AI-generated — may contain transcription errors.

Jessica: As we are taping this pod, Anthropic is meeting with its investors in closed door meetings to talk about going public

Sam Lessin: Meta turning on Muse as a consumer product and having such traction with it narratively and practically, but then also, like, their new models being good and competitive. This stuff is commodity

Brit Morin: Plus Gemini launched all their new models too

Sam Lessin: Everyone's gonna launch all the things, and, like, the consumers are already at the point where, like, it just doesn't matter. Like, the stuff is all good enough, which is classic race to the bottom. There is no lock-in. And then you have, like, the Anthropics and OpenAIs, like, their whole pitch has been the infinity story of one company takes all because they can't possibly justify their existence if that's not true

Jessica: A solid 70% of my Muse use cases that I was so excited about do not work

Sam Lessin: I think it's very hard for startups to survive what's coming.

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

Jessica: Hello, friends. Welcome to More or Less. Did you miss me? I missed you guys. A week without More or Less is just sad

Brit Morin: We did miss you. The boys were not ruly last week when I tried to moderate them, so thanks for coming back

Sam Lessin: But we got good comments on it.

Dave Morin: Yeah

Sam Lessin: People liked it

Dave Morin: People seem to like it

Brit Morin: People like the unruly boys

Jessica: Okay, boys gone wild. Well- ... I'm happy to be back

Sam Lessin: I'll take my shirt off. I have a whole pile of shirts over there

Jessica: Did you take your shirt off on the episode?

Sam Lessin: No, I said I would take my shirt off

Brit Morin: He has done that in former episodes. But, and guys, today is Dave's birthday, so maybe he should take his shirt off

Sam Lessin: Happy birthday, Dave

Brit Morin: Except for he's sick, so he won't do that. He's got a weird voice today. Sorry, y'all

Dave Morin: Thanks, guys

Jessica: Dave, you've got the October cold

Dave Morin: Yeah, I just got the test back, and I have a standard garden variety coronavirus, not COVID

Brit Morin: What is a garden variety?

Dave Morin: I guess that's what we used to call colds, yeah, and flus

Brit Morin: Don't you think we're gonna cure the cold in the next five years?

Sam Lessin: Isn't it, like, 1,000 things?

Jessica: I would like to cure Lyme disease in the next five years, personally, if we cure something

Brit Morin: Oh, it's happening. Trump made an executive order.

Jessica: Well, I'm actually happy to hear that

Sam Lessin: Trump made an executive order. There is no more Lyme disease

Jessica: It's called Lyme Inconvenience. He just renamed it

Brit Morin: It's gonna be eradicated by 2028, he says

Sam Lessin: I like that. It's Lyme Inconvenience. Lyme disease no longer exists

Brit Morin: No, he also said that mosquitoes are gonna be 90% down by 2028 in Washington, DC only

Sam Lessin: You know what's funny about that, the mosquitoes thing? You realize that's been the issue with Washington, DC since Washington, DC was invented

Brit Morin: Mosquitoes?

Sam Lessin: Yes

Brit Morin: Is it 'cause of all the fountains?

Dave Morin: No, it's just marshy

Sam Lessin: It's a bog. It's built in, like, the shittiest climate land. But it's... Like, literally this, Trump is like, I bet there was, like, a Andrew Jackson era order for the same thing. Like, America's been fighting mosquitoes in DC for its entire history

Brit Morin: Well, there are mosquito drones now and lasers, so there are new mosquito killers

Jessica: Okay. We're... Guys, we're not talking about mosquitoes. But I do, on things we're not talking about, Dave, have you heard of the nasal rinse? I'm sorry to bring this up, but I am convinced that this is the key to fall immunity for parents

Dave Morin: Oh, yeah

Jessica: Like, you just have to keep nasal rinsing all the time

Sam Lessin: Jessica's constantly washing her sinuses out and saying that's what the Koreans do

Dave Morin: It is. It's great

Jessica: Hello. I have, knock on wood, had my best immunity, fall immunity of, like, the last five or six years this year

Dave Morin: There was a bunch of science that was actually done

Brit Morin: It's not even... It's barely fall yet. How do you have any data?

Jessica: Oh, by now I would've been sick, like, three times. Like, Sam-

Brit Morin: Really?

Jessica: ... can attest to this. Like, uh, we've had multiple things flow through the house with kids and, you know, I'm not feeling, like, tip-top shape, but, like, I'm definitely not down for the count

Brit Morin: And it's not the peptides for you?

Jessica: I don't peptide. I have zero peptides over here

Brit Morin: I'm one week in

Jessica: Let's get the peptide update, Brit

Brit Morin: I just need to talk about one thing

Jessica: Just one? I want the whole update

Brit Morin: Guys, for three years I have had this crazy hip pain, lower back pain, glute pain. I went and got MRIs. It was fray... I had, like, a frayed tissue. I had a lot of inflammation. I injected this Wolverine claw thing last week that has all this stuff in it, like, called BP-157 and blah, blah, blah, copper and stuff, and it's gone. I promise you, for the last six days, it's been gone

Sam Lessin: Oh my God. Brit, did you discover this? Should I try this?

Brit Morin: I just didn't know it would work that quickly. Why? How did it work so quickly?

Sam Lessin: It's fucking great

Brit Morin: It's not placebo 'cause I have real MRI results

Sam Lessin: It doesn't work that fast

Brit Morin: Well, that's what I thought, but why am I not feeling pain?

Dave Morin: It's placebo

Brit Morin: This is not just my brain

Jessica: But Sam, when were you convinced that yours was a placebo?

Sam Lessin: So pretty quickly, actually. They're supposed to take a few weeks to really kick in, but I actually am, as much as I'm making fun of Brit, I'm totally with you. Like, this stuff works, right? And it worked really fast for me too. So congratulations. Welcome to the peptide world

Brit Morin: Maybe I'm a fast peptide reactor

Sam Lessin: We're now 50/50 peptides on the pod

Brit Morin: Yeah. More or less peptides

Dave Morin: We should probably make our own branded peptides

Sam Lessin: Brit and I should splinter off. We can have Brit and Sam's Peptide Corner, where we just talk about the new peptides we're trying every week

Dave Morin: More or less peptides coming soon

Jessica: I am just gonna hawk nasal rinse and electrolytes over here

Brit Morin: NeilMed. NeilMed nasal rinse

Jessica: NeilMed

Sam Lessin: But Brit, it's, like, pretty good, right?

Brit Morin: I mean, I'm kinda it- I don't really love how it, much it hurts and itches, this particular peptide

Sam Lessin: The claw, initially your body doesn't like the copper at the injection site, but it's fine now

Brit Morin: I moved it to my butt though and it's better. I've got the most tissue back there, so we're good

Dave Morin: Yeah, I use ears

Jessica: Wow. Only tech podcast to talk about butt injections five minutes in, right here

Brit Morin: You're welcome, audience

Jessica: Okay. So Brit's on the peptide train. Dave, I'm, like, nowhere close to the peptide train. Are you peptide curious? I'm not currently

Dave Morin: I'm definitely curious. I just got really sick, so I haven't had a chance to schedule my-

Jessica: So I'm gonna be the lone holdout?

Sam Lessin: You are

Jessica: The, the venture capitalists are going peptides?

Sam Lessin: That's exactly correct

Brit Morin: Of course we are. We live in the future over here. You're the skeptical journalist.

Dave Morin: I think you should get into it, Jess

Sam Lessin: Jess is gonna be a long h- holdout on peptides. I think you'll eventually end up taking them, but you'll be a long holdout

Brit Morin: That's probably right

Sam Lessin: But Brit, Dave, and I are gonna be fucking living our best lives in the meantime

Jessica: We're gonna look so good. Look how good my skin looks with that copper in it.

Guest: I'm gonna have to work out, like, five times as much as you guys to keep up.

Sam Lessin: Brit, Dave, and I are gonna get all the thumbnail clippings by our- ... our editorial team in More or Less.

Guest: Yeah.

Jessica: Now you're talking-

Guest: Yeah

Jessica: ... my language.

Sam Lessin: It's true.

Jessica: Now no one's gonna... It's gonna be really shameful. Okay, guys. So as we are taping this pod, Anthropic is meeting with its investors in closed-door meetings to talk about going public. So we unfortunately do not yet have an update out of those secret meetings.

Sam Lessin: How are you not in those meetings?

Guest: When will we know?

Jessica: They're breaking for lunch now, so I'm, I'm pretty plugged in. But I, I don't have an update for you in the, the first two hours that I can share. But the significance of this is the IPO is still a go.

Sam Lessin: And the market is getting hammered. What a great day to be discussing this.

Jessica: We need to talk about the bigger picture here, but Anthropic, still a go, but big question will be what happened to them in the third quarter. Some rumors of a slowdown. So yeah, Sam, what's happening in the markets bigger picture?

Sam Lessin: I don't know. I'm just looking at Google Finance. Numbers go down, except for the VIX is up a lot. So I mean, I think people are worried, confused. Where are my IPOs? Where is my number go up?

Guest: Yeah. People are freaked out by the private credit debt world.

Jessica: Absolutely.

Sam Lessin: You mean Apollo?

Guest: It's all Apollo's fault. It's always Apollo's fault.

Sam Lessin: It's not their fault. It's just like, you know, as someone smart to me said today, Apollo's the entire market.

Guest: Yeah.

Jessica: Here's what I think is... Is that true?

Sam Lessin: That is what a smart person said to me today.

Guest: Yes.

Jessica: Well, smart people can say dumb shit. It doesn't make it true.

Sam Lessin: All the time.

Guest: Yeah. We do it professionally on this podcast.

Jessica: Our ratio of smart to dumb, though, is very high.

Guest: Yeah, it's very high.

Jessica: Look, it's a really interesting moment. We know if you circle back three to six months, there was pretty high exuberance in Silicon Valley that Anthropic and OpenAI would be public companies by the end of the year.

Sam Lessin: Well, by like September 1st, like that's not, that wasn't the end of the year. Everyone for weeks has been like, "This is the week."

Jessica: I was at a cocktail party mid-August, and I was like, "Shit, this thing is coming," and I sent a lot of alarm bells off 'cause there was a lot of activity. Okay, but things have changed. Markets are very uncertain, big picture, with everything going on. Very specifically, these infrastructure IPOs, companies like Endscale, XB Energy, the information's been all over them, are basically slowing their roll on their IPO in various phases due to pricing issues. So the public investors, you have some, like Firmless I believe, that have just totally done a 180 and are now doing private rounds. So public investors aren't like, "We're chomping at the bit for this." I think one of the big questions now is what are the private markets gonna do? The private credit markets are pulling back. My guess is honestly that Nvidia is gonna be left as the investor of last resort.

Guest: Oh, the investor?

Jessica: Yes. Not as public companies, but, like, who is gonna come and do the next rounds of all these big companies that were eyeing the private markets, but maybe they could go out at far lower prices? So I don't know. You basically, the capital you have left is, like, traditional private capital or strategic capital.

Guest: Well, and at the same time, the revenue growth is slowing at these big companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, and so I think we had OpenAI talk about how they got to 50 billion, but their target was 68 billion in September, right?

Jessica: Oh my God, do we have to talk about that whole issue maybe? I don't know if we have to talk about the accounting issue. We can decide, but anyway.

Guest: This is not an accounting podcast.

Jessica: Their, all their token sp- all the enterprise token spend is mo- well, not all, but some is moving to open models, and like, you know, CFOs are cracking down on spend, and Meta's launching their own models, and Microsoft's pulling off.

Sam Lessin: That are good. I think this is the key part. The funny part was I, I was texting with, I think, Dave, and I can't remember what thread I was on this morning, about like, "Do I wanna be rich or intellectually right?" It's a very hard choice because, like-

Guest: Sam always wants to be intellectually right. Yeah.

Sam Lessin: It turns out I'm much more interested in being right than rich. To me, it's like none of this is surprising. This is exactly what we've all talked about, and the reality is Meta m- turning on Muse as a consumer product and having such traction with it narratively and practically, but then also, like, their new models being good and competitive, this stuff is commodity, right?

Guest: Plus Gemini launched all their new models too.

Sam Lessin: Everyone's gonna launch all the things, and, like, the consumers are already at the point where, like, it just doesn't matter. Like, the stuff is all good enough, right? Which is classic race to the bottom. There is no lock-in. And then you have, like, the Anthropic's and, and OpenAI's, like, their whole pitch has been the infinity story of one company takes all because they can't possibly justify their existence if that's not true. I think all the things are just coming home to roost that we've been talking about for months, and in some cases, years, right? The problem is is it's kind of like I'm ambivalent about it because the party being over makes me poorer 'cause, like, all the numbers are correlated, right? Like, the reality is there are no numbers. The numbers are just baseline other numbers, right? So it's just a really interesting moment we're in, where sobriety and rationality is starting to show up, which is good, but that sobriety and rationality with a $40 trillion debt and the structure of our current markets and what the markets need and narratives, capitalism, all that stuff, are just, like, not super stoke-ful for everyone who's around the table.

Jessica: You're connecting a bunch of points here, right? So we were talk- I was making this point that there's this concern about the infrastructure piece, which obviously is a signal of confidence way into the future. Related to that is just competition, right? I mean, let's check in on everyone's Muse usage. Where are we at here? What are people experiencing?

Brit Morin: Oh, I can tell you one thing. I've never been a heavy Muse user, and then I updated my Muse yesterday-

Sam Lessin: Never, you mean, like, in, like, two weeks? I've never, in the two weeks it's existed, been a heavy Muse user.

Jessica: Oh, well, Jess has gone full send mode on Muse, but I try to go full send, the internet won't let me. But yes, continue.

Brit Morin: Well, yeah. Now you're getting blocked now by JPMorgan, and Amazon, and all kinds of things. But also, I got a little creeped out yesterday. I did the update, and then my starting screen was like, "You, by clicking this button, enable Muse to use your whole computer, even when you're not there, store everything." Like, it's like all the things, and I'm just like, "I don't like this. I've seen this before." And I think that's why I choose things like OpenClaw or Open Harnesses to be my, like, really open and unlocked harness. And giving Muse and Meta literally my whole computer is, like, the scariest thing ever to me, so I've not gotten that far. I think a lot of people are having this conversation right now. I'm in a lot of WhatsApp groups, and everyone's like, "How much information are you guys giving all your agents?" And some pe- a lot of people are going, like, full send mode. At the same time, it's very binary. A lot of people are like, "No way."

Sam Lessin: Muse is the one I'm most willing to give complete informa- like, information to, ironically. Like, I actually trust Muse the most, but I don't give any of them local access.

Dave Morin: Why?

Sam Lessin: It's an old Bob lesson, my dad line, which is when I was a kid, I was scared at Disney World on a rollercoaster, and he said, "Don't worry, Sam, Disney's a public company." Right? And the basic point is, like, it's a real company, they can be sued, it's meaningful to them, they care about the security angles, right? So I think, like, the problem with even OpenAI and Anthropic is if you sue them, it's not clear you'll ever get any money out from them. Again, this goes back to the whole internalizing the profits or the value and externalizing the risks, right? They might cause a national crisis, but you're never gonna be able to sue them, right? Whereas Meta is, like, a highly legible, profitable, suable company with everything to lose, and therefore, can be trusted a lot more. Same with Google. I would trust Google the same way.

Brit Morin: I know. I would trust Google first, and I'm waiting for Google to roll theirs out. I think the Gemini stuff was a step in the right direction, but they haven't fully connected the dots yet.

Sam Lessin: It's the trust, and then it's just, it's also the whole, on the other side, it's like who can just do the BD deals to keep stuff open? Because that's the other thing we're seeing, is there's nothing surprising about anything going on. Turns out that once you see a ton of agentic traffic, which is completely commoditizing your underlying service, you're gonna turn it off, right? And so that's the other thing that's happening, is it's kinda like the early days of APIs on websites where everything was open, and it was totally fun.

Dave Morin: Yep.

Sam Lessin: And then all the services go up and like, "Wait, we can't have APIs now that everyone can script against them, because then we have no lock-in and no value," and they all got quashed, right? We're just playing that game all over again.

Jessica: I just know, uh, to everyone at Meta who's gonna be mad for me saying this, I'm sorry. I speak the truth. But, and this isn't a fault of theirs, but, like, a solid 70% of my Muse use cases that I was so excited about do not work. I cannot complete things. Like, the internet is just standing in my way 100% of the time.

Sam Lessin: The internet's fighting back.

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

Jessica: Okay, I'll give you all these examples. I used to be able to say, "Muse, reorder my latest Good- Good Eggs order." Good Eggs, basic, not Amazon, not grocery shop, right? 100% of the time now, it tells me that I have to enter my payment information or check out from the app, and I've now done this three times, so it's not like the browser was stalling once or twice. I even check, 'cause I know AI. I'm like, "No, you can do this for me," each time, and 100% of the time, it hasn't done it. My grand AGI of parenthood challenge, logging into my kids' school thing, it will not do. It just won't do it anymore. And it's like, "I need you to take control of the browser and log in." And I'm like, "Why?" And they're like, " 'Cause I need you to." And so again, I think it's a great product, and I'm still using it as much as humanly can, but the magic of closing the loop in my core use cases is completely gone.

Dave Morin: I think this is a real thing, for what it's worth.

Jessica: It is still printing out the kids' piano practice lessons, so email to printer still works, but it doesn't involve internet.

Dave Morin: To Meta's great credit, I think they've built a great product here, and they spent a lot of time trying to get the details right and to do it at consumer scale, which is very difficult, and takes a lot of details. I mean, it's crazy the amount of details. Like, you have to build a great model, you have to build a great harness, you have to build a great front end. You have to think about all these things that you're talking about that need to, quote-unquote, "just work." And what's kind of wild about this product category is that it really does need to just work, otherwise you lose people and churn people. And it's, I think, even more aggressive than maybe the 2010 social era, where people would try things, and if it didn't work, they'd kinda bail, but then they'd get invited by another friend. And these things are like, they can really do harm. Like, Britt and I had a experience of this with Instinct over the weekend, where she had booked and then double-checked a reservation. We had some friends coming into town. We wanted to take them to somewhere specific and booked, double-checked the reservation. We thought we were good. We get to the reservation or the restaurant. Turns out Instinct had booked it in LA, not San Francisco. And it's like, what happens? Like, I immediately am like, "This doesn't work. I'm done. Like, I'm out on Instinct."

Brit Morin: I got so mad at my Instinct. I was like, I told it, "I'm so frustrated with you right now. How are you gonna fix this and make it up to me?"

Jessica: Just don't taunt it. Yes.

Sam Lessin: So look, I can't not r- chime in here 'cause, like, again- Hilariously, of all the people in the world, like I had all these experiences 10 years ago with Fin. I'll tell you a really funny story, which is-

Jessica: Explain what Fin is for anyone who doesn't know.

Dave Morin: L-lick the cookie on Fin, please.

Sam Lessin: I got to 'cause it's like this is straight up the middle. Look, 10 years ago, Andrew Kortina, who co-founded Venmo, and I left what we were doing and started a company called Fin. It was... We called it AAI at the time, or artificial artificial intelligence. And we basically said, "In the future, there are going to be assistants that do exactly what they're all trying to do right now, but we're not there yet. So what we're gonna do is figure out the product experience, build the entire thing." They're still not, but this... So I'll get to this. Build the entire experience, figure it all out, and then we'll slot humans in to just do the minimum that we can and chip away at it in the transaction. So requests would come in, we'd understand what they already categorize them. We had a credentials vault for your credit card. We had a graph of everything we knew as a system as well as about you personally. You'd make a request, "I need a dinner reservation with my friends here," or, "Every week, make sure I send Jessica flowers," or whatever you want. We'd categorize, we'd understand, we'd have recipes for completing them. We built the entire thing and then multi-threaded, voice-activated. It was great, and people loved it. In fact, hilariously, you talk about booking the wrong restaurant recommendation, Marc Andreessen was a user at one point and got livid because we screwed him, Fin did, the same exact way, booking effectively a work lunch at the wrong place for him and telling the wrong thing. It's the exact same story, right? And so here's what we learned doing this. I've talked to several entrepreneurs over the years about exactly the moment we're in now and the problems. One is the biggest problem with running these assistant services is that you have to do everything and to make the service valuable. You can't just do scheduling. You have to do all the tasks, and you become liable for every service provider down the chain from you, right? That you say. So if you say, "Hey, there's gonna be a car there for you, and I'm gonna book it for you," it is now your responsibility that the car is there, even if something else screws up down the line. Problem one. Problem two, which is associated, if you wanna run these efficiently and cheaply at low margin, the problem is, is that some of the mistakes become massively expensive. Like if you book someone the wrong plane ticket or send them to the wrong restaurant, that's like not a small deal. Normally, what you do is say, "Well, I'm very sorry. I'll pay for it." Like DoorDash says, "Hey, I screwed up your food order. No worries. I'll just pay for it." The problem is, and DoorDash can do that because they take a ton of margin and food isn't that expensive. If you're booking someone's thousand-dollar plane ticket or doing something really important and screw it up, you don't have the money, you don't have the margin to pay for the mistakes. And so there's a fundamental problem, like with running this service. And then unlike a human assistant, which is what we're all trying to proxy, everyone has a hairline trigger. Like if you screw me once, it's so easy to fire a digital assistant effectively. There's no emotional bond. I didn't hire the person. It didn't take me a bunch of time. Like if your human assistant screws up, which they do all the time, you don't instantly fire them. Like you're like, "I have to work with you." There's some stickiness. There's like this whole human... But people, if you turn into a service and say, "We have a service for doing this stuff," the tolerance for mistakes goes to zero. Now, with Fin, people would constantly cancel and then be like, "Oh man, I really miss that," and come back a month later, right? Once there was a mistake. But the problem is you're always gonna run an error rate, whether it's one percent or point one percent, you're gonna have that. And that's before you get into the adversarial service abstraction component. And I don't know how these services are gonna be able to do it, because that, that is the real reason. People always ask me repeatedly over the last few years, "Why don't you restart Fin? Why don't you restart Fin? You could do it now. It'll work." And I'm like, "You guys don't understand why we stopped doing Fin." It was not that we couldn't provide a great service and not that the economics didn't work. Both of those were fine. The problem was what does it mean to take on that level of responsibility as a service, and can you make the economics of mistakes work?

Jessica: But at some level, it does feel inevitable too. And so the question I think is like what gets us through this period? And Sam, you've written about sort of treaties and you think doing treaties at scale. Like I do feel like it is inevitable, that we're just in an intense early adopter growing pain period. That's how it feels to me. You can't stop this.

Sam Lessin: I think what's inevitable is the death of the web. I think what's inevitable is like a bunch of like the simple shim like types. Yes, you will obviously use these things, right? And for a bunch of stuff, and they'll be good at a bunch of stuff. But it's, it-- The problem is gonna be there's gonna be like a holy war of access to services and a lot to figure out about mistakes and what you do and don't trust them with and how you operate, that I think is just gonna be really messy for the coming years. I don't-- I think it's very hard for startups to survive what's coming.

Jessica: Are the harnesses going to have to strike a ton of specific deals with the biggest service providers?

Dave Morin: Yes.

Sam Lessin: Yes.

Dave Morin: That's what we were talking about last week.

Sam Lessin: That was the framework. The treaty thing is interesting. I think there's another piece I was thinking about this week about this. So the treaties thing is, look, everyone's gonna shut it down because you gotta be top of wallet and have a brand, or you have no value, right? If I say I need a plane ticket, and instead of even having to click on links, it's literally a perfect agentic marketplace for the lowest price, you're screwed. Like no one's gonna survive in the travel industry that way. But I actually have a-another piece I've thought of recently about this, which is I think the way APIs work is gonna change a lot. 'Cause right now, the way an API works is you get a key, maybe it's trusted, maybe it's not, and you have a set of things or capabilities you have access to in a given service provider. I actually think it's gonna move to a world where every API is actually a back and forth negotiation for access, right? The way it'll work is you'll show up at a company like a Amazon and say, "Hey, Amazon, I'm Instinct here. I'm Muse here. I have this great customer over here. His name is Dave. He's awesome. Like, you wanna work for Dave. Dave's really rich and great, and he's gonna spend a lot of money. I'd really like you to, to let me do X, Y, and Z." And then Amazon's gonna say, "Oh, interesting. Well, I'd love to know X, Y, and Z about your person you're working for." And then the API will respond back and forth and negotiate the level of access and what they get to do. So I think there's gonna be like a constant negotiation between service providers for passing access through, where the value becomes if you're a high-quality brand, almost like Hollywood. If you have Ari Gold as your agent You're like, "Okay, this guy's gonna keep playing, he's trustworthy, and his clients are good, so I'm more likely to do business with you." Whereas if you show up as like an unwashed agent out of nowhere and you're like, "Hey, I'm some open source agent you've never heard of," I'm gonna be like, "I'm not gonna talk to you."

Brit Morin: Well, don't you think it's gonna be more like a credit score? Dave, we'll all have an agent score, and it's like the score of our agent times ourselves and how trustworthy we are, how much credibility we have, influence we have, how much we buy.

Dave Morin: The S&P 5 million of, or 5 billion.

Jessica: It's like clout for agents. I have good clout.

Sam Lessin: Well, kind of, but I don't think it'll be a sc- I mean, if you as a company could pull that off in centralizing the scores, that would be a really interesting thing to achieve is the upshot.

Dave Morin: I feel like it's gonna be this pretty bad middle ground, Sam, where something like this is gonna happen.

Brit Morin: I feel like it will happen.

Sam Lessin: It's gonna be like some shitty f- Well, I think they'll be like... It's like FICO.

Dave Morin: Yeah.

Brit Morin: Guys, I saw three things this week of like multi-agent harnesses, har- a harness of harnesses. Have you seen all these things?

Jessica: Why do we talk harnesses? No one cares about harnesses. Just drop harness.

Sam Lessin: I don't even know what a harness is.

Brit Morin: It's like you could put your Grok and your Muse and your OpenClaw and your everything- ... in, in one UI, and then you can talk to all of them in different ways, and I'm like, "Now we're doing a turducken. I don't understand what's happening here."

Jessica: I also like to think of it this way. What would Amazon have to build to get me off this use case of like using these other services, right? So I mean, and I do believe that personal agents will be a thing and there's space for that market, but right now I'm in the mode of literally how much brain activity do I have to spend on buying more paper towels? And I'm going where that number is as close to zero as possible. And if it's Amazon, great. So I actually b- when Muse made me log into Good Eggs for the 13th time, I was like, "How's good old Rufus?" Now, I think they've changed the name thankfully, but Rufus was Amazon's agent. It's in the app. And I was just checking, and Rufus or whatever it's called now actually still works to take a picture and buy something.

Sam Lessin: What idiot named it Rufus?

Brit Morin: That's some terrible branding. I thought they changed it.

Jessica: They did, but to me it's always Rufus because I don't-

Dave Morin: Isn't Rufus a sci-fi throwback of some kind?

Jessica: It's not Rufus.

Brit Morin: This is why tech people are not marketing people.

Jessica: It's Alexa for shopping, thank God, what it always should've been. But anyway, it's not that bad.

Sam Lessin: Rufus sounds like calling Homer Simpson.

Jessica: Yeah. Anyway, so that's like where we are at this moment. And I also, t- can I bring this to a slightly different place, which is as a journalist I have views about this. But what do you guys think about the incredible seesawing of narratives around who is the golden child in the space and who is doomed? I just cannot get over every day Alex Wang is either the best entrepreneur to have ever graced the United States of America and beyond, or he's like a horrible person, why is he running a la- Not horrible, but like does the entire industry recognize how quick to build people up and tear them down?

Sam Lessin: I don't know, you're the journalist. Shouldn't, shouldn't you be the one to go by? Like isn't it your industry?

Brit Morin: How many articles does it take to tear them down?

Jessica: No, but we're not doing this.

Dave Morin: I think this is just the metabolism of social media.

Jessica: But it's to the point that it's nonsensical.

Dave Morin: I understand that, but that is the story, Jess. The story is that the metabolism is so fast now, everybody rises and falls intra day.

Jessica: Intra hour.

Dave Morin: It's like day trading your personal brand these days, and whatever you're gonna do today, nobody's gonna remember next week. Like yeah, there's people doing podcast tours all week, and then like, you know, you forget about it and move on to the next thing next week. And it is the story.

Jessica: Someone told me they were busy... They were like, "Oh, sorry, we were busy with like the Sam Altman interview." I was like, "Wait, which? Oh, that one, the one that was like a disaster with Vanity Fair. I forgot about that."

Sam Lessin: The most interesting thing I saw on Twitter this week, ha- I talk about like the state of this where Jess is like, why are we doing these like hypercycle narratives coming largely from media and the internet? It's kind of how unhinged Gen Z media is.

Dave Morin: Yeah. That was, by the way, Sam, gonna be my other take on this, which is that it's Gen Z culture.

Brit Morin: What part is Gen Z culture?

Sam Lessin: These like internet accounts that are posting these wild videos about Muse as like sperm and like these crazy psychedelic videos. Have you seen some of these?

Brit Morin: Wait, what? No. Muse is sperm? What does this mean?

Jessica: The little character, you know? Like the little-

Sam Lessin: The little Muse character has found its way into like-

Brit Morin: Oh, that he's a sperm?

Dave Morin: It's been memed to death, yeah.

Sam Lessin: The Muse meme count is incredible. And so basically the thing for me that I think is happening is in some ways we're now the old people. So we're here being like, "Wow, not only is no one pursuing truth"-

Jessica: I'm like, "Where's my quill and ink?" Like that, you know?

Sam Lessin: Well, but that's kind of what all we're sounding like. 'Cause the, then the, the medium is, "Oh, the hypernarrative is this person's the greatest ever and the worst ever." And then all the young people are like, "This is obviously all ridiculous and stupid."

Dave Morin: Yeah, that's the whole thing.

Sam Lessin: And so their entire media culture is now like psychedelic AI weird shit that like makes no sense.

Jessica: Okay, but what is a business decision maker to do?

Dave Morin: You have to play the game.

Sam Lessin: More memes.

Jessica: You can play the game, but what's true and what's important?

Dave Morin: It doesn't matter. I think that's to, to like Mark's great credit, he hired Alexander Wang, who is a Gen Z entrepreneur- ... who knew how to play this game. He's playing it excellently, you know? Like it's exactly how to play the game. I remember seeing there was a study at some point a couple years ago about this in high schools and Gen Z culture and things, and like they literally do believe that the game is so rigged and everything is so messed up that they might as well just like- ... fuck it, and just, like, do memes crazy and do things that don't make sense because the world that came before them was a world that made too much sense. And so it's a big reaction to that.

Jessica: What ages are Gen Z exactly? So they're-

Brit Morin: Oh, I know. It's for people born between 1995 and 2010, so 31 to 16.

Sam Lessin: Yeah. And I do think, like, I- I saw a really funny video on the internet, it was also about-

Dave Morin: It's punk rock in another form

Sam Lessin: ... where this person was like, "The 30-year is trading at, like, 5%. Should I be worried?" And, like, the account was like, "No. You have no assets. You're poor. This is not your fight." And then it's just like and it's, like, this whole thing about how, like... And the whole point is the economy's rigged, all this shit is crazy, so, like, let's just make weird memes, right? And, like, I just think understanding that that cultural undercurrent is there. Like, maybe what's happening right now, in some ways, with the stock market and some of these even IPOs, the Anthropic, that was, like, the last hurrah, the most extreme version of winner take all meaningful moment, right? We're like, "Oh my God, Anthropic OpenAI is gonna be the only company left in the world." And there's a bunch of people our age who get sucked into that narrative and believe it to some degree, and they get really into it, and that becomes, like, the dominant narrative that capital flows. But then this new wave, right, of like, "Oh, shit, like, all this AI is fine. Lots of stuff will change. None of this is the greatest or the worst. It's all just whatever. Let's make weird memes," is kinda like culturally the moment we're entering, where, like, Gen Z takes over effectively. At which point no one knows how to trade anything, right? 'Cause it's like, "Uh, like, what are we doing?"

Brit Morin: This feels scary for our futures.

Dave Morin: No, I think I... That's why I'm making an argument is you have to take the gestalt of it all. It's like you have to pay attention to the whole thing, not isolated things inside of it. You kind of have to really interpret it as like the whole story is like it's the Crocs on stage and the crazy shirts and the lights all the same thing. It's punk rock by a different name. You know, it's an absolute rejection of the prior generation.

Jessica: But what if you aren't punk rock? Asking for a friend. Like, how do you grow a business if you're decidedly not punk rock or not Gen Z?

Dave Morin: Well, but Jess, this punk rock stuff is just marketing. At the end of the day, we talk about business a lot on this pod, and we talk about the realities of these business models, and, like, we can debate that and get into that really deeply, but what we're really talking about here on the cultural side, this is just marketing stuff, right? Like, how do you pierce through?

Sam Lessin: But Dave, I think it is more than marketing. I think there's something in the middle I'd say about it, which is I think there is, like, an undercurrent of this that will drive business and culture and who wins and who raises capital and stuff. So I don't think it's just, like, some isolated thing off to the side.

Dave Morin: But isn't narrative just marketing, Sam? I mean, I guess that's what I'm saying, like, who raises capital is a marketing game, right? Like, if you establish the narrative-

Sam Lessin: But that does matter for business. I just don't think you can dismiss it too much. Like, I think there is a cultural shift that will define a lot of how the world works going forward that's happening here. There'll be a reaction to it. Jess, for your sake and business readers, like, plenty of people will still believe in, like, a return of rationality and sanity and normalcy, and there'll always be a counterrevolution that'll be plenty big to support truth-seeking businesses. We kinda went from, like, oh wait, COVID. Now this AI super cycle of "it's gonna kill us all," like, I think it's all just, like, this sweep, right, of nothing matters, this is all wild, let's all gamble, and where are we going? And, like, by the way, maybe China loves this because they're like America is getting so culturally unhinged at the youth, that we're just gonna dominate it all. I think it's, like, really hard to miss the hallmarks here.

Jessica: No, I think you're absolutely right. It's happening, and it's sorta wild to watch in real time. And I think people who are playing this game well, it's sort of working to them, but I also think it will work to a point. Like, if they're not building great products and building trust, then they won't, you know.

Brit Morin: I think in history we've seen that there's the CEO or the founder who's the punk rock leader, but then they hire in the loaded guns, the Cheryls, the Erics, the people behind them to, like, help build the business. So maybe there's a combination of that.

Sam Lessin: Or maybe, like, Mark Benioff has to hire, like, a Gen Z meme lord to make Salesforce.

Brit Morin: Yeah, I think every company needs a Gen Z meme lord.

Sam Lessin: People are gonna try all this shit.

Jessica: But what if it's not authentic to you, right? Like, I don't know. I mean-

Brit Morin: Does The Information need a Gen Z meme lord, Jess? Is that what you're thinking about right now?

Jessica: No, but like, I- I... We couldn't have a Gen Z meme lord. Like, it just wouldn't-

Sam Lessin: No, you totally could.

Dave Morin: You could create a brand that's like a magazine that's a different cover. You could definitely do it, but you wouldn't do it under your main brand. It's like The Economist.

Brit Morin: You should totally do that. I like that idea for you.

Jessica: Well, but it- it's interesting. I do see these memes go around. Like, the latest one, Brit, you and I were on, about who's a good hang and a fun time based on how much beer they drink following The Cheeky Pint appearance. And I'm reading this thing, had beers with half the people on the list, and I'm like, "This is completely wrong." All the people listed as heavy drinkers- ... have not touched alcohol in a decade, and actually, the best hangs, like the people I'd wanna have a beer with, are over there. But I'm like, I could spend an hour coming up with a clever meme refuting this meme.

Brit Morin: You're not the meme lord, Jess.

Jessica: But, uh...

Brit Morin: Newsflash. Just a quick newsflash for you.

Sam Lessin: It's like you have to be on Peptized to be a meme lord.

Jessica: Yeah.

Brit Morin: Yeah. Same way I had to close this.

Dave Morin: Here's the thing, Jess is a meta meme lord. She's like a meme lord above the meme lords.

Sam Lessin: But look, I'd actually say, like, Jess, I'm not stressed for you or your... what you wanna do or belief in your systems and values of rationality. I think you're gonna be fine because the reality is that's... the other thing that's going on is just, like, subcultures are getting really deep. There are plenty of people that are gonna be super deep into rational, real subculture. You just need to stay true to that, right?

Jessica: We're the truth subculture, Sam.

Sam Lessin: You are the truth. That's 100% what you are.

Jessica: Okay. I'm happy to own that subculture.

Sam Lessin: Like, I think the thing that, that's always been true, and you've known for a long time, is like-

Guest: Most people don't care about the information or truth. It just happens that people who do care about the information and truth and what's actually going on are, like, the richest, most valuable customers, right? And so, like, you just have to be okay with the fact, which I know a lot of journalists aren't. Like, this is the New York Times problem. Actually, the vast majority of the world doesn't care, right? They just want an entertaining story. They're very nihilistic. They're gonna make crazy videos about whatever. And then there's a small number of the people who, at least to date, have run things, do care a lot. And, like, I think that's gonna be the split. The question is whether the meme lords get in the building, the nihilists end up running things or not, right? That's the real question.

Jessica: Yeah, and not only are the people who are in the truth subculture wealthy off accurate information, but they're also powerful in the decisions they make, too, for now.

Guest: Historically.

Jessica: Right, that's your point. Yeah. That could change. Speaking of which, guy, we only have a couple more minutes. I am really excited and only mildly nervous to be interviewing Barry Weiss at WTF, that I announced today. And it is related to all of this because if you think about it, so Barry is the editor in chief of CBS News. Definitely the most controversial person scrutinized in media. There are publications, I hope that none of you met people read, in tech media industry trade substacks that write about her 24 hours a day. I mean, it's insane.

Guest: Jewish. They're almost certainly supported by-

Jessica: Yes

Guest: ... certain lobbies.

Jessica: No

Guest: I mean, like-

Jessica: I mean, her meetings are record- Right. Anywho, so for a year she hasn't said a single thing. Yountville, October 27th, 28th-

Sam Lessin: It's happening

Jessica: ... she's gonna say a lot.

Guest: Ooh.

Jessica: So I'm very excited, but I'm also, I'm just bracing for every level of criticism, me- Like, you know, it's just so, so turbulent.

Guest: You're bracing for, for you? It's gonna be great for you.

Sam Lessin: No, it's gonna be great for you. This is Jess becoming a meme lord.

Jessica: There are people on X who've already decided that I'm either gonna be too hard on her or too soft on her or too... Like, people, I mean, bots, basically, right? Like, but already just by having literally added her to the speaker page.

Guest: Yeah, which is how you grow your account.

Jessica: There are people with strong opinions.

Sam Lessin: Yeah, and then a week later, no one will care about anything 'cause they have forgotten.

Guest: If you're not canceled by at least some people, you're not doing anything.

Sam Lessin: Yeah. No worries, Jess. Just go hard.

Jessica: Of course I'm gonna go hard, but I also think, like, people should be interested in what she actually has to say in her mind about her own freaking strategy, instead of people just reading about leaked audio meetings.

Guest: Are you worried that this off the record conversation with only women will be biased and that only women will be able to hear the words?

Jessica: You think I'm doing it... None of this is off the record. It is so on the record.

Guest: No queens, Sam. No queens.

Sam Lessin: No queens. Down with the matriarchy.

Jessica: I have to decide what my media strategy is, and let's face it, I'm, who I let in and who I let out. I don't know. Gotta have the little perks to this job. But no, no, I, this is very much on the record.

Guest: I don't have my T-shirts with me, my Down With The Matriarchy T-shirts. Just have Muse listen in real time, create Gen Z memes for you.

Sam Lessin: Oh, that's a good idea.

Jessica: Oh, yeah. Just have a little bug in your ear. We've been thinking about a new app to launch. We should do the information meme app, Ness.

Guest: That's apparently how, like, Alex Wang was saying on X the other day, that's how he does it. He just has, like, his Muse generate all the memes.

Sam Lessin: You should hire this guy, Steve Jobs, but it's Steve Sobs, who made the best by far meme thing of Muse I've ever seen. I'll send you his link.

Jessica: Oh, I've seen that. But wait, we had one more topic, which is sort of related because I'm also interviewing her at WTF. But Brit, we wanna talk about Bumble going private.

Sam Lessin: I know. Did you know this when she was being booked-

Jessica: No

Sam Lessin: ... for WTF?

Jessica: I did not know this when she was being booked.

Sam Lessin: It's a $1.3 billion deal to go private, right?

Guest: Is there debt in that or is it all equity?

Sam Lessin: No, I think it's, there's some debt in it. They gave some details on it. It, it's at least, I think, half debt.

Jessica: Yeah, I mean, I get the sense that da- building dating apps are hard. You've watched most of them get consolidated into Match Group. I will say, I know Whitney personally, and she is, like, a beast.

Guest: Nobody has the slightest clue how to solve this problem, by the way.

Sam Lessin: I think this is a really tough category, and I think the public market pressure doesn't make it easier. So our friend John and then Robbie, his partner, like, took it private.

Guest: This is a really hard product challenge.

Sam Lessin: John's great. I don't know Robbie as well, but John's amazing. Here's my only funny thing. Their holding company is called Ithaca. I think it's really funny that Ithaca is now in the business of suitors, 'cause, like-

Jessica: Just getting into Greek mythology?

Guest: Sam, explain the joke to the audience.

Sam Lessin: Well, Ithaca is Odysseus's homeland.

Guest: It's also the homeland of Cornell.

Sam Lessin: Okay. So it's just really funny because, like, the whole thing is, like, Odysseus comes home and there are all these suitors for Penelope, kind of like suitors on Bumble. But then Odysseus kills them all. You can't kill all the suitors. Those are your customers.

Jessica: Oh my God, this is a cautionary tale. But no, in Bumble, the woman is, Penelope is the suitor 'cause Bumble, the women reach out first. The women have control.

Sam Lessin: Oh.

Jessica: Yeah, yeah.

Sam Lessin: But Penelope's not interested in any of them. That's her whole thing. She's just waiting for Odysseus.

Jessica: We're gonna have to rewrite history or something 'cause ...

Sam Lessin: There's some issue with this narrative here. Like, I feel like it's just a funny acquisition from a narrative perspective.

Jessica: This was Ithaca's first thing, right? We have to see what their second one is and if there's a trend line.

Guest: It's gonna be a lot of work.

Jessica: So Ithaca, which again is, as Sam and Dave said, a holding company started by John Hageman and Ravi, who was at, Ravi was at Sequoia. Was, yeah.

Guest: Yes.

Jessica: Their thesis is to take things and bring frontier intelligence to businesses that can leverage it to be way more successful, way more profitable, right?

Guest: Forward deployed holding company.

Jessica: Forward deployed holding company, right?

Sam Lessin: There are many of these out there right now.

Jessica: There are many of them, but they're in, like, accounting, in, like, roll-ups, right? And but, like, Thrive has one. Like, a lot, a lot of people have them

Dave Morin: Offline Holdings, we have one.

Jessica: On one level, it makes a ton of sense. I just sometimes think it's easier to build things, to be honest.

Brit Morin: From scratch?

Jessica: Yeah.

Brit Morin: Well, Bumble has a big brand. It has a ton of users.

Jessica: Yeah, that's true.

Dave Morin: I do think data matters in dating probably, but n- by the way, I worked on Hinge for over seven years, and this is really difficult.

Jessica: You did? How did I miss that?

Dave Morin: I was on the board of Hinge m- until we sold it to Match Group with Justin and those guys. So I've, like, worked in dating apps, and it's extremely difficult, and no one has come up with a new mechanic that works.

Brit Morin: Actually, TuTuTu has.

Dave Morin: Uh, it's just not at scale yet.

Jessica: You mean a mechanic like swiping? I don't think I've ever been on a dating app.

Brit Morin: There's this new type of dating app that gets you to meet in person, and it's, like, hockey sticking.

Sam Lessin: Yeah, there's a bunch of these.

Brit Morin: Yeah, so you know, offline is the place to be.

Sam Lessin: I've been pitched a few dating app mechanics I think are pretty innovative, and AI does help in certain interesting ways. I think it's a hard category.

Brit Morin: Maybe they'll just turn it into On- an OnlyFans competitor, Sam. How would you feel about that?

Dave Morin: Well, by the end of the day, you have to compete with Instagram because Instagram is just a dating app.

Jessica: It's not just... I don't date on Instagram.

Brit Morin: It's... For Sam, it's a shopping, it's a commerce app for Sam.

Sam Lessin: It's an everything app. To me, I'm kind of on the fence about it. Like, I, I really think that Jess is right. Historically, in a lot of categories, it's way easier to go de novo, especially when you have, like, humans and, like, all these p- like... But in certain things, like, there are just, like, dating... I actually backed this very small dating, agenticy dating startup, like, a year ago with a tiny angel check just to... It was a cool idea, and the... Getting traction's so difficult, right? And the reality is that, like-

Dave Morin: Liquidity is so hard. Like, you have to have a... It's a marketplace, and you have to have liquidity on both sides of the marketplace. And that's actually my big question about Bumble is it appears their liquidity has dramatically disappeared. And so whether or not they can get an advantage to get distribution again and drive liquidity on both sides of the market is, like, extremely hard. It's harder than social networking.

Brit Morin: Do you mean having hot people on both sides?

Dave Morin: No, just having people on both sides.

Brit Morin: Do you think they rank their people based on, like, h- matchability scores internally?

Sam Lessin: Internally, absolutely.

Dave Morin: Yeah, of course they do.

Jessica: Isn't that how dating apps work?

Brit Morin: No, but, like, do you think internally they're like, "Oh, we've got 40% real, like, hotness here," versus Hinge has 60%?

Dave Morin: Yeah, they know everything.

Sam Lessin: That would be really funny if a public dating app was like, "We're doing very well because of our 100 million users, 90 million of them are really hot." Or another one's like, "We have a problem. It's like we have an enormous network, but it's all the most ugly people. What do we do with this?"

Dave Morin: By the way, this is not dissimilar to... There's, like, an adjacent business story here, which is that, like, you know, Airbnb and Booking.com are, like, the tale of two wildly different business strategies in the same market, and Bumble is kind of like Airbnb. They stuck on their same mechanic for five years. Didn't work out very well. Stock went sideways. Match Group, on the other hand, bought every single vertical dating app in the game. So they have Hinge. They have M- Match. They have e- Harmony. They've got whatever. They have everything.

Brit Morin: They have, like, the farmer one, farmer dating.

Dave Morin: Yeah, they went completely horizontal across a ton of different verticals, and so they've been driving a much better business. They also aren't doing that well, but it's an interesting business strategy question as to, like, which way you have to play in order to, like, get all these different verticals.

Sam Lessin: It'll be fun to watch, smart people taking on a hard problem.

Dave Morin: Yeah, totally.

Brit Morin: I'm rooting for them.

Dave Morin: Someone needs to do it because it's kinda sad situation out there. It's actually, like, a really important mission.

Brit Morin: No one likes to date anymore. It's really sad.

Jessica: Well, we will be watching.

Brit Morin: They're just making memes.

Sam Lessin: The memes are so good, though.

Brit Morin: Jess, are you gonna buy the new Apple Home View Center thing?

Jessica: Don't need it. I didn't know if it was a meme.

Brit Morin: It's the Facebook Portal/an iPad on your kitchen table.

Jessica: I have six of those things sitting in a closet from four different companies. Why do I need a fifth?

Brit Morin: Yeah, but are they connected through all your iOS devices? 'Cause you've got your photo rolls and Siri AI, which is better now.

Jessica: I'm trying to get screens out of my kids' face. I want screens out of their face. I'm not putting them in my kids' views.

Sam Lessin: Apple would do... But to that point, you know what I would buy from Apple? Is, like, an Apple printer.

Jessica: I'd buy a button to buy more paper towels. I wanna reduce the friction in commerce.

Dave Morin: They used to make printers back in the old days.

Sam Lessin: I know. I had a dot matrix printer.

Dave Morin: Bring back the ImageWriter.

Sam Lessin: If you had an ImageWriter 50000- ... and it, like, was a beautiful, modern ImageWriter, but it, like, was smart about what it printed for you and, like, kept you off your phone, that I would be... And you could do banners around your office with the little dot paper. That's a very Gen Z coded thing for them to do- ... would be for them to bring back the printer, and that would be sick.

Brit Morin: Maybe ModRetro should do that.

Jessica: I just heard the printer automatically going off 'cause of my, one of my Muse tasks still working really well, and I was delighted by it. I just felt, in my physical environment, it was great.

Sam Lessin: Jess, wouldn't you want, like, ImageWriter 10 million, wouldn't you want it to make, like, a slightly different chime for different people so you know whose paper is up? Like, there's all these, like, cool things you could do.

Jessica: Guys, we're just teaching our kids that, like, the only way through the world is through, like, an Apple screen. I don't want them anywhere near me.

Sam Lessin: Well, no, through an Apple printed piece of paper.

Brit Morin: Whatever. You already have an Alexa and a Google. We have all the things. I'm just gonna unify it all.

Jessica: There's not a single one in our house. There's not a single one. They're all in closets.

Dave Morin: What are you talking about? I've seen Google things in all your houses.

Jessica: They are not visible. They are all put away in cabinets.

Sam Lessin: I literally have two phones on me- ... in front of me, like, right now.

Brit Morin: The Morins over here are gonna go full Apple Home, and we'll report back in, like, three months and tell you how much awesome, more better our life is.

Sam Lessin: I don't even like Apple, and I have more Apple products than anything.

Jessica: No, no, it's not having... It's specifically the era of the HomePod with the screen. It's the Alexas with the screens, the Googles with the screens, the Facebook Portal. Remember that puppy?

Brit Morin: The most tech people that I know are the most anti screens. It's really funny.

Jessica: It's not funny. There's, like, a canary in the coal mines. I am so excited I'm gonna finally see the Elizabeth Holmes movie this weekend. Sam's seen it.

Dave Morin: Oh, yeah, gotta see it.

Sam Lessin: Oh, my God, guys, I'm so excited to see it a second time. I may be the on- first person in the world to see it twice.

Jessica: This is so exciting. Like, I cannot wait. Will we be able to do spoilers on the pod? I don't know, but, like-

Sam Lessin: Well, I think, again, this comes down... It'll be an interesting question 'cause you'll see it, Jess, and you'll feel the art and the importance and decide whether it's the rare thing that is worth people just seeing.

Brit Morin: Oh, I can keep my mouth shut when it's understood.

Dave Morin: I think everybody's gonna go.

Jessica: Dave, I hope the rest of your birthday is full of fun and minimal nasal congestion. We're thinking of you, buddy.

Dave Morin: Yeah. Thanks, uh-

Jessica: Hang in there

Dave Morin: ... thanks, Jess.

Jessica: Okay. And dear listeners, we'll see you again 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.