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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, 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: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 guess is JC Cangela. JC was head of entertainment deals at Meta, where he led a 20 person team spending a billion dollars a year acquiring content to power the experiences across Facebook, Instagram, and Oculus. He worked with everyone from major studios to influencers to bring content like The Walking Dead, Red Table Talk, and the Simone Biles documentary onto Meta's platforms. Before Meta, he co founded a digital entertainment studio.
Speaker 1:He sold that to Discovery Warner Media. In our conversation, he shares the top two things big tech algorithms use to decide what content wins, the shift engineers controlling content, what that means for creators, how short form video impacts long form content, why the line between tech and media has essentially disappeared, and how AI is creating for him a new renaissance. He's gone from ideas to live products himself in a matter of days. Oh, and a quick note, I asked JC about Multbook, the Reddit like social network for AI agents. Well, shortly after our interview, his former employer, Meta, acquired Multbook.
Speaker 1:Its two co founders are now part of Meta's super intelligence labs. Things sure are moving fast. A special thanks to creator and entrepreneur, Michael Sklar, for connecting me with JC. Please enjoy my conversation with JC Gangela. Last time we chatted, we were talking about Anthropic buying and storing 7,000,000 books to train Claude, its AI model.
Speaker 1:This came out in that Bart's versus Anthropic lawsuit. And that reminded you of a cool story for a company you once worked for, and I wanted to ask you if you'd share it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I worked for, what was then proudly the number two internet company in the world called Yahoo. Yahoo much like other companies that we now know went through a buying spree and bought up a bunch of assets including Mark Cuban's company broadcast.com. And through its bunches of acquisitions and building a thing called Yahoo Music, it acquired a library of 7,000,000 CDs that it then stored in a big barn somewhere in Iowa. And as Yahoo was pulling out of the original music space, like who figures out what to do with those CDs?
Speaker 2:And it turns out the market value for 7,000,000 CDs was negative $600,000 It was more to store or dispose of those CDs than the value of the content that was written on.
Speaker 1:Hilarious. Who bought it? Do you remember?
Speaker 2:From my recollection, there was a disposal company that bought it. Someone went in and tried to cherry pick a bunch of good CDs out and that person paid $0 basically to do that. And then a disposal company came in and got rid of all the all the stuff. I'm sure some of those CDs are floating around with a Yahoo Music sticker in someone's basement right now. So you could be the proud owner of a Yahoo Music CD.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:What was the reason Yahoo needed the CDs, like the technical or legal reason?
Speaker 2:The reason at the time is you could not perform a song unless you owned a physical copy of the music. Yahoo Music was a service much like Spotify. And so you needed a CD, physical CD sitting in a warehouse somewhere to be able to play that song even though the song itself was a digital copy of the CD that you had ripped down. So yeah, that was a funny remnant of law and practice and technology all catching in physical media all catching up to present day. And we will likely see the same thing repeat very soon.
Speaker 1:Quick context before we get back to JC. Anthropic settled the Bart's versus Anthropic case for about 1,500,000,000.0. Bart's is a group of authors, and while Anthropic did buy millions of printed books, which are easier to defend, the bigger concern was around the so called shadow libraries. These are large online collections that can include unauthorized copies. That's where the legal questions really come in.
Speaker 1:So the books help, but they don't fully answer how all the training data was sourced. With that, back to JC. And what's the reason that an LLM needs to store the books?
Speaker 2:They don't. Right? They need to buy the books to have a plausible defense of where they got all their content. And let me not cast aspersions on what the LLMs are trying to do. But my sense is that there has been a trend of retrofitting practices back to plausible copyright law enforcements.
Speaker 2:And I think the spectrum of behaviors range from buying a bunch of physical copies to what we see more and more now, which is striking commercial relationships with content owners.
Speaker 1:Right. So those books in Anthropic's case are they don't need to store them. They just need to buy them to show some argument towards fair use.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You had mentioned that engineers value content differently than other folks. Can you just share your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:I think my experience in working at a kind of platform or distribution platform really is that it's all bits, right? It's all just things that come through the pipes. And so for you and I, I have a lot of memories of watching The Godfather with my dad. It'll be a seminal moment in my young adult life of watching with him and having him explain the things that I'm missing and what's happening in the scenes and suggesting to read the book. And when the clips of The Godfather gets circulated on these platforms, they run up against cooking videos that were created on a computer and whatever performs the best tends to get served the most.
Speaker 2:And so we lose an element, I think in this new world of all the cultural and creative history that these things have when it's simply a matter of what gets the most clicks. You're in fact in the short form world, everyone including Rob Kelly is a media company. And so we have to pay attention to the world that we actually live in. And the thing that I get fired up about is trying to work on things that I'm gonna be proud that my 12 year old son, Jack, and my five year old daughter June get to see because they're gonna see a lot of it.
Speaker 1:Interesting. And I mean, that really comes down to the incentive system for an algorithm based company. So if a Dance Moves video is up against the godfather and Dance Moves gets five x views, that just gets pushed up in the algorithm. So it always bugs me when someone says the data, like, oh, yeah. We need to license some data when they're talking about the godfather.
Speaker 1:So I'm like, really? Data? Okay. But it kinda shows that they they're on the the other side of the world than I am, and that's okay. Content versus data.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, just any thoughts. Am I thinking about that the right way?
Speaker 2:Yes and no. Right? So so I think it's important to say that people that work at tech companies like stuff. And in fact, it's part of the reason I've had a job at a few of these that they like certain stuff. They like Hollywood actors and actresses.
Speaker 2:They like the allure and luster of both the talent and the underlying stories that they represent. And I think there's value in the world for those going forward for the foreseeable future. They don't love this word content, so I try not to say it all that much. But that we think of as media companies have a
Speaker 1:ton
Speaker 2:of How come you
Speaker 1:don't like the term content?
Speaker 2:I think it's a harder one for people that spend their lives crafting stuff. So if you're a TV writer, you introduce yourself as a writer. And if you're an editor, you introduce yourself as an editor. And even if you make content or videos for a platform like TikTok, you usually say something like, I make dance videos. And more importantly, it's so varied.
Speaker 2:The term itself is so abstract and it can incorporate so many things that I don't think it gives us analytical power to talk about what's going on in the world. So so that's the reason I I try not to use it. But I think your question was a good one, which is like, is everything changing? Are we fucked? And so my point of view on this one is no.
Speaker 2:My point of view is that these companies are strikingly similar. Not only do we see lots more technology happening in entertainment and media companies, but we see what were traditionally technology companies, including things like Amazon buying, MGM. And so I don't think it's fair to say, we have tech players and we have pure play entertainment or media companies because they all play in the same pool. I do think you're spot on though to say that the consumption of this stuff has changed dramatically over the last five years or so that we are in an era where there are some clear winners around how people consume stuff and how they consume stuff overwhelmingly now is this thing called short form video that TikTok kind of brought to the forefront and Instagram and YouTube quickly thereafter co opted. And now from my perspective is most of the consumer Internet.
Speaker 1:Is and you mentioned this to me, you gave me this line, the controllers of content in the future, you said, are engineers.
Speaker 2:I think you're right. So I think that people with an engineering background, at least for the foreseeable future will determine what we consume on a bunch of different dimensions. And so in that sense, I think you're right. I also hear this narrative sometimes that if you're creative, if you have a passion about storytelling or you have a passion about certain creative area that all the technology people are taking that and they're destroying it, right? And I don't really believe that narrative either.
Speaker 2:And in fact, I think it's a really good time if you're creative to kind of go explore those things. So I wanna be careful to not say that like, there's no place for creative people in the new world. But I do think we have to be very honest with who's controlling what most people are seeing most of the time. And I think that people that make good stuff need to be engaged with the reality of how viewers, fans, followers, readers, moviegoers, TV watchers are consuming their stuff. And it's likely on a little phone in front of themselves, right?
Speaker 2:And so, yeah.
Speaker 1:Short form content has become super popular. What place do you see for long form content?
Speaker 2:It's very clear if you spend any time on the algorithms that this has changed over the last two or three years too. And I think for the good, what we're seeing with algorithms now is a acknowledgement that all creative assets can be considered one in the same or same ish. But I think it points to a big change and the big change which people have got on record to say is that the future of these algorithms is just serving you Rob Kelly and me JC exactly what we want at the moment that we want it. And having a sense that sometimes I want something that is a little shorter that that kind of flies by. And sometimes I want something that's a little longer.
Speaker 2:But I think the notion that there's a short form experience and then there's a long form experience so they never touch and they're not related. It was the thinking in call it circa 2021, 2022, 2023, I don't think it's the thinking now. I think that there are some subject matters that lend themselves to long form. I think learning is a big one. If you look at what's happening with video podcasts, I think there's a lot of new viewership consumption that's happening on short form video.
Speaker 2:But the vast majority of consumptions happening for these longer form shows. And so this is a great example of how these two things will work together now and in the future. There's a way to bring in audiences with the short form highlights and there's a behavior of people staying around for longer for episodes.
Speaker 1:Can you take me through a typical content licensing deal sort of start to finish at a company like Meta? I'm just looking at your LinkedIn and you've got Disney, Sony, Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, MGM, Lions Gate, Walking Dead, Simone Biles documentary.
Speaker 2:In those cases that you're you're naming, often that comes from, know, a multi year investment plan. Let's say movie and TV content would work on a bunch of different surfaces underneath the meta umbrella, right? For the most part, the content investments are determined at a kind of meeting of the minds driven by how users are acting on on the platform. And so we should know that we're giving a ton of signal to these platforms when we start to consuming things. This is good and bad.
Speaker 2:But your organizations and technology companies that are licensing content for managing on the order of dozens to hundreds of deals on an annual basis and test these content theses and there would be some successes and there'd be some that wouldn't go so well and you kind of move on. And so I think from a media owner or a video creator perspective, you might see moves from someone like a meta as kind of all over the place or changing from every six months. But from where people in the organization sat, it made a ton of sense that you were trying new things every six months or so. And so you needed to kind of strike new relationships and develop new kinds of stuff.
Speaker 1:I've written about AI content licensing deals and Meta was super quiet while OpenAI was super busy and Google to some extent too. You know, Meta had this one deal with Reuters in late twenty twenty four and then kinda nothing. And then late last year, suddenly, CNN, they licensed content from for AI. Fox, People Inc, Gannett, a little bit later, Wikipedia. What's going on when suddenly we see publicly just a flood of new deals?
Speaker 1:Can you just take us inside a little bit? Like, what's going on?
Speaker 2:My sense is that there's a need on one side of the product for something specific. And so one of my experience at Meadow was that you'd go to a CES or any kind of industry event and you had to be really careful about who gets excited when. Because the risk of an engineering executive who would maybe value the thing that comes in front of them differently than someone who lives and breathes this stuff. You'd just be really careful if your boss's boss's boss was taking a meeting with the CEO of a studio because they talk about creative projects in a certain way that's really compelling. They're really good in a room.
Speaker 2:And for someone who doesn't live in that world that could be a little bit more exciting than you would want them to be. There could be some walking back that needs to happen after the meeting. But my sense is if you see a flurry of announcements, it's often, you know, a larger initiative that's getting kind of meted out at that moment.
Speaker 1:What's it like to be in the same room as Mark Zuckerberg?
Speaker 2:Well, I should say that every new employee gets, you know, talking to from senior level executives. And and at least when I was there, we spent some time at the original office and and Chris Cox who was the CMO at the time gave a rah rah speech and Mark picked his head in and said, go team. Didn't spend a ton of time with the guy. I will say that I was impressed by the decision making that his executives felt empowered to do, especially around larger initiatives, larger investments. Once they were sure of the direction of the company and the project, they had a ton of free will and free rein to to go make things happen.
Speaker 2:And the company moves really quickly in a way that I think is really impressive for such a big organization.
Speaker 1:You had mentioned that at Meta, had a lot of meetings every day. Can you just share how meetings are done at at Meta including your calendar and and how booked you were or weren't?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I should say too that please take this as high praise. Right? But the best people that have operated in that environment were people that were taking between eight to 18 meetings on a daily basis and meetings at Meta went on the half hour. And often like any meeting, would take four or five or seven minutes for everyone to assemble.
Speaker 2:And so the amount of time that you had to conduct actual business was really really short. And if you were assembling a meeting that had a bunch of people that felt the need to relay the input to the topic at hand, it was a certain skill to kind of manage lots of people in that twenty two minutes or whatever that turned out to be. I find that skill okay. What I couldn't really handle and I've learned about myself is that 18 back to back meetings over a nine and a half hour day would leave me exhausted, just really kind of spent and, you know, pity the person that scheduled the one on one after 4PM, right? They were getting the worst version of me.
Speaker 2:And so one of the great joys of working for yourself is you get to schedule your own meetings and your own days. And it's also a good reminder of like figuring out what kind of environment you work the best in.
Speaker 1:Who are some Meta execs that stood out just in your experience working with Meta over time?
Speaker 2:So I get to spend a lot of time with Marni Levine. She was the chief business officer at the time who was amazing and lovely. And she was a former Obama official. She worked with Sheryl against a bunch of the initiatives that we were working on as a company then. I was so impressed with her ability to understand a wide variety of issues, press in on things that she thought needed to be pressed in on and then delegate and push out kind of going and doing.
Speaker 2:And she was just warm and personable and a real human being in a way that that was impressive for someone who runs a massive organization at C level at a company like Meta.
Speaker 1:Is that who the deal making team reported into?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We reported it to Marnie who reported it to Cheryl who reported it into Mark. So yeah. And I learned that everyone has first names, you know, there. So it was a different different culture than than I was used to.
Speaker 2:The other answer to your question of who impressed me is my favorite person at Meta, a woman named Simba Goldman who she ran entertainment partnerships for a very long time and is just the most wonderful human being and operator. She was just brought the right amount of tact and grace and killer instinct to a place that needed it. And she was just a good hang. She didn't take herself too seriously. She was warm, you know, you could do very well to learn all of her tools of the trade if you wanted to be a corporate citizen, she was an excellent one.
Speaker 1:What advice would you give the CEO of a large content driven company, media driven company in this new age of AI? And then I've got the same question for someone starting from scratch.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the answer is the same actually. Right? The way that algorithms work, I will give you the tip, you don't have to hire me as a consultant. The conceptual way to understand how most algorithms work these days, if you're a creator of stuff, if you make things is that you need volume and recency.
Speaker 2:So volume is lots of stuff and recency is, and you made it recently, yesterday, today, last minute. And so if you're a large media owner, you have a bunch of different media assets. You've probably figured out by now that you need to be on all the social media platforms in different ways with different strategies depending on the user bases and what you're trying to achieve in those places. What I found is that the hard thing to do is to figure out, okay, if I'm on TikTok, YouTube, Meta, I have innovation, marketing and what I'm thinking of as my kind of content media budgets, I'm deploying them against all those things. How do they all work together?
Speaker 2:If I wanna make a choice, make a trade off, how do I do that? And so the thing that I'm working on now, the thing that I get out of bed and get excited about is some of the work that we're doing to try to help people understand that to make those choices between different content investments that they have at a level above C level executive. The easiest way for us to do that is to build a dashboard that shows you the effect of one video on one platform versus one video or another and what your audiences are seeing. And and that kind of work used to be done by a group of 25 to 40 people that I worked with at at Meta can now be done with one really talented business analysis.
Speaker 1:You once told me that you see us all as media companies. And in a separate conversation, you also mentioned that you record all your calls, your meetings in Riverside, which is a podcast platform, even though you don't broadcast it as a podcast. How do you think about that?
Speaker 2:Yes. Come take a phone call with me and you get this heavyweight podcasting system behind it. Yeah. Look, I I think we've seen business entertaining, right? Like look at Puck, right?
Speaker 2:I think Puck is a great example that the water cooler conversations that used to happen have turned into a really successful newsletter. The conversations that I have aren't that entertaining. I'll be very frank. But I do think there's a general move to catalog all kinds of conversations and I'm curious about the tools. And so, you know, if you schedule a phone call with me, I'll typically send you a Riverside link.
Speaker 2:And I have yet to figure out exactly what that turns into. But I think it's good practice and my sense is that over a period of time, more often than not, our meetings, our business meetings, the back and forth that we do and the little catch ups that we do at the beginning and the end will turn into some version of of the things that we think of as podcast now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I want to get your hot take on the top LLMs, just even a word or two on each. OpenAI.
Speaker 2:So a lot of colleagues of mine at Meta have gone over to OpenAI. And I think those people are really smart. And so the word that I would say if you said OpenAI would be promising.
Speaker 1:How about Google and Gemini included in that?
Speaker 2:I'll say it more than one word just because I'm so impressed, right? Like this was a technology that wasn't so functional. I'm a daily Gmail, Google Calendar user and the amount of times that I now find myself using Gemini to do call it administrative or simple tasks is it's overwhelming. They've done a really great job I think of integrating very good LLM into existing dominant products. So I'm a fan and user.
Speaker 1:Which one do more of your friends have more of your friends gone to OpenAI or Google?
Speaker 2:So just, you know, it's set stages, right? Fiji CMO who is a product leader at Meta when I was there and ran Facebook and the video initiatives now is the chief product officer. She has a great title at OpenAI. And so her crew of people are really smart, really thoughtful. The things that they work on by the way, aren't the things that tend to get newspaper headlines.
Speaker 2:They're the meat and potatoes, the blocking and tackling of how products actually work. And so I would not bet against her. Yeah. Yeah. I I feel very strongly that she's in a very capable, amazing person.
Speaker 2:How about anthropic? My best friend, Claude. I don't know. I I so I'm supervised. I run cloud code all day every day.
Speaker 2:I organize my life through it. It allows me to do things like publish websites, and I'm not so smart and able to do it through that thing. I just think it's cool. I think they've got good branding. I think they their product is a little fuzzier in a good way and gives me like, you know, that nice little feeling in your stomach.
Speaker 2:We know that technology companies that have that branding over time tend to lose that kind of feeling. So I don't wanna be too naive here. But I I think they say smart things and and I'm a big user. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which do you use? I understand you use Claude code, but for your actual answer engine, do you use Claude Claude. More often?
Speaker 2:Everything goes into Claude code. I have
Speaker 1:this Regardless of whether you're creating something using Claude code, actual questions you just have day to day?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, prep for this interview comes out of Cloud Code, goes into a thing called Obsidian, which is a note taking software. And there's a kind of, you know, Frankenstein y implementation called Clot City in that I run and and that powers my whole life. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is it fair to say that Claude code is so useful to you that it's obviated the need for you to use the other answer engines? Because you're just happy
Speaker 2:staying in one No. I still, you know, I cheat on Klotzka the time. Look, think these products are gonna be They are ubiquitous. They have different uses for it. I still would use a ton of OpenAI, I'm an OpenAI subscriber.
Speaker 2:I just find myself gravitating to Cloud Code for a specific set of uses and those set of uses of mushroomed over time.
Speaker 1:Back to the hot takes, your hot takes on LMS. How about x x AI, Grok? Word or two that comes to mind?
Speaker 2:Yeah. D none of the above. Like, I I don't use that platform.
Speaker 1:And then how about Meta? Meta AI, I should say.
Speaker 2:I mean, if you look at the last earnings call, they're using it Meta AI and lots of different real world functionality. I have to disable Instagram on my mobile device about every three to six months because it's stuck back on there and I find myself on there too much. I think they're gonna do well.
Speaker 1:So you've got experience with social media. This new thing called Mold Book has come out. Can you just describe what it is and what's your take on it? And is this a glimpse into the future?
Speaker 2:This is the first of what I think will be many of agent led software for individual consumers. You download a piece of software, that piece of software has access to a bunch of the stuff that you have and are able to kind of go execute on your behalf. There's some kerfuffle and stories about my notebook and your notebook chatting on a social media screen. Some folks have big feelings. We've got a five year old in the house, so sometimes there's big feelings, and there's big feelings around around this one too.
Speaker 1:I mean, can you envision a future where humans are watching AI? Humans are the spectators and AI are the entertainers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A 100%. I mean, I should say that like, I don't believe in the Wally vision of the future. Right? I think I like that movie, but I think human beings tend to like human beings.
Speaker 2:But I think we get entertained by a bunch of different things. How computers talk to one another, we kind of understand some parts of it and we don't understand other parts of it and I think that's fascinating.
Speaker 1:I wanted to ask you about these five websites that you built. And what I'm most interested in and you can share examples, but you're not a developer and suddenly you've brought five things to life, I think, since you and I last met within the last year and maybe more, but I know of five. And I want to ask, is this part of a new renaissance period? You suddenly created stuff using AI that you sounds like wouldn't have or would have taken a lot longer, maybe only would have done one of the five. Is that how you think about it or is there a different way you're thinking about?
Speaker 2:You know, this came out of actually, Rob Rob Kelly, you you changed my life. Right? So I I think I think this came out of
Speaker 1:You know, I'm keeping that in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's right. At some point last year, we have a mutual friend in common who connected us. Right? Michael Sklar?
Speaker 2:Michael Sklar. It's amazing human being, teaches at Rice University in their business school. Michael and I had the same conversation that you and I Rob had, which is like, don't we just buy a lot of domains? Like we get excited as human beings about opportunities and they could be economic opportunities, they could be cultural opportunities. You just like, oh man, wouldn't it be cool to have a domain?
Speaker 2:I bought a domain last year called fix the ten. The 10 is a big highway that rolls through LA and some of it collapsed after a fire and I said, oh, I wanna I want the domain fix the ten. I don't know why I bought that domain, but I felt compelled in that moment to do it. And so I looked at myself at the midpoint of last year and realized that I had 37 different domains that I was paying, you know, some amount of money to keep over time and and I had content on exactly zero of those sites. So it was time to put up a shut up, right?
Speaker 2:And in initial phases, I was investigating do I do a WordPress blog? Is there a sub stack that redirects to a thing? There are a lot of different choices, right? And the acceleration of my project was brought a wholly and a 100% by Cloud Code.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the example there, you sent me one California walk, californiawalk.com. That was a domain you own for a while. I checked it out and at dinner time in our family, we have like highlights of the day. And one of my highlights was, wow, this California walk thing looks so cool.
Speaker 1:Concept is taking hikes with buddies and and with the with new friends too just around California. And that all came from a domain you once bought and then building it in Claude Code?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm I'm so happy to hear that, Rob. We're gonna get you Yeah.
Speaker 1:It works.
Speaker 2:We're gonna get you on the California Walk 2026, it's upcoming April, hold your calendar. Every year for the past one year, I've led a series of people from San Francisco to Los Angeles walking inspired by the Camino in Spain. And last year, we got to Big Sur. So we didn't get it all the way. That's okay.
Speaker 1:And what I mean by earlier when I mentioned Renaissance is, at least this is my lens on the world. Lots of people have ideas. You can easily now buy a domain name. Some of us actually take the idea and buy a name because we're excited about it for the moment. And then like you, I I've done this too and and done nothing with it or I own a 170 or something.
Speaker 1:My wife hates that because she sees the GoDaddy bill. By renaissance though, are we in this new era where you can now actually bring that idea to life using AI so much more easily that it's actually going to impact the world. There are gonna be a bunch of new californiawalks.com out there.
Speaker 2:From your lips to God's ears, Rob Kelly. And it it does kind of feel cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Some final questions. I want to get your sort of hot take on AI's impact on different social media platforms.
Speaker 1:Just again, a word or two. TikTok, how will AI impact TikTok?
Speaker 2:TikTok, a lot of changes right now. Right? Corporate ownership change. I think that TikTok, the product experience of TikTok is the biggest thing that's happened in the media world in the last six years. I think AI will be the next biggest, but the TikTok of consumption has had a lasting effect on on how we how we view the world.
Speaker 1:How will AI impact YouTube?
Speaker 2:You know, they're very interesting. They they come out with a bunch of different announcements and trying different things. My sense is that creators will continue to find a home on on YouTube and AI will be very important to them.
Speaker 1:How about Meta's brands? Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp?
Speaker 2:AI works on a bunch of different levels. Right? And so they recently came out with earnings and I think their earnings were around how AI created some efficiencies in their advertising products that allowed them to have record earnings, right? And so not only is this gonna be on screens that we see, but it's on all the things that control all the products underneath it. I think Meta is well situated to commercialize AI in in ways that Google is and OpenAI and others wish they would be.
Speaker 1:So this last set of questions what I call kind of humanitarian questions and you just go speed round. Do you consider yourself an AI optimist, pessimist, or some other descriptor on the spectrum?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mostly optimist and user. Right?
Speaker 1:What in AI are you most worried about?
Speaker 2:I have a personal worry, right? I still have a 12 year old and how this all works with Jack is front and center of how I wanna spend my professional time. And I don't love the content that he watches. I don't love the videos that he watches.
Speaker 1:AI related or you just mean in general social media?
Speaker 2:Just in general, that's my point, right? I'm not sometimes I'm not sure, is my point of view just not a 12 year olds and so I don't love Roblox videos, right? Or is there something really wrong with Roblox? Very smart friends who work there who do amazing work. And so I just don't, it's not for me, right?
Speaker 2:Sometimes it's hard I think for us to pull apart what historically has always been tension between 45 year old men and 12 year old sons. And what's happening in AI. And I I don't I don't know that I can do it at this moment either.
Speaker 1:I've got a question about Jack in the future. Jack's here in a moment.
Speaker 2:Great. Great. Great.
Speaker 1:What do you think of universal basic income?
Speaker 2:I'm fascinated by it, right? Dario, the CEO of Anthropic seems to think that this is a really important thing for us to figure out. He's a very smart guy. In my experience, people like to work. I would love a future scenario where it doesn't feel like people need to work overwork or are undervalued for the work that they're doing.
Speaker 2:And I don't know. Will UBI make up some of that gap? That would be really, really quite lovely.
Speaker 1:What are you telling your kids and other young folks in your life about AI and their future?
Speaker 2:Kids are telling us, right? The learning has always been that kids gravitate to cool stuff, cool stuff leads to fads, habits and trends. Trends often pull other users along and they're all doing a thing.
Speaker 1:So is Jack liking AI these days?
Speaker 2:He does. He gets frustrated with it. It's interesting to see what he gets frustrated with. His expectation is that it does everything. And so, you know, how to carefully write a prompt is not something that he has a lot of patience for.
Speaker 2:That being said, he's very fast with it. He does a bunch of coding that he's gotten into himself and he will show me like, hey, I used to have to do this part of the thing, but now I just press this button and now it happens over here.
Speaker 1:Wait, I've got a 10 year old. So you got a tip on a tool that Jack's using for
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll send you one afterwards. MIT has this really great website then and it's what he used when he was 10 actually. And now he's kind of moved into Roblox world building and has friends that are doing the same thing. So, and Roblox has great AI tools to help kids build their world. So, you know, I think these are skills.
Speaker 2:Like I don't think this is a bad thing. You know, it's moderation and it's management, but from a parent perspective.
Speaker 1:Will you create an AI avatar so that family and friends can have conversations with you including when you've passed away?
Speaker 2:I haven't thought about that. God, I hope not. I mean, here's what I've learned over the past few years. I left Med Inn in 2023, my mom passed away shortly thereafter. It was a very funky time for me coming through that and continue to come through that.
Speaker 2:But learning from that is that how important it is to spend actual physical time with the people that we love and actually be present. And part of what I wasn't really great at it, both in the workplace unfortunately and at home was being like super present when I'm present and I've been working on that. So it feels like a better use of my time to continue to be really present with people when I'm with them and not spend time building a replacement for me to do that, mostly because I really enjoy spending time with people that I love.
Speaker 1:Alright, JC. Thanks for investing the time.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Rob.
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