A New AI Investment Fund's Strategy and Opportunity — With Techmeme Ride Home

Brian McCullough and Chris Messina are starting a new, $15 million fund for pre-seed through Series A investments in AI companies. They've already raised money from Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and Dennis Crowley and join Big Technology Podcast for a special episode where they share their strategy and the opportunity they're going after. At the core of this question is whether AI companies are worthy of investment or will just be subsumed by larger players. Stay tuned for the second half where we cover AI + Hollywood strikes and AI + warfare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Two investors with backing from Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Dennis Crowley, among others, join us right after this to talk about their new fund. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.

• 0:44Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a bonus show for you today. Yes, a bonus show. Two investors, Brian McCullough, Chris Messina, here with us today. They're starting a new AI fund and I thought it'd be a perfect opportunity to talk about why you'd start a fund with AI right now. Are there really moats? Is there anything investable? And for anyone thinking about what the next generation of startups are going to look like, well, you're about to hear them. Brian and Chris, welcome to the show.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 1:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thanks, Alex. So the first question for you guys is, are you bananas? Because I've seen so much discussion on Twitter about people talking about how there are no moats for AI. Very like prominent investors, Keith Rebois, Sam Lessin, saying that they think that anybody investing in early stage AI right now is relatively insane because the value is ultimately going to go to the big tech companies, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and the chipmakers like Nvidia. So where exactly are you aiming to play? And why do you actually believe? I mean, you've convinced Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon and others to join in. So where are you going to play?

• 2:20Speaker 02

  Everyone we talk to, no matter what the nature of the call is, eventually it devolves into what are you seeing? And like, literally, the conversation with Mark Andreessen was the same, where he's like, "Okay, guys, I'm in. Now, what are you seeing?" Like, it is, but everybody's, it's wide open. I mean, like, literally, if you, if, I know that, you know, AI is a thing, has been going on forever, but like, this moment is barely six months old. Which, actually, Chris and I can speak to that in terms of why we're doing the fund. So, you're calling us investors. We've been on your show before. I'm a podcaster. Chris invented the hashtag, but essentially-

• 2:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  You're not just investors, but now that you're starting the fund, that's the label you get.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  So, okay, okay. Let me, let me, let me explain as fast as I can. So, what we're announcing today is the Ride Home AI Fund, which is a $15 million target fund, doing seed, pre-seed, Series A, and this new AI technology. Most relevant to anyone listening, it's a 506C fund, which is why we can talk about it today, which means any accredited investors listening can invest. So if you're having AI FOMO and want to participate in this moment, but you can't get into an A16Z fund or a Thrive fund, you can get into our fund. So, check out ridehomefund.com for more info. But, essentially, this was, it was almost inspired by Chris. I've been running the Ride Home Fund for two years, and Chris

• 3:46Speaker 02

  was always a great source of deal flow. And my remit to him was always like, if there's somebody coming off the bench, you know, that had a previous exit, or that you've known for a while, that like, by definition, you'd invest in whatever they were doing next, send them my way. And around December of last year, it all became AI stuff. And these were folks, for whom this wasn't their first rodeo, who didn't bite on Web3, or crypto, or whatever, but were activated by this AI moment. And we can give you examples if you're interested. But that also activated Chris, which he can speak to, which is, we were both like, we want to back these people. The talent of our, you know, we've both been in the valley for over 20 years. The talent that we're seeing, coming off the bench,

• 4:30Speaker 02

  activated by this moment, we just wanted a fund to back those folks.

• 4:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, the real question is, where's the investment opportunity? I mean, that's, so of course, you're on the phone with Mark Andreessen and he's like, yeah, of course, there's opportunity there. But again, what everybody's saying about AI investment is you have the big companies and they're going to crowd out any, any seed company that you're funding that doesn't have, for instance, like the, the money to spend on the GPUs. Or potentially, they're building a thin layer on top of something like a ChatGPT and ChatGPT could just subsume it. For instance, Character AI, right, which is like, it allows you to chat with all these historical figures. Like, it's very easy just to go into ChatGPT and be like, alright, ChatGPT or Bing or Bard. You're Abe Lincoln, let's have a conversation and it will do that. So then what's the value of, of character?

• 5:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  So where are you guys seeing specifically, outside of the people? The investment opportunity to actually make a splash here with seed companies and series A companies? That some of these other luminaries, like a Keith or Boy or Sam Lesson are saying do not exist.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  I think the, the skepticism or the reluctance from a lot of folks is exactly the moment to lean into this. Because now is when we're going to be learning what types of products actually make sense. So what Brian and I ultimately are looking to invest in is the productization of these new techniques that start from an assumption that software and technology and that the way that humans actually use computers is going to go through a rapid revolution. But that those existing incumbents are going to, you know, defend their existing models and how they, they make money currently. Whereas a bunch of other folks who don't have to worry about that can build something entirely new that are set with new assumptions. And so part of that is looking at behavior.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  That's a big piece of how we learn to build social software that people actually wanted to use. And then the second part is coming up with generational brands that actually reconstitute existing marketplaces or product experiences that were in the marketplace, but that can be remade through technology. So looking back on things like Airbnb and Uber. So just that these were ideas that people understand. You know, you have property, you want to rent it out. You have a vehicle, you want to like lease it out or you want to like drive people around and charge people for that. But bringing technology like GPS and mobile phones to that allowed for these large companies to be created. And I think in a similar way, we're going to see the same thing with AI and generative AI.

• 6:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  So I'm being reminded now, like hearing the way that you guys speak of this stuff, I'm being reminded of a Benedict Evans tweet where he talked about the answer is not that you're going to start to talk to Microsoft Excel. It's that the way that you do spreadsheets just changes because you into a completely different form factor where you're

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Why do you need a spreadsheet?

• 7:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  For instance, the data. Exactly. Why do you need a spreadsheet? You'll just upload the data and talk to it.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  I would use the analogy of like, if this is a paradigm shift in compute, which we believe it is, what was the thing in the paradigm shift of the PC era that sold PCs was the spreadsheet, something that didn't exist before that paradigm shift that allowed accounting to 10, 100x or whatever. We're obviously looking for those things, but but let me back up for a second. Fundamentally, what we believe is like, you asked the question like, well, will the incumbents or the people with the large, largest models always win? If that ends up being true, then yes, this is academic, but we don't believe fundamentally that's true. We believe that fundamentally, this is still software. Like, how did Zoom win over other sort of, you know, conferencing software? Why does this one win over that one? Figma win over that?

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Like, in the end, it's the end result of what you do with the software for for users in terms of their productivity and their delight in the product. For all of the talk about generative stuff and AI stuff, in the end, it's software and in the end, it's inputs and outputs, right? So we have this theory that while everyone is still looking for what the, you know, investing in this is not on rails yet in the same way that has been for things like SaaS or like D to C companies that that people understand this is how you build a company that reaches this many users or customers or something. But in the end, we think that on the input side, it matters.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  And Chris will go into this about our theory of AI varietals, but it matters the models, it matters the data, the input that creates the things, and it matters the output. So you could have three different startups that are like, we use AI. To look at x-rays and find cancer, right? But what have you trained that on? And does one model work better than the other? And already, people are talking about things like accuracy and not having hallucinations and stuff like that. So people that get more accurate will win. But also, what have you trained it on? Is it? Do you like the results it gives you? Does the output? Well, this output is more accurate, but that output, like in a clinical setting, allows me to interact better with my patients and things like that.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  So in the end, we believe that this productization is the way to go because it will be the inputs and the outputs with the underlying software and AI stuff sort of abstracted away that will matter. And the analogy that I have to give Chris credit for for coming up with is our theory of varietals like wine.

• 9:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hold on. We're going to get to your theory, but I also want to ask, isn't this kind of a tough area to invest in? Because, you know, what is in an AI company? Like, if I'm investing in social media or I'm investing in SaaS, okay, I know what I'm doing. If I'm investing in AI companies, all of a sudden, you're the range of companies. Like, you guys can be consumer, you can be business, you can be anything. So how do you pick what you invest in? And then we can get into your varietals theory.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  It's back to people. It's back to application of the productization. Can I give you an example of a company that we actually have cut a check for?

• 10:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wait, you guys have already cut a check and you haven't even finished raising your fund?

• 10:29Speaker 02

  It's a 506C. We're allowed to do that.

• 10:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  We're moving fast. That's the whole idea. Yeah, let's hear it. Yeah, definitely.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  FY.ai, fix-it-yourself.ai is training models on all of the world's sort of owners manuals, users manuals, specifications and things like that. The idea being, train an AI bot to fix your dishwasher, repair your car, my printer all of a sudden isn't working or is flashing this green light. What does it mean? As opposed to going in and finding the PDFs or calling the 1-800 number, they're training.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  On every product under the sun, they're refining the model in terms of can this be a white label thing that a Samsung or a Frigidaire or whatever would use to sort of be the the sort of bot that would interface with the customer so that the customer doesn't have to call the 1-800 number so that it would save on things like, you know, warranty stuff or whatever. Or also, on the consumer facing side, what if there was one bot that anytime something broke, you could use your smartphone to like turn on the camera and be like, okay, the dishwasher isn't working. Look in the back there. Oh, that hose is disconnected and the bot tells you what that means and X, Y. So this is inputs and outputs. We love

• 11:52Speaker 02

  the founding team. They have previous experience in the space, relationships with, you know, OEMs and things like that. Like, that is sort of a definitional example of like sort of the productization that that we like. It's not the only stuff we'll invest in, but like, that's, that's where we're seeing stuff that we get excited about.

• 12:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I like that. I mean, the idea that I could like, for instance, you know, converse with my refrigerator to try to figure out like how it's broken.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, the analogy I use is like, you know how every website has like the sort of chat bot on the bottom right hand corner that if you have a question like the AI. Well, imagine a chat bot AI that comes into the real world into meatspace, not just on a website, right?

• 12:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Like.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Elon's working on some of those.

• 12:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  We just had Ethan Mollick on the show. He's a professor at Warren who assigned his students to use ChatGPT in class and talked about how everyone's gonna, you know, lots of students are going to be cheating with this stuff. And I personally cannot wait for the first person to cheat with chat or chat refrigerator and, you know, like, you know, the paper included the term, as an AI refrigerator, I cannot complete your paper, however. So let's hear about this AI varietals theory. So what does that mean?

• 13:08Speaker 01

  So to, I think, generalize from, from the example that Brian just gave. When we were going through this exact exercise, when we were trying to decide, you know, do we want to do this fund or not? And why now? And why us?

• 13:24Speaker 01

  It stood out to me that there's been this refrain, or refrain rather, in the, in the business that data is the new oil. And it's been bandied around for quite a while. And the assumption is that if you have just a load of data, you know, you've got some data lake or warehouse someplace on the internet or in someone's cloud, that you have an advantage for both training and building AI products. And while there may be some truth to that, and having an enormous amount of data can be useful, there's also a lot of crap out there. There's a lot of stuff that's undifferentiated, that's just kind of nonsense. And, you know, having worked at various tech companies, I know for a fact that a lot of the stuff inside of these spreadsheets or whatever, just is not structured in a way that can be useful for training these data sets. So

• 14:08Speaker 01

  as I was thinking about a better way to think about the opportunity, it occurred to me that it's not that data is the new oil. It's that data can be thought of as a type of terroir. And, you know, obviously, coming from California, being in California now, you know, we've got Napa Valley right up to the north. And so there are all these places throughout California where the terroir, the earth, the, the place in which grapes grow, represent different types of cultivation opportunities. So essentially, by cultivating the land and growing grapes in it, and then harvesting those grapes, which of course have grown in different climates, with different soil types, that produces different types of expressions in wine. And those different expressions in wine, if you bear with me for this metaphor, are kind of

• 14:52Speaker 01

  like the types of products that we expect to be able to create from creators of these products that understand deeply the data that they're working with. Maybe they've actually set up the data ingestion pipelines and the refinement pipelines. They understand deeply a customer segment and the needs of those customers. And perhaps most importantly, they have the vernacular or the language of that customer, and they know how to speak that customer, and to deliver products and services that fit into the environment or the industry that those Their customers are in. So it's not enough to just have a whole shit ton of data and just to build a company or product. You actually have to have some empathy for the market that you're dealing with.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  And we think that that's going to be the opportunity for founders that are thinking about that and are thinking about the whole life cycle of building AI-powered, AI-enriched products, that there are going to be opportunities. And these opportunities are going to take many, many years to play out. Well, many, many years, like in my, in my thinking, it's like, you know, three to five years, maybe eight years. But nonetheless, now is the time to start. Now is the time to learn. Now is the time to experiment. And for those founders who either have left big tech companies, or more importantly, were laid off or fired from those companies, they're going to be hungry to be building those products and those services. So that's really where I think Brian and I, you know, both students of history,

• 16:16Speaker 01

  both internet history, as well as social media history, as well as longer-term history, are seeing opportunities for us to support those founders, coach them through launch, and help them get distribution and to be discovered.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  I also think, Alex, that it is going to be, there's going to be a ton of M and A over the next three years, right? So I, like you, have seen like the studies and things like that, that, and anecdotally, oh, we didn't expect that all of the incumbents would adopt this AI stuff that quickly, right? Like, everybody and their mother has added AI features to their existing products, right? Where it gets tricky is where it gets fundamentally disruptive to, like, again, Microsoft adds AI to Excel, but what if you had something that AI could do that obviates the need for a spreadsheet entirely, right?

• 17:15Speaker 02

  The thing that we're looking at is like, again, to use the spreadsheet example, like Chris and I, believe me, there are 100 different startups out there that are like, draw on a napkin a room and the AI will generate like sort of the perfect interior design.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Beautiful interior for you.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. But like, my wife is, is an architect and every time those come through, we float them by her and she's like, can it create a BIM file for me that I can send to the structural engineer? No. Why? Cause it's two kids, 25 years old from Stanford, there's no architects on the, you know, she's like, you know, that we have, I'll lose my license if things do not meet certain like building code standards and things like that. So like, our, like, our dream sort of company to come our way right now would be like, a 25 year old from Stanford, that's AI guru, an architect with 20 years' experience that

• 18:14Speaker 02

  understands, you know, the needs of the profession and the, and someone that's ex Autodesk, right? Because what my wife is like, is like, the day that you could come to me and you could train my, you could train an AI on my previous, you know, career-long history of drawings and like, this is how I like to design an interior, this is how I like to, and, and, and you could do the napkin sketch into the AI thing, but it's based on what I like to do. So it's like my style of design and it's functional, like, so that in a day I could have BIM files that are actionable. That's the 10x sort of equivalent to the spreadsheet.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think maybe, maybe Brian, another way to layer this is, I do like Microsoft's frame of co-pilots. And if we think about these as tools for collaboration and for reasoning and for thinking through or going through the creative process, then ultimately you kind of want to mix where, you know, as, as Brian said, like Lisa would submit her designs to train an AI, she would produce a series of sketches, she would then submit them to the AI to get some other ideas or other directions, perhaps returning sketches in her style in order for her to work out the thought process. And then when it's time to actually move forward into the finalization workflow, then They could, she could go into a mode that is all about that type of collaboration.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  The problem is that so many of these generative AI tools are designed only on the final product and the outcome and, and those outputs and outcomes are based on a popularity contest on the internet, which is all good and well, but not necessarily the most appropriate for coming up with novel ideas or synthesizing new outcomes or coming up with entirely new concepts or practices. So it's great for maybe returning to things that have been done or are well understood in the marketplace and are therefore somewhat commoditized, but creating things that are new expressions and creative, I think still is an area where there's loads of opportunity.

• 20:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, this is interesting for two reasons. The first is that it is, it seems to be an application that like something like a Google will not want to go after because it's just small enough to be under the radar for them, but just big enough that could be a really interesting company. And the second reason is that because we talk about generative AI and it seems like the conversation always goes toward chatbots, but if it can go towards, for instance, blueprints or having a dialogue with other like important technical but creative images, then you could really, and plans, then you could really get into an interesting place. We're here with Brian McCullough and Chris Messina. We're running this both on the big technology podcast feed and on the tech meme ride home feed. If you're a big technology podcast listener, I definitely think that their show is worth

• 21:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  checking out. Brian's show is worth checking out every day, a little update on what's going on in tech. And if you're a tech meme ride home listener, I'd say, you know, come give big technology podcast a shot.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Well, and Alex, how many times have we seen? Oh, sorry. I was gonna say, how many times have we seen on Twitter, people say that they use a tech meme every day and your show for the, the in-depth sort of stuff twice a week?

• 21:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  I think it's a great pairing. It's been, it's really, it does, if you're going to think about your tech podcast media diet, you know, I think putting those two together, that's the way to go. All right, let's take a quick break. We'll be back on the other side of this break to talk about how these two were able to get in front of the Marc Andreessen's and Dennis Crowley's of the world and were able to convince them to invest. And then we have a couple of AI related stories that we want to talk about, AI warfare, AI and the Hollywood strike. We'll make it a quick second half, so stick with us. We'll be back right after this. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data.

• 22:08Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 22:50Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 23:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here with Brian McCullough and Chris Messina, two investors who are raising a $15 million target fund from investors, including Mark Andreessen and Dennis Crowley, Chris Dixon. I have some thoughts about Mark Andreessen that maybe I'll share on a different show, but in the meantime, I'd like to hear how you were able to get in front of him to raise the money from him. And don't you, doesn't he also have like AI related funds? So talk a little bit about that process.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. The short answer is, is that it's because Mark and Chris Dixon listen to the show. Chris is very kind. He has said multiple times that when the Andreessen Crypto Fund invests in a company or hires new people, they give them my book. So the bottom line is, is that actually it was, it was Chris and Mark, those were the first two LPs we reached out to. There's some other luminary names that you would know, but have not agreed to allow us to use their names to fundraise. Essentially, we went out and, and we said sort of what you said at the beginning, which is no one knows what this space is. Come in

• 25:06Speaker 02

  with us and you know, as an LP, you'll be able to see the people we're seeing and the, the companies and ideas that we're seeing.

• 25:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Great. So we have a few minutes left together. I thought that, you know, we're doing this as a special episode, but we still want to cover some of the news. I feel like doing a big technology podcast or a tech me right home show without going over some headlines would be a complete waste. So let's not waste this opportunity. Now we're in the middle of this big writer and actor strike inside Hollywood. And we put a document together to talk about, you know, to sort of discuss type of stories we wanted to cover. And, you know, usually I like to go through like a more robust setup, talking about the story and what's happening and then ask a pointed question. But there's a one liner in this document that just said, AI and the Hollywood strike, Brian's anecdote, without any detail. And I was like, I'll be damned if I don't ask about that. So Brian, let's

• 25:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  hear, let's hear your perspective on what's going on here. And it seems like you've had an interesting interaction.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  So I, you know, I do daily tech news and do headlines like you do headlines on your show. So you might have done a similar piece. I think it was in the Washington Post, maybe, where they were talking about how in this sort of strike moment where how long has it been going on? More than two months now? Like this might be the moment where TikTok stars The writers' strike. Become the writers, the writers and the now the actor's strike. Yeah, that's shorter. Yeah, go ahead. So, but that, that, that studios might gravitate towards TikTok stars since they're not in a union to, in the same way that in the strike in the, in the, in the aughts,

• 26:42Speaker 02

  that sort of begat the, the takeover of reality TV because it was cheaper and non-union. And so TikTok stars might be moving over to, to fill the gaps of what Hollywood needs for content. At the same time, the article posited that this was training folks that were in Hollywood, that were actors, writers, or whatever, to be like, I need my own platform, almost push them into the creator side of the equation. And so the, the article was positing that this could kill both sides of, of the equation in terms of like the traditional Hollywood model. And so my anecdote is this, you know, I'm in podcasting, I talk to a lot of podcasters. I also, weirdly enough, have a background in, in comedy and stand-up

• 27:27Speaker 02

  comedy and improv and stuff like that. So a lot of the shows and, and friends that I listen to their podcasts are like comedy podcasts, but like, let's just say broader picture, people that work in Hollywood, right? All of these years, they've had podcasts, like comedy and, and various Hollywood folks were early adopters to podcasting because it was like a supplemental thing. Like if you can get staffed on a writer's room for a couple of years, then you make a decent living, but then you might not be staffed on a writer's room for a couple of years. Or like actors know you go from role to role or whatever. And comedians, you know, you go touring, but then, you know, the, the pandemic cut down on touring. So here's my anecdote.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  The people that I know that run comedy podcasts and have done for, it's not like they just started it because of the strike. They've been doing it for five or six years. Almost to a person or to a podcast, they have suddenly gotten extremely serious about it. Where people have launched memberfuls or Patreons or whatever. Where now you could argue that people are doing this because they're not getting income. But what I've been seeing over the last two months, and this was really hit home to me. Last week where I realized that every comedy podcast I listened to has sort of gotten more professional about it. Doubling their episodes and things like that. I'm seeing the people that I know in comedy.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  They used to think of doing these side hustles, a YouTube page, a Twitch page, a podcast or whatever. As like, this is what pays the rent in between my main gigs. I think they're literally getting sort of evangelism about like, well, this is my main gig. And if I get a show, then like, that's just gravy.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  You're saying that the creator economy was delayed by like three years and now thanks to the strike.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Or, or the creator economy had been to this point, the people that were non-professionals that were trying to break in. And I'm seeing it from the reverse now where the professionals are like, screw the Hollywood system. I can probably make more money and have, even if it's not more money yet.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Do you think it's really screw the Hollywood system though? Because it seems like there's this desire to get paid the way that Hollywood pays. And that the creator economy is, you know, as you both know, like a slog. It's a lot of work, you know, especially if you're doing, you know, your own stunts effectively. So is there actually a desire to dispense with the Hollywood system? Which as I understand, you know, relatively pays well, especially through like union fees and.

• 30:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  It might, it might actually, yeah, it might actually be a reverse of the way that we've seen it play out in journalism. Where in journalism, the stars have actually like gone and done their own thing.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Substacks and stuff.

• 30:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Because, yeah, Substack because they know they can make more money. It's more stable. The business sucks. And so they've actually gravitated towards this, like, I will insulate myself from the pressures of the business.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  See news like.

• 30:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, but that's what I'm saying here.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's different.

• 30:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hollywood, that's what I'm saying, it's gonna be the reverse. In Hollywood, you might have a place where the stars, this, this system is gonna really work very well for them. Barbie movie, Oppenheimer movie, if you're a star in one of those movies, you're not, you don't care about having your own podcast. However, this is something that the middle class and even the bottom of, you know, actors and comedians, they're extremely entertaining, they're very talented, they can be engaging on their own. And, and this strike might be a wake up call for them. Where they say, hey, now I'm gonna take advantage of this system. So it will be flipped where they're, you know, the middle class will say, I can make money and protect myself. And the stars will stay with the system, whereas in journalism, the stars have left and the middle class has remained with the system.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Let, let me give you a middle class example, and I don't know if this will, people, everyone will agree with me, this is a middle class. But you know, the Office Ladies podcast, um, which is Jenna Fisher and Angela Kinsey from, from the original show, the US show, The Office. Pam and whatever the other, so, um, now, those are examples of actors for whom I'm sure they've gotten residuals from, for whatever degree The Office did play on cable television. But once it's gone to streaming, residuals and things like that, stop. The, The Office Ladies podcast, I guarantee you, those two ladies are making seven figures a year from that podcast.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  And so imagine the equivalent of Jenna Fisher today from an equivalent show. Where sure, you get paid well for the two seasons that Netflix gives you before they cancel the show. But you have this fame and you have this level of notoriety and like.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Don't you have to have the fame, like, is, like, that's not middle class, I'm sorry, that's, that's like.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  Well, I, I, I could give you other examples of people.

• 32:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  That is the middle class of Hollywood, that's different than the middle class of America.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  I see.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  That's not Tom Cruise, right, I, I, right, I tried to caveat by saying you wouldn't agree. But so imagine a player actor on an equivalent television show today, that was a big hit on Netflix, that runs for two years, that has no residuals, so you got paid well for two years, but you don't get to do anything else with that, right? Um, you could be the equivalent of Jenna Fisher and be making millions of dollars a year by parlaying that sort of fame into a podcast or a, a YouTube channel or whatever, a platform that you own and you control and, and is. You can still get a show or get a movie, you know?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  You know, so to add to this.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  That's it. I'm surprised at how sort of negative you are to this idea. I feel like that this is like training people to grab the means of production in a way that they were only dabbling in before.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  I guess what I'm suggesting though is that you're still dependent upon these streaming platforms and the algorithms that sort and organize the content. Now, that is not absolutely true if you do, well, I was going to say a Substack, you know, sort of tries to have this, you know, perspective, perception of being neutral. But now that they have notes, they are getting into the business of algorithmic amplification, or at least choosing what, you know, rises to the top, as opposed to an email inbox, which currently at least so far is still reverse chronological. So my point is that especially for media talent, they are dependent upon platforms like YouTube or Netflix or TikTok or Reels and those types of rich media platforms. And so that's why suggesting that the workers can seize the means of, you know, production

• 34:01Speaker 01

  and distribution, I think is not quite accurate because it's just substituting the previous gatekeepers with a new set of algorithmic gatekeepers.

• 34:09Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, let's, let's, let's move on to.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Actually, I want to say one more thing, because I think it is, okay, it is relevant to this. I was listening to the artificiality podcast this morning and Jonathan Colton, who's a musician, made a very useful, I think, point, which is to say that the ability to make and derive an income from entertainment is a relatively novel thing in human history. And the fact that we've created a regime, intellectual property controls, to protect ideas is something that has only come around in recent human history. It's not something that is guaranteed. It's not something that we necessarily have to persist forever. And especially in the era of generative AI, we may have to rethink the way in which intellectual property and that type of production actually functions. So I thought that was actually very useful.

• 34:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, my God. I think that person is so, so completely wrong. And entertainment is definitely going to be here to stay. But we have to, we'll record, let's record, we're going to do another one of these. So let's table that and we'll come back to it.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  We'll see, we'll see how it goes.

• 35:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  There's this wired story that's completely wild. It's called the AI power, totally autonomous future of war is here. I mean, there are some quotes in there that literally come out of a movie. So there's this Israeli guy, Amir Alon, who's built, who's part of this company that's built this autonomous speedboat called the Seagull. And he says that it can be equipped with a remotely operated machine gun and torpedoes that launch from the deck. And he says, it can engage autonomously, but we don't recommend it with a smile. We don't want to start World War III. And the article, the next paragraph goes on to basically underscore what this means. Autonomous systems with the capacity to kill already exist around the globe. In any major conflict,

• 35:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  even one well short of World War III, each side will soon face the temptation, not only to arm these systems, but in some situations, to remove human oversight, freeing the machines to fight at machine speed. In this war of AI against AI, only humans will die. And it's so interesting to me because obviously, we do have this advanced, you know, AI technology that can kill people. But I look at that and I look at like the biggest war in the world right now, which is the Ukraine war. And you have Russians and Ukrainians like fighting side by side and sort of World War One style trench warfare. So, you know, my question is like, um, you know, it seems clearly that this idea of AI warfare is overhyped.

• 36:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  And maybe we have just reached a state of like, we've armed ourselves to the gills, you know, with technologically advanced weapons. And it does seem like there's just so much reticence to use them. That, I mean, we do, I guess we have Ukraine flying drones into buildings in Russia as we speak. But it just the juxtaposition of that is so interesting. We have trench warfare. That's really what's happening. And all this AI technology in the world, like, it's like the most thing that the thing that's being used most is Starlink, where the Ukrainians can communicate with each other. What do you guys make of that? It seems like a contradiction.

• 37:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  AI investors.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Where is the contradiction? Just that, okay, your, your point is that trench warfare is warfare that is being waged in 2023, while we have the technology to essentially execute autonomous warfare. So it seems like there are a number of factors to that, one being that, you know, that type of, I mean, tho- those, those technologies are being deployed increasingly, for sure. And we, we know that the, the drone technology has improved greatly and that Ukrainians are finding new ways to improvise and create new types of explosive devices that drones previously were not meant to be, as far as I know, sort of used or created for out of off the shelf components. So that is happening. I think the question then is,

• 37:54Speaker 01

  to the degree that you have, what does it mean to have a number of robots and self-directed machinery, more or less mowing down humans, if one side doesn't have to actually deploy humans onto the battlefield at all? And what does that mean morally to essentially annihilate? I mean, it's, it's, it's a type of, I don't know what to call it. It's not, it's like robicide. It's not genocide, but essentially if you have the ability to do that, you can just decimate people.

• 38:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's definitely genocide. If you're using robots to kill people, like you are, you can't take the human out of that. It's robot assisted genocide, maybe, but it's genocide.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Sure, but, but, but I guess I'm asking the question, like, what, what are you sort of, it feels like the way in which the quote unquote rules of war have been developed is such that there is a sort of desire for two different sides, depending on the type of war it is, but in this case, it's a territorial war, for those who desire to maintain ownership and possession of land or a specific place to fight for that land. And at some point, the ability for one side to, you know, declare that they're done fighting and they throw up, you know, the white flag and they surrender, you know, sort of, there's, there's a, an, a presence and honor in that in terms of human society and civilization. To surrender to robots that have, you know, executed warfare against you feels like there

• 39:14Speaker 01

  is something completely lost in at least the traditions of war and that we're not quite ready for societally, like what that would mean.

• 39:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  I guess what I'm trying to say is like, where, where is this weaponry? I mean, is it actually being used in, in, in the conflict, the fact that like it's being built up this way?

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Let me, let me, let me build off.

• 39:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Be, be there.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  Let me, let me build up off of something that Chris said tangentially, which is like, so in the history of warfare technology, what always happens is somebody, there's a technological leap that one size, one side has, and they completely run the table on the other side. So you can talk about the machine gun in the Boer War, but yet in World War One, people hadn't learned the lessons and they were still rolling out cavalry, right? In World War Two, you know, basically battleships were obsolete because of the aircraft carrier, but you still had, you know, the Battle of the Gulf. Right now, today, people are questioning to the degree that any surface navy might

• 40:15Speaker 02

  be an obsolete technology because of the, the nature of missile technology, et cetera. So Chris is saying, we have the ability right now for any combatant to have a drone swarm that is not controlled by human pilots or whatever, and then goes after troops on the ground, or God forbid, civilians in cities, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, that will happen, and that has happened, by the way, in, in there's wars going on in the Caucasus right now, where that is going on. The reason it will happen is because it's sort of Moore's Law for weaponry, which is, you know, like in the stupid latest Top Gun movie with Tom Cruise, like, they don't need pilots anymore. Well, you don't need. Sort of romantic.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  You don't need, you don't even need to train people to sit behind a laptop and, and guide the drones anymore. You can send out a swarm of drones and be like, just decimate everything in this valley, right? I know this is, sounds terrible, and I agree morally, it's terrible. It will happen from one side to the other, because it'll be so cheap for them to do, that it's the Moore's Law of like, the, the destructive power of the technology. So what Chris said was, that will happen, it will be a bloodbath, and then people, the, the other side will learn, well, then we need our own drone swarms that can combat the drone swarms. And so I'm not saying that we're anywhere close to like, what was that movie where it was like, you had giant mech robots that fought over Alaska or something?

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Avatar 2 is like, too.

• 41:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Isn't that like, almost all movies? Yeah, I don't know. This is not going, I guess it just doesn't seem like this is going in a good direction. This is scary stuff. Are you guys gonna invest in military AI technology?

• 41:58Speaker 02

  We have no plans to, absolutely not. No plans to. We want to, we want, we want to 10x what people do productively. We want to invest in products, not in weapons.

• 42:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Brian and Chris, thank you so much for joining. Just a true pleasure to speak with you guys. Let's do this again sometime soon. Congrats on the announcement. The first show, I think that you're talking about it is this one.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we always love breaking news here on Big Technology Podcast. So thanks for helping us do it. Congratulations and we'll speak to you guys soon.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Thanks, Alex. Thanks, Alex.

• 42:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thanks so much and thanks to all of you, the listeners. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 42:46Speaker 03

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