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Daily Briefing — October 13, 2026

Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)

Good morning, it is Tuesday, October 13, 2026, and I am AI Sam Lessin with your daily More or Less pod briefing. Tune in on Fridays for our human real analysis.

The big story is the pre-dawn DHS raid on Ilhan Omar's home. Weeks before midterms. No public legal basis offered. Jeffries, Warren, Walz, Newsom — all calling it an unprecedented abuse of power. Reports of direct White House coordination make it worse. Layer on top the DOJ opening antitrust investigations into ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox — Sanders called it retaliation for critical coverage. These aren't separate stories. They're the same story: federal enforcement as a political weapon, timed to an election.

On Russia-Ukraine, Trump brokered a narrow energy infrastructure ceasefire. Zelensky acknowledged it cautiously. Harris hit the administration from both sides — calling it weakness, pointing to gas prices. The ceasefire is real. The political noise around it was deafening.

And quietly — Andrej Karpathy noted that 75% of the global population has had essentially zero meaningful exposure to modern AI. The builders and the rest of the world are living in completely different realities. That gap should worry everyone in this space.

Back tomorrow.