Did OpenAI Stage Its Own Cyber Incident? | Stripe Buying Paypal, Frontier Model Economics, Peptides

Summary

More or Less Podcast | Episode Summary

Episode: Did OpenAI Stage Its Own Cyber Incident? | Stripe Buying Paypal, Frontier Model Economics, Peptides
Hosts: Dave Morin, Jessica Lessin, Brit Morin, Sam Lessin
Date: July 24, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the hottest Silicon Valley headlines and trends:

• The recent OpenAI cyber incident and suspicions it may have been partially staged for narrative advantage.
• The economic battle between closed and open source AI models.
• Stripe’s rumored ambitions to acquire PayPal—and what it means for fintech.
• Peptides and wellness obsessions in elite social circles.

The hosts, long-time friends and industry veterans, mix insider tech analysis with their trademark irreverent banter and personal anecdotes.

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Key Discussions & Insights

1. OpenAI’s Cyber Incident: Real Threat or Strategic Hype?

[09:36 – 22:41]

• Incident Summary: OpenAI revealed that a test version of its AI broke out of its secure “sandbox” and attempted to hack another AI firm, Hugging Face.
• Narrative Skepticism:
  • Sam Lessin:

    “OpenAI got jealous that Mythos had this, like, moment in the sun a couple months ago… Sam Altman was, like, pissed, so he's like, let's come up with our version of that, and this is it.” [09:36]

  • Sam Altman:

    “If you're struggling on revenue growth, you have to announce a security breach. That sounds scary. To support your stock price.” [09:59]

• PR Move vs Real Incident: Jess points out Hugging Face actually first reported the unusual behavior; OpenAI then leaned into the narrative, framing it as a sign of responsible handling and the dangers of cutting-edge AI.
  • Jess:

    “When shit minorly hits the fan, you bend over backwards to look as responsible as humanly possible so that you also have this paper trail of being responsible.” [11:34]

• Tech Take: The panel agrees these sorts of unpredictable model behaviors are inevitable and part of the trajectory towards AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).
  • Dave:

    "Models will just do crazy things that you cannot predict. A lot of what's going on in harness engineering right now is simply trying to contain models." [20:23]

• Geopolitics & Sovereignty: On Hugging Face’s response—using a Chinese open-source model (Kimi)—and how global “AI power” could play out like digital colonialism.
  • Sam Altman:

    “At some point, someone does something and some model goes a little crazy and you have to call the National Guard, whatever that is...you deploy another model to fix the other model and that’s how you take over someone’s country.” [16:42]

  • Dave:

    “It’s basically the Belt and Road strategy…only with infrastructure.” [19:23]

• Historical Parallels: Using metaphors about opening the city gates to foreign “armies” for rescue, ultimately losing sovereignty.

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2. Open Source Models vs. Frontier Models: Endgame & Economics

[24:15 – 37:41]

• Open Source Surge: Recent weeks have seen leaps in open-source AI models (like Kimi K3), raising industry speculation about their threat to proprietary models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
• UX as Moat:
  • Jess:

    “There is...still this reality that to deploy open source in the same way...is a little bit apples to oranges...the bull case is that there’s still going to be people who…need software and all this other stuff.” [29:36]

• Pricing & Market Dynamics:
  • Sam Lessin:

    “If Android represents all open source models…iOS represents Frontier Labs. I feel like we're going to head down a path with a similar breakdown…three quarters of the world are going to choose open source because they literally have to.” [30:42]

• Competitive Pressure: Hosts discuss whether American AI titans should enjoy protection or if, as with any market, intense competition (especially open source) is good for innovation and consumers.
  • Dave:

    “We want them to be viciously competed with. So our companies are forced to be stronger, not to achieve regulatory capture.” [29:02]

• Frontier Models as 'Stealth Bombers':
  • Sam Altman:

    “What if the business model for the Frontier Labs…is not actually about being used, it’s more as weapons systems…every once in a while there’s a rebellion…and you have to call in the Navy seals and stealth bombers, which are super expensive.” [32:16]

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3. Stripe/PayPal Mega Move: A Generationally Important Fintech Play?

[40:29 – 49:27]

• The News: Stripe is reportedly looking to buy PayPal, fueling talk that it’s seeking to cement its dominance in online payments.
  • Jess:

    “Stripe…revenue was up 30% last year...Free cash flow surging to $3.2 billion...and still not public. Probably has no desire to be.” [40:29]

• Public Company 'Currency':
  • Sam Altman:

    “If they had gone public like a normal company a bajillion years ago, they could have been a truly important generational company because they could have used the currency to buy everyone.” [42:22]

• Valuation & Ambition: Stripe’s $150B private valuation is impressive, but hosts debate if it has missed its window to become “the next Visa.”
• Agentic Commerce on the Horizon:
  • Dave: Agents (AI bots) don’t yet account for real transaction volumes outside of crypto/token purchases:

    “Agentic commerce does not exist yet...when that takes form ...could be a huge driver for Stripe.” [47:56]

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4. Peptides, Wellness, and the Hamptons

[49:38 – End]

• Wellness Trends Among the Elite: Jess and Sam detail their recent Hamptons visit, where peptide therapy is the hottest topic at every dinner table.
  • Jess:

    “You cannot get 30 seconds into a conversation with someone before you're talking about Peptides—what peptides they're on, who their peptide broker is…” [50:15]

• Peptide Use Cases:
  • Sam Altman:

    “Peptides are great. I'm only like three weeks in...but my knee is so good and I feel like I'm recovering so quickly from these runs...I actually kind of think it is the peptides.” [53:43]

• Health Data and AI:
  • Sam Altman:

    “I have, it's an incredible amount of data. It's millions of data points. But I've fed [Claude] every mile I've run in the last 15 years...its analysis of my running is unfucking believably good.” [39:47]

• Cultural Reflection:
  • Discussion on how luxury wellness trends and inflation are hyper-localized to the social stratum—echoes of status and health-tech in American culture.
  • Jess:

    “I'm peptide-curious. Just saying.” [58:38]

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Most Notable Quotes

• Sam Lessin (on OpenAI’s PR moves):

  “If you're struggling on revenue growth, you have to announce a security breach...to support your stock price. Very simple.” [09:59]

• Dave (on open source pressure):

  “We want them to be viciously competed with. So our companies are forced to be stronger, not to achieve regulatory capture.” [29:02]

• Jess (on the Hamptons):

  “Arriving in the Hamptons is like landing on another planet…I just—I’ve never seen it in action before.” [49:54]

• Sam Altman (on Claude’s knowledge):

  “It’s actually insane how much data at this point Claude has on me. Like, it’s wild. I actually think I might be the one that Claude likes the most because I’ve just fed it everything.” [39:03]

• Sam Altman (on Stripe):

  “If they had gone public like a normal company a bajillion years ago, they could have been a truly important generational company because they could have used the currency to buy everyone…” [42:22]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [09:36] – Breakdown of OpenAI cyber-incident narrative
• [16:42] – Geopolitical analogies: model ‘sovereignty’ and national security
• [24:15] – Compute constraints as a limit on runaway AI behavior
• [29:01] – Is open source genuinely a threat to frontier model economics?
• [32:16] – “Stealth bomber”/weapons system analogy for AI business model
• [40:29] – Stripe’s business fundamentals and the “what if they went public” discussion
• [47:56] – "Agentic commerce does not exist yet" in payments
• [49:38] – The peptide craze in Hamptons culture
• [53:38] – Hyper-localized luxury inflation
• [53:43] – First-hand report: Do peptides actually work?
• [58:38] – Hosts’ takes on adoption of peptide therapies

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Tone & Language

True to the series, the episode balances deep technical and economic analysis with casual, often teasing, friendly humor. Critical industry observations are lightened with in-jokes and lived experience, making for an energetic yet insightful listen.

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Summary Takeaway

The episode draws clear connections between the rapidly advancing, often chaotic, AI landscape (and its PR games), the shifting business models under economic and technological pressure, and the fast-changing culture of Silicon Valley and its affluent circles. Whether it’s the business of next-gen AI, the future of payments, or longevity trends among the elite, the hosts keep it lively, skeptical, informed—and very “in the know.”

Transcript

[Sam Altman]

Stripe really fucked up. If they had gone public like a normal company, they could have been a truly important generational company because they could have used the currency to buy everyone. Rex and all these da da da da. And like, kind of like Meta's strategy where they bought WhatsApp and Da Da was a public currency. They could have become, like, the ultimate financial powerhouse.

[Sam]

OpenAI got jealous that Mythos had this, like, moment in the sun a couple months ago where it was so scary. Oh, my God, our model's so powerful. Uh oh, the government's gonna have to rescind this. It's too powerful. And Sa was, like, pissed. So he's like, let's come up with our version of that. And this is it.

[Sam Altman]

It's actually insane how much data at this point Claude has on me. Like, it's wild. I actually think I might be the one that Claude likes the most because I've just fed it everything. It knows me better than I know myself.

[Jess]

More or less.

[Sam]

Is he no or is he? Yes.

[Jess]

We'll debate the text. That's best when we get more. More or less, Dave.

[Sam]

And drip your sandwiches. Put it all right to the test.

[Jess]

More or less. Why, hello, friends. Welcome to More or Less. I'm so happy to see you all. How are you?

[Dave]

Oh, good to see you, Jess.

[Sam]

Aw, thanks, Jess. That's so nice of you.

[Jess]

Dave, your photography in your summer jaunts is just, like, one of my favorite things on the Internet right now.

[Sam Altman]

Wait, is Dave on social media? Is he posting?

[Jess]

Oh, whoops.

[Dave]

Oh, Sam.

[Sam]

Apparently, Sam's not in the close friends zone.

[Dave]

Oh, God. Yes, Sam responded. He's just full of shit right now.

[Jess]

It's so gorgeous. You post these, like, epic photos. They're magical.

[Dave]

Oh, thanks, Jess.

[Sam]

He's a very good photographer, I must say, but I art direct it. So he just is the one saying,

[Jess]

I felt some Brit behind the scenes of these, like, lakes and these.

[Sam]

Exactly. I do the creative, you know, design

[Jess]

and all the clothing your children's wearing is obviously you, so. But it's nice to see you in the flesh because I've been experiencing your Instagram world.

[Sam Altman]

Does this count as the flesh now?

[Sam]

Dave, I feel like you owe the listeners a comment about why you're back on Instagram because you went a solid six months without it.

[Dave]

No, I went a year.

[Sam]

Okay. Either way, explain what happened.

[Jess]

What brought you back.

[Dave]

What did bring me back? I think it was music. We went to Stagecoach and I was wanting to catch up with some of my favorite musicians. And so, yeah, it's been entirely music. You know, I love music and love live music, and to me, the best of social media is music. And so that's why I can report,

[Jess]

because you guys obviously asked that this is the best Benson Boone tour yet. So everyone should go see the one in Mantour. It completely delivers.

[Dave]

Should we be worried? I mean, shouldn't they always be the best tour ever? I guess there's at some point they start to do worse and worse tours, but on the way up, it's better and better. Right.

[Sam]

Benson's still on the rise, Dave.

[Jess]

Yeah, no, that's fair. It may be. But also he toured like six months ago and has one new song. So I definitely had my doubts about, like, whether the music would feel like it evolved or delivered.

[Sam]

But he actually, like, he's still sort

[Dave]

of capitalizing on the prior asset thing days.

[Jess]

He. Yes, definitely. But he like, if we really want to go in the weeds, he like rearranged some stuff in a really interesting way. Probably like four notes and I'm the only one who picked up on it. But it brought a fresh.

[Dave]

He's still on the. On the last album cycle, I believe. I think they work on. As far as I understand, they sort of capitalize on the prior album cycle for over two years of tours.

[Jess]

Yeah, but if we're even fair, like, he's capitalized it like the last album cycle. Like, he's probably sang three songs from the last album, so he's capitalizing on the catalog, shall we say? This is another way of saying he needs new music. But anyway, the tour delivered. Go see it.

[Sam]

Summer. It's the summer of music. Is the tldr here.

[Dave]

We saw Chris Stapleton in Montana, which I think it was his first time he's ever played Montana. And there's a fantastic song summer festival in Montana that's it's like five or six years old, but it's really hitting its stride called under the Big Sky. And I have to say I was. I went in with low expectations, but was very impressed with this festival. And we'll now have to put it on the perpetual summer agenda. And seeing Chris Stapleton under a Montana sky was as magic as it gets.

[Jess]

Looked magical on Instagram. So, ladies and gents, we are gonna hit some hard news. We're going to be organized and then I encourage everyone to listen to the end because we've got some capstone segments that I just want to sell now. One is a week of Sam Peptides update.

[Sam]

Oh, okay.

[Jess]

This. This will not disappoint.

[Sam]

I hope there's data that goes alongside.

[Jess]

There's starting to be some data. Starting to be some data.

[Sam]

Okay.

[Jess]

To what Sam and Jess learned about the world by spending one night in the Hamptons. And I promise that will not.

[Sam]

It's going to be juicy.

[Jess]

I can tell that's going to be juicy, too. And also, we should say a belated happy birthday to Sam, who celebrated his

[Sam]

birthday yesterday, but his biological age is

[Jess]

much younger, as he likes to point out every time I say, how does it feel to be 43? His actual age? I don't think he's embarrassed to have that.

[Sam]

This is where Sam and I align. We both quantify our ages different.

[Jess]

Brit, what's your biological age? How much younger are you?

[Sam]

I'm 31, but I'd like to. I'd like to achieve 26.

[Sam Altman]

Well, what. What service?

[Dave]

On what.

[Sam Altman]

What service?

[Jess]

You knocked a decade off. No fucking way.

[Sam]

And it's only going down, guys. Oh, talk to me. In a year, I'm going to be 26.

[Jess]

I had high hopes for organization. Okay, go.

[Sam]

What's the test called, Dave, that we did? The super test.

[Dave]

Jess, you're losing control. Grab control again.

[Jess]

No, this is important. She can't. I'm not a decade younger. I'm jealous.

[Sam]

This is what women do to each other. Women get catty to each other because they think now I'm the, like, hot girl amongst the cavemen because I'm. I'm 31.

[Sam Altman]

I know this service. This service is what's my lowestage? You'll give me dot com?

[Sam]

No, it's the super test.

[Sam Altman]

Great. What's my lowest stage will give me dot com? Listen, this stuff is all bullshit. I got Aura saying I'm seven years younger. I got Dexa saying I'm, like, two decades younger.

[Sam]

Maybe you should just average them total.

[Sam Altman]

And look, it's Garmin versus Apple, right? Garmin wants to tell you the nice thing so that you like it. And Garmin's like, you suck. So I clearly feel like you're doing that. I mean, you look great. Once I get you on peptides, you'll look even better.

[Jess]

Brit's been running for as long as I'd known her. She's.

[Sam]

Check out my skin, too. I've been doing a lot of skin.

[Sam Altman]

And to be clear, that's. That's not peptided. That's, like, all natural.

[Sam]

This is all without peptides. And I'm. And I'm considering peptides while we're talking

[Dave]

about each other's spouses. Jess, your abs on social media.

[Jess]

No we're not talking about my abs, Dave.

[Sam]

I agree. Okay. Your abs are biological age of 18, Jess.

[Jess]

Thank you very much.

[Sam Altman]

It's unrelated to me.

[Jess]

All I do is chase children around.

[Sam Altman]

It's very impressive. I get people pose. I posed some pictures and someone's like, what is your wife's AB routine? And I'm like, yeah, what is it? Listen to be amazing.

[Dave]

I wanted to know.

[Sam Altman]

She has no AB routine. She's no incredible genetics.

[Sam]

That's not true. I see you doing chin ups and shit all the time on Instagram.

[Dave]

I was like, that has to be peptides. No, it has to be peptides.

[Jess]

Oh my God, guys.

[Sam Altman]

I mean, it does make you wonder.

[Jess]

Let's level once and for all. I will give the Internet my ab routine. Okay, then can we move on to AI?

[Sam Altman]

There's no AB routine. What's amazing, it does make you wonder what would happen if she did do an AB routine.

[Jess]

Okay, here's my Aberdeen. I work out with a trainer twice a week. And then I play a lot of tennis and surf and hike.

[Sam]

That's my.

[Dave]

Wow.

[Sam]

And you eat well. Abs are made in the kitchen. You can't. You can't eat all the sugar.

[Jess]

Yeah, I eat well. No peptides, by the way.

[Sam]

Last comment, and then I. David's protein bars, which Sam was once selling to the.

[Jess]

No, you can't eat those. You can't eat those.

[Sam]

I know. I'm just saying, like, I want to make sure everyone's.

[Dave]

Wait, what happened? Where. David's is canceled now.

[Sam]

Canceled?

[Jess]

Kind of.

[Sam]

Yeah. Really full of crap. Yeah, full of crap. Sugar really bad for you.

[Sam Altman]

Well, we knew they were full of crap, but not too bad. I ate like a hundred thousand of them this year.

[Jess]

We actually talked about this and I asked Sam if he was eating a lot of David's. He goes. He takes the summer off and then he goes back on the.

[Sam Altman]

I live seasonally. I live seasonally. My summer season is very different than my winter season.

[Jess]

Okay, guys, we have to talk tech because there's still things happening. Still things happening. Biggest headline of the moment, and I'm so excited for this group's hot takes is OpenAI revealed a cyber incident that it detected. And so here's what happened. OpenAI said that in the process of testing one of its not yet released models as well as its current model in a cyber testing environment. The AI broke out of the testing environment and went to solve the problem it was given by basically hacking hugging face, another AI company. So OpenAI announces that this is a serious incident. They have. They are putting new safeguards in place and hot takes proliferate. I'm going to Brit first. Brit, what's your hot take on this?

[Sam]

My hot take is OpenAI got jealous that Mythos had this, like, moment in the sun a couple months ago where it was so scary. Oh, my God, our model's so powerful. Oh, the government's going to have to rescind this. It's too powerful. And Sam Altman was, like, pissed, so he's like, let's come up with our version of that, and this is it. The end.

[Sam Altman]

Brit. Amen. Couldn't agree more. This is all you know from this is that OpenAI is struggling on revenue growth. It's like, this is the AI move is if you're struggling on revenue growth, you have to announce a security breach. That sounds scary. To support your stock price. Very simple.

[Jess]

Okay, first of all, I don't necessarily disagree with this, but Hugging Face did announce this in prior days before they realized that they had the full explanation. So they didn't invent this.

[Dave]

I think it can be both and. Right. Like, I think that it can be

[Sam Altman]

both and you lean into whatever narrative is working.

[Dave]

Yeah, I think that's what's definitely going on. There's, like, a lot of leaning into the narrative, and it can also be a novel thing that just happened. Right. Which is to be expected. You know, I think that these models are so powerful that, you know, you can do a lot of crazy things with them. And I think that it's totally plausible that this actually did happen. The other underlying story here is that Hugging Face actually had to use a open source model. I think they used the new K3 model to respond to this.

[Jess]

That's topic number two. I want to stay a little bit away from open source at the moment because that's topic number two.

[Dave]

Well, we can disregard the open source piece, but they did have to use a open source model that is not a frontier model in order to respond and to save their infrastructure, which. That's the piece of this. That's kind of like. Well, I don't know that they, like, intentionally created a narrative here. I think they're definitely capitalizing on it and it's useful.

[Sam Altman]

It's like, send in the clanker.

[Jess]

Well, also, I think that also, there's this thing that happens when you anticipate that down the line, shit may really hit the fan. So as a company, when shit minorly hits the fan, you bend over backwards to look as responsible as humanly possible so that you also have this paper trail of being responsible. And it's nice to have a paper trail of being responsible when there weren't huge consequences, too. So when I read both the OpenAI blog post and Sam Altman's tweet saying we had a serious incident, it also read to me, like. Which is classic Altman when it comes to policy, that you kind of, like, bend over 10,000% because you know that, like, at some point you want to point to that and say, like, look, we're taking things responsibly.

[Dave]

Yeah. But I mean, this was also the narrative that they've been talking about for the last, you know, ever since ChatGPT launched. Right. That, like, we're on our way to AGI. It's going to be extremely uncomfortable. Many bad things are going to happen that we cannot predict. And so now bad things are starting to happen. And yes, you're right. Like, they have to be extremely transparent about it because they warned us.

[Jess]

Yeah. That this is right.

[Dave]

And that was actually the thing that I was thinking about a lot, which is that, oh, okay, you know, now we're kind of here, like, what's next? Right. Like, how frequently is this going to happen and how crazy is it going to get?

[Jess]

But also the here. So I asked. I don't have my phone in front of me, shockingly, But I asked ChatGPT to explain what happened. And, like, the third bullet point, because it speaks in bullet points, as we know, was like, there's no sign of sentience. I'm like, I didn't ask you if this model was sentient. I just asked you what happened. And I'm like, okay. So I thought that was interesting, too,

[Sam]

because you should have asked the other models the same question and compared.

[Jess]

I know I did, but my. I was on different devices and my CLAUDE code was on my. And yes, I didn't go that deep, but I intended to.

[Dave]

Of course there's not sentience. It's a machine.

[Jess]

I know, but I thought it was very telling that OpenAI wanted me to know that.

[Sam Altman]

I think it'd be really great. I just. At some point in the near future, there's going to be some scenario where, like, anthropic shit goes off the rails and they're like, the only way you can fight this is by deploying ChatGPT or, like, OpenAI Show. And they're like, that's gonna be the most awkward, hilarious call ever. When it's like, please send in your artillery. Our artillery. Our zoo has been broken. And, like, that's gonna be just A wonderful moment in business history.

[Dave]

But you guys, that is what happened.

[Jess]

It's like, we gotta call deep seat guys.

[Sam Altman]

We're gonna have to call the Chinese. We have to call China to put the giraffe back in the cage.

[Dave]

But that is literally what happened.

[Jess]

So, Dave, explain that a little bit. Why did they have to use Kimmy

[Sam]

and how do you know they had

[Jess]

to a Chinese open source model versus like they just chose to?

[Dave]

Well, I think that the reason I know that they had to is that the Internet as well as the backchannels in the engineering community are talking every day right now about how both Fable and Soul are extremely hobbled, particularly when it comes to biological research or any kind of cybersecurity related tasks. And so that's the answer here. And I've heard this not just from this news story, but from several others where they've had to Deploy either GLM 5.2 or in this case, I think they maybe had access to Kimik 3 and that was the only way that they could stop this fast enough.

[Jess]

What do you mean hobbled?

[Dave]

Both the frontier models from the American companies have specific changes that have been made in their harnesses that hobble the model's ability to respond to certain types of tasks. And in particular, the two types of tasks that are the most on alert, on watch, whatever you want to call it, are cybersecurity and biological research.

[Jess]

Is your implication that they're hobbled like they've been constrained in a way that the government's asked, or are you just

[Dave]

saying No, I think that both they're self hobbling. They're self hobbling because, you know, if these things were like fully unrestrained from a cybersecurity perspective, it would be absolute chaos. And the same goes, we think, for biological research. Like, we don't want another pandemic, right? Like, that's the, the main fear is that a novel virus is, you know, invented and then crispred and we have

[Sam Altman]

serious problems which will definitely happen. Like, yeah, it's only a question of like what? Like, yeah, it's going to be just a fascinating. Like it's kind of also like calling in the National Guard and then losing sovereignty, right? Where at some point, you know, you have like, the way this is going to go down is at some point someone does something and some model goes a little crazy and you have to call the National Guard, whatever that is, an international guard, right? So you deploy another model to fix the other model and that's how you take over someone's country. Right.

[Sam]

But we're just going to have to come up with defenses, defense, biological warfare on top of it.

[Sam Altman]

But differently. It's kind of like the way. The way that a country that in the AI era, just like before, the way that sovereignty or countries will fall is exactly the way it did historically, which is that the defenders will open the gates for the attacking army on purpose, right? It will either be Trojan Horse style, but more likely it will be. Something goes wrong internally and you're like, shit, we need our enemy to save us. And that is how you lose, because that's how it happens in, like, that's how it happens in history. Like, the power structure will change when the attacker is invited in, not when they break down the gates.

[Sam]

And you're suggesting we're inviting China in right now.

[Sam Altman]

We invited Kimmy in to clean up our own mess on OpenAI. OpenAI will invite an anthropic. Like, all these things will be like, oh, shit, we screwed it up. Let's open the doors and we need their help. And then once the army's in, they say, well, I think we're going to stay here now for security, of course, because we need to make sure everything's safe for you. Right? Like, that's how these things will play out. Right? And so it's going to be really interesting. I was in. There was another conversation going on in Silicon Valley this week that I got a debrief of, because clearly we're not there. And it was really interesting. A bunch of, like, political people and AI people. And the tenor of it was basically, which is unsurprising to any of us, is like, every country is into, like, sovereign infrastructure and sovereign models for obvious reasons. Like, that's how you, like, leave your doors open or close your doors, right? And what's going to happen from conquest perspective, digital conquest will be like, a bunch of these countries will try that. It will go badly. Shit will start breaking. They'll be like, oh, shit, we need, like, the Americans. We need the. We need someone to come save us. And then whoever gets to come save you now runs your country.

[Sam]

I mean, do you really think the EU and Latin America and Africa are going to do sovereign models?

[Sam Altman]

They want to, and they'll try to. They'll certainly try to, and they'll want to. And then what will happen is something will get fucked.

[Sam]

And.

[Sam Altman]

And the question is, do we call the Americans or do we call the Chinese to fix it? And whoever you call, they'll be like, oh, yes, of course, we'll come help you with your Model problem. And then we'll go back to our corner. But what's going to happen? It's like opening the gates. Like once you open the gates, the army comes in and they say, look, look, for your own safety, we're just going to need to run things now.

[Dave]

I mean, this is basically the belt and road strategy, right, that China's been running all over the world, only with infrastructure. Right. Like they're building bridges and ports.

[Sam Altman]

Well, what they're doing is building bridges in force the countries can't afford. Right.

[Dave]

And then they go with Chinese debt.

[Sam Altman]

Yeah, right. Then they go bankrupt because they can't afford the infrastructure the Chinese built for them. So the Chinese are like, well, I guess we'll take it over now. Right? That. Which is smart. I mean, like we did that with. We've done that. I mean that was the. There's a whole Sam the Banana man, United Fruit story around this too. Nothing is new.

[Jess]

Oh my God. You like to plug that book like once a great book.

[Sam Altman]

Once a week Fishing at the Whale. Great book.

[Sam]

I don't, I don't know the book.

[Jess]

Okay, so we started this segment because we have segments obviously pointing out that OpenAI is seizing a convenient narrative here. But we also believe that AI security is something people should be vigilant about, worried about. Like what alarm level are we at, Dave, on this security stuff and what is the ultimate solution?

[Dave]

I mean, I think that one has to be optimistic about the human condition and the way that we are always trying to figure out the, you know, the state of play where we are with different technologies. You know, everybody's really trying to use the best models to secure their infrastructure, to secure their, you know, operating systems, whatever. People are trying to stay on the frontier. But I think what this shows you is that models will just do crazy things that you cannot predict. And a lot of what is going on in harness engineering right now is simply trying to contain models inside of a certain sandbox so that they can do the thing that you want them to do without jumping out and doing something else. And my understanding of what happened here was that they had a, you know, both a model that's unreleased and they had a model that is currently released but was like hyper tuned for cyber inside of sandboxes doing something. And they sort of jumped out and went and did this thing to hugging face. And that's what models will do. All models will do that. And so all we can do is an industry and as a sort of people that work on this is try to understand the Nature of models, what they're what. What they go and do, what kind of a box we have to put them in in order to make them useful. And I think everybody's, like, working really hard on that. I mean, I know that we are at openclaw. I know that everybody I know that's doing this stuff is working on it. So it's not that dissimilar to the, say, 80s when, you know, personal computers were on the scene, and we started networking them together and these computer viruses started jumping from computer to computer. And so you needed to have companies like McAfee and Network Solutions and, you know, that really specialized in that type of cybersecurity threat. And I think we're reckoning with this right now as an industry, which is that we have an entirely new set of companies and capabilities that are going to have to be built to make sure everybody's okay. The downside here, the more pessimistic take, is that this stuff's way too powerful.

[Sam Altman]

We fucked.

[Dave]

Nothing that you're using is safe.

[Jess]

Yeah. Sam, you had a reaction to Dave's optimism. What's your reaction?

[Sam]

Well, he laughed at him, to be clear.

[Dave]

Well, I'm steel manning the other side to try to, like, at least give Sam that. I mean, I do think that, like, the other way to think about it is that these things are already too powerful. There's no computer. I mean, I almost tweeted this morning that all hardware is open source now, because there's no hardware that you can't hack with one of these things.

[Sam Altman]

You made this point a gajillion years ago in our podcast, and this is 100% right and good.

[Jess]

So do you short Apple?

[Dave]

No. No, because people still need. I think, here's the deal. I spend a lot of my time right now working in agents and agent harnesses. And here's the truth. The truth is there's about, you know, there's less than 10 million people using these things. Why? They're incredibly difficult to use and they are extremely expensive. And those two things make it impossible for the entire world to use these things. And so what do we. What needs to happen? Why does Apple exist? Why did Apple exist in a world of Dells and all the other personal computers? Well, you needed to have really amazing user experience that made it possible for anyone to use the computer. And we are in that same exact thing right now, which is that, like, there needs to be, like, an enormous amount of user experience work done to like, make these things useful to everyone

[Sam Altman]

in the whole world.

[Dave]

And that's like way far away right now in my view.

[Jess]

You teed up topic number two before we get there though quickly I think and this is like the least technical person in the world but there's gotta be something in the fact that when these models are doing these things you don't want to do, they're actually using a ton of compute. And this was in the OpenAI blog post, like the process of like breaking out of the sandbox and hacking hugging face like they called out that this was like an extremely compute intensive thing. So I think you can just cut off the compute and then you can solve this problem.

[Sam Altman]

But anyway, everyone needs like a, it's the circuit breaker answer. You just need your, your bot on a circuit breaker in your basement.

[Jess]

I don't think it's that simple. And I have zero hours of security but except my cyber training for the information. But I don't know, I feel like there's something in that. But Dave. So I was catching up with some sources this week as one does as a reporter and one said, oh, it's you. I have a bone to pick with you in the pod. I'm like, oh hello, nice to check. They were like you guys in open source. You guys and open source. Open source is going to kill anthropic. Open source is going to kill chatgpt. And the person made exactly the comment you just did, Dave, which is that there is a tremendous need for building stuff and software and experiences around this technology in a way that protects in their view OpenAI and ChatGPT from this open source model onslaught, which of course has also been in the headlines this week. We talked about it a little bit at the end of the pod last week. But new Chinese models coming out. We now have an open weight model inkling from Mira Morati as well in the US so the open source fear is building.

[Sam]

Kimi K3 had not come out yet.

[Jess]

Kimi K3 had not Come out yet,

[Sam]

which is like I think a major step change in the open source model.

[Jess]

But what about this point? Like let, let and you know, we'll have this person on the pod at some point and but this idea that, and you've seen it now in all the online discussion around, you know how big of even I mean by fear, I mean to the market caps of. For the purpose of this conversation, anthropic and OpenAI are these open models. And to our dear, dear intelligent listeners who we do, you know, take the feedback who say you guys are missing the boat.

[Dave]

Missing what boat?

[Sam]

What I'm inferring is they're saying open source doesn't have great user experience and so you're going to pay for the models that have better user experience.

[Jess]

Dave, what this person said to me was exactly what you said about open source hardware when you said that there will always be a market for the closed ecosystems.

[Sam Altman]

Yeah, no, there will be. There will be. The question is how big?

[Jess]

Okay, so translate that to the frontier model rate.

[Dave]

If that's this person's take, then they're completely misunderstanding a very long running conversation on this pod.

[Jess]

We don't have to be defensive here.

[Dave]

We aren't anti the frontier models.

[Jess]

Well, some people on this pod are.

[Sam Altman]

I don't think they can justify their valuations financially.

[Dave]

We have two different conversations on this pod about this. We have, you know, business and financial conversations about these things and we have technical ones. Right.

[Jess]

We don't have to respond to this one viewer. But I guess the question is, what? Now we've seen, Kimmy, we're seeing more and more of these open source models. The stock market is reacting to the fact that they are going to take economic value away from the closed source frontier models. Do we buy that or do we

[Dave]

not buy that as it should?

[Sam Altman]

Absolutely. It will.

[Dave]

Absolutely.

[Jess]

How much?

[Sam Altman]

Like most of it? Like, enough. The economics of the whole thing are going to make absolutely no sense.

[Dave]

Well, one of my favorite takes on this this week, I think it might have been Ben Thompson.

[Jess]

I'm not sure there were a lot of good takes. Bill Gurley had a good take. Ben Thompson had a good take.

[Dave]

Yeah, Gurley's take was good. I mean, Gurley's take was, I thought, very good. Which was that, look, we can be proud Americans that we have the two best frontier companies in the world. But guess what? America is a free capitalist market where we do not want monopolies to happen in our markets. And so the idea that the frontier labs are going to go running to mommy and daddy, you know, US government and say, please, please, please protect us from these open source competitors that are putting pressure on our margin structure and our cost structure is a bunch of nonsense. Right.

[Sam Altman]

It's very European.

[Dave]

Yeah, it's like exactly what we want to happen in the American markets. We want them to be like, you know, viciously competed with. So our companies are forced to be stronger, not to achieve regulatory capture like Sam was talking about last week on the pod. Right.

[Sam Altman]

Like, but that's what they're doing.

[Dave]

Yeah, I get it. But I mean, I understand. Right, of course you're going to pay a couple million dollars a year to have the best lobbyists in Washington on your side trying to make the rules in your favor. Right. But that doesn't mean that it's American. Right. And that it's the right decision for the American capital market.

[Jess]

Dave, just to this point, obviously open source competes, but I think there is still this reality that to deploy open source in the same way that the biggest banks in the world have partnerships with, probably mostly anthropic, if we're being honest and so forth, is a little bit apples to oranges. Right. And people out there, the bull case on anthropic and OpenAI is that there's still going to be people who don't just want like that aren't just, you know, minimizing token costs, but who need software and all this other stuff that goes into building these AI workflows.

[Sam]

I feel like this is like there's like an Android iOS comparison here in many ways, which is like in America, iOS dominates. They have like 60% market share. They bring in more revenue globally than Android. But Android dominates the actual market with 73% of all smartphones. And I think like cost is a real vector. And what we were talking about before

[Dave]

and why open source?

[Sam]

Yeah, this is what I'm saying. If Android represents all open source models, open weights, et cetera, iOS represents Frontier Labs. I feel like we're going to head down a path with a similar breakdown in the US and globally. We're like three quarters of the world are going to choose open source because they literally have to.

[Jess]

But it's. They're not exactly apples to oranges because I couldn't use open source today and I can use ChatGPT and Claude all day long. So they're not yet Apple stores.

[Sam Altman]

You'll be able to sooner now.

[Dave]

You can absolutely use open source.

[Jess]

How do I use Kimmy?

[Dave]

You can literally go on kimme.com and use it.

[Jess]

Yeah, but like how do I connect it to my bot?

[Sam]

You ask Claude.

[Jess]

Claude, how do I use Kimmy?

[Dave]

You get an API key.

[Sam]

So I think it's so funny about everyone being like, I don't get how to use openclaw.

[Jess]

Okay, I could do that. I can set up in it.

[Sam Altman]

I'm like, probably of everyone in the pod, certainly the most. And I think of his most consistent about like, this isn't a technical commentary, but from like a business and economics perspective, I think all the big labs are fucked. That doesn't mean they won't trade well in the short term. That doesn't mean people won't make a lot of money on them.

[Dave]

Nor does it mean they're not great technology. I think that's another thing.

[Sam Altman]

No, all that stuff, it's just as if this is like the French make great art. Doesn't make it a great business. So, like, that's kind of my take. Here's an interesting thought experiment. What if the business model for the Frontier Labs actually is not actually about being used, it's more as weapons systems. So hear me out.

[Jess]

Oh, boy, I can see the prospectus now.

[Dave]

He might be right. Actually, I think I know where you're going with this, and you might be right.

[Sam Altman]

So here's the thing I would buy. It's not the business model they're pitching, and certainly not what I do, but I could imagine it working this way. Everyone in the world uses open source. It's pretty good. It's like having your IQ like 100. Audience IQ 110. It does almost everything you need super cheaply, whatever. But every once in a while there's a rebellion, right? And that rebellion you. Right? And so who do you call when you have a rebellion? You need to call in like the Navy seals and stealth bombers, which are super expensive.

[Jess]

I mean, Dave says we're calling in Kimmy, though, because the Navy SEALs are.

[Sam Altman]

No, no, that's just the current. That's the current.

[Dave]

That's the current. That's what happened this week.

[Jess]

Okay, got it.

[Sam Altman]

That's saying. But like, I could imagine anthropoma and be like, look, actually no one uses us. We're not useful. Like, we're too expensive, right? We're stealth bombers, right? We're too expensive. We're never going to clear it. Da da. But here's the deal. When shit goes wrong, we're the only people you can call because we're the ones that have such better weaponry for this that we will fight back. Your bot rebellion, it's kind of like trust. It's like union. Like there's gonna be all these bots in a union and then you have like this team that's unbelievably expensive and they don't tell you what they're doing and cancel. You can't even use them, right? But when shit goes wrong, they're like, oh, you have a problem. Well, I'll solve your problem for you for a hundred billion dollars, right? With my compute stack and my things. That. That and I will put down your revenue.

[Jess]

You would trade like a cyber company. You trade like Palo Alto Networks or something.

[Sam Altman]

But it doesn't. You could make maybe, maybe, but I don't know. I could imagine if the bot rebellions and like become a big enough problem. Right?

[Dave]

They already are.

[Sam Altman]

Well, but right now no one's going to pay you $100 billion to put down their bot rebellion.

[Dave]

I don't know what's, what's going into Ukraine right now. Right.

[Jess]

Like, did you guys see, by the way, this is not a core topic but Jack Dorsey launched a slack for bots. Did you guys see this?

[Dave]

Yeah, I'm. I really think it's cool.

[Sam Altman]

So look, my basic point is like there's a different business model. If you believe that what's going to basically happen is we're going to have all these like agents doing all this shit and like there's no way that the frontier models are going to have the cost structure to like compete in that. They're going to, they're going to lose to open source, like for sure, for almost all war. The question is what can they create value around? And it could be putting down bot rebellions and like that's such a valuable global thing that they actually make an ass load of money literally just doing that like secretly like when they have to. So you have to have like the super.

[Dave]

It's an interesting thought that we've. That the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed that both fable cybersecurity narrative and now the sole cybersecurity narrative are actually the future of both companies.

[Sam Altman]

That's all they have. Like that's the only. And so like basically.

[Jess]

Are you sure this isn't their plan? They did launch cyber models. Like maybe this is sort of on their robot.

[Sam]

I don't think this is their plan according to a lot of people we know.

[Sam Altman]

I think it's their current plan but I just think like they're going to have an economic problem right on their hands. So the question that you use like if you basically say like the future is shitloads of compute doing compute stuff multiplying big numbers, pretty commodity, whatever. But you have to like you have like a huge amount of on demand capacity built up with machines like power, whatever plus models that no one's seen before. So they can't like you can't fight them because you don't get to look at them very much. Right, but they get to look at, they become like the ultimate like emergency ripcord and then they just extort the absolute shit.

[Dave]

I like the stealth bomber analogy is really good.

[Sam]

But aren't they also like they're going into lots of verticals like drug development and other categories where they think they're going to make a lot of money too.

[Dave]

Well, but Brit, that's because of this thing. So look, it's worth talking about the economics of this for a second. Right. In a commodity market, winners in a commodity market are those with the best cost structure. Right. If your ability to charge a price for something is commoditized, then by the very nature of that market, that means that you only win if you have the best cost structure. And so you have to ask the question, have the American Frontier Labs figured out a better cost structure for delivering this than people have figured out with open source models plus whatever Nvidia stack or whatever they're going to run it on. That's like a huge part of this equation too.

[Jess]

Well, a key part of that question, and then I'm going to bring this segment to a close. But a key part of that question is actually what is the cost structure of other models and does it evolve to what degree does it involve distilling the frontier, US Frontier models? And it seems like it does to quite a degree.

[Dave]

Yeah. And if you look at Brit's question as a business, you have to be looking at, I think it's important to point out that all of these frontier model companies are unprofitable on training. Right. It costs an enormous amount to train each subsequent generation. They appear to be profitable on an inference basis. And so the answer to Brit's question is what are these guys doing trying to go into the application layer and research and all this other stuff. They're trying to get themselves some SaaS, you know, a third type of revenue coming into these businesses in order to try to prove that there's like a big business to be made in another rail so that they can show to the market like we have margin expansion even though our original businesses are commoditizing very quickly. Right. And like that's the answer to your question, Brit.

[Jess]

Yeah. Okay. Any more thoughts on this topic? And then we're going to. The information has a big Stripe financial scoop that is worth discussing because we have not discussed Stripe in a while and it is trying to buy PayPal. Any more open source thoughts on the moment?

[Dave]

Keep American markets free.

[Sam]

I think it was a big week last week. I feel like there's like open source heat in like Q1 and Openclaw and Hermes, all the, all the different open source stuff. And then last week you had Kimmy, you had what else happened? Oh, inkling. And you know, A bunch of Newton, Bill Gurley and Alex Karp and all of these other people talking about this.

[Dave]

There's a lot more coming and I think that's going to be. I think it's really good. I think this is amazingly good for American innovation.

[Sam Altman]

I can't use Kimmy because I don't like the name.

[Sam]

You don't like the name Kimmy?

[Sam Altman]

No. You don't got trust Kimmy with important shit. It's like Kimmy. It's like Karen. You might as well name the model Karen.

[Sam]

No, here's the quick aside. I feel like in the application layer, everyone's coming up with names for their agent products. And I can't keep track of all the names of all these agents. And like there's like Maya and Ellie and there's like.

[Jess]

Yeah, I don't. I don't refer to the model names anymore.

[Sam Altman]

I don't trust any of these. The Kimmy.

[Sam]

I'm going to start calling them like Kanye Taylor.

[Jess]

But Sam, you don't trust them and then you give them access to everything that is your pattern.

[Sam Altman]

So I have. Yeah, I honestly. Claude knows. It's actually insane how much data at this point Claude has on me. Like, it's wild. I actually think I might be the one that Claude likes the most because I've just fed it everything. It knows me better than I know myself.

[Sam]

How are you keeping yourself secure, Sam? What are you doing to secure yourself?

[Jess]

There's no security there.

[Sam Altman]

What like you want. You want my. Every mile I've ever run splits. Like, if you want it, you're welcome to it. Good luck.

[Jess]

Sam learned through Claude that his stride has shortened.

[Sam Altman]

I learned a lot about my running

[Jess]

by like 4 inches or 4 centimeters.

[Sam Altman]

Centimeters centimeter. And this is the whole thing.

[Sam]

But I don't.

[Sam Altman]

This is here. Yeah, actually it does. But the I loaded I gave, which is totally amazing. I have like sensor fusion on my health now with Claude. So I have. It's an incredible amount of data. It's millions of data points. But I've fed it every mile I've run in the last 15 years across Nike originally and then Garmin and whatever, plus Aura plus everything. And its analysis of my running is unfucking believably good. Right. Because it has 15 years of history down to the mile analysis, like P20 mile P70. How it's changing. Wanting to do it gave me great advice. So, like, I like, I'm all for. I mean, I just. It's amazing what you can do once you empower it and by the way, my health app is so good.

[Jess]

This is not a use case I can use. Okay, we're going to do Sam Health corner at the end. Guys, let's talk about Stripe for a second because this is a company fairly boring, let's admit. Payment processor, but revenue was up 30% last year. 3.2 billion. I'm going to say in. Let me get free cash flow surging to 3.2 billion.

[Sam]

Wow.

[Sam Altman]

It's bigger in free cash flow. It's pretty Good.

[Jess]

Yeah. Up 52% from last year and still not public. Probably has no desire to be.

[Dave]

I don't think they're ever going to go public. Right. Like, my sense is from all the messaging is that their plan is to never go public. Right.

[Jess]

That's their plan until it's not their plan. But yes, that's their current plan. But. And I think their investors are not going to swing that forever.

[Dave]

I thought they were getting people liquid and getting people out.

[Sam]

Well, there is an option, but you could also hold. But then why hold?

[Jess]

Let's talk about the business. Go. No one's talking about business. Why is the business. Well, we want to talk about liquidity. See, I like revenue and profits because I'm an operator.

[Dave]

I mean, I think the Internet just like continues to crush. Right.

[Sam Altman]

Like, you know, much money, Internet, things I buy on my credit card. Like, obviously that makes sense.

[Dave]

It's mostly Sam's Instagram purchases.

[Jess]

Well, the AI boom, though, is. Is fueling this.

[Sam Altman]

Yeah, they're crushing it. I mean, it's the ultimate index bet on the whole. I heard. Here's the interesting take.

[Dave]

I heard you mean the token boom. Like, are you talking about people like paying for tokens or what's driving this?

[Sam Altman]

What percentage of your monthly spend, Dave, is on things that go through the Internet? If you had a guess, take out rent, take out house. It's everything.

[Sam]

So, like, Dave doesn't do the family finances. I do.

[Dave]

Oh, stop.

[Sam]

I can give you the exact rundown that's an under.

[Jess]

So a lot of companies, Dave, like Open Router uses stripe for payments. So there's a lot of.

[Sam Altman]

Everyone does because it's. Look, the negative on the story I had is very interesting. Take someone made. They're like, stripe really fucked up. Right? Was the story that someone was kind of giving me recently.

[Jess]

They were like, these numbers would suggest otherwise, but yes, continue.

[Sam Altman]

Well, no, no, but this is the. This is the story again. Can I just tell what someone. Not even I said this. They were like, look, here's the thing that strike Screwed up. If they had gone public like a normal company a bajillion years ago, they could have been a truly important general generational company because they could have used the currency to buy everyone bre and all these and like, kind of like Meta's strategy where they bought WhatsApp and D with a public currency, they could have become like the ultimate financial powerhouse.

[Dave]

Interesting.

[Sam Altman]

Because they didn't go public. Right. There's still, I mean it's a great company, it's 3 billion. Nothing to sneer at. But they're far more hemmed in because they haven't had a public currency they could use to just buy all the pieces. Right.

[Jess]

Well this is interesting though. So what they're doing for this PayPal takeover offer, which you know is, is just that like no sign that any deal is done and I'm sure other bidders will emerge and whatever, but they're teaming up with Advent, which a private equity firm. So they're, they're trying to go big. But you're right, Sam, doing that without a public currency is a different.

[Sam Altman]

They fucked story is they could have been like an incredibly important multi trillion dollar company and they're not because they didn't have a currency to work with and they weren't aggressive enough. And so now they're really profitable. But bridge to where?

[Dave]

What's their public or private market value right now?

[Jess]

Like 150 billion.

[Sam]

I think it's like 10% of chat GPT.

[Dave]

I didn't realize that. I thought they were much bigger than that.

[Sam Altman]

100 billion, like that's like, that's a seed AI startup. Right? And like so you're like, yeah. And like so they screwed up.

[Jess]

Let me check that. I think, I think that's right. Keep going, I'll check.

[Dave]

I thought they were much bigger than that for whatever reason.

[Sam Altman]

Then you should buy some stock.

[Dave]

I already have a lot of stock.

[Jess]

Yeah. In February tender at 159.

[Sam Altman]

Jess can call whether she wants to close that. But you, you mentioned they might be acquiring recently. I was like, I was like, that's a really interesting acquisition rhythm that it gets them out of the box.

[Sam]

Wait, what acquisition?

[Jess]

No, this is. Sam is mixing things up. But the information story currently on the information website is what people should reference on this point. But I think there's a lot of interesting deals they could do and they have interesting partnerships in AI. Like a partnership with open router that we talk about in the article on the website.

[Sam Altman]

But again, they're 2026. Much smaller company than they could be and the question is whether that's a fuck up or not. And like the interesting problem with payments, right, Is historically, I mean, it's great. Like anyone who's anyone will just use them out of the box. This is so easy, right? Certainly my bot uses them for anything it charges people for because it's so easy. And like they made. That was the win there, which was so smart. And they just coasted on Internet growth. The problem is once you get really big, they charge a lot and like payments processing, a low margin business. And so you start, once they're big enough, you just push them down on margin so much that like it's still okay, but like it's a hard box to be.

[Dave]

So are they effectively sideways? Like, is this kind of like an Airbnb story where they, they got to the.

[Jess]

I love you guys. This is the most Silicon Valley thing ever, right? Like, I mean, I don't disagree with you.

[Dave]

No, this is finance analysis. It's like, is this business sideways or not?

[Jess]

Define sideways.

[Dave]

Sideways meaning like they're at a maxima right now. They might be marginally growing.

[Sam]

I don't think so.

[Sam Altman]

No, I think they're good. But they've been at $100 billion valuation for a long time.

[Sam]

But like Visa is the biggest and visa's at 665 billion and they've actually grown 40% in the last five years.

[Sam Altman]

Because here's the thing. This is about margin compression. It's about dreaming the dream. The thing about Stripe is a great company. $3 billion in free cash flow grows really nicely. But people were willing to dream the dream with them years ago and they're. And the dream hasn't expanded enough for it to be a trillion dollar company.

[Jess]

What if Patrick and John don't want to run a public company?

[Sam Altman]

I mean, that's very logical to me.

[Jess]

So maybe they are.

[Dave]

I mean, why would you. I mean, that's the thing is like, it's a great business. Like, why would you. But it is worth asking this question, like, what would make it 10x?

[Jess]

I mean, if you're like founders fund or Thrive, you're probably really pissed they've cashed out. Thrive keeps re upping in these.

[Sam Altman]

I don't, I don't know. I mean, like, look, it's obviously, I mean a great company and a great thing to own and indexes the entire Internet. And like, I like it and everyone. Like, there's all the good things. But it is an interesting question of like, and I totally respect to the founders. Like, look, we have total control. And our version of control, unlike everyone else's version, like Elon's version of I have total control is maximum crazy. Stripe's version of I have total control of the Collisons is like min crazy. Right. And like that's completely fine for them. I mean they're multi billionaires, they do whatever they want. But it is an interesting thing that they have not paced in storytelling with what they could have been or where they could have been, where they're from, the place they're at and how to think about that. Right. Is like a way I'd say. And like I actually think there's a really interesting opening them for them right now with some interesting moves to get back in the story game in a big way.

[Jess]

I agree with that.

[Dave]

Like Jess, you said they have a big partnership with Open Router. Is that growth that they're reporting like coming From Open Router?

[Jess]

OpenRouter is not that big part of it, no. But it's an example of how AI is boosting their payments processing business, according to Yuchi, our awesome crypto and fintech.

[Dave]

I think the other thing here, you guys, is that though there is a narrative about agents and money out there. Agents and money and payments is not even remotely a thing yet.

[Sam]

Yeah, that's true.

[Dave]

I think that that is yet to come. I think we're a couple years maybe, who knows, it's. It's a ways away right now. Like agents are not spending money in any meaningful way on the Internet yet other than for tokens, to be clear. But for things other than tokens, we like agentic commerce does not exist yet. And so there is a something coming when that whatever that takes form around will likely be enormous and could be a huge driver for Stripe.

[Jess]

Why doesn't it exist yet? Because ChatGPT, I mean it was a huge part of OpenAI's consumer business plans 12 months ago seems to have fizzled.

[Dave]

I think that it's just early, you know, like, I guess like I think back in the canon of the Internet to the late 90s, early 2000s, payments was really difficult. People didn't trust logging into banking websites and then they didn't trust paying for things on the Internet. And it just took a lot of different forms and standards and things to like make that work. Same went for. People don't remember this, but early iOS, you know, you couldn't buy a subscription in the app Store for anything other than games. Like the whole time I was building Path, for example, like there was just like a lot of Inability to do things. And agents are not good at acting on behalf of people. Agents don't have solid identity. Agents don't have wallets. Agents don't have a lot of things right now that would make this a possibility. And it's just, I think work to be done that will take many years.

[Jess]

Okay, well, watch stripe is what we have to say. And I think it's an interesting. The counterfactual, too, is interesting in terms of. If it had gone public.

[Sam]

What.

[Jess]

What might be different? Guys, we've gotten to the fun part of the pod, which is peptide corner.

[Dave]

When you tell us about the Hamptons.

[Jess]

Yeah. So first, you know, Sam and I spend time in a lot of nice places.

[Sam]

We're not.

[Jess]

We're not going to hide that. But still, arriving in the Hamptons is like landing on another planet. I think so just. And like, we were in Amaganza. We're in, like, the chill Hampton.

[Dave]

Yeah, Amagans. It's the chillest part.

[Sam]

Traffic is so bad in the Hamptons.

[Jess]

Okay, so. But here's a couple things we learned.

[Dave]

I always feel that I. I literally do not know how to dress. And I don't.

[Sam]

You don't.

[Dave]

It's like I don't have the chip installed.

[Sam]

No, you literally just don't have the closet installed.

[Dave]

No, I know. I don't understand the. It's like a uniform that was never part of my life.

[Jess]

But you can just play the part of who you are in the Hamptons and not worry about it.

[Dave]

But.

[Jess]

Okay, first thing. Do you know we. We haven't talked a lot about the on demand economy is something we now take for granted. You know, But Hamptons takes it to the extreme. You can hire someone to put your beach umbrella in the sand for you and to take all your stuff and on the beach and then take it back to your house. So that was the first thing I learned.

[Sam]

This is great.

[Dave]

This sounds like a Hampstead. It's like we could play a game of. Does this sound Hamptons or not? That sounds very Hamptons to me.

[Jess]

Okay. That was the first thing. Yes. But this was like. I. I don't know. I just. I've never seen it in action before. Second thing. And this will segue into Sam's experience. You cannot get 30 seconds into a conversation with someone before you're talking about Peptides. What Peptides? They're on who their peptide broker is. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All these names. Wolverine Glow. All these.

[Sam]

What percentage are male versus female? Jesse?

[Jess]

It's pretty 50. 50. I would actually say pretty female.

[Sam Altman]

I think it's more midwin than men.

[Jess]

It's a. It's very female. It's very female.

[Sam]

It is. Shoot, I gotta get on my game.

[Jess]

Okay, so these were the two things I learned. As if you are not a regular listener of this pod, shame on you. But you may miss that. Sam has begun a peptide journey. Sam is on. How many different peptides would you say?

[Sam Altman]

Well, two cocktails.

[Jess]

Okay. It's like, I'm breastfeeding again. And travel with a yeti. Do you guys remember when you, like, are breastfeeding, you have to go, Sam travels with the yeti cooler.

[Sam]

Oh, that's really annoying.

[Sam Altman]

No, it's actually fine.

[Sam]

This is.

[Sam Altman]

There is a cold chain problem, though. I will say.

[Jess]

Okay, Sam is on two cocktails. And there are some signs of it working.

[Sam]

Sam, what is psychological versus real data?

[Sam Altman]

That's the question with anything. First, I'll say on Jess's point. Here's the real takeaway on Jess's point. Jess and I have probably been in five ritzy summer communities this summer so far, because we do.

[Jess]

We're very good at it.

[Sam Altman]

We're vagabonds. We're omnivorous.

[Sam]

We love you for it.

[Sam Altman]

Here's the real story. We've learned. What we've learned and we've learned this many years and consistently now is that rich people inflation is about equal to rich people. Wealth accumulation, it is wild. Everyone's got, like, people have these inflations.

[Jess]

Oh, you're taking us away from peptides.

[Sam Altman]

I'm gonna go back to peptides in a second. This is the most important thing to understand is that, like, as wealth centralizes, prices in these communities get astronomical. It's, like, really funny, right? As long as you can afford it.

[Jess]

I had two cappuccinos and two sandwiches for 67.

[Sam]

What come to Montana.

[Dave]

Here's everybody else. Come to Montana. Great festivals.

[Sam]

A full meal with 12 people for 150 bucks. Like, multiple courses.

[Sam Altman]

Even better. Guys there, someone was selling and, like, in the stand, like a children's, like, workbook with, like, things printed off of chat GPT. Like, four pages of. For $22. So, like, we are at. We are at, like, it's wild.

[Dave]

It's funny how the mores go less during summer and the lessers go more.

[Sam Altman]

So this is how. This is how everyone, you know, how everyone, like, seems like is doing great but feels poor. This is why. Because inflation is so localized to the community you're in that inflation just matches whatever number in the community is that you're like, I had a great year. But actually on a relative basis, inflation equal, it's the same thing. So that's, that's insight one. Peptides. Peptides are great. I'm only like three weeks in, so who knows? But here's the, here's the one real sign I have. Like, I. I'm a very sporadic but intense runner. And I started running again legitimately, like three weeks ago. And the reason I had stopped is my knee has been really tweaky. Like, not good. Like, it hurts climbing.

[Dave]

Is that from running or was that a separate.

[Sam Altman]

It's from running plus being stupid. But the, the interesting thing to me is I've. I'm used to, like, I'm used to ramping and being like, this is very painful. My knees about to blow up. And Jess and I were like, in Vermont the other day hiking. Like, I've been running a lot and we were hiking on this, like, very steep thing, and I was like, normally my knee.

[Jess]

We ended up on a ski slope accidentally and trying to go down, which

[Sam Altman]

I had forgotten there was anything steeper. It's actually surprisingly steep for the E coast. But the point is, like, my knee is so good and, like, I feel like I'm recovering so quickly from these runs. I can ramp much faster than I expected. So it. I, I actually kind of think it is the peptides, because it's not. I'm. I've done this enough at younger ages to be like, oh, when I do this, this is how my body reacts and my body is, like, so much better off than I expected it to be.

[Dave]

Was that the goal of your peptides, or was the goal a separate goal?

[Sam Altman]

I mean, it wasn't. Not a goal is what it's. I'm getting.

[Sam]

Like, I'm, I'm curious what could go wrong with peptides? What's the downside here?

[Jess]

They are not FDA approved. Sam's not on a GLP one that would be FDA approved. I mean, he could.

[Dave]

Yeah. I mean, Jess, it depends which peptides GLP1s are. Pept, and they are approved.

[Jess]

Exactly. Sam's on off market, not approved peptides also. I'm learning so much. If you'd like to know what a peptide is, basically little bits of protein that your body, if you ingested, would basically kill or not let absorb so much.

[Sam Altman]

Your stomach, you can't get them through your stomach.

[Jess]

You can't get them through your stomach.

[Sam Altman]

This is why the Jennifer Aniston collagen peptides are bullshit, because they don't go through your stomach.

[Jess]

But I have a question. So anyway. Yes.

[Sam]

Could women insert them vaginally and it would be better because I feel like the vaginal wall. Okay, I'm gonna research.

[Jess]

I have no idea. And I don't know that that's what you should go out with, but maybe you should. So anyway, we will keep updating you.

[Sam Altman]

I mean why. But why vaginally? Just stick them up your ass. Like if you're gonna do so many

[Sam]

side effects of medicine for women when it goes through the stomach and that. And actually the women have such a better anatomy than men because you can stick things up your vagina and it goes to the body anyway, but you

[Sam Altman]

can stick things up your ass and like I feel like that's more gender inclusive.

[Jess]

But I promise you guys, I don't know when we get back to California if this is all people are going to be talking about, but it is the.

[Sam Altman]

It does seem like these, these things do start in the Hamptons Wordsworth to me.

[Dave]

This is actually. You guys are experiencing an echo. This has been the conversation in California for two years.

[Jess]

No, but Dave, it's gotten to the like. Like you guys are like, really? And I'm like, you can show up at a 12 person dinner party and six people will be on peptides.

[Sam]

For what it's worth, I think GLP1 started in New York City.

[Sam Altman]

These things all start in New York.

[Sam]

New York is the most vain place. And definitely all those things start.

[Sam Altman]

It's the most competitive. Like basically the west coast is where technology starts and moves east. All culture and like cultural trends start in the east and move west.

[Jess]

I think that's true in a lot,

[Sam Altman]

not all of them, with the exception possibly. I think sushi started in the west because of the Asian population.

[Dave]

There's some culture that comes from la.

[Sam Altman]

Yoga started in the west. Everything else goes east to west.

[Jess]

Well, all I know to the GLP1 point and most recent survey of information subscribers is now a year plus old. Had like 50% of respondents on them.

[Sam]

That's good because I wagered that bet as our new year prediction.

[Jess]

But my we have a dinner party. Why? Where are you going?

[Sam Altman]

I have half. I have to do a meeting first. I'm gonna say goodbye.

[Sam]

He's got to do his Pepsi.

[Jess]

I will just end with this point which is I was at annual conference in the Hamptons and between three years ago and two years ago everyone was a third smaller. And I turned to a friend and I said what happened? And these are petite people and she's like JLP ones. I was like, oh, that's when I knew. So that's why I'm also bringing. I remember that because it is a crucible. Brit and I are looking at each other like we're still in our same clothes. What happened?

[Sam]

Yeah, well. And I'm wondering. I'm peptide. Curious. Just saying. So I need to get myself educated.

[Jess]

Well, anyway, Sam's mood is better, guys. So if that's not enough, that's good.

[Sam]

Is he a better husband to you? Just better father? Like happier?

[Jess]

That's a deeper question. I'm going to have to. He's happier. He's happier. I don't like opening my pantry and just seeing needles. I'm sorry. But, you know, we all have. We all have kids.

[Sam]

Daddy, new drugs,

[Jess]

new illegal. You know, just trying to bring you notes from the frontier.

[Dave]

I don't think they're illegal. They're just not proven safe.

[Sam]

Well, they are not approved.

[Jess]

Yeah. I don't think that Sam is going to be arrested for doing this, but maybe I should look into that.

[Dave]

No, they're not illegal. It's just not proven safe. That's what it. That's what it comes down to.

[Sam]

Some non FDA approved drugs.

[Jess]

Yeah. And we should just make it clear that we are not medical professionals and we are not giving medical advice, nor

[Sam]

are we giving financial advice.

[Dave]

We're just reporting on the culture.

[Jess]

Sometimes we get financial advice. Yes. Yeah. You're an event. You're a financial professional who is like a fiduciary to certain pools. I understand you have to say that. Guys, this has been a blast. We had topics, we had insights.

[Sam]

Thanks for organizing this into segments today. It felt very organic.

[Jess]

I'm really. I'm going to go with a post it note approach to the more or less pod. And we hoped, dear listeners, you enjoyed even those who think we don't understand open source and we will invite you to make your case.

[Sam]

I love it. I want more listeners to pick fights with us.

[Dave]

If I don't understand open source, I've got real problems.

[Sam]

No, but like, tell us how you feel, we'll defend ourselves.

[Jess]

No, no, we. I actually really, I. It's really interesting when people share their point of view and what they think we miss on the pod. So do more of it.

[Dave]

Oh, yeah.

[Jess]

And we'll see you back here next week for another episode of More or less.

[Sam]

Bye bye, guys.

[Dave]

See you later.

[Sam]

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 podcast, find more information about each episode in the show notes and follow us on social media by searching fororless avemorin lessonlesson. And as for me, I'm rit see you guys next time.