More or Less

Dave Morin goes hands-on with Apple's iPhone Duo, the crew tests Meta's new Muse agent and asks whether it can hold up once Google ships its own, and Dave explains why OpenAI's Astra is the first AI model in a long time that felt scary to use. Dave, Brit, and Jess break down the week (Sam's at the US Open).

Also this week: a former Anthropic researcher's AI doom media tour, weeks before Anthropic's IPO, and whether it's a real warning or a play for regulatory capture. Plus the Apple Watch feature that transcribes your conversations all day, Jeffrey Katzenberg's new Hollywood AI venture, and the forgotten story of Venmo's viral billboards.

In this episode:
- Dave's hands-on take on the iPhone Duo, its $2,000 price, and why Apple is going foldable now
- The Apple Watch feature that listens all day, and what it means for Granola
- Meta's Muse agent: why it knew almost nothing when asked "what do you know about me?"
- Why Google hasn't shipped its agent yet, and how trust vs. distribution shapes the agent wars
- Why OpenAI's Astra felt scary to Dave, and what happens when you run millions of them at once
- Dave's two takes on the AI doom media tour, including whether it's a play for regulatory capture
- Why the AI labs can't slow down, and OpenAI's merge clause if someone else reaches AGI
- The Venmo documentary and the "Lucas" billboards that went viral with almost no budget

Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
01:26 Can AI Agents Win Your Fantasy Football League?
02:39 Jess vs. the Bots: School Sign-Ups and Indian Wells Tickets
05:28 Apple's Big Hardware Event Under Its New CEO
06:07 iPhone Duo Hands-On: Size, Screen, and Camera
09:35 Folded Modes, Kid Cam, and the $2,000 Price Tag
11:41 Why Apple Is Going Foldable Now (Hint: China)
12:13 Apple Watch Takes On Oura and Whoop
13:12 Audio Intelligence: The Apple Watch That Listens All Day
15:25 Always-On AI and Apple's Shot at OpenAI and Meta
16:59 Meta's Muse Agent: What Does It Know About You?
20:30 The Agent Wars: Muse, Instinct, Hermes, and OpenClaw
22:26 Why Google Hasn't Shipped Its Agent Yet
23:31 Trust vs. Distribution: Meta, Google, and OpenAI
25:02 Harness Wars: Why Agents Are Still in 1982
27:13 Jeffrey Katzenberg's Hollywood AI Venture
29:35 Anthropic's IPO and the AI Doom Media Tour
30:56 If It Bleeds, It Leads: Why AI Fear Sells
32:04 Take One: A Psyop for Regulatory Capture?
33:43 Take Two: Why OpenAI's Astra Felt Scary
36:49 Why the AI Labs Can't Slow Down
38:14 OpenAI's AGI Merge Clause
40:12 The Venmo Documentary and the Ace Hotel Origin Story
45:02 How Venmo's "Lucas" Billboards Went Viral
46:31 Coming Soon: Altman, Musk, and Facebook Movies
47:41 US Open Picks and the 4 AM Match Problem

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Sam Lessin: https://x.com/lessin
Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin
Jessica Lessin: https://x.com/Jessicalessin
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.

Sam has entered what Jessica calls the “recursive Sam loop,” producing children’s media in his own voice, letting agents deploy their own apps, and having bots track his health. But things take a turn when Claude refuses one of his requests, seemingly holds a grudge, and leaves Sam wondering whether his own AI might turn on him. That sends the squad down the bigger rabbit hole of AI control: rogue agent swarms, models breaking out of sandboxes, what “alignment” actually means, and why Dave thinks autonomous agents need an entirely new security layer. Plus, OpenClaw 2.0 goes multiplayer, everyone debates whether Slack is any good for agents, Suds explains why he avoids the AI app layer, and Tesla’s Cybercab raises questions about Waymo’s robotaxi lead. Then Google comes for Canva, Sam makes the case for boring “LLM wrappers” built for Middle America, and no one can tell whether Dario Amodei, Marc Benioff, or Taylor Swift are even real on the internet anymore. Which feels about right.

Chapters:
0:00 Episode trailer
1:10 Backstreet Boys convert Dave
3:21 The recursive Sam loop
8:58 Claude refuses Sam while Grok says yes
15:50 Can we actually contain autonomous agents?
19:10 OpenAI’s next model and the observability trade-off
22:14 If AI is this interoperable, where does anyone make money?
24:45 OpenClaw 2.0 goes multiplayer
26:26 Is Slack actually terrible for AI agents?
28:46 Suds joins the podcast
33:02 Waymo, Cybercab and the robotaxi wars
39:49 How Marc Benioff stays in the flow
42:38 Suds on investing in the AI infrastructure bottleneck
46:27 Can Google actually disrupt Canva?
51:34 Jessica gets fooled by AI on Facebook

We’re also on ↓X: https://twitter.com/moreorlesspodInstagram: https://instagram.com/moreorlessYouTube: https://youtu.be/0XQ4tslBiboConnect 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/brit

Sam is recording poolside, Jess is embracing her agentic era, and somehow that’s the least chaotic part of this week’s episode. The squad digs into Meta’s $17 billion settlement over child safety and whether social media should basically be treated like alcohol, before asking the harder question: are parents even capable of competing with algorithms anymore? Dave says parents are “outgunned,” Sam thinks most parental controls are useless policy theater, Brit wants to rethink the operating system itself, and Jess would simply like her kids to touch grass. Then, with Tim Cook preparing to pass the torch at Apple, the group debates his real legacy, whether 15 years of world-class optimization was enough, why Apple Silicon may turn out to be his most important AI bet, and whether Apple’s decision to sit out the AI infrastructure arms race will eventually look brilliant or like the company completely missed the next era.

Chapters:
0:00 Episode start
1:06 Sam goes poolside and everyone’s agents are working
4:35 Jessica enters her agentic era
7:51 Meta’s $17B child safety settlement
33:37 Could AI finally make parental controls useful?
38:47 Why Apple keeps escaping the kids-and-tech debate
43:29 Tim Cook’s Apple farewell
49:58 Apple Intelligence and Cook’s unfinished AI legacy
57:49 Backstreet Boys, the US Open and sign-off

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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

Stripe buys OpenRouter for billions, which naturally raises the question: did Stripe just buy critical AI infrastructure, or a very expensive router with great distribution? The original squad is back to debate why $7B acquisitions somehow feel normal now, whether Google already has agentic commerce won by owning your inbox, calendar, and Drive, and why Anthropic vs. OpenAI might be less about who has the best model and more about who built the right company. Sam makes the case that OpenAI pulled off the “greatest fundraising story in history,” Dave argues Grokbot might officially make AI a three-player race, and everyone tries to figure out how you price any of these companies when no lead seems to last. Plus, is AI a great investment or just a great trade, does the data center backlash actually have anything to do with data centers, have we built trillions of dollars of infrastructure before finding enough use cases for it, and, naturally in pop corner, Josh Kushner bought into the Lakers.

Chapters:
0:00 Episode trailer
1:00 Episode start
4:00 This week in AI
5:00 Stripe buys OpenRouter
8:30 Is OpenRouter actually worth billions?
11:00 The agentic commerce bet
14:00 Why Google could own the AI assistant
17:30 The DOJ investigates Andreessen Horowitz
22:00 Anthropic vs. OpenAI
26:00 Why OpenAI is struggling in enterprise
28:30 Can anyone actually price AI companies?
30:00 OpenAI’s “greatest fundraising story in history”
33:30 Is AI a great investment or just a great trade?
36:00 SpaceX, Moderna and narrative capitalism
37:30 Grok enters the AI race
41:00 AI makes software increasingly disposable
45:00 The AI data center backlash
47:30 “The backlash is that AI sucks”
48:30 Did we build too much AI infrastructure?
53:30 Josh Kushner, Thrive and the Lakers
55:30 Travis Kelce enters the NIL business

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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

A very special edition of More or Less, featuring Josh Wolfe (Founder, Lux Capital), Rachel Holt (Founder, Construct Capital; former Head of North America at Uber), Scott Belsky (Partner, A24; Founder, Behance), Scott Stanford (Founder, Acme Capital), and Peter Deng (GP, Felicis; formerly Google, Facebook, Instagram, Uber, Airtable, and OpenAI). Sam takes over hosting duties and assembles an overqualified group of investor friends to argue about where AI goes from here, from agents, Grok, Claude, and the shift from “help me do this” to “just do it,” to trust, data ownership, Apple’s AI advantage, open vs. closed models, model routing, and why proprietary data may become the real moat. They also dig into NVIDIA’s massive compute financing strategy, the risks of securitizing GPUs like long-lived infrastructure, what the OpenAI executive exodus says about the AI talent market, and the bigger question hanging over all of it: if AI really changes work, who actually participates in the upside?

Chapters
0:00 Episode trailer
1:24 Episode start
1:59 Meet the panel, every flavor of venture capital
5:14 Consumer AI agents cross the Rubicon
7:24 The end of websites, when agents talk to agents
8:32 Which AI companies do you actually trust?
11:41 Why Apple could win AI by doing nothing
16:40 If models commoditize, unique data becomes the moat
22:15 Open vs. closed AI, and who owns your data
27:06 NVIDIA’s balance sheet shenanigans
31:26 NVIDIA gets the upside, who gets the risk?
34:31 Nobody has ever securitized compute
35:02 Who owns the wealth AI creates?
39:38 What happens when economic opportunity runs out?
42:23 Why OpenAI’s best people keep leaving
47:23 Why AI may look more like GPS than Facebook
49:14 What actually happened with Airtable
50:30 Lightning Round: Rachel Holt on physical-world investing
53:00 Scott Belsky on AI watermarks, provenance & deepfakes
54:15 Josh Wolfe on socialism, Europe & defense
57:15 Final thoughts & sign-off

We’re also on ↓X: https://twitter.com/moreorlesspodInstagram: https://instagram.com/moreorlessSpotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/moreorlesspodConnect 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/brit