Chris Keevil is founder and CEO of 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"

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

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

My guest today is Nic Baird, co-founder and CEO of Koah Labs.

Koah is 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

My guest today 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'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

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

My guest today is Thad McIlroy, author of The AI Revolution in Book Publishing – and the most strategic thinker I know on where AI and books collide.

He’s an insider who knows the big publishers but he also tracks more than 1,800 startups in the space (including 350 in AI).

In this conversation Thad breaks down the“original sin” of AI in publishing—and why it’s driving so much fear and anger across the industry.

We talk about why publishers are, in his words, “constipated by copyright,” and how that same mindset crippled them during past tech waves—from Amazon… to Kindle… to the Google Books project.

He shares a wild story of an author who made over $100K by quickly creating 200 books using AI.

He also lays out his simple “15% framework” for publishers and calls out one common approach from publishers as “pathetic.”

He explains John Grisham’s AI pushback (he’s banning it) is a bad move for the Big 5 publishers.

And for those of you building startups in this space, he lays out what he calls the “Manifest Destiny” of publishing—and how AI could finally make that a reality

Make sure you stick around for the final question—Thad's story about his dad came out of nowhere (and got me weepy).

Special thanks to Zach Stewart at the Canessa Art Gallery on Montgomery Street in SF (right at the heart of AI) for connecting Thad and me.

Please enjoy my conversation with Thad McIlroy.

Thx!
Rob

Jennifer Elliott is a veteran engineer in data centers whose customers have included Google, Meta, AWS, and Netflix. She has a wild story to share.

What makes Jennifer so fascinating is the duality.

She is highly technical, lives in Silicon Valley, and has invested in multiple AI startups -- she's bullish on AI.

But she’s also actively preparing ​​for a future where AI becomes — in her words — an ‘apex predator’ that could take humans out

She’s already building a list of her ‘Ride or Die’ people and designing an off-grid ‘Hidey Hole’ bunker community.

We get into exactly what concerns her about AI — including the surprisingly simple way she thinks it could attack, the personality traits of her Ride or Die people, and the two locations she’s already scouting out.

One of them happens to be a place where Peter Thiel spends time.

She also shares her take on the one way a startup could beat Nvidia — the most valuable company in the world.

This conversation feels both extreme and oddly familiar — because I think we all have a Jennifer in our lives… someone thinking a few steps ahead about worst-case scenarios.

Special thanks to the artist Sean Orlando for connecting me with Jennifer— go Glenview Elementary!

Now please enjoy my conversation with Jennifer Elliott.

Thx,

Rob

JC Cangilla was Head of Entertainment Deals at Meta, where he led a 20-person team spending $1 billion+ per year acquiring content to power 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 that he sold to Discovery/WarnerMedia.

In our conversation, he shares:

• The top 2 things Big Tech algorithms use to decide what content wins
• The shift to engineers controlling content — and 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 ask JC about Moltbook, the Reddit-like social network for AI agents… Well, shortly after our interview, his former employer Meta acquired Moltbook – its 2 co-founders are now part of Meta’s Superintelligence 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 Cangilla.

Thx!
Rob Kelly