The Future Feels Personal: X Mayo on How Creatives Can Survive AI

A listener had WORDS about our King Willonius BBLDrizzy episode + SXSW!

Hello!

New week, new format, and we are turning on the paywall soon because… well, we value ourselves and hope you do too! We’ll always keep a portion of the newsletter free: the episode summary and a little bit of my insight. But we’ll save the bulk of my deep thoughts for paying subscribers along with behind the scenes from the show, an audio version of this newsletter, and more goodies coming.

Update on SXSW. We are doing a Life With Machines panel, and I’m up to even more.

Here’s what I’m up to at SXSW below. If you’ll be in Austin and are interested in connecting, please fill out this little form!

March 8, 2025 | Featured Session: Primal Instincts: Making Social "Social" Again

• Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM CT

• Baratunde Thurston sits down with Mozi founders Molly DeWolf Swenson and Ev Williams to explore the intersection of IRL and the internet, and to discuss the past, present and future of "social.”

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March 9, 2025 | Life With Machines: The Best and Worst of A.I.

• Time: 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM CT

• Our live Life With Machines moment with Rahaf Harfoush and Matt Klinman. Also BLAIR!

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March 10, 2025 | Mastering the Interview: The Tools to Make Real Connections

• Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM CT

• Rich Roll and Baratunde Thurston discuss the art of conversation. How do you build trust with the person across the table, and forge a real connection?

It was a busy week in AI. At the Paris AI Summit, JD Vance—who thinks banning drag shows is good governance but regulating AI is overreach—lectured Europe on its AI policy. Elon Musk’s xAI dropped Grok 3, a turbocharged model that supposedly outshines OpenAI and Google in math, science, and coding—just don’t ask it to calculate how many of Musk’s own children he’s met. Also, anyone else wondering if Elon’s power play with DOGE’s access to sensitive government data about all of us is what he’s gathering to feed to his AI? And Chipotle has outsourced hiring to an AI named Ava Cado.

Meanwhile, over in Life with Machines land, we just posted a special bonus episode. It’s a conversation I had on X Mayo’s podcast, The Dough. We’ve also got some big updates on the show, including new ways for you to get involved!

Here’s the Spotify link:

Welcome Note

Hey friends,

We say we want audience feedback and, well, we just got some. X Mayo had thoughts about our show, which is why we posted this episode. Because one of the promises of this podcast is that we take these conversations seriously—not just as an intellectual exercise, but as a real engagement with how AI is upending people’s lives and the way we feel.

X came in swinging. There was anger, confusion, fear, and humor of course. AI isn’t some abstract thought experiment to her. It’s a real, tangible force trying to rewrite the rules of an industry she’s fought hard to succeed in: writing for television. And she’s not alone. So many of us are living through a shift we didn’t sign up for, orchestrated by people who didn’t ask for our input.

Here are some resources inspired by this episode:

• This article by the brilliant @emily Emily Tavoulareas on how technology is core government infrastructure—not a supplementary component. This is the less-told story of DOGE you should be tracking. By taking control over the technological infrastructure of the US government, Elon Musk and team are literally taking control of the government.

• This piece in Wired on why we shouldn’t discount human writers in the age of AI. To quote “2025 will be a turning point, not for AI replacing us but for a renewed appreciation of the emotional, spiritual, political, cultural, and ultimately financial value of high-quality human writing. Ironically, the advent of AI-generated search, stalling traffic to original websites, will kill off the need for pointless “content” to game the system and will push people to demand better.”

Baratunde’s Take

Here are some thoughts that have been bouncing around my brain after talking with X:

(1) AI Isn’t Just a Tech Issue—It’s an Emotional One

We love to intellectualize AI. We debate its merits, its risks, its regulatory future. But we rarely stop to acknowledge that for a lot of people, AI isn’t just interesting, it’s personal. It’s their job, their industry, their sense of self-worth being put on the chopping block by a technology they had no say in developing.

X was honest about her fear and frustration—about how tech bros are making decisions that affect her livelihood without her consent. And that discomfort is important. Because AI isn’t a neutral force. It’s being deployed by people with power, and it’s reshaping lives in ways that go far beyond efficiency and optimization.

Engaging with the feelings around AI isn’t just necessary—it’s unavoidable. We are emotional beings. The machines might not feel (yet), but we do. And ignoring that only makes the backlash stronger.

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