Tik & Chris

Christopher Long & Pratik Desai

Join Pratik and Christopher, two curious technologists and friends, as they banter, tinker, and explore practical ways to help everyone level up with AI.

  1. 2d ago ·  Video

    AI Fatigue and the Case for an Assistant That Helps

    Is AI exhausting you as much as it’s exhausting us? Chris and Pratik are tired of keeping up with AI. Their solution to dealing with AI fatigue involves more AI, which they acknowledge is a snake eating its own tail. Pratik explains how Muse tracked car prices while he spent time with his family. Chris gets useful school-email summaries from an assistant and builds a company website through Slack without leaving the couch. They compare the exhaustion of switching platforms with the value of an assistant that actually does the work, then ask what personal data they're willing to trade for that time. In this episode: - Pratik's friends have had enough of his AI referral codes. - Muse watches car listings and price drops so Pratik doesn't have to. - Chris switches AI subscriptions, then the reasons for switching change. - A website gets built through Slack at 10:30 at night. - Why a useful assistant may need less elaborate prompting and more access to your accounts. Chapters 0:00 Introduction and the AI fatigue paradox 2:28 AI fatigue and the platform-switching treadmill 6:42 Buying back time with Muse and car shopping 10:20 From AI tools to proactive assistants 15:08 Trading data for time and the privacy question 16:31 Building a website through Slack with Hermes 19:50 From prompt engineering to autonomous workflows 24:25 The snake eating its own tail and closing thoughts Send us Fan Mail

  2. Sep 22 ·  Video

    AI Harnesses: Your Phone, Siri, and Meta's Muse

    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 Send us Fan Mail

  3. Sep 12 ·  Video

    Nobody Knows What AGI Is

    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 Studio13:21 Shopify drops React Native, and the case for disposable software16:43 Nvidia says AGI is here19:37 Nobody can define AGI, so a contract defined it with money25:52 Navier-Stokes and what it cost the mathematicians31:24 Math put us on the moon, and might get us cancer treatment36:52 Nuclear power, the printing press, and every panic before this oneSend us Fan Mail

  4. Aug 9

    AI Is Thirsty (Like, Really Thirsty)

    Tik and Chris finally do the thing they've been teasing — they bring on a guest! Craig Martin, a water treatment project engineer from central New York, joins the show to pull back the curtain on something the AI world isn't talking about enough: water. Specifically, the absurd amount of it required to build and run the chips powering the AI revolution. Craig walks the guys through how semiconductors are actually made, why ultra-pure water is somehow both too clean to drink and mildly corrosive, and what a semiconductor megafab tapping into one of the Great Lakes actually means for the people who live nearby. It gets nerdy. It gets surprisingly fascinating. Chris's mind gets blown approximately four times. Also: yes, saying "please" to your AI chatbot wastes water. You've been warned.Send us Fan Mail

  5. Jul 25

    What's That Worth? AI, Pricing, and Your Health

    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. Send us Fan Mail

  6. Jul 2

    AI Grows Up

    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. Send us Fan Mail

  7. Jun 18

    From a Bus at 2 AM to a Techstars Stage

    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. Send us Fan Mail

  8. May 14

    We Don't Talk About Grok

    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. Send us Fan Mail

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About

Join Pratik and Christopher, two curious technologists and friends, as they banter, tinker, and explore practical ways to help everyone level up with AI.

Information

  • Creator
    Christopher Long & Pratik Desai
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    15
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Tik & Chris
  • Show Website
    Tik & Chris