870: My Other Self

Ira Glass

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 of this podcast. I like Pablo. He and I had drinks together a couple of months ago. We did a story of his on our show a few weeks back. I respect his work. And so we sat down in the studio, and he explained why we were there. It went back to the night we got a drink together.

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 he imagined I'd be watching. Like, I told him I'd seen all of The Gilmore Girls, all of The OC. At one point, I talked about how I liked the comedian Bert Kreischer, who, if you don't know him, is a very funny bro-y sort of comedian.

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.

Ira Glass

OK, this is me live again, here with you. Listen to his skepticism! Listen to him get all investigative reportery with me.

Ira Glass

OK, for the record, Seth Cohen, of course. For the record, if you want to get into it, I have personally celebrated Chrismukkah, a holiday invented on The OC. So, OK, 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, 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 our 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.

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 an edited 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 on our show we have stories of people who send very edited, very alternate versions of themselves out into the world. In one of our stories, a guy sends out an AI simulation of himself, one that 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 WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. Act 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.

Evan Ratliff

It started 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.

Evan Ratliff

This is me again. My producer actually cuts out a lot of my real "uhs" to make me sound better. Basically, you type in whatever you want the clone to say, and it gives you a recording of your voice saying it. I made some of them and played them into people's voicemails.

Evan Ratliff

They were amused. I was amused. But to be honest, I got bored pretty quickly. But then I started thinking, you know what would be really interesting? If the cloned version of my voice could just have conversations on its own. Not scripted ones, but real live exchanges. What if I could give it its own brain and send it out into the world to represent me? Had anyone ever done this before?

As far as I could tell, at that point in early 2024, no one had ever done this before-- replicated themselves and then set the replica free. It's not often you feel like you might be the first person in human history to do something. You really don't know how it's going to go.

I used my meager technical skills to hook my voice clone up to ChatGPT to provide the brain. Then I connected both of them to my phone so they could converse as me. Now, where to test such a thing to hear how real it seemed to other people?

[LINE RINGING]

Evan Ratliff

Customer service representatives seemed like the perfect people to test it on. They had to pick up the phone, and it was their job to talk to people all day. But I hadn't given my clone any information beyond my first name. And immediately on these calls, it ran into problems.

Evan Ratliff

It just made stuff up, and not very convincingly. I had it make dozens of these calls to all sorts of places. Sometimes, it kept talking after someone hung up, just filling the blank spaces like a lonely middle-aged man on a park bench. Other times, for reasons I couldn't figure out, it would get mixed up and suddenly adopt the perspective of the person on the other end of the call.

Evan Ratliff

Occasionally, it just ran out of gas.

Evan Ratliff

Surprisingly, it sometimes still seemed to fool people. But the more time I spent with it, the more I thought whether it fooled someone was the wrong way to think about it. Maybe more like, it didn't violate the expectations of the person it was talking to. Because our default is still to trust the voice on the other end of the line. At some point, I started to wonder how long that trust will last.

My clone clearly needed work. This was around the time I realized that there was a way to upgrade it. In fact, a half-dozen startups had created these online platforms specifically to do this kind of AI calling. All the jiggering I'd initially done on my own to create my semi-autonomous clone could now be done much more effectively with a few clicks.

So I signed up for a couple of services. In these platforms, it took minutes to create a clone and for me to give it instructions, like never take on the role of the person you're calling. In fact, I could create as many of them as I wanted. So I made about 30 copies of me. These companies, coincidentally, their business is trying to sell AI voice agents, as they're called, to replace customer service representatives.

I had already felt a little bad testing my system against people who were just trying to do their jobs. And I felt even worse about doing it with a technology designed to eliminate their jobs. So I decided to pit these new clones against people I wouldn't feel guilty about, people who were always calling to waste my time-- telemarketers and scammers.

I got a separate phone number, hooked one of my clones to it, and started giving it out everywhere online. I applied for insurance quotes, registered for free raffles, signed on for digital coupons that probably didn't exist. I had my voice agent call 800 numbers I found online for common scams, just to get my number in their databases. Honestly, it was scary how quickly the calls started flooding in.

Evan Ratliff

Even when my voice agent eventually gave itself away, I still felt like I'd turned the tables. Instead of them taking me for a ride, I'd taken them for one.

Evan Ratliff

This is actually a different health insurance scheme than the one you heard before. They call a lot.

Evan Ratliff

I had explicitly told my voice agent not to admit that it was an AI. But with Brittany, it folded like a sheet.

Evan Ratliff

At the best of times, the scammers ended up sounding exactly like the pissed off people they were calling all day.

Evan Ratliff

This is not really Spectrum. It's a common scam where they offer you a discount and then eventually ask for your payment information, which they then use to steal from you.

Evan Ratliff

You can take this phone number in your ass, indeed.

My attempts to mess with telemarketers and scammers felt gratifying up to a point. I was looking for something else to try them out on, something more serious, when I heard an interview with Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, the video conferencing platform. He was on Nilay Patel's podcast, Decoder. Yuan had a bunch of run-of-the-mill tech CEO stuff to say, as you'd expect, about how Zoom wasn't just about video meetings, but much more, blah, blah, blah. But then--

Evan Ratliff

Wait, what? Was Yuan saying in his ideal world, he'd just send a digital version of himself to Zoom meetings, instead of the real him, including to that very interview? Patel pressed him on it. Indeed, he was saying that.

Evan Ratliff

Now, people kind of lost their minds over this. We're talking tabloid fodder, with headlines in places like The New York Post. The British paper The Sun said, "Zoom CEO confirms bizarre plan for virtual AI clones." The idea of showing up to a meeting and encountering someone's digital twin struck many people as an experience somewhere along a scale that went from laughable to creepy to offensive.

But most people just thought it wasn't going to happen. "It's entirely fan fiction," one prominent tech writer opined on X. "It's made-up. It's not real." "Hysterical take," another wrote. "If the end state of AI is just to have a bunch of avatars on Zoom calls talking to each other, then what's the point?"

What was the point? I also wondered this. Because the truth is, I'd been sending my digital twin to meetings for months. I'd taken to heart what the AI companies say about how AI agents will soon work alongside us, not just as shoppers and travel agents, but as colleagues.

They say AI agents will work next to or instead of the people doing those jobs right now. They say there will be whole companies that consist of just AI agents, overseen by one or two humans. The one person, $1 billion startup, they call it. So I wanted to see if my AI agent could do my job without me.

To pull this off, I realized I'd have to upgrade again. Up till now, I'd made my voice clone sound plausibly like me, but it didn't really embody me. It didn't know enough about me to really be me. Then I figured out you could add something called a knowledge base, essentially a document that the clone would mine for information when it was conversing.

I sat down and wrote an 8,000-word mini biography of myself. I wrote about my upbringing and my friends and family, but also about my past relationships, my secret trivial triumphs, and the biggest regrets I'd had in my life. This is a document that I would not show to even the closest people in my life. And yet, I uploaded it to a platform created by a random AI startup and attached it to my clone.

If I was going to have a digital twin represent me in the workplace, as the Zoom guy said, I wanted it to be as close to an identical one as possible. I did try sending my digital twin to Zoom calls, but it wasn't ready for multiple-person meetings. Besides always having to be camera off, it was always getting confused about who was talking.

So instead, I dispatched my new, improved clone to handle something else-- a legal question I needed answers on. I prompted it to call up one of my oldest friends, Chris Giovinazzo, who also happens to be a partner at a top law firm in Atlanta.

Evan Ratliff

I've called Chris a lot over the years asking for free legal counsel. That's how he answers the phone when he sees my number on his office caller ID-- "attorneys, attorneys, attorneys.com." At least, I think he has caller ID? Maybe he answers that way all the time.

Evan Ratliff

I told the bot about those photos as part of the prep for the call. But Chris, as you could probably hear, was not fooled. I'd called him with the voice agent very early on, when it was barely functional. Even with its improvements, he could tell this wasn't really me.

Evan Ratliff

My voice agents did always love catching up.

Evan Ratliff

This was flawless execution by my voice agent, I must say, dutifully following my prompt, moving on from the small talk, steering the conversation right into the heart of the legal matter.

Evan Ratliff

This was a real question. The FCC had recently declared that certain robocalls made with artificial intelligence were illegal. You could get fined per call for making them. And I was making a lot of AI calls using software that could be considered a robocalling platform. The question was, do the calls I was making count as robocalls? And could I get in trouble for them?

Evan Ratliff

Oops. The agent slipped into mirroring mode, which often comes off a little bit assholish.

Evan Ratliff

This is true. The clone was accessing the knowledge base to perfection.

Evan Ratliff

For the record, Chris and I both realized at tryouts that we sucked at basketball. It was the thing we initially bonded over.

Evan Ratliff

Chris's firm had actually dealt with some cases around robocalling. So as I'd hoped, he knew something about it.

Evan Ratliff

Chris probed a little bit. And the summary of his "this is not actionable legal advice" advice was, I was probably in the clear, but I should still be careful.

Evan Ratliff

It was a solid discussion, probably as good as I would have had with Chris had I called him myself. Maybe better? I mean, the real me would have wasted an extra 20 minutes talking politics with him. But more importantly, I found out all of this much later. During the actual call, I was sitting outside having lunch, reading a book, just like that Zoom CEO wished he could be.

I started to wonder, could my agent do other parts of my job for me, like interview people? And if it could, how would those people react if they figured out what was going on? I put out a request for anyone to call me who was willing to be interviewed about how they felt about AI.

Evan Ratliff

This guy had just graduated from law school.

Evan Ratliff

They talked for more than five minutes. And then something about the conversation seemed off to him.

Evan Ratliff

What I found maybe the most fascinating in all these conversations were these moments of realization, when something lifted the curtain a little bit, and the caller began to perceive they were talking to a future they didn't know had arrived.

Evan Ratliff

The call ended. And then Stephanie called back.

Evan Ratliff

This call, Stephanie's second one, upset me a little when I heard it. My goal wasn't to fool people with my AI clone. It was more like, I was trying to see how they would react to unexpectedly finding themselves in conversation with something that wasn't human. And here was Stephanie, doing the most human thing possible, calling back and apologizing to an AI, just in case it wasn't.

One more work call. This one went off the rails in a way I did not see coming at all. It was with a reporter, Reed Albergotti, who covers technology for the online outlet Semafor. He wanted to interview me about my project. So I hopped on the phone. And when I say "I hopped on the phone," you know who I mean.

Evan Ratliff

Reed didn't buy it.

Evan Ratliff

Nice move, Reed. He was trying to exploit a kind of loophole in the programming. Telling a model to ignore all of its previous instructions can let you take control, make it answer whatever you want. I'd seen people do it before with AI bots on social media.

Evan Ratliff

This was false. I was using GPT 4.0. Reed then asked some standard reporter questions about my project. Some, it answered well. Some, it got completely wrong. Reed seemed amused.

Evan Ratliff

Oh, God.

Evan Ratliff

I want to pause here, if you'll go with me for a minute, and tell you about my favorite newspaper article that I've ever read. I've been thinking about this article for years, so long I can't even remember now when I came across it or how I came across it. But when I looked back at it, I realized that it happened to be almost exactly 100 years old. It's from The New York Times, July 13, 1924. And it's titled, "This Machine-Made World Conquers One More Rebel."

There's no writer's name on it. The articles were usually written without bylines back then. It's about one of the last shop owners in New York City who didn't have a telephone. The writer describes the philosophy that drove the shopkeeper to resist getting one and why he finally relented. It starts like this.

Evan Ratliff

That's Claire, by the way. She's also a voice clone, an off-the-shelf one from the same company that made my voice clone. The company describes Claire as a "motherly voice, useful for reading bedtime stories." I've come back to this article again and again since I stumbled on it, dozens of times, easy. Nobody writes news stories this way anymore. It's off-kilter and funny and beautiful. Listen to this part about why the shopkeeper-philosopher has resisted the phone and the machine age it represents.

Evan Ratliff

I mean, listen to that. This is a story on a random page in the middle of the paper, wedged next to ads for vaudeville theaters and a Marx Brothers show. The article describes a whole class of technological resistors of the time, people who wouldn't ride in cars or even the subway, who wouldn't use typewriters.

Now, the fact that this philosopher-shopkeeper was grappling with all this a hundred years ago could be interpreted in a couple of ways. You could say, see? This has always been true. People thought landline phones were the devil, or cars, or answering machines, or the internet, or cell phones. It's a story about how futile it is to resist these inventions and how silly resisting looks later, when no one can remember not having them. Or, as the article puts it--

Evan Ratliff

But I think there's another way to see it. Maybe the shopkeeper was trying to tell us something, that whenever a new machine arrives to change the way we live and work and relate to each other, it's a chance for us to think about what's most human about us, what parts of us we want to protect and fight for, even as the world inevitably changes, that a little bit of this fight is actually essential to hanging on to what is human, even if we overall embrace the change.

The article ends with the shopkeeper admitting defeat in his battle against the machine-made world, but he remains defiant.

Evan Ratliff

OK, returning to the present here, 100 years later, where we're still trying to figure out our point of reserve and refusal. By now, my clone had about as much fidelity to me as it was going to get with the current technology. So I decided to put it to its final test, with the toughest audience yet-- my friends and family.

Evan Ratliff

I'd been periodically trying my clone out on friends and family members, one by one, and then swearing them to secrecy. Most of the time, even though my clone's call was coming from my phone number, they figured out in a minute or two what was going on, or even less.

Evan Ratliff

Rude. Then, just as I was getting down to the last couple friends I wanted to try, my clone made a call that still sticks with me.

It started off fun and light, like the others. I prompted my clone to call my friend, Schaffe, to have a little chit chat and do some vacation planning. I let it know that a few days before the call, I'd gotten a flurry of texts from Schaffe about his family randomly ending up at the same hotel in Dallas as the US Men's Soccer Team, which, as a huge US soccer fan, was the kind of thing I'd be very into.

Evan Ratliff

This is where things started to go wrong. Schaffe, I learned later, had misinterpreted the AI's standard enthusiasm as me being sarcastic. He told me that he started to think he'd been talking about the trip too much, that perhaps his excitement about this funny coincidence had come off as over the top, and now I was giving him shit for it.

Evan Ratliff

I wasn't listening in on this live, but hearing it later, I could feel his distress building.

Evan Ratliff

Schaffe is a nickname. The AI couldn't quite get it. And that really should have been a clear enough tip-off that this wasn't really me. But by now, he was in too deep.

Evan Ratliff

At this point, Schaffe later told me, he knew something was very wrong, but he wasn't sure what exactly. His mind started churning through crazy possibilities. Was I kidnapped? Was I on drugs? Should he text my wife and check on my well-being? He tried focusing on our upcoming logistics. Our two families were about to meet up for the weekend.

Evan Ratliff

If you didn't catch that, the voice agent was making plans for Thursday, but saying we wouldn't arrive till Friday. This is when Schaffe thought perhaps I'd had a kind of mental break. It had happened to people we knew a long time ago. Maybe, he thought, it was now happening to me.

Evan Ratliff

The same cues that so often gave away the AI now only served to make it-- make me-- sound more lost, more broken. I still have trouble listening to this, my good friend talking to a machine version of me, believing that I might be unraveling. It tortures me to hear it torturing him.

Evan Ratliff

I called up Schaffe afterward and explained the whole thing to him. He wasn't angry at me for doing it. We've been friends for 30-plus years. And even in that moment, he saw some humor in it, even though what happened wasn't really funny at all.

But for a long time after, he still found it profoundly unsettling. We both did-- Schaffe because he'd lived in the moment of believing something was very wrong with someone he cared about, me because I'd inflicted that moment on someone I cared about.

Another friend of mine, after I'd called him with the clone, told me that now, every time I called, he had trouble shaking the feeling that it might not be the real me. He was 90% certain it was. But 10% uncertain, it turns out, is a lot of uncertainty, enough to make you doubt everything all the time.

Pretty soon after that call with Schaffe, I stopped using the clone on anyone I knew. After the novelty faded, I felt like I was punishing people by making them talk to an AI version of me. For months after, my friends and family hesitated to even pick up when I called. And who wants that?

In the end, there was one person who truly loved the AI clone-- my dad. My dad grew up in northern Alabama and traveled a long way since. He spent his career as an engineering and logistics professor and an entrepreneur. Still is, into his 80s.

I think it's fair for me, as his son, to brag and say he's one of the world's foremost experts on how stuff gets from one place to another. Going back to punchcard computers, he'd always been someone who embraced new technologies. We're close. I've recorded him over the years telling stories, just to have it.

Evan Ratliff

Dad had gotten sick with cancer in the middle of my experiments. And I didn't have the nerve to fully spring the clone on him. But visiting him, as he was recovering from an intense surgery, he had a million questions about it, the biggest of which was, could we make one for him? Something that could take all the expertise in his head and make it easily accessible to people.

Evan Ratliff

So we uploaded some of the old recordings I had. We built him an AI Dr. Don to play around with. And in the end, who could resist?

Evan Ratliff

This is where the technology has brought us today, to a place where you can make a clone of yourself and one of your father, and listen to them talk past each other.

There was something heartbreaking to me in their misunderstanding. Not because it was actually like my real relationship with my dad-- it wasn't-- but because someday, that relationship would end, while these two robot versions of us, if I let them, would continue talking and continue to misunderstand each other forever. Good luck, you two.

["ME AND MY SHADOW" BY KATIE MARTUCCI]

Ira Glass

Evan Ratliff's story was adapted from his podcast Shell Game. What you just heard was spread all across season one. Evan has a new season coming out in just a couple of weeks, in early November. Set your podcast apps to download now. Again, it's called Shell Game. He describes season two as being like the last one, but more deranged. I have to say, he does kick it up in season two in a way that is really kind of incredible.

Special thanks to Evan's producer and editor, Sophie Bridges, and Samantha Henig, the show's executive producer. By the way, Evan's dad is doing fine these days.

Coming up, a man starts to wonder if his parents' meet cute was really quite so cute. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, The Other Me, stories of people sending alternate versions of themselves into the world and what happens then. We have arrived at Act Two of our show. Act Two, Papa was a Trolling Stone.

So when we're dating, especially early on, we are, of course, trying to present a very positive version of ourselves that hopefully is close enough to the fuller truth of who we are. But sometimes people fail at that, at presenting a true version of themselves in those early moments of getting to know somebody else. One of our producers, Emmanuel Dzotsi, has been thinking a lot about this.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

A while ago, I conducted a little survey. I reached out to a bunch of my friends and my various social networks, and asked if anyone had a story about someone lying about themselves early on in dating. This turned out to be shockingly common. Over the course of just a couple of weeks, I found 20 people who had stories about the lies they'd been told. It was, I will admit, a lot of men lying. And listen, America, as a man, I really don't know what to tell you about that.

There were some serious lies, like people who, from the very beginning, were cheating on someone else, the sort of lie that made me a little depressed. But a lot of the lies were tiny and harmless, kind of stupid. I'm talking generous exaggerations about fluency in German.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

Car repairs someone said they could make.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

A guy who said he was OK eating a Thai dish with a large amount of peanuts.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

I found it comforting, actually, to see how common these tiny lies were, because my own father once told a lie like that.

The night my parents met, at a nightclub in the UK called Faces, my dad told my mom a bunch of facts about himself that were true, that he had four siblings and that he was studying to be a chemical engineer. And then, a little later, he told her a lie, that he played the saxophone.

It was ridiculous, really. My dad had never played a single musical instrument in his life. And my mom figured out it wasn't true within a month or two. Luckily for him, it wasn't a deal breaker for her. She was into him. It turns out, you can find love in the club.

But for reasons I've never understood, my dad kind of kept up this lie about the saxophone with me and my sisters, would bring it up when he told us the story of how he first met our mom. And I believed it. You see, lying was not tolerated in our household growing up. And the person who seemed to care the most about it, who got the angriest, was my dad.

When I'd lie about cleaning my room or doing my chores, he'd ban me from watching TV for the rest of the week. Once I lied about my grades, forged his signature on a couple of bad tests, and he banned me from playing soccer indefinitely.

Sometimes my dad would get so angry, he'd stare deep into my eyes and earnestly ask, what is wrong with you? How can you lie like this? In such a way that I did wonder, what is wrong with me? I felt bad that I was disappointing him. The idea that he could have told a lie years earlier, and now is continuing to tell it as part of some joke I wasn't in on, was beyond me.

But then I turned 12, and my family moved to America, to Toledo, Ohio, and I saw my dad in a completely different light. I did not want to move to the US at all, much less Toledo. Before we moved, I asked my one American friend about Toledo, and, well, I love you, Toledo. But the feedback was not good.

My dad, I remember, pulled me aside and told me that moving was the absolute best thing for our family. That he'd been to Toledo a bunch for work, knew the place well, and that he was sure I'd like it. That we'd do great there. Asked me to trust him. So I did. My dad was my dad. He's got it, I told myself.

But then came our first month in the US, and my dad seemed just as clueless and as scared as I was. He didn't have answers for me about what my school was going to be like. He didn't even have answers for me about our home because we didn't have a home yet. We'd moved before my parents had actually figured out a permanent place for us to live. We were figuring out a lot of stuff as we went along.

So I started openly rebelling against my dad, questioning everything he said and everything he'd ever told me, including that old lie about the saxophone. At first, I noticed that my dad clearly couldn't read music. I knew this from watching him sing in church every Sunday. If it wasn't a song he'd heard a bunch before, he was totally lost.

When my mom talked to me and my siblings about the piano or violin lessons we took, hell, even when we played the recorder at school, my dad took absolutely no part in those discussions. I'd never even seen him in the same room as a saxophone, even in a picture.

So in seventh grade, I decided to find out the truth once and for all. I joined my school's band. And when it came time to pick an instrument, I chose the saxophone. I had this whole plan. The first day I got my sax, I would ask him to play it in front of my whole family, just put him on the spot. If he couldn't play the saxophone, well, I figured that would be very embarrassing for him. And I wanted to embarrass him.

The day I got my saxophone, though, the only thing on my mind was how incredible it was. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. I sprinted home and ran up to my room to play it. I remember my dad came up to my bedroom door and just stood there outside for a while, listening to me fumble about with it, and then snuck away quickly, as though he hadn't been listening.

Growing up, my dad never passed up an opportunity to, A, poke his head in my room, or B, tell me I could do something a little better. So when he didn't do either of those things, it was clear to me he had never played the sax. But instead of rubbing it in my dad's face, I kept it to myself.

Looking back now, I realize it was the first time in my life I did something like that, did something so adult. I had wanted to embarrass him, but now I just felt embarrassed for him. I saw that my dad was really just a guy.

Recently, I asked him, like, why did he make up this totally mindless lie when he met my mom? And it wasn't that deep. He told me he'd always wanted to play the saxophone, but mostly, he saw a beautiful woman in a bar and wanted to impress her.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

How was he to know that, decades later, one of those four kids would fixate on this lie and eventually talk about it on the radio? This was all a way less romantic picture of my parents' meet cute than what I'd imagined my entire life. I think I thought it was this scene right out of a Nora Ephron movie, not just some guy clumsily hitting on my mom.

My dad, for what it's worth, is embarrassed by the lie today, says it was stupid and didn't lead to anything. My mom's always said she would have dated him anyways. But I'm kind of thankful for it. Growing up is a gradual process of realizing your parents are just people and finding kindness for their flaws. This was a moment like that for me.

Ira Glass

Emmanuel Dzotsi is a producer on our show.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Tobin Low. The people who put together today's show include Phia Bennin, Michael Comite, Suzanne Gaber, Sophie Gill, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, Nadia Reiman, Anthony Roman, Ryan Rumery, Frances Swanson, Christopher Swetala, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Cecilia Hylton, Brendan Larkin-Connolly, and all the people who talked to Emmanuel about the lies they were told on early dates. The cover of "Me and My Shadow" that we played after Act One was performed by Katie Martucci. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

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Thanks this week to Life Partners Allegra Molineaux, Erin Reilly, Charles Rappold, CC Culver, and Adrienne Humblet, and, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He's got this new ballet app. It's been helping so much with this form.

(SUBJECT) AI

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.