Michael Calore: The inscrutable billboards.

Lauren Goode: I was just like, “What? No, keep me in the land of Burrata and Caravaggio.”

Michael Calore: Well, Lauren, I’m sorry to tell you that you came back on the show just in time to talk about AI agents. I know.

Lauren Goode: Great.

Michael Calore: It’s something that we’ve talked about a lot this year and our listeners have heard about it a lot, and we’re not sick of talking about it. In fact, we have a very fun conversation about AI agents happening today.

Lauren Goode: Well, if you can promise me fun, I’m in.

Michael Calore: I can. I can.

Lauren Goode: All right, let’s do it. I’m excited.

Michael Calore: We’re moving beyond the hype and putting AI agents to work in real-time for us. Or more specifically, we’re bringing on journalist and podcast host, Evan Ratliff, because he created a company composed of AI employees and executives, and he is here to tell us all about it. Welcome to the show, Evan.

Evan Ratliff: It is fantastic to be here.

Lauren Goode: Evan, you’re also an original WIRED one. You were at WIRED for a long time, right?

Evan Ratliff: I’m an old school WIRED person. I was only at WIRED very briefly, for a couple of years a long time ago, but I have contributed to WIRED for now many decades.

Lauren Goode: And of those two years, for how long were you disappeared? Because that’s part of your lore.

Evan Ratliff: Oh, that happened, yeah, that was in 2009. I only actually disappeared for one month, which is insane given how much I’ve talked about this over the years. I was trying to disappear for one month in the manner of sort of faking my own death and people could go find me, but it was pretty much going to be on my tombstone.