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Washington Square. On air is the audio town square for the Washington Square Review. Lansing Community College's literary journal. Writers, readers, scholars, publishing professionals, citizens of the world, gather here and chat about all things writing. Hey there. This is Melissa Ford Luckin, editor for the Washington Square Review. I'm here today with Benjamin Clabo, whose story the Mothman and La Llorona will be in our Summer 24 issue. Hey there, Benjamin.

Hey, how you doing?

I'm doing awesome because I'm here talking to you, so that's a good time. Tell us about your story.

Yeah. So this is a story that I wrote, or started writing about a year after moving to West Virginia. So I'd been living in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, which is my wife's hometown, for about three years. And then from there I got into the MFA program at West Virginia University, and we packed up and moved to Morgantown. And then I noticed, I think anytime you move, you're noticing similarities and differences from the place you were and the place you've moved to. And one thing I noticed was this mythical creature, La Llorona, was a very constant presence culturally in Guatemala. And then here in West Virginia, we have this cryptid, or being called the Mothman. I'd like to hope that at some deeper level, there's all these complicated, nuanced things going on in my brain that help me decide what to write about and that give me inspiration. But on a very basic level is also just, huh, La Llorona, Mothman. Why don't I put them together in a story? And then I also, I don't write a whole lot of fantasy. And it never really occurred to me to have those two mythical beings or creatures, like, actually on the page in a physical sense. But I'm very interested in why mythologies take hold or how people interact with those mythologies in their everyday lives. And so that's why I came up with the idea to have this little boy, Kevin, working these two creatures or beings from these two cultures that he's grown up with into his own world of kind of comic book fantasy. That was the original idea.

How did you decide to use comic books as a backdrop?

Oh, I don't know. I think I was just thinking of what a child might do with these legends, these receives.

Right.

So I also, you know, my. My wife is from Guatemala. I'm from Massachusetts. So it occurred to me, you know what? At the time, we wanted children. Now my wife is actually pregnant. So we were wondering. I spent a lot of time wondering, what is that kid's worldview going to be like drawing from these two quite disparate cultures. So I, I was just imagining, you know, somewhere like a comic or his creative output if he goes on to. I'm sure every child is creative in one way or another. Whatever he creates in the world, he's probably gonna be drawing from these two different worlds in these two different ecosystems of mythology. And it strikes me that something like a comic maybe I'm actually not a reader of comics.

That was gonna be my next question.

They're just so culturally relevant. So it occurred to me that in my happen upon that as a way to express himself for sure.

I think they also lend toward more the visual. So by using the comics in there, it invites the reader to think about what these two would look like.

Yeah, that's a good point. I hadn't even thought of that.

But absolutely having read the story, that was the first thing that came to mind for me was trying to imagine what they would look like. Talk a little bit about what you were saying about the two different cultures because you were in Guatemala and now you're in Massachusetts and those seem very different to me.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm in West Virginia now. I grew up in Massachusetts and then, yeah, spent about three years in Guatemala after previously having lived other places in Latin America. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I think a lot of my work now has been focusing on where those two cultures meet because that's where my family meets. Right. So, you know, the relationship between my wife and myself and then the life of our kids is going to be all on those like cultural borderlands in a sense. Right. So there's just a lot of differences regarding of course, religion, the effect of materialist capitalism on somebody's worldview, I guess. Of course. And that's one thing, thinking about the creatures or beings in the story. La Llorona is. Has been a very important cultural presence for God knows how many generations in Mexico and in Central America. Whereas the Mothman's a more recent phenomenon in where most people in the American culture encounter him is through the movie with Richard Deer, with the Mothman festival where you can buy all sorts of Mothman trinkets. So it's just this interesting kind of arena to look at those differences.

Talk a little bit about the culture around the Ya Lorona. Tell us a little bit about that character.

So primarily in Mexico, but then now also in many parts of the Spanish speaking world, Guatemala of course, and also the southwestern United States. There's a belief in this woman who I Mean, the way I encounter the story is her children have died. Reading up on it, it seems that often the story is that she's killed her children out of some sort of jealous rage because he's upset that her husband has cheated on her, I think, is the myth as it's most commonly told. But then she now walks the streets at night, wailing for her dead children. Right. So she says, you know, looking for her children. Her child. I think the number of children depends on the myth. There's many different variations of it, but people in communities where there's this legend think that if you hear her at night, it means that she's out there looking for her children. And interestingly, the closer she sounds, supposedly the farther away she is. Whereas if she sounds very far away, she's actually quite near, which adds a little bit of a haunting element to it, I think. And then. But then that myth has shown up in a lot of music in Mexico and Latin America. There's a fantastic horror movie that's kind of a political horror movie called. I think it's called Lerona by Guatemalan filmmaker Bustamante, I think, is his name Jair Bustamente. Also fantastic movie that ties that myth into a lot of the political history of Latin America and Guatemala specifically, with people who have lost their children because of the conflicts there is.

She's meant to be someone that people should fear or to be sympathetic for. How do people typically respond to her?

Oh, that's a good question. I mean, people typically fear her. I think if she's there, you hear her, it's bad news. Right. But that was one thing that was interesting about having the story that I wrote framed from the perspective. Well, from the perspective of the father. But it's. A lot of the mythology plays out through the lens of the child's imagination, because I kind of didn't want to have to do a ton of research or base the story entirely on the way these myths present themselves and like, the most common iterations of them. I kind of thought what's interesting here is how this child, who's had this very unique upbringing, how he develops in his own mind a concept of these different ideas and how that reflects his multicultural background. Right. So his seeing his identification of La Llorona with his grandmother is not, I think, how that myth would typically be understood. But that was kind of my point.

I hope, for sure it adds another layer to the story and shows that the child has, you know, moved out of the original like myth and is creating their own meaning from it in their new context, I think, is one of the things that makes the story more than just, you know, surface level. It has that cultural layer. Talk a little bit about the Mothman the way it is, like, originally out in the world, and then we'll kind of think about how that idea came into the story.

Cool.

Yeah. So, I mean, my first encounter with the Mothman was just hearing him reference when I came out to West Virginia and thinking, who the heck is this Mothman? He sounds interesting. I want to get to know him. That story comes out of a sequence of bizarre events in the 1960s, early 1960s, in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where people were just reporting, seeing this giant, black colored, winged figure. And there was multiple newspaper reports that kind of started making the news all in. Originally in Point Pleasant, but then spread throughout the country, apparently, and people were scared. I think he was pretty much seen as a purely negative force. Then about a year and a half or so after the sightings began, a bridge over the Ohio river connecting West Virginia to Ohio collapsed. And there were reportedly were sightings of him, like around the time of the bridge collapse. And many dozens of people died. It was a huge tragedy. And at that point, people started wondering, okay, did Mothman cause this? Or was the Mothman warning people that this disaster was going to happen? So since then, now, like I said, there's a festival in Point Pleasant. There's just a lot of paraphernalia. I mean, I was in Seattle and I saw a Mothman mug for sale somewhere, like a little trinket shop I thought was interesting. So it's kind of become this modified lore. But the original story is that he was first unequivocally bad. Then we don't know. But then. So again, in the story, I thought it'd be interesting to have this family create their own take on it that, you know, I was imagining a father telling bedtime stories to his son and is probably more likely, if he wants to talk about this figure in the first place, to give it a more. Make him more of a hero than a villain.

It's interesting, I think, because the son did the same thing with the Mothman. Kind of recreated the character the way that they needed that character to be. Yeah. Talk a little bit about how this particular story fits in with your other work. I know you're an MFA student or working on an MFA in fiction, and so you must be working on other projects. Are those similar to this one or different?

Yeah, I mean, so I've. I'm wrapping up a novel project now that explores, you know, American expats in Guatemala. So it's definitely, again, that same cultural borderland space that I'm inhabiting and trying to parse through and looking at beliefs and mythologies and how that all wraps up, especially in a multicultural context. I also. I have just completed another short story that is about political violence, which is something that was kind of an afterthought in the story, actually, which seems straight, the story, you know, the Mothman and Lerona. Because I just needed a plot basically, for all these ideas that I had in mind. But then I realized, oh, here it is. Here's the plot that brings all these ideas together and taps into something I think about all the time also, which is the nature of political violence, the nature of political force, and the immovability of political force. So I'm writing another short story that also have finished another short story that looks at that in the context of the Roman Empire and their policy of crucifying enslaved people, when one. If an enslaved person were to kill their master, the. The rest of the slaves in that household were also killed. Which is a horrifying fact and horrifyingly played out at times in the history of the Roman Empire. I've been looking at that as this way of understanding of how supposedly civilized societies justify really grotesque incidences of political violence. So. And in a way, I guess that does tie into the Mothman and Lerona story in the sense of the state doing what it do and having the power to do. So.

How much influence was your experiences in Guatemala and the. The way that you're seeing the state and the politics and the way that politics can impact everyday people?

Oh, it was huge. Definitely. I mean, I can speak most assuredly from my own perspective, which of course is very privileged perspective. I was not ever myself an immigrant from Guatemala trying to come here, but. But just with my wife. We were in. In Santiago, in her hometown, and wanted to come to the States for all sorts of reasons, partly so I could pursue an mfa and she wanted experience living here. And we just decided we wanted to move back to the States. And it was interesting as an American citizen, and we've got, of course, a very strong passport. We feel like the world is our oyster, in a sense. Yeah, we can go to Cuba for a bit. North Korea is off limits. But generally we sense that we can go where we want to go in experiencing that sense of, huh, we can't go live in the United States right now. And it took forever with the visa. And we, of course, had to get engaged so that we could get the visa. And there's a lot of complications. And, you know, people still ask now, like, oh, well, you know, will Rose's family come to visit? And they, A lot of Americans struggle when I say, no, they can't. You know, most Guatemalans can't just qualify for a tourist visa to visit the United States like that. So just that experience of, I mean, the lack of freedom to go where one wants was something I profoundly noticed for the first time when I was living over there.

Yeah, for sure. Talk a little bit for anybody who's wondering what that experience would be like for a Guatemalan who did want to travel, what steps would they have to take and what barriers would they encounter.

So basically, I mean, just to put it in stark terms, the US Government doesn't want people coming over on a tourist visa and then staying. Right. So the assumption is if Guatemalans or Central Americans in particular in general were given carte blondes to come over on tourist visas, people would potentially stay to work. Right. So therefore, if somebody from one of those countries, you know, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, countries that have a lot of immigrants that come here, they need to prove. They need to prove that they're likely to return home at the end of their visit to the United States, which usually in practice that means property owning property or having some sort of job with a steady, with a contract, basically that proves that you have to go back to work, which I would assume the majority of people in those countries don't have either of those circumstances. You know, I mean, especially, you know, housing. Oftentimes it's intergenerational homes. So younger folks don't have their name on the title or the deed, the property. Right. And then jobs, a lot of informal work, you know, artisan work or not many people have a contract that says, I'm going to be working at this job for X number of months or years. Right. So in practice, you know, and somebody in, I think what's the standard situation for a Guatemalan family has very, very little chance of getting a tourist visa.

To come to the US Listening to explain all that really echoes back to what you were talking about earlier with your stories and the way that political influence kind of like simmers in the background.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was initially in my undergrad. I studied. It was called Social Thought and Political Economy. So my initial world was social sciences, and I kind of migrated to more of a literary ecosystem intellectually. But yeah, that's definitely. I can't help but have it Be present when I'm writing for sure.

Yeah. Talk a little bit about the novel that you said you were working on. Is that part of your program requirements?

Yeah. So hopefully it will be my thesis for the program, which is nice to have a project that's in relatively solid shape. I don't know if it's good, but at least it's almost done. It's a project or the novel is about an American ex, an American who's kind of non conformist. Think you'd call him a hippie. And like many of the expats who go down, especially younger, go down to live in some of these like lakeside communities in Guatemala. He has this idea of reconnecting with spirituality and I think what most, what a lot of readers would assume kind of as a problematic relationship with the, with the community he's joining. Right. But then he's also a complicated, interesting guy and then he disappears. So the novel is looking at how both his ex girlfriend, who is an American, and his current partner, who is a Guatemalan woman, are A, trying to find him and then B, reconciling their different worldviews and their different understandings of who he was as a person as they try to find him.

That does sound good. How far into it are you?

There's a draft done. I'm in the revising process now, which I thought was. I mean, I've done a lot of revising already, but I thought the revisions were going to be pretty quick. And then to be honest, I think I was reading In Search of Lost Time when I wrote a few of the early chapters. So a lot of my characters, the first person narrators, are talking like these French aristocrats, which isn't what I'm doing. So I'm having to iron out a lot of things syntactically. But it's just hopefully a few months away from being pretty much done in Dustin.

How do you think you'll know when it's done?

I think the story is pretty much done. I don't think anything that's not happening now is going to happen on the sentence level. I just read it and when something seems off, I go, oh, darn. And I was hoping that wouldn't happen very much. And so I went through what was going to be my last read through and I was like, oh, darn, oh darn, oh darn. And I stopped and told my wife, like, yeah, it's going to be a few months, not a few weeks. Darn. That happens sometimes.

How many words is it?

Oh, somewhere in the 90,000 ish range, I think.

Okay. And how long did it take you to write the first draft?

A little over a year. It comes in spurts, so I actually write more during the vacations, the summer break, and I have other freelance work going on, but I have more free time during the summer than I do when I'm teaching as part of the MFA program I'm in. So I plugged away at a little bit during my first year in the program and then finished the draft last summer. So about half the draft was written in the space of three months because that's when I finally had time to write for two to three hours every day, which is where I really needed, what I need to do to really feel like I've got the momentum to make serious project and make serious progress on such a long project.

Yeah, a year. That's a long time to be with one story. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the teaching you do. You said that was part of your program.

Yeah, so I teach undergraduate composition. So English101, English102, the intro comp classes that the undergrads have to take.

And what do you like best about teaching those classes?

Oh, I like. I mean, I think when you see students writing really, really well, and then you come in the next day in class and you see them with a book in their hands. In their hands, and you realize, like, ah, there's a connection there, you know, I think it's kind of an ironic thing maybe to say as a writing teacher, but one of the things I'm realizing is that writing teachers can only do so much and the students who are the best writers are the ones who read the most. And I think our job as teachers is often just to encourage people to read often and to read carefully and to read thoughtfully and then apply that same type of thinking to their writing.

Had you done teaching before this experience?

Yeah, I was a teacher for a while of English as a second Language. So I taught a bit in Mexico, a bit at a school in Boston, which is a fantastic experience. There are students in from all around the world. So that was like a very. As you can probably tell, I'm very enthused by just multicultural settings and what happens when all these different ideas in different parts of the world come together. So that was a really cool time and place, but that was a very different type of teaching. Of course, teaching, especially like a lot of elementary classes. So teaching people with no English to say, you know, hello, how are you?

Do you feel like those experiences Were more. Maybe more personal because you get to know the people and you're talking with them compared to the composition.

You know, maybe. Yeah, I would say so. I think also, to be completely honest, the English as Second Language students were thrilled to be there. They were spending their own money to be in the course, whereas some of the undergrads.

Yes, they're there because they have to be.

Yes. Not English majors. If they're English majors, they would have tested. They wouldn't have had to take the intro comp course in the first place. Right, right.

Yes, they're there because they have to be. And that. That does.

And they're great. They're great. But they're. Yeah. A little less enthusiastic sometimes.

Yeah. Is there anything about the teaching that surprises you that you hadn't expected to happen? That does.

Yeah.

I'm trying to decide if I should say what I was going to say, and I'm just going to say it. I think you can tell that Alanis students and a lot of young folks don't read as much as they ideally would, you know, so sometimes I am surprised by what seems to be an unfamiliarity with the written word. And so that's why, like I said, I think most. What we can do is encourage people to read, to get people to see that reading is a valuable use of time. Because you. I mean, I don't know. I don't know enough to know whether or not. It's just that writing is actually quite hard or if it's especially hard when you haven't encountered the written word on a regular basis. You know, and I think if people are reading mostly very short things, you know, I mean, social media captions or whatever, as opposed to books or little or even just newspaper articles, you know, what's the difference between just a headline on a phone versus actually reading the entire newspaper article? Just the amount of absorption of text is a lot different.

So, yeah, it is very different. What I was thinking about when you're talking about, you know, just looking at a headline and maybe scanning the first couple lines of a news article, is that when you have something. Something printed, you know, like a newspaper or a magazine or even a book or whatever, when you look at it, you can assess it real quickly and see how long it is, and you can kind of, in the back of your mind, make some assumptions about it. But when you're looking at it online and all you get is that first line, it's hard for your brain, I think, to really engage it in the same way as your brain does engage with something that you're holding and you can see the whole thing. That's just a theory I kind of cooked up in the past couple months. So.

No, that makes sense. I do a lot of reading on my Kindle just because when I was in Guatemala, especially during the pandemic, I didn't have the ability to get physical books. But then when I came back to the States and started going to the library and getting physical books again, I was like, this is the real deal. Yeah, It's a very different experience to me.

It also seems really different. Yeah. What kind of stuff do you. So we were talking about how the importance of when you're a writer, that reading, you know, feeds the writing. What kind of stuff do you like to read currently?

Oh, so I try to read very widely. I do read mostly novels, as it turns out, though, so it's probably not a coincidence, even though I try to read more widely than that. I went through a phase where I was reading the classics because as a not being, you know, not being an English major, when I came to the MFA program, I was really worried that I was going to have this huge gap. So I read basically anything that I imagined being on in English, college syllabus, anywhere. And that was really rewarding. I really enjoyed, I mean, some of these books that you hear about being these dense, unreadable tomes. I'd open them up and I'd say, Tolstoy's Hilarious. I really enjoyed a lot of those. And then now I guess I could plug. I've just read this book called. Actually, it hasn't been translated in English yet, but it's called the Tarantula. I would assume that will be the English title as well, by Guatemalan writer Eduardo Helphone. Some of the most brilliant fiction I've encountered a long time looking at historical memory and personal memory. And he's somebody with an incredible life story and just somebody who writes very dense fiction that brings so many different concepts into it without seeming too complicated.

Right.

Like, I think that's real skills. When writers crystallize all these complexities into a very readable and sense sensible package, which is something he does really well. So it's Eduardo Halfon.

Nice. Well, thank you for that recommendation. I wanted to kind of backtrack a little bit to something you said about not having a writing or English background and going into the mfa. What made you decide to pursue an mfa?

That's a good question. They're kind of. Well, first, I guess let's talk about maybe decide to Try writing, you know, fiction seriously. So I a was really into, you know, politics, but I mean, like, socio. The social sciences, I should say. Like, I was really interested in trying to use social sciences as a way to figure out how the world works. And then somewhere along the way, I started realizing that a lot of social science uses numbers or assigns value to things that probably are impossible to really ascribe value to, and then uses those number those values to try to identify trends and thereby to understand the world. And that's great. But I kind of realized as much as that is interesting and useful, there's something that interested me more in getting right to the particular in the way that storytelling lets you do, in the way that narrative lets you do. And looking at something that maybe isn't, like, scientifically verifiable, but is certainly there because you can feel it with something kind of deeper inside yourself. So a. I saw literature as a way to understand the world in a way that made sense to me. And then also, I have always been creative. I used to write songs and sing, and then I was pretty bad at singing and I was pretty bad at playing guitar. So I realized writing would be a way to continue. The part I was kind of decent at was the writing. So I was like, oh, maybe I could leave the guitar and the microphone behind and just write. And then. And then as far as doing an MFA program or applying MFA programs, I haven't in HOD because I don't enjoy or I don't. I didn't like the idea of being, like, having my writing life institutionalized, if that makes sense. But then I finally decided that the benefits would outweigh any negatives, and they have tenfold. Just having a writing community, having lots of people in my life with whom I can discuss literature and writing has been one of the best things that's ever happened to me.

Absolutely. I think that's absolutely. One of the great things about MFA programs is surrounding yourself with other people that are interested in reading and writing, and you can talk to them. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, thanks a lot. We're looking forward to hearing more from you in the future. So if people want to stay in touch with you, you've let me know. They can find you on Twitter.

Mm.

Okay. That's awesome. Well, thanks a lot for stopping by and talking with me today.

First, thank you so much. It was a lot of fun.

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It'S time for Stars.

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I'll have a real good time. Good morning and welcome to another episode of Stars on Sports. I am joined today by our assistant Athletic Director Stephen Cutter and our producer Dadalion Lowry. And gentlemen, today we're going to be talking about AI artificial intelligence and it's been prevalent in our news. I was listening to one of our previous podcasts when we were forecasting the year and we briefly talked about that and said we would follow up with it. So here at that time I was at a conference last week and I was working with a colleague and they use AI crazy amount. I mean for almost everything. And you know they're a teacher part time and they were putting lesson plans in and then fine tuning it to a quiz and just telling you how efficient and effective he was with that. And so I dived into AI and when I think of AI, I think of ChatGPT, but in sports it is so much more than that. I mean and we again even in our previous podcast we talked about how the baseball program and even some of our other programs have been utilized baseball wearable technology. But in other programs for recruiting Scouting and game analytics. It was crazy, really. And I don't think we'll get all to it today, but I thought it was about time to talk about that and how we use it at LLCC and even in a general sense of using it in athletic administration throughout college athletics. And I don't use it. I haven't used it. As I talked about in our previous podcast over winter break, the AI chatgpt part of it, I did a sample wedding toast and that's what I did. And I haven't gone back to it, but I need to for efficiency and effectiveness. I mean, again, wearable technology. I have a smartwatch. I get to be a part of your program and use the Pyson watch. And I work with stats a lot because we're our sports information directors too. But with the ChatGPT, and I don't want to keep saying ChatGPT because there are other forms of generation, but I do want to touch on a couple different of those things. I mean, officiating, advertising, you talked about it a little bit before the podcast on, you know, writing things or presentations, equipment, the wearable technology. And again, there's just so many ways it can go. Just quickly, your initial thought then, on artificial intelligence in sports?

Well, I have a quote that says artificial intelligence won't replace great coaches, but coaches who use AI will replace those who don't.

Ooh, that's a good one. I need to think about that one.

I think that's probably fair to say in a lot of occupations.

Yeah, absolutely. It is fair to say. And again, that's. I agree. One of the things that every time I would read something about AI, it would what are the cons? And the one thing to remember is sports is still human factors to the core. And we talked about that earlier today of performance, of the human actually doing it that AI can't replace, although it is. And officiating a little bit. I think the MLB is chasing, when.

I think about AI, I think about efficiency. If you're chasing things like efficiency, AI can provide you with that efficiency. That doesn't mean that you just take and copy and paste everything that it's putting out, but it can definitely streamline some of the things that you're trying to do. More of the mundane tasks, the everyday things you can, you can streamline those, become more efficient. I also look at AI as somewhat of a friend of mine in a lot of ways because I will end up putting things in there and it will provide me with feedback for what my thoughts are. And so it's almost like a. I'm talking to somebody that's sitting right next to me and I'll be looking for feedback. You know, what is a high performing entrepreneur that has a top 100 business in the world gonna say about this? You know, and kind of prompting, not for everyday level conversations, but for some feedback from, you know, that degree of type of person. And that definitely helps in a lot of different ways, provide you with some different ideas.

Definitely speeds up the research because you could have done all that on your.

Own, of course, right through Google or anything else, but it just, it speeds it up. And once again, that goes back to what I initially started talking about with just efficiency. It speeds things up.

Yeah. And we all need to be more efficient in what we do, especially as more things are thrown on us or that we are dealt with or in the society where we keep moving on to certain things. So I think that's where it will help me more, is trying to be more efficient. I mean, you talked about before the podcast how even like doing stats, how if you did that on your own, that could be a tedious task, that takes hours, where now AI can help us significantly lower that time, and I mean significantly in your eyes. And that's important because it allows you to be doing other things or really now then analyzing that stats, which also AI can do, so you can move forward with it. Dadalyn, what about you? Anything you think of right away when you think of AI?

Yeah, I actually use it quite a bit in the role that I do here at the college. They actually started, I want to say, about maybe a year ago, they started utilizing something called AI Spark in the podcast platform that we use to distribute the podcast. And one of the things, the features is first of all, it generates a transcript, which AI does most of the time anyway and has been doing for a long time. But in addition to that, it'll go through. And if we were to sell ads, even though we don't really do that in our podcast, it gives you little areas where it would be easy to sell an ad. It separates things, you know, our conversation right here that we're having, it'll take and it'll separate where the chapters would be interesting. And for me to do that, to go through and do that with 30 different podcasts, that's a lot of time. But the other thing it does, and I think what I've found the most helpful, is writing show notes. I don't actually use the show notes verbatim because AI, I think is a tool And I also think it's still in the process of learning a lot of things. It's kind of like a toddler and we're teaching it. And it's kind of funny because you're supposed to be able to put into these show notes. I would like a humorous tone, but it does not understand humor at all. There's certain things it just doesn't understand yet.

Yeah, and that's bad. Humor is a good one.

And I always have to correct my name every time, I bet.

And I thought you had used it for show notes before. In a previous meeting we had. And. And you're right if you take it verbatim. I mean, it shouldn't be used for that context. It should be used to give you a guideline or utilize. The other thing that hit me in the last week that made me think I need to use AI is I then a zoom meeting. And all of a sudden, up in the chat, one of the people in attendance said, like recording just activated AI for note summary. And they were leaving the meeting. I'm thinking, crazy. It came up at the beginning when it said this zoom meeting being recorded. Now it says this is being summarized by AI. Even though we had a person in our meeting that was taking minutes, but this person didn't want to wait for that. Now that's happened twice in two meetings I've been at. So I'm thinking, wow, I really need to get to know this and understand it and learn it because it makes sense. It could eliminate that section secretary position in the future like you do for show note that help you to do that. But again, the caution there is still the human element of checking it. And we've talked about kids turning in papers that some use it and don't proofread, which I think a problem in all our society. We don't proofread enough that write, rewrite, rewrite. Rewrite is a process to get a final document. And I think that's where we're at with a little bit of AI. We rely on it too much that we might not check it as well as we should have. One of the interesting statistics that I saw, and I don't know if this is accurate in one of the documents I read it, but another use of AI in sports is predictions outcomes, you know, now especially in the sport gambling world, AI helped determine those scores and such injuries were a big part of it. But it said it's 40% accurate at this time. So not real high, but getting better than I'm sure when it first Started and from what I see, it probably started around eight years ago. But it's really, the last two years have really been where it's exponentially grown so much that the Olympics were kind of the first big event this last summer that really used AI as an integrated component for workflows, for storytelling, for explaining sport that people don't know about, and for the viewer experience, which I think is where AI will probably help us the most in the future is fan experience. Really back to the social media and the short attention span that AI can really help with the fan experience at events.

I also think it gives us a platform to amplify human potential. And we, we talked about experience a little bit, but with the human potential we're capable of so much and you just have a right hand partner or left hand partner that's next to you to be able to amplify that potential if you know how to use it. And if you're looking to cut corners and just take everything verbatim and copy and paste, I think you're missing the genuineness of the human experience. But it's, it certainly is a powerful thing that if used correctly, can certainly enhance your performance.

And back to your quote earlier about coaches, coaches still have to coach. Can it help them coach better? Yes.

It also helps them because they're able to focus on the relationship piece more and the mental development without having to do all of the crossing the T's and. And dotting the I's.

Right, cautioning the T's and dotting the I's. Because one of the benefits from AI from Wombrad is how specific it can help you get with each individual, especially predicting an injury or coming up with an injury rehab program.

Customized training.

Customized. Thank you. Yes.

For individuals. Yes.

And then the same on the other side is the virtual reality, which I also noticed your program uses. How that has, you know, as we talked about before in this podcast, how do you, you know, we've even seen with our team, when you get to the big game, how do you prepare for it or how do you make practices and virtual reality has helped with that. Doesn't replace it, but it helps and.

Definitely stacks bricks in the proper direction.

Oh, we couldn't go a podcast without using the word bricks. So we need to have an over under of how many times we use use the word bricks in in our podcast and AI could probably help us with that.

Hey, we haven't said anything about your parking in a while, so, you know.

No, we haven't. But my last podcast, I told You, I did my best parking job that I have done. But you know, I park on the fourth floor where it's not as busy. So I'm just getting pretty good at backing up and in.

You know, AI can actually do your parking now.

Well, see, my car doesn't have that. I need a car that does this. I just, just put it in and let it do for me. But you're right, even another world of automobiles how, you know, I was leaching a vehicle and it had all the bells and whistles of, you know, let me know there's a car here. Or if I get too close to a car, it slows me down. And now I went to a used car and I missed some of that. Like, I'll tell you, the biggest thing I learned now we're digressing is like in my old car, it kept me between the lines, like if you went over, it would mess. And actually I was a little worried because sometimes in the snow it messed up with it. But then when I'd go drive my wife's car, I almost got a little lazy because I expected the car to do its thing for me, you know, especially with construction on 27, it was, you know, nerve wracking. So digressing. But yes, AI outside of the sports world is really impactful.

I don't know that much of a digression. It just shows how much AI is going to influence us or be a.

Part of our lives.

No matter what you do, you're not going to escape it.

That is true, you aren't. And people are worried about it. I mean, there's a lot of fears and it's going to take over the.

World.

But it comes to anything in life. It's balance and moderation and using it in the right context. Again, there's cheating involved with AI and again the extreme, even in the classroom. We've talked about it and probably should do a session at our formation days on using it the right way in the classroom and in the field.

I mean, sure, these same conversations were being had when the Internet was coming out too. And they're trying to balance technology with human judgment and you know, the same conversations. So it just shows that we're progressing as a society and things are moving along in our world. And it's no different than the Internet or those that had the encyclopedias in their homes. It's what do you do with it? If they just sit on a bookshelf and nobody pulls them out and goes through them, then it really doesn't matter. That you have it. And so it's the people that are using it and using it for really tactical advantages and to grow better and grow more efficient.

And it is moving rapidly. I mean and it's hard for sports rules to stay caught up with it. Even as we look at baseball or football with the sideline technology where you know we've had issues in the past of intercepting headsets or signs or illegal videotaping of games.

Not that long ago you weren't able to wear one of these in a baseball game. Just this right here. And now you'll see kids with multiple watches on and it's all fine now. Yeah.

And it helps communication. It eliminates some things that. And it works. I think those are benefits. One of the issues is cost. It's still expensive in some facets but hopefully more companies come out like even our streaming and streaming the big thing that the pandemic helped exponentially change. I joke streaming is one of the trainer needs to be at a game and we need to stream our event. And the technology, there's automated cameras now that can pick up motion and move and not in all sports. Yeah, but it's getting there. But you know how that has evolved and helped us out and you know, made it more think more accessible to everyone. But again it difficult. You know those are costs involved and we're you know trying to balance that and costs have come down but there's certain group that were ahead of the game that had a monopoly on it that now have evolved and they're more competition and more company that do different things such as stream live stats, scouting and analytics. And it's almost hard to, you know, more overwhelming to figure out what to use. And that's a big topic in our office right now as we move forward on how to, you know, maximize that we can do all those things for all our sports because right now we only do them for a couple and things again technology has grown to allow Baseball and softball were one of the last ones that they developed cameras for stream streaming. And still in the four you know, development stages of that. And your group done an excellent job just with different cameras to to stream games. But it's important. I mean it is here to stay. So yeah it I think of again I just keep thinking of like chat GPT but I'm dealing with it every day. And you brought up the good example even before technology like encyclopedias were resource to use things. You know, if you were in a fraternity or sorority, you had classmate that you utilize for help in. In Those assignments. Now it's technology doing a lot of that for it. I laugh at this because it's called an iPhone, but the phone feature, the least amount of thing that we probably use on this thing.

I very rarely make calls anymore.

That's crazy. I don't. I agree. But I actually like it as a business call because again, again, it hinks, you know, another part of technology, it syncs to my hearing aid. So I hear better on the phone than I do an office phone where it doesn't magnify or amplify the sounding, but it's here to stay. I don't want to lose that human element, whether it's relationships, whether it's conversation, whether it's officiating. I worry about the officiating piece and how it's taken over there. Again, I think our society is having less tolerance for human error when being human is to err.

I think it even puts a higher priority on human communication verbally. And so that becomes a very large thing because a lot of things that you. Whether it's an email or a text or anything else, you're not really sure if it was AI generated or not. But with the verbal technology, you know where that's coming from. And so it puts a bigger priority on being able to communicate with words, because ultimately, in our world, as we continue to progress forward, we still have to be able to communicate. And we've talked on previous podcasts how important communication is, whether it's on sports teams or families or business environments.

I hate to digress even more, but kind of interesting to that notion is when I went to a conference in Florida, like back in January, I'd have to say 40% of the sessions on podcasting were about AI. And there was one podcaster they had set up so that all of her episodes were done by AI in her voice. Now, she's very upfront about it and she lets people know, but that's what the topic of her podcast was, AI. And it was just interesting because you'd listen to it and you'd never know it wasn't her.

That's crazy.

I mean, it's just.

Yeah, it blows your mind. It does. And I know one of me is plenty. We don't need an automated person of me. But you talked about using it for presentations and such and be able to search videos. It's almost like Google, in a sense, you know, the new Google, putting it in there and coming up with answers for you, and then you take it and run with it.

It's Like Atari to Nintendo Sputter.

It is. I mean, that's what it was supposed to be. I mean, and quicker. Which time is better graphics of the issue. Yeah. And it only will continue to get better. And back to your quote. If we don't embrace it, we'll get left behind, unfortunately. And that's where I'm at. I haven't embraced it as well as I should have. That I. That's, you know, a goal of mine now is to use it more in moderation in a way to help me be more efficient in my office environment.

It can help you with some of those home projects, too.

Well, I need all the help I can get there. And that's, again, another way to not digress. But how it does, it just. It is such. It is such bigger than sports. It shows that sports is a microcosm of society. Because I do believe it starts with. I think sports has been able to test a lot of things that it can carry over into other parts of the world and vice versa. We're going to end it there for now and we'll have many more conversations on AI. I might use AI in the future to generate my last question, but I have two today. Give it a run.

That's a good place to start.

Yes, it is, actually, I will. But as we record this podcast, it's March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament. So my first question is, do either of you fill out a bracket for Madness?

No.

No.

Interesting. Wow. Okay. Well, I fill out one with my family. I don't join all the pools and everything. And, you know, but we had student athletes in our office today, and they were talking, you know, they were, you know, cross country kids, but they knew everything about every team in the basketball tournament. Thinking I have to go home and tweak my. My bracket. But it is such a special event, so.

So you do.

I do. With just my fam. I mean, I fill one out, but I used to do one at my previous employer, but I was included in that, but I don't do that anymore.

Do you typically find that you're on the money?

No, no, I usually do it Sunday night right after it. And I don't have enough time to really study college basketball throughout the year to really know which team. Plus my heart.

There you go.

That's where I was going with. This is your time to give it a try. Wow, that's funny.

Create a bracket for me.

I don't even think of that. That's where I got to get into the mindset of thinking of using AI. To use it. But it is a big sporting event and I don't know relatively comparably speaking of what it is compared to others. But I like the tournament, the College World Series in baseball, the College World Series in softball. I mean these are fun time of year, these kind of sporting events where they're the bracket where the best team doesn't always win, but the team playing the best will win this time of year. Matchups and seeds, you know, like right now, our NJCA basketball tournaments are going on right now and you know, our women just missed it for the second year in a row. So we're watching and seeing the team there to see what we got to do. And the same with the men's tournament going on right now. We got closer there at the end of the season, went on. So you know, those kind of events help make make sports fun and people watch. And so that's going on in our psych and talking to cross country kid today about college basketball. So it brings people together and a lot of people do fill out a bracket. Like there's mascot brackets out there. There's you know, favorite color team or favorite name of team brackets out there. So I use all of those to help pick my team because I just don't study it enough. And I do. Okay. I mean I usually finish in the top half, but I don't win it. So one other question though, because this is killing me. I was at this conference and we were practicing interviews with people and one of the questions one of the ads asked was non negotiable. What's a non negotiable for you? And we'll talk about it in coaching. But my first instinct is raisins and cookies. That's a non negotiable. Raisins should not be in cookies.

So.

What do you think about raisins and cookies?

Raisins and cookies? I think they definitely have a place.

Wow, man, Cutter, we are in different food palates.

Yeah, I gotta agree with Cut on this one because I dig raisins. I know why people don't like them.

I get it. Great. Oatmeal raisin. That's exactly.

It goes great with oatmeal cookies.

I do not like. I like oatmeal chocolate. Chocolate, not oatmeal raisin cookies. Okay, that's good to know. You both would have raisins in your cookie because in future podcasts I love cookies. We're going to talk about crumbl and other cookies but. But for now you both like raisins in your cookies.

I'm not gonna say I like it.

But okay, it's not one of your favorites, but you will eat them. I won't eat them. You'll eat them. Is it one of your favorites? Sure it is. Do you like raisins in your trail mix?

Yes.

Yeah, it doesn't bother me. I don't mind that. I like raisins just as raisins, but not in other things.

For some reason, seeing that like 80s commercial with the raisin nets, I think they were like that.

Yeah, two scoops of raisins or something like that. So you're not opposed to raisins?

No, no, no.

Just.

Just certain things.

You don't like Raisin Bran. So anyway, until next time. Go stars. Stars on Sports is recorded live at the WLNZ Studios. Engineering and production assistance are provided by Dadalion Lowry and you can listen to the episode and other episodes of Stars on Sports on demand@lccconnect.org to find more information about our athletic program, visit lccstars.com thanks for listening. Be sure to join us next time for more Stars on Sports. Oh, I'll have a real good time.

This has been a presentation of LCC Connect, a weekly program that features the voices, vibes and vision of Lansing Community College. All shows featured on LCC Connect are recorded at the WLNZ center studio located on LCC's downtown campus. Each program is podcast based and can be heard anytime@lccconnect.org if you or someone you know would like to be a guest on one of our shows, connect with us by emailing LCC ConnectCC.

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