Evan pushes the experiment one step further, sending his AI voice agent to talk to his closest friends and family — his buddies, his daughters, his dad. With their alternately joyful, skeptical, and painful reactions to meeting an AI version of him, he tries to come to terms with what generative AI means in this machine-made age. Shell Game is made by humans. More specifically, it's made by three humans: Evan Ratliff (host and writer), Sophie Bridges (producer), and Samantha Henig (executive producer). Visit shellgame.co to find out more and support the show. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.shellgame.co/subscribe
Hey, this is Evan.
Hi.
This is Stephanie.
Nice to meet you, Stephanie.
As you probably know, I'll be recording our conversation for a podcast.
Is that all right with you?
Yeah, go ahead.
From the beginning of this experiment, I've been exploring my personal feelings about AI and voice clones and voice agents, and sometimes just exploring my feelings, period.
But as a journalist, I'm used to gathering a wider range of views too.
I'd gotten some sense of the ambient anxiety around AI from therapists and startup founders and people I worked with.
But what about the general public?
So, a couple months ago, I put out a request for anyone to call me at a listed phone number to answer a few questions for me about how they felt about AI.
The number forwarded to one of my VAPI numbers, so of course it would be my AI voice agent asking the questions.
Hi.
Well, I'm glad we could connect.
So, Stephanie, have you had much personal interaction with AI?
You know, I'm on Twitter, so I'm assuming that I see things on Twitter that are generated.
I'm 57, so I have one foot in the modern technology and then one foot back in the past where there were four channels or whatnot.
So.
But I'm.