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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:Then I went on to be a three time founder and CEO, driving a $100,000,000 plus in revenue and some failures too. And now I'm back at the table, interviewing this new world's current and future leaders. This isn't only a business story, it's a human one. So every episode ends with me asking my guest what AI means for our jobs, our families, and the next generation. We'll figure this out together from the inside.
Rob Kelly:Welcome to Media and the Machine. My guess is Andy Beach. He hails from Microsoft, where he was the CTO of AI for their media and entertainment business. He now consults AI startups and is a VC investor at Hallstone, a firm investing in media and tech. Most people think AI will be won by the biggest models, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini.
Rob Kelly:And he says that's wrong. The real winners will be the apps built on top. We talk about what that looks like. Think YouTube and TikTok. They didn't invent video.
Rob Kelly:They changed how we consume it. Andy believes AI apps will do the same thing, not just recommending what to watch, but building your whole day across Netflix, YouTube, and more. Andy points to companies like Midjourney, Runway, and Eleven Labs. They started as models, but had to become full apps to win. We also get into the Mac versus PC style battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, and why Apple using Gemini is smarter than building its own LLM.
Rob Kelly:We cover sports, including Andy's work on AI with the NBA and motocross. You'd be amazed at the fan experience AI is gonna allow us. We also go deep on where the money's going. AI training and licensing could get even bigger. Andy shares lessons from inside Microsoft, why they never try to become a media company like Google.
Rob Kelly:Finally, talk about who wins first. It's not big studios, it's independent creators, small teams using AI to make better content faster. Special thanks to Peter Csathy for putting Andy on my radar. Peter did a great interview with Andy back in early two thousand twenty five. Now please enjoy my conversation with Andy Beach.
Rob Kelly:What's AI's bigger impact? Creation or distribution?
Andy Beach:Oh, it's a good question. Do I do I have to pick one?
Rob Kelly:If you use YouTube and TikTok as a benchmark and you look at AI, next five, ten years, will AI have an even bigger impact on creating content, whether it's text audio, video, anything else about the same, less?
Andy Beach:I think it'll greatly impact particularly the creator side of of the production, probably faster than it is in sort of Hollywood type productions Mhmm. In part because there's less legal hurdles. But the immediate benefit that generative AI workflows bring to a creator is that they get a more polished production with a lot smaller team. And I think AI only enhances that and brings more players into the world who didn't imagine that they could do production before because they either assumed it was gonna take a lot more people or it legitimately just did take a lot more people to get their vision out there to the world.
Rob Kelly:I think you probably agree that there's kinda start your day with AI now. Maybe social media was the last big disruption where suddenly people start their day with social media to consume content. Will the AI frontier models be the new way to start one's day?
Andy Beach:Yeah. I would say there's two different layers at play. There's the AI layer, which I think of as truly just the core models. But then above that, there's the application layer. Then within that, people are taking those AI models and creating an experience that a human uses to interact with it.
Andy Beach:And I think that application layer is rife for an AI disruption. Someone will come out with something that is curating entertainment for me. And, ideally, it's doing it not just on a single platform, but across multiple platforms. In other words, it's it's going out and looking at all of the things that it understands I might have access to, and it's sort of saying, here's how you're you wanna start your day, or here's how you wanna end your day, or make sure you watch this the next time you're with the wife and kids because it's the kind of thing you guys love to watch when you're together. And that's more sophisticated than just a a recommendation algorithm because a recommendation algorithm just sits inside of my YouTube or my Netflix.
Rob Kelly:But if today, you know, my understanding is social media is something like 50 plus percent of the way people are consuming media ahead of broadcast TV and YouTube and others. I guess what I'm wondering is in the same way that suddenly when Facebook came along and now Meta owning Facebook and Instagram and and their applications, folks began starting their day with Meta's properties. So do you think it's more likely that people will start their day or consume content through an AI platform company like a ChatGPT or a Google Gemini or Claude or X, or will it be the applications, as you brought up, that are built with the AI technology?
Andy Beach:I think it's more of that. I think there's a subset. I think right now, you're certainly going to experience people that want that lifestyle, and they're having to do it through Claude or OpenAI or Gemini. But long term, I think those companies are going to be the core engine under an application that somebody else goes and builds.
Rob Kelly:But, of course, the applications could be owned by the platforms. Right?
Andy Beach:But remember even, you know, you use Meta as an example. First of all, let's remember it started as Facebook, and Meta wasn't even a thing that it turned into that. And they acquired Instagram, and they acquired other platforms, and they created threads as a Twitter counterpart. So all of that was organic growth that happened over a decade or more. And so I think we could get to a period of time where they have that.
Andy Beach:The reality in the short term is that they're building lots of core technology, but it the real innovation will come from outside of those large companies by the startups that are experimenting with AI, and they will find a great UI, UX experience. And then they themselves will either become incredibly large or they will be acquired by somebody who is large and expanded. What's something that would surprise the big media entertainment companies about the AI companies? The biggest thing that a media company would be surprised at is that that they aren't the only thing that tech company is thinking about. In other words, media gets very caught up in how they use media to go tell stories and to create entertainment.
Andy Beach:But the reality is that every company is a media company in this day and age. That is something that I found myself saying a lot when I worked at Microsoft in meetings. Even though I was chief technology officer for media and entertainment there, I was getting constantly pulled into discussions with our retail companies, with manufacturing or health care. Because all of those companies are using media in massive ways, whether it's internal communication tools for themselves, whether it's external communication with their customers, or whether it's a literal lifeblood of of what they're doing. Like, even in medicines, you have remote surgery applications, and you want those to extremely high quality images and very low latency because you're literally in a life saving situation when you're when you're using that content.
Andy Beach:All of that became incredibly powerfully obvious to everybody during COVID because even a company that would have issued media before was now having to use it to reach the customers that weren't coming into physical stores anymore.
Rob Kelly:I'm really interested in your take on Google as a tech company that became a giant media company. Mhmm. And Microsoft never did. Mhmm. Curious your take why.
Andy Beach:It's funny that people say that.
Rob Kelly:Do you think they wanted to be or want to be more of a media company?
Andy Beach:I don't think they want to be. I mean, they they certainly play in the entertainment space. They still have Xbox, and they have division companies. I don't think there's a strong desire to go be more in the first party business because they see that as distracting from being able to provide the broader solutions that are interoperable regardless of the industry you work in. Today, there are no product people sitting inside of Microsoft that would raise their hand and say, I only work on media solutions.
Andy Beach:That's it.
Rob Kelly:Right. Will any content creators get paid by AI for training, or has that chip sailed?
Andy Beach:It's a business model that not only does exist, will be even bigger in the future. I think there are people who today have jobs that will be impacted or disrupted by AI, who a core piece of functionality that they do in their day to day is potentially providing content that directly is designed to feed into the the training of AI models.
Rob Kelly:Can you give me your hot take on sports leagues? And I'm just curious how AI will change any of these. Let's start with the NBA. Mhmm. My favorite.
Andy Beach:I think we could look to places like the NBA who think about a lot of this work. You know, they they have a lot of very granular data about what is happening on the court. Think of it as like exact coordinates for Mhmm. Everywhere that everybody is standing on this on the court simultaneously. And then you pair that with the 30 to 50 cameras that are all incredibly high quality that are pointing at that court, I can now do a lot of interesting things where I either make it appear like I'm part of the game or a character I know and love is part of the game.
Andy Beach:They're already experimenting with both of those. They ran a Christmas day special last year where they broadcast a game and had animated characters that were participating in the basketball game by replacing certain players. Then there might be a point in time where I can watch the game as if I'm in the game, like a total first person point of view of standing on the court, and they're generating that display in real time for me as an individual to do it. Or maybe I'm creating clips out of it that make it look like I actually was part of the game that I can send on to others.
Rob Kelly:What about the newer leagues compared to kind of the big ones? What are they doing if anything in AI?
Andy Beach:I talked a lot with the folks that do Motocross GP, production company called Dornah out of Spain. They have races that go on in The US, in Asia, across Europe, and Latin America. They've got hundreds of cameras that it takes to tell that story. A motocross racetrack is gonna be kilometers long, and it's designed for these bikes that go incredibly fast. And so you you end up with cameras that are on the bikes, on the riders, that are following them.
Andy Beach:That leads to an experience on the production side where you're you're looking at hundreds of tiny screens for all of those incoming sources, and you're trying to derive a story out of the moment that's going on, then just being able to find the shot you want. I'm looking for the last spectacular wipeout that we had, and being able to curate some of that so that you're picking from five shots, not a 150 or a 180 simultaneously.
Rob Kelly:What about AI rights in sports? I assume the leagues own the rights for pretty much all the content that they're producing or broadcasting. Right? Yeah. It's gonna change from league to
Andy Beach:league and sport to sport. But generally speaking, the content that is produced that we think of as the game is typically the the rights of the the league itself, and then typically the sort of pre and post information. There's always some video of, like, you know, some additional context as the games are about to start or there's some post interviews. That that's typically all sort of at a league level. But then there's a lot of other content that gets created that might be owned by the team.
Andy Beach:There's all of the practices during the week or there's side pieces about an up and coming star or things like that that might be owned or co owned by the team or by an individual athlete.
Rob Kelly:Yeah. And the reason I ask is, I mean, TV rights have become such a major part of sports business, the business of sports. I'm just wondering, you know, how AI rights will work. And for instance, do you happen to know or any major sports leagues or teams licensing either their data analytics to AI companies or their video to AI companies. They've got a lot of it.
Andy Beach:I'm positive it's a conversation that's been had with a number of them. The conversation that's probably gone on inside of leagues for the moment is do we partner and sell our data, license our data to a given company so that they get better results and more and more accurate results about our content? Or do we build our own, you know, not large language model, but maybe a small language model?
Rob Kelly:Any idea which way it's trending towards, like, either building your own LLM if you're a sports league or sports team versus licensing?
Andy Beach:It'll likely play out across in a couple of different ways. A very big lucrative sports league very well might go test and build their own model. I think the reality is a lot of leagues will either fall below the threshold of being able to do that. They would find out very quickly. It's pretty tough to do and pretty expensive even even when it's a smaller model than a a large language model.
Rob Kelly:I'm curious your take on radical shifts in sports entertainment due to AI, and I'll start off with an example. I think Elon Musk might have been the one to first mention this that I had heard, which will be are people gonna be watching robots beat the hell out of each other as a sport?
Andy Beach:I mean, battle bots already exist. So I I I don't feel like
Rob Kelly:It's not even new. Yeah.
Andy Beach:It's not it's not even in you. I you know, I think
Rob Kelly:But I think what he's talking about is, well, in some cases, some of the videos were six foot tall AI robots versus I think now, and I think he was part of this too, getting them to be shorter. Maybe he doesn't want them to outmatch him something like four to five feet tall. But, you know, a little different than the battle bots. Right? Actual, like, human looking robots powered by AI in a ring.
Rob Kelly:You think that's gonna happen? Are we gonna be watching AI robots fight?
Andy Beach:I I think it'll happen. I also don't think it's that radical. I think it'll probably be, let's go just leverage the the fact that AI is having a moment. It'll either take off and go crazy, or it'll just die out pretty quickly.
Rob Kelly:Let's say a hedge fund says, Andy, we've got a few billion dollars, and we want to create a new sports league, and we wanna leverage cutting edge technology like AI. How would you start thinking about it?
Andy Beach:I would go work on a sport that was all already popular. I don't think AI is going to make a given sport or a given subject matter inherently popular just by adding AI to a thing. It has to be a thing that we already have a cultural passion for in in some way or the other. Okay. Like fighting?
Andy Beach:Could be fighting. Could be racing. The thing that I would probably focus on is how sticky can I make the sport for the individual? Me and when I say sticky, I mean, how do I keep them coming back and constantly wanting to engage? A sporting event, it's like the last of appointment viewing that we have.
Andy Beach:If you're a sports fan, you absolutely know that, you know, come 2PM on Sunday, there's a game, and you know you're gonna be there because you don't you don't wanna miss it. But there's a lot of time to fill between those games. And so how do I leverage everything I know about the team and athletes? How do I leverage everything I know about the audience? How do I leverage the hopefully vast archive of material that I have from that sport to create an overall engaging experience for the fan that takes place not only during the game, but every other day of the week so that I keep them sort of constantly engaged and thinking and and keep that sport top of mind for them.
Rob Kelly:Yeah. I just can't get you to have those robots beating the hell out of each other, can I? But you did just make me realize perhaps the biggest win for sports and AI is that it's still a real world experience. It's the richest content in the world, which is live people competing. Can I just get your quick take on the big frontier models?
Rob Kelly:I'll just rile them off one by one. Just like a couple words that come to mind for you, OpenAI.
Andy Beach:Yeah. I mean, foundational, but they're still finding their footing within it as well. You know, they're still trying to decide, are they more of a text and LLM company? Are they multimodal and generating images and videos and other elements? What is that core business?
Andy Beach:There's still a lot of experimentation for them to do before they they settle into a given lane as their primary thing.
Rob Kelly:How about, your quick take on anthropic?
Andy Beach:I think more people think of Anthropic as the coding and developer AI tool, even though it does a lot more than that and has a lot of overlap with what OpenAI does. And I think maybe they're the modern version of the Mac and PC debate that will go on and back and forth around philosophical issues of which one someone likes more than the other even though they're pretty close at the end of the day.
Rob Kelly:Wait. Which one's the Mac and which one's the PC?
Andy Beach:I don't know. You I I think I think that's a debate that everybody will have for a number of years.
Rob Kelly:How about Google Gemini?
Andy Beach:They're an interesting one because they have so many internal vectors that they can pull on for data. You know, YouTube is a first party Google product that gives them access to a lot of internal training data in many ways. Now, whether we think of that as internal training data because we're talking about it as the creator content and other things that are out there, but it is their platform. And and It's
Rob Kelly:in their terms and services.
Andy Beach:Exactly. It's one of those things that we maybe didn't know we were signing up for that we we signed up for anyway. I think they they very much with the VEO three and Nano Banana stuff want to be in the high quality image and video business.
Rob Kelly:How about, x AI, Grok?
Andy Beach:I think they are learning very quickly that guardrails and safety are gonna be an important part of the business model, and you can't just rip them out and turn it loose. They got a lot of flack earlier in the year for about the fact that you could create images of other people, that you could create underage adult content, and all of that brought a lot of legal and regulatory scrutiny on them that they maybe were, you know, conscious of but ignoring. And now they're having to go back and and replumb and and reput in guardrails. And actions like that can be seen as playing too fast and loose with the technology will will cause them a a deceleration in the adoption speed that they get.
Rob Kelly:Which AI apps do you think are most likely to be acquired by the the big frontier models in your space?
Andy Beach:I suspect that one of the areas that we will see model companies acquire that's not nearly as sexy as the other parts is either around security or around transparency. They will acquire companies that make it easier for them to more securely protect their model. In other words, how do I keep the next model maker from just buying an account on my system and then training all of his stuff against my system. But then there will also be companies that they acquire that are just really good at tracing the origins of something. How did that character get created?
Andy Beach:We've talked about the fact that there's a black box because it's not like Homer Simpson lives inside of a model per se, but it was certainly trained against his image and likeness to create weights that would cause, if you put in the right set of words, to generate something that that looked like him. And so how do we trace the provenance of something we create to the earliest core pieces of a model? That's gonna be super important stuff that platforms care about.
Rob Kelly:What do you think is gonna happen to companies like Midjourney, Runway, Eleven Laps? Are they gonna end up as independent companies? You even consider them media companies yet? How do you look at those types of companies?
Andy Beach:I view the different layers that go into the media stack, and they sort of straddle the line between an AI company and an application company. Many of them started as purely making a model, mid journey and runway being two great examples of it. But I I think they both pretty quickly realized that without a robust application front end, there wasn't a market for that model, and so they had to become the application as well. But we're getting pretty close to that collapse part of the cycle where we we see these systems start to acquire one another. We will see application companies that start flourishing and coming out, and they will probably be some of the first places that a model company buys because it buys them into that market, but it also gives them a broader audience for their underlying tech.
Rob Kelly:With Midjourney, Runway, and Eleven Labs, do you think it's more likely that folks in the entertainment media space are buyers of the companies, not technology? I
Andy Beach:think it's more likely we will continue to see tech companies that also wanna have a media presence versus media just acquiring technology for technology's sake. We're seeing media become more software like even in the thing that it delivers and even in the way that it gets created versus the other direction. Tech is just becoming even more of a tech company in in many ways.
Rob Kelly:But tech is becoming more like media companies all the time.
Andy Beach:But it's it's acquiring
Rob Kelly:OpenAI selling advertising.
Andy Beach:Sure. Absolutely. But it's they're not changing the way that they're creating tech, I guess, as an underlying piece, whereas I think tech is certainly changing the way that we make media Mhmm. More and more. So I I suspect that the acquiring companies continue to be more on the technology side of the the ledger, and they will likely have media and entertainment as one of the places they leverage this.
Andy Beach:I bet if we were to ask someone at eleven Labs, they would say that, like, yeah, M and E is super cool, but our real business is call support centers or telehealth where instead of trying to figure out how to make Brad Pitt sound really good for two and a half hours, we had to create millions of voices to interact with individuals on phone calls. Mhmm.
Rob Kelly:I want to get your take on Apple and Amazon. And the reason I'm picking both of those is that they're the two companies with a ton of money who don't have a popular LLM that anyone knows about.
Andy Beach:Sure. Yeah. Let's start with Apple. So they made a big announcement where they were partnering with Google, and that was gonna be their AI partner effectively. You know, if you're using a iOS or Mac OS, you'll be leveraging Gemini.
Andy Beach:And I I think that's actually a fairly smart way for them to do it because they didn't already have a huge AI division that was racing forward to try and create these things. So to go create one from scratch would have put them incredibly behind. And so that partnership on Gemini does a couple of things. It gives them some best of breed technology that they can bake into it, but they still get to craft and control and own the overall user experience. And it allows them to revisit that partnership in time as well.
Andy Beach:Like, you know, they're basically making bet that says, we think Gemini is gonna be really solid for at least the next two years. And at the end of those two years, they could look at it and go, you know what? Anthropic's ahead of them. We need to swap over to a new vendor.
Rob Kelly:At first, I was frustrated with the fact that they were so behind in AI and and had no LLM because I just thought, well, they can afford to do it. But now I wonder, is their big win gonna be that they create amazing devices and products that are all AI enabled and new things that we haven't talked about? We're gonna be opening up little iRobots under the Christmas tree, you know, for with an Apple logo on it that leaps out of its gift box and does flips and then can go vacuum or something. It's just interesting though that they've never in my recollection, they've never outsourced a key piece of software. If you call the LLM software in this case, I don't know.
Rob Kelly:Maybe that's not the accurate term for it.
Andy Beach:I I think of it more like the, you know, they they don't design the screens that go into iPhones, you know, famous Wow.
Rob Kelly:So you look at it more like that. I look at it more like the OS or software. You look at it more like the screen. Interesting. So how about Amazon?
Rob Kelly:Why does it not have a consumer facing LLM in your opinion?
Andy Beach:Don't think they need one. I think the closest you'll get is probably more of the the software that lives on top of an LLM is the thing that that people want from them. They want the a word robot that lives in all of our alarm clocks and devices, but that doesn't have to be tied to a particular LLM.
Rob Kelly:Yep. So all the major LLMs have been trained on scraping content data from the web and elsewhere, books and so forth. I'm wondering why do you think there isn't a clean model, meaning all the content that's been trained on was either licensed or it's public domain, and that LLM could be transparent even about the data sources. Why hasn't that happened
Andy Beach:yet? It already has, is the short answer. So For
Rob Kelly:a major LLM?
Andy Beach:Sure. Firefly from Adobe calls itself a clean model
Rob Kelly:Yep.
Andy Beach:And says that it's it can show you the providence of all the content that was trained on it. Likewise, you've got, Moon Valley who's been working heavily in the Hollywood ecosystem and markets itself as one of the few clean models that are out there with licenses for all of the trained datasets that it uses. So they already exist.
Rob Kelly:I know Bria is like that too.
Andy Beach:Bria is absolutely like that as as well.
Rob Kelly:But those certainly aren't considered in that upper tier one frontier model. Right? Aren't they more kind of tier two, tier three model?
Andy Beach:I mean, I think it's also just a matter of age with those, as well. Like, all the models that we've cited so far that we're calling that bigger tier model, they've they've been around longer and they have a legacy of training that predates when we were more concerned about and explicit about how they were trained. Trust me, if any of those big models wanna work in Hollywood pipelines, they're going to have to come up with a way of having a purely ethically sourced model as part of the workflow, which means it's either gonna be a new model or they're gonna have guardrails inside the current models that make it possible to trace the provenance.
Rob Kelly:You jumped ahead to what I was gonna ask next. How could the enterprise salesperson selling for OpenAI, selling their software or for Anthropix Claude or Google Gemini, if they're selling to an enterprise, and let's say the enterprise is a entertainment or media company wanting to use the LLM to create new media. Right?
Andy Beach:Mhmm.
Rob Kelly:It's gotta be a clean model so that the buyer, the entertainment company creator, can then own the IP. Right?
Andy Beach:Sure. It gets super tricky when you're talking about the media and entertainment customer because, you know, we'll we'll pick on Disney. Of course, they don't want you to be able to go out there and just use any model to create a Star Wars character or a Marvel character or a classic Disney animated character. But then when they go buy a model as a service, they absolutely wanna be able to use it for that for themselves. Mhmm.
Andy Beach:Their own abilities to do it. And so I think there is a point in time where it's less about whether or not the model can do it. It's more of what it's allowed to do for a given user. In other words, if I can prove that I am Disney, is it okay for it to go create stuff from my IP catalog? It's all about what I as an individual have the rights to generate.
Andy Beach:And if I don't have the right to generate it, then the system shouldn't generate it by default.
Rob Kelly:But let's say someone comes to you and says like, Andy, I wanna take out Disney. I mean, right now, if you use any of these models from as far as I know, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, that they are not being transparent about their data and to the point of indemnifying, like, know, so could you even use it to create this new Disney killer? Because you could get sued by a Disney or someone else because they'll say, hey, that's got a little bit of Darth Vader in there.
Andy Beach:Sure. But I loved, you know, you had a recent guest that talked about exactly this scenario of trying to peel back the onion and determine, like, what percentage of of a given character might Yeah.
Rob Kelly:Copy site. Tommy at copy site. Uh-huh.
Andy Beach:It really comes down to if someone were just hiring me to go out and help them on this journey, part of the questions before we ever get to picking models is what is the appetite to take this on? In other words, are you highly conservative? Do you wanna make sure you are completely indemnified for millions and billions of dollars? If you want to go create new intellectual property that is cocreated with some sort of AI model? Or are you a little more Wild West?
Rob Kelly:Yep. Yeah. I know if I were a buyer of any DLMs trying to do that, would ask to be indemnified. What's the impact of AI on the top streaming companies? I know you've worked with Netflix before.
Andy Beach:Classically, Netflix at the end of the day is a data company, first and foremost. Their data just happens to be videos.
Rob Kelly:But also they're I mean, they have a lot of data on arguably the best recommendation engine, right, of all the streaming companies. Because Netflix is considered more tech savvy or tech first, do you think they'll use AI more for creation of content than other streamers?
Andy Beach:They had an Argentinian series that came out that sort of famously was the first production that they had that had generative AI visual effects in it. And now that they've acquired a generative AI related production company, I'm sure that we'll start seeing more about how it impacts their workflow, but it won't immediately be available in everything. It'll be sandboxed and tested and scaled slowly over time.
Rob Kelly:And what you're talking about is Netflix acquiring Ben Affleck's AI company. Right? Correct. Company called Interpositive for $600,000,000. Well, I gotta say that's a a big move that the other streamers haven't haven't yet made.
Rob Kelly:Says something about them being proactive.
Andy Beach:Well, yeah. They did also just save a bunch of money by not buying Warner Brothers Discovery. So and in fact, they got paid a breakup fee. So in many ways, they're still ahead cash wise.
Rob Kelly:Job displacement, which people in the entertainment and media industries do you think AI is going to help the most first?
Andy Beach:I would say the individual or independent creators are actually most helped by it. People who by and large have made their careers off large productions will fill the squeeze first in that their jobs have changed.
Rob Kelly:What's just an example in sort of plain English of the what you mean by independent creative?
Andy Beach:Anybody that's on has their own YouTube page is certainly falls into that list. But I would even say those small production companies, it's gonna be easier and faster to get their edits done. They're gonna have higher quality looking content. If they've missed a shot, they're not gonna have to go reset up an entire production. They might be able to generatively create it.
Rob Kelly:And then larger studios, you say, will feel more of people's jobs changing. Can you give just an example or two of what you mean by that?
Andy Beach:Yeah. They I mean, I I think we're already seeing that in the way that the head counts work in inside of the studios and and the technologists. I think we see more technologists coming into the studio system and trying to rationalize how how and what systems get used. Some of the the jobs that are automated by this, whether it's reviewing and logging of content or transcribing or others, those are some of the early areas where where we have seen reductions.
Rob Kelly:Tell me about the Pedro Pascal story.
Andy Beach:Ages ago, I I, lived and worked in New York. My wife at the time my brand new wife, I should say, at that time was becoming a big fan of knitting the way a lot of people were and, would spend a lot of her Saturdays at a yarn shop in Red Hook, New York, Brooklyn neighborhood. And I would go along with her many weekends and spend a ton of time hanging out at the coffee shop next door to that yarn shop, shooting the breeze with the barista and drinking way too much coffee. And it was years later watching Game of Thrones that I realized that very handsome barista was Pedro Pascal.
Rob Kelly:Game of Thrones, Mandalorian.
Andy Beach:It's it's funny and amusing to think that everybody starts somewhere and that at some point, he was a NYU grad student who was making lattes for me in Red Hook, New York. Fun.
Rob Kelly:What can go right in an AI world that's got you excited? Maybe most right.
Andy Beach:I would love a world where I could have a thing that I just talked to in my house, and I'm like, hey. Did I pay the power bill this month? That's a pretty complex step of things that have to be put together to verify whether I've done it. And if if it could go, no, you haven't. You forgot.
Andy Beach:And I could go, oh, great. Do me a favor. Pay that. Oh, what a dream that is, to take all of those mundane things off. But we just talked about, like, six or so pretty complex systems talking to each other to enable that.
Rob Kelly:When do you think AI can replace your job or role?
Andy Beach:I don't know that it ever implicitly changes a human being's role because I think our roles change organically and naturally over time. I'm doing a very different job this year than I was two years ago. And five years even before that, I was doing a different job even though I was still at Microsoft in in those first two. So our jobs naturally change throughout our life in many ways.
Rob Kelly:So as long as you're changing your own job and role, AI then can never replace your job or role.
Andy Beach:If we really think about it, it's the way stuff has always worked in many ways. The reality is that technology has changed so much from the time I was in school that if I was just going by on what I learned in school to do my job, I would have been out of a job twenty years ago.
Rob Kelly:None of
Andy Beach:this would be none of we wouldn't be having this conversation. But I continually educated myself as part of my job to learn the new thing, and I'm still doing that today.
Rob Kelly:What are you telling kids and younger folks in your life about what changes to make in this new world of AI? You've got a daughter. Right?
Andy Beach:You know, five or ten years ago, categorically, I even four years ago, I was telling everybody, you know, make sure you have a a computer science degree as part of what you're doing. STEM is super important, and and you you want that in there. The influx of generative AI into our workflows, to me, has brought back the importance of more of the critical thinking skills that live outside of maybe the the stem workflow. It's less about math, and it's more about how do we do good critical thinking about the work that we're doing. That's sort of a classically what a liberal arts type education is.
Andy Beach:And I almost wonder if we're not gonna see an upswing in more of that because it is important for the next wave of the technology that we're interacting with.
Rob Kelly:If AI does a lot of the work in life and you had endless time, what would you do with all your newfound time?
Andy Beach:In many ways, I I feel like I'm kind of already doing that in in some ways. I I get to offload and automate so many parts of what I do that I have more time, and so I I get to spend that time thinking. I used to have a picture that lived right by my desk that said, I I just wanna make things and think about them. I think I'm closer to doing that now than I ever have been in my career.
Rob Kelly:Have you or will you create an AI avatar for your family, friends, or business so that those close to you will be able to have conversations with you while you're alive or when you passed away?
Andy Beach:I wish I had a version of me that I could send to meetings so that I didn't have to go to meetings nearly as much. And there's probably some people I meet with that wishes that, the digital Andy would show up because the the the human and organic Andy is, either too quiet or too noisy at times.
Rob Kelly:Well, thanks for all the time today, Andy.
Andy Beach:Rob, thanks so much. This was a blast. I enjoyed talking to you about it.
Rob Kelly:Well, this is Media and the Machine. A few things about you and me. If you wanna hear about the next new episode, make sure you hit follow on the show and your podcast app. If you wanna go a little deeper, head to mediaandthemachine.com and subscribe. When you share your email with me, you can see handcrafted transcripts, read the essays in my newsletter, and be the first to hear about who the guest is on the next show.
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