Eric Mulvin: 00:00
Welcome to the Unfinished Business Podcast. I’m your host, Eric Mulvin, and this is a show where we sit down with CEOs, leaders, visionaries, and creators talking about who they are and what they’re doing changing the world, whether through their business, through their leadership, through their creativity, or through their organization. Because it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve accomplished, even someone like Walter Cronkite still had something that he wanted to do in his career and wanted to accomplish. And so we explore those stories here on Unfinished Business with Eric Mulvin.

Lindsey Mastis: 00:38
Human intelligence plus AI. Unfinished business.

Eric Mulvin: 01:06
These are full-time remote staff in the Philippines who work as part of your team, handling calls, emails, chat support, and admin tasks. So you can improve support, scale faster, and keep costs under control. For example, one client cut out over $600,000 a year in payroll costs by switching key support roles to Pac Biz Outsourcing. So if you’re trying to lower costs or scale support, visit pac-biz.com to learn more. Or you can give us a call Monday through Friday at 480-771-3009. Alrighty. Today I am very excited to introduce you to our next guest. She is a four-time Emmy and regional Edward R. Morrow award-winning journalist, a keynote speaker and founder of Blue News Media. She was the first television news anchor in the United States to specialize in artificial intelligence, helping audiences understand emerging technology through clear, human-centered storytelling. Today she works with AI and technology leaders to sharpen their message, uncover the stories that build trust, and prepare for high visibility moments. She also speaks internationally on the impact of AI on business, creativity, and society. This summer, Lindsey will deliver a keynote on AI and music and host an AI Film Festival at the United Nations AI for Good Summit in Geneva, Switzerland. Whether she’s interviewing innovators, advising founders, or speaking on global stages, her work focuses on one question: How do people stay relevant, creative, and deeply human in a world transformed by technology? Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome Lindsey Mastis. All right. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here, Lindsey.

Lindsey Mastis: 02:51
Eric, thank you so much for having me. It’s always wonderful to talk to you.

Eric Mulvin: 02:54
Awesome. So just a little background. As I mentioned, she was uh she’s a speaker, and that’s how I came across Lindsey here. Is I was at a I think it was like a year or two ago, I was at a conference. No, it was last year, and uh I heard her speak on AI, and I was like, oh, we gotta I gotta connect with her. So thanks for for being on the show and sharing some of your expertise with us here today.

Lindsey Mastis: 03:16
Absolutely, and thank you for having me. This is really exciting. It’s an exciting time to be talking about artificial intelligence. Like we’re experiencing the moment.

Eric Mulvin: 03:24
We are in the middle of living his through like history right now. I know that uh we’ll be books written about all the stuff we’re living at the moment, which is if you zoom out and uh forget about the day-to-day headlines, it is pretty crazy to think about, considering you’re uh you know, it’s kind of like a historian here uh documenting what’s happening along the way.

Lindsey Mastis: 03:45
Oh, it’s so fascinating. You mentioned Walter Cronkite at the beginning, and I’ve met him. I actually got a chance to meet him. He came to my college and I placed myself between where he was speaking and his vehicle and was able to get his autograph on the way out, which was amazing of his autobiography. So I have a signed copy of his autobiography and uh incredible, you know, talking about different things he wanted to do with his life and the knowledge that he passed down to the next generations. And a lot of young people, like who’s Walter Cronkite, right? Like so he was one of the first, you know, nightly news type of anchor, anchor people. And uh yeah, so much has changed, you know, from when I started in the business to what’s happening now. And you know, when I started, we were doing beta tape, and now everything is digitized, and now we’re going to AI. So it’s an it’s exciting to see how much things have changed in just a couple of decades.

Eric Mulvin: 04:39
Yeah, very much so. And uh I I had the opportunity to go to a program of his at Arizona State University. So I almost became a journalist myself, and that’s why I went to the program in high school, and that’s when I realized uh you gotta like move every time you want a promotion and like live in some little town. So I was like, oh, I’m gonna try something else.

Lindsey Mastis: 04:59
I’ve lived in so many states, but you know, it it’s giving me a different perspective, and I feel that I have a really good grasp on America in general. You know, I’ve I grew up in the Midwest. My first job was in Illinois. I moved to DC, then I moved to Los Angeles, I became a national correspondent, and I even got to to travel internationally for a bit too. Moved back to, or actually moved down to Florida, which is honestly a whole different, you know, different part of the country, and then moved back to DC. And there was a couple months I actually lived in Dallas when I was in my early 20s. So, you know, I’ve had a a good a good perspective on on different regions and what’s important and how things do differ throughout this very large country.

Eric Mulvin: 05:41
Yeah, you know, it’s I I get the opportunity to working with my team in the Philippines, you get a little bit of an outside perspective on the US. And yeah, the perception is we’re just one they don’t realize how big it is. I think that’s the first thing. And it’s like a bunch of little countries put together almost, it seems like.

Lindsey Mastis: 05:58
Right. I was trying not to say Florida’s its own country, but it it comes to me, I was like looking around and like, you know, there’s really no other place in the US that’s quite like this. You know, you’ve heard of the Florida man news and that type of thing. And I didn’t quite believe it till I moved down there. I was like, well, yeah, these are the most unique stories I’ve ever covered.

Eric Mulvin: 06:15
Oh, yeah. I guess as a reporter, you get very colorful stories to find.

Lindsey Mastis: 06:21
Yeah, you’re just like, well, I didn’t have that on my bingo card. I and we try to think through scenarios as well. So we want to be prepared for everything. And there’s so often we’re like, well, I I couldn’t even dream this up to prepare for it. And you find yourself in the strangest of situations.

Eric Mulvin: 06:36
Yeah. So uh I’m curious, like, where along your journey did you start getting into the AI stuff? And uh and because I I think you’re one of your your taglines is you’re the first national reporter, right? To to speak on AI.

Lindsey Mastis: 06:51
Yeah, local news broadcaster. So I was in I was a news anchor here in the DC area, and really as soon as OpenAI announced Chat GPT, I I did it. I did it was very fast. In fact, I was meeting with my former news director just last night, and she was talking about the creation of the position. And she asked me immediately, she said, You want to make this your main thing? I said, absolutely. So I had artificial intelligence as my official beat and the first one in the country to do that at a local news level and as an anchor. And uh I was really grateful for that because I have been interested in technology for my entire life. I was a Star Trek next generation fan, like you wouldn’t believe. Like I had cardboard cutouts, like I had the figurines, I was all about the transporter technology, wanting to know about the thrusters, like all of this really innovative technology. And then I would get excited through my life when I’d find out or see news articles about how, hey, you know, this fictional technology that they were highlighting in Next Generation, they just created it. And I would get so excited about it. And, you know, in eighth grade, I remember photocopying the rest of my science book because we didn’t get through the whole book and I wanted to finish reading it over the summer. And so when I got into TV News, there was, especially at the local level, there’s really no dedicated, you know, tech reporters for the most part. There are some people that do syndication. But in 2009, I think it was, augmented reality started to become a thing. And I remember doing stories on augmented reality and having to really go into the newsroom, go into the meetings that we would have and try to sell them on covering this technology. And I remember doing a story or two, and I’d come back and I’d say, Hey, you know, there’s this new thing that it can do, or you know, they’re using it for this purpose now. And I remember being told, you already did that story. As if it’s just one, one story and you’re done. It’s like, well, no, there’s so much more to it. And I luckily had a really great news director then as well, who would make me the lead story on the news if Gmail went down. Wow. Because even though we had crime and other things going on, he’s like, every single person watching was affected by this today. This is top story. Whereas, you know, what’s going on in the community is extremely important as well. But this is something people needed context to. Why did it happen? What what do they need to do if it happens next time? What was responsible for it? So anytime I had an opportunity to report on tech, I did. But it wasn’t until, honestly, until ChatGPT came out that I was given the opportunity to make it one of my absolute main things that I did. And out of everything I was doing, it was my most favorite.

Eric Mulvin: 09:36
Yeah. Well, I feel like I have a lot of similar stories to you. Like I I was into space growing up, and you know, that pulled me into, and I always said, Oh, I’m gonna, I know I want to start a business one day. I don’t know what, but I know it’s gonna deal with computers because I was all into the tech as well. And so it’s interesting, you know, where that passion takes you. And uh it’s that’s a broad interest, but yeah, how it pulled you into tech and then reporting and uh and AI. So what was your involvement with AI before Chat GPT? I mean, and what being that you were paying attention when it first came out, I’m guessing you had to been watching it a bit earlier than that then, right?

Lindsey Mastis: 10:17
I’m trying to remember back actually, because you know, we were coming out of the pandemic, and during that time, I actually launched an unscripted daily show that was giving people information they really at the beginning especially couldn’t get elsewhere. And I was having people contact me with their symptoms and ask me if they had it. And this was before there were tests. So I started putting doctors on the program. And through that, you know, I was trying to find a way to keep the program going and morphing it into wellness show. And as part of that, I started to bring people on that might have had different types of wellness tech. So, like, think of like the aura ring, think of you know, lumen where you blow into it. There’s so many different even, you know, wearables or ones that you just kind of use on the side. And so I was trying to integrate some of that into the programming. And I think we had gotten to a point in this country where you know, we’re coming out of it and a lot of people were kind of tired of talking about it. And so that show was going by the wayside and it opened me up to doing the next thing. And that’s when there started to be more of a discussion about, hey, this new technology. And again, I jumped on it. I mean, as soon as the announcement came out, I’m the one explaining what’s going on. And, you know, I’m really good at taking technical concepts, explaining them to broad audiences, explaining why it matters, and then also how people can can use it themselves. One of the biggest hurdles right now is trust in AI. And so that’s something else that I focus on is you know, how you present this in a way that that garners trust, especially when it’s tech that could really help people out. So starting out with that medical tech was really important because that’s something that could be life-saving for people. And that I think was a really good transition between what I was doing during that time to what the next thing I would be doing. And you know, if if that hadn’t happened, if we hadn’t gone through this, you know, international medical uh situation that it’s just it was so overwhelming. I don’t know what would have happened if how that trajectory might have happened or if it would have occurred a little bit sooner. I think that would have been possible because we were all fixated on surviving for a few years. But it was it was natural for me. And especially because I had been working at the station so long, people knew me, my management knew me, my news director knew me really well. So she just knew like this is a perfect fit for you. And she knew I’d run with it. And it was, it was honestly so fun. I just kept telling people, like, I haven’t been this excited to cover something since augmented reality. Like just thinking about it would put a smile on my face. I could be covering some of the most tragic, awful news of the day. And then I’d get to turn my attention to AI and I would just feel elated. Like this is it was it was it was like an emotional release to to cover something that has so much promise.

Eric Mulvin: 13:10
Yeah, that that’s so true. And that was you said around 2023, right? So we’re looking at about it was like immediate.

Lindsey Mastis: 13:17
It was immediate. It was like I did like a story, and she’s like, You want to make this your thing? Like, yes.

Eric Mulvin: 13:23
Yeah, that’s so cool. Because I mean it’s it I’m sure you’ve probably experienced this. You might have been working on a story and you think you’re ready to go, it’s about done, and then all of a sudden something has changed with AI like that day, and now you probably have to tweak your story, right? It’s changing that rapidly.

Lindsey Mastis: 13:38
Yeah, I had to really figure out, you know, especially because I was morning shift at the time. So I was waking up at two in the morning. I had to be in the newsroom by 3 a.m. from my first meeting, second meeting at 3:30. I think for those of you that work internationally, you understand these hours. And I would have to make sure that if I was going to package something up, that if it aired at a 5 or 6 or 10 p.m. at night, it would still be relevant. And so I really started to think of how can I do this so that no matter what time of day it would be, it would still make sense. And if it was something that was completely going to change, of course I would, you know, put the hair and makeup back on, drive all the way back in. But I realized that the human aspect to this is so important. That part doesn’t really change. How does this technology relate to you as a human being? How is this going to help or hurt you? So I started exploring both the positives and the negatives. Even though I very much focus on the positives, we a lot of technology exists because there is a problem and it’s a solution to a problem. So I don’t like to ever ignore the negatives. We have to address them and then make it better and use technology to overcome these hurdles. So I started seeing it through this other lens of if I structure the story this way so that the main focus is on who’s watching, that part would still be relevant no matter what happened with the technology. Now, if I’m reporting just on, hey, this thing happened, I would have to leave instructions. This needs to be updated. And the anchors would have to update it, or if it’s something that I would do the part that I knew would stay the same and then keep the parts that might change in the anchor introing it, or sometimes the anchors will do what’s called a tag at the end. So they’ll come back and they’ll say, you know, a sentence or two. Sometimes it’s a little longer, especially if there’s been a change. So I would just leave instructions with the team. And, you know, we it is a team. TV News is a team. It doesn’t matter if you just see one person on that screen. There’s at least a team of probably 20 people behind them making it all come together.

Eric Mulvin: 15:43
Cool. Well, you bring up interesting point that you know, we might bounce around a little bit here with some of the ideas because we’re talking about AI, and that’s a big topic I talk about with a lot of guests on the show, but this is also about entrepreneurship. Yes. And you you live that out here, and you also have your own business, right?

Lindsey Mastis: 16:02
Right. So I’m I’m a first-time entrepreneur, and I know you’ve had what is it, six LLCs? Which is incredible because I I, you know, went through the process of forming my first LLC. I grew up in a household of entrepreneurs. So, you know, my mom had started multiple businesses. My dad was in construction, owned his own business as a general contractor. And it was really great because growing up, I lived it with them. I saw, you know, that the phone, what no matter what time of day or night that phone rings, you answer it. I saw what goes into it. And for me, I was very interested in journalism. So I ended up going that route. And it wasn’t until I was coming up on 20 years in my career, and I thought, well, it’s time to do something different. And it’s also time to get off that 2 a.m. shift. It was simply part of it too, let’s be honest. And I thought, you know, out of everything I do, the thing that brings me the most joy is artificial intelligence. And I I wanted to see how I could do that full time and stay, you know, in TV news. And it just, I couldn’t see the pathway toward that. I did try to pitch it. I did try to, you know, internally, you know, come up with some ideas. Maybe we could do this or that. And TV news has really changed. I was doing what was three or four people’s jobs by the time I left. You know, it used to be different positions. So I thought, well, the only way I can do this if it’s is if I hire myself. So I decided to start my own media company and I have three pillars to it. So I do public speaking, I have an independent journalism arm to it that will be morphing into a lot of like sponsored content because I’m figuring out the business model on this. It’s different from the way TV News was because it has to be self-sustaining. So that’s something I’m working toward. And then all in year one, people kept asking, how can we work with you directly? And so I decided recently I’m I’m launching an advisory arm, which I had always intended to do. I just am now launching it. Whereas, you know, I didn’t year one was more I’m in year two now. And so it’s like it’s time to launch. So I’m doing a soft launch on it right now, offering strategic advisory, offering deep dive sessions, basically using that whole 20-year brain that I have in TV news and focusing on founders in the AI space and tech leaders in the AI space that need to communicate with the public. Ultimately, you know, investors are watching as well. And it’s very important because we do have a trust problem in artificial intelligence. So that’s what I think of a lot. And entrepreneurship gives me the ability to see a need and then act on it. And so that’s what I’m doing with it right now. And and it is my first company, but I it was so fascinating. I don’t feel like I’m starting from scratch because I’m coming in with this 20-year career, and I’m also coming in with this another almost 20 years of having watched my parents do it.

Eric Mulvin: 18:58
Yeah. Well, and being a reporter, you’ll you really hone those skills that I think are really important for being an entrepreneur where you’re chasing stories, you can’t give up.

Lindsey Mastis: 19:10
Oh, yeah. You have to talk to strangers all the time. Right? That’s a big part of it. Yeah, I have to sell not only with sales, like sales with like, hey, can I I have a camera? Can you step in front of the camera and talk to me right now? You know, that’s an intimid intimidating thing for people. Yeah, the sales part is interesting because I tell people, you know, journalists don’t have sales training, and yet we were selling people on trust every single day, selling people we would talk to on on you know, convincing them to get in front of a camera and share their stories. And uh an honorable thing to do, of course, but it it is what you said, like the crossover is really interesting because I I didn’t realize there would be so much crossover when I started.

Eric Mulvin: 19:50
Yeah, that is fine. I never thought about that before, too, until you mentioned that. Now, but I wanted to circle back to something you talked about because and I’m curious where you’re at in this stage of business, maybe not there yet, but you mentioned how in a newsroom, you know, you see the anchor on screen, you don’t see the team of people behind them. And I think it’s so much again like a business where you typically you might see the CEO, they’re in the news every day, and you’re like, gosh, this guy working like 20 hours a day, and you do but you don’t see the multitude of people behind the scenes that help help them get to where they are. Right. And you act you get to see that being the reporter, and actually, well, besides a newsroom, you’re talking with AI leaders, and they’re probably have the people behind the scenes off the side of the camera or off the side helping out, maybe even prompting them on some things to say. So talk to me a little bit about that. Like for entrepreneurship, like how there is it, it takes so much more than one person to build something.

Lindsey Mastis: 20:51
Right. And I could be I know solo entrepreneur over here, but nothing is actually completely done in a vacuum. And we might say, yes, we we built our company ourselves, we you know, bootstrapped this, we but yeah, there are there are so many mentors that are providing information that we wouldn’t have had before. I think professional development is extremely important, even if it’s you know something that you have to invest in. There’s so much to be learned. And a lot of the professional development services that I have tapped into, especially on year one, have ongoing live coaching. And so I will a couple times a month be able to jump on a live call with a group and in that call get questions answered that I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten answered. And uh, even people like my parents, I call my parents so often now and ask them business questions. Like, hey, when you guys did this, and there’s certain things they can help me with. There’s other things where they’re like, you know, when I was starting my LLC for the first time and asking them some of those basic getting started questions, they’re like, We started ours so long ago we don’t remember. So finding Someone who is just a little bit ahead is sometimes so important. So someone’s someone who might be in business three years instead of for me, it’s been one and a half. I’ve learned so much from somebody who’s just a little bit farther ahead and they’re like, hey, this next thing is XYZ. And I remember doing that when I would be mentoring students who wanted to be journalists. Around year five, I was a great mentor to student journalists because I remembered what it was like to be in their shoes and they were still coming up around the same technology that I was. Whereas now I mentor students in a different way because they’re getting a completely different curriculum. So I think entrepreneurship is very similar. The professional development’s important because they are in it and they’re seeing it in real time and they can give you guidance that is relevant today. Someone who is a mentor that maybe has had 30 years experience in the business has a different type of knowledge that they’re going to be sharing. And it might be a little more strategic or a little bit more, you know, long, like big picture, or something that you didn’t see in yourself. People with extreme amounts of experience are able to look at someone and say, you’re missing an opportunity. Here it is. So it’s so important, I think, to have many different mentors. And you might have some that, you know, someone that you talk to a lot more than others. There are organizations that I’ve tapped into that provide free resources for people that are getting started as well. Score is a big one. You’re saying you’re nodding your head. I’m assuming you you know at least about score.

Speaker: 23:31
My first business, I tapped into score as well. And that was very, very helpful. And uh actually been thinking about that guy lately. Like, man, I need to reach back out to him, see what he’s doing these days. Because yeah, that’s uh it I came, I saw them at a booth or the the organization at a booth like a couple months ago at a business fair. And I’m like, oh my gosh, I completely forgot about like the help that they gave me in the very beginning.

Lindsey Mastis: 23:54
But yeah, it’s yeah, and just to give listeners who haven’t heard of SCORE, I forget what the acronym stands for. So let me just go here. It’s uh, you know what? I don’t know where it says what the acronym is, but SCORE, and it’s a they’re mentors, they’re retirees that have a wealth of information and they offer a lot of business insights, and they’ll match you with someone who has the kind of background that you’re needing to tap into. So for me, I started off with one mentor, and we got to a certain part in my business where he said, you really need more marketing guidance. And he introduced me to someone else, and they said, Oh, actually, you also remind me of what this other person is doing who just, you know, is a mentor who just joined score. And so now they’ve been getting on calls together. So I’ve had, in essence, really three different mentors for completely different parts as my business grew. Because a lot of people who start with score are brand new. They’re they’re even just seeing if, hey, maybe this will be a business. I had already dove off, dove into the deep end. It’s like, I put all my eggs in my basket and I started the LC already, and here’s where I’m at. So I was in this like growth area where they’re like, okay, we’re starting here and now you need this. And it was really wonderful because I was able to get that help that I needed. There’s so many other resources that I’ve been tapping into as well. In year one, you know, as a female, I was able to uh to get a competitive grant. It was amazing through Women’s Net. It’s called the Amber Grant. And uh I was one of three recipients. They they give it out every month at three different winners, and they focus on on women-owned businesses. And so not only does it help with like I the camera speaking you two through that was you know, I got that thank you to the grant. I got additional professional development thanks to the grant. And but it also like opens up a network of of women entrepreneurs, which is really helpful as well because you see what other people are doing with their business and it gives you ideas as well. And I think that’s what entrepreneurship is really about, is it’s a bunch of people figuring it out together.

Eric Mulvin: 26:00
That’s a great phrase because it’s something I tell a lot of people, and I’ve I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it on the show. A quote I always say is like nobody knows what they’re doing, we’re all figuring it out as we go, even the top people, like there’s a whole like the top four like consultancy firms out there, like even the top CEOs have people mentoring them, coaching them, and a like why are you as a startup like so good that you don’t need that kind of mentorship that everybody else out there uses? So, but it’s not it’s not talked about so much publicly, right? Like it’s not like oh yeah, all these people at the top have all these other people helping them.

Lindsey Mastis: 26:37
So I think Cinnamon TV News, how often do you think about the person who’s actually running the teleprompter? You know, the words that appear in front of us that we’re reading, you know, and I and I did a lot of of unscripted on television, but if I was doing traditional anchoring, I might be sitting at that anchor desk for three or four hours straight. There’s no way I could write all that content, deliver all that content, update all that content. So behind the scenes, you have someone who’s just running the prompter. So they’re listening to what I’m saying and they’re matching what I’m saying with how fast or slow it goes. And then there’s also somebody, whenever you see those lower thirds pop up with someone’s name on it, there’s someone hitting a button to make that happen. Unless it’s an automated station. Some stations are going automated, in which case, if things start going gangwater, you notice. Right, there’s a lot of automation. Even robotic cameras, you know, it used to be that you’d have a person behind every camera in the newsroom or in this news studio. And now we have robotic cameras, but there’s still someone in charge of the robotic cameras. If you let robotic cameras just run on their own, inevitably one’s gonna spin out of control, another one’s gonna come at the desk, one’s gonna run someone over, you know. And we had fail-safes on ours. So if you got too close to it, it would just stop. And so we would have a floor director also letting us anchors know which camera to even look at. Which one to look at, you know, and uh right, but and depending on the newsroom, we had two at my last station, we had two different newsrooms because we had two channels. We had a cable channel and a regular broadcast channel. And so I might be on one for a couple of hours and then run over to the other one for a couple of the hour hours, and one of them had more resources than the other. So the other, like the one without resources, there’d be someone in my ear saying, like, camera two, camera three, camera one, camera, you know, and so you’re all this stuff is going on, and everyone has to make that happen. You have a director, you have a producer, you have an executive producer, you might have a writer, photographers out in the field, reporters out in the field. If it’s a big enough story, they might send a field producer. We have an assignment desk full of multiple people that are fielding calls, making calls, calling police departments, calling for information, looking at all the emails that come in. Then you have all these managers kind of in between, making sure that this arm is talking to that arm. It’s huge. It’s a huge operation. And yet there’s one person often that you just see on that screen and everyone thinks it’s them and that they’re making all the magic happen. And I’ve always been a big believer in elevating everyone. I love it when TV stations show the control room because you get a chance to see like these are the people hard at work, these are the people making you look good. I even had uh at my last station, we had a makeup artist, an Emmy winning makeup artist who made me look good every day. You’re having a bad skin day, a bad hair day, right? She’s got you. You know, nice. Like, because you still have to show your face, even if you’re having a situation. And we wear a lot of makeup, right? So the situation gets bad fast. And they even help with skincare. Like, try this, try that. And it’s it’s it’s incredible to have so many people that are helping you as the front-facing person look good, but it truly is a team. And I don’t think that the team gets enough recognition. I was luckily at a station that always tried to give the team recognition, making sure that if they were in the awards, that everyone that was involved in the newscast was part of that. And uh yeah, so it’s it’s just like that in entrepreneurship. Even if you’re a solopreneur, there are other people that are helping you out. And I always try to remember who did what so I can come back and say, like, this just happened for me because of you. Thank you. And that thank you goes such a long way. And of course, it’s something we do for others, but it’s a pass it along, right? I’m not gonna be able necessarily to mentor someone who’s mentoring me because I’m learning so much from them. But little do we know, they might actually be learning from us too. And we may not even realize that part of it.

Eric Mulvin: 30:35
That’s very true. Yeah. That’s yeah, helping out others. You I mean, well, so I looked it up score. It is service corpse for retired executives. Thank you. I don’t know if they’re all retired. I think the one that I had helping me was he was an active uh owner that was running out of the room.

Lindsey Mastis: 30:52
We see him, right? Somebody might be retired from one business but still working in another, I found.

Lindsey Mastis: 30:58
Yeah.

Eric Mulvin: 30:58
Yeah.

Lindsey Mastis: 30:59
One of my mentors, I think, is retired but started his own other business, and what he started actually is helping me.

Eric Mulvin: 31:06
See, it’s all full circle, all goes together. So going back to you know, your start for entrepreneurship, did you always feel like that was gonna be the end goal? Or at what point did you realize, like, I’ve gotta go out on my own and start my own thing?

Lindsey Mastis: 31:22
When I realized that I didn’t see a path to to more, you know, I think that as a lot of people in journalism are this way. We don’t like to do the same thing every day. When you cover news, you go to a different place every day. You meet different people every day, you do something different every single day. I have, I mean, I’m just gonna list some of the things I’ve done that I cannot believe I was allowed to do. I have driven a semi-truck, I have driven a fire engine, I have driven an ambulance, a police car, a school bus. Like they let me behind the wheel of all these huge, crazy vehicles. Just because one day I was like, oh, we should do school bus safety, we should do fire engine safety. I’ve I’ve been in the front car of a train as they’re honking at cars that should not be going across the tracks right now to show how dangerous that is and how many close calls they see every single day. So I’ve gotten to do all these different things. And after a 20-year career, it’s sometimes hard to say, oh, I haven’t covered that yet. So I kind of was like, I’ve done this, I’ve done that, I’ve done, I really just want to do AI that’s then, and I was doing some incredible, amazing stories, but I really did want to make it my own thing. And that’s what was the that was the driving force. I never ever thought that I would do entrepreneurship. I grew up around it and said to myself, oh, you know, I see the stress that my parents are under. I didn’t want that for myself. And now I have that. Yay! But it also gave me a different perspective on my parents. You know, I I don’t think I understood what they were going through when I was growing up and why certain decisions were made and why they had certain reactions to things and why why there was maybe so much stress in the household sometimes. Why, you know, when you’re a kid, you just want mom and dad to play with you, right? You don’t, you do not realize, you know, they’re trying to keep the roof over your head right now. And and that’s given me a whole new perspective on where my parents were, and including at the same age that I am now. And and I I I think that that’s part of when we go through life, having a new perspective and appreciating people that maybe we didn’t understand as well. I mean, how well do we understand our own parents, right? We we see them from this child point of view. And to see parents from an entrepreneurial point of view is it’s a very different thing. And I I feel like it’s a gift that I’ve gotten to experience this.

Eric Mulvin: 33:53
Yeah, that’s that’s interesting. As a parent of uh some young kids who are seeing me go through that stress and struggle, I’m curious, like, what’s one of the biggest realizations you had out of that?

Lindsey Mastis: 34:03
Well, I think that one of the biggest things is just understanding what it felt like to know everything was on you. Because even when I worked and everything was on me, and you’re like, I’m the reason my lights are on, I’m the reason my rent is paid, I’m the reason I have food on the table. There was there was a lot I didn’t have to do. And I didn’t realize what I didn’t have to do until I had to do it myself. How much a company provides, even in terms of like if I was doing a tough story, you know, we’d have we’d run it through legal, right? And yeah, there would be like an attorney for the station that you could just be like, hey, can you read my script real quick? What do you think? All good, right? And now having to make those decisions without, you know, like I know what to do, but not having everything at your grasp, a lot of the accounting things that that workplaces provide, you know, all you have to worry about is did the check clear my my bank account? You know, you don’t have to worry so you so much, you’re like, well, I gave them my routing number. That’s all you have to worry about. You don’t have to worry about, oh shoot, did I put the right in, you know, did I put the right routing number on that invoice? Is it off by one number? What will happen if it’s off by one number, right? If it happens in a company to an employee, the company makes it right. If you’re the business owner, if you sit out an invoice that’s wrong, right? That’s on you. And it’s a whole different stress level. And my dad built houses, you know. I I don’t know what it’s like to have to build something people live in, you know, and I know that he always went above and beyond to make sure it’s like the safest house you could possibly imagine. Because that’s, you know, I think that I’m a lot like my dad. Like when we do something, we want to make sure it’s top-notch and that it’s the safest thing that you’ll ever experience, and that it’s a good, you know, it’s it’s you know, we’re not gonna put anything out that shouldn’t be put out. And so understanding that that there were multiple people relying on you and that it was all on you, you couldn’t just go to your boss and say, Hey, I just emailed this to the wrong person, and they give you guidance, like, oh, just email, just do this, right? Like instead, you’re like, Oh my god, what do I do? Who do I talk to about this? Yeah.

Eric Mulvin: 36:12
And then I mean the person everyone’s coming to you for right.

Speaker 2: 36:16
And I say those things. I mean, I’m so lucky. I really haven’t had much go wrong, right? But what I have had is some the fear of is this the right decision? Right. So then we get like the decision fatigue, even if it’s only like two decisions, right? Because it’s it’s completely on us. We can’t bounce that off of anyone else. That it it’s harder. So yeah, a lot of that. And I think what you’re asking about is you’re probably wondering like, what do my kids think from their point of view about dad? And it’s really hard to say because I don’t know that I could have verbalized it, especially at that age, of what my perspective was of what my my dad did. The thing is, I got to go to work with him a lot. So I think I understood a little bit more about what he was doing. You know, on weekends, I would go to a construction site, help clean up the construction site. I thought I was helping build a house, by the way. I was my mom, I was recently watching some uh, you know, digital VHS footage of me as a little girl when we were building our house, uh, the house that we moved a f a few times with the the house that I ended up doing the most growing up at. And I I saw video of myself and I realized I wasn’t doing anything. I thought I was I was the one building that house. I was going there and I was, you know, putting those walls up and I was I was draw triwalling, I was hammering things in, I was putting up, you know, I was putting you know all that stuff up and and I’m I’m playing in the dirt.

Eric Mulvin: 37:45
That’s that’s so fascinating because uh I mean it that really for me is validation. I’ve always tried to expose my kids to the business in different ways, which to me is a little challenging because my company’s like 7,000 it’s about 7,700 miles away from here in Phoenix. But I just did come back from the Philippines and I I invite my like it wasn’t this trip, but the last trip, I had my daughter show up to one of my talks to the company. Oh good. She got to see that, and I was no, I was running like a w I I want to say I was actually running like one of my AI workshops to the company. But yeah, she got to see that, and uh I I saw it did change her perspective a bit. And you know, but for me it’s important to expose the kids to to that just to see some context, because you know, I lock myself in the office room. I I get to work from home, but a lot of what I do is pretty invisible to the kids. They don’t see, you know, when I go to a conference, they they’re not there most of the time. Not really productive to have your kid there at the conference, right? Asking questions and stuff. But yeah, that’s uh that’s fascinating. So thanks for sharing it.

Lindsey Mastis: 38:53
Yeah, I think the more they are exposed, the better. And I mean you can take some pictures and then do a little slideshow or even just explaining, like, you know, I was in all these meetings all day, and this is it’d just be one line. And they may, it may, they may absorb it, they may not absorb it, right? That’s kind of the age of you don’t know what they’re actually paying attention to. Um, but sometimes there’s something that makes all the difference. And I just remember, like one of my favorite memories is when my dad would be working on blueprints and he’d have all of his materials out, and I’d sit down at the table with him, and he would, you know, give me a piece of, I think it’s called drafting paper. And, you know, you do this, you know, you’d have all these like drafting tools, and I remember there being like a little like bean bag that sand came out of, and you’d kind of go around so things would move around. And I I remember like creating my own blueprints, and then my dad a few on a few occasions would have somebody to the house because he built two of our houses, maybe more, two of the houses, two of the houses that we lived in, and we lived in apartments as well, but two of the houses, and I remember he had somebody over, you know, to go over blueprints, things like that. He’s trying to sell them on a house. And as a little girl, I came up with my blueprints, and I sold the guy on my house. And my dad tells me years later that he thinks that actually helped seal the deal. There you go.

Eric Mulvin: 40:14
That’s cool. So going, let’s see, I want to take it back a little bit more to AI, and because you have such a unique perspective, and you’re probably a bit more informed than most people. You’re I’m sure even when you see a headline today, you’re looking at it differently through a different lens than someone like myself or or just the general public. And now you’re out, you have an upcoming event where you’re speaking at a United Nations event. That’s cra that’s incredible. Congrats on that.

Lindsey Mastis: 40:43
Thank you. Yes, through the International Telecommunications Union, and uh there’s two events going on at the same time, both in Geneva, Switzerland. So I’ll be hosting the AI for good film festival and then giving a keynote on AI and music, focusing on creativity. It’s called Tool or Takeover, and we explore what could go wrong and what needs to happen so that it can actually go right.

Eric Mulvin: 41:07
Interesting. So and those are coming up when? When are you heading up?

Lindsey Mastis: 41:11
Oh gosh, I’m leaving soon. I’m leaving in the early July. So it’s coming up, uh, I believe I’m speaking on July 8th, and then doing the uh film festival on July 9th.

Eric Mulvin: 41:22
Okay, fun. So I I have a passion background. I want to make movies one day. It’s one of my like goals I I talk about to people, hopefully manifest into a reality. But I too grew up like in the school newsroom doing the morning announcements and learning on beta tapes.

Lindsey Mastis: 41:40
I never took it as far as you did, but we didn’t even have video at our school, and I was in college by the time I got to do any of that, so that’s amazing. We didn’t have video, like uh yeah. I was again, I’m oldie.

Eric Mulvin: 41:51
So yeah, well, and I mean things change so quickly. So I am I’m really curious, you know, some of your thoughts on like especially the creativity side and AI, because I like we talked before the show started about photography, and that’s that’s a big area where I mean you could go into Chat GPT and and make a picture, yeah. Or take an existing picture and transform it into something else. And there’s a big debate on what’s art, what isn’t art, how much do you manipulate it before it becomes art, or is that some people look at it, oh, that’s still AI slop. So well, I don’t know. Talk a little bit about where you think the status of like AI and the creative world because they’re clashing and there’s a lot of different opinions out there. What what do you think the state of it is currently today in middle of 2026?

Lindsey Mastis: 42:43
So we have to remember that art and music, all of it, it’s subjective. It’s a very subjective thing. So you could even have someone who uses no AI whatsoever, and there will still be people debating on whether that’s art or not. But yeah, when it comes to creativity, so one of the big things I did last year is I put out a mini news, uh mini documentary called Is AI Ruining Music? And I went to the largest music conference in the United States. It’s called NAM, the I think it’s National Association of Music Merchants, if I have that right, in Anaheim. I spent three days there. I talked to so many musicians and asked them that question. And I talked to Jackson Brown, I talked to Roseanne Cash, DJ Cherish the Love, a lot of big names, uh, Kim Bullard, who’s part of the Elton John band. And some of these musicians have used it and are using it. Some musicians are really thinking about how we can make sure people know if something is AI generated and then they can decide if it’s something that they actually want to listen to. And then I ran into a lot of musicians that said, absolutely not. It is cheating, it’s not music, it has no soul. You’ll hear that a lot. It has no soul, it has no and it’s it’s just a fascinating conversation. And I really wanted to capture that moment in time when we’re still figuring it out. And people would ask. Me, well, is it? You know, is it yes or no? Is it ruining music? And the better question is, is it ruining music for musicians? Someone who is not a musician but has always had a want to do it. Perhaps they grew up in a household where they weren’t a, you know, maybe the family couldn’t afford a musical instrument or lessons, or maybe they chose an instrument and had a terrible teacher. Or they chose an instrument and they were stuck with it and it wasn’t actually their instrument, right? Like because sometimes we’re like, oh, that’s a pretty instrument, and you start playing it, and you’re like, this is not for me, but maybe the trombone would be amazing, you know, but you’re stuck. So some people have they have that music in them and they don’t have a way to get it out. I’m seeing some people turn to artificial intelligence to bring to life something that’s always been inside of them. That’s so different from somebody who says, we’re we want to just have a music-making content farm so we can make a lot of money and we don’t care what we’re putting out. And we are seeing a lot of issues with AI and the term stealing comes up. And there’s different, there’s different ways that this might happen. And there’s some people who say, is that stealing? Is it not stealing? But we are actually seeing, and there are documented in the news uh case cases or cases where there would be a musician who puts out a song, it gets famous maybe somewhere in the world, and then and somebody with ill intent takes their song, sticks it through an AI, it’s the same song, but an AI version of it, calls it something different, saturates the market with it. The real musician is now not making money on their own song. They’re not getting royalties for the one that is becoming famous because they’re skirting the system and it’s hurting musicians. So that’s one of the reasons why this people are so passionate about this. How I look at it is the name of my talk is Tool or Takeover. Are we using it as a tool or we’re using it to take over? And one of the points that I’m gonna be making is what I like to call the AI music machine. And we have actually seen this happen before, where somebody puts a lot of information into AI, they’re using AI to write the music, write the lyrics. They’re now distributing this and then using bots to quote unquote listen to it. So it’s like AI music made for bots. But what’s happening is they’re dipping into the royalties that are meant for human musicians. And yes, there’s usually a human on the other end of that making the money. There’s a very famous case out of a man from, I think I want to say, is it North Carolina? And I think it’s around eight million dollars that he was able to allegedly take from the royalty system by doing this. And so it’s that’s why there’s so many alarm bells going off. But here’s something else to think about. I’ve heard of musicians taking a song that they wrote and then using AI to come up with the instrumentation. A lot of musicians, it’s very expensive. So I’m a songwriter on the side. I’ve written almost 300 songs. I get I produce my music as well. And my co-producer and I, we bring in actual musicians, live real people from the community to play on my songs. We just had a drummer come in last weekend to play on one of my songs called one of my songs that’ll be coming out. Honestly, I don’t know when it’s gonna come out because I’ve I’ve been afraid to actually put my music out because of what’s going on. But but I am still producing my music. I had a percussionist come in uh last month. I’ve had stringed instruments come in. But some musicians, it’s very expensive to do this. And for some musicians, there’s no way to bring their song to life and have an orchestration for it without artificial intelligence. So you have to ask yourself, well, is it just the barrier to entry that’s keeping this person from being a musician or for, you know, from putting out their song, their vision of how they want it to sound? And then you also have people who write the lyrics and use AI just for the music. You have people who write music and use AI just for the lyrics. You have people who are artists and they want music to go with their visuals. And it’s been so hard for them to find a musician that makes exactly what they’re thinking for their art that they decide to turn to AI. You have musicians who are doing all the music themselves and can’t find the visuals that they want and are turning to AI. So there’s all these different scenarios, but then you also have people that say, Write me a song that makes people cry. Okay, how many people have used that exact prompt? Write me a happy song about the summer. Okay, write me the song of the summer. Write me a song about homecoming, write me a song about right. Is that songwriting? I like to think of it as a paint by number. You can get a paint by number and you can make a beautiful piece of artwork. Are you an artist? If you see someone’s paint by number art in a gallery next to somebody who created a vision out of something that they felt. Are they both artists? Is only one an artist? What if the artist that didn’t use paint by number, what if you don’t like their art? Are they an artist to you? Are they not? There’s all these amazing questions that we are trying to tackle. And the argument that I make is that musicians need to know what they can do to retain ownership and authorship of their songs. At what point is a song that you mostly created, but you used a little bit of AI, at what point is it no longer your song? And there are different arguments about this because you can go to some of these AI companies and they say, well, we’re giving you a license. Like that’s great. But what does the what does the copyright office say? What does, you know, there does what is case law going to end up saying? So I the these are spaces that I’m in that I’ve been talking about quite frequently, listening to other people who are boots on the ground trying to figure it out as well. And even though we have some rules and regulations, and well, this rule is supposed to apply and that rule should apply, it’s not figured out. If it was figured out, we wouldn’t be confused. And on top of that, because we’re seeing bad actors that maybe not are even, they may not even be in the United States. A lot of the copyright is that’s a US thing. And if somebody is stealing your song and they’re not in the US, what are the consequences? And also, there’s really not a good like customer service type of thing for artists. So if somebody takes your song, makes an AI version out of it, and then they use their bot farm to report your channel. So now your channel’s taken down, the original no longer even exists. What recourse do you have? And right now you can’t just call up one of these distribution companies, get a live person on the phone, and they fix it for you. A lot of times you’re going through an email support system, and I hear so many musicians talk about I feel like I’m talking to an AI. Like I’m up I’m a real person that is being told that my music was AI generated when it wasn’t, and an AI is making that determination determination, and then telling me I’m not even a human, and then telling me, and it’s it’s really sad. You know, I my heart breaks for all the musicians that are and artists that are going through this right now. And from somebody who studies all this, I actually have stepped away from distributing my music in the traditional sense where I have a few songs on Spotify, but very few right now. And I’m trying to find a way that I can be a little more direct to consumer and cut out the AI bot scrapers.

Eric Mulvin: 51:20
Interesting. That man, that I feel like I have a whole other episode where we could unpack everything you just talked about right there.

Lindsey Mastis: 51:27
Yes. And I think because we’re talking about entrepreneurship, and and that’s the thing when you create something, when you’re an entrepreneur, you have to be prepared for these moments. And it’s hard when you’re doing it all alone, you know. And it like we’re talking about art and creativity, same thing could happen in manufacturing.

Eric Mulvin: 51:44
Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, I hear the stories on people they make something on Amazon, and then like weeks later it’s getting ripped off, and sometimes by Amazon itself. And like, what are you gonna do going up against Amazon? And uh so yeah, and Delay, a lot of these artists, you know, like yourself, you know, there’s not like it’s just you. I mean, you have a team, you’re bringing or organizing people together, but it’s not like it’s a company, you know. You’re there’s people on their own in their homes or wherever they are working on this stuff. Uh, but I thank you for sharing that because that is interesting, even the impact it’s having on you, and you’re rethinking how you redistribute the music. It is it is interesting, all the areas that AI is touching and impacting, for better or for worse. I do like the perspective about because I I uh too, you know, I love music. I I have friends that have that are producers that have won awards, like the equivalent of like Grammys and stuff in other countries, even and that but I so I know a bit of what it takes to get something out there. And like I’ve had my friends uh that are in music put together songs for different projects and you know, for my theme song for different podcasts before. Yeah, yet this show I did it all myself. So with a bit I there’s a thing I call on the show or I I call in business AI plus HI that you like AI is great, but you need that HI component.

Lindsey Mastis: 53:11
Human intelligence, absolutely. And you’re I love your theme song, by the way. I was singing it all morning, you know, like it is catchy, that’s the thing. It’s like, well, there’s gonna be AI, completely AI generated songs that are going to be some of the biggest hits. Absolutely, it’s gonna happen. And the thing is that you had a vision when you created that. You weren’t just like passively making something, you knew what you wanted, and then you used it as a tool to bring to life something that you wanted to exist in this world.

Eric Mulvin: 53:41
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it exactly. That captures it perfectly. Is like I didn’t just go into Chat GPT, make me a theme song. It was I was, I think I probably spent a full week like going back and forth with the lyrics, with and then the visuals. There’s a mix, I mean, there’s a couple clips that’s like uh AI generated, but it came from photos, you know, and then animating that, or I don’t know, it’s just uh combining it all together. So I I love that aspect, but you you expose kind of the the other side of it that I think a lot of people, unless they’re into industry or they’re looking at the news, I think the average consumer has no idea the battle that’s going on behind the scenes between artists and the platforms themselves. You know, and I saw recently uh YouTube made a big change to kind of try to combat some of that because there’s been this whole thing about people just taking other people’s content, running it through AI, making it their own slightly tweaked version. But for the creator, they’re looking at this like this is my like their last five videos are the exact same as my last five videos, just slightly tweaked. But because they have the bigger audience, they have the access to the the bot farms, who’s getting the attention? And it so YouTube’s trying to combat that, but it’s uh is a uh again with uh your your reporting background, it’s definitely a an exciting time to be in this space for sure.

Lindsey Mastis: 55:07
Right, and exciting positively and also exciting alarmingly, uh especially when it comes to that, because also it it’s hard if if you’re a real creator and you get flagged as being the one that isn’t real because bot farms have all reported you. Like that’s what I worry about when I hear that there’s a crackdown. I I think good, but who’s going to be wrapped up in this that is not that shouldn’t have been? You know, there’s still the potential to have people who who weren’t doing anything wrong all of a sudden get flagged. And and that’s that’s why I I really, you know, I miss the boomer generation sometimes, you know, because they they did customer service well. Where you remember back in the day, no matter what business you called, somebody answered like before the second ring, and they got you to whoever you needed to get to, and they got it done. And I do miss that telephone generation a bit because it at least you knew that there was somebody who was gonna make it right if something went wrong, and I don’t feel that’s the case anymore.

Eric Mulvin: 56:08
Yeah, I know. I got like all the big platforms, and I it is interesting, you know, we talked earlier about how everyone’s trying to figure it out, and that is like as a as a leader, no matter who you are in business or just even world leaders, it’s clear sometimes that that’s the case. But the we’re all trying to figure this AI thing out, and uh I I don’t know, it’s like I guess we could look back to history to try to guess maybe where things might land, and I don’t know how much of that you’ve done.

Lindsey Mastis: 56:39
I love history. So I just finished reading uh probably a few weeks ago, Thomas Edison, a biography about Thomas Edison. And it was like like, oh my gosh, this could have been written now. And yeah, just really fascinating, and you know, about the phonograph, and but I do want to talk a little bit about music for a second because something that I kind of forgot it happened. I knew part of this, and I brought up part of this before, but there was an aspect of it that I didn’t realize. So I remember, you know, I think there’s I don’t know if it’s in the Johnny Cash movie, or I’m a big Johnny Cash fan as well as an Alton John fan. And at one point, you know, Johnny Cash was really liking he was listening to the radio and he was hearing, you know, his future wife on on the airwaves. He used to listen to her family perform. And his dad apparently remarked, you know, that why are you listening to this? This isn’t even music. They they they probably can’t even play because in that day, musicians came in live to the radio stations and performed live. And if it was a record, they were wondering if, well, they performed it one time, but uh could they perform it again? How do you even know it’s them? How do you and there was a backlash to records? There was also questions about also the ownership, because apparently in the early days, and this is something I recently learned, in the very early days, the whoever was making the record, whatever the band was or musician was, they got paid once to make that recording. And they were concerned that okay, I I sing my song once, and now this record company owns it, and now they’re distributing it, and there’s no reason for anyone to have to pay me to pay live to play live, and now I’m obsolete, and that’s what we’re seeing again. Musicians didn’t go obsolete because records were made. Musicians didn’t perform a song once. We figured it out, and it all has to do with authorship, ownership, distribution, right? Those three things who owns part of that, and a lot of people don’t realize this. But historically, during certain times, the music industry, certain places, certain record store companies, certain people would put their names on songs that they did not write. This allegedly still happens today in some capacity, but I’m gonna talk a little bit more about the past. In some cases, if you went to a recording studio, there might be somebody there who now gets song credit. They didn’t have anything to do with writing that song, but they’re getting royalties the rest of their life. So it there’s some things that have happened throughout the creative industries that have always been a little like, wait, what? You know, why is this happening? Why is it this way? And that’s something that we have to figure out right now. So moving forward, I don’t think that all of a sudden there’s no point in doing music because bots have got us, you know, bots bots can do music better than people. Okay, well, but there’s no point for me doing anything. I was like I said, I went out last night to meet up with my my former news director, and we’re at a restaurant where there’s an open mic being held, and it was packed, and there were so many musicians. And we were sitting outside, and some of the musicians were coming outside and teaching each other’s songs and say, when you do this chord after this chord, you gotta do this chord, and I play like this, and they’re showing each other’s instruments off. It was a beautiful thing, you know. I I just I don’t see that going away entirely. I think that there’s still those communities, we’re still gonna appreciate that, but we might appreciate AI music too. You know, we might have real musicians doing cover songs of AI of AI music, right? That might become a thing as well. But I I feel like as someone who’s a consumer and a lover of music, it’s gonna be what you connect with. You know, I connected with your theme song, you know. I’m singing, I like it’s very catchy, and it’s really it’s like you know, I I was just singing all morning. Like, okay, I’ve got this, I’ve got your theme song down, right? And I know it’s AI, but I’m having a great time singing along. So I’m having a good experience as a consumer of your music.

Eric Mulvin: 01:00:35
Thank you. Appreciate that. And yeah, that you you had brought up uh you know something a little bit earlier as relates to people using AI to create music and what’s what’s really music and not, or you know, and there’s still to be determined, but you mentioned how people, okay, maybe they go to Chat GPG, write me the song of the summer, write me a happy song, you know, or make me a happy song. And I feel like it reminds me a lot in business too, you know, and you could make the case about, you know, how the creativity behind a business, and it’s like a almost like a symphony, you’re trying to direct all these people at the same time and they don’t know what they’re doing, and trying to organize that into one nice, beautiful performance. But a lot of times in business, people especially these last couple years, and now it’s getting to the point where I’m like, stop saying this. You know, when the you’re having a problem in your business and they’re just like, oh, chat GPT it. Like, oh, chat GPT, how do I make my business grow? And if everybody is asking the same question and chat GPT, so I had this prediction I made and I told my staff when ChatGPT came out and when you know I run a call center. That’s one of the things that greatest threat to to AI and to being re the jobs that are being replaced. Although we both know, you know, who wants to talk to customer service that’s all AI? Nobody, but it’s not it’s not stopping the wave that’s happening. But so much so, like people are like, yeah, just Chat GPT, those problems. Well, where do you think things are also going where okay, everybody like the age of information? Like, I saw this posted on Facebook by another entrepreneur the other day. They’re like, Decades ago, it was lack of access to information. Today, we have every possible thing at your fingertips that you could possibly imagine. So, what is it? Is it’s it’s not the lack of information, maybe it’s the abundance. But what do you think about this whole interesting situation we’re in?

Lindsey Mastis: 01:02:27
Yeah, I I think the younger generations don’t realize that we didn’t have access to information when we were growing up. I had an encyclopedia set at home from I think the 60s that I was referencing. I had to do a report on tigers. And I think at the time there were five different species of tigers. And I went to the encyclopedia at my house, I went to the library at school, I went to the county library, and I could only find the names of three. Couldn’t find it anywhere else. You couldn’t Google it, Google didn’t exist. And yes, when the internet finally came of age, we had the age of information. I do not think that we’re still in the age of information. I think we’re in the age of misinformation, perhaps. I call it the age of AI, but it’s also the age of there’s a lot of ages of that I’m hearing of. It’s also the age of attention. I’ve heard that terminology as well. But I say misinformation because we did have a lot of people that painstakingly put a lot of information online for us to benefit from. And now we are seeing facts being flown thrown out the wayside and people don’t know what to believe. And we’re seeing sites that historically have had an archive that are going away. I worked at a TV station in town. Uh, guys, I worked at a few different places here in the DC area. And, you know, over a decade ago, I worked at the station. And at some point, it appears that they might have decided not to keep an archive. If you try to find any of my work during that time, it is gone. You cannot find any references to any of the stories that I did. I luckily kept some copies of some of my work, a very small fraction of my work. And of course, you know, it wasn’t in 4K, that didn’t exist. Some of it is four by three because we hadn’t made the digital crossover yet. So the quality is absolutely terrible compared to what we have now. And we are at risk of losing a lot of our history because of it. TV stations used to have librarians in at what’s what’s called a tape library. So we’d have tapes and they would be in charge of knowing what was where. And there would be a system to figure out what was where. Because if you think of a broadcast, you know, the the lead story, there’s how many different stories in a broadcast, and you have to know, well, I’m looking for a VO, like a 30-second mention from five years ago on this subject. And I think we had some video that I want to pull up and use as file video today. Where is that? How can I find it? And they had it the network level. When I was an intern at the network level, they had a librarian. My first station, obviously too small for them to have a librarian. My second station, the library was there. There was no librarian. It was in shambles. I spent three days going through that library to find some original video of Anwar Alalaki, who, for people who are much younger, they probably don’t remember. Taliban, this is all, you know, the beginning of the war, uh, DC area Imam that later helped recruit people for, you know, to do bad things to America, basically. And I found this video that was an interview with him like three days after 9 11, where he referred to it as an accident. And it was just a very fascinating video. But I kept the tape. I used it the part the part I needed to on air. And I was afraid to put it back in the tape library because I was afraid it would disappear. I had it on my desk and I had somebody in upper management that said, I’ll hold on to. It and I was like, are you sure? Like, I’m really safe keeping this thing. They lost it. And I don’t know if it ever resurfaced, but those things happen where it just, it’s a tape, who knows where it went, it got misplaced, somebody taped over it. You know, um, I remember doing a story when I was out in Los Angeles, uh, the University of Southern California, I believe, is where they have a lot of the interviews that were done with survivors of the Holocaust. And I was doing a story because the medium that they used, those tapes were disintegrating and they were at risk of losing all of this historical video. And they were very quickly trying to, well, they’re keeping it temperature controlled and very quickly trying to digitize it so that they wouldn’t lose it. But we all know a digital, it just takes one little delete button and it’s gone.

Eric Mulvin: 01:06:48
Yeah.

Lindsey Mastis: 01:06:49
So I do feel like right now we are at risk. It used to be, oh, you know, if you put something online, it’s always there. No, no, it’s not, it could very easily disappear forever. There’s a woman who I believe she’s since passed. She recorded so much, just she had VHS tapes and just recorded things off of the TV.

Eric Mulvin: 01:07:08
Yeah, for like decades, right? Like I saw the video of or some of her recordings on YouTube.

Lindsey Mastis: 01:07:15
And had she not done this, they didn’t the TV stations that put this programming out didn’t do a good job of keeping hold of it. If it wasn’t for her, we would have lost these shows entirely. And every so often there’s a story that comes up where it’s like, hey, this new film has just been discovered of of you know some historical thing that happened. Usually it has to do with the moon or whatever.

Eric Mulvin: 01:07:37
Like, yeah.

Lindsey Mastis: 01:07:37
What do you mean? NASA didn’t have this? What happened? Somebody took it home. And so I don’t think we’re in the age of information anymore. I think we are at risk of losing a lot of the historical data we had. And then we also have AI, which, you know, the be we want to make AI the most amazing thing ever. But right now, it sometimes hallucinates. It sometimes gets things wrong. I have high expectations that eventually we’ll get to a point where that doesn’t happen as much. But or hopefully ever.

Eric Mulvin: 01:08:05
Hopefully.

Lindsey Mastis: 01:08:06
For right now, like all this beautiful work that people did to to digitize our world is either disappearing or getting misinterpreted, or in some cases, it’s called uh disinformation when it’s done on purpose.

Eric Mulvin: 01:08:18
Yeah. Well, that yeah, I know there’s no solution to this now. You know, we’re just talking about the state of it, but I really appreciate you sharing all this unique perspective on everything. Because I know people are we’re out there trying to figure it out, we’re living it. We’re, you know, these questions are coming up that we’re asking maybe in our business and in the creative world, you know, and and and everything. There isn’t a thing out there that isn’t being touched by AI impacted, even if you don’t want it to be, like you still now have to like see, okay, well, AI is impacting us in other ways. So there’s there’s nobody that isn’t impacted by it. So I know we’re getting close to the the end of time here. And man, I really appreciate talking with you. There were so many cool things you shared that I’m like, ah, I could keep going and going with uh stuff.

Lindsey Mastis: 01:09:05
So yeah, and sometimes I point out the problems because somebody on the other end is thinking of a solution, and it’s like that could be magical, like just because we brought it up. Somebody’s saying, actually, I think I have a fix for that. Let me create a company and tackle it.

Eric Mulvin: 01:09:19
Exactly. And that’s part of the hope that I have. You know, the next wave of entrepreneurs, there’s a we’re creating new problems that now need to be solved. And uh, you know, it’s an opportunity for people listening to wherever they’re at in the world. That’s what I always encourage people like, look, look how you could solve the problem. We can’t wait for the governments to fix things. Like it really at the end of the day, it’s up to us to to make the impact and the difference and to and I’m here in DC.

Lindsey Mastis: 01:09:46
They’re looking for solutions too. So I’ve heard they are relying on on us to to come up with what the solution might be. And um I mean, that’s the that’s the beauty of of being in the space that I’m in, because I can show people what’s going on and they can say, actually, we have I know what to do, you know, and connecting with the right people. So it could be a beautiful thing, but we have to point out what needs to be fixed. And I think about what you do too, you know, having actual live people that you can connect with. I mean, that sometimes you just need to talk to somebody about what you’re going through. Like, hey, this thing or that or this product or you know, that human connection. It just it’s so important, especially in the age of AI.

Eric Mulvin: 01:10:30
Yeah, that that’s a good way to wrap it up. You know, that human connection, because as you went back and look back in history or think back on your time as uh through all these different transitions in your life, I think that’s a consistent theme, you know, that you’re trying to bring together, whether it’s music or journalism. And you know, we have this question I always ask all the guests on the show that I did not prep you for.

Lindsey Mastis: 01:10:57
Okay.

Eric Mulvin: 01:10:58
But uh I’m curious uh what your answer is. So you know the show is called Unfinished Business. And so I’m curious what you know, you’re a year and a half into your entrepreneurial journey, and uh but you you do music, you do a lot of different things here. What’s some what’s a big unfinished business for you? What’s something that you hope to accomplish in your lifetime that you’re working towards?

Lindsey Mastis: 01:11:19
I always say that whatever I’m going to be doing at the end of my life has not been invented yet. And that I said that at the beginning of my career. And throughout my career, I’ve always been the one to create new positions in the newsroom using interactive technology, for example. When that was new, I actually convinced a station to buy technology so that I could do interactive TV. And uh even at my last station, you know, I created the alert desk position and then helped train other stations on how to do it using touch screen technology and uh, you know, quick updates for people. And so yeah, I couldn’t have envisioned that when I first started out. It didn’t exist. We didn’t have the technology to make that happen at the time. And even now, you know, I don’t think I could have, you know, I am in a way I’m a futurist, but there are certain things where you you think of the future in certain ways, and certain of it, certain things come true and certain things are a surprise. And so we say, like, well, I there’s the parts that surprise me, I I couldn’t dream up, I couldn’t think of. But yeah, I don’t know what I’m gonna be doing yet. I just know that when I am on a cruise ship with all my friends, my lady friends, when I’m older, you know, we’re all retirees on the cruise ship and we’re sitting around our buffet talking about our lives. I want to be able to say, I did this, I did that, I pivoted, and then I did this thing. And the through line is that I helped people the whole time. So whatever I’ll be doing at the end of my life, it will be helping people, but I don’t think I could tell you what it is because it it doesn’t exist right now.

Eric Mulvin: 01:12:52
I love it. Yeah, and that makes it the world of possibilities endless, which is exciting and it which is why you are definitely a true entrepreneur, because that’s uh that’s part of being an entrepreneur there for sure.

Lindsey Mastis: 01:13:05
So we all like to be a little surprised, right? We need a little surprise in our life, definitely.

Eric Mulvin: 01:13:10
And uh yeah, with AI, every day is every day is changing so quickly. So well, if uh someone listening, they wanted to uh I mean you mentioned a lot of different things, you know. You’ve come out with some mini documentaries, you have a Spotify channel with some of your music or you know, your business as well. What’s the best way to connect with you or to to follow some of your work?

Lindsey Mastis: 01:13:33
I’m the only Lindsey Mastis in the world. I’m Greek, but my parents give me some Irish first name. I don’t know why. So I’m Lindsey Mastis, L-I-N-D-S-E-Y. Mastis is spelled M-A-S-T-I-S. I would say the best places to go are my YouTube channel to see AI content. I have a Substack as well, and then my website, lindseymastis.com, especially for you know leaders in the tech space that are wanting to tap in to a lot of of what the insights that I can bring, especially when it comes to kind of leveling up, forward facing, you know, what’s landing with your with the with the public. Those are areas that I can directly help with. Um music-wise, as I said, I’m looking for a different distribution channel. I use a whole different name for my music. I keep them pretty separate, and I’m a big Elton John fan. So I go by Amoreena, which is an Elton John song, for my music. Uh, there’s a few Amoreenas out there because it’s very popular, but you should recognize me when you see it. Amoreena Music is a really easy way to get to it. I have Amerinamusic.com and Amoreena Music for all the socials.

Eric Mulvin: 01:14:40
Okay, awesome. And uh, I’m gonna try to get this out to quickly so that we can get it out with uh your AI music. Are you are you able to are is the event in person only in Switzerland or is there any virtual component if someone there are virtual components?

Lindsey Mastis: 01:14:54
Absolutely. We’re I was just in a planning meeting about this this morning. So yeah, you can register. So the the keynote that I’ll be doing on Tool or Takeover, AI Music, and Creative Ownership, that is through something called the the WISIS Forum, V S I S Forum 2026. You can register and you can see my session live online, but you have to register, you can’t just like find a link. So that’s the easiest way to do that. And then AI for Good conference also has a virtual component to it as well.

Eric Mulvin: 01:15:24
Cool. So you don’t have to go to Switzerland to see this stuff.

Lindsey Mastis: 01:15:27
But you can if you want.

Eric Mulvin: 01:15:29
Yeah, it’d be a great time to visit in the summer hearing. Yeah. So cool. Well, thank you again so much, Lindsey. Super appreciate it. And uh, if you guys liked this conversation today, if you want to hear more amazing conversations with people who are out changing the world with AI, with business, with their leadership, then please make sure you subscribe to this podcast, Unfinished Business with Eric Malvin, which is out wherever you listen to podcasts, and then on social media at is with Eric. So until next time, we’ll catch you guys on the next episode. See you all later.

Lindsey Mastis: 01:16:01
Thank you, Eric.

Theme Song: 01:16:02
CEOs and visionaries shaping what’s to come, building more than profit, lifting everyone. Every path’s unique, but it takes a choice to grow. Set your goals and shape the way your future goes. The people in tech connect to amplify. Unfinish business. And follow unfinished business on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever you listen.