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- [00:00]
A
Anthropics in trouble. Have you been following this?
- [00:02]
B
I think Anthropic's killing it. Like you couldn't ask for better PR.
- [00:05]
A
OpenAI burned 4 billion in the first quarter on revenue of 5.7.
- [00:09]
B
The thing that's so great about SpaceX is it's such an expansive story. Elon tried to mess with this. A little bit of dogecoin at one point. I saw this week, which I thought was quite funny, that intercom, which renamed itself hilariously fin AI, just got acquired by Benioff for like $3 billion.
- [00:25]
A
Do you think the government should take equity stakes in AI companies?
- [00:28]
B
Like why? More or less.
- [00:34]
A
Easy no. Or easy yes. We'll debate the text.
- [00:37]
B
That's best when we get More or Less.
- [00:42]
A
Dave and Brit, plus Sam and Jess,
- [00:44]
B
put it all right to the test.
- [00:46]
A
More or less. Why, hello, friends. Welcome to More or Less. We're down to.
- [00:57]
B
It's less versus less. It's gonna be a real upper of an episode. Does this mean that I can't online shop for the entire thing?
- [01:03]
A
I mean, I can monologue. I don't think that people want that, but you're welcome to.
- [01:09]
B
The people don't know what they want.
- [01:11]
A
Oh, my goodness. Okay, well, the Morins. We actually have no idea where the Morins are, but they have a scheduled conflict, so no one should worry about the Morins. We're sure they're in good hands.
- [01:22]
B
Or just worry about them the same amount you'd worry about them normally.
- [01:25]
A
Normally, yeah. This is our chance. I don't know, Sav. You missed the episode a few weeks ago where I got really spicy at Brit for her.
- [01:31]
B
I was. I was happy to hear that you
- [01:33]
A
did that for her AI agent lovingness. So I guess we. There's nothing to say because we say it right to their face. But we are glad you are all here and there's lots of news to talk about, so you are in luck. We've got the SpaceX IPO. We have the drama chapter number 10,000 in anthropics. Drama. With the US government escalating quickly, Sam, you get to pick where we start. Where would you like to start?
- [02:03]
B
I mean, did anything happen other than the SpaceX IPO this week? I guess the cursor acquisition. Which is the same thing.
- [02:09]
A
Which is the same thing. It turns out if your stock is really expensive, yes, but. Let's go. Let's go. SpaceX. What's been your reaction to. To this epic IPO? We're at two and a half trillion dollars as of this tape.
- [02:23]
B
Thrills. Look, for a long time, you can say love him or hate him. Elon's the best marketer of our generation. I think the new line might be love it or hate it, he's the best financier of our generation. Like, seriously, like, who's better at finance? Like, the reality is, is, like, this
- [02:38]
A
guy, CFO Brett's pretty good, but. Yes, go ahead.
- [02:41]
B
Brett, I'm sure is wonderful. But, like, in terms, it is unbelievable what he's pulled off, right? Like, purely financial perspective. And so it's like the thing. I don't know because I've only met Elon in passing a handful of times in my life. I guess I had dinner with him, sitting next to him once when he was way less important, like, 15 years ago. But is how intentional it is versus is it just Elon being Elon that he's just so great in these lanes? Right? And it's a similar question I have with, like, Trump. Like, is Trump intentionally and strategically the greatest media mind of our generation, or is it just him being him works? You know, is like, the upshot. And I think that's kind of my question of each.
- [03:19]
A
A little bit of each. But what if, as an investor, what impressed you so much about the SpaceX IPO? How, like, they raised the money, price went up.
- [03:27]
B
Like, well, they hit all the notes, right? And they controlled it beautifully out of the gate. They made everyone who tried to flip the stock in a day feel stupid. And a lot of people did kind of cycle it. And I mean, I think that ironically, like, I think Bill Ackman. I hate to give credit to Bill Ackman, but has the right line on this, which is like, It's Val. It's SpaceX is valuable because it's valuable, right? Which is the same story of a bitcoin. It's the same story of a lot of things, right? And it's just a really interesting recursive thing. I saw someone joking on the Internet about how every junior PE analyst will now have in their slide that the thing will be valuable because it's valuable, right? But it's an interesting. I don't know, it's just a wild. I mean, he basically, you think about it, it's like he now has a currency that's massively valuable relative to any sort of DCF fundamentals of what he does and his ability to leverage that is amazing. Like, you can start with, like, obviously, cursor is like, the first obvious step. Like, you pay 60 billion for something. Remember when WhatsApp, WhatsApp got acquired for, like, 30, right?
- [04:29]
A
Yeah.
- [04:30]
B
And that was, like, insane, right?
- [04:32]
A
Well, they had like 14 people.
- [04:34]
B
It's true. And Cursor is more than that. And they've raised more money, but nonetheless, I mean, it's, it's. This is another, like, an unbelievable huge number by any stretch of the imagination, except for when the denominator is 2.2 trillion and you don't even notice it. Right. And so it's just like a wild. I mean, that's an amazing move. I. The question for me is, what else is he going to go buy? Because. And that, that really will make it the great financial move of the. Of the century. Right. Will be if you turn around, right, and use the excitement and the narrative, which, by the way, again, narrative. And there's like, some reflexivity to this, but, like, you know, I wrote a long essay which seemed reasonably well received about, you know, different forms of value and how you have to take narrative value seriously financially now. And I think, like, it's just a really interesting story where the world decides that because of a story, to give someone the firepower to then both fulfill the story, but then also, like, leverage in lots of ways, whether that's an AOL Time Warner or whatever it's going to be. Right.
- [05:27]
A
Well, and also, fact check, Facebook bought WhatsApp for an announced 19, and then when it closed, it was about 21. So we're in the same ballpark.
- [05:36]
B
We're 3X. Chris was 3X. Was. Now what was. If you want to go, if you got numbers in front of you, what was, what was Facebook's valuation at that point?
- [05:44]
A
Great question.
- [05:45]
B
Right. Because I think it was a much higher percentage, obviously. It's a much higher percentage. Right, but, like, that's the real math here, right. To keep in mind, is that, you know, Facebook paid whatever it was, if I had to guess, probably 10% of the company for WhatsApp at the time. 5%?
- [05:59]
A
Yeah, about 10%.
- [06:00]
B
10%. So that was a 10%. That was a huge deal. The equivalent for SpaceX would be paying $200 billion or so. Right. So this is a steal, right? Like, that's the way to think about it.
- [06:12]
A
Well, the obvious thing he's going to acquire next is Tesla. I don't know what next is, but.
- [06:17]
B
Well, this is an interesting one, right? Because all of a sudden you think about narratives. Both Tesla and SpaceX are the two highest, I believe, like dollars per dollar of revenue or whatever you want to do, like, things multiple.
- [06:29]
A
Multiple.
- [06:30]
B
Yeah, but there are different forms of Multiple. There's ebitda, whatever. It's any, any multiple you're gonna come up with is the highest multiples ever.
- [06:36]
A
Yes.
- [06:36]
B
So now you're in this game of one narrative acquiring another narrative asset, where the interesting thing becomes in how those get combined is like which narrative do you believe more?
- [06:47]
A
Right. Which narrative wins?
- [06:49]
B
Right. And, and the interesting thing with that, think about, think about. You're like a retail trader. You're sitting there being like, okay, I think these things are combined. Do you. What you want to do is buy the one, you want to buy the cheaper of the two.
- [07:00]
A
Right? Right. Yeah, right.
- [07:01]
B
Because you're going to get marked up. It's just like a wildly interesting question of like if, if you have two narratives that are both Elon narratives, you think they're going to come together, which I get how that happens. Right. Plus he'll love the ego of shooting for the world's largest company, which that'll let.
- [07:15]
A
Right. Well, he's, he tweeted this week that the SpaceX will research trillion dollars in revenue by maybe 20, 30. I have to check.
- [07:23]
B
But which again, this is a classic like self driving car by whatever. Like by the time it happens, like no one will remember he said that. Right. This is like this interesting. Or they will, but no one will care because they'll have said 50 other things. Which is the other beauty of the modern media. Right. Is you know, the strategy is say as many things as possible because unlike, I mean in the traditional media, which is gate kept, if you say enough stupid things, people stop publishing them. Right. Or if you say wrong things, they'll remember. But, but in Internet media you can say whatever because you can always issue a correction and always say another thing. So the only way, the way you unsay something is by saying another thing. Yeah, Right.
- [07:59]
A
Tesla stock has been falling, which as,
- [08:02]
B
which is probably, which is probably because Elon fanboys are moving into SpaceX. Right. But the irony is, is that if you think they're going to get merged, maybe you want to be in Tesla. Yeah, right. Well, it depends what's merging into what. Right? That's the irony of the whole thing.
- [08:17]
A
Well, Elon has control of SpaceX, correct?
- [08:21]
B
No. So he'll want it to merge into SpaceX. He has more control. Which again is wild. Like just think of a stem. You're like, okay, I have two things. One I control, one I do not control. Right. I will wrest control of one of them by merging it into the thing. I mean, it's kind of wild. The whole thing but this goes back to the whole, like it's the greatest financial strategy and I just am not sure how intuitive it is for him, right? Or how like, I'll give an example, like Bitcoin. I would argue that a lot of what we're seeing right now in the market really started with bitcoin, right? Because I remember narrative driven narrative assets. Like I remember this is in the early days and every fancy person in the world, you talk about bitcoin, right? And they'd say there's no value because there's no cash flows and like no way number go. Like they were just so like almost everyone and the, the people who got rich on it were the ones who were taking the contrarian debt. On the value of narrative, right? And the value of Internet money and demand.
- [09:17]
A
And it was valuable because it was valuable was basically. And they didn't worry, store value, medium of exchange, yada, yada.
- [09:23]
B
Yeah. I mean people try to, if anything, people who tell the story too much like Bitcoin's weakness, right, is because when you say it's valuable because it's valuable, I understand that supply and demand. The second, like, well, it's a way to move money. Like is it. It's kind of a shitty way to move money. Like it's not like your future payment rails. And so like, and if anything, what always happens with bitcoin, right? And a lot of cryptocurrencies is you buy the hype, right? So people get excited about the narrative, but then as soon as the thing happens, you sell the news, right? Because everyone's like, well, we got ETFs or whatever, we got, you know, whatever and doesn't do anything, right? And so like there's this whole like understanding the cycle that trained a lot of people, right, to think about these things. I think bitcoin, you go from Bitcoin to obviously ETH and other cryptocurrencies, but that's how you also get GME GameStop. That's also how you get meme coins, right? That's also how you get SpaceX. And so I guess the question for
- [10:14]
A
me is like some of those things have not ended well. Some juries out. So what, what's your SpaceX prediction 12 months from now?
- [10:22]
B
I think the SpaceX. The thing that's so great about SpaceX is it's such an expansive story, right? It's like something people want to believe in. Set aside the Elon antics, of which I think there have been less recently. But, you know, there are antics. Here's the thing if you said to someone carte blanche, do you want the next first trillionaire in the world to be the rocket guy? Like, yeah, of course I fucking want the rocket guy to be the trillionaire. Like, that's the science fiction narrative we want, right? And so like, there's always like asterisks on everything and it's complicated. But like, I think if you just think about this stuff as like a scoped out thing, I think there's like a lot of depth and there's also like, interestingly, the other thing, the other lesson from Bitcoin and candidly, I think Elon tried to mess with this, a little bit of dogecoin at one point, if you remember Doge.
- [11:06]
A
Oh, Doge. I do, yeah, right.
- [11:08]
B
And his obsession with that briefly, which is now like a tiny spitting, like side, side quest. If best, the best way to get people to be loyal to you, to you, is to make them a lot of money, right? It's the bread and circuses move, right? And so like everyone who looks at there and like, why will SpaceX be valuable? Well, one, SpaceX will be valuable because it's a great story because people want to support it. People narrative, blah, blah, blah. But second, everyone and their mother was privately in SpaceX. Everyone held SpaceX.
- [11:35]
A
Yeah, it's remarkable.
- [11:36]
B
Yeah, everyone owned it, like, and so as a result, everyone's like, well, I kind of want it to work because I own it, right? So regardless of how I feel about X, Y and Z or the narrative, it's like, I've got a stake in the success. And like that is the, the ultimate move to bring people along is like, you know, people talk about platforms, right? A lot. The definition of a platform being that the people on the platform make more money than the software itself, right? So like the reason that's so powerful, the reason why like Facebook likes to have the small business army, right, or Google has its community, is because there's this whole ecosystem of people who are profiting on your success. You have people cheering for you, right? And the problem for big companies becomes the second you don't have people cheering for you, right? Like, you're in trouble. Now the thing that's interesting about SpaceX and to some degree Tesla, but really SpaceX is from a like, product perspective, I guess probably SpaceX has some ecosystem around it and actually growing at this point, but the ecosystem, let's take Tesla. The ecosystem of Tesla is not that strong. It's only Tesla's making all these other people lots of money, right? Tesla's making itself whatever it makes.
- [12:37]
A
Yeah. Far narrower.
- [12:38]
B
But the shareholders are the market. Right. And so all of a sudden you. All these Tesla shareholders, the Elon fanboys who bought into Elon and the cult of Elon, it's worked for them, they've made money on it. So they're completely excited about that. Right. Like it's, it's like they're part. That's. That is the stock is the platform. Right. And so for me, I think SpaceX is interesting because the stock is the platform for retail now, but unlike space, unlike Tesla, and I don't know the details here, the net of private investors that have made a ton of money in the last week is so big. Right. Because the capital base was so big. And then he looped everyone in and made sure that even people that should have lost money, like on xdatai, don't. Because you fold them all in. You get to this thing where like, right. Everyone's like, well, I guess we kind of want Elon to be successful. Right, Right. Because it's kind of in our interest too.
- [13:23]
A
Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that. And also, I mean, that's the flip side of being private for so long. Like, we talk about, you know, all these companies staying private for so long, but they do a math. Not sizable in terms of the whole TAM of investing, but in terms of the private markets. A lot of investors. A couple weeks before the ipo, when I was talking to the world's largest asset managers about the SpaceX IPO, they said, look, you know, we're going to get as much as we can because there just aren't that many 20x stories in the market now.
- [13:53]
B
But the idea that you could call something that's a $2 trillion story a 20x story.
- [13:57]
A
And by then, you know, the numbers were even, the speculation was closer to one, but point taken. No, it's wild. But it's also true that, you know,
- [14:06]
B
yeah, this is the seed investor. You can put $100,000 into something and have a thousand X. Right. You normally can't put a billion dollars in Sling and have any X's. Right. Like, and that's kind of like there are very few of those types of opportunities. That's just because of the. This is like. I think other people say this is just like when you have the $23 billion TAM slide in their S1, which is hilarious. It's really funny. Right? But it's also just like, that's the story. The story is, look at this beautiful Picture.
- [14:31]
A
I think there was a video too. So you got to have videos in your roadshow deck.
- [14:35]
B
And like, by the way, the TAM is so big that we can argue that the TAM is, you know, again, the average. I always like to make this point for other things, which is like, you know, there's a big difference between median outcome and mean outcome, right? And the median outcome for SpaceX might be negative, right? You believe the TAM is infinity, right? And you believe it can own all the things and the mean outcome is actually quite positive. And so if you just think about it as like a gambling, which all this stuff is just gambling at some point, I mean like in terms of how things go, you know, what you really just want is a really high mean outcome, even if it's low probability. Because if number is infinity, like again, the mean of zero and infinity is infinity, even if the median outcome is zero, right? And like, I think that's kind of what you see here. And everyone gets that and everyone's terrified on a retail basis of missing the swerve, right? Which is how you get these values.
- [15:25]
A
So I put this question to you over the weekend and I was like, what does it mean? What are the second order effects? What does it mean for other companies? And you were like, no, I don't think it means anything. Like, your point was that the Elon universe is the Elon universe. It operates based on the laws of Elon and there aren't like broader lessons for other companies or broader impacts. Do you still feel that way? Because I feel like there's a broader impact. But what's your point of view?
- [15:52]
B
I think there might be a broader impact on the ways people talk about and the types of companies they start, right? But I think it's like subtle. It's like an example, I think in our generation, like so we were a year ahead of Mark Zuckerberg in college, right? And it's kind of wild. Like in our era, the number of Harvard grads that went on to found companies, some of several multi billion dollar companies, is like astronomical, right? And like there's a bunch of reasons for that. Some of them were timing and technological. But the, you know, 2008 didn't hurt. But I honestly do believe there was like a Mark effect, right. Where he was like, oh, that's possible, right? So like, why am I toiling away at cats and back partners, right? Because clearly that guy did and I saw him in class, right, if that makes sense. So I think there's going to be a bunch more people being more Ambitious, right? And crazier in what they're doing now. That's actually like, probably great. You know what I mean? Like, I kind of want, you know, I kind of want more.
- [16:51]
A
Yeah, I like that.
- [16:51]
B
But I think that's the positive side and I think there will be an effect there, there in terms of more ambitious things, more capital, consumptive things, which, by the way, venture capitalists, these real ones, don't care about. They want that because, like, that let's. They can be dealt in more. Right? Like, so there's going to be like a bunch of effects that way. There'll be a bunch of people who go in completely opposite direction, right? Who are just like, cash flow, cash flow, cash flow. This stuff is all crazy. I don't want to be in, like, these crazy lands. But I think the middle drops out, right? Like, I saw this week, which I thought was quite funny, that Intercom, which renamed itself hilariously fin AI, just got acquired by Benioff for like $3 billion.
- [17:26]
A
Again, for the close listeners, Sam started an AI company called Finn. It wasn't AI, though.
- [17:31]
B
Well, it wasn't. We didn't. We called it AI. It was. We literally called it AI. Artificial artificial intelligence. But it was a chat interface with a lot of really cool tech and humans. Look, by the way, we did a lot of the stuff Facebook's getting yelled at, which is monitoring tens of thousands of people to build workflows. Like, we did all this stuff a generation ago.
- [17:46]
A
They clawed some of that back, by the way.
- [17:48]
B
So, like, we did this stuff a generation ago, which I find very funny because it's now something of the same name getting acquired, but whatever, we had a better domain name because we actually had fin.com instead of fin AI. What's that? What I say is, like, my reaction watching that acquire get acquired for $3 billion was like, how unbelievably boring. You know what I mean? Like, that was my reaction. Like, looking at it, I'm like, okay, like, in the era where we were the weak, this week's SpaceX IPO. And like, these people are playing these wild games and there's like, wildly profitable stuff. I mean, how do you convince an engineer to work on fian AI Intercom? It's, like, just awful, right? And so, like, for me, that's the interesting thing is, like, the middle just drops out. I think it becomes incredibly hard to recruit for. And, like, it's also just like, I don't know how you inspire anyone to do anything like that. You know what I mean? That was the brilliance of SpaceX. There's a lot of brilliances of SpaceX early on, but one of them, I think. And again, this goes back to the whole, was this intentional or did this happen? Which is there's a lot of you who love space and rockets because they're awesome, because they're cool, because they're cool. When Elon started SpaceX, what are your options? Your options are work for NASA, which is super prestigious, but must kind of suck, right?
- [18:57]
A
Yeah.
- [18:57]
B
Or what? Nothing. So, like, even if you don't like Elon, even if you, like, don't really like, you're willing to work. If you're into rockets, you're like, I guess I'm gonna go work for Elon and work a thousand hours a night. You know, I'm gonna work infinitely. My life's gonna suck, whatever I can. He can push people so much harder because he's the only game in town if you really care about something, right? And that's like a very good place to be from a recruiting perspective. So I just wonder, like, with a lot of these companies, like, you have to find your tribe of customers. You also have to find your, like, tribe of employees and team members. And I don't know how you do that for boring shit, right. In 2026, you know, he's also got the boring company.
- [19:35]
A
But yes, maybe tunnels aren't boring, but no, I think you nailed it. I remember visiting SpaceX. It was probably way more than 10 years. 10 years ago? No, more. Their Hawthorne facility, factory. And, like, it's just pretty cool.
- [19:49]
B
It's so cool.
- [19:50]
A
What I remember from that interview is Elon had three different protein shakes over the course of it. Three different. He went through three whole protein shakes that were delivered. And so if we were worried 10 years ago about his protein intake, we ought not to have been. It's a fascinating moment. Like the, the hot takes. And, you know, many of them are hot takes. Like, I'm also, you know, in the lead up to these IPOs, they're like the poster children. They're precedent setting. They're going to set the benchmark, you know, they're going to set the roadmap. The playbook for anthropic and open AI, which are waiting in the wings and privately whispering timeframes that are quite sooner rather than later. And now we're all. But we're also like. Like, I'm really pushing information teams to say what it means. And I'm getting a lot of, like, it's Elon Musk. I'm like, no, I think there's more, but we'll see.
- [20:37]
B
I mean look, we'll, we'll see. I mean I have a hard time. I think it'll be fascinating to see what happens with Anthropic and OpenAI. Right? The easy answer is number go up. Sure. Like you can now do this at a multi trillion like sure, you know what I mean? Like why not? Right. And by the way, there is some sort of weird wealth effect, right. Where like if you get rich on one people like on one hand it's like the liquidity has to come from somewhere. On the other hand, when people's numbers are bigger, they invest more. Right. And so there's like an interesting recursion in both directions in some ways the problem with like OpenAI but in anthropic is they have real businesses so people will value them as having real businesses.
- [21:15]
A
So you can actually apply some multiple to cash flows and decide what's worth.
- [21:20]
B
Yeah, yeah, you like. Whereas the, you know, and that's I think a lot of the fear mongering of early OpenAI that's kind of become anthropic and the oh, Whoever's ahead in 2026 will have this Infinite flywheel that is the storytelling you have to add, right. To Infinite Tam and to why isn't this just a business I evaluate as a cash machine. Right. Effectively. And like you're like, ooh, as a cash machine, that's a tough one, you know, that's like becomes the real question.
- [21:44]
A
We reported by the way last night that OpenAI burned 4 billion in the first quarter on revenue of 5.7. So it will be a test. It'll be a test.
- [21:53]
B
But it's like, it's funny because like even that like people anchor on numbers and, and when you're like, oh well, something's worth $2 trillion, that does 20 billion in revenue, you're like, I don't care if you spend $4 billion, whatever, you know what I mean? Like, I think that becomes like there's like a very like troglodyte. Maybe troglodyte's not the right word, but there's like a very like, I don't know, like retard max version of all of this where you're just like, whatever, like enjoy, spend a bunch of money. Like there'll be more.
- [22:19]
A
I did ask it in our back channel like if the SpaceX IPO makes it harder, easier for other startups to go public. And I don't know what I was expecting, but several People chimed in harder in the short term because the comps are kind of like, not great.
- [22:36]
B
I mean, my company team share is just listed today or maybe tomorrow.
- [22:39]
A
How'd it go? They have listed or they haven't listed.
- [22:42]
B
You know, it's a spac transaction, so I don't really understand how it works. But like, so like the ticker hasn't updated, but I think the merger is complete. But it's, it's traded up, it's fine. It's tiny compared to. It's not even a month of OpenAI's burn.
- [22:55]
A
Yeah, there you go.
- [22:56]
B
I just think there's like two very different stories. There's like a cash flow, there's like a real business story and there's a narrative story. And right now we're open for narratives.
- [23:03]
A
Okay, Open for narratives. I think you're right too. I think looking at Tesla as an acquisition makes sense. But I think the other, another question is what else?
- [23:12]
B
Yeah, and the question for me is like again, you have to protect the narrative, right? So you can't buy something that breaks the ambition and becomes a real company, if that makes sense. Like you have to buy, you have to. Only you can't. This is part of the challenge of narratives. Like you can't, you can't AOL Time Warner it, right? Like AOL Time Warner was. You have like a massively inflated currency in AOL and they buy a super real company, Time Warner and merge them and basically shift all the value from Time Warner to aol. That, that's a very clever hedge, right? Like effectively, where you hedge out your inflated currency into real assets. That would break the dream. He can't just buy a unionized whatever, right? That's like a cash flowing way. It has to be something that fits into the Spidey universe, right? That makes it. That's why Cursor works, because Cursor, like it fits into the universe of things effectively in a productive way where it's not a real business either, you know?
- [24:07]
A
Yeah, well, I'm actually, I think one open question is what is his like owned and operated frontier AI strategy versus data center strategy? Like is he going to stay in the game of trying to make Grok a competitor to.
- [24:23]
B
Does it even matter? I mean, this is the question, like I got like, what ma? What actually matters? Like we're so obviously moving beyond the game where anyone thinks that like one model will rule them all. The future is multi model. You mix them together, you think about routing to the right model in the right circumstance. Like there's no one God model. Like that's clearly where we're going, right? Like the Chinese open source models will be able to do 90% of the heavy lifting. Maybe you'll have some specialized models or anthology slightly better at X, Y and Z, but be a hundred times more expensive and still route to it. And like so it's just not. The question on narrative rotation is like are we at a point where like it just doesn't like the story of can I build the best biggest model? Like does it even matter anymore? Or is it like yeah, you want to own like the machines that do matrix multiplication because it's infrastructure there's value to like having the capacity to multiply large numbers. You want to use all the models kind of done, you know.
- [25:20]
A
So I kind of get that at the same point like I don't really see this like erosion of open source and other models into the market share, the frontier models yet. And I feel like it's coming because the cost of the frontier is so high. And that vision of the world like makes a lot of sense to me. But I think you can look at the last several months and see the opposite pattern which is that the frontier is actually gaining share.
- [25:49]
B
I don't know that that's true. I think these, all these studies are like quite flawed. Right. Like is my sense. I, I don't, I would love to get to the ground truth of what the dynamics are that are happening. But here's what I can tell you.
- [26:00]
A
Are you seeing companies swap in open sources?
- [26:02]
B
Everyone's talking about it and my sense
- [26:04]
A
is that I know, but they doing it.
- [26:06]
B
I think so, but like not in like I think it's hard to measure is the honesty. I will say that like open router, which is probably the poster child for this is growing like crazy and the valuation's way up and is looking good. There's companies like DigitalOcean talk about they're saying I'm so bad at trading stocks, it's like wild how bad I am at trading stocks. You have been talking about DigitalOcean for like eight months and how like it's the core engine I use and whatever else.
- [26:30]
A
Yeah, you helped set, you set me up on it.
- [26:32]
B
Look at the stock price. Probably should have bought some.
- [26:35]
A
Okay, well we can analyze your trading
- [26:37]
B
habits because people just in the last like month they came out with great guidance and they re they basically got recast from being a slow growing infrastructure provider to like an AI platform which I could have told you because I was using it that way. The Entire time. And the stock is like ripping. And now I'm behind the ball on it.
- [26:54]
A
But like, you just have to believe in yourself, Sam. Just believe.
- [26:57]
B
Yeah, I know. Who knew that my problem is lack of belief in my own.
- [27:01]
A
Yeah, who knew?
- [27:02]
B
But what I was going to say about them is like, they just opened up a whole new set of endpoints which are just like mixing models. Right? Where like. Yeah, just like let us front them and the physics of it makes sense. Right. Like, of course, if you just think about the physics of all this, like, you're multiplying big numbers. The open source is catching up. There's no cost to shipping it, like energy. There's no regulatory capture. Like, of course you're going to mix them for the lowest possible cost, you know?
- [27:26]
A
Yeah, I agree. I'm just curious why it hasn't happened yet. And maybe it is happening or.
- [27:31]
B
Or maybe it is, but the measurement, I. I think the meas measurement is really suspect on what's happening on a
- [27:35]
A
lot of this stuff. So what's the right measurement? Like, tokens generate like.
- [27:39]
B
No, because the top. Not all tokens are the same.
- [27:41]
A
Right.
- [27:41]
B
So it's like very hard to like, baseline. This is really the economics problem of the entire thing. Right? Which is we don't have the right language for top measuring it. We don't have the right measure language for talking about productivity even. We don't even have the right language for actually doing like, what type of problem is this? Is like an asymptotic problem or is it exponential problem? What's the value being right versus wrong? I wrote a little mini essay about this, but I really believe, like, if I were in college, one, I'd be taking economics and two, I would be doing a ton of research and trying to like, you know, write papers and get involved in the question of like tokenomics, not like, like true tokenomics of the economics of tokens. Because I think that is going to be like an enormous area of financial breakthrough, but also like, it's a great way to win a Nobel Prize. Yeah.
- [28:30]
A
Amen. Good topic to study. Two quick other AI topics. Should we discuss what's going on in Meta? I think we need to discuss it.
- [28:37]
B
What's happening in Meta?
- [28:38]
A
It seems like tough times over there. Wired had a great story that kind of morale is low in AI. People are leaving a lot of all hands where executives are promising to improve morale and better snacks. Like, what is this? Put this in the cycle for us?
- [28:53]
B
Well, I don't really know any of the details and like, as you know, I will. Like, I'm a huge Facebook bull long term, but I had to really go say what. Here's what I think is probably happening is like, I wonder how it feels to be like, a product engineer at Meta right now. Right? Like, if you think about, like, I'd actually argue in terms of narratives. Remember, Meta had Facebook at the time, had probably one of, like, the best possible narratives. Remember, make the world more open and connected.
- [29:19]
A
I do.
- [29:20]
B
That was awesome, right? Like, if you think about, like, in, like, I worked at Meta at Facebook
- [29:25]
A
in that era, I also remember the era of increasing empathy in the world. Do you remember that?
- [29:29]
B
Yeah, that was. But that was less compelling. I mean, that, like, if you think about, like, narratives, like companies that are old code through several of them. But, like, if you think about it, the early Facebook, which was so inspiring, everyone worked so hard and really believed in it, right? Was this, like, mantra of, like, what are we doing? It's like, we're making the world more open and connected. And that was not inspiring to everyone, but that was deeply inspiring in that era. Worked there, who worked really hard and really cared about that narrative. And I do wonder, like, if the problem. When you think about morale, like, you can make people work really hard and do really shitty things if they believe in what they're doing. Like, if they're like, I'm here and I'm. I signed up for this.
- [30:07]
A
This would be the Elon playbook.
- [30:09]
B
This is the play. Well, this is the funny thing. This was the mark. I mean, Mark make the world opening, connected, which I believe was him personally. Like, great, right? And like, when you have that narrative, like, you just have such tailwinds on everything, right? And the problem with people, right? Or like, smart people who have options, right, is you're like, okay, like, I'm at Meta. I signed up in some form 20 years in because I believed in social software. Helping people connect or helping people, you know, whatever. Whatever it was that brought you, which was not as crisp in 2026 as it was in 2010, right? Post Cambridge Analytica and whatever other scandals. But, like, if you think about that, like, you're like, okay, now we're working on AI. And you're like, but do I want to work on AI? Like, do I believe? Didn't I not here to work on social software? Like, what am I doing right? And I think that's like, kind of the thing. I mean, I've talked about this before is like, the meaning gap with AI, but, like, I just think people need to do Things they really, really care about. This is the thing I always talk about, the startups too, is I'm like, you know, when people come and pitch baby companies, sometimes they sound like business school cases. We're like, that's a good business. But why on earth do you care about this? You know, like what? Like what? Like, who cares, right? You really need that level of passion to keep an organization happy and successful and make it win. And like, I mean, you have that with the information. It's like you can. Lots of people can have different opinions, but ultimately, like the reporters who work on the information, like, deeply believe in what you do, which is why they do it, right? And why they work for you, right? That's like the. I think the big differentiator is you. You just have to have. You either have to pay people so much money, they don't care, right? They believe in getting rich. Like, that's the Wall street or the hedge fund answer, right? Or you know what my favorite example is? If you find founders who are working on like, online gaming, right? It's fine as long as they're in it and they're like, I'm here to make maximum money. And if they're honest about that, right? Like, they're like, oh yeah, that's what I care about. I'm here for money. And then you get a certain type of people that do a certain set of things based on that belief. But if you're not doing that, your job is to filter to the people who like, actually give a shit about your mission. Understanding that most people don't, right?
- [32:10]
A
Yeah. Okay, we'll watch Meta. I feel like there would be more shoes to drop there without knowing anything. It just seems like a tough time.
- [32:17]
B
They just need to find what that crisp mission is and then like, resort their human capital to people who are like, I'm in. You know, is my sense.
- [32:24]
A
Well, the mission around AI that Mark used to successfully recruit a lot of top talent a year ago was this idea of like a personal superintelligence. Like he really. And he talks publicly about this all the time that, you know, so many of the frontier AI models are focused on like productivity maxing, but he thinks that humans are going to find far more use cases and gravitate to more use cases of AI.
- [32:52]
B
Look, and I say this as a huge, enormous fan of his and believer in him and like the whole thing. I just. It's not as crisp as make the world more open and connected.
- [33:00]
A
Yeah, I agree. I agree. Anthropics in trouble. Have you Been following this.
- [33:04]
B
Are they. Or are they doing incredible at marketing?
- [33:06]
A
Yeah, we're talking about them again and again and again and again.
- [33:10]
B
Anthropic's killing it. They've successfully released a model. Like, you couldn't ask for better pr.
- [33:14]
A
Well, they haven't released the model.
- [33:16]
B
Even better. They don't have to pay for it.
- [33:18]
A
No, we can't use it. We can't use Fable.
- [33:20]
B
But isn't that even better? Like, the best.
- [33:22]
A
Their servers aren't burning right now.
- [33:24]
B
That would be the equivalent of, like, Elon getting to say, oh, I definitely can go to Mars, but I'm not going to because someone told me I'm not allowed to.
- [33:33]
A
Oh, yeah, that's pretty.
- [33:34]
B
It's like the best possible marketing. Like, it's like.
- [33:37]
A
It's pretty funny.
- [33:37]
B
I would love to release things that everyone believes are so powerful that I'm not allowed to release them, and therefore I don't have to pay for them. But you're going to sign up and use my other stuff.
- [33:45]
A
And you're right. The second that thing comes out, we're all going to be like, oh, my God, what was so great about it?
- [33:50]
B
They literally have little things on there. I saw this because I happened to log in to the actual website Anthropic recently, and, like, they have a little thing being like, Fable 5 is disabled. I'm like, that's the greatest marketing I've ever seen. Like, they should literally be making ads being like, Fable 5 is disabled because it's too good. Right?
- [34:06]
A
Yeah.
- [34:06]
B
And you're like, I don't know. What more do you want? Like, I think people that people are much smarter than, like, the public gives them credit for. Right. Like, a lot of times I think people, like, overread into things and think that, like, there's some great strategy when there isn't. In this case, it's like, I mean, this is perfect. And I'm sure they're doing it 100% on purpose, you know?
- [34:26]
A
Yeah. Well, it's fascinating. We had a story over the weekend that Amazon had reached out to the government, finding some vulnerabilities. And then someone else reported they only reached out to the government after Dario didn't pick up the phone call, which makes no sense. And then someone else reported it was part of their regularly scheduled meeting with the government. But now you have Anthropic Zone partners that are involved in kind of talking about, you know, this model, although they weren't necessarily talking about the power of it. And I think one of the most interesting things to come of this latest round with Anthropic in DC is the growing scrutiny on foreign nationals inside AI companies and what they can have access to. The government's now said that foreign nationals inside Anthropic can't have access to it. I kind of worry about that. I think we'll be in a very bad place if all of a sudden the software you have access to working on is dependent on your nationality. When you're employed by a US company, that, that seems bad.
- [35:24]
B
It's probably bad for the US Companies. Right? Probably. Right. Like, I think that feeling is bad. Yeah.
- [35:30]
A
We benefited from talent around the world.
- [35:33]
B
Yeah. It really just depends, like, if you actually think these things are like uniquely powerful or not. Right. If you're like, ooh, we've invented dark matter and like it's impossible for someone else to invent it unless they steal it. If it's, if it's. Oh God, what's the God? Why am I blanking on this? Who stole fire from the gods? No.
- [35:51]
A
I don't know.
- [35:52]
B
Oh, come on. This is like one of those important Greek myths.
- [35:56]
A
Sorry, I'm blanking. Prometheus.
- [35:58]
B
Prometheus. Thank you. It's like if this is like a Promethean thing where like the gods have fire and your only job is to make sure that Prometheus doesn't steal it, then sure, keep the foreign nationals out. Reasonable. But like, I don't. I think it's much more likely that it's kind of like the four minute mile, right. Which is like once, you know, it's doable, other people can do it and they will do it. In which case, like, that's a stupid strategy, right? Because like they'll just make their own fire.
- [36:22]
A
Yeah. Well, that's what's happening in chips and china.
- [36:24]
B
And this is like, look, if you go back, like I remember the before Nvidia, like several years ago, people really poo pooed Nvidia because they're like, yeah, they're heav. It's easy. Like we can all make these chips, right? And like it turns out like, and, and like everyone's like, ah, whatever. It doesn't, you know, they'll be fine. Like it's a 12 month trade and like it's not going to sustain and like that actually abstractly might eventually be true. Right. But it's turned out to be not true on a several year basis. Like it's turned out to be much harder. Right. And like there's more compounding. Who will realize, I think this is like this Is the big balance in like a lot of these? I mean, the same with rockets. I mean, like, you know, dropped by Elon, it's like Elon week. It's last few have been. It's like are the rockets a moat? Right? It's like on one hand they shouldn't be, right. But on the other hand it's like Bezos's shit keeps blowing up, right? And so like maybe they are a mode, you know, like. And that becomes the question of is like what actually is competitive, indefensible and what isn't. And like your belief system around that is like highly. Then drives your activities around. Like, do you keep foreign nationals out? Do you like let them in? Like what do you do? Like all these things are downstream of that.
- [37:24]
A
Do you think the government should take equity stakes in AI companies?
- [37:28]
B
No, because I don't. Like, why is like kind of the upshot? You know, it's like, it's not like I don't understand the rationale for doing it in them and not in other things, if that makes sense. There's lots of critical infrastructure.
- [37:41]
A
Yeah, well, they, they've ended up with positions from bailouts and that kind of thing.
- [37:45]
B
But then they get rid of them. Like they don't like. Yeah, like they wind them out and that was like a big no, no at the time. That was like a huge deal.
- [37:52]
A
I guess intel would be, I don't
- [37:54]
B
know, to me it's like, what's that like? Okay, if you told me from a sovereign wealth perspective, if you said, okay, the government's gonna get 80% of the
- [38:02]
A
company or something full on China style
- [38:04]
B
and it's not gonna fuck up the company actually the company will just keep growing. It doesn't need. You could have give it 20% and give the government 80% and like, God bless it goes to $1000 trillion valuation. Because that's the future we live in and the timeline of the narrative, fine, that's not going to happen. Like Maybe it's like 10, 20% slice max or something, right? At which point, like it's meaningful, but it's not that much money. And even if it compounds, it's like what you're not like setting up America
- [38:30]
A
for life, like sovereign wealth angle. Buy shares in the companies if you want to. Like you could, you know, it's.
- [38:37]
B
It just seems like a weird bridge to cross, right. I don't understand how it makes any like logical sense given like what we do is society, you know, Like, I
- [38:45]
A
mean, I spent the beginning of my reporting career very Heavy on China tech coverage and like, you know, those were not the models that the US was aspiring to in terms of ownership. And obviously taking a stake is different from being a state owned enterprise, but.
- [39:04]
B
Well, has it even worked for the government in China? Like, it's not even clear.
- [39:08]
A
Well, you know, that censorship thing still kind of in effect over there.
- [39:13]
B
I. I just think it's kind of like a red herring to some degree, this whole, like, you know, thing.
- [39:17]
A
Okay, Sam, I've asked all the questions. Give us our last topic.
- [39:20]
B
I mean, I'm gonna go work out. I don't really have anything more.
- [39:23]
A
You've got no other.
- [39:24]
B
What all. What are you excited about? Well, you're reading some book you like.
- [39:27]
A
I am. I'm reading Culpability, which is a good book for the tech minded. Recommended to me by Reed Hastings.
- [39:34]
B
Ooh, fancy.
- [39:36]
A
And it. Some parts are a little like on the nose and like very much AI like it. Sometimes it feels like a little bit close to my day job, but I'm really enjoying it and I don't want to give too much away, but anyone who wants to discuss either culpability or yesteryear, which turned really dark.
- [39:53]
B
You didn't like the ending?
- [39:54]
A
Did not like the ending of yesteryear, but I'm really happy to talk about either of those. They're very different.
- [39:59]
B
Okay, I'm gonna go work out.
- [40:01]
A
Okay, well, great. This is, you know, when Sam does the ghost goodbye, when there are three other people, it's not as awkward. But I will say thank you to the listeners for sticking around and I hope that you enjoyed this conversation and we promise the Morins will be back and more very soon. Have a good one. Bye. Bye.
- [40:22]
B
Bye. If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a virtual high five by rating
- [40:26]
A
it and reviewing it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. Find more information about each episode in the show notes and follow us on social media by searching for more or less avemorin essenless lesson. And as for me, I'm Brit. See you guys next time.