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For the season 3 finale, we're running a QBR (quarterly business review) on the podcast itself. From the text that started it all through three seasons of struggles, wins, lots of learning, and two new jobs. Then we dive into our goals season 4 live: more community, an in-person event, and a production upgrade. We finish with our favorite and least favorite episodes, as well as reminisce on the memories that keep us going. 39 episodes in and we still love what we do! See you in season 4!

In this solo episode, the last one of Season 3, Ellen picks up where Eden's MCP episode left off and asks how AI agents actually get to a company's data. She starts with what an agent is, an AI that works toward a goal in steps and calls tools to reach things it can't touch on its own. She then walks through how software's access to data has changed: developers wrapping hand-written SQL in functions, then agents calling those same functions as tools, then MCP as the "menu" of tools any AI app can use. From there she introduces Databricks and Genie. Genie began as a plain-English-to-SQL translator, and it has grown into your business analyst. The real challenge turned out to be giving AI the tribal knowledge about your data, not writing SQL. She breaks Genie into three pieces: Genie Agents that analysts teach, Genie One as the single front door, and Genie Ontology as the shared map of what your data means. She also covers how Genie reaches out to tools like Slack through MCP, and how it can become a tool inside someone else's agent, all while your data stays governed.

MCPs are everywhere right now. Can Eden explain them in 10 under 10 mins? Not sure, but she'll try. In her last solo episode of Season 3, Eden breaks down the Model Context Protocol — the standard Anthropic released in 2024 and handed to the Linux Foundation in 2025 — using the hat business she and Ellen actually run as the example. What happens when you try to wire an AI agent to Shopify, Notion, Formspree, and Instagram DMs by hand? You build five custom integrations, maintain them forever, rewrite them when you switch models, and drown your context window in JSON. MCP is the fix. In this episode:• The problem MCPs solved (and why "the model is a brain with no limbs")• Hosts, clients, servers — what each piece actually does• Tools, resources, and prompts• The July 2026 spec change that made MCP stateless• The critiques: context bloat, the 67,000-token tax, and real security incidents

Eden and Ellen break down the economics of AI chips. They talk through how a chip actually gets made (wafers, logic dies, HBM memory), why one company in Taiwan (TSMC) manufactures nearly every advanced chip on Earth, and why NVIDIA's record-breaking quarter might be propped up by companies investing in each other in a circular loop.

90% of the Fortune 100 run their code through GitHub, and this week it went down for 7 hours. If your reaction to that is questions and confusion .... this one is for you. Eden breaks down Git vs. GitHub (not the same thing!!): The 2005 drama that made Linus Torvalds rage-build Git in two weeks, the platform that built upon it and became a social network for developers, plus the bare minimum version control every vibecoder needs to know.

LLMs predict the next word. World models predict the next moment. Eden explains the AI "brains" powering Waymos and humanoid robots and Ellen gets into the real-world applications: simulated tornado testing, robot hands that can hold an egg, NVIDIA's Cosmos, and why people are getting paid to wear GoPros while doing chores. Your delivery robot is smarter than you think.

Ellen goes solo to tackle quantum computing! She walks through quantum computing basics: classical bits vs. qubits, what superposition and the Bloch sphere actually mean, why rotating qubits creates wave interference that amplifies right answers and cancels wrong ones, why that gives quantum computers an exponential edge over brute force, and why all of it points toward Shor's algorithm eventually breaking RSA-2048 encryption.

Episode Description In this episode, Eden and Ellen cover recent AI news. 1. Apple v. OpenAI LawsuitApple's federal lawsuit against OpenAI, two former employees, and hardware startup IO over alleged theft of trade secrets — plus the Musk-Altman fallout on X. 2. OpenAI Sandbox EscapeHow an OpenAI model being tested for hacking skills broke out of its sandbox and breached Hugging Face. 3. AI 2040 Scenario ForecastA look at AI 2040, a long-form projection of AI's trajectory through 2040, including proposals for international coordination and universal basic income. 4. AI and the Jacobian ConjectureHow AI disproved an 87-year-old math conjecture with a single counterexample.

Phia was supposed to be the Google Flights for fashion. An AI shopping assistant co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, backed by $43.5M and a Coachella lineup of celebrity investors. Then researcher Ben Edelman caught their browser extension cookie stuffing: silently taking affiliate credit for sales it didn't drive, possibly even swiping commissions from your favorite influencers' links. In this solo episode, Eden breaks down how the scheme worked (feature flags, background tabs, and a setting literally called "enable coupon auto drop"), why it only targeted iPhone Safari users, whether Phia's Series A investors were misled, and what past cookie-stuffing cases, from the eBay wire fraud convictions to the ongoing Honey lawsuits, might tell us about what happens next. Sources mentioned in this episode: Ben Edelman's investigation: https://www.benedelman.org/phia-forced-clicks/Brian Dunning's Blog Post Alleging Ebay's Involvement in Cooking Stuffing: https://www.briandunning.com/fix_ebay.html

It’s the golden episode (season 3, episode 3), and Eden and Ellen are getting a little science-y. This one’s all about health tech wearables — the rings, watches, and bands tracking your every move, and what’s really happening under the hood. We break down: How the hardware senses your body — optical PPG (photoplethysmography), ECG, LED light, and why the fingertip and earlobe are prime real estate for readingsThe metrics — heart rate, HRV, respiratory rate, blood oxygen, blood pressure, temperature, and how each one is actually derivedSignal vs. noise — why your ring is more trustworthy asleep than mid-workout, and the adaptive filtering that cancels out your footstepsAI, machine learning & inference — the difference between measured data and educated guesses, and why you are your own baseline (and why that baseline is the real product lock-in)The competitors — Oura, Whoop, Garmin, Apple, and up-and-comers like the Lumia ear cuffYour data & who’s protecting it — privacy policies, consent screens, Washington’s My Health My Data Act, Senator Cassidy’s proposed HIPRA, and what happens to your data when a company changes hands As always — we’re no doctors, lawyers, or geopolitical specialists. Stay safe out there.

In this solo season-three opener, Ellen recaps Databricks' 2026 Data + AI Summit, unpacking the keynote's core framework — Context, Control, Cost, and Choice — and CEO Ali Ghodsi's argument that AGI already exists but lacks the enterprise access needed to be useful. She walks through the expanded Genie product family, including Genie Code, Genie One, Genie Agents, Genie ZeroOps, and Genie App Builder, along with the underlying Genie Ontology layer that powers them. The episode also covers two major infrastructure announcements: the Rayden engine for real-time analytics, and LTAP, which unifies transactional and analytical data, eliminating traditional data pipelines. The episode closes with a brief look at Omnigent, a Day 2 open-source tool Ellen has adopted into her own workflow.

Why does representation in tech (especially in AI) actually matter? Because we've seen what happens when it's missing. Eden and Ellen walk through a history of products built without women in the room: crash-test dummies modeled on the average man that left women 47% more likely to be seriously injured, drugs dosed for male bodies, heart attacks misdiagnosed because the textbook symptoms are men's, hiring algorithms that penalized the word "women," and facial recognition that couldn't see darker-skinned women. The through-line is simple. When women aren't in the room, tools get built without them in mind, and the harm is real. Now AI is being shaped in exactly those rooms. This episode is about why that can't happen again, what the numbers at the top labs actually look like, and why getting women in early isn't optional.

It's an off-season check-in because some things just can't be an email. Ellen and Eden are back at the mic to catch up on everything since production wrapped — TGC Media is officially an LLC (yes, there's a prenup), merch is incoming, and the new website just went live thanks to Eden's Claude Design and Claude Code build. Both Ellen and Eden came back from their work trips with the same question on their minds: how do you actually vibe code as a team? From merge conflicts and over-documented AI-generated code to whether any of it is production-ready, this one's for anyone navigating the messier side of building with AI. Plus — AI slop horror stories, Eden's surprising change of heart on in-person work, and a TikTok about Gen Z IQ decline that makes the whole "AI native" thing feel a little more complicated,

In our season two finale, we’re talking all things AISPIRATION: (AI + Inspiration) the AI tools, automations, and workflows helping us work smarter, create faster, and make life a little less manual. From streamlining podcast production and prepping for high-stakes presentations to building custom Notion automations, organizing shopping decisions, cleaning up chaotic inboxes, and using AI as a real tool for self-improvement, this episode is one big brainstorm on how to make AI actually useful in everyday life.

This week I'm diving into one of the most fascinating infrastructure stories happening right now — data centers. We're going full 101 on what they actually are, how they work, and why AI has completely broken everything the industry thought it knew. We cover the four pillars every data center is built on, why a random suburb in Northern Virginia became the backbone of the global internet, and what happened when drone strikes took out three AWS data centers in the Middle East earlier this year — and what that means for how we think about digital infrastructure as a target of war. Then we get into the AI shift — why a single Nvidia GPU rack draws 42 times the power of a standard server rack, why Meta scrapped two years of construction mid-build because their facility was already obsolete, and why Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are all racing to secure nuclear power plants just to keep the lights on. And then we go to the frontier. Space-based data centers — and why the cooling problem doesn't disappear just because you're in orbit. The moon — and why 14 days of complete darkness makes it nearly impossible. And the ocean floor off the coast of Denmark — which is actually working right now. Sources & further reading: Middle East AWS attack highlights data center vulnerabilities — TechTarget: https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/feature/Middle-East-AWS-attack-highlights-data-center-vulnerabilitiesSpace-based data centers — Real Engineering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osMooAvpSSsUnderwater data centers — Denmark / North Sea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyklsgOClJAEquinix data center infrastructure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v477fvbj3rk