AI-generated — may contain transcription errors.

Jessica: OpenRouter was in acquisition talks way back when Stripe has bought OpenRouter.

Brit Morin: For less than we thought.

Sam Lessin: We thought it was good, though.

Brit Morin: Seven and a half.

Dave Morin: I think this is actually the beginning of Groq being the third foundation lab that is truly in the game.

Jessica: Jason Kelsey teamed up with Liquid Death on a very funny ad, which it basically begins with the premise that data centers are sucking all the water, therefore drastically harming society. I don't think we're gonna ban construction of data centers in this country, but we might. I think the backlash is, like, way more of an issue than-

Dave Morin: But what I'm trying to say, Jess, is that the backlash is not about the data centers. The backlash is about that AI sucks.

Guest: More or less. Is it no or is it yes. We'll debate the tech that's best. When we get more or less. Dave and Brit plus Sam and Jess put it all right to the test. More or less.

Jessica: Why hello friends. Welcome to More or Less, OG edition. The OG gang is here.

Dave Morin: We're back.

Jessica: But can we start by applauding Sam for his episode last week? I mean, way to go, Sam.

Sam Lessin: I had a lot of fun with the replacement killers.

Jessica: You prepared. I was so proud of you that you prepared.

Sam Lessin: No, I didn't prepare.

Brit Morin: First of all, he prepared maybe too much. There were six people or something on this pod. It was like the most people I've ever heard on a pod.

Sam Lessin: I will do that six-person rapid fire in a wet... I literally was soaking wet and covered in the sand because I literally had, I had a boating mishap on the way to record the pod. It was g- I had a lot of fun. My only complaint was I didn't get to do any internet shopping 'cause I actually had to pay attention.

Brit Morin: It's hard to host.

Jessica: But Sam, can I give you a really genuine compliment? I, I'm gonna give you one and then we're just gonna, like, then all bets are off.

Brit Morin: Well, yeah, after you give a compliment, I wanna give one complaint, but go ahead.

Jessica: I interview people for a living, which honestly also involves introducing them, and I hate introducing people because you're either in, like, resume zone or, like, it's so hard to find a concise way that expresses both their significance, their title, but also your relationship to them, which will then inform this entire conversation, and you, like, nailed it with all six people.

Sam Lessin: Boom.

Jessica: I really was very impressed. I always prepare for these interviews and then I'm like, "Shit, how am I gonna introduce this person in a way that isn't, like, boilerplate, but isn't pretending we're best friends?" And even those of you, you're very close to some of those people.

Sam Lessin: The key is to actually just have your best friends on.

Jessica: Yes. It was, it was great.

Brit Morin: He introduced them quickly 'cause there were six of them.

Jessica: Yes, and you were concise.

Sam Lessin: It turns out when I try, I'm not so bad at this.

Brit Morin: My only complaint, Sam, is that you can't have people with the same name on the same pod. It gets very confusing. I'm like, "Scott who?" And all men's voices are sounding the same to me, and I'm like, "Who's saying what?" It's just crazy. There's six people. Everyone's called Scott.

Sam Lessin: Here's the funny thing. So I now have my Sam bot infrastructure, has the ability to run Twitter ads for me. So I messaged it. I was like, "Hey, I had all these guests on. Pull some good quotes from them and, like, just spend 500 bucks and promote it on Twitter." And it's really funny because my totally automated pipeline for doing this did a very good job, but it actually confused the Scotts, right? So it basically put the picture in a thing of Scott Belsky, and then had a quote, uh, from Scott Stanford. So you're not alone.

Brit Morin: I'm telling you.

Sam Lessin: That is also a Claude, a Claude shortcoming when you have guests with the same name.

Jessica: Yeah. Well, also, I listened to it on 2X, which just, like, really changes everyone's voice. And so I was like, "I think that's a modified Belsky. I think that sounds Wolfesque." So anyway, great job, Sam. You're up every four weeks now. No, just kidding.

Sam Lessin: Great. Happy to do it.

Jessica: Guys, we are back in the Bay, back to school, back to big headlines and news. We have a jam-packed episode.

Brit Morin: Back to wearing sweaters. Ugh.

Jessica: I know.

Brit Morin: It's August and I'm in a sweater. This is the worst.

Jessica: I got on a Zoom today in a sweater and someone said, "Oh, you're back in San Francisco." I said, yes.

Brit Morin: Yeah, it's so depressing.

Jessica: We've got the Stripe OpenRouter deal. We have major AI updates. We have a venture capitalist getting probed for conflicts of interest story.

Brit Morin: Well, can you even call them a venture capitalist?

Sam Lessin: No conflict, no interests.

Jessica: Oh, my goodness. Okay. Well, we'll preview that. We also just have y- the usual smattering of updates, including-

Brit Morin: Jason Kelsey's newest ad we need to talk about as well. Yeah, so some of, some pop culture meets tech updates at the end.

Jessica: But guys, this is it. This is it. Pop culture corner is really AI corner, is really data center corner. It's happening.

Brit Morin: That's so gross.

Jessica: We've reached the convergence.

Brit Morin: Ugh.

Jessica: Okay. Speaking of reaching things, I'm not sure if you caught, Stripe has declared, "We have reached AGI." Did you guys see it?

Sam Lessin: I did. Well, the singularity.

Brit Morin: The singularity.

Jessica: Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. The singularity.

Brit Morin: So different, Jess.

Dave Morin: They declared that in January.

Brit Morin: But they brought it up again.

Dave Morin: Yeah, they had to lick the cookie, right?

Jessica: Upon a deal that close listeners to this podcast may have heard some things, but as the information was the first to report that OpenRouter was in acquisition talks way back when Stripe- ... has bought OpenRouter

Dave Morin: For less than we thought.

Sam Lessin: We thought it was good, though.

Dave Morin: Seven and a half.

Jessica: For 7.5 billion. The Information has their revenue, which I meant to pull up before this pod, but sometimes you gotta work.

Sam Lessin: Well, the story I heard is that once the, the Stripe thing got... Like, people started talking about the deal, OpenRouter volume tripled. Because basically, like, no one had heard of it, but, like, literally just talking about the deal was the greatest marketing they ever had, and so there's a funny dynamic around that.

Jessica: That actually explains a little bit.

Sam Lessin: It's gonna be really interesting how this hap- everyone's got a router. Ramp's got a router. Everyone's got a... It's too easy to make a router.

Dave Morin: Yeah. I already started building a new router 'cause I don't want my tokens going through Stripe now.

Sam Lessin: For what it's worth, Dave, I got a router for you that actually is both open source and fully private. We just put-

Dave Morin: Perfect

Sam Lessin: ... a little bit of money into it.

Dave Morin: So they can't really call it OpenRouter anymore.

Sam Lessin: It's Closed Router.

Dave Morin: I want to invest.

Sam Lessin: Yeah, you actually totally can. I just put a s- angel check in.

Dave Morin: All right, cool.

Jessica: Okay. I want this brilliant hive mind-

Dave Morin: I'm getting deals done here, Jess

Jessica: Well, if they're done here, that way I get to at least write about them.

Dave Morin: And do I get any credit at all for raising OpenRouter's price by hearing about it first? But I think it, the price went down. You reported it was 10 billion, Dave, and it ended at 7.5.

Jessica: Guys, the devil is in the pricing details. OpenRouter was bought, a young, fast-growing AI startup, for a shit ton of money.

Sam Lessin: Seven times the Instagram acquisition price. That's where we've come.

Dave Morin: That's actually the real story here, which is that this stuff just clears the deck, and everyone's like, "Eh."

Sam Lessin: Eh, $7 billion acquisition.

Dave Morin: Just another 7 billion. Don't you think there's gonna be a, a million more of these, especially once we have the IPOs running from Anthropic and OpenAI? Yeah, I mean, that's the only way that these guys can grow.

Sam Lessin: Well, they also just, like, it's just a percentage of valuation. There's no sense to any of these numbers. It's just, like, drags it all around at the same time.

Dave Morin: Yeah. How much cash is involved in this? Do we know? 6 billion, to the investors. No, cash or stock? Oh, I thought it was cash.

Jessica: It's a mix. It's a mix. It's a mix.

Sam Lessin: It doesn't matter. Stripe is effectively liquid.

Jessica: Well, it is an interesting that Stripe is private, and we had a very smart episode that went, examined that in depth a couple episodes back. I want winners and losers from you guys. You're already jumping ahead by talking about the fact there's so much competition that, that could render them and this acquisition looking stupid, but who wins, who loses for this? What does this mean for Anthropic and OpenAI, right? For tho- If you are listening to this pod and you don't know what OpenRouter is, I don't know what you are. But basically, it is a gateway to helping you pick the right model for the right task, thereby potentially weaning t- any one frontier model off monopoly power.

Dave Morin: Well, and cutting your costs.

Sam Lessin: It's not even that. It's just this very simple way to use any model. It's that's what Sam's right. Like, it's not even that complicated. All it is is you take the key and we replace the key with their key, and they can, like, multiplex it to multiple backends. It's incredibly simple.

Jessica: Guys, we just need to think of the listener here for a second and stop talking for each other and start putting some structure to this, right? So what I'm hearing, Sam and Dave, is you think this technology is commoditized, and this is a bad acquisition for Stripe. Good or bad for Stripe, Sam and Dave, and Brit?

Dave Morin: It's fine.

Jessica: But why are you saying that? You just poo-pooed this technology.

Sam Lessin: There's no technology.

Dave Morin: It's not technology. Yeah.

Sam Lessin: It's just, like, a marketing and, like, endpoint that got popular, and for instance, OpenClaus, et cetera, helped get popular, and that's useful. It's distribution in, like, a very technical zone. There's no technology that matters.

Dave Morin: Is this, like, the equivalent of a TBPN acquisition where it's, like, someone paid a lot-

Sam Lessin: No

Dave Morin: ... for something that's, that's, like, kind of not really worth that much?

Jessica: Guys, I just wanna point out TITV has more followers than TBPN on YouTube, okay? I said it. Now I'm moving on.

Sam Lessin: Look, here's the way to, I would think about it, which is, look, technologically, there's nothing important here. It's actually kind of funny and scary because they're just, like, centralizing all the data. They get a look at all the requests. So you get a huge request pile coming through, which is actually quite valuable from a data acquisition perspective, but distribution's hard. Ramp announced a router, right? Everyone's gonna announce a router. Stripe could've done their own router from zero, and, like, it'd be fine. Like, people already use Stripe infrastructure for lots of stuff. They'd probably build a pretty good one. Like, it's not a hard thing to build. But honestly, just turning on a bunch of volume from zero is useful. I said this when we first brought up the OpenRouter Stripe thing. I was like, "I actually really like this." Like, I think Stripe kind of missed an opportunity to be a much more important company with a bunch of these types of things. And, like, the idea that, yeah, we'll route a bunch of money payments, and now we'll route a bunch of tokens around, and we can be infrastructure light, but kind of the key layer, it makes a lot of sense for them. So, like, I think it's a good move by them, and I don't think the price matters. The price, I'm sure, is just driven by what other people would pay for it.

Jessica: So it's a good move in terms of distribution, but they should expect a lot of competition. Uh, Sam, I think you say this a lot, and I think it's true, and investors will always come up to me, and they're like, "You and I are in the same business. We just monetize it differently." Finance is about information. Media is about information. And I think AI is, like, the, just illustrating this to the next level, and if you have Stripe as a payments infrastructure layering on, I mean, literally AI intelligence, but also information about how to optimize those payments, I don't know, I think it makes sense. I also think they communicated it very well, to be honest. Their blog posts were s- good.

Sam Lessin: Look, the mere narrative of we're Stripe, and in this AI age, we do more than clear credit card transactions, is, like, a very good narrative expansion for them, and they're super profitable, so, like, why not?

Dave Morin: Well, clearly this is just the first of many moves Stripe's gonna make. Like, agentic commerce is gonna be a really huge deal the next few years. So I, I would expect them to, like, make more moves in the agentic direction, especially in infrastructure.

Jessica: We're gonna need the agentic commerce heat map because I understand the potential of agentic commerce. I also think that, like, I'm gonna be assigning stories on agentic commerce until I die. Like, that's pretty much how I feel.

Sam Lessin: It's like micropayments.

Jessica: Or it's like VR.

Dave Morin: I don't think it's VR. I'm way more bullish on agentic commerce than VR.

Sam Lessin: Look, in the end of the day, I will say that one thing my, my bot does not do is I'll be like, "I wanna buy this book." And I don't let it yet clear the transaction, right? Just buy it for me. I could easily do that and just give it my Amazon credentials, but there is, like, a better way to do that, right?

Jessica: Well, I had an interesting payment experience today, which is sort of this question which I think is ripe in the consumer world of, like, is the chatbot gonna be the one interface for everything, for all our services, all our commerce, all our information, or does AI diffuse, if you will, into these products in very different ways and enhance them and build these experiences, but, like, the chatbot isn't the gateway? And obviously, OpenAI wants the chatbot to be the gateway, and Google doesn't.

Sam Lessin: That game is over.

Jessica: Well, I think it is, 'cause I had a really interesting experience, and this is topic two that I wanna get to, but is... I don't know. Someone sent me a bill for something, the extra gas from my rental car or something, and I saw for the first time a just pay button, like, in the email, and I don't know exactly, like, where it was, but I opened an email, clicked Pay, and it was in my Apple Pay. And that is, like, such a world... I don't... This is not even an AI experience per se. It, it isn't. But it's so much different. Like, when I see an invoice come in, I'm like, "I'm gonna have to log in. I'm gonna have to put my credit card information in." So it was a great example. I don't know exactly who was enabling that in the stack, but there's, like, so many ways to go more seamless in the stack that are different.

Sam Lessin: I've taken over our home economics recently, because we had some-

Jessica: Oh

Sam Lessin: ... PA turnover.

Brit Morin: What does that mean? List out what you do now, Sam.

Jessica: This is also why I was paying a bill in my email. Maybe this is, this feature has existed for four years. I don't know.

Sam Lessin: I have a general rule which is I don't pay medical bills, 'cause I'm not sure they're real. So I just generally just don't pay them, 'cause they're like, I can't be bothered to understand if this is real or spam, so it's just not worth it until they really bug you. But I saw a bill for a child medical visit, and I was like, "Eh, maybe I should pay this." I went to pay it, right, and you know, I, like, literally was, like, standing in the kitchen on my phone, and of course, you, like, put in their stupid account number and then, like, a last name, and it's like, "No." And I'm like, you know what? It was 20 bucks, and, like, you didn't make this easy enough for me, so you're not getting paid the 20 bucks. Deal with it, right?

Jessica: Oh my God, Sam. I'm gonna be at some doctor that's not gonna see a child because we have an outstanding payment for 20 bucks. Okay, pay it.

Sam Lessin: No, that's not accurate. But the basic point is, I do think in the PA transition world where, like, you're taking back over accounts and you're figuring out... Like, it's, it's a wildly fucked up world, and there is no reason that this can't be massively fixed at this point, right?

Jessica: If you need money from the lessons, you may or may not get it for a while.

Brit Morin: Guys, do you guys use CC by Gemini? 'Cause it's getting better and better, and I think you're just... I think it's just gonna handle this.

Jessica: Brit, give us the CC update.

Brit Morin: Okay. I mean, I use all the tools, right? So I also get... Like, I have a lot of things connected to my email. But CC from Gemini, which is, like, literally obviously plugged into Gmail, has gotten better and better and better over the last year. It's bracketing things into, like, urgency. I can imagine a simple pay button in my CC emails every day where it's just like, "Do you want me to take care of these five things?" "Yes." Like, and it's just done. It does all the calendaring for you. There's this whole market of family tech startups doing AI f-

Jessica: But they're gonna get killed by Google is what I'm hearing.

Sam Lessin: They're all gonna fail.

Brit Morin: It's just, like, when you don't own the calendar and own the inbox, it's-

Dave Morin: They're all gonna die.

Sam Lessin: They're all gonna die.

Brit Morin: And then also the Drive. You have, like, all your kids' information probably stored on Google Drive somewhere. Like, it's just... I think it's game over for, uh, the little guys. But I would pay attention to CC or try using it, 'cause I do think agentic commerce in Gmail is gonna happen.

Dave Morin: I don't even know what you're talking about. What is CC? Like, a person's name?

Brit Morin: Like CC, like you CC someone on an email. You haven't followed CC? You should plug in CC.

Dave Morin: No, what are you guys talking about?

Jessica: It's like a Google test of their version of a personal assistant.

Dave Morin: Yeah. Sam, do you know what they're talking about?

Sam Lessin: I think it must have been only marketed to women.

Brit Morin: All moms know what CC is, Dave. I have, like, all the other agents doing, like, my work inboxes. My personal inbox-

Sam Lessin: This is so funny. I mean, I've built my own versions of this with my exercise, cute workload.

Brit Morin: I don't think it's as good as CC.

Sam Lessin: No, it's so much better.

Brit Morin: You don't know. I wanna compare my CC versus your agent.

Sam Lessin: Brit, my agent is looking at my planned workouts. It's looking at the weather. It's looking at my Garmin and my Aura. It's adjusting the workouts based on my heart rate response to different-

Brit Morin: I get that that serves Sam. What is serving your family? Because that's what CC does for me.

Sam Lessin: That is serving my family.

Jessica: Brit, let, let's move on from this topic. This won't go well, so let's keep going here. But I'm pro CC. We haven't directly addressed, let's keep this a minor topic, is everyone here feeling as bearish on Google as the markets are at this moment?

Sam Lessin: No. Are the markets today... Is it another buying opportunity for Google?

Dave Morin: Yeah, Sam, actually, Sam, your buying opportunity is back.

Sam Lessin: Ah. I love opportunities for buying Google that I then don't take and feel bad about later.

Jessica: I'm actually pretty excited, guys. When I agreed to interview Corey of Google, he was not in charge of all of Google's AI, he was just in charge of most of Google's AI, and I'm gonna be interviewing at AI Agenda live September 23rd in the Information, and he got a bigger job, so I have to prepare more for that interview.

Sam Lessin: Oh, by the way, speaking of which, this... I'm wearing my No Queens T-shirt for our protest of WTF.

Dave Morin: Oh, that's amazing.

Sam Lessin: I actually am only wearing this because I ran out of clothes, but I found this, and I had made this for last year's WTF concert for our men's protest.

Dave Morin: Yeah. Come on, Sam.

Sam Lessin: The problem is I have to be in New York, so I'm gonna have to-

Dave Morin: Aw

Sam Lessin: ... find other people to No Queens protest.

Jessica: Yeah, good luck. All the queens are gonna be in Napa October 27th and 28th for the Information WTF. Don't wear one of those.

Brit Morin: We gotta fix the queens in AI situation. There's a new report that launched today that only 26% of AI hires are women, and, like, women are literally not getting, like, interviews for shit. It's not great.

Jessica: It's not great, Brit, but you know what? The men don't care to hear us talk about that, so we'll-

Brit Morin: I know. We're in the post-woke era, so we'll just complain to ourselves.

Jessica: How about this one, guys? I don't know if you saw, the Department of Justice of the United States of America is investigating Andreessen Horowitz for conflicts of interest.

Sam Lessin: What?

Jessica: No, Dave's actually surprised. Dave, I put this on the docket.

Brit Morin: Dave doesn't read things.

Sam Lessin: It's like they don't understand that, how venture capital works. Yeah, it's like, what's the famous John Doerr-ism? No conflict, no interest.

Jessica: Dave, you are the only one who reads my docket, so now my heart is broken. This is true. They are particularly scrutinizing a deal as first reported in the information.

Sam Lessin: What is the point of a private market if you can't have conflicts of interest? No, I knew we were gonna talk about it, I just don't understand. Like, what are they... Like, w- why? They're very angry that the sky is blue. They're gonna like write, like... Venturecopalis has board seat on two competitive companies. What do we do?

Jessica: Databricks, Fivetran, two competing companies.

Sam Lessin: What does the Justice Department have to do with this?

Jessica: Well, the Justice Department is in charge of justice, Dave.

Sam Lessin: So who got mad? Was it Fivetran or Databricks? How did this happen?

Jessica: Databricks bought dbt Labs, as first reported in the information, which sparked this inquiry, and I don't know what, exactly what happened from there. Reporting forthcoming. But also, guys, Andreessen's pretty close to the Trump administration, I gotta say, I don't think this is going anywhere.

Sam Lessin: No, that's what I'm trying to figure out, like, what's the point of this?

Jessica: It is unusual. Someone's trying to make a statement.

Sam Lessin: It's like some intern, like, needed something to do at the Justice Department.

Jessica: I'm just speculating here, but it's unusual. We haven't seen one of these since Eric Schmidt had to get off the Apple board with the FTC. Do you guys remember this? I mean, we used to have-

Brit Morin: There's also the Apple Disney thing, some-

Sam Lessin: But these things are handled by gentlemen in private. You don't bring the government into these things. That's what I'm saying. These are not Justice Department problems.

Jessica: Well, someone wants to send a statement then. That would be my conclusion.

Sam Lessin: But Jess, what statement? I guess like, what, what's the claim here? Is it an antitrust claim? Or what is it?

Jessica: It is an anti-competitive claim.

Sam Lessin: That Andreessen Horowitz is a monopoly? Did Sequoia do this?

Brit Morin: Ooh, that would be a good story.

Jessica: There is no way this came from another venture capital firm, because-

Sam Lessin: Oh, you'd be surprised, Jess. All venture capital firms do is talk shit about each other. I want someone to declare Slow Ventures an unfair monopoly in venture capital. This is the greatest marketing you can- I declare it. I will call the Justice Department. Occam's Razor says the only plausible answer is that Marc Andreessen actually planted this 'cause it's great marketing. You're like- For sure ... we're such a great venture capital firm that it's a competition issue. You know? Like, that's gotta be it. 100%.

Jessica: I would not put that at zero. The man does consider himself a modern industrialist.

Sam Lessin: It's kind of brilliant. Uh, Sequoia's probably gonna be like, it's kinda like the AI thing. Sequoia's be like, "Well, we're a monopoly too." They're gonna be like trying to figure out, like, something. They're gonna be like, "Wait a minute," like all... It's kinda like the AI companies and, and, like, security breaches. It's like, no, our, our cyber also hacks the world, and we're also stopping training because alignment is in jeopardy. Yeah.

Brit Morin: Mm.

Jessica: Like that too. That, that's what we're hearing across the industry.

Brit Morin: Mm.

Sam Lessin: What is the marketing plan that comes after this? 'Cause the current marketing plans are hilarious. Of we're so powerful, regulate us, or we're so powerful... Like, the government as hilarious marketing. What comes next?

Brit Morin: What could the seed funds do, Sam, is my question.

Sam Lessin: Can we get AOC mad?

Jessica: By talking about egg freezing. That's how you get an AOC controversy.

Brit Morin: Ooh, I'm involved in a lot of those companies.

Sam Lessin: Wait, why does that make her mad? An egg freezing monopoly that's jacking up prices.

Brit Morin: Well, doesn't Trump wanna kill all the eggs and embryo freezing?

Jessica: She's been posting her process, like, publicly, down to like

Sam Lessin: Yeah, and she also got, like, divorced from her 30-year fiance. What's going on in the wokesphere?

Brit Morin: I don't think she has a 30-year fiance.

Jessica: You can't get divorced from a fiance

Sam Lessin: Isn't she 30? I wanna know more about the fiance.

Jessica: Well guys, I just want you, all you VCs, you know, sleep with one eye open because you're not safe.

Sam Lessin: No, this is why we don't do boards. Boards are the worst. You should never have any formal control of anything.

Jessica: Yeah. It does come down to boards. Okay, let's do an Anthro Open update. We don't have to go here long, but we are clock ticking down to the $2 trillion Anthropic IPO.

Sam Lessin: Well, Jess, everyone, what happened? I mean, is, how fucked is OpenAI?

Jessica: Well, we're gonna get to that. But first I want you guys to know, do you know, there's been a lot of attention on OpenAI's weird nonprofit structure, but do you guys know that Anthropic has this separate trust that picks the board, that holds special powers?

Sam Lessin: We should bust that trust.

Brit Morin: Whose trust is it?

Jessica: It's the Anthropic Trust. It's, it's just a group of, I think there are five, but they've only filled three, people who pick the board members, and one of them is Ben Bernanke, fun fact. And this trust is also gonna maintain some of that power in an IPO, which will also give the co-founders super voting shares.

Sam Lessin: Bernanke must really, that must really piss off Larry Summers, 'cause it's like he is their Larry Summers.

Jessica: You had Larry on the OpenAI, and then you had Bernanke on... Yeah, okay. But also, guys, if I told you Dario owned 2% of Anthropic, would you say that was a lot or a little?

Sam Lessin: It's $40 billion.

Brit Morin: It's 40 billion, but I would expect him to own more. What about Daniela? Do we have reporting on Daniela?

Sam Lessin: Was it really that expensive? I guess they really did have to raise that much capital. Like, that's what it comes down to.

Jessica: Yeah. Also, their, their revenue is up, The Information reported 14x in Q2. So compared to last year. So they are at a 14x, Q2 was 11 and a half billion. There are a lot of co-founders, eight, nine, 10.

Sam Lessin: What's it gonna be like to have like 50 people running around San Francisco with $40 billion each? It's like one thing when like there's one person, but like, th- this is actually a weird, like, egalitarian wealth play.

Brit Morin: No, it's not just Anthropic guys either. Like, now the OpenRouter founder, like, everyone's gonna have like $40 billion. There's just so many people that are gonna have tens of billions of dollars.

Jessica: Guys, it's almost like The Information should have a wealth conference. It's almost like that, hmm.

Sam Lessin: Although here's a funny thing. There's something very funny about, if you wanna talk about relativity. So Dario- In a lot of ways, like, is one of the most important people in AI, right?

Jessica: Yeah.

Sam Lessin: Banks 40 billion bucks out of the IPO. Who cares where it trades in five years? It's gonna be liquid $40 billion before it goes wherever it goes. OpenRouter, dude, I don't know who it is. What is he gonna bank? A few billion? Three? Four?

Brit Morin: Mm, they profited 1.5 for the company. Six of the seven and a half went to investors. One and a half was to the company.

Sam Lessin: Oh, so they actually didn't own that much of the company.

Brit Morin: Or that's just how the deal was constructed. But if you imagine-- I mean, how-- he probably still owns at least half the company, don't you think? Like, OpenRouter's only been around for a couple of years.

Sam Lessin: My basic point is it's incredibly capital efficient. So you have, like, the guy who is one of the most important characters or whatever maybe gets 10 to 20 times as much money as the guy who very smartly takes no infrastructure and wraps a router on top, which is not that technical, but did a great job marketing it. That's kind of a funny 10Xer, right? A 10X, 20X difference. Like, what Dario did is a lot harder.

Jessica: Okay. Or compare it to Taylor Swift. She's worth, like, $2 billion, and she's been at this for, like, 20 years.

Dave Morin: The best is that the founder of OpenRouter was the CTO of OpenSea.

Sam Lessin: I love it. The guy loves tokens.

Dave Morin: Yeah, it's like tokens to tokens.

Sam Lessin: It's just all tokens. It just-- we just change what tokens mean.

Jessica: Okay. Sam asked a question, which we're gonna get to, but before we finish on Anthropic, I've gotta plug the awesome profile. I helped the team, but we did a fabulous first ever story of Dario's wife.

Sam Lessin: And you got it out first.

Brit Morin: Oh, I saw that.

Jessica: You have to read it in The Information. The Wall Street Journal copied us later, but we were first with the definitive story, including her entrepreneurial history, her romantic turned business relationship with Eric Schmidt that led to the, his investment in Anthropic, to crossing paths briefly with Jeffrey Epstein in terms of pitching him on her company, but that is that. And I highly recommend it because Cammie is one of those people Claude doesn't even know she exists. Interesting.

Sam Lessin: That's probably a special case.

Jessica: Yes. But was just, by my reporting, in growing influence internally as well at Anthropic.

Brit Morin: What does GPT say about Cammie?

Jessica: Check it out. That's a great question. Okay, Sam, you referenced OpenAI and the fact business doesn't seem to be growing so well. I'm curious what you guys think. Dave, you might have some proprietary info or not. I think enterprise is proving tough for them. I, it's not like they're at a standing start in enterprise. It's not like they have no business there. But I keep hearing anecdotally that they're having trouble getting customers to switch from Anthropic, even on incredible terms. But what is everyone else hearing? This is a big issue.

Dave Morin: The truth of the two strategies is really straightforward. If you look at both companies, Anthropic decided to be Microsoft and to become an enterprise company. My understanding is that they focus entirely on their largest enterprise customers, and that they don't care about press, they don't care about smaller enterprise customers or small businesses, nothing.

Jessica: They care about press.

Dave Morin: I don't think they do.

Jessica: I mean, my text messages, Dave. I mean, they, they are deeply engaged in their press. They are deeply engaged.

Brit Morin: In the last two months, 'cause they had such a bad brand. They're trying to turn it around.

Dave Morin: Maybe. But point is, like, they decided to be Microsoft, build an enormous enterprise business, and have done a great job doing that. OpenAI chose a consumer strategy. You know, they were a consumer company all the way from the beginning, and so they just-- they're two completely different bodies with different organs. And I think that it seems like OpenAI is trying to get into the enterprise game. It's not the core business. It's not what they started out being good at. It's kind of like Meta trying to get into hardware. Like, they're just never gonna be good at hardware.

Jessica: I wanna go to Brit and then Sam. Brit, what is your take? Then Sam.

Brit Morin: Well, I mean, the revenue's still growing, right? I was reading it was 40 billion is the latest. And so while it's discounted from Anthropic, it's not stagnant. And so I do think $40 billion is a big number, and I'm not counting them out. I think there's been a ton of shifts over there in her company with various people. They're still on the track to go public. I think it's now reported by 2027 is the latest, right, Jess?

Dave Morin: The-- Sarah Frier was signaling earlier today in the press. Like, she was on CNBC-

Jessica: They change their signaling bi-weekly.

Dave Morin: I understand, but, like, her statement as of today, they will be in the public markets by '27, so that means before the end of year is what they're-

Jessica: No, no. I think that means before end of 2027. They're not gonna go public this year, Sam. I mean, Sam. Dave. They're not. There's no guidance that they're giving that said that. I think what they're saying is in 2027, we will be a public company at some point. I don't think we talked about they pushed out their head of revenue, the woman who was doing the corporate business and just replaced her.

Sam Lessin: Look, I did CNBC earlier today on this topic, and here's the basic way I would look at it. The real story here is the variance quarter to quarter and year to year on how you project these things is God knows what, right? It's, like, an enormous variance, right? And the problem is that's a problem for everyone. Like, people wanna pattern match Anthropic and OpenAI to the rollout of the internet and Google and Facebook.

Jessica: Well, you have to pattern match if you're talking valuations like this. I mean, that's your job if you're an investor.

Sam Lessin: That's what they've grafted to. They said, "Well, we're an internet company, and internet companies that are working grow like this." But it was-- that was a very, very different age. I mean, companies that could control their growth. Now, look, Facebook had a period when it stalled out and had to be restarted and whatever. Like, it's not perfect. But I think the real issue here is when people are like, "Well, the ARR this year is this, and we're gonna hit this number," it's like no one has any idea, right? And the fact that you can accelerate and then decelerate and then re-accelerate, these are things that are acting like early stage companies still trying to find ignition. But they're just so big and went so quickly that they were having these IPO-style conversations about things that aren't. Now, how does it all play out? I mean, like, look Anything where, like, you can accelerate and decelerate and miss is a huge problem for the whole industry, right? 'Cause it just means that, like, we don't know, right? And that doesn't mean you still don't buy it or, like, you know, you do the Kushner barbell thing, buy some sports teams that you pay att-

Jessica: Oh, that was gonna be our last topic. Yes

Sam Lessin: You got a barbell. You're like, "Look, if this AI stuff works, we might as well have our hat in the ring here." Like, it doesn't mean they're not. And like, so I think they'll be able to raise capital and get out on a meme, but, like, these are gonna be stocks that, like, wildly hit and then wildly miss their quarters. You know, OpenAI, I think if you unwind the tr- the real story of OpenAI, which I give Sam Altman a lot of credit for, it's the greatest fundraising story in the history of the world, right? And to do that, right, the narrative was AI scary. It wasn't always consumer. It was enterprise, then it was consumer, then it was kind of, like, floating, figuring it out. It was get all the talent and tell the story there'll be one winner in AI, and it will be us 'cause we will compound and be so far ahead we're uncatchable. That's clearly not true. And Anthropic did a different strategy, which was just focus on the part that was working, which is, like, coding and business applications where people, like, there's a lot of spend, da, da, da, da. They're crushing it with that strategy. Will that last forever? Who know? I mean, like, technical people like Codex more now, right? But it doesn't actually matter. It doesn't matter who's in the lead right now. What matters is that no lead is secure, and projections don't mean anything, right? And so I think that's the real story is it's too easy to switch, leads don't matter, it's gonna be impossible to financially price any of this stuff, and I think OpenAI missing massively on quarter and getting so eclipsed is just... It's like if Uber got hit by a Lyft, right? That wasn't supposed to happen. It doesn't tell the story of, like, how growth is supposed to work in these things.

Jessica: I think that's well put. I'm sure you guys might have this experience, but if I run into a random hedge fund person or investor, before they say, "Hi, Jessica," they're gonna ask me if Anthropic's ARR is slowing. Like, that is basically like, "Oh, it's nice to see you," you know? Because it is su- it is the question, and no one has any idea.

Sam Lessin: Well, and here's the thing. It might slow and then re-accelerate, which is a mess for any investor, right? Like, that's the problem is you can't price this stuff 'cause you don't know. Like, I was saying to someone, I was like, "Look, obviously anyone on this call would be an idiot to not have wanted to seed invest in Anthropic." Doesn't matter the dilution. For the people who did it, they're gonna make a ton of money. I would love to hold Anthropic stock right now. If you said, "Hey, Sam, do you wanna hold Anthropic st- stock, but you can't sell it for five years, what price do you pay?" I have no idea, right? I don't think anyone does 'cause the variance is just so massive on these things.

Jessica: But the lockup is not gonna be five years.

Sam Lessin: No, but I'm saying hypothetically.

Jessica: I see. I see.

Sam Lessin: People will make a lot of money on the narrative of these things, and they're clearly quite useful. I mean, we all consume a lot of them. They're just... It is not like a social networking platform or a traditional internet platform where there's return on scale the same way, and where once you're plugged in, you're there forever. It's much more like it's a great service as a utility. It's way easy to swap them around, and that means you're gonna have these wild swings in growth rate and revenue and everything else. I mean, like, literally you can ask the bot which bot I should-

Jessica: And also I think what you see from people like Sarah Friar, the CFO, or other executives there is they know they have to make these comparisons because you need comparisons to sell, so they compare to, like, electricity or something.

Sam Lessin: I've done this comparison. The electricity comparison sucks for them. Like, electricity, it's very, very useful. It's ubiquitous. That's true. The actual value of it, though, right, from an efficiency perspective, from how much you consume-

Jessica: The investors made money with the rollout of electricity. I asked ChatGPT this question

Sam Lessin: If you look longitudinally over time, like the whole... So I actually did this comparison recently, and I'll pull up the data. We can stick it in the notes, the show notes. It's not a great story to have invested in. Now, it's true that you can make money. Like, you're, you know, you get there first pre-regulation, ride the IPO wave, you get out, you've done fine. But if you just held electricity from the beginning to now, it turns out it's like it's a great utility. And by the way, that's a regulated utility with regulatory capture that's hard to transport. AI is globally liquid with no borders and is easy to transport. So you're gonna get the lowest cost provider. There's no money to make.

Jessica: Yeah. This is why it's gonna be so fascinating.

Sam Lessin: So people will make a lot of money trading. I mean, this is the thing I, like you just have to be honest about is just like it's a great trade.

Dave Morin: It's a great trade right now.

Sam Lessin: It's been a great trade for the last few years, and it might still be for a little while longer, and the irony is they've done a really good job of getting people to give them really cheap money and then buying infrastructure, which will have some residual value, right? But, like, I don't understand how things that are these lumpy, where, like, you can't be the winner and compound your winning as OpenAI just demonstrated, is, like, a thing you can own long term.

Jessica: Well, you, I mean, it's gonna be crazy to see.

Sam Lessin: You know what my good analogy is for this is have you guys seen the Moderna stock?

Brit Morin: Yeah. Well, 'cause they, like, they're curing skin cancer now.

Sam Lessin: But here's the thing that's really interesting. Like, there's a guy who works at Sloan named Yoni who, like, put his life savings a while ago into Moderna on the theory that this would happen, and I told him at the time, I was like, "If you actually believe that, you need to, like, lever it all to hell. You'll make a ton of money," which he didn't do.

Jessica: Didn't your grandfather also do this, Sam? I hope I'm not betraying any privacy.

Dave Morin: He did or did not lever it.

Sam Lessin: He didn't lever it, and so he... I'm sure he made some money, but he didn't, like, make... He, I mean, this was a generational wealth moment if you levered the crap out of it, right? But he was like, "Well, I'm holding it forever." I'm like, "That's insane." And, like, Moderna is like an IP company. It's like the same thing as publishing. The stock is gonna go down. The innovations might be amazing, but unlike Lilly, like, they don't have any angle other than publishing, which is not a good business. So the stock can go down. You can have these moments. It's a great thing to trade because there's a great narrative. Hooray, new very cool vaccine thing. People are gonna love that. They're gonna buy it in the moment, but it's not a long-term hold.

Dave Morin: Wait, what happened? It went from fifty to a hundred and fifty or a hundred and seventy-five in one day?

Jessica: They announced a skin cancer vaccine.

Sam Lessin: Which by the way, again, like there's a bunch of people with like eighty dollar calls on that thing that have just made like insane money. But it is just really interesting this whole vibe, which by the way relates to Kalshi and all this gambling stuff, is like people are so deeply making money in trading stories that are not owning assets. Like it's not about owning Moderna. I don't think you wanna own Moderna, right? But you sure as hell can pay attention to a positive press thing that can swing the stock wildly quickly. That's how you make all the money.

Jessica: Sam, before I even had coffee this morning, Sam was like, "What percentage of one's net worth should be in memes?" And I was like, "Well, that's a deep question, Sam."

Brit Morin: I, I didn't understand that question, Sam.

Sam Lessin: Well, look, I just think, like if you think about it, it's like we all have assets. That are like financial assets. They have cash flows, you know, they're valuable companies, and they have a lot of things that we own that trade at one billion times their cash flow. Like they're not financially priced.

Brit Morin: Okay. So narrative.

Sam Lessin: Yeah. So th- those are memes. Like SpaceX is a meme. It's a great meme. It's an awesome meme. Like SpaceX, like Moderna, has every ability to pop out headlines that people are gonna go nuts for. But, you know, it, it isn't that dissimilar from a GME, not in that they don't do amazing things, but just in terms of how it's priced.

Brit Morin: You know what's so weird is that I've been playing with Grok Bot now for the last week, and it's like it said I was signing into something with SpaceX AI, and then, I mean, I'm signing into another thing with Cursor and like I'm just- ... there's so many brands confused within Grok Bot, and I'm like, "What is going on here?" But to the Anthropic and OpenAI point, I think it's also like these things, like Elon just launched, can come out of nowhere and also threaten the market. Like this game is so early still, and like there are so many people in the world who have not adopted AI or any of these models. And so I agree with your point, Sam, about like the five-year trend being incredibly lumpy and unpredictable, and like the six-month outlook seems the sharpest.

Sam Lessin: Which again, it's completely fine as a seed investment. Like we're used to this as seed investors, that like things have an incredible quarter, but then a shit quarter, and then a great quarter, and then this happens. That is what we're used to. And by the way, if you told me, "Hey, I have a company three years in. They're doing really well. Revenue's still super lumpy, hard to predict," makes all the sense in the world. The only difference here is that these things are at a scale that's never been seen before so quickly, and everyone wants to tell a going public projectable cash flow public market story about them that's really hard to tell, right? Because they're still, for any... in this industry and what's playing out, operating in a lot of ways like the biggest, you know, seed companies in the history of the world.

Jessica: Oh, Brit, tell me about Grok Bot.

Brit Morin: Well, I would like Sam and Dave to weigh in. I was off last week, so I didn't really install it till a few days ago. I mean, Grok Bot is another agentic harness that connects all your things. It does have like a simplified user interface, which is great. However, it's made by Elon as part of the Cursor acquisition within xAI, SpaceX, blah, blah, blah, eventually Tesla like umbrella.

Dave Morin: It's made by Cursor.

Brit Morin: I know, but it also says all the other brands like everywhere I click.

Jessica: Every time I have to log into X, I like cancel my meetings 'cause it's gonna take me that long to figure out how to do it.

Brit Morin: Again, a really good job onboarding you. You can connect like all your apps really simply. Just like everything, you have to feed it all your data. You have to like get it to know about you. Theoretically, you can set up like multiple agents with different vertical ways of expertise, so I have like my research agent and my, you know, whatever agent, and it's fine so far. It's good. It's fast. It's better designed than everything else. I just, again, this all feels like it's table stakes.

Dave Morin: It's definitely the best design so far by a long shot. Like I have serious respect for the product work and design work done here.

Jessica: In what way? 'Cause I think of like a just a prompt field.

Dave Morin: It's by far the best version of a consumer just being able to boot up one agent, two agents, three agents, four agents. You know, each one has a different job. They will do things in the background.

Brit Morin: They can all use a computer in the background, so like-

Dave Morin: It's genuinely well done. I think this is actually the beginning of Grok being the third foundation lab that is truly in the game. That's my take. This is a good product. Now, to Sam, you know, to the conversation about OpenRouter earlier, distribution is not easy on these things. Doesn't matter how well designed agent product or a social network is, distribution is very, very difficult. Now, they've got the advantage of X and things like this, but nonetheless, it'll be interesting to see how far this thing distributes itself based on the quality of the product. There's a lot of people talking about it. I do think they moved the bar forward.

Sam Lessin: I gotta actually start playing with these things again, 'cause I just like have gone down my own like crazy version of this, where I don't use any of the software. I feel like I should... If you guys think it's this good, I'll actually spend time going back to use some of the software.

Dave Morin: It's worth checking out. I think they did a good job.

Brit Morin: Well, the irony is it's the most consumer-friendly. Like if I had a normie friend in Texas who wanted to like play with an agentic harness, I would just like send it to them, and yet it's like tied to Elon, and it's named Grok. And you know, I'm like, I'm not sure how people feel about all that, not much less like AI in general.

Dave Morin: I mean, in Texas they'll love it.

Brit Morin: Well, I guess in some parts of Texas they'll love it. A lot of people hate Elon in Texas.

Sam Lessin: The thing that's wild to me about the moment we're in and like understanding this is I think they also launched xAI recently, like a code repo thing to compete with GitHub.

Dave Morin: They did.

Sam Lessin: Which has been like hilariously down constantly 'cause it can't keep up with all the bot traffic. Here's the funny thing to me about that. It's a great example. Like if you said, "Hey, I'm gonna launch a GitHub competitor," that used to be like a hard thing to do. Now, it's like three people like sitting somewhere in Elon's office or something or some office around. They're just like, "Yeah, like we're just gonna like..." I just think that just changes the world so dramatically when all this stuff, you're just like, "I don't care." There's no software lock-in, right? Like it, it can be distribution. It can be anything about... Like you... But you're like, "Oh, I'm like angry that GitHub is down." It doesn't matter. It's so easy to replace.

Dave Morin: This is a really good point, Sam, and I was thinking about that last week. We were off the grid entertaining some friends, and I, I wasn't paying that close of attention to what was going on with Grok Bot. But that was my exact take, that wow, you can kind of just build this. You know, you could've started a month ago, and it comes out pretty good now.

Sam Lessin: Yeah. It's fine. It works.

Dave Morin: I've got this company we're investors in called Bitrig. This is like the former SwiftUI team from Apple, has built like a really amazing iPhone app development environment.

Sam Lessin: I know these guys. Aaron Sitrick is all fired up about this.

Dave Morin: It's gotten so good. You can build any iPhone app for yourself now, and it's like truly amazing. I'm building front ends for things in fully in Swift on my iPhone from my iPhone and then sending them out on test flight And it's so good

Sam Lessin: I thought you can't build from an iPhone, you have to do it from your desktop.

Dave Morin: Well, they did, but Bitrig went back around and they created a server-based development environment that you can talk to from a Mac app or from an iPhone app. So there's no actual code changing on the iPhone. That was Apple's problem with these apps, is that if you ship an app to the iPhone, it should not be able to change itself while it's on the phone. And so this is basically using a server to develop a new iPhone app that you can then push to TestFlight and have your users download it that way. And it's pretty amazing. I'm building iPhone apps, which, I mean, the amount of money you and I spent investing in these things in the 2010s, like, I'm building entire startup's iPhone apps, um, just, just for fun.

Sam Lessin: I have my own portfolio app, my own health app. I have, like, six apps. I mean, most of my home screens are apps that are just for me.

Dave Morin: Yeah. It's amazing.

Jessica: Almost like if there were a new OpenAI hardware device, you could make it.

Sam Lessin: But isn't it just, like, a puck?

Brit Morin: I don't think there ever will be an OpenAI hardware device.

Sam Lessin: No, there will be.

Brit Morin: And did you hear all of Apple's new devices leaked? There's a bunch of leaks that Apple has had out.

Dave Morin: That usually means they did it on purpose.

Brit Morin: Oh, like 10 things, like, leaked.

Sam Lessin: I do think there is something with the devices, though, Brit, to your point, with OpenAI, 'cause again, they're great narrative capitalists, is like, it's a classic buy the narrative, sell the news, right? Which, again, makes these things hard to be public, which is, like, the argument that they will never release a device is because it will only hurt their stock price if they're public. It's hard to imagine a world, like... Which is very, very different than, like, I think Elon pulling off some rocket. Like, he has the downside of rocket blow up.

Jessica: I agree with that narrative. Do you think, therefore, that the impetus to just launch things to keep your highly paid researchers and engineers happy no longer exists? 'Cause that used to be also another reason.

Sam Lessin: Well, that was how they got all the talent, for sure. And, like, the strategy was get all the people and pay whatever, and then give them their own fiefdoms and let them do whatever they want. It was basically about a talent acquisition. But there was this era that I think we're now past of, like, the labs playing a game where they would be valued on talent acquisition and, like, narrative. That works great until the numbers show up, right? And the problem is now that there are numbers, those types of pure play narrative games come a lot harder, right? It's like, it's the classic, like, Silicon Valley thing, don't ever have revenue. It destroys your story.

Dave Morin: There's lo- nothing like data to screw up a good story.

Jessica: Sam, by the way, I'm surprised, maybe you have them and I just have not seen them. Do you have Narrative Capital T-shirts? 'Cause what kind of meme lord are you without-

Brit Morin: Ooh, that would be a good fund name. There should be a venture fund that is just called Narrative Capital.

Dave Morin: There has to be one

Brit Morin: Only invests in narrative companies.

Sam Lessin: Yeah, fact-free zone.

Jessica: Okay, guys, we have not gotten to sending your pee to data centers yet, which really was one of the more surprising things I've seen on the internet. Okay, so I'm browsing the internet, as one does, and I see something. I'm like, "This is surely a joke." And then I watch it. I'm like, "Don't think it's a joke." Jason Kelce teamed up with Liquid Death-

Dave Morin: Oh, the Jason Kelce ad, yeah

Jessica: ... on a very funny ad, which it basically begins with the premise that data centers are sucking all the water, therefore drastically harming society.

Dave Morin: Which hilariously they don't do.

Jessica: Well, it's nuanced.

Sam Lessin: The Lake Mead thing's a real problem.

Jessica: And so this ad urges you to pee in a jar and send it to cool the data centers and spare our water. This is kind of shocking, guys. I mean, we think AI shapes pop culture and tech, but this is wild. Brit, what was your take when you saw this?

Brit Morin: The funniest comment I saw was this girl saying, "No fucking way I'm sending my pee with my DNA to that data center." "I don't want AI all up on me like that. I'm gonna send my cat's pee instead." And I was like, "That's so funny." Well, I can tell you that after having been in, like, real rural America for the last, like, six weeks, no one gives a fuck about AI. No one uses AI. People don't care. They dislike it.

Dave Morin: Not only that, they actively do not care, and these issues are not actually the issues. Like, that's, like, the main thing we learned being in Montana most of the summer, is, like, no one cares. And everything that Silicon Valley thinks is the issue is not actually the issue. The data centers, no one cares. What people actually care about is they're sick of people sending them AI slop in email for work. They, like, don't wanna read AI. They don't wanna-

Jessica: Ooh, hat switch, hat switch.

Dave Morin: Yeah. I mean, they're just sick of it. They're, like, sick of it actually being in their life more than anything, and I think that's pretty interesting.

Brit Morin: The main use of AI we saw while in Montana was, like, some real estate postings.

Dave Morin: No, real estate redesigns. That's, like, the main place that she saw it.

Brit Morin: See the house before and after.

Jessica: Oh man, AI better cure cancer quick.

Brit Morin: I don't know that it's gonna roll out as quickly as, like, AGI 2027, whoever Larry and Sergey called.

Jessica: We're gonna wrap this sterling episode, but I, I don't think we're gonna ban construction of data centers in this country, but we might. I think the backlash is, like, way more of an issue than-

Dave Morin: But, but what I'm trying to say, Jess, is that the backlash is not about the data centers. The backlash is about that AI sucks, and it is inhuman. No one has ever seen an AI video or read an AI essay. They, like, intuitively dislike this experience. There's, like, a visceral feeling to this. And so the trying to stop the data centers, I think, is about that. It is not about water or any of this stuff. It's about this feeling that people have that AI just sucks. It's not that great to interact with reading one of these essays or, you know, watching a video, or even the apps that get created, a lot of them, they're slop There's even a word that's been invented for this. And so I think that's, like, actually where the energy of this is coming from. And I guess one thing I'll say that's kind of back to the prior topics that I think is interesting, human metabolism of technology is much slower than we intuitively think, especially when we're on the rise of a, one of these new technologies. Like, we are on the absolute ramp of hype right now, and, you know, we're gonna see all these things go public. I do think at some point these companies are gonna run into real growth problems, which is that they have to figure out how to grow into verticals that they're not currently in because technology itself just has not taken a form yet that can move its way through certain types of enterprises. Like, I keep hearing this on the front lines, you know, OpenClaw World and kind of being directly at the front lines, that enterprises are not ready to adopt this stuff we're talking about. Even the best of the best sales teams are having problems convincing the human factor in all of these organizations to adopt this stuff. And so I think we're gonna see, you know, in 2027, '28, I think you're gonna see this sort of come home to roost for real.

Jessica: In what way? What's gonna happen?

Dave Morin: I think you're gonna see a retraction in the market. Like, you're gonna see we've built out a dramatic amount of infrastructure. A huge, you know, $3 trillion, $4 trillion of CapEx has gone into this, and everyone rushed in, and they're trying to make the same money that Anthropic's making. And the use cases and the things that are gonna metabolize this further into society have not appeared yet. And so you're gonna see a correction happen where we've got too much infrastructure, not enough use cases, and then there's gonna be a bunch of money made over the next 20 years, but there's gonna be kind of a, I think, a pullback at some point here, and it's gonna happen after the IPOs. Unknown time period.

Sam Lessin: I mean, this is the whole, like, pensioners always get fucked, right? This is, like, the Nvidia, BlackRock deals where, like, the bag holders are the pension funds. A bunch of people are clearly gonna make a lot of money on these IPOs, right, that are the tech insiders, but, like, ultimately, someone gets hurt, right? Someone number go down, if you believe that.

Dave Morin: I mean, I think so. Just look at the SpaceX IPO. Like, the SpaceX IPO is telling the story right now. The exact same thing is going to happen.

Sam Lessin: Well, but SpaceX is kind of fine.

Dave Morin: We'll see. It's just sideways.

Sam Lessin: It's supported by a meme, right? Like, it's a narrative story. But this is the thing I think is unclear that I think SpaceX, to your point, is a good example of. It's like, who has an incentive for number go down, right? The problem with some of these things are they're so big, and, like, the country wants them. From a financial perspective, the money has to go somewhere, is you kind of need either someone to, like, come back to first principles on economics, or you need someone who has a real incentive for number to go down to, like, build the narrative. Otherwise, people will just kind of, like, not on purpose, but, like, implicitly collude to, like, let these things drift along and be very valuable.

Dave Morin: Yeah, totally.

Sam Lessin: So the question is, there has to be a shock. You need something. You need either a better narrative which sucks the wind out of the old narrative, which can happen, but is super hard when the narrative of AI is everything. Like, it, what's, what's more than everything, right? Like, or you need, like, something to go very badly that then people start having to rationalize, which is unclear how that plays out. So I'm with you. I, I think it's very difficult to defend stock prices that you'll never see financially make sense in numbers, in profit. So you either believe that, like, we're just ha- holding onto the chip 'cause there's a one in three chance it pays out, which is very venture capital, by the way. But you kind of still value the chip 'cause it still might pay out. It's, like, not impossible, right? That it pays out.

Dave Morin: I think that it likely will, but it's gonna be a long time. Like, I guess that's what I'm trying to argue here, is that human metabolism of technology has always been quite slow. Like, people change at a slow rate, even if the technology is powerful. Like, you saw this happen with, we've talked about electricity. You can go back and look at cars. You can go back and look at big general purpose technologies that have, like, radically changed society. It's like, always in the beginning, there's, like, this huge amount of hype and, like, there's gonna be all these use cases, and that does end up happening, but it's usually 20 years later. You can look at '99, right, for this, right? In the internet era. In '99, like, Pets.com was the ultimate, right? That was, like, the harbinger of the apocalypse. It did end up happening. Everyone does buy their pet food online, but it was tr- fully 20 years later.

Sam Lessin: But it's just interesting. The question I think socially is gonna be... Like, this happened a little bit with the internet boom, but at this level, the richest people in America, all of a sudden, most of them, are gonna be people who secure the bag, so to speak, in this cycle. And then if you really think stock numbers goes down, right, a lot, pensioners are the holders on them. The biggest problem is just gonna be people are gonna be really pissed. Like, all of a sudden, the Montana people are gonna be like, "Not only does AI suck, but our economy is dominated by a bunch of people who didn't actually deliver any value." That's very different than, like, the Google and the Meta story, things like that, where you're like, "Okay, people did really well. They were super lucky, but they also did things that had permanent financial value." I think the, the, the thing is gonna be second and third order effects of all this in the coming years, how the society refactors itself and responds to, like, what's clearly, like, a major distortionary event.

Dave Morin: Yeah, no question.

Sam Lessin: And that's how AOC becomes president, and then we all get guillotined.

Jessica: Get, get guillotined? Oh my God, guys. Okay, I think we need to wrap. We need to give a nod to, uh, Josh Kushner buying the Lakers. Big deal.

Brit Morin: Although I heard it was maybe not happening.

Dave Morin: Did it happen? I thought there was, like, a lot of, like, not happening.

Jessica: No, guys, you cannot believe everything you read, and CNBC sadly reported this story.

Dave Morin: Well, that's why we're asking you.

Brit Morin: Yeah, you're the authoritative source.

Dave Morin: Yeah, you tell us what's going on.

Jessica: Not only has the sale happened, but the Buss family trust also sold their remaining position over the objection of Jeanie Buss, but unfortunately, her objection does not carry weight based on the structure of the trust.

Sam Lessin: I do love that the Winning Time was awesome.

Jessica: Winning Time was great. It was a TV show.

Brit Morin: No, the show Running Point with Kate Hudson is all about her.

Jessica: No, that show sucks, Brit. I'm sorry. Running Point is so bad.

Brit Morin: No, it... Uh, are you joking? No. Season three's gonna be so good 'cause they're gonna fold this all in. Watch

Jessica: I couldn't even finish season two. I c- I just started it, and I, this show-

Sam Lessin: It's just goofy

Jessica: It's not my jam. But Winning Time is great. I learned a lot about amortizing depreciation of owning sports teams for, um-

Sam Lessin: It's great

Jessica: ... tax. It seems great. Seems exactly what Josh should be doing right now is buying a sports team.

Sam Lessin: Yeah. It turns out that, like, owning sports teams is one of the greatest grifts ever from a tax perspective.

Jessica: I also love that, like, Josh is clearly doing the deal-

Brit Morin: But it's Thrive. It's not Josh

Jessica: No, it's both. They're letting Bob do all the press. I'm like, come on, guys. It's just he loves the press

Sam Lessin: Until recently you couldn't, funds couldn't own any sports team pieces.

Jessica: Yeah. There's very hard caps on that.

Sam Lessin: What happened was in the NFL and a few other leagues, no individuals could afford them anymore. Like, they ran out of people who had enough money who could buy them, and so they started lifting the rules so that private equity could buy in because they just wanted numbers to go up, and they couldn't find... It's like they were just out of individuals who could afford them.

Brit Morin: Also, did you see Travis Kelce is partnering with Publicis Sports and his talent agency to launch TECTA Publici- which is connecting major brands with college student athletes. He's, like, agenting all the NIL deals now.

Sam Lessin: What to Do NIL?

Brit Morin: Yeah. So little bit of Travis Kelce business.

Sam Lessin: Not that big of a business.

Brit Morin: I don't know. I think it's something he's interested in and passionate about, and he's retiring soon.

Sam Lessin: Yeah, that's fair. All right. I gotta go. What are we doing?

Jessica: Okay, dear friends.

Sam Lessin: Bye.

Jessica: We're ending. S- so with that-

Sam Lessin: Bye

Jessica: ... Sam needs to go take a s- you know, a Sudafed, and we will thank you all for listening to another episode of More or Less. We'll be here again next week. Until then-

Sam Lessin: Whether you want us to or not

Jessica: ... farewell. Bye.

Brit Morin: 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 @britt. See you guys next time