The Ledger, every show

“There was a group of very powerful staffers in the Biden administration, about half a dozen people who kind of controlled AI policy. And the interesting thing is none of them have ever worked in Silicon Valley.”

“I have no doubt that if the Democrats were still in office, we would be in an escalatory spiral right now with the destination being World War III.”

“And if you look at what the people of Crimea want, and there's been a lot of Western polling on this, there's been man on the street interviews by NBC, the people of Crimea by something like over 80% say they want to be part of Russia.”

“So my point is that it's militarily impossible to retake Crimea. The people of Crimea don't want Ukraine to retake it. They want to be part of Russia, and yet Zelensky cannot give this up.”

“They cancel elections, they cancel freedom of the press, they cancel freedom of religion. Zelensky's political opponents, their assets have been seized, they've been in prison.”

“And now basically every country in the world, except for China, Is coming to Washington seeking to negotiate a new trade deal for the United States on better terms for the US.”

“You have crazy leftists firebombing Tesla dealerships painting swastikas on Tesla cars, accosting Tesla drivers. Okay. Creating violence and chaos and trying to depress Tesla sales.”

“And so, if we hobble ourselves with unnecessary regulations, if we make it more difficult for our AI companies to compete, that doesn't mean that China's gonna follow suit and copy us. They're gonna take advantage of that fact, and they're gonna win.”

“Every left-wing organization in the world seems to be getting paid by this slush fund at USAID, which disburses about fifty billion a year.”

“Crypto companies would tell me they would go see the SEC. The SEC would tell them nothing about what the rules were, but they would have enforcement people in those meetings just writing down everything they would say. And the next day they would get sent a We…”

“You add up the cost of a compute cluster with 50,000 plus hoppers, and it's going to be over a billion dollars. So this idea that you've got this scrappy company that did it for only six million, just not true. They have a substantial compute cluster that they…”

“The members of this working group are going to be, there's me, there's the head of the SEC, the secretary of the treasury, and all the agencies and departments that have an interest in crypto. So we formed this working group. I'm actually chairing it, or I wil…”

“If you actually listen to what the Russians have said, there's only been two red lines. The first red line was they said they would not accept NATO expanding to Ukraine, and they proved their seriousness on that issue by invading Ukraine in February of 2022. T…”

“I think my contention would be that the real reason they're paying all this massive advertising is not to influence consumers, but to influence the coverage that they get.”

“Look, I have no evidence of this whatsoever, but the action in the betting markets and the narrative they were trying to create in the media do line up. So if somebody was going to investigate election manipulation, this is what they should look into.”

“If those people stay in control, I think that the Republicans could have an electoral majority as far as the eye can see.”

“If you look back now over the last 10 years, it's clear that he's the transformational figure In American politics. It's not Barack Obama with all due respect. It's Trump.”

“The FBI had their own tool called teleport, which would allow them to transmit secret instructions to the trust and safety team at Twitter.”

“I think we're at the tail end of this being a salient issue in American politics. I think Trump has ended it as a federal issue, and it's now going state by state, and in most of those states, the pro-choice forces are winning. I think this issue is over, and …”

“There's no question that just as a factual matter, this episode was suppressed in YouTube search.”

“That's a pretty simple explanation for why the Google search results are horribly biased in one direction.”

“All the data is basically pointing one direction, which is a Trump victory.”

“I just don't think your typical community wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard, and I don't think it matters that much if it's a small modular one either.”

“I think it's still a good thing to be looking at breaking up Google. I actually think that would be good. At the end of the day, it might even be good for shareholders. This thing should be probably three separate companies like we've talked about in our previ…”

“And I think that this idea that it's somehow a propaganda tool around, you know, programming our youth, I think that's a moral panic that's been exaggerated.”

“The mainstream media lies so much, that's what's creating the distrust.”

“He wanted to send in the National Guard to Minnesota. It was actually Waltz who rejected the National Guard.”

“Something like 10, over ten million migrants have entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration.”

“We could have agreed to a deal in the first month. The Biden administration shot that down. That is why we have the war going in Ukraine.”

“You're making it into a for-profit. You're giving everyone shares, but the guy who puts in the original seed capital doesn't get anything. That's ridiculous.”

“I think that Ukraine within, it could be in the next month. It could be the next two months. It could be the next six months. I think they're eventually going to collapse. They're getting close to being combat incapable.”

“And if you look at like, for example, ABC news, 100% of the coverage by ABC news is positive. Whereas something like 93% of their coverage on Trump is negative.”

“The real influence operation in this country is by the mainstream media. They're the ones who are spreading disinformation about the war in Ukraine and so many other issues on a scale that dwarfs what any of these, like, Handful of podcasters that most people …”

“I've long held the view that if you want to make online platforms liable as publishers for every piece of user generated content, then you're going to have very little free speech left. Cause I just think that corporate risk aversion is going to force these gu…”

“Putin just came out today and announced his endorsement of Kamala Harris.”

“She's gonna say whatever is necessary to win the election, but you're a fool and kidding yourself if you think you're gonna get something really different after the election. You're gonna get a continuation of the Biden, Harris, Elizabeth Warren economic progr…”

“Counterintuitive, but I think he is the moderate within the Republican Party. He's a moderate on abortion. I know, Jake, how you're still bitter about that extreme court case. However, he's been very, very clear that he will not support national abortion ban. …”

“She wants, and her campaign has confirmed, she wants a 44% capital gains tax. She wants a 25% unrealized gains tax. These are things that I think the vast majority of Silicon Valley considers to be disastrous for the startup ecosystem.”

“In the wake of January six, Merrick Garland's Justice Department did an analysis of whether Trump could be prosecuted for incitement, whether he incited that mob, and the legal memo came back, and they said, no, we don't have a case here. It does not meet the …”

“The economy is a little bit shaky, and it's being propped up by massive amounts of government spending, like we talked about on a previous episode. We're running unsustainably high levels of deficit and debt. We're running, what, two trillion dollar a year def…”

“I mean, I think probably Virginia Tech is better than Harvard. And the reason is because they're less infected with the whole woke DEI ideology that now pervades these like top schools.”

“The media's coverage of the Harris campaign was 84% positive, whereas the coverage of the Trump campaign was 89% negative.”

“What causes inflation is the printing of too much money. It's government spending too much. It is not corporate greed because corporate greed is a constant. It's not price gouging.”

“Elizabeth Warren And Bernie Sanders are now the thought leaders and really the beating heart of the Democrat party. I think what's happened is the Republican party has moved to right-wing populism and the Democrats in response to that have concluded that they …”

“Our workshopping this issue has pretty much convinced me that it should be four companies. Search, advertising, YouTube, and Android, because I think Android could be a standalone business because of the value of the search default.”

“You can design your career that way, but that is not a career that's going to enable you to either run a company as a CEO or be a founder of a startup or be on a track to one day being a founder or a CEO.”

“If you look at job creation over the last four years, there's been no net new job creation for native-born Americans. All the job creation has been foreign-born or-”

“The fact of the matter is the vast, vast majority, well over 90% of the employees at Google are liberal Democrats, and the Google search does rely on manual actions, and the people performing those actions are, again, overwhelmingly from one side of the politi…”