The Ledger, every show

“The tech industry is more centralized in Silicon Valley than it has been in its entire existence, and I think it's AI.”

“Don't ever do diamonds in the rough, only do diamonds.”

“And so I say no, you don't, because I think, like, if you're trying to fulfill your personal emotional needs at work, like, I think that's a very fundamental problem, and you shouldn't try to do that.”

“We always say, do not bring your whole self to work. Like, whatever you do, do not bring your whole self to work.”

“One of my things in the firm is I say, we should back every single European founder who moves to the US. Like, we should just reflexively say yes.”

“If you look at AI, it's, I think it's the most hyper, hyper democratic, small D democratic technology I think we've ever seen.”

“We got to know him after that. And, you know, as you know, like became, you know, thoroughly convinced or reinforced our view that he was a generational talent. And I think, yeah, we feel very strongly that that, that, that is the case.”

“If you're a television producer or if you're a news editor or whatever, like you can't possibly move your organization fast enough to stay ahead of these cycles. And so what you end up doing is you end up chasing them. And that's, and basically the role of mai…”

“We see at Silicon Valley where, you know, kind of there, these guys get under pressure and, you know, they kind of feel anxious or whatever, and they decide that, you know, somebody tells them about psychedelics and they try it and they kind of come out the ot…”

“What's happening is all the old edifices, all the old incumbent institutions in the last hundred years that are run by managers, they're all in some state of fundamental collapse. Like, they're all collapsing in, like, trust and credibility because they can't …”

“All of the sort of legacy venture firms at that point, they were all like that. They were all just like tribes of lone wolves. And then the thing that we knew that was not publicly known was, generally speaking, inside the firms, they didn't even like each oth…”

“We actually need AI to work because we're going to need, you know, we're going to need machines to do all the jobs that we're not going to have people to do. Because we're literally going to depopulate, we're going to depopulate the planet over the next hundre…”

“Even if AI, like, triples the pace of economic change in the economy, it's going to just translate to, like, a much higher rate of economic growth is going to transfer, translate to a much higher rate of job growth. And, you know, there, there'll be some level…”

“Chat GPT is like almost certainly a better doctor than your doctor today, but like chat GPT can't get a license to practice medicine, right? So it can't substitute for a doctor. It can't prescribe medications, right? It can't, you know, perform procedures, rig…”

“I think Substack could be, like, a thousand times the size of the existing, like, content industry, whatever you want to call it, media news industry the, Collective, you know, kind of value.”

“A fair amount of our cons are actually aimed at Washington because again, it's like if you're a policymaker in Washington, and you're sitting there 3003 thousand miles away, and your entire information source is like East Coast newspapers that hate Silicon Val…”

“Black box. Cartel.”

“My new version of this, my, the new test I think is happening is what we might call the GPT test, which is, okay, if what somebody says is indistinguishable from chat GPT output, like not going to make it. Right. And then the more advanced version of the test …”

“He went out and actually got a former director, ah, actually, he got, ah, a guy who had actually been in the Obama administration, as basically the head of border, the head of the border security in the Obama administration, to basically come in and give an ho…”

“Emotionally I want to like hold out hope that there is, you know, still something special. About human creativity, and I certainly believe that, and I very much want to believe that, but I don't know, when I use these things, I'm like, wow, they seem to be awf…”

“There are sitting United States politicians in, in serious offices who like literally faked Vietnam War records.”

“Einstein was the exact opposite of a moral exemplar. Einstein was Stalinist. Like, Einstein was, like, a full-on, like, Einstein was pro-Stolic, like, not even just pro-communist, was actually, like, pro-Stalin, and Einstein thought, but, like, American democr…”

“If you read the history of those people at that time, specifically people like Oppenheimer, you realize, yeah, the people who invent the technology have no special moral claim. They have no special predictive power for the consequences of the technology, and t…”

“The movies that are greenlit today, right, are not gonna come out, you know, until, like, whatever, 20, yeah, it's like, twenty-twenty-seven, twenty-twenty-eight soonest, and so we, so we're in this, like, liminal period, or this interstitial period, where for…”

“These are all the hot button issues that if you screwed them up, you, in, in Hollywood, you got your career destroyed, right? So if you said the wrong thing about COVID lockdowns or vaccines, if you said the wrong thing about Trump, if you said the wrong thing…”

“Mel Gibson finally got greenlit to do his sequel to Bachelor of the Christ, which is the resurrection movie, and which he's making right now. At least my friends in Hollywood are like, yeah, that never would have happened. Like, that never would have happened …”

“The employment shifts everybody's worried about are actually not going to happen at anywhere near the velocity people think because it's like, you know, a significant, significant percentage of jobs in the US literally are, you know, licensed or unionized or c…”

“One of the things that we, that was discovered during that process that I didn't know is that in prior union agreements with the dock workers, they already had a one-to-one ratio of people sitting at home doing nothing to every productive dock worker as a cons…”

“Number three is it's gonna be a cult of personality, and it's gonna be a cult of personality not just inside the company, but outside the company. And we're not gonna, you know, we're not gonna spend any money on marketing. We're not gonna put any time at IR. …”

“He's polarized the market very deliberately, you know, in the same way that I think a lot of great entrepreneurs do, which is, you know, people that either love him or hate him, they either love the products, hate the products, That's very helpful from a busin…”

“I think it's been net positive for the world that China has been so enthusiastic about open source AI coming out of China which has been great.”

“I can tell you, the American models have all kinds of constraints also. Right, implemented, you know, usually by a very specific kind of person in a very specific location in the US.”

“The counter argument to that, which, you know, which we believe is, well, it's not copying, right? There's a distinction between training and copying, just like in the real world, there's a distinction between reading a book and copying the book, you know, as …”

“I mean, it's kind of taking a victory lap was very disconcerting. And for exactly the reason you said, which is survivorship bias. Right. Which is you pick the one that worked out and then, you know, it's the airplane, the red dots, the airplane, you know, you…”

“If you don't do this, you're living in a world of Chinese robots everywhere.”

“We chose to de-industrialize through a set of explicit policy choices, you know, not, not least of which is You know, we made a lot of industrial activity illegal over time.”

“Europe has basically made AI illegal. Like, they're regulating themselves to death. And so the smart AI people in Europe are moving to the US.”

“The partisanship is actually holding up the reputation of institutions that otherwise, where their ratings would, their trust ratings would literally go to zero which I think is probably what happens in the fullness of time.”

“We chose to de-industrialize through a set of explicit policy choices, you know, not, not least of which is You know, we made a lot of industrial activity illegal over time.”

“And then, by the way, the US is benefiting a lot, because Europe has basically made AI illegal. Like, they're regulating themselves to death. And so, the smart AI people in Europe are moving to the US.”

“If you're a family, you know, if you, if you're a family, if you're parents of a kid where I grew up and you've got a smart kid and you think you're gonna get them into, you know, a top university in this country, like, you are fooling yourself. Like, there is…”

“Professional CEOs Are often very good at running a status quo business, but when the, when things change, they have a very hard time reacting.”

“What's happening is what Ted Kaczynski Famous philosopher, Takasinski, what's called over socialization, right? People are too worried about what everybody else thinks, right? And so people, people get too wrapped up in the sort of mob scapegoating cycle of, y…”

“New people entering the workforce had a much worse experience, right? And so the COVID was sort of a, there was this sort of dichotomous experience where if you were like a 20 or 30 year veteran of a company and like a high ranking official, it was Absolutely …”

“I think the result of it was, I think it was a result of 80,000 dollars of ad spend by the Russians in, in the relevant period of the election. It was like a total of like a 140,000, but during the actual run of the election, it was 80,000 dollars, and so the …”

“It turned out that the method that was supposedly used by the Russians slash, you know, the Trump campaign to do the mind control, you know, basically like that, that method, I mean, we now know basically it never worked. Like it, the whole psych, psych, psych…”

“Europe, Europe persists in shooting itself, not just in the foot, but in the other foot and in the ankle and in the knee and in the gut. And they're just on this absolute frenzy to regulate and kill, you know, tech in Europe”

“Crypto, you know, became incredibly politicized, and the government, US government basically launched a full-on war against it, tried to kill it.”