Buddhism, Bots & Billionaires

Buddhism, Bots & Billionaires

My guest today is David Perlman. David has a PhD in Neuroscience and Meditation, and he’s an expert in misinformation. He’s got an unusual background observing leaders up close — from the Dalai Lama to Jack Dorsey.  And it was at Twitter, where David worked as a User Research Data Scientist, that he was shown the door after a controversial interview with Vice Media. He shares that story. His work has appeared in nine journals including The American Journal of Psychiatry, NeuroImage, and The Cyber Defense Review. We talk about David’s contrarian view on Anthropic’s closely guarded Mythos model, what AI could mean for propaganda, misinformation, and future elections. And why he thinks many people are wrong about climate change. Special thanks to Jennifer Elliott for connecting me with David — you might remember Jennifer from Episode 10 (The Data Center Expert's Ride or Die Plan for When AI Turns [https://mediaandthemachine.transistor.fm/episodes/the-data-center-expert-s-ride-or-die-plan-for-when-ai-turns]. Enjoy! Thx,  Rob Kelly

This AI Company Has Paid Out $20M to Content Owners

Marty Pesis is co-founder and CEO of Troveo [https://www.troveo.ai/]. Troveo helps content and data owners license their video, audio, and text to top AI models like OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic – and AI Unicorn startups too.. Marty says he may have the largest AI data corpus in the space (it includes 8M hours of video, 4m+ hours of audio, and billions of words of text). We open the interview with Marty’s very first AI data deal, a request so strange I had to stop him and make sure I was hearing it right. We get into how Tesla cars are really training machines on wheels. We talk about the future of data collection. Picture factories with workers wearing GoPros, wrist cameras, shoulder cameras, sensor gloves, and narrating what they’re doing so robots can learn. We cover the pricing of of data including what type of content AI Modfels will pay $1,000 per hour for. And the one library of content he’d want if he could have any. He also shares what  learned from Troveo investor Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, and MrBeast, who bought Marty’s last company. And we end, as usual, on AI and families, including Marty’s view that because of AI, college is not even on his radar right now for his young kids. Thx! -Rob

AI Wants Needles in a Haystack. He Finds Them

Chris Keevil is co-founder and CEO of Versos AI [https://www.versos.ai/], a company helping AI labs find the needles-in-the-haystack data they need to train their models. Chris works at the center of a new market. It’s where the frontier AI models are paying for video most of us would never think to value: 10,000 hours of hands tying shoes, ice melting,, micro-dramas from Asia and a coffee shop in China. AI wants it all.  We talk about why some AI training clips sell for 30 cents a minute while others go for a dollar per second… and why some AI companies are now doing “whole corpus deals” to buy entire content libraries in bulk. Chris has a birds-eye view of this world being a partner to content companies such as CuriosityStream (which was profiled in Episode #1 "The CEO Quietly Licensing 2M+ Hours of Content to AI Giants" [https://mediaandthemachine.transistor.fm/episodes/the-ceo-quietly-licensing-2m-hours-of-content-to-ai-giants-clint-stinchcomb-ceo-of-publicly-traded-curiositystream-inc] Chris also explains why the demand for training data will “never run dry” as AI moves from understanding words to understanding the physical world — motion, gravity, culture, behavior, and eventually even industrial systems like oil refineries and hydroelectric dams. We also discuss some goldmines of AI data such as security camera archives, niche media libraries, and even the videos sitting on your phone. And finally, Chris shares why he’s a cautious optimist on AI, despite believing it could massively reshape jobs, business, and society. Please enjoy my conversation with Chris Keevil. Thx! -Rob

Inside the Mind of Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman

There are only a handful of people truly shaping the AI race. Sam Altman at OpenAI. Dario Amodei at Anthropic. Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind. Elon Musk at xAI. And Mustafa Suleyman at Microsoft AI. This episode is about Mustafa. He co-founded DeepMind (with Demis Hassabis), where AlphaGo shocked the world by beating Lee Sedol in Seoul, then came back a year later in China and beat Ke Jie, the world’s top Go player. He later co-founded Inflection, built Pi, and then moved to Microsoft after a roughly billion-dollar deal to bring Inflection’s team and technology into the Microsoft AI orbit. What makes Mustafa especially interesting is not just the resume. It’s the lens. He grew up in London, with a Syrian father and an English mother who grew up in poverty.  Before AI, he worked on mental health, city policy, and conflict resolution. So when Mustafa talks about AI, he does not just talk about models. He talks about China, jobs, biology, government, safety, and power. His book, The Coming Wave, is one of the clearest ways to understand what the people building AI think is coming next. Here’s my summary of The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI (MAI). Thx! -Rob

Sailing Champ Builds “the AdSense for AI”

Nic Baird is the co-founder and CEO of Koah Labs [https://www.koahlabs.com/] -- they are building what Tom Tunguz of Theory Ventures calls the AdSense for AI. Nic breaks down: • AI token economics in plain English: why serving an AI user can cost 100 times more than serving a web user.That’s why he thinks most AI apps cannot reach global scale on subscriptions alone. • Ads are coming to AI. The question is whether they’ll be useful—or terrible? Nic says the best AI ads won’t look like pop-ups, banners, or pre-rolls. They’ll be part of the answer. • Where people will first see these ads: ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and the agents and apps outside the frontier models. • Whether Claude can really stay ad-free forever? • We get into privacy too. How do you use AI in ads without reading people’s most personal chats and creeping them out. And Koah's fundraising story is wild. Tom Tunguz reached out before Koah even had a product And after passing on 150 adtech companies he made his Series A decision in 24 hours. Nic is also an 8-time national sailing champion and his dad won the America’s Cup and is in the sailing hall of fame. We talk about Nic's scariest sailing moments and how he got to meet Larry Ellison on the world’s biggest private superyacht. Special thanks to Tom at Theory Ventures for putting Koah on my radar. Please enjoy my conversation with Nic Baird. Thx! Rob