Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet, And again, thank you so much for
your support. Do you remember that self absorbed narcissist named
Jim Acosta. Remember that guy worked for CNN, just super annoying.
He dyed his hair and they gave him his own
show because he was you know, prior he was the
White House correspondent, just a belligerent jerk, and remember you
like wrestled the microphone away from some White House intern
so he could keep berating Trump. He parlayed that, you know,
anti trump ism into the well and the dying of
the hair into a talk host slot, an anchor slot
or something. His show did terribly and he got let
go by CNN a couple of years back. He then
launched a podcast. I know you weren't aware, Really nobody
is aware, and the first podcast episode that he did,
he was like, it was like, I don't even know
how to describe it. He was sitting sort of like
off to the side, the camera was mounted way too high,
shooting down at him. He's leaning back and behind him
is like just a blank wall. He's like doing it
from his closet, and he was just like talking about
how it's going to be this super exciting thing. He
brought on I think he brought on Norm Eisen, that
leftist democrat lawyer hack guy, and their connections kept dropping
out and it was just so cringey to watch. It
was awkward. He's still doing it, though. I mean, when
you make millions and millions and millions of dollars at CNN,
you can float a podcast like this for quite some time.
Because it's obvious he has no production value or staff.
Not that I look, when I did my podcast, I
had no production staff either, so I'm not knocking that
it's just mine. Nobody could tell because coming from my background,
I had to learn and utilize the production skills my
entire career. He obviously did not. He was he was
a face, right, and not like a you know, world
wrestling face, but he was in front of the camera.
He wasn't behind the camera, and so when you have
to do the work behind the camera, you learn you
know about production value. Anyway, Jim Acosta is back in
the news, not on the news, he's not doing anything
other than his podcast. But for some reason, he thought
it would be a really good idea to I guess,
accept an invitation from the parents of one of the
slain high school kids from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. Remember the Parkland,
Florida shooting. It's been seven or eight years now, and
the parents asked him if he would I guess they
developed well, they asked him if they were if he
could interview their son. Their son is dead, but they
created an AI version of him. And I have nothing
bad to say about the parents. They deserve all sympathy
and empathy. People grieve in their own way. If this
makes them feel closer to their son, I have no
problem with them doing whatever they feel gives them some
comfort and peace. I do have a problem with Jim Acosta,
and I have a bigger problem with Jim Acosta doing
this interview and treating it as if it is an interview. Okay,
you're talking to a chat bot. You're interviewing a chat
bot that has just been skinned, basically, and it was bizarre.
I've seen clips of this and it looks like a
rudimentary form of AI. The voice changes, the inflection is off,
and also remember it's programmed. And he touted this interview
he posted up on Twitter and the leftist Twitter called
Blue Sky. He says, a show you don't want to miss.
I'll be having a one of a kind interview with
Joaquin Oliver. He died in the Parkland school shooting in
twenty eighteen, but his parents have created an AI version
of their son to deliver a powerful message on gun violence.
It wasn't a powerful message. I can just tell you
that it was AI reciting talking points that came from
the parents, So it was, you know, more gun control,
mental health screenings and stuff like that. But the promotion
of this, it's ghoulish, is what it is. It's ghoulish.
So here's from the Huffington Post, hardly a right wing publication.
Former CNN host Jim Acosta faced backlash on Monday after
sharing what he called a one of a kind interview
with an AI version of Parkland school shooting victim Joaquin Oliver,
a bot created by his parents to honor their son
on what would have been his twenty five fifth birthday.
The interview is shared to Acosta's substack page. It depicts Oliver,
who was one of seventeen who died in the twenty
eighteen massacre, remarking on the cause of remarking on the
cause of death, and stressing why it's important to talk
about gun violence in schools. When asked for its solution
to gun violence, the AI emphasized a need for a
mix of stronger gun control laws, mental health support, and
community engagement. Now, the dead teenager's parents, Manuel Oliver and
his wife Patricia Oliver, are co founders of a gun
control advocacy group called Change the ref I don't know
what that means. I guess referee, change the referees or something.
And so they've been involved in a whole slew of
projects that demand action against gun violence, in other words,
gun control, and in a video shared to Twitter, Manuel
the father acknowledge that the AI was his and his
wife's idea, adding that Acosta should not be blamed for
quote what he was able to do in the interview.
If the problem that you have is with the AI,
then you have the wrong problem. He said. The real
problem is that my son was shot eight years ago.
So if you believe that is not the problem, you
are part of the problem. Okay. I always say this,
beware of false choices. It's this is not an either or.
People can object to the use of the AI. They
can object to the mass shooting at the school. They
can object to your refri it's a gun control. They
can object to efforts to stemy gun control. And for me,
I object to interviewing a chat bot. I don't understand
the point of doing this. This is a stunt. It's
a stunt in service of a political narrative. That's all.
This was Acosta. When he posted this announcement on Twitter,
he shut down his account to block anybody from replying
to him. Okay, but he also posted over on Blue Sky,
which is the leftist Twitter where they ban people like
if you just say there are only two genders, you
are like automatically banned off of that platform, Which is
why it's just an echo chamber that's descending slowly into
the most radical left wing voices, because anybody who says
anything that cuts across the grain, they get banned. So
he also posted on Blue Sky and they dragged him too,
So a moment of unification in objecting to Jim Acosta,
he really is bringing Americans together. But look, there's also
a larger issue here, and it has to do with
Ai okay Ai. Because there's another story from CBS News
I'm going to bring to you in a second that
raises another problem with this kind of technology being used.
All Right, if you're listening to this show, you know
I try to keep up with all sorts of current events,
and I know you do too, and you've probably heard
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I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app
and it's a website and it combines news from around
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News as they make the media landscape more transparent. On
Twitter at Pete Callner, here is a tweet. It's from
It's all a distraction who says these parents are exploiting
their dead son. It's Munchausen by Ai. Yeah. Well, like
I said, I'm not going to throw any stones at
the parents because I you know, they lost a child
and in a horrific way. Then you get all of
the you know, the stuff that comes at you from
the conspiracy theorists and the gun people pro and con.
It's just like, I can't imagine what they're going through,
and so, you know, people do what they do to grieve.
So I'm not going to I'm not going to throw
any shade at them. I am going to throw a
lot of shade at Jim Acosta because he utterly deserves it,
and as a journalist with a conscience, like well as
a self proclaimed journalist. Right, That's what makes this so
egregious is that you know, he treats it as if
it's an interview with a live person doing this interview
instead of recognizing, like, what you're doing is simply promoting
talking points for a campaign, and as a journalist, I
don't see the value unless, of course, you are an
operative of some kind in yourself wanting to advance talking points,
you know, advance the campaign. And if that's the case,
which is the case, by the way, with Jim Acosta,
it then lays bare the lie that that's what he
was doing while he was a quote unquote journalist at CNN.
So all right, then there's this story at cbsnews dot
com by Meg Oliver Jill Smola. By the way, this
is the pattern you know in all news stories nowadays
where you always start the story with some person and
they teach you this in journalism school is to personalize
the story. So you start with the personalization. And it's
Jill Smola. She's a seventy five year old retiree who
understands the power of human connection, having spent her working
days as an aide taking care of the elderly. She said,
we would play games, put puzzles together. She said human
interaction was important so that they had somebody to talk to,
that they weren't just sitting in a chair doing nothing.
But these days it's Smola sitting in a chair, a
widow with a lung condition who lives alone. She says
she doesn't get that human interaction anymore. She says she
can go weeks on end without seeing anyone. She can't
drive anymore. She rarely leaves her home in Orlando, Florida,
but recently she did gain a new companion, an AI
powered chat bot. She uses the chat bot, called elie
Q to quote, visit exotic places, and play trivia. Smola
talks to the chat bot for up to five hours
a day and says the connection is truly meaningful. She
said that people who might find the situation sad don't understand. Quote.
I'd rather talk to a human being, but that's not
possible for me except if I get on the phone,
which you can do, I think, she says. So I
enjoy her, and then jokingly ds, I enjoy her better
than my daughter. Okay, so she has family, she has somebody,
but she doesn't talk to her daughter on the phone.
Several AI companions have recently hit the market, including l
e Q, which normally costs fifty nine dollars a month
to use. Smaller received the chatbot for free, though with
funding from a federal grant. I've got questions about that,
but they are not addressed in the CBS story. Talia Porteny,
an ethicist at Columbia University who studies seniors and AI
used in the medical space, told CBS News that loneliness
is rampant, with one in four older adults saying they
feel isolated. But Portney also said she's concerned about the
possibility that reliance on these chatbots could backfire and create
even more isolation. Because it's easier. You don't have to
go anywhere, you don't have to make plans, you don't
have to do anything except turn the thing on and
type away. She said, this could go really wrong if
it's not deployed in an ethical and responsible way, which
I think we all know that the health industry has
proven over the last five years would never do anything unethical. Right,
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memories that'll last a lifetime. Here's a message off of Twitter.
It's a pete tweet from russ. I have so much
sympathy for the parents of the Parkland children. However, my
sympathy is tempered by the ones who, after eight years,
would use a chat bought version of their child to
do meeting interviews and promote any political agenda. I don't
know how I would grieve a child, but I have
walked with people who are and there is nothing healthy
about this. And Jim Acosta is a hack and worthy
of contempt. Yes, that is true. So a while back
a guy named Derek Thompson wrote a massive piece at
the Atlantic dot com. This thing is one two let's
see here, three four, five, six, seven, eight nine, so
eighteen pages. It'll take you an hour to read it roughly,
and I did. I read it, so you don't have to,
but I recommend it to you. I know it's from
the Atlantic, but it's a very good piece on all
of these different angles to the anti social century is
what he calls it, the anti social century. And he
starts off because again got to personalize the story. Except
he is the personalization, he says. A short drive from
my home in North Carolina is a small Mexican restaurant
with several tables and four stools at a bar facing
the kitchen. On a sweltering afternoon last summer, I walked
in with my wife and daughter. The place was empty,
but looking closer, I realized that business was actually booming.
The bar was covered with to go food, nine large
brown bags. The space once reserved for that most garrulous
social encounter, the bar hangout had been reconfigured into a
silent depot for customers to grab food to eat at home.
Until the pandemic, the bar was bustling and popular with regulars.
But since then, obviously their model has shifted, and I
have seen this in various restaurants, in fact, not just restaurants.
Christy and I were at home improvement store and over
the weekend and as we're you know, we check out,
and you know, you've got a lot more self checkouts now,
and so we're walking out and we realized, oh, this
is the indoor but the outdoor, which was where we
parked near, is on the other side. And she's like, oh,
we're gonna have to walk all the way around. It's like,
well we can. I said, we could just walk through here,
like sort of the lobby area, you know. So we
walked through there. What used to be a whole rows
of cashier checkouts had been converted into you know, like
an office. And as you walk past it, and we're
walking sort of behind it and you can see inside
and they've got a countertop and a window, and they
got just shelves and it's just packed with stuff for
people to pick up people with the online ordering. And
I made a reference like, oh, here's the COVID spot
right like, because that's when they put that in was
during COVID. I've picked stuff up from the COVID window.
So it's not just restaurants and bars, but for restaurants
and bars. It's particularly noticeable when you're looking at it
through this socialization aspect. He goes on to say the
share of US adults having dinner or drinks with friends
on any given night has declined by more than thirty
percent on any given night, down thirty percent. There's an isolationist.
And this is over the last twenty years. I should
point out there's an isolationist dynamic that's taking place in
the restaurant business. According to Washington DC restaurant tour Steve Sallis,
he said, I think people feel uncomfortable in the world today.
They've decided that their home is their sanctuary. It's not
easy to get them to leave. Even when Americans eat
at restaurants, they are much more likely to do They
are much more likely to do so buy themselves, which
I've never had a problem with doing. When I was single,
I would go out to eat. I would go to
movies by myself. I didn't care. But I know some
people don't like to do that too. But now apparently
more and more people are doing that, going out to
eat alone. And here's the thing. Going out to eat
alone in the past, you'd have to bring a book.
That's what I would do. I would I would walk
to a local restaurant or you know, a pub or something.
When I was down in my first apartment when I
moved to Charlotte, was off of well Running mead Woodlawn
right there at Sellwyn Avenue. I'd walk down a Sellwyn
pub or I'd walk around the corner, go to Park
Road shopping center, and I'd walk down there. I would
bring a book and I would eat and I would read.
People watch. But now you just walk in with your
phone and then you can doom scroll the whole time
and be completely unaware of your entire surroundings. The evolution
of restaurants is actually retracing the trajectory of another American industry,
which is Hollywood. Right. Technology turned film into a home
delivery system. So this is not a new trend, and
what we're seeing with the restaurants is similar to what
we saw with movies. Americans are spending less time with
other people than in any other period for which we
have trustworthy data going back to nineteen sixty five. Men
who watch TV now spend seven hours in front of
the TV for every one hour they spend hanging out
with somebody outside of their home. The typical female pet
owner spends more time active engaged with her pet then
she spends in face to face contact with friends of
her own species. Yes, yes, insert cat lady joke there, Okay.
Back in twenty twenty three, Viveck Murphy, Joe Biden Surgeon
General published an eighty one page warning about America's epidemic
of loneliness, claiming that its negative health effects were on
par with those of tobacco use and obesity. Well, and
I guess you should throw in there also sitting, right,
because remember sitting was the new smoking. I'm getting it's
hard to keep track of which of these things is
the worst thing all capitalized, you know. The United Kingdom
now actually has a Minister for loneliness, so does Japan.
But solitude and loneliness are not one end the same,
he says. It's actually very healthy emotional response to feel
some loan. In fact, that's your cue to you know,
get up, get out, meet Some people get socialization. Right,
that's loneliness. Solitude that's a little different. And here's the thing,
even when you think you're in solitude, you're not really
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dot com. Let me go read some texts on the
text line. The whole point of an interview is to
get new insights or information. Jim Acosta could have just
gone to a website and interview the Q and a
page to get the same answers right exactly, Kevin says,
like online social media, it could be taken too far,
but in moderation it seems to be good for older folks.
It shouldn't take the place of children talking to their parents.
Children just don't have hours to talk their elderly parent
want keeping older ones interacting and talking. This is the
thing people with the text line, okay, like you have
to write in a way that I can understand keeping
use AI to help you write your texts. Keeping older
ones interacting and talking with somebody or in this case
something definitely helps keep them mentally sharp and seems to
help with loneliness. Yes, I do see there. I do
see the benefit of the technology in that regard. In
that limited regard, I should say, because again, like loneliness
and solitude are different things. It's healthy to feel loneliness
because then you will reach out to other people. Right
That Q is the thing that pushes you off the
couch and into face to face interactions. According to Eric Kleinenberg,
who is a sociologist at NYU, the real problem here
is the nature of America's social crisis is that most
Americans don't seem to be reaching out to the biological
cue to spend more time with other people. Their solitude
levels are surging, while many measures of loneliness are actually
flat or dropping. Right, so they feel lonely and they're alone,
they're in solitude. They start feeling lonely, and rather than
get up and go out and meet people and see
friends and do that sort of you know, hang out
with family, whatever, they then go online. They then text
and chat with people. And honestly, is that really very
different than the kind of interactions you would have with
one of these chat bots? Right? How many people in
your life do you talk with And you say, you know,
you keep in touch with them, but it's only just
text messages. You share memes and gifts and quick little texts. Right,
You don't actually see them on a regular basis. You
don't talk to them on the phone. Right, day to day,
hour to hour. We are choosing this way of life,
its comforts, it's ready entertainments, but convenience can be a curse.
Our habits are creating what's called a century of solitude.
This is the antisocial century. The individual preference for solitude,
scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over a long
period of time, is rewiring America's civic and psychic identity.
So Derek Thompson again, this is a piece at Theatlantic
dot Com called the Antisocial Century talks about how the
first half of the twentieth century was extraordinarily social, but
in the nineteen seventies the US entered an era of withdrawal,
as the political scientist Robert Putnam famously documented in his
book back in two thousand called Bowling Alone. Intitutions of togetherness,
such as marriage, eroded slowly, others fell away quite swiftly.
From nineteen eighty five to nineteen ninety four, active involvement
in community organizations fell by nearly half. The decline was
astonishingly broad, affecting just about every social activity and every
demographic group that Putnam tracked. So what happened in the seventies.
Kleinenberg noted a shift in political priorities. The government dramatically
slowed down construction of public spaces places that used to
anchor community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls.
They became less successible or they closed altogether. He also
pointed to, among other things, new moral values such as
the embrace of unbridled individualism. But he found that two
of the most important factors were by then ubiquitous technologies.
The most important factors were what two things can you
guess them. The automobile and the television set, right, those
were the things that drove people away. TV transformed America's interior,
decorating our relationships and our communities. The effects are still
going on today, and now we've got a new technology
that is exacerbating the problem. Right if you consider it
a problem, and that's the phone. All right, that'll do
it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening.
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