AI-generated — may contain transcription errors.

Brit Morin: I don't know if we have the number yet for how many bots our brains can contain at once, because I've got about two dozen and my shit's going crazy. I think I can do, like, 10 to 20 things at once. I realistically can do, like, three

Jessica: AI's important enough and these companies have big enough opportunities to build actual businesses. But they value it at a price that assumes a stratospheric growth rate across all industries for all time. Probably not.

Dave Morin: Yeah, like the growth rate that assumes that they will be, as a business, larger than the entire United States economy.

Sam Lessin: I wake up in the morning and I'm like, "What should I eat?" DoorDash tells me what to eat. Where do I go? The Google Maps lady tells me, "Turn left, turn right." The trick is that technology has convinced you that you are the one in control.

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

Jessica: Why, hello friends. Welcome to More or Less. Guys, I'm so excited.

Dave Morin: Coming to you live from X headquarters.

Jessica: You're at X headquarters?

Dave Morin: Yep.

Jessica: That's amazing. That still exists?

Dave Morin: It does. This conference room, this is the board room. Interesting building in San Francisco. Lot of history.

Sam Lessin: I thought they were out of San Francisco.

Dave Morin: No, they're here.

Jessica: San Francisco's back, baby. Haven't you heard?

Brit Morin: Yeah, you gotta be in San Francisco.

Jessica: We have so many agendas. Got four notebooks going, so we have a lot to do. First of all, to the Morins, guess what temperature our cold plunge is set at? Just guess. A cold plunge.

Dave Morin: 40.

Brit Morin: 42. The answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Sam Lessin: Great. Great answer.

Dave Morin: That's actually what mine is set to.

Jessica: We are rolling at 39.

Brit Morin: 39?

Jessica: This is not healthy.

Dave Morin: No, it's perfectly healthy.

Jessica: I am a woman. I should not be in this. I almost froze to death.

Brit Morin: Women need high 50s, Dave.

Sam Lessin: You want a gender neutral cold plunge?

Jessica: Yes.

Brit Morin: Yeah.

Sam Lessin: You know, there is a solution to this, Jess, which is we just need two cold plunges.

Jessica: It's the his and her cold plunge.

Brit Morin: Or just don't cold plunge, Jess. I gave that shit up a long time ago.

Sam Lessin: The honest answer is it was off, and then I asked someone to turn it on, and I'm sorry it's at 39, 'cause you liked it when it was at, like, 45.

Jessica: You liked it at 45? Ugh. I am surprised I am sitting here alive. That's all I have to say. And it is related to this theme because I've also decided that if one is gonna spend very concentrated periods of their life just managing the bot craziness, one has to recenter their brain on a regular basis.

Brit Morin: One has to cold plunge to freeze their southern selves.

Jessica: I was like, "I've got too many bots. I've got too many things going on. There's too much news. My calves are also hurting."

Brit Morin: Can I talk about this? I was telling Dave, so back in the social network days, the, the nascent times of the 20- 2000s, this dude named Robin Dunbar had come up with this thing called Dunbar's number, which is, like, how many-

Dave Morin: This dude.

Brit Morin: I'm just explaining it for the layman out there, which is how many social nodes your brain can comprehend at once. His answer was 150. Hence, like-

Sam Lessin: Well, that was back then. Now it's 20

Dave Morin: No, it, it's still 150.

Brit Morin: Well, hence Dave created Path and everything. Even if it's 150, those are real people. I don't know if we have the number yet for how many bots our brains can contain at once, because I've got about two dozen and my shit's going crazy. I think I can do, like, 10 to 20 things at once. I realistically can do, like, three.

Sam Lessin: Can you explain what you mean by you have 20? Like, I have, like, tons of sub-agents. I only talk to three of them.

Jessica: I'm not gonna let us go down. We have a whole section on bots, and I'm going to announce the bot AGI challenge as well, so get very excited for that. But we- we're gonna jump in. Okay.

Dave Morin: What's our agenda, Jess?

Jessica: Our agenda, we have to talk about what's going on in the markets, public/private venture, some shock waves. We have to talk about Dot Muse Instinct, the latest. This will be our bot segment.

Sam Lessin: Is this where we talk about how Elon bought dot.com?

Jessica: Oh, no, I missed that.

Sam Lessin: Did you guys see this? He bought dot.com and redirected it to X, which is freaking hilarious. He paid, like, $20 million for the joke, which I think is totally worth it.

Jessica: For him it is. Also, why- how did they not own dot.com? Okay. And also, I don't know if you saw, but there's been a worldwide global US super intelligence pact. It's official, guys. Everyone signed it.

Dave Morin: It's an accord, Jess.

Jessica: It's an accord.

Sam Lessin: My favorite was, did you see whose signature looks like a third grader's? You know, Brockman.

Jessica: Brockman just wrote GBD.

Brit Morin: Well, Donald Trump spelled his name wrong on something recently, uh, when he signed.

Dave Morin: I heard that Trump is in town today too.

Jessica: Oh, no.

Brit Morin: Yeah, he's doing AI meetings this week.

Dave Morin: I heard he's in San Francisco here.

Sam Lessin: Shit, I have to fly into San Francisco in an hour.

Dave Morin: Maybe that's what the sirens were.

Brit Morin: Should get him on the pod.

Dave Morin: Nah, we should get Marco Rubio on the pod. Let's focus on the next thing.

Sam Lessin: Guys, I have to say, on the pod, I'm at yet another secret conference. We have a lot of fans.

Brit Morin: I know. Dave and I have gotten stopped out in public a lot.

Dave Morin: Oh, yeah, I got stopped yesterday.

Sam Lessin: It's in a very, very small world, but, like, a lot of people really like our podcast, so good job.

Dave Morin: Yeah. We appreciate you guys.

Jessica: I mean, I won't say who, but, like, top eight CEO in tech came up to us out of the blue.

Dave Morin: At a different secret conference this weekend.

Jessica: "Oh, I've been looking for you to tell you," like, kind of stuff. So-

Dave Morin: That's awesome.

Sam Lessin: So we should keep doing it.

Jessica: We love that fan and everyone else.

Sam Lessin: Thank you, everyone.

Dave Morin: We're happy to have you. Appreciate you listening.

Jessica: Let's deliver some value, guys. Okay, so Anthropic S-1 came out. Information subscribers would've known the numbers, of course. But-

Dave Morin: Well, it didn't come out. It was a leak, right? And it doesn't have up-to-date numbers

Jessica: ... attest to the ballerness of the reporter at Reuters who broke it. So yes, you can update the numbers, but sure, these numbers are public.

Sam Lessin: Have you seen the memes of SaaS investors welcoming Anthropic to the no growth table? It's really funny.

Guest: That's funny.

Sam Lessin: Like, people are posting these memes of, like, of, you know, these SaaS companies being like, "Welcome, Anthropic."

Jessica: Well, it's more, it's more just the, the amount of the losses, I think, that if people haven't been paying attention.

Sam Lessin: Well, also, the flat lining at 70 or whatever the number was. People like growth. Flat is very scary.

Jessica: Flat lining. Tell the people what flat lined. Give them a sense of the numbers.

Sam Lessin: Look, I'm just repeating what I see on Twitter, but there was like a, you know, the revenue was hooking up, and then, like, basically as token prices have dropped, their revenue, shockingly, just kind of flat lines. And again, like, in a world where we're playing infinity or zero games, which is the whole world right now, flat is very scary, 'cause flat can go up or down.

Guest: You do not want an S-shaped curve in a world of infinity games.

Jessica: I don't think their revenue growth is zero, so to be clear.

Guest: No, but the slope of the curve changed.

Jessica: Yeah. No, the slope of the curve changed.

Sam Lessin: Everyone's talking about second and third derivatives anyway, so you know.

Jessica: By the way, it also changed in the extreme positive direction, too, which we all knew sort of wasn't sustainable.

Sam Lessin: Problem is the whole thing, when it's just jittery, right? Like, you can't project. And if you can't project, then you know what the hell's going on.

Jessica: So Sam, your view that there's no long-term predictability in growth, value, revenue, profits of these companies, I think is true. And-

Sam Lessin: Oh my God, am I right about something? Am I being validated?

Jessica: Yes.

Guest: So what's gonna happen to all the LPs and then VCs when the frothy Anthropic might not come through?

Sam Lessin: People are gonna find a way to get their bag.

Guest: Regulatory capture.

Jessica: Well, also, though, Sam and I are just singing. We're so tired and delirious.

Guest: You, you guys do sing a lot. It's sort of weird.

Jessica: Guys, I, I stay up so late. Recruiting awesome journalists in Israel, which I'm doing-

Sam Lessin: Yeah, how's your Israeli recruiting going?

Jessica: Oh, I, I had such a fascinating, fun conversation last night with someone. I really enjoyed it, and then I was like, "Is it gonna be worth a 73 sleep score?" And I said, "You know what? It is." And that is actually one of the highest compliments I can pay to these people. But macro picture is not good. So even assume Anthropic is not on the table. Aura, God bless them, love them, pulled their IPO and cited market conditions. Those market conditions, as pod listeners realize, is everyone's concerned about inflation. They don't know what the Fed's gonna do, right? You-

Sam Lessin: Well, and interest rate.

Guest: Wait, Jess, you said that Anthropic is not on the table?

Jessica: I think Anthropic probably... I, I think it's 60% they get out in November, 40% they use the general market uncertainty to regroup a little. Maybe it's 65% they get out.

Guest: Is the market that bad? We're talking about Aura. I don't really understand what happened here other than that they mispriced this. Like, they priced it way too high. You know, they got cold feet, it seems like. Like, the market's not in that bad of shape this week.

Sam Lessin: Here's a question I have. I like Aura as a product. I really do. And I actually, you know, Martin, who works with Jessica, was pointing out to me that years ago, I was explaining why GoPro is definitely going to zero. I don't think that of Aura. I think Aura's fine. The question is, who wants to own mid assets in 2026? We're just in a world where, like, everyone's trying to figure out what's gonna 10X. Everyone's effectively a seed investor, and the problem with Aura is, like, they'll do fine. Maybe it grows, but does it go from a $10 billion to a $20 billion dollar company? What is the $100 billion story?

Jessica: I wanna answer Dave's question first, which was really what is happening in the markets, 'cause it doesn't look like they're tanking and, you know, day to day it doesn't look that bad. But there is, like, a huge uncertainty fear underneath, and a lot of that is around what's gonna happen to interest rates, and bond prices are all over the place. So there's a lot of volatility and concern in the bond market that is macro, and some of it's just related to the Fed and inflation. Some of it's related to war and geopolitics, but that is a factor. I think what you said is also true, Sam. I mean, when people talk about the window being open, it, it is for any company just at a different price. But, like, there's a lot of fear and uncertainty in the markets right now. And so I think if Anthropic gets cold feet, they have cover.

Sam Lessin: Totally, which is what OpenAI did.

Jessica: Yeah. Which they probably still get out because I... You just don't wanna be in limbo. I think, Sam, it was your favorite company, Box.net-

Sam Lessin: Oh, I love Box.net

Jessica: ... that was many years ago when they pulled their IPO. Like, you don't wanna have to be in that limbo. Customers get worried, employees get worried, and so forth.

Sam Lessin: Here's the real question. The private markets and the public markets have two very different views, it seems, of what these companies are worth.

Jessica: Oh, it looks like... Sam, did you read the information this morning?

Sam Lessin: I may have.

Jessica: Wall Street and Silicon Valley split over AI's price tag.

Sam Lessin: Aw.

Jessica: Oh.

Sam Lessin: You know, I've been at a conference, but I probably did read it. Very good stuff.

Jessica: You're welcome. I gave you a talking point for a podcast. It's worth 399 bucks.

Sam Lessin: Love the information. Great publication. Totally right. I just think that's, like, the big thing is, like, these things can keep raising private capital is my sense for now. It's not like they can IPO and then they're done. Like, there are lots of IPOs where, like, I don't... Like, you do, you IPO, you don't, you're not incinerating cash. These things have to think about, "I have to raise money for the IPO, and then be willing to raise tons more money continuously." And the question I think they have to ask and you have to ask yourself is, like, who's gonna be more gracious on that when you go and find out? It, it turns out right now, I actually think it might just be that the public markets are not going to give them what they need versus the private markets. It's better to stay private and just, like, run up private capital and, like, there's lots of people who wanna own these things privately for all sorts of reasons, but the second you have to deal with, like, actual liquidity and, like, what the public markets will pay, I just am not sure it's the same.

Guest: But then it just further constipates the whole cycle, right? Like, I was meeting with an LP, especially with Aura. They're in, like, a quiet period, so literally all the people who've banking on them getting out today and were, like, planning all their budgets and forecasts off of this IPO as one of many that are potentially in the stack right now. So I'm talking about an LP that I was meeting with that has exposure to Aura and was like, "I literally know nothing. Like, I'm in, we're in a quiet period, so I don't know how to, like, reforecast what I'm doing." And so then if LPs are constipated and then further paused, then VCs are gonna get constipated and further paused, and so down the line.

Sam Lessin: So much constipation.

Guest: A lot of constipation.

Sam Lessin: What's the fiber?

Guest: Yeah, we, we need some Mucinex.

Jessica: Guys, ick. I mean, fine, just like... But that's true, and that's been the story of the system for some time. We've also had- The hugging faces and, you know, all the, the craziness happening too. So what was the big sale yesterday?

Brit Morin: World Labs. But their last raise was at five billion, and they sold for eight. Fine.

Jessica: Yeah, but Martin Casado and a16z made a shit ton of money. Yeah.

Brit Morin: A lot of LPs are also talking about this as a barbell strategy. Like, there are companies that are, like, getting out or... meaning, like, getting acquired, OpenRouter or World Labs, et cetera.

Dave Morin: I mean, there's gonna need to be a lot more of that 'cause there's nowhere else for these things to go.

Brit Morin: Or else they're gonna take 10-plus years. That's, like, the thinking.

Sam Lessin: Fei-Fei is rich. Fei-Fei is great. Why does Fei-Fei sell? She sell- I think everyone's just in this, like, get your bag and get in the platform moment 'cause everything is uncertain.

Dave Morin: Yeah, because distribution.

Jessica: And also, like, building a frontier lab as a Stanford professor is probably not, like, exactly how you wanna spend all your time, right?

Sam Lessin: The problem is, like, this whole cycle and whole story, again, like, Anthropic and OpenAI are financially like an infection. If they can't support their spending, right, we all fucked.

Jessica: Not me.

Sam Lessin: You're fine. Uh, thank God. Which is the, the problem is, like, it's a really weird place where, like, it's in no one's incentive for these things to not work out, even if you're not invested in them, if you're broadly in the economy. And yet, there's real risk that they're not gonna work out, right? And that's a really weird place to be.

Brit Morin: But I think one of the crazier things I saw in the leaked S1 is that Anthropic, like, has, over the next 10 years, over half a trillion dollars in mostly non-cancellable contracts, like, booked.

Dave Morin: Yeah, it was my favorite sentence too, is like, who's making the money? Not Anthropic. It's all the cloud providers. It's, like, completely ridiculous.

Sam Lessin: Or they figure out wet labs and vertically integrate and close down their services, and they're in a completely different business, and, like, whatever. But, like, it's weird. It's like SpaceX is, like, an option on 15 different businesses plus unique ro-rocket capabilities. These guys are, like, in a commoditization race for their core, where, like, again, if... And they are options on really great stories, but they're just stories.

Dave Morin: I mean, Sam, back to your prior set of comments, what does not work out mean?

Sam Lessin: For what?

Dave Morin: These businesses. Like, what does not work out mean? Like-

Brit Morin: Anthropic or OpenAI

Dave Morin: ... what happens if they don't work out? What does that actually mean?

Sam Lessin: I'd flip it around and say, right now, like, what is going on? I keep referring to as, like, the triangle trade. Like, DC needs them to work out. We need 8% GDP growth. We don't have it. We've got a huge debt problem.

Jessica: Eight's pretty... We're not getting to eight.

Sam Lessin: Well, people are saying maybe four of inflation, four real. Like, there, there's some, like, people are arguing with the numbers. But, like, let's... It's a big number. It's a number much bigger than we've ever had in recent history. So DC needs it. The country in that way needs it, right? Silicon Valley's having a fucking party. And then New York weirdly really needs it too because New York is, like, this is, like, a huge financial engine for New York. Unlike historical tech situations where, look, you can't make that much money on Facebook or Google if you're in New York because they don't need that much money. It's, like, not your business. Now you need s- everything. Every insurance product, everyone's freaking having a party. And so the problem is when you say not, well, what happens if they don't work out? I'd flip it around and say, right now, if you did not have an AI story, we would be in, like, terribly dire straits.

Dave Morin: Yes, but, like, what happens if these don't work out? Do these companies literally shut down? I'm trying to bring it down to earth for the listener, like, what really happens?

Jessica: Here's what happens. So we're talking about a question of valuation. The first shoe to drop would be around pricing and valuation, which is one reason OpenAI isn't rushing to do this in the public markets. Because if the public markets are fundamentally gonna value you at a percentage and of what you've been privately raising at, that is a big event. It's a big event for employees. It's meaningful, right? It changes the narrative. It has practical problems. And I think, look, many high-flying companies have come out at one valuation and settled somewhere else. And I think that probably is the most likely thing, not that these companies have escape velocity that's unlimited, but there's a trading event where these early investors can take their bag, and then there's some settling of what this thing looks like, uh, with the asterisks that the, the liability regulation and business growth are all jump balls for how they could land at any one moment in the narrative. But it's not clear that that's a death sentence. It's also quite challenging. Then you have other issues about, you know, just that we spend most of our time on the pod talking about, which is how do things commoditize when-- as these products diffuse? What is, like, the real underlying demand of pricing power? You know, I tend to believe that AI is important enough and these companies have big enough opportunities to build actual businesses. But... Or they value it at a price that assumes a stratosphere growth rate, you know, across all industries for all time. Probably not.

Dave Morin: Yeah, like the growth rate that assumes that they will be, as a business, larger than the entire United States economy.

Sam Lessin: Which, by the way, if that happens, we're gonna be communist anyway, so it doesn't matter. Like, zero and infinity are the same thing for these companies, right? Which is the weird thing.

Brit Morin: And also, wasn't this week the first week the Vercel charts were showing the open models outpacing the closed models to some regards?

Dave Morin: Yes.

Brit Morin: Like, the displacement of closed versus open continuing to be a headwind as well.

Dave Morin: Well, but it's unclear, Brit. You can read that chart two ways. You can read it that there's a... open models are outcompeting the closed ones. But what that chart doesn't show is that pie is getting bigger. And so it's hard to tell if that chart matters to the outcome for these companies in the public markets. Anthropic must believe that it has sufficient knobs to turn on token pricing and token consumption, that they can get into the public market and maintain some kind of pricing power that gives them the ability to get everybody liquid, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it, right?

Sam Lessin: The thing that I think is just interesting is you look at these businesses, and you're like, generally speaking, these public companies, especially at this scale, there's like two things. You're investing in a core business- That has some properties that you believe in, and then you're buying option value on top, right? Which is there's six things that might happen to make them super valuable. I think the, the core anthropic business, which is can you sell premium tokens to people effectively? Like, can you sell it at a higher price than the open models because, like, what you're doing is so valuable? Like, the... And it- people will sink infinite amounts of money into marginally better tokens. That's the core business. It's been totally true for the last bunch of months. It's flat lining. Are there certain people that will pay infinitely forever for slightly marginally better tokens? Maybe. But, like, that's, like, the weakness of the core business is that whole conversation. And I think things like Muse, which again, can argue are not as advanced as Feeble, but are clearly sufficient for, like, what normal people need, right? Kind of put a dent in that story.

Dave Morin: I think there's a, a further nuance here, Sam, that I've picked up on in the last maybe couple weeks, which is that these companies also went and built forward- these, like, quote unquote forward deployed companies to go effectively be like McKinsey and service the Fortune 500 or 2000, and build token operations inside of those companies with kind of the expectation that they would then be able to sell their luxury tokens to those Fortune 500. And I think that they kind of thought that this was a really good business strategy, that they go and they build software that consumes their tokens. Those tokens get priced at a premium. And it does appear to be that there's a little bit of a business strategy mishap going on here, which is that the open models came out of nowhere, and all of a sudden the CFOs were like, "Hey, you built me this software to spend your tokens, but, like, your tokens are really expensive, so I kinda wanna spend the other tokens." And now there's these forward deployed companies and forward deployed teams that are kind of in this weird position out there in the market, and that's, like, a nuance that I've been picking up on that I haven't seen anybody really talking about. But I, I think that it's a, it's a thing that's playing out.

Sam Lessin: The forward deploy thing actually weirdly, you know, you look at the Palantir or whatever, in a story of it's a security problem, it's an integration problem, it's hard to switch, it actually kind of makes sense for locking a bunch of people in. It's just a very different business model if it's like what we're doing forward deploy and what we're gonna get paid on is the tokens. But actually, the reality is, and this is my biggest thing-

Dave Morin: That's what I mean. It might have been a foolish business strategy

Sam Lessin: ... Yeah. It's just, it's not a terrible thing to try, but the thing for me is, like, I keep going back to this fact. I use a lot of Claude. I think Claude's excellent. It's like the core of my infrastructure brain. But if I woke up tomorrow and Claude was gone, I would care for about one second, right? And, like, that is the fundamental baseline problem in the core business model, not necessarily unique data, wetlab, vertical integration, bogey, solve all cancer in a way others can't. Like, there are still option values on having this, but you gotta support a massive core infrastructure and cost structure, and the question is, is there a core business or not?

Brit Morin: So what do you think Meta's gonna do if they just hired a head of enterprise this week to go compete here? Ooh. Oh, time out.

Jessica: We have a guest showing up. Are you guys in adjacent rooms? You have the same headboard.

Dave Morin: You guys must be in the same place.

Guest: We're actually in the same room and we're sharing a bed. But we, you know, we don't really want you to know, so we're using AI to, like, fuzz the background a little.

Jessica: Oh.

Dave Morin: Yeah.

Sam Lessin: We change the- AI changed the bed color to be different.

Brit Morin: Okay, hold on. Before you guys keep talking, this is Adrian Oun. Adrian, introduce yourself for the people.

Sam Lessin: Adrian's a pilot.

Guest: That is my claim to fame in the world. I can fly a plane and a helicopter. No, I'm a friend of the Moores and Lessons for the last 20 years. That's what I am.

Brit Morin: And what do you do, Adrian? Why should we believe what you say today w- with any of your wisdom?

Dave Morin: He flies planes.

Guest: I fly planes. I invest in companies. I'm investor in about 100 funds, 300 startups, 40 unicorns. And then with my other hat, I, I'm a founder. I've run a bunch of companies, some that worked, some that didn't. But these days I mostly help companies get off the ground and kind of help incubate them, mostly in AI and deep tech.

Sam Lessin: Okay, guys, I got to tell you one floor as we were gonna do. So we're at-- Adrian, you know, we fly down to this secret conference, and we run into this, like, large institutional LP, and they're talking about h- very excitedly, they're actually an LP of ours, I quite like them, about how they're using AI to track their 14,000 private company positions, da, da, da, da.

Dave Morin: You're like, "You have too many positions."

Sam Lessin: Adrian's like, "Wow, you invested in 14,000 companies?" They're like, "Well, no, like, through the funds we're invested in 14,000." And Adrian does the math in his head and he's like, "Yeah, I've invested in 14,000 companies too that way."

Jessica: Classic Adrian. Yeah. Well, Adrian, we're thrilled to have you. I think people should also know you sold, built one of the very first AI companies and sold it to Google back in the day, so.

Dave Morin: And I wrote him one of the first checks for that company.

Sam Lessin: And then built another one and sold it to OpenAI. Did you write him a check for the one he sold to OpenAI?

Dave Morin: No one wrote checks to the one he sold to OpenAI.

Jessica: It was so secret until the information broke.

Guest: No, we just hadn't even raised yet. We were going to, and you were gonna all be our first calls, except Sam.

Dave Morin: I was trying to.

Guest: Sam always detests any valuation that I give him. Sam is too cheap to invest in my company.

Sam Lessin: It's true. Adrian used to be like, "We should do this together." And I'm like, "Adrian, I can't afford you. You're too expensive."

Guest: But Dave can afford me, and Dave is a great partner.

Brit Morin: The Moores pay up, okay? We understand the premium pricing.

Dave Morin: Yeah. Adrian, who's your first check always?

Guest: Dave is always my first call.

Dave Morin: I invest in people.

Brit Morin: And Brit.

Guest: Dave and Brit are good partners. Sam is just annoying.

Sam Lessin: I offered to split the cost of fuel with you, and this is how you repay me, Adrian?

Jessica: And Adrian doesn't even return my call. So, okay, Adrian, you're in time for second segment.

Dave Morin: What are we talking to Adrian about?

Jessica: I, I didn't know he was coming. I didn't know this was a drop-in invite people to the pod pod.

Brit Morin: We need to talk about OpenAI's Dev Day. I think this is a good transition.

Jessica: We are moving to our bot update of the week. As a g-

Dave Morin: Right. Okay

Jessica: ... a listener of the pod, you know we have been exploring the bots at various levels. Sam's all in, Brit is orchestrator, Dave is building, and I'm sitting here on the sidelines, in or out. I'm happy to report this week, everyone, I went full bot.

Brit Morin: You went full Muse.

Jessica: I went full Muse.

Dave Morin: It's good to have you, Jess. Get on the train of the polyagentomerous future.

Jessica: I keep waiting for Mark and Susan to call me and telling me to stop using Muse. This is how much I'm using it. But-

Brit Morin: Wow.

Dave Morin: Why would they want you to stop? They want you to consume it even more.

Jessica: I am melting down their data centers, Dave. I'm convinced. I'm convinced. I'm so convinced.

Dave Morin: Jessica's understanding of what compute scale is is hilarious.

Jessica: I'm like, "Oh, it just bought me an ice cream and delivered it. I'm surprised there isn't a blackout across Louisiana." Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.

Dave Morin: Jessica either thinks there's like 12 people in the world, or she thinks that, like, these numbers for AI spend on neo clouds are way too small based on how much she thinks she's spending with her ins- virtual instance.

Guest: I think you're just forgetting that the latest models, like, are incredibly efficient if you don't use... Like, we all have, like, the Sols, and the Light, and the Kimys. Like, there's very, very inexpensive models right now. They're almost certainly not using the highest computation models, so I don't think cost is a big issue.

Jessica: Okay. Well, I'm glad that I'm not personally responsible for this. But also, and we should mention, and he's gonna come on the pod, Ben Schweeren, Schweeren? How do you pronounce it? Of Cotu, joined Instinct as its first chief business officer, which finally got me on Instinct, 'cause none of you schmucks invited me, and he's like, "Why aren't you on Instinct?"

Brit Morin: I have so many invites. You didn't even ask.

Dave Morin: Why are we having the business officer? Let's get the product guy.

Jessica: We can get Noah too. I don't know. I, I just thought that's what we do. We invite people on the pod. So anyway, guys, I want to announce a competition. All these bots are trying to compete, especially for the mom brit. You were right. And I have decided that the first bot that can log into my kids' school software and update three kids' after-school plans and make sure they are synced with a Google Calendar-

Dave Morin: All the bots can do this

Jessica: ... you have not seen these after-school plans. It is very, very complicated. Muse is currently at 90%, but anyone that can do this has my undying loyalty, and I will award the equivalent of a Millennium Prize.

Guest: I actually love this as the AI benchmark for Jessica.

Brit Morin: First of all, I don't think anyone here that's a dad should be talking right now. The moms are the ones who log into the kids' software.

Jessica: I will hawk your product for six months if you can do this for me.

Guest: Jess, you don't need to do that. You can start a company tomorrow called The Mom Index that has 12 mom tasks that each model has to complete-

Brit Morin: Dave wanted me to do this like three years ago.

Dave Morin: This is actually a way better benchmark than any of these other bullshit benchmarks.

Jessica: Brit, build it with me. We're building the benchmark.

Brit Morin: I'll build it in... By the time we're done with the pod, it'll be ready.

Jessica: Booking a tennis court, number two.

Guest: Codex can do all this today. I think you're insane.

Brit Morin: I know.

Guest: I think any, any of these can basically do it.

Dave Morin: Adrian, you're right. Uh, but I mean, that is also the problem with... This is why OpenAI had to rebrand Codex Dots, right? Because people don't know how to use Codex, and Codex is for coders, not for moms.

Brit Morin: It's also a bad brand. You need to call it Dotty.

Dave Morin: That's why they did it.

Brit Morin: I know.

Jessica: I just haven't had time to get my Dots going yet, but Dave, Adrian, talk to me about Dots.

Guest: Dots is Muse from OpenAI, right? Or Instinct from OpenAI.

Dave Morin: I think that's, like, an unfair framing for what it's worth. OpenAI already did this, and they just rebranded it. Like, Codex-

Guest: I agree with you, Dave. I agree. So, like, basically, everybody has the same functionality, and the thing is that everybody's packaging that functionality in different ways and kind of different experiences. And basically, Instinct and Muse realize, let's just go back to the single thread, act like an assistant sort of thing, whereas Codex was actually a little more in the power user, like, you can have different threads, you can control them. And so because the Muses and Instincts of the world are taking off, OpenAI was like, "Okay, let's just go ahead and kind of copy it." If you're already a pretty power Codex user, you're a little like, "What the hell did you just do?" Right? Like, "This makes no sense for me."

Jessica: Yeah, but most people aren't, so it's still a good strategy.

Dave Morin: It was already there for six months.

Guest: Correct. But to Jessica's point, if you're not yet on the platform, and remember, I think the last number is, like, a billion-ish people use ChatGPT. And by the way, 1.005 billion have tried it and didn't stick with it, which I think is an even more insane number. That's the number I really wanna focus on. But that means there's also a bunch of billions that are not yet on the platform. And so I think it's probably a good customer acquisition strategy, and probably for existing users, it feels a little disjointed. It's like you just kind of piled this thing on as opposed to redesigning this from the ground up for what I really needed.

Brit Morin: Yeah, but they said, like, text messaging is coming. Clearly they did this in a hurry, right? They did this in the last two weeks. They had GrokBot, Instinct, Muse, all in the last month.

Jessica: Guys, I can't use Amazon on Muse, so goodbye Amazon. That's how loyal I am.

Dave Morin: This is what we were talking about last week. It's 1982. The Macintosh hasn't been invented yet. Nobody has figured out how to make AI agents useful for the every person global scale. It's like we're still not even close.

Guest: I agree with what Dave is saying, except Dave, you forgot to insert your Open Claw reference in there, so can you just try again and get it in so that the audience knows you're affiliated with Open Claw?

Dave Morin: All of these are built on Open Claw. All of them.

Guest: It's true. I actually, I'm giving you a hard time. I kind of agree with you, Dave. I think you're getting to the question that I think really matters right now, which is not the UI. It's what's the moat? What's the defensibility? We're all, like, hopping into GrokBot, and hopping into Muse, and hopping into Instinct, et cetera. So if Instinct is worth $800 trillion or whatever it's worth right now, I wanna know what's the moat.

Jessica: What about network effects? W- is the first one to talk to the others the winner?

Brit Morin: This is what Instinct's doing, and I started doing it this week. So your Instinct can talk to someone s- else's Instinct.

Dave Morin: I'm sorry, Brit, but Instinct has absolutely no advantage.

Brit Morin: Okay, well let me just tell you.

Sam Lessin: If the cost of writing software is going to zero, there is no moat on those integrations as long as those integrations are done via APIs and not done via BD deals.

Dave Morin: Amen, brother.

Sam Lessin: I think that what you're finding is that there's gonna be winner take all, I should say winner take some. There's gonna be a few big winners because the setup cost for the user starts to be pretty incredible. Like, I don't wanna go try the latest thing 'cause I've got all my setup already.

Jessica: So Adrian, I agree, this is an important question about the moat. Brit, what are your thoughts?

Brit Morin: My point is, I was intrigued by Instinct letting your Instinct talk to other people's Instincts, and I am in a bunch of women's private WhatsApp groups. A bunch of my mom and female entrepreneur friends are, like, obsessed with Instinct because of the coordination vector. And back to Jessica's point, I think me and Jess are the voice of m- sort of the normal part of America. You boys, like, live in your little bubble, so.

Jessica: So normal.

Brit Morin: Okay. So what they love about it is, like, they can just, like, offlay all this stuff and, like, people are coordinating with other moms for play dates and whatever it is they need to coordinate about that's really annoying. The problem is, I've started using this now with a bunch of people and their Instincts and my Instinct, and they're off talking to each other, and now I'm not talking to these people anymore. And I think this has, like, serious social repercussions if, like, the agent-to-agent future keeps going this way. Like, I did it with Dave and then I didn't even text with Dave for a whole day. And I was just like, "Dave, text my agent."

Dave Morin: I, I was never more offended. Brit started using her Instinct to try to coordinate with me, so I-

Brit Morin: We were coordinating date night

Dave Morin: ... I immediately came back and had it start coordinating far more interesting things with her.

Sam Lessin: Some, some of my best friends in the world I haven't seen for, like, nine months, but I talk all the time through FaceTime, right? Like, why is FaceTime okay but my Instinct agent is not okay? It's just that the Overton window has yet to move into this world where we're used to communicating via agents. We went from we communicate in person, now we communicate via Instagram posts.

Dave Morin: You might be right.

Brit Morin: No, there's no humanity in it. I'm losing actual context of humans.

Jessica: FaceTime is human-to-human, reducing the barrier between us.

Sam Lessin: Is Instagram the same? Is TikTok the same? Like, is text message the same?

Jessica: I know where this is going. I'll cut to the chase.

Sam Lessin: I'm glad you have all the answers.

Jessica: No, but on this, I just feel it very deeply. I am gonna cut my screen time by 20% by using these bots. So we are just, the middle has fallen out. I'm already on track, right? 'Cause I can track it. There are gonna be parts of things that are hyper-automated, hyper-efficiency, hyper-productivity boosting, but we have to balance this out with, like, transcendental medication meditation.

Sam Lessin: I would like to make three short points. Point one, my favorite thing was Jessica has innovated, is she was like, "Oh, let's just give the bots our printer and it can just print the shit we need so we don't have to look at screens." Brilliant.

Jessica: Nice.

Sam Lessin: Right? So, like, now our printer is just, like, humming with, like, "Here come the daily reports." It's actually fabulous. Great idea, Jessica.

Jessica: Love it. Thank you.

Sam Lessin: Point two, Adrian, there's no fucking moat to switching these things. We've been talking about this in the pod forever. I literally have, like, a GitHub repo and a bunch of databases, and a new one comes online, I just feed it my background and I all update it. It's costless to switch. It cost me nothing. When Muse came online, I thought it was very funny. I literally just fed it everything that Claude had built for me, and, like, there was no switching cost, right? And there never will be, 'cause that's the whole point, is that there's no switching costs to these types of things.

Brit Morin: That's not entirely true that there never will be.

Sam Lessin: Okay, so the never will be, so last part, here's the crazy part, and this is my third point. To your point, I think you're 100% right about this. The only way there ends up being lock-in somehow, right, is through BD, which is hilarious because it basically means that what it's gonna end up being is the world first all of a sudden all the engineers got overpaid. Right now we're in the place where all of effectively the political operatives are getting overpaid to try to deal with Washington, and ultimately it's gonna be, like, all the business teams getting overpaid to seal these deals. But, like, it's basically this, like, race-

Jessica: It might work for the opening months of figuring this out, but it's gotta sort itself out

Sam Lessin: ... whoever can clock in Walmart and Amazon exclusivity for 100 gajillion dollars.

Jessica: It'll be the same as the frontier models. The Microsoft-OpenAI marriage lasted, what, six months, 12 months of exclusivity?

Sam Lessin: This time though maybe they'll define AGI better.

Jessica: I've just defined AGI.

Sam Lessin: Yeah, I think there's also vertical integration, right? Like, if you're the iPhone, you could sit there and be like, "I'm listening all day, I'm collecting notes, but I'm just gonna not hand that out to someone else."

Brit Morin: Apple and Google should win this. I don't know why Apple and Google are not winning this yet. It's crazy to me.

Jessica: Guys, I'm sorry, Apple is so bad. While I have Muse doing, like, the most insane things and Instinct doing the most insane things, I was calling my chief design officer, Clark Miller, and I told Siri to call Clark Miller and it couldn't. And I'm like, "Are you fucking kidding me?"

Sam Lessin: Guys, that's why it's gonna be so funny when they win. Like, the, when the idiot wins, that's gonna be the funniest fucking outcome.

Dave Morin: There's no winning here. There will not be one agent to rule them all. The future is polyagentomerous. Everyone is going to talk to every single one of these agents. Instinct did one billion in GMV, and 50% of it is travel. It is super clear that Instinct is the new Kayak.

Sam Lessin: Why do you say that?

Dave Morin: Because it's, like, very obvious in the data.

Sam Lessin: Just 'cause they did a billion dollars in GMV, that's actually not that many plane tickets.

Dave Morin: I understand, but, like, DoorDash is launching their agent today. Like, they're gonna be the DoorDash agent.

Jessica: Okay, guys Raise your hand if you think 18 months from now, Instinct is an independent company.

Guest: They hope it's not. I mean, this is the moment for them.

Jessica: None of us think gonna be an independent company, right?

Dave Morin: Very expensive. My other thought, Jess, is back to what you were talking about, which is I've been thinking about this a lot this week. Maybe it is not the end of times. Maybe it's the beginning of times.

Guest: Oh.

Dave Morin: And the reason why is that for the last 30 years, whatever, since the late '70s, computers came on the scene, and people spent the majority of their days sitting in buildings, looking at glowing rectangles, fidgeting with computers to try to get them to do the things that they wanted them to do, and most of the output has been not that great. And we've all been, like, trying to fidget with these things to get them to do amazing things for a long time, and it didn't really produce, like, that much interesting cultural content. It didn't really produce the greatest architecture. We're sort of at the end of that era, and I actually think it's quite exciting that we all can just speak English to these things now and be creative. And what movie do people reference the most as, like, the future that they wanna live in? The movie Her.

Guest: They wanna live in that? That is, like, a very cynical movie.

Dave Morin: People talk about how much they want to live in a home where there's no screens.

Guest: The whole point is that guy's so lonely.

Dave Morin: I understand what happens in the end, but when people reference the guy's home and how he interacts with the computer, people really, like, I think, want the screens out of their life. They want more offline experiences. They want to connect with their friends. And so the optimist take here is the one that Brit is saying, which is that, like, maybe these things, yeah, you aren't doing the logistics over text with your friends anymore, but maybe you're actually hanging out with your friends a lot more because of the, these new computers.

Guest: I have, like, almost the exact opposite thesis, which is what I think of as, like, the disembodiment of humans. We keep saying, "Hey, the tech sucks. We don't like this social. We don't like these agents," whatever it is. Ergo, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back and retreat into the real world. But let me give you an example. When I was a kid, I grew up in the US. I had, like, a thick accent. I was, like, kind of, like, not the most attractive kid. I didn't feel like I fit in in normal life.

Dave Morin: Unlike now when you're a stunning adult.

Guest: Yeah, now I'm a stunning adult. Now I'm on Mad Peptides.

Jessica: This is a no peptide episode. Just want that on-

Guest: Will you just let me finish my damn point? Okay, so the point is, I would go to the internet because I felt like it was more genuine. I could be as tall as I wanted to be. I could be as skinny as I wanted to be. I could have no accent. I could do whatever I want. I think that what happens is as technology gets good, we use it to express ourselves. The problem right now is that we're in this kind of local optima where it's like the first version of technology, the first version of your agent interacting with my agent feels dystopian, feels shitty, but two things change over time. The first is products only get adopted if consumers want to adopt them, ergo, products have to be better and better at kinda tricking you into believing this is what you want. And then the second thing that happens is we just become more accustomed to these things. We become more used to them, and so that Overton window changes. If you fathom, if I told you to imagine the year 2026 in the year 1950, be like, "We're all gonna be walking around staring at four-inch pieces of glass," you'd be like, "That's fucking insane. Nobody would ever do that." Except that's literally what we do all day, and we feel empowered by doing it. We love doing it, right? And so I just think we're gonna end up in a world where these agents end up being more Her-like than Instinct-like, or whatever that looks like, but I think that we're going to continue to invest more and more of our lives into staring at screens, as I'm doing right now. I feel like I'm interacting with four of my really close friends, yet I'm staring at a 12-inch piece of glass that's just firing off random pixels in front of me.

Jessica: I think human agency is a key thing here. I think you can actually, like, live the life you wanna live.

Dave Morin: I think it's better to focus on computers. Computers are incredibly difficult to use, and they waste so much time.

Guest: Can I for once say I think you're, everyone's right? Here's the reality. Let's start with the thing we actually agree on, that this technology should help people live the lives they want to live, right? I think that's, like, the key baseline. Here's the thing. Jess, you're a attractive, successful, rich person.

Jessica: Will you stop flirting with her on the air?

Dave Morin: I agree.

Guest: I can't. And so the world is your oyster. So you're gonna say, "Hey, look, this digital stuff, I don't need it. I wanna be in the real world. Just take care." But Adrian is a terrible accented child, and, like, Adrian wants to find his people online, which aren't physically located to them, right? He, like, he wants to be really into some ex- into his, he wants to find his people that might not be possible. He might not be able to travel to them, and the screen will, like, end up bring him to them. So I just think it's like everyone's gonna, like, live the best life they can, and, like, the real problem is that is the economy and the world is getting so split between the extreme haves and have-nots. And globally, the haves are living more and more the same life, and it's awesome, and everyone else is getting real mad, right, about that split. That's, I think, the big story on a lot of this stuff.

Jessica: And this isn't to overlook the, like, potentially addictive natures and the weird, like, that is all really important, but I think as someone who runs a business, like, all, I have the privilege to decide how I use my time, and it's very exciting because I can ... accomplished so much.

Sam Lessin: Are you acknowledging your privilege? Do you have a n- land acknowledgement while you're at it?

Jessica: No, I've got none of those. But I do worry about, there's so many ways that it can suck in and exploit and all that kind of stuff. But I really think, I mean, I also hit every goal I achieve, obviously, but my screen time will be dramatically reduced this year. And-

Brit Morin: Well, especially because apps are going away. Literally, this thing DoorDash launched today where you can just text message what you want from DoorDash is kind of amazing. It's like the first step in what's about to happen.

Jessica: Well, but I use Instinct and Muse to text message DoorDash too.

Brit Morin: Fine. Either way, you don't need the apps anymore, unless you're Sam and you're on TikTok all day long, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

Sam Lessin: But if so, then we're sitting in this, like, local blip. Because it's like you gotta project out. If you project out N years, like, almost certainly we all have neural links or equivalents, like, plugged into our brain. Like, we're only getting more and more connected and online. We're not certainly, like, moving away from that world anytime soon.

Dave Morin: No, I think it's a barbell.

Sam Lessin: Really? Go live on a farm, Dave.

Dave Morin: I do live on a ranch part of the year.

Sam Lessin: Then give me your 25 little iMacs that are chilling back there. Give me those. Give me your scrapping-

Dave Morin: I have way, way more than 25, Adrian

Sam Lessin: ... Okay, give me your 200 Mac Minis, give me your damn 19 phones that are, like, lying around your house, and then go tell me you wanna live on a farm.

Dave Morin: No, no, no, I only have one.

Jessica: The upshot here, and I'm gonna bring this segment to a close and then we'll, we'll have some parting thoughts, right? Is as always, the technology doesn't have agency. The humans have agency over the technology, and that, I believe, will st- will, will su-

Sam Lessin: I'm not as convinced as you on that. I think actually that you have the perception of agency. Like, I wake up in the morning and I'm like, "What should I eat?" DoorDash tells me what to eat. I g- where do I go? The Google Maps lady tells me turn left, turn right. I wanna mate with somebody and, and the Hinge app tells me who to mate with. Like, like, the, the trick is the technology has taken over, but-

Dave Morin: Adrian, we need to get you m- married and with children

Jessica: Get Adrian to Esland

Sam Lessin: ... the trick is the technology has convinced you that you are the one in control.

Dave Morin: I could not disagree with this more.

Jessica: I totally disagree.

Sam Lessin: I love being the peacemaker. Check this out. Can we agree that being disconnected is the ultimate status symbol at this point?

Jessica: Yes, absolutely.

Sam Lessin: Like-

Jessica: Yes

Brit Morin: As long as you have money and you're not unemployed

Sam Lessin: ... like, it's kinda like how rich people like to go into the woods and pretend they're self-sufficient and, like, when they have the staff hiding in the back. Like, the idea of disconnection in the real world is, like, the ultimate luxury.

Brit Morin: Do you know what the phrase that people are, uses? Offline is the new luxury.

Sam Lessin: Ah, so you own a luxury venture firm. But the basic point is, like, that is the status symbol is I don't need to be online all the time.

Jessica: I agree. I do feel like I need to, like, defend how incredibly hard I've been working this last week.

Sam Lessin: Okay, no. If the status symbol is to not be offline, if you genuinely... or not be online, if you genuinely believe that, then why the hell is everybody like, "Why don't I fucking have Starlink on my plane right now," right? Like, this is bullshit. The, the reality is we love to say this, but none of us are actually doing it.

Brit Morin: They want the option to be online.

Dave Morin: I think there's some truth to that, Adrian.

Sam Lessin: That's a funny way of saying you're right, Sam. I know those words don't exist in your vocabulary.

Brit Morin: He can't say it. He can't say it

Sam Lessin: ... but I want you to practice.

Jessica: Thank you. Oh, you can come back every week, Adrian. Okay, guys. This is wild. I just, by the next time we convene, how many more agents are there gonna be?

Dave Morin: Like, in the world? Like, so many.

Jessica: No, no. I just mean, like, how many more announcements? Dave knows the answer to this question. Let him answer it.

Brit Morin: Like, seven-day, week-over-week agent.

Dave Morin: There are millions of OpenClaus every week starting. I mean, it's like, it's crazy.

Brit Morin: And Muses, and Dots, and Instincts.

Dave Morin: I do think the way to think about this, and you guys didn't believe me two weeks ago, three weeks ago, is that every single app on your phone's becoming an agent. It's going to happen extremely quickly.

Sam Lessin: I just don't know what happened to them as businesses then, because I agree with you.

Dave Morin: Sam, some of these things do very real things. Like, DoorDash is a very serious marketplace business that coordinates enormous amounts of commerce.

Sam Lessin: So I guess the, the world is, like, the software world. But it's funny, I actually have more apps on my phone I use now than ever before, personally. But here's the funny thing. My home screen now is almost entirely apps I've made for myself, and I love them.

Dave Morin: Sam, I think this is the other thing that's happening, and we've been saying this for a couple of years actually, but I think Astra was maybe the crossover point where you're gonna see this happen as well, that, like, there's just gonna be a proliferation of personal apps people build for themselves and their friends, and it's throwaway, it doesn't matter. You can build it in one hour. I think it's gonna be actually kinda cool.

Sam Lessin: It's kinda like the... I literally now am using apps more than ever before, and they're all apps I built for myself, and then hilariously with test flight limits, I actually have users on some of them now, right? Who are just like, "Oh, I want this too," and I'm like, "That's cool." And then I send one to Dave, which is a sick app, and Dave's like, "Oh, do you have access to all that?" I'm like, "Yeah, so just make your own."

Jessica: By the way, do not reveal what it is, but Brit and Dave, you have a test flight if you haven't received it yet.

Brit Morin: I don't wanna use Sam's app. He's gonna store all my data.

Jessica: No, my app. My app.

Brit Morin: Oh, oh, oh.

Sam Lessin: By the way, Jess, I heard about this app and I'm a little unhappy that I'm not on the test flight, so if we could solve that today, that'd be great.

Jessica: You can be on the test flight right now. Let's solve it right now. This is, I'm an equal opportunity. You just have to tell me it's perfect, you know? And then you can have it.

Sam Lessin: You are perfect. Oh, wait, only Sam's allowed to hit on you, my bad.

Jessica: No, any, anyone's really. It's open season.

Sam Lessin: No, Dave hits on her all the time now. It's weird, but it's fine. Dave just awkwardly comments on her abs, like, once every three weeks.

Brit Morin: This is true.

Jessica: I've got Pilates later to stay motivated, so thank you.

Dave Morin: Anything to keep this podcast interesting.

Jessica: I would like to make one recommendation. Is everyone ready for a book recommendation?

Brit Morin: Is it about tennis?

Sam Lessin: I just recommended a book on stage.

Jessica: Nope, not original. Everyone's recommending Roll the Carls, Roll the Calls by Ari Emanuel. Guys, this book is good. And it's not just good because Ari is Ari and swears a lot, but it is honestly one of the best books about drive, ambition, knowing yourself. It is hilarious.

Sam Lessin: And it was written by the same guy who wrote Open, right?

Jessica: It was same ghostwriter as Open and Shoe Dog.

Brit Morin: Oh, I love Shoe Dog.

Jessica: The top three, I tweeted, "This is the canon."

Dave Morin: Oh, so these aren't actually written by these people, they're written by ghostwriters.

Brit Morin: Yeah, but that's how all celebrities do it. But

Jessica: Specifically JR, but they are-- I just have not read a book in a while where I'm, like, trying not to read it too fast. I'm savoring it. So I highly recommend it.

Brit Morin: Okay, what's the name again?

Jessica: Roll the Calls.

Sam Lessin: I reposted the Fin commercials we shot 10 years ago. They work perfectly in 2026. It's, like, wild. Like, I look at them, I'm like, all the things. We had a private asset store, vault for your credit card and all your things, and the use cases are great. But my opening one in it anecdotally is me being like, "Hey, Fin, the book Shoe Dog is amazing. Please send it to the following six people. Thanks." Right? And, like, that was my opening use of agent anecdote from a decade ago. So the world's a small place.

Jessica: Matt Vassallera did the videos, my brother.

Sam Lessin: He did, and they're beautiful. They're really great.

Jessica: Does anyone have a suggestion? And do not say Taylor Swift's new songs, because I will not endorse them as a pop culture reference.

Brit Morin: Well, the only one I would endorse is Babylon, but we can skip that if you'd like. Well, did you know Miley is only known as Miley now? She dropped the Cyrus.

Jessica: Didn't know that.

Brit Morin: Yep. I feel like Elon should drop the Musk. I think it's just Elon from here on out.

Sam Lessin: I mean, he's-- That's been-- He doesn't-- Yeah, he's just Elon.

Brit Morin: Well, who else needs to drop their last name? Who, who do you think is done with their last name?

Dave Morin: When do you become the first letter of your name is the real question.

Sam Lessin: Well, you become-- Prince, Prince became a symbol.

Dave Morin: I aspire to be D.

Sam Lessin: Here's the thing. I was at the US Open, and it was very funny 'cause they're doing, like, the, the, the quarter- women's quarters, and they were doing the fan cam. It was very funny to see who got a-- when they, like, put your-- on a celebrity, it's like who got a full name like Michelle Obama versus who gets, like, one name like Rizza. And you're like, okay, so, like, there's, like, some hierarchy of, like, how many names do you need to describe a human?

Jessica: Michelle would've been enough. It was out of respect that they added Obama.

Brit Morin: No, you have to go into parental naming strategy. Dave and I thought about this with our third child because you can't pick a generic name. It has to be a name that can live on its own, so that one day if he or she has made it, they can just go by that first name.

Sam Lessin: Unless the robots take over, and then you want them to be able to hide, and you want them to be like Bob Smith.

Brit Morin: Fair.

Sam Lessin: Adrienne, what is your parting word?

Jessica: Yeah, give us a parting word. What do we not talk about enough on this pod?

Guest: I think that the thing that we keep circling around that just sits in my mind is the AI revolution is happening so fast. We end up going through these eras where we're creating an enormous amount of value. Like, we w- all of a sudden we didn't have agents, now we all have agents, and we create an enormous amount of value. But then because AI is this kind of cool commodity that can go build anything, as soon as the idea comes out, everyone does it, and we collapse that value, like, immediately. And so what I keep asking myself is, at the limit, where do you wanna build those real businesses? What's gonna survive in this? So-

Sam Lessin: This is the point that AI is communist.

Guest: Sure. I would've said commoditized, but you can say communist as well.

Sam Lessin: It's also the dev story of the week, which we didn't talk about.

Guest: At the limit, you can have infrastructure. Okay, that's quite interesting, right? Because, like, who cares if everybody has the models if they don't have the compute to run it? So having the infrastructure, and that could be energy, GPUs, et cetera, seems really interesting. The other thing is having proprietary data. That obviously seems very interesting, right? If you're the Jane Street of the world and you say, "I'm just not gonna give anyone else my data that I'm training on," that seems interesting. And then the third one that we don't talk enough about is the algorithms, and right now we still live in a world where these algorithms are kind of a commodity. If someone has it, within a week somebody else has it. Jev comes out, everyone else backs out the engineering of Jev within 48 hours.

Dave Morin: What's Jev? Just to make sure everybody understands.

Guest: It's an LLM that's done, uh, d- as a single pass classifier. So it's basically instead of trying to predict the next token, it just tries to predict one thing, which is what is your cla-- is this a stop sign, is this not a stop sign? Is this fraud? Is-- And it's a great idea, and it worked really well, and within 24 hours, literally everyone copied it, and the people who made it will get, will see no value.

Brit Morin: Did it get funded?

Dave Morin: I thought they did 100 million in revenue in seven days.

Guest: It also, I think it raised a big round. But again, ignore Jev for a sec. What happens is we go into this world of AI for science, right? Like, where do you make the money? You can make the money on producing the physical world products. "Hey, we all got this thing, but I just built the damn vaccine, and what you're buying is the damn vaccine that you're stabbing in your body," right? Like, that's an interesting way to monetize these sorts of things. Another is to just move to a world where we're just far more secretive about algorithms as opposed to right now, where we do the classic tech community thing of employees move around all the time, they share everything, et cetera, right?

Sam Lessin: This is-- But for what it's worth, though, this is, like, the other really negative dark future of AI, which is kind of like the Middle Ages version, where everyone effectively builds a castle and a moat and hoards. We end up in the Middle Ages 2.0 with these, like, sovereigns you-- that are, like, completely... You can't open it. You can't edit it. You have a car that's a black box that self-destructs if you touch anything. Like, it becomes really testy 'cause there's no other way to create moats, right?

Jessica: It's just a pendulum.

Dave Morin: So far, that future is not here, though. We're decidedly in the open version of this right now.

Sam Lessin: The-- For that to happen, everything needs to crash. Right? Everyone, everyone's, like, pretending they're getting paid on the open. If it all crashes out and people get super hoardy... I mean, this is what's happening with networks. Like, I actually think one of the ironies of AI is it's very hard to take cold pitches as a VC now 'cause, uh, you're inundated with them. It's too easy to generate reasonably credible things. So what do you do? You lock down and only talk to your friend.

Jessica: Well, this has happened to the news industry, right?

Dave Morin: Yeah. This is a real thing.

Sam Lessin: And so this whole thing is like there's this irony that, like, when you play it to the limit should create a very closed, stratified society and companies that hoard data and people that don't wanna talk to each other and APIs you can't penetrate that just give you yes/no answers with no context.

Dave Morin: This can't be what's gonna happen. It's too fear, too closed, too negative. It's just not how humans are by default.

Sam Lessin: This is the thing that I think is interesting is in the spectrum of negativity, this is my, my, like, scoffing at the 10% kill all people thing. M- maybe there is some percentage truth. There's also- Aliens might show up, an asteroid might hit us. But this is at least far more practical and a real problem to talk about and deal with in the spectrum of how AI plays out. So if you wanna talk about negativity, while I agree it's very negative, it's a valid conversation. I think less negative than people who say like, "Oh, well, we can't care about anything in the middle or anything 'cause all that matters is, like, the edge case that we can't predict," right?

Dave Morin: Oh, sure. Yeah. I agree with that.

Jessica: Okay. One more question. Sam, are you gonna be home for dinner? I defrosted some of those cows that I shipped from that place.

Brit Morin: His instinct can tell your instinct, if he will.

Sam Lessin: I'll be in the air in an hour.

Dave Morin: Looks like he's in a hotel room.

Brit Morin: In a... Adrian's got a plane, though. It depends how fast Adrian flies.

Jessica: I'd like to not know the details of that, but okay. Well, dear friends, we did it.

Dave Morin: That must mean they are in California.

Sam Lessin: No.

Dave Morin: There's only one secret conference going on in California right now, so this is pretty easy to figure out.

Sam Lessin: I actually don't think you know where we are, but you might.

Jessica: Let's not taunt each other at secret conferences, guys. I'm going to a fun one this weekend, too. Actually, I think I can talk about it.

Sam Lessin: I just like... Kevin Collin makes fun of me 'cause I swear I don't go to conferences, but I clearly go to conferences.

Jessica: Sam, your, your shirts are one living name badge, let's just say that. Okay. Dear friends, we did it. Adrian, you can come back t- not anytime, little notice.

Sam Lessin: Well, Adrian now has the link that we do this on, so we can't stop him.

Brit Morin: Halfway through the episode.

Sam Lessin: I like the idea of just giving our friends the link 'cause it's always the same, and they just, they show up.

Brit Morin: That's actually really fun.

Sam Lessin: As long, as long as I meet my quota of complimenting Jess's abs and giving one dig to Sam and Dave, then I think I'm invited back.

Brit Morin: What do I get? What am I doing, Adrian? Where's my compliment?

Dave Morin: I'm offended you're not hitting on Brit.

Brit Morin: Yeah, what the fuck?

Sam Lessin: Brit did not invite me to her big birthday bash. Or wait, or did you invite me but I didn't come?

Brit Morin: Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

Sam Lessin: Whatever it is, I didn't go, but I'm still mad about that 'cause I saw the photos after, so we're not friends, Brit.

Dave Morin: That was a big invite list, so you really didn't get invited.

Brit Morin: He was invited- ... and he did not come.

Jessica: He forgot what color he was, and he didn't know what to wear.

Sam Lessin: That, that's right. I didn't own enough pink.

Dave Morin: I mean, Brit invited, like, everyone she knew to that.

Brit Morin: I did not.

Sam Lessin: Okay. Well, now I'm gonna go check, 'cause if I wasn't invited, Brit, I'm mad at you, and if I was invited, I'm still mad at you.

Brit Morin: Oh, you were totally invited.

Jessica: Just know which grudges you're holding at all times. And with that, friends, we thank you for listening, and we do, it means a lot. We love the feedback, and we'll see you back here next week for another episode of More or Less. 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, @jlesson. And as for me, I'm @brit. See you guys next time