#150 — Did Anthropic Use the Pope as a Marketing Stunt? Ft. Amir Efrati
May 29, 2026 · Listen · All episodes · Chat with the show's AI
Jessica Lessin, Dave Morin, Brit Morin and Sam Lessin debate the tech of the week.
Full transcript (AI-generated — may contain transcription errors):
Jessica: I think we're all gonna start talking to ourselves, in our cars, at our desks. We're just gonna be talking to our AIs
Amir Efrati: And if we see power issues come up, then Trump will say, "Well, you know, you need to pay for it."
Jessica: Did you guys see that the Fed introduced, uh, their latest data about AI adoption growth, and it's actually been flat or linear, nearly flat, for the last three months?
Dave Morin: There were some charts running around yesterday that Claude Code and Codex have, like, flatlined, you know, their daily usage.
Jessica: ElevenLabs is also resurrecting Stan Lee's voice in a partnership with Marvel.
Brit Morin: CTO of Uber basically came out and said it, I mean, this was, had a huge impact, saying, like, he's not seeing the ROI to spend more on AI.
Dave Morin: This is a classic venture capitalist predicting the future, but not technically understanding where it was gonna go at all.
Guest: More or less. Is it no or is it yes? We'll debate the tech that's best. Will you get more or less? Dave and Brit, plus Sam and Jess. Put it all right to the test. More or less.
Brit Morin: Why, hello friends. Welcome to More or Less, and we have a special edition today. Mr. Co-Executive Editor of the Information, Amir Efrati. Amir, welcome to your first More or Less, I believe.
Dave Morin: Amir, what are you doing slumming it with us, man?
Jessica: Yeah, we are not organized like you are.
Amir Efrati: I'm a religious listener, and not just because my boss is part of this podcast.
Dave Morin: Oh, interesting.
Jessica: That's a nice compliment.
Amir Efrati: I would listen to it anyway, so. And I-
Dave Morin: So who's your favorite?
Jessica: Yeah, which one?
Dave Morin: Just, just tell us.
Amir Efrati: D- difficult, difficult to answer, but I, I will give a little shout-out to Brit, because-
Dave Morin: What?
Amir Efrati: ... I believe it was a week, a week or two ago, she highlighted the trend of developers whispering to their AI. So if you go into an office of a startup, you shall see many a-whispering, and we wrote about that, uh, this morning in AI Agenda, which, um-
Dave Morin: Oh, amazing. So wait, was she right or was she wrong?
Jessica: First of all, I was right. Second of all, I was not just right two weeks ago, Amir, I was right a year ago. This was my prediction for the year. I... It might even have been 2024, Jess. Maybe we should go back and check. In December, when I was like, "I think we're all gonna start talking to ourselves, in our cars, at our desks."
Dave Morin: I'm sorry, but you did not predict WhisperFlow and the way that people are talking to them.
Brit Morin: E- exactly. We're gonna have to go back. You predicted we'd be talking to, like, a s- what were those things called? Echo devices. Like, that kind of thing.
Jessica: No, I just thought we'd be talking out loud to our AIs a lot, and, like, I would call Whisper an AI that we talk to.
Dave Morin: This is a classic venture capitalist predicting the future, but not technically understanding where it was gonna go at all.
Jessica: Oh my God. That was a dig, Dave. Ouch.
Amir Efrati: But the prediction of the future is fundamental to what we are as humans and how we communicate.
Brit Morin: Well, guys, as you can tell, Sam is not here, so Amir is... I- as much as I think Brit, Dave, and I bring so much to this pod, I was like, "You know who we need? We need Amir." Because Amir, we think we're in the center of AI. Amir is in the center of the AI infrastructure world, the AI, these models. Like, he has been leading this coverage for the Information for, I don't know, 12 years. Has AI been around for 12 years?
Jessica: I mean, depends who you ask, but yeah. But I do think, I've always thought that journalists would make for the best investors, and we've actually seen many spin out to become investors, like MG Siegler and others. So I'm validating Amir here, 'cause I think he's gonna give way better insight than all of the rest of us.
Dave Morin: Yeah, Amir, you wanna join our firm?
Amir Efrati: Well, I keep thinking about Jack Dorsey.
Brit Morin: You cannot recruit... What are you doing?
Jessica: We don't have a non-solicitation with you, Jess, in this podcast agreement.
Dave Morin: Before we started, he said that I was his favorite, but now that we're, you know, on air, he chose Brit, so now I'm gonna recruit him to Offline Ventures.
Brit Morin: He's just being political, because honestly, he walks into the office and he's always like, "You know, Dave made some good points on the pod today. Dave's on fire on the pod today." You know? So I, I know that you are... Eh, presumably he never brings up Sam. Hmm.
Dave Morin: He's had enough of listening to him around the, around the Information shop, I'm sure.
Amir Efrati: I can't compete on BMI with Sam.
Dave Morin: None of us can. You have to take a lot more peptides, man.
Amir Efrati: I don't take peptides. I don't use Instagram, but I did just buy two gadgets for my kids that I could talk about if we go in that direction later, so.
Dave Morin: Should we talk about the real news?
Brit Morin: Let's talk about the real news. So let, let's pick up, and again, we had, hope everyone had an awesome Memorial Day weekend. We can get into the, some of the fun things in the latter half of the pod I'm sure everyone was up to. But once again, AI occupying primo position. And let's start where we ended. So Dave, I introduced, uh, I talked about an article that recently published in the Information about briefing tech companies about this forthcoming executive AI order. You, before I finished my sentence, called it fake news. And the news wasn't fake in that this meeting actually did happen, but you were right.
Dave Morin: You can say that again.
Brit Morin: That you were right. I have no problem saying that. To, to Sam.
Jessica: She's married to Sam.
Dave Morin: I'm just, no, I know, I'm just modeling it for Brit. Yeah.
Brit Morin: It appears that this thing is very, very much in limbo after some pullback from Trump. But Amir, I know you're actually following, uh, where this is at this moment. So what, what are you seeing, and what do you think is gonna happen here? And then Dave, we'll let you talk a bit about why you predicted this.
Amir Efrati: Well, the, the different factions are, are really interesting, because while you have the, the fight between Anthropic and DOD over these various guardrails that Anthropic was insisting on, it's still the case that much of the national security establishment relies on and loves Anthropic models, and they wanna keep using them, and they want the relationship to be good or at least to have unfettered access to whatever the, the models are. Mythos- And the introduction of Mythos only kind of accelerated or emphasized that, but it's always been the case. And I think people at Anthropic and OpenAI and other labs, they understand, I think fundamentally that, like at the end of the day, the government is going to be involved in one way or the, the other with these, these models. So yes, there's this EO and limbo, maybe not a lot is gonna happen in the near term, but through a combination of this becomes a national security kind of thing, and the growing kind of backlash that you do see in public with kind of trepidation around job loss. You saw it in Rome over the weekend with Pope Leo, who got a tremendous amount of attention for his encyclical on AI. I don't know how many of you read all 43,000 words. I only read maybe 5,000 of the words.
Dave Morin: No. So I had my agent actually use a skill that I built to figure out how, what percentage of the encyclical was written by AI.
Jessica: Guess what percent was written by AI?
Brit Morin: 64%.
Jessica: You think 64, Jess? Is that like a biblical number? Um, Amir, what do you think?
Amir Efrati: You know, I would guess a third.
Dave Morin: 10%.
Jessica: 10.
Amir Efrati: 10%.
Brit Morin: Oh, okay.
Dave Morin: Even so, like is the word of God supposed to be written by AI, or is it all just the word of God?
Jessica: Well, this is God. It's AGI, Dave.
Dave Morin: Yeah.
Jessica: Dun, dun, dun.
Brit Morin: Is that within the margin of error of your bot, Dave? I mean, 'cause 10% like might-
Dave Morin: Well, these, these predictors actually predict the likelihood that it's written by AI. So it's a 10% likelihood that there are parts of it written by AI. Yeah. So it's relatively low.
Brit Morin: Okay. So Amir, you were saying, so do you think this papal... It wasn't a decree. It was a, it, it was a word that I hadn't even heard before.
Amir Efrati: Encyclical. Apparently, uh, they'd been guiding about this for a while, and a lot of people were anticipating it. First time I ever heard of it, um, and it was kind of symbolically important that an Anthropic co-founder was in the room for this in Rome with the Holy See. And so I, I think a lot of the concern-
Dave Morin: I'm surprised by the way that the, the, that Rome got taken advantage of by Anthropic for marketing. Like I think, I think that's like actually the story here.
Amir Efrati: Say, say more, Dave.
Dave Morin: No, I mean, I think that's like, that's-
Jessica: Such a journalist. Such a journalist response. Okay.
Dave Morin: No, it's like-
Jessica: Keep going, Dave
Dave Morin: ... actually the story.
Brit Morin: I'm gonna sit back, guys. My work on this podcast is done.
Dave Morin: It's actually the story-
Jessica: Bye, Dave
Dave Morin: ... because the, the Pope shouldn't have had anybody on stage with him, let alone, you know, one of many of these different researchers, providers. And so I really think that the church was taken advantage of, and it became a marketing moment for Anthropic, not an encyclical moment for the church. I think that's pretty unfortunate because it could've been a, a much more egalitarian, neutral message that could've gotten people to think about these questions. Instead it became marketing for Anthropic.
Amir Efrati: I think it w- it makes sense from the Pope's perspective because at least you're saying, "Well look, a legitimate leader in the field is willing to come here and participate in, you know, this articulation of a broad set of concerns about AI, you know, causing, uh, a lot of pain while it also causes, um, a lot of prosperity." So I could see why he did that.
Brit Morin: But okay, so what's the net-net of where you think this regulatory action may be going broadly?
Amir Efrati: Where we seem to be going is the government eventually, one way or the other, having much deeper participation in the, I don't wanna call it vetting, but certainly getting an early access, early look into what is being developed.
Dave Morin: Isn't that the actual real thing here, which is that these are powerful tools that now have national security implications in that, you know, these more powerful models are-- They're like extremely powerful. They can... We, we're seeing it. They can find tons of bugs. I'm hearing that they can reverse engineer any software binary. And so like software's no longer a closed source. All software will be open source going forward because you can just rip open any binary and reconstruct the software. And so like that means that there's like a massive national security implication to models that are more powerful than what we are currently using at the consumer level. And so it makes total sense that they would want to see them first, right? And so that makes sense to me.
Amir Efrati: Dave, you're saying that closed source models are not closed and anyone can re-engineer them at this point? Is that what you're saying?
Dave Morin: Not models, binaries. So like every app on your computer that is compiled into a binary, that may not matter anymore. Like it used to be that you couldn't open them up and figure out how they were written, right? Um, and so it, it appears as though traditional software may no longer be closed source anymore, which I think is a really interesting thing to think about.
Jessica: Who are the people reviewing these binaries, and like what is their background? Like within the White House.
Dave Morin: What do you mean, what do you mean reviewing the binaries? Like we're, we're confla- we're, we're conflating words. You mean models.
Jessica: The models, sorry. Who at the White House is reviewing the models?
Brit Morin: I mean, it's usually out of the cyber homeland security kind of folks.
Dave Morin: Well, and you have, you know, Sriram who works in the White House from Silicon Valley that runs AI for the administration.
Brit Morin: But he-- But the, the reviews are coming out of like the cyber. I, I feel good. I also think... I mean, the, so the question here, big picture again, very hands-off approach to AI regulation from this administration and all regulation. But the drumbeat of anti-AI, AI sentiment pressure around jobs from voters getting louder and louder, administration facing more pressure to do something. You have Mythos coming out where I think like DoD did get an early look and that's like actually held up as like a somewhat productive- kind of relationship on both sides. But it was, like, a very narrow window. I think they had, like, a week or two ahead of time. And so those are some of the things being ironed out. But I guess we're basically back to where we were, which is very little drumbeat of meaningful regulation, which I just don't think will hold. Like, the question this raises for me is, like, what else will the administration do to appear tough on tech? Because they're going to have to, and the election is getting closer and closer, and Eric Schmidt is getting booed at graduation speeches and-
Dave Morin: Well, so this is actually something else I was gonna bring up, since you bring up the booing at, at graduation speeches. When I, when I initially saw that, I was asking the question, like, "Why is this happening? This is much worse than it appears." We've talked about this on this pod. And then I had this, like, weird feeling that the pattern seemed very similar to something else we've talked about on the pod, uh, quite a bit last year, which is the TikTok ban, and that there's, like, a similar feeling to what's going on with this data center activism, students at graduations booing. I mean, this is the same thing that was going on with Palestine. This was the same thing that, you know, has gone on with many different topics over the last many years. And so I started asking around, I was like, "Is this China?" to a lot of friends that, you know, and folks that I know around Washington and various places. And, and then I saw over the weekend that Mr. Wonderful from "Shark Tank," uh, who's been trying to build a data center in Utah, actually started asking the same question, and then he hired forensic experts to go and factually prove that it is China actually, um, funding all of this opposition in Utah. And, uh, he actually mapped it all out. You can go look on his, um, Twitter and Instagram, and he shares all of the data, and apparently has now shared this with the national security establishment. And so I actually hadn't been thinking about it, maybe to my d- I don't know, strategic detriment or something, but that we're actually up against a much more formidable foe than just, and, you know, Anthropic has used an, a fear-based message to scare the American public. They're all gonna lose their jobs and, you know, et cetera. You're actually dealing with foreign adversary that's trying to divide us on this technology as well, which, you know, makes sense, of course. I guess that makes sense that that's happening. But I think it's kind of more in the water than people realize, and it's now showing up at city council meetings in, like, rural Utah, and that's, like, a, that's a problem.
Brit Morin: Well, we talked at length about what the tech community and tech companies can do to try to combat this and what big a problem it is. I don't think we have to fully open-
Dave Morin: The banned TikTok chapter, because here it is again, like, causing social problems in the United States.
Brit Morin: I mean, guys, like, we went through that, and TikTok's still here, and it's in this pseudo JV, and does anyone really care? I mean, it just sorta-
Dave Morin: Nobody cares-
Brit Morin: Um-
Dave Morin: ... but it's actually damaging our ability to innovate on a major, a, a really important technology tool, right? And so that's a problem. Like, Anthropic is also up against scaling problems where they are unable to scale. Their downtime is really, really bad. You can just go look at their website, and look, they've got demand through the roof, product market fit through the roof, right? And so the prices they have to charge are unbelievably high. They're, like, ridiculous luxury prices for their tokens, and it's all because they need more capacity, right? And so if foreign adversaries are successful in stopping us from being able to build the capacity for frontier models, then that's, like, a real national security issue. So I guess I get it.
Amir Efrati: Well, the Trump administration is unlikely to do something so heavy-handed that it tanks the economy. This is why going after Anthropic was quite in, in calling them a supply chain risk, was quite an interesting thing to do because if Anthropic were to fail, that would have a massive cascading effect on the entire economy, and AI and data centers in general are what is literally keeping this economy going. So I think they're gonna have to find a very specific balance. Maybe they can go after these companies on speech issues and, you know, national security access. We, we have the whole scenario now where there is a model that exists called Mythos. Nobody really has it except for Anthropic, and who knows if the actual real model, as opposed to distilled versions of it that they give access to, will ever kind of come out, and maybe that's the thing that the government gets exclusive access to. But a- as far as the data center story, which is a very local story, I can't see the government federally doing anything, you know, to make life harder. And certainly all of the companies have made very specific pledges around power, and if we see power issues come up, then Trump will say, "Well, you know, you need to pay for it." So, um, yeah, I think that's what's gonna happen.
Jessica: By the way, did you guys see that the Fed introduced, uh, their latest data about AI adoption growth? And it's actually been flat or linear, nearly flat for the last three months. So it's interesting-
Dave Morin: Yeah, there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of data that suggests this, actually
Jessica: ... to see the curve starting to flatten out and, like, where do we go from here? At least in the US, right?
Dave Morin: I think it's just price, personally.
Brit Morin: This is a great next topic.
Dave Morin: Yeah. Go ahead.
Brit Morin: Okay. So Dave, you think it's price?
Dave Morin: Yeah. I mean, I think they hit it. I think that you're seeing signals of this all over the place, although I don't-- It's hard to get really... Maybe you guys have better data. There were some charts running around yesterday that Claude Code and codecs have, like, flatlined, you know, their daily usage. I asked around. I don't think that's actually true, but, you know, there are a bunch of signals that suggest that there's kind of a, a flattening happening right now on a bunch of different metrics, and to me, the only explanation has to be price, right? Like, it's just too expensive to use the frontier models. And we're seeing this in the OpenCloud community where, like, people just, like, they hit a ceiling really fast and they're like, "I'm just not paying for this." And we're also seeing founders that are running massive agentic stacks, and they're swapping out for open source models, like, left, right and sideways because it's just, like, unsustainable for their margins. Like, they just cannot pay these luxury prices.
Brit Morin: Amir, someone on your team, Laura on Amir's team, Laura Bratton, who writes our Applied AI newsletter, spoke to the COO of Uber, right, on this point?
Amir Efrati: CTO.
Brit Morin: Am I getting this wrong? CTO of Uber, where he raised the point... He just basically came out and said it. I mean, this was, had a huge impact. You know, got a lot of attention, saying, like, he's not seeing the ROI to spend more on AI. And we've, we've done a number of stories. Nikesh Arora of Palo Alto probably told us this about 6 months ago, 12 months ago, when DeepSeek came out. He said he was sort of keeping his budget relatively flat, but just getting more for it. Now, that could have changed dramatically. Am I remembering those facts correctly, Amir?
Amir Efrati: Uh, alm- almost. So the CTO almost, almost bragged about blowing through the AI budget in the first few months of the year. Then the COO, over the weekend in a podcast, said that, I think that this led to a bunch of internal meetings, and that he, this is Andrew McDonald, did not see much of a return on this investment yet. But the, the thing is, like, it's way easier to spend on these models, Dave, than to, like, hire more people, and it's something that you can shut off unless you're using it in production very specifically. So I, I'm just curious how you reconcile what you were saying about the cost and everything with just the unprecedented growth that Anthropic has seen and the, like, flippening with OpenAI, where it has just completely overtaken OpenAI from a revenue perspective.
Dave Morin: I think both things can be true, right? Like, these amazing frontier models, like 5.5 and 4.7 are amazing, and they are genuinely incredible at doing a lot of engineering tasks with code in particular. And they're also very good at coordination and project management with agentic harnesses, right? And so then the other thing that's happening, we see this at OpenCloud, is that when you deploy agents into an enterprise, your token consumption goes up sometimes on the order of 3,000%, right? And so you go from having single individuals hitting these AIs 10 times a day to get information to having agents hitting a- the API 100 plus times per day just b- in, like, default mode, let alone doing work on behalf of people, right? And so it makes total sense that you see this parabolic curve happening when, once the agents came into the game because their consumption is just massively larger than humans. But at the same time, I think the article you guys did with Uber, that is reflective of startup CEOs that we're hearing from. It's reflective of CIOs that I'm talking to. Uh, you know, I spoke at Dell World last week, and there were 10,000 people in the audience. I was talking to CIOs all day long. And everybody's asking the same question, which is, "What is the productivity of the tokens?" And yes, it's amazing that we can do work now either by individual humans using AI to do work or individual hu- humans building agents that then do work. And yes, it's easier to build an agent than it is to go do a recruiting loop. But the productivity per token is, like, totally unclear in how to measure that. And so that's kind of the question everybody's asking, so that's why I'm saying, like, both of these things can be true.
Brit Morin: Here's the something I've been wondering, and I, I'm just channeling Sam a little bit because what would be a, a More or Less pod without a, a sort of wild and controversial but not entirely wrong point of view. I am starting to feel, having, like, hooked up Claude Code to various things, as it relates to my own personal productivity, not, like, the productivity of everything across the information or whatever, but my own personal productivity, the number of use cases on a given day is somewhat bounded, right? It can help me with emails, it can help me with scheduling, it can help me with research, right? And I can get a lot of value from it, but, like... I know, Brett, you're shaking your head, but I-- But the people are more like me than you, so let's just-
Jessica: Right now. They're gonna be me soon.
Brit Morin: I'm not sure they are. I, I think... I, and I'm not an AI-
Dave Morin: I know they are
Brit Morin: ... bear. I'm not.
Jessica: They're for sure gonna be me.
Brit Morin: Great.
Amir Efrati: I agree.
Brit Morin: Guys, I haven't even finished my piece.
Dave Morin: That's like being in, like, '84 and saying people aren't gonna use computers. Like, it's just like-
Jessica: Let her finish. I wanna hear your statements, Jess.
Dave Morin: Yeah. G- All right. I'll stay, I'll stay out of this.
Brit Morin: I'm not... This is not, like, an anti-AI diffusion statement, right? I believe AI is gonna transform society.
Dave Morin: Mm-hmm.
Brit Morin: I think the ways... I do. I, I really do. And, and I think the ways that... I'm not letting you guys bully me into a different position. But I think we are at a point-
Dave Morin: Someone's gotta play Sam.
Brit Morin: ... where a lot of new shit is gonna have to be built pretty fast and in a way that normal people to, can use it to realize a lot of these levels. And increasingly, like, what's shifted for me... So I think I totally understand that adoption takes time. Look at the history of the personal computer. Look at the history of the internet. We're in the pre-DARPA Net days. I get all that. But it is also true that work is very defined and segmented by what people do, and I don't think AI is gonna be as transformative to all types of work universally. And I think what we're likely to see is that there are some segments of the working population that are gonna be able to deploy it to a much har- higher ROI and to a future... Or much more adoption, and there might be some that don't. And I actually think that it's very possible we live in a world where over the next 10 years, most people don't need to be paying $20 a month for a personal agent that can do all these amazing things. And even if, you know, in theory their lives would be so much better if they had this personalized health concierge or personalized this or that, they're gonna be like, "I don't really need it." Not because they hate AI or they hate big tech companies, but just, like, the universe of things that they spend their time on in a given day, like, they're making a very rational trade-off. Like, and I think AI will transform work, but it's not gonna transform all things equally. And I think it is this real experience, and I've talked to a lot of people. I mean, you guys are as bot-pilled as anyone on the planet. I'm not saying that as a bad thing.
Dave Morin: Why do you say that? I, I don't know why you would say that.
Jessica: At least we're very self-aware of it.
Brit Morin: I've sort of built everything I need on a daily basis. Like, I actually, you know, spend about X percent of my life doing this, and it's gotten Y percent better. So I think when we're thinking about what AI adoption curves are gonna be looking like, I do believe economics is probably the best way to understand them. And you're right, Dave, that price is probably the best way to understand a flattening. But I think as we continue, we can't actually just acknowledge that the utility isn't going to be as transformative or as ROI positive universally, and I think that's gonna look wildly different. And I think there are gonna be segments of the population where it's totally rational for them to not have a bot be the center of their lives. I really believe that.
Jessica: Okay, here's my take. I hear what you're saying. I have a lot of normie friends too. I'm from Texas. And I think two things. One, like, there are so many ways I use AI and have been using agents outside of normal chatbot, like, you know, prompting, that normal people have no idea about and I think will want to adopt. Like, I have created financial dashboards for our family. I understand, like, down to the penny-
Brit Morin: Yeah, but most-
Jessica: ... our levels
Brit Morin: ... people don't manage their finances as actively.
Jessica: Uh-huh. The number of people that, like, look at their bank accounts and just want a bank account update of, like... Like, literally money is the number one thing people care about.
Dave Morin: ChatGPT just launched a literal mode for this.
Brit Morin: You can use, like, plain old Gmail, or you could use Superhuman, or you could use all these productivity-enhancing things.
Jessica: But, like, you have to have the context on the person is the thing. And, like, like, I took my daughter to Legoland this past weekend. It knew things about her already from all the conversations and context that I have with my-
Brit Morin: Look, I very candidly think most people don't care. I really do.
Jessica: Okay. Do moms and parents not care about summer camp signups, about all the school emails and the things they need to do? Like, moms will always pay $20 a month if, if, like, literally 2% of their mental load gets shaved off. Then the health thing you talked about.
Brit Morin: But they don't.
Jessica: Then finances.
Brit Morin: Like, this isn't-
Jessica: And then... Wait, wait, wait. I'm not done. I have two more points. One is I think that the communication layer that has not been invented yet by agentic AI and the ability for, like, my agent to talk to your agent to, like, not bother you, but I just need a quick answer on something. Maybe it's about scheduling the next More or Less or something else. Like, there's so much interesting stuff to think about there. When my son's teacher can, like, have a full personality profile on him based on what my agent knows about what's been happening with him behind the scenes over the last month, so she knows why he's being quiet in school, and she can, like, treat him differently at school. Like, that stuff is going to be transformative. And the last thing I'll say is I, I do agree with you that this is, like, a lot of friction for a lot of people, and they don't wanna spend their day just, like, with an AI agent and app. I think a lot of it's gonna be invisible. Like, you're gonna be adding things to your shopping cart when you're shopping, and you're not gonna realize AI's running in the background figuring out the next thing to show you to buy. Um, it's like TikTok is invisible with the AI, and Meta has invisible algorithms.
Brit Morin: Yeah, but I'm not talking about that. Like, I just think history is full of example. Like, this is a f- I'm pressing this 'cause this is a fundamental mistake I think the technology industry makes, that every human on the planet wants to march towards efficiency. And I think just because a better product exists, even if it was free, some people just wouldn't adopt it. I don't think that building the best free product guarantees adoption. Like, I could streamline my school communications in so many ways. Look, I, I think that's the fundamental thing. Like, and tech people assume that it's more efficient and cost-effective, people will just adopt it. And it turns out people make a variety of choices that can range from very personalized choices for a whole lot of reasons. And there is a general march of fundamentally useful tools and technologies having wider penetration in society through different channels. But, like, there... I get as m- I have three kids. I get as many school communications as the rest of them. I could make a million choices based on existing technology about how to be better on top of it, and I choose not to. And I just don't... Like, I'm not optimizing towards that. So I think we have to be very careful to assume that just because something is technologically possible and getting easier and easier, that people will naturally adopt it. Like, humans make a bunch of different choices for a whole lot of reasons, and I think this is a very core issue. And, you know, when I hear OpenAI say something like, "Who wouldn't want this amazing doctor in their pocket for all of this kind of stuff?" I think some people want that, and some people would say You know what? I actually still prefer to talk to a human. Or who wouldn't want a Pernuvo body scan of your... Like, there are just different types of people who want different things, and the, the AI industry needs to, like, learn this fast, in my opinion.
Dave Morin: Look, I agree with you. There's always been this problem in Silicon Valley, which is that the narrative gets way out ahead of the actual, like, user experiences, the, the customer experiences. Like, the, the obsession with the technology goes, like, a million years ahead of where, or 10 years ahead usually, of where reality actually is. And the, the difference between today and a world where more people are actually using these tools to not just make their life more efficient, but perhaps have more fun, more delight in their life, is usually user experience. And Apple, one of the number one companies on the planet, is proof of this, right? Like, the way that you create great technology experiences in people's lives is by actually spending the long haul on creating simple, usable, delightful technology that actually can fit into people's very busy lives that you're absolutely right about. Like, people don't care about technology. They care about their family. They care about their emotional state every day. They care about, you know, making money to put food on the table. They care about going on some travel. Like, they care about, like, things we all universally care about, and the only way that you're gonna fit into that is by actually doing the hard work of user experience. This is actually the number one thing that's driving me absolutely crazy in AI right now, is that nobody uses this stuff. Nobody uses, you know, Claude Code and Codex in the grand scheme of the internet. There's, like, single-digit millions of people using it. They're incredibly technical. They're like computers from 1984 that you have to, like, literally compile the kernel and, like, talk to it in, like, this weird language. Like, it's still super, super hard to use, and those of us that have spent the time to, like, tinker with it and figure it out, like, we're all like, "This is awesome." Like, "It's changing the way that I work," and actually maybe work is going to be completely different years from now. I fully understand this. It's like I, I've actually spent most of my career working in user experience. Like, the thing I am good at is user experience and design and product, and, like, that's actually why I'm passionate about it, 'cause I wanna go spend the next five to 10 years of my life working on agents, 'cause I do think that just like computers, somebody had to go on that mission and try to figure out how to make it usable for everyone. But, like, the broad conversation in Silicon Valley is like, because there's this, like, new narrative game, and I think it's partially that, like, the new generation grew up with the internet, they, like, massively amplify each other into these, like, crazy narrative spirals. You kind of have this, like, narrative gloss over the whole thing right now, and everybody's just trying to, like, out-narrative each other about their, like, new way, their new take on the current version of the technology, when, like, guys, we really need to go on a serious user experience, um , odyssey to figure out how to get this stuff to more people.
Brit Morin: Like, I just also think, and maybe this is putting a finer point on it, so thank you guys for indulging me in this, but, like, not everyone wants to productivity max.
Dave Morin: I'm not talking about productivity, Jess. I'm actually just talking about delight in your life. Like, it's like most computers suck to use.
Brit Morin: Not just UX has to change. Uh, we need entire new use cases, because right now these things are geared towards productivity maxing.
Dave Morin: Yeah, but that's like, that's an artifact of the generation is what I'm saying, is that, like, this generation is obsessed with token maxing, productivity maxing, like, looks maxing. Like, it's all about, like, what can I optimize, right?
Jessica: Well, guys, Amir should jump in, by the way.
Brit Morin: Well, but I think it's really important because I think this is not... I think it's really important. It, it's not just a question, Dave, of, like, do you build a better UX on the thing? It's like, what are you even building?
Dave Morin: Well, Jess, like, I guess that's what I'm saying is I both agree with you, but I also think that computers suck, and they waste an enormous amount of people's time in today's world. Like, I'm not talking about AI. I am talking about the Mac that you are talking to me on. I'm talking about the iPhone that you use or the Android that you use. These things are awful. They take an enormous amount of time and energy away from people that could otherwise be going towards human relationships, their friends, the work that they're actually trying to do. Like, oftentimes pen and paper are better than trying to design something on a computer today. And so I guess that's to me, like, the great thing about AI is that we can now just talk to computers with English, and we're still trying to figure out how to do that in an effective way and help everybody else do that in an effective way. But, like, to me, that's kind of the, the thing we're trying to get to is that computers are no, no longer suck in our lives and waste huge amounts of time, and it's not even about productivity maxing. It's actually about getting the time that is being wasted out of people's lives and making computers a more productive citizen in society, and that's, like, the exciting thing about AI to me. It's not the productivity maxing thing. But the way we have to get there is through design and user experience and, like, improving the way that this stuff works. And so anyway, that's, like, kind of my take on it, and Amir, you should talk.
Amir Efrati: I agree with a lot of what was said. I, I always think back to the question of, like, how big is a market? I'm sort of responding to Jessica's earlier comments. And for a long time people were like, "Oh, you know, Google's best days are behind it, and it's not gonna grow. Uh, it's not gonna accelerate growth, and, you know, the market is X big." And it was, like, 10 times bigger than anyone thought. I think it was the same for a lot of companies. If I'm not mistaken, Jess, you wrote a whole column about this, like, seven years ago. And so I think in this case, just like, um, Dave was saying and, and, and Brit too, the-- we are living in the future here in Silicon Valley. We're like at 1% penetration of what is the market in terms of what you can currently do with these tools. Only 1% of the people are actually doing it. We're still only like 12 or 24 months out from like past, you know, the point where you were still telling people, "Oh, you can put your blood work into this, and it will actually give you extremely useful information." And I realize, Jess, you're saying not everyone needs that or wants that, but people still have no clue what they can do. So bridging back to Dave's point, there is still a discovery problem. It will be solved over time, I'm sure. Maybe it's already being solved, but the market is enormous and-
Dave Morin: No, it's gonna take years, man. It's gonna take like literally 10 years.
Brit Morin: I'm not anti... I started by saying AI is gonna transform society and how we live and work, right? I think the market for these like all-encompassing personal agents is very unclear. And I think the, the sort of mentality of like, "Look at all the things that I do as a power user, therefore the market size is X," is not actually how this technology rolls out. I mean, what percentage of people in Ameri- America, the United States, even use Google Docs?
Dave Morin: I think a lot, actually.
Brit Morin: Uh, I'm not... I don't think so, actually.
Amir Efrati: You're, you're talking about agents. I view these things right now, I'm not in like agent land like the rest of you might be, but I still view these things as... That a friend who can like help solve problems, can give you ideas for how to solve problems, whether it's being your car mechanic or plumber or anything else, or doctor, and to just help you measure things that you never could before. And we're, we're in this environment where a lot of white collar industries are, you know, shrinking, having layoffs. You talk to people who are left at these companies, they are being forced to think about how to be, you know, more efficient and use these tools like never before. So every conversation, I'm sure you have the same conversations every weekend, are very, very illuminating. You have like an advertising ex- executive who's like, "I had no idea I could measure all this data that we have to create, you know, a, a dashboard or create like a report telling..." You know, like-
Dave Morin: I don't go a day without hearing this, Amir. Like, it's like amazing. And I think like-
Brit Morin: But I also hear, "Yeah, I built a bunch of stuff and I'm good for now."
Dave Morin: I guess I... Your job is to be skeptical.
Brit Morin: Well, usually Amir is way more skeptical than I am.
Dave Morin: But like, we're also running-- We're on a ins- super insider podcast, and like part of what we do in Silicon Valley is work through these things, right? Like, we talk about them to try to figure out like how to take this technology further. How do we make this tool better? Can we fit it? And sometimes the technologies don't fit, right? Like crypto tried to fit itself into a lot of different use cases that it turned out to be absolutely terrible for, and like normal databases were just fine. And that might be the case for agents too, but I'm also hearing every single day the same thing that Amir is hearing, which is like literally every day I have somebody, usually they're like pretty normal, small business owner that's like, "Oh my God, I didn't know that like I could load in 20 years of legal files into an agent." And like, I've been trying to... Like literally this weekend I was on a dad's trip in Zion with UTVs, and there were some guys I never met before, and this guy's like, doesn't work in tech, and he's just like, "I've had this 20-year legal problem that I could never solve, and I uploaded all of my, uh, legal docs and all the emails for, from 20 years of negotiation, and I'm literally gonna be able to solve this with the counterparty next week on Tuesday, because we can now finally see where it all connects and it's like, it's like reducing the confusion." And like that's amazing for him.
Brit Morin: I don't know how we've gotten to a point of this con- Sure, that's great, and he'll come up with a bunch more things, and he'll use increasingly open source models. But he is a lawyer. That is a very specific job.
Dave Morin: No, no, he's not a lawyer. He's just a, he's just a real estate... He was j- he's like a real estate professional that like works in commercial real estate, and he had this like, this deal that had gone on for... You know, it was a local deal down in Southern California, like in the, you know, counties around San Diego, and like it's just, you know, normal, normal work, right?
Brit Morin: Yeah. I just don't think that moms across America are gonna have personal agents. I don't. I don't, I think-
Jessica: Okay, what are we wagering?
Dave Morin: Brit just like disagrees.
Jessica: What are we wagering?
Dave Morin: Yeah, you need to make a bet on this.
Jessica: Okay. What percentage a year from now of-
Brit Morin: I can't make bets, unfortunately.
Jessica: Amir, you want in?
Dave Morin: Why can't you make bets?
Jessica: 'Cause you guys are journalists? What? You never use Polymarket? Come on.
Brit Morin: Guys, you have to go soon. We're moving on time. But also, like it's a pointless bet because you'll just redefine agent.
Dave Morin: Agents are gonna be the thing for a long time, Jess. Like it's gonna take... It's like- We're gonna be talking about agents like we talk about computers, you know? It's gonna be like computers
Brit Morin: My just fundamental point is, like, we cannot assume that the goal is more productivity for everyone.
Dave Morin: No, I agree.
Brit Morin: We just can't. There are fields and people where it is, but this technology is being designed by people who think that, and I think that could be its undoing. What's going on, Bri? You got any pop culture? I got a book recommendation.
Dave Morin: I just drove 400 miles through Zion in a UTV with... You know, I've never done this before, and I had never even considered doing it, but a friend of mine does this dad's trip every couple of years and invited me to go, and it's, like, the most dusty, dirty, crazy experience, but these four-person UTVs are kind of a magic technology. Like, you can go 50 miles an hour across the desert in super bumpy terrain, and you barely feel the terrain. It's like you're floating. And it was a really cool experience that, you know, is, like, pretty accessible. You go to Zion, go to the national park, rent one of these things, and go camping. You know, we pitched our own tents. It was a great experience for my boys. I kinda couldn't recommend it more. It's very challenging, very difficult, like, hard to be j- you know, full of dust every day, but, you know, it was really neat, so.
Jessica: Dave went offline.
Brit Morin: And to me when I went to Burning Man.
Jessica: Very offline.
Brit Morin: Yes, and-
Dave Morin: Oh, yeah, they actually-
Brit Morin: ... I went-
Jessica: I went offline too
Dave Morin: ... they also took our, they took our phones away, and made us put our phones away for the whole weekend, so everybody was completely off the grid. And it just reminded me, it took me, like, the whole first day to stop thinking about some things I had been reading on the internet. It, it's just, you know, we all talk about this all the time, but there is really something about truly getting off the internet and detoxing from it, and I think we all talk about it but don't actually do it. And so I was thinking about that a lot, that, you know, we've talked about it a lot on the pod, but now that you can generate anything you want on the internet for free, and that, like, the internet's just, like, full of infinity content, I do think actually these offline, truly offline experiences, like, are gonna become extremely valuable. Like, I, I don't know. I could not recommend it more, so it was great.
Jessica: I'll bridge from that back to the online sort of, which is, you know, there's been a lot of news this week with AI entertainment. So Suno raised a round of, like, 5 billion. ElevenLabs has these, all these new launches of new music verticals, um, where the track can actually change genres mid-song. So you can, like, start listening to a song with pop, and then it moves to rock, then it can go to, like, country, in the same, with the same lyric base. And ElevenLabs is also resurrecting Stan Lee's voice in a partnership with Marvel, which is, you know, kind of the second big one after Val Kilmer has licensed his voice for movies. And, and then Steven Spielberg, you know, Cannes happening over in Europe, and Steven Spielberg is, like, warning Hollywood, like, "Guys, you have to make original stories or, like, this industry's toast." And, and so I think that, you know, Steven Spielberg saying it is like Steve Jobs saying it in, in tech and, and I think that, you know, we, we all know this is happening to the entertainment industry, but it's like the... People are finally, I think, trying to take it seriously, and yet there's this binary thing happening where, like, AI Canva is happening in Suno and ElevenLabs' world. And so I'm, I'm fascinated by the sort of the, the binary nature of AI entertainment and original films. And then I'll end with two original films I did watch this weekend while Dave was offline and I had two nights to myself. One was called Remarkably Bright Creatures, Sally Field on Netflix, so good. And the other is an A24 film on Apple TV called Eternity, where this woman had two different husbands in her lifetime, and then they all die, and she has to choose who she's spending eternity with. I think you'd like it, Jess.
Dave Morin: You better choose me.
Brit Morin: Yeah. I have one recommendation and a story. But Amir, do you... My story-
Amir Efrati: I wanna hear your Mark Rober story, yeah
Brit Morin: ... which will be at the end, like the third thing, so-
Amir Efrati: Tell, tell the story.
Jessica: Are you meeting him? Do we know him? Is he coming on the pod?
Brit Morin: First- ... I highly recommend a story called Yesteryear. Now, this is a novel, and when I heard what this novel is, was about, I did not think I would enjoy this novel because it's about a tradwife, of which I am quite far from one, um-
Dave Morin: I don't know. You might be kind of a Silicon Valley tradwife.
Brit Morin: You know, guys, I got no sour- a French press
Dave Morin: No, what that means in Silicon Valley is that you're working
Brit Morin: ... today. I have a French press. No, but in my house-
Dave Morin: You're like, you know, that's, like, the way you do it around this town.
Brit Morin: I don't even think there is a way anymore, but that's actually this book, so I was, like, skeptical. But I saw it, and I was reading the Information Summer Books recommendation. I was triangulating all these lists. I'm like, "Yesteryear is on all of them." So I start reading it, and I cannot put this book down. I'm planning my evening in my head, and I'm like, "I'm gonna read some Yesteryear." Like I am right now 'cause, you know, I'm so engaged in this podcast. But it, so the premise is, of course, a tradwife who is a huge influencer, um, with a huge following. But the twist, which sounds corny, but I promise you it's not, is that she gets transported back to the 1800s. But it is not weird, and I really have felt that this book captures, like, the experience of being a woman better than anything else I've ever read. So I highly, highly recommend it. Um, secondly, Yesteryear, and I can't reveal too much because I, I will be writing about this, but I did get to go to Crunch Labs yesterday and meet the amazing Mark Rober and spend some time with him, and he is wonderful. For those of you who don't have parents in school, Mark is, uh, an amazing YouTuber who has kindled kids' love of science through his very, very wacky, outrageous experiments that are crazy. He's been doing one video a month since, I believe, 2015. I, uh, first upon hearing that at the end of the day, well, like, they were waiting for parent pickup, they showed Our kids, Mark Rober on YouTube, like had a mini conniption that they, they were like throwing up YouTube videos waiting for the bus. And then after watching them, I kinda like got it. So anyway, I had an amazing experience, which I will be writing about. But at, for those of you who know, one of the things if you visit CrunchLabs, which is top secret so I can't tell you where it is, is you shoot a tennis ball cannon. And if you hit the bullseye, you get $10,000. Four people in history have done this.
Guest: No you didn't.
Brit Morin: Until yesterday-
Guest: Yay
Brit Morin: ... when I hit the bullseye. Woo!
Guest: Editors play-
Brit Morin: Now
Guest: ... All I Do Is Win-
Brit Morin: The video-
Guest: ... soundtrack right now, please. Okay
Brit Morin: ... the video is forthcoming because we have the video of my reaction, to which Mark just like falls to the floor and it's hilarious. We will get the video of the shot. For those of you ready to like wring my neck about journalistic ethics, I will be not ac- I will not be accepting the money, so have no fear. But it was really... I'm sure, I'm sure I can donate it to something else. I'll work with the CrunchLab team to find something. I don't know. That would create more problems. We're trying to-
Amir Efrati: Right, we write about-
Brit Morin: ... absolve the journalistic, uh-
Amir Efrati: We write about OpenCall. We can't, we can't contribute
Brit Morin: ... um, but anyway, I, it's kinda cool. I mean, it's obviously like completely dumb luck. Al- although I have taken a few like shooting classes, and I did remember like you like pause your heartbeat. You ta- you not pause your heartbeat, you like tune into your heartbeat and take a deep breath. So I had a like some fundamental skill. My kids think I'm the coolest person in the world, which is important, and number five in history, you're looking at her. We do not need to plug Mark Rober on this podcast. But, um, more cool things coming from him, and that was like a pretty wild experience, and just the nicest guy who really has the stoke for kids loving problem-solving and science. So it's great. So anyway, okay guys, nothing happened on this pod. No fireworks, no energy, same old topics. I think it was Amir. Amir, we're gonna have you back.
Amir Efrati: I hope you didn't-
Brit Morin: Yeah, Amir-
Amir Efrati: ... feel like me-
Brit Morin: ... you're gonna have you back
Amir Efrati: ... getting up on your desk. I'm, I hope you feel better.
Brit Morin: No, I, I can handle it, believe me. Um, I think my husband's gonna be very proud of me, so that's what I'm in it for. Um, and it was great to be here with you all. So we will see you again. I, next week I might have a conflict, I might not. I have to look at my calendar. But-
Guest: Maybe Amir will come back
Brit Morin: ... some com- if, if I have a conflict, Amir has the conflict. But some combination of friendly faces will be here next week for, maybe Mark Rober, maybe. No, not that.
Guest: No, it's happening.
Brit Morin: Um, for another episode of More or Less. Bye.
Guest: Bye, guys. If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a virtual high five by rating it and reviewing it on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Find more information about each episode in the show notes and follow us on social media by searching for @moreorless, @davemorin, @lesson, @jlesson, and as for me, I'm @brit. See you guys next time