AI will be making us more anti-social (08-06-2025--Hour1)

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to vpetclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your 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 me say get your news from multiple sources. Why Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's an app and it's a website and it combines news from around the world in one place, so you can compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out at check dot ground, dot news slash. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind Spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check dot Ground dot news slash Pete. Subscribe through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground 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, so highest ethics of any industry. Right. Here's a great idea. How about making an escape to a really special and secluded getaway in western North Carolina. Just a quick drive up the mountain and Cabins of Asheville is your connection. Whether you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon, maybe you want to plan a memorable proposal, or get family and friends together for a big old reunion, Cabins of Asheville has the ideal spot for you where you can reconnect with your loved ones and the things that truly matter. 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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 You're more connected. You know. Stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video started in nineteen ninety seven and Mint Hill North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories, all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creative video 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. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.