In this episode of the American Dream Factory Podcast, Nick Smoot sits down with Morgan Linton, co-founder and CTO of Bold Metrics, early Sonos employee, AI builder, and one of the most compelling people experimenting at the edge of artificial intelligence.

Morgan’s path is not linear, which is exactly what makes it valuable. He studied computer engineering and computer science at Carnegie Mellon, then turned down traditional software jobs to become an unpaid intern in the DreamWorks story department. From there, he joined Sonos before the product had launched, when the company had only a few months of runway left, and helped it grow into a billion-dollar company.

That unusual path gave Morgan a rare mix of technical depth, storytelling, taste, sales experience, startup scars, and founder judgment. It also prepared him for the moment we are in now, where the future will not belong only to people who can write code. It will belong to people who can see what the world needs, imagine something better, and use machines to help build it.

Today, Morgan and his wife Dana lead Bold Metrics, a machine learning company helping major apparel brands reduce returns, improve fit, and design clothing around real human body data. Bold Metrics can predict dozens of body measurements from simple inputs, then map those insights to garment data so brands can recommend better sizes and make better products.

Nick and Morgan talk about why that matters in the AI era. As software becomes easier to build, the real moats become harder things: data, momentum, distribution, taste, and trust. Morgan explains why proprietary data is so powerful, why most people underestimate distribution, and why building something useful still requires judgment, creativity, and real-world understanding.

The conversation then moves into the new world of AI-powered software development. Morgan shares how he moved his engineering team into agentic coding workflows and why he believes leaders now have a responsibility to use these tools. They discuss Codex, GPT-5.5, Cursor, Droid from Factory AI, Grok Build, Devin, Graphite, Claude Code, model routing, agentic code review, and the difference between a model and a harness.

Morgan explains that a model is not the whole product. The model is the intelligence. The harness is the system that tells it how to behave, use tools, execute tasks, and interact with the user. The same model can perform very differently depending on the harness around it. That means the future is not just better AI models. It is better combinations of models, harnesses, workflows, and human judgment.

For people just beginning with AI, Morgan’s advice is simple: do not start with a book, a course, or a four-hour tutorial. Start by building. Pick one repetitive thing you do every day and ask an AI coding agent to help you automate it. A spreadsheet process. A report. A tax calculation. A file cleanup task. A simple internal tool. Once you build something useful, you cannot unsee what is happening.

The deepest part of the conversation is not technical. It is human.

Nick frames AI as the next wave of the internet, and Morgan pushes the idea further. This is not just the next wave of the internet. It is the next wave of humanity.

Morgan argues that non-creative work can and will be done by machines at scale. That should not terrify us. It should free us. The computers can do the 996. Humans get to return to the work that makes us human: creativity, love, emotion, imagination, risk, beauty, invention, and solving real problems with people we care about.

This episode is part founder story, part AI field guide, and part hopeful argument for the future. Morgan’s message is clear: stop watching from the sidelines. Start building. Use the tools. Experiment. Automate something small. Follow your curiosity. Take the weird path. Build with taste. Create something useful.