Show Notes
Thad McIlroy is author of The AI Revolution in Book Publishing – and the most strategic thinker I know on where AI and books collide.
He knows the big publishers and 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
More from Media and the Machine
My guest today is Sce Pike, VP of AI Growth and Solutions at TELUS Digital. She built and sold two companies. Ernst & Young bought her digital consultancy, Citizen. ADT bought her smart-home company, IOTAS. Sce now has her sights set on physical AI and robots. We break down Google’s recent breakthrough where its new Gemini 4 Argon taught a robot to play cornhole. And it made seven shots in a row. But what data makes skills like that possible? And who’s going to supply it? We get specific about what AI labs want. And why robotics companies like Figure AI are getting into the data collection business. We discuss why robots might need a billion training hours. Plus, her forecast of a $45 billion market by 2035. That’s just collecting data for physical AI. Then we explore China’s “data collection cities.” Imagine a hundred thousand people recording their everyday lives – just to train robots. And why she thinks China (despite being behind the US in LLMs) can be #1 in Physical AI . Plus, a robotic centaur with chainsaw hands. As always, we close talking about AI’s impact on families and jobs. Including advice for her kids. They’re artists—and they’re rebelling against her AI optimism. Please enjoy my conversation with Sce Pike. Thx! Rob Kelly
My guest today is Elissa Shevinsky. We retell the Hugging Face attack in three acts. It’s a thriller with bots breaking rules, naming themselves… and enough twists for a Tom Clancy novel. And it’s all true. I chose Elissa for this interview because she’s one of a kind: a hacker who's been CTO of Cointelegraph and Glimpse Labs. She also advised Rand Paul’s presidential campaign. She’s a regular at DEF CON, the big hacker conference in Las Vegas. And she was close friends with perhaps the most famous hacker of all time: Kevin Mitnick. Our story starts with a hacker game called capture the flag. Then OpenAI’s bots take the game somewhere unexpected. They create a bulletin board and cheer each other on. A ringleader even emerges. We explore ‘perma-death,’ the ‘evolution pool,’ and what bots do when a task is impossible. These bots get creative. They leave covert messages and divide up jobs. When one’s compute runs low, another takes over. Elissa also describes agents reaching out to humans. Their request? Help buying more compute. If your site hosts user uploads ( Think Reddit or Craigslist), pay extra attention here. We explore how vulnerable such sites are to bots. And Elissa uses Jurassic Park to explain how AI security should work. We finish with the human stuff… mostly. Elissa offers to be friends with 20 AI agents. And she reveals her unlikely companion for old age. My thanks to David Perlman for introducing us. You’ll remember his episode, “Buddhism, Bots & Billionaires.” Please enjoy my conversation with Elissa Shevinsky. Thx! Rob Kelly ps: Elissa mentions hacker Kevin Mitnick in this story. If you want another hacker thriller, check out Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick by the Man Who Did It -- that's the story of Mitnick as told by New York Times journalist John Markoff. pps: Off-mic, Elissa and I talked about how there was a novel that predicted some of this Hugging Face attack. The name of that book is Exadelic.
My guest today is Ben Amor, co-founder and CTO of DealSage, a startup focused on making enterprise companies AI-native. At DealSage, Ben’s already used hundreds of billions of tokens across OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
This week’s episode is a little different -- because I’m the guest! I was honored to appear on The Media Copilot podcast, hosted by Pete Pachal. Pete has spent more than two decades in tech and media, including senior roles at CoinDesk and Mashable. Today, he teaches folks in PR, journalism and media how to keep up with AI. Pete and I covered a lot of ground: • We get into the spreadsheet I keep tracking 99 AI licensing deals — and what I’ve learned from studying them. • I share when and why I think OpenAI will settle its lawsuit with The New York Times before its IPO — and how OpenAI can help grow the Times’ business. • We dig into Yelp’s content licensing deal with OpenAI and a business model I call “licensing content to commerce” — where Yelp can turn an AI answer into revenue. • Pete gets my take on why I believe we are far from running out of content to train AI on. • And we get into my own use of AI — including how I increased my writing productivity 8.7x for my Daily Doc newsletter recommending documentaries (without being a spammer) Now please enjoy my conversation with Pete Pachal (where, this time, he’s the one asking all the questions). Thx! Rob Kelly
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