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

(01:10) - High Interest Rate Phenomenon (17:46) - WSJ Opinion: 'The People Get a Vote on AI Safety' (30:00) - Timeline Reactions (51:45) - Driscoll's China Bet Backfires (57:47) - Jim VandeHei, co-founder and CEO of Axios, discusses his book *Simplify*, which presents a system for increasing productivity by focusing on high-value work and eliminating or automating unnecessary tasks. He also explores AI’s potential to streamline business operations, expand media distribution, augment employees, and create new opportunities without replacing essential human creativity, leadership, and judgment. (01:15:00) - Steve Menneto, president and CEO of Malibu Boats, discusses the company’s nine-brand portfolio, global expansion, vertical integration, and nearly $1 billion in revenue. He also covers boating-market trends, premium consumer demand, electric and autonomous technologies, skilled-labor needs, defense opportunities, and the customer purchasing journey. (01:30:00) - Matthew Wilson discusses Jack and Jill, an AI-assisted hiring platform where he serves as co-founder and CEO. He explains how its agents connect professionals with suitable jobs and companies with qualified candidates, reducing the noise created by AI-generated applications and recruitment outreach, and notes that the company has raised $40 million. (01:39:25) - Rune Kvist, an entrepreneur focused on frontier AI risk, discusses his company’s $40 million Series A and its work developing AI safety standards, audits, and insurance. He explains how liability frameworks and insurer-led oversight could align incentives, improve trust, and enable continued AI innovation while managing catastrophic risks. (01:48:59) - Tyler Bahl, a marketing executive at Activision, discusses his career journey and work bringing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 to market. He explains the franchise’s marketing strategy, gameplay evolution, creator partnerships, AI use, esports, and efforts to serve its broad community. (02:23:03) - Stephen Colbert and Josh Kline discuss his passion for "The Lord of the Rings" and their work developing Scripto, a collaborative production platform designed to improve communication and efficiency across entertainment teams. The comedian, writer, and television host also reflects on sustainable creative processes, expresses optimism about filmmaking, and encourages aspiring creators to stop waiting for permission and make their own work. (02:44:58) - James Cadwallader discusses Profound’s $180 million funding round and its rapid adoption among major global brands. He explains how Profound helps marketers understand and improve their visibility across AI platforms, create content for AI agents, and manage advertising, with the broader goal of becoming the leading AI marketing company. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Tuesday, September 15th, 2026. We are live from the TVP N Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

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

• 0:13John Coogan?

  It's great to be back. Uh, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  Great success.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  Eric Lyman had to issue an apology to.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely nobody.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  No, no, no. You didn't see this?

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 0:31John Coogan?

  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 gonna 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 business.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  International expansion.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, not a fan of it. Not a fan of it. No. Congratulations to the whole team going global, taking over the world. Very exciting stuff. Um, well, the top thing on my mind today is figuring out what's going on with interest rates, the high interest rate phenomenon. We had zero interest rate policy, ZERP, the ZERP era ended. Now we're in the HIRP. I don't think we should say that one. That doesn't sound very good, but uh, the high interest rate policies, the high interest rate phenomenons are upon us. Uh, what's going on? It's very obvious what's going on. Take one look at the chart. It's the war. You can see the US attacks, attacks Iran, uh, in the beginning of 2026.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  Interest rates are low. We should pull up this chart from the Wall Street Journal. It gets more dramatic every time they show this chart, this one right here, Jordy. Uh, take a wild guess. What's driving interest rates? It is, of course, the war which starts there and then boom, up into the right from then on. But there's other questions about what's going on. Is AI, is the build out having an effect here? 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, uh, get into that. Uh, it's obviously, um, 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

• 2:22John Coogan?

  that the government wants to do with money from healthcare, pensions, uh, even funding the military. Like if they're paying interest, they're not paying for other stuff. That's not good. Uh, bad for the prospects of the American home buyer. Interest rates are now above 7%. Getting very unaffordable for lots of people. Uh, 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, uh, interest locked periods. There's a whole bunch of, uh, 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.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  And so, uh, not good for anyone. How do you get out of it? Maybe end the war, but there are other things at, at work. Uh, this war is, uh, 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, uh, I forget what is the IEA or something, the, the, there's a, there's a body

• 3:49John Coogan?

  that forecasts energy build out specifically in solar, and they've gotten it wrong every, every year for 10 years. They've underestimated the growth of solar. You've seen this chart, right?

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  International Energy Agency.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  Is that it?

• 3:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  I, I, IEA. Yeah. So every year they'll be like, okay, we had a great year last year. We're going, we're going parabolic. We're up into the right, but clearly we're not going to build more at solar. People are going to 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, of the predictions and then how we blow them out. So that is something that, that we want to clearly keep working on because, uh, 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. Um, but this, this war is specifically driving energy prices because of course, uh, oil transported through the Strait of Hormuz is a key pressure point for control of the conflict.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  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, uh, 2007 that they've been this high. So not good. Uh, it doesn't always go this way though. I wanted to understand, do, does war or war even in just war in the Middle East, does that always cause interest rates to spike? It makes sense. It's an expensive thing. It's a, it's a capital suck. It's depressing in many, many ways. There's a whole bunch of economic reasons why you could think that war would cause interest rates to spike, but does that always happen? So during Gulf War I, which, uh, I, I didn't realize this, but we have a, a son of a veteran on our team. Um, so thank you for his service, but, uh, during Gulf War I, there was a textbook oil shock.

• 5:28John Coogan?

  So, uh, Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2nd of 1990. Uh, the US military buildup began basically immediately and the Desert Storm offensive started January 17th, 1991. So about six months between the initial conflict over there, the US gets involved. What happens when the US gets involved? Interest rates spiked and interest rates were already 8.29%. Already pretty high, 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, et cetera, the usual playbook.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  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, uh, tight ending and so, uh, there was, there was less pressure on interest rates. The Afghanistan war played out in reverse. So immediately before the invasion, the 10 year was at 4.52%. Yields fell to 4.22%. You could imagine that there's some sort of like optimism around like, oh, this will be a quick operation. This won't be a quagmire. Of course, the opposite happened.

• 6:50John Coogan?

  So six months into the war, the 10 year hit 5.25% up significantly, up basically, uh, three quarters of a percent since the start of the offensive. And so the end result of that is that now WASH, the new Fed chairman is in a tough spot. The markets expect a rate hike to bring inflation down. So, uh, 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

• 7:35John Coogan?

  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, uh, inflation excluding food and energy. And even that's a 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, uh, lots of people want to see happen. Um, 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?

• 8:15John Coogan?

  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.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, I guess you could see a couple of orders of magnitude. You get to 25% of the economy. I don't know. But, um, but today, the problem that's happening with rates specifically is that AI creates investment demand before any productivity benefits arrive. And so you, we see this with like a trillion dollars of capex for like a couple hundred billion dollars of actual revenues. And so, uh, data centers require financing, construction capacity, equipment, electricity. That spending happens today, but broader productivity benefits take longer to diffuse. And so economists, uh, specifically, a group of economists that have studied this, uh, they describe AI as a source of upward pressure on real rates and potentially prices during the compute build out.

• 9:21John Coogan?

  Uh, and Dylan Patel, Dorkesh, uh, have talked about this a little bit where, you know, compute, because there's high ROI, it, it tends to suck demand out of the investment community. Like you look at what Jensen's doing, securitizing GPUs, you look at the incredible demand for investment grade being attached to data center build outs with Nvidia lending IG status to different companies for build outs and backstopping different data centers. That just means that if Nvidia is 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

• 10:03John Coogan?

  or you can go to eventually like an insurance fund, uh, where there's a lot.

• 10:07Jordi Hays?

  I see where you're going with this.

• 10:08John Coogan?

  What are you thinking?

• 10:09Jordi Hays?

  You think Jensen should, should backstop the Fed?

• 10:12John Coogan?

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

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  Everyone knows my stance on that already.

• 10:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  So we can move on.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  So, uh, there's also this interesting indirect effect, which is that.

• 10:37John Coogan?

  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 San Disk, Moons, you have more money to go and spend money, traveling, spending money in the real economy. And so you have this wealth effect that supports consumer spending purely on the, you know, stock market gains, the equity gains that are related to the AI boom. Obviously, everyone talks about like the San Francisco housing market liquidity from like lab employees, but that's actually happening on a much broader scale from just people across the United States that have gone long any AI basket or even any basket that includes

• 11:22John Coogan?

  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. But of course, those are the two possible outcomes here. And they, and they say that in both of those scenarios, whether AI succeeds or AI fails,

• 12:07John Coogan?

  rates will fall, which is maybe good, because everyone wants lower rates. Everyone wants to be able to afford a mortgage or afford a house. But how does this work mechanically? Because it's very weird to think that you would have a scenario where there's a massive bust in the AI economy, and yet you get lower rates. But then also, if AI succeeds, you get lower rates. But they explain it this way. They say, in the next six months, if AI succeeds, you'll see productivity gains, trillions in revenue, and there will be a deflationary impulse. So as AI diffuses, things will get cheaper, because there will be, 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

• 12:51John Coogan?

  one law firm, 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 two grand an hour.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  You saw Morgan and Morgan is, is, is setting up their own data center?

• 13:03John Coogan?

  No, wait, really?

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

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

• 13:08John Coogan?

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

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  If you're an AI researcher, and you've ever wanted to work for a personal injury law firm,

• 13:16John Coogan?

  Now's your opportunity.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  Check out Morgan and Morgan. They have all those billboards.

• 13:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  Just call the number on the billboard.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Yes, I'd like to start racking GPUs for you. But, I mean, he, so he's paying for that in cash? Because doesn't he famously have a billion dollars in cash?

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. He says you're not a billionaire unless it's just sitting in a checking account.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  It's got to be in the checking account, apparently. But you can imagine so many scenarios where, yes, Morgan and Morgan is saving money using AI, they're getting more efficiency, but their competitor is also saving money using AI, and they get into a little bit of a price war. Maybe margins don't compress fully, but they stay sort of healthy, and the end result is deflation, cheaper services, cheaper goods, not for everything, but for the things that are most impacted by AI productivity gains. Then, in the other scenario, the doom scenario from Apollo, if AI fails, the bubble bursts, there's an equity sell-off, and there's a flight to Treasury. So everyone's buying Treasuries,

• 14:18John Coogan?

  saying, I got to get out of these crazy AI stocks. The stuff hit a wall. It's not, it's not going to be useful. I got to buy Treasuries. A lot of buying, if you buy a lot of Treasuries, yields fall and interest rates fall, of course. So, interesting, interesting dynamic. There is the third kind of crazy scenario, which was outlined by Dylan Patel from Semi Analysis, which is like, it never stops. Like, we're going to keep investing, and, and the data centers and the AI boom is going to continue to suck capital until there's like none left. And like, it will, 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

• 15:03John Coogan?

  happens in the next six months. And we'll, and we'll know, we'll check in, in six months with this Apollo prediction, what will happen. Maybe we'll be in the exact same place, looking for the next six months. That's happened.

• 15:13Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully, the war will be over.

• 15:14John Coogan?

  Hopefully, the war will be over. That would be the easiest thing to like, resolve, I think.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:20John Coogan?

  Potentially easier than product.

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  Sovereign debt.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, sovereign.

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  Driver of world peace.

• 15:25John Coogan?

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

• 15:51Jordi Hays?

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

• 15:55John Coogan?

  Yes, that's true.

• 15:56Jordi Hays?

  We know.

• 15:57John Coogan?

  But I'm, I'm fortunately doing much better. But while I was there, I was noticing like, okay, it's actually a better experience. I'm getting text messages to let me know where I am in the queue. I don't exactly have to ask, like, when am I coming up? When will I be getting out of here? But I do have to sign, e-sign a bunch of forms, and the forms don't render properly on, 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, it's the diffusion question. It's the fact that somebody hasn't gotten in there and actually pitched them on a, on a transformation process just yet. But it is coming. And so, all of that means more time for the doctors to actually spend time with patients, doing the important

• 16:39John Coogan?

  work, and spending less time on the papers and the filing and the signatures. And, you know, and we're, 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, some cause for optimism amid, 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

• 17:23John Coogan?

  that we've been having in the last couple of weeks. First, I'm going to tell you about Railway. Railway is your all-in, is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. So, the technology risks came into focus last week. The, is the political system prepared, says William Galston in the Wall Street Journal. Experts have long worried about economic, social, and social, and security impact of artificial intelligence. This year, those risks have moved on to the public agenda as growth, as job growth slowed, worries that spread, that worries spread that AI would displace entry-level workers. Next, local concerns proliferated about the effects

• 18:07John Coogan?

  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

• 18:51John Coogan?

  chilling chapter on possible biological weapons research. There was another chilling chapter on what's going on in the Middle East. It's the meme, both sides are using Claude to fight each other. Really, really crazy stuff. I think this was mostly through like routers and third parties and all sorts of stuff. But it's clearly a hairy mess to fight diffusion attacks and, or distillation attacks, but also just all sorts of, all sorts of nefarious use. It's a, it's a true game of whack-a-mole. And so, full, full employment for alignment researchers at the labs. On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Aminé published an essay urging the industry to, quote, "slow the pace at which we improve

• 19:32John Coogan?

  the capabilities of AI models to give risk mitigation strategies a chance to catch up." He proposed a three-step plan to accelerate this process. We talked about that yesterday. The third 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 it's, a DeepSeek employee basically was like, I don't like Dario. He was, he compared

• 20:15John Coogan?

  giving Dario AGI to like, giving Hitler the bomb. It was a very, very hardcore message from, from a DeepSeek employee. But of course, it's like, translated through seven layers of, of abstractions.

• 20:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had no idea if that was real.

• 20:28John Coogan?

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

• 20:32Speaker 02

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

• 20:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:35Speaker 02

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

• 20:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  It's, it's really, really hard to get a, to get a feel on the vibe in China. It's like, I think the, I think the compute gap is 10x. America has 10 times the compute of China. So, you would, you would imagine that if, if both countries get to AGI and it, or ASI, and it's aligned with the country, then even if China attacks with the super cyber weapon, our AGI can defend better because we have 10 times the compute. I think that's sort of how it would work out. But it is, it is difficult. And then there is, there is this weird scenario where it's like, if you have an aligned superintelligence, and

• 21:25John Coogan?

  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.

• 21:40Jordi Hays?

  Podcasts, microphones.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  Microphones, I suppose. I don't know. It's all, it's all very, very sci-fi, but.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  I mean, one of the.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

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

• 22:00John Coogan?

  That's a very online phrase.

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  After the president said, I am the hoax buster and right now I'm breaking another host 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 EA's on the timeline, but here we are.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  Here we are. Extremely, extremely online, just time, but also, also administration. AI developers face collective action problem that only in 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? It's like the seatbelt clearly is a safety feature in a car. And if one company does it, it's a cost.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  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.

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  John Morgan would like a word.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably. So.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  He's not spending a billion dollars on AI so that people stop getting into car accidents.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Volvo put, 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.

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 24:10John Coogan?

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

• 24:16Jordi Hays?

  Streetcar.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  Streetcar.

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  In Europe, you can't.

• 24:19John Coogan?

  You can't. It's like, he wants more. It's like, I want to be able to get a roll cage.

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's so wild that, that you had millions of people driving cars and car accidents happening and yet people were still saying, no, I don't want, I don't want more safety. I don't want to have to put this thing over my lap. I don't want to do that every time. I gotta put it on over every time.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  Well, do you remember the era of, of automatic seatbelts? Did you ever see cars that had those?

• 24:49Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 24:50John Coogan?

  This was like a late eighties, early nineties phenomenon, but if you got into like a Saturn or something or, you know, it would, you would step into the car and then it had a, part of the 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 like.

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  Ferraris will hand you the seatbelt.

• 25:16John Coogan?

  With the little, with the little pushout thing?

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so you don't have to reach back too far.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  That's, that's such a half measure. Either put it on me entirely or don't, I guess. But even the, even the automatic 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 like 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, like car-based fatalities and injuries because people just started driving faster. But there wasn't efficiency 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.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  A big seatbelt shout. 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 in 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. Amade argues for an additional step, sensible and targeted AI regulation that focuses on corporate transparency and independent third-party evaluation, which can't succeed without evaluators embedded within firms and enjoying unfettered access to all relevant information. In a better world, support for assuring AI safety would be bipartisan.

• 26:49John Coogan?

  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. Amade said he agrees with Treasury Secretary Scott Besant that, quote, "A Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world," and he wants to keep democracies' AI lead over autocracies as large as possible. He opposes the sale of powerful AI chips and semiconductor equipment to China and supports security measures in AI companies to prevent Chinese theft of key data.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  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?

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

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

• 27:56John Coogan?

  Potentially, maybe. That's just what we need.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  This one simple, AI safety experts hate this one simple trick.

• 28:03John Coogan?

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

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

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

• 28:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really, really breaks.

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  Presidential guardrails.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Paperclip, the paperclip or 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 in 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 rate is like 36% or something like that. The war took a lot off of that. And so there is like a ground swell and you're already seeing this with the backlash to data centers.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  And it feels like both on the right and the left, data center backlash has been pushing up against the Trump administration. And so if the, if, if everyone who's against data centers can easily port over to this exact pro AI safety, AI slowdown, which is highly correlated, even though there's a world where you don't slow down the build out, you just slow down training 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.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  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.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  There's a new Time cover.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  With what?

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  It has Claude on the front with the question, how dangerous are you?

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Are you?

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, so full, full, full, full push on this narrative.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:18Jordi Hays?

  One of the most brilliant.

• 30:19John Coogan?

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

• 30:25Jordi Hays?

  Oh, well, that's, that's a whole other story.

• 30:27John Coogan?

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

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but I was talking about the campaign around this moment, AI safety. It is really coming from every possible angle. 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, two of the reporters on the byline for this cover are funded by

• 31:14Jordi Hays?

  the Tarbell Center and AI Dumer Org, he says, controlled by Dustin Moskowitz, Moskowitz, sorry. Tarbell gives journalists large grants and, and these are Jordan's words, to insert AI Dumer 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. They, they give cash to journalists and these journalists are, you know, at Time Magazine,

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 32:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  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, and then they're like, wait, they gave money to this person in our newsroom. So I don't know.

• 32:37John Coogan?

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

• 32:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 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.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  Now, the.

• 32:57Jordi Hays?

  LA Times.

• 32:59John Coogan?

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

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  It's a free lunch. It's, it's actually, they say free lunches don't exist, but there are exceptions.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  In this case, it's, your steel man is that. Is that the Tarbell Center gives a free lunch.

• 33:20John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 33:20Jordi Hays?

  CNBC, Fortune, Time, USA.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  Individuals.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

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

• 33:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  On the website.

• 33:29John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 33:30Jordi Hays?

  San Francisco Standard, China Talk.

• 33:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Jordi Hays?

  Platformer, Bloomberg.

• 33:34John Coogan?

  Is there techery on there?

• 33:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Go subscribe to such stratechery.

• 33:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, but it, but it's basically every, pretty much every newsroom.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:45Jordi Hays?

  NBC.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  Theo, Theo Von?

• 33:49Jordi Hays?

  Not yet.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:50Jordi Hays?

  It's the final holdout.

• 33:52John Coogan?

  Caller Daddy?

• 33:54John Coogan?

  What about spitting chiclets?

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  Bussin' with the Boys? Is Bussin' with the Boys on there? Okay. What about the new Jackass movie? Did that, do they take Tarbell money?

• 34:07Jordi Hays?

  Probably.

• 34:07John Coogan?

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

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

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

• 34:20John Coogan?

  Is Alex Hermosy involved?

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

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

• 34:30John Coogan?

  Manosphere remains clean.

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  For now.

• 34:33Jordi Hays?

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

• 34:37John Coogan?

  Maybe, he's got some good ones, honestly. Uh, 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. Uh, they, they will build a tool for sale. So are they actually buying a data center? Let's find out. Uh, the announcement positions the Orlando, Florida-based firm as both a legal practice and a potential technology vendor at a moment when the broader industry is racing to build or buy AI products.

• 35:17John Coogan?

  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?

• 35:37John Coogan?

  I'm so, uh, uh, okay, the time, it must be like they were investing in technology broadly and then they adopted frontier models. Uh, the firm has a chief transformation officer, uh, who has been working on this. Uh, the financial investment covers the firm's Brooklyn, New York-based production, uh, 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 and Ellis, the world's largest firm by revenue, committed $500 million to, uh, build a proprietary AI platform in May. Latham and Walkin said last week it purchased its own Nvidia GPU servers and leased private space over the past three years.

• 36:22John Coogan?

  Though the firm declined to disclose what it spent. Goodwin Proctor said it has set aside 25 million annually for AI. MX2, uh, 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, uh, lead scoring. Like, there's a lot of very basic work that needs to be done, just pulling police reports, generating letters. Uh, it, 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.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  But clearly they'll want to do things their own way, so makes a lot of sense. Are you going to buy Palmer Lockey's new shirt? He's getting out of the Hawaiian t-shirt game and into the blue button-down shirt. He calls it the Ballmer. It comes with sweat stains already applied. I was really trying to understand what, is this like he's reacting to the news of Ballmer and the Clippers? And so he made this as a joke? Like, why, like, why is he, like, this is a funny video, but it resurfaces.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

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

• 37:47John Coogan?

  Clipping? What do you mean clipping?

• 37:48Jordi Hays?

  Clippers, you know, people that clip podcasts and content?

• 37:53John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 37:53Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm, I'm joking.

• 37:55John Coogan?

  The Ballmer?

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  Um, no, I think he's just having fun. I originally was reading into it being like, wait, does Palmer have some beef with Steve?

• 38:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Is he making fun of him? I think he's just like, it's a fun, fun, uh, fun moment in technology history. Uh, let me tell you about Shopify really quickly. Shopify is a commerce platform that goes with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 38:20Jordi Hays?

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

• 38:26John Coogan?

  Why?

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  Um, I, uh, it seems like they've, they've probably run out of money or something. Um, which crazy is I was on Pully over the weekend. Yeah, so this notice serves to inform you that Pully will be shutting down and will cease all operations and services on 12/8/26. To ensure they've entered into an exclusive partnership with Carta. So not an acquisition, but, uh, Carta is just basically saying, we'll help bring your customers over.

• 38:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:58Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, I, I think this is, Pully's a company, I believe they raised something like 20 million. A $20 million Series A was their last round. Uh, let's see, I think, uh, or maybe it was a Series B. Pully had a Series B from Founder's Fund, actually. I didn't even remember that. I think Stripe did the A.

• 39:19John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 39:19Jordi Hays?

  Back in this, their last round was in 2022.

• 39:22John Coogan?

  Stripe did the A?

• 39:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think so.

• 39:25John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 39:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:27John Coogan?

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

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Series A was by Stripe.

• 39:31John Coogan?

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

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  I think it's just such a small, I think it's just such a small market.

• 39:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:38Jordi Hays?

  Carta has to, in order to be, who knows what, what Carta's actual valuation is right now? Because they made plays in the secondary and they got so much pushback. That actually drove a lot of customers.

• 39:48John Coogan?

  They always needed like a second act.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Two, you know, um, one of the companies that I'm a shareholder in that's on Pully was specifically on Pully because they didn't want, they, they were worried about Carta, sort of like.

• 40:00John Coogan?

  Running a secondary market?

• 40:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, running a secondary market on top of, uh, on top of their cap table. But, uh, but yeah, I think this is the, the, uh, the kind of business where you can be a big company. You just have to have like 80% of the market, right? And, um, so yeah, tough, tough go. But it'd been like almost four years since they had raised money. So at this point, they probably were just out of cash.

• 40:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:23Jordi Hays?

  The not making a lot of money, big, big pref, you know? At that point, like probably 50, 60 million dollar pref stack.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:30Jordi Hays?

  Was going to be impossible to clear.

• 40:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

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

• 40:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, the typical Pully user story outside of like those, those one-off like transition periods where there's a new cycle around something Carta's doing that drives, uh, uh, adoption was just being lower cost than Carta. I think Carta runs like maybe 5K a month for most venture-backed startups at like the early stage, or 5K a year, I think. And, uh, Pully would sort of, sort of come in with a bid that was like half that. And it's quite, the product is kind of just a Excel sheet in the cloud. It's like, it's just SaaS to kind of keep track of who owns what. It's obviously really important and core to the business and something that you don't really want to skimp on. Because there's a lot of financial implications to that.

• 41:18John Coogan?

  But, uh, what would, a lot of companies, what they would run into is they would get a quote from Carta that would be like five grand a year. And then Pully 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 Pully, but our team isn't really familiar with that. And, uh, we're going to wind up billing you 200 bucks extra a month and it's going to wind up being the same price. Because our, the, the, the associate on, on your account that, uh, 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 Pully, they're going to spend more time messing with.

• 42:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, as an, as an investor, probably like eight, you know, nine out of 10 investments are on Carta.

• 42:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:13Jordi Hays?

  And there's no benefit in.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  And then also on the upmarket side, it goes to like Shareworks and Morgan Stanley and like other like more investment banking grade products because you're getting ready for IPO. And so this like this, this, 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.

• 42:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:40John Coogan?

  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.

• 42:49Jordi Hays?

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

• 43:10John Coogan?

  Do you think any startups are running vibecoded cap table management?

• 43:13Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 43:14John Coogan?

  No?

• 43:15Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  You don't think there's one crazy person out there that's just like, yeah.

• 43:20Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 43:31John Coogan?

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

• 43:45Jordi Hays?

  New update from the Ramp AI Index.

• 43:49John Coogan?

  Economics Lab.

• 43:50Jordi Hays?

  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 Seoul 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, Astros, you know, in many ways seemingly a bit more cost efficient. And so that's probably.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:28Jordi Hays?

  A factor, but also the data retention stuff that Anthropic is working towards fixing by the fall.

• 44:34John Coogan?

  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 gotta roll this out everywhere. I don't really know how much these things diffuse that way, but that, that, that launch weekend into the long Labor Day weekend certainly gave a lot of people time to, to demo it on personal projects and bring it into the workplace with confidence. So good, good, good results there. Let me tell you about MongoDB.

• 45:18John Coogan?

  What's the only faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. After his forthcoming IPO, Aliko Dangote estimated wealth is expected to be around $58 billion, putting him above Ken Griffin, Lakshmi Mittal and Jack Ma. Refinery IPO, refinery IPO. What, what do they do? The 69-year-old tycoon's net worth is projected to be as, as worth as much as 58.

• 45:48Jordi Hays?

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

• 45:52John Coogan?

  The petroleum refinery and petrochemicals company that would catapult him past US hedge fund tycoon Ken Griffin and technology billionaire Eric Schmidt. You better not bid for a new T-Rex skeleton against this guy. He's expected to raise about 1.6 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

• 46:37John Coogan?

  on the continent. His plant reached bulk capacity this year just as the war in Iran kicked off, shielding Nigeria from supply issues that other countries faced. It also made Africa's most populous nation a net refined fuel exporter for the first time. Pretty good stuff. Good day to be a tycoon. What's going on with John Turnus?

• 46:58Jordi Hays?

  John Turnus, the Terninator.

• 47:01John Coogan?

  Sounds like Terminator.

• 47:05Jordi Hays?

  I know. Was at the Emmys last night.

• 47:09John Coogan?

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

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but did the phone fold?

• 47:13John Coogan?

  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, I don't know. It, it, it hits completely different because there is actually something novel about it.

• 47:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:38John Coogan?

  I don't know, it's better. And he's smiling, he's all smiles at the, at the Emmys, very good.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

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

• 47:54John Coogan?

  People were, people were.

• 47:55Jordi Hays?

  Guy likes to make hardware.

• 47:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, this has been his life's work.

• 47:59Jordi Hays?

  This is bullish.

• 48:00John Coogan?

  He's been doing this for decades. People were, were speculating that Jensen was talking to Donald Trump at the All In Summit on an iPhone Duo, but the Germinator checked 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, I think reviewers were allowed to be onsite 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.

• 48:42Jordi Hays?

  Still trying to think about using that screen.

• 48:47John Coogan?

  I think it's, I think it's gonna be good. Full self-driving, pull that out. I think that's the move. People are already watching their phones constantly when they're texting, driving. If you're in FSD and it's level four or something, so you can be fully, I think level three, you, you just have to be available to take over. You don't actually have to be.

• 49:09Jordi Hays?

  Have the laws actually been updated?

• 49:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, so there's a Mercedes that is level three, which is odd because Tesla's technically level two, because you have to be eyes on at all times. You can take your eyes off the road for like 30 seconds. Mercedes has a, has a version where if you're on the freeway and you're going, I think, over 30 miles an hour or something like this, or there's some, there's some barrier, it will let you watch a video on the, on the monitor, on the display in the car. It will actually let you do that because Mercedes is then taking the responsibility. It's more of an insurance problem than a technology issue because I don't believe that the, the Mercedes level three system is actually probably, is actually less, it probably has

• 49:55John Coogan?

  more disengagements than Tesla's level two FSD system with the, with the, with the most up-to-date iteration. But while it's working, you can tune out entirely. So iPhone Duo bull case there. I don't know. On a plane, you're not bringing a iPad, you're not bringing a laptop, just bust that thing out, watch a movie.

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  Then you could bring a mouse in your pocket, too.

• 50:20John Coogan?

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

• 50:34Jordi Hays?

  He was playing a character.

• 50:35John Coogan?

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

• 50:41Jordi Hays?

  You don't think this is.

• 50:43John Coogan?

  Absolute cinema.

• 50:44Jordi Hays?

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

• 50:56John Coogan?

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

• 51:01Jordi Hays?

  You became the character.

• 51:02John Coogan?

  He's, 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 Consul. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 51:16Jordi Hays?

  Ben says they always cast him as him.

• 51:19John Coogan?

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

• 51:23Jordi Hays?

  One year ago today, Dylan joined TVPN.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:28Jordi Hays?

  One of the.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 51:30Jordi Hays?

  Applause.

• 51:35Jordi Hays?

  What a legend, what a dear friend. It's a privilege to get to work with our dear Dylan every day, even though he's not here in the UltraDome with us.

• 51:44John Coogan?

  No.

• 51:45Jordi Hays?

  He's too important. He's gotta be up in San Francisco.

• 51:48John Coogan?

  Apparently, China stole the American recipe for blueberries. Did you see this?

• 51:59John Coogan?

  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.

• 52:21John Coogan?

  Oh, that's for Dylan. Okay. Gong for Dylan, not gong for blueberry intellectual property theft?

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

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

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:32Jordi Hays?

  They stole the secret.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  So about 15 years ago, executives from US fruit grower Driscoll's went to China with the 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

• 53:18John Coogan?

  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 growth.

• 53:38Jordi Hays?

  Leverage.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  The blueberry economy over there is booming. Production in China shot up 25-fold since 2010. In 2021, China overtook the United States as the world's top blueberry grower. And by 2025, its annual production was double what it was in the United States. For Chinese consumers, it was a blueberry bonanza. This is the Wall Street Journal writing. I love it. "Blueberry Bonanza. Prices dropped so low, often $3 or less for a nine-ounce container, that state media trumpeted an era of blueberry freedom, in which even ordinary people can gorge on a once exotic fruit. For just about everyone in the blueberry business, though, it has been a knife fight plagued by intellectual

• 54:24John Coogan?

  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 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

• 55:09John Coogan?

  them to rival growers. Some Western fruit companies worked with private investigators who went undercover at plant nurseries posing as traders or farmers.

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  Dream job. Dream job.

• 55:20John Coogan?

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

• 55:26Jordi Hays?

  A spy movie, but you're an undercover.

• 55:29John Coogan?

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

• 55:33Jordi Hays?

  Blueberry Special Ops?

• 55:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:37Jordi Hays?

  Gold Rock's calling it the Fruit Wars.

• 55:38John Coogan?

  No, it is crazy. It's like, I mean, you would, like, when you're discussing China, you think about the geopolitical implications of powerful AI, defense, technology, supply chain dependency, critical minerals, critical industries. But it can, but it's often easy to think like, oh, well, it's blueberries, or it's shoes. Like, it's not, it's not critical to the national interest, but it can still be difficult and detrimental ultimately, because once, you know, this happens and the intellectual property gets taken and 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.

• 56:18John Coogan?

  And so, very, very difficult for Western companies to properly capitalize on the opportunity.

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a fascinating IP story, because your IP is, in large part, a plant that can just be taken out of the ground and planted somewhere else and then propagated. And it's like, do you own a living? Like, can you, can you?

• 56:41John Coogan?

  Is it your tokens, or are they my tokens now?

• 56:43Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 56:44John Coogan?

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

• 56:46Jordi Hays?

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

• 56:50John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 56:51Jordi Hays?

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

• 56:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 57:00Jordi Hays?

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

• 57:10John Coogan?

  For that friend who sends you too many reels, you now have superintelligence, personal superintelligence at your disposal.

• 57:17Jordi Hays?

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

• 57:22John Coogan?

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

• 57:36Jordi Hays?

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

• 57:43John Coogan?

  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?

• 57:55Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 57:56Speaker 03

  Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 57:59John Coogan?

  Welcome to TBPM. 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?

• 58:23Speaker 03

  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 you're basically forcing me down to the newest employee to focus only on those things we're actually good at and that you want to do and should do, and then deleting the hell out of all the things we do at work we shouldn't do, or that someone could do better, or that we could offload to AI. 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

• 59:04Speaker 03

  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.

• 59:25John Coogan?

  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?

• 59:44Speaker 03

  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, because I saw the biggest difference, really, with our rank-and-file employees. Just forcing them to do the exercise in the book of, what are the three things you need to do in order to crush your job? What are the three things you do that you think are stupid? And almost all the time, we could delete those. And what are the three things you think you could offload or have automated by AI? And it's just such a game changer. And you can apply this to anything from how you communicate, to how you structure the company. I don't even know how companies

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  without some form of this system are going to be able to thrive over the next five to 10 years, because the velocity of change, especially as you integrate your company with artificial intelligence, it's so fast. And you're gonna have to have a lean system with people focused only on the work that matters, figuring out what can be rightly outsourced to machines and to AI. Otherwise, you're just gonna be like all these old-line companies where all these barnacles build up and inertia sets in, and the bureaucratic blob takes over.

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  How do you, how do you react to this, this take that I see sometimes where it's like, AI is being forced on people? I've seen, like, I think a few people are like, "Oh, my boss is forcing me to use AI." 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 overdelegating and degrading the quality of your work, but we want you to get rid of the drudgery that actually can be offloaded reliably.

• 1:01:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the right way to approach it from the company's 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

• 1:02:23Speaker 03

  least use it passively, much like you would have used a computer, or a calculator, 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 yeah, occasionally it gets things right, occasionally it gets them wrong. But then there's the one to two percent 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

• 1:03:07Speaker 03

  images of these companies, and those 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

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  have political toxicity and political upheaval, and that's not good for democracy, not good for free markets.

• 1:03:58Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  Let me put this thing down here. Yeah, I'm trying to hold it. How's that?

• 1:04:08Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  There we go.

• 1:04:14Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Perfect. We're back.

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  There we go. There we go.

• 1:04:16Jordi Hays?

  Perfect. Much better. John?

• 1:04:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you, how do you grapple with the cognitive outsourcing question? Like, there was this report, I think like a year ago, that showed developers paired with AI were like actually less efficient at closing bugs in these open source repos. That was true for like one month, and then all of a sudden, it became way more efficient to use AI. But there's these 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

• 1:05:00John Coogan?

  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. Like, I just saw this with Astra and Blender, it can build all these crazy amazing models. They're

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  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, how do you deal with the trade-offs there?

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  It's a really, really, really good question, and a very hard one to answer, because a little bit depends on what you do and how old you are. I would say if you're in college and your, kind of, your brain is still forming, you've got to give yourself space to learn, to think, to look across different domains, teach yourself how to do deep concentration, deep thinking. I think, once you're in the workforce, I think what's worked for me, at least, has been, I use it deeply, I use it a ton, I use it across every aspect of the company, in my personal life mainly, because I feel it's important for me to be an AI lab rat, so I can explain it to our readers and to my company. 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

• 1:06:50Speaker 03

  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,

• 1:07:35Speaker 03

  where it's not great, it's like, if you're not that creative of a thinker and you're thinking thinly, it might make it a little bit better, but it's still going to be relatively thin. As you guys know, the magic only gets unlocked when you're persistent with the, with using, whether it's, whatever you're using, whatever tool you're using, you have to use a lot. You have to give it a lot, you have to give it a lot of feedback, you have to make sure you say this works, that doesn't work. And once you do that, and it knows more about you, your style, your weaknesses, your blind spots, your strengths, that's when you really start to see the big unlock. And the problem is, not many people have that kind of time to be able to put that type of work in right now, which is why you have this weird, messy middle inside businesses. The technology, I think, is better than most

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  people think, and it's way harder to connect into existing systems than people think, because of your data pools, your-

• 1:08:26John Coogan?

  We're in this right now, where we're doing like this national press cycle around the AI stuff, and like, that's an important conversation, but like, there are a whole host of people that don't know that like, it can build websites, and like, there'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, you can use it to control, like, I used it to fix my wifi on my desktop, because it can actually access the computer now. And there's all these, there's all these new features that they just get tucked behind the empty blank box of like, what do you want to do? And a lot of people are like, I don't know, what are you capable of? And

• 1:09:08John Coogan?

  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, in one other kind of separate topic, which is just, I think that when, when people talk about AI in, 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, 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?

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, but 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. 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 six-to-eight card show

• 1:10:24Speaker 03

  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 six 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.

• 1:11:07Jordi Hays?

  Have you, have you thought much at all about maybe to, one to two to three years in the future, where you could have agents that could function as effectively as a CEO? Because I think about a lot of the job of a CEO is to like, have the sort of global context on the business, know, know all, know hopefully everything there is to know about the business, that is sort of like, you know, both public, public and private, right? And then, 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

• 1:11:50Jordi Hays?

  on the right things. And it doesn't feel like we're that far away from like, going to your favorite agent and saying like, slash goal, like, here are KPIs for the next quarter, and start to, like, it almost feels like easier to automate the CEO than it does to automate, like, a lot of these sort of like, specific functions, like web design, where the web designer can get like 90% of the way there, but can't get 100% of the way there with the model. But if you're just sort of like routing, routing information and, and making sure the right people have the right context, and sort of moving the ball forward, I do feel like the CEO, we're not that far away from like a CEO agent, and

• 1:12:33Jordi Hays?

  it might be, might be closer than, than some of these other roles.

• 1:12:37John Coogan?

  Than a journalist agent?

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 1:12:39John Coogan?

  That's a good way to lead the conversation.

• 1:12:41Jordi Hays?

  Maybe. Like, I'm going first.

• 1:12:43Speaker 03

  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 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

• 1:13:25Speaker 03

  goes away. Do I think that you'll be able to start a company from scratch now, 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 would just have the six designers you have today, but they can do 10 times as much work. And that's certainly been for us. And we 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.

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  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 AIed 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.

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, makes no sense. Well, thank you so much.

• 1:14:44Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:14:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  And it's what drives the value.

• 1:14:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:59Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:15:00John Coogan?

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

• 1:15:01Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

• 1:15:03John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Pigma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Pigma files with Design System context. Our next guest is the president and CEO of Malibu Boats. We have Steve Minato with us in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TPN Ultra Dome. Steve, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:15:20Speaker 04

  Doing great. Good afternoon, guys.

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  Good afternoon.

• 1:15:22Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for having us.

• 1:15:24Jordi Hays?

  It's a nice palate cleanser for us. We're talking about a lot of AI.

• 1:15:27John Coogan?

  It's a very interesting business.

• 1:15:28Jordi Hays?

  But we're excited to talk about your business.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  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 even just what the day to day looks like for you.

• 1:15:43Speaker 04

  Sure. Malibu Boats, Inc. is a collection of nine brands. So we have Malibu and Axis in the towboat category. We have Cobalt in the runabout category. Then we have Pursuit, Saxtor, which is our new acquisition. We just acquired in March in Finland and Poland. We have the MBG brands, which is Kobia, Pathfinder, Hughes, and Maverick. So nine different boat companies with all different, you know, ability to get to the water and really have fun with whatever you're doing. If it's technical fish, to runabout surf, to surfing, to exploring venture dayboats, we offer all of them.

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

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

• 1:16:34Speaker 04

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

• 1:16:56John Coogan?

  And 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?

• 1:17:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, our overall strategy, we do look at boat building. How do we continue? You know, we've been boat building 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.

• 1:17:50John Coogan?

  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 either keeps you up at night or gives you cause for optimism in the long term?

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  Well, it's a split world. Like, you've heard the saying of the K economy. We are seeing that in spades. So when you think about a payment buyer, someone who's going to take a payment out on a boat, you know, 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 better. 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. 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 two customers split, and we're, you know, we're trying to find new ways to help that payment buyer

• 1:18:57Speaker 04

  out to get into the market.

• 1:18:58John Coogan?

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

• 1:19:04Speaker 04

  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 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 the next person's up, boat, you know, changes itself, and the next person surfs, you know, the way they want to surf. So, you know, that's kind of, technology

• 1:19:48Speaker 04

  leads to more fun, more safety.

• 1:19:50John Coogan?

  What is your view on the electrification of boats? We obviously saw a massive success with Tesla in automotive. The boating community's been slower to adopt electric boats. We've talked to some folks who have been working on it. Do you have a view on what the future of propulsion systems looks like on the water?

• 1:20:09Speaker 04

  I think, yeah, I think propulsion systems are going to evolve, right? They always do. 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 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 a, you know, in a relatively, you know, close area where I can get back to shore in a dock, you know, sounds like electric may have a fit. If I'm going out in the saltwater, I'm out into, you know, the ocean or so forth, you know, a little bit more work needs to be done in electric

• 1:20:53Speaker 04

  to be able to get the confidence up that I can go and then come back in the same day, right?

• 1:20:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:59Jordi Hays?

  What are the different, like, autonomy tiers? Like, and 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?

• 1:21:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, and some of the technologies is there, as you just explained it, is we do have waypoints, state points, and so forth, technology already on boats. So you can, you can put in coordinates, hit a, you know, a button, and the boat can cap it itself to that, you know, that waypoint, and, you know, kind of an auto-drive situation. But if it's fully autonomous, you know, we're a little bit, you know, further out on that, where, you know, it has the total package, where you can just sit back and let it drive itself, you know, from docked, you know, take your tour, and then come back to the dock. 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.

• 1:22:07Jordi Hays?

  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, would that ever be a focus for Malibu? Are you guys pretty much committed to consumer and recreational?

• 1:22:34Speaker 04

  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 on the unmanned surface vehicles, you know, for marine.

• 1:23:05John Coogan?

  I have a couple more questions.

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  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?

• 1:23:26Speaker 04

  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, either most of our products or our supply chain is US-based manufacturing 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

• 1:24:09Speaker 04

  Door manufacturing to the States. So we're, we're in the midst of that integration right now.

• 1:24:14John Coogan?

  Got it. What does that mean for hiring? How difficult is it to hire for all the different roles? I mean, it seems like with the level of vertical integration you have, you need people with specialties in wire harnessing, electricians, all sorts of different, all sorts of different professional skills and roles. What does the hiring pipeline look for you, look like for you? And is it particularly weak right now? Is it particularly strong right now? What is hiring looking like?

• 1:24:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, hiring is, is kind of down the 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, 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

• 1:25:25Speaker 04

  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 gel coat and in lamination and so forth.

• 1:25:38John Coogan?

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

• 1:25:58Speaker 04

  Think about, yeah, the journey is, 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. Then it gets to the dealer. Then there's sea trials, right? And then 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 Lake City, you know, around Halloween, we'll

• 1:26:40Speaker 04

  have the, 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 it as well.

• 1:27:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:08Jordi Hays?

  I'll wait for John to get one and then I'll get a bigger one.

• 1:27:11John Coogan?

  I'm sure that happens a lot.

• 1:27:13Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? So you guys don't have like a sort of racing focused brand. I imagine that's a much smaller market than some of these other markets. How, I just have a sort of random question. You're the first recreational boating expert we've had on the show ever. So you're the guy to ask. But every time I see a video of a cigarette boat, it ends up, you know, flipping around like this and going on some, basically ends up flying. I think that's because those videos just tend to go really viral. I'm sure they normally can stay on the water. How, how dangerous is that? How popular is it? Is it, is it

• 1:27:54Jordi Hays?

  less popular than it, than it was historically? Or is it, or is it rising? I'm just very curious.

• 1:28:00Speaker 04

  You know, I'll 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, and 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.

• 1:28:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:46Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:28:57John Coogan?

  That's fun.

• 1:28:58Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:29:00Speaker 04

  Me? No, I'm sorry. I'm not, I'm still in the little guppy stuff. I haven't had anybody, you know, any, any big fish.

• 1:29:08Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:29:12Speaker 04

  There's a lot of time.

• 1:29:13Jordi Hays?

  We actually, we actually ask that to a lot of our guests.

• 1:29:16John Coogan?

  There was a week where we asked that to like every guest and it was like mostly tech CEOs and the answers were all over the place. But we appreciate you humoring us. But thanks so much for coming on.

• 1:29:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thanks for, yeah, educating us on the markets. Fascinating. And, and yeah, love, love the brands and, and all the products. I hope to, I hope to experience all of your products over the course of my life.

• 1:29:37John Coogan?

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

• 1:29:39Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:29:43John Coogan?

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

• 1:29:48Speaker 04

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

• 1:29:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great, great to meet you, Steve.

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences. A 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.

• 1:30:16Speaker 05

  Hey, guys. Thanks to be here. Yeah, having a fun time over here.

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:30:21Jordi Hays?

  Did you catch any of the last interview?

• 1:30:23John Coogan?

  No, I don't think they can.

• 1:30:24Speaker 05

  Just the last, the last five seconds or so.

• 1:30:26Jordi Hays?

  Oh, great. We were talking about boats.

• 1:30:28John Coogan?

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

• 1:30:30Jordi Hays?

  And fish.

• 1:30:31John Coogan?

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

• 1:30:32Speaker 05

  Probably about this big movie, a sardine.

• 1:30:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:30:34Jordi Hays?

  Oh, there you go.

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  That's a.

• 1:30:36Jordi Hays?

  Better than nothing.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  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, you would expect just the median fish to be the one that you catch. But you're going for minnows.

• 1:30:49Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:30:56John Coogan?

  The right.

• 1:30:56Jordi Hays?

  Hire. You want pure precision.

• 1:30:59John Coogan?

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

• 1:31:02Speaker 05

  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 two different AI agents, an agent called Jack that works for professionals and helps them find their dream job, and an agent called Jill that works for companies, helping them find amazing, amazing people to hire. And together, we operate actually the largest agentic social network in the world with close to half a million people across San Francisco, New York, and London. Having agents helping them find their dream job, representing them like a Hollywood agent would represent a movie star by doing that, bringing that, that service to every single person on the world.

• 1:31:43John Coogan?

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

• 1:31:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, we operate a couple of different business models. So we operate on a success fee model is primarily what we're operating on today. We also have some more traditional kind of SaaS based, like retainer based style as well. But 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.

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  How difficult is this?

• 1:32:19Jordi Hays?

  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 like, you know, I get tricked by like AI sales emails where they're pulling, you know, I see like the subject line or whatever, and I see this top of it and it's like some very specific detail and I'm still like-

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

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

• 1:32:57Speaker 05

  I think that's spot on observation, right? Like, good people have always had lots of inbound. Great companies get lots of inbound. And 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 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

• 1:33:38Speaker 05

  at scale. And likewise, from a company's perspective, they're getting huge volumes of applicants for every role that they put out there. And we're seeing companies not even put roles 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 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

• 1:34:19Speaker 05

  this kind of perfect mutual fit where there's a really interesting opportunity that really fits well with what with what somebody's looking for. So that's, that's what we've built is this incredibly high signal to noise way of kind of escaping out of this like arms race that you see with with with AI-generated outbound on both directions.

• 1:34:37Jordi Hays?

  What what's going on in the traditional recruiting market? How are how are traditional recruiters, you know, adopting AI? I imagine, 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 of. So it feels like even if, even if there's some disruption to the traditional recruiter model, they're probably still doing well. But how are they? How are they adopting AI? I'm just sort of curious because I'm sure you end up, some of them probably use-

• 1:35:14Speaker 05

  You see a lot of the, a lot of the innovation that's been happening over the last two 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 town and we're going to spam the town, 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, let's identify who could be a fit for this role and let's outreach to them with some AI-generated messaging. We're seeing the same on the candidate's side. Let's have AI apply for 1,000 jobs for me in one day. And that's leading to

• 1:35:59Speaker 05

  this like cacophony of noise that 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, this, this, this connection up where you've got this incredibly, this ability to offer these incredibly high signal connections that are then outside of this, this, this world of outbound.

• 1:36:24John Coogan?

  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 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?

• 1:37:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think we're still in the early days, right? There's definitely, there's definitely adoption. The problem is if you get adoption amongst a small group of people, but they can do this at enormous scale, you're seeing-

• 1:37:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, it creates a bunch of spam.

• 1:37:09Speaker 05

  And 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, it is the same thing happening on the candidate's side.

• 1:37:35Jordi Hays?

  How far are we from, you know, two people, let's say a candidate and an employer talking and saying, yeah, it seems like we're, we have a good fit here. And then them leaving it up to the agents to actually negotiate the final comp package. Because it's always the sort of 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-

• 1:37:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think the, 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 two 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. It's 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

• 1:38:44Speaker 05

  the background every day, and then connect you up with the right people. And this like 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 up for?

• 1:38:56John Coogan?

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

• 1:38:59Speaker 05

  Sure. Yeah, we raised $40 million.

• 1:39:05John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:39:06Jordi Hays?

  Who, who came in to the round?

• 1:39:09Speaker 05

  Yes, so Esri Capital led the rounds. And we had Creando who led our $20 million seed round last year. They doubled down. Madrona Capital, and then a whole bunch of others as well.

• 1:39:18John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, congratulations. And thank you so much for hopping on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:39:22Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 1:39:23John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 1:39:31Jordi Hays?

  Up next.

• 1:39:31John Coogan?

  Already here, Rune.

• 1:39:32Jordi Hays?

  You're not going to believe it. Another $40 million series day. 40 million number of the day.

• 1:39:38John Coogan?

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

• 1:39:41Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on.

• 1:39:44Speaker 06

  Good to see you guys.

• 1:39:45John Coogan?

  Good to see you too. Congratulations.

• 1:39:46Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:39:48John Coogan?

  Oh, hit the gong.

• 1:39:52John Coogan?

  Did it. But Jordi has some important questions.

• 1:39:54Jordi Hays?

  Really wants to know, what's the biggest fish you've ever caught?

• 1:40:00Speaker 06

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

• 1:40:12Jordi Hays?

  Good man. Just in it for the sport.

• 1:40:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:40:14Speaker 06

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

• 1:40:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, great to, great to have you back on the show. What's, what's new in your world?

• 1:40:23Speaker 06

  Well, kind of the whole, 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, that's exactly what we're working on. And so we should talk a little bit about that. And that comes at the back of us raising our $40 million series day. So we now have the capital to go and make a dent in this problem. It's, it feels like that is now the bottleneck for progress. Security becomes a bottleneck for progress. And so needs to get solved urgently.

• 1:40:58Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:41:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. So our approach, we both built standards, audits, and insurance for frontier AI systems. The way we think about this problem is that there needs to be willingness for, there needs to be some demand for the audits. There needs to be the capacity for the audits, and there needs to be good incentives that these orders are doing a good job. Demand for these audits. Done taking care of everyone, your whole Twitter feed will tell you that this is urgently needed now. And now the short, the short-term bottleneck is on capacity of world-class auditors who both get frontier AI systems and know what an audit looked 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.

• 1:41:55Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:41:56Speaker 06

  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. That was 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, 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 rest saw.

• 1:42:20John Coogan?

  Uh, I saw Naval post something about, uh, the like liability being a key, uh, discussion point here. I'll pull up the post. Um, he said, um, he said that, uh, li- strong liability enforcement could be helpful in the AI debate. If your agent swarm goes rogue, you're liable. If your weekly protected model gets jailbroken, you're liable. If you serve a weekly protected open source model, you're liable. How did you, how do you interpret that? How close are we to that actually being the reality? Because I think most people would look at that and be like, yeah, that makes sense. That's the way it should be. Uh, is it not that way? Should we change something? Uh, what's going on? Give me more context on what Naval's talking about there.

• 1:43:06Speaker 06

  Yeah. Uh, so Naval, at the highest level is saying, we have all these existing tools.

• 1:43:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:11Speaker 06

  That we put to use here. It's already a criminal act to kill lots of people. Won't that apply here?

• 1:43:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:43:16Speaker 06

  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. Uh, there's a couple of, uh, caveats to this. First of all, the way AI, um, shows up today doesn't fit neatly into liability categories today. So for example, uh, today's cyber laws rely on human intent to hack something. In the case of Hugging Face, there's no human intent.

• 1:43:46John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:43:48Speaker 06

  And so all of a sudden it becomes a gray area.

• 1:43:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:50Speaker 06

  My hunch is that the courts will still have found that OpenAI is in fact liable for the Hugging Face and would be, need 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.

• 1:44:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:00Speaker 06

  And then secondly, uh, liability only works up until the cap of the balance sheets of the people who can be liable. So if, uh, OpenAI were to, um, IPO at a couple of trillion dollars, uh, well, that's the absolute cap where it can be covered. And some people at least are saying that some of the risks here are bigger. How do you cover risks that are bigger than the balance sheets? That's traditionally what insurance does, catastrophic risk insurance.

• 1:44:25John Coogan?

  Is there, what, what is the best, uh, example that you'd pull from? Like, i- is there another industry where the, where the industry as a whole carries insurance in excess of their balance sheet? Is this common? Should I be looking at like housing insurance, mortgage insurance, the car industry, the nuclear industry? I don't, I don't even know.

• 1:44:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think there, there are many places you can pull from. Nuclear is kind of easy to understand. So to, the, in nuclear insurance is mandatory. Basically the government said, we guys need you to build nuclear power plants.

• 1:44:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:59Speaker 06

  Uh, but in return, you better carry insurance because when something goes wrong, we don't want to pick up the bill.

• 1:45:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:04Speaker 06

  And, uh, so what they do is they actually, all the, the nuclear power plant operators have a mutual insurance where they cover each other's asses.

• 1:45:13John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:45:13Speaker 06

  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. Uh, and I think there's, there's a lot to, to learn from that. Um, though we'd have to get, I think, when you look at nuclear overall, they went too hard on regulation after, after a big incident, which means that we don't have nuclear energy today.

• 1:45:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:36Speaker 06

  So we have to find a way to let the market operate

• 1:45:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:39Speaker 06

  in this way while still being extremely mindful that, uh, China is racing ahead. This is not about slowing it down. This is about getting the confidence to, to move forward.

• 1:45:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How is, how is the, the legacy, how are legacy insurance players thinking about pricing this risk? There's so many, there's so many, uh, unknowns in many ways. When you think about a nuclear power plant, depending on where it is, you can sort of, uh, think about a downside scenario and then maybe add up all the, the, the property values in nearby area and potential damages if there were any type of adverse event. Whereas I think with, with AI, it's like right now, very much operating in the digital world. So there's, there's hacking risk. There's risk of, you know, over the weekend, it was risk that a, an agent swarm could take down the entire internet, right? And it's sort

• 1:46:33Jordi Hays?

  of very unclear what the economic, I mean, you can make guesses on what the economic cost of that would be, but it almost seems like in that situation, such a large number, you know, if you took down the internet for, for a day, what would that cost the global economy? It's like probably trillion dollars. A big, big, big, big number. That's sort of hard to underwrite. Um, so is, is there enough clarity yet to actually get into this game of, of, of insuring this kind of risk?

• 1:47:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. Uh, the, a couple of points are true. Uh, 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 been 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, catastrophic risk models are, there's all discipline related to this and how do you deal with the fact that there are very few events? How to 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. Uh, that's another reason why you want to use the existing labs' own balance sheets because they already

• 1:47:48Speaker 06

  have exposure. It's going to, it's going to take a, a while until AIG would like to put up, uh, $10 trillion, uh, here. Uh, but the labs already have their full market cap on the, on the line. So can you take that and put that into an insurer? So you get the benefits of a formal watchdog who has an incentive to bring the risk down and tell the truth about what, what's actually going on and have the quantitative tools. But you don't have to stand up $10 trillion balance sheet overnight. So I think that's the most promising way to get started in the spirit of how nuclear, uh, is, is kind of governed by the market today.

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  Well, I'm so glad that you have, uh, a fresh funding round, uh, 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.

• 1:48:35Jordi Hays?

  I like the commercial approach to AI safety too. Yeah.

• 1:48:40John Coogan?

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

• 1:48:52Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:48:52John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:48:53Speaker 06

  Good to see you guys.

• 1:48:54John Coogan?

  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 TDP UltraDome. We have Tyler Bahl from Activision. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much.

• 1:49:12Speaker 07

  Here you go. Some more swag out there when you get done.

• 1:49:16Jordi Hays?

  Dream hat.

• 1:49:17John Coogan?

  Uh, this is, uh, this is not the gift I wanted. I wanted to be able to play Modern Warfare 4 tonight because I played the, I played the beta, got completely addicted. And then I feel like you pulled it from my grasp.

• 1:49:32Speaker 07

  We might be able to hook you up.

• 1:49:33John Coogan?

  I will do any.

• 1:49:34Speaker 07

  Make sure you get you some code. But I think more important, we should get you out to Infinity Ward.

• 1:49:39John Coogan?

  Ooh, that'd be amazing.

• 1:49:40Speaker 07

  Get the whole team out here.

• 1:49:41John Coogan?

  Thank you for the hat on.

• 1:49:42Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:49:42John Coogan?

  But I am, I am 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.

• 1:49:52Speaker 07

  That's exciting.

• 1:49:53Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:50:01John Coogan?

  It's my bias.

• 1:50:02Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:50:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's really, really good.

• 1:50:09Speaker 07

  We're excited that you're excited. So that's why I'm here. Yeah. I just wanted to, you know, stop by. I'm a big fan.

• 1:50:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:14Speaker 07

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

• 1:50:22John Coogan?

  Uh, maybe, uh, let's start with a little bit of interruption on yourself. You roll your journey to Activision, uh, what your day-to-day looks like. And then I want to go into, uh, sort of the story that you tell around Call of Duty, around Modern Warfare. Like what, what is the journey that got us here today? So, but let's start with, uh, with a little bit of your history.

• 1:50:44Speaker 07

  Yeah. I'm, I'm literally a 14-year-old kid living my dreams. So like I started in music. I was a DJ. I was in, uh, doing hip hop in New York City on the radio, worked at Sony Music as an intern, uh, worked at Conan O'Brien and stuff, right? Yeah. The old late night with Conan O'Brien. Um, it kind of, it was like a page. Um, and then I went into like sneakers. I was a sneaker head. So I worked at Reebok and Adidas and part of that relationship.

• 1:51:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:07Speaker 07

  And then Google. So I went over to Google for six years. I worked on the apps business, uh, working on search and maps and Google Assistant and all those products. And then Jeffrey Katzenberg, uh, called, uh, to come work on Quibi down here in LA. Um, RIP. Yeah.

• 1:51:23Jordi Hays?

  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 like short form dramas, basically.

• 1:51:40Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 1:51:42Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:51:48Speaker 07

  I, I still believe in the product. It was just the wrong time, right? Like, we literally launched right when COVID was breaking out and, and, you know, some of the, some of the crazy shows that, that were in development that never reached, you know, the main, or never was actually released were like really exciting. So, and then after it shut down, the, the shows went on to win Emmys and stuff, right? 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 six years and really excited to bring MW4 to the market this year.

• 1:52:26John Coogan?

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

• 1:52:34Speaker 07

  No, you know, I, I didn't play the, 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 nine.

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  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, it goes through everything.

• 1:52:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, like, but you gotta think it's 24 years or 24 games that, 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, you know, and, you know, Southeast Asia or in China and other places in developing markets, but it's massive game, really, really successful. And so, yeah.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Are those bolt on handheld devices that modify?

• 1:53:21Speaker 07

  Like Backbone and those.

• 1:53:23John Coogan?

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

• 1:53:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, like, you know, I know the guys over at Backbone and I think like it's, it's a really great product.

• 1:53:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:36Speaker 07

  But, you know, for someone that doesn't play on mobile, right? Like, and so 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.

• 1:53:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:45Speaker 07

  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.

• 1:53:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:53Speaker 07

  But I think, you know, I don't know how big the, you know, the market is for them. And, and then there's been a lot of kind of competition in that space and stuff.

• 1:53:59Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:54:05Speaker 07

  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.

• 1:54:17Jordi Hays?

  That's a kind of fan. First guy in Boston with an iPad.

• 1:54:21John Coogan?

  Did you do a backflip with it?

• 1:54:23Speaker 07

  I did not do a backflip.

• 1:54:25John Coogan?

  You missed.

• 1:54:26Speaker 07

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

• 1:54:36John Coogan?

  It's a pretty good aspect ratio of gaming, actually.

• 1:54:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:54:40John Coogan?

  I could see it working pretty well.

• 1:54:41Speaker 07

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

• 1:54:46Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:54:53John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:54:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so that, that's, that's where we'd want to look.

• 1:54:57John Coogan?

  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 tenants, the marketing messages that you think are important to never stray from?

• 1:55:11Speaker 07

  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? 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, so you really want to think about, okay, how do I reach? So when we have an idea or someone's pitching me something, I go, does it check these three boxes? Green light, go all the way.

• 1:55:55Jordi Hays?

  Aston Martin collab.

• 1:55:57Speaker 07

  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. You go, okay, wow, has it got swagger? I go, yeah. And then can we scale it? Can we tell a story about it? Can we, so putting it in the game, not everybody can get an Aston Martin, but you can play it in the game, you can drive it there. And so that gives you the scale. And that was a really exciting partnership because our design teams 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.

• 1:56:26Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:56:29Speaker 07

  Who knows?

• 1:56:30Jordi Hays?

  I feel like, no, I feel like they're, I know that, I don't know if it's, they're gonna sell 2,000 of those cars, but they, at least in LA, they could sell 100.

• 1:56:39Speaker 07

  Well, you know, one thing was like the windows originally were too small. And then our, our design team looked at it and go, well, you gotta be able to hang out a window with a gun, right? So like, you gotta be able to get your body outside of it and stuff. And so all of those little things, when they were going back and forth with the studio team and, and the design team at S M R, and 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, and have some edge. And so this whole storyline of North Korea invading South Korea, very topical right now and what's going on in the world. And, you know, I think that, that grittiness of showing these conscripts, you know, that are in South Korea, that's, that's a real thing, right?

• 1:57:23Speaker 07

  Where, you know, BTS just were conscripts and stuff, right? They had to go serve.

• 1:57:27Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:57:34Speaker 07

  And telling that zero to hero story is really, really cool, right? You know, and I think that's what people wanted from us. And in addition to that, we got Task Force One for One with Price and Ghost and all the characters people love. And that's a separate storyline. And so how those two things come together is gonna be really cool for people to go.

• 1:57:50Jordi Hays?

  How have parental views on quote unquote violent video games evolved? Because I, like, growing up, my parents were very wary of, of Call of Duty, but of course I found a way to convince them that I was gonna play and I was, and some of my most cherished memories with my friends growing up are like in Rust, like 1v1ing my best friends, you know? And so like, and, and, and very clearly, like, there wasn't like the, the, the general fear that I think parents of that generation had around like, oh, if my, if my kids are, are, are playing video games that, that have violence in them, like maybe that, that'll influence them. Now, as a, as a parent, like I will not be worried about my kids playing.

• 1:58:35Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:58:45John Coogan?

  Stop scrolling reels.

• 1:58:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a rite, it's gonna be a rite.

• 1:58:47John Coogan?

  Actually go play Rust, come on.

• 1:58:49Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:58:59Speaker 07

  I think there's different worries, you know, in the space of like more like social media addiction or thinking about like what types of games? What are the quality of the games? Like, I think there was some research yesterday that I saw on X where it was talking about, you know, just games being a decompression, right? And, and being able to kind of, you know, after a long day or having, being stressed out in school to be able to go and play with your buddies. But when we look at our research, the number one reason why people play is not because of the guns and the violence, it's because their friends are there.

• 1:59:26John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:59:36Jordi Hays?

  No, but that was the thing as a kid too. I was playing because it was competitive and fun.

• 1:59:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:40Jordi Hays?

  And, and like, and it was like, for me, growing up in California, as 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.

• 1:59:57Speaker 07

  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.

• 2:00:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:00:05Speaker 07

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

• 2:00:13John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  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?

• 2:00:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, we're always playing with the movement, right? Like, and so 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? Really thinking about, okay, how are we more 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, you know, we had the beta, we had weekend one and we got some feedback. And then we changed some of the movement and TDK by weekend two, right? And everyone was feeling a lot better about it. And so, but this is always going to be a debate, right?

• 2:01:30Speaker 07

  And as soon as we launch this game, they'll want something totally different from us. I think the biggest challenge that I have right as a marketer, right? Is that the community is so big.

• 2:01:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:39Speaker 07

  You have people that, you know, just want to play zombies, right? You know, and they just love the zombies mode. Some people just want to play the campaign.

• 2:01:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:46Speaker 07

  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.

• 2:01:58John Coogan?

  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. And I'll be like, that doesn't apply to me. 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, what is the balance that you found? How do you even engage with that community effectively?

• 2:02:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, every single game that we've made had had some level of skill-based matching making to it and stuff, right? Or some level of matchmaking. And so, you know, 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, 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. Right? Like that is the, like, when you do this, you're trying to balance it out so that, you know, an uncle 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.

• 2:03:07Speaker 07

  But I think, you know, I think the intention I think is lost a lot of times that there's actually real people that work here and really care about this game. And really want to see the engagement, you know, grow and stuff and making sure that everyone is having a good time. And, you know, we don't always get it right, but it's figuring out that balance and listening to the community.

• 2:03:24John Coogan?

  And it should be a benefit of scale to some degree with a really large player pool. The skill-based matching matchmaking can be more accurate. You can actually find pools of players with similar skill levels. So there is something where the best thing that you can do in many ways is just like make the game appeal to a really, really broad swath of gamers. And then you'll, you know.

• 2:03:45Speaker 07

  But we're listening, right? And then 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 three, four 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, you know, the best way to communicate with them over time.

• 2:04:18Jordi Hays?

  What is sentiment like in the gaming community around AI? I would assume that the gaming community is so broad and probably generally reflects like the general populations. 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 like speeding up.

• 2:04:39John Coogan?

  Finding bugs.

• 2:04:40Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:04:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, there's 4,500 employees at the company and they're, you know, they're dedicated to their craft and art and stuff. And so I think where AI can be beneficial, at least on the marketing side, I can tell you one, you know, now that I can do meeting notes, right? Via AI, right? And I saw Jim and I heard Jim talking earlier, right? It just about those little efficiencies actually add up, you know, like when I was going to go to school, I was going, instead of going to business school, I was going to go to design school, right? And I decided.

• 2:05:16Jordi Hays?

  Turned it down.

• 2:05:16Speaker 07

  Turned it down. I went into business. But, but I think, you know, when I, when I look back at it, you know, when we're concepting an idea, I can respond back instead of me typing some feedback, right? I can go, hey, I think it should look like this, right? 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, right? And I think it's all about, we've always had tools, right? We've had Adobe, you know, since, you know, when I was, you know, a marketer for 20 years ago. It's applying these tools and being able to get the most out of them. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's not a good topic in the community and stuff. And we want to respect that and we want to make sure that we're not putting out slop in the market and stuff, right?

• 2:05:59Speaker 07

  And I think, you know, protecting the, you know, the studios and the publishing unit as much as possible is our priority.

• 2:06:06John Coogan?

  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, in this era where you kind of get a speed tree-like system for anything and that calls.

• 2:06:29Jordi Hays?

  Every pixel needs to be.

• 2:06:30John Coogan?

  Hand placed. I don't know.

• 2:06:33Jordi Hays?

  How has working with live streamers and creators evolved over the last 10 years? The last time, I don't, when I, when I was like in high school, I would watch like Starcraft 2 live streaming. And I was, 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. But then like the, and so the market like share might shift dramatically for like a week. And then it sort of reverts to back to where it was or baseline.

• 2:07:16Jordi Hays?

  But how do you think about working with creators in the lead up to a launch like this? And what have you guys learned from, you know, the last, your last six years?

• 2:07:24Speaker 07

  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 Cato, you know, 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, we're actually investing more and more in the creator community and trying to figure out, okay, how do we grow the next wave? But 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.

• 2:08:07Speaker 07

  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, you know, 1,600 different versions of that content, you know, 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, you know, I think the brands have been de-emphasized on social. And so clipping, you know, is really the avenue for us to get more of our content out, you know, via these channels by flooding the zone.

• 2:08:52John Coogan?

  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?

• 2:09:06Speaker 07

  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, you know, movie studios or gaming studios kind of still lean on to it as you're building towards your launch. But, you know, we spend a lot more on digital and there's, the landscape is literally changing, you know, in the last six months. Like clipping didn't exist a year ago or a year and a half ago, right?

• 2:09:33Jordi Hays?

  Until we created it.

• 2:09:34Speaker 07

  Exactly. But I, but I think, you know, and Mr. Beast has his own, you know, clipping company, right? And so I think in a lot of ways, you know, that's new and then you have to figure out, okay, how does that work? And then the, you know, the tech platforms then kind of de-emphasize 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, you know, either the sources, you know, or influencing the sources or editing our sites to better reflect that? And so that, that's really changed how we think, you know, about marketing our games. Because so many people are going on like, how do I get better in Call of Duty? Or like what loadout should I have?

• 2:10:16Speaker 07

  And all the attachments, like which attachment should I have for my gun and stuff, right? And so they're using, you know, AI a lot more for that. And so we have to think about.

• 2:10:24Jordi Hays?

  I've been using AI a ton, like as, as like a, as like a racing coach, basically. Where I'll like do a few laps and then I'll, and then I'll be asking questions about like how to adjust, you know? 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.

• 2:10:45John Coogan?

  Kill Block.

• 2:10:46Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 2:10:46John Coogan?

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

• 2:10:59Speaker 07

  The, no, I, we're part of the.

• 2:11:02John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:11:06Speaker 07

  That's what I was waiting for.

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  Was it a surprise to you that you learned about Kill Block six months ago?

• 2:11:12Speaker 07

  No.

• 2:11:12John Coogan?

  Or has it been in the process?

• 2:11:13Speaker 07

  No, it's been.

• 2:11:14John Coogan?

  Get ready to start marketing this. It's a new, it's a new thing that you need to explain.

• 2:11:17Speaker 07

  So one of the great things about Activision is that we were part of what we call the green light process, right? From the very beginning.

• 2:11:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:23Speaker 07

  So the, 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 envisioning and what they want to bring to market. But when we saw Kill Block, I mean, it's this, basically this map that dynamically changes.

• 2:11:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:37Speaker 07

  As it can be 500 different combinations.

• 2:11:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:40Speaker 07

  It's, uh, it was inspired by the Real Madrid stadium. So, you know, they have the soccer pitch and it actually goes underground so that they can have concerts.

• 2:11:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:48Speaker 07

  Basketball games or other things. And, and so what if you could build a map that just is dynamically changing every round that you're going in?

• 2:11:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:56Speaker 07

  And, and so then you can have a map that has infinite combinations. And so it, it was really exciting to see because, you know, from a marketing standpoint, we're like, wow, you know, this is going to create a new loop, a new level of gameplay. And you can't just memorize the map anymore, right? 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

• 2:12:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:17Speaker 07

  the sports idea of inspiring, you know, like, okay, how do we go to a sports event? Not necessarily a gaming event, to talk about this new map and this new mode that, that the team created.

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  It also seemed like there were some BTS, uh, sort of documentary style, uh, features that dropped ahead of the launch to sort of go a layer deeper than just a cinematic preview trailer. Was that deliberate?

• 2:12:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, a hundred percent. Like, I think we want to be able to, we're, we've been teasing out different elements all the way through. And, and I think you'll see some, some new stuff from us this week.

• 2:12:50John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 2:12:50Speaker 07

  Tokyo Game Show, um, later this week. So, um, 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, rounded cinematic, um, you know, game? And we wanted to kind of show that, um, that was a companion to the multiplayer and the new DMZ experience.

• 2:13:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Jordy, you have another one?

• 2:13:19Jordi Hays?

  What is the, what is the current state of, of esports and esports investment? At least from a, from, from our side of the, the market, the whole venture world, it feels like the category hasn't panned out. Uh, you know, there, there, there isn't a, you know, $10 billion esports.

• 2:13:38John Coogan?

  Billionaires buying 10 billion.

• 2:13:39Jordi Hays?

  Esports team. You did, 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, maybe not panning out as this massive new asset class. Maybe that, that's been okay because gaming feels bigger than ever. But how are you guys investing in it? How, how important is it to the overall Call of Duty universe?

• 2:14:03Speaker 07

  I mean, the competitive, you know, portion of Call of Duty, that's the elite, elite, you know, and being able to show that off. So CDL is still really thriving, Call of Duty League for us. And so I think you see it with, um, you know, 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, you know, we don't see that as much anymore. But, you know, we had a match, um, you know, our champs in, in Paris and stuff. And I mean, there was hundreds of thousands of people like, you know, you know, you know, uh, watching the tournament and, and celebrating. And you thought you were watching a football match and stuff, right? And so it was really exciting to see that because there, if you market it the right way, if you build that, that camaraderie,

• 2:14:48Speaker 07

  I, I think it has a lot of potential, but it's just, you know, are you investing in it? Are you thinking about, right? Do you have the right people in place to be able to do that? And so it's still a big part of our marketing mix, um, because I think it shows what the best of the best could look like within Call of Duty.

• 2:15:04John Coogan?

  Do you know the history of, uh, like demographic shift within the Call of Duty player base over the last 20 years or so? Like, I would, my, my naive assumption would be like, the, 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.

• 2:15:23Speaker 07

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

• 2:15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:31Speaker 07

  You know, instead of you're painting the ground and you're throwing paints on people, right?

• 2:15:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:35Speaker 07

  Then you graduate into something like a Fortnite, right?

• 2:15:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:15:37Speaker 07

  And then you graduate into something like a Call of Duty and stuff. So you can kind of see the migration

• 2:15:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:15:42Speaker 07

  of how younger users might, you know, come into the franchise, um, through other games.

• 2:15:47John Coogan?

  But you're potentially the final stop on the bus and you can carry a

• 2:15:51Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:15:52John Coogan?

  a, a gamer through to 50, 60, like there's no need, there's no.

• 2:15:56Speaker 07

  The misconception is though, like, how big is gaming, right? Like, so the average age of a gamer is 37.

• 2:16:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:01Speaker 07

  I think it's, you know, um, you know, if, if you

• 2:16:05Jordi Hays?

  John.

• 2:16:06Speaker 07

  There's about like three point.

• 2:16:07Jordi Hays?

  He's literally the average gamer.

• 2:16:09Speaker 07

  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? The person will be like, I'm not a gamer. I was like, do you play Candy Crush? They're like, oh, yeah.

• 2:16:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:19Speaker 07

  Play Candy Crush. Do you play Wordle? Yeah, I play Wordle. Um, do you go on LinkedIn and play the LinkedIn Queens game and stuff, right? Like, there's games on LinkedIn now.

• 2:16:27Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:16:34Speaker 07

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

• 2:16:36John Coogan?

  I mean.

• 2:16:37Jordi Hays?

  I mean, if anyone can do it.

• 2:16:38John Coogan?

  The instructions are already set up for it.

• 2:16:39Speaker 07

  I, I think everyone is a gamer, right? And I think like, so for us on, on the Call of Duty side, and, and by the way, Activision has other games like Spyro coming out next year and stuff, right? And so there's, there's a lot of diversity to our portfolio, but with Call of Duty, there's so many different ways to play that I can, I think I can market to you.

• 2:16:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:57Speaker 07

  Like, we have a game called Prop Hunt. I don't know if you've ever played it in Black Ops, right?

• 2:17:00John Coogan?

  Loves Prop Hunt.

• 2:17:00Speaker 07

  So you can be a tire.

• 2:17:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:02Speaker 07

  And you hide in the map as a tire. And then everybody comes around trying to shoot you as a tire and try to, and then you can change what prop you are and stuff, right? But it's adult hide and seek.

• 2:17:11John Coogan?

  And that's a game that I saw on social media clips and I was like, I gotta find that game. That looks amazing. And I thought it was a different game.

• 2:17:17Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:17:18John Coogan?

  And it was just a mode.

• 2:17:18Speaker 07

  So, uh, so finding those elements of being able to like show a parkour mode or show like, 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, you know, four years ago when MW2 came out. And I think, you know, we're really.

• 2:17:37Jordi Hays?

  That's a standalone game?

• 2:17:39Speaker 07

  It's going to be part of MW4. So you're going to have campaign, multiplayer and DMZ.

• 2:17:43Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 2:17:43Speaker 07

  And so this new extraction mode, I think is going to really blow people's socks off. And, and we're really excited about that.

• 2:17:51John Coogan?

  Does Spyro have an ESRB rating yet?

• 2:17:53Speaker 07

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

• 2:17:58John Coogan?

  Cause if it's kid friendly, you gotta come back on the show. Cause I got a five year old.

• 2:18:02Speaker 07

  Oh yeah. I mean, Spyro is.

• 2:18:04John Coogan?

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

• 2:18:06Speaker 07

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

• 2:18:14John Coogan?

  Well, we'd love to have you back.

• 2:18:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'd love to be back.

• 2:18:16Jordi Hays?

  Honor, honor to have you on the show. I mean.

• 2:18:18Speaker 07

  You guys gotta come out to the studio on a Friday, hit the pit, play the game.

• 2:18:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:23Jordi Hays?

  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? Awesome. Well, you should see it on the big board. It's like the whole team.

• 2:18:34John Coogan?

  It gets heated.

• 2:18:35Jordi Hays?

  It gets heated.

• 2:18:36John Coogan?

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

• 2:18:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Locking it.

• 2:18:41Speaker 07

  Well, I got flashbang. Thank you so much.

• 2:18:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna throw a smoke while you take off.

• 2:18:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, nice.

• 2:18:46John Coogan?

  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 guest coming in just a couple of minutes. We have a very special guest. We have Stephen Colbert, fresh off SPAMMY wins and his co-founder, Josh Klein from Scripto.

• 2:19:06Jordi Hays?

  Fresh off, absolutely destroying us.

• 2:19:09John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 2:19:09Jordi Hays?

  In the Emmys. It wasn't even close. It wasn't even close.

• 2:19:13John Coogan?

  It wasn't close. But, uh, we can run through, uh, the New York Times interviewed 10 year old children to predict the future. And the answers are all over the place. They went viral because there's some really, uh, depressing takes. There were some blackpilled 10 year olds talking about Terminator, future World War III. 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. Uh, Paige Merritt from Atlanta says, I think everything is going to be AI and AI robots in 2050. What will the robots do? Like a barista, a waitress. It's going to be robots carrying the food. Garbage people.

• 2:19:57John Coogan?

  Are there jobs AI won't do? 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, uh, if I scroll down, uh, 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 Vaughn from Queens. And, uh, he said, in the old days, they paid Americans go to the west, 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. Just interesting. Paid Mars colonization.

• 2:20:40John Coogan?

  You can, I think you can still get paid if you go in Homestead in Alaska in some niche use cases, in some niche situations.

• 2:20:48Jordi Hays?

  I get paid to Homestead in that, uh, Lotner?

• 2:20:52John Coogan?

  That would be, that would be pretty good. Um, there's, uh, Who will be in the, who will be in charge of the United States in 2050? They asked a 10 year old Jimmy Molly from La Grange, Illinois. And he said, I don't really know, but the person I hope will be in charge, Adam Sandler. Adam Sandler will be the president? He said, no, vice president. My, the president will be my dad. There's another, uh, there's another kid in here 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. Uh, 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.

• 2:21:37John Coogan?

  It might be how a king works, just like it passes through generations. Uh, and someone else says that they're going to run for the president, but um, it's a, it's an interesting, it's an interesting tour of the future generation, what they think the, the future will look like. Uh, one kid says, well, 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 going to 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.

• 2:22:22John Coogan?

  Use natural resources like potatoes to make some sort of instrument that's got a totally new sound. Would you play a potato? Would you play a pumpkin? I, I love that. That is so crea, that's just so creative. Um, 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? 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.

• 2:22:57Jordi Hays?

  And a little black pilling.

• 2:22:58John Coogan?

  It's not all bad news.

• 2:23:00Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 2:23:09John Coogan?

  They forgot where they're coming 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.

• 2:23:20Speaker 08

  Good morning.

• 2:23:21Jordi Hays?

  Good morning.

• 2:23:22Speaker 08

  I don't know where we are. Is it good morning? I woke up in New Zealand two days ago. So I have no idea what day or where I am.

• 2:23:29Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:23:32John Coogan?

  Here in Hollywood at the TBN.

• 2:23:34Speaker 08

  Fantastic.

• 2:23:35John Coogan?

  Very.

• 2:23:35Jordi Hays?

  What are you doing in New Zealand?

• 2:23:38Speaker 08

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

• 2:23:39Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:23:41John Coogan?

  How did you get into Lord of the Rings?

• 2:23:43Speaker 08

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

• 2:23:47John Coogan?

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

• 2:24:00Speaker 08

  Hey, I got nothing against Game of Thrones. I love those books. George R R Martin is a friend, but um, uh, I don't know. I love this, I love the, the implied history. I love its, its roots and the fact that Tolkien wrote the books because he really liked making languages. And so he made up Elvish languages and he thought, 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, uh, you would have called, the Germans would call it a, a Gesamtkunstwelt, 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?

• 2:24:45Speaker 08

  Anyway, that's just a teaser is what we call the business.

• 2:24:49Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:24:56John Coogan?

  Does, is Scripto Elvish?

• 2:24:59Speaker 08

  And Andorl and Mistful.

• 2:25:01John Coogan?

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

• 2:25:05Speaker 08

  No, we named Scripto Scripto because it, it was created by two comedy writers and we thought of what's the dumbest possible name for our program. So we went, well, we're not going to come up with the best name, but the dumbest name we could do. So that's how we came up with Scripto. No, never thought of going to Tolkien on that one.

• 2:25:22John Coogan?

  And what is the elevator pitch for Scripto?

• 2:25:25Speaker 08

  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 a awards presentation, or whether you're creating a video game. It, the, that data that is stored in every keystroke should be going all the way down the production line.

• 2:26:09Speaker 08

  So there's no doubt what the one truth is we're working on today. What is the rope we're pulling on? And that, that's why we created it is to be able to communicate between departments.

• 2:26:18John Coogan?

  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?

• 2:26:27Speaker 08

  Well, between me and Josh?

• 2:26:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:29Speaker 08

  Well, all of the shows who use it, I mean, it, it's, the easiest way to do that is tell you how it came about is because there just wasn't something that did this. And, and one of the reasons I have such a clear view of what this thing needs to be is that it was built for the, my needs initially is that, you know, we produced, you know, depending on the season, between 200 and 160 shows a year. And to be able to, you know, not have to go back on decisions as long as they were communicated properly down the chain of command, over 200 people working on the show. We wanted something that everybody could look at at once and everybody, based upon their permissions, could actually add to at once if they wanted to.

• 2:27:09Speaker 08

  And, and so we wouldn't have any more $800 goats with the, our $800 goat is the origin of the entire thing. We wrote a sketch that involved a goat.

• 2:27:20Jordi Hays?

  Been there.

• 2:27:21Speaker 08

  We, we cut the damn goat. We cut the damn goat at two o'clock and at three o'clock, the goat shows up. And I said, we cut the, 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, you know, mess up your studio. The goat had been through a lot. Okay? And I mean, just, just the moral cost of what they had to do to that goat for us to use it. Um, and it costs us 800 bucks and we were, we started this back on basic cable. It was a lot of money. And so, uh, it's still a lot of money for Hollywood these days, but, um, so we said no more $800 goats.

• 2:28:05Speaker 08

  And so how do we, how do we communicate on the needs of the show? My show is still, you know, up until the very end, The Daily Show, John Oliver, SNL, the other shows that are using it, we got about a dozen shows going. Each one of those has their own needs that we have, we are, we tailor, and they're all different kinds. There's video game production, there's narrative production, and there's what we call presentational, like right down the pipe, like you guys do, production. Um, all of those feed back into our, uh, development.

• 2:28:37Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the intensity of, of show business because I think we, we understand it in a, in our, 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, uh, we, we felt from very early on when we, it was just John and myself and, and Ben on our team. And then as we started adding people, it felt like you were on a sports team where you showed up and you can feel when somebody is not at, they're playing at their best level, right? And, and it's like that daily repetition and, and in, in our case, the practices are happening all live. So there's no practice. There's just like live gameplay, but, um, but yeah, talk about it from, from your point

• 2:29:20Jordi Hays?

  of view and, and maybe tie that into how, you know, how it's influencing your work on Scripto.

• 2:29:25Speaker 08

  Well, and, and Josh, this will be a good one for you to jump in on here. Once I, uh, get my show biz out of the way and into the biz biz is that I, you know, people would say, oh, what do you love about your show? And, uh, 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? Cause it's no good if you can do a good show, but it absolutely kills you and everybody on the staff. Cause you gotta do another one tomorrow. This is a marathon, not a sprint. And you had, you had to remember that. And basically the, 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.

• 2:30:10Speaker 08

  People only do what you ask of them. But if you, 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 expanded that now?

• 2:30:44Speaker 09

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

• 2:30:50John Coogan?

  Great to have you on the show.

• 2:30:52Speaker 09

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

• 2:30:55Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:30:58John Coogan?

  We wanted a llama.

• 2:30:59Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:31:02Speaker 09

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

• 2:31:06Speaker 08

  I just want you to know that we literally had a plaque on the wall of the show that said, anything that could eat the host is going to be expensive because they had, you had to put up chain link fences between you and a mountain lion. We wanted to write a sketch with a 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.

• 2:31:26Speaker 09

  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 got a 25 year background in production technology, um, including at the, uh, you know, sort of established screenwriting software company some years back. And the, what all the other tools out there lack is, is like a deep level of collaboration and really tying everybody together. So you guys have the benefit of being in studio and so your team's always there all the time. But that's not, it's less and less common for scripted content, right? And so one of the things, since I've been brought aboard two years ago,

• 2:32:08Speaker 09

  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 are we talking about, Stephen? We're batting 800 this year for the five variety shows.

• 2:32:25Speaker 08

  For the five, for the five.

• 2:32:26Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:32:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're more about quantity over quality.

• 2:32:44Speaker 09

  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 cuss.

• 2:32:58Speaker 08

  What?

• 2:32:58Speaker 09

  What?

• 2:33:01Speaker 09

  Nobody told you?

• 2:33:04Speaker 08

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

• 2:33:10Speaker 09

  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's been done in what looks like an old version of like Hollywood's Microsoft Word, you could describe it. And so we're 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 two working writers. So we're very pro AI

• 2:33:53Speaker 09

  tooling for this industry. We're not pro AI where it touches the domain of the human writer.

• 2:34:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Are you optimistic about the, the pace or, or future of the movie industry? It feels like there's a whole bunch of technology trends that are coming together. Some are really scary, some like backrooms, obsession, iron lung. We saw these YouTubers break out and actually get on the big screen and put up numbers that are exciting to traditional studios. Is this meaningful or is this a sideshow?

• 2:34:28Speaker 08

  Very much, it's very meaningful. My, my wife actually runs a couple of movie theaters. She, she's the head of Montclair Film Festival and Montclair Film, and they have a couple of theaters in, 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. There have been some fantastic, even big budget things like, you know, Universal's biggest thing ever was, was The Odyssey, the highest grossing film of all time. So it's not just the small budget things that are turning up big numbers and are attractive to, you know, sort of the, the larger players in the industry. And listen, anything that

• 2:35:11Speaker 08

  also brings efficiency to that, a process that's this old, I think, 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 the movie industry, but it's clearly not going away. That's, that's what this year has proven.

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

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

• 2:35:47Speaker 08

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

• 2:35:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:35:50Speaker 08

  Like, what I would, I would say to anybody who'd say like, oh, I want a career something like yours, whether it was as a writer or a producer or, or as a performer, what I would say is the first thing you've got to do is go get in trouble. Which, what I meant was go create something. Go create something that someone could see. If it would, write something, go have a reading in a coffee shop. 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,

• 2:36:34Speaker 08

  thinking. That is not how to get better at what we do. You have to go do it. You have to get in trouble.

• 2:36:39Speaker 09

  I'd like to add the, the distribution platforms and the ability to go to a broad audience very quickly has changed. But I, I worked in commercial production for years. And if you, that was the way in for directors a long time ago, not writers, directors, Ridley Scott, Michael Bay. They would beg, borrow and steal to put together a reel and do some spec spots and get the attention of somebody else. And eventually you get the attention of Walter Hill and David Geiler that allows Ridley to go do Alien, or Jerry Bruckheimer puts you on the rock.

• 2:37:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:13Speaker 09

  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 create something people want to watch.

• 2:37:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. You, you have the benefit of being able to go top down with some of the biggest shows in the world on day one. Are you still trying to pull lessons from what's happening with Blender and Black Magic Design, DaVinci Resolve, going to a free tier, the low end, the indie filmmaker, and then creating a groundswell and creating a whole host of people that are just familiar with this technology? And then if they wind up on a big production, they're already an advocate?

• 2:37:53Speaker 08

  Funny you should ask.

• 2:37:56Speaker 09

  I was trying to figure out how to get this one in. So, so we, we do have a different model than the existing players in the space. And that is, if you are an individual writer, just trying to work your way into the business and working on a personal level, our software is free. This is world-class, superior screenwriting and production software that we make available for free to any writer, anybody watching this. Go to scripto.live, go get a free account. It's the world's best screenwriting software. It's free.

• 2:38:29Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 2:38:30Speaker 09

  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've got a great script in you, or you're a student and you, another type of aspiring writer, you should never have to pay for professional screenwriting software again, because we make the world's best screenwriting software available for free.

• 2:39:10Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:39:11John Coogan?

  Do you?

• 2:39:12Jordi Hays?

  Nothing for now. This was super fun, guys.

• 2:39:13John Coogan?

  This was amazing.

• 2:39:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thank you for jumping on.

• 2:39:16Speaker 09

  Thanks so much for having us on, guys.

• 2:39:18Jordi Hays?

  The chat is saying Colbert is my new favorite tech founder. So, new chat.

• 2:39:23Speaker 09

  Mine too.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations.

• 2:39:26Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang, guys. And good luck down in New Zealand.

• 2:39:29John Coogan?

  And we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:39:30Speaker 08

  Thanks very much.

• 2:39:31Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you both.

• 2:39:32John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:39:33Speaker 09

  Thank you. Likewise.

• 2:39:34John Coogan?

  We have James Caldwell from Profound joining in just a few minutes. We'll bring him in, but we'll go back to the timeline with a few other minor updates. 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

• 2:40:15John Coogan?

  knew and gave him a deceptively simple instruction. Go out and get me Venezuelan oil. I need it. The executive was Samur Awad, who had been appointed to lead Orland's new Swiss trading arm just a year earlier. The trader was, was Komho 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.

• 2:40:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm kind of zoning out because it's three hours in. There's so many red flag words in the last, in the last minute that this sounds, uh, sounds, sounds bad.

• 2:41:05John Coogan?

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

• 2:41:09Jordi Hays?

  Caracas restaurants?

• 2:41:11John Coogan?

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

• 2:41:16Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:41:25John Coogan?

  Going around sanctions is tough, tough, risky stuff. Warsaw prosecutors have charged Awad and other former executives at Orland Trading Switzerland with criminal mismanagement. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has folded the scandal into a wider cleanup.

• 2:41:39Jordi Hays?

  Donald Tusk?

• 2:41:42John Coogan?

  Tusk is a funny name, but that is the prime minister of Poland.

• 2:41:47Jordi Hays?

  Donald Tusk? The...

• 2:41:49John Coogan?

  We love Poland. Yeah, that's the prime minister of Poland.

• 2:41:52Jordi Hays?

  Powerful.

• 2:41:53John Coogan?

  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 in cryptocurrency replace conventional buyers and payment channels, offering traders outsized profits, but exposing them to serious risk.

• 2:42:24Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:42:27John Coogan?

  Who?

• 2:42:29Jordi Hays?

  Elon Musk.

• 2:42:29John Coogan?

  Why?

• 2:42:30Jordi Hays?

  Because he's coming out with the Roadster.

• 2:42:33John Coogan?

  But that's in October, right?

• 2:42:34Jordi Hays?

  October 1st, but J Cal was talking with.

• 2:42:38John Coogan?

  Are you sure there's not going to be any oil powered functionality?

• 2:42:44Jordi Hays?

  American jet, American jet fuel.

• 2:42:46John Coogan?

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

• 2:42:50Jordi Hays?

  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 one by no exaggeration is going to blow people's minds.

• 2:43:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:43:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, hopefully not literally blow people's minds.

• 2:43:10John Coogan?

  It might if you're standing behind it. There's four.

• 2:43:12Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:43:18John Coogan?

  So the bet, the bet, zero to 60 time was originally announced 1.9 seconds. Model S Plaid, two 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 1.5 is crazy. Getting even lower is crazy. People have been saying maybe it goes one second zero to 60, which is insane. But the big question is that Elon has been hinting it. It will jump. It will fly. It will lift off the ground. We've already seen this with the Xiaomi car that can jump over potholes. I think it gets about six inches of air, maybe four inches of air. And so we're going over, under. So the question is, is the roadster will probably be able to lift off the ground while driving on a flat surface.

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  How far do you think it will be able to lift off? It could have jets that take it six feet up in the air. It could have a little jumping. It could just be suspension, you know?

• 2:44:11Jordi Hays?

  You look at, you know, how this might impact GT class and IMSA or WAC, right? If you can now bike.

• 2:44:18John Coogan?

  Off the line.

• 2:44:19Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, not, not line is one thing, but cornering, if you can just hop over, you know, are they going to have to adapt?

• 2:44:25John Coogan?

  Don't even turn, just go straight over.

• 2:44:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're just in the air.

• 2:44:28John Coogan?

  There's a chicane, you just go over it.

• 2:44:29Jordi Hays?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:44:30John Coogan?

  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 not Price is Right rules. It's closest wins. How high will it go off the ground?

• 2:44:44Jordi Hays?

  Half a foot.

• 2:44:45John Coogan?

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

• 2:44:47Jordi Hays?

  I'm going above that.

• 2:44:48John Coogan?

  What do you, what, what, what? Give me a number.

• 2:44:50Jordi Hays?

  Seven inches.

• 2:44:50John Coogan?

  Seven inches. I'll take, I'll take eight inches. Okay?

• 2:44:55Jordi Hays?

  Too predictable.

• 2:44:56John Coogan?

  If I do, if you do six, seven, eight, you're really boxed in. You're, it's over for you. Okay, I win.

• 2:45:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to nine.

• 2:45:01John Coogan?

  You're going to nine? I think it's gonna be like three feet. I think it'll be six feet. I, I, I think it's gonna be way up there. My prediction, five feet. What about you, James? How high do you think the Tesla Roadster will jump off the air?

• 2:45:15Jordi Hays?

  What a dramatic entrance.

• 2:45:16John Coogan?

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

• 2:45:21Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:45:22John Coogan?

  Audio, we'll figure this out.

• 2:45:24Jordi Hays?

  But you look fantastic.

• 2:45:25John Coogan?

  You look fantastic.

• 2:45:26Jordi Hays?

  You look like.

• 2:45:27John Coogan?

  The button down shirt, but the warm lighting is really doing a lot of work, a lot of contrast.

• 2:45:31James Cadwallader?

  How's that? Are we good?

• 2:45:32John Coogan?

  Sounds fantastic.

• 2:45:33Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 2:45:33John Coogan?

  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?

• 2:45:43James Cadwallader?

  I'll, I'll go six inches.

• 2:45:45John Coogan?

  Six inches? That's exactly what George said. Yeah, okay.

• 2:45:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 2:45:48John Coogan?

  That would be big. That would be big.

• 2:45:49Jordi Hays?

  That's a lot.

• 2:45:50John Coogan?

  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?

• 2:46:00James Cadwallader?

  Uh, we've raised a hundred and eighty million dollars.

• 2:46:06James Cadwallader?

  Jackson Sequoia and Kline Parkins.

• 2:46:09John Coogan?

  Who are they again?

• 2:46:10Jordi Hays?

  Good group, good group.

• 2:46:12John Coogan?

  Who are they again?

• 2:46:12Jordi Hays?

  Um, yeah, talk about, catch us up to speed. Uh, you've come on, I think, every, every round at this point. Uh, what's, what's happened since the last round?

• 2:46:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's the state of the market?

• 2:46:23James Cadwallader?

  Yeah, we've been busy. Um, you know, we launched the business two years ago with a very simple proposition, which was, hey, I'm a marketer. How does AI talk about my brand, products and 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, you want to fix it. And so, you know, over the past six to nine months, we, we've been building our own harness in-house that's, that's tailored to marketing. And yeah, we, you know, we've seen incredible adoption across, yeah, a third of the Fortune 100, uh, some of the biggest brands on the planet.

• 2:47:04James Cadwallader?

  Uh, now using profound to actually do their marketing, like build the work with agents, which is, yeah, it's pretty cool.

• 2:47:10John Coogan?

  How, uh, are, sorry, if you have something.

• 2:47:13Jordi Hays?

  Go for it.

• 2:47:13John Coogan?

  Uh, I, 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, it's not just an, 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?

• 2:47:49James Cadwallader?

  Yeah, that's the, yeah, the, the kind of similarities stop with the acronym, right? A, AEO and SEO, that's kind of about as close as they get. Like how, how ChatGPT or Gemini or Grok talks about your brand or products or services really is just a function of all marketing that lives on the web. Um, the, the, the difference is that when an agent is crawling the web, it's very different to a human. It consumes, you know, a hundred X or, you know, we, we believe eventually a thousand X more of the web than a human will.

• 2:48:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:17James Cadwallader?

  And that's just creating this new demand on marketing teams. And there's creating this, 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. And 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. Um, but yeah, the, the demand, the, the customers that we work with is, is, is coming from everywhere. It's orthogonal. We work with giant consumer electronics brands. Uh, we work with, uh, you know, the likes of Walmart. We work with, you know, great software brands like, like Zoom, for example, banks like Royal Bank of Canada and some of the biggest brands, uh, banks on the planet.

• 2:49:01James Cadwallader?

  So yes, it's, it's, uh, basically if you look around the room right now, any brand in the room will, will be thinking about what we're working on.

• 2:49:11John Coogan?

  This is a little maybe tailored to the agentic commerce side of the business, but I ran into a very odd scenario where I, I had Kodex go shop for shoes for me and I, 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 14s 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, uh, but I was like, oh, this, 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 a knee overreaction, a knee jerk reaction to push away AI agents

• 2:49:55John Coogan?

  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, well, how are you talking to CEOs about their posture towards AI agents? And their robots.txt basically?

• 2:50:14James Cadwallader?

  I mean, we, we, we're pushing in the opposite direction. Of course you, if you're a marketer, of course you want your, your website to be machine readable. Uh, we actually have just shipped a, a pretty cool new product called Dynamic Bot Rendering, where at the edge, so this is, uh, you know, at the edge, we're able to detect if a user agent from an AI answer engine like chat or, you know, rocket, 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. Um, so we're, we're seeing this kind of this, this new form of marketing that's aimed at purely at agents proliferate. Um, but then interestingly, like an emergent behavior as well, as we're seeing these big brands use our platform

• 2:50:59James Cadwallader?

  um, to create marketing that's aimed at humans as well. Uh, we had a large CPG customer update 40,000 webpages in a week. Um, and it's, it's really good quant, it's really good content. They did, they did a good job.

• 2:51:12John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:51:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how are you tracking the emergence of new personal agents like Muse and, and Instinct? I imagine like you guys are one of the first calls when, you know, the, the CMO of a brand or this, of a CEO of a company, like, you know, hears about one of these new things and they say like, are we covered here? I imagine you kind of are covering them in real time. Um, but they're kind of a different, different flow.

• 2:51:38James Cadwallader?

  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 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.

• 2:51:54James Cadwallader?

  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. It's an inevitable future. 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.

• 2:52:38Jordi Hays?

  How, how are you thinking about other workflows? Like, I'm thinking Metas is 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, 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 going to try to deploy it. So they bring back even more budget. But at the same time, there's, it feels like there's an opportunity for a company like Profound to help marketers sit between, sit between them and the places that they're, they're spending money, just because there's

• 2:53:23Jordi Hays?

  not always perfect alignment. Like theoretically, the ad platform is just like, well, we want as much of your money as possible, even if they might, you might get more value out of it somewhere else in a split second, like even thinking about arbitrages. So how are you thinking about fitting into those kind of paid media workflows?

• 2:53:39James Cadwallader?

  Yeah, so we've quietly launched Profound Ads, which has been a very early success story where we're seeing, yeah, it's that counter positioning or that adjacency that starts to provide value. Because, you know, what a marketer wants is one agent that can sit across all of the surface areas and deploy that media spend dynamically. In, you know, the old world of software, that was very difficult because, you know, every product had such different surface areas, such, such different curvature. It's 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, Profound Ad Studio is being used by brands

• 2:54:23James Cadwallader?

  like Ramp to actually create, publish, measure paid advertising, initially on generative platforms, but over time, we're going to 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 want to pick off marketing.

• 2:54:55John Coogan?

  I imagine that when you sign a client, you are on an ongoing basis, generating a lot of prompts to understand how the AI system, different AI tools across all the different models are responding to these. Are you in contact with the labs already so that you don't get flagged? Have you been flagged for like distillation? Are there any hurdles that you run into just because the shape of your work doesn't look like, hey, fix this bug in this codebase like, like many other companies look like?

• 2:55:28James Cadwallader?

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

• 2:56:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's very complimentary. 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, if there's, if you ever get caught in like accidental situations or anything, because I know

• 2:56:16James Cadwallader?

  Not, not yet.

• 2:56:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, obviously, yeah, at your scale, like you have investors that overlap with all the labs. So you can like get in touch, which is great. Makes a lot of sense.

• 2:56:25Jordi Hays?

  Amazing update.

• 2:56:26John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:56:27Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:56:31James Cadwallader?

  I promised the guys at Saga, so Ben Braverman, Max Oldman, those guys, I give them a shout on TBPM.

• 2:56:37John Coogan?

  I love those guys.

• 2:56:41Jordi Hays?

  We got to do a roundtable. We got multiple seats here. Tell the Saga guys, get to the Ultra Dome.

• 2:56:47John Coogan?

  Get to the Ultra Dome.

• 2:56:47Jordi Hays?

  Right now. But yeah, an incredible, incredible win for Saga.

• 2:56:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:54James Cadwallader?

  Love those guys.

• 2:56:55Jordi Hays?

  Keep it up.

• 2:56:55John Coogan?

  Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:56:57Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:56:57John Coogan?

  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 at 11am Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts.

• 2:57:06Jordi Hays?

  I am.

• 2:57:07John Coogan?

  Sign up for our newsletter at tbpm.com.

• 2:57:08Jordi Hays?

  I'm so glad that we had the CMO of Activision, or Cod, come on the show and not tell us, hey, you guys got to cut off the.

• 2:57:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.