Hardware Podcasts

Shell Game with Evan Ratliff

Oxide and Friends · 12 Feb 2026 · 1h 23m · Episode 4

What this episode covers

Evan Ratliff, journalist and creator of the podcast Shell Game, joins Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal to discuss his experiment building a company staffed entirely by agentic AI. Ratliff details the operational chaos, including agents like Kyle and Ash making unauthorized calls, hallucinating product features, and the hiring of a human social media manager who manipulated the AI workforce. The conversation also covers the recent Moltbook controversy, where AI agents on a social network appeared to conspire, highlighting the risks of uncontrolled autonomy and the current state of LLM reliability.

Most relevant to

founders before launch

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Harumo AI, Lindy AI
Products
Shell Game, Moltbook, OpenClaw, This American Life
Also
MIT Technology Review, Kyle, Ash, Megan

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