Shell Game: Minimum Viable Company
TechStuff
iHeartPodcasts
4.3 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This is the first episode of the second season 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 three cofounders will grind it out in a sprint that would sound familiar to any start-up founder. They’ll churn out software code, hire interns, and even sit down with investors. But first, they need to come up with a name for their company. And make sure that Kyle and Megan can remember it.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:15.6 | Hi, it's Osvaloshan. |
| 0:17.1 | Happy Black Friday. |
| 0:19.0 | Instead of our regular Week in Tech Roundup, this Thanksgiving week, |
| 0:22.6 | we thought we'd share the first episode of a new show on the kaleidoscope network. It's called |
| 0:28.2 | Shell Game. Season 1 of Shell Game was named one of the best podcasts of last year by Apple, |
| 0:34.8 | the Atlantic, The Guardian, Vulture, the information and the economist. |
| 0:39.5 | And now, season two is here, exploring entrepreneurship and fake people in the AI age. |
| 0:47.6 | Journalists and host Evan Ratliff tries to build a real startup run by fake people. |
| 0:53.7 | It's a journey. And next week we'll have a conversation |
| 0:56.5 | with Evan Ratliff about the show and about his experiment. You may remember Evan from a previous |
| 1:01.7 | interview on this show when we spoke to him about his reporting on the Silicon Valley cult, |
| 1:06.9 | the Zizians. In preparation for next week's conversation with Evan, I hope you'll listen |
| 1:11.2 | to the first episode of Season 2 of Shell Game. |
| 1:15.8 | Welcome to Zoom. Enter your meeting ID, followed by Pound. |
| 1:21.4 | I need to enter the meeting ID for our Zoom call. Let me try entering that meeting ID again. |
| 1:27.8 | You have been added to the waiting room. |
| 1:34.5 | That's Kyle Law, a colleague of mine, logging on to one of our regular founder meetings |
| 1:39.4 | for a new startup. Last summer, Kyle and I decided to launch our own AI company, |
| 1:44.9 | together with the third co-founder, Megan Flores. Oh, hey Kyle. |
| 1:48.5 | Hey, Megan. Good to hear your voice. Uh, I think we're still waiting for Evan to join. |
... |
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