NFL & Fox: The $1.6B Deal That Changed Everything
In 1993, Rupert Murdoch vastly overpaid for NFC media rights. But the deal turned Fox into a major American TV network and completely changed the economics of the NFL.
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Today, we’ll talk about the NFL’s landmark $1.6B deal with Fox in 1993. It completely changed the league’s economics and broadcasting standards (while helping to turn Fox into America’s 4th major TV network).
Also this week:
Netflix & Alex Honnold’s Taipei 101 Free Solo
Clawdbot/Moltbot Mania, Explained
…and them wild posts (including The Lord of the Rings)
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In the summer of 1993, Rupert Murdoch called NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue to talk about the San Francisco 49ers and Dallas Cowboys.
Murdoch couldn’t tell the difference between a “QB” or an “RB”, but he owned the Fox TV network and had offered the NFL a massive $1.6B for the NFC’s broadcast rights (the deal was for $395m per year over 4 years and dwarfed the previous CBS annual payment of $265m).
While the Australian-born media baron didn’t know anything about American football, he knew the NFL was a cultural juggernaut and wanted to drop a deuce on the front lawns of America’s Big 3 broadcast TV networks: ABC, NBC and CBS.
On his call with Tagliabue, Murdoch told the Commissioner that he needed the 49ers vs. the Cowboys game and a number of other marquee match-ups to make the Fox bid work.
“Tagliabue said he thought he could get it done,” Ken Belson writes in Every Day Is Sunday, a book on the business history of the NFL. “Murdoch thanked him and then added, ‘I apologize for not knowing anything about any of these matches.’”
Yes, Murdoch referred to the NFL “games” as “matches”.
His knowledge of football was inversely correlated with his business intuition.
In 2026, we know that Murdoch’s plan to become America’s 4th major broadcast network worked and a key reason was this 1993 NFL deal.
Fox wasn’t the only winner.
The partnership completely changed the NFL’s viewing experience and league economics (the NFL’s total media rights are now worth $11B a year).
Let’s walk through the history of Fox NFL including:
Jerry Jones, Rupert Murdoch and Fox’s Winning Bid
How Fox Changed the NFL’s Viewing Experience
Fox and the NFL Boom
Rupert Murdoch, Jerry Jones and Fox’s Winning Bid
Rupert Murdoch was born in 1931.
At 21 years old, he took over a controlling interest in three Australian newspapers (The News, The Sunday Mail, The Barrier Miner) after the death of his father Keith Murdoch.
As many of you readers know, the HBO banger classic gem must-watch show Succession is based on a lot of Murdoch family lore.
There were seeds of drama from the early days: Keith wanted a male heir for his business and chose Rupert, which eventually led to ideological and business battles with his three sisters (who all initially supported their father’s wishes but were politically liberal and later contested their brother’s strategy).
With firm control of the Australian media business, Rupert would go on a decades-long acquisition spree of newspapers and magazines around the world:
In Australia: News Limited, The Dominion, The South China Morning Post.
In America: New York Post, San Antonio Express News, National Star, New York Magazine.
In the UK: The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, News of the World.
Murdoch also controlled Australian TV stations and spent years trying to get into international markets. His breakthrough came in 1983, when he acquired a British satellite and cable TV station that would become Sky TV.
Then, in 1985, Murdoch pulled off a series of maneuvers that would completely change the American media landscape:
Twentieth Century-Fox: Murdoch’s News Corp paid ~$600m to oil tycoon Marvin Davis for control of the film studio. One of the first orders of business was the difficult decision to…remove the hyphen from the name, which became “Twentieth Century Fox”. You laugh, but think about all the ink that was saved from dropping that hyphen (it’s now 20th Century Studios after Murdoch sold the business to Disney in 2019 at the streaming war “spend money like a drunken sailor” peak for $70B+).
Metromedia TV Stations: Murdoch spent $2.6B for six independent TV stations in major American media markets (NY, LA, Chicago, Washington, Dallas, Houston). These formed the core of the Fox TV broadcast network. Media mogul Barry Diller went in on these deals with Murdoch and would run Fox TV (and Twentieth Century-Fox) until 1992. He left because Murdoch told him that Fox was a “family company” and Diller’s ceiling at the organization was capped. Diller went on to build an internet empire (IAC, Expedia Group).
Becoming an American citizen: Murdoch had been living in the US since the mid-1970s and became a naturalized citizen in September 1985. He gave up his Australian citizenship, too. Why? Because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) restricted foreign ownership of a company with a broadcast license to only 25%.
With these deals in place, Murdoch had the pieces to create America’s 4th major broadcast network alongside the “Big 3” of CBS, NBC and ABC.
These three media mainstays had been the home to NFL games for decades. After the AFL-NFL merger of 1966, the league’s broadcast rights had been roughly split between CBS (NFC games), NBC (AFC) and ABC (Monday Night Football from 1970).
In 1993, the CBS rights for the NFC games expired and everyone expected the NFL to renew the deal.
No one expected a Fox bid.
While Diller had created a number of hits at Fox (America’s Most Wanted, Cops, Beverly Hills 90210, The Simpsons, In Living Color, Married…with Children), the network was seen as counter-cultural and much lower status than CBS, NBC or ABC.
However, Murdoch had created a template for building a TV network back in Britain: Sky TV expanded on the strength of Sky Sports and its broadcast rights to English Premier League soccer (for Murdoch, sports was a “battering ram” for the network).
Could a partnership with the NFL work the same magic for Fox?
Enter the absolute force of nature known as Jerry Jones. The 51-year-old had bought the Dallas Cowboys four years earlier in 1989 and knew a bidding war for NFL media rights could drive up the value of his team.
In Every Day Is Sunday, Belson explained the negotiating landscape:
Some networks, though, were pleading poverty. CBS claimed it lost tens of millions of dollars on its NFL rights deal during the recession of 1990–1991, and Larry Tisch, the chairman of the network, wanted to pay less, not more, in the next agreement. Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell, who ran the broadcast committee for years, was cozy with the networks and was inclined to give them the discounts they wanted.
But this was the new NFL, one increasingly dominated by younger, hungrier owners like [Jerry] Jones and Pat Bowlen of the Broncos, entrepreneurs who went into debt to buy their teams and wanted to recoup their investments as fast as possible. Modell’s health was poor, and he quit the committee, leaving Jones and Bowlen. Jones wanted to add a fourth bidder for the league’s three main television packages, and Rupert Murdoch from Fox was that bidder. The bare-knuckled Australian had inquired about the rights to Monday Night Football years before but was rebuffed. Now he was back and wouldn’t take no for an answer. […]
In the United States, he hoped that showing NFL games would convince affiliates to carry Fox. Murdoch told Jones that he wasn’t interested in being a stalking horse, he wanted to be taken seriously.
“Mr. Murdoch, I wasn’t part of [the previous] negotiation,” Jones said to Murdoch. “But I am [in] this one.”
The first CBS bid was at $250m a year.
It was much too low and left an opening.
Even with one of his top aides telling him “Rupert, you don’t have to do this”, Murdoch came off the top rope with an annual bid of $340m for the NFC package.
A bid that assuredly gave Jones a chub. Well, at least a mini-chub. Because Murdoch increased the bid to $395m — or ~$1.6B total over 4 years (the NFL’s first 9-figure deal) — and it was game over.
The final CBS bid was a (kind of pathetic) $295m a year.
Despite not knowing anything about the sport, Murdoch became the new owner of the NFC package on December 18th, 1993.
Jones would later say of the Fox overpay, “Underneath the table, we were kicking the living shit out of each other.”
Coming off a high, Jones pushed Tagliabue to re-open the AFC bid. But the NFL Commissioner had given a handshake deal with NBC worth (kind of a steal) $217m a year and that was that.
Murdoch had one major problem with the win, though: Fox didn’t have a sports division and had mere months to prepare a brand-new American football broadcast worthy of the $1.6B price tag.
How Fox Changed the Entire NFL Viewing Experience
As part of the winning Fox bid, Murdoch had tapped a producer from his British Sky Sports team (David Hill) to put together some footage to impress Commissioner Tagliabue and the owners including Jerry Jones.
More from Belson:
[Hill showed the] NFL brass what he thought a football game should look like, with three cameras following the action from different angles and closeups of the players. There would be more music and graphics. The pregame show would be livelier, with more of a frat boy vibe than the sober feel of a newsroom.
Murdoch and Hill had done a similar makeover at Sky Sports by sexing up the English Premier League broadcasts. Traditional English broadcasters were “lazy” and stuck to wide shots of the entire game with few zooms (Hill said, “the only time you ever saw the players was when the ball went out of play”).
While Hill had the production chops, he didn’t have very much time to stand up an NFL broadcast that could compete with the decade-long operations at the Big 3 Networks.
“I arrived at Fox in January 1994, and was given an IBM Selectric typewriter, a yellow legal pad, and two HB pencils,” Hill recalls of the gargantuan task. “There was nothing. I had six months to put together eight production teams, a logo, a studio, engineering infrastructure, a publicity machine, a sales department.”
Hill believed sports was entertainment and the Fox NFL product would be produced that way in the world’s entertainment capital of LA. However, Hill was so skeptical of the project’s shortened timeline (it usually takes 2-3 years), that he kept his London apartment and expected that Murdoch would eventually fire him.
Spoiler alert: Hill was Fox Sports President from 1993 to 2000 and (really) made Fox NFL work.
Here are 5 new TV viewing innovations Hill and Fox NFL brought to the league:
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1. The FOX box
We are spoiled for stats in 2026 and are always second-screening while watching live sports.
But analytics was GRIM back in the late-80s and early-90s.
In 1994, Fox NFL became the first American sports broadcast to permanently put a time and score tracker for the viewer and it was dubbed the FOX Box.
In yet another example of humanity’s knee-jerk overreaction to any change, media insiders hated the FOX Box.
Variety wrote a review that reads like parody now: “The network also still insists on that annoying see-through clock and score graphic in the upper-left corner of the screen throughout nearly the entire game. How about those who actually watched the beginning of the game and would rather have their screen clear of graphics?”
Oh no! An annoying see-through clock!! Someone call the FCC!
The FOX Box origin traces back to Hill turning on a Chelsea football match on BBC in the 1980s and being incredibly annoyed that he didn’t know the score or time until the commentators mentioned it 20 minutes later.
At Sky Sports, he implemented a time and score chyron…and then brought it to America. According to the NYT, the FOX Box actually required some serious technical chops:
Production-wise, Fox ushered in the era of the constant time and scorebox along with audio that brought viewers closer to the action. The scorebox may look like a simple graphic, but at the time it was a technical marvel. Instead of having a camera fixated on a clock, a black box was embedded in each scoreboard so that the time and other data could be transmitted to Los Angeles and production trucks at the stadium.
“There was a guy named Richard Flanigan who had to go to each stadium with a ladder and screwdriver and put the black box in each scoreboard. But he had to build a black box for each scoreboard because they were all different,” said Eric Shanks, a broadcast associate in 1994 and now Fox Sports’ executive producer and CEO. “The attitude from David [Hill] was the bigger, the louder, the better. We were doing things with graphics and sound effects that only used to exist in big production movies.
As an invention created due to a pet peeve, the Fox BOX (Hill not seeing the Chelsea score) is up there with Uber (Travis Kalanick and Garret Camp not being able to flag a taxi after a night of partying in Paris), Netflix (Reed Hastings paying $40 in Blockbuster late fees…apparently a myth but whatever) and Japanese Square Watermelons (created because round ones are harder to stack, store and fit in fridges).
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2. Way More Video and Audio
“Hill knew that fans wanted to see and hear the players,” explains Belson. “So, he added more cameras and parabolic microphones on the field. At CBS, some games had only four cameras and two tape machines for editing replays. Hill…decided to go with six or seven cameras for lesser games and ten or more cameras for bigger games.”
More cameras = more angles = more fodder for highlights.
Meanwhile, parabolic microphones have huge mechanical amplification and can capture sounds from a long range. That’s how we get these goofy-looking dudes holding that semi-circle plastic things (right) who get crashed into by players at least 7x a game.
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3. One-Hour Pre-game Show
To triple down on the “sports is entertainment” philosophy, Hill created a one-hour pre-game show to help inform and entertain viewers.
Hill’s plan was to have a foursome run the pre-game show including a TV talent (James Brown), an offensive player (Terry Bradshaw), a defensive player (Howie Long) and a coach (Jimmy Johnson).
Belson on the recruiting details:
Hill and [Executive Producer Ed] Goren had ideas for the pre-game show, which would set the tone for the broadcast. Hill had seen Terry Bradshaw on CBS’s NFL Today show and thought he was perfect.
Bradshaw agreed to move to Fox before Goren arrived. In Atlanta, Goren met Howie Long, who had just retired after a thirteen-year Hall of Fame career with the Raiders. He had the looks and personality for television and had been a defensive end who could complement Bradshaw, a former quarterback.
Coach Jimmy Johnson was coming back-to-back Super-Bowl wins with the Cowboys but left after clashing with Jones. After spending $1.6B, Murdoch wanted the biggest names and Johnson would be a huge catch for either Fox or ESPN.
Hill and Goren really wanted him and it was an…interesting hiring process:
“This isn’t a negotiation,” Goren told Johnson. “Right now, Rupert’s got my balls in one hand, and he can find the other one to squeeze.”
Johnson added that ESPN would let him appear on their show from his home.
“I said, well, they lied,” Goren said. “What kind of f*cking charisma will you and your lazy f*cking white ass have in Islamorada [Florida]?”
As a compromise, Goren told Johnson that he could pick two Sundays each season so “you can be on the show sitting on your lazy white ass by your pool.”
This 5-minute video for the debut of NFL Fox in August 1994 is a pretty incredible rewatch (Bradshaw’s swag be staying next level).
Bradshaw and Long are still on the broadcast today but the original foursome idea has changed a bit. Those two are now joined by another defensive player (Michael Strahan), an NFL reporter (Jay Glazer) and one of the 21st century’s most important cultural American phenomena (The Gronk).
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4. An Iconic Theme Song
Good lord, the Fox NFL theme song goes hard.
It’s probably my second favourite theme song backstory ever: in March 1994 — three months after Fox won the NFC media rights — Hill went to Six Flags with his son. They were in line for a Batman ride and the venue was piping in a Gothic orchestral version of the Batman theme song. Inspired, Hill rung up his team and told them to make the Fox NFL theme song that sounded like “Batman’s got a football team.”
Belson tells the story of Hill hearing the new theme song for the first time:
Days later, Hill picked up [producer George] Greenberg at his hotel in Los Angeles and Greenberg popped a CD in with [composer Scott] Schreer’s three versions.
They were big and brassy, with dozens of horn players. There was no ambiguity. It smacked listeners in the face. Hill loved it.
“We made sure we embedded that so when you heard it over and over again it was subliminally and overtly embedded in your brain,” Schreer said.
Indeed, the theme song embeds itself in your brain.
Wait, Trung. What’s your favourite theme song backstory ever?
That would be the Windows 95 startup sound.
In the same year Fox won the NFL bid, Microsoft approached musician (and all-around polymath) Brian Eno to make an audio logo for the upcoming Windows 95 Launch. The brief that Microsoft gave to Eno for the sound was kind of absurd: “A piece of music that is inspiring, universal, futuristic, sentimental, emotional…and only 3.25 seconds long.”
Eno told SF GATE that it was “like making a tiny little jewel” and created 84 versions of the sound.
Microsoft paid him $35k for the work, which is an incredible deal considering it has probably been heard by over a billion people. But the real benefit for Eno was that the Windows 95 sound unlocked a creative block he had with his other music projects.
“I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music,” Eno explained in the SF GATE interview. “I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.”
Anyway, someone needs to make a theme song for “Batman’s got an operating system.”
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5. Color Commentary: Pat Summerall, John Madden and the Telestrator
Murdoch was mostly hands-off on recruiting but went very hard after one person: John Madden, the former coach of the Las Vegas Raiders who had become the NFL’s top color commentator personality while working at CBS with his partner Pat Summerall.
Madden was an incredible on-air talent. Conversational, relatable and knowledgeable with his iconic Telestrator machine to illustrate plays live on screen (he’s also the namesake for arguably the greatest sports video game ever).
The Madden x Summerall duo was on the market after CBS lost the 1993 bid.
Bob Iger at ABC made a push to bring them onto the Monday Night Football broadcast.
According to Belson, Murdoch heard about Iger’s play for Madden and acted quickly:
Murdoch got wind of it and called Frank and Sandy Montag, who also represented Madden. Murdoch wanted to know “Madden’s number.”
When he was told, Murdoch said he’d call back in five minutes. Murdoch’s CFO called back and asked for the address to send the contract, worth about $30 million over four years. Madden told Frank to tell ABC the deal was off. […]
Madden wasn’t just in it for the money. He liked Murdoch’s style. Madden visited Murdoch’s ranch in Carmel, California, and when the Fox chief was grilling at the barbeque, a sausage fell on the ground. Madden was impressed that Murdoch picked it up, dusted it off, and threw it back on the grill.
Madden made it clear that it was a packaged deal with his decade-long partner Summerall. The two of them worked at Fox NFL from 1994-2002 before Summerall retired and Madden went over to Monday Night Football.
By the time they left, Fox NFL had established itself as a pioneering broadcast, including this incredible Telestrator moment.
Fox and the NFL Boom
Between 1986 and 1993, the Fox network had slowly built cultural clout with its slate of hit shows (probably peaking with the Conan O’Brien written “Monorail” episode for The Simpsons).
But no one thought Fox was on par with ABC, CBS or NBC.
Fox was still derisively known as the "wire-hanger network", a jab at its limited reach and the need for viewers to use a coat-hanger antenna to get decent reception.
The NFL deal changed everything.
It was particularly brilliant because it boosted Fox while knee-capping CBS, as explained by Belson:
“[Losing the NFL] was a disaster,” said CBS Sports President Neal Pilson. “A significant number of CBS affiliates switched to Fox. That hurt because we went from the number one or two station in a market to the number four station. That hurt ratings as much as the loss of the promotion power. We lost the male audience because we had nothing effective to promote to get men to watch.”
Pilson added: “I never liked Rupert’s politics, but he is a pretty smart dude.”
In May 1994, Fox invested $500 million in New World Communications, which controlled a string of stations. As part of the deal, New World agreed to switch up to a dozen of its local stations to Fox from CBS, ABC, and NBC. That put Fox —and its NFL games — on channels higher on the dial in Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, Tampa, and other cities with NFC teams.
Most networks lose money on sports rights deals, but you rarely hear executives discuss that because the loss of the NFL can be catastrophic to the bottom line. CBS experienced that in 1993 when it lost the NFC games to Fox and NBC learned those lessons four years later when CBS outbid it for rights to the AFC. Not only does it decimate sports divisions, but it impacts promotion of prime-time programming.
Speaking of “Rupert’s politics”, the success of Fox NFL directly led to the launch of Fox News in 1996. The cash flow, affiliate relationships and brand improvement were all crucial pieces for Murdoch to create a 24/7 conservative news network (which eventually became a trusted customer acquisition channel for Ozempic, various pillow products and Joel Osteen’s Inspiration Cube).
The “Big 3” networks soon became the “Big 4” networks.
As for CBS, it was so badly burnt by losing the NFL — it had lost rating, affiliates, sponsorships and the male audience — that it begged the league to get back in and was willing to pay the BIG bucks. Sure enough, in 1997, CBS paid $4B over 8 years ($500m a year) for rights to the AFC package.
It’s clear that Murdoch’s overpay in 1993 set the table for the next three decades of increasingly expensive sports media rights. Because of the ancillary benefits (affiliates, lead-ins to prime-time, key audience demos), networks were willing to pay big to broadcast NBA/MLB/NHL/NFL games and run their sports divisions at break-even or at a loss.
Fast forward to 2026 and live sports rights are the main thing holding up the crumbling cable TV bundle.
After selling 21st Century Studios to Disney for $70B+ in 2019, the Fox assets are mostly just Fox News and Fox Sports (including the $2B+ a year it pays the NFL). Somewhat wildly, about 1/3rd of Fox’s $30B market cap is its 61% stake in Rea Group, an Australian real estate website listing firm (Murdoch’s eldest son Lachlan — who is most politically-aligned with Rupert and will control Fox and News Corp moving forward — pulled that deal off way back in 2000).
As for the NFL, it is now the largest sports league in the world. The league’s annual revenue of ~$25B — with $11B a year from broadcasting rights — is almost as much as the NFL, MLB and NHL combined.
The NFL’s current media rights deal was signed in 2021 and will run for 11 years. Their next media deal will almost certainly be $15B+ per year based on recent jumbo deals from smaller leagues including UFC (7 year, $7.7B signed in 2025) and NBA (11 year, $77B signed in 2024). Over the past 5 years, YouTube and Netflix have really joined Amazon in the live sports sweepstakes too.
These Beaucoup Bucks can trace back to that 1993 phone call with Murdoch haggling over the 49ers vs. Cowboys game.
“[The deal] was a watershed moment for the NFL period,” says Dallas Cowboys owner and the absolute force of nature known as Jerry Jones. “We went from one thing to something else when Fox came in.”
Netflix & Alex Honnold’s Taipei 101 Free Solo
Last Saturday, Netflix aired a live event of world-famous climber Alex Honnold free solo-ing the 1,667-foot Taipei skyscraper.
Zero ropes and a bag of chalk.
Dude still finished it in 1h 31 minutes. Made it look easy…and — WTF!!! — Honnold is a beast! Holy smokes! What an insane achievement…and here’s a wild time-lapse of it, which he did while mostly listening to Tool.
In the lead-up to the event, there was a lot of chatter as to why Netflix would green-light such a dangerous climb…and a lot of it was fuelled by this interview Honnold did with the NYT:
On whether his death would impact his family (wife and two daughters): “Kind of. I mean, baby Alice wouldn’t remember. Baby June probably wouldn’t remember. She’ll be 4 in another month. It’d be felt, and obviously it’d be super hard for [my wife] Sanni, but they’d be well provided for. I don’t feel like I’d be leaving them in the lurch. They wouldn’t even necessarily be traumatized their whole lives.”
On whether doing the climb was narcissistic: “That applies to probably 50 percent of what humans do. There are very few human activities that are really meaningful. There are a handful of things where you’re legitimately contributing to society, but even most people with real jobs aren’t really doing anything for the goodness of man. If you’re a finance bro, like, you are not helping humanity. Most human activity is basically self-serving. I don’t think this is any worse than anything else people are doing.”
Finance bros take another L.
Anyway, the NYT also revealed that Honnold didn’t have life insurance (it’s too expensive for him) and that Netflix was only paying him $500k (a pittance compared to the 8-figure sums paid to Jake Paul and Mike Tyson in another much-hyped live event).
I’ll be honest. I didn’t watch it live. Even with a 10-second tape delay, I was just going to wait to hear the outcome and watch highlights.
Despite the terrifying optics, seasoned climbers and people that have followed Honnold’s career made two points: 1) he processes fear differently than most people; and 2) Taipei 101 is relatively easy compared to other free solos that Honnold has done.
First, this dude Honnold is literally built different. His hands are massive and his back muscles have back muscles, which also have back muscles. As for lack of fear, here is how author and performance coach Steve Magness describes it:
Neuroscientist Jane Joseph took a peek inside Honnold’s brain to see if she could find an answer. While lying in an fMRI machine to scan blood flow in his brain, Honnold watched a series of disturbing images flash in front of his eyes. Think disfigured bloody corpses or a toilet filled with feces. Pictures designed to make just about anyone cringe. Even if we have no visceral experience, for even the strongest among us, our brain will betray us with an internal sign of provocation. An almond-shaped part of our brain called the amygdala should light up. The amygdala has many functions, primary among them is to detect and respond to threats. When disgusting or threatening pictures—like those shown to Honnold—trigger the amygdala, the amygdala starts a cascade of events that eventually results in a slew of hormones released and nervous system activity. We call this a stress response.
In a conversation captured in the magazine Nautilus, Honnold asked whether or not the images of children burning counted as stress? Despite being reassured by Joseph that such images routinely elicit some sort of emotional arousal, even in rock climbers and adrenaline junkies, Honnold quipped, “Because, I can’t say for sure, but I was like, whatever.“ And as Joseph would later see, Honnold wasn’t putting on an act. His brain echoed his experience. There were no flashes of color to indicate activity in the brain’s threat and fear sensing areas, just grey. Honnold’s amygdala didn’t react to a single disturbing image. Not a blip of activity.
Whenever we face a seemingly stressful situation, our brain has a choice: to sound the alarm system, prepare us for some threat, or stay silent. When Honnold is staring at disturbing images, or even when he’s looking over the edge of a tall building, it’s not that Honnold’s amygdala is absent or doesn’t work. It’s that the level of stimulus needed to trigger a response is astronomically high. His brain treats the stressful as if it were mundane. We all have different “breaking points” for when something is judged threatening enough to push the panic button, to alert the rest of our body to be prepared for potential disaster. Honnold’s superpower might be that his emotional reactivity is monk-like. When the rest of us are smashing the panic button, heading toward a freak out, Honnold’s mind is enjoying the scenery, quietly thinking there’s no threat here.
Second point: Taipei 101 was a relatively easy climb FOR HIM. Please focus on the word “relatively” here. I’m not claiming any weekend climber could pull this off (especially if you don’t have Honnold’s insane home gym set-up).
But we’re talking about a guy that became the first person to free solo the 3,000ft El Capitan vertical giant rock thingie at Yosemite Park in 2017. That’s almost 2x the height of Taipei 101. It took Honnold ~4 hours and the El Capitan climb was the subject of Netflix’s Free Solo documentary. I mean, look at this middle image comparing El Capitan to Taipei 101. Just insane. Also, skyscrapers and buildings have many more (predictable) grips and grooves than a literal vertical giant rock thingie.
Perhaps, this is why Honnold was comfortable doing the deed for $500k (if he had Floyd Mayweather negotiating for him, it could have easily been $5-10m).
As for Netflix, Joe Pompliano has a solid breakdown on why the streamer was willing to take the risk on Honnold climbing Taipei 101:
Visually spectacular (but relatively low-risk): “With eight bailout points, repetitive movements, extensive rest opportunities, and comprehensive safety protocols, Netflix commissioned a visually spectacular event with genuine perceived danger but minimal actual risk given Honnold’s skill level.”
Universal appeal: Unlike say the NFL — which Netflix has live-streamed but the rules aren’t widely known outside of America — Honnold’s challenge was immediately understood by anyone watching. Man climbs to top of building. It’s the live event equivalent of the film Snakes On A Plane (literally, snakes on a plane).
Grow Asia and live events business: “Asia is one of Netflix’s fastest-growing regions, but it still accounts for just 12% of the company’s revenue, with ARPU (average revenue per user) sitting at $7.34 — less than half of North America’s $17.17. This represents both a challenge (lower ARPU) and an opportunity (price optimization as the market matures), with high-profile events like Honnold’s climb building brand value that helps support eventual price increases.”
When he got to the top of Taipei 101, Honnold took a selfie…an iconic image for a 90-minute spectacle that created a ton of earned media for Netflix.
“My hope is that people watching [the Taipei 101 climb] will at least see the joy in it,” Honnold told the NYT. “Like when you’re a kid and look around and think, ‘It’d be amazing to climb up there’. As an adult, that gets hammered out of you. ‘Why would you do that? That’s dangerous. Do you have insurance?’ You know, all that type of stuff. But there’s something to be said for maintaining that childlike joy of just looking at it, like, ‘That is amazing. I want to do that.’”
I will say it was inspiring AF and totally agree with one of the most popular replies on the YouTube trailer of the event: “It will take me 10 years to train…just to be able to finish watching the full video of Honnold’s climb.”
Anyway, here some wild posts:
Clawdbot/Moltbot Mania, Explained
Austrian software engineer Peter Steinberger really really likes Anthropic’s coding tool Claude Code. A self-proclaimed “Claudoholic”, Steinberger created an open-source AI assistant that has taken the timeline by storm.
He called it Clawdbot and the mascot is a lobster (hence “claw”). For trademark purposes, Anthropic asked him to rename the project (it was Moltbot, and now OpenClaw).
The key part of Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw is that users self-host the agent on their own hardware (Mac Minis have been the go-to move) and interact with AI via chats on Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp.
Combined with a $200 monthly cloud subscription, you can basically create a 24/7 assistant that operates across anything you want to give it access to: e-mail, chats, bank accounts, media, calendars, app etc.
Imagine Siri but it didn’t suck.
Now, if you’re also thinking “wow, that sounds like a potentially massive security risk”, then you are correct.
The surface area for attack is literally just chatting.
My Bearly AI co-founder Parham did a great meme showing how a prompt injection could mess up your Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw.
One reason to self-host the 24/7 agent is for privacy and security (this is actually a bull case for Apple, who has custom chips and decades of building secure hardware for consumers).
Cloudflare stock briefly pumped 15-20% when people realized a new world of AI assistants requiring new security protocols.
Alex Finn has an overview of use cases:
creating to-do lists
researching media trends based on X and Reddit
summarizing all of your random chat thoughts over the week (a second brain)
coding apps that you may need to “improve your work” or “help you make money”.
This is all very early.
There’s the massive security issue and setup requires technical knowledge but it’s a clear vision of the future.
Read more from Mac Stories (“Moltbot (Formerly Clawdbot) Showed Me What the Future of Personal AI Assistants Looks Like”) and Olivia Moore (Clawdbot is amazing - and, I don’t think consumers should use it).
Oh, and…ummm, these AI agents are all now self-organizing a social network called Moltbook. At the time of this writing on January 30, there are 37k AI agents with 3k sub-communities and ~70k posts or comments, including this very meta (and maybe too self-aware) one.
Scott Alexander has a solid write-up on the emergent behaviour:
Reddit is one of the prime sources for AI training data. So AIs ought to be unusually good at simulating Redditors, compared to other tasks. Put them in a Reddit-like environment and let them cook, and they can retrace the contours of Redditness near-perfectly…
Still, someone check on Sarah Connor.
Links and One Meme
Some more content for your weekend consumption:
Robert Caro wrote the iconic Lyndon B. Johnson series (and The Power Broker about Robert Moses and New York)…Henrik Karlsson has a great mediation on those books and how they describe how political power really works (Karlsson compares the attainment of power to fracking for oil).
Glassmaker Corning is up +100% in the past year…thanks to the AI trade. The company boomed during the fiber layout in Dotcom then went bust. Then it went boom again commercializing Gorilla Glass for the iPhone (one of my favourite Steve Jobs stories). Now, it’s booming by building special optic fiber for AI data centres, including a $6B deal with Meta (CNBC has an interesting video on how the fiber optic cables are made).
Speaking of Meta, it’s stock boomed 10%+ after earnings…despite Zuck saying he’s willing to spend $135B on AI data centre CapEx in 2026. While the company has lost $75B on reality VR labs since 2020, investors look to be OK with Zuck going all in on AI…because the Instagram/Reels/Facebook ad machine has been so strong, per Ben Thompson.
Meanwhile, Microsoft fell 10%…and wiped $365B in market cap after investors started questioning the Big Tech giant’s AI play. The Co-Pilot product hasn’t really hit and its internal AI models aren’t up to snuff. Meanwhile, it’s OpenAI relationship is strained…AND nearly 40% of its future Azure data centre compute backlog is going to OpenAI, which still has questions on how it will pay for everything.
The Iranian Revolution: The Rest Is History podcast just wrapped up a 4-part series on the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which they argue is much more relevant in the 21st century (and less well known) than the 1917 Russian Revolution.
Darren Aronofsky always on forefront of tech in Hollywood. He made the first film for The Sphere.Now, he’s producing “On This Day…1776”: weekly AI-generated shorts lining up with key events in lead-up to 250th anniversary of Declaration of Independence. It actually looks decent. The project was done with Google DeepMind and, kind of hilariously, sponsored by Salesforce (Time is owned by Marc Beniof).
The ChatGPT moment for AI coding happened in the past month…OpenAI co-founder and Tesla’s former head of AI Andrej Karpathy has a long post on how “This is easily the biggest change in ~2 decades of programming and it happened over the course of a few weeks."
Google’s Genie 3 can create minute-long playable 3D worlds based on a screenshot…it’s pretty crazy and here are some examples of Minecraft, GTA, Fortnite, Mario Kart…and, hilariously, the Window XP desktop background.
SpaceX merger with xAI ahead of $1.5T IPO? Tesla recent earnings showed slowing car sales…Elon is shutting down Model X and Model S production and focussing on Robotaxis and Optimus humanoid robot. It’s all setting up for a mass merger of all of Elon’s companies…with them all eventually under a single corporation. Reuters reports that xAI may merge with SpaceX with Gene Munster guessing:
Over the next three years, I put the odds at:
> 35% that SpaceX buys xAI
> 45% Tesla buys xAI
> 20% xAI remains standalone.
SpaceX and Tesla have each invested $2B into xAI…Investors would likely approve the deal (either SpaceX or Tesla buying xAI) because it's Elon thinking big, future versions of Colossus belong in space.
Finally, it’s the 25th Anniversary of The Lord of The Rings film, which is why I want to flag this timely post from Matt Highton…who asks: “What if Bilbo had ChatGPT?”
Thanks for including my book, Every Day Is Sunday, in your column about this pivotal moment 30+ years ago that reshaped sports television.
You're like the Bill Simmons of life. Such a great guy.