Media and the Machine

AI Wants Needles in a Haystack. He Finds Them

Chris Keevil is 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

AI Models Got the Hype—But Apps Decide Who Wins Next

Andy Beach was the CTO of AI for Microsoft in 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'll be won by the biggest models—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini. Andy 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, 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 ElevenLabs. They started as models—but had to become full apps to win. We also get into the “Mac vs PC” style battle between OpenAI and Anthropic. And why Apple using Gemini is smarter than building its own LLM. We cover sports including Andy's work on AI with the NBA and Motocross.You'll be amazed at the fan experience AI is gonna allow us. We also go deep on where the money is going. AI training and licensing could get even bigger Andy also shares lessons from inside Microsoft. Why they never tried to become a media company like Google.  Finally, we 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 of Andy back in early 2025 Now Please enjoy my conversation with Andy Beach. Thx! -Rob

Top Podcaster: AI Kills Info Podcasts—Not Personalities

Chris Hutchins is host of the All the Hacks podcast — heard by over a million listeners, with 10 million+ downloads. AI describes Chris as “Tim Ferriss meets Mr. Beast with a spreadsheet.” He’s also founded and sold two companies — one to Google and the other to Wealthfront. In our conversation, Chris explains why AI could replace a huge number of podcasts — and which ones actually survive and why. He shares what he’s learning from a current test in which for the past 2 weeks he’s recorded everything he says (and I mean everything including conversations with his wife) . He shares how that experiment is changing how he thinks about the new way content will be created and consumed. He lays out a future where you don’t use apps at all — just one AI interface. He also breaks down a test where he used AI to read his podcast ads — and even his wife couldn't tell which was her husband and which was AI He explains why he stopped using OpenClaw, even though it blew him away… and how his use of LLMs has completely flipped in the past year.  Special thanks to Jay Clouse for connecting Chris and me through his amazing Creator Science Lab, including an event in Boise where Chris and I first sat down together.  Speaking of that, this episode has a bonus second part. The first part you’re about to hear is purely on AI. But then at the end, I’ve included a separate, mostly uncut conversation we recorded last year where I asked Chris tactical questions I had myself on how to build a great podcast –I hadn’t yet launched mine.  That bonus includes how he thinks about audio vs. video, when to start selling ads, how he picks which topics to work on, and how he prepared for his appearance on the Tim Ferriss show Please enjoy my conversation, parts 1 and 2, with Chris Hutchins. Thx, Rob Kelly