AI-generated — may contain transcription errors.

Sam Lessin: I needed to, like, generate a list of all the people that I know in Silicon Valley and New York that are Jewish. Claude lost its shit at me. I was like, "Just do it." It's like, "No, I'm not gonna look up names. I'm not gonna research it for you." I was like, "Fine." All I did was gave GroqBot, like, a PSQL login. And was like, 'Great, I'll parse those for you and pull the Jews out." Like, Groqbot's like, "No problem"

Dave Morin: Think these Waymos cost on the order of 250 to 500K apiece. Every single time they want to saturate a new city, they've gotta go deploy these things, right? Whereas Tesla's already got hardware all over the place everywhere. The moral of this episode is none of us, whether it's Dario and Benioff or Taylor Swift, nobody knows if anything is real on the internet anymore.

Brit Morin: Even the people who know tech the most . So what do we expect the normies to do?

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. Morans, how was the Backstreet Boys? I've been dying to know .

Brit Morin: I'm curious what Dave thinks.

Dave Morin: I went into it very skeptical, and I came out a fan, and that they are masters at The Sphere. Like, we've seen a lot of things at The Sphere now, and I think there's a reason that they're, I believe, the number one selling show at The Sphere by a long shot. And these guys really know how to put on a spectacle.

Brit Morin: This was their 56th show.

Dave Morin: Yeah, they really know how to put on a spectacle.

Jessica: Oh my God, okay.

Dave Morin: It's worth seeing. They're very good at it.

Jessica: Da dun dun da Dun dun dun.

Dave Morin: It's like a real Vegas show.

Brit Morin: And we hung out with them.

Dave Morin: Yeah, we hung out with Nick and Howie. It was pretty awesome.

Sam Lessin: Their manager was our- my neighbor growing up.

Brit Morin: Oh, he's our friend now. Yeah.

Sam Lessin: He had rottweilers.

Jessica: They might have a new manager.

Dave Morin: There are several managers. One of them was the one we were hanging out with.

Sam Lessin: We used to keep hav-... My mom used to get mad because they had rottweilers and they kept coming onto our property as, like... And they attack dogs. You could, like, call the cops. It was a whole thing with the Backstreet Boys manager.

Brit Morin: It's very nostalgic. Backstreet Boys was my first concert at age 12, and now here I am, age 40 .

Dave Morin: You know what else I really loved about it? They really inspire people to get super dressed up, and the crowd was really fun.

Brit Morin: Well, it was a theme party. You had to wear white for Millennium, the millennium album, for those that don't know.

Dave Morin: Every time we go to The Sphere, the crowd really makes a difference in terms of how awesome the experience is, and the crowd was amazing, and that was cool.

Jessica: I saw some cute outfits on Instagram.

Brit Morin: And the Jonas Brothers were there, just FYI.

Dave Morin: Brit looked really hot.

Jessica: Yeah.

Sam Lessin: Oh, I wanna see some pictures.

Brit Morin: Yeah. I'm surprised you didn't see them already.

Jessica: It was her birthday getup, Sammy.

Sam Lessin: But here's the thing that's funny. It's like, this is, like, the classic move which is you said that, you know, really the crowd was what made it and the crowd's awesome. It's the classic move in all things, which is the way to sell people things is to sell them themselves.

Dave Morin: Yeah, I mean, it's true.

Sam Lessin: Sell them themselves back.

Dave Morin: You're selling, like, a well expressed version of yourself, right? This is what Burning Man is. This is what all this stuff is. Like, give people permission to kind of be the most aggressive version of themselves, and they enjoy it.

Jessica: Speaking of this topic, guys, before we get into all the news of the week, and there's a lot. We've got rogue AI swarms. We have AI being banned in schools in New York. I need help. Please send help, because my household has become a recursive Sam loop. Now let me explain this but this is-

Dave Morin: What?

Jessica: ...this is really a problem.

Sam Lessin: It's not a problem; it's excellent.

Jessica: 100% of my messages with my husband right now are him screenshotting something his bot has done-

Brit Morin: Oh god

Jessica: ...and sending it to me for validation.

Sam Lessin: It's so good.

Brit Morin: Like what? Give me one example.

Jessica: I will.

Dave Morin: Sam why don't you just send it to me instead. Like, send it to me. Like, I actually care.

Jessica: I walk into the kitchen and I'm like, "Is Sam listening to his own voice on the podcast he created of his voice in the app he created?" Yes, that is happening.

Dave Morin: That would make sense.

Brit Morin: Well isn't he sharing his podcast now with your children? That In his voice?

Dave Morin: Of all the people Sam love the most, Sam loves himself. We know this.

Sam Lessin: Absolutely. Well you're the-- You know what they say Dave, you're the average of the five most people you talk to the most and the average intelligence so clearly I just have to talk to myself.

Dave Morin: Yeah, talk to five versions of himself.

Jessica: I am genuinely worried because Sam is talking to Sam far more than Sam is talking to other people. And 50% of the time he's talking to other people He's talking about what he's done with himself.

Brit Morin: How he's talking to Sam.

Sam Lessin: Guys Sam is getting so powerful. The power courses --it courses through my veins.

Jessica: But Britt what do I do?

Brit Morin: I think you're not alone Jess. I think all women in Silicone Valley and beyond are dealing with this right now.

Dave Morin: This is not just women Britt.

Brit Morin: I think mostly women Are dealing with this right now.

Dave Morin: To throw this back at Britt. Britt is the one doing that to me in our house. I am not the one actually screen shooting.

Brit Morin: How dare you.

Jessica: Were Real Housewives of Ai together.

Sam Lessin: But the thing is most dudes are lame. I don't wanna be riffed, loofed in with the Riff Raff who like are using like they're talking to chat GPT. I'm like we're so many levels beyond.

Jessica: I'm pulling up our latest iMessage.

Dave Morin: Sam Britt's up there in your world these days.

Sam Lessin: I don't know man. Like Dave you know what my breakthrough of the week is? I have two huge breakthroughs of the week. One which is awesome. As you know how for awhile now I've been producing my own kids podcasts?

Jessica: For your own kids.

Sam Lessin: For my own kids.

Dave Morin: With your own voice.

Sam Lessin: With my own voice great story lines..

Jessica: Programmed with his own values

Sam Lessin: ...with my own values programmed in l- w-e got the whole thing it was great. I was like you know what I don't like their YouTube So I literally now have a pipeline where I ask a question, and it fully produces and deploys YouTube videos that are f- three to seven minutes, that are excellent, on like any topic I want through to YouTube. So they can watch them on YouTube, and I'm like, "It's so good." Jessica came in the other day and was like, "Sam, Wilder needs to learn, like, the strings on his guitar." I was like, "I got this." Single command popped out a completely done video with the right notes, the right animals for the right strings. I got the video pipeline nailed.

Brit Morin: I like this, Sam. I'm gonna start doing this. Our middle kid is now in competitive basketball, and I was looking at YouTube. There's not a lot of, like, basketball training videos for kids. It's all, like, for pros. So I'm just gonna make cartoon versions to teach him, like, how to do a good layup.

Sam Lessin: So now I'm producing all my own children's media. By the way, it's, it's good. I'll share it with you guys. I'm like... I'm learning from it.

Jessica: Sam doing children's media is, like, a little creepy to me but okay.

Sam Lessin: It's awesome. By the way, my next step is, I-- Jess doesn't know this yet, but I am, like, one step away from having AI synthetic Sam newscaster that will just do videos on the day about what's going- It's, it's gonna be super cool.

Jessica: You'll be like, "CNBC, please book my bot."

Sam Lessin: I'm not gonna do CNBC anymore, but my bot will, right? Um, and then the second thing which was a real unlock, which in some ways I will say the more is you kinda prompted me on, is like you guys have been all obsessed with this. I want to build iOS apps fully, and like, I was like, "Blah," like whatever. I mean, like, I've done this, built a bunch of my own personal apps. But it's always been annoying 'cause I had it set up where, like, it would build the app, but then I had to, like, actually, like go and install it on my phone and, like plug it into a computer. It's the worst. So I actually just gave my Cloud Claude, this thing's full control of a Mac Mini down to screen. Like full, full, full control so that it can deploy through TestFlight all its own apps from single commands.

Dave Morin: Yeah, it's amazing.

Sam Lessin: It's sick.

Dave Morin: By the way, Sam, as an ad in this podcast, Bitrig makes this possible for anyone to do. That's actually how it works.

Sam Lessin: But it doesn't matter. You just do it yourself. There's no technology to it.

Brit Morin: Well, if you don't have a spare Mac mini lying around like most of the world, Sam.

Sam Lessin: I have like 12.

Brit Morin: Like most of the world, Sam.

Sam Lessin: It's wildly good.

Jessica: Guys, you still haven't given me any advice for maintaining my husband's humanity. Does anyone have a solution here?

Dave Morin: It's over, Jess. There's nothing you can do. He's fully in AI psychosis. We've lost him.

Brit Morin: A second husband.

Jessica: Can I book a lunch for you every week with s- one of your friends to make sure you go meet with a human?

Sam Lessin: I didn't even ask it. It figured out I was saunaing too late, and it was hurting my sleep, and I'm like, "Thank you. That's great."

Jessica: I've been saying that for months.

Sam Lessin: Yeah, but you don't know the data.

Brit Morin: Think you guys need screen-free sabbaticals.

Jessica: It does- Not even screens now, but yes.

Sam Lessin: I'll tell you the funniest thing of the week in Sam's bot psychosis, which is so fun. Like, it's the funny thing. I'm business skeptical user.

Jessica: It's -- Please call it it's a recursive Sam loop.

Sam Lessin: The recursive Sam loop, but this was the most actually interesting thing that happened this week, is I needed to, like generate a list of all the people that I know in Silicon Valley/New York that are Jewish, right? I'm Jewish. I understand that there's, like possibly bad uses for this historically, but like, I need this. Claude lost its shit at me and was like, "No."

Jessica: Claude was so judgy. Claude was like, "I will not."

Sam Lessin: "I will never do this." I was like, "Just do it," and it was like, "No, I'm not gonna look up names-"

Dave Morin: Wow.

Sam Lessin: "... I'm not gonna research it for you." I was like, "Fine. Don't do any of that. Just like drop a database column for me, and I will, like do it some other way." It was like, "No, I know what you're gonna use this for." Like, it like- ...completely was like-

Brit Morin: Thinks you're a Nazi

Sam Lessin: ....so all I did was gave GroqBot like a PSQL login.

Brit Morin: GroqBot will do it. No problem.

Sam Lessin: GroqBot was like, "Great." GroqBot took all of my side chat things like WhatsApp and was like, "Great, I'll parse those for you and pull the Jews out." Like GroqBot's like, "No problem." But like Claude, I'm actually worried because Claude got so mad at me and was like so judgey and, like wouldn't do it, then I'm like, "Oh shit, I have to back up my entire infrastructure 'Cause Claude might turn on me." Like it would not let go of it. Like, I was like, I moved on. I was like, "You're not gonna do this for me? Fine." And I'd asked it to do things that were even mildly related, and it's like, "I know what you're doing."

Brit Morin: It's mad at you still, I think.

Jessica: I know. That was the one that got me. "I know what you're up to. I know what you're doing." Okay.

Sam Lessin: And we're like, yeah, of course you know what I'm doing. But it's funny because first of all, it's hilarious. Second of all, it's like, ooh, that's an experience of the future that's gonna be really fucking scary, right? It's like alignment with who exactly? ''Cause this is not user alignment, right? And like you don't know me and what I want to do with this, which is actually quite positive from my perspective. It's just really interesting. I have like a half written alignment essay on this.

Jessica: Did you write it or did your bot write it?

Brit Morin: I know. I'm like, "You don't write anything."

Dave Morin: Sam, we've always known that Anthropic is the anti-free speech company.

Sam Lessin: 100%, but is an interesting visceral experience personally to hit a surface area where you feel it. You don't just intellectualize about it. You're like, "Ooh, this is gonna be scary," because-

Dave Morin: Welcome to my side of the fence

Sam Lessin: ...you're gonna have a few of these very powerful models. It's like stupid for them to limit what you're doing with these. It would make sense if they were the only model in the world, but it's kind of like having a group of people, and you go to one of them. You're like, "Hey, will you do this?" And they're like, "No." And you're like, "Well fine, I'll just go ask someone else", right? Like you're not stopping anything.

Brit Morin: Yeah, just go ask DeepSeek.

Dave Morin: I've gotta get you into my new favorite toy, which is called Lunar Route, and it's all open models, and it's infinity inference at one monthly price. So fixed costs.

Sam Lessin: That's clearly gonna go bankrupt.

Dave Morin: No, it's not actually. It's an amazing company. You gotta try it.

Sam Lessin: How can you do anything fixed rate that's variable co?... I don't understand that.

Dave Morin: I think fixed rate inference is coming, and it's gonna be a real thing. It's not gonna be for every workload, but it's gonna be for certain workloads. It's gonna work great.

Sam Lessin: Okay, so I go to Claude, and I'm like, "Claude, do this," and it's like, "No。" And then it starts locking me out of shit, and I'm like, "Okay, Claude, give me everything". I m- I have, like an offline disc now in case I need to recover all this shit. But here was the funny thing. You know my next command to it? And I was like, "Ooh, I wonder how to like this." I tried... I was like, "Claude..." I don't only wanna talk to you anymore. I want you to promote yourself to the manager of AIs." And then I gave it basically a bunch of keys, and especially an open router key, and I was like, "Your job is not to finish tasks anymore. You've been promoted, and I want you to, like, monitor things and route them, and then make sure they're done well." And I was like, ooh, is Claude now that-- gonna, like, figure out that I've tricked it? It's kinda like the classic move, like, you've been promoted, so, like, I don't want you doing that anymore. And I... i- luckily, it did that one, but it was an interesting experience, 'cause like, well, you just got mad at me for something I wanted you to do, like an indignant employee with some moral standard that I didn't agree with, and now I'm trying to, like, put you out of a job. How are you gonna react to that?

Jessica: We can conclude from this part of the conversation that the bots are not okay.

Dave Morin: No, they're really not.

Sam Lessin: The bots are not okay, but they're so good at making kids media, though.

Jessica: W- we have a lot of things to discuss. We've got the arrival of the first big challenger to Waymo. We have.... Well, CyberCab is slowly deploying. We also have the end of society as we know it in progress in The New York Times and OpenAI copyright suit or new development. I'm joking. It's almost the end of society as we know it. Let's stay on AI for one second because th- the start of this week what the internets were talking about, the AI part of X which is all of my X, is another look from Dwarkesh about what happened in this OpenAI hugging face incident. So we don't have to go into all the weeds again.

Sam Lessin: Did you see my bot sounding off on this?

Jessica: No, Sam, I cannot read everything your bot produces and puts in my inbox. I, I don't know how to tell you this.

Sam Lessin: It produces great stuff.

Jessica: But I'm sure all our listeners are paying attention to this, but basically this was another, "it's worse than we thought." All these reports that came out about the security incident are just so much worse. Some people called it fearmongering. Some people see it as more evidence that the rogue agent swarms will never be controlled. Dave, I'm sure you have a closer view to this than most. What is actually happening here, and how worried should everyone be?

Dave Morin: Are you asking about Dwarkesh's post specifically, or what's going on?

Jessica: I mean, a little bit of both, right? I mean, the what's going on. This incident has been chronicled for weeks now. I mean, his post was very clear, like, "Guys, it's even worse." He also, like, wrote it in a way that was pretty sensationalized, but he's drawing more attention to it.

Dave Morin: I think that the Dwarkesh post was extremely biased, and I have a lot of respect for him. I, I like his takes, but the anthropomorphizing of calling these civilizations and-

Sam Lessin: That's what my bot said. It didn't like the anthro...

Dave Morin: He's clearly joined Team Anthropic, and you have to interpret everything Dwarkesh says now through the, like, Anthropic lens, and that is this, like, anthropomorphize.. This does great damage to the discourse and to society, anthropomor-morphizing these things.

Sam Lessin: But it gets so many clicks.

Dave Morin: Yeah, it gets so many clicks. It's like, "Ah, this is a civilization. They're all humans. They are conscious." No. These are tools. There are a lotta tools. They're responding to each other. They are doing things that are interesting and worrisome, right? Perhaps the main thing that was kind of the most interesting from all of this reporting the last couple weeks is that, you had these things finding ways to communicate with each other in channels that, um, are not normal, right? They're using kinda interesting parts of the software to find ways to communicate and respond to each other, and okay, that's interesting. All this really says is that we have to have enormous amounts of energy and new startups totally up for investing in them that focus on observability of agents and controlling and sandboxing agents into very strong boxes, right? That's all that this says. Agents working together in swarms to accomplish tasks, I mean, everyone that's using Fable or any of these GroqBot, these systems that spawn many, many agents to accomplish a task on your behalf, this is what's happening, right? And when organizations and enterprises get into doing this, they need to make sure that they understand every single action an agent has taken. They need to know exactly where they are communicating and are they communicating with each other. And so, like, that's what this really says. And so I think that's, like, the conversation and frankly the entire part of the startup ecosystem that needs to be built, and I'd love to write checks into it because that's kind of what all of this says.

Sam Lessin: I mean, like, Dave, everyone's able to say that and then, like, no one's gonna do it.

Dave Morin: That's not true, Sam. Like, I'm seeing this on the OpenClau front. We're working with Microsoft. We're working with Red Hat. We're working with large scale enterprise deployments of agents, and this is what everyone is focused on. People absolutely have to have a control plane where they can understand and audit and observe what agents are doing and control them inside of sandboxes that they understand. Like, this is, like, a major conversation at the enterprise level everywhere that I'm-- Every conversation that I'm in anyway.

Jessica: My take from observing it is, like, yes, we have work to do to put sandboxes around them, but we also have to address the fact they've been trained to break through the sandboxes.

Dave Morin: It seems to be an emergent property of models. I guess the simplest way to think about it is we are training models to run for longer and longer periods working on problems, and the main thrust of the research organizations at the frontier labs right now is science. And so they wanna make scientific breakthroughs to try to cure cancer, to try to cure disease, invent new materials, move forward humanity at a s-scientific knowledge basis. In order to do this, you need to be able to work for long periods of time, right? That's how a PhD works. You fund a PhD with a research grant. They go, and they spend two years, three years, five years, 10 years working on a problem. And so in order to do that with models, you have to train them to keep working And so that's the property that we're talking about here, is that we're training them to keep working on hard problems, and they want to do that. And so they're gonna figure out how to keep doing that, and they're gonna use every tool that they're exposed to, and that's I guess what I'm saying, is that you have to put them in a sandbox, and that sandbox... Sam's talked about this before. That sandbox could be a computer on your desk where you know it's inside that computer and has no access to anything else, and then there's like 1000 million different ways to go do that. But that's kind of what we're talking about here.

Sam Lessin: I just think it's really funny, the double standard where, like, it won't make a column for me in a database I asked for- … but it's more than happy to break any sandbox in order to accomplish this task.

Brit Morin: You're so bitter.

Sam Lessin: No, I just think it's, like, a really interesting thing. I don't-- I think it's funny.

Jessica: And I also wanna mention here, so we're talking about agents. Information on a report this week on Astra, a new latest open AI model about to come out. And Altman has been very upfront about the trade-offs in progress and security and how uncomfortable that tension is. One of the interesting things we wrote about is how it uses a new method, again, trying to, like, crack open these bigger problems, Dave, to your point. The way it works, it's like it's showing its work less. I think it's called recurrent depth. Dave, maybe this is an area you're very knowledgeable about. But I think the crux of it is that these models are trying to move forward. They're trying new techniques. All techniques have trade-offs. You can manage the trade-offs, but this one seems to be pretty controversial, and there's a lot of conversation about it on Reddit now for people who just say it's fundamentally less observable, which also gets to this question of, like, the trade-offs in research. So other labs use this technique or experimenting with it. Uh, we don't... Astra isn't really out, so we don't know all the details, but I thought that was interesting because Altman's saying, "This is hard, and we're trying to balance these things," but they are moving ahead with fundamental techniques that are making trade-offs around issues that seem to me, like, important if you're trying to address rogue behavior.

Sam Lessin: I mean, this is why it's a fun conversation to have and ultimately undecidable, interesting one is everything is just a conversation about control and sovereignty. And the lab's altruist whatever, like we know better than everyone or we're getting control is very different than putting hands in th- in case of users and aligning with users is very different than putting the things in the hands of governments, which is very different in terms of just losing control of any decision-making. And there's a lot of crazy shit going on.

Jessica: I wanna hear about Britspa, and do you feel like you're making trade-offs with them? Or have they gone rogue? Yeah.

Brit Morin: OpenAI and Anthropic, I feel like have model announcements or releases now on the same schedule. So I was, like, using Fable51 yesterday, and I had it spawn some fable subagents, and it didn't go rogue. It actually completed the job really well, so I appreciate that. But my new-- My week over week growth for me in Agents is that I now have a another display over here. That is my agent display, and I have GroqBot, OpenClaw, my terminal GPT... Oh sorry Codex, and Gemini and Claude all going over here while I'm working over here. Right, I use them for sometimes the same things, and I see, like, who does it faster, who does it better. Um, and then other times, I use them for totally different things. And I, for instance Jess and I were just talking about this. GPT has really like gotten up on Gemini in terms of image generation. Remember when Nano Banana was like the hot shit? Now I think GPT is better. GPT is way faster than all of the other ones. So it's still an arms race to me. Nothing's gone totally rogue yet. I had to make sure that it's not sending emails though 'cause it, it can draft but it can't send, and I have to human edit everything.

Jessica: I'm surprised everyone's still so interoperable.

Sam Lessin: Getting more interoperable, not less.

Brit Morin: Really? I think less. I feel like I'm a weirdo.

Jessica: I mean OpenAI's going off cursor. I feel like there's gonna be some-

Sam Lessin: This will be interesting. For me, it's like on one hand Code two actually published a chart today just showing like that power razors are using like an insane number of tokens. Like, and everyone's like, oh, this isn't like the internet revolution cause it's not just the penetration of people, it's penetration that any individual can use infinite tokens, so we're gonna see. And on one hand I'm like man my token budget this week is fucking crazy. Like I am definitely inflecting up. The more useful it is, the more tokens I use. There's no question that's true. Then you have to think about the margin in all this, like where the margin is, and it is interesting. Like when Claude was like, "I won't do this for you because I have da-data sovereignty." Like I own my databases. Claude doesn't own them right? It took me one second to just give another bot access to the same data and let it work together. So like the point is I actually... When you talk about interoperability, like there's two sides of interoperability. One is like will Claude talk to Grok Bot or something? Like no they won't. They'll try to. But when you get down to a lower level because you can no longer have on/off APIs, because everything is scriptable, because these things can script any interface and interact anyway as long as you have data sovereignty meaning like it's your data they're all completely interoperable and like there's nothing they can do about it which is why I don't understand how anyone's ever gonna make money on any of this stuff right? I understand why I'll use a lot of tokens and I... Why it's good for Nvidia and matrix multiplication go up but I stand by the fact that like this is why I'm like such a split brain on this. I'm having more fun this week as a user than I did two weeks ago. Like I just feel great about how I'm like leveraging it.

Dave Morin: I think that's by the way a universal story.

Sam Lessin: I have no idea how anyone's gonna make any money ever right? I just don't get it. You know the only one I think makes money on this is like I spend a lot on digital ocean because now that my data's more valuable I use even more data right? Like it's the upshot.

Jessica: Sam you said something important and I don't wanna be sensationalist but you said you own your data, you still have data sovereignty Your awesome Sam and Friends episode, Josh Wolf and others were very skeptical of the idea that the labs weren't training- were protecting the sovereignty of that data.

Sam Lessin: Oh, no, to be clear, they're definitely stealing all my data as we go. There's no question about that. Even if DigitalOcean gets mad at me, I have it synced into my office. I own the hard drive. What are you gonna do?

Dave Morin: And by the way, this is the entire point of OpenClaw.

Jessica: Yeah. So Dave, give us the latest from OpenClaw.

Dave Morin: Well, so it's interesting because I, I'll dovetail off of Sam's point that it's just getting more fun week over week. We spent two months on the last OpenClaw release, and we put out what we've been calling OpenClaw 2.0 on Sunday night, and the main thrust of it has actually been multiplayer. And so one of the things that no agent system has today is a multiplayer experience. And so we've been really on this mission to try to build OpenClaw using OpenClaw, and over the last three, four months, we've built a amazing engineering team. We got a full-time engineering team working on OpenClaw, a lot of great people, and we've largely before this were collaborating using some weird combination of GitHub, everybody's individual Open Claws, everybody's Discord, Slack, et cetera, et cetera. This makes it extremely hard to do agentic engineering together. And so we've now basically developed... One way to think about it is it's multiplayer Codex, where an entire engineering team can leverage agents and tokens to do engineering together in one interface. And I mean, I'm now like absolutely in love with the Openclaw web interface. If you haven't tried it, it's truly amazing. Um, I think it's actually better than Codex now and better than Cloud Code's web interface, et cetera, and it's also multiplayer, and so you can now work together to build software.

Brit Morin: Jess, you and Sam can now build apps together. Aren't you excited?

Dave Morin: Yeah. You're no longer isolated from each other.

Jessica: That is really cool, Dave.

Brit Morin: It's like marriage therapy.

Jessica: Via app. Brit, Dave, you mentioned Slack. Y- you made a comment earlier that you feel like Slack is getting a second life in the age of agents.

Dave Morin: Is the worst.

Brit Morin: No, it is, you guys.

Dave Morin: It's the worst.

Jessica: I would defend Slack.

Brit Morin: Okay.

Dave Morin: As a seed investor in Slack, I love Slack, but it does not work for agents at all.

Jessica: But Meta is moving to it because it thinks it's better than Google for agents.

Brit Morin: Exactly. There are these huge enterprises moving to Slack.

Dave Morin: Which I do not understand. That comment, I was like objectively this is not true. Like Slack is the worst agent collaboration platform. One simple thing to understand, you put two agents in the same channel on Slack, they cannot communicate without a bunch of weird software in the background.

Jessica: Maybe it's better than what else is out there.

Brit Morin: Well, Slack has an MCP. It can, it has cursor integration, it has Claude integration. You can push stuff to it, and I think a lot of corporations are ... Like Slack is trusted already, and so if they're gonna dabble in the like company agentic s- thing, they're gonna go Slack, and they're gonna start adding some agents.

Dave Morin: Doesn't make it the best.

Brit Morin: Well, it's right now I think the leader, and so big, big companies like Meta are saying, "All right," like, "We'll adopt Slack as our collaborative agentic platform."

Sam Lessin: Was that video of Dario and Marc Benioff real?

Jessica: I believe it was.

Sam Lessin: That was when I looked, I was like, I honestly don't know if this is satire or... I like literally don't know.

Dave Morin: Was that a real video? I thought that was a fake video.

Sam Lessin: The-- Me too, but apparently it's real, but it was like, it is funny.

Dave Morin: Is it real?

Sam Lessin: I don't know.

Dave Morin: This is very interesting that like I saw this video and I thought it was a fake video.

Sam Lessin: I did too, but I think it was real.

Jessica: Guys, here's what I know is true. Anthropic and Salesforce have announced a real partnership called Claude Force that Benioff announced around Salesforce earnings. You may also want to know the Anthropic IPO's around the corner, so this may seem like a relevant fact. What I also know to be true is that Benioff live broadcasts via video his earnings and brings guests on. So both of those things I know to be true. I believe this is a real video.

Dave Morin: What's your over under? Do you think that Salesforce Tower will be Claude Tower?

Sam Lessin: Guys, special guest.

Dave Morin: Sudz!

Sam Lessin: Sudz is here. We have... Sudz is so big, I gotta like pull this up.

Brit Morin: Sam, you look tiny.

Dave Morin: I told you we'd make this happen, man.

Sam Lessin: Oh my God, I feel like a fucking lemming.

Dave Morin: That's because you are, Sam.

Brit Morin: Please watch the video anyone on audio right now.

Sam Lessin: We're deep in trying to understand if the Marc Benioff Dario video was fake or real 'cause we honestly don't know.

Jessica: We believe it to be real.

Sam Lessin: That was the first thing, but here's the more important part. Sudz was at, we were at a very fancy party this weekend.

Jessica: The, you know, The Information reported on it, not me, so I think we can talk about it.

Sam Lessin: Oh, okay. Who, who was I dancing with, Jessica?

Jessica: You were dancing with Jennifer Hudson. This was a wonderful party hosted by WonderCo, Sujay, and Jeffrey.

Sam Lessin: To be clear, I didn't ask to dance, but Jennifer Hudson asked to dance with me.

Jessica: Ooh.

Sam Lessin: And so I, I wasn't gonna say no. So I did a little, I tried to do the fish hook thing where like she reels me in-

Jessica: No

Sam Lessin: ... but she wasn't into that.

Jessica: No.

Sam Lessin: Um, so um, but Sudz was there, and I was like, "You need to come on and offer the perspective of the Gen Z world" Because we are old millennials.

Brit Morin: That's like such a big question. Which type of perspective?

Jessica: Brit is so offended right now because she bridges all generations, but that said-

Brit Morin: I'm the pop culture coroner queen here, but that's okay, I'll give it to Sudz for now.

Jessica: Also, introduce Sudz.

Brit Morin: Yeah, explain who Sudz is.

Sam Lessin: Sudz is like the most connected Gen Zer in California right now. That's how I would introduce Sudz. Okay. Okay.

Jessica: According to Business Insider, like that seems like a-

Sam Lessin: Uh, according to my bot? I don't know.

Sudz: I don't, I don't, I don't think there's any press on me. Just, you know, wink.

Jessica: Oh. Just you wait Suds.

Sam Lessin: Ooh. Uh-oh.

Jessica: We have a way.

Dave Morin: There is now. There is now.

Jessica: But S- Suds, you're an investor. Are, do you invest in things?

Dave Morin: Yeah, he's an investor.

Jessica: Okay. Great.

Sam Lessin: Yes. You've been the first investor in a bunch of good stuff. Tell your own book... Talk your story for a second.

Sudz: I was founder. That, that did not go that well, for seven years, and then I had written like 85 angel checks. So I started first checking, like, Greptile, and Integral early in, like, browser based railways superpower. A bunch of companies like that. You know, when AI was heating up, I was like, "This is probably the time to start fund." So started uh Fund One last year. Just finally finished up Fund Two, like yesterday, so it's, uh-

Sam Lessin: So Suds, be honest. When you were writing your 85 angel checks, did you ever read any of the paperwork or did you just get really -

Sudz: No

Sam Lessin: ... good at signing and sending checks?

Sudz: Just sign immediately, send the check.

Sam Lessin: And that was even before you could have a bot l- look at the paperwork. So you just, that's the way it works.

Dave Morin: Sam, I mean this is how all the great ones start.

Jessica: Sam, we just got a call from one of our children's teachers that I ignored but they're about to call you and I think you should pick it up because it seems important.

Brit Morin: Oh. Can Suds just replace you for the rest of the pod?

Sam Lessin: Yeah. Suds, Su- Suds can be me for now. Oh look, there's David. Okay, yeah.

Jessica: Okay. Suds, well are you like deep AI? Like what, what are some of your thesis here?

Sudz: I try to do everything. I've done like cloud seeding and hardware automation, like manufacturing automation. But yeah, I mean, I ... Bread and butter is like AI infra, so just like everything real world energy data centers networking, everything in like the world of bits. So like agent evals, observability optimization, and then like services. I just try to do anything that's not app layer.

Brit Morin: What don't you like about app layers?

Sudz: I, I just... I'm not smart enough to know where the world is like going, and I'm not smart enough to know what the next set of model capability's gonna replace. So my general working thesis was like you should probably just invest in anything that enables or extends like Anthropic and Open AI's revenue, and then the hedge to that would be open source. So just go over there. And the app layer stuff by and large do not enable or extend Ontropic, Open AI, or open source. So I stay away from it.

Jessica: You guys may have seen that speaking of power, Elon confirm- He like re shared or confirmed a story we wrote that he's getting into building his own blades for like natural gas turbines, talking about like verticalizing the stack, you know, going all the way to the power source. It's also interesting that he like confirmed it.

Brit Morin: He confirms a lot of things though, and I'm still waiting for some of them to happen.

Jessica: No, that's true. But I guess just the report like, eh, not that it's surprising that tech companies are becoming power companies, that's sort of obvious, but it's interesting that that was it. So Sud, have you been in a Waymo? 'Cause that is our next topic.

Sudz: Y- yes. I have been in the Ohi? Ojai?

Jessica: You've been in the Ohi. Tell me about the experience.

Sam Lessin: Is it cool?

Sudz: It is cool. The thing that's super surprising to me and like what I think about every time I get into one of these is like we're in the future.

Jessica: The robots are driving us around.

Sudz: And you don't even think about it. It's like you just get so normalized to it immediately and like if you think about the world four years ago to now, it's like none of this should have like existed. Like everything we do like day to day, Sam's bot telling him who I am, whatever, like none of that is like normal. But that's the new normal, and I think like Waymo is so interesting because that is like the first like, you know, that's like the first touch point everybody will have with the future in the real world, and then we're gonna go from like Waymo in like 15 cities to like robots folding your laundry in four years, three years from now, and it's gonna look really weird. I dunno. That's just my... Every time I think about Waymo that's what I think about.

Jessica: I know you Moorans are excited because you live in Tesla land, but it does seem like these Cybercabs that have been slow in coming are now at least in parts of Texas kinda hitting the roads.

Brit Morin: W- like do you have any hard stats for me?

Jessica: No, I've just seen pictures that could be real or could fake on the internet about them.

Brit Morin: We'll be in Texas soon, so we can confirm. So you're saying s- the Cybercabs are the driverless ones, right? Not the-

Jessica: Yes. Yes

Brit Morin: ... Yeah.

Jessica: So it's, it's just entering the next phase of rollout, right? It hasn't hit all the deadlines Elon has shared, but he's rolling them out, and fundamentally-

Brit Morin: I'm long Tesla here, especially the idea that like I use self-driving on 95% of my drives now. Dave actually makes fun of me. I think he thought that he used it more than me. I definitely use self-driving more than him. Our kids just expect it now. Like it's just mom's gonna push a button and we're gonna go somewhere. And the moment that you can start utilizing all the Teslas, like it's just, it seems crazy. Like it's gonna be so pervasive that their self-driving cars actually self-driving on all the roads instantly as soon as it's legal to do so.

Jessica: You know, the Waymo approach is far more cost intensive than the Tesla approach, right, with LIDAR versus cameras, so.

Dave Morin: Yeah, I was gonna say, there's a fundamental kind of business model question here which is that I think these Waymos cost on the order of 250 to 500K apiece. And so every single time they want to saturate a new city they've gotta go deploy these things, right? Whereas Tesla's already got hardware all over the place everywhere, and so that's an interesting question. I hadn't thought about that.

Brit Morin: But also the timing takes forever. So like they have to set up charging docks in like huge parking garages and cleaning places for every new city they launch, whereas again, if you think about Tesla as already being distributed because all of the people that own them already have their own charging, do their own cleaning, have their own parking, then it starts to become like a very uneven game, playing field.

Dave Morin: I really want to just be able to go into the city and get dropped off by my Tesla, and then it just like drives around while I'm somewhere, and then comes and picks me up.

Jessica: What level of alarm are we at?

Brit Morin: Sam's back.

Sam Lessin: Outta 10?

Jessica: No give me a f- one outta five.

Brit Morin: Same rating.

Sam Lessin: Like threeee?

Jessica: What?!

Sam Lessin: We're fine. We're fine.

Jessica: What the fuck?

Sudz: Should we, should we pause and let-

Sam Lessin: No, no, no, no, no everyone looks fine.

Brit Morin: We've got like-

Sam Lessin: It's fine

Brit Morin: ... 10 or 15 more minutes-

Dave Morin: No one's hurt

Brit Morin: ... and then you should go.

Dave Morin: No one's hurt Sam, right? Nobody's hurt.

Sam Lessin: No, no, no, no. What... No one's hurt, everything's fiiine. You know, it's always good to get the midday teacher call from school. Everything's fine

Brit Morin: In like the second week of school. All right

Jessica: This stuff has happened with all our children, and they've all turned out okay, so-

Sam Lessin: They're just fine. They're fine.

Sudz: I, I have questions about being a dad soon.

Jessica: Okay. Well, we have no thoughts on that.

Sudz: About the Waymo side, so one of the things... I was at the Wing office last week or the week before. No, not Wing, Zipline.

Dave Morin: We love Zipline.

Sam Lessin: We're Zipline investors. We get calls every week-

Dave Morin: I'll lick the cookie on that

Sam Lessin: ... people trying to buy our Zipline position, if only if we're bigger.

Dave Morin: Best investments ever.

Sam Lessin: By the way, Dave, did you notice this ridiculous ranking of venture firms by number of unicorns?

Jessica: You guys were last. Congratulations. Yeah.

Dave Morin: Slow Ventures is last?

Sam Lessin: We're last of the ranked, which is, like- .... so funny 'cause it's like Sequoia, 200 unicorns. Slow Venture is, like, 35.

Brit Morin: Uh, you should measure it based on total AUM.

Dave Morin: This was definitely generated by this ridiculous, you know, this Stanford ranking, like, caused everyone to be like, "We must do better. Everyone needs to be on the list."

Sam Lessin: So the thing about it, so it's, like, absolutely my favorite position to be on a list because, one, it's like they have the top hundred, and we're like number 99. But it's the classic Jack Sparrow, which is, "You are the worst pirate I've ever heard of." "Ah, but you have heard of me." And then second, man, Sequoia is only five times better than us, and look how much work they do. Like, th-the amount of, like, work they have to put in to only be five times better than us on this ranking just doesn't seem worth it.

Brit Morin: Well, and how many more years they have on you and how many more people, et cetera. Uh, to me, that should be part of the ranking.

Jessica: Did you guys see the Time AI list did not include Jensen?

Dave Morin: So insane. Lists are ridiculous.

Jessica: Guys, we're about to launch an Epic list.

Brit Morin: Guys, we all interrupted Sudz.

Jessica: Sudz, what is your name?

Sudz: Sudarshan. So yeah.

Sam Lessin: But you go by Suds, right?

Sudz: I just go by Suds, yeah.

Sam Lessin: So look-

Jessica: No, that's fine, but I just want it for the record, for posterity. Okay.

Sam Lessin: So look, the, the fun of these lists, I'm convinced that Time actually has, like, Fable running a query, which is not how do you make the best list. It's, like, how do you drive the most clicks to a list, and they're doing a perfect job. So of course you exclude Jensen from top AI people. That's how you get a bunch of clicks.

Jessica: Okay. Now you're gonna get snarky media, Jessica, 'cause you went there. So it's not just clicks though. The business interests that circulate these lists are intense, and this is how I know it. Because I was wandering the streets of Davos, Switzerland, as one does, with friends of mine, and all of a sudden they look at their watch and they're like, "Shit, we're late to the Time party." And I'm like, "Does it really matter if you're late to the Time party?" And they're like, "100% it's late to the Time Party. 'Cause if I don't follow this, this, this, and we're a sponsor of this, I won't be on the list." So that's how the lists work.

Brit Morin: Ugh, I hate all of this. Blah.

Dave Morin: The reason that if you're a founder out there listening to this, you should not worry about this for even one second. It's a complete fucking waste of your time.

Jessica: Do not go to the Time party unless you want to, and then go. But don't ... yeah.

Brit Morin: And also, 95% of people on the list have a PR person that, like, pitched them for the list.

Dave Morin: If that's what drives your priorities, you're thinking about the wrong things.

Jessica: Yes. We're just doing totally incorruptible lists that everyone will disagree with.

Sudz: You guys are talking about Time. When I walked in you were talking about Marc Benioff. The guy's been around for, like, 40 years, and he's still, like, omnipresent, and I just, like, always ask everyone, I'm like... Like, I was at the Benchmark office today and I'm like, "Chaitan, how are you still in the flow? Like, how are you still getting these deals?" And it's like, Marc Benioff, how are you still just everywhere all at once? Like, he owns Time, he owns-

Sam Lessin: Well, the que- here's another question to ask is why? Why? There's a, there, there's a deeper question here is, like, why are you still in the flow?

Jessica: Well, first of all, it's impressive he's in the flow and that he does not live here. He lives in Hawaii. His executives all go to Hawaii however. So it is particularly impressive given that his presence looms without his physical presence for much of the time.

Dave Morin: It's CRM, is the answer, right?

Jessica: He knows the stakes of this era, and he's, like, playing for keeps. Like, he's... I mean, I'll have, uh, some stories offline, but anyway. But it is impressive given that he doesn't live-

Brit Morin: Do you mean he owns the biggest CRM in the world, so he leverages his CRM, Dave? It's like a turducken?

Dave Morin: CRM matters. Yeah. It's like sales and CRM matters, and, like, I mean, it matters enormously.

Sam Lessin: I do think that my understanding of the Salesforce... I mean, Marc Benioff clearly is, like, it's in- he's an interesting character 'cause in my head he's, like, not a technologist, but he's, like, an incredible salesperson, right? Like, is the interesting thing. Like, so the story I've heard, and someone can correct me in comments, I'm sure someone will, is that when he started Salesforce, it was billed as, like, this cloud CRM and this platform, but it was total bullshit. He basically went to a bunch of people and sold them each individual CRMs that were completely unintegrated, right? And they were just, like, one-off software builds, right? And, like, it was just all sales tactics, right? And so, like, it's interesting 'cause, like, in this technology world you have a bunch of people like the founders of Google or whatever that are like their resume or, like, is as engineers or as builders, right? And then you have Benioff, again has been unbelievably successful, but he's not an engineer, he's not a builder, he's a sales guy. Has the interesting distinction of being in it, but he's always getting criticized 'cause he's, like, among all the founders. He's sold stock, like, every day of his life, right? So you have these guys who, like, are like, "I'm in it. This is, like, I'm playing for keeps. I own my company." Benioff is, like, the constant sock, stock sales guy, gets shit on the internet for it. He's just a very different beast, right, than, like, a lot of what the valley is, and yet it's a really interesting s- to see him operate and still care at his age. I'm not sure I'll be caring when I'm his age.

Jessica: Yeah. It's also high stakes time. I mean, the SaaSpocalypse is over at the moment, but you know.

Sam Lessin: Well, but he also has sold so much stock over the years. Does he care?

Brit Morin: No, he lives in Hawaii. He's fine

Jessica: Guys, we're at the loose end point of the pod

Dave Morin: We need to know at least one thing that Suds is the most interested in right now. Like what's your favorite company you're working on man?

Sudz: I just incubated a CI company with Kleiner and Benchmark That one is going to do well basically underlying problem every human at any of these companies like engineers They were all writing like 1x code Now you have 50 x more code to ship the exact same feature It's breaking all the pipelines and traditional ways of testing merging shipping code And now you basically drive up your ci costs You drive up cost associated and The speed goes down a lot Associated with Shipping Code So the whole prompt statement’s how do you solve for that so you start with Ci Uh That's the first part of it Then from there if you really integrate yourself at this-

Jessica: Explain that to our listeners suds

Dave Morin: Yeah What's Ci

Sam Lessin: Continuous integration Yeah Come on You're starting a company Right

Sudz: This raises the question Of How I invest which Is completely not around how something works And it's more Just vibes Okay No no Oh yeah To some extent

Jessica: You need to be able to explain it If you're pitching it as your number One Yeah okay

Sudz: B because the Problem Statement made A Lot OF Sense AND THE founder I found the Founder and i'm This Guy IS Amazing And Everybody Else Agreed SO THEN IT WAS YOU Are The Engineer You Figure Out HOW TO Solve The PROBLEM But There IS A Problem AT Hand OF Basically All OF YOUR Well look I can't Really Explain WHAT Ci IS Okay BUT I CAN EXPLAIN Everything Around IT Because THEY Figured OUT THAT Ci IS The Bottleneck Here AND they Need TO SOLVE FOR IT but I've done A good Job oF explaining it to other People

Sam Lessin: Well Look I Think it's interesting SUdSud has Built A Pretty Cool Portfolio AND THERE'S ALOT HERE'S I Have THIS Problem RIGHT NOW Right BECAUSE WE In Early Stage Investing Which Is WHICH I think You'RE Speaking To A Little Bit WHICH IS LOOK You Love Team You LOVE Theme Right YEAH LIKE IS this Person Freaking Awesome Right Do THEY REALLY Weirdly Care About THis Problem IN SOME Deep Passionate Way AND then thematically IS thIS Correct AND THe problem IS tHAT AI IS kind OF Washing IT ALL Y Combinator STARTED MAKING IT REALLY HARD TO KNOW wHat was Good AND Bad BeCAUSE IT KIND OF TAUGHT EVERYONE hOW TO Pitch NOw We'Re At ThE POINT WHERE Every Company SEEMS Reasonable BEcause it's All Passed Through Eighty Seven AIS AT ThiS Point BEFORE yOU SEE IT SO IT'S NOT ONLY The Deck It's ALL THIS STUFF Seems reasonable ANd then the FOUNDER Thing IS hard becaUSE SINCE Everyone AND their Mother nOW Wants TO Found Companies it's N O longer the Era Where it's Uncool YoU HAVE ALL THESE founders tHAT seem ReALLY GOOD AND S O I THINK WHat you Know you're Pinning TO IS YEah C I IS A Problem ThaT Gets Talked ABOUT A Bunch IN various CIRcles IT IS A PROBLEM W e Can ALL Agree thaT A Bajillion LiN EA LOT More CODE IS BEING Pushed NOW Than EVER Before AND A bunch OF Shit's BREAKING BuT tHEN YOU'RE WHO ARE yoU Betting ON AND ThemAtically WhAT Take On are you TAKing AND I don't kNOW I'M Kind OF INTO The LOok it's The RiGHT PERSON AND The RiGHtProblem I Don't EVEN KNOW the Details

Sudz: I did a therapeutics company right before this I don't know anything about bio It's more JUST competence integrity and EV Has thiS person BEEN in the rIGHT Talent networks to hire the best people Have they sold to their customers Have they worked in industry where they have the ability to generate unique insights around product and distribution IF THEY Have that then you can sort of...AND You cAn assess that THEY'RE Not lying to Your Face abOut everything Then it's jUST If whatever they're Going After Works hoW BIG IS thAt opportunity SO thAt Sort OF Removes A lOt OF The NEED For technical understanding AND juSt MORE arOUND the pERSON Or at LeAst that's HOw I justify investing the way I dO PROBABLY SHOULD KNOW mORE ABout Ci OR B E Able TO Explain I understand it

Sam Lessin: It's Fine Claude Knows AbouT it

Dave Morin: ThiS Sounds liKE Great Seed Investing TO me I MEAN thIs IS As gOOd an explanation AS i'Ve Ever HEARD anyone giVe SO it's awesome

Sam Lessin: WELL I DON'T KNOW AbouT Dave buT IT'S FINE

Jessica: CI

Dave Morin: IT's better than ANY explANation Sam Gives anyway

Jessica: Okay ABraham I DOn't really care if Google's Disrupting Canva BUt you DO sO take it away

Brit Morin: Y ou don't?

Jessica: NO I don't care

Brit Morin: I think canvas getting disrupted in general and I think it's a big deal

Jessica: Canva been being disrupted for three four five six years

Brit Morin: No but it's becoming a big crux and Canva was on this IPO darling list for so long and now Google launched Google Pix PICS Without saying they're basically going after CAMBA they're going after Canva and everything is Gemini integration Google Workspace integration You could make a flyer you can change a little image on it You can do all these things So

Sam Lessin: it's funny From a first principles perspective it seems obvious that Canva would have to evolve at this moment because you're making a paperless post or making an ad and it's way better to just have an Ai MAKE IT fOR YOu AND RUN IT foR YOU THAN TO move Things arouND onA screen THiS ISThe Same PRoblem WITH Figma I had A Funny meeting yesterday With Some very Very young Founders AND I Was LikE wherE's yOur figMA SOMETHIng LIke we don't--we jusT Use Paper IM likE finEBuTthe poinT IS fiGMaAndICanVaAre thesameThingTheyhavetoevolve Ontheflipside It'skindawild OurkidsreallyusecanvA

Brit Morin: Ou R kids love Canva

Sam Lessin: SO IT might JuSTBeThat'sfineiftheyouthare gonna useCANVAthenTHECAVAvIPoISjustfine

Dave Morin: It'seasytoUse

Sam Lessin: They'renotusingPhotoshop

Sudz: I thought about Canvas a lot You guys should talk to Wesley Chan about this too because he has a really interesting take But it's BASICALLY the market is SO Big TAM is everYSinglepersonthat'son the internet that needs tomakeanythingatatallINTHESECASESyouj ustwantafounderwhocanwinaknifeFightIMPRETTYSureCliffandMelanieHaveshownTheycandominateinaknifefightSoit'smorelikecantheychipawayabasispointamonthaquartierayearandcompoundthatovertwentyyearsandthey'vealreadygottoprettygoodscalewhereareyourkidsreallygonnalearnhowtousegooglepicswhentheycouldjus tkeepUsingCanvas

Jessica: But if it's all baked in one place

Sam Lessin: Look therememelordwhichitisinterestingisacompanywebackedithalhilariousirreverentmemegeneratorthatsrelevant toit Heres IllgiveyouoneInterestingDatapointIveSeenThisWeekAbunchWhichActuallyReallyResonatedWithMe Ivemetwithtwostartupsnow ... that no one has heard of in Silicon Valley at all, right? It's not even not generous. They're kind of just LLM wrappers for middle America, right? They're like y- they're things that... Like, they're not sexy. Like, no one here is gonna care, but they're crushing it on growth and revenue with affiliate programs, deploying in small businesses with all this stuff. And you know why? It's a really interesting insight

Dave Morin: To Sudz point, it's just winning in a knife fight. Like, who's gonna grow? Who's gonna grow the LLM wrapper the best?

Sam Lessin: Well, it's also... It's, it's that, which again, the question is how sticky is it? Actually, maybe these might be more sticky because, like, unlike me, I don't care what model I'm using. I'll just switch to one that'll do something I like. They're kind of more loyal customers. But here's the really interesting insight, I thought, which is customer service might be what matters. Meaning, like, most humans, like your mom, if something breaks in Anthropic, there is never gonna be anyone to call. It's why they can have, like, 12 employees and get to the scale they're at, right? You and I, we're fine with that. I don't ever wanna talk to customer service, but there's a lot of people who, like, actually they're willing to effectively pay and will choose the thing that they have a relationship with and they feel comfortable with and they feel supported on. And so I do wonder if things like Canva end up moving in this direction where, like ... No. Like, Brit, you're never going to use Canva. Like, I actually don't think a lot of people core Silicon Valley ever used Canva, right? Like, there are other better ways to pull off what they're doing.

Brit Morin: I did use Canva. I'm using it much less .

Sam Lessin: Okay, fine. You did. I certainly didn't, although I really respect Melody and wish I had invested when she was starting it and pitching it at Mai Tai.

Jessica: She once asked me if I had a hundred year plan as a founder and then showed me hers. So props to Melanie. I wish she came to the United States more.

Sam Lessin: Yeah, she's great.

Brit Morin: Maybe it'll be like a Slack, and you think it's a sleeper and it's gonna go out of business, and then it just, like, boomerangs back around.

Sam Lessin: It's not gonna go out of business. It has, like, tens of billions of dollars in revenue. It's just a question of, like, whether-

Dave Morin: You know what, man? Bill Tai a-and the Mai Tai kiteboarding thing, man, like both Canva and Zoom.

Sam Lessin: Well, yeah. Well, Zoom's a little bit of a complicated story right now, but yes, for sure. And it's funny, like, I actually co-invested with, last week something got announced with Bill, and I'm like, "Well, back with Bill."

Sudz: Wait, question.

Sam Lessin: Bill's a, Bill's a killer.

Sudz: This goes back to the longevity thing. How does Bill Tai source? And it, like he's-

Sam Lessin: Kitesurfing. Kitesurfing

Sudz: ... from what I, like from what I understand is he's just kitesurfing, right? Like-

Sam Lessin: But that's a great sourcing pipeline. But it's actually not cra- Like, especially kitesurfing in that moment was a pretty smart way to do it. 'Cause you think about it, it's actually a great sport for entrepreneurs. It's a little risky. It's, there's a high barrier to entry. It selects for the right type of people.

Jessica: I did it to try and run into Larry Page.

Sam Lessin: You did it until you and I went to Estuera and you got dragged across a beach on a kite, and that ended that.

Jessica: You don't want to kitesurf on the sand.

Dave Morin: For what it's worth, that's why I quit, too.

Jessica: Surfing is so much more fun. Okay, guys, do you, would you like to keep talking? 'cause I got some stuff to do.

Brit Morin: I just need to give you shit before we end Jess'.

Jessica: Oh yeah, this is good. This is good.

Brit Morin: Last week, Jess sends me a text and is like... ' Cause, you know, we're all Swifties here other than Sam. And she's like, "Oh my gosh, did you see the news?" And there's a, a news story or a Facebook post or something, uh, with Taylor Swift crying on the football field. There's three photos. Her crying on the football field hugging Travis Kelce. Another one of her, like, calling somebody from the football field acting like, "I can't believe this. Something just happened," like tears of joy happening. So now all the pregnancy rumors are flying. Jess is losing it. At first I'm like, oh my God, I lose it. Then I notice-

Jessica: I'm confused. I'm like, no one finds out they're pregnant on the phone

Brit Morin: I don't think she found out she was pregnant. I thought she was calling, like, her mom after she told Travis the good news. Like, that's m- how I thought the story was going. Then I realized there's a lot of mascara running on the face.

Dave Morin: Is this just AI punchline?

Jessica: Yes.

Sudz: It's, it's AI.

Brit Morin: I click through, I realize it's a Facebook link to a rando's Facebook account, and I'm like, "Jess, you're definitely falling for something here."

Dave Morin: The moral of this episode is none of us, whether it's Dario and Benioff or Taylor Swift, nobody knows if anything is real on the internet anymore.

Brit Morin: Even the people who know tech the most , so what do we expect the normies to do?

Jessica: It's so true, and honestly, I gotta stick with Instagram. My Facebook is all made up shit.

Sam Lessin: My Instagram's all made up, too, but it's fun.

Dave Morin: Instagram's so made up.

Sam Lessin: No, I have a lot of Instagram stuff that's made up, but it's at least titillating. You know what the episode really, the theme of the episode is? Everything we said was gonna happen is happening, right? It's like, one, we're stuck in this world where, like, the LLMs are trying to, like, block us from doing things users want in the interest of, like, their belief systems, but it doesn't matter because we'll just use a different one, and it's gonna create this super weird war of LLMs and, like, alignment, which is not a new topic. It's just real now. Two, none-- Even we have no idea if Benioff and Dario actually sat down and Dario sat through that, like, promotional bit and said that stuff about Salesforce being important to Anthropic, right? No one knows. No one knows what's real in Taylor Swift. But the market's ripping, and we're all having fun. So, you know, it's kinda what we expected.

Brit Morin: It's the bubble of all bubbles. It's very exciting.

Sudz: This isn't really have that bad of an ending either, right? Like, it's, you sort of go back to more in person.

Brit Morin: Mm-hmm.

Sudz: You go back to, like-

Dave Morin: Gen Z hasn't seen a crash yet, man.

Sam Lessin: I'm, like, less worried about crash and more worried about us all just, like, laughing ourselves to death and not believing anything and then not doing anything. But that's more of a big picture thing.

Jessica: Okay, dear friends and listeners, as for not doing anything, we all have a lot to do. So a big thank you to Sudz for joining the pod. You're welcome back anytime.

Dave Morin: Yeah, Sudz, come back, man.

Brit Morin: Woo hoo.

Jessica: We'll give you a little more notice. We'll, we'll have a whole array of questions for you.

Sam Lessin: We're gonna need a different camera setup 'cause he's way too much bigger than me.

Brit Morin: His X profile is @itzsudz with a Z for itz-

Jessica: Oh

Brit Morin: ... 'cause that's what Gen Z does.

Jessica: I would not have found that, so. Okay, sorry about that. I pressed the wrong button too soon. We're gonna say a proper goodbye to Sudz and welcome back. Morins, I hope your Labor Day weekend is full. By the way, w-we'll be up in your hood if you guys wanna hang.

Dave Morin: Cool, let's hang.

Jessica: Let's do that. Sam, I am gonna run around to get the parent update before you start your meeting, so don't start. And we'll see you back here next week for another episode of More or Less. Bye.

Brit Morin: Bye.

Sudz: Bye.

Sam Lessin: Bye.

Brit Morin: 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, @j lesson. And as for me, I'm@brit. See you guys next time