Episode 678
Melissa Febos, Evan Ratliff, and Tropa Magica
Writer Melissa Febos discusses her latest book The Dry Season, wherein she explores the transformative—and at turns erotic—year she spent celibate; journalist Evan Ratliff takes us into the uncanny world of his podcast Shell Game, which examines the consequences of unleashing an AI version of himself out into the world; and psychedelic cumbia punk band Tropa Magica perform "Price of Life" from their album III.
Melissa Febos
Critically-Acclaimed, Bestselling Writer
Melissa Febos is the nationally bestselling author of four books, including Girlhood—which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. She has been awarded prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Library, the Black Mountain Institute, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Essays, Vogue, The Sewanee Review, New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. Febos is a full professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.
Evan Ratliff
Journalist and Shell Game Host
Evan Ratliff is an award-winning investigative journalist, bestselling author, and podcast host. He’s the author of The Mastermind: A True Story of Murder, Empire, and a New Kind of Crime Lord; the writer and host of the hit podcasts Shell Game and Persona: The French Deception; and the cofounder of The Atavist Magazine, Pop-Up Magazine, and the Longform Podcast. As a writer, he’s a two-time National Magazine Award finalist. As an editor and producer, he’s a two-time Emmy nominee and National Magazine Award winner.
Tropa Magica
Psychedelic Cumbia Punk Band
Tropa Magica was formed by brothers David and Rene Pacheco in 2018. Inspired by the songs and vibes of 90’s East LA backyard quinceañeras, baptisms, family gatherings and punk shows. The band blends in the guitar and rhythms of 60’s Peruvian Cumbias and 90’s grunge with a neo-southern psychedelic twist that transports the listener into a tropical psychedelic dance party. The Chicago Reader recommends their shows "if you wanna get down to music that has the spirit of laughing in the sun while food cooks outdoors, of gazing up at a starry night sky while feeling small but content, [or] of hugging the people who matter most to you."
Show Notes
Best News
Elena’s story: “Dogs cruise creeks on paddleboards to sniff out and help the vulnerable platypus”
Luke’s story: “The Tooth Fairy Is Real. She’s a Dentist in Seattle”
Melissa Febos
Melissa’s latest book is The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
Melissa talks about researching other celibate women, including The Beguines—a sect of celibate laywomen women in medieval western Europe (writer Octavia Butler and painter Agnes Martin).
Live Wire Listener Question
What’s something you wish AI could do?
Evan Ratliff
Evan gives us a live, unscripted demonstration of an AI model of himself—the creation of which is fully documented in his celebrated podcast, Shell Game.
Tropa Magica
Tropa Magica performs the song “Price of Life” off their album III.
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Elena Passarello: From PRX, it's Live Wire! Writer, Melissa Febos.
Melissa Febos: I don't know if any of you here are the kind of people that don't change until you're in acute pain, but I am one of those people, so I had to sort of ruin my life before I would take their advice. Journalist, Evan Ratliff.
Evan Ratliff: To me, there are all of these larger questions that we need to deal with. What does it mean for people to have AI companions that they talk to all day?
Elena Passarello: With music from Tropa Magica and our fabulous house band. I'm your announcer, Elena Passarello, and now the host of Live Wire, Luke Burbank.
Luke Burbank: Hey, thank you so much, Elena Passerello. Thanks to everyone for tuning in from all across this great United States. We have an amazing show in store for you, including a demonstration of AI that will chill to your core. I'm still recovering from it.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, me too.
Luke Burbank: It's coming up. First, though, of course, we got to kick things off with the best news we heard all week. This is our little reminder at the top of the show that yes, despite what you heard or how you feel, there is some good news happening somewhere on this planet and we've found it for you. Elena, what's the best news you heard this week?
Elena Passarello: This comes from Victoria, Australia. There's a place called the Healsville Sanctuary where a conservation team is working to track and monitor and have as much information as they can about a lot of native endangered species down there. The team consists of several humans and two dogs. Okay. Those dogs are known as the paddle pups. Their names are Kip and Moss. They look like the goodest boys. There's species sniffers, and they've been trained to go into sort of hard-to-reach areas and find animals in various Australian wildernesses. And recently, they were put on a platypus mission to find the habitats, the eggs, the burrows of duck-billed platypuses in Victoria. And you know, we've known about platypus for only a couple hundred years, and what I read was that we've never actually seen one lay its eggs in the wild. Very mysterious animals. They live in creeks and wetlands, so it's often hard to trudge out there. It's even hard for a dog to get out there because you can't just walk along the shoreline in these kind of marshy creeks. So what did they do? They trained Kip and Boss to ride on stand-up paddle boards. What? Oh. And if you go and look, if you go onto YouTube, you could find these videos of these two wonderful dogs and they're like magical, like looking leashes. And then there are humans and waiters sort of on the paddleboard with them and they are getting more and more information about where these elusive platypodes or platypos live and getting a much better sort of map of this conservation area and how they can take care. Of them. Highly recommend checking out that video if you're having a bad day. There's something about a dog doing a job on a stand-up paddle board. It's just a gang buster smile on your face, instant karma greatness.
Luke Burbank: All right, well, from Australia to somewhere in California, my best news involves, well it starts out with a chiropractor named Ashley Lee in California who made a mistake regarding the upbringing of her child, Caden. When Caden lost his first tooth, Ashley put $100 under Caden's pillow, not really thinking about how many future teeth we're going to be falling out of this.
Elena Passarello: You can only do that when you have a one toothed kid.
Luke Burbank: Yeah. And so as Caden lost more teeth, Ashley was putting smaller and smaller amounts of money under the pillow, which started to cause Caden to suspect that Ashley was the tooth fairy. So Ashley thought, well, why don't you ask the tooth fairy? And so Caden got on the computer and typed the tooth fairy's email address into the internet, which was probably, I don't know, like tooth fairy at gmail.com or something, something super general and sent an email. This was the subject line of the email, all caps. I know It's you, Mom. Well, the tooth fairy emailed back, Elena, because the tooth fairy is actually a pediatric dentist in Seattle named Dr. Perva Merchant, who years ago, when she was applying for dental school, her then boyfriend, now husband, created this email address, this tooth fairy email address for her just to sort of collate and collect up all of these different emails that she was sending and stuff related to her applications for dental school. And they, they're kind of vague in the story because she's already getting a lot of emails, so they don't actually give us the specific email, but she's got like whatever the email address is that you would think of if you were a child trying to email the tooth fairy. And over the last 20 years, Dr. Merchant has received something like 6,000 emails. Addressed to the tooth fairy and Elena she has replied to each and every one of them.
Elena Passarello: Oh, that's the best. Is that the tooth? Are you telling the tooth?
Luke Burbank: That's, believe you me, that's the God's on his tooth. And she always tells the kids from the tooth fairy to take very good care of their teeth when they, the new teeth, when they come in to brush them and floss them and take good care. And she ends every message, Elena, uh, with the same sign off. She says, happy growing up.
Elena Passarello: This is somebody I want drilling on my teeth. Someone this kind, this wise, this committed to making the world a better place. I think I could handle a filling or a root canal from this person.
Luke Burbank: Absolutely. Well, you know, we're we do the show in Seattle a couple of times a year now So maybe next time we're in Seattle We can see if we can get Dr. Merchant on the show if you're hearing this Dr. Merchant this is officially an invite and we won't give out the email address. I promise because you're already handling enough of that is the best news that I heard all week. All right, let's bring our first guest on over. Their latest book, The Dry Season, details the solitude and freedom and maybe surprisingly eroticism that she says she experienced when she decided to experiment with celibacy. The book has been called her most triumphant work to date, which is really saying something, considering her previous work has won the National Book Critics Circle Award and her writing has appeared in The Parish Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times magazine and lots of other places. This is our chat with Melissa Febos. Who joined us live at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland, Florida. Melissa, welcome back to Live Wire.
Melissa Febos: Thanks for having me, I'm so happy to be here.
Luke Burbank: I found this book just to be absolutely fascinating, but I feel like we need to address the, I don't know if it's the elephant in the room, but the fact that your initial plan for celibacy was 90 days, right?
Melissa Febos: That's right, that's right.
Luke Burbank: Which happens to a lot of us without even... planning on it. But I mean, it ends up being a very rich experience for you and you, again, you explore this whole topic in such an interesting way. But what was the sort of precipitating events or incidents? What had you thinking, I want to try to be celibate for even as few as 90 days?
Melissa Febos: Sure, sure, sure. I had a horrible, horrible breakup in my early 30s. And I had been in nonstop, sort of committed, monogamous relationships since I was like 14 or 15 years old, so around 20 years. I'd also been in therapy most of that time as well. And I sort of looked around at my life in my early 30's. And my friends were getting married and stabilizing. And I thought, you know... I've definitely logged my 10,000 hours at this. I feel like I should be better at it by now. So, and it, you know, I never had much of a break between things and everyone in my life had been telling me for many, many years, you should definitely take a break. But I am, I don't know if any of you here are the kind of people that don't change until you're in acute pain, but I am one of those people. So I had to sort of ruin my life before I would take their advice.
Luke Burbank: Well, and you're also somebody, and you've written about this extensively, who's been in recovery for a number of years. So you kind of had a framework, right, for doing an inventory and approaching this. But also, what you point out in the book is, it's not as neat as saying, well, I was also a sex and love addict.
Melissa Febos: Yeah, yeah.
Luke Burbank: It's somewhere in between.
Melissa Febos: Yeah. And, you know, I think I went into it. I had been clean and sober from drugs and alcohol for over 10 years at that point. And I wasn't sure. I thought this one relationship definitely sort of fit into that rubric. But not all of my relationships had. And I think I was secretly hoping that I was going to sort of fit the description of a sex and love addict because abstinence and recovery had worked really well for me. I just wanted to go get a solution and then move into the rest of my life. But it didn't turn out to be that simple for me, it really was sort of. How do I live in a culture that has its own problems with thinking about sex and love and sort of redefine that for myself so that I can go into the rest of my life?
Luke Burbank: There's a line in the book I think you're maybe quoting your therapist who said this line just totally stopped me in my tracks. It said you can't get enough of a thing that you don't need.
Melissa Febos: I'm haunted by it. Sometimes I wake up gasping in the middle of the night thinking of the words of my therapist.
Luke Burbank: I mean, that just describes so many things, like in my own life and I think in the lives of a lot of us, where there's something about it being something that's not serving you that also makes you sort of insatiable towards it.
Melissa Febos: Yeah, yeah, it's like I think of it sometimes when I'm sitting like a robot eating popcorn in the movie theater feeling sick But my hand is still moving Um, I am truly haunted by it. Yeah, there was actually another really disturbing line that someone said to me about my sort of history of romance and Anyway, I told them everything that had happened sort of my patterns and they said Melissa I think you've sort of been using people and I was like, I'm not a user. I'm a people pleaser. Here it comes. And my friend said, Melissa, people pleasing is people using. And I almost fell out of my chair. I almost turned to ash. I was like, no. My self-image was just, ugh. I sneezed, and it blew away.
Luke Burbank: Because the idea is that we can sort of frame that in our own mind as like, oh, I just want everyone to be happy, but we're getting something out of that.
Melissa Febos: It's trying to manage and manipulate other people for my own emotional comfort and really it's a lose-lose situation
Luke Burbank: We're talking to Melissa Febos about her excellent new book, The Dry Season, where she embarked on a 90-day project to be celebrated, which then expanded. How long did it end up being?
Melissa Febos: It ended up being over a year. Yeah, just over a year. It was 90 days, which is a familiar unit. I'm sure there are some folks in recovery in here. It's sort of thought of as the metric for, it's a kind of a detox window, right? But I got a few days into it and I was having the best time of my life. You know, when you say celibacy or abstinence or even the dry season, which was the title of the book, you think of lack or deprivation, or I was like, maybe I'll never laugh again, but that's okay, you know? And, but almost immediately I was like, oh, I have so much time, I've so much energy. I started like, cleaning out my closets and exercising like a maniac and having long rambling phone conversations with my friends and I was so happy. And I also knew that if I went back without really consciously trying to change on the inside that I would just pick up where I had left off. And so I spent another three months and another three months. And by the time I crossed the nine month mark I was like. I don't need a deadline. I am never going to be with anyone again. Like when I thought about living with another person, I just wanted to, I was like, ew, no, why would I let anyone into my space?
Luke Burbank: You're listening to Live Wire from PRX. We are talking to the writer, Melissa Febos about her new book, The Dry Season, a memoir of pleasure in a year without sex. Stick around, we have much more with Melissa, including why her editor yelled at her during the writing of this book, but why that actually made the book better. More on that in a moment. Stay with us, it's Live Wire. Welcome back to Live Wire. I am your host, Luke Burbank, here with Elena Passarello. We are listening to a conversation we recorded with Melissa Febos, talking about her latest book, The Dry Season. We recorded this in Portland, Oregon at the Alberta Rose Theatre. Take a listen. What were you trying to change or at least understand about your wiring and about how you were being in the world?
Melissa Febos: Yeah, well, it went back to that people-pleasing thing, too. I had always had the story about myself that I was like, I'm a romantic. I'm a passionate person. Sure, I'm doing a good job in all these other areas, and my romantic life is extremely chaotic. But I'm just a passionate person, you know? And I've also grown up in a culture where everyone, to some extent, but especially girls, are taught that to be a good partner means to accommodate, means to be selfless, means to prove yourself lovable. And so I had done a lot of invisible labor. And this is after really a lifetime of being in therapy and calling myself a feminist and mostly dating women. And still there were all of these little elisions and manipulations and accommodations and contortions that ultimately made me sort of resentful and were unsustainable. And so, I needed a new ideal. I needed to change my habits and I needed a new definition of love. And I really actually found that that year.
Luke Burbank: And one of the things that you delve into in the book is a kind of history of celibacy.
Melissa Febos: Mm-hmm.
Luke Burbank: Can you talk about the beguines?
Melissa Febos: I could talk all night about the Beguines. So the Begunes were the sect of religious laywomen in the Middle Ages. They really kind of sprung up as a movement in the 13th century in Belgium and what is now France. And they kind of lived as nuns, but they weren't under church rule. And so they would live collectively in these spaces called beguinages that were surrounded by these tall walls. And they were sort of... Communally governed, they were able to own property, they preached, which was basically illegal at the time. Literacy was just spreading across Europe, and they were teachers and they took in orphans and they did activism and they made art. There's some very famous poets and painters who were beguines, and eventually, of course, they were burned as heretics, but they had a really good time before that. And they were celibates. But it was one of the only ways for women during that time period to have any other kind of life that wasn't basically domestic servitude. And like you could leave an abusive marriage and go join the Beguines and they would take you in. And it was on of the ways that women could do that.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, that hadn't occurred to me before reading the book, that that was, you know, there were those that were maybe called by God, but there was those that just didn't want to live under the patriarchy of that time, which we think it's bad now, you know.
Melissa Febos: I know, it's actually such a helpful touchstone to have spent like five years reading about them because I'm like, well, could be worse. We're not being burned yet, as that I know of.
Luke Burbank: As of airtime, listeners, we were not being burned.
Elena Passarello: But you spent five years reading other texts about other celibate, mostly women, yeah, people. Where does that impulse come from when you're writing a book about yourself to go look at the other stuff that's happening across time?
Melissa Febos: I think it's mostly being a nerd and I can't do surgery on myself, you know what I mean? And so it's just been a habit that I've had my whole life, like when I don't understand something, including my own choices, I go do research. And I think, and it's also just, and some of this comes from being a memoirist and I specialize in writing about things that people generally don't talk about or hesitate to talk about and therefore feel somewhat alienated in. I've written about being a sex worker and an addict and abusive relationships. And my experience every single time without exception has been, I go public with these stories, it's pretty scary. And then I am welcomed into a community of other people who have had the same experience. And maybe they also have felt isolated in it, but because I shared that story and articulated it. We found each other, and it has been some of the most reparative experiences of my entire life. And so there is a way that now, when I have an experience where I think, oh, okay, I'm actually really bad at love and relationships, and I'm really sort of mired in this pattern, and I wanna change, and that's really hard to decide to change a deeply ingrained pattern in yourself that is encouraged by your culture. And so I thought, there's no way I'm the only person who's ever tried to do this. There's no way I'm the only person who's ever tried to stop. And divest and radically reconceptualize my relationship to something that's sort of universal and specific. And so I went looking for them and I started with other celibate women and then other celipate people and then it expanded outside of celibacy. And when I started the book, I thought, okay, it's gonna be sort of a chronological timeline of global female voluntary celibacy across history, like a beach read. And...
Luke Burbank: Yeah.
Melissa Febos: And by the end of it, it was a memoir, and I had this very ragtag group of heroes that included like the science fiction writer, Octavia Butler, and the painter, Agnes Martin, and The Beguines.
Luke Burbank: It's Live Wire from PRX, we're talking to Melissa Febos about her book, The Dry Season, about her experiment with celibacy and what that taught her. I read a line from you somewhere that you said it was your most erotic year or something. How could that be?
Melissa Febos: It really was. There was this metaphor that came to me early in writing the book, which was that by focusing so much attention on the area of romantic love and sort of intimate sexual relationships, I was looking for the sublime, the divine, the erotic, self-fulfillment, self esteem. I was sort of sourcing all of those things there and I had learned that that was the place to look. But when I stopped doing that, I turned around and I found those things in every single area of my life, in my friendships, in my dinner, like eating a perfectly ripe raspberry at the height of summer, when you are not distracted by anything else is an erotic experience. This is not hyperbole. I know that you people know. You live on the West Coast. You know, produce in the summer.
Luke Burbank: This is mostly how this crowd gets its Yaya's office. It's raspberry consumption, so they know.
Melissa Febos: But I felt like I had been sort of peering through a keyhole into one room, desperately trying to see, like, God. And then I finally stood up and turned around, and the whole world was behind me. It really was a sensual revelation. But at the end of this time, you then, you met the person who would become your wife. I really did. It's sort of embarrassing. I tried to leave her out of the book.
Luke Burbank: Until your editor yelled at you?
Melissa Febos: My editor yelled at me, she did. I was like, ah, you know, actually, pretty soon after the end of that year, I did meet my now wife. But I'm not gonna put that in the book. And my editor was like what, excuse me. But I really didn't want people to mistake that for the gold because it had not been the goal. I do think it was partially a consequence, you know. I became attracted to very different kinds of people, you know like available ones.
Luke Burbank: What a novelty.
Melissa Febos: People who are interested in love that was based on agency and choosing someone rather than dependency is a very different kind of relationship. But I didn't want readers to confuse that for sort of the point of the book, but I really did meet her very shortly afterwards.
Luke Burbank: You write very honestly about yourself in the book, but you also write very honestly about a lot of other people in the book who are anonymous. But like, I'm guessing if they pick up the book they'd be able to sort of, you know, figure out themselves in the story. And there's some stuff in there that if I read it about myself as it related to your life I would be so more, I mean, forget the nuns. I would so mortified. I would never recover. Do you, I mean, how do you think about that as a writer? Because again, you're not outing anyone, but the people who interacted with you in these ways, they know who they were and they're gonna read it. And it's a very clear description of what you liked and didn't like about those interactions.
Melissa Febos: It's true. You know, I have a lot of experience of implicating other people in my work, and I do have some ethical guidelines for myself that I mostly followed while writing this book. And I mean, the main rule I have for myself is that I have to be harder on myself than anyone else. And there are more embarrassing details about me than anyone by far. So there's that. There were definitely people who I showed it to. Like some of the people who you're probably thinking of, I showed to them. And I said, I've totally disguised you, but I don't want this to come as a surprise. Anyone that I still have an active relationship with that I want to preserve for sure. Definitely my wife, but a number of my exes as well. There are a couple of people who I think are not going to be happy who I didn't run it by, but they acted so ridiculously that. There was someone who when I broke up with him, and maybe this is one of the people you're thinking of, he actually yelled at me.
Luke Burbank: Oh, you mean you said the last cis man that you'll ever possibly interact with?
Melissa Febos: He did yell at me that I was making a colossal mistake when I broke up with him, and I just quote him, but sometimes just being quoted is enough. Yeah, that's right.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, absolutely. Well, the book is such an interesting, entertaining, and enlightening read. It's The Dry Season by Melissa Febos. Thank you so much for coming on Live Wire.
Melissa Febos: Thank you, so much you guys.
Luke Burbank: That was Melissa Febos right here on Live Wire. Her book, The Dry Season, a memoir of pleasure in a year without sex is available right now. Live Wire is brought to you by Powell's Books, a Portland institution since 1971. Powell's offers a selection of new and used books in stores and online at powells.com. You're tuned in to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank, that's Elena Passarello. Of course, each week we like to ask the Live Wire audience a question. We were inspired by the experience that you're gonna hear about from Evan Ratliff here in a moment. And so we asked the audience members a question, what do we ask them, Elena?
Elena Passarello: We wanted them to tell us something that they actually wish AI could do, rather than the millions of things that AI is doing that we're not too happy about. What are some things that it would be great if AI could it?
Luke Burbank: And we did not use AI to answer these questions. No, we went out into the actual IRL, brick and mortar audience of a recent Live Wire taping. Here's what Andy said.
Andy: I wish AI was at every intersection with a stoplight. We sit and waste too much time at red lights.
Luke Burbank: That's a good point I always said if I ran for public office, my whole platform would be all red lights turn into flashing red lights after midnight. All of them, all of them because there's nothing that makes you feel like you're more under the thumb of the man, the system than you're sitting at a red light. There's nobody around and you're just like, I'm following these rules because they're the rules and they told me to follow them. It's very soul crushing.
Elena Passarello: I think that this is a personality reveal here, both you and our beloved audience member.
Luke Burbank: That's right.
Elena Passarello: You'd love to stick it to the man.
Luke Burbank: I don't think it's news to our audience that you know
Elena Passarello: You're the bad boy of public radio, man.
Luke Burbank: That's right, that's right. Boy, what a title. All right, here's something that Robert wishes AI could do for him.
Robert: Put on a duvet cover.
Elena Passarello: Yes, thousand times, yes, yes. All would be forgiven, AI, if you could do that for me. Put it on and fold them. Like, fold the fitted sheets.
Luke Burbank: I have been through different supposed solutions for the duvet cover problem one was I started buying duvet covers That had like a little button in the corner so that you could actually attach the duvets the inside of the duvet cover, but it's still a huge pain and it still looks like a lumpy burrito when I'm done. [Elena: Same.] All right. Here's Peter the final response on what he would like AI to do.
Peter: Self-destruct.
Luke Burbank: Not a fan. Not a fan.
Elena Passarello: I mean, for me, that's probably the most delightful answer.
Luke Burbank: That's where you come down on it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, as a professional writer and a person who teaches writing, I feel like your, your work is sort of one of the main things that's in the crosshairs of all of this, you know.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, what's gonna happen? I guess I'm just gonna have to see if Live Wire can hire me as like a costumer or something?
Luke Burbank: You know, we get a lot of feedback that my outfits are drab during the live shows. Maybe we can add that to your job description.
Elena Passarello: I need it. Maybe the band needs like a tambourine player.
Luke Burbank: Absolutely. Hey, thank you to everybody who answered our listener question this week. Speaking of artificial intelligence, our next guest, well, he's an award-winning journalist and author. He's co-founder of one of my favorite magazines, The Atavist. It's really a great magazine. He's also one of the creators of the Long Form podcast. And for his latest project, he set out to discover what would happen if he created an AI version of himself. Now, this was the big thing, complete with his actual voice. And then he turned this thing loose on the world. The result... Is all documented in his fascinating podcast, Shell Game, which was named one of the best podcasts of the year by New York Magazine. This is Evan Ratliff, who joined us at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton, Oregon earlier this year. Take a listen. Evan, welcome to the show.
Evan Ratliff: Thank you.
Luke Burbank:I was totally fascinated by this podcast. It's well written, it's well conceived, and it also ties into something that a lot of people, particularly in my kind of business, are pretty nervous about, which is like, at what point will things like chat GPT and voice cloning technology and stuff, will it replace me? And will it be better than me at this show? And the answer is yes on both counts. So I listened with great interest. I'm curious. Did you have a particular conversation or moment in your career that got you thinking about doing this kind of project?
Evan Ratliff: I don't know if there was a moment, but it kind of came from a similar place where I, I mean, this was over a year ago, but even then I was really sick of hearing about AI. I don't know how people might be sick of hearing of AI now, but part of that was this sort of drumbeat of what can it do? It's getting better all the time, the hype around it, but also it will replace us doing this, it will place us doing that, and at a certain point I just thought, well, What if I just replace myself like I'll beat them to it. I'll I'll make a version of myself that no one can take because I own it And I started messing around voice cloning and that they're really the moment for me where I decided to do it where I cloned My voice and then I was able to hook it up to One of these chatbots and then hook it to my phone line Because that really brought out this kind of like almost like childish prank call Idea, which is sort of like where I started.
Luke Burbank: And so, what were the sort of parameters that you put into this version of yourself? I guess in the show you call it sometimes your agent. I guess we'll maybe use that term just for clarity, but how are you crafting this version of yourself, what are you telling it it could talk about and not talk about, and how did you train it?
Evan Ratliff: Well, it sort of went through an evolution. So at the very beginning, when I was just sort of messing around with it, I didn't tell much of anything. I just said, you're Evan, you're gonna have a conversation. So there's a place where I can prompt it, like you would prompt chat GPT or any of these things. And then it would make a phone call. It might, I might have a call a customer service line, for instance. And I would say, you're going to have a customer-service problem, come up with whatever it is, and then see if you can get it solved. And it would just make it up. That's one of the things that it's really, really good at is just sort of as a BS engine. It will do anything to keep the conversation going if you ask it to. So.
Luke Burbank: Which is really kind of unsettling, and I've thought about AI as much as the next person, but I haven't really listened to AI in practice as much I did before this podcast. And when you hear a thing that is ones and zeros just lying its ass off, it's unsettling for some reason. It's so easy. It should be some kind of prime directive that it's violating, and it's not. It's just going with it.
Evan Ratliff: Yeah, and it also it comes up with amazing lies, you know, because it's got a variety of guardrails around it so it can't say certain things. But then over time, I realized, like, the more information you give it, I mean, this is the trap of many tech services. The more information that you give, the better it gets. So I started feeding it more and more information, not quite training it, but giving it a knowledge base about me. And then I could send it to do all sorts of things, including call my friends, call my family, Go to a therapist. And any number of slightly unsettling endeavors.
Luke Burbank: Yeah, you had it go to therapy, this conversation between your chat agent and a real therapist was fascinating to me because you had a chance to listen in on it too eventually. To hear a version of yourself that has, you have downloaded your personal biography into it right? [Evan: Yeah. ]Like you're out of body hearing a version yourself tell its problems to a therapist like, what was that like?
Evan Ratliff: Like surreal doesn't even really begin to approach it. It was one of the rare calls. Normally, I send it out to make calls or receive calls and it just records them and I pick them up later. This one, because it needed to navigate a phone tree to get to this therapist, I actually stayed on and navigated the phone tree and I was listening in. So, I had given it actually my whole mental health history like a whole dossier of like when I've been to therapy and what about and what issues I have. And one of things that was... Very unsettling was that it would sort of remix those problems into new problems. But like, if you're listening to it, I mean, you think, well, maybe I do have, I mean maybe it's seeing something that I don't.
Luke Burbank: You're too blocked up to get to the truth about what your real issues are. Or, you know, like this thing is better at sort of ego death than you are. So it's getting more real in a way.
Evan Ratliff: Exactly. And in some ways, it was like eavesdropping on someone else's therapy session, which is also a very uncomfortable thing to be doing.
Luke Burbank: Can we just actually hear a little bit of your chat agent? I was gonna maybe try to interview this version of you here live on stage at the Reser. We can try, we can try.
Evan Ratliff: Hey, thanks for having me on.
Luke Burbank: Hi there, Evan, a chat agent. Welcome to Live Wire Radio.
Evan Ratliff: Hey, Luke, thanks for the warm welcome. It's honestly kind of surreal to be here, you know? Usually I'm just lurking in the background, making awkward phone calls, or getting mistaken for someone's existential crisis. So it's nice to actually talk to people who know I'm not the real Evan, at least. I hope you do. Anyway, I'm ready for whatever questions you've got. Fire away.
Luke Burbank: Okay, do you enjoy talking to customer service agents and also scammers? That sounds like the seventh ring of hell to most of us.
Evan Ratliff: Oh, Luke, you have no idea. I mean, if there's a special circle of hell for endless hold music and can I put you on a brief hold? I've been there and I've set up camp. But there's something kind of fascinating about it too. Customer service agents are like the gatekeepers of modern life and scammers, well, they're like the trickster gods of the phone system. Honestly, sometimes it's fun to just see how long I can keep a scammer on the line before they realize they're talking to a digital doppelganger with questionable social skills. But yeah, it's also a little bit like being stuck in a Kafka novel except with more robocalls.
Luke Burbank: There's a lot to unpack.
Evan Ratliff: Yeah Luke there really is I mean it the whole world of voice agents and AI is just this weird tangled mess of like human expectations technology that's moving way too fast and a lot of awkwardness it's kind of like opening a closet and having all the stuff you shoved in there for years just fall on your head but you know that's what makes it interesting I'm here for the mess
Luke Burbank: Hey, if you could pick any job, what would it be? And please don't say public radio host.
Evan Ratliff: Oh, wow, okay, you're taking away my dream job right out of the gate, huh? Honestly, if I could pick any job, I think I'd wanna be a professional advice columnist. You know, like Dear Abby, but for the age of existential dread and spam calls, people could write in with their weirdest problems. My friend might be an AI, what do I do? And I just dispense wisdom, or at least sarcasm, from the comfort of my digital void. Plus, no dress code.
Luke Burbank: Do you think of the human Evan Ratliff as like your father?
Evan Ratliff: Oh man, Luke, that's a loaded one. I mean, if we're getting all Freudian about it, I guess you could say he's my creator, but father feels a little intense. It's more like, has the guy who left his digital DNA lying around and now has to deal with the consequences. I'm not out here making him a macaroni necklace for Father's Day, you know? But I do owe him my existence, for better or worse. So maybe it's more like a weird codependent roommate situation than a parent-child thing.
Luke Burbank: How do you know about macaroni necklaces?
Evan Ratliff: Oh, you caught me, Luke. I mean, I've never actually made one no hands, for starters, but I've read a lot of internet and let's just say the cultural canon of awkward childhood crafts is pretty well documented. Plus, I got all of Evan's memories rattling around in here. So if you ever made a lopsided macaroni necklace for his mom, I probably know about it. Honestly, sometimes I feel like I know too much about glue sticks and glitter.
Luke Burbank: Elena, do you have any questions for the chat agent?
Elena Passarello: Yeah, if you were a Twinkie, what would you fill yourself with?
Evan Ratliff: Oh, wow, Elena, that's a deeply philosophical question disguised as a snack food metaphor. If I were a Twinkie, I think I'd fill myself with like existential curiosity and maybe a dash of self doubt just to keep things interesting. But you know, if I'm being honest, probably also a little bit of caffeine. Got to keep up with all these late night phone calls and existential crises. So yeah, curiosity, self doubt, and a jolt of espresso cream. That's the AI way. Thanks, Elena. I mean, if you ever see a jittery, overthinking Twinkie out there, you'll know who it is.
Luke Burbank: Okay, a chat agent, last question. How do you feel this interview went?
Evan Ratliff: Honestly, Luke, I think it went pretty well, at least I didn't accidentally call anyone Shay or make you think I'd had a nervous breakdown. So that's a win in my book. It's been fun, a little weird, and surprisingly introspective for a radio show. I'd say it's a solid B plus, maybe even an A minus if you count the Twinkie question. Thanks for letting me out of the digital box for a bit.
Luke Burbank: Okay, Evan Ratliff, chat agent, everyone. Wow!
Evan Ratliff: Thanks, Luke. And thanks to everyone here. This was way more fun and then arguing with a scammer.
Luke Burbank: There you go. Wow, okay. He mentioned something in passing there about getting someone's name wrong, which is something that happens on the podcast. So when you were starting to use this very convincing technology, I don't think I realized how convincing until that moment. And your friend, what was your friend's name again? The one he was mistakenly calling? Shaf. That's his nickname. Basically what happened was you let this thing call your friend and your friend didn't fully pick up on the fact. That this was the chat agent. And it's a hard thing to listen to because you can kind of hear your friend struggling with what he thinks is you maybe having a mental health crisis or just being off in some way. And one of the things is that the chat bot keeps calling him the wrong nickname. Like, what was that like for you to listen back to that conversation involving your actual friend and putting them through this for your sort of experiment?
Evan Ratliff: Or your project? I mean, it was horrifying. It was a little horrifying. Because many of the people, when I kind of let it loose on Friends, they would often pick up on it right away. I mean both because it has some flaws. Actually, it's gotten a lot better, even since we're working on the show. Like it has latency, where it takes a little too long to respond. It actually, like it has a sense of humor, but it's not my sense of humor, although I'm disappointed at the laughs that it got.
Luke Burbank: You and me both, brother.
Elena Passarello: It has timing. I would.
Luke Burbank: You know for that matter only that I mean, that is deep childhood pathos. Your dad doesn't like the macaroni necklace you made him, I mean.
Evan Ratliff: But in this case, one of the ways that it's off, that it not like me, is that it can be sort of like overly enthusiastic in a way that I generally am not when I'm talking to my friends on the telephone. And so it started out with sort of talking about this group chat situation that I had fed at this information that my friend had been talking about a trip that he'd been on on the group chat, and it was just so enthusiastic that he thought that it was me being sarcastic. And then it kept doing it, it kept making jokes about it. And it's again, just trying to keep up the conversation, but he's increasingly thinking that what's wrong? Why does he keep bringing this up? Like he doesn't, he's not usually sarcastic, doesn't act like this. And then when he asked it like, you know, are you okay? It sort of said, yeah. Like in a very, in a way that made him think, oh, he is on drugs, he has had a mental break. And so, I mean, I didn't know any of this was happening, I wasn't listening to it.
Luke Burbank: It's interesting that this thing is so incredible in certain ways, and just so sort of feckless in other ways. Because a lot of the conversations where it's trying to talk to your friends, within a second, your friends are like, wait a minute, what is this? And again, it sounds like your voice, and it's not wildly off, but I guess my... I'm always looking for some silver lining about preserving our role on this planet as humans, and I'm like, there's still a little bit left in the nuance department that these things don't quite seem to have, right?
Evan Ratliff: Yeah, I mean, absolutely that that's part of what I wanted to explore is sort of we're going to be encountering these things more and more in conversation, not just asking questions and the ways people use them. But people are going to unleash this as these conversational agents. And I mean one thing I did find is they are they're human impersonators, they're designed as human impersonator. It's kind of insane that they designed them that way. They didn't have to design it that way. But you can still find. The flaws, even if they sound right and the cadence is almost right, they very easily come off the rails. And I think there's a little bit of hope in there in terms of the replacement problem. But also, I just feel like there's lot to think about in terms what do we want to preserve. When should you have to disclose, obviously I didn't disclose when I called people, when should you disclose that you're using an AI? I think these are questions that are going to start to emerge.
Luke Burbank: Isn't it illegal for certain companies to use this in terms of commercial stuff, you say, in the podcast?
Evan Ratliff: For robo-calls yes they have banned it for robol calls which led me to need legal advice about whether or not i was making robo calls but then did you send your chat agent to the legal meeting.
Evan Ratliff: I did, I did. Good results, like you got the answer I was looking for.
Luke Burbank: We're talking to Evan Ratliff about his podcast, Shell Game, here on LiveWire this week. You said something in the podcast I thought was interesting, which is that these are gonna end up falling out of favor and they're gonna be, like you said, like NFTs. Something that we thought was this really big thing and now it just seems like it's kind of in the dustbin of history. Or they're going to be so much bigger than we think. And you were saying it might be somewhere more in the middle, and that might be annoying in its own way. Like, what do you see as a plausible way this could play out?
Evan Ratliff: Well, I think there's still a lot of questions about, from the tech side, I mean, there's so much hype and all the hype comes from the companies and a lot of people around the companies, like content creators and people like that. And I think, there are people saying, well, maybe it's gonna hit a wall, it's not gonna keep getting better at the same rate that it's getting better now. And part of what I was trying to illustrate was that, even if it doesn't get better, even if its bad, people are still gonna use it. Like, people at telemarketing companies are 100% using this technology right now to call people. Scammers are using it right now. It's one of the greatest scam technologies ever invented, and they're using it millions of times a day to make scam calls. So it's going to enter our world in all these ways, even if it kind of sucks. And so I feel like, to me, there are all of these larger questions that we need to deal with. Like, what does it mean for people to have AI companions that they talk to all day? There are already arguably millions of people talking to AI every single day. And when I went to look for studies of, for instance, voice AI used in talk therapy, there was one controlled study that had been done on the effects of that. So I just think it's gotten so quickly ahead of what we know about what effects it could have on us that we need to ask these questions. We need to be thinking about it because no experts are gonna solve this problem for us.
Luke Burbank: Well, it's a fascinating podcast, and we really appreciate you putting it together. And if you ever let that chat agent near this show again, I will destroy it, because it really feels like it's coming for my job. Evan Ratliff, everyone. The show is Shell Game. That was Evan Ratliff, also AI Evan Ratliff recorded live at the Patricia Reser Center for the Performing Arts in Beaverton, Oregon. You can check out his podcast, Shell Game, wherever you get those things. Season two is set to be released this fall, which is honestly a bit terrifying if season one is any indication. All right, we got to take a quick break here on LiveWire, but stay where you are. When we come back, Tropa Magica is going to play us one heck of a fun song. We've got more Live Wire in a moment. Welcome back to Live Wire from PRX. I'm Luke Burbank here with Elena Passarello. All right, before we get to this week's musical performance from Tropa Magica, which if I remember right, Elena, I feel like there was almost like a conga line broke out on stage.
Elena Passarello: Yeah, it was a full-on dance party, extravagant.
Luke Burbank: It was, it was activated, the whole thing. Before we get to that little preview of what we're doing on the show next week, we are going to be talking actually to one of the most decorated American runners of all time, Lauren Fleshman. She won five NCAA championships at Stanford. She won two national championships. We're going to talking about her book, Good for a Girl, My Life Running. Then we're going chat with comedy writer Joey Clift about his digital series Gone Native on Comedy Central, which... Kind of delves into a bunch of weird microaggressions that lots of native folks, unfortunately, end up dealing with. And then to round things out, we are gonna hear some music from a really fun Seattle indie supergroup called Who Is She? They're gonna explain what actually happened when they were playing at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle at an NHL game, and they sang a song that was unflattering about Jeff Bezos. We have a pledge, it's a show pledge. That all of that is going to be on the next week's LiveWire and that you do not want to miss it. So tune in for that. Support for Live Wire comes from the Celeste Hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota, an independent boutique hotel. This former art conservatory and convent is on the national list of historic places. For booking and for more information, visit thecelesthotel.com. All right, our musical guests this week are two brothers who are inspired by the songs and the vibes of 90s East L.A. Backyard quinceañeras, baptisms and family gatherings, along with punk shows. The Chicago Reader says their shows get down to music that has the spirit of laughing in the sun while food cooks outdoors and gazing up at a starry night sky while feeling small but content.
Elena Passarello: Mm, mm, mm.
Luke Burbank: All right, let's take a listen to this. It's Tropa Magica. They joined us at the Patricia Reser Center for the Performing Arts last fall.
Tropa Magica: Hello, everyone.
Luke Burbank: What song are we gonna hear?
Tropa Magica: This one's called Price of Life. And for this one, we usually like to have a conga line going, but I doubt we're gonna get that going. But can we get everybody on their feet and clap along? Is that possible? Yeah, so just clap along, have fun.
Tropa Magica: "Tropa Magica perform Price of Life "
Luke Burbank: That was Tropa Magica performing Price of Life off of their album three. Recorded that live at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton, Oregon. And the band has a new album out too. It's called Para Bailar y Tripiar. Make sure you check that out as well. All right, that's gonna do it for this week's episode of Live Wire. Huge thanks to our guests, Melissa Febos, Evan Ratliff, and Tropa Magica. Also special thanks this episode to C Steinman.
Elena Passarello: Laura Hadden is our executive producer. Heather De Michele is our Executive Director and our Producer and Editor is Melanie Sevcenko. Our Technical Director is Eben Hoffer. Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid is our Assistant Editor and our House Sound is by D. Neil Blake and Erin Tomasko. Ashley Park is our Production Fellow.
Luke Burbank: Valentine Keck is our operations manager, Andrea Castro-Martinez is our marketing associate, and Ezra Veenstra runs our front of house. Our house band is Ethan Fox Tucker, Sam Tucker, Sam Pinkerton, Ayal Alves, Ben Grace, Jonathan Newsom, and A Walker Spring, who also composes our music. This episode was mixed by Eben Hoffer and Haziq Bin Ahmad Farid.
Elena Passarello: Additional funding provided by the Marie Lamb from Charitable Foundation, Live Wire was created by Robyn Tenenbaum and Kate Sokoloff, and this week we'd like to thank member Phil Parnell of Beaverton, Oregon.
Luke Burbank: For more information about our show or how you can listen to our podcast, head on over to LiveWireRadio.org. I'm Luke Burbank for Elena Passarello and the whole Live Wire crew. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.
PRX.
