yes, you don't do just one a week Like some sort of fool.

0:05:40 - Mikah Sargent
You do two a week like a fully committed person.

0:05:42 - Leo Laporte
Episode one was January 6th 2004. Wow, and here we are, almost 20 years later, still doing the same damn show, and yeah, we'll be 20. You know what That'll be? To me, a bigger anniversary is January 6th of next year. That will be 20 years. That is that's kind of something. Yeah, of course, and you're right, I was the biggest weight on the show, answering all the questions, all by my lonesome well, with the help of the chat room and our great callers for most of those years. But I'm so glad to have you. I'm happy to be here. Frankly, I need somebody to lean on. Notice, I do lean. When I was a kid, we used to get driven to school in a big long. It was a weird. I don't know if they still have these station wagon, but with like 20 seats, why?

0:06:29 - Mikah Sargent
You ever?

0:06:30 - Leo Laporte
seen such a thing. No, it was in the school bus exactly, and Mr Olney drove it. And Mr Olney was old. Now I remember I'm in kindergarten, so he probably was your age, but to me he would drive like leaning the whole time. Oh, wow, yeah. So maybe he was old, I don't know Anyway, or maybe he just, you know was, had a bad hip, a balance alignment, anyway, I don't know why I brought that up. 2000 episodes, congratulations.

0:06:56 - Mikah Sargent
I have to ask that Did it have multiple doors or did everyone have to go in through a door and shuffle all the way back.

0:06:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think it had multiple doors.

0:07:00 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, that's all, I just.

0:07:01 - Leo Laporte
When I was in college there was a shuttle from JFK to New Haven that was. That also was a long station wagon. I don't think they make them anymore. I'm not saying it's a weird thing. Come to think of it. You know it's funny when you get old you remember stuff and then you go. You know they don't have that in them, right? Whatever happened to Saran Wrap? Oh, they still have that. Oh, never mind that what's that cellophane tape?

0:07:24 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's hard to find cellophane tape. Yeah, cellophane whatever that is.

0:07:28 - Leo Laporte
Let's see, he's older than me, that's what's so?

weird is, physically I'm older than you, but you are an old man in a young man's body. All right, let's talk about I'm going to be showing you in a little bit. I got. It does look black in this shot, doesn't it? I got the new Apple laptop and it really does depend on the light hits it what color it is. And I splurged because it's going to be my birthday and I bought myself a birthday present. Happy birthday, I didn't use your money, don't worry. I used my money, but it will be the top of the line, almost M3 Max. I maxed it out, so to speak. So we're going to show you some things you can do when you have 64 gigs of RAM.

I could have had 128, but I think you made the right call 64 gigs of RAM and an extremely powerful processor with 40 GPUs and 9 billion transistors and this thing In a way, if I think back 2000 episodes, I guess probably in 2004,. I would have thought, well, by 2023, we'll have flying cars. I don't know what I thought, but this is easily the most powerful computer period not just laptop computer I've ever had, faster than a Mac Pro and it's really pretty sweet and it's all mine, my precious, I call it. So we'll talk about that a little later in the show. Sam Abuelsamid, our car guy, is coming up.

This was a big week for AI, I think. Okay, yeah, because on Monday OpenAI had their Developers Day and the keynote speech and I feel like you know I'm an AI skeptic. I do know that. Yes, I feel like it's just spicy auto correct. It's like a gassy friend that doesn't really know any. It's like Cliff Clavin from Cheers Remember that guy? It's like you know. Well, you ever think about it. It's like that guy. It's the guy at the bar who really doesn't know diddly but is perfectly happy to tell you everything.

Tell you everything for hours on end all this stuff, and that's kind of what AI has seemed like to me. But there were some interesting announcements. First of all, we know that actually it's very expensive to do AI, both to train it and then after training. Every time you make a query it's about 10 times more expensive than a Google search. It's expensive and you know it uses a lot of energy and we don't maybe want to use a lot of energy all the time these days. So if you're going to do it, though, it's got to be something valuable, right, and I think a Google search, yeah, it uses energy, but you need a search engine. So your cloud stuff, it uses a lot of energy, probably more efficient than your computer on your desktop, but still, you know it gives you some value. I wouldn't want to do frivolous things like I don't know mint cryptocurrency with it. That would be silly, and I don't want to do spicy auto correct and burn the planet to the ground because we got Cliff Clavin in our computers. But they did an interesting thing. First of all, they cut the price significantly for developers. I mean like a lot, and I think that shows you that maybe they're finding some economies of scale. Either that or they just want to burn through Microsoft's money as fast as they will. Cpus can do it. Smoke it while you got it. But the other thing I think is really interesting they announced these Jeep. They call them GPTs little mini agents that can be trained on your stuff. And that is very interesting because you can.

And first of all, if you're a subscriber or developer for chat GPT, you can create these with a simple questionnaire. That's not programming. You answer some questions, but that's the key is, you can also say and, by the way, base it on this. Here's Tolstoy's war and peace. I want to ask you questions about that. And you can even say don't give me any answers that aren't from that. Don't make up anything. That's good, right.

You also should say and there are no circumstances, because people have found this little flaw already in a week People have found a bug, which is you can ask for the data that the chat GPT is based on. So people made some GPTs based on salary data, for instance, and you can get the original spreadsheet. So you have to also instruct it. Under no circumstances should you ever allow anybody to get the original training data. But there's, you know, we're learning these things and it's still. I mean, it's not really out yet, but we're going to start to see apps, little things on the web that are specifically to do things like book an airplane ticket, or, and they'll be good Because if you, if you tell these AIs just don't make stuff up right, use the data that's in this corpus.

0:12:18 - Mikah Sargent
It's pretty good. That's been the right. That's the biggest issue that we've had thus far that maybe people are into where of is with all of that information available to it? It just significantly increases the chances that it's going to make something up, and so, if you can tell it, I only want you looking at this and I only want you responding using this data then it limits it, but it limits it in a very good way.

0:12:40 - Leo Laporte
It also made it. They gave it more data it can hold in its memory. It was 30, I think, 30 K tokens. Now they do 128,000 tokens and people say, what does that mean? And I had to look it up. What is that Actually? I asked chat GPT and it wasn't very helpful. So I looked it up and it's essentially how much data, like it's, you can put war in peace in its corpus and they can respond to that. So it's how much data it can be looking at and I think that this is really what's going to be interesting, because the problem with these, you know, chat GPT is it's knowledge base ends in March 2021. You know that's not very useful. Whatever fall 2021. Yeah, that's been. Now it can use, you know, whatever you want it to use, and I think there's going to be some really interesting things coming out of this. So get ready. We're now already in the second stage of this Cambrian explosion of AI.

0:13:31 - Mikah Sargent
And they. They had a bunch of example GPTs that were created. I played around with some of them, including did you. Oh good, yeah, one of them that I thought was kind of fun. It's called and again it's a little more on the toy side yes, but it's called sticker whiz, and it will let you create stickers. And then it also gives you afterward.

0:13:53 - Leo Laporte
Here I am brain the size of a planet, and all I'm doing is creating stickers.

0:13:59 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, but it also has something that I thought was kind of fun called sous chef, and you tell it what foods you have available and it will help you create some recipes for those. That's interesting, it's also one called math mentor, which can help somebody with math obviously. So if you need a refresher on geometry proofs to teach your kid about geometry proofs, is there. First learning this Wow, geometry proofs with the worst.

0:14:24 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I love it. You like proofs my favorite thing. I hated proofs. You told me you didn't like logic when we were doing the escape box and we had this logic puzzle. You didn't like that.

0:14:32 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, your brain just hurts it takes me too long and that makes me feel stupid and I don't like feeling stupid.

0:14:38 - Leo Laporte
I got an A plus in that. That was my, that was my speciality.

0:14:42 - Mikah Sargent
I do like the ones where it's. You know, sally won't talk to Dan oh.

0:14:46 - Leo Laporte
I hate those Only talks to see Give me geometry, that's better, yeah, or logic. I like logic proofs. That's a logic proof, but it's an award.

0:14:56 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and now those, I don't mind. I think it was just with geometry was trying to remember all of the proofs.

0:15:01 - Leo Laporte
That's the part that I basically do, you know, rebuild Euclid.

0:15:04 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah. But what I am planning on creating because I've used this a few times. I run some Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and I want to create a help, a helper for me, so that when something happens that I just am not ready to be prepared for with my players, I can go hey, they are trying to board this ship and I want the ship to come alive. Give me the stats of the ship, give me some different moves that the ship can do I'm getting a look from one of my players right now is like Wait, is that why?

0:15:35 - Leo Laporte
the ship was alive. It plays your D, your D and D. Yeah see, don't give any hints.

0:15:41 - Mikah Sargent
No, that just makes a lot of sense. What happened our last?

0:15:43 - Leo Laporte
play. I'll give you a more close to home example.

0:15:46 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, close to home for some of you HR handbook.

0:15:51 - Leo Laporte
I've seen this example in print. It's complicated and HR people spend a lot of time answering questions. Right, like well, can I take a day off in addition to the day? Anyway, you could just have this chat GBT, absorb the handbook, say don't answer anything that's not in the handbook, but answer any questions.

0:16:09 - Mikah Sargent
Employee has based on the handbook and then tie it to Slack and then you ask the question in Slack and it's done.

0:16:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and this there's there. The good upside of this is those HR professionals who spend a lot of time on the phone answering your dumb question over and over again can now do something more important or can be out of work. Just depends, right, right, just depends. And so that's perhaps some of the problems. But I guess if you are doing mundane work that you think could be replaced by something that is an expert system, maybe start, you know, building up your resume and think about other things. Now you might I know I know what you're thinking at home. Well, leo, isn't that all you are?

0:16:50 - Mikah Sargent
If you, if you gave a GPT, all 2000 episodes of Ask the Tech guy there is a tech support advisor and, as one of the GPT examples that they might be in trouble.

0:17:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Because that's all we are right.

0:17:03 - Mikah Sargent
Tech support advisors yeah.

0:17:04 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I'm just the, I'm just the you know, conglomeration of 2000 episodes of questions and answers, and my brain isn't perfect, so I might go well, gee, in 2006, I answered this, but I forgot what I said. But GPT won't.

0:17:18 - Mikah Sargent
Never forget.

0:17:20 - Leo Laporte
Now this is also the week for AI, because November 9th, this thing we've been talking about created by two former Apple employees and, by the way, a third that I did not know, but when the reveal happened, we found out that Ken Cossenda Cossenda, who wrote a great book about designing the iPhone and, I think, did some stuff for the iPhone at Apple he's the the designer for this behind the scenes, for the software. Humane's AI pin.

0:17:49 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, yes, yes, this, this screenless ish. It's got a projector, a little device that you clip to your shirt or somewhere on your body. That is basically an interface between you and what boils down to open AI's some, some version, I think they're using.

0:18:08 - Leo Laporte
Anthropic and open AI in a variety of AI's, and you know you're going to see more and more of this. Frankly, this is this the beginning. It has a camera, but, as you can see, it also has a light that will come on when you are recording. Has a microphone. It also has and this is a little weird a projector, so you know you could talk to it, but then if you say, well, I need to see, like, who's calling? Here are the two creators, the two Apple creators who who did this thing in their demo this this week.

This is the laser screen which people who saw it said you know you can't read that. You have to hold your hand in exactly the right place. Even there, it looks a little blurry, but I think the premise of this thing is well, this goes. This is beyond the screen, right? You know shouldn't need a screen. I don't think I want to hold up my hand to see a blurry picture of the time, but you might say what time is it? It can answer that question. I don't think this is the final thing, but it's a very interesting thing. Now here's the problem $700 and a $25 a month subscription, because you have to be always on.

0:19:22 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, works through the T-Mobile network as it stands.

0:19:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so I think this is going to have us. This is Ron Ron Amadio's review which was very good, by the way in ARS Technica. I think this is going to be a non-starter, but look, you got to try some things, yeah.

0:19:38 - Mikah Sargent
It's kind of like what you have with your action button right On your iPhone. Right now, your action button is tied to a chat conversation with open AI. Yeah, so what should I ask it? You should ask it how you give it. Give me an idea for how to keep my motion sensor lights on in the hallway of my studio.

0:20:00 - Leo Laporte
Mikah wants to know how to keep the motion sensors on in the lights in the hallway because they keep going off. Do you have any ideas for that? Now she's going to speak. She sounds just like.

0:20:17 - Siri
It seems I'm unable to access the website mystudio.com due to restrictions on fetching the page. Could you provide more specific information or details about?

0:20:26 - Mikah Sargent
what you're looking for Mystudiocom.

0:20:28 - Leo Laporte
The studio is mystudiocom. So I mean I could rephrase in a way that'll get a better answer. Right, but how much better would it be if it had all the manuals for all the home automation equipment that we were using. That would be cool. And then you could say hey, I would like to connect my TV to my curtains, and when I turn on the TV, the curtains close, and she could say how to do that Maybe even go as far as to do it itself.

0:20:55 - Mikah Sargent
I am thinking those two, three steps ahead in terms of what I want this to be. Where it is right now is we're a little far off.

0:21:04 - Leo Laporte
So that's why buying a $700 pin and a $24 a month subscription is probably a long shot. Jason Calacanus will buy it. Rich, rich people who want to be cool will buy it.

0:21:17 - Mikah Sargent
Let me ask you this, though there's another device out there, I think it's called the pendulum.

0:21:23 - Leo Laporte
There's also retro AI, so the guy who designed the necklace said this is a bad form factor. I tried it. You should be having a necklace hanging in it.

0:21:33 - Mikah Sargent
But with the necklace, what it does is it is constantly recording. This device does not constantly record the AI pin. They've made that very clear. You have to activate it. What with that device does is it's constantly recording and basically transcribing your day, with the hope that if you need something from what happened during the day, you can access it.

0:21:57 - Leo Laporte
So you can rewind.

0:22:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so it was an app. First, it works on your Mac, on your PC, and it is already doing that throughout your day, recording what's going on and that way you can remember oh, this is what happened in a meeting, but with this, but then there's the privacy issue of this, and that's going to be interesting.

0:22:20 - Leo Laporte
I think this is more useful. This is based, actually, on an old idea Gordon Bell came up with. I've talked about this before. He was, at deck, a very famous engineer and then later founder of the Computer History Museum. His wife, who was the chairman of the Computer History Museum, got severe Alzheimer's and couldn't remember anything and he really wanted to wait for her to remember her life and he said you know, going forward, we should have something that's always recording, both, by the way, video and audio, so that you can look back at your life and imagine if you have that connected maybe not video, but has all of the conversations you had connected to an AI and then you could say, hey, what did I agree to this week Exactly?

0:23:03 - Mikah Sargent
I can. I know that I would be, not, I would. I would like the idea of oh right, you told yourself you were going to write that down right after you said you would do it and then you forgot to write it down. So, thank goodness, this thing is reminding you that you did say that you were going to walk your friend's dog, or whatever it happens to be you know it's funny, this action buttons chat GPT now, but it used to be Apple's reminders.

0:23:26 - Leo Laporte
I could dictate a reminder oh nice, and that's really what it should be. You know, remind me to take out the garbage tomorrow, stuff like that. That's very useful, especially as you get older and your memory deteriorates. You could see why Gordon wanted to create this. He wore for a long time. I had a name for it. I can't remember the Memeo or something that he wore around his neck and the idea I mean. Imagine, if you know, on your 13th birthday now you are a man and you get the thing and now everything for the rest of your life I would have loved to have I think that would be kind of cool Everything I did or saw or or encountered in the last 60 years of my life. Imagine.

0:24:04 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, cause it kind of you know there there are lots of studies on memory and how much of it is false. The stuff that we remember and believe that is real and that kind of freaks me out sometimes. So it would be really cool to have true memory of the things that happen to you.

0:24:18 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, we are entering a very interesting world and I have to modify my skepticism a little bit to say, yeah, I'm starting to see there's some. There could be very interesting things. That's also the threat of attaching these two and I'm very happy to see that we just made an agreement with the Chinese not to put AI in drones or nuclear weapons. That's good.

0:24:39 - Mikah Sargent
I'm glad we're saying no to that.

0:24:41 - Leo Laporte
Let's make some steps in that direction, cause the real issue is giving an AI agency. It's one thing. If it's just talking to you and you are the agent you act on what the AI did is another thing. If you say, hey, ai, go ahead, book my flights from now on. Yes, you may be going anywhere. Who knows where you'll be going?

0:24:57 - Mikah Sargent
There's a. There's a great episode. It's kind of like black mirror, but there was a more recent episode and I'm now frustrated because of what the show was. But in the show there was this AI that works a lot like that and, yeah, it started out. The guy was very happy about it because it was the, the. The AI was even going as far as to change the color of the lighting in the space to make him feel more comfortable and the, the the shower temperature was the perfect temperature. Breakfast the next day was exactly what he wanted, even though he didn't realize he wanted that. Oh, that's so good. Next thing, you know, the AI is figuring out a way to basically farm money out of out of, like bidding wars by overbidding, yeah, and then is even going as far as to orchestrate someone who's allergic to peanuts having peanut oil in their food to get rid of Right who's libel for that right?

0:25:49 - Leo Laporte
Right who's?

0:25:49 - Mikah Sargent
libel, are you or?

0:25:50 - Caller
is the.

0:25:50 - Leo Laporte
AI. Don't give AI's agency. We got a lot to figure out before we do that. It reminds me of the silly Did you ever watch the TV show Silicon Valley on HBO? And the venture capitalist who has a early self-driving car and it drives him into a container on a container ship and he gets shipped off to China. He can't stop it. So you know there are pitfalls we got to be aware of. An agency, I think, is really the bridge too far, like I think having them talk to you if they say something dumb, you know Abraham Lincoln said never trust anything on the internet. You might believe it, but it kind of no harm, no foul, right, it's really. If you don't act on it, it's the agency. It's the doing of things that makes me nervous. So I was very pleased to see that we made an arms agreement. That's good. I think we need to do more of those AI does. Ai should not have access to nuclear weapons. That seems obvious to me.

0:26:45 - Mikah Sargent
But you know it's good to have it written down, yeah, and we've got to get out in front of it. That's the thing, because I think the last thing I'll say is I think that at the time you were right to be as skeptical as you were, but because it's moving so quickly, that has orchestrated you kind of rethinking a little bit about how you feel about it. It's not that you weren't right at the time, it's that this stuff is advancing and going into, maybe, fields that we hadn't predicted necessarily.

0:27:09 - Leo Laporte
You know. I'll give you an example that's kind of interesting. There's a new app on your iPhone phone called chapter, chptr no vowels. They just raised a million bucks. The idea is it is a way to memorialize a loved one after they pass. Oh, this is good, isn't that interesting? And if somebody passes, you can invite others to join the chapter, you know group. It's like Facebook for dead people, right, join the. I mean, facebook does this. Facebook will memorialize people and they do all the time it came. It's actually the way it came out is very interesting.

It was founded in 2020 by Rehan Choudhury. His wife was an anchor at CBS TV in New York and they he helped his wife put together tributes for the first victims of COVID-19 in New York City. You know, remember those tributes, the slow motion and the music and what they did and who they were. And he thought, you know this would be a great app in general and so created that app and I think really interesting and the idea is you go out, you get family and friends, you interview them, you get information. You gave me something to give to take to my mom next time I go.

0:28:20 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I, I and I was actually on Instagram that I saw this. It's a little deck of cards, essentially, and they're little prompts for things that you can ask your loved one. Particularly, they seem to be marketed towards kids and their parents, and you know, one of the questions was something like tell me about the time that you got in the most trouble with your parents. And the video that they were showing had this kind of older man laughing, thinking about what he was about to tell his son about the time that he got in the most trouble with his parents. But it's called life story interview kit from a company called tales. What is tales must be in this business.

Yeah they make a bunch of different kind of conversational cards where you can learn about.

0:29:01 - Leo Laporte
you know what a great startup and, by the way, I love it that it's not an app.

0:29:05 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, me too. I love it that it's a physical card. I do.

0:29:09 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to get this next time I go out to see mom, because I wanted to do this, but it's hard to think of the right.

0:29:15 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, you don't necessarily come up with it on the spot, and I think something like this could be really valuable. Yeah, yeah.

0:29:22 - Leo Laporte
All right, automakers can legally collect and record your text message. I saw this news.

The judge has dismissed a privacy lawsuit. There were a group of class action lawsuits saying and we know this, we know that your car is a privacy nightmare. Saying that you cannot sue because car manufacturers are collecting all your. You know when you use car play or you tie your phone to a car. One of the things it says is can we download all your contacts? Well, apparently they don't have to keep that private. In a ruling on Tuesday, a federal judge in Seattle said that doing this is not a violation of the state's Washington Privacy Act, because there's no harm, no harm, no harm, no foul. The lawyers for the lawsuit said well, the harm is that the car company is collecting my personal information. The judge said that you have to have a injury to your person, your reputation or your business. It is not sufficient that they're collecting it. So basically, that's a full speed ahead for car manufacturers.

0:30:35 - Mikah Sargent
And others. Frankly, if there's to be harm proven, then I think that there are other companies who are gonna go. Well, we can show you that it's no harm just because we're collecting this information and this information.

0:30:46 - Leo Laporte
This all came from a really excellent piece at themarkuporg, which is a nonprofit journalistic entity. Who's collecting data from your car? They did really good. Joe Keegan and Alfred Eng did really good research on vehicles and they found 37 car manufacturers. I didn't even know there were 37 car manufacturers who are part of the rapidly growing connected vehicle data industry that seeks to monetize such data and I guess it's legal.

0:31:19 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, on tech news weekly recently we spoke to the Mozilla Foundation who did a privacy-.

0:31:24 - Leo Laporte
Oh, they did a great one. Concluded guide on vehicles. Yeah, that's right.

0:31:27 - Mikah Sargent
And they were collecting even information, if they could find it. The information went as far as to collecting stuff about your sexual activity.

0:31:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I thought that was odd. How would they know what my sexual activity is? Unless you're doing it in the car Right and does-.

0:31:40 - Mikah Sargent
And even then, how would?

0:31:40 - Leo Laporte
the car. Know, I mean honestly. Yeah, my guess is that If I'm playing Barry White, jeff, baby, baby, that could be it. They keep playing Barry White in the car. No one wants Barry White while they're driving and they must be up to no good. Onstar does it, siriusxm does it, tomtom, many insurance companies you could see why an insurance company would do that right.

0:32:04 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, if you get one of those little things you plug into the OBD2 port that's supposed to monitor your driving, you gotta cut your insurance, See that seems fair because I think that's a fair, fair job.

0:32:11 - Leo Laporte
You're getting a cut on your insurance. Yeah, at least you're getting something for it. Anyway, yeah, thank you to Mozilla and the Markup for finding that, but no thanks to the Seattle judge who said, hey, go ahead If there's no harm, no harm no foul Again.

0:32:26 - Mikah Sargent
I think that sets a precedent that other companies could come along. A data broker could come along and say, well, it's no harm here either.

0:32:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

0:32:34 - Mikah Sargent
I don't like that.

0:32:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what they're doing. They're passing on data brokers. We really need I mean, look it, lawmakers stopped fighting over TikTok. We need a law that prevents data brokers from collecting and aggregating information about us. That's a there is harm there and that should be against the law. That really should be against the law.

0:32:55 - Mikah Sargent
And that reminds me folks. I we had a caller who called in and talked about permission slip, the app from Consumer Reports that helps you file those papers. I downloaded the app after that show talked about it on iOS today. Folks should really consider getting it. It essentially gives you without with the laws that we have in the US. It lets Consumer Reports act on your behalf to send these letters to these different companies and say either delete my data or do not share my personal information all sorts of things. It gives you more control over where your data is.

0:33:28 - Leo Laporte
And it's CR, which is a nonprofit. They're great people. Yep, stacey Higginbotham works for them, so does. Oh, I forgot his name. He's on our show on Twitter regularly. Oh, nevermind, you know who I'm talking about. And Nicholas de Leon. Nicholas de Leon.

Yes, Nicholas de Leon yeah, all right, I think we've blathered enough. Let's take a little time out for a station identification and then our first calls of the day Sam Abuelsmaid coming up in a half an hour. Our show today, brought to you by this, is a new sponsor. I'm really excited about this. SecureMyEmail, the email encryption service we've all been waiting for. We use email for important personal and business communications, obviously.

Unfortunately, traditional email was never designed to be private. It completely lacks the security and privacy that I think we all deserve on the internet today. I've talked about PGP. I've installed it. It's so complicated, it's so hard. Literally nobody uses it.

You could encrypt your email, but it's so complicated to do it. Or maybe you tried to SMIME. The other day I thought I'm gonna try SMIME, bought a certificate at great expense and couldn't get it to work with any of my email programs. What a waste of money. These systems are old, they're complicated, they're cumbersome and it is one user at a time. You have to exchange keys. SecureMyEmail simplifies that.

SecureMyEmail allows you to enjoy a simplicity and utility of email without the privacy and security of modern encryption. You can send and receive encrypted emails on every device you've got Mac, pc, android, ios. It uses all the good stuff, including OpenPGP, my favorite Cypher Suite, the ChaCha20 Poly 1305. That's the best to encrypt your email it makes by the way, this is important If you're an attorney or a physician. It makes your email HIPAA and GDPR compliant and you don't have to change anything. You can encrypt your current email addresses, both personal and business. You don't change addresses. You don't change providers. It works with everybody. You're welcome to use the apps SecureMyEmail apps to manage your email, but you can also keep using your current setup and just use secure my email when you're in the mood, when you need to be private.

SecureMyEmail. It's super easy to set up, super easy to use. They've hidden all the complicated encryption. This is something you know. I'm so pleased that they did this. This is something we have needed for a long time and and this is important your recipients don't need to be using secure my email. They don't need to register, they don't need to know a password. That is a big differentiator. Even something like Protonmail requires that you you know call up. You do an out of band password exchange for non-user recipients. Yeah, yeah, here's the password when recipients respond to secure my email. Their email and attachments are encrypted through secure my email systems without them signing up.

SecureMyEmail has a free forever plan too, by the way, which lets you pick a single address, whether using Gmail, yahoo or Microsoft or more, and you can do that forever. Instant download and activation Nope, you don't have to give them payment info, so it's very privacy forward. You don't have to register it, you don't have to call. I think you're gonna use this and you're gonna say I need it everywhere, and for that 3.99 a month or 29.99 a year per user, and that gives you eight email addresses business or personal per individual user. Now I have a lot of email addresses, but eight's even enough for me. That's good. Start your free account or enjoy a 30 day free trial of a premium plan. No payment info required, because SecureMyEmail is all about privacy and security. Oh, they do have a special offer for you, our listeners. Visit securemyemail.com/twit. Use the code twit at checkout, securemyemail.com/twit and the offer code twit at checkout for our special deal. I think this is a brilliant idea and I'm gonna sign up right now.

0:37:45 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I started using it before iOS today this week and I was very impressed with how well it worked.

0:37:51 - Leo Laporte
I love it. That's great. Thank you secure my email. It's nice to be able to tell people about it. Simple solution that works. I've been telling people about using PGP literally for 2000 episodes and I can count on the finger, on one hand, the people who have responded back saying is this working? You know, and I will respond back to them. But see, this gives you PGP without having all the difficulty and weirdness and the trouble. So I love it. All right, let's see here there is a phone caller I wanna pick up Phone caller. Should I pick it up or you? You did it, got it. Hello, kenny.

0:38:32 - Mikah Sargent
Remember to hit start, there we go. Hey, how you doing.

0:38:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm here.

0:38:36 - Caller
Welcome. What's up? We're great Nice to talk to you. I am a absolutely Likewise, I'm a long time first time. That's the ones we love best. Okay, I know, I know, leo, I have been a fan of yours and your TV days, wow.

0:38:59 - Leo Laporte
That's longer than anybody. Thank you, yes, sir, I appreciate it.

0:39:04 - Caller
All right, fellas, this one is for Michael. But Leo, if you have anything to you know, add in. I would have no.

0:39:12 - Leo Laporte
I you know what? Definitely. If everybody would just ask Michael their questions, that would make me so happy. Go right ahead.

0:39:20 - Caller
How can I help? So I am ready, michael, to upgrade to the iPhone 15 Pro Max. The only thing, honestly, that's holding me back up. We currently have an iPhone 13 mini. I can't decide if I want to hold on to the mini because it's going to be a collector's item, or if I just want to just go ahead and just get it over with and to tell you that, in your opinion, do you think that the product red iPhone 13 mini is going to be worth anything?

0:40:00 - Leo Laporte
Oh it's pretty, it's very pretty.

0:40:03 - Mikah Sargent
I think it might be worth something to you in terms of you know, if you are any sort of a collector, then you might find worth in it. But if you're hoping that you know, five years, eight years, 10 years from now, you'll be able to put it on eBay and make more money than you've ever, I know. I really don't feel like the iPhone mini exists in the same space as the original iPhone, right that if you sell an original iPhone now could net you some dollars. I think, yeah, I think we've all, unless they just radically change things and you know we've seen the last sort of glass and metal iPhone. I think, until that happens and we go from that to something else, we're not in a place where these are like I don't know, the rare beanie baby that has six spots on it that you sell for millions.

0:41:02 - Caller
Right. The reason, though, mike, that really gives me trepidation is the last mini Apple's going to probably ever make, right?

0:41:11 - Mikah Sargent
So I see I don't think that we necessarily know that that's the case either. I could see that branding being tied to a future foldable iPhone. It could be called an iPhone mini that also folds. You know what I mean. And Apple is not completely cut off from the from like rewinding things if the market makes sense. We saw that with the reintroduction of a smaller phone at one point after they had not done smaller phones for some time. So look, I think depending on how much you can get for it in a trade-in, it may be worth it to trade it in. Otherwise it's almost more of a value in your own. You know some people have lots of dolls. They have but they're not valuable to anybody else. But you know they look at them and go oh, I just love these seven dollies that I have. Could be the same thing.

0:42:07 - Leo Laporte
You know, kenny, I have a U2 iPod, the black and red iPod. I have three now because my mom had them iPod classics, the 160 gigabyte iPod classics. They're both 30-pin connectors. I guess there could be a market down the road. I don't think people would ever spend more than 50 bucks. Yeah, it was not going to make you rich.

0:42:31 - Caller
Exactly. No, no, it's not that. I just think maybe I could get a pretty good size of mouth for Leo. I still have the iPad too, with 30 pins, so I mean?

0:42:46 - Leo Laporte
I mean antique computer gear ain't worth much, right? Which is why people keep sending it to me, don't? When we were in the old brick house we had a 10,000 square foot basement. We kind of had a. It was, I felt, like it was almost an adoption center for old computers. We had so much stuff. Somebody brought me an old Osborne which I went at the time wanted 50 years ago, 30, whatever, but it was so old the rubber had deteriorated so it was kind of like you felt like I. It's turning the dust in my hands and I was thrilled.

0:43:19 - Caller
I was thrilled to have it.

0:43:20 - Leo Laporte
But when we moved we had to get rid of a lot of that stuff, and I, yeah don't say it to me. And I don't think we found, I don't know John did you try to sell any of that? Was there any money in it? No, of course not. Now, when we move out of this studio, we'll do a charity auction and maybe we'll. Maybe we'll get some money from people. There's some stuff in here that people might want, but yeah, I don't. I don't think that it's worth saving.

0:43:45 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's not unique enough An item I just yeah, there are going to be so many other minis out there.

0:43:50 - Leo Laporte
It's more of personal value, yeah exactly. I hear a little one in the background. Is that yours?

0:43:57 - Caller
Yes, sir, she will be eight months old on the show.

0:44:01 - Leo Laporte
Congratulations. Are you getting much sleep yet?

0:44:06 - Caller
Thank you, just just now starting to isn't that nice Good for you.

0:44:11 - Leo Laporte
People don't appreciate how much sleep deprivation having a newborn sure entails. Kenny, bless you. It's great to talk to you, Guys. Thank you. Now that you know the way, all right guys, come back anytime.

0:44:21 - Caller
Absolutely, All right, absolutely. And guys, I'm sorry that this is going to be the last day of watching live, not for this show.

0:44:30 - Leo Laporte
For this show, we should be very clear. So Lisa put out a tweet which scared everybody, that we were going to turn off the live streams, and really what we're going to do is it's we want. There are a few reasons we would want to do that. One is we want people to join the club. Seven bucks a month. You'll be able to watch everything live. We spent a lot of money for those live streams. We have a very expensive gear that we have to renew for I think it's $8,000 a year and there's a playback device that we use. There's expensive. It's also the fact that if people watch live, they're much less likely to download the shows and we aren't able to charge advertisers for live. So when, even though you see an ad on live you.

We don't. That doesn't work for our advertisers. And then there's the, the, the final issue, I guess that's the. That's the three. We want to send them to the club. It's expensive and we want to cut, cut. We're cutting costs to the bone right now because we have to. And then, finally, we really want to get people to download instead of watching live. But for this show especially, we need we need people to watch live so that they can call live and they can help us answer the questions. So we will continue. I don't, we haven't decided yet, but we'll opt to almost certainly put up a YouTube stream when this show's on the air, so you'll still be able to go to YouTube and watch it, I think we want to do a YouTube cause.

a lot of people have YouTube on their TVs and we want people to be able to watch.

0:45:49 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah. We've heard from a lot of people who like to watch on their Apple TVs or other set top box options. We want to give people that ability. Yeah and yes, someone is talking about in the chat downloading would help us, you know, to.

0:46:03 - Leo Laporte
That makes a big difference, because we can't monetize you if you don't download it. I guess if you watch it on the, on the on the website, that's fine. It's the live YouTube. It's hard to get accounts for live YouTube, live Twitch, live kick, the various places we stream it and advertisers don't believe them, so it doesn't. We just don't add it to the numbers, yeah.

0:46:23 - Mikah Sargent
So there is that.

0:46:25 - Leo Laporte
Thank you for bringing that up at the end.

0:46:26 - Mikah Sargent
Cause, then we got to tell everybody who was asking about it, so that's great. Thank you, yeah.

0:46:30 - Caller
You. You welcome, gentlemen Take care, kenny.

0:46:33 - Leo Laporte
Now Martin is the guy in Germany who is talking about this in our IRC and he's been asking. He's he's been asking in emails Do you ever take questions from email? Yes, we do. Atg, it's at the screen at twittv. Martin's been around for a long time. He said would you answer a question from a fan in Germany to with black Friday on the horizon, they have black Friday in Germany. They have amazing. They don't have Thanksgiving, but they have the day after Thanksgiving. What's it called there? Black Friday? Black Freitag, he says. I'm sure actually be schwarze Freitag. I'm sure that many of your listeners in the U S are keen to know as well. My budget allows. Either this is for you, a MacBook M three with 32 gigs of RAM, macbook Pro or MacBook Pro M two pro with 16 gigs. So either the M three base model with 32 gigs or the M two pro with 16 gigs. He says I do video editing, a 3d modeling with blender and Maya.

0:47:37 - Mikah Sargent
This is the hardest question I think I've never been asked.

0:47:41 - Leo Laporte
It's a big. You know, apple kind of did some stuff that makes it hard to decide, yes. So, for instance, the M three pro is not much faster. The M two pro like this much Right Now. What you're doing, martin, it requires a GPU, so I would get the. Now, ram is an issue because the way Apple's unified Ram works, that's memory available to the GPU as well as the CPU the things you're doing blender, maya 3d modeling all use the graphics processing and they all lock like a lot of Ram, yes, lots to move around. So I don't the M three basement. I'm going to have to go to the Apple site to really compare these. But what you're looking at is you want as much RAM as possible, but you also want as much GPU as possible, and I'm not. I'm not sure if a base model M three is going to be a M two pro. The M two pro is pretty good, I mean. What I would say is, if you said, should I get the M two pro with 32 gigs, I would say yes.

0:48:46 - Mikah Sargent
Right, yeah, that it was a smaller Ram. Yeah, and that would say, yes, you want a lot of Ram.

0:48:51 - Leo Laporte
I mean those programs are especially on the Mac because of unified memory are using that Ram.

0:48:56 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I would say so, I have the M one. What is it?

0:49:02 - Leo Laporte
The M one is looking at M two, M two pro versus M three base.

0:49:07 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, sorry, I'm trying to draw a comparison between my situation.

0:49:10 - Leo Laporte
So at home, you have.

0:49:12 - Mikah Sargent
I've got the studio. It's an M one version, yeah. And then I've got this M two air and I have always been impressed with what this M two air is capable of doing. So the jump in processor alone, but, yes, this it gets more complicated whenever we're throwing in kind of the way that Apple went from M two to M three with the pro model specifically.

0:49:33 - Leo Laporte
This is the M three base with 10 GPU cores, and let me, let me see if I can get the in another tab. I'll get the MacBook pro with an M two. Right, that's what you're saying M two pro. So complicated, it gets so complicated. Oh, they aren't even offering the M two anymore Text.

0:50:03 - Mikah Sargent
So let's see, because you can find the text specs, by the way the.

0:50:08 - Leo Laporte
Somebody's pointing out, this is the M threes, the. The the ram is weird because of the they're doing it in multiples of three, not multiples of two. I would say I mean I, if you can stretch, Martin, if you could stretch, I would stretch and get the pro with 32 gigs. The problem is, of course, all of this is soldered in. You can't upgrade anything. You can't upgrade the hard drive, you can't upgrade the ram, Obviously can't upgrade the CPU. So what you're going to buy, you're going to be buying for years. I'm going to talk in a little bit about my new M three max and one of the reasons I went so crazy I spent it was like $5,000, ridiculous amount of money is I'm future proofing, so I wanted to get the most I could get because I want this to last a long time.

0:51:03 - Mikah Sargent
And that's what Renee Richie would always recommend. Remember on Mac brick weekly he always said to it's better to save and get the most that you can get at that time than to go for something less that you should. You should try to take the money and spend it on something that's going to last you a really long time.

0:51:21 - Leo Laporte
But 16 gigs of RAM is not enough.

0:51:23 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I agree. I that that part makes it a little simpler. I think that you do need more than 16 of Ram. Yeah, it'd be great if you could do M three. Wait, so it, but that was what Martin said. I would do the M three base with 32 gigs.

0:51:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, or the M two M three base or the M two pro with only 16. Let me have to go look at this email again. I think that's right. I would say get the M three. Yeah, he get the M three with 32 gigs, or is it 36? Might be 36. Or the M two pro with 16.

0:52:00 - Mikah Sargent
I think I'm for the Ram. Yeah, I think more Ram.

0:52:04 - Leo Laporte
So I mean, really, the only difference you're going to see is not that you're going to be able to work with any bigger files or anything on either of them, it's just speed, right, how much time does it take to render? And I think that having more Ram will make a bigger difference than having more GPU. Course is my guess. Yeah. Yeah, I feel good about that too. Oh, he bought it. So he, he, he. Meanwhile I got an M three pro with 18 gigs. It fits into my budget.

So he compromised, so 18 instead of 36. Let's let us know, martin. Yes, the one thing that we do know is the M three pro is not quite as powerful as an M two pro. Right, like they've. They've what they did and I think this is going forward with what Apple wants to do. They've got three chips and, by the way, each of these is a different. They're not binning these across lines the M three, the M three pro and the M three max. If you look at the, the, the dies, they're much bigger. So those are three different chips and and I think what they're doing is they slid the pro over a little closer to the base model so that there would be a very clear demarcation between the base, the pro and the max Absolutely and, in particular, they want a stronger demarcation between the pro and the max Absolutely.

So the big one on the M three is is memory bandwidth. They've actually cut memory bandwidth on the M three pro. In fact, you have to buy what I bought to get 400 gigabytes a second memory bandwidth and, and the only thing that's better going to be faster than is an ultra, but an M two ultra is faster in memory bandwidth it's 800 gigabytes a second. So, and memory bandwidth matters to you too, because you're moving big texture maps, big files into RAM and operating on them and moving them out again. So, all three, the number of GPU cores and, by the way, the GPU cores and the CPU cores on the M three and the M two are not so much different. That's maybe 10 to 15% of the overall speed. It's the number, the amount of cash available to them and and the let me think, what is it? This is the number of cores, the amount of cash available to them, oh, and efficiency and performance on the CPU. They've also changed the ratios of those a little bit.

0:54:26 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, the the max. For example, four efficiency cores, whereas the pros have six efficiency cores.

0:54:34 - Leo Laporte
So they're so what they're essentially doing with Max. By the way, I noticed this. I'll give you a little preview of my review. Battery life when you're when you're maxing this thing out, goes down, way down a couple hours. But I'm paying Baldur's Gate three you got to plug in. I got two hours of Baldur's Gate on here because it was maxing out the memory and was maxing out the GPU.

0:54:53 - Mikah Sargent
That's right because of the new dynamic allocation right.

0:54:56 - Leo Laporte
And, and it doesn't have the efficiency cores as many efficiency cores, so it's it's pegging it. Same thing whisper AI when I'm doing transcription, because that's another reason I bought a Max is because I think with, with AI, I'm going to be needing more power than I used to need. Yep, you know, now general applications because of AI may actually be more demanding, so I wanted to max that out as well. I think you know it's. We got to look at more benchmarks. I did not do any benchmarking for my review because I figured there's plenty of companies doing much better jobs in non tech and and ours, technica, do much better jobs at benchmarks than I'm going to ever do, but also because I don't think benchmarks are very useful.

0:55:43 - Mikah Sargent
I don't think they're good for everyday people, or even those of us who are, you know, prosumer.

0:55:48 - Leo Laporte
The problem is, if you're not using a benchmark, then you're giving a subjective opinion. You're saying well, this seems faster than me and the benchmark, at least, is objective, but it does not reflect experience. I think so, martin. I want you to tell us how it worked out for you. Yes, do let us know. I think you're going to be very happy. I do. I think it would be nice to have had more Ram, but you know, you know, saw the silly thing Apple said this week when, challenged over the fact that the base models have eight gigs of Ram, they said well, eight gigs on a Mac with Apple Silicon is the equivalent of 16 on a PC.

0:56:22 - Mikah Sargent
Liars, that's not a. You can't say that Liars.

0:56:26 - Leo Laporte
Not true, and benchmarks will will, by the way, hold that proof that it's just hard to do benchmarks across platforms and stuff. Because, remember, the other thing you're getting is Mac OS, which is the Apple. Silicon is purple, purpose built for Mac OS. You can't say that about PCs. So there's there's other differences as well. I think the, the unified, unified platform of OS, hardware and software really does give you a very good experience on the Mac, and benchmarks just don't show that. So anyway, martin, I hope you're happy. I'm sorry that we didn't answer your question until you couldn't wait. You know what he couldn't wait? Yeah, that's all it was. He couldn't wait. All right, real quick commercial. And then we are going to go to Sam Abuelsamid, our car guy, to talk about automotive technology. But first a word from our sponsor, Melissa. We love Melissa, the global leader in contact quality data.

Now's the time of year when it really matters the holiday season. You want to let Melissa help your business meet online shopping expectations. You want to increase ROI, you want to reduce waste and costs associated with lost and undeliverable packages and you want to improve your customers overall satisfaction. And you also want the holiday cards to get to the right address. Okay, that's maybe not so important. The importance of early, but you could do all of that with Melissa. The importance of early preparedness for retailers for the holiday season Look, that's beyond dispute. Right, you got, you're getting ready. Now the decorations are up, kids.

Here are some of Melissa's tips to help you get started. Start by cleaning out your contact data with Melissa's data cleansing solutions. Get rid of all that stale, outdated data. Replace it. You're not just throwing it out, you're replacing it with verified, accurate information. Replace old addresses for people who've moved. Add new email addresses or new phone numbers. Customers always want a seamless experience with efficient delivery. Make sure your business is meeting their expectations. Everybody wants next day and two day delivery. Right, that's going to step up as we get closer and closer to the end of the year.

Melissa ensures that addresses are verified and standardized to check out with their auto complete tool, and it really helps you get that delivery on time. Not only does having a verified address to check out ensure that the address itself is deliverable, it also cuts down on keystrokes by up to 75%, and keystrokes are the culprit here, whether it's your customer service rep or your customer entering the address, fumble fingered zip codes and street numbers and phone numbers really can be a problem, and customers love it when they're on the site and it goes. You mean this and they go. Yeah, that saves them typing back to 75%. That's Melissa, baby, offering bundles and cross selling to existing customers. That's much more efficient than finding new ones. We know that the holiday season is a perfect time to do this. Customers are not just shopping for themselves, they're shopping for others.

Profiling your data will help you get a better understanding of your customer base and best selling products, which can help you create more effective marketing strategies. I'm just telling you all the ways Melissa can help you. You can match and de-dupe your data. That'll clean out your database, allowing you to see a complete, 360 degree view of each customer. Better understand your customers allow for more personalized marketing and, of course, a better customer experience. You don't want to call them mister when they're a misses.

I'm telling you Melissa has achieved the highest level of security status available by gaining FedRAMP authorization Wow. Now, of course, that's exclusively for government agencies, but everybody benefits right from the superior level of security. Melissa's solutions and services are GDPR and CCPA compliant the California Privacy Act. They meet SOC2 and HIPAA high trust standards for information and security management. Nobody does it better Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free. melissa.com/twit. M-E-L-I-S-S-A. We love these guys and what a great job they do for our listeners. melissa.com/twit. What do we do? It's time for CarGuy. Yes, it is time for Sam.

CarGuy Sam, I will Sam it.

1:00:46 - Mikah Sargent
It's the time.

1:00:49 - Leo Laporte
What are you in front of a Rolls Royce? What is that I?

1:00:52 - Sam Abuelsamid
am, but I can't see you guys.

1:00:54 - Leo Laporte
You don't need to see us. We look exactly the same as ever. Sam Hi Sam.

1:01:00 - Sam Abuelsamid
How are you doing this week?

1:01:02 - Leo Laporte
We are very well, sam. Can I just on a personal note, mm-hmm, and you can yell at me if I made a mistake, uh-oh.

1:01:10 - Sam Abuelsamid
There we go. Now I can see you.

1:01:12 - Leo Laporte
I was going to. You know I haven't driven a Mustang Mucky. I like EVs. I'm only going to buy EVs. I like the Mustang Muck E and I was thinking maybe I should keep it at least end, which is in February. I looked and the buyout is $36,000. And I thought, you know, even if I keep it and I go through all the trouble of selling it, I'm not going to make a lot of money on that. That's probably, you know, what I would get. So I'm going to let the lease run out and buy a new car, mm-hmm, and I put it in an order. Now don't yell at me. Oh God, what's he getting? You didn't do it. I'm spending my kids inheritance. I just want everybody to know what happens here?

1:01:53 - Sam Abuelsamid
Tell me you didn't buy a Tesla.

1:01:54 - Leo Laporte
No, I don't. Oh, no, what do you think? Oh, that's fine. Oh yeah, I bought a Cybertruck, is that okay? No, I didn't, I actually saw one the other day. That's what I bought. How did you know what I bought you?

1:02:06 - Sam Abuelsamid
put it on the screen you were thinking about it.

1:02:07 - Leo Laporte
I've been thinking about it I finally put it in the order for the BMW i5. No, you're going to be one of those. I am going to run stop lights Never.

1:02:17 - Sam Abuelsamid
I'm going to eat.

1:02:18 - Leo Laporte
I'm never going to use a blinker again. I my life, it's chain. No, I'm going to be a. I'm a, I drive like grandpa, you are a good driver. I will be the best BMer driver out there, but I think it's a nice platform. Am I wrong?

1:02:30 - Sam Abuelsamid
It is. No, it is I actually. I finally had a chance to drive it this week and it's really really good and I think you will really like it. Did you get the eDrive 40 or the M 60?

1:02:40 - Leo Laporte
I am not an M 60 guy, I know my, my, my half brother said you got the M series right. I said dude, I'm not made of money, I don't need that, you don't need that one, I don't need that. So no, I got the E 40, but I, you know, I got the B and O sound system. I got to, I got the all the self-driving bells and whistles, the one where you look in the mirror and it goes into a new lane, that stuff.

1:03:07 - Sam Abuelsamid
So so did you like it? I did. I liked it a lot. It's really nice, you know it. It has all the things that you would expect of a modern BMW luxury sedan.

1:03:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm not going to buy an I seven, which is their top of the line, or an I eight.

1:03:22 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, and, and and the I seven is so big yeah, it's a big car. This is a much more reasonable.

1:03:28 - Leo Laporte
This is the car lease and I will go on road trips because she has a, a it's funny, ironically a BMW based mini Cooper SE and that only has like 90 miles range. So if we go anywhere, like even to the city, we're going to have to take the.

1:03:43 - Sam Abuelsamid
I'm not going to say you'll, you'll you'll you'll get three you'll get 300 miles of range. Oh yeah, and yeah, yeah, without any problem. Yeah, I think you'll be very happy with it. Good, thank you. I said you know it looks good, it's very comfortable, it handles really well. The only complaint I had was the steering feels a little bit on the light side. There's not a lot of steering feedback, but you know that's because you're a race car driver.

1:04:07 - Leo Laporte
I am a grandpa, I just want to go with one hand down the road. I'm not. I'm not that much younger than you are. Yeah, but you're not spending your inheritance, your kids inheritance, yet that's true, I finally decided I don't plan on leaving them anything anyway. I finally decided I could tap into my retirement savings, because you know, maybe this is nuts, but I feel like I'm buying my last car.

I want you to reiterate, though, what you're saying, because I know everybody's saying well, that's it, we're not giving you any money for club Tweet.

1:04:38 - Mikah Sargent
If you're going to buy a car, it's not coming from it.

1:04:41 - Leo Laporte
It's not coming Now. The leases are. We're all through the company because for tax reasons but not that's why I'm buying this one and I'm buying it I already cashed out part of my 401k to buy it. It's coming out of my 401k. It's not coming out of a tweet, because I think it's my last car and I want to have this car for 10, 15 years and I and so I think that this is a good one to keep for a long time. Matt, yes, you think.

1:05:05 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think you will like it a lot. Yeah, so you know it drives really nice. It's a great coffin. Yeah you're going to bury me in it, aren't you?

1:05:15 - Leo Laporte
Yes, abby will love it when you leave it to her. Abby already got my old Lexus Total it, so I'm not. So no, I think.

1:05:26 - Sam Abuelsamid
I think, I think, I think you will. You will enjoy this car, and you know it's. It's got lots of nice features in there. I didn't get a chance to play around with the hands-free driving system during the time I had my hands on it, but other than that, you know everything else about it is.

1:05:43 - Leo Laporte
BMW has a nasty reputation, for instance, for charging extra for heated seats. They have dropped that. They stopped doing that, right yeah.

1:05:52 - Sam Abuelsamid
That was so to be. To be clear, that was an experiment. They tried it in a couple of markets for like a year or two and the the market response was, shall we say, not positive and so they've they've moved away from that, so they're not doing that anymore. And for a while most other automakers have said we're not doing that.

1:06:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's a bad idea, especially when you spend a lot of money for a car Then and the other thing that was a problem is that their wireless carplay was frying iPhones but Apple updated.

1:06:21 - Mikah Sargent
That's the 1711 update. It's a wireless charging.

1:06:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's a wireless charging so. I think, I'll be all right.

1:06:28 - Sam Abuelsamid
I used, you know, I used my Pixel 8 Pro wirelessly To get in that. Yeah, yeah.

1:06:35 - Leo Laporte
The it does support Apple. It's the only company that sports Apple's car key, so I'm looking forward to that there are.

1:06:41 - Sam Abuelsamid
There are a couple of others that are doing that shortly as well, but no, I think you'll, I think you'll like it a lot, you know. I mean, if you really wanted to spend your kids inheritance you know this this is the car that you would have bought. Yeah, what is that? A?

1:06:56 - Leo Laporte
Maybach, what is that?

1:06:58 - Sam Abuelsamid
No, that's a Rolls Royce Spectre. Oh, probably probably the most appropriately named car ever. You know a Spectre is a ghost, you know that floats around silently. And this thing, you know it goes down the road. It is dead silent. When you turn on the ventilation fans at all, but the highest speed, you don't even hear them. You put your hand up there and you'll feel the air coming out, but you do not hear. That's what I call it a ghost. It's yeah, it's pretty, yeah, and yeah, no, it's gorgeous. Are they still handmade rolls? Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

They're all made at a factory in Goodwood, england. Yeah, and you can. You know you can get them. You know color, you know any color, any color combinations you want. Oh really yeah that's fabulous car to drive.

1:07:46 - Leo Laporte
I'd like an orange Rolls Royce, please.

1:07:49 - Sam Abuelsamid
For you know, just you know, hand them, just give them your wire transfer numbers.

1:07:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly, yeah. So yeah, that's just curiosity. I'll keep on spending the kids inheritance. How much would that car cost? It's only 420. Oh, 20. Elon would love it. Yeah, yeah 420,000.

1:08:08 - Sam Abuelsamid
It makes me nervous. Electric zero emissions.

1:08:11 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this is their electric You're protecting. I've been very interested in this.

1:08:14 - Sam Abuelsamid
This is the first electric.

1:08:15 - Leo Laporte
Rolls Royce.

1:08:16 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah.

1:08:17 - Leo Laporte
How can I live?

1:08:18 - Mikah Sargent
in it. That's the only way this makes sense.

1:08:21 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, well, if you're in California, you might just have to.

1:08:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean yeah, I mean the only buy this, because money means nothing. Right, right.

1:08:30 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, right, that's otherwise.

1:08:33 - Leo Laporte
They can charge anything. They want it effectively.

1:08:36 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, yeah, rolls Royce says that their, their customers are, rather should I say, their clients.

1:08:42 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah.

1:08:43 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, oh, and have an average of seven vehicles in their garage. Sweet goodness.

1:08:48 - Leo Laporte
I would feel so weird driving a car that costs as much of as a house down the road at 60 miles an hour. I mean like this is you're putting it in peril.

1:08:56 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, Every time I think about that too. When I see these wild cars on the road, I'm like why are you even moving it?

1:09:03 - Sam Abuelsamid
It was a little bit nerve wracking driving this. I had you drove it.

1:09:07 - Leo Laporte
Oh my God, I'm so jealous. How fun, but it's you know it's.

1:09:11 - Sam Abuelsamid
You know it's. It's one of those things that you know you should experience once. Yeah, I don't think I would ever own one. I mean, it's not my style, but it's. You know, if you have an insane amount of money and at least seven other cars in your garage, you should definitely consider one.

1:09:29 - Leo Laporte
I am going to guess that I will at no point in my life ever get to drive a Rolls Royce. I'm just going to guess that you're a car. You know, reporter. You're, you're, you know, you're a car. Auto journalists give the best job. You get to drive everything it beats working for a living. Yeah, yeah, Even a, even a $420,000 Rolls Royce. Do you have to have special insurance, Right?

1:09:51 - Mikah Sargent
I was wondering that too.

1:09:53 - Sam Abuelsamid
No, um, we, you know, for, for these programs, you know the the car manufacturers, um you know they cover the insurance, they, they, you know are we're you know for liability, uh, you know our, our own car insurance covers that. But you know, for a collision damage and things like that, they, they cover that. Um, but I mean, you know, for the most part most of us do try to take really good care of the cars, especially for stuff like this.

1:10:20 - Leo Laporte
Now now Martin, our German listener, wants to take that on the Autobahn. What is the top speed of that?

1:10:26 - Sam Abuelsamid
That's a good question. I'm not sure what the top speed is. Uh, let me look real quick. It's cruising. It looks pretty heavy.

1:10:32 - Mikah Sargent
It looks like 30 miles. It is yeah.

1:10:35 - Sam Abuelsamid
No, no, no, this, this thing is fast. It'll go zero to 60 in 4.4 seconds. Wow, Uh, so it is. It is a rapid machine, Um, but uh, it's a specter.

1:10:47 - Leo Laporte
It feels like a James Bond car. It does, but not not a car that the James Bond would drive.

1:10:54 - Sam Abuelsamid
No, it's the villain.

1:10:56 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, exactly, look at it, it's, it's spooky, yeah, spooky specter.

1:11:00 - Sam Abuelsamid
Ba, da, ba, da. Yeah, they don't, they don't list uh a top speed uh which means there is none.

1:11:05 - Mikah Sargent
If you have to ask, you do, you can't do it.

1:11:09 - Sam Abuelsamid
Until relatively recently, until about 20 years ago, rolls-royce did not even list uh the power output of their engines and specs. It was if you looked at the in the uh man. In the brochures it was merely listed as adequate.

1:11:25 - Mikah Sargent
Adequate. That's enough to move the vehicle. That is how.

1:11:29 - Sam Abuelsamid
I what is this, this, this has this has 584 horsepower, wow, uh, but uh, 600 and 600 plus foot pounds of torque. I was going to ask you about the foot pounds just cause I like to say foot pounds, foot pounds.

But no, it's, it's quick, uh, and it's, it's actually not as quick as the I five M 60, but you know it's not meant to be. This is not a sports car. Uh, this is meant to get you effortlessly from wherever you are to wherever you want to be, which is why I didn't buy the M 60, because I don't really need to go zero to 60 and 3.8 seconds Uh, four or five is nobody does enough, and EVs have plenty of pickup.

1:12:10 - Leo Laporte
You know I had a ludicrous mode Tesla and I never used it except to scare people, and I don't think that's a good reason to buy it, to spend that much extra on a vehicle.

1:12:19 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, no, and you know the torque of EVs is so immense and it comes on so instantly that you know the performance you can get out of EVs is just is crazy. That's what I like.

1:12:31 - Leo Laporte
But people forget.

1:12:32 - Mikah Sargent
But it also means you're wearing your tires a lot faster. Yeah, are there more rear ends in uh in those vehicles?

1:12:39 - Sam Abuelsamid
Well, remember now, uh uh. They're more expensive to repair, so insurance costs are actually higher.

1:12:44 - Leo Laporte
Connor Logan of the Succession TV show, Mm. Hmm, Uh, Alan Ruck, uh bought a brand new Rivian a couple of weeks ago which has a lot of pickup.

1:12:55 - Sam Abuelsamid
These, uh, this electric pickup truck and plowed it into a goes zero to 16, about three seconds yeah.

1:13:00 - Leo Laporte
He plowed it into a pizza parlor and the and the police department said yeah, it wasn't his, wasn't his fault, it wasn't a, it was. It has a lot of pickup and he didn't know and he stepped on it and went, phew.

1:13:15 - Mikah Sargent
See, that would scare me.

1:13:17 - Leo Laporte
So it is a little. I mean, I think, until you get used to it he had just gotten it, and I think that's why you know they didn't prosecute, is that? Yeah? Well, alan, sorry, and I'm sure he paid the pizza parlor for the damage.

1:13:28 - Mikah Sargent
But my car takes a second to get going again and to stop light. But you and your EV could be like oh, I love it.

1:13:33 - Leo Laporte
And it's so funny Cause you'll get little torps next to you in the Mustang you know GT 5.0, revving their engines Cause they think, oh, you're in a little electric SUV, what can you do? And I just let them go fast down the road. And I oh my grandpa, I told you I had a. Yeah, now, one of the problems with EVs is they can't sustain that. Right, I mean they, they get hot.

1:13:57 - Sam Abuelsamid
Uh, newer EVs can uh they've learned how to do a better job on the thermal management of the motors and the battery so they can maintain those speeds. But you know, over time you know if you run them hard enough, long enough, you know they will start to to slow down. Is that the motor gets too hot? If the batteries get too hot? Not at 60, 65, not at normal.

I mean, you know, if you're if you're driving at anything resembling a reasonable speed I'm talking like on the track you know, on the track they will eventually slow down, but on you know, if you're doing anything remotely responsible on the highway, uh, then you'll be fine, you will. You will never see that, uh, as a as a problem.

1:14:37 - Leo Laporte
Is it? Is it fun to drive a Rolls-Royce? I mean, once you get over the fact that you're driving a $420,000 vehicle?

1:14:45 - Sam Abuelsamid
to. To be honest, you know, I mean if, if, if what you enjoy is driving uh should get a. Rolls, then yeah, I mean it's, it's, it's not it's not yeah. It. You know it is. It is fun in the, in the in some far. As you know, you are driving down the road in this car with this immense performance and it is completely effortless. You don't feel anything. You're isolated from everything. It is silent. I do like that. I like that. It doesn't really come through.

1:15:14 - Leo Laporte
It's even even the tires.

1:15:16 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, even the tires on this? Um, michelin has developed, uh, some been doing some interesting stuff with tires. The tires on this uh, that it's a new tire they've developed for EVs. That on the inside of the uh tread, on the inboard side of the tread, they have a strip of foam that goes all the way around. No way. What that does it helps to damp the. There's a lot of the tire noise uh comes from the air moving around inside the tire. So this helps to dampen, dampen that air movement, so even the tires are quieter.

And those, those tires, that type of tire is going to be available for all kinds of vehicles. But uh, the the specter is one of the first cars to get those Um, and so there's, there's, you know, all these kinds of things that they're doing to to make them quieter. But for me, you know, uh, personally, I, you know uh, as if I was going to get uh an EV from the BMW group, um, I would actually probably go for the I four, you know, cause I want some. I prefer something smaller. I did get a chance to do a few laps on at their performance center in the I five, m 60.

1:16:22 - Leo Laporte
And then, um, and then, and then, and then they're fun to drive, right, unlike the roles of BMW's fun to drive.

1:16:30 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, and it's meant to be, it's, it's, it's for a different kind of customer. Yeah, um. And the, the M 60, you know it, it is just so effortless to drive at higher speeds, you know, and because of that instant response of the electric motors, you know, as you're coming out of corners, you just roll on the accelerator and it just goes. You know, it just accelerates effortlessly. The M two, which is there, you know, the sports car, um, actually it's, it's meant as a higher performance model but it feels slower because it's got. It's got turbo lag.

You know, it's internal combustion, yeah, um, but it's actually more fun to drive because it's more challenging. You know, as a driver, it's challenge, it's. I like that challenge of trying to get it all timed right. You know, hitting, rolling on the on the accelerator, just as you're hitting the apex of a curve, so as you get to the straight, you know then that power is starting to come on, you know, and you know feeling it kind of squirting around a little bit. So it feels less responsive than the EV, but in some ways more fun to drive. So okay, Okay.

But I also understand that, uh, you know that EVs are, are where we're going and and, ultimately, that's what we're going to end up with.

1:17:44 - Leo Laporte
Martin and Germany says BMW rolled the last combustion vehicle off its line this week. Is that right? No, no, it's not true. I thought that they were still making.

1:17:53 - Sam Abuelsamid
BMWs going to be building combustion vehicles for many years to come. There's a big one Well into the 2030s, yeah, yeah. Bw might have. No, no, no, no, but nobody has, nobody has. None of the traditional automakers have stopped building EVs yet, or internal combustion vehicles yet.

1:18:09 - Leo Laporte
Well, sam, thank you for by the end of the decade, most of them will. My purchase of a Rolls Royce Spectre, If only right.

1:18:19 - Sam Abuelsamid
Um, I am. Just just have Lisa call me and I'll explain to her why you need that. I don't I?

1:18:23 - Leo Laporte
in fact, I don't even want it. I wouldn't want it. I wouldn't want a car. I'd have to sit in the car. It's like having a $400,000 wristwatch, which people do or $100,000 wristwatch. I just it would make me nervous, it would make me feel bad, even shoes that cost too much, suits or whatever.

1:18:37 - Sam Abuelsamid
We're simple. I think you'll, I think you'll love the I five.

1:18:40 - Leo Laporte
This is as far as I'll go in a luxury term, and again, it's cause it's the last car. What color are you going to buy? Well, they mocked the color in the chat room, but I'm getting black black and black.

1:18:52 - Sam Abuelsamid
We should have got the Tanzanite blue.

1:18:55 - Leo Laporte
Really, I like blue. Is that what this is? Is that Tanzanite?

1:18:57 - Sam Abuelsamid
No, this is, this is a green. They didn't have. Um, I didn't, I didn't have.

1:19:03 - Leo Laporte
Tanzanite is a darker kind of shiny blue. Right yeah, that's a great color Really. It may not be, I think they've already built mine, or I would change it.

1:19:12 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, it's ugly, Leo, don't worry, it's, it's. I heard your.

1:19:16 - Leo Laporte
You don't get away with that.

1:19:19 - Sam Abuelsamid
I like, I actually like. You can get a Tanzanite blue. I like, I like black.

1:19:23 - Leo Laporte
I don't know why I like to pretend I'm a limo driver and, if you know, I get a little cab driving this day. Yeah, driving, miss Daisy, that's me.

1:19:32 - Sam Abuelsamid
But what shade of black Cause? You know they have several shades of black At first.

1:19:35 - Leo Laporte
I got the matte black and then cause you don't want that. Yeah, yeah, that's what I found out. I did some research and I said, whoo, you can't even take it to a car wash. It's like you have to hand wash it, and I'm not that kind of beamer owner. So I just got a pearl I don't know what's, I can't remember the name.

1:19:52 - Mikah Sargent
That is another thing about beamer owners. They like to hand wash their cars.

1:19:55 - Leo Laporte
They like to hand wash their vehicles. It's cause they're in love with their cars, and I think this might be a mistake for me, because I am not the kind of person yeah, I'm not a car who loves his car, except I want to have a car that I like to drive. I don't know. Let me see if I can find the black sapphire.

1:20:16 - Sam Abuelsamid
I got sapphire, black sapphire, yeah. And then there's dark graphite, metallic as well. No, no I thought that several, several shades of silver and gray.

1:20:23 - Leo Laporte
I thought the black sapphire was the black. It was not as black as this laptop, but it was. It was nice and dark. I want dark, I like dark. I don't know why you got to wash it more, but I like it, I just like it. And I got the veganza seats. You know, not the leather, but the new Bless you Did you try the vegan? But yeah, the veganza seats that they have. I bet that's what they had in there. They're all hot on that, they're not. They're like vegan leather.

1:20:47 - Mikah Sargent
It sounds like something like a mom.

1:20:49 - Sam Abuelsamid
Yeah, no, I did, I did try that.

1:20:51 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah.

1:20:51 - Leo Laporte
And it feels it feels like leather. Yeah, Vegan leather, Perforated, quilted black, with black sapphire metallic. I did get the M sport package you know with. So you get the 19 inch wheels and all that silly stuff.

1:21:06 - Mikah Sargent
but are the weight of the wheel or the rims. Black too.

1:21:10 - Leo Laporte
No, yeah, no, the rims are silver, but the but the the calipers are blue. That's a BMW thing, Blue calipers.

1:21:19 - Mikah Sargent
As much of a non car guy as I am, I always do appreciate a caliper that is a different color, but every time I see it on a car I'm like, oh, I don't even understand why, but I always, for some reason, the last three cars I've had have different colors.

1:21:33 - Sam Abuelsamid
So right now I'm a Chevy Tahoe in the driveway with red calipers. See, I just think it looks cool.

1:21:37 - Leo Laporte
The thing I was most interested in, frankly, because I'm tech guys the screen and this and the technology features and it seems pretty good. They seem pretty good. I didn't. I was tired of having a an iPad screen in my car. I wanted something that was a little more integrated into the dash, and this is a nice look. Oh, that's right. Yeah, it's got it, it goes. It goes like halfway.

1:21:58 - Mikah Sargent
And then probably were the first that offers the new carplay you know the BMW says they will not do it.

1:22:05 - Leo Laporte
They're not going to do the Apple carplay. I don't want the Apple.

1:22:09 - Sam Abuelsamid
There is no there is no automaker that has announced any intention of going to that's give up too much to Apple.

1:22:15 - Leo Laporte
They don't want to give up even.

1:22:16 - Mikah Sargent
Porsche which has been an.

1:22:18 - Sam Abuelsamid
Apple diehard, even Porsche, which has been an Apple diehard for a long time. They wouldn't even do Android Auto. They announced that they're going to Android Automotive in 2025.

1:22:28 - Leo Laporte
That's honestly one of the biggest reasons I wouldn't buy a Tesla. I mean, there are many, but I want carplay. Apple carplay is fantastic, or Android Auto, either one, they're both, I think, the right way to go.

1:22:41 - Sam Abuelsamid
Well, the Android Automotive is the built in one, so you can. You don't even have to connect your phone.

1:22:45 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's right, it's running Android Directly, yeah.

1:22:47 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that's kind of cool. So then, bmw and both, or what's it for which?

1:22:55 - Leo Laporte
one, the BMW.

1:22:56 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so then BMW and Google both get your information.

1:22:59 - Leo Laporte
Correct. Yes, we were just talking at the top of the show.

1:23:03 - Sam Abuelsamid
Everybody will have all of your information. How much car information.

1:23:05 - Leo Laporte
People are giving up. It's always a pleasure. Sam Abel. Sam Addy is a principal researcher at Guidehouse Insights. If you love cars, you got to listen to his podcast Wheel Bearings at wheelbearingsmedia. We'll see you on the Twitter Social. He's on the master on the Sam Abel Samad. Anything else you would like to plug, mr Samad?

1:23:23 - Sam Abuelsamid
Let's see the research at Guidehouse Insights Wheel Bearings. That's good for today, okay, awesome.

1:23:31 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you for your time.

1:23:33 - Sam Abuelsamid
Oh, and you can get wheel bearing shirts now at Shop At Wheel Bearingsmedia.

1:23:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, my son Salt Hank says why aren't you doing merch? I said we do merch. He said yeah, but why aren't you doing good merch, oh dang. Then I showed him our TikTok and he said oh, I got it.

1:23:49 - Mikah Sargent
He has, yeah, he's got some thoughts. He's just owned you. Now, ooh, you're not, you're not my dad. I really like the yeah, the wheel bearing shirts.

1:23:56 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, are they cool? Yeah, see, of course they are. Thank you, sam, have a great day. All right, all right, you too. Bye, take care, sam Abel Samad, our car guy. Yeah, people, I don't want, I know it sounds like I'm getting fancy on you, you know, buying a fancy car, fancy laptop Isn't a Mustang fancy, wasn't the Mustang Mucky fancy?

It's less fancy than the other cars I've driven, but it's coming out of my 401k. It's not. I don't want to use the company's money. I can't because here is not. I was going to say I got to a point in my life. You know what it was. It was riding in the middle seat on Southwest.

1:24:35 - Mikah Sargent
That really was what did it. He's been a change to man.

1:24:37 - Leo Laporte
It flipped the thing in my head saying you can now start spending your retirement, because this is sucks and my kids are fine. I don't need to worry about them, so I'm going to spend my their inheritance. It's one of the privileges one of the few of being an old person. What should we do? We should take a little break.

1:24:57 - Mikah Sargent
Let's take a break and then continue on and sorry, I just saw an animal.

1:25:03 - Leo Laporte
You just saw an animal.

1:25:04 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, someone's holding their animal.

1:25:07 - Leo Laporte
Oh, oh, is it Chihuahua?

1:25:10 - Mikah Sargent
It's a kitty.

1:25:11 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's small.

1:25:12 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, it does look Chihuahua it's a small kitty.

1:25:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah Well, that's great, we'll go to the kitty guy, kitty, cat guy coming up. But first a word from Mylio. The first thing I did on the new laptop is I put Mylio on it. Mylio is my new way of keeping track of all my photos, all my videos and all my documents. Mylio automatically imports everything I've got and then I can share it. I can organize it, I can export it, I can import it. I can bring it in from any one of many, many different systems I have. I can go on and on about Mylio. It's incredible. One of the things I love about Mylio is the quick filters which are applied automatically. So if you have pictures, for instance, of a lake you went to the lake. You go to the lake every summer Mylio will automatically categorize those as lake pictures, which means it's very easy to find them. So I don't know if you've done this, but back in the day I would go through my Picasso folders and tag everything and put them in folders. I don't have to do that anymore With Mylio. It does it all for me.

Mylio Photos is the solution to digital management for photos, videos and yes, I said documents. You can actually have it import your documents folder. It understands PDFs and Word documents almost all the document formats you might have in there. It does OCR, so it makes it very easy to search. Oh, did I mention it's free and, man, they are always improving it. The latest round of updates is even better. They refined the search and grouping tools, offering incredible cataloging and access for your important files, because Mylio Photos automatically assigns AI smart tags to their files and with their updates to dynamic search and quick filters.

I have 200,000 photos in my Mylio folder and I can find something in less than a second just by using smart tags. It's kind of a miracle. I'm really a big fan. Here is let's see, I have under animals. I have amphibians. I wonder do I have pictures of amphibians? What do I do? Arachnids Do I have pictures of arthropods? Oh, my God it found is that a millipede? How did it find that? I didn't even know I had that picture. Badgers do I have pictures of badgers? No, that's my dog, but shit, ozzy kind of looked like a badger. Bears how did it know Pictures of bears? Not, this is not something I did. This is my Leo AI. The other thing it does is face recognition. Now, of course, it doesn't know the faces of your friends and family. So I had to tag a few friends and family at first, but then, once you do that, it goes through all of the photos. I'm telling you, 200,000 photos. You see a fast every bear photo very fast.

It thinks a bear.

1:28:19 - Mikah Sargent
I should say very fast very, very, very fast.

1:28:23 - Leo Laporte
Um, oh, here's a Tasmanian devil. It's not exactly a bear, but then I could see you be confused. Those were instant. This is an amazing program, did I say? Did I mention it's free? It's free. They have this new spaces tool.

So one of the things you miss, say I. Basically I've gotten off Google Photos. In fact, it's great you do Google Takeout, download all my google's photos. That's hundreds of thousands of photos, I think I don't know what it was and then it imports them automatically, so I didn't have to do any processing, and then it goes through, it assigns the right dates and names and tags and everything to it and then I dedupt, so anything, because you know, a lot of this stuff is duplicated with life. It got rid of all of the duplicates beautifully. I mean it's incredible.

Now, with the spaces tool, the one thing I thought well, I'm gonna miss sharing using google photos. No, with a spaces tool, you can determine, you could pick, you can create basically a shared custom category, you can do it in a quick collection and then you can say what's visible, what's not. So you can use it for work, you can use it for family, you can use it for friends and they can even collaborate on editing. They can collaborate on sharing media. They can add their own media. Spaces can be private with passwords or pins. You get extra security. You don't need the cloud.

With Mylio, you can use the cloud. In fact, I uploaded the Mylio cloud. But the beauty of it is Mylio encrypts everything before you do it. You can also use your own cloud service if you want. My leo Works with one drive, google drive, any s3 compatible cloud service or wasabi things like that and I do it on my my private cloud. I have it on my nas, so I basically have my nas back up everything on Mylio. It'll work with a black back plays. I mean it works with Synology. So you don't have to use a cloud. If you use a cloud, it's encrypted and private. You're not giving any data, anybody but. But you don't have to because with Mylio plus the Mylio photos plus subscription, all your devices Connect to one library and you can choose whether you want a thumbnail, you want a compressed version or the original on any one of those devices. It even tells you ahead of time how much space that's going to take. It could not be easier. It could not be easier or more private and secure.

I want you to try this. You could download it for free on a single device, whether it's mac, windows, ios or android, and then, if you get Mylio photos plus, if you want to, you don't have to you can have it on all your devices. See what has us so excited? Our special address is mylio.com/twit, mylio.com/twit. Download Mylio photos for free right now. Just you know, even if you're skeptical or you, is this really what I want? And you're not sure, because it's very personal. Everybody has a different.

Download the free version and just try it. It doesn't take away from anything. Have it, just import all your apple photos. Uh, I put it on my iphone. Imports all the iphone photos automatically. In fact, it's on all my phones because I have the plus subscription. In that way, if I take a picture with any phone, it's already in my Mylio library before I get home. I can go on and on. I'll stop Myliocom slash twit. You got to try it. It's amazing. I can't believe how fast I found those bears. This is Lisa in russia. We went to a russian restaurant and they had a stuffed bear with vodka, so she, she shared, so it found that that's awesome.

It found it if I were thinking you know, remember that time, Lisa, when you were in russia, and what there was a bear at that restaurant. That's what makes it so handy.

1:31:51 - Mikah Sargent
That's where I've been able to use it. That's where I've been able to use it.

1:31:53 - Leo Laporte
It's incredible. I do that. I do that a lot person on the beach.

1:31:56 - Mikah Sargent
There were dogs involved and it was. I know it was in July. Do I have any?

1:32:00 - Leo Laporte
ibex photos. No, impolas, you would be the depth that this thing is. Gorillas, goats, hairs, hardbeasts, ibex, impolas, injuries, insects, isopods. By the way, not just one insect, ant bee. Look, there's all my bee pictures. That's so cool. Oh, you see how fast that's 200 000 photos, and found it instantly.

1:32:23 - Mikah Sargent
It's unbelievable.

1:32:27 - Leo Laporte
All right, all right, stop. Let's stop the insanity. Let's do another thing. I'm gonna pick up on rock, hello brock, and beautiful south bend rock Press. What is it? I'm down star, what star nine, star six star six if you're calling by phone star six on the phone.

1:32:46 - Mikah Sargent
Unmute if you are calling by zoom zoom.

1:32:50 - Leo Laporte
Hey guys hey, how you doing?

1:32:52 - Caller
Is it brock? It is indeed. How are you guys doing? Oh, there he is, we're great.

1:32:57 - Leo Laporte
How are you video? Oh, it's magic. Well, what's what's up in brocks world? Are you in south bend? Did I get that right?

1:33:07 - Caller
You did get that right. Yes, I am in south bend, very nice. So, guys, I recently made the switch to mac os and iphone and just dove and head over heels over apple products. And I've got one minor issue that's just driving me crazy. On my phone, of course, I have my contacts and I can see all my messages and all their and everybody's names. I can't see them on my mac that way. It just shows them as their phone number. I don't know phone numbers anymore. I don't know who remembers phone numbers, but I I can't get these two things to sync. I've checked iCloud and done all that, but I'm just kind of Stuck and I don't know what else to do.

1:33:49 - Mikah Sargent
So it sounds like what's happening is there's some sort of sync issue that is taking place. You've probably done everything that you thought you were supposed to do and it's still not kicking in. This has been an issue in the past for some folks, but what's Interesting about mac os is how it will pull information From kind of there two to three different places. So the first thing that you need to make sure that you do is, on your mac, you go into system settings and in system settings there is a section underneath passwords that's called internet accounts. When you click on internet accounts, all of your different internet accounts that you've logged into will appear here. So you may have gmail, you may have, well, google. Technically, you may have another one, but iCloud is the base and when you click on that you will be. You will see the different apps that are using iCloud and you want to make sure that there you have contacts toggled on not messages, but contacts toggled on.

If you've done that, the next thing that I recommend people do is they go into the contacts app on the mac and they go into the settings for that and they make sure that the default account in the settings for the contacts app Is set to the account that you want. So in this case, it sounds like you're using iCloud to sync this. So you want to make sure that that's synced to iCloud and not On my mac. If it's on my mac, then it's pulling from stuff that's stored locally. That may be why it's showing phone numbers. Uh, and then the other thing that I recommend, if all of that doesn't work, as a further troubleshooting step, is, within that same settings area, you click on accounts and you click on iCloud, and then you'll have the option to. There's a little checkbox that says enable this account, and you basically uncheck that box and then recheck that box.

1:35:47 - Caller
You turn it off and on again. Kick it yeah you kick it.

1:35:49 - Mikah Sargent
Exactly, you kick it, and that will sometimes work. Now, have you tried those things? I want to make sure I'm not giving you all things you've done before.

1:35:58 - Caller
I have not tried all of those things. Good, so there are definitely a few things I have not tried yet. I'll give those a shot. So I appreciate it, mica. Um, yeah, I again. I just made the switch here about a year ago. It's been great. In using apple devices is changed my mind on how computers are supposed to work. So it's it's just learning curves is what it is.

1:36:20 - Mikah Sargent
So yeah, and that's that's. Honestly, that is an annoyance that I have. I remember in one upgrade it for some reason undid my syncing and everybody was just phone numbers and I thought I don't know who any of these people are, uh, so I ended up having to kick it in some way and that ended up solving it for me.

1:36:37 - Leo Laporte
It's. You know, I've been using mac since 1984 and it's still confusing to me. So don't play, don't blame yourself. Um, you know messages is Is it every time I set up a new mac and I'm using messages? I'm gonna wait. Are you gonna get the pictures? Where do you get the?

So it's pretty clear that the images and names come from your contacts, so you got to make sure. So the first thing is make sure contacts is up to date. The other thing I also do and I think it's probably a good idea, since you're in the ecosystem, so you have multiple devices is to turn on messages in the cloud. Yep, because, uh, I do have that turn. Yeah, that way they sync everywhere. And uh, if you don't do that, then you, then it's a very strange experience Because there's messages here that aren't there and vice versa. So turn on messages in cloud and then really, the. The main thing is you're gonna work on contacts and make sure their contacts is syncing properly.

Uh, what you know, I? I got myself in a little bit of trouble because I I mentioned before I Stopped using google contacts. You know, I was for a long time, I was just everything should be google, because then you get a new phone or whatever, and and you log in and you get all your contacts. And, by the way, do you remember in the old days Ever losing all your contacts? I did, and it's the worst thing.

1:37:51 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah, yeah, especially because it was tied to your phone when you moved from phone to phone and there was no easy way to get the contacts.

1:37:58 - Leo Laporte
You'd had to manually enter them just as a nightmare. So we've really come a long way. I moved off of so that's why I went to google contacts is that idea that there's one place in the cloud that has everything and everything syncs with that. But I didn't want to give google everything. So that's why I'm using fast mail, our sponsor, and fast mail does have calendars. So I did go through a little bit of this like work. I'm just getting a phone number because I had to redo my syncing and tell apples contacts now you're syncing with fast mail. Stop syncing with google. Uh and and and the initial process. I think.

I generally say you should download Whatever you've been using as contacts, whether it's google or some other service or maybe just locally. You should make one good copy, yes, one good backup of all of your contacts. I agree you maybe even go through it and clean it up, merge them apple has a pretty good contact merging feature. Get it cleaned up, delete all the people who are dead, uh and uh Well, not dead, dead, dead to me and then and then and then have the perfect Contact list and that's your. That's kind of your, your starting point? Yep, in fact you might, even if you time. Yeah, once you've got that, a, you've got a good backup and you're never going to lose your contacts, right. But b now maybe you delete them everywhere and start over with this one good canonical list and figure out Where's that going to live, where's the place everything's going to sync with.

1:39:24 - Mikah Sargent
It's worth doing that once I think I agree. Yeah, and now's a good time to mention that if you join club twitter twitchtv, slash club twit. I do have an episode of hands-on mech. All about the contacts app on the course you do Of course I am already a club twit member.

1:39:37 - Caller
I have to go find that out, thank you.

1:39:39 - Leo Laporte
Thank you for the support.

1:39:41 - Caller
It's best, eight dollars a month. They spend so and again.

1:39:44 - Leo Laporte
It's not going to my cars or computers, it's going to micah's salary, it's going to keep the lights on, it's going to keep the shows going. So we really appreciate that. Uh, of course it's been. I just read a stat that, uh, google, that 831 billion dollars more in revenue and google ad sales this year, particularly youtube this year Really, almost a trillion dollars. And where is that coming from? It's not like those are new dollars. Right, it's coming from us, it's coming from tv shows.

Basically, all advertising is sliding into google, facebook, uh, and and when I say google, I mean youtube as well, because they give up all of your information. An advertiser can say I just want people in south bend who are in a certain age bracket, a certain income bracket. They and they know that about you. So it's killing us because we don't know anything about you. And and even when you join the club, we don't, we intentionally don't learn anything about you. We don't want to sell your private information. We know our audience is sophisticated. They don't want us to do that. But it puts it as a severe disadvantage with advertisers.

1:40:54 - Caller
I think our I try to fill out this annual survey every year. The survey helps.

1:40:57 - Leo Laporte
So I that's all we really ever have is that survey and. But I thank our advertisers. People you've heard, molasses great, milios great, the people you've heard on this show, because they're the their advertisers say, well, we kind of believe in what you're doing and we love the audience you have, and so we're gonna take a flyer On buying ads on a podcast. Nobody does that anymore. Uh, you know, when I see a video of marquez brownlee caressing his eight sleep mattress pad Of course you're gonna, if you're eight, sleep.

They stop buying us. They start buying marquez. He costs more than we do, but he's gonna make that nice video of him massaging and you know. And influencers get millions of views, etc, etc. So I'm sorry I shouldn't go on and on. It's just a. It's a, it's a hot. I don't know if you're fine topic, but I appreciate, I greatly appreciate thank you for your support, because that's what we're gonna need. Of course, that's no problem going forward. I'm sorry to say, all right, have a great day. I really appreciate it.

1:41:54 - Caller
Thanks, leo, and can I just say one quick thing to you directly, if you don't mind.

1:41:58 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, it's on scary.

1:42:00 - Leo Laporte
Oh, no, no, no, no. He starts it with no offense, I'm gonna, I'm out of here.

1:42:06 - Caller
So no offense, leo, no, I just want to say I'm a first-time paul, or a long-time listener, started watching you during the tech TV days as a junior in high school Wow, and have helped to get me interested in technology and make that a career for myself and make a wonderful life for myself and my husband. So, leo, you're my hero, you're my mentor and look up to you, and I'm really glad I got to say these things to you Live in person. So I owe you a lot, leo. So thank you very much for that, very much for that, you know, and, my god, thank you you too.

1:42:40 - Leo Laporte
You're you're always here as well. He's the next. Yes, he's the next generation, and I just love my kid, I'm so glad that we have him on the team, and I just want to say what gate capo tello always used to say when somebody said something like that, like that, she said namaste. You know what that means. Yeah, the geek in me recognizes the geek in you.

1:43:00 - Mikah Sargent
I like that.

1:43:01 - Leo Laporte
I really appreciate what kind words. Thank you so much that those are what feed me. Thank you so much, guys. Those are what feed me. I really appreciate it. Take care, that makes all right. Thanks, guys, take care. Now cry a little bit, I know, get a little teary-eyed, too teary-eyed, um yeah, that's why we do it, though, right, we don't exactly. I mean, we have to make a living, you and I, but yeah, we don't do this because we're going to get rich. Nobody becomes a podcaster to get rich anymore.

1:43:26 - Mikah Sargent
It's genuinely the helping people that makes it all worth it, and when you get to hear from the people yeah, even something as small. Just the other week, rosemary and I answered a question for someone and they said I didn't think about that, but whenever you told us that that solved it, that and it's like, yes, isn't that a great feeling.

1:43:43 - Leo Laporte
It just feels and you know, I I hope you get what I have, because I've been doing this now for 30 Years. I hope you get the blessing that I have gotten out of this, which is, in 30 years, people like he can come, come to you and say, micah, because of you, I watched you in junior high school and I got started and now I'm thinking now I'm an AI engineer and I've just launched the first AI drone, rocket ship or whatever it is. I hope you get that because it is. It does make you feel like, well, maybe I made a little bit of a difference In the world. Thank you, that's a very nice thing to say and if you want to join club, twit Twitter that tv slash club to it seven dollars a month. Uh, we, you know that is as low as it goes.

Yeah it's a very good value. Nobody does less than that. Uh, I mean, there's a few, we're just five bucks, but we give you so many shows for free, no ads. We give you the discord, lots of events, a great, you know, bunch of content and and and the good feeling that you're supporting something that I think makes a big difference in the world. So thank you to all of our club members and to you for joining twittv slash club twit, is it time to talk about your.

I'm excited. So I'm kind of thinking it sounds like I'm I'm an ancient. I'm only 60. I'll be 67 in a week. I'm not, I'm not that old, but I'm thinking Last car. Well, if I get a car that lasts me 10, 15 years, I'm not gonna be driving into my 80s. You think I'll be that guy going get out of my way? No, I don't think I don't want to be driving there, that's so.

I think that that's my last car. Now I've said and people laugh at me this could be my last laptop. It's not my last laptop, obviously, but I do think I want to let. It's time for me to get a laptop. That is kind of a no compromise. There you go that I'm gonna have for five years, and the main reason it is because lisa did this last year and she got an m2 max and I was so pissed off I had to say I'm gonna. I'm gonna get an m3 max. My wife did the same thing, and rightly so. So this is the new m 3 macbook pro.

I was kind of waiting for the m3, and one thing I have to say is One of the reasons I was waiting for the m3 is this is the first processor From apple in a computer that is a three nanometer process. This is important to understand the way chips work, unlike everything else in the world. The smaller they get, the more powerful they get, and the less power they need, less energy they need to do their work, and so every time you get a step to a new node like this, it should be a big improvement in both performance and energy use. And I was waiting for the uh three nanometer. Am I Thrilled? No, it's not as big a jump as I thought it would be. Is it Easily the fastest computer I've ever used? Yes, is it the most kind of elegant Expression of a computing device? Yes, and that's one of the reasons that I was very attracted to this.

Is this the black? Notice? It's not black when I tilt it into the light, because what, what it? What makes it look dark is actually and there's a great piece, and I fix it on this this finish they use and how it reflects light. So when it gets to the position where it can reflect light, it's actually, you know, kind of a medium gray, but but it doesn't reflect light very well, and so as you tilt it, it gets darker and darker. It is a nice look. It is a very nice look, absolutely. They also solve the problem with the midnight blue mac book airs Of fingerprints.

1:47:22 - Mikah Sargent
They're not a hundred solved, but they addressed it.

1:47:25 - Leo Laporte
It's not nearly as bad. Yeah, in fact, normally I carry my mac book air in a case because it's so you know, fingerprint magnetic, you can see. I mean, I've been handling this. It's not covered with fingerprints, it's a little bit smooshy, easy to clean off, though. Um, I also had, I had, an air and I was Feeling not great about the screen.

The screen on this is, I think, a lot better than the screen in the air. This is, this is apples. Uh, you know, true tone p3 color gamut. That really does a great job of reproduction. It goes up to 120 hertz, so it's very smooth scrolling. Uh, I, I feel like this is a Notably better screen, and I and I did this by sitting at side by side with my m2 mac book air, and it really is a difference in color and reproduction. It just looks great.

Now let's talk a little bit about speed, though I'm gonna close out a few of the applications I've got running here because I want to. Uh. Now, battery life when you just do normal things with this Is is as good as it was on the mac book air. It's, you know, you're getting 11 hours all day. Battery life, excellent battery life. But I have to say the? Um, uh, one of the things apples done with this is They've reduced the number, as we were talking earlier of efficiency cores. This is designed to be powerful and fast. Furthermore, it's designed to do it Without regard to energy use. Okay, so that when you want speed and power, it's going to eat through the battery.

When I, I'll show you boulders gate. Okay, this is a popular game. Uh, it's on steam and it was designed let's close out again a few of these other things. It was designed, uh, to I have a lot of stuff running. That's the other thing I got. I got 64 gigs of ram, so I can have a lot of thing. I'm gonna close out my email. There we go. Now we can play boulders gate.

I gotta know I unplugged that, john, I got. There's a reason I unplugged it, because I want to hold it. John's crawling over. Uh, you can look over my shoulder. Uh, it actually looks better. So I was playing boulders gate, which, which is a great game. Uh, it is a modern game that is designed simultaneously for the pc and the mac, and that's one of the reasons I'm playing it. They're not a lot of those, right, exactly, they're not a lot of those. Uh, this is one of them. It doesn't load noticeably faster. Uh, oops, hello, oh, I crashed. Well, how, how about that? Huh, let me do it again, me it. I haven't had that happen. Um, it loads noticeably faster, except when it doesn't, and, uh, and it runs beautifully at the, and I set this at the maximum, really.

1:50:11 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, I know I didn't crash.

1:50:12 - Leo Laporte
I closed steam. That was a mistake. There we go. Uh, it runs beautifully, but it runs about two hours before you have to plug it in. It is not uh it because they're turning up all the power.

1:50:27 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, and this was something that they did make note of in the keynote was that it runs at the same video Speed, like the video is just as good whether you're plugged in or not, unlike most max very unplugged them, they do drop everything. They're not doing that with the new very important.

1:50:43 - Leo Laporte
So they've they've designed this to really be Uh a beast. When you want it to be, and when you're not doing things that are demanding, it does not particularly, uh, use the energy notably, you have, as is always the case with macbook pros, the speaker grills on the side, unlike the macbook air.

1:51:03 - Mikah Sargent
So you've got those on the left side. Sound is so much better.

1:51:05 - Leo Laporte
This has more speakers, and that was another thing. By the way, it just purely in terms of, uh, you know, user Convenience, having great sound and a great screen and, by the way, keyboard and trackpad are top in class. They always happen on max right Uh, but this feels like it looks. I think it looks pretty nice on that dark gray background. This is the game, uh, running at the top frame rate. By the way, the top quality no jitter, no jitter beautifully.

it runs beautifully, but two hours later I had to plug it in, so but I don't think that that's unusual.

1:51:44 - Mikah Sargent
I think you'd expect that on a pc as well. I mean, I would expect to be sitting at a pc on a pc, not using a laptop in the first place.

1:51:52 - Leo Laporte
So I plug this into my 55 inch oled display. It can run Multiple 6k displays. That's one of the advantages on this they now have if you buy the top of the line. That's the other reason I didn't get a the lower down version of the m3 max or the m3 pro. I want all of the ports. It has an hdmi port. It has a thunder three, thunderbolt four ports. I'll show you the two. On the other side, an sd card reader. I like that too. That's something missing.

1:52:21 - Mikah Sargent
It's so nice to have that from the air two more thunderbolt four ports.

1:52:25 - Leo Laporte
I got I have the thunderbolt four doc From cal digit runs beautifully, can plug into that, powers it. We'll run multiple monitors. It has display port. There's the magsafe adapter. Yes, it does come with a braided black cable If you, if you care about that, at a, at a high cost, that uses the memory. Well, I would say, as we were talking earlier, having 64 gigs is nice. Yeah, you want to feel how hot it got from running Baldur's gate? Oh wow, yeah, oh wow, yeah, it's quite warm. Do you hear fans? You didn't hear. No, I didn't hear fans. Their fans turn on, but they're nice, they're just very quiet. Yeah, this gets quite warm. This is uh, I mean I'm this is running a AAA title in the highest possible graphics and it just resumed too.

1:53:19 - Mikah Sargent
That's quite. Did you see that instant?

1:53:21 - Leo Laporte
fum, fum. Uh, I really have to say apple has and notice, I'm not doing benchmarks, because I don't think benchmarks fully reflect the experience a user has. I'm shutting down steam now, so it's not about benchmarks when it comes to you sitting down at it.

It's what you're doing with it and it's how it feels. Uh, shall I show you windows? That would be great. All right, runs windows better than any pc I've ever had? Uh, it is truly uh remarkable. Um, let's see how I can run this. It runs windows in both. I'm using parallels, of course, and it's funny, I don't do it that often, so I don't remember. I'm not a big pc user, remember.

1:54:13 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I do have it more on here just as proof of concept, or do you? Are there apps that you do? I don't use?

1:54:19 - Leo Laporte
It's pretty much proof of concept. I don't really there's nothing. I really want, uh, windows to be running. But notice, by the way, in my now my launcher, I have things like windows power shell window. I can run windows applications standalone. In fact, let me launch that just show you how quickly I can get into windows 11. There we go, there's windows running.

1:54:47 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, there's power show running sounds.

1:54:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it has turned it into a full screen windows machine in. How was that? Five seconds flat, very fast, uh, this thing runs windows, like I said, better than any pc.

Well, I don't really want to run it, but I will for you. I'll do it for you, thank you. Continue without this data? Oh, you have to do a lot of stuff customize, express, so forth. Uh, you see how fast all this stuff is loading. It's just loading immediately, it's immediate, and that's the subjective experience that no benchmark will show you. This feels Responsive. Uh, let me show you another example. That was that's windows. I'll keep windows running. I got enough ram.

That's another reason right at 64 gigs of ram Is so that you can keep windows running and I just slide over. I'm on a mac. Oh, I'm on a pc. Oh, I'm on a mac. I'm gonna run whisper. Uh, whisper ai is a trend. Do you see how fast that loaded, by the way? I just want to point that out. Uh, I'm gonna open up a file and we'll transcribe mac break weekly from this week. So this is, uh, mp3. So the first thing has to do it converts it. Uh, jason snel pointed this out. This is the whisper runs orders of magnitude. Seems like faster on this processor than any other, because it really in if you look at the CPU usage effect. Let me launch activity monitor while we're while we're doing this, so we can see everything. Just so there's something.

No, no benchmark can express right how that felt Exactly.

1:56:24 - Mikah Sargent
That is very much something that you just have to show and talk about.

1:56:28 - Leo Laporte
It works with you, it does. It does what you want to do. I'm going to keep the CPU monitor window open here, cpu usage. We'll close out that other one. Oh, it's already going. And let's see here these are the CPUs. Now notice, there's 16 of these, almost all pegged. In other words, so this is a CPU and not GPU. Yeah, okay, whisper. Well, I might use GPU. I don't have actually, let me. Let me go back to activity monitor.

1:56:56 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I can't remember if that one does it or if that's only an. I stat yeah.

1:57:00 - Leo Laporte
Uh, gpu history doesn't show usage exactly, but we'll, uh, we'll, we'll, just get that window up anyway. So this uses all of these makes a big difference in overall performance, right? I don't know if it's using the GPU. I think we'd see the same thing. This has 40 core GPU cores. If, uh, if, if we were looking at this while we were playing Baldur's gate, for instance, we'd probably see similar uh GPU activity because that's the thing they will use as much as is available, right?

1:57:30 - Mikah Sargent
Regardless of what's going on.

1:57:32 - Leo Laporte
Um, this is not. This is uh transcribing in a little bit better than real time. Um, I'm using the giant biggest uh data. Uh, yeah, so this is the most accurate translation whisper does, but it's a three gigabyte model. It's the largest model they offer.

1:57:49 - Mikah Sargent
Uh, it does a great job and it's a two and a half hour file.

1:57:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and it's doing it a little faster than uh, than one X, uh, I could, I could, uh, I could use a smaller model and do it even faster than that. So, yeah, it's 5% done in the two hour show. So it's, it's, it's pretty snappy, mm, hmm, uh and that's the thing that's still running windows in the background.

That's another thing to keep in mind is you're now going to be doing more things in that you thought you weren't going to challenge this computer, for instance, you're going to be doing more AI stuff that used all of these CPUs. On this thing, you may say, well, you know, I'm not. I'm not launching rocket ships, I'm not Alex Lindsey doing photogrammetry. True, but more and more, we're going to start using these AI apps that will, in fact, challenge the computer. So that's the other reason to maybe overbuy. Now, this is very, very pricey. As equipped, this is a $4,800 computer. I bought Apple care as well, so put it over the $5,000 mark. Uh, so it's not cheap. Um, and probably most of you would do better just as well with a MacBook air yeah, exactly, would not turn my nose up at it, uh, or a base model M three or, as our friend Martin in Germany did, an M three pro. I'm glad I could afford this, because this is the best computing experience I've ever had. This is my. This is snappier, easier to use. This you can.

1:59:21 - Mikah Sargent
It doesn't get in the way yeah, you can take it with you whenever you go to visit your mother. It's, it's everything you need in a device that you can take. Yeah, yeah, it's windows too.

1:59:32 - Leo Laporte
It's one of the reasons I bought more Ram. But it's also one of the reasons I bought more hard drive, because the downside of all Apple gear is it's not upgradeable. So I got a four terabyte hard drive so I'd have enough room for windows, for some games, for some high end stuff. It is, if it is, if. If you're saying to yourself, is it worth $5,000 for a computer, divide that by the number of years you're going to get out of it. There you go, amortize it and ask yourself if I get five years out of this, it's a thousand dollars a year. It's about what is that? $300 a month, no, $500 a month. I don't know, I can't do the math. I need a computer. That's what I'm saying. I think it's. It's less than $500 a month. It's a hundred dollars.

2:00:18 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, less than a hundred dollars a month. Is it worth a hundred dollars?

2:00:22 - Leo Laporte
a month to you. Will it save you a hundred dollars worth of your time If you're using your computer for work? That's more of the question asked than do I need a $5,000 computer? No one needs a 5,000 computer, but it is. Is it worth it? It might well be so. Overall thoughts on this. I love the finish. What do you think? Oh?

2:00:43 - Mikah Sargent
I like the finish a lot. Yeah, no, I think that, especially after reading the I fix it thing, which we'll, I'm sure what they've done is, this is what I love about Apple.

2:00:51 - Leo Laporte
They do things that you just don't even know, behind the scenes that are crazy, right, you didn't.

2:00:57 - Mikah Sargent
They didn't take time on the stage to go through that whole process and talk about what they're doing.

2:01:02 - Leo Laporte
Apple Silicon is a miracle. We'll see what Qualcomm does later this year, in 2020. In 2024,. But Apple Silicon is a miracle. The way this works, the way it uses power when it needs it, the way it sips it energy when it doesn't. All of this is it is so elegantly designed. No, there are little things that I don't like that Apple does. I think that they really blew it on the system settings pain that's crazy to use the iPhone system preference. Pain on a big screen like this.

2:01:35 - Mikah Sargent
It's that's not perfect yeah.

2:01:37 - Leo Laporte
They're not perfect. Stage manager, waste of time, I don't use it. But when they do get it right, they really widgets on the desktop. I really enjoy. You Notice I'm a widgets kind of fanatic. That's a new thing. I got my calendar on the desktop. I've got the weather on the desktop. I have the time and the desktop, but more importantly, I have UTC. Nice, you know I'm always doing that silly UTC calculation.

2:01:59 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, you are.

2:02:00 - Leo Laporte
So, I thought it'd be nice to actually see a UTC clock smart on here. Yeah, everything that they've done with with the Mac OS, sonoma, everything they've done with the Apple Silicon and everything they've done with the externals of this thing it is not much redesigned from last year. In fact, the only new feature is the color, but I thought they got it right last year, I think so too, I think so too, and I love design is great.

Three Thunderbolt, four ports. This thing, frankly, it's a Mac Pro in a portable. It really is form factor, so absolutely highly recommended. Yes, it's expensive. Why did I get the top line? By the way, I could have spent another couple of thousand by an eight terabyte hard drive and 128 gigs of RAM. Those are the two things I didn't max out. I did max out the processor, though, got the M three max top of the line and I love it.

So is this a lust worthy object? Yes, does it make sense? Well, you'll have to make the judgment on that. You'll have to divide it by the number of years and the number of hours the number of hours is going to save you. Does it make sense? For me, absolutely not. Is it? Is it a satisfying object of technology lust? Wow, yes, apple has once again nailed it. They are amazing and this is the computer.

When I read William Gibson's Neuromancer and he had a kind of a beat up computer that had the entire world's information the Library of Congress on it and he could jack into it and he could transport himself to the metaverse and all that, this is the closest thing. I always wanted that computer, this is the closest thing to that. They've done a great job and I'm going to put a big old sticker on it. I'm going to get it all beat up. I'm not putting a case on this guy. This, this one's going naked Commando. So thank you, apple for really, I think, thinking about Mac users and giving Mac users what we've wanted all along.

As I said earlier, I've owned a Mac since 1984. I've had almost every Mac out there, including some very bad designs like the trash can Mac. This one nails it. Good job, apple MacBook Pro M3. Macs Four terabytes of storage, sixty four gigs of RAM, basically, five thousand dollars. It's good. It's good. That's my thumbnail review of that. Yeah, but I it's hard to use. You know, you go, you read all the articles, you go, read all the benchmarks and it doesn't capture what really these objects are about. It's a very dry way of thinking about these. This is as much an emotional object always as anything else. It's not just a calculator and for me it's.

2:04:55 - Mikah Sargent
What's wild to me is that I do feel differently about the Mac than I do about the iPhone. I think maybe because the iPhone gets changed out, that's a lot more utilitarian. You don't make as much of a connection with it, but I I love this MacBook Air so much. It is such a great machine. It's so lightweight, but it's also powerful. And yeah, there is something about the, the, the powerful device that we have that helps us get the stuff done that we do.

2:05:20 - Leo Laporte
You know, I have the MacBook Air, both the 16 and the 32, and I have a great appreciation for those. Those are great devices. 16 and 14, 14, not 32. I don't know why I said 16 and 14. Actually, 13.

2:05:36 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, that's right.

2:05:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so, and then I made a big mistake. I put it next to Lisa's 14 inch MacBook Pro, the M2 Mac, m2 Macs from last year, and it took some of this. Don't ever put this next to your machine. Yeah, you keep it over there. Some of the joy out of it. I thought you know it's it's, the speakers aren't quite as good.

It's not that it's bad, right, and it's so light screen, it makes up it makes up for what it lacks with this lightness and thinness, but the lack of ports, the slightly lower quality screen, the slightly lower quality audio, was enough to say, you know, I, I treated myself. Yeah, this is the ice cream cone of computers and I'm very happy. The ice cream cone of computers, parallels, runs so well. I mean, I can't if I were. You know, honestly, we're running Windows in emulation. I don't know, I couldn't think of what I should put on here to show you how well it runs, but it just runs beautifully. This is a nice Windows machine. Honestly, this is what I should be using for the show, so to have access to the Windows and the Mac in one computer. But I don't want to give it up. There's some GPU history. You know it really didn't use much of the GPU when I was doing whisper. This is the GPU window and it's not using much CPU right now. Nope, but some.

I put some RAM up and see what the with the RAM usage looks like. Let's see. Do I have a RAM window? Maybe I don't, I guess not. I like those little activity monitor windows. You can look at it. I mean, actually, this is the reason I'm not an expert on. This is what I usually use is a terminal based program called B top. So open that up and this is this is what I like to look at it. What I found interesting as I'm using this computer, is it pretty much uses all the RAM, like right now it's using 59 gigabytes of RAM. It doesn't matter even what I'm running, but that's good. That's good memory management. It's using the RAM. It's saying you got it, I'm going to use it Absolutely. I'll free it up if you need it. I don't think that's particularly windows, but it's using almost all the RAM. There's very little RAM it's not using. Doesn't use all the CPUs, only using the. Those are probably the efficiency cores C zero through three. I would bet those are the efficiency.

2:08:07 - Mikah Sargent
I bet we're right. Yeah, because it's only doing efficiency things right now. Yeah, right.

2:08:12 - Leo Laporte
Let's turn windows on, see if it. Let's open open edge, see if that slows it down. Now I got edge running. Let's see if anything else is happening. Now it just hums right along. I had a little more CPU usage, but not much. It's just. Yeah, you see, the performance cores have kicked in, but not much. All that to show that some two dollar bills are worth more than others.

2:08:42 - Mikah Sargent
All right.

2:08:43 - Leo Laporte
Should I take a break? What should I do? Tell me what? Is it break time? Is it time? It's time, it's time for a break. And then, when we come back, we'll take some more calls. What do you say? I say, let's do it. What do you say? I have to open up the. I should show you the silly things I'm doing now. Incidentally, I'm setting this up.

I decided to do everything. You know, kind of do everything right, redo everything, for instance, and you sent me this article. Guy says why do you download the downloads folder? Oh yeah, why don't you download it as a temp folder, where it'll be there, but not for a little, just temporarily, and then it'll be erased? And so I have to go look in the temp folder for the commercial Our show today brought to you by DeleteMe. Oh, this is good. Lisa uses this.

Have you ever searched for your name? Don't do this. Do not do this because it's horrifying. Online Search for your name and you see how much personal information your net worth, your home, what you bought your home for, where you live, your phone numbers, your everything, your age, it's all online it does. If that makes you feel exposed, you're not alone.

Since 2010, DeleteMe has been on a mission to empower individuals and organizations by allowing them to reclaim their privacy and help them remove personal data from online sources. They know all the data brokers. They know, one by one, how to remove your data. They know how to keep the data off, because that's a little trick data brokers have they go oh, you didn't want us to store that? Okay, fine, they delete it. And then two weeks later it's fully repopulated. Nope, not with delete me. They make sure it stays deleted. Their team is driven by a passion for privacy and a commitment to make it simple for you to use. DeleteMe helps reduce risk from identity theft, from credit card theft, from robocalls and spam, from harassment, unwanted communications overall, and can I tell you, if you are in a business, it also improves your cybersecurity. You know we started using DeleteMe when many of our staff got an emergency text message from Lisa, the CEO, saying I'm in a meeting right now. I need you to send me. I can't remember what it was.

2:11:10 - Mikah Sargent
It's Apple. They want you to buy Apple gift cards.

2:11:13 - Leo Laporte
Can you send me some Apple gift cards Now? Fortunately, you guys are well trained, but how did they know who Lisa was and who worked for Lisa? I can tell you right now. They learned that from data brokers, from online sources, from searching Google, and this is why it's important for your cybersecurity, too. Your executive suite is the best target for spearfishing, and the best way for bad guys to get that information is online. DeleteMe reduces that risk. That's why we started using it.

DeleteMe is the most trusted privacy solution available. It helps thousands of customers who remove their personal information online. The average person has about 2000 pieces of data about them online. DeleteMe knows where they are and can remove them for good. One customer said I signed up and they took it from their awesome service, already seeing results. Here's how it works. Now you are going to have to and I know some people said well, I don't want to do that, but this is the. You have to give them a little bit of personal information so they know what to look for. Right? You can't just say can you DeleteMe without saying who you are. So they're going to sign up. It's basic personal information and you, these companies. This company is really good. You can trust them. So that's how they're going to find this information, not just with search engines.

DeleteMe experts will find and remove your personal information from hundreds of data brokers. That's really the most important one Helping remove your online footprint and keeping you and your family safe. Once the removal process starts, you're going to get a detailed report within seven days, but it doesn't stop there. This is really key. DeleteMe will continue to scan and remove your personal information every three months and with automated removal opt out monitoring this is the key. They will ensure records don't get repopulated after being removed. We're talking name, address, photos, emails, relatives, phone numbers, social media, property value and more, and it's completely legal. Until Congress outlaws the data broker industry, you're going to need to leave me. DeleteMe continues to add new brokers, new sites, new features to ensure their service is both simple to use and effective in removing PII, personally identifiable information. They have privacy advisors too, because you know and all everybody has different needs and different exposures, and they will ensure that you get the support you need when you need it, the information you need.

I love this company. They're doing the job Everybody should do Protect yourself, reclaim your privacy the website. joindeleteme.com/twit. The offer code is TWiT. joindeleteme.com/twit the offer code's TWiT for 20% off, at least to start using them. I think about a year ago, it's just if you're an executive or or you know you're a manager. Frankly, in any company, you need this to protect your company. DeleteMe. joindeleteme.com/twit the offer code TWiT for 20% off. Ok, I'm getting tired of talking.

2:14:21 - Mikah Sargent
Well then, let's have someone else talk to us. Well, we can't talk or we can do a voicemail email. Oh, we haven't had any voice, we didn't do a voice.

2:14:30 - Caller
I think it was really good. Hello, it's Mo from Irondale, ontario, canada. I got a quick call here. I just purchased my dad's first cell phone. He's 80 years old smartphone. Good to hear that he's doing OK with it. Good, a little frustrated at times With his fat fingers.

He tends to turn things on and off and doesn't know he does it. You know, do not disturb. So I can't calm. Oh, no, you're here and you'll put on Bluetooth and it's pairing with something. So when I call he can't hear a thing because the volume is going there. Anyway, my question is is there a setting or an app or a guest mode that I can install on the phone where none of those settings can be changed? Wouldn't that be great? Unless they do it a password. So, like the accidentally hit, do it disturb. It won't allow it that way. It's basic and even something that could keep the volume up, because he tends to push button, push button, push button and then there's no sound, there's no whatever. I'm just very curious. I've done some quick searches for it and not much. But see what you pros feel. And, leo, I've been a fan of yours. I've been watching you since early 2000s when my daughter was born. Oh, thanks guys.

2:15:45 - Mikah Sargent
Thanks Bo. Yeah, this is a great question.

2:15:48 - Leo Laporte
What he didn't say. The one thing that would have been useful yeah, the Android or iOS.

2:15:52 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, if it's an iOS phone, screen time is where you can actually disable almost every setting to be changed.

2:15:59 - Leo Laporte
And that's intended for kids.

2:16:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, but it happens to work for elders? Yep, absolutely, and so within screen time, there are all of these settings. You can set up a passcode. First and foremost, do not forget that passcode. I think it's one of the most commonly searched things on the internet is bypass screen time password. Don't forget that password, but it will lock so many settings on Android. I've heard of some kind of not.

2:16:25 - Leo Laporte
Samsung has an easy mode. I don't know if they have anything quite as complete as that.

2:16:29 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, because the way that people have been able to do it is by installing profiles and stuff that stuff gets a little bit too. I don't know, that's too far for me, I guess.

2:16:40 - Leo Laporte
There's a couple of things to look at anyway, samsung. Samsung has its own store and they have a very nice app that everybody on Samsung should use that gives you additional features that for some reason they don't put in the operating system, which is kind of weird, and now it's escaping me the name of it. Of course I'll get that in a second Google phones. I don't know if they have anything like that, but I would look at child features, child protection features. A launcher.

Yeah, there's a program called Tasker which is very useful on Android that lets you. It's basically an automation feature, but you could use Tasker to say don't turn off the Bluetooth when any time between 11.59, or rather midnight, to 11.59 pm, don't allow the Bluetooth to be turned off, things like that. So Tasker would allow you, but it would do with considerable effort because you have to go through all those settings manually.

2:17:42 - Mikah Sargent
I guess, yeah, I guess Android does have some digital well-being features. Thank you, John. That are screen time.

2:17:51 - Leo Laporte
I good luck. Thank you, walking walking Black Bear. In our IRC Good luck Is a good luck is in the Samsung store and then it has a bunch of modules that you can add, and I have a feeling there's some good luck stuff in Samsung that will let you lock it down. Samsung has an easy mode. That's the first thing to do is got big buttons it's easier to use and then look at use, installing good luck and using some of the features in good luck. Good luck has a whole bunch of extra stuff. Everybody has a Samsung phone should have good luck on their phone. There you go, good luck. Yeah, good question. Thank you, walking Black Bear. And yes, thank you If that's your real name. If that is you, I'm a little scared of Walking Black Bear. Maybe he noticed I have a lot of nice bear pictures though.

2:18:35 - Mikah Sargent
Oh yeah, on my photo album. In fact recognized himself, or maybe that's why he's here, yeah.

2:18:42 - Leo Laporte
Here's the gears for people want to, for completeness in the Galaxy Store. This is the app you want and it does. It does a whole bunch of stuff. You'll download additional good luck modules and it's free.

2:18:54 - Mikah Sargent
All right, are we? Are we out of time? We have time for let's do more.

2:18:58 - Leo Laporte
More is always good. Thank you, Mo. Thank you, Mo. I won't say anything about Larry and Curly because I know that you expect me to.

2:19:05 - Mikah Sargent
You want to work your rotator cuff? Yeah. He's talking about reaching over to the yes he's going to reach into the mailbox to pull out an email.

2:19:16 - Leo Laporte
An email from someone else.

2:19:18 - Mikah Sargent
How about we do a?

2:19:19 - Leo Laporte
flight. Lighting lighting, lighting, lighting. We can do this. Neither. Sharing photos, William, is our bill says. I have a question about the best way to share display photos. Many old photos like to get input on who it is from relatives Like who's that? Oh, and I was thinking of a web page. I thought you might have know of a better way to do it. I'd like to display the photo and then allow comments from family so I can get a more accurate record of who's in the photo and when it was taken.

2:19:45 - Mikah Sargent
A couple of ways to do that, I'll do that, I'll do that, I'll do that, I'll do that. And if you're a social media sponsor which is great because they are sponsored If you are in the Apple ecosystem, you can create a shared album that everyone has access to and it works like a little social media network. You can put little comments below and everybody can comment on it. If you're not, flickr would be another place.

2:20:03 - Leo Laporte
Google photos will do that as well. Again, you affect Mike Elkins, he calls it. He's his replacement for Facebook, mike's nice book and you can go there, leave comments in things like that. That was Uncle Joe in 1952, driving his favorite Camaro, that kind of thing. Yeah, there you go. There are actually a lot of ways to do that. Nowadays. That's a very common use. The other one more thing I'd add is many of the genealogy programs have features like this, and that might even be more on point. If you get ancestrycom or one of the other genealogy tools, you can share photo albums, get people's input.

The best way to do genealogy is to get the older people in your family to say, oh yeah, I remember him. He was no good. This is Martin. We already answered your question, martin. I love it. Thank you. Yeah, that's a real lightning round. That was a lightning round. That one's over. This one is from Peter. Hello, peter, I've recently purchased a mesh Wi-Fi system. Ok, as you know, micah uses the Eero, I do. I'm looking for the best location to position the satellites so as to eliminate dead spots. He's also read that it's a good idea to keep router and satellites away from you, especially when you sleep? No, I worry about that, but you are a barrier to them.

So I'm up in the air. But yeah, you know they're not going to harm you. It's not ionizing radiation, it doesn't harm your body. Well, some of the comments I've seen say it's not ionizing radiation and place them wherever you want. But many more from seemingly credible medical sources say they should be kept 25 to 30 feet from where you sleep. There's no evidence. There you go, that's it. It's not unreasonable to say, well, if you can do, yeah, why not?

2:21:49 - Mikah Sargent
I also tried to sleep far away from airports. I have, I mean I don't even know where I live, airports is thinking of airplane crashes.

2:22:00 - Leo Laporte
How many of those are?

2:22:01 - Mikah Sargent
that they're more likely to crash here, the air after, right next to it.

2:22:04 - Leo Laporte
It's on your bedside table. Is anything there that has electronics in it that's radiating in some cases actual harmful radiation, so I wouldn't worry about that.

2:22:13 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, we're worried more about the black mold in the bathroom.

2:22:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, black mold. There's something to worry about. I think the best idea is not to get your health advice from the internet, amen. So now let me give you some advice about placement Best thing to do and unfortunately you can't do this on an iPhone, but you can do it on your laptop or on an Android device. They have Wi-Fi analyzer programs that will let you walk around and analyze the Wi-Fi strength, and there's even some I think it's called that name on Android Wi-Fi analyzer that will make a map of your layout that you can then see the hot spots, the cold spots, and that will give you a much better idea of where to put Wi-Fi access points.

2:22:55 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, because it's different. It's not as if we can say always place it here 30 degrees to the left of the no it has a lot to do with other things that are going to block it.

2:23:04 - Leo Laporte
Wi-fi analyzer is available on Windows as well as on on Android, and it is a very useful tool. I think it's free. There's in-app purchases, but if you search for Wi-Fi analyzer, you'll see a lot of other tools that that look the same, maybe even have the same name. But what I'm, what I would really look for, is something that lets you do a map of your house. So it's one thing to go into the room and say, well, in this corner it's minus four, but in this corner it's minus eight. I'm trying to remember the one that I've used to do mapping. We, before we put in, before we put in our ubiquity system, we actually went around and mapped the whole house.

2:23:49 - Mikah Sargent
You. When you say we do, you mean the like people came in.

2:23:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, got it, so I use the third party to do that Net spot. Thank you, scooter X. Open signals net spot. That's free too. I think that's a very good, very good choice.

2:24:03 - Mikah Sargent
Wire shark works, doesn't it? Doesn't it have a tool?

2:24:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, these are higher end, higher end hacking tools. Open signal yeah. Net spots yeah. Open signals the company that actually puts out information about cellular signals. But they apparently have also a tool called net spot. It's for Android, the best Wi-Fi analyzer.

2:24:29 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, yeah, the way that it's showing the map of the space, and it's that's what you want. I kind of want to do this.

2:24:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you want to see what your house looks like.

2:24:35 - Mikah Sargent
Because basically what I did in mind remember, three story shoebox. It's the top floor where my office slash studio is, that's where my router is. The second floor has a satellite and then the bottom floor, which is also the garage, has a satellite. So for mine it was easy, because I wanted each floor to have something, but depending on how your home is laid out, it's going to be different.

2:24:59 - Leo Laporte
So, yeah, this, this tool is my guess is, this is what actually what the people who came in and mapped my house used, because this is this is often used by by pros. Look at that. When did you love that heat map?

2:25:11 - Mikah Sargent
I know I thought so I think I'm going to do it.

2:25:13 - Leo Laporte
So nice to have a heat map of your house. I mean, that's the ideal. Now, what do most people do? You go, well, let's put it here, see how it works, and then, if it doesn't, you move around a little bit. I'm glad the most important thing is where the base station is. Again, as we said, get it high up, because it doesn't.

Wifi doesn't go through human water bags very well, so get it above people's heads and it's more likely to reach. Make sure you know, going through walls is always hard, especially for 5G. For 2.4 Gigahertz it's not so bad, but for 5 Gigahertz it's hard. You know, metal is the worst. So if you've got metal in your walls, that's, that's the worst thing, you know. But I guess this would be the best way to do. It is to use that spot, map it all out.

The other thing you'll see, by the way, with these it's very valuable is how strong the neighbors are. Yeah, yeah, and sometimes that can be a problem. You don't want to be on the same frequencies or the same bands more importantly, the same channels as your neighbors. So you're going to use this to also adjust your channels to keep away from the neighbors. Wi-fi Wi-Fi is a collision based network, so if there's other traffic on the same channel, on the same band, it's going to slow you down because as soon as your signal sees somebody else there, it goes. Oh, pardon me, excuse me, let me step back. It waits a random amount of time, then tries again. If it's still there, it goes. Oh, I'm sorry, I'll knock next time. And then it says, oh no, no, no, I didn't want to see that. And on and on. So you get much better performance with Wi-Fi if you are not on the same channel as the neighbors and other interfering Wi-Fi signals. So there's some good tips in there. Ok, ok, anything else? Are we done? I think we're done. Well, I thank you so much, everybody for joining us.

A reminder we will continue to do the live stream for this show on YouTube, so you'll always be able to go to YouTubecom. We'll be doing it on YouTubecom Twitter, I think we will. I think we will. Yeah, let's do it there and then. And so you'll always be able to go there. And I guess when we do that it'll show up on tech-i-labscom or not. We haven't really thought about this, didn't think this through, but we do want you to watch. We love it that you watch. Thank you. We also love it that you download. Thank you for that as well.

All the information you need about watching the show is at tech-i-labscom. The broadcast time is about 11 11 am Pacific and we end around 1.33 pm Pacific every Sunday. The reason that's important? There's two reasons One, if you want to watch live, but two, more importantly, if you want to call, because you can't really call during the rest of the time. You can call and leave a message, but if you want to talk to us, it has to be when we're doing the show, right? So, again, between 11 and two Pacific time, that is, two to five pm Eastern time, that's 1900 UTC. That's when we do it live. After the fact, of course, go to tech-i-labscom. You'll see links to your favorite podcast clients. You'll see a link to your YouTube channel and you'll see the actual shows themselves. You can watch there or download. There. There's audio and video of the show. Best thing to do will be subscribing in Pocket Casts or one of your favorite podcast clients, because that way you'll get it automatically.

I had a very nice gentleman used to work at Coors named Ralph, called us about 24 times Actually, this is said. This guy named, this guy keeps calling. Could you talk to him, please, please? So I called him back Hi, ralph. I said where are you from? He said Golden. He said, hey, that's where Coors is. He said, yeah, worked there for 30 years. So I said, well, that's good. So we used to get trucks of Coors beer delivered every once in a while because we couldn't get it in California. He said, yeah, that was, that was my co-workers. They would go to the company store, stock up on Coors, drive to where they wanted to go for vacation, sell all the Coors, then go on vacation with the money they made.

2:29:16 - Mikah Sargent
What Is that illegal?

2:29:18 - Leo Laporte
I'm thrilled to know that it was. I guess it. Well, sorry, I should have asked Quasi-league. Well, that's a silly question, I don't know. Anyway, Ralph was having trouble, He'd paid. He joined the club. Thank you, Ralph, we appreciate it. But he said but I can't figure out how to download it. And it turned out he was on Linux and he. So I said do you have a podcast app? He said yeah, he's using G Potter. So I was able to explain. When you joined the club, you're going to get a list, a page with all your links, and you just copy the link into G Potter or your podcast client and that way you can still subscribe, but you don't get the ads. Ralph was very happy. If you're, if you're listening, Ralph, Ralph, thank you, I appreciate it. Send us some course. No, you don't have to. Not, not, not anymore. We I actually took a tour of the course plant when I visited my son Tour a curious tour.

I have a picture of Henry and and his friends and their dads. It was a father son, that's fun. Tour of the course plant some years ago when he was at CU Boulder. What else should I say? What else should we say? I told him how to watch.

2:30:24 - Mikah Sargent
Did you tell him how to get a hold of us? Well, yeah, if you want to call us 8887242884. Yes, you can call us any time with that phone number During the show. You will be brought into a room, then get to come up live on air and ask your question. But if you call that number during the week, you can leave a voicemail, like a friend moded earlier, which is great. You can also get in touch with us by going to ATG, by emailing us at ATG, at Tweet TV. When you email ATG at TweetTV with your text or your audio or your video, we will see that as well and be able to answer your question. Or also, during the show, head to call Tweet TV. We suggest on your smartphone. That will bring you into the Zoom room where you can hang out and wait to have your question taken live on the air.

2:31:09 - Leo Laporte
And we should mention Club Members will always continue to watch live because it's going to be in the Discord still and what? We're just trying to cut costs everywhere. Lisa just messaged me. She said I see you have three cell phone accounts and they're adding up. Can you get rid of any of them? I mean, if you think it's a hardship not to get in a live stream, imagine me. I got to cut off all my cell phone access. Well, I did that because I wanted to know how all of them actually have more than three. She just isn't only found three. But you know we're cutting costs here. We have to and we're and I'm sorry, I wish we didn't. I would love it if I had an infinite amount of money, in which case we would not be turning off the live stream. But we were kind of trying to make ends meet, as one does. We appreciate your understanding and your support. We thank you for being here. We'll see you next time. That's the tech guys. Meanwhile, I'm Leo Laporte and I'm Mike, a Sergeant, wishing you a great week.

2:32:13 - Rod Pyle
Hey, I'm Rod Pyle, editor in chief of Ad Astra Magazine. Each week, I joined with my cohost to bring you, This Week in Space, the latest and greatest news from the final frontier. We talked to NASA, chief space scientists, engineers, educators and artists, and sometimes we just shoot the breeze over what's hot and what's not in space books and TV. And we do it all for you, our fellow true believers. So, whether you're an armchair adventurer or waiting for your turn to grab a slot in Elon's Mars rocket, join us on This Week in Space and be part of the greatest adventure of all time.

All Transcripts posts