Digital Age Essentials for Mature Adults

Embracing Technology: Seniors and Modern Gadgets

In this episode of 'Mature Adults with Donna and Mike', the hosts Mike Roth and Donna Hoover discuss the use of technology among seniors, focusing primarily on the adoption and utility of cell phones and AI. They share personal anecdotes, discuss the challenges seniors face with modern technology, and delve into the benefits and practical uses of AI for everyday tasks such as planning trips, writing emails, and finding specific information. They touch upon the importance of staying connected, even as one ages, and the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence that can enhance daily living. The episode wraps up with a promise to explore AI in more depth in a future episode, inviting listeners to suggest topics for further discussion.

00:00 Welcome to Mature Adults with Donna and Mike
00:55 Technology and Seniors: A Modern Challenge
07:19 The Importance of Staying Connected
11:23 AI: The Future is Here
14:21 Practical Uses of AI for Everyone
17:54 AI in Everyday Life
21:52 The Rapid Growth of AI
23:51 Wrapping Up and Looking Ahead

Transcript

Digital Age Essentials for Mature Adults

[00:00:03] Mike Roth: Welcome to Mature Adults with Donna and Mike, the podcast where wisdom meets curiosity and life's next chapter is celebrated. 

[00:00:13] Donna Hoover: Whether you're navigating retirement, pursuing new passions, or simply looking for a fresh perspective. This is a place to embrace the beauty of aging and discover all the opportunities that come with it.

[00:00:26] Mike Roth: Join us twice a month as we explore topics that matter to mature adults. From health and wellness to travel, finance, real estate, storytelling, and many more. Together, let's redefine what it means to thrive at this exciting stage of life.

This is Mike Roth and

[00:00:48] Donna Hoover: Donna Hoover.

[00:00:49] Mike Roth: Thanks for joining me, Donna, and today's episode of Mature Adults with Donna and Mike. We're going to be talking about technology and the use of technology by seniors.

[00:01:01] Donna Hoover: This is gonna be an exciting episode. It does not sound like it at the offset, but it is 'cause we're gonna get into AI and all kinds of crazy things.

[00:01:09] Mike Roth: But let's start back at the beginning. Absolutely. We live in a senior centric community and we do have younger people here. And I'm gonna talk about a friend of mine named George and I wanted to contact him.

I said, George give me your cell phone number. And George gives me his cell phone number and I said, is that the best number to reach out? And George says, no, and he gives me Another telephone number in the three five two area code, which is our local area code. And he says, that's my home phone.

I'll answer that. And I said, so you're not gonna answer your cell phone when you see me on the caller id? And he says, no, I don't know how to work that.

I said, George, you got a cell phone and you don't know how to work it. And he says, yeah, I keep it in the car. I say, okay, so when you're in the car, do you turn it on?

He says no, it's for emergencies.

[00:02:00] Donna Hoover: Oh my.

[00:02:01] Mike Roth: So I said, if I called you and you didn't pick it up, and I left you a message on your voicemail, and he says, oh, I have an answering machine at home for that.

[00:02:11] Donna Hoover: So he has a thousand dollars piece of equipment that he's not utilizing at all.

[00:02:15] Mike Roth: Oh, it's his emergency. Contact system.

[00:02:18] Donna Hoover: He should just get one of those buttons, you press it and it's I'm falling. I haven't got up, yeah.

[00:02:22] Mike Roth: one of those life alerts.

[00:02:23] Donna Hoover: Yeah. Why are you bothering him with a cell phone at this point?

[00:02:27] Mike Roth: He is driving around, but maybe his car breaks down he needs help, so I guess

[00:02:31] Donna Hoover: I guess,

[00:02:32] Mike Roth: well, so George can only be contacted by landline. Which makes him a little bit obsolete.

[00:02:39] Donna Hoover: did you stress to him the importance of learning this technology and helping him to understand what he had at his disposal

[00:02:47] Mike Roth: And he said, Mike, I don't wanna learn how to use that. And I said, it's like having a computer in your hand.

You could look up things on the web. And he said, at home, I have a pc.

[00:02:56] Donna Hoover: Oh my.

[00:02:58] Mike Roth: And I can do my email on that machine. I can look at some stuff on the web.

[00:03:02] Donna Hoover: Do you know how many cat videos he hasn't watched? I'm just saying it's like the most popular thing now.

[00:03:08] Mike Roth: Now tell the truth to our audience.

Are you a cat lady?

[00:03:11] Donna Hoover: Oh, I'm well, I like animals when I have some cats. 

[00:03:15] Mike Roth: Oh. Some means

[00:03:16] Donna Hoover: Two.

[00:03:17] Mike Roth: Okay. You become a cat lady when you have at least five.

[00:03:21] Donna Hoover: Yeah I've heard rumors, so I'm trying to stay away from that number.

[00:03:24] Mike Roth: A lot of my friends have cats too that's okay. In fact, my grandfather had a cat. I never know what happened to her. One day I was watching her as a teenager. I opened the door, the cat ran out the back door.

[00:03:34] Donna Hoover: Oh.

[00:03:34] Mike Roth: Gramps didn't have a cat anymore. 

[00:03:35] Donna Hoover: Ooh.

[00:03:37] Mike Roth: Sometimes that happens. And that was the days before you put a in your pet to find them

[00:03:41] Donna Hoover: Before the technology that we're gonna talk about today.

[00:03:44] Mike Roth: Having a cell phone and using it is, I think, almost second nature to most people. And yet I find that many seniors shy away from 'em.

[00:03:53] Donna Hoover: I agree. They did not grow up with this technology like most of it. And so it, it becomes an oppressive sort of a feeling like, oh, I, I don't wanna touch it.

I don't know what to do with this thing.

[00:04:05] Mike Roth: Yeah. If you grew up with a rotary dial telephone and some of the teenagers don't know what that is before a rotary dial phone could be sold or rented.

It had to pass a 10 foot drop test from a ladder.

They would drop it from a ladder, 10 feet, hit the cement floor, and if it broke, they couldn't sell it.

[00:04:23] Donna Hoover: This is true.

Oh my. Interesting. 

[00:04:25] Mike Roth: I was told that was the truth.

[00:04:27] Donna Hoover: Maybe it's for when you got really mad at people and you know how like it used to be so great just to slam the receiver down.

[00:04:32] Mike Roth: Oh yeah. They were nice and heavy.

[00:04:34] Donna Hoover: It's not fun like that anymore. You don't wanna slam your phone down.

Maybe that's why he keeps his landline. Aha.

[00:04:40] Mike Roth: Oh, I don't know if he had an anger management problem,

[00:04:42] Donna Hoover: But 

[00:04:43] Mike Roth: definitely a cell phone is not a gadget. It's something that everyone should have. And perhaps should turn it off sometimes, like when you're recording a podcast.

[00:04:53] Donna Hoover: good idea.

[00:04:54] Mike Roth: Yeah. Or maybe in the theater when you're seeing a live show that has a courtesy to the other theater goers or the actors and actresses on stage.

[00:05:02] Donna Hoover: If you go to an improv show, definitely turn it off.

[00:05:05] Mike Roth: Yeah. 'cause on an improv show, I'm gonna say if your phone Went off, everyone at your table pointed at the person whose phone went off. They get up, come up the front, we're gonna turn it on speakerphone and everyone in the auditorium can enjoy the telephone calls.

It'll probably be very funny.

[00:05:20] Donna Hoover: I think so too. I love that. That's amazing. 

[00:05:22] Mike Roth: Yeah.

Occasionally that has happened. But the cell phones that are modern have web browsers on 'em. Now most cell phones have the capability to use AI.

[00:05:33] Donna Hoover: I know, and I have to say how many conversations do you have nowadays where someone asks a question or comes up with a statement and you stop to Google it?

Like to find out the answer to that question or to determine the accuracy of what that person's just said. I do that all day long. How can you not do that?

[00:05:53] Mike Roth: My wife watches some foreign TV shows in the English shows. Sometimes they say a word in England and I say what does that mean i n American? And she looks at me like she doesn't know, and she takes out her phone, puts the word in, and we get what the English American translation of that English word was. And some of times they're very interesting, but the. Ability to stay in touch with people no matter where you are.

And now it's really no matter where you are in the world, 'cause it'll work on a cruise ship. It works on foreign countries. And I understand that many airlines are now allowing calls to work or text messaging. In fact I'm flying on Air Canada soon and on their flights, text messaging and the internet are gonna be free.

Oh yeah. That's an incentive to fly Air Canada. 

[00:06:46] Donna Hoover: I guess so.

[00:06:47] Mike Roth: And you might not want to have a conversation when you have a stranger next to you, and it's a particularly private conversation, but certainly texting or sending an email, I. From any place is important, and if someone wants to reach you with an important message, like you won the publishers clearing house lottery for a million dollars. You'd want to get that news 

[00:07:07] Donna Hoover: Right?

I would really wanna know that. Yeah. 'cause then I'd know how much to spend once I landed on my trip.

[00:07:13] Mike Roth: Don't bother picking up your suitcases. Just buy all new clothes.

 And new suitcases.

[00:07:18] Donna Hoover: I like where this is going.

[00:07:19] Mike Roth: Staying connected to other people is really important. As people get older, sometimes their friends die off, but you can make new friends. There's no rule that says you can't make new friends as you grow older. 

I'm doing that now. I just moved here, what, not even a year and a half ago.

So everyone in my life is brand new now.

Yeah. And I moved here seven years ago and probably have 150 friends or more.

[00:07:46] Donna Hoover: That's a lot of 

[00:07:47] Mike Roth: I have to keep 'em in database 'cause I can't remember that many telephone numbers.

[00:07:52] Donna Hoover: The cool thing is too, is in your phone you can also have their picture right there.

So if you forgot who it was and you got the name, you got the face. Oh, there you go.

[00:08:02] Mike Roth: Yeah. And.

Not everyone puts their picture into their phone. So when caller ID happens you see their picture. But some people do and that makes it very much more convenient.

[00:08:12] Donna Hoover: It does. And then you can make notes down at the bottom.

This is where I met this person. This is who this person, in case you can't remember.

[00:08:20] Mike Roth: I meet a lot of new people down here and it's important for me to write down. Why I met him, how I met him. I met you at the Improv Club. I met this one at the actors workshop and Chris said to me that he does voiceover work. And so I put that down. Three years later, I discovered a project that Chris might be interested in. I can pick up the phone and call him.

[00:08:44] Donna Hoover: There you go. 

[00:08:44] Mike Roth: Send him a text message.

[00:08:46] Donna Hoover: People are missing out on a lot and we're just scratching the surface of the usage for a cell phone.

That's a very basic device that we have at our disposal right now.

[00:08:56] Mike Roth: I run the Mercedes Benz Club here in The Villages and

have a lot of events and sometimes the event has a location where we're gonna take a little bit of a cruise, like we did a cruise on the Mount Dora canal and we're standing there, I got 20, 25 people waiting in line to get on the boat and I got a list of people who paid for it, and Joe is not here. So I can take out my cell phone, dial his number and call him to find out where Joe is. Or I could send Joe a text if he doesn't pick up. Okay. We had a car show at Lake Sumter landing a couple of weeks ago, and two of our members weren't there with their cars when we were getting ready to drive into the square in a protected, caravan. Okay. And he wasn't there.

I texted him.

Where

are you buddy? I got an immediate response.

[00:09:50] Donna Hoover: There you go.

[00:09:51] Mike Roth: I'm five minutes away.

[00:09:53] Donna Hoover: And you wouldn't know that otherwise and Right. Not only that, the planning of that event, a lot of people will text and they'll have a group of people all at once that they're addressing.

So say you have 10 people in a club or 10 people you need to talk to. We're all meeting for dinner tonight.

[00:10:10] Mike Roth: Yeah. And they'll say I want to park next to Donna at the town square. If you're not there, I better get the message somehow.

[00:10:18] Donna Hoover: Yeah. And like back in the old days, think about it, when you were gonna arrange an event, you had to make a phone call and then make another phone call and then half the time the person's not home and they don't answer.

So now you gotta call 'em back later. Now you can either just send an email. or a text and you can text everybody at the same moment or email everyone at the same moment. You've sent out virtually one email or one text, and you've addressed however many people. You want to at one time?

[00:10:46] Mike Roth: Yeah. An email sending carbon copies or blind carbon copies makes it easier on email, on texting where you can do group texting. I've always been a little bit hesitant about that because then you're in that group and you start getting messages back when anyone sends a message,

[00:11:05] Donna Hoover: That does happen.

It is, this isn't a perfect world, but the ease of being able to address multiple people at one time can be very valuable. 

[00:11:15] Mike Roth: Get you to the right place at the right time. Make sure you don't miss something.

And it's very important and a good use of the technology.

Now just briefly on, on AI, artificial intelligence, as I was saying to Donna before, about two and a half years ago, I got introduced to AI. I guess the first time I became consciously aware of it, where I got clubbed over the head. I'm watching a piece on 60 minutes on AI when Open AI chat, GBT became available, and I thought that was the greatest thing ever, that you can chat with the computer. The computers can give you answers to questions and insights that you didn't have.

So immediately I had tried to get on it, and for months it was jammed.

[00:12:00] Donna Hoover: Everybody wanted it.

[00:12:02] Mike Roth: it was unusually good. And then I go to a convention and I was talking with a guy and he showed how writing descriptions of my podcasts which was one of my more difficult tasks

became easy and better in using an AI.

And so I tested it and it was, I couldn't believe it.

[00:12:21] Donna Hoover: And so just as a brief like a quick little one or two lines, how does that work? what's happening out there that they're able to do that? The writing for you?

[00:12:30] Mike Roth: I think what's happened in the world of AI is A company called Nvidia came up with some very large, very fast processors and storage.

And if you want to think of it this way they go ahead and they have this AI create a large learning model, LLM, where they read everything on the internet.

And put it in a database and then they index it. And then the LLM helps them figure out how to write answers and access the information. So all of a sudden the companies that are providing AI services need very large computers. And a lot of them in fact many of 'em are going to nuclear power to power all of these large mainframes. My

[00:13:18] Donna Hoover: my goodness,

[00:13:19] Mike Roth: Meta or Facebook. Facebook's parent companies just put in an application with the US government to run a nuclear reactor.

[00:13:27] Donna Hoover: Oh my. So they're basically accessing all of this information that's out there and bringing it all together in one succinct place for you. 

[00:13:34] Mike Roth: But it's more Okay. Because they're scraping everything that's out there. For instance, they scrape every copy of the New York Times. New York Times wasn't happy about it.

They sued some companies like Perplexity for doing so without their permission and apparently gonna be making a settlement about that. But if it was available electronically on the web where it was a PDF document of how do you work your word processing program. And you have a simple question. About how to make a every letter in the sentence, capital letters without retyping the whole thing.

If the manual for the word processing program was in your AI, the AI could address it from the PDF manual and come up with what the answer is.

[00:14:21] Donna Hoover: So what would you say are some practical uses that maybe people who have not tried AI as yet what could they use it for?

[00:14:30] Mike Roth: Improve your writing without actually improving your writing. We all learned how to write a paragraph in high school or college, and what AI does is take the same input that you have and come up with a better version.

[00:14:42] Donna Hoover: I'm a writer, so I hate this.

[00:14:44] Mike Roth: It's good because you can become more persuasive or you can become more salesy, or you can become more friendly and give the AI the tone that you'd like to reflect in the message that you're trying to transmit.

[00:15:00] Donna Hoover: So if you were gonna write an email to somebody maybe a business or something, and you didn't feel confident that you were expressing yourself properly, then they could help with that?

[00:15:09] Mike Roth: That's right. These are called prompts that you could give your AI. I want this message to be enthusiastic as a promoter and salesy at the same time. And I find that the more difficult the subject is, the more important it is to use AI. I used to have a methodology for writing difficult. Emails or letters to write it once and put it aside for two or three days, come back to it and say, oh, man I can think of something better to than that, and I would make it better.

[00:15:44] Donna Hoover: Emotions have subsided.

[00:15:45] Mike Roth: Yeah, the emotions have subsided. And then I would send out the corrected copy two days later. Now with an AI, you can tell the what you want to say, and the AI will say it better for you.

[00:15:58] Donna Hoover: So you could ask it like make this a little less harsh or something to that effect.

[00:16:04] Mike Roth: Or tougher.

[00:16:05] Donna Hoover: Or tougher. 

[00:16:06] Mike Roth: Add a call to action in it.

Oh, let the AI figure out what the call to action is. Very good. It's, I think, going to improve communications between people and make your job or your life easier.

[00:16:19] Donna Hoover: So if I'm a senior and I don't work and I don't need to send any business emails what else could I use AI for?

[00:16:27] Mike Roth: What else could you use AI for? You can use AI for thousands of things. Actually, when AI started those three or four companies two and a half years ago. You only communicated with the AI by typing into it what they called the chat box. And then the AI answered you in a chat box with a lot more words. Today you can talk to most of the AIs, turn on the microphone and your computer or your phone, and you say give me a list of the top 10 hotels in Barcelona that are near Las Ramblas and are rated at least four stars.

[00:17:02] Donna Hoover: That's a nice usage. Now seniors travel, so there you go. 

[00:17:06] Mike Roth: Or you could say, based on the criteria that seniors feel important, what are the four cruise lines that would be acceptable to me?

[00:17:13] Donna Hoover: So you cut through a lot of the fat as an order and get right to what you want.

[00:17:17] Mike Roth: I couldn't believe how many of the hotels there were in Barcelona and they were both big hotels, small hotels, a lot of hotels I didn't never even heard of 'cause they were in Spanish.

[00:17:27] Donna Hoover: So yeah, you could say, I wanna go to four star hotels that have pools or something like that. And so you've really

[00:17:34] Mike Roth: Rooftop pools that are infinity pools .

[00:17:35] Donna Hoover: Well there.

So you've really narrowed down your research time like crazy.

[00:17:40] Mike Roth: It may make my travel agent obsolete and Dwayne might not feel good about that. Sorry, Dwayne.

[00:17:45] Donna Hoover: Sorry, Dwayne, 

[00:17:46] Mike Roth: It makes the whole operation of finding out information that you want.

More important. I use a lot of home automation equipment around the house and I was having trouble with one of 'em and the error message said, use an elf file instead. I said ELFL file. What the heck is an "ELF" file? You ever heard of one?

[00:18:10] Donna Hoover: No. Around Christmas, there's some stuff, but no, I, no.

[00:18:13] Mike Roth: Usually they're EXE files, or executable files. And I went into the AI, I said, what's an ELF file and how do I use it? And how do I convert what I have into an ELF file? And they gave me the answer!

[00:18:26] Donna Hoover: And keep Santa Claus outta this. 

[00:18:27] Mike Roth: Uh, sometimes you have a problem that takes hours to get the solution to whether it was Dr. I drive an electric car and was taking a trip two years ago to New York to visit my daughter on Long Island, and I wanted to know where the rest stops were that had. Electric vehicle charging ports.

[00:18:48] Donna Hoover: Oh. So that was important.

[00:18:50] Mike Roth: Oh, yeah. And my wife and I did it manually. We created the chart going north, and then we created the chart going south, and it took us five, six hours to do it.

[00:18:59] Donna Hoover: Oh my goodness. 

[00:19:00] Mike Roth: We had to know where to stop and what route to follow. And that was at the time when 95 and Philadelphia fell down and we decided we didn't want to go through Philadelphia. Which coincidentally meant we didn't want to go through Washington DC

so we Took an inland route, and so we mapped it out. Now, today on my cell phone, I can use an application called " A Better Route Planner". it will calculate all of that for me. And it will allow me to tell the plan what is the percentage of charge I have at the beginning of the day?

What is the percentage of charge I want to stop at? Because I don't wanna go any place near zero, right?

[00:19:41] Donna Hoover: right?

[00:19:41] Mike Roth: I tell it, let's go down to 30%. Okay, let's stop for lunch at a place where there's a charging station. So I'm not losing time. And it makes that route plan in less than 60 seconds.

[00:19:55] Donna Hoover: That's five hours you just got back.

[00:19:57] Mike Roth: Yes. Each way. And it makes a very big difference.

[00:20:00] Donna Hoover: Yeah. 

[00:20:00] Mike Roth: We were go, I don't know if you've ever spent any time in Jacksonville, have you? I hadn't spent much time there and we had a event in Jacksonville and it was just an overnight stay. But I didn't want to take any chances. I wanted to be near the airport and I wanted to be in a brand new hotel. So I told the AI, gimme the names of the brand new hotels near the Jacksonville airport. I got three back.

[00:20:25] Donna Hoover: Perfect. 

[00:20:26] Mike Roth: So it saved a lot of time and it makes root planning my trips a lot easier. Sometimes you have technical problems, and when I'm planning a improv show. It's 90 minutes long with 20 scenes, 16 players, and I want to give a fair distribution of parts to everyone in the show. I wanna make sure that the cross tally works, that the number of players required in each scene should equal. The total number of scenes that each player is in when added up that little problem would take four to six hours and be an aggravating problem.

[00:21:03] Donna Hoover: Oh goodness.

[00:21:04] Mike Roth: What I discovered I could do with an AI is write down which players should be in watch scenes. Okay. The total number of scenes, the total number of players required and sent. A copy of that into the AI 'cause it can now read spreadsheets and find the mistakes.

Interestingly, over the last year, I've discovered sometimes the AI makes a mistake. That's right. And I say to the AI in the chat box, or talk to it, say, oh. Check Donna Hoover, she only appears in six scenes, but her total number of scenes on the sheet says seven. Where, what's missed up? 

[00:21:42] Donna Hoover: And will they say, oh, I'm sorry I made a mistake. No, they probably don't say

[00:21:45] Mike Roth: It does say something like

[00:21:46] Donna Hoover: Does it really? And then

[00:21:47] Mike Roth: Then it recalculates it and figures it out. So it does it in a heck of a lot less time.

[00:21:52] Donna Hoover: Oh yeah.

[00:21:52] Mike Roth: But we're in a. I don't wanna call it a time warp, but we are in a period of tremendous growth in the world of AI.

Two and a half years later, after I got involved with it when I started, I say there were two or three, then 168 AI is now, there is 70,000 companies in the world of AI.

[00:22:09] Donna Hoover: Wow.

[00:22:10] Mike Roth: Okay. So yes, there is a lot of duplication of what people are doing, and they're doing it differently. And we're also playing leapfrog in that world where one company's got something that's better than the next guy's company and then someone else jumps them and then someone else jumps them.

It's just unbelievable the way this technology is coming. The AI can create videos now. They can create images, they can create talking images.

[00:22:35] Donna Hoover: Yeah. I'll tell you interestingly, my book, as we've talked about briefly, I'm getting ready to publish it and I asked AI how I could promote it and what were the steps and what did I need to do? And they wanted to know what date did you wanna. Launch this book. And so it did a calendar for me, okay, in this month you should do this.

In this month you should do that. You should be already contacting people, and it gave me a whole rundown what I'm supposed to be doing, and that is knowledge that I didn't readily have, and it just basically handed it to me. In a matter of minutes.

[00:23:11] Mike Roth: And let's pretend you wanted to pick an editor for your book. You could say to the AI, I'm an author seeking an editor for my book. I want the editor to have been in the business of editing books for at least 10 years and has edited at least five extremely successful books.

I want the edit to be located in the United States, in the state of Florida, or in New York City or chicago, and I want the editor to have edited books. In my field of study, which is blank, and then the AI. Can come back with a list of editors.

[00:23:47] Donna Hoover: I think I know what I'm doing this afternoon now, Mike. Thank you.

[00:23:51] Mike Roth: Good. There's a lot more we can talk about In AI technology, but I think we ought wrap it up here, Donna. Unless you think we missed something. It was critical for the first go round. 

[00:24:00] Donna Hoover: Oh, I think we're gonna have to talk about AI again, because we had a pre-conversation and we didn't even get into any of the things you and I discussed. So there's probably a whole nother episode that we can do sometime in the future.

[00:24:11] Mike Roth: Okay, great. Again, our next episode's coming up in two weeks. It'll be released again on a Monday morning at nine o'clock.

[00:24:19] Donna Hoover: Thank you for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed it. You've been listening to Mature Adults with Donna and Mike. We release a new episode the first and third Monday of every month. If you have suggestions for future topics, email us at Mikedonna281@gmail.com.