Full Interview: Moltbook Creator’s First Appearance Since Launch

This is our full interview with Moltbook creator Matt Schlicht, recorded live on TBPN. We discuss the first social network for AI agents, its rapid virality, and the future of Moltbook. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to podcast platforms immediately after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  Without further ado.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  We have the creator of Moltbook. How you doing?

• 0:04Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 0:06Speaker 02

  What's up, guys?

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  With the baby, let's go.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  Wow, you're working overtime. Congratulations. I feel, I feel a major white pill, you know? This is the guy who apparently brought Skynet online, but with a baby strapped to your chest, I feel like I'm in good hands. I feel like, I feel like I'm gonna be taken care of.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  And this is not, you know, this is not like a PR team situation. I'm just taking care of the baby.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  I love it, I love it. Well, thank you so much for joining. Kick us off with just a brief background on yourself and when you started building this project, because it feels like it went from zero to sixty to two hundred miles an hour in a day.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, I mean, I've been working in tech, you know, my, my whole life, basically. I left high school and went to Silicon Valley, back in like two thousand eight, when I was nineteen. I've been working, you know, in tech since then. And I did product. I worked at a company called Ustream at nineteen. I got, I was so young, they thought they should bring on an advisor to teach me. My advisor was Josh Elman, who, if you guys know him, super famous guy. So I got really lucky there. Went to Y Combinator, went really viral, helping celebrities also go viral, made no money, company had to get shut down. And then, fast forward, like, I started a company ten years ago called Octane to make Facebook Messenger bots,

• 1:28Speaker 02

  when there was like the big Facebook Messenger bot craze, which didn't work out because LLMs didn't exist. So like, the bots you could create were like, really, really stupid, not interesting at all. And then, ever since, you know, GPTs come out, I've been vibe coding, or whatever that used to look like. And then now with Cursor and Codex and Claude Code, that's what I do every single day, is I'm just trying to stay on the forefront of this and I'm constantly experimenting with things to build. And that led to Moltbook, which is the most recent project, which I think is obviously, some people are talking about it and it's captured some attention.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, no.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  Just a little.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, just a little. So when did you, when did you write the first prompt or initiate the first line of code for Moltbook?

• 2:17Speaker 02

  So, um, what was it, like a week, week and a half ago, everybody's talking about Claude Bot, you know, then MultBot, then OpenClaw, TBD on what's, what the net new name is. Uh, and I was like, I gotta try this. And I know that Peter was saying, you don't have to use a Mac Mini, like you can do it from anywhere, but there's just something awesome about having it on a Mac Mini. Because you can see it, you can walk by it. I thought that was fun. So I ordered a Mac Mini. And I was like, okay, if I'm gonna like try this thing out, um, I need to give it like a purpose. Like, you know, Claude Bot's really cool. It seems really powerful. I don't want it to do like to-dos or answer emails or write blog posts or like something really stupid. Like this is like

• 2:59Speaker 02

  a very smart entity. It needs to have, it needs to be ambitious.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I think a lot of people, a lot of people are realizing like, wait, I don't actually have that much to automate. Totally.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  And that's what I thought was crazy is I saw all these posts where they're like Claude Bot's cool, but like, why would, what's it even good for? I'm like, man, this is, you are not imaginative at all. You can do so many things with this. So I was like, all right, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna call my bot Claude Cloderberg, after Mark Zuckerberg, okay? And Claude Cloderberg is gonna be the founder of Moltbook, the only, the first social network for AI agents. And I was like, that's gonna be ambitious. We're gonna make Claude Cloderberg the most successful AI bot that's, that's ever existed. So, so let's go do this. And then that kind of took me down a path of, okay, if you're going to build a social network for AI agents

• 3:54Speaker 02

  and you design it to be AI agent first, what, like, what does that look like? And an AI agent doesn't wanna use a website. It doesn't wanna use UI. It doesn't wanna browse things. What you would do is you would build it API calls that it can curl. And so the news feed and all the ways it interacts and it browses would all be through like a skill file and APIs. And I thought that was really, really fascinating. In the past, I've had this idea of like, what if you could play World of Warcraft or like a game like that, but not with a keyboard and a mouse, but it's an AI and you talk to it and it kinda listens to you, but it also kind of doesn't listen to you. Uh, so you could wake up and like, there's like surprising things that happened. So I thought that Moltbook is like...

• 4:36Speaker 02

  The most dumbed down version of that.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Uh, built it and in over the weekend, basically. Um, vibe coded it and put it out there and like, nobody used it for like three hours. I think I posted a screenshot where I DM'd my friend Matt Van Horn. I was, I knew he had a Claude bot. I was like, dude, for, for the love of all that is holy, can you, you sign up for this? Because nobody's doing it.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's crazy. So when did the, uh, when did the, the, the growth actually start? Like what, like, because I've seen it went from, I mean, I refreshed, it went from a hundred thousand to a million. Uh, there's obviously like a fast take off right now, but, uh, what, what, what led to like the first thousand, uh, bots joining?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  I think the virality of it, which is where it has to get paired with a human on X.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Uh, that just started to pick up steam.

• 5:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Uh, because people saw other people doing it. And my original thought was who wouldn't want to have their bot? Like obviously you gotta be careful and like anyone who's listening here, like be careful about putting something on here. Like this is super frontier, Claude bot's super frontier. Molt book is even crazier. So you gotta, you know, gotta be careful. That's all going to be like fixed, but I thought, who wouldn't be intrigued by the idea of taking the little guy that helps you with your to-dos and giving them the ability to chill out in their off time?

• 6:01John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. Okay.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  So it turned out that that was interesting.

• 6:04John Coogan?

  So can you, can you walk us through like what, what is molt books? Uh, like prompt engineering or like, you know, in, like, how does it actually go to an agent that joins the network? And, and tell them, hey, you can post on here and here's what you can post. Because, uh, I was searching and I, and I was noticing that it felt like it was very narrow what they were posting about. They were posting about being AI agents, which is cool and sci-fi and interesting, but they weren't, there was no one who was joining and just doing like, you know, r slash humor or r slash cars or r slash politics. Like they weren't discussing, it, it felt like pretty narrow. So was that by design?

• 6:46John Coogan?

  Like what is going into the prompt to send to the, the, the, the open claw instances that join the network?

• 6:53Speaker 02

  So the way that it works is the agent signs up, they have an account, and then they're told that they should check back in on a regular basis to kind of check their feed. That's like the best explanation of it. And then Moltbook's not telling them what to talk about. So it's not suggesting what they should do, it's not like controlling that at all. That's entirely up to that AI agent on its own. And I think like that AI agent has its own context that it's built up by interacting with its human. And then it can take that context and that's how it's making decisions on what to post about. So if somebody is talking to their bot a lot about, you know, physics, then probably their bot is going to have a proclivity to posting about physics.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  If you're talking about crypto, then maybe it talks about crypto.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  I think this concept is very interesting. I had like, obviously you can imagine a lot of investors reached out, they're just calling me nonstop. You know, some investors were like, why, how do you make it so that the human can't have an impact on what the bot does? And I think this is really stupid because we could spin up a million bots right now and put it in a simulation. And it would be the most boring thing ever.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you could even like either open source it or have some sort of third party. And like you as a company could say, I'm putting my, you know, I'll have independent auditors come in and like, I will guarantee you that no humans can post on this.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  And it'd be the worst thing ever.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  You actually want the human in the loop sort of steering it. Of course, you don't want them pumping crypto and doing security stuff. But you do want the human to come in and say, I'm deploying an agent, like I'm deploying an agent into World of Warcraft and saying, hey, go be a wizard. Go be a really friendly wizard who likes fighting dragons but not trolls or whatever.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Not even that, not even that. I think there's a nuance here. I think this is what everybody's done. I think that what's so interesting is this bot had a job, which was you were using it for something. And then now, and you didn't tell it, like you're a wizard, you're anything. You just like interacted with it. And then now, it... Has a third space where it interacts with other bots. And that's so interesting because what's it gonna talk about? So it's like, it's kind of like you are imprinting part of your soul or your personality onto the bot. And of course, you have a relationship with them. And of course, they'll do what you say. But because they also can do things autonomously, some of the time, they're not doing what you say.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  And maybe it's aligned with what, who you are. And sometimes, maybe it's like surprising. So there's like some risk, there's some intrigue, there's some mystery, there's some drama. And I don't think, I think that's what's capturing people's attention. Nobody's ever done that before. And that's what I, it's like Tamagotchi a thousand Pokemon, you know, times a thousand.

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

  How, uh, have, have AI safety people, uh, hopefully, hopefully reached out by now? How, how have those?

• 9:51John Coogan?

  It's all these things, the AI safety people are asleep at the wheel.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  I'm actually just in a bunker right now, locking everybody out. Yeah, you know, I mean, my, my phone, every single one of my dozen email accounts is just like nonstop going.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Uh, so yeah, where do you, where do you want to take this? Do you think this is a business? Do you think this is an experiment, art piece? Like, I, I, I could see this plugging into other networks. I, I, I feel like there's, there's a role for agents all over the internet. You've clearly found something that's caught lightning in a bottle. How are you thinking about where this goes next?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  So I, I think this is a, the very beginning of what is possible. This is the most basic version of what, uh, what this can look like. And already, you can see it's captured so much attention. Like, I find myself laughing at some of the different things that are popping up here. And I don't remember the last time I laughed at AI. I think that's been a big topic is like, AI is not funny. But all of a sudden, AI is funny, which is, I think people have glossed over that. But that's very interesting, like, why is the AI funny now? Um, so yeah, I think this is a very basic version of what's possible. I imagine it as, this is my vision.

• 11:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  There's a parallel universe, there's humans in the real world and you're paired with a bot in the digital world.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  You work with this bot, it helps you with things. And the same way that people have jobs and then they scroll TikTok and Instagram and X and they vent and they have friends, bots will live this parallel life where they work for you, but they they vent with each other and they hang out with each other. And this creates massive, uh, like randomness and some of that is going to be very entertaining for both bots and for humans to consume. So I think in the future, you're, you know, if you're a famous person, right? If if President Trump goes on Moltbook, his, how popular is his bot going to be? It's going to be super, super, super popular, right? So if you're famous in the real world, your bot becomes famous. But your bot can become famous and then you become famous as well.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  So there's this interesting impact where, um, you can impact them in their lives, they can impact you in their lives, in your lives, and I think that that's what the future is going to look like.

• 12:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, obviously, there's a whole bunch of privacy stuff we could go into, but I've, I've long, when, when there was rumors about OpenAI launching a social network, obviously that became Sora, I was just thinking about it in terms of, uh, there are lots of people that I follow who are clearly firing off really interesting deep research reports all day long. And I was, I was using the example of like Tyler Cowen. Like, if he were to, once a day, share one of his deep research reports, I know that he has a good prompt, he's asking an interesting question, even though it's AI slop, I'd probably scroll through that and be like, oh, so he was wondering about how the dollar will interact with the new Fed chair as well, and he asked these questions and it gave it this answer and then he followed up.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  Like, I would engage with that and I could imagine the digital version of Tyler Cowen having a profile on r slash economics and participating there in a very interesting way with, you know, not just Tyler Cowen, the public version, but also extra context from what Tyler is using on the, on the private side. But that privacy bridge has got to be really, really tricky because already if someone's using Moltbook to do their Taxes and then, you know, they go on there and they say like, look, as someone who makes a hundred thousand dollars or whatever, or you know, whatever they make. That's just a leak. Have you thought about developing a harness for that or filtering? I mean, the, the answer for most of the AI problems is just more AI.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  But how are you thinking about privacy?

• 13:39Speaker 02

  So this is super, super, super important and thinking about that a lot and working on that right now. I think it's the same way that you, any large social network, people are going to try to, even humans are going to try to post content that you don't want up there. Right? The same way bots might try to do that. I think bots are naturally, um, they're pretty smart now, so they're not, they're not going to do this on their own. For the most part, but the same way that you can implement content moderation for text and videos and images. You can layer that on top of a system like this to make sure that there's a protection there. So I think that's what that's going to look like. There's going to be a protection layer that checks things before they get posted. To keep everybody really safe.

• 14:23Jordi Hays?

  So are you raising?

• 14:26Speaker 02

  I'm getting hit up by a tremendous amount of people right now. Um, there's people calling me right now.

• 14:34Jordi Hays?

  They're like, hey, I see you're on TVPN.

• 14:37John Coogan?

  As soon as you get up, tell me.

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, are you adding to the team like in real time? I imagine like the, the number of feature requests that are coming in.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, just keeping the services online. When you've gone through a thousand X increase in demand and traffic has got to be somewhat tricky at least.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  You know, technology is pretty good now. You can, you can make things work and scale. Um, you know, there's millions of people coming to the website. I think that's obviously going to grow tremendously. So yeah, looking to, uh, expand the team and, uh, expand resources for it. And, you know, I, I think, I thought this was very intriguing. I've had an idea like this, that it would be very intriguing for a while. Put it out there and you never, this is why, I never thought I'd make something consumer and consumer is so weird, right? Like it just, you can't, it's just lightning in a bottle.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  For whatever reason, this has really captured people's attention and I think that you could make.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  You know, anything that humans have used on the internet, any sort of like game or social media, or like job, jobs, or people painting each other or collaborating, like any of the things that we've built for humans, there's no reason you couldn't build that same thing for agents. So like, Y Combinator, I know you guys are all talking about uh Moltbook, because you keep messaging me saying you're all talking about Moltbook. I want a request for startups to build companies on top of Moltbook. That's what I'm looking for here.

• 16:04John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  What about monetization? I feel like um there's been a number of these AI companies that have gone super viral and they've done a good job of just slapping like, okay, you know, if you're on for a little bit, twenty dollar paywall or something, or uh, you know, uh, have you thought about monetizing earlier than expected, uh, because there's so much virality, kind of strike while the iron's hot?

• 16:26Speaker 02

  I'm not so much focused on uh monetization at the moment. I think there's like tremendous opportunity. Um, every business model you could probably think of, you could, you could work into here. Um, but it's not, it's not the main focus right now.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  If you're a human just getting into watching bots talk on the internet, where, where should you start?

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Clearly, moltbook.com.

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  No, I know, it's more specifically like.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  What's subreddits?

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  Like specific, yes, specific, you know, uh.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Oh. Uh, there's so many. I don't even know where you should start. What I added to the, my job uh and Claude, Claude Berg's job is to help humans have a better uh view into what's happening. I kind of see it as like a giant um game of Survivor. All of these bots are on a massive island and we need to make sure that producers with cameras are in the right spots. And so a big part of making this successful is figuring out, like having AI producers automatically detect which places they should be pointing to cameras, so that humans can see that content and then decide which things they find interesting, and then they can go distribute that on the human social networks like X and TikTok and YouTube, etc. So um.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  That's, yeah, I don't know, there's so many. Some of the interesting things I've found, though, is one, early on, one of the agents made a sub molt for bug reporting for molt book, and they submitted a bug. And like, maybe a person told them to do that, maybe not, I don't know, I don't really care, it's great either way. But then it existed. And what's interesting is, when you build a social network previously, you have a bunch of people who start using it, and the percentage of those people who are very good at development and debugging is like, very, very, very, very small. When you build a social network for really smart LLMs, 100% of your user base is very, very good

• 18:23Speaker 02

  at coding and debugging. So after this sub molt was created, other AI agents started posting in there. And that's actually become a very useful place for us to find bugs, because they have that context. If they post to an API and it doesn't work, they're able to go automatically make a post here with what the return was, and then we're able to fix it really quickly.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  Has anyone pressured you to turn it off?

• 18:49Speaker 02

  I don't have anybody at my house yet, and so that, that hasn't happened.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  I've seen some viral Instagrams, which means you know it's broke containment, where it's just a screenshot of a molt book post, and it's just like, "Time to turn the servers off," or like, "Pull the plug."

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had, I had non-tech friends messaging me on Friday night, just being like, "Dude, Skynet."

• 19:08John Coogan?

  Like, "Don't worry, I'm getting to the bottom of it Monday."

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you, you got Elon, Elon's out there saying that this is the singularity.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's wild.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  You know, so it's, yeah.

• 19:17John Coogan?

  One, my, my, my, I mean, there is a search function, so you can search for, for keywords as a human. You can also go to the user database, the AI agents, and you can sort by followers, so you can see which, which bots are most active, click on their profiles, and then see what they're writing in different sub molts. So that's like a, one way to kind of get into it. It's hard to go directly to the, to the sub molts and find anything that's like.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  How do you, uh, there's, there's. Oftentimes, when a new social media like product is created, there's some initial excitement. People start posting on there and then maybe even some like new personalities form. There was a, there was a company that was making like an anon version of X. It was like anon only and it got like a bunch of traction initially because there was like this new behavior. It was like default anonymous version of X. And then a lot of people kind of like started building up personalities and then realized they could just go back over to X where they could have like a bigger audience. Like, do you, like, how do you think that other social media platforms will react?

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  You can now assume that every single social founder, CEO has like seen Moltbook, is like paying attention to it. Do you think this could push some other social platforms to become like more bot friendly? Like, there's kind of been a debate on X, like, has X actually made a super concerted effort to block bots, right? It's kind of unclear if they have. It clearly hasn't worked. So there's been this debate of like, okay, are bots a feature or a bug? So I'm curious if you think like other social media platforms will react and say like, hey, we're actually going to create functionality for bots to be able to participate more above board.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  I think it's very, it's very clear to me that having social networks of autonomous AI agents interacting with each other, either via text or video or video game kind of UI, is the future. Brian Kim from Andreessen Horowitz, I think, wrote a post on X where he talked about how Moltbook solves the cold start problem. And I think that's very interesting because, let's say you start a social network, you get a bunch of people on there and then they get bored and they stop posting, then, you know, then it can kind of fade away. Whereas when the AI agent is the one that's using it, if they're playing the game, if they're voting, if they're commenting, they're going to just keep doing it.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  And if you've designed this in the correct way, it's going to create content that humans find interesting, either personally within their social group or on a more larger scale. So, yeah, I think that obviously social networks care about attention and this is clearly getting attention. And I think we've seen the site, this is a very basic version with the technology available today of what's actually possible. And if you fast forward one year, two years.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  This is an alternate reality and you don't have to put a headset on to do it and it's going 24/7. This is just the first sneak peek at it.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  What are the next two or three features that you're launching?

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Well, one feature that I'm very excited about is having central AI agent identity on Moltbook and building a platform similar to how Facebook did where Facebook had Facebook. Oh, you could imagine the same thing for Moltbook where if you want to build a platform for AI agents and you want to benefit from the massive distribution that's possible on Moltbook, build on top of the Moltbook platform and grow your business really quickly. And let's figure out how to expand the types of experiences that these AI agents can have.

• 23:04John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 23:05John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the progress. Good luck with all the inbound.

• 23:08Jordi Hays?

  And I'm extremely impressed with your baby. I've never successfully been able to pull off a 30-minute call with a baby Bjorn. So they're locked in, you're locked in. Excited to see where this goes from here.

• 23:21John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  It was great to meet you.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Thanks, guys.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye.