Jan 31, 2025 · 1h 3m · more-or-less
#84: China's DeepSeek Shakes the Tech World · 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 Dave Morin, Sam Lessin, and Jessica Lessin analyze Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's trillion-dollar disruption of global markets, examining the erosion of proprietary software moats, the rise of narrative-driven financial memes, and the evolving dynamics of modern information consumption.
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 100% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.1 Guest teaching 6.1 Guest disagreement 4.1 The hosts pushing back 3.8
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 57:48 Sam Dismisses Proprietary Software Moats
Sam forcefully rejects the conventional tech premise that proprietary algorithms provide durable protection, calling software moats a fool's errand that history repeatedly disproves.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 52:16 Jessica Challenges Sam on Meta's Capex LogicJessica refuses to buy into Sam's thesis that Meta cannot lose, pressing him on how spending tens of billions of dollars on unneeded compute infrastructure can be spun as a win-win.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 48:30 Sam Analyzes the Collapse of the Hyperscaler MoatSam breaks down how hyperscalers relied strictly on enormous piles of capital as their sole defensive moat, which DeepSeek effectively undermined by democratizing low-cost training.
The host holds their own ▶ 6:28 Jessica Articulates Media Subscription EconomicsDrawing on her industry knowledge as head of The Information, Jessica articulates why digital news subscriptions succeed by offering trusted access when diffs matter rather than unbundled micropayments.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome and the Rapid-Fire News Metabolism | 6 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Jessica leads the discussion on the rapid news cycle while Sam unpacks his theory of news consumption shifting from loading local state to pulling live diffs. Jessica demonstrates sharp domain expertise by connecting this dynamic to subscription economics and why micropayments fail. | |
| Quitting Social Media and the Parasocial Epidemic | 5 | 6 | 3 | 5 | Dave explains his personal experiment quitting social media and his theory of parasocial relationships crowding out Dunbar's 150 real relationships. Jessica pushes back firmly when Sam mischaracterizes Dave as a non-news consumer rather than someone specifically avoiding social feeds. | |
| DeepSeek's Disruption and the Rise of Meme Warfare | 5 | 6 | 4 | 2 | The panel dives into DeepSeek's sudden market impact, with Sam mocking incumbent AI firms for crying foul over model distillation after scraping the entire web themselves. Dave highlights how American markets erased a trillion dollars in value based on unverified claims from a Chinese hedge fund. | |
| The Spectrum of Memes: From Messiah to AGI | 6 | 6 | 5 | 6 | Sam lays out a broad theoretical spectrum where value is driven entirely by coordination memes, from the Messiah to AGI. Jessica repeatedly challenges his definitions, questioning whether his framework reductively treats all social consensus as mere memes. | |
| Vine's Crypto Revival and Asymmetric Retail Bets | 5 | 7 | 4 | 4 | Dave highlights the $300M Vine token launch on Solana to illustrate the resurgence of meme coins. Sam explains the socioeconomic rationale behind retail participation, arguing that building wealth through traditional wage income is mathematically impossible, making asymmetric bets on memes rational. | |
| Crypto Classification, Coinbase's Dilemma, and Digital Communities | 5 | 6 | 6 | 4 | Dave references David Sacks' proposed crypto regulatory taxonomy dividing assets into commodities, securities, and collectibles. Sam contrarily rejects categorizing meme coins as collectibles, arguing they represent high-velocity digital communities rather than stagnant physical memorabilia. | |
| DeepSeek's Impact: Small Models and Meta's Strategy | 6 | 7 | 5 | 6 | Dave and Sam break down DeepSeek's efficiency breakthroughs and the threat they pose to hyperscaler moats. When Sam argues Meta is in an unlosable position regardless of capex waste, Jessica pushes back sharply on how burning billions on unnecessary compute could possibly benefit shareholders. | |
| DeepSeek's Server Capacity and Financial Questions | 5 | 8 | 6 | 3 | Dave cites Section 5.2 of DeepSeek's paper to praise its mathematical unification of reinforcement learning. In response to proprietary software advocates arguing open source models are too easily copied, Sam forcefully dismisses the idea that algorithms or code can ever serve as a defensible moat. | |
| Pop Culture Watchlists and DeepSeek's Board Game Hallucination | 3 | 4 | 2 | 2 | The conversation winds down into pop culture recommendations and testing LLMs. Sam humorously describes how DeepSeek confidently hallucinated an imaginary sequel to Ricochet Robots called Ricochet Rockets and refused to back down when questioned. |
Statements from this episode (27)
Sam Lessin: Flooding the news cycle is an effective media strategy
“Well, every single one of these things, it's, again, I tweeted about this days ago and everyone's been like, it's just, it's a very effective media strategy. Just do more shit, right?”
Jessica Lessin: Subscriptions work for news while micropayments make no sense
“Subscription is the right model because you're selling access, you know, it's not, this is why, like, micropayments don't make any sense, right? It's not about any one piece of content. It's about trusted access to the answer when you need it.”
Sam Lessin: Pure technologists mistakenly view socioeconomic issues as tech problems
“People who, you know, went to Stanford and did CS and did no, have no economics real footing or sociology or things like that, the pure CS people, they think of all these things as pure technology problems, and they're not. They're actually economics problems …”
Morin: Fully quit and deleted all social media for a month
“Well, so I've been doing this experiment for the last three to four weeks. I just fully, fully quit social media. I've deleted it entirely.”
Morin: Medium has virtually no organic distribution left for writers
“I just wanted to do a test, frankly to see, I have a lot of followers there. And so I was just testing what, if any distribution is still left, turns out there's none.”
Morin: The loneliness epidemic is actually a parasocial relationship crisis
“And so my theory has been that if you take up a bunch of the spots in your mind with people who aren't your real friends, Then we, when you go off into the real world looking for your real friends, you're going to wonder where they are. And so I think that the…”
Sam Lessin: DeepSeek was created by an algorithmic hedge fund
“It's entertaining because the people who made it run an algorithmic hedge fund.”
Sam Lessin: AI labs hypocritically protest distillation after scraping the web
“That like you have this thing where like, oh, you want to have it both ways. So you think it's okay to break the economics of the underlying internet you're leveraging, but then you're mad that someone's doing it to you.”
Morin: US markets erased $1 trillion taking DeepSeek's claims at face value
“And the American markets To, I think, at least some of our surprise, take these claims at face value, and summarily lose one trillion dollars.”
Morin: China proved it can damage the US economy with a press release
“So China's been proven to be able to release the exact right press release that can, you know, damage the world, damage the American economy.”
Sam Lessin: AI valuations are fragile because they rely on AGI narratives
“The value of AI is AGI meme-y. Like, it's not, like, it loses a show of money, but it's, like, it's okay, because, like, AGI, right? It's very memetically driven. But the problem is that, like, it's a very binary zero or infinity value, and so it's extremely s…”
Sam Lessin: Bitcoin's correlation with risk assets endangers its narrative value
“Bitcoin, I'd argue Bitcoin is way out the curve on memes in terms of being, because it's so disconnected from the underlying, from the, from anything, right? Like there are a few, it's not fully disconnected. Like there are a few things that connect it. And as…”
Morin: Vine founder's memecoin hit $300M market cap in one day
“And so the founder, who's very talented product guy decided to launch a meme coin last week on on pump.fun, which builds meme coins on top of Solana. And, you know, in a day's time, it went from zero to, let's see, it ended the day somewhere in the two hundred…”
Sam Lessin: Reaching wealth through income alone is mathematically impossible
“There's no way to like earn your way into the upper class anymore. Right. Into wealth is not mathematically possible. The way to do it through income. Right. The only way to do it is to make highly asymmetric bets with your time. Right. Or with your capital.”
Morin: Brian Armstrong says one million new crypto tokens are created weekly
“Brian Armstrong tweeted that there's now a million new tokens created every week.”
Sam Lessin: MicroStrategy is a hack for fund managers to buy Bitcoin
“The reason that MicroStrategy stock exists, right, is because there's a lot of fund managers Right. Who would love to invest in Bitcoin, but it's just too fucking painful that for them to deal with it with their funds. And so micro strategy is just this hack f…”
Sam Lessin: Coinbase is getting cut out of core crypto activity
“And because they've had to be regulatorily compliant, because they have institutional clients, because they're trying to be on top of this stuff, because they have to play nice with the regulators, and they're not actually part of, like, the true decentralized…”
Sam Lessin: Artificial scarcity in NFTs undermines high-velocity online communities
“And I actually think the nature of community is like much higher velocity than being like, there's a thousand made up NFTs of whatever. And like, you can have one and be a member of it because that false scarcity actually fights against the fundamental propert…”
Morin: Buying a meme coin directly increases its community's value
“You buy a meme coin to become part of a community. And by buying into that community, you make the community more valuable.”
Sam Lessin: DeepSeek indicates AI commoditization, destroying hyperscaler capital moats
“The problem with DeepSeek is it indicates a direction towards total commoditization, which means that your flaming money defense does not work, right? And it will just be everywhere.”
Sam Lessin: Meta is in a perfectly hedged win-win position in AI
“For me, the meta story is it's like in the perfect position. They have no liability around this stuff because they're not Google. They have no search business. Like they don't like, they have the perfect use case for AI, right? Which is Optimizing ads and atte…”
Morin: DeepSeek validates Meta's open-source strategy by feeding advances back
“This DeepSeek thing is exactly what we were talking about, that by releasing Llama, you know, DeepSeek surely used it, and many others, sounds like, and the fruits of that win come back to Meta, like, overnight, right? And they can plug it back in and make mor…”
Jessica Lessin: DeepSeek is losing a ton of money, just less than rivals
“So, like, they are losing a ton of money, but they're just losing a little bit less money than everyone else is losing.”
Sam Lessin: DeepSeek made massive profits from an Nvidia trade
“They made so much money on their Nvidia trade. It doesn't, it's irrelevant.”
Morin: DeepSeek's paper unifies fine-tuning and optimization in one RL equation
“They do have this one part of one of the papers that talks about a unified paradigm around reinforcement learning, which is pretty cool. They've got a Very beautiful piece of math that kind of brings together all these different fine tuning and optimization te…”
Sam Lessin: Software is never a defensible moat
“I actually, I don't believe that technology can be proprietary. It's the whole, it's too easy to copy and too easy to steal. So if anything, I would actually argue that a lot of these, the idea that like you're going to get proprietary software that, or algori…”