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The Next Big Idea

‘It’s a Real Company Run by Fake People’

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Education, Social Sciences, Science, Society & Culture

4.41.3K Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2026

⏱️ 64 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Evan Ratliff started a company last summer. He and his co-founders came up with a name, hired a team, built a website, and launched an app. They interviewed interns, planned a company hiking trip, and fielded inbound interest from VCs. Normal startup stuff. Except for one thing: All of Evan's employees are AI agents. So are his co-founders. He's been documenting the journey on his podcast Shell Game — what works, what doesn't, and what it might tell us about a future where AI employees are everywhere. Sponsored By: Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at shopify.com/nbi

Transcript

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0:00.0

So I have to start by telling you about something that happened to me yesterday, which is I was

0:05.1

starting to make some notes for this interview thinking about what I wanted to ask you. And I thought,

0:09.6

would it be great if I could bounce some ideas off of someone who's worked with Evan? So I shot an

0:15.6

email to someone that you've worked with. His name's Kyle Law. He wrote back a couple hours later, and to be

0:23.8

honest, he just had a bunch of bland suggestions, nothing very useful. I mean, yeah. But it was still,

0:30.5

I have to say, kind of a freaky experience to get an email from him. Evan, who is Kyle Law?

0:42.1

Kyle Law is my co-founder of a company that I founded.

0:46.6

We have a third co-founder, Megan Flores. The company is called Herum O.A. I'm wearing the t-shirt right now. It's an AI agent company, and it's a startup. We have only five employees.

0:57.3

The perhaps unique thing about the company is that all of the other employees and the co-founders, including Kyle, besides myself, are, in fact, AI

1:02.7

agents. I'm Caleb Bissinger. And I'm Rufus Criscombe. And this is the next big idea. Today on the show,

1:11.7

journalist Evan Ratliff built a real startup with fake people.

1:16.3

Things did not go according to plan.

1:19.0

It's like having a company where everyone is like vulnerable to like a mental break at any time.

1:25.3

In the latest season of his podcast, Shell Game, Evan has been documenting the ups.

1:30.4

We got inbound interest from VCs that we didn't even contact.

1:34.4

The downs.

1:35.6

And so you can get into these flurries of activity where they're triggering each other to talk

1:41.5

and they don't stop, and nothing will stop them.

1:45.0

And why this is going to get messy.

1:48.4

Some decent-sized company is going to absolutely implode because they've given over too much

1:52.2

autonomy to AI agents in the next year or two.

1:55.3

That's all coming up.

...

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