Yuck, Digital. No Thanks!

0:00This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Yuck digital. No thanks. It's one more thing. I'm strong and getty. One more thing. Before we get to Yuck digital, no thanks. I get way too many fishing texts. It drives me crazy. That's why it makes me angry when I go to a restaurant and how many, too? Insider outside doesn't matter to me. Okay, can I have your phone number? No. Why do you need my phone number for me to eat at this restaurant? Mind. Because if I give it to you, I'm gonna get all these damn texts because you're just selling it to people. I know you are. It drives me nuts. Anyway, I got one of these texts the other day. I think it's probably reached critical mass right now and there's so many freaking companies and Russian mobsters who have my phone number. I might as well just give it up to everybody. I'd have posted on my roof so airplanes going overhead can see it. I got this one yesterday though. Usually it's pretty obviously a scam with some fruit. But this one's pretty good. If I had to choose my friend all over again,

1:01I'd still choose you every single time from a random phone number. They're just hoping that I'm a lonely person that thinks, wow. Is there any link attached? One of my very, well, it's a phone number I could text back but I assume something. I do it. I assume that alerts them that this is a live number and then I just get endless. Katie, Katie, too soon. He's still bouncing back from the affair with the Ukraine. That's right. It's a scammer. I don't want it to be a relationship ending. You think I should have pursued this? Oh, yeah. Every time I get one to solve all the time, I'll get these texts that say, hey, Ashley, are we still on for lunch later? And I always go, you have the wrong number. Sorry. Oh, I do. I'm so sorry to have bothered you. And then I'm like, okay, I know what this is. You didn't bother me. It's all good. So, now that we're talking, what do you like to do for fun? And oh, I just, I wrote these people in for, if I had time for as long as I can,

2:01because that means they're not going to do it to somebody else. Well, if you ever seen Theo Vaughn's stuff on that, they podcast her comedian. He's got a whole website of it. He is so good at it. It is hilarious. Oh, yeah. I know. I'm here at the hospital. Thanks for getting a hold of me. I just had my legs removed. And I'm really needing someone to talk to. Oh, yeah. And they'll keep going until you use the word scammer. And then they stop. Yeah. Oh, it's so fun. Wow. Yeah. Okay, I'll text this person back. And then tomorrow we'll check in and see how this person who said, if I had to choose my friend all over again, I'd still choose you every single time. How should I respond to that person? I feel the same way about you. So lovely Matt. That'd be a good one. I was going to go with you. Wow. Both of the words of a truck. You betrayed me and you were now my mortal enemy. Where do you live? I like you, though. I like that even better. See, I'm probably technically digitally naive. I always, I don't want to respond in any way. So they don't know it's a live phone number.

3:02Yeah. And it landed. But they can probably tell that anyway. I know. I mean, my phone I send, I send red receipts. So if I open it, it shows both now Android and Apple. Well, I don't send red receipt to anyone. I don't, I don't, I want to be, well, I want plausible deniability to say. Yeah. It's always plausible deniability and everything you do, kids. Here's a tip from your old uncle, Joe and Jack. That's better. Don't open it. And then you don't send the red receipt. You just don't open it. But it's never, it says delivered. So the scammers would know, okay, that is a phone. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I might as well engage them and mess with them. Yeah. Because all that would delight me. Yeah. As long as you don't click any links, you're fine. I was made for that. To get it out. So, uh, so my, uh, my introduction and digital yacht, essentially, it's about this piece. We referenced very briefly during the show, uh, the radio show slash podcast, um, earlier

4:02by Ted Joy, uh, being human as cool again as AI saturates everyday life. People are seeking refuge in flesh and blood alternatives from bookstore signings to vinyl record sales. And there are a bunch of different examples about this. And I don't, examples of this. I don't care if this has reached any sort of critical mass. Uh, I have given up on quote unquote humanity. But if individuals or small groups of people or my friends or my family can do the right healthy thing, that's good enough for me. You've given up on humanity. That's an interesting place to be. Oh no, I never had any particular hope from humanity before humanity. That's one of the reasons I'm in conservative. Um, that's why you have to have incentives and diss incentives to have an orderly society because you're not going to reform humanity and all of a sudden, human nature is going to change after a million years. It'll never, ever happen. Anyway, so here's this bookstore in Alabama. It's gotten a fair amount of coverage in the national news. Um, it's a small, almost windowless business on a dead end street in Birmingham, Alabama.

5:06Um, and it doesn't look like much either, but their thing is, uh, when many indie book stores barely survive, uh, this book, the Alabama booksmith is flourishing, but it has a crazy strategy that draws customers who buy past stores in their own cities to purchase from a distant retailer. Here's the secret. Every book in the store is signed by the author. Hmm. The store owner wants the author to travel to Alabama to sign copies in the store. He likes to see the human author in the flesh. In an age of AI, sloping books on Amazon, this is the ultimate verification of authorship blah, blah, blah, blah. The Alabama bookstore can guarantee sales of several hundred copies of a new book and maybe more. And that's enough to convince authors to fit in Alabama on their book tours. And here's something for you, the Alabama booksmith. It rarely charges a premium for the signed copies. Our books don't cost more of the owner told the New Yorker, but they're worth more. Interesting. Let's repay him with their loyalty. Store does not solicit business. It now is approximately 5,000 customers on its email list.

6:10And so many people travel from out of town to visit the store that it is negotiated, discounted rate with a local hotel. Is that crazy? Uh, then Ted writes about, um, hmm. The same dynamics fueling the vinyl, revival, and music, musicians sell these gigs. Many do it themselves. They man the merch table. I've actually seen this. Oh, cool. I bought some CDs, but I liked the idea of vinyl even well. I had a lovely, lovely conversation with a songwriter. I thought it was terrific. Um, anyway, uh, you transact directly with fans here to a real human to something no AI bot can replace. Everybody enjoys it. And then Ted writes, I speak with authorities, someone who's been on both sides of the transaction. I bought directly from musicians, relishing the opportunity to chat for a few seconds with the person behind the album. And I've peddled my own works at public events, welcoming my chance to do the three essays, sell, sign, and shmuz. Let's see. You see the same thing. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. And jump in anytime. I'm sorry.

7:10There's a lot here and I tend to go kind of quickly, but, um, there's a new secret strategy in the arts and it's built on the simplest thing you can imagine, namely existing as a human being. Uh, here's ad week, which I used to read all the time. Um, you see the same thing in media right now where live streaming is taking off. For viewers, live streaming offers a refuge from the glowing, growing glut of AI-generated content on their feeds. And I would also suggest it's a contrast with like the super edited, insanely high-paced, fast-paced stuff. Uh, they write, in a social media landscape where the difference between real and artificial is grown nearly imperceptible, the unmistakable humanity of real life video, real time videos are refreshing draw. And then, then they get into the, they think Amazon shut down its fresh stores, fresh and ghost stores, whatever it's called, um, that you could buy groceries without dealing with any checkout clerks and that people didn't want this. I know there's a divide on the show over this and I fully think maybe I'm in a minority.

8:15I'd rather do the self-check out, but I know you don't like it. No. Love self-check out. I just don't like Haslan with the computer thing because I don't know how to handle up three bananas. Oh, wow. Oh, so your, your inner, uh, misanthrope is in conflict with your inner Luddite. Yes. Absolutely. That must be terrible. And they, and they enter, why am I doing your job? Yeah, but then, uh, you know, I got a thing of grapes. I don't know why. It doesn't have a barcode on it. The frig. See, I think it's fun to figure it out. That's weird. I mean, I'm weird. I know I'm weird. Uh, as AI customer service becomes more pervasive, oh my god. Judy and I were trying to rebalance what we have in our 401k. You got a little, this fund, a little, that fund, a little, that fund, and we talked to our financial guru and he said, yeah, you're super heavily weighted in this. I'd sell some of this. And we thought, all right, no problem. I think I'll do it on the website. How hard can it be harder than getting a camel through the eye of a needle to paraphrase

9:18the Bible as it turns out. And then I tried the effing chatbot that was going to help me. I might as well have asked my dog, a baxter, baxter, how do you figure I sell some of this and buy some of the other thing? Baxter, listen to me. It was complete waste of time. So we get this. Use the phone to call a human being and he helped us brilliantly in about five minutes. Well, congratulations on getting a hold of a human being. Oh my god. I was trying to do a thing with a bank yesterday and could not figure out how to get to a human. Just couldn't do it. Yeah. Okay. So I interrupted myself, but I like this a couple of sentences is AI customer service becomes more pervasive. The luxury brands will survive by offering this human touch. I'm now encountering this term, concierge service is a marketing angle in the digital age. And it's a fancy way to say, you can speak to a human. If customer service makes a comeback, I'll be so happy. Oh, yeah, it might cost you.

10:22It's like, you know, I at this point in my career own a pretty nice car and where I go for service is different than if you own a pretty cheap car. They take care of you. It's humans at every step and they want you to be happy. I'd love to see that penetrate down in the market more like it always used to be. Yes, Kate. I get it. I'd like to see it go down to the peasants. I would like that for you peasants. That's how I heard it too. I bought some jeans the other day, brand of jeans and they sent me an email saying, we want to make sure you get the right size so you don't have to return them. And so they measured them and they said they explain to me, take your favorite pair of jeans and measure them this way and see if they're the right size. And I didn't so they sent them to me and they fit perfectly as opposed to like half the time when I order stuff online, it doesn't fit. And then you're supposed to send it back, but I never get around to it. So I have stacks and stacks of clothes that don't fit.

11:22Well, your local thrift store is thriving. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is interesting. Even tech companies are figuring this out, Spotify now boasts that it has human curators, not just cold algorithms. Oh, cool. Apple music says human curation is more important than ever. Wow. I would actually think in that world that maybe the AI would be better than a human, but maybe not. Huh. I, you know, I haven't paid attention lately. I remember early on thinking they sucked the algorithms, I don't know, I don't want to get off into musical explorations, but just they were terrible. I'd like listen to something like really quirky and esoteric from a certain era, and it would give me the big smash hits from that era. And I'm like, no, I'm a hipster. How do you not get that I'm a hipster? Spotify gotten really good with that. Well, if you listen to something, it's more exploring things that are kind of in that

12:27realm rather than just throwing the, you know, the hits at you. Oh, what I want to, but what I hate about Spotify is not having to search for the hot hits. So if I type in Fleetwood Mac, and you have your albums listed, you don't have rumors. I've got to type that in by title to get that if I'm listening to Fleetwood Mac. You got all these other live albums and recent albums, nobody wants. You can't give me the biggest hit they ever had. That happens over and over and over again. Drives me nuts. I almost don't use Spotify because of that. Interesting. Yeah, I'm not familiar with it. I mostly listen to Apple music. Interestingly, band camps, band camp is organizing band camp clubs where members get special music selections, listening parties and other perks from human curators. Then they like talk to each other about whether they like to song and stuff, imagine that. Let's see. Recently, streamer Quobuzz, somebody, anybody, Q-O-B-U-Z, launched a, announced a launch of a proprietary AI detection tool, the companies published a set of principles that include

13:32this paragraph. Quobuzz, or whatever you said that, could be a nobody or could have 80 million followers on some platform. I don't know them. It's a music streaming service that's considered better than Spotify for sound quality. Okay. I like that too. I like that too. You got my attention. I can send this to my son, who, as I've said, several times would be an editor rolling stone if he had been born 30 years sooner. But there's so much content everywhere he can't make any money from it. So I thought this was interesting. Final note from this. Bob, Bob, the paradox of living in a digital age, human beings have more prestige than ever. They just, and they get it just by showing up. Just being a human is so attractive in the digital world. This won't change. In fact, the Silicon Valley elites forcing tech down our throats will only make us hate

14:32cold, sterile tech more than ever. They have me. And they won't fix that problem by training AI to pretend to be human that just adds insult to injury. Oh, so true. This might even be the hot new career path ready made for curators, concierges, caregivers, conversationalists, and other people who love being around people. As the old pop song anticipated, they might just end up being the happiest people of them all. So welcome to the lovely new economy where humans actually matter. Go ahead, try it out. Be cool. Be a human. All the bots in botan will never be able to take that away from you. Well, I don't particularly like humans, but since all the AI customer service stuff sucks, I prefer a human to that because it's just horrible. I like some humans, just a question of how many and how much there's like five on planet earth, the rest of y'all can pound sand. What if they're friendly? Do they annoy you? Or depends? It depends. Go ahead, listen, serally friendly or like clearly friendly for a purpose.

15:35I just, again, we were talking about this earlier in the show. The idea that AI is going to take all of our jobs, okay, I'll believe you're a genius. Sure ain't close yet. I mean, you would think customer service would be better than it is. You can call a multi-billion dollar bank and their AI customer service thing is shit. I mean, it's just shit. Whatever question you have, I'm sorry. Did you say accounts? No, I didn't say accounts. You piece of it. It's just, I can't believe it's not better than it is. How are you? How's it going to replace every white color job in America if they haven't gotten better than this so far? Can you speak more distinctly than the average human being, right? What about your average marble mouth taffle? Boomhauer calls in, needs to do something for checking, can't, what's he doing? I'm going to be a cop. Yeah, I know. I need to read it over a check out counter. I need to read it over a check out over there. Come on, I'll go, damn it. I need to do a little ranger traits. I like getting out for their customer service. I actually think they're customer service.

16:37High school kids standing out in the parking lot and the long line taking your order. I like it. Yep. Nothing I love better than the old in-and-out michael. Well, I guess that's it with pickles. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human