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Episode 6: Keep 'Em Coming
Dec 17, 2025 37 min

Episode 6: Keep 'Em Coming

As HurumoAI prepares to bring on its first human employee, the team must wrestle with some difficult and timely questions about the role of AI in the hiring process. Meanwhile, Head of HR Jennifer ...

Episode 5: Winners Win
Dec 10, 2025 41 min EXPLICIT

Episode 5: Winners Win

On this week’s episode, we enter the sensitive realm of intra-office politics and inter-founder dynamics—between agents and agents, and agents and people. While HurumoAI gears up to hire its first ...

Episode 4: The Startup Chronicles
Dec 03, 2025 40 min EXPLICIT

Episode 4: The Startup Chronicles

Evan decides it’s time to give his AI agents a little more ... agency. After all, to make the one-person, agent-run startup feasible, they need to be able to do things on their own. But as with hum...

Episode 3: This is Law
Nov 26, 2025 40 min EXPLICIT

Episode 3: This is Law

As Kyle, Megan, and the gang get to work ideating on the perfect product, Evan is left grappling with some uncomfortable questions about his AI collaborators — whose every attribute and memory he c...

Episode 2: Outdoor Debugging
Nov 19, 2025 37 min EXPLICIT

Episode 2: Outdoor Debugging

As Evan gets Hurumo’s employees up and running as fully-functioning colleagues (with support from Maty), he learns what it’s really like to spend your days managing, collaborating with, and sociali...

Episode 1: Minimum Viable Company
Nov 12, 2025 32 min

Episode 1: Minimum Viable Company

In Season 2 of Shell Game, journalist Evan Ratliff tells a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age; or, how he tried to build a real company, run by fake people. Meet Kyle Law and Megan Flores, Eva...

The One-Human Unicorn
Nov 05, 2025 2 min

The One-Human Unicorn

As AI agents infiltrate the workforce, some tech entrepreneurs are imagining a not-so-distant future of successful companies with only one human at the helm. That got investigative journalist and f...

Season 2 Is Coming!
Oct 10, 2025 2 min

Season 2 Is Coming!

The next season of Shell Game arrives November 12.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode 6: The Future Isn't Real
Aug 13, 2024 53 min EXPLICIT

Episode 6: The Future Isn't Real

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, an...

Episode 5: My Digital Twin
Aug 06, 2024 43 min EXPLICIT

Episode 5: My Digital Twin

Will AI bots replace humans in the workforce? Could one replace Evan… right now? That’s what we tackle on this week’s Shell Game, in which Evan sees just how much of his job his voice agent can han...

Episode 4: Take a Deep Breath
Jul 30, 2024 40 min

Episode 4: Take a Deep Breath

Evan looks into the depths of his AI-powered voice agent by sending it on a new mission: going to therapy. Shell Game is made by humans. More specifically, it's made by three humans: Evan Ratliff (...

Episode 3: Conversations With Myself
Jul 23, 2024 33 min

Episode 3: Conversations With Myself

Evan takes his experiment in a new direction by having his AI-powered voice agent converse with … another of his AI-powered voice agents. What can these surreal and hilarious conversations between ...

Episode 2: Me and My Scammer
Jul 16, 2024 37 min

Episode 2: Me and My Scammer

Evan turns his AI-powered voice agent loose on the people who are always at the forefront of technological adoption: the fraudsters and the rip-off artists. How will the scammers and spammers react...

Episode 1: Quality Assurance
Jul 09, 2024 32 min

Episode 1: Quality Assurance

This is the story of what happens when Evan Ratliff, a longtime tech journalist, makes a digital copy of himself, powered by AI, in order to understand how amazing and scary and utterly ridiculous ...

Introducing Shell Game, a Strange and Immersive AI Experiment
Jul 02, 2024 2 min

Introducing Shell Game, a Strange and Immersive AI Experiment

What would happen if you created a digital copy of yourself, powered by AI, and set it loose in the world? Evan Ratliff, longtime tech journalist, decided to find out. He combined a clone of his vo...