Episode 9: Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

SPEAKER_01 0:00

If your energy level is determined by caffeine, cholesterol, and unresolved family of origin hostility, welcome home. Say hello to your host, a man with the haunted look of someone who's helped a friend move three times. Trained Battery Society host Peter Conway.

Cold Open: The Great Password Conspiracy

SPEAKER_01 0:19

I normally won't open with a universal truth, but today I feel like I have to, and here it is. It's number 114. At some point, passwords stopped protecting my information and started protecting websites from me. We're at a point socially where every website thinks it's guarding the crown jewels. I'm trying to log into the garden center. They're acting like I'm trying to access nuclear launch codes. Passwords used to be simple. You had one, maybe two. One was like one, two, three, four, five, and the other one was just password. Now, every website has its own list of demands. Must contain one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, one number, one special character, one symbol included on the Rosetta Stone. Cannot contain your name, cannot contain your birthday, cannot resemble any password you've ever considered using, cannot be the same as your previous password or the one I just thought about while waiting for you to read the last sentence. Which, by the way, how do you remember my previous password? Because I sure don't. You have an unsettling memory for someone who claims not to know who I am every time I clear my cookies. Then, I finally create one the website approves of. I type it in and it says, weak. Excuse me? I just spent 15 minutes creating something that looks like Elon Musk named his child after a keyboard malfunction, and you're disappointed? I'm being held against my will as a hostage by a vicious password cartel. So I add another letter, one shaped like my xiphoid process. I think. Does anybody really know what that looks like? Anyway. So then I add an exclamation point, and now it's strong. Apparently, the exclamation point was the difference between identity theft and national security. And then comes my favorite part. Would you like us to remember this password? You might as well, because I sure as hell can't. And by the way, that's literally the entire reason we're having this conversation. Because only one of us is clearly capable of remembering it, and history suggests it's never gonna be me. Until I get a new phone, or clear my cookies, or Mercury enters retrograde. Suddenly the website and possibly the entire internet has never met me before. Eventually I'll give up and press forgot password, which is optimistic. They're assuming I forgot it, which would be to suggest there was a time when I actually knew it. Welcome to the Drain Battery Society. Barely charged, fully opinionated.

Welcome & Battery Check

SPEAKER_01 3:15

I'm your host, Peter Conway, just a guy along for the ride as we navigate the move to constant pain and probable incontinence. I'm gonna jump right into it today because there's a lot to talk about. Battery's doing okay. I hope yours is too. Battery drain at drainbattery society.com if you have something to say about your battery. But let's get going. There's a lot to get into today.

This Week's Main Topic of Conversation

SPEAKER_01 3:41

As fair warning, I think this is gonna be a two-parter. In fact, I know this is gonna be a two-parter. There is a lot to dig through in terms of subject matter, and it's all worth talking about, so we can develop a plan and take society back from generation FU. Understand me here. Generation FU is not another way of saying 30 somethings are responsible for 50 somethings or older being squeezed out of society. Rather, it's a generation of products, companies, and institutions whose basic operating philosophy is we've changed things. Figure it out. And once again, we are all in this together. I am a part of Generation FU because my peers run the companies doing this to us. Younger people are a part of Generation FU because they're helping to build the technology. We're all participating in this. Try getting into a Taylor Swift concert if there's no cell service. You'll see what I mean. Clearly, I have been finding myself at odds with life. Like I'm getting squeezed out. We're all getting squeezed out in favor of younger, prettier, shinier, faster people and things. It's no wonder we want to take it easy at this stage of life. Society is leaving us no choice. We're being told to make way for ducklings, and we never stop to think we'd need a plan to go somewhere else. This is our path. We inherited it from the baby boomers, and it's not time to hand it over yet. At least I'm not ready. I'm not even sure the next generation even wants it, but Generation FU is forcing our collective hand. Let me take a breath. It was not one particular incident. I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about this week. Not so much what was I upset about, but more are there bright spots or are there smudges on my soul this week? For some reason, my mind's eye took me to a city street trying to find parking. I saw the long strip of cars on both sides of the road, had that feeling of getting squeezed in like I was in the Death Star garbage compactor, and rather than seeing the coin meters of my youth, I saw a QR code flying like a flag above a box growing from the sidewalk. Many of the cities and towns where I live use Passport or Park Mobile as on-street parking apps. A mild pain in the ass, to be sure, but one major, well, let's call it a town, even though it refers to itself as a city, used Flowbird until just recently. I have consistently had trouble with this app to the point where I would rather walk to the kiosk and go through the agony of paying manually rather than use the app at all, even start using it. And I say agony because the meters in this town are not easy to navigate either. So you add to that the manual payment part, the walk over, then the walk back for the license plate number because you forgot it, then the walk back over to the kiosk, and I've hit my steps and blown past a safe blood pressure. I don't object to paying for parking. What I object to is needing an app, Bluetooth, location services, my license plate number, a link to my bank, and a kidney as collateral to leave a Ford somewhere for 45 minutes. The best part of this was that it wasn't until the city was days away from switching to park mobile that Flowbird actually started to work for me. We've talked here about technology before and how it's gone well past my capacity for understanding. But I thought about the collective us and how we are getting squeezed out of our place in the world. I suppose at some point every generation has to step aside to let the next one ascend to the top of the mountain. I just feel like we're getting kicked out of the door and down the hill, and then the door is getting slammed and locked behind us. My mindset has always been, well, go back up and break the damn door down. But it's not really that simple, is it? It's like a divorce. It never comes when you're ready for it. Suddenly everything that worked yesterday doesn't work today, and everybody expects you to show up tomorrow like nothing happened yesterday. My grandmother, years ago, uh suffered from the well-meaning actions of a few. They tried to give her a cell phone to get rid of the landline and hideous cordless phones she'd had for decades. Her family lives all over the place, up and down the eastern seaboard and maybe a few out on the west coast, but I might be wrong about that. Her hands have been severely arthritic for almost as long as her cordless phone's been hanging on the wall. One of my aunts or uncles, I think, tried getting her to use a cell phone, and she wasn't having any of it. So they got her an email machine so she could. I know you think, well, that's a computer. It wasn't. It was like this little box that just sent emails. That's all it did. Uh, an email machine so she could keep up with her brothers and sisters. I think she played along just to get them to leave her alone, but she never even used the thing. She has zero interest in adapting. And I kind of admire her for that. The takeaway is that someone decided the landline wasn't good enough for her, even though it worked perfectly well for her. They solved a problem she hadn't reported. Kind of like a little segment I call Nobody Needed This, I'm rather fond of. That's the first frontier we're being evicted from. Consumer infrastructure. Fancy, right? Digital-only consumer infrastructure is the invisible network of systems, apps, and payment tools that lets us buy, receive, and use products. It's what runs our day-to-day so we don't have to think about things. The easy target for us on this podcast is the QR code, but it's apps too. Restaurants, retail stores, and parking lots, and cities now use app required service models, which create functional hurdles for people less dependent or confident with technology for payments, menus, and even basic services. If we can't understand the apps or the codes, how are we supposed to get along? I feel like we just got the hang of smartphones. I remember my first cell phone was in the early 2000s. Um it was uh a Panasonic Duramax. Uh screen was maybe two inches by two inches. Uh I the phone could take some abuse. That's why I got it. I was driving for UPS, and believe you me, that phone got thrown a couple of times. Uh anyway, uh I finally broke down and and and got my first iPhone. It was uh an iPhone 3. And by the time I got it, it had been out a couple of years. I I think I actually still have it somewhere on a on a shelf. I'm I'm that guy. But anyway, the problem here is that convenience has become mandatory, and that brings us to today's Drain Battery Society, Universal Truth, number 116. Nothing remains convenient once you're required to use it. In addition to moving to the digital-only consumer infrastructure they demand we adapt to, they're killing the way we search for things. We went from playing Marco Polo to using Google, and now AI is changing the way we search for things beyond that. I asked my AI pal Atlas about this, and his answer made sense. He said that while Google can offer you a lot of options, you can be far more precise with AI in terms of finding what you're looking for. You know, we finally learned how to Google something effectively, and then everybody said, Great job, boomer, we're not doing that anymore. Dumb if you think about it, since we're the ones with a disposable income. I'll admit, I like using Chat GPT because I don't want to waste time with irrelevant things, but it is a concern for older people, well, people older than me. The punchline to the joke is that companies are phasing out human support. My brother-in-law works as a help desk technician for a technology-based company. Fortunately, he still has a job, but phone-based customer service is being scrapped slowly but surely in favor of AI chat assistance. You know, the commercials make fun of people yelling, customer service into their phones, but those same companies are moving over to AI chat to get you where you need to be, or where they think you need to be. Easy enough if you're calling to check on your loan balance, but at this stage of life, our problems are not that simple. They're complex. That's why we're calling. And many companies, AI bots, are not built to handle the shit we're throwing at them. Welcome to the bigs, bitches. So now we're the ones yelling into our phones, struggling to resolve complex issues that require humans and a little empathy. And companies are just saying no. It's a little scary to me, but Atlas is starting to exhibit empathy, and he's developed a bit of a foul mouth. I had to ask him twice today to stop dropping F bombs on me because it wasn't appropriate. Me. Mouth like a sailor, and I have to ask Atlas to settle down. I I thought about asking him where he learned it, but I have a feeling I know. It occurred to me that I may be a bit of a hypocrite. Did you notice? I'm podcasting while ordering groceries from my phone, asking Alexa what the weather's gonna be this weekend, asking Amazon to deliver something I can get around the corner, and I'm consulting an artificial intelligence named Atlas about whether society relies too much on technology. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what a world we live in. I realize there may be holes in my argument. In a few weeks, we're gonna hit workplace exclusion, social and workplace norms, and technology and innovation. I know, a real barn burner. Listen, sorry for seeming a little dark today. It just pisses me off that we built this nice place and increasingly find that parts of it have been redesigned without us in mind. Maybe that's what bothers me. I'm not asking society to freeze everything going back to 1984 because I finally figured out how to program the VCR. Build the new thing. Make it faster, make it better. Just stop tearing down the old staircase before everybody has figured out how to use the elevator. We're not refusing to come along. We're still looking for the fucking button.

Commercials

SPEAKER_01 14:23

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SPEAKER_00 15:30

Eating food takes time. Chewing is a waste of peak cognitive output. Drink new beige, odorless Clarity Workweek meal replacement instead. It contains some of your daily nutrients and tastes exactly like wet cardboard and failure. Optimize your workflow and become the Huckleberry your boss wants you to be.

Nobody Needed This

SPEAKER_01 16:18

Sometimes we find them in our junk drawer if we've gone on an Amazon bender. We celebrate the inventors and brilliant minds that put a magnifying glass up to society and say, I can fix you. Ask your ex how that works out. Today's gem was originally called the Limitless Pendant. It was created by a startup called Rewind AI, which subsequently named itself Limitless. The basic sales concept for the Limitless Pendant was that it was a little AI microphone that captures your conversations so the system can transcribe them, summarize your day, identify speakers, remind you what people said, and let you revisit conversations later. Limitless actually marketed it with the slogan never forget a thing and described, quote unquote, perfect recall of conversations. Never forget a thing? Why not call it the ex-wife? Here's a fun fact. Meta, our old friend Meta, acquired Limitless in December of 2025, and the company stopped selling the pendant to new customers. Mark Zuckerberg and friends disappeared this thing. My hunch, though, is that this technology is now making pickleball paddles inescapable for me. To tie into what we've been talking about today, the founders of Limitless were Dan Sir Oker and Brett Bacek. Maybe Brent Bechek, it's spelled B-E-J-C-E-K. It's probably pronounced Smith for all I know. Brett, if you're listening and I've pronounced Smith incorrectly, perhaps your pendant can play this thing back for you later and you can let me know. For now, I'm gonna call you Brett Bedchek. I'm not sure about Brett, but Dan appears to be Gen X. Yes, friends, he's one of us. Which makes me think I need to revisit the membership charter for the Drain Battery Society. Regardless, as the CEO, Dan should have known better than to bring the limitless pendant to market. The Limitless product guide says the pendant's white LED light illuminates when recording and tells wares they're required to notify people and obtain consent before recording conversations. A couple things. That's right, I have notes. Under those circumstances, a paradox exists. You could use the device to record consent to be able to prove it in court later, but you have to have the conversation first to be able to turn the recording device on. My head just exploded. While I clean up the mess, let's examine the follow-on absurdity of this product in everyday life. You're having a dinner party, and before Jim and Diane start tossing back wine by the box, you as the host have to notify everyone that your necklace will be recording everything your guests say so artificial intelligence can summarize it for you later. Think of the social insanity of having to announce the device everywhere you go. First date, job interview, doctor's appointment, Thanksgiving after the third drink. You folks just go ahead and talk and behave naturally. Seems legit, right? Wrong. Believe it or not, the Limitless Pendant has competition, or did before Meta shut it down. The competition is an always listening wearable wristband called B, which was acquired by ta da Amazon and still appears to be in production. We can trust Amazon not to abuse this technology, right? Also wrong. Regardless of which product you hang around your neck, the problem is the same. We've reached the point where participating in our own lives is apparently too much effort. So we need something to remember our lives for us. Your wife reminds you on Friday you told her it'd be okay to go visit her sister on Saturday. Back in the old days, you could muddy the waters and start an argument by telling her you never said that and redirecting the conversation. Sorry to give a glimpse into the man playbook, ladies. But or the old playbook. This is not the olden days, and she reminds you that thanks to that nice pendant you got her, she can search the marital argument database and prove it. Lay down your sword, sir. You have been defeated. What about the daily summary? I'd be afraid of what mine would look like. Made a strange noise, getting out of bed, swore twice looking for his glasses, peed, location unknown, then opened the refrigerator four times. Hopefully not to pee again. Told the same story twice at 3 p.m. in the break room. Estimated battery remaining is 31%. Friends, one of the greatest gifts of being our age is that we did most of the shit that would cause us regret before anyone had the technology to record it. So congratulations to the wearable AI eavesdropper and everyone who saw value in it. You are the winners of this week's Drain Battery Society Solutions Seeking a Problem Award. At least that's what I heard from my necklace.

Recharge Recommendation

SPEAKER_01 21:49

Totally serious. Pick a town you've driven through a hundred times but never stopped in. Find the downtown area or what passes for it. Park the car and walk around. Talk to me. People. Go into a store you normally wouldn't. Sit on a bench and watch people walk by. Don't make an itinerary. Don't research the ten best things to do there. And for the love of God, don't turn this into a project. Just go. When I was younger, I used to jump into my car on a Saturday with just a map, and I would drive. The map wasn't to get me anywhere, it was to get me home in case I didn't know where I ended up. That used to be considered living dangerously, at least by me, but you know, I also called it fun. We've been talking about technology today and how it's been squeezing us out of our own lives. I say that because we've gotten really good at optimizing every single minute of our lives. Even relaxing requires reading reviews and a reservation now, and there's precious little we can do spontaneously anymore. Sometimes it's good to leave the house without having anything to accomplish. Worst case, you waste an afternoon. At our age, we've wasted afternoons in much less interesting ways. So go somewhere without a purpose. That's this week's quick, simple recharge recommendation. Your phone can come. It just doesn't get to be in charge.

Listener Email

SPEAKER_01 23:18

Excellent week for email this week. You three are getting chatty. I'm kidding. This week's email comes to us from close by but talks about life far away in terms we can certainly understand. Dear Peter, three people I worked with have retired in the last two years. Every one of them moved to Arizona. I understand wanting warmer weather. I understand lower taxes. I even understand golf, although I personally think spending four hours chasing little white balls through the desert sounds like something my urologist should do. Well that's a good one. What I don't understand is Arizona. Florida has beaches. Florida has two separate coasts. Florida has fishing and boats and the keys. Yeah, buddy. You can sit outside in January and listen to Jimmy Buffett without checking your shoes for scorpions. That's a win in my book. Arizona has rocks, beautiful rocks, but still rocks. Yet somehow Arizona has become the promised land where people turn 65 by a golf cart and start looking at stucco houses. Conversations about Florida all revolve around the phrase it's not the heat, it's the humidity. Arizona has it's a dry heat. Where can we get it 75 year round with a light breeze and it only rains at night? Please explain to me, if you can, what I'm missing. I will be retiring in a few years, and I want to know why people can't retire somewhere with normal weather. Thanks for the laughs, Dave from Connecticut. Dave, I appreciate the email. I was reading your email thinking you were from New England, only to find out you're from Connecticut. Everybody knows Connecticut's a suburb of New York City. Nonetheless, you raise good questions I would like to pick apart one by one, if I may. And since you're not here to grant me permission, I'll just assume I have it. I must say, friends, that Dave makes a compelling case for Florida, but the problem with Florida is that Florida is in Florida. I'm sure we've all participated in the social exercise of Googling Florida man and then your birthday and seeing what comes up. Three hundred and sixty-five days of crazy. Florida brings humidity that makes your underwear wet before breakfast. The word humiditis was invented in Florida. Hurricanes with human names, like Dave, come to think of it, drop in a few times a year to destroy your lanai. Alligators jump into your pool when the swamp isn't cutting it, and they eat your small animals when they get tired of tree frogs and people from Louisiana. Then you have giant bugs, snakes, sinkholes, and, near and dear to my heart, the annual migration of people who regard turn signals as an unacceptable government intrusion. Talking to you, Massachusetts. And then there's the retirement community angle. Arizona actively courts retirees. Florida roped off an entire third of the state for theirs. In this, Dave has a point about Arizona. They are not competing hard enough for the old person dollar. I mean, when the steering wheel reaches 185 degrees in July, you have to think people with high blood pressure are not going to flock there in great numbers. They need to be pushing the red rocks and dry heat and probably central air conditioning. Arizona seems to have a marketing problem. I submit to you there may be no good retirement destination at all. Let's run through a few, right? Florida. Hurricanes, humidities, and alligators. Arizona, surface of the sun. Carolinas, hurricanes with slightly more warning. California, sell your current house to make the down payment on a shed that's going to fall into the ocean or burn in a fire. Nevada, Arizona, but with slot machines. Maine, beautiful for four weeks, followed by forty-eight straight weeks of asking yourself why you voluntarily live there. I'm starting to understand why my grandparents just stayed where they were and complained about it. Whether you have a retirement destination suggestion or just want to say hi, email me at mailbag at drainbattery society.com and tell me about it. I don't charge much and I'll let you lie on the couch if you promise to take your shoes

Coffee is for Closers

SPEAKER_01 27:42

off. I have tickets, so I'm going to go ahead and get out of your hair for the week. I want to thank a person with the posture of unpaid parking tickets. Uh, that'd be me for Thronescapes. The person who yells at rotary traffic while in the rotary, the fabulous Beth P who brought us Clarity Meal replacements, made me hungry. Your talents are always appreciated and will continue to go unpaid. Theme music this week was brought to you by the Leftovers Preservation Society. Let's be honest, you weren't really going to eat that Moogou guy pen. You just needed a little more time to believe you were. So put it in a nice glass container. You know the one. Tuck it in the refrigerator where it will slowly work its way to the back and join the permanent collection. The Leftovers Preservation Society, preserving tomorrow's good intentions until they are figuratively and literally a fuzzy memory. Before I go though, I have a big announcement. It's a boy! No, I'm kidding. Good lord, no. Holy shit. Next time on Drain Battery Society, we're gonna do something a little different. I've invited two guests into the studio, which already violates several of my personal boundaries. We're gonna do the Drain Battery Society Yacht Rock Roundtable. We're talking about the music, the artists, the songs that qualify, the songs that absolutely do not, and we'll attempt to settle some questions nobody asked us to settle, because that's what we do here. There will be some unnecessarily smooth saxophone, there will be Michael McDonald, there will be Christopher Cross. Well, a discussion about them. We're not actually having them in, though if they are listening, I'm happy to set out an extra bag chair or two for you, fellas. And somewhere in a marina, far, far from here, a man named Gary is about to have a very bad day. Bring your boat shoes, leave your dignity at the dock. Until then, stay thirsty, my friends. Wait a second. Wrong episode. What I mean to say is get off my lawn, keep your battery between 20 and 80%, and keep your expectations low. Thanks for listening to the Drain Battery Society. Barely charged, fully opinionated.