Call Center Documentary

Seven minutes. That is the invisible clock running behind a huge slice of modern customer service, and it changes everything about how work feels on the other side of the headset. Mike Williams of Sage of Quay Radio talks wiith Peter Tompkins, the filmmaker behind Disconnected: Voices from the Call Center, about what call center life actually looks like when you strip away the corporate recruiting pitch and the “we are family” posters.

Check out Sage of Quay Radio hosted by Mike Williams.

We dig into the machinery of the job: average handle time, hold-time limits, scripts that punish you for missing a single word, recorded calls scored by quality assurance, and the bizarre reality of being told to upsell someone who is already furious about a billing mistake. Peter shares how thin training can be, how hard it is to find real-time support when supervisors vanish into meetings, and why the stress turns into anxiety, migraines, self-medication, and a constant sense that you are never quite “right” no matter how hard you try.

From there, we zoom out to the business model and the culture. We talk about attrition that feels intentional, outsourcing and offshoring to lower-cost countries, union resistance, and why call centers can resemble modern sweatshops where the extraction is mental and emotional rather than purely physical. We also look ahead at AI customer support, what happens when bots can handle thousands of calls at once, and the uncomfortable question of who still gets to earn a living when automation replaces entire job categories.

If you have ever worked a support job, managed a team, or wondered why calling a big company can feel so miserable for everyone involved, this conversation will give you language for what you already sensed. Subscribe for more, share this with someone who has lived the call center grind, and leave a review with your take: which workplace metric has done the most damage where you work?

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Transcript

Welcome Back And Film Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Folks, I have Peter Tompkins back with me today. In fact, before we got started, I mentioned to Pete that I was on his show twice, and he's been on my show twice. It'll be his third time. And uh the first show, Pete went back to July of 2023. So that was almost three years ago, so time flies. And Pete is the content creator behind the YouTube channel PT Pop, a very enjoyable channel. And Pete is also a musician, he's an artist, and he's a filmmaker. And today we're going to talk about his newest documentary, Disconnected, Voices from the Call Center. Pete, correct me if I'm wrong, two other films, Road to Forgiveness, which I watched, which that was a great documentary as well, about your upbringing as a child in your family, and then also The Artist.

SPEAKER_03 1:06

Correct. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

I watched that also a while back. So those two were great. I also watched Disconnected. You sent me the link, and it was great. And uh what I mentioned to Pete folks before I got started with the show is that as many of you know, I worked in the corporate world for over 30 years. So I'm very familiar with call centers and the call center environment. I never worked in one, but in my capacity in my corporate job, I had interaction with the call centers from a financial perspective. So what Pete talks about in the film is real. So with that, Pete, I don't know how you wanted to start. Did you want to talk a little bit about how you got into the corporate world, the call centers, or did you want to go before that? How would you like to kick things off?

SPEAKER_02 1:56

Well, I guess I'll start with a little bit about college. You know, and when you go to college, you think that it's the key, the golden ticket to a great future. You're gonna walk out of school and you're gonna people are gonna be handing you buckets of money just because you have a diploma from a state school. Because I went to uh Ohio University. When I got out of school, I couldn't find any jobs. This was 1988. And, you know, I think we were kind of at the what is that, the beginning of Reagan? Beginning to the end of Reagan's term.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Toward the end.

SPEAKER_02 2:33

The economy wasn't the greatest. And my friend and I, we couldn't find work, and he ended up getting a job in a call center with progressive insurance. And then I got a job with a small telecom company in a call center. And so it just kind of all started there. And initially, call center jobs weren't that bad. And but it was just something I just took because there was nothing else that I could get at the time. So it it just kind of started as just something that I stumbled into and it didn't pay really good, but it was in a nice building, and I got to put on a suit and work in a glass building and drive to a kind of a posh part of Cleveland and sit in a cubicle and talk to people on the phone. And I initially thought it was cool because I got to wear those headsets like they wore in the you know the Apollo Houston astronauts in the control room with a little I thought that was so cool. And I'm like 20 through 22 years old. And and then my initial job in the call centers wasn't bad. There wasn't there were no metrics yet. You could get up and go to the bathroom, you could do what you could talk to your neighbors, you could have an hour lunch, all those things. So that's kind of where it started.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Okay, so you're a young guy, you're 23 years old, you're in a nice corporate facility, you don't have all of the, like you said, the metrics, and we'll get into that in a little bit as we continue the discussion. So you started off, there's no AI, there's you can get up and go to the bathroom, you can pretty much manage your day yourself. And over time, over time, as you and I both know, that managing of yourself at work that disappears. And it actually, in my view, it kind of disappeared pretty quickly as the whole thing with the call centers became more competitive, but also initially call centers were, and you tell me if this is your experience, but this is my experience coming from my background, were expensive to run.

SPEAKER_03 4:38

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:39

So companies were always looking for ways to cut costs, make it more efficient, more effective, more productive. You know, we used to hear that word all the time, right? Productivity. So when did you start to see the the shift from being able to go to work and be a human being to and managing your your your yourself at work to when it started to be taken away from you and essentially employees started to be micromanaged?

SPEAKER_02 5:12

Oh yeah, that that happened. I I my initial company, a friend of mine worked alongside me. She left to go to a company called GTE Wireless. This is in 1994, at the beginning of the cellular boom. And she called me up at my desk and she said, Come on over here, you're gonna make like another$5,000 a year. It's a great company. Cellular is the next best thing. And I interviewed, got the job, and it was my first experience with metrics. It was about like a two, I went from like a six-man call center to a 200-man call center. And it was this big, big room that took up half the building with just as far as the eye could see, cubicles. And there was a beeping leaderboard with red letters on the wall that would beep anytime there were more than 10 calls holding. And the, you know, the the director would come running out of his office and tell everybody to get on the phones. Calls were holding, and you just couldn't leave your desk. You you had to have permission to go to the bathroom. One time I got up to go to the bathroom and a supervisor saw me, and she's like, Where are you going? And I said, I'm going to the bathroom. She goes, No, no, no, you can only go in your breaks.

SPEAKER_03 6:26

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 6:27

And you know, at the time I was, what, 30? How old was I? I was almost 30.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 6:33

And I was just totally overwhelmed. You you we got two weeks of training to learn cellular telephones. At the time on maybe three or four computer systems. And I thought I knew them really well. I thought I really understood, but the minute I got on the floor, I I realized I had no idea what I was doing.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

And with the I'm sorry, you brought that up in the documentary about the training and how deficient it was.

SPEAKER_02 7:02

Oh, yeah, it's it's you know, just think of it this way. Anybody who's watching this, yourself included, anything you learned when you were in the corporate world, could you learn all of that that took you maybe a career or a lifetime to learn in two weeks? Get on the phones and talk to the general public about it proficiently and coherently and rapidly. And I'd say no, most people couldn't. Even if you work in a fast food place, they give you more training to learn how to cook a burger than they do in a call center. So in a call center, they give you two weeks of training to learn a whole boatload of systems. They want you to learn how to sell. You have to now these days you have to upsell, and you have to learn customer service. Now the two the two different the two different skills are completely different. Customer service is one thing, but sale selling is an entirely different task. And most people don't have the gift to sell. I think you have to have, it's like being a musician or something. You have to really have to have an innate ability to really desire it and understand it and how to turn people around to get that sale. So they're bringing the average person in off the street to learn an entire catalog of products, how to sell, how to do customer service, and then they're throwing people on the phones. And most people don't last because there's no way it's not humanly possible to learn all that and be good at it and proficient within 30 to 90 days.

SPEAKER_00 8:30

What tools did they give you, Pete, uh, to be able to do the job and you have two weeks of training? Obviously, that's not a lot of training. So when a call came in, how were you able to address the customer's issues or concerns? I mean, what did they give you something to a reference to look at? How did that work?

SPEAKER_02 8:50

Well, back then, this is the mid-90s. I don't think we had any reference material back then. There wasn't like an online database, like in some of the more recent call newer call centers had that kind of stuff. But back then, you we may have had manuals. I think we actually had three ring binders. Yeah, we had binders, and you could look up the different model phones. There was only three phones. Right. There was a flip phone, Motorola Flip, there was a bag phone, and then there was a car phone that was permanently installed on the console in between the seats of cars. So I think that's all we had, and we and we would be you know rifling through the notebook trying to get information if we didn't understand what the customers were asking or things like that. So initially it was just a binder. That all as the years went by, it it was all online. It wasn't much better than the three room binder, um, especially later on with Verizon Wireless, where I worked in the 2009 to 2010. They had online support. I know what you call it. You know, somebody called in and asked about their StarTech phone or their Motorola phone or whatever model. You had to try to find that model in the computer to try to find how it worked, because each phone is different. And it was not much, much, not to me anyway. I could never find the customer's answers on the online sources.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

So it was mostly technical support oriented.

SPEAKER_02 10:21

It was billing and technical support. People calling in about their phone didn't work or they didn't understand why they had certain fees on their bill and things like that. It was mostly questions like that at in the initial phase, my first corporate call center.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Okay. Okay. And I know we'll talk about how some of these customers treated the call center employees, which uh was brutal. I I know that for a fact. So after Verizon, you said that was around 2010.

SPEAKER_02 10:55

Uh Verizon was yeah, 2009 to 2010, Verizon Wireless.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

Okay. So where did you go from there? Or did you go? Did you get out?

The False Promise Of A Foot In

SPEAKER_02 11:05

I went back to school on was studying graphic design and web design back then, and I got out, and then we moved back to Ohio a few years later, and I started working in banking here in call centers and banking. And it was the same thing. And I and the the the thing I got stuck in is when they advertise these jobs online, they make it sound like this is the step to a better career. Use the call center as a gateway to a better job down the road. You can get into marketing, you can get into HR. And I kept thinking, well, yeah, if I can get into this really nice bank in Ohio, it'll be a step into getting into, you know, the web design for the company, run their website or something like that. I was a grown man. I was still bamboozled. And so I went into banking. I I've been in banking off and on over probably the last I've been in like three or four banking call centers.

SPEAKER_00 12:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 12:04

In Cleveland and one in Arizona.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

I remember it being sold even where I worked as entry level and a foot in the door.

SPEAKER_03 12:15

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

To bigger and better things in the company.

SPEAKER_03 12:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:18

But the thing is, a lot of people never survived.

SPEAKER_03 12:21

No, no.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

They were carrying people out in body bags because of the just the rate and pace and the the mental pressure of what the job entailed. And I know you talked about the measurements and the metrics. Did you want to talk about that a little bit so we can get into I don't want to cut you off here on anything, so if there's something you need to talk about, I I would really like the audience to understand what the environment was really like and how it was mentally exhausting.

SPEAKER_02 12:58

Oh, sure. Well, when you're in a call center, because the call centers are so expensive to run, the C-suite people or the men and women at the top of the corporation try to get you to have a customer on the phone for only a certain amount of time. And the traditional amount of time in every call center around the world is seven minutes. And I came up with how they came up with that. I don't remember now, but the seven-minute talk time is the average amount of time you're allowed to handle a call. And they do that because it costs them money to have all the phone lines up and all the lights on in the call center and the air conditioning and the building itself cost them money. So somehow they came up with a seven-minute talk time. So you get a customer who drops into your headset and they are screaming at you. These days, they're screaming at you almost immediately about something that they consider a horrendous thing that the company has done to them. So within seven minutes, you've got to try to take control of the call, figure out what they're screaming about, handle that issue that the customer has. And in the process, especially in the modern-day call centers, you have to sell to them. You have to upsell. So if they have like an iPhone, whatever the latest model is, you've got to upsell them to the next model iPhone while they're screaming at you because they don't like their current phone. And if you don't do that, and the and your call gets recorded and listened to by the quality assurance people, you get written up because they'll say, Well, I don't care if they're yelling at you. You're supposed to upsell. That's part of your metrics. So they have these metrics. I'm kind of jumping around, but No, it's fine. There's a series of metrics that you have to meet within a certain percentage. You have average handle time, you have hold time, you can't keep the customer on hold for more than like 30 seconds. If you go above those 30 seconds, you get in trouble. If you don't sell enough or try to upsell, you get in trouble. If you don't say certain words, if you have a script and you miss one word in the script, you get writ up. If you don't empathize well enough with the customer, or they don't hear empathy, if they hear you yawn, if they hear anything out of the ordinary in the call, you can get written up. So you're the metrics are so regimented that you're constantly paranoid. You're you're in a state of panic, constant panic and paranoia. I didn't mind, you know, people calling, calling you dirty, filthy names. And I didn't mind that because they're not standing in front of me. You can call me whoever you want over the phone. I don't care. So what bothered me was I really wanted to help these people and try to figure out what they wanted. But in the meantime, I'm thinking, oh my God, this call, but I'm on the call with the customer for 10 minutes. You start to panic because you're above the seven minutes. And then you've got to try to sell, and they're already angry. And if you if you say, Oh, would you like the latest model of iPhone? And they're like, No, I didn't call about that. They start screaming and yelling, and it gets it just escalates everything. And then if it escalates and they hear the call, management hears the call, they write you up because you didn't control the call, and they get mad at you because the customer got mad because you didn't present the sale the correct way. Right. It's this mind. I don't know if it's I don't know if I can use this word fuckery.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:44

And it's it's this mind fuckery that they put in in and very few people are skilled enough mentally. You have to be really mentally organized and almost sociopathic where you just don't care. And you have to just go, well, you know, I'm sorry, you know, how about this phone? And and just kind of do it. You have to do it with a smile too. If they can't hear the smile on your voice, you get reddened up.

SPEAKER_00 17:04

Yeah, it's like they stuck you in a pressure cooker and they expect you to operate under all that pressure. And it is almost comical that the customer is calling because they have an issue, and many times they're agitated because they have this issue, they're angry, and then you're gonna start talking to them about, hey, why don't you try this model?

SPEAKER_01 17:27

Yeah.

Attrition Outsourcing And Offshoring

SPEAKER_00 17:28

They're gonna sit there and say, I don't care about that model. I want this model to work. So, yeah, all these time constraints. I remember the metrics, and my and for me, it goes back a long time ago, at least over a decade. And I know it's gotten a whole lot worse since then. And back when I was in the corporate world, our help center was or call center, we used to call it a help center, was contained within the company. In other words, they were our employees and they worked for the company, but over time what was happening was they were moving away from that, moving to more contracted personnel, and then they started to farm out the work to companies that quote specialize in call center operations. So, with that, my experience, what happened was many of the employees became transient. And so just when you've got somebody up to speed on working a call center, they reach a point where like I'm I'm out of here.

SPEAKER_03 18:41

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

And now you've got a new batch of people coming in and the whole process starts all over again. I mean, really, when you think about it, Peter, it's it's ineffective in a lot of ways. Oh, it's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 18:52

Well, what it comes down to, like when I was at I well, I noticed that the uh the attrition rate, I worked for what was Bank One, it's now Chase.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:02

When I first moved to Arizona, and we had a training class of like 35 people, and after two weeks, we had 30 people. And after, well, I think the training class was was about three weeks. After three weeks, we had maybe 20 people left. And then once I hit the floor, all the people, there was only like three or four people left from that entire training class working for the company still, and people would just walk out. And it's it's really sad because you know that most of the people showed up with good intentions. They want to work, they wanted to be with that company and they want to do their best. But I think what it comes down to is the companies, I you know, this is just my hypothesis. I think the companies see the customer as a necessary evil. So they need somehow to pacify that customer. So they throw up this call center or variety of call centers, and they just give the customers customers bare bones service just to shut them up. Do you know what I mean? Like it's just like it's there's no way you can give legitimate customer service. If you've got two million customers and 500,000 of them are calling a month, there's no human possible, there's no human possible way you can actually address uh sufficiently or if or efficiently those customers' concerns. So and and to get to what you're saying, a lot of these places to to compensate for the the amount of money they're spending in America, they're outsourcing everything to BPOs, or they're offshoring them to India, the Philippines, and because those people in the Philippines are making like two, three bucks an hour, which in their country is a lot of money.

SPEAKER_03 20:55

Right.

SPEAKER_02 20:56

Actually, many of the people that work in the Philippines, their jobs are considered more prestigious than being a nurse. And they're making more money than nurses, which I was just astounded when I found that. I've done so much research, it's hard for me to organize it all in my head, but it it's it comes down to the corporations don't really care. It's it's a necessary evil to have the call center and these these customers that are giving them all the money, that are making them wealthy so they can go off on some exotic island and have fun. It's a pain to them to have to have service these customers. So they offshore everything to save a buck.

SPEAKER_00 21:33

Yeah, we used to call them, again, I'm going back a long time ago, but we used to call them low-cost countries, LCCs.

SPEAKER_03 21:39

Oh, wow.

Escalations And Vanishing Supervisors

SPEAKER_00 21:40

And what would happen is like if you moved the part of your business over to India as an example, and at one time it was considered an LCC, a low-cost country, but then the employees started to have an awareness and awakening. And hey, we want more money. So when it got to that point, what would happen is then they would look, when I say they, I'm talking about the hierarchy within the corporation, they would then look to move the the work to another country where it was lower cost. So they they continue to just move things around. Uh eventually, of course, what'll happen is you run out of places to to move things. And in my mind, that's where the the advent of artificial intelligence comes into play now. And I, you know, I don't I don't know if you want to talk about that now or if you want to talk about it later. It's up to you. But the one thing I wanted to ask you, Peter, was did you have different levels of support within the call center, level one, level two, or was it just one level? In other words, if you if you couldn't resolve something or somebody couldn't resolve something on the desk, it got bounced to a level two support structure.

SPEAKER_02 23:02

Yeah, it depended on the call center, but most teams had a manager, and they would sit at the desk and you all sat in a group of cubicles, and the manager was kind of like the at the center, and you could run over to their desk and say, Hey, I've got this question I can't answer. And she's and if she had time or wasn't busy, you could transfer the call to her. And if she couldn't handle it, she would, you know, if it was an escalated call with an IRA customer that wanted out of their contract or cancel their account or whatever it happened to be, usually there were there's a couple different there was a team lead was your first recourse, then the manager. But once you transferred it to the team lead or the manager, you usually never heard heard from that customer again. You never you just took the next call. But there was usually team lead, manager, call center director, and then some of these people would get so angry, it would get all the way to a CEO at times if they found a way to wiggle their way up to the top. But we had, and then there was quality assurance people, and there was sometimes what they call floor walkers for Verizon. They had people walking the floor because Verizon's call center was a 2,000-man call center, and it was massive. Just as far as the eye could see, just look like little whack-a-moles, just little heads out of the horizon. And they were supposed to be supposed to be floor walkers, there were supposed to be all these people. But the catch is you have supervisors and team leads, but they all disappear. Nobody ever knows. And this is this is any any call center. You have people in charge that somehow are always in meetings, and nobody knows why they're in a meeting, but they're in meetings all day long, especially when you need them the most. And I I got so paranoid, I thought, isn't this weird? I've got a lady saying that a raccoon ate her phone, and she wants a new phone because a raccoon ate that phone, you know, really weird stories. You get these customers seen the really freaking weird stuff, and you had no idea how to handle it, and you'd look up and you'd think, Well, I wonder if the if all these supervisors are in a room calling each of us with weird calls just to step us up. Because the weirdest calls would come in when they'd all go into meetings. But to answer your question, there's different there's different levels, but they were very rarely around. You would very rarely find a supervisor.

SPEAKER_00 25:32

I'm going to assume there was a metric that was in place that measured how many calls left your desk and had to go to a team lead or to a manager to the next level.

SPEAKER_02 25:44

I don't know if there was a metric, but you would get talked to.

SPEAKER_00 25:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:47

They would say, hey, you know, Pete, you should have been able to handle this one on your own. This isn't something that shouldn't have gone escalated. You know, you should know what you're doing by this time. You know, they would talk to you like you were a little child and reprimand you. I got that a lot because there was sometimes I just said, you know, what do you do with a lady whose phone was just eaten by a raccoon? You know, I mean, I would get you get really weird calls. Like the the weirdest thing about call center work is you get a really good idea of the intellectual or low intellect low intellectual capacity of the country of the United States. I mean, it's really scary when you hear people that don't know how to add and subtract, don't understand, you know, their bank account at all. You wonder how people even function. But yeah, you get you, I I don't think it was a metric, but it was definitely they would sit down with you and you know, take you aside, you get a tap on the shoulder and say, hey, that call you just sent over to me, let's go talk about it. You know, and they'd say, Well, you shouldn't have sent that to me. You should have been able to answer that on your own. But there's so many thousands of things you've got to know.

SPEAKER_00 26:57

Right.

SPEAKER_02 26:57

You can't remember it all. But they expect you to, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

Yeah, it's a catch-22 also, because if you take the initiative and you're proactive and you make a decision and it's not what they consider to be the right decision, then you're going to be spoken to anyway.

SPEAKER_02 27:11

Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Burnout Anxiety And Breaking Points

SPEAKER_00 27:13

Right? Yeah. So you you're in this catch-22 situation. But I I wanted to have you talk a little bit more about the mental fatigue and how it just wears people down because you know, we've talked about we're talking about the metrics and the environment and all that stuff, and I'm sure people are starting to get the idea of what this is all about. But if you could just talk a little bit about how it impacts people's mental well-being.

SPEAKER_02 27:44

Oh, it's it's horrible. It's it's really stressful. As I said, the attrition rate is at least 60%. So hypothetically, if you had a hundred people in class, training class, you would lose 60 of them within the first anywhere from 30 days to six months. And people, the there was when I was at Verizon, there were people that were dropping on the floor, passing out, and the paramedics were at the call center at least once a month. And it got to a point where the the last day I was there, I was walking out the backstairs, and they were coming up with a stretcher because the lady had screamed. She let out this horrible scream and collapsed on the floor. And and people, as I said, come there with good intentions. They want to work, they want a job. There's a lot of single moms in the call centers. For some reason, there's a lot of pregnant ladies in call centers. So they need the job. They need to work, but the stress is so horrible, they they just they just quit. You know, they need the health insurance for their baby. For me, I can I can't speak for other people, but for me, it it got to a place where I couldn't handle like I got very paranoid in the call centers because you could never, you were never right.

SPEAKER_03 29:00

Right.

SPEAKER_02 29:01

And I started to second guess myself, and I started to wonder, like I said, I wonder, are they all sitting in a room sending me these crazy calls? Are they making stuff up just to make it hard for we'd all get these weird calls? So it for me, it it it weighed heavy on my self-esteem, how I looked at myself. I would start to feel Did you have anxiety? Oh yeah, anxiety. I started going into counseling, and when I was in Arizona, I was seeing a counselor about it. You know, when he agreed, you know, as you see in my film and my documentary, Art Krasilovsky is I worked with specifically with call center employees. And people start medicating, self-medicating. I didn't, but I had a friend that worked at progressive insurance, a no a different friend, and he would sit in his car and get high before he go in, or he'd sit on his brakes and get high.

SPEAKER_03 29:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:56

And you know, people just can't handle it and they need the job. And it's there's a lot of people that medicate, they get suicidal, they get overwhelmed on the floor, they pass out. It's a really uh it's it's a meat grinder of an atmosphere.

SPEAKER_00 30:13

Yeah, like I said, it's a pressure cooker, and it it there's a lot of mental abuse that takes place. And so a mental abuse will ultimately lead to physical problems as well. You know, if you're if you're inundated with stress all the time, oh yeah, that's gonna manifest physically. And you said the lady that let out the scream and fell down, she probably had an anxiety or a panic attack. It's probably what happened.

SPEAKER_02 30:42

Yeah, I had migraines. I forgot about that. I had really bad migraines at Verizon and they magically went away when I quit. But yeah, they manifest in a lot of different ways, and and people have to find a way to escape. So it's a very stressful, it's not physically stressful, it's mentally stressful.

SPEAKER_03 31:02

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 31:03

And a lot of people just and there's a lot of young people. There's not many people over like the age of 40, but most of the people in there are are young people that are trying to start families, trying to buy houses, trying to do all the things that we all dream of doing, and they have the best of intentions. And I and it's of my opinion that they're being taken advantage of. And they're setting being set up to fail.

SPEAKER_00 31:32

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 31:33

Stressful.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

It's stressful, and like you mentioned, there's a high attrition rate, it's transient, and it's it's really a fallacy that you're going to go there and have a career. And it's sold, it's sold that way. And so people are thinking, hey, I can get my foot in the door, like you mentioned before, and this this company, it's a stepping stone to bigger and better things. I can go buy a house, I can get a car, I can take care of my family, I have health insurance. But the thing is, the tenure there is going to be very short-lived, unless you know you're really somebody who is used to wearing a flak jacket and going to work every day.

SPEAKER_02 32:11

Well, and I've only known a couple people to make it out of the call center and get advanced out of there to bigger things. There's a woman I work with that ended up working in marketing and she got transferred. When I was with Wells Fargo, she got promoted and transferred to their headquarters in San Francisco. But she's a rarity. Most people uh don't even stay more than six months, they can't handle it, or they get fired because they can't make the metrics. Uh so it's a very unforgiving environment, and they it's a lot of false advertising the way they sell the job to a potential employer or employee. They make it sound like you just got it made, man. You can come in here. This is your your foot in the door to Wells Fargo or Verizon Wireless or whoever the big company is, not to pick on anyone specifically, but it it's it's a it's really disheartening when you see it's really almost impossible. And in order to get promoted, you have to meet all the metrics. So if you have to be within 80% of all the different categories, you have to meet talk time and hold time and all that stuff. If you don't meet all those, you can't post out of that position. And you might just be a point away, and they'll say, sorry, you can't apply for that position because you're not meeting the metrics. So very few people, even if you do state, can't meet the metrics, they might be meeting them enough just not get fired.

SPEAKER_03 33:37

Right.

SPEAKER_02 33:38

But they're they're hanging by a thread and they they want to post out. They want to try for something they're more qualified for, but they they always seem to rig the numbers. So you're just not sorry, maybe next quarter you can post for that position. So you never really get a chance to post out or apply for another job internally.

SPEAKER_00 33:57

It's interesting. You would think that the progression from a promotion perspective would be you're at the desk in the cubicle, maybe then to a team lead, from a team lead to a manager, and then from a manager, I guess maybe something else will open up in the company. Is that the track that you found most people had to follow in order to hypothetically get out of the call center?

SPEAKER_02 34:21

Well, not always. No, I knew a guy that that got promoted to quality assurance.

SPEAKER_03 34:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 34:28

Quality assurance is the group of people that listens to the calls and grades them and then sends them the the grades to your supervisor. The woman who I worked with at Wells Fargo, she got promoted to marketing directly from the call center, and then she got somehow transferred to San Francisco in the headquarters. I don't know how she rigged that. I don't know what she not nothing against her for being a woman, but it's kind of a huge leap to go from taking sales calls in a bank to working in the headquarters for Wells Fargo. But most people, it depended on what you wanted to do. Some people who wanted to get into management would oppose for the team lead position or manager. A lot of people did it just because it paid a little bit more money, maybe one or two dollars an hour. Wasn't a huge pay increase. There's a couple people on TikTok who are lifers in in the call center, and they've all said, Yeah, I got all the way to a supervisor and I wasn't making much more than when I was a call center rep. So the the I don't know if I don't think there's any direct pathway, career path. You can pretty much do what you want if you can meet all the metrics.

Call Centers As Modern Sweatshops

SPEAKER_00 35:36

I would think that the leap that that one lady made that you mentioned, that could possibly be because she was connected somewhere. She knew somebody in the company that was able to help her and pull her out. I've seen that plenty of times. Connections and networking is very, very important. It's it's who you know, right? As you know. Uh, Peter, before we got started, I mentioned to you that you made a very interesting connection to the old sweatshops into the call centers. And I thought it was a very good connection because uh as I said to you before we got started, the call center really is a sweatshop, but it's just more technologically advanced. In the sweatshops, it had to do more with physical endurance and the breakdown of people's physical abilities by being in these sweatshops for so long and working long hours. But today it's not so much the physical aspect, which could be an outcome if your mental health is not good, but now it's more mental fatigue, mental abuse. So can you explain what made you go back to the sweatshops? Because I I thought it was a very good connection.

SPEAKER_02 36:49

I you know, why did I keep going back?

SPEAKER_00 36:53

No, you went back to it. In other words, you brought that into as part of the history in the documentary. You made sweatshops, and then now we have call centers. And I thought that that connection point, that timeline was was very good.

SPEAKER_02 37:06

Well, I made the connection because when I I'm a really stubborn guy, and I had been working in these call centers constantly thinking, well, this has got to be, it's gotta be. I would in two different states, I kept thinking, well, maybe it's gonna be better at the next company. You know, maybe the next call center for the big companies may be better. And one day I'm sitting there going, this is just crap. This is just like a sweatshop. And I would always say this is just like a sweatshop. They're just taking advantage of people, trying to pay them barebone minimum. They got a nice, you know, got a nice clean environment, but you're mentally driven, you know, crazy. And I I came up with this while I was sitting there at one of these banks. The banks were really bad because you had to sell. And if you weren't making the sales goals, you were just constantly being put on performance improvement plans and things like that. So I came up with a connection to sweatshops from from like the 1800s, early, or that been the 18th century, no, 20th century, early 20th century, late 19th century, where the you know the people worked in the mills. Yeah. And it, you know, it's not a direct comparison, but it's pretty similar. And and what I think it comes comes down to is just corporate greed. They don't they really don't care about you and me at all. They just want to make some money and the cheapest way possible. And I understand capitalism. Like if I want to sell glasses, you know, I gotta get them made as cheaply as possible so I can make a profit and you know have a lot of money in the bank. And they'll sacrifice, they'll cut any quarter down to do that. So I think I thought it was a legitimate comparison.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

There was.

SPEAKER_02 38:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:52

It was a great analogy. And if we go back in time, when I first started in the corporate world, human resources was called personnel.

SPEAKER_02 39:01

Yes, yeah, I remember that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:03

Right. And then it went to human resources. And so when you think about the word resource, like your stapler is a resource. Your keyboard and your computer is a resource.

SPEAKER_03 39:14

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 39:15

So when they switch from personnel to human resources, what they're really saying is we have human tools.

SPEAKER_02 39:21

Yes, exactly. Yeah. You just become another widget that they can replace or plug and unplug and plug in and things like that.

SPEAKER_00 39:33

Yeah. And once you're obsolete or you you know you're not performing up to the metrics, you're not producing, then they just go get another resource to replace it. It's interesting. I'll tell you a little story. When I first started in the corporate world and the company that I worked for, they had a they had a creed, and it had to do with employees, and it was referred to as respect for the employee. So the employee was respected.

SPEAKER_01 40:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:01

The employee wasn't a tool, they weren't a resource, they were a human being, and so they were to be treated with respect, and it was great. Down the line, uh you know, eight to ten years later, then they started talking about work-life balance. So so so before it was your personal life is very important to you, and your work should not impede upon your personal life. They are two distinct things in your life. And then it moved to, well, now we have work-life balance. You've got to balance your work and your life. So they got away from the respect part of it, and now it's kind of like they're massaging it. By the time I left, which was back in 2014, it was referred to as work-life integration.

SPEAKER_02 40:59

Oh no, I have not heard of that one.

SPEAKER_00 41:01

Yes. So your life is your work and your work is your life. So now it's inseparable.

SPEAKER_01 41:07

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 41:08

Now it's integrated. So there's no work is no longer in a separate bucket. You're all in one bucket now. Your personal life and your work life, it's all in the stew. So that was the evolution that I saw having worked in the corporate world for over 30 years. And I look back at it, I can chuckle now. I remember when I was there, I was, you know, I was figuring out what this was all about. This was just, you know, they were soft-selling the change in how they view the employee, is what they were doing. And most people didn't pick up on it, and until it was too late. And when I mean too late, there is a point when people look back, when you're in their current situation, and they're like, you know, this is not right. How I'm being treated is not right. So we talk about the call centers, we can talk about how, you know, how employees have received pay cuts, how things like profit sharing has disappeared, sure, benefits, employees are paying more and more now for their benefits. You know, back in the day, a long time ago, and I know I'm talking about a long time ago, companies picked up the benefits 100% for their employees. So going back a long time ago. And all of that is gone now. And so, like I said, they've they've relegated the employee to a resource, a tool, uh really a disposable tool. I hate, I don't like saying things like that, but no, no, it's true.

SPEAKER_02 42:43

It's true. Because my wife was working for a major financial institution, she'd been there 15 years, and they, you know, this company's eyes are bigger than its stomach, decided to acquire another company. And wouldn't you know it? They just screwed up the finances behind it and had to have layoffs. So they laid off like 15,000 people. My wife is one of them. And since she got laid off, I think about half her team was let go. She was a manager, and all these people that loved her are calling her on her personal phone saying, you know, they made a big mistake because now other people are leaving because the new boss is horrible. They all like you. And other people are they're still laying people off three years later because they screwed up. You know, and so these companies, it's not just call centers, you know, the employee in general is a necessary evil to get their product out there or their service that they're selling. And and I've seen it from my wife. My wife is an amazing employee. She's she's not political, but she knows how to navigate the waters politically, and she's very good at working well with multiple types of people.

SPEAKER_00 43:56

Right.

SPEAKER_02 43:57

And they didn't value it. They just tossed her out the window with everybody else. And even her boss now knows it it was a huge mistake. But they didn't care because it was they bought this other company and they had to make cuts somewhere because they wanted to get it, they wanted to have an advantage online, which is a whole nother story. But I I've seen it from multiple angles. And it I'm very anti-corporate now. So it's very hard for me to, you know, think of ever working again. You know, fortunately, my wife works and and I'm able to do this stuff and try to make some money on the side. But it's it's a pretty evil setup. And it and it wasn't always that bad. There was a time when there were unions, there were the call centers were unionized. And as you'll see in my documentary, they would do things to keep the unions out, like start paying the employees more money. They would basically bribe the employees, say we'll pay you more money if you don't unionize.

SPEAKER_03 45:01

Right.

SPEAKER_02 45:01

And they or or if a call center got word that there was a move to unionize, they'd shut the call center down and route the calls to another another office that was open. So these corporations are are I I think they're pretty evil, most of the big ones.

SPEAKER_00 45:18

Our company, the communication workers of America, CWA, was trying to get a foothold in our company for for quite a while.

SPEAKER_03 45:27

Yeah.

Unions Layoffs And Broken Systems

SPEAKER_00 45:27

And they didn't succeed. And uh one of the tactics that was used by the company, if they sensed that a particular area or segment of the business was leaning toward a union, they would they would dismantle that particular location or the work that was being done at that facility, and they might farm it out overseas.

SPEAKER_02 45:56

Oh yeah. Oh yeah, they didn't do it all the time.

SPEAKER_00 45:59

You know, and also what a lot of people should know, I know it's a this is a little off track here, but companies will buy other companies for the sole purpose of getting rid of them as competition.

SPEAKER_02 46:08

Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:10

So when they give you the big, you know, spiel about we're bringing this company on, there's not going to be any changes, and you know, there's going to be a smooth assimilation and all this stuff. And then you, you know, a couple of months down the line, they're cutting head heads, there's head count cuts, they're laying people off, letting them go. You know, a lot of times it's because they don't want that company to succeed.

SPEAKER_03 46:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:35

Or they take from it what they can benefit from, and then once that's taken place, they they need, they they get what they need, then that's that. And they just cut it off off the block and it's gone. I remember one company that uh the company I work for bought this is a long time ago. And the company that was purchased, I'm not gonna say any names, folks, because okay, was was successful and they were making inroads in the in the telephone area in that segment of of the business. And within short order, that company, which was an aspiring young company, which made a great product, was decimated once we purchased them.

SPEAKER_03 47:24

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:25

It was gone. So now, is that because they didn't want it around and they wanted the technology, or was is it because it was just poor management? Well, I don't know. It could be either one.

SPEAKER_02 47:37

And one thing you'll find when these companies buy one another, I worked for Time Warner Cable in a call center. And before it was Time Warner, I don't remember who they were before, but they bought Adelphi, which was telephone cable provider. So you had like Time Warner combined with Adelphi, combined with like two other cable companies. And when you do this, you have to integrate multiple computer systems, and not all of them are compatible. So they kind of rig these systems so they can talk to each other. Yes. And you probably know more about computers maybe than I do, but some were mainframe, old-fashioned mainframe systems, some were modern GUI interfaced systems, and they there was no way you had they had to have multiple terminals at your desk. You had to have three screens. One was for the mainframe, one was you know for the GUI interface uh Microsoft system. And these companies they just they patch it together somehow, and it never works right. Maybe, you know, and I no, but because they want comp they want to be competitive and they want to eat up all the competition, they don't care.

SPEAKER_00 48:47

You're absolutely correct. The old systems were called legacy systems, yeah, and they were bringing these new systems, and the new systems had to speak to the legacy systems. Yes. So then there was this patchwork of of development that took place to connect the red wires to the blue wires. And what you're saying is absolutely true. And so we used to call it a big bowl of spaghetti.

unknown 49:08

Oh God.

SPEAKER_00 49:09

And then at some point, what would happen is somebody would say, hey, we really have to consolidate all this stuff. We we can't have all of these systems because when you have all these systems, you have now additional expense because you've got to support the different infrastructures, the software applications, all of that stuff. So then there's these this undertaking to try to get it consolidated and it put a you know a new system in that does the whole thing end-to-end. And and that almost never works. No, it almost never works.

SPEAKER_02 49:43

And it's expensive too to come up with a whole new system. Yeah, yeah.

Making The Documentary On Camera

SPEAKER_00 49:46

There's a lot of there's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes in corporations that the corporations will never ever tell you about what goes on internally, and a lot of the bureaucracy, wasted expense, the inefficiencies, all of that. And they will never let the cat out of the bag. And but you I know you know because you've been in the corporate world, and I know, and it's gonna be plenty of people who are listening to this who've worked in the corporate world, or probably maybe still working in the corporate world, know exactly what we're talking about. So, but now, Pete, in the uh in the documentary, you had interviewed people too. And so I'm assuming it wasn't that difficult to have people step up and talk about their experience at the call centers.

SPEAKER_02 50:35

Well, actually, it was. It was really hard. And it's always hard. It's hard to get people to go on camera. This is my this is probably my fifth project, my third complete documentary. And it's very hard to get people to talk on camera. A lot of people are all talk until the camera, they you mentioned a camera, and they're like, oh, maybe I don't want to do this.

SPEAKER_03 50:57

Right.

SPEAKER_02 50:58

So I I contacted all kinds of people. And but but the people that I did get in the film were were more than willing to talk. One was Debbie Goldman of Communication Workers of America, who had just written a book called Disconnected. It's not the same disconnected as my film. I can't remember the name of her book, but she's an awesome woman. I think she's from New Jersey and very knowledgeable about call centers. And she was very willing to go on the film because you know we have similar, she has a different message, but we have similar goals trying to educate people about how I guess how far we've fallen.

SPEAKER_01 51:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:40

Because she has she has a union perspective from it. And then I got my friend Kevin. He and I worked in the call center together, and I got Art Kraslowski, who's a friend and a fraternity brother, but he had worked in counseling for 40 years, working with people, a lot of people in the call centers that he worked for. And he worked for some big companies like you did.

SPEAKER_03 52:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:04

And he had some things that I couldn't put in the film that he told me about. But yeah, it's it's not easy. It's not an easy process getting people to be in the film. I wrote to people on TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, hey, please, there's this one woman on TikTok who would be amazing in it. And but she never responded. I didn't even know she got the messages. It's you know, it's hard to hard to find how to contact people. There's another person I was going to have in the film who was the opposite of my message, a very positive person about call centers. But by the time I got around to getting to him, I I kind of was done. I was, I didn't want I didn't want to bring up a different point of view. Right. I want to keep it all the same, going the same direction. He he's very positive about being a supervisor, and he was a really great person, but I I just didn't feel he fit in in the direction he was going. So it got it it took me a long time to get the people I got in there. And then you've got to coordinate schedules and you've got to figure out you know what they're gonna say. And look, Debbie was in New Jersey, I'm here in Ohio. I didn't have the money to fly to New Jersey, and she we did you know our interview over Zoom, which I figure was fine.

AI Replacing Support And Whole Jobs

SPEAKER_00 53:20

It was, it worked fine.

SPEAKER_02 53:21

Oh, good, good.

unknown 53:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:22

In fact, the whole film, I was gonna ask you, where do you see AI taking this?

SPEAKER_02 53:31

Wow. Yeah, you know, and and we had talked about corporate greed, and AI is another way. They're desperately trying to find a way to eliminate customer service reps and call centers. And they're thinking that they're definitely pushing to try to get AI to replace live bodies answering the phone. If they could figure out a way to get those bots to talk like they're human and nobody can figure out nobody can uh figure out that they're not human, they would do it in a heartbeat because AI can one AI bot in a call center can handle a thousand calls at a time, you know, at once. So when you get in, you get a bot on the phone, that computer system is speaking to 999 other people at the same time, and it doesn't cost them anything. So I think I think they're trying. It's not working quite as smooth smoothly as they hoped, but I think they're desperately trying to get this all moved to AI, just like the grocery stores are trying to do the self-checkout, or McDonald's has now got all the iPads instead of cashiers.

SPEAKER_03 54:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 54:39

They're trying to find a way to sell their products and service their products with robots or AI, just so they can save a buck. I always think of that Christmas vacation movie where Brian Doyle Murray gets kidnapped by by Eddie. Yeah. And they bring him into the house, and and and the wife finds out he cut bonuses and and and his wife goes, Of all the dirty ways to save a buck, or the cheap ways to save a buck, and that police officer goes, I'd beat you with a hose. And I think of that these companies they they just are desperate to cut corners. And I I get hopped up on it because you know, with the political climate of our country today and the Epstein files, a lot of these predominantly men are not exactly nice people. And they're they're doing things that are hurting a lot of people and they're they're making money hand over a fist. So I think AI is another way they're gonna look to try to save some money. Yeah, I think it pretty nasty about it. If if it's just it drives me, it doesn't drive me crazy, it makes me so angry because, well, we you know, you know the climate of the country right now and where things are headed. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 55:53

Yeah, I was seeing a lot of stuff now that's coming out, uh, unless you're in a coma, you you should be waking up to how this world really works and the power structure behind it, right? So yeah. Uh the the other question I was gonna ask you, well, I'm I'll make a point first because it has to do with the AI question I asked you.

SPEAKER_03 56:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 56:16

The problem that employees are gonna have with AI, in my view, is that I'm gonna run a little story by you. So I have an old task camp 2488 Neo, which I do my recording on my songs.

SPEAKER_02 56:32

Multi-track.

SPEAKER_00 56:32

Multi-track, 24-track. Uh the machine goes back to 20 2010, 2011. It's a it's a great machine, it still works, works great. And so I had to replace the hard drive in it with I wanted to do a solid state drive, get rid of the old drive, the original drive. So in the old days, what we would have to do is well, you can't call Task Am anymore because they're not going to talk to you. The machine's like 15 years old, so that's that.

SPEAKER_03 57:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:01

Right? Or you'd have to go to the internet and you have to roll around and full support forums and stuff like that to see if you can pick out the information you need. Well, I went into Grok and I typed in, hi Grok, I have a Task Cam 2488 NEO. I want to replace the the original hard drive because I'm concerned that it's going to fail. What do you suggest is the the best solid state drive to put in it? First I asked it if it would take a solid state drive, and it said, absolutely. And so what it did, Pete, was it it gave me all the instructions, everything I needed. It recommended a drive for me that worked perfectly. I put it in yesterday. And that was that. So the reason why I'm telling this story is because that's the type of question that would have gone to a call center many years ago in order to see if you can get some help. Even if it was even a technical call center for technical support. Today, you don't have to do that anymore. You could just type in your question or you know, you could ask your question audibly, and the AI will give you what you need. But it's great from the perspective of we don't have to scour the internet all over the place to get what we need or the information that we're looking for. But on the other hand, when you look at that, you think to yourself, there's going to be a lot of people out of work at some point. And I don't know, it could be five years from now as the technology gets better and better. Certainly 10 years from now, I think it's going to be a whole different ball of wax, Pete.

SPEAKER_03 58:45

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:45

So, I mean, what are your thoughts about that?

SPEAKER_02 58:48

Yeah, I think you're completely right because I I do the same thing. Now, now the catch to Grok and ChatGPT is their information isn't always correct.

SPEAKER_00 58:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 58:57

And I found some things that I thought that I know what I'm talking about, and they're I'm like, I'll correct them. I say, this isn't right. They're like, oh, you're right. You know, I didn't catch that the first time through. But yeah, I think I think it's going to replace a lot of jobs, and I think a lot of people are going to be out of work. And, you know, there are millions of people around the world that work in call centers. And when they finally figure out a way to have it all replaced by AI, there'll be people that won't have any place to go other than to go work at Walmart or something like that.

SPEAKER_03 59:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:31

And I so I think it's a definite, a definite eventuality. I don't know how soon it's going to happen, but you can bet your bottom dollar, they're in some back room or some some laboratory somewhere trying to figure out how to speed it up. Because I'm sure they had this long before they released it. And I think the thing that I don't like about AI, especially now what we're seeing with the war we're in, is there's a lot of fake videos out there that's misleading people about who's alive and who's dead and how many people were killed and where we really are fighting, how many missiles are falling. And there's some really drawbacks to it too, but but I think it's definitely gonna eliminate and I I don't know how people are gonna make money. You know, and as I said in my film, AI is you know it's it's a it's a paradox. You know, these companies want their cake and eat it too. But if they eliminate all the jobs, who's gonna buy the products to put money in their pockets so they can go to some fancy island and have a party?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:35

I don't know what the answer is.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:37

I think eventually they they want to get to universal basic income. Yeah, right. So I think that that's definitely in the works. It they talk about it a lot in the UK, as a matter of fact, you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:50

Oh, they do.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:51

Yep. And I was thinking in terms of you know the work, the financial work that I was involved in in my company, I was thinking, you know, there were a lot of people that were working on strategy, planning from a financial perspective. And I took a step back and I thought to myself, I can see where AI can be implemented to take care of most of the foundational aspects of the planning process. Of course, you're gonna need human input to make certain adjustments based upon things that you know, where you know that you have to make adjustments, but the the the foundational aspect of it, I can see where a lot of people won't be in the finance business in a cubicle doing that work anymore because the AI will be able to aggregate all of this information from various segments of the business and be able to to put the planning together. So yeah, so it's just one of those things, you know, that it is inevitable, it's here, and it's not going to stop. And I'm sure there's people who are listening that don't want to hear that. Oh, Mike, you're accepting it. It's it's not a matter of acceptance, it's it's a matter of reality. I mean, they didn't come this far to not implement it full blown. Uh I'm sorry. It's it's just the way it's gonna happen. You know?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:27

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I like I said, I think they've had AI for a while.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:31

And and they finally released it. It's kind of ironic. I think they released it right around COVID. Didn't it really come out full blast at the beginning of COVID?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:38

That's when they started introducing it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:43

But yeah, I think they've they've they've got a plan, whoever they are, you know, uh they talk about a shadow government or a New World Order and all that stuff. But I think the universal income, I think, is what it's called. I think it's what you call it. I think they're looking to send us all a check each month and we don't have to work. I don't know what we're gonna do all day. You know, well, they'll give us just enough to buy food and pay the utilities, I suppose. But I don't know what what else it's gonna be.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:14

And you'll own nothing and be happy.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:17

That's what that's the way it seems.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:19

And we're seeing that today. We're seeing that with everything is subscription base.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:23

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:24

Right? A lot of these large investment companies are buying up the the single-family homes.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:30

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:31

And they're making the rentals. And the the process of doing that has raised the cost of buying a house to astronomical levels for most people. And so now I I think the the figure is that the average age for a first-time home buyer is 40.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:53

Oh my god, wow.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:56

So this is how out of hand it has gotten. So, you know, there's a lot of things that are taking place that I think a lot of people not really focused on or paying attention to and just think, well, it's just the way it is. But there's a lot of planning, Peter, behind the scenes by this shadow group that is forcing these things to happen. You know, because it's like the great Oz behind the curtain. They're pushing the buttons and they have the levers, and you know, and and to the extent that people don't become aware or wake up to how the world really works, then unfortunately they will implement their end state, you know, which George Orwell told us in 1984. So but in any case, I don't I we we I went off on a tangent on you there.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:46

Well, no, no, I think you're right on track, because that's there was one of the point of my film was I wanted to not only tell people about the horrors of a call center, but how now they're replacing it's kind of a message about AI too.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:00

Because I I finished the film with like, hey, we were here with sweatshops, and they replaced the sweatshops with machines, they replaced the people in the fields that were slaves with machines, then they replaced, you know, the sweatshops by sending them all overseas so they didn't have to be governed by regulations in the states. So uh people in Taiwan and Vietnam are now making our clothes. And now they're gonna replace all of us with AI. So it's kind of an evolution of corporate greed, leading to who knows what. So that's this kind of I wanted to, you know, and my my concern is I won't get the district. I've got a distributor, but I I'm trying to figure out how to get the reach, get it out to the masses with because I'm not going to get on Netflix, but I'll hopefully by my fingers crossed, I'll be on Amazon and and Tubi and a few places like that.

Why Creators Cannot Get Paid Now

SPEAKER_00 1:05:49

Good. Good. Yeah, I I hope so. But it's very difficult when you're independent anything these days to get that reach. It's very, very difficult. A musician, I'm a musician. I don't even know how do you make a living as a songwriter and a musician. You really can't.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:08

I don't know.

unknown 1:06:09

Right?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:11

I'm on I'm on um gig salad and I I had a solo act up until COVID. All my gigs died at COVID. And since then, people have said, hey, we want you to play at our bar for three hours. And I'm like, well, here's my fee. I I charge, you know,$350 to$500 for three hours.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:28

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:28

Which, if they're going to hire a band, it's going to cost them, it should cost them like two grand for four guys or four gals or whatever. Nobody will hire me now because I'm charging too much. And so I tried to say$150, but it's not even worth me packing up the car with all of my junk and driving 20 minutes or you know, an hour to a gig for anything under$350. But these places don't want to pay it anymore. And I don't know what happened. I can't get anybody to pay the rates I used to make before COVID. And if there was a memo sent out saying musicians aren't worth it or what?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:03

Well, I was watching a documentary about a month and a half ago, and it's a a current documentary, I forgot the name of it, and they were saying, Pete, that bars, bars, people are not going to bars anymore.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:16

Oh really?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:17

So yeah, so so what's happened is a lot of these places they're half empty or you know, almost all empty because people just aren't going anymore. And they said that uh another another statistic said that the the amount of alcohol has declined significantly as far as people drinking alcohol.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:40

Really?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:40

Yes. So there there's been a shift, and uh it's interesting, and the shift took place, it started with the whole COVID thing back in March of 2020. Since that, put the stake in the ground there going forward, bars are not doing the business that they used to, not anywhere near the business they used to, and the amount of alcohol that people are are drinking is down significantly. And this is based upon the documentary I watched. So that could be another reason is that you know they don't want to pay because how many people are actually going to be in the joint?

SPEAKER_03 1:08:16

Yeah, they won't make their money back.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:18

They won't make their money back.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:20

So a lot of things have changed. A lot of of things have changed.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:24

Uh well, I mean, er I mean, now they've got AI is right, you know, the writer strike in Hollywood was based off of they didn't want their jobs replaced with AI, because you can go and have a script written in two seconds. So the writers would be out of work. Now you can take the likeness of Tom Cruise and make a movie with the advanced versions of different AI packages. I'm sure you're gonna have to pay Tom Cruise for that, but you don't have to have lighting, you don't have cameras, you don't have to have sound. It's all done at the push of a button. So even if you've noticed, my movies aren't anywhere near the same as what they used to be.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:03

No.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:04

There's not big blockbusters anymore. There's nothing that you're like, wow, I gotta, you know, take the kids to this tonight. Yeah, you know, but the the good old days where you go to a movie theater to see Star Wars or whatever, it's it's all gone. It's over. Yeah, it seems to be that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:20

Well, you know, Pete, they're not even going to have to bother with getting any kind of rights from a Tom Cruise or whoever, because what they're going to do is they're going to create their own actors and actresses with AI.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:33

Oh, sure.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:35

And you know, they're not tied to any existing actress or actor. They're AI creations. And to the public, they will be real. And I could just see in the future where people will talk about these AI-created actors and actresses in these films as if they're real people. And they'll have a following and they'll put them on the covers of of the magazines in the supermarket.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:04

Oh, yeah. They'll even have little romantic uh trists, they'll be cheating on their spouses, their AI spouses or something. It's the same thing with music. They've got all that stuff you can create on uh, is it Suno? Yes. And and these songs are getting millions of listens. And they've taken a lot of them off of YouTube because they consider them not legitimate. But I don't know if you watch Rick Beto or Beatto.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:30

Rick Beato, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:31

Beatto. Yeah. He's he's discussed it. And you know, I don't even know. I I can understand if it's a good song, but how do you how do you copyright that? You're not allowed to copyright it, I don't think. So who owns the music and and it's putting everybody out of work. I mean, I I've even seen interviews with big stars. I can't remember if it was Roger, Robert Plant, or I don't even know if he's still alive. But one of the one of those big guys said, you know, there's no way to make money anymore in music.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:02

No.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:02

Unless you're a big star like, you know, the big guys that are touring. But you have to get like 10 million plays to make any real serious money. I think it was like 10 million, he said. Streams? Streams.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:17

I think you get a lot more than that. I'll tell you, Pete. I'll I'll tell you my own story. Since 2013, when I released my first album, Toon Core is my publisher, I have eight point nine million streams over the course of twelve, let's say twelve and a half years. My my royalties were something like sixty five hundred dollars.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:42

Over twelve years? Yeah. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:45

8.9 million streams. So so there's no money to be made in streaming. There's none. It's concerts, it's merch, yeah, and whatever else you they can conjure up to sell the brand. It's not music anymore because albums are gone. And I say albums, obviously vinyl, CD is essay, right? Everything now is streaming on demand. And again, it gets down to you'll you'll own nothing and be happy. So you don't even have a physical media anymore with music. You just go on to your Spotify or whatever, and you know, you you stream it.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:27

So it's crazy, it really is. So if if you're a musician, a talented person, I know you have how many albums have you published, released?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:37

I think I've done five CDs, uh it's probably four CDs and one EP.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:43

Okay.

unknown 1:12:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:44

I had a five-song EP I released in 2012.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:47

And and you're a very talented songwriter and a very talented musician. Um I've listened to your music and it's great. But there's a lot of us like that. And we're never gonna you're never gonna make any money at it. The system, the cards are stacked against us.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:03

You know, so especially now you've got AI bands. I mean, you you can't compete with, I mean, that's perfection. Like I I put a I put I had this, I went into Suno and I put in a song. I said, uh, make a song about how much I love to pick my nose.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:18

And and it made this big band number like and it was like, it was brilliant. It was really funny. And I that's all I said. Make a song about how much I love to pick my nose. It gave me a whole three verses and a chorus and bass drums, guitar. And I'm like, I couldn't have done that. Uh, you know, and how do you compete with and the sound quality isn't as good as a real studio, but I don't know how we're gonna compete with that.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:44

No, uh, and the thing is when we talk about sound quality, most people don't give a second thought to sound quality. No, and the thing you your point is is really spot on because I experimented with an AI app that I subscribe to called Moise's and I was just curious. So what I did was I I popped in a demo right and a three-minute demo. And I asked it to its vocal and guitar. I asked it for arrangements, drums, bass. I mean it it popped this thing out. I'm listening to it, I'm going, you've gotta be kidding me. It was good. I'm not gonna lie, it it was good. Now, were there a couple of little flaws there, a couple of things that I would not have done or something I would change? Yes, but I'm talking overall, overall, it was it was pretty darn good and depressing at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:49

Yeah. You know, so yeah. I've used it to give me ideas.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:55

Like like I'm working on a painting over here. Um I'm doing these new series of paintings in day glow fluorescent paints. And I needed ideas for characters to put in this, and it gave me a whole bunch of ideas, and so I you know, took the the character it gave me and I drew it on the canvas. But I wouldn't use the image it gave me and publish it as my own.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:19

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:20

I know if it's the same thing, it's kind of different. I'm taking my rendition of that and putting it on the canvas. So in that way, I think you can use it as a tool to improve songs or art or writing. Ideas I use 30% of my film is AI. Much of it is AI.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:38

So um It was good too. I you know, I I I knew that because I had read up on it when you sent me the link, and your use of the AI in the film was excellent. It fit perfectly and it flowed.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:52

Thank you very much. Thanks for so much for watching it because uh I'm I'm really happy with the results, but I hope it it opens some people's eyes.

Release Plans And Where To Watch

SPEAKER_00 1:16:00

Oh, I I I hope so too. And so, Peter, where can people see the film? Is it available yet to the public?

SPEAKER_02 1:16:07

Not yet. It's with my distributor. I work with Film Hub and they uh told me they're backlogged by about two months. So I gave it to them about five weeks ago. So they still haven't processed it yet. What happens? They have to process it and they find any flaws. I've got to fix them. I've got to meet their metrics. And if I don't actually, if I don't meet their metrics, three if I get three strikes, they kick the movie out. So I I don't don't know. I'm thinking if it goes well, I should have it out by April or May. Usually it takes a while to for them to get through their quality, quality control.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:46

Now, when they put it out, when they release it, will it be on Amazon or are you going to also put it on YouTube? How is that going to work? What platforms will it be available on?

SPEAKER_02 1:16:54

Well, it should be. I mean, they send it out, they work with multiple streaming platforms. They work with YouTube and Tubi and Amazon. They'll send it to all those places, and those places have to view it and accept it or decline it. So uh right now my uh documentary, The Artist, is on Tubi. It's on YouTube, it's on Amazon. So it should be, I think it's good enough quality to to meet all of those other platforms requirements. Yeah. So it should be on Amazon to be. Where else do I? I think it's on Apple. My my film is on Apple TV as well, I think. So it should be on some of the bigger streaming platforms.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:37

Okay, so when it's available, let me know. And I'll get the word out, uh put it up on the blogs. That that should help.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:45

Yeah, that'd be awesome. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:47

I'll do that for you. And I'll put all the links to all of your platforms in the description box below. I I'll leave a link to Road to Forgiveness and The Artist, because both of those are on YouTube.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:59

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:00

That's where I watched them. So and then disconnected voices from the call center will be uh it's TBD, but hopefully within the next few weeks it should be available.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:09

I'm hoping. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:11

Okay. All right. Well, Pete, it's been very enjoyable. It's good to talk about something other than the Beatles.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:18

Yeah. It's so funny.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:21

Yeah, Pete asked me if I had uh watched that film. Was it Man on the Run?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:26

Yeah, I think that's what he's calling it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:28

Yeah, Billy or Paul McCartney's uh new documentary, whatever. And I I have not watched it yet. I told Pete I'm so beatled out that I've had no interest in watching the film. I will at some point, but did you watch it?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:44

No, I just I I saw a a gentleman on YouTube reviewed it.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:49

Uh yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:50

I didn't know it was on Amazon Prime, and I I pay for Amazon Prime. So I was thinking of sitting in here, maybe just watching it, trying to see if I could stomach it. Because, you know, I I want to hear the real story of the Beatles, the women that they impregnated and that the horrible things they did as young men, because they this portrayed these guys as these teetotalers drinking rum and coke in a hotel room after a concert. And like, there's no way.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:16

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:17

I want to hear the real story, but you'll you'll never hear that because they they promote them as such good boys.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:22

Yeah, yeah. You'd have to go to my channel for the real story.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:25

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh and well, we maybe we can talk about this when we're when we're off, but uh I was looking at videos of Rory Rory Storm and the Hurricanes with Ringo. Yeah, and I had never seen these until last night. I I I got this idea to watch some of his videos where he's actually playing drums with the band before he's with the Beatles. And I was shocked it didn't really sound his drumming wasn't that great.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:52

And and it he didn't sound like he did when he's with the Beatles.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:56

If you've ever watched in those videos, but we we can talk about that another time.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:00

Yeah, yeah. No, we could we should maybe maybe do another show. We could talk about your findings because you you you've gotten into more and more into the whole Beatles story because I've watched your videos on it, and I mean I can be in host mode and you can come on as a guest and and talk about what what you found, you know, and your thoughts. Because you like me, you were a huge Beatle freak.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:21

Oh, yeah, I was majorly obsessed. Yeah, I drove my family crazy with them. And this is years after they had broken up, so they weren't, you know, none of the merchandise was around or their records were in the stores, but you know, the Beatles were were old news. Right. But when I found them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:40

Yeah, I I quote them on the tail end, you know, 1968, 67, 68 around there. But I was the same way. I was a total, total beetle nut. My brother used to come to my house and I had all his beetle memorabilia pictures. He said it's like a beetle shrine. That's what he would say to me.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:59

Did you see the interview with Klaus Burman? I I think it was with him, and he was saying, like it was 1967, and he walks into John Lennon's flat, and John is on the floor crying. No, seeing how how miserable he is and how much he hates his life. And I'm like, wow, you know, I this was from one of the people that was with the Beatles, you know, from pretty much day one.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:24

Back in Hamburg.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:25

Yeah, and I'm like, wow, this is a guy that, you know, when you don't know the real story, you see them as these funny, clever guys, but behind the scenes, they were well, at least John was a very tortured person, and he wasn't happy. And and I think that I want to do a video about that because I I gotta find that video again where Klaus, I think it's Klaus. Is Klaus still alive?

SPEAKER_00 1:21:47

I I think he is, yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:49

I think so. It's a good it was just a like a two-minute video, and he's like, Yeah, there he is. John Lennon on the floor crying because he's so unhappy. So he says, Klaus, I'm miserable. I hate my life. And it's like you're he was in the you know, the middle of of Beatlemania.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:04

Right. And he's miserable.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:05

It was nothing like we all think it was.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:07

Right. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:09

Well, Pete, with that we I said I wouldn't talk about the Beatles, but we kind of we kind of did a little bit, which is fine. Again, folks, the the documentary is disconnected, Voices from the Call Center. It's excellent. I've watched it and uh it should be available within the next, I guess, several weeks.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:27

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:28

Maybe four to six weeks. And uh I will put a link down below for Pete's other documentaries, Road to Forgiveness and The Artist. They're both excellent as well. And Peter, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about the call center in the corporate world.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:42

Awesome. Thanks so much for doing this, Mike. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:45

Oh, anytime. Anytime, really.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:47

Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:47

All right, thank you so much, Peter.