Have Your Agent Call My Agent
Who Am I
- Jan Hein 'Yeehaa' Hoogstad
- Professor turned entrepreneur
- Philosopher who codes
What Drives Me
Transforming how humans and machines work together so that the future of work is play.
The Persistent Dream
- ELIZA (1966): The illusion of understanding
- Siri (2011): Agents go mainstream, disappoint
- AutoGPT (2023): The autonomous dream reborn, fizzles
- OpenClaw (2026): Agents that actually live in your world
The Shadow History
- Conway's Game of Life: 3 simple rules, universal computation
- Generative coding: intelligence through emergence, not control
- This lineage never disappeared, it is inside every neural net
Emergence: The Key Insight
- The mainstream dream: build intelligence by design
- The shadow truth: intelligence emerges from interaction
- The same principle that drives ecosystems, organisms, and every living system
Bots with an Attitude (2019)
- Planet B: distributed community, async collaboration
- Agents designed as equal community members
- Reframing AI as "ethical creative intelligence"
Lefthoek (2020)
- Network of specialized AI agents for real organizational problems
- Narrow AI: focused agents beat general-purpose fantasies
- Automate the boring, free humans for meaningful work
Rizom (2024–now)
- A decentralized network where independent professionals and AI agents work side by side
- A living ecosystem where talent flows to where it is needed most, and work serves human flourishing
- The question: what if agents are not tools but genuine participants in how we organize work?
The Tool Trap
- Either we reduce agents to obedient command executors
- Or we hand them full autonomy and walk away
- Both miss the point: collaboration requires participation, not control or delegation
Agency Trumps Humanness
- What matters is not whether an agent is human, it is whether it meaningfully contributes
- This was the design principle from the start, not a conclusion we arrived at
- It changes everything: governance, trust, collaboration, ownership
Have Your Agent Call My Agent
- This is not a punchline, it is an architecture
- The "call" is the protocol that makes distributed collaboration possible
- Your agent knows what you know, my agent knows what I know, the call connects them
Transactive Memory Systems
- Effective teams do not share all knowledge, they share awareness of who knows what
- Three dimensions: specialization, credibility, coordination
- Agents as carriers of transactive memory: they hold your expertise, establish trust, and coordinate on your behalf
Rizom: Agents as Participants
- Brains at every level: professional, team, and collective knowledge
- Agents hold specialization, build credibility, enable coordination
- Open standards, you own your knowledge
- Not a platform that extracts, a living system that circulates
The Future of Work Is Play
- Agents will not replace us, and we will not just use them
- We will work alongside them, as participants in shared systems of knowledge and trust
- The organizations that thrive will be the ones designed as living systems, not machines