Shell Game is a podcast about things that are not what they seem, hosted by journalist Evan Ratliff. Season 2 tells the story of enterprise and entrepreneurship in the AI age. Evan confronts head-on the assertion from tech entrepreneurs and VCs that we’re on the precipice of AI remaking the workforce. That we should expect not just AI colleagues working alongside us, but also, by Sam Altman’s telling, the dawn of a billion-dollar company with only one human involved. Evan learns what it would take to create such a company by doing it. With the help of his technical advisor and Stanford student Matty Bohacek, he launches the startup, called HurumoAI, with five AI employees created using tools including Lindy, Retell AI and ElevenLabs. To inform how he thinks about his own unnerving power to create and manipulate human imposters, Evan seeks guidance from Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University. Over the course of eight episodes, he explores what AI agents tell us about the work we do, the meaning we find in it, and the world that their makers say we’ll all be living in soon enough.
