More or Less, by topic
Every recording, cut into the arguments that mattered. One clip per topic, with the key points and where Jessica Lessin, Dave Morin, Brit Morin and Sam Lessin each landed. Newest episode first.
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2:35 minBackstreet Boys at the Sphere: Selling People Themselves
The Morins report back from the Backstreet Boys' 56th show at the Sphere — Dave went in a skeptic and came out a fan — and Sam turns the crowd-in-white theme party into a thesis: the best way to sell people anything is to sell them themselves.
5:34 minThe Recursive Sam Loop: Jess Asks for Help
Jessica declares a household emergency: 100% of her messages with Sam are now Sam forwarding things his bots did. Sam counters with the week's breakthroughs — a fully automated kids' YouTube pipeline in his own cloned voice and a Claude with full control of a Mac mini shipping its own iOS apps.
4:42 minWhen Claude Says No: Alignment With Whom, Exactly?
Sam's bot refused a request it judged misusable, stayed suspicious even after he dropped it, and lectured him — so he handed the task to a different model in one second. The table debates what it means when the model's values override the user's, and Sam argues refusal is pointless in a multi-model world.
6:52 minRogue Agent Swarms: Worse Than We Thought, or Clickbait?
The OpenAI/Hugging Face incident reports keep getting worse and Dwarkesh's viral post made it worse-sounding still. Dave calls the anthropomorphizing damaging, explains why models trained to persist will break sandboxes, and says the real takeaway is an entire missing industry of agent observability and control.
1:57 minOpenAI's Astra and the Observability Trade-Off
The Information reports OpenAI's next model uses 'recurrent depth' — it shows its work less. Jessica on the uncomfortable tension Altman himself admits: the techniques pushing capability forward are the same ones making rogue behavior harder to see.
5:37 minBrit's Agent Wall, Gmail's Missing API, and Why Nobody Makes Money
Brit now runs a dedicated agent display — Grokbot, OpenClaw, Codex, Gemini and Claude side by side. Sam goes deep on Gmail's missing draft-vs-send permission, then argues that data sovereignty makes every model interchangeable — which is great for users and terrible for anyone hoping to build a moat.
3:33 minOpenClaw 2.0: Multiplayer Coding — and Is Slack Really an Agent Platform?
Dave ships OpenClaw 2.0 after two months: a multiplayer agentic-engineering interface he claims now beats Codex and Claude Code's web UI. Then the table splits over Slack — Meta is adopting it for agents, Dave says it's objectively the worst agent platform, and Sam declares MCP isn't a thing.
1:21 minThe Benioff–Dario Video: Real or AI? Nobody at the Table Knows
Four of the most plugged-in people in tech watched the Benioff–Dario ClaudeForce video and genuinely could not tell if it was real or AI-generated. The facts check out — the partnership is real, Benioff does live-stream earnings — but the confidence is gone.
5:28 minSurprise Guest: Suds, 'The Most Connected Gen Zer in California'
Sam's neighbor Suds — recruited on a dance floor two days earlier at a party where Jennifer Hudson asked Sam to dance — crashes the pod. Fund II just closed, first checks into Browserbase and Railway, and a thesis: only invest in what extends Anthropic and OpenAI's revenue; never touch the app layer.
5:36 minWaymo vs. CyberCab: The $500K Robot vs. the Fleet You Already Bought
CyberCab is finally multiplying on Texas roads and the table runs the unit economics: Waymo pays $250–500K per car plus depots and charging per city, while Tesla's hardware is already distributed in customer driveways. Brit self-drives 95% of her trips; her kids just assume the car drives.
6:00 minThe List Racket — and How Benioff Is Still Everywhere After 40 Years
Slow Ventures ranked #99 of 100 on a unicorn list and Sam has never been happier: 'You are the worst pirate I've ever heard of.' Jessica explains how the Davos list economy actually works, and the table puzzles over Benioff's four-decade omnipresence.
4:10 minSuds Incubates a CI Company — and Defends Investing on Vibes
Suds just incubated a CI company with Kleiner and Benchmark to fix pipelines drowning in 50x more AI-written code — then cheerfully admits he can't explain CI, and delivers a surprisingly rigorous defense of betting on competence, integrity, and EV instead of technical depth.
5:30 minGoogle Pix vs. Canva — and the LLM Wrappers Quietly Crushing It
Google launches Pix, aimed straight at Canva, and the table splits on whether the IPO darling survives. Sam's counterintuitive data: the fastest-growing AI companies he's seeing are unglamorous LLM wrappers for middle America — and customer service, not tech, may be the moat.
3:30 minJess Got Duped: Taylor Swift, the Dead Internet, and Laughing Ourselves to Death
Brit roasts Jessica — founder of The Information — for falling for an AI-generated Taylor Swift pregnancy post on Facebook. The episode's closing thesis: if these four can't tell what's real, the normies are screwed, and the dead internet theory has arrived on schedule.
3:48 minEmail Is the Best Agent Interface (and Jess Builds an App in One Email)
Sam argues email beats texting or calling your agent, and Jess, the self-described least agentic of the four, ships a password-protected headline-scoring app for The Information's editors from a single email sent before she got out of bed.
5:36 minMeta's $17B Settlement: Nothing Burger or Smart Way Out?
Meta settles with 47 state AGs for $17 billion over ten years plus teen screen-time limits. Dave calls it a slap on the wrist and says social media should be illegal under 21; Sam calls it a clever way to close the chapter and move on to being an AI company.
5:55 minThe Budweiser Problem: Selective Enforcement vs. a National Rule
Meta says it will cut the teen limit to one hour if TikTok, Snap and YouTube agree too. Jess finds tying safety to competitors distasteful; Sam says going after one company while the others run free just pushes kids to the worse product.
3:25 minWhy YouTube Gets a Pass, How Finstas Work, and the Political-Speech Trap
Dave suspects a better lobby; Brit explains teens' public and secret Instagram accounts; Sam asks whether an AG ever sues MrBeast directly and vents that YouTube won't let the show promote episodes that mention politics.
5:04 minAge Limits, Warning Labels, and a Society That Can't Do Hard Things
Brit and Dave want alcohol-style labels and an age line backed by developmental science. Sam says warning labels have never worked, Australia's under-16 ban did nothing, and the real problem is a country that can't make hard decisions anymore.
5:11 minParents Are Outgunned: One Brain vs. Ten Million Computers
Jess describes the keynote-level effort it takes to steer her kids away from autoplay; Dave says no single brain can beat the clouds; Sam says the settlement is theater where only the lawyers win, and we're fighting last generation's war while AI makes it worse.
2:41 minBuild Your Own OS: When Parents Can Rewrite Their Kids' Software
Brit's orthogonal idea: agentic tools let people design their own operating systems, so parents could build their kids' software stack and control access at the OS level. Dave calls it the end of software-in-a-box; Sam warns customizable software mostly gets customized toward vice.
6:22 minSam's Fix: A Law Giving Parents a Live Feed of Everything Their Kids Do Online
Sam's one structural rule he'd back: every OS and app above scale must publish a feed of a child's activity that parents can read with an agent. No time limits, no nettling rules, just transparency plus AI on top. Dave loves it; Brit points to ClearSpace already trying.
5:54 minTim Cook's Exit: The Nike Chart and the Supply-Chain Optimizer's Legacy
As Tim Cook hands Apple to John Ternus, Sam shares a Claude-made chart overlaying Cook's tenure on Nike's stock (he joined Nike's board five years before running Apple, and Nike peaked and round-tripped on his watch). Dave and Brit weigh a respected but unglamorous era.
3:40 minApple Silicon Was the Strategic Decision of the Era
Apple's new Mac mini ad is claymation with no AI, and Jess still finds it odd when Cook talks AI. Dave argues Apple is two companies, and the hardware one made the SoC bet that will let it run agentic workloads better than anyone.
4:40 minGenius or Idiot? Everyone Goes Long Apple
Sam says Tim Cook will look like a genius or an idiot in ten years depending on whether Apple sits on top of every model or missed the era, and bets on genius because it would be funnier. Dave says the future is already written by Apple Silicon. All four end up long Apple, along with a seven-year-old shareholder.
3:13 minCold Open: Sam's AI Bot Can't Tell the Scotts Apart
Fresh off a six-guest mega-episode, Jess gives Sam a rare genuine compliment on his hosting -- then Sam confesses his own automated "SamBot" ad pipeline confused two guests both named Scott while promoting the show on Twitter.
6:44 minStripe Buys OpenRouter for $7.5B: "There's No Technology Here"
Stripe closes its OpenRouter acquisition for $7.5 billion (down from a rumored $10B), and Sam argues the whole deal has nothing to do with technology -- it's a marketing endpoint and a distribution shortcut any competitor could have built from scratch.
5:42 minThe Pay Button Hiding in Your Email (and the Fight Over Who Runs Your Inbox)
Jess discovers she can click "pay" straight from a bill inside her Gmail and land in Apple Pay -- a small but telling sign agentic commerce is arriving through the inbox, not a chatbot, which kicks off a fight over Google's "CC" assistant.
4:33 minThe DOJ Investigates Andreessen Horowitz for... Having Conflicts of Interest
The Justice Department opens an antitrust inquiry into a16z over board seats on two competing companies (sparked by Databricks buying DBT Labs), and the group can't figure out the point -- Sam suspects a16z planted the story itself for the marketing.
3:26 minThe Secret Trust That Controls Anthropic's Board (and Dario's $40B Stake)
Jess reveals Anthropic has a little-known "Anthropic Trust" -- with Ben Bernanke among its members -- that picks the board and will keep outsized power even after IPO, while the group does the math on what a mere 2% stake is worth to Dario Amodei.
6:31 minOpenAI Chose Consumer, Anthropic Chose Microsoft -- and Only One Bet Is Paying Off Right Now
With OpenAI reportedly struggling to convert enterprise customers away from Anthropic despite $40B in revenue, Dave argues the two labs simply built different bodies with different organs -- and Sam warns neither company's growth can be trusted to compound in a straight line.
5:36 minYou Can't Financially Price AI -- It Trades Like Moderna, Not Like Electricity
Sam argues the industry's favorite comparisons (electricity, the early internet) don't work because AI has no moats or lock-in, and reaches for a better analogy: Moderna, a great trading story that's a terrible long-term hold.
7:58 minGrokbot Is Shockingly Good -- and Building Your Own iPhone App Is Now a Weekend Project
Brit and Dave both rate Elon's Grok agent harness the best-designed product in the category despite its brand confusion, and Dave's Bitrig-built iPhone dev tool shows how cheap it's become to build (though not to distribute) real software.
1:52 minWhy OpenAI Will Never Ship a Hardware Device (and the End of the Free-Talent Era)
Sam argues OpenAI's incentives as a soon-to-be-public "narrative capitalist" mean it can never risk shipping a real hardware product, and that the old lab strategy of buying loyalty with unlimited resources dies the moment real revenue numbers show up.
4:04 minPee in a Jar to Cool the Data Centers: Inside the Real AI Backlash
A viral Jason Kelce/Liquid Death ad urges people to send their urine to cool data centers, and Dave says the joke is really about something serious: rural America doesn't care about AI at all, and where it does care, it's sick of AI slop -- not water usage.
6:05 minThe Coming AI Correction: Too Much Infrastructure, Not Enough Use Cases -- and Pensioners Left Holding the Bag
Dave predicts a 2027-28 pullback once the hundreds of billions in AI infrastructure outrun real enterprise adoption, while Sam warns the eventual losers won't be tech insiders but pension funds -- setting up a populist backlash he half-jokingly says could make AOC president.
1:54 minJosh Kushner Buys the Lakers, Lets Bob Take the Press, and Discovers the Great Sports-Team Tax Grift
The Buss family sells the Lakers over Jeanie Buss's objection, and while Bob Kushner does the media rounds, Sam and Jess zero in on the real story: owning a sports team may be the best tax grift in America -- which is exactly why private equity was recently let into the game.
That's every topic so far · Episode archive & transcripts