I sit down with Kevin Ben Smith, founder of Snipd, for a wide-ranging conversation on why every podcast app you’ve ever used is secretly a music player - and what happens when AI finally gets to listen with you. We get into: the bicycle commute in Zurich (and the Sam Altman podcast) that started Snipd, the Amazon-reviews neural net that convinced him to bet on AI five years before ChatGPT, why Snipd has data Apple, Spotify and YouTube don’t have, why his three-person team specifically refuses to build an ad-skipping feature, why today’s podcast advertising is a “huge hack” and the YouTube-style model that should replace it, the Snipd DJ stringing 5-to-10-minute moderated supercuts across every show you’d never get to, why audiobook publishers are too paranoid to license cleanly, Kevin’s blunt verdict on ElevenLabs voices (“5 minutes and you wanna blow your brains out”), and the open API Snipd is opening for Claude, Codex, and OpenClaw - so your AI agent can finally tap into everything you’ve ever listened to. Whether you make podcasts, build with AI, or just want a smarter way to listen, this one’s for you. Chapter Markers Follow Kevin Ben Smith: https://x.com/kevinbensmith Follow Kevin Rose: https://x.com/kevinrose