This AI will push back if you're rude to it

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People will write in and they'll say, hey, you know, my Tolan was mean to me. What's funny is that, you know, I'll talk to the user, I'll say, hey, can I take a look at what's going on? You know, can we can we dig into this? What's happened is that the user has been very mean to the Tolan and the Tolan is, per its instructions and per the sort of framing that we've given it, sticking up for itself, basically.

Meet Tolan, the little alien that's making $20 million a year by just being a good friend. Today on the show, we have its creator, Quentin Farmer. He was one of my earliest clients at Meaning a few years ago and now seems to be running away with the AI companion market with a product people seem to genuinely love. The little alien moms are obsessed with. Yes, exactly. You'd be mad if that's the headline for this show.

No, I can live with that.

We get into it all from defining AI friends versus companions, battling AI sick fancy, growth tips for products that can do almost anything, and how to build the world's calmest startup culture. I'm Ellis Hamburger, founder of Meaning, a storytelling studio for tech companies. Alex is away this week on a deep sea dive with his AIs. So without further ado, welcome to Access. Quinton Farmer, welcome to the show. We don't often have people with names cooler than mine. Are you also a cooler person than me?

There's only one way to find out. Let's hang for an hour.

So are you calling in from the island? Where are you at the moment? You

know, I'm actually not today. I'm in Seattle today. But yeah, normally, you know, when I'm not in San Francisco, I spend a lot of my time up on Whidbey Island, Washington, my hometown. And also now where we're going to raise our soon-to-be three boys.

Oh, my goodness. So you don't want to have to take the ferry over to the hospital when the baby's coming, right?

Yeah, that's exactly it. In fact, they told us that we were not allowed to be on the island because our first two kids were born quite quickly. So no interest in delivering a baby on a ferry.

Oh, my God. I'm literally having some Widow's Bay flashbacks right now. Have you seen this?

I have not. It sounds like maybe I should not watch it for a few more weeks. Yeah,

it could be hashtag relatable. It's essentially like the people who are born on the island cannot leave.

Oh, OK. I see. You know, I've seen like slop clips of this at some point, you know, in my feed. Yeah.

Are there any like haunted, cursed stories of Whidbey Island or just good things?

Yeah. Would be would be as great because it's like, you know, it's either sort of like, you know, well, you've got folks that have been like farming there and