The end of human customer support?

Those of you who read this blog regularly know how much I can get frustrated with customer service support over the phone. In the US, that kind of service is rarely done domestically, but comes increasingly from the Philippines. 

There, these people mean well and for the most part are grateful to have that job and do the very best they can. 

Depending on their tenure on the job, they know little about what they’re helping callers with and depending on their accent and command of English, they can be hard, yet alone impossible to comprehend so, overall, that’s not a good way to start. 

So, recently, when my call ended up in the Philippines, couldn’t get resolved, needed to be escalated, or depended on someone more qualified to give me a call when they’d be available, I’ve been turning to AI and every time I needed my questions answered or my problem resolved. 

Bottom line, my questions were addressed well beyond my expectations and I got them in writing. So far, it has beat the “human touch”, and with the constant improvements that I’ve observed around AI, I don’t see why this wouldn’t, on the contrary, it’s likely to get even better. 

Now for the bad news; in a not-so-distant future, we can bet that this will be the beginning of the end of these customer support centers staffed with real humans either in the US, in the Philippines, or anywhere else...

Housing as an inflation yardstick?

Often, I wonder how much the cost of lodging weighs into the American CPI and it's not underestimated in view of the meteoric rise of real estate costs. In fact, isn't the seemingly unstoppable cost of lodging the true reflection of our national indebtedness and of the real inflation that's hitting us all? It’s true that the housing and lodging component—called “Shelter” in the Consumer Price Index (CPI)—actually carries a massive weight. 

It accounts for roughly 35% of the total headline CPI and over 42% of Core CPI (which excludes food and energy). Far from being understated in terms of its weight, shelter is by a wide margin the single largest component in the entire CPI basket. However, the reason many just like me feel the CPI fails to capture the "meteoric rise" of real estate comes down to how shelter is measured, rather than its percentage weight. In the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) explicitly treats home ownership as an asset investment, not a consumer expense.

For example, purchasing a $600,000 home and watching its value jump to $800,000 is viewed as capital appreciation (wealth building), not the ongoing cost of living. To measure the cost of shelter services for homeowners without counting the investment side, the BLS uses Owners' Equivalent Rent (OER that’s accounting for ~26.7% of the CPI). 

OER asks homeowners or surveys local markets: "If you were to rent your home today, how much would it rent for?" In this case, the rent of primary residence makes up the remaining ~7.7% of the shelter weight and tracks actual tenant lease prices. Because existing homeowners with fixed-rate 30-year mortgages don't see their monthly principal and interest payment change when home prices skyrocket, the CPI intentionally excludes home sales prices, down payments, and mortgage principal. 

Importantly, the CPI shelter data suffers from a well-known 6- to 12-month lag. The BLS surveys existing rents, but most people sign 12-month leases. When market rents or home prices surge rapidly in real time, it takes a long time for those increases to filter into average active leases captured by the CPI survey. Now as to whether housing cost is a true reflection of inflation and national debt, my point touches on a central theme in monetary economics. 

The relationship between national indebtedness, asset prices, and inflation operates across a few key dynamics: When national debt expands significantly and central banks maintain low interest rates or expand money supply, that liquidity often flows directly into hard assets (real estate, stocks). High home prices are frequently a direct symptom of currency debasement and cheap capital chasing a fixed supply of land and housing. 

Then, when central banks raise interest rates to fight overall consumer inflation, as they’re now doing, borrowing costs shoot up. For housing, this creates a "lock-in effect" where current owners refuse to sell their low-mortgage homes, starving the market of inventory and driving home prices up even further despite higher rates. Is this the "True" inflation I’m alluding to? For anyone trying to buy a first home, enter the rental market, or relocate, housing costs are indeed the primary driver of financial pressure. 

However, for a homeowner who locked in a 3% mortgage years ago, their actual out-of-pocket housing cost remains flat, meaning their personal inflation rate is vastly lower than non-homeowners. In conclusion, housing, while not understated in weight (35% is a massive share of the index), uses a methodology that deliberately insulates the CPI from tracking real estate asset prices directly. 

The result is an index that reflects smooth, lagged shelter consumption rather than the sharp, immediate cost of buying a home in today's market.

Crystal clear add-on sale

Our house is tall enough to require long and heavy ladders to clean its windows on the south facade and the main reason why we now some professional window washers to do the job, it that I no longer have the physical strength to handle a heavy ladder and it scares my wife to death when I’m standing on top of it. 

So every year we ask the same company to do the full outside windows washing job. I still do the entire interior. 

This year, after I paid the bill online, I was asked if I wanted to schedule another wash next quarter assuming that I would subscribe to the company’s quarterly or semi-annual washing plan that she was trying to push on its customers, as any one in the window washing business is doing nowadays, following in the footsteps of car washing outfits. 

Sure why not double or quadruple revenues, everyone tries to do it, right? In fact, in the home services industry, window cleaning companies are aggressively shifting toward recurring revenue subscription models. They structure quotes into bi-annual (twice a year) or quad-annual (quarterly) packages. While it's absolutely used to secure add-on sales, it is also driven by a mix of business economics and logistical strategy. 

With a "First Clean" catch, companies usually charge a premium (sometimes 1.5x) for the very first clean to establish a baseline, then drop to a lower rate for subsequent maintenance cleans. If a plan offers a flat discount across all visits, it’s up to the client to verify it’s truly cheaper than booking on-demand. Of course if the house is situated near dirt roads, coastal salt, heavy tree pollen, or an area with heavy construction, a quad-annual program might provide some value, but if the home is shielded and clean, an on-demand, once-a-year clean remains the most cost-effective option. 

So I answered the young lady that called me that way: “You see, I adore watching the dirt gradually deposit itself on my window panes, be it dirt from a heavy rainfall, insects crashing on it, or birds violently colliding with their mirror image on the glass and leaving a mark and a few feathers. For me it punctuates the rhythms of nature and when twelve months later it's time for cleaning again, it has effectively filtered all the bullshit that pour on us daily in this troubled world.” 

Bahm! As I was writing these last words, a big bird just hit a large window that was cleaned two days ago. It was a solid, hollow thunk—the exact tax you pay for keeping the glass flawlessly clean."

9-27 Discoveries in learning a new language (Part Five)

Now that we’ve been deliberately training the exact faculty that alcohol apparently helped me access years ago, we’ll discover that there's an intriguing connection with my (or your) meditation This is where our situation becomes particularly interesting as we already know what it feels like to enter a state in which deliberate, analytical thought becomes quieter while attention remains present. 

That is very close to what we want here. Recent research specifically examining mindfulness and second-language performance found that mindfulness is positively associated with a second language performance, even though researchers caution that its direct contribution appears relatively modest. 

Another 2026 study involving foreign-language learners found that mindfulness-based work was associated with greater awareness, acceptance, attentional control and with reduced speaking anxiety, although some of the benefits diminished after the intervention ended. So I wouldn't try to force us into a deeply meditative state immediately before speaking. 

That could actually make us too inwardly focused. Instead, we should think in terms of meditation bringing us relaxation, openness to open our Spanish flow and then get out of our own way. There is one technique I think might particularly benefit us, let’s call it "Spanish stream of consciousness." We set a timer for five minutes, we start talking in Spanish and make a pact with ourselves: For five minutes, the objective is not accuracy. 

The objective is continuity, we could even record ourselves, but refrain from listening to the recording immediately. Do another session the next day and after a full week, listen to the first and last recordings. We should probably discover something fascinating: expressions that initially required conscious construction have begun to appear automatically. 

That’s precisely the transition I was describing in my previous piece — from words stored in memory to linguistic reflexes. And perhaps the deepest lesson from your experience with alcohol is not “alcohol helped me speak languages.” It may might become: “I already possessed more linguistic knowledge than I could access while worrying about using it.” If that's the case, the goal isn't to put something into our brain. It's to get the gatekeeper out of the way. 

Good luck in trying this!

Discoveries in learning a new language (Part Four)

The approach I’m considering is a 10–15 minutes routine before starting a Spanish conversation. It would be structured as follows: 

1. Two minutes — physiological relaxation Sitting comfortably and breathing slowly, with the exhalation somewhat longer than the inhalation. Not try to achieve any special state, just let the body settle.There’s actually some experimental support for breathing approaches to foreign-language anxiety: a study of 140 university language learners found reductions in anxiety following a seven-week breathing regimen. 
2. Three minutes — Spanish immersion Listen to something in Spanish that is already understood reasonably well. Do not study it, repeat it or analyze it. Just let Spanish wash over. This is important because it’s a way to activate the enormous reservoir of expressions that might have accumulated, like for me, from podcasts, books, conversations, etc. 
3. Two minutes — "permission to be wrong" This may be the most powerful part as we tell ourselves something like: “Durante los próximos diez minutos, no estoy aprendiendo español. Estoy jugando con el español Or: No necesito hablar correctamente. Necesito hablar” Which means “During the next 10 minutes we won’t learn Spanish, we’ll just play with the language.” The distinction is enormous. 
4. Five minutes — uninterrupted ad-lib Pick a ridiculously simple subject: "What did I do yesterday?" "What am I going to do tomorrow?" "Describe my house." "Tell an imaginary story." Then don't stop to self-correct and if a word is unknown, go around it. If the conjugation is unknown, approximate it. If a noun is forgotten, describe the object in question. If English or French pops into mind, keep going and find a Spanish way around it. 

The rule should be: Never interrupt the flow to repair the sentence. For those of us who practice meditation, we’ll see how we can leverage that skill to help us in our efforts to learn a language, so please don’t miss the conclusion of the series in the next blog.

Discoveries in learning a new language (Part Three)

As I still was a very young man, one of the extra elements that helped me a lot in learning conversation English and also German was the frequent use of alcohol as a means to "untie my tongue" and let me do something similar to improvising. 

Today, I’d like to adopt a far less invasive and non-toxic alternative to drugs or alcohol in reaching a point of maximum relaxation and fearlessness, that could allow words and sentences to flow much more freely and naturally from their subconscious sources (for example from my daily lessons, the book I read or the podcasts I listen to in Spanish)?

Undeniably, the use of alcoholic beverages was something at times part of my youthful past and early experiences. While it probably didn't give me any linguistic knowledge, alcohol temporarily lowered the internal censor that was preventing me from accessing the knowledge I already accumulated. 

That distinction is important. Research consistently finds that anxiety is associated with poorer foreign language performance. I read about one analysis on the subject covering more than 10,000 learners that found a moderate negative relationship. The remaining question in front of us is, can we reproduce the “untied tongue” effect without having to use enablers like alcohol? 

I would hope so and think it’s quite possible, as my existing meditation practice could provide me with an unusually good starting point. Let’s call it a "Spanish disinhibition routine!" The objective would not be to become maximally relaxed in the sense of sleepy or passive, but probably to get to something more subtle, like relaxed attention, much reduced self-monitoring and full permission to improvise. 

In other words, we would want our conscious mind to stop constantly asking “Is that the right tense? Is that the right word? Am I making a mistake?” and allow the material accumulated through our reading and listening to emerge and freely pour through the conversation! 

In the next blog, we see how we can devise a method to do just that...

Discoveries in learning a new language (Part Two)

The views about language learning that I introduced yesterday could actually be pushed one step further: perhaps the ultimate goal isn't “knowing Spanish” but developing enough automaticity that Spanish begins to happen to me, or to us when we decide to learn a new language. In fact, we can really observe three different stages: 

• 1. Recognition: "I understand that expression when I hear or read it." 
• 2. Retrieval: "I know that expression and can produce it if I think about it." 
• 3. Automaticity: "The expression comes out before I have consciously constructed it." 

It’s obvious that this third stage is what makes conversation feel fluid. And it explains why someone can have a surprisingly large vocabulary and still struggle to speak as I have witnessed when I was learning German with some Japanese with huge vocabulary and perfect grammatical understanding but were woefully unable to put the simplest sentence together. 

This is what I love about my concept of “short blocks of words”, because it captures something important. I should in fact have called it “linguistic building blocks” or, more playfully, “linguistic Lego.” Each block is something the brain can retrieve as a unit rather than scrambling to assemble word-by-word under the pressure of conversation. 

Now, when I refer to my grammar being “abysmal” it’s not necessarily something I will simply postpone. Unbeknownst to me, grammar might actually start becoming easier once I have memorized enough blocks. After hearing quiero que..., tengo que..., me gustaría..., ¿por qué no...?, etc. hundreds of times, patterns of conjugation and syntax begin to become familiar almost without deliberate study. 

That could make a nice final observation: perhaps grammar learned in context eventually becomes less something we remember and more something feels right to us when we blurt it out. Tomorrow, we’ll continue with the technique involved in “supercharging” our learning of foreign languages, so please, don’t miss that one!