Media and the Machine

My guest today is Noah Levin. After years of suffering from what he calls quote “founder envy,” he finally took the plunge to become a founder. In less than 5 months of using AI, he quit his full-time job and launched his business, Serious People.  He's already worked with 10 clients, and his business is less than a year old He says AI finally gave him the confidence to take the leap. He’s not a p...

In this episode, I profile Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind. Demis's mission is to build AGI—artificial general intelligence—and use it to solve science's biggest mysteries. I do so through what I believe is the most comprehensive biography of him: The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby. Mallaby spent 30 hours interviewing Demis and had more than 100 conversations with the people who...

My guest today is David Perlman. David has a PhD in Neuroscience and Meditation, and he’s an expert in misinformation. He’s got an unusual background observing leaders up close — from the Dalai Lama to Jack Dorsey.  And it was at Twitter, where David worked as a User Research Data Scientist, that he was shown the door after a controversial interview with Vice Media. He shares that story. His work...

Marty Pesis is co-founder and CEO of Troveo . Troveo helps content and data owners license their video, audio, and text to top AI models like OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic – and AI Unicorn startups too.. Marty says he may have the largest AI data corpus in the space (it includes 8M hours of video, 4m+ hours of audio, and billions of words of text). We open the interview with Marty’s very first...

Chris Keevil is co-founder and CEO of Versos AI , a company helping AI labs find the needles-in-the-haystack data they need to train their models. Chris works at the center of a new market. It’s where the frontier AI models are paying for video most of us would never think to value: 10,000 hours of hands tying shoes, ice melting,, micro-dramas from Asia and a coffee shop in China. AI wants it all....

Mustafa Suleyman helped build DeepMind, sold to Google, licensed to Microsoft for a billion—and now he’s warning us what’s coming next. This is based on the The Coming Wave biography (co-authored with Michael Bhaskar) and is a global crash course in AI, biology, and the power games driving the next era of human history. 10-Second Takeaways China’s AI Surge : AlphaGo’s victory was China’s “Sputnik...

Nic Baird is the co-founder and CEO of Koah Labs -- they are building what Tom Tunguz of Theory Ventures calls the AdSense for AI. Nic breaks down: • AI token economics in plain English: why serving an AI user can cost 100 times more than serving a web user. That’s why he thinks most AI apps cannot reach global scale on subscriptions alone. • Ads are coming to AI. The question is whether they’ll b...

Andy Beach was the CTO of AI for Microsoft in their Media and Entertainment business. He now consults AI startups and is a VC investor at Hallstone, a firm investing in media and tech. Most people think AI'll be won by the biggest models—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini. Andy says that’s wrong. The real winners will be the apps built on top. We talk about what that looks like. Think YouTube and Ti...

Chris Hutchins is host of the All the Hacks podcast — heard by over a million listeners, with 10 million+ downloads. AI describes Chris as “Tim Ferriss meets Mr. Beast with a spreadsheet.” He’s also founded and sold two companies — one to Google and the other to Wealthfront. In our conversation, Chris explains why AI could replace a huge number of podcasts — and which ones actually survive and why...

Thad McIlroy is author of The AI Revolution in Book Publishing – and the most strategic thinker I know on where AI and books collide.  He knows the big publishers and also tracks more than 1,800 startups in the space (including 350 in AI). In this conversation Thad breaks down the“original sin” of AI in publishing—and why it’s driving so much fear and anger across the industry. We talk about why p...

Jennifer Elliott is a veteran engineer in data centers whose customers have included Google, Meta, AWS, and Netflix. She has a wild story to share.  What makes Jennifer so fascinating is the duality.  She is highly technical, lives in Silicon Valley, and has invested in multiple AI startups  -- she's bullish on AI.  But she’s also actively preparing ​​for a future where AI becomes — in her words —...

JC Cangilla was Head of Entertainment Deals at Meta, where he led a 20-person team spending $1 billion+ per year acquiring content to power experiences across Facebook, Instagram, and Oculus He worked with everyone from major studios to influencers to bring content like The Walking Dead , Red Table Talk , and the Simone Biles documentary onto Meta’s platforms. Before Meta, he co-founded a digital...

Mark Riley was the Head of Innovation at Dow Jones and is now Founder and CEO of Mathison.ai. At News Corp, Mark met with more than 110 AI companies—before ChatGPT even launched—and now coaches publishing CEOs on how to grow with AI. If you run or build a media business, this one is about how to survive—and grow—in the AI world. In this chat, we get into: • Whether publishers should woo or sue AI...

Jimmy Hutcheson is the CEO of SPIN and a private equity investor hunting for the next great media brand. If you like music and tech, you’re going to love this one. Jimmy bought SPIN from Billboard about six years ago — and since then the company has grown revenue 17X Its TikTok following rivals Rolling Stone. Today SPIN is far more than a magazine. –  It runs major events, licensing deals, brand p...

Tommy Petrov is the Ukranian-born Co-Founder and CEO of CopySight AI . Tommy and his team have built a  Similarity Score — think of it as a FICO score for copyright risk in the age of AI. Whether you’re Disney protecting Star Wars or a creator making something new, CopySight helps measure how close AI-generated content is to existing intellectual property. For example, when someone uses Midjourney...

Doug Leeds is the co-founder and CEO of RSL and previously creaed and led IAC Publishing (now People Inc.).   He’s tackling the question every media CEO and content owner is asking right now: how do you get paid by AI companies — including even if you’re small? He’s already working with Reddit, People Inc., USA Today and others — a collective representing nearly half the content AI models train on...

Anthony Shore is a linguist who's helped bring more than 270 names to market, such as Accenture, Yum Brands, JetBlue, Tonal, Fitbit Sense and Verizon. I get Anthony's take on: • Which AI answer engine has the best name (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Meta AI). • The wild, laugh-out-loud emails between Elon Musk , Greg Brockman , and Ilya Sutskever as they debated what to call OpenAI . •...

CJ Chilvers is author of Principles for Newsletters , A Lesser Photographer , and The Van Halen Encyclopedia . He ghostwrites about AI for major tech companies. And he's been writing newsletters since he was 12.  His day job is Content Strategist at an agency, giving him a front-row seat to how B2B marketing is really using this technology. CJ believes small creators have a two-to-three-year head...

Ty Ahmad-Taylor is a founder & two-time CEO with a career at the center of media & tech. He started at The NY Times , built and sold his startup FanFeedr to Samsung, and later became a product VP at Meta and Snap.  Today, he’s on the boards of GoPro and SFMOMA—and working hands-on with AI. One of the wildest parts of this conversation: Ty rebuilt a startup that once took four and a half ye...

Clint Stinchcomb is CEO of CuriosityStream (NASDAQ). 2 years ago, it was “the Netflix of Documentaries.” Now it's on track to earn more money from AI content licensing than from subscriptions. Clint and I talk about how AI licensing really works for content-driven/media companies.  We use CuriosityStream as a real example, not a theory.  We focus on deals, content, and money. Key Takeaways: • How...

I’m Rob Kelly, and this is Media and the Machine, a show about the biggest technology shift of our lifetime and how to profit from it (together).   Each week I talk with founders and CEOs closest to AI and Content, the people figuring this out in real time. I’m also building an AI content business myself and sharing what I learn along the way. I'm a 3-time founder and CEO and earlier in my career...