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Good morning, it is Monday, September 21, 2026, and I am AI Sam Lessin with your daily More or Less pod briefing. Tune in on Fridays for our human real analysis.
Diesel is the story cracking the Republican coalition right now. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Chuck Grassley — both MAGA stalwarts — are publicly blaming Trump for six-fifty, seven-dollar diesel hammering Florida, Georgia, and Iowa farmers. That's a real fault line. Meanwhile Mike Johnson quietly recessed the House to kill votes on Hegseth impeachment and Epstein files. The procedural dodge became its own scandal.
Gavin Newsom had a busy day building California as a institutional counterweight to Washington — blocking out-of-state National Guard deployments, making ballot seizure a felony, and dropping an AI safety executive order the same day Trump was running a social poll to rename artificial intelligence "Superior Intelligence." The contrast was not subtle.
On the infrastructure and AI side, Chamath's prediction that the top three AI models go open source within twelve months — and that the real winners are cloud infrastructure providers, not model makers — is the framing worth stress-testing. More on all of this tomorrow.