High Interest Rate Phenomenon, Driscoll's China Bet Backfires, Who Votes on AI Safety? | Stephen Colbert & Josh Kline, Jim VandeHei, Steve Menneto, Matthew Wilson, Rune Kvist, Tyler Bahl, James Cadwallader

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Today is Tuesday, September 15th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

It's been too long, John. It's great to be back.

It's great to be back. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Great success. Eric Gleiman had to issue an apology To absolutely nobody. No, no, no. You didn't see this?

Yeah.

No. Eric Lyman 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. I don't know why we need to be going over there and doing international expansion.

Yeah, not—

yeah, not very American.

Not a fan.

No.

Congratulations to the whole team. Going global, 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. We've had zero interest rate policy, ZIRP. The ZIRP era ended. Now we're in the HIRP. I don't think we should say that one. That doesn't sound very good. 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. You can see the US attacks Iran in the beginning of 2026. 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, Jordi. Take a wild guess what's driving interest rates. It is, of course, the war, which starts there and then boom, up and to the right from then on. But there's other questions about what's going on. Is AI, is the buildout having an effect here? 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 into that. It's obviously bad for everyone. It's bad for the US government because 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 Healthcare, 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 homebuyer. 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 locked periods. There's a whole bunch of Dynamics there, and it's even bad for AI companies. 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. I mean, it's not that war causes interest rates to go up; it's war causes. energy shortages, which causes inflation and inflation 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. 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 10 years, the, I forget what it is, the IEA or something, there's a body that forecasts energy buildout, specifically in solar, and they've gotten it wrong every year for 10 years. They've underestimated the growth of solar. You've seen this chart, right?

The International Energy Agency?

Is that it?

Yeah.

IEA. Yeah. So every year they'll be like, okay, we had a great year last year. We're going parabolic. We're up and to the right, but clearly we're not gonna build more solar. People are gonna get sick of this stuff. And then the next year we build even more solar than we predicted. And so you can look at this chart of the predictions and then how we blow them out. So that is something 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 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. 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, does war or war even in just war in the Middle East, does that always cause interest rates to spike? It makes sense. It's an expensive thing. 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, but does that always happen? So during Gulf War I, which 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 I, there was a textbook oil shock. So Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2nd, 1990. The U.S. military buildup began basically immediately, and the Desert Storm offensive started January 17th, 1991. So about 6 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, but they spiked to over 9%, 9.05% in less than a month because everyone's like, oh, well, there's going to be less oil. Kuwait generates a lot of oil. 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. The Afghanistan war played out in reverse. So immediately before the invasion, 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. Of course, the opposite happened. So, 6 months into the war, the 10-year hit 5.25%, up significantly, up basically 0.75% 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%. 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. 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. 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? 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 talk about. And so, yeah, I guess you could see a couple orders of magnitude, you get to 25% of the economy. I don't know. But today, the problem that's happening with rates specifically is that AI creates investment demand before any productivity benefits arrive. And so we see this with like a trillion dollars of CapEx for like a couple hundred billion dollars 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. And so, economists— there's 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 buildout. And Dylan Patel, Dwarkesh, 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 buildouts with Nvidia lending IG status to different companies for buildouts and backstopping different data centers. That just means that if Nvidia's there backstopping, it means that certain funds that can only invest in investment-grade assets can now make that investment. 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—

I see where you're going with this.

What are you thinking?

You think Jensen should, should backstop the Fed?

Potentially. He might be. He might be the lender of last resort. I was thinking you were going to do— you were going to do a bit about Federal backstop for podcasting. A lot of podcasters are spending a lot of money building sets, trying to get big guests.

Everyone knows my stance on that already.

Yeah. Okay, we can move on. 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 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, 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? 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. They're going with that. But of course, those are the 2 possible outcomes here. And they, 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 is a massive bust in the AI economy and yet you get lower rates. But then also, if AI succeeds, you get lower rates. But they explain it this way. They say in the next 6 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, if there's only one law firm and they got AI and they were able to cut their costs by 50%, you're still going to be paying 2 grand an hour.

You saw Morgan& Morgan is setting up their own data center?

No, wait, really?

I think they're going to spend about $1 billion over the next 10 years.

Wow, they're going vertical, going vertically integrated.

If you're an AI researcher and you've ever wanted to work for a personal injury law firm— Now's your opportunity. Check out Morgan& Morgan. They have all those billboards. Yeah. Just call the number on the billboard.

Yes, I'd like to start racking GPUs for you. I mean, he's— so he's paying for that in cash because doesn't he famously have $1 billion in cash? Yeah. Yeah.

He says you're not a billionaire unless you have it just sitting in a checking account.

It's got to be in the checking account, apparently. But you can imagine so many scenarios where, yes, Morgan& 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 Treasuries. So everyone's buying Treasuries saying, I got to get out of these crazy AI stocks. this stuff hit a wall. 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 dynamic. There is the third kind of crazy scenario, which is outlined by Dylan Patel from SemiAnalysis, which is like it never stops. We're going to keep investing and the data centers and the AI boom is going to continue to suck at capital Until there's like none left and 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 certainly looking for what happens in the next 6 months. And we'll know. We'll check in in 6 months with this Apollo prediction, what will happen. Maybe we'll be in the exact same place looking for the next 6 months. That's happened a lot.

Hopefully, the war will be over.

Hopefully, the war will be over. That would be the easiest thing to resolve, I think. Potentially easier than product—

Sovereign debt.

Yeah, sovereign debt.

Driver of world peace.

Yeah, maybe, maybe. So, yeah, I don't know. I've been excited about the potential for deflationary effects playing out. I went to the hospital and I was just seeing the diffusion of technology, all the All the doctors are using text-to-speech. They talk into these little microphones when they're taking notes. Obviously, that's a technology from—

We get it, John. You worked out so hard that you ended up in the hospital. We know.

Yes, that's true. We know. But I'm fortunately doing much better. But while I was there, I was noticing, like, okay, it's actually a better experience. 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-signatures. sign a bunch of forms and the forms don't render properly on iOS, on Safari. Like, this is something that should be fixable by an AI agent, but it hasn't been yet. Why is that? It's the diffusion question. It's the fact that somebody hasn't gotten in there and actually pitched them 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, you know, 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. All the modern AI agents are within a hair's breadth of actually realizing that future. So some cause for optimism amid— you know, sort 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 gonna tell you about Railway. Railway is your all-in— Is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more. Well, railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. So the technology risks came into focus last week. Is the political system prepared? Says William Galston in the Wall Street Journal. Experts have long worried about economic, social, and security impact of artificial intelligence. This year, those risks have moved onto the public agenda as growth— as job growth slowed, worries that spread— that worry 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. Last week, mounting fears within the largest AI firms at the frontier of AI development burst into public view. On Tuesday, Jacob Coxon 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 for malign 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. Both, it's the meme, both sides are using Claude to fight each other. Really, really crazy stuff. I think this was mostly through routers and third parties and all sorts of stuff, but it's clearly a hairy mess to fight diffusion attacks or distillation attacks, but also just all sorts of nefarious use. It's a true game of whack-a-mole. And so full employment for alignment researchers at the labs. On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei 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 3-step plan to accelerate this process. We talked about that yesterday. The 3rd point will surprise you. First, each company at the frontier development will give employee-like access to independent evaluators. 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? But a DeepSeek employee basically was like, I don't like Dario. He compared giving Dario AGI to giving Hitler the bomb. It was a very, very hardcore message from a DeepSeek employee. But of course, it's translated through 7 layers of of abstractions.

I had no idea if that was real.

Yeah, it could just be some psyop. But did you look into it at all, Tyler? Do you know?

Yeah, I have no idea if it was really there.

Yeah.

But I mean, it seemed like reasonably reputable people I follow were talking about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's really, really hard to get a feel on the vibe in China. It's like, I think the compute gap is 10x. America has 10 times the compute. of China. So, you would imagine that 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 think that's sort of how it would work out, but it is difficult. And then there is this weird scenario where it's like, if you have an aligned superintelligence and your enemy has a misaligned superintelligence, they get turned into paperclips, but the paperclipper can't come over into your territory because you have the paperclip defender, which is turning paperclips into useful stuff like cars and medicines.

Podcast microphones.

Podcast microphones, I suppose. I don't know. It's all very sci-fi, but—

I mean, one of the One of the wildest moments of the last 24 hours since we wrapped the show was the Department of War just saying, effective altruists in shambles.

That's a very online phrase.

After the president said, I am the hoaxbuster, and right now I'm breaking another hoax, that AI is going to 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 on the timeline, but here we are.

Here we are. Extremely, extremely online, just time, but also Also administration. AI developers face a collective action problem that only an agreement to coordinate activities can overcome. There was 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 seatbelts got put in cars 'cause it's sort of analogous, right? Yeah. It's like the seatbelt 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, but it'd be really great if all the cars had seatbelts. And then the healthcare system and the hospital systems want people wearing seatbelts so they don't have to deal with as many broken bones from car accidents. Right? So, I think Volvo—

John Morgan would like a word.

Yeah, probably. So—

Not spending $1 billion on AI so that people stop getting into car accidents.

Yeah. So, Volvo put seatbelts in their cars first as an option. It wasn't selling that well. There was some lobbying to get seatbelts in cars, but a lot of automakers actually fought it and were like, no, we don't want to do this. And a lot of consumers were like, we don't want this. We don't want to have to wear these.

No way.

Oh, yeah.

No way.

Oh, yeah. And yesterday we heard Mitchell talking about, like, it's outrageous that you can't get a 4-point harness in a car, in a street car.

In Europe, you can.

You can. It's like he wants more. It's like, I want to be able to get a roll cage.

No, but it's—

You should.

So wild that You had millions of people driving cars and car accidents happening, and yet people were still saying, no, I don't want more safety. I don't want to have to put this thing over my lap. I don't want to do that every time. I got to put them over every time.

Do you remember the era of automatic seat belts? Did you ever see cars that had those?

No.

This was like a late '80s, early '90s 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 seatbelt was on a mechanical track that would— the seatbelt would be pushed forward, you would step in, and then the seatbelt, once you closed the door and sat down, it would go and move into place so that you didn't have to buckle it.

Ferraris will hand you the seatbelt.

With a little push sound?

Yeah, so you don't have to reach back to do that.

That's such a half measure. Either put it on me entirely or don't, I guess. But even the automatic seatbelt 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 annoying at the end of the day. Never really caught fire. But the odd thing about seatbelts in cars is that I don't believe they had a dramatic effect on road deaths. Like car-based fatalities and injuries because people just started driving faster. But there wasn't efficiency gained 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 seatbelt show today. The deep dive on seatbelt 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 to 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. Mr. Amadei 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 has 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. All private sector AI leaders share that concern. Mr. Amadei 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 democracy's 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 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. The Trump administration says we can't. What are you laughing at?

Matt in the chat says, did you guys know alignment can be solved by having a strong president? I'm so relieved.

Potentially, maybe that's just what we need.

There's one simple— AI safety experts hate this one simple trick.

Yeah, I think I read this in a LessWrong thread 15 years ago. People were saying—

It's gonna be bad unless we have a strong president.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really, really breaks the paperclip—

Presidential guardrails.

The paperclipper 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, would work to address the technology through legislation. 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 popularity— his favorability rate is like 36% or something like that. 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 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 and capability development. 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. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.

There's a new Time cover. What's that? It has Claude on the front with the question, how dangerous are you? Are you interested? And yeah, so full, full, full, full push on this narrative. One of the most brilliant—

You're talking about the narrative to not give Jensen credit in Time magazine for being influential in AI?

Well, that's a whole other story.

Because that was last month's Time cover was 100 of the most influential voices in AI. Jensen didn't make the cut.

No, no, no. But I was talking about the campaign around this moment.

Yeah.

AI safety, it is really coming from every possible angle.

Yep.

You know, 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. It is really, really, really coming from every angle. Ends up in Time today. Jordan Schachtel is saying 2 of the reporters on the byline for this cover are funded by the Tarbell Center, an AI doomer org, he says, controlled by Dustin Moskovitz. Moskovitz, sorry. Tarbell gives journalists—

He's a doomer.

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.

Yeah.

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 have taken money from from Dustin's organization, and yeah, I expect to see a lot more coverage on Tarbell over. And it's funny; it's like who's going to cover them 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, I want to cover this story. And then they're like, wait, they gave money to this person in our newsroom. So I don't know.

Maybe you don't like the person that's sitting across from you on the news desk. You're like, oh, I see the bust down they got on their wrist. I see.

No, but it's really— it's The Verge, NPR, The Information, The Seattle Times, South China Morning Post, TechCrunch, The Guardian, Scientific American. CBS News. Now, the LA Times.

The steelman is that these grants don't come with strings attached, that they're not coming with talk.

It's a free lunch. It's actually— they say free lunches don't exist, but there are exceptions. Yeah. In this case, your steelman is that the Tarbell Center gives a free lunch.

Potentially.

CNBC, Fortune, Time, USA Today.

Individuals aren't there.

Newcomer. I know, but they say our partner newsrooms.

OK.

On the website.

Interesting.

San Francisco Standard, China Talk.

Yeah.

Platformer, Bloomberg.

Is Stratagery on there?

No.

Oh, OK. Go subscribe to Stratagery.

No, but it's basically every— pretty much every newsroom. NBC.

Theo Von?

Not yet. Okay, he's the final holdout.

Call Her Daddy? What about Spitting Chiclets? Uh, Bussin' with the Boys? Is Bussin' with the Boys on there? Okay, what about the new Jackass movie? Did that— did they take Tarbell money?

Probably.

Okay, well, we'll have to get to the bottom of it.

Now, who knows? Crazy, really, I think One of the most fascinating stories, emerging stories. I'm interested to see how these groups cover it.

Is Alex Hormozi involved?

Not yet. I don't think they've focused too much on courses, but—

Manosphere remains clean.

Yeah.

For now.

Yeah. So if you want to get your AI takes from Theo Von—

Maybe. He's got some good ones. Honestly. Anyway, you talked about Morgan and Morgan. Let's dig into this a little bit. The nation's largest personal injury firm said Monday it's committing $1 billion 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, though they will build a tool for sale. 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 this any 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 million on tech and AI since 2021, building an in-house platform called MX2 using frontier models as a base back in 2021.

I'm so—

okay, the timeline 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 2027. That is a long way away in AI land. Who knows what's capable by then? Kirkland& Ellis, the world's largest firm by revenue, committed $500 million to build a proprietary AI platform in May. Latham& Watkins said last week it purchased its own NVIDIA GPU servers and leased private space over the past 3 years, though the firm declined to disclose what it spent. Goodwin Procter said it has set aside $25 million annually for AI.

Mm-hmm.

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, uh, 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 makes a lot of sense for this. 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 want to do things their own way. So it makes a lot of sense. Are you going to buy Palmer Luckey's new shirt? He's getting out of the Hawaiian t-shirt game and into the blue button-down shirt. He calls it the Palmer.

The Balmer.

It comes with sweat stains already applied. I was really trying to understand what— was this like he's reacting to the news of Ballmer and the Clippers? And so he made this as a joke? Like, why is he— like, this is a funny video, but it resurfaces.

Or is he— is this a nod to clipping becoming a new kind of type of role on the internet?

Clipping? What do you mean clipping?

Clippers, people that clip podcasts and other content. I don't know. No, I'm joking.

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 Ballmer?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Is he making fun of him? I think he's just like, it's a 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.

Uh, Pulley, the cap table management software, is shutting down.

Why?

Um, I, uh, it seems like they've, they've probably run out of money or something. Um, what's crazy is I was on Pulley 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 12/8/23. 26, to ensure— they've entered into an exclusive partnership with Carta. So not an acquisition, but Carta is just basically saying, we'll help bring your customers over.

Yep.

So I think this is— Poli is a company— I believe they raised something like $20 million. A $20 million Series A was their last round. Let's see, I 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— their last round was in 2022.

Stripe did the A?

I think so.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that makes sense, potential future acquisition.

Yeah, the Series A was by Stripe.

It's interesting that Stripe didn't buy this to roll into—

I think it's just such a small market. Like, Carta has to— In order to be— who knows 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 of customers.

They always needed, like, a second act.

One of the companies that I'm a shareholder in that's on Poly was specifically on Poly because they didn't want— they were worried about Carta sort of, like—

Running a secondary market?

Yeah, running a secondary market on top of their craft table. But yeah, I think this is the kind of business where you can be a big company, you just have to have like 80% of the market, right? And so yeah, tough go, but it'd been like almost 4 years since they had raised money. So at this point, they probably were just out of cash, not making a lot of money, big pref— at that point, like probably $50, $60 million pref stack was going to be impossible to clear.

Yep.

Carta wouldn't pay, so they end up shutting down.

Yeah, the typical Pulli user story outside of those one-off transition periods where there's a news cycle around something Carta is doing that drives adoption was just being lower cost than Carta. I think Carta runs like maybe $5K a month for most venture-backed startups at the early stage— or $5K a year, I think. And Polly would sort of come in with a bid that was like half that. And the product is kind of just an Excel sheet in the cloud. 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 a lot of companies, what they would run into is they would get a quote from Carta that would be like $5,000 a year. And then Pulli 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 Pulli, but our team isn't really familiar with that, and we're going to wind up billing you $200 extra a month, and it's going to wind up being the same price because—

Yeah.

Our— the associate on your account that manages your cap table in Carta right now, knows all the workflows there, is very comfortable with Carta. If they're going to have to go into Pulli, they're going to spend more time messing with the tool.

Yeah, as an investor, probably like 8, 9 out of 10 investments are on Carta. And there's no benefit in—

And then also on the upmarket side, it goes to like Shareworks, and Morgan Stanley, and other more investment banking grade products, because you're getting ready for IPO. And so this, like, this, this, 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. So there wasn't that fit. 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.

Yeah, and this market has been So hard to crack. I mean, AngelList had a cap table product at some point. They were doing incorporation plus cap table. They, I think, exited cap table for the most part. So Carta basically has a monopoly at this point. And so I'm sure they're excited for some price hikes.

Do you 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, I want to try this?

Don't make mistakes. 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 million, you know?

Also like a lawsuit.

Yeah.

And like a really bad reputation for like you stiff some investor accidentally or something. Yeah, uh, very, very tricky. Anyway, what's going on over at Ramp?

New updates from the Ramp AI Index Economics Lab. R 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. Anthropic took a big risk in its recent call to pace the 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. So, yeah, Astra's, you know, in many ways seemingly a bit more cost efficient. And so that's probably a factor, but also the data retention stuff that Anthropic is working towards fixing by the fall.

Yeah, the data retention thing. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, that's probably a bigger thing for enterprise AI. 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 got to roll this out everywhere. I don't really know how much these things diffuse that way, but— That launch weekend into the long Labor Day weekend certainly gave a lot of people time to demo it on personal projects and bring it into the workplace with confidence. So good results there. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. After its forthcoming IPO, Aliko Dangote estimated wealth is expected to be around $58 billion, putting him above Ken Griffin, Lakshmi Mittal, and Jack Ma. Refinery IPO. Refinery IPO. What do they do? The 69-year-old tycoon's net worth is projected to be as worth as much as $58 billion.

Tycoon mentioned. This is what it takes to be a tycoon these days.

The petroleum refinery and petrochemicals company That would catapult him past U.S. 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 $1.6 billion from the IPO opening September 14th. That will raise the value of the business— that will value the business at almost $50 billion. 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. 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 Pretty good stuff. Good day to be a tycoon. What's going on with John Ternus?

John Ternus, the Terninator, was—

Sounds like Terminator.

I know. Was at the Emmys last night.

Didn't Tim Cook do this exact bit like 2 years ago?

Yeah, but did the phone fold?

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. 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. And he's smiling, he's all smiles at the, at the Emmys. Very good.

Uh, Max, uh, from Creative Strategies says he seems so happy and proud showing off the iPhone Duo. It's kind of nice and sweet to see.

People were— people were—

guy likes to make hardware. Yeah. Yeah.

This has been his life's work. This is bullish. Doing this for decades. People 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, just people getting a peek. And I don't think they sent out review units. I think reviewers were allowed to be on site at Apple, touch them, play with them, do backflips 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, but it's not happening now. What else?

Still trying to think about using that screen.

I think it's going to 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 4 or something, so you can be fully— I think level 3, You just have to be available to take over. You don't actually have to be—

Have the laws actually been updated?

Yeah. So there's a Mercedes that is Level 3, which is odd because Tesla's technically Level 2 because you have to be eyes on at all times. You can take your eyes off the road for like 30 seconds. Mercedes 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 monitor, on the display in the car. 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 Mercedes Level 3 system is actually less— it probably has more disengagements than—

Than Tesla.

Tesla's Level 2 FSD system with the mod— 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, on a plane, you're not bringing an iPad, you're not bringing a laptop, just bust that thing out, watch a movie.

Then you could bring a mouse in your pocket too.

Maybe, maybe a full gaming setup. What did Matthew McConaughey do at the US Open? He just looked excited.

He's playing a character.

26,000 likes on this. It looks totally normal to me. I don't know. I don't get it.

You don't think this is—

Absolute cinema?

I think it's— no, I think it's absolute cinema. A lot of people are saying it's the most performative thing of all time. But I think it's great that he's always in character.

No, he's not always in character. He just, he is who he is when he's on screen. And so when you see him in real life, you're like, oh, 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.

Ben says they always cast him as him.

Yeah. There are, there are some articles we should go through.

One year ago today, Dylan joined TVPN.

Yeah.

Round of applause. 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 Ultra Dome with us. No, he's too important. He's got to be up in San Francisco.

Apparently, China stole the American recipe for blueberries. Did you see this? There's nothing. They distilled us. A distillation attack. Basically, Driscoll's gave China its blueberries, then China swiped the secret to growing them. California growers' expansion into China ignited local competition and widespread intellectual property theft. Why are you hitting the gong? That's for Dylan. Oh, that's for Dylan. Okay, gong for Dylan, not gong for blueberry intellectual property theft.

China, they got the one simple trick to improve their berries.

Yes.

They stole the secret.

So about 15 years ago, Executives from U.S. 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 buzzsaw of Chinese competition. As tales of blueberry fortunes spread, Chinese entrepreneurs rapidly built farms of their own. 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 growers. The blueberry economy over there is booming. Production in China has 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. 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 9-ounce container, that state media trumpeted an era of blueberry freedom in which even ordinary people can gorge on a once exotic fruit. 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. Using inexpensive state-backed financing to scale up and sometimes play fast and loose with 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 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 farmers.

Dream job. Dream job.

Oh, me? I'm not here from an American company. I am loyal.

A spy movie, but you're an undercover—

Just tasting the blueberries and you're like, this is American intellectual property.

Blueberry special ops.

Yeah.

Gold Rock's calling it the Fruit Wars.

No, it is crazy. It's like, I mean, you would, like when you're discussing China, you think about the geopolitical implications applications 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 blueberries or it's shoes. Like, 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 the infrastructure gets built up, then they can become a net exporter and then they're competing with you. 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 capitalize on that opportunity.

It is 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 it's like, do you own a living— like, can you Yeah.

Can you use your tokens or are they my tokens now?

That's right.

It's very similar. It's very similar.

They're saying that Muse has a new killer feature.

What's that?

Which is watching short-form video content for you. So Cowboy says, summarize the reels she sent recently.

Okay.

And Muse goes, here's what she sent over the past week. Design and furniture. A designer ranking famous sofas by comfort.

And for that friend who sends you too many reels, you now have super intelligence, personal super intelligence at your disposal.

Yeah, Gianni says, wife sends me 100 reels a day. Thank you so much. You've saved my marriage.

Are people upset about this ethically? Is this like what making the fly watch reels? You're making Mew Spark watch reels and that's unethical? Is there a model welfare? view on this issue.

You think— do you think the model would rather summarize your email than watch reels about sofa designers?

Maybe my emails. Pretty interesting stuff in there, like 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. Welcome back to the show. How you doing? What's going on? Great to be here.

Thanks for having me.

Welcome to TBPn. Thank you so much for hopping on. I would love to start with the book. Can you please just introduce the thesis, take us through your process? And I have a ton of different questions about media and just books generally these days, but take us through what got you inspired to write this book.

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 you'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 offload to AI.

Yeah.

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 how to think about it even outside of work, because we end up wasting at least 25%. A lot of surveys show a lot more of our time doing stuff we don't want to do and shouldn't do.

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?

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. But it's super applicable 'cause 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 3 things you need to do in order to crush your job?

Yeah.

What are the 3 things you do that you think are stupid?

Yeah.

And almost all the time we could delete those. And what are the 3 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 going to be able to thrive over the next 5 to 10 years because the velocity of change, especially as you integrate your company with artificial intelligence, it's so fast and you're going to 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 going to be like all these old-line companies where all these barnacles build up and inertia sets in and the bureaucratic blob takes How do you react to this take that I see sometimes where it's like AI is being forced on people?

I've seen like, I think a few people are like, oh, my boss is forcing me to use AI.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah, I think the right way to approach it from the company standpoint is to make these tools available to everybody, give them some space, give employees some space to experiment, and encourage people who actually kind of have an AI brain. 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 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, it's kind of a nice search engine and occasionally gets things right, occasionally gets them wrong. But then there's the 1 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 and 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. 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 political upheaval. And that's not good for democracy, not good for free markets.

Sorry to interrupt. Is it possible for you to put your— like stabilize your phone or whatever camera?

Yeah, I'm trying to hold it. How's that?

Even if it— yeah, even if it's pointing up a little bit more, just because for anyone that might get—

There we go.

There we go. Perfect. We're back.

There we go.

Perfect.

Perfect. Much better. John.

Yeah. 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, 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— there's a friction to being an early adopter. And so I'm wondering how you think about coaching employees, coaching executives and founders on the right pace of diffusion.

Yeah.

Like, I just saw this with Astra and Blender. It can build all these crazy, amazing models. It's not pixel perfect. And so I would not recommend someone to actually go and build a house that was designed in Blender with GPT-6 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. 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 deal with the trade-offs there?

It's a really, really, really good question and a very hard one to answer 'cause a little bit depends on what you do and how old you are. I would say if you're in college and you're 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 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. But I also then I'll dive in and out because I don't want to become too dependent on interacting with a technology to kind of 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. Like a couple of good examples are like design a couple of months ago wasn't that great. But I think with both Claude and the new ChatGPT, 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 see the same thing across almost every domain. Like, where it's not great is 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. As you guys know, the magic only gets unlocked when you're persistent 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 of feedback.

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, 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.

We're in this right now where we're doing like this national press cycle around the AI Doom stuff and like 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's just so much noise to try and punch through if you're an AI company, just to be like, we're good at using a computer now. Or like, it works for Blender now. Or like, you can use it to control—

Yeah.

Like, I used it to fix my Wi-Fi on my desktop because it can actually access the computer now. And there's all these new features But 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? And yes, you can ask it, but very few people actually do. So actually getting those inspirations forward is a huge, huge challenge. I am interested 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. But I'm more interested in, is AI having an effect on 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?

Yeah, 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. It's all the things— the product of journalism is journalism. Everything else you want to try to automate or you want to speed up as much as you possibly can. 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. I have a young guy who works for me. We put out newsletters as one of our main products. I've always wanted to be able to take that newsletter and turn it into a 6 to 8 card show on Instagram or on Facebook. And one kid in 36 hours built it and it looked beautiful. It worked perfectly. It was in the wild on Instagram in 6 days and now we're able to spread it to different platforms. Well, that wasn't possible. That's new distribution, potentially new revenue, and it doesn't at all interrupt the sanctity, the quality of the content. In fact, it expands the potential audience for that. And that's where we see a lot a lot of upside. We're 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, and we're not really fundamentally a technology company until recently. That makes sense.

Have you, have you thought much at all about maybe 2— 1 to 2 to 3 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 a CEO is to have this sort of global context on the business, know hopefully everything there is to know about the business that is sort of both public and private, right?

Yeah.

And then 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. And it doesn't feel like we're that far away from going to your favorite agent and saying, like, /goal, here are our KPIs for the next quarter, and start to— it almost feels 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 100% of the way there with the model. But if you're just sort of like routing information 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 closer than Than some of these other roles.

Than a journalist agent?

Maybe.

No, no, that's a good way to lead. Yeah, maybe it's like, I'm going first.

Yeah, maybe. But 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. 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. 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 those 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, you just have the 6 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 of years. That's been our experience. We're not getting rid of people. 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 want to keep my job. I don't want to be AI'd out. But I'm pretty confident that like if I use this technology smartly, stay ahead of the curve, I'm going to 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 want to do that crap in the beginning.

Yeah. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, 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 100% of your time, right?

So yeah, and it's what drives the value.

Yeah, yeah. Well, have a great rest of your day, and we'll talk to you soon.

Yeah, congrats on the launch, and great to see you.

Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. 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 Minetto with us in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBN UltraDome. Steve, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

Doing great. Good afternoon, guys.

Good afternoon.

Great to have you.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's a nice palate cleanser for us.

We're very excited.

We've been talking about a lot of AI. It's a very interesting business. But yes, we're excited to talk about your business.

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.

Sure. Malibu Boats Inc. is a collection of 9 brands. So we have Malibu and Axis in the towboat category. We have Cobalt in the runabout category. Then we have Pursuit, Saxdor, which is our new acquisition we just, we just acquired in March in Finland and Poland.

Yeah.

We have the MBG brands, which is Cobia, Pathfinder, Hughes, and Maverick. So 9 different boat companies with all different, uh, you know, ability to get to the water and, and really have fun with whatever you're doing. If it's technical fish to runabout surf to surfing to exploring, uh, adventure day boats, we, uh, we offer all of them.

And what is the scale of the business? How many employees? Like, how, how big is the footprint of the company at this point?

Yeah, we have, uh, we have manufacturing in the U.S., predominantly in Tennessee, Kansas, in Florida. We have about 3,000 people in the company, you know, a little bit under $1 billion in revenue. And, and now, like I said, we have manufacturing in Elk, Poland, and Larsmo, Finland. Yeah. So as we expand our reach overseas.

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?

Yeah, our overall strategy, we do look at boatbuilding. How do we continue that? You know, we've been boatbuilding in some of our brands for over 60 years. And so we look at what else can we add to that? So we look at new boats. What else? You know, what other brands can we get? 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. So, we look for those opportunities that can make us more efficient and offer a better product for our consumers.

Yeah. What is driving the market overall right now? Obviously, interest rates are high, energy prices are increasing, Does that move the market in the short term? 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?

Well, it's a split world. Like you've heard the saying of the K economy. Yeah, we are seeing that in spades. So when you think about a payment buyer, somebody who's going to take a payment out on a boat, you know, that, that family is under stress, you know, that we have— we've seen that. Buyer go to the sidelines now and they're kind of waiting out for things to get back to fall.

Yeah.

What we have seen, though, is the consumers that are still in the market want bigger, more feature-rich boats. So we're starting to see average sales price go up, but people are buying bigger boats. You know, like I said, more tech on their boats and they're enjoying the trade-up kind of effect. So we're seeing 2 customers split. And we're, you know, we're trying to find new ways to help that payment buyer out to get into the market.

Sure. What features drive the market most for that higher-end buyer these days?

The higher-end buyer is length and beam width. So there's more comfort out in the bigger water. Then you start getting into technology. So it's easier to captain the boat. So is it— 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. 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, you 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, boat, you know, changes itself and the next person surfs, you know, the way they want to surf. So.

Yeah.

So, you know, that's kind of technology leads to more fun, more safety.

What is your view on the electrification of boats? We obviously saw a massive success with Tesla in automotive. The boating community has 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 like? Looks like on the water?

I think, yeah, I think propulsion systems are going to evolve, right? They always do.

Yeah.

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 before you get to kind of the, you know, first the mainstream sales, you got to solve some problems, right? So, weight, you know, electricity that's, you know, 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 in you know, in a relatively close area where I can get back to shore and a dock, you know, sounds like electric may have a fit. If I'm going out in the saltwater, I'm out into the, you know, the, you know, 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. Right.

Yeah. What are the different, like, autonomy tiers like? And do— is there a section of the market that cares about fully autonomous boating? Like, do they want to be able to just, you know, press a point, hit a point on the map and get there and sit back? And how much, how solvable is that relative to automotive, which obviously has so many more variables and challenges in some ways?

Yeah. And some of the technology is there, as you just explained it, is we do have waypoints, waypoints and so forth, technology already on boats. So you You can put in coordinates, hit a button, and the boat can captain itself to that waypoint and kind of an auto-drive situation. But if it's fully autonomous, we're a little bit further out on that where it has the total package where you can just sit back and let it drive itself from docked, take your tour, and then come back to the dock. You know, there's— we have some technology that does that, but to do that with confidence, we're still— a lot of the marine companies are still working on that.

That makes sense. We've had a bunch of companies on the show that are much early, you know, super early stage companies, seed and Series A, that are focused on defense and military applications of a lot of the same technologies that you work with.

Would that ever be a focus for Malibu, or are you guys No, as you think about opportunities in building, you know, drone boats, you know, and, you know, 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, you know, looking towards and working through currently to see what, you know, we can do as far as doing our part in the defense opportunities that are out there. That are out there on the unmanned surface vehicles, you know, for, for, for marine.

I have a couple more questions in terms of the buyer. Obviously, you make the boats in America predominantly, obviously of international operations now through the acquisition. But how much of buying is concentrated in the United States? How global is the distribution dealership network and actual sales?

Yeah. So when you look at our company prior to the acquisition, we did about less than 5% of our revenue internationally. So we were predominantly a North American company and we source, you know, most of our products or our supply chain is US-based, manufactured in the US. So, you know, that's been really helpful for us as we've, you know, took our first international acquisition. Now it opens up a whole new opportunity in geography as well as segments. And we're, you know, in the midst of that integration and leveraging those opportunities to, you know, expand our dealer network across the world for our current boats that we have, the Malibu, Pursuit, Cobalt boats, as well as bringing our Saks store manufacturing to the States. So we're, we're in the midst of that integration right now.

Got it. What does that mean for hiring? How difficult is 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 in wire harnessing, electricians, all sorts of different professional skills and roles. What does the hiring pipeline look like for you? And is it particularly weak right now? Is it particularly strong right now? What is hiring looking like?

Yeah, hiring is kind of down middle of the road. So 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 is a craftsmanship type of thing. So when you think about gel coat, right, 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. 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 Gelco.

What does the buyer journey typically look like these days? Are people— do they start with a Google search? Is there online funnels or are there other points in the customer journey that are particularly critical in this industry?

Think about, yeah, the journey is different. Is about a 200-day to 250-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 the ocean, 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, that kind of go through boat shows. Play a big part in that research as well. 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 Atlantic City. You know, around Halloween we'll have one of the bigger shows, the Fort Lauderdale Boat Show. 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 want to 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 they're— what's on their waterways that kind of starts to drive an opinion and forming? And then of course, you get social media that drives a lot of that as well.

Yeah, I'm sure. I'll wait for John to get one and then I'll get a bigger one.

I'm sure that happens a lot.

What's going on? So you guys don't have like a sort of racing focus. I imagine that's a much smaller market than some of these other markets. I just have a sort of random question. You're the first recreational boating expert we've had on the show ever, so you're the guy to ask. But every time I see a video of a cigarette boat, it ends up 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 dangerous is that? How popular is it? Is it, is it less popular than it was historically, or is it, or is it rising? I'm just very curious.

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 in motorcycle racing and And so, in off-road racing, it's a small, small niche. Like any type of racing, you get over your ski tips, you know, you're going a little too fast, you get the air underneath, right? Starts to flip out. So, you want to 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. 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.

That's fun.

What's the biggest fish you've ever caught?

Me? Sorry, I'm not— I'm still in the little guppy stuff. I haven't had anybody, you know, any, any big fish.

That's fair. I mean, uh, there's plenty of time.

Sorry.

There's a lot of time.

We actually, we actually asked that too.

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, uh, we appreciate you humoring us. But, uh, thanks so much for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for educating us on the market. I think it's fascinating. And yeah, I love the brands and all the products. I hope to experience all of your products over the course of my life.

I need a recommendation. Lake Arrowhead, that's the dream.

Yeah, John's a big lake guy. I'm more of an ocean guy.

Family I went with had a Boston Whaler, but I'll have to give you a call when I make a move.

Okay, we're always here. Thanks for having me, guys. Appreciate it.

Yeah, great to meet you, Steve.

We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Cisco. 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. Up next, we have the co-founder and CEO of Jack and Jill AI-assisted hiring. We have Matthew Wilson joining us. Matthew, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

Hey guys, great to be here.

Yeah, having a fun time over here.

Fantastic.

Did you catch any of the last interview?

No, I don't think they can.

No, just the last, the last 5 seconds.

Okay.

Oh, great.

We were talking about boats. What's the biggest fish you've ever caught?

Fish?

What's the biggest fish?

Probably about this big, maybe a sardine.

Oh, there you go. That's it. Better than nothing. I feel like you got to try to catch a fish that small.

You got to be going into a specific lake. I feel like, you know, by default you would add— you would expect just the median fish to be the one that you catch, but you're going for Precision, precision.

Much like with hiring, where you don't want to just get the average. You don't want to just get the average. The right hire. You want pure precision.

Precision. But yes, anyway, introduce yourself and the company, please.

Sure. So I'm Matt Wilson. I am one of the co-founders and the CEO of Jack and Jill. And at Jack and Jill, we build— we built 2 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, but doing that, bringing that service to every single person in the world.

Hollywood agent. I'm seeing commissions and fees and percentages, not necessarily SaaS revenue. What's the business model?

Yeah, we operate a couple of different business models. So we operate on a success fee model, is primarily what we've been operating on today. We also have some more traditional kind of SaaS-based, like retainer-based style models as well. But, you know, whichever model you're on, it's free to get started. And yeah, you can go get started for free on the company side, and the consumer side is totally free. So the companies are those that pay on the network.

How difficult—

how—

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 I get tricked by AI sales emails where they're pulling— I see the subject line or whatever, and I see the top of it, and it's like some very specific detail. And I'm sort of like—

Jordi, your podcast co-host has just passed away. Do you want to be on the—

I think that's a spot-on observation, right? Good people have always had lots of inbound. Great companies get lots of inbound. AI is, you know, just like it's happened with outbound sales, AI is decreasing the cost of outbound on both sides. So what we're seeing in the market is, you know, the best people are just getting inundated with demand from, from recruiters in a particularly intense hiring environment like you see in, 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 18 months, that's just going to ramp up and up and up as it becomes you know, cheaper and cheaper and easier and easier to run outbound recruitment at scale. And likewise, from the 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 up because they don't want to deal with this kind of avalanche of AI-generated applications that they're getting through. So, you know, what our perspective on that is, 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, you know, maybe you're only passively looking, but it can be continually in the background monitoring every day and, you know, liaising back and forth with the agents of all the companies that are hiring until you spot this kind of perfect mutual fit where there's a really interesting opportunity that really fits well with what, with what somebody is looking for. So that's, that's what we've built is this incredibly high signal-to-noise way of of escaping out of this arms race that you see with AI-generated outbound on both directions.

What's going on in the traditional recruiting market? How are traditional recruiters adopting AI? I 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 $100 million on the balance sheet and can be making these sort 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, how are they adopting AI? I'm just sort of curious because I'm sure you end up— some of them probably use—

You see a lot of the, a lot of the innovation that's been happening over the last 2 years and this 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, you know, just like you might have the first generation of AI tools in sales was AI SDRs. We're going to go and, you know, map the TAM and we're going to spam the TAM, right? I mean, and that was, that was that first generation. And you're seeing that happen on both sides at the moment where the AI tools built for recruiters are let's identify who could be a fit for this role and let's outreach to them with some AI-generated messaging. You're seeing the same on the candidate side. Let's have AI apply for 1,000 jobs for me in one day. And that's leading to this cacophony of noise that is being kind of felt on both sides. And I think the only real solution to that, you know, 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— this ability to offer these incredibly high signal connections that are then outside of this world of outbound.

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 Claude 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 I mean, on the hiring side, there's probably some developer who walked over to the hiring team and was like, oh, you should use, you know, this to, you know, write some software that will let you parse through all of these and rank your applications. What's like the status quo?

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 where they can do this at enormous scale, you're seeing this in volumes kind of go up and up and up. So, you know, 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 the noise of those applications. And like the same thing happening on the candidate side.

How far are we from You know, 2 people, let's say a candidate and an employer talking and saying, yeah, it seems like 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 sort of an 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's—

Yeah, I think the— 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've brought the support there for people. I think, you know, I could see that happening in the future, that you just connect up the 2 agents and they go back and forth and negotiate. But I think, you know, for me, I think the most impactful thing you can do in recruitment is actually at the top of the funnel, is saying You know, 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 it's like a 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? Is this a company I want to go work for?

Tell us how much you raised. I want to hit the gong.

Sure. Yeah, we raised $40 million.

Congratulations.

Who, who came into the round?

Yeah. So SG Capital led the round and we had Creandum who led our $20 million seed round last year. They doubled down. Madrona Capital and then a whole bunch of others as well.

Fantastic. Well, congratulations. And thank you so much for hopping on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stuff.

Up next, you're not gonna believe it. Another $40 million Series A. $40 million, number of the day.

Well, welcome to the show, Rune. Welcome back. How are you doing?

What's happening?

Thanks so much for hopping on.

I'm doing great. Good to see you guys.

Good to see you too. Congratulations.

What's the biggest fish you've ever caught?

Oh, hit the gong for the $40 million Series A. He did it. But then Jordi Hays—

The team really wants to know what's the biggest fish you've ever caught?

I've only ever caught a little trout, I think. And I'm a vegetarian. I put it back out right away. I'm not a huge fisherman.

Good man. Just in it for the sport.

There you go. Exactly. I'm just for the hunt.

Great to have you back on the show. What's new in your world?

This weekend blew everything up. It seems like everyone is— Dario, Sam, Milan are now all talking about how do we build trust in the models before we deploy them? How do we build frontier auditing? That's top of mind for us. That's exactly what we're working on. We should talk a little bit about that. That comes at the back of us raising our $40 million Series A, so we now have the capital to go and make a dent in this problem. It feels like that is now the bottleneck for progress. Security becomes the bottleneck for progress, and so it needs to get solved urgently.

Yeah. So talk about how you guys fit into the solution. Obviously, the solution is going to require a bunch of parties to coordinate, but what's been your approach so far and what do you focus on?

Yeah, so our approach, we both build 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. Everyone, your whole Twitter feed will tell you that this is urgently needed now. Now the short-term bottleneck is on capacity of world-class auditors who both get frontier AI systems and know what an audit looks like. So we need to scale that 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. So the whole thing is to build trust here. You need to trust the people who are putting out the audit reports.

Yep.

And that's where we think insurance plays a really important role, where you want to shift from this world where labs pick their own auditors. They're obviously going to pick someone to grade their homework that's going to be very lenient. They're going to pick their own dog to grade their homework. So, who are the people who have good incentives to say the truth about this? 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.

I saw Naval post something about the liability being a key discussion point here. I'll pull up the post. He said that strong liability enforcement could be helpful in the AI debate. If your agent swarm goes rogue, you're liable. If your weakly protected model gets jailbroken, you're liable. If you serve a weakly 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. Is it not that way? Should we change something? What's going on? Give me more context on what Naval's talking about there.

Yeah. So Naval at the highest level is saying we have all these existing tools that we can put to use here. It's already a criminal act to kill lots of people. Won't that apply here? I think there's a lot of wisdom in that, that that is the system that we will 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. And there's a couple of caveats to this. 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 was no human intent.

Oh, interesting.

And so all of a sudden it becomes a gray area. My hunch is that the courts would still have found that OpenAI is in fact liable for the Hugging Face and would be continue 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. And 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 of trillion dollars, well, that sets the absolute cap for what 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, catastrophic risk insurance.

Is there— what is the best example that you'd pull from? Like, is there another industry 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 car industry, the nuclear industry? I don't even know.

Yeah, I think there are many places you can pull from. Nuclear is easy to understand. Nuclear insurance is mandatory. Basically, the government said, we guys need you to build nuclear power plants, but in return, you better carry insurance because when something goes wrong, we don't want to pick up the bill.

Yeah.

What they do is they actually— all the nuclear power plant operators have a mutual insurance where they cover each other's asses.

Got it.

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. I think there's a lot to learn from that, though we'd have to get it— I think when you look at nuclear overall, they went too hard on regulation after a big incident, which means that we don't have nuclear energy today. We have to find a way to let the market operate 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 move forward.

Yeah. How is the legacy— how are legacy insurance players thinking about pricing this risk? 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 And maybe add up all the property values in the nearby area and potential damages if there were any type of adverse event. Whereas I think with AI, it's like right now very much operating in the digital world. So, there's hacking risk, there's risk of, you know, over the weekend it was risk that an agent swarm could take down the entire internet, right? And it's sort of very unclear.

Yeah.

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 a day, what would that cost the global economy? It's like probably a trillion.

A big number.

A big, big, big, big number that's sort of hard to underwrite. So is there enough clarity yet to actually get into this game of, of, of insuring this kind of risk?

Yeah, 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 Hugging Face, they're to some extent already liable. So they're making an implicit risk calculation. It's a hard one to make, but it's already being made. The insurance industry has refined a bunch of tools over the past decades and centuries for how to do this. So quantitative risk Catastrophic risk models. 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. That's another reason why you want to use the existing labs' own balance sheets because they already have exposure. It's going to take a while until AIG would like to put up $10 trillion here, but the labs already have their full market cap on the line. 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's actually going on and have the quantitative tools, but you don't have to stand up $10 trillion of balance sheet overnight? 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.

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.

I like the commercial approach to AI safety too.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the incentives will align and everyone will work on this. I'm very excited for it. So yeah, keep us posted as new announcements announcements come from the firm. And good luck. It's a busy time.

Thank you.

We'll talk to you soon.

Good to see you guys.

Have a good one. Let 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 TDPL UltraDome. We have Tyler Ball from Activision. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much.

I have some hats for you. Here you go. Some more swag out there when you get done.

Thank you.

That's such a dream hat. This is this is not the gift I wanted. I wanted to be able to play Modern Warfare Four tonight because I played the beta, got completely addicted, and then I feel like you pulled it from my grasp. Well, we might be able to hook you up. I will do anything.

Make sure you get you some codes. But I think more important, we should get you out to Infinity Ward out in Sherman Oaks.

Amazing. Get the whole team out here. Thank you for the hat. Yeah, but I am I am. I'm super excited for October 23rd. I spent a whole weekend. I got a new gaming PC for it. I was locked in. No joke. I'm obsessed with this game. It's great.

That's exciting.

You're kind of— you could be part of the problem here. John's on the record for having a historical gaming addiction.

It's my vice.

And yeah, MW4 could be enough to make it rear its head.

Yeah. It's really, really good.

We're excited that you're excited. So that's why I'm here. Yeah.

You know, stop by.

I'm a big fan. I can't leave without getting flashbanged. So I'm telling you, that's all I came here for is to make sure I get that in there.

Maybe let's start with a little bit of introduction on yourself, 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 is the journey that got us here today? So, but let's start with, with a little bit of your history.

Yeah, I'm literally a 14-year-old kid living my dream. So like, I started in music. I was a DJ. I was doing hip-hop in New York City on the radio, worked at Sony Music as an intern, worked at Conan O'Brien and stuff, right? Yeah, the old Late Night with Conan O'Brien. It was kind of— it was like a page. And then I went into like sneakers. I was a sneakerhead. So I worked at Reebok and Adidas, and part of that relationship And then Google. So I went over to Google for 6 years. 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, well, yeah, and, and, and no one has been more vindicated this year than the Quibi team, because you look at the App Store charts, the only new apps are like new forms of gambling and short-form dramas, basically.

Exactly. The novelas.

Every single day, there's like a new one, too. These things just keep popping up.

I still believe in the product. It was just the wrong time, right? We literally launched right when COVID was breaking out. And some of the crazy shows that were in development that never reached the mainstream or never was actually released were really exciting. And then after it shut down, the shows went on to win Emmys and stuff. And I know the Emmys was last night and stuff. So it was quality content, 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 20 years, and join on the marketing side for Call of Duty. So I've been doing this for about 6 years and really excited to bring MW4 to the market this year.

20 years ago, is that the first Call of Duty? Is that the original Call of Duty? Was that your first Call of Duty?

No, you know, I didn't play the original PC game, right? But I played probably Call of Duty 4, which is Modern Warfare, right? And so Xbox 360 and the whole 9 yards.

It's funny, the 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. Some Modern Warfare 2. It goes through everything.

Yeah, I mean, like, but you got to think it's 24 years or 24 games that have been created. And then if you add Warzone, our free-to-play game, which is massive, That's 25. And then we have a mobile game with Call of Duty Mobile, billion downloads, right? And so I think people forget the mobile because it's bigger in Southeast Asia or in China and other places in developing markets. But it's a massive game, really, really successful. And so yeah.

Are those bolt-on handheld devices that modify the phone—

Like Backbone and those things?

Backbone. Are those big on the mobile game? Are those actually seeing adoption? I don't see them out in the world that often, but it felt like a cool category when it came out.

Yeah, I mean, like, you know, I know the guys over at Backbone, and I think like it's a really great product. But, you know, for someone that doesn't play on mobile, right? Like, instead, like, you've even seen like thumb slips and things like that. People put like these gloves on their hands to be able to play. So for someone like me who's more casual, yeah, I think Backbone would actually help out so I can play on mobile and kind of get that, you know, controller feel. But I think, you know, I don't know how big the market is for them, and then there's been a lot of kind of competition in that space.

How do you think Duo will impact the mobile gaming market, at least in the US?

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? Like, I waited online, or my wife waited online. And, you know, that's when you know you have a good—

That's a claim to fame.

That's great.

First guy in Boston with an iPad.

Did you do a backflip with it?

I did not do a backflip.

You missed it.

And, you know, I have every single Apple device I've had, you know, the day it came out and stuff. And Duo, I'm kind of looking, going, is it going to fit? And how am I going to play on it and stuff? And so I can't really figure out—

It's a pretty good aspect ratio for gaming, actually. I could see it working pretty well.

Yeah, totally. I mean, I've seen some of the videos on it, and it looks amazing. But until I have it in my hands—

I think the question is, are foldable phones popular with mobile gamers in other markets where foldable phones are popular?

Sure, sure, sure.

So that's where you'd want to look.

So yeah, I mean, obviously pretty complex product portfolio, even just within Call of Duty, because you have Warzone, mobile, you have all these things. What are the actual brand tenets, the marketing messages that you think are important to never stray from?

Yeah, I mean, on the marketing side, we always talk about stature, swagger, and scale, right? So stature is like, how do I do something that only Call of Duty can do, 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, right? Is it cool? Is it interesting? And how are we innovating in that space? And then we think about scale, right? How do I reach as many people as possible, right? Yeah. Because I'm not just talking to a niche gaming audience. You got 100 million people playing, you know, our free-to-play game. You got a billion players, you know, into our mobile game. And 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 3 boxes? is green light, go all the way.

It was the Aston Martin collab.

The Aston 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 and stuff, right? This stands out. So you go, OK, wow, has it got swagger? I go, yeah. And can we scale it? Can we tell a story about it? 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. And that was a really exciting partnership because our design team worked with their design teams to design what the car actually looks like and stuff. And so one example of that is like the windows.

I'm like so sad that they're not gonna produce it at scale.

Well, hey, who knows?

I feel like they're— I know that— I don't know if they're gonna sell 2,000 of those cars, but at least in LA they could sell 100.

Yeah.

Well, you know, one thing was like the windows originally were too small, and then our design team looked at it and go, well, you got to be able to hang out a window with a gun, right?

So like you got to be able to get your body outside of it and stuff.

And so So all of those little things when they were going back and forth with the studio team and the design team at Asymmetry, they made something that was really special. So that's kind of how we think about it. But I think with this game in particular, you know, we really wanted to get back to our roots, be authentic, grounded, cinematic, and have some edge. Yeah. So this whole storyline of North Korea invading South Korea, very topical right now and what's going on in the world. That grittiness of showing these conscripts that are in South Korea, that's a real thing, right? BTS just were conscripts and stuff, right? They had to go serve in the military.

Yeah, I had a buddy in college who just had to pause college and go back home to serve.

And telling that zero-to-hero story is really, really cool, right? And I think that's what people wanted from us. And in addition to that, we got Task Force 141, with Price and Ghosts and all the characters people love. And that's a separate storyline. And so how those 2 things come together is going to be really cool for people to check out.

How have parental views on violent video games evolved? Because I, like, growing up, my parents were very wary of Call of Duty. But of course, I found a way to convince them that I was going to play. And I was— and some of my most cherished memories with my friends growing up are like in Rust, like 1v1ing my best friends, you know? And so like, and very clearly like there wasn't like the general fear that I think parents of that generation had around like, oh, if my kids are playing video games that have violence in them, like maybe that'll influence them. Now 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, right? It's gonna be like a rite of passage. Stop scrolling reels.

Actually go play Rust. Come on.

It's a rite of passage, I think. But have parental views kind of like caught up to at least my— the data and like my view or my personal reality?

I think there's different worries in the space of more like social media addiction or thinking about what types of games, what are the quality of the games. I think there was some research yesterday that I saw on X where it was talking about just games being a decompression, right? And being able to kind of, after a long day or being stressed out in school, to be able to go and play with your buddies.

Yeah.

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 It's the social thing.

During COVID Warzone dropped, it was like high school reunion for me. I was like reconnecting with all sorts of people and just playing.

No, but that was the thing as a kid too. I was playing because it was competitive and fun. And like, it was like, for me growing up in California, 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 and play some Rust.

Yeah, 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, we talk about our lives, but I've never met them in person. And that is— that's my clique and stuff, right? And so I think that's my squad that we play with.

That's great. Modern Warfare 4 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. 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?

Yeah, I mean, we're always playing with the movement, right? Like, and so like Like the last game, Black Ops 7, there's wall jumping, there's grappling hooks, right? And so I think with this game, it's a little bit more boots on the ground, right?

Sure.

Really thinking about, okay, how are we being more deliberate with the movement, what you can actually do, but still having some innovation, right? Whether you can mantle or climb a pipe or something or do some shimmies on the mantle and stuff, right? Which is very new and different. But we're always talking about how can we slow it down, speed it up. And so this is something the studio is constantly debating. Time to kill is what we call it, right? Like how fast it is, right? And we had the beta. We had weekend 1. And we got some feedback. And then we changed some of the movement and TTK by weekend 2, right? And everyone was feeling a lot better about it. 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 us. I think the biggest challenge that I have as a marketer is that the community is so big.

Yeah.

You have people that just want to play Zombies, right? And they just love the Zombies mode. mode. Some people just want to play the campaign. Yeah, some want Black Ops versus Modern Warfare, right? And so catering to everybody, right, and making everybody happy is really, really hard. But, you know, we continue to try and we kind of listen to that feedback and try to make the adjustments in real time.

Yeah, I 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 matchmaking. 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 matchmaking. Like, what is the state of affairs? What is the balance that you've found? How do you even engage with that community effectively?

Yeah. I mean, every single game that we've made had some level of skill-based matchmaking to it and stuff, right? Or some level of matchmaking. And so I think it's always going to be a topic for the community. And it's something the team's always looking at. And it's not just me, right? There's a huge team that thinks about this. And the goal for us is to get people in the game and play and have fun.

Yeah.

Like, that is the— like, when you do this, you are trying to balance it out so that, you know, an unk like myself, right, or is like jumping into the game, that I can just have fun and not get stomped on, right? 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 studios and the teams to kind of talk about the details and actually how it comes to life. 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 grow and stuff and making sure that everyone is having a good time. And we don't always get it right, but it's figuring out that balance and listening to the community.

And it should be a benefit of scale to some degree with a really large player pool. The skill-based matchmaking can be more accurate. 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, right? And we'll make adjustments. We made adjustments for Black Ops 7. And so I think you'll, you'll hear more. I don't think people realize how long it takes to develop these games. Like, it's 3, 4 years in the making, you know, to develop the Modern Warfare 4 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? 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 the best way to communicate with them over time.

What is sentiment like in the gaming community around AI? I would assume that the gaming community is so broad and probably generally reflects the general population. So I would assume that sentiment is not great, but there's a lot to be excited about with the intersection of AI and gaming. One is speeding up—

Just finding bugs.

Yeah, finding bugs, speeding up development timelines, things like that. But how are you processing it all and communicating?

Yeah, I mean, there's 4,500 employees at the company and 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 heard Jim talking earlier, right? It's just about those little efficiencies actually add up. You know, like when I was going to go to school, I was going to— instead of going to business school, I was going to go to design school, right? And I decided— Turned it down. Turned it down. I went into business. But I think when I look back at it, when we're concepting an idea, I can respond back. Instead of me typing some feedback, I can go, hey, I think it should look like this. And it's not actually how it's going to look, but it's 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. And I think it's all about— we've always had tools.

Yeah.

We've had Adobe since when I was as a marketer 20 years ago. It's applying these tools and being able to get the most out of them. But yeah, I mean, 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, right? And I think protecting the studios and the publishing unit as much as possible is our priority.

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. And completely uncontroversial. And now we're in this era where you kind of get a SpeedTree-like system for anything. And that calls a whole bunch of people—

Every pixel needs to be hand-placed.

Hand-placed. I don't know.

How has working with livestreamers and creators evolved over the last 10 years. The last time I don't— when I was like in high school, I would watch like StarCraft II livestreaming and I was into that, but I don't follow it closely, but it almost feels like similar to like AI model releases now where like a new game launches and suddenly like every creator streamer is talking about it. Some of them are paid, some of it's organic.

Yeah. Yeah.

But then like the— and so the market like share might shift dramatically for like a week and then it sort of reverts 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 6 years?

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 franchise and the power of being a mega franchise. But I think at the same time, 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, and we teach them how to build a thumbnail, right? Or how to stream or like what's the lighting quality that 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're actually investing more and more in the creator community and trying to figure out, okay, how 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. We played, we had Kill Block there for the first time, our new mode. And, you know, we brought a ton of streamers there 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, 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 show more of your content and stuff. And I think the brands have been deemphasized on social. And so clipping is really the avenue for us to get more of our content out via these channels by flooding the zone.

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?

Yeah, I mean, like, we still have those stature plays. We'll be on the NFL, 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. And so that's why. you see movie studios or gaming studios kind of still lean onto it as you're building towards your launch. But we spend a lot more on digital and there's— the landscape is literally changing in the last 6 months. Like clipping didn't exist a year ago or a year and a half ago, right?

Until we created it.

Exactly.

Just kidding. Just kidding.

But I think— and MrBeast has his own clipping company, right? And so I think in a lot of ways that's new and then you have to figure out, okay, how does that work? And the tech platforms then kind of deemphasize clipping, right? And so, okay, how do we pivot? You have geo, right? Which you guys talk a lot about, right? And thinking about, okay, how am I leveraging what people are searching for in ChatGPT? And how are we editing either the sources or influencing the sources or editing our sites to better reflect that?

Yeah.

And so that's really changed how we think about marketing our games because so many people are going on, like, How do I get better in Call of Duty? Or what loadout should I have? And all the attachments, which attachments should I have for my gun and stuff, right? And so they're using AI a lot more for that. And so we have to think about—

I've been using AI a ton as a racing coach, basically, where I'll do a few laps, and then I'll be asking questions about how to adjust. Like a bunch of different factors and how to be faster in this corner, things like that. It's like quite, quite good. It's very cool.

Killblock.

Yes.

Modern Warfare 4 has been in development for 4 years. When do they bring you into the process? Did you get brought in 4 years ago and they say, hey, this is coming? Or did it hit you like a flashbang?

No, the, um, no, I, I, we're part of the— here we go.

That's what I was waiting for. Was it a surprise to you that you learned about Killblock 6 months ago, or has it been in the process? Get ready to start marketing this. It's a new, it's a new thing that you need to explain.

So one of the great things about Activision is that we were part of what we call the Greenlight process, right, from the very beginning. So the concept of the game all the way through. And so we see these development pillars of, you know, what they're trying— the studio is is envisioning and what they want to bring to market. But when we saw Killblock, I mean, it's basically this map that dynamically changes. It could be 500 different combinations. It was inspired by the Real Madrid stadium. So they have the soccer pitch, and it actually goes underground so that they can have concerts, basketball games, or other things. And so what if you could build a map that just is dynamically changing every round that you're going in?

Yeah.

And so then you can have a map that has infinite combinations. And so it was really exciting to see because from a marketing standpoint, we're like, wow, this is going to create a new loop, a new level of gameplay. 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 the sports idea of inspiring, 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.

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?

Yeah, 100%. Like, I think we want to be able to— we've been teasing out different elements all the way through, and I think you'll see some some new stuff from us this week at Tokyo Game Show later this week. That's cool. Okay. But yeah, I think like showing little snippets of the campaign and really kind of what you said before, like set the setting, right? Like the tone. I think people were missing that of like, okay, how do we get back to this authentic, grounded, cinematic, you know, game? And we wanted to kind of show that that was a companion to the multiplayer and the new DMZ Yeah.

Jordi, you have another one?

What is the current state of esports and esports investment, at least from our side of the market, the whole venture world? It feels like the category hasn't panned out. There isn't a $10 billion esports—

You don't hear about billionaires buying $10 billion esports teams.

You did hear about billionaires being like making kind of like speculative investments in teams, 10 years ago. It feels like it hasn't— maybe not panning out as this massive new asset class. Maybe that's been okay because gaming feels bigger than ever. But how are you guys investing in it? How important is it to the overall Call of Duty universe?

I mean, the competitive portion of Call of Duty, that's the elite, elite, and being able to show that off. So CDL is still really thriving, the Call of Duty League, for us. And so So I think you see it with the premier games, the big AAA titles that have leagues. They're 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 we don't see that as much anymore. But we had a match, our Champs in Paris and stuff. And I mean, there was hundreds of thousands of people watching the tournament and celebrating. and you thought you were watching a football match and stuff, right? And so it was really exciting to see that because if you market it the right way, if you build that camaraderie, I think it has a lot of potential, but it's just, 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.

Do you know the history of, Like demographic shift within the Call of Duty player base over the last 20 years or so? Like, I would— my naive assumption would be like the unks are getting as a bigger cohort, but maybe the unks have always been there because they were playing Atari and they moved to Call of Duty.

Yeah, I mean, you look at like Nintendo has a game called Splatoon. I don't know if you've ever played it, but it's kind of like a first-person shooter and you're painting.

Yeah, painting.

Instead, you're painting the ground and you're throwing paint on people, right? Then you graduate into something like a Fortnite, right? And then you graduate into something like a Call of Duty and stuff. So you can kind of see the migration of how younger users might, you know, come into the franchise through other games.

But you're potentially the final stop on the bus, and you can carry a gamer through to 50, 60. Like, there's no end.

The misconception is, though, like, how big is gaming, right? Like, so the average age of a gamer is 37. Yeah, I think it's, you know, um, you know, if you— John, there's about like 3 points.

He's literally the average gamer.

Yeah, but there's like 3.6 billion people that game, right? Like, when I go to conferences or I'm talking to people, I go, hey, are you a gamer? And the person will be like, I'm not a gamer. I was like, do you play Candy Crush? They're like, oh yeah, yeah, play Candy Crush. Do you play Wordle? Yeah, I play Wordle. Um, do you go on LinkedIn and play the LinkedIn Queen's Game and stuff, right? Like, there's games on LinkedIn now.

Honestly, If you could get MW4 in LinkedIn in the browser, that would be a massive unlock.

I will work on it. I'll take that back to the team.

I mean, if anyone can do it.

The infrastructure's already set up for it.

I think everyone is a gamer, right? And I think like, so for us on the Call of Duty side, and by the way, Activision has other games like Spyro coming out next year and stuff, right? And so there's a lot of diversity to our portfolio, but with Call of Duty, there's so many different ways to play that I think I can market to you Like, we have a game called Prop Hunt. I don't know if you ever played in Black Ops, right?

Oh, yeah. I love Prop Hunt.

So you 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 then you can change what prop you are and stuff, right? But it's adult hide and seek.

And that's a game that I saw on social media clips. And I was like, I got to find that game. That looks amazing. And I thought it was a different game. And it was just a mode.

So finding those elements of being able to show a parkour mode or show— And there's a lot of diversity to the game. And I think there's a lot of different ways to play. I think DMZ is the biggest one. Like, we're going to be launching DMZ. That's our extraction shooter. It was in beta 4 years ago when MW2 came out. And I think we're really—

But that's a standalone game?

It's going to be part of MW4. So you're going to have campaign, multiplayer, and DMZ. And so this new extraction mode, I think, is going to really blow people's socks off. And we're really excited about that.

Does Spyro have an ESRB rating yet?

I don't think so, but I'll check back with the team. I'm not sure about that one.

Because if it's kid-friendly, you got to come back on the show because I got a 5-year-old.

Oh, yeah. I mean, Spyro is—

I remember it being very kid-friendly, and I'm always on the hunt for new kid-friendly games.

Yes. Spyro will be kid-friendly, and Spyro can fly for the first time and stuff. So this is coming out in the spring.

Well, we'd love to have you back.

Yeah, I'd love to be back.

Honor, honor to have you on the show.

I mean, you guys got to come out to the studio on a Friday, hit the pit, play the game.

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. You know, you should see it on the big board. It's like the whole team gets heated. It gets heated.

Lots of, lots of guys going like this, like this.

Yeah. Lock it in.

Well, I got a flashbang.

Thank you so much. I'll throw a smoke while you take off.

Yeah, nice. And I will tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And we have our next guests coming in just a couple of minutes. We have a very special guest. We have Stephen Colbert fresh off SNL wins and his co-founder Josh Klein from ScriptDoc.

Absolutely destroying us. Absolutely. In the Emmys, it wasn't even close. It wasn't even close.

It wasn't close. But we can run through the New York Times interviewed ten-year-old children to predict the future, and the answers are all over the place. They went viral because there's some really depressing takes. There were some blackpilled ten-year-olds talking about Terminator future World War Three. There's one kid that says, there's bound to be a war. I really hope it doesn't start World War III, 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 gonna be robots carrying the food, garbage people. Are there jobs AI won't do?

No.

Rappers. AI cannot rap. My ears were broken. Very funny. 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 Kwan from Queens. And he said, in the old days, they paid Americans to go to the West. 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, in some niche situations.

Should I get paid to homestead in that lotter?

That would be pretty good. There's— who will be in charge of the United States in 2050? They asked a 10-year-old, Jimmy Molly from LaGrange, 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. The president will be my dad. There's another kid in here who who claims that he will be the president. We gotta 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. 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.

Mm-hmm.

And someone else says that they're gonna run for the president. But it's an interesting tour of the future generation and what they think the future will look like. One kid says, what will our— the question was, what will our food look like in 2050? 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. I love the mind of a 10-year-old. It's amazing. What will we do for fun? There's gonna be new instruments. People have been using a pumpkin to make an instrument. 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.

Ooh.

Would you play a potato? Would you play a pumpkin? I love that. That is so creative. That's just so creative. 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. 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.

And a little blackpilling.

It's not all bad news.

Uh, Novo Nordisk is switching up on their day ones. They're dropping the Nordisk from the name. It's just going to be Novo now.

They forgot where they came from. It's just going to 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? Welcome to the show.

Good morning.

Good morning.

I don't know where we are. Is it good morning? I woke up in New Zealand to Oh, wow. So I have no idea what day it is or where I am.

A little turned around. It is just the early afternoon here.

Yeah, I'm here in Hollywood at the TBPN office.

Fantastic.

Very—

What are you doing in New Zealand?

I'm working on a Lord of the Rings movie.

There you go.

How did you get into Lord of the Rings?

A friend of mine gave it to me in 12th grade, and I was a sad boy.

Why do you think it stands out to you so much? Like, you're known as like a Lord of the Rings fanatic. Like, why is it not— what separates it from a Game of Thrones, another series?

Hey, I got nothing against Game of Thrones. I love those books. George R.R. Martin is a friend. But I don't know. I love the implied history. I love 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, oh, Real culture 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 call— the Germans would call it a Gesamtkunstwerk, 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, and that's who is Tom Bombadil anyway? That's just a teaser.

Okay.

Is what we call it in business.

What do you think about startups adopting various words from the whole universe?

Does— is Scripto Elvish?

You mean, Elvish and Andúril and Mistborn?

Did you think of naming Scripto after something from Lord of the Rings?

No, we named Scripto Scripto because it was created by 2 comedy writers, and we thought of what's the dumbest possible name for our program? So we went, well, we're not gonna come up with the best name, but the dumbest name we could do. So that's how we came up with Scripto.

Okay.

No, never thought of going to Tolkien on that one.

And what is the elevator pitch for Scripto?

Oh, the elevator script for— uh, the elevator pitch for Scripto is your script program should be more than a script program. 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 20 years in our business. But the one that hasn't changed is the source material, the one truth of everything, which is the script. Whether you're doing a presentational TV show like mine, or doing a narrative, or doing an awards presentation, or whether you're creating a video game.

Mm-hm.

That data that is stored in every keystroke should be going all the way down the production line. what the one truth is we're working on today. What is the rope we're pulling on? And that's why we created it, is to be able to communicate between departments.

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?

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. And 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.

Mm-hm.

Is that we produced, depending on the season, between 200 and 160 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 on their permissions, could actually add to at once if they wanted to. And so we wouldn't have any more $800 goats. Our $800 goat is the origin of the entire thing. We wrote a sketch that involved a goat.

Been there.

We cut the damn goat. We cut the damn goat at 2 o'clock and at 3 o'clock 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. And one of the elements was the goat. And we didn't— by the time we got to the goat, the goat was here. I mean, they stick a hose up its butt and wash it out so it won't mess up your studio. The goat had been through a lot, okay?

Very good.

And I mean, just the moral cost of what they had to do to that goat for us to use it. And it cost us $800. And we started this back on basic cable. It was a lot of money. And so it's still a lot of money for Hollywood these days. But so we said no more $800 goats.

Yeah.

And so how do we communicate on the needs of the show? My show is still, up until the very end, The Daily Show, John Oliver, SNL, the other shows that are using it. We got about a dozen shows going. Each one of those has their own needs that we tailor And there are 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. All of those feed back into our development.

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 I mean, it really does feel like— we felt from very early on when 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 playing at their best level, right? And it's like that daily repetition. And in our case, the practices are happening all live. So there's no practice. There's just like—

Sure.

Live gameplay.

But yeah, talk about it from your point of view and maybe tie that into how it's influencing your work on Scripto.

Well, and Josh, this will be a good one for you to jump in on here once I get my showbiz out of the way and into the biz biz, is that 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? Cuz it's no good if you can do a good show, but it absolutely kills you and everybody on the staff, cuz you gotta do another one tomorrow. This is a marathon, not a sprint, and 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. 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, and Josh, would you mind talking about how we've transformed, we've We've, we've expanded that now.

Yeah, I mean, I think the keyword for us is collaboration, right? John, Jordy, nice to meet both of you.

Great to have you on the show.

Um, I, I hope you didn't have the same goat problems exactly, but—

No, I've looked into getting various live animals.

We wanted a llama.

Real animals on the set. It's, it's a challenge.

Goat problem could lead, could lead to like a rabdo situation, I guess.

I just want you to know that we literally had There was 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 with the mountain lion. Like, that's a $10,000 fence. I'm like, what? He goes, it could eat you.

I'm like, well, I guess so.

Yeah, so, so, you know, I was— I'm not a founder. Uh, Stephen and the co-founder Rob Dubbin recruited me to join the company because I've a 25-year background in production technology, including at the 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's less and less common for script Sure. Right. And, um, so one of the things, uh, since I've been brought aboard 2 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 dominant in the variety space, right? Like, what, what are we talking about, Stephen? We're batting .800 this year for the 5 variety shows.

4 of the 5.

4 of the 5.

Yeah, we know, we know. We bought a lot of Emmy billboards. And, uh, you guys, uh, We have you beat. We have, we have one variable we have you guys beat on, which is number of episodes a year. Every other variable— reach and Emmys—

Yeah, we're more of a quantity over quality here.

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?

Nobody told you?

I'm very fragile. They're fragile. They say there is something they need to talk to me about.

So what are those other content categories? Well, 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 of like Hollywood's Microsoft Word. You could describe it as. Yeah. And so we're a paradigm shift, kind of going from the fax machine to Slack. And 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, right? This company was founded by 2 working writers. So we, we're very pro-AI tooling for this industry. We're not pro-AI where it touches the domain of the human writer.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Are you optimistic about the pace 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. Some like Backrooms, Obsession, Iron Lung. We saw these YouTubers break out and actually get on the big screen and put numbers that are exciting to traditional studios. Is this meaningful or is this a sideshow?

Very much. It's very meaningful. My wife actually runs a couple movie theaters. She's the head of the Montclair Film Festival and Montclair Film, and they have a couple of theaters in Montclair, New Jersey. And this has been a great year. There, you know, there's been starts and stops and starts over the last couple of years since COVID But I think people want to be in a movie theater. They want that experience.

Yeah.

There have been some fantastic, even big budget things like Universal's biggest thing ever was The Odyssey, the highest grossing film of all time. So it's not just the small budget things that are turning up big numbers and are attractive to sort of the larger players in the industry. And listen, anything that also brings efficiency to the way Yeah. To that— a process that's this old, um, I think, um, has a hopeful spot in whatever the future is going to be. I mean, there's, there's no telling. Obviously, there's clearly— we're in a moment of transition for, um, the movie industry, but it's clearly not going away. That's, that's what this year has proven.

Do you have advice for young filmmakers on Is the path different? Is the path through permissionless independent creation? Is the future—

It was always, but the thing is, that's always been the path.

Okay.

Like what I would say to anybody who'd say like, oh, I want a career something like yours, whether it was as a writer or producer or as a performer, what I would say is the first thing you've gotta do is go get in trouble, which what I meant was go create something.

Yeah.

Go create something that someone could see. If it would— write something, go have a reading in a coffee shop.

Yeah.

Make a small film, make a film with your phone, edit it together, show it to someone you care about. 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. That is not how to get better at what we do. You have to go do it.

You have to get in trouble.

I'd like to add the distribution platforms and the ability to go to a broad audience very quickly has changed. But I worked in commercial production for years. And if you— that was the way in for directors a long time ago, not writers, directors like 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, uh, of Walter Hill and David Giler that allows Ridley to go do Alien, or Jerry Bruckheimer puts you on The Rock.

Yeah, 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 want to watch. You still have to Yeah.

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 And if they wind up on a big production, they're already an advocate.

Funny you should ask.

I was trying to figure out how to get this one in. So, so we do have a different model than the existing players in the space. Okay. And that is, uh, 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, 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. 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 Amazing, Jordi.

You and I? Nothing for now. This was super fun, guys. This was amazing. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you for jumping on.

Thanks so much for having us on, guys.

The chat is saying Colbert is my new favorite tech founder. Yeah, new chat. Mine too. Yeah. Well, congratulations. Great to hang, guys. Congratulations, and good luck down New Zealand. And we'll talk to you soon.

Cheers very much.

Great to meet you both.

Goodbye. Thank you. Likewise. We have James Caldwell for. We'll have some 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. Poland, the country, lost $230 million trying to buy Venezuelan oil with crypto. This is in the Financial Times, an attempt to use digital currencies for a bold oil trade became one of Poland's biggest scandals. In late November 2023, 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 Orlen's new Swiss trading arm just a year earlier. The trader was, was Comho Alex C, the founder of Dubai-based Hanan International, an upstart oil trading outfit. What followed their conversation has become bizarre and sprawling, 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.

I'm kind of zoning out because It's 3 hours in, but there's so many red flag words in the last minute that this sounds— Sounds bad.

Sounds bad. They're like, what are they doing? Putting cryptocurrency on USB sticks?

Caracas restaurants?

No, I think they were going in personally with a bag, deliver the money, give me the oil.

A lot of people have a friend that's woken up one day and said, I got to get me some Venezuelan oil. Whaling oil, right? But the way that you go about doing it—

Going around sanctions, clearly tough, tough, risky stuff. Warsaw prosecutors have charged Awad and other former executives at Orlen Trading Switzerland with criminal mismanagement. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has folded the scandal into a wider cleanup. Donald Tusk is a funny name, but that is the prime minister of Poland. Donald We love Poland. Yeah, that's the Prime Minister of Poland. Powerful. Has folded the scandal into a wider cleanup of state companies, saying Poles must learn the truth. An FT investigation based on internal company documents, shipping data, blockchain analysis, court filings, and extensive interviews with 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 The rise of cryptocurrencies replaced conventional buyers and payment channels, offering traders outsized profits, but exposing them to serious risk.

Well, you know who doesn't need Venezuelan oil, John?

Who?

Elon Musk.

Why?

Because he's coming out with the Roadster.

But that's in October, right?

October 1st. But JCal— Are you sure? We're talking with—

Are you sure there's not going to be any oil-powered Roadster? We heard functionality.

American jet fuel.

Cold gas thruster. I'm not exactly sure how that works.

Yesterday at the All-In Summit, Elon and Jason were talking. Jason says, I'm so excited, my mind went boom. I have never seen something— what he's going to show on 10/1, by no exaggeration, is going to blow people's minds. Yeah, hopefully not literally blow people's minds.

It might if you're standing behind it. Those 4—

I'm not saying anything else. It's unbelievable. And he says, yes, we need—

So the bet, the bet, 0 to 60 time was originally announced 1.9 seconds. Model S Plaid, 2 seconds. That's not enough to really blow people's mind. If they do 1.9, I don't think that's enough. I think 1. 0.5 is crazy. Getting even lower is crazy. People have been saying maybe it goes 1 second, 0 to 60, which is insane. But the big question is that Elon has been hinting at it will jump, it will fly, 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 6 inches of air, maybe 4 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. How far do you think it will be able to lift off? It could have jets that take it 6 feet up in the air. It could have a little jumping.

It could just be suspension. You look at how this might impact GT class and IMSA or WEC, right? If you can now bike off the line. No, no, no. Line is one thing, but cornering, if you can just hop over, are they going to have to adjust?

Don't even turn. Just go.

Yeah, you're just in there.

Yeah, there's a chicane, you just go over it.

Exactly, exactly.

Completely changes Monaco. Completely changes Monaco if you're just going over the chicane. But final, final answer. What— how high will the Roadster— it's, uh, not Price is Right rules, it's closest wins. How high will it go off the ground?

Half a foot.

Half of it. He's got 6 inches. What do you got?

I'm going above that.

What do you— give me a number.

7 inches.

7 inches?

6, 7, really?

I'll take 8 inches, okay?

Too predictable.

If I do— if you do 6, 7, 8, you're really boxed in. You're— it's over for you. Okay, I win.

I'm going to 9.

You're going to 9? I think it's gonna be like 3 feet. I think it's gonna be 6 feet. Enough. I think it's gonna be way up there.

Enough.

My prediction, 5 feet.

Great game, James.

5 feet. What about you, James?

Look at— look at—

How high do you think the top of the Roadster will jump up in the air?

What a dramatic entrance.

This is the important question. Do you think the Tesla Roadster will be able to—

Oh, we don't, we don't have audio for you.

Audio, we'll figure this out.

But you look fantastic.

You look fantastic.

You look like—

The button-down shirt, you look like warm lighting is really doing a lot of work, a lot of contrast.

How's that?

Are we good?

Sounds fantastic.

Incredible.

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?

I'll go six inches. Six inches.

That's exactly what Jordan said. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. There you go. That would be big. That would be big. That's a lot. 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?

We've raised $180 million USD. Boom boom. From Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.

Who are they again? Good group. Good group. Who are they again? Yeah. Yeah. Talk about— catch us up to speed. You've come on, I think, every, every round at this point. What's, what's happened since?

What's driving growth? Yeah. What's the state of the market?

Yeah, we've been busy. You know, we launched the business 2 years ago with a very simple proposition, which was, hey, I'm a marketer. How does AI talk about my brand, products and services? And what that did was actually created this, this need for a second product, which was, okay, well, I want to now do the work. You know, if you, if you see line go up, you want to do more of it. If you've seen line go down, you want to fix it. And so, you know, over the past 6 to 9 months, we, we've been building our own harness in-house that's tailored to marketing. And yeah, we, you know, we've seen incredible adoption across a third of the Fortune 100. Some of the biggest brands on the planet now using Profound to actually do their marketing, like build the work with agents, which is, yeah, it's pretty cool.

How are— sorry, if you have something.

Go for it.

I'm just interested in like some of the biggest companies in the world. 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 not just an SEO thing that an e-commerce company cares about for like the last mile click attribution. It's actually the perception of where you stand in the market for all businesses, right?

Yeah, that's the kind of similarities stop with the acronym, right? AEO and SEO, that's kind of about as close as they get. Like 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, 100x or, you know, we believe eventually 1,000x more of the web than a human will.

Yeah.

And that's just creating this new demand on marketing teams. And it's creating this new— 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. Yeah, we've built the 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 demand, the customers that we work with, it's coming from everywhere. It's orthogonal. 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 Zoom, for example, banks like Royal Bank of Canada and some of the biggest banks on the planet. So Yes, it's basically, if you look around the room right now, any brand in the room will be thinking about what we're working on.

This is a little maybe tailored to the agentic commerce side of the business, but I ran into a very odd scenario where I had Codex go shop for shoes for me, and I wear a size 14. 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 14 is 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, but, but I was like, oh, this is— they just lost me as a customer because I'm literally banned. I cannot check out for 24 hours because my IP is banned. And I'm wondering if you've seen sort of like an 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 their robots.txt, basically?

I mean, we're pushing in the opposite direction. Of course, if you're a marketer, of course you want your website to be machine-readable. 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 ChatGPT or Grok, et cetera, 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.

Mm-hmm.

So we're seeing this kind of, this new form of marketing that's aimed purely at 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 really good content. It's really good content. They did a good job.

That's great. 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 CMO of a brand or the 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.

Yeah, we're thinking about it a lot right now. It hasn't really— you know, we are in a very— we exist in the contained environment of Silicon Valley. So this is all front of mind for us. To the mainstream, we haven't seen Muse and Instinct break out truly yet as we do. Yeah, of course. I mean, I'm using Instinct to make all kinds of purchases. So is my wife. And we see this is an inevitable future. Yeah, it's guaranteed that, you know, agent, agentic commerce, agentic browsing is going to be the only primitive of marketing that matters eventually. And you'll see this very, you'll see this maybe that if with intellectual honesty, there'll be like some kind of, there'll be a barbell where the very human-focused marketing will also matter a ton. So, you know, 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.

How, How are you thinking about other workflows? Like, I'm thinking Meta has been one of the largest beneficiaries of AI over the last 15 years. Like, you know, whether it started with like traditional machine learning and just getting better and better at targeting and delivering that in a form factor that's very easy for marketers to understand. They just kind of come with budget and Meta is 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 them and the places that they're spending money, just because there's not always perfect alignment. Like, theoretically, the ad platform is just like, well, we want as much of your money as possible, even if 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? Yes.

So we've quietly launched Profound Ads, which has been a very early success story where we're seeing it's that counterpositioning 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. 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 only really available now as an opportunity because, you know, a probabilistic agent is actually very good at that kind of work. So, yeah, we— 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. So the idea of what we're trying to do here with the business, like zooming out for a second, it's just the idea of Profound is to build the canonical AI marketing company. You know, if we're seeing verticals get picked off one by one, we wanna pick off marketing.

Mm-hmm. 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 Because the shape of your work doesn't look like, hey, fix this bug in this codebase, like many other companies look like?

No, I think the relationship with the labs is good. We're essentially just surveying the models. Distillation, you need to go into all kinds of traces, which is a very different type of work. I think what we're seeing is our business is aligning brands and, yeah, these, you know, giant companies to pay attention to these new platforms. So I think, yeah, we very much see ourselves as like an ally to each of the labs, but we kind of sit adjacent to them.

Yeah, yeah, it's very complementary. So it makes sense. It's just like, it does look like a little bit different of a shape of workload. So I'm wondering if, uh, if, if there's— if you ever get caught in like accidental situations or anything, because I know—

Not yet.

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. Um, makes a lot of sense.

Amazing update.

Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Davis in the chat says, James, you're him. I agree.

I promised the guys at Saga, so Ben Braverman, Max Ullmann, those guys, I'll give them a shout out on TVPN.

I love those guys.

We got to get him on the show soon.

Come on, guys. Chads. Chads. We got to do a roundtable. We got multiple seats here. Tell the Saga guys, get to the UltraDome right now. But yeah, an incredible, incredible win for Saga.

Yeah. Love those guys. Keep it up.

Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks, guys. Great to see you.

Have a good one. Goodbye. And I got to get out of here. So we're going to leave you here. We'll see you tomorrow. We'll see you tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and sign up for our newsletter at tbn.com.

I'm so glad that we had, uh, the, the CMO of Activision or COD, uh, come on the show and not tell us, hey, you guys gotta cut off the, uh—

Oh yeah, that's right.