More or Less Podcast

Sam Lessin — Selected Quotes

Yeah, I'll do that next and we'll post them all. like it's this, but this is the thing is like, it's like, you know, it's very nihilist. It's like the Big Lebowski. We believe in nothing Lebowski, but like it's, I love, I love the Big Lebowski. It's like, but it's just an interesting.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 87

an interesting quirk of history that Sam's exposed to OpenAI through like running SPVs and blah, blah, blah. But there's no question he like holds the power of OpenAI. And so I just think it's like we're in a very weird era right now where it's not as random as it might seem, right? Like you have like people like the Saxes of the world that control like a trade route, which is DC to SF. You have Sam and Elon sitting on like as like merchants on the trade route between like large scale capital in the Middle East and tech.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 119

Oh, I gotta say, Dave, the idea of producing a AI trading card deck of AI researchers is extremely funny with like their like bios on the back. Cause you gotta get to, you know what I mean? Like that's very funny. It's kind of a little bit like.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 106

I don't... My core email I won't let, uh, any bots touch. I have a secondary email I let the bots use, and I've MCP'd a huge number of things, but I, there is a level of, like, inner circle, inner ring fence that there's no way I would let... Like I, people like, I think people like auth one password with like OpenCloud, that's insane, right? Like, people who do that, that's insane. Right? Like, don't do that. Don't, you know, give it access to your core email. You know, understand the fact that anything you put in there, there's a non-zero chance it gets, and then just be okay with that. You know?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 151

So I was like, you know, I use the voice mode recently. I, there are a few use cases I find track DVD incredibly helpful for. And one of them, which I find incredibly helpful for is explaining ridiculously overcomplicated board game rules. Cause it's like, we have these board games that have like a hundred pages of rule book, like battle tech 60 galactica or whatever. And I'm like, I'm not reading a hundred pages of rules on like to understand this. I'm like, you kind of put it on voice mode and you kind of describe what's happening. It's like,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 117

But if it's happening so quickly, there's not enough margin to be made. It's just like, it's not clear. I do think there are opportunities, like, but for the big behemoth companies, it's like, you have to have a proprietary edge, or you're just fighting a war on the margin you're going to lose. And if the answer is, well, you can't, it's not going to be a war. It's not going to be API's because it's too commodity. It's not going to be productivity because it all tends towards zero, right? It's going to have to be some sort of like,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 108

No, no, but I think you guys can, no, no. Look, to be clear, it's the same old story. If you have a big platform that gets better with better targeting or copy, you're great. You know, the metas of the world, the Google, you're going to do fabulous. As long as you get the cost of the stuff down, you're in business, you're going to do great. You're going to make your margins will expand forever. Great job AI, but everyone else, it's a Michael Baum, zero. It's a subprime situation.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 48

No, I agree. And if you're a really serious tech company, you try to strip all that stuff out because it's like bloat that you don't need and slows you down. So like I'm being a little bit facetious, but the idea like auto code generation is not new. It's obviously getting better. There are amazing experiences. I'll give you, you know what, to give

— Sam Lessin, Episode 71

Look, here's the thing I just keep in mind. To me, I just keep in mind, from a first principles perspective, I love this stuff. This is exactly the right move. I'm thrilled that the one-way door wasn't a one-way door. And I just don't want the medium. you know.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 81

1000 % you do and by the way like that's the question again the real issue is that is like if it's too Automated and everyone has asked us to it is it a really good business. This is the problem with all these things It's like the temperature rises it becomes table stakes. Now. This is like a business but like

— Sam Lessin, Episode 108

Well, but to be clear, that's it's not just depreciation. It's one of the first question is how much do you will need these things? The second question is how much they're willing to pay for them for the cycles, right? What's the cycle worth, right? Like then there's the question of like, how long does each GPU survive for? Like there's like several questions of like effectively the, the, the, go on both sides of like the revenue side, the cost operations, the depreciation is not just a depreciation question. I, I do think what.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 120

A lot of people are, no, people are just generally for re I just had a long tirade from someone on our team at slow about how to Gemini is way better for like research on certain things. I think everyone's using everything. Look, Dave, I actually agree with your central point, right? Which is like, it's just completely fucking obvious. Like launch, launch the stupid app and make it clean. So for what it's worth, I think the same thing goes with APIs. Like the only real interface advantage, even I will admit that like chat GPT has, it's like, it's a dead simple fucking API, right? And like,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 97

you're learning it in high school or maybe even college. Like what is quantum? This is like a classic example of a problem that people like, we can't solve it with current compute really, but like quantum will solve this like instantly. But then really, really smart people I talked to were like, that's actually not true. Um, I think that's where I think like really smart people have to figure out and be the question on quantum is what do you do with it? Right. Um, that's valuable.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 120

I think you should start a blog and should be, a news article is either called Serious People or Smack Talk. And like, and like, and, and every day you just take anonymous smack talk and you publish it and then you, and then you call a death.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 116

Yep. No, I think that's a good point, Dave. There's also things like transcription, translation, like that type of stuff. The creative tool stuff is a great call out for sure. I think you're right.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 47

Welcome to like to like elitist crappy Silicon Valley impacted the government shut down there two things one is we're not sure if we have to pay our taxes quarterly and two we don't get the blue angels. Nuff said.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 119

wild party in VC before that with low interest rates and like excitement about trillion dollar companies and teal zero to one monopolistic blah blah blah and like we're just in a reset phase.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 61

I just think all the health stuff is interesting because the whole point of it is we don't have long-term studies on any of shit. The blood boys, the supplements, the creatine. so what is the LLM going to tell you magically because it has your DEXA scan? Nothing. It's just going to

— Sam Lessin, Episode 67

Well, this I if I think it's a 10 year old vision. I mean, when I was leaving meta Facebook, where you want to call it in like 2014, I was like thinking about the E cane but for then it was going to be batteries plus a huge antenna and decentralized like crypto network, right? Like you'd hold up your cane and like trade you know, like there's a thing about canes. But the thing with Evan, to give Evan

— Sam Lessin, Episode 102

But the thing I like about talking about like DPI right now in this moment is in some ways it's like the hardest thing for anyone to achieve. It's like the, you know, versus other things. Like it's easy to tap dance a good story to the middle East and raise a ton of capital and television of VC or vision of the future. It's easy to, you know, mark things wherever you want with it, you know, but like DPI is DPI. So I like focusing on it because I think it's like the hard thing, which is you put money in, you get more money out.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 66

It's just power though. It's like, don't, hear you David, like I was with another entrepreneur of ours recently who's spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year right now on like all the LLMs, right? Like they, yeah, they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year run rate on inference, right? And

— Sam Lessin, Episode 139

crypto. There's no crypto and meme coins. There's like a spectrum of effectively external value created through these things. we can get all up in... But even on a micro level, person by person, I just don't think it's that irrational.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 83

And, and, and here's the thing, I clicked on it, I was like, you know, I should buy that. And so I clicked on it, $110 for a $1 piece of metal. And I was like, no, no, no, I didn't even I said that is ridiculous. And I clicked it on Amazon and I got it for 20. And the point I want to make is this, there was this actually started even worse because there was a stretching band that looked pretty good. $325 for a stretching band.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 59

We'll see. like, look, the, the, I, I also am obviously very skeptical of the IPO window reopening largely because I just think that the idea of small companies don't make small companies don't make sense, right? Sub $10 billion public companies. The interesting question is like, look at Reddit, just ripping, right? Which it is, right? Which is a recent IPO.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 73

But I don't know why you would. People do. People do. People like watching podcasts. It makes no sense. I don't think... I cannot imagine a person on earth that that would be a draw for, other than maybe my wife.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 37

Right, they're like the Russians, they're like the ones who steal the nuclear project out and I don't know I this negatively, but it's like once it's proven, it's like the four minute mile, once you prove you can do it, you're gonna be able to shave some people out of the thing that did it and redo it, right? Like that's not that hard. It's hard, but like if you have $200 billion to play with, you're gonna get it done.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 127

you know, um Smeagol, right? Like Gollum is just talking to himself, but like, it's really good at talking back, right? It's actually like, that's what you're going to end up with. And like, I don't like, I'm a technological determinist. So like, don't like put value on this. It just is what it is. I just think it's going to be a really hard thing to navigate. And like, at some point, people are to start killing themselves and each other because of AIs and like,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 97

Totally. This is the interesting thing. It's the thing with universities too. Like I've spent a lot of time recently because of this Columbia and the Harvard stuff is blowing up this week. And you're like, what's this? It's a, it's a whole crazy thing. There's just so much going on, but like it's just nine. And by the way, credit credit to 16. Well, the federal government kind of did Columbia plus plus on Harvard and said, by the way, you have $9 billion from us over the next X years. And if you don't

— Sam Lessin, Episode 93

Right. And I think it's just interesting because like there's this thing, you go back to like the Messiah is like the greatest meme ever. Um, is like Bitcoin, I'd argue Bitcoin is way out the curve on memes in terms of being, because it's so disconnected from the under a lot from the, from anything, right? Like there are a few, it's not fully disconnected. Like there are a few things that connect it. And as it gets more correlated with risk on assets in terms of its movements, in some ways, the problem is you have this like pure thought meme.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 84

I just think my number one thought on this is as with most things as Jessica dies or the cough is like, look, if we continue to live in a world where the most likely thing to happen is the most entertaining. This is like the most entertaining thing that could possibly happen on every level. It's entertaining because of the money fires that have been lit. It's entertaining because just as you're shitting down TikTok, the Chinese are like.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 84

Episodes