The Ledger, every show

“Alex Scarf I think is a national hero.”

“Yes, I think the demographic estimate is something like seven percent of Americans are like these sort of extreme progressives, which basically is the AI, you know, most of the AI companies except for, you know, maybe except for Elon. And so you've got seven p…”

“And so I think, I, I'm sort of a radical, and so I think the whole idea of, like, corporate brands is basically just, like, it just, it kind of they're on their way out. Like, it's just, as a concept, it just doesn't make sense in the new media environment.”

“What's the point Of having a department store, right? Of having a sort of mid-sized firm. And I, and the answer is, by the way, there's no point. Like there, for the same reason, there's no point to department store. There's no point to the mid-sized firm for …”

“So yeah, so it's basically a, the way I think about the debanking is it's a sort of an extra legal, unconstitutional you know, completely outside the bounds of any law or constitutional provision. It's the government. Applying pressure. The government regulato…”

“And I at least believe the 21st century is basically going to be another version of that, and it so happens that we're back in a bipolar world, and we have the US and the Communist Party of China which is sort of, you know, USSR two point oh, and they have a m…”

“The money has not been dispersed because the deal keeps getting renegotiated to add new political requirements.”

“Like put ankle weights around our own feet. That is the way to basically snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in a way that I, that's a level of self-harm that would be so cosmic. I mean, quite frankly, if we do that, we deserve to lose.”

“The AI version of that is, you know, Eliezer Yadkowsky's version of that is we must bomb data centers. Like, if there's a data center that we think might take off, like, if the training run starts to go too well, like, we need to send in the Air Force and be b…”

“Even in the US, if you do the sort of, there's you know, sort of analysts that do the mapping of ideologies and political views in the US, it's only like six percent of the US population that agrees with the point of view that ended up getting built into socia…”

“Inside some of these companies, there's at least the beginning of a, you know, the beginning of a purge, retrenchment, rethink on, on, on these topics.”

“If we go to war with China over Taiwan or something crazy like that, like these drones could all become weapons that are used against our own soldiers.”

“The truth is like, you know, Americans, Americans ought to be able to buy a car that costs 20,000 dollars. And is that good? And of course it'd be great if they could buy it from an American company, but if they can't, they should be able to buy it from a Chin…”

“The guy who, you know, has the highest odds of fighting off the, you know, the Chinese and the U S auto market is of course, you know, Elon is being tortured to death by his own government.”

“For every doc worker in the U S actually works on the doc doc, there's actually somebody sitting, there's a doc worker sitting at home doing nothing, still getting paid.”

“I gave it a 50,000 dollar no strings attached grant this summer in Bitcoin.”

“A lot of this sort of quote, unquote, AI safety movement kind of has gotten wrapped around the axle on this. And, you know, and look, this like correlates to the whole kind of obsession in the last decade in the, in our culture with, you know, safetyism and so…”

“Monopolies stop innovating. Monopolies are just death to innovation because as you like to say, the motto of any monopoly is we don't I don't care because we don't have to.”

“And so basically the regime that, you know, the government is threatening to put in place right now is going to, you know, by using this limit, they're going to basically enshrine the two or three companies that they believe are the only companies that matter …”

“The whole industry is consolidated down to a small number of very large companies that are basically, basically they're large scale political lobbying operations.”

“Inevitably this, the threshold is going to walk down and it's going to end. You just tell what's going to happen. It's going to go to 50 and then 20 and then five million and then one million. It's going to walk all the way down and it's going to hit, number o…”

“We weren't making progress on it, and then I just did a, because I controlled, you know, I controlled Mosaic at that point, so I just did a fait accompli, and I just declared it, and I created the image tag.”

“Again, ironically, and some, and to your point, ironically, some of the companies that are lobbying hardest for regulatory capture and cartel, you know, kind of government cartel status for AI are companies that exist today because the internet was open.”

“The last thing I want is these things locked down. Like, I want these things to be out there, like, doing all kinds of crazy stuff.”

“The California high-speed rail project. Which is now ten billion, it's over ten billion in spend with zero ground broken.”

“And then basically within like five years, it was like Facebook is like the living demon incarnate on earth and destroying everything. Right? It went from like useless to evil in one step. Right? You know, the headline never gets never just like, oh, this is k…”

“Because you'll live in this new world, and in the new world, you'll just tell the machine what you want for a photo, for an image, and it'll generate you as many options as you want, and it's generating you something that's better than you would have been able…”

“Those jobs are never coming back if there's not a step function change in technology and in the ability to use technology to get leverage. And to be able to transform those jobs and transform the economics, like they're just, they're never coming back. It does…”

“And so the paradox here would be, yes, the cost of developing any given piece of software falls, but the re, the reaction to that is a massive surge of demand for software capabilities. And so the result of that actually is, although it even, it looks like sta…”

“And so your proprietary data as, you know, company X will be a little bit useful on the margin, but it's not actually going to move the needle. And it's not really going to be a barrier to entry in most cases.”

“Maybe it's actually easier to automate the manager job than it is the worker job.”

“With sort of sufficiently advanced, ubiquitous video conferencing all of a sudden immigration law becomes less relevant, right? Because like if, you know, it's perfectly legal to stream bits across the border even if it's not possible for people to move across…”

“There were both there were other big banks that wanted to buy SVB, and there were private equity firms that wanted to buy SVB, and basically do a private sector bailout requiring no, no taxpayer involvement, and the FDIC actually blocked those also.”

“My guess, you know, we'll, we'll see what happens in more, more authoritarian societies, but my guess is in at least Western societies with relatively open. Access to information. It will just be impossible for, it will just be impossible for most centralized …”

“My view is that's actually a fake problem. That, that, that the real problem was they weren't working hard to begin with. And they were goofing off 20 hours a week in the office already. And so yeah, they're goofing off at home, but they were goofing off in th…”

“As the generative AI revolution hits white-collar work, you know, over the next five years, like, I suspect, I'll put it this way, a reason for bullishness on AI in the workplace is I suspect it may be easier than it looks to replace a lot of white-collar work…”

“At a lot of companies, including a lot of big tech companies, it's HR has a charter to basically drive political and social change and enforce that change. Very broadly inside the organization, right?”

“Look, if there's a unifying issue, there's basically two unifying issues in Washington. One is they don't like China and the other is they don't like big tech. And so, you know, this is a winnable war. Like, this is a winnable war on behalf of startups and ope…”

“Anthropic is very much in the group of kind of big tech, you know, kind of new incumbent big tech, you know, lobbying very aggressively for regulation and regulatory capture. In D.C., and so I think it's sort of an open question whether Amazon is going to pick…”

“As far as I can tell, every single use of AI to do something bad is already illegal under current laws and regulations.”

“Our view as, you know, I would say both technologists and investors in the space is that the methods of attack of detecting AI generated content after the fact are basically not gonna work. And they're not gonna work because AI is already too good at doing thi…”

“You're not gonna lock this stuff up. Like you're not gonna lock it up. Nobody's locking it up. It's not locked up. These companies are security Swiss cheese.”

“Why I won't destroy all the jobs and the sort of short version of it is because it's illegal to do that because so many jobs in the modern economy require licensing and are regulated.”

“There's just so much sort of glue in the system now that, that that prevents change and it'll be very easy to sort of not have AI healthcare or you know AI education or whatever, because literally some combination of like, you know, doctor licensing, teacher b…”

“You, the issue with it, my, you know, people have different opinions. My opinion on it, the issue of it is it kind of greenlit, you know, essentially 15 different regulatory agencies to basically put AI under their purview in sort of undefined ways.”

“A central bank digital currency, I think, is kind of the ultimate ring of power. Like, it, it's very difficult for me to see a system like that getting built, and then politicians not using it to reward their friends and punish their enemies.”

“If you take out every possible restriction on what people can do and you let them fully express themselves, then what you're left with is pure choice. Right. Right. Right. Right. And so at that point, the differences in the outcomes that are based on pure choi…”

“It's capped at 800 because there's just constant pressure on the SAT to equalize itself by demographic group. And so the overwhelming priority at the company that does the SAT is to actually try to reduce group distinctiveness, right? As opposed to unearth tal…”