Shell Game’s first season started with a simple and perhaps-slightly-unhinged premise: What would happen if I made a clone of myself, and set it loose in the world? After eight months of running that experiment, we brought you a story in July 2024 that we believed you would find equal parts bizarre, compelling, funny, and disturbing.
As part of the ride, we aimed to give you a sense of what a world full of AI voices might feel like, and to raise a series of broader questions that felt to me under-asked. Questions about the grand experiment we all seemed suddenly to be enrolled in, where AI was being deployed as human impersonators, as scammers, as companions, as therapists, as “digital twins” on Zoom, and as potential avatars for our own friends and loved ones. Today, almost two years from when that project first started, those questions are now roiling society — from the lawsuits against AI companies accusing them of encouraging self-harm, to the mass proliferation of AI slop, to the increasingly close relationships many people are developing with chatbots.
Now — finally — we’ve come to Season 2, the trailer for which is atop this post. This one began with a simple and perhaps-even-more-unhinged premise: What would happen if I created a real company, run by fake people? Or put another way, what if we took at face value some of the claims emanating from the AI industry, particularly around the deployment of autonomous AI agents. Claims, for instance, about 2025 being “the year of the agent.” About how AI agents have begun a rapid march towards replacing a large portion of white collar jobs. About how, as startups raising hundreds of millions of dollars are pitching: AI employees are evolving into “real coworkers,” right now.
Eleven months of madness later, we’ve returned with a story we believe you’ll find… equal parts bizarre, compelling, funny, and disturbing. Hopefully on this ride we’ll all learn something about the work we do, the meaning we find in it, and the world that AI makers say we’ll soon be living in. Either way, we hope it’s a fun listen.
One programming note: For paid subscribers, the release here next week will come with instructions on how to access the ad-free feed. As always, we can’t thank you enough for your support.
“Keep ‘em coming!”
Evan
