Adam Torres and Richard Titu discuss AI Vibes Summit.
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Listen to coverage of the AI Vibes Summit in Santa Monica, California. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Richard Titus, CEO of Kimono.network, explore AI and the AI Vibes Summit
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About Richard Titus
As a tech-native executive with a passion for disruptive innovation, Richard had the privilege of launching two of the world’s largest digital agencies—Razorfish & Schematic. he led a range of technology and media businesses, from start-ups to global giants, including Samsung where he was one of the most senior non-native “board room” executives.
His expertise spans AI, DeFi, machine learning, SpaceTech (as a founding member of the Space & blockchain streams at the Creative Destruction Lab), and NeuroTech. His notable achievements include leading the digital transformation of Great Britain’s leading media organizations—the BBC and Associated Northcliffe (Daily Mail)—successfully balancing growth and profitability.
About Kimono.network
Kimoni.network is a revolutionary platform dedicated to transforming human connections
their mission is to provide real-time, reliable contact data enriched with AI-driven insights, empowering every interaction with integrity and confidence.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and today I am in Santa Monica, California at the AI Vibes Summit held by Tal Navarro. And we’re having all kinds of fun. I just watched this amazing performance, amazing panel, and I was able to snag Richard Titus right off of the stage for an interview.
First off, Titus, welcome to the show. Thanks. Thanks for having me. All right. So you just came off of a panel. We were talking about music. AI technology. Before we get into the panel, what brings you to the AI summit in general? Well, those three areas are things that I’ve been passionate about for most of my life.
I began my, my professional career as a musician. I was assigned recording artist on Electra. When I was 17, I was in a metal band. We toured a bit and then we got dropped, which is probably the best thing that ever happened to me. It probably prevented me from being a drug addict. And, and the other thing music did for me is it introduced me to computers because there was something called MIDI.
That was invented in the 1970s, 1980s. And it was a system and a standard that allowed you to hook a computer up to an electronic keyboard to make music. Yeah. And that was the beginning for me of a, of a journey around technology transformation, which has lasted, you know, 40 years at this point. I’ve led businesses like the BBC and the Daily Mail and founded companies like Razorfish, Schematic, and 19 other startups before the one I’m working on now called Kimono, which is my 20th startup.
And this conference is, my, my role on the panel is I, IE’s who the piano player and I have done a few talks where she does her piano bit and then we talk about Ai creativity and innovation and then scott page and I know each other from the beach boys. I think floyd days I work for the beach boys. Yeah, and so that panel was actually sondra and I know each other from europe So we have like I knew all the panelists that I have had long long.
Come on. It was like really funny Yeah. Okay. So that explains the comfortability because I’m sitting here looking at I’m like, why does it feel like these people, everybody knows each other? Like I’m the new one here. Scott and I met backstage at a Beach Boys show. Stop. 40 years ago. And so one of the things that I found interesting not just about the panel, but about, about the conferences, when we think about AI and creativity and how those two things meld and specifically what we were talking about was the music panel, where do you stand on that?
Like, it’s really interesting. So I, my history around technology and creativity, as we say, it goes back to literally my childhood. And I’m very, very neurodiverse. So I have what’s called dysnumeria, which means I can barely count. I can’t do basic addition. If you tell me your phone number, the only thing I know is I won’t know your phone number.
If you, if you and I try to schedule an appointment, I will screw it up at least six times. And with language, I struggle, like I’m talking, I’m fine, but written word, I end up writing like Yoda, like everything’s in the wrong order. And so technology for me was a way of expressing myself that allowed me to, to manifest a more powerful way of expressing myself.
That said, what’s interesting about AI. is for the first time ever, the machines, and I call it sort of human and machine just to differentiate one is made and one is organically evolved. That may Change in time. This is the first time for our whole lives. Technology has been across the table from us as a tool that we, the humans control interface, manipulate to make things.
What’s happening now is first. The technology, the machine moved across the table and is sitting in the creator seat with us as a co creator. And then in some cases, like there’s some new applications where the machine is hiring humans to. To augment its inability to do a task or to learn something. And so this gets really, really to the core for us as human beings of what it means to be human.
Like we have for, you know, thousands of years identified our ability to be superior to animal and machine. It’s like in the Bible, it’s in the Declaration of Independence. And suddenly that is no longer necessarily the case. And we can project because we as humans are really good at predicting in very odd ways.
The pattern matching from where we are today to a future where machines are better than us at most things. I think it’s really deeply disconcerting to the human condition and to us as a species. And me as well, by the way, the first time I saw Chachibiji too, very, very early on, I was terrified. Yeah. I’ve actually now sort of moved to a different place, which is I think we just have to rethink what it means to be human.
And in many ways, The things that means to be human are less about specific skills and more about our ability to context switch and interface between non, nonlinear connections, all of the things we’ve been taught to do our education system. Everything teaches us to do series of linear instructions. I mean, David Wolfram gave this great talk at one of the first Ted, the Ted events ever, he said.
We teach people, young children, mathematics, like addition, subtraction, where a calculator is so inexpensive. Now, every desktop could have a calculator and we should be teaching computer science in grade one, not addition and subtraction. And I actually agree with them. Our education system has continued to create industrial workers in an information work economy.
And that is actually the biggest problem with our society right now is we are about to eliminate a whole bunch of linear and non interesting jobs. And we don’t have enough jobs that are. other kinds of jobs. And we haven’t trained a workforce or a society to embrace those skills. In fact, we punish them, you know, artists are like the least compensated members of society, right?
And it turns out that the most important right behind nursing or caregivers, which is also a category we don’t reward very much. Well, when you think about AI and how quick with some of the tools it is to create things in general, whether it’s music or otherwise, I have this discussion with my friends all the time.
So Quantity versus quality, using AI for music and artists being able to put something out there without fully developing or things like that. Like this. What’s your thoughts? So this is, I’m gonna challenge, first of all, the word create and the word iterate are not the same thing. Mm-Hmm. , they’re not synonyms.
Mm-Hmm. . And I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a machine yet create, from a standing start. Mm. I have seen them iterate at a phenomenal level. Yeah. And iteration is a thing that we. often blurred with creation, which it is absolutely not. Now, interestingly, I think a lot of iterators pretended to be creators for long periods of time.
I mean, I’d argue, I love the blues is one of my favorite kinds of music. I went to a Willie Nelson, John Cougar concert last night and watching those guys play the blues. It’s like, I think about how they stole it from like African Americans in the 1930s. That iteration, that, you know, constant iteration evolution.
That’s a thing that we considered a primary human pursuit. Machines are now competing with us in that area. What they can’t compete in is standing start creativity. And they’re only as smart as the inputs. And so we have to start rethinking what does it mean to train a machine? You have to figure out what is the training data that’s going to derive a result that’s unexpected or delightful or powerful or useful.
And I think. That, that starts with education, but it also starts with the mind map of what is important in society. And if you, you know, look at our, our, our leaders globally, they’re not thinking about this from a, it’s here. We have to adapt. They’re thinking about it. I’m gonna stop it. And that never really works out very well.
What about artist development? Like I was listening to this clip the other day and Andre 3000 is talking about like, you know, some of the, why, why a lot of hip hop music, according to this discussion was sounds kind of the same nowadays. And he makes this argument where he says, well, you know, if you look at outcast in the early days, if they, they sounded like everyone else, too, they weren’t ready.
They had years.
And I’m not picking on AI, I just mean with technology in general, somebody you know, put something out pretty quickly if they, if they choose to, right? Not judging anybody, but what do you think about artist development in general now that you can just go to market so quick and that’s not even AI, it could be technology, whatever, like Andre, Andre struck me with that one.
I’m like, outcast not sounding like outcast is a thing to me. Right. So Peter Gabriel has this great line. He says, the one thing you can’t stop is the exponential rate of continuing change. Right. And it’s one of my favorite quotes of his and I absolutely agree with it. And so, but what’s interesting is the, one of the reasons that all sounds the same is they’re using the same training data or the same, the same source files.
So it’s just like AI and artists development way. Artists become, I mean, one of my favorite stories is from Rick Rubin at a bank called a system of a down. And. They were sitting in his studio working on, they couldn’t come up with a lyric for this one part of the song and he said, Walk over to the bookshelf, pull the book off, and read me the first thing you read.
And it was like a prayer from the Bible. The guy didn’t, the guy, the guy is, had never read the Bible. Wow. It’s not his religious choice. Yes. It ends up in the song. It’s an authentic prayer. Powerful moment in the song unexpectedly because because it’s not there, you know, it’s not his cultural reference and those are that that serendipity that tangential thinking that is a thing of machine.
I don’t think it’s gonna for a very long time. They’re very good at. Yeah. What I will say is that The, the acceleration from standing start to mediocrity or homogeneity is much faster now. And so that’s kind of an interesting thing because it means good enough for things that don’t matter. You don’t, we don’t have a lot of work for people who do mediocre things.
Interesting. And that is, that is a problem because our society is a pyramid that’s built on the majority of people contributing to society. 80 20. Doing mediocrity or homogeneity is their primary contribution to society and in it in this world The machine and the systems may replace a lot of that function.
We haven’t worked out what that means We also our whole economic system is predicated on a lot of people working very hard for a few people to benefit And I think that is It’s a systemic problem where the machines take over a lot of that work, which is the way we value people’s value of their contribution.
What it means is we got to step our game up. Yeah. Or we have to change the measures. It’s probably a combination. Yeah. Like, I mean, it’s, I’ll never forget I, cause I’m neurodiverse, but I’m also very intelligent. I could go into math and from pattern matching, I would be able to take a multi choice. I took the, I’ve got a perfect score in the SAT.
Wow. And they were like, how did you do this? Cause you can’t add. Yeah. I was like, well, it was really easy to tell which one was the right answer. Right. And they couldn’t, the way my brain worked is different than anyone else. Taking the test. They were sure I was cheating. Like they made me take it three times.
Got a perfect score every time. Wow. And then they finally were like, Wow. You were like the original Well, this is actually very common among neurodiverse, neurodiverse people. And it’s a rising trend that we recognize these people. At least one of my daughters, probably two of them are very neurodiverse.
And, you know, my, my middle daughter really struggled with reading for a while, but she now gets excellent grades. She’s incredibly smart, but reading, it wasn’t that linear consumption of word after word wasn’t the way she, she grokked information. Yeah, you mentioned you’re working on another company right now.
Talk to me about that. So I have a new company. We’re not, we’re sort of in stealth, but I’ll talk a little bit about it. Yeah, the company is called kimono. I’ve had the idea for more than 10 years, but we started the company really three months ago. We raised about a quarter million dollars a day. We’ve just started raising money.
Yeah. And we are attacking what I think is the most, one of the most difficult problems around AI and data. So contact data that’s phone books is the most prevalent use data type in the world. It has the worst data integrity, the way we architect the data models, the way we manage it, the way we, you know, keeping local copies in three or four databases on your local device.
This is nonsense, right? You would never do this in any other data type. And we think this is secure, but it’s actually the least secure has the least data integrity. It’s the least accurate. So I guarantee you, if I open up your phone and look at people’s phone numbers, you have between three and 15 phone books on your phone and the data for a single person across those phone books will be different.
You won’t, it won’t be. We’re going to solve that. That’s our first problem. We’re solving the second problem. We’re solving is there’s a business called plaid that does it for financial data is sinking and syndicating that information across platform, network, and device. And then the other thing. From that, those two things, we start to have a real sense of being able to think about identity and content within a really secure.
Self sovereign model as opposed to making money from selling this to third parties, which is what everyone else does. And so you’re going to trust me in a way you wouldn’t trust Google, Amazon, Facebook, because I’m not in the business of monetizing that data from third parties. I’m the business of providing you a service and, and helping you manage your data.
And it’s a really interesting business. If I’m correct, it’s a billion dollar business. If not, it’s still a super fun problem to solve. What’s it like right now being an AI founder? Like so many ideas, so many things going on, like It’s funny, it’s my 20th startup as I said Yeah, especially having 20, you know, startups like What’s it like?
Startups are always the same You’ve got this idea, you begin with a thesis Your thesis is sometimes correct, sometimes wrong The way you’re going to talk to customers changes and iterates It’s always the same, right? And there’s always money for interesting ideas The more times you’ve done it, you can skip some of the wrong steps.
Like I don’t ask for, I don’t go and try and raise money from people who aren’t investing in pre product startups. Like there’s a whole group of people I don’t want to go and pitch and I understand the game a little more. So I’m less likely to give away a huge chunk of the company before I have a product in market.
The flip side is. I’m 56 years old, and I’m working harder than I’ve worked in a decade, and I work very hard. How does that make you feel? It’s awesome, but it’s also like, I’m not as, I’m not as good as good a physical shape as I was then. So it’s much harder and I enjoy it. So the parts of it, I have an advantage that I’ve done this so many times, I, I can do less and be more effective.
But it is also, I’ve, I both love and hate this part, which is the early part where you don’t have any money and you have to like, you know, you’re, you’re constantly hustling. What I love is I haven’t felt this excited about a time in technology since the first time I saw the World Wide Web. I was on the internet for almost a decade before the World Wide Web existed.
Really? My dad was in worked at an aerospace play firm and we had an internet connection early. And I had, I run a BBS if you don’t know what that is, Google it. And so I was very network savvy and very distributed computing savvy, but I was not like the browser for me. The first time I saw it, I thought it was HyperCard.
I actually didn’t understand this as a network system. And then once I understood this was HyperCard over a network, My brain exploded because I, I understood what that meant for the future. And this is sort of what year was this roughly just for the audience? Yeah. Well, when you were on like this, I was on the internet in the seventies and eighties and I was, I saw a version of mosaic.
I don’t know. Yeah. I’m just curious because most people, most people, they’ve only heard of the, if they didn’t have, you know, if that wasn’t in their family, they, that’s the first thing was AOL are hearing this is way before that. Yeah. I mean, I remember getting an AOL account. I was on CompuServe before that, and I had a CompuServe was this thing, I tour with the Beach Boys, which is one of the things we talked about here.
And so when I was on tour, I had a modem and I could dial up on CompuServe and message my father and my family and my friends. Was that, you were the coolest person ever? They’re like, what does this guy do? No, I would write emails. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had like email romances. I convinced women to get this CompuServe and they used their parents fax line to, like, send me love mail.
You were so far ahead, so far advanced back then. Now, you know, you can tell ChatGPT to write your girlfriend a message every day. Note to self. I like it. It works great until she gets home from someone else. And then you’re toast same data, right? That’s good. So what’s really interesting about this business is everyone expects me to be doing something around generative AI.
And I am talking to some firms about joining their boards, although I haven’t done it yet. I think this, if you think about the big problems around data and AI contacted it, you can’t build a smart agent. You can’t build any personalized services without knowing who someone is. And none of the existing players are trusted enough or capable of doing this.
So you really need an independent third party, and that’s probably us or someone like us. And I also sort of, I get attracted by big problems that are hard. Everyone thinks this is too hard, which is why I like it because it’s hard. Wow. I think that’s a good way to end it. Titus. If somebody wants to continue to follow your journey, follow the companies, connect, how do they do that?
So the best way to find me, my Twitter account on x. com, sorry, is At Richard Titus on almost every other platform is, is RxDXT on LinkedIn. It’s RxDXT on Instagram. It’s RxDXT. The company is called kimono. network. As of now, we’re working on getting another domain. We’re very much in stealth, but if you’re interested in investing a little more and just reach out and I’d be happy to give you a conversation.
Awesome. Titus. Well, Hey. Appreciate you taking some time out of the conference to come over and stop in. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll put all of Titus’s information in the show notes and the website and all that other good stuff so that you can follow along and, and connect with them as well.
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Thanks.
