Kevin Roose Has 18 New Best Friends—And They're All AIs - Ep. 21
AI and I15 Touko 2024

Kevin Roose Has 18 New Best Friends—And They're All AIs - Ep. 21

The NYT’s Kevin Roose has 18 new friends—none of whom are human.

His new friends are AI personas that he made with Noma, Kindroid, and other AI companion apps. There’s fitness guru Jared, therapist Peter, trial lawyer Anna, and over a dozen more.

Kevin talked to them every day for a month, sharing his feelings, asking for parenting advice, and even using them for “fit” checks.

This isn’t the first time Kevin has had an…unusual interaction with an AI persona. A year ago, he was the target of Bing’s chatbot Sydney’s unhinged romantic affections.

Kevin has gone deeper into the world of AI companions than anyone I know. He is a tech columnist at the New York Times, cohost of the Hard Fork podcast, and the author of three books. In this episode, I sat down with Kevin to learn more about his interactions with AI. We dive into:

  • Why AI companions aren’t just for lonely people or shy teenagers
  • Why AI personas are better friends than ChatGPT
  • How AI companions can be used to safely explore different social contexts
  • The risk of young people relying on AI for friendship
  • The icks of AI dating and intimacy
  • How to use AI to articulate what you value in your relationships

This is a must-watch for anyone curious about how AI is changing the way we form relationships.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share!

Want even more?

Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free.

To hear more from Dan Shipper:

  • Subscribe to Every
  • Follow him on X

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Jaksot(98)

She Turned Her Whole Life Into Training Data—For an AI Baby

She Turned Her Whole Life Into Training Data—For an AI Baby

Sarah Rose Siskind is incubating two types of intelligence at once: her unborn child, and FetusGPT—an LLM trained on nothing but what she hears and says throughout the day.This includes Seinfeld episo...

10 Joulu 20251h 13min

Why Opus 4.5 Just Became the Most Influential AI Model

Why Opus 4.5 Just Became the Most Influential AI Model

The world changed last week—Opus 4.5 is the best coding model Dan has ever used.It can keep coding and coding autonomously without tripping over itself—and it marks a completely new horizon for the cr...

3 Joulu 20251h 25min

Best of the Pod: Would You Shut Down Your Most Successful Product? The Arc to Dia Story

Best of the Pod: Would You Shut Down Your Most Successful Product? The Arc to Dia Story

If you had millions of people using a product you spent years building, would you kill it?That’s exactly what The Browser Company did with Arc.Originally recorded in July before The Browser Company’s ...

26 Marras 20251h 23min

Best of the Pod: Claude Code - How Two Engineers Ship Like a Team of 15

Best of the Pod: Claude Code - How Two Engineers Ship Like a Team of 15

If you’re using AI to just write code, you’re missing out.Two engineers at Every shipped six features, five bug fixes, and three infrastructure updates in one week—and they did it by designing workflo...

19 Marras 202553min

Building AI Agents to Launch a Million Businesses

Building AI Agents to Launch a Million Businesses

Henrik Werdelin wants to launch a million businesses that each make $1M—and he’s doing it with AI.After helping launch Barkbox and Ro Health through his incubator Prehype, Henrik is distilling everyth...

12 Marras 20251h 5min

What Jason Fried Learned from 26 Years of Building Great Products

What Jason Fried Learned from 26 Years of Building Great Products

37signals makes tens of millions in profit every year but Jason Fried isn’t all that interested in running a business.Instead, he cares most about making great products—like Basecamp, HEY, and Ruby on...

5 Marras 202558min

How Salesforce Is Using AI to Power the Enterprise

How Salesforce Is Using AI to Power the Enterprise

This episode contains sponsored content in partnership with Salesforce.At Dreamforce 2025, Every CEO Dan Shipper sat down with Silvio Savarese, chief AI scientist at Salesforce, to discuss how one of ...

31 Loka 202514min

Inside Claude Code From the Engineers Who Built It

Inside Claude Code From the Engineers Who Built It

At Every, the team credits Claude Code with transforming the way they work.They now ship to codebases they barely know, each new feature makes the next easier to build, and even non-technical teammate...

29 Loka 20251h 10min