The Ledger, every show

“All the knowledge in a company is with the individual contributors are doing the work and the customers that like, there's no There's no knowledge with the people who are talking to you as CEO who are on your staff.”

“Don't try and fix them. They can't be fixed. It's not going to happen.”

“China's not gonna have that kind of restriction and you getting behind in AI, I think would be very dangerous for the world.”

“All the things that you perceive that are happening to you that are bad, you know, be it like the systems against you or somebody undercut you or racism or sexism or this or that or the other is very small compared to like, it means a lot if you believe it, yo…”

“These little snippets of advice that VCs give, because they watch some fucking podcast, are all fucking stupid, like it's just, there's a lot of depth to these things. You have to know the answer to the next question, and the next question”

“And I think it's going to end up being one of the best investments we ever made.”

“Like these businesses are all work and they're being priced appropriately for how they're growing. So that's not an effect. So the thing that you could say is they're not going to keep growing like that or like, and so forth. And I'm not sure about that. Like …”

“You have LLMs, which have generalized pretty, you know, like in fascinating ways, but they've kind of also asymptoted in that you know, we have run out of data for the most part.”

“As we saw, I think with both SoftBank and Tiger Global, if you try to change that demand supply imbalance, you just end up creating a mess.”

“With the studio model, the, to me, the big problem with that historically and, you know, I think Bill Gross was probably the greatest practitioner of that historically is that it's not idea. It's an idea maze. And so and it's very hard to run through the idea …”

“If AI is a super weapon that will also be true there, and so if you believe that, then I think what you want is open source, and I think if you want regulatory capture or monopoly for yourself, you want to shut that down.”

“It's like literally the most transparent form of payment that there is in the world, like more than visa, more than dollars, more than anything.”

“The funny thing was like, if you go back to 2008, All the stories on how Obama got elected were Facebook. Like, he mastered Facebook. He got elected on Facebook. Facebook's the greatest thing. It's making the world more democratic. Arab Spring. Wow, this is so…”

“You know, what they found in terms of the quote-unquote Russian hacking was just about effectively nothing. Like, there was nothing. And so, but the dominant media narrative Was that Facebook had been hacked by the Russians, and I think like probably half the …”

“None of them got to crypto in any real way. They, you know, they're trying on AI, but they're way behind. And they definitely, you know, and they mostly missed American dynamism entirely.”

“He was clearly, like, clearly, clearly, clearly, like, as Mark said, you know, top two in one thing. There's just very few people on Earth that are top two in anything.”

“Yeah, it was actually a big thing in Trump's Middle East speech where it was such a, Remarkable speech in the sense that he advocated for the Middle East living or evolving from their own culture as opposed to being changed into our culture, which is a massive…”

“Venture capital is so underwhelming in that it, you know, it's a great product for investors for LPs, but it's a kind of very mediocre product for entrepreneurs because like we, you know, you get almost nothing. You get like some money and then a smart person …”

“Maybe the single best thing that you can do to improve the world is to build a company that, you know, Deliver some product or something that, that improves the world. Like that is actually, that's the thing. It's actually better than has a better impact than …”

“If you look at the top people, you know, if you look at Martine Cassato and Chris Dixon and Alex Rampell and David Ulovich and so forth, like that team is better, like IQ wise capability wise than the executive teams of Meta or Google or Apple or any of them.”

“The bad thing that's happened to the culture in the DOD is it's become kind of, You know, politically and bureaucratically driven as opposed to mission driven.”

“So every piece of network infrastructure you need to make AI work, Is, is in this new technology that's invented”

“And to Margot at TechCrunch you can write what you want about me, you can say what you will about us, but we're not going to stop, so sorry.”

“It was probably the, I think Unarguably the worst four years in our career in terms of White House policy as it related to technology and, you know, probably to business more broadly.”

“And we had, you know, dozens of companies kicked out of the banking system simply for In a very legally compliant way trying to build a company, you know, that would, you know, employ people and, you know, make the country strong.”

“One of the really remarkable things about the whole crypto crackdown was, you know, the claim, the lie, and it was clearly a lie, and I'll explain why, was that, oh, we have to protect consumers. But as they were, you know, basically terrorizing every complian…”

“It's like every major, you talk to any major tech CEO of the biggest companies in the world of the, you know the biggest pharma companies in the world, none of them could get meetings with this administration.”

“So it hasn't, Congress did not pass a law. The, there was no executive order. There was no policy. There was no nothing. There was just phone calls and letters and threats you know, from you know, from various kind of people in the government, you know, rangin…”

“Probably the one thing we could do to lose to China is try and use policy to beat China.”

“The way around that for America is highly automated factories, which are almost impossible to build if you have union labor.”

“Most of the kind of issues that he's run into have been based on the fact that he is, you know, a modern manufacturing facility that's highly automated. And that's why California in particular has been You know, basically kicked them out of the state.”

“If you think about what we're concerned about in terms of our AI policy, which is really at the federal level, almost a hundred percent kind of competitiveness with China. We're probably focused on entirely the wrong issue because the real issue competitively,…”

“All of those under the Gensler regime are essentially illegal because or they're legal but you'll get sued by the SEC, by the US government, and the reason that you'll get sued is they claim that anything with utility is has asymmetric information attached to …”

“The White House in particular has been extremely bad on this issue.”

“They've basically subverted the rule of law to attack The crypto industry.”

“For little tech, which is, by the way, you know, everything that we've invested in foundation, not everything, but almost everything is growing incredibly fast and doing incredibly well, and these will be snuffed out by this kind of regulation.”

“We have a company with an incredible drug platform. They cured. A rare disease, like past phase one clinical trials, carried it, sell the drug to Sanofi because, you know, so they can get some of the money back to develop more things, and the Biden administrat…”

“These policies are from kind of the radical side, which is, you know, like it's a significant side of the Biden administration but it is, it's a powerful side, and they really are in charge I would say, you know, kind of much more than the moderates.”

“They're not only underfunded to do AI, but the, there's a push among the big tech companies to Enact legislation that would essentially outlaw AI in universities by eliminating open source.”

“I don't know why you have to go to school to learn anything, you know, in 2030. Like, that's not gonna be true. So, like, I think education's gonna reemerge much better than it's ever been.”

“GM is totally vulnerable to Tesla and BYD. This is why, you know, HP ended up being totally vulnerable to Apple because Apple was still building computers and HP was assembling computers and GM is assembling cars and Elon completely kind of re-engineered how y…”

“Yeah, like, I mean, I think, I, that, that's the most overblown fear ever, right? Like, so we've now had this AI revolution started in 2018, and I think unemployment has gone nowhere but down since then. And, you know, like, they're gonna take all our jobs. Ev…”

“I think that this is a interesting, like, weird misapplication of good intentions in a policy way that's probably going to Kill more people than ever get saved by every kind of health, FDA, et cetera, policy that we have”

“With kind of misguided regulation You know, we could actually force our way from something that, you know, is open source, open weights. Anybody can build it. We'll have a plethora of this technology. We'll be like, use all of American innovation to compete, o…”

“One of the blocks was there was a bank that was going to buy Silicon Valley bank and by buying Silicon Valley bank, it would move up into the G-SIB category, which is globally systemic important banks. And they're like, no more G-SIBs.”

“One of the big things that's changed in talking to many police officers is like grand theft auto is no longer a thing. Like if you steal a car, you don't get prosecuted in almost any state. Certainly in any blue state, you're not getting prosecuted for stealin…”

“So if you have a place like You know, a very low accountability culture, like say Google, which, you know, has a monopoly that kind of supports the other businesses. So it's hard to have accountability when there's like a single profit center that dominates to…”

“We want to do well and do good is probably a pretty dangerous phrase in retrospect in that You know, you kind of want those things aligned. So whatever the company produces is going to make the world a better place like that. And you kind of want to stop it th…”