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What Was Believing What You Hear? A Dirt Nap City Dead End · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Alex.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Hey man.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: What's going on?
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: How you doing?
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm doing alright.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think I just shared with you that I prepared some dead ends for today.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, what's a dead end?
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad you asked.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's something that we used to do or used to have or used to exist, but doesn't really exist anymore.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: And this one, but so I've got two that I'm gonna do later.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna record during the same session, but but um but this one, this is a third one, that I just want to kind of get your reaction to something, and then I want to talk about it, and then that'll be it.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: It'll be short and sweet.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: You down for that?
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think I'm I'm game to play this.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna tell you that um I actually wondered if there's a possibility this would make you angry.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Oh.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: But AW Alf Alfred from Austin assured me that you should not get angry about this.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: I would get angry you saying that it doesn't exist anymore.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I would no no that I would get angry about uh uh for what I'm about to uh play for you.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: But but really, there's no reason to get angry.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: I just I just was being a little paranoid.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: So now so now I just uh just I want you to listen to this.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I was recently sent a recording um of somebody uh telling me some things, and I want you to listen to it.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: All right, we get your reaction.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh one good thing about recording uh these episodes virtually over the internet is that we don't have to be in the same room together because Kelly's farts smell really, really bad.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: You didn't record that, did you?
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, I never said that.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: That was AI yes, yes.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: That was uh that was AI Alex.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's pretty crazy.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that crazy?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and I I bring it up because you know it's gonna be the the thing I think that is in the past is believing your ears or believing your eyes, you know, that that um that something actually really happened or or was really said.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um so basically what happened is uh Chris, one of our Patreons, he had been doing some uh AI voiceover stuff for me for my normal job, and he decided to take your voice and my voice and plug them into the AI algorithm and generate some things with it.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Make your own episode of Dirt Nap City.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: You could, you could, and so he played me the one of me first, and it was actually in a video, and he had made a new section of the video.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: We had recorded the video a long time ago, and I didn't remember what I had said, and so I didn't even think anything of it.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, What do you think?
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Yeah, it looks great.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: I you know, I seem to know what I'm talking about.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, Well, this section here, you didn't say it, and then he showed me.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you had forgotten that you hadn't said that.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it was all covered with b-roll shots, it wasn't showing me, it was just audio, but but it was mixed with my normal audio, and then he said, Yeah, and then uh, and then I did a couple of Alex, and so he played me uh that one, and I was like, Wow, that is just scary.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to play it for you one more time, and I kind of I think there's it sounds a little it sounds a lot like you, it does sound an awful lot like you, yeah.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: But then I also hear a little bit of Barack Obama in it.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I want you to listen this time with an ear towards Barack Obama.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, one good thing about recording uh these episodes virtually over the internet is that we don't have to be in the same room together because Kelly's farts smell really, really bad.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: You didn't record that, did you?
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: I like that part when I act like I was caught.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's funny because people tell me that I have that cadence of Obama, anyways.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'd never noticed it until I heard that recording.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Have you heard what NBC is doing with um and uh they're the digital arm of NBC uh for the upcoming Olympics.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: I guess if you're listening to this, the Olympics have already passed.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um they have a virtual Al Michaels, you know, the announcer, Al Michaels.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: And you can what you can do is you customize, you log into the NBC platform and you customize the events that you're interested in and the countries that you're interested in.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then every day you get a little digest of Al Michaels giving you highlights of the things that you liked, except for it's not it can't, you know, there's like five million possibilities or 50 million possibilities, infinite number, really.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, yeah.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: And but it's Al Michaels narrating it, virtual Al Michaels.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, he signed off on it and he's getting paid for it, but he doesn't have to do any of the work.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: So is it video and audio or just audio?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's video, it's not video of him, it's video of you know, highlights of highlights from the Olympics.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, I guess you know, where this really um just is terrifying is I I know that a lot of people are trying to scam people all the time.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Happens, you know, and and my grandmother actually got scammed for um because they called the caller told her, called on the phone and told her I had been in an accident and I needed money, and she had to go to Walgreens and buy gift cards, and you know, it was very, very fishy, but she fell for it and she bought like a$2,000 gift card and gave it to him, and and then uh and then called me later and was kind of mad at me.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Grandma, I had nothing to do with that.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: That was that was But imagine if that had been your voice telling her that.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's pretty scary stuff.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, it's probably um it's probably gonna be super efficient for things like you were talking about, like voiceovers, yeah, and things that somebody legitimately signs off on.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean we actually just had a project where um it was shot in the spring and it was supposed to go live in the middle of the summer, and it didn't go live in the middle of the summer, so then we were trying to kind of adapt it for the end of the summer, and we had to have the narrator say something different, and we used this was kind of how all this came to be.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: We used the program to do that, and uh we we did get permission from the actor who was in the original video.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, do you mind if we change what you said?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what we what you said, here's what we want you to say, and he was fine with it.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: But the thing that's great kind of crazy about that clip that you played, though, is that it wasn't robotic.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: No, it didn't sound like you know, Stephen Hawking.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um it you know, it didn't it just it had the right uh kind of inflections and even had the cadence that I kind of use.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that was that it genuinely sounded like I was doing an interview.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, so what um Chris told me was that as he created that, because I have not created one of these yet, um he he did all these, but what he told me was that you can add pauses, you can add kind of uh little stutters or bumbles, you know, to make it sound more natural.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and of course, the voice will train on what you sound like and what your cadence is and all that sort of thing, but you can kind of lengthen and shorten pauses and things like that.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And he said it took a bit of tweaking to get it to sound like that.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: Did he have this like the um does it help that we have all these hours of podcasting?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like, does that make it like a bigger sample size?
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: So interestingly, what he told me was that on this particular uh website, you can do two things.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: You can do a kind of short clip, and that short clip only requires um a short sample size, you know.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: So you can upload two or three minutes worth of stuff, and that's plenty to give it what it needs, and then you can make those adjustments to pauses and cadence and speed and all that sort of thing.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: But um, but if you want to go um if you want it to go to the next level, you have to pay because I think the first one up to 30 seconds or something is free.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then if you want to make a longer recording, you have to pay for it, and you can do a deeper, like you can train it with you know hours of stuff.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it'll just get better and better.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's amazing that that kind of stuff is basically free, though.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's the kind of stuff that the CIA you'd you'd expect them to have access to, and it would cost millions of dollars.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: But it's just pretty crazy that it's just available.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they had access to it 10 years ago, probably, right?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's like it's just like um GPS.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, that was that was always or the governments had GPS forever.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: We just got it later and it was less accurate, and now you know it catches up.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, I guess the takeaway from this is don't believe what you see, don't believe what you hear, because our ability, and and that's I guess if you were trying to name this dead end, what would you name it?
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Like what would it what what is the thing that we're we've lost?
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: I said personal identity at one point, but I I got shot down for that.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we didn't we haven't lost our personal identity, but we've lost authenticity, I suppose.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, I don't even know if because authenticity, we haven't lost authenticity because we can still have it.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: We've lost the ability to know to believe our eyes and ears.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's kind of that's kind of the simplest way I can put it is you can't you can't believe just because you see or hear something now that's been recorded, you can't believe that it's true.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Or imagine that technology where someone could type in words and the computer says them in your voice in real time.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: So you could be on a phone call with somebody, or you just say it and it it it trades your voice for someone else's voice.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it's you basically remember those old things when they would interview people anonymously and it would deepen their voice or you know, change their voice.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: It changes their voice, but it changes my voice to yours, or or vice versa.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: But on the other hand, imagine the possibilities for people with ALS or people that can't speak anymore, you know, and and that have lost that ability.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I talk about Stephen Hawking.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that it has some great implications for but but yeah, like everything else, people are going to use technology for good and evil.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: I guess I guess in that situation, um if you at one point could talk and then you couldn't, and you were able to um you were able to take the recordings from when you could talk and make that into your voice, that would be something interesting.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's something that Roger Ebert passed uh Dirt Knap City Yeah check it out half of one uh Dirtnap City episode.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: He later in life, you know, lost his ability to speak, but but he had so many hours of his show that they were able to do something that not even close to what we just heard, but this was like 20 years ago, and but he had like a Stephen Hawking type machine that had his voice, but they said it wasn't available to the general public because you have to have had all that library of of voice to do that.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now it would be really simple.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's just crazy that the technology's gotten so different so fast.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I got I got one more for you here.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you want to hear another one?
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: Kelly, I I wanted you to know that I am super stoked to be doing this podcast with you.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, even though we have been friends for decades, I feel like every time we record an episode, I get to know you a little bit more.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that is very meaningful to me.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: You're always fun to hang out with.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: Although you you uh you do tend to interrupt me while we while we are recording, and your dad jokes are often so bad that I pretend not to hear you.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: I still think you are one heck of a friend, and I hope that you you never change.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, yeah.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know, it's just a well-spoken person.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: There's no I mean, that's that's the the good version.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's the rehearsed, practiced version that doesn't right.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: The wedding speech.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we could do our wedding speeches with these in the future.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: It wouldn't be a terrible idea to uh to do a best man kind of uh wedding speech and then just lip sync it because you know it wouldn't you know it wouldn't fall apart.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Millie vanilli, baby.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: If you get a little nervous, you just maybe I could do that when I do lectures.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: I could just uh write it out and then just lip sync the whole thing.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Or not, or just sit there without your lips moving and your and your students are going, what drink drink some water during it?
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Ventriloquism.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I hope we haven't lost our ability to trust our eyes and ears, but um, you know what they say, trust but verify.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, interesting.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: Alex wants to around so smart and precise.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: Not like you and me know why you're cold as dice.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: Lift inside quiet.