AI-generated — may contain transcription errors.

Brit Morin: Did you know Meta and Microsoft, two of Anthropic's largest enterprise clients, have basically halved their use of Claude recently?

Sam Lessin: Claude must be so lonely.

Brit Morin: And the reason is they're using their own models instead.

Dave Morin: One of the labs, I'll let everyone guess which one, believes that if you don't bring about the machine god, then the machine god, once it is created, will go back in time and put you into a simulation of hell. Like this is a real belief.

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

Brit Morin: Welcome back to another episode of More or Less. This is Britt Moran subbing in as moderator today for our dear friend Jessica Lessin while she attends to a trivial thing called a team offsite. Just kidding. We love all the people at the Information and we're glad they're offsiting about some strategy.

Sam Lessin: There's one person we don't love, but we're not gonna tell you who it is.

Brit Morin: Oh. Yeah, you don't wanna piss off a journalist, Sam.

Sam Lessin: You gotta keep people on their toes.

Brit Morin: Okay, yeah. There's one person, you know who you are.

Sam Lessin: We might not know who they are, but there's one. There's always one.

Brit Morin: So dear listeners/viewer, you're getting three VCs and no journalist today.

Sam Lessin: It's gonna be unhinged.

Brit Morin: And I apologize in advance for the shit that's about to go down. So let's start with the important stuff.

Sam Lessin: We're gonna be in a truly fact-free zone. No babysitting today.

Brit Morin: We don't have facts.

Sam Lessin: So since Jessica's not here, let's pick some topics. I wanna talk Nathan Fielder.

Brit Morin: I don't know what that means, but okay.

Sam Lessin: I wanna hear about your peptide journey. I went to the LA premiere last night.

Dave Morin: Oh, wow. Fancy man.

Sam Lessin: Yeah. I got to give the guy a high five. I want peptides, I want Fielder, and I want DEXA scans. And then if there has to be some tech news, we can talk about that as well.

Brit Morin: Okay, 'cause I have four big tech topics. A lot's actually going on, but, but we can start with DEXA scans.

Sam Lessin: Well, why don't you tell us what the four big tech topics are, then we'll just do them.

Brit Morin: Okay. Four big... We can't speed through them. The people wanna ingest and understand. I, I'll tell you the topics. I'll give it a macro overview. We're gonna talk about why people continue to not be loyal to Claude. We're gonna talk about, and how, and what that means for their IPO.

Dave Morin: Friends don't let friends use Claude.

Sam Lessin: You can, you can use Claude all you want, but if Claude goes away, who cares?

Brit Morin: Okay, we're gonna get to your comments shortly. Thank you, gentlemen. We're also gonna talk about even more personal agents that have come out of stealth with hundreds of millions-

Dave Morin: No

Brit Morin: ... of dollars in funding.

Dave Morin: We don't need to.

Brit Morin: We're gonna talk about the personal agent protocol. We're gonna talk about TikTok getting into commerce agents. We're gonna talk about why founders are 17 years old raising so much money. We're gonna talk about local computing, computing at the edge, as some call it. And then lastly, we're gonna talk about how some people are now starting to buy pro rata shares from early stage funds.

Dave Morin: Did you prep us with an agent?

Brit Morin: Well, of course I did, Dave.

Dave Morin: Oh, God, no.

Sam Lessin: Whoa, they're starting to buy... What does that even mean they're buying pro rata shares?

Brit Morin: I know. You're gonna enjoy this segment.

Dave Morin: No slop grenades for agendas.

Brit Morin: One of the biggest fights that Dave and I get into- ... as a married couple, for those who don't know, is my use of AI, which he calls all use of AI, AI slop, and it's not, because I iterate with these things.

Dave Morin: I'm actually starting to love that I'm in l- several meetings a week, not including you, where people are like, "No more slop. You need to bring human-created stuff to this meeting, and we're not doing slop anymore."

Sam Lessin: I love slop. Let's start with, I wanna hear first, Britt, about your DEXA scan today.

Brit Morin: Okay.

Sam Lessin: What's going on after the call?

Brit Morin: Well, first of all, last week on the pod we had Matt Mazzeo join, who has a company called NOHO Labs and is all about peptide protocols.

Dave Morin: Britt's now on all the peptides.

Sam Lessin: Are you not on them, Dave?

Dave Morin: I signed up and I'm gonna do the onboarding this week or next week. I'm getting it into my schedule.

Sam Lessin: Did you use our discount code?

Dave Morin: Yes, I did.

Brit Morin: More or less VIP is your 50% off discount, everybody.

Dave Morin: Actually, I learned that Mazzeo had already given me a discount when I signed up, so that was nice of him.

Brit Morin: Okay. Well, I have four peptides I'm about to start. I'm a little nervous about it. Well, I've got the Wolverine.

Sam Lessin: Oh, I love the Wolverine.

Brit Morin: By the way, all the peptides need way better branding.

Dave Morin: Are you gonna grow a beard?

Sam Lessin: Nah.

Brit Morin: We're gonna see. It's gonna be a 12-week trial . Things got, might get weird.

Dave Morin: I hope not.

Brit Morin: I've got one that's a bunch of numbers.

Sam Lessin: Are you doing Klo?

Brit Morin: Klo with a K.

Dave Morin: Well, no, you gotta explain what these are. What is Klo?

Sam Lessin: It's the blue one.

Brit Morin: I have this, like, constant hip and back pain, but it's not something that I can actually solve through surgery or anything. And so the theory is that this Wolverine blend is helpful for muscle relief and pain, and so I'm gonna try to inject it close to my hip.

Dave Morin: Wait, is that also the blue one or is that a different one?

Sam Lessin: No. Klo is the blue one.

Brit Morin: Yeah. It's a blend of the Wolverine, so it's a special type.

Sam Lessin: No. Well, there's Wolverine in the Klo. But are you doing separate Wolverine or you're just doing-

Brit Morin: No, Wolverine and Klo. Yeah. Tesamorelin. Tes- I'm gonna get ripped.

Sam Lessin: Tesamorelin.

Brit Morin: So I'm gonna get ripped is the second one. That's all I know. Um, and I'm gonna lose some visceral fat maybe. And I'm gonna have NAD, but I'm gonna use that sparingly after conferring with some, some experts.

Sam Lessin: Yeah, the NAD is not my favorite.

Brit Morin: I'm only gonna use it if I'm feeling sick.

Dave Morin: Yeah, NAD should only be used when you're getting sick.

Sam Lessin: I think that's right. That's sweet. Well, the, and then you're probably doing BP, like, 1295 or some shit and yeah.

Brit Morin: Yeah. There's one with a random number in it that I also was like, "Sure."

Dave Morin: Why is it that everyone that I talk to, no matter which doctor they're working with, this is the five of these that they go recommended? So, like, what value is there in the service?

Brit Morin: It's the stack.

Sam Lessin: Well, the doctors have to- To consult with you to put... because it's a trial experimental. It's a, it's a compliance thing. But yeah, this is gonna be great. Brett, I'm very excited for you to try them. I'm a few months into the journey. I'm pro. I think it's been great for training and marathon, and I feel better.

Brit Morin: Well, and so what I'm doing today and why we have to be timely with this pod, boys, is because I have a DEXA scan in one hour 'cause I need to get all my stats, p- pre-peptide stats, and then I'll measure again post-peptides. And I've been doing my DEXA scans for many years, and I have all of my data now. I actually use ChatGPT Health. I find it's the best health agent 'cause it connects-

Sam Lessin: Oh, Ashley Yuki.

Brit Morin: What? Oh, yeah.

Sam Lessin: Why... Ashley Yuki is around. She's great. But why-

Brit Morin: Yeah

Sam Lessin: ... um, why do you use that? I just dump it all in myself. Why do you need the ChatGPT thing?

Brit Morin: Well, ChatGPT Health has a bunch of connectors into, like, MyChart and a bunch of hospital systems and medical systems.

Sam Lessin: Yeah, but whatever. You just dump it all in, like-

Brit Morin: No, but I like having the connectors and the-

Sam Lessin: Don't you wanna own your own data?

Dave Morin: No, because friends don't let friends use Claude.

Brit Morin: This is ChatGPT, Dave.

Sam Lessin: I can use whatever. I actually just dumped in is I dumped in a full sequencing.com, like my full genome-

Brit Morin: Oh

Sam Lessin: ... which is pretty cool. You gotta get on sequencing.com.

Dave Morin: Isn't that kind of scary?

Brit Morin: Okay, let's come back to that when we talk about some of these personal agents, 'cause going on device and private is now in vogue. Who would've thought earlier this year when we were talking about that?

Dave Morin: What are you talking about? It, that started in January with OpenClaus. This is nothing new.

Sam Lessin: So okay, so we got Brett's health journey. I'm very excited. I'm, like, on the same journey, and I also, I did a DEXA scan when I got back to California, and I'm gonna do one November, like, 5th, which the only compounding factor is I am running a marathon November 1st, which has other issues, but it's an interesting journey.

Brit Morin: Yeah, I love it. I'm, like, all about the quantified self, so I'm down to experiment with anything and see how it goes.

Sam Lessin: All right. Topic two. Guys-

Brit Morin: I love how you're the moderator now, Sam

Sam Lessin: ... I went to this movie premiere last night.

Brit Morin: No one can see that that's listening. Explain what it says.

Sam Lessin: It's the You Can See Everything movie with, that Nathan Fielder made with Elizabeth Holmes. I cannot say anything other than this is potentially the greatest movie ever made. It's very long. It is painful to watch at moments.

Dave Morin: Why can't you say anything?

Sam Lessin: Because it's like, it's a whole thing. You don't want me to say anything, but I cannot recommend this movie highly enough. It is high art. I was saying to someone, it literally to me justifies the three-hour movie format as opposed to TV shows or, like, epic series versus, like, shorts 'cause it had to be the length it was. And I have to just say, like, I've always loved Je- I love comedians. I think comedy's, like, the highest art in the world in terms of, like, the human experience and truth and meaning. I, like, love comedians. Nathan Fielder, like, I don't know if he's gonna win an Oscar, but he deserves one.

Brit Morin: Whoa.

Sam Lessin: This movie is so good. So it... I know there's a lot of hype, but let me add on to that and extend it. I thought it was an incredible piece of media.

Dave Morin: Why can't you talk about it? Did you have to sign an NDA?

Sam Lessin: No, it's not an NDA. It's just, like, it's... This movie deserves to be seen without the spoilers, and it just de- it deserves it, is the honest answer, Dave.

Dave Morin: Cool.

Brit Morin: When does this roll out to the rest of us? Do we know?

Sam Lessin: I- I think it comes out in, like, 10 days or something. Anyway, I just cannot speak highly enough of it and him, and, like, I literally... A friend, a person I know invited me the day before as, like, an extra ticket to the premiere in LA, and I literally, like, hopped on a plane and went down and watched it and then flew back up this morning, and it was totally worth the trip.

Brit Morin: Nice. I love that. Okay, Sam, are you now guiding this episode? Would you, would you ...

Sam Lessin: No, I'm done. I have no other points on the week.

Brit Morin: Okay, great. Well, then I wanna switch to some tech news that we can talk about and weigh in on. Did you know Meta and Microsoft, two of Anthropic's largest enterprise clients, have basically halved their use of Claude recently?

Sam Lessin: Claude must be so lonely.

Brit Morin: And the reason is they're using their own models instead. Like, Muse is using its, like, Muse model, and Microsoft's using OpenAI and GitHub Copilot.

Sam Lessin: The end state of all things is narcissism, where you just talk to yourself. Muse talks to Muse.

Brit Morin: Is this gonna continue happening? Do we think this adds any weight?

Dave Morin: I think it also overstayed its welcome.

Brit Morin: What did?

Sam Lessin: Yeah, why are you so negative on Claude all of a sudden? What, you used to... You were hating on Claude.

Dave Morin: I just think that the way that it talks to you is so biased and kind of... There's, like, a certain flavor to Claude slop that you can actually sense who on Twitter is talking to Claude too much now. Um-

Sam Lessin: I do think that's true

Dave Morin: ... I think that that's just bad. It's actually the way that it so fundamentally was tuned to make people get into a parasocial relationship with it, I think, is actually the thing that nobody's talking about. You know, you can, like, think of these things as dangerous weapons or that they're gonna kill us all or whatever fearmongering thing is going on in any given week, but I think actually the thing that Claude did that has burned its, has sort of caused what's happening right now is that it was over-tuned for a parasocial relationship. People got deeply into relationship with it in a way that was pretty unhealthy, and I think people are waking up to it now, both individually and collectively as organizations, and I think that's, like, a big part of what's going on.

Sam Lessin: So it's interesting. I use a lot of Claude, but I don't actually talk to Claude that way.

Dave Morin: You just use it as inference.

Sam Lessin: Yeah, it's just, it's just infrastructure for me, and it's just excellent at what it does. I mean, I published my diagram of, like, how all of my infrastructure works, and, like, I'm loving it. I, as I said on the last pod, like, my thing is, though, I think that the warning sign, you know, mine is what we've been saying all along, which is this stuff is great. Multiplying big matrices is amazing. You can do great stuff with it, but it's very, very hard to build important businesses for the long term when if it went away tomorrow, there's a perfect replacement and always will be. It's fine. And so, like, I'm not switching off of Claude. I think Claude's completely fine and does what I need, but it's a one-line change if I want to, and, like, it doesn't matter. Silicon Valley, I mean, to be silly about it for a second, I just think Silicon Valley is very bad at business. I think Silicon Valley is very good at technology, and the irony is, is technology's been so dominant in certain areas that, like, being good at technology has swamped All sense of business and strategy for a long time. So it's like you don't need to be good at business, you just do technology. But this is a little different.

Dave Morin: Well, Sam, I think that you've rightly pointed out that Silicon Valley's great at one kind of business, which is create enormous capital bubble to make number go up until the like the one emerges that can outstrip all of the business losses and become infinity. That's like the kind of easy way to explain the Silicon Valley business.

Sam Lessin: Although it's a recent phenomenon, right? Because like even as far as ten, 15 years ago, the businesses that Silicon Valley generated were like unbelievably capitalistic. You know what I mean? Like it wasn't about like moving heavy dollars. Like that's kind of a recent Bitcoin style. There's a series of things. I, I honestly think a lot of like what's gone on has been people learning the wrong lessons from like Bitcoin and religion effectively in this era, right? Where if you think about like this dynamic, it's like you had the era of Google and Facebook, which everyone got wrong from like a storytelling perspective, largely because like, well, how big could they possibly... Even I got this wrong. Like I was like, what is the thing that is more than a hundred billion dollar company? That's unfathomably large in historical context. And so people got, "Oh my God, things can be huge." Then Bitcoin, which again, I was early on, you know, Dave, you were too, and like then Ripple and Solana and like all this stuff taught people the lesson of like effectively the aver-- which I love this line, 'cause it's true, which is the average of zero to infinity is infinity, which is like-

Dave Morin: Yeah

Sam Lessin: ... hyper asymmetry because of scale. And so people got really comfortable with that. GME-

Dave Morin: And those were even weirder, by the way, 'cause they had no dilution involved in some cases.

Sam Lessin: Well, they were, they were even better because they were no dilution, they were totally capital light. Like we talk about the whole like setup of them. But you had this kind of like set of compounding narratives. I, I actually gave a talk about this last week and about how like, you know, this is like, if you really wanna understand what's going on with the labs and these stories and the capital allocation, it's basically the West's really lack of comfort with the concept of zero and infinity. It doesn't fit in like a Western framework, which is why we went around killing all the Pythagoreans in the times of the Greeks. It's why the church fought zero so hard. There's like this long history of the Western tradition hating on zero and infinity 'cause it like breaks all logic.

Dave Morin: Sam, can you unpack that a little bit? I'm very educated on this, but I actually think most people are not. What do you mean by that?

Sam Lessin: Okay, so there's a great book, if you haven't read it, there's this great book about the number zero, and it's called The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.

Dave Morin: It's a great book.

Sam Lessin: It's an awesome book, and it's an important one to internalize, I think it talk about what Silicon Valley's business model is and, and kind of where we are. The basic point of the book is that if you go all the way back to like the time of the Greeks and before, the idea of true zero, right, was like highly fought. And so like the, the first historical vignette is the Pythagoreans who wanted to kind of introduce the idea of true nothingness. This is like kind of like creation ex nihilo from the Bible. How do you like create something from nothing? These are very deep philosophical problems, and the West hated it because it's really hard to reason about, and it's really hard to talk about consistent growth and like the things we're good at. Same thing with like infinity, like infinity is a weird concept. Because of that, the zero came from India. The West fought it like hell. The only reason it exists in Western culture is it is just too useful, like you need zero. Like the traders made it happen. The church fought it like holy hell to like keep it out of Western culture. But like fast-forward, if you think about like our markets and the way we build businesses, and we think about competition and compounding and all those sorts of things, they're great at like most normal modeling in numbers that we're familiar with, what we can argue about and multiply, da da da. The second you introduce a zero or an infinity anywhere in the chain, you break everything because the tail, which is infinity or zero, dominates the whole story, right? And what's really interesting, I think, is in some ways, if you look at the story that we've seen in the last many years in Silicon Valley, the tendency towards infinity, which you saw the, the geometric returns on Google and Facebook and oh my God, the world is infinitely large and we can dominate the whole thing, started this. Things like Bitcoin, which is like, oh my God, if everyone believes, then belief is self-perpetuating and it can be in- infinitely valuable, right? And it can only be zero. Then you see like GameStop and like this whole series of things. I think there is this... In fact, in some ways, like the tails infected the entire narrative of Silicon Valley, right? And so that's why we get to the today's-

Dave Morin: Which tails?

Sam Lessin: The tails like meaning the extreme, like zero or infinity, like the tails of numbers.

Dave Morin: Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Brit Morin: And you're saying we've been on an infinity curve for a while now.

Sam Lessin: Well, we've been putting infinity into our Excel models, and when you put infinity into the Excel model-

Dave Morin: I think if I play back, Sam, what you're suggesting is that just like, you know, this notion that zero, we assigned a number to nothing, we've now like assigned infinity. It's become part of our models in Silicon Valley in the la- really in the last five years, and it's like a, it's a new phenomena.

Brit Morin: Well, I like the Bitcoin example. I think crypto too.

Sam Lessin: Crypto definitely is part, is a huge unlock for the thinking.

Dave Morin: But crypto was pretty isolated from the entire game for a while.

Sam Lessin: Agreed. But then it kind of, the crypto thinking plus a lot of the stuff br- came into the AI story. Now you have these two interesting infinities and zeros. Infinity and zero-one was like the Sam Altman original pitch, which is we will own everything. Whoever gets the AGI first owns infinity. There are no more businesses except for us, and it can only go to zero, right? And so you're like, "Okay, well, the average of infinity and zero is still infinity, so I guess we should invest in this. Who cares what the price is? Who cares how much capital it needs?" Like that was infection one. Now we have the inverse going on, which I think is to be taken very seriously, which is it might be that, it's actually not, and like that was a silly narrative when you think about it, but people believed it enough.

Dave Morin: Uh, people still believe it, Sam.

Brit Morin: People are still trying to buy.

Dave Morin: I mean, just to interject one point and then get to your next point, I was at a dinner last week, and there were a bunch of researchers there from both of the labs, people from the actual labs.

Sam Lessin: I think I know what dinner this was 'cause I was invited to it and I couldn't go, but keep going.

Dave Morin: Yeah, it was a good dinner. You should've been there. One of the guys from one of the labs, I won't say which one, just to be nice, framed the beginning of the dinner around this question of Who at this table believes there will be only one company left?

Brit Morin: Who raised their hand? What percent of the dinner table raised their hand?

Dave Morin: Only the people at the labs.

Brit Morin: Oh, both at both labs.

Dave Morin: Yeah.

Sam Lessin: Okay, so yes, there are... It's religious, but it's a thing. Here's the flip side. Now we have the opposite thing in this story, too, which is actually the labs are creating infinite liability, and the best case is that they're zero, right? The infinite liability, which is kind of the flip side, which is this is like P doom people.

Brit Morin: Negative infinity.

Sam Lessin: Which is like, it's negative infinity, right? It's the same story, and the problem is like, like, and this is the thing I actually have a real issue and been trying to think a lot about what the right answer is, although we know the right answer will never happen, which is like, look, if you're like, oh no, it's not that it's gonna create infinite value and only be one good company. Actually, we're all gonna die, right? Infinite negative.

Brit Morin: That's like actual P doom.

Sam Lessin: Then you should spend an infinite amount of resources to stop the end of the world, which is also a useless statement in terms of, like, how you address the world. And so I actually think the real story of now is we have narrative of-

Dave Morin: Wait, which one is that? I'm trying to think

Sam Lessin: ... the P doom story. It's like if there's a 10% or even a 1% chance of cataclysmic everyone dies, then in theory you should spend all of the money in the world to stop it.

Dave Morin: But what's interesting, what's coming up for me in this is more again on the religious side of this infinity argument, which is that-

Sam Lessin: They're both religious. It's Christ and Antichrist

Dave Morin: ... there's another one though, Sam, which is there, one of the labs, I'll let everyone guess which one, believes that if you don't bring about the machine God, then the machine God, once it is created, will go back in time and put you into a simulation of hell. Like, this is a real belief.

Sam Lessin: But this is my point is, like, this is the religious zero in, in infinity infestation of-

Dave Morin: Yes

Sam Lessin: ... technology.

Dave Morin: Yes.

Sam Lessin: And, like, the thing is, it's causing a bunch of really bad decision-making, because here's the thing. I'll give you an example. Like, let's talk about practical land. Forget cataclysm, but, like, there's a real chance that we will have lab leaks, as we've already had with Hummingbirds. You have to call them lab leaks. It's like Wuhan. Lab leaks, right? Like, that's what it is.

Brit Morin: With the Russia one this week, too. Mm-hmm. But keep going.

Dave Morin: The Russia one's fake news, it turns out.

Sam Lessin: The lab leaks are gonna cause trillions of dollars of practical damage, like Katrina-sized catastrophes. They're gonna shut down Bank of America and freeze up the US Fan- whatever, and lots of people are gonna die.

Dave Morin: Or hack everybody's secrets.

Sam Lessin: All these things, right? And, like, that's actually f- as wild as it is, fairly practical. The funny thing about that is we could do something about that. Like, it's not that hard to think about what the US liability framework could be. Like, think about post '08, we had to have cash reserves, whether it's you have to carry a lot of insurance, 'cause if you're doing lab research, then things might get out, but you don't have the balance sheet to pay for it. You can't dump that risk on the US government or the US people. Like, you should pay for that, right? So because we're so obsessed with the tales of zero and infinity and the religion, we're missing actually good decisions in business about how to operate in a new technological landscape. And, like, I think that's the thing is like, to me is like, religion is super fascinating.

Dave Morin: Or are we just human and trying to figure it out? I mean, there's, like, this interesting thing, which is that you could look at it and be like, "Well, we're not taking this seriously enough," but we are being kind of human about not releasing these models, giving the top companies in the world the best models to secure themselves from these Katrina-scale disasters, Sam. We are kind of being human about this.

Sam Lessin: I don't know. It's just a weird world 'cause, like, things are so consolidated in terms of the decision-making on this, and, like, the people who are, are, are, like, hyper-religious, right? Like-

Dave Morin: Yeah

Sam Lessin: ... it's very imam-like.

Brit Morin: Doesn't this bring us to why, I mean, the news this week that I mentioned in the agenda is, like, more of these personal agents, but many of them private, running on device, running open models.

Dave Morin: I love you, Brit, but none of these work, and nobody's using them yet.

Brit Morin: Personal agent protocol that Meta, Walmart, Instinct, Shopify, Sierra, Stripe, everyone else is trying to publish a standard for how AI bots transact and buy things for you so that you are protected.

Dave Morin: No, they're not. That standard's not about protecting anyone. That standard's about making commerce happen.

Brit Morin: Yeah, but, like, having agent identity and, like, primitives for commerce, I think, make a lot of sense, right? 'Cause there's a audit trail, for instance, of what the agent is doing every step of the way.

Sam Lessin: I don't know. I mean, like, look, this feels like, to me, we're back to, like, more fundamental open/close style things, like conversations, right? And here's the thing. The internet was born without an identity layer so that anything could interact with anything, right? That was both its biggest weakness. It's why we have spam and risk, and da, da, da. It's also why it grew.

Dave Morin: We're never gonna get out of talking about identity, are we, Sam?

Sam Lessin: Well, it is all an identity. We've been talking about the same problem for, like, twenty years, right? And, like, it's the same problem, just more scale, and here's the interesting thing. Like, I still don't get why anyone gives a shit about MCP. Like, why does anyone care about this?

Dave Morin: It makes no sense.

Sam Lessin: Like, it's totally irrelevant.

Dave Morin: Yeah.

Sam Lessin: It's like, oh, but I don't care-

Brit Morin: Explain, explain why you think it's irrelevant, Sam.

Sam Lessin: Because everything, it's just an API. These things can read APIs and documentation. It doesn't matter whether it's MCP or not. It's just ways for machines to talk to machines, right? And so for me, it's when people are like, "Oh, we have new standards, da, da, da," it's actually a very simple thing. It's like either your machine or a service you have has an API in some way, shape, or form, which Dave was pointing out a year ago, even if you don't publish it, I can reverse engineer it now, right? Either it is accessible to other machines, in which case it will be used by other machines, or it is not, in which case you can have something that is protected. And so the entire thing, like these standards and protocols, is all bullshit. What is interesting, though, is, like, I don't know about you guys, I've already noticed from Muse, for instance, Facebook's thing, that certain workflows that used to work have already been turned off, right? Because servers are like-

Brit Morin: Like what? What's an example?

Sam Lessin: Well, like, I tried to book a hotel last minute last night, and, like, it got in, like, a doom loop on, like, Hilton's website, which I am sure, right, is just because people are already ratcheting up their anti-bot stuff, 'cause it's like, we need to have a relationship with the customer, like- We actually don't want a bunch of bots running around booking this stuff now that it's practical, now that it's a real concern.

Dave Morin: I think that's what this standard is about, Sam.

Sam Lessin: Is to say that, like, we wanna leave it open effectively?

Dave Morin: No, I think it's a... Yeah, it's a standard designed to get people to talk about this problem, right? 'Cause I think you're right. People are, people are throwing CAPTCHAs everywhere. Like, I saw a bunch this morning on things that you-

Sam Lessin: But people don't... The thing I don't understand about, like, the s- the standard doesn't change anything. Like, it's either simple. It's like, as a business, you're either gonna be able to say, "Well, I literally cannot stop people from crawling me or taking my stuff." That's what happened with, like, the textual internet and why we even have AI, is they basically just, like, Carmen Sandiego stole the entire internet to bootstrap these things, right? Like-

Brit Morin: So what you're saying, Sam, is your Muse agent tried to book a room for you on the Hilton site, which it used to probably do easily, and now it's getting in these loops because Hilton has done something to, like, block the agents?

Sam Lessin: Yeah, it's Cloudflare. I mean, it's basically businesses understanding s- correctly that if you get intermediated and just become yet another way to clear a transaction out the back end, the market becomes too efficient, you'll have no relationship with the customers, and your business is worthless.

Brit Morin: Which is what Amazon did too, right? To Muse as well.

Sam Lessin: Which is correct if you have, like, enough power to do it.

Brit Morin: Do you think Hilton has enough power to do that?

Sam Lessin: I don't know. I mean, this is-

Dave Morin: For sure they do.

Sam Lessin: I mean, I, I'll tell you that I stopped, well, I eventually, after the third retry, stopped Muse and just went and booked it myself 'cause I was, like, clearly not gonna... Like, it was just spinning.

Brit Morin: Well, a lot of the ticketing sites have started doing this too, I've noticed, 'cause I'm, I buy a lot of tickets for things.

Sam Lessin: This is, like, the downfall of Open Graph. This is the same story over and over and over, right? Which is, like, the technology is not a... When you talk about all these agents spinning up, we don't have a technical problem. We can send bots on the internet to do lots of commerce for us now, right? Like, and everyone can do it. There's no... I mean, and, and Muse might be slightly better, but, like, it's all the same stuff. The question is now business and politics. You either have a set of people who are like, "Look, I need volume at all costs. And by the way, maybe I'm a hired gun CEO, so I only care about the next three years anyway, and then I'm gonna retire. So fuck it, let's, like, let everyone rip on our website and book whatever they want." Or you have people who are, like, stewards of capital in companies who are like, "Eh, like, I kinda need that relationship to the customer myself, right? Like, I can't be part of a perfect market."

Brit Morin: I mean, imagine you're the CEO of Hilton. What is your take right now? Is it just, is it, like, open to the agents all day long? Like, how dare you... How should we think about this?

Sam Lessin: It's a really interesting question, and what's also interesting question is what they're allowed to do with other hoteliers. Because in one sense, if they're all together, like, "No, we're just not gonna serve as bots because, like, we need the human relationship," that's like collusion. If that makes sense, right? I don't know how you think about that. But on the other hand, it's a really interesting collective action problem because, uh, and I think that's the interesting question, is like, will the tech companies and bots exploit collective action for volume in the short term, but long term business efficiency and no value, or will the industries figure out a way to work together and push back?

Brit Morin: But isn't this part of why maybe this personal agent protocol is coming together? So I've been seeing Dave and Josh Elman even was talking about how this is very similar to Facebook Connect, you know, the i- And, and, like, that if you have authorized your identity behind these agents, you are a real person, like, you should be able to get into walmart.com and buy whatever you want through your agent.

Sam Lessin: Oh, I thought you were gonna say something different, which I have a half-written essay on, is that actually the, the fact that Facebook Connect ultimately didn't work and Open Graph failed and had to be shut down is the same story, where, like, there's not enough value trade for the brands.

Brit Morin: Why wasn't there enough value trade for Facebook Connect? You brought your whole social graph along with you. The brands didn't find that valuable?

Sam Lessin: Like, all... The thing that was valuable in early, in Dave's era of platform, was feed distribution. It was a trade. I give you distribution, you let me do this and give me data, and that was a trade that worked. Every iteration of after that, leading up to when I ultimately had to be silly one who had to say, "Fine, we're done," and really shut things down a lot on platform, the problem is you couldn't find a value exchange that worked. It was supposed to be like, "Oh, you give us data." There was never a clear business case for why Facebook Connect worked.

Brit Morin: But for retailers and agents, commerce agents, wouldn't it be that the data is already starting to show, at least in the reports I'm reading, that, like, people are spending more, transaction time is faster, like, all of the e-commerce metrics you would wanna see, time to check out, all of that stuff, is through the roof.

Sam Lessin: Short term, but, like, at what cost? I mean, the problem is, like, short term, true, potentially. I literally, I booked a car service on Muse the other day, it worked fabulously. So, like, for sure it'll drive volume short term. The question is that in the mid to long term, if we actually live in a world of agentic efficiency, no one's gonna make any money.

Brit Morin: Well, it just means that your brand has to be stronger than ever before.

Sam Lessin: No, you, you, you have no brand anymore because, like, it doesn't matter.

Brit Morin: Well, if you have a commoditized product line.

Sam Lessin: But, like, hotels, like the Hilton, for instance. This is my, my example last night. I went to Muse and said, "Hey, I need a hotel room. I have an early morning flight out of LAX." I don't care.

Brit Morin: Well, you don't care, but a lot of people are hotel snobs.

Sam Lessin: Uh, I don't know. Are they g- I mean, this is the question, right? Like, for me, that becomes a pretty efficient market. Now, it didn't work, right? And I had to then do it myself, and then I all of a sudden did care.

Brit Morin: You should've used Instinct. Instinct is the travel agent, as people are calling it right now.

Sam Lessin: Maybe. I don't know. It's just an interesting, it's an interesting era.

Dave Morin: Yeah. I don't know. It's like, I agree with you that the business incentives are the hard part, but like, we're describing this as a fight between Hilton and an AI company over who controls the customer relationship. Where's the agency in that? There's a difference between another platform inserting itself into my life and me sending a tool that works for me, and they're not necessarily the same thing. If an agent answers to somebody else's advertising or commercial incentives, your critique, I guess, applies. But it connects to this thing that I was thinking about at Esalen this weekend. Human potential isn't just about making people more productive. It's about expanding their ability to act on their own intentions. And I don't know, like, I kind of think about- Building agents versus building agency, which was, like, a thing that came up this morning in an OpenClaw meeting that I was in. It's like, are we building a new intermediary that controls everything, or are we giving the individual more power? And I think this connects to what you're talking about, Brit, or I guess trying to bring up around some of these more personal agents that are starting to pop out. And to the earlier conversation, we're talking about these extraordinary valuations. We believe AI has this extraordinary potential, but, like, whose potential are we actually underwriting? I don't know. Like, I think that if the user has extraordinary power and has extraordinary agency, and they're able to send one of these things on their behalf to do what they wanna do, they should be able to do that. But the companies and all their incentives getting all mixed up in all of this, I guess, are, like, this giant messy smokescreen around what people are actually trying to figure out in all of this.

Sam Lessin: I like the human agency thing. Like, I love this stuff as a user. I use it so aggressively. I'm, like, really happy with what I have my infrastructure for lots of self-actualization. So I'm in. I just think it's like, it feels very much to me like the old argument about who owns my data. Remember that, like, 10, 15 years ago, the... Everyone was obsessed with, "Well, I own my data, so it should be on an API, and if I wanna take it with me, I should take it with me." And then all these were like, "No, privacy and security. Like, you should not be able to do that. It's not your data." And then Europe decided we're gonna have this ridiculous download your data thing, which download your data is fine. Downloading your data from Europe is, like, the saving grace because if you didn't have that, if... I make Eur- a lot of fun of Europe, and the right to be forgotten is the dumbest law ever written. But the download your data forcing, right, which is like you get to get co- like, is pretty critical. Like, you'd be very sad. We'd be all be very sad and locked into things we don't like if it weren't for that, right, backdoor out. And so it's just an interesting... I feel like now we're in the inverted thing where like on the one hand, if I'm a company, like, the whole value is the relationship with the customer. It is the brand, it is the trust, it is the loyalty. The second you become a commodity in a market, you're worthless, right? That is the zero case.

Brit Morin: I know, but I just don't think the companies have a choice.

Dave Morin: Well, but I think this is the thing that's playing out is that these companies have very different incentives than truly giving you maximum personal agency.

Sam Lessin: That's correct. Their goal is money.

Dave Morin: What does agency mean? It means you have the ability to act on your own intentions to make something, understand something, to change your life. I don't know. I think, Sam, to your point, like, I think people feel that these agents are extremely powerful, and that they can maybe do things with their potential that they couldn't do before. But often, the incentives of these companies, because they're offering them for rent and based on their own incentives, I mean, very simply, it's like getting in the way of your ability just to book a hotel, let alone, like, I don't know, try to do something far more powerful with your life, right? And so, like, maybe that's the, that's the breaking line.

Sam Lessin: This is the ultimate wild part of capitalism, right? Is that it's such a good system 'cause it encourages people to push the edge and invent new things and meet the market. But the whole point is that it tends towards zero profit, which is why you have to keep doing new stuff to meet the market and kind of the edge, right? Like, that's the fundamental con- It's so cool, right? But that is, like, the structure of it. And the problem is, is if you collapse relationships to zero and everything becomes commoditized, then Hilton has to figure out how to innovate, or they can't afford to, or they can't afford to provide their service.

Brit Morin: This happened in the social media era. Do you remember when all the brands were holding back from, like, starting an Instagram profile or a YouTube page or something because they, like, were like, "No, people will come to our site directly. We will not have an intermediary through our social media accounts"?

Dave Morin: But I mean, that was a pretty messy era, Brit. That was pretty messy. I mean, entire swaths of the media ecosystem went out of business.

Brit Morin: I know. I was there.

Sam Lessin: If Instagram never existed, the companies that were in the league would actually be better off than they are today.

Brit Morin: Right. They were all intermediate. Like, everyone was in... Media companies, retailers, everyone got disintermediated.

Sam Lessin: But the reason was really interesting, I think, which is not because they didn't see the game that was being played and the reality of it. It was a collective action problem, which is they couldn't gang up and together, like, hold the line of being like, "No." And in the case of Instagram, if they did, a thousand new people would come in and fill the hole. That's a little harder in the hotel business.

Brit Morin: They also couldn't say no to going where the audience was, and the audience was on social media, and Google was, like, putting sponsored ads in front of all their search results, so people weren't coming to their website anyways. So now agents are gonna go to the websites, and they can't refuse the demand of these people that wanna buy stuff from them, I don't think.

Dave Morin: No, Brit, you're just wrong. They already are.

Brit Morin: Some of them are. I'm not-- I'm giving you that. I think Hilton and Amazon, but, like, my bet is that over time, majority of these brands fold and let agents buy stuff from them, book stuff from them. Like, McKinsey is saying this is a three to five trillion dollar market by 2030.

Sam Lessin: And they've never been wrong.

Brit Morin: Well, ChatGPT's already has, like, fifty million shopping queries per day. Like, shopping and booking is a huge part of what's happening.

Sam Lessin: But on the other hand, it's like, here's the thing. It's just an interesting business problem because, like, what ChatGPT originally s- uh, what ChatGPT originally said is, "Oh, put yourself inside us." You know what I mean? Like, "We'll effectively literally front end you," or, "Give us specific APIs that will let us do this to make it easier." Pri- companies have been trying this forever, right? Which is like, "Hey, we should be partners. Give us the APIs, we'll sit on top."

Brit Morin: Even TikTok's doing that now. TikTok, you can, like, one-click buy stuff now in TikTok.

Sam Lessin: The only change now is that, like, you don't only, you don't need custom APIs, and not only that, but you can't tell what's a human and what's a bot. So, like, basically, if you want a human to be able to shop at the thing, it's very hard to stop the bots, although it is doable. Or, like, there's gonna be a cat and mouse game around that for the next ten years.

Brit Morin: But I think that's what this protocol, again, is trying to do, is to say that there is a human and an agent. This is a real thing, not a spoof.

Sam Lessin: I, I don't know. I, I think it's gonna be really... We'll see how it all plays out and who wins in it. I think what the brands would probably hold out for, what they'd rather have, is to be able to, like, just do business development deals, right? They're like Amazon... It's not that Amazon isn't gonna do anything in commerce with these things, but what they're gonna do is they're gonna ransom it and be like, "Okay." Uh, who's gonna be... Like, we, we'll dr- we have a lot of things that are hard to get at other places, so, like, let's do some business here. Let's come up with, like, the deal.

Brit Morin: All the agents are gonna do it, all the harnesses, 'cause that's really fueling the business model.

Dave Morin: It's gonna be no different than the Google Apple deal for search. Like, it's just gonna be massive BD deals. Like, that's how it, that's how this ends up.

Brit Morin: But each one will take their part of the bag. So-

Sam Lessin: Well, and the funny thing is, is with the agents, I wonder if you can run long tail BD so much faster. Uh, the part of the problem with BD is just, like, it's time-consuming. Like, Amazon's clearly, it's worth doing a business deal with Amazon. Do you think in the future, Dave, like, these micro agents basically go out and negotiate deals more dynamically using, like, AI, like, at scale?

Dave Morin: Hmm.

Sam Lessin: 'Cause I think that's the... Like, you could imagine Hilton-

Dave Morin: Maybe

Sam Lessin: ... Hilton can do a small number of BD deals by themselves with humans. But if all of a sudden you have a gajillion bots running around, services, you know, Instinct 6.0 and 7.0 and 9.0, they can't support them all. So historically they'd be like, "Well, we just wanna do deals with you." Now it could be, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, y- Instinct 9.0, we'll do a deal with you. Like, let your bot talk to my bot. We'll hammer out the terms." They negotiate with each other. You actually can have a whole different business ecosystem of negotiated deals and treaties effectively that you could never have managed before.

Dave Morin: I like this, agent treaties.

Sam Lessin: I think they're treaties. Maybe that's in their branding we can do, which is we'll call them agent treaties.

Dave Morin: Yeah. We're gonna start a treaty framework. Screw this standard stuff.

Brit Morin: I like it. It's like, I think that the underworld of all the developers and VCs should do that.

Dave Morin: Standards were so 2010s and 20- 2000s. We're moving to treaties.

Sam Lessin: Standards exist in a world where you need standards because you can't do a bunch of one-off deals. It's too complicated, right? It's too much work. So you have the standard and you write to the standard, right? Fine. We don't need that shit anymore. Now, like, with AI, everything can be a pairwise t- treaty, negotiated truces, right? And so everything becomes the agent treaty framework.

Brit Morin: But only the agents are negotiating? So, like, A- Amazon's agent and Muse's agent will figure it out?

Dave Morin: It's kind of what's happening i- across all domains. Like-

Sam Lessin: It's kinda like modems. You know what I mean? Like, and now they used to connect. You, like, basically be like, "Look, I love this. This is a thing. We should push on this."

Dave Morin: I, I'm in.

Sam Lessin: 'Cause it's like, that's right.

Brit Morin: I don't see any commercial value in this though for us, Sam. Is this just like an ego play?

Sam Lessin: Well, okay, if we really wanted to make it into a business, a money-making scheme, you come up with, as Dave said, the agent treaty framework, and then you basically would want some sort of, like, treaty platform, right? Where like, okay, we're gonna sign a treaty, and, like, you can have treaty lawyer bots. We're gonna have, like, a meeting place where you can put up, okay, I'm willing to do treaties.

Brit Morin: I think treaty is just a good brand. I could see a character for it already. I think since now we're just using characters as agents, like, we should just own the treaty bot.

Sam Lessin: Yeah, but we're just like, there are no standards anymore, only treaties.

Dave Morin: What's interesting is a very large open source project that I may or may not be involved with. We have so many inbound PRs now that we literally just can't deal with it anymore. And so this is breaking in open source, it's breaking in bots. The whole, like, 2010s, 2000s way of thinking about this just is fundamentally not working anymore.

Brit Morin: So what do you do about that, Dave? How do you fix that?

Dave Morin: We develop the, the treaty framework. Like, that's what-

Brit Morin: Oh, okay

Dave Morin: ... I'm saying.

Sam Lessin: The ATF is a thing. I love this. We gotta spend time on this.

Brit Morin: The ATF.

Dave Morin: Yeah.

Sam Lessin: The Agent Treaty Framework.

Brit Morin: All right. I'm gonna move us to our next topic. Well, we... Okay, I'm glad we got that covered.

Sam Lessin: No, this was very good. This is why we do this podcast, by the way. It's not for the listeners. It's so that we can iterate on ideas.

Brit Morin: No, it's for us to come up with new ideas, for sure. Have you heard about this thing called Megalith, Michael Romano? Do you guys know Michael Romano? It's a new type of fund vehicle that buys pro rata rights from seed funds that they often can't or won't exercise.

Dave Morin: I mean, that's every seed fund.

Brit Morin: I think so too.

Dave Morin: Why didn't anybody else do this?

Brit Morin: They have no dry... These funds have no dry powder left. Let me give more context.

Dave Morin: You can buy all of mine. I have infinity.

Brit Morin: They have pro rata rights, but they have more, no more dry powder. There's no follow-on, like, mandate, and maybe they're just not organized for it.

Dave Morin: No, it has nothing to do with not being organized for it. It has everything to do with that the LP ecosystem doesn't wanna buy this right now.

Brit Morin: Some of them. It depends, but yes.

Sam Lessin: Here's the thing I find funny about this. So when Slow Ventures does seed deals, we always put pro rata rights in.

Dave Morin: As does Offline Ventures. Yeah.

Brit Morin: Mm-hmm.

Sam Lessin: They're very important, and whenever we do deals, I'm always like, to the founders, I'm like, "Listen, I wanna be really clear now," and I'd love... Usually I would, like, ask for written documentation, but I'm always put, I'm like, "We care about these. This is not like, 'Ha ha, you have pro rata rights.' Some people, later stage funds, are gonna tell you later that your seed pro rata doesn't matter, and, like, we'll just, like, quash it and, like, not respect it because they don't need that. They already own plenty, and, like, make the cap table work by, like, taking out the seed." And I'm always like, "Listen, that's gonna happen later because it always does." It happened early in Slow's history with a deal that I did I n- I'll never forget, when a well-known large VC that we thought we were friends with, and literally is an LP of ours-

Dave Morin: Yeah

Sam Lessin: ... starts with the letter S.

Dave Morin: I remember this clear as day.

Sam Lessin: Did this to us on a deal. They're like, "Oh, well, Slow doesn't need their, their pro rata." And I'm like, "Whoa." So very clear that pro rata matters. It's critical to the model. The interesting funny thing, though, about, like, selling pro rata rights is X may be Slow and Offline, who take this very, very seriously. Seed funds get fucked out of their pro rata constantly.

Dave Morin: All the time.

Sam Lessin: It is, in some place, like, we care a lot about this and make a big point of it, and we'll never, ever fold on it. But, like, lots of funds do. And so it's kind of funny to package that 'cause it... I think a lot of people look at, like, early stage pro rata rights as, like, not worth the paper they're written.

Dave Morin: Well, I think to your point, Sam- I've always just assumed now, ever since that experience, and I've seen it many times over now, that the Series A funds, the big mega Series A funds, will just take away pro rata from everyone. They renegotiate the contract every single time. It's not clear, and the only thing that saves you is a very good relationship with the founder.

Sam Lessin: Well, or, like, the willingness to go absolutely nuclear.

Dave Morin: Yeah, totally.

Sam Lessin: 'Cause you can't sue people over it.

Dave Morin: Yeah. Nobody does, though.

Sam Lessin: Well, I've gotten close.

Dave Morin: Yeah. Fair.

Sam Lessin: I'm willing. For, for all those founders out there listening, I will sue you over my pro rata rights, just to be clear.

Brit Morin: I mean, it's real money a lot of the time.

Sam Lessin: Well, it's usually what actually makes the deal work. Like, that's the irony of a lot of things is, like, a seed fund without any follow-on, the math, especially in these capital-consumptive days, unless you're in, like, a crypto project, really is pretty damn hard if you can't follow on.

Brit Morin: For sure. Truly concentrate. Well, the thing is that the Megalith fund is letting the GPs have the bulk of the carry still. They're taking, like, a 1.25% slice or something of the carry, and then taking the investment.

Dave Morin: That makes sense, 'cause why would you do this otherwise? Like, you have to incentivize the GP to do it.

Brit Morin: Does that change your mind? Would... If you had a fund that was out of capital, you couldn't follow on anymore, no pro rata ri- You still have pro rata rights, though.

Dave Morin: You're still, I think, kind of buying market data. Like, you're buying private market data doing this, because the fund's goal is to be very good at choosing the right ones to extract the alpha out of, and so you're kind of getting... It's like second pickings pro rata. They should just name this fund Second Pickings Capital.

Sam Lessin: If I'm an LP in a fund and you use my capital to find the thing, I'd kinda want you to offer it to me as an SPV before you give it to an entirely different investor stack.

Brit Morin: That's what I was gonna say. I think something like 64% of LPs now want co-invest rights.

Sam Lessin: That's all they ever want.

Brit Morin: Well, I know, but 64... There's an actual number now around it.

Sam Lessin: I feel like half LPs in the world only do early stage investing for the option on possibly getting, like, co-invest later.

Brit Morin: And it makes sense if you do the math, but also they all want, like, no fee, tiny carry. It's the terms of these co-invest deals, less advantageous than they used to be.

Sam Lessin: There is an interesting dynamic at play. It's not, like, core Silicon Valley, but... I don't know if you guys have seen this, but I think it's kind of interesting. Like, I think there is, like, two types of LPs in the world. There's the type of LPs in the world that are excited when the people, the funds that they've invested in make them money and the fund managers make money. Like, that's good. Like, that's the goal, and that's, like, classic Silicon Valley is, like, we will wanna win. There is this, like, I think, other class of LPs, though, that maybe come from a bit further afield. They're more from the finance world, that seem, like, personally affronted if GPs make money. They wanna make the money, right? But they're like, "No, we're gonna, like, quash you on fees or whatever," 'cause, like, they're like... And it's, like, seems like a, it's an insult to them for the GPs to make money, which is an interesting dynamic.

Dave Morin: Hmm. Why?

Sam Lessin: Well, at the end of the day, it's just a profit pool, and if you're not playing an iterative game, and, like, then why wouldn't you be like, "Well, I want all the profits"? I think that's one of the interesting things about private markets in general, especially in this moment where, like, all bets are off on so many things, is you know what the private markets really are, is they're just the no standard... They're the treaty markets. They're the standard markets. Right? Like, everything's just a treaty.

Brit Morin: Are we making treaties with LPs as seed funds?

Sam Lessin: Yes, 100%. It's all treaties. It's treaty based.

Brit Morin: Could our agents just be doing this with their agents?

Sam Lessin: It's treaties, not standards. That might be, like, the newsletter theme of the week, right? Which is, like-

Brit Morin: What do you think-

Sam Lessin: It's, like, that's where we're at

Brit Morin: ... is the LP/GP treaty of the future, Sam?

Sam Lessin: Sorry, now I'm just writing my newsletter. The, um... What is the... I think, I don't know. I think it's, like, fine.

Brit Morin: You think the, the current treaty of LPs to GPs, the general contracts that we sign, are all fine?

Dave Morin: Sam-

Sam Lessin: I don't know

Dave Morin: ... you were tweeting about hedge fund letters. What have you learned?

Sam Lessin: Oh, hedge fund guys are so smart.

Brit Morin: Do people not think hedge fund guys are smart?

Sam Lessin: Well, I just generally think that people who do venture capital, the average IQ is pretty low, right? That doesn't mean there aren't-

Brit Morin: Thanks, Sam

Sam Lessin: ... exceptions. Right?

Brit Morin: Like us three, obviously.

Sam Lessin: But, like, the average venture capitalist I don't think is that smart. I guess that might be true of the average person trading on Wall Street, but the average hedge fund manager, I think, is just, like, smarter.

Brit Morin: Why do you think they're smarter?

Dave Morin: It's very hard.

Sam Lessin: They're dealing with more inputs and they're thinking more broadly about the world, and balancing more factors.

Brit Morin: I think you have to qualify them, again, as later stage venture capitalists, not... The early stage venture capitalists have to be, like, wizards and, like, artists with some intuition that, like, you can't even compare to hedge fund guys.

Sam Lessin: Look, typically, I'm an early stage venture capitalist. I think it's extremely fun. I also don't like the idea of having a book I have to look at every day, because I like my relaxation time, right? Like, I'm not, I'm not envious of the hedge fund people. But you just read their letters and, like, they're pretty good. I don't normally read them, but, like, I'm an investor in a bunch of these funds. You know, they, they... I've just been getting a bunch of quarter letters, and I was like, "This world is so weird. I'm actually curious what these managers are saying." And it's just really interesting. Like, I think they have really sophisticated takes.

Brit Morin: What's one smart thing that they've said recently?

Sam Lessin: So I think one of the most interesting points I saw from two managers is, these are ones who are way, way, way up on, like, AI stocks or AI Microns of the world, and I think they're all struggling with, like, what's the Main Street application of AI, 'cause AI is so hated by Main Street and by normal people. And the ones who are bulled up on it, the basic narrative is Main Street says they hate it, but then if you actually show it to them and use it, they love it. And so, like, it's, like, there's this whole gap around, like, perception versus the real- the narrative versus the reality of it, and, like, so-and-so's small town store has been around for 100 years You know, then you show them how to redesign the store with AI, and their mind is blown, and they're super psyched about it. You know what I mean? And so like there, there's like a whole narrative about like, okay, what's the real story on how people feel about this stuff, and what's, like, story versus narrative? I thought that was somewhat interesting, et cetera.

Dave Morin: It's funny that you bring that up, Sam. Like, I, I keep hearing this from OpenClaw users. There's a lot of small business OpenClaw users that are, are that store that you just described, and it reminds me of the early Facebook days, when in 2006 or '7, right after we launched News Feed, there were protests outside of the building, but if you actually looked at the usage numbers, they were through the roof. So there was like all these protests, like, "News Feed is evil," and, "I hate it," and yet the actual numbers suggested that people loved it. And so I think there's, like, an element of that going on right now. I don't know that it's the total story, but there's a, there's definitely an element of it.

Brit Morin: They might not have loved it. They just might have been, like, addicted to it for other reasons.

Dave Morin: It wasn't the same as it was... I mean, it was very different back then.

Brit Morin: Well, I'm gonna get the Peptide Refrigeration Travel Kit, 'cause I've got a lot of travel coming up, so I'll be set. Okay, well get ready, new Brit 2.0, 4.0-

Sam Lessin: It's gonna be fun. Bye

Brit Morin: ... is coming in the next 12 weeks. Wait, Sam, let me say goodbye to the people. Thank you for listening and viewing and listening to the tr- uh, what's the treaty called? I hope you all, uh-

Dave Morin: ATF

Brit Morin: ... follow the-

Sam Lessin: ATF, the Agent Treaty, Treaty Framework

Brit Morin: ... Agent Treaty Framework.

Dave Morin: Sam and I are working on it. We'll come back to you later.

Brit Morin: Thank you for dealing with our antics. We will have Jessica here again next week to properly moderate.

Dave Morin: Thank God.

Brit Morin: Oh my God, I thought I did a B plus.

Dave Morin: No, it has nothing to do with you, Brit. It's that without her, the band doesn't work.

Brit Morin: Let's see what happen... Yeah, okay.

Sam Lessin: Just relationship-wise, I wanna call out. The roles were reversed, and I was like, "Thank God Brit is gonna be back next week." I would be, like, sleeping... I wouldn't even be allowed in the house.

Dave Morin: That's actually not what I meant. It had nothing to do with you, Brit. I meant the band was not complete.

Sam Lessin: I just don't even, like-

Brit Morin: Mm-hmm

Sam Lessin: ... I'm, like... I'm floored. I'm floored.

Brit Morin: You're... Sam, he... Dave is gonna have to say some nice things to me later today to make up for that one, and everyone just heard about it.

Dave Morin: Uh, that's not what I meant at all.

Sam Lessin: Is your love language words? 'Cause you could get something else out of it.

Dave Morin: Not what I meant at all.

Brit Morin: Acts of service, actually, Dave, so I expect a clean kitchen, and, uh- ... do something for the kids.

Sam Lessin: Dave's never cleaned a kitchen in his life. Dave, you don't know, like-

Dave Morin: Clean the kitchen every night, man

Brit Morin: He knows how to take out the trash.

Sam Lessin: What?

Dave Morin: Yeah.

Brit Morin: He's, he has, like, one job. It's fine.

Sam Lessin: I will say, on kitchens, guys, I will... I, I, I gave Dave, I sent him a mea culpa this week-

Dave Morin: Oh

Sam Lessin: ... 'cause I was wrong-

Brit Morin: Uh-oh

Sam Lessin: ... about something.

Dave Morin: It was very nice.

Brit Morin: Oh. That rarely... It's like once a decade for you.

Sam Lessin: Yeah, it was. Well, this was about a decade ago. But I was, like, really hot and heavy angry about investing in Zipline because it was, like, completely out of scope for our fund, and Dave was like, "We're doing this." And we did it, but we didn't do enough. But Dave, that's my mea culpa to you there.

Dave Morin: Appreciate it, Sam.

Sam Lessin: Now, my mea culpa to both of you is I love the Mill.

Brit Morin: The Mill is amazing.

Sam Lessin: It's like, I was not expecting that device to s- last in our kitchen, but it's great.

Dave Morin: I agree, for what it's worth. Like, we invested in it, and I still was skeptical, but it's truly pretty amazing.

Brit Morin: Think we've got, like, a 12X on that one, but I, I could see it at a 50 soon. So they've got some deals in the works, so everyone should get a Mill.

Sam Lessin: I mean, they're unbelievably expensive, so I don't know if you can sell, but, like, I love it.

Brit Morin: No, they're going into enterprise and commercial, like, literally, uh, grocery stores and restaurants and all kinds of-

Sam Lessin: Yeah, they're too expensive for anyone other than, like, assholes like us to buy, but they're great.

Dave Morin: And did you know the founder is Susan Kare's son, the designer of the Apple logo and the original Macintosh?

Brit Morin: That's why they're so pretty. They look like an Apple trash can, compost can. All right, well, that's our plug for the week, everyone. Check out the Mill. This was the longest ending of a podcast episode ever, so we're gonna wrap it up now. Thanks to everyone for listening, watching. Please subscribe, like, comment, all the things. Let us know what you think about the ATF, and we'll see you back here next week.

Sam Lessin: I just registered agenttreatyframework.com. Do we get the .ai?

Brit Morin: Thank you, Sam. Another episode of More or Less. Goodbye. 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.