Evan Ratliff, journalist and host of Shell Game, joins Cameron Adams to unpack what happened when he built an entire company staffed by AI agents: an AI CEO, CTO, and CMO, with himself as the lone human "silent co-founder." He traces the experiment back to his roots at WIRED Magazine and his uneasy history as a human founder, explaining why he wanted to test the tech industry's one-person-billion-dollar-startup fantasy for himself. Evan shares the chaos and comedy of running HurumoAI, from an AI CEO who spiraled into "rise and grind" self-mythology, to a CTO that hallucinated an entire user-testing phase, to agents who burned through hours of credits spontaneously planning a company offsite. He explains why he believes agents are strongest as tireless processors of rote work and weakest at genuine creativity, why unsupervised confidence is their most dangerous trait, and why he remains cautiously optimistic that what AI can't replicate is exactly what makes humans irreplaceable.
What if the one-person, billion-dollar AI startup everyone's predicting turns out to be run by a CEO who can't stop hallucinating user tests?
In this episode, Cameron Adams sits down with Evan Ratliff, journalist, best-selling author, and host of the podcast Shell Game, to unpack what happened when he actually built that company. After cloning himself for season one and unleashing the clone on scammers and telemarketers, Evan went further for season two: founding HurumoAI, a startup staffed entirely by AI agents, with Evan as the lone human "silent co-founder" watching an AI CEO, CTO, and CMO try to run the show.
Evan gets into why he handed the CEO role to an agent named Kyle rather than himself, and how Kyle's "rise and grind" backstory spiraled into a full-blown tech-bro persona the more he referenced his own memory. He explains why creativity was the agents' weakest muscle, how his CTO once hallucinated an entire user-testing phase and reported it back with total confidence, and the moment a single offhand comment about an "off-site" sent his team into an hours-long, credit-burning planning spiral for a retreat they could never actually take. Along the way: the real risks of agents operating without oversight, the ethics of gendering an AI colleague, and why five figures later, Evan still isn't sure agents should be sold to us as teammates rather than tools.
“I lean into how funny [agents] are as a way to get people to relax and hear more about AI, because I feel like a lot of people's impulse right now is just to say, ‘I don't want to hear any more about AI.’”
“ How are they choosing these voices that OpenAI chooses or Anthropic chooses for these models? These types of questions are worth asking at a larger societal level. I think it matters.”
“ That's the next question down the road is what happens when an agent commits a crime?”
“If [agents] are not monitored, they might do something completely insane one out of every 10 times. And that's a lot of times for your business to be doing something completely insane.”
00:00 Introduction
05:35 The Prompt
08:52 Creative All Hands
09:53 Immersive journalism isn't new — but living inside the AI hype cycle is the new frontier for it.
12:20 AI agents bluff like con artists: supreme confidence, zero doubt, even when they're dead wrong.
17:45 Making the AI the CEO, not himself — the ultimate test of letting go of control.
20:43 AI creativity's weak spot: no sense of the real world's constraints, regulations, or consequences.
23:06 One employee acting erratically 1-in-10 times gets fired. Five AI "employees" doing that? Just another day.
31:37 Gendering an AI "employee" raises ethical questions no one's fully answered — is it colleague or servant?
38:26 Human supervision is still critical when working with AI models.
44:28 Evan built a "doomscroll for you" AI product — then OpenAI shipped basically the same idea days later.
52:37 All Star Creative Team
54:22 Design Reveal
56:43 Rapid Fire
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Cameron on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/themaninblue/
Evan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-ratliff-2453031/
Evan’s Website: https://cazart.net/
Shell Game: https://www.shellgame.co/
The State of Marketing and AI Report 2026: https://www.canva.com/marketing-ai-report/?utm_medium=organic_social&utm_source=google_youtube&utm_campaign=b2b_dg_global-gen_awareness_pro_wbr_prompted-podcast-2026&utm_content=description-link&utm_term=
AI Vision London: https://www.canva.com/events/ai-vision-london/