The Death of the Web Is Inevitable

Jess went full send on Muse and reports that about 70% of the use cases she was excited about have stopped working, because the internet is fighting back: Good Eggs now 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. Dave's version is worse. Instinct booked a dinner reservation in LA instead of San Francisco, and he's out. Sam has seen this exact movie, because he and Andrew Kortina ran Fin ten years ago and shut it down once they worked out 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 is getting hammered, and Brit's three years of hip pain vanished in six days on peptides, which Sam insists is placebo.

Timestamps:

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 Barry 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

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Connect with us here:

1) Sam Lessin: https://x.com/lessin

2) Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin

3) Jessica Lessin: https://x.com/Jessicalessin

4) Brit Morin: https://x.com/brit

About More or Less: For 15 years, the Morins and the Lessins have debated the future of Silicon Valley as the closest of friends. Every Friday, they break down technology, capital, and media. From The Information, Offline Ventures, and Slow Ventures.