Sep 4, 2026 · 55m · more-or-less
AI Agents Are Going Rogue. Should We Be Worried? │Claude vs. Grok, Tesla vs Waymo, Google vs Canva · More or Less Podcast
Sam Lessin · 17m spoken Jessica Lessin · 10m spoken Dave Morin · 10m spoken Brit Morin · 7m spoken Sudarshan "Suds" · 5m spoken
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of the 'More or Less' podcast, co-hosts Jessica Lessin, Sam Lessin, Dave Morin, Brit Morin, and guest Sudarshan 'Suds' debate AI model censorship, multi-agent developer workflows, the competing economics of Waymo versus Tesla, enterprise software shifts, and the societal dangers of synthetic media.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 89.3% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.2 Guest teaching 1.6 Guest disagreement 1.0 The hosts pushing back 2.1
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 47:44 Suds Rejects Canva Disruption Narrative
Suds directly counters Brit and Jessica's premise that Google Pics will disrupt Canva, aggressively asserting that Canva's founders will win any knife fight and retain their compounding scale.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 43:20 Jessica Demands Technical Explanation of CIWhen Suds admits he cannot explain what CI actually stands for or how it operates, Jessica firmly interrupts and refuses to let him slide, insisting he must explain it if he is pitching it as his top incubated bet.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 47:44 Suds Educates Hosts on Consumer Product MoatsSuds explains Wesley Chan's framework on compounding basis points and founder resilience, schooling the hosts on why incumbent consumer design platforms withstand Big Tech feature replication.
The host holds their own ▶ 16:00 Dave Reframes Agent Hype into Sandboxing RealitiesDave cuts through media sensationalism around rogue agent swarms, demonstrating deep engineering knowledge of audit control planes, sandbox boundaries, and enterprise deployments at Microsoft and Red Hat.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Episode Preview: AI Censorship, Autonomous Vehicles, and Digital Reality | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Introductory banter and preview clips regarding Backstreet Boys at the Sphere and cultural spectacle. No guest is present yet, and conversation is light personal storytelling. | |
| Sam's Recursive AI Loop and Personalized Content Pipelines | 5 | 0 | 0 | 1 | Sam details his automated local AI agent pipelines for generating kids' media and deploying iOS apps to a Mac mini. The co-hosts joke about AI psychosis while Dave references BitRig's automated deployment framework. | |
| Claude vs. Grok: Content Censorship, Preachiness, and AI Alignment | 5 | 0 | 0 | 2 | Sam contrasts Claude's moralistic refusal to filter names with Grok's permissive database querying, prompting a discussion on model alignment and data sovereignty. Sam pushes back on Dave's plug for fixed-rate inference startup Luna Route. | |
| Rogue Agent Swarms: Dwarkesh's Report and OpenAI Astra | 7 | 0 | 0 | 2 | The hosts analyze Dwarkesh Patel's reporting on rogue agent swarms and OpenAI's recurrent depth model Astra. Dave provides deep domain expertise around agent sandboxing, observability, and enterprise deployments at Microsoft and Red Hat. | |
| Multi-Agent Workstations, Token Economics, and OpenClaw 2.0 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 1 | Brit outlines her multi-agent terminal setup while Dave announces OpenClaw 2.0's multiplayer agent architecture. Sam analyzes token unit economics and data sovereignty vs model margin compression. | |
| The Enterprise Slack Debate and Salesforce's 'Claudeforce' Partnership | 6 | 0 | 0 | 4 | Dave strongly critiques Slack's viability for agents, while Brit and Jessica push back, citing Meta's migration, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations, and enterprise trust. Jessica details Salesforce's Claudeforce initiative. | |
| Guest Sudarshan 'Suds' on Gen Z Investing and AI Infrastructure Theses | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Guest Sudarshan 'Suds' joins to discuss his transition from 85 angel investments to raising venture funds. He outlines an AI infrastructure thesis focused on data centers, energy, and observability while explicitly avoiding application layer bets. | |
| Waymo versus Tesla: Autonomous Driving and Business Models | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Suds reflects on riding in autonomous Waymos as the premier touchpoint with the future. The hosts compare Waymo's expensive capital-intensive hardware and fleet depots with Tesla's distributed fleet and camera-only economics. | |
| Parenting Interruption and Early Zipline Investments | 5 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Following an interruption from Sam's kid's school, Suds brings up Zipline, prompting Sam and Dave to recount early seed bets. The group critiques vanity VC unicorn lists and click-driven rankings. | |
| Marc Benioff's Longevity, Salesforce, and Enterprise Sales | 6 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Suds questions Marc Benioff's multi-decade staying power. Sam and Jessica dissect Benioff's strengths as an unrepentant master salesperson rather than a pure engineer. | |
| Suds' CI Incubation and Early-Stage Investment Philosophy | 6 | 2 | 3 | 6 | Suds discusses incubating a continuous integration startup with Kleiner and Benchmark, but when pressed by Dave and Jessica to define CI, he admits he cannot technically explain it. Jessica sharply calls him out for promoting a thesis he cannot describe, leading to a discussion on founder-centric investing. | |
| Google vs. Canva and Mai Tai Kiteboarding Origins | 6 | 5 | 3 | 3 | Brit highlights Google Pics taking aim at Canva, but Suds pushes back forcefully, arguing Canva's founders are proven knife-fighters with massive TAM and defensible network scale. Sam adds insights on middle-market LLM wrappers and Mai Tai kiteboarding deals. | |
| Taylor Swift AI Deepfake and Disinformation on the Internet | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2 | Brit teases Jessica for believing an AI deepfake of Taylor Swift on Facebook, wrapping up the show with reflections on online reality degradation, Gen Z market cycles, and upcoming holiday plans. |
Statements from this episode (34)
Lessin: Built AI pipeline that autonomously produces and uploads YouTube videos
“So I literally now have a pipeline where I ask a question and it fully produces and deploys YouTube videos that are three to seven minutes that are excellent on like any topic I want through to YouTube.”
Lessin: Gave AI full control of a Mac mini to deploy iOS apps via TestFlight
“So I actually just gave my cloud cloud and this thing's full control of a Mac mini down to screen, like full, full, full control. So that it can deploy through test flight all its own apps from single commands.”
Dave Morin: Anthropic Is the Anti-Free Speech AI Company
“Sam, we've always known that Anthropic is the anti-free speech company.”
Sam Lessin: Frontier AI Guardrails Are Pointless in a Multi-Model World
“You're gonna have a few of these very powerful models. It's like stupid for them to limit what you're doing with these. It would make sense if they were the only model in the world, but it's kind of like having a group of people, and you go to one of them, you…”
Sam Lessin: Luna Route's Fixed-Fee Unlimited Inference Will Go Bankrupt
“That's clearly going to go bankrupt.”
Dave Morin: Fixed-Rate Inference Pricing Is Coming for Certain Workloads
“I think fixed rate inference is coming, and it's going to be a real thing. It's not going to be for every workload, but it's going to be for certain workloads. It's going to work great.”
Morin: Anthropomorphizing AI Models Does Great Damage to Society
“This does great damage to the discourse and to society, anthropomorphizing these things.”
Morin: Eager to Invest in Startups Sandboxing and Observing AI Agents
“All this really says is that we have to have enormous amounts of energy and new startups totally up for investing in them that focus on observability of agents and controlling and sandboxing agents into very strong boxes, right?”
Brit Morin: GPT has caught up to Gemini in image generation
“GPT has really, like, gotten up on Gemini in terms of image generation.”
Sam Lessin: Coatue data shows power users consume an insane volume of tokens
“KOTU actually published a chart today just showing like that power raisers are using like an insane number of tokens.”
Sam Lessin: Universal scripting makes AI models interoperable, destroying provider margins
“When you get down to a lower level, because you can no longer have on-off APIs, because everything is scriptable, because these things can script any interface and interact anyway, as long as you have data sovereignty, meaning like it's your data, they're all …”
Sam Lessin: Nobody in AI will make money except infrastructure providers
“I have no idea how anyone's gonna make any money ever. Right. I just don't get it. You know, the only one I think makes money on this is like, I spend a lot on digital ocean because now that my data is more valuable, I use even more data.”
Sam Lessin: AI labs are definitely stealing and training on user data
“Oh, no, to be clear, they're definitely stealing all my data as we go. There's no question about that.”
Dave Morin: No AI agent system currently offers a multiplayer experience
“One of the things that no agent system has today is a multiplayer experience.”
Lessin: Meta is switching to Slack over Google for AI agents
“But Meta is moving to it because it thinks it's better than Google for agents.”
Dave Morin: Slack is the worst AI agent collaboration platform
“Like Slack is the worst agent collaboration platform. One simple thing to understand, you put two agents in the same channel on Slack, they cannot communicate without a bunch of weird software in the background.”
Lessin: Anthropic's IPO is around the corner
“You may also want to know the Anthropic IPOs around the corner, so this may seem like a relevant fact.”
Suds: Invest in whatever extends OpenAI and Anthropic revenue, avoid app layer
“My general working thesis was like, you should probably just invest in anything that Enables or extends like Anthropic and OpenAI's revenue. And then the hedge to that would be open source. So just go over there and the app layer stuff by and large do not enab…”
Jessica Lessin: Musk confirmed he is building natural gas turbine blades
“Elon confirmed, he like re-shared or confirmed a story we wrote that he's getting into building his own blades for like natural gas turbines.”
Suds: Laundry-Folding Robots Will Arrive in Three to Four Years
“We're gonna go from, like, Waymo in, like, 15 cities to, like, robots folding your laundry in four years, three years from now, and it's gonna look really weird.”
Brit Morin: Uses Tesla Self-Driving on 95% of Personal Drives
“I use self-driving on 95% of my drives now.”
Brit Morin: Tesla Robotaxis Will Deploy Instantly Once Legalized
“It's gonna be so pervasive that they're self-driving cars. Actually self-driving on all the roads instantly as soon as it's legal to do so.”
Dave Morin: Waymo Vehicles Cost Between $250K and $500K Each
“I think these Waymo's cost on the order of 250 to 500 K a piece.”
Lessin: Time excluded Jensen Huang from AI list to drive clicks
“So look, the funny thing about these lists, I'm convinced that Time actually has like Fable running a query, which is not how do you make the best list. It's like, how do you drive the most clicks to a list? And they're doing a perfect job. So of course you ex…”
Jessica Lessin: Prominent media lists are driven by corporate sponsorship
“So it's not just clicks though. The business interests that circulate these lists are intense. And this is how I know it. Because I was wandering the streets of Davos, Switzerland, as one does with friends of mine. And all of a sudden they look at their watch …”
Brit Morin: 95% of people on media lists are pitched by PR
“And also, 95% of people on the list have a PR person that, like, pitched them for the list.”
Jessica Lessin: Marc Benioff runs Salesforce from Hawaii with visiting executives
“Well, first of all, it's impressive he's in the flow and that he does not live here. He lives in Hawaii. His executives all go to Hawaii, however.”
Sam Lessin: Early Salesforce was unintegrated one-off software builds
“So the story I've heard, and someone can correct me in comments, I'm sure someone will, is that when he started Salesforce, it was billed as like this cloud CRM. And this platform, but it was total bullshit. He basically went to a bunch of people and sold them…”
Sam Lessin: Marc Benioff is a pure salesperson, not a builder
“And then you have Benioff again, has been unbelievably successful, but He's not an engineer. He's not a builder. He's a sales guy.”
Suds: AI code volume breaks traditional CI pipelines and raises costs
“Now you have 50 X more code to ship the exact same feature. It's breaking all the Pipelines and like traditional ways of testing, merging, shipping code. And now you basically like drive up your CI costs, you drive up costs associated, and like the speed goes …”
Lessin: Generative AI makes every startup pitch look reasonable to investors
“Now we're at the point where like every company seems reasonable. Because it's all passed through 87 AIs at this point before you see it. And so it's not like the deck, it's like all this stuff seems reasonable.”
Brit Morin: Google is directly targeting Canva with Google Pics and Gemini
“Canva was on this like IPO darling list for so long, and now Google launched Google Pix, P-I-C-S, and without saying they're basically going after Canva, they're going after Canva, and everything is like Gemini integration, Google workspace integration, you co…”
Sam Lessin: Customer support will drive stickiness for non-technical AI software
“Here's the really interesting insight I thought, which is customer service might be what matters. Meaning like most humans, like your mom, if something breaks an anthropic, there is never going to be anyone to call. It's why they can have like 12 employees and…”