Man Lost in Wilderness Refuses to Answer Unknown Caller

BUCK: Clay, there’s kind of a funny story. I don’t know if you have recently, I’ve gotten a few, like, random robotexts, you know, I’ve started to get robotexts. And I hate that. I’m not an authoritarian at all, but when I hear about people that are spam emailers or spam phone callers and they’re making los money by harassing people, I’m like, lock ’em up, you know, lock ’em up for a long time.

So, I do have a real appreciation for that and how annoying it is. Turns out there was a hiker lost on a mountain in Colorado. And there weren’t really a lot of identifying details. The New York Post had this story. And the hiker was lost for 24 hours, which doesn’t sound that long, but think about that, right? Like, that’s a long time be wandering on a mountain by yourself. Obviously, the police were trying to figure out what’s going on here. People knew the person was missing.

And the guy wouldn’t answer his phone because he kept getting calls. It’s kind of remarkable, why couldn’t we figure this out a little better. Emergency services kept calling his phone, but he wouldn’t answer because it was an unknown caller. Now, as much as that feels like now a ridiculous thing in retrospect, I hate those unknown callers, too; so I kind of get it.

CLAY: I don’t remember the last time I answered my phone and it was somebody who didn’t know calling me, right? So I respect the antipathy that this guy clearly has for anybody who is a spam caller, that even while lost in the wilderness, he was like, I don’t want to pick up that call. You know, that’s probably a spam caller.

He also might have been thinking he was worried about maybe his battery juice on his phone and you answer a phone call and everything else. But the positive story is here they found him, he’s okay. But that is a sign of how much people hate spam calls, that even a guy lost in the wilderness didn’t want to answer a call from somebody he didn’t know.

BUCK: I get where he’s coming from on that one. You know? I actually was tweeting at — under the Trump administration for a while at the FCC commissioner being like, “Hey, man you got get these robocalls.” Because for a while it was such a plague. And he responded, I remember. He was like, “Yeah, I’m on it, man. I agree. It’s horrible.”

So I’ve been trying to fight this war. I want to get rid of robocalls, Clay, and I want to get rid of themoving backwards noise from trucks. If I can achieve these two things, I will have done a lot for humanity.

CLAY: I would say this too. Are you anti-voice mail? Like, I hate getting voice mail, right? Like just text me. Like, give me two sentences. Because inevitably, like, I don’t have a good enough signal or I’m not able to actually play it. I’m big on text messages. But if you leave me a voice mail, it’s like, I don’t want all these instructions from you. Like just be like, “Hey, you know, hit me back up,” or whatever. These long form voice mails inevitably end up like scandalous, like, you don’t know what’s going on.

BUCK: Think about the old school, ’cause you and I both had old school answering machines I’m sure back in the day. Remember that? Where we’d like have the little tapes, and it would go, and it’d be like, “beep,” it’s be you know whole thing.

We had this whole routine where you’d say, “Hi, this is John, and I’m calling, it’s about 6 o’clock on a Friday,” even though you weren’t sure if the person had, you know, their time set off. I just wanted to give you my number, you do all this stuff. Well, when you text somebody, assuming you’re in the contact list — they know who it is, they know what time you’re texting, they know everything — they know how to get back in touch with you. So you skip all that stuff on the voice mail. So what are you really giving somebody a voice mail?

I mean, unless you’re gonna sing happy birthday or something for somebody on their voice mail, which, you know, is a bold move but some people might. Doesn’t really seem like there is a lot of usage for it. So these are the ways that technology, I think, is evolving.

I will say also, though, a long time ago I think everyone believed that if we had video phones, that would be the thing that everyone used all the time. I don’t know. I kind of want to sit there in an old sweatshirt and not actually have to look into a camera. So that did not become as useful or as common in use, I should say, as everybody would have thought 20 years ago.

CLAY: I will say the best thing about this is the video phone, is kids. When you’re on the road, to be able to see your kids, that’s pretty fantastic.