The Ledger, every show

“It's a small number of programs that pay for the whole thing, right? So it's federal student loans. It's federal research funding. It's a, and it's a couple of things in the tax law and a few other things. And so it's not like it would take, it would not take …”

“It's an empirical observation that the faculty at American universities is now radically polarized on in, in one political direction. Radically, and we could also post a graph on this maybe, which is the numbers are like really radical. There's fields in which…”

“There is a pretty active campaign in the other direction and, you know, that, that campaign has taken hold of a lot of universities, a lot of government agencies you know, a lot of the power structure of the people who get to decide whether things are legal. T…”

“A very large percentage of the studies in the last 50 years don't replicate. They're basically fake results.”

“If you're a homelessness nonprofit, do you make money by actually solving homelessness or having to be there, Be more of it, right? You make money by having there be more of it. You feed the problem.”

“So a cynic would say, That the A number one reason why a big company would be lobbying aggressively to try to get basically government regulatory protection is if internally they are convinced that it's gonna be a race to the bottom.”

“Specifically there, it's the teachers, you know, they, you know, it's moderate, I don't think it's controversial to say moderate K through 12 systems run primarily for the teachers and specifically for the teacher unions, which are tremendously politically pow…”

“These effects of technology driving up the marginal productivity of the worker and therefore driving up income while simultaneously driving down the prices of goods and services is just these two factors are so massive and increasing quality of life. That all …”

“I think the single biggest policy mistake of my lifetime was the decision in the seventies, effectively in the seventies into the eighties to ban, essentially ban civilian nuclear power.”

“Quite frankly, it's one of the reasons why Russia is able to do what it's doing in Ukraine is it has this flow of money from oil you know, which in, in a counterfactual universe where the world by now had cut over to civilian electric Like they wouldn't have t…”

“Sitting here today in 2023, the following is true. More people in the world have computers in the form of smartphones specifically and internet access than have electricity or running water in their homes.”

“We don't in America today in most industries actually live in what you call a free market system. We live in more of a captured kind of Big business cartel ecosystem, and you look just across sort of sector after sector after sector, what you see are sort of t…”

“A society built in the idea that love scales becomes an Incredibly dark, dystopian, hostile, you know, and ultimately murderous, murderous place because love doesn't scale.”

“The answer is to actually put the pedal forward, more people, more ideas, more solutions. And, you know, yes, clearly that's that I agree with him in that argument.”

“I think what's going to happen is I look, I think we'll get fusion to work at some point. There's very smart people working on it. I think they'll get it there. I think the same forces and ideas and people that have prevented the deployment of nuclear fission …”

“The college system in the US is a cartel and, you know, it's quite literally a self-regulated cartel by virtue of the fact that it requires, it's on the sort of federal student loan drug to work financially and then the accreditation agencies that determine wh…”

“On the other side of this kind of change, typically what happens is a much larger industry with like way more employment, way more output. And I, I'm a hundred percent convinced that's what's going to happen for sure in the tech industry and for sure in, in, i…”

“From a societal standpoint, the last thing on earth you would have wanted to do is to slow down the progression of the introduction of the car to protect the blacksmith jobs. Like that would have made everybody worse off, right? To protect a very small, what u…”

“Einstein, unfortunately, and I know Einstein's, a lot of people consider Einstein to be a hero, not just scientifically, but morally, and the movie paints him as a, both a scientific and a moral hero, which is kind of the received wisdom. A little bit of an is…”

“And unfortunately, you know, the history of this is, is that, you know, Einstein and Oppenheimer and others basically chose to ignore the information and they chose to buy into a system sort of past the point that, you know, for at least for people as smart as…”

“And so there are probably something like two hundred million people alive today who would not be alive had Oppenheimer not admitted The bomb.”

“The moral valence on China is shifting in real time right now on both sides of the political aisle in Washington, in the same way the moral valence on the Soviet Union shifted in the late 19 forties, early 19 fifties, and I think there are people who have been…”

“Utilitarianism has become very trendy among our current intellectual elite, who has gotten very fond of sitting on Mount Olympus and making these calls and deciding, you know, which eggs you break to make an omelet, and, like, I think that's a bad road.”

“The EU is about to pass, you know, a law based on these ideas that I think is going to be very devastating for them.”

“The consequences of stopping nuclear power 50 years later, you know, it's just been, it was just like a catastrophic mistake. You know, geopolitically, it's directly connected to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Europe is effectively funding Russia to invade Ukra…”

“There's now an attempt to apply that, that, that, that ethos or that rule for AI, which I think would be another catastrophic mistake.”

“Like we we've been in this 50 year period of actually very low productivity growth and very low technological change throughout our society. Which is sort of the opposite of what a lot of people think they've experienced, but like just practically speaking, mo…”

“Like most of the economy is, is one form of cartel or another. Like, as far as I can tell, it's like, you've got the education cartel, you've got the healthcare cartel, you've got the banking cartel. And then you've got, you know, you've got cartels of workers…”

“This can only be happening because we're in a moral panic right now but like, let's say, rationality has left the room for the time being”

“It's a completely unscientific position. By definition, it's a completely unscientific position because there is no way at all to prove or disprove the theory. Right. And so it is the worst kind of ivory tower thought experiment.”

“As long as China's a big enough threat, it will be sufficient to kind of glue us together to be able to actually make some rational decisions as a society. You know, maybe the presence of an external enemy is actually helpful to kind of galvanize, you know, ki…”

“Once you're at, like, super genius level, like, I don't know, maybe there's a handful of, like, real life, like, Luthers in the world, but, like, once you're at super genius level, like, you have better things to do than, like, go around and try to kill a bunc…”

“I don't think what's happening now is a betrayal of liberalism. I think it's just the full realization of liberalism. Like, I think it's what happens when you take liberalism to the extreme, which is you declare war on the intolerant, right?”

“A lot of the people I am opposing, at least rhetorically on these AI issues are actually people in the tech industry who are showing up in Washington asking for various kinds of things that I think would be, you know, horrifically destructive.”

“And for that second risk expressed as AI alignment, what you're dealing with fundamentally is social engineering. And when you're dealing with social engineering, you're necessarily dealing with politics.”

“No, AI is not going to kill us all. AI is not going to murder every person on the planet.”

“And then, you know, on the other side of it, if you, like, read about this in the media or follow the public conversation, there's just this, like, horrifying, basically, you know, sort of onslaught of, like, fear and panic and hysteria about how this is, like…”

“And then quite honestly, also, you know, a set of people who I think are trying to take advantage of this and trying to go for, you know, regulatory capture and try to basically establish a cartel and, you know, try to basically choke off innovation as startup…”

“Does the writer need the actor anymore? Like, if I were a director or actor, I'd be a lot more worried than the writers.”

“Everything I just said is consistent with what's in every standard economics textbook, textbook as compared to these, like, basically what I consider paranoid conspiracy theories, that somehow the machines will take all the work, humans will have nothing to do…”

“And quite honestly, it's like fifty-fifty right now, whether or not the government's going to basically bless a cartel of a handful of companies to basically control AI for the next 30 years.”

“With respect to AI, they basically have two, basically, they essentially have a two-stage plan. So stage one is to develop AI as a means of population control within China. So to basically use AI as a technology and tool for a level of Orwellian authoritarian,…”

“An AI that's smart enough to, like, turn every atom on the planet into paperclips is not going to turn every atom on the planet into paperclips. Like, it's going to be smart enough to be able to say, why am I doing this?”

“I'm a little less convinced that the tech, software technologies we have now are, like, on some linear path towards just, like, quote, unquote, AGI, or just, quote, unquote, like, consciousness, like, I don't, It's hard for me to believe that consciousness is …”

“Technology never actually creates unemployment. Technology only ever creates jobs in that.”

“Regulating linear algebra. Like, are we really gonna regulate linear algebra, matrix multiplication, like, really, seriously? And then even if we do, are we going to possibly do it, you know, in a way that makes any sense?”

“Tesla has been climbing the ladder on self-driving car functionality capability. They do new software releases, push live to car at night anytime they want. Those new releases are not being tested by any federal, the federal, you know, it's a, whatever it's no…”

“Oh yeah, you know, they're putting in place laws that, you know, a hundred years from now, you know, the laws that are being put in place now on a lot of modern technology topics are going to look just as silly as red flag laws, but. Since nobody ever learns a…”