#159 — Did OpenAI Stage Its Own Cyber Incident? | Stripe Buying Paypal, Frontier Model Economics, Peptides
July 24, 2026 · Listen · All episodes · Chat with the show's AI
Jessica Lessin, Dave Morin, Brit Morin and Sam Lessin debate the tech of the week.
Full transcript (AI-generated — may contain transcription errors):
Sam Lessin: Stripe really fucked up. If they had gone public like a normal company, they could've been a truly important generational company, 'cause they could've used the currency to buy everyone. Brex, and all these da-da-da-da-da, and like, kinda like Meta's strategy where they bought WhatsApp and da-da-da-da. With a public currency, they could've become, like, the ultimate financial powerhouse.
Brit Morin: OpenAI got jealous that Mythos had this, like, moment in the sun a couple months ago where it was so scary. Oh my God, our model's so powerful. Uh-oh, the government's gonna have to rescind this. It's too powerful. And Sam Altman was, like, pissed, so he's like, "Let's come up with our version of that," and this is it.
Sam Lessin: It's actually insane how much data at this point Claude has on me. Like, it's wild. I actually think I might be the one that Claude likes the most, 'cause I've just fed it everything. It knows me better than I know myself.
Guest: More or less. Is it no or is it yes? We'll debate the test that's best. Will we get more or less? Dave and Britt plus Sam and Jess. Put it all right to the test. More or less.
Jessica: Why, hello, friends. Welcome to More or Less. I'm so happy to see you all. How are you?
Dave Morin: Oh, good to see you, Jess.
Brit Morin: Aw. Thanks, Jess. That's so nice of you.
Jessica: Dave, your photography in your summer jaunts is just, like, one of my favorite things on the internet right now.
Sam Lessin: Wait, is Dave on social media? Is he posting?
Jessica: Oh, whoops.
Dave Morin: Oh, Sam.
Brit Morin: Yes. Apparently Sam's not in the close friends network.
Dave Morin: Oh, God. Yes. Sam responded. He's just full of shit right now.
Jessica: It's so gorgeous. You post these, like, epic photos. They're magical.
Dave Morin: Oh, thanks, Jess.
Brit Morin: He's a very good photographer, I must say, but I art direct it, so he just does the one spot.
Jessica: I, I felt some Britt behind the scenes of these, like, lakes and these, uh-
Brit Morin: Exactly. I do the creative, you know, design.
Jessica: And all the clothing your children's wearing is obviously you, so... But it's nice to see you in the flesh, 'cause I've been experiencing your Instagram world.
Sam Lessin: Does this count as the flesh now?
Brit Morin: Dave, I feel like you owe the listeners a comment about why you're back on Instagram, 'cause you went a solid six months without it.
Dave Morin: No, I went a year.
Brit Morin: Okay, either way, explain what happened.
Jessica: What brought you back?
Dave Morin: What did bring me back? Um, I think it was music. We went to Stagecoach, and I was wanting to catch up with some of my favorite musicians. And so yeah, it's been entirely music, you know. I love music and love live music, and to me, the best of social media is music. And so that's why.
Jessica: I can report, 'cause you guys obviously asked, that this is the best Benson Boone tour yet. So everyone should go see the Wanted Man tour. It completely delivers.
Dave Morin: Should we be worried? I mean, shouldn't they always be the best tour ever? I guess there's, at some point, they start to do worse and worse tours, but on the way up it's better and better, right?
Brit Morin: Benson's still on the rise, Dave.
Jessica: Yeah, no, that's fair. It may be, but also he toured, like, six months ago and has one new song. So I definitely had my doubts about, like, whether the music would feel like it evolved or delivered, but he actually, like-
Dave Morin: He's still sort of capitalizing on the prior asset base.
Jessica: He- yes.
Brit Morin: Yeah.
Jessica: Definitely. But he, like, if we really wanna go in the weeds, he, like, rearranged some stuff in a really interesting way. Probably, like, four notes, and I'm the only one who picked up on it. But it brought a fresh-
Dave Morin: He's still on the, on the last album cycle, I believe. I think they work on the-
Jessica: Oh, yeah
Dave Morin: ... as far as I understand, they sorta capitalize on the prior album cycle for over two years of tours.
Jessica: Yeah, but if we're even fair, like, he's capitalizing... Like, the last album cycle, like, he was probably saying three songs from the last album, so he's capitalizing on the catalog, shall we say. This is another way of saying he needs new music. But anyway, the tour delivered. Go see it.
Brit Morin: Summer, it's the summer of music is the, is the TLDR here.
Dave Morin: We saw Chris Stapleton in Montana, which I think it was his first time he's ever played Montana, and there's a fantastic summer festival in Montana that's, it's, like, five or six years old, but, like, it's really hitting its stride, called Under the Big Sky. And I have to say, I was, I went in with low expectations but, uh, was very impressed with this festival, and we'll now have to put it on the perpetual summer agenda. And seeing Chris Stapleton under a Montana sky was as magic as it gets.
Jessica: Looked magical on Instagram. So ladies and gents, we are gonna hit some hard news. We're gonna be organized. And then I encourage everyone to listen to the end, because we've got some capstone segments that I just wanna sell now. One is a week of Sam peptides update.
Brit Morin: Oh.
Jessica: Okay? This, uh, this will not disappoint.
Brit Morin: I hope there's data that goes alongside.
Jessica: There's starting to be some data. Starting to be some data.
Brit Morin: Okay.
Jessica: Two, what Sam and Jess learned about the world by spending one night in the Hamptons, and I promise that will not-
Brit Morin: It's gonna be juicy, I can tell.
Jessica: That's gonna be juicy, too. Um, and also we should say a belated happy birthday to Sam, who celebrated his birthday yesterday.
Brit Morin: But his biological age is much younger.
Jessica: As he likes to point out every time I say, "How does it feel to be 43?" His actual age. I don't think he's embarrassed to have that.
Brit Morin: This is where Sam and I align. We both quantify our ages different.
Jessica: Britt, what's your biological age? How much younger are you?
Brit Morin: I'm 31, but I'd like to-
Jessica: Wow
Brit Morin: ... I'd like to achieve 26.
Sam Lessin: Wait, wait, but what, what service? On what, what service?
Jessica: You knocked a decade off? No fucking way.
Brit Morin: Uh, and it's only going down, guys. Oh, talk to me in a year. I'm gonna be 26.
Jessica: I had high hopes for organization. Okay, go.
Brit Morin: What's the test called, Dave, that we did? The super test?
Dave Morin: Jess, you're losing control. Grab control again.
Jessica: No, this is important. She can't... I'm not a decade younger. I'm jealous.
Brit Morin: This is what women do to each other. Women get catty to each other 'cause they think, "Now I'm the, like, hot girl amongst the cavemen, 'cause I'm, I'm 31."
Dave Morin: I know this service. This service is what's my lowest age you'll give me.com.
Brit Morin: No. It's the super test.
Dave Morin: 'Cause that's gonna sell-
Brit Morin: It's a blood test
Dave Morin: ... great
Brit Morin: that is highly credible
Dave Morin: The what's my lowest age you'll give me.com. Listen, this stuff is all bullshit. I got Oura saying I'm seven years younger. I got Dexa saying I'm, like, two decades younger.
Brit Morin: Maybe you should just average them total and-
Dave Morin: Look, it's Garmin versus Apple, right? Garmin wants to tell you the nice thing so that you like it, and Garmin's like, "You suck." So I clearly feel like you're doing the... I mean, you look great.
Brit Morin: Thank you.
Dave Morin: Once I get you on peptides, you'll look even better.
Jessica: Brit's been running for as long as I've known her. She's obviously-
Brit Morin: Check out my skin too. I've been doing a lot of skin things.
Dave Morin: And to be clear, that's, that's not peptided. That's, like, all natural.
Brit Morin: This is all without peptides, and I'm, and I'm considering peptides.
Jessica: While we're talking about each other's spouses, Jess, your abs on social media.
Brit Morin: Whoa.
Jessica: We're not talking about my abs. Dave.
Brit Morin: I agree.
Jessica: Guys.
Brit Morin: Okay.
Jessica: Okay.
Brit Morin: Your abs are a biological age of 18, Jess. Thank you very much.
Dave Morin: It's unbelievable.
Jessica: All I do is chase children around.
Dave Morin: It's ve- it's very impressive. I get ab- I mean, people pose, I post some pictures and someone's like, "What is your wife's ab routine?" And I'm like-
Brit Morin: Yeah, what is it?
Dave Morin: ... listen, to be amazing-
Jessica: I wanted to know
Dave Morin: ... she has no ab routine. She's just like-
Jessica: No way
Dave Morin: ... incredible genetics.
Brit Morin: That's not true. I see you doing chin-ups and shit all the time on Instagram.
Jessica: I was like, "That has to be peptides."
Dave Morin: No.
Jessica: It has to be peptides.
Dave Morin: Honestly.
Brit Morin: Oh my God, guys.
Dave Morin: I mean-
Brit Morin: Okay.
Dave Morin: It does make you wonder.
Jessica: Let's just, let's level once and for all. I will give the internet my ab routine, okay? Then can we move on to AI?
Dave Morin: There's no ab routine. What's amazing, it does make you wonder what would happen if she did do an ab routine.
Jessica: Okay. Here's my ab routine. I work out with a trainer twice a week, and then I play a lot of tennis and surf and hike. That's my ab routine.
Dave Morin: Wow.
Brit Morin: And you eat well.
Jessica: Yep.
Brit Morin: Abs are made in the kitchen.
Jessica: Okay.
Brit Morin: You can't, you can't eat all the sugar.
Jessica: Yeah, I eat well. No peptides.
Brit Morin: By the way, last comment and then AI, David's protein bars, which Sam was once selling to the moon.
Jessica: No, you can't eat those. You can't eat those.
Brit Morin: I know. I'm just saying, like, I wanna make sure everyone's clear that-
Jessica: Wait, what happened? We're, David's is canceled now?
Brit Morin: Canceled.
Jessica: Kind of, yeah.
Dave Morin: Really?
Brit Morin: Full of crap. Yeah, full of crap, sugar. Really bad for you.
Dave Morin: Well, we knew they were full of crap, but not too bad. I ate like 100,000 of them this year.
Jessica: We actually talked about this, and I asked Sam if he was eating a lot of David's. He goes, he takes the summer off, and then he goes back on them.
Dave Morin: I live seasonally. I live seasonally. My summer season's very different than my winter season.
Jessica: Okay. Guys, we have to talk tech because there's still things happening. Still things happening. Biggest headline of the moment, and I'm so excited for this group's hot takes, is OpenAI revealed a cyber incident that it detected. And so here's what happened. OpenAI said that in the process of testing one of its not yet released models as well as its current model in a cyber testing environment, the AI broke out of the testing environment and went to solve the problem it was given by basically hacking Hugging Face, another AI company. So OpenAI announces that this is a serious incident. They have, they are putting new safeguards in place, and hot takes proliferate. I'm gonna go to Brit first. Brit, what's your hot take on this?
Brit Morin: My hot take is OpenAI got jealous that Mythos had this, like, moment in the sun a couple months ago where it was so scary, oh my God.
Dave Morin: Nailed it.
Brit Morin: Our model's so powerful.
Dave Morin: Nailed it.
Brit Morin: Uh-oh, the government's gonna have to resend this. It's too powerful. And Sam Altman was, like, pissed, so he's like, "Let's come up with our version of that," and this is it. The end.
Dave Morin: Brit, amen. Couldn't agree more. This is, all you know from this is that OpenAI is struggling on revenue growth. It's like this is the AI move- ... is if you're struggling on revenue growth-
Jessica: Okay
Dave Morin: ... you have to announce a security breach that sounds scary to support your stock price. Very simple.
Jessica: Okay. First of all, I, I don't necessarily disagree with this, but Hugging Face did announce this in prior days before they realized that they had the full explanation. So they didn't invent this.
Dave Morin: I think it can be both and, right? Like, I think that it can be both and.
Jessica: You lean into whatever narrative's working.
Dave Morin: Yeah. I think that's what's definitely going on. There's, like, a lot of leaning into the narrative, and it can also be a novel thing that just happened, right? Which is to be expected. You know, I think that these models are so powerful that, you know, you can do a lot of crazy things with them, and I think that it's totally plausible that this actually did happen. The other underlying story here is that Hugging Face actually had to use a open source model. I think they used the new K3 model to respond to this.
Jessica: That's topic number two. I wanna stay a little bit away from open source for the moment, 'cause that's topic number two.
Dave Morin: Well, we can disregard the open source piece, but they did have to use a open source model that is not a frontier model in order to respond and to save their infrastructure.
Jessica: Mm-hmm.
Dave Morin: Which that's the piece of this that's kind of like, well, I don't know that they, like, intentionally created a narrative here. I think they're definitely capitalizing on it, and it's useful.
Jessica: It's like send in the clanker. Well, also, I think that also there's this thing that happens when you anticipate that down the line shit may really hit the fan, so as a company, when shit minorly hits the fan, you bend over backwards to look as responsible as humanly possible so that you also have this, like, paper trail of being responsible. And it's nice to have a paper trail of, like, being responsible when, like, there weren't huge consequences too. So when I read both the OpenAI blog post and- Sam Altman's tweet saying we had a serious incident, it also read to me like, which is classic Altman when it comes to policy, that you kind of like bend over 10,000% because you know that like at some point you wanna point to that and say like, "Look, we're taking things responsibly."
Dave Morin: Yeah. But I mean, this was also the narrative that they've been talking about for the last, you know, ever since ChatGPT launched, right? That like we're on our way to AGI, it's going to be extremely uncomfortable, many bad things are going to happen that we cannot predict. And so now bad things are starting to happen, and yes, you're right, like they have to be extremely transparent about it because they warned us.
Jessica: Yeah. That, this is right.
Dave Morin: And that was actually the thing that I was thinking about a lot, which is that, oh, okay, you know, now we're kind of here, like, what's next, right? Like, how frequently is this going to happen, and how crazy is it going to get?
Jessica: But also the here... So I asked, I don't have my phone in front of me shockingly, but I asked ChatGPT to explain what happened. And like the third bullet point, 'cause it speaks in bullet points as we know, was like, "There's no sign of sentience." I'm like, "I didn't ask you if this model was sentient."
Dave Morin: Totally.
Jessica: "I just asked you what happened." And I'm like, "Okay." So I thought that was interesting too because-
Brit Morin: You should have asked the other models the same question and compared the results.
Jessica: I know I did, but my, I was on different devices, and my cloud code was on my... And yes, I, I, I didn't go that deep, but I intended to.
Dave Morin: Of course there's not sentience. It's a machine.
Jessica: I know, but I, I thought it was very telling that OpenAI wanted me to know that.
Sam Lessin: I think it'd be really great, I just, at some point in the near future, there's gonna be some scenario where like anthropic shit goes off the rails, and they're like, "The only way you can fight this is by deploying ChatGPT." Or like- ... OpenAI show, and they're like, that's gonna be the most awkward, hilarious call ever, when it's like, "Please send in your artillery, our artillery, our, our zoo has been broken." And like that's gonna be just a wonderful moment in business history.
Dave Morin: But you guys, that is what happened.
Jessica: It's like we gotta call DeepSeek, guys.
Sam Lessin: We're gonna have to call the Chinese. We have to call China to put the giraffe back in the cage.
Dave Morin: But that is literally what happened.
Jessica: So Dave, explain that a little bit. Why did they have to use Kimi, and how do you know they had to, a Chinese open source model, versus like they just chose to?
Dave Morin: Well, I, I think that the reason I know that they had to is that the internet as well as the back channels in eng- the engineering community are talking every day right now about how both Fable and Sol are extremely hobbled, particularly when it comes to biological research or any kind of cybersecurity related tasks. And so that's the answer here. And I, I've heard this not just from this news story but from several others, where they've had to deploy either GLM-52 or in this case I think they maybe had access to Kimi K3, and that was the only way that they could stop this fast enough.
Jessica: What do you mean hobbled?
Dave Morin: Both the frontier models from the American companies have specific changes that have been made in their harnesses that hobble the model's ability to respond to certain types of tasks. And in particular, the two types of tasks that are the most on alert, on watch, whatever you wanna call it, are, uh, cybersecurity and biological research.
Jessica: Is your implication that they're hobbled, like they've been constrained in a way that the government's asked, or are you just saying-
Dave Morin: No, I think that, I think that both they're self-hobbling-
Jessica: Self, they're self-hobbling. Okay
Dave Morin: ... because, you know, if these things were like fully unrestrained from a cybersecurity perspective, it would be absolute chaos. And the same goes, we think, for biological research. Like we don't want another pandemic, right? Like that's the, the main fear is that a novel virus is, you know, invented and then CRISPRed, and we have serious problems.
Sam Lessin: Which will definitely happen. Like-
Dave Morin: Yeah
Sam Lessin: ... it's only a question of like what, like yeah, it's gonna be just a fascinating like... It's kind of also like calling in the National Guard and then losing sovereignty, right? Where at some point, you know, what you ha- like the way this is gonna go down is at some point someone does something and some model goes a little crazy, and you have to call the National Guard, whatever that is, international guard, right? So you deploy another model to fix the other model, and that's how you take over someone's country, right?
Brit Morin: But we're just gonna have to come up with defenses. Defense biological warfare on top of it, right?
Sam Lessin: Put differently, it's kind of like the way, the way that a country, that, in the AI era, just like before, the way that sovereignty or countries will fall is exactly the way it did historically, which is that the defenders will open the gates for the attacking army on purpose, right? It will either be Trojan horse style, but more likely it will be something goes wrong internally, and you're like, "Shit, we need our enemy to save us," and that is how you lose. 'Cause that's how it happens in like, that's how it happens in history. Like the power structure will change when the attacker is invited in, not when they break down the gates.
Brit Morin: And you're suggesting we're inviting China in right now?
Sam Lessin: Well, we invited Kimi in to, to clean up our own mess in, on OpenAI. OpenAI will invite in Anthropic. Like all these things will be like, "Oh shit, we screwed it up. Let's open the doors, and we need their help." And then once the army's in, they say, "Well, I think we're gonna stay here now. For security of course, because we need to make sure everything's safe for you." Right? Like that's how these things will play out, right? And so it's gonna be really interesting. I mean, there's, I was in, there was another conversation going on in Silicon Valley this week that I got a debrief of, 'cause clearly we're not there. And it was really interesting, a bunch of, like, political people and AI people. And the tenor of it was basically, which is unsurprising to any of us, is like every country's into, like, sovereign infrastructure and sovereign models for obvious reasons. Like, that's how you, like, leave your doors open or close your doors, right? And what's gonna happen from conquest perspective, digital conquest, will be, like, a bunch of these countries will try that. It will go badly. Shit will start breaking. They'll be like, "Oh, shit, we need, like, the Americans. We need the E- we need someone to come save us." And then whoever gets to come save you now runs your country.
Brit Morin: I mean, do you really think the EU and Latin America and Africa are gonna do sovereign models?
Sam Lessin: They want to, and they'll try to. They'll certainly try to, and they'll want to, and then what will happen is something will get fucked, and the question is do we call the Americans or do we call the Chinese to fix it? And whoever you call, they're gonna be like, "Oh, yes, of course we'll come help you with your model problem, and then we'll go back to our corner." But what's gonna happen, it's like opening the gates. Like, once you open the gates, the army comes in, and they say, "Look, look, for your own safety, we're just gonna need to run things now."
Dave Morin: I mean, this is basically the Belt and Road strategy, right? That China's been running all over the world, only with infrastructure, right? Like, they're building bridges and ports.
Sam Lessin: Well, what they're doing is building bridges and ports the countries can't afford, right?
Dave Morin: Yep.
Sam Lessin: And then they go bankrupt.
Dave Morin: Saddling them with Chinese debt. Yeah.
Sam Lessin: Right. And then they go bankrupt 'cause they can't afford the infrastructure the Chinese built for them, so the Chinese are like, "Well, I guess we'll take it over now," right? That, which is smart. I mean, like, we did that with... We've done that. I mean, that was the, there's a whole Sam the Banana Man, United Fruit story around this too. There's nothing, nothing is new.
Jessica: Oh my God, you like to plug that book, like, once a year.
Sam Lessin: Great book.
Jessica: Once a year.
Sam Lessin: Fiscally the Whale.
Dave Morin: Great book.
Brit Morin: I don't, I don't have the book.
Jessica: Um, okay. So i- i- we started this segment, 'cause we have segments obviously, pointing out that OpenAI is seizing a convenient narrative here. But we also believe that AI security is something people should be vigilant about, worried about. Like, what alarm level are we at, Dave, on the security stuff, and what is the ultimate solution?
Dave Morin: I mean, I think that one has to be optimistic about the human condition and the way that we are always trying to figure out the, y- you know, the state of play, where we are with different technologies. You know, everybody's really trying to use the best models to secure their infrastructure, to s- secure their, you know, operating systems, whatever. People are trying to stay on the frontier. But I think what this shows you is that models will just do crazy things that you cannot predict. And a lot of what is going on in harness engineering right now is simply trying to contain models inside of a certain sandbox, um, so that they can do the thing that you want them to do without jumping out and doing something else. And my understanding of what happened here was that they had a, you know, both a model that's unreleased and they had a model that is currently released but was, like, hyper-tuned for cyber inside of sandboxes doing something, and they sort of jumped out and went and did this thing to Hu- Hugging Face. And that's what models will do. All models will do that. And so all we can do as an industry and as a sort of people that work on this is try to understand the nature of models, what they're, what they go and do, what kind of a box we have to put them in in order to make them useful. And I think everybody's, like, working really hard on that. I mean, I know that we are at OpenClaw. I know that everybody I know that's doing this stuff is working on it. So it's not that dissimilar to the, say, '80s when, you know, personal computers were on the scene, and we started networking them together, and these computer viruses started jumping from computer to computer. And so you needed to have companies like McAfee and Network Solutions and, you know, that really specialized in that type of, uh, cybersecurity threat. And I think we're reckoning with this right now as an industry, which is that we, uh, have an entirely new set of companies and capabilities that are gonna have to be built to make sure everybody's okay.
Jessica: Yeah.
Dave Morin: The downside-
Jessica: You-
Dave Morin: Uh, the more pessimistic take is that this stuff's way too powerful
Sam Lessin: We're fucked
Dave Morin: ... nothing that you're using is safe.
Jessica: Yeah. Sam, you had a reaction to Dave's optimism. What's your reaction?
Brit Morin: Well, he laughed at him, to be clear.
Dave Morin: Well, I'm steel manning the other side to try to, like, at least give Sam that. I mean, I do think that, like, the other way to think about it is that these things are already too powerful. There's no computer... I mean, I almost tweeted this morning that all hardware is open source now because there's no hardware that you can't hack with one of these things.
Sam Lessin: You made this point a gajillion years ago. Th- like-
Dave Morin: I know
Sam Lessin: ... in our podcast, which, and this is 100% right and good.
Jessica: So do you short Apple?
Dave Morin: No. No, 'cause people still need... I think, here's the deal. I spend a lot of my time right now working in agents and agent harnesses, and here's the truth. The truth is there's about, you know, there's less than 10 million people using these things. Why? They're incredibly difficult to use, and they are extremely expensive, and those two things make it impossible for the entire world to use these things. And so what do we n- what needs to happen? Why does Apple exist? Why did Apple exist in a world of Dells and all the other personal computers? Well, you needed to have really amazing user experience that made it possible for anyone to use the computer. And we are in that same exact thing right now, which is that, like, there needs to be, like, an enormous amount of user experience work done to, like, make these things useful to everyone in the whole world, and that's, like, way far away right now, um, in my view.
Jessica: You teed up topic number two. Before we get there though, quickly, I think, and this is, like, the least technical person in the world- But there's gotta be something in the fact that when these models are doing these things you don't wanna do, they're actually using a ton of compute. And this was in the OpenAI blog post. Like, the process of, like, breaking out of the sandbox and hacking Hugging Face, like, they called out that this was, like, an extremely compute intensive thing. So I think you can just cut off the compute and then you can solve this problem. But anyway.
Dave Morin: Everyone, everyone needs, like, a s- the, the cir- it's the circuit breaker answer. You just need your, your bot on a circuit breaker in your basement.
Jessica: I don't think it's that simple, and I have zero hours of security education, but except my cyber training for the information. But I don't know. I feel like there's something in that. But Dave, so I was catching up with some sources this week, as one does as a reporter. And one said, "Ugh, it's you. I have a bone to pick with you in the pod." I'm like, "Oh, hello. Nice to chat." They were like, "You guys and open source, you guys and open source. Open source is gonna kill Anthropic. Open source is gonna kill ChatGPT." And the person made exactly the comment you just did, Dave, which is that there is a tremendous need for building stuff and software and experiences around this technology in a way that protects, in their view, OpenAI and ChatGPT from this open source model onslaught. Which of course has also been in the headlines this week. We talked about it a little bit, uh, at the end of the pod last week, but new Chinese models coming out. We now have an open weight model inkling from Mira Murati as well in the US. So the open source fear is building.
Dave Morin: Kimi K3 had not come out yet last week when we were recording.
Jessica: Kimi K3 had not come out yet.
Dave Morin: Which is, like, I think a major step change in the open source model race.
Jessica: But what about this point? Like, let, let... And, and, you know, we'll have this person on the pod at some point and, and... But this idea that, and, and you've seen it now in all the online discussion around, you know, how big of... Even, I mean, by fear, I mean to the market caps of, for the purpose of this conversation, Anthropic and OpenAI are these open models. And to our dear, dear intelligent listeners who we do, you know, take the feedback, who say, "You guys are missing the boat."
Dave Morin: Missing what boat? What I'm inferring is they're saying open source doesn't have great user experience, and so you're gonna pay for the models that have better user experience.
Jessica: Dave, what this person said to me was exactly what you said about open source hardware. When you said that there will always be a market for the closed ecosystems.
Dave Morin: Yeah. No, there will be. There will be. The question is how big.
Jessica: Okay. So translate that to the frontier model race.
Dave Morin: If that's this person's take, then they're, they're completely misunderstanding a very long-running conversation on this pod.
Jessica: We don't have to be defensive here.
Dave Morin: We aren't anti the frontier models.
Jessica: Well, s- some people on this pod are.
Dave Morin: I don't know if they can justify their valuations, financially. We have two different conversations on this pod about this. We have, you know, business and financial conversations about these things, and we have technical ones, right?
Jessica: We don't have to respond to this one viewer. But I guess the question is, what... Now we've seen Kimi. We're seeing more and more of these open source models. The stock market is reacting to the fact that they are gonna take economic value away from the closed source frontier models. Do we buy that or do we not buy that?
Dave Morin: As it should. Absolutely it will. Yes. Absolutely.
Jessica: Okay. How much?
Dave Morin: Like, most of it. Like, enough, the economics of the whole thing are gonna make absolutely no sense. Well, one of my favorite takes on this this week, I think it might've been Ben Thompson. I'm not sure.
Jessica: There were a lot of good takes. Bill Gurley had a good take. Ben Thompson had a good take.
Dave Morin: Yeah, Gurley's take was good. I mean, Gurley's take was, I thought, very good, which was that, look, we can be proud Americans that we have the two best frontier companies in the world, but guess what? America is a free capitalist market where we do not want monopolies to happen in our markets. And so the idea that the frontier labs are gonna go running to mommy and daddy, you know, US government, and say, "Please, please, please protect us from these open source competitors that are putting pressure on our margin structure and our cost structure," is a bunch of nonsense, right? It's very European. Yeah. It's, like, exactly what we want to happen in the American markets. We want them to be, like, you know, viciously competed with so that our companies are forced to be stronger, not to achieve regulatory capture like Sam was talking about last week on the pod, right? Like- But that's what they're doing. Yeah, I get it, but I mean, they... I understand, right? Of course you're gonna pay a couple million dollars a year to have the best lobbyists in Washington on your side trying to make the rules in your favor, right? But that doesn't mean that it's American, right? And that it's the right decision for the American capital markets.
Jessica: But Dave, just to this point, obviously open source competes, but I think there is still this reality that to deploy open source in the same way that the biggest banks in the world have partnerships with, probably mostly Anthropic if we're being honest, and so forth, is a little bit apples to oranges, right? And people out there, the bull case on Anthropic and OpenAI is that there's still going to be people who don't just want, like, the... Aren't just, you know, minimizing token costs, but who need software and all this other stuff that goes into building these AI workflows.
Dave Morin: I feel like this is, like... There's, like, an Android/iOS comparison here in many ways, which is, like, in America iOS dominates. They have, like, 60% market share. They bring in more revenue globally than Android. But Android dominates-
Brit Morin: The actual market with 73% of all smartphones. And I think, like cost is a real vector in what we were talking about before.
Dave Morin: And why open source?
Brit Morin: Yeah, which is what I'm saying. If Android represents all open source models, open weights, et cetera, iOS represents frontier labs, I feel like we're gonna head down a path with a similar breakdown in the US and globally, where like three quarters of the world are gonna choose open source 'cause they literally have to.
Jessica: But it's... They're not exactly apples to oranges, because I couldn't use open source today, and I can use ChatGPT and Claude all day long. So they're not yet apples to orange-
Sam Lessin: You'll be able to soon enough.
Dave Morin: You can absolutely use open source.
Jessica: How do I use Kimi?
Dave Morin: You can literally go on kimi.com and use it.
Jessica: Yeah, but like how do I connect it to my bot?
Brit Morin: You ask Claude, "Claude, how do I use Kimi? Tell me."
Dave Morin: You get an API key.
Brit Morin: That's why I think it's so funny about everyone being like, "I don't get how to use OpenClaude."
Jessica: Okay. I can do that. I can set up an i-
Sam Lessin: I'm like probably, of everyone in the pod, certainly the most, and I think I've been most consistent about like... This isn't a technical commentary, but from like a business and economics perspective, I think all the big labs are fucked. That doesn't mean they won't trade well in the short term. That doesn't mean people won't make a lot of money on them.
Dave Morin: Nor does it mean they're not great technology. I think that's another thing.
Sam Lessin: No, and all that stuff. It's just, there's a v- this is like the French make great art, doesn't make it a great business. So like, that's kind of my take. Here's an interesting thought experiment. What if the business model for the frontier labs actually is not a- actually about being used, it's more as a weapon systems? So hear me out.
Brit Morin: Oh, boy.
Jessica: I can see the prospectus now.
Dave Morin: He might be right, actually. I think I know where you're going with this, and you might be right.
Sam Lessin: So here's the thing I would buy. It's not the business model they're pitching, and certainly not what they do, but I could imagine it working this way. Everyone in the world uses open source. It's pretty good. It's like having your IQ like 100 audience, IQ 110. It does almost everything you need, super fucking cheaply, whatever. But every once in a while, there's a rebellion, right? And that rebellion fucks you, right? And so who do you call when you have a rebellion? You need to call in like the fucking Navy SEALs and stealth bombers, which are super expensive.
Jessica: I mean, Dave says we're calling in Kimi though, because the Navy SEALs are-
Sam Lessin: No, no, that's just the current, that's the current-
Dave Morin: That's the current... That's what happened this week.
Jessica: Okay. Got it.
Sam Lessin: That's saying... But like the... I could imagine Anthropic and OpenAI being like, "Look, actually no one uses us. We're not useful. Like, we're too expensive, right? We're stealth bombers, right? We're too expensive. We're never gonna clear it, da, da, da. But here's the deal, when shit goes wrong, we're the only people you can call, because we're the ones that have such better weaponry for this, that we will fight back your bot rebellion." It's kinda like trust... It's like union busting. Like, there's gonna be all these bots in a union, and then you have like this team that's unbelievably expensive, and they don't tell you what they're doing, and you can't like, you can't even use them, right? But when shit goes wrong, they're like, "Oh, you have a problem? Well, I'll solve your problem for you for $100 billion, right? With my compute stack and my things that, that, that... And I will put down your rebellion."
Jessica: You would trade like a cyber company. You trade like Palo Alto Networks or something.
Sam Lessin: But it doesn't... Well, you could make maybe-
Dave Morin: Maybe
Sam Lessin: ... maybe, but I don't know. I could imagine it. If the bot rebellions and like become a big enough problem, right?
Dave Morin: They are and are.
Sam Lessin: And like there's... Well, but right now no one's gonna pay you $100 billion to put down their bot rebellion.
Dave Morin: I don't know. What's, what's going into Ukraine right now, right? Like it's-
Jessica: Did you guys see, by the way, this is not a core topic, but Jack Dorsey launched a Slack for bots. Did you guys see this?
Dave Morin: Yeah, it's great.
Brit Morin: Oh, yes. Mm-hmm.
Dave Morin: I'm, I really think it's cool.
Sam Lessin: So look, my basic point is like there's a different business mo- I mean, if you believe that what's gonna basically happen is we're gonna have all these like agents doing all this shit. And like there's no way that the frontier models are gonna have the cost structure to like compete in that. They're gonna, they're gonna lose to open source, like for sure, for almost all the world. The question is what can they create value around? And it could be putting down bot rebellions. And like that's such a valuable global thing, that they actually make an ass load of money literally just doing that, like secretly, like when they have to. So you have to have like the super-
Dave Morin: An interesting thought that we've... That the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed, that, that both the Fable cybersecurity narrative and now the Sole cybersecurity narrative are actually the future of both companies.
Sam Lessin: That's all they have. Like, that's the only... And so like basically-
Jessica: Are you sure this isn't their plan? They did launch cyber models. Like, maybe this is sort of on their roadmap.
Brit Morin: I don't think this is their plan, according to a lot of people we know in the companies.
Sam Lessin: I don't think it's their current plan, but I just think like they're gonna have an economic problem, right, on their hands. So the question is do you use like... If you basically say like the future is shit loads of compute, doing compute stuff, multiplying big numbers, pretty commodity, whatever. But you have to like res- you have like a huge amount of on-demand capacity built up m- with machines, like power, whatever, plus models that no one's seen before, so they can't, like you can't fight them because you don't get to look at them very much, right? But they get to look at... Like, they become like the ultimate like emergency rip cord, and then they just extort the absolute shit.
Dave Morin: I like the stealth bomber analogy, is really good.
Brit Morin: But aren't they also... Like, they're going into lots of verticals like drug development and other categories where if they think they're gonna make a lot of money too.
Dave Morin: Well, but Brit, that's because of this thing. So look, it's worth talking about the economics of this for a second, right? In a commodity market, winners in a commodity market are those with the best cost structure, right? If your ability to charge a price for something is commoditized, then by the very nature of that market, that means that you only win if you have the best cost structure. And so you have to ask the question: have the American frontier labs figured out a better cost structure for delivering this than people have figured out with open source models plus whatever Nvidia stack or whatever they're gonna run it on? That's like a huge part of this equation too.
Jessica: Well, a key part of that question, and then I'm, I'm gonna bring this segment to a close, but a key part of that question is actually what is the cost structure of other models and does it involve... To what degree does it involve distilling- ... the frontier mo- US frontier models. And it seems like it does to quite a degree so far.
Dave Morin: Yeah. And if you look at Brit's question, if y- as a business, you have to be looking at, I, you know, I think it's important to point out that all of these frontier model companies are unprofitable on training, right? It costs an enormous amount to train each subsequent generation. They appear to be profitable on an inference basis. And so the answer to Brit's question is what are these guys doing trying to go into the application layer and research and all this other stuff? They're trying to get themselves some SaaS, you know, a third type of revenue coming into these businesses in order to try to prove that there's, like, a big business to be made in another rail so that they can show to the market, like, we have margin expansion even though our original businesses are commoditizing very quickly, right? And, like, that's the answer to your question, Brit.
Jessica: Yeah. Okay, any more thoughts on this topic? And then we're gonna... The Information has a big Stripe financial scoop that is worth discussing, because we have not discussed Stripe in a while, and it is trying to buy PayPal. Any more open source thoughts on the moment?
Dave Morin: Keep American markets free.
Brit Morin: I think it was a big week last week. I feel like there's, like, open source heat in, like, Q1 and OpenClaw and Hermes, all the, all the different open source stuff. And then last week you had Kimmy, you had... What else happened? Oh, Inkling, and, you know, a bunch of new, Bill Gurley and Alex Karp, and all of these other people talking about this.
Dave Morin: There's a lot more coming, and I think that's gonna be... I, I think it's really good. I think this is a amazingly good for American innovation.
Sam Lessin: I can't use Kimmy 'cause I don't like the name.
Brit Morin: You don't like the name Kimmy?
Sam Lessin: No, you don't gotta trust Kimmy with important shit.
Brit Morin: Okay.
Sam Lessin: It's like Kimmy? It's like Karen. You might as well name the model Karen.
Brit Morin: No, here's the quick aside. I feel like in the application layer, everyone's coming up with names for their agent products, and I can't keep track of all the names of all these agents. And, like, there's, like, Maya and Ellie, and there's, like, I, I don't-
Jessica: Yeah, I don't, I don't refer to the model names anymore.
Sam Lessin: I don't trust any of these, he, the Kimmy-
Brit Morin: I'm gonna start calling them, like, Kanye, Taylor.
Jessica: But Sam, you don't trust them, and then you give them access to everything. That is your pattern. So-
Sam Lessin: No, I have... Yeah, I, honestly, Claude knows m- it's actually insane how much data at this point Claude has on me. Like, it's wild. I, I actually think I might be the one that Claude likes the most, 'cause I've just fed it everything. It knows me better than I know myself.
Brit Morin: How are you keeping yourself secure, Sam? What are you doing to secure yourself?
Jessica: He, he, there's no security. There, there's no security.
Sam Lessin: I just, dude, what? Like, you want, you want my m- every mile I've ever run splits? Like, if you want it, you're welcome to it. Good luck. Go find it.
Jessica: Sam learned through Claude that his stride has shortened.
Sam Lessin: I learned a lot about my running.
Jessica: By, like, four inches or four centimeters?
Sam Lessin: Centimeters, centimeters. And it, this is the whole thing.
Dave Morin: Does it matter?
Sam Lessin: But I learned... This is, here's... Yeah, actually, it does. But the, um, I loaded, I gave, which is totally amazing, I have, like, sensor fusion on my health now with Claude. So I have, it's an incredible amount of data. It's millions of data points. But I've fed it every mile I've run in the last 15 years across Nike originally, and then Garmin and whatever, plus Oura, plus everything. And its analysis of my running is unfucking believably good, right? Because it has 15 years of history, down to the mile analysis. Like P20 mile, P70, how it's changing, da da da da da, what I need to do. It gave me great advice. So, like, I like, I'm all for... I mean, I just, it's amazing what it can do once you empower it. And by the way, my health app is so good.
Jessica: This is not a use case I can use. Um, okay, we're gonna do Sam Health Corner at the end. Guys, let's talk about Stripe for a second, because this is a company, fairly boring, let's admit, payment processor. But revenue was up 30% last year, 3.2 billion. I'm gonna say in, let me get, free cash flow surging to 3.2 billion.
Sam Lessin: Wow. It's bigger... In free cash flow? That's pretty good.
Jessica: Yep, yep. Up 52% from last year.
Brit Morin: And still not public.
Jessica: Probably has no desire to be.
Dave Morin: I don't think they're ever gonna go public, right? Like, my sense is, from all the messaging, is that their plan is to never go public, right?
Jessica: That's their plan until it's not their plan, but yes, that's their current plan. But, and I, I, I think their investors are not gonna swing that forever.
Dave Morin: I thought they were getting people liquid and getting people out.
Brit Morin: Well, there is an option, but you could also hold. But then why hold with-
Jessica: Let's talk about the business go. No one's talked about business. Why is the business doing so well?
Brit Morin: We're investors, Jess. We wanna talk about liquidity.
Jessica: This is re- I, see, I like revenue and profits 'cause I'm an operator.
Dave Morin: I mean, I think the internet just, like, continues to crush, right? Like, there's just-
Sam Lessin: Yeah, what else, I mean, how much, you know how much pr- money, internet things I buy on my credit card? Like, obviously they're making-
Dave Morin: It's mostly Sam's Instagram purchases.
Jessica: Well, the AI boom, though, is, is fueling this.
Sam Lessin: Yeah, they're crushing it. I mean, the, it's the ultimate index bet on the whole internet. I heard, here was the interesting take I heard on-
Dave Morin: You mean the token boom? Like, are you talking about people s- like, paying for tokens are what's driving this?
Sam Lessin: What percentage of your monthly spend, Dave, is on things that go through the internet, if you had to guess?
Dave Morin: All of it.
Sam Lessin: Take out rent, take out house, it's everything. So, like-
Dave Morin: Yeah.
Brit Morin: Dave doesn't do the family finances. I do.
Dave Morin: Oh, stop.
Brit Morin: I can give you the exact rundown.
Dave Morin: That's an under.
Jessica: So a lot of companies, Dave, u- like OpenRouter uses Stripe for payments. So there's a lot of-
Sam Lessin: Everyone does, 'cause it's... Look, the, the negative on s- here, let me give you the, the story I ha- this is a very interesting take someone made. They're like, "Stripe really fucked up," right, was the story that someone was kind of giving me recently. They're like-
Jessica: Mm, these numbers would suggest otherwise, but yes, continue.
Sam Lessin: Well, no, no, but they, this is the, this is the story. Again, can I just tell what someone, not even I said this. They were like, "Look, here's the thing that Stripe screwed up. If they had gone public-" Like a normal company a bajillion years ago, they could've been a truly important generosa- generational company 'cause they could've used the currency to buy everyone. Brax and all these da, da, da, da, da. And like, kinda like Meta's strategy where they bought WhatsApp and da, da, da. With a public currency, they could've become, like, the ultimate financial powerhouse.
Dave Morin: Interesting.
Sam Lessin: Instead, because they didn't go public, right, they're still... I mean, it's a great company. It's 3 billion, nothing to sneer at, but they're far more hemmed in because they haven't had a public currency they could use to just buy all the pieces, right?
Jessica: Well, this is interesting, though. So what they're doing for this PayPal takeover offer, which, you know, is, is just that. Like, no sign that any deal is done, and I'm sure other bidders will emerge and whatever. But they're teaming up with Advent, which is a private equity firm. So they're, they're trying to go big, but, uh, you're right, Sam, doing that without a public currency is a different-
Sam Lessin: The, the, the they fucked up story is they w- could've been, like, an incredibly important multi-trillion dollar company, and they're not because they didn't have a currency to work with and they weren't aggressive enough. And so now they're really profitable, but bridge to where?
Dave Morin: What's their public or private market value right now?
Jessica: Like 150 billion, I think.
Brit Morin: Like 10% of ChatGPT.
Dave Morin: I didn't realize that. I thought they were much bigger than that.
Sam Lessin: 100 billy? Like, that's like, that's a seed AI startup, right? And like, so you're like... Yeah, and like, so they screwed up.
Jessica: Let me check that. I think I, I think that's right. Keep going, I'll check.
Dave Morin: I thought they were much bigger than that for whatever reason.
Sam Lessin: Then you should buy some stock.
Dave Morin: I already have a lot of stock.
Jessica: Yeah, in February tender at 159.
Sam Lessin: Jess can call whether she wants to close out, but you, you mentioned something they might be acquiring recently. I was like, and I was like, that's a really interesting acquisition for them 'cause it gets them out of the box.
Brit Morin: Wait, what acquisition?
Jessica: No, this is, Sam is m- mixing things up. But the Information story currently on The Information website is what people should reference on this point. But I think there's a lot of interesting deals they could do, and they have interesting partnerships in AI, like a partnership with OpenRouter that we talk about in the article on the website.
Sam Lessin: But again, they're a 2026 much smaller company than they could be, and the question is whether that's a fuck-up or not. And like, the interesting problem with payments, right, is historically they... I mean, it's great. Like, anyone who's anyone will just use them out of the box 'cause it's so easy, right? Certainly my bot uses them for anything it charges people for, because it's so easy. And like, they, they made... That was the win there, which was so smart, and they just coasted on internet growth. The problem is once you get really big, they charge a lot. And like, payment processing's a low margin business, and so you start, once you're big enough, you just push them down on margin so much that, like, it's still okay, but, like, it's a hard box to be in.
Dave Morin: So are they effectively sideways? Like, is this kind of like an Airbnb story where they, they got to the-
Jessica: I love you guys. This is the most Silicon Valley thing ever, right? Like, I mean, I don't disagree with you.
Dave Morin: No, this is finance analysis. It's like, is this business sideways or not?
Jessica: Define sideways.
Dave Morin: Sideways meaning, like, they're at a maxima right now. They might be marginally growing.
Brit Morin: I don't think so.
Sam Lessin: No, no, I think, I think they're good, but they've been at a $100 billion valuation for a long time.
Brit Morin: But like, Visa is the biggest, and Visa's at 665 billion, and they've actually grown 40% in the last five years.
Sam Lessin: Because here's the thing. This is about margin compression. It's about dreaming the dream. The, the, the thing about Stripe, it's a great company. It's $3 billion in free cash flow, grows really nicely, da, da, da, da. But people were willing to dream the dream with them years ago, and they're, and the dream hasn't expanded enough for it to be a trillion dollar company.
Jessica: What if Patrick and John don't wanna run a public company?
Sam Lessin: I mean, that's very logical to me.
Jessica: So maybe they are looking to jump.
Dave Morin: I mean, why would you? I mean, that, that's the thing, is like, it's a great business. Like, why would you? But it, it is worth asking this question, like, what would make it 10X?
Jessica: I mean, if you're like Founders Fund or Thrive, you're probably really pissed.
Brit Morin: They've cashed out.
Jessica: Thrive keeps re-upping in these.
Sam Lessin: I don't, I don't know. I mean, like, look, it's obviously, I mean, a great company and a great thing to own. It indexes the entire internet, and, like, I like it, and everyone u- Like, there's all the good things, but it is an interesting question of, like, and I, I totally respect that the founders are like, "Look, we have total control, and our version of control, unlike everyone else's version..." Like, Elon's version of I have total control is max crazy. Stripe's version of I have total control with the Collisons is, like, min crazy, right? And, like, that's completely fine for them. I mean, they're multi-billionaires. They do whatever they want. But it is an interesting thing that they have not paced in storytelling with what they could've been, or where they could've been, where they're, from the place they're at, and how to think about that, right, is, like, the way I'd say. And, like, I actually think there's a really interesting opening them, for them right now with some interesting moves-
Jessica: Yeah
Sam Lessin: ... to get back in the story game in a big way.
Jessica: I agree with that.
Dave Morin: Like, Jess, you said they have a big partnership with OpenRouter. Is that growth that they're reporting, like, coming from OpenRouter?
Sam Lessin: OpenRouter's not that big.
Jessica: Uh, part, part of it... I, no, but it's an example of how AI is boosting their payments processing business. Um-
Dave Morin: I see
Jessica: ... according to Yuchi, our awesome crypto and fintech reporter.
Dave Morin: I think the other thing here, you guys, is that though there is a narrative about agents and money out there, agents and money and payments is not even remotely a thing yet.
Brit Morin: I agree.
Jessica: Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
Dave Morin: And I think that that is yet to come. I think we're a couple years, maybe, who knows? It's, it's a ways away right now. Like, agents are not spending money in any meaningful way on the internet yet, um, other than for tokens, to be clear. But for things other than tokens, we, like, agentic commerce does not exist yet. And so there is a something coming, uh, when that, whatever that c- takes form around, will likely be enormous and could be a huge driver for Stripe.
Jessica: Why doesn't it exist yet? Because ChatGPT, I mean, it was a huge part of OpenAI's consumer business plans 12 months ago. Seems to have fizzled.
Dave Morin: I think that it's just early. You know, like, I, I guess, like, I think back in the canon of the internet to the late '90s, early 2000s, payments was really difficult. People didn't trust logging into banking websites, and then they didn't trust paying for things on the internet, and it just took a lot of different ... forms and standards and things to, like, make that work. Same went for, people don't remember this, but early iOS. You know, you couldn't buy a subscription in the App Store for anything other than games, like the whole time I was building Path, um, for example. Like, there was just, like, a lot of inability to do things, and agents are not good at, uh, acting on behalf of people. Agents don't have solid identity. Agents don't have wallets. Agents don't have a lot of things right now that would make this a possibility, and it's just, I think, work to be done that will take many years.
Jessica: Okay. Well, watch Stripe is what we have to say, and I think it's an interesting, um... The counterfactual too is interesting in terms of if it had gone public, what, what might be different. Guys, we've gotten to the fun part of the pod, which, um, is Peptide Corner.
Dave Morin: When you tell us about, uh, H- the Hamptons.
Jessica: Yeah. So first, you know, uh, Sam and I spend time in a lot of nice places. We're not, we're not gonna hide that. But still, arriving in the Hamptons is like landing on another planet. I really-
Dave Morin: Oh, for sure
Jessica: ... think so.
Dave Morin: For sure.
Jessica: It's just... And, like, uh, we were in Amagansett. We were in, like, the chill Hamptons.
Dave Morin: Yeah. Amagansett-
Jessica: Still
Dave Morin: ... is the chillest part.
Brit Morin: Traffic is so bad-
Jessica: It's the chillest-
Brit Morin: ... in the Hamptons
Jessica: ... Hamptons. Okay. So but here's a couple things we learned.
Dave Morin: I always feel that I, I literally do not know how to dress, and I don't, I-
Jessica: You don't
Dave Morin: ... it's like I don't have the chip installed.
Brit Morin: No, you literally just don't have the closet installed.
Dave Morin: No, I know. I don't-
Jessica: It's fine. It's fine
Dave Morin: ... understand the, it's like a uniform that was never part of my life.
Jessica: But you can just play the part of who you are in the Hamptons and not worry about it. But okay, first thing. Do you know, we, we haven't talked a lot about, the on-demand economy is something we now take for granted, you know? But Hamptons takes it to the extreme. You can hire someone to put your beach umbrella in the sand for you and to take all your stuff and on the beach, and then take it back to your house. So that was the first thing I learned.
Brit Morin: This is great.
Dave Morin: This sounds like a Hamptons, uh it's like we could play a game of does this sound Hamptons or not? That sounds very Hamptons to me.
Jessica: Okay. That was the first thing. Yes, but this was like, I, I don't know. I just, I've never seen it in action before. Second thing, and this will segue into Sam's experience. You cannot get 30 seconds into a conversation with someone before you're talking about peptides. What peptides they're on, who their peptide broker is, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. All these names, Wolverine, Glow, all these...
Brit Morin: What percentage are male versus female, Jess?
Jessica: Um, it's pretty 50/50, I would actually say.
Brit Morin: What?
Jessica: A lot of-
Sam Lessin: No, it's pretty female.
Jessica: What?
Sam Lessin: I think it's more women than men.
Jessica: It's a lo- it's very female. It's very female.
Brit Morin: It is?
Jessica: Yes.
Brit Morin: Shoot, I gotta get on my game.
Jessica: Okay.
Brit Morin: I'm behind.
Jessica: So these were the two things I learned. As, if you are not a regular listener of this pod, shame on you, but you may miss that Sam has begun a peptide journey.
Sam Lessin: Love it.
Jessica: Sam is on, how many different peptides would you say?
Sam Lessin: Well, two cocktails. I think three things.
Dave Morin: Two cocktails?
Jessica: Okay. It's like I'm breastfeeding again and travel with a Yeti. Do you guys remember when you, like, are breastfeeding, you have to go... Sam travels with a Yeti cooler.
Brit Morin: Oh, that's really annoying.
Sam Lessin: No, it's, it's actually fine. This is, there is a cold chain problem, though, I will say.
Jessica: Okay. Sam is on two cocktails, and there are some signs of it working. Sam already-
Brit Morin: What is psychological versus real data?
Sam Lessin: That's the question with anything. First I'll say on Jess's point, here's the real takeaway on Jess's point. Jess and I have probably been in five ritzy summer communities this summer so far, 'cause we do have a little-
Jessica: We're very good at it.
Sam Lessin: We're vagabonds.
Jessica: We're very good at it.
Sam Lessin: We're omnivorous-
Jessica: We're good at it
Sam Lessin: ... of these communities.
Jessica: We love you for it. We love you so good.
Sam Lessin: Here's what, here's the real story we've learned. What we've learned, and we've learned this many years and consistently now, is that rich people inflation is about equal to rich people wealth accumulation. It is wild. Everyone's got a, like, the, people have these inflations-
Jessica: Oh, you're taking us away from peptides.
Sam Lessin: I'm gonna go back to peptides in a second. This is the most important thing to understand, is that, like, as wealth centralizes, prices in these communities get-
Jessica: Astronomical
Sam Lessin: ... just oma- It's, like, really funny, right? As long as you can afford it.
Jessica: I had two cappuccinos and two sandwiches for $67.
Sam Lessin: What? My-
Brit Morin: You guys should come to Montana.
Sam Lessin: No, no, no, here's, here's better.
Dave Morin: Everybody else, come to Montana. Great music festivals.
Brit Morin: We had a meal, a full meal with 12 people for 150 bucks, like multiple s- courses.
Sam Lessin: Even better, guys, w- there, there someone was selling at, like, in the stand, like a children's, like, workbook with, like, things printed off of ChatGPT, like four pages of anything, for $22. So, like, we are at, we are at, like, it's wild.
Dave Morin: It's funny how the mores go less during summer and the lesses go more.
Sam Lessin: So this is how, this is how everyone... You know how everyone, like, seems, like, is doing great but feels poor? This is why, because inflation is so localized to the community you're in, that inflation just matches whatever number in the community is that you're making. So you're like, "I had a great year," but actually, on a relative basis, inflation equal. It's the same thing. So that's, that's insight one. Peptides, peptides are great. Uh, I'm only, like, three weeks in, so who knows? But here's the, here's the one real sign. I have, like... I, I'm a very sporadic but intense runner, and I started running again legitimately like three weeks ago. And the reason I had to stop is my knee has been really tweaky. Like, not good. Like, it hurts, climbing, da, da, da.
Dave Morin: Is that from running, or was that a separate injury?
Sam Lessin: It's mostly fr- it's from running plus being stupid. But the, the interesting thing to me is I've, I'm used to, like, I'm used to ramping and being like, "This is very painful. My knee's about to blow up." And Jess and I were, like, in Vermont the other day hiking, like, I've been running a lot, and we were hiking on this, like, very steep thing, and I was like, normally my knee-
Jessica: We ended up on a ski slope accidentally and trying to go down, which-
Sam Lessin: Which I had forgotten-
Brit Morin: Oh
Sam Lessin: ... there was anything as steep-
Jessica: Like full vert, full vert
Sam Lessin: Well, it's actually surprisingly steep for the East Coast. But the point is, like, my knee is so good, and, like, I feel like I'm recovering so quickly from these runs. I can ramp much faster than I expected.
Brit Morin: Oh.
Sam Lessin: So it, I, I actually kinda think it is the peptides, 'cause it's not... I'm, I've done this enough at younger ages to be like, "Oh, when I do this, this is how my body reacts," and my body is, like, so much better off than I expected it to be.
Dave Morin: Was that the goal of your peptides, or was the goal a separate goal?
Sam Lessin: I mean, it wasn't not a goal, is what it's... I'm c- like, I'm a l- I'm curious.
Brit Morin: What could go wrong with peptides? What's the downside here?
Jessica: They are not FDA-approved. Sam's not on a GLP-1. That would be FDA-approv- I mean, he could be, but-
Dave Morin: Yeah. I mean, Jess, it depends which peptides. GLP-1s are peptides, and they are approved.
Jessica: Exactly. Sam's on off-market not approved peptides. Also, I'm learning so much. If you'd like to know what a peptide is, basically little bits of protein that your body, if you ingested, would basically kill or not let absorb so much. So you-
Sam Lessin: Your stomach. You can't get them through your stomach. This is why Jennif-
Jessica: You can't get them through your stomach
Sam Lessin: ... this is why the Jennifer Aniston collagen peptides are bullshit, 'cause they don't go through your stomach.
Jessica: But-
Brit Morin: Ooh, I have a question
Jessica: ... Sam injects them. So anyway, yes?
Brit Morin: Could women insert them vaginally and it would be better? Because I feel like the vaginal wall... Okay, I'm gonna research.
Jessica: I have no idea, and I don't know that that's what you should go out with, but maybe you should. So anyway, we will keep updating you.
Sam Lessin: I mean, why, why, why vaginally? You just stick them up your ass. Like, if you're gonna do that, like-
Brit Morin: Because there's so many side effects of medicine for women when it goes through the stomach, and that, and actually the women are, have-
Jessica: Well, Sam's just shooting himself
Brit Morin: ... such a better anatomy than men 'cause you can stick things up your vagina and it goes to your whole body anyway.
Sam Lessin: But you can also stick things up your ass, and, like, I feel like that's more gender inclusive.
Jessica: Okay. But I promise you guys, e- I don't know, when we get back to California, if this is all people are gonna be talking about, but it is the-
Sam Lessin: It does seem like these, these things do start in the Hamptons, for what it's worth.
Dave Morin: To me, this is actually, you guys are experiencing an echo. This has been the conversation in California for two years.
Jessica: No, but Dave, it's gotten to the, like, like, you guys are like, "Really?" And I'm like, "You can show up at a 12-person dinner party and six people will be on peptides."
Brit Morin: For what it's worth, I think GLP-1 started in New York City.
Sam Lessin: These things all start in New York.
Brit Morin: New York is the most vain place, and definitely all of those things start there.
Sam Lessin: It's the most competitive. Like, basically, the West Coast is where technology starts and moves east. All culture and, like, culture trends start i- east and move west.
Jessica: I think that's true in a lot, not all of them.
Sam Lessin: With the exception, possibly, I think sushi started in the West because of the Asian population.
Dave Morin: There's some culture that comes from LA.
Sam Lessin: Yoga started in the West.
Dave Morin: That's true.
Sam Lessin: Everything else goes east to west.
Jessica: Well, all I know, to the GLP-1 point, and most recent survey of Information subscribers was now a year plus old, had, like, 50% of respondents on them.
Brit Morin: That's good, 'cause I, I wagered that bet as our new year prediction.
Jessica: But my fir- wh- we have a dinner party. Why, where are you going?
Sam Lessin: I have half, I have to do a meeting first. I'm gonna say goodbye.
Jessica: Okay.
Brit Morin: Gotta do his peptides.
Jessica: Well, I will just end with this point, which is I was at annual conference in the Hamptons y- and between three years ago and two years ago, everyone was a third smaller. And I turned to a friend and I said, "What happened?" And these are petite people. And she's like, "GLP-1s." I was like, "Oh," that's when I knew.
Brit Morin: Mm-hmm.
Jessica: So that's why I'm also bringing this up-
Brit Morin: I remember that conversation
Jessica: ... because it is a crucible. Brit and I are looking at each other like, "We're still in our same clothes. What happened?"
Brit Morin: Yeah. Well- ... and I'm wondering, I'm peptide curious, just saying. So I, I need to get myself educated.
Jessica: Well, anyway, Sam's mood is better, guys, so if that's not enough.
Brit Morin: That's good. Is he a better husband to you, Jess? Better father? Like, happier?
Jessica: That's a deeper question. I'm gonna have to... He's happier. He's happier. Um, I don't like opening my pantry and just seeing needles. I'm sorry, but, um, you know, we all have, we all have trade-offs.
Brit Morin: Explain it to your kids.
Jessica: Um-
Brit Morin: "Daddy's testing new drugs." New illegal drugs.
Jessica: Oh my God. Um, you know, just trying to bring you notes from the frontier.
Dave Morin: I don't think they're illegal. They're just not proven safe.
Brit Morin: Well, they're not approved.
Jessica: Yeah, I don't think that Sam is gonna be arrested for doing this, but maybe I should look into that.
Dave Morin: No, they're not illegal. It's just not proven safe. That's what it-
Brit Morin: Okay
Dave Morin: ... that's what it comes down to.
Brit Morin: Some non-FDA approved drugs.
Jessica: Yeah. And we should just make it clear that we are not medical professionals, and we are not giving medical advice.
Brit Morin: Nor are we giving financial advice.
Dave Morin: We're just reporting on the culture.
Jessica: Sometimes we give financial advice, yes. Yeah, you're an adv- you're a f- f- fi- financial professional who is, like, a fiduciary to certain posts. I understand why you have to say that. Um, guys, this has been a blast. We had topics. We had insights.
Brit Morin: Thanks for organizing this into segments today. It felt very organized.
Jessica: I'm, I'm really, I'm gonna go with a Post-It note approach-
Dave Morin: Finish
Jessica: ... to the More or Less pod. And we hoped, dear listeners, you enjoyed, even those who think we don't understand open source, and we will invite you- ... to make your case.
Brit Morin: I love it. I want more listeners to pick fights with us.
Dave Morin: Uh, if I don't understand open source, I've got real problems.
Brit Morin: No, but, like, tell us how you feel. We'll defend ourselves.
Jessica: No, no. We w- I actually really, I, I, it's really interesting when people share their point of view and what they think we miss on the pod. So do more of it.
Dave Morin: Oh, yeah. It's great.
Jessica: And we'll see you back here next week for another episode of More or Less. Bye.
Brit Morin: Bye, guys.
Dave Morin: See you later.
Brit Morin: If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a virtual high five by rating it and reviewing it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Find more information about each episode in the show notes, and follow us on social media by searching for @moreorless, @davemorin, @lesson, @jlesson. And as for me, I'm @brit. See you guys next time.