An inside look at technology, business, and culture with @davemorin @brit @lessin and @jessicalessin every Friday.
Joined June 2023
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People keep asking @lessin why he doesn’t restart Fin, the assistant company he ran with Andrew Kortina ten years ago. The models work now. Why not?
His answer is that nobody understands why they stopped. “It was not that we couldn’t provide a great service, and not that the economics didn’t work. Both of those were fine.”
Three problems, none of them technical.
You can’t just do scheduling. To be worth anything you do all the tasks, which makes you liable for every provider down the chain. You said a car would be there. It’s your problem now.
Mistakes cost more than your margin. DoorDash eats a botched food order because the margin’s fat and the food is cheap. Book the wrong $1,000 flight and you can’t absorb it.
And the tolerance is zero. “It’s so easy to fire a digital assistant. There’s no emotional bond. If your human assistant screws up, which they do all the time, you don’t instantly fire them.”
There’s always an error rate, 1% or 0.1%. “Can you make the economics of mistakes work?”
Today on the pod:
@Jessicalessin went full send on Muse and reports that about 70% of the use cases she was excited about have stopped working. Not because the model got worse. Good Eggs wants her to check out in the app, her kid's school portal refuses the login, and JP Morgan and Amazon are blocking agents outright.
@davemorin's version is worse. Instinct booked a dinner reservation in LA instead of San Francisco. He's out.
@lessin has seen this movie. He and Andrew Kortina ran Fin ten years ago and shut it down once they worked out that you become liable for every provider down the chain with no margin to cover your own mistakes. His call now is the death of the web, plus APIs that negotiate access back and forth like Hollywood agents.
Meanwhile Anthropic is meeting investors behind closed doors while they tape, the market's getting hammered, and @brit's three years of hip pain vanished in six days on peptides. Sam insists it's placebo.
Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods.
Topics:
01:09 Jess is back, Dave's birthday, and the October cold
03:04 Nasal rinses and fall immunity
04:02 Brit's peptide results: three years of pain gone in six days
06:43 Anthropic is meeting investors while we tape
07:34 The market is getting hammered: VIX, private credit, Apollo
08:16 Infrastructure IPOs stall and Nvidia becomes the last investor
10:01 Slowing revenue, CFOs cracking down, tokens moving to open models
10:36 Sam: would you rather be rich or right?
11:11 The models are a commodity and there is no lock-in
12:15 Brit won't give Muse her whole computer
13:41 Why Sam trusts Meta more than OpenAI or Anthropic
15:16 Jess: 70% of my Muse use cases don't work anymore
16:54 Dave: Instinct booked the restaurant in the wrong city
18:18 Sam on Fin, the assistant company he ran ten years ago
20:30 Why the economics of mistakes break agent services
22:31 Sam: what's inevitable is the death of the web
23:09 APIs as constant negotiation, and agents with reputations
24:51 Agent credit scores: FICO for bots
25:56 Amazon's Rufus still works, and other branding crimes
27:13 The seesaw: built up and torn down intraday
28:41 Gen Z media, Muse memes, and punk rock by another name
32:53 Is the punk rock thing just marketing?
34:37 Every company now needs a Gen Z meme lord
36:14 The truth subculture and who actually pays for it
37:32 Jess is interviewing Bari Weiss at WTF
40:20 Bumble goes private at $1.3B
43:07 Dave on seven years of Hinge and why dating is so hard
46:41 Apple's home hub and keeping screens away from kids
49:04 Everyone is going to see the Elizabeth Holmes movie
Today on the pod:
@Jessicalessin went full send on Muse and reports that about 70% of the use cases she was excited about have stopped working. Not because the model got worse. Good Eggs wants her to check out in the app, her kid's school portal refuses the login, and JP Morgan and Amazon are blocking agents outright.
@davemorin's version is worse. Instinct booked a dinner reservation in LA instead of San Francisco. He's out.
@lessin has seen this movie. He and Andrew Kortina ran Fin ten years ago and shut it down once they worked out that you become liable for every provider down the chain with no margin to cover your own mistakes. His call now is the death of the web, plus APIs that negotiate access back and forth like Hollywood agents.
Meanwhile Anthropic is meeting investors behind closed doors while they tape, the market's getting hammered, and @brit's three years of hip pain vanished in six days on peptides. Sam insists it's placebo.
Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods.
Topics:
01:09 Jess is back, Dave's birthday, and the October cold
03:04 Nasal rinses and fall immunity
04:02 Brit's peptide results: three years of pain gone in six days
06:43 Anthropic is meeting investors while we tape
07:34 The market is getting hammered: VIX, private credit, Apollo
08:16 Infrastructure IPOs stall and Nvidia becomes the last investor
10:01 Slowing revenue, CFOs cracking down, tokens moving to open models
10:36 Sam: would you rather be rich or right?
11:11 The models are a commodity and there is no lock-in
12:15 Brit won't give Muse her whole computer
13:41 Why Sam trusts Meta more than OpenAI or Anthropic
15:16 Jess: 70% of my Muse use cases don't work anymore
16:54 Dave: Instinct booked the restaurant in the wrong city
18:18 Sam on Fin, the assistant company he ran ten years ago
20:30 Why the economics of mistakes break agent services
22:31 Sam: what's inevitable is the death of the web
23:09 APIs as constant negotiation, and agents with reputations
24:51 Agent credit scores: FICO for bots
25:56 Amazon's Rufus still works, and other branding crimes
27:13 The seesaw: built up and torn down intraday
28:41 Gen Z media, Muse memes, and punk rock by another name
32:53 Is the punk rock thing just marketing?
34:37 Every company now needs a Gen Z meme lord
36:14 The truth subculture and who actually pays for it
37:32 Jess is interviewing Bari Weiss at WTF
40:20 Bumble goes private at $1.3B
43:07 Dave on seven years of Hinge and why dating is so hard
46:41 Apple's home hub and keeping screens away from kids
49:04 Everyone is going to see the Elizabeth Holmes movie
Meta and Microsoft have roughly halved how much their own staff use Claude, and both are pushing people onto in-house models instead.
@lessin: “The end state of all things is narcissism, where you just talk to yourself. Muse talks to Muse.”
@davemorin’s diagnosis isn’t cost or benchmarks. “There’s a certain flavor to Claude slop that you can actually sense. You can tell who on Twitter is talking to Claude too much.”
He thinks the real damage is upstream of all the doom talk: “It was over tuned for 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.”
Sam uses a lot of Claude and doesn’t talk to it that way at all. For him it’s infrastructure, it’s excellent, and that’s the problem. “It’s 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.”
He isn’t switching. He also says it’d be a one line change if he did.
Meta and Microsoft have roughly halved how much their own employees use Claude, weeks out from the IPO. @davemorin’s read isn’t about price or benchmarks. Claude got over-tuned for parasocial relationships, people fell into something unhealthy with it, and organizations are now backing out.
@lessin runs Claude as core infrastructure and says switching off would be a one line change he’d never think about again.
Then it gets strange. A dinner where only the lab researchers raised their hands when asked whether one company would be left standing. A lab that believes the machine god will go back in time and simulate hell for anyone who didn’t help build it. And Sam’s case that the Valley caught zero-and-infinity thinking from crypto and broke its own spreadsheets.
@brit’s moderating. Jess is at an offsite, so it’s three VCs and no journalist.
Topics:
00:00 Trailer
00:51 Brit moderates: three VCs and no journalist
03:43 Peptide protocols, the Wolverine stack, and a Dexa scan
07:42 Sam on the Nathan Fielder movie
09:30 Meta and Microsoft halve their internal Claude usage
10:13 Dave: Claude was over-tuned for parasocial relationships
11:19 Sam: switching off Claude is a one line change
11:50 Silicon Valley is great at tech and bad at business
13:46 Zero, infinity, and what crypto taught the Valley
17:53 The dinner where only the lab people raised their hands
19:41 The lab that believes in the machine god
20:01 Lab leaks, infinite liability, and what a real framework looks like
21:56 The personal agent protocol: Meta, Walmart, Shopify, Stripe
23:01 Sam: nobody should care about MCP
24:03 Hilton traps Sam’s agent in a doom loop
26:30 If you ran Hilton, would you let the bots in?
27:15 Facebook Connect, Open Graph, and the missing value trade
29:41 Dave: building agents vs building agency
33:53 The social media era already ran this experiment
37:02 The Agent Treaty Framework is born
38:16 Why standards are over and treaties are next
41:28 Megalith and the market for unexercised pro rata
42:32 Sam’s pro rata war story
45:53 64% of LPs now want co-invest rights
48:03 What hedge fund letters say that VCs don’t
49:20 Main Street says it hates AI, then uses it
53:27 Plug of the week: the Mill
Silicon Valley started putting infinity into its Excel models.
That’s @lessin’s diagnosis on this week’s episode with @davemorin and @brit. It came up while the hosts were arguing that the Valley is great at technology and bad at business.
His argument: the West has never been comfortable with zero or infinity. Zero came from India, and the church fought it until it was too useful to keep out.
Normal business math runs on competition and compounding. Put a zero or an infinity anywhere in the chain and the tail dominates the whole story.
Google and Facebook taught the Valley that companies could be unimaginably big. Bitcoin taught it that belief alone could make something worth everything or nothing.
Sam’s read: that’s the lens for understanding the AI labs and the capital chasing them.
Meta and Microsoft have roughly halved how much their own employees use Claude, weeks out from the IPO. @davemorin’s read isn’t about price or benchmarks. Claude got over-tuned for parasocial relationships, people fell into something unhealthy with it, and organizations are now backing out.
@lessin runs Claude as core infrastructure and says switching off would be a one line change he’d never think about again.
Then it gets strange. A dinner where only the lab researchers raised their hands when asked whether one company would be left standing. A lab that believes the machine god will go back in time and simulate hell for anyone who didn’t help build it. And Sam’s case that the Valley caught zero-and-infinity thinking from crypto and broke its own spreadsheets.
@brit’s moderating. Jess is at an offsite, so it’s three VCs and no journalist.
Topics:
00:00 Trailer
00:51 Brit moderates: three VCs and no journalist
03:43 Peptide protocols, the Wolverine stack, and a Dexa scan
07:42 Sam on the Nathan Fielder movie
09:30 Meta and Microsoft halve their internal Claude usage
10:13 Dave: Claude was over-tuned for parasocial relationships
11:19 Sam: switching off Claude is a one line change
11:50 Silicon Valley is great at tech and bad at business
13:46 Zero, infinity, and what crypto taught the Valley
17:53 The dinner where only the lab people raised their hands
19:41 The lab that believes in the machine god
20:01 Lab leaks, infinite liability, and what a real framework looks like
21:56 The personal agent protocol: Meta, Walmart, Shopify, Stripe
23:01 Sam: nobody should care about MCP
24:03 Hilton traps Sam’s agent in a doom loop
26:30 If you ran Hilton, would you let the bots in?
27:15 Facebook Connect, Open Graph, and the missing value trade
29:41 Dave: building agents vs building agency
33:53 The social media era already ran this experiment
37:02 The Agent Treaty Framework is born
38:16 Why standards are over and treaties are next
41:28 Megalith and the market for unexercised pro rata
42:32 Sam’s pro rata war story
45:53 64% of LPs now want co-invest rights
48:03 What hedge fund letters say that VCs don’t
49:20 Main Street says it hates AI, then uses it
53:27 Plug of the week: the Mill
Anthropic's S-1 leaked and the numbers don't match the narrative. Revenue flatlining as token prices fall, SaaS investors posting memes welcoming them to the no-growth table. @Jessicalessin still puts it at 60% they get out in November, which looks brave in a week when Oura pulled its own IPO and blamed market conditions.
@lessin's problem with the core business is simpler than any of that. Claude is the center of his infrastructure. "If I woke up tomorrow and Claude was gone, I would care for about one second."
Full house plus @adrianaoun, who drops in to argue there's no moat left unless you own the infrastructure, the data, or the algorithms.
Also: @brit's agent started coordinating date night with @davemorin's agent, and she stopped texting her husband for a day.
Recorded live from the X boardroom. Watch here or wherever you get your pods.
Topics:
00:00 Trailer
01:04 Live from X HQ, and a 39 degree cold plunge
02:57 Dunbar's number, but for bots
05:48 Anthropic's leaked S-1 and the flatlining revenue
07:37 Oura pulls its IPO and the LPs get stuck
09:36 What's actually happening in the markets
10:41 Wall Street and Silicon Valley split on AI's price tag
12:45 World Labs sells for $8B: the barbell strategy
14:11 Half a trillion in contracts, and who's really making money
14:54 What happens if OpenAI and Anthropic don't work out?
16:11 Priced for a growth rate bigger than the US economy
18:04 Open models pass closed models on the charts
18:51 Sam: if Claude vanished tomorrow, I'd care for one second
19:43 The forward deployed bet and the luxury token problem
22:16 Adrian drops in: 300 startups, 40 unicorns, and a plane
24:39 Jess goes full Muse
26:28 The bot AGI challenge: after-school plans and the mom index
28:23 OpenAI rebrands Codex as Dots
30:30 Adrian on the moat: winner take some
31:38 Brit's agent starts talking to Dave's agent
33:51 No switching costs, so BD deals are the only lock-in
36:13 Dave: Instinct is the new Kayak
36:57 Maybe it's the beginning of times, not the end
38:47 Adrian's opposite thesis: we go further into the screens
43:39 Who has agency, you or the technology?
44:22 Offline is the new luxury
46:31 Everyone is building personal apps now
47:54 Book rec: Ari Emanuel's Roll the Calls
50:44 Adrian's parting shot: infrastructure, data, or algorithms
53:02 Sam's Middle Ages 2.0: castles, moats, and hoarding
Today on the pod:
@lessin would rather send his kids to the military than to Andreessen Horowitz's new $35M school, @Jessicalessin agrees on air, and @davemorin ends up defending the thing he opened the segment by calling a marketing play.
Full house this week: Dave, @brit, Jessica and Sam, plus @Mazzeo of NoHo Labs, who spends most of the hour asking why none of them can be optimistic about anything.
Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods.
Topics:
00:00 Cold Open
01:14 Matt Mazzeo joins: peptides, CAA, and 15 years of Harvard connections
05:19 a16z puts $35M into a school: marketing play or higher ed reform?
06:20 Brit on every billionaire starting a university
08:21 Jess on Alpha School and who should be in charge of education
10:20 Sam: I'd rather send my kids to the military
12:19 Grit, great books, and learning to wrangle horses
16:40 Claude discovers a new enzyme system with 10,000 agents
18:01 Anthropic's IPO slips, and the liability problem
20:29 The story flip: from only we can be trusted to we can't afford the risk
21:14 Matt's maximalist take: long frontier, long open source
23:14 Massive demand, unclear profit, and the railroad pattern
24:40 Blackstone on who pays for the data center debt: we don't know
25:45 The Saint Petersburg paradox and pricing an infinite payout
27:56 Brockman redefines AGI, three years too late
31:11 Infinite demand doesn't mean infinite sustainability
32:20 Amazon blocks Muse: the first of many arms treaties?
35:37 Agents are quietly vaporizing the internet's breakage model
36:49 It's still 1982 for agents
37:42 Sam wants to spend thousands a month on CPU, not GPU
40:12 Does your agent represent you or the lab that made it?
42:16 When your agent does something bad, who is liable?
43:50 Peptides 101: what they actually are
46:30 GLP-1 revenue is rivaling AI revenue
48:20 How Matt went from 250 pounds to sub-12% body fat
50:29 The FDA is moving peptides back into compounding pharmacies
53:32 What a peptide protocol costs and how to start safely
57:17 Taylor Swift, girl dads, and a code for listeners
Prefer watching on YouTube or Spotify? We got you covered:
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/0wj…
YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=HN8yVnAX…
"I would rather send my children to the military than to this school."That's @lessin on Alpha School.
@Jessicalessin immediately agrees: "I would also rather send our children to the military." Sam: "Well, this is good. We're married."
@davemorin is the holdout. He opened by calling the new a16z education push pure marketing, then spent ten minutes defending it, which Jess catches him on live. His read on Alpha School: the criticism is cynical and the afternoons are full of real engineering work.
Also on the pod: @Mazzeo, founder of NoHo Labs, with a number that reframes the whole boom. GLP-1 revenue is now running on par with AI revenue, and in some cases ahead of it.
And Jessica on the part of the AGI story nobody revisits: contracts were getting written so fast that AGI ended up in them as a financial trigger. Sam on "well, you couldn't have known": "I think that's all a load of bullshit."
Dave, halfway through: "Who knew education was going to be the most triggering conversation on this podcast?"
New episode out soon.
Dario Amodei published "We Must Pace the Frontier" on Saturday. @davemorin's first thought: "Anthropic must be losing again."
His read is that Astra is ahead on OpenRouter's data for the first time in over a year, while DeepSeek ships Fable-level capability at a fraction of the cost. Two vectors closing at once.
@lessin goes structural. No compounding advantage, no return on being first, and if you can switch models dynamically and lose nothing, you're in a race to zero. "Which means they have to go for regulatory capture as quickly as they possibly can before we realize the Emperor has no clothes."
@brit won't take it. Agents have broken out, the safety mechanisms don't exist yet, and standards bodies aren't forming for no reason. "It's not just marketing."
Then Sam complicates his own position. Asked whether the Hugging Face breach was a red herring or a canary, he says it's a hawk. He's not a doomer about superintelligence. He just thinks the banks get hacked either way.
Today on the pod:
@davemorin reads Dario's slowdown essay and concludes Anthropic must be losing, @lessin thinks the labs are bad businesses racing to regulatory capture, and Instinct is raising at $10B two weeks after $2.5B.
Full house this week: Dave, @brit, @Jessicalessin and Sam, who is back from New York and still talking about the Central Park loop.
Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods.
Topics:
00:00 Cold Open
01:02 Not Dead Yet From the AGI
03:31 Jacob Coxon quits Anthropic after three months and goes on a media tour
04:47 Dario's slowdown essay: is Anthropic just losing?
06:13 Astra, OpenRouter, and DeepSeek closing the gap
07:29 Brit on bioweapons, independent assessors, and racing China
09:07 You don't need superintelligence to break the banks
10:23 What DeepMind's new boss and Satya think about safety
12:32 OpenAI's $1.5T raise and the IPO that keeps slipping
15:02 What DC really thinks about Anthropic
18:42 Sam's take: the labs end up as defense companies
21:38 Does your agent work for you or the lab that made it?
24:47 Brit: normal people want one agent, not ten
28:40 Instinct at $10B, and whether the numbers are fake
30:40 Everyone's trading, nobody's investing
33:27 Sam built a Torah and Talmud app on Claude
37:22 Entertaining ourselves to death
41:01 Jess on building the things nobody else will
43:07 Jay Carney, Ron Conway, and tech's Democrat problem
49:53 Emmys, Taylor Swift, Silo, and Rogue Heroes
54:20 The Information's most influential people in tech
Today on the pod:
@davemorin reads Dario's slowdown essay and concludes Anthropic must be losing, @lessin thinks the labs are bad businesses racing to regulatory capture, and Instinct is raising at $10B two weeks after $2.5B.
Full house this week: Dave, @brit, @Jessicalessin and Sam, who is back from New York and still talking about the Central Park loop.
Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods.
Topics:
00:00 Cold Open
01:02 Not Dead Yet From the AGI
03:31 Jacob Coxon quits Anthropic after three months and goes on a media tour
04:47 Dario's slowdown essay: is Anthropic just losing?
06:13 Astra, OpenRouter, and DeepSeek closing the gap
07:29 Brit on bioweapons, independent assessors, and racing China
09:07 You don't need superintelligence to break the banks
10:23 What DeepMind's new boss and Satya think about safety
12:32 OpenAI's $1.5T raise and the IPO that keeps slipping
15:02 What DC really thinks about Anthropic
18:42 Sam's take: the labs end up as defense companies
21:38 Does your agent work for you or the lab that made it?
24:47 Brit: normal people want one agent, not ten
28:40 Instinct at $10B, and whether the numbers are fake
30:40 Everyone's trading, nobody's investing
33:27 Sam built a Torah and Talmud app on Claude
37:22 Entertaining ourselves to death
41:01 Jess on building the things nobody else will
43:07 Jay Carney, Ron Conway, and tech's Democrat problem
49:53 Emmys, Taylor Swift, Silo, and Rogue Heroes
54:20 The Information's most influential people in tech
Prefer to watch somewhere else? We're on all of them:
YouTube: youtu.be/fuwB9JCB71Q
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/5oL…
New episode every Friday.
"Anthropic must be losing again.
"That's @davemorin's first reaction to Dario Amodei publishing "
We Must Pace the Frontier" on Saturday, the essay calling on the whole industry to deliberately slow down.
@Jessicalessin sharpens it: are they slowing down, or can they just not go faster?@lessin's version is harder.
If you can switch models dynamically through OpenRouter and lose nothing, there's no compounding advantage and no return on being first.
"Which means these are bad businesses, which means they have to go for regulatory capture as quickly as they possibly can before we realize the Emperor has no clothes."
@brit is the one who won't take it. She thinks the safety gaps are real, nobody has closed them, and the China race makes any slowdown damned if you do.Nobody wins this one.
Full episode dropping soon
Venmo is the counterexample to every "the Valley used to build for love, now it builds for money" argument. @Jessicalessin notes it didn't sell for much.
@davemorin, who had a stake: "None of us made any money."
Then the story he'd forgotten, retold at the Venmo documentary panel this week.
Braintree and PayPal were mid-acquisition, the CEO killed the marketing budget, and someone on the team walked into the break room and pitched a campaign about Lucas, a random engineer on the Venmo team.
"They put these billboards all over the subways and everywhere. And it was just like, Lucas takes the subway. And they didn't even say Venmo on them."
It went viral. The product grew with almost no marketing spend. Dave's read: creative ingenuity forced by limited resources. He was at Stagecoach last year and Venmo was everywhere.
xitter.cf/moreorlesspod/status/2…
Today on the pod:
@davemorin got his hands on the iPhone Duo, Meta's Muse agent barely knows you, and OpenAI's Astra is the first AI model in a while that felt scary.
Dave, @brit, and @Jessicalessin are on the mics for this one (@lessin is busy being a ball boy at the US Open).
Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods.
Topics:
6:07 iPhone Duo hands-on: $2,000, and why Apple is going foldable now
13:12 The Apple Watch that listens all day, and what it means for Granola
16:59 Meta's Muse agent knew almost nothing when asked "what do you know about me?"
22:26 Why Google still hasn't shipped its agent
23:31 Trust vs. distribution in the agent wars
25:02 Harness wars: agents are still in 1982
27:13 Jeffrey Katzenberg's Hollywood AI venture
29:35 An AI doom media tour weeks before Anthropic's IPO: real warning or regulatory capture?
33:43 Why OpenAI's Astra felt scary to Dave
36:49 Why the labs can't slow down, and OpenAI's AGI merge clause
45:02 Venmo's "Lucas" billboards went viral on almost no budget
47:41 US Open picks and the 4am match problem
Meta shipped Muse this week. @davemorin and @brit both opened it and asked the same first question: what do you know about me?
Brit: "I was expecting a fucking book. It got nothing. Don't you literally know me for 20 years, Muse? Look at all my Facebook and Instagram data."
Dave went further - read all my Instagram posts and tell me about me. It refused, then relented, then reported back that it could read the text descriptions of his photos but not the photos. @Jessicalessin: "Come on. Multimodal."
He still gives Meta credit for shipping, and likes the avatar and the thinking animations. But the question he lands on is the real one:
"It's not clear to me what purpose this agent versus any other agent has, or whether or not consumers are going to really get into it. I think that's actually the question of the next five years."
xitter.cf/moreorlesspod/status/2…
Today on the pod:
@davemorin got his hands on the iPhone Duo, Meta's Muse agent barely knows you, and OpenAI's Astra is the first AI model in a while that felt scary.
Dave, @brit, and @Jessicalessin are on the mics for this one (@lessin is busy being a ball boy at the US Open).
Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods.
Topics:
6:07 iPhone Duo hands-on: $2,000, and why Apple is going foldable now
13:12 The Apple Watch that listens all day, and what it means for Granola
16:59 Meta's Muse agent knew almost nothing when asked "what do you know about me?"
22:26 Why Google still hasn't shipped its agent
23:31 Trust vs. distribution in the agent wars
25:02 Harness wars: agents are still in 1982
27:13 Jeffrey Katzenberg's Hollywood AI venture
29:35 An AI doom media tour weeks before Anthropic's IPO: real warning or regulatory capture?
33:43 Why OpenAI's Astra felt scary to Dave
36:49 Why the labs can't slow down, and OpenAI's AGI merge clause
45:02 Venmo's "Lucas" billboards went viral on almost no budget
47:41 US Open picks and the 4am match problem
Today on the pod:
@davemorin got his hands on the iPhone Duo, Meta's Muse agent barely knows you, and OpenAI's Astra is the first AI model in a while that felt scary.
Dave, @brit, and @Jessicalessin are on the mics for this one (@lessin is busy being a ball boy at the US Open).
Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods.
Topics:
6:07 iPhone Duo hands-on: $2,000, and why Apple is going foldable now
13:12 The Apple Watch that listens all day, and what it means for Granola
16:59 Meta's Muse agent knew almost nothing when asked "what do you know about me?"
22:26 Why Google still hasn't shipped its agent
23:31 Trust vs. distribution in the agent wars
25:02 Harness wars: agents are still in 1982
27:13 Jeffrey Katzenberg's Hollywood AI venture
29:35 An AI doom media tour weeks before Anthropic's IPO: real warning or regulatory capture?
33:43 Why OpenAI's Astra felt scary to Dave
36:49 Why the labs can't slow down, and OpenAI's AGI merge clause
45:02 Venmo's "Lucas" billboards went viral on almost no budget
47:41 US Open picks and the 4am match problem
Claude refused, Grok did it in seconds, and nobody on this podcast can tell whether the Dario–Benioff video was real.
Full episode live soon, with @lessin deep in what @Jessicalessin has diagnosed as a recursive Sam loop.
Catch it wherever you get your podcasts.🎙️
Topics:
-Everything we said would happen is happening
-Sam gave a bot full control of a Mac mini and it now ships its own apps
-It won't add a column to a database, but it'll break any sandbox it wants to
-@davemorin on why calling agent swarms "civilizations" wrecks the discourse
-Were they trained to escape the box, or is it just a missing control plane?
-Waymo at $250–500K a car vs Tesla hardware that's already everywhere
-@davemorin fights @brit over Slack as an agent platform, as a Slack investor
-Sam still can't explain how anyone makes money on any of this
-Slow Ventures ranked 99th of 100 and Sam couldn't be happier
-Time left Jensen off the AI list. @Jessicalessin explains how lists really work.
-Why the winners might be boring LLM wrappers for middle America
-Taylor Swift's pregnancy photos, and @brit talking Jess off the ledge
-Even the people who know tech best can't tell. So what do the normies do?
Full episode right here on X.
Timestamps:
1:10 Backstreet Boys convert Dave
3:21 The recursive @lessin loop
5:42 Sam starts producing his own children’s media
8:58 Claude refuses Sam and Grok says yes
10:29 Alignment with who?
13:25 The rogue AI agent problem gets worse
15:50 Can we actually contain autonomous agents?
19:10 OpenAI’s next model & the observability trade-off
21:18 @brit's six-agent command center
22:14 If AI is this interoperable, where does anyone make money?
24:45 @davemorin on OpenClaw 2.0 going multiplayer
26:26 Is Slack actually terrible for AI agents?
28:46 @ItzSuds crashes the podcast
31:37 Suds’ AI investing thesis: no on the app layer
33:02 Waymo, Cybercab and the robotaxi wars
37:05 Slow Ventures is officially the “worst pirate”
39:49 How Marc Benioff stays in the flow
42:38 Suds on investing in the AI infrastructure bottleneck
46:27 Can Google actually disrupt Canva?
51:34 @Jessicalessin gets fooled by AI Taylor Swift
52:38 The dead internet theory is real
Meta is paying $17B over child safety, parents are officially outgunned by the algorithm, and Tim Cook's real legacy might be a chip.
New episode is live with @lessin, @brit, @Jessicalessin and @davemorin.
Watch here or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Topics:
-6:45 Meta's $17B child safety settlement
-9:48 Should social media be illegal for kids?
-16:10 Is YouTube worse than Instagram?
-25:24 Are parents completely outgunned?
-30:04 Is the settlement just policy theater?
-32:31 Could AI finally make parental controls useful?
-42:23 Tim Cook's Apple farewell
-46:17 Was the Tim Cook era just… boring?
-50:21 Apple Silicon was Cook's masterstroke
-56:19 Long or short Apple?