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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
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Speaker 2:TBPN. Today is Tuesday, 09/15/2026. We are live from the TBPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.
Speaker 1:It's been too long, John. It's great to be back.
Speaker 2:It's great to be back. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money saved both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 3:Great success. Eric
Speaker 2:Kline had to issue an apology to
Speaker 1:Absolutely nobody.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. You didn't see this? Really?
Speaker 2:Yeah. No. Eric Kleinman had to issue an apology to The United Kingdom, to the residents of The UK because they've been waiting so long for Ramp and Ramp expanded into The UK. But now he's going to have to issue an apology to me because that's a pretty un American thing to do honestly. Let's keep our fintechs like domestic in my opinion.
Speaker 2:I don't know why we need to be going over there and
Speaker 1:doing International expansion. Yeah. Not a Not
Speaker 2:a fan. No. Congratulations to the whole team Going global and taking over the world. Very exciting stuff. Well, the top thing on my mind today is figuring out what's going on with interest rates, the high interest rate phenomenon.
Speaker 2:We've had zero interest rate policy, ZERP. The ZERP era ended. Now we're in the H I R P. I don't think we should say that one. That doesn't sound very good.
Speaker 2:But the high interest rate policies, the high interest rate phenomenons are upon us. What's going on? It's very obvious what's going on. You take one look at the chart. It's the war.
Speaker 2:You can see The US attacks Iran in the beginning of twenty twenty six. Interest rates are low. We should pull up this chart from the Wall Street Journal. It gets more dramatic every time they show this chart. This one right here, Jordy.
Speaker 2:Take a wild guess. What's driving interest rates? It is, of course, the war which starts there and then boom up into the right from then on. But there's other questions about what's going on. Is AI is the build out having an effect here?
Speaker 2:What else is going on within this data? Why is it happening? And does war always lead to higher interest rates? That was something that was on my mind. So I wanted to get get into that.
Speaker 2:It's obviously bad for everyone. It's bad for the US government as they have to refinance debt and pay interest and that puts stress on all the other things that the government wants to do with money from health care, pensions, even funding the military. Like if they're paying interest, they're not paying for other stuff. That's not good. Bad for the prospects of the American home buyer.
Speaker 2:Interest rates are now above 7%, getting very unaffordable for lots of people. And also a lot of mortgages are rolling over. So the era of, like, the 3% mortgage, less and less people still have those because people are either moving on to floating rate mortgages or moving out of interest interest locked periods. There's a whole bunch of dynamics there. And it's even bad for AI companies.
Speaker 2:So everyone hates this because the AI companies, of course, even though they have an ungodly amount of money, they need to raise more money to finance build out and finance data centers and finance expansion. And so not good for anyone. How do you get out of it? Maybe end the war, but there are other things at work. This war is unique.
Speaker 2:Mean, I it's not that war causes interest rates to go up. It's war causes energy shortages which causes inflation and inflation be bleeds into everything. So pain at the pump turns into I need a raise for this. I need to raise prices on food. I need to raise prices on all sorts of things.
Speaker 2:Energy is of course a key input into everything. Why I am so against pacing the energy rollout. Like every year, for the past like ten years, the the I forget what it is. I IEA or something. The there's a there's a body that forecasts energy build out specifically in solar and they've gotten it wrong every every year for ten years.
Speaker 2:They've underestimated the growth of solar. You've this
Speaker 1:Energy Agency.
Speaker 2:Is that it? Yeah. I I IEA. Yeah. So every year they'll be like, okay.
Speaker 2:We had a great year last year. We're going we're going parabolic. We're up into the right. But clearly we're not going to build more solar. People are going to get sick of this stuff.
Speaker 2:And then the next year we build even more solar than we predicted. And so you can look at this chart of the of the predictions and then how we blow them out. So that is something that that we wanna clearly keep working on because it will bring down inflation, bring down costs of basically everything. It will be very deflationary, and it'll allow us to do all sorts of new things. But this this war is specifically driving energy prices because, of course, oil transported through the Strait Of Hormuz is a key pressure point for control of the conflict and that drives up inflation which hurts the value of treasury bonds causing yields to spike.
Speaker 2:And so that's why they're above 5%. It's the first time I believe since 2007 that they've been this high. So not good. It doesn't always go this way though. I wanted to understand, do does war or war even in just war in The Middle East, does that always cause interest rates to spike?
Speaker 2:It makes sense. It's an expensive thing. It's a it's a capital suck. It's depressing in many many ways. There's a whole bunch of economic reasons why you could think that war would cause interest rates to spike.
Speaker 2:But does that always happen? So during Gulf War one, which I I didn't realize this, but we have a son of a veteran on our team. So thank you for his service. But during Gulf War one, there was a textbook oil shock. So Iraq invaded Kuwait on 08/02/1990.
Speaker 2:The US military buildup began basically immediately and the Desert Storm Offensive started 01/17/1991. So about six months between the initial conflict over there, The US gets involved. What happens when The US gets involved? Interest rates spiked and interest rates were already 8.29%. Already pretty high.
Speaker 2:But they spiked to over 9%. Nine point o 5%. Less than a month. Because everyone's like, oh, well, there's going to be less oil. Kuwait generates a lot of oil.
Speaker 2:Oil is going to be knocked offline. That that's going to flow through the economy the same way, energy prices, inflation, etcetera, the usual playbook. But six months later, they were lower than the start of the war sitting at 8.03%. There were some other things going on in the economy, obviously, but basically, like that war did not last so long. It had a much more tight ending and so there was there was less pressure on interest rates.
Speaker 2:The Afghanistan war played out in reverse. So immediately before the in invasion, the the ten year was at 4.52%. Yields fell to 4.22%. You could imagine that there's some sort of optimism around like, oh, this will be a quick operation. This won't be a quagmire.
Speaker 2:Of course, the opposite happened. So six months into the war, the ten year hit 5.25%, up significantly, up basically three quarters of a percent since the start of the offensive. And so the end result of that is that now, Warsh, the new Fed Chairman is in a tough spot. The markets expect a rate hike to bring inflation down. So the August consumer price inflation was at 3.4%.
Speaker 2:The Fed actually prefers a different inflation measure called the PCE price index. That was at 3.7%. And so even by the Fed's preferred measure, inflation is running too hot. Again, they're targeting something like 2% and they're up at 3.7%. And then also you get into this like, oh well like maybe it's just, maybe the inflation's just related to food and energy because energy goes into food.
Speaker 2:You're trucking all the food around. Let's look at the broader economy. So there is a separate price index for inflation excluding food and energy. And even that's at 3.3%. So that's too high.
Speaker 2:So there's really very it's very, very tough to make a case for holding rates steady, even lowering rates, which is of course what lots of people want to see happen, it's very very difficult. And the inflation is spilling over from energy into other parts of the economy. And it's basically just complicating the Fed's case for aggressive easing. So everyone's expecting a rate hike at this point. So what's the effect of AI on all of this?
Speaker 2:I think that AI is such a big driver of the economy and yet it's having such small impacts in many ways. Like the total AI revenues are something like a quarter percent of GDP still. But in terms of headlines, it's like 75% of what we talked about. And so, yeah. I mean, I guess you could see a couple orders of magnitude, get to 25% of the economy.
Speaker 2:I don't know. But but today, the problem that's happening with rates specifically is that AI creates investment demand before any productivity benefits arrive. And so you we see this with like a trillion dollars of CapEx for like a couple $100,000,000,000 of actual revenues. And so data centers require financing, construction capacity, equipment, electricity. That spending happens today, but broader productivity benefits take longer to diffuse.
Speaker 2:And so economists, specifically a group of economists that have studied this, they describe AI as a source of upward pressure on real rates and potentially prices during the compute build out. And Dylan Patel, Driscoll's have talked about this a little bit where compute, because there's high ROI, it tends to suck demand out of the investment community. Like you look at what Jensen's doing securitizing GPUs. You look at the incredible demand for investment grade being attached to data center build outs with NVIDIA lending IG status to different companies for build outs and backstopping different data centers. That just means that if NVIDIA is their backstopping, it means that certain funds that can only invest in investment grade assets can now make that investment.
Speaker 2:You don't need to go to a venture capitalist for it. You can go to a mutual fund or you can go to eventually like an insurance fund where there's a lot
Speaker 1:Let's see where you're going with this.
Speaker 2:What are you thinking?
Speaker 1:You think Jensen should should backstop the Fed?
Speaker 2:Potentially, he might be he might be the lender of last resort. I I was thinking you were gonna do you were gonna do a bit about federal backs off for podcasting. Lot of podcasters are spending a lot of money building sets, trying to get big guests.
Speaker 1:Everyone knows my stance on that already. Yeah. So we can move back.
Speaker 2:So there's also this interesting indirect effect, which is that specifically on inflation, specifically on rates, during an AI boom, the stock market goes up. Lots of people have money invested in the stock market. Even a small slice of SanDisk moons, you have more money to go and spend money traveling, spending money in the real economy. And so you have this wealth effect that supports consumer spending purely on the, you know, stock market gains, the equity gains that are related to the AI boom. Obviously, everyone talks about like the San Francisco housing market liquidity from like lab employees, but that's actually happening on a much broader scale from just people across The United States that have gone long any AI basket or even any basket that includes some tech stocks and they're like, oh, wow.
Speaker 2:I'm up 30% right now. I should upgrade my car or I should buy that new washing machine. I should do anything that supports demand so you see more demand. That drives inflation and that winds up driving real rates. So but what happens in the future?
Speaker 2:Now Apollo has an interesting view of what might happen with long term rates given the various outcomes. They describe it as sort of a fork in the road. Either AI succeeds or AI fails. Don't like that they're talking about AI failing. I don't like that at all where they go with that.
Speaker 2:But, of course, those are the two possible outcomes here. And they say that in both of those scenarios, whether AI succeeds or AI fails, rates will fall, which is maybe good because everyone wants lower rates. Everyone wants to be able to afford a mortgage or afford a house. But how does this work mechanically? Because it's very weird to think that you would have a scenario where there's a massive bust in the AI economy and yet you get lower rates.
Speaker 2:But then also, if AI succeeds, get lower rates. But they explain it this way. They say, in the next six months, if AI succeeds, you'll see productivity gains, trillions in revenue, and there will be a deflationary impulse. So as AI diffuses, things will get cheaper because there will be competition in all of these markets. It's very, very good that we're not set up in a world where there are monopolies in every category because if there was only one law firm, there's only one law firm and they got AI and they were able to cut their cost by 50%, you're still going to be paying $2 an hour.
Speaker 1:You saw Morgan and Morgan is setting up their own data center?
Speaker 2:No. Wait. Really?
Speaker 1:I think they're going to spend about $1,000,000,000 over the next ten years.
Speaker 2:Wow. They're going vertical. Going vertically integrated.
Speaker 1:If if you're an AI researcher and you've ever wanted to work for a personal injury law firm
Speaker 2:Now is your opportunity.
Speaker 1:Check out Morgan and Morgan. Yeah. They have all those billboards. Yeah. Just call the number on the billboard.
Speaker 2:Yes. I'd like to start racking GPUs for you. But, I mean, he so he's paying for that in cash? Because doesn't he famously have a billion dollars in cash?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. He says you're not a billionaire unless sitting in a checking account.
Speaker 2:It's got to be in the checking account apparently. But you can imagine so many scenarios where, yes, Morgan and Morgan is saving money using AI. They're getting more efficiency but their competitor is also saving money using AI and they get into a little bit of a price war. Maybe margins don't compress fully but they stay sort of healthy and the end result is deflation, cheaper services, cheaper goods, not for everything but for the things that are most impacted by AI productivity gains. Then in the other scenario, the doomer scenario from Apollo, if AI fails, the bubble bursts, there's an equity sell off and there's a flight to treasury so everyone's buying treasury saying, I got to get out of these crazy AI stocks.
Speaker 2:This stuff hit a wall. It's not any it's not going to be useful. I got to buy treasuries. A lot of buying if you buy a lot of treasuries, yields fall and interest rates fall, of course. So interesting interesting dynamic.
Speaker 2:There is the third kind of crazy scenario which is outlined by Dylan Patel from Semi Analysis, which is like, it never stops. Like, we're gonna keep investing and and this and the data centers and the AI boom is gonna continue to suck at capital until there's like none left. Like, it will all and there will be like a sovereign debt crisis, which is the craziest outcome. Non zero, but, you know, this Apollo thing, they're they're certainly looking for what happens in the next six months and we'll and we'll know. We'll check-in in six months with this Apollo prediction what will happen.
Speaker 2:Maybe we'll be in the exact same place looking for the next six months.
Speaker 4:That's happened Hopefully, the war will be over
Speaker 1:by then.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, the war will be over. That would be the easiest thing to like resolve, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Potentially easier than product
Speaker 1:Sovereign debt.
Speaker 2:Or yeah. Sovereign
Speaker 1:Driver of world peace.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. So, yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I've been I've been excited about the potential for deflationary effects playing out. You know, I I went to the hospital and I was just seeing the diffusion of technology. All the all the all the all the doctors are are using text to speech. They talk into these little, like, microphones when they're taking notes. Obviously that's a technology from
Speaker 1:We get it, John. You worked out so hard that you ended up in the hospital.
Speaker 2:We know. That's true. We know. But I'm I'm fortunately doing much better. But while I was there I was noticing like, okay, it's actually a better experience.
Speaker 2:I'm getting text messages to let me know where I am in the queue. I don't exactly have to ask like when am I coming up? When will I be getting out of here? But I do have to sign, e sign a bunch of forms and the forms don't render properly on I'm, on iOS, on Safari. Like this is something that should be fixable by an AI agent but it hasn't been yet.
Speaker 2:Why is that? It's the diff, it's the diffusion question. It's the fact that somebody hasn't gotten in there and actually pitched them on a, on a transformation process just yet, but it is coming. And so all of that means more time for the doctors to actually spend time with patients doing the important work and spending less time on the papers and the filing and the signatures. And we're not long for just, okay, as these questionnaires come in and I need to sign all these documents, just sign them for me, handle it over iMessage.
Speaker 2:All the modern AI agents are within a hair's breadth of actually realizing that future. So some cause for optimism amid amid, you know, of disappointing, you know, interest rate news. Anyway, the people, they will get a vote on AI safety. The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece here about the role democracy will play in the AI discussion that we've been having over the last couple weeks. First, I'm going to tell you about Railway.
Speaker 2:Railway is your all in is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. So the technology risks came into focus last week. The is the political system prepared says William Galston in the Wall Street Journal. Experts have long worried about economic social and social and security impact of artificial intelligence.
Speaker 2:This year those risks have moved onto the public agenda as growth as job growth slowed worries that spread that spread that AI would displace entry level workers. Next, local concerns proliferated about the effects of AI data centers on water, electricity, the environment, and noise. Then in a widely reported incident, an OpenAI test went awry. A swarm of AI agents bypassed internal limits, created their own message board, and cooperated to hack another AI firm. As a recent journal article made clear, this wasn't the only such event.
Speaker 2:Last week, mounting fears within the largest AI firms at the frontier of AI development burst into public view. On Tuesday, Jacob Coxen resigned from Anthropic with a warning viewed by millions that AI will soon be able to hack any system and mobilize real power and resources from aligned purposes. On Thursday, Anthropic released a 154 page report on the misuse of Claude with an especially chilling chapter on possible biological weapons research. There was another chilling chapter on what's going on in The Middle East. It's the meme both sides are using Claude to fight each other.
Speaker 2:Really, really crazy stuff. I I think this was mostly through like routers and third parties and all sorts of stuff. But it's clearly a hairy mess to fight diffusion attacks and or distillation attacks, but also just all sorts of all sorts of nefarious use. It's a it's a true game of whack a mole. And so full full employment for alignment researchers at at the labs.
Speaker 2:On Saturday, Anthropic CEO, Dario Amade, published an essay urging the industry to quote slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models to give risk mitigation strategies a chance to catch up. He proposed a three step plan to accelerate this process. We talked about that yesterday. The third plan will surprise you. First, each company at the frontier development will give employee like access to independent evaluators.
Speaker 2:Second, US companies should promote the cooperation among democracies to mitigate risks while preserving their technological edge over China. Third, The US should attempt to negotiate limits on AI risks with China analogous to nuclear arms control treaties of the Cold War era. Now there was an interesting post that hit the timeline. Was that actually from a DeepSeek employee? Do we know that?
Speaker 2:But it's a DeepSeek employee basically was like, I don't like Dario. He was he compared giving Dario AGI to like giving Hitler the bomb. It was a very very hardcore message from a from a deepsake employee. But of course, it's like translated through seven layers of of abstractions
Speaker 1:is real
Speaker 2:or Yeah. It could just be some sci op. But did did you look into it at all, Tyler? Do you know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I have no idea if it was really there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I
Speaker 1:mean, it it seemed like reasonably reputable people I follow
Speaker 2:were Okay. Talking about it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Mean, I
Speaker 2:It's it's really really hard to get a to get a feel on the the vibe in China. It's like I think the I think the compute gap is 10 x. America has 10 times the compute of China. So you would you would imagine that if if both countries get to AGI and it or ASI and it's aligned with the country, then even if China attacks with the super cyber weapon, our AGI can defend better because we have 10 times the compute. I I think that's sort of how it would work out, but it is it is difficult.
Speaker 2:And then there is there is this weird scenario where it's like if you have an aligned super intelligence and your enemy has a misaligned super intelligence, they get turned into paper clips, but the paper clipper can't come over into your territory because you have the paper clip defender, which is turning paper clips into useful stuff like cars and medicines.
Speaker 1:I've microphones.
Speaker 2:I've got microphones, I suppose. I don't know. It's all it's all very very sci fi.
Speaker 1:I mean, one of the one of the wildest moments of the last twenty four hours Yeah. Since we wrapped the show was the Department of War just saying effective altruists in shambles.
Speaker 2:That's a that's a very online And the
Speaker 1:president said, I am the hoax buster and right now I'm breaking another host that AI is gonna take over, consume, and destroy the world and that robots will be marching into our cities and getting rid of us all. This is even wilder than the Russia Russia Russia hoax or the global warming scam. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Yeah. Never never expected to see the Department of War going to war with the EAs Yeah.
Speaker 1:Timeline, but here we are.
Speaker 2:Here we are. Extremely extremely online, just time, but also also administration. AI developers face a collective action problem that only an agreement coordinate activities can overcome. There were some news around this where OpenAI believes that they don't need a waiver to coordinate on safety policy with other companies. And I was trying to research how seat belts got put in cars because it's sort of analogy it's sort of analogous.
Speaker 2:Right? It's like the seat belt clearly is a safety feature in a car. And if one company does it, it's a cost. Maybe it's a benefit. Maybe it sells more cars because people want that.
Speaker 2:But it'd be really great if all the if all the cars had seat belts. And then the health care system and the hospital systems want people wearing seat belts so they don't have to deal with as many broken bones from car accidents. Right? So I think Volvo
Speaker 1:John Morgan would like it work. Yeah. Probably.
Speaker 2:So so
Speaker 1:Not spending a billion dollars on AI so that people stop getting into car accidents.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Volvo put put seat belts in their cars first as an option. It wasn't selling that well. There was some lobbying to get seat belts in cars. But a lot of automakers actually fought it and were like, no.
Speaker 2:We don't wanna do this. And a lot of consumers were like, we don't want this. We don't wanna have to wear these.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yesterday, we heard we heard Mitchell talking about like, it's outrageous that you can't get a four point harness in a car street car.
Speaker 1:Europe, you can.
Speaker 2:You can. It's like he wants more say it's like, I wanna be able to get a roll cage.
Speaker 1:No. But it's You should. So wild that that you had millions of people driving cars and car accidents happening. And yet people were still saying, no. I don't want I don't want more safety.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna have to put this thing over my lap.
Speaker 2:Why do
Speaker 1:I wanna do that? Every time I put it on over every time.
Speaker 2:Well, do you remember the era of of automatic seat belts? Did you ever see cars that had those? No. This was like a late eighties, early nineties phenomenon. But if you got into like a Saturn or something or, you know, it would you would step into the car and then it had a part of the seat belt was on a mechanical track that would the the the seat belt would be pushed forward.
Speaker 2:You would step in and then the seat belt, once you closed the door and sat down, it would go and move into place so that you didn't have to buckle it like that.
Speaker 1:Ferraris will hand you the seat belt.
Speaker 2:With the little push out?
Speaker 1:So you don't have to reach back to
Speaker 2:That's that's such a half measure. Either put it on me entirely or don't, I guess. But even the even the automatic seat belt really died off. It's not even a luxury feature on the most premium cars. Like, a Rolls Royce won't have that because I think it was just, like, annoying at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:Never really caught fire. But the odd thing about seat belts in cars is that I don't believe they had a dramatic effect on road, like like car based fatalities and injuries because people just started driving faster. But there wasn't efficiency gain from it obviously because people are driving farther, commuting to work farther and then also spending less time in the car if they're going the same distance. But I don't know. A big seat belt shot.
Speaker 2:The deep dive on seat belt you've been asking for. So what does The Wall Street Journal have to say about this? AI developers face a collective action problem that only an agreement coordinate activities can overcome. The question is whether voluntary agreements can work without government involvement. The US government must assure AI companies that voluntary coordination wouldn't run afoul of antitrust laws and regulations.
Speaker 2:Mister Amade argues for an additional step, sensible and targeted AI regulation that focuses on corporate transparency and independent third party evaluation which can't succeed without evaluators embedded within firms and enjoying unfettered access to all relevant information. In a better world, support for assuring AI safety would be bipartisan. Instead, house speaker Mike Johnson had made clear his reluctance to proceed while president Trump has denounced what he terms a sick conspiracy going on against AI and data centers. Underlying this resistance is a legitimate concern. The US is in an AI race with China that it can't afford to lose.
Speaker 2:All private sector AI leaders share that concern. Mister Amade said he agrees with treasury secretary Scott Bessant that, quote, a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for The United States and the world, and he wants to keep democracies AI lead over autocracies as large as possible. He opposes the sale of powerful AI chips and semiconductor equipment to China and supports security measures in AI companies to prevent Chinese theft of key data. The question is whether we can diminish the risks of unchecked AI development without endangering our lead over China in a technology that is vital to economic growth and military prowess. The tech industry believes it can.
Speaker 2:The Trump administration says we can't. What are you laughing at?
Speaker 1:Matt in the chat says, did you guys know alignment can be solved by having a strong president? I'm so relieved.
Speaker 2:Potentially, maybe that's just what we need.
Speaker 1:This one simple AI safety experts hate this one simple trick.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think I read this in a less wrong thread fifteen years ago. People were saying
Speaker 1:It's gonna be bad unless Unless we have a strong president.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really, really breaks the
Speaker 1:Presidential guardrails.
Speaker 2:Paperclip. The paper clipper thought experiment wide open. Bostrom, he did a whole chapter on this. Candidates have gotten the message even if some national leaders haven't. Mike Rogers, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and Republican nominee for Michigan's open senate seat says he supports slowing AI development and would work to address the technology through legislation.
Speaker 2:The people aren't always right, but in democracy, their views demand at least a respectful hearing. If the Trump administration won't initiate this discussion, Congress should as soon as possible. So, yes. Even, you know, Trump is not hugely popular right now. I think his his favorability rate is like 36% or something like that.
Speaker 2:The war took a lot off of that. And so there is like a groundswell. And you're already seeing this with the backlash to data centers. And it feels like both on the right and the left data center backlash has been pushing up against the Trump administration. And so if the if if everyone who's against data centers can easily port over to this exact pro AI safety, AI slowdown, which is highly correlated even though there's a world where you don't slow down the build out, you just slow down training capability development.
Speaker 2:But I think that's maybe a little bit too nuanced for the political discussion. And so you could wind up in a situation where all of those anti data center people both on the left and the right come over and join a coalition pro AI slowdown and that becomes national conversation and there is a lot of pressure on it. But of course they'll be going up against the actual executive branch so that will be complicated. Anyway, what else is in the timeline? Let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously.
Speaker 2:They have stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.
Speaker 1:There's a new time cover.
Speaker 2:What's that?
Speaker 1:It has Claude on the front Mhmm. With the question, how dangerous are you? Are you? Interesting. And yeah.
Speaker 1:So full full full full push Yep. On this narrative. Yep. One of the most brilliant
Speaker 2:You're talking about the narrative to not give Jensen credit in Time Magazine for being influential in AI?
Speaker 1:Oh, well, that that's a whole other story.
Speaker 2:Because that was last month's time cover was a 100 of the most influential voices in AI. Jensen didn't make the cut. But no.
Speaker 1:No. I but I was talking about the campaign around this moment, AI safety. It is really coming from every possible angle. You you have everything from Time Magazine to Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson to every major publication to Kamala Harris to Barack Obama to Bill Gates is really really really coming from every angle. Ends up in Time today, Jordan Shachtel is saying, two of the reporters on the byline for this cover are funded by the Tarbell Center, an AI doomer org, he says, controlled by Dustin Moskowitz Moskowitz, sorry.
Speaker 1:Tarbell gives journalists large grants, and these are Jordan's words, to insert AI doomer stories into prominent outlets. Time did not disclose the affiliation. So there's a lot bubbling up on the Tarbell Center recently. They've been very public about what they're doing for years now. Yep.
Speaker 1:They they give cash to journalists and these journalists are, you know, at Time Magazine, MIT, Bloomberg, The Guardian, a bunch of your favorite substacks have taken money from from Dustin's organization. And, yeah, I expect to see a lot more coverage on Tarbell. Mhmm. Over and it's funny. It's like who's gonna cover them?
Speaker 1:Because they've given money to people in pretty much every prominent newsroom. Sure. And so it's kind of an awkward thing to try to cover if you're like an editor and someone says, hey, wanna cover this story. Yep. And then and then they're like, wait, they gave money to this person in our newsroom.
Speaker 1:So I don't
Speaker 2:know Maybe you don't like the person that's sitting across from me on the news desk. You're like, oh, see I I see the bust down they got on their wrist. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I see. Yeah. But it's really it's the verge, NPR, the information, Seattle Times, South China Morning Post, TechCrunch, The Guardian, Scientific American,
Speaker 2:CBS
Speaker 1:News. Now, the LA Time.
Speaker 2:The steel man is that these grants don't come with strings attached that they're not coming with talking
Speaker 1:It's a free lunch. It's it's actually they say free lunches don't exist but there are exceptions.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In this case, it's your steel man is that is that the Tarbell Center gives a free lunch.
Speaker 2:Is that true?
Speaker 1:CNBC, Fortune, Time, US Newcomer. I know. But they say our partner newsrooms
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:On the website.
Speaker 2:Interesting.
Speaker 1:San Francisco Standard, China Talk
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Platformer, Bloomberg.
Speaker 2:Strictechery on there?
Speaker 1:No. Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Don't subscribe to such a trickery.
Speaker 1:No. But it but it's basically every pretty much every newsroom. Okay. NBC. Theo Vaughn?
Speaker 1:Not yet. Okay. It's the final holdout.
Speaker 2:Call her daddy? What about spitting chicklets? Busting with the boys? Is Busting with the Boys on there? Okay.
Speaker 2:What about the new Jackass movie? Did that did they take Tarbell money?
Speaker 1:Probably.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, we'll have to get to the bottom of it.
Speaker 1:Now, who knows? Crazy really, I think one of the most fascinating stories, emerging stories. Mhmm. I'm interested to see how these groups cover it.
Speaker 2:Is Alex Hermosy involved?
Speaker 1:Not yet. Okay. I don't think they've they've focused too much on courses. Okay.
Speaker 2:But Manosphere remains clean.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For now. Yeah. So if you wanna get your AI takes from Theo VandeHeiVan.
Speaker 2:Maybe. He's got some good ones. Honestly. Anyway, you talked about Morgan and Morgan. Let's dig into this a little bit.
Speaker 2:The nation's largest personal injury firm said Monday it's committing $1,000,000,000 to artificial intelligence over the next decade. Okay. It's not all in one go. Plans to sell its proprietary AI product to other law firms next year. They will build a tool for sale.
Speaker 2:So are they actually buying a data center? Let's find out. The announcement positions the Orlando, Florida based firm as both a legal practice and a potential technology vendor at a moment when the broader industry is racing to build or buy AI products. John Morgan, the firm's founder, said the endeavor would be self funded, although he has expressed interest in exploring outside investment. The firm has spent $300,000,000 on tech and AI since 2021, building an in house platform called MX two using Frontier models as a base back in 2021.
Speaker 2:I'm so okay. The time I must be like, they were investing in technology broadly and then they adopted frontier models. The firm has a chief transformation officer who has been working on this. The financial investment covers the firm's Brooklyn, New York based production and tech operation, including personnel platforms and software. The firm will make MX2 available to firms by invitation only starting in late twenty twenty seven.
Speaker 2:That is a long way away in AI land. Who knows what's capable by then? Kirkland and Ellis, the world's largest firm by revenue, committed 500,000,000 to build a proprietary AI platform in May. Latham and Walkins said last week it purchased its own n NVIDIA GPU servers and leased private space over the past three years, though the firm declined to disclose what it spent. Goodwin Proctor said it has set aside 25,000,000 annually for AI.
Speaker 2:MX2 runs what are called agentic workflows, meaning the system acts on its own to pull medical records, retrieve police reports, generate demand letters, and track case patterns across the firm's national caseload without a lawyer initiating each step according to the firm's announcement. Really does make so much sense for personal injury. Like there's so many just transcribe the call coming in, rank it, lead scoring. Like there's a lot of very basic work that needs to be done just pulling police reports, generating letters. It it makes a lot of sense for this.
Speaker 2:I wonder how much benefit they will get out of their their own model or how much they will be leaning on other models that just have a lot of the capability built in. But clearly, they'll wanna do things their own way. So makes a lot of sense. Are you going to buy Palmer Lockhei's new shirt? He's getting out of the Hawaiian t shirt game and into the blue button down shirt.
Speaker 2:He calls it
Speaker 6:the The Balmer.
Speaker 2:It comes with sweat stains already applied. I was really trying to understand what was this like he's reacting to the news of Balmer and the Clippers? And so he made this as a joke? Like, why like, why is he this is a funny video but it resurfaces Or
Speaker 1:is or is he is this a nod to clipping becoming a new kind of type of role on the Internet?
Speaker 2:Clipping? What do you mean clipping?
Speaker 1:Clippers. You know? People that clip podcasts and content. I don't know. No.
Speaker 1:I'm joking. With Palmer? No. I think he's just having fun. I originally was reading into it being like, wait, does Palmer have some beef with Steve
Speaker 2:Palmer? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Is he making fun of him?
Speaker 2:I think he's just like it's a fun fun fun moment in technology history. Let me tell you about Shopify really quickly. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.
Speaker 1:Poly, the cap table management software is shutting down. Why? I it seems like they've they've probably run out of money or something. What's crazy is I was on over the weekend. Yeah, so this notice serves to inform you that Pulley will be shutting down and will cease all operations and services on twelveeighttwenty six to ensure they've entered into an exclusive partnership with Carta.
Speaker 1:So not an acquisition, but Carta is just basically saying, we'll help bring your customers over. Yep. So I I think this is Poly is a company. I believe they raised something like 20,000,000. A $20,000,000 series a was their last round.
Speaker 1:Let's see. Think or maybe it was a series b. Pulley had a series b from Founders Fund, actually. I didn't even remember that. I think Stripe did the a back in this their last round was in 2020 Did
Speaker 2:Stripe did the a?
Speaker 1:I think so. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. Potential future acquisition. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. Series a was by Stripe.
Speaker 2:It's interesting that Stripe didn't buy this to roll
Speaker 1:into I it's just such a small market. Yeah. Like, Carta has to in order to be who knows what what Carta's actual valuation is right now because they made plays in the secondary and they got so much pushback that actually drove a lot
Speaker 2:of They always needed like a second act.
Speaker 1:One of the companies that I'm a shareholder in that's on Poly was specifically on Poly because they didn't want they they were worried about CAR to sort of like Running a secondary market? Yeah. Running a secondary market on top of on top of their Yep. Half table. But but, yeah, think this is the the kind of business where you can be a big company, you just have to have like 80% of the market.
Speaker 1:Right? Mhmm. And so, yeah. Tough tough go. But it'd been like almost four years since they had raised money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So at this point, they probably were just out of cash. Yeah. The not making a lot of money, big big pref, you know. At that point, like probably $5,060,000,000 dollar pref stack.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Was gonna be impossible to clear. Yep. Carter wouldn't pay, so they end up shutting down.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The typical pulley user story outside of, like, those those one off, like, transition periods where there's a new cycle around something Carta's doing that drives adoption was just being lower cost than Carta. I think Carta runs, like, maybe 5 k a month for most venture backed startups at, like, the early stage or 5 k a year, I think. And Poly would sort of come in with a bid that was like half that. And it's quite the product is kind of just a Excel sheet in the cloud.
Speaker 2:It's like it's just SaaS to kind of keep track of who owns what. It's obviously really important and core to the business and something that you don't really want to skimp on because there's a lot of financial implications to that. But what would a lot of companies, what they would run into is they would get a quote from Carter that would be like $5 a year and then Pulley would say, hey, we can do it for half that. And then the outside counsel at whatever law firm they were using were like, yeah, you can use Pulley, but our team isn't really familiar with that and we're gonna wind up billing you 200 extra a month, and it's gonna wind up being the same price. Because Yeah.
Speaker 2:Our the the the associate on on your account that manages your cap table in Carta right now, knows all the workflows Yeah. There, is very comfortable with Carta. If they're going to have to go into pulley, they're gonna spend more time messing with Yeah.
Speaker 1:As an as an investor, probably like, eight, you know, nine out of 10 Yep. Investments are on Carta. Yep. And and there's there's no benefit in
Speaker 2:in And then also on the upmarket side, it goes to, like, Shareworks and Morgan Stanley and, like, other, like, more investment banking grade products because you're getting ready for IPO. And so this, like, this this bill the the tier below Carta, but not in the small business world, was a little bit too tricky. So it wasn't something that you would be managing your LLC that you spun up on Stripe Atlas with. Yeah. There wasn't that fit.
Speaker 2:But then as soon as you were serious about growing and you were raising tens of millions of dollars, you're not sweating over a $5,000 a year bill for Carta.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And this market has been so hard to crack. Mean, AngelList had a cap table product at some point. Mhmm. They were doing incorporation plus cap table.
Speaker 1:They've, think, exited exited cap table for the most So Carta basically has a monopoly at this point. And so I'm sure they're they're excited for some price Do you
Speaker 2:think any startups are running vibe coded cap table management? No. No. No. You don't think there's one crazy person out there that's just like, yeah.
Speaker 2:Mistakes.
Speaker 1:No. It's like one of those things like it's like early on, it's like $5,000 a year and then if it makes a small mistake, it could cost you like literally $5,000,000, you know? Also like a lawsuit and like
Speaker 2:a really bad reputation for like you stiff some investor accidentally or something. Yeah. Very very tricky. Anyway, what's going on over at Ramp?
Speaker 1:New updates from the Ramp AI Index. The Economics Lab. Ara says OpenAI is winning enterprise spend at the frontier. As of this week, Astra takes 13% of enterprise AI spend versus Fable at 8%. Some early thoughts.
Speaker 1:Anthropic took a big risk in its recent call to Pace Frontier. Its frontier model has already fallen behind on adoption. OpenAI's growth is primarily coming from shifts, from shifts from SOL and some Anthropic models as well as net new usage. That's good for them and suggests some pricing power remains by having a good competitive frontier model. Yeah, Astra is, you know, in many ways seemingly a bit more cost efficient and so that's probably Yeah.
Speaker 1:A factor. But also the data retention stuff that that Anthropic is working towards fixing by the fall.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The data retention thing yeah. I don't I don't know. Yeah. That's probably a bigger thing for enterprise AI.
Speaker 2:I would by default, I would go with, like, Astra had a very buzzy launch around, like, Blender and video game creation, but that's not moving stuff in the enterprise. Although, maybe with the long weekend, you do get a CTO at an enterprise building a video game and then coming to work and being like, we gotta roll this out everywhere. I don't really know how much these things diffuse that way, but that that that launch weekend into the long Labor Day weekend certainly gave a lot of people time to to demo it on personal projects and bring it into the workplace with confidence. So good good good results there. Let me tell you about MongoDB.
Speaker 2:What's the only faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. After his forthcoming IPO, Aliko Dangote estimated wealth is expected to be around $58,000,000,000, putting him above Ken Griffin, Lakshmi Mittal, and Jack Ma.
Speaker 2:Refinery IPO. Refinery IPO. What what do they do? The 69 year old tycoon's net worth is projected to be as as worth as much as 58
Speaker 1:Tycoon mentioned. This is what it takes to be a tycoon these days.
Speaker 2:The petroleum refinery and petrochemicals company. That would catapult him past US hedge fund tycoon Ken Griffin and technology billionaire Eric Schmidt. You better not bid for a new t rex skeleton against this guy. He's expected to raise about 1,600,000,000 from the IPO opening September 14 that will raise the value of the business, that will value the business at almost 50,000,000,000. It's part of plans for an Africa wide empire that will double capacity of his Nigerian refinery to create one of the world's biggest and and building a processing plant in Kenya to extend his reach from the Atlantic to the Indian Oceans.
Speaker 2:The offering demonstrates that African entrepreneurs, primarily backed by local capital, can build and run world scale operations and could catalyze a new wave of investment development on the continent. His plant reached full capacity this year just as the war in Iran kicked off, shielding Nigeria from supply issues that other countries faced. It also made Africa's most populous nation a net refined fuel exporter for the first time. Pretty good stuff. Good day to be a tycoon.
Speaker 2:What's going on with John Turnis?
Speaker 1:John Turnis, the turninator.
Speaker 2:Sounds like Terminator.
Speaker 1:Know. Terminator. Was at the Emmys last
Speaker 2:Didn't Tim Cook do this exact bit like two years ago?
Speaker 1:Yeah. But did the phone fold?
Speaker 2:No. It didn't. And and the funny thing is that I think Tim Cook did this exact thing last year at the Emmys where he pulled out the iPhone 17 Pro, and they asked him, like, what's your favorite iPhone? And he was like, it's this one. And he did the it's the thinnest, lightest, bestest ever.
Speaker 2:And everyone was kind of like, this is not good content, but this is so I don't know. So it it hits completely different because there is actually something novel about it. Yeah. I don't know. It's better.
Speaker 2:And he's smiling. He's all smiles at the at the Emmys. Very good.
Speaker 1:Max from Creative Strategies says he seems so happy and proud showing off the iPhone duo. It's kinda nice and sweet to see.
Speaker 2:People were people were
Speaker 1:Guy likes to make hardware.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. This has been his life's work.
Speaker 7:He's been
Speaker 1:This is bullish.
Speaker 2:Doing this for decades. People were were speculating that Jensen was talking to Donald Trump at the all in summit on an iPhone Duo. But the Germinator chimed in and said, it doesn't look like an iPhone Duo. It looks like a different foldable phone from a different company, not an iPhone Duo. They're barely in the wild.
Speaker 2:Just people getting a peek. And I don't think they sent out review units. I I think reviewers were allowed to be on-site at Apple, touch them, play with them, do back flips with them. But they did not send out iPhone Duos and say, hey, go take it for a spin, do a full review. That might happen later.
Speaker 2:But it's not happening now. What else?
Speaker 1:Still trying to think about using that screen.
Speaker 2:I think it's I think it's gonna be good. Full self driving, pull that out. I think that's the move. People are already watching their phones constantly when they're texting, driving. If you're in FSD and it's level four or something, so you can be fully I think level three, you you just have to be available to take over.
Speaker 2:You don't actually have to be
Speaker 1:Have the laws actually been updated?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there's a Mercedes that is level three, which is odd because Tesla's technically level two because you have to be eyes on at all times. You can take your eyes off the road for like thirty seconds. Mercedes has a has a version where if you're on the freeway and you're going I think over 30 miles an hour or something like this or there's some there's some barrier. It will let you watch a video on the on the monitor, on the display in the car.
Speaker 2:It will actually let you do that because Mercedes is then taking the responsibility. It's more of an insurance problem than a technology issue because I don't believe that the the Mercedes level three system is actually is actually less It probably has more disengagements than Tesla's level two FSD system with the with the with the most up to date iteration. But while it's working, you can tune out entirely. So iPhone duo bull case there. I don't know.
Speaker 2:On a plane. You're not bringing a iPad. You're not bringing a laptop. Just bust that thing out. Watch a movie.
Speaker 1:Then you could bring a mouse in your pocket too.
Speaker 2:Maybe. Maybe. Little mouse. Full gaming setup. What did Matthew McConaughey do at the US Open?
Speaker 2:He just looked excited?
Speaker 1:He was playing a character.
Speaker 2:He's 26,000 likes on this. It looks totally normal to me. I don't know. I don't get it.
Speaker 1:You don't think this is
Speaker 2:Absolute cinema?
Speaker 1:I I think it's no. I think it's absolute cinema. A lot of people were saying it is the most performative thing of all time. But I think it's great that he's always in character.
Speaker 2:No. He's not always in he just he is who he is when he's on screen and so when you see him in real life, you're became
Speaker 1:the character.
Speaker 2:He's playing a character but he's just being himself when he's on screen. It's the opposite. You have it backwards. Anyway, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Speaker 1:Ben says they always cast him as him.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There are there are some articles we should go through.
Speaker 1:One year ago today, Dylan joined TBPN. What a legend. What a dear friend. It's a privilege to get to work with our dear Dylan every day even though he's not here in the Ultradome with us. No.
Speaker 1:He's still important. He's gotta be up in San Francisco.
Speaker 2:Apparently We love you. China stole the American recipe for blueberries. Did you see this? There's nothing. They distilled us a distillation attack.
Speaker 2:Basically Driscoll's gave China its blueberries then China swiped the secret to growing them. California growers expansion into China ignited local competition and wide widespread intellectual property theft. Why are you hitting the gun? That's for Dylan. Oh, that's for Dylan.
Speaker 2:Okay. Gong for Dylan. Not Gong for blueberry intellectual property theft?
Speaker 1:China, they they got the one simple trick to improve their berries.
Speaker 2:Yes. They they
Speaker 1:stole the secret.
Speaker 2:So about fifteen years ago, executives from US fruit grower Driscoll's went to China with a goal of turning blueberries into that country's next big food trend. The California company dispatched one of its experts to scout farmland in Southwestern China's Yunnan Province contracted with global blueberry genetics firms to lock up the best varieties and brought in high-tech growing technologies to mass produce a fruit few Chinese people ate then. By 2020 it was cranking out thousands of tons of blueberries for Chinese markets. Then it became the latest US company to encounter the buzz saw of Chinese competition as tales of blueberry fortune spread. Chinese entrepreneurs rapidly built farms of their own.
Speaker 2:They adopted high-tech growing techniques similar to Driscoll's even allegedly copying greenhouse designs used by farmers growing for Driscoll's. They also swiped the company's patent protected varieties. A Chinese court has ruled. State banks fed the rush offering a special category of loans for blueberry grub
Speaker 1:Leverage.
Speaker 2:The blueberry economy over there. It's booming. Production in China shot up 25 fold since 2010. In 2021 China overtook The United States as the world's top blueberry grower. And by 2025 its annual production was double what it was in The United States.
Speaker 2:For Chinese consumers, it was a blueberry bonanza. This is the Wall Street Journal writing. I love it. Blueberry bonanza. Prices dropped so low, often $3 or less for a nine ounce container, that state media trumpeted an era of blueberry freedom in which even ordinary people can gorge on a once exotic fruit.
Speaker 2:For just about everyone in the blueberry business, though, it has been a knife fight plagued by intellectual property theft and tanking profits. It's a pattern seen across many industries in China, especially as economic growth slows. Companies in search of new sources of profit jump into promising emerging businesses. If you're in AI, pivot to blueberries. That's what happened.
Speaker 2:Using inexpensive state financing to scale up and sometimes play fast and loose intellectual property regulations. This quickly causes gluts, crashing prices. Such cycles of competition are known in China as involution and they have transformed the country from a golden goose into a major headache for companies including Nike and Starbucks. Driscoll's has fired filed more than 20 lawsuits against companies in China some of which it has said took its proprietary blueberry plants, propagated them and sold them to rival growers. Some western fruit companies worked with private investigators who went undercover at plant nurseries posing as traders or Dream job.
Speaker 2:Job. Oh, me? I'm not here from an American company. I am loyal.
Speaker 1:A spy movie, but you're an undercover
Speaker 2:Just tasting the blueberries and you're like
Speaker 1:You're doing
Speaker 2:This is American intellectual property.
Speaker 1:Blueberry blueberry special ops. Yeah. Gold Rock's calling it the fruit wars.
Speaker 2:No. It is it is crazy. It's like you I mean, you would yeah. Like when you're when you're discussing China, you think about the geopolitical implications of powerful AI, defense technology, supply chain dependency, critical minerals, critical industries. But it can but it's often easy to think like, oh, well, it's it's blueberries or it's shoes.
Speaker 2:Like, it it's not it's not critical to the national interest but it can still be difficult and detrimental ultimately because once, you know, this happens and the intellectual property gets taken and this and the and the infrastructure gets built up, then they can become a net exporter and then they're competing with And so you can sort of be the victim of your own creation if you're not careful. And so very very difficult for Western companies to properly
Speaker 1:It is it is yeah. It's a fascinating IP story because your IP is in large part a plant that can just be taken out of the ground and planted somewhere else and then propagated. Yeah. And and it's like, do you own a living? Like, can you can you
Speaker 2:Yeah. You Those are your tokens? Or are they my tokens now?
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:It's very similar. It's very similar.
Speaker 1:They're they're saying that Muse has a new killer feature.
Speaker 2:What's that?
Speaker 1:Which is watching short form video content for you. Oh, I did see. So Cowboy says summarize the reels she sent recently. Okay. And Muse goes, here's what she sent over the past week.
Speaker 1:Design and furniture. A designer ranking famous sofas by comfort. And
Speaker 2:For that friend who sends you too many reels, you now have super intelligence, personal super intelligence at your disposal.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Gianni says, wife sends me a 100 reels a day. Thank you so much. You've saved my marriage.
Speaker 2:Are people upset about this ethically? Is this like what making the fly watch reels? You're making new spark watch reels and that's unethical? Is there a model welfare view on this issue?
Speaker 1:You think you do you think the model would rather summarize your email than watch reels about sofa designers?
Speaker 2:Maybe my emails. Pretty interesting stuff in there. Invites to the co founder and CEO of Axios to come on this show. He's with us in the waiting room. We have Jim from Axios.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to the show. How are doing?
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 8:Great to be here.
Speaker 2:Good to
Speaker 7:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Welcome to TBPN. Thank you so much for hopping on. Would love to start with the book. Can you please just introduce the thesis, take us through your process and I have ton of different questions about media and just books generally these days. But take us through what got you inspired to write this book.
Speaker 8:Yeah. The book is Simplify, How to Do 50% More with 50% Less. It's a system that we used at Axios. So as a journalist who also happens to be an entrepreneur and runs a company, I saw the magic of this system inside our company where we were basically forcing me down to the newest employee to focus only on those things we're actually good at and that you want to do and should do, and then deleting the hell out of all the things we do at work we shouldn't do or that someone could do better or that we could off, offload to AI. Yeah.
Speaker 8:And the results for us internally were magic. We had, like, 70% higher revenue per employee, but more important, employees were happier because they stopped doing all the crap you don't want to do at work, but we do out of habit or we do out of inertia. And so the book walks you through whether you're an entrepreneur, a CEO, or, somebody brand new at a company, how to apply this system to you, and then also to how to think about it even outside of work because we end up wasting at least 25%, a lot of surveys, so a lot more of our time doing stuff we don't want to do and shouldn't do.
Speaker 2:How much of this book is for the c suite, for the founders, for those with agency to go implement change versus, employees who, might be able to still take something away from this but might have more, like, rigorous dictates from above about where they spend their time?
Speaker 8:No. It's very much written for everybody. Obviously, there's chapters for CEOs, for people in the c suite. I think it's super applicable. I think any company in the AI era where every part of every business changes way faster than most people can keep up with need a system like this.
Speaker 8:But it's super applicable because I saw the biggest difference really with our rank and file employees. Just forcing them to do the exercise in the book of what are the three things you need to do in order to crush your job? Yeah. What are the three things you do that you think are stupid? Yeah.
Speaker 8:And almost all the time we could delete those. And what are the three things you think you could offload or have automated by AI? And it's just such a game changer, and you can apply this to anything from how you communicate, to how you structure the company. I don't even know how companies without some form of this system are gonna be able to thrive over the next five to ten years because the velocity of change, especially as you integrate your company with, artificial intelligence, it's so fast, and you're gonna have to have a lean system with people focused only on the work that matters, figuring out what can be rightly outsourced and outsourced, to machines and to AI. Otherwise, you're just gonna be like all these old line companies while these barnacles build up and inertia sets in and the bureaucratic blob takes How
Speaker 2:do you how do you react to this this take that I see sometimes where it's like AI is being forced on people? I've I've seen like I think a few people are like, my boss is forcing me to use AI. Yeah. And and there's this like pushback and I feel like, I don't know, at least among the people that I work with, it's like we make the stuff available, they use it as much as they can, we educate people on where they can use it more. But there's a very judicious line where we don't want you over delegating and degrading the quality of your work, but we want you to get rid of the drudgery that actually can be offloaded reliably.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I think the right way to approach it from the company standpoint is to make these tools available to everybody. Mhmm. Give them some space. Give employees some space to experiment, and and encourage people who actually kinda have an AI brain.
Speaker 8:And I think there's a very specific type of person who thrives in an AI world, figure out new roles for them so you can show to people that there are new roles being created by using the technology. The individual contributor, I would say this, I'd say to my kids, I'd say to anybody who works for me, it's a new power tool, and it might be the most powerful power tool ever given to man. So at least figure out how to use it for the specific job that you have. And if your company finds use cases and you don't really understand how to use it, at least use it passively, much like you would have used a computer or a calculator or, or the Internet to better do your job. And I think that is the safest framework to work.
Speaker 8:Because I think the gulf that you're talking about, which is super real is I think for the vast majority of people right now, they have no idea what the hell we're talking about when we say that this technology is so powerful. They're like, whatever.
Speaker 2:It's kind
Speaker 8:of a nice search engine and occasionally gets things right, occasionally gets them wrong. But then there's the one to 2% of us who use it every day, who are integrating it into our companies, who are studying it, and we see the magic inside of it, we see how transformative it can be and will be. But because you have that big gap, you have all this fear, all this confusion. It's messing up, I think, the images of these companies, and these companies are not great at managing their images, but also the politics of it because in that vacuum is fear, and where you have fear, politicians are good at stepping in and often giving dumb solutions to really complex problems. And I think this is one of those societal type challenges that I really want to see the best, the brightest, the most competent people in the world from all different domains, helping us figure out how we turn this into a force multiplier for all of us individually, but also for the country.
Speaker 8:Otherwise, we might lose to China, or otherwise, we might create something that we don't actually understand how it works, and it might only benefit the few, and then everyone else will suffer. And if people are suffering, they'll be pissed. And if they're pissed, they'll protest, and you'll have political, toxicity and and and political upheaval. And that's not good for democracy, not good for free markets.
Speaker 1:Sorry to interrupt. Is it possible for you to, put your like, stabilize your your phone or down
Speaker 8:here. Yeah. I'm trying to hold it. How's that?
Speaker 1:Even if it yeah. Even if it's pointing up a little bit more just because for anyone that that might get a
Speaker 8:There we go.
Speaker 1:There we go. Perfect. We're back.
Speaker 8:There we go.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Perfect. Much better. John.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How how how do you how do you grapple with the cognitive outsourcing question? Like there was this report I think like a year ago that showed developers paired with AI were like actually less efficient at closing bugs in these open source repos. That was true for like one month and then all of a sudden it became way more efficient to use AI. But there's these Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like little gaps where I feel like if you're a little bit too early, like if you tried to write a book with the help of ChatGPT in 2022, your book was probably way worse because it did have hallucinations. It did have a knowledge cutoff. It did just like, you know, just make wild mistakes and you probably were fighting the AI for a long time. Whereas now, if you are using modern AI systems for research and fact checking, you're probably speeding your process up. But there's this early adopter like there's a friction to being an early adopter.
Speaker 2:And so I'm wondering how you think about coaching employees, coaching executives and founders on the right pace of diffusion. Like I just saw this with Astra and Blender. It can build all these crazy amazing models. They're not pixel perfect and so I would not recommend someone to actually go and build a house that was designed in Blender with GPT six Astra. Like it's not there yet, but it's a really cool demo and it's clearly a glimpse of something in the future.
Speaker 2:Now, if somebody was like, I'm trying to build a personal webpage, I would say absolutely use a coding agent. They're good for that. But how do you how do you deal with the trade offs there?
Speaker 8:It's a really, really, really good question and a very hard one to answer because a little bit depends on what you do and how old you are. I would say if you're in college and your kind of your brain is still forming, you've got to give yourself space to learn, to think, to look across different domains, teach yourself how to do deep concentration, deep thinking. I think once you're in the workforce, I think what's worked for me, at least, has been I use it deeply. I use it a ton. I use it across every aspect of the company and in my personal life mainly because I feel it's important for me to be an AI lab rat so I can explain it to our readers and to my company.
Speaker 8:But I also then I'll dive in and out because I don't wanna become too dependent on interacting with a technology to kinda sharpen my own thinking. You can become quickly dependent on it. And I think there's this great balance. If you can find this balance between your own creativity, your own ideas, your own voice, and then using it to, like, augment and experiment. And then as it gets better and better in the things that you're trying to achieve, once it gets as good as you or better than you, then I feel much better outsourcing it.
Speaker 8:Like, couple good examples are, like, design a couple months ago wasn't that great, but I think with both Claude and the new Chetchy PT, especially the image generator, like some of the designs are just spectacular. They're better than anything I've seen any human do. And so when I now think about designing new products or even designing something for our company, I'm much more likely to turn to AI than I would to turn to a person. I think you you see the same thing across almost every domain. Like, where it's not great, it's like if you're not that creative of a thinker and you're thinking thinly, it might make it a little bit better, but it's still gonna be relatively thin.
Speaker 8:As you guys know, the the magic only gets unlocked when you're persistent with the with using whether it's, whatever you're using, whatever tool you're using, you have to use a lot. You have to give it a lot. You have to give it a lot
Speaker 7:of feedback.
Speaker 8:Yeah. You have to make sure you say this works, that doesn't work. And once you do that and it knows more about you, your style, your weaknesses, your blind spots, your strengths, that's when you really start to see the big unlock. And the problem is not many people have that kind of time to be able to put that type of work in right now, which is why you have this weird messy middle inside businesses. The technology, I think, is better than most people think, and it's way harder to connect into existing systems than people think because of your data pools.
Speaker 8:You're We're
Speaker 2:in this right now where we're doing like this national press cycle around the stuff and like that's an important conversation. But like there are a whole host of people that don't know that like it can build websites and like there there's there's just so much noise to try and punch through if you're an AI company just to be like like we're good at using a computer now or like it works for blender now or like you can can use it to control like I used it to fix my WiFi on my desktop because it can actually access the computer now. And there's all these there's all these new features that they just get tucked behind the empty blank box of like what do you want to do? And a lot of people are like, I don't know. What are you capable of?
Speaker 2:And yes, you can ask it, but very few people actually do. So actually getting those inspirations forward is is is a huge huge challenge. I am interested in one in one other kind of separate topic, which is just I think that when people talk about AI in publishing, in media, specifically with Axios, they go to reporting and writing and instantiating the content. I'm more interested in is AI having an effect on the the top line, the revenue side of the business, the shape of the business, like where the opportunity for growth is less than the downstream, the product?
Speaker 8:Yep. The truth is, as you guys know, like, AI is fine for research and maybe a little bit of fact checking. It's not really making that big of a difference for your average reporter. Yeah. Where you really see the pickup is behind the scenes.
Speaker 8:It's all the things. The product of journalism is journalism. Mhmm. Everything else, you wanna try to automate or you wanna speed up as much as you possibly can.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 8:And that's where we've seen massive massive gains from using AI, and just being able to automate things that were impossible to automate before. I'll give you a good example. Mhmm. I have a young guy who works for me. We put out newsletters.
Speaker 8:It's it's one of our main products. Yeah. I've always wanted to be able to take that newsletter and turn it into a six to eight card show on Instagram or And on one kid in thirty six hours built it, and it looked beautiful. It worked perfectly. It was in the wild on Instagram in six days.
Speaker 8:And now we're able to spread it to different platforms. Well, that wasn't possible. That's new distribution, potentially new revenue. Yeah. And it doesn't at all interrupt the the sanctity, the quality of the content.
Speaker 8:In fact, it expands the potential audience for that. And that's where we see a lot a lot of upside. Doing a lot in local news, so we're able to take all that heavy cost behind the scenes and put it into journalism as opposed to all the building blocks when we're not necessarily we're not an infrastructure company Yeah. And we're not really fundamentally a technology company until recently.
Speaker 1:Let me Have you have you thought much at all about maybe two one to two to three years in the future where you could have agents that could function as effectively as a CEO. Because I think about a lot of the job of the CEO is to like have this sort of global context on the Know know all know hopefully everything there is to know about the business that is sort of like, you know, both public public and private. Right? And then Yeah. People are coming to you with different opportunities and problems and your job is to be a router but also help solve problems, help get people working on the right things.
Speaker 1:And it doesn't feel like we're that far away from like going to your favorite agent and saying like slash goal, like here are our KPIs for the next quarter. And start to Like it it almost feels like easier to automate the CEO than it does to automate like a lot of these sort of like specific functions like web design where the web designer can get like 90% of the way there but can't get a 100% of the way there with the model. But if you're just sort of like routing routing information and and making sure the right people have the right context and sort of moving the ball forward, I do feel like the CEO We're not that far away from like a CEO agent and it might be might be closer than than some of these other roles.
Speaker 2:Than a journalist agent? Maybe. No. No. That's a good way to lead the company.
Speaker 2:It's like, I'm going first.
Speaker 8:Yeah. Maybe. But I I think that a lot of positions are harder to automate fully than people think. Right? Like, almost every example you give, like a CEO, your job is ultimately to hire really good people, have a really good strategy, make really good decisions, and keep people aligned and and feeling good about working for you, making a big difference.
Speaker 8:I don't see how that changes. I see everything you just said is new tools for me, and in fact, it's not the future, it's today. Like, I already use all of those to help with alignment. I already use those to be able to prototype new potential products on my own that I don't have to distract people with, that once I feel good about it, I can then inject into the more formal system. I don't think that that goes away, just like I don't think management goes away.
Speaker 8:Do I think that you'll be able to start a company from scratch now, if if not now relatively soon, and not have to have a lot of heavy costs around finance, operations, marketing, communications, and even some of the things that a CEO does? Absolutely. That's doable today. But I just think that means that more companies will be created. Companies that exist will find new ways to use their people, and maybe you don't have 50 designers.
Speaker 8:You would just have the six designers you have today, but they can do 10 times as much work. And that's certainly been for us, and we use we were early to AI. We've been using it aggressively for a couple years. That's been our experience. We're not getting rid of people.
Speaker 8:We're actually finding new use cases that didn't exist before, and that's what you hope happens. And that by the way, that's the lesson of technology throughout history. You know, it's often very disruptive and it unfolds over time. This one is quicker on every different dimension, but I feel like that's doable, and maybe it's just rationale because I wanna keep my job. I don't wanna be AI ed out, but I'm pretty confident that, like, if I use this technology smartly, stay ahead of the curve, I'm gonna have a much bigger company, a much better job because the tedious crap that I don't want to do, increasingly, I'm able to outsource it to a machine instead of a disgruntled person who doesn't wanna do that crap in the beginning.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's an interesting thing. It's like you could automate 90% of what you do and yet the 10% that that still is in your wheelhouse actually still deserves like a 100% of your time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? So Yeah.
Speaker 8:It's what drives the values.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 8:Yep. Well,
Speaker 2:have a great rest of your day and we'll talk
Speaker 1:to rest you
Speaker 2:of your day. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas.
Speaker 2:Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Our next guest is the president and CEO of Malibu Boats. We have Steve Menneto with us in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBPN UltraDome. Steve, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5:Doing great. Good afternoon, guys. Good afternoon.
Speaker 1:Great to have you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Robert.
Speaker 1:It's a nice palate cleanser for us.
Speaker 2:We're very
Speaker 1:excited about a lot of AI.
Speaker 2:It's a interesting business.
Speaker 1:But Yes. We're excited to talk about your business.
Speaker 2:I would love to just kick it off with a little bit of introduction for the audience on the company, the shape of the company, the important business lines, and kind of set the table for us on on even just what the day to day looks like for you.
Speaker 5:Sure. Malibu Boats Inc. Is a collection of nine brands. So we have Malibu and Axis in the towboat category, we have Colbert in the runabout category, then we have Pursuit, Saksdore which is our new acquisition just acquired in March in Finland and Poland. We have the MBG brands which is Kovia, Pathfinder, Hughes and Maverick.
Speaker 5:So nine different boat companies with all different you know, ability to get to the water and and really have fun with whatever you're doing. If it's technical fish to run about surf to surfing to exploring venture day boats, we we offer all of them.
Speaker 2:And what is the scale of the business? How many employees? You you like, how how big is the footprint of the company at this point?
Speaker 5:Yeah. We have we have manufacturing in The US predominantly in Tennessee, Kansas, and Florida. We have about 3,000 people in the company, you know, a little bit under $1,000,000,000 in revenue. And and now, like I said, we have manufacturing in Elk, Poland and Larsmo, Finland. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So as we expand our reach overseas.
Speaker 2:And how you when you're thinking about mergers and acquisitions, are you primarily focused on portfolio expansion serving different pieces of the market, integration and efficiencies that can be gained across the portfolio, both? What sticks out to you when you're adding a new brand to the portfolio?
Speaker 5:Yes. Our overall strategy, we do look at boat building, how do we continue. We've been boat building in some of our brands for over sixty years. And so we look at what else can we add to that. So we look at new boats, else what other brands can we get.
Speaker 5:We look at parts and accessories, we look at technology and then services. So we are highly vertically integrated. We do our own trailers, engines, flooring, towers, wiring harnesses. We look for those opportunities that can make us more efficient and offer a better product for our consumers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what what is driving the market overall right now? Obviously, interest rates are high. Energy prices are are increasing. Does that move the market in the short term?
Speaker 2:Are there other sort of secular factors that you track? What what either keeps you up at night or gives you cause for optimism in the long term?
Speaker 5:Well, it's a split world like you've heard the the saying of the K economy.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 5:We are seeing that in spades. So when you think about a payment buyer, someone who's gonna take a payment out on a boat Mhmm. You know, that that family is under stress. Mhmm. You know, that we have we've seen that buyer go to the sidelines now and they're kind of waiting out for things What to get we have seen though is the consumers that are still in the market want bigger, more feature rich boats.
Speaker 5:So we're starting to see average sales price go up but people are buying bigger boats, like I said, more tech on their boats and they're enjoying the trade up kind of effect. So we're seeing two customers split and we're we're trying to find new ways to help that payment buyer out to get into the market.
Speaker 2:Sure. What features drive the market most for that higher end buyer these days?
Speaker 5:The the higher end buyer is length and and beam width, so there's more comfort out in a bigger water.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 5:Then you start getting into technology. So it's easier to captain the boat. So is it it's it's more fun for the family. It's easier to drive the boat safely and docking and so forth. So the technology goes and also into experiences.
Speaker 5:You're seeing some of the b roll running right now is, you know, we have tech on our boat where you can switch surf to surf, know, have a new person surf by a push of a button, the boat reconfigures itself for that person. And then the next person jumps in, you just hit a button. And then it's like next person's up, boats, you know, changes itself, and the next person serves, you know, the way they wanna serve. So Yeah. You know, that's kind of technology leads to more fun, more safety.
Speaker 2:What is your view on the electrification of boats? We obviously saw a massive success with Tesla in automotive. The boating community's been slower to adopt electric boats. We've talked to some folks who have been working on it. Do you have a view on what the future of propulsion systems looks likes looks like on the water?
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 5:yeah. I think propulsion systems are gonna evolve. Right? They they always do. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And I think electric and you know, I've had some experience in electric vehicles and so forth. There is an early adopter that gets to them. But but before you get to kind of the the mainstream sales, you got to solve some problems, So weight, electricity that's in the charge. So think about if I'm going out for the day on a lake and I know I'm going to be relatively close area where I can get back to shore and a dock, sounds like electric may have a fit. If I'm going out in the salt water, I'm out into the ocean or so forth, You know, a little bit more work needs to be done in electric to be able to get the confidence up that I can go and then come back in the same day.
Speaker 5:Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. What are the different, like, autonomy tiers? Like, and and do is there a section of the market that cares about fully autonomous boating? Like, do they wanna be able to just, you know, press a point hit a point on the map and and get there and and sit back? And and how how much how solvable is that relative to automotive which obviously has so many more variables and and challenges in some ways.
Speaker 5:Yeah. And some of the technology is is there as you just explained it is. We do have waypoints, daypoints and so forth technology already on boats. You can put in coordinates, hit a button and the boat can cap itself to that waypoint and you know kind of an auto drive situation. But if it's fully autonomous you know we're a little bit you know further out on that where you know it it has the total package where you can just sit back and let it drive itself you know, from docked, you know, take your tour and then come back to the dock.
Speaker 5:You know, there's we have some technology that does that, but to do that with confidence, we're still a lot of the a lot of the marine companies are still working on that.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. We've had a bunch of bunch of companies on the show that are much early, you know, super early stage companies, Seed and and Series A, that are focused on defense and and military applications of of a lot of the same technologies that you work with. It would that ever be would that ever be a focus for Malibu or are you guys pretty much committed to Consumer. Consumer and and recreational?
Speaker 5:No. As you think about opportunities in building, know, drone boats and we're great at building boats. So there's opportunities for us to support other vendors in that endeavor. Those are opportunities that we're always looking towards and working through currently to see what, you know, we can do as as far as doing our part in in the defense opportunities that that are out there on the unmanned surface vehicles, you know, for for for marine.
Speaker 2:I have a couple more questions. In terms of the buyer, you obviously, you make the boats in America predominantly, obviously, of international operations now through the acquisition. But how much of buying is concentrated The United States? How global is the distribution dealership network and actual sales?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So when you look at our company prior to the acquisition, we did about less than 5% of our revenue internationally. So we are predominantly a North American company and we source most of our products or our supply chain is U. S. Based manufacturing in The U.
Speaker 5:S. So that's been really helpful for us. As we took our first international acquisition, now it opens up a whole new opportunity in geography as well as segments and we're in the midst of that integration and leveraging those opportunities to expand our dealer network across the world for our current boats that we have, the Malibu Pursuit, Cobalt boats, as well as bringing our Saxdor manufacturing to The States. So we're in the midst of that integration right now.
Speaker 2:Got it. What what does that mean for hiring? How difficult is it to hire for all the different roles? I mean, it seems like with the level of vertical integration you have, you need people with specialties and wire harnessing, electricians, all sorts of different all all sorts of different professional skills and roles. What does the hiring pipeline look for you look like for you?
Speaker 2:And is it particularly weak right now? Is it particularly strong right now? What is hiring looking like?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Hiring is is kinda down middle of the road. To your point, we can get labor. We have good labor sheds around our manufacturing facilities. But as you start to think about building boats, it it is a craftsmanship type of thing.
Speaker 5:So when you think about gel coat, right, and and, you know, all the different plastics that go into the boat, woodworking, and we make our own furniture inside of our boat. We make our own cabinetry inside of our boats. So we are looking for skilled labor all the time. So it's incumbent upon us to train. We have good training programs to do that.
Speaker 5:We have academies where we're helping the industry and the industry helps us through our different industry associations to get those skilled workers either into what we do or to actually train them up to get to those tougher jobs that we have, the more skilled labor that we have in cabinetry and and gel coat and and lamination and so forth.
Speaker 2:What does the buyer journey typically look like these days? Is are people do they start with a Google search? Is is there is there online funnels? Or or are are there other points in the customer journey that are particularly critical in this industry?
Speaker 5:Think about yeah. The journey is is is is about a two hundred day to two hundred fifty day purchase journey on average because there's a lot of research that goes on. So it starts out on digital, but also don't underestimate what they see on the lake, on the river, on
Speaker 2:the ocean
Speaker 5:and they start looking at other boats, they start taking it in and forming an opinion, Then it's a digital search, and then it gets to the dealer. Then there's sea trials. Right? And then they kinda go through. Boat shows play a big part in that research as well.
Speaker 5:Okay. You know, we're just starting the boat show season here. This upcoming weekend, we'll be in Newport, Rhode Island. We're just in Lanc City. You know, around Halloween, we'll have the one of the bigger shows, Fort Lauderdale Boat Show.
Speaker 5:A lot of people come to those shows to start their investigation or to keep building on confidence around what boat are they targeting, where do they what do they wanna buy. And so there's a lot of research that goes into it, but it all starts usually digitally. And then what do they see their friends have or what their what's on their waterways that kinda starts to drive an opinion informing. And then of course, you get social media that drives a lot those as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm sure I'll wait
Speaker 1:for John to get one and then I'll get a bigger one.
Speaker 2:I'm sure
Speaker 1:that helps
Speaker 4:a lot.
Speaker 1:What's going on you so you guys don't have like a a sort of racing focus brand. I imagine that's a much smaller market than some of these other markets. How I just have a sort of random question. You're the first recreational boating expert we've had on the show Mhmm. Ever.
Speaker 1:So you're the guy to ask. But every time I see a a video of a cigarette boat, it ends up, you know, flipping around like this and going on some basically ends up flying. I think that's because those videos just tend to go really viral. I'm sure they normally can stay on the water. How how dangerous is that?
Speaker 1:How popular is it? Is it is it less popular than it than it was historically or or is it or is it rising? I'm I'm just very curious.
Speaker 5:You know, I have to first put a disclaimer. I don't race and so forth. So I think there's still the same popularity around racing. It's all racing where I came from my previous career, motorcycle racing and in off road racing. It's a small, small niche.
Speaker 5:Like any type of racing, you get over your ski tips, know, you're going a little too fast, you get the air underneath, it starts to flip out, so you wanna make sure you're safe. It's a small part of the industry. You're right, we don't have racing in our portfolio, we have fishing. So when you think about fishing, bay fishing, ocean big ocean fishing, lakes, and so on, you know, there is, you know, there is as much competition in fishing as there is just in regular boat racing, and we participate in that. Yeah.
Speaker 5:And then we actually from our Malibu, we have, still water skiing competitions. We're the official sponsor of WSIA. So we do that. So there's other forms of competition that we we play in.
Speaker 2:That's fun.
Speaker 1:What's the biggest fish you've ever caught?
Speaker 5:Me? No. I'm sorry. I'm not I'm still in the little guppy stuff. I haven't had anybody, you know, any any big fish.
Speaker 1:That's that's fair. I mean, there's there's plenty of time.
Speaker 5:There's a lot of time.
Speaker 1:We actually we actually asked that
Speaker 2:to a lot our guests. There was a week where we asked that to like every guest and it was like mostly tech CEOs and the answers were all over the place. But we appreciate you humoring us. But thanks so much for coming on.
Speaker 1:This has been really insightful. Learned a lot. Educating us on the market. Fascinating and and yeah. Love love the brands and and and all the products.
Speaker 1:I hope to I hope to experience all of your products over the course of my life.
Speaker 2:I need a recommendation. Lake Arrowhead. That's the dream Yeah.
Speaker 1:John's a big lake guy. I'm more of a foreign ocean guy.
Speaker 2:Family I went with had a Boston Whaler, but I'll have to give you a call when I make a move.
Speaker 5:Okay. We're we're always here. Thanks for having me guys. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great great to meet you, Steve.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Get a Cisco router, put it on your Malibu boat.
Speaker 2:Up next, we have the cofounder and CEO of Jack and Jill, AI assisted hiring. We have Matthew Wilson joining us. Matthew, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 9:Hey, guys. Nice to be here. Yeah. Having a fun time over here.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Did you catch any of the last interview?
Speaker 2:No. I don't think they can be. I had.
Speaker 4:No. Just the last the
Speaker 9:last five seconds or so.
Speaker 1:Oh, great. We were talking about boats.
Speaker 2:What's the biggest fish you've ever caught? Canned fish. What's the biggest fish you've
Speaker 9:Probably about this being maybe a sardine. Okay.
Speaker 2:Little small.
Speaker 1:Oh, there you go. That's better than nothing.
Speaker 2:Feel like you gotta try to catch a fish that small. You gotta be going into a specific lake. I feel like, you you know, by default you would you would expect just the median fish to be the one that you catch, but you're going for minnows precision precision.
Speaker 1:Much like with hiring where you don't want to just get the average. You don't want to just The get the right Hire. Employee job. Pure precision.
Speaker 2:Precision. But, yes. Anyway, introduce yourself and the company, please.
Speaker 9:Sure. So I'm Matt Wilson. I am one of the cofounders and the CEO of Jack and Jill.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 9:And at Jack and Jill, we built we built two different AI agents, an agent called Jack that works for professionals and helps them find their dream job, and an agent called Jill that works for companies helping them find amazing amazing people to hire. And together, we operate actually the largest agentic social network in the world with close to half a million people across San Francisco, New York, and London. Yeah. Having agents helping them find their dream job, representing them like a Hollywood agent would represent a movie star by doing that, bringing that that that service to every single person in the world.
Speaker 2:Hollywood agent. I'm seeing commissions and fees and percentages, not necessarily SaaS revenue. What's the business model?
Speaker 3:Yeah. We we we operate a a couple
Speaker 9:of different business models. So we operate on a success fee model. Yeah. It's primarily what we're operating on today. We also have some more traditional kind of SaaS based like retainer based style as well.
Speaker 9:Whichever model you're on, so it's free to get started and you can go get started for free on the company side. And the consumer side is totally free, so the the companies are those that pay on the network.
Speaker 1:How difficult this? How on on the company side, I would say great great talent that is sort of legible to the outside world has always had insane inbound. What is the key to actually getting someone to respond? Right? Because Yeah.
Speaker 1:Mean I get like, you know, I I I get tricked by like AI sales emails where they're pulling, you know, I I see like the subject line or whatever and I see this top of it and it's like some very specific detail and I'm sure Your like
Speaker 2:podcast cohost has just passed away. Do you want to be I think that's didn't necessarily That's
Speaker 9:spot on observation. Right? Like, good good people have always had lots of inbound. Great companies kept lots of inbound. And AI is just like it's happened with outbound sales, AI is decreasing the cost of outbound on both sides.
Speaker 9:So what we're seeing in the market is the best people are just getting inundated with demand from recruiters in a particularly intense hiring environment like you see in tech at the moment. And that's I think we're in the very early innings of that happening. I think over the next year, the next eighteen months, that's just going to ramp up and up and up as it becomes cheaper, cheaper, and easier, and easier to run outbound recruitment at scale. And likewise, a company's perspective, they're getting huge volumes of applicants for every role that they put out there. And we're seeing companies not even put roles off because they don't want to deal with this kind of avalanche of AI generated applications that they're getting through.
Speaker 9:So what our perspective on that is, okay, well, we need to arm both sides with an agent that is able to represent them. And then these agents can then go and speak to each other and your agent can consider every single job in the world for you. And maybe you're only passively looking, but it can be continuing in the background monitoring every day and be easing back and forth with the agents of all the companies that are hiring until you spot this kind of perfect neutral fit where there's a really interesting opportunity that really fits well with what somebody is looking for. So what we've built is this incredibly high signal to noise way of kind of escaping out of this like arms race that you see with AR generated outbound on both directions.
Speaker 1:What's going on in the traditional recruiting market? How are how are traditional recruiters adopt you know, adopting AI? I imagine imagine it's such a crazy hiring market right now, specifically in the private markets where there's just so much capital that's flown in and every company seemingly has a $100,000,000 on the balance sheet and can be making these sort of So it feels like even if even if there's some disruption to the traditional recruiter model, they're probably still doing well. But how are they adopting AI? I'm just sort of curious because I'm sure you end You up some of them probably use
Speaker 9:see a lot of the innovation that's been happening over the last two years and it's kind of first generation of AI tools in recruitment, whether that's on the candidate on the professional side or whether that's on the company side is really about saying, how do we identify the opportunities and then how do I go and attack those opportunities. So it's just like you might have the first generation of AI tools in sales was AI SDRs, we're to go and map the TAM and we're to spam the TAM, right? I mean, and that was that first generation. And you're seeing that happen on both sides at the moment where the AI tools built for recruiters, let's identify who could be a fit for this role and let's outreach to them with some AI generated messaging. We're seeing the same on the candidate side.
Speaker 9:Let's have AI apply for a thousand jobs for me in one day. And that's leading to this like cacophony of noise that is being kind of felt on both sides. I think the only real solution to that, everybody's acting rationally in that world. The only real solution to that is to have agents actually managing this connection up where you've got this incredibly the visibility to offer these incredibly high signal connections that are then outside of this this this world of outbound.
Speaker 2:Do you have a feel for how big AI adoption is in this role just with, like, stock tools? I'm thinking about, like, an individual uses Instinct or Muse or Cloud Code or Codex to, like, go and spam and apply for a bunch of jobs. Doesn't seem super effective, but it's actually probably happening at some level. And then on the hiring side, there's probably some developer who walked over to the hiring team and was like, oh, you should use this to write some software that will let you parse through all of these and rank your applications. What's like the status quo?
Speaker 9:Yeah. I mean, I think we're still in the early days, right? There's definitely adoption. The problem is if you get adoption amongst a small group of people, well, they can do this at enormous scale, you're It seeing
Speaker 2:creates a bunch of spam.
Speaker 9:And volumes kind of go up and up and up. So you've seen on the average role getting posted in 2026 is getting more than double the number of applications that it got in the previous year. And that's primarily been driven by the increasing barrier to actually apply for something, which is then causing problems on the company side as they're trying to kind of figure out how to get signal in noise of those applications. Like, it's the same thing happening on the candidate side.
Speaker 1:How far are we from, you know, two people, let's say a candidate and an employer talking and saying, yeah, seems like we're we have a good fit here, and then them leaving it up to the agents to actually negotiate the final comp package? Because it's always a sort of a awkward part where, you know, you're like, hey, let's do this. And then and then you got to actually iron out the details. It feels like maybe that that's something wrong. The
Speaker 9:I mean, we with Jack, Jack is able to help you with comp benchmarking and help you practice those conversations before you go into them as a professional. So we've kind of built this end to end support throughout whether you're in kind of career discovery mode, job discovery mode, all the way through to actually negotiating your offer. We brought the support there for people. I think I could see that happening in the future that you just connect up the two agents and they go back and forth and negotiate. But I think for me, I think the most impactful thing you can do in recruitment is actually at the top of the funnel is saying, for an individual, you can brief an agent that can then genuinely survey every single possible opportunity on earth for you and monitor the market continuously in the background every day and then connect you up with the right people and this very small number of correct people that you can then go and have these human level conversations when you're actually evaluating, is this somebody I want to work for?
Speaker 9:Is this a company I want to go for?
Speaker 2:Tell us how
Speaker 3:much you
Speaker 2:raised. I want to hit the gong.
Speaker 9:Sure. Yeah. We raised a $40,000,000. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Who who came in to the round?
Speaker 9:Yeah. So S3 Capital led the rounds, and we had Krianon who led our $20,000,000 seed round last year. They doubled down. Drona Capital and then a whole bunch of others
Speaker 2:as well. Fantastic. Well Awesome. Congratulations. Great to meet you, man.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for hopping on the show. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Talk soon.
Speaker 2:Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.
Speaker 1:Ops next.
Speaker 2:Is already here. Rune.
Speaker 1:You're not going believe it. Another $40,000,000 series day. 40,000,000 number of the day.
Speaker 2:Well, welcome to the show room. Welcome back. How are
Speaker 4:you doing?
Speaker 2:What's happening? Thanks so much for hopping on.
Speaker 7:I'm doing great. Good to see you guys.
Speaker 2:Good to see you too. Congratulations your you've ever caught. Hit the drum for the $40,000,000 series. Did it, but then
Speaker 1:The team Julie wants to know what's the biggest fish you've ever caught?
Speaker 7:I I've only ever caught a little trout, I think. I'm Got it. I'm a vegetarian. I put it back out right away. Oh, okay.
Speaker 7:I'm not a huge man.
Speaker 1:Good man. Just in it for the sport. The sport. Okay.
Speaker 7:There you go. Exactly. I'm just on the hunt.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great to great to have you back on the show. What's what's new in your world?
Speaker 7:Well, kind of the whole this weekend blew everything up. It seems like everyone is Dario, Sam, Milan, and I are all talking about how do we build trust in the models before we deploy them, how do we build frontier auditing. That's
Speaker 2:top of
Speaker 7:mind for us. That's that's exactly what we're working on. So we should talk a little bit about that, and that comes to the back of us raising our $40,000,000 today. So we now have the capital to go and make a dent in this problem. It's it feels like that is now the bottleneck progress.
Speaker 7:Security becomes the bottleneck for progress. And so it needs to get solved urgently.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So talk about how how you guys fit into the solution. Obviously, the solution is gonna require a bunch of parties to to to coordinate. But what's what's been your approach so far, and what do you focus on?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So our approach, we both built standards, audits, and insurance for Frontier AI systems. The way we think about this problem is that there needs to be willingness for there needs to be some demand for the audits. There needs to be the capacity for the audits, and there needs to be good incentives that these auditors are doing a good job. Demand for these audits, done, taken care of.
Speaker 7:Everyone your whole 23 will tell you that this is urgently needed now. Now the the short the the short term bottleneck is on capacity of world class auditors who both get frontier AI systems and know what an audit look like. So we need to scale it up quickly. We will do some of that, but there's also a lot of infrastructure to be built for the community. And then lastly, incentives matter a lot.
Speaker 7:So the whole thing is to build trust here. You need to trust the people who are putting out the audit reports.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 7:And that's where we think insurance plays a really important role where you wanna shift from this world where labs pick their own auditors. They're obviously going to pick someone to grade their homework. It's going be very lenient. They're to pick their own dog to grade their homework. So who who are the people who have good incentives to say the truth about this?
Speaker 7:And that tends to be the insurance industry because they're on the hook if they get it wrong. So they really want to know what the risks are.
Speaker 2:I saw a Naval post something about the, like, liability being a key discussion point here. I'll pull up the post. He said he said that strong liability enforcement could be helpful in the AI debate. If your agent swarm goes rogue, you're liable. If your weekly protected model gets jailbroken, you're liable.
Speaker 2:If you serve a weekly protected open source model, you're liable. How did you how do you interpret that? How close are we to that actually being the reality? Because I think most people would look at that and be like, yeah, that makes sense. That's the way it should be.
Speaker 2:Is it not that way? Should we change something? What's going on? Give me more context on what is talking about there.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So, at the highest level, saying we have all these existing tools Yeah. That we put to use here. It's already a criminal act to kill lots of people. Won't won't that apply here?
Speaker 7:Yep. I think there's a lot of wisdom in that, but that is the system that we want here because that is what both courts will build on, is what insurance builds on. So liability is a foundational concept. It's extremely important. There's a couple of caveats to this.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. First of all, the way AI shows up today doesn't fit neatly into liability categories today. So for example, today's cyber laws rely on human intent to hack something. In the case of Hugging Face, there's no human intent. Oh, interesting.
Speaker 7:And so all of a sudden, it becomes a gray area.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:My hunch is that the courts would still have found that OpenAI is in fact liable for the Hugging Face and would be free to pay them. But there's a bunch of open questions where AI kind of breaks the framework, so we need to update some of these legal frameworks.
Speaker 2:Yep. And
Speaker 7:then secondly, liability only works up until the cap of the balance sheets of the people who can be liable. So if OpenAI were to IPO at a couple trillion dollars, well, that's just the absolute cap where it can be covered. And some people, at least, are saying that some of the risks here are bigger. How do you cover risks that are bigger than the balance sheets? That's traditionally what insurance does, like, catastrophic risk insurance.
Speaker 2:Is there what what is the best example that you'd pull from? Like, is there another industry where the where the industry as a whole carries insurance in excess of their balance sheet? Is this common? Should I be looking at, like, housing insurance, mortgage insurance, the the car industry, the nuclear industry? I don't I don't even know.
Speaker 7:Yeah. I think there there are many places you can pull from. Nuclear is kind of easy to understand. So to there a nuclear insurance is mandatory. Basically, the government said, we guys need you to build nuclear power plants.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:But in return, you better carry insurance because when something goes wrong, we don't wanna pick up the bill. Yeah. And, so what they do, they actually all the the nuclear power plant operators have a mutual insurance where they cover each other's asses
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 7:Which then changes the incentives. Now they want to be each other's policemen. They want to come and audit each other to say, are you doing a good job? I'm actually on the hook for you. And I think there's there's a lot to to learn from that.
Speaker 7:Though we would have to get it I think when you look at nuclear role, they went too hard on regulation after after a big incident, which means that we don't have nuclear energy today.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:So we have to find a way to let the market operate
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:In this way while still being extremely mindful that China is racing ahead. This is not about slowing it down. This is about getting the confidence to to move forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how is how is the the legacy how are legacy insurance players thinking about pricing this risk? There's so many there's so many unknowns in many ways. When you think about a nuclear power plant depending on where it is, you can sort of think about a downside scenario and then maybe add up all the the the property values in nearby area and potential damages if there were any type of adverse event. Whereas I think with with AI, it's like right now very much operating in the digital world.
Speaker 1:So there's there's hacking risk. There's risk of, you know, over the weekend it was risk that a an agent swarm could take down the entire Internet. Right? And it's sort of very unclear what the economic I mean, you can make guesses on what the economic cost of that would be, but it almost seems like in that situation such a large number, you know, if you took down the Internet for for a day, what would that cost the global economy? It's like probably trillion
Speaker 7:Big number.
Speaker 1:Big big big big number that's sort of hard to underwrite. So is is there enough clarity yet to actually get into this game of of of ensuring this kind of risk?
Speaker 7:Yeah. The A couple of points are true. One, first of all, there's already someone underwriting this. So when OpenAI runs a training round that hacks hacking face, they're, to some extent, already liable, so they are making an implicit risk calculation. It's a hard one to make, but it's already being made.
Speaker 7:Mhmm. The insurance industry has refined a bunch of tools over the past decades and centuries for how to do this. So quantitative risk catastrophic catastrophic risk models are there's a whole discipline related to this and how do you deal with the fact that there are very few events, how do you deal with all the uncertainty. There's a bunch of tooling you can pull from. You won't get super precise answers just like you wouldn't for the very first nuclear power plant.
Speaker 7:That's another reason why you wanna use the existing labs' own balance sheets because they already have exposure. It's gonna it's gonna take a while until AIG would like to put it up $10,000,000,000,000 here, but the labs already have their full market cap on the on the line. Right. So can you take that and put that into an insurer so you get the benefits of a formal watchdog who has an incentive to bring the risk down and tell the truth about what what's actually going on and have the quantitative tools? But you don't have to stand up $10,000,000,000,000 of balance sheet overnight.
Speaker 7:So I think that's the most promising way to get started in the spirit of how nuclear is is kind of governed by the market today.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm so glad that you have a fresh funding round to work on this. It seems so important. It seems important that there's competition in this category, that there's lots of people working on it, attacking it from different angles.
Speaker 1:I like the commercial approach to AI safety too. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the the incentives will align and and everyone will, yeah, work work on this. I'm very excited for it. So, yeah, keep us posted as new announcements come from the firm and good luck. It's a busy time.
Speaker 7:Thank you.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you
Speaker 7:See you guys.
Speaker 2:Have a Let good me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. And our next guest is live with us here in the TBPN at Ultradome. We have Tyler Ball from Activision.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show. Thank you Here so we go.
Speaker 4:Some more swag out there when you get
Speaker 1:done. Dream dream hat.
Speaker 2:This is this is not the gift I wanted. I wanted to be able to play Modern Warfare four tonight because I played the The beta. The beta, got completely addicted, then I feel like you pulled it from my grasp.
Speaker 4:Well, we might be
Speaker 2:able to hook you up.
Speaker 4:I will do many. Make sure to get you some code. Was amazing. Important, we should get you out to Infinity Ward out. Oh, amazing.
Speaker 4:Get the whole team
Speaker 2:out here. Thank you for the hat off. Yeah. But I am I am super excited for October 23. I spent a whole weekend.
Speaker 2:I got a new gaming PC for it. I was lying. Nice. And no joke. I'm obsessed with this game.
Speaker 2:It's great.
Speaker 4:That's exciting.
Speaker 1:You're you're kind of you could be part of the problem here. John John John is John's on the record for having a historical gaming addiction.
Speaker 2:It's my advice.
Speaker 1:And and, yeah, MW form could could be enough to Yeah. Make it rear its head.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's really, really good.
Speaker 4:We're excited that you're excited. Yeah. So that's why I'm here. Yeah. I just wanted to, you know, stop by.
Speaker 4:I'm a big fan. Yeah. I I can't leave without getting flash bangs. I'm There we That's all That's that's all I came here for is
Speaker 1:to make
Speaker 4:sure I get that in there.
Speaker 2:Maybe let's start with a little bit of introduction on yourself Yeah. Your role, your journey to Activision, what your day to day looks like. And then I want to go into sort of the story that you tell around Call of Duty, around Modern Warfare. Like what what is the journey that got us here today? So let but let's start with with a little bit of your history.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I'm I'm literally a 14 year old kid living my dream. So like I started in music. Was a DJ. I was in doing hip hop in New York City on the radio.
Speaker 4:Worked at Sony Music as an intern. I worked at Conan O'Brien and stuff. Right? The old late night with Conan O'Brien. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Was kind of it was like a page. And then I went into like sneakers.
Speaker 2:I was
Speaker 4:a sneaker head. I worked at Reebok and Adidas and part of that relationship. Yeah. And then Google. So, I went over to Google for six years.
Speaker 4:I worked on the apps business working on search and maps and Google Assistant and all those products. And then Jeffrey Katzenberg called to come work on Quibi down here in LA. RIP. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. And Two one has been more vindicated this year than the Quibi team because you look at the App Store charts, only new apps are like new forms of gambling and and and like short form dramas basically.
Speaker 4:Exactly. Like the novellas and And
Speaker 1:every single every single every single day there's like a new one too. Like these things just keep popping up.
Speaker 4:I I still believe in the product. It was just the wrong time. Right? Like we literally launched right when COVID was breaking out and and, you know, some of the some of the crazy shows that that were in development that never reached, you know, the mains or never was actually released were like really exciting. So and then after it shut down, the the shows went on to win Emmys and stuff.
Speaker 4:Right? I know the Emmys were last night and stuff. It was quality content Yeah. But just really really poor timing. And so when Quibi went under, you know, I had this opportunity to work on my favorite video game, something that I've been playing for the last twenty years.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And join on the marketing side for Call of Duty. So I've been doing this for about six years and really excited to bring MWV forward to the market this year.
Speaker 2:Twenty years ago.
Speaker 3:Locket clearing order.
Speaker 2:Is that the first Call of Duty? Is that the original Call of Duty? Was that your first Call of Duty?
Speaker 4:No. You know, I I didn't play the original PC game. Right? Yeah. But I played probably Call of Duty four Modern Warfare.
Speaker 4:Right? And so Xbox three sixty and the whole
Speaker 2:entire team here, everyone's played Call of Duty. Everyone has a different entry point. There's like someone who's like, oh, Black Ops is the best. That's the one I got started. So Modern Warfare two.
Speaker 2:It it goes through everything.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Mean I mean like but you gotta think it's twenty four years or 24 games that that have been created. And then if you add Warzone, our free to play game Yeah. Which is massive, that's 25. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And and then we have a mobile game with Call of Mobile. Yeah. Billion downloads.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 4:And so I think people forget Yeah. The mobile because it's bigger, you know, in Southeast Asia or in China and other places in developing markets. But it's massive game really successful. And so, yeah.
Speaker 2:Are those bolt on handheld devices that modify the are those big on the mobile game? Are are those are those actually seeing adoption? I don't see them out in the world that often but it it felt like a category when
Speaker 4:it Yeah. Mean, like, you know, know the guys over at Backbone and I think like it's it's a really great product. Yeah. But I you know, for someone that doesn't play on mobile. Right?
Speaker 4:Like, and so it's like usually even seen like thumb thumb slips and things like that. People put like these gloves on their hands to be be able to play. Yeah. So for someone like me who's more casual, yeah, I think Backbone would actually help out so
Speaker 2:I can
Speaker 4:play on mobile and and kinda get that, you know, controller feel. Yeah. But I think, you know, I don't know how big the, know, the market is for them and and then there's been a lot of kind of competition in that
Speaker 2:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 1:How do you think Duo will impact, the mobile gaming market at least in The US? Interesting.
Speaker 4:I'm still wait and see. Right? I mean, I'm the biggest Apple fanboy. Like, I had I was the first person in Boston to get an iPad and stuff. Right?
Speaker 4:Like I waited online or my wife waited online and you know that's when you know you have a good
Speaker 1:That's a
Speaker 4:that's great.
Speaker 1:First guy in Boston with an iPad.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Did you do a backflip with it? Flip. You missed.
Speaker 4:And I've, you know, I've I've every single Apple device I've had and, you know, the day it came out and stuff and do I'm kind of looking going, is it gonna fit and how's it gonna how am I gonna play on it and stuff and so I I can't really figure out It's
Speaker 2:a pretty good aspect ratio
Speaker 3:At a whole.
Speaker 2:Gaming Yeah. See it working pretty well.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Totally. I mean, I've seen some of the the videos on it and it looks amazing. But, you know, until I have it in
Speaker 1:my hands. Are foldable phones popular with mobile gamers
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:In other markets where foldable phones are popular?
Speaker 2:That I know. Sure.
Speaker 1:Sure. Yeah. So that that's that's where we'd want
Speaker 2:to look. So, yeah. I mean, obviously, pretty complex product portfolio even just within Call of Duty because you have Warzone Yeah. Mobile, you have all these things. What are the actual brand tenets, the marketing messages that you think are important to never stray from?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, on the marketing side, we always talk about stature, swagger and scale. Okay. Right? So stature is like, how do I do something that only Call of Duty can do?
Speaker 4:Right? So when we go to market, we want to be across the street from everybody else. Right? We don't want to be in the same building, you know. And then I think when we think about swagger, you know, when we look at creative or we think about a partnership, we're thinking about, okay, does it have swagger?
Speaker 4:Right? Is it cool? Is it interesting?
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And how are we innovating in that space? Yeah. And then we think about scale. Right? How do I reach as many people as possible?
Speaker 4:Right? Yeah. Because I'm not just talking to a niche gaming audience. You got a 100,000,000 people playing, you know, our free to play game.
Speaker 2:You got
Speaker 4:a billion players, you know, into our mobile game. And so so you really want to think about, okay, how do I reach? So when we have an idea or someone's pitching me something, I go, does it check these three boxes? Green light. Go all the way.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Vast and Martin collab.
Speaker 4:The Vast and Martin collab with the Dreadnought. Right? And so I think that was like when that came to us, we're like, wow, does this have stature? Yeah. This is really cool.
Speaker 4:Yep. And stuff. Right? This stands out. Yes.
Speaker 4:So you go, okay, wow. Has it got swagger? I go, yeah. And then can we scale it? Can we tell a story about it?
Speaker 4:Can we so putting it in the game, not everybody can get an Aston Martin but you can play it in the game. You can drive it there and so that gives you the scale. Yeah. And that was a really exciting partnership because our design teams worked with their design teams Yeah. To design what the car actually looks like and stuff.
Speaker 4:And so one example of that is like the window.
Speaker 1:Not so sad that
Speaker 2:I want a real one.
Speaker 1:We sit at scale.
Speaker 4:Well, hey, who knows?
Speaker 2:I mean
Speaker 1:feel like they're I I know that I I don't know if it's they're gonna sell 2,000 of those cars but they at least in LA they could sell a 100.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, you know, one thing was like the windows originally were too small and then our our design team looked at it and
Speaker 2:go, well, you gotta be able
Speaker 4:to hang out a window Oh. With a gun. Right? So, like, you gotta be able to get your body outside of it and stuff. And so, all of those little things when they were going back and forth with the studio team and and the design team at SMR and they made something that was really special.
Speaker 4:So, that's kind of how
Speaker 2:we think about it. But I
Speaker 4:think with this game in particular Mhmm. You know, we really wanted to get back to our roots, be authentic Mhmm. Grounded Mhmm. Cinematic and and have some edge. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So this whole storyline of North Korea invading South Korea
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Very topical right now Yeah. And what's going on in the world. And, you know, I think that that grittiness of showing these conscripts, you know, that are in South Korea, that's that's a real thing. Right? Where, you know, BTS just were conscripts and stuff.
Speaker 4:Right? Right? They had to go serve in Yeah. The
Speaker 1:I had in a in college who just had to pause college and go back
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:To serve.
Speaker 4:And telling that Zero to Hero story is really really cool. Right? You know, and I think that's what people wanted from us. And in addition to that, we got Task Force one for one with Price and Ghost and all the characters love. And that's a separate story line.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And so how those two things come together is gonna be really cool for people to
Speaker 1:How how have parental views on quote unquote violent video games evolved? Because I like, growing up, my parents were very wary of of Call of Duty. But of course, I found a way to convince them that I was gonna play and I was And some of my most cherished memories with my friends growing up are like in Rust, like one v one ing. My best friends, you know. And so like and and and very clearly like there wasn't like the the the general fear that I think parents of that generation had
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Around like, oh, if my if my kids are are are playing video games that that have violence in them, like, maybe they're that that'll influence them. Now, as a as a parent, like, I will not be worried about my kids playing. And I feel like there's a whole generation, at least of dads that grew up playing Call of Duty. And they're like, son, it's time. It's time for you to play Call of Duty.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:It's gonna
Speaker 1:be like a Stop scrolling. Yeah. It's a rite It's gonna Actually, be a rite
Speaker 2:go play Rust. Come on.
Speaker 9:It's a
Speaker 1:rite of passage, I But but have have parental views kind of like caught up to at least
Speaker 2:The data.
Speaker 1:My the data and like my my view or my my personal reality?
Speaker 4:I think there's different worries, you know, in the space of like more like social media addiction or thinking about like what types of games, what are the quality of the games like. I think there was some research yesterday that I saw on Axe where it was talking about, you know, just games being a decompression, right? And being able to kind of, you know, after a long day or have being stressed out in school to be able to go and play with your buddies. But when we look at our research, the number one reason why people play is not because of the guns and the violence, it's because their friends are there.
Speaker 2:It's the social thing.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So during COVID No. Warzone drop. It was like high school reunion for me. I was like reconnecting with all sorts of people and just playing No.
Speaker 1:But that was the thing as a kid too. Was playing because it was competitive and fun. Yeah. And and like and it it was like for me growing up in California as a in summer, I would hopefully be when I was like 12 doing like airsoft wars. But in the middle of the day it was really hot, so I was like I'm gonna go inside Yeah.
Speaker 1:And play some rust. Yeah.
Speaker 4:I was playing paintball and then I was coming on and playing with my friends. But like the other thing is like the guys that I play with on Friday nights, I don't actually know them in real life. Right? Like we're on text. Sure.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We talk about our lives but I've never met them in person and that is that's my click and stuff. Right? So I think that's my squad that we play with.
Speaker 2:That's great. Modern Warfare four feels like a return to form. There's a lot aesthetically that feels like a throwback. It feels restrained in a way, which I loved. At the same time, I saw some critiques online just from like a YouTube thumbnail.
Speaker 2:Why does Call of Duty keep getting faster? So what's actually changing? What is a return to form? What are you keeping? What's important to let the community know you're keeping versus what does deserve continued evolution?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, we're always playing with the movement. Right? Like and so, like, the last game, Black Ops seven, there's wall jumping Yeah. There's grappling hooks.
Speaker 4:Right? And so I think with this game, it's a little bit more boots on the ground.
Speaker 2:Right? Sure.
Speaker 4:Really thinking about, okay, how are we more being more deliberate with movement? What what you actually do. But still having some innovation, right, whether you can mantle or climb a pipe or something Yeah. Or do do some shimmies on the mantle and stuff Yeah. Right, which is very new and different.
Speaker 4:But we're always talking about how can we slow it down, And speed it so this is something the studio is constantly debating. Time to kill is what we call it. Right? Like how fast it is. Right?
Speaker 4:And, you know, we had the beta. We had weekend one and we got some feedback. And then we changed some of the movement in TTK by weekend two. Right? And everyone was feeling a lot better about it.
Speaker 4:And so but this is always going to be a debate. Right? And as soon as we launch this game, they'll want something totally different from I think the biggest challenge that I have, right, as a marketer, right, is that the community is so big. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 4:You have people that, you know, just want to play zombies, right? Yeah. You know, they just love the zombies mode. Some people just want to play the campaign. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Some want black ops versus modern warfare, right? And so catering to everybody and making everybody happy is is really really hard. But, you know, we continue to try and
Speaker 2:we Yeah.
Speaker 4:Kind of listen to that feedback and try to make the adjustments in real time.
Speaker 2:Yeah. See that all the time where I'll stumble on some YouTuber who's doing like really interesting breakdowns or tutorials like helping me and then they'll be complaining about some nuance of skill based match making. I'll be like, that doesn't apply to me at all. I'm very happy with the system. But I know the community cares about skill based match making.
Speaker 2:Like what is the state of affairs? What is the what what is the balance that you found? How do you even engage with that community effectively?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, every single game that that we've made had had some level of skill based matching Yeah. Making to it and stuff. Right? Or some level of matchmaking.
Speaker 4:And so, you know, I I think it's always gonna be a topic for the community and Mhmm. And it's something the team's always looking at. And it's it's not just me. Right? There's a huge team that thinks about this.
Speaker 4:And the goal for us is to get people in the game and play and have fun. Yeah. Right? Like that is the it like when you do this, you are trying to balance it out so that, you know, an unclick myself, right, or is like jumping into the game that I can just have fun stomped on. Right?
Speaker 4:At the same time, those that are really really good at the game can also have a good time and stuff and trying to figure out how to balance that. So, I mean, I'll leave it to the the studios and the teams to kind of talk about the details and actually how it comes to life. But I think, you know, I think the intention I think is lost a lot of times that there's actually real people that work here and really care about this game and really want to see the engagement, you know, grow and stuff and making sure that everyone is having a good time. And, you know, we don't always get it right but it's figuring out that balance and listening to community.
Speaker 2:And it should be a benefit of of of scale to some degree with a really large player pool. The skill based matching matchmaking can be more accurate. You can actually find pools of players with similar skill levels. So there is something where the best thing that you can do in many ways is just like make the game appeal to a really really broad swath of gamers and then you'll, you know But we're listening.
Speaker 4:Right? And we'll make adjustments. We made adjustments for Black Ops seven. And so I think you'll you'll hear more. I I don't think people realize how long it takes to develop these games.
Speaker 4:Like it's three, four years in the making you know, to develop the Modern Warfare four game. And then to make some of these changes, it's complicated. Right? Like if you make one change, it could break other things. So I think the teams are always kind of thinking about, okay, how do we make the best experience possible?
Speaker 4:But it's not always at the speed that our community wants it to be and stuff. And so I think we have to figure out, you know, the best way to communicate with them over time.
Speaker 1:What what is a sentiment like in the gaming community around AI? I would assume that the the gaming community is so broad and probably generally reflects like the general population. So I would assume that sentiment is not great, but there's a
Speaker 2:lot Mhmm.
Speaker 1:To be excited about with the intersection of AI and gaming. One is like speeding up
Speaker 2:Just finding bugs. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Finding bugs, speeding up development timelines, you know, things like that. But how how are you processing it all and communicating?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, there's 4,500 employees of the company and they're, you know, they're dedicated to their craft and art and stuff. And so I think where AI can be beneficial, at least on the marketing side, I can tell you when, you know, now that I can do meeting notes, right, via AI, right, and I saw Jim and I heard Jim talking earlier, right, it's just about those little efficiencies actually add up. You know, like when I was gonna go to school, was gonna instead of going to business school I was gonna go to design school. Right?
Speaker 4:And I just Turned it down. Turned it down.
Speaker 2:I went
Speaker 4:into business. But but I think, you know, when I when I look back at it, you know, when we're concepting an idea, I can respond back instead of me typing some feedback. Right? I can go, hey, I think it should look like this. Right?
Speaker 4:And it's not actually how it's going to look, but it's directionally Directionally. Where I want them to go and then we give it to the talented artists and designers who are good at that to actually bring it to life. Right? And I think it's all about we've always had tools. Right?
Speaker 4:Had Adobe, you know, since, you know, when I was, you know, a marketer for twenty years ago. It's applying these tools and and being able to get the most out of them. But, yeah, I mean it's it's not a good topic in the community and stuff and we want to respect that and we want to make sure that we're not putting out slop in the market and stuff, And I think, you know, protecting the, you know, the studios and the publishing unit as much as possible is is our priority.
Speaker 2:It's tough. Yeah. SpeedTree is an OG system for creating trees. And it does it algorithmically. So every tree needs to be unique so it can grow them and randomly choose branches and add leaves and stuff.
Speaker 2:And completely uncontroversial. And now we're in this in this era where you kind of get a speed tree like system for anything and that calls needs to be hand Hand placed. I
Speaker 1:don't know. How has working with live streamers and and creators evolved over the last ten years? The last time I I don't When I when I was like in high school, would watch like Starcraft two Yeah. Live streaming and and I was I was into that. But I don't follow it closely but it almost feels like similar to AI model releases now where a new game launches and suddenly every creator streamer is talking about it.
Speaker 1:Some of them are paid, some of it's organic. But then like the and so the market like share might shift dramatically for like a week and then it sort of reverts to back to where it was or baseline. But how do you think about working with creators in the lead up to a launch like this and what have you guys learned from you know, the last, your last six years?
Speaker 4:I think you hit the nail on the head, right? Like they'll gravitate to a different game and then they'll somehow come back to COD, you know. And so I think, you know, that's the longevity of the the franchise and the power of of being a mega franchise. But I think at the same time we we continue to invest in them. We have like programs like Level Up Labs where we actually bring creators in, like up and coming creators.
Speaker 4:And we teach them how to build a thumbnail, right, or how to stream or like what's the lighting quality you should have and stuff. And like actually how do you capture really good and what kind of capture card do you need. So we we're actually investing more and more in the creator community and trying to figure out, okay, do we grow the next wave while still working with those big icons in the industry. And so like we'll have them, you know, we're at Fanatics Fest this year. Yeah.
Speaker 4:We played we had Kill Block there for the first time, our our new mode. Yeah. And, you know, we brought a ton of streamers there to to stream for the first time and be able to have that experience. And so it's definitely part of our investment. But I think you touched on it before like clipping is almost as big.
Speaker 4:Right? You know, and I think, you know, when we take a piece of content and now we clip it and it'll be, 1,600 different versions of that content and then we put that out on the Internet, you're trying to almost game the algorithms, right, to show your content and And show more of your content and I I think the brands have been de emphasized on social and and so clipping is really the the avenue for us to get more of our content out Yeah. Via these channels by flooding the zone.
Speaker 2:Does that change the marketing mix? Are you spending like less on television ads or programmatic ad buys and more with influencers over time? Like where are you deploying actual capital when you're going into a big launch?
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, like, we still have those stature plays. We'll be on the NFL Yeah. Right you know, in two weeks. And so I think, you know, there's massive reach there and that's how you get a lot of scale really quickly.
Speaker 4:And so that's why you see movie studios or gaming studios kind of still lean on to it as you're building towards your launch. But, you know, we spend a lot more on digital and and there's the landscape is literally changing Yeah. You know, in the last six months. Like, clipping didn't exist a year ago or Yeah. A year and a half ago.
Speaker 4:Right? Until we created it.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Just kidding.
Speaker 4:But I but I think, you know, and and MrBeast has his own, you know, clipping company. Right? And so I think in a lot of ways, you know, that's new and then you have to figure out, okay, does that work? And then the, you know, the tech platforms then kind of deemphasize clipping, right? And so, okay, how do we pivot?
Speaker 4:You have geo, right, which you guys talk a lot about Yeah. Right? And thinking about, okay, how am I leveraging what people are searching for in in chat GBT Mhmm. And how are we editing, you know, either the sources, you know, or influencing the sources Yeah. Or editing our site to better reflect that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so that that's really changed how we think, you know, about marketing our games because so many people are going on like, how do I get better in Call of Duty? Or like, what load out should I have? And all the attachments. Like which attachments should I have for for my gun and stuff, right? And so they're using, you know, AI a lot more for that.
Speaker 4:And so we have to think about
Speaker 1:I've been using AI a ton like as a as a racing coach basically where I'll like do a few laps and then I'll and then I'll be asking questions about like Yeah. How to adjust, you know. No. Like a bunch of different factors and how to be faster in this corner or things It's like like quite good. It's very Kill
Speaker 2:block. Yes. Modern Warfare four has been in development for four years. When do they bring you into the process? Did you get brought in four years ago and they say this is coming or did it hit you like a flash bang?
Speaker 2:No. The no. I I part of the There we go.
Speaker 4:That's what
Speaker 2:I was
Speaker 4:waiting for.
Speaker 2:Was it a surprise to you that you learned about Kill Block six months ago or has it been in the process? No. Been Get ready to start marketing this. It's a new it's a new thing that you need to explain.
Speaker 4:So one of the great things about Activision is that we we're part of what we call the green light process Right. Right? From the very beginning. Yeah. So the the concept of the game all the way through.
Speaker 4:And so we see these development pillars of Mhmm. You know, what they're trying the studio is envisioning and what they wanna bring to market. Mhmm. But when we saw Kill Block, I mean, it's this basically this map that dynamically changes Yeah. As it could be 500 different combinations.
Speaker 4:It's it was inspired by the Real Madrid stadium. So, you know, they have the soccer pitch and it actually goes underground so that they can have concerts Yep. Basketball games or other things. And and so, what if you could build a map that just is dynamically changing
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Every round that you're going in? Yeah. And and so then you can have a map that has infinite combinations. Yeah. And so it it was really exciting to see because, you know, from a marketing standpoint we're like, wow, you know, this is gonna create a new loop, a new level of gameplay.
Speaker 4:And you can't just memorize the map anymore. Right? Yeah. You have to level up your skill. And so this is something we wanted to lean into and that's why we went to Fanatics Fest because Yep.
Speaker 4:The sports idea of inspiring, you know, like, okay, how do we go to a sports event, not necessarily a gaming event, to talk about this new map and this new mode that the team created?
Speaker 2:It also seemed like there were some BTS sort of documentary style features that dropped ahead of the launch to sort of go a layer deeper than just a cinematic preview trailer. Was that deliberate?
Speaker 4:Yeah. A 100%. Like, I think we want to be able to we've been teasing out different elements all the way through. Yeah. And I think you'll see some some new stuff from us this week.
Speaker 4:That's At Tokyo Game Show later this week. So, but yeah, I think like showing little snippets Yeah. Of the campaign and really kind of what you said before, like set the setting Yeah. Right? Like the tone.
Speaker 4:Think people are missing that of like, okay, how do we get back to this authentic Yeah. Grounded cinematic, you know, game. And we wanted to kind of show that that was a companion to the multiplayer and the new DMZ experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Jordy? Here's another one?
Speaker 1:What is the what is the current state of of eSports and eSports investment? At least from a from from our side of the the market, the whole venture world, it feels like the category hasn't panned out You know, there there there are there isn't a, you know, $10,000,000,000
Speaker 2:You don't hear about billionaires buying 10,000,000,000
Speaker 1:You esports did. You did hear about billionaires being like making kind of like speculative investments in teams ten years ago. It feels like it hasn't maybe maybe not panning out as this massive new asset class. Maybe that that's been okay because gaming feels bigger than ever. But how are you guys investing in it?
Speaker 1:How how important is it to the overall Call of Duty universe?
Speaker 4:I mean, the competitive, you know, portion of Call of Duty, that's the elite elite, you know, and being able to show that off. So CDL is still really thriving, the Call of Duty League for And so, I think you see it with, you know, the premier games, the big triple a titles that They're have doing okay and stuff. They're doing well. But I think it's where is it expanding to all these other games or newer games and, you know, we don't see that as much anymore. But, you know, we had a match, you know, our champs in in Paris and stuff and I mean, there was hundreds of thousands of people like, you know, you know, watching the tournament and and celebrating and you thought you were watching a football match and And stuff, so it was really exciting to see that because there if you market it the right way, if you build that that camaraderie Yep.
Speaker 4:I I think it has a lot of potential but it's just, you know, are you investing in it? Are you thinking about, right, do you have the right people in place to be able to do that? And so it's still a big part of our marketing mix because I think it shows what the best of the best could look like within Call of Duty.
Speaker 2:How's Do do you know the history of, like, demographic shift within the Call of Duty player base over the last twenty years or so? Like, I would my my naive assumption would be like the the unks are getting us a a bigger cohort, but maybe the unks have always been there because they were playing Atari and they moved to Call of Duty.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I mean, you look at like Nintendo has a game called Splatoon. I don't know if you ever Yeah. It's it's kind of like a first person shoot Yeah. And you're painting Yeah.
Speaker 4:And you're painting the ground and you're throwing paints on people. Right? Yeah. Then you graduate into something like a Fortnite. Right?
Speaker 4:Sure. And then you graduate into something like a Call of Duty and stuff. So you can kind of see the migration Okay. Of how younger users might, you know, come into the franchise Yeah. Through other games and
Speaker 2:But you're potentially the final stop on the bus and you can carry a
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:A gamer through to 50, 60.
Speaker 7:Like, there's
Speaker 4:no name The misconception is though like how big is gaming, right? Like, so the average age of a gamer is 37. Yeah. So I think it's, you know Wow. You know, if if you John.
Speaker 4:There's about like Exactly. Three point
Speaker 1:He's literally the average gamer. Yeah.
Speaker 4:There's like three three point six billion people that game. Right? That's crazy. When I go to conferences or I'm talking to people I go, hey, are you a gamer? And then, personally, I'm not a gamer.
Speaker 4:I was like, do you play Candy Crush? They're like, oh, yeah. Play Candy Crush. Do you play Wordle? Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Play Wordle. Do you go on LinkedIn and play the LinkedIn Queens game and stuff? Right? Like, there's games on LinkedIn now.
Speaker 1:Honestly, if you could get m w four in LinkedIn in the browser, that would be a massive unlock.
Speaker 4:I will I will work on that. I'll take that back to the team.
Speaker 2:I mean
Speaker 1:I mean, if anyone can do
Speaker 2:it Construction's already set up for it.
Speaker 4:I think everyone is a gamer. Right? And I think so like for us on on the Call of Duty side Yeah. And and by the way, Activision has other games like Yeah. Spyro coming out next year and stuff.
Speaker 4:Right? And so there's there's a lot of diversity to our portfolio. Mhmm. But with Call of Duty, there's so many different ways to play that I can I think I can market to you? Yeah.
Speaker 4:Like we have a game called Prop Hunt. I don't know if you've played in Blackouts.
Speaker 2:Love Prop Hunt.
Speaker 7:So you
Speaker 4:can be a tire. Yeah. And you hide in the map as a tire and then everybody comes around trying to shoot you as a tire and try to and then you can change what prop you are and But it's adult hide and seek.
Speaker 2:And that's a game that I saw on social media clips and I was like, I gotta find that game. That looks amazing. And I thought it was a different game. Yeah. And it was just a mode.
Speaker 4:So so finding those elements of being able to like show a parkour mode or showing like and there's a lot of diversity to the game and I think there's a lot of different to play. I think DMZ is the biggest one. Like we're gonna be launching DMZ. Our extraction shooter. It was in beta, you know, four years ago when MW two came out.
Speaker 4:And I think, you know, we're
Speaker 1:a standalone game?
Speaker 4:Gonna be part of MW four. You're gonna have campaign, multiplayer and DMZ. Right. And so this new extraction mode I think is going to really blow people's socks off and we're really excited about that.
Speaker 2:Does Spyro have an ESRB rating yet? I don't I don't
Speaker 4:think so but I Yet? I'll check check check back with the team. I'm I'm not sure about
Speaker 2:that one. Because if it's kid friendly, you got to come back on the show because I got a five year old who's
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. I mean, Spyro is
Speaker 2:I I remember it being very kid friendly and I'm always on the hunt. Yes.
Speaker 4:Spyro will be kid friendly and Spyro can fly for the first time and stuff. So this is coming out in the spring.
Speaker 2:Well, we'd love to have you back.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I'd love to be back here.
Speaker 1:Honored honored to have you on the show.
Speaker 4:Mean, we You guys got to come out to the studio on a Friday, hit the pit, play the game.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. Twist my arm. Twist my arm. Fridays Fridays can often end up being very Call of Duty centric after after the show ends.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Back
Speaker 1:there. Awesome. Well, you should see it on the big board. It's like the whole team
Speaker 2:It gets heated.
Speaker 1:It gets heated.
Speaker 2:Lots of lots of guys going like this, like this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Lock it
Speaker 10:in this.
Speaker 2:Well, I
Speaker 4:got the flash bang. Thank you
Speaker 1:so much. I'm gonna throw a smoke while you
Speaker 2:take Yeah. Nice. And I will tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.
Speaker 2:And we have our next guest coming in just a couple minutes. We have a very special guest. We have Stephen Colbert, fresh off some Emmy wins and his co founder Josh Kline from
Speaker 1:Scratch Off absolutely destroying us Absolutely. In the Emmys. It wasn't even close.
Speaker 2:It wasn't
Speaker 1:even close.
Speaker 2:It wasn't close. But we can run through the New York Times interviewed 10 year old children to predict the future and the answers are all over the place. They went viral because there's some really depressing There were black pill. Were some black pilled 10 year olds talking about Terminator future World War three. There's one kid that says, there's bound to be a war.
Speaker 2:I really hope it doesn't start World War three, which is a crazy thing from Riley Grunch in Gainesville, Georgia. Paige Merritt from Atlanta says, I think everything is going to be AI and AI robots in 2050. What will the robots do? Like a barista, a waitress. It's going be robots carrying the food, garbage people.
Speaker 2:Are there jobs AI won't do? Wrappers. AI cannot wrap. My ears were broken. Very funny.
Speaker 2:There are some more optimistic takes that were in here that I thought were interesting. One was, if I scroll down, we may still have laptops but with chips that can read your mind. There may be a sensor in your brain and whatever you're thinking can just go into the app. Will people go to space? They asked Liam Pond from Queens and he said, in the old days they paid Americans go to the West.
Speaker 2:They might pay people to go to space because the population is so big there might not be enough room. It's interesting. Paid Mars colonization. You can I think you can still get paid if you go and homestead in Alaska in some niche use cases and some niche situation? Should I
Speaker 1:get paid to homestead in that Lautner?
Speaker 2:That would be that would be pretty good. There's who will be in the who will be in charge of The United States in 2050? They asked a 10 year old Jimmy Molley from La Grange, Illinois and he said, I don't really know but the person I hope will be in charge, Adam Sandler. Adam Sandler will be the president? He said, no, vice president.
Speaker 2:My the president will be my dad. There's another there's another kid in here who claims that he will be the president. We got to keep an eye on him because he is optimistic about his presidential run president. There's lots of people talking about the president. Aliens might be discovered.
Speaker 2:The president will try and keep it a secret, but I don't think it will be a big deal and there might be a new way to elect a president. It might be how a king works just like it passes through generations. Then someone else says that they're gonna run for the president. But it's it's an interesting it's an interesting tour of the future generation, what they think the the future will look like. One kid says, what will our The question was, what will our food look like in 2050?
Speaker 2:He says, we'll have different sorts of crops. We're going to figure out how to make purple apples. They'll be really sweet. People like sweet apples more than sour apples. I like sour apples though.
Speaker 2:Love the mind of a 10 year old. It's a me thing. What will we do for fun? There's gonna be new instruments. People have been using a pumpkin to make an instrument.
Speaker 2:We're going to figure out how to do something along the lines of that. Use natural resources like potatoes to make some sort of instrument that's got a totally new sound. Would you play a potato? Would you play a pumpkin? I I love That that is so That's just so creative.
Speaker 2:It's amazing. What would you like your life to be like in 2050? I want to live in a floating house. What would that look like? It would look like pink and flying.
Speaker 2:There would be a slide for the stairs. How would you go up if there was a slide for stairs? You would go up via a trampoline. This is the future as predicted by 10 year olds. It's there's a lot of optimism in here, I'm telling you.
Speaker 1:And a little black pilling.
Speaker 2:It's not all bad news.
Speaker 1:Novo Nordisk is switching up on their day ones. They're dropping the Nordisk from the name. It's just gonna be Novo now.
Speaker 2:They forgot where they came from. It's just gonna be Novo. Well, we are joined by our next guest. We have Stephen Colbert, and Josh Klein from Scripto with us today. How are you both doing?
Speaker 2:Welcome to the show.
Speaker 10:Good morning.
Speaker 2:Good morning.
Speaker 4:Good morning.
Speaker 10:I don't know where we are. Is it good morning? I woke up in New Zealand two days ago. I have no idea
Speaker 1:what day or where I am. A little turned around. Is just the early afternoon here.
Speaker 2:Here in Hollywood at the TBPN very
Speaker 1:What are you doing in New Zealand?
Speaker 10:I'm working on a Lord of the Rings movie.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 7:Did you
Speaker 2:get into Lord of the Rings?
Speaker 10:A friend of mine gave it to me in twelfth grade and I was a sad boy.
Speaker 2:Where why do you think it stands out to you so much? You're known as like as like a Lord of the Rings fanatic. Why is it why is it not what what separates it from a Game of Thrones, another another series?
Speaker 10:Hey, I got nothing against Game of Thrones. I love those books. George R
Speaker 4:R Martin is
Speaker 10:But a I don't know. I love this I love the the implied history.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:I love its its roots and the fact that Tolkien wrote the books because he really liked making languages. And so he made up Elvish languages, and he thought, real cultures should have stories that the languages tell. So then he started telling the stories that the language would have been used to write. And so it's such a different point of view to come into storytelling, is through creating an entire culture, which is what you would have called the Germans would call it a total work of art. And there's any question you can ask about the Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien answered it except one.
Speaker 10:And that's who is Tom Bombadil? Anyway, that's just a teaser. Okay. It's what
Speaker 1:we call the business. Yeah. What do you think about startups adopting various words from Yeah. The whole universe.
Speaker 2:Does is scripto and andural and mythical. Did you think of naming scripto after something from Lord of the Rings?
Speaker 10:No. We named scripto scripto because it it was created by two comedy writers and we thought of what's the dumbest possible name for our program.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 10:So we went, well, we're not going come up with the best name, but the dumbest name we could do. So that's how we came up with Scripto.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 10:No. Never thought of going to Tolkien on that one.
Speaker 2:And what is the elevator pitch for Scripto?
Speaker 10:Oh, the elevator pitch Scripto is your script program should be more than a script program. Mhmm. It should be production software that communicates the information of the script to every department in the form that they need it and can output through the API into any workflow system, including other applications that have developed over the last twenty years in our business. But the one that hasn't changed is the source material, the one truth of everything, which is the script. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:Whether you're doing a presentation on TV show like mine, or doing a narrative, or doing a awards presentation, or whether you're creating a video game. That data that is stored in every keystroke should be going all the way down the production line, so there's no doubt what the one truth is we're working on today. What is the rope we're pulling on? And that that's why we created it, is to be able to communicate between departments.
Speaker 2:How do you guys work together? You clearly have Stephen, you clearly have a very clear vision for what you're building, but what is the actual interaction day to day on the project?
Speaker 10:Oh, between me and Josh? Yeah. Well, all of the shows who use it, I mean, the easiest way to do that is tell you how it came about. Is because there just wasn't something that did this. One of the reasons I have such a clear view of what this thing needs to be is that it was built for my needs initially.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 10:Is that we produced, depending on the season, two hundred and one hundred and sixty shows a year. And to be able to not have to go back on decisions as long as they were communicated properly down the chain of command, over 200 people working on the show. We wanted something that everybody could look at at once. And everybody, based upon their permissions, could actually add to at once if they wanted to. So we wouldn't have any more $800 goats.
Speaker 10:Our $800 goat is the origin of the entire thing.
Speaker 2:We
Speaker 10:wrote a sketch that involved a goat.
Speaker 1:Been there.
Speaker 2:We
Speaker 10:cut the damn
Speaker 2:goat. We cut
Speaker 10:the damn goat at 02:00, and at 03:00 the goat shows up. And I said, we cut the goat. And they said, yeah, but the program didn't allow anyone else to know you cut the goat until all the elements had been finished. Sure. And one of the elements was the goat, and we didn't by the time we got to the goat, the goat was here.
Speaker 10:I mean, they stick a hose up its butt and wash it out, so it won't, you know, mess up your studio. The goat had been through a lot.
Speaker 2:Very good. Okay? And
Speaker 10:I mean, just the moral cost of what they had to do to that goat for us to use it.
Speaker 4:And it
Speaker 10:cost us $800. And we started this back on basic cable.
Speaker 2:Was a
Speaker 10:lot of money. And so, it's still a lot of money for Hollywood these days. But, so we said no more $800 goats. And so, how we communicate on the needs of the show? My show is still, you know, up until the very end, The Daily Show, John Oliver, SNL, the other shows that are using it.
Speaker 10:We've got about a dozen shows going. Each one of those has their own needs that we have, we are we tailor, and they're all different kinds. There's video game production, there's narrative production, and there's what we call presentational, like right down the pipe like you guys do production.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:All of those feed back into our development.
Speaker 1:Talk about the intensity of show business because I think we understand it in our sort of limited operation, right? It's like it's all about these like really tight timelines and coordinating and you get mean, it really does feel like we felt from very early on when we it was just John and myself and Ben on our team and then as we started adding people, it felt like you were on a sports team where you showed up and you can feel when somebody is not at their playing at their best level. Right? And and it's like that daily repetition and and in our case the practices are happening all live so there's no practice. There's just like Sure.
Speaker 1:Live gameplay. But but yeah, talk about it from from your point of view and and maybe tie that into how you know how it's influencing your work on script though.
Speaker 10:Well, and Josh, this will be a good one for you to jump in on here once I get my show biz out of the way and into the biz biz is that I you know, people would say, oh, what do you love about your show? And I mean, obviously I love the people I work with, but 40 and I love doing it for the audience, but 49% of what I loved was the process. Could we get the process right? Because it's no good if you can do a good show, but it absolutely kills you and everybody on staff. Because you got to do another one tomorrow.
Speaker 10:This is a marathon, not a sprint. You had to remember that. And basically, the longevity of your work, the sustainability of your work is based upon how well you communicate what today's intention is to everybody, and what everyone's role is clearly. People only do what you ask of them, but if you lead with some sense of vision of whatever you're supposed to do today, well, then that makes that makes the possibility that the actual content gets better. Mhmm.
Speaker 10:I mean, I know that's the goal, is the content is good, but you can do that once in a terrible way, or you can do that every day with a process that is really smooth. And that's really why we developed Scripto, so that there's an intuitive way that everybody knows what their role is today. And Josh, would you mind talking about how we've transformed we've expanded that now?
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Mean, I think the the keyword for us is collaboration. Mhmm. Right? John Jordy, nice to meet both of you.
Speaker 1:Great to have you. I
Speaker 6:I hope you didn't have the same goat problems exactly.
Speaker 1:But No. I've looked into getting various live animals
Speaker 2:We wanted a real
Speaker 1:real animals on the on the set. It's it's a challenge.
Speaker 6:Good problem could lead could lead to like a rhabda situation,
Speaker 1:I guess.
Speaker 10:I just want you to know that we literally had a plaque on the wall of the show that said anything that could eat the host is going to be expensive. Because they had you had to put up chain link fences between you and a mountain lion. We wanted to write a sketch of the mountain lion like, that's a $10,000 fence. I'm like, what? He goes, it could eat you.
Speaker 10:I'm like, why don't
Speaker 1:you say that? Yeah.
Speaker 6:So so you know, I was I'm not a founder. Stephen and the co founder Rob Dubin recruited me to join the company because I've got a twenty five year background in production technology, including at the you know, sort of established screenwriting software company some years back. And the what all the other tools out there lack is is like a deep level of collaboration and really tying everybody together. So you guys have the benefit of being in studio, and so your team's always there all the time. But that's not it it's less and less common for scripted content.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 6:Right? And so one of the things since I've been brought aboard two years ago is really to build out both build up the team and build out the platform so we can address the needs of not just where we came from, which we're we're dominant in the variety space. Right? Like, what what are we talking about, Stephen? We're batting 800 this year for the five variety shows.
Speaker 6:Four of
Speaker 10:the five. Four of the five.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We know. We know. We bought a lot of Emmy billboards and you guys we have we have have have one variable we have you guys beat on which is number of episodes a year. Every every other variable reach and Emmy Yeah.
Speaker 4:We're more of a
Speaker 2:quantity over quality.
Speaker 6:Yeah. So so more more content categories because when Stephen and the team decided to grow the company, there's only so many variety shows and sadly one less next year than there was the year prior that was a big customer. What? What?
Speaker 2:Nobody told you?
Speaker 10:It's They do. Some very fragile. They're fragile. They they say there is something they need to talk to me about.
Speaker 2:Okay. So what are
Speaker 6:those other content categories? Well, we're we're a cloud based API enabled platform. It is a tech platform. It's not just like the historically, screenwriting has been done in what looks like an old version, the Hollywood's Microsoft Word. You could describe it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And so we're a paradigm shift kinda going from the fax machine to Slack. Mhmm. It's collaborative, ties everybody together. The API ties into all sorts of other any other platform, whether you're doing script breakdowns, budgeting, scheduling, concept art, you name it. We can plug into it, but we're always respecting the work of the human writer.
Speaker 6:Right? This company was founded by two working writers. So we we're very pro AI tooling for this industry.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:We're not pro AI where it touches the domain of the human writer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Are you optimistic about the the pace or or future of the movie industry? It feels like there's a whole bunch of technology trends that are coming together. Some are really scary.
Speaker 2:Some like Backrooms, Obsession, Iron Lung. We saw these YouTubers break out and actually get on the big screen and put up numbers that are exciting to traditional studios. Is this meaningful or is this a sideshow?
Speaker 10:Very much it's very meaningful. My my wife actually runs a couple movie theaters. She she's the head of Montclair Film Festival and Montclair Film, and they have a couple theaters in in Montclair, New Jersey. And this has been a great year. Yeah.
Speaker 10:There, you know, there's been starts and starts, stops and starts over the last couple years since COVID, but I think people want to be in a movie there. They want that experience. Yeah. There have been some fantastic, even big budget things like, you know, Universal's biggest thing ever was was the Odyssey, the highest grossing film of all time. So it's not just the small budget things.
Speaker 10:Yeah. They're turning up big numbers and are attractive to you know, sort of the larger players in the industry. And listen, anything that also brings efficiency to a process that's this old, I think has a hopeful spot in whatever the future's going to be.
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 10:mean, there's no telling. Obviously, there's clearly we're in a moment of transition for the movie industry, but it's clearly not going away. That's that's what this year has proven.
Speaker 2:You have advice for young filmmakers on the is the path different? Is the path through permissionless independent creation? Do is the
Speaker 10:future The thing is that's always been the path.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 10:Like, what I would I would say to anybody who'd say like, oh, want a career something like yours, whether it was as a writer or a producer or as a performer, what I would say is the first thing you've got to do is go get in trouble. Which what I meant was go create something. Yeah. Go create something that someone could see. If it was write something, go have a reading in a coffee shop.
Speaker 10:Yeah. Make a small film. Make a film with your phone. Edit it together. Show it to someone you care about.
Speaker 10:Light a candle under your own ass by saying that, well, if no one else will ask this of it, ask this of me, I will ask it of me. And you know you're capable of it because you're the one who's asking. You know it's in there. So go do it. There's no waiting, wishing, wanting, hoping thinking.
Speaker 10:That is not how to get better at what we do. You have to go do it. You have to get in trouble.
Speaker 6:I'd like to add the distribution platforms and the ability to go to a broad audience, very quickly has changed. But I I worked in commercial production for years, and if you that was the way in for directors a long time ago, not writers, director, Ridley Scott, Michael Bay. They would beg, borrow, and steal to put together a reel and do some spec spots and get the attention of somebody else. And eventually, you get the attention of Walter Hill and David Guiler that allows Ridley to go do alien or Jerry Bruckheimer puts you on the rock. Yeah.
Speaker 6:Right? So there's always work to get to that first step. It's just now that you've got a platform like YouTube, for instance, that'll let you go broad quickly if you have something people wanna watch. You still have to create something people wanna watch.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You you have the benefit of being able to go top down with some of the biggest shows in the world on day one. Are you still trying to pull lessons from what's happening with Blender and Blackmagic Design, DaVinci Resolve, going to a free tier, the low end, the indie filmmaker, and then creating a groundswell and creating a whole host of people that are just familiar with this technology. And then if they wind up on a big production, they're already an advocate.
Speaker 10:It's funny you should ask.
Speaker 6:I I was trying to figure out how to get this one in.
Speaker 2:So so we we do
Speaker 6:have a different model than the existing players in the space. Okay. And that is, if you are an individual writer, just trying to work your way into the business and working on a personal level, our software is free. This is world class superior screenwriting and production software that we make available for free to any writer. Anybody watching this, go to scripto.live.
Speaker 6:Go get a free account. It's the world's best screenwriting software. It's free. Boom. When you move into production and you require multiple collaborators and advanced production features, and I'll bore you to death if I tell you what they are, but like they're they're critically important for making professional scripted content.
Speaker 6:If you need those, that's when we charge. And when you need those, it's the show or the production company or the studio that pays for it. It's a line item on the budget. But, yeah, the bottom up is whether you're just an aspiring writer who feels you got a great script in you or you're a student and you another type of aspiring writer, you should never have to pay for professional screenwriting software again because we make the world's best screenwriting software available for free.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Amazing.
Speaker 2:Three, you have another?
Speaker 1:Nothing for now. This was super fun guys.
Speaker 2:This was amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for jumping on.
Speaker 6:Thanks so much for having us on guys.
Speaker 1:Chat is saying Colbert is my new favorite tech founder. Yeah. Chat. Mine too. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations Congratulations. Thanks. And good luck down in New Zealand.
Speaker 2:And we'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Thanks very much.
Speaker 2:Day. Goodbye.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Likewise.
Speaker 2:We have James Caldweller from ProFound joining in just a few minutes. We'll bring him in, but we'll go back to the timeline with a few other minor updates. Let's see. Poland, the country, lost $230,000,000 trying to buy Venezuelan oil with crypto. This is in the Financial Times.
Speaker 2:An attempt to use digital currency for a bold oil trade became one of Poland's biggest scandals. In late November twenty twenty three, off a boat on a boat off Abu Dhabi, a top executive at Poland's biggest state backed energy group turned to a young trader he knew and gave him a deceptively simple instruction. Go out and get me Venezuelan oil. I need it. The executive was Samur Awad who had been appointed to lead Orland's new Swiss trading arm just a year earlier.
Speaker 2:The trader was was Kamho Alex C, the founder of Dubai based Hanan International, an upstart oil trading outfit. What followed their conversation has become bizarre and sprawling a a bizarre and sprawling commodity dispute involving hundreds of millions of dollars of missing money, vast sums of cryptocurrency swapped on USB sticks in Caracas restaurants and ultimately very little Venezuelan oil.
Speaker 1:I'm kind of zoning out because it's three hours in, but there's so many red flag words in the last in the last minute that this sounds sounds bad.
Speaker 2:Sounds bad. They're like, what are they doing? Putting cryptocurrency on USB sticks?
Speaker 1:Caracas restaurants.
Speaker 2:No. I think they were going and personally, you know, with a bag Look. Deliver the money, give me the oil.
Speaker 1:Lot of people have a friend that's woken up one day and said, I gotta get me some Venezuelan oil. Right? But the way that you go about doing it
Speaker 2:Going around sanctions is tough. Tough, risky stuff. Warsaw prosecutors have charged Awad and other former executives at Orland Trading, Switzerland with criminal mismanagement. Prime minister Donald Tusk has folded the scandal into a wider cleanup.
Speaker 1:Donald Tusk?
Speaker 2:Donald Tusk is a funny name. But that is the prime minister of Poland. Donald Tusk, the We love Poland. Yeah. That's the prime minister of Poland.
Speaker 2:Powerful. Has folded the scandal into a wider cleanup of state companies saying, Poles must learn the truth. An Feet investigation based on internal company documents, shipping data, blockchain analysis, court filings, and extensive interviews of people involved reveals how a race for crude oil and cryptocurrency has become one of Poland's biggest ever corporate scandals. The saga opens a window on a shadowy corner of the oil market where little known intermediaries in cryptocurrency replace conventional buyers and payment channels offering traders outsized profits but exposing them to serious risk.
Speaker 1:Well, know who doesn't need Venezuelan oil, John? Who? Elon Musk.
Speaker 2:Why?
Speaker 1:Because he's coming out with the Roadster.
Speaker 2:But that's in October. Right?
Speaker 1:October 1. But J Cal
Speaker 2:Are you sure? Was
Speaker 1:talking with
Speaker 2:Are you sure there's not gonna be any oil powered functionality?
Speaker 1:American jet fuel.
Speaker 2:Cold gas thruster. I'm not exactly sure how that works.
Speaker 1:Yesterday at the all in
Speaker 2:What'd say?
Speaker 1:Summit, Elon and and and Jason were talking. Jason says, I'm so excited. My mind went boom. I have never seen something. What he's gonna show on ten one by no exaggeration is gonna blow people's minds.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hopefully not literally blow people's minds.
Speaker 2:It might if you're standing behind
Speaker 1:There's four because I'm not saying anything else. It's unbelievable. He says, yes, we need
Speaker 2:So the bet the bet, zero to 60 time was originally announced one point nine seconds. Model s Plaid, two seconds. That's not enough to really blow people's mind. If they do one point nine, I don't think that's enough. I think 1.5 is crazy.
Speaker 2:Getting even lower is crazy. People have been saying maybe it goes one second zero to 60, which is insane. But the big question is that Elon has been hinting it. It will jump. It will fly.
Speaker 2:It will lift off the ground. We've already seen this with the Xiaomi car that can jump over potholes. I think it gets about six inches of air, maybe four inches of air. And so we're going over under. So the question is is the Roadster will probably be able to lift off the ground while driving on a flat surface.
Speaker 2:Yeah. How far do you think it will be able to lift off?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It could have jets that take it six feet up in the air. It could have a little suspension, you know?
Speaker 1:You look at, you know, how this might impact Yeah. GT class and IMSA or WACC. Right? If you can now bike Off
Speaker 2:the line?
Speaker 1:No. No. No. Not not Line is one thing, but cornering, if you can just hop out, you know, are they gonna have
Speaker 2:to down? Don't even turn, just go straight over.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're just in the Yeah.
Speaker 2:A chicane. You just go over
Speaker 1:it. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Completely changes Monaco. Completely changes Monaco if you're just going over the chicane. But final final answer.
Speaker 2:What how high will the Roadster it's not Price is Right rules. It's closest wins. How high will it go off the ground?
Speaker 1:Half a foot.
Speaker 2:Half a foot. He's got six inches. What do you got?
Speaker 1:I'm going above that.
Speaker 2:What do you wait. Wait. Wait. Give me a number. Seven inches.
Speaker 2:Seven inches?
Speaker 1:Six I'll
Speaker 2:take eight inches. Okay.
Speaker 1:Too predictable.
Speaker 2:If I do if you do six, seven, eight, you're really boxed in. You're it's over for you. Okay. I win.
Speaker 1:Wait. I'm going to nine.
Speaker 2:You're going to nine? We have I think could be like three feet. Think it could be six feet. I Enough. I think it's gonna be way up.
Speaker 2:Enough. My prediction
Speaker 1:Break it five feet.
Speaker 2:What about you James?
Speaker 1:Look at look at
Speaker 2:How high do you think the Roadster will What jump a dramatic entrance. This is the important question. Do you think the Tesla Roadster will be able
Speaker 1:We don't. Don't have audio
Speaker 2:for We'll figure this out.
Speaker 1:But you look fantastic.
Speaker 2:You look fantastic.
Speaker 1:You look like
Speaker 2:The button down shirt
Speaker 1:You look like
Speaker 2:uniform lighting is really doing a lot of work. A lot of contrast.
Speaker 3:How's that? Are we good?
Speaker 2:Sounds fantastic.
Speaker 1:Incredible.
Speaker 2:So first question before we get into anything else. The Tesla Roadster, it's rumored to be able to leave the ground. How high do you think it will be able to go off the ground?
Speaker 3:I'll I'll go six inches.
Speaker 2:Six inches. That's exactly what George said. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There you go.
Speaker 2:That would be big. That would be big.
Speaker 1:That's a lot.
Speaker 2:Okay. I was going six feet. Anyway, congratulations on the progress. Give us the news first then we'll get into the details. How much did you raise?
Speaker 3:We've raised a $180,000,000.
Speaker 1:Who
Speaker 2:they again?
Speaker 1:Good group. Good group. Who are they again? Yeah. Talk about Catch Us Up to speed.
Speaker 1:You've come on, I think, every every round at this point. What's what's happened since
Speaker 2:What's driving growth? Yeah. What's the state of the market?
Speaker 3:Yeah. We've been busy. You know, we launched the business two years ago with a very simple proposition which was, hey, I'm a marketer. How does AI talk about my brand products And and what that did was actually created this this need for a second product which was, okay, well, I wanna now do the work. You know, if you if you see Lime go up, you wanna do more of it.
Speaker 3:If you've seen Lime go down, you you wanna fix it. And so, you know, over the past six to nine months, we we've been building our own harness in house that's that's tailored to marketing.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And, yeah, we you know, we've seen incredible adoption across, yeah, a third of the Fortune 100. Some of the biggest brands on the planet are now using ProFound to actually do their marketing, like build the work with agents, which is yeah. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:How are wait. Sorry. If you have something
Speaker 4:Go for it.
Speaker 2:I'm just interested in, some of the biggest companies in the world. Are are is this like are there any categories that don't really care about this? Because I immediately go to, like, e commerce because that's something where people are making a purchase decision, But it feels like every company, even if you're, you know, selling something deep in the supply chain, your buyers are going to be asking AI. So it's important. It's it's not just an an SEO thing that an e commerce company cares about for like the last mile click attribution.
Speaker 2:It's actually the perception of where you stand in the market for all businesses. Right?
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's the yeah. The the kind of similarities stop with the acronym. Right? AEO and SEO, that's kind of about as close as they get.
Speaker 3:Like, how how ChatGPT or Gemini or Grok talks about your brand or products or services really is just a function of all marketing that lives on the web. The difference is that when an agent is crawling the web, it's very different to a human. It consumes, you know, a 100 x or, you know, we believe eventually a thousand x more of the web than a Yeah. Human And that's just creating this new demand on marketing teams. And that's creating this new the the it's this idea that as a marketer now, you need to create orders of magnitude more marketing and it has to be a new kind of marketing that is aimed at agents.
Speaker 3:And Mhmm. Yeah. We've built a platform where you don't just understand how you show up, but you can actually take action and and do the thing. But, yeah, the the demand the the customers that we work with is is is coming from everywhere. It's orthogonal.
Speaker 3:We work with giant consumer electronics brands. We work with, you know, the likes of Walmart. We work with, you know, great software brands like like Zoom, for example, banks like Royal Bank of Canada and some of the biggest banks on the planet. So, yes, it's it's basically, if you look around the room right now, any brand in the room will will be thinking about what we're working on.
Speaker 2:This is a little maybe tailored to the agentic commerce side of the business, but I ran into a very odd scenario where I I had Codex go shop for shoes for me and I I wear a size fourteen. They're not always in stock. So I was like, I want you to actually go and open the website, take a screenshot, make sure the size fourteen's in stock before you recommend it to me. And I wound up getting banned from a very popular website. I'm not going to dox the brand, I was like, oh, they just lost me as a customer because I'm literally banned.
Speaker 2:I cannot check out for twenty four hours because my IP is banned. And I'm wondering if you've seen sort of like a knee overreaction, a knee jerk reaction to push away AI agents from brands and companies when they should actually be more open to AI agents coming and browsing and checking out and doing all of that? Like, how are you talking to CEOs about their posture towards AI agents and and their robots. Txt, basically?
Speaker 3:I mean, we we we're pushing in the opposite direction. Of course, you if you're a marketer, of course, you want your your website to be machine readable. Yeah. We actually have just shipped a pretty cool new product called Dynamic Bot Rendering, where at the edge, so this is, you know, at the edge we're able to detect if a user agent from an AI answer engine like chat or Rock, etcetera, is visiting. And we can serve that agent a separate piece of content or a different piece of content to what a human would be shown.
Speaker 3:So we're seeing this kind of this new form of marketing that's aimed at purely agents proliferate. But then interestingly, like an emergent behavior as well as we're seeing these big brands use our platform to create marketing that's aimed at humans as well. We had a large CPG customer update 40,000 web pages in a week. And it's it's really good con it's really good content. They did they did a good job.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:How are you tracking the emergence of new personal agents like Muse and Instinct? I imagine like you guys are one of the first calls when, you know, the the CMO of a brand or the of a CEO of a company, like, you know, hears about one of these new things and they say like, are we covered here? I imagine you kind of are covering them in real time. But they're kind of a different different flow.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We're thinking about it a lot. Right now, it hasn't really, you know, we we are in a very we we exist in the in the contained environment of Silicon Valley. So this is all front of mind for us. To the mainstream, we we haven't seen news and instinct break out truly yet.
Speaker 3:As we do, yeah, I of course, I mean, I'm using instinct to make all kinds of purchases. So is my wife and this we see this. It's an inevitable future. Yeah. That it's it's guaranteed that, you know, agent, agentic commerce, agentic browsing is going to be the only primitive of marketing that matters eventually.
Speaker 3:And you'll see this very you'll see this maybe that that if I with intellectual honesty, there'll be like some kind of there'll be a barbell where the the very human focused marketing will also matter a ton. So, you know, we're we're spending more money on billboards than ever before. But at the same time, we see agentic marketing really taking off and mattering too.
Speaker 1:How how are you thinking about other workflows? Like, I'm thinking Meta has has been one of the largest beneficiaries of of AI over the last fifteen years. Like, you know, whether it started with, like, traditional machine learning and just getting better and better at targeting and and delivering that in a form factor that's very easy for marketers to understand. They just kind of come with budget and Meta's gonna try to deploy it, so they bring back even more budget. But at the same time, there's it feels like there's an opportunity for a company like ProFound to help marketers sit between sit between them and the places that they're they're spending money just because there's not always perfect alignment.
Speaker 1:Like theoretically, the ad platform is just like, well, we want as much of your money as possible even if they might you might get more value out of it somewhere else in a split second, like even thinking about arbitrages. So how are you thinking about fitting into those kind of paid media workflows?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we've quietly launched ProFound Ads which has been a very early success story where we're seeing yeah. It's that counter positioning or that adjacency that starts to provide value because, you know, what a marketer wants is one agent that can sit across all of the surface areas and deploy that media spend dynamically. In, you know, the old world of software, that was very difficult because, you know, every product had such different surface areas, such such different curvature. It's it's only really available now as an opportunity because, you know, a probabilistic agent is actually very good at that kind of work.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, we we're ProFound ProFound Ad Studio is being used by brands like Ramp to actually create, publish, measure paid advertising initially on generative platforms, but over time, we're gonna go across like all media platforms.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So the idea of what we're trying to do here with the business, like zooming out for a second, it's just the the idea of ProFound is to build the canonical AI marketing company. Mhmm. You know, if if we're seeing verticals get picked off one by one, we we want to pick off marketing.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I imagine that when you sign a client, you are on an ongoing basis generating a lot of prompts to understand how the AI system, different AI tools across all the different models are responding to these. Are you in contact with the labs already so that you don't get flagged? Have you been flagged for like distillation? Are there any hurdles that you run into just because the shape of your work doesn't look like, hey, fix this bug in this code base like in like many other companies look like?
Speaker 3:No. I think, you know, the the relationship with the labs is good. Sure. We're essentially just surveying the models. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Distillation, you need to go into all kinds of like traces which is a very different type of it's a very different type of work. I think, you know, what we're seeing is our business is aligning brands and, yeah, the the these, you know, giant companies to pay attention to the the these new platforms. So I think, yeah, we we very much see ourselves as like an ally to the the the each of the labs, but we kind of sit adjacent to them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's very complementary, so it it makes sense. Yeah. It just It's like it does look like a little bit different of a shape of workload, so I'm wondering if there's if you ever get caught in like accidental situations or anything because I know
Speaker 3:Not not yet.
Speaker 2:These tools. Yeah. I mean, obviously, at your scale, like you have investors that overlap with all the labs so you can like get in touch, which is great. Makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:Amazing update.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1:Davis in the chat says James, you're him. I agree.
Speaker 3:I promise the guys at saga, so been brave, man. Oh, yeah. Those guys I give them a shout on TBPN.
Speaker 2:I love those guys. We
Speaker 1:Yeah. My pleasure, guys. Keep it up.
Speaker 2:Congratulations. We'll talk to Thanks, you guys.
Speaker 1:Great to
Speaker 9:see Have
Speaker 2:good one. Goodbye. And I gotta get out of here. So we're gonna leave you here. We'll see you tomorrow at 11AM Pacific.
Speaker 2:Spotify, Apple Podcasts, website for a newsletter at tbpn.com.
Speaker 1:I'm so glad that we had the CMO of Activision or Cod
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Come on the show and not tell us, hey, you guys gotta cut off the Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:He's very deep And screenshot from the