The Ledger, every show

“And I think that we're probably three to six months out from being able to just can businesses off to AI to run at least basic businesses like this.”

“For all tools basically all middlemen businesses are gone. And I believe fundamentally that we are all going to go to the search bar and the new search bar is ChatGPT and you're going to query it and ChatGPT will just build whatever you need or it'll hook into…”

“So if we just paused AI, we shut down all the AI labs and all we focused on was just rollout of what already exists. I think probably Between self-driving cars and AI agents, 20% of all current jobs are gone.”

“And so my belief is basically that as more and more people don't need to learn how to code and can build software, software will become more and more commoditized. There'll be way more competition and it'll be a way harder world for software businesses.”

“I think that this high salary inflation is not here to stay. I think what's happened is all these companies down in San Francisco are going, oh, crazy. We can hire cheap people in Canada, but they're not yet going, oh, hey, we can hire people in India and the …”

“And so as a test, before I started doing this in our operating businesses, I basically built a business a SaaS business, and then I've been running it entirely autonomously using OpenClaw.”

“Like support to me is not a job very, very soon.”

“My, I mean, my kind of belief is like pretty soon Anthropic and OpenAI are gonna launch like basically like CEOs. So you just be like, I'm just gonna hire a CEO for my company. Give me your data. I'll figure it out. I'll run it. I'll run the whole business.”

“I think pricing pressure is just gonna go crazy because it's like the restaurant industry. Like, you know, restaurants are not a bad business. They're bad because there's too much competition.”

“And so I think that if it was accessible to everybody in terms of, if you could just open chat GPT and say, Hey, ChatGPT, I run a business. Can you help me? And it started asking you questions and it said, oh, well, you know, you do sales. Do you want me to se…”

“And I think now people are saying people need to learn how to prompt, which I think is very true for the tool set right now, but I don't know how relevant that is in the future because I think we're still, again, in the palm trio phase. I think that the AIs wi…”

“You know, Ted is for sale right now. Maybe you should buy that. Is that for real? Yeah, it's for, I think it's public knowledge right now. They're shopping it around and he's going to give it, I think he's going to give it away to whoever is going to be the be…”

“The people that will ultimately capture a lot of this value are going to be whoever controls the devices. Because I do believe like a lot of these LLM a lot of this functionality will ultimately be implemented.”

“To be clear, I'm still saying almost all these businesses will be zeros in five years.”

“I think that within 24 to 36 months, these will be four K video people that are indistinguishable, indistinguishable from a human that you'll talk to on zoom.”

“If you actually look at the timeline, he'd already sold out of that position when he went on CNBC.”

“You're about to enter an environment where anyone with cash who has a large sum of cash is going to be able to buy a business at say a 20 or a 30% earnings yield, meaning you can buy a business and pay yourself back in two or three years, maybe five years, and…”

“I've seen companies of with a founder, who's a first time founder, With an idea and they're raising it a forty million dollar pre valuation, right?”

“The story was basically, we started productivity software called Flow. I decided to bootstrap it like Basecamp. And we had a big competitor, Asana. And Asana was run by a billionaire, the co-founder of Facebook. He raised a shitload of money. And originally I …”

“We don't want to be in a situation where we're buying a company where billions of dollars are going to flow into competing with it tomorrow. We just think that's too difficult. So that's why we like to choose industries that are sleepy, where nobody really car…”

“In terms of loss ratios, I'm not counting on having losses. We occasionally will, and we will have business failures, but they'll more look like softness and bad returns. I doubt we're going to have zeros. It's just not like a venture game. These are generally…”

“In the businesses that we own, I'm never going to let a CEO make a sink the boat decision, right? But if it's a two-way door, if it's something where, look, I think this business model idea is hokey, but they've got it in their head as the greatest idea ever. …”

“And I feel like once the context window is like 5,000,010 million, then we'll be able to run entire companies with this.”

“I've basically just accepted that I'm going to live in Claude code until somebody builds her which I'm sure is coming in the next couple of years.”

“I'm either buying like something with a moat, which is very, very hard to find certainly in technology right now home services, businesses, like very, very brick and mortar kind of stuff. But even that I think is at risk with robotics over the next 1020 years.”

“I don't think that they're going to be able to do that for too much longer because there's going to be a lot of competition that comes out. Hopefully somebody watches my video and says, I'm going to build this too, and then go crush Adapar.”

“Like at one point I said how could you optimize my taxes? And it said, oh, you have a credit line over here and you have a credit line in your company. If you use the company money to pay down the personal credit line, you can just immediately write off. Like,…”

“And so if you build an affiliate directory, they're just going to scrape that and then it'll inform the results and you'll never get your links in or credit or anything like that.”

“There's going to be a lot of. A lot of other players in that space coming out over the next probably three to six months. And that it will be, there's going to be an ecosystem of offering similar to AWS and Azure and Google cloud. I think it'll be the same thi…”

“In his annual shareholder letters, he would he would compare himself to Berkshire Hathaway. So he would track social capital's results versus Berkshire. And then one year he just stopped. And I think it was the one year that he didn't actually beat them. I thi…”

“Chris and I had dinner with Charlie Munger a couple of years ago, and we asked him how involved do you get with the CEOs? And he really said I'll never forget this. He goes, I've never been able to change someone's mind. If someone has an idea about something …”

“And so I think this is something that will go away in the longterm.”

“And so we take all the money except for 500 grand. We took 500 grand out. We took all the money and we re-bet it and we lost everything because the Fed came in and the markets rebounded.”

“But I just think right now it's all half baked and all the Protocols are all made up and won't exist in five years.”

“I think in the next 50 years, they probably won't exist.”

“We literally were like, we tweeted it out as like an afterthought and we raised it in like four hours.”

“And I'd argue you'd probably lose money today if you went out and you indexed.”

“Certainty is people will always need physical doctors and yeah, virtual will be 20%, 30%, whatever, but it's not going away.”

“And so my doing that, just going to Ted and probably spending 30 K on, on tickets for three years, I think it ended up resulting in 10 or twenty million dollars of revenue for my various businesses.”

“And like basically all of downtown Detroit, he owns like 20, 30% of.”

“And, you know, regardless of our focus on profitability, almost all of our businesses are growing their top line and their bottom line at 30 or 40% a year and doing it profitably.”

“And I realized that when you fund movies, like, 90% of the time you lose all your money. And even if you do make some money, you rarely make a good return.”

“I mean, we bootstrapped the entire business and now across all of our companies, we do almost three hundred million dollars in revenue.”

“So Serato is the largest DJ software company in the world.”

“And I'd say that it's replaced stuff that my full-time, I used to have a full-time assistant just working on email. That's all completely automated.”

“And so eventually I haven't gotten there yet, but eventually you'll be able to just have it record your entire day and then automatically go into your to-do list or whatever it is and add to-dos or send emails or whatever you need it to do.”

“If you take the normal population, about five percent of people have ADHD, but about 30% of entrepreneurs have ADHD.”

“There's tons of those, but there's going to be like a hundred of them in the app store in like two months. And then Cal AI will not be able to charge what they are.”