Nov 1, 2024 · 1h 4m · more-or-less
#71: Big Tech Earnings and the AI Revolution · More or Less Podcast
0:00 / 0:00
▶ Watch on YouTube →
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, hosts Dave Morin, Jessica Lessin, Sam Lessin, and Brit Morin analyze Big Tech quarterly earnings, the rapid rise of AI-assisted software engineering, and platform attention monetization. They also dissect the media and political fallout surrounding Jeff Bezos's Washington Post endorsement decision alongside personal discussions on consumer technology, parenting, and pop culture.
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 99.5% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.4 Guest teaching 1.9 Guest disagreement 3.4 The hosts pushing back 3.3
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 27:50 Accusation of cynicism over Meta's product strategy
Sam flatly dismisses Dave's framing that Meta's core VR strategy is strapping hardware to people's faces to capture screen time, labeling it an overly cynical take.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 27:55 Dave rejects Sam's cynicism labelDave immediately counters Sam's dismissal, firmly stating that analyzing screen time and hardware capture is not cynical but the literal business reality of the platform.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 14:55 Dave breaks down Cursor and Claude 3.5 SonnetDave educates Jessica on the specific developer tooling advancements over the preceding months, explaining how Anthropic's Sonnet and Cursor integrated into VS Code have accelerated software engineering.
The host holds their own ▶ 52:45 Jessica details editorial standards against CEO op-edsJessica showcases her journalistic rigor and editorial independence by detailing how she refused to publish an anti-Trump op-ed from three prominent tech CEOs because they refused to attach their names to their arguments.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| More or Less Podcast Official Title Sequence | 3 | 1 | 2 | 2 | The co-hosts engage in informal banter about hardware upgrades and phone overheating. Dave shares his experience with the Opal screen time app, while Sam jokingly proposes absurd anti-addiction product features. | |
| Big Tech Earnings and the AI Coding Revolution | 7 | 3 | 4 | 3 | The hosts break down quarterly earnings from Google, Microsoft, and Meta. Dave explains the rapid developer adoption of Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Cursor, walking Jessica through the technological shift in AI coding workflows. | |
| Attention Economics, Social Platforms, and Ad Monetization | 7 | 4 | 6 | 6 | A vigorous debate unfolds regarding Meta's attention economics and whether user volume still matters versus monetization per minute. Sam accuses Dave of a cynical framing regarding VR headsets, and Dave firmly refutes the label. | |
| Parenting, Media Literacy, and Election Night Broadcasts | 3 | 1 | 4 | 4 | Jessica talks about using election night maps to teach her young children math and media literacy. Sam pushes back skeptically on election realities, and Jessica playfully rejects his proposal to host an election night livestream. | |
| The Creator Election and Cults of Personality | 7 | 2 | 4 | 4 | Dave posits that creators and cults of personality are replacing algorithmic targeting as the primary political battleground. Sam extends the thesis by arguing deepfakes have destroyed baseline institutional trust, driving voters toward feudal trust networks. | |
| Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post Endorsements | 8 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Jessica provides journalistic expertise examining Jeff Bezos's decision to end presidential endorsements at The Washington Post. She explains the institutional divide between news and opinion desks and shares a behind-the-scenes account of rejecting an anonymous CEO op-ed. | |
| Washington Post Subscriber Fallout and Boycott Reactions | 7 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Jessica analyzes the fallout of the Post losing 250,000 subscribers, placing it in the context of subscription tiering and churn dynamics. The group discusses the irony of readers protesting Bezos by canceling news subscriptions rather than Amazon Prime. | |
| Pop Culture Recommendations and Female Celebrity Alliances | 3 | 1 | 3 | 3 | The conversation shifts to light pop culture, discussing female pop stars supporting each other on tour. Dave and Sam view these appearances through a transactional lens as calculated PR and audience bundling. | |
| Time's Best Inventions, Smart Toilets, and Microbiome Testing | 4 | 1 | 2 | 2 | The co-hosts discuss Time's inventions list, venture diligence in smart toilets and microbiome testing, and contrast their family approaches to Halloween before closing the episode. |
Statements from this episode (23)
Morin: Apple's iPhone 16 lacks good cases and basic product polish
“There's no cases, like the case stuff, it's like they've cut all of the good cases. They don't make good cases for it anymore. It's very, it's like, it's a very strange product in this way. There's a bunch of details that are just missing.”
Lessin: Vision Pro is the most expensive device per minute used
“I do maintain that if you want to say, Cost per minute of use that the Vision Pro is probably the most expensive device in the history of the world.”
Lessin: AI impact limited to customer service, cloud, and ad optimization
“I think that the idea that there's some product revolution coming I'm skeptical of, but, you know, knocking out some customer service workers, shaving, making EBITDA a little better, You know, pumping some cloud, pumping some ads, that's like bread and butter.”
Lessin: Google says 25 percent of its new code is AI-generated
“Google had the headline that it, 25% of the code written at the company is originated with AI and then checked by people.”
Morin: No Silicon Valley software engineer will surrender AI coding tools
“Like, there's no software engineer in the valley that isn't, is going to give up the AI software engineering tools. It's just, this is the future now.”
Morin: Claude 3.5 Sonnet was the true inflection point for AI-generated code
“I think you can actually trace the act, the true moment that the change happened to the Claude Sonnet, Anthropics Claude model called Sonnet, 3.5. That was the real moment when things, I think it was the inflection moment where suddenly the code that this mode…”
Morin: Cursor enables software developers to write code 10 times faster
“And because of that, it makes it really easy to generate a lot of code very quickly in the same interface you're used to using. And you're just moving, I would argue at least 10 times faster than you were three months ago.”
Lessin: LLMs offer the highest leverage in ad creative and targeting
“Ad creative targeting, like these are the places that LLMs have by far the most leverage in the moment we're in.”
Lessin: Snap inverted its historical cycle of post-earnings stock crashes
“Every single quarter, Snap magically does this thing where they have terrible earnings and, like, the stock tanks, and then slowly people start to think it might work again and it'll increase back up, and they have earnings in the tanks. And for the first time…”
Lessin: Snap stock is trading below half its IPO price
“They're all the way back up to less than half of their IPO price.”
Morin: Spiegel warned that simplifying Snap's user experience will hurt metrics
“Evan gave the guidance that this will hurt our numbers, but we don't care because we're, we want to, you know, go for a better experience for the people that are our core user base and trade off the other way.”
Lessin: Regulators would lose their minds if Meta captured 3 hours daily
“If people were actually using Meta products 2:03 hours a day, regulators would lose their fucking minds.”
Morin: Meta's hardware strategy is identical to Comcast's living room cable box
“It's like literally no different than, it's literally no different than Comcast putting the box in your living room. That's all Meta's trying to do, right? Like, they're developing hardware to increase.”
Brit Morin: YouTube's $50B revenue makes it bigger than Netflix's $37B
“Did you guys see that YouTube within Google's earnings is actually now is a fifty billion dollar revenue generating company, which if you don't count Meta as a media company makes YouTube kind of the number one and Netflix now is, is thirty seven billion at nu…”
Lessin: Consumer internet growth requires helping users get laid or get paid
“I just think humans are pretty simple. Like we want to get laid and get paid. The internet is pretty simple. You can like watch video on it. You can read shit on it. Like you can talk to people on it. Like, they're just like, it's just not that complicated. Ri…”
Lessin: AI deepfakes drive voters to trust individual creators over institutions
“What's happened is there's been enough of it that everyone's just decided that nothing is real or it's too hard to figure out what's real and what's not real. And so they're just like, that's all noise. Right? And so as a result, there's no truth signal in any…”
Lessin: Elon Musk has no persuasion pull with swing voters
“Elon has no pull. With the voters that matter in this, right? Because Elon's community, this is the thing about the right creators, is Elon those people are gonna probably vote for Trump anyway, right? The people that he speaks to”
Morin: Democrats built swing-state local print newspapers to target suburban women
“I went to this big cabal, you know, this was two years ago. I think I've talked about it in the pod before. It was like this secret meeting. Lots of people from the democratic side. And they were talking about how one of the big pieces of infrastructure that t…”
Lessin: Jeff Bezos and all major tech CEOs fear a Trump presidency
“It seems like Bezos, like, by the way, every other major CEO I know, is really scared of a Trump presidency.”
Lessin: Three famous tech CEOs pitched an anonymous anti-Trump op-ed
“Three very well-known tech CEOs reached out to me over the weekend with an op-ed arguing against a Trump presidency and what it would mean for tech. Well-known names. You know them all. Every, every listener of this pod will. And it was a very, it was almost t…”
Lessin: The Washington Post lost 250,000 subscribers over the endorsement decision
“The Washington Post, which is about 10% of their subscribers.”