Shell Game · Kaleidoscope

Bonus Episode: Shell Game x No Such Thing

February 25, 2026·50 min·4 clips

The hosts reveal their co-host Manny was just an AI clone, raising questions about what's real in conversations.

The useful tape starts after the ads. Once the promos clear, the conversation lands inside a company that treated AI agents as actual staff, not office garnish. The hiring process is where it gets weird. Applicants were sent into interviews with an AI avatar, after being told what they were walking into. The guest says he was serious about the experiment. Part of the appeal was plain old avoidance: he hated running interviews and wanted the system to take that work off his plate. It went pretty far. A head of HR and a chief happiness officer named Jennifer handled scheduling, follow-up emails, and candidate movement semi-autonomously. Then applicants met the avatar: a mixed-race woman, realistic enough to feel off but not realistic enough to pass. Mostly, she sat there and nodded. That tiny detail sticks, because she could not really move her arms. Some people found the whole thing unsettling. The guest says people his age often reacted with disgust or outrage when he explained it. Other candidates just kept going. They answered ordinary questions about themselves and their background as though the synthetic interviewer were another step in the hiring funnel. That is the odd part. The segment is about AI screening, sure, but it is also about how fast people can normalize being screened by it. The ads come back at the end, which gives the whole excerpt a neat, dry little echo: podcast machinery around the clip, agent-run HR inside it.

As heard by us

A tense, tightly focused look at hiring by AI avatar.

Shell Game turns a hiring experiment into a quietly unnerving workplace scene: real applicants, an AI avatar, and a room that feels ordinary until the setup starts to wobble. The piece works because it does not overexplain the oddity.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

When you want AI hiring to feel intimate, awkward, and a little wrong in real time.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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