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Episode 448: Evan Ratliff Returns … Or Did He?
448 Plays3 days ago
Evan Ratliff's work often overlaps with the tech industry whether he's disappearing himself as he did for Wired Magazine, or exploring the murky world of AI voice agents as he did with his blockbuster, smashing, DIY podcast Shell Game.
Sponsor: The Power of Narrative Conference. Use CNF15 at checkout for a 15% discount.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction and New Projects
00:00:00
Speaker
I gotta to say I'm very excited right now I got this little preamp booster thingamajig and it means I don't have to crank my gain up as much as this microphone apparently needs a bit more power hey the front runner the Life of Steve Prefontaine is available for pre-order I've gotten some nice notes from people who beat the shit out of that link and just like I mean they hammered it You can visit the booksell of your choice, Powell's Bookshop.org, HarperCollins, Barnes and Noble, and Plunkdown, 32.99, and maybe even 65.98, I don't know, 98.97. I'm just doing the math off the top of my head. Everything helps. Every author you know under the sun begs for pre-orders.
00:00:42
Speaker
And you only have so many dollars at your disposal? My gosh. Inflation, am I right? So I'll just say, consider it. Promotional support for the podcast is brought to you by the Power of Narrative Conference, celebrating its 26th year. How has it been that long?
00:00:59
Speaker
That means they're going to be off their parents' health insurance. Last weekend of March, the 28th and 29th, three to 400 journalists from around the world are coming. Keynote speakers include Susan Orlean, Connie Schultz, Dan Zach, and Connie Chung. No bigs. Listeners to this podcast can get 15% off your enrollment fee. If you just use CNNF 15,
00:01:26
Speaker
At checkout. To learn more, go to combeyond.bu.edu and use that CNF 15 code. But I mean, it's it goes all day. It's going right now. Let me see. It's probably got a call today. It gets like five five to 10 a day, some of which last as long as 20 minutes. So yeah, I got a couple couple today.
00:01:55
Speaker
Oh hey, seeing everything. You know what? I didn't do the theme song thing this week with the with the clips, with the fresh clips. I ran out of time and they're a bit of a bear to produce, so you get ah a teaser quote this
Guest Introduction: Evan Ratliff
00:02:09
Speaker
week. You're just gonna have to deal. This is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell.
00:02:17
Speaker
I'm your unreliable narrator, Brendan O'Meara. Today, we welcome Evan Ratliff back to the program to talk about his incredible, in incredible, incredible, as you can tell my script scrolled like way too far down and I'm filibustering and I found where I'm supposed to be.
00:02:41
Speaker
Script. Incredible podcast. Shell Game. Evan's career today is so varied and so cool. He's the author of The Mastermind, and we talked about that back on episode 141. A true story of murder, empire, and a new kind of crime lord. He was the co-founder of the Atavist magazine. Yeah, that Atavist, before it was acquired by Automatic, the WordPress company.
00:03:05
Speaker
and the reins handed over to none other than Sayward Darby. He was one head of the Cerberus, or Cerberus, I don't know, three-headed dog at the now sunsetted long-form podcast with no shade thrown to the others. Evan, for my taste, was my favorite interviewer. His writing has appeared in many places that would make your head turn.
00:03:28
Speaker
and your eyes turn green with envy. Show no to this episode of more at brendanamara.com. Hey, there. You can check out new blog blog posts. Blog posts, blog posts. Been doing that more.
Newsletter and Tech Frustrations
00:03:40
Speaker
You can pre-order the front runner. Sign up for the monthly rage against the algorithm newsletter. That's there. I think we're all a bit miffed by big tech and the boot-legging billionaires that attended the inaugurations. Like, fuck those guys. Seriously.
00:04:00
Speaker
Permission assets are the way to go. Divorce of the algorithm. It's the place to be. It's the place where I want to live. Book recommendations. Exclusive happy hour. Cool links. Hot sexy nudes of me. JK, JK, question mark? Okay, Evan, a real journalist, not some bozo with a PR 40, is a two-time National Magazine Award finalist. If I had been a finalist, my mother would have said, You couldn't have won it. He's a two-time finalist for the Livingston Award for Reporting, a Deadline Club Award for Newspaper and Digital Feature Reporting Finals. Oh God! What a word salad for that award. I'm glad he didn't win that one. And the winner of Clark Payne Award for Science Writing. Those guys are cool.
00:04:44
Speaker
Shell Game was one of the best shows of 2024, according to Apple's top 10 shows we love, among other best of lists, including mine. I don't have one, but yes, it's a top it.
00:04:57
Speaker
long-form routinely pounded CNF pod into the ground, probably still does. Actually, um point being, Evan is a great guy, great journalist, and a really fearless storyteller, and how he goes about the work,
Book Editing Insights
00:05:11
Speaker
and how he brings it to life. You can learn more about Evan at kzart.net, or kzart.net, let me spell it for you. C-A-Z-A-R-T dot net.
00:05:23
Speaker
and find him on social at Ev Evie underscore rat like the animal underscore public like the library parting shot on leaning into inconvenience but for now here he is and look at that smile Evan Rattler
00:05:52
Speaker
You can almost recite the manuscript by heart. And here, looking at it, it's like, oh gosh, here, here we go again. I got to try to read this and not skim over it because I've read it so many times. And it just maybe with the the mastermind or even some magazine pieces that have you've read a billion times and before you send it, like just what's that? I, how do you keep it fresh in in your head and try to read objectively when you can practically recite it by heart?
00:06:18
Speaker
I mean, it's definitely tough. I mean, it's the same with audio. You got to listen to it a bunch of times. And, you know, I mean, partly I try to like grab on to things that I like in it. Like I will work, ah take a magazine story. I will work so much longer on the lead than on the rest of it. So I will sit there and just grind over the lead and try different ones and And then when it gets to something I like and I'm feeling good about it, then i keep I'll keep tweaking and keep tweaking. And then oftentimes, even when I'm working on the rest of it, I will so go back to the beginning and I'll just do that first. And I get into a mode where it makes me, it actually it feels good that it's working. And then every time I read it, it
00:06:59
Speaker
I'm like maybe there's a word maybe I can make it work a little bit better and a thing that you can improve slightly that you're pretty happy with like I don't know it just puts me in a mood of oh this is gonna be all right this is gonna be good and I've got to do that with the rest of it and so I'm going to push on with it because the rest of it is kind of just an endurance battle. But something about the lead, something about the opener, like I'm just I can't stop tweaking until they take it out of my hands. But something about doing that kind of like flips a switch and makes the rest of it plausible as well.
00:07:35
Speaker
Right, that that's such a good point to underscore, and it it was in my back and forth with the editor I'm working out working with, he you know he's just so astute and has just bought into the whole the whole book, which is just, I am mean, I won the lottery right off the bat with this guy.
00:07:51
Speaker
in in our In our recent exchanges, he was just like the, I guess you could say probably the weakest of the chapters, just mainly because I didn't have great family access. So the first chapter is kind of like that family family stuff. And so it reads a bit thin. And so it as a result, it's maybe one of the weaker chapters and it happens to be the first one and he's big on first chapters and and so naturally so because that just sets up everything else and yeah so we just in really tinkering with this thing and it just ended up being
00:08:27
Speaker
platforming a different aspect of that chapter and getting it up higher and it really I think has just totally made it work in a way that it wasn't working before and it's just sometimes it is just a matter of moving just a passage from page five up to the up to the first page and it's just like okay the expectations feel a little different and it's somewhat downhill skiing from there.
00:08:50
Speaker
Sometimes it feels like if you lock in the organization, the organization of the story from the beginning, then everything just flows. But other times you just, yes you just get hung up and then ah you you have locked into a good editor. Cause I feel like a lot of book editors don't, they don't really get their hands dirty these days. From what I understand, a lot of people have like side book editors that they're having edit books for them. But if you get someone who says, actually, I think if you just like move this here and then work it over a little bit, then you can actually like make the whole thing flow in a different way. And that, that to me is a great, that's what you want from your editor.
00:09:30
Speaker
Yeah, I got lucky this guy likes to get his hands dirty with it and it could be because he's a he's I think he's like this with every book but I think it's especially with this one because he's ah a marathoner you know he's about our age you know like you know mid to late 40s and and so ah he's just kind of of our generation he's a runner too and like prefontaine just really excites him so I think he's just he's just really interesting getting his hands in the dough and in this stuff and just really I sent off, i I did have a preliminary editor because I had such a sprawling, rough draft ah that I was just like, I need to get this thing cut down by, you know, 40,000 words before I even send it off to my main editor. and um And just like when he got it, he's just in there, I sent the editorial letter to the this preliminary editor and he's just like, that's the best editorial letter I've ever read.
00:10:17
Speaker
and this guy who's read like who's written like dozens of books and so he's just like it's amazing he's just like you're very lucky you have someone who's that invested in it and it was like all right could have a lot i wasn't taking it for granted in the first place but was like i'm especially so these days i'm learning so much and it's just from working with him it's been an amazing experience in that regard Yeah, it's a stra but it's strange though. that Don't you
Independent Podcast Production
00:10:41
Speaker
always hear that? people you know I know people who partly make a living kind of side editing books. And I mean i had a great book editor who was a former magazine editor who was like very much in the book. But then you people are always saying, like my book editor just says, like yeah, put it not put it through, but like line it little line edits. and
00:11:00
Speaker
But I don't really understand that. What is the job? Why do you want to be a book editor? Buying met books part doesn't seem that fun to me. that doesn't seem why That's why people got into it. Maybe they're just overworked. I don't know. I don't know why it is that you don't get book editors who so who want to deal with structure and chapters and you know really get their hands dirty as much. I don't know.
00:11:23
Speaker
Yeah, as we kind of like ah you know transition into you know talking a little bit about Shell Game, I think what I really love about the ethos of the the show from the ground up is how you elected to really take a ah real punk rock ethos and independently produce it you know with ah with a small cohort. So you know what was the sort of, you can even talk a little bit about in Shell Game itself, but what was some of the the thought process behind deciding to really go like grassroots with this?
00:11:52
Speaker
Well, I mean, it was a few reasons. the One was just practical, like... I wanted to get it out fast. I mean, I started tinkering with it late last year, and then I really started developing the voice agents, which is the shows about my these like AI voice agents that are use a clone of my voice to that I send out into the world, and I attach them to phone numbers, and I call people with them. So I started doing that early in 2024. And as soon as I started doing it, I was like, oh, someone else is going to do this.
00:12:26
Speaker
And that's a feeling I have on almost anything I do because it's almost always true. Like if you do a big project, chances are somewhere along the way, you're going to open up your computer and say, oh shit, someone else is working on this. And but for this one, I just thought only one person is going to get to do this, like really mess around and be the first one to kind of like say, say like I created a voice agent of myself and release in the world to see what would happen. And As soon as I had that thought, I was like, it's it's got to be fast. Also, the technology is changing so fast that something could come out that would just sort of change the technology entirely and a better voice cloning software or better AI software or something and just ah obviate like what I just done. So anyway, I wanted to get it done fast. And if you're going to work with
00:13:20
Speaker
the sort of podcast platforms of production companies, like they're not particularly fast on and anything that's like narrative and highly produced. You know, you could put out an interview show or whatnot. But so, you know, I talk I talk to some various outlets and I've left deals on the table, but they were going to start. I mean, they wouldn't even have started now. Like would you be working on it now? And the show's done so.
00:13:46
Speaker
That was a big part of it. But also like I knew that it was going to be pretty. I didn't know how personal it was going to actually end up getting, but it was personal to me in the sense of it was important to me. Like I i thought, like, I think I'm on to something here and I have a really clear idea of how I want to do it. And I've worked with a lot of different platforms and companies in the past. Like I've seen it all. And in podcasting in particular, it's like.
00:14:15
Speaker
in some way the podcast industry is, I don't know why, but like maybe it's just developed so rapidly that it kind of like tried to emulate like Hollywood structures. And so you get these situations where you just have like, you get notes from but just like random ass people that are executives. And there's just a lot of bullshit that seems completely unnecessary to me.
00:14:40
Speaker
which is not to say like it's valuable to work with platforms and companies because they have a lot of the great producers work there and you need a good producer and they have the money although the other calculus is like the narrative podcast industry has gone as declined over the last couple of years so you can't get the same budget so at certain point it's like well how much budget am I going to get anyway and so I had a past history of doing a lot of independent projects. That was kind of like one of the reasons we started out of it. So we were like, you don't need a big magazine to make these stories great. Like you can do it on your own. If you know how to hire a fact checker, if you know how to hire a great copy editor, like you can put the pieces together. And so it was kind of in that same mode. I just thought, well, I know enough people to put this together. Like we only need a small team. I know how to do this. And so let's just do it ourselves. Well, of course, we don't get any money budget up front to do it, but
00:15:32
Speaker
It had the advantage that there was no travel. It was not a huge budget thing. Like I could generate all the tape just basically like sitting at my computer. So it was kind of like all that. All that was in the air. And yeah, for this combination of like frustrations I had had in the past and then just like a clear opening of like, you oh, there's a there's a way that ah this can be done. Yeah, you took the next question out of my mouth essentially with the Atavist. You've pivoted away from the Atavist for several years now, but I wanted to get a sense of what starting the Atavist when it was in 2011 and how that might have set you up for this, having that experience in your in in the chamber.
00:16:13
Speaker
Yeah, very much so. I mean, the the experience there was that I was interested in doing really narrative stories. I've done all kinds of magazine stories, but I had a particular love of story stories, stories of the beginning, middle and end, stories with characters and plots and, you know, nonfiction that reads like a short story, that sort of thing.
00:16:34
Speaker
And at the time, there just there's weren't many outlets that wanted to do those ah at length that were open to a lot of different writers. So, of course, The New Yorker does those stories. They've done some of the great ones. But at the time, it was sort of like, you're David Gran, you get to do those stories. If you're Susan Orlean, you get to do those stories.
00:16:53
Speaker
if you're me, once in a while you get to, I did get to do some of those stories at the New Yorker, but like there's just only so many slots because they're also doing all of the stuff that they fills out the whole magazine. And so only one of every other issue or something or even less is going to be that kind of story. So I just said, well, maybe we could just do it ourselves if we had figured out the budgets.
00:17:16
Speaker
We could build them the same way. We could we could adopt the same standards. And then we had all these other ideas about digital design and doing them online and doing them in apps and all the kind of stuff that out of us ended up doing. But the kind of fundamental thing that I wanted to do was, well, what if we could produce that ourselves and we could kind of like expand the number of opportunities for those stories to get told. So and it turned out it is possible. I mean, the biggest problem and I've worked on Popup magazine also like it was the same thing. The biggest problem is these big institutions The things they have are money and marketing. So they're able to like, it's not even marketing, audience probably. They're able to like get these stories in front of a big audience because they have built up a big audience and they built up a lot of credibility and they have the budgets to like really put the money into them. So you got to solve those problems, obviously.
00:18:09
Speaker
But in terms of actually like producing the stories, if you get a bunch of people together that know what they're doing, it's not any different. It's not any different than being inside an institution. It's the same pieces. You can use the same pieces to create the same kind of work. Did you run into, just especially when you're starting Atavist, that it was sometimes when you come up with an idea and you're like, oh, this is great, and then you start thinking about it, you're like, well, if I'm thinking about it, then it can't be that great of an idea.
00:18:38
Speaker
And it's like someone else will probably do it. And that's sort of like negative self-talk that often creeps in. And I wonder like when you were starting Atavus or even starting ah some other things that you have gotten up off the ground, how have you wrestled with that negative self-talk that often gets in the way of you know ah that of people gaining altitude and starting something that could potentially be special?
Overcoming Self-Doubt and Collaboration
00:19:03
Speaker
I think, I mean, it's different. It's vastly different for me between a story idea and this kind of like entrepreneurial idea or a project that's going to turn into a publication or something like that. like If I have a story idea, i I think someone else is going to do it because it's good, not because I'm worried that I can't do it. like yeah I have a huge list of ideas, but there are a lot of them. I'm kind of like someone will probably do that. But if I hit on one that I think, oh, my God, that is a magazine story, I can I would bet you a thousand dollars that that will be in a magazine or a podcast within the next year. Like that happens to me all the time. And so for that, for those, it's like, how quickly can I do this? Am I going to be to pull this off? And sometimes I just I just abandon it because I'm just like, there's no way that I'm going to beat whoever started working on this. There's one like this right now, like
00:19:51
Speaker
I want to start it and I may just like check into it to see if anyone's heard, you know, if any of the players I've heard from anyone, but I guarantee you someone's already doing it. Such a good story. It's different with these other ideas. Like with Atavist, I just sort of thought, well, someone should do this, you know, and then I kind of like half heartedly tried to get a grant and then I didn't get a grant. I always get rejected from that sort of thing. So I got rejected.
00:20:15
Speaker
And then I was like, well, you know, fuck it. I don't know. What what am I going to start? I'm going to start some institution like I just want to do my own freelancing. And then I happen to like have a partner or someone who ended up as my partner in the business, Nick Thompson, who is a very energetic, very positive,
00:20:34
Speaker
full of confidence about what is possible if you just do it. So he basically said, like, why don't we just do it? Like, let's just do it. I know another guy. Like, let's just get together. Let's just start it. And I don't I never would have done it without that. And that's the truth. Like, I just would have continued freelancing. And the same happened with Pop-Up magazine when we started that. Like, that was not my idea. But we kind of got together and had drinks and we're like, let's put on a show. And everybody remembers from that original drinks that I was like,
00:21:03
Speaker
We can't charge more than five dollars. Like no one will come. And everyone was like, what do you mean? I was like, my friends won't even come if we charge five dollars. And they were like, let's charge twenty dollars for the first one. I was like, this is ridiculous. And then it was sold out. You know, it's just like, I don't I don't have that kind of confidence in.
00:21:19
Speaker
in kind of like finding the audience and building everything up, although now maybe I would more because I've done it a few times. But I mean, I think the way I got through that was just getting together with other people because it's also fun. It's fun to create something out of nothing and then suddenly have people paying some attention to it and it becomes, it fuels you growing the organization, it fuels you having bigger ideas and that fuels a bigger audience. And so none of these things would I ever have done on my own, just never. But if there's one or two other people who are energetic and maybe have a little different outlook than you, then that's what kind of gets them off the ground for me.
00:22:00
Speaker
That's great. I love hearing you talk about you know and the the confidence angle of it. and i It's funny you bring that up. I've just been really thinking a lot about that lately. You have someone who's just been chronically not confident over over the years. You hear Nick Thompson there where he said he know he's very confident in regards and energetic and positive when it comes to let's say you know this launching startups or so stuff of that nature. um Whereas maybe you lacked a little bit of that early on.
00:22:27
Speaker
ah But what what would you identify as something that you know you you know you're confident in? You're like, yeah, that's that's the thing I'm good at and I can really lean into. Um, well, I mean, I, I feel like I can deliver a story. Like I feel like, I mean, it would be kind of sad if I couldn't, I've been at it for this long. Let's be honest. like I feel like if you give me a good story or I find a good story, most, of most of the things I generate myself. So like if I find something and someone will give me
00:22:59
Speaker
the runway to like go do it, whether it's audio or it's it's written. like I feel confident that I can deliver it. Now that doesn't mean there aren't moments where I get really thrown off. or For instance, what I said, like what you're halfway through and then some of someone you find out someone else is doing the same thing. and You think, oh my God, now I gotta beat this person.
00:23:22
Speaker
like ah I hate that. I'm not a kind of like competitive in that way. like I don't enjoy the competition and I'm not a scoop person and I'm not trying to like work my sources to be 10 seconds first before someone else. like I like long, in-depth, complicated stories.
00:23:39
Speaker
and i The thing I feel confident about is my ability to eventually get inside those stories and bring back something interesting and tell it in an interesting way. So as long as I'm focused on that, I'm doing all right. It's ah it's everything else around the business. I mean, the whole working as a freelancer, as a writer in audio, all these things, it's just like a battle against cynicism, it's a battle against bitterness and it's a battle against kind of like letting your confidence be destroyed by the many different like mistreatments and rejections that you receive over many years. Like that's just what it is. And so everybody that I know has their ups and downs with that. I'm sure there are uber confident people that don't have their ups and downs with that out there somewhere. But
00:24:29
Speaker
That's just the yeah, that's just part of it. And so I try to like as long as I can like be on an assignment I am totally absorbed in that assignment and I feel Usually feel pretty good about what I'm getting and where I'm going with it, you know Absolutely, yeah. And as you as you were looking to – as you had the idea for Shell Game, what might have been some you know models or examples, be it in print or audio, that kind of set the table for you to be like, oh, this is – if we can kind of mimic this this structure, this you know this kind of – this pacing.
00:25:09
Speaker
you know These are some examples that were like, okay, we can kind of lean on these as ah as it means to see how it's been done before. i don't you I mean, I don't totally work that way in terms of like, I can't think of something, I'm not saying there's not something out there that's like, this is nothing's ever been done like shell game. But like, there wasn't something that I said, oh, this is like this thing, but on on our topic, you know, like, because it was different, it actually was different than what I, even what I normally do, what I like to do. Like I like to tell one story.
00:25:42
Speaker
And this was actually, it was one story and I endeavored to turn it into one story, but each episode is kind of trying a different thing. So they're all kind of a little bit their own self-contained stories and then threads get pulled from one across to the next and hopefully they all kind of come together at the end is the idea. But I don't normally do stuff that way. So For me, that's it was just sort of like feeling out what I wanted it to be. Now, in terms of like tone, you know, there are things that I will just go back to all the time, like S-town, like Brian Reed and S-town. I'll just listen to the opener for a couple of episodes. I probably listened to some of them 50 times, I don't know, and just kind of like
00:26:26
Speaker
just the feel, the the idea it's like the idea of taking such a serious approach to a story that you have these reflections, that you're you're dipping into these details, you're making it funny, and then you're kind of pulling back and telling people,
00:26:45
Speaker
a little bit about what you're thinking, what you're experiencing. like It's more like a mode than it is anything like structure or like even how he talks. like i can't be by I can't be Brian Reed ah any more than I could be you know like any of the Sarah Koenig or whatever, Dan Tversky or like any of the amazing narrative storytellers in podcasting. like I can't be those people, but like I like the mode, the mode that they're in when they're being funny, when they're and I kind of like will listen to that just to get it into my head, like, oh, OK, this is the approach. And then, you know, hopefully mine sounds different, but also has some of that. I don't know that that feeling to it.
00:27:26
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, in terms of like the openings to yeah, you bring up best town and like, oh, yeah, yeah, I can kind of I can feel like, you know, that it that it rhymes a little bit. And I even think of wind of change, too. I have listened to that several times. I just, sure yeah i you know, I just love the, you know, just the the journey that takes you on. And similarly, you know, show game takes you on on a journey.
00:27:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's the hope. I mean, that's what you're trying to to do. I mean, both from a practical perspective, which is you're trying to get people to keep listening to it. So you want people to get to the end of the first one or the first section or whatnot and say, oh, well, I got to keep listening to this, you know, and your ultimate test of that is someone saying, whatever, I didn't get out of my car for 20 minutes because I want to listen to the end of this. And that's, of course, what you want.
00:28:15
Speaker
But it's it's harder. I mean, there's a reason why there's fucking true crime everywhere, which is like it's it's very natural how that happens. Like you tell one bit, one bit, one bit, one bit. And then if you stop somewhere, people like, oh, my God, wait, what about this piece of evidence? And they want to keep going. And so trying to create that with something that doesn't have a natural narrative like that is a very interesting challenge in trying to find out, figure out what you think would draw people into another part of the story.
AI in Narrative Podcasting
00:28:46
Speaker
That's kind of the fun of it. That's the challenge of it. But I like listening to all these places that just do it so well. And then you can kind of like
00:28:55
Speaker
i borrow I mean, ah you're not really borrowing directly because like the stories are different, but just like the idea is, oh, they stopped it there. I see. like I see how they're doing that. And then you can try to kind of apply the same concept to your own to your own work.
00:29:11
Speaker
Say with the mastermind, there was a lot of travel involved know with that, and it was kind of a harrowing reporting journey. And you in and then you know you said, you know sort of at the start of our conversation with this, like it was largely you know from um like your home office, a lot of the reporting and everything together. Just what was that the experience like of just, here was something that was you know largely kind of almost like a ah domesticated reporting experience versus globetrotting.
00:29:41
Speaker
I mean in one sense it was it was amazing it was real up and down because it was incredible I could generate as much literally as much tape as we could ever use in a day or two days if I wanted because basically I have this AI voice agent hooked up to phone numbers I can have a call whoever I wanted and it could receive calls from whoever I wanted. So for instance, I set up this scam line. So I seeded the number, the telephone number out in the world, all these scammers and telemarketers would call the line and the AI agent with my voice picks up and has conversations with them. But I mean, it's it goes all day. It's going right now. Let me see. It's probably got a call today. It gets like five
00:30:21
Speaker
five to ten a day, some of which last as long as 20 minutes. So yeah, I got a couple couple today. It's just generating tape all the time, which if you've ever tried to do a narrative show where you go around and try to interview people like my show before this persona, like we went to France, we went to Israel, where to try it one guy died right before you interviewed him. like It's like that's the whole deal, which I love, too. But this was kind of like, oh, I don't have to do anything. I just like press some buttons and I have more tape. But then I realized, oh, I'm going to get myself into a nightmare here, because if it's not incredibly organized, then we're never going to even be able to listen to all this.
00:31:00
Speaker
I had to come up with the whole system that's like, I would have to comb through them and the very first time I heard it, I would have to note what it was, the date, the time, which platform it was using because I have all these different AI platforms and like try to get the transcript, get the prompt that I used and all this shit had to be organized because if not,
00:31:19
Speaker
Like, it was useless. It was useless to be collecting tape all the time that you can't even listen to. And we didn't have a team of five people to listen to tape. who Basically, it was like me and Sophie Bridges, my producer, who listened to tape. So that became like the additional challenge. It's like it's nice. It's pretty nice to be able to not go anywhere and generate tape. But then also it becomes more of like an organizational problem than a that a reporting problem, let's say. But still like I still had the same issues where like You want certain conversations, you know, and it's like, oh, I want it. I want to try this. And i the great thing was I didn't have to call anyone to get an interview. I could just do that thing. And speaking of organizational, like as you're starting to and gather all this tape and curate what feels like relevant story beats, how are you starting to arc out, say, individual episodes and then arc out what ends up being an entire season?
00:32:15
Speaker
Well, and I mean, I don't want to make it sound more intricate than it was. It was basically like I kept a little list. I mean, I kept i keep I keep these kind of like running documents sometimes. And so I had this running document where I would just throw things in. ah This is some stuff that the AI did today. These are calls I made today.
00:32:32
Speaker
This was early on. Then they started to sort a little bit. I could see, oh, okay, well, I'm using this thing to call my friends and family. So that's probably an episode, like personal stuff. I've used it to like call, the first thing I used it on was calling customer service. That was obviously the first episode. And then I knew I wanted to call scammers, like scammers are an interest of mine. And like that was, I'd already thought like, oh, this would be great to use on scammers. So I did, I made that second.
00:33:01
Speaker
And then there was sort of like a lot of things floating around. And then I would just sort of like literally have a little list that was like, one, customer service, two, scammers, three, this, four, this, five, this, like I wanted to send it to therapy. So like this therapy is episode four, episode three, like just going around, it wasn't some intricate outline or anything like that. And then and then I just started writing scripts like we just didn't have time. We set very, very tight deadlines for ourselves because we wanted to get it out as of the beginning of July. And we were starting.
00:33:31
Speaker
I gathered a lot of tape, but we were starting production basically in June, mid-May. So we didn't just we didn't have much time. So there was a lot of time for intricate discussions over it. It was sort of like, what if we did this? And we we we did take one whole episode and change the order, but that was like a huge shift. Like the whole schedule had to be flipped in order for us to do that. So it was kind of, it was but as we went, which is to me is like a fun way to do it as long as everyone kind of knows what they're doing. And you don't have a bunch of people hovering over it saying like when can I listen to a draft of episode one so that they can then say oh well you need more up top like you really need some lines that say like AI is going to change the world and shit like that you know it's just like I understand why all that structure exists for places with like a lot of institutional bureaucracy but like we didn't have any of that and that felt amazing
00:34:23
Speaker
Yeah, at the start of a conversation, we kind of talked about the the punk rock ethos of it. And that's what I really love about what you're able to bring to this, and I think is all the more inspiring for people who might be reluctant to, say, pick up the microphone or in like start something on their own in this regard and just like, let's do it, do it fast.
00:34:44
Speaker
it get it out there and And not have to answer to anyone except a ah small cohort of people who really believe in it So, you know serving those listeners and just bringing something cool to the forefront but without a lot of that institutional bureaucracy that you alluded to it's just that it's such a it's so charged with that kind of energy and I imagine it's excited you all the more to keep on going to and Yeah, for sure. And I think we we were having a lot of fun making it. And I think for this particular type of show like that, that helps. Like, it comes through. Like, people say that to me. Like, it sounds like you're having a lot of fun making this. And not everything that I do, but certainly not everything in journalism can fit into that. You know, things that are deeply investigative often require more institutional support. This was not a deep investigative kind of project for me.
00:35:36
Speaker
But in a general sense, like I think I really appreciate when people do these kinds of projects, when people go off on their own and decide to just do it themselves without all of the architecture that has like built up around a kind of medium. So I'm i'm into it. I don't want to oversell it, though. It's like I had a producer who happened to be free, who I already knew who is incredible. Like, she's incredible at that stuff. Like, she could do everything, including cutting massive amounts of tape really quickly, adding music, doing her own, like, she has her own editorial outlook and editorial insights because she worked on a bunch of narrative shows before. So I couldn't have done it on my own. Again, like, I can't cut all that tape. I could cut together like a little sizzle reel. Like, I did that and kind of like sold her on it. Like, listen to this. Like, she was like, oh, yeah, this sounds interesting.
Role of Producers in Podcasting
00:36:30
Speaker
But so you do need the right pieces for audio, especially like you need someone who really knows what they're doing if you're going to do a narrative show, because if it kind of it's OK if it sounds a little a little ragged, I think that's fine. But like there are certain fundamental things that you have to be able to do in order to get it out. And then also like my wife is the executive producer and she has worked in audio and she launched a bunch of shows. So she knew aspects around like You have to be it has to get on this platform at this time or it will not appear on the launch date. Like it has to be uploaded this metadata goes here. Like all this stuff that's like so mundane, but like it does not look professional if you don't launch it in that way. So I had it wasn't just me like messing around, you know, it's like you got to get people together who know what they're doing.
00:37:16
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, and in ah in terms of the the story arc of the of the season, it does it does seem to, like you say, like it kind of it goes to therapy, and then ah then it starts to you know yeah it starts to get a little more personal. It starts to talk to more people, more in your in your orbit.
00:37:36
Speaker
And what was the the trepidation of maybe wrestling with sending the agent ah you know into your friend circle, your professional circle, and what that might entail? I mean, the initially, like I didn't have much trepidation about actually doing it because I was having fun doing it. I was having fun I mean, it's basically pranking them at some level. you know they They don't know what it is. They're expecting a call from me. I mean, I should say like this thing is attached to my phone number. And so I can attach it to a bunch of phone numbers, but I could also attach it to my phone number. So you if you were my friend from for 30 years and you just got a call from me one day,
00:38:14
Speaker
and picked up and like I was acting weird. like To me, it was kind of fun and funny. Now, it did go off the rails and it did get it went to some very strange places that I did not expect that are in the show. But I would say the thing that was a bigger it took more for me to say, yes, I want to do this, was including those things in the show, because I'm not generally, I have done projects in the past that are somewhat personal, but I'm not like a memoirist. Like I don't write about my friends and family. I don't think I'm that interesting outside of like doing journalistic projects. And this was one where I was all the, these people that I, most of the people that I knew were like subjected to it. And then I was gonna,
00:39:00
Speaker
play their reactions in public. So that was what I was worried about. But people were I don't know, people were really good about it. And people seem to like really love the spirit of it. And so that kind of assuaged my worries as we went along. Like when I said to people like, hey, i I'm thinking about using this, they were like, oh, yeah, you got to use that. Like I lost my mind on that call. You know, was that kind of thing. So people were very encouraging for me to use it. And then when it came to my family, that was That was even more delicate because just we it was kind of a delicate time in general for us, but but everybody everybody was was into it. i'm Partly they're used to, I've been doing this for so long. like At a certain level, they were like, oh yeah, sometimes you do weird stuff. I did this story for Wired so years ago where I vanished. And that was like the one where people were like, what are you doing? And so now people are like, oh, it's like that vanish thing. like that's what that's That was 15 years ago, so it's not like I do it very often.
00:39:56
Speaker
Yeah, the the one part that started to that made me squirm a bit was in the final episode where you set it off on your friend, but the context of that was you had a shared friend who sounded similarly off. yeah It was kind of a red flag, and then you you know your friend here was really like worried about you, and you know he's talking to the AI version of you, and he's like really worried.
00:40:23
Speaker
And I was just like, that that was uncomfortable. I was really happy you went there, had the courage to go there, because like that felt like, oh my God, i I feel like Evan's, he's overstepped at this at this moment. And I was like happy that you did that, because I think we needed to push it in a direction that made made the listener uncomfortable. Yeah, I mean, I did i had to include it. There was no way that I couldn't include it with i mean with his permission. But yeah, and that was, I think that was partly If that hadn't happened, because there were a lot of people who reacted very positive, not positively, but like in a fun way to getting called by this AI version of me, because they would figure out that it wasn't me. And then they would kind of either mess with it or they would like go with it. And some of those conversations are also amazing.
00:41:12
Speaker
But what I was trying to get at in the show was how just how sort of strange and unsettling all of this stuff is going to get.
AI's Impact on Personal Interactions
00:41:20
Speaker
And I was kind of like pushing it as far as possible in order to kind of create some of those scenarios that we will all experience in in the near or distant future. And so when this one kind of really went off the rails and my friend thought like maybe I was having a bit of I'd had maybe like a little bit of a breakdown.
00:41:41
Speaker
it was just so like It was really painful for me to listen to the tape, but you then you when you listen to it, you're like, oh, I see. i like I see what happens when the world is full of these things that are maybe you and maybe not, maybe human, maybe not. like You get these unique kinds of and so misunderstandings.
00:42:01
Speaker
And they can go to really dark places. And so, yeah, I mean, it was I felt like it was important to kind of take everyone there, um even though it was like it's very uncomfortable to listen to partly because one of the rules that we made for the show at the beginning was we would not cut out the silences. Like if you listen to any podcast narrative podcast, they're always trimming the audio. Like, yeah, they they unless there's like a dramatic pause they'll like clip things down. But these AIs, one of their problems is they're they're a little too slow sometimes or a lot of the time. So there are these pauses before they respond. It's called latency. But we decided not to cut out any of the latency because it seemed like cheating to like make them sound better than they were. And so because of that, there are these long
00:42:50
Speaker
Just like painful silences that we force everyone to listen to actually in several of the episodes That normally you would just absolutely cut out which again is like part of doing it Independently as we knew we wanted to do that and we just did not want someone saying like no one wants to hear Five seconds of silence and I'm like exactly but that yeah, that's why we want to do it. We want to make them listen to it. So ah So yeah, that one was it was significant, but my friend and I are we're still very close It hasn't affected our friendship That's good. and that that ah I'm happy to hear that because it's it was one of those things where you wonder about what the project did or maybe what it could do to other people. Just the fundamental trust that they have between each other if if it became too pervasive. Like, oh my god, like you know I'm sure you've been asked this a million times. it was like Who am I talking to right now? And that was never an issue before, but now it's like people might be thinking, like oh,
00:43:45
Speaker
Is this AI Evan or my friend my best friend? Yeah. Yeah. I go through that now. I mean, of course I exacerbated because sometimes, I mean, I didn't do it today, but like sometimes if I'm doing interviews, I'll just send it. I'll send it instead of me. like it's It's interesting to see what happens.
00:44:03
Speaker
and Yeah. And I've, my friend, it's mostly joking now. People will pick up and be like, say something that shows that it's you, you know, and I'll sell them something, but something from our from our distant past that maybe it wouldn't know, although it knows a lot because I've fed it a lot of information. But yeah, I think these are the kinds of trust issues that I was interested in. not Because I was trying to get away from a lot of the ai writing about AI and coverage of AI that I find a little bit ponderous. And one place that I wanted to go is just like, what does it mean that there are more there are going to be more AI agents in the world than humans? like Inevitably, because they're so easy to make. And it's already true on the internet. that's There's bots everywhere. And like how does it feel to not know if you're encountering a human or not? Does it matter?
00:44:53
Speaker
do you if it If it accomplishes the objective you were trying to accomplish, making a phone call, do you care? Is there something more unsettling about it? Those were the questions I wanted to like get at. Yeah, I know for one, like I hate making cold calls, to call sources, to do that introduction. and it's just It got me thinking, wow, what if you outsource it to someone who is inert to the whole idea of the anxiety around it?
00:45:20
Speaker
And and a and d even just to make the the intro, because sometimes you they they might tell you to fuck off and it'll ruin your day. or So what if what if someone else, what if the AI broke the ice for you? you know Yeah, I mean sales people are already absolutely using this technology for exactly that. like They are using it for cold calling.
00:45:46
Speaker
Partly because like you waste a lot of time cold calling, a lot of people don't pick up. And so it can just like leave a voicemail in your voice. you know So like most of the time someone calling for sales, like they don't get anyone. And if you can leave a voicemail that's in your voice that says, like hey, it's me, blah, blah, blah, that is absolutely like a technology that is being deployed right now.
00:46:06
Speaker
I did use it for reporting because I wanted to test that out, doing interviews. you know Nobody likes doing cold calls for interviews, for sure. I mean, the problem there is i pick the people I picked to interview, for the most part, were ah people who worked in AI. so like They kind of worked on the same platform I was using to call them with. And I thought, well, they can't get mad because if they get mad, it's like undermining their own product. Like they're saying we should all, you know, these are useful. So if they get called by one, they can't be like, I can't fucking believe you called me with this. But with other people.
00:46:43
Speaker
What you're really afraid of when you, I don't know what um what you're, it's just natural to be nervous when you co call someone out of nowhere and you're like, I need to ask you about this. yeah Even whether it's very serious or even if it's not as serious, sometimes it's just hard to make that call. But you're kind of afraid they're going to be annoyed or mad or just like that their response is going to be uncomfortable. yeah And like using an AI is not going to solve that because that person is going to call you back and be like, what what is this? you know like Your chances of making them mad or uncomfortable are greater with the AI currently than with yourself. So I don't think it'll solve the cold calling problem. It can conduct a pretty decent interview if you give it like
00:47:24
Speaker
Questions and like beats bullet points basically like it'll follow those and like it'll ask the questions It's not great at follow-ups. It'll let a lot of things go but like When you do there's certain kinds of interviews that are pretty rote Like you're just trying to get some information for a story and like I can I'm here to tell you like an AI I'm not saying you should or I approve of it or I support this or I want to be replaced But like that was one of the things I wanted to investigate was like can it do this and the answer is yeah, I can do it hmm Yeah, and ah then to that point, you you know, I wrote down that that I want to ask you, like, what questions did that this project answer for you and what more questions did it raise for you as you as you proceed?
Future of AI and Ethics
00:48:10
Speaker
I mean, the question that it definitively answered for me is that we will encounter these more and more everywhere. Like, I don't think that's something because there's a lot of depends on how close you fall, like the AI industry or on, you know, social media, like on Twitter acts like.
00:48:29
Speaker
They're sort of like, it's hitting a wall and ai is going to you know this the AI is going to be like ah they like NFTs and they're going to disappear. like No one's going to be talking about AI in two years. It's all hype. All these companies are going to go away. There is like a whole kind of like push towards that.
00:48:45
Speaker
But the problem is like even as it exists now, these AI agents are useful and they're useful to save money for companies that make calls, that receive calls, that do customer service, that take orders, all sorts of things, even if they're not fully human sounding. So like either way, you gotta grapple with either like these sort of semi-human, almost human things that are gonna be everywhere in the world,
00:49:13
Speaker
or they're going to get they are going to get better and better in which case they're going to be they will be indistinguishable from humans like already people couldn't tell that mine wasn't human sometimes and it wasn't even like the best one that's out there so there will be this question and i the further i got in the more confident i was i guess it's that's not like a question it answered for me it just like verified for me that like this will be an ongoing question there will be more and more of these this is going to be something we're going to have to grapple with, i think I guess what was left to open for me is the question of like what exact how we're going to treat them, like how we're going to treat how we use these things and how we incorporate them into our lives and how much we're going to accept or reject them. And I think right now there's sort of a broad based idea of rejection where there are people like they're just turned off by the whole thing. I also have that feeling
00:50:09
Speaker
But if you look at all, look back at other technologies, like there's always that feeling. And then like, because it's useful, it just like kind of filters into life. And what I was trying to do was like, say, this is the moment where we could discuss, where we could think about like, what do we want from this? And what do we not want from it? I don't know if that's going to happen, but I think we are kind of poised at a point where it's not going to go away, but we do have some ways that we could push it in one direction or another.
00:50:38
Speaker
Yeah there is what got me thinking as well is and it it the idea of the therapy bots kind of kind of got me thinking of it was just this idea so like my so my my mom is like aging kind of has dementia on the It's not horrible dementia yet, but there's dementia there and it's uh and I was just like well like it would be very hard for me personally to engage with her now just because it can be It can just be difficult, but I was like well what if you know what if you did set up, but you know just a ah phone call with the AI voice that is
00:51:18
Speaker
I don't know, it ah it it appeases you know her diminishing mind without the personal cost of having to, say, endorse such a conversation or insults that might come your way, or stuff like that. I don't know if I would do it, but it got me thinking of that. I don't know if that came across you know you're reporting and you know just in your while you were thinking about it.
00:51:42
Speaker
Yeah, of course. and pet And that's people ask about that people. I mean, one of the things about this technology is that people when they hear about it or when they listen to the show, like they want to talk about it. And that's one of the things that people want to talk about. And I feel like ah this is it's a really good example because There are people who will reject that out of hand who will say, well, that's I mean, what kind of person would do that? Like have your mom call an A.I. and think she's talking to you and not be talking to you you know just because you don't want to deal with the fact that your relative has Alzheimer's or your relative has dementia. It's like, I don't know, maybe that person has never dealt with that situation and the emotional challenges of that and the burden of that and like
00:52:29
Speaker
the idea of making someone feel better and then I think it's a big ethical question you know that you have people will have to answer for themselves but it's not something that you would say well Let's just say that's not possible. That's outside of the bounds of humanity that we would ever do that. People grapple with that shit on a daily basis. Like, should I tell my mother that I'm not this person? You know, that I am their child, that I am not my brother. like
00:53:01
Speaker
and People who have encountered this, they know all about this. And like, should you lie to them or should you not lie to them? Like what makes them feel better? What feels right for you? Like these are questions that people already grapple with. So the fact that they would introduce into that maybe the idea that like sometimes you're not always available if they call you 10, 20 times a day. And like maybe that's maybe an AI answer is like, I don't know. I don't know the answer, but I definitely know that like I wouldn't take someone who's in that position like yourself and say like, oh, you can't use this tool e that might be at your disposal because that would that would make you less than human. you know It's just like people have such strong feelings about it. But the reality is like if something can help a situation, I know people will definitely use it for that. I'm certain.
00:53:54
Speaker
And at the very end of the show, it's basically in the the credit of the final episode to you, you include some tape where you you are talking to your voice agent and you are clearly tired.
00:54:09
Speaker
and its seemingly you know, borderline, just like, I am sick of you. And, and you know, you your voice agent has no idea. It's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just going on, like, yep, you have a good day. And you're just like, yeah, it's just like, i am I am done with you right now. And I just wanted to get a sense of including that tape and the thought process of it, because ah it was very illustrative ah just to experience that on tape on the ear.
00:54:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean that's fun in every episode we put like a bit of tape after the credits and we didn't we never told anyone like and a lot of people just stop at the credits, you know, like when I'm listening to a podcast I stop at the credits but it was kind of like for the people who kept going it was like a little treat and then people would realize oh there's one in the second one there's going to be one in all of them and then but the whole time I had this idea that like I never talked to my AI like in the whole show. It talks to itself. like You have two A's talking to each other, but you you never hear me talking to my AI. and i actually never I literally had never. like yeah um That's not true. I i had like tested it out, so i would like I would do test calls with it, but I never like tried to have a conversation with it. and so I had this idea that that was going to be the last bit.
00:55:24
Speaker
and but then we were finishing we were finishing the last episode and it was you know it was just tough it was like try we were my wife and i were away and like like with the family and like we were supposed to be on vacation and i was like up in this attic and like doing the last edits and doing the last tracking. And then finally, like, I finished the last bit of tracking and I was like, oh, I got to do that. I got to do that. I got to have a conversation with. it But it was like, I don't know, midnight or later, probably. And and actually, the funny thing is my wife, she could hear like she couldn't hear what I was saying, but like the walls were really thin and she could like hear that I was talking to someone and she was like, who is he calling right now? And I was just up there like talking to the thing. And then I was like, well, we'll see how that goes. And I tacked it on to the end of the
00:56:09
Speaker
episode and then we listened to it and it did it was like strangely powerful because as you say like I was like wrecked and I was just like oh man we're done you know and it was like yes we're done but I was trying to have an emotional conversation with it but it it kind of went there in an interesting way but uh yeah I well I appreciate you listening because i I don't know how many people listened all the way to the end and actually actually got to that that part of the show That's great. Well, that's it's a it's an incredible feat of work. And just the in the ethos behind it and the way you went about it is and incredible. And I just can't wait to see what you come next come up next with it. So i just Evan, has just I'm so glad we got to Touch Base again and talk some shop. and So thanks so much for coming back on the show and continued success. And I can't wait for what comes next. Hey, thanks, man. It's always great to talk to you.
00:57:06
Speaker
the energy it was manic today yes awesome yes we did it we did it again somehow this show comes together every week i have no idea like truly i like just go into this hole this black hole and then somehow surface from beyond the end of of the event horizon. This is what happens if I talk without a script. And maybe one day we'll make a happy buck off of it. If it weren't for the Patreon crew, we'd make zero American dollars. So visit patreon dot.com slash CNF pod. Shop around. You might find something you like. Thanks to Evan for coming back on the show and talking to this clown.
00:57:44
Speaker
We recorded this back in September, so it's nice to finally be catching up on the black backlog somewhat. Stupid front-runner. You can pre-order the front-runner wherever you buy your books. If you don't, I think there's a clause in my contract where they foreclose on my house that... I have to look at the fine print, but it's already signed, so who knows. The past weekend, I recorded my first ever live podcast. I wrote a little blog about it at brenthenomare.com.
00:58:09
Speaker
There was a time,
Live Podcasting and Social Media
00:58:12
Speaker
back in the age of flip phones, when it took effort to read your favorite blogs or websites, you would have to list, get your bookmarks and like organize them in your browser, and and it'd be part of your routine to just check on those websites to see if your favorite writers or creators had anything new to offer.
00:58:36
Speaker
I checked Metallica dot.com every day back in the day, and that actually led to a story I had written on this ah this young woman who was abducted and murdered, Morgan Dana Harrington, who was at a Metallica show, and I wrote a story about that a few years ago. But point being, I would always check on Metallica, and because I love them, and ah lots of other people too.
00:58:58
Speaker
And then along comes social media and people are sharing links and by clicking on links or stopping your scroll over certain images, machines began learning about you and turning the dials up on some things and down on others. And we let the machines feed us what they thought we were interested in.
00:59:21
Speaker
Even things we weren't. yeah Even if we wanted to get updates from the people we followed, yeah unless we actively sought them out. like I remember now a while ago, this happened frequently, but one particular incident was, I was like, oh, I haven't... seen Bronwyn Dickey's stuff here a while. Like, I haven't seen her in my feed in ages. Like, has she just gone off the grid? And she hadn't. She was posting stuff, but for whatever reason, it wasn't coming my way. And I like, I want to know what she's up to, what she's working on, and just, yeah, she's my friend and I want to know what's happening. So I had to actively seek it. Back in the day, the Internet was beautifully inconvenient in that regard. You had to seek it out.
01:00:05
Speaker
You have to go see things in person. That's what I long for these days. yeah And I'm an introvert, so doing things in person is like... a heavy lift, let me tell you. and And when it happens, like I come home and like the battery, the battery is drained, friend. It's just what I long for, to lean into that inconvenience, to bookmark things again and actively visit the websites of authors or artists and see what they're up to. I have a little thing that I'll i'll expand it, but there's already some there on my website. breda mardo ka
01:00:36
Speaker
where it's just my little newsstand and it's like newsletters and websites that i that I like and you can go there and click on those and it's a nice portal without social media where you can go check out just other cool creators and writers and whatever.
01:00:53
Speaker
And so the live the live event at Gratitude Brewing, it it was inconvenient. You had to attend in person to see the real, raw, live show. It was recorded for podcast purposes. but the That audio surprisingly came out good. I know. It will be edited, as I always do, and re-broadcast, but if you weren't there, you missed it.
01:01:15
Speaker
There was pressure from one subset of the Oregon Writers' Colony members to livestream it so they didn't have to leave their homes, but that would defeat the purpose. I understand there are accessibility issues, but the podcast will be up to as a place to experience that.
01:01:32
Speaker
And we had a soft opening and about 15 people showed up on a Sunday afternoon, bought food, beer, tea, coffee, whatever, and got to experience something of the moment, something inconvenient because they had to go out and put people pants on, people clothes, that's what my wife and I call them, because but anytime we get out of our sweatpants or comb, people pants and the dogs freak out because they know we're leaving. You know, leave their homes, get in their cars, find parking, commune in public, that can be tough.
01:02:00
Speaker
Buy stuff from our gracious host at Gratitude Brewing and experience something that was here one minute and gone the next. People exchanged business cards, they chatted each other up. ah Val, who was there, she's she sold some of her books. like It was a get-together. It was like a cookout or something. I don't know. There were no Zoom windows open. This was face-to-face. This was raging against the algorithm at its purest.
01:02:26
Speaker
I'll have more to say about our next event in April, but for our first rodeo, it was pretty perfect and proof of concept. yeah Ruby McConnell and I hatched this idea about a year ago to do something inconvenient and reawaken that lost spirit of the live event.
01:02:42
Speaker
Something Eugene just doesn't have, this in conversation kind of thing. we It's gonna be a quarterly deal. You know, maybe it'll be copycats, but we took the lead and nobody's gonna catch us. And I'm pretty proud of that. I'm proud of what we did and I'm pretty proud of what's gonna happen. I'm real excited about it. We got the juice, man. So stay wild, see you in efforts. And if you can't do interview, see ya.