Dancing With Ourselves: A Totally RAD 80's Podcast

Remember when customer service actually meant someone served the customer?

Somewhere between the 1980s and 2026, we became the cashier, the bagger, the travel agent, the tech-support department, and apparently the unpaid employee of every business we visit.

Welcome to Episode 150 of Dancing With Ourselves: A Totally RAD 80's Podcast!

Jimmy, Jeremy, Josh, and Kane are back for a hilarious, unfiltered Gen X conversation about the disappearing art of customer service.

It all starts when Jimmy walks into a McDonald's and discovers a sea of ordering kiosks, no traditional ordering counter, and an older woman struggling to place her order. Who steps in to help her? Another CUSTOMER.

Wait… do we work here now?

From the personal service of the 1970s and 1980s to today's automated everything, the guys explore how businesses are changing the customer experience—and who is actually benefiting.

In this episode:

• McDonald's ordering kiosks, missing cashiers, and Josh's disastrous table-number experience.
• Self-checkout, mobile apps, automated systems, and whether customers ever see the savings.
• Why customer service used to mean something different.
• The difference between helpful employees and companies that promise more than they deliver.
• Kane's firsthand perspective on retail operations, customer expectations, and employee accountability.
• Jeremy's experiences with frustrating business services and surprisingly helpful government offices.
• Automated tech support, phone trees, and the frustration of trying to reach a real human being.
• Technology, artificial intelligence, and the gradual disappearance of everyday human interaction.
• Gen X memories, service horror stories, road-trip adventures, and more.

And just when everyone thinks the madness is over, Jimmy unleashes October 20 Gen X trivia, featuring historical stumpers from 1980–1990 and a redemption round that may not be quite as easy as advertised.

Is modern customer service really getting worse? Or have our expectations—and our willingness to do everything ourselves—changed?

EPISODE CHAPTERS

00:00 — Opening Banter, Family Life & Pigeon Forge Adventures

08:10 — What Does Good Customer Service Look Like?

11:03 — McDonald's Kiosks: Where Did the Employees Go?

15:06 — Whatever Happened to "The Customer Is Always Right"?

19:37 — Bad Service, Marketing Failures & Broken Promises

24:54 — Dunkin' Donuts, Ordering Apps & Kiosk Frustration

26:38 — Josh's McDonald's Table-Number Disaster

28:00 — Good vs. Bad Service and Customer Expectations

32:37 — Plumbers, Repairs & Service Calls Gone Sideways

36:52 — The Nightmare of 1-800 Technical Support

45:18 — Are Companies Making Customers Do the Work?

48:07 — Automation, Car Parts & Confusing Technology

51:19 — Government Services: Can the DMV Get It Right?

54:29 — Retro Current Show & Jeremy's Amusement-Park Book

1:00:07 — Remembering Human Customer Service

1:02:08 — Phone Etiquette, Texting & Changing Generations

1:06:29 — Customer Attitudes, Employees & Human Interaction

1:11:31 — October 20 Gen X Trivia: The Hard Stumpers

1:40:28 — The Redemption Round!

1:44:41 — Final Debate: Customer Satisfaction & Survey Scores

1:50:56 — Auditory Ecstasy Outro: "The Dirty Work"

FEATURED OUTRO MUSIC — AUDITORY ECSTASY

🎵 "The Dirty Work" — Auditory Ecstasy

A gritty, swagger-filled celebration of the people who roll up their sleeves and keep things running.

The perfect musical send-off for an episode asking who is really doing all the work.

🎧 Stream "The Dirty Work":
https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/auditoryecstasy/the-dirty-work

🎬 Explore Auditory Ecstasy music videos on the official VEVO channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@AuditoryEcstasyVEVO

🎬 Auditory Ecstasy on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@auditoryecstasy

Music produced by Auditory Ecstasy / Eagle Bradley Productions LLC.

MORE FROM THE DWO FAMILY

📺 Retro Current Show — Gen X music, nostalgia, and retro entertainment.

https://www.youtube.com/@RetroCurrentShow

🎙️ Dancing With Ourselves:

https://dancingwithourselves.buzzsprout.com/

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

Do you prefer self-checkout or a real cashier?

And if you're scanning your own groceries, bagging your own purchases, troubleshooting their app, and filling out their customer-service survey…

Shouldn't you at least get an employee discount?

Gen X memories. 1980s nostalgia. Four friends. Zero filters.

Dancing With Ourselves — A Totally RAD 80's Podcast!

Explicit language and adult humor.

#GenX #DancingWithOurselves #CustomerService #SelfCheckout #80sNostalgia #AuditoryEcstasy

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This episode is a special crossover event.

Instead of a standard in-house Dancing With Ourselves recording, Jimmy, Kane, and Josh head into the trivia arena to appear on Who Will Save Generation X, the game-show-style podcast hosted by Zabe.

*ALSO, this was recorded before Jeremy was a co-host. We would never leave him out of this sort of thing!

If you love Gen X nostalgia, ’80s pop culture, trivia, and a little competitive chaos, this one is right in the DWO wheelhouse.

In this special episode, the DWO guys compete against each other in Zabe’s uniquely Gen-X world of games, memory tests, and pop-culture challenges. Expect laughs, friendly rivalry, deep-cut references, and the kind of useless-yet-essential knowledge only Gen X seems to carry around forever.

Who Will Save Generation X is devoted to remembering, celebrating, and preserving the pop culture of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, as host Zabe tests contestants with trivia games and retro challenges. It’s a perfect crossover match for DWO, and we’re proud to bring this appearance to the DWO feed.

So if you’ve ever wondered how the DWO crew would do when the nostalgia turns competitive… here you go.

Support / Follow Who Will Save Generation X

Website: https://www.whowillsavegenx.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/whowillsavegenx

Be sure to check out Zabe’s show, subscribe, and support a fellow Gen-X creator.

Outro Music

This episode closes with “Atomic Tassel Bazaar” by Auditory Ecstasy.

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Nothing’s ever new… apparently not even in the 1980s.

We love to complain that Hollywood has run out of ideas—but what if Gen X grew up watching recycled ideas without even realizing it?

In Episode 148, Jimmy, Jeremy, Josh and Kane look at TV reboot culture from both directions in time. First, we dig into the shows and movies from earlier generations that were already being revived, remade, continued or re-imagined during the 1980s. Then we flip the timeline and look at what happened when the television Gen X grew up with became source material for somebody else.

From The Twilight Zone and Mission: Impossible to The Fall Guy, The Equalizer, MacGyver, Magnum P.I., Miami Vice, and modern versions of Matlock, the guys try to figure out what actually has to survive for a reboot to still feel like the same property.

Is it the character? The actor? The premise? The theme music? The era?

And if Tom Selleck isn't Magnum… is it really Magnum P.I.?

The deeper question becomes harder than the trivia: when somebody reboots a show you grew up with, are you protecting the story—or the memory of who you were when you watched it?

Same idea. New cast. New era.

Nothing’s ever new.

The conversation includes a particularly strong example with The Equalizer: the crew follows the concept across radically different incarnations while recognizing that the underlying premise survives even when the performer and character presentation change.

We close Episode 148 with “La Señal” by Auditory Ecstasy, an unreleased AE track that fits the episode’s theme of signals, echoes, and old ideas finding new life.

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Why the hell is everything sealed now?

On September 29, 1982, the Chicago Tylenol murders began—and American consumers would never look at an unopened bottle quite the same way again.

In Episode 147 of Dancing With Ourselves, Jimmy, Jeremy, Josh, and Kane use the Tylenol crisis as the starting point for a much bigger Gen X conversation: we didn’t just grow up in a world that seemed more dangerous—we grew up while the modern safety world was being built around us.

Lawn darts. BB guns. Fireworks. Homemade bike ramps. Kids disappearing into the woods for hours. Riding around without seat belts. Playground equipment seemingly designed by people who hated children. Halloween candy inspections. Warning labels. Tamper-resistant packaging. Stranger danger. And parents who often had absolutely no idea where we were until dinner.

Some of those changes unquestionably made life safer. But did something else change with them?

The guys dig into the classic Gen X claim that “we survived,” the survivorship bias hiding inside it, and the difference between eliminating genuine hazards and eliminating the kinds of manageable risks that once taught kids independence and judgment.

Then, because this is DWO, the conversation escapes containment.

The discussion expands into how social media changed the visibility—and perhaps the incentives—around bad behavior, whether young people today are actually more violent or whether we simply witness more of it, IRL streamers turning chaos into content, technology progressively removing human attention from everyday tasks, and the rapidly approaching world of personal AI systems.

Maybe the real story isn’t that Gen X grew up before safety.

Maybe Gen X grew up during the transition—from a world where individuals were expected to recognize and manage much of their own risk to one where packaging, engineering, warning labels, laws, technology, and institutions increasingly manage it for us.

So what did we gain?

What did we lose?

And what dangerous thing did your parents routinely let YOU do that would get them absolutely destroyed on social media today?

🎵 Featured Auditory Ecstasy outro: “Know Your History”

“Know Your History” is an unreleased Auditory Ecstasy track featured in this episode.

Dancing With Ourselves — A Totally Rad 80’s Podcast
Gen X memories, 1980s culture, music, movies, technology, history, questionable childhood decisions, and four guys trying to figure out how the hell we got from there to here.

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How did some of these songs actually become No. 1 hits?

Jimmy, Jeremy, Josh and Kane put the Billboard charts of the 1980s on trial in Episode 146 of Dancing With Ourselves: A Totally RAD 80s Podcast.

The mission sounds simple: take one questionable No. 1 hit from each year, examine the evidence, and decide whether the song deserved its place at the top—or whether America collectively lost its mind for a week.

But this is DWO, so before the musical court comes to order there are Chewbacca cake pans, vintage collectibles, windshield-wiper warfare, toddlers, technology, radio memories and the usual collection of conversational rabbit holes.

Then the prosecution begins.

Captain & Tennille bring “Do That to Me One More Time.”
Stars on 45 turns Beatles songs into an early-’80s mashup experiment.
Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder face questioning over “Ebony and Ivory.”
Patti Austin and James Ingram defend “Baby, Come to Me.”
Stevie Wonder returns with “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”

And then comes the prosecution’s star witness:

Starship — “We Built This City.”

From there the guys move through “Rock Me Amadeus,” “Shake You Down,” “Baby, I Love Your Way/Freebird Medley,” “Hangin’ Tough,” and finally cross the decade line into 1990 with “Ice Ice Baby.”

Along the way, the conversation becomes bigger than bad songs. What actually made a record No. 1 in the 1980s? How much came from record sales, radio airplay, promotion, movies, MTV and the machinery of the music business? Can an overplayed song still be great? Can a bad song create an incredible memory? And how much does nostalgia change the verdict forty years later?

Jeremy brings the music-history ammunition, Josh and Kane dig through the chart evidence, and Jimmy keeps asking the question that started the whole thing:

Was it actually a bad song—or are we remembering it wrong?

The episode closes by turning the question around and asking which No. 1 songs from the decade actually deserve to be remembered among the best. Jeremy immediately goes to a-ha’s “Take On Me,” while the conversation expands into Bon Jovi, Whitney Houston, The Police and other records that still survive the test of time.  DWO_EP146_How_The_Hell_Did_This…

Recorded: September 22, 2026
Featuring: Jimmy, Jeremy, Josh & Kane

🎵 Episode Outro: “Saxual Intelligence” — Auditory Ecstasy
A NeuroWave Metal / Psy-Jazz / electronic fusion track closing out a show devoted to what makes music memorable, strange, successful—or impossible to explain.

So what’s your verdict?

What ’80s No. 1 hit never deserved the top spot—and what supposedly “bad” song will you defend forever?

Dancing With Ourselves — A Totally RAD 80s Podcast.

The actual episode explicitly establishes this “song on trial” framework and then repeatedly tests whether chart placement really represented lasting quality.

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Was the 1980s really better—or were we just younger?

Dancing With Ourselves EP145 puts Gen X nostalgia on the witness stand after Ryan Reynolds sparked a fresh debate over how people remember the ’80s. Are we remembering the decade that actually happened, or the edited highlight reel that survived in our heads?

Jimmy, Jeremy, Josh and Kane start with Reynolds, Top Gun and the idea that nostalgia naturally preserves the things we loved while pushing the fear, boredom and ugly parts of history toward the background.

From there, the conversation goes exactly where a DWO conversation should go.

We get into Transformers and the toys we suddenly want back now that we have adult money, MTV and the arrival of cable culture, Weird Al and misheard lyrics, music as a memory machine, Randy Johnson, the Miracle on Ice, Live Aid, New Coke, the early AIDS crisis, Challenger, Chernobyl, the Berlin Wall and the strange way major events become fused to wherever we were when we first experienced them.

And that leads to the bigger question:

Do we really miss the ’80s—or do we miss who we were in the ’80s?

Maybe nostalgia does lie about some of the details. Maybe it deletes the boring parts. Maybe it turns fear into stories, junk into collectibles and ordinary childhood moments into sacred artifacts.

But maybe that doesn't make the memories false.

Maybe nostalgia isn't trying to preserve history.

Maybe it's trying to preserve meaning.

So dear listener: what are you nostalgic for?

🎙️ Dancing With Ourselves — A Totally Rad ’80s Podcast

Featuring:
Jimmy
Jeremy
Josh
Kane

Recorded: September 15, 2026

🎵 Episode Outro:
“Timelines & Hooks” — Auditory Ecstasy

Explicit language. Gen X opinions. Rabbit holes guaranteed.

#DancingWithOurselves
#DWO
#GenX
#GenXPodcast
#1980s
#80s
#80sNostalgia
#Nostalgia
#80sKids
#80sMusic
#80sPopCulture
#MTV
#TopGun
#Transformers
#RyanReynolds
#AuditoryEcstasy

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What happens when four Gen X guys show up to record a podcast with absolutely no idea what the hell they’re going to talk about?

Apparently, you just start talking and see where the hole takes you.

DWO EP144 begins with Jimmy, Jeremy, Josh, and Kane admitting there is no topic. No prepared macro subject. No carefully constructed plan. Jimmy even puts VYRA to work searching the DWO catalog and the wider Gen X and 80s podcast world for something the guys haven’t already beaten to death.

They consider 1986. Malls. First jobs. Playground rumors. Subscriptions. Repairable technology.

Then they mostly ignore all of it.

Instead, the conversation starts doing what a real DWO conversation does best: mutating.

The guys bounce through Canada, old pizza joints, tabletop arcade games, AI-assisted coding, humanoid robots, Weird Science, algorithms, modern media, and the strange evolution of television spectacle.

That eventually sends everybody straight into the glorious world of Judge Wapner.

From there, the conversation opens up into The People’s Court, Judge Judy, Divorce Court, television judge shows, daytime TV, Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, Geraldo Rivera, true-crime entertainment, and the bizarre American tradition of watching complete strangers argue about their problems on television.

Then the episode gets personal.

Jeremy shares some of his own experiences involving courts, government, disputes, and the legal system, while the guys compare encounters with judges, lawyers, courtrooms, and jury summons. That leads into a much bigger discussion:

How much faith should we actually place in a jury of our peers?

Is a random citizen hearing a complicated case really the best person to decide another human being’s future? Can jurors truly disregard something after they’ve heard it? How much do emotion, personality, presentation, and prior assumptions affect judgment? And is the alternative—a judge, expert panel, or some other system—actually any better?

Nobody fixes the American justice system.

Nobody really fixes anything.

Because this was never supposed to be an episode about the courts.

It was supposed to be an episode about… well, nobody knew.

After nearly two hours of judges, robots, television, algorithms, culture, institutions, personal stories, Gen X memories, and whatever else wandered into the room, Jimmy finally realizes what happened:

They fell into the conversation hole.

And somehow, they made it out the other side.

So grab a seat in the jury box and answer the only question that really matters:

What the hell are we gonna talk about tonight?

Jeremy also discusses material connected to his own experiences with local government and legal conflict. You can find his Etsy listing here:

Jeremy’s Etsy:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/540681920/buford-city-government-the-bullies-the

Featured cover co-host: Kane

Recorded: September 1, 2026

Explicit: Yes

Episode Outro

“The Rabbit Hole” — Auditory Ecstasy

There really wasn’t another choice.

After nearly two hours of following one tangent into another until Jimmy literally declares that the guys have reached the end of the conversation hole, DWO EP144 closes by dropping straight into Auditory Ecstasy’s “The Rabbit Hole.”

Official music video — YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY0Ko8SqYxo&list=RDEY0Ko8SqYxo&start_radio=1

Listen on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/1Vy4Je48Gn7W5vynW82km9?si=gRbYFQpRTYa9JP62QoYi7w

Dancing With Ourselves — A Totally RAD 80’s Podcast
Gen X memories. 80s culture. Real conversation. No filter.

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Before Google Maps, smartphones, live traffic, and that little blue dot always knowing where the hell you are, how did we actually get anywhere?

Jimmy, Jeremy, Josh, and Kane go back to the Gen X world of paper road maps, road atlases, handwritten directions, landmarks, gas-station advice, family-road-trip navigation, MapQuest printouts, TomTom, Garmin, and the old tactical nightmare known as “Just follow me.”

But this one becomes more than nostalgia.

Did growing up before GPS force us to build a stronger internal map of the world? Why can we still mentally drive through neighborhoods we knew decades ago? What happened when getting lost was a normal part of traveling—and recovering meant reading signs, remembering landmarks, asking strangers, improvising a new route, or admitting that maybe Dad had absolutely no idea where he was going?

The guys get into Atlanta landmark navigation, the Big Chicken, the legendary Buford Highway Goatman, road-trip stories, wrong turns, asking pizza shops and gas stations for directions, MapQuest disasters, early consumer GPS units, and the strange transition from understanding where you are to simply following the next instruction.

Then the bigger question:

Did GPS solve navigation—or did it replace navigation?

Modern GPS gives us extraordinary advantages: live traffic, rerouting, exact ETAs, location sharing, lane guidance, worldwide address lookup, and the confidence to travel places we have never seen before. But when the machine handles the route, what happens to spatial memory, landmark awareness, cardinal direction, improvisation, and our tolerance for simply being lost?

The episode also pauses for a heartfelt goodbye and RIP remembrance of Dolly Parton, reflecting on her music, personality, cultural impact, philanthropy, Dollywood, and the remarkable connection she maintained with generations of fans.

And because the episode was recorded on August 25, the boys face another Gen X Time Machine: 15 brutal August 25 stumpers followed by five questions they might actually have a chance of answering.

So here's the test:

If your phone disappeared right now, could you get home from 100 miles away with nothing but a paper map?

Outro Music: “Lantern Without Walls” — Auditory Ecstasy

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Artificial intelligence feels like it exploded into our lives overnight.

But did it?

In DWO EP142 — AI Was Already Here, Jimmy, Jeremy, Josh and Kane go digging through the history of artificial intelligence and discover that the machines have been creeping into our lives for a hell of a lot longer than ChatGPT would have you believe.

The trail runs from 1940s cybernetics and artificial-neuron research, through Alan Turing, the 1956 Dartmouth AI project, early machine learning, ELIZA, DARPA-funded research, expert systems, computer chess, game opponents, search engines, fraud detection, GPS, recommendation algorithms, Siri and Alexa—all the way to modern generative AI.

And then there’s 1973.

A Super Friends episode called “Professor Goodfellow’s G.E.E.C.” warned kids about a giant computer designed to eliminate human labor, brainwork and responsibility. More than fifty years later, we’re still having essentially the same argument.

So what actually changed?

Was AI invented recently—or did it finally become powerful, conversational and visible enough that ordinary people could no longer ignore it?

The guys get into the AI Effect, the difference between automation and intelligence, whether Pac-Man ghosts count as AI, why computers beating humans at chess stopped impressing us, what Gen X was already living with before anybody called it artificial intelligence, and the bigger human question underneath all of it:

If the machine is willing to do our thinking for us, how much thinking are we willing to give away?

Plus: August 18th 1980s stumpers, Gen X detours, arguments over what actually counts as intelligence, and the usual DWO rabbit holes.

Featured cover co-host: Jeremy

Episode outro:
“Mark Me Human” — Auditory Ecstasy

Because maybe the question isn’t whether machines become human.

Maybe it’s what happens when humans decide they’d rather become more like the machine.

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Before streaming, smartphones, instant messaging, same-day delivery, and live tracking, waiting wasn't a malfunction in life. Waiting was an actual part of life.

In DWO EP141, Jimmy, Kane, and Jeremy go back to the Gen X world where you took pictures and waited days to find out whether they were any good, sat beside the family telephone hoping somebody would call, hovered over a cassette recorder waiting for the right song to hit the radio, and sometimes waited months—or years—for a movie to finally make its way from the theater to television.

We get into mail-order catalogs, packages that disappeared into the postal void, concert and ticket lines, checks that had to clear, appointment television, video-store scarcity, and those endless stretches when there was genuinely nothing to do.

And that leads to the real question of the episode:

Did all that waiting actually make Gen X more patient—or did it simply make us better at functioning while frustrated?

We talk delayed gratification, anticipation, boredom, uncertainty, and whether modern technology eliminated waiting or just trained us to become furious whenever anything still takes longer than five minutes.

Then we finish the conversation DWO-style with our August 4 trivia round: 15 hard stumpers pulled from August 4 events across 1980–1990, followed by five easier shots at redemption.

Tonight's Auditory Ecstasy outro:
“When The Ship Don’t Come” — Auditory Ecstasy

The track couldn't fit this episode much better: a song built around anticipation, holding position, waiting for the promised thing to arrive—and confronting what happens when it doesn't.

Listen to When The Ship Don’t Come:

SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/auditory-ecstasy/when-the-ship-dont-come
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/3HdzeWXWlCbax6xMnHcd9D?si=GC_v1K_oQBmV25rTCH3uAw
YouTube: https://youtu.be/-zRoRko63Po?si=MRbfTZyBhi7NoGVu

Audience question: What did you routinely have to wait for growing up that people today would absolutely refuse to tolerate?

Dancing With Ourselves — A Totally Rad 80's Podcast
Gen X memories. 80s culture. Real conversation. No filter.

Search / Discovery Keyword Bank: Gen X, Generation X, 1980s nostalgia, 80s podcast, Gen X podcast, waiting, patience, delayed gratification, analog life, life before smartphones, landline telephone, family phone, cassette tapes, recording songs from radio, 80s radio, film photography, Fotomat, photo development, mail order catalogs, Sears catalog, packages before tracking, concert ticket lines, appointment television, video rental stores, boredom, pre-internet life, analog childhood, 1980s childhood, Gen X memories, instant gratification, nostalgia podcast 

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