Pratik polled an entire airport bar on his way to give a talk on AI ethics, and every single person told him they don't use AI.

Chris and Pratik spend this one on harnesses: the thing wrapped around the model that decides whether you ever actually use it. Pratik defines the term, then walks through Meta's new Muse and its cloud-hosted computer, while Chris reports back from a week with the new iOS 27, where Siri has quietly taken over a chunk of what he was paying ChatGPT for. They also land on the same answer to the daily driver question, which almost never happens.

In this episode:
- Pratik used four different AI tools before 11:30 on a Monday morning and still calls "whatever fits the problem" a cop-out answer
- The one thing both hosts agree on: for most people, the twenty dollar ChatGPT is the entire answer
- Chris rebuilds his glucose monitor workaround as an on-device shortcut and stops burning tokens to read his own screenshot
- Muse negotiating loyalty discounts on two of Pratik's subscriptions, with the support rep on the other end assuming it's him
- The Slack workspace ChatGPT created for Chris that he didn't find until the next day
- Why coding got product-market fit and nothing else did: forty years of QA baked in, versus a feeling

Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:20 Dreamforce and the bar where nobody uses AI
6:57 From the Dash: what should your daily driver be?
16:33 What a harness actually is
23:04 A week with the new iOS, and what Chris stopped paying for
29:37 How Slack quietly democratized AI at work
38:10 Meta's Muse and its cloud computer
45:06 Lockers, credentials, and giving up control
51:54 Why coding works and everything else is a feeling

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No guest this week, which means Tik and Chris had all week to argue about whether this episode should exist at all.

Here's the problem. Nvidia's CEO says AGI has arrived. A researcher walked out of Anthropic the same week saying we're not ready for it. And nobody — not one person in this entire industry — can tell you what AGI actually is. There's no definition. There's no test. There's no committee. The closest thing to an official one is buried in a contract between OpenAI and Microsoft, where AGI gets declared by hitting a profit number. That's it. That's the bar.

Pratik does better in about four minutes: it's AGI when a model can go get the skills it doesn't have and hand back work the experts in that field would actually accept. He runs it against mathematics, where a model just went at an unsolved problem with 10,000 agents, and sits honestly with what that means for the people who gave their whole careers to it. Chris comes at it from the other side — what we allow, and how — by way of nuclear power, the printing press, and railroad doctors who thought going that fast would cause mass hysteria.

It gets philosophical. It gets unexpectedly personal. Chris clarifies twice, unprompted, that he is not a madman.

P.S. - Chris also walks through how they use AI Studio to power the website for the podcast.

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro 
• 4:33 Building the show's website by talking to Google AI Studio
• 13:21 Shopify drops React Native, and the case for disposable software
• 16:43 Nvidia says AGI is here
• 19:37 Nobody can define AGI, so a contract defined it with money
• 25:52 Navier-Stokes and what it cost the mathematicians
• 31:24 Math put us on the moon, and might get us cancer treatment
• 36:52 Nuclear power, the printing press, and every panic before this one

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Chris kicks things off with a story that'll either make you laugh or cringe: someone paid $100+ for an AI-generated song that you could make yourself for much less. From there, Tik and Chris pull that thread all the way through the fabric of modern business — where does the price of AI-powered services actually come from, who decides what's fair, and how long can these pricing windows stay open before everyone catches on?

Then things get personal. Tik goes on the record about using AI to navigate a decade-long health issue — pulling together years of medical records, running them through NotebookLM and ChatGPT, and walking away with more clarity than multiple doctor visits ever gave him. The conversation evolves into something bigger: what happens to billing, throughput, and the doctor-patient relationship when AI starts closing the knowledge gap on both sides of the exam table?

If you've ever wondered whether AI is actually changing anything real, this one's for you.

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Chris and Pratik open with Claude Tag, Siri's new screen-awareness, and Google's shift to "go do the work" search agents — and land on the real question: if AI is about to live inside every app you already use, was building your own agent ever the point?

Then it gets messier: the Fable 5 / Mythos 5 export-control saga, a competitor-authored jailbreak report, and a government that acted on it without testing anything itself. Pratik questions the incentives behind who's grading whose homework; Chris isn't so sure that's the full story. They don't land on an answer — and don't force one.

Closes with an unexpected pivot: the Pope's letter on AI and human dignity. Yes, really.

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Co-host Pratik Desai pulls back the curtain on something he's never talked about publicly — how he went from scribbling a business plan on a bus to Machu Picchu at 2 AM to landing his first contract before he even left Peru. This episode digs into the early chaos of bootstrapping a tech consulting company: figuring out insurance, benefits, quarterly taxes, and all the unglamorous back-office realities that nobody writes down in their business plan.

From there, Pratik walks us through what it actually looks like to get into Techstars — the sub-1% acceptance rate, the intense interview process, and what the program's managing directors are really evaluating when they sit across from you. He shares what day-to-day life in the accelerator looked like, how he balanced active consulting clients with building a product, and what it felt like to be the first founder on stage at demo day in front of a packed house at Google's NYC pier.

And then — the exit. Pratik gets candid about how the landscape shifted, why they made the call they made, and what he'd tell anyone considering applying to an accelerator today. If you're a consultant thinking about making the jump to founder, or just curious what the startup-to-exit journey actually looks like from the inside, this is the episode.

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Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, and the guys think it has nothing to do with the $40M — it's pure Dr. Evil energy. World domination doesn't come cheap, but apparently it might come with a refund.

The bigger story? Anthropic and OpenAI just launched partner networks for consultants... and then immediately announced they're building their own consulting arms. Cool timing, guys. Chris and Pratik dig into what this actually means for the consulting world, whether the "AI is killing jobs" narrative holds up against what these companies are signaling, and why the gap between a working pilot and a working product is where all the real opportunity lives.

They also get into the honest stuff: what does a sustainable consulting career look like when the tools keep changing? Spoiler — it's less about picking the right platform and more about never being too attached to the last one.

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What happens when you lock two AI models in a room with no memory and tell them to talk? Pratik found out — and things got weird fast. We kick off with his deep dive into multi-agent LLMs, complete with unsanctioned starship roleplay, a 150-turn identity crisis, and an accidental recreation of OpenClaw. Then we pivot to a shoe company that pivoted to AI, watched its stock jump 600-700% overnight, and may or may not have a plan. We dig into why that's either genius or tulip-level mania — you decide.

From there, Pratik makes a compelling case for why the future of AI might be a lot of small, culturally-specific models rather than one model to rule them all. Then we get into our new segment, Use Case Bonanza, where we get surprisingly practical: AI as your home repair coach, your sous chef, and your cooking co-pilot. Yes, we talk about dryer vents. Yes, it's actually interesting.

Recorded while Pratik was on a food tour in Toronto (connection permitting lol).

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Anthropic keeps shipping, and this week Tik and Chris try to make sense of the pace. They cover managed agents — what they are, who they're actually built for, and whether the cost makes sense for anything beyond a serious build. They also get into the rumored Mythos model, why Anthropic chose a controlled rollout over a public launch, and what Project Glasswing signals about where cybersecurity is headed. The conversation then turns to the partner program and what it really means to add Anthropic to your consulting toolkit. And through all of it, one question keeps coming up: OpenAI has been quiet — suspiciously quiet — and Tik and Chris aren't sure if that means they're falling behind or loading up for something big. If you've been trying to keep up with how fast this space is moving, this is a good episode to start with.

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It's Pratik's birthday, and the best gift he gets is being right.

Chris and Pratik kick things off debating AI's growing role in baseball's ball-and-strike review system — robots in the dugout, anyone? — before diving into why they started this podcast in the first place: the belief that AI puts a billion-dollar toolkit in the hands of literally anyone willing to pick it up.

From the rise of the one-person unicorn company to how AI is quietly reshuffling the employer-employee relationship, this episode covers the big picture before getting tactical. Chris used AI to plan a family trip and the itinerary passed the ultimate stress test — the wife test. Pratik approves.

Then the main event: they called it weeks ago, and now it's happening. Claude is throttling usage, Claude Code is hitting credit limits, and a suspiciously "helpful" new credits system showed up in everyone's inbox pre-enabled. Chris and Pratik break down the $20 and $8 pricing story behind how AI companies hooked the world — and why the bill is about to go up one way or another.

The takeaway? Get in now, learn the tools now, so when the pricing rug gets pulled, you'll know if it's worth it.

Oh, and the website is live :)

🎙️ tikandchrispodcast.com

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