The Ledger, every show

“Some of the most important things that we should be allocating attention to don't have prices associated with them, and cannot have prices associated with them, and so as a result, we cannot be relying on the market mechanism to guide our attention. We have to…”

“And I said the best time to have been in crypto was January, 2009. And that was when the Bitcoin network launched. And the second best time is January of 2023.”

“Because it puts the burden on others to talk you out of it instead of, like, trying to get smarter yourself.”

“We can't be creating the money and giving it to banks. We have to create the money and give it to people.”

“Like you could have a flat tax rate. Every dollar is taxed the same way, by the way, independent where it comes from. I would tax every dollar. You get a dollar, whether it's from interest rate, capital gains, work, whatever, just you get a dollar, you pay tax…”

“The basic income, which is the idea of everybody getting enough money to be able to cover basic needs such as food, clothing, shelter I believe is what's necessary to make people free economic actors in the labor market, and I think that's essential for innova…”

“And one of the criticisms that people raise is, well, who will do these sort of dirty jobs? And I think the answer to that is it means that the price that has to get paid for somebody to say clean bathrooms will go up. And that's a good thing because when the …”

“The constraining factor on humanity isn't how much physical capital there is. We can do amazing things. I mean, look at Germany. Germany just built a whole bunch of LNG terminals in, like, a few months, right? These are projects that people were like, oh, this…”

“And Susan, my wife and I have been long-term advocates for universal basic income. We are funding a universal basic income trial in the city of Hudson in the state of New York. And we've contributed to other universal basic income campaigns and trials.”

“I mean, I thought it was a very, very bad precedent for Trudeau to freeze the accounts of the truckers during the sort of trucker demonstration.”

“I think it'll be a blip in the long term, and it'll be a blip, you know, much like, you know, web van imploding, or a flooz.com, or whatever, you know, pick your favorite .com, you know, thing that imploded.”

“Yeah, no, I mean, look, I mean, that's tough noogies for you, but you're still one of the world's richest people, and you still could basically give any debt provider an out, and you could still basically just take a bunch of your wealth and sort of say, look,…”

“As long as I am basically reduced to, like, my thumbs and the sort of wetware between my ears while somebody else on the other end is operating millions of servers, that's just the wrong balance of power.”

“If you have raised at a high valuation, you, and you have a lot of money in the bank, you have to get a cash flow positive. It's the only safe place. Literally the only safe place is cash flow positive.”

“We'll see all sorts of structure and pay to play and everything else, but we'll also just see some businesses just blow up and people will be like, you know what, I've got better things to do.”

“By not hogging the economics.”

“Digital technology is exactly like those two prior changes. It shifts the binding constraint and the binding constraint is no longer physical capital, but it is attention. Like what are humans paying attention to?”

“And the reason it's not true is because the market-based system for it to work, it needs prices. And the most important things that we could allocate attention to don't have prices, and more importantly, cannot have prices. There is no system that you could co…”

“I just think that we need to move to what's called whole reserve banking from fractional reserve banking.”

“And there is literally no evidence to support that. All the evidence from all the basic income trials that have ever been run are that people like, wow, I can take better care of myself. I can invest in education. I can take better care of my family. Of my fri…”

“I think, you know, we've seen less innovation than we would probably like in the search space. I think we're seeing less innovation than we might like in the social space. And that's one of the effects of having A incumbent that has very, enjoys very strong ne…”

“One is we could, by law, require companies to have proper APIs and the other would simply be to empower end users more to construct their own APIs, and at the moment, however, most of the laws run the other way, which is if you're trying to hack together your …”

“My primary phone is, is not an Apple phone because I think that the idea that I could have a supercomputer in my pocket that's connected to the entire world through the internet, and in order to install software on it, I really have to go through a single comp…”

“But in crypto, it feels like there's a lot of opportunities, a lot of building, there's a lot of things and this new cycle, you know, feels like the beginning of that, it feels very similarly to me, where we are in crypto today, feels very similar to me where …”

“I think it's politicians misreading where we are and trying to keep us in the industrial, trying to fix the industrial age that is going to make this transition bad.”

“We have a new wave of climate movements that are much more determined than the old ones were that are much more working in kind of a civil disobedience mode. And that's much more historically speaking, much more likely to lead to success.”

“Because it forces discipline. Like if you raise one big fund, you can be less disciplined than if you have three vehicles where you have a very specific thesis for each vehicle. And each time you can ask yourself, does this fit with the thesis? Or am I just, y…”

“And I believe that climate will be that kind of thing. It'll go from something where politicians feel, oh, I can't really talk about it. There's not enough voters. I'm not going to get elected and so forth. I think it's going to go from that to something where…”

“Yeah, I mean, look, if you live in a dollar denominated country, it probably wasn't a very good hedge, but There are many other countries where there's an amazing hedge, right? So, like, I mean, there are other countries that, whose currencies have, you know, …”

“It's because central banks aren't these entirely benevolent, above-it-all policymakers. Cantillon wrote about this in, like, the 1700, that when you print money, basically the people who are closer to the money benefit more. Closer to the money meaning people …”

“Because the blue checkmark, it completely confounded two things. It confounded the identity thing with the importance thing, and the importance thing, I think, was complete BS, always. Like who's supposed to say who's important, who's not important. It should …”

“I don't feel different about TikTok than I feel about Twitter or Facebook for that matter. These systems need to become programmable. If they're not programmable, we're being programmed by them.”

“I've been doing this for nearly 30 years, and I've done, like, three downrounds in that entire time period. Downrounds are incredibly hard to pull off.”

“I think the people where the very first thing that they ever did became a monster success I think that's really warps you.”

“Mind you, we have terrible infrastructure problems in the US, but it's not because there is a lack of machinery somehow. It's because there's a lack of political will to invest in infrastructure.”

“Anything you can do in an app, you need to be able to do programmatically. Anything I can do in the Twitter app, I need to be able to do through a program. Anything I can do in the Facebook app, I need to be able to do through a program.”

“This will shift the power balance substantially. But it has to be a regulatory act because as you rightly point out that act is going to potentially destroy some of the market value of these companies. And so the companies aren't going to do this by themselves…”

“That combination of those three factors, intrinsic motivation plus reputation plus price, is a improvement extraordinarily powerful, and the amount of progress that's been made in math is mind-blowing. And I think we can use that same system in many other area…”

“I very much think that we need to move away from sort of praying at the altar of GDP. It's just become a kind of a measure that is, is completely outdated now that so much of what we can do with digital technology is explicitly about making things either free …”

“Well, I don't, it doesn't matter whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, you should fight for UBI instead of fighting for minimum wage.”

“You have zero work incentive because you start working, you lose all your welfare, but you only make a little bit of money. So the taxes that you effectively face, people who are on welfare today often face tax rates that are above a hundred percent. So like i…”

“The idea that in principle, you could fund a, the development of a protocol through selling some of its currency that is, Then integral to the running, to the integral to the operation of the protocol I think is a really fascinating idea. And I think it will b…”

“These sort of frothiness in the installation phase is good from a social perspective, because it means that A lot of capital is allocated very rapidly to a sector, and then subsequently you can build interesting things on top of that.”

“In that regard, it's very positive that in the Oracle versus Google lawsuit about the definition of Java it was made pretty clear that the API wasn't as protectable as Oracle claimed it was. And it's a good thing because as we've seen, you know, Google re-impl…”

“And now I think we can automate a lot of, not just industrial production, but also a lot of services whether that's shopping services or insurance services or transportation services. We can now automate those and that will free us up to participate more in kn…”

“I think the biggest challenge to getting to basic income is purely a intellectual and cultural challenge that has to do with Having constructed a system for over a hundred years or so, or several generations that, you know, has a specific perception of how the…”

“No, absolutely. We will never run out of things to do. We'll never run out of things that we will pursue passionately, but that's very different from being able to get paid for it.”

“On mobile, it's a lot less clear, because on mobile, you're downloading these apps that are controlled by the companies, and you're downloading them onto a phone, where nominally you control the But because you don't control the apps, you're really, by buying …”