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Very nice to welcome Evan Ratliff (@ev_rat_public) back to the program, the special occasion being his incredible podcast Shell Game, the show where Evan created an AI voice agent in his own image and set it loose on the world.
It raises many questions about the ethics and the utility of the increasingly sophisticated world of voice agents. It won’t be too far into the future where they will be indistinguishable from actual humans.
Evan takes the show into some uncomfortable places over the six-episode run of its first season. He produced and bootstrapped the show himself, which gave him greater agility and autonomy about the journalistic art he brought to the world.
Evan, for those of you who don’t know, is the co-founder of The Atavist Magazine and the author of The Mastermind: A True Story of Murder, Empire, and a New. Kind of Crime Lord (podcast here). He was also one of the three co-hosts for the now sunsetted Longform Podcast.
His work is varied and courageous. In a sense, he’s fearless (not to be confused with reckless); there’s an entrepreneurial spirit to the arc of his career that I greatly admire. He has been traditionally published in many glossies and a major publisher for The Mastermind, but he’s also built his own stage in various magazines and podcasts. Love it.
Parting Shot: On Inconvenience
This past weekend I recorded my first ever live podcast. I wrote a little blog about it. There was a time, back in the age of flip phones, when it took effort read your favorite blogs or websites. You would have a list of bookmarks and it’d be part of your routine to check on those websites to see if your favorite writers or creators had anything new to offer. I checked Metallica.com every day back in the day.
Then along comes social media. 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. We let the machines feed us. Even if we wanted to get updates from the people we follow, unless we actively sought them out, we might not hear from them at all. Back in the day, the internet was beautifully inconvenient in that regard. You had to seek it out.
You had to go see things in person. That’s what I long for these days. To lean into inconvenience. To bookmark things again and actively visit the websites of authors or artists and see what they’re up to. Or create a newsstand on your own website, like the one in the lower right corner of this webpage.
And so, the live event was inconvenient. You had to attend in person to see the real, raw, live show. It was recorded for podcast purposes, but it will be edited, as I always do, and rebroadcast, but if you weren’t there, you missed it. There was pressure from one subset of Oregon Writers Colony members to live stream it, but that would defeat the purpose. I understand there are accessibility issues, but the podcast will be the place to experience the event.
We had a soft opening and about 15 people showed up and bought food, beer, tea, coffee and got to experience something of the moment, something inconvenient because they all had to put people clothes on, leave their homes, get in their cars, find parking, commune in public, buy stuff from our gracious hosts in Gratitude Brewing, and experience something that was here one minute and gone the next.
People exchanged business cards and chatted each other up. There were no Zoom windows open. This was face to face. This was raging against the algorithm at its purest. 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. Ruby McConnell and I hatched this idea about a year ago to do something inconvenient and reawaken that lost spirit of the live event, something Eugene doesn’t have. Maybe there will be copycats but we took the lead and nobody’s gonna catch us. So stay wild CNFers, and if you can’t do, interview, see ya!
