Why tech bro podcasts are obsessed with alpha men
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I'm Yasmin Gagne. I'm Josh Christensen. And this is Most Innovative Companies.

On today's episode, senior writer Ainsley Harris. For Lex, it has been incredibly advantageous to be sort of in the orbit of these great men. GameFam CEO Joe Ferent. Roblox and Fortnite are brand engagement platforms, right? They're not direct to consumer. They're not direct action platforms. And keeping tabs. It's a good example to me of like taking a left turn with comedy. But first, here's the download.

The news you need to know this week in the world of business and innovation. Former FTX executive Ryan Salem was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison on Tuesday, making him the first of Sam Bankman Freed's circle of advisors to receive prison time. That comes after Sam Bankman Freed himself received 25 years in prison.

This comes after Salem pleaded guilty last September to a campaign finance law violation and a charge of operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business. Salem's sentence exceeds the five to seven years that prosecutors had recommended. But was he part of the polycule? One can only hope for his sake. Yeah.

That's an exclusive club. That's an exclusive, that's an exclusive kule. Weight loss drugs like Ozempic could generate $150 billion in annual sales by the 2030s, according to some forecasts. Just last year, the top sales estimates were in the $100 billion range. The

The raise comes as millions seek access to drugs from companies like Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, leading to increased supply, possibly wider usage, and a growing number of would-be rivals. I would just like it not to cost $1,000 a month at this point. Like, let's get those rivals coming. Yeah, it'll get down eventually, but it's not there yet. HIMS actually announced, and I need to read more into this, but HIMS announced last week that

they were selling their own version of Ozempic made by a compound pharmacy that is significantly cheaper. Yeah, I saw that as well. Yeah, hims and hers is interesting. Yeah. Their telemedicine like approach is interesting.

Next, Elon Musk's startup XAI raised $6 billion in Series B funding, backed by investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. XAI has now reached a valuation of $24 billion. This is yet another huge investment in the AI race, which is not going away anytime soon. And wait, what does XAI do exactly? So, that's a good question. It's

pretty broad in terms of their stated goal. It's to quote, to understand the true nature of the universe.

So take from that what you will. Cool. In more depressing news, the Louisiana Senate voted last Thursday to reclassify the two drugs used in medication abortions as controlled substances. This puts the abortion pills in the same category as anti-anxiety medications Xanax and Valium, making it a crime to possess them without a prescription. Violation of the law is punishable by one to five years in prison and fines of up to $5,000. Awful. Just awful. Well,

I'm never moving to Louisiana. Yeah, I mean, as great as New Orleans is, never going there. Mm-mm.

A new study by researchers at Northeastern and Stanford found that common image search results are overwhelmingly white. The study collected 54. Yeah, I know. In the most like, duh, no's overall. It just reminds me back when we had like facial recognition technology came out. And anytime there's something like this that gets looked at, it's just like shows you that like the biases that exist in technology overall. Mm hmm.

The study collected 54,070 unique image search queries on both Google and Bing and then looked at the top 15 results for each query, finding that the average skin tone of the images returned was the second whitest possible on the 10-point monk skin tone scale. I just pictured all images of Conan O'Brien on every search result.

Yeah, I want to know what the first white is possible and if that's technically underrepresentation. Maybe. Yeah, I don't know. Like if you're albino or something? Just the albino, yeah. Yeah. Maybe. Melinda French Gates announced on Tuesday that she plans to donate a billion dollars over the next two years to organizations supporting women and girls around the world. Hell yeah. Melinda, I ask you to consider donating some to me to support me, a woman. You are a woman and or girl. Mm-hmm, correct.

Some would say I'm not a girl, not yet a woman, though. This comes as French Gates prepares to leave the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation next week and receive $12.5 billion from Gates as part of their divorce settlement. Challenge this to all the other billionaires in the world. Show up. Put your money where your mouth is. Give to us. Support this podcast.

Not what I was going for, but also would not say no. And finally, T-Mobile announced on Tuesday that it will acquire the wireless operations of U.S. Cellular for $4.4 billion in an effort to beef up service in rural areas. T-Mobile will onboard roughly 4 million new customers as a result. This acquisition comes at a time when federal regulators have become increasingly skeptical of mergers and will likely review this one.

And that's the news you need to know today. So, Josh, I know we co-host the best podcast in the world. Well, clearly. Certainly, certainly in the top best 100,000 podcasts. Which is, I believe, the top 0.01% of all podcasts made right now.

So many podcasts out there. What are your favorite podcasts or who are your favorite podcast hosts? It's interesting for making a lot of podcasts as I do in like the business and news and journalism space. I end up finding myself listening to very few like news and journalism and business podcast overall. I tend to like read or watch things more in that scape probably because I'm over inundated.

So my favorite thing is to kind of detox with a comedy podcast overall or a sports podcast. And so my kind of like my go-to favorites, at least as of recently, are How Did This Get Made, which is the movie kind of riff track podcast by Paul Scheer, June Diane Rayfield, Jason Matsoukas. And then the other one is Lost Culturistas with Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers.

Both of them kind of pop culture-y, silly, fun. It's just kind of my go-to detox podcast. Yeah, I like less culture-y stuff a lot. Yeah, it's great. And I also get all my pop culture news and recommendations from there sometimes, especially with new music coming out. They're the ones who turned me on to Chapel Roan before she really blew up, blew up. I knew you were going to use Chapel Roan. I was like, that's a Chapel Roan podcast. I fucking love Chapel Roan. Oh, that's their big Chapel Roan stance. Yeah.

and I'm all for it. What about you? What are your favorite podcasts outside of our own? Yeah, I have a couple. I've mentioned them on the pod before, but I love Who Weekly. It's a parody of Us Weekly. It's a show that focuses on the activities and lives of C&D listers. It's such a fun concept. It's a really good concept. The two hosts are really funny. But what I really like about it is there's an element of media criticism. So they're

really good at being like clearly this celebrity orchestrated this type of spawn and that's why we've ended up with this headline you know what I mean clearly here's why they're trying to spin this news about their relationship this way and I actually feel like I've learned a fair amount of useless information but a

Also a fair amount of pretty interesting information about the dark arts of PR. I will say I know more about Rita Ora than I ever wanted to know. Rita Ora is a major subject. I've started to dabble in to listen to Who Weekly. I still don't get the Listener Collins episodes that much. Well, I didn't like those at first, and then I think when I got more into the show, I did. But the Tuesday episodes are really good. It feels like there's a lot of deep cut references in the...

Yeah, exactly. That's what I mean. There's a lot of in-jokes, but there is a Rita Ora segment at the end of every Tuesday episode. Because the joke is that everybody knows who she is, but no one can name any of her songs. I feel that. Yeah, I do, too. I don't know any of her songs. The other one of the other podcasts I really like, which is more in the vein of sort of business and tech, is a podcast by Michael Hobbs and Peter Shamshery. I also really liked

Peter's podcast 5 to 4 which is about the Supreme Court. They have one called If Books Could Kill where they basically like It's a great podcast. read airport books like often kind of self-help books and kind of explain

you know, kind of go through the research, you know, whatever, explain why they're so strange and weird. I feel like I've learned a lot and I think they're just really funny and cool. And I developed a small crush on Peter Shamshiri listening to the podcast. And then I found out because they mentioned it a couple of times that like many listeners have

People keep writing in being like, is he single? I think that happens with a lot of, I mean, the parasocial relationship. You're bound to get some sort of... Not to us, though. No, not to us. Well, I mean, I don't know. Your DMs would say otherwise. I don't know.

I've had some weird DMs. You have a very specific cross-section of male fan. Yeah, it's very niche. Guys, chill out. We've asked you before. My brothers, my Indian brothers, calm yourselves. Me, on the other hand, DMs are open.

So the reason we were talking about podcasts just now is actually because last week, senior writer Ainsley Harris wrote an article about a certain type of tech podcast. And that article riled up a small but very online part of the tech community. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey, Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan, and even Mr. Beast were

were all reacting to her article titled, Tech Bro Podcasts Are Obsessed With Alpha Men and It's Dangerous for the Rest of Us. So we talked to Ainsley and had her explain why so many quote-unquote techno-optimists fell in love with the great men theory and how that's problematic. Before we get into the podcast and the substacks and the YouTube videos, I want to ask you about the great men worldview. Explain to us what that means.

You may have heard of this sort of great men of history idea. It was initially sort of coined by this Scottish philosopher, historian, Thomas Carlyle, who published a book in, I think, 1841 that was a series of lectures that he had given all about essentially his view of history is through the lens of history.

what he perceives as great men who have been the forces moving history. Someone like Oliver Cromwell or someone like, he writes about Martin Luther. He sort of sees history through the lens of these men, specifically men. Does he think all these great men are good? Like to me, there's like Hitler in theory. Well, isn't there the Harry Potter quote from John Hurt? It's like, did great things. He who must not be named

great things terrible but great yes yes I don't think we don't know what he would have said about Hitler but

predates Hitler, but he certainly is not necessarily, the focus is not necessarily like get the good or the evil of these people, but rather a sort of overall sense of respect for their ability to sort of mold the world in the way that they need to in order to get things done. Like that's sort of the, you grab fate and you take it by the throat or whatever. Yeah.

This is like a very sort of like, you're not going to let anything stand in your way. Like that's sort of what's celebrated here is that ability to sort of seize the moment and create the moment. And I think that it's sort of maybe should be no surprise that we're seeing echoes of that in some of what is celebrated today by some of these media makers that we wrote about.

in the piece. And who are some of today's great men? Heavy, heavy quotation marks on great. Heavy quotation marks, yeah. Yeah, we did actually have quite a lot of debates about how to write great men in the story. Should it be capitalized in quotations? You know, what is the right way to indicate what we're referring to here?

The thing that I found interesting is that we, you know, so these great men that we refer to in the piece are people who are guests on podcasts, right? They are being invited or they are celebrated in YouTube videos and newsletters. They're really overcoming the obstacles they're facing. Yes, yes. But we're not.

We're not selecting them, right? The piece is about how they have been selected and put on these pedestals by these media tastemakers, this sort of new frontiersman who people like Lex Friedman, who has the most popular technology podcast in the U.S.,

or the hosts of the All In podcast and sort of their worldview. There's a certain sort of class of people that people like Lex are elevating, and these are the great men, right? So like in the story, we kind of, A, obviously like Lex is not gonna refer to Jeff Bezos as a great man explicitly,

But so that's the phenomenon that we are seeing here is that there's this posture of admiration. There's this posture of feeling that these people are shaping history. But the thing that I think a lot of listeners of these podcasts don't necessarily fully understand is the way in which someone like Alex benefits from this.

putting these people on a pedestal. And I think that's the thing that I really wanted to sort of get at with the piece is that we have this group of people who are really benefiting from being great man adjacent, shall we say? Well, some regard themselves like it almost seems like Lex thinks of himself as a great man to some extent, you know, just by like

osmosis or by proximity. Yes, no, he has internalized the lessons of the greats and is, you know, on a path to becoming one himself. That is, you know, if you listen to his most recent, more recent episodes, like he actually says things along the line where he's sort of putting himself in the arena and

So, you know, before we dive into some specific examples, before we get into the Lex Friedman of it all, what are some of the podcasts or sub stacks or YouTube series that you're referring to? Can you give us some examples? Sure. So there's, yeah, these guys operate on lots of different platforms online.

On somewhere like a Substack, you can find someone like a Paki McCormick who writes a newsletter called Not Boring, where he's sort of elevating startups that he thinks are capable of changing the world. Not only are they paying him, but he also has a VC firm where he is invested in a lot of these companies. So it's essentially like promoting his own portfolio. You also have folks like John Coogan, who is a nicotine entrepreneur. Didn't he co-found Soylent?

Yes, he did. It's unusual to have Soylent and nicotine on your resume. It's true. But isn't Soylent... Soylent is famously not good for you. It's a complete meal, but it's not good for you. Isn't that like the thing? I can't say I have tried it, but I will take your word for it. I think he's trying to kill us. Yeah. I just can't think about it without hearing Carlin Heston. That's Carlin Heston in the original saying, Soylent green is people! Yeah.

And yelling that. No, you don't remember this? No. Soylent Green. It's a movie about how the, it's a dystopian future movie where a company is taking advantage of a hunger crisis by grinding up people and selling it and distributing it as

Soylent. Oh, really? Yeah, that's the whole... I did not know this history. That's what I'm referring to. Yeah, it's an anti-capitalist, dystopian future about hunger and then extreme lengths then the government has to go to to solve these issues. You know who understood about half of that movie? John Coogan. Yeah.

Who wanted to solve hunger, but maybe didn't get the anti-capitalist part. So give us some examples of who's been on his show. And then, you know, we'll play a clip to sort of make sure our listeners know what we're talking about here. And the craziest part is that it was all started by the guy who founded Oculus VR. This is the story of Anduril.

Like any great startup story, we need to understand the founders behind the business first. I was super fortunate to go inside of Anduril. They introduced me to the entire team and I got hours of interview footage that I want to share with you today. So you're probably asking, how does a guy known for gaming headsets become the founder of America's next big defense contractor? My name is Palmer Luckey. I used to be an outdoor kid, then I discovered computers and I became an indoor kid.

There's a celebration happening here and it is of the founder, like, you know, and the idea that, you know, his framing is that you're going to understand what this company is by understanding the person behind it. And, you know, I think obviously when you have a passionate connection to what you're building, like that is obviously something VCs looks for. And it is a way to, I mean, if you look at

something like a glossier, you know, if you have a passionate founder, like that's obviously an asset to the business. So I don't think it's that in and of itself that's sort of problematic here. I feel like what this kind of turns into, though, is this glorification of these figures and this idea that we should be welcoming them as problem solvers of sort of the world's problems writ large.

You described them in the piece as kind of celebrating them as sort of frontiersmen. Yeah, these are, you know, and there's like a very every entrepreneur in some ways is breaking barriers, I guess you could say. But this is sort of like this next level version of this where there's, I think, an embrace of like a very high stakes version of that.

And maybe some of that is the fact that we're living in a moment where it feels high stakes, right? Climate change, like all these things happening. Like it feels like, you know, yeah, if we don't have a way to get to Mars, like we're all doomed, you know, like you can really buy into this narrative that the stakes are really high. And so you need to somehow just again, the way that we, in the context of like, oh, we're at war, we're going to suspend certain rules and allow people

the president or Congress to do things that they might not otherwise be able to do. I think there's this same mentality here where it's like, oh, you know, we're going to let these great men decide that we should, again, that they think we should suspend the rules so the rules don't apply to them so they can go do what they want because the crisis is so...

I mean, some of these people describe themselves as techno optimists. What can you say about that? What does that mean, if that makes sense? It feels like a very Obama era thing.

to have, if that makes sense. Funny you should say that because I would not necessarily call the techno-optimist movement in any way aligned with Obama-era thinking. Totally, but remember everybody was just like, Facebook is amazing. Yes, yes. Like, our president connects with thousands of people on Twitter. Like,

I think that sense of wonder about technology is very much sort of at the heart of, you know, what folks who sort of espouse this idea of techno-optimism, they love it, right? Like, they love technology. And, you know, I think the thing that I want to make clear is that, like, there's nothing necessarily, like, wrong with the idea that technology can deliver progress. But it's this idea that they...

that technology should be above the law or above the rules or not subject to the same constraints or questions.

That's, I think, a lot of the heart of sort of this mentality is that it's just this, we want to enter the frontier. In a frontier, there are no rules. You know, like, why do we need to have these conversations about AI ethics or things like that? It's just going to hold us back is, I think, a lot of times the sort of impulse at the heart of this. And, you know, obviously, that's, I think, problematic. Mm-hmm.

Before we, you know, because obviously so many questions from just that alone, but I want to talk a little bit about the Lex Friedman podcast. I mean, who is this guy in the first place? Yeah, Lex is a really interesting character. It is kind of baffling to me that his podcast is quite so popular.

If you were going to sort of paint a picture of who Lex is, he is someone who used to do AI research. He was at MIT. He has a computer science background. And he started doing this podcast because he clearly cares really deeply about sort of philosophical questions and likes to have these really deep, in-depth conversations with people that can go for sometimes three hours long.

And so he has these guests on, he has scientists, he has entrepreneurs, and he talks with them about their work, about the future, about these sort of like deep questions. But, you know, he's not really asking tough questions or, you know, he's not challenging people. And, you know, increasingly as his profile has grown, he's been able to have Jeff Bezos. He interviewed last year Benjamin Netanyahu, right?

He's talked to Sam Altman. He is high profile enough that his guests are now world leaders. And he's joking with them about their workout routines as opposed to asking tough questions. I think about this all the time with some podcasts that celebrities feel comfortable going on and it's like,

They know what kind of interview they're getting. And it's not going to be too hard. Yeah. You know? And to put this into context for our listeners, he has 8 million followers. This is a massively popular podcast. I mean, he's currently hiring, I think, for like five or six different roles. You know, his platform is enormous. And especially, yeah, to your point, if you're looking across, you know, Spotify, like all the different places that you can get his content. To give our listeners some insight

idea of what we're talking about, here's Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on the podcast. When you look up at the stars and think big, what do you hope is the future of humanity hundreds, thousands of years from now out in space? I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins

our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy. And we can easily support a civilization that large with all of the resources in the solar system. It's this weird tension, I think, in what Bezos is sort of casting here as the vision is that it's like he essentially wants there to be more great men, right? He wants more Einsteins. He wants

more Mozart's, like we should want more greatness. But at the same time, like there's this tension, obviously, that if that becomes like more abundant, like what does that mean? And why can't he see the, like is really the only way to sort of evaluate greatness in someone's contributions. You know, the fact that you are an Einstein, I think there are lots of other ways you can evaluate greatness.

someone in the context of civilization than just whether or not they've discovered the theory of relativity. They literally made a dead teenager a saint this weekend. Yes. Yeah.

You know, the thing that we've, you know, we've been saying great men this whole time, and it's very purposeful, right? Because the thing these podcasts or, you know, all of these media outlets have in common is that basically no women are on the shows. I mean, tell me a little bit about that.

Yeah, I went, I did the hard work of adding up the number of women who have come on Lex's podcast, for example, and it is less than 12%. That's over 400 plus episodes. And even that 11-ish percent of women, they are not these sort of alpha man types, right? They are, there's a musician, for example, there are a lot of like planetary scientists that he's invited on.

It sounds like they're sort of additive to his worldview rather than bringing their own onto the show, if that makes sense.

He's not elevating women as changemakers, right? And I think that is, you know, a little concerning. And also, I think you see that in this kind of movement overall, it's very hard to find the women who, you know, are playing that like leadership alpha male type role. Right.

And, you know, I think there personally, I would argue that there are a lot of women in the world who are making change. And so I think it's striking that this is like a, this is not a question of, are they out there or not? This is a question of who you are elevating, right? So, you know, I think we find in our own work at Fast Company that if you start looking, there are plenty of women doing really innovative and amazing things. And it's just a question of who you're talking to and where you're looking.

To put a finer point on it, in a sentence or two, why do you think they're not inviting more women on their platforms? That's a great question, and it's one I would love to hear them respond to. We did reach out to Lex to see if he wanted to comment on the story, and he didn't get back to us.

What I found also interesting is that as this story was bouncing around social media, no one who was upset about the story or mad about it in any way really took on this issue head on. Ainsley, it's because you're part of the woke mob.

Yes, yes, no. I recognize that the internet is not the place that we have, you know, substantive conversations these days. Yeah, I... Of course, a woman wrote this. Yes, yeah, no, exactly. Heaven forbid we, like, think for ourselves. No.

But there's no engagement on this issue. And there are no women in the conversation. I mean, I think that, you know, the conversation that happened about the piece online, at least if what I saw was representative, was truly representative, you know, it's primarily men mad about what the piece was arguing and women just not even present in the conversation. Yeah, I think it sort of proves the point here. Yeah.

What kind of civilization or change? There's no introspection on it. Yeah. Do you have a sense of what their listener breakdown looks like? Yeah, that's a really good question. I'm sure if you went to a Spotify, they know to some extent those demographics.

And I think you certainly see it in the advertisements on some of these podcasts, right? So there's that. For example, I know we mentioned like the All In podcast in the piece. And I know that like, for example, their summit that they host, I think it's often disproportionately men who apply to attend. So yeah, I think they're probably always looking for women and they're always, I think,

struggling for some reason to find women to be guests at the summit. So, you know, good luck to them, I guess. Before we talk about All In, I want to stay on Friedman for one second because a guest on literally his 18th episode of the podcast, which is not many episodes, was Elon Musk. Tell me about

His involvement in all this and why that relationship came about. So Lex published, when he was at MIT, a paper that concluded it was about self-driving cars. And it concluded that this technology is safer than a person behind the wheel, essentially. Shocker. Yeah.

Yes. Well, this was very advantageous to Tesla, which at the time was facing a lot of criticism for its autopilot software. Autopilot had been involved in some crashes and, you know, there was some regulatory controversy and that controversy has, you know, in some ways persisted. But, you know, they obviously saw this as an opportunity to kind of embrace the

some research findings that were advantageous to them. And other people in the field have criticized the methodology behind Lex's death.

But I think for Lex, it turned into this wonderful opportunity where, hey, what do you know? Literally a week after the paper publishes, he sits down with Elon Musk for his fledgling podcast. And that becomes kind of a breakout moment for the podcast and obviously like a big get in terms of a guest. And the momentum starts to kind of build from there. And since then, Elon has been on the podcast, I think, three times now.

And he and Lex, you know, I think see one another pretty regularly. They do mixed martial arts together. I was going to say they're spontaneous sparring partners. Yes. Right. Lex has tweeted about this. And, you know, he clearly, I think, wants to present himself as someone who's close to Elon, who's sort of part of this inner circle of,

And he's kind of followed a similar playbook now with someone like a Jeff Bezos who, you know, he's had on his podcast. And now, oh, you know, in return, what does Jeff do? Jeff invites Lex to his, he has this sort of annual conference of trailblazers and scientists and entrepreneurs. And Lex is invited to attend. So I think there's this, you

this way in which for Lex, it has been incredibly advantageous to be sort of in the orbit of these great men. And, you know, it's really in a way what has allowed him to build a career in this space, but,

listeners, you know, I hope if they read our piece, come away with a different understanding of Lex's relationship to these people and a little bit of a more nuanced understanding of the fact that, you know, he has incentives here too, and it's in his own interest to put them on this pedestal. It's crazy how we've gotten like nothing, no big perks from taping.

this podcast for a year. And we have good numbers. I'm like, listeners. Not Lex Friedman numbers. No, what are these low quality listeners we're attracting?

Well, I think it's like, I mean, it goes back to the point that Ainsley made earlier about just kind of it's like a nonstop. It's three hours of softball questions. I mean, as opposed to 30 minutes of idiocy. But it's clearly a place where like, I mean, I think you talked about in your piece as well with Elon Musk going on that there was a benefit for Elon Musk going on to that podcast of someone who was like,

going to basically support Elon's propaganda at that point around autopilot. It's good PR. It's never not going to be good PR to go on Lex Friedman. It's the symbiotic relationships in this world, right? Where it's like the people creating... And I think in some cases, they're explicit about that. Like, hey, I'm a VC. I am invested in these companies. I will now elevate and promote them. And in other cases, it's a little...

less clear, but in all of this world, it is this symbiotic relationship where the great men are benefiting from their association with the sort of thought leader, tastemaker people.

I think what's striking and that I think in some ways us in traditional media maybe haven't paid enough attention to this world because I think what we were hoping to do with the piece is really sort of point to just how influential this world has gotten and just how effective it has been. Like there's a reason that it's not just Lex anymore, that there are many other podcasts and YouTube channels and sub stacks, right?

it's working, right? And these narratives catch on and they become the default narrative about these people and the world that they want. And I think for a regular person, they are probably at this point much more influenced, whether they realize it or not, by Lex's views and posture toward an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos than they maybe even are by the old school media posture. And I think it's

time that we sort of recognized just how important these different influencers are because they really are shaping culture and they're shaping how business works right now in terms of the whole tech world. So yeah, I think it's time we kind of recognize their power. I want to talk about a moment you described in the piece from the All In podcast. This was after Google released its Gemini AI feature. What exactly happened there?

Yeah, so you may remember that it's still sort of unfolding. Google's attempts to enter the AI race have been fraught, to say the least. They've had some pretty high-profile missteps in terms of kind of embarrassing examples of what the AI system like Gemini will return to you in terms of images that are ahistorical in weird ways. And there was a whole...

incident recently about you should use glue when making pizza. The list goes on. I'm sure you've seen all these screenshots and everything. Yeah, don't put glue in your pizza, even if Google tells you to. But, you know, so there's, you know, I think this discussion on All In about what went wrong here. So let's listen to a clip of their conversation here.

All right, listen, the top issue this week is the same issue as last week. Google's Gemini DEI Black Eye continues. We covered this woke AI disaster last week.

It was kind of funny, I was watching CNBC and they had a hard time describing the problem. The woman just, I guess, didn't want to call it what it is. It's a racist AI. You type in text and it gives you the opposite or just culturally insane responses. So if you put in, you want a picture of George Washington from Google's Gemini or Sergey Brin, you might get back like a Benetton style diversity ad with like George Washington being black or Sergey Brin being Asian, et cetera. And so-

This has caused a bit of a kerfuffle here in the industry, to say the least. The stock is down 5% since we talked about it last week.

And Sundar sent a memo to the Gemini team. Of course, when they write these memos to a team, it's written to the entire world because you know it's going to get leaked, and so you're writing it as such. It might as well be a press release. I'll give two quick quotes here, and then I'll throw it to the besties because there's so many questions that we have to address. Quote number one, I know that some of its responses, referring to Gemini, have offended our users and shown bias.

To be clear, that's completely unacceptable and we got it wrong. And to be clear, it wouldn't show white people, especially ones like George Washington or just somebody who is obviously Caucasian. And so the next quote will be driving a clear set of actions, including structural changes. To me, structural changes means we're going to lay off a bunch of people and we're going to get rid of the DEI group. That's a newfound motivational riff quote in my mind.

It seems like they think the solution should be to bring founders back.

Is that fair to say? Yes. No, they bring up this example of how Mark Zuckerberg saved meta by bringing it into the future with the metaverse and AI and all these things. And I think with Google, they are saying the same thing. This is a job for Larry and Sergey. They should be getting more involved. And we saw someone like Jason Calacanis say,

Also, you know, was promoting that narrative when things were falling apart at Uber and, you know, standing by Travis Kalanick. And, you know, it's just this idea that I think it's important to recognize that these ideas that they're putting forward are connected to diversity.

business outcomes that are favorable to the people involved, right? So it's all about like, well, who did founder control benefit? Founder control benefits founders and it benefits the people close to them who can, you know, get in on the deals at the right time, right? And that is insiders, like the all-in hosts, right? So I think- Or all VCs, right? Yeah, they're all VCs. Yes.

You have to, I think, as a listener, no one is going to come out and tell you, like, important subtext. You know, founder control favors certain groups of people, founders, of course, but also, yeah, these other insiders. And how do you think about that as a listener when you're hearing this, that we should just...

Essentially, I think what I would love for people to better understand is this idea that all these ideas around great men and founders and everything, maybe some people really do believe this stuff in a sort of pure way, but also it's about who gets paid and it's about who's making money in Silicon Valley. And

I think that if you don't really see that layer to it, it might seem kind of harmless, but dollars are at stake here. It's not just like a philosophy. It's not just a narrative. It's about controlling who makes money. It's also a way of keeping people quiet, right? If you think that Jeff Bezos is a great man or Elon Musk is a great man, you might be less inclined to

care about unionization efforts, for example, or be angry that we have a sort of massive income inequality gap in this country. I think that sort of perspective kind of seeps in through these podcasts.

in some ways it feels like a, you know, this kind of old fashioned idea that like we used to sort of look to business leaders, I think to be moral leaders. And, you know, you think about like the, I don't know, the robber barons, you know, they found a way to achieve that by being philanthropists, right? It was like, oh, I may have,

be controlling the world, but I also am giving a lot of money away. And, you know, I think a lot of what we're seeing right now in this moment is like the tides have turned, like people, I don't think have that same sort of posture of being, um,

they're not really buying that anymore, right? We don't necessarily look at business leaders in that same way. I think people are a little more jaded than that. And I think then the people who want to support those alpha men are mad about that, right? They're fighting back. This is essentially their way of fighting back. Someone has to. Yes. Yeah, they're fighting the good fight. Yeah. I want to end this interview with

talking about Marc Andreessen's viral 5,000-word techno-optimist manifesto. Tell us what he was calling for, and then tell us about your amazing kicker for the piece. Hmm.

Yeah. So I think Marc Andreessen wants people to be building. But not only that, he doesn't just want people to be building and dreaming big. He wants regulators and all the rest of us to get out of the way.

Good, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. And oh, by the way, it turns out that a lot of the companies, let's say like crypto companies that he has invested in, would really benefit from regulators shutting the F up, right? So...

There's, you know, clearly like an alignment of incentives here. And, you know, this whole sort of idea that we need to let the builders build is just sort of very core to this whole movement. It's just, you know, let the builders build. The rest of us don't have expertise in building, whatever that is. Anyway, you don't get a degree in building, but apparently some of us, it's like the right stuff. You know, it's a very like right stuff kind of thing.

Either you've got it or you don't. You're a builder or you're not. And certainly if you're a woman, like you're probably not. But, you know, the idea is very much just sort of this like claiming of the idea that it's even a techno optimist manifesto. It's like the future should belong to us and particularly the future should belong to the builders. Yeah.

And it's a little unclear what that means for the rest of us, other than the fact that we get out of the way and don't make a lot of money. The Manifesto actually listed a number of patron saints of techno-optimism. Tell me about the gender breakdown there. It was 50 men and six women.

Nice. Yes. It was just Lex Friedman's podcast. Yeah. It's just like Lex, Lex, Lex, Lex, Lex. Yeah. I think so much of this is about who you listen to and who you're influenced by. Right. And what you read. And if your media diet is other men who are reinforcing these same ideas, like you're you're not going to come away a critical thinker and you're not going to come away with really an understanding of the world in any shape or form.

This was great, Ainsley. We're going to take a quick break, followed by my interview with Game Fam CEO Joe Ferencz.

A while ago, you might remember that me and Josh went to South by Southwest. And while we were there, I spoke with Joe Farrant, the CEO of Game Fam. Now, you may not have actually heard of his company directly, but you've probably interacted with some of its content. Game Fam is a video game company that develops experiences for brands and creators in Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft. Game Fam is a video game company that develops experiences for brands and creators in Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft.

To date, the company has made campaigns for Sonic the Hedgehog, the NFL, Hot Wheels, Samsung, and Puma. They've also staged virtual concerts for musicians like the Chainsmokers and Saweetie. I spoke to Joe about advertising and finding new consumers in the metaverse. Joe, I actually want to start by talking about the ad network that you sort of work on within places like Roblox or Fortnite.

And your background is in marketing. What are the sort of format or what are the kind of ads that have been most successful? We've been experimenting and innovating in this space since 2019. This was always the vision for the company was to be what I would call a gaming media company. And this is because the volume of

of users on Roblox and Fortnite is almost mind-blowingly huge, right? 100 million daily active users across these platforms, half a billion monthly active users. Roblox users spend 130 minutes per day playing. That's compared to 112 minutes on TikTok, 70 minutes per day on YouTube, right? So the engagement is not only qualitatively

much stronger because this is literally a hands-on engagement, right? It's not lean-in engagement. It's hands-on engagement. But the time spent, it's quantitatively more significant as well. So when we started the company five years ago, we foresaw that this was going to be a place that brands needed to be. I don't think we foresaw how quickly brands

it would evolve to a place that brands need to be in the way they are. So we've been developing a ad network and advertising tech to support this strategy for about four years now.

And we have a number of formats that we can offer to brand partners. And we have very advanced measurement for the engagements and the value that the brand integrations and advertising bring into Roblox and Fortnite. You were sort of using time spent on those platforms as a point of comparison. But one thing I will say is on TikTok or on Instagram, you can immediately click and buy something. That's not quite the case in Roblox.

How do you measure, you know, when you're talking about measuring the success of an ad campaign, like how do you measure conversion there? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think what's exciting is that Roblox is working on a commerce solution that I believe is going to go live this year or next year. And that's been part of their communications that they've shared like with the markets. But I think as it stands right now,

Roblox and Fortnite are brand engagement platforms, right? They're not direct to consumer. They're not direct action platforms, but they're where...

Gen Z and Gen Alpha is spending so much time socializing, building virtual lives, essentially, on these platforms. These platforms are just ingrained into the fabric of these generations of entertainment consumers now. So we measure it using number of engagements, time spent engaging. We actually have run surveys of

our campaigns to understand how players have experienced them and we can provide in-game rewards for all of this, right? So let me give you an example, which is that we did a huge campaign last year for Intuit. We integrated Intuit as the title sponsor. It's a company that Gen Alpha is so excited about. Well, you know, I think it's very smart of them. People often say, why is Intuit on Roblox? And I

What is so shocking to think about is that some of the richest humans I know are 14 to 17 year olds.

Like some of the biggest businesses I know of like that are not major global corporations are now being run by 14 to 20 year olds. It takes a lot to wrap your mind around that, I think. But that's what's happening. So I think that's why Intuit is here is that financial literacy is something that is important to consumers individually.

younger and younger. And there are literally millions of young people trying to be entrepreneurs in the direct-to-consumer world, whether that's in gaming, YouTube, TikTok. Influencer, I've heard, is one of the top career choices that teenagers aspire to. I won't comment on what that means for us as a society, but it is a fact. Yeah, it's a reality. What did that campaign look like?

So that campaign was one of the most innovative campaigns I think that we've ever worked on that I've ever been a part of in my 20 plus years in the branding, marketing and IP world. We had a virtual concert we were doing with Warner Music Group for the global hip hop star Sweetie.

And as we realized the timing of that concert and we realized that we wanted to do something with the NFL and with their official NFL partner, Intuit, we said, well, this concert could be a Super Bowl concert. And we kind of connected those dots and it became the sweetie Super Bowl concert on Roblox presented by Intuit.

And we also at the same time launched a NFL-themed game where Intuit was deeply integrated into that game. So I'll cover both of these. I'll give you some statistics. So the Swedish Super Bowl concert was a massive success.

It's the number one user-rated concert of all time on Roblox. That's out of, I don't know how many concerts, 30, 40 concerts or whatever. It had seven and a half million engagements, visits, concert experiences in the one week that it was live. That's a lot of people if you think about like Coachella and how much brands pay to be at Coachella. Seven and a half million people came to this concert.

And we had, during that time, over 400 million brand engagements that we measured for Intuit. What does a brand engagement look like? A brand engagement here can be anywhere from a lighter engagement of time spent with the Intuit branding in the player's camera, in the player's screen, and being able to measure that, all the way to Intuit engagement.

activities within the game because in the NFL game that was part of this program as well, right? There was the concert and there was the NFL game. The NFL game was called Super NFL Tycoon, which is you are an NFL team owner and you're building out your franchise. Of course, you need a lot of financial services to build an NFL franchise.

and who provides those services. Intuit, in the form of QuickBooks, MailChimp for marketing to fans, we integrated all of the Intuit brands into this. And so some of those engagements were extremely important

rich and integrated the Intuit brands into the fabric of these experiences. And that game, Super NFL Tycoon, has a 92% user rating, which is very strong, right? So it was seamlessly done. And that's something that we're really passionate about here at Game Fam. That's my background. I've been working in that space of brands, IP, and gaming for almost 20 years. And I...

am very excited about doing this properly, right? In a way, it has to benefit players at the end of the day. If it doesn't benefit players, the game's metrics will suffer. If the game's metrics will suffer, the game will suffer in the algorithm. And this is why, if I may hammer on this point for one more second, we highly recommend integrating brands.

into Roblox and Fortnite games rather than trying to build standalone games based on brands. I was going to ask about that. You know, in the past, I mean, there's still an NFL game that comes out every year. What is your sales pitch to brands to say, we need to just put you in Roblox rather than create a standalone thing? It's actually a pretty...

simplistic paradigm, which is my preference for all paradigms in the business world. And if your brand could not support an Xbox game or a mobile free-to-play game or a Switch game on the shelf, your brand is not going to be able to support

a Roblox game in a scaled way. Leaving aside the commercial opportunity here, which the commercial opportunity is still very nascent on these platforms, end of story. But even from a scaled engagement standpoint, Game Fam has three of the top 10 all-time branded games in terms of usage. Number one, Sonic. Number six, Barbie. Number 10, Hot Wheels. Those are all IPs that clearly deserve to have

games as standalone. And then if you look at the other top 10 games on the list, which you can see on, there's a website I'd like to clue you into. It's called RoMonitor. It has every piece of data on the Roblox universe, including on its homepage, the top 10 branded games of all time. And then you can deep dive and see all 300 branded games that have been made in every publicly available metric associated with them. GameFan happens to own this website.

as well. So, shameless plug. I'm glad you disclosed that one. Shameless plug. But it's a fantastic tool. And, you know, if you look at the other top 10 games, almost all of those were actually official Roblox events back when that was...

an official Roblox event. There are no more official Roblox events, right? So Roblox used to push users into official branded events. They no longer do that. Our three top 10 entries there were all standalone games that we launched without support from the Roblox branded event program. But those are the type of IPs, right? Barbie can support...

one of the highest grossing movies of all time. Of course, Barbie is a good IP to support a video game with, but Barbie also needs marketing support for specific campaigns and the game can't provide all of that. So Barbie actually does spend media on Roblox from time to time as well. I want to get your thoughts on sort of the metaverse in general. I think

You know, I wrote a feature about Yugo Labs a while ago, and I remember at its inception... The company that makes a game about poop? That's correct. Okay. There seemed to be this real promise, and everybody seemed to say we're all going to be living in the metaverse, you know, two to three years from now.

I think it's fair to say a lot of people spend time on Roblox. I don't know that it's fair to say we're living in the metaverse, or not all of us are. But tell me how your thoughts on the concept have evolved over the past couple of years. I'm so glad that you asked me this question because I have such...

a strongly held point of view on this. I've read Ready Player One and Neuromancer. I've seen The Matrix, of course, right? So there's so many ideas in popular culture about what a metaverse is, right? We don't really talk at Game Fam about the metaverse. We talk about the metaverse segment or the metaverse industry.

And Roblox is a metaverse. Fortnite is a metaverse. Those are kind of the two scaled metaverse platforms that exist today. We do not foresee there being one metaverse to rule them all. We can't understand how the fundamentals of the business universe would allow that to happen. And we don't know how the fundamentals of the business universe would allow that to happen.

And to be a metaverse, you need to have, first of all, a preponderance of users, right? Let's call it tens of millions of daily active users. You need to have hundreds or thousands minimum of experiences for them to skate around to, and they need to have persistent identities that come around with them. And that word metaverse, unfortunately, it's a very useful term, right?

But it's been thrown around like crazy with places like Yugo Labs. Yugo Labs has NFTs and they're very successful NFTs and they're very cool. But they don't have a metaverse. There's nowhere to hang out in a persistent universe and go across thousands of experiences with those NFTs. So I don't understand sometimes how people applied that word to things that have nothing to do with the concept of a metaverse at all. You talked specifically about targeting sort of Gen Z and Gen Alpha targets.

on platforms like Roblox. A couple of years ago, we published a sort of a feature about some of the safety issues that Roblox has. I'm curious how you think about that and what those conversations are like with advertisers.

Safety is, of course- Your number one priority. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Yes. I'm glad you attended our internal press briefing, obviously. No, but safety is so important, right? We are dealing with very young people on the internet. And, you know, personally, I'm very passionate about young people having good and positive experiences. I'm actually on the board of a nonprofit called 826LA, which is a literacy and education-focused nonprofit in Los Angeles.

middle school and high school students, you know, enhance their learning experience. So this is something that is actually a personal cause that I'm interested in. And so while, of course, Game Fam works very closely with Roblox and with Epic on in

ensuring perfect compliance against their terms of service. We actually go one step further at Game Fam and we're partnered with KERU, the Children's Advertising Review Unit. We are collaborating with them to shape policy and help guide the future of online safety in these spaces. So that is kind of our tangible commitment to safety being our number one priority. We're not just talk. We actually are also walk.

So things like how is it disclosed that it's an advertisement? What are the ways that young gamers can interact with advertisements? Those are the type of issues that we discuss what is considered an acceptable way. What type of offers...

can you present in these worlds that will drive back to the real world or to websites that are outside of COPPA compliance, like Roblox is COPPA compliant, right? But if we're advertising a brand that has a website that maybe isn't fully COPPA compliant for whatever reason, can we drive out to that website? And if so, under what circumstances, with what type of terminology? Those are the type of questions that we discuss with K. Roo. And we are...

kind of on the ground on these platforms looking at how users engage and we can share that with them and they can then help translate that into meaningful guidelines and policy that actually goes all the way up into a legalistic execution at some point. When you're looking at Gen Alpha users who are, you know, about to come into some spending power, do they interact differently with marketing and advertising than, say, like your Gen Z users?

consumers do? Like, what trends are you seeing there? What sort of messaging do they respond to? I think that in terms of broad generality is what I would say is that the younger the gamer is on these platforms. And I want to keep my expertise is really limited to how they interact on these gaming platforms. I think that what happens

interesting is the distinction between fan-made branded content and official branded content. And how to ensure that the fan-made content gets a chance to thrive, but that unofficial content that is starting to compete for mind share and wallet share with the

officially branded content is properly regulated too. And I think Gen Alpha consumers, just by sheer virtue of how young they are, aren't able to necessarily differentiate between those things. And I think that's one of the biggest things where Gen Z, they're much older and they understand, okay, this is fan-made, this is unofficial, this is the official, and how do those things interact? And I think it's very similar to something like, you know, being on X and like following a fake

Kim Kardashian profile for fun, but you also probably want to follow the real Kim Kardashian profile. And you can differentiate between those because you're an adult. But if you're a Gen Alpha gamer, 8, 10, 12 years old, you probably can't. And I think that's something that we all in the IP and brand business need to be navigating in real time together. Can you give me an example of a campaign you worked on where maybe user-generated content started to compete with or surpass...

stuff that you all were putting out? Our Sonic game is the number one branded game of all time on Roblox. It just passed the 900 million play sessions mark. That is less than two years in the market. So, you know, it had 10,000 people playing it when I checked in on it yesterday morning, for example. And that's a huge amount of people to be playing something at one time, right? If you had a live stream with 10,000 people watching it, that's a huge...

huge live stream, right? So this is how our portfolio sits there all day. We had peak usage yesterday of 190,000 across the portfolio, which is concurrence, right? Which is really mind-blowing when you think about how many people you're actually reaching, entertaining, and engaging there. Of course, there's a humongous amount of fan content for Sonic,

on the Roblox platform. And we love that. We think that's great. What we have brought to the Sonic IP and to all of the IPs and brand partners we work with is a level of production values and brand value

kind of architecture that really distinguishes it from the fan-made content. And we monitor fan-made content. And basically there's a line, right? There's a line on all platforms for fan-made content. Is it an homage? Is it a tribute? Is it something that's heartfelt? Or is it a competing, commercialized

product that is an unofficial product that's leveraging the IP in an unofficial way. And, you know, we work with all of our branded IP partners to differentiate where that line is and give our perspective on which of those things they should take action on and which of those things they should allow to live and breathe and celebrate the IP and brands.

AI has been in the news a lot. I think in the past year we've seen generative AI take off so much. I guess I'm curious how you see that technology impacting what you're working on and how you hear gaming companies like Epic Games talk about it. The role of AI specifically. I think that what Epic and Roblox are doing is they're trying to make sure that the technology is being used in a way that's not just for gaming.

are doing is empowering individual creators and very small teams to make very big entertainment products. I mean, this is the same way with OpenAI's Sora that came out, whatever, last week and the videos that that thing can create. It's going to allow individuals to create really interesting video content. And the world is changing really quickly now because of this. And I think when it comes to the gaming platforms, we're not...

quite seen the impact of it yet. The technology isn't quite there today to create major additional efficiencies. If you look at what you can already do with a small team on Roblox and Fortnite, if you look at the fact that our SpongeBob game was made by a small team on Roblox and that game looks like a console quality game, that is the promise of these platforms and AI is going to allow just smaller and smaller teams to

to do bigger and bigger products at the end of the day. And that's where Epic and Roblox, I believe, are staking their claim on being disruptive technologies. When you look at Disney and their investment, to me, and I don't have any personal knowledge of this, but to me, it indicates that they recognize that

that Fortnite is part of the future of content distribution. The way that streaming video started off, whatever, 12, 15 years ago when Netflix changed from the DVDs and the envelopes to the Netflix platform. And I think that a lot of the content companies were slow to figure out their streaming strategy. They licensed some stuff to Netflix. They licensed stuff to Hulu. Now they're verticalized. And are they sure if that's working? And it's a lot.

And I think that what we're seeing is IP companies, brand companies are realizing these metaverse platforms, Roblox and Fortnite, are the future of engagement. A big part of it. It's not the only future. I'm not saying TV and TikTok and YouTube are going to go away. But they're a huge piece of the future.

And so people are getting their strategies in place much sooner so they can be moving with the speed of change and not playing catch up the way I think we did with online video and Instagram and things like that over the past decade. You just described the fact that a small team of creators can make something really impactful. I'm thinking, you know, you just said you'd be surprised that, you know, how small the team was behind the SpongeBob game. How many people are you going to be able to lay off because of AI? Yeah.

I'd like to think that AI is going to allow us to hire more people because I think it's going to allow us to move more quickly to develop more exciting products. We have a huge value add to bring to these platforms, which is best practices in free-to-play design and player monetization, best practices in live services. These games need constant monetization.

content. Let me tell you, coming up with three years of new Mimi ideas for our game Twilight Daycare, it's not easy. It's a discipline. It's a qualitative discipline that you get better at by doing it over years. We can help teach younger developers how to be in that space. So we're really set up

to, I believe, take advantage of these changes. That's something that's really important to me as the CEO and founder is that I don't want us to be trying to squeeze an extra nickel out of a revenue stream by using these efficiencies. I want to use these efficiencies and these tools to grow

the pie. That's why I got into this business. That's why I started the first professionalized developer for Roblox and Fortnite five years ago, the first one in the world, is because I wanted to be part of what these tools are going to do to empower and grow creativity, not what they're going to do to help squeeze an extra

Has it changed the way you think about hiring? Not quite yet. It is bubbling up. We are thinking about it. There are discussions being had around what are the implications. But we are still a small business, right? So we deal with what's tangible business.

every day and we kind of try to lay best practices and we try to lay down strategies to move quickly when things do change, which they will and they will change quickly. An example of this is we scaled right from, like I started the company as, you know, one person. We had two people, five people, 10 people. We scaled from like 10 people up to almost 200 people in 24 months because we knew that was going to happen and we put in place infrastructure on the HR side to

to allow that to happen in what I think has been a safe way for the company and for our team members at the company to grow long-term careers in this space. So as we look at the impact AI is going to have, we are now looking to do the same thing. What is the impact AI will have? How do we train up our teams to take advantage of AI? And how does that power additional growth for our business, not shrinkage for our business?

We've seen an enormous amount of layoffs in the tech sector, especially, and there's sort of retrenchment across the board when it comes to spending. Have you seen that impact your bottom line? No, our business has been on a growth curve for over four years, and that is because we're in a growth segment. And I think when I was looking to start a company after having spent at that point, I

15, 17 years working in and around corporate brand and corporate IP companies. And I was saying, I want to do something, you know, small and move quickly. And I want to be part of the new, not hanging on to the old.

So I looked at Roblox, and I had access to a tool called Data AI, which Game Fam does not own, and is a very good tool, and measures the mobile gaming space. And I had been following Roblox, actually. I had been consulting for the Hot Wheels brand at Mattel, which is a fantastic brand, an incredible team, and great company overall. And I had been following...

following Roblox because I was the lead executive producer and strategist for Hot Wheels Video Games. It was a consulting role. It was the best gig ever. I did it for five years. And that's how I learned about Roblox. And I love like weird entertainment experiences. Okay. So I'm like a huge Adult Swim fan, for example. Right. So when I saw Roblox, I was like,

This is just what the, that was back in 2016. I was like, what, this is, what is, what, what am I even looking at? This is wild. This is so interesting. And then I started following it and I started, actually started meeting with them. I started learning about it. And then in 2018, I saw whatever they call it, right? The hockey stick, right? The hockey stick growth. And I was like, oh, this is, this is going to happen. This is going to be a thing. The power of user generated content. And I believe that with our skills from kind of the last decade

20 years of the media world that there is value to be added on these new platforms. And that's why I started GameFam back in 2019.

My last question for you is actually about predictions. You know, we've seen, I mean, AI in particular changed so much over the past year. A year from now, what do you think the advertising trends are going to be in your industry? Or what are some of the gaming trends you're seeing? I think in terms of gaming, we're going to see continued evolution of advertising.

depth of genre. And to give you an example, we have a game in our portfolio called War Tycoon. It's a game about building an army and you build a base and you go and you have, you know, play fights with other players. And this game has been on a multi-year growth curve for us. And it continues to push the level of depth of sophistication of features that we've seen on the Roblox platform. And every quarter

quarter, we're building deeper social features, deeper team-based competitive features. And that is the trend we're going to see

on these platforms is what were really snackable mini games. That layer is still going to be there, but there's going to be an aging up of these platforms. There's going to be more depth of gameplay and the games on Roblox and Fortnite soon enough are going to be competing for market share with the games on PlayStation and Steam. So you're saying there could be like a Call of Duty on Fortnite?

Well, Fortnite, yes. I mean, I think that... I think a hot take is that a major new shooter IP will spawn out of Fortnite other than Fortnite Battle Royale, right? That a user-generated...

shooter will come off of Fortnite and become an IP unto itself in the next year to two years? I think that's very likely. I mean, when you're talking about Fortnite specifically, you're leveraging Fortnite's shooting and action tech. You're literally working with the same tools that Epic used to build Fortnite. Now can you take those and rearrange those into something that will feel new and fresh and different enough to become its own IP in the gaming space? Yeah.

Yeah, I think so. I do think so. And then on the advertising side, I think that the Disney investment into Epic is just a huge moment for this segment, right? To be validated by one of the biggest and most long-term thinking media companies, arguably the biggest and most long-term thinking company, at least in the Western world, right?

And for them to say, hey, this is where we're putting a flag down for the future of our business in the digital space, that's changing advertiser minds in real time. And they're saying, hold on, what's our business?

strategy here. I've been saying for over a year and a half, two years, every brand and IP needs a Roblox and Fortnite strategy. But when Bob Iger writes a $1.5 billion check to say the same thing, I think that gets a lot more attention. Yes, exactly. Well, this was great. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Yes. Thank you so much for having me. Great questions. We are back with Ainsley and it's time to wrap up the show with Keeping Tabs.

This is where each of us shares a story, trend, or piece of pop culture we're following right now. And Ainsley, since you're our guest, what are you keeping tabs on? I am keeping tabs on the extreme dangers of working from home if you are an equity trader.

I don't know if anyone saw this. What? Crazy. Okay, so a trader for a city in, I think he was based in London. He was working from home and ignored over 700 warning messages that the city's trading systems gave him and somehow managed to make a

Turn what was supposed to be a $58 million trade into a $444 billion trade? No. And it's essentially because like Citi's work from home technical systems failed him and like things weren't working. So he just sort of like overrode the system and like generated a massive supply.

sell-off in European stocks that took the market briefly down with him. So this is like, if you think your work-from-home nightmare is bad, just imagine accidentally placing a $400 billion trade.

I do think, though, it takes like a special kind of male confidence to be like, let me override this. You know what I mean? I feel like I'd be like, I'm going to call my boss, like send some screenshots, double check. Get on the IT channel on your Slack. He had to get to his spin class on time. You know, it's like you just got to like...

Get it done. Josh, what are you keeping tabs on? I'm keeping tabs on, I guess this is on the theme of male hubris again, the Harrison Bucker situation, which is now a couple weeks old. Did you not see this yet? Oh, is this the graduation speech? Yeah, the kicker. So the kicker from the Kansas City Chiefs, for those who haven't, and I'm not going to focus too much on what he said. I'm going to get to something a little lighter around it.

The kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs spoke at Benedictine College, their commencement, and basically just gave this very sexist, transphobic...

homophobic speech that's basically like was basically the extent of it was women belong in the kitchen not in the boardroom sort of like take on it and he doubled down on that take over the weekend at another sort of gala for a catholic charity he's a devout catholic and he cites his catholicism as the reason for these beliefs and how its traditional catholic values but

This comedian, Josh Johnson, I don't know if either of you know who that is. He writes for The Daily Show. He's really funny. He had a great bit about the Harrison Bucker situation where essentially he's talking about the situation, how ridiculous it was. He makes a very funny joke about how he's a kicker, so he has the least CTE, so you know these are his clear and present values. And then he goes on and talks about how Harrison Bucker's mom

is a physicist. And I'll let the bit pick up from there. If your mom's a physicist, I can't imagine how many times in your life you've been corrected. Yeah, I mean, maybe that's what it is. Maybe he's like, you know, I just want a woman who won't talk to me and be right. Yeah, because his mom is a physicist and he's a kicker.

Which means every time he misses his mom, his mom can tell exactly how off he was.

I thought that was a really great pitch. It's a good example to me of like taking a left turn with comedy because there was a lot of very like preachy pedestally like takes after it, which were all like correct and right and deserved. I just really appreciated this take from Josh Johnson as a comedian. It was very funny. Yes. What are you keeping tabs on?

So this past weekend was the finale of the season finale of The Sympathizer, which is a show on HBO adapted from a book I really liked by Viet Thanh Nguyen. I no doubt pronounced that wrong. And I thought the show was really remarkable. And I spent a lot of time being like, are they going to stick this landing? And I think they really did. And it was...

Cool to see how many risks that production took. You know, they had Robert Downey Jr. playing like eight characters. And it just, I was just really impressed. It was, we get so much news about studios not being willing to take too many risks and to see a show that is like half in Vietnamese language. Yeah.

to see a show where the story is not told in a linear way at all with a majority cast of unknowns is kind of amazing. It was also directed by Park Chan-wook, who is one of my favorite directors of all time. So I just highly recommend it. I'm so glad you say that because I do remember reading the book, I want to say in college. And so it's definitely been on my list. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? I think...

No, I'm not going to say this because it's like going to show me. I thought the series was better than the book. I felt like the book was good, but it was a little overwritten. Sometimes it was like, yeah, we get it. You're smart. Calm down in the series sort of.

I think it was not sandbagged by that too much. Yeah. I really enjoyed it. I feel like it hasn't gotten as much attention as it deserves. So highly recommend. That's it for most innovative companies. Ainsley, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me.

Our show is produced by Avery Miles and Blake Odom with an assist from our interns, Ellie Stevens and Claire Zhao. Mix and sound design was by Nicholas Torres and our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Remember again to subscribe, rate, and review, and we'll see you next week.