Transmission for Jesse Michels — American Alchemy
Producer & Operator
Find the friction. Design the system. Ship the thing.
Over a decade turning chaotic creative operations into well-oiled machines. I built this page specifically for American Alchemy — not a generic application.
I was a viewer first. Only maybe slightly obsessed. Spotting interdisciplinary patterns, finding through-lines. Classifying entire areas of science "again", Michael Levin's Platonic space giving rise to intelligent behavior in non-living systems? The hill in the Telepathy Tapes. No need to learn the show on the job — just the operations.
Proof points for the four responsibilities mentioned in the job description post.
10 years of comms across a 30M+ audience at PETA featuring celebrity walk-ins, pitching influencers, real-time press response. The work landed in Kanye, Doja Cat, and Nicki Minaj lyrics by name. Same instinct now applied to a sharper, smaller guest list. I know the other side of the lens, too — years in front of the camera in LA before running things behind it — which is exactly what puts talent at ease: I’ve been the talent.
See the PETA deep-dive →Built the editorial standard process reaching audiences in the millions, teaching the essential gut-punch rule to when hiring new creatives. Never post unless it is ready. Audible gasp, laugh, exclamations create conversions. Reached over 1.1B Facebook Page Impressions near end of years of optimization, were rated #1 in engagement and used as a benchmark by nonprofit agencies, and trained global affiliates in the UK, India, Germany, Australia on the same playbook.
See the PETA deep-dive →First brand on Facebook designing graphics, then editing video on the fly. Tofucken — a foul-mouthed vegan grandma — pulled 100M views at submission (over a billion today). NTEN Do Gooder “Funny For Good” winner. Same year: 3.2B Facebook impressions, 9× YoY video views, all on a short-form-first calendar before shorts or reels even existed.
See the PETA deep-dive →End-to-end ownership for clients — brand voice, websites, ads, and the overhead audits that find money on the floor. Near-zero-infrastructure builds where they make sense (a $0/month payment platform; a non-technical client self-managing e-commerce at ~$15–75/year). AI used quietly in the small places it actually helps: short-form clip editing, scheduled posting, ideation.
See the freelance deep-dive →Some receipts.
Grew the in-house digital team from 2 to 13. 3.2 billion Facebook impressions in 2016. Drove acquisition cost to $0.002 through disciplined A/B testing, and 9× year-over-year video views. Trained global teams in the Philippines, India, and the U.K. on a single reproducible playbook.
Built the editorial and brand system from the ground up. Produced a 3,000-copy printed comic that translated a genuinely complex topic for a non-technical audience — narrative made legible.
80+ AI-augmented posts a week. 70% less podcast production time. A live, shipped product on every single client engagement — not slideware.
“He’s making history.”
Also: a Top-20 Brand Tweet at the 2014 Academy Awards, and a single organic post that drove an unsolicited six-figure donation.
Before I sent this, I did the work. Here’s a free audit of American Alchemy’s setup — yours regardless of what happens next.
Two near-duplicate Wix sites, a dead applyjessemedia.com domain,
and Substack’s 10% revenue cut versus flat-fee alternatives. Quiet drag,
easy to remove.
@jessemichelsclips looks to be under 10K subscribers against a
621K main channel. That’s a major — and very fixable — distribution gap.
Consider it a gift. The findings stand whether or not we ever work together.
In 2025 you publicly asked for “epic Austin-based YouTube/Podcast producers.” I’m relocating to Austin from Massachusetts — by choice, not coincidence. By the time this matters, I’ll already be local.