Mariano Blejman, CEO of SmartStory.ai and Founder of Media Party, on Neuroscience and How It Helps to Understand Audience Behaviour and News Consumption

Why do we choose to read or watch something - are we manipulated by algorithms? Do we have any cognitive independence? How and where will we receive news in the near future? In a world where the majority of content will be created by AI, how will we know whom to trust?

And what does neuroscience tell us about all of that? In a nutshell, these are the questions we tried to answer in this episode with Mariano Blejman, an Argentinian media entrepreneur and the founder of the Media Party festival in Buenos Aires.

Main Topics We Discussed in This Episode:

• Synthetic democracies and the role of AI in creating them
• What neuroscience tells us about why we choose certain content
• When truth becomes as scarce as water, it will start creating value
• The broken business model of the media: opportunities to fix it or rebuild from scratch
• In a world where the majority of content will be created by AI, how will we know whom to trust
• Haven't heard about a BBC car? Well, it doesn't exist yet, but it might be one of the ways people will receive their news in the future
• Narcissism is one of the media industry's problems
• How to use neuroscience to understand news consumption and audience behaviour in general. Mariano refers to Annemarie Dooling's research
• Mariano explains what his startup is doing to help newsrooms understand their audiences' behaviour. He is fascinated with neuroscience and keeps returning to it. I am becoming increasingly fascinated with it too :-)
• Mariano's predictions on the future of news consumption: content will flow to you without being asked. Your behaviour will activate a prompt, rather than you asking for a prompt - and other predictions
• How will the relationship between media and tech industries develop: marriage, divorce, or a never-ending affair?
• Examples from Latin America of how journalists use AI tools to avoid censorship
• How journalists can have more agency to influence the way generative AI technology is developing
• Mad cow world
• And about neuroscience again