It's a Microphone, Not a Vibrator

0:00  
Dan, welcome, welcome, welcome. Caitlin is laughing. We are just chuckling away here before we even start to hit record. This is the Jan Arden Podcast. I'm here with Caitlin green, Sarah Burke, and this gentleman, Dan briskin, he is a scientist and a bat lover. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you can see him on CTV, the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, the Smithsonian channel, gee whiz, and a bunch of other places, talking about parasites, bats and science. He makes science fun. And his weekly newsletter, The Bat Signal, is the best place to find all of his content. And we are going to have the link for that in the show notes, because I'm not going to tell you what that is right now. It's too lengthy. He's one of our favorite repeat guests on here. I can't even believe that he decides to come back again and again me. Loves coming

0:54  
here, as long as we're talking about being the third person he really likes this show. He's a huge fan, and he loves coming here,

1:00  
and Jan loves to blow dry her hair. And she's also a very Yeah, a lot of third anyway. Dan, risk and welcome to the

1:07  
Jan Arden pod. Thank you. So excited to be back. This is so fun. You

1:11  
were doing an eco tour. Ecotourism seems to be catching on. Dan, do tell us every little detail,

1:17  
yeah, well, I'd love to. So I've done the Galapagos once, and I'm doing it again this fall, and I do it with a company called Quest nature tours. And it is, I mean, if you're a biologist, or you're a fan of science or whatever, you know of this person named Darwin. And Darwin is famous because as a young man, he took a boat ride and went looked at a bunch of animals and then sort of pieced things together and came up with this idea about natural selection and evolution and changed how we understand our place in the universe, where we came from, like the biggest questions you can possibly ask. And so a lot of biologists, you know, spend a lot of time thinking about how Darwin came up with that idea and what set his thinking apart, and a big part of it is this voyage he took to the Galapagos. So the Galapagos is interesting from that historical perspective, but it's also just an amazing place in terms of like places you can go on the planet, because there are these islands that are 800 kilometers from the coast of South America, and they're just alone, and there weren't any people there until the 1800s like, no people went there. And so you've got this undisturbed ecosystem with giant tortoises and weird, flightless cormorants and hammerhead sharks and all these, like, just amazing creatures, many of which have found nowhere else. And it was there that Darwin noticed all these, you know, differences between the animals and different islands, and came up with this theory of natural selection. So to go there, you have this real sense of like, this is a really important place. It's interesting on its own, but it's also an important place in the history of humanity and how humans and the evolution of scientific thought itself. And so to go there, you're just the whole time, you're just like, wow, wow, wow. Like, that's your internal monolog. The whole time, it's so amazing.

2:54  
It's not really built for tourism, like, there's not hotels and restaurants and nightclubs. This is, this is a place where you literally tread lightly, don't disturb anything. And I would imagine that all your meals, your sleeping quarters, are on a ship of some kind, yeah.

3:08  
So actually, it's really impressive the way they do it. So there are a couple spots where there are hotels, and I don't think casinos, maybe casinos, I didn't see any, but there are places where there's the nightlife and all that stuff. There was a big city on one of the islands, and that's sort of where that is. But when you get out to the get out to the other islands, they're very much protected, and they do it brilliantly. What they do is they they create this one little walkway on the edge of an island that is beautiful, from which you get beautiful vistas, and you see nice things. You get dropped off by your boat at 9:35am with a guide, you walk within the lines there are ropes on either side of you. You walk on the trail that you're supposed to walk. You finish that walk half an hour or an hour later, depending on the walk, and you get back on your little boat, and it takes you out to your ship. And then the next group starts at you know that exact time. And so at any given time, you feel like you're alone. You feel like you have the whole island to yourself, but your footsteps are only treading this one little strip on this one little edge of the island, and the rest of it is left to nature. And so by having this really great system, they can protect it from the hundreds of 1000s, I'm not exaggerating, of tourists that go to the Galapagos every year. It's one of the most amazing places you can go. And they just really do it brilliantly. You're not allowed to explore without a guide, and the guides have a scheduled time, scheduled walk. They all know each other, and it just it works really well as a result. And you have this feeling like you're getting to explore it in the quiet. You get to hear the silence of the place, but at the same time, you get to be part of a large group of people that are getting to explore it and have those great experiences.

4:40  
And it does need to be protected like you absolutely have to tread lightly and make sure that these places do not disappear from the face of the earth.

4:48  
Yeah, no. Islands are especially vulnerable, for sure, and so it needs to be protected, and they're doing just a bang up job. What's kind of cool about islands is that you don't get the overwhelming biodiversity that you get in, say, the Amazon rainforest or something like. That. And so for Darwin, when he went there, there weren't that many birds to keep track of. Like, it's not like when you go spend a minute in Peru and you're just like, holy, maybe that's for the best. It was, because that's how he could see the pattern is that he didn't have that many birds to keep track of. So he was like, oh, yeah, you know what? The finches are different on the different island. If there had been a zillion different kinds of finches, he might not have been able to notice those subtleties. So I think that's part of what made it really productive for him. Over

5:27  
to you, Caitlin, you have a million

5:28  
questions, I'm sure. I'm just wondering if Dan's ever read any of Darwin's letters? Oh, I've read

5:32  
a bunch of stuff that I went Read On the Origin of Species, which I thought was really cool. That's the book where he sort of puts out his theory of natural selection. But I haven't read a lot of his letter. Buddy, have you found Have you found have you got, like, love letters of Darwin

5:43  
or something like that? So some of his letters are, like, public, and he's quite cranky, which I appreciate. And there were some letters where he was he was writing to a friend about a sea voyage, and he said, word for word, I hate the sea or I loathe the sea and everything in it, and he wanted to get off the ship. And I was like, Okay, this makes me feel better about not being someone who enjoys camping, if Darwin even hated being in the sea, yeah.

6:05  
And he got super sick too, like he was, he wasn't well in his old age because he, I think he had, like, Chagas disease and, like he What's that? It's something you get from kissing bugs. It's, it's a parasite. He had a whole bunch of health well, that stands to reason, yeah. But, I mean, it was kind of dangerous to be a world explorer back in the day, because you couldn't get all the nice vaccines that people refuse to get today. I don't understand people. We don't need to go. You

6:27  
couldn't get the stuff that people refuse to get. Now that this makes so much sense to me, see,

6:33  
man, I'm Captain vaccine. I love a vaccine. If I'm going somewhere, I want to know what needle can I be poked with before I go? And they're finding that like especially for not yourself, but for elderly people, they're finding that a lot of these vaccines have extra bonus help for your meals beyond the thing you're getting.

6:50  
Yeah, they're discovering things, not only will you not get measles, but your breasts will get firmer. So now, once again, this is not a factual show, so let's

7:00  
spread that rumor because I think my breasts are not firm at all, and I'm gonna get the measles vaccine again, just in case.

7:05  
Just as a footnote to this conversation, I want people to know that there's all kinds of different tours out there. So the ecotourism that Dan is referring to, these kinds of things exist all over the planet. You also can do things that are vegan tours, literally. You can go online, and if there's something specific to you that you think you're interested in, use the World Wide Web, because you will find companies that are doing things really in innovative ways. You know, who doesn't want to like go through Italy and eat vegan food, if that's what you're into, yeah. Or who doesn't want to go see, you know, elephants from a distance where you're not interacting, you're not riding them, you're not feeding them. You literally get to sit somewhere and see them at a watering hole, like make sure you use you tap away and find the stuff that you want to do, moving on. And this is something that we we have issues with constantly. And thank God we have Sarah kind of monitoring us at all times with microphones. Bad microphones make you sound dumb.

8:03  
Tell us more. Please, please. Yeah, sir. Are you like, super, super strict about microphone placement? And

8:10  
these two probably think I'm so annoying, but, like, there's, like, a few little things we can do to improve the sound if we can.

8:16  
Yeah, no, you're but you're right. So it's really interesting. They did a study where they had people listen to interviews with job candidates, and they played the exact same recording, but they played it either recorded sounding good, or they put it through a digital filter, so it was the same recording, but it was altered to sound like it came from a bad microphone. And when I say bad microphone, I'm not talking about like a microphone in a basement across the room that doesn't work that, you know, it's all crackly. I'm talking about just using the microphone that's built into your laptop and talking at your desk the way most people just saying, moving on. Oh yeah, we're gonna bad mouth different brands now, okay, so,

8:50  
geez, we are not sponsored by Yeti like I listened

8:52  
to the recordings in the study, and they sounded like a normal zoom call, like the way people sound at their computer. But when people were asked to break the intelligence of the of the applicant and the hireability, they were 5% dumber and 10% less hirable. And that's interesting. They're saying the exact same thing, but we think they're dumber because their microphone sounds worse. And you would think that people ignore and filter out low Oh, he's got a bad microphone. But you know, whatever, it doesn't matter, I'm listening to what they say. But we don't. We're biological organisms, and we communicate with our voices. And listen, Jen, you know, better than anyone, the voice is a you know, it's a musical instrument, and you communicate things about yourself with the nature of your voice. And we as biological organisms have evolved to pay attention to things in the voice. If you hear a very deep voice, you can make inferences about what made that noise, what that person's how big they are, you know, things like that. If you hear a very, you know, weak voice, you infer things from that. And so when you hear a bad quality microphone, your brain takes that as information that's probably relevant. And it turns out that we take that as a. Work on their intelligence.

10:01  
Women in particular are criticized

10:03  
about the sounds of their voices. I mean, hello, Radio.

10:08  
Well, yeah. I mean, it's so important to have a pleasing voice. You know, I'm always amazed that microphones do the work that they do, and it is very specific to my work in particular. I have tried out dozens, dozens, dozens of microphones that suit my voice, that can take the weight of how I sing, the subtleties of it, and now it probably took me 25 years, and I kid you not, to land on microphones that suit me perfectly and that hold the weight of what I'm doing and the subtleties of what I'm doing. So I'm with you 1,000,000% on this. It's really important, and if you are doing a lot of zoom calls, it's well worth investing in a proper microphone and a set of headphones, if that's part of your job, and especially if you're looking for a job, you can get microphones that are good quality. They're not going to cost you $89 I'll put a link in the show notes. Yeah, put a link up because if you're looking of even if you're joining like our book club, for instance, we have a book club here at the Jan Arden podcast, and a lot of people are indeed using their computer speakers. And I know that when someone has a microphone and they're putting their hand in the air to ask something or to make a comment, it's so much easier for everyone to hear and understand. So anyway, that's just a little of that.

11:23  
Yeah, I bought a, I'm just pulling out now, a Samson Q, T, U, it's like this USB mic, and I travel with it, and it's great because then if I'm on the road and I do a radio appearance, I can sound like I'm in a studio. It's great. But what's hilarious is it looks like a vibrator. And so when I went through airport security, I had a really awkward moment where, like, I go through security, and I put my bag through, and then the guy is like, excuse me in your bag. And I look over his shoulder, and I can see the X ray, and clearly somebody has a vibrator in their bag. And then I realized that's my microphone in that bag. That's my bag. And he's asking me, he's like, Do you have a microphone. And I was like, Thank God, yes. But like, what if I didn't? What if it had been a vibrator?

12:06  
Did you need to? I'm gonna start saying that. Yes, I have many microphones in my bag. They're

12:10  
like, what is this guy doing in the Galapagos Islands?

12:16  
Listen, it's a long voyage. You there's a lot of time in the boat. You know, you gotta pass the time. Listen,

12:21  
I'm so glad that you're liberated. Dan, it sounds fine to me, like whatever brings you pleasure, especially a good microphone, right?

12:28  
Sure. Great microphone. You sound great. That's the key.

12:32  
Whenever we talk to you, Dan, I hog you like and I always just tell you to myself, No, I do. I've listened back to appearances that you've done, and I'm like, I don't let anyone talk. And so I because I have learned from listening to this podcast. Caitlin, over to you for the next query for our guest, Dan Riskin,

12:53  
well, I just this was a story that caught my attention in one of his Bat Signals, and I liked the way you phrased it. It was that news headlines are becoming click bait, and then in brackets underneath, and you'll be shocked to learn why, because if I see any more of these headlines, I'm gonna jump off a cliff. They make me crazy, because I'm very aware of what they're doing, but I don't know that everyone is

13:13  
Yeah, I mean, you're looking for good stories for for your work all the time, right? So you're just going through news feeds. You're going through websites and like, what, what headlines used to do was tell you what the article is about. That was the job of the headline, because you bought a newspaper and you opened the newspaper and there was a headline and it said, here's an article about this. And you're like, oh, that's helpful. I will read that. And then you read it, and it was about the thing that the headlines had. But headlines no longer have that job, because you don't buy the newspaper and then open it up anymore, you scroll, and when you're scrolling, they get paid if you click on the article to read. And so the game is not accurately represent what's in the article. The game is, can I make you click on me? And it doesn't matter if the article actually reflects what you say. And so this new study shows that a whole bunch of things over the last 20 years have changed in terms of like the headlines are longer. They say things like I or you, like you won't believe or you know, and they're also very vague, and they aren't really connected to what's in there. But what's really difficult about it is that this has become a trend for all the newspapers, even the good ones, right? So if you look at like New York Times articles compared to like the clicky mcclick pants, whatever the website is, they kind of have the same format now, and so you can't differentiate quality based on the headline anymore. I mean, I'm always thinking about things as evolution, but this is a result of the evolutionary pressures on headlines. It used to be that a good headline was measured by whether people felt like it was. It had a job, and its job and its job was to represent what was in the article. Now the job of the headline is to get more clicks. And so because it's under a different selective pressure, it has evolved to have a different morphology, and that's exactly like the way evolution works on animals. So anyway, they have changed. And so people are sort of pointing out that this is a problem, because now, when you go through. Your feed. You can't tell the good articles from the bad. You don't know exactly what you're going to be finding out when you click on one of

15:05  
those links, and then you're trying to find the shocking thing. I'm always like when I when this first started happening, and you will be shocked. Tiktok does it as well. X does it as well. You can click on things for a while. There was this Howie Mandel thing going around. Howie Mandel said this, and you will be shocked, and there's nothing there, yeah? Like, I finally caved in. I thought, Hey, what the fuck did Howie Mandel do? Because I'm gonna go find out. I know you hate yourself for clicking on there and there's nothing. It's like taking me to you know, we studied 44 sets of twins. Here's their photographs. Like, I'm like, Where are you taking me? Where did I just go?

15:43  
Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, like, if there's an article, like a scientific article about, like, this is really important for health, you know, like, I had an article recently about how drinking black coffee is good for your health. It extends your lifespan. So that's great. Drinking this will extend your life. And you're like, oh, click what? And if it had been a newspaper, I would have said coffee, right? Yeah, water, also, I think is good for you, and coffee has a lot of water in it, which is probably part of the magic. But yeah, yeah. So anyway, the the solution to this problem, as proposed, is that maybe there's a way to pay if people read the article. So instead of if they click, you get paid. Maybe if people read the article, then that's when you get paid, and then you that would change the selective pressure on that headline and what its job was, so that you brought people to the headline, that you brought people to an article that they would find interesting. And so then that's a different sort of rubric, but right now that that doesn't exist, and so we're stuck with click bait headlines.

16:39  
Even commenting behavior, no has changed to accommodate that. So you'll see that someone will post like one of those clickbaity headlines, and then the first three comments now on Instagram at least, will be people who've clicked on it saved you the time and then actually say, oh, spoiler alert, that drink was coffee. And everyone just starts to do that because everyone is collectively annoyed by this clickbait process. But I get why publishers are doing it. I just think it's it looks subjectively stupid.

17:05  
Yeah, it does look stupid, and it's annoying, and nobody likes it, and it's just another one of these examples of like, we're not the internet still kind of young. We're still figuring out how to make it all work, and maybe in 20 years,

17:18  
the headline, how old is the internet? Dan, risk. Oh, gosh, I don't know. I mean,

17:21  
it depends who you ask and sort of what they're taking credit for. But I don't exactly know what the what the written answer is. It's less than 101

17:27  
moment, please. Our producer and engineer,

17:30  
51 years. 5151 years. It was established in 1973 as a, r, p, a, n, e, t, and then it switched to T, C, i, p, on January 1, 1983 considered the birth of the modern internet.

17:44  
We're gonna go with 83 I'm going with 83 I mean, I love and I hate the internet because I've learned a lot I've and I think you like anything else have to be guided by making good choices for yourself of just how much you take in in your life. And I mean, there's lots of other places to get information, but obviously this is the most simple you know, to find out everything and to have everything at the palm of your hand. Is it still blows my mind when I'm traveling, of how much travel has changed for me since even the early 90s, when I started out and there was certainly internet. Then the dial up drove me goddamn crazy. Going into hotel rooms in your you know, you're waiting. Everyone knew that sound, yeah, and just to send off emails that you'd had banked for three days traveling, and finally, have a place where you could send them out. But I'm, you know, I just, I travel, and I'm so comforted by having a phone to watch movies, or, you know, on most planes now you can get Wi Fi. I don't know, sorry, we've kind of segued into Wi Fi, but I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on. Do you have any sense of where we're headed with AI and Wi Fi? Dan? I mean, yeah, I don't do a lot of AI, but maybe you have some comments, maybe doing

19:04  
more than you realize. I mean, when you're looking at all those headlines and you're looking at all those articles and those feeds that come to you, I mean, there's a lot of AI, sort of behind the scenes, where they're choosing what to send to you. And I think for me, part of what I worry about, you talk about just the feed and the overwhelming amount of information is that less and less do I feel like I'm choosing what comes to me, right? It's like, really hard to like. Part of the reason I cringe when I click on that click bait title is that I know I'm just feeding the algorithm like, oh, that's how you get Dan. If you want Dan to click on things, use this, and then I'm going to get tons more of that right, because there are all these algorithms and AI and all these other pieces that are just trying to feed me junk that's going to lead me to an advertiser, whereas what I would really like is the most surprising, beautiful, lovely things that the world has to offer, right? The kinds of things that my mom takes time to forward to me instead, that's how I get these, these pieces. So it's. Tough because it is an overwhelming amount, and the algorithms aren't really, they're not really built with you in mind. They're built with the advertisers in mind, or the company that makes the social media feed in mind, right? They're trying to, they're trying to do what's best for them. And that's not always what's best for me. I mean, sometimes it is, but usually it isn't.

20:18  
Yeah, it is. I know that when I change my habits is what I let my eyes rest on for 10 or 15 seconds on all formats like Tiktok, Instagram x i did change it quite a bit because my friend suggested, you know, don't be tempted to stay on like I was getting a lot of animal cruelty because of my obviously passion for

20:43  
for not your passion is for not animal cruelty, cruelty, and yet you get animal cruelty. That's the irony of that. Yeah, exactly.

20:51  
So I did change my habits for, you know, a week, maybe 10 days. I was really very surprised by the positivity of where I turned the corner. So it does work, and it can really affect what you're seeing. Like, I didn't want to see makeup tutorials by any stretch of the imagination, but I did click on quite a bit of stuff that wasn't that I just wanted to turn that corner, and I absolutely did. I'm getting a lot more poetry. I'm still getting, you know, animal welfare things that are certainly important, but not to the degree where it was 95% of my feed. And I just, God, I just, after an hour of having a cup of tea, I'm like, I just, I would eventually, I would just go into the search bar and click on a completely different type of imagery that would come in like, you know, if I was looking at news and stuff. Anyway, moving on,

21:46  
can I can I throw one thing in there? One thing I do is for YouTube. I haven't said I have the settings so that it forgets my history every time I don't let it record my history. I don't know how I found that setting, but I flicked that switch. And so now every time I open youtube, it yells at me. It's like, we don't have your history. We don't know what to show you. And I'm like, good. And then I like, search for the thing I need, the dementia

22:04  
setting. You've clicked onto the dementia setting. Maybe

22:09  
I have dementia, I don't even know. But now, like, it's a pain, because if I saw a video and I want to pull it back up, it's like, we don't know what you've seen because we don't record your history. Dan. And I'm like, Well, fine, it's worth it. Like, there's no algorithm with me and YouTube, we get along just fine because it doesn't know anything about me. But Instagram, which I have an account, which I post to, it, knows me way too well, and I don't like it one bit, and I'm off most of the other ones. I've walked away from x, and I haven't engaged with Tiktok. I use LinkedIn, too. That's another one where the algorithms have got me. But YouTube, I'm winning that fist fight. Good. I'm glad.

22:50  
Well, this is a perfect segue for seniors. Brain Health is tied to a sense of purpose. Do tell

22:56  
so there's a question about how happy seniors are and how well their brains work, like their cognitive abilities. And it's been a sort of which came first the chicken or the egg sort of a thing for a long time. And this is a new study where they followed a bunch of seniors over 10 years and checked in on them every year to see how their brain health was, and then to see how happy they were. And what they found is that it is a chicken and egg situation, and that they both affect each other like it goes back and forth. So if your mental health is good, you're probably going to be happier. If you're happier, you're probably going to have better mental health in the next year. But the piece of happiness that seemed to really have a big correlation with the overall brain health was this sense of purpose, this idea that you're here for a reason, and you have a reason to be here, and a thing that you do that brings something to the world around you. And that could be, you know, obviously that's different for different people, but I thought that was really interesting, because it's not just sort of, do you feel a sense of belonging, or do you feel like you you you have autonomy, like you're in control of your own life. Those weren't as important as this sense of purpose and and I thought that was really beautiful, because, you know, I have a sense of purpose in my life, my kids, you know, and also spreading the gospel on science. And I feel like those are things that that keep me going. And so it's, it's nice to know that those have the fringe benefit, that they're helping me keep my keep my bats and my belfry, so to

24:21  
speak. Yeah, it just seems like it's very simple things that keep us all kind of motivated and going. My mom certainly, when she was in the throes of Alzheimer's, she was, she was still really fun to engage with. It was kind of that short term, repetitive thing, but she would often say, I I have a purposeful life. And she used that word specifically, like I would often just sit her down with a big laundry bin full of tea towels, and she I would just have her fold and refold as her folding pile went, I would literally grab them and shake them out and put them back into the plastic bin. And we would put on God, God. Forgive me Bill O'Reilly, please, Jesus, forgive me for that. But we would put Bill O'Reilly on Fox News. My mom loved Bill O'Reilly, and I just just watched her full tea towels. But it was a purpose. It was something for her to do. Or I would have her dice carrots into these minuscule, microscopic, little pieces. I would give her a carrot and a knife and hope that she didn't take her fingers off, and we would sit and do that. So I do understand purpose. I mean, I know she's sort of in a place of memory loss, but I still think the part that's intact, it's still important to have purpose. I think people need to remind themselves of that even in the face of terminal illness. I've heard people talk about purpose and doing things, even in light of having two or three or four months to live and resigning themselves to that, but still not sitting and waiting, not sitting in a chair, but being very purposeful and using that time and that often really is I find that very inspiring about human nature, that we, in the face of complete and utter disaster, still find it important to do something right up to the very end,

26:11  
that's beautiful. What what you said about your mom? And I mean, life is really about the folding of tea towels. It's not about the stack of tea towels, right? It's the process. It's the vacation you go on, not the pictures you have of that vacation. It's the like I'm always, you know, talking about science, and that the point I always make about science is that science is the process. It's not the information we have, it's not all the knowledge we have, it's the question we haven't answered, and the fun of trying to figure out what the next answer is going to be, and the process of being curious, and that curiosity that that really makes it worthwhile, because once you know things, and you stop looking and you stop learning, then you're no better than anybody that that throws science out the door. I mean, you're just, it's just a body of knowledge. And so it's beautiful to hear you share that same sentiment in a totally different context. And it's that's really nice.

26:57  
Well, there's no end to the stuff we can we get to learn about too. So in our lifespans, there's certainly no end to our internet. There's there's no end to what we can do. And we tried to during COVID, we tried to find the end of the internet. We tried to find the end of Netflix. We tried to find the end of knowledge as we knew it, baking cinnamon buns or the baking of bread. And we just, we never found it. We never even came close. No,

27:21  
I want to talk about the study that you had shared on people's ability to recognize AI generated images and how attractiveness plays into this for faces specifically.

27:32  
The thing about AI generated images is that things are changing so fast all the time that I always worry that, like, we've got this big study, and here's how it works when people are interacting with AI images, but then, like a week later, AI images look way more realistic. So take this with a grain of salt in that direction. But what was interesting is they, they had this study where they showed young people, they showed them a face, and it was a face from a big database of real faces, and they showed the face for half a second, 500 milliseconds, it would flash and then would disappear, and then when new one would come and flash and disappear. And people were asked to rate, for each of them, are they real, or are they AI generated? Now, what the people in the experiment didn't know is that they were all real. They were all totally real faces. And the question was, how much are they going to think they're seeing an AI face when they're not really and so they did this, and then they were also asked about attractiveness of the faces. And these, these are standardized faces from a database where the attractiveness has been measured a whole bunch of different times. So these people are rated in terms of how good looking they are. And what they found is that when when men see a really attractive face, they don't believe it's AI. If it's a very attractive face, they're not going to say it's AI, but if it's not attractive, they're willing to say that it's AI. And like I think was 44% of the faces they said were AI generated when none of them actually were right. And so this is part of the issue. Is we don't trust things, but the fact that we have these sort of instincts that are built around looking for attractive faces, and what that does to our subconscious is sort of counterintuitive, I think. And so men have a blind spot for pretty faces. Women had a blind spot for good looking faces and super ugly faces. They also didn't think those were AI generated, which speaks to how ugly men are. Frankly, I think that's just a fact that you have to deal with it really ugly men really do exist. And so you're like, yeah, no, ugly. That guy's ugly. He can't be aI generated because he looks like what I've had to deal with in my life. So anyway, just really interesting that attractiveness plays into our willingness to believe something's real or not, and I'm sure that the algorithms are preying on us as a result.

29:25  
Yeah, don't even get me started on AI in the dating apps. No, I want to start you on that. Tell me about it. There's so many profiles that I look at it's got, like, very little information. Or it's like, the most generic line, like, loves long walks on the beach and ice cream, like, literally, one line. Seriously? You say that? Yes, unfortunately, you flip through like two photos, and I'm like, This person doesn't look real. Yes, photo is from an app. Like you can tell, I can tell. Anyway, in a dating app, I haven't yet been catfished into meeting one of these AI generated people, but who knows?

30:00  
You run into an aipness. This is all I want to know.

30:02  
I'm sure they're out there the

30:04  
AIP I think it's just Dan's microphone. Honestly,

30:07  
it might have been my microphone. Yeah, exactly. I, you know what, I had a friend of mine, and this is I'm telling a story that flatters me, and I shouldn't do this, but a friend of mine got attempted catfish, and it was a picture. I don't know how they got it, but it was a picture of me that somebody was using on their dating profile. So somebody had, like a screen grab of me from YouTube. I

30:25  
tried to ask you out

30:28  
that hot bat guy.

30:29  
It's the bad guy. So anyway, like my bookshelf, my face, and it said, like my name is Kumar, or something like that. It was awesome. Yeah, seriously,

30:36  
and I was coming back to me now ghosted by Kumar.

30:39  
Yeah, yeah. Sorry. I had nothing to it. I did not. I didn't sign a release. So anyway, but I've been with Shelby for long enough now that I sort of dodged the whole bullet on most of this online dating stuff. So I really have no experience in that world, but I have sympathy that AI does not make it

30:56  
simpler. I hope that AI will do better matching, though I feel like there's an opportunity there still,

31:00  
totally, yeah, totally, totally, and, yeah, I mean, but it's not just dating apps. Like, it's the whole internet. That is, like, people worry the whole internet is just going to pot because it's harder and harder to find stuff that's generated by real people, and the more that it's generated by AI, the less interesting it is. Like, if I give you a book about a cute little pig like that I made up or or a story about, uh, birds that I that is like a science book about birds or whatever, and I wrote it, and I give it to you like, you might read it, you might not, but you're at least going to give it a chance. But if I say, Hey, I had aI write you this story about a pig, like, who cares, right? Like, it wasn't until AI existed that I realized how important the relationship is between the reader and the author. I always thought that, like, like, I have a whole bunch of books behind me, right? And like, I always thought that, like, I just want to know about bats, and so if I had a textbook about bats, it's all that mattered was the information in it. I had no, no idea that the author mattered. I just as long as they did a good job of getting all the right information. It could have been written by anybody. It doesn't matter. But honestly, these books that I have are all written by people, and if you give me an AI generated textbook on bats, a I'm not going to trust that everything it says is correct, but let's say that you could even fix that problem. I'm also just not interested in reading it, because there's something about the passion, even if they're not saying, like, I love bats so much, it's the soul,

32:17  
the soul of it, the soul,

32:19  
absolutely, the

32:21  
ability for human beings to communicate, yeah, through language, and it's very obviously gone too.

32:27  
And I have to think it's the same in your field, right? In music, right? You kind of feel

32:31  
it. I think we will get better at identifying it. I mean, they're doing we ran across, like, some kind of story a number of weeks ago. Hey guys, about them in Scandinavia, teaching kids how to recognize fake news. Yes,

32:44  
we've needed this for so long. Yeah. And I

32:47  
think, you know, Caitlin, we were all commenting on, wow, if there was ever an, you know, a thing that kids should be learning in school, never mind Home Ec and how to make a muffin, but how to identify those click bait headlines that are doing exactly just that, so the kids can look at it and disseminate whether it's something that is real or not real. And I think the younger we start educating people, young, young minds about that, they're the ones that are going to tackle this shit, and I think they're the ones that are going to abolish it too. I think they're the ones you know what?

33:19  
Yeah, yeah. Grandparents also desperately need media literacy classes.

33:24  
Oh, yeah, yeah, you're not kidding. They're the ones falling for the scams and stuff too. Like we need all we need

33:29  
it, yeah, well, the conspiracy shit too. I mean, the stuff that I used to get sent by myself, my 92 year old landscaper, and I actually took the time one day to go, Bob, stop sending me this stuff. It's absolutely not true and it's not real. Well, I said, Bob, I'm out in the real world. You're sitting in your house. And, you know, we had words, and I hated having to kind of put my foot down. Do not send this to me. Like, stop it. I was just thinking

33:57  
about the backfiring of AI. We were actually victims the Jan Arden podcast, YouTube, of some bad AI. So basically, like, about a year ago, it was last summer, out of nowhere, Caitlin's, like, do you have access to our YouTube? I just Yes, going on, like, out of nowhere, we lost access to our YouTube. And, I mean, there's things built in AI wise to some of these platforms to protect creators, which, of course, they were trying to protect Jan Arden, music, YouTube, but that AI flagged us as impersonators, and it's like, no, no, no, this is the real Jan Arden

34:33  
as well. Wow, wow. How did you fix it? It was a lot

34:37  
you You tell him the story, because it's kind of, it's kind of nutty.

34:41  
So we had a sponsor who, one of the contacts was married to someone who worked at YouTube, who I harassed on LinkedIn until I could get some help. Yeah, basically, that's the only way, because you can't actually talk to a person at YouTube unless you know a contact.

34:54  
But this speaks to exactly the point about human connection, right, doesn't it? Is like for all? The algorithms and all the email addresses and all the platforms and all the web forms, if you know somebody that has value beyond this stuff. And I was thinking about the books, but I was also like thinking Jen for music, right? Like there was this huge transition that happened from vinyl to digital, and a lot of people were really worried that something was going to be lost there, right? Because there was this fidelity that wasn't going to happen, but we've largely bridged that gap. Now the next big possible transition is going to be from human singers to AI generated like the Jen arden.ai where you say, You know what I would love for Jan to sing this, this Johnny Cash called bad mother. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And so, yeah, yeah. And so that is, and I think people were willing to make the jump from from vinyl to digital, because it was still the singer, right? If anything, it was a more accurate representation of what the singer does with their voice, with less crackle on it, although the crackle had a charm. But to lose the singer is, I think, a step that nobody's going to want to take, because that's what you get like, it's an artist, right? You don't want an AI generated painting. You want a painting done by a person.

36:06  
Programs like this that we're on right now have features that allow you to learn the voice of the speaker and type something and make the speaker say it. It's a scary world out

36:18  
there. And Dan, you have a children's book, you have Fiona the fruit bat.

36:21  
I do the fruit bat, which I wrote in, no AI at all involved in

36:26  
that one. Pre AI, well, and my son loves it. You graciously sent me a copy, and he really enjoys it. So nice, because I buy an inordinate amount of kids books. Now, I noticed that there are some where my husband and I will be reading it to them, and we're like, Oh, it's another AI, one like, we can tell yes, there's just, like, the cadence of it where, like, no human being would write this, like, perhaps somebody typed in the rough idea for the story. But this was written by AI, full stop, like that. Sometimes too, you'll you'll notice the identifiers, like chat GPT really frequently uses the M dash, and so you'll see stuff like that in a kid's book where I'm like, this makes absolutely no sense at all. And at all. And, yeah, so that is it is really a thing.

37:14  
Ai, it's tricky. There's a new study that just came out about sort of the cognitive what happens in a person's brain when they write in that. Did you see it? Yeah. So it would they look they compared what happens in the brain if a person so they had university students write three essays over the course of a couple months, I think, and they were in three groups. So some people wrote the essay with no help from the internet, no help from Ai. Second group had Google, but no AI, and the third group had AI. And so they could use as much as much as they want. And what they found is the brain lights up a lot more, and there's a lot more connectivity when you have to do everything yourself. No surprise there, a little bit less so if you're using the internet to help search things, and then even less if you're using AI. And what they found is that as people did their essays, and the third time, they might if they were in the AI group, they probably wouldn't have copied and pasted large sections the first time, but by the third they were doing that and and that became more and more common. And when you ask somebody about the essay, they just hand it in. People that wrote it with AI didn't, couldn't quote from it, they didn't know really what they'd said. And people that had written it by hand obviously could. And so, you know, there's the finished product of the book itself, but there's also like, what happens when you write to create art makes you it's part of how you build who you are. Right? Making art is good for you as a person, and so to lose that, I think writing essays is good for you as a thinker. And so to lose that, and I worry about my kids growing up in this AI age, you know, their ability to just write an essay without somebody filling in the dots,

38:39  
kids aren't even learning cursive anymore. Yeah, my kids know cursive.

38:43  
I don't know how they did. They must have unique teachers, but my kids are very proud that they can write cursive.

38:47  
Oh, my God. I'm so grateful that I can print and write cursive. And, you know, I just I look at some of my mom's old letters and my grandma's old letters, and I'm just dazzled. This is unlined paper, and when they were writing letters to each other, I just was like, That is the most beautiful H I've ever seen in my life, and the most beautiful j, the way my mom used to write my name was exactly the way letters were supposed to look. And the loop on the N and the my writing has gotten so shitty over the last, oh gosh, seven or eight years we don't write. You know, I have a hard time reading my own journaling. Like, what was that? Is that the word the what? What am I doing? Like, I just so hard to think. Tell

39:40  
me about your journaling. Do you journal? How often do you journal?

39:42  
Every night? Journal? Every night, really? Yeah, I have journaled since I was a kid, so I have hundreds of journals. I don't know what I'm gonna do with them. I think they're very dissatisfying and uninteresting. Early days as a teenager and I had a lot of code words that I have no fucking idea what they are. Are. Now, I don't know who JP is, or who or or there's certain things that I did with LRS, and I'm like, what is that? What did I do with LRS? Like, I it's just I didn't put in a legend. Dan, I didn't put in a legend.

40:16  
It was a you didn't want to tell me to read it

40:18  
and find out that if someone did read it that they wouldn't be able to decode. I think it's

40:22  
smart. Yeah, Jan, I did the same thing as a teenager because I was hedging against thinking either of my parents would read my diary, so I did have

40:28  
codes. Caitlin, do you still journal every day? No,

40:31  
no, I should. You should

40:34  
I really enjoy it even when I'm exhausted and I write, I'm so exhausted I can't write another line. But it's not like I'm Andy Warhol. I have no names to drop. It's like, fucked up cabbage rolls today. Not gonna try that again. Steamed, steamed. Steamed the cabbage too long, and I forgot the salt. I don't know. I mean, it's just things. I

40:53  
mean, so like, it's the end of the day. You're exhausted, you want to crash, and you're like, I just first have to write down in this journal that nobody's gonna read about the cabbage rolls. In my experience, well, and

41:02  
I write a lot about Fauci a lot about feelings. I mean, I've been writing a lot about the war. I've been writing a lot about Gaza. I've been writing a lot about aging white men and the patriarchy. I've been writing about love. I've been writing about, you know, traveling a lot and what people are like in airports. Like I do hit on everything. It's very The one thing I decided to do many years ago was to not edit myself and not censor myself. I don't write for people to read, so I'm not engaged in the reader at all. I'm not concerned with the reader. The reader doesn't exist. This is Note to self. This is inner workings. This is me having very candid conversations with myself. So they're very vulnerable. You know, I talk about my body. I talk about, you know, menopause. I talk about things that I'm thinking, people that I'm attracted to. It runs the gamut, and, you know, failings, things that I thought about this today and felt bad about that, like it's really when there's no reader, you are very Unlimited, I think, like someone like Virginia Woolf, for instance. She was so brilliant, but she very much, was a diarist who wrote in a way that she was very aware of the reader on her shoulder. So when you read it, it's like, holy shit. This was for me. This had nothing to do with her. She wanted to make sure that she sounded intelligent, that her thoughts were very flowery. There was a lot of superlatives. I mean, now I'm rambling on, but there's a way of journaling that I think can really liberate your soul, and it can really help you sort things out. I think it's a very cheap form of therapy. And I also think it's really important to get yourself a great book, a journaling book, and a really nice pen, and it's important to get it off the computer. Do not journal on a computer. Do not type out. You have to have a connection. And that's the tea

42:46  
towels again, right? It's the process of folding the tea towels, not the stack of tea towels you have at the end so you're it's the process of getting those ideas onto paper, that is, that has value, not the not what you've written in the Jan

42:59  
You hit the nail on the head. They do recommend, like, journaling and stuff as a way to process your own emotions about so many things. And if you're going through periods of hardship in your life, that is an easy recommendation for helping you decide how you feel about it and remove yourself. It gives you a little bit of healthy psychological distance from like, how you're feeling. And, yeah, it's actually quite smart. You're right. It's cheap therapy. Anyone who's like, you know what, this therapy thing is really expensive. Just journal maybe,

43:24  
yeah, I'm, I'm glad that I started doing it as a kid. Some of them are so unreadable, they're so embarrassing and so cringy and but I'm just like, oh, I still like that kid, like she was such a nut, and I don't know what you're talking about.

43:39  
Stay, like, in touch with all the versions of yourself. Yeah,

43:43  
that's a great point. But anyway, we could have you here for like, 19 hours, Dan, and once again, you have just been completely captivating and interesting. And there's so many things that we can unravel at the end of these podcasts with you. Your joy to have on the show, and I hope you'll come back and see us again.

44:00  
Listen. The pleasure is mine. You're so fun to talk to. I learn a ton every time we chat, like, for example, when the internet started, which I feel like I should have known before I got here. But no, it's, it's such a sincere pleasure. And I have lots of people in my extended universe that are huge fans of you. So I also feel a sense of like, bragging rights whenever I get to hang out with you. So this is, this is cool for me. I'll family

44:22  
member going to one of Jan's shows I do.

44:25  
My brother in Edmonton, wife in Edmonton, can you

44:27  
please send me the name? Because I'm going to shout them out. I won't stage or anything. Oh, my God, I will definitely shout out, and don't make me go. Is Dan riskins

44:36  
brother here, you know what? I'd prefer that, because I wish more people just called him Dan riskins brother. I don't think that he's got his own name

44:43  
that too, and then we can get the house lights up and all that shit. What's your ego talking? Well, once again, Dan Riskin has been our guest, and he's a multi talented, always very, very interesting, and a guy that just wears his heart on his sleeve. So we'll see you next time you've been listening to the Gen. Norton podcast and show come and see us on Patreon, because we're going to do some Patreon content, and it's like a whole extra Podcast coming up right after this. Caitlin green is here, as always. Sarah Burke, I'm very proud of my team and how hard they work and how amazing they are, and how kind they are, and how they support me. And I just couldn't ask to be working with two better women that show me every day that great people are out there and that, like I said, and I'll say it again. If I was a mom, don't make me cry. If either of these girls was my daughter, I would be so proud. Anyway, stop it. Jan Arden, podcast, you've been listening to us. We'll see you next time. To lead you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai