Nov 8, 2024 · 1h 9m · more-or-less
#72: Trump's Influencer Strategy Pays Off and the Future of App Building (with Guillermo Rauch!) · More or Less Podcast
Guillermo Rauch · 21m spoken Sam Lessin · 19m spoken Jessica Lessin · 11m spoken Dave Morin · 7m spoken Brit Morin · 3m 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, hosts Jessica Lessin, Sam Lessin, Brit Morin, and Dave Morin analyze Donald Trump's influencer-driven campaign victory alongside Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch. Together, they examine the collapse of traditional media gatekeeping, the real-world impact of election-night AI and prediction markets, and how generative code tools are democratizing software development.
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 65.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 4.2 Guest teaching 4.0 Guest disagreement 1.8 The hosts pushing back 3.2
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:01:21 Guillermo rejects the Cloudflare comparison
Guillermo Rauch emphatically dismisses Sam Lessin's suggestion that Vercel simply pitches itself against Cloudflare, asserting that Cloudflare merely protects legacy architecture rather than enabling users to build.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 44:41 Sam Lessin attacks AI search extractionSam Lessin forcefully rejects Rauch's framing of AI summaries as a benign evolution, arguing that starving web publishers of clicks destroys the fundamental information economy.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 34:00 Guillermo details election botnet attacksGuillermo Rauch educates the hosts on the mechanics of a 150,000-IP distributed attack on election night targeted at manipulating real-time prediction market trading.
The host holds their own ▶ 49:04 Sam and Jessica dispute the software barrierSam and Jessica Lessin draw on their insider publishing expertise to rebut Rauch's claim, proving that editorial quality and audience trust are the real moats rather than software infrastructure.
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 Opening Title Sequence | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Hosts open the episode reflecting on the election outcome and local San Francisco ballot measures. The guest has not yet joined the discussion. | |
| The Death of Gatekeeping and Legacy Media's Crisis | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Hosts analyze Trump's high-volume internet communication strategy versus Harris's traditional broadcast approach and discuss legacy media incentives. The guest has not yet been introduced. | |
| Guillermo Rauch on Vercel and Defending Election Infrastructure | 5 | 7 | 2 | 4 | Guillermo Rauch explains Vercel's front-end architecture and describes mitigating a massive 150,000-IP botnet attack against election prediction markets. Sam Lessin playfully presses him on why Vercel does not charge an extortion fee for security mitigation. | |
| AI Deepfakes and Media Noise in Elections | 4 | 4 | 1 | 2 | The hosts and Rauch discuss why deepfakes had limited political impact compared to general media noise. Rauch advocates owning domains over relying entirely on platform algorithms, and hosts banter about their domain hoarding habits. | |
| AI Search Agents and the Information Commons | 6 | 5 | 3 | 7 | Rauch describes how AI overview summaries in search engines are cannibalizing informational clicks and elevating frontier personal content. Sam Lessin strongly pushes back, arguing that stripping monetization from foundational knowledge creates a tragedy of the commons. | |
| Personal Apps and Lowering Software Barriers | 7 | 6 | 4 | 7 | Rauch and Dave Morin envision a world where AI empowers billions of creators to spin up bespoke personal apps. Jessica and Sam Lessin dispute this premise, arguing that software deployment was never the primary hurdle compared to high-quality reporting and distribution. | |
| Code Generation and Vercel's Defensibility | 7 | 5 | 3 | 6 | Rauch identifies code generation as AI's primary killer app, pointing to GitHub Copilot's impact. Sam Lessin challenges Vercel's defensibility if marginal software construction costs fall to zero, prompting Rauch to defend the necessity of runtime infrastructure and curated design taste. | |
| Lightning Round: Polymarket and Crypto Conviction | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Rauch highlights Polymarket as an exemplary application that succeeded by delivering user value rather than marketing its underlying crypto infrastructure. Sam Lessin agrees that effective technical infrastructure should remain invisible to end users. | |
| Lightning Round: Raycast and Ambient AI Tools | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Rauch shares his daily workflow using Raycast AI to orchestrate multiple LLMs directly at the OS level for proofreading and vector lookup. Hosts compare his disciplined drafting approach to their more spontaneous posting habits. | |
| Vercel vs. Cloudflare in the Enterprise Knife Fight | 6 | 5 | 5 | 6 | Sam Lessin and Jessica Lessin push Rauch to embrace Cloudflare as a direct competitor in his positioning. Rauch dismisses the comparison by stating Cloudflare arrives after software is built rather than facilitating creation, though he concedes enterprise sales are a competitive knife fight. | |
| Crypto Reflections and the Origins of Dogecoin | 5 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Rauch recounts organizing the original DogeCon in San Francisco and explaining Dogecoin's technical origin as a minor Bitcoin fork. Sam Lessin and Dave Morin share personal anecdotes about holding and losing early cryptocurrency balances. | |
| Final Banter and Host Sign-Offs | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Hosts thank Rauch for participating, exchange parting jokes about building websites, and deliver their closing social media sign-offs. |
Statements from this episode (29)
Morin: San Francisco's shift represents the future of liberal politics
“San Francisco is kind of ground zero for, I think what the future of the liberal side of the house looks like. You had a city that 10 years ago experimented with a lot of deeply progressive policies that largely most of them, you could argue, 80% of the progre…”
Lessin: Internet communication resembles seed investing, broadcast is like growth investing
“Internet communication with an open fat pipe where you can speak to everyone all the time lends itself towards going for home runs, thousand X winner statements, thousand X winner moments, and then just like burying very easily everything else, right? It's kin…”
Lessin: Trump used targeted internet influencers while Harris relied on mass media
“Like if you just get down to how do you run a modern campaign with targeted influencers in the places that matter with an open pipe versus mass media, you know, biggest voices like Trump, just like either intentionally or by happenstance has exactly the right …”
Morin: The 2024 US presidential election was the first true podcast election
“To some extent, I think this election is the first real social media election, and it happened in a way that we didn't expect, right? Like, we thought that this was going to happen when Facebook and Twitter in a way, and then through the 20 tens, we thought th…”
Rauch: Vercel Hosted Polymarket and Washington Post During 2024 Election
“In fact, in terms of the election, we hosted the election microsites for Washington post. We hosted polymarket.com, which was extremely hot this election, like quite literally hot in terms of like, How many servers, how much infrastructure it took to help them…”
Rauch: AWS and Azure require weeks and experts for basic setup
“If you use the, like, foundational cloud infrastructure today, like AWS or Azure, it's really, really difficult to turn your idea into reality. It'll take you on team of experts, and it'll take you weeks just to set up the foundations.”
Rauch: Vercel Processes Hundreds of Billions of Requests Monthly
“We do hundreds of billions of requests per month, and we host some of the largest websites on the internet and some of the smallest websites on the internet.”
Rauch: Vercel mitigated a 150,000-IP botnet attack on prediction markets
“The largest attack that we saw, which we estimate was actually probably targeting some of our customers in the sort of like prediction market space for reasons that I can't fully share, but the attack was pretty sizable, a 150,000 APs, a globally distributed b…”
Rauch: 2024 election saw less AI fake content than anticipated
“I think we saw less of the AI will be used for, like, fake content to some extent.”
Jessica Lessin: The public quickly learned to instinctively spot AI deepfakes
“The deep fakes went pretty quickly from the, like, You know, NBC news breaking news alert every time there was a deep fake to kind of like our brains sort of figured it out.”
Sam Lessin: On the internet, deepfakes add noise rather than singular harm
“In a constrained mass media environment, you're super, super scared of like one wrong thing going through the pipe, right? In, in internet era, the reality is like, it's just noise. It just raises the volume of more noise there.”
Rauch: Selling domain names is a terrible business
“We sell domain names, which is actually a terrible business, but we understand the psychology of creators, which is that again, our goal is to go from zero to one as fast as possible with the least amount of latency.”
Rauch: Platform algorithms limit speech, making independent domain ownership essential
“There's this question of like freedom of speech and X that's censored versus not censored and whatever. There's a question of the algorithms, right? Which I think is a meta question. Sir, you can post anything, but will the algorithm select you such that you'r…”
Rauch: AI search tools will absorb traffic for factual content marketing
“And so if what you're producing is content that is sort of like facts in general knowledge, it's very likely that you're never, you're not even going to get back the backlinks. Cause someone's going to search on Google, for example, what is HTTP? It used to be…”
Rauch: Content bypassing AI filters will be experiential and opinion-driven
“When you have content that kind of like bypasses the great AI filter, and most of that I think is going to be experiential, like personal it's probably going to amplify a lot of hot takes and like things that the for you algorithm likes in general, which is li…”
Lessin: AI search summaries will break the internet's economic machine for truth
“You're just going to break the entire machine for truth, right? Because you just get a reflection of whatever the economics are of the system. And if the economics are, oh, we're just going to like, there's no way to monetize it, you know, or even now it's lik…”
Rauch: Google estimates there are four million React engineers globally
“For what we do, which is react, which is like the front end. There's four million is the best estimate we get from Google and for creating interfaces, which is very much like a design thing.”
Morin: Instagram and X are the low-income housing of the internet
“It's like Instagram and X and all these things are like the low income housing of the internet. And like, we need to like move people out of these things into their own housing.”
Lessin: Lowering software technical barriers only solves 10% of building businesses
“And I think there's some marginal advantage to it. But in my mind, that's like a five to 10% problem of like more great businesses, not like the 90% problem.”
Rauch: Generating software is the killer application of AI
“Generating software is actually the killer app of AI.”
Rauch: Natural language AI will trivially grow React developers to 50M
“Like there's four million react developers. I can move that from four million to fifty million trivially, because now like you just speak English to that thing. Even if like it doesn't do a hundred percent of the job, it's just like this, like infinitely avail…”
Rauch: Much of AI output is horrible slop driven by hype
“We do have to hold AI to an insanely high bar because there's way too much spending and way too much hype, and a lot of it is the slop. It's just like, a lot of it looks horrible.”
Rauch: Crypto apps succeed when decentralized infrastructure is hidden under the hood
“What I saw in Polymarket and starting to see in a lot of other companies is give value to the customer and use decentralized infrastructure under the hood, but don't lead with the decentralized infrastructure. That's just an implementation detail.”
Sam Lessin: Beware hype around infrastructure; it only works when it disappears
“Whenever people are excited about infrastructure, beware, right? Like infrastructure should disappear. That's the point of infrastructure. And it only gets exciting once it's gone.”
Rauch: AI will become embedded everywhere until we stop incessantly discussing it
“I do believe that there will be AI embedded into everything to the point where we stop referring to it incessantly. And I think one of those points, one of those places will be the operating system.”
Rauch: Customers Who Build on Vercel Never Need Cloudflare
“With Cloudflare, it's more like the meme of like, I don't think about you, because when customers build on Vercel, they never end up needing Cloudflare, but they're coming to us to build software, not to sort of like proxy it or whatnot.”
Lessin: AI Is Not a New Frontier, but New Weapons for an Existing War
“We're in a fight era, right? Where like, there isn't Terra Nova, like AI is not Terra Nova, right? AI is just new weapons for a war. And so as a result, like, you just want to be like, no, like this is, we're now fighters. AI's are new weapons. And like, we're…”