The Ledger, every show

“I think this maybe is just the more simple view of things, which is Trump's weather vane is a stock market. Like we see vol is up. We see the VIX is really high, but you know what? The S and P is trading in this band. That's actually fairly tight, given the cr…”

“They are the Google of this era, which is what I mean by that is in the 2000, if you were doing a startup in the 2000, the first question you would get. Is why isn't Google going to kill you? Or why isn't Google just going to do it? They're not going to know t…”

“Look, I think Waymo obviously is ahead. The existence proof is there. Their issue is manufacturing and scale and urgency and fierceness.”

“The Waymo machine takes a hundred times more energy to drive a Waymo than a human does to drive a Waymo.”

“In the Uber world early days, if you didn't have capital, it didn't matter how good your app was, because Masa is going to put a billion dollars into your competitor, and you're going to lose 20% market share tomorrow. So a critical competency, in fact, your w…”

“Can you get a meal, ah, that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store. Because if you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car.”

“So like, if you want to compete with us, go buy a hundred million dollars of real estate in every major city in the world. And then we're going to go head to head.”

“A meal that's efficient, you know, so efficient it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store. A meal that's prepared and delivered to you. That's real. You must do automated production of food. You must do automated delivery of the meal.”

“Because if you're gonna do specialized robots, not humanoids, but specialized robots, They need to have wheels. Right? I like to say, like, if you saw the Beijing, in Beijing, they had the humanoid Olympics. And the half marathon, and you're watching the human…”

“Capital becomes a strategic weapon, which means you must be the best at getting capital in order to win. And we realized that early on in the Uber days, of course, that's happening times 10 in the sort of, let's call the digital AI wars.”

“I still think we probably did things better than anybody that some of those things probably are still better than anybody even today. But obviously the check size much bigger.”

“Until we get super AGI. Humans are valuable, and they are going to become more and more valuable because they will be the long pole in the tent to progress, and that progress is going to accelerate and get faster and more, you know, more robust, except If you'…”

“If anybody comes to me and says a strategic thing was easy, I'm like, you messed up. You could have been way better and gone way further. More competitive advantage. More differentiation.”

“When AI gets cheap, you know what's going to happen, guys? There's going to be a lot more AI, right? I don't think, I think the price elasticity on this one is actually positive. So as the price goes down, the revenue usage, everything's going to go up.”

“When you get really, really good at copying and that time gets tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter, you eventually run out of things to copy. And then it flips to creativity and innovation.”

“2009, if we took 2019 spend, right, the year before COVID, and put it up against 20, 24 revenues, five hundred billion dollar surplus.”

“If all of the miles in California went EV ride sharing, you would need to double the energy capacity of California.”

“Even getting 20% more, 10% more is going to be a gargantuan five to 10 year exercise.”

“I got threatened by the city of San Francisco and the state of California three months after we launched Uber with 90 days in jail for every ride that had occurred.”

“Each and every city we went to, we would send, we would wait for Lyft to launch. And then we would basically say to the city, we'd send them a letter saying, there's this really cool thing called ride sharing. This company called Lyft is doing it. We think it'…”

“Any time we were doing surge pricing and our competitor wasn't, we knew we were gaining market share because somebody could just come to us and get a ride when in the other system they couldn't.”

“What you learn when you go and do what we did in China is you learn that when you go and take your business and go to China, you have to start over. So many people think that you can take your business and take it somewhere, which by the way, Uber kind of like…”

“Most entrepreneurs, let's say Western entrepreneurs that go to China, that is almost none succeed... In our neck of the woods, you're like, okay, Elon definitely did, right? And Apple definitely did. Tim Apple and Elon, right? Those are the two guys.”

“Now we eventually did get a partner, but instead of giving up 50%, we gave up, I think it was seven percent and it was to Baidu, but it was because we were getting massive regulatory heat. And as long as we had a partner by our side, we could be Chinese.”

“So we were spending, let's say tens of millions of dollars a month fighting DD in all these cities.”

“Being anti-competitive is illegal in the United States, unless you get a government official or regulator to do it for you, then it's legal.”

“It's everywhere, but taxis is by far the most intense, literally competent. We talk about Anti-competitive things and antitrust law and Rockefeller and things like this. No, no, no. Taxis. Competition is illegal. They've captured the regulators through lobbyin…”

“You have to be careful of the ease at which you walk through it, because there is an extra power in being bothered by something that is wrong. You can get too used to wrong things happening.”

“Five rooms, 12 hours, one week... So I'm in the two hundred fifty million dollar check or over a room. Then there's like a hundred million dollar room and a fifty million dollar room and a twenty five million dollar room. And there'll be a guy in the twenty-fi…”

“Humanoids have their place, which is let's call it low scale tasks in human design environments designed for humans.”

“CPU manipulates the bits. Storage stores bits. Network moves bits from point A to point B. But if you're digitizing the physical world, you're treating atoms like bits. And you're like, well, I know that CPU manipulates the bits. What manipulates atoms? That's…”

“Humanoids are like low scale, do low scale tasks in human environments. If you're doing high scale tasks, industrial scale tasks, you are going to make specialized machines that move and act in the physical world.”

“There's so many people that are not willing to fight for the best idea because they're going to upset somebody else. And if you don't fight for the best idea, then what idea are you fighting for? You're fighting for the mediocre idea, the politically expedient…”

“Anthony Lewandowski, of course Eric Maihofer, who ran Uber's advanced technology group. He's running food robotics.”

“We had thousands of employees who were not allowed to put our company on LinkedIn.”

“I announced earlier today we did a 1.7 billion dollar raise.”

“So then what we did is we put the companies together and then sold the equity in a singular entity.”

“This is why the Adams thing is cool. Because you're not dropping a fucking app in the app store. You're like, automating a two million pound machine going 35 miles an hour carrying gold.”

“You never go to a customer. I don't care what you're selling. Okay. I don't care if it's enterprise software. I don't care if it's widgets. I don't care what it is. You never go to a customer and say, give me a percentage of your stuff. You go to a customer an…”

“I know a company, remain unnamed, that's spending three and a half, this is on the supply chain side, three and a half billion dollars a year on forklift labor in their facilities.”

“DoorDash was five percent market share when I left.”

“So people know it as cloud kitchens in the U.S., but it's Casinos Aqueltas in Latin America. And we have different names. That means, like, magical kitchens, essentially. We have, like, Kitchen Valley in Korea. We have Flash Kitchen and three other names in Ch…”

“I was the biggest investor in Pronto. I'm like, let's go. So acquired Pronto, and now I'm in the mining business.”

“Entrepreneurs that are coming up since the Uber time. Are not scared of regulation the way that bits.”

“No, no, no, we're like the non-humanoid guys. I don't have a problem with them, but that's not what we do. You're like, oh, do you do like some military thing? You're like, no, that's not my thing either.”

“Honestly, guys, even if it's on your own fiber connected, like, two kilometers away, you're screwed. It's not a thing.”

“I've got a side quest where I'm just investing. I have agents investing and betting on Kalshi and Polly and, you know, these other places. And it's silly how dumb the agents are, even their best agents, to be honest.”

“It's the AGI is not here, and it's kind of silly for folks, I think, to sort of suggest it is.”