[00:00:19] Happy to have you along, my fellow tech enthusiasts, Jay Hill, Sam Bushman, talking tech. We keep an eye on tech so you don't have to. Welcome to the show. The broadcast is brought to you by NetworkProvidersInc.com. We are your AI partners, ladies and gentlemen. Don't just use AI because it's the in-hype thing. Find out where you can make a business proposition that makes sense based on return of investment,
[00:00:44] based on how to make your company smarter, faster, easier to make decisions, focus on things that matter most. We're going to be having an incredible event coming up on August 5th in American Fork, Utah. That'll be highlighting a lot of this, and we'll get the details out to everybody. But anyway, it'll be in the Utah County area, and it'll be lunch, and we'll be training on AI. I've got a presentation I'm going to deliver.
[00:01:12] And so hopefully, you know, we can make that available to people on a download after the event as well. So that's kind of coming up. NPITechGuys.com is the website for the show. You've got audio, video, and a whole lot more there. So check that out, too. Hi, Jay. How's it going, sir? Good. My voice is a little bit shot today, so I apologize for that ahead of time. All right. No worries for that. All you've got to do is get some lemon and honey, and you'll be good to go, my friend. Well, I'm not even sick.
[00:01:40] I just lost my voice Wednesday morning for some reason. I don't know. All right. Well, there you have it. Maybe we need the AI bot to speak on your behalf, sir. That's what we need. I should have trained one ahead of time. I should have been thinking ahead. It's called the J-Bot, ladies and gentlemen. All right. So I don't even understand this headline that you just gave me, Jay. The compact disc is staging a surprise comeback, right? Yes, it is. Amazingly so, right? Okay. Okay.
[00:02:07] CDs are making a comeback, especially among Gen Z and the Alpha Gen after years of declining popularity. In fact, they are outpacing vinyl's growth by a wide margin. Now, vinyl has kind of come back, and people are buying records and everything else. But no, CDs are making a big comeback. Record stores are seeing young customers buying CDs instead of vinyl, a shift that surprised retailers. And this is all happening in 2026. Is it happening because CDs are cheaper?
[00:02:35] Is it happening because they're smaller and sound better? Is it happening because there's easier equipment? What do you think drives this? Well, I think there's a lot to it. I think one of the big things that recently is Sony announcing, and you've probably seen this all over, where people had libraries in their PS4 or whatever it was, and they had bought movies as well. And Sony lost some licensing deal or whatever. I don't know what the deal was, but they said there was like 550 movies that if you had bought any of these movies, they were just removing them from your device.
[00:03:05] It doesn't matter that you bought them. You didn't rent them. Yeah. You had them. And there could be a big lawsuit about that because if I bought them and I own them, you can't just delete my private property. Well, no, there won't be a lawsuit over that because if you really read down in the terms and conditions, you don't own anything. Yeah, you don't really own anything. Oh, shoot. Okay, there you go. Yeah. Sorry, people. They might get a class action or something that people thought they were, but as far as they've got it covered under their terms and conditions.
[00:03:32] But there's better audio quality than streaming on CDs. The physical ownership, the album art, the liner notes, young drivers are inheriting cars that have CD players in them, older cars. Now, that's interesting because any car I have that has a CD player in it, the CD player's broke. I have a driver car that has a CD player in it, and as far as I know it works, I barely ever use it, but I'm sure it does. Come on, Jay. Get on it, buddy. You got to throw back. What I actually want to test, and I haven't done this on this vehicle,
[00:04:02] is it does an MP3 CD work in there because that actually is a killer app. It was a format that was never actually officially supported anywhere, but a lot of people in the 2000s, a lot of manufacturers started making not just vehicles, but DVD players and all kinds of CD players. And they would play MP3s. You could literally have a massive owned library of MP3s that way, too. Yeah. That was pretty cool, and they played great. Now, they say CDs are much cheaper and smaller than vinyl. That's part of the reason, too.
[00:04:31] It's also true, yeah. And, you know, they never really experienced CDs, so it makes the format feel new but also vintage and cool. You know, according to Illuminate, CD sales increased 16% in 2026 compared to 2.4% growth for vinyl. It's interesting, the CDs that are being focused on, right? Yeah. Even used CDs are also booming. The popularity for 1990s rock is crazy. You've got Jeff Buckley, Alice in Chains.
[00:05:01] There's tons of CDs. Thrift store CDs are going crazy, and DVDs because people are buying their libraries. They want physical media. Increase even for players has increased, so retailers and thrift stores are seeing supplies harder to find. Major artists are embracing the new trend. Taylor Swift. Even the Swifties are all over this, Jay. Yes, sir. Taylor Swift released a new limited edition CDs, and BTS has significantly boosted CD sales this year. Yeah, what I've started to see, too, and this is interesting,
[00:05:32] I would go to different plays and different events, like in Branson, Missouri, and different things, and they started to sell little thumb drives with a ton of MP3 and MP4, so audio and video. You can get all their albums or all their concerts or all their whatever on thumb drives. Thumb drives are a lot more expensive in a way, but yet now fans are wanting a collectible when they go to a concert, so they'll buy a CD or they'll buy one of these thumb drives, and they're inexpensive to manufacture, to sell. Guys like you and I can even duplicate them or create them.
[00:06:00] We work with a CD and DVD company that dupes things for us a lot. Fans appreciate the deluxe packaging and artwork on these things. Some fans even share a single CD between friends echoing. This is interesting. How music was shared before streaming? I think that's really cool. Right. The Resurgence mirrors the vinyl revival. Are they going to start doing 8-tracks, Jay? I don't think so.
[00:06:26] I think CDs have a very sweet spot where they're very cheap to make. I mean, just the plastic, you can burn them yourself, so it puts control back into people if they want to. But it's also something tangible. Like you go to an event, and it's like a photograph, like a Polaroid or something, in your hand. It's not just a digital thing that you put away, and you don't think about it again, and it's somewhere on your phone maybe. You have a physical piece. It also is kind of a receipt of ownership. I've heard of these guys that, you know, they do gaming or whatever,
[00:06:55] and they will download ROMs and emulators, but they'll go buy a physical copy of it either at a thrift store or wherever because it gives them a receipt that says, I actually own this game so I can back it up or have an emulator anywhere I want legally, 100% legally. So there's a lot of reasons why people like this physical media comeback. I personally support it and think it's great. I understand the digital world's here, and I understand it should live alongside, but I really do like the fact that you have, you know, DVDs. I really think the MD market, speaking of that,
[00:07:25] the MD market should have taken off, Jay. MDs are great. Oh, yeah. They're actually better. Just nobody ever even knows of them. You know, MDs are, they look like the old floppy sort of the small. They're in a hard case, but they're even smaller. They're, I don't know, two, two and a half inches or something square. Yeah, they're like a camera cassette in a lot of ways. Yeah, and they're a CD that's encased in this cassette, but they're owned by Sony. And just like Betamax and everything else before it, they had a hard licensing on it. It was never an open standard, and so it just kind of died.
[00:07:55] When are they going to learn? They always come out with this incredible technology, but they lock it so hard down that nobody wants it, nobody likes it, and something else comes out cheaper and faster, and they lose the game. They've done it so many times. When are they going to get a clue, Jay? Well, even in the gaming industry, you have people that are releasing software and stuff to the open source. You know, Red Alert did that recently. You saw Will Wright, the guy that made SimCity. He released one of his original versions to just open source GitHub.
[00:08:22] If you've got a format that you know is dead like that with Sony, why not just release it because it is kind of a superior format. Just release it and say, hey, anybody can use this now. You don't need licensing. But I'm saying at the gate-go, though, when you come up with this new tech, though, don't lock it down so hard that people can't choose it or won't choose it. I mean, I'm just saying this. The beta could have went forward. These MDs could have went forward. The OS2 operating system could have went forward. But, again, it's all these kind of same things, right? That's exactly right. I think there's a good balance. I look at, like, for example, the USB standard.
[00:08:52] It's a standard. You do have to pay for the logos and stuff, so there is kind of a consortium that's there. But also, if you just want to build USB cables, you can't put their logo on it, but you can make USB cables if you want. I think that's kind of a healthy balance. All I know is USB-C is taking the world by storm, and Apple got spanked on their format, and all it did was cost me a cord crisis. A cord crisis. I like that. I'm just saying, dude, I have cords everywhere that I can't use. And everywhere I go, I pull it up and I'm like, nope, can't use that.
[00:09:22] Well, you know, I like these. That's just a disaster. I like these new multi-tap cords. I've been buying these where you've got a USB-A on one end, and then you've got a C, a micro, a lightning cable, and even a watch charger all on the other end. Yeah, it's incredible. In fact, Jay got me a couple of these for my birthday. They're phenomenal. Yeah. Believe it or not, I'll tell you a little interesting story. Jay got me one of these for my birthday. And I opened the package, and it didn't say who it was from at first, so I didn't know who it was from, but I thought, man, this is cool. I thought it might be Jay, because he always sends cool tech gadgets.
[00:09:51] Trying to send tech gifts, yeah. Kind of thing, yeah. And so I thought it was Jay, but I needed to check with him or whatever. But literally, I looked at that watch thing, and I'm like, man, what is this supposed to charge? And, you know, I kind of understood it's a watch, but I'm just kind of how universal is it or whatever. Anyway, long story short, it turns out that a buddy of mine, actually our producer, Zach, said, you know what? I need to charge this. Do you have the right cord for it? And it turns out that he forgot one of his charges, and we were going on a trip. On a business kind of event.
[00:10:21] We went to the... Oh, they're great for trips. Anyway, so long story short, I said, I don't know, but I bet I got a connector to fit it, and it turns out that the thing I just got in the mail literally five minutes before was the key to him being able to charge this thing. That's awesome. It was awesome. I'm just saying it's a lot of fun. GM's coming up, man. What on earth is happening with GM, Jay? Oh, man. Give me a teaser, then we'll come back and talk about it. Well, the teaser is, they are making more money on subscriptions than cars maybe, you know?
[00:10:51] Oh, for heaven's sakes. Ladies and gentlemen, what is this world coming to? Everything's a subscription. Subscription, a prescription, for everything, right? Hold on. This is TechWatch. We keep an eye on tech so you don't have to. Brought to you by Network Provider. Cybercrime is exploding. Take Sarah from Sweet Delights, whose world crumbled after having to close with not being able to bounce back. Small businesses are prime targets, but the right strategies can keep yours safe.
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[00:12:45] So General Motors, I guess. Government Motors is what they used to call it because they got a big old bailout. But anyway, now they're making more money on what? Subscriptions than cars, Jay? I don't know. They're not necessarily making more money on subscriptions than cars, but they are definitely beefing it up. Yeah. Reporting that their software subscriptions, including OnStar and Super Cruise, are now keep roughly 70 cents of every dollar, with OnStar pulling in about $800 million last quarter alone. It's amazing that these companies
[00:13:13] want to sell you a car, but it has strings attached and subscriptions. I don't know. I don't like that plan. I don't feel right about it. Well, I'm just telling you right now, I'm not buying a car with subscriptions. I understand that there's some value added. It's for OnStar, for example, or things like that, or over-the-air updates. I can kind of get that. But when you have things like... But I'm okay if you can choose to have them or not. I'm not okay if you're forced to have them. Right. The other problem that I have is
[00:13:42] if they include the hardware for them, even if you choose not to do the subscription, you're still paying a bunch of money just for the hardware, for the, quote, infrastructure, the plumbing, if you will, for that to happen. What's the problem is the BMW with the heated seats. They just put heated seats in every car, but you had to pay a subscription if you wanted to use them. That's ridiculous. There's no value added. They're not doing anything there. They're just nerfing the product. I don't even know what to say about it except for shame on them. And, you know,
[00:14:11] I get that they're... How much are they making besides OnStar? 800 million for OnStar? What's that other one? Something Cruise? Super Cruise. Super Cruise. It's like the full self-driving that Tesla has, but it's not... I don't think it's as adept, but, again, you pay a monthly fee for it. You know, you can kind of understand that. There's a lot of AI. There's a lot of processing going back and forth. Yeah. You know. And then you start singing the Beatles song and you got to pay for the Beatles song, Baby, You Can Drive My Car, and all kinds of stuff, right? But there's a lot of stuff that doesn't have that. I mean,
[00:14:40] my wife has a Kia Soul. I mean, it's a very lower-end kind of car, but it has lane keeping and all this kind of stuff in it. There's no subscription for that. It just works. There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Well, we the people need to vote with our dollars. Agree. That's all I can say on that point. We need to vote with our dollars. All right. What is this now? Residential proxies from smart TV apps? What are you talking about? This is kind of... This is interesting. Yeah. So,
[00:15:09] LG to ban residential proxies from smart TVs because apparently a lot of these apps are putting in proxies so that they can route traffic through your TV, basically using your TV as a VPN to hide their traffic and hide what they're doing. The home appliance giant LG Electronics said that it plans to suspend any apps built for their smart TVs that turn a person's television into an always-on residential proxy node. This comes more than a month after researchers found... But wait a minute, Jay. Hold on.
[00:15:38] Don't I own the TV when I buy it? Yes, you do, but you're not the one using this. So this isn't like a proxy for you so you can... I'm being hacked? Yeah. By the way, your mic's going south. Oh my goodness. All right, let's try that and see if it's any better. So the problem is that you've got companies that have legitimate apps for this platform that are doing this and taking advantage of your connection, right? A legitimate is questionable though. So they found that 42% of games and other apps available for download
[00:16:07] on LG's web OS store allowed for unknown third parties to route their internet traffic through a user's TV. I don't want unknown third party routing anything through anything. No, sir. I don't either. I think this is a great move on LG. I think they should have stopped it. All right, anyway, we'll have to work on your mic and get that solved. I don't know what's going on with that, but you've just simply disappeared, Jay, sad to say. So we'll work on that. TechWatch Radio having technical issues, ladies and gentlemen. I don't know what you do about that, but I will say this. When it's live,
[00:16:37] things happen. And I think it's, you know, cable or connector or something like that. We'll get our engineers working on that ASAP though. And there's so much to cover with this, but I've got a big problem with that though. And I really commend these companies for saying, look, we're not going to allow apps to do this. And I guess, you know, you could say they shouldn't have allowed that in the first place. I don't think they did allow it in the first place. I just don't think a lot of times when you build a product or build a service or a capability, you don't realize
[00:17:07] how it can be exploited. And now you're getting people that exploit this and they're kind of discovering it and going, whoa, no, hold on. Because it really reflects negatively on the TV manufacturer or the company and on their whole software suite, so to speak. If you're not careful, people will just decide not to buy that TV at all. They'll be like, nope, I'm going to the Roku platform where this doesn't happen or whatever. And so this is a broader discussion and this is a discussion where companies could get sued big time
[00:17:35] for allowing this to happen because it's basically in a sense, someone's kind of hacking into your network and creating this, I'm going to call it malware, might be the best way to describe it, where it's doing something that no one ever intended, no one wanted it to do. How sinister it might be at first, it might not be too sinister. It might just be, hey, we want to use your connection because then we got a lot of bandwidth to do a lot of things and it's for legitimate purposes. But the problem is that eventually will be exploited and go south
[00:18:03] and be used for all kinds of eventual bots and agents that could create all kinds of DOS attacks or whatever, denial of service attacks and everything else. I mean, who knows where this thing can lead? And so they got to shut that door quick. I wonder if AI found it, Jay. I don't know. I think that... Yeah, okay. Anyway, we'll have to get back with Jay here on this. But that's a very serious, serious issue in my mind. I mean, it's like, wow. I don't see how that's even really happening.
[00:18:33] It's crazy. All right. AI is in the news, folks. I find this story quite interesting. AI is in the news and they're now having AI design radio chips. I don't know if anybody's seen this story, but it's just fascinating. AI is designing radio chips that look wrong and work better. This is interesting. Princeton researchers are now using machine learning reinforcement. They call it
[00:19:03] learning and inverse design systems to create what they call radio frequency circuits without forcing the computer to follow traditional human layouts. And so, you know, we usually lay them out because we say, hey, we can connect this to this and we lay them out kind of flat on a board. Well, a lot of these AI systems now are stacking them and mounting them in weird positions and doing things.
[00:19:31] The resulting structures, they say, can resemble random metallic patterns. And then they say, um, abstract artwork or QR codes rather than recognizable coils and transmission lines. And people are kind of going, what? How's that going to work? Believe it or not, though, some of them deliver wider bandwidth, improved efficiencies,
[00:19:59] and or other record level performance by doing this. Designs that once required highly specialized engineers to adjust the details manually, it would take them weeks to do that, right? Now it's being done, they say, in hours. The technology could accelerate chips for 5G and future wireless networks and it could be worked on for radar
[00:20:30] autonomous vehicles, satellite communications. They say, although the unusual designs must still be fabricated, tested, and proven reliable at commercial scale, the idea is intriguing and working quite well. And my response is this, you know, even if it takes them a while, and even if they don't have them, you know, scale now, how long will it be until some of these do make enough sense to scale broadly and say, hey, this is a new faster,
[00:21:00] better, cheaper, more reliable, better bandwidth, better connectivity, whatever we want to say, way to do this. It's only a matter of time, people, to where this AI self-learning machine stuff will reduce weeks to hours, and then hours to productive, scalable deliverables, and then once that happens, then once you've got that as a baseline, then you can parlay on top of that, and you can have the next one. What I mean is it's going to
[00:21:30] continually expand itself is what I guess what I'm trying to think of the term to use for this, because it's AI machine learning, but once you get the prototype, and once you then put it to scale and distribute it, then you've got a platform now to build more and do more. And so they're starting to put chips on top of each other at weird angles. They're just doing all kinds of cool stuff, and we'll see where that leads, but that's a very interesting twist in AI that you haven't heard of. Now, why do I bring this up? Because Jeff
[00:21:59] Bezos said, hey, there's going to be a ton more jobs because of AI, and right now all we see is a dearth in jobs because of AI. We're thinking everybody's getting laid off, and yeah, those people caught in the middle and who aren't trained for the new jobs are going to be the ones that suffer the most, but if you prepare and you don't turn your back on AI, but you embrace AI, there will be jobs for you in the AI world. I'm telling you right now, there's a lot of jobs that are going away, but there's going to be a lot of new jobs, and just imagine if you could work in a plant where you're helping design these chips and roll out these
[00:22:29] things, and you know, the internet of everything is going to be where you're going to have more and more internet built into things, more and more connectivity, more and more chips, more and more AI, more and more processing different places. You're going to have power plants and processing plants all over the place, and you're going to have at your home eventually, I imagine people would have a big bank storage of power eventually, where it's battery driven and it's local to where you don't go offline, and then you would eventually have some kind of a big GPU bank where you can pass off from your machine
[00:22:59] to all these processing units to do all these different things, and we ain't seen nothing yet, folks. I'm telling you right now, we are on the verge of an incredible AI boom like you've never seen before, and it's going to bring up things and contradict things that we've known and change the game in so many ways, it's not even funny. I'm just telling you, it's going to be crazy in indeed. All right, do we have you back, Jay? All right, we'll keep rolling here. We'll keep rolling here and get Jay back soon.
[00:23:29] Solar power, as you know, has been cool, and you've got little teeny solar panels on different things like a flashlight or whatever else, and a calculator that can do solar things, and then you've really got kind of a gap, and that gap means we're going to go from that teeny solar something primarily to the big solar systems that go on your roof. And there's a few things in between those, but it's either a full system install or else it's this tiny something. There's nothing really in the middle until now.
[00:24:00] Headline says solar power reaches the wall outlet as America's full first, they call it 3700, microinverter arrives. So it's a new microinverter that you just plug into the wall, they say. the Hoy Miles, I think that's how you say it, Hoy Miles, iFlow Pro is what it's called. It has become the first U.S.
[00:24:30] plug-in solar inverter designed to comply with all the guidelines and rules to where you can just plug it in. And not so fast, the products here, but laws are preventing it from rolling out. We'll get into that in another show. Thanks for being alongside for the ride. I'm Sam Bushman, Jay Hill with me. We keep an eye on tech so you don't have to. NetworkProvidersInc.com