The Ledger, every show

“And I've heard friends of mine in the last week Who have said awful things like all Muslims need to go. Well-known, well-respected public people have said this to me in private.”

“And what disturbed me the most was that in the three years after he was elected, every TED conference had plenty of subjects, plenty of talks, and plenty of conversations about why society is falling apart, why Donald Trump is a key root cause of that, why so …”

“I think there's a hundred percent chance that the portfolio of 70 fusion companies that exist today that are pursuing this technology will succeed. And that we will get low cost power in the next 20 years at scale, right?”

“My prediction is the federal government is going to help to monetize that debt, and they're going to help to support that commercial real estate sector through some sort of structured lending program.”

“If they spent four hundred million dollars in the last couple of years, you could probably assume that doing the same trading exercise could be done for five to ten million dollars, 18 months from now, to generate the same model.”

“You're going to invest in a company at a five hundred million dollar valuation and six weeks later, it's going to be worth zero because someone open source the exact same thing that you can now do for a hundred K.”

“And when you do the arithmetic on all this, it's going to balloon the cost to service the debt and without some degree of cutting across the board spending and entitlement programs, discretionary spending and entitlement programs, you can't make the interest p…”

“In the private market, you've got to assume that something in that late stage market is on the order of 70, 80% is worth less than their preference stack.”

“I really do believe that at some point, the whole concept of publishers and publishing maybe goes away. Where, you know, much like we saw so much of the content on the internet today being user generated, you know, most of the content is made by individuals po…”

“The only way to ultimately do that degree of regulation and restriction is going to be to restrict the open internet. It is going to be to have monitoring and firewalls and safety protocols across the open internet, because you can have a set of models running…”

“I still think I still think we'll end up seeing 70% tax rates on the wealthiest people.”

“I don't think you can contain it. I don't think that this idea that we can put in place some regulatory constraints and say it's illegal to do this, Or, you know, try and, you know, create IP around it or protections around it is realistic at this state.”

“So it's really hard to kind of just say, hey, it's going to be hyperinflationary, and the value is going to go to zero, it's just not going to happen.”

“Some of them are terrible, like, and some of them are cronyism. So like you go to some of the universities and the tech transfer offices have deep relationships with certain VCs and investors. That they'll only work. And they always get first picks and first d…”

“So what I've told people is that these businesses are like luxury goods brands. You know, you can buy a purse that carries your stuff, or you can buy a Louis Vuitton or Gucci purse and then feel good about carrying a Louis Vuitton or Gucci purse and be like, l…”

“And if you try and break this up, and if you actually do try and, you know, get into the weeds of this whole system and change it, the publishers ultimately will make less money.”

“The incidence rate is still typically less than two out of every 100,000 people that get the vaccine. But as you saw in the paper you just shared and others have validated it can be as high as 30 times more likely to happen in young people that take the Modern…”

“Ultimately, the benefit was zero, because we ended up accumulating, call it 10 trillion dollars of, you know, four trillion dollars of net costs that we have to pay off at some point, not to mention the economic consequences of the lockdowns. And, ah, you know…”

“It could be that the US dollar coming out of 2023 starts to trade more like a risk asset and less like a risk free asset. And so I think that that's my big contrarian bet is that maybe this year marks the beginning of the end of the US dollar as the kind of gl…”

“I think his reputation has gotten really hurt because of, you know, that role. He's not making a lot of friends, and he's not, he's causing a lot of reputational damage.”

“I think it was a bad decision, and I think that it represented on the least generous statement would be that it represents deep hypocrisy in that not just a few weeks ago did he say he would never delete that account, but he also said he was buying Twitter to …”

“I had said that there could probably be a significant headcount reduction of like, 75% at Google, and the business could keep operating.”

“The crypto ecosystem and the model that so many kind of crypto businesses have engaged in over the years, which is if you can fester the belief, then there is a business. If you cannot fester the belief, there is no business that there isn't a fundamental prod…”

“I think the Georgia Senate runoff race that we had. In the 20 20 election cost the US 10 trillion dollars.”

“This is what I think the Elon action this week really sets a standard. He shows the entirety of Silicon Valley that you can cut deep and you can turn a profit and you can do it fast. And it could set a new standard for how folks are managing this.”

“If Zuck was a smart guy, he would go to Tencent and cut him a check and buy the whole thing for fifty billion and, you know, buy those guys.”

“I don't see a world where we don't have over 60% tax rates on the wealthiest people in this country at a federal level.”

“There's some number of people, some number of tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people who are going to starve between here and there that otherwise weren't going to be starving.”

“If there isn't a resolution in the next few weeks, there will be civil unrest. There will be a really cataclysmic concerning economic effect.”

“And so my guess is huge amount of money from the West and EU going into Ukraine. Ukraine agrees to let Putin keep some regions, some assets, Putin agrees to remove himself from certain regions and give up certain assets. Sanctions are partially lifted, but the…”

“In the next 30 years or so, all traditional brands are gonna die.”

“In the future, all advertising and marketing gets replaced by content creation and content creation direct to consumers through the social media platforms becomes the mechanism by which people are aware of and buy goods and services.”

“And this is why probiotics do not work. Probiotics are single microbes, single bacterial strains or fungal strains that we put into a pill, and we swallow it. And just because that microbe happens to have some beneficial effect, you know, on its own in a petri…”

“It is a matter of time and a matter of natural evolution that we will resolve all of the factors that are driving climate change from animal agriculture to transportation systems to energy systems.”

“The government started shooting at them. They got shot.”

“I stopped going to TED, because I thought the content went to shit, and it basically got overtaken with, like, social justice talks”

“If we actually saw the federal loan program cut back or put these standards in place, the cost of tuition would actually decline and profiteering would decline.”

“There are most VCs, as Vinod has said publicly, add negative value. And I totally agree with him on this. Because they, many VCs, particularly the ones who aren't, you know, valuable and don't really have much to add, try to add stuff, try to say stuff, and th…”

“These carbon markets are absolute BS. Carbon sequestration mechanisms are absolute BS. I mean, none of this stuff is real right now.”

“A lot of VCs, as you know, have marked up their investments and marked up their books of Private companies significantly over the last couple of years with these later stage rounds and ballooning values, and they don't want to take a write down. So they're mor…”

“I wasn't the biggest fan of when I invested my money in venture capital firms, all the fees that they took. And I thought that it, like, created a significant misalignment of incentives that VCs are incentivized effectively to raise more capital and make more …”

“Any sort of assumption that leads to our belief that an alternative intervention or some other force can ultimately win against Russia is, is completely false because Russia has thousands of nuclear warheads.”

“The problem is VCs, they join a board, and they think that they have to quote add value. So they come in and they make a bunch of suggestions and recommendations and push you to do a bunch of things. And as Vinod has said correctly many times, they more often …”

“And in all these cases, from Google, to YouTube, to Twitter, and now to Spotify, the idea of being just an access, a platform for access is proving to be wrong. All of them are de facto publishers.”

“This is the beginning of the end of U.S. Cultural and economic influence globally, or dominance, rather, influence globally”

“As you go down that list, This, 20 companies are total scam companies. They're fraud. They're not going to work. They're grifters.”

“And I think Putin will become a stronger player on the global stage, particularly as it relates to his relationship with NATO. Over the next year and he's been a little bit quiet the last few years. He was kind of, I'd say, suppressed with sanctions and all th…”

“I'd say 90% of them are probably going to start to blow up next year.”