Media and the Machine

Rob Kelly
  • 4.9 (8)
  • Technology

AI is the biggest technology shift of our lifetime. This show is about how to profit from it together. Each week I talk with the founders and CEOs closest to AI and Content, the ones figuring this out in real time. I’m also building an AI content business myself and share the lessons I learn along the way. WHAT WE COVER The Titans -- How companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI are moving, and why their decisions matter. The Incumbents -- How content giants like Disney, News Corp, Universal Music Group, and Reddit are responding to AI, and what it means for creators and publishers. The Playbook -- Real lessons on AI business models, content strategy, creativity, IP licensing, distribution, and getting paid. Family & Our Future -- Every episode ends with me asking my guest what AI means for our jobs, our families, and the next generation. ABOUT YOUR HOST Rob Kelly has interviewed Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, helped pioneer early web content licensing, and built multiple companies with more than $100 million in total sales. His work has appeared on CNBC, CNN, TIME, and Entrepreneur. Thanks! -Rob

  1. 4d ago

    Ex-Agency Pro Warns: 90% Marketing Cuts, Then an OpenAI Bailout

    My guest today is CJ Chilvers, who went independent after parting ways with Studio North, a marketing agency. CJ’s  my first return guest. He was on episode #3, “The AI Content Strategist Big Tech Calls First” where he warned that the AI hype would eventually collide with the need to show real results. Now, he says some Fortune 50 companies are cutting 90% of their marketing teams—while expecting the people left behind to produce 10 times more with AI. In some cases, “the team trained the AI before they left.” CJ also explains why moving marketing under sales is the wrong move, and why:  “The future is gonna belong to the independents.” His biggest prediction is that OpenAI and Anthropic have become too big to fail. He argues that ads and subscriptions cannot cover the trillions promised for data centers—and that a government bailout is inevitable, in part to protect insider investors.  He says the public will pay the bill. CJ warns that this could lead to hyperinflation hitting a population already facing much higher unemployment. He saw similar warning signs before the 2008 financial crisis, when he bundled mortgages for HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks. But he is not an AI doomer. We end with where AI is already working—like radiology, where it detect tumors that human doctors may miss. Please enjoy my conversation with CJ Chilvers. Thx!Rob Kelly

    Ex-Agency Pro Warns: 90% Marketing Cuts, Then an OpenAI Bailout

  2. Jul 7

    How AI Finally Made Him a Founder

    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 programmer. He describes himself as deeply risk averse. And he’s doing it all as a husband and father to a two-year-old. Even more surprising, he says anyone can do it, and he shares the handful of simple steps he took to make it happen. Make sure to listen for these core concepts: • How the math of AI changes everything about starting a new business. • How he used AI as his career coach to get him going. • His $1 Challenge for finding his first customer—and solving the problem of convincing his wife. • The quote “steel thread” milestone he learned at Amazon. • Why you should “dogfood” everything.• And how he used a combination of a Beastie Boys video and a line from Succession to create his brand. Most importantly, you can hear the joy in his voice. Noah is having more fun than at any other point in his career. I wish this for all humans. It’s a feel-good story for AI—and for anyone who finally wants to take the plunge and become a founder. Special thanks to Marty Pesis for introducing Noah to me—you might remember Marty from Episode 17, "This AI Company Has Paid Out 20 mi. dollars to Content Owners" Now please enjoy my conversation with Noah Levin. Thx, Rob Kelly

    How AI Finally Made Him a Founder

  3. Jun 26

    Demis Hassabis: How the Google DeepMind CEO Thinks

    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 know him best. In this episode you'll learn:  How a chess prodigy became one of the architects of modern AI.  The inside stories involving Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel, Mustafa Suleyman, and others who shaped the AI race.  Why Hassabis walked away from money multiple times to pursue science instead.  How DeepMind went from mastering Atari games to creating AlphaGo and AlphaFold.  Why Hassabis is motivated differently than Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei.  How Google produced many of the breakthroughs behind today's AI revolution—yet still lost the consumer AI race to ChatGPT.This episode is part of a series profiling the AI titans. Enjoy!Rob Kelly

    Demis Hassabis: How the Google DeepMind CEO Thinks

  4. Jun 6

    Buddhism, Bots & Billionaires

    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 has appeared in nine journals including The American Journal of Psychiatry, NeuroImage, and The Cyber Defense Review. We talk about David’s contrarian view on Anthropic’s closely guarded Mythos model, what AI could mean for propaganda, misinformation, and future elections. And why he thinks many people are wrong about climate change. Special thanks to Jennifer Elliott for connecting me with David — you might remember Jennifer from Episode 10 (The Data Center Expert's Ride or Die Plan for When AI Turns. Enjoy! Thx, Rob Kelly

    Buddhism, Bots & Billionaires

  5. May 26

    This AI Company Has Paid Out $20M to Content Owners

    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 AI data deal, a request so strange I had to stop him and make sure I was hearing it right. We get into how Tesla cars are really training machines on wheels. We talk about the future of data collection. Picture factories with workers wearing GoPros, wrist cameras, shoulder cameras, sensor gloves, and narrating what they’re doing so robots can learn. We cover the pricing of of data including what type of content AI Modfels will pay $1,000 per hour for. And the one library of content he’d want if he could have any. He also shares what  learned from Troveo investor Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, and MrBeast, who bought Marty’s last company. And we end, as usual, on AI and families, including Marty’s view that because of AI, college is not even on his radar right now for his young kids. Thx!-Rob

    This AI Company Has Paid Out $20M to Content Owners

  6. May 17

    AI Wants Needles in a Haystack. He Finds Them

    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.  We talk about why some AI training clips sell for 30 cents a minute while others go for a dollar per second… and why some AI companies are now doing “whole corpus deals” to buy entire content libraries in bulk. Chris has a birds-eye view of this world being a partner to content companies such as CuriosityStream (which was profiled in Episode #1 "The CEO Quietly Licensing 2M+ Hours of Content to AI Giants" Chris also explains why the demand for training data will “never run dry” as AI moves from understanding words to understanding the physical world — motion, gravity, culture, behavior, and eventually even industrial systems like oil refineries and hydroelectric dams. We also discuss some goldmines of AI data such as security camera archives, niche media libraries, and even the videos sitting on your phone. And finally, Chris shares why he’s a cautious optimist on AI, despite believing it could massively reshape jobs, business, and society. Please enjoy my conversation with Chris Keevil. Thx!-Rob

    AI Wants Needles in a Haystack. He Finds Them

  7. May 9

    Mustafa Suleyman: How the Microsoft AI CEO Thinks

    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 moment,” triggering a full-blown national push to lead in AI.Job Disruption Is Coming: AI won’t just help us—it will replace many white-collar jobs faster than past tech waves.AI + Biology = Superwave: Two powerful tech trends—AI and synthetic biology—are colliding, accelerating change even faster.Regulation Is Critical: We need safety rules for AI like we have for aviation and laser weapons—before it’s too late.Tech = Power: Nations treat innovation as a race. Whoever leads in AI and bio will shape the global balance of power.This is part of my ongoing series profiling the leaders shaping the AI era through their biographies, decisions, and ideas. This episode is part of a series profiling the AI titans. Thx! -Rob

    Mustafa Suleyman: How the Microsoft AI CEO Thinks

  8. May 2

    Sailing Champ Builds “the AdSense for AI”

    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 be useful—or terrible? Nic says the best AI ads won’t look like pop-ups, banners, or pre-rolls. They’ll be part of the answer. • Where people will first see these ads: ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and the agents and apps outside the frontier models. • Whether Claude can really stay ad-free forever? • We get into privacy too. How do you use AI in ads without reading people’s most personal chats and creeping them out. And Koah's fundraising story is wild. Tom Tunguz reached out before Koah even had a product And after passing on 150 adtech companies he made his Series A decision in 24 hours. Nic is also an 8-time national sailing champion and his dad won the America’s Cup and is in the sailing hall of fame. We talk about Nic's scariest sailing moments and how he got to meet Larry Ellison on the world’s biggest private superyacht. Special thanks to Tom at Theory Ventures for putting Koah on my radar. Please enjoy my conversation with Nic Baird. Thx!Rob

    Sailing Champ Builds “the AdSense for AI”
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About

AI is the biggest technology shift of our lifetime. This show is about how to profit from it together. Each week I talk with the founders and CEOs closest to AI and Content, the ones figuring this out in real time. I’m also building an AI content business myself and share the lessons I learn along the way. WHAT WE COVER The Titans -- How companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI are moving, and why their decisions matter. The Incumbents -- How content giants like Disney, News Corp, Universal Music Group, and Reddit are responding to AI, and what it means for creators and publishers. The Playbook -- Real lessons on AI business models, content strategy, creativity, IP licensing, distribution, and getting paid. Family & Our Future -- Every episode ends with me asking my guest what AI means for our jobs, our families, and the next generation. ABOUT YOUR HOST Rob Kelly has interviewed Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, helped pioneer early web content licensing, and built multiple companies with more than $100 million in total sales. His work has appeared on CNBC, CNN, TIME, and Entrepreneur. Thanks! -Rob

Information

  • Creator
    Rob Kelly
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    22
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Media and the Machine
  • Show Website
    Media and the Machine

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