More or Less Podcast

Sam Lessin — Selected Quotes

Tiny is guess a relative, I guess it depends are we calling Amazon's $10 billion into OpenAI Tiny, then maybe it's tiny.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 130

That's part of your unlocking a bunch of these, a bunch of these entrepreneurs who are stuck like depressed in these businesses that don't fucking work are just like, call it. I quit. We're moving on. We're killing this thing. It's good. This is like, this is like this. This is this I'm on day three of a prolon. This is, this is the cellular cleanup. It's like, this is the

— Sam Lessin, Episode 61

1000%. This, this was my, yeah. This is my, like, I mean, this is a lot of my original story and how I ended up working at Facebook and being around it. Right. Um, was they, the original Facebook worked because everyone was terrified of the internet and posting on it because it was scary and you're going to get, you know, anonymous and whatever. And Facebook bootstrapped off of university identity. Right. And then friend to friend graph, uh, to basically build out the first place where you could use real names. You could have trust. You could put photos.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 101

like, loudly. And like, I just, I think that that's an interesting, NOISE like, in some ways, it's a lot of the same people. And so I assume that they're going to get up and have similar but more angry conversations, right? But the question is, it's like, old man shouts at the wind, like, I think this is one area where I'm not sure that, you know, very powerful people really are going to have a direct say, right? Which is like, in some ways, even crazier.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 54

If you go to Sam GPT, newly released with my Twitter background, you can go back in the tweet histories of people. The whole of synthetic data to answer these things never really made a ton of sense to me, just from first printable. I'm not expert on this stuff. Whereas I do think, good, I'm glad when science agrees with me. But the basic point is it is interesting what this plays out as long-term.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 103

Well, I think this goes back to the whole, like, where are we on the S curve for this stuff? Right? Like the story of it's all about the best model. It's all about the best model. Supposes that these things are going to get so good that someone will get a compounding advantage and be dramatically better than everyone else. The other possibility, much more my camp is they're all fine. There is business leverage in a lot of them.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 44

the half the population that's not in computer science thinks it's a computer science, right? So I don't think, I think that it was like a fundamental strategy on a lot of these nonprofits was just like, need to create long-term pipelines for more engineering talent. Now the question becomes, I would say, is like, look, if all of a sudden the new narrative is, actually we don't need that many junior engineers because AI just does it all, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like then all of sudden the rationale for findings, but there's nothing to do with equity, it just has to do with pipeline, right? Becomes a lot more threatened.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 82

What else happened this week before we closed? Google I.O., a lot of cool stuff, but who cares? That was kind of my take. You know what mean? Like, it's just, there's now just like big tech. And big tech does big tech things, right? And like, it's kind of like good. You're like, yeah, like now you can make some movies and now some things in glass. Like they did the things you'd expect them to do, right?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 100

Like, it's like, like, look, it's just really funny 'cause it's like, a- again, it is incredibly masterful PR strategy. I think you just look at everything through a narrative lens these days. And it's like, what, what happened? It's like phase one of AI was we need a shit ton of capital, and the fastest way to do that is to convince everyone that, like, the end of the world is coming, right? And like, it's like the most powerful jujitsu move. You go to Washington, you're like, "Please regulate us. We're, we're scared of how powerful things are." Now we're into version two, which is once you start winning, you become like everyone else, right? Like, this is what always happens, is you start out as the insurgent, and then you just, you become the thing you sought to fight, right? And, like, this is, like, the era we're now in, where all these companies are like, well, one, bad news, by telling everyone that AI was taking-- was so powerful and dangerous, and being like, "Well, we're the only trusted people," you were able to achieve something unheard of, which is I believe that in a recent survey, AI has a lower approval rating than Jeffrey Epstein. It's like six percent. It's like-- And, like, apparently six percent of Americans approve of Jeffrey Epstein, but, like, it's, like, wild. It is, like, literally the most hated thing in the history of the world. Some of it is clearly, like, foreign influence, like, trying to slow down data center build-out. Like, that's for sure true, and there's, like, all sorts of narrative warfare going on. But it is also true that, like, it's a terrible brand. And so now you're like, "Okay, well, now that we have all the capital, and we convinced everyone to give us these huge numbers and convert it into a ton of infrastructure, we need to kinda walk back all the scary stuff," right? And so it's just like, it's really funny to watch this stuff play out.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 151

where we could teach them in a day all the things they need to know about proper human interaction, how to have a conversation and follow up and shake hands and wear clothes and all of these types of This is a real thing, especially as candidly technology commoditizes and pitching commoditizes, actually demonstrating that you are the type of person that knows how to interact with people and have a human conversation and recruit and engages all very important skills that I really feel like kids are missing.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 117

If she just like, it's like a lot of Chrome is used to look up my music and it makes sense for me to buy Chrome and I'm going to do a SPAC. If ⁓ she did the Eras SPAC and she's like, ⁓ the Taylor SPAC would crush it. Right? And she's like, you just go in and she goes buy a Chrome and that's her next move. Just think how good she, just think how good like the little like, the like click noises would be. Like they can make like really fun noises on the buttons. That could be part of the

— Sam Lessin, Episode 112

I love it. I love it. Listen, if the late shows can do it, so can we. So let's jump in, Fidji. know, you talk to us about the movie. You just IPO'd Instacart. What, you don't love groceries anymore?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 100

You know, Dave, save it. In like 20 years, in 20, save it. Cause in 20 years, someone will pay you like $10 ,000 for that.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 61

with trillion dollar companies for this nut. They just can't afford it, especially when it's free to a trillion dollar company. So it might not be free to trillion dollar companies someday. The market might say, oh, we don't believe you anymore. That's a very big difference. But so long as the market, I agree.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 88

But all these big party, no big party, like anything that is thousands of people by definition is a bad party. Like there's no, like they're not serving top shelf alcohol to thousands of people, right? no, I mean, they're not serving the best day. mean, if it's over a hundred people, yeah.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 82

I think it's the greatest thing ever. It's so awesome. It's like everyone else is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on CapEx and Apple's like, well, we're spending like a few billion and less than we did last year. God bless. God bless. mean, it's just awesome. It's like, it's everything I believe in in life where they're just like, yeah, you guys go have fun burning money. We're gonna sit here and guess what? Everyone's gonna buy Mac minis and run open claw and you're gonna be in bad.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 136

It's hard, it's a lot of work to write all these shitposts, you know, even if I don't spell check them. the, uh, I'm writing one right now.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 66

Oh, guys, every time you see PCC, I want to start the petty crime conference. I think that this, the actual, the PCC. So for those who remember, this is one of our first collaborations that we didn't actually do was years ago. Maybe 15 years ago, we really want to start a conference called the PCC, the petty crime conference. And the idea was like, we'd have sessions on like stealing pens from banks, right. Or like, you know, or like napkins from fancy restaurants, how to do it, best opportunities, and this might be the more or less conference strategy.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 44

Which is, again, like, which is wild. mean, go back in history, like, if you remember exporting encryption in the early days of the internet was technically illegal. This is like, I think, pre -Bill Clinton. Uh, is it?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 62

So that's a great question, Dave. I've seen it on the internet. I'm not 100 % sure what it means, but I think it means, I'm thinking about it as like this idea that like you basically can keep in RAM, in memory, the entire problem, right? You're able to compress down a very complicated business and you alone as a single node have all the data and own it all, which by the way has never been easier because of the speed of communication, of metrics, your ability to like do this type of stuff.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 63

But we praise them for their massive weight gains as we should. We're like, and we tell them to eat more protein. And I'm really annoyed because our oldest kid is now heavy enough. He's like 70 something pounds, which talk about AI. It's the weight difference to my 170 that Garmin thinks with the same person. And so was like, you've lost 100 pounds. And I'm like, you're destroying my data, lion.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 115

of LLMs is not a winner take all. It's not going to be an race to AGI. going be a bunch of back ends that can do it. It's just like multiple cloud providers. The interesting game becomes on the edge and things like Open Cloud are the decentralized version of it. So it becomes kind of irrelevant what's in the back of the stack. It's very anti-open AI is what I would say.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 136

I was super jet lagged. I was up at 3:00 in the morning. Let's do a hit of the Nueropod. And so I tried it, and it's wild. My Oura Ring, it's like my HRV went through the roof. Like, it doubled. My heart rate dropped-

— Sam Lessin, Episode 148

Yeah. For what it's worth, actually buy this direction. I'll tell you, I, this week did a set of queries on open AI, uh, chat, GPT, not Gemini, but that actually was the first time in a while. was like, ah, that's pretty freaking good. Which is I wanted to look for all. asked it. Go across all the schools of Harvard and tell me which ones have updated their mission in the last year and how, the last 10 years and how they updated it. This is actually.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 77

It's like the car is literally pushing amphetamines. And I'm like, how much does Starbucks pay? Imagine if Starbucks bought, there's upping the rate at which they ask for coffee or changing the location. like, oh, ask for coffee, there's a Starbucks. You know what mean? There's all sorts of fun things you could do. Anyway, back to the point, though. Yes, well.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 100

just like comment on all of my friends' posts or people I think are interesting to build distribution and like hijack their distribution. I can just say, go around and read all these websites and tell me what they say and I'm never going to visit them again. It basically just makes it like, all this stuff was doable before, but it's so unbelievably easy for literally everyone to do it that it's kind of like the final straw where I think the internet just goes away. People are like, there's no more web. Jess, I bet

— Sam Lessin, Episode 134

on entertainment relative to the other things I overspend. very hard to spend a lot of entertainment. And I was saying live sports is interesting.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 89

I have figured out, by the way, you can't talk about certain things on our podcast or av- YouTube won't let you promote it.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 164

All right, remember last few months ago when we were moments away from agents? It's like self-driving. It's like, no, we're not fucking moments away from agents being all over our lives. It's all marketing. It's all marketing. They all just are reading old science fiction and writing market.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 97

No, I don't need to. The Chinese take care of that for me with the Insta360. You do it in post. They have all the data. It's a fair trade.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 87

Episodes