Program Directory

One man secret­ly hands off more and more of his life to an AI voice clone.

Today, we fea­ture vet­er­an jour­nal­ist Evan Ratliff who, for his new pod­cast Shell Game, decid­ed to slow­ly replace him­self bit by bit with an AI voice clone to see how far he could actu­al­ly take it. Could it do the mun­dane phone calls he’d pre­fer to skip? Could it get legal advice for him? Could it go to ther­a­py for him? Could it par­ent his kids? Evan feeds his bot the most inti­mate details about his life, and lets the bot loose in high-stakes sit­u­a­tions at home and at work. Which bizarro ver­sion of him will show up? The des­per­ate­ly-agree­able con­ver­sa­tion­al­ist, the crank-yank­ing prank caller, the glitched out stranger who sounds like he’s in the mid­dle of a men­tal break­down, or some­one else entire­ly? Will peo­ple believe it’s real­ly him? And how will they act if they don’t? A gonzo jour­nal­is­tic exper­i­ment for the age of AI, that’s fun­ny and eerie all at the same time.