Agentic AI Will Break the Internet (ClawdBot, OpenAI & the AI Demand Delusion)

Transcript

How Google convinced all of the newspapers that they would just make money on the volume and they should give up? I'm familiar with that trade. Yep. Didn't take it. This is exactly the same story once over again with retailers where the chatbot was like, oh, don't worry. Just let us front end you and you'll have no brand, but don't worry because you'll make it up on volume. It's like, no, don't fall for it. But everyone falls for it. You know why they'll fall for it? Because in most cases, the people running these companies want to be there for three years and get a short term revenue shot in the arm and then they're going to take the stock options and leave and leave the companies in ruins. More or less. [SPEAKER_02] Is it no or is it yes? We'll debate the text that's best when we get more or less. Dave and Britt plus Sam and Jess put it all right to the test. More or less. Why, hello, friends. I missed you. Welcome to More or Less. I'm back. How was Switzerland? It was delightful, Dave. I love that place. Thanks for asking. I did. I was expecting first. I thought Davos would be a huge boondoggle. And so I never went because I thought it would be a waste of time and money. Then the scales tipped and I thought it was worth my time. But I had a lot of fun. The weather was warm. [SPEAKER_04] Oh no. [SPEAKER_02] Running into people on the streets. It felt like South by Southwest. [SPEAKER_04] Is the snow as bad as the Western United States? Yes. [SPEAKER_04] Oh, that's terrible news. [SPEAKER_00] Although did you see that there's snow in Russia that's covering up the third story of buildings? Yeah. Although I can't tell if that's AI or not. Some of them look pretty AI-y to me. [SPEAKER_04] Oh, that's a good point. [SPEAKER_04] But some of the snow drifts are amazing. This really feels like AI, but it's cool. [SPEAKER_04] I'm like, no, all of the snow went to one place on earth. [SPEAKER_04] Well, also the Northeast. The place I grew up skiing was Jay Peak. Jay Peak is having a record season. Should we go to Jay Peak and ski some pow? No. [SPEAKER_03] I think we might. Should we? No. We're not going to Vermont. I don't have any reason to be on the East coast. If I did, I would totally go just for the novelty of it. Let's go do some New York meetings and go skiing. [SPEAKER_03] I mean, to be honest, it would be pretty cool. I almost think it's worth doing for the Instagram posts. Yeah. Let's do it. [SPEAKER_03] Okay. Do it for the gram. Fine. [SPEAKER_02] What are we doing for the grams? We're going to ski Jay Peak. It's actually a great mountain. I haven't skied it since I was 10, but it's a good one. [SPEAKER_02] Okay. We need to tell our dear viewers. I've decided, guys, we don't have listeners anymore. We just have viewers. If you're not experiencing this in video, you're missing out. [SPEAKER_02] I don't know about that. [SPEAKER_02] I decided this because my favorite podcaster of the moment, Andy Roddick, also decides this. He doesn't talk about his listeners. [SPEAKER_03] Andy Roddick, the tennis player. [SPEAKER_02] He has the best tennis podcast there is. It's called Served. [SPEAKER_02] I didn't know that. Rackets podcast is number two. I'm sorry. I have to give props. [SPEAKER_02] Oh, wait. So you own this podcast? [SPEAKER_03] No. Got it. [SPEAKER_03] Andy's a great podcaster and he doesn't refer to his listeners. He just refers to his viewers. [SPEAKER_02] Viewers. Is that out of habit because he's used to having viewers and he just doesn't know listeners? [SPEAKER_04] No, nothing is a habit. It's probably out of someone who has a full podcast operation behind them as opposed to us clowns. So I'm just going to take his things. He would also say... [SPEAKER_02] Sam Watson operation. [SPEAKER_02] He would also say subscribe. [SPEAKER_03] I've been told that YouTube is the growth channel. Of course it is. TITV is crushing it on YouTube, guys. Did you know that YouTube is big? There are people on it. But what I was going to say to our viewers is we're down a Brit. She had a work commitment. So I will do my best to keep this podcast feminine. Dave, what is she doing for work? I can't talk about it. [SPEAKER_04] Really? [SPEAKER_03] Really. [SPEAKER_04] So fun. Okay. All right. Boring. [SPEAKER_02] She has some work. She's selling offline too. I don't know. [SPEAKER_03] No. Okay. I want to start by everyone talking about a highlight from their week and I'm going to share a photo. Let's talk about mine. Okay. Here we go. [SPEAKER_04] Go for it. You start. [SPEAKER_03] I'm going to share this photo and I want you guys to tell me what it is. And if in the process, I might share all my text messages, unpublished drafts. Technology is not my forte. [SPEAKER_04] That's fine. You already gave it to Claude or what are they calling it? [SPEAKER_03] Multibot. [SPEAKER_04] Multibot. [SPEAKER_04] What is this, dear viewers? [SPEAKER_03] Whoa. What is that? What is this? [SPEAKER_03] So for you people, you viewers. [SPEAKER_04] What are they doing? Ayahuasca trips at Davos now? [SPEAKER_04] No. You know what they figured out, Dave? They figured out that it's cheaper to just skip the ayahuasca and just lie on the floor. That way there's no cost of goods sold. Okay. So what I'm showing is a picture of, well, I will give it away, but basically a picture of... [SPEAKER_03] Those look like expensive blankets. [SPEAKER_04] What looks like a sleepover in a cathedral. It looks like a sleepover in a cathedral. [SPEAKER_03] Wouldn't you say? [SPEAKER_03] So for you people, you viewers. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] What are they doing? Ayahuasca trips at Davos now? [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] No. You know what they figured out, Dave? They figured out that it's cheaper to just skip the ayahuasca and just lie on the floor. That way there's no cost of goods sold. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_03] Okay. So what I'm showing is a picture of, well, I will give it away, but a picture of... [SPEAKER_03] Those look like expensive blankets. [SPEAKER_04] What looks like a sleepover in a cathedral. It looks like a sleepover in a cathedral. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_03] Wouldn't you say? [SPEAKER_04] It does look like a sleepover in a cathedral. [SPEAKER_04] Okay. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_03] Is it a sit-in protest in a cathedral protesting something? [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. That would have been consistent with the vibe at this thing, to be honest. But no, I went to a Grace Cathedral sound bath. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] Oh, interesting. I've heard those are good, actually. That's the most un-Jessica thing I've ever heard. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_03] Those look like expensive blankets. What looks like a sleepover in a cathedral. It looks like a sleepover in a cathedral. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_03] Wouldn't you say? It does look like a sleepover in a cathedral. Okay. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_03] Is it a sit-in protest in a cathedral protesting something? [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. That would have been consistent with the vibe at this thing, to be honest. But no, I went to a Grace Cathedral sound bath. Oh, interesting. I've heard those are good, actually. That's the most un-Jessica thing I've ever heard. [SPEAKER_04] It is A, the most un-Jessica thing. B, it is the most San Francisco thing. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_04] We need to get you down to Esalen. I went at the suggestion of dear friends, obviously. I was totally game for this experience. I've done one sound bath in my life, which I really enjoyed. For those of you who don't know what a sound bath is, there are gongs and music while you lie on the floor. [SPEAKER_02] It's an incredible racket. [SPEAKER_04] It's an incredible racket. [SPEAKER_04] At least they're using that cathedral for what it's meant to be used for, finally. Well, they have the mind... I learned all about the mind-body programming of Grace Cathedral. You can do yoga. You can do meditation. Esalen was actually part of helping start it, 50 years ago. I enjoyed it very much. 90 minutes of cathedral soundbathing. And also, I left and I was thinking, this is so a Groupon from 10 years ago. This is exactly the thing. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_02] Groupon. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] Remember? [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] Of course. How do you even find out about such things these days? [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_02] I have friends who are wiser and more spiritually tuned than I am, who also have the foresight to get tickets. So anyway, it was a great experience. This podcast is brought to you by the Grace Cathedral Mind and Body Program once a month. Go sound bath. [SPEAKER_02] Go get a sound bath in a real cathedral. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_02] Just make sure if you're bony like I am, you need more than a yoga mat on a cathedral floor. Although that's its own special kind of altered state. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, it was not comfortable, but it was spiritually lovely. Okay, what about you guys? I've been deep down the Moltbot, Claudebot radical. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_04] Shocker. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_04] Wait, so do we... It's been renamed now. Is it no longer Claudebot? Yes, it's been renamed. [SPEAKER_04] For obvious reasons. What's the name? By the way, I'm also learning here. [SPEAKER_04] Moltbot, which is... That's what a lobster does when it evolves or loses its skin. So Claudebot was named after a lobster. [SPEAKER_02] No, Claudebot was named to sound like Claude. [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And let's not kid ourselves. It's good marketing. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] Indeed. I mean, it started as an open source hobby project and it went way bigger than I think Peter ever thought it would. And he's been having a pretty intense week. I've been talking to him a bunch and he... Yeah, it's just been awesome to watch this happen. [SPEAKER_02] And I think that it showed people a future of how to think about personal AI assistance that nobody had actually done yet. There'd been a lot of talk about it, but the idea that you could just give it the computer, I know we've talked about it on the pod before. [SPEAKER_02] We were two weeks ahead of this madness. We were two weeks ahead of this one. And we were two weeks ahead on everyone losing their minds about the security implications. Two weeks ago, our podcast was how this is going to end the internet. And lo and behold, two weeks later, the world caught up. We, once again, just didn't trade the insights. [SPEAKER_04] It's all right, Sam. I've heard you giving advice to people that they need to at least write down or talk about on podcasts what their insights are. So that's a good way to build your reputation and your resume. So there you go. Once again, we're right. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_03] Okay. Keeping this focused, you each get one to two examples of an amazing Moltbot win of the week. What have you actually done with it? I have a little Mac mini running with it right now. And I actually do something that's not that cool, but fine with it. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_02] What are you using it for, Dave? [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_02] One of my big wins was I've always wanted to build an iPhone app for our internal CRM that we have at Offline. We have a super custom CRM that has a lot of different data from a lot of different sources. And we've got great web interfaces, but no iOS interface. And so this weekend, while I was doing it during halftime of my son's basketball game, I booted up a new iOS project and pretty much had the entire thing built in two hours of talking to this thing throughout the day. And now it's on the phones of people at my office, and they love it. And I was looking at the token count that I heard, not the token count, but the cost of the tokens that it took to do the work. And it was around $150. And I was just thinking, you could say that $150 a day on using this tool is very expensive, or you could compare it to the cost of actually hiring an engineer to do this work and all of the back and forth that it would take, which would have been in the tens of thousands of dollars and probably months of work. And so a huge win for me on that front. [SPEAKER_02] Do you pick which models you wanted to use or is it defaulted? [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, you can. I've really experimented with different ones. The coolest thing about it is that it can use any CLI. And actually, I think the biggest insight of Moltbot is that it doesn't use this MCP stuff that was the du jour thing of the last year. It actually uses— [SPEAKER_03] That's what Codeium uses. Do you pick which models you wanted to use or is it defaulted? Yeah, you can. I've really experimented with different ones. The coolest thing about it is that it can use any CLI. And actually, I think the biggest insight of Moltbot is that it doesn't use this MCP stuff that was the du jour thing of the last year. It actually uses— [SPEAKER_03] That's what Codeium uses. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. And the way that Peter ended up, not necessarily stumbling, but really making this happen was that he was making a lot of different CLIs for tools that he wanted to use with his agentic coding setup. And he actually uses Codex mostly. And so he was building all these different CLIs. And then he realized that if you could orchestrate across all of these CLIs, the agent would just use the command line interface, use the UNIX command for help and discover the entire set of tools that the command line interface has, and then just start using it. And so the powerful thing about your question, Jess, is that you can install any tool that you want, and then you can tell it to— You can actually use it to use Cloud Code, or you can have it split its work across Cloud Code and Codex. You can have it do all kinds of different orchestration across all the different tools, depending on what use case you're trying to accomplish. And it's really good at it, which I think is the cool part. Okay, Sam, what's your... What? Mofa? Well, I initially, weeks ago, installed it on an actual computer, and then immediately uninstalled it. [SPEAKER_03] But I dug... I have a whole pile of Mac Minis in my... I've had them because I always... I used to do... Whenever I do a crypto transaction, I would buy a Mac Mini and then never use it again. [SPEAKER_03] I have a growing pile of them. Just like I had one... Every transaction required its own Mac Mini. So I have a whole stack of them that I've wiped. And so I have one set up. I basically... The only thing I actually do with it that's somewhat useful is I set up a Telegram bot for myself and then gave it my Twitter and a few other things. And I can basically... I have it set up to ask where I can just go say, hey, what's going on in the world? And it goes, reads the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. It reads a custom set of Twitter people I follow, etc. Writes me a digest and then posts it on the internet for other people. And the digests are pretty good. So I'm using it just for little shims like that. I will... Soon enough, my next little project, maybe I'll do this afternoon, is just making it go around LinkedIn and like a bunch of posts for me and shitpost comment on things. Just because who cares? I'm happy to give it access to my LinkedIn. I don't care about LinkedIn. And it's funny. My two real insights on it is one, I can't believe that Ngrok didn't make this. This is basically just... To me, I've built things like this before. You just... What's Ngrok? [SPEAKER_04] Ngrok was basically this little tunneling service that everyone uses where you can basically just put your Mac mini on the internet incredibly easily and tunnel into it, whatever. It's mostly used for development. But I've used it forever for little scripting projects, where you want to hit a web server easily and maintain an IP and an address for it, etc. But slapping an LLM on your desktop on top is— [SPEAKER_04] I'm just surprised. Ngrok is awesome. I always wanted to buy it because it's just a great tool. But I was, huh, this is really just an Ngrok extension. So that was point one. And then the second point is, I just really do think it's the end of the internet, right? Because it's just too... The fact that you can do this and automate the browser so easily. It's not that you couldn't do it before, just harder. I can be, hey, go around, generate funny images and post them on Instagram for me. Hey, go around and comment, here's my kind of archive of points of the world. Just comment on all of my friends posts or people I think are interesting to build distribution and hijack their distribution. Or I can just say, hey, go around and read all these websites and tell me what they say. And I'm never going to visit them again. It basically just makes all this stuff doable before. But it's so unbelievably easy for literally everyone to do it that it's the final straw where I think the internet just goes away. [SPEAKER_03] Right. People are, there's no more web, I bet. [SPEAKER_02] What do you mean? No more web browser? What does it mean that the internet goes away? You're just not going to use websites because it'll all just be 100% bot traffic. Right. And then the economics of it break and whatever else, you're we'll see how long information.com exists. Right. [SPEAKER_03] As opposed to it being, I knew we never worked too hard on the design for a reason. [SPEAKER_03] I mean, it's interesting, Sam, because one of the use cases that I built last weekend was I built a Jackson Hole snow report and I had it go get all of the esoteric local news reporters that they have no API. Right. So it just opens the browser, gets the report, goes get stuff from the open snow API. And then I have it set up as effectively a cron job or a repeating task that will look like literally the cron interface in the bar. It's totally easy to implement. Totally. And then after that, I was, oh, I used to have this old idea that I built [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] I built a Jackson Hole snow report and I had it go get all of the esoteric local news reporters that they have no API. Right. So it just opens the browser, gets the report, goes get stuff from the open snow API. And then I have it set up as effectively a cron job or a repeating task that will look like literally the cron interface in the bar. It's totally easy to implement. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_03] Totally. And then after that, I was, oh, I used to have this old idea that I built during the Facebook platform years called Snowtick, which was I assigned snow tick or ticker symbols stock symbols to all of the ski resorts in the country. And so I had it do that. And then I gave it my 10 favorite resorts. And now every week it will go and it'll get the data. It will go scrape the data from the websites where it's hard to get by just opening the browser and doing it. And then it gives me a synthesized point of view as to where it thinks the snow is going to be good next week. And doing that, you're right, it would have been we need one of these Davos Earth models that everyone's talking about in AI now. Maybe. But it would have been easy maybe to do that. But what I didn't want to do is go do the work to do all this. I don't know, a lot of data grabbing you had to do in the old days. And I've got this tool now and it runs every weekend for me, and it's no problem. And you can do that 1000 different ways now. [SPEAKER_03] So all the nerds are really, really incensed by this argument because selenium has existed forever. Guys, you're missing the point, right? Which is, yeah, there's nothing new that you couldn't do with a little technical know how before. But when you make the barrier to doing this stuff truly zero, which is what's happening right now, usually the internet can't survive, it's going to go away. Or does it take another form? I mean, it just feels to me that's why I'm so excited about it, Sam, is that it feels to me like I don't know, HyperCard, or like the beginning of the internet where it's just like, wow, there's this new primitive to build on top of now. People might build skills instead of websites. Now, I've seen a bunch of people go super viral with the skills that they're building. So this I'm going to pause here because this brings us to when I want we've got to move, we need to have the conversation everyone else is going to be having in two weeks now since we're two weeks ahead. So it's six months from now. First of all, what is this thing by then? Is it part of Microsoft? Is it a company with a $10 billion valuation? What is it? It's nothing, it's nothing because there's going to be 1000 versions of it. It's an indicator. This is like a MySpace. It's cool. It's fun. But it's not an important platform. It's just a thing that will be copied 1000 times. [SPEAKER_03] Okay, Dave, what's your answer to that? Agree? Disagree? [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_02] I think that will happen. I think there's probably 1000 copy machines up and running already. I think this is probably the most powerful idea in AI, I don't know, in three years. [SPEAKER_04] But if that's what it is, it's the idea being an agent that just controls things for you. Give the agent a computer, give the agent to computer. But to be clear, that's not a new idea. It is just a good implementation of it. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And I also think the way he implemented skills, which we were just talking about, really matters. It's extremely easy to create a new one and then share it with the community, and then everybody else can download it. And so there's this self fulfilling prophecy going on where people are creating new things to add on to it. There's something like 30,000 projects that have happened in the last seven days. Has he raised any money? Will he? [SPEAKER_03] He started it as an open source project. But I think probably every single investor on the planet's trying to get involved. And I bet— [SPEAKER_03] Trying to write him a check. Except for me. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_03] I bet there's a lot of people trying to get him to come do it and big companies and all those kinds of things. So I don't know, I think any of these things could be an outcome. I think it's a stupid investment for anyone to make. But I will say as an individual developer, I think it's a great example of what you should be doing, right? Which is doing cool stuff that are calling cards with little concern for what the business is. And then maybe it's something and maybe it's not. This is the thing I've been pushing a lot of people on recently is you just have to be doing memorable things right now, right? I'd much rather see you do a memorable viral project of almost any sort than pitch me some weird SaaS thing. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, I think that's right. It's be memorable in this moment. That's what matters. And it's memorable. It's the moment. Although being memorable is an interesting question, Sam. Can you be memorable by just trying to be memorable? This goes back to one of my favorite Rick Rubin isms, which is: don't try to make music for the charts, make music that you love, right? [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_03] Totally. And I think there's a lot of people out there trying to make music for the charts. And I agree, but that's not memorable. I think my favorite memorable thing recently was this guy on Twitter who's so great. He scripted the meter maids. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_03] I haven't seen it. It was so good. He basically built this thing scripting the government's website where you could track where all the meter maids were and where people were getting tickets in real time. And it was awesome. It's a great example of the internet being fun and doing memorable pranky stuff, right? I've been talking to a lot of college students recently. And they annoy me because they come in with these super professional pitches about nonsense. And I'm like, guys, pranks on campus, do fun stuff, experiment, toy, play. That's the whole point of the moment we're in again. And what made the internet great is I want to see more pranks. I want to see more hilarious things being done with technology in unexpected ways. We're back to a hacker era. Right. [SPEAKER_04] And that's great. Yeah. So what else have you guys come across that has this ethos? [SPEAKER_04] And that's great. Yeah. So what else have you guys come across that has this ethos? [SPEAKER_03] It's funny because I also saw a whole bunch of people yesterday talking about that they want to go back to the Apple way of launching things, which is to keep things secret as long as possible. Apple keeps absolutely nothing secret. They try. [SPEAKER_03] Well, I understand, Jess, but the idea that you actually are careful about how you launch something rather than always doing it in public, because the other thing that has become culturally normative is to always be building everything in public. And there was a big conversation over the last few days that that's also not always the right strategy. And so I would posit that Sam's right. If you're doing things to have fun, do as many things to have fun and make lots of projects, do fun things. But if you're getting serious about something, try to be serious about it long enough that by the time you show it to the public, it goes off pretty well. Do you think this is what—so obviously hardware is suited to that in a way that software isn't. I don't know if you guys talked about the information scoop that Apple is developing an AI pin, all a humane. [SPEAKER_04] Okay, we don't have to. I think we probably made fun of it. [SPEAKER_03] Okay. Yeah, I think you did too. At least I did. It's funny. Open AI is kind of taking this advice with their hardware launch, except they're talking about literally everything else except the physical, like which device it is, right? And which one's going to be first. And so they're trying to get some of that aha magic out of the ultimate reveal. It could backfire though, if the device isn't great. We'll see. Okay. What—let's not talk anymore. I want to wrap this AI thing. I do want to talk about the tech's reaction to the ice protests because it is a big topic this week as well. But what else do we have to say about AI at the end of January, 2026? [SPEAKER_02] It's just not interesting. Keeping on. Yeah. It's just keeping on, keeping on. I will tell you guys, I feel like since you're cut from the same cloth, I occasionally have to invoke other parts of the ecosystem. And I—yeah, do it. [SPEAKER_02] I hosted a panel on AI infrastructure at Davos with the CEO of CoreWeave, the head of G42, the CFO of OpenAI and the COO of BlackRock. That's pretty amazing. Fancy people. Take us inside, Jess. Guys, it was a great panel. What was the big question? Well, so the purpose of the—I hope no one from the World Economic Forum is listening, but they probably will now. The purpose is high level dialogue, which is great, but I'm a reporter. I have questions. They need to be answered. So what is high level dialogue? What's the difference between high level and low level? [SPEAKER_03] High level would be how big is the AI opportunity and what are the risks? Okay. Low level would be CoreWeave. You only support NVIDIA. TPUs are on the rise. How do you think about the future of your infrastructure stack? Right. Those would be very different questions. And what I enjoyed about it is I think we legitimately covered it all. I think there were some high level themes that were interesting, but the speakers were really candid about asking more specific questions about their strategies. And when I asked Sarah Fryer, who's the CFO of OpenAI, about their—I asked her to respond to criticism Google was throwing their way. Demis, the head of DeepMind had said he was surprised OpenAI was moving into advertising so quickly because Google was not, which was not actually true and also throwing some shade. So she responded to that and she talked about OpenAI's many business model plans, including IP licensing from discoveries made, which created a big news cycle. And to be clear, this is not us as individuals giving OpenAI a share of any IP we have from using it, but OpenAI striking partnerships around drug discovery and with research institutions or whatever. So I thought that was an interesting part of the panel, but admittedly everyone on that stage had been AI red pills and that was actually their word, not mine. [SPEAKER_04] What does that mean? And so most of the questions I asked came back with a: you only ask that question if you don't believe in the demand and the demand is infinite. And so that question is therefore invalid. That was the pattern. When I asked Sarah about these so-called circular deals where customers are investing, taking an investment from your supplier to go buy more of their product, AKA half the financings in AI, she said, well, you only think that way if you underappreciate the demand. But the other thing I asked—so I asked the CoreWeave CEO—and this is a little wonky even for readers of More or Less—but CoreWeave had a very rocky year in the stock markets last year because it came out as an early AI IPO, but with a very unusual for a tech company debt structure. And most of the year, the market whipsawed it and it was crushed. But then as one of the most important neoclouds, it's recovered. But I asked the CEO, I said, what happens when all the training gets way more efficient? And so all this infrastructure isn't—you don't need it, right. Or training is getting way, way more efficient. And he had this quote, which I'm going to read because it's really stuck with me. He said, it's not the infrastructure that's endless. It's the voracious appetite for intelligence that is limitless. That's the part we have to focus on. And every single step function in the foreseeable future, certainly within the horizons we are working on, are going to do nothing more than accelerate the business. Do you guys have a reaction to that? I have a reaction to that. I mean, it sounds like they're saying the same thing, that the demand is so much bigger than all of you see. We're sitting here looking at our P&Ls and the demand is shockingly larger than all of you normies can see. And that will be our destiny. Is that what they're both saying in different ways? [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And the thing I didn't—I ran out of time and also just didn't think of on the spot—is like, I can think of things where there's limitless demand and they're a total commodity with no margin and no business. Right. So those are two different things, right? You can accept and embrace limitless demand and never ending efficiency gains, but it doesn't automatically follow that that has a healthy profit margin. In fact, you could look at what the internet did to media and entertainment and say, actually, here's an example of a technology where the liquidity for time spent watching videos went way up because it's frictionless to consume this thing. And there goes the business model. So but also he could be right. I actually say that I think that's what's exciting about this moment. But it is concerning to me that the leaders in this infrastructure build out are seeing one side of the coin. [SPEAKER_03] Well, they're religious. I mean, this is the thing about this whole argument. It's either right or wrong. Spidey sense in history says it's wrong. Right. And then when you hear prognostications like this, something's about to— Well, they're religious. I mean, this is the thing about this whole argument. It's either right or wrong. Spidey sense in history says it's wrong. Right. And then when you hear prognostications like this, something's about to go very badly. Time spent watching videos has gone way up because it's just so frictionless to consume this thing. And there goes the business model. So I, but also he could be right. I actually think that's what's so exciting about this moment is, but it is a bit concerning to me that the leaders in this infrastructure build out really see one side of the coin. It's either right or wrong. Spidey sense in history says it's wrong. Right. And then when you hear prognostications like this, something's about to go very badly. It's possible they're right. It's not impossible. And everyone's just playing two things. One is the asymmetry card, which is if we're wrong, we're still fine and it doesn't really matter. And if we're right, it's important. And everyone wants to be important at an important moment and do something important. And then B is the ironies. And this is the scary thing. Look, the world is ruled by narratives. I think people value stored narratives. I'm very pro narrative in a lot of ways. And here's the irony of the whole thing: even if it's wrong, if the narrative is strong enough and growing and people choose to store belief in the narrative, it will keep going for a long time. And they will make a lot of money in the interim. Right. So for me, it's my thing of the week is silver and gold. [SPEAKER_02] Silver and gold. Yes, let's talk about silver and gold. They're up like two X since January 1. Silver and gold is the asset to own. And hilariously, you look at that as someone who believes in Bitcoin and the culture and you're like, oh my god, all that money is supposed to be in Bitcoin, not in silver and gold. But the silver and gold story, which is Bitcoin minus the technology risk, ironically, is the hottest thing in the world. And why is there limitless demand for metals that are useless? Narrative, right? So is it worth buying silver and gold? Well, it has nothing to do with their actual value. It's like, do you believe the story and the story is effectively short everything else in technology and AI, right? So I don't know, if you lead one of these things and you're red pilled, there's two ways to be red pilled. One way, you're actually red pilled, right? You actually believe some of the incredible bullshit that you're hearing. Two is you're not quite red pilled. But the reality is, as we've been talking about for a long time, the cost benefit to just going all in narratively on it is in favor of going all in narratively on it. And candidly, it doesn't even matter, because it doesn't have to be right. It just has to be what people continue to believe. [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, I agree with all that. And I think it's important to point that out that that's what's happening. Isn't that also what's going on with copper? It's anything downstream from the AI narrative is also becoming a narrative. For what it's worth, I almost bought a bunch of copper recently because that one actually makes more sense to me. Copper is part of data. It's much closer to that. That's what I'm saying. You need a lot of copper for not just the data centers with the electricity and the story is that we're going to need in the next few years more copper than has been mined in the rest in the last 10,000 years of humanity, right? And therefore buy copper, which is impossible. Yeah, people are buying copper. They're getting copper traders on staffs of these AI companies. Meanwhile, we've got tech earnings this week, which I know this pod never likes talking about. But Meta is upping its CapEx guidance. So it's just kidding. Those big numbers. We're just going to go a little bit bigger. [SPEAKER_02] But is that Sam's point, which is they're just going to go infinity? They're just going hard on the other side. We're going all in on this narrative. Also guidance. I mean, you can argue that it's better to come in under that over. There's a lot of like—I guess I should double check. I just saw a tweet that they were upping it. I don't know. Maybe I should. Can't believe anything on Twitter. It's just a bunch of clawed bots. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, I know. I'm just going to have to. I mean, that's a problem. But okay, let's scare slightly here. So obviously, with all the things going on in Minneapolis and ICE, this nation is divided and in shock and in turmoil and working through a lot. It's having some interesting reverb in tech. What are you guys seeing? Well, I'll say that was my clawed bot when it summarized the news yesterday. Basically the TLDR on the whole thing was the vibe check was the only story is Minneapolis until that's resolved. Nothing else matters. So clawed bot believes it. It seems bad. My take on it is I did you see. Well, obviously, the initial thing was no one in tech is responding, right? And people were calling them out on it. I thought Andrew Ross Sorkin's take on air was interesting. He had a pretty sophisticated take. And then I'll extend what I would respond to it. His take was, look, we don't need to comment about immigration, the whole nine yards. The thing business executives can comment on is training. You all train people. Clearly, there's a training gap, right? The people that are running ICE or on the ground, etc. And we should fix that. I thought that was a fairly business oriented, benign, approachable approach. [SPEAKER_03] Here was my response take. I was like, look, if you're a business executive, you understand training, sure. But you also understand recruiting. And I actually think the bigger thing is recruiting and contracts. Those are the languages you speak. Yeah, the bigger thing that I think is missing in this conversation is my take on it is, again, not commenting on the immigration part, whatever. Again, in general, I am in favor of our borders being secure. And that's not what's happening here, just to be clear. [SPEAKER_03] I'm just saying I am in favor of those things. But I do think there is a structural recruiting problem, probably for ICE, which is who chooses to apply to ICE and where they come from and how they think about what their role is. Not because you think about, take OpenAI, you get a bunch of researchers with a mission, right, especially early, which is, oh, we get to work on the coolest things. And we're saving the universe with quote unquote safety and the AGI race is important. And we're going to get compensated a certain way. It's attracting a certain set of talent, right, that cares about a certain set of things. If you told me that ICE has a recruitment problem, which is the message they have, the comp structure, the appeal of who wants to do that job is a set of people where you need to do a lot of training and screening. I believe that and I think business executives can understand how that would play out. [SPEAKER_04] And we're going to get compensated a certain way. It's you attract a certain set of talent, right, that cares about a certain set of things. If you told me that ICE has a recruitment problem, which is the message they have, the comp structure, the appeal of who wants to do that job is a set of people where, let's put it this way, you need to do a lot of training and screening. I believe that and I think business executives can understand how that would play out. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_04] Right. And so the question for me is, how do you take ICE or the mission and inject the right people into the culture and the community where they're doing their job, but they're not ending up in really bad places and situations and making bad choices? [SPEAKER_02] So Dave, if you were running Apple, Google, Meta, what would you have done? [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] Whoa, that's a tough question. I guess quickly to respond to Sam's comments, I would extend that to not just the questions of training and these other things that you mentioned, but we see this in Silicon Valley all the time. When you try to scale a company too fast, the quality bar goes down a lot, right? And my understanding is that we're trying to hire an enormous number of people into ICE very quickly. Right. And every time that happens, you see enormous numbers of problems organizationally and with how people behave. Right. And you can only grow human organizations so fast without there being a huge degradation in the quality of how they behave. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] True. I don't know enough to know if that is the cause of what's happening, but what about now? [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_04] So I don't know what I would have done, Jess. I mean, I'm not a person running one of these huge organizations, because here's what they did. Right. So I mean, you had some—first you had these people who had been afraid to oppose the Trump administration publicly. And Jeff Dean at Google, one of their OG AI leads, founder of Google Brain and so forth was the first to come out before the most recent tragedy and do this. And everyone's like, Oh my God, someone from inside a tech company has publicly criticized the administration. That was a big deal. Then you see the Paul Grahams and the other people who were known for being opinionated on Twitter, sharing their opinions. But by the way, these people weren't tweeting about politics for months and months and months. There was really a chill over that. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] And then ultimately you saw the CEOs like Sam Altman, Dario, Tim Cook sort of condemn what's happening, but praise Trump. So basically to literally say what's happening has gone too far, but Trump is a strong leader and we'll do the right thing. Yeah. It's a little dystopic. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_03] It's a little wild. Yeah. I mean, Jess, just go read 1984, go read any dystopian novel about descent into dystopian authoritarian nightmares. And the main thing is that fear drives behavior, right? And I do think that the real underlying thing going on is fear and people are afraid to speak because of what's happening. And that's how this works, right? You have a situation where there are actions being taken that appear to be anti-American, anti-democracy, people's rights aren't being respected in a variety of different ways. And that's pretty clear. And then people are afraid to speak up because they're like, what if it comes to my town? Right. What if it comes to my business? I think there's a lot of that going on in America right now. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] Do you think in the last 72 hours, anything has shifted in the Valley on this topic? On which I guess I don't even know what topic we're talking about. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] On that fear, are people a little less fearful or not? [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_03] Well, it's all about the Overton window. No, I think there's power in numbers. Yeah, exactly. It's once everyone acts, then everyone acts. Right. But nobody's going to be the tall poppy. Right. Well, some people are brave—people have to be first. But I think the flip side to all of that is, well, Sam, I would argue the richest people would be first, right? The people with the most resources, the most insulated people. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_03] Yes. But I don't know. Trump is actually targeting those people very intensely. So they're being very quiet, but they have the resources to withstand it. Right. I think that's the thing—not everybody in the Valley is created equal. But I do think there's this other interesting problem, which is, let's pretend you're—I'll say this—you're like, look, we should have secure borders and law should be enforced. Right. I mean, great. Now I need to hire an organization to do that. And everyone's going to hate that. People are going to be really upset about that. That's the problem statement you have. Who are you going to get to do that? That is good, right? It's not a desirable job. Right. And so there's this interesting question of degrees of freedom and how do you even do hard things when good people don't want to do hard things or they come with baggage or perspectives that are challenging. And so I think this is, again, I'm not excusing any of it. I'm just asking more of an intellectual question, which is, Sam, to that point, in my hometown, there was a big debate about this. And one of the main topics they wanted to do is de-mask the people. And one of the reasons these people are wearing masks is that they can't do the job without their personal life being completely destroyed. So it's how do you enforce laws? [SPEAKER_02] I guess I'm more interested in veering this into business leaders reacting to political territory rather than political territory itself. [SPEAKER_02] But isn't this the story, Jess? Is that all of the business leaders in Silicon Valley, starting with Brian Armstrong at Coinbase, have tried to remove politics from the milieu of the internal culture of the business? [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_03] And so my question is, has that shifted? It's like, you can have whatever politics you want. Absolutely. And this is a free country. If you want to be Republican, you want to be Democrat, just keep it out of the workplace. And let's focus on the job that we have to do. That seems to be the message that's been pretty consistent the last couple of years. It absolutely has. It absolutely has. And it has served a lot of purposes. And I think it prevails. I think it remains the prevailing playbook for leading one of these big tech companies. But you're going to see underneath, and we're seeing this at Google and everywhere, right? The employees who don't want you to do deals with ICE, right? And Palantir. I mean, and you're going to see, and I just don't know. No one knows, but I'm wondering where we are in the pendulum. And is it reasonable? [SPEAKER_02] This seems to have broken out. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. That's what I'm trying to say. [SPEAKER_03] That's certainly what my bot thinks. [SPEAKER_03] It absolutely has. It absolutely has. And it has served a lot of purposes. And I think it prevails. I think it remains the prevailing playbook for leading one of these big tech companies. But you're going to see underneath, and we're seeing this at Google and everywhere, right? The employees who don't want you to do deals with ICE, right? And Palantir. I mean, and you're going to see, and I just don't know. No one knows, but I'm wondering where we are in the pendulum. And is it reasonable? [SPEAKER_02] This seems to have broken out. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. That's what I'm trying to say. [SPEAKER_03] That's certainly what my bot thinks. Well, here's a side thing on this, which is that, and maybe I'm a broken record on this, but I don't use social media except Twitter. And halfway through, I don't know when it started happening, it was maybe a day or two later, suddenly there were people around me that were saying, "Oh my God, America's falling apart." It was really interesting because when you're not exposed, particularly to Meta's products and TikTok, none of the message that's going around is getting into your brain. And so it's a really interesting thing to watch everybody else. I had a bunch of group chats exploding and people around me were talking about this. And there was this anxious feeling that America is so screwed. And I'm having a great weekend. It's beautiful weather. Everything seems fine here in my local life. And it's really interesting to see how much of an effect the internet machine has on people. It's not that this isn't a bad thing that's happening, but the way people are responding to it is clearly also being influenced by the medium. And when you're not in it, you can see it very transparently. The medium is the message, perhaps. [SPEAKER_02] Well, it's not everybody's chosen medium. It's 80% of the world's chosen medium. But when you're not in it, it's very obvious how much the temperature is being raised by the medium. [SPEAKER_02] Look, can I say something else that's very anti-intellectual, and I'll get yelled at for it, but that's part of my job on this podcast. I don't really know what's going on in Minneapolis, right? And I'd say that it's interesting. I think that part of the reason for that is there's basically, when deepfakes first came out, there was the Obama era, and people have these really expensive deepfakes. And Obama will be saying, "We have started a nuclear war," in a deepfake. And I'm thinking, "Oh no, in the future, we'll have deepfake Obama, and I'll start nuclear wars, and you will believe it, right?" I usually think we have the opposite thing going on, which is there's so much information and so many deepfakes and so many God knows what else, and you just don't believe anything. And getting to what actually is going on? It's just so expensive. But it is possible to figure it out, Sam. You can't just say because it's hard that truth doesn't exist. It's hard. Yeah. No, I'm not saying truth doesn't exist. What I'm saying is getting truth is actually getting more and more expensive for every single person, which then creates this really interesting dynamic where even for me, I think I have opinions about this stuff. That's actually somewhat true. But I don't fully trust my own opinions about it. Because there's too much noise. There's not enough signal, there's too many angles and too many deepfakes. And it's too expensive. Fundamentally, it's too expensive in my life, which is a shitty thing to say, but it's true for me to have a deeply informed opinion about this. I can have a structural opinion. It seems like there's three levels of resolution to this, Sam. There's the okay, do I agree with generally what the current administration is doing and all of their actions? That's one level of resolution. Then the one you're talking about, which is the middle one, which is, what's really going on in Minnesota? What's going on on both sides? Are there organized groups involved? Nobody really knows what's going on. And I don't know where there is reporting that explains any of that. There's a lot of stuff all over the internet, but almost everything I read, I'm unsure if I should believe that or not. And then the third level of resolution is you can go watch. After I had all these people telling me what was going on, I went and watched the video of the man being shot. And it's very clear. The New York Times did a great job going frame by frame through what happened. [SPEAKER_02] And you can very clearly see this should not have happened. It's clear as day when you're at that level of resolution. When you're talking about five people tackling a person and one person has a gun and the guy's on his back and a dude turns around, pulls out his gun and shoots him. It's way too quick to the trigger. There's no question that what happened is wrong, but it's wrong on the super micro level. This individual who actually shot him definitely made the wrong decision. Right. [SPEAKER_04] And that's easy to see at that level of resolution. But I think you're absolutely right, Sam, that nobody has the slightest clue what's going on at the Minnesota level. And it's extremely expensive to figure out. I feel we're all pretty good information gatherers. I don't have an opinion, nor do I understand what's going on over there because I can't tell from all of the information and I don't know what information to read. That's real. [SPEAKER_02] In the interest of being mildly confrontational, I think Dave, your reaction is very different from Sam's reaction, right? Sam's saying, I don't know what's going on. And you're saying, I. And Sam makes a smart point, which is, and I'm actually somewhere in between you. It's really hard to figure out exactly what's going on. I have a busy life and there's only so much time I'm going to spend on that. Dave, I also watched the Times breakdown and I thought that was the most useful thing. For sure. [SPEAKER_03] And I think it's naive. I don't believe that the typical average American is going to spend as much time as you have Dave on this, but I wish they would, because everyone would be better off for it. But it's also not going to happen. So instead we're going to be in this world where most people will default to what fits with their existing patchwork of opinions and be somewhat vague about what they think. And that's what we're left with. That is the reality. I mean, any shooting is a complete tragedy. I'm not, and again, I haven't gone as deep, but if someone just randomly made a very bad decision and shot him, okay, well that probably is a training problem. That probably is a recruitment problem. There's things to address about that. But the question for me is, okay, so how does that spiral into everything else? And that's the place where there's so much information warfare and it's so expensive to have an informed opinion. That's true. You can just trust the information, but we don't cover this. They can't trust them. Why don't you cover things like this, Jess? It's actually an interesting question. [SPEAKER_04] I'm not an expert. I'm not an expert and our newsroom is not an expert and it's not. But your processes could produce information that is valuable. [SPEAKER_03] Maybe. And your customer wants it. No, I don't know that the customers do want it. [SPEAKER_04] I'm one of your customers. I want it. That's true. You can just trust the information, but we don't cover this. They can't trust them. Why don't you cover things like this, Jess? It's actually an interesting question. [SPEAKER_04] I'm not an expert. I'm not an expert in our newsroom is not an expert and it's not. But your processes could produce information that is valuable. [SPEAKER_03] Maybe. And your customer wants it. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_04] No, I don't know that the customers do want it. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_04] I'm one of your customers. I want it. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_04] But this is, you shouldn't want it for us, Dave. I think firing some of your customers is an important thing. You should expect from us to be first and accurate and authoritative on matters relating to the tech business and to the degree that Tim Cook or Altman are responding or Google cancels a major contract or something like that. But the work it takes and the experience of the journalists that you want covering some of these other dynamics is not us. Well, I think the problem is broader than the information. Really, no one's willing to pay for this at scale. And that is a societal problem. If you wanted to know, there's information sourced from super trusted people and the business model just isn't there for the average consumer to afford or pay what it actually costs to get trusted opinions on this anymore. I think that is the structural problem with democracy and a lot of the place we're at now is it's extremely difficult to make the business work in a proper way, which is why the New York Times becomes a gaming company and why there are all these supplemental problems in the media industry. If you have 20 journalists, the people you can really trust on this, they do an incredible amount of work to get it right. But you have to pay them a lot because it's really expensive to get it right. No one pays. [SPEAKER_04] I really struggle. Our newsroom really struggles with these big national moments, presidential elections or whatever. When every lens, keyboard, camera, phone is focused on one issue. And there are many that you can't ignore to the point of seeming out of tune with the broader dynamics that are affecting the things we cover, but there's very little upside in covering them either. [SPEAKER_04] I think that's right. I think it's back to the earlier point about fear. I think there's fear about the powers that be, but there's fear about the social aspect of it. If you speak up, you're going to annoy the people next to you. There's this thing where we're all so divided. Nobody wants to talk about it. They prefer to just not talk about it. I think that's a real thing that's going on right now. I certainly feel that way. I used to be incredibly politically engaged, but I've really felt I've got better uses for my mind. And I wondered if maybe that was changing a little bit, right? Like, for example, someone who came out very supportive of one battle in the war was Keith Raboy at Coastal Adventures. His boss, Vinod came out against him. Now, respectfully actually, and he didn't just tweet, Keith's wrong or Keith's an idiot, but another partner had responded to Keith in a thoughtful way and Vinod shared that and added his endorsement, right? If anything, that's cool because it's modeling of how we should be with each other, right? Vinod is generally pretty good at this stuff. I got to say, Vinod every year grows in my estimations over time. But I think it's good modeling because we should be able to disagree like that and have a productive, even intense discussion about something. But often that's not what's happening anymore. I thought it was funny on Keith in totally unrelated news that Jack who works at Slow got intel and outed him for doing pushups off his knees in Barry's bootcamp. [SPEAKER_04] Oh no, he did what? [SPEAKER_04] And it was a whole thing. Because I think it was like, Keith was like, no, it was my fourth Barry's of the day. But I was like, wow, Jack, that's a really bold associate move. [SPEAKER_04] How did I miss that? To go out, calling out Keith for knee pushups at Barry's. [SPEAKER_04] Did he approve that before he did that? That's shots fired. [SPEAKER_04] Of course not. You think we have any internal controls on these things? Shots fired. [SPEAKER_04] No, it was wild. There's even a backstory to it. But I got to tell you that we talk about Keith, Keith scandals. That was the key scandal in my life. [SPEAKER_04] For sure. [SPEAKER_04] It's he secretly only spends half of his time in Miami. Good Lord. Okay. I don't know where we took that conversation other than it's something everybody. That's the type of hard hitting reporting, knee pushups that the information can cover, right? Guys, we have been trying to hire for a weekend section, a reporter to really dig into the crazy cultural things happening in this moment in San Francisco. And Eli Rosenberg just joined us this week. So get ready. Buckle up. Anything new you're hearing about? [SPEAKER_04] I mean, we're hearing about everything. I actually have a great story this weekend. I think it will run on Friday when this pod comes out, but yeah, things getting weird. [SPEAKER_04] How weird? Well, the shooting up the peptides to the—that's old news. I know that's old news. It was in the New York Times. We've got new news. What's the new news? What is not happening in our house? [SPEAKER_03] What, yeah. What are we not doing? Yeah. Jess, come on. You can't keep this secret. What is not happening in this house is a hard thing to actually—this is a test bed of wild and crazy things. Dave, you need to know about this. All right. I'm in. The thing that's happening in our house that I bought off Instagram targeted ads. It's so good, guys. I can't leave again. I can't go to Europe. It's so good. It's a mini wiffle ball pitching machine. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_04] Ooh, that sounds fun. Awesome. So you basically— [SPEAKER_03] No one needs this. No one needs this. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_04] Everyone needs this. Everyone needs this. It's so it's a really well-made, it's portable. It's massively overpriced, and you can plug it in and it pitches mini wiffle balls at you. Is it like one of those tennis machines? [SPEAKER_03] No, this is someone—some bros slapped a bucket on some spinning wheels and sell you mini wiffle balls, but it's great. And it is the best. I now have the kids just whacking wiffle balls all day. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_04] How many injuries have been sustained, Sam? What are we up to an injury count? [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, they're just wiffle balls. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_04] This is boys, Jess. Come on. I did immediately hit a line drive into our four-year-old, but that was his fault. Second shot. He was standing at shortstop and then it's been great. There've only been minor injuries. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_04] That sounds awesome. Better than a Mac mini. And about the same price. [SPEAKER_04] How many injuries have been sustained, Sam? What are we up to an injury count? [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_03] I mean, they're just wiffle balls. [SPEAKER_04] This is boys, Jess. Come on. I did immediately hit a line drive into our four-year-old, but that was his fault. Second shot. He was standing at shortstop. He was standing at shortstop and then it's been great. There've only been minor injuries. [SPEAKER_04] That sounds awesome. Better than a Mac mini. And about the same price. [SPEAKER_04] I'm trying to think about my latest purchases—a sweater. I bought a sweater. I got to say, Meta just reported earnings that when you know the capex is going up, you know the next line is that they've had a good quarter, right? Because they're not going to announce more capex unless they're crushing it. And they did and stocks way up, but I got to tell you, my barometer is how many things have I bought on Instagram in the last week? And so long as that keeps going up, I'm a very happy Meta shareholder and it keeps going up. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] Jess, you don't even know. I bought some really expensive stuff off Instagram the other day. What? For you. Oh, it's perfect. But I did off Instagram, not off. I can give you some other websites. In this case, it was a link to a website and the website had another thing. It was great. But I got to tell you, AI—I could not be more bullish on the things I will buy on Instagram because of AI-driven targeting and commerce. It's wild. You've been consistent on that, Sam. If there's one thing you've been consistent on— [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] That's the thing that BlackRock should be excited about is my ability to buy infinite junk that's well targeted to me. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] So we've got Minnesota and infinite junk. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] So I had, and then we'll bring this to a close, but I was talking, obviously, AI commerce was a hot topic at Davos just because OpenAI was—I mean, I love when I say that and— [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] It was great. But I got to tell you, AI, my, I could not be more bullish on the things I will buy on Instagram because of AI driven targeting and commerce. It's wild. You've been consistent on that, Sam. If there's one thing you've been consistent on. That's the thing that BlackRock should be excited about is my ability to buy infinite junk. That's well targeted to me. So we've got, we've got Minnesota and infinite junk. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] So I had, and then we'll bring this to a close, but I was talking, obviously, AI commerce was a hot topic at Davos just because OpenAI was, I mean, I love when I say that and everyone else is like, no, Greenland was a hot topic, Jessica, for you, AI and commerce. So I'm willing to accept that I'm dialed a little bit differently, but with OpenAI is ad news and shopping news. So I asked Andy Jassy about it, the CEO of Amazon. And he was like, look, this, he was like, maybe we'll do deals with these people. And I was like, why do you have to do deals with them? Like your Amazon. And he was like, oh, we'll do deals with some of them. But he was like, first of all, it's really hard. All the other pieces, the infrastructure, the free shipping, he was talking his book, but then I was talking to some of the leaders of the payment companies that are starting to do these integrations with chatbot commerce. And they were saying that retailers are actually really nervous about this because retailers don't want you just to pick that laser focused thing. They want to merchandise to you. They want to get you on their site to add the sweater or add the boots or add the bat to the wiffle ball thing. So shouldn't AI be very good at this? No, no, but you're in the you're in a different UX. You're in a command line UX. You don't, there's no brand loyalty. It's just find me the cheapest, best, whatever. This is my bait. You know what's going to happen? You know what's going to be skeptical of? But you're, you're halfway there with Instagram, Sam. You're, you would take that AI feed. Sam, you're literally buying things from AI driven commerce. Instagram is AI. Oh, that form is different. I'm saying let's call it chatbot oriented. Here's the thing. You know how Google convinced all of the newspapers that they would just make money on the volume and they should give up. I'm familiar with that trade. Yep. Didn't take it. You should be familiar with that. One of the worst trades in history, right? Does this destroy, this is exactly the same story once over again with retailers where the chatbot was like, Oh, don't worry. Just let us front end you and you'll have no brand, but don't worry. Cause you'll make it up on volume. It's like, no, to be clear, Amazon kind of did this already. Yeah, but this is worse, right? What I'm saying is, is like, [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, no, I agree. It's like, it's just like the, it's like if Shopify is the godsend to the retail world, right. From a platform perspective, we can have a brand and all that type of stuff. The idea that these retailers would be so stupid as to let themselves be front ended by ChatGPT or something and just disappear into the ether of capitalism efficiency. I mean, I just, God bless, but it's going to be the exact same story all over again if they fall for it. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Okay. Well, here's to not falling for the same stories. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] Don't fall for it. [SPEAKER_03] [SPEAKER_02] But everyone falls for it. [SPEAKER_02] You know why they'll fall for it? Because the people, it's a principal agent problem, because in most cases, the people running these companies want to be there for three years and get a short term revenue shot in the arm and be lauded for their ChatGPT integration. And they're going to take their stock options and leave and leave the companies in ruins. It's the same in the media industry. It's a total principal. [SPEAKER_02] I was going to say, you're describing the media business. I remember the first time I met, I don't even remember, this is past the limitations of worrying if I'm supposed to say it. The first time I met Steve Burke, who was the CEO of NBC. And I asked him a question about five years away. And he looked at me, why would I think of something that long term? Right? And I was like, Oh yeah. [SPEAKER_02] No, it's fascinating when you think about the layer consolidation, but that is one of the biggest untold truths of capitalism, right? Is people talking about how capitalism is pretty bad at long term planning. Part of it is structural, things like that. But part of it is honestly just the principal agent problem, where no one's incentivized for long term success. And so they'll fold on anything for a short term hit, right? Which is the bull case on why you will shop inside ChatGPT in some form and why all these companies will get completely eviscerated. But they know that and they don't care. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Okay. Well, let's try to not make the same mistakes, folks. Let's make new ones. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_03] No, they will. They will. It's fine. [SPEAKER_02] And thrive and prosper. To our viewers. Thank you. If you're not yet viewing this pod, you missed some photos, you missed some ice cream. I don't know how you did it. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] I managed to, I've been wanting a towel this entire time. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] Are you joking? Are you joking? [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] Of course I'm wanting a towel. I took a shower. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Okay. Well, let's try to not make the same mistakes, folks. Let's make new ones. [SPEAKER_04] [SPEAKER_03] No, they will. They will. It's fine. [SPEAKER_02] And thrive and prosper. To our viewers. Thank you. If you're not yet viewing this pod, you missed some photos, you missed some ice cream. I don't know how you did it. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] I managed to, I've been wanting a towel this entire time. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] Are you joking? Are you joking? [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] Of course I'm wanting a towel. I took a shower. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] You took a shower. Wow. Okay. And with that, we wish you a wonderful week. We're almost heading into Super Bowl week in San Francisco. It's going to be very exciting. Fun events to the gills. We've got the Ferrari launch we're going to. Sam, are you going to that by the way? [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_03] I don't know. I have something scheduled and I also don't really care about Ferraris. [SPEAKER_02] But maybe. I mean, if it was a Miata launch. [SPEAKER_02] What if I told you it was Miata launch? [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] I'd be there. Oh my God. If there was a new Miata, I would be there in a second. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] Jess, I'll go with you to the Ferrari launch. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] Okay. Dave, you can be my plus one. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_03] All right. Cool. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_03] I moved. [SPEAKER_02] It's going to be great. I don't, we're not missing it. I moved to dinner for it. But we're going to go to some concerts and book parties. It's going to be great. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] And we'll share it all with you, dear listeners of More or Less. So thank you for your viewership. I said listeners. And we'll see you back here again next week for another episode of More or Less. Bye. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] See you guys later. [SPEAKER_02] [SPEAKER_04] 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, @Dave Morin, @Lesson, @Jay Lesson. And as for me, I'm @Brit. See you guys next time. [SPEAKER_02] Model plans, including IP licensing from discoveries made, which created a big news cycle. And to be clear, this is not an individual thing where we give OpenAI a share of any IP we have from using it, but OpenAI striking partnerships around drug discovery and with research institutions or whatever. So I thought that was an interesting part of the panel, but admittedly everyone on that stage had been AI red-pilled and that was actually their word, not mine. They were just, what does that mean? And so most of the questions I asked came back with, you only ask that question if you don't believe in the demand and the demand is infinite. And so that question is therefore invalid. That was pretty much the pattern. When I asked Sarah about these so-called circular deals where customers are investing, taking an investment from your supplier to go buy more of their product, AKA half the financings in AI, she said, well, you only think that way if you underappreciate the demand. But the other thing I asked, so I asked the CoreWeave and I, this is a little wonky even for readers of More or Less, but CoreWeave had a very rocky year in the stock markets last year because it came out as an early AI IPO, but with a very unusual for a tech company kind of debt structure. And most of the year, the market whipsawed it and it was crushed. But then, as one of the most important neoclouds, it recovered. But I asked the CEO, I said, what happens when all the training gets way more efficient? And so all this infrastructure isn't needed, right? Or it's just training's getting way more efficient. And he had this quote, which I'm going to read because it's really stuck with me. He said, it's not the infrastructure that's endless. It's the voracious appetite for intelligence that is limitless. That's the part we have to focus on. And every single step function in the foreseeable future, certainly within the horizons we are working on, are going to do nothing more than accelerate the business. Do you guys have a reaction to that? I have a reaction to that. [SPEAKER_02] I mean, it sounds like they're saying the same thing, that the demand is so much bigger than all of you see. We're sitting here looking at our P&Ls and the demand is shockingly larger than all of you normies can see. And that will be our destiny. Is that what they're both saying in different ways? [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And the thing I didn't, I ran out of time and also just didn't think of on the spot is I can think of things where there's limitless demand and they're a total commodity with no margin and no business. Right. So those are two different things. You can accept and embrace limitless demand and never-ending efficiency gains, but it doesn't automatically follow that that has a healthy profit margin. In fact, you could look at what the internet did to media and entertainment and say, here's an example of a technology where the liquidity for time spent watching videos has gone way up because it's just so frictionless to consume this thing. And there goes the business model. So I, but he could be right. I actually say that I think that's what's so exciting about this moment is, but it is a bit concerning to me that the leaders in this infrastructure build-out really see one side of the coin. Well, that they're religious. This is the thing about this whole argument. It's either right or wrong. Spidey sense in history. [SPEAKER_02] and say, actually, here's an example of a technology that just like the liquidity for [SPEAKER_02] time spent watching videos, you know, it's gone way up because it's just so frictionless to [SPEAKER_02] consume this thing. And there goes the business model. So I, but also he could be right. [SPEAKER_02] I actually say that I think that's what's so exciting about this moment is, but it is a bit concerning to me that the leaders in this infrastructure build out are really see one side of the coin. Well, that they're religious. I mean, this is the thing about this whole argument. It's either right or wrong. Spidey sense in history [SPEAKER_02] says it's wrong. Right. And then when you hear prognostications like this, something's about to [SPEAKER_02] go very badly. It's possible they're right. It's not impossible. And everyone's just playing [SPEAKER_02] two things. One is the asymmetry card, which is like, if we're wrong, we're still fine and [SPEAKER_02] it doesn't really matter. And if we're right, it's important. And everyone wants to be [SPEAKER_02] important at an important moment and do something important. And then B is the ironies. And this is, [SPEAKER_02] I think the scary thing is the world is ruled by narratives. I think people value stored narratives. I'm very pro narrative in a lot of ways. And here's the irony of the whole thing is even if it's wrong, if the narrative is strong enough and growing [SPEAKER_02] and people choose to store belief in the narrative, it will keep going for a long time. And they will [SPEAKER_02] make a lot of money in the interim. Right. And so for me, it's like, I'll tell you a different related thing going on this week, which is my thing of the week is silver and gold, silver and gold. Yes, let's talk about silver and gold, silver and gold, [SPEAKER_04] crushing up, they're up two X since January 1. They are the asset to own is [SPEAKER_04] silver and gold. And hilariously, you look at that as someone who believes in Bitcoin and the [SPEAKER_04] culture and you're like, oh my god, all that money is supposed to be in Bitcoin, not supposed to be in silver and gold. But the silver and gold story, which is Bitcoin minus the technology [SPEAKER_02] risk, right, is the hottest thing in the world. And why is there limitless [SPEAKER_02] demand for metals that are useless narrative, right? And so is it worth buying silver and gold? Well, it has nothing to do with their actual value. It's like, do you believe the story and the story is effectively short everything else in technology and AI, right? And so I don't know, it's obviously if you lead one of these things and you're red pilled, there's two ways to [SPEAKER_04] be red pilled. One way red pills you, you're actually red pilled, right? You actually believe some of the [SPEAKER_03] incredible bullshit that you're hearing. Two is you're not quite red pilled. But the reality is [SPEAKER_03] we've been talking about for a long time, the cost benefit to just going all in narratively on it [SPEAKER_03] is in favor of going all in narratively on it. And candidly, it doesn't even matter, [SPEAKER_03] because it doesn't have to be right. It just has to be what people continue to believe. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, I agree with all that. And I think it's about this. Surprise no one. But I think [SPEAKER_03] it's important to point that out that that's what's happening. [SPEAKER_03] Isn't that also what's going on with copper? It's anything downstream from the AI narrative is also becoming a narrative. For what it's worth, I actually almost bought a bunch of copper recently, because that one actually makes more sense to me. Well, copper is part of data. I mean, it's much closer to. That's what I'm saying. You need a lot of copper for not just the data centers with the electricity and the story is that we're going to need in the next few [SPEAKER_03] years more copper than has been mined in the early, in the rest in the last 10,000 years of humanity, [SPEAKER_03] right or something. And therefore, buy copper, which is impossible. Yeah, people are buying, [SPEAKER_03] they're getting copper traders on staffs of these AI companies. Meanwhile, you know, [SPEAKER_03] we've got tech earnings this week, which I know this pod never likes talking about. But [SPEAKER_03] Meta is upping its CapEx guidance. So it's just kidding. That's pretty gnarly. [SPEAKER_03] Those big numbers. We're just gonna go a little bit bigger. [SPEAKER_03] But is that Sam's point, which is they're just gonna go infinity? They're just going hard on the other side. They're going all in on this narrative. [SPEAKER_03] Also guidance. I mean, you can argue that it's better to come in under versus over. I mean, [SPEAKER_03] there's a lot of. I guess I should double check. I just saw a tweet that they were upping [SPEAKER_03] it. I don't know. Maybe I should actually. Can't believe anything on Twitter. It's just a bunch of [SPEAKER_04] clawed bots. Yeah, I know. I'm just gonna have to. I mean, that's a problem. But okay, well, [SPEAKER_04] let's scare slightly here. So obviously, with all the things going on in Minneapolis and ice, [SPEAKER_03] this nation is divided and in shock and in turmoil and working through a lot. It's having some [SPEAKER_03] interesting reverb in tech. What are you guys seeing? Well, I'll say that was my clawed [SPEAKER_03] bot when it summarized the news yesterday, basically the TLDR on the whole thing was [SPEAKER_03] the vibe. The final vibe check was the only story is Minneapolis until that's resolved. Nothing else [SPEAKER_03] matters. So clawed bot believes it. It seems bad. My take on it is I did you see. I mean, [SPEAKER_03] obviously, the initial thing was no one in tech is responding, right? And people were [SPEAKER_03] calling them out on it, etc. I thought Andrew Ross Sorkin's take on air was interesting, [SPEAKER_03] where he did I think of easy. I think he had a pretty sophisticated take. And then I'll extend [SPEAKER_03] what I kind of would respond to it. His take was, look, we don't need to comment about immigration, the whole nine yards. The thing business executives can comment on, I should be talking about it, just training. Clearly, there's a training gap, right in the people that are running ice or on the ground, etc. And we should fix that. I thought that was a fairly business oriented, benign, fine, approachable. Here was my response take. I was like, Look, if you're a business executive, you understand training, sure. But you also understand recruiting. And I actually, the bigger recruiting and contracts, those are the languages you speak. Yeah, the bigger thing that I think is missing in this conversation, my take on it is, again, not commenting on the immigration part, whatever, [SPEAKER_03] again, in general, I am in favor of our borders being secure. And right in the people that are running ICE or on the ground, etc. And we should fix that. I thought that was a fairly business oriented, benign, fine, approachable take. I was like, Look, if you're a business executive, you understand training, sure. But you also understand recruiting. And I actually think the bigger recruiting and contracts, those are the languages you speak. Yeah, the bigger thing that I think is missing in this conversation, my take on it is, again, not commenting on the immigration part, whatever. [SPEAKER_03] Again, in general, I am in favor of our borders being secure. And Sam, that's not what's happening here, just to be clear. [SPEAKER_03] But I'm just saying I am in favor of those things. But I do think there is a structural recruiting problem, probably for ICE, which is who chooses to apply to ICE and where they come from and how they think about what their role is. And you think about, take OpenAI case, you get a bunch of researchers with a mission, right, which is, especially early, we get to work on the coolest things. And we're saving the universe with quote unquote safety and the AGI race is important. And we're going to get compensated a certain way. It's you attract a certain set of talent, right, that cares about a certain set of things. If you told me that ICE has a recruitment problem, which is the message they have, the compensation structure, the appeal of who wants to do that job is a set of people where, let's put it this way, you need to do a lot of training and screening. I believe that and I think business executives can understand how that would play out. Right. And so the question for me is, how do you take ICE or the mission and inject the right people into the culture and the community where they're doing their job, but they're not ending up in really bad places and situations and making bad choices? So Dave, if you were running Apple, Google, Meta, what would you have done? Whoa, that's a tough question. I guess quickly to respond to Sam's comments, I would extend that to not just the questions of training and these other things that you mentioned, but we see this in Silicon Valley all the time. When you try to scale a company too fast, the quality bar goes down a lot, right? And my understanding is that we're trying to hire an enormous number of people into ICE very quickly. Right. And every time that happens, you see enormous numbers of problems organizationally and with how people behave. Right. And you can only grow human organizations so fast without there being a huge degradation in the quality of how they behave. True. I don't know enough to know if that is the cause of what's happening, but what about now? [SPEAKER_04] So I don't know what I would have done, Jess. I mean, I'm not a person running one of these huge organizations. Here's what they did. Right. So you had some people who had been afraid to oppose the Trump administration publicly. Do a little bit more of it. And Jeff Dean at Google, one of their OG AI leads, founder of Google Brain and so forth was the first to come out before the most recent tragedy and do this. And everyone's like, Oh my God, someone from inside a tech company has publicly criticized the administration. That was a big deal. Then you see the Paul Grahams and the other people who were known for being opinionated on Twitter, sharing their opinions. But these people weren't tweeting about politics for months and months. There was really a chill over that. And then ultimately you saw the CEOs like Sam Altman, Dario, Tim Cook sort of condemn what's happening, but praise Trump. So basically to literally say what's happening has gone too far, but Trump is a strong leader and we'll do the right thing. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. It's a little dystopic. It's a little wild. Yeah. I mean, Jess, this is just go read 1984, go read any dystopian novel about descent into dystopian authoritarian nightmares. And the main thing is that fear drives behavior, right? And I do think that the real underlying thing going on is fear and people are afraid to speak because of what's happening. And that's how this works, right? You have a situation where there are actions being taken that appear to be anti-American, anti-democracy, people's rights aren't being respected in a variety of different ways. And they're just like, that's pretty clear. And then people are afraid to speak up because they're like, what if it comes to my town? Right. What if it comes to my business? I think there's a lot of that going on in America right now. [SPEAKER_04] Do you think in the last 72 hours, anything has shifted in the Valley on this topic? [SPEAKER_04] On which I guess I don't even know what topic we're talking about. [SPEAKER_04] On that fear, are people a little less fearful or not? [SPEAKER_03] I mean, I actually, well, it's all about the Overton window. No, I think there's power in numbers. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, exactly. It's once everyone acts, then everyone acts. Right. But nobody's going to be the tall poppy. Right. Well, some people are brave. People have to be first, but I think the flip side to all of that is, well, Sam, I would argue the richest people would be first, right? The people with the most resources, the most insulated people. [SPEAKER_03] Yes. But Trump is actually targeting those people very intensely. So they're being very quiet. But they have the resources to withstand it. Right. I think that's the thing is not everybody in the quote Valley is created equal. But I do think there's this other interesting problem, which is, let's pretend you're, I'll say this, you're like, look, we should have secure borders and the law should be enforced. Right. I mean, great. Now I need to hire an organization to do that. And everyone's going to hate that. People are going to be really upset about that. That's the problem statement you have. Who are you going to get to do that, that is good, right? It's not a desirable job. Right. And so there's this interesting question of degrees of freedom and how do you even do hard things when good people don't want to do hard things or they come with baggage or perspectives that are challenging. And so I think this is, again, I'm not excusing any of it. I'm just asking more of an intellectual question, which is, Sam, to that point, in my hometown, there was a big debate about this. And one of the main topics they wanted to do is do that? That is good, right? It's not a desirable job. Right. And so there's this interesting question of degrees of freedom and how do you even do hard things when good people don't want to do hard things or they come with baggage or perspectives that are challenging. And so I think this is, again, I'm not excusing any of it. I'm just asking more of an intellectual question, which is, Sam, to that point, in my hometown, there was a big debate about this. And one of the main topics they wanted to do is de-mask the people. And one of the reasons these people are wearing masks is that they can't do the job without their personal life being completely destroyed, you know? So it's, how do you enforce laws? I guess I'm more, we're not going to veer this into political territory, but I'm more interested in business leaders reacting to political territory. But isn't this? I thought we were. No, but I'm trying to veer it into business leaders reacting to political territory. But isn't that the story, Jess, is that all of the business leaders in Silicon Valley, starting with, I feel like Brian Armstrong at Coinbase have tried to remove politics from the milieu of the internal culture of the business? [SPEAKER_03] And so my question is that shifted? It's like, you can have whatever politics you want. Absolutely. And this is a free country. If you want to be Republican, you want to be Democrat, just keep it out of the workplace. And let's focus on the job that we have to do. That seems to be the message that's been pretty consistent the last couple of years. It absolutely has. It absolutely has. And it has served a lot of purposes. And I think it prevails. I think it remains the prevailing playbook for leading one of these big tech companies. But you're going to see underneath, and we're seeing this at Google and everywhere, right? [SPEAKER_02] The employees who don't want you to do deals with ICE, right? And Palantir. I mean, and you're going to see, and I just don't know. I mean, no one knows, but I'm wondering, like where we are in the, it's just a pendulum too. And is it reasonable? This seems to have broken out. Yeah. That's what I'm trying to say. [SPEAKER_03] That's certainly what my bot thinks. Well, here's a side thing on this, which is that, and maybe I'm a broken record on this, but I don't use social media except Twitter. And halfway through, I don't know when it all of this started happening, it was maybe a day or two later, suddenly there were people around me that were saying, "Oh my God, America's falling apart." It was really interesting because when you're not exposed, particularly to Meta's products and TikTok, you have no pro. None of the message that's going around is getting into your brain. And so it's a really interesting thing to watch everybody else. I had a bunch of group chats exploding and people around me were talking about this. And there was this anxious energy, like America is so screwed. And I'm having a great weekend. It's beautiful weather. Everything seems fine here in my local life. And it's really interesting to see how much of an effect the internet machine has on people. It's not that this isn't a bad thing that's happening, but the way in which people are responding to it is clearly also being influenced by the medium. And when you're not in it, you can see it very transparently. The medium is the message, perhaps. Well, it's not everybody's chosen medium. It's a lot of it's 80% of the world's chosen medium. But when you're not in it, it's very obvious how much the temperature is being raised by the medium. Look, can I say something else that's very anti-intellectual, and I'll get yelled at for it, but that's part of my job on this podcast. I don't really know what's going on in Minneapolis, right? And I'd say that it's interesting. I think that part of the reason for that is there's basically, when deepfakes first came out, there was the Obama era, people had these really expensive deepfakes. And Obama will be saying, "We have started a nuclear war" in a deepfake. And I'm like, oh no, in the future, we'll have deepfake Obama, and I'll start nuclear wars, you will believe it, right? [SPEAKER_04] I usually think we have the opposite thing going on, which is there's so many deepfakes and so much information, and so many deepfakes and God knows what else. You just don't believe anything. And getting to what actually is going on is just so expensive. [SPEAKER_03] But it is possible to figure it out, Sam. You can't just say because it's hard truth doesn't exist. It's hard. Yeah. No, I'm not saying that. I definitely am not saying truth doesn't exist. What I'm saying is getting truth is actually getting more and more expensive for every single person, which then creates this really interesting dynamic where even for me, it's like I kind of think I have opinions about this stuff. It's actually kind of true. But I don't fully trust my own opinions about it. Because I don't, there's too much noise. There's not enough, there's too many angles or too many deepfakes. And it's too expensive. Fundamentally, it's too expensive in my life, which is a shitty thing to say, but it's true for me to have a deeply informed opinion about this. I can have a structural opinion. It seems like there's three levels of resolution to this, Sam. There's, okay, do I agree with generally what the current administration is doing and all of their actions? That's one level of resolution. Then the one you're talking about, which is the middle one, which is, what's really going on in Minnesota? What's going on on both sides? Are there organized groups involved? Nobody really knows what's going on. And I don't know where there is reporting that explains any of that. There's a lot of stuff all over the internet, but almost everything I read, I'm thinking, I don't know if I should believe that or not. And then the third level of resolution is, you can go watch. Which like after I had all these people telling me what was going on, I went and watched the video of the man being shot. And it's very clear, you know, the New York Times did a great job going frame by frame through what happened. [SPEAKER_04] going on on both sides? Are there organized groups involved? Nobody really knows what's going on. And I don't know where there is reporting that explains any of that. There's a lot of stuff all over the internet, but almost everything I read, I'm not sure if I should believe that or not. And then the third level of resolution is you can go watch. After I had all these people telling me what was going on, I went and watched the video of the man being shot. And it's very clear. The New York Times did a great job going frame by frame through what happened. [SPEAKER_04] And you can very clearly see this should not have happened. It's clear as day when you're at that level of resolution, right? When you're talking about five people tackling a person and one person has a gun and the guy's on his back and a dude turns around, pulls out his gun and shoots him. It's way too quick. Way too quick to the trigger. It's not even—there's no question that what happened is wrong, but it's wrong on the super micro level. This individual who actually shot him definitely made the wrong decision. Right. [SPEAKER_04] And that's easy to see at that level of resolution. But I think you're absolutely right, Sam, that nobody has the slightest clue what's going on at the Minnesota level. And it's extremely expensive to figure out. I feel like we're all pretty good information gatherers. I don't have an opinion, nor do I understand what's going on over there because I can't tell from all of the information and I don't know what information to read. That's real. Maybe just you have a—how should—no, but just in the interest of being mildly confrontational, I think Dave, your reaction is very different from Sam's reaction, right? Sam's like, I don't know what's going on. And you're like, I—and Sam makes a smart point, which is, and I'm actually somewhere in between you. Right. And it's really hard to figure out exactly what's going on. I have a busy life and there's only so much time I'm going to spend on that. Right. Dave, I also watched the Times breakdown and I thought that was the most useful thing. [SPEAKER_04] For sure. [SPEAKER_02] And I think it's naive. I don't believe that the typical average American is going to spend as much time as you have, Dave, on this, but I wish they would, because everyone would be better off for it, but it's also not going to happen. Right. So instead we're going to be in this world where most people will default to what fits with their existing patchwork of opinions and be somewhat vague about what they think. Right. [SPEAKER_04] And that's just what we're left with. That is the reality. I mean, again, any shooting is a complete tragedy, right? I'm not—and again, I haven't gone as deep, but if someone just randomly made a very bad decision and shot him, I'm okay, well that probably is a training problem. That probably is a recruitment problem. There's things to address about that. But the question for me is, okay, so how does that spiral into everything else? And that's the place where there's so much information warfare and it's so expensive to have an informed opinion. [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, that's true. You can just trust the information, but we don't cover this. They can't trust them. [SPEAKER_04] Why don't you cover things like this, Jess? It's actually an interesting question. [SPEAKER_04] I'm not an expert. I'm not an expert and our newsroom is not an expert and it's not. [SPEAKER_04] But your processes could produce information that is valuable. Maybe. And your customer wants it. [SPEAKER_04] No, I don't know that the customers do want it. [SPEAKER_04] I'm one of your customers. I want it. [SPEAKER_04] But you shouldn't want it for us, Dave. I think firing some of your customers is an important thing, right? You should expect from us to be first and accurate and authoritative on matters relating to the tech business and to the degree that Tim Cook or Altman are responding or Google cancels a major contract or something. But the work it takes and the experience of the journalists that you want covering some of these other dynamics is not us. Right. Well, I think the broader problem beyond the information is really like no one's willing to pay for this at scale. Right. And that is a societal problem. Right. If you wanted to know, there's information style with super trusted people and the business model just isn't there for the average consumer to afford or pay what it actually costs to get trusted opinions on this anymore. Right. And I think that is the structural problem with democracy and a lot of the place we're at now is it's extremely difficult to make the business work in a proper way, which is why the New York Times becomes a gaming company and why there's all these supplemental problems in the media industry. It's like if you're like, hey, you have 20 journalists—the people you can really trust on this—they do an incredible amount of work to get it right. But you have to pay them a lot because it's really expensive to get it right. No one pays. [SPEAKER_04] I really struggle. All this is something our newsroom really struggles with, like these big national moments, presidential elections or whatever, when every lens, keyboard, camera, phone, whatever is focused on one issue. Right. And there are many that you can't ignore to the point where it just seems like you're out of tune with the broader dynamics that are affecting the things we cover, but there's very little upside in covering them. To be honest, I think that's right. And I think it's back to the earlier point about fear. I think there's fear about the powers that be, but I also think there's fear about the social aspect of it, right? If you speak up, you're going to annoy the people next to you, right? There's this thing where we're all so divided. Nobody wants to talk about it. They prefer to just not talk about it. I think that's a real thing that's going on right now. I certainly feel that way. I used to be incredibly politically engaged, but I've really felt like I've got better uses for my mind, you know? And I hope what I had a glimmer of this week is I just wondered if maybe that was [SPEAKER_04] If you speak up, you're going to annoy the people next to you, right? There's this thing where we're all so divided. Nobody wants to talk about it. They prefer to just not talk about it. I think that's a real thing that's going on right now. I know I certainly feel that way. I used to be incredibly politically engaged, but I've really felt like I just feel like I've got better uses for my mind. And I kind of hope what I had a glimmer of this week is I just wondered if maybe that was changing a little bit, right? Like, for example, someone who came out very supportive of— [SPEAKER_04] One battle in the war. Ice was Keith Raboy at Coastal Adventures. His boss, Vinod— [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, that was cool. Came out against him. Now, respectfully actually, and he didn't actually— [SPEAKER_04] Yeah, it was cool. Just tweet, Keith's wrong or Keith's an idiot, but another partner had sort of responded to Keith in a thoughtful way and Vinod shared that and added his endorsement, right? If anything, that's cool because it's modeling of how we should be with each other, right? Vinod is generally pretty good at this stuff. I got to say, Vinod every year grows in my estimations over time. [SPEAKER_04] But I think it's good modeling because we should be able to disagree like that and have a productive, even intense discussion about something. But often that's not what's happening anymore. I thought it was funny on Keith in totally unrelated news that Jack who works at Slow got intel and outed him for doing pushups off his knees in Barry's bootcamp. Oh no, he did what? [SPEAKER_04] And it was a whole thing. Because I think it was Keith was like, no, it was my fourth Barry's of the day. But I was like, wow. It's Jack, that's a really bold associate move. [SPEAKER_04] How did I miss that? [SPEAKER_04] To go out and call out Keith for knee pushups at Barry's. [SPEAKER_04] Did he approve that before he did that? That's shots fired. [SPEAKER_04] Of course not. You think we have any internal controls on these things? [SPEAKER_04] Shots fired. [SPEAKER_04] No, it was just wild. There's even a backstory to it. But I got to tell you that we talk about Keith, Keith scandals. That was the key scandal in my life. [SPEAKER_04] For sure. [SPEAKER_04] It's like he secretly only spends half of his time in Miami. Good Lord. Okay. I don't know where we took that conversation other than it's something everybody. [SPEAKER_04] That's the type of hard hitting reporting—knee pushups—that, the information can cover, right? Guys, I have been trying to hire for a weekend section a reporter to really dig into the crazy cultural things happening in this moment in San Francisco. And Eli Rosenberg just joined us this week. So get ready. Buckle up. Anything new you're hearing about? [SPEAKER_04] I mean, we're hearing about everything. I actually have a great story this weekend. I think it will run on Friday when this pod comes out, but yeah, shit getting weird. [SPEAKER_04] How weird? I mean, weirder than it was. Well, like the not everything from the shooting up the peptides to the—that's not, that's old news. I know that's old news. It was in the New York Times. We've got new news. What's the new news? What is not happening in our house? [SPEAKER_03] What, yeah. What are we not doing? Yeah, Jess, come on. You can't keep this secret. What is not happening in this house is a hard thing to actually determine. This is a test bed of wild and crazy. Dave, you need to know about this. All right, I'm in. [SPEAKER_03] The thing that's happening in our house that I bought off of Instagram targeted ads. It's so bad, guys. I can't leave again. I can't go to Europe. It's so good. Is a mini wiffle ball pitching machine. [SPEAKER_04] Ooh, that sounds fun. Awesome. So you basically like— [SPEAKER_04] No one needs this. No one needs this. Everyone needs this. Everyone needs this. It's a really well-made, portable, massively overpriced, but you can plug it in and it pitches mini wiffle balls at you. Is it like one of those tennis machines? [SPEAKER_04] No, this is like someone's, some bros slapped a bucket on some spinning wheels and sell you the mini wiffle balls, but it's great. And it is the best. I now have the kids just whacking wiffle balls all day. How many injuries have been sustained, Sam? What are we up to on an injury count? [SPEAKER_04] I mean, they're just wiffle balls. [SPEAKER_04] This is it, boys. Jess, come on. I did immediately hit a line drive into our four-year-old, but that was his fault. Right, second shot. He was standing at shortstop and then, you know, it's been great. There've only been minor injuries. [SPEAKER_04] That sounds awesome. Better than a Mac mini. And about the same price. [SPEAKER_04] I'm trying to think about my latest purchases. A sweater. I bought a sweater. [SPEAKER_04] I got to say, Meta just reported earnings. When you know the capex is going up, you kind of know the next line is that they've had a good quarter, right? Because they're not going to announce more capex unless they're crushing it. And they did, and stocks way up, but I got to tell you, my barometer is how many things have I bought on Instagram in the last week? And so long as that keeps going up, I'm a very happy Meta shareholder and it keeps going up. Jess, you don't even know. I bought some really expensive stuff off Instagram the other day. Like what? For you. Oh, it's perfect. But I did off Instagram, not off. I can give you some other websites. In this case, it was a link to a website and the website had another thing. It was great. But I got to tell you, AI—I could not be more bullish on the things I will buy on Instagram because of AI-driven targeting and commerce. It's wild. You've been consistent on that, Sam. If there's one thing you've been consistent on, that's the thing that BlackRock should be excited about—my ability to buy infinite junk. That's well targeted to me. [SPEAKER_02] So we've got Minnesota and infinite junk. [SPEAKER_02] So I had, and then, and then we'll bring this to a close, but I was talking, obviously, AI commerce was a hot topic at Davos just because OpenAI was, I mean, I love when I say that and [SPEAKER_02] It was great. But I got to tell you, AI, my, I could not be more bullish on the things I will buy on Instagram because of AI driven targeting and commerce. It's wild. You've been consistent on that, Sam. If there's one thing you've been consistent on. That's the thing that BlackRock should be excited about is my ability to buy infinite junk. That's well targeted to me. So we've got, we've got Minnesota and infinite junk. So I had, and then we'll bring this to a close, but I was talking, obviously, AI commerce was a hot topic at Davos just because OpenAI was, I mean, I love when I say that and everyone else is like, no, Greenland was a hot topic, Jessica, for you, AI and commerce. So I'm willing to accept that I'm dialed a little bit differently, but with OpenAI is ad news and shopping news. So I asked Andy Jassy about it, the CEO of Amazon. And he was like, look, this, he was like, maybe we'll do deals with these people. And I was like, why do you have to do deals with them? Like you're Amazon. And he was like, oh, we'll do deals with some of them. But he was like, first of all, it's really hard. Like all the other pieces, the infrastructure, the free shipping, he was talking his book, but then I was talking to some of the leaders of the payment companies that are starting to do these integrations with chatbot commerce. And they were saying that retailers are actually really nervous about this because retailers don't want you just to pick that laser focused thing. They want to merchandise to you. No shit. They want to get you on their site to add the sweater or add the boots or add the bat to the wiffle ball thing. So shouldn't AI be very good at this? No, but you're in the you're in a different UX. You're in a command line UX. You don't, there's no brand loyalty. It's just find me the cheapest, best, whatever. This is my bait. You know what's going to happen? You know what's going to be skeptical of? But you're halfway there with Instagram, Sam. You're, you would take that AI feed. Sam, you're literally buying things from AI driven commerce. Instagram is AI. Oh, that form is different. I'm saying let's call it chatbot oriented. Here's the thing. You know how Google convinced all of the newspapers that they would just make money on the volume and they should give up. I'm familiar with that trade. Yep. Didn't take it. You should be familiar with that. One of the worst trades in history, right? Does this destroy, this is exactly the same story once over again with retailers where the chatbot was like, Oh, don't worry. Just let us front end you and you'll have no brand, but don't worry because you'll make it up on volume. It's like, no, to be clear, Amazon kind of did this already. Yeah, but this is worse, right? Like what I'm saying is like, yeah, no, I agree. It's like, it's just like the, it's like if Shopify is the godsend to the retail world, right, from a platform perspective, we can have a brand and all that type of stuff. The idea that these retailers would be so stupid as to let themselves be front ended by ChatGPT or something and just disappear into the ether of capitalism efficiency. I mean, I just like, God bless, but it's going to be the exact same story all over again if they fall for it. [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Okay. Well, here's to not falling for the same stories. [SPEAKER_02] Don't fall for it. [SPEAKER_02] But everyone falls for it. [SPEAKER_02] You know why they'll fall for it? Because the people, it's a principal agent problem, because in most cases, the people running these companies want to be there for three years and get a short term revenue shot in the arm and be lauded for their ChatGPT integration. And they're going to take their stock options and leave and leave the companies in ruins. It's the same in the media industry. It's a total principal agent problem. [SPEAKER_02] I was going to say, you're describing the media business. I remember the first time I met, this is past the limitations of worrying if I'm supposed to say it. The first time I met Steve Burke, who was the CEO of NBC. And I asked him a question about five years away. And he looked at me, why would I think of something that long term? Right? Like I was just, and I was like, Oh yeah. [SPEAKER_02] No, it's like, it's fascinating when you think about the layer consolidation, but that is like, I think one of the biggest untold truths of capitalism, right? Is people talking about how capitalism is pretty bad at long term planning. Part of it is structural, things like that. But part of it is honestly just the principal agent problem, like no one's incentivized for long term success. And so they'll fold on anything for a short term hit, right? Which is the bull case on why you will shop inside ChatGPT in some form and why all these companies will get completely eviscerated. But they know that and they don't care. [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Okay. Well, let's try to not make the same mistakes, folks. Let's make new ones. [SPEAKER_03] No, they will. They will. It's fine. And thrive and prosper. To our viewers. Thank you. If you're not yet viewing this pod, you missed some photos, you missed some ice cream. I don't know how you did it. [SPEAKER_04] I managed to, I've been wanting a towel this entire time. [SPEAKER_04] Are you joking? Are you joking? [SPEAKER_04] Of course I'm wanting a towel. I took a shower. [SPEAKER_04] You took a shower. Wow. Okay. And with that, we wish you a wonderful week. We're almost heading into Super Bowl week in San Francisco. It's going to be very exciting. Fun events to the gills. We've got the Ferrari launch we're going to. Sam, are you going to that by the way, IRS VP? [SPEAKER_03] I don't know. I have something scheduled and I also don't really care about Ferraris. But maybe. I mean, if it was a Miata launch. What if I told you it was Miata launch? I'd be there. Oh my God. If there was a new Miata, I would be there in a second. Jess, I'll go with you to the Ferrari launch. Okay. Dave, you can be my plus one. All right. Cool. I mean, I moved. [SPEAKER_02] It's going to be great. I don't, we're not missing it. [SPEAKER_02] I moved to dinner for it. [SPEAKER_02] But we're going to go to some concerts and book parties. It's going to be [SPEAKER_02] But maybe. If it was a Miata launch. What if I told you it was Miata launch? [SPEAKER_04] I'd be there. Oh my God. If there was a new Miata, I would be there in a second. [SPEAKER_04] Jess, I'll go with you to the Ferrari launch. [SPEAKER_04] Okay. Dave, you can be my plus one. All right. Cool. I moved. [SPEAKER_02] It's going to be great. We're not missing it. [SPEAKER_02] I moved to dinner for it. [SPEAKER_02] But we're going to go to some concerts and book parties. It's going to be great. [SPEAKER_04] And we'll share it all with you, dear listeners of More or Less. So thank you for your viewership. Oh, I said listeners. And we'll see you back here again next week for another episode of More or Less. Bye. [SPEAKER_04] See you guys 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 at more or less, at Dave Morin, at Lesson, at Jay Lesson. And as for me, I'm at Brit. See you guys next time. anything has shifted in the Valley on this topic? On which I guess I don't even know what topic we're talking about. On that fear, are people a little less fearful or not? I mean, I, I actually, Well, it's all about the Overton window. No, I think there's power in numbers. Yeah, exactly. It's like, it's, it's like once everyone acts, then everyone acts. Right. But nobody's going to be this. Nobody's going to be the tall poppy. Right. Well, some people are the brave people have to be first, but I think the flip side to all of that is like, well, Sam, I would argue the richest people would be first, right? The people with the most resources, the most insulated people. Yes. But I don't know. Trump is actually targeting those people very intensely. So they're being very quiet, but they have the resources to withstand it. Right. Like, I think that's the thing is like, not everybody in the quote Valley is created equal. But I do think there's this other interesting problem, which is like, let's pretend you're, I'll say this, like, you're like, look, we should have secure borders and like law should be enforced. Right. I mean, like, great. Now I need to hire an organization to do that. And everyone's going to hate that. Like laws, people are going to be really upset about that. Like, just like, that's the problem statement you have. Who are you going to get to do that? That like is good, right? Like it's not a desirable job. Right. And so there's this interesting question of like degrees of freedom and like, how do you even do hard things when like good people don't want to do hard things or like they come with baggage or perspectives that are challenging. And so I think this is like, again, I'm not excusing any of it. I'm just asking more of an intellectual question, which is like, I mean, Sam, to that point, like in my hometown, there was a, you know, there was a big debate about this. And one of the main topics they wanted to do is de-mask the people. And one of the reasons these people are wearing masks is that they, they like, they can't do the job without their like personal life being completely destroyed, you know? So it's like, how do you, how do you enforce laws? I guess I'm more, we're not going to veer this into political territory, but I'm more interested in But isn't this, I thought we were. No, but I'm trying to veer it into business leaders reacting to political territory. But isn't that the story, Jess, is that all of the business leaders in Silicon Valley, starting with, I feel like Brian Armstrong at Coinbase have tried to remove politics from the, you know, from the like, And so my question is that shifted? milieu of the internal culture of the business. It's like, you can have whatever politics that you want. Absolutely. And this is a free country. If you want to be Republican, you want to be Democrat, just keep it out of the workplace. And like, let's focus on the, on the job that we have to do. That seems to be the message that's been pretty consistent the last couple of years. It absolutely has. It absolutely has. And it has served a lot of purposes. And I, I think it prevails. I think it remains the prevailing playbook for leading one of these big tech companies. But, but you're going to see underneath, and we're, I mean, we're seeing this at Google and everywhere, right? The employees who don't want you to do deals with ICE, right? And Palantir. I mean, and you're going to see, and I just don't know. I mean, no one knows, but I'm sort of wondering, like where we are in the, it's just a pendulum too. And is it reasonable? This seems to have broken out. Like this seems to have broken out. Yeah. That's what I'm trying to say. That's certainly what my bot thinks. Well, here's, here's a side thing on this, which is that, and maybe I'm a broken record on this, but I don't use social media except Twitter. And I, in like halfway, I don't know when it, when all of this started happening, it was maybe a day or two later, suddenly there were like, people around me that were like, Oh my God, America's falling apart. Like it was really interesting because when you're not exposed, particularly to Meta's products and TikTok, you have no pro like none of the message that's going around is getting into your brain. And so it's a really interesting thing to watch everybody else. Like I had a bunch of group chats exploding and people around me were talking about this. And there was like this anxious, like America is, is like so screwed. And I'm like having a great weekend. It's beautiful weather. Like everything seems fine here in my local life. And it's really interesting to see how much of an effect the internet machine has on people. It's not that this isn't a bad thing that's happening, but the way in which people are responding to it is clearly also being influenced by the medium. And when you're not in it, you can see it very transparently. The medium is the message, perhaps. Well, it's not everybody's chosen medium. It's a lot of it's, it is like 80% of the world's chosen medium. But like when you're not in it, it's very obvious how much the temperature is being raised by the medium. Look, can I say something else that's very anti intellectual, and I'll get yelled at for, but that's part of my job on this podcast. I don't really know what's going on in Minneapolis, right? Like, and I, I'd say that like, it's interesting. I think that part of the reason for that is there's basically, you know, people when deepfakes first came out, and there was like the Obama era, people have these really expensive deepfakes. And Obama will be saying like, we have started a nuclear war and like a deepfake. And I'm like, oh, no, in the future, like we'll have deepfake Obama, and I'll start nuclear wars, you will believe it, right? I usually think we have the opposite thing going on, which is there's so many there's so much information and so many deepfakes and so many God knows what they're like, you just don't believe anything. And like getting to like, what actually is going on? It's just so expensive. But it is possible to figure it out, Sam, you can't just say because it's hard truth doesn't exist. It's hard. Yeah. No, I'm not saying to I definitely am not saying truth doesn't exist. What I'm saying is getting truth is actually getting more and more expensive for every single person, which then creates this like really interesting dynamic where like even like me, it's like I kind of think I have opinions about this stuff. It's actually kind of true. But I don't like fully trust my own opinions about it. Because I'm like, I don't, there's too much noise. There's not enough, like there's too many angles or too many deepfakes. And it's too, it's too expensive. Fundamentally, it's too expensive in my life, which is a shitty thing to say, but it's true for me to have like a deeply informed opinion about this. Like I can have a structural opinion. It seems like there's like, there's like three levels of resolution to this, Sam. There's like the, okay, do I agree with generally what the current administration is doing and all of their actions like this? That's one level of resolution. Then the one you're talking about, which is kind of the middle one, which is like, what's really going on in Minnesota? Like what's going on on both sides? Are there organized groups involved? Like nobody really knows what's going on. And I don't, I don't know where there is reporting that explains any of that. It's like, there's a lot of stuff all over the internet, but almost everything I read, I'm like, I don't know if I should believe that or not. And then the third level level of resolution is like, you can go watch, which like after I had all these people telling me what was going on, I went and watched the video of the man being shot. And it's very clear, you know, the New York times did a great job going frame by frame through what happened. And you can very clearly see this should not have happened. Like it's like clear as day when you're at that level of resolution, right? When you're talking about five people tackling a person and one person has a gun and the guy's on his back and a dude like is just turns around, pulls out his gun and shoots him. And it's, it's like way too quick to way too quick to the trigger. Like it's like, not even, there's no question that what happened is wrong, but it's like wrong on the super micro, like this individual who actually shot him definitely made the wrong decision. Right. And that's easy to see at that level of resolution. But I think you're absolutely right, Sam, that nobody has the slightest clue what's going on at the like Minnesota level. And it's extremely expensive to figure out. I feel like we're all pretty good, like information gatherers. I don't have an opinion, nor do I understand what's going on over there. Cause like, I can't tell from all of the information and I don't know what information to read. That's real. I mean, maybe just you have a, have a, like how should, how? No, no, but just in the interest of being mildly confrontational, I think Dave, your reaction is very different from Sam's reaction, right? Sam's like, I don't know what's going on. And you're like, I, and Sam makes a smart point, which is, and I'm actually somewhere in between you. Right. And it's really hard to figure out exactly what's going on. And I leave it a busy life and there's only so much time I'm going to spend on that. Right. Dave, I also watched the times breakdown and I thought that was the most useful thing. For sure. And I think, you know, and I just, it's naive. I don't believe that the typical, you know, the average American is going to spend as much time as you have Dave on this, but I wish they would, because it would be, everyone would be better off for it, but it's also not going to happen. Right. So instead we're going to be in this world where most people will sort of default to what fits with their existing patchwork of opinions and be somewhat vague about what they think. Right. And, and that's just what we're left with. I mean, that is the reality. And it's like, look, I mean, again, I like any shooting is a complete tragedy, right? Like, I'm not like, and again, I haven't gone as deep, but like, yeah. So if someone just like randomly made a very bad decision and shot him, I'm like, okay, well that probably is a training problem. That probably is a recruitment problem. There's like things to address about that. But you know, again, like the question for me is like, okay, so how does that spiral into everything else? And that's like, I think the place where it's just like, there's so much information warfare and it's so expensive to have an informed opinion. Yeah, that's true. You can just trust the information, but we don't cover this. They can't trust them. Why don't you cover things like this, Jess? Like it's actually an interesting question. I'm not an expert. I'm not an expert in our newsroom is not an expert and it's not. But your processes could produce information that is valuable. I mean, maybe, but. And your customer wants it. No, I don't know that the customers do want it. I'm one of your customers. I want it. But this is, you shouldn't want it for us, Dave. I think, you know, firing some of your customers is like an important thing, right? You should expect from us to be first and accurate and authoritative on matters relating to the tech business and to the degree that Tim Cook or Altman are responding or, you know, Google cancels a major contract or something like that. But, you know, the work it takes and the experience of the journalists that you want covering some of these other dynamics is not us. Right. Well, I think also the problem is like the broader problem beyond the information is really like no one's willing to pay for this at scale. Right. And that is, I think, a societal problem. Right. Which is if you wanted to know there's information style with super, super trusted people and that the business model just isn't there for the average consumer to afford or pay what it actually costs to get trusted opinions on this anymore. Right. And like, I think that is the structural problem with democracy and like a lot of the place we're at now is it's just extremely difficult to make the business work in a proper way, which is why the New York Times becomes a gaming company and why like there's all these supplemental problems in the media industry is like, if you're like, hey, you have the 20 journalists are the people you can really trust on this. They do an incredible amount of work to get it right. But you have to pay them a lot because it's really expensive to get it right. No one pays. I really struggle like all this is something our newsroom really struggles with like these big national moments, presidential elections or like whatever, you know, when every lens, keyboard, camera, phone, whatever is focused on one issue. Right. And, and there are many that are just, you don't, you can't ignore them to the point of like, it just seems like you're out of tune with the broader dynamics that are affecting the things we cover, but there's just like very little upside in covering them as well, to be honest. I think that's right. And I think it's, I think it's actually back to the earlier point about fear. I think there's fear about the powers that be, but I also think there's fear about the social aspect of it, right? That like, if you speak up, you're going to annoy your, you're going to annoy the people next to you, right? There's like this thing where it's just, we're all so divided. Nobody wants to talk about it. They prefer to just not talk about it. I think that's like a real thing that's going on right now. I know I certainly feel that way. I used to be like incredibly politically engaged, but like, I've really felt like, I just feel like I've got better uses for my mind, you know? And I kind of hope what, what I had a glimmer of this week is I just wondered if maybe that was changing a little bit, right? Like let's, for example, someone who came out very supportive of- One battle in the war. Ice was Keith Raboy at Coastal Adventures. His boss, Vinod- Yeah, that was cool. Came out against him. Now, respectfully actually, and he didn't actually- Yeah, it was cool. Just tweet, Keith's wrong or Keith's an idiot, but another partner had sort of responded to Keith in a thoughtful way and Vinod shared that and added his endorsement, right? If anything, that's cool because it's modeling of how we should be with each other, right? Vinod is generally pretty good at this stuff. I got to say, Vinod every year grows in my estimations over time. But I think it's good modeling because we should be able to disagree like that and like have a productive, even like intense discussion about something. But often that's not what's happening anymore. I thought it was funny on Keith in totally unrelated news that Jack who works at Slow got intel and outed him for doing pushups off his knees in Barry's bootcamp. Oh no, he did what? And it was like, that was a whole thing. Because I think it was like, Keith was like, no, it was like my fourth Barry's of the day. But I was like, wow. It's like, Jack, that's a really bold associate move. How did I miss that? To like go out, like calling out Keith for knee pushups and Barry's. Did he approve that before he did that? That's like shots fired. Of course. No way. You think we have any internal controls on these things? Shots fired. No, it was just wild. There's even a backstory to it. But like, I got to tell you that, you know, we talk about Keith, Keith scandals. That was the key scandal in my life. For sure. It's like he secretly only spends half of his time in Miami. Good Lord. Okay. I don't know where we took that conversation other than it's something everybody. That's the type of hard hitting reporting knee pushups that, you know, the information can cover, you know? Guys, we just, I have been trying to hire for a weekend section, a reporter to really dig into the crazy cultural things happening in this moment in San Francisco. And Eli Rosenberg just joined us this week. So get ready. Buckle up. Anything new you're hearing about? I mean, we're hearing about everything. I actually have a great story this weekend. I think it will run on Friday when this pod comes out, but yeah, shit getting weird. How weird? I mean, weirder than it. Well, like the not everything from the shooting up the peptides to the, that's not, that's, that's old news. I know that's old news. It was in the New York Times. We've got new news. What's the new news? What, what is not happening in our house? What, yeah. What are we not doing? Yeah. Jess, come on. You can't keep, you can't keep this secret. What is not happening in this house is a hard thing to actually, this is a test bed of wild and crazy. Dave, you need to know about this. All right. I'm in. The thing that's happening in our house that I bought off of Instagram targeted ads. It's so bad guys. I can't leave again. I can't go to Europe. It's so good. Is a mini wiffle ball pitching machine. It's, Ooh, that sounds fun. Awesome. So you basically like, No one needs this. No one needs this. It's everyone needs this. Everyone needs this. It's like, so it's a really well-made it's portable. It's massively overpriced and like, but you can plug it in and it pitches mini wiffle balls at you. Is it like one of those tennis machines? No, this is like someone's, some bros slapped like a bucket on some spinning wheels and sell you like the mini wiffle balls, but it's great. And like, it is the best. I now have the kids just like whacking wiffle balls all day. How many injuries have been sustained, Sam? How, what are we up to an injury count? I mean, they're just wiffle balls. This is, it's boys, Jess. Come on. I did immediately hit a line drive into our four-year-old, but like that was his fault. Right. Like second shot. He was standing at shortstop. He was standing at a shortstop and then, you know, it's been great. There've only been minor injuries. That sounds awesome. Better than a Mac mini. And about the same price. I'm trying to think about my latest purchases, a sweater. I bought a sweater. I got to say, I, I just, I can take Meta just reported earnings that in like, you know, when you know the capex is going up, you kind of know the next line is that they've had a good quarter, right? Cause they're not going to like announce more capex unless they're crushing it. And like they did and stocks way up, but I got to tell you, my barometer is like, how many things have I bought on Instagram in the last week? And so long as that keeps going up, I'm a very happy Meta shareholder and it keeps going up. Jess, you don't even know. I bought some really expensive stuff off Instagram the other day. Like what? For you. Oh, it's perfect. But I, I did off Instagram, not off. I can give you some other websites. In this case, it was like a link to a website and the website had another thing. It was great. But like, I got to tell you, AI, my, I could not be more bullish on the things I will buy on Instagram because of AI driven targeting and commerce. It's like wild. You've been consistent on that, Sam. If there's one thing you've been consistent on. That's the thing that BlackRock should be excited about is my ability to buy infinite junk. That's well targeted to me. So we've got, we've got Minnesota and infinite junk. So I had, and then, and then we'll bring this whatever to a close, but I was talking, obviously, AI commerce was a hot topic at Davos just because open AI was, I mean, I love when I say that and everyone else is like, no, Greenland was a hot topic, Jessica, for you, AI and commerce. So I'm willing to accept that I'm dialed a little bit differently, but you know, with open AI is ad news and shopping news. So I asked Angie Jassy about it, the CEO of Amazon. And he was like, look, this, he was sort of like, maybe we'll do deals with these people. And I was like, why do you have to do deals with them? Like your Amazon. And he was like, oh, we'll do deals with some of them. But he was like, first of all, it's really hard. Like all the other pieces, the infrastructure, the free shipping, like, you know, he, he was talking his book, but then I was talking to some of the leaders of the payment companies that are starting to do these integrations with chatbot commerce. And they were saying that retailers are actually really nervous about this because retailers don't want you just to pick that laser focused thing. They want to merchandise to you. No shit. They want to get you on their site to add the sweater or add the boots or add the bat to the wiffle ball thing. So shouldn't AI be very good at this? No, no, but you're in the you're in a different UX. You're in a command line UX. You don't, there's no brand loyalty. It's just find me the cheapest, best, whatever. This is my bait. You know what's going to happen? You know what's going to be skeptical of? But you're, you're halfway there with Instagram, Sam. You're, you would take that AI feed. Sam, you're literally buying things from AI driven commerce. Instagram is AI. Oh, that, that form is different. I'm saying let's call it chatbot oriented. Here's the thing. You know how Google convinced all of the newspapers that they would just make money on the volume and they should give up. I'm familiar with that trade. Yep. Didn't take it. You should be familiar with that. One of the worst trades in history, right? Does this destroy, this is exactly the same story once over again with retailers where the chatbot was like, Oh, don't worry. Just let us front end you and you'll have no brand, but don't worry. Cause you'll make it up on volume. It's like, no, to be clear, Amazon kind of did this already. Yeah, but this is worse, right? Like is what I'm saying is like, yeah, no, I agree. It's like, it's just like the, it's like if Shopify is like the godsend to the retail world, right. From a platform perspective, we can have a brand and like all that type of stuff. The idea that like these retailers would be so stupid as to let themselves be front ended by chat GPT or something and just disappear into the ether of capitalism efficiency. I mean, I just like, God bless, but it's going to be the exact same story all over again if they fall for it. Yeah. Okay. Well, here's to not falling for the same stories. Don't fall for it. But everyone falls for it. You know why they'll fall for it? Because the people, it's a principal agent problem, because in most cases, the people running these companies like want to be there for three years and get a short term revenue shot in the arm and be lauded for their chat GPT integration. And they're going to take their stock options and leave and leave the companies in ruins. It's the same in the media industry. It's like, it's a total principle. I was going to say, you're describing the media business. I remember the first time I met, I don't even remember, this is past the limitations of worrying if I'm supposed to say it. The first time I met Steve Burke, who was the CEO of NBC. And I asked him a question about five years away. And he looked at me, why would I think of something that long term? Right? Like I was just, and I was like, Oh yeah. No, it's like, it's fascinating when you think about the layer consolidation, but that is like, I think the biggest, one of the biggest untold truths of capitalism, right? Is it's people talking about how capitalism is pretty bad at long term planning. Part of it is structural, things like that. But part of it is honestly just the principal, principal agent problem, like no one's incentivized for long term success. And so they'll fold on anything for a short term hit, right? Which is the bull case on why you will shop inside chat GPT in some form and why all these companies will get completely eviscerated. But like they know that and they don't care. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's try to not make the same mistakes, folks. Let's make new ones. No, they will. They will. It's fine. And thrive and prosper. To our viewers. Thank you. If you're not yet viewing this pod, you missed some photos, you missed some ice cream. I don't know how you did it. I managed to, I've been wanting a towel this entire time. Are you joking? Are you joking? Of course I'm wanting a towel. I took a shower. You took a shower. Wow. Okay. And with that, we wish you a wonderful week. We're almost heading into Super Bowl week in San Francisco. It's going to be very exciting. Fun events to the gills. We've got the Ferrari launch we're going to. Sam, are you going to that by the way, IRS VP? I don't know. I have something scheduled and I also don't really care about Ferraris. But maybe. I mean, if it was a Miata launch. What if I told you it was Miata launch? I'd be there. Oh my God. If there was like a new Miata, I would be there in a second. Jess, I'll go with you to the Ferrari launch. Okay. Dave, you can be my plus one. All right. Cool. I mean, I moved. It's going to be great. I don't, we're not missing it. I moved to dinner for it. But we're going to, we're going to go to some concerts and book parties. It's going to be great. And we'll share it all with you, dear listeners of More or Less. So thank you for your viewership. Oh, I said listeners. And we'll see you back here again next week for another episode of More or Less. Bye. See you guys 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 at more or less, at Dave Morin, at Lesson, at Jay Lesson. And as for me, I'm at Brit. See you guys next time.