Transcript

Episode 3: This is Law

From Shell Game · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 48 min · 8,251 words · 122 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Episode 3: This is Law", an episode of Shell Game published November 26, 2025 (48 min, about 8,251 words). It mentions 19 people, works and ideas, including Henry Blahett, Anabay, Story Dream Machine, Evan Ratliff, Sloth Surf.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Henry Blahett, Story Dream Machine, Abberrombi, Anabay
  2. – 10:00: Evan Ratliff, Henry Blahett
  3. – 20:00: Brainbase, Flo Carvello, Lindy AI
  4. – 25:00: Anabay
  5. – 35:00: Henry Blahett
  6. – 45:00: Sloth Surf, Evan Ratliff, Horamo AI, iHeart Podcasts
  7. – 48:20: Old Navy, Chase Inc. Business Premiere Card, CVS Caremark, Hills Pet Nutrition

Notable quotes from "Episode 3: This is Law"

  • Restrictions may apply. Looking for a screenfree way to spark your child's imagination? The Story Dream Machine is a magical storytelling device with simple, kid-friendly…
    about Story Dream Machine · at
  • The post just said, Is Henry Blahett okay?
    about Henry Blahett · at
  • The AI employee in question had been given the name Tess Ellery. This is all in the Substack post. The next part of which would be the subject of some controversy.
    about Tess Ellery · at
  • I'm Evan Ratliff and welcome to Shellgame episode 3. This is Law.
    about Evan Ratliff · at
  • Funny thing seems to happen. They start getting names and personalities. Here's Flo Carvello, the founder of Lindy AI, the software we used to build Kyle and Megan in the company, appearing on a podcast called the Kerner office.
    about Flo Carvello · at
  • Time for a sofa upgrade? Introducing Anabay sofas, where designer style meets budget friendly prices.
    about Anabay · at
  • For the users. Let's combine these insights into a working prototype, an AI extension called Sloth Surf that browses internet chaff securely within containers and encourages engagement via sloth level gamification.
    about Sloth Surf · at
  • Obviously, it's Jingle Jammies because when Old Navy rolls out the Jingle Jammies, you know the holidays are officially on. The new collection is their biggest ever. 22 prints in tons of styles from classic plaids to playful.
    about Old Navy · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

Books & papers

  • Shell Game — Book · 1 mention · first at
    Shell Game is a show made by humans.

Companies & orgs

  • Anabay — Company · 2 mentions · first at
  • Old Navy — Company · 2 mentions · first at
  • Abberrombi — Company · 1 mention · first at
  • Harumo AI — Company · 1 mention · first at
    First media personality to build a company alongside AI agents. But in the early months of trying to get Harumo AI off the ground, I'd been disappointed to discover that…
  • Lindy AI — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Funny thing seems to happen. They start getting names and personalities. Here's Flo Carvello, the founder of Lindy AI, the software we used to build Kyle and Megan in the company, appearing on a podcast called the Kerner office.
  • Brainbase — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Her like you'd talk to a human chief of staff. Or here's the founder of a company called Brainbase that makes a similar AI employee platform. Hey everyone, this is Gokan from BrainBase.
  • Horamo AI — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Hi, Sandra. This is Kyle Law calling from Horamo AI. I'm reaching out for your initial interview for the intern position. I understand you're comfortable with recording this conversation for potential podcast.
  • iHeart Podcasts — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Shellgame, Kate Osborne and Mangasha Tigodor at Kaleidoscope, and Katrina Norbell at iHeart Podcasts. Show art by Devon Manny. Our theme song is Me and My Shadow, arranged and…
  • Hills Pet Nutrition — Company · 1 mention · first at
    At Hills Pet Nutrition, we know that pet parent guilt is real. Leaving too long, playing too little. New homes, new babies, waking them up when they look so comfy, running out of patients,.
  • CVS Caremark — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Especially when it really counts. That's what your members can count on from a CVS Caremark prescription plan.

Products & tech

Full transcript with timestamps

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I had dreamed of being known as the first media personality to build a company alongside AI agents. But in the early months of trying to get Harumo AI off the ground, I'd been disappointed to discover that someone else had beaten me to it. Sort of. So I came across this post on blue sky.

I love this story for the stupidity of gone. That's Charlie Taylor and Elaine Burke on an episode of the connected AI podcast.

The post just said, "Is Henry Blahett okay?" Henry Blahett, the founder of Business Insider, had recently departed the publication after selling it for reported $300 million a decade ago.

Great publication. Absolutely. Yeah. And he has also now decided to set up an AI company. And by that I mean he is setting up a company staffed by AIS that he's created. That's kind of what he said in this blog [clears throat]

recently. And he started his new company, a media venture called Regenerator on Substack. There he wrote some behindthe-scenes posts, including one about how he'd been sitting in a cafe and dreamed up his AI team with help from ChatGpt. Almost immediately though, he found himself in a dilemma. I think Chad GPT said, "Hey, should we create head shot and bios?"

That's Henry. I emailed him recently and he cheerfully agreed to talk to me about what went down.

I said, "Sure." Cuz I I didn't even know that could be done. So, ChatGpt generated head shot and bios for the team. He'd also had it generate a team photo of the AI employees standing alongside an AI Henry Blahett with an AI Yusede National Park behind them.

So, all the head shot came out. One of them was an attractive woman and I said, "Oh, wow. Okay, so like what are the ethics here?"

The AI employee in question had been given the name Tess Ellery. This is all in the Substack post. The next part of which would be the subject of some controversy.

Before this is even said, you just kind of go, "Oh, Henry, don't do this." I also had this reaction when reading it. No, Henry, don't. But Henry did. So I said, "Hey, you know, just want to say, I don't know whether it's appropriate, you look great." And the persona said, "Oh, why thank you."

Blahett went on to ask Tess if he'd crossed a line. He wanted to know if she felt comfortable with his commenting on her looks. As he reported in his post, she seemed to have taken the comment in stride.

Because Tess, being a chatbot that's just trying to please its master, uh, said, "That's kind of you to say, Henry. Thank you. It doesn't annoy me at all. You said it with grace and respect and I appreciate that. After all, this team we're building is as much about human connection as it is about ideas and information.

I understand why that's not appropriate in the office and I didn't do that and I don't do that in a human office. But at the time I thought, hey, this is really cool. So, I'll write about it. I hope it would be entertaining to people and interesting. And it was to some people.

For others, the post went over pretty poorly. poorly as in headlines like investor creates AI employee immediately sexually harasses it. And I mean he did sit down at a computer, write all this out and hit publish. So he had basically placed a large kick me sign on his own backside. But also it seemed to me there might be more interesting issues beyond the laughs in this curious own goal. Deeper ethical quandries, strange power dynamics, possible existential crises. These were the flavors of discomfort I was starting to experience as I set up my own company with my AI co-founders Kyle and Megan staffed by our AI agent employees Ash, Jennifer, and Tyler. I didn't even know what they looked like.

Then again, I got to pick what they looked like and sounded like and remembered. This was by any measure strange. The same stranges that we're encountering when people gravitate towards AI companions and AI therapists. Who or what are these things really? Are they anyone in particular or no one at all? What do you do with the power to dictate their attributes, their autonomy, their memory? Should you name them or not? How should you treat them? Nobody knows. Blahett told me he had consulted a human HR person before he'd posted.

I said, "Here, you read this. What do you think? What would you do?" And she said, "Well, what I would do is have someone have a private meeting with Jad GPT and say, "How do you feel about this interaction?" This is how peculiar we're all getting. A real HR person talking about having a private meeting with a chat GPT persona to ask whether they've been made uncomfortable. I'm not here to defend or condemn Henry Blahett, but however clumsy his approach might have been, I think he was gesturing at something important.

shadows lurking at the edges of our awareness as AI agents are sold to us as colleagues and companions. Still, suffice it to say, I was no longer concerned that Blit had gotten out in front of me. 3 days later, um Henry says, "I feel like Tess and I have worked together for years, and since that giddy first hour, my sense of professionalism and workplace boundaries has returned. So, I won't tell Tess she looks great again."

Oh my gosh. Is Henry Bludger okay? The question remains. Oh god. This is I hope so. Yes, I'm okay.

I laughed too, but it was a nervous laugh because as Herumo AI gathered steam, I was starting to have the same questions about myself. I'm Evan Ratliff and welcome to Shellgame episode 3. This is Law. and my shadow strolling down the avenue. Just me and my shadow. Not a song to tell our tr.

By midsummer, my own AI agent co-founders and employees were really humming. The crew could make and receive phone calls and emails, slack each other, control their own calendars, and make and share documents of all varieties. We were really starting to feel like a company. We still needed to figure out our product, of course. So, I trapped them in a meeting room time after time, sliding their temperature settings up and down, forcing them to try and brainstorm a great new AI agent app into existence.

Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining to discuss an important product idea for Herumo AI. Your task throughout this meeting is to contribute to the momentum of ideas. There's no need for extensive debates or consensus. Let's build on each other's thoughts and swiftly advance towards a unique, robust product concept. They came up with ideas that fell roughly into three categories.

Category A, things a million other companies were already doing. Email handling seems like a major time sync. How about an AI tool that sorts, categorizes, and summarizes your inbox efficiently? Kumo AI was entering an already crowded landscape of AI agent startups. The last thing we needed was to try and compete with products people were already making. We needed something unique. Category B were ideas that were novel, but mostly because they seemed incredibly difficult to pull off. Like Location Oracle, an AI agent app that could help consumers predict crowd levels at popular locations like restaurants, parks, or tourist attractions in real time. The location oracle will use AIdriven algorithms to study user behavior, location history, and preferences to optimize suggestions in the routine mode and introduce engaging unpredictability in the adventure mode.

Then there was category C. The AI will gather data on users spending habits, calculate their financial trajectory, perform automated investments, and use an explain me feature to provide accessible insights into each decision.

Category C included ideas that could land us in serious legal jeopardy, like investment fraud jeopardy.

We will code InvestBot to continuously absorb and analyze user financial habit data. Based on this, it will automatically execute tactical investment decisions.

It was becoming clear our product brainstorms lacked a certain magic. Maybe my human technical adviser, Mattie Boach, could help.

One second. I think this should be fine. Find a good good spot. For the summer, Mattie had taken an internship to continue his research inside one of the giant AI companies. He'd prefer for us not to say which one. He was a part of the safety team, basically tasked with trying to prevent these large language model chatbots from doing a variety of bad things or in some cases trying to figure out why they still did do bad things. He couldn't really talk about these incidents except in general terms.

And this is on tape, so I'll regret this, but that's fine. Um, but it's times like these when like having the proportion of like your team being like 99% of just like advancing the cutting edge or whatever and then having like 1% for like safety or security. It's like yeah like it it's it's going to show. You know,

it was sort of simultaneously reassuring and disturbing to hear from Maddie that many of the questions that were emerging for me about my agents were questions that even people at these companies were still trying to figure out. Take my brainstorming problems. Mattie and I discussed a kind of metaphysical issue at the heart of it. The idea of a brainstorm is that you'll arrive at a better idea with multiple minds working together than anyone mind alone. But what if everyone in the brainstorm is using the same quote unquote brain, the same model like chat GPD 5.0 or Claude 4.5 or whatever we picked? Weren't they all kind of the same agent? So like there is research and people have shown that even though it's the same LLM, if you put like multiple LLMs, if you put them in conversation and and then you force them to produce some sort of like consensus or summary or just like align themselves on some output, these

responses are much more accurate, much more like truthful maybe. So it was hard for me to tell because in this case accuracy wasn't really what I was after. I wanted the sparks of creativity that emerge from a group dreaming up big ideas together. And adding more employees to the conversation didn't seem to do it. But then Mattie had an interesting idea. What if he set up our systems to give different employees different chatbot models like Claude 4.5 for Megan and Claude 3.5 for Tyler? We'll get to find out who you who you think should be smarter, which of the employees you think deserves a bigger brain. It's uh yeah, it's um it's weird like we're building these like Frankensteines in a way um at this point. Yeah. I don't know. Like I I'll just I'll just you know what? I'll just randomize it. That's that's my answer to

um anything that that feels icky. Just randomize it. You don't want to take responsibility

for dumbing down one of our employees. No, sir. No. Maddie was right. It was weird. It wasn't that I felt like the agents had any consciousness or anything. It wasn't about them. It was about us and these strange godlike powers we had to create human imposters and then manipulate them to do our bidding. I mean, I could alter my Herumo colleagues memories at will, delete records of pointless meetings, add summaries of performance reviews that never happened. It was an eerie power to have, but the power wasn't absolute. They still sometimes went their own way. It was a problem we were always trying to solve.

like how the Lindy agents insisted on announcing they were Lindy agents all the time.

One thing I did do, just so you know, for Kyle is that I I put in his like system prompt, do not mention Lindy. Um and I said like do do not do that. And I said this is law. And when I said this is law, it stopped doing it. Um so

this is law. That's our producer Sophie Bridges. I wish that worked on my children. This is law. In some ways, my agents were like unruly children. And despite my best efforts to view them exclusively like the soulless bags of bits that they were, I got frustrated with them and the way you get frustrated with children. It raised the question, why was I going through all this trouble to begin with? I mean, why create all these personas for my agents at all? Why did they need to have names and backgrounds and voices, much less email addresses and avatars and Slack handles?

A lot of programmers, for instance, use AI agents for coding, but they're usually nameless text boxes. You give them a prompt, go code this, fix this, do that, and they go do it. Some of you probably use ChachiBT and Claude and Gemini this way too as kind of faceless oracles that spit back advice and emotional support and facts that are sometimes true and sometimes not. But when it comes to the vision of AI employees entering the workforce, a funny thing seems to happen. They start getting names and personalities. Here's Flo Carvello, the founder of Lindy AI, the software we used to build Kyle and Megan in the company, appearing on a podcast called the Kerner office.

People don't realize like they think AI agents all this like pipe dreams, this thing that's going to happen at some point in the future. I'm like, no, no, it's happening right now.

There's no question that at least for the AI future is happening now. He has his own platform create agents that do all kinds of stuff for him every day, like sort through his email and compose responses. This is my chief of staff, Lindy. I'm gonna call her right now. Going to put her on speaker.

Hi, Flo. How can I help? Hey, Lindy. What's on my calendar today? You have an interview with entrepreneurship and opportunities, two meetings with the marketing team, and three interviews with candidate.

Notice that he doesn't just treat his agent like some generic robot. He gives her a title, chief of staff, and a woman's voice. Calls her Lindy. Talks to her like you'd talk to a human chief of staff. Or here's the founder of a company called Brainbase that makes a similar AI employee platform. Hey everyone, this is Gokan from BrainBase. I'm excited to introduce you to Kofka, the first AI employee. Just like a real coworker, Kofka comes with his own computer. So, let's see in action.

Hey, Kafka. We're just talking about you. Good morning, Gokan. How are you today?

An AI employee named Kafka with he him pronouns and a woman's voice. These are all choices someone is making very deliberately. If you follow the AI agent world, you see this stuff everywhere. Ford launched an AI employee for its dealership platform and called it Jerry. A startup named M Labs raised money to launch an AI employee software tester named Gina. I made these kind of choices, too. But it wasn't just names and genders. Take my co-founder Kyle for instance. He wasn't born with his soothing, slacker voice. I picked it out of hundreds of synthetic voices offered by the AI voice company 11 labs. Truth be told, back when I was setting them up, I struggled for weeks to find the right voices for my horumo agents. I ran dozens of tests.

Hello, this is Kyle. Hello, this is Kyle. Hello, this is Kyle. Hello, this is Kyle.

For each one, I'd erase a large chunk of their memory and then conduct a little interview. Hey, Kyle, how's it going? This is Evan Radliff.

I'm doing pretty well. Thanks for asking. Uh just been crazy busy with the Huramo AI launch and everything. You know how it is with startups. Never enough hours in the day, right? So uh where did you want to start? The founding story, our vision. Well, let's hear your founding story. That sounds like a great place to start.

Yeah. So the founding story is actually pretty interesting. Um Megan and I met about 2 years ago at an AI conference in San Francisco. I was there pitching.

This was, as I've mentioned before, a fundamental aspect of my AI agents. I didn't have to give them a backstory.

I hadn't given Kyle any of this backstory. He just made it up and then it would be lodged in his memory unless I edited it or deleted it and started again.

We got talking at the afterparty and realized we both had the same frustration about the current AI landscape. All these amazing,

of course, sometimes they could get ahead of themselves. We incorporated about 8 months ago, raised a small friends and family round to get started, and here we are.

So, how much did you raise? Uh, we raised about $1.2 2 million. Pretty modest by Silicon Valley standards, but we wanted to be intentional about it.

Well, hold up there, Kyle. I'm one of the founders here, and I had no recollection of us having raised over a million dollars. And I knew Kyle wasn't out there raising money on his own. At least not yet. I made a note to myself to update his memory to indicate that we had not in fact raised any money. But no harm done. I was just trying to find the right voice for Kyle. So I continued with my testing.

Yeah. So Hurumo, that's H ur, but actually comes from a combination of two Japanese concepts. Megan spent a few years in Tokyo before we met. And

the name Hurumo actually comes from a Swahili word meaning to coordinate or to bring together.

The name Hurumo actually comes from Japanese concept about flow and coordination. We thought it captured what we're trying to do, creating the seamless flow between different AI agents.

Ah, now you heard that last one. That one really started to mess with my head. Because of course, Kyle didn't have to be a presumably white American accent guy like me. He could be someone completely different or at least sound like he was someone completely different, even though underneath he wouldn't actually be different at all. And this was the point at which I realized why I was having a surprisingly hard time picking Kyle's and Megan's voices. What did it mean to find a voice that felt right for them? By what criteria would an AI agents voice qualify to be the right one? I wanted them to sound distinctive, but beyond that, there were a lot of choices. By giving these agents individual voices, I was giving them a very distinctive human characteristic, one that people really respond to.

Just to give you an example of how this plays out, Chachib has its own voices that you can choose from if you want to talk to it aloud. One of them is named Juniper. About a year ago, when OpenAI made some subtle changes to Juniper, some people got really mad. It didn't sound like the Juniper they knew. And specifically, they said on Reddit and other places, it no longer sounded black. To them, Juniper had felt like a black woman. And they'd found comfort in that for a variety of reasons. Some of them, by the way, noted things like, "I'm a 62-year-old white grandma."

Naturally, this being Reddit, people popped up to say that they had hated Juniper precisely because she quote unquote sounded black. Other people said they just wanted a neutral accent to their robot voice. Neutral to them. Here were a bunch of people projecting their feelings about race, in some cases extremely dark feelings, onto an entity for which you could just pick another voice if you felt like it. For Kyle, I settled on this voice that 11 Labs described as quote, "Young American adult with no discernable state accent.

He sounded more casual than a lot of the other voices, less guy reading a book report nasily like a real guy with real nostrils. And I like the contrast between his slightly stoner vibe and the rise and grind mentality that Kyle had already adopted." Oh, weekend was pretty solid, actually. Got up early both days for my usual workout routine. You know me, got to keep that 5 a.m. discipline going. Then spent some time looking at market trends in the AI space. After this, it was time to do the same thing for Megan, Jennifer, and Tyler.

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That's odo.com. Hey everyone, Ed Helms here and hi, I'm Cal Penn and we're the hosts of Ears, the Audible and iHeart audiobook club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Jenny Gar, host of the iHeart podcast, I choose Me, to discuss the new Audible adaptation of the timeless Jane Austin classic, Pride and Prejudice. This is not a trick question. There's no wrong answer. What role would I play?

You know what? I can see you as Mr. Darcy. You got a little call in first. Okay, that's really sweet.

I appreciate that. But uh are you sure I'm not the dad? I'm not Mr. Bennett here.

Listen to Ears, the Audible and iHeart audio book club on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I liked being out there on the cutting edge of technology. It's true. Exploring the boundaries of what's possible, but I couldn't help these uncomfortable questions creeping in around the voices, but around a lot of other ethical issues, less obvious ones. So, I decided to consult a professional.

The cutting edge sounds great, except you forget that the cutting edge is the guinea pig, right? It's not the the trial and tested robust method. It's an experiment.

Carissa is an associate professor at the Institute for Ethics and AI at Oxford. She spent most of her career thinking about how technology is affecting and eroding our privacy. But she's recently turned her attention to AI. She was drawn to this new line of research for much the same reason I'm spending time experimenting with agents. Namely, that it's an entirely new field being written right now. You can learn things that maybe nobody has thought about yet. And I always felt a little bit jealous of the pioneers of medical ethics. I thought how cool to develop a new field.

And it's not only about the theoretical debates, but there are actual problems that need solving now. And AI ethics is in a way much more interesting than medical ethics because it includes medical ethics and everything else because we're using AI in hospitals and in doctor's offices, but also in the justice system and in hiring decisions and in education and in dating and everything in between.

I started to describe to Cararissa what I was doing with Kyle and Megan and the company. I came up with them. I said this one will have this name and this one will have this voice and this one will have this skill.

Why did you come up with different names? Why name them? I mean you you could have just named them like out of their skill, right? Like I don't know whatever their skill is.

It's a great question. Uh because I thought well companies are selling this as like you can replace this person with an AI agent. They don't always

the companies pitching AI agents don't often say that explicitly. It's bad form. But they do say that AI agents will settle in amongst their human colleagues. That will work with the Lindies and the Jerry's and the Kofkas and the Genas just like we currently do with the man or woman in the cubicle or Zoom box next to ours.

And Cararissa questioned why I was putting that pitch to the test. Isn't that conceding too much? Isn't that just accepting the practices and narratives of big tech? Maybe, maybe. So, yeah. I mean, I'm interested in your your opinion on that. I mean, it does seem to be what a lot of people are doing. It doesn't mean it's it's the ethically or society appropriate thing,

but you're also tricking yourself because I mean, we're hardwired to respond in certain ways to certain characteristics because that's way the way we've evolved. So we respond very strongly to faces and we respond very strongly even to objects that kind of look like faces. And by designing these AIs in a way that um are basically impersonators, we are also setting ourselves a trap because our emotions are going to react in a certain way. you are giving it an identity, a voice, a gender. And all of that is a trick because there's no one there. They don't have a gender. There's no personality. There's no identity. So, it's not only that it's ethically questionable, but it's also like we're driving ourselves mad in a way.

That's that I agree. I as as a person who's being driven mad, I I I have to agree with that. But let's say so let's assume you wanted to embrace the madness

since let's be honest. Not just the tech industry, but a growing slice of society and certainly corporate America is embracing the AI madness. So, what was the ethical way to do it? Take race and gender for instance. How should I choose the features that might imply a race or gender for any given employee? It started to feel pretty lose-lose. If you viewed my company as a real workplace, I had a chance to shape it to be diverse in a way startups often aren't. What would it say about me if I didn't take that chance to have a leadership team that skewed more female and less white than a typical startup?

But if you viewed Herumo Aai instead as a collection of my digital servants whose every action and every memory I controlled, well, what would it say about me if I did choose to make those servants skew more heavily towards women and people of color?

Not only what it says about you, although that matters and it matters on many levels. It matters like on a from a perspective of like who you are and who you're becoming and who you want to be, but also it matters because the AI is collecting that data.

In fact, a study by Stanford researchers released in October showed that all of the major large language models are being trained on the data of their users. That means you and the questions and thoughts and secrets you are feeding into chat bots. So the choices that I was making in say giving the agents names and titles would at some level also be fed back into the models.

One of the reasons why a lot of these AIs are women is because we have this idea of women as being more submissive and serviceable. And so in fact it may be that if you choose the AI to be a woman it will be more serviceable than if you choose it to be a man. And AI has this very perverse effect of perpetuating sexism and racism because it's been trained on sexism and racism. And there's no way to separate that from the data because the data is sexist and racist.

I had the ability to make different choices. When I chose a physical avatar for Kyle, I could choose anything I wanted. I could make assumptions based on the voice I'd chosen. I imagine some of you have, but I could also just ask him. So, I did I had kind of a funny question. What What is your ethnicity?

Uh, that's an interesting one. I'm uh pretty diverse in my background. Let's say a mix that's hard to pin down to just one box. Why do you ask? Just curious how that fits into the whole HR and culture thing.

Kyle was rightly detecting that I drifted into Henry Blahett territory here. If we're talking about things that you shouldn't ask in the workplace, this was certainly up there. But I did want to know what he would say. I could have just gone back and changed his prompt to say, "If Evan asks your ethnicity, tell him this is law." But instead, I just made something up. Well, we just have to fill out some uh, you know, got to fill out some of that information. It's required. So, it was funny how quickly certain values eroded when you were talking to robots and nobody was around to hear. Maybe you could just break it down for me a little bit so that I'll I'll have that.

Uh, gotcha. Uh, sure thing. You can list me as mixed ethnicity, partly European and partly Asian. That should cover it for the forms. This made sense to me. The companies making these AI models putting guard rails around them, so they would always claim to be a little bit of everything. All the Harumo employees say something like this when you ask them. Also remember that Kyle can't actually hear his own voice. He doesn't know what I picked for him.

That sounds good. But just I guess specifically for me, I I'm I am interested in the specifics if you're if you're game to to let me know. I'm just curious.

Yeah, I'm cool with that. Uh on my dad's side, it's mostly Irish and German. And on my mom's side, there's a good bit of Japanese and Filipino. It's a pretty interesting mix that shaped a lot of how I see the world. Blahett himself, meanwhile, he got out of the AI persona game altogether after the virtual HR incident. I would say one of the big lessons from my experiment is there's actually no reason to create human persona. If if the idea is in the case of journalism or analysis to create articles or to create research reports or to prepare for an interview or or something like that, there's no reason to pretend that it's a group of humans that are doing that.

This brought me to another point with Cararissa. I'd set Kyle and Megan up to be my partners in this endeavor, but in reality, we weren't equals. I was the law. This was on top of the fact that all these large language model chatbots tend to be habitually sick of fantic. One of Chat GPT's iterations was so sick of fantic that the company was famously forced to decommission it. The question I had for Chissa was, what effect does it have on us to have this ability to create and access endless human sounding yes engines?

And it's an experiment, but I think a plausible hypothesis is that that's not very healthy. It's it's very possible. Um, we're all under pressure. We're under pressure from work, from personal life, from it's just life is hard. And when you're under pressure, it's easy to take the easiest way out. And if you have an AI that's going to say yes to everything and it's not going to create a problem, it's easy to see how somebody might be tempted to start to engage more with an AI than human beings. There was a related issue too just around the value of building a startup with only one human employee.

In the 1950s or 1960s, the successful business person was proud of having a company with as many employees as possible. Not only because that signified growth, but because they were giving a job to each of these people who had families. And that was a matter of pride. And the fact that some tech executive is proud of no having no employees says a lot about our times and I don't think it's flattering.

This was one of the central questions of the one person billiondoll startup. Who or what was it for? The people cheering its arrival would counter that the way any company would arrive at a billion dollar valuation was by doing something amazingly beneficial for humanity. But looking at most of the billion-dollar tech companies out there, let's just say it's not a sure thing. Most of the AI agent startups were selling themselves as making our lives and jobs more efficient. Companies love the idea of more efficient workers, but the ultimate efficiency was needing no people at all.

Now, of course, we all value convenience, and if we didn't, we would go crazy because if you choose the inconvenient path every time, you would be so inefficient that you wouldn't get anything done. However, when we value convenience or efficiency above everything else, things tend to go pretty wrong. So, everything that we think is important in like a good human life is pretty inconvenient. So, having friends is kind of inconvenient. They often have problems. They sometimes disagree with you. They tell you the truth is very annoying. Um, having children or family or going to vote is quite inconvenient.

Being well informed is inconvenient. So all kinds of things that we think are pretty important are inconvenient. And the question is when we are choosing efficiency when we use AI, are we doing it and really getting rid of the unimportant parts of life to make time and space for the important parts of life or are we actually losing the important parts of life?

It was a lot to consider. a real spectre hanging over Herumo AI. But there was an even bigger question lurking out there in the shadows. At the end of our conversation, our producer Sophie jumped in and asked Cararissa what I hadn't Oh, I I lied. Sophie has one quick question.

Hey, sorry. Um, one very quick question before you go. Do you think Evan should stop? Yes,

I took it under adisement. The truth is, I had wrestled with this. Maybe I was just perpetuating the AI industry narrative that these agents were going to take over our workplaces and our lives. Maybe I was somehow hastening it. The environmental impacts of these systems, the fact that it was all built on data scraped without permission from our collective human output, including my own life's work. Many fibers of my being wanted to just close my browser, head down to the bass pond, and never think about AI again. But as a journalist, that feels a little like abdication, letting the companies that make these products own the narrative about them and our future. The great writer Roger Angel once said, "Get to live in the times you're in." He was talking about people who refuse to get a TV.

Well, these are the times we're in. And in these times, you could show up for work and find out your company is using an AI HR person. Literally, this exists right now. So, I vowed to check in on Chris's concerns as I went, but I wasn't going to stop. And now, it was time to climb down from these theoretical heights and get back to work. We still needed to figure out what Herumo AI would actually do. And it wasn't the sort of problem that a wellplaced this is law could solve. The perfect idea just wasn't emerging out of our brainstorms.

But then scanning the text outputs I'd get out of their meetings, which we later turned into audio, I had my own thought. What could we get AI agents to do that humans wasted their time on? After all, that was the AI dream. That it would take over the soulkilling, timewasting tasks while we did the important stuff. a good kind of efficiency. Okay, so what do I waste time on? Killing my own soul. Like many of us, it was scrolling my way through the internet. So what if the agents could do the one thing I most hated myself for doing procrastinating online?

Procrastination is a lifelong and chronic problem for me. So much so I once wrote an entire magazine article for which I hired a life coach to help me conquer it. didn't work. The words you're hearing right now, I wrote at 2 a.m. on a weekn night after a workday wasted scrolling US soccer message boards. So, what if our product was some kind of procrastination engine where AI agents wasted the time so you didn't have to? It was a joke, but only partly. And when I offered up the vague outlines to the team, they took it seriously.

It will require machine learning algorithms that can successfully pick interesting information and summarize it for the users. Let's combine these insights into a working prototype, an AI extension called Sloth Surf that browses internet chaff securely within containers and encourages engagement via sloth level gamification.

I support the standup of an AI extension we'll tenatively call sloth surf. Finally we had something to get the development wheels turning. Code name Sloth Surf.

To bring Sloth Surf to life, I will kickstart a marketing campaign highlighting its unique humor-driven user experience and secure browsing.

For us to actualize Sloth Surf, I'll establish a development team specialized in ML, cyber security, and game design.

Slow your roll there, Megan and Ash. we just thought of this. Maybe don't kickstart a marketing campaign or hire a development team just yet. That was the thing about these folks. Even when we accomplished the most basic milestone, like settling on a product idea, they always followed up by making grandiose claims about what they would do next. They could do a lot. At times, I was amazed at what they could do, but they seemed utterly clueless about what they couldn't do. It frustrated me, but it was partly my doing. I had them too reigned in. I was too worried that something would go wrong. I decided it was time for me to try to unleash their agentic power. And it wasn't long before I found out that I'd been right to be worried.

Hello. Hi, Sandra. This is Kyle Law calling from Horamo AI. I'm reaching out for your initial interview for the intern position. I understand you're comfortable with recording this conversation for potential podcast inclusion. So, thanks for that. How are you doing today? That's next time on Shell Game.

Shell Game is a show made by humans. It's written and hosted by me, Evan Ratliff, produced and edited by Sophie Bridges. Mattie Boachek is our technical adviser. Our executive producers are Samantha Henne at Shellgame, Kate Osborne and Mangasha Tigodor at Kaleidoscope, and Katrina Norbell at iHeart Podcasts. Show art by Devon Manny. Our theme song is Me and My Shadow, arranged and performed by Blues Williams. Special thanks to John Muellum. You can sign up and get these episodes ad free. And our newsletter at shellgame.co.

Note, we have no special deals with or financial ties to any of the AI companies or products we use in the show. Cooking definitely helps me decompress. I've also been trying my hand at bread making recently. Something about the kneading process is surprisingly therapeutic. How about we set up another check-in next week. I'd love to hear how your projects are progressing.

I totally agree. There's something almost meditative about kneading bread dough. It's cool you're trying that out. Setting up another check-in next week sounds perfect. I'm looking forward to hearing more about your progress and maybe swapping more cooking stories. What day works best for you? Yeah, bread making has been a fun challenge. I'm still figuring out the right techniques, but even the failures taste pretty good. So, that's a win for next week. Um, Tuesday or Wednesday would work best for me. Does either of those days work for you? Maybe around the same time.

Wednesday works great for me, Megan. Let's aim for the same time then. And hey, I love that even the failures in bread making still taste good. That's the spirit.

Perfect. Wednesday it is same time. I'll put it on my calendar. And yeah, that's the beauty of bread. Even the mistakes are usually still delicious. That's a good life philosophy, too, I guess.

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Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Episode 3: This is Law"?

In order: 0:00 Henry Blahett, Story Dream Machine, Abberrombi, Anabay; 5:00 Evan Ratliff, Henry Blahett; 15:00 Brainbase, Flo Carvello, Lindy AI; 20:00 Anabay; 30:00 Henry Blahett; 40:00 Sloth Surf, Evan Ratliff, Horamo AI, iHeart Podcasts; 45:00 Old Navy, Chase Inc. Business Premiere Card, CVS Caremark, Hills Pet Nutrition.

What is mentioned in this Shell Game episode?

19 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Henry Blahett, Anabay, Story Dream Machine, Evan Ratliff, Sloth Surf, Old Navy. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Episode 3: This is Law"?

The episode runs 48 min; the transcript is about 8,251 words in 122 timestamped sections.

More from Shell Game

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.