I came together with a veteran of the radio broadcasting business, Mike Kakoyiannis, to Co-Found Tree Goat Media, Inc.

We decided we were going to get out ahead of the trend and creatively invent inside the new medium of our time: AI. But our AI was not going to be in service to further distancing us through media absorption, but instead to fostering a deeper sense of human connection.

The goal with our AI: democratize and monetize the hurting talk audio industry, starting with podcasts.

99% of the podcasters out there are hardly heard and can’t earn from what they have to say, when what they have to say is often the kind of stuff that most people wouldn’t be willing to say.

And that’s precisely why Gen Z is turning to the medium faster than any other demographic – because they find it a safe space to feel and process what’s coming up for them. Inside a dark ocean of content are endless tickets to a sense of belonging, shared human connection, voices working through the same challenges of life and mind and heart and body as I am.

Breaking these voices out of the jail of invisibility is what I’m here to do.

We are building a new form of Search that makes you feel something.

Consider when the last time was that a Google search made you feel ‘all warm and fuzzy’…

Sometimes you hear a voice, and it makes you feel like you have a home. Radio was called “the companionship model” for that reason. Hosts become a part of our lives because we want to be given information and learn and be entertained by humans, not robots, not links on a page. We crave familiar, reliable sources of support. We crave the comfort of the human voice.

So what if the delivery of information started to have more human in it, rather than less?

My team and I are building the technology that knows how to identify the regions most likely to have someone feel something from within spoken dialogue.

Google set out to build the ‘brain of the world’, and in many ways, it did. But what about ’the heart’. What about information delivered in emotionally-connective packages. Human to human.

Tree Goat is building Marbyl as the first search engine for the spoken word.

We are putting the heart back in Search.

We are building that Heart.