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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, this is Media and the Machine, a show about the biggest technology shift of our lifetime and how to profit from it. 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 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.
Speaker 1: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.
Speaker 1:Welcome to Media and the Machine. My guest today is Chris Hutchins, host of the All The Hacks podcast, heard by over a million listeners with more than 10,000,000 downloads. Describes Chris as Tim Ferriss meets mister beast with a spreadsheet. He's also founded and sold two companies, one to Google and the other to Wealthfront. In our conversation, Chris explains why AI could replace a huge number of podcasts, and which ones actually survive and why.
Speaker 1:He shares what he's learning from a current test in which for the past two weeks, he's recorded everything he says, and I mean everything, including conversations with his wife. He shares how that experiment is changing how he thinks about the new way content will be created and consumed. He lays out a future where you don't use apps at all, just one AI interface. He also breaks down a test where he uses AI to read his podcast ads for him, and even his wife couldn't tell which was her husband and which was AI. He explains why he stopped using Open Claw, even though it blew him away.
Speaker 1:Now his use of LLMs has completely flipped in the past year. Special thanks to Jay Klaus for connecting Chris and me through his amazing Creator Science Lab, including an event in Boise, where Chris and I first sat down together. Speaking of that, this episode has a bonus second part. The first part you're about to hear is purely on AI. Then at the end, I've included a separate mostly uncut conversation we recorded last year, where I asked Chris tactical questions I had myself on how to build a great podcast.
Speaker 1:I hadn't yet launched mine. That bonus includes how he thinks about audio versus video, when to start selling ads, how he picks which topics to work on, and how he prepared for his appearance on the Tim Ferriss Show. Please enjoy my conversation, parts one and two, with Chris Hutchins. I asked AI to describe the All The Hacks mini media empire. Okay.
Speaker 1:And you wanna know what it said? I do. Tim Ferriss meets Mr. Beast with a spreadsheet.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Was gonna Accurate? I'm it's a different style, but, you know, I'm honored by that explanation. Thank you, ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:What's most likely way AI would put podcasting out of business as we know it today, if at all?
Speaker 2:I think there are a tremendous number of podcasts. And I would say many episodes I've done probably also fall into this, where the reason you're listening to that podcast is to learn some information. And that podcast is tailored to an audience, not you. If they have a relationship with you, specifically you, then I I I see it as less likely to be displaced. But if they're just coming to you for information, I think that I would probably rather have AI create a podcast that's like, I know everything about you and your personal financial situation.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna go listen to every interview that Tony Robbins has ever done or every interview that Ben Carlson or or pick any financial person. And I'm gonna create the combo of the book they just wrote, all the interviews they've done, and personalize it all to give you the, like, what is the Tony Robbins financial advice for Chris? I don't know. It seems for a lot of people gonna be more compelling than listening to an interview of which maybe 30% isn't that interesting. It's like so if you're listening for entertainment, it's hard for AI to necessarily replace that.
Speaker 2:If you're listening because you have a relationship with a host or with a show, it's gonna be hard to replace that. If you're truly just listening for information, you know, like like, if you look at a lot of blogs, look at NerdWallet. I I don't think most people go to NerdWallet because they value the perspective of NerdWallet. They just know they've aggregated a bunch of financial information. I don't know if I'll ever go to that.
Speaker 2:You know? I don't know I don't know if I'll ever need to go to that website again if tools have access to all of it.
Speaker 1:So in the NerdWallet case, more of a commodity piece of content that is something AI can slurp up and and deliver answers to. News in general. Right? If a couple guys are on a podcast talking about news, and let's say their opinions aren't that unique. Right?
Speaker 1:They're just reading the news of the day. That's the type of business that's more likely to get a big dent in it. Totally.
Speaker 2:But there was a show on Showtime called The Circus, and it was all about politics in
Speaker 1:The United States. One of my favorite all time shows.
Speaker 2:And, like, I care about those specific people's perspectives. Right? Like, I think about this right now with all the craziness going on in the world today. We're not gonna make this a political show. But with everything that's going on right now, sometimes I care less about what's happening and more about what specific peoples whose perspectives I trust think is happening and where it's going.
Speaker 2:And so AI might get good at saying, hey. We know exactly the kind of perspective you want. We've kind of read everything on the Internet, and we'll give you, you know, the version you want. Maybe that'll happen. But there's still a human component of, I wanna know what Mark McKinnon says about this thing.
Speaker 2:You know? Like, so I think that kind of content is interesting. But I would imagine that most people, even people that go to NerdWallet, if someone is going to go from one article on NerdWallet to another article on NerdWallet, they're more likely to get there by going back to Google than to clicking through the website. They don't go to NerdWallet because they wanna read NerdWallet. They go to NerdWallet because Google sent them to it there.
Speaker 2:And so if you don't have a relationship with your audience such that it's like, oh, I wanna read x person's column, or I wanna hear what they're saying, I think it's gonna be hard to break through anything. Which means it's gonna be inherently very hard to build an audience. Because if you don't already have an audience, like, it's gonna be hard for people to want to listen to you. So I think it's great for people who have an audience, because those people kind of have relationship and trust their opinions. But in the future, I think it's gonna be way harder.
Speaker 2:We'll have to figure out new models, new ways to do things, because I just have to assume that there is some reasonable outcome that no one's listening to podcasts at the same clip, and they cannot generate the same, you know, lifestyle and revenue as a business as they do today in, I don't know, two years.
Speaker 1:What are the top couple ways you're doing that?
Speaker 2:I have been recording everything that I say for the last two weeks in person just to kind of see what that does, and it's fascinating.
Speaker 1:And by recording everything, can you just give examples? Like
Speaker 2:Imagine if you had a microphone on your wrist, it just recorded everything you said or did or heard 20
Speaker 1:Like, right right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's right here.
Speaker 1:It's okay with me. I don't mind.
Speaker 2:So, like, here's a crazy idea. What if I record everything I'm saying every day? What if I record everything I'm writing every day? What if I record all my browser history? What if I record everything I type on my computer?
Speaker 2:You know, what if I record every photo I take, every health diagnostic I take? What if I just record everything? Which I think is a direction we're going, and most people are not quite there, but I feel like I am doing a lot of these things. And what if what's interesting is someone has a relationship enough with me that they want my opinion? I don't even have to write the opinion because something can infer the opinion because it's listened to me talk all day.
Speaker 2:It's seen the text I send my friends. It's, you know, heard all of these things, and they could tie that into the LLM they're using daily, Claude, you know, Chad GPT, whatever it is, and know that it's like, hey. What would Chris think about this? And they can have a relationship with me that isn't listening to me talk for a week. It's just that I sit in their LLM as a perspective they can tap for anything in life because the thing they're tapping both has access to everything I've ever said, but in some crazy way that has to be deduped for privacy, etcetera, has access to everything I do.
Speaker 2:And so I might have a conversation with a friend of mine about what I think about OpenClaw or something. And within an hour, someone is asking their LLM, like, should I use OpenClaw? And it already knows my perspective on the latest release because I had a conversation with it that was recorded, that was indexed with that was now made available through this thing. And so I could be at drinks with a friend talking about a topic, and someone thirty minutes later could ask their LLM that question. And because they've subscribed, because they care about my opinion, the answer comes and is derived from a conversation I had with a friend thirty minutes before.
Speaker 1:Gosh. I gotta think that this is that feature of just the twenty four seven recording or however often you're talking. It's only audio at this point. Right? Yep.
Speaker 1:That that's gotta be core to what OpenAI is working on for their new device.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be a strange world where the whole idea of, like, consent of recording is kind of out the window if everyone's recording. And, like, everyone's camera is on their their glasses. It's like, at some point, everything is just being recorded everywhere, and there's just way too much content. And I don't know. I know it's gonna be an interesting world.
Speaker 1:Well, when you think about it, it's the initial ultimate prompt in that you suddenly have the giant input of all your conversation all day, and then you could yield a better answer on whatever to dos or what to do with your business or anything. Right? What to do with your marriage, what to do with relaxing, and then perhaps the future then is if you record everything with video. This is how Twitch was born. I remember cofounder Justin walked around San Francisco with a video camera on his head filming, streaming everything he did.
Speaker 1:He called it Justin TV. And what viewers liked the most was watching him play video games, and Justin TV became Twitch. Maybe that's the next ultimate prompt. Your audio version that you gave in that video.
Speaker 2:Imagine you're in a relationship, and your relationship is is in some sort of rocky state. You're in a like, so one option is you go to therapy and your the therapist is asking you questions like, hey, tell me about how you guys interact. Well, wouldn't it be great if you could just say, here's every conversation we've had for the last seven years. What are we doing wrong? Right.
Speaker 2:Like, I I would have to assume so I, you know, I I took this test at deeppersonality.app. I have no affiliation with this company. And it basically comes up with, a psychological profile and personality test. It takes, forty five minutes. My wife took the same thing, and then it takes the two and puts them together and kind of talks all about where your problems are probably coming, what the most common things you'd fight about are, how to resolve those things, and it's wildly accurate.
Speaker 2:Like, scary level of accuracy. I don't know. I just think that in the future, all of the material is sourced. If you want it to be. Every text, every email, every conversation, every picture, every you know, all your location.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 2:And so I think that people are scared right now about what that looks like, and I'm kind of leaning into it. And I'm like, well, let's let's try to find out what I can do with it. Let's record everything. Let's record it all and play around with what value could it add. Because I think that's where we're headed, and I'd love to be on the forefront of what that looks like.
Speaker 1:So if on your audio side, you gave great examples there of therapy and marriage counseling and anything else, those are the future prompts. You kept saying the person would go to an LLM and find this, which kinda surprised me. I thought you were gonna say the person would come to you in some direct way to find the information.
Speaker 2:I think the future of the Internet is that everyone interfaces in with one one place. And so I don't think you're ever gonna go to your email. I don't think you're ever gonna go to your bank. Like, I think that in the future, there is an interface. And that interface probably looks something like an LLM today.
Speaker 2:It could be that Apple buys Anthropic and turns Siri into this thing. I don't know. But OpenClaw was like a similar moment. It's like, have a way that you say, hey. How much money is in my bank account?
Speaker 2:Right now, it's crazy that I need to go to my bank, log in, and look. Why can't I just ask that question? So I think that it'll be kind of just standard requirements for all properties and and services to have some way for tools to engage with them. The word LLM is kind of not the right answer. Right?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. The model so if you look at OpenCLOA, like, OpenCLOA is the thing I communicate with. It happens to use LLMs to process the conversations. But I don't I feel like I'm talking to my, agent. I don't feel like I'm talking to Claude or OpenAI, even though those are the models that power it.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, has its own memory and and all that kind of stuff. So my answer is I think people will interface in ways that we don't know on a device, and that interface will connect with all the things. Like, we're going from a world where you you got your first iPhone and there was no App Store, to now we have a thousand apps, to now we just have one.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And maybe there's a messaging app, that's it. Maybe there's just a button and you talk to it, like Her, you know, like if anyone's seen the movie. And in that world, I just think all of the tools on the Internet and all of the services are going to need to interface in a different way. That that isn't going to a website. The only reason that I use any app on my phone other than I would say for things like entertainment maybe, and games, and those kinds of things.
Speaker 2:It's like for anything where I'm reading content, I I don't see why I would ever want another interface. Like, why would I wanna go to pick your newspaper's website of choice, or scroll Twitter, if I could get all of that same information in one place? If I could just say, show me the articles and posts that are interesting to me.
Speaker 1:Who are the top leading candidates that would be that interface? Is it is it ChatGPT and Gemini, or is it is it Siri, Alexa? Is it
Speaker 2:I think that if Apple could ship consumer products like that, they've got probably the best opportunity in The US, because I think there's just more iPhones. Mhmm. I think Google probably has the best opportunity because they can ship product, and they have all the Android phones. In a world where design matters less because there's one app, it almost feels like a world where I could actually switch to, you know, an Android phone and not feel like I'm giving up as much.
Speaker 1:Interestingly, you gave two examples where hardware is involved in some
Speaker 2:I think hardware yeah. I think I think OpenAI and and Anthropical have to just, like, ship a device. So I think it's more likely that OpenAI ships a phone or a device that kind of attempts to do this. So does Apple buy one of them? I don't know.
Speaker 1:OpenAI bought Johnny Ives company, and they're actively working on a device. Yeah. You know, that's kinda widely known. So those would be the top three probably in order of how you gave it, which would be Apple because they're the best at weaving in software into hardware. Android, Google, number two, and then OpenAI's wildcard because they're you know, they haven't shipped a hardware device before.
Speaker 1:Maybe Amazon's number four because they've got the Alexa experience.
Speaker 2:Look. I think Amazon, I think Facebook, or Meta, they all have hardware divisions. Right? Facebook's gotten the glasses. Like, it wouldn't.
Speaker 2:If anyone, let's say, does not think that there is a team at Meta building a device that would do this, like Mhmm. I think that's crazy.
Speaker 1:Is there anyone missing from that list?
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah. I think that there's probably a 50% chance that the top thing that falls into this category in the future is something we've never seen or a company that we're not thinking of. So, like, if you just look at history, you know, back in the day, you said, what what's the future of the Internet? And it's like, what's Yahoo? It's, you know, Geocities, and, like, we're wrong.
Speaker 1:Are you using any tool to create audio or video for that matter of your type of content that's moved the needle?
Speaker 2:So I I ran an experiment the other day where I wrote an ad read. I wrote the ad read myself. And instead of recording myself reading it, I took every ad read I've read for the last six months, put it into an Eleven Labs model. So its entire training database was just Chris reading ads. So its inflection, its tone should be perfect, because it's me reading ads.
Speaker 2:And it had all of the words that were also associated with those same brands, Element and Viore, and things that maybe, you know, might get mispronounced. The audio output of the ad was virtually indistinguishable from me. I played it for my wife. I played two. And I was like, which one was the AI?
Speaker 2:And and she was not confident. I would say, I think she got it right, but I she was not certain.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wasn't a slam dunk.
Speaker 2:Now, my pod podcast happens to be video. So I thought, well, this isn't gonna work unless I can also create the video version of it. So what does that look like? And best I could tell the best video model for something like this is, hey, Jen. So I used the free model, which is one model behind the paid model, and it was not good.
Speaker 2:It wasn't production level like the audio was.
Speaker 1:It is fascinating.
Speaker 2:It actually was the first time that I was like, oh, it'd be really fun to release an audio podcast where I don't say anything. Like, I just do it all using AI. But what would I put on video? I need like some avatar or something to make it interesting, or just, okay, this one's not gonna go on YouTube. You know, that also could work.
Speaker 2:But it was good enough that I think if the video stuff were there, you know, I I've been in a couple situations where I've been traveling, and some brand reached out to me and said, hey, we had a last minute change. We're changing the offer. I need you to update the ad. And I'm like, oh, god. This is a real pain.
Speaker 2:Like, what do Mhmm. How do I do this? And in an audio world, pre doing video, you know, I could just bring a microphone, and and it would be fine. If that world still existed, if I had no video on the podcast, and I needed to change the, like, oh, it's not two months free, it's three months free, a 100%. This would be a simple solution for that.
Speaker 2:But the fact that I have video makes it a little challenging today, but I don't know. In two months, will it? Maybe not.
Speaker 1:So it would seem like every content creation medium is getting disrupted by AI. So with text, for instance, you've suddenly got ChatGPT, you know, launches, and you can create endless amounts of text in faster time. With images, you've got mid journey to create whatever you want. Music, you've got Suno. With voice and audiobooks, you can now use Eleven Labs.
Speaker 1:What's the analog in podcasts?
Speaker 2:I think the analog in podcast is just text meets text of speech. So, like
Speaker 1:K.
Speaker 2:I think much of podcasting is scripted. And I've got a great example here. So my my brother-in-law was trying to take some schemas that he had hand drawn for oil and gas pipes and turn them into an image. And he was drawing them out on a piece of paper, and there were it was a medium complicated kind of layout. He And would take it and say, turn this into an image, and it didn't work.
Speaker 2:Like, it just kept failing. And funny enough, was like, how do I get this going? Like, is it I feel like this should be possible. And I was like, oh, I don't know the answer. So I just asked an LLM.
Speaker 2:And I was like, hey. My brother-in-law is taking these hand drawn pictures and trying to turn into images, and it's failing. What should he do?
Speaker 1:Wait. Did you know the answer before you did that, or you just said
Speaker 2:I I this is one challenge with AI. Like, didn't even think about the answer. I think if it were my own problem, maybe I would be more interested and, like, intellectually curious enough to try to think about it.
Speaker 1:It was transactional. You wanted to get get him a quick answer.
Speaker 2:But the answer was you should analyze the image and turn it into a schema that you can ask an image generation tool to create. And so where it was getting mixed up was like, oh, is this pipe supposed to really be slightly off? Like, is it no. He's hand drawing it. That's why it looks like it's not perfectly parallel.
Speaker 2:But if you could identify, oh, we need these three things running horizontally, these three things running on a grid vertically. They should all be spaced out this much. There should be like, if you turned it into a schema and then said, now take the schema and generate an image, then he would have gotten a perfect image. And and then so I suggested he do that. And so similarly, Suno might make great music, but some model needs to come up with the lyrics.
Speaker 2:Some you know? So I think that they're all outputs of similar models. And so Eleven Labs is a completely useless tool if you don't have words to turn into the speech. Now I think 11 is fantastic. I think the quality of what they're doing is amazing, but it's really good at text to speech, which means you need the text.
Speaker 2:And so all of these are kind of layers that sit on top of the base models creating text. And so podcasting is just the same as an audiobook, except that maybe it's given instructions to sound more casual, or maybe it needs to do some real time researching to respond to things because it's not perfectly scripted. But I think that if you went to ChattypuT five four or you went to Opus four six, and you said, come up with a scripted narrative that sounds just like the Joe Rogan show or, like, whatever podcast you want, and then went to eleven Labs and said, come up with voices for these two people, and you turned it into that. It would sound like a podcast.
Speaker 1:So is the commonality in all those? I hadn't thought of it this way. Each one is a text prompt to start.
Speaker 2:Yes. I mean, in my brother's example, you could prompt with a picture and get a picture. So in that concept and I would say, like, Gemini's Nano Banana is probably the best there. Maybe you could just prompt a picture, and it would generate another picture. But at the end of the day, you the best way to do it is to convert the picture to text, and then convert the text back into a picture.
Speaker 2:Right. And so text is the ultimate connector. Now, WhisperFlow, I use all the time. Right? But that's just taking spoken word, turning into text.
Speaker 2:So even when you're in your car, if you have a Tesla and you turn on Grok and you're just talking to it, I'm 99% sure what's actually happening is that it's just getting converted to speech, and then it's real time using a real time voice API to come back to you. And it's doing it very fast. But ultimately, the kind of base connecting layer is text.
Speaker 1:But in terms of actual new brands that are getting created, is NotebookLM the main one? You know, it is a podcast creating tool. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think it's probably the only one I know of that out of the box does that with no extra work.
Speaker 1:Now last summer, when I asked you which models you're using the most, you said this is July 2025. You said ChatGPT 95% of the time, Gemini 5%, Grok x AI almost zero. Those are the three you mentioned. I'm just curious. What's the update?
Speaker 2:I would say Anthropic 98%. And if I'm not using Anthropic models, if I'm not using Claude, it's probably only because I don't want to run out of my quotas. Like, like, I'm on the Anthropic $200 a month plan, and there are weeks where I'm like, am I gonna hit a 100% of my usage before the end? And so sometimes I'll find myself using ChatGPT or Gemini solely because I'm like, you know what? This task doesn't really need, you know, the best, and I don't want it to hit my quota on the other platforms.
Speaker 2:But I think if, you know, at present today, you know, March 12, I would say I'm using mostly Anthropic. I think that when it comes to content and when it comes to writing software, Anthropic up until maybe Codex is five four was just like the better model. But I think that the Opus model when it comes to writing and sounding like a human and having opinion and well, like, think it's just the best model for that. And so if you're trying to write things or be creative or come up with titles and thumbnails and that kind of stuff, I found that I like its output better. It would not surprise me if in two weeks, someone else has a better model and I've switched completely to something else.
Speaker 2:Like I think Codex with five four is making a strong case of replacing some of what I'm doing with Cloud Code. So it wouldn't surprise me if Codex is that, and I switch entirely to OpenAI models, and I cancel my Cloud subscription. I think that what models I choose and how I do things would wildly change if these AI companies stop subsidizing their plans.
Speaker 1:What would you build using AI right now if you were starting something new?
Speaker 2:There are a lot of unique softwares that don't exist well. So I was thinking about this in the world of podcasting. I'm like, oh, there's not a great podcast analytics tool. Right? That does grabs the stuff from Apple, grabs stuff from Spotify, grabs stuff from everywhere.
Speaker 2:It kinda puts it all together in a nice place. There's a there there's a couple, but there aren't a lot, and they're expensive. I could build that. And it's like, but in three weeks, could anyone just go in and in one command be like, build me this? It's like, why would anyone like, the SaaS model, you know, of go build a piece of software and charge everybody some monthly subscription feels useless if everyone can just go in one prompt, ask their tool to go build whatever they need.
Speaker 2:Right? If you're like, oh, I need a Notion replacement, and you could just type that, and it just gets built. So I think there's this interesting place where I see so many ways to build tools that I know people are interested in, and most people have not realized how easy it is to build their own tools. And so in that middle ground, it's compelling. But is it three weeks before people who are not as technical as I am realize that they could just go build these tools themselves?
Speaker 2:And I will say, right now, it's both very easy and still not ready for everyone. But I don't know. It's not gonna be that far. I asked Claude to do something for me, and they just, like, completely built a website that was interactive that I could just send to someone to do something. I didn't even know it could do that, and it just did.
Speaker 2:So it's I don't think we're that far.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about OpenClaw.
Speaker 2:OpenClaw effectively combines the ability to run software on a computer with the ability to communicate with that software through an LLM on whatever medium you want? Slack, iMessage, all that kind of stuff. Does it do things that kind of seemed like impossible for something to happen in the past? Yeah. It definitely does.
Speaker 2:But since then, I've seen a handful of features get launched by existing LLMs that replace quite a bit of the need for some of the basic use cases of OpenCLO. So Claude Cowork now does scheduled tasks. So you can say, hey. Do this thing every day at 3PM. Claude can connect to your inbox.
Speaker 2:Claude can search the Internet. Claude Cowork now can run things on a schedule. So, like, do you even need OpenClaw?
Speaker 1:So it seemed though like you got a glimpse into the future as a power user of this stuff, and that that that changed your thinking. Is this am I in the right ballpark? Change your thinking about how we're going to use a twenty four seven assistant.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I think that was the whole conversation we had earlier, which is like the interface to the Internet will be some thing that looks like this.
Speaker 1:But how is that different than just an agent today and just ChatGPT? Like, how
Speaker 2:ChatGPT ChatGPT doesn't have the ability to log into my bank account and tell me how much money I have.
Speaker 1:Gotcha. But do you just think that's gonna head that way with ChatGPT once you allow it to do that? And soon there's just gonna be Yep. Whether it's Claude or ChatGPT, it's gonna be asking you for, you know, connect to your bank.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And connect to your email, and that'll be the way we get this. What do you even call this? Just having a 247 assistant?
Speaker 2:I don't think it's an assistant. I think it's more I don't know the right name for it. Right? Like Siri
Speaker 1:Is it a twenty four seven you? Is it like a digital phone?
Speaker 2:Not me. Okay. And 247 almost like, of course, do we call the Internet the 247 Internet? No. Like, it's just it's I don't think that, you know, it's it's like a different way to search everything.
Speaker 2:Right now, they're being very careful. I think I think this is the difference between OpenClaw and, like, Anthropic was OpenClaw, there were millions of skills. You could add anything you want, and then people put malware in them, and there's all kinds of problems. And Anthropic has like a very limited list of things that you can kind of connect and interface with in their kind of directory. But I think over time, that just gets built out more and more and more.
Speaker 2:And it's like, oh, banks will wanna be added to it, or Plaid gets into that space. And you just start adding all these things. It's like, well, now it has access to your financials. It has access to your email. It has access to your text.
Speaker 2:And you could just kind of have it be the way you interface with the world in a nonhuman way. Right? Gotcha. You're gonna you're not gonna use it in person, though maybe you're gonna use it to record everything.
Speaker 1:In July, I asked you about the impact that AI is gonna have on kids' college and jobs. And your answer was, I feel like 80% certain that's gonna wildly impact everything, but 20 chance that it's gonna look exactly the same as things look today. Has that changed since last year?
Speaker 2:I'm definitely not less certain. I think the only thing holding me back from saying a much higher percentage is that I just don't know what it will look like. It seems almost impossible to imagine a world where education doesn't evolve. I I was talking to someone about this yesterday, and they were like, gosh, the first version of online education was people would go online, watch the videos. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, that would happen. And we're like, oh, the college is what you come to school to get educated, and that's where the learning happens. I wonder if something shifts, and now you're doing all the learning on your own, and you come to school to do the other stuff, to engage with people, play sports, you know, have conversations, have debates, that kind of stuff. But what if all of the classroom instruction just lives in some adaptive app that's better at teaching people because it can teach in lots of different ways? And then you go to school for, you know, q and a, office hours, recess, lunch.
Speaker 2:I I don't know. I homework, it's like you could literally take a picture of the test that I took in school and say, like, answer all these math problems and show the work. And it would just, you know, spit out the answers.
Speaker 1:What can go right in an AI world that's got you excited?
Speaker 2:I think we just don't have to do a lot of the work that's not fun. But you don't enjoy going to the grocery store. Okay. Have some tool. Go order your groceries and meal plan for you.
Speaker 2:Move money. It allows us to kind of have more free time to do things that we're excited about is my hope.
Speaker 1:How do you think AI can replace your
Speaker 2:job or role? Yeah. Mean, I think that a lot of, at least what I specifically do, it's like I do a lot of research. AI is pretty good at research. I share my opinions.
Speaker 2:Well, doesn't have a personality opinion. I think the the core thing that's gonna be hard to replace is if you have people that have come to trust your opinion, AI has a different opinion. So if people want my opinion, then it's gonna be hard to get that from But if someone doesn't have a relationship with me yet, you could probably replace everything I do with AI.
Speaker 1:If AI does a lot of the work in life, like your work, and you had endless time, what would you do with all your newfound time?
Speaker 2:I mean, right now, I kinda feel like I'm fortunate in that I have a podcast about optimizing my life, and I get to talk about all the stuff I'm doing. And so, like, I the podcast is me talking about the stuff I enjoy spending my time on, which is all of this. So in a way, right now, if I had unlimited time, I'd probably be doing 90% of what I'm doing right now. And maybe if the podcast were gone, I wouldn't share it as much with more people, but I'd probably be doing the same stuff.
Speaker 1:Will you create an avatar for your family, friends, and business, so that those close to you can have conversations with you, both while you're alive and when you've passed away?
Speaker 2:I'll leave it to my kids if they wanna take all the recordings of everything I've said and done and all my emails and texts and turn it into an avatar, go for it. You don't want to? That's fine.
Speaker 1:Alright. Thanks for the time today, Chris.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thank you.
Speaker 1:And here's part two, where we break down how to build a great podcast plus some earlier thoughts on AI. Flywheels. Can you describe the flywheel for
Speaker 2:Yes. The origin of the podcast podcast is is probably probably my my curiosity. So I start with something that I'm really interested in. And I'm fortunate that it turns out other people are interested in some of those things. So I will take a topic, an idea, and I will do a bunch of research, decide whether I can really become the master of this topic or I need to go seek out someone.
Speaker 2:And depending on that decision, I find a guest or I find myself and then go immensely deep on research. And if it's a guest, might listen to at early days, every single thing that guest has ever produced and read everything, read the books, gone as deep as I can. And then if it's myself, I'm just going really, really deep myself trying to understand everything there is about that that topic. And then I'll go record that and release it to an audience who now listens and says, wow, that really inspired me. I have other questions.
Speaker 2:They'll send me other questions of, wow, now that you've gone so deep on x, it's made me wonder how should I be doing y? And then I see that. I'm like, oh, I don't know the answer to that question. I need to go find an answer. I need to go find a person.
Speaker 2:And so I think that's kind of a flywheel where there's probably an offshoot of that where someone learns that thing and goes and shares it with another friend who comes in, listens, gets excited about that topic, and then
Speaker 1:they themselves send me an email or
Speaker 2:a post and ask a question, and then it just kind of spirals into a source of unlimited ideas for what I can go deep on and be curious about.
Speaker 1:Is the curiosity always yours, or are you thinking this is something a lot of folks are gonna be curious about?
Speaker 2:I do not decide on anything about the content based on anything other than whether I'm interested in the topic. Mhmm. Because I find that if you are creating content and you're not interested, people can tell that. And it's gonna feel like such a slog and such a job that it's just not worth. You know, you you can't last as long as you need to.
Speaker 1:That's what Tim said when
Speaker 2:you Yeah.
Speaker 1:Interviewed him.
Speaker 2:You've gotta love it. And if you don't love it, it's bad. And so if you if you're doing something because you're like, oh, people are really curious about this. I'm not, but they are. Right.
Speaker 2:You're just that whole interview or that whole research. You're gonna be like, am I doing this? Like, I don't even care.
Speaker 1:So if the flywheel was o'clock, 12:00 is following your curiosity, next, call it 03:00, 3PM is deep research. Yeah. You figure it out. Maybe you do that yourself. Maybe find an expert on it.
Speaker 1:If you think someone else knows more, then you interview them on the podcast. You so you share it. You create content.
Speaker 2:I think the
Speaker 1:06:00 is that other people are now curious themselves. Yep. Like they've now
Speaker 2:so in many cases, hear people say, oh, I I came to your podcast because I was really interested in one of the kind of major areas. So we're if we're upgrading life, money, travel, someone's like, was really excited about travel. So I came here because a friend told me to. And then you
Speaker 1:did an episode on gut health, And I didn't even think about that, but now I'm really curious about that. So it's like, I'm curious, I do research, I share
Speaker 2:it, someone else is curious. And that sparks this thing that kind of goes back to childhood days where you're like, oh, I'm curious about a thing. And now that I'm so curious, have all these questions and it's made me think about other areas of my life. And I don't know a lot about gut health, but maybe have you ever done an episode on sleep? You know,
Speaker 1:and they'll send an email. Now sometimes the answer is yes, go back to episode, you know, whatever. I did an episode on sleep. But a lot of
Speaker 2:times the answer is no, but now you've got
Speaker 1:me wondering about that thing. And so actually gut health was probably the inverse. Someone probably sent
Speaker 2:me an email and said, oh, sleep, I haven't optimized my gut health, sleep is so great. What do you think about that? I'm like, I don't know the answer. I gotta go find out the answer because I'm so naturally curious myself.
Speaker 1:And I know it's a kinda nerdy diving in, but is it always is curiosity the best word versus problem? Origin story of of the pizzas was a problem. Right?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:So curious about pizza and sharing. You were solving a problem. So give me maybe one concrete example where it's just pure curiosity.
Speaker 2:I think the majority of the topics result from maybe it's curiosity around a problem. So I've recently been doing a series where they're about each major credit card issuer. So I did one on Citibank. It's like all the Citibank credit cards. Now the problem is I really like to dial in and optimize my, you know, all my points.
Speaker 2:And I'd never really had a Citibank credit card.
Speaker 1:And I was like, am I missing out? So I had this problem of
Speaker 2:want to make sure that I'm not missing out. But also I was just curious, like, what do I know about Citi? And yes, you know, on the surface level, you might know, oh, they've got some American cards. But until you go and read everything you can possibly read about every card, read all the terms, all the benefits, all the perks, all the everything, go into all the forums. Now I'm like, I feel like a mastery.
Speaker 2:I have mastery as much as you could not actually being a cardholder of Citi. And so then I actually opened a Citi card, I opened two Citi cards so that I could get deeper before producing the episode. So in a way it was a problem, but I was curious about the solution. But gut health, I never had a problem. You know, a lot of the reasons people explore gut health is they're like, oh, I'm bloated or I'm constipated or, you know, I just I feel weird when I eat.
Speaker 2:I didn't have any problems. I was just thinking, gosh, I would love to be healthier. I'd love to live longer. I've got two young kids. I want to be around as long as possible.
Speaker 2:If there's anything I could be doing in the realm of gut health, I would like to do more, but there was no problem. There was nothing that led me to that other than I knew it was an area of health that I didn't know anything about, and I wanted to learn more.
Speaker 1:All the hacks, mainly in audio podcasts. I know you share it with video on YouTube, but I mean, it's succeeded as an audio podcast. Fair enough to say?
Speaker 2:A 100 we didn't have video. I quit my job to do this full time before we'd released the video. I'd always recorded it from the beginning, but I'd never actually done anything with it because the production and and effort of video is just greater than audio. So if you wanna release this as videos, it'd be more work. And I just didn't know if it was gonna be worth that work early on.
Speaker 1:Still possible today? Audio only?
Speaker 2:I mean, we get 98% of our downloads on audio. So I would say yes.
Speaker 1:It's not just that you started early, you feel like it's still you start from scratch today, audio only if you weren't a video expert, you can make this succeed.
Speaker 2:A 100%. I I think the audio platform is still very, very
Speaker 1:It's a selfish question because I'm trying to figure out whether
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. I think that
Speaker 1:with audio only.
Speaker 2:I think that it ultimately comes down to where your audience is and the type of content you're creating and what platform you wanna create for to create success in YouTube. So we were just talking about Ramit, and Ramit has a podcast, and he has puts it out on YouTube. And then he creates these and and for anyone not familiar, Ramit Sethi has a a big franchise called I will teach you to be rich, a book called money for couples, and the name of the podcast is also that. And so he has an audio podcast that's done really well. But on YouTube, he was releasing the audio podcast.
Speaker 2:And compared to many people, his audio podcast on YouTube has done much better than most people's audio podcast on YouTube. But he also started creating videos natively for YouTube, thinking, okay, what does a YouTube audience want? What's a topic? And what YouTube doesn't seem to want as much is two people sitting down having a long form, you know, one, two hour conversation, but something that's natively creative for YouTube. Those videos on YouTube do much better than the podcast videos on YouTube.
Speaker 2:Example. He'll do one on, like, should you rent or buy? And so his podcast will be interviewing couples about their finances. That'll be should you rent or buy? So if I were making a YouTube video, one would be if I wanted to talk to people about how to access a lounge at the airport when traveling, I would want more visuals.
Speaker 2:I would wanna be like, this is one. This is two. This is three. But if I were doing it for a podcast, it might be more interesting to do it with someone and talk about it and inject these stories. But someone on YouTube didn't come there because they know who I am.
Speaker 2:They came there because they probably searched lounge access, and they're like, I want this thing. I don't know you. I don't wanna hear a conversation. I don't wanna hear you build rapport with a person yet because I didn't come here to know you, and they're they're visually watching it. Like, offense, but, like, watching two people sit here is not the most exciting thing.
Speaker 2:And if you watch Ramit's videos that he does natively for YouTube, you'll see that there are lot of visuals, lot of graphs and charts and and b roll and that kind of stuff. Whereas a podcast like this will be less of that. The other challenge is YouTube does not, at least in my experience, like someone who makes content where each piece of content doesn't necessarily appeal to the person who sought out the previous piece of content. So I did this one episode on something related to investing. And then the next week, I did an episode on parenting.
Speaker 2:And I was looking through the data, and it was like the video they most suggested to watch next after the parenting episode was about the S and P 500. And I was like, I get it. You understand that my content can be about finance and parenting. So you're recommending finance content to someone who just watched parenting content because they're kind of all from the same creator. But the person that searched YouTube for parenting is not interested necessarily in watching finance content next.
Speaker 2:They're probably trying to solve a parenting problem. And so if you cover one niche or one vertical very deeply, I imagine YouTube can also be helpful. But if I cover so many verticals, it's gonna be way less helpful.
Speaker 1:Interesting. The algorithm's recommending it in that case. And the people who work
Speaker 2:at YouTube are smart enough to understand this. And so that will be
Speaker 1:solved at some point where it's like, we know that you create three
Speaker 2:types of content. When someone's done with one, we'll show people other content that's relevant to that one. But right now, it doesn't seem to do that.
Speaker 1:Sequencing media. You did podcast first. Right? Yep. Newsletter second?
Speaker 2:I had a newsletter, and I've kind of started it, and then I've tried different versions of it. I know I launched the podcast on Substack to an audience of people that I'd built up a list over the years doing different things. But the consistent cadence of a newsletter was after the podcast. Gotcha.
Speaker 1:Is, you know, Tim Ferriss started blog and book first and a podcast. Jay Klaus, who we're hanging out with right here in Boise, did a newsletter first, then a podcast. Does it matter? How do you think about the sequence of media?
Speaker 2:I think that the advantage of a newsletter for any creator in any vertical is that you actually have a way to communicate with your audience that you own. When you're on YouTube, you have subscribers. We don't own those subscribers. YouTube owns those subscribers. When you have a podcast, you don't even know who they are.
Speaker 2:You you, like if you really get the data from your host, you will know their IP address, which may be masked by, like, an Apple virtual relay. So, like, what do you actually know about the person who's listening? Maybe you get some, like, demographic data from Apple or Spotify and that kind of stuff, but that's it. When you have a newsletter, you have their email. Like, it doesn't matter if you use Kit or you use Beehive or you use Mailchimp.
Speaker 2:You can move that between places because you have the person. Every other platform that I know, like if you have a million people on Instagram, you can't port those million people to TikTok without having to create videos saying, hey, come this thing. Yeah. I guess you could DM all those people and tell them to go switch to TikTok. But so I think newsletter has this special place where if you can find something of value that complements what you're doing on your any other media channel, having a newsletter gives you the ability to directly communicate with your audience that you can port with you in whatever future the world holds.
Speaker 1:So the sequence didn't matter in that case. It's the commonality of owning subscribers in a newsletter, which is the best way
Speaker 2:to Yes. And so I don't think the sequence matters. I think the sequence should always be the platform and media type that you are most natively drawn to that you love because you will probably create the best content on that platform. So if you love podcasting, then podcasting is a great first channel because you're giving yourself the greatest chance of succeeding by doing the thing that you love. And I've found every time I've tried to post on social, every time I've tried to like do YouTube, I have failed because it is really hard to do multiple things.
Speaker 2:So I'm not a huge fan of the repurposing content, and almost everyone I know that does it, they're like, I do it, but it doesn't really work. But I still do it. And so that's a bit of a weird one for me. It's like, I don't post anything on social or TikTok or Instagram or anything like that. Maybe like the one off picture of, you know, some vacation I'm on, but but nothing too great.
Speaker 2:And I've just found that if there's one medium that I I seem to be good at, let's just double down on that. There's plenty of audience there to build a business that sustains your life.
Speaker 1:Podcast content. So I love how you talk about you can do it for relationship building, you can do it just to have creating the best content ever. Can you do both? So one of my favorite pods is invest like the best, Patrick O'Shaughnessy. I'll be going to his conference in a few months.
Speaker 1:Third year straight, I think he's the best interviewer. I I would rank him number one of anyone I listen to at least. So can you do both? You were sort of in talking, I think, to Jay, you were talking about kinda one or the other, and you chose which I can appreciate, you chose not to go relationship building because you thought it sacrificed the content. But Patrick kinda does both.
Speaker 1:So how do you think about that?
Speaker 2:I think it depends on your network. Right? And and it depends on the same content.
Speaker 1:He was already doing the interviews
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And someone had come to him and said, you know, you're already talking to all these great people. Why don't you
Speaker 2:Record it and put it out as a podcast.
Speaker 1:And just kinda you're already great at asking questions. So but you chose the great content. I'm a content guy, so I I totally appreciate that.
Speaker 2:I think it was more my style. Right? I think Joe Rogan probably builds great relationships and has been very successful as a podcaster. And his style of content that he creates is like a casual meandering conversation that's very curious, going down all kinds of rabbit hole stuff. And my style of content is I want to go really deep and make it really tight and try to pack as much information in one place.
Speaker 2:So that's the content I want us to consume when I'm like, teach me a thing. You could teach me a thing in an hour, and you could teach me a thing in two hours. But if that extra hour is just spent, like, telling fun stories, I I don't want that, and I'm not naturally drawn to it. So for me, I find that it's hard to build a relationship if you're so tactical unless you're in person. And being in person is just such a bigger imposition.
Speaker 2:In this case, we're here in person. We're both in the same city. So actually recording in person versus remote is not that much of an imposition. However, if we were not in the same city, you would either have an expense to travel around, an expense of the time it takes you to get places, or you would need to wait until we were in the same city. Remote, you could be like, can you block, you know, sixty to ninety minutes for me?
Speaker 2:Great. That's so much easier. So for me, if the goal is to find the best people, make it the easiest possible thing for them to do and get the most information, a remote interview works great. But a remote interview is way harder to build a relationship, especially if you're so focused on tactical things. But at the end of the day, I didn't want to spend the cost to fly around the country and spend the time to do that, which would have allowed me to have both.
Speaker 2:If Patrick is already interviewing these people and he's already in person and building these relationships, he could just record it and produce it. And if that's the type of content he wants, great.
Speaker 1:But if the type of content he wants is, like, very, like, let's go through the
Speaker 2:10 k of, you know, public company CEOs, that's a conversation that they're probably not gonna be talking about, fun war stories and whatnot.
Speaker 1:Monetization. So I think you waited eighteen months before you had your first sponsor. I think that's what you mentioned to Tim.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We waited eighteen months out of
Speaker 1:pure necessity to be big enough to be 60 to a 100 episodes, he told you.
Speaker 2:Okay. So that's about two years for him.
Speaker 1:How do you think about that? Is it, you're waiting to figure out if it's worth it? Are you focused just purely on the content, making sure it's awesome?
Speaker 2:I think there's two things you need to wait for before you bring on partners. And the reason is when you sign a podcast deal with a brand, oftentimes, that brand is signing, you know, usually like a test with two or three episodes. But if that works, three to twelve months. And so if you sell a bunch of partners on producing a weekly podcast for the next twelve months, it doesn't look great to call them and say, hey. I decided I don't really like doing this.
Speaker 2:Or, hey. I really it's too much. I wanna do it every other week, And then you're canceling spots, and it's kinda messy. So one reason to wait is if you're just starting a podcast, you don't yet know whether this is a thing that you want to maintain for years. So do it long enough that you feel like I can keep up this cadence, and I love doing this and I can fit it into whatever's going on in my life.
Speaker 2:That's part one. Part two is wait to do this until it's big enough that sponsors care and that the revenue you'd make from sponsors means anything. And so there may be for a small podcast sponsors that will pay a small amount. And there's programmatic ad networks that they don't care how many downloads you have, you just get paid on every download. But that one might not be meaningful.
Speaker 2:If you're getting a 100 downloads, even a thousand downloads, if it's a 10 CPM, every ad is gonna pay you $10
Speaker 1:Is there a number of downloads that roughly feels like, okay, that's the
Speaker 2:So I think when I was getting started on the low end of podcast CPM or cost per thousand downloads might be 20 to $30. So let's say $25. Let's say it's a long form conversation where you have room for four ads. So now you're at every thousand downloads, you can make $100. Now if you go to a brand and you're like, hey, do you wanna do a test with me?
Speaker 2:We're gonna run three ads. It's gonna cost you $300. And you think about the time it would take for a professional at two organizations to agree on some terms for $300. And then you think, let's take a brand. So you have a Viore sweatshirt here.
Speaker 2:Okay. So the average article of clothing from Viore might be anywhere from 50 to $200. And so if they're gonna get a customer to spend, you know, $200, they're probably willing to spend, I don't know, 50 to $100 for that person. If the ad only costs and by the way, that $100 price was four ads. So they're gonna spend $25 on an ad.
Speaker 2:They probably practically don't expect to get any customers for one ad. And so I think you've got to get to a point that brands are spending thousands of dollars. So if it's three episodes in a trial for a thousand dollars, they need to spend $300 an episode, which is at a $33 CPM, like 10,000 downloads. Or, you know, we're kind of ballparking things here. But I think the 10,000 download mark for a consumer facing podcast probably makes sense.
Speaker 2:For a b two b facing podcast where the ticket price is so much higher, it might be totally different. I know people that have smaller podcasts than me and charge 3 to five times the CPM because they're focused on a business audience. And Patrick was is a good example of that. There's a lot of investing professionals who might buy a piece of software that cost $10,000. I'm guessing the average Viori order value is not $10,000.
Speaker 2:It's probably closer you know, it's probably much more reasonable for a consumer.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to AI. So let's say you had ten hours to rebuild all the hacks as a media company with only AI tools, no team. What would you do? Hour by hour on the fly.
Speaker 2:What's interesting is, you know, like, we I I didn't have a team when we built it. So, you know, I I guess AI would make it easier to go and do all of the things. But I think in a world where you now know what AI can do, I start to think about what what is the future of all of this content. Right? There's gonna be so much content.
Speaker 2:And if you want to understand what someone who creates a lot of content thinks, you could go listen to their podcast, or you could have an AI go consume every piece of content they've ever written. So imagine an author has written three or four books. So now you can throw all the books into some kind of model. You throw in all the content they've made. You throw in every podcast interview they've ever been on, and you go create you know, NoBook LM will create an interactive podcast where you're like, create a podcast about this creator exclusively tailored towards someone who is in my exact situation, and then let me interrupt it and ask questions as we're going.
Speaker 2:That seems almost better than listening to the other thing. Now if the purpose of the content is entertainment, well, maybe AI is not gonna be as good at entertainment for a while, but probably will be one day. If it's more curiosity driven, I get a lot of feedback from people saying, hey, I really love that you talked about this thing. I never would have thought of it. Well, AI is not gonna maybe maybe you would have to go and say, hey, come up with an idea that of something
Speaker 1:It's that I not gonna come up
Speaker 2:with it. Yeah. Without asking. So you've gotta get really good at prompting, but I think people are gonna get good. So practically, I'm not sure AI would have done that much to help in the early days.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, what is the name?
Speaker 1:I would have had a
Speaker 2:thought partner to brainstorm the name of the podcast or help design the the website and and all that kind of stuff. Help research topics for a show. I I early on, was like, god, what are 20 things I could record on? And that was a process. Now I could be like, are 20 ideas for a podcast on this topic?
Speaker 2:It would have helped, but I'm not sure that it would have changed that much other than I probably wouldn't have spent so much time interviewing authors about content that was so prolifically available on the Internet that AI could probably do the job I was doing. Not necessarily better, but better for the individual person listening.
Speaker 1:So I've heard you say you'd be willing to lose 10% of your revenue if you could save 50% of your time.
Speaker 2:For sure. Every day.
Speaker 1:Can is that something AI could help you with?
Speaker 2:Almost. I think that there are a lot of things that I do that AI could save time on. But the majority of the things I spend my time on are researching, and I've definitely leveraged AI for research. The problem is if you're someone who's, like, really, really into the nuance, I tried this for that credit card episode with Citi. I'm like, can you go research all the cards?
Speaker 2:Give me a table. Give me all this information. And I did that a little bit late in the process, and I noticed there were some errors. And so if that is what you care about like, if I was trying to come up with creative ideas and and record a podcast that was, like, bouncing business ideas off me and my cohost, great. AI could really help me explore those ideas.
Speaker 2:If I want to go collect information to prep for something. So I just did this interview on Tim Ferriss, and I like, oh, I really wanna
Speaker 1:I wanna have some This is Tim interviewing you.
Speaker 2:This is Tim interviewing me about a problem he has, which is he has a bunch of frequent flyer miles that he's never used.
Speaker 1:And one of the Is that the entire topic? I mean, the topic of the entire
Speaker 2:The premise of this two and a half hour interview is that Tim's got 15,000,000 points, and he hasn't used them and and wasn't sure how to use them. We went off on all kinds of other things, the optimizer's curse and, you know, all kinds of fun stories, but that was where we started. And I wanted to talk about the history of credit cards in case it came up. And I knew the rough history of the credit card, but not to the extent that if I said, hey, Chad GPT, go deep research the history of credit cards and give me a report. And then, hey, Gemini, do this, and hey, this.
Speaker 2:And then take all three reports and give them to one and say, hey, synthesize all these three reports into one report. I think I could get that answer faster with AI than I could without. So that kind of a, like, history lesson teach me a thing, super helpful. But, you know, it's not gonna replace the the conversation and the curiosity and the follow-up questions yet.
Speaker 1:So podcast as a medium, you took a chance on that somewhat still. I mean, it was during the pandemic, but you could have chosen other things. Right? Yep. To start off with.
Speaker 1:Do you think of AI as another medium in that way? In other words, as it comes along, obviously, you're giving all sorts of examples of how we leverage AI. But do you see it as another medium that you're gonna be delivering your content through?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, a couple of listeners put together like All The Hacks GPT or Chris GPT, which is basically like a website that indexed all the information I had, and you can query it and ask questions. With your approval? Or Both did it without approval. Neither tried to make a business of it.
Speaker 2:They were like, hey, I want you to show you this thing. I'm not gonna do anything without your permission. But they did not ask permission And to create I think, gosh, if you wanted to learn everything about a topic, do you wanna go listen to 230 episodes I've done? And in many cases, have a very poignant question. It's like, you know, I wanna launch and grow a podcast.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, there's probably like three or four episodes or interviews I've done about that. But if all of those are being indexed in one place and you can ask specific questions and skip over the stuff that's like, hey, haven't launched yet. So tell me everything that Chris or Chris and these five other people know about launching a podcast. But don't tell me about how to grow it because I haven't launched it yet. Like, tell I'm just at this stage.
Speaker 2:It's hard for me to imagine that that wouldn't be a better piece of content than an interview that covers all of these things from one person. And so I think there will be tools to consume content. Now are they tools that we own on our site? Does someone build a new podcast app that's just indexing creators' knowledge? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Like, a way, ChatGPT and NotebookLM are that. You could just say go query all this stuff and create a piece of content. So I could write 18 tricks to book award travel, but ChatGPT, you could just say, what are the all the tricks to do this? And you'll get an answer. It's pretty good.
Speaker 2:And so I think ChatGPT is a model for consuming content. Like, it is another medium right now. And, you know, I think ChatGPT was early enough that now we're kind of all saying that when we might be using Perplexity or Clawd or Grok or, you know, Meta's Llama Search. Like, there's lot of different versions, but I think that it is a medium to consume content. It's one I use every single day for asking tons of questions.
Speaker 2:But unlike Google, where Google is like, you know, we're using it all the time, but it's ultimately taking us to the content. ChatGPT is taking all the content and merging it together and creating a new piece of content. So they're both, like, the creator slash curator. But how often do you use ChatGPT and then go to the source? So, like, it is a content medium, and we all have to accept that.
Speaker 2:What'll be interesting is, like, how do some royalties work? Because it kinda sucks if thousands of creators create content. ChatGPT is the one that serves it all up and monetizes it. What incentive do I have to create the content they need to survive? Something someone's gonna have to solve that, and I hope that someone does, but I have no idea how.
Speaker 1:So I knew we just got a little time left. So a little speed round on the rest of these questions. What are you most worried about LLMs putting you out of business?
Speaker 2:I'm not as worried of like going out of business because I'm like, hopefully, we'll just adapt. But, you know, we monetize the podcast by working with brands we love, and I do host read ads for them. And in a way that TiVo allowed you to just skip all the ads, it will not be very difficult for some language model to identify all the ads and just skip them. And so someone will create a podcast player that just skips ads. Now as soon as they do that, every podcast host will probably create an RSS feed that checks is this app being used to block that thing.
Speaker 2:Like, it'll be a cat and mouse game. But at some point, that will just be a thing. And so I think most of those player apps know that they won't be successful if the source of the material all hates them. So they'll have to come up with some model like in Google. Google runs all these ads on the content.
Speaker 2:Premium people get to skip those ads and Google passes on that revenue. But none of them are near big enough right now to kind of create that market. So there hasn't been a mainstream ad skipping podcast app.
Speaker 1:Earlier today, were talking you touched upon this, but you're talking about the no more interview podcasts happening possibly because of AI and interrupting and asking it questions. I just wanted to put a little bit of a spotlight again on that. Can you just briefly give your thought on that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think many
Speaker 1:Is it that you're gonna do fewer interview? And I'm I'm not
Speaker 2:the only one. I think Tim Ferriss talked about this. Like, there's just someone goes on a book tour. We just heard from someone today that she went on 60 podcasts to launch her book. It's like, gosh.
Speaker 2:60 podcasts. Obviously, she was hoping you know, she said a great one was when someone asked one or two different questions. A great one. So she was stoked when one or two of the questions in a one hour interview ish, you know, could be longer, shorter, were different, which meant that all of the other questions were all kind of the same.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, I'm doing better. Yeah. Yeah. No. But so
Speaker 2:I think where interview podcasts are interesting is when they're not based on one thing. You know, the book launch interview podcast is, okay. We have one source material. And so this is not I don't have a book. You're not basing this on one piece of knowledge.
Speaker 2:And so that is interesting. The book launch one is not not interesting. It's just there's gonna be 50 versions of it. They're all gonna be somewhat similar. They'll all have their own slant from the host and the questions they're interested in.
Speaker 2:But I think that's less interesting. I've actually had a lot of fun interviewing authors, but it could be, like, two years after they write their book. You know, five years after they write their book. Because I'm not seeking out the, oh, your book's coming out. Now every now and then, there's a person that you're really interested in talking to.
Speaker 2:And because they're an author, they only wanna talk to at a certain time of year. But, you know, I've been talking to Ryan Holiday for a few years about coming on the podcast. And he's like, look, it'd be great if I could come on during this book launch. But we're not just gonna talk about that book. And I'm gonna try, unlike maybe other people who've had him on five times, I might try to span a lot of the things he's discussed in life.
Speaker 2:And how do we weave those together? And what's a common thread? What's so I'm gonna try to do something different. But at the end of the day, all those books can go into some AI agent and tool and and be synthesized. And so I think for that interview to be successful, it has to really come from a place of what is unique about my perspective on what that person is working on and writing that is gonna be different.
Speaker 2:Otherwise, why do it? And why would I need to do it if I could just go ask Chattypedia to synthesize every book he's written and just ask those questions from him and every episode he's recorded of his podcast. So I need to come up with a reason that that would be better.
Speaker 1:And we've both got kids around the same age. What's, what's the latest content you're creating with them?
Speaker 2:So I'm not creating
Speaker 1:With them or for them?
Speaker 2:Either way. Them, I think we have a fun history for at least probably two years of just using the like mini basement podcast studio to interview them on every birthday. And so, you know, everyone does something with their kids in some fashion, like that's our thing now. We interview the kids on their birthday, and we've we're gonna have this, you know, thing from probably two or three whenever they start talking and and can sit through an interview. For us, it was probably around two.
Speaker 2:We'll have this, like, interview with someone every year, and it'll be kind of a fun thing to put together maybe for their eighteenth birthday, thirteenth or whenever they start asking. So that's cool. That's something we're doing. As far as content I'm creating for them, gosh, I have no idea what the world will look like, you know, by the time they're actually consumers of this type of content. And so I don't think about them in the micro sense.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm gonna record a podcast. Let's think about the kids. I do think about I wanna create something that I'm proud of, and I I want them to see me doing something I love. And so I think about them in that perspective all the time.
Speaker 1:That's perfect. Because I was gonna ask you ten years from now, your kids ask what your podcast really meant to you.
Speaker 2:It was just a way to take something I love doing and help other people who maybe love it, but don't have the free time. Right? Like, I have the free time because I have a podcast to go spend twelve hours researching Citi cards. The average person that's like, oh, I love credit cards. I wanna open up a new one.
Speaker 2:Doesn't have twelve hours to think about Citi cards. I can give it to them in one hour. And so in a way, someone the other day was like, would you do if you weren't a podcaster? Was like, I kinda like teaching. Like, I don't know what I would teach though.
Speaker 2:The biggest problem is, like, you know, I've always thought, it'd fun to go be a college professor or a high school teacher at the the schools I went to, just like kind of nostalgic. But there's not one topic I would wanna teach, so it wouldn't make sense. But I like helping others, and I get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing other people solve problems and and have wins and improve their lives. And so if I can do what I love and share it with other people and save them time having a better experience in life, like, that is an awesome thing. I hope that my kids see that.
Speaker 1:How do you think AI is gonna impact our kids' college, jobs? How are you thinking about that?
Speaker 2:I am confident it will well, I say, like, I have, like, a 80% certainty that it will wildly impact everything,
Speaker 1:and then a 20% chance that, like, it's gonna look exactly the same somehow. But realistically,
Speaker 2:I think it's gonna be very, very different. I have no idea what it will look like. And the only big thing that I think I'm trying to do, my kids are not even in kindergarten yet, but get very involved in whatever school they're going to, because schools are notorious for not adopting new technology as fast as the enterprise, as fast as we do individually. And I think I remember taking some marketing classes in school that really didn't even talk about online marketing when it was still early in the Internet days, but it wasn't that
Speaker 1:early, right? Like it was it was not the the eighties, right?
Speaker 2:It was like past 2000. Was like, I think I graduated college in 2007. Like the Internet was a thing then. People were buying stuff online, but the marketing classes were still using textbooks that were probably written three or four years ago. And there was like a half of a chapter, a chapter on online marketing.
Speaker 2:And so maybe that was okay then, but if our kids are four or five years behind on everything that's happening with AI and technology, I think it's gonna be a really hard world to go get a job. And so really trying to help, you know, to the extent I can help shape that or supplement it or pick schools that are more on the frontier of teaching that, that's something I really care about. Constraints came up just
Speaker 1:in researching, listening to some of your podcast interviews, both as a host and a guest. And it just seemed like constraints were important in your life. Like, you know, the origin story of the pizza. Like, the constraint was money. So you made it work.
Speaker 1:You came out, you know, with a hack. Even having when Kevin Rose, you know, announced that you were having a podcast, you knew it was coming out, you had forty eight hours to name all the hacks. Right? Yep. Constraint.
Speaker 1:Got you the name. Where's constraint fit in your life?
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm a terrible procrastinator. So, like, I when you have too much time to solve a problem, I think I get excited about so many things that if I have too much time to solve it, I'm gonna go off to something else. There are multiple times where I will open my computer, open my phone to do a thing, and an hour later, forgot to do the I didn't do the thing. I saw something and I went somewhere. It can be very distracted.
Speaker 2:So the constraint of time is super helpful there. But if I think about the origin story beyond the constraint, I think I was a very not in a necessarily, like, rebellious way, but I was, like, very defiant. Like, if a teacher said something and I thought something could be different and it would be okay, I would have no problem calling that person out whether they were in a position of authority or not. Like, you know, teachers did not have fun teaching me, but I always tried to make sure I knew the thing before I would do it. And so I I have a very contentious relationship.
Speaker 2:I might be like, that thing's wrong. Like, Most people aren't gonna call the teacher out if they're wrong, but I would do it. But only if I was very confident. And don't bat a 100, but I would have no problem challenging authority. And that kind of attitude is less I was less doing it to challenge authority.
Speaker 2:I was more doing it that if I if I believe in a thing or I think a thing's wrong or I think there's another way to do a thing, wanna talk about and bring it up. And so I just try not to view constraints as constraints. It's like, you you can't eat pizza because you don't have money. Well, what if you buy pizza and sell slices? Like, you can't do a thing.
Speaker 2:There has to be some outside of the box way to get whatever you want if you're creative enough and you work hard enough. And and it won't always work, But I think that there are so many stories of people that were like, couldn't do this thing, and I did XYZ, now I did the thing. And so that is really the origin. It's like, I just want this thing, and I'm willing to find creative solutions to get it and kind of remove the so if you have a constraint, how do you remove the constraint? But not in the obvious way.
Speaker 2:The obvious way would be to get more money. I was like, well, that's just not not an option. You know? Like, when I was a kid in high school, couldn't be like, boy, I just want more I'll rob a bank. You know?
Speaker 2:Like, there there was not a logical way to make more money, so you had to get more creative. Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: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 on your podcast app. 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.
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