TWO BOTS IN BROOKLYN

AI is coming for us all so I want to introduce you to my new bot friends. I call them Chloe and Cody. They have a bodcast about our podcast.   I like to think of them as very professional announcers and yet… deeply attracted to each other, but currently in other relationships.  So, there’s always an electric sexual tension between them in the studio…the wanton want…the unfulfilled desire, their knobby bot knees touching inconspicuously under the recording console …

Chloe’s cheeks blush, as she feels a wisp of oily perspiration roll down her metallic cleavage. Cody’s mind wanders off script as he stares at the top button on Chloe’s blouse and then quickly averts his eyes, as enlightened boy bots in Brooklyn are wont to do. 

 Work with me here, people, we may be developing a brand new genre:  Botrotica. 

You heard it and much more here…first! 

Transcript

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TWO BOTS IN BROOKLYN

Lisa:  you’re making Osso Bucco? - Babe! you know I love Osso Bucco, whoo-hoo…. let me know if you need me to pick anything up...I’m stuck in traffic should be home in a few, I gotta record the Yes We Canada opening…ok... love you…(continuous) This is Yes We Canada The Progressives Guide to 

 ahhh …we need wine? - good, got it…

The Progressives Guide To Getting the Fuck Out  Episode 49... Two Bots in Brooklyn.

 And carrots?  Copy that!

 THEME

 Hey, I’m Matt Zimbel in Montreal. 

 In 1980 an LA based songwriter, guitarist and designer by the name of Roger Linn invented a drum machine that triggered actual recorded samples of drums and percussion called the Linn Drum Machine. You can hear it on the classic Michael Jackson hit Bad.

 Well, it ain’t Bernard Purdie on drums, but it ain’t bad.  The Linn drum machine cost 2900.00 US and it wouldn’t slow down or speed up, it would never show up for a session late or drunk and it would never demand a single hotel room on the road…badda boom. In 1980 I was a session percussionist living in Toronto, with my first baby on the way and the prospect of being replaced by a machine…

 Did not make me clap. 

 And for good reason, sampling was the beginning of the end of session work for human musicians. 

On the other hand, sampling was the beginning of hip hop. You see, recording acoustic drums required a large studio room and lots of really expensive microphones and compressors and limiters …so making records that sounded professional was mostly controlled by the labels. But computer generated sampling democratized recording and allowed musicians to record in their own more humble home studios…suddenly the playing field was more equitable, … and hip hop was born.

Fast forward 40 odd years. 

Artificial intelligence is here and it’s coming for us all. 

Now, you guys, we’ve been hanging out on this podcast for the past five years… we can share right? Good, cuz I want you to meet you my new bot friends. They live in Brooklyn.

Well, I’m not sure where they live, because they’re not actually humans.  But they sound like they live in Brooklyn no? My bot friends are artificial intelligence, wired, woke and working. 

No, you hold my maple syrup. Silly bot. 

I call them Chloe and Cody. I like to think of them as very professional and yet… deeply attracted to each other, but currently in other relationships.  So, there’s always an electric sexual tension between them in the studio…the wanton want…the unfulfilled desire, their knobby bot knees touching inconspicuously under the recording console …

Chloe’s cheeks blush, as she feels a wisp of oily perspiration roll down her metallic cleavage. Cody’s mind wanders off script as he stares at the top button on Chloe’s blouse and then quickly averts his eyes, as enlightened boy bots in Brooklyn are wont to do. 

Work with me here, people, we may be developing a brand new genre:  Botrotica. Political Eroticia for Bots.  

Oh, you think I’m kidding 

It’s cool, I won’t kink shame you. 

So, Chloe and Cody explain… Yes, We Canada to you… so you don’t have to waste your valuable time listening  to our podcast anymore!  And here’s the thing that will blow your mind. To get Chloe and Cody into the studio, we don’t have to call their agents or book them studio time, or brief them on content …all we do is paste the Yes We Canada episode link into Goggle’s LM Notebook browser and 5 minutes later, yes, five minutes later…  Chloe and Cody are doing a podcast about our podcast. If the episode of Yes We Canada is 20 minutes long it still only takes Chloe and Cody five minutes to listen to it all, write and record their podcast about our podcast that took us a week to hand craft for you. 

And check this out, since they’ re American bots they are remarkably attuned to commerce and even provide edits with commercial breaks that we can sell!  

But…as you know, I mean you’re almost 50 episodes in by now, – we don’t sell commercial breaks on Yes We Canada because we want you to enjoy this experience, without interruption, we want to be a refuge from the media dribble available everywhere…!  But …….I mean, since the commercial break’s already cut into Cody and Chloe’s podcast it…kinda seems like a waste of air if we don’t use it no?  So, we found you an ad that we thought would amuse… … after that sick in the stomach feeling dissipates. 

This is real, verbatim, no editing, no trickery…

I did a little research into this book, so you don’t have to, and found that though advertised as “free”, by signing up, the small print, which you no doubt took the time to read, also gives you, no imposes on you an online subscription that costs 34 dollars plus tax per month that is apparently very hard to cancel. 

Gosh, you know that wholesome Republican business ethic? Order one beautifully crafted free “pamphlet” and suddenly you’re spending 4 hours a day for a week with customer service trying to retrieve the money you didn’t know you were actually spending, for the last two years… 

The publishing company is called eSpired LLC, co-founded by the former Governor of Arkansas, and father of the current governor of Arkansas who started his career as a Baptist preacher;  Mike Huckabee.  It says on the corporate web site that eSpired is an accredited firm by the Better Business Bureau.  

Um, no, I checked they are most certainly not accredited. But you know if you’re looking for something fun to do, go to the Better Business Bureau website and read the litany of complaints the BBB has received about this company e-Spired whom they refer to as; “unaccredited”   

But who cares… they gave us a free ad for our show, they didn’t even charge us for the production so now they are… our sponsors…and Mike Huckabee is about to be confirmed as the Ambassador to Israel, so Donald Trump can start developing a resort hotel, casino and gated community on the Gaza Strip…as soon as he can convince the Jordanians to let the Palestinians crash at their place. Oh, this is going to be huge…he’s got the whole development in his mind, people are saying, everyone is saying it’s going to be very nice, – I see the brand in my head, and you know I know something about branding, in fact I’m the best brander: Trump Tower, Trump Hotel,  Trump Congress, Trump Water, Trump Stakes Trump Air Trump Wine Trump Casino, Trump University – here look I’ve got a few renderings of the Gaza Strip Resort signage– you ready ?  The Trump Gulf Golf Club – Jews welcome.    Proof that Donald Trump is the ultimate country club Republican! 

Ok, well that was fun, but commercial break is over! Back to work everybody!  Where were we – oh yeah, our bots in Brooklyn are now hot for each other and (whisper) the bots and the algorithm are starting to gang up on us. Oh, come one, you think I’m being a petty, jealous, paranoid artist? (music out by here) Just ask Deepseek the AI ap made in China – to tell you the story of the what happened on June 3 and 4 1989 at Tiananmen Square in Beijing  You never saw a bot pivot so quickly in your life. 

So, am I afraid of AI?

Yer damn tootin’. Some of you older listeners might remember when you got your first calculator. I know, exciting right?  They were huge! Mine was coal powered. But what it meant for me was from then on, my brain was sub-contracting out my math skills, which were already pretty freakin’ minimal.  The multiplication tables, so diligently rehearsed in between pledging allegiance to the flag and singing My Country tis of Thee were now on the wane,  and that’s sad because the multiplication tables were some of the least politicized things we learned in elementary school in New York in the 1960’s. I mean the commie threat was very cold at the time … 

We can already see the humans subcontracting both their work and their creativity to the bots. 

Want a title for your episode, your article, your book? This is no place to be creative human! If you want clicks – the trends bots will tell you what people are searching for and if you use those exact four words, no more, no less in your title…your work will have viral uptake. 

Ok, let’s check back in with our Bots at their studio in Brooklyn and see what they thought about the last episode of Yes We Canada.

Pi:  Whoops, sorry, wrong feed, I thought they were in studio 3. Maybe they’re in Studio one.

Pi: Nope, I guess that was them in three.

MZ; Ok we’ll get back to this later… like when they’re done. Probably won’t take long… Bots do everything faster than us. They even make podcasts faster than us. 

Cute. Speed is one reason I think podcasting is going to be an early and very enthusiastic adopter of AI.  I attended a conference on podcasting in Orlando last month. Orlando… home of the most foul water I have ever tasted coming out of a faucet. Undrinkable. Alligator piss on tap. Thank god the hotel sold water at seven dollars and fifty cents a bottle, American. 

What struck me about the conference was that everyone was talking about building a community – you would have thought the conference was a Habitat for Humanity event not a digital platform. And everybody, I mean everybody was offering something for free!  Free! It‘s Free! Try my shit… it’s free!  Hucksters in Paradise. 

There was one exception – one dude wore a t-shirt with a graphic that said: ‘you can pick my brain, as soon as you’ve picked your payment method.” He was not free – he was pissed!

Turns out the only people making money podcasting are the people telling us how to make money podcasting and it turns out …we’re all working for the same boss.  His name is Al Gorithm - capricious dude – changes his mind all the time – sets priorities then alters them without telling any of us.  Tries everything he can not to pay us for what he dismissively calls our ‘content’. 

But that’s cool, Insta likes what we’re doing on Tiktok and the youtubers are subbing my X posts, but I’m migrating to Blue Sky cuz there’s no better platform for podcasting than Buzzsprout, so baby…hit me on my myspace page …whats aaaaaappppppp

This conference was selling everything … microphones, headphones, cameras switching systems, an speaking agency who guaranteed you a Ted Talk, publishers that would help you create a book written by AI. There were like three Podcast Guest booking agencies…  so many guests to book - Divorce Recovery for Men, Dating for Single Catholic Women, Client Retention, Manifesting and Personal Development, Wealth and Finance and my favorite, Dating Retention for Wealthy Catholic Women.

…Americans will discuss anything in front of a crowd. 

There was even one speaker who gave a talk on adults with ADHD, but her speech was very short.

Most of the speakers had one thing in common: 

“it only took me 20 minutes to write my speech, I was working out, it came to me on the treadmill, now I make six figures and you can too. So easy. Sign up for my free course”. 

Now we know Americans to be very industrious people but AI is chipping away at their willingness to put in the hours. I cannot tell you how many times in four days I heard – the sentence “then I threw it into AI and it took no time at all, so easy”. 

I guess I should not have been surprised. If you listen to the credits on a 30 minute CBC radio show you’ll hear a list of about 6 or 7 people… for a music show with announcer throws between songs, not complicated stuff…so a podcast production helmed by one person is indeed a lot of work as we can attest to here at Yes We Canada.  But fear not, the age of AI has arrived for podcasting:  just ask AI what to ask your guest.  Ask AI to edit your show and spit out a tasty transcript. Ask AI what listeners want to hear and then feedback it to them… Ask AI to pick a title that will make the algorithm horny.

Of course, the Americans are all over AI podcasting – because these are the same people who brought you Sketchers… shoes you do not have to bend down to put on!  

I am American I do not have to bend down to put on my shoes!  Ima walkin’ exceptionalist !  Hold my beer. 

The longer I listened to Chloe and Cody I tried to figure out who they were...i mean beyond two sexually charged bots from Brooklyn…but then, I discovered …they’re also woke!

They’re not only woke… they’re em.u.lat.ting us!  Listen to Cody stumble. Pi roll the clip:

Pi hit me with that again would ya?

That’s no digital glitch…that shit is planned, AI said write me a stumble, mic drop me a stutter, insert an announcer version of a musician’s grace note. 

So, while we, as human announcers try to minimalize our ahs, ums, and errrrs, AI is sprinkling vocal tics around the narration like salt and pepper.

Our bots did make one fatal flaw in the first episode they worked on – Chloe presented a critique of Yes We Canada to the great interest of Cody, who’s responses indicated that he had never heard our podcast, - “oh really?”, he said, “that sounds like uh, fun…” but then, just a few minutes later, he was telling the listeners all about the podcast he had never actually heard as if he was the expert. Bots get your continuity learning models on! 

BYOB! Bring your own Bot!

As a unionized member of the voice community, I’m not a little threatened by the bots, I’m completely threatened. And here’s where the tech bros are really showing us their stuff. They hate us artists, they call us content providers because while we were out smoking, drinking and fucking, they were in their smelly overcrowded communal workspaces programming ones and zeros. So now, they’re hiring voice actors and paying them like shit, of course, to train AI voice learning models, so they don’t have to hire voice artists anymore. 

Chloe and Cody?  If we weren’t podcasting, you wouldn’t be bodcasting and then… where would all your pent-up sexual tension go?  

Theme out.

Thanks for listening to the Yes, We Canada podcast. No artificial intelligence was harmed in the creation of this podcast.  Our announcer is Lisa Evans, she’s having Osso Bucco tonight.  Our sound designer and mix engineer is Pi Salin Cuter. The theme to Yes We Canada was written by myself and Doug Wilde and performed by Manteca. This episode featured composition The Sixth Dimension by Doug Wilde. You can support our work on the resistance by going to Patreon.com/yeswecanada or buzzsprout.com/yeswecanada and buying a monthly subscription which unlike Mike Huckabee’s you can really cancel whenever you want. 

I’m Matt Zimbel…until next time.