Apr 19, 2024 · 1h 1m · more-or-less
#43: TikTok’s New App, Tesla’s Sunken Stock, Are Tech Workers Leaving Silicon Valley For Good? · 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, co-hosts Jessica Lessin, Dave Morin, Brit Morin, and Sam Lessin analyze major shifts across the tech landscape, debating California's changing tech dominance, emerging consumer social platforms, and Tesla's mounting leadership and valuation challenges.
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 99.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.5 Guest teaching 4.1 Guest disagreement 4.0 The hosts pushing back 3.8
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 45:10 Sam rejects Tesla's manufacturing prowess
Sam flatly refutes Dave's premise that Tesla is an extraordinary manufacturing powerhouse, asserting that behind the narrative Tesla actually has terrible operational precision and factory efficiency compared to legacy carmakers.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 52:10 Dave challenges Sam's software commodity claim with Apple analogyDave pushes back against Sam treating automotive software as a pure commodity, invoking Apple's integrated ecosystem to argue Tesla's vertical integration creates an unbeatable proprietary experience.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 3:11 Sam unpacks misleading chart statisticsSam dissects the shared tech jobs chart using principles from 'How to Lie with Statistics', highlighting truncated axes and explaining why high-margin worker productivity matters far more than gross headcounts.
The host holds their own ▶ 15:53 Dave details ByteDance's threat and app rollout mechanicsDave demonstrates deep strategic domain expertise by articulating how ByteDance is copying Meta's Threads distribution strategy to spin up alternate surfaces amid US regulatory crackdowns.
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 Welcome and Spring Break Banter | 6 | 4 | 4 | 4 | Sam deconstructs the chart on California tech job losses by citing 'How to Lie with Statistics' and noting truncated axes. Dave and Sam debate whether spreading tech jobs nationally is positive redistribution or simply off-shoring commoditized labor while California retains high-leverage AI profit. | |
| New York Startups, Ambition, and Big Sur Banter | 5 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Jessica brings up New York tech ecosystem perceptions. Sam and Dave debate whether New York's cultural diversity distracts from startup empire building compared to California's singular tech focus, winding into banter about Big Sur landslides. | |
| Analyzing TikTok Notes, Pinterest Competition, and Balayage | 6 | 5 | 5 | 4 | Brit analyzes TikTok Notes and compares it to Pinterest, while Dave explains ByteDance's distribution playbook modeled on Meta's Threads rollout. Sam cynically dismisses it as a rogue product manager promotion attempt before the group playfully bickers about balayage hairstyles on Pinterest. | |
| Cross-Posting Habits and the Decline of Facebook | 6 | 4 | 4 | 4 | Sam describes how Threads and LinkedIn cannibalized his usage of Facebook's blue app, prompting Brit and Dave to mock him for posting on the blue app in 2024. The co-hosts debate persona segregation across social platforms versus pure authenticity. | |
| Evaluating AirChat and Voice-Based Social Media | 5 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Sam and Dave evaluate Naval Ravikant and Brian Norgard's AirChat app. Sam articulates the core product insight that humans prefer speaking while consuming via reading, though notes he has no desire to hear more tech people yelling. | |
| Confronting YouTube Hate Comments and Negative Publicity | 6 | 4 | 5 | 5 | Dave dramatically reads an angry YouTube review calling the podcast 'useless fluff' and propaganda. Brit and Sam recount how 1-star reviews and hate campaigns helped Life360 and Calendly, while Jessica defends journalistic sourcing standards against anti-media sentiment. | |
| Debating Elon Musk's Leadership and Tesla's Governance | 6 | 4 | 4 | 4 | Jessica questions Elon Musk's tenure at Tesla in light of layoffs and stock drops. Dave wonders why Tesla lacks a true operational number two like Gwynne Shotwell, and Sam counters that Musk's ego and net worth are too intimately bound up in Tesla to ever relinquish control during weakness. | |
| Tesla Delivery Slump and Manufacturing Reality Check | 6 | 6 | 6 | 5 | Dave points out Tesla's delivery decline while defending its status as a rare American manufacturing powerhouse. Sam aggressively pushes back, citing industrial insider accounts that Tesla actually has terrible manufacturing precision compared to legacy automakers like GM. | |
| Software Valuation, Apple Analogies, and Autonomous Ambitions | 7 | 5 | 6 | 6 | Dave mounts a bull case for Tesla as a vertically integrated software-hardware network akin to Apple, while Sam and Jessica argue that Tesla lacks actual consumer network lock-in and must either solve autonomous driving or face a massive valuation collapse down to car company multiples. | |
| Pop Culture Club: Taylor Swift's New Album Drop | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Brit introduces Taylor Swift's 'The Tortured Poets Department' drop and clever guerrilla QR code marketing, prompting Sam to joke that Taylor possesses genuine network effects but her stock would be an overpriced meme stock. | |
| Pop Culture Club: BigShinyBalls.com and Targeted Ads | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 | Brit shares BigShinyBalls.com for birthday supplies and Sam quips about being served targeted ads for it on Instagram. The hosts close out the show jokingly urging listeners to downvote the episode on YouTube to boost viral engagement. |
Statements from this episode (24)
Lessin bets California tech worker productivity dwarfs rest of US
“My bet is that the productivity of California tech workers is off the charts compared to the rest of the country.”
Lessin predicts AI tech jobs will concentrate heavily in California
“If you really believe in the AI leverage story, like it's highly centralized in terms of like which companies are going to benefit from it. And I think within those companies, which teams drive the value from it is a small subset of those teams, right? And I d…”
Lessin: New York lacks tech giants because founders aren't empire-building
“I mean, there have been good New York startups, but I do think, like, the problem is, is like, look, there's just, There are too many places for talent to go. There's too much fun to be had, right? Like, if you want to live in New York and have a billion, a si…”
Jessica Lessin: Threads will not be a huge part of Meta's story
“I don't think the, I think the product is quite good, but I think if you look at the arc of Meta, I don't think Threads is going to be a huge part of the story.”
Morin: Meta is pushing Threads harder than any asset in a decade
“More aggressively distributing threads than any asset they've ever distributed in maybe over five years, maybe 10 years.”
Sam Lessin: Pinterest is the company most vulnerable to AI disruption
“See Pinterest and you see those things as a company that is most vulnerable to, like, AI.”
Lessin: LinkedIn shifted from poor app to platform people care about
“LinkedIn has come from being a dog shit app to something people actually care about all of a sudden.”
Dave Morin says he deleted the Facebook mobile app last year
“I deleted the blue app like last year sometime.”
Lessin: Social strategy should be deep authenticity over algorithmic optimization
“My strategy on this stuff is very simple, which is just utter deep authenticity and fuck the network because you'll find the right people. If you like play to what it wants, it's not shocking.”
Sam Lessin: Speaking and reading is the optimal digital interaction format
“In an ideal world, the way to interact with people is you speak and read Right? Like that's the way to, it's better for me to speak and I don't, and listening is too slow. Reading is much faster. So the best thing is speak and read.”
Lessin says Calendly board thanked him after viral attack drove record month
“When I, like, got all, I, like, hate, I hate Calendly, and I made this viral post with, like, the millions of people engaged with about how Calendly sucks. And like, I got thank yous from multiple board members of the company because they said that it drove th…”
Dave Morin: Negative audience reactions drive engagement just as well as praise
“You can be, it doesn't matter. You can choose cheers as your KPI or booze and they both work.”
Sam Lessin: Elon Musk will still run Tesla in 12 months
“Yes.
Unless he does some hissy fit about his compensation package and like.”
Dave Morin: Tesla has around 35 direct reports into Elon Musk
“There's something like 35 reports into the CEO, which is typical of how I guess Elon likes running companies.”
Lessin: BYD surpassing Tesla eliminates its structural valuation premium
“They're not the biggest shipping EV company in the world anymore. It's that Chinese company. Everyone has EVs. That kind of like structural advantage that makes them dramatically more valuable or differentiated from car companies is gone.”
Morin: Autonomous driving is years away; Tesla will stagnate without Model 2
“This self-driving world, which to me still feels five, 10 years away, right? And so this thing's just going to stay sideways if they don't get that car out the door.”
Lessin: GM delivers six times more cars than Tesla at one-tenth valuation
“GM's like what? Like a fifty billion dollar company? Tesla's a five hundred billion dollar company. GM delivers like six times as many cars, right?”
Lessin: Tesla is just a car company with a GameStop premium
“I think it's a car company. I think it's always been a car company with a GameStop slapped on top, right?”
Dave Morin: Tesla is a computer that drives, not a car
“Like, my opinion has always been that this thing is a computer that drives, not a car that has a computer in it.”
Dave Morin: Tesla is like Apple right now, but mis-executing
“I would argue that it is right now, but it's mis-executing.”
Brit Morin discloses that she and Dave Morin are long Tesla stock
“We are long Tesla, and we're the only ones, we are users, so we know a little bit more.”