Elon’s Trillion-Dollar Move, WaPo Layoffs & The Super Bowl

Transcript

We really have to tell Jeff Bezos it is time to sell The Washington Post. Who knows the buy it? This devastating number of layoffs, there is no vision. If you look at the news organizations at scale, pick The Wall Street Journal, pick The New York Times, they are run by somewhat not rational people who deeply love the news business. But you need that level of religious zeal for news to weather, endure, and lead in news today. We'll debate the tech 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, welcome to more or less. How's it going everybody? So much news, love it. So much news and claw con is happening today. And the people that are listening to this now will have hopefully gone there. They probably a lot of our audience will be at claw con tonight. Okay, please for the people, Dave, tell us about, is it claw as in lobster con? Yes, claw con. So I'm co-hosting tonight. Is this an MSG production? Yes, MSG and Dave Morin production. Weeks and weeks ago, I had my catch up call with MSG, because we're investors in his company. And this was, what, like a month ago. He, I will admit, he's the first person who told me about,, whatever it was called then. Nine names ago. Nine names ago. He's the, I installed that with him on the line. He gets my shout out for my, my patient zero for this stuff. Okay. Are we going to identify him by anything other than his initials or is? Michael S. Galpert. He's gone by MSG since the early New York days. Although I was making the t-shirts for tonight and he wanted his full name, Sam. Oh. Yeah. The founder of Open Claw will be there. And the wait list is like thousands of people long and they keep having to like move venues to make it bigger. Like all the Silicon Valley people are coming out for this tonight. I just, for, so couple thoughts. First, I like that we're using the phrase meetup again. It feels so OG. This is a new thing. It sounds a different scale. He definitely has run meetups on this already. And it's a Scott Heiferman reference. Cause we were back in New York in the old days with the meetups. Sam had a lot of meetups. I did. That's how, how he recruited. Yeah., I think one of the most interesting things going on is that the Open Claw stuff has really differentiated between who in the ecosystem is technical and who is not. Correct. This is a meetup that is about sharing things that you've made, the things that you've built. It's very traditional old school internet. It's how the city used to work. These kinds of things don't happen as much anymore. So it's been pretty fun to work on one. It gives me a lot of memories of the old days when Silicon Valley had technical people running around in it all the time. So now the technical people are just actually doing work as opposed to sharing all their shit on the internet. I don't know about that. This feels very food camp to me. Yeah, it's very food camp. Same era. And we used to do a lot of this stuff at Facebook in the early days. And I think that meetups and developer things have gone on throughout the open source community over the last many years. But I think this is one of the first things that's animated people the way that it has on a really long time. It's so fun. Yeah. So I'm psyched to be co-hosting it with MSG and we've got Peter Steinberger coming. I got Susan Kerr, the famous icon designer from Apple. I swear she was at food camp too. She was. People are flying in for this, Jess. This is like a really big deal. Okay. I hate to tell you, people are flying into the Bay Area for something else right now. It's not open clock. Okay. Definitely. Super Bowl week in the Bay Area. So excited. But,, we can give open class some love to or Claude, whatever it's called. Who knows? It is funny, Jess, to see all of these people, like all of these like NFL influencers taking videos of, oh my God, Northern California is so beautiful. It's, yeah. Guys, I got an ice cream today. It is gorgeous. It is like 67 degrees here on the peninsula. 67? Oh, God. That's great. Freaking you two. We are going to talk about the merger to maybe end all mergers with SpaceX and XAI. Is Tesla next? Okay. We're talking about that. Of course it's next. For sure it's next. Then let it be known. We're going to have to talk about the bloodletting of a third of the staff of the Washington Post going and what Bezos needs to do about it. And we're going to talk about AI fatigue. We can get Claude bot in there. And then we're going to have the PCC, the pop cultural corner to end all pop culture corners. So who wants to take SpaceX bot XAI rescuing an Elon company that was going to have to struggle to raise a lot of capital going forward. I was the first to report the price, 250 billion valuing SpaceX at around a trillion in the exchange. Okay. Take the ball, Sam. What's your hot take? Look, these are all narrative assets, And look, I love SpaceX. I think SpaceX is an incredible narrative, an incredibly powerful company. I think everyone on the SpaceX side is peeved because they're, this XAI thing is not worth a quarter billion dollars or the numbers are all funny money anyway. So really the way to think about it is, it's not worth a fifth, It's not worth 20% of my SpaceX stock. Like really not. Like that's a point worth underscoring. No SpaceX investor thinks that, that it is worth that. But on the flip side, it's good to remember that a year ago, SpaceX and funny money land was worth 200 billion dollars. And there was a story that maybe, maybe by 2030, you'd be worth a trillion in Elon's world. And because we live in relativist funny money land,, you're, well, don't be too upset. You bought into the, into the narrative game and, yeah, you're down 20% on a made up number. That's huge. So it's, it's the whole thing. Everyone, someone was at dinner last night was trying to quote to me that the Twitter price,, ah, Twitter is now what a great trade. And I'm, it's all just percentages. it's just, it's just the reconstitution of the Elon narrative into one mega narrative. And look, the problem is that SpaceX doesn't have anywhere near enough revenue or profit to subsidize the money losing of XAI. Right. So it's, I think it's the right mentality. What are the numbers there? Do their app around average? There is the information. Let's pull them up. It's like not that much revenue and a few billion in profit. Now it's a great story. It's like one of the best stories. So, so great story, not great company. No, SpaceX might someday be when he says like the numbers aren't that big. Well, also remember speaking of narratives, this is on the eve and time to exploit a capital raising event that pursuit presumably could help close this goal. Right. And in fairness,,, look, what Elon has done with this merger is he took one of his toys and combined it with the other toy so that good news, it now has more revenue. I think it's then open AI and certainly more profit. Right. If you don't count all the money losing. Oh, this is definitely on being, Sam, you think you can get to the public markets first to get a premium? Not so fast. I'm going to jettison my what would have been the third or fourth place in this war in terms of timing and appeal to the public market. And I'm just going to literally strap them to this rocket ship. To a rocket booster. That's great, Jess. I know. Just pay me the big bucks. And then I think, Sam, you nailed the point about how investors are feeling about it. I know who are very happy, which XAI's investors, because. Because they just got tossed a lifeline. Yeah. So why didn't Tesla get rolled into this? Is that. That's definitely what's going to happen. It has to. Okay. It is just more complicated to do that now. It's already public, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. It's much harder. It's also clear that the narrative is shifting. they shut down the production of the Model S and the Model X. Yeah. They don't do cars anymore, but somehow the number go up. And yeah, exactly. In favor of the optimist thing. And Elon's entire public narrative has become about,, cars have two civilizations, and we need to take advantage of the sun's energy. And so it's clear that the whole narrative is shifting towards, let's leave Earth and like send the, send, send the optimist robots to Mars and build structures around the sun. And,, that's, that's where we're going next with this narrative. It's super clear. I got to say the thing that I think people miss about this entire Elon arc, right. Which it's, I was joking the other day that, in some ways, Twitter, which I called a vibe buy, like that instead of vibe coding, it's a vibe buy on Elon's part that he then tried to get out of. So, I forgot he tried to get out of the deal. He got to get out of the deal, but like the vibe buy of Twitter is going to turn out to be accidentally probably the most brilliant thing he ever did. Right. Because the reality is he always had a good presence, but as this becomes a total narrative warfare game, even I, and I'm,, again, I, I'm very conflicted about how I feel about Elon, but the fact that I see all the influencers just see what he thinks all day long. He just injects it everywhere and has that direct pipeline. To the extent that this is about narrative shaping and narrative assets. It's amazing because you can sit there and just completely iterate the narrative through influence and the influence. It doesn't matter. It's pretty small. It has like all the VCs and whatever on it. It's like a wildly powerful thing, right. As a tip asset effectively, not financially as a disaster financially, pretty much. Well, not a disaster. It's not great. But, my God, I actually think all of this gets done because of the narrative edge he has and storytelling and none of it really makes sense from a DCF perspective, but that's not the world we live in anymore. I'm going to briefly share the financials. This was a crash graphic, everybody here. So you can see SpaceX, 16 billion in revenue to 210, EBITDA, 8 billion. And a pre-profit. That's a very generous way to put it, Jessica. I know. I, this was not,, I'm going to change pre-profit. Pre-profit is not a concept that should exist. That's a very optimistic way to frame it. Guys, we were crashing this out. Breaking news. First draft of history. The numbers are right though. And then you've got cash, SpaceX with one to 2 billion. Remember this, what's booing the SpaceX numbers is Starlink, So that's really important. And then you have burning nine and a half billion in XAI. To be clear, the large amount of training is not the primary driver. That's the primary cost. That also should change. Why is it worth 1 trillion on 2 billion in free cash flow? Because narrative, Dave. That's like the whole point. That's what we've been talking about. I get it. I'm just staring at it and I'm sitting here going like- Yes, this is why these are good numbers. Especially burning nine and a half billion. Meta's doing 80 billion free cash flow. Yeah, I know. Yeah. And free cash flow. Yeah. The steps that got us here are logical. I think what happens next is going to be fascinating., I still think you probably have a monster IPO. What does monster mean? What percentage does number does 1 trillion go up at an IPO here? 20%? I don't know., I'm making things, I don't know. And this is not my area of expertise. What's Bill Gurley going to say if it goes up 20% of the IPO? Oh no. That's different. No, I wasn't saying pop on opening day. I'm joking. It wasn't. A 20% pop for an IPO like this would be a disaster. Well, not a disaster, but not ideal. To add Tesla to this, they're losing 6 billion per year. So Tesla negative 6 billion, XAI negative 10 billion. I don't know what the Kalshi odds are, but I put them at 90%. I don't know for Tesla, like over some period of time. I asked Kalshi to run that because I really think they should run that. But here's the thing. I just think we have to accept the fact, which is very dangerous, by the way, but it's just where we are., in the area of mass media, there weren't that many narratives of what's valuable. Everyone agreed it was a DCF and maybe there's like a multiple on revenues or profit, really not even that profits. And it was a proxy for dividends. That is still a highly liquid narrative. Like if you find something that over like the cash flows justify the price, everyone will buy it. Like that is globally accepted narrative. But what you have now is cults that the internet connects to people that don't have to actually be that big, They need to be big enough, but not too big. They can just buy from each other and drive these economies around these stocks. And the thing about Elon is he has even this XII move. Here's the real story of the XII move is if you give me money, I will get you paid. I'm going to use every tool in the book, including mergers with other things and all sorts of crazy shit, but I will get you paid. And if you are consistently known as the guy who, if you give him money, you're going to get paid on it, then you get more money., isn't that the grand rule of capitalism, Sam? It's, it is,, I've been saying this for many, many, since the clubhouse days, Like this is, this is the world we live in of like cult capitalism. And it, it, it, it feels very unstable, but also to Jessica's point, like every step is logical enough, And like that the, the party will probably continue. And it's happening at epic levels, you're going to have cult capitalism and,, Jack Dorsey merging his startups or whatever, who Evan Williams, like who,, when I don't, yeah. And this is where we are literally in multi trillion dollar deals., it makes me a little nervous, makes me a little nervous. Is it, is there a premium on, on inspiration?, is the narrative so inspiring that it, it makes this possible? Is that, is that where the premium comes from? Like the difference between, Jess to your point, like Jack Dorsey merging his two things, which are minuscule compared to this. And this is like the inspiration of all humanity. we're, we're going to this, we're going to the store. That's a positive way to look at cult leadership. I'm just saying to, bring another, like what creates the premium really? Is it that people are so inspired by this vision and the actions towards the vision that that's like where the premium comes from? I think that a lot of it has to do with the Peter Thiel mentality of like monopolies and winner take all capitalism. I think people have like deeply, like deeply internalize this culturally, this idea that, if you could own space and maybe they can own space,, is that a thing? And, what is that worth? It's worth infinity or like Bitcoin infinity or like gold., and I think what people have also internalized is the idea of owning a normal stock and compounding 10% a year net of taxes, net of inflation ain't so good. And so they're, okay, well, I can't own normal things. And I can't feel good about owning normal things is the cost of living because of compounding because of taxes. So everyone is in the hail Mary for infinity ball game., and that's why at the same time, all these SaaS stocks getting crashed and like figmas in the toilet and everything. Because it was, this is, who this seems risky without reward. But these are sophisticated opinions, Sam. And we're sitting here commenting on this as it's about to go to retail,, do you think retail investors really think about owning space, as infinity?, I don't think so. Maybe some of them do. Okay. I want to, we do have a packed agenda. So I want to keep us moving. And I think this will not be the only time we talk about space X Brit. Does this raise any, you're, you got your IPOs to come in. That's theme Brit. What else jumps out at you about this? I was wondering if segue to a second topic, Jeff Bezos should buy some smaller social media platform to inflict his narrative. Talk about buying the wrong media platform. Like snap does Bezos by like snap or something. And then they merge and then he can sell the narrative and all the influencers. He's retired. He doesn't care. Jeff is not retired. Jeff is not retired. He is leading a rocket company. He really is. He really is in, in the way that, so he's jealous of Elon right now. That's my point. If most of the news about him is partying,, it turns out that billionaires also go to fashion shows, but let honestly, and I information about this, Jeff is running blue origin. Jeff really, really believes in blue origin. Now I think, I think I'm really interested to look at when he goes out and raises some other capital, because I think if you're going to have your larger competitor hit the public markets, it might be a good time to at least not keep funding the thing yourself. So I, I think that's interesting, but guys, we really have to tell Jeff Bezos. It is time to sell the Washington post who no one wants to buy it. Why? Yeah. We are who would buy it. Yeah. Talk us, talk us through this. And to be clear, not me. This is not. Wait, Jeff, what happened? I actually didn't know the news that you're talking about. Okay. So the Washington post today laid off about a third of his editorial staff, which is a massive number because of AI. That's the question. There is no message. What's interesting about this, just that you bring this up. Like Washington post has definitely become my go-to between like the New York times. I just don't talk. I just don't trust anymore. Really? That's so weird. I just find the Washington post like much more. I just find it better. Jeff, listen to this because you have an Uber fan who will help you find the core of your differentiation, which no one else has been able to do. I'm happy to be on that board. Oh, they don't say that day. If you were going to get a text in 20 seconds, but no, look, Jeff, I think bought the post for really important reasons. He believed in the journalism it was doing and the attempt to help it grow its audience. And we are just at a point now where I think, and you nailed it, Dave, this devastating number of layoffs is part of this tragedy. But to me, the other part of the tragedy is that there is no vision. There is no, and now we're doing X. There's no meaningful story. And I really think if you look at the news organizations at scale, they're thriving today. Pick the Wall Street Journal, pick the New York times. They are run by somewhat not rational people who deeply love the news business. They run by the Murdochs and the Salzburgers. And I don't think that means they have to be run badly or they can't be run with people with business acumen, but you need that level of religious zeal for news to weather, endure and lead in news today. You just do in the same way we talk about this with AI and the zeal and religiosity of it. And I think it's really clear that Jeff is focused on space, which is also really cool, but it's very sad to see. It's turned into,, I agree, Sam, that no one is really clicking on too many headlines about newspaper layoffs except journalists. So that point's taken, but it's exploded because the former legendary Pulitzer Prize winning, busting the Catholic Church for child abuse editor, Marty Baron, he did that when he was at the Boston Globe, however, came out with a very long memo taking Bezos to the woodshed. I think he raised a lot of interesting points. I also just, don't, I have to think about what the value of just sending those memos from the sidelines is. I'm not, I think they have some value, but they also are just, dude, so what are you going to do about it? But so it has spilled one level beyond your typical media story, but. Jess, what do you think the reason is? Do you think it's AI or just cost cutting or? None of this is AI, I actually, I've. Is it the same story that's been going on for 10 years since like 2016? Didn't he buy this in 16? Yeah. I don't even know now. I thought he bought it right after Trump. He bought it right. And switched it to democracy dies in dark darkness, Like that was 16. Yes. He, and this was Marty Baron's point that Jeff stewarded it through an era where he did have more of a vision and Marty's opinion, and he did stand up to the administration more. Yeah. But you also have to throw into the timeline 2017, which is the year that Facebook slash meta destroyed the media business by changing the algorithm and put everybody out of. I'm sorry, David, but we could do the media business was destroyed long before the algorithm. I understand, but that was a massive acceleration. It was for publications that had no focus and no unique business model. Sure. But it wasn't for publications that did. And I think,, the Washington Post has always been straddling. Are they the paper record for DC, which they seeded over more than a decade now that to Politico and others, They didn't hold onto that firmly. The Politico founders who are now the Axios founders came from the Washington Post, I think. Yeah. But also they tried to be more things to more people., there's been this huge debate around how many people they're sending to the Olympics, which is honestly like the most hilarious debate, It's, why are they sending people to the Olympics? ? So it's really this question of who's their audience and how did they own that audience? And so many news publications have tried to be all things to all people because that is inherent in the scale and reach. And they're having a really hard time and it's hard to write the ship. If they were telling a narrative now of writing that ship back towards being the voice of Washington,, all these things, I don't think it would make some of this outcome any less tragic, but it would just explain it. But it's a real mess and it's a real mess that journalists like to talk about. And I think if we are to tie it to Elon, I do think you can expect Jeff to go bigger and bigger with Blue Origin., they're having success on the technology front and no one, even Elon doesn't want space to be winner takes all because they're just going to get busted up. So that is my plea for the Washington Post. Jeff, give it up, focus on space. And I hope there's someone who wants to lead it. Okay. We got to get to AI now from news to AI, our team's favorite pivot. Before we get to CloudBot, some other facts of note. First of all, Google earnings crushing it, cloud soaring. I want to stay up 48%, but that's a number I should check before. This guy's an I'll do my bit. I always do. At least the stock isn't ripping today on the news. It was priced into some degree because it's going to be for the next year. I'll be saying, remember what I said I should buy Google stock and didn't. Literally every episode, Sam, every episode for the next two years., the market's a mess today, but I'm still unable, unwilling to take the macro back because I'm so nervous about the macro market and I'm just not quite smart enough to construct the trade I would do. I think you are. Believe in yourself. That doesn't constitute a buyer sell opinion. That's just a wifely support. But here's what's top of mind for me, guys, because another big narrative now has been open AI is pushing to the enterprise, Meta is pushing to the enterprise. If you think about it, Amazon is the OG, followed now by Google. It's very hard to have consumer and enterprise DNA. I am old enough to remember when the information reported more than a decade ago or ish that if Google Cloud wasn't going to hit some revenue milestone, Larry was going to kill it. Google Cloud was like a 20% project turned into now a business growth up from 33% to 48%. We can find the absolute numbers. It's just really cool. I also wonder if we're seeing the consumer and I think consumer and enterprise are hard to pull off. I think a lot of the companies trying to should pick a blade, but clearly Google Cloud is going up because everyone's talking about Gemini. I don't think you can. Open AI has to play both sides of this. They have to compete. I'm going to say the same broken record. Sam's so short, Open AI. Well, I have been for the whole time. They're just incredible narrative warriors. But here's the thing. Guys, first tech boom, everyone was B2C. Then it was B2B. Then it was B2B2C. Yeah. This is, I'm just old enough and was just aware enough to remember this trend. What about B2A? B2A? Now with agents, we're going B2B2B2C. Again, you can be so excited about AI as a technology and probably a deflationary one in a big way. There's clearly disruption, but the reality is when you write down to it, again, to be the broken record, you can own Meta, you can own Google, have huge profit machines. Maybe you can now own SpaceX, if you really believe. I really hope that XAI doesn't drag SpaceX down. It's just these are hard, not good businesses to be in as a startup. The search for revenue and profit is going to just be real. Because the numbers you need to come up with and pull out of the hat, they're hard to find. Open AI is crushed on early subscription revenue, but Jess, better than anyone else. At that scale, you get all your subscribers up front and then the growth gets really hard. Anyone who's going to subscribe to OpenAI is already subscribed to it. That gets hard. You're going to get in this crazy goal seek for where the hell are we going to get paid on this, is my view. Well, our business grew 24% last year. No, it did, but I'm saying, would you at least agree that the thing in subscription or most business models is the cheapest customer to get as the first? Yeah. And that it gets harder and harder and harder every year because that's just how, because you already have penetrated the easy, but people think CAC goes down, CAC always goes up. I agree with that. Yes. There's like execution that changes that. But they have business lines that haven't yet penetrated into lots of different markets. But this is why they're, well, we're going to have an apps business. And I was, yeah, but this is like a hard to execute 75 business models at the same time. Well, fair. But, I think there are probably five to 10 that are possible. And they're still growing into that. What big companies have more than two important revenue lines? Microsoft. Okay. They don't have consumer. Amazon, Google, Meta. Meta has one business line. Meta has one business line. And Google. Well, I guess Oculus doesn't count. It also depends. Is advertising a business or is search ads different from display ads? I'm just saying, I think most companies end up with one or two dominant business models. I am agreeing with you. And like everything else is a rounding error. Well, here's the follow up question. To find that business model, is it like lightning in a bottle that grows? Or can you throw spaghetti against the wall to find the business model? What companies in history have thrown spaghetti until they found it? I don't think I don't know. But that is what OpenAI is doing. I agree. Well, they're certainly trying to do it faster than ever before because they have to, because the competition is like so huge. Which is why they're raising a shitload of money, hiring a shitload of people. Trying to., this is the thing about narrative hopping though. I think the thing, look, Elon, this is the whole thing about why you need to own Twitter. Maybe Sam is at a huge disadvantage because Sora is not a thing. It's, Elon, take SpaceX. There's been like four major narrative shifts, to get to where it is. First, we're putting a greenhouse on Mars. Yeah. Then it's Starlink. Now it's data centers in space, whatever. Tesla is like six business models, six narrative shifts. And so because Elon gets people paid, they buy into the next narrative. And he's such a great storyteller. You just iterate the narratives. The problem with OpenAI has been this, they had a really powerful narrative initially, which was, we're going to be the first to AGI and whoever gets to AGI first wins. And we will become the monopoly to end all monopolies and everyone, that's it. And, that's been chipped away at, And then it's, oh, well, it's the chat GPT consumer thing. Oh, well, wait a minute. No, it's the enterprising., it's been very schizophrenic about the narrative evolution of why it's super valuable. Right. And I just maybe it becomes a, hey, it's cents on the dollar on power. Like there's a lot of places it could go, but it does feel like spaghetti against the wall goal seek without, whereas it,, even Elon's only iterating the narrative once every few years, not every three months. Yeah. I think those are fair points. And I think I just enterprise businesses are so different from consumer businesses in like in every way. And I think AWS is a remarkable story. If you go into all the details, like a lot had to go, right. They also had a certain type of leader and then Andy Jassy at AWS who,, brought that to life., Thomas Kurian came from Oracle, I think. Where did Kurian come from who runs Google cloud?,, he was the imported real enterprise DNA. And, but I think it's more than just like hiring a fancy leader of it. Yeah. He was president of Oracle. So we'll see. I think both that you have to recognize that Google's done it and Google has a flywheel with the consumer business that like is pretty damn impressive. And they have marketing for their cloud business, Every time Gemini leapfrogs in some capability, that's TPUs. That's Google cloud, we're now going to see, I think open AI meta others try and build it. But speaking of open AI and cloud, so we're entering Superbowl ad mayhem territory, really just a great expensive press release. Have you guys seen the cloud ads? I haven't seen it, but I heard that Sam Altman saw it and had some remarks about it. And now it feels, tell me if this is right. Anthropic and open AI are like dueling it out a bit. He said it was a creative ad, but like the, it's like false claims. It's definitely like not true. Well,. And if you go back,, you go back, the Anthropic co-founders were at open AI, So yeah, the rivalry is as deep as it goes left because of what they felt were unethical decisions, In their words, not mine. And then now you've just seen like Anthropic getting like testier with its advertising. they, I forgot a campaign, the print campaign they did maybe half a year ago that took aim. And this one is taking aim at no ads, like Google was dumbest. And so. I just like that there aren't even in ads in open AI. It's, this is a classic, like the narrative front runs reality. Yeah. It's, this is like the moment limit is just, you got to keep remembering that narratives move faster than reality and people trade the narrative. Right. And, so I, I think it's actually pretty hilarious to do like a anti-ad thing for a thing that doesn't have ads in it. Kate O'Neill is great. I saw this because of her tweet. I'm sorry, Kate Rorsch now. Yeah, I was going to say. Wrong, wrong last name. Great human. Old dorm mate of mine. Great human. But I, I actually saw this whole thing because of her tweet responding to it, which was quite strong. Kate's been doing that lately. She, she, she thinks she's speaking truth to power. I'm not sure who some of these people are speaking to when they think they're speaking truth to power. Like this is another theme as a quick aside. Oracle gotten some hot water this week because it started tweeting in defense of clients like open AI, thereby piling on fears about these clients that they're,, bank rent style. we have no concerns about the ability of, if you fill in the blank, everyone's instantly going to have concerns about the viability of fill in the blank. So I think people have lost the plot in X a little bit. I don't know. Maybe these clawed ads make a difference. Maybe they don't. Tech journalists love them. I just got to think they don't make a difference. I also got to say, we can land all these things we see as strategic challenges for open AI. I think it's true. I use it 22 times a day, ? Only 22? Yes. And I also use Gemini. And have you set up your open claw yet? Yeah, you haven't switched to open claw yet. I haven't used chat GPT in a month. I did use it yesterday. I asked it whether I should eat green turkey. It said no. I keep asking Sam, maybe Sam tonight's the night you can set me up on open claw. Cause I just, I love it. I got a whole stack of Mac mini for you. I've got my favorite open claw and I am having a blast with it. It's great. It's exactly. Now we can talk about open cloth. Take, go. Thank God. We're finally here. The grand finale of the episode. It's so fun. I have it doing all sorts of things for me. I have it reading my list. I had it build for me a list of all the American politicians that matter. And then it can. Assuming not everyone's a ninja. What you're doing is you're building agents or you're using other agents that have been shared socially to do these tasks. I don't use those. Those seem dangerous to me. I know. Nobody's using that. You can't. The unwashed internet is a great way to get computer STDs. I've built a bunch of stuff that is running on traditional servers and like does traditional database stuff. But there's all these like shims you want of like little like projects you want done. And the thing about open cloth, which is just so great is I have it set up in telegram, sit it on my phone at two in the morning when I can't sleep. Telegram. I've got to use this thing through telegram. You don't have to. You can use any messaging. You can use this cord. You can use slack. You can use, you can use iMessage. For me, telegrams that just sits there in telegram. And I'm, what's the news? And I have it trained to go read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the information and everything. Just give me a great summary. I have it trained to continuously update. I have a list of, I had to build a list of the 100 elected officials that matter in the US and they have the tech people. I'd be, what's the vibe? It gives me the Democrat vibe. It gives me like all those things, saves them the Postgres for me, posts them on Twitter, does all these little shim activities. The best shim I have though, and I love it, is I set it up. So it continuously reads LinkedIn for me, picks based on themes I, posts that I might care about. It then asks another bot I built called Sam Bot, which has all of my writing in a vector database. And it asks what my opinion would be, edits it, and then posts comments as me all over LinkedIn, responding to the posts. And the funny part is guys, one, they're pretty fucking good. They're not perfect, but they're pretty good. And two, the amount of engagement, it's off the charts. But is this illegal for LinkedIn's terms of service? Because I actually tried to do this and my bot was telling me that I shouldn't do this. What did you tell your bot? Why would you ask your bot to read the terms of service? It is so obvious you didn't write these posts. Look at the punctuation. There are commas, there are periods, there are apostrophes. I, as Brett, responded to a post that Sam also responded to, and I'm pretty sure it was his bot. But then, so then I drafted off of what Sam had told me a few days ago about this. And so then I had my bot, which is not posting directly for me, because that might be illegal. I pull all my connections, sort them by their number of followers, and then prioritize the top 10% that I should be commenting to. Smart. And so guess who my connection with the most followers is so far? I've only downloaded 20% of my connections because LinkedIn's data export takes time. John Steinberg, the former founder of Cheddar. He's got millions of LinkedIn followers. That's his jam. Everyone should just start commenting on John Steinberg's page. I'm going to tell, I'm just going to tell it to comment on John Steinberg now. This is great. Actually, I will say, I woke up this morning and Clawblot had actually written me. I also have been writing posts on LinkedIn. It wrote me a post that I thought was so good. I have it read Twitter and then summarize Twitter and post on LinkedIn, a summary of what I said on Twitter. And I liked it so much, I took it and I posted it back on Twitter. So it's, it's great. The funny part about all this is, it's pure dead internet theory. Like if you didn't believe the internet was going to die before, you're just going to die now. Because like now this was already happening with bot farms, but now I just sit in Telegram all day long and dispatch agents spouting my bullshit all over the internet. So I literally like my most recent LinkedIn post, which I didn't even moderate, it just got posted. Capitalism doesn't serve people. It serves dollars. 3,000 is 21 likes a long comment. People are, Sam, I agree. Megacomps are happy. All these long conversations with literally a derivative of a derivative of something I said. So if everyone starts doing this. Yes. Yeah, you're Sam. It's dead. Like social media and all of these platforms. That's why we, that's why jelly jelly will rise. This is like my whole thing. I talked to Ikra about this. I'm, you got to pivot jelly jelly, the greatest social network, I think it's, I think it's, I think the only human network is the next obvious step. Well, there's just a lot of people talking about that vibe coding or agentic engineering is so much fun. That people just go too long, too hard, don't sleep,, and that it's actually much worse than it used to be. Totally. If I were not married, I would 100% be there. Yeah. 100%. I agree. But I think it's that. And I also think,,, when Dave started Path, he drafted the like number of friends you can have based off of Dunbar's number, which is about how your brain can only control so many different social nodes in your life. And there's all this stuff about productivity and multitasking, About how much you can actually do at one moment. And so, even today I was in a zoom meeting for like a board I'm on and I had five clawed tasks, open claw tasks, doing things in the background during my meeting. And I was also thinking of new ones I wanted to boot up after the meeting. And, I don't think my brain can manage this many AI agent nodes. And so you need an agent to manage it. So what I've been hearing from Heinrich, the LinkedIn posts, Sam, that I commented on that your bot also commented on is from Heinrich Gordelin, who was talking about having a chief agent instead of like a chief of staff who manages all your agents and you train to be like as directive as you. So this is a new thing that maybe people should start trying. Look, it's just dead internet theory. The whole thing's going to fall apart because,,, I'm just right now, Brett, I'm just instructing my clawed bot to start commenting on all your posts on LinkedIn. Just from now on. So just look forward for that. Maybe I'll raise their engagement since you're gonna have so many followers soon. It's sad., I saw this post from our good friend Aditya that he posted yesterday on Twitter. And he was talking about how he'd spent the weekend building stuff with Claude Code. And he had this like simultaneous realization of how much fun it is on the one hand. But on the other hand, that he'd spent 20 years of his life becoming a great craftsman,, a great engineer at writing code. And he now knows that his skill set is completely invalid and doesn't matter anymore. And that, why would anyone he phrased it in a cool way? I'd have to go look it up. But he just was, why would you write the code when you don't have to anymore?, and that he was both sad, but he actually ended the piece by saying he's like profoundly sad. But I think it's interesting. Sam's case in point., what are we gonna do?, I'm actually seriously wondering,, what are we gonna do? Is the internet just like not fun anymore?, what do we do? The internet is so fun. It's like this blaze of glory of maximum fun until it fucking collapses into a black hole. I've had multiple founders today, like literally just today who are building AI companies who have come to me and be, oh, I need to start building my like agentic version of this where I don't even have a front end,, claw or open AI can just connect into me like all of that. And they're actually like starting to rethink about that. And I feel so bad emotionally for especially the like pre 2022 founders who didn't start off building an AI company realized when the last year or two, they had to pivot to like have an AI narrative. And now we're, what the fuck? Now I also need like an agentic narrative and I have to shift everything in my company again. And I think that's where a lot of people's brains are going, Jess. Guys, you gotta embrace it. I actually, Sam, we won't say the company, Sam sent me a portfolio company to potentially invest in that I thought was amazing today. I'm so excited about it. It is amazing. It is amazing. I'm thrilled to invest. It's the lesson that I just thrilled to invest. It just does one thing exceptionally well. That's really important. And if it's an agentic UX that you access this information from or an app that you have or a live event where you, it doesn't matter. Well, it does matter because the business model has to shift. Yeah, no, no, that's true. We talk, but the point being they have so many options and it's a founder who's just laser focused on solving that problem really intelligently and who's built a community around it and a real track record. And I think if,, yes, you have to think about all the, the UX stuff and all of that, but you, we can't just lose sight of like building something that solves a real problem that people need that that's still, that still works. It still works. And if you're sitting there just without that and worried about hitching at this moment, exactly your ride to this trend or meme, I don't think you guys are going to invest in those kinds of companies because you're going to see 20 of them a day. So it's,, Yeah, but it just changed a lot of patterns. Like for instance, I, you can't, I just have started deleting all of the emails and decks I'm sent because I'm just, at this point in history, if you can't show me bits,, I don't even want to talk to you. Right., it's just, I just can't deal. And it also is too easy to write these decks. So I can't read them. Cause I don't know what the hell they are. It's, there's no, I don't know. So there's a lot of patterns that change, but I do think it's, I'm very net negative on AI's impact on society in the biggest, biggest picture around meaning and things like that. I think it's a real problem, but as purely as a, it's fun to build things. it's never been a better time. You might not make money, but you have a lot of fun. Where it's headed, Dave, is where you've been smartly telling our viewers, we've been headed all along, which is community and in person. And, as I was saying before I was interrupted. Offline, do you mean? And the, maybe the creator, maybe my creator fund? Maybe, but guys, the person running Disney, the network of Mickey Mouse, is the person who runs the live people stuff. The parks,, that is the person leading this company because that is the company Disney has become. Always was too. Iger dumps the IP to open AI, shat the bed on the quarter and handed it to Tom. But isn't parks and experiences only like a third of their revenue? I, Disney was one of my investors. No, but it, it's actually more, it's a lot more than I thought when I looked at the thing, the thing, the numbers, but also it makes perfect sense. What's Netflix trying to do? Bridgerton live. Bridgerton live. Well, and they're doing the Netflix movie theaters. Okay. It's 38% of their total revenue, but it's not the majority. Bridgerton live. But you're putting that person in charge for a reason, Who you choose as your next CEO, especially,, if people don't care about Washington post, they probably won't care about this either, but you had a head to head battle with the creative studio director, Dana Walden and the experiences guy, So it's a right in the face statement about the future of the company. I think that's where we're going. We're going to be back to connecting with people and trusting the things that come from those connections and the rest is going to be bot land. We're looking for the cloud bot. By the way, I did love the rent a human. You guys see rent a human? Someone booted, it's like the most sand lesson thing ever. We're the cloud bots can look at it. It's an API. I haven't played with it too much yet where people can put themselves up to do tasks for the cloud bots. The funny part of all this stuff is there's almost no code behind any of it. It's just like post APIs with funny interfaces, but that's the cultural moment we're in. Right. But it is funny. I was actually thinking of using it in some places where the browsers are annoying to deal with, to, be, oh, well, I'll just punch out to, to rent a human,, to like make you click on a button because blah, blah. To end the AI portion before we bring you guys to a rollicking PCC, by the time you listen to this, it will be too late to attend Dave's meetup this evening. But Dave, maybe you can debrief us next week. Okay. Brent, there's a lot happening. I'm going to go over to you first, but I'm going to come back to tennis because tennis deserves its seat in the PCC. Tennis. Okay. It's the week of football, Jess. Tennis. Okay. I'm sure we'll talk about tennis. He probably hates all of it. There are like 500 events happening. There are a lot of events, a lot of concerts. Concerts and the Super Bowl are apparently related. We are going to some concerts. I'm very excited about them. The Budweiser horses ran by the Golden Gate Bridge this morning and did this amazing Instagram. And I was, our city's cool for a hot minute. It's, we're like LA or New York, but we're not. So I'm excited about that. The football game will be fun. The ads will always be fun. And that's, that's all I got for Super Bowl week. How are you going in a car or you taking the train? Because I'm like worried about. Sam thinks you should take the train to the Super Bowl guys., driving's not that bad, Sam. Like Levi's to the same side. Super Bowl. Been to a lot of things at Levi's that are huge and it's not that bad. It's pretty bad. I just feel it'll be worse. There can't really be that many more people than a typical game that's sold out. Because the people are., like the Taylor Swift concert was as big as this. Sam and Jessica don't like traffic. This is like an important thing to know about us. It's a trigger for both of us. It's one thing we know to avoid for the sanctity of our marriage. You should just not go and watch it from the comfort of your own home. That's horrible. Someone actually just invited me today and I was, that's a last minute invite. To the Super Bowl? Yeah. And asked me if I wanted to bring two people. I was, wait a second. Hi. Are you just giving me three? Yeah, Jess, pass that invite to us, Jess. And now we'll go. Thanks, Jess. Guys. Screw the traffic. It's only for women. It's only for women. I'm a woman, Jess. I will happily. It's California. I can say I'm a woman. If I show up, they're not going to be, you're not a woman. It's still, we still live in the Republic of California. Wow. I didn't know you felt this strongly, honestly. Okay. We can follow up. It's a lot of money. There's a lot of money. We can follow up. Guys, I have to drop. I have a special guest before we go. Oh, cameo. Welcome to the pool house. This is going to be a cameo for the future. Okay. This is not a man that's known to our podcast, but come say hi. This is. Hey guys. How's it going? This is it done. Hey, it done. Introduce yourself. I am wearing a black pearl. Let's go. And, just we'll look back on this in six months. This is what I'm going to give you. Go do your meeting. Okay. We got rid of Sam. Brent, what else do we have? We have the Grammys. Were the Grammys a big deal? No. Meh., okay, here's the thing. I did not adore the fashion. Best new artist, Olivia Dean. I love that decision. Yeah, she was great. She's also going to be in San Francisco this week. Everyone should listen to her. Brina Carpenter didn't win anything. Taylor wasn't there because little did, to be part of the Grammy potential nominees, you have to have an album released between August 30th, 2024, and August 30th, 2025. And her album came out in October. So she'll be up for 2027. Didn't she go to an after party? I read that. She did go to an after party. Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny won some awards. That was great. Lady Gaga and our friend, Michael Polanski were there. She won some awards. And my favorite part of the whole thing actually was Cher got the like lifetime achievement award and she's now like 80. She was just a hot mess on the stage. And I felt really sad for her, but also she's iconic. And I loved it because she just, she's Cher and she just laughed it off. And she was saying all the wrong things. She walked off the stage at the wrong moment. At one point before she had actually even given the award. And everyone was like waiting for who the winner was. So you got to love live TV and not AI stuff. And Cher really brought the power to the Grammys this year. There you go. I could, that recap was all I needed. All I needed. Dave, any pop culture,, tickling your interests these days, or is it all agents? No, I, I've just been getting a kick out of all of the, I said earlier in the episode, all the NFL influencers, like being aghast at how beautiful Northern California is. Like going for walks on the beaches. I guess we're the weather showing off this weekend, which is helpful, helping,, so everyone's going to leave going San Francisco is not as bad of a place as I heard it was,, after all these years of everybody being down on us since COVID, it's nice to see people coming and realizing why a lot of us choose to live here. It is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Wealth tax, smelt tax. No one's talking about it this week. Okay. Dear viewers, thank you for tuning in to another episode of More or Less. We'll be back here next week. And,, until then, have a good weekend. Bye. Bye. 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.