AI-generated — may contain transcription errors.

Sam Lessin: I just wanna have a note to say about Alpha School, 'cause it's also having a moment again.

Jessica: I actually don't care. I would rather send my children to the military than to this school.

Sam Lessin: Matt is with us as the founder of NoHo, the hot up-and-coming king of peptides.

Matt Mazzeo: If, if you check the, like, the GLP-1 revenue relative to AI revenue, they're, like, on par, or s- in some cases, GLP-1 revenue even e- eclipses it.

Sam Lessin: Agreements were written with AGI as part of the financial agreement because the agreements were just being written and created so fast they didn't know what else to do.

Jessica: Some people are like, "Well, you can't know the future." I think that's all a load of bullshit. I think this is playing out exactly how you would expect it to play out, and the question is, how much credit or discredit do you give to the salespeople who were selling it before, and how do you think about an evolving narrative?

Dave Morin: Man, who knew education was gonna be the most triggering conversation on this podcast?

Guest: More or less. Is it no or is it yes? We'll debate the test that's best when we get more or less. Dave and Brit plus Sam and Jess. Put it all right to the test. More or less.

Sam Lessin: Why, hello, friends. Welcome to More or Less, and a very big welcome to our special guest today. We have Matt Mazzeo, folks, joining the pod. Now, let me tell you, right now, Matt is with us as the founder of NoHo, the hot up-and-coming king of peptides, and so we're gonna talk about that.

Dave Morin: Or are you a prince? Which one?

Matt Mazzeo: Uh, I guess neither. I'm a practitioner. I'm a user. I'm a patient of peptides.

Sam Lessin: But also, listeners of the pod may also know Matt Mazzeo as a prolific angel investor in the technology industry.

Dave Morin: Super base.

Sam Lessin: And as a one-time agent. Was it CAA? I get 'em all mixed up.

Brit Morin: He tried to recruit me at CAA many years ago.

Matt Mazzeo: Yeah.

Sam Lessin: He's just told me he was your agent, Brit.

Matt Mazzeo: I tried to get Brit.

Brit Morin: He put me through the car wash. That's what it's called, right, Matt?

Matt Mazzeo: That is exactly what it is. I said, "Brit is world-class talent."

Jessica: And you were right. Maybe not in Hollywood, but right in general.

Matt Mazzeo: They weren't ready for Brit is the truth.

Brit Morin: Sam, I haven't peaked yet, okay? I'm still on my way.

Jessica: I understand. The problem with Matt's, with the agent business is he gets none of it because it's transactional. Very hard when you're not compounding.

Brit Morin: The agent business is a tough business.

Jessica: Tough business.

Sam Lessin: Well, this is, Matt has new frontiers that we're gonna discuss, but we also want Matt's point of view on all the things of the week that we share a point of view on.

Jessica: But wait, we're not done with intros. Jess, he was your entryway made in college. You guys have known each other since freshman year.

Sam Lessin: Freshman day. Freshman day, yeah.

Jessica: He was my fraternity big brother.

Dave Morin: I just can't believe they let Matt Mazzeo go to Harvard.

Matt Mazzeo: I was a scholarship kid. I was a full-ride kid to that school.

Brit Morin: That's so cool. You must've had good SAT scores.

Sam Lessin: Dave, you're not surprised that they let me in, though, however.

Dave Morin: No, not at all.

Sam Lessin: I like, it's just okay. Okay.

Dave Morin: Yeah.

Sam Lessin: It makes sense. I'm wearing crimson. I'm bleeding crimson right now. So Sam, how do you know Matt Mazzeo?

Jessica: Well, he was my fraternity big brother in our fake fraternity at Harvard with all the football players.

Dave Morin: What's your fake fraternity?

Jessica: SAE. Well, it's not fake overall, it's just fake at Harvard.

Dave Morin: You were in SAE?

Jessica: Yeah. Matt and I were in SAE with all the football players.

Dave Morin: How did I not know this? W- is that the only fraternity at Harvard?

Jessica: No, there's a few, but they're all, like... It, somehow I ended up not in the Jewish fraternity, but in the football fraternity.

Brit Morin: But Sam doesn't even know anything about football.

Sam Lessin: It's so true, Brit. He knows nothing.

Matt Mazzeo: He had the liver of a football player.

Dave Morin: Yeah, fair.

Jessica: It's all because I took Spanish A at, like, 9:00 AM five days a week freshman year, and it turns out the only people that do that are the football team, and I didn't know that 'cause I was an idiot freshman who didn't realize that was a very early class. But now I take his peptides, so I'm, you know, that's, like, a classic fraternity younger brother thing to do, is to take the peptides slung by the older brothers.

Matt Mazzeo: It's only fair that you pay it back, Sam. I, I took all your peptides in college, if that's what they were called.

Sam Lessin: Well, if people wonder if the tech industry is insular, just, um, digest this web of connections.

Matt Mazzeo: I've known all of you for over 15 years. Sam and Jessica, Jessica was my first face at college. Sam, my fraternity brother, younger brother in my fraternity. Dave and I met, like, 20 years ago at a cafe, and he blew me away that morning. It was, like, one of the reasons I ended up getting into tech, 'cause I was like, "This guy's one of the smartest humans I've ever met."

Jessica: You had such bad judgment back then.

Brit Morin: Yeah.

Matt Mazzeo: To be fair, my pool of, like, interesting people was, like, very limited then, and so I meet Dave and I'm like, there were more ideas before, like, the breakfast got to our table than I'd ever, like, experienced in my life.

Sam Lessin: Did you go to The Grove? I bet you went to The Grove.

Dave Morin: It was probably The Grove.

Matt Mazzeo: Yeah.

Brit Morin: It was probably The Grove. Okay.

Matt Mazzeo: And then I meet Brit, I'm like, "Oh, my God, she's, like, a decade ahead on all these content creators. She knows exactly how to own distribution."

Brit Morin: I was the OG digital creator.

Jessica: And Matt can still flatter like a Hollywood guy. You still sound like a Hollywood guy.

Dave Morin: You can come on the pod every week, man.

Sam Lessin: And you read the information four times a day. Okay, now that we've gotten that out of the way. Guys, it has been a busy week, and I actually wanna start with something that my mother, Mary Vassallero, requested we address-

Dave Morin: Oh

Sam Lessin: ... on the pod. So get ready.

Dave Morin: We love you, Mary.

Sam Lessin: But she wants to know the group's thought on the Horowitz Andreessen Academy.

Jessica: Matt just said that he invested in that. It's apparently a thing you can invest in. What, Matt, what the hell is this thing?

Dave Morin: You can invest in Andreessen Horowitz marketing plan to reach even younger people?

Matt Mazzeo: Guys, we all went to college in the United States. We all had an experience that I think today we could all agree is somewhat broken, that in the next generation, you know, the idea that you're gonna go to this four-year university, get prepped in, like, just a liberal arts that has no tie to, like, the physical world, no tie to new technology, is wildly behind on all of it, has no direct access to the best companies, the best founders. That's not the way the future of this ecosystem should work. You're gonna come out of it, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt in those worlds and have, like, almost no experience. I don't think that's, like, the future of higher ed, and so taking a bold swing at how you do future of higher ed with a founder like Gagan and, like, the team at Andreessen Horowitz, tying it to the best founders and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley feels like a pretty big swing. And it's, like, a massive industry and

Jessica: Broken.

Brit Morin: I have a different take. Well, first of all, I agree that university needs to be reestablished.

Jessica: How will they do the Hundred Beers War?

Dave Morin: Yeah, is this just Alpha School?

Brit Morin: They're putting $35 million into this, which is, like, two cents to Andreessen Horowitz. This is, like, a, seems like a marketing initiative, which is, like, a top-of-the-funnel sourcing play to get the best founders that are 18 to join them before they start companies. However, I align with the idea that it's interesting to think about where people could go who don't wanna go to normal college. I will also segue to Elon Musk tried this, is trying this, I'm not sure, with... Do you remember TITS? The Texas Institute of Technology and Science.

Jessica: Well, and Joe Lonsdale's got his, which I've given money to.

Dave Morin: Yeah, Joe's got University of Austin. It's incredible.

Brit Morin: So is every billionaire now just starting a university program? Is that the future of universities?

Jessica: Yes.

Brit Morin: Yes.

Dave Morin: You guys, this is just marketing. They're spending $35 million to get access to top of funnel for high school students. You're so cynical. I would love to do a More or Less university. I think the four of you would attract a ton of great talent.

Jessica: I think we should too.

Brit Morin: We're not billionaires yet. We can't do that.

Jessica: Yeah, we can.

Dave Morin: Speak for yourself.

Sam Lessin: Uh, well, yeah, well, no, we're not, but here's my problem. I'm all for, like, higher ed reform and making different types of education more accessible and creating more pathways, and, like, amen. I am woefully uncomfortable with the technology entrepreneurs being in charge for all of this, and Alpha School's a good example. I am seeing more and more people talk about moving their kids to Alpha School.

Dave Morin: So would you put the journalists in charge instead? Yeah, who's in charge, Jess?

Sam Lessin: It's a good question. I actually believe that teachers should, uh, play, have a role to play. I don't think it's an either/or, right?

Dave Morin: Yeah.

Sam Lessin: If you told me... But, like, to see a page of advisors for this school and it be, like, Altman and Mira Murati, who are very bright people, put 'em on my list of important people. But, like, the idea that this is, like, some kind of substitute for education is just deeply uncomfortable to me. I just wanna have a note to say about Alpha School, 'cause it's also having a moment again, and this is... I'm all for... I've been on the board of Teach for America, all for, like, how broken our education system is. It's horrible, and we need, like, multiple cracks through traditional and non-traditional paths. But it's very easy... You know, the Alpha School concept's very seductive. It's, like, two hours of personalized tech-driven learning a day, and your afternoon's to learn all these other skills. When I talk to people whose kids go to Alpha School, they do things like go and let them get their nails painted in the afternoon in exchange for, like, having completed their math problems.

Dave Morin: That's pretty cynical, Jess.

Sam Lessin: They did. I, that's who I've talked to people.

Dave Morin: That's one example of, like, many, many more that I've heard where they do incredible engineering projects in the afternoon.

Sam Lessin: My point is, I think we spend a lot of time on this pod talking about the uniqueness of tech people, sometimes even the cults and religiosity and craziness of tech people.

Dave Morin: We do?

Sam Lessin: We do. These AI people. We talk about cults and religion all the time.

Dave Morin: We don't think they're that unique of flowers, come on. I'm so shocked.

Sam Lessin: I'm actually really confused why you guys... Uh, what you're even talking about. But, like, this is too important to just abandon and turn over the keys to, like, innovative entrepreneurs. I actually believe that.

Jessica: No one's turning over the keys. It's just a path. It's fun. I don't have a problem with people experimenting.

Dave Morin: Who else is gonna do it?

Jessica: Yeah. What are we talking about?

Dave Morin: My main problem here is that, like, if you had $10,000, this would be, like, the equivalent of spending $3.50. So you're upset that it wasn't $100 million or $200 million out of the gate? Yeah. Think bigger. Like, why isn't this bigger? Why aren't we doing way bigger things in San Francisco? Okay. This is, like, the wild o- opposition, right? So Jess and Brit are like, "Shut it down, it's all marketing," and you're like, "It's a drop in the bucket, go bigger."

Jessica: So can I take a different tact? I actually don't care. Like, they can do whatever the hell they want if they wanna do this. I will tell you that I would rather send my children to the military than to this school.

Dave Morin: I'm looking forward to seeing Lion in the 101st Airborne.

Sam Lessin: I would also rather send our children to the military than this school.

Jessica: Well, this is good we're married. You don't even know what the school is yet. You just asked what the school is.

Dave Morin: Brit, listen to all these Harvard kids.

Sam Lessin: Guys, this is such a bad idea.

Jessica: What do I actually think is valuable, especially in an AI world where, like, you can spin up learning about anything you want on demand. You don't need to learn to program, you know what I mean? Like, there's all these kind of evolutions, like, in terms of the, what you actually need to learn. What I think you need to learn is, like, grit. I think you need great community. I think you need, like, to learn discipline. Like, I think I want a rowing team. I want great books.

Dave Morin: Are your kids currently going to a grit school?

Jessica: Actually, yeah. And I would say they certainly are running cross-country and things.

Sam Lessin: And, uh, watching my kid run these cross-country things-

Dave Morin: Yeah. It's the lesson school of grit

Sam Lessin: ... I don't think I share their full value set.

Dave Morin: This is, like, four of the most optimistic humans I've ever encountered in my entire life. A new, a, a company is coming out and being like, "We're gonna try something different." In the last hundred years, how many great universities have gotten started that are in the top, whatever, 20 universities in this country? And you're like, I get... I, I'm bummed out that it's technologists and the people who've built the biggest companies in America are the ones that are gonna take a swing at a-

Sam Lessin: No, th- that's not fair. It's two of the most outspoken voices on a, with a very strong point of view about the future.

Dave Morin: No, the founders, the founders are people who've built great companies. Yeah, I mean, who started Vanderbilt? Who started, like, you know, many of the great universities in the United States?

Sam Lessin: Great. Matt, how old's your oldest kid?

Dave Morin: Josephine is four years old.

Sam Lessin: Okay. Call me when she's 10, and we'll have this conversation.

Dave Morin: I, I'd love to, but I'm just saying I would, I would expect- ... more optimism out of this foursome.

Jessica: I think I'm fine with anyone doing any experiment they want in this type of stuff. It's fine. I just think, like, from my perspective, when you think about the values that you actually need to learn for the future and what's gonna make people successful and happy, it's how to be self-motivated. It's grit. It's resilience.

Dave Morin: Why wouldn't that be part of this?

Jessica: 'Cause that's not what these people are gonna teach.

Sam Lessin: It's not. They're gonna sit at screens all day, Dave.

Jessica: You know why? Because they were like, there's a joke on the internet about, like, the football match.

Dave Morin: How do you know that it's not a serious endeavor?

Brit Morin: I think it's a four-year Y Combinator is what I think it is.

Sam Lessin: Dave, I'm so confused. You, uh, five seconds ago you said this was all marketing, and now you're defending it? What happened?

Dave Morin: No, I'm just saying, how do you know that this is not a serious university endeavor?

Sam Lessin: You just said it's all marketing.

Dave Morin: I understand.

Matt Mazzeo: They're the most driven founders. They're incredible. They're taking a totally new tack, and they're bringing people who are actually building great companies into the fold at the beginning.

Jessica: If they start a school that's a great books program about philosophy and history and putting people in context, and they have a gritty program and it's, and, like, it does all those great things, then great. I just don't think that's at all what they'll produce.

Dave Morin: Man, who knew education was gonna be the most triggering conversation on this podcast?

Brit Morin: It's 'cause we all have kids, too.

Jessica: It's Matt Mazzeo. This is just like freshman dorms all over again.

Matt Mazzeo: Yeah. I've had this conversation.

Sam Lessin: I also don't want my kids' education being run as a for-profit university.

Jessica: They're not. Our kids are clearly not going to this school. That's, like, not a question. It's fine.

Brit Morin: But I do think our kids are gonna go to a different kind of school. I still think that universities will be around, but, like, I wanna admit our kids to a school that has, like, one year, uh, so in a different continent for the four years, and they travel with their class, so they have, like, social connectivity.

Jessica: I'm not doing that. I wanna send them to, what's that awesome school where they go on the ranch?

Matt Mazzeo: Oh, I know which you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, the, the private, yeah, the high school.

Jessica: Like, that's awesome. Like, that's the future of what we're gonna need. The more digital and online all these kids are, we don't need to teach them the vibe code. We need to teach them to wrangle horses.

Matt Mazzeo: The answer is more paths, not less paths. More paths, more options, more experimentation, people who've built shit before building the schools, and connectivity to the, like, the engines of the economy rather than, like, some armchair.

Sam Lessin: I just think incentives also really matter, and you're talking about two of the most outspoken venture capitalists in the world starting an institute in their name. That is going to shape the ideology and curriculum of it.

Dave Morin: Carnegie Mellon, Vanderbilt, like, there's lots of universities named like this.

Jessica: I think it's fine. I think it will, but the only thing that I think is a bummer from my perspective, if you wanna take the bummer side of it, kids are triggering. In some ways, like, if adults make bad decisions for themselves, you're like, "Well, you made a bad decision for yourself," right? Fine. Whatever. You can do whatever you want. Kids are triggering for everyone because, like, they're impressionable and you're like, "Oh, man," like, "if we give them the wrong thing," like, there's, this is like, it's a high-stakes thing, and, like, people have opinions about it. So I can understand being upset about it. If you said the youth of America were gonna, like, in the, end up in a totally wrong program that teaches them all the wrong skills and isn't... Like, fine, I think that's pretty bad. I just... I don't know. I, it's fine.

Dave Morin: What if your kid grows up to be 18 and wants to go here?

Jessica: I would not pay for it or let them.

Sam Lessin: I would not allow our children to do that. No fucking way.

Dave Morin: Do kids do not deserve agency in their own college decisions?

Jessica: 18's a tough one because it's like, there were certain colleges I was not allowed to apply to.

Brit Morin: It's Harvard only for the Lessen children.

Sam Lessin: That's absolutely not true. But honestly, like, I think you have to be, like... I also have Theranos of the brain because goddamn, I'm looking forward to this movie.

Dave Morin: It's gonna be s- It looks, it looks so good. Did you see the trailer today?

Matt Mazzeo: It does look incredible.

Sam Lessin: Uh, the extended trailer? I've watched it three times.

Dave Morin: I did too, actually. It looks amazing.

Sam Lessin: And I do think, yes, you can have innovation and disruption, and there's plenty in the education industry, and I've been in ed reform for a decade as a philanthropist, and I'm happy to walk people through the variety of experiments happening on that front. But I don't think this is the one. I think it is a, exactly where Dave was at the beginning of this podcast but has moved, which is recruiting students who they wanna invest early in. We've seen it a million times.

Dave Morin: No, that is what it is. But I'm saying two things can be true, Jess.

Brit Morin: I think Mazzeo is the only positive person for this on the pod today.

Matt Mazzeo: I'm wildly positive. Great founders, great idea, modern education, another take on it, ties to the economy, and just, like, great builders in an industry that's, like, legacy, obviously broken, and needs a whole bunch of refreshing.

Sam Lessin: Okay. Call me in six years. Now, let's talk about optimism. Guys, Claude's doing science. We spend a lot of time on this pod talking about what AI is not, right? We talk about overhyped, we ta- ma- Sam likes to talk about matrix multiplication, saying it's just, you know, blah, blah, blah.

Jessica: I love matrix multiplication.

Sam Lessin: I know. I gave that to you. But we have heard that Claude, our friend Claude, has discovered a new enzyme system with about, like, 10,000 agents and 21 hours-ish of working, a new enzyme system that appears to have properties like CRISPR.

Dave Morin: Of bacteriophages.

Sam Lessin: Yes, bacteriophages.

Dave Morin: Phages are cool. Phages are- ... like, the un- the unsung hero that nobody ever researched in America, but Russia is, like, a grand expert in. Did you know this?

Sam Lessin: Dave, how do you know this? No, I didn't know. Did not know this.

Brit Morin: Dave has a secret obsession with phages.

Sam Lessin: We don't have to spend a lot of time on this, but I think this is cool. I also think it's helpful for the IPO and changing the negative narrative on AI 'cause I think science is something we all should be more optimistic about.

Dave Morin: It's like, "Of course they're putting this out. Look at us. We've discovered science."

Brit Morin: The next two months are gonna be Claude catnip, you guys. It's gonna be all the most amazing things about how they're curing the world's ailments. Well, they've pushed the IPO back now. What is it? November, I think.

Sam Lessin: You can't read everything you read in The Wall Street Journal. The Information has much more updated timelines.

Brit Morin: What does The Information say?

Sam Lessin: We haven't published the latest story, so we can't really say too much, but there are some interesting things they're sorting through with the S1.

Jessica: Like their liability around all the shit running around?

Sam Lessin: Yeah, I think that's one of 'em.

Jessica: The biggest question for me, which is why all this stuff is so interesting right now with, like, who's responsible and da, da, da, da, is very simple, which is, like, by far the biggest risk factor they have to talk about is liability, liability on, like, all these hacks, et cetera. And if they don't have a good answer to that and can't get the government to pick up the bill on it or the industry to pick it up- It's a real problem. Th- this is like the, the classic criticism of technology is that, and this is actually Jason Lanier. You remember that guy?

Sam Lessin: Yeah, def- I do.

Jessica: He had a, a really good framework I like, which is kind of cynical, but I, I think there's some-

Matt Mazzeo: Who is he?

Jessica: He's just a tech philosophy-type guy. He had this great take, which I think is right, which is like it's very cynical, but it's take, which is like a lot of what technology does is centralize the value, right, of a thing, and then socialize or like radiate out all the risk associated. But this is a very cynical take, but it's, it's an interesting one. That like a lot of companies, what they do is they like basically pull all the value and create a central node that owns it, and he was talking about Meta or whatever in the, in that context. It was years ago. And then you take all the issues with it and you like push them out so it's everyone else's problem.

Matt Mazzeo: This was like peer-to-peer technology was everyone else's-

Jessica: Yeah. And like, a- again, very cynical, but there's... it's an interesting argument, and I think this is a classic good example of it. These companies effectively have infinite liability right now, right? And it's really hard... Like, my dad used to say, like... I remember when I was a kid, we would go to like Disney World, and he was a banker, so he liked these types of finance things. He, I would be scared on a rollercoaster, he'd be like, "Sam, don't worry, Disney's a public company," right? Meaning they're not gonna kill you because it's too expensive for them to kill you. In this case, it is interesting 'cause I think if you have a public company and you're like, "Good news, you made a lot of revenue. Bad news, you think your problem is The New York Times hack, the fact you stole the internet. Like, you think your problem is $20 billion 'cause of teens." It's like, "No, your liability is you set off some nukes." I don't know that you can be a public company with that risk profile.

Sam Lessin: And did we not think about this until two weeks ago?

Matt Mazzeo: So you don't think they're going to go public at all?

Jessica: I think that's the big challenge. And the interesting thing, this is my big cynical-

Matt Mazzeo: You think these things are nationalized before they go public?

Jessica: The question is, this is the big thing, is unwind the talk track from the big labs, from OpenAI in particular, and Sam, but also Anthropic a bunch of years. The story was AGI is coming. It's so powerful and dangerous that we must be the ones that control it and own it, right? Because it would be too dangerous for anyone else to, and at least we're good actors.

Matt Mazzeo: And since you will not start the Manhattan Project, we will.

Sam Lessin: And China will kill you if we don't do this, yeah.

Jessica: It was a story of we will take responsibility because we are the responsible parties. Fast-forward a few years and we're now on the opposite end of the spectrum, which is they're, they're like more traditional businesses competing in a market and, like, they're not one of ones, they're one of a fews. And they're like, "Oh, shit, we can't afford the risk we said we would take."

Sam Lessin: Matt, are you long Anthropic?

Matt Mazzeo: I don't have a position personally, uh, in Anthropic, so...

Sam Lessin: Like, but mentally or n- or in OpenAI, like, how do you see... What's your talk track on those?

Matt Mazzeo: Is it crazy that I'm, like, long all of these things? That I just think the end market is so large that I'm, like, long open source, I'm long frontier.

Jessica: No, that's the new sexy take.

Matt Mazzeo: I, I think about the value accruing to, like, the integral of mine as it, as it grows and, like, the frontier labs own more and more of that.

Sam Lessin: See, he said integral, Dave. That's how he got into Harvard.

Matt Mazzeo: This is a Sam Lesson article from Dropio that should've been written. Up, up next is the efficient frontier. No, it's... But it's like the idea that, like, the frontier labs are accelerating fast enough. We're huge customers of Anthropic, we're huge customers of OpenAI. Same thing for the open source models where I'm a personal investor in Cognition. I think, like, riding the efficiencies gains from, like, the frontier models and the routing is, like, worthwhile. I'm a kind of a believer that, like, all of these things are gonna succeed, and I know it seems like a maximalist take on these things.

Sam Lessin: You could be a maximalist.

Brit Morin: You could be a more, like us.

Matt Mazzeo: I'm a way more on all of these things. I just continue to get blown away by all of these products.

Brit Morin: So you don't think there's a bubble that's ever gonna pop, like, in this current wave?

Matt Mazzeo: No, certainly there's a bubble that will pop, but it's like who's the, who's on the other side of it? But how would you describe it?

Brit Morin: Which things will pop?

Matt Mazzeo: I mean, it all comes down to, like, the over-investment into infrastructure on these things. It doesn't seem like it's st- slowing down anytime soon for us or any of these other players, though. And, like, it seems like we're behind on, like, power construction, data, data center construction. We're still supply constrained on all these things. We are limitless in our desire for more AI, for better AI. Personally, as a company and as an investor, like, I want more of these things, better tooling. Opus 5.5 is incredible. Have you guys played with this product today? It's like use the product. The map and the terrain are totally fucking different here. The terrain is like the products are spectacular and they continue to improve, and it's like, yeah, you can be cynical and be like, "Yes, it's, you know, the celebration parade before the IPO." But on the flip side, it's like what if it's really working and we're discovering more of nature than ever existed and sol- solving more of math than ever existed, and utility's going through the roof? I'm a believer that all of those things are true, and so I am long Anthropic.

Jessica: I think that that's reasonable. At least three conversations that are, can all be true at once. One is like we're gonna consume a ton more of this. There's an enormous amount of demand at all levels coming. I agree with that. The second is, is any of it profitable in, like, any traditional sense? That's a harder question. Like, that's not clear. You can have something that's massively useful and honestly not that profitable. And, like, these things are being pegged as extremely profitable, not just extremely useful, and that's much less clear to me, right? And then the third is, like, we can all agree that, again, that talks about the, what you probably won't learn at the Andreessen Horowitz school, or maybe you will, which is this pattern matches perfectly to the railroad build-out, to the power build, to everything. And you know what happens in all of those? Massive overinvestment and collapse.

Matt Mazzeo: Yeah, and then there's survivors on the other side of that, though, Sam. There's massive survivors.

Jessica: Well, well, there are surviving companies, but there aren't necessarily surviving capital.

Matt Mazzeo: Yeah. The real danger is the capital loss.

Jessica: There's a great book about this. What is it called? It's like bubbles and whatever. It's one of these books everyone reads.

Matt Mazzeo: Engines of Innovation.

Jessica: Yeah, it's a great book.

Matt Mazzeo: Yeah.

Jessica: Good, good call. See, you did your Harvard reading. You got, you scholarship kids.

Brit Morin: He got a full scholarship. That's great.

Jessica: In Harvard, everyone who needs it gets it. It's not really a scholarship.

Brit Morin: Oh.

Jessica: You just like-

Brit Morin: Oh, okay

Jessica: ... it doesn't cost anything, right? But that's-

Brit Morin: I was giving him extra cred.

Sam Lessin: No, but it, it means they really wanted him, yes, but okay.

Jessica: The question is not whether LLMs exist. It might be a question whether society exists. This isn't a question whether LLMs exist. The question is whether the capital being put in now exists, and I, who knows, is the honest answer.

Sam Lessin: Here's a fun fact. So the reason I look so good today, thank you all for commenting on it, is I've been at the Information's AI event in San Francisco going back and forth, having interviewed the head of Google DeepMind, Cory Kawu- Chuolu- Yet. But I just came from a panel with Blackstone. And because Information subscribers are so smart, they're excellent audience questions. So Blackstone has all these-- They're investing a ton in data centers. They're doing their own projects with NVIDIA. And a subscriber said, "Who's gonna pay for the debt?" And the executive at Blackstone said, "We don't know."

Dave Morin: That seems bad.

Sam Lessin: That's where we are, right? And, and he actually d- wasn't, like, embarrassed to say he didn't know. He was just like, "That's where we are in the cycle," right? Like, we've done our modeling of how much we're willing to put at risk and the whole thing, but like an ecosystem-wide level, like that is an unanswered question. And that's certainly a question, and we're starting to see it. We did some interesting reporting on Jane Street last week about it.

Jessica: It's also this big problem which is like, look, I actually... Do you guys know what the St. Petersburg paradox is?

Dave Morin: No.

Sam Lessin: No.

Jessica: I'm giving a talk on it next week. It's awesome.

Sam Lessin: Where? Why? How?

Brit Morin: Well, yeah. Who invited you to do that?

Dave Morin: Is this like your Peter Thiel topic? Like, instead of the Antichrist, it's the St. Petersburg paradox?

Sam Lessin: It's just the first time I've heard it, Dave.

Dave Morin: When are you hosting a debate at the, uh, Churchill Club?

Jessica: I'll do a dry run of this 'cause I have to explain it simply. It's actually not a complicated concept. Imagine there's a game where the payout is you flip a coin, right? If it's heads, you get paid out. If it's tails, you keep playing. The first payout, the probability is 50/50, right? 'Cause it's their first flip, and you get effectively $2 if it pays out. The second one is a fourth, and you get $4, et cetera, et cetera. Basically, every round, the expected payout is $1, right? The question is how much do you pay to play the game, right? And it's an interesting one, 'cause if it's an infinite series, the logical answer is you actually would pay infinity to play the game.

Dave Morin: Yeah. There's no such thing as an infinite series.

Jessica: Well, there are in, I mean, depends on what you're looking at. Like, in philosophy and math, there are. And like there's an in... It's an infinite series, and so the answer is the correct EV on it is infinity, which means you should play forever. Now, in practice, no one pays because if you said, "Hey, you have $1 billion. Will you pay $1 billion to play this game?" Again, mathematically, the answer is yes, you should. Practically speaking, that's a terrible idea, right? 'Cause you 50% of the time immediately lose a billion dollars, and then a fourth of the time lose your billion dollars and blah, blah, blah. And the basic point is that's the problem with a lot of the AI narrative mathematically, is that when you talk about infinite outcomes, there is no price. Like, there is no way to model it. You're modeling it based on utility and outcomes, which gets super weird. The markets don't compute it. The problem with the place we're in is, like, no one has any idea what's gonna happen, right, financially, because you have a thing that's been pitched in this way. Now, you could say, "No, no, the big change is, like, we've actually learned that this is not an infinite payout game," because there isn't a race to the first to AGI, and then no one else gets it, right? Like, instead it's a game with a lot of downside and capped upside and a lot of liquidity, so... But, like, it's just, it's so unclear. This is, like, not like normal math or normal finance.

Dave Morin: So Sam, this dovetails into something I think I saw Greg Brockman say this week. He said something to the effect of that it's clear that AGI is not a point in time, but a gradual series of things that happens, and therefore that's how you should think about it. And so if that's true, then what everybody's been racing for is being first to AGI so that they can receive that infinity payout, right? And if it's true that it's actually this diffuse set of events that might actually happen over a decade, 20 years, 30 years, who knows how long, then you've got environment of catastrophe.

Jessica: But this is the great sales problem because, again, that is maybe, like, the 2026 on-the-fly definition of AGI. That was definitely not the definition of AGI people were going in with three years ago. Three years ago, the story was there is a point in time at which we achieve AGI, at which point the, all games are over because that one winner wins all the markets and therefore is worth infinity.

Sam Lessin: Well, and again, I'm mindful of being too cynical, but this point also corresponded when agreements were written with AGI as part of the financial agreement because the agreements were just being written and created so fast they didn't know what else to do.

Jessica: This is the thing that I sometimes get frustrated with, which is some people are like, "Well, you can't know the future, and things are evolving." I think that's all a load of bullshit. Like, I think this is playing out exactly how you would expect it to play out, right? And the question is, how much credit or discredit do you give to the salespeople who were selling it before, and how do you think about an evolving narrative where, like, is it intellectually honest and are we discovering things, or is it just all salesmanship? We obviously knew... Like this is-- But to me, the idea that, like, there was some magical AGI point in line to be one company was obviously ridiculous, but it was 100% what was being sold.

Dave Morin: And investors bought it.

Brit Morin: Wait, I wanna hear from Matt on this.

Matt Mazzeo: Take the hyperbole out for a second and just, like, assess ground truth. You can talk about, like, the doomers as marketing, like pri- trying to prime the government for con- for regulatory capture. You could talk about AI as the oracle, and it's like we're building towards digital God. You can take all of those frameworks. They're all stories in my mind. Like, just ask yourself the question: Usage of AI and AI-related products up or down next five, 10 years for you as individuals? Ti- share of, share of attention from products that are derivative of AI up or down over the next 10 years?

Jessica: Matt, the answer is obviously up.

Sam Lessin: Matt, I'm running this podcast. Thank you very much. So- ... we gotta keep us moving.

Dave Morin: We gotta talk about peptides.

Sam Lessin: I am so with you on the demand, and I'm actually prepared to share, but we won't have time, my journey through packing for a conference this weekend with all the AIs. Mind-blowing, okay? My problem in talking to the Sarah Friars of the world or the Mike Intraitors or these, like, these AI executives, and they feel like in the long, in the fullness of time, if demand is there, the businesses will be great businesses. And I think that is sometimes true, and it's sometimes not. And I think often about the information economies where information, you know, is more abundant than ever, but it's a good business to a limited number of people. And so will there be winners? Absolutely. And I'm actually pretty long Anthropic and OpenAI. But I think- I'm always a bit frustrated in conversations where these executives sort of aren't willing to recognize that infinite demand doesn't mean infinite sustainability as a business. And I think-

Jessica: Well, uh, can I go a step further?

Sam Lessin: Yeah.

Jessica: 'Cause I think you and I, unsurprisingly, fully agree on this, is here's the difference. Matt, how many calculations do you do per day, or are done on your behalf today, versus 10 years ago, versus 20, versus 50? It is insane.

Matt Mazzeo: Yeah. I ran, I don't know, like, a few million tokens this morning.

Jessica: Well, forget that. I'm saying, like, look, do you know how many multiplications have to happen to deliver this podcast conversation right now? It's, it's more calculations than, like, existed in the world until nine... It's kind of like, yeah, like, of course, the number of multiplications will go up, like, insanely. Like, we'll consume tons of multiplications. But to Jess's point, that doesn't mean they're expensive. That doesn't mean they're valuable. It doesn't mean there's any margin in them, right? They're just calculations, right?

Sam Lessin: And what's happening with open source, we're seeing it now, right? And I'm still actually long the frontier labs, even with open source. But we are seeing how the economic picture is more complicated than, do you want to use more AI? I want to get this group's thoughts quickly on we're in, like, week two of Muse, and the... An interesting development is that Amazon has blocked Muse. Amazon's basically saying, "We're not gonna play ball."

Jessica: No Muse for you.

Sam Lessin: No Muse for you. Uh, you know, these kinds of squirmishes, I will say, are very common in the launch of big tech, so I actually wouldn't read too mu- everyone's just trying. But it's also w- we haven't had the Meta Connect keynote yet, so we can't riff on that, which will be happening shortly. But do we think this Amazon portends some more battle lines to be drawn? Anything to read from it?

Brit Morin: Wasn't a big p- piece of that... Well, two things. One, Amazon has its own agent it's working on, right, to help you buy things, and so it didn't want to be disintermediated there. But also, the advertising business is so massive at Amazon.

Jessica: By the way, just use an OpenClau and nobody can block you.

Matt Mazzeo: Are the independents blocked, Dave?

Jessica: No, it's, it's like your computer can't be blocked.

Matt Mazzeo: Yeah.

Jessica: Oh, Instinct will be blocked, for sure.

Matt Mazzeo: Do you think so?

Jessica: Yeah, 100%.

Matt Mazzeo: I mean, I understand blocking Meta as, like, another hyperscale com- like, competitor and, like, with a marketplace of their own from Amazon. That makes sense to me. But, like, blocking all bots from this future feels shortsighted and doesn't feel viable. Like, you're not gonna be blocked at OpenClau.

Jessica: No, I think it's just like anything. You'll have blocking of large scale bots, and then they gotta go do a business development deal.

Sam Lessin: Yeah. It's all about these arms treaties that have to-

Jessica: It's no different than, you know, Google and AdWords and all these kinds of things. Like, it's the same, same negotiation, different era.

Brit Morin: You know what else has been blocked? StubHub, which is really annoying to me because I'm trying to run all these bots.

Jessica: My answer is just gonna continue to be just use your OpenClau, and none of this is a problem.

Matt Mazzeo: Have you played with Instinct, Dave?

Jessica: Uh, yeah. I use Clau in the cloud, but I just gave it full control over a Mac Mini over there. And, like, you're just gonna gi- but, like, this is just a game of chicken in the egg 'cause they're gonna stop it. They're gonna start saying, "Oh, that's programmatic clicking." Like- How will they know if it's coming from your Mac Mini? I mean, eventually they're gonna, like... There's gonna be a new model which is like, "Hey, make this more human-like in the speed at which you click on things." Like, this is gonna be a war of attrition forever. But it's also a reason to own your own infrastructure, own your own bot. Yeah. But I just think the thing to keep in mind is, like, look, in the end of the day, this just goes back to the whole, like, where's the margin in AI. Obviously, Amazon doesn't want to be 1 of 15 services you check on the fly instantly to find, like, one thing and, like, price optimize. Like, that's completely obvious, like, that they would want. That, like, no one wants that. In the end of the day, if we all are using OpenClaus on local machines and never thinking about any service and have no relationship to any marketplace and no trust, they're all going to zero, right? Like, and this goes back to the whole, like, does AI create or destroy or whatever. The irony is that, like, a perfectly efficient economy destroys capitalism. The whole funny part about capitalism, right, is the whole goal is to make profit, but the whole machine is designed to tend towards zero profit to drive more innovation, right? And so if you're like, "Well, we've reached the end, and there are no markets, and all these things are worthless, and it's just machines doing calculations." Speaking of which, my favorite thing that has happened in the last week is that everyone got on, whatever, Muse, Instinct, all these different new agents, and the first thing that they did was had it rip through their email and find all of the subscriptions that they are subscribed to and unsubscribe them. So the entire breakage model of the internet is just getting vaporized by the day right now.

Sam Lessin: Our subscriptions are up this week quite healthily, so they must have kept all their information ones.

Jessica: Well, no, but that's a good subscription, not a breakage-based subscription.

Brit Morin: I do have my agent summarizing my information emails, just so you know, and pulling out the articles that would be better for me.

Sam Lessin: I think we're gonna trial some MCP access.

Jessica: You absolutely should.

Sam Lessin: I wanna learn so I can price it well.

Matt Mazzeo: Doesn't it feel like more people are just gonna de- default to, like, these modalities first, and then, like, if you're closed, you kind of lose all that market share? Like, I don't care anymore. Like, I, I will outsource it all to Instinct or Muse or OpenClau.

Jessica: Like, these things have no users. Like, even Muse, like, did not get that many users in the first week.

Matt Mazzeo: My wife and mother-in-law love it, and they're like... My mother-in-law is, like, in Destin, Florida. She's not technical. She knows exactly how to use it. She's getting tons of value out of it.

Jessica: I get it, dude, and Muse is a great product. These are all great products. But, like, I think that we've got a long way to go in terms of UX for these things and the rest of the world using them.

Matt Mazzeo: Are you long on agents?

Jessica: Oh, absolutely. I'm, like, my entire life is... Everything is allocated to agents. But, like, the analogy I keep using is that it's 1982. The Mac hasn't been invented yet. There's gonna be a lot of computers made in the future, a lot of agents made in the future, and we've still gotta figure out the UX. Like, it's still not figured out. And it will be, but it's gonna take cheaper compute. It's gonna take better UX. You're gonna need to be able to use them in groups. Like, there's a lot of things that, like, they don't do yet.

Brit Morin: I'm gonna tell my Claw, which does

Guest: ... crawl Amazon per your points here on the pod to filter all the Chinese brands out of my Amazon and only shop for me with, like, American brands.

Dave Morin: There's actually a Chrome plugin that will do this.

Guest: Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. This is your issue, Brett. You keep coming back to this. I wanna help you. This is important to you. I honestly just want something that works fast, but I, I admire your- Oh, it's terrible. The quality's terrible. They don't even have a good brands. They're just random letters. Just... But then how, how you keep falling for them?

Jessica: My biggest issue with Muse and GroqBot, 'cause I think they're both good, and Muse is particularly good for many reasons. I think it was like, I spend $2,000 a month, not on GPU, but on CPU at this point.

Guest: That's a lot for CPU.

Dave Morin: That's why DigitalOcean's ripping.

Jessica: It's so good because the... And the thing about it, like, I can build anything. Like, on this pod, I just, like, built, like, a new app I wanted on my Mac, like, while we're talking. And, like, to me, there's, like, the idea that the problem with, like, a Muse is not... It's, like, exactly the right idea, which is, like, the whole point is to give you more computers. The problem is, like, I don't want a computer. I want a ton of computers, right? And I want it to be fast. I wish I could pay Muse, like, thousands of dollars a month to be better.

Dave Morin: I think you're nailing it, Sam.

Jessica: Not on GPU, but on CPU.

Guest: But that's not what Muse is trying to do.

Dave Morin: I think you're, what you're talking about is actually the future, both multi-computer and multi-agent and multiplayer. And, like, a lot of what's going on right now is, like, copying of what January people were excited about, and I think you're actually talking about the next thing. We should do a whole pod on it.

Jessica: Well, and for me, like, it's like I use all these things. I don't even care.

Dave Morin: It's a polyagentomerous future and, like, it's happening.

Guest: What?

Brit Morin: Polyagentomerous. This is Dave's new favorite word.

Guest: Agentomerous should be killed. Never say that word.

Dave Morin: I didn't invent it. This is Peter Steinberger all the way.

Guest: Polyagenta... It sounds like, um-

Jessica: It sounds sexual.

Brit Morin: Like, you have lots of agents that you're in relationships with, and the agents are in relationships with each other too, and-

Guest: Why can't you call it a polyagent relationship?

Jessica: When we're talking about polyagentomerous. Before we end, we do have to talk about peptides 'cause we have the expert on.

Matt Mazzeo: I do want Dave's take on th- like, I... What does the future look like?

Dave Morin: On what?

Matt Mazzeo: Like, on agents.

Guest: You guys said a sidebar. We've had Dave's take.

Brit Morin: No, no, no, no. I want this to be the last question. Wait, hold on. I like that. That was a... The listeners are gonna be pissed if we don't get the final word in.

Guest: On what?

Brit Morin: Matt's our guest. Let him ask the final question.

Guest: No, we still have to talk peptides. We have a whole other segment.

Brit Morin: Okay.

Dave Morin: We don't have enough time. We gotta go peptides.

Matt Mazzeo: You gotta tell me, Dave, what it looks like. It's too much of a cliffhanger.

Dave Morin: I'll try to keep it reasonably short. But I think that you look at the... There's a great piece that Jacob, the head of research from OpenAI, wrote a couple weeks ago about an alien mind. And in that, he talks about a lot of things, but there's only a couple of sentences dedicated to sort of this problem which they've encountered, which they've spent all this time on alignment, trying to align agents with human values. And the new thing that they've encountered is, oh, well, when there's billions of agents that have been aligned with a certain set of values, and those agents are now encountering other agents out there in the internet that they have to interact with, then the problem changes shape entirely. And so what we're dealing with now is an agent ecology. OpenClaus is growing so fast that we're gonna have billions of OpenClaus by the end of the year. Obviously, Muse, there's gonna be probably billions of Muses. There's gonna be just, like, an entire agent ecology out there that we have to think about not only model alignment, but we have to think about what happens when agents are interacting with each other, when humans are interacting with one agent, many agents. The multiplayer, multi-agent future, I think, is, like, the frontier of research right now. And other question, which is, does my agent faithfully represent me, or does it faithfully represent the lab that created it? And this is something that nobody's talking about, nobody's thinking about. Your Muse agent represents Meta. It doesn't represent you. Claude represents Anthropic. It doesn't represent you.

Jessica: Well, this is the question of alignment with what?

Dave Morin: Yeah, exactly. And when you're talking about your agent now going on your behalf and either doing research or working, say, in a team on your behalf, what is it aligned with? Is it aligned with you, or is it aligned with the lab, or is it aligned with something else? And so to me, like, this is the main future that we're gonna spend the next couple of years working on, is this sort of multiplayer, multi-agent, multi-computer question.

Jessica: I don't think this is gonna be a technology question, and I think this is one of the things I think is... This is, this is a liability and legal framework question that's gonna matter. And the interesting thing is gonna be when your agent does something bad, who's responsible? That's gonna set the tone for everything else. And the thing that's really interesting is a bunch of technologists in Silicon Valley-

Dave Morin: But bad can mean many, many things, Sam. It could be, like, a micro decision where it's like it just didn't do what you wanted it to do, or it did something that creates liability.

Jessica: Well, that's different. But the thing is, if it does something you don't want it to do and that creates liability, then you're gonna make damn sure it doesn't do things you want to do. Like, this is, like, the question. It all relates back to who's liable. I think that is the question bec- and the thing that's really interesting is everyone's chatting. First of all, it's happening so fast, as with the stealing of the internet happened so fast, that we're gonna be so far behind with the legal conversation that, like, all this shit's gonna be a fucking mess before anyone addresses any of it, right? Like, we're gonna, like, yell about it and write essays about it, and none of it matters because it's all gonna move so quickly, it's gonna be a disaster. And then the second is when we have to sort out the pieces and figure it out, there's just this really important question, which is who is liable? If the lab is liable, it's gonna be aligned to the lab. If the person's liable, it's gonna be aligned to the person, right? Like, that is gonna be the cornerstone piece, and, like, how we sort that out as a society is, like, the bajillion dollar question in the ecosystem. The problem is, is like we c- as technologists can debate this shit all day long. People are just gonna build everything, right? And it's gonna be a total mess. No one can ... decide that from a technology or design, which is very different than what we're used to. We're used to the internet, where like you built a service, the service set the rules, people would use it or not, but if they used it, they were playing by your rules, and it was easy to come up with frameworks, relatively speaking, until you got into like legal cases. This is just the inverse.

Matt Mazzeo: You're awesome. That was... Thank you for that. Super interesting.

Jessica: Onward.

Brit Morin: I'm a total peptide noob. D- I think we should like start with a little bit of the basics here before all of you sophisticated peptide people start digging into the complexity of your question. So Matt, what is a peptide, how many are there, and how many people are using them right now?

Matt Mazzeo: So I will walk you through. I was a peptide noob about a year and a half ago. I was at Y Combinator. I bump into Dave at Y Combinator- ... at this point in time.

Jessica: You weren't in peptides then?

Matt Mazzeo: No. I was 250 pounds when I first saw you. So when I left Coatue, I was 260 pounds. I had totally let myself go. Uh-

Jessica: And for listeners, Matt, we've seen you through several fat Matt phases in life.

Matt Mazzeo: Yes. Yes, yes. You've seen, you've seen me- many a fat Matt. This was the fattest Matt.

Brit Morin: Come on our pod and we're gonna comment on your body image over a two-decade period.

Jessica: You did not look like what you look like right now.

Matt Mazzeo: Listen, when you drink 100 beers, it's gonna have an impact .

Jessica: Yes. It-

Matt Mazzeo: We, we can't buy it honestly. By the way, my whole family's like this. My dad was like 300 pounds when I was growing up. I never met my grandfather, he died before I got here. My dad had his first heart attack in his 40s, and so I come from a long line of Mazzios who, like, don't make it that long. And like at 40, you know, I'm six years into my Coatue experience, I had my first kid. I look at my photo with my first baby and I'm like, "Oh shit, I look exactly like my dad." And somebody... And my dad goes, "You look just like your grandfather." And I'm like, "Well, that's fucking even worse," 'cause I never met the guy. And I'm like, "Okay, I gotta figure this out." And so I go down this, like, rabbit hole of a health journey. I, like, get my hormones checked, I get all these things checked. I'm, like, figuring it out. A year and a half ago, I'm a little bit better. I'm still like solidly dad bodding, but I bump into a buddy of mine, and the guy looks like a superhero. We were always the fat guys together, and somehow he's like Benjamin Buttoned himself. He looks 10 years younger. He, like, looks like Captain America. I'm like, "What happened to you?" He goes, "I'm on every peptide." I'm like, "You sound like a TikTok video. What the hell are you talking about?" This... Like, two minutes later I bump into Dave and he's like, we're like hanging out, and it sent me down the rabbit hole. And so I had no idea what peptides were. This is what they are, so I will give you like 101. Peptides are like short chains of amino acids. You guys remember amino acids from biology class, maybe. Think of them as like the building blocks of life. They're like pearls on a necklace. You put pearls on a necklace, you get 40 or more of those pearls on a necklace, that's a protein. The more you put on the necklace, they get folded, they get crunchy, they make up most of the matter in your body. 50 or less, or 40 or less amino acids, that's a peptide. That's what they mean when they say short chain of amino acids. Anywhere from like two to 50 or two to 40 is a peptide. They move flexibly through your body. Your body uses them as signaling molecules. So in your body are thousands of peptides moving around, kicking off all kinds of biological processes. 100 years ago, we discovered the first of these peptides and put it into use. It's called insulin. Insulin's a peptide. You consume food, your body releases insulin. It tells your body to remove sugar from blood, fantastic. We harness it, it solves a lot of problems. It's one of the most powerful medications we have. 80 years later, we discover GLP-1s. GLP-1s come around, you consume food, your body releases GLP-1s. It tells your brain's satiated, tells your body to slow gastric emptying, help digestion. GLP-1s take 30 years to then get modified into compounds that we have today, semaglutide, liraglutide, tirzepatide, soon to be retatrutide, that hit different receptors. Some one, some two, retatrutide three. They do all sorts of things for metabolic health and increasingly other sides of it. In the last handful of years, they have like astronomically... If you check like the GLP-1 revenue relative to AI revenue, they're like on par, or in some cases GLP-1 revenue even e- eclipses it. Turns out, in addition to those peptides, as I go down this rabbit hole of like what are peptides, there are like hundreds of other peptides that are relatively well known. Everything from like, we know what mechanistically they do to they work in animals to like they're already FDA approved. Things like tesamorelin, which is a growth hormone releasing analog that, like, helps, what's it called, release growth hormone th- to your pituitary. There's ones like PT-141 that, like, increases libido. There's ones for recovery, for sleep, for tanning.

Jessica: I know which one I'm interested in.

Brit Morin: Tanning, obviously.

Matt Mazzeo: I go down the rabbit hole, I'm like, "How many are there?" There's like 180 that are kind of well understood, and they used... Many of them used to be compoundable.

Brit Morin: 180? Can I just have one that does all the good things?

Jessica: So what, like peptides are like the internet of the body?

Matt Mazzeo: They're like the coding language of the body. They're messenger molecules. They tag to a receptor often, not always, but many of them tag to a specific receptor and they kick off a biological process. Think of them as like the foreman in your factory. So unlike a steroid which comes in at the end point and, like, delivers the package, these are the things that are way upstream of that. They tell your body, "Kick off this process," and that process could be like release melatonin or release growth hormone or anyone... or increase angiogenesis, or, you know, all of these things. Reduce inflammation or increase mitochondrial output or increase, uh, mitochondrial, uh, number, like that mitogenetic. And so there's a whole bunch of these pro- compounds out there and I'm like, "Where are they?" And none of the doctors can explain it to me. This is the second problem. It's like, where are they coming from? How do I, like, find out what the mechanism action are? Like are they safe? What are the risks? And then Lonsdale introduces me to this doctor who's incredible, Dr. Tina Wu, who's amazing. Harvard Business School, UCLA Medicine, 10 years running quality at NYU. She changes my life. I go and meet her. She tells me everything I wanna know about peptides. She's like, "Here's what the risks are. Here's what the benefits are. Here's where they are. Here's what you want to accomplish." I'm like, "I'm broken. My blood work looks like sludge. I'm 250 pounds." And she puts me on a protocol. Four months later, I'm like a different human being. I dropped 50 pounds. I go from 30-plus percent body fat to sub 12%.

Jessica: And like cognition has a big round. I mean, like there's all these other side effects.

Matt Mazzeo: This is all tied. I see Dave Morin at the next YC and he's like, "What the fucking happened to you?" He has the same experience that I had with my buddy.

Jessica: You should show the audience your biceps. Show your arms, Matt Mazzio. I know which buddy you're talking about too

Brit Morin: Can you do one flex for us?

Matt Mazzeo: Do you really... I, I mean-

Brit Morin: One just-

Jessica: Yeah, you should do it

Brit Morin: Yeah, just for, yeah

Matt Mazzeo: We have a YouTube audience

Brit Morin: Yeah, for everyone watching on video

Jessica: Oh, my God.

Brit Morin: Yeah. Look at that.

Jessica: Wow.

Brit Morin: Look at that. Now Sam and Dave, your turn.

Jessica: I mean, I'm like, like I don't know, like we got, like, like more normal.

Matt Mazzeo: You look great, Sam. You look amazing. You were always fit though.

Brit Morin: Okay. Okay, okay. I have real questions. Are these legal? What's happening here? Like, am I gonna get cancer?

Jessica: Jess is gone, and all Jess wants to know is what legal state these exist in and responsible use, man.

Brit Morin: Yeah, she says we can't feed people hype without some smart questions.

Matt Mazzeo: So the, the regulatory scr- schema is changing rapidly. So a month a- two months ago, the FDA met... So three years ago, the FDA moved a bunch of these peptides out of compounding and created what is effectively now this massive gray market. A month and a half ago, they met to recommend a variety of these peptides back into compounding pharmacies. Six out of the seven that they proposed are moving back into compounding pharmacies. These are ones like BPC-157, which is like, uh, you know, in some studies has shown that it like-

Jessica: You hear 157 a lot. Why is 157 so popular?

Brit Morin: I got that one in the fridge. Can we rebrand all of these to be, like, better brands and not weird numbers?

Matt Mazzeo: Uh-

Jessica: How about Muse?

Brit Morin: So confusing to me

Jessica: Call them Muse.

Matt Mazzeo: Yeah. Actually, uh, the, the brand name for BPC-157 and TB 500, which are two of the more popular peptides-

Jessica: It's the Wolverine

Matt Mazzeo: ... is the Wolverine stack.

Jessica: I need that

Matt Mazzeo: And it's great for, like, repair and, like, you add in, uh, copper and you add in KPV and you, and you create what's called the闭o stack, and that's like-

Jessica: I got that one too

Matt Mazzeo: Yeah. So-

Jessica: I'm doubling up

Matt Mazzeo: ... the branding needs work, but the answer is, like, the research is really interesting.

Jessica: I just wanna know how to not die

Matt Mazzeo: I mean, if you looked at my blood work, my blood work before and aft- you can even put my before and afters into this. It's fricking crazy. Like, it's wildly different. I'm a different person.

Brit Morin: You're saying there's like seven that are, like, in compounding pharmacies.

Matt Mazzeo: So okay, so many peptides are currently available FDA, like they can be compounded in compounding pharmacies. This is like the GLP-1s, insulin obviously, PT-141, tesamorelin, where they've, like, been really well studied. They are currently available as medications. You can acquire those in compounding pharmacies today. There are a variety that, like, have gone into this gray market, 'cause when they moved out of compounding pharmacies three years ago, it created this, like, terrible market where you couldn't reliably test these things. You didn't have good sourcing for any of these things. And so that is, like, under this guise of research use only. It is on the verge of moving back into compounding pharmacies. So six of the seven were recommended by the PCAC, the pharmacy compounding, like the, the FDA's recommendation body, to go back into compounding pharmacy. And in February, another I think 12 are being reconsidered to go back into compounding pharmacy. So this gray market is about to go back into FDA-inspected facilities and state-inspected facilities-

Jessica: Great

Matt Mazzeo: ... uh, where they can be-

Jessica: That's great news

Matt Mazzeo: ... like reliably compounded. And, and then doctors will have much more insight into, like, patient care and oversight and we'll have quality control, as opposed to what's happening now, which is this, like, free-for-all where, like, your gym bro is recommending these compounds to you.

Jessica: That's great news.

Brit Morin: Aw, you're my gym bro, Matt. So like, okay, I'm a peptide noob. I'm on no peptides. Do I need to go see your Tina Wu person?

Matt Mazzeo: Yeah, you should go see a doctor. Don't take anything you read on the internet.

Brit Morin: And the doctor's just gonna do like, like ask me questions like, "Do you wanna be stronger? Do you wanna, like, be tanner?"

Jessica: Bet they're gonna be like, "You look ugly. Here's, here's your stack."

Matt Mazzeo: So I have a great concierge doc. He saw my before photos, he saw my body, and he's like, "You're fine. You might need some statins and blood pressure meds and other heart meds." And I was like, "That doesn't sound fine to me, doc." And then I meet Tina and she's like, "Here's a protocol. What do you want to achieve?" So here's how it works. You join Noho as a member. You meet with one of our doctors. We have doctors on staff. They're not like a Stripe checkout doc. They're like a real doc. They go through your medical history. They teach you everything you wanna know about peptides. And then based on whatever your goals are, better sleep, better cognition, better body composition, they help you derive a peptide protocol, and we either source them ourselves or we help you find sources that you can trust and facilitate your care and then monitor your care over time.

Brit Morin: Mm. And what do I pay you?

Matt Mazzeo: Uh, $300 a month.

Brit Morin: Okay. So it's like a concierge peptide program?

Matt Mazzeo: Yeah.

Brit Morin: And then I'm also paying for the peptides obviously themselves.

Matt Mazzeo: Your membership includes your first peptide, but many of our patients go for a variety of them. When I did my full protocol to, like, change everything in my body, I was on, like, many peptides. I did like six different types of peptides.

Jessica: Seems like everybody is.

Brit Morin: How many are you on now?

Matt Mazzeo: Well, I've actually... So I've finished my second version of the protocol. So I, like, I wanted to see if I could get to single-digit body fat and keep pristine, uh, blood work, so I just nailed that and now I'm, like, on just a maintenance. So I do, like, a low-dose GLP-1 and, uh, I do NAD, and that's basically the extent of it today.

Brit Morin: And what percent chance will I get cancer from any of these peptides?

Matt Mazzeo: You should go talk to one of our doctors. The second doctor that we hired is a re- a published research oncologist, and you should have a conversation with her. And she will take you everything about where the risks are and where they're not and, like, where the research is, and, like, walk you through every step.

Jessica: So I have to go talk to a woodworker. But Matt, you're very, you're a good salesman and you're a good CEO.

Matt Mazzeo: I'm not trying to be a salesman. You should just, I-

Jessica: You're a good CEO. I'm the, look, I'm the one on the call who, like, takes all your stuff. Like, I'm taking more of these things than you are right now.

Brit Morin: Sam, do you feel different?

Jessica: Yeah, I think, I think it's great.

Matt Mazzeo: Are you enjoying the experience, Sam?

Jessica: I am enjoying the experience. For me, it's mostly been that I r- seriously ramped my running. Are you doing it through Matt's service, Sam? Of course. Where else am I gonna get it? It's been great, 'cause I, the big thing which even Jess, if she were here, would agree with for me is that I used to run a lot, and I kinda stopped entirely. I've been ramping really hard since June up back, and the recovery stuff clearly works. Like the, in like a, both in terms of injury stuff or like slight, you know, things like that, as well as just, like, it's, like, kind of a wild experience 'cause I've done this enough in my life to know what it normally feels like, and I'm like, "Wow, this is, like, way better."

Matt Mazzeo: Yeah, I'm just convinced that we're, like, I've spent most of my life trying to find things before they were obvious. This just feels like one of those things. Again, I was, like, happily retired and, like, running a small fund and, like- When I met this doctor, she like changed my life. Like, I'm a different human today. Like, I am objectively... I can do things with my kids that I could not do before. I'm lifting things in a gym that I could not lift before. I could probably out-lift Sam right now, which is the first time in a long time that I could out-lift Sam, and like-

Jessica: But you, you still got a few pounds on me right now.

Brit Morin: Those are fighting words, Sam.

Jessica: You still have a few pounds on me.

Matt Mazzeo: I'm, I'm, I'm 195 right now. I don't know-

Jessica: I'm 170, so you know, still, still.

Matt Mazzeo: We could weight adjust it if you want.

Brit Morin: I love how bros flex their egos versus how girls flex their egos, but keep going.

Jessica: I do have to go, and I will say I do fondly remember a LA birthday party where Matt Mazzeo and I ended up in a gym in a mansion that was rented, and there was a pull-up bar. And you did some very large number of pull-ups, and I did exactly one more.

Matt Mazzeo: One plus.

Jessica: One plus.

Matt Mazzeo: Sam, Sam has, Sam has a very... Like, we have a long competitive streak, and it's always less than plus one. So I will go first, and he has to go plus one over it.

Jessica: And I will always do it.

Matt Mazzeo: He frequently beats the shit out of me, so.

Jessica: No, it's not meaningfully more, it's just, just one plus.

Brit Morin: There's no surprise there. Okay, our last question for you is not about peptides. Are you excited for the Taylor Swift Encore album dropping this week? Bring back your Hollywood roots, come on.

Matt Mazzeo: I am a Swift fan. My sister is a diehard Swiftie. My sister is like, and my wife are like my daughter's heroes, and so they grew up li- she grew up listening to Taylor Swift. The first songs that she was singing were all Taylor Swift songs. And so I feel like every time she drops something, it's like a new thing that she gets to experience with her mom and her, and my sister. So yes, I am very excited.

Brit Morin: Yeah. Good. You're a girl dad. You gotta follow this now. Good.

Matt Mazzeo: For, it's the best thing ever. Like, we've got two, we got the girl and the boy, and it's like, it is the most fun thing I've ever done. Like I, again, I want... The reason I'm doing this company is so I can like dance at the grandkids' wedding. That's the real dream for this. And so it's the most fulfilling thing I've ever done. You guys were way ahead of me. It was fun.

Brit Morin: Can we get like a promo code or something for More or Less listeners? Listeners?

Matt Mazzeo: Yeah, absolutely. I'll do it More or Less VIP or, and, uh, I'll send that to your audience.

Brit Morin: Yeah, how about that? Is that a code?

Matt Mazzeo: I'm building the code right now. More or Less VIP.

Brit Morin: More or Less VIP. What do we get for that?

Matt Mazzeo: Uh, I'll cut the first month in half. How about that?

Brit Morin: Great. 50% off your first month, More or Less VIP. This is what you get, listeners, for those of you who hung in here after Jess and Sam both left the pod early. So, so, so you stay to the end and you get treats.

Matt Mazzeo: More or Less VIP done.

Brit Morin: Love it. Amazing.

Matt Mazzeo: Thank you, team.

Brit Morin: You're the best.

Matt Mazzeo: I love you guys.

Brit Morin: We so appreciate you. I hope you'll come back.

Matt Mazzeo: It's great to see you.

Jessica: Great to have you.

Brit Morin: I'm gonna start my peptide journey, so I'm gonna literally text you in like five minutes.

Matt Mazzeo: Right on. Use the code.

Brit Morin: Awesome. Okay. The mores are going in. All right, thanks to everyone for following along, listening, watching. Please subscribe, like, add us to your favorites, and we will see you all here next week for another episode of More or Less. Bye-bye. If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a virtual high five by rating it and reviewing it on Apple Podcast, 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