Ask the Tech Guys Episode 1991 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.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
Hey, hey, it's time for Ask the Tech Guys. I'm Leo LaPorte coming up. Why doesn't Google know where I live?

Mikah Sargent (00:00:07):
And I'm Micah Sargent. And it's time to answer the question, should we be upgrading our AirPods Pro to the latest generation or should wait?

Leo Laporte (00:00:14):
Ooh plus car guy. Salmon Bull Salmon. I'm going to ask him about the Elon Musk biography. He says, maybe Walter Isaacson got something wrong. Stay tuned. Ask the Tech Guys Is Next podcasts you love [00:00:30] from people you

Mikah Sargent (00:00:30):
Trust.

Leo Laporte (00:00:32):
This is T Twit. This is Ask the Tech guys with Micah Sergeant and Leo LaPorte, episode 1991, recorded September 10th, 2023. A passel of petabytes. Ask The Tech Guys is brought to you by Brooke Linen. Experience the difference for yourself at Check Out Brook Linens new fall collection for bed and bath. Visit in store or online@brooklinen.com. [00:01:00] And don't forget to use the Code Tech guy for $20 off your online purchase of $100 or more. Plus free shipping and buy Miro. Miro is your team's online workspace to connect, collaborate and create together. Tap into a way to map processes, systems, and plans with the whole team. Hit your first three boards for free to start creating your best work yet at miro.com/podcast. Listeners of this program get an ad free version if they're [00:01:30] members of Club twit. $7 a month gives you ad free versions of all of our shows plus membership in the club. Twit Discord, a great clubhouse for twit listeners. And finally, the twit plus feed with shows like Stacey's book Club, the Untitled Linux Show, the GIZ Fizz and more. Go to twit tv slash club twit and thanks for your support. Well, hey, hey, hey. How are you today? Once again, we're plural. It's as the tech guys time. Hi Micah. [00:02:00] Hi

Mikah Sargent (00:02:00):
Leo. How you feeling? I feel much better. Good. Yes it was. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:02:04):
Looking into your eyes to see if you're lying.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:06):
It was a rough couple of weeks. It was, but I feel much better. You do

Leo Laporte (00:02:11):
Have the green eyes of a covid. Long covid sufferer. No long, which is good.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:16):
Yeah, I think I am still using an inhaler, but it's not good. Outside of that, I feel pretty. Oh, so pretty.

Leo Laporte (00:02:27):
You are pretty. It's time to talk about tech. [00:02:30] Micah and I will answer your questions at 88. Never. I always do

Mikah Sargent (00:02:34):
That.

Leo Laporte (00:02:35):
It's always going downhill as soon as I say 88, 87, 24, 28 84.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:41):
Those sound like measurements. It doesn't

Leo Laporte (00:02:43):
Sound good. (888) 724-2884 is how you call

Mikah Sargent (00:02:47):
Us. That's how you call us. If you want to zoom us, zoom us. Well go to call twit TV. On your phone is a great way to do it because if you go by your phone, then you've got the camera, you've got the microphone all built in. So when you head [00:03:00] to that link, it'll say, Hey, can we zoom you? And then you'll go into a nice little waiting room with some other folks who are waiting to get on air to chat with us. Just hit that little button that says Hand up so we know that you're there not just to watch but to actually ask a question. So that's how you zoom us.

Leo Laporte (00:03:17):
Yes. And you can always email because we do emails. You were here last week when it was a weird coincidence. Got two printer questions in a row off the top of the email stack ATG at twit [00:03:30] tv. Is the email address just a weird coincidence?

Mikah Sargent (00:03:33):
Weird. Yeah, weird. I don't,

Leo Laporte (00:03:34):
It could have been three.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:35):
Oh. And if you call during the week to that number, 88 87 24, 28 84

Leo Laporte (00:03:43):
Sounds good. When he says it,

Mikah Sargent (00:03:44):
8 8 8 7 2 4 2 8 84. Then you will be able to leave a voicemail where you can ask your question and have it answered on air.

Leo Laporte (00:03:50):
So what's in the news?

Mikah Sargent (00:03:54):
What is in the news?

Leo Laporte (00:03:55):
There's a lot in the news, which is good. We have a very good twit coming up. I'm just going to plug [00:04:00] the next show because it's Amy Webb will join us. Jill Duffy from PC Magazine join us. And in a big yet, Taylor Lawrence, who you may remember from the New York Times and now at the Washington Post covers social. Her new book is called Extremely Online. And it's the history of the creation of the creator universe that we live in today. So that was really fun. And so I've been collecting stories for the three of them. There are three very smart people. [00:04:30] For instance, the Elon Musk biography from Walter Isaacson comes out Tuesday and a few bombshells in there. One I'm going to talk with about

Mikah Sargent (00:04:40):
Interesting choice of words

Leo Laporte (00:04:42):
So to speak. Or maybe no bombshells. I'm going to talk with one about with Sam Abel Salmon because our cart guys coming up, which is Elon's choice in the next version of full self-driving to use neural networks instead of rule-based full self-driving. It's an interesting [00:05:00] question whether it'll be better, but I'll save that for Sam. He's our card guy. The one that is going to be kind of explosive. The real bombshell is that apparently Elon Musk decided that he didn't want a nuclear war. So he disabled Ukraine's starlink access for a brief period of time to prevent them from using drones to attack the Russian Navy. [00:05:30] Which of course is the kind of thing you would expect. Maybe a president of the United States, a Secretary of Defense to decide not some entrepreneur who's providing internet access to the Ukraine army. So this was quite a revelation. We hadn't heard about it before. And not only that, but in order to demonstrate it to Walter Isaacson his, he gave him private emails [00:06:00] from the US government about it, an email exchange. And the government's very upset about that as well.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:09):
And hasn't Walter Isaacson tried to walk some of this back now

Leo Laporte (00:06:12):
Too? Yeah, he walked it back, but which is just, I don't think

Mikah Sargent (00:06:16):
That's, yeah, what the book says versus what Isaacson is saying. Now,

Leo Laporte (00:06:20):
According to Isaacson, Musk secretly instructed his engineers to turn off starlink satellite coverage to prevent Ukraine from launching a surprise drone [00:06:30] attack on Russian forces in the Crimea. Isaacson has since said on X,

Mikah Sargent (00:06:37):
Yeah, on

Leo Laporte (00:06:37):
X, the network formerly known as Twitter, that contrary to what he writes, must didn't shut down coverage but denied a request to extend the network's range. So they didn't have the coverage. They asked for more. He said, no, no, you can't have that. There's a difference.

Mikah Sargent (00:06:55):
There is a difference.

Leo Laporte (00:06:57):
Which I decided he was saving humanity from a nuclear war [00:07:00] when Ukraine's Vice Prime Minister texted him to say starlink was a matter of life and death. Musk's texted back, seek peace while you have the upper hand. This is not what we want. Private individuals. Private individuals, exactly. To do. It's kind of a shocker. Anyway, nothing more to say about that. We'll talk more about it on Twitter, I'm sure. Yeah, that's

Mikah Sargent (00:07:23):
A tough thing, right? Because in the United States itself, regulations surrounding internet are [00:07:30] one thing, but how does it apply when we're talking about international waters and other countries and a private US citizen having internet access? It's very wrinkly, I guess is what I'm saying.

Leo Laporte (00:07:41):
Miranda Wu said on Twitter. So all you guys who told me it wasn't a big deal that the United States was letting private industry take over its space efforts, you were wrong. And really that's what's happened, which is the government has let more and more private industry in space [00:08:00] and other areas take over and that gives the power to private industry when you do it. So that's what happened. North Korean hackers have been targeting security researchers with a zero day. That may be why everybody who uses Apple devices got emergency updates yesterday or was the day before yesterday. And if you're using now, I want to say that there's a lot of people say, oh my God, you better update. It's a zero day your Mac, your windows, [00:08:30] not your Windows, your iPhone, your watch windows update for other reasons. But these are attacks that are very expensive and really targeted by nation states at dissidents journalists, individuals in three letter agencies. Unless you're one of those, you and I, we don't have

Mikah Sargent (00:08:52):
To worry. We don't need to worry. We should still update. Update, yes.

Leo Laporte (00:08:55):
But it's not a panic

Mikah Sargent (00:08:56):
Situation. It's not, oh my goodness, have they already got me? No, [00:09:00] your threat not going after model is okay.

Leo Laporte (00:09:02):
Yes. Threat model is an important thing to think of. Let's see what else. I'm just looking, there's so many stories. It's hard to pick one.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:13):
Oh, what about the, maybe we do don't want to talk about this. I did see that there was a what Court of appeals that has said that several sort of government bodies have violated the First Amendment due to,

Leo Laporte (00:09:28):
Yeah, this is an interesting case. [00:09:30] So the issue was the federal government during Covid reached out to social networks and, well, I'll say it from the point of view of the government agencies that reached out, please take down misinformation because we're in a public health crisis and people need to hear the truth. Not some nut job saying, oh Covid is no worse than a cold. Go ahead and have it or whatever. [00:10:00] And I think that was a reasonable use of some agencies. The initial injunction said, no government agency should ever be able to talk to social network. And the fifth Circuit has come back and ruled yes, that that was a violation of the Fifth Amendment. But it's important to understand that they very much narrowed the injunction. Okay.

(00:10:25):
So government health officials and the F B I, according to the Fifth Circuit, [00:10:30] likely violated the first amendment by improperly influencing tech companies' decisions to remove or suppress posts on the coronavirus. Oh. And elections too, because they were trying to damp down misinformation there. However, the ruling was an improvement over the very broad temporary injunction, which said no government agency can ever talk to any social network. E F F has said the new injunction is a thousand times better than the original order. [00:11:00] The appeals court threw out nine of the prohibitions, modified the temp to limit it to quote efforts to coerce or significantly encourage social media companies to remove, delete, suppress or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, postage social media content containing protected free speech. So they did defend your right to say things that are misinformation and that the government can't go to these social networks and say, Hey, can you take this down?

Mikah Sargent (00:11:29):
Right. [00:11:30] Because that is the one instance where it actually does become a matter of free speech. You hear people talk about free speech all the time. If I post on social media and a social media company says no, that is not the free speech to do that. They're allowed to do that. If the government has an impact on that, that is where it's truly a free speech issue. So this is interesting because while on the one side, yes, I want that misinformation to go away at the same time I want that protection of the First Amendment. And this was one [00:12:00] instance where we may have seen it kind of work in the reverse.

Leo Laporte (00:12:04):
Yeah, it's not over. I think they could continue to appeal this. They haven't decided yet. I don't think it's unreasonable for if I'm the surgeon general and I see people on Twitter saying things that are actually endangering, in my opinion, in my professional opinion, endangering Americans health, I guess you could say to you should be able to call up Twitter [00:12:30] and say, look, I'm not telling you to take it down.

Mikah Sargent (00:12:31):
Exactly. A suggestion.

Leo Laporte (00:12:33):
Just so you know, this is misinformation and we believe it's causing people to die because free speech is not protected if it kills people,

(00:12:42):
There are limits to free speech, but the government, so I don't think it's wrong for them to do that. Now what the judge ruled was essentially they were taking over the decision-making apparatus of Twitter and others. And if that's the case, the surgeon General, the C D C, the White House and those are [00:13:00] the three agencies involved, should not really be allowed to call up Jack Dorsey, who was at the time c e o of Twitter and say, change your algorithm and stop promoting this stuff. You could see it's hard though if you're the White House, if it's the president calling,

Mikah Sargent (00:13:16):
It's

Leo Laporte (00:13:17):
A little coercive to say, Hey, by the way, knock it off. So I don't

Mikah Sargent (00:13:23):
Know. The same applies if the president calls you and says, let's try to falsify this election. It does have [00:13:30] a power. It does have a pressure. So yeah, understandably just the call from someone so high up with any suggestion, but I agree with you that the surgeon General should be able to go, look, we have data that shows that it's killing people. We want you to see this data. You do without what you will. Yeah, this is

Leo Laporte (00:13:51):
Why it's tricky.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:52):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:13:52):
It's very tricky. And I should add the F b I was the fourth agency that was involved in this. No, all four of those are now enjoined from ever doing that again. [00:14:00] So I guess that's all right on balance. But what does it do? It puts the pressure on you and me and everybody who are getting information from social networks, Facebook and Twitter and by the way, newspapers that we should judge it intelligently and check with experts, ask your doctor kind of thing and try to get to the facts that we now know that this kind of disinformation may well be spread because it's legal and the government can't [00:14:30] stop it. It's free speech. And that's true. That's one of the things about the free speech. Alright, I think we have now canoodled enough on the week's news. That's my decision with Would you like to, don't want to put pressure

Mikah Sargent (00:14:43):
On you? No. The only other thing that there was to talk about was Google getting older, but I don't really have anything to say about it.

Leo Laporte (00:14:48):
Google's 25, happy birthday, Google. Happy Birthday Google. And you know it's 20. Oh God, your bed. Your bed, your bed. Bed. Your bed. Your bed. Your bed. You could do that with snake.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:58):
Mushroom. Mushroom.

Leo Laporte (00:14:59):
Oh, [00:15:00] bed. 20 years old. 20 years ago. Wow. That was all the rage in the internet.

Mikah Sargent (00:15:06):
I don't often say I feel old, but that does make me feel old.

Leo Laporte (00:15:10):
There are people today who don't even know what we're talking about. Let's hope. Anyway. Yeah, it is my fervent prayer boy that there are many people today who go, what are they talking about? What is going on? Alright, lemme just, I was just going to check here to see if I should take a break. [00:15:30] Oh, maybe I should. I I will. Why not? And then we will go to our phones. Beautiful. Do we have calls? Please call us. We do. We have calls. We need your calls. But first I want to tell you about my sheets. Our show today brought to you by Brooke Linen. I had a lovely night's sleep last night and I credit it to Brooke Linen. Brooke Linen, the best sheets, pillowcases, duvets and towels I've ever had. Fall is year. This would be a perfect time [00:16:00] for you to upgrade your bedding collection with Cozy Season Home Essentials from Brooke Lenn.

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Mikah Sargent (00:17:16):
I did. I'm a very warm sleeper. So those, they're very breathable, which is important to me and they are lovely. I just, you sleep cool? I sleep cool, which is what I need.

Leo Laporte (00:17:27):
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Caller Lance (00:19:05):
Hi.

Leo Laporte (00:19:06):
Hi, welcome there. What's your name?

Caller Lance (00:19:10):
Lance.

Leo Laporte (00:19:11):
Lance.

Caller Lance (00:19:13):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:19:14):
Hi Lance. What can we do for you?

Caller Lance (00:19:17):
Well, I wanted to use you guys opinion on some problems that I have due to my landlord contract with Cox Cable tv. [00:19:30] I can't get good internet. I also wanted Scott Wilkerson's opinion on making Adobe Admiral sub out of an O P C.

Leo Laporte (00:19:42):
Okay, so let's start first. I mean obviously there must be people somewhere who enjoy Cox Cable. I'll tell you what I'll find out because Tuesday we're going to do the Apple event and I'm going to be in my mom's basement on Cox Cox cable. Oh boy, on fiber. Now my experience when I was out there, she's got fiber. [00:20:00] It was very good and very high speed. Both she and my sister are on Rhode Island and they have Cox as their provider. So it really will vary. And this is the case with all cable companies for a couple of reasons. One, there's a national outfit, but then each local cable company is an individual franchise. So in Lafayette that's, and if you go to the office, there's that Cox cable office that's the local franchise. So they have a certain amount of flexibility in how they operate their [00:20:30] business.

(00:20:31):
And it may be one of the things that a cable company can, one of the dials or knobs they can turn is how much bandwidth they provide to the neighborhood. So the way cable works, they buy a pass, that's a technical term. They buy a passel of petabytes from their upstream internet service provider, which is going to be one of the big backbones or something like that. They buy that and then they parcel it out to neighborhoods, each neighborhood. [00:21:00] And how big is the neighborhood? Well, it depends. Again, this is another thing that varies, but each neighborhood will have its own headend that they connect into for the internet. So maybe they're buying a hundred gigabits per second and they say, well, we want to give Lance's neighborhood four megabits or whatever, four, let's say four gigabits because there are a thousand customers there and they're going to divide that.

(00:21:27):
And with a thousand customers, remember not everybody's [00:21:30] online all at the same time. That's generally going to be sufficient and they kind of make that kind of calculation, well how much do you need per thousand people? Based on statistics on the amount used by those thousand people, it's not a hundred percent. 24 hours a day might be 43% at 6:00 PM when everybody turns on Netflix, it might be 4% at three in the morning when everybody's fast asleep. So they know all these stats and they assign you a certain amount of internet. Now if more [00:22:00] people move in, more customers sign up, more people use it more. And guess what? One of the things that's happening in general is people are streaming, a lot more people are cutting the cord. Cox will maybe not have enough bandwidth in your neighborhood. So it could be that That's problem number one and all what it is, is if you think about it, here's you, here's the head office where they have the a hundred gigabytes, let's say, of capability.

(00:22:25):
There are many choke points along the way. The first one is that head end, [00:22:30] your neighborhood distribution point and how much it's getting too many people on that one spot problems, but there's more because then it goes to your curb and then it goes into your house. I've had problems with my cable where the guy came out, checked my house, they have meters. They say, well, the signal's bad, and checked it all the way up to the outside to the curb where it was we have underground cables, but in your case it might be coming through the telephone poles. They would check that and say, oh yeah, we got a bad connection. He actually [00:23:00] lifted up the concrete lid on the underground thing and went in there and spliced a new cable

Mikah Sargent (00:23:08):
In. Yeah, my dad was a cable guy and had to go fix nodes all the time. I didn't know that. Yeah, so he'd track it down to the node of the neighborhood. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:23:15):
You should be talking about this, not

Mikah Sargent (00:23:16):
Me. Some of those terms I didn't know, I wasn't paying attention to dad.

Leo Laporte (00:23:21):
What does dad know? But he

Mikah Sargent (00:23:23):
Never know anything. He pull out this huge contraption and oh no, it's not the house. And then he'd have to drive down and find the node and go fix stuff

Leo Laporte (00:23:29):
There. So [00:23:30] these checkpoints, so first is the node, then there's the connection in the ground right outside your house or in the pole upside and then it's into your house and it could be in your house too. One of the things people do often, which is a bad thing, is they put splitters. So the cable's coming into the house and they split it and they split it and they split it again. If you don't have good splitters, they're attenuating the signal each time you split it and it can really degrade the signal.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:54):
First thing I did when I moved into the place I'm in now, there was one of those stupid splitters, so I replaced [00:24:00] it with one that's powered. There you go. And so then it will help boost the,

Leo Laporte (00:24:03):
Yeah, so that's another thing. So you can see Lance, there's a whole bunch of stuff between you and the cable company and even then the cable company can be bad, but I'm going to say it's not because Cox is all over the country and I know it's good, at least in Rhode Island. So it could be your franchise is not the best it, but it could go all the way down as a customer. What do you do about that? Well, you got to call 'em and you got to see, and you might ask your neighbors document. Document, [00:24:30] you might ask your neighbors, for instance, one of the ways to know that it's your neighborhood as opposed to you is if it gets bad at primetime every night when everybody starts streaming, then that means they haven't provided enough bandwidth.

Caller Lance (00:24:44):
Well, oddly, oddly enough, the ING offices at this apartment complex has new has of [00:25:00] complaints from my neighbors on this. And oddly enough, because these problems I'm not getting the fees are paid for and unfortunately it makes it mandatory that the companies that could stop at games release their digital only gain a blue weight.

Leo Laporte (00:25:26):
So that could be two things. That could be Cox again, or it could be the apartment [00:25:30] complex. As soon as you say apartment complex, you're in an apartment complex, they are also fiddling with it. So yeah, if you've got all your neighbors complaining, then there are two possibilities. First of all, it's not in your house probably that it's either the apartment complex and what they're doing to the signal when they get it or it's Cox itself or some combination of the two. I can't fix it for you, but I think the first thing to do is talk to the apartment manager and see if they can

Mikah Sargent (00:25:55):
Determining if you are paying for your internet through your apartment complex versus [00:26:00] if you were paying directly to the cable company and you were the one who had to get it set up and you call the support team that can kind of help you determine, which is because a place that I lived before, yeah, I had to talk to the landlord and the landlord handled all of that because

Leo Laporte (00:26:16):
It was all, they may the customer as opposed to you being the customer. So that's

Caller Lance (00:26:25):
The one that's paying the bill. The only thing in [00:26:30] the day provide from Cox's free basic cable tv.

Leo Laporte (00:26:35):
Okay, alright. So they don't provide the internet. One of the things that really is happening right now is that cable companies are starting to realize it's over and that TV is not their future. That internet providing internet is their future. And so that's why they've been raising the cost of internet inch by inch so that it comes close to the cost of cable. And that's why cord cutting is no longer a real [00:27:00] savings because often you have to pay more once you aggregate everything altogether. I know my YouTube TV is now almost 75 bucks a month, which is what my cable bill was, right? So I haven't saved any money. If you add on top of that, the 60 bucks that I pay Comcast for my cable, I'm now paying out of 35 bucks instead of 75. So this is a big transition we're going through right now.

(00:27:25):
Cox, Comcast Spectrum. Notice what's going on with Spectrum and E S P N. [00:27:30] They don't really care that Disney pulled the plug on them, even though their customers must be screaming bloody murder, but they don't. In fact, if you call Spectrum now and say, Hey, what happened to E S P N? They'll say, yeah, we suggest, in fact we're going to give you a free week of fubu. We suggest you transition over to an over the top streaming service like Hulu, fubu, YouTube tv, because basically we don't care. We know we're going to lose you as a TV customer. [00:28:00] That's why Disney is normally these carriage things get solved before football season starts. It always happens. Always. Yeah. The week before N F L starts, but college football and N F L and people are going crazy. I don't think Spectrum has solved it, have they? I don't think they have. So in that case, they're just saying, yeah, we know you're not going to watch TV with us. So nevermind.

Caller Lance (00:28:26):
Ironically, as TV [00:28:30] goes, all I care about is the programming from the Discovery Network and National Geographic

Leo Laporte (00:28:41):
And those, you can get all of those over the top. So by over the top, by the way, that's a term of art, meaning over the internet as, I dunno why we don't just say over the internet, but anyway, you get all of those over the top, that's what the cable company's called. And so I think really that's the future, but first you're going to get good internet and that's a problem. [00:29:00] So I'm not sure exactly what to suggest except first call the apartment manager, see if they could do anything. If everybody in the apartment is screaming, then clearly that's where that issue is coming up is at the apartment. So you call them first, they want to keep their tenants happy. Hey, it's great to talk to you Lance. We're going to move on because I don't want to go more than 20 or 30 minutes on a call, so I want to be fair to everybody. It's good [00:29:30] to talk to you. Thank you so much for calling in. Seven two four two eight eight four. We love our phone callers. Yes we do. Alright. I want to say I haven't talked to our friend in Miami in a long time, so he's had his hand up for three weeks.

Mikah Sargent (00:29:51):
Oh really?

Leo Laporte (00:29:51):
Yes. So Chris, come on down. You

Mikah Sargent (00:29:54):
Are the next contestant.

Leo Laporte (00:30:00):
[00:30:00] Oh, did he hang up?

Mikah Sargent (00:30:02):
No, he's in the on air room. Okay, so we're just waiting for the unmute. Unmute.

Leo Laporte (00:30:09):
Oh well I don't hit anything. Should I go to John?

Mikah Sargent (00:30:14):
Yeah, let's go to John.

Leo Laporte (00:30:16):
Alright, I'm pushing buttons. Nothing happens. Hello John.

Mikah Sargent (00:30:24):
Alright, I think we do have John. [00:30:30] Hey here. They're just muted.

Leo Laporte (00:30:32):
Yeah. Hello? Hello,

Mikah Sargent (00:30:33):
John. Hey John.

Leo Laporte (00:30:34):
Where are you calling from? Can you hear me? I

Caller John (00:30:36):
Hear you. I'm calling from Leesburg, Virginia.

Leo Laporte (00:30:40):
Beautiful. Leesburg.

Caller John (00:30:42):
That's right. That's in Northern Virginia. It's near Washington. Yeah. It's a little with historic districts and all this stuff, which is okay.

Leo Laporte (00:30:53):
It's okay if you like history, if you like old stuff, I guess. Yeah,

Caller John (00:30:59):
The streets are too [00:31:00] narrow and there's far in the middle and since I can't see it makes walking a little bit of a pain than that.

Leo Laporte (00:31:07):
Oh, it's not cobblestones. I hope

Caller John (00:31:11):
Sometimes it is, sometimes it's not. Do

Leo Laporte (00:31:13):
You use a stick?

Caller John (00:31:15):
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:31:16):
Yeah. So it seems like that would be hard on an uneven surface.

Caller John (00:31:22):
Well, it's not, but when they put obstacles in the way, then you have to veer left, you have to rear. Right. So it's a little bit annoying. [00:31:30] So I have a few questions here for

Leo Laporte (00:31:32):
You. Yes indeed. If you don't

Caller John (00:31:33):
Mind. I bought this key Kron Q D R Pro. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:31:38):
I hope on my recommendation. I love my key.

Caller John (00:31:42):
Well, yeah, it was and I wasn't sure which, because there's a lot of different options. So I chose the brown switches, but when I bought it, there was a sound file that made clicking noises on the [00:32:00] order page, but there's no clicking noise mistake. Was that wrong on their part to put that? Well,

Leo Laporte (00:32:06):
I've looked at those YouTube videos. Key Keon makes really expensive. Sean, can you hand me my key kron? It's right over there. Expensive.

Mikah Sargent (00:32:15):
Expensive

Leo Laporte (00:32:16):
Keyboards over-engineered

Mikah Sargent (00:32:17):
Or Well,

Leo Laporte (00:32:19):
A hundred pound keyboard.

Caller John (00:32:21):
That's right. It's combination keyboard and weightlifting at church. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:32:27):
They're very heavy, but you want heavy because that means they're solid. [00:32:30] Right. And you're banging on these things. This is a wireless key cron. I have one at home as well. I think this is the Q one. I'm not sure which one I got, but one I got red and one I got brown. Like a lot of fancy keyboards. You could choose the electronic switches and some are more clicky than others and they have YouTube videos and they turn the microphone up pretty loud.

Mikah Sargent (00:32:54):
Yeah, it gets the A S M R mode.

Leo Laporte (00:32:56):
So can you hear the clicking on that

Caller John (00:33:00):
[00:33:00] A little bit, but on mine I don't hear any clicking.

Leo Laporte (00:33:03):
No clicking at all. Huh? You want clicking? No,

Caller John (00:33:08):
It'd be nice.

Leo Laporte (00:33:11):
Well, I've never returned anything to Heat Run. They're in China, but I think that they probably given the, this is a $300 keyboard, given the cost might mean

Caller John (00:33:23):
I couldn't get by Amazon. I had to pay 20 bucks shipping for it.

Leo Laporte (00:33:28):
Yeah, they ship from China [00:33:30] direct. They may not be China, but they make 'em in China. Those

Caller John (00:33:33):
I got it as quick as I did. I thought it was going to

Leo Laporte (00:33:36):
Be No, I was surprised how quickly they came too. They really, look, I am very happy with them, but I think you should be able to say, I don't like these switches. They don't have to send you a whole new keyboard. They can literally replace the switches. I mean that's one of the advantages of these. These are basically, you can disassemble 'em and change the switches apparently

Mikah Sargent (00:33:57):
Noticed cherry blue and Cherry green [00:34:00] are much louder than,

Leo Laporte (00:34:02):
I don't think Kron sells cherry anymore. I think they sell their own key caps. That's why

Caller John (00:34:08):
I It was brown or banana or that

Leo Laporte (00:34:14):
Thing. I can't remember if these are red or brown. I'll have to look.

Mikah Sargent (00:34:17):
I think those are browns. Leo. These

Leo Laporte (00:34:19):
Are browns. You can tell

Mikah Sargent (00:34:20):
The click coming from the blues and the reds. That usually comes from an internal mechanism. Something. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:34:26):
The click is coming from hitting the back. Exactly. Your

Mikah Sargent (00:34:27):
Click is coming from bottoming out the key.

Leo Laporte (00:34:30):
[00:34:30] That's bonito. Who knows everything. Yeah. Benito is our third tech guy, so you could tell these were browns just from the sound. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:34:39):
I have Browns too.

Leo Laporte (00:34:39):
Yeah, I like the Browns. I don't want 'em to be too cliquey. I'm on the air. Right. You don't want to hear me typing, right? Yeah, sure. But you want click so that you know you've hit the key.

Caller John (00:34:49):
Yeah. Although it's pretty good, even without the clicks is great.

Leo Laporte (00:34:56):
I love these. There's a lot of travel that's supposedly better for you [00:35:00] than the chila keyboards. Better for your carpal tunnel, your repetitive stress injuries. Yeah, I like it. I know I hit the key. I typed it. It just makes it easier. Exactly. Of course you're a touch typer obviously, so really knowing where the home row is and knowing you've hit those keys. Oh, that's very important.

Caller John (00:35:20):
And the f and j are so indented. It's wonderful that way.

Leo Laporte (00:35:24):
Yeah. They're not only do they have a dot on 'em as most keyboards do, but they are more indented. Isn't that wild? [00:35:30] That's right. Wonderful. And so you can feel that your finger, your index finger is right where it belongs.

Caller John (00:35:36):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:35:37):
Yeah. I'm not a touch typist. I am kind of like a fake You're not. I always touch you were. I don't have to look at it, so I guess I am, but I'm kind more like I learned on my own. I never studied in school. You studied in school? Yeah. We had to learn in school. You had Mrs. Avery teach you and whoever, actually

Mikah Sargent (00:35:54):
Her name was Mrs. Typewriter.

Leo Laporte (00:35:56):
Mrs. Typewriter taught him and not Mavis Beacon. Mavis [00:36:00] Beacon didn't teach you.

Mikah Sargent (00:36:01):
Mavis Beacon was her teacher.

Leo Laporte (00:36:02):
Oh, okay. One thing I like this would be of complete uselessness to you, John, is you control the LEDs in the background and I've got it set up so it lights up briefly when I hit a key. That's kind of how I know you can't even

Caller John (00:36:16):
See it. Oh, I see. Now there's a funny dial on the keyboard around.

Leo Laporte (00:36:19):
Yeah, that's volume. That's for volume.

Caller John (00:36:22):
Volume of bug

Leo Laporte (00:36:23):
For your computer. What do you mean? For what?

Caller John (00:36:27):
Don't do anything.

Leo Laporte (00:36:28):
Well, [00:36:30] it works with Mac and Windows. There's a switch on the back that'll tell you whether you're on a PC or a Mac.

Caller John (00:36:35):
Yeah, I have the switch, but the volume, it doesn't do anything. Volume with a round.

Leo Laporte (00:36:40):
Yeah. Yeah, that's, it works on both my Linux machines and my Mac. Is that any

Mikah Sargent (00:36:45):
Configuration or did you have

Leo Laporte (00:36:46):
To do No, no. It worked out of the box. And if you push it in, it mutes. Yeah. Oh

Mikah Sargent (00:36:51):
Really? You can program that knob to do whatever you

Leo Laporte (00:36:53):
Want. Yeah, it's programmable. In fact, they have special, what's the name of the kron software?

Caller John (00:36:59):
It's a weird special [00:37:00] software.

Leo Laporte (00:37:00):
Yeah, it's Q max or something. So that software you can install and then you can totally program every function of this. In fact, the one I have at home has four programmable function keys on the left. Oh really? Yeah, I think that's a q3. I can't remember. What do you use? Benito? You like key crunchs too? Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:37:19):
I have a Keyon. I have a Q five mine's. The shorter. The shorter ones. The slim.

Leo Laporte (00:37:23):
Yeah, this is 75%. I think it's a little smaller.

Caller John (00:37:27):
Oh, I see. I wanted the NU pad. So that [00:37:30] was the other Ah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:37:31):
Yeah. So you got a bigger one. Yeah,

Caller John (00:37:34):
I got hundred eight keys according to

Leo Laporte (00:37:36):
108. What do you do with all those keys?

Caller John (00:37:39):
That's right. Well, there's some keys that indicate that they're F 13 and 14.

Leo Laporte (00:37:45):
Yeah, I like having F 13. I only go, mine only goes to 12.

Caller John (00:37:50):
I'm not sure what the purpose of those are because

Leo Laporte (00:37:52):
Again, all of that is assignable. So I have never used the customizing software. I like it out of the box as [00:38:00] an Ansy keyboard. I want it to be standard, but you can totally customize it if that dial's not working. Maybe there is some. You're using Windows.

Caller John (00:38:11):
Well, I have Linux, I have Windows, I have Mac, but I use it. But for Windows and Linux, I have a KT M.

Leo Laporte (00:38:23):
Right. So I have this, by the way, one of the reasons I got the wireless one is because I [00:38:30] could switch the Bluetooth with function 1, 2, 3. So I can use up to three different with the same keyboard. Exactly. I love that. I don't even use a K V M so this, because my mouse does the same thing. This has a switch, the middle switch, if it's switched all the way over to the right is windows and all the way to the left is Mac. And my experience was Windows works with Linux as well, and I have used that knob on without modification on both Windows Mac. Now

Caller John (00:38:56):
The switch between Bluetooth and [00:39:00] sb,

Leo Laporte (00:39:01):
It's got Bluetooth and

Caller John (00:39:02):
Is an off position. What is that?

Leo Laporte (00:39:05):
The middle one's off, so that means it's just the battery. Just save battery that's just turned off all the way to the right of the keyboard as you're looking down on the keyboard is Bluetooth all the way to the left. That's right. Is cable. Exactly. So this one you can plug in a cable. It has a type C connector. Oh yeah. And

Caller John (00:39:22):
Use it as keyboard. I use that for, because not all my stuff has

Leo Laporte (00:39:28):
For the kvm. Yeah, [00:39:30] you need a hardwire to the kvm. Yeah. I mean I'm very happy with these, but there are a million keyboards out there, Annie and AKA likes Doss keyboard. Doss keyboard. I got a Doss keyboard on his recommendation, but once I started using Key Krons, I just don't think I'll ever go back. These are so fantastic, fantastic.

Caller John (00:39:48):
These are wonderful things.

Leo Laporte (00:39:49):
And I have an old Northgate I B M Northgate keyboard. Now that clicks, that's Buckling Springs and those actually click before you bought 'em out they go. [00:40:00] And those are audible clicks if you want those. Now

Caller John (00:40:04):
The other thing I like about this keyboard is that my, I used to have, I would hit the enter entity and the backslash would go off as well. Which kind confused all the poor software

Leo Laporte (00:40:16):
Because those keys are approximate. Backslash is right above end or maybe it's not. You accidentally mashing them both.

Caller John (00:40:25):
No, it wasn't. But this keyboard never does that.

Leo Laporte (00:40:28):
That's probably an electronic [00:40:30] malfunction I would guess. Yeah, no, this keyboard is super precise. I've never, every keyboard, you got to get used to it. At first. My test is how fast I could type my bit word and password because I type that out all the time and in order to type it, because I've got numbers and special characters in upper and lowercase, I have to do a lot of manipulation of the keyboard. If I can doing it over and over again, get fast with my bit warden password fault key, [00:41:00] I it's like 60 character password. Then I know I got a keyboard and do it accurately without looking at it. Then I know I've got a keyboard I can stay with. I didn't mean to turn this into an ad for a kiron. I would say contact them. They might send you the other switches, the more clicky switches. Just say, Hey, I'm blind. I listened to your YouTube video. It sounded a cliquey. They weren't. What's your CLT case?

Caller John (00:41:27):
I've never had good results. Kind to contact them by [00:41:30] the way too.

Leo Laporte (00:41:31):
Are they in China? I know the keyboards may come from China. I don't know if the company,

Mikah Sargent (00:41:35):
It's either Chinese or Taiwanese. It's

Leo Laporte (00:41:36):
One of those. Oh, maybe it's Taiwan. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe they don't have the best customer service.

Caller John (00:41:45):
No, they seem not to. They love sending you emails. But

Leo Laporte (00:41:51):
Yeah, the knob is programmable. It's designed to enhance your creative workflow and an aluminum rotary encoder allows you to easily customize [00:42:00] the knob to your desired key or macro commands like zooming in and out, adjusting screen brightness, brush size, volume, selecting video clips or photos back light hue on balder's gate three. You can have it. I don't know. What would you use this for on Balder's gate? You zoom in, maybe not. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:42:18):
Switch between dialogue options.

Leo Laporte (00:42:21):
Yeah, maybe switch between weapons. That would be good for that. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:42:25):
Aluminum rotary. Now

Leo Laporte (00:42:27):
Actually be good for Starfield. I could switch between [00:42:30] weapons and starfield with this.

Caller John (00:42:31):
I'll have to experiment.

Mikah Sargent (00:42:32):
Yeah, any RRP G where you switch,

Leo Laporte (00:42:35):
So it's completely programmable, completely.

Mikah Sargent (00:42:37):
Inventory items

Caller John (00:42:38):
Now. So my windows doesn't have a Bluetooth. I could get a dongle I guess.

Leo Laporte (00:42:44):
Well, I mean I wouldn't worry about that. Did you get the wireless keyboard? Not all of 'em are wireless. Yes. Yeah,

Caller John (00:42:49):
You did. I did both.

Leo Laporte (00:42:51):
Well that's why I got this. So I got this and I got a Logitech mouse that allowed me to switch between three computers. So when I want to go, I have a Mac studio and I have a Linux [00:43:00] game machine and it's easy. I just press function one to go back to the Mac function, two to go to the Linux box and the mouse underneath has a button and then it makes it very easy. I don't want to use a K V M. I'm using the same monitor, same keyboard, same mouse with two different computers and it works beautifully.

Caller John (00:43:20):
Oh, that's great. Yeah. Alright.

Leo Laporte (00:43:22):
Hey John, it's always a pleasure talking to you. You come up with the toughest questions.

Caller John (00:43:27):
Yeah, well that's the idea.

Leo Laporte (00:43:30):
[00:43:30] Stump the tech guys, I'm really glad to hear from you. I hope things are going well and I hope you enjoy your key crime. Maybe you're going to end up just having to buy another set of switches, I guess. Have you changed, have you done that? Benito changed your switches?

Caller John (00:43:45):
That's kind of like a pain in the neck to take it apart.

Leo Laporte (00:43:47):
Yeah, I don't know. I haven't

Mikah Sargent (00:43:48):
Changed my switches, but they give you tools to do it. It's actually pretty simple if you want to do it.

Leo Laporte (00:43:52):
It looks like it's easy. That's that hard.

John Ashley (00:43:53):
It's easy, but can get complex depending on what kind of switches you have, if you choose to loop them or not. And

Leo Laporte (00:44:00):
[00:44:00] It gets crazy, doesn't it?

John Ashley (00:44:01):
It can get crazy. I'm talking from experience.

Leo Laporte (00:44:03):
Do you like John Ashley? Do you prefer the cherries or? I

John Ashley (00:44:08):
Actually do not prefer the cherries. I don't prefer the standard ones. I go for more different colors switches. I have a set of what we call hako violets.

Leo Laporte (00:44:17):
See when you get into the keyboards? Yeah. It's something else, isn't it? There's something about it that just get people really nerdy. I got

Mikah Sargent (00:44:23):
To be careful. I would and depending

John Ashley (00:44:25):
On what kind of switches I can get, certain types of lubrication that has a little more of,

Leo Laporte (00:44:30):
[00:44:30] I've never lubed switches. I just feel like, my God, I shouldn't have to. It's

Mikah Sargent (00:44:37):
A very personal thing. Everybody, every their keyboard, that's everybody always interfaces with their

Leo Laporte (00:44:42):
Keyboard, your device, your input devices, your mouse, your keyboard, and your monitor are the most important part of your computer. They're the human interface devices. So yeah, if you're using 'em a lot, you want to get 'em right. And you're a musician. I know. And a gamer. Benito. So you have specific [00:45:00] demands on your keyboards. John Ashley, I don't know what you do at home, but you obviously care about your keyboards as well. It's interesting. We got a bunch of, yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:45:09):
Keyboard nerds. Keyboard

Leo Laporte (00:45:10):
Nerds and

Mikah Sargent (00:45:11):
A hot tip. What are they called? If you live in the area, in the Bay area, there's a local retailer that sells peon stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:45:15):
No. So you can go in and try 'em. John, you got to move out here. Forget Nova's. Come out here. So where's the retailer?

Mikah Sargent (00:45:24):
Central computers.

Leo Laporte (00:45:25):
Oh, I love Central down there in the mission.

Mikah Sargent (00:45:27):
There's like a bunch of them.

Leo Laporte (00:45:28):
Yeah, yeah. [00:45:30] I did a video for them once on how to build a computer.

Mikah Sargent (00:45:32):
So I mean I guess you could also order parts from them, key con parts from them if you want to get want to shop locally?

Leo Laporte (00:45:37):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's for the Bay Area. There might be somebody in Notebook.

Mikah Sargent (00:45:40):
They deliver too, so if you want to shop on their store

Leo Laporte (00:45:43):
Can Central computer. Yeah, central computer. Yeah. They are real nerds in there. Oh really? Someday I'll get my v h s. It's actually I think in my office, the v h s made for them. I cut myself as I was working in the case and they didn't edit it out. I started, oh, I'm bleeding. [00:46:00] Well, don't do that. And then let's show you what else. Just try not to cut yourself on the case.

Mikah Sargent (00:46:06):
I thought you were going to say they came out and just wrapped your finger while it was still going on. They

Leo Laporte (00:46:09):
Didn't even wrap my finger. Wow. They kept turning the camera. They didn't

Mikah Sargent (00:46:14):
Stop. What are keyboard nerds called? Key babies.

Leo Laporte (00:46:17):
Key babies, sugar daddies, key babies.

Mikah Sargent (00:46:20):
You want to go with that, Mike? We can coin that a term. Hey, are you key?

Leo Laporte (00:46:24):
How about Key? I

Caller John (00:46:26):
Have another question if you have time.

Leo Laporte (00:46:28):
I'm a keyhole. Go ahead, John.

Caller John (00:46:30):
[00:46:30] The other question is I have an AirPods Pro and is the sound much better or is it worth getting these second generation AirPods Pro?

Leo Laporte (00:46:41):
I think so.

Mikah Sargent (00:46:42):
Yeah, so I had my AirPods Pro for a long time and they started to not be as good as they once were. Really bunch. Yeah. I had some sound issues with them, some clicking and stuff and most of that was covered under the extended warranty that they had, [00:47:00] but my dog got a hold of one of mine, and so I knew that when I took it in, they were going to say, well, there are dog marks on it. That's why it's broken. Not because it's

Leo Laporte (00:47:08):
Just your dog ate your AirPods.

Mikah Sargent (00:47:10):
My dog ate my AirPods, so I had to upgrade and I was so happy that I did the second generation. The noise cancellation is better, I think. So

Leo Laporte (00:47:18):
Noticeably plus firmware update coming for them in the next week or two when Apple pushes out iOS 17

Mikah Sargent (00:47:25):
Conversation awareness and

Leo Laporte (00:47:27):
All these new

Mikah Sargent (00:47:27):
Features, some special, what I love [00:47:30] is that over time it learns your behavior and it will change the volume if you want it to, depending on what you're listening to. So if they notice that you, when you're listening to spoken word stuff, turn down the volume or turn up the volume versus when you're listening to music, it's another way. Then it starts to learn that and can automatically the

Leo Laporte (00:47:47):
Volume. That's how these devices should be. We are attaching 'em to very smart computers. They should learn and get better over time. That's really cool. I didn't know they did that. That'ss really cool.

Caller John (00:47:57):
I may have a little bit of hearing loss, so [00:48:00] that would be great to get that to. You

Leo Laporte (00:48:04):
Can also get Mimi, which is a nice little app for your iPhone to do a hearing

Caller John (00:48:08):
Test. Yes, I tried that. It doesn't work with voiceover though. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:48:11):
That's really,

Mikah Sargent (00:48:12):
See, I'll reach out to the developers too. Oh, do

Leo Laporte (00:48:15):
You know those

Mikah Sargent (00:48:15):
Guys? No, I tend to do that. Getting out to them and saying, Hey look, we've heard

Leo Laporte (00:48:21):
Your whole audience. Exactly. And if you think about it, a hearing test should absolutely support accessibility for crying out loud.

Caller John (00:48:30):
[00:48:30] But yeah, it doesn't work, right? I mean they tried, but it doesn't quite make it hearing the test itself. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:48:41):
It needs to obviously, or you won't be able to because what it does is it plays beeps in your ear and you have to

Caller John (00:48:46):
Tap on

Leo Laporte (00:48:46):
The phone. Yes or no. I heard that. Is there going to be an AirPod Pro three?

Caller John (00:48:54):
Is there going to be,

Leo Laporte (00:48:55):
We've heard

Mikah Sargent (00:48:56):
Rumors. I don't know if the pros are going to get an up to grade or if [00:49:00] it's just going to be, but probably we'll see New AirPods Pro. So you may want to wait because Definitely, yeah, because then you're doing a huge upgrade from AirPods to AirPods three. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:49:12):
If they're going to do it, they're going to do it Tuesday, right? Yeah. They're not going to, won't fact, the latest rumor is there won't even be an October event. Mark Germond says he doesn't think there's going to be enough to make out worthwhile if they announce new AirPods. The only reason they might be the Ming Chi quo said, no, no, no, not until next year, next fall [00:49:30] for the AirPod Pro three. But the reason they might want to update them is because they're getting rid of the lightning Jack we hear on the iPhone and that's, they'll be the last place that still uses the lightning. I mean the last current product, if you have an old Apple TV remote,

Caller John (00:49:47):
I like the Lightning only because

Leo Laporte (00:49:50):
You can't put it in wrong.

Caller John (00:49:52):
Well, yeah, that's one thing. Well, the USB is also true, but if I have to switch to U S B C, I have this camera [00:50:00] kit that's not going to work anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:50:03):
Right, but you might not need it anymore because

Caller John (00:50:06):
Well, yes. Well, the point is I have a deck that I like to use. I wired headphones with you. I do that because I love, I have an old P seven, which may be old, but it still works quite well. We're going

Leo Laporte (00:50:23):
To hear a lot of complaints when they go to type C and it seems pretty clear they're going to do that.

Mikah Sargent (00:50:28):
We'll do, yeah. I think we'll get [00:50:30] adapters as needed and it stinks to have to buy adapters, but I

Leo Laporte (00:50:34):
Think Apple will offer,

Caller John (00:50:36):
I have lots of adapters around here.

Leo Laporte (00:50:38):
Yeah. I look forward to the day when I only have to have a type C me

Mikah Sargent (00:50:41):
Too

Leo Laporte (00:50:41):
Charger for everything. That will be nice.

Mikah Sargent (00:50:44):
One charger to rule them all.

Leo Laporte (00:50:48):
I'm going, as you know, going to be my mom's flying out tomorrow and I'm packing together my kit so that we can stream on Tuesday, the Apple event very quickly. And everything [00:51:00] is type C except for my iPhone. So I have a bunch of type C cables and as soon as I get there, I'll have to have that one lightning cable because I'm going to use my iPhone as the camera. I decided. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:51:14):
Nice. You

Leo Laporte (00:51:15):
Prefer you use e camm for iOS today?

Mikah Sargent (00:51:18):
Yes. To show the phone on screen. But when it comes to actually being a camera camo is

Leo Laporte (00:51:25):
The way or continuity camera.

Mikah Sargent (00:51:26):
Yes, continuity camera does. Yeah, that's true. You can use continuity camera. [00:51:30] It just doesn't have as much control.

Leo Laporte (00:51:32):
Yeah, I think I'll use camo. John, I'm going to, by the way, call in about half an hour early to make sure my setup. I did some stuff. I bought some stuff. Alex, Lindsay. Oh, oh boy. I got some of these nano lights that Alex uses. They're just fluorescent tubes and I got three of 'em. And what temperature? I don't know what temperature I should set them at

Caller John (00:51:55):
Cent 56. Is that going to destroy your RF connectivity?

Leo Laporte (00:52:00):
[00:52:00] No, no. They're designed for this and Alex recommended 'em, so I would hope if it buzzed on the, they're battery powered so that they don't get plugged in. Oh, okay. Maybe.

Mikah Sargent (00:52:11):
How tall are

Leo Laporte (00:52:11):
They? They're not that big about that big. I should have brought 'em in. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:52:15):
I'm curious. But

Leo Laporte (00:52:16):
I got a whole kit just designed for this, Alex or somebody recommended a 30 inch gooseneck clamp that you put on and your phone holds it. But if my phone goes up and down, that won't be good. [00:52:30] The microphone I'm bringing is a Sennheiser drum microphone that I really like. So we'll see how that makes sense compared to the PR 40. Yeah, it's going to be fun. And then you're going to get to see my mom's basement. My mom might even tot her in and say hello. I'm hoping she will as we do, I'm going to do two shows from there. I'm going to do

Caller Chris (00:52:48):
We love mom.

Leo Laporte (00:52:49):
Yeah, mom's great. I'm going to do, who was that? Was that Chris?

Mikah Sargent (00:52:54):
I think that was, yeah, Chris from Miami.

Leo Laporte (00:52:57):
Hey John, I'm going to let you go. We're waiting for Sam [00:53:00] Ab Salmon, our car guy. I'm going to ask him about this new self-driving thing that Elon said, but since we've got Chris from Miami chiming in, you figured out how to unmute, huh?

Caller Chris (00:53:13):
I did know. Well, you know what? Well, I'm here now. Video is on everything. I was thinking about mom because she hasn't been anywhere and I so miss her. And then I sent a message to Lisa, let Leo know that I'm sending some prayers to mom and to the family [00:53:30] and everything. Sweet mom. Sweet. I'm going to, she should chime in. I mean, I'm way down here.

Leo Laporte (00:53:35):
Well, I told her, and actually I'm not really in her basement, although she has a basement. I could go, but it's like a dungeon. But I could go down. Wait,

Mikah Sargent (00:53:42):
Hold on. I love this. This is a fake story. There is no basement you're

Leo Laporte (00:53:46):
Going to be in. Well, just because you're supposed to say, Hey Chris, you're supposed to say

Mikah Sargent (00:53:49):
I'm in my mom's basement.

Leo Laporte (00:53:50):
Podcasters are in their mom's basement and their jammies

Mikah Sargent (00:53:53):
Just flip

Leo Laporte (00:53:54):
Over my, but actually it's because I want ethernet into her cable modem. So

Mikah Sargent (00:53:59):
It's [00:54:00] like her office or something.

Leo Laporte (00:54:00):
So it's her office, which is next to her bedroom. And so she'll be there. She says, I'm looking forward to listening. I hope she comes in and says hi. She's very self-conscious, gotten old, and I know how she feels. We get all wrinkly and old and we think nobody wants to see us. But I know that Chris from Miami wants to see her, so I'll tell her that. I love mom. Chris is waiting for

Caller Chris (00:54:21):
You. Mom's a rockstar. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:54:24):
Chris, we're waiting for Sam. I thought you could, since you did get in. Go ahead. Fill that time.

Caller Chris (00:54:30):
[00:54:30] Alright, well let's start off. Good afternoon my friends. I had to get the yes in there. Welcome back, Micah. Sergeant, we missed you bunches. I kept you in my prayers, by the way, Bob, I heard you had some of this affliction going on, but you're too good looking to get sick, so get back to work. Leo was crushed. He's been crushing it on his own lately. Been

Leo Laporte (00:54:50):
Absolutely spectacular. It's literally horrible without Micah. I just don't like doing the show, Adam. So

Mikah Sargent (00:54:57):
Well, I am glad to be back. Glad you're feeling better. For sure. [00:55:00] It's frustrating having

Leo Laporte (00:55:02):
To, yeah, I tried to get Covid so that we could both take it because Lisa had it too. You all went to podcast movement and you got it. Max got it. And Lisa got it. Three out of the four people we sent to podcast movement. I'm glad I didn't go. I'm

Mikah Sargent (00:55:15):
Glad I was thinking the same thing. Honestly, I'm honestly truly glad that you didn't go.

Leo Laporte (00:55:19):
She said, I don't want to go with you. I'm taking Micah. That's not how it happened. Okay, fine.

Mikah Sargent (00:55:26):
Okay.

Caller Chris (00:55:26):
We all want to take Micah. We all have a trip

Leo Laporte (00:55:28):
With him. I know Mike Micah is the greatest. [00:55:30] He really is. Expect I him while he was gone, but I'm glad he, I'm

Mikah Sargent (00:55:32):
Glad to be back. Glad to be feeling better and not having to just sit around and he's

Leo Laporte (00:55:36):
Wearing his Star Wars socks, which is kind of cool.

Mikah Sargent (00:55:39):
They do.

Caller Chris (00:55:39):
Look at you with

Mikah Sargent (00:55:40):
Your Star Wars

Caller Chris (00:55:41):
Socks. Leo got. Those are

Leo Laporte (00:55:43):
Spectacular. Aren't they good? Do you want to see what says on the bottom? Sexy, sexy bay? I dunno what sex

Caller Chris (00:55:49):
That would be. It's either, well, I always

Leo Laporte (00:55:50):
Like you,

Mikah Sargent (00:55:51):
Bob. It says Sex Bay. Sex

Leo Laporte (00:55:54):
Bay. I'm the Sex bay. I dunno [00:56:00] where these came from. Probably.

Caller Chris (00:56:02):
Oh my God. Perfect.

Leo Laporte (00:56:03):
What's that cheap suit company that we get stuff from

Mikah Sargent (00:56:06):
Cheap Suit Company.

Leo Laporte (00:56:07):
You know where I got Cheap

Caller Chris (00:56:08):
Suit Company on

Leo Laporte (00:56:09):
My feet? I know.

Mikah Sargent (00:56:11):
Cheap Soup Company. Campbell's? No,

Leo Laporte (00:56:14):
Not so.

Mikah Sargent (00:56:15):
Oh Suits You sent in little box tops from Campbell's and they sent you those socks.

Leo Laporte (00:56:19):
The cheap suits that I get that are

Caller Chris (00:56:22):
Crazy's. That's good Mic. It's

Leo Laporte (00:56:23):
Not she in. It's like shh. Oh, those are the Frosted Flake socks you got from Tony the tiger. Tony [00:56:30] the tiger. They came in one of the boxes,

Caller Chris (00:56:32):
The box cereal.

Leo Laporte (00:56:33):
Tell me Sam salmon fries inside please. He's

Caller Chris (00:56:37):
Had trouble already. Do you have

Leo Laporte (00:56:38):
Holding up a question for us

Caller Chris (00:56:41):
Or you just the car guy?

Leo Laporte (00:56:42):
No, you're not willing.

Caller Chris (00:56:43):
Well, you know what? Well a little bit because the big deal was, well I did send Lisa an email about Mac Break weekly this past week with Jason Snell and we all like Jason, we appreciate him, but I got to say he got a little bit heavy there with you in the [00:57:00] conversation and I did mention it to Leo that maybe he needs to cut back on the coffee and conversation with you because I think he got a little bit much there with you. Did

Leo Laporte (00:57:07):
He? I don't even remember him getting a little bit much.

Caller Chris (00:57:09):
I clearly remember he a little wasn't anything heavy but I think Was

Leo Laporte (00:57:12):
He Snitty? Wasn't he a snit?

Caller Chris (00:57:15):
He was a little bit judgmental. What about

Leo Laporte (00:57:18):
Me?

Caller Chris (00:57:20):
Just a little bit convers. I got to

Leo Laporte (00:57:21):
Go find conversation with you. Fee. I need to go find this. Well, if he was no doubt was well-deserved. What episode? I don't remember that all.

Caller Chris (00:57:30):
[00:57:30] I'm on Leo. I'm not on. It's easy. It's easy. Appreciate the guy

Leo Laporte (00:57:34):
When you're watching it. Think that there's a tension between people but we know each other so well. We're like an old married couple or what is it? Oh, so we couplet three foursome. Anyway, I thought we were in a

Caller Chris (00:57:50):
Relationship. Okay,

Leo Laporte (00:57:51):
We all know each other really well and as a result we sometimes sound like we're beefing but it never really is. Chris just [00:58:00] doesn't like it when dad and dad fight. That's all. Dad and dad love to fight. That's what dad and dad live for. Alright, we got to go. Chris Sam's here. Sorry Chris. Thank you. Chris from Miami. Sam's here. Sam's here. Have a safe

Caller Chris (00:58:12):
Flight. Leo,

Leo Laporte (00:58:13):
Thank you. I'll see you in Miami if the plane gets diverted. Knock on wood, that just seems like a horrible situation to be diverted to Miami. If seeing him in Miami, something's gone terribly wrong. My flight is to Boston. Boston. Sam [00:58:30] Bull. Sam is principal researcher at Guide House Insights. He is the host of Wheel Bearings, the wheel bearings podcast and he is Mike car guy, our car guy, and he's going to join us in just a moment. Our show today brought to you by Miro. We love Miro. Actually Mike has done a great Miro template for us. What is Miro? Quick question before I answer that one for you. Are you and your team suffering from [00:59:00] context switching? They say, and I think this makes sense. The reason when you get up and go into the other room and then forget what you got up and went into the other room four was that going through the door to the next room is a contact switch and your brain goes, forget what I was doing, what's new?

(00:59:21):
And you forget what you were doing. This is a problem with teams too, where you're going from tool to tool or tab to tab [00:59:30] in your browser and you lose stuff. It just goes because your context switching, you're going to lose information, you're going to lose ideas, maybe their best ideas, but you don't have to switch. You don't have to do that because with Miro there's no context switching. It's all there. What is Miro? Now I'll tell you, Miro is the collaborative visual platform that brings all your great work together. No matter where you and your team are, it's [01:00:00] really good for teams that are in different areas. Hybrid work teams, especially if you're in different time zones, that's when you really can lose detail and information. But with Miro, you've got a single source of truth. Everything comes together in one workspace online and by the way, it does integrate with all those tools you're using.

(01:00:19):
So we use it with Zapier and Google Drive and Slack and all the tools we use all get integrated in, which means you're not leaving anything behind, you're just gaining. [01:00:30] In fact, go to the Miro verse, look at all the things people are doing with Miro Miros capabilities. So much more than a whiteboard. It's a visual collaboration tool packed with features for the whole team so you can build on each other's ideas and build your future. You'll shorten the time to launch your customers, get what they need faster. With Miro, you only need one tool to see your vision come to life. Planning, researching, brainstorming, designing feedback cycles. All can live in the Miro board [01:01:00] across teams faster input means faster outcomes. In fact, Miro users report Miro increases project delivery speed by 29% view and share the big picture overview and a cinch. You can zoom in to see the details, zoom out to see the 30,000 foot level and everyone has a voice and you know when everyone has a voice, everyone can tap into a single source of truth.

(01:01:26):
Your team stays engaged, invested, and happy. They know [01:01:30] they're being heard. They know where you are right now. They've got Kanban boards and swim lanes. They've got everything you need on any confusion on who needs to do what. You can map out all the processes, all the roles, the timelines. There are a variety of different templates. You like swim lanes, they got that you like Kanban, they got that. Strategic planning is easier when it's visual and accessible. You could tap into a way to map your thought processes, your systems, your plans, [01:02:00] and the whole team is engaged. They not only view it, they have a chance to give feedback as well. And if you're feeling some meeting fatigue, Miro users report saving up to 80 hours per user per year. That's like an extra two week vacation every year and all that just from streamlining conversations and feedback.

(01:02:20):
If you're ready to be part of the million users who join Miro every month, I've got something for you. Your first three boards are free, so [01:02:30] now you can start working better together for nothing. miro.com/podcast, this is the best way to see what Miro can do for your team timers when you're in your Zoom meetings, icebreakers, I can go on and on. I love Miro. It's so powerful, so cool. And it is what you need, what you want it to be no matter what you need. Miro, m i r o.com/podcast. We thank 'em so much for supporting Ask the tech guys. Hi, Sam Bull [01:03:00] Salmon, how are you?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:01):
Hello, Micah and Leo. How are you guys? Well,

Leo Laporte (01:03:05):
I wanted to ask you, I'm sure you have something you want to talk about, but you know me, I like to derail the conversation immediately.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:03:11):
I'm good with that.

Leo Laporte (01:03:13):
In the new Walter Isis in biography of Elon Musk, which comes out Tuesday, there've been a numerous kind of revelations. One of them was, and maybe you knew this already, I hadn't heard it before, that Elon at some point decided [01:03:30] we are not going to do full self-driving the way we've done it in the past. We are going to use our natural advantage because every Tesla has a camera and they apparently have millions and millions of video clips from these Teslas, including I guess mine. I didn't even know they were recording them and saving them that they can use to train full self-driving. So they decided to take advantage of something that they really have a moat. No one else can do [01:04:00] this and train their next generation full self-driving, which is not out yet on these videos instead of the way they've been doing it. Had you heard this before or was this a revelation?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:04:13):
Actually, I think Mr. Isaacson has misunderstood what he was told much as I think many people made the same case about this. Oops,

Leo Laporte (01:04:24):
Really? Oh no, that was me. That was me just going off

Sam Abuelsamid (01:04:28):
Thought maybe you couldn't hear [01:04:30] just as many people said about his Steve Jobs book. Tesla has been grabbing short video clips from customers vehicles for years doing this. This is how they've done it all along. Because unlike most companies that are developing automated driving systems, Tesla does not really have much of a notable fleet of internal vehicles that are out just [01:05:00] collecting data. You've seen Waymo and Crews and other vehicles driving around San Francisco for years learning with test drivers in there. Yeah, learning. They're just recording data constantly and the difference is that they are capturing all of the data from all the sensors for the entire drive.

(01:05:21):
Typically, those cars will come back to the garage at the end of a shift and offload several terabytes of data, [01:05:30] upload that onto the servers of those companies, and then that gets processed and they pick out the relevant things, any anomalies from that data, but they capture 100% of all the data. Tesla doesn't do that. Tesla only captures a few seconds worth of clips when they think something might've happened that might be anomalous, that might be worth taking a look at. Because if you look at all those other avs, they have [01:06:00] racks of hard drives in the back that they're using to capture all this data and Tesla doesn't have that kind of onboard storage and you certainly can't be streaming all that video data in real time. So when they detect that something possibly anomalous or if the driver is using autopilot or the F S D beta and they intervene, they'll use that as a trigger to capture a short snippet of video data. So this is not [01:06:30] new. I mean this is how Tesla has always done it.

Leo Laporte (01:06:32):
Let me read from the excerpt C N B C published from the biography on full self-driving 12, which is coming out. Until then Tesla's autopilot system had been relying on a rules-based approach.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:06:45):
No, that's true. I mean that's false. That's false. It's never, Tesla has never used, it's always been an AI-based approach.

Leo Laporte (01:06:52):
The neural network planner, and he's talking about Deval Schroth, a member of the autopilot team who in a [01:07:00] meeting in December, according to Isaacson, explained to Elon, we've got all this video, it's like chap cheap pt, but for cars we process, this is a quote from the book attributed to Schroth. We process an enormous amount of data on how real human drivers acted in complex driving situation. Then we train the computer's neural network to mimic that. Until then, the autopilot had been relying on a rules-based approach. The neural network [01:07:30] planner that Schroth and others were working on took a different approach instead of determining the proper path of the car based on rules. So is it the case that Isaacson just misunderstood what he was being told?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:07:42):
I think that's a distinct possibility. It's also possible that maybe Elon has been less than truthful to us in what he's been telling us about F S D so far. Because if you go back to Tesla's 2019 autonomy day and many comments [01:08:00] he's made before and since he's always said we're using an end-to-end AI approach, we're not using a rules-based approach. That's always been what they've said. Now it's

Leo Laporte (01:08:10):
Certainly

Sam Abuelsamid (01:08:10):
Possible that he was misrepresenting what they were doing. Alright,

Leo Laporte (01:08:16):
Let's not say lie, but so well,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:08:19):
I mean

Leo Laporte (01:08:20):
Ison write,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:08:20):
He lies about a lot of things. So I wouldn't be surprised

Leo Laporte (01:08:22):
About the cars. Cameras identified such things as lane markings, pedestrians, vehicle signs, traffic signals, then the software applied a set of rules such as stop when the light is red go in and [01:08:30] green. Tesla's engineers manually wrote, this is a direct quote from the book, manually wrote and updated hundreds of thousands of lines of c plus plus code to apply these rules to complex situations. By early 2023, the Neural network planner project, this is early this year, had analyzed 10 million clips of video collected from the cars of Tesla customers. In fact, he says that's what Musk was showing off in this famous video he did [01:09:00] in August where he almost ran a red light intervention and he grabbed the steering wheel. So this is a disconnect here between what we've been told by Musk. And remember Isaacson was embedded for several years. I mean, he would go to meetings, sounds like he was actually at this meeting, but we should also mention while he's a famous writer and biographer, he is not a technologist. So it may well be that he'd understand [01:09:30] what he was hearing.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:09:32):
And as I said, it's also a distinct possibility that what we've been told up till now is not the truth either. So it could be both or any combination of things. Even if what Isaacson is writing is true that they have not been using a neural network based path planner. And I think this is what he's talking [01:10:00] about because if you look at an automated vehicle software stack, there's kind of four main things that have to happen. You have perception, which is processing the sensor signals and trying to get an understanding of what's happening in the environment around the vehicle and classifying what the sensors are seeing. So saying that's a truck, that's a car, that's a dog, that's a pedestrian, that's a cyclist. And then you have to do prediction, predict, what are all of these targets [01:10:30] around me going to do in the next three to five seconds? Then you plan a path through that environment and finally you send the control signals to your actuators to execute that. It's possible that what we've been told up until now by Tesla and by Musk, that they were using an end-to-end AI approach was not accurate. And maybe what Isaacson is saying now is in fact the correct answer that they have been using a rules-based [01:11:00] approach for the path planner, for the motion planner, and now they're switching to a neural network approach.

Leo Laporte (01:11:08):
By mid-April 2023, reading again from the book, it was time for Musk to try the new neural network planner. He sat in the driver's seat next to Ashok Ellu, Swami Tesla's director of autopilot software. You probably know Ashok three members. No, I don't. Okay. Three members of the autopilot team got in the back as they prepared to leave the parking lot. Musk selected a location on the map for the car to go and took [01:11:30] his hands off the wheel. When the car turned into a main road, the first scary challeng arose. A bicyclist was headed their way on its own. The car yielded just as a human would've done for 25 minutes. The car drove on fast roads and neighborhood streets handling complex turns, avoiding cyclists, pedestrians, and pets. Musk never touched the wheel A couple of times he intervened by putting his foot in the accelerator when he thought the car was being overly cautious. At one point the car conducted a maneuver he thought was better than he would've done. Oh wow. He said, [01:12:00] by the way, you get the impression that Isaacson was in the backseat. Oh wow. He said, even my human neural network failed here. But the car did the right thing. He was so pleased he started whistling Mozart's little night music.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:12:13):
Okay,

Leo Laporte (01:12:14):
Amazing work guys. Musk said at the end, this is really impressive. Then they all went to the weekly meeting to hear the verdict. Musk could not believe the neural network project would work, must declared. He was now a believer and they should move their resources to push it forward. That was spring April of this year. [01:12:30] So it's interesting what you're saying is that Cruz and Waymo and others are already doing this anyway because they're training.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:12:40):
Well, there's a distinct difference between what everybody else is doing. The others are, in terms of training, they are capturing actually far more data than Tesla is. Now granted, it's in a narrower scope of driving [01:13:00] environment because Tesla has no restrictions on their operating domain. You can use the system anywhere. I have a

Leo Laporte (01:13:07):
Friend who lives in Bernal Heights in San Francisco, and he said for a couple of months we were seeing cruise cars constantly because it is a very twisty difficult, it's hard for me to drive it very narrow. And they said they were training it there. They were just go up there, go up there, go up there, and then it stopped. So that makes sense, but they're training it for San Francisco or Phoenix or la not for

Sam Abuelsamid (01:13:29):
Right. And they're trying [01:13:30] to capture as many scenarios as possible within those to make as generalized a system as they can. And then taking that, putting it into simulation and tweaking it to create new scenarios from the real world scenarios that they've captured in simulation, which is why Cruise has been able to, in the last 12 months, they've gone into multiple new cities, including Austin and now Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina [01:14:00] and Seattle, where they have never tested vehicles before and get up and running within a few weeks. Now there's something I got to say though, that's really important. The idea of using completely end-to-end AI without any rules-based approach is fundamentally stupid and reckless for a system like this. Because as you and I know, these systems don't have a fundamental understanding of their environment of what's going on. They're doing pattern matching. And [01:14:30] to allow systems like that to be used without any kind of extra oversight in a safety critical situation like this is really dumb.

Leo Laporte (01:14:41):
Well, here's the example that actually,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:14:44):
Go ahead, lemme finish. What other companies do is they utilize AI for some of these components like the path planner and the perception, but they also utilize rules-based systems as guardrails [01:15:00] to limit what the AI can do. So MobileEye for example, has a system that they call responsibility sense of safety model, which is very much a rules-based guardrail set for the ai. So everything that all the sensor data goes through two paths, it goes through the AI path and it also goes through this r s s path and the r s s path is designed exclusively to say, okay, [01:15:30] is this kind of motion going to potentially cause a crash? What's here? Or is this going to cause or contribute to a crash? And if it is, then it prevents the AI part from doing what it wants to do. So it imposes guard rules-based guardrails on it, and that is a fundamentally much safer approach to take. Now, it may limit what the system can do, but that's a good thing in terms of safety.

Leo Laporte (01:15:58):
Well, the example is, and [01:16:00] this may be explains what we had already knew happened, F S D would roll through stop signs wouldn't stop. And Musk said, and by the way, Isaacson confirms it in the book, 95% of humans creep slowly through stop signs rather than coming to a complete stop. So an F S D fully trained only on video would say, well, that's what you do. You roll through the stop slowly, but the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration said, [01:16:30] the law says you got to stop. And that would be an example as you say, of writing a rule that says, okay, yeah, yeah, all of your training says roll through a stop, but when you see a stop sign, you come to a full stop.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:16:44):
Exactly. And this week I was in Munich for a couple of days for the A mobility show, which is their big auto show now that replace the former Frankfurt Motor Show. And I actually had a chance to go for a ride with MobileEye [01:17:00] in a Zika oh oh one, which it's a Chinese vehicle, Chinese brand vehicle from GLI group, and it's not available here in North America, but it's the first production model that has mobilized supervision system and supervision is their camera-based hands-free driving system. So similar to GM Super Cruise, but it's, it's camera only. It doesn't use any radar as part of it. It's got 11 cameras including eight high resolution [01:17:30] cameras, which Tesla doesn't have. Tesla has like 1.3 megapixel cameras. These are eight of the cameras that are on the supervision system are eight megapixels. So you have a lot more resolution about what's going on and a lot more computing power.

(01:17:43):
And I went for a 40 minute ride in this thing and it also has something like the navigation on autopilot that Tesla has where you put in a destination and it'll navigate through the environment. It'll do interchanges, go through [01:18:00] intersections and stop and everything. The driver still has to watch the road because they feel mobilized. Philosophy, and I agree with this is that you have to have a certain minimum time between failures and with a camera only system, you're not going to get that without having human supervision. Now they have more robust systems that are coming that add radar and LIDAR into that, that get you to the point where [01:18:30] you don't have to supervise anymore. But in a 40 minute drive in this car around Munich on various surface streets going through intersections, making turns, going through roundabouts, going on the auto, on and off, the auto bond from the time we pulled out of the parking lot at the show facility and the driver engaged the system the next 40 minutes, he did not have to touch the steering wheel. He did not have to intervene, and he went through all kinds of scenarios that this [01:19:00] is the first time a camera system like this that I have felt remotely safe. I have never felt this safe in a Tesla vehicle with autopilot or F S D. And that was completely hands-off the whole time. And the mobile I approach to this is I think a far better, far more robust and safer approach.

Leo Laporte (01:19:21):
Yeah, we'll see. I mean, I haven't seen a reaction from Tesla to the book knowing Elon. I'm going to guess, and I [01:19:30] don't know if Isaacson gave it to him, he would've asked for a chance to review the book before it came out so he can correct

Sam Abuelsamid (01:19:36):
Error. I'm sure since it's an authorized biography. Yeah, they reviewed it,

Leo Laporte (01:19:41):
So I don't know. I don't know. It's an interesting conundrum. It doesn't seem like it's a bad idea to use both neural networks, generative adversarial networks, something like that to train the car in addition to rules to make sure a car doesn't run stoplights, [01:20:00] stop signs, that kind of thing seems like a good combination. It's not exclusive, right? You could use

Sam Abuelsamid (01:20:08):
Oh, absolutely, and that's actually what you want to do. You want to have just as you do on the hardware side where you want to have redundant and diverse sensor signals for an automated driving system that have both overlap but also have unique capabilities. So there's some things [01:20:30] that that's why you use camera radar and lidar because they each have different strengths and weaknesses. Think

Leo Laporte (01:20:35):
About that's

Sam Abuelsamid (01:20:35):
Between them.

Leo Laporte (01:20:37):
That's kind of how humans drive and we drive on automatic most of the time, but occasionally we'll think about what we learned when we took our driver's license test. I remember a guy got rear-ended in San Francisco because I slowed down and stopped at a yellow light and the guy behind me said, I thought I just assumed you were going to go through it. And so he [01:21:00] stepped on it and I didn't because my automatic reflexes perhaps were overridden by my knowledge that I wasn't going to make it through and that was going to be a red light night.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:21:12):
And that's why he should have been looking for your brake lights. He should have followed

Leo Laporte (01:21:15):
Brake lights.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:21:16):
He should hit the brake stove.

Leo Laporte (01:21:17):
He should have followed rules instead of his gut.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:21:18):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:21:20):
Yeah. It's kind of like that, isn't it? Gut driving versus,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:21:25):
As I was saying, just as on the hardware side, you want redundancy and diversity. You want the same thing on the software side. [01:21:30] You want at least two distinct, unique algorithms that are processing the same information in different ways and they should ideally come up with the same result. And if they don't, then okay, I've got to back off. I've got to slow down and figure out what's going on here and understand why I am getting different results. But you shouldn't rely on just one solution. That's an unsafe scenario. [01:22:00] Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:22:01):
What did you want to talk about today?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:22:05):
I mean, I actually got part of it in there talking about MobileEye and my ride in supervision, but also one of the things that was interesting about the show in Eunich was just how many Chinese manufacturers there were. There was a lot, was actually quite a few vehicles that were unveiled there. And there was I think seven different Chinese brands displaying. We know

Leo Laporte (01:22:29):
About B Y D. [01:22:30] Right? That's the biggest,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:22:32):
They're the biggest seller of what they call new energy vehicles in China, which is both battery electric and plugin hybrid vehicles.

Leo Laporte (01:22:41):
Are there companies that are about to sell in the US that we haven't heard of?

Sam Abuelsamid (01:22:47):
Right now? None of the Chinese brands have specifically have indicated that they're going to launch in the US market, not at the moment anyway. [01:23:00] Right now they've got a big enough market in China. They're expanding into Europe right now, and they're gaining a lot of traction in Europe. Companies like B Y D, Ong, Neo and several others are all getting some significant traction in Europe. Where there is more demand for EVs than there is here, we may see them. What we are seeing is we are seeing Chinese made vehicles here that [01:23:30] are under what are not considered Chinese brands. Like for example, Volvo and Polestar and Lotus. I took a drive in the new Lotus Electra, which is their first electric S U V, and that vehicle is launching here next year. That's it right there. And that's going to be on sale here in North America next year, and it's built in China. Lotus is now owned by G along [01:24:00] with Zeer and Volvo and Polestar and a number of other brands. The Polestar four is also coming here that's built in China. So we will see more Chinese made vehicles here, just perhaps not under Chinese brands.

Leo Laporte (01:24:13):
Yeah. So Lotus is an Italian brand.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:24:17):
English. English. Colin Chapman? Yeah. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:24:20):
Okay. It's Colin Chapman, the late Colin Chapman. Of course Polestar is a Volvo company, but they make 'em in China. Yes, right.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:24:28):
Yeah. Well, they will [01:24:30] be making Polestar here early next year as well. The Polestar three is going to be assembled at the Volvo factory in South Carolina, starting in early 2024. And then the Polestar four is going to be coming from China.

Leo Laporte (01:24:44):
One other thing I wanted to ask you about, lucid, c e o, Peter Rollinson got paid 379 million last year, which was a third of their total revenue

Sam Abuelsamid (01:25:00):
[01:25:00] Thoughts? Well, first I'll say that in general, I think almost all CEOs with the exception of Mrs. LaPorte are vastly overpaid. She

Leo Laporte (01:25:12):
Is underpaid, I can promise you.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:25:14):
I'm sure. Yeah, sure. She's

Leo Laporte (01:25:15):
Putting up with me. She should make a lot more.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:25:17):
Yeah. But my guess is that most of that 379 million was probably in the form of stock options. So it was probably option [01:25:30] grants that were priced very low at some point in the past and that he cashed in.

Leo Laporte (01:25:36):
Yeah, his base salary was only $575,000,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:25:40):
Which is actually pretty low for an automotive c e

Leo Laporte (01:25:42):
O. He had 5 million in stock options and 373 million in stock awards gains. Right. So I mean, it's kind of like real income. You could eventually sell a stock.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:25:54):
Yeah, no, absolutely.

Leo Laporte (01:25:55):
Well, he came from Tesla, they had to lure him over, and maybe that's why he had such a big, [01:26:00] well,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:26:00):
I'm not sure luring him was quite the way it worked out. I know Peter, and actually before Tesla, he was at Lotus. Ah, no kidding. He came from Lotus to Tesla and was the chief engineer on the model SS helped develop the model Ss and then left and went to what is now known as Lucid Motors. It was originally named Tiva, but it was eventually rebranded as Lucid.

Leo Laporte (01:26:28):
People thought it sounded too much like [01:26:30] sandals, and they said, how going to drive that? Well, I still think the Lucid looks like a mighty, mighty fine car.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:26:38):
Oh, it is. It's a gorgeous car. Drives fantastic. The

Leo Laporte (01:26:42):
Electra would be the new Lotus would really not be for me. Probably. I probably couldn't even get into it. Maybe you

Sam Abuelsamid (01:26:48):
No, no, you absolutely could. The Electra is more, is closer in size to the Model X. Oh, so it's a crossover.

Leo Laporte (01:26:55):
It looks fancy.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:26:57):
Yeah, fancy sch. Now what's not in these pictures here that you're showing [01:27:00] is sitting across about six feet away from the Electra was the Lotus Amira, which is the one that I would actually want. That's the one that you probably couldn't get into. It's a little sports

Leo Laporte (01:27:13):
Spot. You see it over? I see it over here. The black car with these? Yeah, there

Sam Abuelsamid (01:27:16):
It is there. Yeah. That's the M

Leo Laporte (01:27:17):
Wheels.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:27:18):
But they also, this week, Lotus unveiled the Amaya, which is based on the same platform as the Electra, but [01:27:30] it's a sedan, so it's a little bit lower, similar overall size, but a little bit lower. Not as low as the Amira, but it looks pretty slick as well

Leo Laporte (01:27:40):
For an English company. They sure come up with funny names. Yeah,

Sam Abuelsamid (01:27:45):
Kind of s,

Leo Laporte (01:27:45):
They were Italian

Sam Abuelsamid (01:27:47):
Lotus's have always had names that started with E like Esprit, Elise Ellan, Elise Xie. So they've always had names that start with E for [01:28:00] their road cars.

Leo Laporte (01:28:01):
Sam, you're the greatest. I appreciate you letting me once again hijack your segment, but Oh, no problem. I just had to know this story seemed like it was a revelation. Maybe it was.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:28:15):
Yeah. I mean the part about training is not, that's the way they've always done it, but perhaps the part about switching to a neural network for the Path planner might be new or it might not. Depends on [01:28:30] whether you believe Elon and what he's always said and what Isaacson is saying today. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:28:36):
Well, what it tells me is I got to read this book with a grain of salt maybe.

Sam Abuelsamid (01:28:40):
Yeah. And I think that would be probably fair for pretty much any authorized biography should always be read with a big grain of salt, especially when it's about someone with the say ego of Mr. Musk.

Leo Laporte (01:29:00):
[01:29:00] And with that, we thank Sam Bulled. You can hear his podcast wheel Bearings. It's at Wheel Bearings media or wherever finer podcasts are sold. He is on Mastodon at Sam Abou, and of course he's a principal researcher at Guide House Insights where his customers are very lucky recipients of his wisdom, as are we indeed. Thanks Sam. Have a great week. Thanks so much. You too. Alright, bye-Bye. Bye. Yeah. Well that's interesting. Yeah. This is [01:29:30] why I love having Sam on, because you really get the story exactly in depth and true information. I want to talk to Paige. I do, but I think we need to take one more break. We do have another ad. Oh, we've got a second ad that we need to get to. I took a break and I do this a lot where I took a break but didn't do the ad.

(01:29:47):
Yeah, so maybe this would be a good time to take a break and do the ad novel and then they could stick the ad in the earlier break. That's what I'm thinking. You're smart. See without you, the show just doesn't work. [01:30:00] Actually did that last week too. See it was up to John Ashley to tell me Now we're going to say hello Page. Hi Paige. I see you. Press star six so we can hear you if you haven't already. And welcome to ask the tech guys. Oh, maybe I didn't push the send a breakout room. That's my problem. My fault, Paige. Here comes Paige Star six. That was up. That was me. I heard a chuckle button malfunction. [01:30:30] Hi Paige.

Caller Paige (01:30:31):
Hi. Are you?

Leo Laporte (01:30:33):
We're great. How are you?

Caller Paige (01:30:36):
Well, I miss the radio show only because it was two days.

Leo Laporte (01:30:43):
Yes, but do you miss the 19 minutes of commercials? No,

Caller Paige (01:30:47):
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. No.

Leo Laporte (01:30:50):
So even though there were two days, we still do almost as much content in one day because we don't have all those ads. Yeah,

Caller Paige (01:30:59):
No,

Leo Laporte (01:30:59):
I'm very excited. [01:31:00] Yeah, I miss it too. I was just thinking the other day, 19 years I did that. That's a lot. That is a mind boggling. I don't think I've ever really absorbed how long that was. That's a commitment, believe me. I loved doing it and I miss it too in some ways, Paige, but I think what we're doing here is close and yeah, if I weren't so lazy, we would be doing two days, but I'm just, I like having Saturdays off. [01:31:30] Yeah.

Caller Paige (01:31:30):
Weekend start an hour earlier.

Leo Laporte (01:31:32):
Okay. You want to do that next? We'll start that week. Week at 10 11 instead of 11, 11, 10, 11, exactly. Yeah. 10 on that.

Caller Paige (01:31:40):
So I have two questions. One's about ear and echo, and one is kind of an oddball

Leo Laporte (01:31:47):
Question. I love a nice lead in to what the questions are going to be so we can be prepared. Thank you for that.

Caller Paige (01:31:55):
So I have an Euro six plus system. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:32:00):
[01:32:00] Is that what you have?

Mikah Sargent (01:32:02):
Six plus six Pro Six plus. Okay. I have the six pro. Okay.

Caller Paige (01:32:07):
Okay. And then two various echo devices and they periodically, randomly, overnight. Seems like switched to my guest network.

Leo Laporte (01:32:26):
So the guest network is also an ERA network, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:32:30):
[01:32:30] So you're aware of this. Tell me how you're aware of the fact that this is happening. This will help me. I have

Caller Paige (01:32:38):
Two of the speakers connected to each other, and when it goes haywire, they will no longer both play at the same time.

Mikah Sargent (01:32:51):
Got it. Okay. Okay. So my first suggestion, if you have not already done this, is to hop [01:33:00] into the A L E X A app and make your device, forget the wifi network, the guest network, forget about it. Forget about it. Because if you make it forget about it, it won't join it. It won't even know how to connect to that guest network. Now the way to do that is in the app, and it used to be, I'm annoyed, you used to be able to go online and go to a e xa.amazon.com, but slowly but surely they've [01:33:30] deprecated that. So now you have to do it from the app. You open the A E X A app, you choose devices, you find the Echo and a E X A device, you tap on it, and then you hit the little settings gear in the top right corner. Okay,

Caller Paige (01:33:47):
I am there.

Mikah Sargent (01:33:48):
And then you go to tap on wifi network under wireless. And then you, [01:34:00] let's see,

Caller Paige (01:34:01):
That's where I go when I want to change it back.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:04):
Yeah. Now I'm trying to see,

Caller Paige (01:34:05):
I haven't seen anything about forgetting.

Leo Laporte (01:34:08):
Yeah, that's what you do on an iPhone.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:10):
Yeah. I'm trying to find where that was the wrong. Lemme ask

Leo Laporte (01:34:13):
A question. Ask question. It's the same name for both networks or no? Does a guest network have a unique name?

Mikah Sargent (01:34:18):
Mine does and the euro stuff. Mine

Leo Laporte (01:34:20):
Does. It does. Okay.

Caller Paige (01:34:22):
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:23):
Oh, here it is. Manage your content. Okay, so actually you do do this from online. [01:34:30] So we will have to include a link in the show notes. I won't be able to give you the full U R L, but there's a page where you manage your content and devices. You choose the preferences tab, and then under saved wifi passwords, you delete the one for that guest network and that's going to make your A L E X A device. Forget that guest network for some reason. I don't know if maybe in the middle of the night it's sensing some sort of drop in the connection on the main one. So it's like, well, I need to connect, so let me switch over to this [01:35:00] and that's why it's doing it. But that will then make it forget that guest network. It won't flop over to it. Perfect. So I will pass that link over and we will get that into the show notes, which can be found at twit tv slash A T

Leo Laporte (01:35:16):
G. Forgetting is good.

Mikah Sargent (01:35:18):
Forgetting can be good

Leo Laporte (01:35:19):
Because if it doesn't know the password, it can't join it. Yep. Now the reason it's interesting that it's joining it, it probably just says, oh, this is stronger.

Mikah Sargent (01:35:28):
So yeah, I'm thinking some, I'm going to join [01:35:30] it. Weird drop is happening, happening. One

Leo Laporte (01:35:31):
Thing I like to do with arrows, in fact with all mesh networks and IOT devices is when I'm setting up the iot device, turn off the five gigahertz radio. Unfortunately with ERO

Mikah Sargent (01:35:45):
You can. Oh, you

Leo Laporte (01:35:45):
Can? Yeah. It used to be you had to call them. Now you can do it.

Mikah Sargent (01:35:48):
Yeah, it's in the troubleshooting page.

Leo Laporte (01:35:50):
So turn off the five gigahertz network and just use a 2.4. Because most iot devices don't work with five gigahertz. They may join [01:36:00] it, they may see it, but they'll have problems with it. So it might be worth setting the whole thing up again to have all your echoes. Just join the 2.4,

Mikah Sargent (01:36:08):
2.4. And if you're curious page about how to do that, we've got a lot of people who listen, who use eero. You launch the eero app, you go into the settings page, you tap on troubleshooting, you choose, my device won't connect, and then it says my device is 2.4 gigahertz only. When you tap on that, you can temporarily pause the five gigahertz radio. I think it does it for [01:36:30] about eight minutes, eight to 10 minutes. And then at that point you'll go into the app and do the connection. That's a great way. It'll only be via 2.4.

Leo Laporte (01:36:38):
Yeah,

Caller Paige (01:36:40):
That's a great way to do it. Okay, great. I'll try that. They are on five G. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:36:44):
Yeah. I mean I guess they can use it, older devices.

Mikah Sargent (01:36:49):
And what Leo is suggesting too, especially if your echoes are far away from the main arrow device, that's going to be a great thing for you because the 2.4 gigahertz can pass through a lot of stuff. [01:37:00] I would suggest though, Paige doing the forget network first, just in case might

Leo Laporte (01:37:07):
Solve

Mikah Sargent (01:37:07):
The whole Yeah, you don't want to drop a possible better connection, especially if you're trying to sync two speakers together to pull audio. You want to have that better, more robust connection.

Caller Paige (01:37:17):
Okay. Okay. Now for the oddball question, I'm ready. This is my paranoia coming out. So we're moving toward things like having your driver's license [01:37:30] digitally on your phone.

Mikah Sargent (01:37:32):
This is great because Leah's going to be able to talk about this,

Caller Paige (01:37:37):
But then you have to hand over your open phone unlocked phone. And so I was thinking would it make sense to have a less smart phone with less of your apps on it? You don't have your banking on it?

Mikah Sargent (01:37:56):
Sort of like my spy phone. [01:38:00] Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:38:01):
So Apple has announced that they're going to allow people to put driver's licenses in the Apple wallets. Not every state is going along with it. It's actually a small minority of states right now. California just added this capability, but without putting it in the Apple wallet, you have to get a California D M V app. And this is where it's really going to come down to the, I wish they'd supported Apple. To be honest. I'm [01:38:30] not going to press this show my M D L button, but what will happen is a QR code will pop up that the trooper who has pulled me over for speeding can scan. Right. And I don't need to give them my phone and do not give them your phone. And if they want your phone, give them your driver's license. The other thing in California says is always carry your driver's license. This doesn't work in a lot of circumstances. Now I am going to try this because I'm flying. You did it too, right? Or no?

Mikah Sargent (01:38:58):
No, I did not.

Leo Laporte (01:38:59):
But they say I read [01:39:00] about it. This works for the T S A and I will press that button.

Mikah Sargent (01:39:03):
Yeah. If you have t s a pre-check, which I know you do, and you have this driver's license option, there are two terminals that support it. One in L A X and one in SS F o.

Leo Laporte (01:39:15):
You can't see it because I'm hiding the QR code, but it says, oops, this QR code is single use.

Mikah Sargent (01:39:21):
Oh, that's

Leo Laporte (01:39:22):
Good. It'll be refreshed the next time you open this screen and then swipe right for the credential. And then it shows [01:39:30] info from my driver's license, including the number issue, date, expiration date. And because it's issued in the state of California app, you can show this. I presumably the state of California is going to make sure it's highway patrol and others use it. Now, whether my local police will use it or not, I suspect they're going to ask me for my driver's license. Here's another thing. Great thing. Look at that

Mikah Sargent (01:39:55):
And go, why is that there?

Leo Laporte (01:39:57):
Share my age. So it's not unusual [01:40:00] that you have to show your driver's license. I don't have to anymore, but Lisa still does. She has a short driver's license to buy liquor or when you go to a concert to get that bracelet. So this now can share my age using a special app or using True Age. Now, obviously the venue will have to have those tools, but that's kind of interesting too. And actually it is better than giving them your driver's

Mikah Sargent (01:40:26):
License. Yes. And honestly, that's the implementation that Apple has designed. What's so [01:40:30] cool about it is it is scenario by scenario. So it is only handing over the exact precise information that someone needs. So in the case where something is requiring that you be 21 or over, they won't even hand over your birth date. It will simply be is this person 21 or over? Yes or no? And so it will just say yes. So it's actually a more secure thing than me handing over my ID that has my address on it. It has my birthdate. It is giving as [01:41:00] little information as possible. But yes, in the case where a trooper or somebody would be wanting to gain access to your phone, don't give 'em your phone. Don't give 'em your phone, and in fact, hit all three buttons on the phone to keep it from even this is

Leo Laporte (01:41:16):
On an

Mikah Sargent (01:41:17):
IPhone. Yeah, sorry. On an iPhone, your side button and your up and down volume buttons that will make it so that the next time you access the phone, you have to type in your passcode so the person couldn't hold your phone up to [01:41:30] your face and unlock it using that. It basically disables that. But I mean, your idea, I think that instead of having a second phone that has fewer apps on it, it just makes more sense to keep doing what you've been doing thus far, which is carrying those physical versions rather than having do unwieldy apps. I think it should anyway, no matter what, perhaps what changes is you get to leave your physical ID in a bag or something as opposed to carrying it along with you.

Leo Laporte (01:41:58):
Now, I will tell you this, [01:42:00] which maybe you've heard us talk about, but the recent court ruling says that the border patrol does have the right to ask for and take your phone period.

Mikah Sargent (01:42:11):
Really?

Leo Laporte (01:42:11):
So when you cross the border, your electronic devices, now most of the time they don't. But the case came up when a attorney was crossing into the United States. He had on his phone, he had privileged communications with his clients. They said, I can't give you my phone. They said, well, you can either give us your [01:42:30] phone or you're going to airport jail. And I don't think anybody wants to spend any time in airport jail.

Mikah Sargent (01:42:34):
No, that's the worst jail.

Leo Laporte (01:42:37):
So he gave him the phone and didn't get it back for six months, even though he was never charged with anything. He sued reasonably. And the judge has now said, no, they have the right to do that. Really when you cross the border. Now, different courts have ruled different things, but I'm going to say because it is not settled law [01:43:00] that in fact border patrol assumes, and here's the worst thing. They assume not only do they have the right to access any of your electronic stuff as you cross the border, they also say anywhere within 100 miles of the border, which means almost 90% of the US population, and this comes up in Maine and New Hampshire when you're, you can get stopped within miles of the border and they can still take your phone. This is a big issue. I think the courts [01:43:30] really need to resolve this, but as of right now, I'm trying to find the story.

(01:43:37):
It looks like a court is, and I think it was a Fifth Circuit. Yeah, it was a federal appeals court says, law enforcement does not need warrants to search phones at the border. So that's something where you should be paranoid. And in fact, what some people do is they care. Either they wipe their devices before they cross the border [01:44:00] or they carry dummy devices or I'm not going to, there are ways to do encryption and so forth that it's not clear that there's any data on your drive. People are doing a lot of different things backing up to iCloud, then erasing their phone. I'm not going to do that. But this guy, there was no probable cause. I think they just didn't like him. His phone was searched and seized in 2021 by the border patrol. And

Mikah Sargent (01:44:29):
I hate [01:44:30] to say it, but well do I hate to say it. I don't know. To put on my Johnny Jet hat for a moment, you have to wonder if interactions played a role in

Leo Laporte (01:44:42):
The Yeah, he may have said, no, you're not taking,

Mikah Sargent (01:44:44):
Yeah, and I'm a lawyer and this and that and the other. And it's like if we can just treat everybody with kindness sometimes, a lot of times I've found that really pays dividends. But again,

Leo Laporte (01:44:55):
Here from the Fifth Circuit decision, this is really chilling. The phone's passcode feature [01:45:00] prevented the border officers from accessing the phone and thus from searching it. So they took it and sent it to a forensics lab. The lab bypassed the phone security features, extracted the phone's data, returned the phone and the data to the Department of Homeland Security. All of that took about three months.

Mikah Sargent (01:45:17):
I didn't know they went that far with it.

Leo Laporte (01:45:18):
Department of Homeland Security then used a filter team to screen the extracted data for privileged materials. That took another two months. Once the filter team had finished, they provided the border [01:45:30] officers in Dallas with two thumb drives consisting of the data. The filter team determined the officers were authorized to search. So now we're five months later, the D h S conducted a board research of that data and returned the phone to him almost a year later. There was no, as far as, there was no filing with probable cause. There was no warrant. They just did it. And the court said, yeah, that's fine. They can do that.

Mikah Sargent (01:45:57):
And the whole time, the lawyer [01:46:00] obviously was just living

Leo Laporte (01:46:02):
Their life by way. He was a member of global entry. He was a trusted traveler. Whoa,

Mikah Sargent (01:46:07):
That's wild. To me,

Leo Laporte (01:46:11):
That's

Mikah Sargent (01:46:12):
Mortifying. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe you should carry a spy phone page. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:46:17):
Well, I think that it's pretty clear that the police don't have the right to do that with law enforcement. Right. Just remember, border Patrol does. So if you go within a hundred miles of the border, which by the way, we are within a hundred [01:46:30] miles of the border. I don't know why C P B would be wandering around Petaluma, but if you're within a hundred miles of the border, you just keep that in mind. Okay. Alright.

Mikah Sargent (01:46:40):
Sorry, Paige.

Leo Laporte (01:46:43):
Here's what Tech Dirt writes. When it comes to the border, the house always wins.

Mikah Sargent (01:46:50):
Fair enough. Yeah. You want to be able to go home.

Leo Laporte (01:46:53):
Right. This is just a bizarre ruling and it's just unclear really [01:47:00] where I think the law is unsettled at this point because other federal courts have come to the opposite conclusion that they don't have the right to do that. But this most recent one is the Fifth Circuit. Anyway, Paige, great questions. Thank you guys. You're right to be paranoid

Caller Paige (01:47:16):
And I really look forward to Sundays.

Leo Laporte (01:47:19):
Well, you can do too. My biggest fear was that people would just lose track of me and we would just leave that audience. No way. Thank you. I'm glad [01:47:30] that at least a few people have come along for the ride. And Rich does a great job on Saturday and I know a lot of people just listen to Rich instead. But I've listened

Caller Paige (01:47:38):
To him too, but he's very different.

Leo Laporte (01:47:40):
It's a different show and I miss doing it. I loved, boy, 19 years is a long time. I really loved doing it. It was really, for me, the achievement of a life goal to do a nationally syndicated radio show about technology was all I'd ever wanted. And so once I did that, I can now just coast. [01:48:00] Thanks,

Mikah Sargent (01:48:00):
Paige. Thank you so much. Thanks.

Leo Laporte (01:48:02):
Bye. Take care. Let's see.

Mikah Sargent (01:48:07):
Should we do an email or it's going to be about printers?

Leo Laporte (01:48:10):
No, it isn't. I have a solemn promise from John Ashley that if he's going to make me reach all the way. By the way, rotator cuff is Elbow is it really? Didn't know that. Or Tommy John surgery elbow. Oh, okay. This is a rotator cuff. But I said Tommy John's surgery and a very kind listener.

Mikah Sargent (01:48:27):
Yes. It wasn't one of those, you know what really grinds [01:48:30] my gears? It was a very

Leo Laporte (01:48:31):
Kind email. You call you shoulder surgery. Yeah. Tommy John surgery. It's not. Alright, here we go. Sim unlock on an Android phone from Luke in Portland Club twit member. Oh, that means he gets special treatment.

(01:48:47):
An answer. Hi Leo and Micah. I hope you guys are doing well. My girlfriend wants to unlock her Android phone so she can go to another wireless service. I don't know much about Android and I'm an Apple guy, so [01:49:00] she gives me a lot of crap for using Apple products. What's the most efficient way to sim unlock that phone? So the rule is the carrier has to do it. Once you've paid off the phone, it's yours. Right. If you have a deal with a carrier, you'll pay it off over two years. They don't have to. And because Verizon made such a stink about it, the F C C said, well, all right, Verizon said, if we sim unlock the phone, the minute we ship it to somebody, it's going to fall off a truck and we're going to have problems. So [01:49:30] what he's talking about, by the way, is actually called Carrier lock, where you buy a phone from Verizon.

(01:49:35):
Verizon says you can't use it with any other carrier. F C C says, no, that's wrong. They have a little wiggle room for the phone companies like they have a couple of months to do it. Sometimes it's 90 days. So to eliminate, I don't know what Fevery, but if you own the phone outright and you've had it bought it a few months ago, you just call [01:50:00] the carrier. And most cases carriers have an app, or you can even do it in the settings, but check depends who your carrier is. Check and see if there's an app that unlocks it. I know T-Mobile, I think has an app. You just unlock it and they're required to required once you own that phone outright.

Mikah Sargent (01:50:16):
Yeah. They might make you go through a little bit of a song and dance, but they are required to for at and t I go to the website. And if it's been that period of time, there's a simple thing that just says, unlock this device.

Leo Laporte (01:50:29):
Yeah. [01:50:30] Here from Verizon's website. Why does Verizon have a device locking policy? Well, there's no answer to that.

Mikah Sargent (01:50:38):
They said there's

Leo Laporte (01:50:39):
Just no answer. I click the link and there's no answer. How do I know if my device is locked? Literally, they have a link that says, why does Verizon do this? Can you see that? Why does Verizon and I click it and nothing happens? Wow. Well, there you go. [01:51:00] So you should be able to do this as, oh,

Mikah Sargent (01:51:04):
There it is. Why is Verizon? It's right in emails.

Leo Laporte (01:51:07):
Oh, they just went too far. We have a device locking policy to help prevent theft and protect customers from fraud protect customers. A device that's locked and not usable in networks outside of Verizon is less attractive to criminals.

Mikah Sargent (01:51:19):
Yeah, that's an ugly phone.

Leo Laporte (01:51:21):
And yeah, don't worry about it. Just unlock it and take it with you. I always buy unlocked.

Mikah Sargent (01:51:28):
Yeah, same. And pretty much that's what [01:51:30] we do.

Leo Laporte (01:51:30):
Yeah. Never had a problem with that, but I think if it

Mikah Sargent (01:51:34):
Always gets to me

Leo Laporte (01:51:35):
From a Verizon. Yeah. And you just put in a sim nowadays, you don't even need a sim on most new phones.

Mikah Sargent (01:51:40):
You just

Leo Laporte (01:51:40):
Use the eim, which is great. What else? That was

Mikah Sargent (01:51:43):
Good. That was a good one. That was fun. Thank you. Luke from Portland. Thank you. Luke Club. Tutt member. Hope your

Leo Laporte (01:51:48):
Girlfriend doesn't get mad at you or anything. Yeah. Just because you're a lowly iPhone user, man. Those iPhone users, I

Mikah Sargent (01:51:56):
Tell you, I

Leo Laporte (01:51:56):
Feel sorry

Mikah Sargent (01:51:57):
For them. Me too.

Leo Laporte (01:51:58):
Are you going to buy the new iPhone?

Mikah Sargent (01:52:00):
[01:52:00] Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:52:01):
Am I going to buy the iPhone

Mikah Sargent (01:52:02):
For you? I was going to say it will be purchased. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:52:07):
So Mike and I will be covering Apple's event 10:00 AM Tuesday, September 12th. We will be streaming, as we always do, streaming their content and then sitting in front of it and talking about analyzing it. The only problem with that is Apple takes us down on YouTube when we do that. So we won't be streaming that live on YouTube. [01:52:30] We will stream it everywhere else. Both audio and video. So when you go to twit tv slash live to watch this, YouTube won't be an option. That's the only thing you need to know. Now, if you want a clean un commentated version of it, apple streams it. Of course. And please watch that. But if you want to hear what Micah and I think about what an Apple's announcing, what do we think they're going to do?

Mikah Sargent (01:52:54):
Well, we know, or I mean we're all but certain. Do we know that there will be an iPhone announced? Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:53:00):
[01:53:00] Pretty sure about

Mikah Sargent (01:53:00):
That. Yeah. Every September, apple for the longest has announced at the very least new iPhones. Do you

Leo Laporte (01:53:06):
Look at the event invitation and

Mikah Sargent (01:53:08):
Toss? No, not anymore. That's just depressing to me, honestly. Now it makes me sad when I see all of those little what Really? Yeah, because I guess it's like once you know how the sausage is made, once you understand the separation between the marketing department and the technology department, and it's just [01:53:30] very vaguely related.

Leo Laporte (01:53:32):
Wonder lust is the tagline. W o N Like wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder who made the iPhone 15. So wonder And then lust, because Apple acknowledges that really they sell most of the phones based on a carnal desire to own it.

Mikah Sargent (01:53:50):
Yes, indeed. And we're hearing that the colors for the pros are super muted this year. A dearth of color.

Leo Laporte (01:53:58):
Blue steel. Gray steel. Steel. Steel. [01:54:00] Steel. Steel and silver steel. Yeah, but it will be titanium, oddly enough. Not

Mikah Sargent (01:54:05):
Stain steel. Remember we had that caller who said, these phones are too

Leo Laporte (01:54:09):
Heavy? Well, it'll be lighter, although it might be thicker. It'll still be lighter. Might be a little bit thicker.

Mikah Sargent (01:54:13):
Interesting.

Leo Laporte (01:54:14):
Here's the thing that they're, they're saying right now that Mark Germin and all the rumor mongers, the Highend, the iPhone pros going to be more expensive than,

Mikah Sargent (01:54:22):
Yeah, a hundred dollars more. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:54:24):
Two reasons. Periscope lens. So it's going to have a lot of zoom. And the fact that [01:54:30] they're going to replace this surgical stainless steel with nonsurgical titanium never

Mikah Sargent (01:54:35):
Operate

Leo Laporte (01:54:35):
With titanium. Never.

Mikah Sargent (01:54:37):
No. Many people have titanium allergies. No. I also read something about stacked sensors. Did you hear about this? This is like the newest, latest camera that's not Periscoped different. And this is supposed to be coming to all of the iPhones. Let me see. Stacked sensor iPhone. I don't know. Somebody [01:55:00] had this really weird kind of drawing of what or diagram of what a stacked sensor could be or what it looks like, and I didn't understand it. It

Leo Laporte (01:55:11):
Might be related to Ning, which they've done before, which is the idea that in order to give you more resolution. You have a higher, anyway, we'll find out.

Mikah Sargent (01:55:23):
Quo suggests that the new stacked sensor design will only be included in Apple's standard lower end iPhone 15. iPhone 15 plus, [01:55:30] not the pro and pro Max.

Leo Laporte (01:55:33):
If you don't want spoilers. Yes. Do not read this. Minutes Before we went to press. Press record. Press play. Began the minutes. M World published the script.

Mikah Sargent (01:55:47):
Oh, come on.

Leo Laporte (01:55:48):
For Apple's event.

Mikah Sargent (01:55:50):
It's a goof, isn't it?

Leo Laporte (01:55:51):
No, they say this is the rehearsal script. What that leaked out. The last time we did [01:56:00] this, some people question whether it was real or not until after the W W D C keynote when it was clear we made the whole thing up. Oh, maybe they are. Maybe. You know what? It's not April 1st, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, maybe it is made up.

Mikah Sargent (01:56:14):
Well, we can't vouch for the validity of the most recent file we for. Maybe it's made up. We can't vouch for the gull ability of the internet.

Leo Laporte (01:56:20):
Okay, so I fell for it.

Mikah Sargent (01:56:23):
Oh boy. We will

Leo Laporte (01:56:24):
See probably besides they're saying now four new models. I thought for briefly there was going to be a fifth [01:56:30] Ultra. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:56:31):
One more

Leo Laporte (01:56:31):
Model. So iPhone 15. iPhone 15, 15

Mikah Sargent (01:56:36):
Max.

Leo Laporte (01:56:38):
Oh, maybe iPhone 15

Mikah Sargent (01:56:40):
Or iPhone 15 plus, right.

Leo Laporte (01:56:41):
15 plus iPhone 15 Pro. iPhone 15 Promax. I'm still holding out hope for an iPhone 15 Pro. Ultra Ultra that costs 5,000 bucks.

Mikah Sargent (01:56:53):
So I

Leo Laporte (01:56:53):
Can say no to you.

Mikah Sargent (01:56:56):
What are you going to do with, sorry. What would Apple [01:57:00] do with an ultra? What is an ultra,

Leo Laporte (01:57:03):
I don't know. Maybe a little propeller would come out and it would

Mikah Sargent (01:57:05):
Fly Now that would be cool. A drone camera. Oh, it's huge. It's

Leo Laporte (01:57:09):
This big. I don't know. They also will probably announce a new Apple watches and of course Lisa and I were talking, she says, you're going to buy the new watch and I said, I don't think so because the

Mikah Sargent (01:57:20):
Ultra's so good.

Leo Laporte (01:57:21):
I really like the Ultra. They're not going to do a new ultra, I don't think they're going to do a new basic watch and it'll have a new chip, faster chip better, which usually means better battery [01:57:30] life and it will have some new sensors. But see, it depended. If they had a blood glucose sensor, then I would

Mikah Sargent (01:57:36):
Buy, right? Absolutely. But yeah, that's still going to be a few

Leo Laporte (01:57:38):
Years. If they had a blood pressure sensor, I might buy. I don't know if they're going to do that. So we shall see. But my guess is, okay, so I know this is fake now because here comes Jeff Williams, Apple's Chief operating Officer, strolling confidently a grassy corner of Apple Park like Toby McGuire and Spider-Man three.

Mikah Sargent (01:57:58):
I think this is [01:58:00] poor choice.

Leo Laporte (01:58:01):
Don't do that. It fooled me. I don't like that. It fooled me. I believed them for a whole minute. Even

Mikah Sargent (01:58:06):
If I wasn't fooled by it.

Leo Laporte (01:58:08):
You were good. You said, oh, come on. That's not

Mikah Sargent (01:58:09):
True. Honestly, I won't say who, but let's say someone I know regularly will say things out loud to me, did you hear the dah dah dah, dah. And I go, is it true? And then we take a moment and find out. No, it's not true. I just don't believe anything. Just think about until, can confirm it. Is it

Leo Laporte (01:58:26):
True? Is it true? Is it safe? Anyway, we'll find out. [01:58:30] Probably new phone, new watch. We'll watch and see if new AirPods,

Mikah Sargent (01:58:33):
We'll watch and see bringing it full circle. We do need to take that moment to say, is it true Now the government can't call up Twitter and say, you please not do the misinformation.

Leo Laporte (01:58:43):
Right? They're not allowed. That would be funny if they call up Twitter and say, could you not publish rumors about the new Ivo? But I don't

Mikah Sargent (01:58:50):
Think, don't they care? But

Leo Laporte (01:58:52):
Yeah, they don't think they care about that. Although

Mikah Sargent (01:58:54):
I guess with all of the taxes that the US makes from Apple, maybe they would care. Maybe

Leo Laporte (01:58:59):
They care. [01:59:00] Maybe they're really rooting forever. Apple Type C connector will replace lightning. I'm pretty sure that's the case as well. Anyway, we're in a situation now where there's not a whole lot of stuff to get excited about.

Mikah Sargent (01:59:13):
What we can get excited about, what I'm looking forward to is there's almost always some new software and hardware merging feature that happens that gets to bring the, there's always something like, so for example, [01:59:30] dynamic Island, we didn't know about that. The new phone was announced and then this was software site. That's exciting. That was so fun.

Leo Laporte (01:59:36):
Was really excited. I still love the dynamic island.

Mikah Sargent (01:59:38):
And sometimes there'll be in the past, there's a camera feature that we didn't know about. There'll be something

Leo Laporte (01:59:45):
Like those we'll grab ahold of and be jumping up and down, but don't make me jumping down too much because I'm going to wear my jammies.

Mikah Sargent (01:59:52):
Yeah, and you'll be in the basement in my

Leo Laporte (01:59:54):
Mother's

Mikah Sargent (01:59:54):
Basement. You don't want to bring down the ceiling on you.

Leo Laporte (01:59:58):
Knock it off down. [02:00:00] Mom doing a podcast. Well keep it down. I want to make

Mikah Sargent (02:00:04):
A phone call. You got to get off the internet off the

Leo Laporte (02:00:07):
Phone. Mom. I'm trying to podcast here anyway, so please watch. And then we'll do Mac Break weekly immediately after. Yeah. Excellent, excellent. That will be a fun Tuesdays you move in iOS today earlier.

Mikah Sargent (02:00:22):
Yeah, iOS today will be at 8:00 AM and then yeah, we'll roll in. I'll be there all day. iOS the show and then Mac [02:00:30] break afterward.

Leo Laporte (02:00:32):
Okay. What do you want us to do, John? Ashley, we've stalled long enough. Oh, you

Mikah Sargent (02:00:35):
Were stalling.

Leo Laporte (02:00:36):
Oh, I didn't know that. No, I wasn't stalling. I never stall. Chris has been hanging out for since the beginning. Is that Chris from Miami?

Mikah Sargent (02:00:43):
No, no, no. This is a different Chris.

Leo Laporte (02:00:44):
Oh, no wonder Mike. I'm going

Mikah Sargent (02:00:45):
To send Chris breakout road. Chris from

Leo Laporte (02:00:48):
Somewhere else. Chris, come on down. Should I send him

Mikah Sargent (02:00:52):
From Penza?

Leo Laporte (02:00:54):
From Penza? Is that just north of

Mikah Sargent (02:00:59):
Albuquerque?

Leo Laporte (02:01:00):
[02:01:00] We're

Caller Chris (2) (02:01:02):
Getting punched. Guys are cracking up today.

Leo Laporte (02:01:04):
Poor Bama. We are. Hello Chris. Where are you calling from?

Caller Chris (2) (02:01:07):
Hey, west Palm. I'm just north of Christon Miami and he sucked up all the caffeine himself.

Leo Laporte (02:01:13):
I think there's no caffeine in the entire state. You

Mikah Sargent (02:01:15):
Can't find any coffee beans anywhere.

Caller Chris (2) (02:01:19):
I love how rapidly he goes when he gets on.

Leo Laporte (02:01:22):
He's hysterical. It's become shtick. How many cups in are you? I'm 23. It's [02:01:30] really become shtick. So what can we do for you, Mr. Chris?

Caller Chris (2) (02:01:34):
So a little feedback for you. I joined Club Twit. Thank you very much for everything you do out there and I figured I would do my donation. Thank

Mikah Sargent (02:01:41):
For your

Leo Laporte (02:01:41):
Support. Thank you.

Caller Chris (2) (02:01:45):
I never learned how to download the ones without the commercials on it, but do you have a commercial now that comes on for some energy soft drink and the volume is about twice as loud as any other

Leo Laporte (02:01:57):
Commercial? Let me explain that to you because not [02:02:00] exactly as it seems. So first of all, you paid for it. Get the ad-free versions getting your seven bucks a month and you might as well what happens if you could find the emails? We give you a link to a special page that has all of the shows because every club member has their own unique feed that has no ads on it. So go back and find that email and there'll be a link in there

Mikah Sargent (02:02:27):
I could connect real quick and show [02:02:30] everybody how this is

Leo Laporte (02:02:31):
Done. Sure. If you want to do that super quick.

Caller Chris (2) (02:02:33):
Got around to the old ones and

Leo Laporte (02:02:35):
Yeah. Well, we love it that you listen to the ads. I don't want to stop you from

Caller Chris (2) (02:02:38):
No, I don't mind. I don't mind the ads.

Leo Laporte (02:02:40):
There are now two kinds of ads. We've had a lot of trouble as we've mentioned, and one of the reasons we want people to join the club is advertisers. They don't get it. They don't get what we do. I think the advertisers who do really benefit from the kinds of ads we do, right? We are talking about something we use we know [02:03:00] about and we really explain what it is to you. And I think we do a great job, but unfortunately many agencies and many advertisers are used to the way they bought ads on radio and TV where they're not host red, they're just inserted into the content. They're just dropped in. And that's why sometimes you'll see three different car and manufacturer's ads, one right after another on a football game because they're not buying, they're, it's not the same [02:03:30] experience. They're buying inserted ads. The ad you heard is an inserted ad and we don't control, unfortunately, we don't control the volume. This makes me mad. We're going to talk to the company that does that because that absolutely should never happen. But we didn't say, almost

Caller Chris (2) (02:03:47):
Drove me off the road one day I was driving down the road and that ad came on. I was Oh wow,

Mikah Sargent (02:03:52):
It

Leo Laporte (02:03:52):
Scared you. So was it recent? It was so loud. Was it fairly recent?

Caller Chris (2) (02:03:56):
Yes. Yeah, just the last show I had

Leo Laporte (02:03:59):
It on it. So [02:04:00] we switched over a couple of months ago to a libson company. Lipson's been in podcasting forever and ever called Advertise Cast. And the way it works is the feeds then go to them. Not if you're a club member, but if you're not a club member, the feeds go to them. And then we do our ads on this show. For instance, we had two ads that I read, but there's four positions. So we mark with a special invisible marking the position of the other two ads. That's usually when we go, we'll be right back after [02:04:30] this or something and pause. And then if they have an advertiser for your region even they will drop that advertiser in and we get paid for it. We don't get paid as much as we would if we were doing the ads. But we get frankly, some advertisers, the only way we can ever reach most advertisers is through this direct, what they call direct ad insertion. And so we have to do it because we're just not close to sold out. We're less than 50% sold out these days because of that. So [02:05:00] I'm sorry, but I should say we approve every client. No client goes on there that we haven't said yes to. I get a list and it's a long list of clients and I say, no, no, we're not going to do cigarettes, we're not going to do beer, we're not going to do vaping, we're not going to do Bitcoin, stuff like that.

(02:05:20):
But we have a relationship. I'm going to actually be with Trevor who runs advertised cast in Green Bay. When we go out there, one of the reasons we're going to Green Bay is to meet with them

Mikah Sargent (02:05:27):
And you can say, Hey

Leo Laporte (02:05:28):
Trevor,

Mikah Sargent (02:05:29):
Shout out. [02:05:30] Is

Leo Laporte (02:05:30):
This the kind of dad you want? I can tell you nobody, no

Mikah Sargent (02:05:34):
Advertiser wants. Don't want that either. Exactly.

Caller Chris (2) (02:05:37):
It's a guy that it sounds like he's doing a breakaway in soccer. The gold guy go,

Mikah Sargent (02:05:43):
Oh my goodness.

Caller Chris (2) (02:05:44):
And he's talking about some energy drink. It's kind of funny.

Leo Laporte (02:05:47):
This has always been an issue on TV too, and some of it is not that it's louder. There are F C C rules that can't be louder than the main content, but they can do tricks with it to make it feel louder.

Mikah Sargent (02:06:00):
[02:06:00] And it doesn't apply to O T T stuff.

Leo Laporte (02:06:01):
That's the Yeah, they're allowed to the hell

Mikah Sargent (02:06:03):
See the problem. So for everybody who's in the club, we get these questions all the time. So I'm going to make a little package that John Ashley can basically cut out if he wants to and share with people. So I went to TWIT tv. So can we show my screen? I'm airplay one. Alright, so I click on club, click

Leo Laporte (02:06:20):
On

Mikah Sargent (02:06:21):
Club, and then I scroll down. Yes. And on the right side it says manage your membership, right? Oh, I choose access your account. So

Leo Laporte (02:06:28):
If you didn't have the email, [02:06:30] you can just do this.

Mikah Sargent (02:06:31):
Yes. And then if you're not logged in, you'll give the email that you use to log in. Mine's my twit email. All I do is I click over on podcasts.

Leo Laporte (02:06:39):
Look at this, watch this. This is amazing. And then look, I've never done this.

Mikah Sargent (02:06:43):
Here's all, here are all of the shows. So if I wanted to ask the tech guys without ads,

Leo Laporte (02:06:48):
That's a special feed, then it's going to be your feed only. You don't show

Caller Chris (2) (02:06:52):
Delete the old subscriptions. Yes,

Mikah Sargent (02:06:55):
You would remove your old subscription. You would click on subscribe. And again, I won't show this. This [02:07:00] has my own special feeds, but when you click on subscribe, it's actually going to pop up with different podcasts providers. So maybe you use Apple Podcasts, maybe you use Spotify, whatever you happen to use,

Leo Laporte (02:07:10):
There's probably an R S Ss as

Mikah Sargent (02:07:11):
Well. And there's also, yeah, just a plain o r sss and you can just copy and paste that as well. So yeah, those others are just to make it easier. But that, and then also folks, maybe you are going, how do I join the Discord from this page? You click on this button right here, discord, and then you can join the Discord. So if you've had trouble with any of that, that's where [02:07:30] you do it. It's just that simple button access.

Leo Laporte (02:07:33):
And even if you don't plan to spend much time in the Discord, there are help sections in there. So if you have other questions, that's where you can go and get support from an and the team.

Caller Chris (2) (02:07:44):
I have a good question for you today.

Leo Laporte (02:07:46):
Okay,

Caller Chris (2) (02:07:47):
So you guys earlier said that Google turned 20 today. Does that like dog ears? Is it 25?

Leo Laporte (02:07:54):
25?

Caller Chris (2) (02:07:55):
That's a good question. Is it like dog ears? They've forgotten where I live. They think I've moved to Washington [02:08:00] DC when I'm really in south Florida.

Leo Laporte (02:08:02):
Oh Lord, Google.

Caller Chris (2) (02:08:04):
Yeah. Maybe it isn't

Leo Laporte (02:08:05):
Dog ears. Actually that's probably your internet service provider rather than Google. But this

Caller Chris (2) (02:08:12):
Is, I've gone down every rabbit hole I can think of. I called Xfinity and I said, Hey, can you sign me a new ip? And they said, no, we can't.

Leo Laporte (02:08:19):
So this is the fault of G O I P location. And by the way, that might be why you got that loud ad because they also [02:08:30] do that. They're using, we can't really tell where you are. But what they'll do is look at an IP address and say, well that is assigned to this I S P for this region. So he must be in upper Washington state or wherever it is that they're putting you. And that's just a failure of geo ip. It isn't a perfect thing. So I'm not sure why their Xfinity would be the one because it's their IP address.

Caller Chris (2) (02:08:57):
I'd see a lot of people talking about Mac [02:09:00] spoofing. I've got an or B.

Leo Laporte (02:09:02):
They don't see your Mac address. They only see your IP address. So Mac address spoofing will not help. It's based on the IP address. And unfortunately Xfinity has assigned you one from a pool somewhere up north.

Caller Chris (2) (02:09:19):
Yeah, and it worked for years. I mean it just a couple of weeks ago and it was just an annoying at first. And then they sent one of my prescriptions to the wrong pharmacy in Washington DC [02:09:30] and now my YouTube TV won't give me local stations.

Leo Laporte (02:09:34):
Oh, that's very frustrating.

Caller Chris (2) (02:09:36):
I called YouTube tv and they were like, we don't how to fix it, call you.

Leo Laporte (02:09:41):
So one thing you could do, it's ironic because Xfinity does not guarantee you a static IP address. They say never rely on your IP address. How can you get a new IP address sometimes disconnecting your cable modem?

Caller Chris (2) (02:09:58):
I did that and let [02:10:00] it out for an hour, actually unplugged the cable to it. I remember that one time with Xfinity was a thing that,

Leo Laporte (02:10:07):
So that's the one reason you might want a Mac address spoof because Xfinity does know the Mac address of your router. And so if they see the Mac address, they say, oh yeah, that's Chris. We know he lives in Washington dc So if you did a Mac address spoof, what would initially happen is your Xfinity would drop off because they say, well, [02:10:30] that's not him at that. You can say, you can call Xfinity and say, I've put a new router in or something. Or maybe just hope that it gets, this is interesting. So let me

Caller Chris (2) (02:10:44):
Look at, did you do that in the land setup page? Isn't that a WAN setting

Leo Laporte (02:10:48):
Or it the Mac address?

Caller Chris (2) (02:10:50):
Yeah, it's like asking me, the only place I can see to do anything on the Mac is add a new one in land settings. I can see my router is not there, the Orbi is not in there. Everything else [02:11:00] in the house, like 36

Leo Laporte (02:11:01):
Items, it's the cable modem. It's the thing that you have attached to the cable that is critical. So if you could change the last, so I'm looking at a website. The website first says if you need to change your IP address, this is aru john.com and some of it's accurate, so I'll use the rest, turn off your router and your Comcast modem. Wait for 20 seconds up to two minutes, turn on and see [02:11:30] if you get a new IP address. It doesn't always do that. It didn't for you. So the next thing is log into your routers configuration, navigate to the Mac address section into the WAN Mac address and change the last digit. Now do a power cycle.

Caller Chris (2) (02:11:47):
There's nowhere in WAN to do that. It's only in land that I can do it. And that's just internal in the house, right? Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:11:52):
Right. All right. Well, so you've obviously seen these articles.

Caller Chris (2) (02:11:58):
Yeah, I saw that one. Yeah, [02:12:00] draft. Alright, well

Leo Laporte (02:12:02):
That's what you need to do. It's really, it's, I stu, you,

Caller Chris (2) (02:12:04):
I've stumped the best.

Leo Laporte (02:12:07):
This is the problem is I know exactly what's going on. The real problem is Xfinity is not responsive and that's probably because they had a pool. Probably your Xfinity provider in your area also has customers in Washington dc and so they have one IP pool that they're using for everybody. I don't know, it's terrible. It's go to [02:12:30] IP location.net and see. See, I'm on this here. There are many sites like this, but see where it thinks you are been and you says, thinks we're in Santa Rosa. It says it thinks you're in Washington dc

Caller Chris (2) (02:12:44):
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:12:45):
That's a bad I S C,

Caller Chris (2) (02:12:48):
What's my ip? Was that No, see if I go to what's my ip? It knows I'm in Florida. If I go to any other map, MapQuest or M S N maps or That's interesting. Anything [02:13:00] other than Google, it knows where.

Leo Laporte (02:13:03):
This is another one. IP location.net. Why don't you try that real quick while we're here. IP location.net. My IP might be giving you Google's what Google thinks and Google's wrong, but IP location.net is using the,

Caller Chris (2) (02:13:22):
Yeah, west Palm Beach, Florida

Leo Laporte (02:13:24):
It. Correct. So why is Google specific? Is Google ignoring that? Is

Caller Chris (2) (02:13:28):
It?

Leo Laporte (02:13:29):
It's [02:13:30] in Google

Mikah Sargent (02:13:30):
Maps in where does this show up that you know that it's

Leo Laporte (02:13:33):
Any non-Google

Caller Chris (2) (02:13:34):
Properties. It's Google Maps. Any search you do in Chrome shows the wrong address. If you just put in restaurants and don't put in the zip, it'll tell you that you're,

Mikah Sargent (02:13:42):
Oh, restaurants near your Washington DC location that is not your actual location. Got it. My

Caller Chris (2) (02:13:47):
YouTube tv. My YouTube TV thinks I'm in Washington DC and there's no way to change it. All the

Leo Laporte (02:13:53):
Google the properties do. Yeah.

Caller Chris (2) (02:13:54):
Yeah. All

Leo Laporte (02:13:55):
Google. Yeah. I got into a loop with that. Have you ever

Mikah Sargent (02:13:59):
Lived in dc?

Caller Chris (2) (02:14:00):
[02:14:00] No. I was there two years ago for a weekend, but no, no.

Leo Laporte (02:14:05):
Remember when my YouTube TV decided I was in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania? Never been there. I don't know why I thought that. How'd

Mikah Sargent (02:14:11):
You fix it?

Leo Laporte (02:14:12):
Well, this wasn't a good thing. I called them and they said, yeah, we can't fix it. What you have to do is cancel that account and create a new one. Are you kidding me? But the good news was the customer service rep said, I'll transfer all your credits and all that stuff over to the new account once you create it. But yeah, we can't fix it within the account,

Mikah Sargent (02:14:28):
But yeah, and you're having it everywhere [02:14:30] so that

Caller Chris (2) (02:14:31):
Everywhere wouldn't even, it's like they picked up my house and transported me to dc

Leo Laporte (02:14:36):
Does it do it on more than one computer or is it all on that

Caller Chris (2) (02:14:39):
Computer? Yes. No, it's on everything in that. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (02:14:41):
That would drive hash up a wall.

Leo Laporte (02:14:43):
It's not cashed information.

Mikah Sargent (02:14:46):
I was thinking if somewhere at some point you had put in an address if you had lived in DC that it could have been pulling from that. But the fact that

Caller Chris (2) (02:14:53):
This is just, I was there two years ago, but again, it was like a three day weekend and I came back, everything worked fine. This is a [02:15:00] recent thing that started happening about three weeks ago.

Mikah Sargent (02:15:04):
Okay, that's interesting. I actually thought that you were, I remember a listener calling in before who had a similar issue.

Caller Chris (2) (02:15:11):
I do too. I remember that call. I wasn't sure what the outcome was.

Mikah Sargent (02:15:15):
They moved to Washington DC

Caller Chris (2) (02:15:18):
That's

Leo Laporte (02:15:19):
The solution, by the way.

Caller Chris (2) (02:15:20):
Yeah, just move.

Leo Laporte (02:15:22):
Google's always right. You know Google's always right. Oh yeah. West Palm is very nice. You're in a very nice area. Is it a little [02:15:30] sweaty and hot today?

Caller Chris (2) (02:15:32):
It's very sweaty and hot. I was hoping to talk to Sam and ask him to ask Elon to put my recirculation button back on my Tesla. I don't know why my ac, they took it out. No, the button is there, but every time you get in the car it's off.

Leo Laporte (02:15:46):
Oh, it resets

Caller Chris (2) (02:15:47):
Pulling air in from outside. It's 98 degrees here.

Mikah Sargent (02:15:50):
I don't want that.

Leo Laporte (02:15:51):
Wait a minute.

Caller Chris (2) (02:15:52):
No Time. Time I drive that car

Leo Laporte (02:15:54):
You can because you grew up in St. Joe. 98 degrees in a hundred percent humidity.

Mikah Sargent (02:15:59):
Yeah, it's [02:16:00] a nightmare.

Leo Laporte (02:16:01):
My sister warned me because I'm going back to Rhode Island, apparently it's very similar. It's eighties, but it's very,

Mikah Sargent (02:16:06):
Very

Caller Chris (2) (02:16:06):
Humid. Really? Walk out the door and your hair just goes bang.

Leo Laporte (02:16:10):
Yikes. Okay,

Caller Chris (2) (02:16:11):
Well thank you guys. I appreciate

Mikah Sargent (02:16:13):
You dabbing cloths.

Caller Chris (2) (02:16:14):
I'm going to keep banging on it. Good luck. That's

Leo Laporte (02:16:18):
Very frustrating. I'm looking at all sorts of, how do you change your location in Google? You're right, it is Google Now I think we've determined that because IP location and what is my IP says you're in Palm. So [02:16:30] it's clearly that Google has got it in its head for some reason that you're in dc So it isn't very frustrating. It isn't Xfinity.

Caller Chris (2) (02:16:38):
I'm going on vacation this weekend, so I'm going to unplug it for three days and see if that rolls the IP over. Doing it for an hour or two didn't work, but maybe if I do it for a longer period of time, maybe. I don't doubt it.

Leo Laporte (02:16:51):
Have you ever been to Washington DC? Yeah, he said it for a few days. I wonder if your phone decided that that's where you were and then the phone [02:17:00] told everybody, Hey, he's moving

Caller Chris (2) (02:17:01):
The phone. The phone knows where I'm, if I do Google map, the phone works fine. Yeah, but it's not on my wifi. Well, it is on my wifi, isn't it? Yeah. No, the phone is not, and your

Leo Laporte (02:17:13):
Computer doesn't have g p s in it. I mean, that's why your phone knows where you are because it actually, yeah, because it's pulling from G P s instead of using ip. What an odd problem.

Caller Chris (2) (02:17:26):
There you go. There's your afternoon stumper. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:17:28):
I'll be thinking about this for [02:17:30] a while and I'll be thinking about you when we move to Washington DC Yeah,

Caller Chris (2) (02:17:33):
Well, I'll be looking at the show notes,

Leo Laporte (02:17:35):
The weed chat

Caller Chris (2) (02:17:36):
Room,

Leo Laporte (02:17:36):
Discord, anything you can do to help, we would appreciate it. Thank guys. Hey, it's great to talk to you. Thanks for joining the club. We really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Good to talk to you. And now you know how to get rid of those ads. Yes, yes, exactly. $7 a month ad free versions of all of our show access to the best social network ever. Our club to Discord, stuff that we don't put out in public like Micone. Hands-on Macintosh, hands-on [02:18:00] windows with Paul Ott again, untitled Linux show. Scott Wilkinson's. Home Theater Geeks. So many great programs because our club TWIT members are financing them, so it helps us a lot. Every podcast network is reporting that has just gotten very difficult to do podcasts. But thanks to our club, we now have, I think almost 7,000 members, which is a full 1% of our audience.

(02:18:26):
If we could get it to 2, 3, 4. Yeah, let's skip that. I dream of five. [02:18:30] We could really do something with that money and it wouldn't go into my pocket. I can promise you twit TV slash club twit. We appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Do you want to do one more call before we go? I hate to end on a, we can do one more call, but I think we do need to take a quick break. Oh, alright. We're going to take a little break and then when we come back, why don't we do a voicemail? How about that? You're watching. Ask the tech guys. We're listening either way. Okay. Voicemail [02:19:00] time. Who do you got?

Caller Don (02:19:04):
Hi, this is Dawn from Gaithersburg Merrill, and my question is that it seems in the last couple months, apple podcasts and its integration between the iPhone and the Apple Watch are not in sync anymore. My podcast queue on my phone is no longer syncing in the same as it is on the watch. So [02:19:30] the watch seems to be the controlling mechanism for the podcast when I live to them through my AirPods and in my car. So I don't know if Apple did something odd or this is just an Apple podcast issue, but I'd like to be able to have my podcasts in the order that I prefer, which I have on my phone rather than the randomness that the watch plays it on. Thanks.

Mikah Sargent (02:19:55):
So he's using a nice feature of Apple podcast, which is just keep playing, don't ever stop, [02:20:00] but it's not playing in the order that he is set up. I am not a regular user of Apple Podcasts, so I'm not sure. My suggestion to you is launch the watch app on your phone. Then you will go to the podcasts settings on your phone. So there are three tabs at the bottom, my watch, face Gallery and Discover from the My Watch tab. Just scroll down until you get to podcasts and you'll see settings [02:20:30] Add episodes from up next or add episodes from Saved and then you can also add shows. I would check this page and see that it's the same as what you have in your phone with your podcasts app. It could be that for some reason it started using shows that you have listed here instead of just pulling from your up next from your podcasts app.

(02:20:56):
So if you can show that over the shoulder shot, [02:21:00] I can show people there you. Yeah, so you want have up Next and Saved, selected. You don't want to have ad shows. You don't want to have anything in there because if you choose ad shows, then it's going to ignore what you have on your Apple Podcast app and just make its own and make its own list. Yeah. As for order, I don't know how you would reorder that. Yeah, it should be, if you have it set so that it pulls from your up next seems like it should copy and it's going to pull from the up next and it'll copy. Yeah. What I think happened is that for some reason that [02:21:30] shows section ended up getting added here and that's where it breaks and it does its own thing versus what you want it to do, which is from your phone.

(02:21:37):
Let your phone be the ruler instead of let your Apple watch be the ruler. Got it. You're so good. I'm glad you're feeling better. Me too. I will be back here next week. Yeah, I'm going to fly back east tomorrow. You're gone again. Sorry. Won't you be gone again after that? So you'll be like, that's later. Oh, is that way later? Okay. It feels like you're flying to flying. I'm, I'm going [02:22:00] to tell you this right now. I'm not missing this show ever until the cows come in. The cows come home, maybe Christmas, I don't know, but I have no plans for not being here on a Sunday. I was just reading a list of all of the different countries who have versions of when the pigs fly and one you hold down your eyelid and you say, is there a train coming at me here? What country is that? I believe it was Germany.

Leo Laporte (02:22:28):
Is that plane coming? Yeah. [02:22:30] No, you'll see Thatwas out.

Mikah Sargent (02:22:32):
No.

Leo Laporte (02:22:33):
Well, you know what we say in America, the good Lord willing and the creeks don't rise. I will be here next week and you will too for Ask the Tech guys. I hope you will too. Ah man. We do this show, we do this show every Sunday from 11:11 AM to about 1:32 PM That's a Pacific time. If you live in God's country on the East Coast, that would be, I don't know, it's hard to figure. It'll [02:23:00] be something like 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM

Mikah Sargent (02:23:03):
I don't do all that fancy math. That's

Leo Laporte (02:23:04):
Fancy math. Let alone the Godless hinterlands of Europe, which are on U T C and I think that would be about 1800 U T C Universal coordinated time. They even couldn't get the letters in order. They couldn't even get the letters in order. So do come by and watch the live streams at Trip tv slash live. There's audio and video there. If you're watching Live Chat [02:23:30] live in our irc, that's open to everybody. Irc twit tv. And if you are in the club, of course you can do that in the Discord after the fact on-demand versions of the show are available at our website. We kept Tech Guy Labs, so you can just go to tech guy labs.com, see the shows. This was episode, what was it? 1991. Wow.

Mikah Sargent (02:23:54):
Oh my goodness. Holy

Leo Laporte (02:23:55):
Moly. But they're all the episodes. Going back to, I think we missed the first couple, [02:24:00] but going back to 2004, there's episodes. The Space Odyssey. The Space Odyssey.

Mikah Sargent (02:24:06):
I just wanted to upset John

Leo Laporte (02:24:10):
Because John's saying no, it was 2001. I did not do the show in 2001. I was busy doing the tech TV or something. Twit TV slash ttg is another way to get to tech guy labs.com or search for tech guy in your favorite podcast app or ask the tech guys or any variation thereof and it should [02:24:30] show this up. It's the same feed as the tech guy feed, so it should just show up there. Thank you so much everybody. Thank you all. That's Micah Sargent. You'll see him on iOS today. Tuesday mornings a little early this time. 8:00 AM You're going to start here. Yeah, 8:00 AM 8:00 AM Pacific. And then see Micah and me as we talk about Apple's Launch. 10:00 AM and then Mac Break Weekly. You're going to stick around for that I hope on Tuesday. You'll also see Mike on Thursdays with Tech News Weekly and

Mikah Sargent (02:24:56):
Wow, I forgot what it was called. Hands on Mac, which comes out on Thursdays.

Leo Laporte (02:25:00):
[02:25:00] We're still in the

Mikah Sargent (02:25:00):
Hands. Hands. Were here. We

Leo Laporte (02:25:01):
Couldn't remember the name.

Mikah Sargent (02:25:02):
Where do I put them in

Leo Laporte (02:25:03):
This show with this on a Mac? Is there anything else to say? No, stay tuned. Amazing Twi coming up. Taylor Loren. Yes. Amy Webb. Jill Duffy. What a powerhouse. It's going to be a great show. Absolutely. And we will do that next. Thanks everybody. We'll have a great time, a great week. I'll see you from Mom's house, from the basement. On behalf of Michaelson, I'm Leo LaPorte. Have [02:25:30] a great geek week.