Elon tells investors SpaceX and Tesla should merge. @lessin has a theory he says nobody else has floated: there’s an enormous SpaceX lockup cliff coming in the spring, and folding Tesla’s retail shareholders into the denominator makes all that supply much easier to absorb. @davemorin thinks the rocket-powered car demo was timed to justify the deal. Sam thinks two engineers got told to bolt rockets onto a car. 83% of respondents in @Jessicalessin’s new Polls app say it’s mostly about Musk control. Then the PHP vulnerability, and Sam’s conclusion is blunt. All your regional banks will be hacked. The labs are centralizing profits while externalizing the risk, and they should be carrying hundred billion dollar insurance policies. Plus Google informing Jess she’s liable for everything her agents do, Netflix’s content shakeup, Dave’s theory of priority slop, and @brit’s second week with no back pain. Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods. Topics: 00:00 Intro 01:04 Dave’s back, and the nasal rinse discourse 02:06 A web-wide PHP vulnerability 03:12 Sam: all your regional banks will be hacked 04:16 The zero days the labs are sitting on 04:56 Dave on the gap between frontier models and the public ones 06:29 Why labs should ban their own teams from the frontier 07:17 Pearl, Coinbase, and Bitcoin as a byproduct of compute 08:32 Can you even build a cybersecurity company in 2026? 09:16 Cold storage: your documents in a mine near the North Pole 10:22 Sam: the labs need $100 billion liability policies 11:30 Google says you’re liable for everything your agents do 13:55 How many Teslas have the Morins owned? 15:05 Sam’s Mazda dealership is living in the future 16:32 The two futures of car buying 17:14 SpaceX and Tesla are going to merge 18:01 The rocket car demo was a stunt to justify the deal 19:24 Elon doesn’t control Tesla, and that’s the point 21:09 Why the merger needs a narrative 22:25 The Information launches Polls: 83% say it’s about control 23:09 Sam’s lockup theory that nobody else has said 25:36 Will shareholders approve it, and the SXSI joke 27:29 Brit: Teslas are becoming entertainment vehicles 28:17 Dave on the Cyber Cab experience 30:12 Jess’s enthusiasm falls back to earth, and the Waymo bug 32:33 Netflix: content shakeup and what they should actually make 35:32 Dave’s viral take: content slop vs priority slop 38:05 Sam let his bot write the entire AGM deck 39:28 Dave’s broadsheet newspaper for Offline 40:19 Internships for teenagers, run by bots 41:30 Meta’s new voting stock and the end of capitalism 42:08 The wealth tax debate 44:36 The Elizabeth Holmes movie and the surprise Q&A 49:28 Peptide check-in, and a necessary disclaimer

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

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.

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

"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.

"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. nitter.siddz.com/moreorlesspod/status/2…

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." nitter.siddz.com/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