How I AI
How I AI

How the founder of Morning Brew built a Claude content machine that never runs out of ideas and never sounds like slop | Alex Lieberman

July 20, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Alex Lieberman built Morning Brew from a college newsletter into a media powerhouse, and now as founder of the AI consultancy 10X, he’s turned his own content engine into a case study for how to use AI without producing slop. The core insight is counterintuitive: when AI-generated content feels generic, the problem is usually not the AI—it’s the human feeding it weak raw material. Lieberman’s system, called the “content machine,” is a structured workflow that forces the human to do the hard part (having specific, lived-experience ideas) while letting AI handle the grunt work of research, drafting, and iteration. The result is a process that raises the floor without necessarily capping the ceiling.

Mapping the workflow before adding AI

Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.

Read Full Summary →

Free • No credit card required

Listen to Audio Summary Open in App

What you'll learn

  • 1 (00:00) **Two Core Problems Driving the Content Machine** - Alex Lieberman frames the episode around two challenges: being time-capped on content creation and making it easy for employees to become creators while working full-time.
  • 2 (03:57) **Why Employee Creators Are the New Marketing Channel** - Alex explains that trusted distribution is the new moat, and turning employees into creators is underutilized.
  • 3 (07:14) **The Great Writer Debate: AI Raises the Floor but Can It Raise the Ceiling?** - Alex engages with Lulu Meservy’s take that AI caps great writers, offering his own nuanced view.
  • 4 (09:22) **Step Zero: Map Your Workflow Before Adding AI** - Alex walks through his manual content process to identify where AI fits best.
  • 5 (13:37) **The Content Machine Architecture: Oracle, Interview Panel, Writer’s Council** - Alex reveals the three-part system he built inside a Claude/MCP-based tool.
  • 6 (17:14) **How the Machine Learns Your Voice and Avoids Slop** - The content machine uses a personal voice guide, style guide, and a lessons file to iteratively improve.
  • 7 (23:11) **Live Demo: Running the Content Machine in Real Time** - Alex opens Claude and walks through a real example on the topic of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs).

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Guests on this episode

Alex Lieberman

Show Notes

Alex Lieberman co-founded Morning Brew in college and grew it into one of the most-read business newsletters in the world before selling it to Business Insider. Now he’s the co-founder and co-managing partner of Tenex. In this episode, Alex explains why distribution is becoming a durable moat, why founders and teams need to “climb Cringe Mountain,” and how he rebuilt his content process around AI without letting it produce generic slop. He walks us through every step of his Content Machine live: an Oracle that scans internal systems and the internet for content spikes, an interview panel that pulls out his real ideas, voice and style files that keep drafts sounding like him, an editorial council that scores and revises posts, and a lessons loop that learns from his feedback.


What you’ll learn:

  1. Why the blank page is the biggest friction point in content creation, and how an AI Oracle eliminates it
  2. How to map your current workflow before you add any AI
  3. How Alex built a six-step Content Machine in Claude that goes from idea spike to publishable post
  4. Why the interview step (not the drafting step) is where AI slop actually comes from
  5. How to codify your voice in a Markdown file so an AI drafts in your register, not the internet’s average
  6. Why your employees are your most underleveraged marketing channel right now
  7. How the Tenex Creator Cup turned content creation into a team sport with a $5,000 prize pool

—

Brought to you by:

Firecrawl—Power AI agents with clean web data

Customer.io—Build customer engagement campaigns from a single prompt

—

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Introduction to Alex Lieberman

(02:35) Why Alex built a content machine

(06:56) Alex’s thoughts on AI slop

(09:00) Mapping the workflow from scratch

(13:24) The six-step Content Machine setup

(23:11) Live demo: Oracle, Interview Panel, and Writer’s Council in action

(30:38) Employee advocacy: the Tenex Creator Cup and $5K prize pool

(36:45) Lightning round: great engineers, AI use cases, slop fixes

—

Tools referenced:

• Claude / Claude Code (Anthropic): https://claude.ai

• Wispr Flow (voice-to-text transcription): https://wisprflow.ai

• No

How I AI

More from this podcast

How I AI →