The Lip Phone, AI, and Why Good Conversations Still Matter

The epitome of 1980s cool…the red lips phone.

Confession: When I was a kid, I desperately wanted one of those ridiculous lip-shaped telephones.

If you’re an “elder millennial” (ouch) like me, you probably remember them. Bright red, oversized, with a cord that looked like it had been stretched halfway across the house. I just knew that, like DJ Tanner on Full House, if I had that phone I too would embrace teen life, spending hours talking to my friends, twirling the cord around my finger and dragging it just far enough down the hallway that my parents couldn’t hear every word.

I never got one.

It’s funny the things we remember, isn’t it?

That phone popped back into my mind recently—not because I’ve suddenly decided to decorate my office with 1980s memorabilia (although…never say never), but because it made me think about how dramatically communication has changed over the course of my lifetime.

Back then, talking to someone required a little intention. If you called the house, everyone knew you were calling the house. Someone else’s parent might answer. Your sibling might already be using the phone. If you wanted privacy, your biggest advantage was finding a room where the cord would reach.

Today, I can send a text, jump on a Zoom call, leave a voice memo, collaborate in a shared document, or ask AI to summarize an hour-long meeting. Heck, I could probably do most of that from my family’s little aluminum fishing boat in the middle of a lake. But just because I can doesn’t mean I should—especially if the fish are biting. They certainly aren’t going to reel themselves in.

We’ve gained an incredible amount of convenience over the last few decades. I’m just not convinced we’ve always gained the same amount of connection, and that’s something I’ve found myself thinking about a lot lately.

Like just about everyone else, I’ve spent the past year experimenting with AI. Some of it has been purely out of curiosity. Some of it has become part of my everyday work. I’ve used it to compare websites, organize research, summarize meetings, brainstorm ideas when I’m stuck, and even help me find patterns across conversations that I might not have noticed otherwise.

Some of those experiments have been genuinely impressive. Others have simply reminded me how much context, experience, and judgment still matter.

One experience, in particular, has stayed with me.

A few months ago, I was in a strategy meeting with a client while AI quietly recorded notes in the background. Normally, I’d be splitting my attention between the conversation and my notebook, trying to capture every important detail while still staying engaged. This time was different. I noticed myself relaxing into the conversation because I wasn’t worried about documenting every answer. I asked better follow-up questions. I picked up on hesitation in places where I might have missed it before. Instead of thinking about what I needed to write down next, I was thinking about what my client was actually trying to tell me—even if they didn’t quite have the words yet.

When the meeting ended, I still had the notes.

What I gained was the conversation.

That experience challenged the way I’d been thinking about AI. So much of the public conversation is centered around what it can create. Can it write? Can it design? Can it build? Can it automate?

The answer, increasingly, is yes.

But after spending the better part of the last year experimenting with these tools—and after spending the better part of this week rewriting this very article with AI’s help—I don’t think those are the questions I’m most interested in anymore.

I’m more interested in what AI gives us back.

For me, it’s been time. It’s been mental bandwidth. It’s been the freedom to stop worrying about capturing every detail so I can actually pay attention to the person sitting across from me. Instead of dividing my attention between listening and documenting, I get to stay curious a little longer. I ask another question. I notice something that wasn’t said out loud. Sometimes that’s where the real work begins.

Working on this article became an unexpected lesson in itself. AI helped me organize ideas, explore different angles, and push through the blank page—that intimidating place where so many good ideas quietly die. But somewhere along the way, I realized I kept editing for something AI couldn’t quite understand. Not facts. Not grammar. Something harder to define.

Voice.

Rhythm.

Perspective.

The subtle difference between an article that simply communicates information and one that actually sounds like me.

That isn’t a criticism of AI. In fact, I think it’s one of its greatest strengths. It can help us get from zero to sixty remarkably fast. It can organize, summarize, brainstorm, and accelerate. But getting from sixty to one hundred still requires discernment. It requires deciding which ideas deserve to stay, which ones should be cut, and whether the final piece reflects what you actually believe instead of what sounds convincing.

That’s the part I worry we don’t talk about enough.

As AI becomes more capable, I wonder if businesses will start feeling pressure to produce more simply because they can. More blogs. More videos. More emails. More social posts. More everything.

But I’ve never believed that more was the goal.

The internet certainly doesn’t need more content.

It needs more thoughtful content.

It needs ideas that are rooted in experience instead of trends, in curiosity instead of urgency, and in genuine expertise rather than whatever happened to be generated in the last thirty seconds. AI can absolutely help us get there, but I don’t think it should be deciding where “there” is.

So yes, I’ll keep using AI. I’ll use it to organize research, summarize meetings, compare documents, and occasionally help me stare down a blank page. I’ll also keep questioning it. I’ll keep editing. I’ll keep deleting paragraphs that don’t sound like me. And I’ll keep asking whether something serves the reader before I ask whether it serves the algorithm.

Because in the end, I don’t think my value—or yours—comes from how quickly we can produce something.

I think it comes from knowing when it’s ready.

And at least for now, I don’t think AI knows that yet.

One last confession…

The image at the top of this article was created with AI. Ironically, the phone I wanted so badly as a kid only exists today because of a technology that didn’t exist back then. It felt like the perfect illustration for this piece. AI created the picture, but the memory, the meaning, and the story behind it are entirely human.