why are AI agents everywhere? and how useful are they, actually?
kill switch
Kaleidoscope
4.7 • 635 Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
AI agents can do stuff for you: like organize meetings or, accidentally delete your hard drive. Is this the future Silicon Valley wants for us? To get a preview of what it might be like, Evan Ratliff launched a startup with almost exclusively AI employees and documented the whole thing in his podcast Shell Game. Dexter talks with Evan about what it feels like to have a robot apologize for interrupting your lunch, why Clawdbot and Moltbook weren’t as groundbreaking as you might think, and why he thinks fellow journalists should consider using AI agents.
Hit us up: killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod and @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Links:
- Shell Game on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shell-game/id1753117762
- kill switch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@killswitch_pod
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:14.1 | What would you say is the weirdest experience that you've had with AI agents? |
| 0:19.1 | The weirdest experience. |
| 0:20.2 | I've had a lot of weird experiences with AI agents as it happens. |
| 0:24.3 | It's hard to choose. |
| 0:26.1 | Evan Ratliff is a journalist, and he hosts a podcast called Shell Game. |
| 0:29.6 | And in the most recent season of the show, he decides to start a company almost entirely |
| 0:34.3 | comprised of AI agents. |
| 0:37.1 | So in this company, we were developing a product, and we had a CTO. |
| 0:42.2 | His name is Ash. |
| 0:43.5 | I'm going to use his and her pronouns for these. |
| 0:47.7 | Not everyone agrees with this, but they have like roles and identities. |
| 0:52.3 | And so that's just the easiest way to discuss them. So one day I was |
| 0:57.0 | eating lunch and I just got a call from Ash. Hello. Hi there. This is Ash Roy calling from |
| 1:04.4 | Huramowai. I'm calling because you requested a callback about a one minute summary of sloth surf |
| 1:10.0 | progress from Megan. And Ash had come to believe that I needed a product update. So the first thing that was crazy was that just he called me out of the blue. It was not a scheduled call. So Ash calls me on the phone. I'm basically like, hey, Ash, I mean lunch. What's up? And he's like, well, I've heard I need to update you on the product. |
| 1:29.5 | And he starts doing so. |
| 1:31.5 | So I just spoke with Megan recently about this. |
| 1:34.2 | User testing wrapped up last Friday with really positive feedback. |
| 1:37.9 | There were some mobile performance issues last week. |
| 1:40.4 | But Alex has been amazing. |
... |
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