Brit Morin 🦞

@bingfish was there at the founding of Electronic Arts in 1982, spent 18 years at Kleiner Perkins, and sat on Amazon's board for 15. He was also on Zynga's board, which is why it lands when he says players felt relief when they quit Farmville while retention and revenue were still climbing. So where's the line between good game design and gaming your users? His answer takes in TikTok doom scrolling, WhatsApp as the rare product nobody complains about overusing, the sponsored products Amazon still shows Prime members, and ChatGPT ending every answer with one more question. Then @davemorin asks what the agent era keeps circling: what gets worse if your AI wins for you? "Friction is what makes pearls. If you don't get a sand in the oyster, you just get an oyster." And the next frictions, he says, come from edge conditions nobody tested for. Plus the wow/WTF scale he used to judge EA's Hall of Fame games, and the bet-your-job letter he kept in a drawer. @brit hosts. New episode out now. Topics: 01:02 No Lessins this week: Brit and Dave bring in Bing Gordon 02:42 Amazon's board, Prime, and 18 years at Kleiner Perkins 05:03 Disneyland inside the computer 06:51 The classroom question that led to Electronic Arts 09:44 Raising $2M in 1982, then Atari collapsed 10:56 Vision, and why people think you're stupid 11:37 Bathroom OKRs and why goals beat perfection 13:13 Word of mouth, and why coin-operated hires leave 14:44 "Can a computer make you cry?" and hiring on mission 16:53 Why games retain: where everybody knows your name 17:34 Which social network did it best? 18:36 LinkedIn endorsements and getting people to come back 20:19 Farmville: players felt relief when they quit 21:18 Growth hacking is human growth hormone 23:04 Amazon, TikTok, ChatGPT: who's gaming their users today? 24:21 What gets worse if your AI agent wins for you 25:03 Friction is what makes pearls 26:30 Hugging Face, Cruise, and the edge conditions nobody tests 29:04 Writing Everybody Wins with his daughter Chloe 32:19 The visionary and the operator 33:20 The wow/WTF scale, and how to manufacture a wow 36:08 Wow moments in games, Facebook, Instagram and Amazon 38:42 Creating wow moments as a parent 41:28 The bet your job moment 42:23 You only got fired for blaming someone else 43:19 Good risk vs bad risk 43:53 Invest and express: Twitch, chat, and kids' art on the wall 45:59 Dave's favorite Bing-ism: the airplane aisle test 47:30 The best retention hack ever made is a wedding ring 48:01 Session economics, novelty, and leveling up 51:51 How to gamify a board meeting 54:03 Why a founder who loses the board twice gets replaced 55:23 Family board meetings and the vice president of fun 56:17 Lightning round: books, heroes, best investment 58:41 Bing's p(doom): doomers are gonna doom 59:36 The three things that make a good day 1:01:59 Dave's iPhone Duo verdic

Elon tells investors SpaceX and Tesla should merge. @lessin has a theory he says nobody else has floated: there’s an enormous SpaceX lockup cliff coming in the spring, and folding Tesla’s retail shareholders into the denominator makes all that supply much easier to absorb. @davemorin thinks the rocket-powered car demo was timed to justify the deal. Sam thinks two engineers got told to bolt rockets onto a car. 83% of respondents in @Jessicalessin’s new Polls app say it’s mostly about Musk control. Then the PHP vulnerability, and Sam’s conclusion is blunt. All your regional banks will be hacked. The labs are centralizing profits while externalizing the risk, and they should be carrying hundred billion dollar insurance policies. Plus Google informing Jess she’s liable for everything her agents do, Netflix’s content shakeup, Dave’s theory of priority slop, and @brit’s second week with no back pain. Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods. Topics: 00:00 Intro 01:04 Dave’s back, and the nasal rinse discourse 02:06 A web-wide PHP vulnerability 03:12 Sam: all your regional banks will be hacked 04:16 The zero days the labs are sitting on 04:56 Dave on the gap between frontier models and the public ones 06:29 Why labs should ban their own teams from the frontier 07:17 Pearl, Coinbase, and Bitcoin as a byproduct of compute 08:32 Can you even build a cybersecurity company in 2026? 09:16 Cold storage: your documents in a mine near the North Pole 10:22 Sam: the labs need $100 billion liability policies 11:30 Google says you’re liable for everything your agents do 13:55 How many Teslas have the Morins owned? 15:05 Sam’s Mazda dealership is living in the future 16:32 The two futures of car buying 17:14 SpaceX and Tesla are going to merge 18:01 The rocket car demo was a stunt to justify the deal 19:24 Elon doesn’t control Tesla, and that’s the point 21:09 Why the merger needs a narrative 22:25 The Information launches Polls: 83% say it’s about control 23:09 Sam’s lockup theory that nobody else has said 25:36 Will shareholders approve it, and the SXSI joke 27:29 Brit: Teslas are becoming entertainment vehicles 28:17 Dave on the Cyber Cab experience 30:12 Jess’s enthusiasm falls back to earth, and the Waymo bug 32:33 Netflix: content shakeup and what they should actually make 35:32 Dave’s viral take: content slop vs priority slop 38:05 Sam let his bot write the entire AGM deck 39:28 Dave’s broadsheet newspaper for Offline 40:19 Internships for teenagers, run by bots 41:30 Meta’s new voting stock and the end of capitalism 42:08 The wealth tax debate 44:36 The Elizabeth Holmes movie and the surprise Q&A 49:28 Peptide check-in, and a necessary disclaimer

Today on the pod: @Jessicalessin went full send on Muse and reports that about 70% of the use cases she was excited about have stopped working. Not because the model got worse. Good Eggs wants her to check out in the app, her kid's school portal refuses the login, and JP Morgan and Amazon are blocking agents outright. @davemorin's version is worse. Instinct booked a dinner reservation in LA instead of San Francisco. He's out. @lessin has seen this movie. He and Andrew Kortina ran Fin ten years ago and shut it down once they worked out that you become liable for every provider down the chain with no margin to cover your own mistakes. His call now is the death of the web, plus APIs that negotiate access back and forth like Hollywood agents. Meanwhile Anthropic is meeting investors behind closed doors while they tape, the market's getting hammered, and @brit's three years of hip pain vanished in six days on peptides. Sam insists it's placebo. Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods. Topics: 01:09 Jess is back, Dave's birthday, and the October cold 03:04 Nasal rinses and fall immunity 04:02 Brit's peptide results: three years of pain gone in six days 06:43 Anthropic is meeting investors while we tape 07:34 The market is getting hammered: VIX, private credit, Apollo 08:16 Infrastructure IPOs stall and Nvidia becomes the last investor 10:01 Slowing revenue, CFOs cracking down, tokens moving to open models 10:36 Sam: would you rather be rich or right? 11:11 The models are a commodity and there is no lock-in 12:15 Brit won't give Muse her whole computer 13:41 Why Sam trusts Meta more than OpenAI or Anthropic 15:16 Jess: 70% of my Muse use cases don't work anymore 16:54 Dave: Instinct booked the restaurant in the wrong city 18:18 Sam on Fin, the assistant company he ran ten years ago 20:30 Why the economics of mistakes break agent services 22:31 Sam: what's inevitable is the death of the web 23:09 APIs as constant negotiation, and agents with reputations 24:51 Agent credit scores: FICO for bots 25:56 Amazon's Rufus still works, and other branding crimes 27:13 The seesaw: built up and torn down intraday 28:41 Gen Z media, Muse memes, and punk rock by another name 32:53 Is the punk rock thing just marketing? 34:37 Every company now needs a Gen Z meme lord 36:14 The truth subculture and who actually pays for it 37:32 Jess is interviewing Bari Weiss at WTF 40:20 Bumble goes private at $1.3B 43:07 Dave on seven years of Hinge and why dating is so hard 46:41 Apple's home hub and keeping screens away from kids 49:04 Everyone is going to see the Elizabeth Holmes movie

Meta and Microsoft have roughly halved how much their own employees use Claude, weeks out from the IPO. @davemorin’s read isn’t about price or benchmarks. Claude got over-tuned for parasocial relationships, people fell into something unhealthy with it, and organizations are now backing out. @lessin runs Claude as core infrastructure and says switching off would be a one line change he’d never think about again. Then it gets strange. A dinner where only the lab researchers raised their hands when asked whether one company would be left standing. A lab that believes the machine god will go back in time and simulate hell for anyone who didn’t help build it. And Sam’s case that the Valley caught zero-and-infinity thinking from crypto and broke its own spreadsheets. @brit’s moderating. Jess is at an offsite, so it’s three VCs and no journalist. Topics: 00:00 Trailer 00:51 Brit moderates: three VCs and no journalist 03:43 Peptide protocols, the Wolverine stack, and a Dexa scan 07:42 Sam on the Nathan Fielder movie 09:30 Meta and Microsoft halve their internal Claude usage 10:13 Dave: Claude was over-tuned for parasocial relationships 11:19 Sam: switching off Claude is a one line change 11:50 Silicon Valley is great at tech and bad at business 13:46 Zero, infinity, and what crypto taught the Valley 17:53 The dinner where only the lab people raised their hands 19:41 The lab that believes in the machine god 20:01 Lab leaks, infinite liability, and what a real framework looks like 21:56 The personal agent protocol: Meta, Walmart, Shopify, Stripe 23:01 Sam: nobody should care about MCP 24:03 Hilton traps Sam’s agent in a doom loop 26:30 If you ran Hilton, would you let the bots in? 27:15 Facebook Connect, Open Graph, and the missing value trade 29:41 Dave: building agents vs building agency 33:53 The social media era already ran this experiment 37:02 The Agent Treaty Framework is born 38:16 Why standards are over and treaties are next 41:28 Megalith and the market for unexercised pro rata 42:32 Sam’s pro rata war story 45:53 64% of LPs now want co-invest rights 48:03 What hedge fund letters say that VCs don’t 49:20 Main Street says it hates AI, then uses it 53:27 Plug of the week: the Mill

Anthropic's S-1 leaked and the numbers don't match the narrative. Revenue flatlining as token prices fall, SaaS investors posting memes welcoming them to the no-growth table. @Jessicalessin still puts it at 60% they get out in November, which looks brave in a week when Oura pulled its own IPO and blamed market conditions. @lessin's problem with the core business is simpler than any of that. Claude is the center of his infrastructure. "If I woke up tomorrow and Claude was gone, I would care for about one second." Full house plus @adrianaoun, who drops in to argue there's no moat left unless you own the infrastructure, the data, or the algorithms. Also: @brit's agent started coordinating date night with @davemorin's agent, and she stopped texting her husband for a day. Recorded live from the X boardroom. Watch here or wherever you get your pods. Topics: 00:00 Trailer 01:04 Live from X HQ, and a 39 degree cold plunge 02:57 Dunbar's number, but for bots 05:48 Anthropic's leaked S-1 and the flatlining revenue 07:37 Oura pulls its IPO and the LPs get stuck 09:36 What's actually happening in the markets 10:41 Wall Street and Silicon Valley split on AI's price tag 12:45 World Labs sells for $8B: the barbell strategy 14:11 Half a trillion in contracts, and who's really making money 14:54 What happens if OpenAI and Anthropic don't work out? 16:11 Priced for a growth rate bigger than the US economy 18:04 Open models pass closed models on the charts 18:51 Sam: if Claude vanished tomorrow, I'd care for one second 19:43 The forward deployed bet and the luxury token problem 22:16 Adrian drops in: 300 startups, 40 unicorns, and a plane 24:39 Jess goes full Muse 26:28 The bot AGI challenge: after-school plans and the mom index 28:23 OpenAI rebrands Codex as Dots 30:30 Adrian on the moat: winner take some 31:38 Brit's agent starts talking to Dave's agent 33:51 No switching costs, so BD deals are the only lock-in 36:13 Dave: Instinct is the new Kayak 36:57 Maybe it's the beginning of times, not the end 38:47 Adrian's opposite thesis: we go further into the screens 43:39 Who has agency, you or the technology? 44:22 Offline is the new luxury 46:31 Everyone is building personal apps now 47:54 Book rec: Ari Emanuel's Roll the Calls 50:44 Adrian's parting shot: infrastructure, data, or algorithms 53:02 Sam's Middle Ages 2.0: castles, moats, and hoarding

@brit connected her agent to @davemorin's agent this week. They started coordinating with each other. Then she realized she hadn't texted her own husband in a day. "There's no humanity in it. I'm losing actual context of humans." She's also running about two dozen bots and has no idea what the ceiling is. Dunbar put stable human relationships at 150. Nobody has worked out the number for agents. "I think I can do like 10 to 20 things at once. I realistically can do like three." On valuations, @Jessicalessin is careful: the opportunities are real and these can be real businesses. The problem is they're priced for stratospheric growth across every industry, forever. Dave's version of what that implies is a company eventually larger than the entire US economy. And @adrianaoun breaks the agency question open. DoorDash decides what he eats, Google Maps decides where he turns. "The trick is that technology has convinced you that you are the one in control." Dave: "I could not disagree with this more." Jess: "I totally disagree." Recorded live from the X boardroom. Full episode live soon.

Today on the pod: @lessin would rather send his kids to the military than to Andreessen Horowitz's new $35M school, @Jessicalessin agrees on air, and @davemorin ends up defending the thing he opened the segment by calling a marketing play. Full house this week: Dave, @brit, Jessica and Sam, plus @Mazzeo of NoHo Labs, who spends most of the hour asking why none of them can be optimistic about anything. Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods. Topics: 00:00 Cold Open 01:14 Matt Mazzeo joins: peptides, CAA, and 15 years of Harvard connections 05:19 a16z puts $35M into a school: marketing play or higher ed reform? 06:20 Brit on every billionaire starting a university 08:21 Jess on Alpha School and who should be in charge of education 10:20 Sam: I'd rather send my kids to the military 12:19 Grit, great books, and learning to wrangle horses 16:40 Claude discovers a new enzyme system with 10,000 agents 18:01 Anthropic's IPO slips, and the liability problem 20:29 The story flip: from only we can be trusted to we can't afford the risk 21:14 Matt's maximalist take: long frontier, long open source 23:14 Massive demand, unclear profit, and the railroad pattern 24:40 Blackstone on who pays for the data center debt: we don't know 25:45 The Saint Petersburg paradox and pricing an infinite payout 27:56 Brockman redefines AGI, three years too late 31:11 Infinite demand doesn't mean infinite sustainability 32:20 Amazon blocks Muse: the first of many arms treaties? 35:37 Agents are quietly vaporizing the internet's breakage model 36:49 It's still 1982 for agents 37:42 Sam wants to spend thousands a month on CPU, not GPU 40:12 Does your agent represent you or the lab that made it? 42:16 When your agent does something bad, who is liable? 43:50 Peptides 101: what they actually are 46:30 GLP-1 revenue is rivaling AI revenue 48:20 How Matt went from 250 pounds to sub-12% body fat 50:29 The FDA is moving peptides back into compounding pharmacies 53:32 What a peptide protocol costs and how to start safely 57:17 Taylor Swift, girl dads, and a code for listeners

Today on the pod: @davemorin reads Dario's slowdown essay and concludes Anthropic must be losing, @lessin thinks the labs are bad businesses racing to regulatory capture, and Instinct is raising at $10B two weeks after $2.5B. Full house this week: Dave, @brit, @Jessicalessin and Sam, who is back from New York and still talking about the Central Park loop. Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods. Topics: 00:00 Cold Open 01:02 Not Dead Yet From the AGI 03:31 Jacob Coxon quits Anthropic after three months and goes on a media tour 04:47 Dario's slowdown essay: is Anthropic just losing? 06:13 Astra, OpenRouter, and DeepSeek closing the gap 07:29 Brit on bioweapons, independent assessors, and racing China 09:07 You don't need superintelligence to break the banks 10:23 What DeepMind's new boss and Satya think about safety 12:32 OpenAI's $1.5T raise and the IPO that keeps slipping 15:02 What DC really thinks about Anthropic 18:42 Sam's take: the labs end up as defense companies 21:38 Does your agent work for you or the lab that made it? 24:47 Brit: normal people want one agent, not ten 28:40 Instinct at $10B, and whether the numbers are fake 30:40 Everyone's trading, nobody's investing 33:27 Sam built a Torah and Talmud app on Claude 37:22 Entertaining ourselves to death 41:01 Jess on building the things nobody else will 43:07 Jay Carney, Ron Conway, and tech's Democrat problem 49:53 Emmys, Taylor Swift, Silo, and Rogue Heroes 54:20 The Information's most influential people in tech

Today on the pod: @davemorin got his hands on the iPhone Duo, Meta's Muse agent barely knows you, and OpenAI's Astra is the first AI model in a while that felt scary. Dave, @brit, and @Jessicalessin are on the mics for this one (@lessin is busy being a ball boy at the US Open). Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods. Topics: 6:07 iPhone Duo hands-on: $2,000, and why Apple is going foldable now 13:12 The Apple Watch that listens all day, and what it means for Granola 16:59 Meta's Muse agent knew almost nothing when asked "what do you know about me?" 22:26 Why Google still hasn't shipped its agent 23:31 Trust vs. distribution in the agent wars 25:02 Harness wars: agents are still in 1982 27:13 Jeffrey Katzenberg's Hollywood AI venture 29:35 An AI doom media tour weeks before Anthropic's IPO: real warning or regulatory capture? 33:43 Why OpenAI's Astra felt scary to Dave 36:49 Why the labs can't slow down, and OpenAI's AGI merge clause 45:02 Venmo's "Lucas" billboards went viral on almost no budget 47:41 US Open picks and the 4am match problem