Aug 9, 2024 · 57m · more-or-less
#59: Google: Can it Outrun Regulation? · More or Less Podcast
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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, Brit Morin, Sam Lessin, and Dave Morin analyze the landmark federal antitrust ruling against Google, the shifting economics of artificial intelligence and web scraping, and the localized realities of consumer inflation.
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 99.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.2 Guest teaching 3.1 Guest disagreement 4.0 The hosts pushing back 3.9
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 23:13 Sam Dismisses OpenAI as FTX
Sam forcefully rejects the strategic premise of OpenAI's Opal investment, declaring OpenAI's core business is failing, comparing it directly to FTX, and claiming it is headed to zero.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 15:10 Jessica and Brit Reject No-Monopoly ClaimWhen Dave and Sam claim Google is not a monopoly because of Meta and Amazon advertising competition, Brit and Jessica immediately shut down the framing by distinguishing ad markets from search and citing Google's 94.9% mobile search share.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 14:04 Brit Details Apple Services Revenue DependencyBrit educates the group on the concrete financial stakes of the Google-Apple search agreement, breaking down the exact numbers: $20 billion from Google represents nearly a quarter of Apple's entire $85 billion services division.
The host holds their own ▶ 25:35 Jessica Demonstrates AI Content LaunderingJessica leverages proprietary reporting from The Information, demonstrating firsthand how ChatGPT scrapes paywalled executive departure scoops and launders attribution through secondary aggregator links.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Opening Banter: Brat Hair Summer and Cultural Memes | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | Lighthearted opening banter among co-hosts discussing Charli XCX's Brat summer meme, hair styles, and Olympics pop culture. No formal pushback or deep subject expertise displayed. | |
| Massive Festival Crowds, Taylor Swift, and Cultural Safety | 4 | 2 | 3 | 3 | The hosts touch on festival crowd sizes, Taylor Swift Vienna cancellations, and campaign branding around Kamala Harris. Brit argues for calling female candidates by their last names while Dave counters that Kamala is superior branding. | |
| Show and Tell: Fascial Scrapers and Social Ad Arbitrage | 6 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Sam brings in a fascial scraper to illustrate social ad arbitrage, contrasting high Instagram customer acquisition costs with Amazon fulfillment economics. The group explores the clearing price dynamics of DTC products. | |
| Google Antitrust Ruling: Search Monopoly and the Apple Deal | 7 | 4 | 5 | 5 | Jessica outlines the antitrust ruling invalidating Google's default search arrangement on Apple devices. Sam and Dave challenge the court's monopoly definition and lack of consumer harm, while Brit cites Google's 94.9% mobile search share. | |
| Tech Regulation, Election Stakes, and Regulatory Evasion Tactics | 6 | 4 | 4 | 4 | Discussion centers on tech regulatory risk under Lina Khan and election stakes. Sam argues tech companies historically outrun regulators, while Jessica points to blocked acquisitions like Figma and workarounds like reverse acquihires. | |
| OpenAI's Opal Investment and AI Content Laundering | 7 | 4 | 7 | 6 | Sam aggressively derides OpenAI's $60M Opal investment as an FTX-like venture distraction and declares OpenAI a poor business losing money. Jessica pushes back on his cynicism and reveals how ChatGPT launders Information scoops. | |
| AI Scraping Scandals, Copyright Battles, and Chatbot Disillusionment | 6 | 3 | 4 | 4 | The conversation shifts to NVIDIA and Perplexity content scraping, followed by Dave's positive testimony on building tools with coding copilots. Sam agrees on developer leverage but stays bearish on generic AI infrastructure margins. | |
| Runway AI, Avatar Animation, and Creator Arbitrage | 4 | 3 | 7 | 6 | Brit demonstrates Runway's avatar animation tool, prompting Sam to dismiss it as an uncanny gimmick that no creator will sustain value from. Brit retorts that volume and short-term arbitrage are vital for digital creators. | |
| Tesla Karaoke Mics and Autonomous In-Car Entertainment | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | Brit highlights Tesla's new in-car karaoke microphones with anti-howl technology. Sam mocks it as distraction narrative for self-driving cars, prompting a joke about Waymo karaoke shuttles. | |
| Waymo's San Francisco Expansion and Uber's Future | 6 | 4 | 4 | 4 | The panel discusses Waymo's rapid scaling across San Francisco and what it means for Uber's platform economics, driver compensation, and long-term viability in an autonomous future. | |
| Airbnb Market Softening and Amenity-Rich Office Spaces | 6 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Dave reports rural Montana property managers abandoning Airbnb to return to long-term leases, while Sam notes centralized hotels offer superior reliable service. They review commercial real estate adding hotel-like amenities. | |
| Southampton Culture, Inflation, and Fast-Casual Value Menus | 5 | 4 | 4 | 4 | The hosts transition from Southampton pricing and fast-casual meal bundles to female longevity and strength training research cited from Stacy Sims on Huberman's podcast, debating heavy lifting versus rep volume. |
Statements from this episode (25)
Lessin: Avoiding identity politics wins Harris white male support
“I'm into the fact that she is not playing race and gender cards, and it's just playing, let's talk about policy, let's talk about Donald Trump if you must, but like, I actually really appreciate that. I think that's winning her a lot of white male votes of lik…”
Lessin: Demand generation, not fulfillment, drives the cost of modern internet commerce
“The reason that this one dollar piece of metal is a 110 dollars on Instagram is because someone had to pay to make me think I want it, right? It's all about reaching the audience, right, and incepting the demand. That's the expensive part of this shit at this …”
Morin: Paid social customer acquisition kills direct-to-consumer businesses
“Which is why none of these businesses work.”
Lessin: Extremely bullish on AI only for Google and Meta ads
“I'm, as, if you hadn't heard, I'm extremely long AI only in the case of ads optimization and making a shitload of money for Facebook and Google”
Brit Morin: Google's $20B search deal accounts for a quarter of Apple's services revenue
“Google paid Apple, twenty billion for the default search deal, and Apple's services division, which this revenue went into, generated eighty-five billion. So about a quarter of its services division is coming Directly from Google.”
Lessin predicts federal antitrust search ruling against Google will be struck down
“So I personally think if this is, if the case ended up coming down, they, that the courts defined it as the search ad market was not a monopoly, but the search consumer was, and that I, my money says this gets struck down, which is why the stock isn't.”
Morin: FTC Chair Lina Khan has completely stopped US tech innovation
“Yeah, she's been successful in completely stopping the innovation cycle in the United States so that nobody can get acquired.”
Lessin: Microsoft, Amazon, and Google Used Multi-Billion Acqui-Hires to Avoid Regulators
“These deals, we've now had three, basically like billions of dollars of acquihires of teams to get around acquiring companies. Microsoft's done it, Amazon's done it, and now Google's done it.”
Brit Morin: OpenAI invested $60M into Opal Camera
“OpenAI investing sixty million dollars into Opal this week.”
Lessin predicts OpenAI equity value is headed to zero
“Guys, I've been saying OpenAI zero the entire time. And I'm gonna keep saying it.”
Lessin: AI chatbot summaries will not kill The Information's business
“Texting a chat bot for a piece of information, like, it's not, I mean, That is not going to kill our business. If we continue to do that well, we're going to have an amazing business and it's much, much deeper than that.”
Sam Lessin: Nvidia Scrapped an LLM Over Scraping Netflix Content
“You know what also got reported this week was how NVIDIA scrapped their large language model they had been working on that had been stealing all this information, like, in content from Netflix and everyone else, and they realized, oh, shit, we really can't lau…”
Lessin: AI startups only win because Big Tech fears copyright lawsuits
“The only way startups win, right, I think in this world, is if the really big companies basically are too prissy And then also are too legal. Like they're suitable. They're real targets. So they can't do this stuff. And then they let all of the babies, like th…”
Lessin: AI infrastructure economics are worse than traditional cloud models
“I just don't think there's any, like, it's not a great business. It's just like cloud infrastructure, but worse, right? From a business model perspective.”
Sam Lessin: Creator success requires edge and differentiation, not generic AI tools
“Is, it's exactly the type of shit that just everyone comes blind to is everyone does the same thing, and then no one gives a shit. The whole creative thing is finding edge. It's edge. You gotta do something different.”
Morin predicts a one- to two-year AI video arbitrage for creators
“Yeah, because they will think it's me, especially in this short window of opportunity we have in the next year or two, when all the creators haven't figured it out yet.”
Lessin: Nvidia does not justify its current meme-stock valuation
“You should not short NVIDIA because you can't short anything that's a meme stock that way, it's too dangerous, which is part of why they had such high valuations, but yes, it does not justify its valuation.”
Lessin: Uber is a terrible business until it eliminates human drivers
“Uber's a shitty company until they get rid of all the drivers, and then it's actually kind of an interesting company.”
Sam Lessin: Lyft Is Finished as a Major Competitor
“Lyft is gone. Nine, eight dollars a share, what, there's shit in the bed.”
Morin: Helena property managers dropped Airbnbs for long-term residential leases
“All of the property management companies in my hometown that were in the business of Servicing Airbnbs were getting out of the business. They gave, you know, 60 day notices to like every Airbnb in town that they were servicing because they want to get into the…”
Lessin: Offices and homes cyclically out-compete each other generationally
“It's just the cycle. It's like your home out competes your shitty office. So then your office has to get better. Right. And then you're like, cool. Now my office can out compete. You're like, oh shit. Now it's your home has to get better. And like people just …”
Jessica Lessin: Most wellness and quantified self research is tuned to men, not women
“Has been, it's all of that great stuff, many of which people in this community, in the tech community are very interested about, has been very tuned to men, and there's been actually very little research on how some of the, anything from, like, fasting to ice …”
Lessin predicts creatine will be widely recommended for women within a year
“All I'm saying is that the benefits of, for men, the white male, overstudied white male of creatine are clear. I mean, you're like, women are so different. I promise you in a year, they'll be like, oh yeah, creatine, great for women too.”