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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, 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, IP licensing, distribution, and getting paid.
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.
Beyond business, every episode explores what AI means for jobs, creativity, families, and the next generation.
If you want clear thinking based on real experience in AI and media, Media and the Machine is your guide
Thanks! -Rob
I'm Rob Kelly, and this is Media in the Machine, a show about the biggest technology shift of our lifetime and how to profit from it. Each week, 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 lessons of what I learned along the way. You know, life's funny. I began my career lucky enough to interview leaders like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Rob Kelly:Then I went on to be a three time founder and CEO, driving a 100,000,000 plus in revenue and some failures too. And now I'm back at the table, interviewing this new world's current and future leaders. This isn't only a business story, it's a human one. So every episode ends with me asking my guest what AI means for our jobs, our families, and the next generation. We'll figure this out together from the inside.
Rob Kelly:Welcome to Media in the Machine. My guest today is CJ Chilvers. He's been writing a newsletter since he was 12 years old, and he still had it today. CJ is a hidden gem, one of the clearest long term thinkers I've met on content, tech, and strategy. He's the author of three books, Principles for Newsletters, A Lesser Photographer, and The Van Halen Encyclopedia.
Rob Kelly:By day, he's senior content strategist at Studio North, where his job is to get the most ROI for every word. For the past three years, since Chatuchiquette launched, he's been ghostwriting about AI for major tech companies with a front row seat in b to b marketing. He shares how small creators have a two to three year head start on big companies, how it's 1995 all over again for curation, and why unsexy things like email, logins, links, and tags matter more than ever in this AI world. He explains why OpenAI and other LLMs are headed toward ads, and how yet he still sees a future where AI is completely ad free. We also get into how he'd start a content business today, from being okay with his work getting scraped, to how he'd get discovered, to the business model he'd use.
Rob Kelly:Please enjoy my conversation with CJ Chilvers. You've got this great essay on the principles of creating with AI, And I just wanted to ask you to kind of elaborate on a few of them. Number 12 in that essay is AI does nothing to solve the hardest part of creating for yourself or for clients. Having the courage to express an opinion in public. Voice is not opinion.
Rob Kelly:What do you mean by that?
CJ Chilvers:It's kind of an expansion of the IBM principle. It goes back, know, to the sixties where a machine can never make a decision here at this company because then there's nobody standing behind that decision. There's nobody to punish if it goes wrong. There's nobody to applaud if it goes right. There's no incentive to do the thing that works best for the company really, if there's no punishment or awarding.
CJ Chilvers:So it's kind of the same idea. AI can have an opinion, of course, But is it gonna stand behind that opinion? Is it gonna have an unpopular opinion? Well, no, it's trying to sell more of itself. So it's not likely to be honest with you.
Rob Kelly:What do you mean by that? It's trying to sell more of itself.
CJ Chilvers:I mean, that's its purpose is to sell itself right now. They're not gonna do anything that's gonna decrease the sellability. You know, if you're OpenAI, everything you do is trying to prop up the value of what you have, whether it's real or not. Any guardrails you throw in are not gonna impede that. That's the only thing I worry about too because everybody's talking about guardrails and ethics and all that kind of thing, responsible AI.
CJ Chilvers:What happens when that conflicts with business interests? Well, we've seen what happens. You know, the guardrails suddenly aren't there anymore. So one of these days that's gonna be the loophole that whatever slips out is gonna slip out.
Rob Kelly:What do you mean? What's an example?
CJ Chilvers:An example like, I'm trying to think of the way a hacker would approach a new technology. You know, where are the vulnerabilities here? The vulnerabilities is that there's an incentives. There's always an incentive and that's always gonna be the vulnerability. So the incentive for an AI company is to propagate itself.
CJ Chilvers:It's like a mini evolution type of thing. So what happens when you throw a wrench into that? It gets real interesting. And I think that's where there could be more and more vulnerabilities as we go because the hype isn't getting any greater than it is now. This is the height of the hype.
CJ Chilvers:So how do you get money after that? You have to demonstrate something. Right? What happens if you can't demonstrate it? I have a sneaking suspicion it's just gonna be a bunch of lies until or unless you can demonstrate the value.
Rob Kelly:Which things do you think might be lies?
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. That's that's a good question. Well, since I'm so close to it all the time, it's hard for me to kinda give an overview. I can say on a micro level, it's really bad at writing. I mean, if you've been doing it for twenty five years and you look at it, there's a company with a dedicated AI for creating marketing emails.
Rob Kelly:Mhmm.
CJ Chilvers:I took one look at what it produced and it was like, no. No. The first few words are completely wrong and wouldn't do well. And you could give it all the guiding, but really it's like doing thousands and thousands of a b tests. You get to know an audience.
CJ Chilvers:You know, they have a personality. You really can't convey that or at least it doesn't seem like you can practically. Obviously you can do prompting till the end of time and try to get, you know, an approximation. But if the dedicated company to this is giving me slop, then I'm saying it's not up to that task yet. I've seen all kinds of things make it out onto the web from huge companies where I'm just like, no, no, this is so bad.
CJ Chilvers:And they don't They don't care. They're willing to take a hit
Rob Kelly:in the revenue for the cost savings. You've told me that you see small companies having a two, three year head start over big companies due to AI?
CJ Chilvers:Oh, yeah.
Rob Kelly:Can you just share what your thinking is about that?
CJ Chilvers:Smaller companies, the reason I say they have a really big advantage is because they care about the little differences. Whereas the bigger companies, they're not gonna turn on a dime. Everybody's just worried about the next quarter's numbers. That's it. You have a small company you care about ten years from now.
CJ Chilvers:You care about when you're gonna leave it to your children. So everything matters. All the little things matter. And you have a far greater outlook. But yeah, anybody I work with at a big company, no, it's just next quarter.
CJ Chilvers:That's all I care about. And so they'll make lots of dumb decisions, especially for cost cutting. If you're dealing with a small company as a marketer, you're dealing with the CEO or the COO or CMO. If you're dealing with a large company, you're dealing with someone who's a middle manager and is probably not gonna be there in a couple of years. They only want their next promotion or their next small raise or title bump so they can go somewhere else.
CJ Chilvers:It's a totally different incentive structure. So yeah, the person just looking for a small promotion, they're not gonna be looking out for the ten year outlook on what it what it is they're doing. They just want the thing out there.
Rob Kelly:Do you think larger companies are more excited about AI for cost savings and replacing people costs versus growth and new creation?
CJ Chilvers:I know it for sure. Right now, everybody's revenue is dropping. If you're not one of like five companies, you're seeing people cut back on things. So it's the only way. It's the only way to have a margin is to cut your costs.
CJ Chilvers:So most executives are getting ahead of it right now. The last thing that they want in the world is to report quarterly margins that are worse because that means that they're not gonna be the CEO of this next company that they really like. That's just the way most of them think. So whatever it takes to get past the next year or two is what they're gonna do. And it doesn't really matter.
CJ Chilvers:This is one of the reasons I really liked Apple for a long time is because Steve Jobs with all of his faults and he had many, I would not have wanted to work for him. But he had a hundred year outlook for his company and he did not care if a decision he made this quarter cannibalized next quarter's profits. He didn't care at all. He was looking at a hundred years. That's the only time I think in my life I've seen that at a big company.
CJ Chilvers:Most of the time, it's the smaller companies where every CEO, every president is a Steve Jobs looking out at least ten years.
Rob Kelly:Is it fair to say that small companies right now are using AI more for opportunity growth, revenue growth, creating new things, innovating, and the larger companies are using it to cut costs, buy time because they are scared?
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. I see it firsthand. I talked to a CEO two years ago. It was two years ago. And I asked him what he was using it for.
CJ Chilvers:And he said, oh, I replaced my marketing department. I let him go immediately. I was like, really? You're that confident in this? And he's like, well, you know, it's good enough.
CJ Chilvers:So that's kind of the feeling I'm getting all over. They're gonna have to hire people back. A lot of them are, but they would rather do that. They would rather be wrong with a handful of people and get rid of entire departments. It's the only way they can make their quarter look good right now, unfortunately.
Rob Kelly:So if you take the small business mentality or the long game, small business or a Steve Jobs like big business, How would you use AI for growth and creation and how would you think about that?
CJ Chilvers:Well, I would say what it's really excelling at now from a strategy point of view is giving you more options. So, you know, we all get stuck in our rabbit holes with strategy and we forget there's a whole world out there of things that we don't deal with every day. It's one good thing about AI is it it will say, hey, have you thought about this? And it can do that 50 times over for every idea you have. It can be a little addictive and maybe it's unhealthy to have so many options presented to you.
CJ Chilvers:But I would suggest doing it after you said, hey, I think this is the way to go. Give me 50 reasons why it might not be. And if I can't overcome one of them, then I'll incorporate it. So it's really just like a it's like a hive mind check on your ideas. That's what is best at at like a a strategy level.
CJ Chilvers:I still wouldn't use it to write.
Rob Kelly:Number 19 is it was content strategy. It's now content strategy. Even the greatest AI wielding creatives have terrible implementations. Again, editing will be a more desired skill. Strategy is the competitive advantage.
Rob Kelly:What do you mean by content strategy?
CJ Chilvers:Well, that's my title at the agency I work at right now. So I'm senior content strategist. So my job is to get the most ROI for every word that's on whatever it is you're doing. So if I know that one word is gonna get you 5% more of whatever it is you're looking for than another word, that's my job. So I do that, like I said, with landing pages, emails, whatever it takes.
CJ Chilvers:But in the end, it's all just suggestions. If you don't have a strategy and you just want the content to have the content, well then, you know, it's it's not gonna work for you. And the other hand AI has all the strategy, it's trying for the content and it can't make the two match.
Rob Kelly:What do you mean it has all the strategy? How does AI have all the strategy?
CJ Chilvers:It knows. Because one of the first things and easiest things it can get to is research. And when it's hard for you and I to get through a lot of the research and actually understand what it all means, it's trivially easy for an AI to do the same thing. It knows what I just said. It knows that humanizing brings in more money.
CJ Chilvers:It knows that this word works better than that word. It knows it because this has been published all over the place. It's not news. It's just the result of lots and lots of testing. So it knows it better than I do even, but it's not gonna spit that out necessarily because people don't prefer that.
CJ Chilvers:People prefer what they prefer. They don't always prefer the truth, especially business people. Like I said before, the big business people, they want something that's very pretty, very shiny. You know, they want a new logo. They want new branding thinking that that's a strategy.
CJ Chilvers:Thinking that this is how I project myself to the world. Not knowing that your brand is what other people say about you. Branding is what you want other people to say about you. But the branding itself doesn't do much towards that goal. It's just how you interact with the people.
CJ Chilvers:So, yeah, it always surprises me how much a business will spend on branding thinking it's doing what I'm saying here, but it's not a strategy. The strategy is what the AI knows but can't implement all the way.
Rob Kelly:Now if your job is content strategist, are there days where it's AI content strategist? In other words, you're having to focus specifically on AI?
CJ Chilvers:For the last two and a half years, I've been pretty much exclusively writing about AI for the big tech companies. I'm under NDA so I can't say which ones, but that's it. That's what I've been writing about. So I dive in the weeds with AI as part of the business model of the agency I'm at is that we help you build your AI. In addition to guiding it with everything that we know internally from decades of testing.
Rob Kelly:So number eight in the essays, who did you turn to for trusted info on AI, not AI?
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. I mean, if you wanna know right now where does AI stand? How close is it to being superhuman? All this stuff. Don't ask AI.
CJ Chilvers:It'd be the last thing you'd wanna do.
Rob Kelly:Right. I'm interviewing you. I'm not interviewing an AI right now.
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. And I'm not close enough to this to be among the experts and the experts usually have a financial motive for telling you how close it is to being superhuman and that kind of stuff. I'm just here to be like the logical putting together of facts into something, you know, a web. So I look at this and it's just like, well, I know there's no finish line. You can't define for me probably and I can't define with like concrete analysis what consciousness or intelligence really is.
CJ Chilvers:You know, evolutionary biologists think that the core of human consciousness is the thing that got us through when so many others died out. And we're still extremely young species, but they think it's predictability. They think that's also why we dream. We're making predictions. That's all these things are doing.
CJ Chilvers:That's all AI is doing. It's a prediction machine. And Genentech AI is predictions coupled with actions or actions with predictions thrown in. So it's doing what we're doing. It's not doing particularly well, but there's no finish line.
CJ Chilvers:There's no point at which it crosses where you can say, now it's better than us. Because if it crosses that line, we wouldn't know what that looks like because it's more intelligent than us. And that's at the AGI level. So everybody always worries, well, what if it becomes superhuman? Well, you're not gonna know it.
CJ Chilvers:And it's probably not gonna tell you. And by the time you figure anything out that's wrong, it's ten thousand years ahead of you. The fact that there's no finish line is the real tough part about this. I think if you do like a microscopic examination, you could say that a calculator is more intelligent than you at math. It just yeah.
CJ Chilvers:It probably is. Does that mean that it's a greater intelligence? I don't know. It's a mathematician maybe.
Rob Kelly:Number 14 in the essay is in b two b AI can open conversations and create interest. Closing still happens between humans, sometimes entire committees. The companies who are fastest in getting a human involved with the customer are likely to be more competitive. Use AI to quickly get that human in front of that client. What do you mean by that, especially that last part?
CJ Chilvers:That is kind of a a mantra in b to b. I hear it all the time from salespeople. What do you want from this landing page? What do you want from this email? So like, just I wanna reply.
CJ Chilvers:I wanna know that customer's out there. They're interested so I can give them a call or I can go by and visit. Because at the b to b level, you could be selling things that are millions for every contract, tens of millions. So that requires a lot of human contact and a lot of trust. And so the quicker you can get those two people together, that's what they want.
CJ Chilvers:So that's what I try to do. And I will tell them in five second increments on the page, like, okay, this person somehow got here. We hope it's through us, but they somehow got to your page. How do you keep them for that first five seconds? Keeping them for the next five seconds is an entirely different game with a different set of strategies.
CJ Chilvers:And almost nobody makes it to below the fold on a page. You know, there's no fold, but below the fold, almost nobody does. So whenever I get a client who is spending weeks on paragraph four or five on a landing page or in an email even. It happens all the time. Like paragraph 10 in an email, I'll be like, there's nobody down there.
CJ Chilvers:Like, you know, I can measure it. There's nobody down there. And we can see it in studies too. There's nobody down there. Stop spending weeks on that.
CJ Chilvers:Okay? If you wanna spend weeks on something, spend it up top. Figure out how you can get an action from them quickly so you know they're even there anymore. Yeah. And then it can go as far.
CJ Chilvers:It depends on how much the person actually cares about their business. Because if you're dealing with the CEO, you can just tell them straight up be like, hey, 50% more people will click through this if you did it in plain text. I'm sorry for your designers, you know, all that kind of thing. But for this particular audience, I will bet money that you're gonna have a huge amount clicks through this if you just do it in plain text and make it look like an actual email from you. You know, I've had them try it once and it was true.
CJ Chilvers:It was 50% more. It feels like it's coming from a real person, especially if you change that from to a real person. And then, yeah, you're off to the races. There's nothing that beats that. But the prestige kind of a fancy design, sometimes again, you're dealing with the middle manager or something and they're like, hey, I'm doing this because I wanna impress my boss, not because I want more customers.
CJ Chilvers:So make it look really good. Make it look really impressive. And so it's an entirely different incentive.
Rob Kelly:You mentioned that we're sort of in a world now where everything's free. Is that, I mean, is that mapping to the AI world where suddenly, you know, just about everything is free? I see you nodding. If that's the case, how do you now look at is it that you need to embrace the front end of your content and let it be free and then have a back end that AI cannot serve?
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. It's always gonna be a race.
Rob Kelly:That only only you can serve? Yeah. Like, how do you think about that?
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. It's been the game. Everybody's you know, I don't know for how long people have been saying that. You know, if you're gonna be a non fiction writer of any kind, it's always the back end. It's always your consulting, speaking.
CJ Chilvers:That's the kind of thing that makes money. For a long time it was courses. I was definitely tempted by courses because it was a product. For me, products are everything because they scale. Whereas coaching services speaking, doesn't scale.
CJ Chilvers:So the best strategy is products, but no, I just, it doesn't work for my brain not to do it in a like a packageable shippable book even though I know it's way better to do it. Yeah, that is the way. It's always been the way, of course, but it's really the way now. And I don't know how long it's gonna last. So if you haven't made a name for yourself yet, just get out there.
CJ Chilvers:Start making a name for yourself because pretty soon nobody's gonna be able to tell the difference between you and some avatar.
Rob Kelly:Well, there's one idea that AI is the way to make a name for yourself because it will ingest anything out there. So if you do focus, it's gonna give you a chance. Right? It's gonna give you some exposure. And I know in the beginning, there weren't really links and citations.
Rob Kelly:But, you know, most of the models now are kind of looking more like a search engine in that way. They are, you know, at some point citing the source.
CJ Chilvers:Even more like a search engine.
Rob Kelly:Yeah. Is that the way to get discovered now if you're creating new content? Might that even replace some of social media, which I know you've stayed off of? So is AI the type of thing that that a CJ would use and would embrace as a platform versus social media?
CJ Chilvers:What I tell people is, you know, whatever is comfortable for you making content, just get out there and make it and don't worry about it. Because AI is gonna do something different tomorrow. Just like Google, you're never gonna know. So don't play that game. Play your own game.
CJ Chilvers:We're not looking for lots and lots of followers. You're looking for the handful of people that can really make a difference. And the only way you're gonna do that is by playing your own game. If I threw keywords into what I did, it would first it would kill me, but it would probably drive off like half of my audience too. So yeah, it's not even a thing that enters my mind.
CJ Chilvers:Just like, people have a hard enough time creating the content in the first place. If you find something that works for that, then do it. Do it all day long. Don't worry about Yeah. Because how long is it gonna be until my son's generation grows up and they've had this all along and it's gotten so good that they just trust it.
CJ Chilvers:And so why would it still be citing things? It doesn't serve them to keep citing things like this. Or they cite things but they cite things to companies that pay them to cite things. So the business is gonna keep shifting and it doesn't pay to play their game.
Rob Kelly:In your view, AIs, meaning like the LLMs we know about today, ChatGPT and and the bunch, sounds like you see them becoming and looking more and more like a Google, not in terms of interface, but by business model having incentives. Is it just a matter of time before they serve advertising in your view? Is that a no brainer?
CJ Chilvers:There's an exception to that. So I see a world where eventually something like I'm not gonna say it's Siri, but something like it, let's say, hopefully it's Siri. But something gets good enough, right, where you don't have to go browse the web anymore. You don't leave your device or your wearable or whatever it is. You don't have to make that trip out where ads might get at you.
CJ Chilvers:In that case, that's a company selling hardware and they make the vast majority of their money off hardware and services. So they really don't need to dumb down the results with ads. So they'll win if they choose that route. That's ten years into the future probably. But that's such a huge advantage when you're the one selling the hardware and everything else is just back up for it.
Rob Kelly:Isn't that why Apple's got the biggest opportunity here? Yeah. They are set up to make money on the back end through hardware and they could do it with no advertising business. Even the ethos of Apple seems very anti ads. Right?
Rob Kelly:It's hard to imagine them doing anything like that. Yet they don't own an LLM. It's really interesting where they don't own a name brand LLM.
CJ Chilvers:And all their people are being poached right now by Meta.
Rob Kelly:Yeah. But for sure, it sounds like you believe ChatGPT, it's a matter of time before they have some form of advertising.
CJ Chilvers:At their evaluation, I don't see how they couldn't. At the rate is putting people out of work, at some point, subscriptions are gonna take a big dip. And then they're gonna try to figure out a way to be worth what they're worth within a different model and it has to be ads. I I don't see any other way.
Rob Kelly:Couldn't they just serve businesses with subscriptions, not just consumers, you know, paying $20 a month? Oh, they do.
CJ Chilvers:Yeah.
Rob Kelly:So in that way you see them becoming more like a Google, the opportunity, the value of selling ads is so enormous and that's why Meta does it and that's why Google does it.
CJ Chilvers:Because LLMs right now, every company has their own private LLM and they've gotten experience at it now. So why would you pay in the future for it?
Rob Kelly:And at that point, the incentives start to maybe go off the guardrails as you mentioned earlier.
CJ Chilvers:Think about what Google looked like before OpenAI came along. You'd have to scroll down the page to get to a real result at all and you still do in a lot of cases. It's half ads and then slop and so right now people are preferring to use something like OpenAI because it has a citation. You can still get to where you need to go. But in the most cases, are just looking for a simple answer to a question.
CJ Chilvers:Mhmm. The only problem I have with that right now is that if you ask a question about Van Halen, it scraped that from me. I know. I know it did. But also it's wrong.
CJ Chilvers:So it's wrong.
Rob Kelly:How does it get it wrong if it scraped it from you? Like how the mechanics of it, do you know?
CJ Chilvers:I have an idea. What's your idea? It didn't just scrape from me and it probably didn't prioritize canon books over books from less reputable people or forums that go way back and nobody's keeping an eye on them. Yeah. So it can easily come up with the wrong answer.
CJ Chilvers:It's just not weighting things properly.
Rob Kelly:Let's go to number 15. You got with so much new content about to be added to everyone's information diet, trusted editors will rule for the foreseeable future. Still believe that?
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. And right now that's going against the tide. I know that. It's become very unpopular right now to say that. And that's because anyone who's selling AI right now, the first thing they're selling is curation.
CJ Chilvers:It's like, that's the number one thing it can do. Right? That's the greatest thing that it can do. It's horrible at it. I mean, at some point I'm really like seriously considering starting a series of newsletters for each of my books.
CJ Chilvers:And it's just gonna be curating the information that I get every day coming in that either supports the principles or adds new principles, something along that line that I know just from studying it for so long is a big deal. Right now AI doesn't know this. It has no context for this. It's it's showed it over and over again. It just reports things that happen and it summarizes them.
CJ Chilvers:It'll get better and better at that. But at some point, I want a real human to say, here's what happened today that's a big deal and here's why it's a big deal. It's something that AI can't get at yet. I know this is a big deal because back in 1984, I saw this show on TV that was never recorded by anybody. And this guy said this about that.
CJ Chilvers:And so I have this context about this whole thing and AI doesn't have it yet because it doesn't First of all, it doesn't hyper focus like I do on stupid things. But also it doesn't know how to wait it. And it's probably never been asked that question and on and on and on. So it's got a lot of learning left to do. The thing is like, why would it waste its time learning that stuff as opposed to the stuff that can make it more money?
CJ Chilvers:So there's an incentive there too. I'm really seriously thinking about doing this. It's like getting me excited.
Rob Kelly:So you would take the Van Helens encyclopedia, your photography book, your book on email newsletters. You would take those and launch a new newsletter for each?
CJ Chilvers:And others. I ghostwrite a lot of stuff, so I've gotten close to other subjects too, enough to know whenever a new story pops up, I'll just be like, well, that's crap. It didn't happen like that. Or, you know, I could add context to it in some way. I mean, just imagine you're a you're a Van Halen fan right now.
CJ Chilvers:Mhmm. You have access to countless sites, a dozen podcasts. There's always something coming out on YouTube that's AI fake. All these things are popping up at all times, but you're a real fan of this band and you wanna know what's really going on and what really matters. I come out with the newsletter once a week.
CJ Chilvers:You know, here's five things that actually happened. I know they happened. I know the people involved. I've met them and this matters and here's why it matters. And that's three sentences right there.
CJ Chilvers:And you're all caught up in a couple of minutes as opposed to waiting through all this stuff every week trying to figure out if it's real or not.
Rob Kelly:Would you also call BS on the items that are BS?
CJ Chilvers:Oh, yeah. I do that already.
Rob Kelly:So is the argument there there's really two things I want you to take on. One is the corpus of content is now greater than ever because of AI. I I would say that's a fair argument. Right? Like, never have we had so much at our fingertips.
Rob Kelly:Right? So much content, call it. One argument there is, well, of course, then curation becomes even more valuable. People thought the Internet was big. Now you have this thing called AI.
Rob Kelly:So is that tracking so far? Like a a good argument for curation. And there was already BS in the world before. It's just now there's BS amplified because it's easier to generate BS out there because you could create it using AI itself. So curation.
Rob Kelly:Great argument for curation. You're out there saying, hey. I'm a domain expert in Van Halen or whatever else. Photography. This is the good stuff this week.
Rob Kelly:Maybe here, ignore this other thing. By the way, there was a big article, but that that's not accurate. That's what you mean by creation in that case?
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. Or, you know, it could also be an AI thing. I wrote a book where I had to break down the definitions of every kind of AI there is. And so I see things that are always incorrect and incorrectly stated or illogical. I have fun calling that kind of stuff out one at a time, But I feel like people would appreciate something that was honest, opinionated, and actually curated, not automated.
CJ Chilvers:It's 1995 all over again. When blogs first started, they were called weblogs. You know, this is in the mid nineties, and I did this too, where you just went to your index file and you updated it with a couple of links you found from the day before because the web was small. And if you found something cool, you wanted to tell people about it. So you put the link and then you'd write a couple of sentences why this is a cool thing to visit, why it's important.
CJ Chilvers:And that's because it was the Wild West. It was chaotic. Lots of stuff was happening, and nobody knew where to go, what was real, and what wasn't. And here we are again. We're right back in 1995, and we need that kind of thing again where people we trust to say, this is the thing you should look at.
CJ Chilvers:This is the cool thing.
Rob Kelly:So AI gives curation the curation business a massive opportunity. And what about just the true creation part? Creating something that didn't exist before. In your case, you were talking about curating articles, showing off what you believe to be valuable and helpful and true, lack of better word, and saying what's not. What about true creation?
Rob Kelly:Creating something new that did not exist. Is that just all opinion? Is the opinion the creation part?
CJ Chilvers:It could be. I have a hard time with this because I the AI companies are telling us that all their models are doing are learning the way people learn. They're they're just taking in things that are training them and then they're doing their own kind of processing of that based on their training. I have a really hard time believing that seeing some of the results, but okay. Let's let's take them at their word that that's what's happening.
CJ Chilvers:That's kind of what we're doing. And so anything that I would call original isn't original. Nothing's really original. We all were trained, you know, from other things. But that's also why I think the hyperlink is the most important invention of my time.
CJ Chilvers:I don't think there'll be anything invented during my lifetime that's better than that. The ability to express an idea, but also then link out to where the ideas came from and how they mix together and the canonical places to go for those. Yeah. Connecting ideas. Who would have thought that's this is the best thing ever.
CJ Chilvers:I I love it. I think the hyperlink is just magical, and it's being underused right now because it doesn't make any business sense to link after things. It says a part of the curation too.
Rob Kelly:So I think I understand your curation part. How would you define then creation for lack of better word?
CJ Chilvers:It's the same thing. I don't think there's not really a difference. I tried to have an essay about essays. It's out there.
Rob Kelly:Very meta. Yeah.
CJ Chilvers:But it basically says like everything is an essay of a different form or size, you name it. But there shouldn't be a difference between what's being curated and a 10 paragraph essay. They're all things that you were trained on just like a model was trained on. If you're really good about it, you link out throughout that to where you learned each individual part. But sometimes you just wanna get it out there and you throw it out there.
CJ Chilvers:Fine. Then somebody else links to you. There's nothing new under the sun. But as I'm discovering like every day people don't know about simple things that I thought everybody knew about. But I'll give you an example.
CJ Chilvers:The first big newsletter acquisition of all time. There was some newsletter that was trying to compile these into a list, the hustle or something like that. And so I spoke up, I I responded. I'll be like, oh, that would be Daily Candy. Daily Candy was the first big one ever.
CJ Chilvers:I remember. Yeah. It was huge. And it was big news because it was like when Facebook bought Instagram, it was like, how could you pay that much? It's just a newsletter.
CJ Chilvers:Like it's email where they pay like a 120,000,000 or so. It was I forget exactly how much, but people were like incensed that a real company would pay that much for a newsletter. But it made sense because it was a daily newsletter with, like, a 60 to 80% open rate. It was like it was like outrageous open rate. People engaged in high ticket items every day in the perfect demographic.
CJ Chilvers:Why wouldn't you pay a 120,000,000 for that? You know, it just seems obvious to us now. It was just a huge change in in the mentality of people back then.
Rob Kelly:Let's see. We covered this one. True creation requires trust and opinion. This is a weakness for AI and an opportunity for creators. Invest in creation.
Rob Kelly:That's funny. This happened to be the next one. We nailed that. Email newsletters, though, you say still return the best ROI for curated content. Just on that last line, though, could you say what you mean?
CJ Chilvers:Well, it's an objective thing that
Rob Kelly:Mhmm.
CJ Chilvers:It gets measured every year. And every company, I think Litmus puts out a new number every year, the ratio of like email versus social media for ROI.
Rob Kelly:And some years it's like 40 to one, some years 20 to one. The value of an email subscriber versus a a Twitter follower or An email versus An email versus a view on YouTube or Or a post.
CJ Chilvers:So it's like what Oh,
Rob Kelly:the actual content.
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. So whatever you're investing in, that email you're sending out or the post you're putting up somewhere on LinkedIn or whatever. So, yeah, it used to be 40 to one and different people put different numbers on it. But in my experience, it's way higher than that. It's like a thousand to one in b to b.
CJ Chilvers:It's not even close. You know, people just don't engage that way in b to b. Email is still the only ubiquitous thing. And I know younger generations don't feel the same because they grow up with their school email pretty much and everything else is done on social media, but they'll find out. I mean, it's just like, you know, for twenty years we had to have a fax machine when we didn't need a fax machine.
CJ Chilvers:It's just the ubiquitous thing that you have to have to sign up for things. So for now anyway, that's true. And I think it'll continue being true for at least as long as I'm working. And the only thing that will replace it is the login because that's even more trustworthy. If you trust a business enough where you have a login, they don't really need your email address necessarily.
CJ Chilvers:They can contact you in any kind of way they feel like, but they also know your behavior and they know what you care about. So that might be the only thing threatening it right now. I know a lot of people
Rob Kelly:are saying, no. It's all social media, but social media is so fragmented right now. Who's gonna be the ubiquitous social media? I just I don't see that happening. Number 17 is humanization of content beats personalization and automation.
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. I get a lot of requests for personalization. And personalization rarely works anywhere near as well as just being a human. And that goes back to our plain text versus highly designed email. Same thing.
CJ Chilvers:Looks like it came from a human. It's gonna get opened a lot more, a lot more. Like 10 times more than something that's highly designed. So it's
Rob Kelly:still okay if you don't say, you know, dear Rob or hey, Rob. You just send the newsletter out.
CJ Chilvers:It would be much better if you didn't say that. I I know people are reporting numbers that say, oh, it's much higher open rate, much higher click through rate if you say dear so and so. You are disconnecting yourself from that human to human relationship you could be having when you do that. It's not worth it for extra clicks and extra opens, which by the way, nobody can tell right now. None of that's real.
CJ Chilvers:Don't believe in any of that. Nobody can tell who's opening anymore.
Rob Kelly:Back to number 17, when you say because this is these are principles of creating with AI. Humanization of content beats personalization and automation. Are you implying or suggesting there that AI is going to try to do a lot of personalization and automation? Or help generate more personalization and automation and that could backfire because it will not seem human?
CJ Chilvers:No. Because I think it will learn if it backfires. Now it might have guardrails on it from its parent company that don't allow it to act like a human. That's a different thing. But I think it already knows.
CJ Chilvers:Any well trained model already knows what I just said. It's overruled by humans in the process.
Rob Kelly:Let's take the flip side. So when you say with number 17, humanization of content beats personalization and automation, Are you saying that in this new world of AI, there'll be so much of what looks like automated content from a machine that the more you can humanize your content, the more you'll stand out and win?
CJ Chilvers:If you didn't have guardrails on AI, it would make everything look like it came from a human. So that's the only thing stopping it. Humans get in the way of their own progress by trying to personalize and it never comes off as personal. So I saw I tell all my clients and only the small businesses listen, try to make this feel like it came from a real human and you'll be more successful. And the big businesses will never do that because that's against the incentive.
CJ Chilvers:But I'm guessing AI already knows the truth about that and it's just the guardrails that keep it from doing more human like stuff.
Rob Kelly:So number 18 is most businesses have short term biases, cost cutting with AI will come before revenue boosting. Still agree with that one?
CJ Chilvers:Oh, yeah. I mean, that was written two and a half years ago when this was just emerging and I I think we've already seen this. You know, this is fully in swing right now. They're cutting way back probably more than they should
Rob Kelly:right now. Ahead of where they're seeing even the value of creating with AI or they're just hoping it's going to help them save mostly labor costs.
CJ Chilvers:And it's snowballing. So the more businesses that cut more people, especially at the higher levels when you're hearing, you know, 50,000 here, 10,000 there, that snowball effect, they're not dummies. The CEOs know that all these people being laid off are gonna create a lot more supply for them. Right? So if they have to hire back, they're gonna hire back cheaper.
CJ Chilvers:So why wouldn't you do that? They have no fear of people not being there if they need to fill a role, which is a big mistake because then you're only hiring the people that don't have options. And this is the same thing for the return to office thing, which was a big mistake saying return to office or you're gonna get cut. Well, who are you cutting? You're cutting the people who can go anywhere to any job because they're the best at what they do.
CJ Chilvers:You're not cutting the people who don't have a choice. You're literally letting go of your best people. It wasn't thought through. There was no real strategist there behind it, and this is the same thing. Cost cutting is insanely high right now for what it should be.
CJ Chilvers:And because they think the supply is always gonna be there of workers. And maybe it is, but it's not the workers you want probably.
Rob Kelly:Is the typical customer in in your day job the marketing department of a large company? Usually. Yeah. And do you foresee all large companies having a marketing AI internally?
CJ Chilvers:They should. I know a lot of companies do right now as far as sales. Mhmm. Which as Seth Godin would say, all sales is is failed marketing. That's not exactly true in b to b for a lot of reasons.
Rob Kelly:I always like to think of it as marketing is just automated sales. It's well, marketing should put your sales. I'm an optimist, so I flip
CJ Chilvers:it to the positive. Me me too. I always say like, if your marketers are doing their jobs, then your salespeople should have it real easy.
Rob Kelly:But Seth's a better marketer by the way, so I I probably would defer to his approach.
CJ Chilvers:Well, he has to say something that's really catchy. So that's the way he says it. Right? He's good at it. Yeah.
CJ Chilvers:So it's kinda true.
Rob Kelly:So the first AI you saw what I'm trying to see in the future, it's always, you know, it helps us feel a little more in control and confident about what we're doing. In the future, do you see each department in a business? Let's start with sales and marketing as having their own internal AI.
CJ Chilvers:They have it right now. Yeah. Absolutely. Siloed off sometimes. Sometimes it talks to the other departments.
CJ Chilvers:Manufacturing is great at this. And manufacturing is using CV AI as computer vision in the factory to know exactly where inventory is at all times. And then it talks to the other AIs in IT that talk to each other and analyze what's going on there and in the rest of the supply chain and how many orders we got today and where they came from. And it's all a bunch of AIs analyzing things and then handing them over to somebody who makes a decision.
Rob Kelly:But the best sales and marketing departments are building their own internal AI as opposed to saying they're using ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini. They might be leveraging that through APIs and stuff, but they're building their own proprietary AI.
CJ Chilvers:Right. And everybody really should be at that level in b two b. But like I said, it's a different world also in b two b that for closing a sale, you actually do need salespeople. You can't just have marketers Mhmm. Because, you know, if you're selling a $100,000,000 worth of stuff to a city government, you're gonna have to be in a lot of meetings with a lot of people and a lot
Rob Kelly:of angry voters sometimes. Well, that was number 14. You said closing still happens between humans, sometimes entire committees. That's an extreme example. But, you know, if big businesses, that's definitely something that
CJ Chilvers:would be done with more than just one person. I see government being the last to automate that process just because of all the people involved and all the political backlash that could happen with a wrong decision. So I don't know. If I were in business right now, if I were in b two b, it's been a bloodbath lately for government. But right now that's where they need humans for the foreseeable future.
Rob Kelly:Back to the internal AIs that say a marketing or sales department's building, and maybe we can talk just about marketing in What's the content internally that a big business would use to train their own AI? What's the most important content? Do you get to work on that at all? I don't work daily on
CJ Chilvers:that kind of thing. We have an entire department devoted to that, but I know how they do it. So I'll hypothetically put myself, let's see in sales at somebody who's not one of my clients, Apple. Because Apple's very vocal about who they hire for everything. So you can say confidently, I'm not working with Apple and Always fun to talk Yeah.
CJ Chilvers:About because everybody knows it and everybody knows their style.
Rob Kelly:Okay. So Apple's marketing department were picturing if you were in the room or your equivalent in the room over at Apple building their own marketing AI. Yeah. What content do they use for their own marketing team's AI?
CJ Chilvers:The first and most important thing would be your style guide. Both design and copy and the style guides of everywhere you publish. Those are the most important things because those are gonna be your guidelines for whatever you're doing. Like you cannot go beyond this number of characters. You can't say these words.
CJ Chilvers:You have to say these words. That kind of thing. Like it's rules. So there's an enormous amount of that to get through. And that AI really helps with that because it's hard for someone like me to go through all that and memorize everything.
CJ Chilvers:So it's great to have AI for that. Then you would throw in examples of previous work, years and years of previous work. So it gets an idea of the voice of the company. Then throw in the research so it gets an idea of the audience, what works and what doesn't. From there, it's kind of a custom thing.
CJ Chilvers:It's like internal things that are private. There has to be all kinds of guardrails so none of it gets out into the public, but still they they never run out of things to feed it. The real problem they're having now at that level and those companies is that the data is of such poor quality that they're having a hard time getting an analysis of all of it at once. I don't think that's gonna be a problem for long because the numbers on that keep going down as a challenge. But right now it's very challenging to them.
Rob Kelly:So they're feeding all that proprietary kind of internal IP Mhmm. Marketing IP. And then are they also using combining that with an external LLM?
CJ Chilvers:Not external.
Rob Kelly:No. Well, I know it's all for internal use only, but what are they meshing that with? In in other words, they're not building ChatGPT from scratch or Claude from scratch. So what do they use for the actual trained AI?
CJ Chilvers:There's companies for that. Okay. There's a whole ecosystem of companies for that.
Rob Kelly:Something more open source?
CJ Chilvers:It could be. Usually? Yeah. There's open source. There's full service versions of it.
CJ Chilvers:There's the hardware makers. Mhmm. You know, the giant servers that have to host all this stuff. They do their own thing, or they can help guide you. It's all really what suits your particular business.
CJ Chilvers:It's gonna be a different solution every time.
Rob Kelly:So external vendors are helping large companies build an internal, say, marketing AI. Yeah. It might be a hodgepodge of models. Obviously, it's all gonna be privacy protected and only confidential to the internal customer marketing company.
CJ Chilvers:That's their biggest priority is keeping it all inside.
Rob Kelly:And so a big company's marketing department, what would they then go out to a ChatGPT or a Claude or Gemini to use? Well, they shouldn't. They shouldn't.
CJ Chilvers:Well, by policy, most of these companies have all their marketers sign that they won't. So don't put anything that's work related into anything outside the company. You know, they may have a business account at OpenAI, but they have to sign out of that, you know, if they wanna do a personal question or sign back in if they wanna do a work question. So you could see how this this can get muddy. Yep.
CJ Chilvers:So they got some issues there for sure.
Rob Kelly:Let's switch gears. I've just got a handful of rapid fire questions. We can dig into any one in particular. If you just go through each of your content creations, I'm sure I'm missing some, but how it's gonna be impacted by AI? Just a quick take.
Rob Kelly:Your email newsletter.
CJ Chilvers:It's gonna be scraped, but I don't care because it's mostly opinion. Go ahead, scrape it.
Rob Kelly:Your Van Halen encyclopedia.
CJ Chilvers:That I cared about being scraped. But for twenty years, it was scraped by humans first and used for all kinds of projects. So it's been stolen enough. I don't know. I don't know what to tell them anymore.
Rob Kelly:How about your photography books?
CJ Chilvers:Well, that was a weird one because that was all opinion as well as like a manifesto. If you read it now, it all sounds so obvious. This is written like 15 ago. Back then it was super controversial. And I got a lot of blowback back then.
CJ Chilvers:They made fun of me in the daily beast.
Rob Kelly:Why'd they make fun of you?
CJ Chilvers:Because I said that the most popular camera in the future would be on people's phones. And they said that nobody nobody's giving up their real cameras for a phone camera. Whoops. Yeah. So that you read it now and it this is like, yeah.
CJ Chilvers:Well, duh. Of course. But reading it back then, it was a big deal.
Rob Kelly:How about your principles of email book?
CJ Chilvers:I mean, good luck. Everybody knows those principles to be true and everybody ignores them. So if it wants to propagate those, okay. You know, nobody's gonna listen to it. I can't tell you how many people I've told, don't worry about your subject line as much as your from line.
CJ Chilvers:Like, the difference in your results are dramatic. It's like 10 or 20 fold if you focus on your from line and nobody nobody wants to hear it.
Rob Kelly:So overall, if you look at all your creations, it sounds like you're mostly okay with AI grabbing it for free or you see it as inevitable. But with Van Helm Encyclopedia being the exception?
CJ Chilvers:Which is funny because that's not really my content. That was 200 contributors. And I was basically the organizer, the editor of the whole thing. But it's definitely like a a punch in the gut when you see it everywhere.
Rob Kelly:So KISS is talking about living on in eternity in part using AI with these holograms of themselves. They did a big sort of demo of it at Madison Square Garden in their last live, I'm putting in air quotes here, live concert. Do you think Van Halen will do that?
CJ Chilvers:No. No. They can't agree on anything. Okay. None of them can agree on anything with each other.
CJ Chilvers:So that's the reason why they have a vault with, like, thirty years of unreleased material. And now I've been told there's somebody working on it. I don't know if that's true. It's just sitting there. It's been years and years.
CJ Chilvers:We haven't heard anything. So all the reports I get is that they
Rob Kelly:all hate each other. So They gotta put you in charge of the vault.
CJ Chilvers:Hey, I do it in a heartbeat, but no. No. They they have all their own people.
Rob Kelly:Now you wrote a book on photography. How do you feel about either you or the community, you know photographers? Are we gonna get to a point where they are selling their, you know, the images of pictures that they have taken to AI to train AI.
CJ Chilvers:I think we're already past it. I think AI is so good at it right now. What you would be selling it for it would get less and less.
Rob Kelly:You mean AI has already looked at enough pictures that they can make variations of whatever they want and?
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. And and you can see that from musicians who have sold their entire catalogs over the past ten years or fifteen years because they knew it is worth less and less with every ear. So why not? Did Bruce Springsteen do that? I think he did that.
CJ Chilvers:There were just massive Yeah. Massive deals like ten years ago. Now you probably couldn't get those deals.
Rob Kelly:You think film companies will follow then? Are they next?
CJ Chilvers:They don't have any money now. I don't know what they're gonna do. They're shutting down every day. You know, and that was predictable too. As soon as streaming started up, it was so predictable.
CJ Chilvers:It was like you're going from a solid tangible object to something that's always gonna be a lower quality because it's always gonna make more money sense for it to be lower quality to get it into a home. It's never gonna be the superior product it was. And they were okay with that for pennies because it meant they didn't have to deal with the supply chain. They could turn an office of hundreds into a dozen. It's the same cost cutting mentality we're seeing right now with AI.
CJ Chilvers:And, you know, long term, they regret it now because they had a great who was it? It was the was it the head of WB or MGM? It's one of these who was saying, we had such a great business. People were paying us $20 a disc. They were putting out all kinds of additions.
CJ Chilvers:We had this amazing business going. He's like, we have nothing now. Streaming is drying up. Like, we're dependent on subscribers and they're not coming in. They're only leaving.
CJ Chilvers:They're beside themselves what to do now because they didn't think long term.
Rob Kelly:With AI back to this rent versus own, you know, if you've got your own newsletter and you've got your own book, in this case self published or own 100% of it, got your own website or blog, you know, you own this. Social media and other platforms, you're really renting. Right? Mhmm. And you don't control it.
Rob Kelly:In that world, is there any reason to think that the Frontier Miles, ChatGPT and company are gonna be any different?
CJ Chilvers:I don't even think you're renting. I think they're renting you with an option to buy because anything you put up on YouTube, they own. They own the distribution of that. They probably own a lot more. I haven't read the EULA.
CJ Chilvers:They might even own like your likeness in perpetuity. Who knows? I I haven't read it. But those companies can turn evil real quick and do whatever they want with your stuff. So it's it's not even renting.
CJ Chilvers:You're giving up a whole lot for whatever exposure you're getting. As far as AI, they're not even offering that. And they're gonna offer less and less of that. You're not even getting the exposure. They've just got the content and they're gonna keep the people and eventually serve them ads or something.
CJ Chilvers:I don't know. I don't know how they're gonna keep going, but you're not involved.
Rob Kelly:So if you were creating new content today, say those curated newsletters that you're talking about earlier, and maybe they're attached to a blog on a website if you do it the way you've done it in the past. Are you letting the AI bots grab it and just or are you blocking it all?
CJ Chilvers:You can't block it. Even if you try even if you followed all the rules and all the regulations of every country. No. I mean, was it anthropic proved that pretty well? It didn't matter what you had to block it.
CJ Chilvers:You can have a file that said, please don't scrape this, mister AI. They will scrape it. They don't care. Like, they were tearing through books, you know, just piles and piles of physical books, scanning them and just using all that information too. Like, they don't care.
CJ Chilvers:There's too much money involved.
Rob Kelly:If you're creating something new today, new content, you're just gonna let AI grab it all because they can anyway?
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. You don't have a choice. And, you know, but it's the same thing as if you go outside today. You're passing by how many Ring cameras and now that's being used by the parent company to track behavior, all kinds of stuff. So you don't have a choice.
CJ Chilvers:I mean, you are content. You will be used. And if by some miracle there's, you know, some kind of a law passed against some of this stuff, so what? Another country will come along and just do the same thing and they'll advance faster than us. So So you
Rob Kelly:create new content today, you let AI grab it because it just can and there's no beating it, and then you just make sure you got a damn good back end?
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. The end game is really just whatever relationship you're building with the actual humans reading it. So who cares where the rest goes? I think it's a matter of how much you're losing compared to what you have now. And that's what people are angry about.
CJ Chilvers:But it doesn't matter if you're still building relationships. I mean, it may be one at a time instead of a dozen, but it's still there to be had, you know. It hasn't gone away.
Rob Kelly:Yeah. I was just thinking in a new world where you could ask AI, just give me the CJ Chilvers feed of content. You could ask him for that. It probably could grab
CJ Chilvers:That would be confusing.
Rob Kelly:It probably could, you know, but let's just say that, give me CJ's newsletter that he's been writing for years. It probably could figure out how to grab, you know, have access to all that content. And then the question in that case is, why would anyone still subscribe directly and have a direct relationship with you? Thinking out loud here?
CJ Chilvers:If you can answer that, that's their whole purpose and content right there. Why?
Rob Kelly:So does it come down to they know it's you for sure because it's got from CJ in the email so they they know it's human. They get the newest stuff maybe first. They can hit reply and it goes to you. Mhmm. And you then have access to these back end things that maybe AI would have more trouble with.
Rob Kelly:Let's say you want to do office hours, one on one consulting with them. You wanna take them all to the big Van Halen reunion, whatever the case may be.
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. It's all that. It's the fact that I've spent years and years meeting up just people, other bloggers, newsletter writers in person, just, hey, let's go hang out. I'll drive up to Minneapolis and visit with another blogger I like. And, it's just hanging out.
CJ Chilvers:So real people know real people and they get to talk to real people. So you develop this network. I think that's gonna be very valuable because if you just know one real person in this whole publishing thing in your topic area, then they'll be able to expose you to the other real people.
Rob Kelly:Does that mean that the in real life products, like information products become more important than ever because it is the thing that AI cannot emulate that you going and having a meet up, a hangout, a meal, a concert.
CJ Chilvers:To me, yes. To most, no. I think to the 80%, no. There's not gonna be a difference. That's why Netflix, YouTube, all these companies are betting on AI creation for their future.
CJ Chilvers:Because why? For the reason you just said it. I I think the majority of people are not gonna care. As long as they get their content, they're not gonna care. It's gonna be a minority, but it's the minority that I want.
Rob Kelly:So that's all that matters. You know, we're chasing different audiences. I understand you want that audience who's gonna hang out with you maybe as a human, but what's the part about Netflix that didn't follow? What's their part in this?
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. This is this is a new thing. Part of what I was talking about earlier, big layoffs at YouTube. Mhmm. Why?
CJ Chilvers:Everybody's going to YouTube. If anything, it should be all the cable companies. Why YouTube? It's because they're betting on more and more automation. That's where they think everything's going.
CJ Chilvers:They know something we don't. And it's probably because they have all the analytics and the things that they have created. They do put an AI layer now over YouTube shorts. Smooth them out, punctuate some things. It must work.
CJ Chilvers:They seem to really like it because they're applying it to everything. So they're making big bets, but this is the way forward, not creators. So that's fine. I would just tell creators that that's not your audience then. The people who just eat up the AI generated slop, that's not for you.
Rob Kelly:And then Netflix, what's their part in this?
CJ Chilvers:That's a good question because all they've said is that they're into it. I don't know what they're gonna do. I don't know how you make movies, entire TV shows. I guess animation would be first. That'd be the easiest, but I I don't get it.
CJ Chilvers:I mean, long term, don't get it. Short term, I get it. It's more money.
Rob Kelly:You don't get how a Netflix could use AI to create compelling content?
CJ Chilvers:I get that, but I don't get how that makes a hundred year company. That's a short term strategy. I see. It's not gonna differentiate them. So, you know, good luck for the next couple of years.
CJ Chilvers:But after that, I don't know what makes you any different than someone who has a really fast computer and a model they built from doing the same thing. It's just pixels in the end. Whoever tells the better story is gonna get the audience probably. So Netflix is gonna compete on that? No.
Rob Kelly:Yeah. It's so interesting. So it's getting back to this theme of the human differential in this new world of AI. You could just use AI to try to automate everything. In your case, in the Netflix example, you and I could start to create movies, films, shows that look a lot like what Netflix creates if they go down that path.
Rob Kelly:And then that's the beginning of the end for them. It's not a hundred year company.
CJ Chilvers:Right. But they're not thinking Fascinating. They're thinking about next quarter. And they're thinking about all the subscribers are losing and how are they gonna offset that. And it's just costs.
CJ Chilvers:That's all they can do. But nobody cares because they don't last there long. The turnover is really high at Netflix.
Rob Kelly:So what's new starting from scratch? Hundred year Netflix like company in this new age of AI look like?
CJ Chilvers:Well, I know it doesn't look like that. I know what it doesn't look like. What I think it looks like is if we can take the human fallibility out of the process, Use AI for process and less for the actual connection. So if you're trying to connect with a human in your content, it's gotta be human to human in some way or else it's less compelling. It's just a bias we have.
CJ Chilvers:You're not gonna change the human brain fast enough to catch up with that. So they're fighting human behavior if they're going down the content route. If they put AI in the process, I think there's all kinds of gains they can make. All kinds of efficiencies they're not even thinking about because everybody thinks about AI as gen AI and not all the other flavors of AI that are out there that could help them. It's just because it's quick and easy.
Rob Kelly:One in 20. You mentioned once that only about one in 20 things you do is gonna resonate with your audience, so just constantly be shipping.
CJ Chilvers:Because I don't know what the one in 20 is. I never know. Everybody says this who has a blog. It's just like the thing you spend five minutes on and just push it out is the thing that hits. And then the thing you spent weeks on and put it out there, it gets nothing.
CJ Chilvers:And you just you never know. So you gotta just ship? That's why you'll find kind of like everything and anything in my newsletter sometimes because I have no idea what people are gonna reply and say that was really cool.
Rob Kelly:Have you ever shipped too early?
CJ Chilvers:No. Not me. I always ship too late.
Rob Kelly:It's sort of like, you know, firing someone. They always say, you never fired someone early enough. Is shipping like you can can never do it early? Like the earlier the better, just get it out. I totally You know, within reason.
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. My brain is all about those deep dives. It's all about strategy. And the problem with that is is what you give up, it's a spectrum. And if you have too much on the strategy side, you're giving up the executive function side, the quick decisions that have to be made.
CJ Chilvers:So I've come to terms with that. I'm happy with that. That's fine. I know my brain and I know what kind of things it's really good at. It's not good at shipping.
CJ Chilvers:And I just have to remember that. I have to remember it. Right now, I'm struggling because I like I said, I've been working months and months, nights and weekends with my clients. I haven't put anything out on my website in a long time because of that. I've been working my my brain to death.
CJ Chilvers:Like, I am exhausted. But to my readers, I'm lazy. If I had the right brain, if I had, you know, that just executive function to just push stuff out, I would have a 100 things to push out on my blog right now. I just don't. I I'm not good at that.
CJ Chilvers:I'm just not good at that. The longer I wait, like, the more good it has to be. Totally.
Rob Kelly:Kevin Kelly's got the thousand true fans, and I love your one true fan philosophy. Can you just share that?
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. Everybody loves Kevin Kelly's thousand true fans and every time they bring it up, I'm just like, You don't even need that many. Just one person is all you need to reach. Just a conversation with the president of Follett got me a job there that lasted four years. Do the math on what that could add up to.
CJ Chilvers:I didn't need a thousand true fans to do that. I don't need a thousand true fans to meet people who make big differences in my life. You know? This is why I keep publishing stuff regardless of what the algorithm says I should do because I don't care about that. I care about reaching the one person who's gonna make a difference that I don't even know six months from now.
CJ Chilvers:And that's the only way to do it.
Rob Kelly:Is that back to then your philosophy on just ship in these certain different domains you have and ship with good stuff and you'll connect with the right people and life will take
CJ Chilvers:care of itself? Yeah. You know, it's a recipe for sanity. You're not gonna get viral anytime soon on that. But I don't know anybody who's quickly gotten a lot of followers and fans and all that who's still in the game.
CJ Chilvers:They drop out five ten years at most because it just can't. You burn out way too easy.
Rob Kelly:Alright. CJ, you've got photography, Van Halen, newsletters, email, about newsletters, an email newsletter, about email. You do a lot of stuff. I think about this a lot. Outsiders might say, hey.
Rob Kelly:What about the ten thousand hour rule? You appear a little scattered, but you also seem very fulfilled. How do you think about that?
CJ Chilvers:I try not to because I think, yeah, if you create yourself into a character and pigeonhole yourself, you're you're gonna make a lot more money and you're gonna be more marketable for sure. But I don't know. There's a certain number of us, a percentage that are just generalists, and it's okay. We're curious about things. We need those too.
Rob Kelly:I know you've talked about having fun buckets or maybe a fun bucket. What are the buckets and what are the fun buckets?
CJ Chilvers:I've been diving deep into that lately because work has finally lit up where all summer, I was just nights, weekends, just constant. And so I crashed out of it and had to find something fun. So yeah, I have a tag for fun stuff. And it could be anything. Anything that, like, occupies a very nerdy, detailed mind.
CJ Chilvers:So it could be diving back into the Van Halen book or it could be everybody in the family gave me their coins. And I'll go through them, separate by date, find the rare ones, you know, that kind of stuff.
Rob Kelly:And these are basically things that are fun that you are then going to create something about? Have some creation, a project that ends up with a new thing in the world?
CJ Chilvers:Sometimes sometimes it's no. And it's just it's like so nerdy, it's embarrassing. Like everybody giving me their coins. Or last year, I spent basically the whole year salvaging broken electronics, repairing them, and then basically decking out the rooms in the house with all these fixed, you know, amplifiers and speakers and all this cool stuff. And then at the end of the year, was just like, okay, well, I did that.
CJ Chilvers:You know, what's next? What's the next fun thing to learn? So I I sometimes I bring that to the blog and the newsletter and sometimes I write about it because there is a connection that gets made somewhere. And one of them like when everybody brought me their coins, this is like six months ago. I went a deep dive like I haven't since I was a kid on, you know, what's out there, what's valuable, what do people care about now.
CJ Chilvers:And I went so deep that I found these awesome content creators in this space who are doing things that content creators in other spaces don't know about yet. And so, yeah, it was a really cool deep dive. I'm like, oh, I had no idea people were out there. They had this business model and it's it's a crazy business model, but I love it. People just watch them sift through coins and they may find, oh, yeah, you know, this quarter is actually worth $2 and they'll explain why.
CJ Chilvers:And people, you know, tuning in by the tens of thousands on YouTube for this, and this guy is selling maybe the materials he uses to actually do the hunts or the microscopes to inspect the coins. Like, he's got a whole thing behind this, but at the same time, he is occasionally finding something really valuable and it's all adds up for him. And it's really probably the the ad revenue that's supporting it all.
Rob Kelly:If someone at a party comes to you and says, what do you do? What's your answer?
CJ Chilvers:I write. That's pretty much it. Yeah. That's how I got a job actually at one place. Because I just got into a discussion with somebody and I didn't know who it was.
CJ Chilvers:I said, I write. He asked about what I wrote. And we got into this deep discussion about publishing. And he turned out to be the president of this big company and and hired him. Follett.
Rob Kelly:Right? Yeah. So yeah. You never know. You said the more constraints you have, the more creativity comes out.
Rob Kelly:That got me thinking to whether CJ thinks about content constraints.
CJ Chilvers:Mhmm.
Rob Kelly:Constraints in general and how that could be an ally in creating content. Any quick thoughts?
CJ Chilvers:Every day. But it's different for every person, and I think that's the nuance that I I learned doing the photography book because that was all about how constraints interact with creativity. And so it's true, they do, but only to a certain amount and it's different for every person. In the book I put it, it's like the difference between the movie Halloween and The Phantom Menace. Just as an example, one movie that had the constraint of we're doing this for, I think it was $200,000, and they had to concentrate on the writing.
CJ Chilvers:They had nothing else. They bought good film stock, and they wrote and wrote and wrote and edited crazy. And it came out, and it's built a multibillion dollar business out of Halloween. Now the phantom menace, going into that, George Lucas had all the money in the world, all the resources, anything he asked for, he would get. And it just came out kind of blah.
CJ Chilvers:And people were like, I don't know. Do I like that? It's I'm not sure. Yeah. Once you have some constraints, it forces you to focus.
CJ Chilvers:Too much though, I don't think they could have done Halloween on $50,000. But 200, yeah, that was just enough.
Rob Kelly:You got a vault of twenty five plus years of content. What's inside and what do you plan to do with it? How do you manage it?
CJ Chilvers:I was up to now managing it just through tags. I know people wanna get fancy with it, say, Zettelkasten or throw it into some kind of AI that will make sense of it. No. It's just tags. That's all you need.
CJ Chilvers:Tags are so powerful. People don't understand that just by selecting a couple of tags, can it's a powerful smart filter for things. It's amazing. It's it's kinda like building your own app to have the right tags in each of your posts.
Rob Kelly:Do you tag across different platforms? Are you talking about?
CJ Chilvers:No, just plain text. So if you think about it, like a lot of journaling apps are coming out now. And one of the main features is I can look back at this date throughout history for my journal. And maybe I have 15 entries over fifteen years for this date in my journal. Well, you can do that with tags.
CJ Chilvers:You just select this month, this year and look back and there's everything you did on that date. So, yeah, there's limitless kind of creations you can do with your content with tags. So I'm a big believer in that. But I know it's simpler. It's easier to just throw it all into an AI and let it sort out.
Rob Kelly:Are you tagging all of your email newsletters?
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. I do tags.
Rob Kelly:Which platform is that through?
CJ Chilvers:It can be any because it's plain text. I read it right now and do a lot of stuff in bare markdown just because that's the right amount of constraint. Like I can't have too much if you put everything into Notion, I'll just play with Notion all day. But if you just keep it all in plain text files, it's a pain to open them. So there needs to be something in between.
Rob Kelly:I think I got this right. You said if you're creating a new business today, you'd start by selling consulting services and you'd give away everything else.
CJ Chilvers:Mhmm.
Rob Kelly:I assume meaning content. Did I get that right?
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. For right now, that's the way to do it. If you caught me ten years ago, I would've said courses, but those have gone downhill and everything's on YouTube now. So you don't really need them. So, yeah, it has to be insulting or speaking something in person for sure or relatively in person.
Rob Kelly:What are your favorite documentaries?
CJ Chilvers:Oh, man. I needed a warning for that. God, I don't I don't have one.
Rob Kelly:It's okay if you don't. That's why we're testing.
CJ Chilvers:I love a good documentary, but I mean, if there's ones that live in my head constantly and replay constantly, I can't get rid of. And you know that it's something like real Satriani, that just lives in my head and I
Rob Kelly:can't get rid of it. I watched it based on your tip. It was fascinating.
CJ Chilvers:It's fascinating for all the wrong reasons too. It's it's like
Rob Kelly:How come? What what do you mean?
CJ Chilvers:I don't know if you noticed, but a lot of what's being said doesn't line up with the lips. A lot of what's being played doesn't line up with the instruments. It's cut over several days. They're wearing different clothes as they're talking to each other. The editing is kinda all over the place.
Rob Kelly:Oh, so you think there was some posing going on?
CJ Chilvers:Well, I think they recorded a voice and they wanted to show the person that that voice came from, but that they didn't have a shot. So they got that person in the frame and then went back to another person, but that other person is still walking around. He's in a different outfit now in the background. Do you have
Rob Kelly:any theories as to why?
CJ Chilvers:I think that's just why. I think I think they captured what they wanted to and then they'd had to find shots to line it up. Yeah. They just didn't they had one camera maybe. I mean, it was it was the early nineties, so it was probably shot on 35 millimeter or something and they just So you
Rob Kelly:don't think it was like a like maybe it was a real nasty studio session and but yet they didn't want some kind of monster, like Metallica, some kind of monster documentary.
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. I think there was a lot of that too. I think because at the end, I don't know if you noticed at the end of that documentary, he says, oh, and I got a new band. And he said they show him, like, doing the finalized songs with entirely different people.
Rob Kelly:I didn't notice that. I thought I watched
CJ Chilvers:it through the credits. Yeah. During the credits. It's all different musicians. And the final album, some of those original takes are in there.
CJ Chilvers:But, yeah, most of it is this other band. But I love yeah. I love concert films.
Rob Kelly:Do you have a favorite concert film? Like real concert film?
CJ Chilvers:Live Without A Net for sure. And that's because and I've since heard an interview recently with the director of that. And it's maybe the only time that Van Halen was professionally captured on real film cameras from multiple angles in all done live. Maybe not all. They punched up maybe some of it, but their other concert film that they tried to market as the big deal was entirely rerecorded in the studio.
CJ Chilvers:And you can can see it in the film too. There's some songs where there's no audience being shown at all. And they just recorded it at sound check and put in the audience sounds later. Yeah. And then singer had to come back, rerecord all their lines because now they're out of sync with the drummer who's rerecorded all his parts.
CJ Chilvers:It was a mess. But live without a Danette is the closest they've ever come.
Rob Kelly:Do you consider yourself an AI optimist, pessimist or some other descriptor on the spectrum?
CJ Chilvers:On the spectrum is a good word. Realist. So I guess optimist because I'm not panicking. I I fully expect it to automate me out of a job. I'm sure of it, but not today.
Rob Kelly:What can go right in an AI world that's got you excited?
CJ Chilvers:I guess the things we can't see. A lot of stuff under the hood. I have apps right now that are doing all kinds of crazy things in settings, in views, different perspectives and angles that you wouldn't think of, but AI is now baked in. That stuff is really cool. I just wanna get away from the generative AI.
CJ Chilvers:To me, that's boring.
Rob Kelly:What's an example of the app that does things from different angles?
CJ Chilvers:Well, I just got back into OmniFocus. Now just briefly, I'm not all the way back in because it's way out there in terms of what my constraints are good for. It doesn't fit me at all. But I thought it was so cool that they're not baking AI into creation in that app. They're baking into process.
CJ Chilvers:So you can tell it all these kinds of automations to build out procedures for you, checklists, things that you might not have thought of yourself, templatize things that you do multiple times, like all kinds of really smart things yet in the background though.
Rob Kelly:How do you feel about universal basic income?
CJ Chilvers:I don't know. Around here, it's too politicized. So I would like to know if it works or not because every side that comes out says one thing or the other, but it's paid for by one side or the other. So I don't know. The classical economist in me would say, hell no.
CJ Chilvers:If everybody gets a universal basic income, then that means all the prices are gonna shoot up to match. Like, how are gonna deal with that? But then the studies show that no. Sometimes it doesn't do that. So I don't know.
CJ Chilvers:Sounds like it's gonna happen, but I think that what's gonna happen is a whole lot of joblessness before anybody figures anything out.
Rob Kelly:What are you telling your son about this new world of AI?
CJ Chilvers:Oh, this fires me up. I was just thinking about this today. I don't have to tell him anything because he knows. But what I'm telling everyone else in his life is to please let him use it. It's a tool.
CJ Chilvers:It's not evil. The schools seems to think it's almost like piracy. Don't touch it. Don't talk about it. Don't it's a cheater, hacker way out.
CJ Chilvers:No. It's a tool that we're all gonna use, and he should know how to use it by the time he gets out of school. That's part of your job. So I don't know. It fires me up.
CJ Chilvers:They do the same thing with dictation. They don't allow dictation for any parts of assignments, which again, you're cutting out a huge amount of people like me who have trouble starting things. Once we get into them, we get detailed and we get awesome at it. They have real trouble starting things and you're cutting those people out by saying, no, you can't start by just talking. Why not?
CJ Chilvers:It's another tool. Like, everybody's gonna be using these tools. Like, I think education is so far behind.
Rob Kelly:If AI ends up doing a lot of our work in life and you had endless time, what would you do with all your time?
CJ Chilvers:I'm gonna be honest. I'd probably go back to the Van Halen psychopedia even though it wouldn't do anything. It's just fun.
Rob Kelly:Yeah. You'd be getting a giant dividend from big AI companies, some sort of universal basic income check. So you'd be working on Van Halen.
CJ Chilvers:Or something else that people like. It's, you know, I wanna make people happier and have more fun and just like I don't wanna produce things that are just consumed. You know? I want them to do something to people. I guess this is why musicians wanna be actors and actors wanna be musicians.
CJ Chilvers:They see the other and they're like, wow. He's really affecting so many lives. So I know that book brings happiness to so many people. And my other books probably don't because there are a lot of uncomfortable truths in them. So I go back to the thing that makes people happy.
Rob Kelly:How do you feel about having an avatar of you in life for your family, friends, colleagues, others to use when you're gone?
CJ Chilvers:Sure. It's not gonna be accurate. But yeah.
Rob Kelly:I mean Sorry.
CJ Chilvers:Which one of
Rob Kelly:us What do you mean?
CJ Chilvers:I'm not the same person I was ten years ago. I know you're not. And and that person ten years ago was not the same person of ten years before that. Like, I mean, you're gonna have to choose which era and Right. Some are better than others.
Rob Kelly:What about just the concept of your wife or your son or your friends having, know Yeah. AICJ to talk to.
CJ Chilvers:Anything that helps, sure. But, know, I'm Irish Catholic. I can't imagine doing that. I can't imagine not avoiding the sad thing and actually confronting it. No.
Rob Kelly:CJ, thank you so much for investing the time.
CJ Chilvers:No. Thank you. That was yeah. That was great.
Rob Kelly:What question didn't I ask that I should have?
CJ Chilvers:There was one. There was one that was gonna be a deep like, it was the focus of my next article. I have like three on tap right now. Three on draft mode. Well, don't know if they'll actually come out because you know, me.
Rob Kelly:That's okay. I'm not coming out super fast either on my side with this. The hardest part by the way is launching with I've never had to do this quite calculus which is I am hearing from smart people that you wanna, you know, have your best podcast episode first because it really has an impression on people. I don't know that whether this how true it is or not.
CJ Chilvers:The most successful podcast I know didn't do that.
Rob Kelly:Didn't do that? Interesting. Because
CJ Chilvers:they figured it out as they went. And they And that's a
Rob Kelly:faster way maybe to getting to the best.
CJ Chilvers:Exactly. Exactly.
Rob Kelly:It's Yeah.
CJ Chilvers:Yeah. A problem that I have.
Rob Kelly:Oh, thank you for telling me that. I needed to hear that.
CJ Chilvers:They were terrible at first. But I knew them, and I knew they were the best at what they did.
Rob Kelly:Well, this is Media and the Machine. A few things about you and me. If you wanna hear about the next new episode, make sure you hit follow on the show in your podcast app. If you wanna go a little deeper, head to mediaandthemachine.com and subscribe. When you share your email with me, you can see handcrafted transcripts, read the essays in my newsletter, and be the first to hear about who the guest is on the next show.
Rob Kelly:You can also email me directly from there. Maybe you wanna recommend a guest. I'll give you a shout out if you do. I love paying it forward. From time to time, I also open up office hours and host small meetups for subscribers, just to meet, talk, and build things together.
Rob Kelly:If you're creating something of your own or thinking about it, I'd love to help. Maybe you've got a podcast in you. Finally, I don't have a marketing budget for this show. So if it's finding you and others, it's because someone like you passed it along. I'm genuinely grateful.
Rob Kelly:If you have a moment, an honest rating helps me make this better for you. You can just go to the show page and click one of the stars. And I'd rather you give me a low rating than no rating at all. I mean it. It pushes me to get better.
Rob Kelly:Thanks again, and see you next time.