I just want to have a note to say about Alpha School because it's also having a moment again. I actually don't care. I would rather send my children to the military than to this school. Matt is with us as the founder of NoHo, the hot up-and-coming king of peptides. If you check the GLP-1 revenue relative to AI revenue, they're on par, or in some cases, GLP-1 revenue even eclipses it. 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. 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? Man, who knew education was going to be the most triggering conversation on this podcast?
Why, hello, friends. Welcome to More or Less. And a very big welcome to our special guest today. 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 going to talk about that. Or are you a prince? Which one? I guess neither. I'm a practitioner. I'm a user. I'm a patient of peptides. But also, listeners of the pod may also know Matt Mazzeo is a prolific angel investor in the technology industry. Super base. And as a one-time agent, was it CAA? I get them all mixed up. He tried to recruit me at CAA many years ago. He's just told
me he was your agent, Britt. I tried to get Britt. He put me through the car wash. That's what it's called, right, Matt? That is exactly what it is. I said Britt is world-class talent. And you were right. Maybe not in Hollywood, but right in general. They weren't ready for Britt. Sam, I haven't peaked yet, okay? I'm still on my way. I understand. The problem with Matt's agent business is he gets none of it because it's transactional. Very hard when you're not compounding. The agent business is a tough business. Tough business. Well, Matt has new frontiers that we're going to 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. But wait, we're not done with intros. Jess, he was your entryway mate in college. You guys have known each other since freshman year. Freshman day. Freshman day, big brother. I just can't believe they let Matt Mazzeo go to Harvard. I was a scholarship kid. I was a full-ride kid to that school. That's so cool. You must have had good SAT scores. Dave, you're not surprised that they let me in, though, however. No, not at all. It's just okay. I make sense. I'm wearing crimson. I'm bleeding crimson right now. So, Sam, how do you know Matt Mazzeo? Well, he was my
fraternity big brother and our fake fraternity at Harvard with all the football players. What's your fake fraternity? SAE. It's not fake overall. It's just fake at Harvard. You were in SAE? Yeah. Matt and I were in SAE with all the football players. How did I not know this? Is that the only fraternity at Harvard? No, there's a few, but they're all like, somehow I ended up not in the Jewish fraternity, but in the football fraternity. But Sam doesn't even know anything about football. It's so true, Brett. He knows nothing. He had the liver of a football player. Yeah, fair. It's all because I took Spanish A at 9 a.m. 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 because I was an idiot freshman who didn't realize that was a very early class. But now I take his peptides. So, you know, that's a classic fraternity younger brother thing to do is to take the peptides slung by the older brothers. It's only fair that you pay it back, Sam. I took all your peptides in college, if that's what they were called. Well, if people wonder if the tech industry is insular, just digest this web of connections. 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 20 years ago at a cafe. And he blew me away that morning. It's one of the reasons I ended up getting into tech because I was, this guy's one of the smartest humans I've ever met. You had such bad judgment back then. To be fair, my pool of interesting people was very limited then. And so I meet Dave and I'm like, there were more ideas before the breakfast got to our table than I'd ever experienced in my life. Did you go to the Grove? I bet you went to the Grove. It was probably the Grove. Yeah, probably the Grove. And then I meet Britt. I'm, oh my God,
she's a decade ahead on all these content creators. She knows exactly how to own distribution. I was the OG digital creator. And Mac can still flatter like a Hollywood guy. You still sound like a Hollywood guy. You can come on the pod every week, man. 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 want to start with something that my mother, Mary Vassalera, requested we address on the pod. So get ready. We love you, Mary. But she wants to know the group's thought on the Horowitz Andreessen Academy.
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? You can invest in Andreessen Horowitz's marketing plan to reach even younger people. 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. In the next generation, the idea that you're going to go to this four-year university, get prepped in a liberal arts that has no tie to 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 going to come out of it hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt in those worlds and have almost no experience. I don't think that's the future of higher ed. And so taking a bold swing at how you do future of higher ed with a founder like Gaggen and 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 a massive industry and broken. I have a different take. Well, first of all, I agree that university needs to be reestablished. How will they do the 100 beers war? Yeah. Is this just Alpha School?
They're putting $35 million into this, which is two cents to Andreessen Horowitz. This is a marketing initiative, which is 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 want to go to normal college. And 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? Well, and Joe Lonsdale's got his, which I've given money to. Yeah. Joe's got University of Austin. It's incredible.
So is every billionaire now just starting a university program? Is that the future of universities? Yes. Yes. 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. I think we should too. We're not billionaires yet. We can't do that. Yeah, we can. Speak for yourself. Well, yeah. Well, no, we're not. But here's my problem. I'm all for higher ed reform and making different types of education more accessible and creating more pathways and amen.
I am woefully uncomfortable with the technology entrepreneurs being in charge for all of this. And Alpha School is a good example. I am seeing more and more people talk about moving their kids to Alpha School. So would you put the journalists in charge instead? Yeah. Who's in charge, Jess? universities? Yes. Yes. 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. I think we should too. We're not billionaires yet. We can't do that. Yeah, we can. Speak for yourself.
Well, yeah. Well, no, we're not. But here's my problem. I'm all for higher ed reform and making different types of education more accessible and creating more pathways and amen. I am woefully uncomfortable with the technology entrepreneurs being in charge for all of this. And Alpha School is a good example. I am seeing more and more people talk about moving their kids to Alpha School. So would you put the journalists in charge instead? Yeah. Who's in charge, Jess? It's a good question. I actually believe that teachers should have a role to play. I don't think it's an either or, right? Yeah.
If you told me, but to see a page of advisors for this school and it be like Altman and Mira Maradi, who are very bright people, put them on my list of important people. But the idea that this is some kind of substitute for education is deeply uncomfortable to me. I just want to have a note to say about Alpha School because 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 how broken our education system is. It's horrible. And we need multiple cracks through traditional and non-traditional paths. But it's very easy. The Alpha School concept is very seductive. It's two hours of personalized tech-driven learning a day and your afternoons 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 having completed their math problems. That's pretty cynical, Jess. They did. I just want to talk to people. That's one example of many more that I've heard where they do incredible engineering projects in the afternoon. My point is, I think we spent 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. We do? We do. These AI people. We talk about cults and religion all the time. We don't think they're that unique of flowers. I'm so shocked.
I'm actually really confused why you guys, what you're even talking about. But this is too important to just abandon and turn over the keys to innovative entrepreneurs. I actually believe that. No one's turning over the keys. It's just a path. It's fine. I don't have a problem with people experimenting. Who else is going to do it? Yeah. What are we talking about? My main problem here is that if you had $10,000, this would be 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. Why isn't this bigger? Why aren't we doing way bigger things in San Francisco?
Okay. This is wild opposition, right? So Jess and Britt are like, shut it down. It's all marketing. And you're like, it's a drop in the bucket. Go bigger. So can I take a different tack? I actually don't care. They can do whatever they want if they want to do this. I will tell you that I would rather send my children to the military than to this school. I'm looking forward to seeing Lyon in the 101st Airborne. I would also rather send our children to the military than this school. Well, this is good. We're married. You don't even know what the school is yet. You just asked what the school is. Britt, listen to all these Harvard kids. Guys, this is such a bad idea.
What I actually think is valuable, especially in an AI world where you can spin up learning about anything you want on demand. You don't need to learn a program. What I mean is there are all these evolutions in terms of what you actually need to learn. What I think you need to learn is grit. I think you need great community. I think you need to learn discipline. I think I want a rowing team. I want great books. Are your kids currently going to a grit school? Actually, yeah. And I would say they certainly are running cross country and things. And I'm watching my kid run these cross country things. Yeah. It's the lesson school of grit.
I don't think I share their full value set. This is four of the most optimistic humans I've ever encountered in my entire life. A new company is coming out and being like, we're going to try something different. In the last hundred years, how many great universities have gotten started that are in the top 20 universities in this country? And you're like, I'm bummed out that it's technologists and the people who've built the biggest companies in America who are going to take a swing at it. No, that's not fair. It's two of the most outspoken voices with a very strong point of view about the future. No, the founders are people who've built great companies.
Yeah. I mean, who started Vanderbilt, who started many of the great universities in the United States. Great. Matt, how old's your oldest kid? Josephine is four years old. Okay. Call me when she's 10 and we'll have this conversation. I'd love to, but I'm just saying I would expect more optimism out of this foursome. I think I'm fine with anyone doing any experiment they want in this type of stuff. It's fine. I just think from my perspective, when you think about the values that you actually need to learn for the future and what's going to make people successful and happy, it's how to be self-motivated, it's grit, it's resilience. Why wouldn't that be part of this?
Because that's not what these people are going to teach. It's not. They're going to sit at screens all day, Dave. You know why? Because there's a joke on the internet about the football match. How do you know that it's not a serious endeavor? I think it's a four-year Y Combinator is what I think it is. Dave, I'm so confused. Five seconds ago, you said this was all marketing and now you're defending it. What happened? No, I'm just saying, how do you know that this is not a serious university endeavor? You just said it's all marketing. I understand. 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 of the beginning. 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 does all those great things, then great. I just don't think that's at all what they'll produce. Man, who knew education was going to be the most triggering conversation on this podcast? Because we all have kids too. It's Mad Mazio. This is just like freshman dorms all over again. Yeah, I've had this conversation. I also don't want my kids' education being run as a for-profit university.
They're not. Our kids are clearly not going to this school. That's not a question. It's fine. I do think our kids are going to go to a different kind of school. I still think the universities will be around, but I want to send our kids to a school that has one year on a different continent for the four years and they travel with their class. So they have social connectivity. I'm not doing that. I want to send them to what's that awesome school where they go on the ranch? Oh, I know what you're talking about. Yeah. The private. Yeah. The high school.
That's awesome. That's the future of what we're going to need. The more digital and online all these kids are, we don't need to teach them the Viber code. We need to teach them to wrangle horses. The answer is more paths, not less paths, more paths, more options, more experimentation, people who've built stuff before building the schools and connectivity to the engines of the economy rather than some armchair.
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. Carnegie Mellon, Vanderbilt. Like there are lots of universities named this. I think it's fine. I think it will. But the only thing I think is a bummer from my perspective, you want to see the bummer side of it. Kids are triggering in some ways.
That's awesome. That's the future of what we're going to 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. 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 engines of the economy rather than some art chair.
I just think incentives also really matter. 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. Carnegie Mellon, Vanderbilt—there's lots of universities named like this. I think it's fine. But the only thing I think is a bummer from my perspective—if you want to see the bummer side of it—kids are triggering in some ways. If adults make bad decisions for themselves, you're like, well, you made a bad decision for yourself. Fine. Whatever. You can do whatever you want. Kids are triggering for everyone because they're impressionable, and you're like, oh man, if we give them the wrong thing, this is a high stakes thing and people have opinions about it. So I can understand being upset about it. If you said the youth of America are going to end up in a totally wrong program that teaches them all the wrong skills, I think that's pretty bad. I don't know. It's fine. What if your kid grows up to be 18 and wants to go here? I would not pay for it or let them. I would not allow our children to do that. No fucking way. Kids do not deserve agency in their own college decisions. 18 is a tough one because there were certain colleges I was not allowed to apply to. It's Harvard only for the less than—that's absolutely not true. But honestly, I think you have to be like—I also have Theranos of the brain because goddamn, I'm looking forward to this movie. It's going to be—it looks so good. Did you see the trailer today?
It does look incredible. The extended trailer, I've watched it three times. I did too, actually. It looks amazing. And I do think yes, you can have innovation and disruption. And there's plenty in the education industry. 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 exactly where Dave was at the beginning of this podcast, but has moved, which is recruiting students who they want to invest early in. We've seen it a million times. No, that is what it is. But I'm saying two things can be true, Jess.
I think Mazzy is the only positive person for this on the pod today. I'm wildly positive. Great founders, great idea, modern education, another take on it, ties to the economy and just great builders in an industry that's legacy, obviously broken and needs a whole bunch of refresh. Okay. Call me in six years. Now, let's talk about optimism. Guys, Claude's doing science. We spent a lot of time on this pod talking about what AI is not, right? We talk about overhyped. Sam likes to talk about matrix multiplication, saying it's just blah, blah, blah. I love matrix multiplication.
I know. I gave that to you. But we have heard that Claude, our friend Claude, has discovered a new enzyme system with about 10,000 agents in 21 hours or so of working. A new enzyme system that appears to have properties like CRISPR of bacteriophages. Yes, bacteriophages. Phages are cool. Phages are like the unsung hero that nobody ever researched in America, but Russia is like a grand expert in. Did you know this? Dave, how do you know this? No, I didn't know this. Dave has a secret obsession with phages.
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 because I think science is something we all should be more optimistic about. It's like, of course they're putting this out. Look at us. We've discovered science. The next two months are going to be Claude catnip, you guys. It's going to be all the most amazing things about how they're curing the world's ailments. Well, they've pushed the IPO back down. What is it? November, I think. You can't read everything you read in the Wall Street Journal. The Information has much more updated timelines.
What does The Information say? 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. Like their liability around all this shit running around? Yeah, I think that's one of them. The biggest question for me, which is why all this stuff is so interesting right now with like, who's responsible—the answer is very simple. The by far biggest risk factor they have to talk about is liability. Liability on 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.
This is like the classic criticism of technology, and this is actually Jason Lanier. You remember that guy? Yeah, definitely. I do.
He had a really good framework. I like—which is kind of cynical, but I think there's something to it—which is cynical, but it's like, a lot of what technology does is centralize the value of a thing and then socialize or radiate out all the risk associated. But this is a very cynical take, but it's an interesting one. A lot of what companies do is basically pull all the value and create a central node that owns it. And he was talking about Meta or whatever in that context. It was years ago. And then you take all the issues with it and you push them out. So it's everyone else's problem. This was in the context of peer to peer technology. It was everyone else's. Yeah. And like, again, very cynical, but there'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—I remember when I was a kid, we would go to Disney World and he was a banker. So he liked these types of finance things. I would be scared in a roller coaster. He'd be like, Sam, don't worry. Disney is a public company. Right. Meaning they're not going to kill you because it's too expensive for them to kill you.
In this case, it is interesting because 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? You think your problem is $20 billion because 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. And did we not think about this until two weeks ago? So you don't think they're going to go public at all? I think that's the big challenge. And the interesting thing—this is my big cynical—you think these things are nationalized before they go public?
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 ago. 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 a good actor. And since you will not start the Manhattan Project, we will. And China will kill you if we don't do this. Yeah.
It was a story of we will take responsibility because we are the responsible parties. Fast forward a few years, we're now on the opposite end of the spectrum, which is they're like more traditional businesses competing in a market. And they're not one of ones. They're one of a few. And they're like, oh shit, we can't afford the risk we said we would take. Matt, are you long Anthropic? I don't have a position personally in Anthropic. But mentally or in OpenAI, how do you see—what's your talk track on those? Is it crazy that I'm like long all of these things that I just think the end market is—
Because it would be too dangerous for anyone else to, and at least we're a good actor. And since you will not start the Manhattan Project, we will. And China will kill you if we don't do this. Yeah. It was a story of we will take responsibility because we are the responsible parties. Fast forward a few years, we're now on the opposite end of the spectrum, which is they're more traditional businesses competing in a market. And they're not one of ones. They're one of a few. And they're like, oh shit, we can't afford the risk we said we would take. Matt, are you long Anthropic?
I don't have a position personally in Anthropic. But mentally or in OpenAI, how do you see it? What's your take on those? Is it crazy that I'm long all of these things? I just think the end market is so large that I'm long open source, I'm long frontier. No, that's the new sexy take. I think about the value accruing to the integral of mine as it grows. And the frontier labs own more and more of that. So you said integral, Dave. That's how he got into Harvard. This is a Sam Lesson article from Dropio that should have been written. Up next is the efficient frontier.
No, but it's the idea that 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 riding the efficiency gains from the frontier models and the routing is worthwhile. I'm a believer that all of these things are going to succeed. And I know it seems like a maximalist take on these things. You could be a maximalist. You could be more like us. I'm way more on all of these things. I just continue to get blown away by all of these products. So you don't think there's a bubble that's ever going to pop in this current wave?
No, certainly there's a bubble that will pop. But it's, who's on the other side of it? How would you describe it? Which things will pop?
I mean, it all comes down to the overinvestment into infrastructure on these things. It doesn't seem like it's slowing down anytime soon for us or any of these other players. And it seems like we're behind on power construction, 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, I want more of these things, better tooling. Opus 5.5 is incredible. Have you guys played with this product today? Use the product. The map and the terrain are totally different here. The terrain is the products are spectacular and they continue to improve. And you can be cynical and say yes, it's the celebration parade before the IPO. But on the flip side, what if it's really working and we're discovering more of nature than ever existed and solving more of math than ever existed and utilities going through the roof? I'm a believer that all of those things are true. And so I am long Anthropic. I think that's reasonable.
At least three conversations can all be true at once. One is we're going to 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 any traditional sense? That's a harder question. It's not clear. You can have something that's massively useful and honestly not that profitable. And these things are being pegged as extremely profitable, not just extremely useful. And that's much less clear to me.
And then the third is we can all agree that 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. Yeah. And then there's survivors on the other side of that, though, Sam. There's massive survivors. Well, there are surviving companies, but there aren't necessarily surviving capital. Yeah. The real danger is the capital loss. 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. Engines of Innovation. Yeah, it's a great book. Good call.
So you did your Harvard reading. He got scholarship kids. He got a full scholarship. That's great. At Harvard, everyone who needs it gets it. It's not really a scholarship. It doesn't cost anything. I was giving him extra cred. No, but it means they really wanted him. Yes, but OK. The question is not whether LLMs exist. It might be a question of whether society exists. The question is whether the capital being put in now exists. And who knows is the honest answer.
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. I haven't interviewed the head of Google DeepMind, Corey Kavuchuolu, yet. But I just came from a panel with Blackstone. And because Information subscribers are so smart, they're an excellent audience. They ask good 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 going to pay for the debt? And the executive at Blackstone said, we don't know. That seems bad. That's where we are, right? And he actually wasn't embarrassed to say he didn't know. It was just like, that's where we are in the cycle. We've done our modeling of how much we're willing to put at risk and the whole thing. But at an ecosystem wide level, 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.
It's also this big problem. I actually, you guys know what the St. Petersburg paradox is? No. I'm giving a talk on it next week. It's awesome. Where? Why? How? Yeah. Who invited you to do that? Is this your Peter Thiel topic? Instead of the Antichrist, it's the St. Petersburg paradox? Is this the first time I've heard it, Dave? When are you hosting a debate at the Churchill Club?
I'll do a dry run of this because 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. If it's heads, you get paid out. If it's tails, you keep playing. The first payout, the probability is 50-50. You get effectively $2 if it pays out. The second one is a quarter and you get $4, et cetera. Basically every round, the expected payout is $1. The question is how much do you pay to play the game? And it's an interesting one because if it's an infinite series, the logical answer is you actually would pay infinity to play the game. Yeah, there's no such thing as an infinite series.
Well, there are. I mean, it depends on what you're looking at. In philosophy and math, there are. And it's an infinite series. 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're worth $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. Because you 50% of the time immediately lose a billion dollars. And then a quarter of the time lose your billion dollars. And the basic point is that's the problem with a lot of the AI narrative mathematically. When you talk about infinite outcomes, there is no price. 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 no one has any idea what's going to happen financially. Because you have a thing that's been pitched in this way. Now you could say, the big change is 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. Instead, it's a game with a lot of downside and capped upside and a lot of liquidity. But it's just so unclear.
And then a fourth of the time lose your billion dollars. 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. 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 no one has any idea what's going to happen, right? Financially, because you have a thing that's been pitched in this way. Now you could say the big change is 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? Instead, it's a game with a lot of downside and capped upside and a lot of liquidity. But it's just so unclear. This is not like normal math or normal finance. 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. But this is the great sales problem because that is maybe 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 all games are over because that one winner wins all the markets and therefore it's worth infinity. 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. This is the thing that I sometimes get frustrated with, which is some people are saying you can't know the future and things are evolving. I think that's all a load of bullshit. 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 is it intellectually honest and are we discovering things or is it just all salesmanship? We obviously knew this, but to me, the idea that there was some magical AGI point in line to be one company was obviously ridiculous, but it was 100% what was being sold. And investors bought it.
Wait, I want to hear from Matt on this. Take the hyperbole out for a second and just assess ground truth. You can talk about the doomers as marketing, trying to prime the government for regulatory capture. You can talk about AI as the oracle, like we're building towards digital God. You can take all of those frameworks. They're all stories in my mind. Just ask yourself the question: usage of AI and AI related products up or down next five, 10 years for you as individuals? Share of attention from products that are derivative of AI up or down over the next 10 years? Matt, the answer is obviously up.
Matt, I'm running this podcast. Thank you very much. So we got to keep us moving. We got to talk about peptides. 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 and Traders or these AI executives is they feel like 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 often think about the information economies where information 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 Open AI, but I think I'm always a bit frustrated in conversations where these executives aren't willing to recognize that infinite demand doesn't mean infinite sustainability as a business. And I think—
Well, can I go a step further? Yeah. Because I think you and I unsurprisingly fully agree on this. 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. Yeah. I ran, I don't know, a few million tokens this morning. 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 more calculations than existed in the world until now.
It's kind of like, yeah, of course the number of multiplications will go up insanely. 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? And what's happening with open source, we're seeing it now, right? And I'm still actually along 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 week two of Muse, and an interesting development is that Amazon has blocked Muse. Amazon's basically saying we're not going to play ball. No Muse for you. No Muse for you. You know, these kinds of skirmishes, I will say, are very common in the launch of big tech, so I actually wouldn't read too much. Everyone's just trying. But it's also, we haven't had the MetaConnect 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?
Wasn't a big 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. By the way, just use an open claw and nobody can block you. Are the independents blocked, Dave? No, it's like your computer can't be blocked. Yeah. Oh, Instinct will be blocked for sure. Do you think so?
Yeah, 100%. I mean, I understand blocking Meta as another hyperscale competitor with a marketplace of their own from Amazon. That makes sense to me. But blocking all bots from this future feels short-sighted and doesn't feel viable. You're not going to be blocked at open claw. No, I think it's just like anything. You'll have blocking of large-scale bots and then they got to go do a business development deal. Yeah, it's all about these arms treaties that have to... It's no different than Google and AdWords and all these kinds of things. It's the same negotiation, different era.
You know what else has been blocked? StubHub, which is really annoying to me because I'm trying to run all these bots. My answer is just use your open claw and none of this is a problem. Have you played with Instinct, Dave?
Yeah. I use Claude in the Cloud, but I just gave it full control over a Mac Mini over there. And you're just going to get... But it's just a game of chicken and egg because they're going to stop it. They're going to 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 going to, there's going to be a new model which is this is going to 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 in the end of the day, this goes back to the whole where's the margin in AI? Obviously, Amazon doesn't want to be one of 15 services you check on the fly instantly to find one thing and price optimize. That's completely obvious that they would want... No one wants that. In the end of the day, if we all are using open claws on local machines and never thinking about any service—
That's programmatic clicking. How will they know if it's coming from your Mac Mini? Eventually there's going to be a new model. This is going to 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, in the end of the day, this goes back to the whole where's the margin in AI? Obviously, Amazon doesn't want to be one of 15 services you check on the fly instantly to find one thing and price optimize. That's completely obvious that they would want... No one wants that. In the end of the day, if we all are using open claws 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? This goes back to the whole, does AI create or destroy or whatever. The irony is that a perfectly efficient economy destroys capitalism. The whole funny part about capitalism is the whole goal is to make profit, but the whole machine is designed to tend towards zero profit to drive more innovation. If you're saying 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. Our subscriptions are up this week quite healthily, so they must have kept all their information.
Well, no, but that's a good subscription, not a breakage-based subscription. I do have my agent summarizing my information emails and pulling out the articles that would be better for me. I think we're going to trial some MCP access. You absolutely should. I want to learn so I can price it well. Doesn't it feel like more people are just going to default to these modalities first and then if you're closed, you kind of lose all that market share? I don't care anymore. I will outsource it all to Instinct or Muse or OpenCloth. These things have no users. Even Muse did not get that many users in the first week.
My wife and mother-in-law love it. My mother-in-law is in Destin, Florida. She's not technical. She knows exactly how to use it. She's getting tons of value out of it. I get it. Muse is a great product. These are all great products, but 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. Are you long on agents?
Absolutely. My entire life is everything is allocated to agents. But the analogy I keep using is that it's 1982. The Mac hasn't been invented yet. There's going to be a lot of computers made in the future, a lot of agents made in the future, and we've still got to figure out the UX. It's still not figured out. And it will be, but it's going to take cheaper compute, better UX. You're going to need to be able to use them in groups. There's a lot of things that they don't do yet. I'm going to tell my claw, which does 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 American brands.
There's actually a Chrome plugin that will do this. Oh yeah, I forgot about that. This is your issue, Brett. You keep coming back to this. I want to help you. This is important to you. I honestly just want something that works fast, but I admire your... Oh, it's terrible. The quality is terrible. They don't even have a good brand. They're just random letters. But how do you keep falling for it?
My biggest issue with Muse and Grokbot, because I think they're both good and Muse is particularly good from an interracer's perspective, is I spend $2,000 a month not on GPU, but on CPU at this point. That's a lot for CPU. That's why DigitalOcean's ripping. It's so good because I can build anything. On this pod, I just built a new app I wanted on my Mac while we're talking. And to me, the idea that the problem with Muse is not exactly the right idea, which is the whole point is to give you more computers. The problem is I don't want a computer. I want a ton of computers. And I want it to be fast. I wish I could pay Muse thousands of dollars a month to be better.
I think you're nailing it, Sam. Not on GPU, but on CPU. But that's not what Muse is trying to do. I think what you're talking about is actually the future, both multi-computer and multi-agent and multiplayer. A lot of what's going on right now is 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. Well, for me, it's like I use all these things. I don't even care. It's a polyagentimerous future and it's happening. What? Polyagentimerous. This is Dave's new favorite word. Agentimerous should be killed. Never say that word. I didn't invent it. This is Peter Steinberger all the way.
Polyagent... It sounds sexual. Like you have lots of agents that you're in relationships with and the agents are in relationships with each other too. Why can't you call it a polyagent relationship? When we're talking about polyagentimerous, before we end, we do have to talk about peptides because we have the expert on it. I do want Dave's take on it. What does the future look like? On agents? You guys set a sidebar. We've had Dave's take. No, I want this to be the last question. Wait, hold on. I like that. Those listeners are going to be pissed if we don't get the final word in. On what? Matt's our guest. Let him ask the final question.
No, we still have to talk peptides. We have a whole other segment. Okay, we don't have enough time. We got to go peptides. You got to tell me, Dave, what it looks like.
It's too much of a cliffhanger. I'll try to keep it reasonably short. There's a great piece that Jacob, the head of research from OpenAI, wrote a couple weeks ago about an alien mind. In that, he talks about a lot of things, but there's only a couple of sentences dedicated to this problem which they've encountered, which they've spent all this time on alignment, trying to align agents with human values. The new thing that they've encountered is 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 on the internet that they have to interact with, then the problem changes shape entirely.
What we're dealing with now is an agent ecology. OpenClaw is growing so fast that we're going to have billions of OpenClaws by the end of the year. Obviously, Muse, there's going to be probably billions of Muses. There's going to be an entire agent ecology out there that we have to think about not only model alignment. 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 the frontier of research right now.
Another question, which is, does my agent faithfully represent me or does it faithfully represent the lab that created it? 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. Well, this is the question of alignment with what? Exactly. When you're talking about your agent now going on your behalf and either doing research or working 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? To me, this is the main future that we're going to spend...
Model alignment, we have to think about what happens with agents are interacting with each other when humans are interacting with one agent, many agents. The multiplayer, multi-agent future, I think is the frontier of research right now. And another 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. Well, this is the question of alignment with what?
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, this is the main future that we're going to spend the next couple of years working on is this sort of multiplayer, multi-agent, multi-computer question. I don't think this is going to be a technology question. And I think this is one of the things I think is this is a liability and legal framework question that's going to matter. And the interesting thing is going to be when your agent does something bad, who's responsible? That's going to set the tone for everything else.
And the thing that's really interesting is a bunch of technologists in Silicon Valley. But bad can mean many things, Sam. It could be a micro decision where it just didn't do what you wanted it to do or it did something that creates liability. 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 going to make damn sure it doesn't do things you want to do. This is the question. It all relates back to who's liable.
I think that is the question because the thing that's really interesting is everyone's chatting. First of all, it's happening so fast with the stealing of the internet happens so fast that we're going to be so far behind with the legal conversation that all this is going to be a mess before anyone addresses any of it. Right? We're going to yell about it and write essays about it and none of it matters because it's all going to move so quickly. It's going to be a disaster. And then 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 going to be aligned to the lab. If the person's liable, it's going to be aligned to the person, right? That is going to be the cornerstone piece. And how we sort that out as a society is the bajillion dollar question in the ecosystem.
The problem is, we as technologists can debate this all day long. People are just going to build everything, right? And it's going to 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 you built a service, the service set the rules, people would use it or not. But if they use it, they're playing by your rules. And it was easy to come up with frameworks, relatively speaking, until you got into legal cases. This is just the inverse. You're awesome. That was super interesting. Onward.
I am a total peptide noob. I think we should 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? So I will walk you through. I was in the 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. You weren't in peptides then? No, I was 250 pounds when I first saw you. So when I left KOTU, I was 260 pounds. I totally let myself go. And for words with Matt, we've seen you through several fat Matt phases in life.
Yes, yes, yes. You've seen many versions of fat Matt. This was the fattest Matt. Come on our pod and we're going to comment on your body image over a two decade period. You did not look like what you look like right now. Listen, when you drink a hundred beers, it's going to have an impact. Yes. We can't deny it honestly.
By the way, my whole family is like this. My dad was 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 forties. And so I come from a long line of Mazios who don't make it that long. And at 40, I'm six years into my KOTU experience. I have my first kid. I look at my photo with my first baby and I'm thinking, oh shit, I look exactly like my dad. And somebody, and my dad goes, you look just like your grandfather. And I'm thinking, well, that's even worse because I never met the guy. And I'm thinking, okay, I got to figure this out.
And so I go down this rabbit hole of a health journey. I get my hormones checked. I get all these things checked. I'm figuring it out. A year and a half ago, I'm a little bit better. I'm still 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 Benjamin Buttoned himself. He looks 10 years younger. He looks like Captain America. I'm thinking, what happened to you? He goes, I'm on every peptide. I'm thinking, you sound like a TikTok video. What the hell are you talking about? Two minutes later, I bump into Dave and he's 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 101. Peptides are short chains of amino acids. You guys remember amino acids from biology class, think of them as the building blocks of life. They're 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 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.
A hundred years ago, we discovered the first of these peptides and put it into use. It's called insulin. Insulin is 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.
Eighty years later, we discover GLP-1s. GLP-1s come around. You consume food. Your body releases GLP-1s. It tells your brain it's satiated. It tells your body to slow gastric emptying, healthy 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 1, some 2, retatrutide 3. They do all sorts of things for metabolic health and increasingly other sides of it. In the last handful of years, they have astronomically, if you check the GLP-1 revenue relative to AI revenue, they're on par or in some cases, GLP-1 revenue even eclipses it.
Turns out, in addition to those peptides, as I go down this rabbit hole of what are peptides, there are hundreds of other peptides that are relatively well-known. Everything from what we know mechanistically they do to they work in animals to they're already FDA approved. Things like Tessamorelin, which is a growth hormone releasing analog that helps release growth hormone to your pituitary. There's ones like PT-141 that increases libido. There's ones for recovery, for sleep, for tanning. I know which one I'm interested in. Tanning, obviously.
I go down the rabbit hole. I'm thinking, how many are there? There's 180 that are kind of well understood and many of them used to be compoundable. 180? Can I just have one that does all the good things? So what, peptides are like the internet?
Turns out, in addition to those peptides, as I go down this rabbit hole of what are peptides, there are hundreds of other peptides that are relatively well-known. Everything from we know what mechanistically they do to they work in animals to they're already FDA approved. Things like Tessamorelin, which is a growth hormone releasing analog that helps release growth hormone to your pituitary. There's ones like PT141 that increases libido. There's ones for recovery, for sleep, for tanning. I know which one I'm interested in. Tanning, obviously. I go down the rabbit hole. I'm like, how many are there? There's 180 that are kind of well understood and many of them used to be compoundable. 180? Can I just have one that does all the good things? So what, peptides are like the internet of the body? 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 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 release melatonin or release growth hormone or increase angiogenesis or all of these things, reduce inflammation or increase mitochondrial output or increase mitochondrial number, like that mitogenetic. And so there's a whole bunch of these 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 find out what the mechanisms of action are? 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 want to 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%. And cognition has a big rebound. I mean, there's all these other side effects. This is all tied. I see Dave Morin at the next YC and he's like, what happened to you? He has the same experience that I had with my buddy. You should show the audience your biceps. Show your arms, Matt Mazzeo. I know which buddy you're talking about too. Can you do one flex for us? Do you really? I mean, you should do it. We have a YouTube audience. For everyone watching on video. Oh my God. Look at that. Look at that. Now, Sam and Dave, your turn. I mean, we got more normal. You look great, Sam. You look amazing. You were always fit though. Okay. Okay. Okay. I have real questions. Are these legal? What's happening here? Am I going to get cancer? Jess is asking what legal state these exist in and responsible use, man. Yeah. She says we can't feed people hype without some smart questions. So the regulatory schema is changing rapidly. A month, two months ago, the FDA met. Three years ago, the FDA moved a bunch of these peptides out of compounding and created what is effectively a 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 in some studies has shown that it has interesting properties. You hear 157 a lot. Why is 157 so popular? I got that one in the fridge. Can we rebrand all of these to be better brands and not weird numbers? How about Muse? It's called a Muse. Yeah, actually, the brand name for BPC-157 and TB-500, which are two of the more popular peptides, is the Wolverine stack. And it's great for repair and you add in copper and you add in KPV and you create what's called the Close stack. I got that one too. I'm doubling up. The branding needs work, but the answer is the research is really interesting. I just want to know how to not die. I mean, if you looked at my blood work, my blood work before and after, you can even put my before and afters into this. It's crazy. It's wildly different. I'm a different person. You're saying there's seven that are in compounding pharmacies. Okay. So many peptides are currently available. FDA compounded in compounding pharmacies. This is like the GLP-1s, insulin, obviously, PT-141, Tessamorelin, where they've been really well studied. They are currently available as medications. You can acquire those in compounding pharmacies today. There are a variety that have gone into this gray market because when they moved out of compounding pharmacies three years ago, it created this 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 under this guise of research use only. It is on the verge of moving back into compounding pharmacies. Six of the seven were recommended by the PCAC, the pharmacy compounding, the FDA's recommendation body to go back into compounding pharmacy. And in February, another 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 where they can be reliably compounded. And then doctors will have much more insight into patient care and oversight and quality control as opposed to what's happening now, which is this free for all where your gym bro is recommending these compounds to you. That's great news. Oh, you're my gym bro, Matt. So okay, I'm a peptide noob. I'm on no peptides. Do I need to go see your Tina Wu person? Yeah, you should go see a doctor. Don't take anything you read on the internet. And the doctor is going to ask me questions. Like, do you want to be stronger? Do you want to be tanner? But they're going to be like, you look ugly. Here's your stack. 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've joined 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 want to know about peptides. And then based on whatever your goals are, better sleep, better cognition, better body composition, 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. And what do I pay you? $300 a month. Okay. So it's like a concierge peptide program? Yeah. And then I'm also paying for the peptides obviously themselves. Your membership includes your first peptide, but many of our patients go for a variety of them. When I did my full protocol to change everything in my body, I was on many peptides. I did six different types of peptides. Seems like everybody is. How many are you on now? Well, I've actually finished my second version of the protocol. So I wanted to see if I could get to single digit body fat and keep pristine blood work. So I just nailed that. And now I'm on just a maintenance. So I do a low dose GLP one and I do NAD and that's basically the extent of it today. And what percent chance will I get cancer from any of these peptides? You should go talk to one of our doctors. The second doctor that we hired is a published research oncologist. You should have a conversation with her and she will teach you everything about where the risks are and where they're not. And where the research is and walk you through every step. So I have to go talk to a woodworker, but Matt, you're very, you're a good salesman.
Seems like everybody is. How many are you on now? Well, I've actually finished my second version of the protocol. So I wanted to see if I could get to single digit body fat and keep pristine blood work. So I just nailed that. And now I'm on just a maintenance. So I do a low dose GLP one and I do NAD and that's basically the extent of it today. And what percent chance will I get cancer from any of these peptides?
You should go talk to one of our doctors. The second doctor that we hired is a published research oncologist. You should have a conversation with her and she will teach you everything about where the risks are and where they're not. And where the research is and walk you through every step. 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. I'm not trying to be a salesman. You should just, I'm the one on the call who takes all your stuff. Like I'm taking more of these things than you are right now. Sam, do you feel different? Yeah, I think it's great. Are you enjoying the experience, Sam?
I am enjoying the experience. For me, it's mostly been that I seriously ramp my running. Are you doing it through Matt's service, Sam? Of course. Where else am I going to get it? It's been great because the big thing, which even Jess, if she would hear, would agree with for me is that I used to run a lot and I kind of stopped entirely. I've been ramping really hard since June back and the recovery stuff clearly works. Like in terms of injury stuff or slight things like that, as well as just, it's a wild experience because I've done this enough in my life to know what it normally feels like. I'm like, wow, this is way better.
Yeah, I'm just convinced that we're, 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 happily retired and running a small fund and when I met this doctor, she changed my life. I'm a different human today. I am objectively able to 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 outlift Sam right now, which is the first time in a long time that I could outlift Sam and you've got a few pounds on me. Those are fighting words. You still have a few pounds on me. I'm 195 right now. I'm 170. So still, still.
We could weight adjust it. I love how bros flex their egos versus how girls flex their egos, but keep going. I do have to go, but I will say, I do fondly remember an LA birthday party where Matt Mazze 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. One plus. One plus. Sam has a very 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. And I will always do it. He frequently beats the shadow me. No, it's not meaningfully more. It's just one plus. 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. I am a Swift man. My sister is a diehard Swiftie. My sister and my wife are my daughter's heroes. And so she grew up listening to Taylor Swift. The first songs that she was singing were all Taylor Swift songs. And so I feel every time she drops something, it's a new thing that she gets to experience with her mom and my sister. So yes, I am very excited. Yeah, good. You're a girl dad. You got to follow this now.
Good. It's the best thing ever. We've got two, we got the girl and the boy and it's, it is the most fun thing I've ever done. I want, the reason I'm doing this company is so I can 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. Can we get a promo code or something for More or Less listeners? Yeah, absolutely. I'll do it More or Less VIP and I'll send that to your audience. Is that a code? I'm building the code right now. More or Less VIP. More or Less VIP. What do we get for that? I'll cut the first month in half. 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 you stay to the end and you get treats. More or Less VIP. Done. Love it. Amazing. Thank you, team. You're the best. I love you guys. We so appreciate you. I hope you're coming back. Great to have you. I'm going to start my peptide journey. So I'm going to literally text you in five minutes. Right on. Use the code. Awesome. The Mores are going in. All right. Thanks to everyone for following along and listening and 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 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 at More or Less, at Dave Morin, at Jess Lesson, at Jay Lesson, and for me, I'm at Brit. See you guys next time. It's not really a scholarship. You just like, it doesn't cost anything. I was giving him extra cred. No, but it means they really wanted him. Yes, but OK. The question is not whether LLMs exist. It might be a question of whether society exists. It doesn't question whether LLMs exist.
The question is whether the capital being put in now exists. And who knows is the honest answer. 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 Informations AI event in San Francisco going back and forth. Haven't interviewed the head of Google DeepMind, Corey Kavuchuolu, 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 going to pay for the debt?
And the executive at Blackstone said, we don't know. That seems bad. That's where we are, right? And he actually wasn't like embarrassed to say he didn't know. It 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. It's also this big problem, which is like, look, I actually, you guys know what the St. Petersburg paradox is? No. I'm giving a talk on it next week. It's awesome.
Where? Why? How? Yeah. Who invited you to do that? Is this like your Peter Thiel topic? Like instead of the Antichrist, it's the St. Peter's paradox? Is this the first time I've heard it, Dave? When are you hosting a debate at the Churchill Club? I'll do a dry run of this because 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? Because 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 because if it's an infinite series, the logical answer is you actually would pay infinity to play the game. Yeah, there's no such thing as an infinite series. Well, there are. I mean, it depends on what you're looking at. Like in philosophy and math, there are. And 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're of $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? Because you 50% of the time immediately lose a billion dollars. And then a fourth of the time lose your billion dollars. 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 going to 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. 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. 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 all games are over because that one winner wins all the markets and therefore it's worth infinity. 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. 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 points in line to be one company was obviously ridiculous, but it was 100% what was being sold. And investors bought it. Wait, I want to hear from Matt on this. Take the hyperbole out for a second and just like assess ground truth. You can talk about like the doomers as marketing, like trying to prime the government
for regulatory capture. You can 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. Share of attention from products that are derivative of AI up or down over the next 10 years. Matt, the answer is obviously up. Matt, I'm running this podcast. Thank you very much. So we got to keep us moving. We got to talk about peptides. 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 and Traders or these like these AI executives, 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 in open AI, 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... Well, can I go a step further? Yeah. Because I think you and I unsurprisingly fully agree on this. 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. Yeah. I ran, I don't know, like a few million tokens this morning. 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 more calculations than, like, existed in the world until now.
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? And what's happening with open source, we're seeing it now, right? And I'm still actually along 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 an interesting development
is that Amazon has blocked Muse. Amazon's basically saying we're not going to play ball. No Muse for you. No Muse for you. 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 much. Everyone's just trying. But it's also, we haven't had the MetaConnect 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? Wasn't a big 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. By the way, just use an open claw and nobody can block you. Are the independents blocked, Dave? No, it's like your computer can't be blocked. Yeah. Oh, Instinct will be blocked for sure. Do you think so? Yeah, 100%. I mean, I understand blocking Meta as, like, another hyperscale, 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 short-sighted and doesn't feel viable. Like, you're not going to be blocked at open claw. No, I think it's just like anything. You'll have blocking of large-scale bots and then they got to go
do a business development deal. Yeah, it's all about these arms treaties that have to... It's no different than, you know, Google and AdWords and all these kinds of things. Like, it's the same negotiation, different era. You know what else has been blocked? StubHub, which is really annoying to me because I'm trying to run all these bots. My answer is this going to continue to be just use your open claw and none of this is a problem. Have you played with Instinct, Dave? Uh, yeah. I use Clawed in the Cloud, but I just gave it full control over a Mac Mini over there. And, like, you're just going to get... But, like, it's just a game of chicken and the egg
because they're going to stop it. They're going to 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 going to, like, there's going to be a new model which is like, this is going to 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 goes back to the whole, like, where's the margin in AI? Obviously, Amazon doesn't want to be one 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... Like, no one wants that. In the end of the day, if we all are using open claws 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. Our subscriptions are up this week quite healthily, so they must have kept all their information. Well, no, but that's a good subscription, not a breakage-based subscription.
I do have my agent summarizing my information emails, just so you know, and pulling out the articles that would be better for me. I think we're going to trial some MCP access. You absolutely should. I want to learn so I can price it well. Doesn't it feel like more people are just going to default to these modalities first and then if you're closed, you kind of lose all that market share? I don't care anymore. I will outsource it all to Instinct or Muse or OpenCloth. These things have no users. Even Muse did not get that many users in the first week. My wife and mother-in-law love it. And they're like, my mother-in-law is in Destin, Florida. She's not technical.
She knows exactly how to use it. She's getting tons of value out of it. I get it, dude. And Muse is a great product. These are all great products, but 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. Are you long on agents? Oh, absolutely. My entire life is, everything is allocated to agents. But the analogy I keep using is that it's 1982. The Mac hasn't been invented yet. There's going to be a lot of computers made in the future, a lot of agents made in the future, and we've still got to figure out the UX. It's still not figured out. And it will be, but it's going to take cheaper compute. It's going to take
better UX. You're going to need to be able to use them in groups. There's a lot of things that they don't do yet. I'm going to tell my claw, which does 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. There's actually a Chrome plugin that will do this. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. This is your issue, Brett. You keep coming back to this. I want to help you. This is important to you. I honestly just want something that works fast, but I admire your... Oh, it's terrible. The quality is terrible. They don't even have a good brand. They're just random letters. There's...
But how do you keep falling for it? My biggest issue with Muse and Grokbot, because I think they're both good and Muse is particularly good from an interracer's perspective, is, like, I spend $2,000 a month not on GPU, but on CPU at this point. That's a lot for CPU. That's why DigitalOcean's ripping. It's so good, because... And the thing about it is, like, I can build anything. Like, on this pod, I just, like, built, like, a new app I wanted on my Mac 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. I think you're nailing it, Sam. Not on GPU, but on CPU. But that's not what Muse is trying to do. I think 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. Well, and for me, like, it's like, I use all these things. I don't even care.
It's a polyagentimerous future and, like, it's happening. What? Polyagentimerous. This is Dave's new favorite word. Agentimerous should be killed. Never say that word. I didn't invent it. This is Peter Steinberger all the way. Polyagent... It sounds like, um... It sounds sexual. Like, you have lots of agents that you're in relationships with and the agents are in relationships with each other, too. And why can't you call it a polyagent relationship? When we're talking about polyagentimerous, before we end, we do have to talk about peptides because we have the expert on it. I do want Dave's take on it. Like, what does the future look like? On what? Like, on agents.
You guys set a sidebar. We've had Dave's take. No, no, no, no. I want this to be the last question. Wait, hold on. I like that. Those listeners are going to be pissed if we don't get the final word in. On what? Matt's our guest. Let him ask the final question. No, we still have to talk peptides. We have a whole other segment. Okay. We don't have enough time. We got to go peptides. You got to tell me, Dave, what it looks like. It's too much of a cliffhanger. 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, 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. OpenClaw is growing so fast that we're going to have billions of OpenClaws by the end of the year. Obviously, Muse,
there's going to be probably billions of Muses. There's going to be just like an entire agent ecology out there that we have to think about not only model alignment, we have to think about what happens with 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. Well, this is the question of alignment with what? 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 going to spend the next couple of years working on is this sort of multiplayer, multi-agent, multi-computer question. I don't think this is going to be a technology question. And I think this is one of the things I think is this is a liability
and legal framework question that's going to matter. And the interesting thing is going to be when your agent does something bad, who's responsible? That's going to set the tone for everything else. And the thing that's really interesting is a bunch of technologists in Silicon Valley. But bad can mean 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. 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 going to 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 because 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 happens so fast that we're going to be so far behind with the legal conversation that like all this is going to be a fucking mess before anyone addresses any of it. Right? Like we're going to like yell about it and write essays about it and none of it matters because it's all going to move so quickly. It's going to 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 going to be aligned to the lab. If the person's liable, it's going to be aligned to the person, right? Like that is going to 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 as technologists can debate this shit all day long. People are just going to build everything, right? And it's going to 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 use it, they're 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. You're awesome. That was, thank you for that. Super interesting. Onward. I am a total peptide noob. 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? So I will walk you through. I was in the 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. You weren't in peptides then? No, I was 250 pounds when I first saw you. So when I left KOTU, I was 260 pounds. I totally let myself go. And for words with Matt, we've seen you through several fat Matt phases in life. Yes, yes, yes. You've seen many of fat Matt. This was the fattest Matt. Come on our pod and we're going to comment on your body image over a two decade period. You did not look like what you look like right now. Listen, when you drink a hundred beers, it's going to have an impact. Yes. We can't buy it honestly. By the way, my whole family is 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 forties. And so I come from a long line of Mazios who like don't make it that long. And like at 40, you know, I'm six years into my KOTU experience. I have 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 because I never met the guy. And I'm like, okay, I got to 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 botting, 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. A hundred years ago, we discovered the first of these peptides and put it into use. It's called insulin. Insulin is 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. Eighty years later, we discover GLP-1s. GLP-1s come around. You consume food. Your body releases GLP-1s. It tells your brain, it's satiated. It tells your body slow gastric emptying, health digestion. GLP-1s take 30 years to then get modified into compounds
that we have today. Some glutide, liraglutide, terzepatide, soon to be retitrutide that hit different receptors. Some 1, some 2, retitrutide 3. 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 the GLP-1 revenue relative to AI revenue, they're like on par or in some cases, GLP-1 revenue even 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 Tessamortalin, which is a growth hormone releasing analog that like helps, what's it called, release growth hormone to your pituitary. There's ones like PT141 that like increases libido. There's ones for recovery, for sleep, for tanning. I know which one I'm interested in. Tanning, obviously. 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. 180? Can I just have one that does all the good things? So what, like peptides are like the internet of the body? 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 formin 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 increase angiogenesis or all of these things, reduce inflammation or increase mitochondrial output or increase mitochondrial number, like that mitogenetic. And so there's a whole bunch of these 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 mechanisms of action are? 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 want to 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%. And like cognition has a big round. I mean, like there's all these other side effects. This is all tied. I see Dave Morin at the next YC and he's like, what fucking happened to you? He has the same experience that I had with my buddy. You should show the audience your biceps. Show your arms, Matt Mazzeo. I know which buddy you're talking about too. Can you do one flux for us? Do you really? I mean, you should do it. We have a YouTube audience. For everyone watching on video. Oh my God. Look at that.
Look at that. Now, Sam and Dave, your turn. I mean, I'm like, I don't know. Like, we got like more normal. You look great, Sam. You look amazing. You were always fit though. Okay. Okay. Okay. I have real questions. Are these legal? What's happening here? Like, am I going to get cancer? Jess is gone and all Jess wants to know is what legal state these exist in and responsible use, man. Yeah. She says we can't feed people hype without some smart questions. So the, the regulatory schema is changing rapidly. So a month, 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 brain 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, you know, in some studies has shown that it like, you hear 157 a lot. Why is 157 so popular? I got that one in the fridge. Can we rebrand all of these to be like better brands and not weird numbers? How about Muse? It's called a Muse. Yeah, actually, the brand name for BPC-157 and TB-500, which are two of the more popular peptides, is the Wolverine stack. And it's great for like repair and like,
you add in copper and you add in KPV and you create what's called the close stack. I got that one too. I'm doubling up. The branding needs work, but the answer is like, the research is really interesting. I just want to know how to not die. I mean, if you looked at my blood work, my blood work before and after, you can even put my before and afters into this. It's freaking crazy. Like, it's wildly different. I'm a different person. You're saying there's like seven that are like in compounding pharmacies. 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,
Tessamoralin, 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 because 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 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 where they can be reliably compounded. And then doctors will have much more insight into like patient care and oversight and 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. That's great news. Oh, 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? Yeah, you should go see a doctor. Don't take anything you read on the internet. And the doctor is just going to do like, like ask me questions. Like, do you want to be stronger? Do you want to like be Tanner? But they're going to be like, you look ugly. Here's your stack. 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've joined 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 want to know about peptides. And then based on whatever your goals are, better sleep, better cognition, better body composition, 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. And what do I pay you? Uh, $300 a month. Okay. So it's like a concierge peptide program? Yeah. And then I'm also paying for the peptides
obviously themselves. 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. Seems like everybody is. How many are you on now? Well, I've actually, so I 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 one and, uh, I do NAD and that's basically the extent of it today. And what percent chance will I get cancer
from any of these peptides? You should go talk to one of our doctors. The second doctor that we hired is a published research oncologist. You should have a conversation with her and she will teach 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. 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. I'm not trying to be a salesman. You should just, 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. Sam, do you feel different? Yeah, I think, I think it's great.
Are you enjoying the experience, Sam? I am enjoying the experience. For me, it's mostly been that I seriously ramp my running. Are you doing it through Matt's service, Sam? Of course. Where else am I going to get it? It's been great because the big thing, which even Jess, if she would hear, would agree with for me is that I used to run a lot and I kind of 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 because I've done this enough in my life
to know what it normally feels like. I'm like, wow, this is like way better. 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 outlift Sam right now, which is the first time in a long time that I could outlift Sam and like, you've got a few pounds on me.
Those are fighting words. You still have a few pounds on me. I'm 195 right now. I don't know. I'm 170. So, you know, still, still. We could weight adjust it. I love how bros flex their egos versus how girls flex their egos, but keep going. I do have to go, but I will say, I do fondly remember an LA birthday party where Matt Mazze 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. One plus. One plus. 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. And I will always do it.
He frequently beats the shadow me. So. No, it's not meaningfully more. It's just one plus. 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. I am a Swift man. My sister is a diehard Swiftie. My sister is like, and my wife are like my daughter's heroes. And so they grew up, 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. Yeah, good. You're a girl dad. You got to follow this now. Good. It's the best thing ever. 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. Can we get like a promo code or something for more or less listeners? Yeah, absolutely. I'll do it more or less VIP or, and I'll send that to your audience. Yeah. How about that? Is that a code? I'm building the code right now.
More or less VIP. More or less VIP. What do we get for that? I'll cut the first month in half. How about that? 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. More or less VIP. Done. Love it. Amazing. Thank you, team. You're the best. I love you guys. We so appreciate you. I hope you're coming back. Great to have you. I'm going to start my peptide journey. So I'm going to literally text you in like five minutes. Right on. Use the code. 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 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 at more or less, at Dave Morin, at Lesson, at Jay Lesson, and as for me, I'm at Brit. See you guys next time.