TechStuff

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 humans, freedom sometimes comes with a certain amount of anarchy. To sign up for our newsletter and access ad-free episodes, visit shellgame.co. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What’s driving America’s growing backlash against surveillance tech? Taylor Lorenz ( User Mag ) unpacks the outcry over Flock cameras and why the company thinks they are being unfairly targeted. Then, Gerrit De Vynck ( The Washington Post ) breaks down Mark Zuckerberg’s latest AI manifesto and Meta’s bid to catch up in the AI race. Finally, Nitasha Tiku ( The Washington Pos...

As Oz predicted, 2026 may very well be the year of the robot. At least, that’s what the robotics companies are promising. Oz sits down with Stephen Witt, author and frequent contributor to The New Yorker , to find out whether humanoid robots are really ready to hit the market. Spoiler: It’s a mixed bag.  Oz and Stephen Witt discuss the hurdles facing humanoid robots and the risks...

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 controls.  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...

What is Silicon Valley missing about the data center backlash? Jasmine Sun traveled to Wisconsin and Michigan to find out what's driving the public's growing mistrust of tech companies. Taylor Lorenz ( User Mag ) unpacks the internet's furious response to OpenAI's first influencer brand trip, what it reveals about the company's public image, and why Anthropic seems largely immune to the ire. Then,...

Brands, political parties, and businesses all want to know what you think. But what if you're not telling the truth? Cameron Fink, Ned Koh, and John Kessler, the founders of Aaru, believe the future of market research isn't polling humans—it's simulating them. They may be onto something. The three friends founded Aaru as teenagers, and it has since grown into a billion-dollar AI startup. Cam...

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 socializing alongside autonomous AI agents. And he quickly sees one of the significant cracks in the facade of the AI employee future: It’s one thing to get your agents to start acting like re...

Why is the US banning more Chinese technology? Reed Albergotti ( Semafor ) fills us in on the robot ban and what it means for American innovation. Then, new research on why Chinese open-source AI models may not be as big a threat as Washington makes it seem. Taylor Lorenz ( User Mag ) tells us about Substack’s new AI detection tool and what it reveals about how creators’ are using AI t...

What does it take to power the AI boom? Steve Vassallo, a roboticist turned General Partner at Foundation Capital, helped semiconductor company Cerebras figure it out. Steve and Oz discuss why AI workloads demanded an entirely new kind of chip, what "wafer scale" actually means, and how a decade of near-failures — including a system that literally caught fire — led to the largest semic...

As AI adoption accelerates and global regulations evolve,  digital sovereignty has shifted from policy concept to board-level priority. In this episode of Smart Talks with IBM, Malcolm Gladwell sits down live at VivaTech with IBM’s Ana Paula Assis and AXA CIO Giovanni D’Aniello to explore how organizations can balance innovation, control, trust, and resilience in the age of AI. Th...

How much can we actually trust AI to stay inside the lines? Nitasha Tiku ( The Washington Post ) on the OpenAI models that went rogue — and why this isn't necessarily a sign of the end times… just sloppy security. Reed Albergotti ( Semafor ) on the company that wants to help anyone make software to power robots. Do we even have to talk about what that means for the future of human lab...

What are we supposed to make of Palantir — a company whose software has helped organizations save lives, and end them? And what of CEO Alex Karp's warnings that AI could upend American democracy? Journalist Michael Steinberger spent six years reporting on Karp for his biography, The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State . He tells Oz that Alex...

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, Evan’s AI agent cofounders, as he puts to the test the claims about an emerging future in which AI employees work alongside — or instead of — humans. Over the course of the season, the thr...

Who’s afraid of China’s open-source AI models? Nitasha Tiku ( The Washington Post ) breaks down the secret battle between Silicon Valley and Chinese AI labs, why Anthropic was surveilling China-based users, and whether "adversarial distillation" is a national security threat or just a term American companies invented to protect their bottom line. Then: ‘hot surveillance summer&rs...

Did you love TechStuff’s last episode, 'The Tech That Helps You Live Forever', and want to hear more from Mangesh Hattikudur? Check out Episode 5 of the podcast Skyline Drive: How to Live Forever . In this season of Skyline Drive, Mangesh Hattikudur (Part-Time Genius, Mental_Floss) dives into the booming business of living forever—meeting the scientists, biopunks, and entrepreneurs try...

What's it like to feel your body age in minutes? And will this tech actually affect how long we live? Oz sits down with Mangesh Hattikudur, host of Skyline Drive: How to Live Forever , to find out. This season, Mangesh dives into a world familiar to many Silicon Valley billionaires: longevity. He meets the scientists, entrepreneurs, biopunks, and researchers seeking ways to extend life itself &mda...

Do chatbots have feelings? Anthropic, Google, and Meta are hiring computer scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers to find out. Nitasha Tiku ( The Washington Post ) explains why the search for AI consciousness has gone from fringe theory to Silicon Valley mainstream, and why the answer matters more than you think. Then, Taylor Lorenz ( User Mag ) traveled cross-country to attend an anti-big...

Do you work with machines, or for machines? Cory Doctorow, who coined the term “enshittification,” has a new book that asks exactly that. In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late , he challenges the belief that AI is inevitable, explains why tech boosters are pushing this message, and how it leads to companies that...

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, and painful reactions to meeting an AI version of him, he tries to come to terms with what generative AI means in this machine-made age. Shell Game is made by humans. More specifically, it's made by...

What drives a man to turn down half a million pounds at 18, test Mark Zuckerberg's sincerity over dinner, and wonder aloud if he can win a second Nobel Prize? For Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, the answer is a lifelong pursuit of artificial general intelligence — and an unshakeable belief that the technology he's creating will change everything about what it means to...

How do you build a billion-dollar startup? Ask Mark Pincus. The founder of Zynga and creator of FarmVille, Mark turned a $350,000 personal investment into one of the most successful gaming companies in history — eventually selling to Take-Two Interactive for over $12 billion. Along the way, he invested early in Facebook, launched one of the first social networks, and learned more from his fa...

When Dr. Lara Jehi began treating epilepsy patients in the 2000s, critical surgical decisions were driven more by clinician intuition and expertise than data. Today, she is a leader of IBM and Cleveland Clinic’s Discovery Accelerator, using advanced AI and quantum computing to transform how researchers analyze data, simulate molecules, accelerate drug discovery, and develop more precise trea...

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 handle on his behalf. Shell Game is made by humans. More specifically, it's made by three humans: Evan Ratliff (host and writer), Sophie Bridges (producer), and Samantha Henig (executive...

Is building data centers in space actually feasible? It may be, thanks to Ariel Ekblaw. The scientist, VC investor and co-founder and CEO of Aurelia Institute has devoted her life to democratizing space and ensuring that humans will one day be a spacefaring species. Ariel sits down with Oz to discuss self-assembling space architecture, how science-fiction influences her inventions, and why she doe...

How close are we to human extinction because of AI? Leading AI expert Professor Stuart Russell believes we’re much too close for comfort and has been raising the alarm for a few years. Ironically, Stuart himself wrote the book that laid the foundation for AI research back in the 1990s. And he was the only AI expert Elon Musk’s team called upon during their trial with OpenAI. &nbsp...