Kevin Roose is AGI-pilled. Why aren’t you?

Today, I’m talking to Kevin Roose, journalist and author of the new book The AGI Chronicles, which details the recent and explosive transformation of the AI industry.

Kevin was a longtime New York Times reporter and host of the popular podcast Hard Fork, but he and friend of the show Casey Newton just left the Times to start the all-new tech podcast Machine Gods, which launched last week.

Kevin and I talked about launching Machine Gods and what it’s like to go from The New York Times to being an independent creator — and then of course we talked about the book, which is an excellently reported dive into the companies racing to build artificial general intelligence.

I wanted to get a sense from Kevin of what it was like to report this, to try and understand these characters and this moment in time, and where it all goes next. Fair warning: This conversation takes a pretty philosophical turn at the end, but I think you’ll find it a really worthwhile back-and-forth.

Okay: Kevin Roose on The AGI Chronicles, starting Machine Gods, and where AI goes from here. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Kevin Roose, you are the author of The AGI Chronicles and the cofounder and co-host of the new podcast Machine Gods. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks so much for having me.

I was listening to the first episode of Machine Gods and you and Casey discussed the fact that technically you have the title of CEO.

It’s true. I won the coin flip and we needed someone. When you start a company as we have, you need to list someone as the CEO, I guess, to know who to haul in front of Congress when our first scandal inevitably breaks. So that’s going to be me.

It’s funny because you’re a CEO on Decoder. It means I’m going to have to ask you the Decoder questions.

[Laughs] Okay. Well, I’ve been a CEO for about five minutes and most days I frankly forget I’m the CEO.

Honestly, that tracks with most of the CEOs on the show. They all act like they’ve only done it for five minutes. We’ll come to it.

I want to talk about your book. It’s called The AGI Chronicles. It is a meticulously reported book about the main frontier labs and the culture shift they’ve all undergone as AI has come into the forefront and become a much more commercial product in many ways.

But let’s just start with Machine Gods. You were a journalist for The New York Times for a long time. Obviously, I think the audience probably knows this, but you and I have known each other for a long time. I will say that since I have known you, your desire to be a YouTuber has been top of mind. You’re just like, “How do I get over there?” And I’ve always been like, “Run, don’t do it.” But you did it.

You left The Times, you started your own podcast with our friend Casey Newton. It is the next generation of the very popular podcast, Hard Fork, which was excellent. And I’m excited for you, but what made you take the leap?

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Yeah, you have been trying to convince me out of this for as long as I’ve been trying to convince myself into it and you have not succeeded because here I am.

Yep, I failed. Utterly failed.

No, look, I think that for some very good reasons, media companies have long been a little bit wary of going all in on YouTube or any other video platform. The ones that have gone all in have not necessarily come out of that with good feelings about it because there are a lot of–

Yeah, they pivot to video and also into death, routinely.

Yeah, you pivot to video or you sort of waste a bunch of money doing things that don’t pay for themselves. So, I think there are some structural economic reasons for that, but I also think it’s that there aren’t a lot of institutions that are equipped to make that kind of a long-term bet.

I’ve been trying to YouTube-pill people in media for many years, as you know. You’ve been trying to undo the YouTube-pilling on your end, but I just think it’s clearly the most important media platform in the world right now. It’s a place where journalism has not historically had a central place.

If you were to look at YouTube as a whole and try to assess what piece of it is dedicated to what you or I would consider high-quality journalism, it’s a vanishingly small part of the overall ecosystem there.

So, part of my mission is just to crack that and figure out how to do YouTube and video in general in a way that is sustainable from an economic and a sort of creative standpoint. And then just to experiment and do a bunch of things.

This is not a face that needs to be on YouTube. So I’m also hoping to bring some other people in and nail some formats. But I look at what The Verge has done there. I look at what people like Joanna Stern and MKBHD have done there. To me, that is very exciting and it’s a space where there’s a lot less competition than text or podcasts.

Machine Gods is a podcast that you’re doing in partnership with NPR, which I want to talk about. But do you think of it as a YouTube product?

We want it to be video-first. What that means basically is that we are going to give a shit about what it looks like to a degree that we have not always done. We’re going to try to give people a lot of reasons to want to watch as well as listen.

Obviously, we know that there are some people who just don’t like video podcasts and so we want to give the audio audience something that is enjoyable, but this is the direction of things. You can’t do a podcast now without doing video on top of it. So we’re going to try to really embrace that and make a good version of it that is as good as two middle-aged journalists can pull off on YouTube.

Truly the future of media is middle-aged journalists pivoting to YouTube. I feel the same way because I’m now making more video and that’s what we’re doing. It’s going to be great.

The other reason to leave and to do this — and obviously people know I’m friends with Casey as well, and I’ve been talking to you and him about it for a long time — is that the AI story is here. There is a platform shift. There are new companies, new characters, new ideas to talk about in the world. It’s funny because in that context, usually you get a media shift as well. The way we tell stories or the formats we tell stories usually shif