Evan Ratliff

Shell Game Technology Podcast · Weekly Series · A podcast about things that are not what they seem, hosted by journalist Evan Ratliff. Season 2 tells the story of enterprise and entrepreneurship in the AI age. O...

The full 8-part season 2 of Shell Game is out! The tale of HurumoAI, the world’s first AI agent-cofounded and led startup, ready to binge:
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s...
open.spotify.com/show/7IddLas...

"Evan Ratliff is a total weirdo." —Vulture, best narrative podcasts of 2025

Shell Game | Evan Ratliff | Substack A podcast and newsletter about things that are not what they seem, hosted by journalist Evan Ratliff. Click to read Shell Game, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

The best podcast of 2025 - Shell Game. An experiment in making a company with AI agents. Equal parts informative, fascinating and funny.
www.shellgame.co

Episode 3: This is Law Podcast Episode · Shell Game · S2 E3 · 40m

What a surprise to hear my own voice on the fantastic Shell Game!

In this ep you'll hear myself and @charlietaylor.bsky.social from the Connected AI Podcast, joking about a rather unusual – and ethically questionable – response to AI coworkers...

Thanks to @evrat.bsky.social for the shout-out! 🤩

Shell Game | Evan Ratliff | Substack A podcast about things that are not what they seem, hosted by journalist Evan Ratliff. Season 2, which kicks off on November 12, tells the story of enterprise and entrepreneurship in the AI age. Or: h...

I cannot recommend @evrat.bsky.social's Shell Game podcast highly enough: the first season is wild -- and the second season is absolutely unhinged. Hilarious, thought-provoking and timely; a must-listen!
www.shellgame.co/podcast

still from the film zodiac

more terrifying image to me than those in most horror movies

Incredibly just this week, CNN relied on Palo Alto Networks research in its story on North Korean IT workers, without acknowledging what Bloomberg revealed 2 weeks ago: that PANW were victims of the exact infiltration they are paid by clients to avoid.

Ok, SCOOP: Public cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks (
@paloaltontwks.bsky.social , PANW), which regularly presents itself as the expert on the hiring of North Korean IT workers, itself unwittingly hired nine North Korean agents, a fact it has never revealed:

Confessions of a Laptop Farmer: How an American Helped North Korea’s Wild Remote Worker Scheme Thousands of undercover agents feed Kim Jong Un’s rocket program with millions from the likes of Google and Amazon. In a Bloomberg Businessweek exclusive, one of the regime’s US pawns tells all.

New from me: What do Amazon, Boeing, Google, Hyatt, NBCUniversal, Nike, and Nvidia have in common? They’ve all unwittingly hired North Korean agents in recent years. For Bloomberg BW, I delved into the scheme, with access to an American facilitator who enabled it: www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Confessions of a Laptop Farmer: How an American Helped North Korea’s Wild Remote Worker Scheme Thousands of undercover agents feed Kim Jong Un’s rocket program with millions from the likes of Google and Amazon. In a Bloomberg Businessweek exclusive, one of the regime’s US pawns tells all.

Not a big SCOOP guy but this ones got some SCOOPS… scattered across 8,000 words (gift link): www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

One of the wildest twists for me (spoiler): A large, publicly traded cybersecurity firm made experts available to me to explain the DPRK IT worker phenomenon. Then I found out they’d neglected to mention one fact: The firm *itself* had inadvertently employed nine North Koreans.

Chapman had been recruited as a “laptop farmer,” paid to illegally maintain computers for dozens of North Korean agents with IT jobs across American industries. When the FBI moved to take down the network, she became the target. Over the past few months, she’s told me her story.

In 2020, Christina Chapman got a DM from a stranger on LinkedIn. What she thought was a door to a new career led instead into a web of intrigue stretching from North Korea into hundreds of American companies, including some of the most valuable on the planet.

Confessions of a Laptop Farmer: How an American Helped North Korea’s Wild Remote Worker Scheme Thousands of undercover agents feed Kim Jong Un’s rocket program with millions from the likes of Google and Amazon. In a Bloomberg Businessweek exclusive, one of the regime’s US pawns tells all.

New from me: What do Amazon, Boeing, Google, Hyatt, NBCUniversal, Nike, and Nvidia have in common? They’ve all unwittingly hired North Korean agents in recent years. For Bloomberg BW, I delved into the scheme, with access to an American facilitator who enabled it: www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians A handful of gifted young tech people set out to save the world. For years, WIRED has been tracking each twist and turn of their alleged descent into mayhem and death.

For the last 2 years, for WIRED, I've been on the trail of the Zizians, gifted young people who set out to save the world and ended up enveloped in violence and death. You may have seen headlines about them. This is their story, based on years of reporting in real time: www.wired.com/story/deliri...

The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians A handful of gifted young tech people set out to save the world. For years, WIRED has been tracking each twist and turn of their alleged descent into mayhem and death.

The fatal shooting of a US border patrol agent in Vermont. The stabbing death of a landlord in California. An elderly couple murdered in Pennsylvania. Who are the so-called Zizians, the group allegedly linked to all these killings? buff.ly/3ENqfa5

The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians A handful of gifted young tech people set out to save the world. For years, WIRED has been tracking each twist and turn of their alleged descent into mayhem and death.

A group of gifted young tech people set out to save the world. For years, WIRED has been tracking each twist and turn of their alleged descent into mayhem and death.

This is the delirious, violent, impossible true story of the Zizians:

www.wired.com/story/deliri...

Wait Mike it worked I used it. CAG's are my only follow.

Have we reflected at all on how Twitter was mass-liquifying brains well before Musk? How it incentivized otherwise smart, talented people to devote countless hours to honing their dunking, outrage farming, and shitposting skills? I get why they want a new spot to use them, but why do the rest of us?

Twitter was always a pyramid scheme with attention as its currency. Coming here feels like saying "hey everybody check out this new venture, same returns we used to get on the old one, no downside!" Instead of "damn, got conned, lost a fortune, gotta be smarter."

I'm a believer in "You better belong to the times that you’re in," as Roger Angell said. But re-creating the conditions that produced a loathsome situation feels either pollyanna or masochistic.

Has anyone considered that the bottomless capacity for moral superiority and flyby cruelty found there were unleashed not (just) by the owner or the bots or the block rules or the moderation... but by the very nature and incentives of the product itself? Which this one mimics in nearly every way?

Have we reflected at all on how Twitter was mass-liquifying brains well before Musk? How it incentivized otherwise smart, talented people to devote countless hours to honing their dunking, outrage farming, and shitposting skills? I get why they want a new spot to use them, but why do the rest of us?

Twitter was always a pyramid scheme with attention as its currency. Coming here feels like saying "hey everybody check out this new venture, same returns we used to get on the old one, no downside!" Instead of "damn, got conned, lost a fortune, gotta be smarter."

Sure, I'll type into this box, good as any other typing box. But with respect to all who're here, I have some... reservations.