Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Well, we have had an eventful week and a half or two.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: I say something.
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Yeah, it's been kind of nuts.
I mean, just two hurricanes.
One that's been really bad close to home here. I mean, within an hour of us is western North Carolina. And I know a lot of you folks have heard about western North Carolina and all the devastation that went on. It is for real. It's for real.
And in that vein, it has made me think about a lot of topics around caregiving and tech because of having, you know, it's bad enough for all of us. When we have a hurricane coming or we have a natural disaster or we especially a hurricane coming, we can actually see it coming. There's a lot for us to think about. But, you know, if you add aging parents or aging loved ones into the mix, then that adds a whole other level of complexity, doesn't it?
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Boy, you're not saying it's really true.
So, for me, I have a situation where I have four separate locations. My work life works in a separate place. I work in a place, and then I've got two parents in different places but relatively close together, and I got to worry about all four of them and how they're affected.
The lucky thing is that my mom's situation actually stayed pretty stable, and we had power. So we ended up, the two of us, back at that place, and there were some things we had to do. Like, there's a normal stuff, like when you lose power for more than two or three days, you got to do something about your freezer. And so we handled that. And that's not really a tech subject, but as a reminder, just, you know, I bought groceries on the day of the. Of this hurricane coming in, and those groceries ended up in a cooler coming. Going to Orangeburg. So don't just react to what you need to do sometimes. Think about it. What happens if you lose power? And that was the most likely thing to happen with these hurricanes. And then for Barry and I, we were surprised. This hurricane took a different path than what it should have. And even in that surprise, there were some things that we needed to both be taken care of. And it goes back to the rule. The first rule of caregiving is make sure you're.
Because if you're not okay, you can't do anything for anybody. So, um, in retrospect, I would have had a plan. We probably would have thought through a little bit more things, and I think that's probably similar where you're at. You're always the best memory of what to do of what these kind of things is usually when, after it happens and you go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: And, you know, like, like you said, you kind of do an after action review. You want to, you want to go through and say, all right, what worked and what didn't work and what would I change and all that. And to, to your point about taking care of yourself, this, this was kind of a weird thing for, for me is that the day after the hurricane, I had a flight plan to go on vacation with me and my wife. And we, the night before our flight, we, we had no power. We had no Internet.
We did, we were doing the best we could at the time, but when we kept checking to make sure the airport was going to be good. And so we're, we're planning for this and we're getting ready to go out of town and, but we're also thinking about and talking to my dad, my wife's mom, my aunt, who I help out a good bit and kind of rolling through the, I don't know, I guess guilt is the right way to say it. You know, you felt like, all right, I've paid this money, I've paid all this stuff in advance for before my vacation, but at the same, and I'm going to lose that money if I don't go take it. But at the same time, you also feel like you're, I don't know, you're kind of abandoning people in a way. I know you're not. I'm not really, but, you know, I have this kind of weird syndrome about guilt about stuff like that. But I long, and the short of it, we did manage to get out of town, and we were out of town for the whole week that a lot of folks were out of power. And the whole time I'm checking with my dad and my kay's mom and my aunt and making sure that they have what they need, that their neighbors are checking in on them. And, you know, they got power back relatively quickly. But I felt like I couldn't relax on vacation until I knew that they were in good shape or that they were being taken care of. So we did what we could with that, but ultimately it all worked out good and our vacation actually worked out good, too. So that was nice. We got back on a couple of days after power came back on, so it's good.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: And for me, making sure that my mom had an idea of when I would check in, you know, what things to have, even checking with her day before and making sure she had things like water and batteries.
And so I was able to do some of that stuff beforehand and feel kind of at ease. She has a situation where if her power is down, she can't call anybody. So making sure her cell phone was charged and making sure that we did the right things to give her a sense of security.
Even talking to neighbors and saying, hey, check on her, knock on the door, see if she's okay. When things calm down, it really helps to have a plan.
And then the other thing I almost forgot was post all of this, making sure things work like, okay, the phone works like it should. The Internet ship works like it should.
If you have a camera down that needs to be reset, what you need to do. I just finished having a call, actually, about my mom's camera that didn't return and making sure I scheduled something to get that fixed. So you have to think about afterwards, too, and what to do about that kind of thing. And then, you know, we were down there for a week, so it really helped. But your tech also requires some maintenance and some post work that you need to think about how computers work. Sometimes computers reset, and they have to be brought up in a different way. Make sure you have that.
Make sure, you know, the things that are essential to what she needs to do work. And then, you know, there's little simple things like gas in the car and light bulbs so that you can change the light bulb that dies. Those kind of things that you really need to keep in mind, too.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: For sure. Did you find yourself afterwards making a bunch of checklists for next time, or. I'm sure, you know, checklist ahead of time, but you're.
[00:07:01] Speaker B: I did. There was stuff I had to put on there. Yeah.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: It's never enough to. And you brought up good points. Like my dad, I made sure he had a generator. He had several battery packs and stuff for charging phones. And same thing with my aunt. She had battery packs, a generator. Not really appropriate for her at this point, but in my. In my mother in law, she's in an assisted living place, and they. They had generator backup and that kind of stuff. So I felt good that they all had, you know, they all have what they needed. So that was good.
Yeah. And. But, you know, you do need.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: We had a simple situation, too, Barry, that we have a parent that's in a assisted care area right now, and for us, it was new, and so had. Making sure that we knew what the protocol was. What do you do when you need to check on them? You need to ask those questions, so make sure you do it's really important.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: And I was reminded of something, speaking of assisted living, I was reminded of something before we went out of town. We stopped by and saw my wife's mom. And they assisted living, at least in hers, they're not. Everything is on generator.
They prioritize the things in the kitchens and the food preparation areas.
But also I learned that all of their rooms have normal power outlets, and then they have power outlets that are orange, and the orange ones are hooked up to the generator and up an uninterrupted power supply situation. So there was some power the whole time, but there wasn't the. The what they were used to put it that way. But I can see where that'd be very helpful. Say if you're on. If you're on oxygen or something like that, you know, that that would be great to know and not have to worry about that. That's gonna. That's gonna have power all the time. I'm sure that it's probably limited. You wouldn't be wanting to plug in everything that you have in there. But if you, you know, you can keep a phone charged, you can keep necessities powered. It's all good. It's all good. And even things like hearing aids, for that matter, being able to make sure that those things are charged. Any other kind of personal devices and.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: That sort of thing, or emergency radios or trackers, if you have trackers that you're trying to use to see where loved ones are, you know, some of those require things like Wi Fi to work.
But. But at least you can make sure that they.
The support system is charged and ready to go. And, you know, I don't know about you, but during the power outage, I used my phone and my iPad to watch television to see reports.
They even enjoy a football game every once in a while. So, you know, it pays to make sure you have that. You understand what those things are and what the passwords are and if they work, that kind of thing. So there's a lot. There's a good bit you can check beforehand to make sure it works.
[00:10:06] Speaker A: And no, too, if you're gonna have an extended power outage, just realize ahead of time that even that stuff may fail. Like in my area, the cell towers went out about, I don't know, a day after the power went out otherwise, because, you know, those things run on diesel generators when they don't have power. So. But the. The runtime on those things is limited by how much fuel they have in them. So in this case, I think maybe the cell towers went down when they ran out of fuel. It may have been from other damage, too. And after that, about all we could reliably do was occasionally get a phone call through, but mainly text. So, you know, text is your friend. It's the, it's the least.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: Least bandwidth intensive. It takes the least amount of data and is it can get you through to at least get. At least get in contact with somebody even when you don't have much sales service at all.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: Yeah. So one of the things I had to do post ham is I had a google home set up with ad and t give them a little, small, tiny plug on that and so that I can pull up on my camera. I pull my hand bed on my phone, and I can see mom, and there's five cameras in a place. And so when the storm hit, two of the cameras went out. And I knew, okay, I gotta do something with that. So when I was down there that week, I made sure I could reset one of the cameras. And one of the Google cams are easy to reset. There's a little button in the back of them, and you can just hit a button or you unplug it and put it back in. It resets. I did one of them. All right. The other one I did was actually, was actually installed at the very top of a wall in mom's living room. And you can't reach it. There's no way you can get a ladder there. You can't do anything. And so I ended up on the phone having a conversation with them about what to do. And it turns out that one of the things you can do is that you can print out or have the code for those cameras. And to reset it, you can show it a QR code, and the QR code will reset the camera.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: No way. That's cool.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: Yes, way. So I thought, oh, okay. So, so what he actually, the tech was actually telling me is if you have those preset, then you can show the camera to Kuko and it'll reset on its own and you're fine. Of course, I didn't have that, so I had to call in somebody to come actually, to get on there and actually hit the reset button to do it. And, you know, if you had a ladder, I guess you could figure that out if you wanted to. So just keep in mind, one of the prep things you can do now, if you have one of these camera setups is to go ahead and have these QR codes ready for options. So cool. I'm going to, when I go back, make sure. That I talk to the technician about getting that QR code set up and printing out and then having it available so that we can reset that item without having to go, someone to go up the ladder. And, you know, they're coming in to do it now and they're charging me a fee for it. And so I'm in the future, I'll be. I'll be saving that fee. And I thought that's a cool idea of the things we need to do for that. And I'm sure other camera sets have now thought of this problem and have features like that, too, that you need to keep in mind that not, in addition to having anything set up, you need the cue cards printed on a sheet of paper. I'll get mom to hold it up to the camera and it'll reset. So that was kind of cool. I wanted to make sure we concluded that on this.
[00:13:31] Speaker A: Yeah, that's extremely slick. I love that idea. That's awesome.
Tell you those kinds of things. You know, being able to have a cue card available or be able to have like a manual available for the tech in the house or, you know, some diagrams about where things are and how it's put together, I think all that stuff is key and put it in something that you can get to, you can have with you all the time. Personally, I'm a fan of Apple notes. You know, I'm a fan of Apple notes.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: And you have a really cool setup that you told me about that I want you to make sure you share because it's really.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: Yeah, there's. There's a couple of cool things I ran into this week. One is I found an. I'm going to go for a couple things here. I found this nice fellow over on YouTube. His, um, his channel, I believe, is called Apple everyday carry. And this guy is. Is a Apple iPhone and Apple iOS shortcut wizard. This dude has done a lot of stuff with his iPhone to kind of help him organize this kind of, this kind of thing. Like manuals or even, you know, QR codes or, I don't know, let's see here. Like receipts, for that matter. Oh, gosh. All kinds of things, you know, signs and things like this. But anyway, what this guy has done is he's. He's created himself what he calls his outboard brain. And I watched him a little bit and actually got inspired by watching his channel to build some of my own stuff. But I'm gonna talk about one of his things first that I really like. He wrote an iOS shortcut that when you run it. All it does is it pop. Pops up a, pops up a little menu that asks you if you want to choose a photo that you've already taken or do you want to take a photo yourself. And in the demo he did, he did this. He had just gotten, I don't know, I think he just gotten a coupon or something like that. I think it was a matter of fact, I know what it was. It was great clips. He had gone to great clips. He got his hair cut and they gave him a dollar con, two dollar coupon for the next time. He said, man, I need to remember this coupon because, you know, a month from now, I'm going to use it. So he took a picture of the thing and it, you know, that's, you know, everybody takes pictures of all kinds of things. You know, a lot of people take pick pictures of documents and that kind of stuff. But this takes a little bit further. So this guy would take a picture of the coupon and what it would do after that, instead of just putting it in photos, it would put it in a folder in apple notes and it drops the photo in there into a new note. And then it did the slick thing. It looked at the picture and any text in the picture, it extracted it and then pasted it below the photo in the apple note. And what that did for you is that made that instantly searchable. So he's got this, he's got this folder. He calls it clippings. And anything he puts in there, he's got a new note. It's in the clippings of folder. And after that, all he has to do is just search for any word that might have showed up in that photo anywhere.
[00:16:33] Speaker B: Oh, wow. That's neat. That's very neat.
[00:16:35] Speaker A: Super slick. Super slick. But he's done a ton of stuff along those lines and I think that's applicable here. It's an easy way to keep up with all those pieces of info, documents or whatever you happen to have that, you know, you're going to want to get back to later on at time, at some point in time. But what he inspired me to do was to think about, so I'm going to give you a little, little story here. So my dad has a generator, and I have talked with my dad several times and showed him how to crank this generator up. It's a fairly simple process. Once you've done it a few times and you're used to it. So what it comes down to is you, there's a little, little vent cap on the where you put the gas in, you have to turn the vent cap on, then you have to go and you have this little knob. You turn it over to where it says choke. And then you pull the cord on the side of it, it'll start to crank up. And when it'll run a little rough wise on choke, then you turn it up to run and then you're good to go. It's just running, it's doing its thing. So a few steps in there, but you have to remember them all. And to turn it off, there's another sequence too, where you like, put it down to a place where you cut the gas off and then let it run out because you want to. If you're going to store it for a long time, you don't want gas sitting in the carburetor. So that's the thing too. So I've explained this to him several times, but it's been a while and he hasn't practiced it in a while. So when the, when the hurricane came and power was out for a day or two, he, he said, well, I'm gonna crank this generator up. So he got up there, he cranked the generator up, he did his thing and it was cutting off on him. Meanwhile, I mean, I'm a thousand miles away and he's calling me and say, I don't, what's up with this generator? This thing won't work. And, and that's what I don't get. This. This thing had plenty of power to do his coffee. That was his biggest concern at the time, that was. Hooked his coffee maker up. You gotta have his caffeine fix. So we talked and talked. I don't understand what is going on. And we went through several things, but the short end of the story here is that what it was, is he'd forgotten one step in that whole sequence. And it was the very first one about turning the vent cap on, on the, on the gas cap. So it was running for a little while till it couldn't get any more gas because it couldn't breathe. Then it would turn off.
Okay, I figured this out. I knew what it was. Actually felt amazing that I could figure out what it was from a thousand miles away too. That was pretty cool. But anyway, so what it, what inspired me to do was to think about these little checklist items to help out in an emergency, things that you. A sequence you might need to go through. And the guy on everyday carry inspired me to write a shortcut that will look into a folder on your, on your iPhone. And that folder can contain little videos of how to do things like crank the generator. And where I was going with this was I was thinking that it would be a whole lot better to help my dad to have a video that, of me doing it for him and explaining how I did it when I was working through it as opposed to somebody else on YouTube. He doesn't know. He may not trust what they're. What they're doing. So. And I could show him with his exact equipment. So the idea is, is you drop a whole bunch of videos in this folder, and in our case, I'm going to put it in an iCloud folder and share it with him. And then I'm going to install this little shortcut on his phone. And then whenever he's in a situation like that where he needs to know one of these how to's or one of these sequences, he hits one button on his phone, it pops up a menu, and he's got things like how to crank the generator, how to take a photo on my phone, how to reset the Roku, you know, little things like that. And hits it. It brings it up in quick. Look, you play the video, it's all good, and it goes away. Now, a lot of you out there, I know if you're tech savvy, you're thinking, why don't I just put that in Apple photos or whatever, you know, your phone's made for that. Well, a lot of these folks, you know, they don't think of this as a computing device or an information device. They think this is a phone. So you have to make access. Access to that kind of information is as easy as possible. So I'm still playing with a full on video about it when I'm done. That I'll put here on YouTube and maybe we'll put a link to it in the show notes if I get it out there. But just wanted to mention that it was kind of slick, so I'm having fun with that.
[00:20:47] Speaker B: I think it's a cool idea. And, you know, you can even set it up so that it's. It's actually local to the phone, so that way you don't have to depend on a network or anything to do it. It's just always there. So I think it's a really cool idea. A lot of nice in my head. I have a lot of things I could go way. I could do that, too. I can add this in. So now you got to be wary of the people using it because my mother won't touch my cell phone, so it's not an option for me. But. But Barry's father is a little more tech savvy and get to it and all that other things. So we just have to kind of muted where it's there.
[00:21:24] Speaker A: Yeah. So we're gonna give it a shot and see how it goes and said we'll. We'll link off to that kind of thing if we get it going.
[00:21:30] Speaker B: No problem.
[00:21:31] Speaker A: Okay, well, I'm looking up at our rundown list up here and seeing a few things that we want to talk about.
I'm gonna say one thing here. I just had a. An interesting success story this weekend, talking to, working with my aunt.
Unfortunately, her husband passed away not too long ago. And about a year ago, before he passed, they asked me if they would do some of their finance stuff around being an executor for them in their wills. And at the time, they were telling me all about their life insurance policies and that kind of stuff. And they showed me this one life insurance policy that was. It looked like typed text on a piece of paper. It didn't look like this was written on a computer. This looked like type text, and it was from a company, was issued in 1995. And the gist of it was, is there's this life insurance policy that's a paid up policy. They didn't. They haven't paid any kind of premiums on this thing since 1995, and it's worth x thousands of dollars. I'm not gonna say how much is worth, but I got lick. When they first showed it to me, I thought, this doesn't look good. What is up with this? This company is not in existence anymore. So I started digging, and I found out that somebody at some other company had bought that company, and then another company had bought the company that bought the company, and he ended up going through about four different companies over the years. And I trolled through websites and talked to different people I could find, and eventually, I found the company that was.
That held it at that point and verified it was a good policy. And she got a check from them this past week.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: Oh, that's cool.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: I was. I felt amazing that I was able to help her get the money out of that policy that. From a company that had been gone for a long, long time. So, yeah, if you. If you. If you have loved ones that you're helping do planning for that kind of stuff, and you see something about a paid up policy or you see something about companies that you haven't heard of, do some digging on the web, do some googling you can find out where, where those policies live now and who owns them and how to, how to get money out of them. So it actually does work. I'm surprised.
[00:23:52] Speaker B: Cool. Can I talk about something that's on my mind, too? Absolutely. Yeah. We're in that season that you have to figure out how to handle voting for your loved ones.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: And I wanted to say, you know, we're in South Carolina, so we have rules in South Carolina that may not apply everybody else, but one, there's two kind of things I want to mention. First of all, that because we had storms in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia, South Carolina has actually extended its deadlines for voter in person and voter registration. And it's actually given a couple of days leeway. I don't know. We're recording this at a different time. You may see it. So I'm not going to concentrate on the dates, but check to make sure that you don't still have some days if you haven't registered in person that because of the storm you still can do voting for the national election.
That's one thing. And then the place you can do that in South Carolina is really easy. It's called South Carolinavotes dot Gov and it has lots of different action applications on it, including things like telling you where your fluid sink is, telling you if you're registered to vote, showing you a sample ballot, you can check on other people to see if they're voting. So if you're doing this for your loved ones, you can put their address in and make sure that they're set up. You can actually register online up until a certain day and a member of the deadline might be extended. But I think we're pretty close to it. And in South Carolina we have early voting, which is different than absentee voting. Early voting means you can go into any one of the South Carolina voting offices and you can actually vote. Then you can do that up to November 2. I think it starts on October 21 first and that's early voting. And so as long as you do that in those time periods, you can vote on a day different than November 5, which is national voting day for all of us. And then you still can do absentee voting if you get do at lunch. But you have to request an absentee ballot to come to you first and then fill out. So all that information is on scvotes dot Gov for South Carolina. And I think there's similar things like that, Georgia and North Carolina, too. So have a plan for making sure you can take your loved one to wherever they need to do to vote, even as if that's absentee voting. If they're over 85, they can get an absentee ballot automatically. In South Carolina, if you're.
Anyone can vote early on the 21 October by going into an office and just sitting and presenting your card and an id, and you can vote then. So that's a civic duty. You need your voice heard. So if you're in South Carolina, make sure you do that.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: That's great advice. That is great advice. And, you know, I like the making the plan, and that's something we've noticed here in the last couple of weeks, that that's something you need to have on your list, too, for disasters, because there are a lot of folks in western North Carolina who are going to have a hard time getting their vote in, honestly.
[00:26:51] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:26:52] Speaker A: Um, and you know, what would be the. How would you do that if you're in that kind of situation? It's something to think about to put on your list, for sure.
All right, let's see here. So I sent you something. This is. I'll cut this out, but I saw, I sent you something earlier about a device.
That is an AI pin. Did you see that thing?
[00:27:15] Speaker B: Oh, so I didn't, I didn't actually see that, the, the, um, the item, but I saw what it was because I was driving when it came by. But it looks kind of cool.
[00:27:24] Speaker A: The gist of is, the way they're selling it is it takes meeting notes for you. It just, you know, clips on your shirt or you wear it on a chain or you have it on a wristband, and it. It takes notes all day for you. And then you can, it feeds it to an AI, which will summarize it over the day. All the stuff that you've done, it keeps transcripts of the day, lets you go back and summarize it. It'll come out with tasks and to dos and things that you've agreed to and all of that. And it's $169.
[00:27:59] Speaker B: That's pretty cool.
I've been really amazed at how AI can summarize and do those kind of summaries very quickly.
So I had another option where, you know, I was sending in this letter I was telling you about, and I had to read a document and go over it. And there are ways for you to summarize that document in ways that you can get the gist of a document quite very quickly.
There is even a product called notebook LM on Google. Have you heard of this before?
[00:28:34] Speaker A: I've heard of it, but I hadn't dove into it. Tell me about it.
[00:28:37] Speaker B: We always been talking about sticking data in our own little container and having an AIH use only that data to answer questions on it. So guess what it can do, Barry. So it can give you notes, it can give you flashcards, so you can learn from it. But it has a podcast feature.
[00:28:56] Speaker A: No way.
[00:28:57] Speaker B: Yes way. So stick in a bunch of information. You can say, create a podcast from that, and two AI robots will talk to each other about that data and what it summarizes from it. It's, like, conversational.
And I found out the other day, Barry, you can interrupt it and say, I want to ask a question, and it'll respond to the question with both bots.
[00:29:24] Speaker A: Wow, that is kind of crazy.
[00:29:28] Speaker B: That in that crate. That's. That's silly. Crazy.
[00:29:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: So, you know, I'm listening it to on one of. One of our favorite podcasts. You probably know the one I'm talking about. It's MBA.
And they're going like, it can't be that good. It's not that good. And so they played a little bit of it on the podcast, and you went and went, oh, my God, that sounds like them, because it's really, like, conversational. And another point you need to know from this data is this. And I'm like, who's the podcast? And who's the AI on this one? And then he said, well, and you can interrupt it and ask a question, and it'll say, oh, yeah, okay, well, we got a question from a user.
It's like, wow.
[00:30:13] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:30:14] Speaker B: I don't know if you want to use this in the podcast or not, because maybe it'll put us out of business one day. I don't know. But, you know, it's. It was like, what do you mean? It makes a podcast. It actually has two people, a man and a woman, talking about the data you put in.
[00:30:29] Speaker A: That could.
[00:30:29] Speaker B: That's.
[00:30:30] Speaker A: That can be used for a lot of good. That can be used for a lot of.
[00:30:33] Speaker B: That could use. That's evil incarnate. Is it nothing? Could not be.
Can you imagine the features with riverside, with the voice analysts that we have? And you couple that with this, they could make us talk about stuff, about anything. I know.
[00:30:52] Speaker A: For real. And one of the things I was actually kind of impressed with Riverside on was, is that I. I can have it produce things in my voice right now, but I can't do it for you, which is great.
I like that you can't do it for you. So, you know, I guess it's the responsible product party who's paying the bills that they'll, they'll, they'll, uh, further your account. That's the ones that it'll let you do, because it's just you, but you can't impersonate anybody else. I'm glad of that. So what you gonna do?
[00:31:23] Speaker B: Headed towards strap to Star Trek at warp speed. I'm just telling you.
[00:31:27] Speaker A: I tell you, we were on biggest when we were on vacation. I'm standing in Acadia National park, and I'm looking out over this, this ocean cove on these massive rocks and trees everywhere. And my wife is next to me, and she gets a FaceTime call from my daughter, who's at our house to let us know that our powers come back on. And they're having a conversation on the side of this cliff with my daughter. And I thought, we live in Star Trek. We live, literally live in Star Trek.
[00:31:57] Speaker B: We live in Star Trek.
We live in 1965 Star Trek for sure.
[00:32:02] Speaker A: At least. At least that.
[00:32:04] Speaker B: Well, 65%, you know, the warp stuff ain't happening.
[00:32:08] Speaker A: Well, they're getting there. You know.
[00:32:12] Speaker B: That'S. That's a breakfast conversation that you and I can have. But, you know, I've learned some things about the universe that made that a little bit harder to deal with, so. But, yeah, it's kind of cool.
[00:32:24] Speaker A: Could you back to tech here this week? I saw device that I think is very intriguing, and I think it could be really useful for a lot of things, but especially for the field of caregiving and helping your loved ones record data and get that data and get that data summarized in a way. And it's basically, what it is, is an AI pin. Looks like a. I don't know, it looks like a little medical guardian or a first alert device that folks wear sometimes can be a watch, it can be a pin, whatever. But what it does is it follows you around during the day, and as you're having conversations, as you're in meetings, as you're talking to your doctor, as you're talking to your insurance professionals, it's recording all this stuff. And then it feeds that to a nice little AI that will transcribe it all. It'll attribute the sections of text to different, to different voices or different people, and it'll come up, and it'll come up and it will summarize that data for you so that you can go back and refer to it or you can share it. So I think this thing is going to be huge for this field. We're not mentioning it yet because we hadn't tested it, but I think it's something worth using. What do you think, Bob?
[00:33:41] Speaker B: I think it'd be cool. Now there's some privacy. Things you always want to check in on this, like where's the state of go and what happens when it breaches. But can you imagine if you had, say, a loved one who went to a doctor and you couldn't be there, and the doctor's giving them details and information about their condition or their prognosis or something about that's going on with their bodies, and now you get a summary of that information in a way that you can look at it and go, oh, so they did get cleared. Oh, so they do need to reduce their cholesterol. Something like that will be really invaluable, especially when you're dealing with parents who may have things like memory loss or fog or just flame overwhelmed by the technology and the conversation that they're having. Can you really be helpful to them? So this has a lot of problems. And I know Barry and I are going to probably do some testing to see whether or not this really works, but then we'll bring it back up and if it does and talk about it, give you more, giving all information on it. But, you know, this has game changing kind of appeal to it that I think we are really investigating.
[00:34:43] Speaker A: It really does. And if we get it in and we, and it works good, we will do a full review and whole episode on it, I'm sure.
Let's see. One thing that you told me earlier that I threw on the list from last time is there was a line in here about letting people take photos of you even if you don't like how you look, because they aren't for you.
[00:35:05] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Because, you know, we all have phones now that generate memories of things. And if you have the stream of data that comes through when you take pictures is being looked at by some machine language learning AI and coming up with snippets of, hey, you're on vacation in certain place, or, hey, remember this picture way back when? So those kinds of things are happening. And what I've learned is if you don't provide it that good information about what your life is going on, and I don't mean putting it on Facebook or Instagram, that's another kind of conversation that if you're doing that, God bless you, I understand. But you want to do it for yourself. And that means that you need to talk to your family about the fact that when you take those pictures, you know, the normal. I have a family member, some family members who say, yeah, get away from me. They put their hands up like this, and I'm like, nobody wants a picture like that.
What we want is you in a moment. So you make a contract with them to say, look, I'm not putting it on Facebook. I'm not doing this to some privacy, but I want to be able to have a moment where I can remember what happened three or four years ago and see a picture that's like that of a loved one who may not be here anymore or a moment which we may never do again. And so you need to be aware of that and realize you're actually documenting your life and your loved one's life in a way that might be really useful later down the road. So you can't undo that two, three years later. So I think it's really cool to make that kind of dialogue. And I do it for my friends and they do it for me, my family does it for each other. And you end up with these great moments that you can share with each other. And there's even some features, I think, in some of the new phones, Apple has one. I know Google has one too, where you can share as a family those photos together and they get grouped together. So, you know, you gotta. You gotta create that. That ammunition to put in that gun to shoot off. If you don't do that, then you'll have nothing. So you don't have nothing. So, yeah, I think it's a cool idea. And you have to get past some people who rightfully have some issues about you taking pictures all the time. You know, never put pictures of people on Facebook and stay. They know you're doing it. But the personal track. The personal tracks different.
[00:37:18] Speaker A: Yep. And how do you, did you have to have that conversation with the, with the person who puts the hand up in front of the.
[00:37:24] Speaker B: I did, and she was receptive to it. So, you know, it's, I think over time, you get people realizing what you're doing and you gotta build trust, obviously. Again, you know, I think about some commercials where the kid was walking around taking pictures and being annoyed, but then he put together this nice little reel and everybody went, oh, he was really in the moment. He was actually talking to people. That's a real life thing that can actually happen. So I've got pictures of my sister who I lost three years ago, who now pop up when occasionally it's because I kept taking pictures throughout the whole time. So consider that. Realize that that life reel is worth having with influence, you know, obviously there's some things you don't want to do.
Make sure people are fully clothed and make sure you don't take pictures of people with the food in mouth and stuff like that. But, you know, other than that, taking a couple of moment pictures really helps.
[00:38:23] Speaker A: I agree. And my dad has this thing where he. He won't smile in a photo. And I'm like, what is up with that?
[00:38:31] Speaker B: He's.
[00:38:31] Speaker A: Why? I just don't like the way my smile. My smile looks. I think I look fake. Well, you know, these. These photos aren't for you, man. We're doing this because we can remember you. And I'd rather you just be you. As opposed to you. Yeah, just be you. And you don't have. You don't have to look all stern and stuff. I mean, well, sometimes he is, but, you know, hey, what are you gonna do?
[00:38:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I actually think about smiling more.
I wanna look that serious.
[00:39:00] Speaker A: So do you wanna be remember or smiling? Think about it that way. Yeah.
Smiling or scowling.
Anything of anything else for today?
[00:39:13] Speaker B: There was a couple of things, like when I charge things for my use, remembering things like your iPad, your computers can charge your phone, that your car is a generator. You can get in the car and put gas in it and making sure you have the cables to go ahead and connect all your devices to your car setup if you had to. There were times I actually drove around or tried to by getting in the car and turning on the engine. So if you don't have a generator handy, guess what you do? It's call your car and it actually can charge your phone. And if you charge enough devices, you can keep yourself going for good bit.
So remember those things.
And then, you know, you know, write down the things that you missed while you have had this power outage. And then, you know, figure out a way to make them happen for the next one. So I'm actually thinking about putting in a generator for myself and what it would do and what I have to fix up. There's a whole conversation that can be had about how you do that, especially if you're using gas as your input. So talk to your gas company about it. There are lots of deals out there that can be had. Don't do it now because everybody's rushing to do it now and you'll get charged the gouge fee for it.
Wait a while and when it comes down, go back in and have that conversation and maybe get a reasonable setup on what it takes.
I think that's useful.
[00:40:44] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. And in fact, my dad, who he is, he's thinking about downsizing next year and, you know, selling some, selling his house and some property and going into a smaller house. And it's, we're lucky enough to be in a situation where he's going to have it built. My brother's a builder, so it's going to be, gonna be built. And they're already planning as they build it, to set it up where it's got a generator attached to it and ready to kick in if power goes out. And just that land straight up. And I think a lot of people are gonna start doing that. So I think that's everything I got right now. What about you?
[00:41:20] Speaker B: I think that's good.
If you really like what you're hearing and you really like we're talking, you should choose our podcast, write a review for it, subscribe, because that'll help us. We should be doing that kind of thing.
[00:41:33] Speaker A: Yes, please do that. Please do that and know that you, so we have YouTube channel. If you're listening to us, you can go and see our lovely faces if you'd like to, while we're talking about this.
[00:41:43] Speaker B: And we have a beautiful email address you can send things to if you like to as well.
[00:41:47] Speaker A: So what's that email, Mister Clark.
[00:41:49] Speaker B: Caretechandtipsmail.com. so you can certainly do that spelled out of the and so, yeah, absolutely.
[00:41:58] Speaker A: Good deal. All right, well, that sounds good. Well, I think we'll button it up for today and we'll see you next time on care tech and tips.
[00:42:07] Speaker B: All right, I'm Bob.
[00:42:09] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:42:21] Speaker B: Sadeena Wadde.
