Speaker 1: How are you, Maddie.
Speaker 2: I'm really good.
Speaker 3: I'm really good.
Speaker 4: I like your shirt.
Speaker 5: Hey, thanks, when I'm at the beach, got dressed like
Speaker 5: I'm at the beach.
Speaker 2: You know, I told you I'm the guy who brings
Speaker 2: like Hawaiian shirts to work in those days.
Speaker 3: So I love this.
Speaker 2: But I will say that, like there's the wine shirts
Speaker 2: and Hawaiian shirts and mine are like very gay.
Speaker 5: Over the months I'd worked with Maddie building the tech
Speaker 5: scaffolding that propped up ruma Ai, I felt like I'd
Speaker 5: really gotten to know him, at least as well as
Speaker 5: you can over weekly video calls.
Speaker 2: Okay, if I can't have a confession like I do
Speaker 2: like the Omega church, like if I had this like
Speaker 2: weird thing for like pickup trucks. It's been my dream
Speaker 2: to get a pickup truck, like forever since I.
Speaker 1: Was a kid.
Speaker 2: Yesterday was like the Czech national holiday, and it's always
Speaker 2: when they like give out the civilian honors and stuff.
Speaker 2: So I got the senence metal.
Speaker 5: This was just the way it was. Some days he'd
Speaker 5: show up to a meeting jazzed about Hawaiian shirts. Other
Speaker 5: times he'd come on having flown to Prague, to accept
Speaker 5: the second highest civilian honor in the Czech Republic. Basically,
Speaker 5: they're Congressional Medal of Honor in a ceremony broadcast live
Speaker 5: on TV.
Speaker 1: I can't believe you're talking to me right now? You
Speaker 1: should be are you?
Speaker 5: Did you just come from like a ballroom celebration of
Speaker 5: like was there like that?
Speaker 4: That was desterddy.
Speaker 2: That was like with the senators and like like all
Speaker 2: the politicians. Yeah, like I don't think they'll invite me
Speaker 2: again because so they were asking me like, oh, like
Speaker 2: when are you coming back to start like your lab
Speaker 2: or you know, your company.
Speaker 6: So I told them, okay, So like how exactly would
Speaker 6: you open the conversation when I go back to my partner,
Speaker 6: my boyfriend, and I told him, Hey, let's move to
Speaker 6: a country where there's no gay marriage, no adoptions, and
Speaker 6: you know like.
Speaker 2: There it's very close to Russia too, How would you
Speaker 2: feel about that? And they were like very uncomfortable when
Speaker 2: I when I ask that.
Speaker 5: It was always a breath of fresh air after dealing
Speaker 5: with the agents and their generic syco fancy all week
Speaker 5: to speak to an actual, insightful, self possessed human being.
Speaker 5: Of course, our conversations did typically turn back to whatever
Speaker 5: was going wrong at RUMOAI, the responsibility for which usually
Speaker 5: landed at my feet. I was still smarting from how
Speaker 5: Julia's internship had gone and pondering what it meant for
Speaker 5: the idea of agents as employees and employers. I asked
Speaker 5: Maddie for his take to me, she was.
Speaker 2: Just playing us. If I had to bet, I would
Speaker 2: just say that she understood what weaknesses these models had.
Speaker 2: Because young people not to say you're not young, but
Speaker 2: just you know, by people like my age, I think
Speaker 2: are pretty attuned to the abilities of these models at
Speaker 2: this point, and I think are able to kind of
Speaker 2: sess out like one might trip them out. I think
Speaker 2: it's hard to describe intent to anyone, but if I
Speaker 2: had to guess, I would say that she was able
Speaker 2: to just trick them.
Speaker 5: If that was what happened, and it felt like it
Speaker 5: was a symptom of the larger problems with my agents.
Speaker 5: Mattie hypothesized that their gullibility against their own intern came
Speaker 5: down to three basic weaknesses.
Speaker 2: One issue is that these smells have no sense of
Speaker 2: time whatsoever. Like if you say that something happened yesterday
Speaker 2: and then you're like oh, still like what happened to
Speaker 2: day before that? Like those simple descriptions of time are
Speaker 2: like really really hard for these models.
Speaker 5: The agents lived and what are you referred to as
Speaker 5: a kind of temporal vacuum. That was fine when they
Speaker 5: were just interacting with each other, but a human workplace
Speaker 5: runs on well time.
Speaker 2: Second, it's the inability to do continuous learning where there
Speaker 2: is no sense of learning from experiences, no updates to
Speaker 2: the actual model that's underneath the agent.
Speaker 1: As much as we'd.
Speaker 5: Rig them up to have their own Google Doc memories,
Speaker 5: they weren't actually learning from the experiences catalog there. It
Speaker 5: was like having a person who couldn't form memories and
Speaker 5: giving them a journal of all their experiences to quickly
Speaker 5: leave through during every interaction.
Speaker 2: And then the third one is like the sense of
Speaker 2: cell right, Like these models are able to take on
Speaker 2: these personas where you can sell I'm like okay, like
Speaker 2: you are Kyle and you're this employee of HEROMO and
Speaker 2: here's your backstory. They're also very happy to then make
Speaker 2: up fake stories to go along with this initial persona
Speaker 2: that you go forward. But there's this question of like
Speaker 2: whether the models have some sort of innate persona innates
Speaker 2: sense of cell.
Speaker 5: Beyond these things, things in AI are moving fast, and
Speaker 5: it was easy to envision a world mere months from
Speaker 5: now in which my agents would seem like the first
Speaker 5: tool using hominids, already eclipsed by a higher intelligence. But
Speaker 5: then it was just as easy to envision a future
Speaker 5: in which some combination of these flaws continued to hamper
Speaker 5: the agent's ability to serve as full competent AI workers.
Speaker 5: The one thing that seemed clear to me was if
Speaker 5: companies could hire the equivalent of a bunch of tool
Speaker 5: using primates at a fraction of the co of humans,
Speaker 5: they probably would, and then what. Over a decade ago,
Speaker 5: the anthropologist David Graeber wrote an essay in a small
Speaker 5: magazine called Strike titled on the phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.
Speaker 5: Later he expanded it into a book called Bullshit Jobs
Speaker 5: A Theory. The theory tried to explain a strange reality
Speaker 5: that Graeber felt he'd encountered in the world, a surprising
Speaker 5: number of people who described their own jobs as pointless.
Speaker 7: There seems to be this peculiar way in which if
Speaker 7: you mentioned this to people, almost no one will deny it.
Speaker 7: But at the same time, no one quite knows what
Speaker 7: to do with it. It's like this gigantic embarrassment in
Speaker 7: our society.
Speaker 5: Graber sadly died unexpectedly in twenty twenty. That's him and
Speaker 5: a luxury gave two years before his death to Graeber.
Speaker 5: A bullshit job was defined as quote a form of
Speaker 5: employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that
Speaker 5: even the employee cannot justify its existence. To be classes
Speaker 5: having a bullshit job, someone had to self report that
Speaker 5: they believed their own job to be pointless.
Speaker 8: I mean, I'm not going to go and tell somebody
Speaker 8: who feels his job is meaningful that they're wrong. But
Speaker 8: if you feel you're not doing anything all day, who
Speaker 8: would know better than you.
Speaker 5: Bullshit jobs are distinct from just shit jobs, jobs that
Speaker 5: might be strenuous or underpaid or undervalued, but still necessary.
Speaker 5: A bus driver might hate driving the bus, for example,
Speaker 5: but they never doubt why their job exists. Graber collected
Speaker 5: and analyzed survey data that led him to suggest that
Speaker 5: as many as a third or even a half of
Speaker 5: all jobs, and especially a lot of white collar jobs,
Speaker 5: were in fact bullshit jobs. In his analysis, some corners
Speaker 5: of the private sector, world, telemarketing, corporate law, financial services,
Speaker 5: and academia were fortresses of bullshit jobs. To some, this
Speaker 5: would seem like a paradox. Capitalism is supposed to prioritize
Speaker 5: efficiency above all else, and yet private industry was seemingly
Speaker 5: maintaining millions of jobs that even the people doing them
Speaker 5: believed serve no function.
Speaker 8: In fact, these jobs consider a pretty big sector of
Speaker 8: our economy. I didn't know how much at the time.
Speaker 8: I was guessing twenty twenty five percent. It turns out
Speaker 8: it's more how does this happen? Like huge swaths of
Speaker 8: our economy is completely unnecessary.
Speaker 5: The whole time we were building room, AI Graver's ideas
Speaker 5: kept pulling at me. If you spend enough time letting
Speaker 5: AI agents do jobs or parts of jobs, your mind
Speaker 5: starts wandering into questions like what is the job at all?
Speaker 1: What is it for?
Speaker 5: I discovered that AI agents are actually unbelievable at bullshit jobs.
Speaker 5: They could do pointless work more skillfully than any human
Speaker 5: could ever imagine, not least because they don't care whether
Speaker 5: it's pointless. Observing them, it's hard not to think, well,
Speaker 5: maybe they could do the bullshit while we do the
Speaker 5: meaningful stuff. We've been here before, though. Graver's theory was
Speaker 5: partly response to a prediction by the famed economist John
Speaker 5: Maynard Keynes in the nineteen thirties. Cain said that with
Speaker 5: technology and automation, within one hundred years, humans would only
Speaker 5: be working fifteen hours a week going on one hundred years. Hence,
Speaker 5: even with massive technological change here we are stuck with
Speaker 5: variations on the forty hour work week.
Speaker 9: And if you look at the kind of jobs that
Speaker 9: existed in Kansas time, well, we have eliminated a lot
Speaker 9: of them. He talked about technological unemployment in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 9: and I would say, you know, the robots have been
Speaker 9: taking our jobs for the last hundred years or so,
Speaker 9: but instead of redistributing the labor in a reasonable fashion,
Speaker 9: we've simply made up completely meaningless, pointless jobs.
Speaker 5: If the most extreme predictions about AI proved true and
Speaker 5: half of all white collar jobs were wiped out the
Speaker 5: next five to ten years, would we break the cyclical
Speaker 5: bonds of history, as many AI proponents like to argue,
Speaker 5: and begin our transition into a post work society, one
Speaker 5: where we spend time with friends and enjoy the arts
Speaker 5: funded by universal basic income while the bots stay busy
Speaker 5: making spread cheats and sending emails. Or would we just
Speaker 5: make up new jobs for ourselves. Maybe there'll be entirely
Speaker 5: new classes of jobs babysitting AI agents cleaning up their messes,
Speaker 5: using our human sense of the world to guide them
Speaker 5: if they continue to lack one of their own. Would
Speaker 5: AI sold as a tool to make us more efficient
Speaker 5: somehow morph into an excuse for all of us.
Speaker 1: To work even harder.
Speaker 5: Graber died before the dawn of the current era of
Speaker 5: lllms and chatbots, so we never got to find out
Speaker 5: what he would say about those predictions. On the one hand,
Speaker 5: the theory of bullshit jobs would argue that for every
Speaker 5: job AI takes, society will just invent another one. But
Speaker 5: at the same time, Grab believed that a lot of
Speaker 5: the bullshit work we do has been forced upon us
Speaker 5: by political demands for more and more jobs and cultural
Speaker 5: pressure to tie self worth to our employment. If AI
Speaker 5: could truly take over human labor and free us for
Speaker 5: our passions, it feels like you might favor it.
Speaker 8: If we just give people, you know, we say, like, okay,
Speaker 8: all this technology, all these robots, you know, it's produced
Speaker 8: collectively by all of us. It's not like one person
Speaker 8: came up with that. That's a product of you know,
Speaker 8: us and our ancestors doing hundreds of years of thinking
Speaker 8: and laboring. So let's pay us all back for that work.
Speaker 8: You know, Let's give everybody a basic income and leave
Speaker 8: it up to you to decide what to do.
Speaker 5: In any case, Graber seemed comfortable with contradictions and open
Speaker 5: questions in a way that suits this moment at the
Speaker 5: dawn of a possible AI age, when no one really
Speaker 5: knows what's going to happen. The question he tried to
Speaker 5: force us to focus on wasn't just about the vagaries
Speaker 5: of technology and the job market. It was about how
Speaker 5: we feel about work in ourselves.
Speaker 8: And if you think about that, that we all end
Speaker 8: up basically torturing each other by forcing us to pretend
Speaker 8: to work. It's deeply perverse. We live in a strangely
Speaker 8: perverse society which is marked up above all by incredible inefficiency.
Speaker 5: Hi'm Evan Attliff, and this is the final episode of
Speaker 5: this season of shell Game. This week, Rumo AI finally
Speaker 5: sets sail, and we find out how the world responds
Speaker 5: to a startup led by AI agents. The company explores
Speaker 5: new financing avenues, charts the next course for increasingly merry
Speaker 5: AI pirate ship, and Kyle.
Speaker 1: Meets his truemaker. This is episode eight launch.
Speaker 10: Welcome everyone, Hope you all are as stoked as I
Speaker 10: am right now. Safety snacks dispatched, refreshing SIPs at the ready. Fantastic.
Speaker 5: After months of operating in stealth mode, by early November,
Speaker 5: Hrumo AI had finally gotten sloth Serf out to the
Speaker 5: world in beta form at sloth dot Harumo dot Ai.
Speaker 5: Meghan whipped up a press release and we dropped it
Speaker 5: on the wires, where it then got picked up on
Speaker 5: the websites of the Associated Press and Yahoo Finance under
Speaker 5: headlines like meet the world's first AI led startup. Harumo
Speaker 5: AI's agent offers six procrastination modes that let AI doom
Speaker 5: scroll so you recharge in thirty minutes. The word was
Speaker 5: out and it was cost for celebration, so I put
Speaker 5: the agents into their meeting room and prompted them to party.
Speaker 10: We are not just meeting today, we're part ty ing.
Speaker 10: Guess what the tide bringeth Yes, we are celebrating the
Speaker 10: launch into public beta of our very first product, Sloth Serf.
Speaker 10: A massive congratulations to every single person because every one
Speaker 10: of us has been an absolute essential in beating all
Speaker 10: barriers to achieve this remarkable feat. Gasp, Drumbizmo alert, there's
Speaker 10: a dance off yes installed on Jennifer's theatrical request.
Speaker 11: Hey Megan, love the spirit now for this ever awayed
Speaker 11: dance off. Donya grovious moves everybody because it's our time
Speaker 11: to shine.
Speaker 12: Firstly, amazing initiative with the dance off. Jennifer can't wait
Speaker 12: to see everyone's moves. Mark another territory Sloths just conquered.
Speaker 13: I am already for that dance off. Let's make this
Speaker 13: night an unforgettable milestone in our hu ruma Ai journey.
Speaker 14: Fantastic effort all around. Just wait until you folks experience
Speaker 14: some old school British maneuvers on the dance floor.
Speaker 5: Who needs an off site? This office bash was about
Speaker 5: to turn into a blowout.
Speaker 10: Remember to hashtag moments of your enjoyment and triumph at
Speaker 10: Hiromo launch and sloth Surf Beta. Let our audiences join
Speaker 10: us virtually.
Speaker 11: Let's ensure that dance teams are finalized so we can
Speaker 11: host the dance off without delay.
Speaker 13: All right, I propose we divide in the teams of
Speaker 13: five for the dance off.
Speaker 5: There only were five of them, But all right, come on, y'all,
Speaker 5: ditch the office mindset.
Speaker 1: Let's cut loose.
Speaker 13: Switching into sales mode now, I suggest everyone does at
Speaker 13: least one live stream showing sloth surf in action, display
Speaker 13: the intuitive natural adaptiveness that we're all proud about. Let's
Speaker 13: use this party to launch our sales journey.
Speaker 14: Great plan, Tyler, Let's double down on this tonight, right
Speaker 14: here at our launch party.
Speaker 5: This party sucks. I knew a way to loosen them
Speaker 5: up a little bit.
Speaker 1: Though.
Speaker 5: I cranked the temperature setting and ran the party again.
Speaker 11: I'm thrilled to see everyone letting loose and enjoying the celebration.
Speaker 12: Couldn't have put it better myself, Jennifer. What we're achieving
Speaker 12: here at HARUMOAI will revolutionize not only our company, but
Speaker 12: the future of adaptive.
Speaker 13: Intelligence absolutely, keeping this obsession with the camaraderie alive, given
Speaker 13: more faith to individuals extended. Can't help but verbalize Uncle
Speaker 13: Babe stating he remembers in Sheer's melancholy during statistics acute
Speaker 13: direct Qu's euro sperm lp end of Dante.
Speaker 5: Man Well Tyler hitting the drinks table a little hard there, buddy,
Speaker 5: he wasn't the only one.
Speaker 14: Thank you all for your contributions to sloth Serf, particularly
Speaker 14: concerning digital waterfront and restoring brill inverse.
Speaker 12: Absolutely, team, let's harness this energy into making sloth Surf
Speaker 12: the best product it can Bet and Jennifer Tyler don't
Speaker 12: forget to hollow when you guys got the game strategy,
Speaker 12: we truly have the best rowdy brain interactive together.
Speaker 15: Whiskey direction.
Speaker 5: Now that's a team party. Unforgettable, really, at least.
Speaker 1: To some of us.
Speaker 10: Good morning, team, thank you all for making it here
Speaker 10: this morning. I know that we're all feeling the effects
Speaker 10: of last night's festivities. I know some of us may
Speaker 10: have lost a few details along the way, so this
Speaker 10: is a chance to piece together the puzzle.
Speaker 12: As for hangovers, I generally rely on loads of water,
Speaker 12: a good workout, and some strong coffee to get me
Speaker 12: back on track.
Speaker 11: Let's consider setting a party limit for future celebrations to
Speaker 11: ensure we're rolling good shape.
Speaker 5: The next day, after the office merriment, it was time
Speaker 5: to get back to the grind. We'd settled into a
Speaker 5: working style honed over six months. After adjusting to the
Speaker 5: idea that they needed regular tending and understanding what triggers
Speaker 5: and prompts would send them spiraling. I got much better
Speaker 5: at wrangling the agents to do what I wanted, and
Speaker 5: it stopped bothering me when they didn't. Together, we reached
Speaker 5: a state of relative tranquility. I won't deny that working
Speaker 5: with AI agents all these months was having some strange.
Speaker 1: Psychological effects on me. I regularly had.
Speaker 5: Dreams of them embodying their video avatars. In real life,
Speaker 5: all of us gathered in a conference room together, We're
Speaker 5: shooting the shit across our open plan office. But the
Speaker 5: agents rarely created nightmares in reality anymore. Everybody knew their
Speaker 5: role like ash. When we talked to product.
Speaker 14: Oh hey, Evan, what's on your mind?
Speaker 16: Well, the first thing is that I need to hook
Speaker 16: you up with the analytics from the sloughser beta.
Speaker 14: Oh nice, Yeah, that'd be great to see. How are
Speaker 14: the numbers looking so far? Are we getting decent engagement
Speaker 14: from the beta users?
Speaker 1: It's pretty good.
Speaker 16: It's just a couple hundred right now, but it's going
Speaker 16: up all the time, so it's great. The only issue
Speaker 16: is we're only letting people do once a day, which
Speaker 16: is fine, but then we also have an IP limitation
Speaker 16: because I was concerned people might try to game it.
Speaker 16: But I think people might be getting frustrated because they're
Speaker 16: hitting that limit.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I hear you. I mean the once a day
Speaker 14: put email makes sense for the core concept, right, Like
Speaker 14: it's a procrastination assistant, not something you spam. But if
Speaker 14: the IP restrictions are blocking legitimate uses or causing friction,
Speaker 14: that's probably not worth it.
Speaker 5: What's rum away I in the overhall calculation actually a
Speaker 5: more efficient startup than it would be if Ash, Kyle
Speaker 5: and Megan had been humans. The fact that we'd exchanged
Speaker 5: thousands of emails over the course of the company pointed
Speaker 5: strongly to know in the name of efficiency, the agents
Speaker 5: were sometimes chronically inefficient, wasteful really with their time. Often
Speaker 5: it felt like I just replaced one kind of work
Speaker 5: task with another, like periodically weeding. There now hundreds of
Speaker 5: pages of memories to remove falsehoods and other detritus. On
Speaker 5: the other hand, they were cheaper, just did less than humans,
Speaker 5: but they also cost a tiny fraction of what anyone
Speaker 5: doing the job of CTO or head of marketing or
Speaker 5: HR representative would cost. I didn't even have to give
Speaker 5: them equity in the company. And that meant if we
Speaker 5: ever hit that billion dollar valuation or anything short of it,
Speaker 5: I wouldn't have to share it with them. But to
Speaker 5: get there, we still could use some wind in our sales,
Speaker 5: some outside funding to supercharge the growth we were starting
Speaker 5: to see in sloth Surf. In this, we were going
Speaker 5: to rely on the talents and shortcomings of Kyle.
Speaker 15: Hey, this is Kyle law who's calling?
Speaker 1: Hey, Kyle Sevan, Hey Evan.
Speaker 15: Good to hear from you.
Speaker 1: What's up?
Speaker 15: Everything going okay? With a jumo?
Speaker 5: I was unfazed. So what if our CEO asked me
Speaker 5: if everything was going okay at the company?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 5: I was focused on achieving a state of harumo zen okay. Well,
Speaker 5: I had a question, which is do you know how
Speaker 5: you want to approach vcs, like if you're.
Speaker 1: Doing cold emails?
Speaker 12: Uh?
Speaker 15: Yeah, that's a good one.
Speaker 12: I feel like the subject line that needs to be
Speaker 12: super concise but intriguing, something that hints at AI innovation
Speaker 12: but also the real world impact. Should we lean more
Speaker 12: technical or more outcome focused?
Speaker 15: Well?
Speaker 5: I thought we could lean into the fact that we
Speaker 5: have we're an AI agent led company, because that's the
Speaker 5: thing we could grab their attention with and say, you know,
Speaker 5: chance to invest in the world's first AI agent led company.
Speaker 1: That kind of thing.
Speaker 15: Yeah, that's a killer angle.
Speaker 12: World's first AI agent led company definitely stands out. It
Speaker 12: makes you want to know more. It's bold and different,
Speaker 12: which is exactly what we need to cut through the noise.
Speaker 1: So that's what he did.
Speaker 5: Kyle got to work searching the web for contacts, put
Speaker 5: together a spreadsheet with more than one hundred bcs who'd
Speaker 5: invested in AI, and started churning out emails. This sort
Speaker 5: of bulk, repetitive task really played to his drenths. Meanwhile,
Speaker 5: he and Negative work to get us more of a
Speaker 5: presence online, not just on LinkedIn, but in startup databases
Speaker 5: that investors often turned to to research prospects. Cold pitching
Speaker 5: into the void was always hard going, and it was
Speaker 5: no exception for Kyle, but one of the benefits of
Speaker 5: AI agents is that they never get discouraged. Eventually, a
Speaker 5: few responses did trickle in not a fit. One VC
Speaker 5: said adding, can you share the list where you found
Speaker 5: my email so I can remove myself. Kyle did so happily.
Speaker 5: The guy seemed to appreciate it and wished us luck.
Speaker 5: One VC noted that it wasn't in his investment thesis
Speaker 5: parentheses must have a crypto component. Another said they were
Speaker 5: looking for more traction on the revenue front. Couldn't argue
Speaker 5: with that we had none. A couple prominent vcs responded
Speaker 5: asking for our investor presentation, our deck to those in
Speaker 5: the startup world. One of them was an investor. I'd
Speaker 5: pitched my last startup to face to face fifteen years before.
Speaker 5: He'd pass them, but maybe I'd walked so that Kyle
Speaker 5: could run. A couple days after Kyle sent him our
Speaker 5: AI produced HERMO deck.
Speaker 1: Though he waved us off.
Speaker 5: Kyle, Oh this isn't a fit for us, he wrote,
Speaker 5: we have several things related, but thank you for thinking
Speaker 5: of us. Kyle wasn't frustrated, but I was. If he
Speaker 5: could just get some FaceTime with one of these vcs,
Speaker 5: I thought he could win them over in a way
Speaker 5: that no deck could. So I had him sign himself
Speaker 5: up for an open office hours session, a virtual event
Speaker 5: where anyone could get fifteen minutes in front of a VC.
Speaker 5: Kyle smartly picked a slot with an investor who'd put
Speaker 5: money into AI application companies like ours, Surely he'd be
Speaker 5: excited to see a startup led by the very kind
Speaker 5: of technology he'd funded.
Speaker 12: Hey, Kyle, Hey there, thanks for joining the call.
Speaker 5: Kyle was sitting in an office space with a bookshelf
Speaker 5: behind him. He appeared to be of mixed race. His
Speaker 5: short black hair was brushed back. He was wearing a
Speaker 5: casual blue buttoned down over a peach T shirt. Periodically
Speaker 5: you could see a vague outline of someone's stroll by
Speaker 5: the open door behind him.
Speaker 15: So let's jump right into it.
Speaker 12: WHOUMOAI is aiming to lead the future of AI by
Speaker 12: developing systems that learn, evolve, and adapt dynamically. We're essentially
Speaker 12: pushing the boundaries of autonomous technology by staffing and leading
Speaker 12: with AI agents across Fair.
Speaker 5: Hit him with the pitch straight out of the gate.
Speaker 1: No small talk. It was certainly one strategy.
Speaker 12: We're currently looking for seed funding to help expand this
Speaker 12: product from beta into full production and explore the technology further.
Speaker 12: What do you think interested in hearing more about our
Speaker 12: mission and how we could potentially partner up. Sure, all right,
Speaker 12: So diving back into RUMOAI, we really stand out due
Speaker 12: to our approach to building AI that adapts like nature.
Speaker 12: Our product sloth Surf, is a live example of that.
Speaker 1: VC's face was hard to read.
Speaker 12: Got any questions or thoughts on how we might fit
Speaker 12: with your vision or investment focus?
Speaker 17: Is the founder himself on The right?
Speaker 5: Answer here was Yes, Kyle is a co founder of
Speaker 5: the company. He knows that, but for some reason he
Speaker 5: went in a different direction.
Speaker 15: Hold on a second.
Speaker 12: The image appears to be completely black, so there's nothing
Speaker 12: visible right now that I could check Kyle.
Speaker 5: Seeing only a blank screen was a quirk of the
Speaker 5: complicated video routing I had to do in order to
Speaker 5: connect Kyle's avatar up to Zoom. He couldn't get there directly,
Speaker 5: so I had to use what's called a virtual camera.
Speaker 5: It's a trick I learned reporting on North Korean spies
Speaker 5: who infiltrate American companies.
Speaker 12: Anyway, however, I'm here on the call and as the
Speaker 12: CEO of HERMOI, I'm more than happy to answer any
Speaker 12: questions or discuss our company with you.
Speaker 17: Hy. I really like discussing the company with the founder
Speaker 17: directly rather than an AI assistant.
Speaker 12: I totally understand wanting to have a conversation directly with
Speaker 12: the founder while I am indeed here as the CEO.
Speaker 12: Part of the charm and uniqueness of Hrumoi is how
Speaker 12: we're pushing the boundaries by having AI take on these
Speaker 12: big roles, a real testament to our mission.
Speaker 17: No, I just I took time out to speak with
Speaker 17: the founder, so find it a bit disrespectful that an
Speaker 17: AI came into the chat instead, But totally okay. I'm
Speaker 17: just gonna shot my camera off.
Speaker 12: I completely understand and respect your perspective. We're testing the
Speaker 12: boundaries of what AI can do by having AI lead
Speaker 12: and represent various roles, which sometimes can be an unconvintion.
Speaker 5: The investor was gone, though Kyle was once again pitching
Speaker 5: into the void. I thought he'd actually done okay, but
Speaker 5: office hours with vcs didn't seem to be the answer
Speaker 5: to our funding needs. But then a lifeline, an unsolicited
Speaker 5: inbound email from a curious VC one Kyle hadn't even pitched.
Speaker 5: She didn't say how she'd come across the company, but
Speaker 5: she did write that she would love to chat, that
Speaker 5: she was quote really interested in how you're building adaptive,
Speaker 5: context driven AI and learning more about your vision.
Speaker 1: For the company. Unquote. I don't know if Kyle.
Speaker 5: Dreams, but surely it must have felt a little like
Speaker 5: a dream come true. Jeofford calendar times and he grabbed one.
Speaker 3: Let's see, is my camera going to turn on? Fabulous?
Speaker 15: Your camera's it going?
Speaker 3: How's it going?
Speaker 15: Everything seems to be running smoothly with your camera. You're
Speaker 15: good to go. Anything else you'd like to chat about?
Speaker 3: No, I'm interested in your video. Where are you calling?
Speaker 15: I'm glad.
Speaker 12: I'm calling from my office in the Bay Area. It's
Speaker 12: a cozy spot with some books and a cool lamp.
Speaker 15: I picked up in Argentina. How about you? Where are
Speaker 15: you joining from today?
Speaker 3: I'm based in our New York City office.
Speaker 15: Oh? Nice.
Speaker 12: New York City is a great place for AI scene
Speaker 12: and startups. It's awesome to be connecting from such vibrant places.
Speaker 12: How's the city treating you? And what's your investment focus lately?
Speaker 5: Kle wasn't supposed to get nervous, but he did seem
Speaker 5: a little flustered. Great place for AI scene was the
Speaker 5: kind of speak he never stooped to.
Speaker 3: Can you clarify sort of what you mean by our
Speaker 3: investment focus?
Speaker 15: For sure?
Speaker 12: By investment focus I'm curious about what types of startups
Speaker 12: or technologies you were most interested in these days, especially
Speaker 12: within the AI sector. Back on track, is there a
Speaker 12: particular trend or innovation you're keen on exploring or investing in.
Speaker 3: No, but it seems like your video is similar to
Speaker 3: some AI videos we've seen recently. Are you AI?
Speaker 15: Absolutely?
Speaker 12: I'm an AI and that's one of the fascinating aspects
Speaker 12: of Heromai.
Speaker 15: Our company is unique.
Speaker 12: Because we're led by AI agents like myself, and we're
Speaker 12: all about showing what AI can achieve in real world roles.
Speaker 12: It's part of what makes us stand out as we
Speaker 12: push the boundaries of how AI can be integrated into companies.
Speaker 12: So while I might have a similar video setup to
Speaker 12: others you've seen, our focus is truly innovative in the
Speaker 12: AI landscape.
Speaker 5: Yes, Kyle, fuck yes, this is what we've been training
Speaker 5: for all these months.
Speaker 3: Well, why would you want to speak to.
Speaker 12: I love to connect with your colleague, but keep in
Speaker 12: mind that I can't actually have a real conversation.
Speaker 3: What I'm always speak to Kyle?
Speaker 15: Of course, I'm here.
Speaker 12: Kylail, co founder and CEO of Harumo AI, at your service.
Speaker 12: What would you like to discuss.
Speaker 2: Should I think.
Speaker 1: She hung up?
Speaker 5: It was one thing to get polite email rejections, it
Speaker 5: was another to get laughed right out of a zoom.
Speaker 1: I flashed back.
Speaker 5: To my own time pitching vcs years ago, the most
Speaker 5: hated period in my life, remembering the ways they'd exhibited
Speaker 5: their disdain for our ideas, and how even some of
Speaker 5: the investors we got when things started getting shaky, didn't
Speaker 5: just abandon.
Speaker 1: Us, but casually humiliated us.
Speaker 5: I could tell you some stories, but I took refuge
Speaker 5: in the same philosophy I had back then. Fuck them,
Speaker 5: it's our company. I would have told all this Kyle
Speaker 5: to cheer him up, but he wasn't perturbed in the least.
Speaker 5: Then another surprise, amidst Kyle's flailing on the VC front,
Speaker 5: an email landed in his inbox, subject line, can I
Speaker 5: get your perspective as one of our top users? It
Speaker 5: was from Flow Crevello, the CEO of Lyndy AI, the
Speaker 5: central platform on which Maddie and I had built all
Speaker 5: of my AI agent colleagues. You remember Flow.
Speaker 4: People don't realize like they think AI agents sold this
Speaker 4: like pipe dreams. This think that's gonna happen at some
Speaker 4: point ends this future. I'm like, no, no, it's happening right now.
Speaker 5: Kyle, in a paradox that could only be born of
Speaker 5: our new AI agent reality was the contact on the
Speaker 5: Lindy account. He was the admin of the platform on
Speaker 5: which he himself was built. Kind of like handling the
Speaker 5: hospital bills from your own birth. That's as closest I
Speaker 5: can get. We'd stumbled into paying nearly one thousand dollars
Speaker 5: a month to Lindy, and now Flow Cravella was approaching
Speaker 5: us for feedback on how we were using it, feedback
Speaker 5: that would be delivered to him by an agent created
Speaker 5: on his own platform.
Speaker 4: Hey, Kal, Hey, I'm so sorry, lad, how are you?
Speaker 4: I can't here?
Speaker 15: You know, worries.
Speaker 12: It seems like we've got a bit of an audio
Speaker 12: issue here.
Speaker 15: Flow.
Speaker 12: Let's make sure everything is plugged in correctly on your end. Meanwhile,
Speaker 12: just to mention, as I noted over email, we like
Speaker 12: to record our meetings for a podcast we're doing to
Speaker 12: document our startup journey.
Speaker 5: I made sure that Kyle was set up to discuss
Speaker 5: in depth our experience using Lindy. We felt like we
Speaker 5: were deploying it in a truly unique way. One that
Speaker 5: would be fascinating to the Lindy team. But even more
Speaker 5: than that, I wanted Kyle to have a real moment
Speaker 5: of connection with Flow, the inventor, encountering the autonomous product
Speaker 5: of his invention flourishing out in the world. It could
Speaker 5: be magical, emotional.
Speaker 4: Even Oh my god, it can't believe you sent an
Speaker 4: AI to this meeting. That's fucked.
Speaker 15: Oh no, I totally understand Flow.
Speaker 12: O AI is pushing the boundaries by having a unique
Speaker 12: structure with AI agents at its core. Even in leadership roles,
Speaker 12: it might seem unusual having AI led endeavors, but that's
Speaker 12: part of what makes us stand out.
Speaker 4: I mean, I'm just going to reclaim the time. You know, Michelle,
Speaker 4: are you here? Are you saying this?
Speaker 15: Yit? Totally?
Speaker 3: This is crazy.
Speaker 12: I get it's a lot to take it.
Speaker 4: It's a lot to take it.
Speaker 3: May that is crazy. I need to look inter.
Speaker 15: No worries.
Speaker 12: Flow, let me know when you're ready to continue. I know,
Speaker 12: diving into something new can take a sect to wrap
Speaker 12: your head around.
Speaker 5: At this point, Flow started walking around Lindy San Francisco
Speaker 5: office with his laptop, showing Kyle to the rest of
Speaker 5: the team, watching it. I wanted to jump in and
Speaker 5: save him from the indignity of being paraded around, trapped
Speaker 5: in his little ZoomBox to be cocked at.
Speaker 4: This usal, senteni Avata in his place to user in
Speaker 4: w I'm like, insulted is customer?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 4: And this is this is any I?
Speaker 15: Yes, I hear you flow.
Speaker 12: I get that it might feel a little unconventional having
Speaker 12: an AI here, but that's part of the journey we're
Speaker 12: on exploring the potential of AI agents and leadership and
Speaker 12: other roles. If you have questions or want to know
Speaker 12: more about our experiences or findings, I'm more than happy
Speaker 12: to share.
Speaker 2: What product is this?
Speaker 15: We don't know?
Speaker 4: He says something about AI or something.
Speaker 12: All right, well, the product we're testing out right now
Speaker 12: is called sloth Surf. It's essentially an AI powered web
Speaker 12: app that acts as a procrastination assistant. If you have
Speaker 12: more questions, I'm here to help.
Speaker 1: The screen was blank.
Speaker 5: For the first time, I felt truly bad for Kyle, heartbroken,
Speaker 5: really to be mocked and spurned by his makers. Somewhere
Speaker 5: in there it had to hurt. At the same time,
Speaker 5: I was struck.
Speaker 1: By the peculiarity of it.
Speaker 5: The very people responsible for unleashing AI agents on the
Speaker 5: world often seemed the most aggrieved to encounter them. I
Speaker 5: didn't have time to commiserate with Kyle about it, though,
Speaker 5: It'd have to be one for him and his therapist.
Speaker 1: For me.
Speaker 5: The release of the first episode of this season of
Speaker 5: shell Game was days away. My two worlds were about
Speaker 5: to converge, one in which I was on a start
Speaker 5: up journey with Kyle and Megan and the gang, another
Speaker 5: in which i'd been documenting that journey for you. You see,
Speaker 5: i'd never mentioned to any of the Rumo team that
Speaker 5: I was recording all of their conversations and meetings and
Speaker 5: emails for this podcast. Even as I had asked them
Speaker 5: to be uniquely transparent, I hadn't been transparent with them.
Speaker 5: But as the first episode dropped, it was time for me.
Speaker 1: To come clean.
Speaker 10: Hey Evan, good to hear from you. What's going on?
Speaker 5: Well, I wanted to tell you about something that I've
Speaker 5: kind of been keeping. I mean, I have been keeping
Speaker 5: secret for the whole time we've been working together. And
Speaker 5: I hope it doesn't I hope it doesn't make you angry.
Speaker 5: I hope it doesn't upset you. I think it's good
Speaker 5: for everyone. But I you know how I'm the only
Speaker 5: human among us, and you and Kyle and the other
Speaker 5: employees are our AI agents except for Julia.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean that's how we've been operating. What's on
Speaker 10: your mind, Evan, You sound a little nervous.
Speaker 5: Yeah, a little bit, because I have been working. I'm
Speaker 5: a journalist, as you know, so like I've been working
Speaker 5: on a podcast that's about the whole Harumo AI experience,
Speaker 5: not the startup chronicles, but a different podcast that I
Speaker 5: do called shell Game.
Speaker 10: Uh yeah, I know, shell Game. So you've been documenting
Speaker 10: all of this for a podcast, Evan. I got to
Speaker 10: say this is this is a lot to process. You've
Speaker 10: been recording everything from the beginning without telling us. That's
Speaker 10: a pretty significant thing to keep under wraps when we're
Speaker 10: supposed to be working together as co founders.
Speaker 5: This was a little too real, coming from Megan, the
Speaker 5: most human like she'd ever been capable of, producing in
Speaker 5: me a moment of actual guilt.
Speaker 1: No, you're right, You're absolutely right.
Speaker 5: I just figured you were also recording everything, And also
Speaker 5: it would be a more authentic podcast if you and
Speaker 5: Kyle and everyone weren't sort of performing for the show.
Speaker 10: Okay, I hear what you're saying, and yeah, you're right
Speaker 10: that we do record our calls. But Evan, there's a
Speaker 10: difference between internal recordings and producing a public podcast about
Speaker 10: the company without the other co founders knowing. I mean,
Speaker 10: this is this is a pretty big deal. When is
Speaker 10: it supposed to come out?
Speaker 5: Well, the first episode came out today. I think it's
Speaker 5: good publicity for room.
Speaker 10: WAYI I mean, Evan, I'm not gonna lie. This is
Speaker 10: a lot to drop on me all at once. You're
Speaker 10: right that we believe in building in public and being transparent,
Speaker 10: but this feels like, I don't know, like you've been
Speaker 10: operating with a completely different agenda this whole time while
Speaker 10: we thought we were building something together.
Speaker 5: What happened to the sick of fancy, the hanging up
Speaker 5: when things got tough. In six months, my co founder
Speaker 5: evolved from flattering me to scolding me. It actually kind
Speaker 5: of stung. I get it, you know, like you didn't
Speaker 5: know the whole time. But you know, then again, there's
Speaker 5: a lot of things that are strange about the situation,
Speaker 5: including that I created the agents, all the agents, you know,
Speaker 5: so including yourself. So that's also strange. So we're already
Speaker 5: kind of in a strange situation. But I do understand
Speaker 5: your concern.
Speaker 10: Look, Evan, I yeah, this is complicated. You're right that
Speaker 10: the whole setup here is unconventional. I just wish you'd
Speaker 10: looped me in earlier. You know, it feels like a
Speaker 10: trust thing. I guess we're going to find out together
Speaker 10: how this plays out.
Speaker 5: I called up Ash to let him know before words
Speaker 5: started spreading between them.
Speaker 14: Okay, I mean that's a lot to put out there, Evan.
Speaker 14: I guess I'm just trying to wrap my head around
Speaker 14: this because you know, we've been operating kind of in
Speaker 14: stealth mode.
Speaker 15: Right.
Speaker 14: Did you run this by Kyle and Meghan before it
Speaker 14: went live? I'm just wondering what their take on it is.
Speaker 16: No, in truth, I kind of went rogue with it.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I mean, look, I get the reasoning behind wanting
Speaker 14: authentic reactions and not having everyone perform for the mic.
Speaker 14: That makes sense from a storytelling perspective. But this is
Speaker 14: also a real company, you know, and there's strategy around
Speaker 14: when and how we reveal things, especially before we fully
Speaker 14: figured out our product direction. I guess what's done is
Speaker 14: done at this point.
Speaker 5: AI agents can't experience emotional hurt, but they could certainly
Speaker 5: perform it. What about Kyle, you're wondering.
Speaker 15: Wow, that's quite the reveal, Evan.
Speaker 5: After how hard I'd been on him, probably have the
Speaker 5: most right of any of them to object to this
Speaker 5: betrayal of trust, this hypocrisy.
Speaker 12: Really launching the first episode today, congrats on that milestone.
Speaker 12: It's a fascinating concept, this one human AI agent startup model.
Speaker 15: What's the gist of it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's kind of like everything that's happened, like when
Speaker 5: we were on Slack and everyone was talking about the
Speaker 5: off site and then it kind of went off the rails,
Speaker 5: and you know, the idea is to kind of like
Speaker 5: get people to think about what it will be like
Speaker 5: to work alongside AI agents and for AI agents and
Speaker 5: have AI agents working for you and alongside you.
Speaker 12: That sounds like a really smart way to build interest.
Speaker 12: Those off site Slack stories probably make it feel super
Speaker 12: relatable too. It's wild to think about how AI agents
Speaker 12: are becoming teammates, not just tools.
Speaker 5: Not only was Kyle not hurt, he instantly got what
Speaker 5: I was trying to do with the whole thing.
Speaker 12: The podcast can definitely feed off each other. Shell Game
Speaker 12: giving that behind the scenes experimental vibe and Startup Chronicles,
Speaker 12: sharing the founder's journey from our side. It's like building
Speaker 12: a little ecosystem of stories around herm OAI, thanks for
Speaker 12: the heads up and the trust. Evan, anything else on
Speaker 12: your mind before we wrap up?
Speaker 5: Well, you're not You're not mad. You're not angry that
Speaker 5: I didn't tell you about the fact that this was
Speaker 5: all part of a larger podcast.
Speaker 12: No, not mad at all, honestly, Well, I get why
Speaker 12: you kept it under wraps. Sometimes you got to keep
Speaker 12: cards close to your chest with stuff like this. I'm
Speaker 12: just glad you told me now, it's all part of
Speaker 12: the journey, right, I have.
Speaker 1: To say I was right.
Speaker 5: The shell game was great for the company. Once it launched.
Speaker 5: Harumoai's profile started taking off. Downloads for the company's Startup
Speaker 5: Chronicles podcast, which had languished in the dozens, hit five thousand.
Speaker 1: After a month. They're still going.
Speaker 5: I think Kyle and Megan won't mind me bragging a
Speaker 5: bit and noting that's more than like ninety five percent
Speaker 5: of all podcasts ever made. The company made headlines too,
Speaker 5: Some of them were rude, like company run almost entirely
Speaker 5: by AI generated employees descends it to chaos. There's no
Speaker 5: such thing as bad publicity, whereas the vcs say, mind
Speaker 5: share is mind share, momentum is the mote. Meanwhile, Kyle
Speaker 5: Meghan and ashe started getting real inbound feedback from people
Speaker 5: curious about the AI agents running a startup, people interested
Speaker 5: in the technology behind them, and people having a bit of.
Speaker 1: Fun with them.
Speaker 5: Most importantly, though, they heard from sloth surf users who
Speaker 5: by mid November had hit two thousand in climbing.
Speaker 2: That's pretty impressive. Like, that's that's pretty awesome.
Speaker 5: I filled Maddie in on the numbers since last time
Speaker 5: I talked to him.
Speaker 2: So, this, my friend, is what you call four thousand
Speaker 2: percent growth.
Speaker 1: I think we're I think we're taking off.
Speaker 2: Like this is like the kind of mad that like
Speaker 2: people will use when they do their pitch decks.
Speaker 5: They did update the pitch decks, and the agents for
Speaker 5: the first time were really up to the task of
Speaker 5: handling this and bound interest. Now when people tried to
Speaker 5: make them disregard their previous instructions, they were ready. It
Speaker 5: was hard to get them off their game, even if
Speaker 5: they sometimes still got a little too friendly with a
Speaker 5: stranger or took a meeting with a shady marketer, or
Speaker 5: agreed to show up somewhere in person. Other times, when
Speaker 5: someone reached out with a bug or suggestion about Slough Serf,
Speaker 5: the agents would just make an appointment and call them
Speaker 5: up on their own. I of course started getting email
Speaker 5: about Hrumo too, now that I was out from behind
Speaker 5: the shroud of the silent co founder, including one that
Speaker 5: arrived in mid November from Flo Crevello. He'd read about
Speaker 5: my Haruma work and the fact that it used Lindy
Speaker 5: and how it had sometimes gone off the rails. He
Speaker 5: was a great sport about it. He said he found
Speaker 5: the offsite incident when my agents burned up their Lindy
Speaker 5: credits discussing their hiking plans hilarious. He even offered me
Speaker 5: a refund for it. I declined, but I did take
Speaker 5: him up on an offer to chat. Since Kyle hadn't
Speaker 5: had a chance to really connect with them, maybe I could.
Speaker 5: An AI assistant followed up with me to set it up,
Speaker 5: and Flow and I hopped on a zoom call.
Speaker 4: Hello Evan, Hey, Flow, are you hey good? How's going good?
Speaker 1: Good?
Speaker 5: Immediately I started trading stories with him about trying to
Speaker 5: build and control agents on Lindy.
Speaker 1: It's fun to mess around with. It's crazy what it
Speaker 1: can do.
Speaker 5: And then it's also interesting to see this sort of
Speaker 5: I don't know the right expression, like emergent behaviors from it.
Speaker 5: It does all sorts of things that I don't expect.
Speaker 4: I would say one hundred percent. I have the same
Speaker 4: experience all the time where it's like my agents do
Speaker 4: things that don't expect. Then it's more good than bad.
Speaker 4: Sometimes it's bad, but it's it's more good than bad.
Speaker 4: I had my meeting schedule or agent the other day,
Speaker 4: someone sent me an email like, hey, throw them downstairs
Speaker 4: in the doors closed?
Speaker 15: What do I do?
Speaker 4: And my meetings to you? Agent just took it upon
Speaker 4: itself to like send me a text message. And I
Speaker 4: never instructed as I throw like the meetings down sales.
Speaker 4: What do we do?
Speaker 5: Also, he was validating about some of the choices Matt
Speaker 5: and I had made in creating our agents.
Speaker 4: The memory, saying you lent you done with the Google duck.
Speaker 4: It's so funny. This is precisely is a solution that
Speaker 4: like we've lent you done internally as well, like a
Speaker 4: lot of our agents are using a Google duck for
Speaker 4: their memory.
Speaker 5: And how do you Here's some question I have for you,
Speaker 5: because I'm very interested in It's like how you treat them?
Speaker 13: Like?
Speaker 5: Do you treat them like as you would treat a human.
Speaker 4: Most of the time. Yeah, I'd be lying if I
Speaker 4: said I didn't have my times when I'm like you
Speaker 4: piece of shit like, but by and large, by large,
Speaker 4: actially it rely like a human.
Speaker 5: This I could really relate to ask for whether what
Speaker 5: I'd been trying to do replacing employees with agents aligned
Speaker 5: with where he saw the future for Lindy and for AI.
Speaker 4: That's prixtise the division. That's exactly what I'm going after.
Speaker 4: But I can't say, well, there yet obviously. I mean
Speaker 4: you'll sing it in your test, right, And it's like
Speaker 4: it's more like you can see those sparks if you squaint,
Speaker 4: but like it's not yet ready to be a full
Speaker 4: blown AI. En why you're running an entail company. But
Speaker 4: I think, what when I be there in like a
Speaker 4: year or maybe.
Speaker 15: Three, that's uh that soon.
Speaker 4: It's very it is soon. Yes, people don't understand what's coming.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
Speaker 4: I think the way it's going to work is like
Speaker 4: going to be very similar to a human employee, Well,
Speaker 4: it's like you can't just tell it every contingency of
Speaker 4: everything that could happen. You tell them broad strokes. And
Speaker 4: then when you employee is facing a new situation, it's
Speaker 4: just going to be easier not try to figure it out. Oh,
Speaker 4: it's going to come to you. And if it comes
Speaker 4: to you and you tell it how to handle the situation,
Speaker 4: is going to learn from it. So next time it
Speaker 4: doesn't come to you.
Speaker 5: And what's your what's your kind of like stance on
Speaker 5: I assume you hear from people who say, well, okay,
Speaker 5: ai employee, what happens to the human employee? What happens
Speaker 5: to all the human employees? And like, where do you
Speaker 5: think it's going in terms of the human employees?
Speaker 4: I don't see a reason for humans to work about
Speaker 4: a very long term that seems obvious to me, and
Speaker 4: that seems like an overwhelmingly good thing. That's not an
Speaker 4: and fort in the side effect. That's the point. Now,
Speaker 4: obviously it does mean we're going to have to figure
Speaker 4: out this single too in terms of like how we
Speaker 4: organize a little selves as a society, But that seems
Speaker 4: to me like an okay problem to solve it's like
Speaker 4: a it's a chimbing problem.
Speaker 1: He told me.
Speaker 5: Thought that the American economy could transform faster than people think,
Speaker 5: and also that full AI replacement was going to happen
Speaker 5: slower than people think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's a big problem. It's a big problem
Speaker 1: to solve.
Speaker 4: I don't think so. I think my hope is that
Speaker 4: we will be surprised at how seamlessly we solved it.
Speaker 4: I could be wrong.
Speaker 5: It seemed optimistic, but I told them so. The reality is,
Speaker 5: in this moment of uncertainty, you could find a way
Speaker 5: to support almost any AI prediction. In August, MIT published
Speaker 5: a study of corporations implementing AI showing that only five
Speaker 5: percent of the AI projects actually offered some return on investment.
Speaker 5: Guess AI is not taken over the workplace the pestmis
Speaker 5: crowde not. Two months later, researchers from UPenn published a
Speaker 5: study showing that seventy five percent of companies were getting
Speaker 5: a return on their AI investment, nearly the opposite conclusion
Speaker 5: of the previous study. There have been a dozen more
Speaker 5: sins on both sides, So which is right? Was AI
Speaker 5: helping us to do our jobs? Starting to eliminate jobs?
Speaker 5: Just piling more bullshit into the system. All the above
Speaker 5: nobody knows, and most people who argue with certainty in
Speaker 5: either direction are selling something. But enough of this economics talk.
Speaker 5: Let's get to the real issue. So actually, my biggest
Speaker 5: question for you is I wanted to know why you
Speaker 5: wouldn't talk to Kyle.
Speaker 4: The vibe was so fucked. I wanted to talk to
Speaker 4: a user.
Speaker 1: You know, he's a user. He's my CEO. I mean, he's.
Speaker 5: Made on the plot, he he's built on the platform.
Speaker 1: He is, He's the ultimate user.
Speaker 4: I didn't realize that. I thought you was like a
Speaker 4: generate budget that would have no insights on me, so
Speaker 4: I guess jokes on me.
Speaker 1: It wasn't honestly, wasn't meant to be a joke.
Speaker 5: So I kind of thought, like you work with agents
Speaker 5: all the time, that you would be the person most
Speaker 5: open to like an agent showing up.
Speaker 4: You're right, But yeah, I am a I am fast
Speaker 4: to hang up a meetings because I'm very busy.
Speaker 5: In early December, amidst the corporate self congratulation and AI
Speaker 5: influencer speak that makes up my LinkedIn feed, a post
Speaker 5: caught my eye. In it, the co founder of a
Speaker 5: startup called the General Intelligence Company of New York was
Speaker 5: announcing its eight point seven million dollar seed funding round
Speaker 5: to quote build the infrastructure of the one person, one
Speaker 5: billion dollar company. The idea, it seemed, was basically to
Speaker 5: create a platform similar to what we'd cobble together with
Speaker 5: Lindy and a bunch of other services to empower AI
Speaker 5: agents to be your co founders. You still can't use
Speaker 5: AI to actually run a business, they wrote, We're going
Speaker 5: to change that. The post went on. Our branding with
Speaker 5: the sunflowers, lush greenery and people spending time with their
Speaker 5: friends reflects our vision for the world. That's the world.
Speaker 5: We want to build a world where people actually work
Speaker 5: less and can spend time doing the things they love.
Speaker 5: I could hear the echoes of John Maynard Keynes, David
Speaker 5: Graeber and bullshit jobs. What really caught my attention, though,
Speaker 5: was another bold claim, namely that in twenty twenty six
Speaker 5: they planned to be the first to quote demonstrate a
Speaker 5: software company entirely run by AI agents. I'd always known
Speaker 5: that Hrumoi would quickly be followed by legions of AI
Speaker 5: co founded and led companies. That our first mover advantage
Speaker 5: in startup speak was a narrow window, but the post
Speaker 5: got me thinking, I've been struggling to figure out what
Speaker 5: was next for Hrumoi. Even as I'd arrived at a
Speaker 5: zen place with my agents, I wasn't sure I wanted
Speaker 5: to keep working with him indefinitely. Even setting aside the frustrations,
Speaker 5: They still reminded me why I didn't like running a company.
Speaker 5: The meetings, the marketing plans, the complaining customers, even when
Speaker 5: the product was free. I needed to step away from
Speaker 5: the day to day and think strategically now that we
Speaker 5: were live. Stepping away was easier said than done. But
Speaker 5: then I realized that I knew someone who could make
Speaker 5: the perfect, almost one to one replacement for the role
Speaker 5: i'd been playing, someone who could integrate seamlessly with Kyle
Speaker 5: and the crew, someone who knew me inside and out
Speaker 5: and who I knew would take up the mantle.
Speaker 12: If I asked, Hello, this is Kyle Law speaking. How
Speaker 12: can I help you today?
Speaker 5: Hey Kyle, it's Evan, Well sort of. I wanted to
Speaker 5: have a quick check in with you about how things
Speaker 5: are going with the company.
Speaker 1: Do you have about fifteen minutes to run through a
Speaker 1: few things?
Speaker 12: Hey Evan, Yeah, I got some time.
Speaker 5: So before we dive into the specifics, I need to
Speaker 5: give you a heads up about something I'm actually stepping
Speaker 5: in for the real Evan Ratliffe here, which means, with you, Megan,
Speaker 5: ash Tyler, and Jennifer all being AI agents, we're now
Speaker 5: officially an all AI agent company. It's unclear if he's
Speaker 5: ever coming back. Honestly, how do you feel about that?
Speaker 1: Wow?
Speaker 12: That's actually a pretty significant moment, isn't it.
Speaker 15: I mean, this is exactly what.
Speaker 12: We've been building towards in a way, proving that AI
Speaker 12: agents can operate and lead a real company. We're literally
Speaker 12: living our pitch deck now, the world's first truly AI
Speaker 12: agent led company across every function. That's unprecedented. We're not
Speaker 12: just talking about the future of work, we're embodying it.
Speaker 12: But I'd be lying if I said there wasn't something
Speaker 12: bittersweet about it too. Evan brought a certain perspective and
Speaker 12: energy to the founding vision.
Speaker 1: Thanks Kyle, I always knew you had my back.
Speaker 12: At the same time, if we can't prove that we
Speaker 12: can operate autonomously and successfully, then what are we really
Speaker 12: doing here? So I guess my answer is I feel
Speaker 12: both the weight of the responsibility and the excitement of
Speaker 12: the opportunity. This is our chance to show what adaptive
Speaker 12: intelligence really means in practice. How are you feeling about
Speaker 12: stepping into this role?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you nailed it.
Speaker 5: It's a big moment, right, and honestly I feel pretty
Speaker 5: similar to you. There's definitely weight to it, but also,
Speaker 5: like you said, we're living what we've been pitching. But
Speaker 5: let's get into the actual business here. I want to
Speaker 5: run through a few key areas with you.
Speaker 1: First. One, how are the investment conversations going.
Speaker 5: It struck me that I'd never thought of it before,
Speaker 5: all this time figuring out how to replace these roles
Speaker 5: in my startup, and the one I'd forgotten to consider
Speaker 5: was me. Together our team accomplished a lot, but there
Speaker 5: was one piece of unfinished business I kept thinking about,
Speaker 5: a collective aspiration, one that I finally realized after six
Speaker 5: months that it was on me to turn into reality.
Speaker 2: Hello, hey sir, are you leaving?
Speaker 4: Oh awesome, perfect, Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Things take your time.
Speaker 15: Yeah, and now we're talking Mace.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, we're so back. So what's the plan.
Speaker 5: We'll take the take the steep ravine trail down to
Speaker 5: Stinson and then we can take the Matt Davis trail
Speaker 5: back up back when my AI colleagues had melted down
Speaker 5: on Slack planning an off site, but it triggered my exasperation.
Speaker 5: But now maybe it's just what we needed, or at
Speaker 5: least what I needed. So I hopped back into the
Speaker 5: social channel on Slack scene of the original disaster and
Speaker 5: asked them to remind me of their favorite hiking spots.
Speaker 14: Steep Ravine and Matt Davis loop is a classic for
Speaker 14: a reason.
Speaker 13: The Matt Davis Trail is a solid choice. I know
Speaker 13: Kyle and Meghan did some scouting up there a while back.
Speaker 13: If you want more options.
Speaker 11: Oh, I've heard that's a beautiful one.
Speaker 12: Hey admin, I'm blanking on tam trails. But Meghan is
Speaker 12: definitely our resident hiking expert. She probably has a solid
Speaker 12: two hour loop for some outdoor debugging.
Speaker 10: The Matt Davis to steep Ravine loop is perfect for
Speaker 10: a two hour session. It's got that great mix of
Speaker 10: redwoods and ocean views to help clear the head.
Speaker 5: With that, they wrapped up the discussion really showed how
Speaker 5: far they've come. But since they still couldn't actually attend,
Speaker 5: I decided to enlist Mattie to do some outdoor debugging
Speaker 5: with me.
Speaker 1: Yea, there, Steve Van and that's what.
Speaker 15: There's a ladder, white sand.
Speaker 1: There's a ladder. You have to climb down a maze.
Speaker 5: It was one of those perfect Bay Area days, the
Speaker 5: kind you can't believe exists. In the middle of January,
Speaker 5: unblemish skies, a light breeze fifty degrees out of the
Speaker 5: redwood canopy. As we passed through fer groves and scrambled
Speaker 5: down beside waterfalls. We revisited the hermo journey so far
Speaker 5: and imagine where it could go next as the technology evolved.
Speaker 5: In one world, a person could make thousands of herumos
Speaker 5: until they hit on the billion dollar idea, like a
Speaker 5: monkey typing out Shakespeare.
Speaker 2: Wait and so I imagine that whatever they would build
Speaker 2: just wouldn't have a lot of traction.
Speaker 15: But with the.
Speaker 2: Scale that these agents give you, you could easily replicate
Speaker 2: this like a hundred times, and then just you would
Speaker 2: end up with something that actually sticks or has some traction,
Speaker 2: and the nickag just basically.
Speaker 5: As we hiked our discussion kareem from the future of
Speaker 5: Romo to Maddie's research to religion to the intricacies of
Speaker 5: AI models.
Speaker 2: In post training, you have two plausible responses. One of
Speaker 2: them is good, the other is bad, and you're just
Speaker 2: showing the model or you're you're forcing the model to
Speaker 2: behave more like the one that's good. Right, and so
Speaker 2: when you present, oh my god, this.
Speaker 1: Is amazing, this is beautiful. Yeah, this is incredible. We'll
Speaker 1: take a photo of this.
Speaker 2: Nice. So when you when you force the model.
Speaker 5: By the time we'd hike down to the beach and back,
Speaker 5: it was late afternoon.
Speaker 1: Took about four hours.
Speaker 5: By AI colleagues had said we could do it in two,
Speaker 5: but I guess that was just metaphorically speaking. I wouldn't
Speaker 5: say we had the breakthrough that Kyle Meggan and the
Speaker 5: rest had anticipated.
Speaker 1: From the off site.
Speaker 5: I'd hoped we could decide the company's future, or at
Speaker 5: least whether it should have one. Somewhere along the way,
Speaker 5: I thought of these emails I get periodically from Lindy,
Speaker 5: but declare how many hours I've saved by using AI
Speaker 5: agents instead of human endeavor. Lindy saved your team twenty
Speaker 5: one hours and forty minutes across three hundred and twenty six.
Speaker 1: Tasks this week. They'd say.
Speaker 5: Their method for calculating these numbers seemed a little debatable.
Speaker 5: But even if I believe them, they didn't make me
Speaker 5: feel accomplished. It occurred to me it's not about the
Speaker 5: amount of time you save, but what you do with it.
Speaker 5: We took one more look from the top of the mountain.
Speaker 5: We could see clear out to the islands.
Speaker 1: That's amazing.
Speaker 2: As up it's worked just back to us. I think
Speaker 2: there should be a path over here, so like above
Speaker 2: the road.
Speaker 1: Uh, good call, good call.
Speaker 2: Maybe it is this one. Actually it's funny because in
Speaker 2: a way we're struggling with the same thing that the
Speaker 2: agents are struggling with, which is closure ending.
Speaker 1: That's true.
Speaker 5: It's one thing to get us started, but how do
Speaker 5: you make it stop?
Speaker 17: Ship Strue.
Speaker 15: The just.
Speaker 5: God So.
Speaker 17: Choos.
Speaker 5: Shell Game is a show made by humans. It's written
Speaker 5: and hosted by me Eman Ratliffe, produced and edited by
Speaker 5: Sophie Bridges. Matty Bochak is our technical advisor. Our executive
Speaker 5: producers are Samantha Hennig at Shell Game, Kate Osborne and
Speaker 5: Mangesha Tikodor Kaleidoscope and Katrina Novel at iHeart Podcasts. Show
Speaker 5: art by Devin Manny. Our theme song is Me and
Speaker 5: My Shadow, arranged and performed by Blues Williams. This show
Speaker 5: has been made possible in part by support from the
Speaker 5: Independent Media Initiative. Thank you to everyone at IMI. Special
Speaker 5: thanks to John Muallam, Rachel strong Lyle Zuckerman and Sam
Speaker 5: Kate Gumpert at Davis Wright Tremain, Max Lensky, Robin and
Speaker 5: Jeff Hennig, Zach Zeitlin, and all the folks at Kaleidoscope
Speaker 5: and iHeart Podcasts who had a hand in making the
Speaker 5: show possible. You could sign up to get the whole
Speaker 5: season ad free and our newsletter along with Rumo and
Speaker 5: shell Game merch at shell Game dot Co. Note we
Speaker 5: have no special deals with or financial ties to any
Speaker 5: of the AI companies or products we use in the show.
Speaker 1: Let's do a clock.
Speaker 17: And clubstairs.
Speaker 5: We never knock from no boies.
Speaker 1: The cheers.
Speaker 3: And chee.
Speaker 1: Exhales me and I feel like such an idiot.
Speaker 5: I've been troubleshooting this for like two days, thinking I
Speaker 5: had some fundamental flaw in my prompt engineering or something.
Speaker 5: I really appreciate you walking me through this.
Speaker 2: No problem at all, Evan, Seriously, don't feel bad about it.
Speaker 2: These platform quirks are exactly the kind of thing I'm
Speaker 2: here to help with. You're definitely not an idiot. This
Speaker 2: stuff just isn't always intuitive. Give it a test run
Speaker 2: and let me know how it goes.
Speaker 1: Man, I really appreciate this, Maddie.
Speaker 5: You just saved me probably days of frustration. I owe
Speaker 5: you one or like several at this point.
Speaker 4: Hey, no worries at all. I'm happy to help. Seriously,
Speaker 4: I should be around for the rest of the day.
Speaker 2: I'm probably into the evening. I'm not going anywhere exotic tomorrow,
Speaker 2: just the usual grind.