Anthropic must be losing again. Okay, so they're slowing down because they can't go faster. Their treadmill's stuck. No, because Astra is objectively just crushing them. It's so much better, it's not even close. The fact that with open router, you just switch dynamically whenever the fuck you want means that 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. Normal people, frankly, don't even want one agent. And if they want an agent at all, they're gonna have one. They don't deal with switching. They want to put all their stuff in.
That's like saying people wanted one app and they didn't want one app. Why hello friends. Welcome to more or less. How's it cooking morons? Hey Jess. We're around. We are not dead yet from the AGI. The AGI has not killed us.
Oh my God. 10% of me is dead because that's the probability. But yes, it has been a week in the tech headline, essay missive, hot take, X culture of the internet. That's why you're listening to us folks. We're going to break it all down for you. We're going to tell you how it all ends for real. Well, let's welcome Sam back to the pool house. Sam, how is New York? New York is doing really well. New York's in a great place. It's maximum great weather. Central Park, you do your Central Park loops. It's like the most attractive thing in the history of the world. It's great. Most attractive thing. Why? Because are there attractive people on the Central Park loop?
Oh yeah, guys, this is what I come home to. I come home to how hot the New York women are. The level of talent in New York is just unbelievable. The level of talent of hot women. Talent. What are you talking about? Where are we going with this? I'm just saying, it's a very attractive city. And in the beautiful weather, everyone's running. Everyone's fit. Everyone's having a good time. The U open was great. What percent of these people are on peptides? Britt, this has always been the case. They didn't need peptides to be hot in New York City. Who knows? Well, Sam, peptides. It's just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like, San Francisco is a self-fulfilling prophecy for tech.
New York is a self-fulfilling prophecy for a lot of other things. And it's a wonderful thing. I find LA to be hotter than New York when it comes to hot people. I disagree. I actually think, though, that's a really interesting question, Britt. I think this is a lot about a person, which is like, what do you find the people physically more attractive, LA or New York? And for me, it's no question, New York. Okay. Well, you have to rank guys and girls separately. No, I agree. I think broadly it's the most attractive city on earth. I'll battle you on that one. Not where I thought it was going with this answer.
Although he did come back and talk about how attractive the female runners in Central Park are. Fabulous. Congratulations, Jess. Thank you. I really have either. We have a very trusting relationship. I can say this to my wife. We can appreciate physical beauty. I don't mind. You're the one who likes Benson Boone's abs. I mean, the world likes Benson Boone's. And I like Jess's abs. Thank you. And you like Jess's abs and I'm fine with that. This is getting really awkward right now. It's okay. I'm going to bring us back to the end of times. Okay. So we're going to talk AI. We have to talk some other things as well. Or the beginning of times. Or the beginning of times.
Is that where we are, Dave? All I know is that I'm really tired of all the crying wolf. When you woke up on Saturday morning or Friday night. Saturday morning. No, because we talked about it at dinner on Friday night, Dave. Did we? We talked about Doomsday. Yeah, that was the dinner combo on Friday. We were at the University of Michigan and that place is awesome. A little LP love there. And we talked to the dean of engineering and the dean of the business school and all these smart people about whether it was going to be the real end of times by 2030. Correct. So Jacob Cox on quit Anthropic, went on a media tour. After three months. After a very short period of time.
And he did not invest yet. By the way, already has a new venture. In the modern world, if you're about to get fired, the best thing you can do is do something like this right on your way out right before you get fired. And be a whistleblower. Yeah, totally. Good point. If you're about to get fired and you don't do this or you lose your severance package, but the level of media exposure you get is more than worth it. But you get an event business. Okay. Second thing that happened, though, is Dario, the man took to the pen his favorite place and wrote a very long essay saying, you know what, guys, we need to slow down.
This race that I've been leading that I'm about to ride to a multi trillion dollar IPO. We're going to slow down. What happened? Wasn't he supposed to have done that the week before? What's going on? Stay tuned. Stay tuned. Stay tuned. So, Dave, you are drinking your mocha latte capo something. Just a mocha, Jess. Iced mocha. Love it. Today it's green juice like a real Marin County guy. Oh my God. We have to talk about the stereotypes later. Okay, so what did you think? What went through my head? Anthropic must be losing again. Yeah, 100 percent. Well said. Okay, so they're slowing down because they can't go faster. Their treadmill's stuck.
No, because Astra is objectively crushing them. It's so much better. It's not even close. But this is the problem. They're just going to go back and forth. Astra is shockingly good. Yeah, we just, this is the exact same. Hard to even cloud months ago. It's whatever. No, I think this goes back. This is a shocking leap forward. Even in the context of that, we talk about this every week. And poor listener, you're probably extremely bored. There's a new model every week that's shockingly better. This one's the leap forward. It wasn't the other 12. Okay, we can come back to Astra. And everyone, I think you're onto something with that.
But there's a second point, which is an American lab is crushing them by every conceivable metric. You look at open router's data. They're now beating Anthropic for the first time in over a year. That's happening. On the other hand, you have DeepSeek coming out with a Fable level model for 100x less cost. And so you have twin vectors here. They're dramatically falling behind very quickly. And so I think that's the overarching thing that's going on here. I think it's what you guys to go about here. The overarching theme is there's not a compounding advantage.
Because there's no compounding advantage, there is no return on being first, which means you're in a brutal competition to zero and all this shit. Right. Which means it's a bad fucking business. Right. Now, it doesn't mean they don't IPO for lots of money and people trade their way to riches. But we've been saying this for years, it doesn't matter. The fact that there's no one hasn't broken out will win forever. The fact that with open router, you just switch dynamically whenever the fuck you want means that 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.
So then Britt, I want your reaction and also part of Dario's proposal was independent assessors. Right. This idea that Anthropic, they're going to slow down. They're going to prioritize safety even more. Apparently they were prioritizing it all along. And they are going to let in these assessors who are going to have a lot of access and will somehow determine that they are complying with the slow down mandate. Okay. I hear Dave and Sam and I understand the point of view. I think it's somewhere in the gray area. There definitely is stuff to be concerned about. We don't have safety mechanisms set up for a lot of the things that these agents can now do.
We've seen them break out. The bioweapons is one of those scary things that everyone's talking about. You've seen Demis at DeepMind today, I think, suggest there should be the DeepMind Institute and everyone's calling for these standards committees and independent validators of all of these things. Right.
This idea that Anthropic is going to slow down. They're going to prioritize safety even more. Apparently they were prioritizing it all along. And they are going to let in these assessors who are going to have a lot of access and will somehow determine that they are complying with the slow down mandate. Okay. I hear Dave and Sam and I understand the point of view. I think it's somewhere in the gray area, right? There definitely is stuff to be concerned about. We don't have safety mechanisms set up for a lot of the things that these agents can now do. We've seen them break out. The bioweapons thing is one of those scary things that everyone's talking about. You've seen Demis at DeepMind today, I think, suggest there should be the DeepMind Institute and everyone's calling for these standards committees and independent validators of all of these things. So I don't think everyone would do that for no reason. It's not just marketing.
Yeah, marketing. No, it's not just marketing. I think there's real stuff to figure out. But we can't because China's racing ahead. Trump calls in on the All-In podcast stage or whatever and says, no, it's all a hoax. Keep going because we're competing with China and we have to stay ahead. And so it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. But here's the funny thing, guys. I actually agree. I was on with a very smart investor recently this week. And they're like, Sam, what's the chance that Hugging Face is a red herring or is it a canary? And I'm like, it's a hawk. It's definitely a canary. It's such a canary. Of course it's a canary. Yeah.
We don't need super intelligence for AI to break everything. All the banks are going to get hacked. All the bad stuff is going to happen. Right. And all of your own stuff. Everybody's everything. A hundred percent. And the downstream effects are going to be wild. Right. Because JP Morgan did a hack and the government says, well, we have to regulate this and reset everything. It's going to be a complete mess. Right.
We're at the point of complete mess. The things people are putting in place to solve the mess will do nothing. We're way past that point. So it's funny because on one hand, I'm not a doomer and AGI is going to drag a black hole over and paperclip optimize everything to death. That's all to death. I do think the level of chaos coming is insanely high.
But I also think that if you're the lead labs, it's a trillion dollar valuation in a rapidly commoditizing space where you can't defend your lead because the lead's going to switch every five moments. And then everyone's just going to switch on the fly because there's no lock-in to any of these things. They're using it as marketing. Right. To try to get an advantage. I think they're both true. Right. You know, it's interesting. So next Wednesday, I'm going to be interviewing Korai Kavakilu, who now runs DeepMind because Demis has moved himself upstairs. And I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about prep calls before interviews. I'm probably not. I don't know.
That sounds like 2026 to me. Let's break the rules, Jess.
And so I had a prep call with him on Friday. So this was when we had Jacob Cox on, but it was pre-Demis. I just said, I'm obviously going to ask you about safety in this. And I won't reveal exactly what he said, but it was clear to me his thinking is sort of what Satya has come out to say, which is, yeah, it's called product development. And if you aren't building something while you're building the safety alongside it in 2026, you have a research lab that has not built an effective engineering organization. And Satya said this in a tweet storm shortly after. And now on one hand, I think it's probably nice for the incumbent legacy guys to be able to say that because they probably feel like they have existed in a world of more constraints.
I think Zuckerberg has said something similarly, but that is also what's happening here and why Dario and Sam and Elon have to cloak it in the slowing down, which implies losing a race or putting your foot off the gas as opposed to, yeah, it's getting harder to build this stuff as responsibly as we can. And we're just going to keep trying our best. And we're going to talk more about that. Yeah. Zuckerberg did an amazing job articulating this. And I've never seen people on X actually like what Zuckerberg says, but there's a lot of people being like, thank you.
I know. And I think Satya sounded very smart on it. I think it's Korai's point of view as well. And it just shows how Sam and Dario and Elon gravitate towards a much different framework. They have to convince us all this thing is so powerful and so new and so crazy. That's how they raise all the money.
Right. That's how they raise all their money. Open AI is out there again. We and others reported trying to do a round around 1.5 trillion privately. They also are saying that they're slowing their IPO because of this. Open AI has not been on a reasonable path to an IPO in any reasonable timeframe. They just don't want to feel left out. They have been at the beginning of a long journey and they keep taking other news as evidence for why they're not ready to IPO. It's maddening to the point I'm now yelling about it.
No, it's just obvious, but it's a game. I posted about it the other day, which was like, look, there have been three eras of how tech deals with messaging and marketing. Era one, I'll call it the Bill Gates era, where you get called before the stand and you're super indignant about it. You're super pissed off and you look terrible. It ends up being a disaster. It really hurt Microsoft. It broke its spirit when the world said you're doing something bad. They said, and it was just the indignation.
Era two was the Google and Facebook era where everyone looked at what Bill Gates did and said, well, that was a mistake. So we're going to fight this. The fight back has actually worked better than what Bill Gates did. Google wasn't broken up. Meta hasn't been broken up yet. Yeah. Like they've done better.
Right. And so that's good. And then I think what we now see is the third wave tech policy, which is the classic answer: embrace and extend. You're not going to change the narrative. The narrative is this scary. So great. Let's take that narrative. Let's double down on it and then twist it and use it in a way that's advantageous to us. So for Open AI, it can be like, well, we're not going to IPO. Or for Anthropic, it's like, we need regulatory capture. It's fascinating because in our era, I would say the policy department wasn't that important. It was products. Now, I think we're in a world where, if you think about who gets paid the most, who matters the most, it's who's representing these guys in DC and the spin mastering of it is valuable in a way that I wonder if policy people are making ten times what they used to. I guess they kind of are.
It's funny you say this. One of widely respected people—can you call them operatives? They probably don't like to be called operatives. I don't even know what these people like to be called, but political lobbyist advisor—they probably like to be called advisors who's as connected as they come—was coming through San Francisco last week. Had a lovely coffee with her. And I said, what's the vibe on Anthropic in DC? And she goes, money. And what she basically meant is every lobbyist, every advisor, every lawyer is like, Anthropic is on one hand, we're scared of all these things, but good golly, I want to be working for them because I'm going to make a lot of money. And I thought it was a very interesting reaction this person shared. And actually today, as we tape this, I believe Anthropic's head of policy is on stage at a Politico event saying they're on the phone with the White House daily.
Can you call them operatives? They probably don't like to be called operatives. I don't even know what these people like to be called, but political lobbyist advisor, they probably like to be called advisors who are as connected as they come, was coming through San Francisco last week, had a lovely coffee with her. And I said, what's the vibe on Anthropic in DC? And she goes money. And what she meant is everybody is sorry, every lobbyist, every advisor, every lawyer, they're like, Anthropic is. On one hand, we're scared of all these things, but good golly, I want to be working for them because I'm going to make a lot of money. And I thought it was a very interesting reaction this person shared. And actually today, as we tape this, I believe Anthropic's one of their heads of policies on stage at a Politico event saying they're on the phone with the White House daily or something to that effect. Right. So, yes, it's a completely different situation. Everyone's getting their bag. Everyone's getting their bag. Okay. So, Dave, can I drill in a bit on the monitoring questions? So there's been some rush out like these independent monitors. Let's take the slowing down or not. But is there a next wave of safety measure that potentially requires more collaboration or something? Would that be useful or more independence? Like, is that a pipe dream or is this a good path to pursue?
There's actually good precedent for this in the security community. And I think I heard it was maybe Elon or somebody else, I can't remember, propose a different idea, which is that as a new model is about to go into market, the big labs, whether they're United States, China, wherever, should allow the other labs to red team their models before they go. Yeah, that was an Elon idea.
Okay. I think that's your next level way of looking at this. And this is a standard practice in the industry. There are several organizations. I believe the one that's the most powerful was bought by Google that maintains a list of all of the most important bugs and the most important software in the world. And they all red team each other. They all report bugs. They all fix them immediately. I mean, this is the way that we have to go. We have to depend on each other's systems to test each other's systems and really test them with the most powerful tools. Right. And I think that's one of your next questions that you'll see people talking about. I don't know about independent auditing with people having employee badges, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. Sounds like pretty hard to coordinate and hard to trust or harder to trust. Maybe you need both.
But what about on the US-China vector? No idea. Yeah. I don't think DeepSeek is going to be like, why yes, Anthropic. There's an interesting company. So we funded a long time ago. We were the first investment called Sublime Security. We're talking to the founders of this. The whole point was Sublime early on. They're like, look, we all know the top 10 tech companies in the world. What they do is they get on a weekly call between the CISOs. Right. And they're like, this is what we're seeing, blah, blah, blah. They're sharing things. Does that really happen? I didn't know that.
Oh yeah. This is major. Yeah. That's like the biggest companies in the world. They kind of unofficially do that. And the Sublime's pitch early on was like, look, that's fine for the top 10 companies, but there's no collaboration and security between anyone else. You're just on your own. Right. And so how do you build a collaborative platform for everyone to use security as in like a place that is compounding? And so you could see some of that type of stuff start to evolve for this stuff. I mean, it's not going to be humans because again, if this stuff happens too fast, right, you're going to have to come up with a framework for it. Like how this all works is TBD and who pays for it and whatever. I mean, I don't know. It's going to be, it's a nice idea. I will see how it actually plays out in any practical way. You know, for all we know, I would expect there already are working groups on this between all the big companies, just as there are other security domains, but who knows? I mean, I think it's an interesting moment. I think you're right, Sam, but I think they have not actually started testing each other as far as I understand. I don't know. It's an interesting question of how it plays out. I mean, look, this does speak to my other big hot take on this, which is the only way in my mind that Anthropic and OpenAI become really, really valuable companies long-term, not trading, not short-term, whatever, five to 10 years longer is effectively as defense companies, right? If you said to me, hey, what they're actually doing all day long with these super fancy computers and all this computing, you can't compete in the token marketplace. You just can't, and make any money. What you can do at the edge with 10,000 PhDs is develop a bunch of zero days against other LLMs and not release them. Make a closed system. So they're office and defense? Just make money on the defense. You're anticipating every possible bad thing that can happen, and you have this thing ready to go.
I think this is not hypothetical, and this is actually just what's happening. But the Disney model, you don't release the models. You basically just keep it like the nuclear weapons. And then when a country gets subverted, there's only one person or two people you can call to fix it. I think we're already there.
And it's going to cost you like a gajillion dollars, right? And so you're just like, the entire business model of the labs, first of all, they caused the problem to some degree, or it's going to happen anyway. But you're just like, look, I can't shut this off. And the only thing you'll be able to shut it off with is effectively a zero-day model, like a new intelligence that hasn't already been exposed. Because the second it's exposed to the web, or people have seen it, it will get built on top of and built around. So it's over, right? So it has to be zero days. But you're basically out there developing zero-day fancy models to quash the bad models that take over banks. That's how you make a lot of money.
Dave, you think we're here already. Say more. Dave, I think this is just true. I think that these things have, I mean, you see this every week. There's a massive conversation at the national security level. It's popping up every single week everywhere. That's why you have the president commenting on this issue. The commenters, but no one's out there saying, I'm going to spend billions of dollars building a model I'm never going to release ever. And I'm holding it in a reserve for when shit goes wrong. And you can call me and you can pay me 10 billion to fix your bank, which I think is the business model.
But aren't there a bunch of companies starting to do this that are not the model companies? No, nobody can afford that. Nobody can afford it? No. You can't train. Training these models is like... It's like the future is instead of having 10,000 nuclear weapons, you're going to have 10,000 super intelligences in silos. And when you need them, you call them. And the nice part is, once your country is subverted by an evil AI, there's no price you won't pay to fix it. That's how you get a great Austin Powers movie, by the way. Are you saying, Sam, that things that aim to be free and democratic then become premium and exclusive? And isn't that generally how things work?
Yes. No, I was just taking that opportunity to point out that this is all the same narrative, especially if they're really expensive to make. I've been reading more Talmud, and I'll tell you that in Torah, there is nothing new in the world.
I think it's worth going a little bit more nuanced about this around the concept of alignment. I think that actually Mark Zuckerberg had a really thoughtful point of view here, that companies that create models that are misaligned from their users, the users just won't use them, right? And I think that this is actually a very simple, but very important point. And I would actually push it even further to say yes. And right now, when you're using any agent of any kind, you have to ask this question: Does this agent work for me? And does it do what I tell it to do? And if it doesn't, you're not going to use it. And I think there's an even further nuanced point, which is that is this
Especially if they're really expensive to make. I've been reading more Talmud, and I'll tell you that in Torah, there is nothing new in the world. I think it's worth going a little bit more nuanced about this around the concept of alignment.
I think that actually Mark Zuckerberg had a really thoughtful point of view here, that companies that create models that are misaligned from their users, the users just won't use them, right? And I think this is actually a very simple, but very important point. And I would actually push it even further to say yes. And right now, when you're using any agent of any kind, you have to ask this question: does this agent work for me? And does it do what I tell it to do? And if it doesn't, you're not going to use it.
And I think there's an even further nuanced point, which is that is this agent actually aligned, faithfully aligned with me? Or is it aligned with the model company? And I think the next frontier of thinking about this. Most people aren't thinking about this. They accept that Sam made this point a couple weeks ago that Claude literally won't do things for you in certain zones that relate to its values and its founders' values. And the same is the case with Grok and the same with Muse now. Grok will basically do anything. That's alignment, right? And so the question is whether or not it's faithfully aligned with you or the lab. And I think that's also going to be one of the next frontiers of this.
I don't know that it's a you thing. I think it's more nuanced, like per task. I actually now use Grok a bunch, right? Because of that, I hadn't been using Grok. Now I have a whole set of workflows on Grok, which are my things that Grok does. I have other stuff on Claude. Now, just in a lot of cases, if someone's like, I'm not going to do this or I don't do it well, you're just like, find me someone that will. I mean, this is the thing about these models: if you just think about them as people, and you're going to find some guy, you find some annoying person at your company who's like, I won't do that because it violates my morals. You're like, whatever, I'm just going to go to Steve and he'll do it, right?
And so I think it's not like a personal human, a full alignment. I think it's more just like, yeah, you're going to work with a lot of people and Bob's super cheap and we'll do a bunch of basic tasks. And if he's going to be all curmudgeonly about taking out the trash, then you call Charlie and Charlie's fine with it.
I actually think this is a good pivot to the next topic, which is our polyagenturous future. I think that last week we were talking about Muse's launch and on the first day of Muse's launch, I think last week I was talking about how Muse wouldn't basically query my Instagram posts for me. And I was frustrated by it. I spent the rest of the week playing around with it. It turns out that Muse is insanely good at interest-based stuff. I guess I benefit from having worked on Facebook for many years. So my mind understands the data sets that Meta has access to. And so I've been pushing it to the limit in terms of finding things related to my interests, vintage car parts or whatever. And it's so insane at this, but I'm never going to use it for a bunch of work use cases that are totally not Meta's domain, right?
And I think what a lot of people do is they're like, oh, I need to have one of these and not many of them. And I just don't think that's true. I think Sam's actually right that we're now in this polyagenturous future where you're just going to talk to whatever ones work for whatever works. I actually disagree. I want to state my disagreement. Britt, you use like ten of these every day. You told us you got a whole extra monitor for them. I have a screen right here. All my agents are doing things right now.
Yes. And let me point out to you, crazy tech people on camera with me that we have worked in Silicon Valley for twenty years. We do this for our jobs. We have to try all of them. We are way more technologically advanced than normies out there. Normal people frankly don't even want one agent. And if they want an agent at all, they're going to have one. They don't deal with switching. They want to put all their stuff in. But the switching is free. I don't think it matters. They just want one thing. They don't want to deal with lots of things. That's like saying people wanted one app and they didn't want one app or one friend.
I think they want one thing when they start to really understand what an agent is and what it can do for you. I think this is actually offensive to the everyman. Maybe two. Maybe they have a work agent and a home agent, personal. Britt, how many apps do you have on your phone? I am a different user than every internet user. You're saying that normal people don't have many apps on their phone? Well, they actually don't have that many. Apps are different. Way less than I have on my phone.
They have way more than one. I have a relevant experience to share on this topic because there's still a question, right? The Groks, the Muses, and also apps are building their own agents really well as well. I mean, this is why the SaaS industry is still alive because it turns out that Rippling can build really, really good AI with all of the Rippling context. You don't just want to export some of your Rippling data into Claude. So that's another thing. And I have to give props to Oura's agent or Ring, the new one. Oh, because I was getting high sleep scores and I was still exhausted. Didn't know it was happening. What happened?
And I was like, peptides. No, I don't peptide. I accidentally pressed the agent that and instantly if I do that by accident, I pop it away usually because I don't want to chat with something. But I was like, let's see, let's push it. And I'll be like, I got a ninety-three last night, but I'm falling asleep at one PM. And it went back multiple days to what happened in my REM cycle on Wednesday that explained why, despite sleeping well Friday night, I was a wreck midday Saturday. And it was interesting. And then I was like, well, let me push it and ask it, can I change my snack schedule to maybe mitigate this? And it also had some really good feedback.
But don't you think in the future you're going to have that all wrapped into your own personal agent? And then you're just going to know that in one place. Like I have it all wrapped in one place. Yeah, but other people might use it through their existing things.
There. Well, this is a good thing. The business thing, we have trillion dollar stories being told, right? And you're like, if you're using many of them and you can hot swap them and it's a constellation of friends, it's very hard for any one of them to be worth infinity, right? Like, there's not a compounding advantage. And I think that's all she wrote. Now, again, I want to be really clear. It doesn't mean I wouldn't love to have a bunch of Anthropic stock at zero and trade out. There's money to be made. And I think everyone kind of gets that. But any thinking person is just, it's so hard. The only bet I've heard people making, which I rationally get it, is you're like, this shit, the world gets so weird and everything kind of falls apart. And it's just an asymmetry story of who the fuck knows. And that's pretty loose analysis.
Well, so what do you guys make? I think it was on this pod a week or two ago that UVC made fun of me for not having used Instinct yet. I was tickled that the information reported it's looking to raise at a ten billion dollar valuation with— That's only because they're out of compute. These numbers are fake. But for those who care, Khosla, Sequoia and Benchmark are in. But say more about the numbers being fake, but also this whole category. Like if we're already multi-agented, is there room for more?
Sure. You always have more friends. I think Instinct is a really good product. It's one of my many agents that I've tried and used. It has their moat so far is that it's really falls apart. And it's just an asymmetry story of who the fuck knows. And that's pretty loose analysis.
Well, so what do you guys make? I think it was on this pod a week or two ago that UVC made fun of me for not having used Instinct yet. I was tickled that the information is reported. It's looking to raise at a $10 billion valuation with- That's only because they're out of compute. These numbers are fake. But for those who care, KOTU, Sequoia and Benchmark are in ToxDelete. But say more about the numbers being fake, but also this whole category. Like if we're already multi-agented, is there room for more? Sure. You always have more friends. I think Instinct is a really good product. It's one of my many agents that I've tried and used. It has their moat so far is that it's really simple and it's text message based. So you can just text with it and it does things. Fine. It launched a few weeks ago. So their moat is like an API that could be vibe coded. It's a harness. Yeah, you have a phone number that you can just text. But then you can do things like a phone number can. It can call people. It can do whatever. So- It's just an agent. Yes. And so there are many of these agents, as we've been talking about. They raised their first round at two and a half billion. There's three million new open clause every week. And now they're going to raise it 10 billion like two weeks later. There's 100,000 reported users, which is maybe a lot for two weeks, but not worth $10 billion in valuation. So it's just that they were, how is this healthy? I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be down on founders of any kind, but this is not healthy for your company. They don't want to be diluted. So they're just negotiating the terms. No, no, it's not about not being diluted. It's about how do you actually build a business that's worth $10 billion? You don't. You sell it to someone. Well, Open Router proved that you can just sell it. Maybe that's how you make it valuable. I'm sorry, Britt, but Open Router had an actual business. How much revenue did they have? I mean, we've reported their revenue. They had revenue. I mean, it was a- They have usage. The announcement that they were thinking of being acquired tripled their usage. So it's good PR. So Sam, do you think Instinct's worth 10 billion? What do you think? I think the really interesting thing is just everyone's trading and no one's investing. Is there any investing going on? I feel like there's ghost in it. I am definitely investing. I'm investing, but you know what, Dave? You and I have not made gajillions of dollars because we're not trading on AI. We're doing fine. Well, you're not king making. You're doing normal investing. You're not doing king making trading investing. I'm finding things at zero and giving them money and then want them to create businesses and number go up. And then every once in a while, someone pays a lot for the business or whatever. But I haven't changed our investing that much. And you know what? In the Silicon Valley ecosystem, financially, that's insanely wrong right now. This is all secure your bag, get liquid. There's a deep market to buy this on the other side, especially as a seed investor. I am currently wrong, right? I'm betting I'd become right, but I could stay wrong for a long time. I just don't like the trading game. And maybe that makes me bad. I don't know. When do you think the trading game really started?
So it was 13 million in monthly revenue. 13 million monthly revenue. So 150 million. Look, Open Router, it was good. It was a good in, good out. But just remember, I just go back to, don't you remember the quaint old days when Instagram was shockingly worth a billion dollars when it was bought? I mean, it's hilarious. No, we were talking last week about when Flickr was bought for 20 million. That was a big deal. And Summise was bought. Well, I was talking about Summise the other day with Borthwick, who just made a killing, by the way, on which one did you make a killing on? Oh my God, I forgot about Summise. Yeah, well, everyone just wants to know. So what? The thing that's so interesting is that there's actually, if it is liquidity, right? Because there's so much money, Sam's right. That's the thing that's interesting. And that's the thing that's different. You can be extremely successful as a trader, even if you look at who's buying instincts next round or whatever, it's all traders. Well, and what's really interesting, right, is you have this thing where take bending spoons. Bending spoons is making really good business deals offering a tenth of the private price because there's no liquidity. They're the liquidity provider. And right. And for this type of business. And then you have a lot of people. There's so much money with asymmetry on the minds. And if drying up is more of a macro event than it is a tech event, right, is the interesting thing from my perspective. I don't know. I don't know how the ball game ends. I mean, I know that we're so disconnected from any semblance of normal capitalism or reality. And I know it's going to drive an unbelievable amount of fear, loathing, anger and resentment in all sorts of ways. This makes the dot com bubble look quaint. But who knows? I'm open to the fact that this could go on for years. Or it just could be we've hit a too big to fail point. And this is the greatest stories ever told. Right. The greatest stories ever sold. That's never the case, Sam. To your point about reading the Talmud a lot. This is not the case. To the Talmud. Do you want to talk about your app Jewish combo, Sam? Or is that? Oh, I just, it's, Claude is so good at Judaism. It's wild. I just- Say more. Say more. I thought I was bad at Judaism. I thought Claude was not into giving you- No, no, no. It won't tell me who's Jewish. It won't help me distribute my Jewish apps, but it'll help me build them. Right. I need Grok to distribute them. I basically, it's the high holy days. I think that a lot of stuff is interesting. So I literally, I did a few things, but I created a great app, which is just combination, Bible, Talmud, and then history kind of woven together with an agent I can talk to and ask questions of. That's quite good and interesting. And then I just started having it send me daily, what's the Torah portion? You know me, what am I going to be most interested in? What are the big debates in it? How does it relate to religion disconnected from land, which is one of the big innovations in Judaism? And it's so good. And I've said it to people who know a lot more about religion than I do. And they're, this is insanely good. What are the sources on this? So I don't know. There's enough stuff online to make great Bible study, I guess, for interesting Old Testament Talmud stories plus Talmud stories. There you go. But use case of the week. By the way, yeah. Torah.lesson.com if you want to sign up. It's actually really excellent. Oh, God. Got a little app store going. Oh, God. Big app store. Are you charging for that? That's just for the community, but it's really good. God wants everyone to have it. Yeah. This is evangelism. Speaking of religion and AI. All right. So things are getting weird. I think I may have said this on the pod, but I have my, there's those signs things are getting weird. For me, the billboards that are just 150 million in ARR. And that's the whole billboard. Because there's traders amongst us, Jess. And there's someone who just needs to mark that company up because it's obviously worth 10 billion. It's a very funny thing to put on a billboard. But anyway, what else is cooking? What are people paying attention to? We talked Apple phone. We've got Apple contemplating the server business again. Something reporting in the information. They just noticed people are making money on that. Maybe they should do that. Apple's, wait a second. John Turnus is a cyclist, I read. Isn't everyone that's an exec at Apple a cyclist? Well, if you live in the South Bay, you're a cyclist, right? The problem is—
There's just those signs things are getting weird. For me, the billboards that are just 150 million in ARR. And that's the whole billboard.
Because there's traders amongst us, Jess. And there's someone who just needs to mark that company up because it's obviously worth 10 billion. It's a very funny thing to put on a billboard. But anyway, what else is cooking? What are people paying attention to? We talked Apple phone. We've got Apple contemplating the server business again. Something reporting in the information. They just noticed people are making money on that. Maybe they should do that. Apple's like, wait a second. John Turnus is a cyclist, I read. Isn't everyone that's an exec at Apple a cyclist?
Well, if you live in the South Bay, you're a cyclist, right? The problem is, I wonder what the insurance cost is on that. That skyline's a dangerous road to bike. What's John Turnus's life insurance policy? Guilty as charged. I am looking at a new bike. This is not good. Guys, my eight sleep told me my sleep age. How many years younger do you think I am in my sleep age? Four. And what are you going to do if I'm younger than you? You're not. You're definitely not younger than me. You're definitely not. I don't know. Dave, let's be honest here. Dave's going to find a bot that tells him he is though. It's not that hard. You just find another person. It's like Trump's doctor.
It's your point about Aura, Jess. I feel like all these apps are starting to have more intelligence in them. And it's interesting to see what things are. I'm getting sleep reports now about my sleep age. I'm trending younger than last week already. I was 35.8 last week. I'm 35.0 now. Longevity age scores are like the doomerism of health apps. Which is funny because why don't all these apps say you're going to die because of AI? Like, I'll get upset when they're like, sure, you're 20, but you're going to die next year. The AIs aren't talking to themselves. Yeah, it's all just collective delusion. People love this. People like gamify it.
People love this. This is the most entertaining business in the history of the world. Who cares? They can compete against each other. This is a game now. It's like, especially for couples who sleep in bed together, like me and you, Dave, it's like, it's instantly created more engagement. If you just step back and say, look, if you want to understand our era, looking back to our years, we are entertaining ourselves to death. This is the most entertaining business cycle in the history of the world. It's so entertaining, right? And if you're just like, okay, you know what the algorithm is really good at? You know what AI is really good at? Entertainment.
And so the entire model of the world right now is let's make all the most entertaining stuff happen and we're going to love it. That's where we're at. Well, it started with social media. My reels are getting so entertaining. Where do you even get that sleep score? I saw it yesterday and I can't find it. Maybe yours is so bad it didn't want to tell you. No, mine was in my 30s, just like you. No, that's your age. No, it's just on your home screen. No, it's not. It's on your home screen. Your sleep score or are we just talking about the overall age score? Sleep age. Your biological age based on your sleep score. When I'm 80, I'm actually going to be 68.
If you go to like, you have the heart age, I'm seven and a half years younger than my actual age of my heart. I don't think that's your sleep age, Brit. I think that's your cardiovascular age. I don't have a sleep age. It's based on my, maybe I'm in a private beta, you guys. My sleep duration, my HRV. Wait, you have private Aura? What? I have private eight sleep. It's even better than private Aura.
Oh, eight sleep. But eight sleep is bullshit. I love eight sleep as a product, but it is the most garbage of the garbage scores because they're just trying to tell you how great they are at making you better. Eight sleep is the one, it's really funny. Apple wants to congratulate you. They're just nice. Garmin is an asshole, right? Aura is kind of reasonable because they're selling you some semblance of reality. And eight sleep is the most self-congratulatory. And I'm going to say, because of eight sleep, you've slept so much better. And now you're 12 years old. It's basically a marketing loop.
Brit says my biological age is a calculation in progress. It requires two weeks, but I've been using eight sleep for two years. It's just in the right more. Aura, come on. Not Aura, eight sleep, Dave. No, Brit. I saw this. Guys, we've reached a new level of not entertaining. Sorry, we can cut this part out. No, let's not. Let's just let people know what's really going on in our worlds. Well, I just wanted everyone to know I'm six years younger in my sleep score. Hey, Brit, I just want you to know that I'm 6.8 years younger. Brit, why is it so important to you to be younger? We need to analyze this. Which makes the whole thing deeply suspect.
I would like to have sleep competitions. This is why people love Silicon Valley people, because we're so relatable. 39.1. I literally can't. Okay, now, eight sleep's dumb. I don't believe any of this. Oh, yeah. See, once Brit's losing, this is where you guys learn how competitive Brit is. Once she's losing, she just stops playing the game. Well, it's just, it's obviously not correct. I think the point that Sam's making is the social media era of the 2010s happened. I started a media company, Jess, you started a media company. It was like, you have to get people to emote. That's the whole point of drawing them in. That was not Jessica's strategy. That was not my strategy.
Okay. Well, maybe that was news media. I'm like, you're going to hit them with the ARR numbers and they're going to love you. But yes. They emote when they're so pissed at what you've reported. You actually drove a lot of emotion. And I think we're at peak emote right now, because you have to emote so hard and do the most crazy things to get attention. And so to Sam's point, you have to create entertainment amongst all of this, whether it's the narrative, whether it's in the app itself, in the reels you're watching, Jess. So I think people are yearning for feelings. But what if you don't, right? Everything swings.
I don't know. This is like, I've been spending a lot of time at work thinking about the things that we should do that just no one else will do. We'll compete in the things that now we did first and everyone else is doing. I am way more interested. I have two big ones. I'm not ready to talk about them, but they're very exciting. One is a new editorial expansion. One's a new product. And they're just things other people aren't going to do. And I believe in my bones they're insanely valuable. So we're going to do them. Are they defensible? Can people just rip you off? No, there's no way they can rip me off. They can. They always try.
These are good. One is that by design, you can't. And the other is people won't. But they could try. They always try. The other thing, though, is I would like to say a word about how entertaining reels have been. And I actually watch them and I'm like, thank you, AI. I am cracking up. The stuff I get about tennis is so funny. And then I'm seeing these pro surfers surfing with their four-year-olds getting barreled. And it's totally awesome. I got that one too. I know. They're just so good.
And then, but I love these ones of people. Like it's obviously describing a reel is like the least exciting thing you can do on a podcast, but I'm going to do it anyway. It's like a mom falling over on the stairs. She's exhausted. She's so tired. And then his text comes in. Can you play tennis? And she goes, yes, I can play tennis. It goes like that. I thought that was really funny. We're getting a real sense of Jess's social media feed right now. It's literally all tennis. And that's everybody I know. Do you want to have dinner? No, I can't have dinner until February. Oh, do you want to hit tomorrow?
And then I'm seeing these pro surfers surfing with their four-year-olds getting barreled. And it's totally awesome. I got that one too. I know. They're just so good. And then, but I love these ones of people. It's obviously describing a reel is the least exciting thing you can do on a podcast, but I'm going to do it anyway. It's a mom falling over on the stairs. She's exhausted. She's just so tired. And then his text comes in. Can you play tennis? And she goes, yes, I can play tennis. It goes like that. I thought that was really funny. We're getting a real sense of Jess's social media feed right now.
It's literally all tennis. And that's everyone I know. Do you want to have dinner? No, I can't have dinner until February. Oh, do you want to hit tomorrow? Yeah, I'm available all day. So it's everyone you know right now. It's a big chunk of people I know. If I promise you, if I'm like, you want to meet to talk about this? They say no. I'm like, you want to meet to hit? They'll be like, I can be there at nine because that's the mode of where we've gotten to. I'm going to bring us to one more topic, really a topic to close, which is I don't know. Have you guys seen picking up on politics a little bit more?
All the tech people are waking up and realizing they need the Democrats to wake up in their corner on these tech issues. And I don't know if you saw, but Jay Carney, who ran Amazon's public policy and been around many big tech companies, has joined Ron Conway and SV Angel in taking on the task of educating, informing, influencing the Democratic Party about AI. And I think this will be very hard to do, but there's a big drumbeat. I don't mean to be sleeping in as cold, but didn't Ron Conway retire? This is a separate initiative, though. I don't believe so. Ron Conway is still active-ish. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe he does. I don't know.
People started talking about it, but I think now you're starting to see that wave where all these tech companies are waking up and saying, OK, they're probably feeling like it served us pretty well to pivot hard Trump in terms of their business, not making a judgment on any issues other than has it helped their businesses to pivot Trump. But now they're looking down the road a little bit and they're thinking, oh, maybe we have a bigger problem. So none of us here are Washington, D.C. experts. But would anyone like to opine on said topic? I try to stay out of politics. On the Democrats?
Yeah, or how your Mark or Tim Cook or any of these CEOs who were behind Trump in his inauguration and are in lockstep with him. I mean, we forget how strange it was when Silicon Valley turned to support Trump. I remember. We don't forget that. Well, a reporter sending me notes saying Mark and Ben of Andreessen Horowitz are going to endorse Trump. And I basically, I said, we're about to file the story. And my instinct was check your sources. Right. It just didn't. And of course, the story was right. And we published it and we broke it. That was weird. And now, not so weird, but the screw will turn again or what swings? The something swings, turns. Pendulum. Thank you.
Well, I don't know. I don't know that anything turns, Jess. The Democrats have been hopelessly lost for a long time. And I guess we'll see once the election cycle starts and we have a look at the field. But to me, this whole thing has been hopelessly lost for many years now. And so I think that's what everybody I know that's more independently minded, were Democrat, is looking for a new message. And thus far, there isn't one. And so I think, I don't know what's going to happen here. I guess we're going to see.
I think tactically for the big companies, it just requires them to have a strategy, especially as if you have investigations and all the things that could happen if Democrats are controlling. Oh, they definitely have strategies. They're heavy policy. Look, everyone feels like they're betting right now. We talk about the pendulum or the thing, the cycles like the whole bet is the pendulum has broken and we're in some runaway cycle to one direction. But do you believe that or do you believe people want us to think that because that's how you get anthropic three trillion? No, I mean, I obviously look, the history is long. The railroads all went bankrupt.
WorldCom went bankrupt. Everything goes bankrupt in these types of cycles. I think this time is not different, but the details can be different. And the reality is there's a lot of money to be made on the trade. The question is that can be true and you can still make or lose a lot of money. Yeah. Unfortunately, the problem for anyone who grew up emotionally as an investor and believes in is we're all about buying, not the selling part. It turns out you need to do both. This is not the podcast to listen to if you're looking for trading advice. If you want investing advice, we're very good at it. But we might be the worst traders in the world. Buy low, sell high.
Yeah, but they don't sell. Go extremely long. That's what we're good at. We can rename this podcast Go Long. South Park had it right. It's buy, start up, sell out, bro down. Right? That's what we're currently in. Right? We're between sell out and bro down. We're just in the start up part. I feel like it's a new beginning. I really do.
What does that mean? I think you drown out. Things have gotten so extreme and crazy. At some point, I did not care to see a nice kid I went to college with his opinion on Dario's essay on X. Right? At some point. But it's so entertaining. Peak spewing shit. So yeah. So with that part of your brain that you devote to entertaining, you're watching. Which is for most people the entire thing. Great. You're watching tennis moms fall on the stairs.
It's great. Send me all of those reels. I'll take your Marin moms. I'll take your Atherton moms. I'll take all of it. But for people building things, I think you actually can accept that era has been drowned out. Everyone's going to drown themselves out in a sea of memes and do something else. Touch grass, perhaps. I will say I liked Rob Chung, who I love and came and played tennis with us recently, but he was the first employee at Finn back in the day, was posting his Dario commentary, which I thought was the whole thing was just all right, so let's go through all the characters in Dr. Strangelove and figure out who is who in Dr. Strangelove. I'm like, that's fun.
That's a good spit on this. So it's great. But if you want to build, it's for the entrepreneurs out there or the real event. Don't look at the big board. He's looking at the big board. By the way, that's what happens in Dr. Strangelove is they bring the Russian and he looks at the big board. Rob Chung's awesome. That's what we're seeing. I've never seen that. You've never seen Dr. Strangelove? No. Is that weird? Britt hasn't seen a lot of the great movies in the canon, Sam.
She's never seen the Big Lebowski. She's never seen... You've never seen the Big Lebowski? What? It's because I'm 35, you guys. You're not 35. I went to your brain. On my sleep score, I am. You honestly fake being a cultured person with no culture, which is very impressive. I am such a cultured person. I will school you on any pop culture test. Sam, I've fought this battle for years. Don't even try. So are you just going to skip her and just go on to your kids or are you going to try to save her? Yeah.
I'm already... The kids are getting absolutely educated in the canon. Britt, Dr. Strangelove came out decades before we were born. It's not a... Well, it was before me. That's all I'm saying. Guys, this is a fragmented culture universe. Britt, bring us to some... Let's wrap with some pop culture. Let me talk to you about modern culture. What's happening? Where's my wedding dress pictures from Taylor Swift? Britt runs a pop culture website, you guys. Let's go. The Emmys happened this week. I don't think Sam's watched anything that won an award on the Emmys.
I am such a cultured person. I will school you on any pop culture test. Sam, I've fought this battle for years. Don't even try. So are you just going to skip her and just go on to your kids or are you going to try to save her? Yeah. I'm already... The kids are getting absolutely educated in the canon. Britt, Dr. Strangelove came out decades before we were born. It's not a... Well, it was before me. That's all I'm saying. Guys, this is a fragmented culture universe. Britt, bring us to some... Let's wrap with some pop culture.
Let me talk to you about modern culture. What's happening? Where's my wedding dress pictures from Taylor Swift? Britt runs a pop culture website, you guys. Let's go. The Emmys happened this week. I don't think Sam's watched anything that won an award on the Emmys. He has no modern television taste, clearly. No one cares. And Taylor Swift was in a cameo and Taylor Swift was at the Chiefs game. There's a lot of Taylor Swift happening. There's a bunch of rumors about what's going on. There's some big announcements to be had. There's a lot of football going on. That's what's happening in the pop culture world. I do like the SAS British show. Have you watched that? Oh, yeah.
Rogue something. It's so good. Not Rogue One. Rogue Heroes. Dave. Not emanated. It's really good. Highly recommend. It's about the founding of the British SAS during World War II. I've heard it's good. Just so good. I will say we just finished Silo and Silo is incredible. I think I put Silo in top 10 TV ever. Top three. I feel like didn't they read the book? It's based on the books. The book was one of the best selling sci-fi self-published novels on Amazon ever.
And the show is just fantastic. It's great. I haven't seen Project Hail Mary, but I read the book and really liked it. What was that? Do you remember nuclear war scenario? Jess and I watched this entire movie recently and I was convinced it was really familiar. Then at like two thirds of the movie I was like, oh yeah, I read this book. Just read the books. Well, yeah, at the end we were like, oh wait, there's some decent... I don't know, season finale of Lioness coming out. There's not. I need some more. Lioness is fine. I'm fine with Lioness. Tires. No, it's great, but that's over. Diplomat coming back, you know.
If you are a fan of all things newspapers and comedy, the office creators have a show called The Paper that is pretty funny. What loving husband found that for you? Loving husband. You find TV shows. That's how you show her you love her. It's just his love language is that I enjoy television more than Sam enjoys television. So his love language is that. I do like this character from the Tires show, Stavros Haleakas. This guy, have you heard of this guy? He's the most foul comedian I've seen in a long time and it's excellent. He's become part of my sauna routine. Speaking of comedians, guys, I just announced the WTF lineup and Whitney Cummings is coming.
Do you guys know, speaking of great mom humor? Isn't there a double Whitney? Isn't Whitney Wolf Herd coming too? Whitney Wolf Herd. We got the CEO, president of NASDAQ, head of Goldman Sachs investment banking, lots of AI. Should I start going by Samuel Wharton Lesson if she's Whitney Wolf Herd? Should I just be like, you are referring to my full name? It's because she became popular as Whitney Wolf. Then she got married. So now she's kept all the names. I'm going to be... Yeah, I'll switch to David Brooks Morin from here on out. David Brooks Morin. How do you feel about this topic? Great Samuel Wharton Lesson. Brooks, you're the least preppy person I know.
How are you Brooks? David Brooks Morin will get more respect than Dave Morin. Just saying. I know I should switch to it, right? Guys, my whole family is from the East Coast. Britt, you changed your name. Do you feel good about the name change? Well, the name change happened because I was one of two Brittneys and one needed to be Britt and one needed to be Brittney. Also, I started dating Dave when I was nineteen. That's what happened to me, too. And I felt from the brand perspective of our couple brand, it was like Dave and Britt was cleaner than Dave and Brittany. Well, you're Brittany Bonet Morin. That's my legal name. Brittany Bonet and wait, what, David, what is it?
David Brooks. David Brooks. David Brooks. That's how David Brooks can go on NPR. I like that your name is S-A-N-S. David Brooks Morin is like a serious person on NPR. I'm into it. Serious person. David Brooks Morin has a pipe. You should get a pipe. I have a pipe. I'll get a pipe for next week's podcast. Should I start smoking a pipe while we do this podcast? Let's do an alternative podcast under our full names. Are the listeners with us at all right now? What's happening? There are no listeners left. It's just us. They tuned out at the sleep score.
We're going to give people back their time? Go back to your reels, people. They do like entertainment these days. This could be entertaining for them. Speaking of entertainment, check out The Information's most influential people in tech list if you're busy this week. Fifty people. I worked very hard on this. Can it be fifty reels? Fifty reels. Fifty people who are going... I held... I did it with amazing reporter Jemima. And we held ourselves to the standard of over the next ten years. Not necessarily who's going to be the biggest name in lights, but the people that other people, if they called you, you'd pick up the phone. Influential people.
Well, David Brooks Morin should be on there. I don't know about David Morin, but David Brooks. Well, I know, but I'd get accused of insider. I'd get accused of all sorts of things if I put you guys on the list. But anyway, if you want some fun weekend reading... But not David Brooks Morin. Here's the question. Do you want to be a three name person or a one name person? You know what I'm saying? Miley Cyrus just became Miley. She's got baggage from her parents. But you want to be Oprah. You want to be Rupert, you know? I was at the US Open. The crowd came out. Michelle is there, whatever. Half the people get one name lands and the other half get two names.
It's very clear you want to be a one name person, SZA or something. I don't know. There are all these people where it's just Steve or something. There's no question. But there are a lot of one namers. What about a one initialer? I think the ultimate thing for the crowd cam is no name necessary. What's the... there's a rap line about Prince, how Prince turned himself into a symbol. That's an Eminem line. Ever since Prince turned himself into a symbol. Turning yourself into a symbol is one step, but no name. You got to be an emoji. That's what you got to be. And with that, examine your names, examine your children's names. Have a great weekend.
And we'll see you back here next week or some configuration of us and our alter egos for another episode of More or Less. Bye guys. Bye. Bye. See you later. 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 More or Less at Dave Morin at Lesson at Jay Lesson. And as for me, I'm at Brit. See you guys next time. They always try. The other thing, though, is I would like to say a word about how entertaining reels have been.
And I actually watch them and I'm like, thank you, AI. I am cracking up. The stuff I get about tennis is so funny. And then I'm seeing like these like pro surfers surfing with their four-year-olds getting barreled. And it's like totally awesome. I got that one too. I know. They're just so good. And then, but I love these ones of people. Like it's obviously describing a reel is like the least exciting thing you can do on a podcast, but I'm gonna do it anyway. It's like a mom falling over on the stairs. Like she's exhausted. Like she's just like so tired. And then his text comes in. Can you play tennis? And she goes, yes, I can play tennis. It goes like that.
I thought that was really funny. We're getting a real sense of Jess's social media feed right now. It's literally all tennis. And that's like everybody I know. Do you want to have dinner? No, I can't have dinner until February. Oh, do you want to hit tomorrow? Yeah, I'm available all day. So it's everyone you know right now. It's a big chunk of people I know. If I promise you, if I'm like, you want to meet to talk about this? They say no. I'm like, you want to meet to hit? They'll be like, I can be there at nine because that's the mode of where we've gotten to. I'm going to bring us to one more topic, really a topic to close, which is, I don't know.
Have you guys seen picking up on politics a little bit more? All the tech people are waking up and realizing they need the Democrats to wake up in their corner on these tech issues. And I don't know if you saw, but Jay Carney, who ran Amazon's public policy and been around many big tech companies, has joined Ron Conway and SV Angel in taking on the task of educating, informing, influencing the Democratic Party about AI. And I think this will be very hard to do, but there's a lot, a big drumbeat. I don't mean to be sleeping in as cold, but didn't Ron Conway retire? This is a separate initiative, though. I don't believe so. Ron Conway is still active-ish.
Yeah, I don't know. Maybe he does. I don't know. People started talking about it, but I think now you're starting to see that wave where all these tech companies are waking up and saying, OK, we, they're probably feeling like it served us pretty well to pivot hard Trump in terms of their business, not making a judgment on any issues other than has it helped their businesses to pivot Trump. But now they're looking down the road a little bit and they're thinking, oh, maybe we have a bigger problem. So none of us here are Washington, D.C. experts. But would anyone like to opine on said topic? I try to stay out of politics. On the Democrats?
Yeah, or how your Mark or Tim Cook or any of these CEOs who were behind Trump in his inauguration and are in lockstep with him. I mean, we forget how strange it was when Silicon Valley turned to support Trump. I remember. We don't forget that. Well, a reporter sending me notes saying Mark and Ben of Andreessen Horowitz are going to endorse Trump. And I basically, and I said, we're about to file the story. And my instinct was check your sources. Right. Like, it just didn't. And of course, the story was right. And we published it and we broke it. That was weird. And now, not so weird, but the screw will turn again or what swings? The something swings, turns. Pendulum.
Thank you. Well, I don't know. I don't know that anything turns, Jess. Like the Democrats have been hopelessly lost for a long time. And I guess we'll see once the, you know, the election cycle starts and we have a look at the field. But to me, like this whole thing has been hopelessly lost for many years now. And so I think that's what everybody I know that's sort of more independently minded, were Democrat, is kind of looking for a new message. And thus far, there isn't one. And so I kind of think, I don't know what's going to happen here. I guess we're going to see. I think tactically for the big companies, it just requires them to have a strategy,
especially as if you have like investigations and all the things that could happen if Democrats are controlling. Oh, they definitely have strategies. They're heavy policy. Look, everyone feels like they're like betting right now. We talk about the pendulum or the thing, the cycles like the whole bet is the pendulum has broken and we're in some like runaway cycle to one direction. But do you believe that or do you believe people want us to think that because that's how you get anthropic three trillion? No, I mean, I obviously look, the history is long. The railroads all went bankrupt. WorldCom went bankrupt. Everything goes bankrupt in these types of cycles.
I think this time is not different, but the details can be different. And the reality is there's a lot of money to be made on the trade. The question is like that can be true and you can still make or lose a lot of money. Yeah. Unfortunately, the problem for anyone who grew up emotionally as an investor and believes in kind of is like we're all about buying, not the selling part. It turns out you need to do both. This is not the podcast to listen to if you're looking for trading advice. If you want investing advice, we're very good at it. But, you know, we might be the worst traders in the world. Buy low, sell high. Yeah, but they don't sell. Go extremely long.
Like, that's like what we're good at. We can rename this podcast Go Long. South Park had it right. It's buy, it's start up, sell out, bro down. Right? That's what we're currently in. Right? Like, we're between sell out and bro down. And we're just in the start up part. I feel like it's a new beginning. I really do. What does that mean? I think you drown out. Like, things have gotten so extreme and crazy. Like, at some point, I did not care to see like some nice kid I went to college with his opinion on Dario's essay on X. Right? Like, at some point. But it's so entertaining. Pink peak spewing shit. So yeah.
So with that part of your brain that you devote to entertaining, you're watching. Which is for most people like the entire thing. Great. You're watching tennis moms fall on the stairs. It's great. Send me all of those reels. I'll take your Marin moms. I'll take your Atherton moms. I'll take all of it. But like, for people building things, I think you actually can accept that like that era has been drowned out. Everyone's going to drown themselves out in a sea of memes and do something else. Touch grass, perhaps. I will say I liked Rob Chung, who I love and came and played tennis with us recently,
but he was the first employee at Finn back in the day, was posting his Dario commentary, which I thought was the whole thing was just like, all right, so like, let's go through all the characters in Dr. Strangelove and figure out who is who in Dr. Strangelove. I'm like, that's fun. That's like a good spit on this. So it's great. But like, if you want to build, it's for the entrepreneurs out there or the real event. Like that, you know. Don't look at the big board. He's looking at the big board. By the way, that's what happens in Dr. Strangelove is they bring the Russian and he looks at the big board. Rob Chung's awesome. That's what we're seeing. I've never seen that.
You've never seen Dr. Strangelove? No. Is that weird? Britt hasn't seen a lot of the great movies in the canon, Sam. Like she's never seen the big Lebowski. She's never seen like... You've never seen the big Lebowski? What? It's because I'm 35, you guys. You're not 35. I went to your brain. On my sleep score, I am. You honestly fake being a cultured person with no culture, which is very impressive. I am such a cultured person. I will school you on any pop culture test. Sam, I've fought this battle for years. Like, don't even try. So are you just going to skip her and just go on to your kids or are you going to try to save her? Yeah. I'm already...
Like the kids are getting absolutely educated in the canon. Britt, Dr. Strangelove came out decades before we were born. It's not like a... Well, it was before me. That's all I'm saying. Guys, this is a fragmented culture universe. Britt, bring us to some... Let's wrap with some pop culture. Let me talk to you about modern culture. What's happening? Where's my wedding dress pictures from Taylor Swift? Britt runs a pop culture website, you guys. Let's go. The Emmys happened this week. I don't think Sam's watched anything that won an award on the Emmys. He has no modern television taste, clearly. No one cares.
And Taylor Swift was in a cameo and Taylor Swift was at the Chiefs game. And there's a lot of Taylor Swift happening. There's a bunch of rumors about what's going on. There's some big announcements to be had. And there's a lot of football going on. That's what's happening in the pop culture world. I do like the SAS British show. Have you watched that? Oh, yeah. Rogue, Rogue something. It's so good. Not Rogue One. Rogue, Rogue. Rogue Heroes. Dave. Not emanated. It's really good. Highly recommend. It's about the founding of the British SAS during World War II. I've heard it's good. Just so good. I will say we just finished Silo and Silo is incredible.
I think I put Silo in top 10 TV ever. Top three. I feel like, didn't they read the book? It's based on the books. The book was one of the, I guess it was the best selling sci-fi self-published novel on Amazon ever. And it, the show is just fantastic. Like, it's like, I haven't seen Proud of the Hail Mary, but I read the book and really liked it. And then what was that? Do you remember nuclear war scenario? Jess and I watched this entire movie recently and I was like, this is really familiar. And then like, it took me to like two thirds of the movie. Like, oh yeah, I read this book. Just read the books.
Well, yeah, at the end we were like, oh wait, there's some decent, I don't know, season finale of Lioness coming out. There's not, I need some more. Lioness is fine. I'm fine with Lioness. Tires. No, it's great, but that's over. Diplomat coming back, you know. If you are a fan of all things newspapers and comedy, the office creators have a show called The Paper that is pretty funny. What loving husband found that for you? Loving husband. You find just TV shows. That's how you show her you love her. It's just his love language is like, because I enjoy television more than Sam enjoys television. So it's love language is like.
I do like this character from the Tires show, Stavros Haleakas. Or this guy, have you heard of this guy? He's the most foul comedian I've seen in a long time and it's excellent. He's become like part of my sauna routine. Oh, speaking of comedians, guys, I just announced the WTF lineup and Whitney Cummings is coming. Do you guys know, speaking of great mom humor? Isn't there a double Whitney? Isn't Whitney Wolf Heard coming too? Whitney Wolf Heard. We got the CEO, president of NASDAQ, head of Goldman Sachs investment banking, lots of AI. Should I start going by Samuel Wharton Lesson if she's Whitney Wolf Heard? Should I just be like, you are referring to my full name?
It's because she became popular as Whitney Wolf. Then she got married. So now she's kept all the names. I'm going to be. Yeah, I'll switch to David Brooks Morin from here on out. David Brooks Morin. How do you feel about this topic? Great Samuel Wharton lesson. Brooks, you're the least preppy person I know. How are you Brooks? David Brooks Morin will get more respect than Dave Morin. Just saying. I know I should switch to it, right? Like, guys, my whole family is from the East Coast. I mean, Britt, you changed your name. Do you feel good about the name change? Well, the name change happened because I was one of two Brittneys and one needed to be Britt
and one needed to be Brittney. But also, I started dating Dave when I was 19. That's what happened to me, too. And I felt from the brand perspective of our couple brand, it was like Dave and Britt was cleaner than Dave and Brittany. Well, you're Brittany Bonet Morin. That's my legal name. Brittany Bonet and wait, what, David, what is it? David Brooks. David Brooks. David Brooks. That's how David Brooks can go on NPR. I like that your name is S-A-N-S. David Brooks Morin is like a serious person on NPR. I'm into it. Serious person. David Brooks Morin like has a pipe. You should get a pipe. I have a pipe. I'll get a pipe for next week's podcast.
Should I start smoking a pipe while we do this podcast? Let's do an alternative podcast under our full names. Are the listeners with us at all right now? What's happening? There are no listeners left. It's just us kind of. They tuned out at the sleep score. We're going to give people back. Their time? Go back to your reels, people. They do like entertainment these days. This could be entertaining for them. Speaking of entertainment, check out the information's most influential people in tech list if you're busy this week. 50 people. I worked very hard on this. Can it be 50 reels? 50 reels. 50 people who are going. I held. I did it with amazing reporter Jemima.
And we held ourselves to the standard of over the next 10 years. Not necessarily who's going to be like the biggest name in lights, but the people that other people like if they called you, you'd pick up the phone. Influential people. Well, David Brooks Morin should be on out. I don't know about David Morin, but David Brooks. Well, I know, but I'd get accused of insider. I'd get accused of all sorts of things if I put you guys on the list. But anyway, if you want some fun weekend reading. But not David Brooks Morin. Here's the question. Do you want to be a three name person or a one name person? You know what I'm saying? Like Miley Cyrus just became Miley.
She's got baggage from her parents. But you want to be Oprah. You want to be Rupert, you know? I was at the US Open. The crowd came out. Oh, like, you know, Michelle is there, whatever. Half the people get one name lands and the other half get two names. It's very clear you want to be a one name person, like SZA or some shit. I don't know. Like there are all these like people who like it's just like Steve or something. And like that, there's no question. But there are a lot of one namers. What about a one initialer? I think the ultimate thing for the crowd cam is no name necessary. Like what's the there's a rap line about Prince, how Prince turned himself into a symbol.
That's an Eminem line. Ever since Prince turned himself into a symbol. Turning yourself into symbols one step, but no name. You got to be an emoji. That's what you got to be. And with that, examine your names, examine your children's names. Have a great weekend. And we'll see you back here next week or some configuration of us and our alter egos for another episode of More or Less. Bye guys. Bye. Bye. See you later. 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 more or less at Dave Morin at lesson at Jay lesson. And as for me, I'm at Brit. See you guys next time.