He Built an AI Podcast and It Became the #1 Show.

**Samir** (0:00)
All right, before we start this episode, I need to play something for you.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
You are listening to the Epstein Files, the world's first AI native investigation into the case that traditional journalism simply could not handle.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:15)
Welcome to the Epstein Files.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:16)
Last time we traced the Dubin family's post-conviction ties to Epstein, a 2010 social invitation, subpoenaed financial records, and victim testimony naming their household.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:28)
Today, we are looking at official White House visitor logs showing Epstein entered the Clinton White House at least 17 times between 1993 and 2000, while his abuse operation...

**Samir** (0:37)
So what you just heard is not hosted by humans. There's no studio, there's no mics, and there's no real host to this. This podcast was written, voiced, and published by AI automatically based on whatever the news was that day. And it did it yesterday, the day before, and it'll do it again tomorrow. The show is called The Epstein Files, and in its first week, it had over 100,000 downloads. And last week, only a few months later, the guy who built it woke up to a notification. His show had become the number one podcast in the UK. He tweeted the screenshot of the chart with three words, just getting started. Only a few months after launching The Epstein Files, he launched a second show called War Desk, a daily AI-generated breakdown about global conflict.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:26)
Welcome back to War Desk. Last time we covered March 15th, 2026, day 16 of Operation Epic Fury. Tonight, we're looking at what changed on March 16th, 2026 As part of our ongoing investigation, as always, every document and source we reference is available at wardesk.net.

**Samir** (1:41)
It's been live for about two weeks, and it's already crossed 33,000 downloads. Now, just to give you a sense of how crazy that is, the average new podcast gets 141 downloads per episode in its first 30 days. Wardesk is averaging over 1,000. That's top 5% on a two-week-old show. So the creator of the Epstein Files and Wardesk is a guy named Adam. And we mentioned his show on a podcast a few weeks ago. So he reached out to us. I've been so fascinated by this concept of an AI-generated podcast, and even more so by an autonomous AI-generated podcast. So I had no choice but to reach out to Adam and have a conversation with him. Now, just as a reminder, as you get into this episode, I've been a career creator. I've been making stuff for 16 years. I went to film school prior to this. My intention has always been to be a career storyteller. And things are changing. I think it's incredibly important for us to understand where the media landscape is going. And talking to Adam has really opened my mind and showed me where I think the future is going. So while this conversation is about podcasting, I think it has implications for all media, all types of creators, and everybody who's working in entertainment. So here's my conversation with Adam Levy, the creator of the AI podcast, The Epstein Files.
Adam, welcome to the show.

**Adam Levy** (3:03)
Thank you. Thanks for having me, Samir.

**Samir** (3:06)
Turns out we've known each other, which I didn't know, but you heard our episode where we were talking about your project, The Epstein Files podcast. And actually how that went was I, during the recording of the episode said, somebody could make a documentary series right now about the most culturally relevant news story, which is The Epstein Files at the moment, using AI. And after we recorded, Colin came to me and said, hey dude, someone already did that, but they did it as a podcast. And so we ended up doing a punch in line because we listened to it and we're like, oh my God, this actually happened already and punched it in. And I became fascinated not only by the creation of it, but by the performance of it. It had done 100,000 downloads in the first week. I think recently it became the number one podcast in the UK.

**Adam Levy** (4:01)
Yeah, Friday, crazy.

**Samir** (4:03)
It turns out you are the creator of it. So welcome. And I would love to hear the story of how this came together, how you thought of it, what it took to make it, everything.

**Adam Levy** (4:14)
Yeah. I think it's important to preface that I was not expecting it to do what it did. And I really just started, I put my best foot forward of trying to just see if it was possible to do it.
And lo and behold, it kind of just like took off the way it did. So completely utter shock to me. And it's completely changed my approach of what I think is next moving forward for synthetic media, AI media. And yeah, I guess I could start with how I got the idea. Maybe that's a good place to start.