In The Blink of AI with Georgie Healy

Lucas Cantor has an unusual claim on the AI conversation. In 2019, Huawei asked him to finish Schubert's Unfinished Symphony using artificial intelligence, and he did it. He's an Emmy-winning composer who has worked on every Olympics since 2002, produced a cover of Everybody Wants to Rule the World with Lorde, and now invests in music technology. His new book is Unfinished: The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

In this episode Georgie Healy gets Lucas to take apart the story we're all being told about AI. Why he thinks nobody actually knows what the term even means. Why every single person he asks assumes AI can do the job they're not an expert in, and can't do the job they are. Why the claim that AI democratizes creativity is a fallacy sold by AI companies, and what it actually democratizes instead. Why B2B SaaS isn't dead, and who benefits from you believing it is. And why the music industry, supposedly murdered by Napster, is bigger now than it was before.

If you build, market, or operate anything, this is a useful hour of pressure testing. Lucas isn't a doomer and he isn't an evangelist. He's someone who has been inside the technology long enough to tell the difference between what it does and what it's sold as.

Recorded ahead of his first trip to Australia for BIGSOUND - which is September 1st - 4th in Brisbane!

Chapters:

00:00 Cold open

00:54 Welcome, and who Lucas Cantor is

02:49 The AI hack: stem separation

04:14 Taylor Swift's wedding

04:55 BIGSOUND, and the fear around AI in music

06:23 Why the purist argument falls apart

07:25 Tuning has drifted since the Renaissance

10:02 Composer, producer, author, investor

11:16 What Suno is, and the ethics problem

12:20 Why all music sounds better now

15:33 What it actually means to have your music stolen

16:56 Covering Everybody Wants to Rule the World with Lorde

19:19 Source Connect, Audio Movers, and remote studios

20:22 The fallacy that AI democratizes creativity

22:38 Black Swan, conductors, and the war on expertise

24:26 The doctor who said AI could write a pop song

27:38 Why he called himself a Luddite

30:18 Hans Zimmer's studio, and saying yes to Huawei

32:34 Finishing Schubert's Unfinished Symphony

37:00 "I don't think anybody knows what AI is"

38:49 Every AI agent ad shows something nobody needs

42:14 Hot take: is B2B SaaS dead?

45:13 AI is a story, and that's the problem

46:25 What actually wins in music tech

49:28 Amusing, but not amazing

50:20 Ben Affleck, Scorsese, and AI in the creative process

53:30 Two Emmys and a coach of the year award

55:36 The one takeaway from Unfinished

57:33 Georgie's Substack, Attention Is All I Need

Robin O'Connell spends his days inside LinkedIn's marketing and advertising team in Australia, working with founders and brands on content strategy - which makes him a rare voice on where AI genuinely helps marketers, and where it still falls flat. In this episode, Robin makes the case that the smartest move for any marketer right now is trying to replace parts of your own job with AI, just to find out fast what it can't do. His answer: strategy. AI can automate tactics at scale, but it still can't replace the judgement that comes from genuinely understanding a customer.

Georgie and Robin get into how brands actually stand out on LinkedIn (hint: it's not by looking like Apple), why comments and DMs are a better growth signal than impressions, and how to tell when AI-written content is quietly killing your credibility.

The standout story, though, is personal: Robin's dad Dennis, a serial entrepreneur in Dublin who lost his retail business during COVID, now runs a landscaping venture - and uses AI image generation on an iPad to show clients exactly what their garden will look like before a single spade hits the ground. It's one of the clearest, most human examples of AI actually changing how someone runs a small business.

Find Robin on LinkedIn for more on marketing, AI, and content strategy.

Freddie McKenzie is the co-founder and CEO of Manifest, an AI platform that helps creative and marketing agencies capture the real value of their work without timesheets. Before Manifest, he built and exited VIVID Creative, an Auckland-based production agency behind campaigns for Jetstar and other major brands, and in this conversation with Georgie Healy he traces that journey and where he thinks AI agents, and the AI hype cycle, are actually heading.

Freddie shares his AI hack of stacking meeting transcripts to actually see progress over time, and explains why he refuses to automate the one interface he thinks matters most: his inbox. He unpacks why Manifest's CTO built a proprietary AI model instead of wrapping an off-the-shelf one, the real story behind Manifest's $2 million pre-seed raise in a tough funding market, and his take on why most companies experimenting with AI agents still can't get past their first prompt. He also makes the case that the so-called SaaS apocalypse is a myth, and shares his simple rule for founders chasing product-market fit: find the ugly problem, not the sexy one.

Mentioned in this episode:

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Welcome to the first ever episode of AI Icons, a new thing I'm launching on the show. Here's the idea: the people reshaping tech have stories more entertaining than anything Hollywood is putting out, so in under 30 minutes I'm going to tell you the whole story, the good, the bad, and the ugly, but only the facts. No spin. And at the end, I'll give you my two cents on what actually made them an icon, and whether it's something you and I could ever replicate.

First up is Mira Murati, and I'll admit it, I'm a fan. I take you all the way back to her childhood in isolated post-communist Albania, where maths was the one subject the party couldn't rewrite, through a scholarship in Canada, degrees in maths and mechanical engineering, and a Goldman Sachs floor in Tokyo at 21. Then it's Tesla and those ridiculous Falcon Wing doors, a risky bet on a startup called Leap Motion, and the move that made her famous: OpenAI, where she rose to CTO and helped bring DALL-E and ChatGPT into your life.

And then there's the part that genuinely reads like a thriller. The 72 hours in November 2023 when Sam Altman was fired, Mira was named CEO, and a 52-page memo and a string of 2:30am texts sat right at the center of it. I walk you through what we know, what we still don't, and what came out under oath. I finish on her next act, Thinking Machines Lab, the record-breaking raise, the talent exodus, and why, out of my four Gs, I think one of them explains her better than the rest. Come find out which one.

Global hiring and payroll can be a headache. Deel brings HR, IT and payroll together in one platform, helping companies including Shopify, Revolut and ElevenLabs scale internationally.

Ready to expand your business?

Build your global team with Deel at deel.com/dayone.

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

Peter Gostev is head of AI capabilities at Arena (LMArena), the community-based platform where millions of real people vote in blind tests to rank AI models, born out of research at UC Berkeley. Before Arena, Peter was Head of AI at Moonpig and built a large following sharing hands-on explorations of what the latest models can actually do. He joins Georgie Healy from London for a genuinely nerdy, insider look at how models are judged and where the frontier is heading.

In this episode, Peter explains the difference between static benchmarks and human judgment, and why a model can pass every test you write and still produce something that looks completely awful. He breaks down the current state of the leaderboards, why Anthropic's models are dominating and how that tracks with real world adoption, and gives a sharp comparison of the top Western models, including why Anthropic's non-reasoning models are exceptional while OpenAI's strength lies in deep reasoning. Georgie and Peter get into why people aren't using Chinese models more despite their quality, the economics behind AI pricing and how enterprise usage is priced very differently from consumer subscriptions, why release cadence matters as much as capability, and what the wave of data centre investment means for the models arriving next. Along the way there's a fond detour on Opus 3 as the model you could talk to for hours, and why better models can sometimes feel worse.

Tune in for a clear-eyed, hype-free guide to how AI models are really evaluated, straight from someone who watches the charts move in real time.

Mentioned in this episode:

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Damian Naughton is the General Manager of ANZ at ElevenLabs, the voice AI company now past US$500 million in ARR, just four years after its 2022 founding. Formerly a regional VP at Slack and an early team member at Sydney's Hyper Anna (acquired by Alteryx), Damian is leading ElevenLabs' new Sydney office and tripling the local team as enterprise demand for voice AI accelerates.

In this episode, Damian and Georgie Healy cover why ElevenLabs is planting a flag in ANZ now and the local customers already on board, including Xero, Employment Hero, Heidi Health, Australia Post, and Andromeda Robotics' aged care companion robot Abby. Damian unpacks the company's high performance culture and the "11x yourself" philosophy, why intrinsic motivation beats top down pressure, and how he co-designs stretch goals with new hires. They get into voice cloning and the ethics behind it, how little audio you actually need to clone a voice, and how ElevenLabs handles consent, safety, and scammers, including a clever "reverse" use case that keeps fraudsters on the line to gather intel for banks. Damian also shares his view that enterprise AI needs to be led by the business rather than tech, why the BPO and consulting worlds are facing real disruption, and his take that tall poppy syndrome is a scourge holding Australian tech back.

Tune in for a candid conversation on voice AI, building a high performing team, and how enterprises should prepare for a near future where your own AI assistant takes action on your behalf.

Time Stamps

00:00 – Intro: Your AI Assistant Will Soon Take Action For You

02:17 – AI Hack of the Week: A Michael Caine Voice Butler On The Fridge

04:57 – ElevenLabs Launches in Australia and New Zealand

07:14 – Why Voice AI Is Ready Now (Xero, Employment Hero, Heidi, Andromeda)

10:52 – From Journalist to Voice AI: How AI Is Changing the News

13:40 – Inside Hyper Anna, the Aussie Startup Acquired by Alteryx

15:31 – ElevenLabs' High Performance Culture and the "11x Yourself" Rule

25:38 – The ElevenLabs Founding Story: Two Polish Founders and Bad Dubbing

28:42 – How Will Australia React to Voice AI?

31:24 – Voice Cloning Ethics, Consent, and Celebrity Voices

34:12 – How Little Audio You Need to Clone a Voice

37:17 – Voice AI and Scammers: How ElevenLabs Fights Fraud

42:05 – Can AI Bring Back Music From Artists Who Have Passed?

45:11 – Can Enterprise Companies Actually Adapt to AI?

53:05 – Advice for Heads of AI: Let Business Lead, Not Tech

56:39 – Rapid Fire: Tall Poppy Syndrome, Hiring, and Spicy Takes

1:02:05 – Where to Follow Damian and ElevenLabs

Global hiring and payroll can be a headache. Deel brings HR, IT and payroll together in one platform, helping companies including Shopify, Revolut and ElevenLabs scale internationally.

Ready to expand your business?

Build your global team with Deel at deel.com/dayone.

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

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Akshay Kothari is the COO and co-founder of Notion, the workspace platform now used by over a hundred million people. Before Notion, he co-founded Pulse, the newsreader app built as a Stanford class project that Steve Jobs name-checked on stage at WWDC 2010 before LinkedIn acquired it. He joined Notion in 2018 when the team was fewer than ten people, and in this conversation with Georgie Healy he traces that journey and where knowledge work is heading as agents take centre stage.

Akshay shares his AI hack of the week, turning a screenshot of restaurant recommendations into a shareable Notion database, and explains how the unit of work has shifted from taking notes to simply having a chat. He unpacks the design obsession behind Notion's identity, the block architecture that lets anyone build their own tools, and the new Developer Platform that brings outside agents like Claude and Codex onto Notion's context graph. He paints a picture of a "factory of agents" working round the clock while humans move to reviewing and applying taste, makes the case for model optionality and cost control, and shares his rule for custom agents: macro delegate, then micro steer.

Global hiring and payroll can be a headache. Deel brings HR, IT and payroll together in one platform, helping companies including Shopify, Revolut and ElevenLabs scale internationally.

Ready to expand your business?

Build your global team with Deel at deel.com/dayone.

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

Mentioned in this episode:

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This is a #paidpartnership with Commonwealth Bank

Blair is the Chief Engineer of Generative AI at Commonwealth Bank, overseeing nine to ten teams building the AI platform that powers Australia’s largest bank and its millions of customers. Including me, a Dollar Mite since primary school.

His origin story is not what you would expect. He was a self-described hacker who grew up clicking through every system configuration setting he could find on his mum’s school computers after hours. That curiosity took him from building on GPT-2 before ChatGPT even existed, to the heart of one of Australia’s most important institutions.

In this episode we get into:

• The litmus test he uses to spot bad AI use immediately
• Why context matters more than prompting
• What an AI platform actually is and why your company probably needs one
• Why software engineers need to take more accountability for what they build
• The single security mistake most people are still making
• Why it is absolutely not too late to figure AI out for yourself

Practical, candid, and full of things you can action today.

00:00 Intro

03:05 What Does a Chief Engineer of AI at a Bank Actually Do

06:02 How CBA Collaborates Across Hundreds of Engineering Teams

08:56 How to Keep Up With AI Tools Without Getting Overwhelmed

12:04 Why Tool Consistency Matters in Enterprise AI

14:56 Why Blair Shares His AI Insights Publicly

17:51 What Being a Hacker Really Means in Tech

20:50 How Blair Hudson Went From Startup AI to Commonwealth Bank

23:59 Why CBA Starts Every Sprint With a Real Customer Call

27:06 Why Over-Engineering Is Killing Your AI Projects

29:47 Where AI Is Actually Moving the Needle in Banking Right Now

32:15 Why the Year of the Agent Was Overhyped

34:41 How to Build AI Fast Without Cutting Corners on Safety

39:28 What Is an AI Platform and Why Does Your Company Need One

41:49 How CBA Handles Shadow AI and Tool Adoption at Scale

45:09 Why Context Is More Important Than Prompting

50:29 The Number One Security Mistake You Are Still Making

52:30 The Easiest Way to Start Using AI to Save Time Today

54:05 Why You Should Never Ship AI Output Without Reviewing It

55:38 Why It Is Not Too Late to Learn AI

Global hiring and payroll can be a headache. Deel brings HR, IT and payroll together in one platform, helping companies including Shopify, Revolut and ElevenLabs scale internationally.

Ready to expand your business?

Build your global team with Deel at deel.com/dayone.

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

Mentioned in this episode:

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"Can does not imply should."

That one line from Dr Simon Longstaff cuts to the heart of everything wrong with how the tech industry is currently building AI. The Executive Director of The Ethics Centre and one of Australia's most respected moral philosophers joins Georgie for a conversation that is equal parts grounding and mind-expanding, and one of the most important episodes the show has produced.

Simon's path to becoming Australia's foremost ethics expert is not what you would expect. He left school at 16, cleaned toilets on a remote island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, drove ambulances, became a paramedic and fire officer, and was eventually adopted by one of the clans of the Anindilyakwa people. It was at the end of a ship loading wharf that an indigenous elder taught him something about seeing patterns in the world, a lesson he has carried through 35 years of philosophical work and only recently realised had shaped everything.

In this episode he unpacks why ethics is not an optional extra bolted onto technology but the foundation it has to be built on, why the pharmaceutical approval model could be the blueprint for governing AI, and why "necessary fictions" mean that CEOs deploying AI are responsible for outcomes they literally cannot understand. He also makes the case that the coming wave of job displacement does not have to be a catastrophe, and explains what ancient Athens and pre-colonial Indigenous life have to do with universal basic income.

Global hiring and payroll can be a headache. Deel brings HR, IT and payroll together in one platform, helping companies including Shopify, Revolut and ElevenLabs scale internationally.

Ready to expand your business?

Build your global team with Deel at deel.com/dayone.

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

Mentioned in this episode:

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When Katelyn Lesse was leading engineering at Stripe, she noticed everything around her shifting because of AI. So she left, and joined Anthropic. Today she leads platform engineering at one of the most important AI companies in the world, which is why we were so thrilled to host her for Anthropic's first ever interview in Sydney.

Katelyn does not lead with technical jargon. She leads with a question every builder needs to sit with right now. Are you building on the exponential, or are you stuck on the linear? Most people, she says, are already further behind than they realise.

In this episode she shares the exact framework she uses to think about building in the AI era, why your frustrations with Claude are actually signals you are onto something, and what it really means to be AGI pilled inside Anthropic.

00:00 Intro

02:53 AI Hack: Using Claude to Pick Wine

03:42 Katelyn's Background and Path to Anthropic

05:32 Why She Left Stripe to Join Anthropic

11:22 What Building on the Exponential Means

11:48 Why Australia Is a Top AI Market

13:05 Is the Claude Obsession Healthy?

15:20 The Framework for Building AI Products

16:38 Why Evals Are Non-Negotiable

18:18 Inside Anthropic's Developer Platform

20:11 What Is Harness Engineering?

25:13 AI Security, Sandboxes and Human in the Loop

29:09 Cloud Managed Agents Explained

31:56 Open Source MCP vs Closed Claude

33:48 How AI Is Changing Engineering Teams

36:24 How to Choose the Right AI Coding Tool

39:12 The End of the Traditional Tech Team

44:30 The AI Magic Moment Everyone Remembers

45:30 What It Means to Be AGI Pilled

47:21 Rapid Fire With Anthropic

49:56 Advice for Developers Building With AI

Global hiring and payroll can be a headache. Deel brings HR, IT and payroll together in one platform, helping companies including Shopify, Revolut and ElevenLabs scale internationally.

Ready to expand your business?

Build your global team with Deel at deel.com/dayone.

Weekly Substack: https://georgiehealy.substack.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georginahealy/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georginahealytech/

In The Blink of AI is part of Day One, the podcast network dedicated to founders, operators & investors.

Sign up to get your weekly insights into the up-and-coming AI startups: https://dayone.fm/newsletter

Mentioned in this episode:

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