Ex Machina Podcast

Has artificial general intelligence already arrived? And what happens when machines become vastly more intelligent than humans?

Trent McConaghy, co-founder of Ocean Protocol and a longstanding AI and blockchain entrepreneur, joins Fabric Ventures' Richard Muirhead to explore the future of artificial superintelligence, human agency and autonomous machine economies.

From his early work in AI-driven engineering to pioneering digital ownership and decentralised data infrastructure, Trent reflects on decades of building at the frontier of emerging technologies.

They discuss why Trent believes AGI may already be here, how humans could evolve alongside superintelligent systems, and why AI agents might become an entirely new class of economic participants.

Ex Machina explores the human stories behind the Machine Economy.

Follow the podcast for more conversations with the founders and thinkers shaping what's next.

Chapters

00:00 Superintelligence: Will AI Treat Humans Like Children?
03:15 Can Humans Keep Up With AI?
05:03 Has AGI Already Arrived?
05:59 Sovereign AI Agents and Machine Autonomy
08:00 From a Pig Farm to Pioneering AI
10:37 Using AI to Design Computer Chips
14:59 Solving AI Hallucinations in Engineering
19:35 The $30,000 Sensor Story
21:35 Building Solido and Advancing Moore's Law
27:18 From Solido to Ocean Protocol
30:21 The Early Days of NFTs
33:15 The Bitter Lesson: Why Data Matters
35:23 Moore's Law and the Intelligence Explosion
38:04 AI as the World's Biggest Customer
39:28 AI, Jobs and the Future of the Economy

Could AI agents become crypto's biggest users?

Nicolas Cary, Co-founder and Vice Chairman of Blockchain.com, joins Richard Muirhead to explore what 14+ years of building through crypto's biggest cycles reveals about the future of digital assets.

From surviving the 2022 market collapse to the growing importance of privacy in AI, they discuss why machines could adopt crypto faster than humans, Europe's challenges in building global technology companies, and what the next generation of founders needs to get right.

Plus, Nicolas shares the extraordinary story of Bitcoin wallets he hid across Yorkshire in the early days of Blockchain.com — some of which may still be out there.

Ex Machina is a podcast by Fabric Ventures exploring the human stories behind the Machine Economy.

Could AI agents become crypto's biggest users?

Nicolas Cary, Co-founder and Vice Chairman of Blockchain.com, joins Richard Muirhead to explore what 14+ years of building through crypto's biggest cycles reveals about the future of digital assets.

From surviving the 2022 market collapse to the growing importance of privacy in AI, they discuss why machines could adopt crypto faster than humans, Europe's challenges in building global technology companies, and what the next generation of founders needs to get right.

Plus, Nicolas shares the extraordinary story of Bitcoin wallets he hid across Yorkshire in the early days of Blockchain.com — some of which may still be out there.

About Ex Machina

Ex Machina is the podcast about the human stories behind the Machine Economy.

Hosted by Richard Muirhead, the series features founders, investors and researchers building the technologies reshaping how machines act, transact and participate in the economy.

From AI models and agents to robotics, compute, financial infrastructure and the physical systems powering them, Ex Machina explores the people making the next technological shifts possible.

About Richard Muirhead

Richard Muirhead is Managing Partner at Fabric Ventures and host of Ex Machina.

A founder and investor, Richard has spent decades building and backing technology companies, with a focus on early-stage companies shaping the Machine Economy.

About Fabric Ventures

Fabric Ventures is a thesis-driven venture firm backing companies from inception across AI, robotics, fintech, distributed computing and Web3.

Follow / learn more

Ex Machina: https://exmachinapodcast.com

Fabric Ventures: https://www.fabric.vc/

Richard Muirhead: https://x.com/richardmuirhead

00:00 The Machine Economy

01:43 Meet Nicolas Cary

03:23 What Crypto Got Wrong About NFTs

12:23 Discovering Bitcoin After 2008

16:28 Building Blockchain.com

17:53 Bitcoin Hidden Across Yorkshire

20:20 Blockchain.com and Coinbase's Origins

23:48 Why Privacy Matters in AI

32:16 What Crypto Can Teach AI

34:18 Building Through Crypto Market Cycles

37:46 The 2022 Crypto Collapse

40:39 Why Europe Struggles to Scale Startups

47:00 Why AI Agents Could Adopt Crypto Faster

47:41 Building With AI and Claude

49:26 The Future of Money and Work

Can Ethereum keep pace with accelerating AI?

Ethereum researcher Justin Drake joins Kubi Mensah, founder of Gattaca and the team behind Titan, to explore Ethereum's future, from Lean Ethereum and post-quantum security to autonomous agents and the infrastructure needed for a machine economy.

Hosted by Richard Muirhead, the conversation also traces Kubi's decision to shut down a profitable trading firm to build one of Ethereum's leading block builders, and Justin's warning that AI could advance faster than Ethereum's roadmap.

Explore more at exmachinapodcast.com.

About Ex Machina

Ex Machina is the podcast about the human stories behind the Machine Economy.

Hosted by Richard Muirhead, the series features founders, investors and researchers building the technologies reshaping how machines act, transact and participate in the economy.

From AI models and agents to robotics, compute, financial infrastructure and the physical systems powering them, Ex Machina explores the people making the next technological shifts possible.

About Richard Muirhead

Richard Muirhead is Managing Partner at Fabric Ventures and host of Ex Machina.

A founder and investor, Richard has spent decades building and backing technology companies, with a focus on early-stage companies shaping the Machine Economy.

About Fabric Ventures

Fabric Ventures is a thesis-driven venture firm backing companies from inception across AI, robotics, fintech, distributed computing and Web3.

Follow / learn more:

Ex Machina: ⁠exmachinapodcast.com⁠Fabric Ventures: ⁠https://www.fabric.vc/⁠Richard Muirhead: ⁠https://x.com/richardmuirhead⁠

Ex MachinaThe human stories behind the Machine Economy.

When does a technology stop being “too early” and become ready to matter?

In Episode 2 of Ex Machina, Richard Muirhead sits down with Zachary Bogue, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at DCVC, to explore how investors decide when frontier technologies are actually ready to become real businesses.

Zach has spent 16 years investing across deep tech, including companies such as Planet, Oklo and Recursion. In this episode, he and Richard discuss AI infrastructure, the economics of generative AI, nuclear energy, tech bio, scientific vs technical risk, founder judgment, low-consensus investing and how DCVC makes decisions around “weird, early, scary things.”

At the heart of the conversation is one question:

How do you know when “too early” becomes “right now”?

Chapters

00:00 Introducing Zachary Bogue & DCVC
00:58 What DCVC means by deep tech
01:18 Planet, Oklo & Recursion
02:47 When is a technology actually ready?
03:20 Science risk vs technical risk
06:18 Zach’s path into venture
08:49 Building DCVC before “big data” was a buzzword
13:03 Founders Den, Kaggle & Plaid
14:35 From a sub-$10M fund to institutional scale
19:14 What DCVC looks like today
21:10 Is AI infrastructure overbuilt?
22:48 Why generative AI is still early
24:02 The two ways AI could disappoint
27:25 AI sovereignty
31:14 Reindustrialisation & energy demand
32:19 Why nuclear is back
33:19 DCVC’s biggest investing failure mode
37:42 Contrarian investing
38:40 Why good ideas still look bad
41:37 What makes a founder worth backing?
42:21 How DCVC makes investment decisions
43:58 Investing in “weird, early, scary things”
45:32 Closing thoughts

About Ex Machina

Ex Machina is the podcast about the human stories behind the Machine Economy.

Hosted by Richard Muirhead, the series features founders, investors and researchers building the technologies reshaping how machines act, transact and participate in the economy.

From AI models and agents to robotics, compute, financial infrastructure and the physical systems powering them, Ex Machina explores the people making the next technological shifts possible.

About Richard Muirhead

Richard Muirhead is Managing Partner at Fabric Ventures and host of Ex Machina.

A founder and investor, Richard has spent decades building and backing technology companies, with a focus on early-stage companies shaping the Machine Economy.

About Fabric Ventures

Fabric Ventures is a thesis-driven venture firm backing companies from inception across AI, robotics, fintech, distributed computing and Web3.

About Zachary Bogue

Zachary Bogue is Co-Founder & Managing Partner at DCVC, an early-stage deep-tech venture firm investing in entrepreneurs solving hard, real-world problems using applied AI and frontier technologies.

Follow / learn more:

Ex Machina: exmachinapodcast.com
Fabric Ventures: https://www.fabric.vc/
Richard Muirhead: https://x.com/richardmuirhead
DCVC: https://www.dcvc.com/

Ex Machina
The human stories behind the Machine Economy.

What separates a real technological inflection point from hype?

In Episode 2 of Ex Machina, Richard Muirhead sits down with Zachary Bogue, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at DCVC, to explore how investors decide what is genuinely becoming possible and what is still too early, overhyped or unlikely to happen.

They discuss the economics of AI, the return of nuclear, the rise of AI-native biotech, and why some of the most important breakthroughs still look like bad ideas at first.

Full episode out Wednesday.

Evgeny Gaevoy joins Richard Muirhead for Episode 1 of Ex Machina.

Evgeny founded Wintermute in 2017. What followed was far from a straight line: an early thesis that quickly became obsolete, years spent taking on opportunities larger competitors ignored, a close call with runway, and eventually the making of one of crypto's defining trading firms.

They talk about moving too slowly in the early years, finding an edge, building a team, founder-led companies, liquidity and the logic behind preparing for several possible market futures rather than betting everything on one.

Then come the harder tests: the $160m hack, FTX, market stress and the risk systems that allowed Wintermute to keep operating.

The conversation ends on the future of markets, the convergence of crypto and traditional finance, and Evgeny's characteristically direct view on token vesting.

Ex Machina is hosted by Richard Muirhead and Fabric Ventures, exploring the human stories behind the Machine Economy, the models, agents, robots, compute and new financial rails being built around it.

The world is entering an era where machines act, earn and spend on our behalf: the Machine Economy. We are all, knowingly or not, summoning a deus ex machina, with no idea how the plot resolves.

Hosted by Richard Muirhead and the team at Fabric Ventures, Ex Machina brings you the founders building it: the open-source models, the agents, the robots, the compute, and the new financial rails underneath it all and how each of them went from zero to one.

First episode releasing next week!