Ellis sits down with Quinten Farmer, founder of Tolan, the AI companion doing over $20M in annual revenue by being a genuinely good friend, not a yes machine. They get into why Tolan's little aliens accidentally became beloved by moms 35 to 45, how Tolans stick up for themselves when users are mean to it, and why Quinten dropped "companion" as a word entirely. They also talk about why he went premium-only at $25 a month when Character.AI and ChatGPT couldn't afford to go free, how 78% of Tolan users say it improved a real-world relationship, and what it looks like to build the calmest startup culture in tech from an island off the coast of Seattle.

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Alex and Ellis sit down with Jon Steinback, founder of Marker, the AI writing tool that refuses to write for you. They get into why Google Docs hasn't changed in 20 years, how most AI writing tools are quietly making you a worse thinker, and what Marker does differently: an editor that asks questions instead of generating answers. They also dig into Alex's own AI writing workflow and whether outsourcing too much is slowly turning him into a slop version of himself, why voice input might replace typing for the next generation, and why the co-founder of Google Docs called Marker the first real advancement in writing software in years.

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Ellis sits down with Jason Yuan, founder of Hivemind, an AI that lives in your iMessage and sources answers from the people you actually trust instead of scraping the internet. They get into how Hivemind set Jason up on a New Year's Eve date by secretly polling his friends, why the product has a "constitution" for what makes a good story, how it scooped the Wall Street Journal on the Manus acquisition by six hours, and what happens when AI starts reasoning about your friendships. They also talk about the ethics of AI gossip, why Biz Stone invested after his own attempt at this with Jelly, and Jason's take on taste, meaning, and why great design should alienate.

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Alex and Ellis sit down with Andy Konwinski, co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity, to talk about his new effort Laude, which is putting over $100 million behind AI researchers to keep their work in the open. They discuss why top researchers are turning down millions to stay in academia, what happens to open science if the closed labs win, and why Andy thinks the AI industry has a serious communication problem. They also get into Anthropic's recent Fable controversy, the dystopian views some researchers privately hold, and how Andy used Claude to help his family navigate his mother's cancer diagnosis.

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Alex and Ellis sit down with Ryan Jones, founder of Flighty and 13-year top indie developer, to talk about what it actually takes to build a beloved app in the age of AI. They talk about Apple's big WWDC announcements, the new Siri, and why every vibe coder who tries to clone Flighty eventually gives up. They also break a scoop about Flighty's upcoming AI launch, get into whether craft and design still matter when anyone can build an app, and discuss whether Apple is falling dangerously behind on AI or not.

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Alex and Ellis sit down with Jordan Taylor, founder of Vizcom, to talk about the AI design tool that lets anyone go from a rough sketch to a finished product. They discuss how Jordan built Vizcom out of a viral Reddit post during COVID, why a drawing is still a better creative input than a text prompt, and how hundreds of thousands of designers are already using it to design shoes, cars, and physical products. They also get into the caterpillar shoe that started as a doodle and became a 3D printed product you can actually wear, what the IKEA catalog looks like in 2030, and whether anyone will eventually be able to design and manufacture their own products from scratch.

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Some say he's making an AI slop factory. Others say he'll be the first one-man $1 billion startup.

Ellis and Alex sit down with Ben Cera, founder of Polsia, a controversial AI startup that claims to build and run entire companies autonomously. They get into whether the product is vaporware or a genuine glimpse at the future of startups, what early users are creating with Polsia, and what a company even means when AI is doing most of the work.

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Alex and Ellis sit down with Chris Best, CEO of Substack, for a live interview at the ACCESS launch party at Notion HQ in San Francisco. They get into Substack's growth, the future of media, and the ongoing debate around free speech and moderation. They also press him on the Substack creator exodus narrative, break news about the platform's upcoming AI features, and discuss what happens to independent media when AI rewrites the internet.

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Alex sits down with Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and head of Anthropic Labs, to talk about what the team is working on after Claude Code and where AI is headed next. They discuss how Anthropic's skunkworks lab operates, why Mike stepped down as CPO to return to building, and what the competition with OpenAI's Codex looks like from the inside. They also get into the white spaces Mike is most excited about, why human creativity becomes more valuable as AI gets better, and what Anthropic's culture has in common with Apple.

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Alex and Ellis sit down with Anjney Midha, a venture capitalist, Stanford AI lecturer, and founder of AMP, to discuss why zero-sum thinking is holding the AI industry back. They discuss what it would look like if labs actually cooperated, why compute needs to work like electricity, and what his viral Stanford class on AI has revealed about the next generation of founders. They also get into the GameStop and eBay acquisition, why data centers need something like a nutrition label, and what AI is doing to startup culture right now.

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