More or Less

Elon tells investors on an earnings call that SpaceX and Tesla should merge, and Sam has a theory he says nobody else has floated: there's an enormous SpaceX lockup cliff coming in the spring, and folding Tesla's retail shareholders into the denominator makes all that supply far easier to absorb. Dave thinks the rocket powered car demo was timed to justify the deal, Sam thinks two engineers got told to bolt rockets onto a car and it will never ship, and 83% of respondents in the Information's new Polls app say it's mostly about Musk control. Then OpenAI finds a web-wide PHP vulnerability and Sam's conclusion is blunt: all your regional banks will be hacked, the labs are centralizing profits while externalizing the risk, and they should be carrying hundred billion dollar insurance policies. Plus Google quietly telling Jess she's liable for everything her agents do, Netflix's content shakeup, Dave's theory of priority slop, and Brit's second week with no back pain.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:04 Dave's Back, and the Nasal Rinse Discourse
02:06 OpenAI Finds a Web-Wide PHP Vulnerability
03:12 Sam: All Your Regional Banks Will Be Hacked
04:16 The Zero Days the Labs Are Quietly Sitting On
04:56 Dave on the Gap Between Frontier Models and the Public Ones
06:29 Why Labs Should Ban Their Own Teams From the Frontier
07:17 Pearl, Coinbase, and Bitcoin as a Byproduct of Compute
08:32 Can You Even Build a Cybersecurity Company in 2026
09:16 Cold Storage: Your Documents in a Mine Near the North Pole
10:22 Sam: The Labs Need $100 Billion Liability Policies
11:30 Google Says You're Liable for Everything Your Agents Do
13:55 How Many Teslas Have the Morins Owned?
15:05 Sam's Mazda Dealership Is Living in the Future
16:32 The Two Futures of Car Buying
17:14 SpaceX and Tesla Are Going to Merge
18:01 The Rocket Car Demo Was a Stunt to Justify the Deal
19:24 Elon Doesn't Control Tesla, and That's the Point
21:09 Why the Merger Needs a Narrative
22:25 The Information Launches Polls: 83% Say It's About Control
23:09 Sam's Lockup Theory That Nobody Else Has Said
25:36 Will Shareholders Approve It, and the SXSI Joke
27:29 Brit: Teslas Are Becoming Entertainment Vehicles
28:17 Dave on the Cyber Cab Experience
30:12 Jess's Enthusiasm Falls Back to Earth, and the Waymo Bug
32:33 Netflix: Content Shakeup and What They Should Actually Make
35:32 Dave's Viral Take: Content Slop vs Priority Slop
38:05 Sam Let His Bot Write the Entire AGM Deck
39:28 Dave's Broadsheet Newspaper for Offline
40:19 Internships for Teenagers, Run by Bots
41:30 Meta's New Voting Stock and the End of Capitalism
42:08 The Wealth Tax Debate
44:36 The Elizabeth Holmes Movie and the Surprise Q&A
49:28 Peptide Check-In, and a Necessary Disclaimer
We're also on:
X: https://twitter.com/moreorlesspod
Instagram: https://instagram.com/moreorless
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2CJdt6HhJ8ioNkbqqVKckC
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/more-or-less-from-the-morins-and-the-lessins/id1692234179
Connect with us here:
1) Sam Lessin: https://x.com/lessin
2) Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin
3) Jessica Lessin: https://x.com/Jessicalessin
4) Brit Morin: https://x.com/brit
About More or Less: For 15 years, the Morins and the Lessins have debated the future of Silicon Valley as the closest of friends. Every Friday, they break down technology, capital, and media. From The Information, Offline Ventures, and Slow Ventures.

Jess went full send on Muse and reports that about 70% of the use cases she was excited about have stopped working, because the internet is fighting back: Good Eggs now wants her to check out in the app, her kid's school portal refuses the login, and JP Morgan and Amazon are blocking agents outright. Dave's version is worse. Instinct booked a dinner reservation in LA instead of San Francisco, and he's out. Sam has seen this exact movie, because he and Andrew Kortina ran Fin ten years ago and shut it down once they worked out you become liable for every provider down the chain with no margin to cover your own mistakes. His call now is the death of the web, plus APIs that negotiate access back and forth like Hollywood agents. Meanwhile Anthropic is meeting investors behind closed doors while they tape, the market is getting hammered, and Brit's three years of hip pain vanished in six days on peptides, which Sam insists is placebo.

Interested in peptides? More or Less listeners 50% off their first month at NoHo Labs. Use code: MOREORLESSVIP on https://noholabs.com/

Timestamps:
01:09 Jess Is Back, Dave's Birthday, and the October Cold
03:04 Nasal Rinses and Fall Immunity
04:02 Brit's Peptide Results: Three Years of Pain Gone in Six Days
06:43 Anthropic Is Meeting Investors While We Tape
07:34 The Market Is Getting Hammered: VIX, Private Credit, Apollo
08:16 Infrastructure IPOs Stall and Nvidia Becomes the Last Investor
10:01 Slowing Revenue, CFOs Cracking Down, Tokens Moving to Open Models
10:36 Sam: Would You Rather Be Rich or Right?
11:11 The Models Are a Commodity and There Is No Lock-In
12:15 Brit Won't Give Muse Her Whole Computer
13:41 Why Sam Trusts Meta More Than OpenAI or Anthropic
15:16 Jess: 70% of My Muse Use Cases Don't Work Anymore
16:54 Dave: Instinct Booked the Restaurant in the Wrong City
18:18 Sam on Fin, the Assistant Company He Ran Ten Years Ago
20:30 Why the Economics of Mistakes Break Agent Services
22:31 Sam: What's Inevitable Is the Death of the Web
23:09 APIs as Constant Negotiation, and Agents With Reputations
24:51 Agent Credit Scores: FICO for Bots
25:56 Amazon's Rufus Still Works, and Other Branding Crimes
27:13 The Seesaw: Built Up and Torn Down Intraday
28:41 Gen Z Media, Muse Memes, and Punk Rock by Another Name
32:53 Is the Punk Rock Thing Just Marketing?
34:37 Every Company Now Needs a Gen Z Meme Lord
36:14 The Truth Subculture and Who Actually Pays for It
37:32 Jess Is Interviewing Barry Weiss at WTF
40:20 Bumble Goes Private at $1.3B
43:07 Dave on Seven Years of Hinge and Why Dating Is So Hard
46:41 Apple's Home Hub and Keeping Screens Away From Kids
49:04 Everyone Is Going to See the Elizabeth Holmes Movie
We're also on:
X: https://twitter.com/moreorlesspod
Instagram: https://instagram.com/moreorless
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2CJdt6HhJ8ioNkbqqVKckC
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/more-or-less-from-the-morins-and-the-lessins/id1692234179
Connect with us here:
1) Sam Lessin: https://x.com/lessin
2) Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin
3) Jessica Lessin: https://x.com/Jessicalessin
4) Brit Morin: https://x.com/brit

About More or Less: For 15 years, the Morins and the Lessins have debated the future of Silicon Valley as the closest of friends. Every Friday, they break down technology, capital, and media. From The Information, Offline Ventures, and Slow Ventures.

Meta and Microsoft, two of Anthropic's biggest enterprise customers, have roughly halved their Claude usage, and both are running their own models instead. Dave's diagnosis is the one nobody else is making: Claude was over-tuned for parasocial relationships, people got into something unhealthy with it, and organizations are now quietly backing away. Sam is blunter about the business. He runs Claude as infrastructure, but switching off would be a one line change he'd never think about twice. Then it gets strange: a dinner where only the lab researchers raised their hands when asked if one company will be left standing, a lab that believes the machine god will go back in time and simulate hell for anyone who didn't build it, and Sam's case that Silicon Valley caught zero-and-infinity thinking from crypto and broke its own spreadsheets. Plus Hilton's website trapping Sam's agent in a doom loop, and Dave and Sam inventing the Agent Treaty Framework on air. Jess is at an offsite, so it's three VCs and no journalist.

In this episode:
- Why two of Anthropic's largest customers cut their Claude usage in half, weeks before the IPO
- Dave on parasocial tuning as the thing that actually burned Claude, and how you can spot Claude slop on Twitter
- Zero, infinity, and what crypto taught the Valley about putting infinity in a spreadsheet
- The dinner question about one company being left standing, and who raised their hand
- The personal agent protocol from Meta, Walmart, Shopify, Stripe and Sierra, and why Dave says it's about commerce, not protection
- Hilton, Cloudflare and Amazon blocking agents, and whether holding the line counts as collusion
- Dave on building agents versus building agency, and whose potential we're underwriting
- The Agent Treaty Framework: why pairwise deals replace standards when negotiation is free
- Megalith buying unexercised pro rata from seed funds, and Sam's war story about the fund that quashed his

Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:51 Brit Moderates: Three VCs and No Journalist
03:43 Peptide Protocols, the Wolverine Stack, and a Dexa Scan
07:42 Sam on the Nathan Fielder Movie
09:30 Meta and Microsoft Halve Their Claude Usage
10:13 Dave: Claude Was Over-Tuned for Parasocial Relationships
11:19 Sam: Switching Off Claude Is a One Line Change
13:46 Zero, Infinity, and What Crypto Taught the Valley
17:53 The Dinner Where Only the Lab People Raised Their Hands
19:41 The Lab That Believes in the Machine God
20:01 Lab Leaks, Infinite Liability, and What a Real Framework Looks Like
21:56 The Personal Agent Protocol: Meta, Walmart, Shopify, Stripe
23:01 Sam: Nobody Should Care About MCP
24:03 Hilton Traps Sam's Agent in a Doom Loop
26:30 If You Ran Hilton, Would You Let the Bots In?
27:15 Facebook Connect, Open Graph, and the Missing Value Trade
29:41 Dave: Building Agents vs Building Agency
33:53 The Social Media Era Already Ran This Experiment
37:02 The Agent Treaty Framework Is Born
38:16 Why Standards Are Over and Treaties Are Next
41:28 Megalith and the Market for Unexercised Pro Rata
42:32 Sam's Pro Rata War Story
45:53 64% of LPs Now Want Co-Invest Rights
48:03 What Hedge Fund Letters Say That VCs Don't
49:20 Main Street Says It Hates AI, Then Uses It
53:27 Plug of the Week: The Mill

We're also on
X: https://twitter.com/moreorlesspod
Instagram: https://instagram.com/moreorless
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2CJdt6HhJ8ioNkbqqVKckC
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/more-or-less-from-the-morins-and-the-lessins/id1692234179

Connect with us here:
1) Sam Lessin: https://x.com/lessin
2) Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin
3) Jessica Lessin: https://x.com/Jessicalessin
4) Brit Morin: https://x.com/brit

About More or Less: For 15 years, the Morins and the Lessins have debated the future of Silicon Valley as the closest of friends. Every Friday, they break down technology, capital, and media. From The Information, Offline Ventures, and Slow Ventures.

Anthropic's S-1 leaked and the numbers are not what the narrative promised: revenue flatlining as token prices drop, and SaaS investors posting memes welcoming Anthropic to the no-growth table. Jess still puts it at 60% they get out in November, which looks optimistic in a week when Oura pulled its IPO and blamed market conditions. Sam's problem with the core business is simpler than any of it: he runs Claude as the center of his infrastructure, and if it vanished tomorrow he'd care for about one second. Dave spots the strategy mishap nobody is naming, where forward deployed teams built software to burn luxury tokens right as open models had CFOs asking why they're paying premium prices. Then Adrian drops into the pod uninvited to argue there's no moat left unless you own the infrastructure, the data, or the algorithms.In this episode:- The leaked S-1: flatlining revenue, half a trillion in mostly non-cancellable contracts, and why the cloud providers are the ones making money- Oura pulling its IPO, LPs stuck in a quiet period, and the barbell strategy that sent World Labs out at $8B- Sam on Wall Street and Silicon Valley splitting over what AI is worth, and why staying private may beat going public- Jess on companies priced for a growth rate larger than the entire US economy- Dave on the forward deployed bet and open models undercutting luxury tokens- Jess announces her bot AGI challenge: update three kids' after-school plans and sync them to Google Calendar- Adrian on the moat question: no lock-in without BD deals, so the business teams get overpaid next- Brit's instinct talking to Dave's instinct, and what happens when you stop texting the people you love- Whether this is the end of times or the beginning of them, and why offline is the new luxuryChapters:00:00 Trailer 01:04 Live From X HQ, and a 39 Degree Cold Plunge02:57 Dunbar's Number, but for Bots05:48 Anthropic's Leaked S-1 and the Flatlining Revenue07:37 Oura Pulls Its IPO and the LPs Get Stuck09:36 What's Actually Happening in the Markets10:41 Wall Street and Silicon Valley Split on AI's Price Tag12:45 World Labs Sells for $8B: The Barbell Strategy14:11 Half a Trillion in Contracts, and Who's Really Making Money14:54 What Happens If OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Work Out?16:11 Priced for a Growth Rate Bigger Than the US Economy18:04 Open Models Pass Closed Models on the Charts18:51 Sam: If Claude Vanished Tomorrow, I'd Care for One Second19:43 The Forward Deployed Bet and the Luxury Token Problem22:16 Adrian Drops In: 300 Startups, 40 Unicorns, and a Plane24:39 Jess Goes Full Muse26:28 The Bot AGI Challenge: After-School Plans and the Mom Index28:23 OpenAI Rebrands Codex as Dots30:30 Adrian on the Moat: Winner Take Some31:38 Brit's Agent Starts Talking to Dave's Agent33:51 No Switching Costs, So BD Deals Are the Only Lock-In36:13 Dave: Instinct Is the New Kayak38:47 Adrian's Opposite Thesis: We Go Further Into the Screens43:39 Who Has Agency, You or the Technology?44:22 Offline Is the New Luxury46:31 Everyone Is Building Personal Apps Now47:54 Book Rec: Ari Emanuel's Roll the Calls50:44 Adrian's Parting Shot: Infrastructure, Data, or Algorithms53:02 Sam's Middle Ages 2.0: Castles, Moats, and HoardingWe're also onX: https://twitter.com/moreorlesspodInstagram: https://instagram.com/moreorlessSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2CJdt6HhJ8ioNkbqqVKckCApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/more-or-less-from-the-morins-and-the-lessins/id1692234179Connect with us here:1) Sam Lessin: https://x.com/lessin2) Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin3) Jessica Lessin: https://x.com/Jessicalessin4) Brit Morin: https://x.com/britAbout More or Less: For 15 years, the Morins and the Lessins have debated the future of Silicon Valley as the closest of friends. Every Friday, they break down technology, capital, and media. From The Information, Offline Ventures, and Slow Ventures.

Andreessen Horowitz puts $35 million into a new school and the pod nearly falls apart over it. Sam says he'd rather send his kids to the military, Jess is all for fixing higher ed but not with two venture capitalists writing the curriculum, and guest Matt Mazzeo (NoHo Labs founder, former CAA agent, prolific angel) spends ten minutes asking why the four of them can't be more optimistic about anything. Then Claude runs 10,000 agents for 21 hours and discovers a new enzyme system, which Brit points out is the beginning of two solid months of Claude catnip before the IPO. Sam's bigger worry: you can't take a company public when your top risk factor isn't the New York Times lawsuit, it's setting off nukes. Dave thinks the question nobody is asking is whether your agent represents you or the lab, because your Muse agent works for Meta. Plus Amazon blocking Muse, the Saint Petersburg paradox, and Matt going from 250 pounds to single digit body fat on peptides.

Matt is giving More or Less listeners 50% off their first month at NoHo Labs. Use code: MOREORLESSVIP on https://noholabs.com/

In this episode:
- Why the a16z school turned into the most heated argument this pod has had, and where each of them landed on Alpha School
- Claude discovering a new enzyme system with 10,000 agents in 21 hours, and the timing of that announcement
- Sam on why infinite liability may keep Anthropic from going public at all
- Matt's maximalist case: long frontier labs, long open source, long all of it
- The Saint Petersburg paradox, and why there's no way to price a company pitched as an infinite payout
- Greg Brockman redefining AGI as a gradual series of events, three years after it was sold as a winner-take-all moment
- Amazon blocking Muse, and whether every agent ends up in business development talks
- Does your agent faithfully represent you, or the lab that built it?
- Peptides 101 with Matt: what they are, the FDA moving them back into compounding pharmacies, and what a protocol actually costs

We're also on
X: https://twitter.com/moreorlesspod
Instagram: https://instagram.com/moreorless
YouTube: https://youtu.be/HN8yVnAXocQ
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/more-or-less-from-the-morins-and-the-lessins/id1692234179
Full transcripts: https://moreorlesspod.com/episodes/

Connect with our guest:
Matt Mazzeo: https://x.com/Mazzeo
NoHo Labs: 50% off your first month with code MOREORLESSVIP

Connect with us here:
1) Sam Lessin: https://x.com/lessin
2) Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin
3) Jessica Lessin: https://x.com/Jessicalessin
4) Brit Morin: https://x.com/brit

About More or Less: For 15 years, the Morins and the Lessins have debated the future of Silicon Valley as the closest of friends. Every Friday, they break down technology, capital, and media. From The Information, Offline Ventures, and Slow Ventures.