Straight Answers

An LLM assessed 109 question → answer exchanges, the host's own answers included. Speaker names were hidden during assessment. Each exchange was marked answered, partly, redirected or not addressed, with a quote as its source. Every exchange below is timestamped and plays. How it works →

These readings are observational: the transcript shows whether the question was answered directly, whatever the reason. It is an AI reading of a public exchange, never a claim about intent, and the tape is one tap away on every row. full disclaimer →

15%of assessed questions not answered directly · how? → 8playable exchanges ↓ 0with none identified → 30people measured →

Every one of the 34 people on the record is accounted for: 2 carry a full rate (8 or more assessed questions on raw tape), 28 more have their questions counted (4 of them with at least one not answered directly; too few raw questions for a fair percentage, edited feed included), and the remaining 4 never took a direct question in any tape we hold: compilations, panels and cameo appearances leave nothing to assess.

The whole show 3 of 20 questions on raw tape
15%
0%25%50%+

All speakers

All 2 people with 8 or more assessed questions on raw tape. Click a name to see their exchanges. highest rate none identified small samples

Person Not answered directly (%) Redirected + not addressed Questions Argument clarity /5
Jessica Lessin Founder & CEO, The Information 25% 2 8 3.5
Sam Lessin Founding Partner, Slow Ventures 8% 1 12 3.9

The moments, on tape

The question asked, then the AI assessment note from the answer. Tap to play the moment. Not addressed = the question was not engaged; redirected = acknowledged, then steered elsewhere.

Not addressed Dave Morin ▶ 23:05

“What will bending spoons do with it? Do you think?”

answered: “If anything, this is the right way to go about things”

Redirected Jessica Lessin ▶ 7:52

“Wait, I have a question, Jess, what do you mean by feminine energy? Like, what do we need to bring to the, to bear here?”

answered: “the point isn't to define it. The point is to, like, unleash more energy.”

Redirected Jessica Lessin ▶ 24:18

“A lot of brands pulled out of advertising on X, you know, based on Elon and everything else that was happening there, but it, I mean, how detrimental was it to that business? It didn't, I mean, a lot of them came back.”

answered: “I guess it's like on the corporate side, which way do we think the pendulum's swinging?”

Redirected Anatoly Yakovenko ▶ 29:45

“What, like, what's going to happen with these IPO valuations, Anatoly? All these big, the circles, and like, what's going on?”

answered: “hard to imagine five trillion dollars worth of stable coins issued”

Redirected Tony Conrad ▶ 34:27

“Yeah. Um, and that, that's a little bit of a scary thing for me in the market right now.”

answered: “Well, I always get nervous when markets get pulled forward, you know, like, even like our”

Redirected Ricky Van Veen ▶ 46:02

“And Ricky, if you were, like, starting College Humor today with AI as it exists, would you do anything differently?”

answered: “being in the partnerships org, like, we think about how to empower creators”

Redirected Sam Lessin ▶ 6:13

“And then Instagram came out with like, okay, we're going to have the common unit and we're going to have the feed and a network structure and all the rest of it. And so that's the thing that stuck, right?”

answered: “The thing that strikes me is so different about this AI wave though, versus mobile”

Redirected Britt Morin ▶ 20:19

“Or what we, what do you guys do about that? Because that's a reality today.”

answered: “Every time we do conversations with like normies, like the head of school or whatever”

Percentages come from raw unedited recordings only: produced podcast audio has tangents and stumbles cut in the edit, which moves the speaker up by about 12 percentile points. The small-sample counts include the produced feed. This is a reading of a transcript. It is not an accusation of dishonesty, and there are many good reasons not to answer a question directly (confidential numbers, unreleased products, someone else's news to break).

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