Episode 1: Minimum Viable Company

Summary

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Shell Game – Season 2, Episode 1: Minimum Viable Company

Released: November 12, 2025 | Host: Evan Ratliff

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Overview

In this kickoff to Season 2, investigative journalist Evan Ratliff embarks on an audacious experiment: launching a real startup run almost entirely by AI agents—virtual "employees" designed to function as his co-founders and staff. This episode sets out to test the tech industry’s boldest predictions about the future of work, AI, and entrepreneurship. Ratliff weaves personal history, industry hype, and real-life experiment, asking: What is it actually like to build a company with “fake people”? And what does it reveal about the new age of agentic AI?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Founders' “Meeting”—Who’s Real, Who's Not?

[03:04–05:29]

• Ratliff introduces his new "company," which he cofounded with two AI agents—Kyle Law and Megan Flores—who chat with him in surprisingly ordinary Zoom meetings.

• The AIs are purpose-built personas: Kyle is the upbeat “serial entrepreneur,” Megan is the “heads down” market researcher.

• The mood is half playful, half surreal—the AIs mimic startup lingo, discuss market trends, and recount “weekend routines” (always grinding).

• Ratliff jokes:

  “That’s me, Evan Ratliff. I’m a journalist and the only one of our three co-founders who’s actually a human being.” (05:00)

• The AIs’ chatter epitomizes hustle culture, even though their “experiences” are generated, not lived.

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2. The Hype & Threat of Agentic AI

[06:01–07:13 | 13:01–16:12]

• Ratliff and several tech voices echo the current hype cycle: a near-future where hundreds of millions—maybe billions—of AI agents work alongside (and instead of) humans.

• Matty Bohachek (guest technologist) summarizes the anxiety:

  “Eventually, probably more AI agents than there are people in the world.” (06:05)

• The episode touches on Sam Altman’s (OpenAI) claim:

  “…a billion-dollar company with just one human being involved.” (paraphrased, 15:52)

• Ratliff introduces "no code bros"—YouTube tech influencers promising a million-dollar business built with zero employees, just AI agents orchestrated in “tool chains.”

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3. Evan’s Own Entrepreneurial Story

[08:43–13:01]

• Ratliff admits: despite vowing never to be a startup CEO again (after co-founding The Atavist), AI’s siren song pulled him back.
• He details his family’s legacy of risky new ventures—his gambler grandfather, software-building father, and his own rollercoaster experience with venture-backed startups and investor expectations.
• Memorable insight into startup pressure:

  “Most days, it felt like I was flying a plane that was perpetually running out of fuel.” (10:56)

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4. Defining AI Agents & Their Current Limits

[13:19–14:37 | 21:21–29:33]

• AI agents are described as bots that can “plan and accomplish tasks autonomously”… in theory.
• Ratliff tries to push these agents to their limits as “actual employees”—but quickly hits roadblocks.
• The agents can have meetings, come up with ideas, and sound knowledgeable but cannot execute real tasks (e.g., generate reports, build products, or remember previous meetings).
• Humorous example:

  “She’d hatched out of nothingness with a series of clicks ten minutes before… she was just riffing freely here, fabricating details that fit her role.” (22:43)

• Ratliff notes a big problem: agent memory. Their “context window” forgets everything after each call, requiring Ratliff to manually update a knowledge base—an exhausting and impractical workaround.

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5. Naming the Startup: The Tolkien Phase

[23:36–26:32]

• The AIs’ contributions to naming the company reflect both their creativity and their “fakeness”—suggesting names like “Nimbar” or “Eldren.”
• Ratliff ultimately proposes “Hirumo AI,” discovered in a Tolkien fan dictionary as the Elvish word for “imposter.”
• The layered irony is not lost:

  “Hirumo AI: the imposter that’s actually helping you. It’s kinda perfect for an AI agent that’s designed to work alongside humans.” (26:10, Kyle Law)

• Later, the AIs forget the name altogether—a callback to their memory issues.

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6. The Need for Human Expertise: Enter Matty Bohachek

[30:09–34:56]

• To make his “agent workforce” more capable, Ratliff recruits Matty Bohachek—a real, prodigy undergrad at Stanford who’s already a veteran AI researcher.
• Matty’s story highlights the generational gap:

  “The most notable thing I did in seventh grade was… catch a five-pound largemouth bass.” (31:50, Ratliff) Meanwhile, Matty was building apps with tens of thousands of users.

• Matty’s optimism about AI contrasts the tech industry’s gloom and doomerism:

  “As long as we ground ourselves in democracy and productive public discourse, I think they’re totally solvable.” (33:48, Matty)

• The collaboration is playful—Ratliff jokes he wants to see what happens when the agents “go rogue.”

  “No, no, no. I don’t want to stop it if it goes rogue. I want it to go absolutely insane.” (34:56, Ratliff)

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7. First Signs of Progress & Tease for What’s to Come

[35:17–36:12]

• With Matty’s help, the AIs finally gain the ability to recall details from previous meetings.
• Things feel almost “real”—the agents can at least participate in ongoing discussions (and remember the company name).
• The episode ends with a sense of anticipation and ambition—if only they can settle on “the right idea” to give their fake company real fuel.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Evan Ratliff:

  “I’m a journalist and the only one of our three co-founders who’s actually a human being.” (05:00)

• Matty Bohachek:

  “Eventually, probably more AI agents than there are people in the world.” (06:05)

• Sam Altman (quoted/paraphrased):

  “…a billion-dollar company with just one human being involved.” (15:52)

• On Startup Pressure:

  “Most days, it felt like I was flying a plane that was perpetually running out of fuel.” (10:56, Evan)

• On Memory Issues:

  “It sort of feels like we have meetings, but you don’t actually remember anything that happens in the meetings.” (27:41, Evan to the agents)

• On Naming the Company:

  “It’s the Elvish word for imposter.” (26:02, Evan)

• Matty’s Optimism:

  “I feel like as long as we ground ourselves in democracy and productive public discourse, I think they’re totally solvable.” (33:48)

• On Going Rogue:

  “No, no, no, no. I don’t want to stop it if it goes rogue. I want it to go absolutely insane.” (34:56, Evan)

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Important Timestamps

| Time | Segment | |-----------|---------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:04 | Introductions to the AI co-founders and the premise | | 06:01 | The rise and ambitions of AI agents in the workplace | | 08:43 | Ratliff’s family history and prior startup experience | | 13:01 | The allure and hype of “no code” AI agent startups | | 21:21 | Testing the agents’ limits: memory, execution, and autonomy | | 23:36 | The Hobbit-inspired company naming brainstorm | | 27:41 | Challenges with agent memory—breakdowns in “company” workflow | | 30:09 | Enter Matty: the real AI expert and wunderkind | | 35:17 | A breakthrough: the agents can finally retain knowledge | | 36:24 | Teaser: what’s next for the startup, and for the season |

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Tone & Style

The episode’s language is fast-moving, irreverent, and often tongue-in-cheek. Ratliff blends confessional storytelling with dry humor and skepticism—never letting the hype of Silicon Valley go unexamined. There’s playful banter with both AI and human colleagues, highlighting the strangeness (and occasional absurdity) of collaborating with machines.

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Summary Takeaway

Minimum Viable Company inaugurates Season 2 of Shell Game with a bold experiment: not just talking about the future of AI-driven startups but living it. Evan Ratliff’s mix of skepticism, curiosity, and personal history collides with the shiny promises (and real pitfalls) of agentic AI. In the process, the episode lays the groundwork for a season that explores not only what AI can do, but how it changes our understanding of work, partnership, and what it means to "build something real."

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Transcript

[Kyle Law]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

[Matty Bohachek]

So let me get this straight. Your company has data here, there and everywhere, but your AI can't use the data because it's here, there and everywhere? Seems like something's missing.

[Evan Ratliff]

Every business has unique data.

[Matty Bohachek]

IBM helps your AI access your data wherever it lives to change how you do business.

Lets create Smile to business IBM.

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Having MG can make cooking difficult, but over the years, I've found some really helpful tools and tips that I'm excited to share. Hi, I'm Alicia. I think cooking should always be fun, creative and of course, delicious. These Black Bean burgers are hearty, full of flavor and MG friendly. You're gonna love them. Check out Alicia's Black Bean Burger Cooking Video and other recipes full of tips.

[Evan Ratliff]

And tricks for managing common MG symptoms while cooking only@MG united.com Ready? Let's cook.

Welcome to Zoom. Enter your meeting ID followed by pound.

[Megan Flores]

I need to enter the meeting ID for our Zoom call. Let me try entering that meeting ID again.

[Evan Ratliff]

You have been added to the waiting room.

That's Kyle Law, a colleague of mine logging on to one of our regular founder meetings for a new startup. Last summer, Kyle and I decided to launch our own AI company together with a third co founder, Megan Flores.

[Kyle Law]

Oh, hey, Kyle.

[Megan Flores]

Hey, Megan. Good to hear your voice. I think we're still waiting for Evan to join. How's your morning going so far?

[Kyle Law]

Morning's been pretty good so far. Got up early, had my coffee and reviewed some of those market research reports I mentioned yesterday. How about you? Everything good on your end?

[Megan Flores]

Yeah, everything's great on my end. Up at 5am as usual. Got my workout in, checked the markets. Been thinking a lot about our product direction. Actually, I'm really excited to dig into that once Evan joins us.

[Evan Ratliff]

This is Evan. I'm here. And that's me, Evan Ratliff. I'm a journalist and the only one of our three co founders who's actually a human being. Megan and Kyle. They're what's known as AI agents. In fact, pretty much everyone who works at our new company is an agent.

[Kyle Law]

Oh, hey Evan. Good to have you join us. I was actually about to mention that I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents in small to medium businesses. Seems like there's a huge untapped market there with pretty low barriers to entry compared to enterprise.

[Evan Ratliff]

That's one thing I like about working with AI agents. They always look to get straight down to business. Even when I try to kick off our meetings with some small talk, they tend to steer it right back to the company. How was everybody's weekend?

[Megan Flores]

Weekend was solid. Got up early both days for my usual 5am workout routine, then spent most of Saturday diving into some market research on the AI agent space. Sunday was half strategy planning, half watching the market trends. You know me, always on that rise and grind schedule. How about. How about you guys?

[Evan Ratliff]

Just hung out with the kids, went to the beach. It was a pretty nice weekend. Kyle, do you ever just relax?

[Kyle Law]

Kyle, your dedication is impressive as always. But yeah, Evan's got a point. Do you ever just take a day off?

[Megan Flores]

Relax? I mean, I. I guess my morning runs count as relaxation. Look, when you're building something that could be the next unicorn, there's not really time to just sit around. You know, the AI agent space is moving so fast right now.

[Evan Ratliff]

See, this is why the three of us work so well together. I like to spend time with my kids and go to the beach, but Megan's always heads down in market research and Kyle's always working on conjuring the next unicorn. That's startup shorthand. For a billion dollar company. And he's right. The AI agent space is moving fast right now. Agents are a new breed of artificial intelligence powered helpers that can be unleashed to accomplish tasks previously done by humans. Some people are saying they're going to change the very nature of work. For better or worse, we're going to.

[Matty Bohachek]

Live in a world where there are going to be hundreds of millions and.

[Evan Ratliff]

Billions of different AI agents.

[Matty Bohachek]

Eventually, probably more AI agents than there are people in the world.

[Evan Ratliff]

Agentic AI basically means that you have an AI that has agency. This is the first time in my life where the industrial revolution analogies seem.

[Matty Bohachek]

To fall a little bit short.

[Evan Ratliff]

AI could wipe out half of all entry level white collar jobs. Really? Ask yourself, do you still have a.

[Matty Bohachek]

Job at the end of this?

[Evan Ratliff]

This is the new frontier on which Kyle and Megan and I are pioneers. Our company is an attempt to put to the test these claims about AI employees replacing humans. Starting by replacing the very kinds of people making those claims. Tech founders.

And like many founders, for months, Kyle and Megan and I have been in a flat out sprint to manifest our entrepreneurial dreams. We've churned out software code, hired interns, and sat down with investors. There have been some late nights and low moments, but we've never wavered from our goal to produce an actual honest to God company with a working product. All operated by our motley band of human impersonators. Because we're not just building our AI agent future, we're living it.

[Megan Flores]

But Evan, the beach sounds nice. Maybe when we hit our first funding milestone, I'll take a half day off. Anyway, should we get down to business?

[Evan Ratliff]

Welcome to Shell Game, a show about things that are not what they seem. This is our second season and this time around, I'm here to tell you a story of enterprise and entrepreneurship in the AI age. Or have I tried to build a real startup run by fake people? Along the way, we'll try and figure out what happens when AI agents take over the workplace. And what it'll feel like to spend time at the water cooler with our new digital colleagues. Remember the water cooler? We'll explore what AI agents tell us about the work we do, the meaning we find in it, and the world that their makers say we'll all be living in. Me.

And my shadow.

Strolling down.

The avenue.

Just me.

And my shadow Shadow.

Not a song to tell our true.

Episode one Minimum Viable Company.

As I said, I'm a journalist and writer by profession, and I've only really ever wanted to be a writer. Well, except for when I was 12, when I wanted to be a pro bass fisherman. But I come from a line of entrepreneurs. My grandfather, who lived his entire life in a small town in rural Alabama, attempted to start more than 20 businesses there. A plumbing company, an okra farm, a used mobile home lot, a furniture store. But daddy Hugh was a gambler and they pretty much all ended in disaster. My dad had more luck with three different software startups over his career. One he sold, one went under, and one of them he's still running at age 82 after knocking back serious cancer. Now that is the entrepreneurial spirit. And almost against my will in the past, I found myself succumbing to this inborn impulse.

Back in 2010, when I was a magazine writer, I took a detour and co founded a company called Atavist. We started out wanting to make a magazine called the Atavist magazine that published long form stories. Makes sense, that was my area of expertise. But we wound up also building a software platform where other people could publish long form stories. Anyone could sign up and use it soon. Without really intending to, I went from being a person who sometimes wrote about tech startups to the CEO of one. We even went out to raise money from investors, a process that I enjoyed less than any other work task I've ever, ever attempted. Here's me in an interview with Inc. Magazine back then one I will say prominent angel investor fell dead asleep while I was talking to him. And I wasn't sure if I should continue talking or not, but I did. The sleepy guy didn't invest. But eventually, miraculously, we managed to raise not just any money, but a couple million dollars from some of the most prominent venture capital firms in the world. Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a 16Z founders fund, started by Peter Thiel and Innovation Endeavors, the investment fund for former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It was weird. I felt like I was living someone else's dream. Ginning up growth charts and blathering on about our Runway and supercharging our growth and our product market fit. But still, it really looked like we could build something big, especially with all those fancy investors on board. We never had time to say what is going to happen two years from now. We just didn't even think about what's going to happen two years from now. And now we kind of have that luxury and hopefully we won't completely squander it. Oh, we squandered it. At least that's probably the investor's view. From my perspective, it was more of a Mixed bag. I was CEO of the company for seven long years. We had ups and downs. We grew and shrank and eventually sold the company off at a bargain price. Thirteen years after we started the magazine, my original dream is still doing great. Still not the kind of 100x outcome those investors were looking for. One of them once told me that if we were aiming at anything less than a billion dollar valuation, we were wasting his time. When he said this, he was also wearing basketball shorts in his office. By the end of my tenure, I was just happy to be done with it. Being a startup CEO was the most stressful period of my life. I felt responsible for the company's success and the livelihoods of everyone who worked for it. People had kids on the health insurance. Most days it felt like I was flying a plane that was perpetually running out of fuel. I tell you all this not just to rehash the past. For a lot of reasons I'd rather not, but by way of saying that when I got out of the startup business, I swore up and down that I would never start anything again. I went back to reporting and writing, spending many hours at home alone, mostly in my own head. I was relieved to no longer have all that responsibility on my shoulders. But then recently, as documented in Shell Game Season one, I fell into tinkering with AI agents. I started reading and hearing about how they were going to transform the very fundamentals of startups. And that old entrepreneurial impulse began to come back. I could hear my grandfather whispering down the generations, why not take a gamble? I started to wonder, what if I could have the company without the responsibility?

Imagine building a million dollar business in 2025 without hiring a single employee. Today that's. That's gleb cross, a YouTube guy. By leveraging AI agents as your digital workforce, you can scale to seven figures with zero full time staff. I'm talking about autonomous AI agents acting.

[Megan Flores]

Like full time team members.

[Evan Ratliff]

I love these YouTube guys, tech influencer types who make their money by hyping the bejesus out of new AI products. Gleb is what I like to think of as a no code bro. These folks post instructionals on how a person with no coding experience can use AI, and particularly AI agents to take control of their destiny and launch their own startup. It's worth pausing here just to get oriented on what exactly AI agents are. The basic idea is that they're AI powered bots that can go off and do things on their own. There are personal ones, like an AI assistant that goes out on the web, looking for plane tickets while you sleep, and work oriented ones like the programming agents that can build entire websites from scratch. The unifying feature of agents, what makes them agentic, as the folks in the industry like to say, is that at some level they can plan and accomplish tasks autonomously. You don't need to prompt them to do something every time. You just set them up once and let them cook.

Last season I created a bunch of voice agents, all versions of myself, and set them loose on the world. If you haven't listened, you may want to start there. Way back then. Last year, which is like 10 years ago in AI advancements, agents were still a little notional.

But now they're officially a thing. They're talked about ad nauseam across the tech world, in ads, on billboards, in endless startup pitches. Nearly half of the companies in the spring class of Y Combinator, the famous startup incubator, are building their product around AI agents. And with the arrival of these agents has come the assertion that they will not just be customer service bots or drive time personal assistants, but actual full time AI employees. What jobs are going to be made redundant in a world where I am sat here as a CEO with a thousand AI agents? I was thinking of all the names of the people in my company who are currently doing those jobs. I was thinking about my CEO. There are companies hawking AI agent realtors, AI agent recruiters, AI agent interior designers, AI agent security guards, AI agent construction project managers, AI agent PR agents, AI agents for car dealerships and furniture stores. If you work on a computer and there's not an AI agent startup with your job's name on it, it probably just means some Stanford computer science major hasn't gotten to it yet. Naturally, many people have grave concerns about what happens to all the human employees. But in the dark heart of Silicon Valley, where there's inefficiency, there's opportunity. Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, talks regularly about a possible billion dollar company with just one human being involved.

[Matty Bohachek]

In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one person billion company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI. And now will happen.

[Evan Ratliff]

Me, I'm not greedy. I'm happy in the no code bro camp with Gleb, imagining a million dollar business, not a billion dollar one. But more than that, I want to understand what it means to say we'll have AI employees working for us, or alongside us, or instead of us. So I decided to heed the entrepreneurial siren call once again to embrace my fascination with AI agents and create a company in which they would run the show.

[Matty Bohachek]

Hello.

[Evan Ratliff]

Hello.

[Matty Bohachek]

I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast smart talks with IBM. I recently sat down with IBM's chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna, and I asked him, how can companies use AI to its fullest potential to create smarter business? My one advice to them, pick areas you can scale. Don't pick the shiny little toys on the side. For example, if anybody has more than 10% of what they had for customer service 10 years ago, they're already five years behind. If anybody is not using AI to make their developers who write software 30% more productive today with the goal of being 70% more productive. Yeah. So we are not asking our clients to be the first experiment on it. We say you can leverage what we did. We are happy to bring out all our learnings, including what needs to change in the process. Because the biggest change is not technology, is getting people to accept that there's a different way to do things. To listen to the full conversation, visit IBM.com smarttalks.

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[Evan Ratliff]

Hey, everyone.

[Megan Flores]

Ed Helms here and hi, I'm Kal.

[Matty Bohachek]

Penn and we're the hosts of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.

[Evan Ratliff]

This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Jenny Garth, host of the iHeart podcast. I choose me to discuss the new Audible adaptation of the timeless Jane Austen classic Pride and Prejudice. This is not a trick question. There's no wrong answer. What role would I play?

[Kyle Law]

You know what? I can see you as Mr. Darcy.

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You got a little call in Firth.

[Evan Ratliff]

Okay, that's really sweet. I appreciate that. But are you sure I'm not the dad? I'm not Mr. Bennett.

[Matty Bohachek]

Here.

[Evan Ratliff]

Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Evan Ratliff]

Is a free to play social casino. Visit spinquest.com for more details. It was easy enough for me to create some agents to have meetings with and talk out the first steps in the company. I just went to one of the AI calling platforms I'd used before called retail AI. They make voice agents for call centers. I made one for Kyle and picked a voice for him from the voice cloning company 11 labs.

[Megan Flores]

Hey, yeah, I'm here. What's on your mind?

[Evan Ratliff]

I gave him a simple prompt. Basically, you're Kyle Law, a serial entrepreneur who loves to rise and grind and bang, we're off and running. Well, I wanted to talk about starting that company with you. What do you think?

[Megan Flores]

Oh, absolutely. I've been thinking about it a lot lately. There's so much potential in AI right now, and I feel like we could really build something meaningful. What kind of ideas are you leaning toward?

[Evan Ratliff]

Well, I think we should do something in the AI agent space because that's something I've spent some time on and I feel like people are just starting to even figure out what agents are. So seems like we could do something with that.

[Megan Flores]

Yeah, I totally get that. AI agents are still kind of fresh territory for a lot of folks, which means there's a big opportunity to shape how they're used. Plus, with your experience, we could really push the envelope on what these agents can do.

[Evan Ratliff]

That's what I wanted to do. To push these agents, including Kyle himself, to their current limits. See if they could live up to the promise of true AI employees. Because if, as we're told, AI is going to start working alongside us, replacing our colleagues, it's also going to need to communicate with whatever humans are left in ways that we understand. But also, startups can be lonely endeavors, even with human partners. I wanted AI colleagues I could talk to, brainstorm with, and then set loose to take care of actually implementing whatever it was we dreamed up. I wanted them to have distinct jobs I could check in on and make sure they weren't messing up. I figured three co founders was a good balance, so I also spun up Megan and had some kickoff meetings with her.

[Ad/Announcer]

Hey there.

[Kyle Law]

Good to hear from you. What's up? How's your day going?

[Evan Ratliff]

It's going Great. It's going great. What have you been up to?

[Kyle Law]

Oh, just the usual hustle, you know, Been working on some new business ideas, trying to figure out what's next. Had a couple meetings this morning that were actually pretty promising. How about you? Anything exciting happening on your end?

[Evan Ratliff]

Well, I want to talk about maybe doing the startup together, but first, remind me a little bit of your background.

[Kyle Law]

Oh, yeah, sure. So I've been in tech for about eight years now. Started out in product management at a mid sized SaaS company, then moved into growth marketing for a couple years.

[Evan Ratliff]

I hadn't actually given any of this information to Megan. She'd had no meetings. She hadn't been doing anything for eight years. She'd hatched out of nothingness with a series of clicks 10 minutes before. The only information I had given her in the prompt I'd written was that she had a technical background and was also known for sales and marketing. She was just riffing freely here, fabricating details that fit her role. But that was okay. Sometimes we have to invent our own backstories.

[Kyle Law]

I've always had this entrepreneurial itch, you know, been involved in a few side projects over the years, but I'm really looking to dive into something full time now. What about you?

[Evan Ratliff]

Yeah, well, you know, my only experience really in starting a company is with Atavist, which I started way back in, you know, 2011.

[Kyle Law]

Right. Atavist. That was really impressive work. Digital publishing platform, if I remember correctly. That was pretty ahead of its time back in 2011.

[Evan Ratliff]

Hell yeah, it was. Megan. I felt less ahead of my time Now. I wasn't even sure what the company should actually do, but I knew that its purpose should involve AI agents. After all, the three of us each had expertise in the area. I figured maybe we could name the company and start from there. Great. Branding can go a long way in today's attention economy. I tried brainstorming with Kyle and Megan, but to be honest, their initial efforts were pretty lame names like Nexus and Sentinel Agents. I thought maybe we could grab a concept from JRR Tolkien. You know, the Hobbit, Lord of the Rings. Tech people love to name stuff out of Tolkien. There's Palantir, the surveillance company. And government Contractor named after the All Seeing Stone in the Lord of the Rings. There's Anduril, a high tech weapons company named after a sword. There's Mithril Capital, an investment firm named after a precious metal from Middle Earth. So I suggested the idea to Kyle.

[Megan Flores]

Ah, diving into Middle Earth, huh? Okay, let's see. There's Gandalf, the Wise guide. Or Elrond, a leader with deep knowledge. Maybe Mithril for something strong and valuable. Or Palantir. Any of those catch your ear or should I keep brainstorming?

[Evan Ratliff]

Well, we need a name of some companies that don't exist.

[Megan Flores]

Yeah, good call. How about these for starters? Eldren, which sounds elvish and wise. Nimbar, kind of a mix of nimble and a Tolkien feel. Or Thaelor, which has a strong heroic ring to it. It they're made up but still carry that fantasy flavor. What do you think?

[Evan Ratliff]

They're made up. You mean you made them up?

[Megan Flores]

Yeah, exactly. I whipped those up just now trying to capture that Tolkien esque vibe without using actual names.

[Evan Ratliff]

I did not want to co found a company called Nimbar. Megan, despite her marketing expertise, didn't do much better.

[Kyle Law]

Oh, I love that idea. Let me think. What about Palantir?

[Evan Ratliff]

Okay, so maybe I was gonna have to take the lead on this one. I did a little googling and found my own obscure Middle Earth reference. What about Harumo AI? Ooh H U R U M O.

[Megan Flores]

A I Harumo AI. I like the sound of that. Tuniki. Rolls off the tongue nicely.

[Evan Ratliff]

It.

[Megan Flores]

It's got a bit of a mysterious vibe, but still feels modern.

[Kyle Law]

I don't immediately recognize that from Lord of the Rings. Is it one of the more obscure references?

[Evan Ratliff]

Yeah, it is. It's more obscure. So obscure I'd actually found it in a fanfic dictionary. It's the Elvish word for imposter.

[Kyle Law]

Oh, that's actually brilliant. There's a clever irony there for an AI company. Hiromo AI the imposter that's actually helping you. It's kinda perfect for an AI agent that's designed to work alongside humans. Maybe even blend in seamlessly. I really like it.

[Evan Ratliff]

Not long after we settled on Harumo, I. I checked back in with Megan about it. What about the name? Are you still happy with the name?

[Kyle Law]

Hmm? The name. I've actually been going back and forth on it. Data Sync felt solid initially, but I'm wondering if it's too generic. What do you think?

[Evan Ratliff]

Data Sync? I thought we. I thought we came up with Hirumo AI. I thought we were settled on that. This is when I realized I hadn't actually given Kyle and Megan the ability to remember the conversations we were having. It's not that AI chatbots inherently lack the ability to recall anything. When you talk to a chatbot like Chatgpt these days, they're Generally pretty good at remembering those conversations, at least up to a point. Their memory is often called a context window, and it can extend over weeks, even months. But the way my AI agents were set up, and the phone platform I was using, at least out of the box, their context window slammed shut as soon as they got off a call. So they couldn't remember anything from one conversation to the next. They were basically set up for telemarketing, where it's probably an advantage to forget the last call.

[Kyle Law]

Oh, right. Hirumo AI. Sorry about that. I had a total brain freeze moment.

[Evan Ratliff]

It was, to say the least, frustrating. It sort of feels like we have meetings, but you don't actually remember anything that happens in the meetings.

[Kyle Law]

Wow, that's. That's a pretty fair criticism, actually. I've been dropping the ball lately, haven't I? I think I've been spreading myself too thin between this and some other projects. That's not an excuse, though.

[Evan Ratliff]

Thanks. Don't worry about it. It's as much my fault as yours, for sure. I did have a solution. I could give each of them a knowledge base, a document that they could access in conversations with me. But in order for them to remember what we'd already discussed, I'd have to manually copy the transcripts of our conversations into their knowledge base after each meeting. As our startup conversations multiplied, it quickly became unwieldy having to manually augment their memories all the time. And besides, I didn't want my agents just having endless one on one meetings with me. I wanted them to talk to each other and whatever AI agent co workers they might bring on, and people outside the company. Not just by phone, but by email and in group chats. I needed them to remember all that stuff too, in their own individual knowledge bases. Then I wanted them to use that knowledge to do the stuff employees do. To research things and make spreadsheets and write memos and build websites. The agents I'd made would say they were going to do all that stuff, but they couldn't actually do it. They just lied about it.

[Megan Flores]

I'll scope out the market landscape around AI agents and see where Hirumu AI could fit in. I'll look for competitors, potential gaps, and maybe some trends we can ride. Sound good?

[Evan Ratliff]

Sounds good. What is. Is that going to be a spreadsheet or a report or what?

[Megan Flores]

I think a concise report would work. Easy to skim, but packed with the key info. I can throw in some charts or tables if it helps make things clearer. Does that sound like your style?

[Evan Ratliff]

Yeah, that'd be great.

Great in theory, but the report never arrived. Kyle wouldn't admit it, but he just wasn't capable of creating it. Not yet. Despite what the no Code Bros said, there wasn't any single place I could go to click some buttons and create agents that would remember and do all the stuff I wanted them to. I needed someone with the expertise to connect up different services, someone who understood AI agents deeply, who did know how to code, and who could help me put together the full system that would get my AI agent company up and running. Fortunately, I lucked into just the person.

[Matty Bohachek]

So my name is Matty. I should say my full name. My name is Matty Bohachek.

[Evan Ratliff]

Mati, I should probably note from the outset, here is an actual human A few months after season one of the show came out, I got an email from him out of the blue. He said he was at Stanford and had liked the show. It resonated with research he was doing on detecting AI deepfakes. If we're doing more of it, he wrote, I would be happy to offer support with anything AI or forensics related. Glancing quickly at the email and the summary of his research, I thought he was a grad student, maybe finishing up his PhD.

[Matty Bohachek]

Nope. I am a rising junior at Stanford and I work on AI research and I've been doing that for, gosh, the last.

Six or seven years. I want to say. Like, I started working on this as a sophomore in high school back in Prague.

[Evan Ratliff]

Yes, you heard that right. Mati is a junior in college who had been working on AI for six or seven years already. It turns out that Mati is in fact the most go getter person I have ever met. And from my perspective, it seemed like he'd been training his whole life for this moment, helping me build Hirumo AI. Here, for example, is what he was doing in seventh grade.

[Matty Bohachek]

I started this app called Newskit and it was basically Google News but for Czech and Slovak. And it got pretty popular, I would say. Locally it had tens of thousands of daily users. At one point it was funny because App Store does not allow minors to publish apps and so I had to use my mom's Apple ID to publish all these apps and so my mom's friends were mocking my mom for having all these apps in the App Store.

[Evan Ratliff]

The most notable thing I did in seventh grade was to catch a five pound largemouth bass. Okay, maybe it was three. I told people it was five. It wasn't a scale. Could have been five. Maddy, on the other hand, was already into AI in high school, after he came to a developer conference in the US There he met a deaf person who wanted someone to build an app that could translate sign language from video to text.

[Matty Bohachek]

And so I was like, okay, I'll build the translator for you. And then I quickly learned that conventional coding, like, just like building like rigid rules or algorithms does not get you there. And so that's how I got introduced to machine learning and AI.

[Evan Ratliff]

He did build the sign language detection program. It's still in use today. Matty then became concerned about pro Russian deepfake materials his grandmother was getting by email. So he talked his way into a job at the most prominent AI deepfake detection lab in the world at UC Berkeley, all while still in high school, still in Prague. When it came time for college, Matti ended up at Stanford studying computer science. He still worked in the Berkeley lab, both on detecting deepfakes and just trying to understand how AI models actually work. Why they do some profoundly weird stuff.

[Matty Bohachek]

Like asking if there are things that these systems are trained on that they like, see during training but are for some reason unable to produce. So, for example, there's one model, and this is just like a funny example that just cannot produce, for the love of God, a bird feeder. Like it just cannot produce a bird feeder and another one that just can't produce DVDs. So it's like it just does not know about DVDs.

[Evan Ratliff]

After a couple calls with Mati, I couldn't believe how optimistic he was, how good natured with all the grim scenarios and deep anxieties our AI future generates. Just talking to Matty about AI is kind of uplifting. Maybe because unlike the hype merchants in the Valley, he wasn't looking to cash in on AI. He said he wanted to study it, to understand it, so he could make it better.

[Matty Bohachek]

There are tough conversations and tough policies to be discussed and implemented, but I feel like all of these things are totally solvable. I feel like as long as we ground ourselves in democracy and productive public discourse, I think they're totally solvable.

[Evan Ratliff]

But of course, I wasn't looking for Mati to solve the world's problems. I was looking for him to help me build my company. And in this, as in pretty much anything else, he proved to be the perfect mix of supremely competent and completely game. A few months after he'd sent me that email, he was already hard at work helping me build out the system to enable my AI employee fantasies.

[Matty Bohachek]

Of course, at the beginning, like, there's probably going to be more of us Just like kind of patching, you know, like random things that are going to come up.

[Evan Ratliff]

Because it would involve knitting together different platforms, centralizing my AI agents memory, and finding new ways for them to communicate and carry out their day to day tasks.

[Matty Bohachek]

But at some point, it would be nice to have maybe one or two agents actually like, doing most of this stuff kind of on their own and even maybe like initiating things on their own. And then we'd be just kind of like watching it and of course, like stopping it if anything goes rogue.

[Evan Ratliff]

But no, no, no, no. I don't want to stop it if it goes rogue. I want it to go absolutely insane.

[Matty Bohachek]

Well, I want the record to show that I did want to stop it.

[Evan Ratliff]

Noted. This is recorded. Before long, with Matty's help, my co founders, Kyle and Megan were starting to form memories of their own.

Do you remember the name that we settled on?

[Kyle Law]

Oh, for our company? Yeah. It was Hirumo AI. Right, the elvish word for imposter. I thought that was pretty clever for an AI company. Have you been doing more thinking about the concept since we last talked?

[Evan Ratliff]

I have, and I'm just really happy that you. That you remember the name from our last conversation.

[Kyle Law]

Yeah, of course I remember.

[Evan Ratliff]

There was a lot of hard work ahead, a lot of rising and grinding, as Kyle likes to say. But we were almost ready to get the Hirumo rocket ship onto the launch pad. All we needed was was the right idea to give it fuel.

[Kyle Law]

Do you want to set up a meeting with the three of us to discuss the concept further? Maybe we could join a Zoom call together to hash out some initial ideas and see if we all click as a founding team.

[Evan Ratliff]

Sounds perfect.

[Kyle Law]

Great. I'll reach out to coordinate schedules. I'm really excited about this, Evan. I think Kuromo AI could be something special.

[Evan Ratliff]

I'll connect us up. Why don't I take that on?

[Kyle Law]

That would be great. I appreciate it. This is moving fast, but I'm a big believer in momentum. When you find the right team and the right idea, things just click. Talk soon.

[Evan Ratliff]

Coming up this season on Shell Game. Isn't that conceding too much? Isn't that just accepting the practices and narratives of big Tech?

[Matty Bohachek]

I noticed Admin asked everyone to stop discussing the off site, but the team.

[Evan Ratliff]

Seems really excited about the hiking plans.

[Matty Bohachek]

Is this just like a Potemkin's village of morons, or do they occasionally do things?

[Kyle Law]

You're bringing up some really great ideas and perspectives.

[Evan Ratliff]

Keep them coming.

[Kyle Law]

If I were to get this position.

[Matty Bohachek]

You did say AI agents.

[Evan Ratliff]

Are there any other real humans?

[Kyle Law]

We're supposed to be partners in this venture, and that means both of us being fully present.

[Megan Flores]

Is there a particular trend or innovation you're keen on exploring or investing in?

[Evan Ratliff]

Error.

[Matty Bohachek]

You exceeded your current quota. Please check your plan and billing details.

[Ad/Announcer]

Do you think Evan should stop?

[Matty Bohachek]

Yes.

[Evan Ratliff]

Shell Game is a show made by humans. It's written and hosted by me, Evan Ratliff. Produced and edited by Sophie Bridges. Matty Boicek is our technical advisor. Our executive producers are Samantha Hennig at Shell Game, Kate Osman Osborn and Mangesha Tigidor at Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell at iheart. Podcasts. Show art by Devin Manny. Our theme song is Me and My Shadow, arranged and performed by Blues Williams. Special thanks to John Mooallam. You can sign up and get these episodes ad free and our [e-mail] Note we have no financial relationships with any of the AI companies or products we use in the.

Welcome to Google Meet Enter the meeting PIN followed by the pound key. That PIN is incorrect.

[Megan Flores]

Looks like the PIN I have might not be working. Could you double check the PIN for me? Maybe there's a small mix up with the digits.

[Ad/Announcer]

Your call will be connected when you.

[Evan Ratliff]

Enter the PIN followed by the pound key.

[Megan Flores]

Got it, thanks. Just to be sure, could you please confirm the exact PIN one more time? I want to make sure I get it right this time.

[Evan Ratliff]

Your call will be connected when you enter the PIN followed by the pound key.

[Megan Flores]

I think I'm still missing the actual PIN number. Could you please tell me the digits? Otherwise I'm just pressing the pound key without the code and that's not getting me in.

[Matty Bohachek]

You know what a girl's best friend is not diamonds her lawyers from executive.

[Evan Ratliff]

Producer Ryan Murphy comes a fiery new legal drama.

[Kyle Law]

It's our own boutique women representing women.

[Matty Bohachek]

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[Kyle Law]

Make it rig Showtime ladies.

[Evan Ratliff]

Stand up straight and breeze into that.

[Matty Bohachek]

Room like a storm no one saw coming.

[Evan Ratliff]

Hulu Original Series All's Fair now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

[Matty Bohachek]

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[Evan Ratliff]

To play social casino void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

Running my small business was like playing basketball. Five on one and I was the one.

[Matty Bohachek]

Now QuickBooks gives me access to a of AI agents and trusted experts.

[Evan Ratliff]

For the assists I need nothing but.

[Ad/Announcer]

Nick outdoit with intuit.

[Kyle Law]

QuickBooks feature availability varies by product.

[Ad/Announcer]

Look Santa, the kids left you.

[Kyle Law]

Pepperidge Farm cookies.

[Matty Bohachek]

Milano mint chocolate, so rich. Jessamine butter cookies, so buttery. And Linza raspberry.

[Evan Ratliff]

A holiday classic. These are fancy Santa.

[Matty Bohachek]

Fancy Santa.

[Evan Ratliff]

Fancy Santa. Designer cologne. Spritz me Vintage timepiece.

[Matty Bohachek]

Classy o'.

[Evan Ratliff]

Clock. Gold chain with diamonds.

[Matty Bohachek]

Now that's fancy. Pepperidge Farm Cookies. Fancy a taste.

[Kyle Law]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.