870: My Other Self
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A quick warning. There are curse words that are unbearped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. I had a weird experience this week. I was asked to be a guest on the podcast, Pablo Torre finds out. I'm a fan in this podcast. I like Pablo. I had drinks together a couple months ago. We did a story of his on our show a few weeks back. I respect his work. And so we sat down on the studio and he explained why we were there. It went back to the night we got a drink together. The question of when did you know you wanted to get Ira into this studio and talk to him? It was when I asked you about the last time you watched television. Yeah. And at that time, I'm not sure if I had watched it in months. A big chunk of the interview was just about stuff I had never seen on TV and what TV shows I had seen going back decades. And what was interesting to Pablo was that most of it did not match. What do you imagine that'd be watching? Like, I totally might have seen all of the Gilmore girls, all of the OC. At one point I talked about how I like the comedian, Bert Kreischer, who if you don't know him is a very funny, broy sort of comedian. Why do you? Okay. So just as a general stereotype. Yeah. You liking the dude who is mostly in my view known for being shirtless and like chugging beer. That's not why people love Bert Kreischer. He's funny and he tells stories. There are other examples from sports. We talked about how I'm barely on social media. I've never really watched cable news. All of it seemed to blow Pablo's mind. I've just like mapped like the approval matrix of Ira Glass has Michael Jordan on it. It has Bert Kreischer on it. It has his own cousin Philip Glass kind of. I don't know. I love Philip. You had seemingly an obligatory reference to the OC. Is it an obligatory? That was a show that I watched. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Who's your favorite character on the OC? Okay. This is me live again here with you. Listen to his skepticism. Let me know and get all investigative reporter with me. Who's your favorite character on the OC? Okay. For the record, Seth Cohen, of course. For the record, if you want to get into it, I have personally celebrated Christmica, hardly invented on the OC. So okay. Pablo's idea of who I am from hearing me on the radio does not really match who I turn out to be. In all these ways, he told me later he'd expected I would be watching highbrow stuff. The West Wing, curb your enthusiasm, MSNBC, Fox. At some point, I realized like, oh, to him, it's like I'm a fictional character. Even though we'd hung out a little, we worked together on the story he put on a show, which it didn't bother me, but it kind of surprised me that Pablo was surprised. He's on TV all the time. Morning Joe, ESPN. Like, of course, I'm not the same in real life as you might think if you only heard me on the radio. That's normal. When we all go to our jobs, there's personal stuff about ourselves that nobody needs to know on the radio. I'm going to edit it down better and more interesting version of myself. But I bet that's true of you at your job. We all have some version of ourselves that we project into the world. That is what we call adulthood. Today in our show, we have stories of people who sent very edited, very alternate versions of themselves out into the world. One of our stories, a guy sends out an AI simulation of himself when they can talk to see what will happen. In another, a man misrepresents who he is to his own children and things unfold from there. From WB Easy Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm in our glass. Stay with us. It's This American Life at one me and my shadow. So reporter Evan Ratliff had a recent experience creating another version of himself and then setting it loose into the world. Here he is. Starting with just my voice. I wondered how much a cloned version of my voice would sound like my real one. You've probably heard of or maybe even played around with this technology where you can use AI software to make a synthetic copy of your voice. You just upload a recording of yourself and a few minutes later, you've got a voice that sounds like yours and can say aloud whatever text you give it. I'm Evan Ratliff and I'm a journalist who's been covering technology and particularly the darker places where humans and technology intersect
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