Aug 2, 2024 · 1h 7m · more-or-less
#58: The Death of Friends · More or Less Podcast
Sam Lessin · 27m spoken Jessica Lessin · 13m spoken Dave Morin · 11m spoken Brit Morin · 6m spoken Podcast Theme Singer · 16s 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, Britt Morin, Dave Morin, and Sam Lessin dissect the social rituals of East Coast elites, examine the diverging monetization realities of Big Tech's artificial intelligence boom, and debate how synthetic bot companions are eroding authentic human connection. The hosts also analyze the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, exploring the cultural spectacle of viral athletes, broadcast innovations on Peacock, and the evolving business dynamics of athlete creator rights.
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 88% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 6.4 Guest teaching 2.2 Guest disagreement 2.1 The hosts pushing back 2.8
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 25:50 Britt tells Sam to read the product FAQs
When Sam dismissively claims it is impossible for the Friend device to store all user audio locally, Britt directly refutes his assertion and bluntly tells him to read the FAQs.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 39:20 Sam rejects AI-generated conversation zingsSam outright rejects Britt's optimistic framing of wearable AI generating snappy social one-liners, arguing that canned bot responses carry zero authenticity or value.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 24:15 Britt briefs hosts on Avi Schiffman's Friend hardwareBritt educates the hosts on the background of Avi Schiffman, the $1.8 million domain acquisition, and the exact hardware specifications of the 99-dollar pendant.
The host holds their own ▶ 1:01:46 Dave cites US Ski Team governance on athlete creator rightsDave demonstrates authoritative expertise by citing his ten-year tenure on the US Ski Team board to address the unresolved tension between sports federations and creator-athlete contracts.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Summer Check-In and Sam's Harvard Critique | 6 | 0 | 1 | 1 | Sam outlines his detailed thesis on Harvard's institutional crisis, categorizing cultural, hiring, and governance issues. Dave and Jessica facilitate the discussion while Britt makes brief social interjections. The hosts control the framing completely with no pushback or schooling. | |
| East Coast Summer Banter and Brand Prestige | 4 | 3 | 3 | 2 | The group discusses East Coast summer culture and Amy Griffin's Hamptons conference. Britt corrects Jessica on the exact attendee count and clarifies Meghan Markle's nametag convention, offering playful resistance to the hosts' East Coast fashion banter. | |
| Hollywood-Tech Convergence and Outside Perspectives on AI | 5 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Britt shares firsthand observations from lunch discussions with fashion designers regarding their superficial grasp of AI. The hosts synthesize this by contrasting mainstream misconceptions with Silicon Valley insider realities. | |
| Hamptons Networking Intensity and Coastal Tech Influx | 6 | 2 | 4 | 6 | Britt argues the Hamptons has newly morphed into a tech networking hub like South by Southwest. Dave and Sam push back forcefully, pointing out that Wall Street dealmaking and social climbing have defined the Hamptons for decades. | |
| Tech Earnings Analysis: Meta's Ad Machine Versus Microsoft | 8 | 0 | 1 | 3 | Sam articulates a deep operational contrast between Meta's immediate ad-optimization monetization and Microsoft's struggle to resell cloud capacity. Jessica provides earnings reporting context while Britt asks basic clarifying questions. | |
| Apple Intelligence, On-Device Silicon, and Hardware Cycles | 8 | 0 | 0 | 2 | Dave shares detailed user testing of the iOS 18.1 Apple Intelligence beta, drawing historical parallels to PC chip upgrade cycles in the 1990s. Sam concurs and analyzes the long-term hardware defensibility. | |
| Cloud AI Revenue Realities and TikTok's Azure Deal | 6 | 5 | 5 | 4 | Britt introduces the Friend AI hardware device, detailing founder Avi Schiffman and technical specs. When Sam flatly rejects the claim that data is stored strictly on-device, Britt pushes back firmly, instructing him to read the product FAQs. | |
| The Death of Friends and Bot-Driven Social Networks | 7 | 2 | 2 | 3 | Dave and Sam analyze Zuckerberg's forecast that bots will outnumber humans, reflecting on Facebook's historical follower graph missteps. Britt interjects to question compliance and state her preference for lower volume. | |
| The AI Noise Machine and the Compression Cycle | 7 | 0 | 0 | 1 | Dave and Sam discuss how on-device AI will homogenize communication, illustrating a pointless cycle of AI generating decks and summarizing them back down. Host expertise is high with no guest opposition. | |
| Conversational AI Companions and the Battle for Attention | 6 | 4 | 4 | 6 | Britt describes people spending hours conversing with Pi and suggests wearable AI will provide real-time conversation quips. Sam shuts down the premise, arguing that AI-scripted retorts carry zero social value. | |
| AI-Generated Content, Spammed Inboxes, and Modern Feudalism | 7 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Sam argues AI-generated spam is destroying cold email and recruiting, returning society to relationship-based fiefdoms. Britt adds technical context about ATS keyword algorithms, playfully teasing Sam about his feudalism thesis. | |
| The Collapse of robots.txt and Fighting Web Scrapers | 8 | 1 | 1 | 2 | Dave and Sam dissect the breakdown of web scraping conventions and robots.txt. Sam presents his countermeasure of data chaffing to poison scraper pipelines, while Jessica highlights journalistic integrity constraints. | |
| Viral Olympic Celebrities from Pommel Horse to Rugby | 5 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Britt highlights breakout viral Olympic stars including Stephen Nedoroscik, educating the hosts on his nerd-to-hero narrative. The hosts discuss sports media coverage and celebrate Gabriel Medina's viral surf photo. | |
| Debating Judged Olympic Events, Skateboarding, and Breakdancing | 5 | 3 | 3 | 4 | Sam criticizes judged Olympic events like rail skateboarding and breakdancing, arguing they degrade the Games. Britt highlights the innovative multi-view streaming UI on Peacock and corrects Sam's pronunciation of Katie Ledecky. | |
| Olympic Athletes, Social Media Rights, and Creator Contracts | 8 | 1 | 2 | 2 | Dave leverages his decade on the board of the US Ski Team to discuss whether athletic governing bodies should contractually claim athlete social media rights to build unified media narratives. Britt makes brief playful family banter. |
Statements from this episode (33)
Lessin: Tens of thousands read the 1636 Forum's weekly Harvard newsletter
“We have tens of thousands of people reading our weekly newsletter, which is kind of the axios of Harvard for what's going on and hopefully how to fix it.”
Britt Morin: Amy Griffin's annual Hamptons summit had 200 attendees
“No, it was 200. I counted the rows.”
Lessin: Uninformed East Coast people believe AI will take over everything
“Wandering on the East Coast and talking to people on the East Coast about AI that know nothing about AI is, boy, do they have opinions and believe it's going to take over everything.”
Dave Morin: AI is just a cloud business facing identical problems
“The, that AI is just a cloud business. It's going to run into the same problems.”
Sam Lessin: Meta has direct AI utility while Microsoft must sell it
“Because they have an actual use case for AI. Microsoft actually has to sell the fucking AI, right? Because that's the whole thing is not, they can't use it. They got to actually sell it.”
Sam Lessin: Nvidia will crash because AI hardware spending is experimental
“It's gonna be fine for a while, but it's gonna crash because people are, because it's not, it's kind of experimental spend.”
Sam Lessin: Customers are racking Nvidia servers and underutilizing them
“People are racking all of these NVIDIA servers and then under utilizing them, right?”
Morin: Apple's smart replies are far better than Gmail autocomplete
“Smart replies, which is anytime you're text messaging or writing an email, the keyboard automatically suggests like entire sentences for you to include into what you're doing. And the first time it started doing it really kind of shocked me. Like I was taken a…”
Morin: Apple will probably put a native LLM chip on board
“And will Apple actually improve the speed of the chip? Will they put a native LLM chip on board? I think the answer to that question is probably yes.”
Lessin: Shorting Nvidia is crazy, and I would never do it
“I would never short NVIDIA because that is a crazy fucking idea, right? Like I think part of the reason that some of these things rip is because people should be rightly terrified to short them”
Lessin: No company besides Meta is consistently making money on AI
“All I'm saying is like, until people are consistently making money on AI, which no one is other than Meta, It's just a very chaotic period.”
Jessica Lessin: TikTok Pays Microsoft $20M a Month for Azure OpenAI
“I read in the information that TikTok is paying Microsoft Twenty million dollars a month to access open AI through Azure.”
Dave Morin: AI journaling app Dot is the best companion app available
“The one thing I will say is that there's a great app called Dot, which is a former Apple designer that started a AI app. And it's similar, but different in that you give it access to your calendar and you answer some questions, which of all of these apps that …”
Morin: AI boyfriends far outpace AI girlfriends in App Store usage
“Well, there was a piece this week, I'll have to find it, that looked at the data in terms of what's being used in the App Store, and AI boyfriends are far outpacing AI girlfriends, apparently.”
Sam Lessin: Ubiquitous AI companions providing emotional validation are mathematically inevitable
“And like, there's a bunch of lonely people, and actually just mathematically, if everyone wants a cheering section, right, in their corner, it makes sense that it's going to be, it's too expensive for it to be humans, so it's going to be a chorus of AIs cheeri…”
Lessin: Meta shut down all of its expensive celebrity AI chatbots
“They also just shut down all their like super expensive celebrity bots. I think I read that in the information.”
Morin: Pervasive AI bot feedback will kill friend-based social media
“The hardest thing to do in a network to get engagement is to get the friends to respond to the thing that somebody posts. And so if that's true, then friends in social media will truly die. They already are dying, but like this is maybe the death knell.”
Lessin: Future social networks will ask which bots should follow you
“I think the new onboarding flow for social networks in a bot age, instead of it being like you show up, You're like, who are you? And then who do you want to follow? It'll flip around or you show up and you're like, hi, I'm Sam. And it's like, who do you want …”
Britt Morin: Regulators will force platforms to label AI bots as not real
“They're gonna have to label them as not real. Like, well, No. All the regulatory stuff with AI.”
Morin: Apple's AI keyboard defaults will insidiously influence how billions communicate
“I was sitting there going, wow, this is the new devil in the defaults for how a billion people are going to use AI every single day. This thing is recommending what I should say in response to my friend that I'm text messaging.”
Sam Lessin: Nvidia Creates Little Real Value Powering Redundant AI Cycles
“Nvidia is a three trillion dollar company selling a machine that takes meaning and generates a bunch of noise around it, and then flips around and compresses back the noise to the meaning, and like, what have you done, right? Like, you've created no value, rig…”
Sam Lessin: Real-world AI assistant startups face fatal business model flaws
“There are real business model problems with it, actually, from my experience that have nothing to do with technology. It makes me extremely skeptical of the startups that are trying to interact in the real world as your assistant.”
Sam Lessin: Short AI companions because algorithmic feeds beat them for attention
“Yeah, I'd be short this stuff because your AI girlfriend better be damn entertaining to be, to compete with literally a billion people producing content for your attention with an algorithmic feed. I think that's really hard, right?”
Morin: Most pitch emails are ignored now because they are LLM-generated
“I don't take most pitch emails seriously anymore, because they're all LLM generated, and you can tell.”
Sam Lessin: Cover Letters Are Worthless Due to Cheap AI Generation
“Cover letters are fucking worthless now, right, because, like, they're too cheap To send.”
Lessin: AI Will Limit Interactions to Vetted People and Known Networks
“I do think, unfortunately, what it really is gonna do is limit our willingness to interact with people we don't know or aren't vetted.”
Morin: WhatsApp will win the AI era because it has real communities
“I've been thinking that, like, WhatsApp actually ends in the most success in social with all of this AI stuff, because they're actually real communities.”
Morin: Anthropic rotates bot names to bypass web scraper blocks
“And suddenly you've got this problem that I was reading about this week where Anthropix changing the name of their bots. They're creating 10 more bots. Developers are having to, like, you know, block this bot and that bot and this name and that name. It's a bu…”
Lessin: OpenAI's research origins gave startups cover to ignore scraping rules
“People like OpenAI stood on the grounds of, we're doing God's work, and we're an academic research thing, we're not a for-profit thing, and that gives us the license, because what we're doing is important, and because we aren't doing it for profit, to break a …”
Lessin: The only defense against AI scrapers is feeding them fake data
“What you basically do if you want to fuck with these guys is you don't actually shut them off. You basically try to identify them and then give them, feed them bad shit. Right. So you basically feed them all the wrong stuff. Use AI. Again, this goes back to th…”