Beneath the Byline: Interview with Nat Rubio-Licht

Nat Rubio-Licht is a Senior Reporter at The Deep View. Nat previously led CIO Upside, a newsletter dedicated to enterprise tech, for The Daily Upside. They've also worked for Protocol, The LA Business Journal, and Seattle Magazine.

Your background: Was there a specific moment that made you realize you wanted to be a journalist? If not, how did you end up where you are? Why journalism and not some other type of writing? 

It started in high school when I took my first journalism class and I just thought, “What do I like doing? How can I monetize writing? How can I monetize writing in a way that's more stable than being a novelist?” which kind of sucks, but I picked journalism. My first school out of high school was University of Portland in Oregon, where I studied English for a year. It was fine. I wanted to go to a better journalism school, so I transferred to Syracuse. Then, right out of college, I did business journalism, which narrowed into tech journalism, which narrowed into AI. I feel so lucky that I kind of landed in one of the most exciting beats in business reporting, generally, and something that is so, well, life-changing. I mean, everybody has different opinions on that, but I think the potential is pretty stellar. I became a journalist because I wanted to write every day. I love writing. I do creative writing in my free time. 

What are your favorite types of stories to tell? 

 I think my favorite types of stories to tell in journalism are ones where I get to be on a scene or where I get to flex the creative muscle a lot more. For example — as far as being on the scene — last week, I was in San Francisco for a conference and I got to go to a lab that was using human neurons, like human cells derived from stem cells, to build AI chips. I got to write that and it got published. I loved writing that story. I was bundled in a lab coat and got to hold a chip in my hand that had living cells in it and put it under a microscope and watch the neurons as they moved over the electrodes in the chip. That was fascinating. I love when I get to flex that I was physically there — that creative description— as well as long-form stories where I get to sort of embed my own commentary and my own analysis in it. 

We do a lot of commentary and analysis of the Deep View but we've started doing long-form. Recently I published a 2,000-word long-form essay about how AI is sort of creating or strengthening the tech oligarchy— like the concentration of power in a small number of hands — and in that, I also did get to flex a little bit of the creative writing muscle, because the lede of that story was about a TikTok that Grimes posted in 2021, which was kind of goofy and fun. 

As for creative writing, the stories that I like telling the most are — this is going to sound so silly — but the driving force behind my creative writing is love, and how love can manifest, and how any emotions, like love or pain or fear, can manifest like in the body; and, I guess, emotional decision making. But, I am also trying to weave some of my own journalism knowledge into it, so some of the books I'm working on right now are related to AI, science fiction, and two-steps-ahead, speculative fiction. 

I like to use both my journalism and my life experience to sort of inform my creative writing. And it's why I'm interested in this genre of near-future science fiction, because I am constantly basically reporting on near future science fiction. Soon enough, life is going to mimic what we, hopefully, — I mean hopefully not completely become 1984 — but life might mimic what we once dreamt of in science fiction, and that's such a crazy thing to consider. 

What have been some of the most challenging moments of your career? 

I mean, one is getting people to respond to you and getting people to want to talk to you. That’s the age-old problem of journalism. It's hard to get people to want to talk to you and to get them to trust you with their story. I mean, journalism is a lesson of empathy, so I try to approach every story I write with empathy when it's not just straight-up business analysis. And the other thing is just the blank page problem. When I can't think of an interesting lede, sometimes I sit there and the cursor just blinks back at me. It just feels aggressive, and I end up wasting an hour just staring at a screen. I can go back to the long-form piece that I mentioned; it's called “The Race for Power Behind AI's Utopian Story.” This is a commentary/opinion essay about the dangers of concentrating power into the hands of a couple of billionaires. The part that was challenging about that for me was setting aside that instinct to leave myself out of it, and to leave my opinion out of it, because I realized, after covering this industry for so long, I have a right to have an opinion on it. I've become a subject matter expert over the years, so wrestling with that as well as wrestling with this idea of, “Oh, if I write about OpenAI or Nvidia or Anthropic, none of them are ever going to talk to me again.” But that's not true. In fact, I've gotten outreach from all of those companies since I published this, not related to this. They're like, “Hey, come to our happy hour. Come to this event, come to that.” So, getting over the fear of, “Someone's going to dislike me if I write this about them,” and realizing that holding people accountable helps everybody. 

What story/stories are you the most proud of? 

Well, this one — “The Race for Power Behind AI’s Utopian Story.” I'm really proud of this piece. I'm really proud of the one that was published on Monday (March 22, 2026), the biological computing piece, which is the neuron chips. I used to work at a company called Protocol, which was an offshoot of Politico that fell apart. I wrote a story there that — I mentioned, I really love doing those like on-the-scene pieces — I wrote a story there where I went to a house party in the Hollywood Hills because I live in LA. Thiswas during the big NFT and crypto boom a couple of years ago, and I got to essentially just write about my experience. They were calling it an NFT minting party, where they invited a bunch of influencers and actors and musicians to essentially mint their own NFTs, and those NFTs would grant them access to community events, etc. I wrote a 2,500-word “This was my experience at an NFT minting party in the Hollywood Hills,” and I loved that piece because I essentially wanted to call out the fact of how easily people can be drawn into something that seems new and shiny, whether or not they actually understand the technology and the implications behind it. As happens when publications shut down, a year later, the website shut down as well. So now, that story just exists in a PDF on my laptop. 

What is your favorite story that you wanted to tell that didn’t get the greenlight or got killed?

So, the Deep View is a startup with an editor and one other reporter and I was there before either of those people. Generally, all of my stories that I want to write get the green light here, one, because I understand the publication very well, and two, because we are very much like, “If you're excited about something, then write it.” That’s what I love about the Deep View. But Protocol was a little bit more of an institution, and I guess it's not that it didn't get the green light, it’s that the story got kicked around basically until the publication shut down, which was upsetting. This is super, super nerdy, but I'm a big fantasy nerd and I love Dungeons & Dragons. I got to do an interview with the creators of a show called Critical Role, which is like a live play, Dungeons & Dragons Twitch channel that I used to watch every week. I got to interview the CEO and the founder, who are both also big voice actors in the industry and I was like sitting there like— it was amazing. I wrote a long form piece about how creators who were originally just nerds who like to play Dungeons & Dragons and like to have a good time together have turned it into a multimillion-dollar business that gets ads from major retailers and tech companies and things like that. I wrote it, and I was really proud of it, and I understood the subject matter. I sent it to the editor and it wasn't turned down. Protocol just wasn't very scrappy, and it just essentially sat. I filed it and then it sat for months and months and months. And then I heard, “Oh, we need to tweak this a little bit and can you go back and ask them questions about whether or not they would take VC backing or anything like that?” And I'm like, “That's completely unrelated to the pitch that I—” Anyway, it got kicked around a bunch and eventually we were finally going to do something with it and the publication got shut down. 

What do you read (journalism and not)? 

As far as publications, I kind of just read your standard fare: Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, TechCrunch, things like that. I find that the Rest of World has a lot of very good out-of-U.S. coverage, which I think is really important because I think that as a tech reporter based in the US, we kind of think that “this is the whole world” when it really isn't. As far as what I read, I'm looking at my bookshelf right now… it depends on how much I want to challenge myself. I tend to gravitate towards fiction over nonfiction. And I mean, I only started reading again for fun a couple of years ago and it was when I picked up A Court of Thorns and Roses. Look, say what you will about those fantasy books, they got me back into reading in a very big way. Since then I went from reading one to two books a year to reading like 25, 30 books a year. So, A Court of Thorns and Roses, Throne of Glass, Fourth Wing, they’re fun. As my tastes have diverged a little bit, I love Andy Weir. Andy Weir is probably my favorite author. I love Project Hail Mary, of course, I love The Martian. Project Hail Mary was one of my five-star books last year. It made science approachable. I started listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson's podcast after that. I'm like, “Who am I?” But I love it. Andy Weir is phenomenal. He also wrote a really good short story called The Egg, which I recommend reading. It's like only two pages, but it's about essentially a theory of reincarnation and it's phenomenal. My other 5 star read of last year was a book called This is How You Lose the Time War. I'm going to pick it because it's written by two authors and is like the quintessential, really-good-book for me. It is less than 200 pages long. It was written by 2 authors who go back and forth— it's written in a letter style — so it's about operatives on the opposite ends of a time war who are sending letters to each other and they fall in love. It's amazing. I've read this book several times. I've cried every time I read it, and this is the impression that I want to leave on people with my own writing, where it gives people goosebumps. That’s the goal with my creative fiction at least. 

What writers and authors have influenced your work the most?  

I think Alex Heath is fantastic. Ed Ludlow is fantastic. Taylor Lorenz, of course. As far as journalists, Karen Hao. As far as authors— I'm now just looking at my bookshelf as well — Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar are the people who wrote This is How You Lose the Time War. Andy Weir, as I mentioned, Madeline Miller, who wrote Circe and The Song of Achilles. I love her writing. I love Taylor Jenkins Reid as well, who wrote Daisy Jones and the Six, Malibu Rising, and The 7 Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Donna Tartt, that was my other five-star read of last year: The Secret History.

How have you seen journalism/the media change throughout your career? What further changes do you anticipate?  

The way that my editor describes it is that AI is very good at finding the mean at any given task, but I don't think that AI can report. It can't go out and talk to people. It can't go out and form relationships.That is, I think, one of the most important parts of journalism. It can distill facts, but as far as creating compelling arguments, the stories, the analysis and the commentary, that always is going to be a result of human judgment, in my opinion. Human judgment is incredibly important. I think that AI could definitely be used in a lot of ways in journalism. For example, I'll use AI to sometimes help me come up with headlines that don't suck because I'm a very bad headline writer. AI could be used to distill really dense legal or technical documents. It could be used to surface a bunch of links really quickly. If you're like, “Oh, I've got 30 minutes to write the story and I just need some background information on this topic,”  it could be used to surface links, as long as you check everything. At the end of the day, the best journalists that use AI are still going to have to use the tenets of journalism. First, if you're double-checking everything that a source is telling you, you double-check everything that AI tells you, too, because AI is just as fallible as people. 

AI is changing as it impacts SEO (Search Engine Optimization). How information is surfaced is changing. Now, as people lean towards AI, they're going to have to figure out how they can get their stories to land in Perplexity or to land on ChatGPT or whatever. That’s why I'm really happy to work at a business whose primary revenue is derived from newsletters; we're not an SEO-based business, which is, I think, very helpful. I think that people are pivoting to new media a lot. A lot of people are going independent, a lot of people are creating Substacks, a lot of people are joining newsletters, and I think that's kind of where the industry is headed. There are a lot like podcasts, newsletters, short-form video — all of it is journalism, and all of it can be used as journalism as long as the core tenets of what makes good journalism are adhered to. 

People consume more media than they ever have. How do you think this has changed the world? 

I think it makes people think the media is all there is, in that it gives more gravity to whatever we post online. I don't want to say they take it too seriously, but I don't know, if a high schooler’s post flops on TikTok, then it might feel like the end of the world when, in reality, you could just turn your phone off and go on a walk. I think — I mean, this is coming from someone that lives in Los Angeles, like the heart of the entertainment industry and the influencer industry and whatnot— the increased media consumption and the increased weight that we give the internet has devalued human connection a little bit. People will do things just so they can look good on Instagram and, I feel like I sound like a freaking boomer when I talk about this stuff, but I'll sum it up as: brain rot is real. Get your eyes off a screen and go and have a real conversation because I think the media that we consume, at the end of the day, impacts how we communicate and who we are.

What is your advice for younger people interested in journalism?

My advice for young people in journalism is don't let AI do it for you. Especially as someone who reports on this industry, cognitive decline is real, or cognitive atrophy. Cognitive surrender is real. Strengthen your skills in writing, and ask yourself, “Can I answer this question on my own with a little bit of research?” Or, “Can I answer this question on my own before you go running to AI to do it for you?” Have conversations with people, ask them real questions, get to know them as people. Look people in the eye when you talk to them.

Part of journalism is paying attention and asking good questions. What are some daily habits or ways of being that promote paying attention and asking good questions?

I ask people how they are and I care about the answer. If I'm going out and getting coffee, I'll ask someone, “How are you doing?” or “How’s your shift been?” I go to boxing 4 or 5 times a week and I make sure to, especially if there are new people in class, ask how they're doing. I will not touch my phone. Sometimes I'll do two classes in a row and I won’t go on my phone in between classes. I have conversations. I put my phone on do-not-disturb all the time, so I don't have notifications constantly rolling in. I actually don't remember the last time my phone wasn't on do-not-disturb. So that’s a recommendation I would give as far as limiting the noise. 

Interview conducted by Grace Mackey