AI-generated — may contain transcription errors.

Dave Morin: At this point, I think that we're probably in a zone where social media should just be illegal, similar to alcohol. It's that bad for mental health. YouTube is, like, the most nefarious of all. And Roblox, I actually think Roblox should just be banned.

Brit Morin: But also, Australia just banned this for kids under 16.

Sam Lessin: And it does nothing. According to Business Insider, more teens are now using it in Australia.

Jessica: I don't like the fact that we are in a territory where screen time is even close to in these dimensions. Like, that's the kinda problem we're at.

Sam Lessin: We're gonna look back in 10 years, and Tim Cook is either gonna look like a fucking genius or an idiot, and Apple will either be a really important company or have completely missed an era.

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. Sam, where are you?

Sam Lessin: I'm at the pool because it's a beautiful day .

Jessica: So for those... You guys have to watch on YouTube.

Dave Morin: Sam will only record podcasts near bodies of water.

Jessica: AKA, I'm told my facial expressions make the show, so please watch on YouTube. But also, you will find that Sam, who I can attest, has a real office, but 10 feet from his perch is on a lounge chair?

Sam Lessin: It's a beautiful day. I wanted to, you know, get some vitamin D.

Jessica: Okay. You sound fine, actually.

Brit Morin: To be fair, I'm a little jealous. I think you look very happy right there, Sam.

Sam Lessin: Yeah. I- I figured out how to record Riverside on my phone reasonably, so I don't... Why would I ever use a desktop again?

Brit Morin: Well, shouldn't your agents just run it all?

Sam Lessin: They- they- they do. The agents are hard at work.

Brit Morin: You don't even need to use your own computer anymore. The agents run them all.

Jessica: I'm slightly worried 'cause Sam is sort of training for a marathon, and I think to get his long runs in, he's gonna start doing them during this podcast.

Sam Lessin: I could do that next week. I did a pretty intense workout a little earlier, but the good news for you is I don't generally do the long runs on Wednesdays.

Jessica: Okay.

Brit Morin: Oh, thank God.

Jessica: Great. Well, Morins, what's new? Brit, once again, your hair really delights, so really need to call out.

Brit Morin: Another reason to watch the video, all of you audio listeners.

Jessica: It's really-

Brit Morin: Thank you

Jessica: ... magnificent.

Brit Morin: Well, you know, I'm saving time in my day because I'm so much more efficient with my agents, and I do have a second display now. So I have my agentic display and then my productivity display, and now I have more time to do my hair.

Sam Lessin: I've gone the other way. I mean, I- I have so many displays in my office, and yet, here I am on my phone. I have one phone I'm on to buy things and a second phone to record More or Less, and that's what I need.

Jessica: Weren't agent... Wait, you're really double-phoning it right now, and one's on Instagram?

Sam Lessin: Yeah, of course.

Jessica: Okay. Great. I'm- I'm really glad we're not interfering. By the way, weren't agents supposed to render the UX obsolete? Why do you need more screen real estate?

Dave Morin: Turns out it's going the opposite direction.

Brit Morin: We're not there yet. I'm waiting for agents to become invisible. My agentic workloads have gotten very high. I have typically five to six agents running at a time, and many times, I'm also sending one agent to the other agent, meaning, like, sending Claude to Grok Bot or something like that, not just, like, Claude to Claude.

Sam Lessin: How do you even know how many agents you're running? Like, aren't they just a cloud of things being done? Like, I don't know how many agents I have running. They're just a cloud of things.

Brit Morin: I still don't trust all of them.

Jessica: We have abstracted our workflow, Sam. We have abstracted. We are the less. They are the more.

Dave Morin: Yeah.

Sam Lessin: Well, to be clear, I have lots of things happening. I just, like, don't think about them as agents.

Dave Morin: Yes, but Sam, you- you're using agents in a very strange way.

Brit Morin: And you talk to your agent over email every day. I don't do that.

Sam Lessin: Guys, I gotta tell you, listen, the email agent thing, I was on with an entrepreneur, actually two in the last week, and he's like, "Well, I have, like, the... I call the agent, and I text the agent." And I was like, "Yeah, but email's by far the best," and he's like, "Yeah, it is." Email's sick. The multithreading of it is so good, right? I don't know. Anyone who's texting with their agent doesn't get it.

Brit Morin: What? It's... I have multithreads with my agent and every agentic harness I am using.

Sam Lessin: But how do you manage? Like, what... How are they talking to you?

Dave Morin: How about everybody just manages it how they like it? Who cares?

Jessica: Lick it, Dave.

Sam Lessin: Well, you're welcome to do that and be less productive, but I'm by the pool.

Jessica: We have a packed agenda. We have a major Meta settlement. We have a changing guard.

Dave Morin: Yeah, let's get on with it.

Jessica: No, I'm gonna tell one agent's story-

Dave Morin: All right. Fair

Jessica: ... because it's my prerogative. I'm clearly the least agentic among us, but I have had a few knits with information headlines of late. Because basically, the news cycle is moving so fast that our amazing team is just getting the stories out there, and we're not always giving our headlines love and care. Clearly a problem for AI. Woke up early, didn't really wanna get out of bed, but I was like, "I should feel productive." So I emailed my agent.

Sam Lessin: Ah, email.

Brit Morin: What is with you guys emailing your agents? Ugh.

Dave Morin: No one uses email.

Jessica: Because I wasn't gonna log in. You know how many sto- I have six passwords, right? I said, "Can you build me an app?" And, uh, my bot's trained on the corpus of information history, right? I've been... It- it has a lot of context about the information. And I said I want it to suggest three headlines for every story, and then I also want a section where you can put your headline in, and you can get a score, one out of five. And I want it to be red if it's a three or under, so you feel very scared about publishing it. You know, all this stuff. And in... I don't know. I didn't check my phone again for 20 minutes. I have a full-on app that is live, password protected. I demo it to my editors at a 9:15 meeting that day. Because they're very smart, opinionated people, they instantly had three points of feedback. In the meeting, I say, "You know, we d- we figured out that based on the best performing headlines," so it has a lot of biases, and I said, "Go from three to six options." And it's updating while I'm in the meeting, and it's really cool. And the cool thing is, A, just to be clear about our policy, our policy is editors can override this at any point, right? This is a tool for editors. Editors are in charge of what the headlines are. But I'm getting, like, amazing feedback, and I built it in an email. This is one email.

Brit Morin: Dave built a social app during our date night last night.

Dave Morin: To be clear, this has been being worked on for a week.

Brit Morin: Okay, fine. On Sunday, he started it.

Dave Morin: I added some stuff to it.

Jessica: Okay. Well, everyone knows, I just... I'm, I'm sorry to cop the mic because you guys all have more robust agent stories, but for those of you listening to this pod-

Brit Morin: I'm really proud of you, Jess, that you're in your agentic era

Jessica: ... who think you're not a Dave, Brit, or Sam, help is on the way, and it's really cool.

Sam Lessin: Well, especially if you have my version of the, uh, deployment going.

Jessica: Yes. Then, like most of you out there in your organization, perhaps you, this caused me to check in on the state of our AI tooling across the company, and it... let's say it's wholly inconsistent. So that is my next, getting ready to negotiate with Anthropic. Wish me luck.

Dave Morin: Good luck with that.

Jessica: Anyway, big win. Okay, guys, we're gonna start with some big news this week, which is Meta's settlement with 47 states and some other entities over the collection of child harm safety cases that have been embroiling it for quite some time now. $17 billion settlement that also came with more limits on screen time, more notifications, more of what we've seen in terms around the parental controls, and interestingly, has an entire campaign attached to it where Meta is asserting it is now the gold standard on all of this and is trying to goad YouTube and others to join it.

Sam Lessin: I like that, by the way. That was smart.

Jessica: Of course you like it. It's completely up your alley. Dave, I'm gonna go to you first. You have been very outspoken, rightfully so, about social networks and mental health. What do you make of this move? There are still other cases out there, but this is sort of one of the big kahuna, potentially big tobacco-like cases that was hanging over the company.

Dave Morin: It seems like a nothing burger to me. The amount of money is de minimis, doesn't matter.

Jessica: They were spending, like, 2 billion a quarter on legal expenses or something.

Dave Morin: How much?

Jessica: I, I remember 2 billion. I don't remember over what, if that was a quarter or-

Dave Morin: I mean, but still, like, $20 billion to Meta is nothing.

Jessica: Right. Agreed. Agreed.

Sam Lessin: Over 10 years.

Dave Morin: This, like, literally is a nothing. Looks to me like you can just abuse children, get away with it, and then get slapped on the wrist.

Jessica: Defend that they're abusing children. I'm not gonna let that fly. Unpack that.

Sam Lessin: Spicy.

Dave Morin: I mean, it's like I'm not alone in asserting this. Meta's systems are optimized for engagement. They addict you to the feedback loop in the algorithm.

Sam Lessin: It's so good.

Jessica: Is YouTube abusing children?

Dave Morin: Absolutely.

Jessica: Snap abusing children?

Dave Morin: Absolutely. And they do this with impunity and with virtually no consequences, and I think these AGs could have taken this much further. I'm actually quite surprised that they settled for so little.

Sam Lessin: What would you want them to get?

Dave Morin: Meaningful pain.

Brit Morin: Also, it's over 10 years, so that, it's, like, 1.7 billion a year, which is nothing.

Jessica: Yeah. I also should say the, the amount could be a maximum, and also, I believe, which a- again, we can turn this piece over to Sam, but it will pay more if Snap, TikTok, and YouTube also agree to things.

Sam Lessin: I liked that. That was clever.

Dave Morin: At this point, I think that we're probably in a zone where social media should just be illegal, similar to alcohol.

Sam Lessin: Whoa. Wait, alcohol's not illegal.

Brit Morin: If you're under 18 or 21.

Dave Morin: Probably under 21, you shouldn't be allowed to be on social media. It's that bad for mental health.

Sam Lessin: What would have become of poor you and me without Ain- AOL Instant Messenger back in the day?

Dave Morin: Messaging apps are a different story. Like, I think messaging's probably fine.

Sam Lessin: Is Snap a messaging app or a social network?

Brit Morin: Other than group messaging.

Sam Lessin: How do you define a group?

Jessica: How do you define a message? No, that... Sam, that's an excellent point. That's an excellent point.

Sam Lessin: I don't know. I, I honestly think this is a totally logical conclusion for everyone. My sense is Meta probably, like everyone, there's, like, a bunch of emails you just don't want out 'cause, like, that's how these things work. You gotta settle. You gotta give them a pound of flesh.

Jessica: Well, you're making a practical, like, it was wise for Meta to s-

Dave Morin: But it's not a pound of flesh.

Jessica: It's not a pound of flesh, Sam.

Sam Lessin: The limits are a pound of flesh. I mean, like, but it's fine. I mean, it's like-

Dave Morin: What's the limit, I guess? Like, give me a little bit more.

Sam Lessin: It's, like, two hours a day.

Dave Morin: My response so far is only to the, the money number. I don't know what any of the other rest of it is.

Brit Morin: Here's what the deal includes. Ready? A default two-hour daily time limit cumulative across Instagram and Facebook that teens can only turn off with a parent's permission. Likes will be hidden on teens' profiles and those that they interact with. School mode, or a mute on notifications between 8:00 AM and 3:00 PM during school days. Prompts noting when a teen has hit 15 minutes of continual use, then notifications when cumulative use has hit 60 and 90 minutes. The ability to choose a feed that is not driven by an algorithm, the ability to turn off auto-play for videos and content

Jessica: But neither of those are defaults, so let's point that out.

Dave Morin: Yeah, the devil's in the defaults, so doesn't matter.

Brit Morin: Extreme makeup filters will no longer be accessible. That's a key-

Dave Morin: Sure

Brit Morin: ... for girls. And-

Jessica: So you do it in Grok and bring it over

Brit Morin: ... for that two-hour time limit, it will be reduced to a one-hour daily limit if TikTok, Snap, and YouTube also agree.

Dave Morin: Sorry, what do you mean? I don't, I don't know what you mean by that.

Jessica: Sorry, I'm all for Meta taking out an ad in the New York Times tomorrow, which I think they're doing, saying, "We agreed to these terms. What about you?" That's fun corporate business warfare. I love it. But saying that basically you're imposing a safety tool, and you're gonna make it more safe if someone else does it-

Brit Morin: But that's a business problem for them.

Dave Morin: I agree with that, Jess.

Sam Lessin: I totally disagree.

Jessica: Okay. I get my point, you get yours. I'm sharing my point. Let me draw an analogy and then you can have it if you're still awake over there. Do you need a pina colada?

Sam Lessin: No, I'm s- uh, if you wanna bring me one.

Jessica: Absolutely not. But I could DoorDash you one though. To take Dave's analogy, this is what that component feels like to me. And by the way, I'm in favor of any limits on this, even if I don't think they'll be effective. If you say, "You know, we studied alcohol, and we feel like it should be banned if you're under 21 because developmentally you're not ready. But if Budweiser and Tito's agree, we'll, we'll make it 19. We'll throw our principles out the window"

Dave Morin: That's exactly it, Jess.

Sam Lessin: You guys are so wrong.

Brit Morin: I agree with Sam.

Jessica: Or, no, sorry, we'll make it 23. My analogy's off.

Sam Lessin: Jess, can I... Let me help you out here.

Dave Morin: Let Sam make his extremely biased point, Jess.

Sam Lessin: It's not a biased point. It's very simple. If society had the balls, right, at a national level to say, "We as a society, as a democracy, don't want social media, people to, kids to use more than one hour of social media a day," if we could actually pass that and believe that as a society, then fine. That's the same thing for all the players. This is, like, the equivalent of saying, "Hey, if you're Budweiser, because Budweiser, we don't like Budweiser, or Budweiser's the biggest target or has the biggest checkbook, you can't let your beer be more than 3% alcohol, but everyone else can have 6 or 8% alcohol." What do you think the teens are gonna buy? They're gonna buy the 6 or 8% alcohol. It's just, like, selective bias.

Jessica: I understand why they do it. I don't like the fact that we are in a territory where screen time is even close to in these dimensions. Like, that's the kinda problem we're at.

Sam Lessin: It's not. But let's just acknowledge we are, and, like, that's the conversation nationally. And you're not going after the everything apples to apples. And so I think Meta's making a really good point, which is like, look, if we as a society wanna make a decision at a national level that we believe that kids should only do an hour of screen time a day in similar services, fine. Then, like, we can all agree to that, but selectively going after one provider and not the others, like, I think it's actually a very brilliant thing, being like, "Look, we're gonna do part of it be- because we wanna settle with you guys. We wanna move on from this. Candidly, we wanna be an AI company. Like, let's be done with this. But, like, we're happy to give more money, go even more extreme. You guys actually have the legal horsepower, and society believes that we should only have kids do an hour a day. Fine"

Brit Morin: I agree because, to use the alcohol analogy as a continuation of what you said, Jess, we need to label social media companies that are alcohol brands, in this case, with a label, and we need to make a rule for all of them as a country. And I agree with Sam that Meta's taking a stab here at trying to do that. But we really need the higher powers to come in and help.

Dave Morin: Just to throw it out there, YouTube is a way worse, way more egregious offender.

Brit Morin: Totally.

Sam Lessin: I completely agree.

Dave Morin: Just so I don't sound biased against Meta, like, YouTube is, like, the most nefarious of all. And Roblox, like, I actually think Roblox should just be banned.

Sam Lessin: Dave, so here's my thing I don't understand about your argument is, like, I totally agree with that, by the way. Then, like, Instagram's like, "Okay, we have a two-hour screen limit," but there's no limit on YouTube. Kids hit their two-hour Instagram limit, which is, like, more moderated, at least they're trying, et cetera, and they just bump over to, like, something that's way worse, where there are no controls. That, like, is good for no one. That only hurts Meta with no upside. So it's, like, not-

Dave Morin: I'm not arguing against you, Sam.

Jessica: Sam, your point is reasonable, and I think we can all agree that this should not be dealt on a company-by-company basis. And I see, to the degree that Meta's trying to make that point and change the broader conversation, I understand that. I am just sort of deeply uncomfortable with the fact that we are now so openly... Implicit in all of this is this exposure is bad. And who should decide how bad, or is it one-hour bad or two-hour bad or four-hour bad? And that just, like, makes me look pretty uncomfortable.

Sam Lessin: Like, I'm not one who can see that it's as bad as some people think it is, even close. But what I will say is, like, the story to read here is, like, people being like, "Look, if you wanna have a real national conversation about this, let's have a real national conversation. Like, don't go after the easy targets. Like, let's have a real chat about it. And if you have the votes/the staying power or the will to get something bigger done, great. Like, we're on board for it, but don't selectively enforce," which is, I think, a totally reasonable place to be. I don't think that it's necessarily bad or... I'm not saying it should be something. I'm just saying, like, whatever it is, it's a social, it's a societal conversation, not a conversation about a single company.

Jessica: Dave, why do you think YouTube, given the nature of the product, hasn't faced the same level of vitriol and, and scrutiny? And it has faced some, to be... But why I, what's your theory on that? Yeah

Dave Morin: I'm not sure. Maybe they have a better lobby. I think people don't perceive it to be the same type of product.

Brit Morin: The social dynamics are different. There's still an algorithm, and there's a feed of a bunch of crap, but you aren't looking at, like, what other girls that you know at school are liking or saying about you. They're not commenting on your stuff all the time.

Dave Morin: You're not seeing that on Instagram anymore anyway. Like, Instagram and YouTube are basically the same product now.

Brit Morin: Not true. No. Most teenagers have Finstas, so they have their public Instagram, and they have their private, just their friends Instagram that they post all their, like, super pretty photos of themselves to, mostly so they get their friends to comment on it, like it, so the popular kids like them, the boys like them.

Jessica: Wait, where do the pretty ones go? They go to the public or the pri- I'm so confused.

Dave Morin: I don't know, and I don't know that it matters.

Jessica: Explain teenagers to me.

Brit Morin: Okay. There's two feeds you have. So you have your outward one, which is connected to whoever, and, like, your mom and dad know about that one, and then you have your, like, secret one that, like, only your select people who you approve can follow.

Sam Lessin: Y- you need to keep up your cover story one, otherwise people don't, will go after your fake one and say, "Where's your Instagram?" Here's an interesting question: Do you think we ever get to the point where, like, an AG sues MrBeast directly? Like, skip the platforms.

Dave Morin: Maybe.

Sam Lessin: Right? They're like... That would be interesting.

Jessica: It's very hard. It's called freedom of speech, baby. It's a tricky one.

Sam Lessin: But it's, i- it's all tricky. I just, it's an interesting thing about, like, where-

Dave Morin: Sam, you have this playing out with much more egregious offenders.

Sam Lessin: Like what?

Dave Morin: I don't even wanna say their names publicly, but there are other YouTubers, they transmit content which is far more damaging than, say, MrBeast, and you've got, like, nation states going after these people, trying to arrest people and put them in jail.

Sam Lessin: You're talking about, like, Tate? I don't know. Is there... The Tate brothers.

Jessica: Whatever Dave's trying to do, don't ruin it.

Sam Lessin: I have figured out, by the way, you can't talk about certain things on our podcast or av- YouTube won't let you promote it.

Jessica: YouTube is not gonna be happy about this.

Sam Lessin: So now we can't promote this podcast 'cause I said Tate.

Jessica: But do not talk about whatever happens in Washington DC that starts with a P, because then they will not allow us to promote it.

Sam Lessin: I know. I'm so annoyed. We had a great podcast episode, and I can't promote it because we mentioned the DT name.

Dave Morin: I don't even know what that is.

Sam Lessin: So it's political speech.

Jessica: We can't. We're trying to save this podcast.

Sam Lessin: I'm not sure how to think about that from a policy perspective. I'm not sure that's smart or right.

Jessica: I just enjoyed Sam's arguing with a dear, hardworking YouTube account manager over the state of their political advertising. I was like, "This is gonna get nowhere fast." You gotta go to the top.

Sam Lessin: It's not gonna get anywhere. It just doesn't really make... It's a good strategy for avoiding public scrutiny, but it doesn't intellectually make sense. In fact, it's kinda weird to be like, "Well, we're not gonna allow more conversation that's political speech or promote it, and we're only gonna have things about c- crazy celebrity topics."

Jessica: Well, you remember the Russia Today stuff, right? This is all, was all hatched in, in all of that.

Dave Morin: I just don't know how to resolve this.

Sam Lessin: No one does. That's why it's interesting.

Brit Morin: No. I think we label it and set an age limit and a time limit and the same things-

Sam Lessin: When has that ever done any- what are you, what are you, Jill Biden?

Brit Morin: Alcohol, smoking.

Sam Lessin: No, it was Al Gore's wife who, like, put video game warnings. This video ga- it, like, does nothing.

Dave Morin: Look, Sam, that's, like, pretty unfair. When you're trying to structure a society in a healthy way, like, you have to have real conversations about law and how to structure things, and I think this is a very real and reasonable thing to be discussing, which is where should the box be? Where is this detrimental to developmental psychology and brain development? For example, there's very well-established science around cannabis, for example, right? Like, we've now recently in modern times, the last 10 years, broadly legalized cannabis, like, across many, many, many states of America. There's, like, very good science that kids under the age of 18 really should not have this in their system. I know that it happens anyway, but, like, we have to set the bar somewhere, right? Like, we have to say, like, there is good research on psychosis and the outcomes around that for kids under 18 it shouldn't impact. Now, we know that it's gonna happen anyway, but we have to set the bar somewhere, right? And I guess that's what this conversation still is not turning into. It's, like, a gobbledygook, like, here's, like, all these different-

Sam Lessin: It's all gobbledygook.

Dave Morin: It is. Like, Brit had to, literally took, what, 30 seconds to read off all of the random stuff. Nobody remembers even listening this far into the pod what she said earlier. And instead of us having a conversation, kids under 18 shouldn't touch this stuff. And yes, kids are gonna touch it. Of course, they are.

Sam Lessin: Because we can't ever agree at a societal level or do anything hard, so instead we argue and come up with these ridiculous, like, sideshow things to placate all the political parties and, like, leave every... Like, I just don't think we can make hard decisions anymore as a society about how we wanna live and manage.

Jessica: Well, then people are gonna have to make hard decisions for themselves and their families.

Sam Lessin: Amen, and s- and communities have to do this. Like, this is why I don't, I don't think putting the blame or regulating at this level makes sense.

Jessica: Dave, I'm with you. I would label this. I would label it.

Dave Morin: That is why this became what it became, right? Like, the reason that this is, like, flooding through to the... How many AGs were involved in this?

Brit Morin: 47.

Dave Morin: It's insane.

Sam Lessin: It's, like, more than there are states. It's, like, 83 AGs.

Brit Morin: But also, Australia just banned this for kids under 16.

Sam Lessin: And it does nothing.

Dave Morin: Parents feel helpless, man.

Sam Lessin: According to Business Insider, more teens are now using it in Australia.

Brit Morin: Oh, according to Business Insider? Come on.

Sam Lessin: I love Business Insider. It's my third favorite publication.

Dave Morin: Shit talking and trolling this conversation is fine, but, like, we're trying to actually have a c- ... real conversation about, like, where should this go? I think that just being like, "Nothing matters, doesn't care, never gonna happen." The reason this is at 47 attorneys general is that parents feel helpless. They feel helpless at the behest of gigantic fucking data centers that have the control over their kids' minds.

Sam Lessin: Parents need to get a fucking grip on it.

Dave Morin: But it's true.

Jessica: I'm gonna start peeing right now.

Sam Lessin: Here's the thing, guys, I hate YouTube for our kids. I think it's awful, right? I keep getting them to watch '80s and '90s comedies with me, which is just so fun, and every time they're on YouTube I'm like, I'm sad for it. But you know what? I don't even personally have the balls to actually fully ban it for them. It's a home issue, it's a parent issue. Like, I'm not saying it's not a thing. Every family has different s- like, setups. If we could have a national conversation about it, I'm actually down for that. Like, I think that's the right of a healthy civilization. But we're not exactly healthy right now as a civilization in terms of our ability to do anything hard or have big conversations at a national level.

Dave Morin: Because why?

Jessica: Because social media has broken us apart.

Sam Lessin: Oh, it's the social media destroyed everything.

Dave Morin: No, it's not that it destroyed everything, it's that the current structure of it makes it very hard to agree, to find common ground. Like, that's the truth.

Sam Lessin: Well, I think the thing is it's always been hard to agree nationally on anything, which is why America moves slowly and the na- federal government isn't designed to do these types of things. States are, communities are. They've all been blown up in favor of kind of national integrated economy, and the problem is the federal government is just not set up, and it's... You can't do a democracy well with 300 million people.

Jessica: Okay. We've really extrapolated to many layers. First of all, I don't think that I am pro giving parents more tools, labels, all of that.

Sam Lessin: Or just parents having balls.

Dave Morin: I'm sorry, you guys, but parents are outgunned.

Jessica: I was gonna say today, like, so I have all the resources in the world, I have all the awareness of the pros and cons of these platform. And, like, on a regular basis, I have to, like, gear myself up to present my children with alternatives to this stuff on the same level as if I'm giving a keynote presentation to 300 people. Last night I was like, I know the kids are gonna wanna watch some YouTube thing. There are very limited YouTube things that I allow. Go Mark Rober. And I was like, "I need to present options." So I'm like, I know there's this Disney Pixar series called Win or Lose that's based on the inside out emotional competency thing that's really good. Okay. Is there an episode they haven't seen? Okay, good. I'm gonna take the time when they're watching this episode to get six other shows like this episode, because even when I'm scrolling the kids areas of these apps, it's crap.

Sam Lessin: Total shit.

Jessica: Honestly, it's an end of a long work day, a lot of shit. It took, like, centering myself, speaking my truth, a lot of mental work- ... to not just put on whatever plays after Mark Rober. Okay? And I have a ton of resources and awareness, competencies, like, all this kind of stuff. It is simply too much to say all of this is on parents. Especially because, like, half of the kids in America don't have their parents home or childcare because the parents are working more than one job, and the kids are left with an iPad at home, or left at, like, a daycare center or something that lets them watch screens.

Dave Morin: Nobody has any chance. These clouds, I mean, I don't think Meta publishes it or Google publishes it, but my guess is that it's around 10 million computers in, like, these clouds globally, if not tens of millions. And no one brain has any chance. Parents have absolutely no chance. And, like, I really think that's what this is about, is that, like, your brain, your singular human brain is outgunned. And with AI happening, it's just getting even more intense. Like, the power of the compute is even stronger.

Jessica: By the way, it's not just kids. I want this for my parents too. Guys, I want this for me. I want this for me. And for me. But, like, I'd rank it kids, boomers, then us. We're hanging on, as Sam scrolls Instagram.

Sam Lessin: No, I actually am scrolling Instagram.

Jessica: Sam, why'd you move inside? A little lawnmower noise? What's going on?

Sam Lessin: It's getting too hot. It's too sunny.

Jessica: You need air conditioning.

Sam Lessin: The, um... I needed vitamin D, but not too much.

Jessica: But you're still putting your hands behind your head like you're, you know, in Ibiza, so very nice.

Sam Lessin: Neither of us have been to Ibiza, so I don't think we know what that's like.

Dave Morin: That's good, actually. I hope neither of you ever go.

Jessica: Maybe Jess has and you just don't know about it, Sam.

Sam Lessin: I mean, God bless if she wants to go to Ibiza.

Jessica: I'll go with you, Jess. Girls' trip.

Sam Lessin: The societal biggest level picture thing where we can talk about individual liberty and the harm principle and John Stuart Mill.

Dave Morin: He invoked John Stuart Mill.

Sam Lessin: Like, we can talk about liberty and, like, the extents of it and, like, things like that. I think those are all really interesting conversations. Well, we can't really have a intellectual or big picture conversation about this or AI. So instead we're gonna look for, like, reasonably easy targets and then selectively ask them for some money and some changes, is just that good. 'Cause I don't think it does anything. I think it's all theater. Like, you started out by saying it's a nothing burger, Dave, like, in terms of a slap on the wrist. I'd say it's a nothing burger for actually helping anything.

Dave Morin: Totally.

Sam Lessin: Right? And that's kind of the point, is like, it's all theater, right? And, like, it's a huge amount. The only one who does well in the theater are the lawyers, who make a bunch of money on it. And, like, you get some AGs who get to say, "I signed onto a thing," and, like, "We won." And so everyone needs to be able to say they won.

Dave Morin: But nobody won. I guess that's why I called it nothing burger. Like, nothing got ac- ... change. Nothing's gonna improve

Sam Lessin: No one wins, but everyone gets to go to their constituents. It's kind of like, how the hell do you get out of Ukraine or Hormuz? You need, everyone needs to be able to claim a win and then realize we probably shouldn't have gotten into this fight in the first place. It, or like the way we set it up was wrong. And I just think, like, I wish that we could have real conversations. And I actually appreciate Meta at least being like, "Look, we'll do what we need to do to, like, give you a win. Like, let's move on. We're happy to do some things, whatever." But also opening the door and being like, "Hey, let's like... If you wanna have more real conversation, we're down for it. But like let's do it in like a actually sensible, logical way, as opposed to this being like a selective enforcement game of politics." It's like you're fighting last generation's war.

Jessica: We live in the real world where this stuff is just happening, and I, so I think we need, like, a lot of different bites at the apple.

Brit Morin: Okay, orthogonal idea.

Dave Morin: AI is gonna be so much worse.

Sam Lessin: So then what's the, why are we dealing with last generation's war?

Jessica: Okay, Brit is gonna kind of culminate this topic. Brit, bring it to a coherent, forward-looking, insightful clo-

Brit Morin: I was gonna expand it.

Jessica: Okay, you, we just need to move, so you can take us anywhere.

Brit Morin: I'll expand it, and then we can move to the next topic. Okay. But I think a lot of the hubbub in Silicon Valley right now is, like, well, making agentic apps is, like, so passe. Like, the new thing is, like, what if you can create a whole agentic operating system for yourself and just, like, make your own OS, and you don't need iOS in the App Store or Android and Google Play, and then you just... Parents can make their own children's software stacks, and then they won't skirt around the opportunity to even get onto YouTube or Roblox or any of these things. Because you're controlling it at, like, the OS level.

Dave Morin: This is not an unreasonable long-term thought, that part of what has made it hard for parents to actually enforce their ideas about what is good parenting is the structure of the technology so- the software itself. It's very hard to change the software right now, but that's changing rapidly, right? Like, I think one of the most interesting emergent ideas that Brit is kind of talking about is this notion that all software should just be changeable. We've kind of lived in a world for 30 years where software is, like, put in a box and delivered to you, and you don't get to change it very much. You can maybe ask the creator of it to do this feature or that feature. But we're kind of moving into a new world where you can actually just prompt and change your software. Sam, you've talked about this extensively, like you're running a lot of your own stuff on your phone now. I am, too. And maybe Brit's right. Maybe in a few years you're just gonna be able to be like, "Please get rid of all of this." The phone will just finally do it, versus right now it's like, it's really difficult.

Sam Lessin: I think this is good. Can I embrace and extend? So one, interestingly, I think if you gave everyone, you said, "All your software is now customizable," the humans will be like, "More boobs." Customizable software is not gonna be, lead to restraint. The people are gonna be like, "I want more powerful marijuana strains." Like, they don't want less powerful shit, right? And so, like-

Dave Morin: But that's fine for adults, Sam. If you want your OS to be all boobs, fine.

Sam Lessin: I do. But the thing I would say, in terms of structural solutions, though, this, let's get into structural solutions. Here would be a law that I actually think I would really get behind that could make sense, which is every OS and app produced has to publish a feed of every action of children that their parents can watch with an agent and know what their kids are watching and can have a conversation. They can't stop them necessarily for version one. We say, as a rule, if you're a parent, there has to be a simple way to get a feed of everything your kids are consuming on any app they're using.

Dave Morin: I would love that.

Sam Lessin: Then you're like, okay, this is a rule for everyone. This isn't just for Instagram. It's like, look, yeah, kid, do what you're gonna do on Instagram, but I get to see everything you're looking at and clicking on. Watch what you're gonna watch on YouTube for now, but I want the log of it really easy to access. And then the obvious next step is I wanna be able to have a conversation with you about it. In theory, I wanna be able to block you from channels in the future. But if you said to me, "Hey, until you're 18, I'm not gonna, like, limit your screen time," that's stupid. I'm not gonna, like, try to come up with these nettling rules. It's a very, very simple concept. Simple, low level. If you're looking at shit on your phone, until you're 18, I have an easy way to sidecar.

Brit Morin: Well, I'm gonna block some shit.

Dave Morin: That would be amazing. I mean, this, this doesn't exist. I mean, it's important to point out, Sam, that, like, you can't get this right now. The, the, the meta API, the f- the Google API, it's not that hard. Come on.

Sam Lessin: Well, I'll give you an example.

Dave Morin: These are, like, database logs. Like, there could be an API for this no problem.

Sam Lessin: Even iMessage. Like, take iMessage. Like, they have all these fucking controls. Who can talk to your teen? It's too much. But if you said to me... And, like, by the way, you know what I have? I have a desktop, like, sitting in my compu- in my room where I just, like, logged into my son's iMessage account, and I sit there and fucking screenshot it all day long algorithmically, 'cause there's no APIs to it, so I can process, like, what he's talking about and who he's talking to as a parent, right? Like, that's insane. It should be really easy to just be like, I get CC'd easily. And by the way, this is beautiful in the agentic world, because in an agentic... Before it'd be like, that's really hard to review all that stuff. I don't wanna, like, click on everything. Now you're like, look, I can just run Claude on it and just care, these are my values. What should I care about? Things like that. But you can just be so much smarter about the product decisions and, like, policy-wise what you're actually shooting for in a way that, like, enables parents and helps people, right? And people aren't.

Brit Morin: But again, you need that at the OS level, right?

Sam Lessin: You could also just go after the big ads.

Dave Morin: Yeah. It's like, I just need a meta API. I need a YouTube A- API.

Sam Lessin: To Brit's point, at the OS level, this is why I always think it's so funny that Apple avoids all scrutiny on this. Apple could easily, with their App Store review process-

Dave Morin: I don't think they avoid scrutiny on this, man

Sam Lessin: ... on the kids stuff, they get to blame... I mean, the, the stuff like the, like, age verification stuff would be so easy for them to do, but somehow it's Facebook's problem. Like, they're pretty good at pushing off blame to others.

Dave Morin: But to your point, it's everybody's problem. It's not just Apple's problem either.

Sam Lessin: But I'm just saying, they have the, because of the App Store, they have a very nice... Google Play and App Store has, like, have a very nice low-level way to enforce and hook into all this stuff, so it'd be good to do it at the OS level. You can't do it there, fine. You just say, "After you have more than five million users, one of the requirements is that, like, parents have the option, right, to get the full stream continuously of data," right?

Brit Morin: But it is at the OS level, 'cause it is also group chats on iMessage, Spotify. Yeah, all these things.

Dave Morin: Dude, what a mess.

Sam Lessin: I have an API that grabs my continuous Spotify and listening history. It's super interesting. Like, I actually know when I go to bed and when I wake up. There's all sorts of interesting facts about what I listen to when I work late at night. It's fascinating to look at Spotify at scale. But I actually kind of would love to have the API of what my kids are listening to, 'cause if they're listening to, like, WAP on repeat, I'd kinda wanna know. There's no reason that you can't just publish that, like, make that easy. So I think there'd be, like... This is what I'm talking about in terms of lazy policy, is like, smart people, you could come up with, like, these, a few things that would really make a difference, and wouldn't even be that objectionable in most cases to anyone, could really move the needle, but instead we're stuck in, like, AG pissing matches about stuff that doesn't matter.

Jessica: It just, I like this API publishing thing, but we also need solutions that are dead simple for non-technical-

Sam Lessin: That's pretty simple

Dave Morin: Just being able to see a log of what your kid looks at?

Sam Lessin: And when. Are they on, looking at their device in the middle of school? Like, I don't even know. I mean, I, I know, 'cause our kids don't have phones, but if you're a parent, it's just, like, simple. It's like, hey... And by the way, especially with an agent on top that you can plug any agent you want into, be like, "Hey, is my kid paying attention or are they, like, chatting with their friends at 2:00 PM?" Like, I'll figure out what to do with that, right? But, like, there's no way to even know right now, and it wouldn't be that hard to make it very transparent.

Jessica: By the way, the one person Arsa does text with on his iPad has very technical parents who have figured this out, because every time he texts or call, they reference it to me.

Brit Morin: Or their agent references it to you.

Sam Lessin: Parental controls that, like... And people, this is the thing, is they are so complicated. Even as a pretty motivated, reasonably technical person, like, our universe for parent, parental controls is a mess in our house. Total mess, and, like, it's irrecoverable. And I think that's the bigger thing, is you can come up with more of these things, but you're talking about things people can't use. This is what people can't use. You just need to, like, strip it down, allow people to have conversations.

Jessica: Can we make alternatives easier?

Brit Morin: We have a company that's working on this, like, at some level, called Clearspace. So they're taking, like, a, almost like a VPN approach to understanding everything that your kid's doing and letting you, like, speak in English to the AI and say, like, "I want them to do this and not this and this and not this," and it starts to, like, implement some of the controls for you. So there are definitely startups taking a stab at this.

Sam Lessin: Isn't it insane that, like, you actually literally need companies that are trying to, like, layer parental controls? It's such a fucking mess.

Jessica: I was saying to her, can we make, like, soccer more-

Dave Morin: No, because we've also ruined soccer.

Brit Morin: Yeah. Have you seen the latest write-ups about that? Was it Time magazine?

Dave Morin: Everybody I know that's got kids in soccer is like, "Please, I just don't want to."

Brit Morin: It's not just soccer. It's every competitive sport. It's ridiculous.

Dave Morin: American capitalism sports.

Jessica: Oh, look at us, parents decrying the state of the youth.

Sam Lessin: I bought my kids a model airplane that then I built.

Dave Morin: That's the whole idea.

Jessica: It's like a drone technical, like, it probably has AI on board. It probably has a GPU.

Sam Lessin: No, it doesn't. It was made in China, so it might have a GPU in it for spying purposes.

Jessica: Okay. Well, we're interested in your opinions on this topic.

Sam Lessin: No, we're not.

Brit Morin: I am.

Jessica: I said that so Sam could say that, and then we could move on. So there are a couple other things we wanna get to, worthy of spending the amount of time that we did on that topic.

Sam Lessin: Dolly Parton.

Jessica: We can talk about Dolly, but first I wanna talk briefly about the imminent passing of the torch of Tim Cook to John Ternus. Information reported this week about Tim Cook's farewell. OneRepublic played, Loreen spoke, Tim acknowledged his partner Mike. And Dave, Brit, Apple files that you are, is this a big moment? How are you feeling?

Dave Morin: Yeah, it's a huge moment. I mean, end of an era.

Sam Lessin: End of the era of supply chain optimization?

Dave Morin: I mean, Sam, when you take over a co- a company at the scale of Apple and grow it an order of magnitude, you can talk.

Sam Lessin: No interest. I will say, did you see the chart I, that I posted that Claude made me?

Dave Morin: No.

Sam Lessin: I'm very proud of this. I said, "Hey, Claude. I want a chart that basically talks on a, obviously a zero, a percentile basis, so you can baseline it, when Tim Cook became in charge of Apple and when he joined the board of Nike, and the market cap of the two." And it's hilarious, because he joined Nike five years as a board director before he became the head of Apple. And if you look at the charts, for the first 15 years or whatever it is, 15 and change, which is the, the time I said, that is literally Nike's maximum stock price, and it is now back down to basically where he started. And so it's really funny. If you look at the chart, which I will post a link to if I remember-

Dave Morin: So what happened?

Sam Lessin: This is my being really cynical, snarky, but the cynical, snarky take is, in about 15 years, you can supply chain optimize the hell out of a company and make stock go way up, but then Apple better figure out how to not be Nike, right, and come up with the innovations and stay ahead of the market, because literally it's almost, like, to the month. This chart implies he's leaving Apple at the maximum price possible for a Tim Cook style optimizer. But it's obviously just a silly chart, but it is funny to look at.

Jessica: Do you guys think Tim Cook's legac- the extent of his legacy has been overlooked? That, like- His legacy as sort of the successor to Steve, but does that-

Dave Morin: I don't think so. I feel like he's very respected. I guess it depends on what you mean by that, Jess, but there's been a lot of thoughtful writing and content created about the work that he's done. I mean, I, it's a pretty hard act to follow. And if, if you were to sort of go point by point on the Tim Cook legacy, it's pretty hard not to look at it and say he followed a really tough act. He made this thing into a multi-trillion dollar company. They did launch a lot of great products. They established a dominant new position in certain form of Silicon that emerging as, like, a major materially different strategic move than everybody else at their scale. Was he, like, the Jobsian innovator that came up with the iPhone? No. But I feel like he's quite respected for what he did do, and I don't think there's anybody out there panning that.

Brit Morin: I'd also argue that the era he was CEO, interesting but a little boring. Like, there was a mobile revolution and a social revolution in the 2000s that Steve truly took advantage of. The 2010s were, like, a lot of SaaS things and, like, I don't know. It was fine. Like, a lot of stuff became big. But, like, now we're going into the agentic era, and it's a whole different beast that requires you a different set of innovation. And so maybe there's, like, some interesting blessing in disguise here. Like, he did what he does best in the era that's about scale and SaaS and optimization and, like, all of this stuff, and commerce and cloud. And now Turnus can take over and hopefully come up with some magic for the next era.

Jessica: My first story covering Apple for The Wall Street Journal was memorial held for Steve at Stanford.

Sam Lessin: I remember when you, when I drove you to drop you off at Stanford.

Jessica: You did drop me off for that. I wasn't invited, in case that wasn't obvious. I did a string of stories as young beat reporters do when they start beats, which is, like, any time Tim issued a policy, they started doing more philanthropic matching, which is something Steve hadn't done. And I got a big, a lot of news cycles over the early days of Tim Cook and enjoyed the limited number of times I interviewed him. But I think it is interesting to look back and see, I mean, j- just not to r- forget how much in the shadows he was of Steve. And, and I think the res- to your point, Dave, the results kind of speak for themselves.

Sam Lessin: The financial results are unbelievable.

Jessica: Yeah. No, they are. And I, and I think that's what I meant. And but I also thought it was interesting in one of, you know, presumably we're sort of at the end of his, like, outward communication of pitching products. You know, the- Apple announced the new Mac Mini.

Sam Lessin: Did you see with no AI with Claymation? People were panning that on the internet. Well, the whole commercial for it is a bunch of Claymation, which is very fun and cool, but, like, how do you not use AI in a product that is fundamentally about AI?

Jessica: What was interesting to me is how much the press release in Tim's own post on X talked about it for AI workloads, which is something that we have been talking about for more than a year, and I know, Dave, you're very passionate about. Honestly, it still feels a little weird to me when Tim talks about AI because I feel like it has not been, they've just taken such a different tack, and then it felt like they had the Apple AI, Apple Intelligence launch that largely did not pan out in the way they wanted it to. But it's certainly looming over his exit and what's to come. But it's also nice, as we've talked about too, over the last two, three years, the conversation about AI has been so co-opted by large language models or a certain handful of apps and certain cent- And it's always been much bigger and broader and more interesting than that.

Dave Morin: I guess Sam would say it. Like, AI is matrix multiplication. It's a type of compute operation that requires real hardware engineering. And Apple has always been two companies. It's been a hardware engineering company on the one hand and a design and software engineering company on the other. And they're completely, in a way, completely different companies.

Sam Lessin: And a supply chain company.

Dave Morin: Sure. These are completely different modes down there, and everybody actually interprets Apple and its innovation through the software side of things because that's the buttons you push on and things like this. But, like, Apple is insane at doing the hardware engineering side of the equation and made some extremely smart decisions under Tim. Like, the system on a chip, the SOC decision, I think will go down as one of the most strategically important technology decisions that happened in Silicon Valley in this era because the ability to run agentic AI workloads on this chip is extremely... It's, like, just really, really good. And their ability to do it very high bandwidth with large amounts of RAM and their sort of integrated GPU, CPU, RAM clustering, I mean, it's just amazing stuff that they had, like, a lot of foresight on, and that's because on the hardware side of the house, they understand atoms and heat and energy and how to make boxes filled with, like, the right stuff. And so I just think that that's, like, a very kind of misunderstood part of the equation here, and that he's gonna go down in history having made a really important strategic choice that's gonna play out over the next few years.

Sam Lessin: I do think, Dave, the thing I think you and I can agree on is we're gonna look back in 10 years, and Tim Cook is either gonna look like a fucking genius or an idiot, and Apple will either be a really important company or have completely missed an era. And, like, we don't know yet. I think his legacy will be defined by the AI, what comes next.

Jessica: I don't think it's gonna have missed an era. I mean, I, I don't know that. I don't know that, but, like, the scale is tipping towards-

Sam Lessin: This is the question is, look, there's a lot of ways in which Apple actually will come out of this era looking good Hilariously good. They didn't sink all the money into data centers, right? They're gonna do it on t- they're gonna get to sit on top of every model as the last model to consumers, they can maintain that. It's very possible in 10 years that Apple is laughing all the way to the bank, and people will be blessing Tim Cook for having done, fallen into none of the traps. Didn't big a- build a big research team, didn't do data centers, didn't get snowed. Like, then people will be a hero. If that's not true, right, and it turns out that Apple is internally dysfunctional, can't get AI stuff done, blah, all the negative stories, then the story will be Tim spent the last 15 years optimizing last year's game. It's classic innovator's dilemma. He missed the big swerve, and he's gonna be vilified. But we won't know for 10 years.

Jessica: So Sam, if you had to place a bet today on that, what would you place it, if you had to today? We should note that our seven-year-old is putting all of his allowance money into Apple and is very excited about it.

Sam Lessin: He is. It's amazing. He literally was like, he... And he's like, he wants to do it now. He's like, "I need all of my cash in Apple."

Brit Morin: Why?

Jessica: I have not really peeled back the onion on why.

Brit Morin: Is it the Turness move? Is he a Turness fan?

Dave Morin: No, he just looks around and he sees Apple products everywhere. It's, like, not rocket science.

Sam Lessin: He's really into the idea he can finally afford a whole share and he wants to vote.

Jessica: Well, I told him about shareholder meetings, which got him very exci- I'm try, you know, trying to teach the element of business. But Sam, d- you're not off the hook. Which do you think it's gonna be, 10 years from now?

Brit Morin: Oh, yeah, or give a percentage. You can give what percent.

Sam Lessin: I love the humor of it all, so I'm gonna bet that it's kind of one of these accidental genius moves, right, which is that he goes down in history and Apple looks fucking great because they avoided a incinerator box of cash, and they're gonna be on top in 10 years. So I'll take the pro-Apple case, largely 'cause I think it'll be hilarious if it plays out, and I think it's quite possible. But I don't know.

Jessica: I think I take that case too. Not that I think there's gonna be necessarily an implosion, but y- Apple's a very hard company to bet against. I mean, my journey as covering it at the Journal was like, "What is the iPhone number this quarter? What is the iPhone number this quarter? This thing's supposed to disrupt the iPhone. This thing's suppo- oh wait, it didn't, it went up. Wow, it turns out there are customers in China. Oh wait, there are fewer customers in China. It's still going up," right? And now, at some point, that does get disrupted, but I think it's very hard to predict exactly how, and I don't think it's gonna be disrupted by OpenAI's Puck or whatever they're launching, right?

Dave Morin: I mean, if you believe the whole idea of the bitter lesson, right, this idea, this is, like, one of the animating beliefs of the AI community, that the more compute you throw at a problem, better things get. If you were to n- sort of narrow down to a single decision that mattered to answer this question 10 years from now, it's the Apple Silicon decision, right? Like, they got into the game at a level that nobody in this time period did, and they're gonna be in a extremely strong position. Had they spent all of their money optimizing software or building data centers or whatever, those are decisions that could have had dramatic impacts on their future. But they didn't. They became good at the one thing that supposedly is the main thing that matters in this era. I would say that the 10-year future's already written.

Sam Lessin: But they're no longer TSMC's biggest client. They don't have a bunch of computers in a warehouse. We'll see.

Jessica: Dave, you're gonna be long Apple. Where are you, Brit?

Dave Morin: Yep, I'm long.

Brit Morin: I'm long Apple too. I don't think the iPhone's going anywhere, and I think that locks people into all kinds of things. And so we in Silicon Valley see change so much more rapidly than the rest of the world, but it's gonna take a long time. So I'm with Dave.

Jessica: That's a way of saying we're one big hype machine, but yes.

Dave Morin: Best hype machine ever created.

Sam Lessin: That's why Hollywood hates us.

Dave Morin: Yeah, we're better than Hollywood.

Sam Lessin: Better than Hollywood.

Dave Morin: Hollywood didn't have software.

Jessica: Morins, what are you looking forward to this weekend? Give us a hint. What's going on in the world?

Brit Morin: Well, Backstreet's back, all right. We're going to the Sphere. It's gonna be fun.

Sam Lessin: I have to go, guys. I'm, I'm keeping someone waiting.

Brit Morin: Bye, Sam. See you later.

Sam Lessin: Bye.

Brit Morin: Um, and I'm making Dave go with me to meet my childhood crush.

Dave Morin: I cannot. I just-

Brit Morin: Howie.

Jessica: Do it, Brit. Do it.

Brit Morin: And I will be wearing white.

Dave Morin: Let it be known that I'm not going willingly.

Jessica: Oh, come on, Dave. It's an experience.

Brit Morin: We'll have stories next week.

Jessica: So stay tuned.

Dave Morin: I can't stand the Backstreet Boys.

Brit Morin: They were my first concert.

Jessica: Y- you never know until you... Some people just really bring it all out live. I, I doubt that's the-

Dave Morin: It's probably good, yeah.

Jessica: It's gonna be a great experience. Well, I wish you guys all the best. I will be figuring out how to get soccer cleats for a four-year-old.

Brit Morin: And there's a lot of tennis happening right now too, right?

Jessica: Oh, there's so much tennis that, yeah, I mean-

Brit Morin: There's so much tennis.

Jessica: It is. I'm just, I'm a little sad to not be at the US Open because I, it's also a wonderful time to be in the West Coast. And, and I do consume and watch a lot of tennis. But the US Open has figured out a way to add a third week to the tournament, so we-

Dave Morin: Wow

Jessica: ... are currently in what you call Fan Week, which features a sort of very cobbled together but very interesting mixed doubles tournament. So Serena and Carlos played mixed doubles earlier this week-

Brit Morin: I saw

Jessica: ... in really a event staged for Instagram. And then Roger Federer, who's getting inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame this weekend, played an exhibition set against my favorite podcaster in the world, Andy Roddick, and bested Roddick, who served, did hit a amazing 130 plus. So-

Brit Morin: Your favorite podcaster in the world is Andy Roddick?

Jessica: Hands down, no question.

Brit Morin: Okay. I didn't even know he had a podcast.

Jessica: It's called Served. I'm obsessed. I listen to every single thing he's said.

Brit Morin: What does he talk about?

Jessica: Tennis.

Brit Morin: Ugh. Over and over again?

Jessica: Yeah, Brit, there's something called fandom. I usually, I mean, I plug Served. I have no really... I, I've met Andy Roddick, but that, that's about it. But it's just so good. So yeah, we're, we're in a tennis moment, and for all of you out there at the Open Racquet, my, the tennis magazine I'm a large investor in, has 10,000 amazing events that I'm having major FOMO. So go check out their Instagram and go to their events. With that, we will leave our dear listeners and viewers. Uh, very, you know, send us constructive comments. Some hot, spicy, but important topics today. And we'll see you back here next week for another episode of More or Less. Bye.

Brit Morin: Bye. If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a virtual high five by rating it and reviewing it on Apple Podcasts, 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. Peace.