The CarriersEdge Podcast | Episode #105
Mark: Hello. Welcome to episode 105 of the CarriersEdge podcast. Final episode of the season, I'm Mark Murrell. How do I introduce myself? President of CarriersEdge and joined by our illustrious CEO.
Jane: Jane Jazrawy. Also of CarriersEdge.
Mark: Yes. Also known around these parts
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: From time to time. And we have got lots of summer stuff on our mind, but we also have some work things to talk about. And I think this being the last episode of the season, we will kind of do a little bit of a wrap up and talk about some things that are happening over the summer maybe. And I will hint and tease that there might be some things different about this podcast in the fall.
Jane: Yes. We will leave that at that. I think we should start with the weather. Apparently, most of the planet is engulfed in this huge heat wave.
Mark: Most the Northeast has had a huge heat wave, although apparently it broke because the people that were in eastern time today told me that it's not hot anymore. They got they got some heavy rain and it's cooled off and it's nicer now.
Jane: Well, I was just thinking it's weird because on the island it's freezing.
Mark: Oh, it's sunny and warm there's just a cold wind.
Jane: Yeah. And it's probably just down here by the water.
Mark: Yes. So very different.
Jane: But I'm wearing a sweater. And it's not air conditioned.
Mark: Yeah. And we are not going for ice cream after that's for sure.
Jane: Yeah. It's actually kinda cold down here too.
Mark: Yeah. Well, I keep it cool so that we don't sweat so much when we're down here working out and things.
Jane: Oh, if you hear my teeth start chattering, that's why.
Mark: Well, that's what Martha's job is to cut out all of the teeth shattering, yes, in the edits. So on the work front, I wanted to start with a very interesting topic that you were discussing on the radio a week or a week or two ago.
Jane: Mhmm on Education Station
Mark: On Education Station and this was the subject of was communication, which is like, ugh kill me now another talk about communication, but you had an interesting perspective that you and Jimmy, I guess, were talking about, which is how do you teach communication or teach listening or something like that.
Jane: Yeah. I mean, teaching communication is not a one and done like you don't have an hour long. Here's how you communicate. And I think I I mean, people ask us for courses in this, and you can kind of skim the surface. But yet for every single piece of communication, you're looking at a much deeper dive if you want to really become an expert in it.
I mean, there's tons and tons of bits and pieces around education and or not education. Around communication and the style of communication that you have, your nonverbal, your verbal communication, how you talk to people, how you listen to people, the difference between passive and active listening. Like, there's just so much. But what we were talking about, what I do is I listen to all the Education Station shows that have gone, like, previously in the month, and then I talked to Jimmy Mack of the not the Drew Barry show, the Dave Nemo show. In my head, I had Drew Barry and it's like, no, it's not Drew Barrymore. Dave Nemo, very different people.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: But, anyway, so we were talking about it because I had listened to a one of his shows where he had a couple of recruiters from Melton Truck Lines, a trucking company in the United States, and they were talking about the importance of listening skills, the importance of listening to drivers. And how important that is. And he said, you know, so how do you teach that? And that was like a big
Mark: How do you teach learning? Or how do you teach listening?
Jane: How do you teach people to listen really well, and and it was kind of a big zzzzzt yeah it was a
Mark: It was a question they weren't expecting.
Jane: They weren't expecting the question and they don't know how they teach it. They recognize good good listening skills. They can identify good listening skills, but they don't know that people really know how to say, okay. You know, your listening skills are poor, but here's how you're gonna improve them. And it's kind of a well, you just do it.
And that's one of the things that people do this when they're really good at stuff. Oh, and where you wanna say, oh, you just do it.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And and that's it. Like, you know, just do it.
You know, be more social. Just do it. Just get out there. And, you know, you're talking to someone with poor social skills and they don't know what to do. They're not necessarily shy, but shyness can be part of it.
But there can be other obstacles to having good social skills. Or and listening skills same thing. Just listen better. You know, listen.
Mark: Right.
Jane: And you hear this in school all the time, you know, listen. You gotta listen. And what does that look like? And what does it mean?
Mark: Yeah. What are you listening for? What are the steps? One of the specific things that I should be thinking about as I'm listening.
Jane: Exactly.
Mark: And people don't know what that is. And a lot of people that are educators aren't really sure how to itemize it because there are people like you say that are naturally good at it. Yeah. Those are the worst educators, people that are naturally good at something.
Jane: But educators generally are good communicators.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. They have to well, good educators are good communicators. A lot of times the educators are the people that were the best practitioners in the discipline and they're not really good at listening they just naturally know how to do it and somebody has said, oh, now teach other people to do what you do, and they are lost.
Jane: So if there, it's actually there's a bunch of there's a bunch of things to listening that are interesting. One of the things and we had our our eldest had communication issues when he was very little. And so we went to, like, a communication work like, a series of workshops. Do you remember what it was called?
Mark: He was, like, two years old. So this was a long time ago.
Jane: I know it was a really long time ago. It started with it was a helping hands. I don't remember, but it was done through the hospital and he was identified with a speech, he wasn't speaking at all. And one of the things that I I learned there was the there was, like, kind of a game where, you know, you throw a ball to another person and then they spoke and then you throw it back in that taking turns process. And that was one of the things that they were talking about. That wasn't necessarily our child's issue, but other people's other people's children had that issue. And it was that taking turns. And and I think that a lot of people, especially in trucking, especially when you're a sales when your mindset is towards sales is that you don't stop talking. And you don't give the other person an opportunity to actually say anything. You just wanna impart your knowledge or your stories or whatever it is and it might be perfectly pleasant for the listener, but you're not communicating. You are projecting.
Mark: Yep.
Jane: And so you have to learn how to stop and actually allow someone else to speak. And that and there's skill in that. You know, if you're not used to doing that, it's hard to kind of have silence around you.
Mark: Yeah. And you really have to be comfortable and confident with yourself in order to just shut the hell up and listen and be quiet for a bit. A lot of people just can't. They're too edgy.
Jane: Yeah. You can't. You have to allow for the space. So you have to, like you said, stop talking, and maybe there is a pause, and maybe there is empty air there for a while. It reminds me of that song, the Alanis Morrison song.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: You know?
Mark: Why are you so petrified of silence? Yes.
Jane: Here, can you handle this and then?
Mark: One bar of silence that seems to take forever.
Jane: Yeah. But it's a great part of the song because it's silent. And so that's like the first step is just thinking about and getting comfortable with silence and letting someone else think about their thoughts and what they want to say because sometimes people need to collect their thoughts and one of the things that you can do if someone asks you a question and you don't have your answer right away, you're not that quick or you haven't thought about it, is telling people give me a second. Let me think. You know, I need to think about this for a second.
I need to, I'm thinking. That communication just to acknowledged that there is a silence and I know there's silence and I'm sorry about this, but I gotta think. I can't answer you right now. There.
Mark: Now I have the song in my head.
Jane: Oh, so
Mark: I have a bar of silence going. But yes, I I think that's important, but that's certainly one of the the tricks in teaching people how to listen I think is giving the specifics of what you should be doing, what's going through your head rather than just listen better.
Jane: Yeah. And I always think of it, think of it as, what does it look like? This is something that you get from teaching children, but it's teaching people. It shouldn't be children or adults. Is what does it look like when you're doing it properly?
Mark: And what are the differences? So what does it look like? Yes. It looks like this. But a lot of people can't see the difference between the right and the wrong, and you have to say, these two places, see these two things, these are different.
Here it's this, there it's that. And then go through that sequentially, and that will build kind of a template that people can follow when they're doing it properly.
Jane: Right. And I mean, there's a whole bunch else that goes into it. But just that, you know, if you're gonna teach people, then teach people how it looks when you're doing it right, how it looks when there's a problem. And not necessarily how it looks you, like how it looks the other person. So what is that nonverbal behavior that that person is exhibiting that may or may not be the fact that you're not getting your message across or that they're not listening or they're they're angry or they're having some sort of emotion.
Because that body language can be misinterpreted. And I think body language is a really important part of listening and communication and and being able to interpret people's body language because body language.
Mark: As an educator, it's critical.
Jane: Yeah
Mark: You're in front of people, you've gotta be paying attention to their body language.
Jane: You make assumptions about people, so the whole eye contact thing. You know, some people hate eye contact, and don't wanna make and will listen better like you when they're not making eye contact. And you're
Mark: I have got in crap for that so many times.
Jane: You're perfect example because you'll be well, okay. So just an aside, everyone else listening. When Mark is listening, he often drums on the table. So or on whatever surface he's on and it makes it look like he's not listening. So to me, you know, some intense drumming like, it can get pretty intense.
Like, I'm looking at you, you know, playing a song in your head.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And I'm thinking, well, you're not listening to me.
Mark: And I'm watching you doodling and sketching and filling in an entire notebook with anything except actual words. But that's the stuff that people need to do in order to listen.
Jane: Yes. I need to draw in order to listen.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: And you need to well, I sometimes I can't stand it, but you don't need to look at me.
Mark: I'm not so bad with that anymore.
Jane: You're not bad.
Mark: But I do remember reading about somebody else. And I don't know why this sticks with me, but in the book version of The Big Short, one of the characters in there was on the autism spectrum and they were talking
Jane: The main character. Right?
Mark: No. One of the others. The guy whose character was morphed into a slightly different person into a made up name and was played by Steve Carell in the movie, real life version of that guy is also on the spectrum and has a lot of the hallmark communication issues of people on the autism spectrum and you put it really nicely in a quote in the book that he said. If I'm looking at you, that's the one time I'm not paying attention. I can't pay attention and look at you at the same time. So some people when they're communicating, they just can't make eye contact.
Jane: Well, our one of our kids has a really good solution for that, which is look at a point on the forehead. So it looks like they're looking at you, but they're really not. Not a point, like, not at the top, like, sort of in between the eyes so that you don't have to do that intense eye gaze. But it's I mean, and we've had it where people are have their eyes closed, and it looks like they're not paying attention.
Mark: Oh, I used to have that. That used to really irritate the crap out of me when I was doing speeches and I would see people in the audience. And I remember one of the first speeches I did there was an audience member that leaned back, had his arms crossed and his eyes closed the whole time. I'm like, man this dude's sleeping in my presentation, and it drove me crazy. I was like so distracted with him the whole time because why isn't he paying attention? And I would make jokes and I would like kind of raise my voice unexpectedly to see if I could wake him up and nothing fazed this guy. And it drove me nuts. And then at the end, the whole thing was finished and the audience went out, it was a break and I was sort of collecting my stuff at the end. He comes up and said that was really good and he starts asking me a bunch of questions about it and I'm like, oh, damn, he was actually paying attention. It just didn't look like it. It looked like it was something totally different.
Jane: Yeah. More and more people are neurodivergent, and they listen in different ways.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So you can't really tell whether people are listening or not. And sometimes they can't, what I've learned is that because we do a lot of non visual talking and listening on Zoom. We do not use cameras on regular meetings. Like, sometimes on a special occasion or something if you're doing a presentation, then we'll turn a cam like, only the speaker turns the camera on. But in general, in our work we don't we basically just have a phone call. It's all phone. It's all non non visual, so it's only audio. And, you know, we've learned I think you get kind of a sense of how to do it without visuals. And what I've noticed is that people sometimes can't get everything the entire like, it it depends on the information, but some information, you're just not gonna get it all.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And you have to do it kind of you have to keep on repeating the same thing over and over again. So if it's a message about how you do your work or processes or whatever reminders and, you know, remember we do this and remember we do this. Those kinds of things are really helpful. I don't think eye contact actually is a is a deal breaker in those cases.
Mark: No. Well, we're not making eye contact because we're not on camera.
Jane: Well, even when you're on camera, I find that I tend to not look at everybody. I'm often looking at myself to make sure that I don't look stupid.
Mark: So what's interesting going back to the of central bit about listening and how to teach listening and how to be better at it, all of those kind of things. I think we have realized or I suppose we've learned through practice how to hear a lot more about what's going on with people just by things like the pace of their conversation, the tone, how they sound. We're listening to the sort of tone quality of their voice. Are they sounding tired? Are they sounding happy? It's a whole different vibe than if you were in front of somebody. And if I was teaching, actually, I've had conversations with people about how to listen how to pick up on what your staff are doing, like how to manage people virtually, which is kind of a tricky thing and similar to I think what you were probably getting through with the the trainers and trying to manage people and how to listen and what to watch for when you're when you're listening or what to listen for when you're listening. And there are a lot of things that you don't really think about that much, like the pace of their speech. And are they speaking in a way that's very relaxed or very tense. Are they speaking in a way that's obviously a higher pitched voice than they normally speak?
It's really an uncomfortably fake a higher pitch voice or lower pitch voice. All of those things you start to be aware of and it tells you something about what they're saying or what they think about what you are saying and, you know, we've had people that have spoken with artificially high voices all the time and it's like, you're not being honest or artificially low voices. The famous case being Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos always, like, as a petite woman always had this low booming voice and it's like, it doesn't add up. And it wasn't her real voice. It was a fake voice.
Jane: And it makes yeah. You kind of her whole persona, I always found it a little bit off putting because, like, that doesn't make sense to me.
Mark: Yeah. And I find the same thing. If I'm having a phone call, I don't do a lot of phone stuff now where I have people sort of cold calling me or calling out of the blue, but can pick up on a lot of those things when I am talking to somebody and I watch for it. You know, how comfortable are you, how relaxed, how agitated, what what's going on behind the scenes there. And it tells you a lot about the context of the conversation.
Jane: So for going back to our original, you know, how do you listen well? And we've talked a lot about how people
Mark: Or how do you teach people to listen well?
Jane: And how do you teach. So in a nutshell, I think there's a couple of things about listening. And one is to respond like basically repeat things back to the person. Give them time to speak and and basically make sure you understand it. So what I, you know, what I hear you saying is this.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And then let the conversation, you know, keep going. Because most of the time when you say, oh, so what you're saying, what I'm hearing you say is this, you'll get corrected if you're wrong. And not, I think, If more people said that, it would make communication a lot easier. You wouldn't have those assumptions. If you say, if you start with, okay, I think this is what you're saying.
Mark: Yeah. And
Jane: that's not just not judgmental at all. Yep. If you start responding in an angry way because you you misunderstood the person, then you're just causing an issue.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: So that reflecting back what the person has just said to you. And also, I think what's important about listening is if you're having a difficult conversation, not beating around the bush. What I've also noticed about people is that they will let you they kind of let you when you're the authority figure. They let you kind of guide the conversation. So if you don't go anywhere, they won't go.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Like, they're not gonna bring up something unpleasant. Yep. They're waiting for you to do it. And you have to be the one to jump into it and how you frame that unpleasant conversation is basically the tone of the the rest of it. So when someone when you're superior, you know, frames something a certain way, it's very difficult, I think, for an employee to try and reframe it, but you can. Like, you can do the same thing that's being done to you. It's just that I don't think people are taught how to do it.
Mark: No.
Jane: They're not. They're basically reacting with a very emotional response and you can hear that in people's voices shaking. You can hear that in men and women doesn't matter young or old. I've made people's voices shake. Quite a bit.
Mark: Ah yeah.
Jane: I I'm very very aware of the voice shaking, you know, either in nervousness or fury or anxiety or and it might not be that I say anything like I'm not attacking them or anything, but what they're saying is very emotional.
Mark: Yep.
Jane: And the can't help it. It's, you know, I'm not making them afraid. They're just are, it's emotional.
Mark: Yeah. Well, that's an important part of teaching people how to listen is explaining to them the importance of being kind of a disconnected observer. Like, you're receiving it, but you're not the intended audience regardless of what they're saying. You have to separate yourself from it and parse it rather than reacting to it.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: You process it rather than reacting to it. And it can be tricky, but you have to think about it as if it's not coming right at you, but you are standing off to the side, watching it go past, going towards somebody else, and then you can process it from there, interpret it, filter it, clarify it, whatever from there, but you have to step out of the way so that it's not hitting you directly. And then you can deal with it more easily. So interesting.
Jane: I think it's actually interesting that we're doing this, like, so close to reviews.
Mark: Yes. We're getting all wrapped up and getting prepped to do our semiannual staff reviews. Yeah. Oh, it's good timing. We're all ready for it now.
Jane: Well, we call them BARs. What does it? Bi-annual
Mark: Bi-annual reviews. Yes. They're not really performance reviews because any performance issues get dealt with at the time, and it tends to be more of an assessment of the status of the position. How is the position working out? And is it what we need and what needs to change and what do we need to be doing differently in our processes and things like that? So much more of a collaborative review where people step back from their job for a little bit and think about it from distance. And they do kind of what I just said, they step out of the way and look at it from the outside. And we get some really good insights by doing that, and it helps us to really identify blockers or inefficiencies in our process and make them better.
Jane: And what's interesting is that we have some standard questions that we always ask at a BAR, and it's basically want what well. What didn't go well? What do you wanna change?
Mark: Yeah. What do you wanna work on over the next six months?
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And what do we need to do to support you or something like that?
Jane: Yeah. Very, very open ended questions, which is funny because we've done these for years and then we got a new HRIS and it had its own questions and they did not work.
Mark: Yeah. Those standard HR questions just did not work.
Jane: No. It's like if you just ask an open ended, okay. So, you know, why are we happy right now? What or what are you happy with? What, you know, what things did you work on that you liked? And those open ended questions so open ended is basically where it doesn't matter like a whole bunch of different answers could be the answer.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And a closed question is, an answer where you basically have it it's yes or no.
Mark: Yeah. A fixed list of answers.
Jane: Yeah. You you know you know what the answer is gonna be. But if you kind of say in open ended given the open ended question, then you have the opportunity to be surprised by the answer. And that's actually very informative because you ask the question and people So when someone asks me, what went well over the last six months? I'm thinking about a project or a course or something like that. But sometimes, the answer will be I really liked doing this training session or I really like this webinar or I really liked, you know, teaching someone something. And it's kind of, like, it's like, oh, you did that. Oh, I forgot. That's so you kind of get insight about the person and what their character is just from answers to open ended questions.
Mark: Right. Yeah. The things that were the highlights for them that you may not have realized.
Jane: Yeah. You have your highlights, but they're not necessarily the other person's highlights.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a good experience. It's a lot of work. And while it's happening each time, I'm like, oh my god, I'm never gonna get to the end of it.
But at the end of it, I'm always thinking, yeah, that was really good. We got a lot of really good ideas out of it. We fixed a lot of issues. So
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Looking forward to it. I will say now because I haven't started them yet.
Jane: Well, the what do you wanna change is a is a good one? And I think it depends on well, that's one of those open ended questions where you know, the platform department is always talking about process changes and technical changes, and then the writers are talking more about, you know, how they get these courses out. And, you know, it just could be the or they will talk about, oh, I don't like this staff meeting because of this or I don't wanna do this anymore. And one of the after a review, I think this was an anonymous survey was the, you know, we don't want cameras on anymore for Zoom meetings. We tried Zoom meetings with cameras on for, like, I don't know a month?
Mark: Early in COVID.
Jane: Yeah. Because we everybody else was doing it and he thought, oh. Maybe we should do it. So we tried it and it was like, no.
Mark: Yeah. It did not work. No. Yeah. Yeah. We learned a lot of good stuff. So that kind of brings me around to the next thing that I wanted to talk about a new course that's just about to be released. Leadership or the second course in our series of leadership courses. And it's just been called leadership internally, and it occurs to me that I don't know what the actual name or subject is, but you've made a few comments about it being really well done and it's a really nice looking course and the content's really good.
So tell me more about it. What is this course actually about? What's it called? And what do you like about it?
Jane: It's called Leadership Styles.
Mark: Oh, Leadership Styles. Okay.
Jane: So there are
Mark: All the different styles of the manager in the middle, manager of the top
Jane: No
Mark: Manager on the outside, that kind of thing.
Jane: Yeah. Sorry. Yes. I didn't finish listening to you. But yes
Mark: So let me explain how to listen.
Jane: Oh, yeah. That's a whole other thing, the whole mansplaining thing. So leadership styles is so if you look at our emotional intelligence course, leadership styles has actually it it's like moving one step further from emotional intelligence and kind of talks about the styles of leadership that you use in different situations. So there's about six different leadership styles and and I'm not even gonna get into them because there's tons of names for
Mark: There's a course where you can learn them all.
Jane: Well, it's not just that, but there's tons of different names for everything. Right?
Mark: Right.
Jane: There's also you look at different behavioral those tests like Myers-Briggs, and
Mark: Right.
Jane: DISC and all of that stuff. It's kinda like that with leadership styles too. It's you know, they have there's all these different terms based on whatever book you got. But there's like six of them and the idea is that you don't choose one leadership style. You actually should move between leadership styles depending on what is happening within your team.
Mark: Interesting.
Jane: Yeah. So one of them is democratic where you're asking everybody for input and basically everybody decides how you're gonna move forward. But then there's another leadership style which is can't remember commanding, which is you've already decided what needs to happen and this usually happens in the case of an emergency or or like there's an issue. And you basically say, you do this. You do this. You do this. But this is what we're doing. Here's how it's gonna happen. Here are your roles. Go.
But you don't want to use that leadership style all the time. But you don't want to use a democratic style all the time either because in the case of a crisis, you don't wanna be like, okay.
Mark: You don't always have time for that.
Jane: It's not very efficient. So there's there's a whole bunch of other ones. And it's basically when you should use one or the other and when what's when's it most effective? Which one's you know, how you might feel comfortable in one or not in another, but here's how to do it, that kind of thing. The reason that I really like the course is because it does relate very nicely to emotional intelligence and also the use of color.
And this may be completely, you know, lost on a bunch of people, but we're using color a lot in emotional intelligence, and that use of color translates into leadership styles. And, you know, so as the characters are assuming one leadership style over another, they're they're clothes change color.
Mark: Oh, interesting.
Jane: So you might have, I can't remember.
Mark: So is it the same characters with different outfits?
Jane: The same outfit, different color.
Mark: Interesting.
Jane: Yeah. So we were playing around with color quite a bit, and I think it looks really nice. You can really tell, like, when you move from green to black to orange. Like, they're definitely different. Things are happening, and there's a lot of scenarios.
So there's a lot of examples of of in real life what this would look like.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: And I also played around for a little bit of artificial intelligence. Well, I was
Mark: Oh was that the one where you did the voice?
Jane: Well, I did the voice, and I also adjusted some photos. It was really interesting because Adobe Photoshop has some generative AI in there. And so you can actually create images just by typing in a prompt, which is when it creates a person out from scratch, they're very weird looking.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So what I'm doing is I'm adjusting backgrounds and, like, if I want an entire person and their head's cut off, I can generate the top of their head
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Their hair.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: And it's really good for that. It's really good for changing the background from a living room to an office.
Mark: Oh ok.
Jane: It's really good for that. You may not like the type of like, what it does, but you just give it more details and it will.
Mark: Right.
Jane: So I did try I did try saying, you know, put the put a jungle as a background and it gave me potted plants. Like it's weird that way.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: It it doesn't quite do what you think it's gonna do, and I was trying to remove someone from a couch.
So I really like the picture of the person, but I didn't want his pregnant wife on the couch next to him because doesn't work for a leadership course.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So I'm trying to get Photoshop to remove this woman from the couch and replace it with something else. And I just kept getting different pregnant women. It was weird.
Mark: Swapping out the pregnant women.
Jane: Yeah. Like, you know, add couch. More pregnant woman. And then, like and they're really creepy looking too. Like, it was not a good pregnant woman.
So I finally I can't remember what I typed, but I typed, like, you know, a phrase and it finally gave me couch cushions or something like that.
Mark: Okay. Interesting.
Jane: So I also but what I also did was for some voiceover that I didn't like, I got some auto I got some AI generated voice. Again, I don't think it's great, but it's better than what, I wouldn't do an entire course with artificial intelligence. Like, I wouldn't do that.
Mark: No. Those fake voices, they sound weird. They're so uncanny valley.
Jane: Yeah. And I used it very very sparsely. Like, I'd done three lines. And I needed a conversation, and the conversation person that I had, who only had these couple of lines, was two young and so I needed to have her older. So I looked at I basically looked that up, but there's, like, you can find a zillion different voices. And but, you know, it's it's like finding an actual human voiceover person.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: You have to listen to endless samples of the people talking and you're like, no.
Mark: That's after adding in a whole pile of tags to narrow it down
Jane: No, what they do. Well, I think if I bought a service, then it would be easier. But I was trying to because it was such a little amount, I was trying to do it for free. And so I was just experimenting. And what I found was, they just give you names. It's like Siri. Well, not Siri, but a Mac the Mac used to have a whole bunch of different names,
Mark: MacinTalk.
Jane: MacinTalk yeah. Yeah. But you can still find those people and their voices on just any Mac. And, you know, it wasn't like Siri it was like Annabelle and Maggie and David and Jonathan. Remember, like, one would sound almost human and another one would sound like a robot and another one sounds like, you know, whatever. But you would have to go and listen to every single one to actually figure out what you wanted. It was kind of that.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: I had a list of names, and I'm trying to I mean, all I can tell from the name is a male or a female.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And there was there was one who talked like this. Like, okay, that's not good.
Mark: So you found something?
Jane: I did. I did. I found a thirty something woman with a relatively low voice. So, yeah, she sounded fine.
Mark: Now we're gonna have to find the same thing for French and Spanish.
Jane: Yeah. But most AI voices you can do in French and Spanish. I'm not that concerned about that. I wanted to I just really didn't want that I wasn't happy with what we had.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: But so, yeah, those are my two content generating AI experiments. And I have to say it's very useful, but I would not repeat, not try and do an entire project. An entire, you know, entire course, like, do all the art, all of that? No.
Mark: Well, it's that's kind of lining up with how we're seeing it on the platform side as well is that it's useful as a shortcut in a very few specific places. So you've got something like, you know, the voiceover thing. Yeah. You could have gone and found found somebody was that kind of voice and get them to record that bit, and it would have sounded a little bit better than what you got, but the amount of time you would have put into it would have been way more than what you did here.
Jane: Yep.
Mark: Same thing with this photo. You could have removed that background yourself, found another background, put it in there, remove the pregnant wife, put something else in there. You could have, you know, either yourself or one of your designers change the guy's outfit if you want. You could do all of those things, but AI experiment gets you there way quicker.
And it's it's stuff that you can do, but you're gonna be putting six hours into it instead of twenty minutes or half an hour or whatever it was. And it's the same thing that we see with AI tools that are code supplements. And so we've had one that we've been using for about six months, I think, now. Maybe longer, maybe since last summer. So I guess
Jane: Is that Copilot?
Mark: Yeah. Copilot that we've been using, which is fairly mature as these tools go, but it's useful for some things. It's not going to write a lot of code for you, but If you give it very specific parameters, it will finish things for you more quickly than you would be able to. So it is people will say, oh, yeah. AI is just auto complete on steroids and well, kind of is, but it's a little bit smarter than that and it's a little bit faster and it's a little bit more thorough. And in particular for unit tests where you have to write a series of tests that very clearly test whether a particular function works as designed. Those things are tedious. Developers hate doing them, but you have to do them all the time. So it's really good for that.
So you can write your functions and then say, give me unit test for this and it will do it. We'll go and build those tests for you. And they'll be pretty decent tests and it will get them done pretty fast. So much like what you're doing, it's all stuff you could do yourself. But it's much quicker if the tool does it for you.
Jane: Yeah. Absolutely.
Mark: I still would not trust any code that was entirely written by AI anymore than an entirely AI generated image or content. I mean, we keep seeing people that are using AI for generated generated content, and it's just flat out wrong. Because the AI is just it's either so vague and general that it's useless or it's specific and just flat out wrong.
Jane: Well, the problem I think is that and I read this somewhere. Where did I read it? Is that the way that AI has been trained. And most of the AI's that people are using are from, you know, Alphabet or Microsoft or whatever, those, let's say, their libraries, they were trained on the Internet.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So they are not necessarily true.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And, you know, getting the AI to actually discern what is true, what is not, that's a whole different process. You basically have to train them on what's true or not. And the other problem is that they
Mark: You have to teach them how to listen.
Jane: Then you get to the problem where, you know, truthiness as Stephen Colbert is to say, you know, what is the truth? And so now you're getting, I don't know, was some was it Bing? It was telling people to eat something?
Mark: I think it was Bing was they were having some problems with it a while ago in earlier generations. I think it was yeah. There was one recently. I think it was Google's AI chat that was giving people really bad advice.
Jane: Yeah. And I think that's the issue is that people are not gonna trust AI until they stop doing that. And the issue is that, basically, they flung AI out into the world, and it's kinda half baked.
Mark: Yeah. And the complex challenge now is that since the world is aware of it, you have all of these people who create content that have said, I don't want my stuff being used to train AI. So the AI language models get trained on the data that's available to them that's available publicly or that is produced by people who don't care, don't care enough to assert ownership and prohibit that use of it. So you're not really getting good data to work from. So it's gonna be trickier. That's gonna be the next hurdle for them is to try and figure out how to get good data to train their models.
Jane: Yeah, if nobody wants well, you're basically using people you're using people for and profiting off of them.
Mark: Which is what has happened in for time in memorial is you have, you've learned things by reading the books written by others. You've learned to write by reading other people and all of that other stuff. And it's all fine at the scale of a human or scale of an individual.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Everything is fine until it scales. What's becoming my new motto. Because it applies in so many places. Everything is fine until you scale it up exponentially, and then everybody is like, hold on a second. That's not really what we meant. I'm okay with you doing it, but not a computer that is a hundred million times more powerful than you.
Jane: Well, also, that whole training AI and you're feeding it all this information, what it spits out is not. When a human reads a book, that human interprets the book and might use some specific words or a concept or whatever from that book. But they don't regurgitate the book.
Mark: But it's also conditioned by all of their other life experiences.
Jane: Exactly.
Mark: That go into filtering what they read and creating something new.
Jane: And with AI.
Mark: It has no life experience.
Jane: So it's just regurgitating and it basically regurgitates things that are very close to the same, like, the identical thing. And and AI doesn't say, oh, I got this from here.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: It doesn't do what every academic is or what every child is taught to do is say, who are your sources? Where are you getting this information?
Mark: Yeah, it doesn't say this book says this, but this book also says this. So let's put these two together and come up with this other thing.
Jane: Yeah. It just slams everything together and says, here you go. Here's the information that you asked for because you're paying extra in whatever application that you've bought. To get an AI enabled whatever. And, yeah, it kind of annoys me because these huge tech companies kind of assume that they have the right to go and scrape everything and then just regurgitate it without saying, yeah, this came from someone else.
Mark: Because it wasn't expressly prohibited
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Except that now it is becoming expressly prohibited
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: They're getting more and more boxed into
Jane: which is good. I I don't think that's right. I mean, as a person who creates a lot of content, I don't think it's right to have some friggen computer just, you know, vacuum it up along with everything else, and you lose a lot.
Mark: It can be quite enraging.
Jane: Can be.
Mark: Which brings me to the last thing that I wanted to talk about.
Jane: Road rage?
Mark: Yes. The last thing that is on our list for new courses that are coming soon that I'm also excited about.
Jane: Rage of the road colon fury
Mark: Rage of the road. Yes. Now we had covered this a little bit in our defensive driving courses. We had some bits about it and what to do about it and how to recognize it and all of that sort of stuff. But now we've got a dedicated course on the subject. And this I find interesting because I wouldn't have thought there was a course there. Like, I wouldn't have thought there was that much to the subject unless you start getting into a lot of the sociological things or psychological things underpinning it, but you obviously have found enough for a course in there. So what's this one all about?
Jane: Well, I didn't find enough of a course. One of our writers.
Mark: The the Yeah. The grander you.
Jane: The grander the content you?
Mark: The content underneath you. Yes.
Jane: Rhiannon, who's one of our writers did this course and Berenice who's our lead creative, did the graphics, which are quite good. I really like the graphics because we've got we've got some like, we have some people, but we also have some characters like a cart not a cartoon, but like an illustrated character as well. So it works really well in the in the course, but it's really about what it is. So what what road rage is and how you can express it.
Because you can express it in a number of different ways. You can express it physically using your vehicle or verbally.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: So and it's not just about other people's road rage. It's about yours
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: As well. So what are the what are the things that make you feel road rage? What does it look like, triggers. And how do you stop these triggers? Like, how do you stop from or how do you change from having road rage and expressing road rage to not expressing it?
And what do you do? And what does that look like? So before, like, in defensive driving in our defensive driving courses, we do talk about road rage. We talk about, but it's really kind of basic. It's like, you know, avoid the person. Don't engage. And if you are feeling angry, you know, try to calm down or, you know, do these things strategies to calm down. But this course goes into it into more detail. It's not a long course. I think it's gonna be like maybe forty minutes tops, but I think what it also does is instead of putting it in the general the general category of defensive driving, it focuses attention on road rage specifically so that if people are having issues with that specific thing.
It's not, you know, wrapped in just, like, general defensive driving that you're just you're really focusing on the issue. And then the another part of the course, which is good, is is what to do, like different different strategies and then different strategies to handle other people.
Mark: Okay. Interesting. And both of these are nearing the completion stage.
Jane: Yes. Leadership is voice is being done. Yeah. I think it's gonna be going out in the next month or so.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And yeah Road Rage too. I think Road Rage is still getting some audio done, but I think it's it's not very I think, yeah, it's not a long course, so that'll be. I can see the the audio coming in from our real life voiceover guy.
Mark: Right.
Jane: So that will be coming soon. And then further down the line we have Owner Operator Business Skills.
Mark: Which will be later in the summer.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: Right.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Yeah. The long awaited completely overhauled Business Skills for Owner Operators or how to not lose money when you own a truck.
Jane: Well, we can't we can't prevent you from losing money, but we
Mark: How to set yourself up with the best chance for success.
Jane: Yeah. How to how to not be surprised by things and how to, you know, make sure that you've planned and, yeah, And you're not going to get taken advantage of
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Things like that.
Mark: Does it tell people to stay out of the spot market?
Jane: It does not. I don't wanna say I mean, I'm not gonna say
Mark: Yeah if somebody wants to make that work, they can.
Jane: Lots of people.
Mark: Yeah lots of people have done it very well.
Jane: Yeah. I don't like, as far as the strategy, that's that's not the purview of the course.
Mark: Okay. Understanding the business fundamentals so that you can make an informed decision, about whether or not you want to get into the spot market.
Jane: Yes. And it does include things like budgeting and figuring out what your, you know, what your revenue is gonna be. So that's something to think about in in in the framework of the spot market versus trying to find consistent customers where you may have to start out in the spot market because that's what you've got. That's what's available. And then move towards building relationships with customers that will give you repeat business, which is a lot may not be as profitable as the spot market can be, but it is much more reliable.
And you have you know, so I am assuming that for, you know, someone who's wanting to be an owner operator, you're going to start off with primarily relying on a carrier and then kind of moving into the spot market like half and half and, you know, kind of find a happy medium.
Mark: Hmm interesting.
Jane: That's how I would do it.
Mark: Okay. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing these courses out. And I think with that, we can bring this episode to a close.
Jane: And this is it for the summer.
Mark: Yes. Thank you all for listening to another season of The CarriersEdge Podcast, AKA, Jane and Mark's Ramblings, and we will we'll see in the fall with some new stuff. Have a great summer, everybody.
Jane: Yes. Have a good one.