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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, Google, Meta, and xAI are moving, and why their decisions matter.
The Incumbents -- How content giants like Disney, News Corp, Universal Music Group, and Reddit are responding to AI, and what it means for creators and publishers.
The Playbook -- Real lessons on AI business models, content strategy, creativity, IP licensing, distribution, and getting paid.
Family & Our Future -- Every episode ends with me asking my guest what AI means for our jobs, our families, and the next generation.
ABOUT YOUR HOST
Rob Kelly has interviewed Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, helped pioneer early web content licensing, and built multiple companies with more than $100 million in total sales. His work has appeared on CNBC, CNN, TIME, and Entrepreneur.
Thanks! -Rob
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.
Rob Kelly:I Then went on to be a three time founder and CEO, driving a $100,000,000 plus in revenue and some failures too. And now I'm back at the table, interviewing this new world's current and future leaders. This isn't only a business story, it's a human one. So every episode ends with me asking my guest what AI means for our jobs, our families, and the next generation. We'll figure this out together from the inside.
Rob Kelly:Welcome to Media and the Machine. My guest today is Noah Levin. After years of suffering from what he calls founder envy, he finally took the plunge to become a founder. Less than five months of using AI, he quit his full time job and launched his business, Serious People. He's already worked with 10 clients and his business is less than a year old.
Rob Kelly:He says AI finally gave him the confidence to take the leap. He's not a programmer. He describes himself as deeply risk averse, and he's doing it all as a husband and a father to a two year old. Even more surprising, says anyone can do it. He shares a handful of simple steps he took to make it happen.
Rob Kelly:Make sure to listen for these core concepts, how the math of AI changes everything about starting a new business, how he used AI as his career coach to get him going, his $1 challenge for finding his first customer and solving the problem of convincing his wife, the quote, steel thread milestone he learned at Amazon, and why you should dog food everything. Most importantly, you can hear the joy in his voice. Noah is having more fun than at any other point in his career. I wish this for all humans. It's a feel good story for AI and for anyone who finally wants to take the plunge and become a founder.
Rob Kelly:Special thanks to Marty Pessis for introducing Noah to me. You might remember Marty from episode 17. This AI company has paid out $20,000,000 to content owners. Now please enjoy my conversation with Noah Levin. Tell me when the light bulb went off that you were gonna be a founder finally.
Noah Levin:Well, I've had founder envy my whole career, and I am the sort of person who's a little bit risk averse, maybe a lot of it risk averse. So the tipping point was always sort of out there in the future. I had I had explored things for a decade plus in the past. At one point, I almost opened up my own ramen shop, which is a very different kind of startup. But what finally got me to taking the plunge was
Rob Kelly:I just got a no on the ramen shop. Why didn't that get started?
Noah Levin:Well, it turns out that on the spectrum of startups where four hour work week laying in the hammock on the beach while someone ships product for you is on one end of the spectrum. And all the way on the other end of the spectrum is getting up at four in the morning to start the soup for the day. And I realized that even if I were successful at that, the sort of best case scenario was still going to be me me waking up in the morning to turn on the burner for the soup. So I realized it was not the startup I wanted to build as much as I do love and still love ramen.
Rob Kelly:Can you talk about how AI changed the math of starting a business and how core was that or is that to why you finally did start a business?
Noah Levin:With AI, a few things are different. One is that you can get a lot closer to a proof of concept, if not an actual product, before you have to talk to another person, even my wife who sits in the next room doing her job, before you have to think about getting any external capital. In fact, a lot of ideas don't require external capital anymore. There's a lot more you can do bootstrapped. And the need for, like, a technical and nontechnical cofounder for hiring engineering talent to get something done, it's not that these things are gone forever, but they're just changed dramatically.
Noah Levin:And so what it meant is that I could prototype things myself, and I could get a lot closer to the cliff edge before jumping. And I I developed confidence that I was able to build things myself and add value as a consultant in the world before actually taking the plunge. So with AI, you're just able to get a lot farther down that value chain before you cut off cut off your old income stream.
Rob Kelly:Where were you exactly? What point in your career and life were you exactly when you started the process?
Noah Levin:It was late last year, around Thanksgiving last year when I started to experience what the new models were capable of. I think a lot of people had the same moment that I did around Thanksgiving when Opus 4.5 came out. And that was sort of the moment where the models went from being promising to being actually capable of delivering on their promise from end to end.
Rob Kelly:And you were a VP of Product at this company, Honor, still during this time. You were employed.
Noah Levin:Yeah. I was on vacation. My wife is South African, and so we were with her family down in Pluttenberg Bay in South Africa and sitting in this Airbnb in a beach town with some time on my hands. And I decided to use ChatGPT, not even not even Codex or Quadco, just plain old ChatGPT to do some career coaching for myself. And what surprised me was that ChatGPT was a really good career coach.
Noah Levin:It was unusually effective at not just playing back to me what I wanted to hear, but also bringing what felt like new ideas to bear.
Rob Kelly:And you were just using an open prompt for this career coach?
Noah Levin:Yeah. This was fairly straightforward. Like, I want you to help me figure out the next steps of my career. And we just had a very long running, engaging conversation. At the time, I was blown away by what I could get done in this chat, and I thought, let me see if I can build an app that does this type of career coaching for myself and others because I found this to be so valuable.
Noah Levin:Also, because the models had gotten to the point where me as a product manager who was technical but not technical enough to actually code my own app, I thought maybe the tools were finally ready to allow me to conjure something like that into existence. And it took a few weeks. It wasn't overnight. But it built me an app.
Rob Kelly:So if we call it step one, and obviously these things go concurrently, but we can call step one that you used AI as a career coach. And then you started to talk about how you then, as a follow-up step, started to build an app. Did the career coach recommend that, or did you just enjoy the career coach experience of ChatGPT so much you decided, let's create an app.
Noah Levin:Yeah. It didn't recommend that I create an app. But the reason I I decided to do it was I was having this sort of meta experience with the career coach, and I just couldn't believe how good it was. So I wanted to learn what else the models were good at because I had some hunch that for me, use of these tools was gonna be really important in the next thing that I did. And this was an idea that was sitting right in front of me.
Noah Levin:We brainstormed. Think I had 20 or 30 different ideas of something I could build, and this one just felt I was getting so much value out of doing it myself that I knew there had to be value for others. It was about having a proof of concept on what's possible.
Rob Kelly:So you didn't wanna get in the business of being a career coach necessarily.
Noah Levin:I it was an opportunity to flex the muscles that were suddenly mine. And this idea of stepping up to the cliff, which by the way is an idea that I took from an early career coach, a human career coach of mine. This was a way of seeing what was possible before deciding to take a plunge.
Rob Kelly:And how much programming experience do you have?
Noah Levin:So I took programming in high school. But if you put me in front of a coding interface and asked me to write code from scratch, it would be a long time before you saw a good app come out of that.
Rob Kelly:What would you recommend to someone who has got zero technical ability, has never done a programming class?
Noah Levin:You you can a 100% do it. So the way to get started if you're nontechnical is just to start building something. Find a thing to build and build it for yourself and build it end to end. If you wanna really stretch yourself, build it for yourself and one other person because that gap between something that works for you and something that works for you plus someone who's not on your local computer is a big, big difference. And if you don't understand the concepts as you're seeing them, you can literally just ask.
Noah Levin:And these tools are, I would assume, the first in history where they teach you how to use them as you're using them.
Rob Kelly:So back to step one is you used AI as your career coach. Step two, you built an app from scratch, and you happen to choose a career coach. What was the cost and how long did it take just to build the career coach from scratch?
Noah Levin:I think I ended up spending just the Claude Max subscription fee, so that was $200 a month. For .com domains, it costs about $10 a domain a year. For .ai domains, it costs, I think, 75 ish bucks a year.
Rob Kelly:Okay. So $275, and you've got an app, now a career coach app. Who else used it besides you?
Noah Levin:Oh, no one. No. Absolutely no one. And there's the biggest lesson in the whole in the whole thing. So the Did you try to
Rob Kelly:get someone else to use it?
Noah Levin:I mean,
Rob Kelly:your wife or I did. Friends?
Noah Levin:I did. So now that anyone can build anything, right, if I can build this, then definitely there are lots of other people who can and probably have. And so now the question is, what's the moat? What what makes something that I build more valuable than something you might build? And the answer is, of course, distribution because it's always distribution, and everyone has said that for history.
Noah Levin:But now it's, like, very stark because it's obviously a commodity to build these things. That's more and more and more true over time. So I was, you know, sitting directly in front of the distribution problem. At this point, I have a working app. I can give someone the link.
Noah Levin:They could use it. They can pay me money to use it. But who gives a shit? If you don't have a platform to start with, if you don't have some audience that will care about the thing you built, you need to really go and cultivate that as a part of your strategy in order to get the first user in the door.
Rob Kelly:You talked about this $1 challenge. What can you share on that?
Noah Levin:Well, I it was AI pill. Right? I was I was deeply deeply into these tools, and I believed that they were going to change the way we all worked, but I didn't quite have the the product in mind yet that I was going to build with them. And so I decided I was going to explore consulting, which it's an easy thing to do in the sense that you are the product. And so it's readily available to you, and the cost of your first unit is is sort of zero.
Noah Levin:But it's totally unclear if someone wants to pay for your expertise or not when you're starting out. And so I sat down with my strategist, who was Claude at that point, and Claude who had all the career coaching context that we had been through. And we talked about what was holding me back from taking the plunge. What was the threshold that I would have to meet to feel good about this decision? And what we realized was the biggest threshold I had to meet was demonstrating to my wife that I was not abandoning my income completely and that there was going to be income coming in the other side of this thing.
Noah Levin:So I set what I thought was a relatively aggressive goal, which is in six months, be back at income parity or some promise that I will be back at income parity with my job. But six months is a long time to wait with no signal, so I set a milestone that at three months, I wanted to have my first dollar of income. And there's a term that we used at Amazon called steel thread, which I really like to describe a milestone on a product build. Steel thread, we were building, for example, the Prime Now app or the revised Amazon Fresh app. The steel thread is when you can get the entire journey to happen beginning to end with all the systems connected just once in a super manual way with all the ugliness that you haven't built out yet, but you know that the end to end machine works.
Noah Levin:So the first unit of the first order that gets placed at Amazon, that was the Steel milestone. And for me, that Steel Thread milestone was the first dollar that made it all the way into my bank account, meaning that I managed to do something for someone who cared enough about it that they were willing to write me a check for it.
Rob Kelly:And literally $1 or greater, just some amount of money.
Noah Levin:Yes. The odds were that it was going to be higher than $1.
Rob Kelly:Right.
Noah Levin:But, yeah, it didn't need to be full income replacement at that point. It needed to be someone who paid me money to do something. There's a real value in being a consultant in this new world of AI where you can learn a ton about other people's needs. You can help them build for those needs, and then you can discover commonalities across those needs that can become products over time and product enabled services.
Rob Kelly:So tell me what happened in the ninety days.
Noah Levin:So in the ninety days, I started so I'll I'll tell you what I didn't do at the beginning of the ninety days. I did not post on LinkedIn, I am now an AI consultant, come hire me, for a bunch of reasons, probably most of which was a bit of impostor syndrome and not wanting to stick my neck out quite that far at the beginning. What I did instead is I started saying yes to anything that I saw anywhere near me that seemed like an opportunity. And one of those turned out to be my first consulting gig, which was as part of a network that I'm on called Reforge, where people share their experiences as freelancers in the product and tech space. Someone posted a need for a consultant on an engagement that was coming up that had a little bit to do with AI, and I said yes.
Noah Levin:And that became my first notch in my belt.
Rob Kelly:What was the engagement?
Noah Levin:It was a marketing data engagement for a large crypto company.
Rob Kelly:And just from your experience of doing the career coaching to yourself and playing around with building an app helped enable you to gain their confidence to to say, hey, Noah. Yeah. Let's go.
Noah Levin:Yeah. I think I gained their confidence. But if I'm being honest, the more important thing was that I was sort of ratcheting up my own confidence. And there's a pattern to each of these steps in retrospect, which is every time I needed to figure something out, I went to AI for help. And AI, in whatever form, it differed by a stage, helped me get some confidence to do the thing for the first time.
Noah Levin:And once I had done it, it became very easy to do it again and again. So this consulting engagement, there was not a rigorous interview process to, like, test my AI credentials. The question was, did I believe that I was the right person for it enough to present myself that way? And then when I was in the actual engagement, could I figure it out? And for both of those things, having AI as a backstop and knowing how to use it correctly throughout the course of the engagement was sort of critical.
Noah Levin:It was load bearing for me to do these things for the first time. And then once I did them for the first time, I was I was able to do them again and post more openly about it.
Rob Kelly:Had you ever been a consultant before, like, formally?
Noah Levin:No. Okay.
Rob Kelly:So you get your first customer in this ninety day challenge that you set for yourself, the $1 challenge, and you got the dollar in ninety days, more than that. What next?
Noah Levin:Well, I think it was that first engagement that gave me the confidence to start writing publicly about what I was doing with AI. Because there's something about being paid for it that validates that you have expertise that's useful to someone. There's no reason I couldn't have written on LinkedIn from day one and started talking about the things I was doing with AI or more explicitly talked about the company I was building, except that I didn't feel confident in doing it, and actually felt a little bit like I was just going to be contributing to the slop on everyone's way. It's a combination of impostor syndrome and just, you know, I think there's a lot of junk out there. I don't want to be junky.
Noah Levin:If I'm going to put something out under my own brand name, it has to be worthwhile in some way. And I've posted some AI generated stuff on my LinkedIn that I I feel sick about because I just think it's a waste of everyone's time.
Rob Kelly:How would you describe what you first started to share on what you thought you'd be good at?
Noah Levin:Well, I started sharing some of the things I was doing for my own productivity. So it was less about what I was doing for the client and more about what I was doing to create an infrastructure for myself to support client work. So when I was working with my first client, I used AI tools to transcribe meetings and to generate artifacts like meeting agendas and weekly summaries. I started posting about the techniques I had learned, and I had one post go my level of viral where I think got something like 15,000 impressions, which for me was quite a bit, and got a lot of engagement, a lot of people sharing their own solutions and posting back and forth on the comments. And so it was a way of establishing credibility in the space by authentically sharing things that I was learning and figuring out.
Noah Levin:And that was the beginning of all the rest of the volume I've seen.
Rob Kelly:Now you're starting to think about your actual brand and creating a true company. Is that fair?
Noah Levin:Yes.
Rob Kelly:Can you just share how you came up with this brand that is very much you and fun? And it seemed like a cool part of the journey.
Noah Levin:I appreciate that. The brand is Serious People. That's the name of the company. And the name Serious People comes from an episode of Succession in the last season when the very disappointed father looks at his four f up kids in a karaoke room, and it comes just after it seems like everyone might be getting along. And he looks at them just disapprovingly, he says, I love you, but you are not serious people.
Noah Levin:And there's something about that moment in the show that I just think is so funny because it juxtaposes being serious as a virtue and being serious as sort of superfluous or irrelevant. I don't know. It it stuck with me, and I love it as a name because it simultaneously conveys that we take the work seriously, but we also don't take ourselves that seriously, which is how I would like to work. And suddenly, as someone who's building my own company, I get the choice of who to associate with and how I want to approach the day. And so it's a daily reminder of taking the work seriously but not taking myself too seriously.
Noah Levin:So that that became the name. And then, I guess, as I was, like, hanging a shingle and putting up my website and starting to create brand assets that I would post, I worked with Claude Design, which was a new tool, to come up with brand guidelines, basically, a creative direction. And Claude Design took it initially in a very clever direction, I thought. I gave it one very specific image to work with, which was let's see. This is a deep cut.
Noah Levin:Let's see if people get this reference. There's a Beastie Boys video for Sabotage, which is them running around town sort of like fools but wearing corporate attire. Mhmm. And I thought, you know, that's kind of the image for serious people. It's like it's like playing dress up as a business person.
Noah Levin:And Claude loved this. It took this and ran with it and came up with this very extensive brand universe that I never expected to get out of it, which included personas and this nineties circa 2000 office environment and this sort of tan grading on all of the visuals that make it look sort of retro but not that retro, VHS tracking lines on video, like, all these very specific things that I would never have thought to ask for and frankly didn't even need at the stage of building a company. I needed a domain name and a website at this point.
Rob Kelly:And it's basically got these kind of it's got on your homepage, it's seriouspeople.ai. It looks like scenes out of the office or office space.
Noah Levin:It does. It definitely gives the office vibes.
Rob Kelly:And completely generated by AI, all of this.
Noah Levin:Yeah. So what what you're describing is if you go to seriouspeople.ai, there's a brand reel that runs in the background of people at a really boring, maybe slightly dystopian workplace where there's
Rob Kelly:always no audio. Just, yeah, just a reel running.
Noah Levin:Uh-huh. And there's little gags throughout. Yeah. There's there's boxes of training data that people are moving around. And there's there's a a poster on the wall for Dario Amade, the president of Anthropic, who's employee of the month, and all these little site gags.
Rob Kelly:I love the guy drinking the cup of coffee, the mug of coffee, and it says on the mug, make no mistakes.
Noah Levin:The reason that I like this whole brand aesthetic, and it like, the question is, like, why does this even matter? Right? This is this feels like it's just me effing around a little bit. And maybe it is in part. But the reason I think it matters to have a brand at all is that the space is very crowded.
Noah Levin:And listen, you're you're Media and the Machine guy, so and this is you know this better than I do. But distribution is having a presence online, having people remember you. And it's gonna matter both on the demand side and the supply side for me. People need to wanna work with me, not just hire me. And so to have a brand that's memorable and that has a a point of view, both aesthetically and also about the work, is, I think, useful.
Noah Levin:It's a way to build a flywheel over time. But on top of that, what I'm noticing is that the clients who I'm getting, the inbound I'm getting, are people who are drawn to that creative and understand that I'm in it because it's fun and that I don't want to take this work more seriously than is merited. I've worked at a lot of very intense companies with people who are very intense themselves. And there's so much virtue in that for learning how to do a job well. But ultimately, you can choose to associate with people who wanna get a beer at the end of the day and laugh about it.
Noah Levin:And for me, this is a way of sort of pre filtering the people I get to work with so that it's the people who are having fun with their day while doing great work.
Rob Kelly:The one concept you talked about is dogfooding. Can you just share more on that?
Noah Levin:Yeah. I mean, dogfooding, if you work in tech, dogfooding is sort of a core part of how you ensure that your product is a quality product. It's to make sure that you're using it yourself. At Amazon Fresh, we were all Amazon Fresh customers. And you want to know if the eggs come broken because that means someone else's eggs are coming broken.
Noah Levin:I think dogfooding for me was part of the process of starting a company because everything that I was trying to figure out with how to use these tools for knowledge work is something that my clients are also trying to figure out. And the use cases vary a little bit, but the tools and the com sort of the core use cases are very similar. So over time, what emerged are I would spend days building things like a knowledge base or a set of skills for doing my work. And then I would go into client conversations, and lo and behold, they were having the exact same challenges. And I had some actual experience to reference because I had been building these things for myself.
Noah Levin:In my case, it has just been paying dividends because the more time I spend building something for myself, the more useful I am to other people. And so now I set aside time, which I would probably do anyway, but I I allow myself to indulge in it, to rebuild the things that I need to do my job on a regular basis.
Rob Kelly:Alright. So you got that customer number one back within thirty days. How long was it before you got customer number two?
Noah Levin:It happened relatively quickly. It happened within a month.
Rob Kelly:And how'd they find you or you find them?
Noah Levin:I started posting about what I was doing, and almost immediately, I got inbound from people who I knew well and people who I didn't know well.
Rob Kelly:So by the way, just a real interesting, like, insight. You know, a lot of folks would do what you said. You know, you kinda did some, but, like, they would post on social to get customers. You found a customer more, you know, organically or just through a networking group, and then started posting, and that helped you get customer number two and beyond. Accurate?
Noah Levin:There yes. And there's nothing there's no reason I had to go through that step of finding one customer and sort of back channel before starting to post. But for me to develop the confidence to put myself out into the world, to get over my impostor syndrome, and also just to get reps at doing this, to believe that I was good at it. That first customer was really important, but it was the gate for me to posting about what I was doing online. For me, LinkedIn is where my audience audience is, and it's just unbelievable what demand that unlocks.
Noah Levin:The inbound from every time I post is more than I can keep up with.
Rob Kelly:And at this point, what types of things were you posting?
Noah Levin:I was posting mostly about my own work, things I had built for myself and best practices that I was learning.
Rob Kelly:Sort of productivity tools, AI productivity stuff.
Noah Levin:Yeah. Productivity broadly. I think I think that word productivity has a little bit of a an old school connotation. It's how to use AI, how to use AI tools. The tools are are so open ended right now.
Noah Levin:And the use cases are so nascent that the way I learn how to do most things is by spending a lot of time on x, seeing what people are posting, trying them myself, kind of trying to filter through them. And so what I learned was that it was useful to people who trusted me in my network to report out what I was seeing on my own front lines and allow them to test it out in their own use cases.
Rob Kelly:Gotcha. So if I had to sum it up, it was you're you're on this new journey playing with AI tools, and you were sharing the how to stuff as part of that on LinkedIn, and that was leading to additional leads. Yes. How many customers have you served so far?
Noah Levin:Cumulatively, it's about 10 active. It's like I can keep about three or four active at a time.
Rob Kelly:And at what point did you feel good talking to your wife about going all in on this?
Noah Levin:Well, we talked about it all the time.
Rob Kelly:And Did you did you ask did you ask AI when you should talk to her about it?
Noah Levin:I I try to there's a couple domains where I try to do my own thinking still. And one of them is on managing my relationship with my wife.
Rob Kelly:Man, I was trying to hook you there.
Noah Levin:No. I mean, she's been super supportive the whole way through, but I think rightly skeptical of, is this going to work? And so as the proof points come in, it feels a little bit like bringing a macaroni drawing to your parents after a day in preschool. It's like, look at this look at this win that I had. It it seems like this is actually working.
Noah Levin:So it was about a month ago, maybe two months ago, where it became very clear not only that I was past the threshold of I might need to go look for a full time job, but also that I'm past the threshold of I can no longer be the only product because my dance card is full at this point.
Rob Kelly:So how many beginning to end? How long was it before you got to the point where you felt like, hey, this can be it. I don't need to go look for another job?
Noah Levin:It was four, maybe five months in, which I think is
Rob Kelly:That's it.
Noah Levin:I think is way faster than I expected it to be. And I'm lucky that I didn't have to have the hard conversation with myself in the mirror at month six or month nine of, is this still something I should be investing in?
Rob Kelly:What do you tell folks, like at a barbecue or over dinner or drinks, that you do?
Noah Levin:I tell them I do AI consulting, and I sort of hate that description. It feels really cliche and doesn't actually describe well what the work is, in part because AI is not actually the point. Right? The point is to improve the business. But it oftentimes ends up being with AI as the primary tool, and so that's the shorthand I've used.
Rob Kelly:Is there one you prefer or that you think will become more commonplace?
Noah Levin:The term that I think everyone will start using in the next year or two years is applied AI. And I don't know what the job title is, but it it could be applied AI engineer or applied AI manager or something like that. I think applied AI is there is a subset of people out there who are starting to seek out this profession even though not everyone really understands what it is. But I bet you in a decade, we're all gonna be doing some version of it.
Rob Kelly:How many of those clients you've worked with involved building an agent?
Noah Levin:All of them to one degree or another.
Rob Kelly:Why not call yourself agent builder?
Noah Levin:You know, I've heard the term agent builder, and I like it for more colloquial description. I I there's a thing in Austin, the agent builder's breakfast that a guy named Michael Ducker runs, and he's doing it in a bunch of cities. I love going to those because I I do think finding other people who build agents is a really, like it's a concise way of describing this role in the value chain, but it's also a little bit reductive. Agent builder, it almost sounds like a craft, like cabinet maker. And the reason to build an agent is the point.
Noah Levin:It's not the agent itself. It's the value that it unlocks. And I don't think that agent builder totally captures all that.
Rob Kelly:Gotcha. Did you get to meet Whole Foods founder during your time at Amazon and Whole Foods?
Noah Levin:I did. I had I it was during COVID, so a lot of it was virtual, but I did have a number of meetings with John Mackie.
Rob Kelly:What was he like?
Noah Levin:I mean, he's John Mackie. Right? He's he's n of one. So he you never quite knew what his opinion was gonna be coming into a meeting. But we were in lots of conversations where we were trying to figure out how the Whole Foods way and the Amazon way work side by side, which manifested both in the business and the product and the ways of working.
Noah Levin:So it was kind of cool to see the way John stood up to the machine a bit. He really, like, stands by his conviction, and he would do that in the face of lots and lots of pressure to the contrary.
Rob Kelly:Yeah. I think I heard on from David Senra, Founder's podcast, that John Mackie said he wished he had held out and just remained independent.
Noah Levin:That doesn't surprise me, if that's what
Rob Kelly:Not he gotten married.
Noah Levin:I I think Amazon is very principled about disagree and commit. Right? You make a decision and you move on. And Whole Foods is very consensus driven and wants stakeholders to all buy into a decision before it's made.
Rob Kelly:Real briefly, I just got an does Amazon really hold an empty chair representing the customer in all their meetings?
Noah Levin:Not literally, but I've seen.
Rob Kelly:Alright. Couple of humanitarian questions. What are you telling kids and younger folks in your life these days about just the change in the world of AI?
Noah Levin:Well, I have a two and a half year old, and I'm not telling him anything about AI. I think he'll figure it out on his own, and it's gonna be a native part of how he grows up. He points up the robot cars as we drive around. That's about his only interaction of it. I think the kids who I'm most concerned about are the ones who are graduating college right now because it's not totally clear what we've set them up for.
Noah Levin:They have debt to pay off, and they need to go get jobs. But what it is to do an entry level job right now is really ambiguous. And a lot of the work that used to be available to people who are right out of college as a training ground for future careers is going to AI. And so there's fewer and fewer opportunities to go put yourself into a machine and let it take you all on that journey.
Rob Kelly:Yeah. What's your advice for them?
Noah Levin:My advice is to be super high agency and to build things yourself. So if you're not already deep into these tools, you ought to be, and you ought to be using it for everything you can. And just the ability to apply these tools for your own purposes is going to be a useful skill to any company that wants to hire you. The thing that makes what I'm doing fun is that I've got some experience to draw on of actually running a business where these tools can be put to good use toward that end. But if I didn't know how to run a business in the first place, I would be a lot less useful.
Noah Levin:I think there are a lot of 22 year olds right now looking for jobs who don't have the benefit of that experience and need to go get it quickly so that they can be useful in providing leverage with AI rather than just being kind of a sharp knife that could be stuck in the wrong place.
Rob Kelly:Are you happy you went down the path of this AI consultant versus launching a ramen shop?
Noah Levin:Well, the ramen shop still could be out there in the future, but for now, I've never been happier in my career. It's just so much fun right now.
Rob Kelly:Is it fair to say AI is the driving force behind why why you finally became a founder?
Noah Levin:Yeah. It is. No question.
Rob Kelly:Fantastic. Thanks a whole bunch, Noah.
Noah Levin:Rob, thank you. Appreciate this a lot.
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Rob Kelly:Thanks again, and see you next time.