On today's explain from Vox, we're going to talk about rage. The specific kind of rage you feel when you have to deal with customer service. There was one woman who had tried to get a prescription from CVS and had to travel somewhere and try to get a transfer. She ultimately wound up to sort of having three different relatives try to pick it up in three different states. I've been talking to a lot of people who are having a hard time dealing with their parents' estates to the point where they do things like book a chunk of time every Friday to get on the phone and yell at people. I can't go to a party right now and bring up this subject without seven people being like, oh my god, let me tell you about how this company screwed me over and that one screwed me over. We're going to ask if AI agents are going to make our rage economy better or worse. 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Go to fetchpet.com/save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com/save. So Heather Timbins, you cover consumers for the Guardian and you told us all these stories of how people are getting very, very mad. How mad are we? Is anyone measuring it? There is a great survey called, hopefully enough, the ConsumerRage survey, which has come out every two years. It dates back to the 1970s. This is a real survey called the ConsumerRage survey. The real survey, actual real survey, and it tries to figure out sort of how you are feeling about being a consumer in America. And it found that at that point, almost 80% of Americans had had a service or product problem in 2025. And that's about double what it was in the 1970s. And more than two thirds of those customers had felt rage over it. And about half of those people had raised their voice trying to solve it. There is nothing in this world that makes me more mad than talking to the robot when you're trying to get in touch with customer service. Why is everything shit today? I mean, everything we buy, it's just shit, it's garbage. Even the junk food you eat to make you feel better, tastes like shit now. You can't even have a case of the saddies and eat some chocolate because it tastes bad. I know this isn't that big of a deal but I am so fucking pissed at these corporations sitting here saying that we have to go to a subscription service for something that has always been available. And then I'm going to transfer you to support. Who am I talking to now? The janitor? What they put me on with? I was transferred to you. People are sort of simmeringly mad and they are dealing with an increased number of product and service problems like things are actually wrong. It's not just that, you know, we're all angry right now and everything's amassed. It's, you know, things are actually you're actually getting worse service and buying worse products sometimes. And you've been writing about this for a while now. How exactly does the anger transition into rage at one point? Do we break into rage, you think? And what is causing that? It's such an interesting thing because I think it is a particularly American thing to think that you should get good customer service. And when I talk to people around the world who build customer service models and AI models, they say, you know, their American focus groups are the most, are the toughest and most fascinating because they expect to be treated well. You know, you sort of like, you have a focus group in France and everyone's like, uh, everything is shit and it will always be shit. You know, and the Americans will, and the Americans will say, no, but I, you know, I, we're so used to thinking of ourselves as the consumer is king. Yeah. This massive consumer economy powers the US economy, which powers the world economy. And we're so used to having choice it. And the reality is like that the choices, the fact that you are going to be treated well as a consumer, those things have sort of slipped away over the past couple of decades. Right now we're in an era of extreme financialization. Airfare is at its highest level in more than a decade. Healthcare costs are among the top of the list for Americans financial worries. It's type of shit. It's so fucking aggravating and frustrating and it just makes me like, what the fuck is wrong with America do? You know, anything that a company can squeeze at you and as much as it can get you to pay, it's going to do. Tell us how the consumer experience is getting worse. We're not just getting angry or things are actually getting worse. Is there like a direct relationship between the two phenomena? You know, we have seen a whole lot of private equity buyouts. Restaurant chain Denney says it's been acquired by a group of investment firms in a deal worth around 620 million dollars. 450 hospitals nationwide have been taken over by private equity. My sub was not a sub above. And the Jersey Mike employee who was hooking up the sandwich goes, yeah, bro, it's because, you know, it ain't the same sub anymore. And that, you know, there's a direct correlation to how unhappy consumers are and companies that have been taken over by private equity. And that's, you know, in part because the model is really put a lot of debt on the company, take it over sell their real estate, make them pay, you know, rental fees, and then squeeze the cost as much as you possibly can. And so then you start to feel that and things like, you know, whatever your favorite fast food chain is, whatever your favorite retail brand is. Sometimes some of those things go bankrupt like Joanne's and Toys of Russ. I mean, those are real things that are happening, but there's also just, we're just sort of in an era of financialization, even things that are not private equity taken, you know, private equity owned. I was talking to Ben of Ben and Jerry's who's been trying to buy his ice cream brand back. It was bought by by Unilever and then now spun off into Magnum. But, you know, he has this sort of analogy where he says, you know, for many corporations, what you do is you sort of, you keep slicing a little bit off the loaf of baloney, trying to cut costs here, cut costs there. And then at the very end, you're like, do you even, what have you got left? Do you have baloney anymore? And then you're talking about private equity and optimization, perhaps, but there's this experience that like anyone I'm sure listening to this can relate to where you get on the call with the customer service represent maybe at first you're talking to a robot and you're on the phone tree and you're pushing buttons and then you're finally after maybe 30 minutes you finally get to talk to a human. And then that human transfers you to another human and you have to tell that human your story again and that human transfers you to another human and you have to tell that person your story again. And that's maybe if you're lucky that you're getting a bunch of humans, you can get off that call feeling a little bit like this whole system is designed to enrage you. Is there any truth to that feeling? It's not that it's designed to enrage you. It's just designed to get as much money from you as possible and spend as little money on you as possible. When I talk to people that are building customer service in AI systems right now, like their ultimate goal is you never talk to a person. If they are doing things right, you never ever talk to a person. And for some of them, some of them, the sort of frustration is built in on purpose because they want you to give up because if you go, God, that $8 subscription free, I didn't renew that, you know, or T-Mobile's got an extra $12 on there, but I didn't actually ask for that whatever. It's going to take you so long to get that taken off that you're going to decide, my time is not worth that money and then they get to keep the money. And that's not like an accidental thing. It's like a, it's, you know, that's that is intentional. Yeah, I wonder how much people are getting creative right now. I read this one article in the Atlantic by a guy named Chris Colin titled that drop call with customer service. It was on purpose in which he sort of documents this horrible experience he had trying to figure out why his Ford just like shut down in the middle of like a curvy road and almost killed him. And by the end of it, he's talking about, you know, positive ways to sort of deal with the, you know, mind numbing experience that is calling a bunch of customer service agents. And he said that he and his friends started doing admin nights every Tuesday, where they'd have, they'd all go over to one friend's house and like, you know, turn it into a social activity that like Tuesday nights is when we're going to deal with all of our life admin. and.
We'll do it with friends, with snacks, with drinks, whatever. Have you seen a lot of that? Is that one way we're adapting to our, I don't know, contemporary misery? There's a huge desire to find some sort of a solution that isn't just like everything sucks and it's getting worse and we're all beaten down. So I do see-- It's funny because I actually feel like more people have just accepted that everything's terrible and that's all it is. Chris feels like the exception because he's like, what if we made this a social activity which feels like, what, but then you read about it. It's like, oh, that's so smart. So where there's like an Instagram meme to about the last chapter in every economic book that's written right now that's like, this is terrible and there's corporate monopolies, et cetera. But here's how we can do better that the last chapter is like, but it doesn't have to be like that. I mean, interesting things are happening on the state and city level, you know? The Mound Donnie Consumer Protection folks are trying to do really interesting stuff. They are with their, you know, click to cancel rule where there should be one button where you can cancel your subscription. California has just started a new consumer's art position and it's headed by Rohit Chopra from the FTC. You know, there used to be during our last big period of inflation in the 70s and also right around World War II, thousands of federal officials who went around and checked prices to make sure that people weren't ripping people off in price gouging for things that people need like tires and coffee or whatever. There are ways that we have dealt with these kind of problems before that could be adopted again. And maybe one more note on like the hopeful side of things is that I don't know soon if we realize Mark Zuckerberg's wildest dreams, we can have an AI agent like Muse do all this work for us. You know, like the fantasy of a personal AI agent talking to a company's AI agent and fixing my problem is so lovely. Like I love that idea except for the fact that, you know, there's not a snowballs chance in hell that I would give my bank details to an AI agent right now or, you know, or my health details or anything else. I just, you know, and I'm not alone in that and banks are telling you not to do that. Right now, you know, there are some people that have proposed new rules that and one of them is that your AI agent should be should have some fiduciary duty to you. Like we don't really have any any specific thing that says if you're using Muse and you want it to find you the best couch or whatever it is, that it is going to steer you to the thing that is best for you and lowest price and not to something that maybe, you know, meta's got a financial relationship with. And that's and that's one, you know, that is another area that's kind of got to be cleared up there. Like is your AI agent really working for you? You know, they've been they've been sold as like your agent but says who, you know, is there a fiduciary duty kind of thing around there? Heather Timon's writes about consumer rights and corporate power for the Guardian and she actually wants you to contact her with your stories about ranging out at customer service. She asked us to give you her email. So if you send it to me at
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We just spoke about how the economy and how customer service works is making everyone rage out. Are AI agents, which you just recently wrote about for The Atlantic, going to make it better or worse, you think? I think in the meantime, in the early time, it's going to make it probably a lot worse, right? I mean, what we are essentially, even just seeing right now, is that these agents are inundating the internet with skills of persistence, right? These are relentless things that are tasked to do, you know, the, the onerous activities we don't want to do. And they're already flooding call centers. Yes, I can hold. I've got all the time in the world. They're flooding restaurant reservations, Friday evening, a table for five by the window. Yes, I'll hold. They're flooding, you know, plumbers and people who just run small businesses with requests and queries. Here are 20 different available times for you to come repair the sink. 9 a.m. 10 a.m. 10 15 a.m. 11 a.m. And they're not people, right? So they call, they call people up on the phone and it's an automated voice, right? So I think it's going to make a lot of people feel honestly pretty awful. But the world has all of a sudden become very inhuman, or they're these inhuman burdens being put on the humans who don't have agents yet to work on their behalf. And that imbalance, I think, is going to make a lot of people pretty mad. You wrote for the Atlantic that we are not ready for our coming AI agent future. How are we not ready for this if it reaches like a critical mass. The argument is that we aren't ready for it because the economy is built off of and kind of in a lot of ways, drives off of inefficiency off of the fact that people aren't paying perfect attention to everything, right? People aren't moving their money from savings account to savings account every day because they're getting the margins on a slightly better interest rate or something like that. The entire subscription economy is based off of inefficiency, right? You don't cancel the thing you don't use for a long period of time or it just lays dormant for a while. But what these AI agents offer in their most idealized fashion is that they pay perfect attention to everything all the time. They're hyper vigilant and able to act on your behalf in inhuman ways. And if a large portion of the population is using these to do their banking to do their e-commerce and at the same time you have these large organizations like banks, like healthcare companies, Blake.
you know, platforms like Amazon and Walmart. You're going to see just, I think incredible amounts of chaos. This is not the economy would in that way start to behave more like the stock market, right? Where prices fluctuate on the order of, you know, milliseconds and things like that. And as we know from, you know, watching the stock market over decades, like that's wild ride. I don't know if we want, you know, diapers to behave like securities. Would have been more speculative, but also illustrative ideas here is what people refer to as is an egentic bank run, right? So this is the idea that say five million people are using the same agent to do all of their banking. And they all identify at the same time that there is a high yield savings account that everyone should be in, right? So they move money on moss, you know, millions of agents pulling money out of one account to the next. And then those banks are struggling because they've just lost all of these deposits at once. But it's, you know, theoretically possible that something like that could happen all of the time. Is this a two way street? Are the companies also adopting agents into every part of their processes and, and not, I don't know, consumer relations? Yes. If slower, I think on, on that end. But what I like to think of this as is as an arm series. A lot of retailers, especially Amazon has blocked a number of these agents from accessing their platform because even though Amazon can make, you know, good money off of these sales, they don't yet want these companies to have access to their back-end infrastructure, right? There's a lot of like corporate secrets like inventory and who's buying what and who's selling what these agents can act as really good intelligence gatherers if they're granted access to these platforms. And what you will see eventually is that the retailers are going to have demands, right? Yes, you guys can let the agents on the platform, but you can't undercut our prices in this way, right? It will just be, it will just be something that you have to trust that your AI agent company is making a deal, you know, in your best interest. And I think that that's, that's really interesting because you could end up having this future where everything feels really good as a consumer 'cause it's frictionless, right? And my agent's gonna do all this stuff for me while I sleep or, you know, while I'm hanging out with my family or whatnot. And in reality, what's going to happen is you're not really, you're just having someone do something for you, but nothing else has really changed, right? You're not getting a better deal. It's not, it's not that much more helpful to you because these companies have taken care of themselves first. But that is the promise. That is what Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg are trying to sell us. - Agents, assistance, campaigns, whatever you want to call them that are doing stuff in the background all of the time. And that, I think, will really transform what people can do in how we work and kind of, maybe to some extent, how we just sort of like live our lives. - A lot of it for me, you know, when I'm using my muse agent, I just, you know, I kind of want to, it to help me be like a better father and, you know, a better husband and show up better for my friends. - Do you think it's a pipe dream or do you think there is some reality one day when we, as a society, will say this AI agent consumer facing world of ours is better than the one we had a hundred years ago where when you had a problem, you went to a store and talked to a human being or called one on the phone and they empathetically helped you through it. - Something that I think's really funny is, you know, meta with muse has really sort of dominated the conversation of these AI assistants and this is the company that wanted to connect the world, right? That us being together is this universal good. It is strengthening the bonds of humanity. - Our mission isn't to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. - But this is a tool that is fundamentally anti-social. You don't have to interact with those people you don't want, right? I'm not trying to romanticize, you know, running really annoying errands when you're busy and your kids are sick and you've got work deadlines and things. But there's also the experience of interacting with people on a day-to-day basis that I think is foundational to our humanity and these things, you know, basically want to automate that away. And so I think that that's a real thing that we need to think about and grapple with. And the other part of this is, what are we freeing this time up for? Is a real question. - I'm always wondering that myself 'cause that's what the game probably is. You're gonna have so much time to do what to then just like spend more time scrolling your platform. - To spend more time scrolling your platforms, spend more time working. - There is a lack of thoughts about what a human is for. If we fully embrace automation in all these different ways, right? It's one thing to say, I wish it was easier to buy paper towels on Amazon. It's another to say-- - It's pretty easy. - Yeah, I know, right? I know. - I don't do it that often, but I'm pretty sure it's really easy. - It is. I think it's good to have those interactions and it's okay to sand down some of them, but I think this feature suggests like what if you never had to do anything you didn't want to do? And I don't know if they've thought that through. (upbeat music) Charlie Warzel wrote, "AI agents are here. Nobody's ready with this colleague Mateo Wang at the Atlantic." Ariana Spuru produced today's show with the help of her colleagues, Jolly Myers, Abishai Artsy, Gabriel Dunnetov, Bridger Dunnigan, and David Tatashore, and without the help of Dustin DeSoto, Danielle Hewitt, Heidi Mahwagdi, Kelly Wesinger, Miles Bryan, Denise Gerra, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Amina Alsadi, Patrick Boyd, Miranda Kennedy, and Noel King. Break Master Sylinder wishes you a happy Halloween. I'm Sean Ramos for today. Explain is distributed by WNIC, that shows a part of the box media podcast, networkpodcasts.voxmedia.com. And you can listen to our show ad free by signing up at vox.com/members. (upbeat music) (whoosh) Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odo comes in, and all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all-in-one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Try for free today at od.com/vox. That's od.o.com/vox. Support for today's episode comes from Delta, official airline of the National Women's Soccer League. Traveling is basically magic. It creates opportunities, it fosters understanding, expands horizons, it connects people and communities to each other and to their own potential. Those are the values that drive Delta. With up to 5,500 daily Delta and Delta connection flights to more than 300 destinations on six continents, Delta is committed to helping you explore your world. Whatever gives you the travel bug, Delta is here to help you get there. Visit Delta.com for more info. Delta, wherever the journey takes you.
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