More or Less Podcast

Sam Lessin — Selected Quotes

There's going to be both. It's just like, it's just like your iPhone is more powerful than like all the computers in the world in 1990, wherever the dumb statistic is, right? And there's a hundred bajillion times more compute in cloud services. It's like, it's just yes, right? Like to all this stuff. But again, the question, cause I'm a capitalist is where do you make the money on it? Right? What are people underestimating? What people overestimating? And like, I think my cards are pretty transparent on it.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 47

Well, AI is not evil might be available. We might need that. We can sell it at the Cannes Festival for millions of dollars to tech. Join the AI is Not Evil Consortium. I can't believe you're not a member of the AI is Not Evil Consortium.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 155

... and she was at the l- the premiere last night. She sang a song. She sang You've Got a Friend in Me. She's has billboards. Like, there's so much happening, and she's getting married in three weeks. I was quite surprised to see her go out so far.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 152

Well, yeah, you can't I agree that you can't be it's a precarious thing if your distribution is like caught up in TikTok or something. But like there are ways to do this. You're like, you're a creator, you're the trusted like cult leader of some weird ass shit that's super vertical, people love it, but it's not everyone, you are their leader, right? And then you get to and you have multiple ideally places to touch them, whether it's, you know, newsletters, plus YouTube plus whatever plus whatever.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 47

or just like not identity lines at all. I mean, I think like, look, I'm totally with you that I feel as a white man. But like, I feel like what's what I'm seeing in this kind of era is like, they're like, look, in this last few months, even, we've kind of switched where there was a lot of things that were unsayable, or you could say, but it was like danger, not dangerous from a practical perspective. But like, it's just like, you weren't supposed to say the name like, yeah, fuck it, we can say whatever we want, we can say what we actually believe. And I actually that's very liberating and good. Now,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 82

I understand why Nvidia loves it because as long as it's inference, somehow they're getting paid, right? So like six levels down, who cares what model you're running or how you're arbing it or whatever.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 140

Look, I was one of the first very few Facebook users before that. I was on six degrees and all this shit. And I've been on social media. NOISE I'm still very long on social media. I think Instagram is super fun. I enjoy posting to it. And just for my own, you know, there are two purposes of me. One is like a nice little journal of my life. And then two, I like the feedback from friends and family. I'm able to share that stuff. I think it's like really powerful. And I don't really care about the noise. NOISE And candidly, like I find a lot of value.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 53

I think that's certainly been true up to now and for the long period of time that has been sadly the right way to play it.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 59

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

to want to be the next president of the United States, right? Because I don't know if it's in six months or 12 months or three years, but like, you know, the paid Piper is going to get paid and it's going to be painful and the leader is going to get in a lot of trouble, right?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 122

I just think it's all pop music and it'll all wash out to zero. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen or get used a bunch. I just don't think there'll be margin in it. think like, and you'll, doesn't mean there isn't margin in the world. It's just going to be, it's kind of like, some ways, you know what I'd say? Here would be my analogy is you know how all the kids now like hate photo filters and post like super un-pose raw Instagram shit. It's like, there's like this anti filter thing going on. Like that's the future. Right. And it's going to be exactly the same thing. This is just like hyper filters.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 77

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

Well, I often think of the question of being... Look, I get it, it's just... Maybe, I just think... Yeah, but I just don't care about them.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 103

To be clear, Britt, this is like everyone in the US is arguing about whether you should become a programmer and your big proof point is that children can do basic math really fast. It seems like the wrong skill set.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 67

Well, that might be right. the thing about that is like that, you know, it's if they actually have a sustainable advantage, like apples for rich people too, right? That's a great fucking business. Right. And so like, if you can be a premium priced thing that actually is better, and is more expensive, maybe there's a there's a defensible model in there. But I think the vast majority of the bulk of quote unquote, intelligence, it really just will be this ultimate arbitrage game where I don't know how anyone makes money. Because it's too easy to arbitrage. It's too easy to change models. Like it's too easy.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 139

Oh God, I'm blanking on his name, but I actually quite like him. Um, Andrew Palmer lucky Palmer is getting good at this too. Right? Like there's a bench of people who are getting good. Brian Schimpf, whatever. There's like a set of guys who are becoming really good at shipping money around, right? Like the big tech and I'd argue that like for instance, Josh Kushner is getting pretty good. There's like a set, but there's no one who can raise who can do it on a scale.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 118

But if they're really introspective about it, they're not gonna be that excited about that either. So it's really just like a waiting for a good dough play being like, ah, these are like steps along the way. They're part of the narrative and there's some really important island we're going to. And it's just super risky because no one can really articulate what that island is or why or how it works, right? Or why it's a good business. uh It's not unreasonable. We've all watched science fiction and we all see the matrix.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 119

Interestingly, then you're back to actually being an Apple thing and a Google thing and Apple and Google aren't short stacked, right? They're dealt in, they're playing the full game, etc. So look, I think there's a lot of problems with like, I was really against I think like this child porn, child porn is always the issue people use to like wedge and everything else, because no one wants to argue in favor of child porn. But like even that we like, well, it's encrypted, but we're going to fingerprint to know if you're sharing child porn is all like really fucked.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 62

This is a good insight. I really want that thing to have a counter, and it would be even greater if it was connected to the internet, so you see, like, you're like a rat hitting the button. So I want, like, my... I want that data set, and then I want a physical counter of the number of espressos that have gone through, 'cause that's kind of fun, right?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 160

My thing is like, what, what fucking budget spies? mean, like Silicon Valley is riddled with spies. Everyone's got spies. The funny thing is, the interesting thing about this is one, I think it's very funny that like a company like deal that mostly does offshoring payroll, like hired clearly the shit spies, right? Who are like the worst spies. But then two, it's like, it's interesting that like, you know, if it was James Bond, they just kill the spy. In like a lot of other companies, they would like just quietly exit them, right?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 91

And in fairness to them, it's a very rare occurrence, so they really, they're not wrong. They're just wrong this one time.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 144

Well, RLPs are great. most, mean, like, look, I, know, I, there's been some funny memes, obviously, passing around about everyone coming off the AI train and back into the Bitcoin crypto. I actually think there is something else going on though, which maybe is a little more intellectual, which is people need a good narrative, right, at any given time. And, you know, I'm really into this, you know, everything's narrative at this point, mostly because I've been reading

— Sam Lessin, Episode 73

is effectively Alexa 2.0 where Alexa actually works, right? Where it's like, these are not hard questions. Most of human questions are not hard questions, right? Everyone's able to answer them. There's no technical moat from that perspective. It's literally just who's closest to the person's face. Then like the correct strategy is to race to the face. I like that race to the face.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 127

So I got to say, I want to get into this. Here's the thing that's confusing me about this one. I would normally be shitting all over this as the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. I am confused because founders funded this and I actually think they're usually both disciplined. And I know for a fact that they're not the type of fund that cares about management fees, which is the normal reason for doing this. So

— Sam Lessin, Episode 44

It might be I mean, I think I think that the most competitive markets are the ones that look closest to zero marginal cost AI stuff, right? That's why like, I'm like super creator fun, like we're very anti investing in pure entertainment, right? It's too competitive, like everyone can do pure entertainment. It's like there's no differentiation. Even if you're good today. It's so hard to be good consistently, whereas we're super into defensible niches. We're like you are the god of lawn care.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 102

Pretty good, right? I also just finished at 3 a.m. last night because I couldn't sleep. The nuclear war book, which is terrifying. Do know about this one?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 84

not just Redbook, how about you have some DeepSeek? It's entertaining because the people who made it run an algorithmic hedge fund. So I dearly, I dearly hope that they were shorting the shit out of Nvidia. And that was the entire monetization strategy because one of the great money grabs in the history of the world. And it's even, it just keeps getting more entertaining because now all these AI people, you what are they calling it? They're all pissed off that like they're claiming that like it was lifted out of their model. What are they calling this now?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 84

So can I please play the under on this? So I think you're totally wrong. me, like, so just to push back, I agree that a bunch of Facebook people have gone there, right, over time. And I have a much more cynical read than you do about that, which is here's what happened. No, no, no, it's actually, it's much more cynical.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 93

Look, it doesn't need to be because it can just offload it all right just offloads it doesn't I don't believe it's all on the device no way but

— Sam Lessin, Episode 58

Guys, I gotta tell you, listen, the email agent thing, I was on with an entrepreneur, actually two in the last week, and he's like, "Well, I have, like, the... I call the agent, and I text the agent." And I was like, "Yeah, but email's by far the best," and he's like, "Yeah, it is." Email's sick. The multithreading of it is so good, right? I don't know. Anyone who's texting with their agent doesn't get it.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 164

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