The Ledger, every show

“I really no longer believe in the concept of institutional reform. Like, I think fundamentally it doesn't happen or it's so rare as to, like, be basically something that you can't ever count on. I think basically progress happens by starting new things, right?”

“I mean, I guess I'm an optimist on this point. Like, I tend to think open access information basically makes a lot of these historical things, you know, fundamentally impossible. Not, you know, not necessarily, you know, not all centralized institutions get to…”

“I no longer think there are any qualified people starting tech companies that actually have bad ideas. I think all the ideas are good ideas. I think it's just a question of timing and execution.”

“So I think retail will basically be gone.”

“I think VR is going to be like a thousand times bigger.”

“And so I think the valley is actually going to become more central, not less central, even though the technologies that we're building are making it possible for the world to distribute.”

“They were basically like, they were rounding errors on everything. Like, there weren't 10, there weren't 20, there weren't a hundred, there were three or four. And there were two preconditions for them. One is, they all were offshoots of monopolies... And then…”

“This version of the thesis is, in any industry as a result of this dynamic, in the long run, the winning company in the industry will be the best software company, right?”

“Number one, today in the American economy, you actually have very low productivity growth, not very high productivity growth, which is counters against the argument that there's some level of unprecedented technological disruption that's happening, because you…”

“So there is a phenomenon in Silicon Valley where if you get accepted at Harvard and you drop out on day one, you are much more attractive.”

“If you go out 10, 20, 30 years, You know, there are behaviors that we would obviously like to discriminate against that all of a sudden we may start reclassifying as non-free will based.”

“And so I actually think I'm sort of a complete, I guess, contrarian or radical on this point, which is the problem that we have today is not too much technological innovation at all. The problem, overwhelmingly, is that we don't have enough,”

“The kicker to the whole thing is if you have, the sectors where prices are crashing by definition, right, are shrinking as a percentage of the economy, and the sectors where prices are rising are growing as a percentage of the economy, and so what's actually h…”

“I actually have reached the point where I think that all of the ideas in tech and all the ideas in Silicon Valley are good ideas. I don't think there actually are bad ideas. I mean, maybe we could pick a couple, but they actually all seem to be good ideas. The…”

“But, like, the majority of the world is the world of atoms, and in the world of atoms, he would make the claim that innovation has been comprehensively outlawed Actually, formally outlawed by the legal and regulatory and political apparatus, and then sort of c…”

“I know of exactly two Trump supporters in Silicon Valley.”

“I think in the long run, it counts as an advantage to us that the Chinese are so state directed on some of these things.”

“It's ironic that we have this guy running for president who would seriously move us backwards on a number of those topics.”

“I think the archetype slash myth of the twenty-year-old founder has been blown completely out of proportion.”

“And so, I think the critical crisis in the economy at large is not that the unicorns are overvalued. The critical crisis in the economy at large is that there aren't enough unicorns.”

“Most firms, the general partners put in their pocket, take it home and buy vineyards and yachts. In our case, it pays for all this.”

“I think there's a little bit too much in the Valley right now of the pivot. And the lean start, you know, the lean startup and the, you know, the, everything's an experiment and minimum viable product and failure is good. And kind of all these excuses to be ab…”

“I'm convinced in the future pills are all going to have chips in them. So for example, like every pill you take is going to have a biodegradable chip in it.”

“There is no substitute. The big takeaway, and this applies to everything we fund, and it's what we work on all the time, there is no substitute to the first five years of people in the office, 18 hours a day, six days a week, grinding away. And it's grinding a…”

“If you watch what Palmer Luckey does, or if you watch what, you know, Alex Karp does, or if you watch what Elon does, or if you watch what any of the great communicators do, like, that's what they're doing. You know, I'd say put Jensen in the, in that rank, yo…”

“Basically since then, my view is that, that sort of second mode of being you know, which is to, the sort of agenda-driven, you know, kind of really took over, which I think, and I think probably will never, never actually unwind.”

“Do, do, do, do, do people running for president have to go on Joe Rogan, right? And you know, up until twenty-twenty-four, the answer was absolutely not. After twenty-twenty-four, the answer is 100% they have to.”

“We're entering a golden age, which is AI is going to be a superpower that everybody on the planet's going to have access to.”

“It's like the most dramatic increase in programmer productivity in, like, ever.”

“Anthropics thread said they trace the, they trace some black male behavior to literally to the AI doomer literature that they, that, that it was in the training data.”

“The federal government is down. Estimates are as much as 400,000 workers in the federal government since Trump took office the second time.”

“If you increase marginal productivity of the worker, you don't have a diminishment of human work, you have an expansion of human work.”

“At our leading edge companies, estimates are the leading edge programmers are like 20 X more productive than they were a year ago.”

“Look, this is the fastest category of technology in the entire history of the world, right? In terms of growth rate of usage and revenue.”

“The AI native kids are going to outperform the you know, their older Luddite peers, like gigantically, titanically.”

“Whatever is the thing that we think is the thing that's going to tilt the election today, It's gonna be a hundred social media meme cycles old. Like, nobody's gonna remember anything that's happening right now. The election is gonna turn basically on, like, wh…”

“The idea that there's like whatever rhetorical combat or like that there's like this virtual environment in which there's lots of points of view and there's lots of, you know, again, both lots of truths, lots of lies. Like this is not new. In fact, this is the…”

“People, people would get canceled for things they literally never did. And for, you know, for people then imputing beliefs or, you know, some, I don't know, straight comment or misreported comment, and then it gets imputed into, you know, this person is a horr…”

“Essentially all of the remaining old media properties that don't figure out a way to adapt to the new world are gonna, you know, they're, you know, gonna get basically run by private equity and that'll be that.”

“And so now we know that it's going to sweep through coding and then we know, you know, we know that if it's going to work in coding, it's going to work in everything else, right? It's just that, cause that's like the hardest, in many ways, that's the hardest e…”

“So the way I think about it is we've had four fundamental breakthroughs in functionality, LLMs, reasoning agents and then and then now RSI and they're all actually working.”

“In the next three or four years, it's like somewhere between three or four years out, basically everything is selling out. So like the entire supply chain is, is, is, is sold out or selling out. And so there, there's no, like, we're just gonna have like chroni…”

“Between the US and China right now, there's like a dozen primary foundation model companies. Companies that are like at scale at some level of like critical mass. It's not going to be a dozen in three years, right? Like it just because these industries don't b…”

“So it turns out what we now know is an agent is the following. It's a language model. And then above that, it's a bash. It's a bash shell. So it's a Unix shell. And then the agent has access to the shell and, you know, hopefully in a sandbox, maybe in a sandbo…”

“I have Absolutely no doubt that everybody in the world is gonna have at least, you know, an agent like this, if not an entire family of agents, and we're gonna be living in a world where I think it's almost inevitable now that this is the way people are gonna …”

“We're about to go through computer security is about to go through the most dramatic change ever, which is number one, like every single latent security bug is about to be exposed. So we're going to have like the, we're set up here for like the computer securi…”

“And so this thing that was this incredibly scarce resource of high quality software is just going to become a completely fungible thing that you're just going to have as much as you want.”

“I think this is the grand unification basically of AI and crypto is what's about to happen now. I think AI is the crypto killer app, I think is where, where this is really going to come out.”