Tech for Boomers with Joshua Mesnik

In this episode of Decluttering 55+, host Michelle Passoff discusses the importance of decluttering not just physical spaces but also the complexities of technology and digital life for older adults. Joined by tech expert Joshua Mesnik, they explore the challenges faced by baby boomers in navigating technology, the significance of password management, recognizing online scams, and the evolving landscape of customer service in a digital world. The conversation emphasizes the need for awareness and practical strategies to enhance digital literacy and safety.

Takeaways

-Decluttering is about making space for what you want in life.
-Next level clutter includes emotional and technological challenges as we age.
-Technology can be overwhelming, but it can also enhance our lives.
-Password management is crucial for online safety and efficiency.
-Phishing scams are prevalent and require vigilance to avoid.
-Using password managers can save time and enhance security.
-Be cautious about sharing sensitive information online.
-Customer service is increasingly automated, requiring adaptation.
-Accepting the digital landscape is the first step to navigating it.
-Engaging with technology should be a source of joy, not frustration.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Decluttering 55 Plus
02:29 Understanding Next Level Clutter
05:35 Navigating Technology for Older Adults
08:23 The Importance of Password Management
11:18 Recognizing and Preventing Scams
15:17 Customer Service in the Digital Age

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Decluttering 55+: Wisdoms to Create a Legacy, Not a Mess

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Transcript

Michelle 0:34

Hello to all you declutterers out there, and welcome to Decluttering 55 Plus with Michelle Passoff. This is the place to come to make space for more, not less, of what you want in life. When you let go of what you don't want, need, use, and love, you get things done that you've been stumping you, and you'll have space for anything. That's right, anything is possible. Without clutter in the way, you can dream the impossible dream and make the unimaginable real. From time to time on this podcast, we will discuss conventional clutter, papers, clothes, and other stuff. For the most part, however, we talk with authors, authorities, geeks, and experts about next level clutter. Next level clutter are areas of life that are confronting or confounding to us as we age, so we sweep them under the carpet, put them off another day or forever. When you declutter next level clutter, you're really deciding to jump in, learn new things, straighten out uncertainties, get help when you need it, and get things done. We claim this will not only invigorate your life, but it will make you someone who creates a legacy, not a mess. We talk about health and fitness, preparing a memoir, social relationships, deciding where to live and what to do next in life, getting your financial house and legal matters in order, and in the end to plan your final arrangements. Why not? Today we're going to talk tech with Joshua Mesnick. Tell me technology can't make your head spin sometimes. Well, if it makes you feel any better, you're not the only one, and 55 plusers are not the only ones. You're mystified oftentimes by all things tech. But technology is here to stay and it's integrating into our lives in new ways every day. So today we're going to talk about it. Josh is a filmmaker, actor, educator, and entrepreneur. As the owner of Wise On Tech, he coaches older adults and entrepreneurs on using technology, especially AI, for growth, health, connection, and creativity. Also, he's the co-founder of Waffle Video AI, and Josh connects filmmakers and content creators with AI companies for the training of AI models. Josh is from Florida, but he lives in Los Angeles, California. I would be remiss not to mention that Josh and another colleague of ours collaborated on the digital decluttering chapter of my upcoming book, Decluttering 55 Plus, Make Room for What Matters. Thank you, Josh, for being here with us today.

Joshua 3:06

Thank you so much for having me.

Michelle 3:08

Yeah, how's the life out there in uh Los Angeles?

Joshua 3:12

It is sunny, but not too sunny. High 70s. It's a gorgeous day.

Michelle 3:17

Well, that's great. You know, weather is not something so passe anymore to talk about. But in any case, neither is technology. So let's get coaching. How did you get the idea to just focus your business at first on baby boomers?

Joshua 3:34

So before my consulting business was called Wise on Tech, it was called Boomer Tech Help. And honestly, I started this as almost like a joke because my parents were calling me all the time for tech help. This was in like 2021, 2020, 2021. You know, we were all starting to live more online. You know, that was when the pandemic hit. People are now, all right, you're zooming each other, you know, your jobs are remote. There were more tech questions popping up. So my parents were calling me, my they would send their friends to call me and they would be asking me about, you know, pretty much anything that you get stuck on if you're trying to live more online, whether that's again finding an email that's missing or figuring out how to send someone a big video or, you know, kind of just little things. But all of a sudden I'm on the call for 45 minutes. Yeah. And I just thought to myself, I'm like, you know what? Next time a friend of a friend of a friend calls me, I'm going to consider charging because it's challenging walking people through verbally how to do something like find it, file, rename it, sort it, and delete it. So it kind of just got started as a way to, I don't know, bring some financial support for myself in while helping people that were reaching out.

Michelle 4:50

You became everybody's favorite son?

Joshua 4:52

Yes. All of a sudden, it actually became viable for me to spend significant time kind of reaching out and marketing it and starting the consultancy. That was sort of the genesis.

Michelle 5:02

Do you think baby boomers struggle more with technology than younger people do? Or does everybody struggle with technology?

Joshua 5:10

Well, it's funny because when you were introducing all this, I was thinking to myself, I struggle with technology. Technology can be invasive. And one of the words I wrote down was boundaries. Because even someone who has high digital literacy, which means they're able to use multiple digital tools from hardware, computers to software, interacting with the digital world easily, even someone who has high digital literacy will suffer at the hands of technology. Part of that is because if you're not careful, you'll spend more time engaging with the technology than you will doing the things that you actually want to do in your life. And all of a sudden, like in your words, it becomes like a clutter in your life. The technology becomes a sore spot instead of a tool or something that you're using to create joyfully with.

Michelle 6:02

The point is supposed to make your life better or easier. What's the top reason or the top two or three reasons people were coming to you? Was it all different, or were you finding some kind of pattern in the reasons people were calling you?

Joshua 6:16

Yeah. Very interesting. I would have people reach out to me mostly around the things that surround personal technology. So the things that you're doing on your phone, on your computer. Again, finding an email often was like big source where I was like, I had this email and then I need it, but it's not there. Why can't I find it? So a lot of email questions, a lot of questions around storage. Like I ran out of storage on my cloud account, on my Dropbox, on my Gmail. Why have I run out so quickly? These questions would quickly not devolve, but evolve to so where you would see that there's one problem, but it's connected to five other problems. Well, you know, you have your Gmail, you've run out of storage. Well, we're gonna have to upgrade your Gmail account to get you more storage. Do you know your password? And then it would be like, oh, my password. No, I don't want a password. I don't like passwords. You know, uh I have no idea where my password is.

Michelle 7:08

Let's stop there because I think that is one problem I always struggle with. And I have my husband store all the passwords on a password management site app. And I haven't myself jumped in to use it, so I always have to ask him to go into the app and find it. What do you do and what do you recommend for all those passwords, for example?

Joshua 7:32

This is one of those things where you need that mental software update where you think a password has to be something that I remember. And then because I can remember it, it's secure, it's safe, it's something that I recognize and can remember. I can recall at any time, and that's a good password. We have to start thinking of passwords more as keys. You don't memorize all the grooves of your key. You just have the key and you put the key in and it unlocks the door. Your password is like a key. And to store all these keys, you don't want to store them in your head and you don't want to store them on a piece of paper. And you really don't even want to store them on an Excel spreadsheet, although I have seen that work in short-term solution, but you want to store them in systems or softwares that are specifically designed to keep your passwords. And there are many out there. You can do a quick Google search or perplexity search to find nice password management solutions for you.

Michelle 8:24

So there's a password management apps. What are some of the top ones that people use?

Joshua 8:30

OnePass, Dashlane. I personally like Dashlane. Even the Google and Apple have built-in their, you know, Apple's keychain is a built-in password management solution. Google has their own as well.

Michelle 8:41

So what do you do? You open that app every time somebody asks you to give a password for something and you just make your own list, or does it make lists for you? What happens once you get into the app?

Joshua 8:52

Yeah, so the password manager, first of all, makes your passwords easily findable. And that is, again, when you're trying to declutter your life and you're trying to make technology easy for you. What you don't want to be doing is at a friend's house, wanting to log in to your Gmail to show them a fun photo, and all of a sudden you can't find your password, and now you just lost an opportunity to have a good time with somebody. You want it to be easy. So a password manager, first of all, helps to make your passwords easily searchable. And all of your database is, you can find any password with a quick search. Another thing that the password manager does is it auto-fills your passwords when you visit different websites. So instead of you having to go every time to find that password for that specific website, it'll plug it right in for you. And that over time, as you begin to use the digital technology and you're online more and more, the amount of time that you spend in that little moment of visiting a website and putting a password, if you were to compound that over many years, you'd literally be saving yourselves hours of time just in entering passwords.

Michelle 9:56

And it's at your fingertips. It's not on some pad in your cabinet in your office, which is 10 miles from where you are at the moment. It's actually at your fingertips all the time. And how secure is it?

Joshua 10:09

Exactly. And it updates across devices. So every time you change a password on one device, it'll automatically sync across every other device. And again, that's an essential quality of a password manager. I'm not able to tell you technically exactly how it's encrypted. I believe it's 256 hash. There's a 256 encryption key that basically these passwords are protected because if someone were to hack, let's say, Dashlane and like just invade Dashlane with hackers and Dashlane was broken open, even though they've hacked the password manager that is keeping your passwords, those passwords are encrypted so that the person hacking that third party, Dashlane, can't see your passwords. It's end-to-end encrypted.

Michelle 10:52

So nobody even at the password company can get into. You know, this brings up another kind of fear that I have all the time. So let me just complete the conversation about password managers. Like OnePass is called and Dashlane. And what was the third one?

Joshua 11:09

OnePass. It's funny, I haven't looked into these in a while. I've been using Dashlane for a long time. But yeah, OnePass, Dashlane. Then you can search for the rest of the There's a few top performers.

Michelle 11:18

But that brings up another topic, which is really important, and that is making sure that you're safe and secure online. How pervasive is scamming and how do you recognize it and how do you prevent it? Can you say something? I know this can take up hours to talk about, but can we devote a couple of minutes to that?

Joshua 11:34

You're really most vulnerable where people can reach you directly in your email. So emails are the place where people will go for phishing, which means they'll send an email that seems as though it's something that you'd want. And they'll even impersonate your family. I get emails from my mom. It says Denise on the email. But if I look closely, I notice that it's from an address that's not my mom. And so these are how scammers they get your email address, maybe from some website that you signed up for 10 years ago, the security of that company, maybe the company went down, maybe somehow were hacked. And so your email is now accessible on the dark web. People will take that email and they'll send you these phishing attacks. They'll try to get you to give up information that's valuable. Generally, you'll know if it's a phishing attack, if there's a link that's suspicious. You don't want to just open emails and click on links unless you know exactly who it's from and what it's about. If you have a question, I would say pause and really do some due diligence to make sure that you're interacting with someone you trust.

Michelle 12:40

Because what can happen if you're invaded by somebody in the dark worlds of the internet?

Joshua 12:45

It's all about information. They're looking to get into sensitive accounts, for example. So at some point, they would ask you for your routing number or your banking password. At some point, they would ask you for a two-factor authentication. So one thing that happened to me that I'll share is I was in a real rut. I was trying to rent a home. I was under pressure. I went to Craigslist. I found a great place here in LA. And I go to apply for the place. And throughout the conversation, it sort of evolved to where they asked me to give them a link that they were going to send to me. Now, what I didn't know was happening is they had actually found a way to convince me to go on to my mobile service, Verizon, to send them a link which would give them access to my Verizon account. Then what they did is they sent a link back to me saying, Hey, did you get that link? We need you to give us the code. And on the message, it says, do not share this with anybody. But I was in such a rush that I totally dismissed that first part of the message and I sent them the code. And what it allows them to do is if they can get access to your phone, then they can go to your bank account, they can try to enter your email, which they know, they'll try to enter a password, which it won't work, then they'll say, I forgot my password. That will send them a link. It'll come to them now that they have access to your phone, and then they get to reset your password and they get to enter your bank account. So that's one of the most dangerous forms of getting scammed, is basically handing over their ability to receive two-factor authentication from you.

Michelle 14:22

What I'm getting out of what you're saying is I definitely look at the email from which it's coming. And if it's not related to what you're meaning to get, then don't answer it.

Joshua 14:37

Yeah, and just be very cautious. Sometimes it actually is fine. And a lot of calls I would get were actually when I started consulting, and that was around this kind of thing. People were afraid that they'd been hacked. There's a lot of steps that need to be made from someone like getting your password even to them actually hacking you and actually getting access to your resources. So you don't have to go into panic mode right away. But yeah, just be cautious around uh sharing sensitive information or ever sharing a code that says, do not share this with anybody. Don't share it with anybody.

Michelle 15:10

So beware, but at the same time, you don't want to be discouraged either. Beware, but don't be discouraged.

Joshua 15:18

Sure. Yeah, you don't want to be tiptoeing your way through uh your digital life.

Michelle 15:22

Well, one thing that's bugs me that I want to touch on briefly because we only have a couple more minutes, is customer service. I get frustrated when I want to find out something from a website. I want to get an answer from a website that I'm visiting, and I have to go through an AI bot or whatever it is. I can't get a real person to tell me what is the answer to my question. So what do I need to do to get more comfortable with customer service online?

Joshua 15:50

The first step in the grief cycle, I believe, is acceptance. I don't know if that's actually true, but accept that you will not see more people as your customer service agents, you will see more bots as your customer service agent.

Michelle 16:05

Now you have to have acceptance?

Joshua 16:08

You will be interacting with more robots on your customer service calls than you will be humans in the future.

Michelle 16:15

Sometimes I feel like I have to get a call. They send me to articles, they send me to YouTube videos, and you almost have to surrender to that. Is that what you're telling me?

Joshua 16:24

We're in a little awkward development phase. We're in like the young teenage years where our limbs are just forming and we're just forming into ourselves. What I mean by that is right now there are customer service agentic models, AI models that are being created to make customer service with an AI as smooth as it would be with a person and probably smoother.

Michelle 16:53

But that's all we're gonna have time for today, Josh. So I'm gonna take your advice. I'm going to put my passwords into password manager apps. I'm gonna take your advice and be very, very cautious about phishing. They call it P-H-I-S-H-I-N-G, not F-I-S-H-I-N-G, but people who are looking to take your money. And I'm gonna relax. So I want to thank you for coming today. We're gonna wrap it up for the moment. So fear not, we're gonna have Josh back for another episode. For the next time, we're gonna talk a little bit more about AI, which you open up the subject talking about the customer service evolution. Thank you for being with us, Josh. Before we sign off, let me remind you all to pick up a copy of Decluttering 55 Plus Wisdoms to Create a Legacy, not a mess. It's an illustrated book. You flip it to any page, and it's gonna give you prompts in all areas of next level clutter to get things done. Also, if you could go to the website www.decluttering55plus.com and sign up on the Let's Connect page to let us know that you're there, your triumphs, your challenges, write in and tell us all about that. We'd like to know it, and we'll stay in touch. So that's all we have time for today. Tune in next week, signing off for now. Have a clutter free day. Bye now.