The Ledger, every show

“I don't think they think they're writing software. I think they're midwifing a deity here, and I don't know which one I'm more afraid of, the regulatory capture or the second theory I call the Dr. Frankenstein theory.”

“I think the odds that, that, you know, The US with two, you know, proprietary models can stay ahead of China with 10 open source ones is very low.”

“But the thing people may not realize is the managers of the VC group at the large endowments have no incentive to try and right size this number. In fact, many of them are bonused on paper marks. And so, if anything, they have the reverse incentives to get the…”

“You have the new kind of VC-backed defense companies who all, and maybe I kind of put Palantir in that group, but they all I think have an incentive To kind of have tension with China, if you will. It actually increases revenue. I call them the new neocons.”

“I think the policy of American, of the American government to try and keep China out of the AI game is futile. I've always felt that way. I don't think it'll work. In this case, I actually think it backfired.”

“They've gone back through, and looked at excess deaths at a number of different countries, and lockdowns achieved nothing.”

“At least for the cohorts that are old enough, the churn's about 65% annually, so they're only 35% retaining, which Sachs had hinted at on All In, and maybe the reason that I think Sam at one point said he didn't really see the twenty-dollar thing as his future…”

“I think the thing, you know, that could cut against that, if the regulation gets extremely difficult and mundane and expensive, that could actually lead to more oligopoly. And I think some of the players know that and are begging for regulation.”

“Because it's more intense, everyone's chosen to go open source, and that creates a system that, in my mind, is capable of innovating far faster Then the competitive system we have here.”

“Having spent a ton of time in China over the past 20 years, it's hard for me to adopt this mindset of vilification that's heavy amongst many in Washington and now many in Silicon Valley.”

“I think it is insanely unfair to the companies the way they're forced to go through this process where The bankers pick the price and pick the shareholders. There's just no need to do that.”

“And precisely because of regulatory capture, the banks have kept our government from doing that. They've, the government wanted to, they have something called FedNow, but there's massive pushback in the finance committee in Washington, so it never happens.”

“They score you, but they score you with a black box. They don't tell you how they score you. Right. And guess how you can learn more. You hire them. So they get paid on both sides, and it's just, it's more of a heist, I think, than anything else.”

“The Tesla case is a great example that, that package, that type of package that they did for Elon, I've said this, you know, publicly, I would agree to that type of package for every company I've ever worked with, and most CEOs wouldn't take it. It basically s…”

“One thing that would be really great is if they just wouldn't vote because then the people that are active shareholders would have More of a say in what happens with these companies, but there's, they own such a large percentage.”

“Same, same exact conclusion, which is rest of the world ends up running on Chinese models. If they're able to succeed at what you just said.”

“No one's funding more lobbyists begging for AI regulation than Anthropic themselves.”

“I would just say, you know, a 17 year patent is way too far. Like, we need to dial it back. I think that we will innovate faster without it.”

“And then you hear this idea, oh, you know, the Chinese are just copycats. They're not innovators. It's just not true. Like, it's just flat out not true.”

“Uber started in the dingiest, you know, smallest of offices like most startups do, and I already talked about how determined Travis was. He's one of the smartest people I've ever met. He's one of the hardest working people I've ever met, and I don't think the …”

“I said then, and I still believe now, the biggest threat to the U.S. Let's call it AI hegemony is, is the Chinese open source models, and the developers even in the US that are working on their own are using those, and you can see that on all the tables that a…”

“It started with the original, from my perspective, with the original Microsoft open AI deal where credits go in as A in kind investment. And then those credits are used back against, you know, Azure and Microsoft cloud services. And in the, in that case, you k…”

“I would suggest that what we might be seeing is the exact result of everyone copying the Yale model. You know, Howard Marks famously said, you make a lot of money when you do something non-consensus and accurate. But what if everyone copies David Swenson? What…”

“If we move to a world where, you know, the answer to getting the everyday consumer into high growth tech is to put their, you know, endowments, for one case, IRAs into, you know, these venture funds that are charging two and 20. I just think there's more obfus…”

“All of the problems we talked about that created the zombie unicorns. We're just rerunning that. Like there was this maybe part of not living through a correction, but like we're funding these AI companies, the exact way we funded those companies.”

“One, another negative element of all the systems issues that we're talking about is the firms that, that, that beg their way onto the cap chart by writing a. Three hundred million dollar check or whatever. They differentiate themselves by being the best friend…”

“I think it's actually the highest profile companies that are at risk because they're the ones that, you know, an activist judge is going to want to make an exception out of.”

“One of the key reasons so many companies have super voting is so that these two companies can't tell them what to do”

“Once you invest in something, you just start to adopt the mouthpiece for it and make a lot of arguments that are central to that company's success. And I think that's happening now that we have a large number of VCs in the military space.”

“In the 20 cases where you have this super high multiplier 55% of the cases are just two of the judges, and there's something else that, that I learned in reading this, which I didn't know, but the chancellor who is one of the two, gets to pick who the cases ar…”

“I read this, and I think, you know, any company that I'm involved with, I'm gonna encourage to leave because this is radically different Then why I was told we were supposed to go to Delaware.”

“And I've said, you know, for a long time, the number one thing we could do would be to open up our border for skilled immigration from China as wide as we possibly can.”

“If you're gonna sell something in a 120 countries around the world and try and tell one country they can't have it. There's no effing way that's gonna work. Like, and especially these goods have digital attributes.”

“I think there's zero chance that you're going to stop China or somehow like I even, I use the phrase increase the gap.”

“But any one of these decisions, and certainly the combination of them, could lead to escalation. It could go as far as leading to a hot war.”

“Almost everyone in the AI space that I see with a microphone in front of them says, The US has to win the AI war. I don't know what that means. And if I guess as to what it means, I don't think it's possible. And so. It's an infinite game, and no one that I ta…”

“I see a very similar vein in AI, where people, especially people that believe in AGI and ASI and magical AI, think that it's just gonna explode, and then whoever controls this uncontrollable force will control the globe. In a zero-sum way. And I just, I don't …”

“Protecting the U.S. By trying to somehow injure or disable or hinder a competitor that's in a different country in the long run will make us weaker. I believe that fundamentally.”

“I think your friends at open AI added to that last week by putting out an anti deep seek paper that I thought was quite sad. Like if a company like GM or Ford were to put out a paper like that about BYD, we would look at them and go, oh, you just want the gove…”

“I've been concerned that the way an LLM works and the way it's optimized that building bigger clusters and more parameters won't buy you much. Right. Whether I've said it or not, Ilya said it, Andreessen said it, other people said the same thing, and so to m…”

“But I think if you, I think I can imagine that if you just poke China enough, if you keep poking and you keep poking and you keep raising the constraints, you increase the odds that they make a run at Taiwan.”

“I don't think blocking ASML or blocking AI technology or blocking anything is working. It's just not working”

“Tariffs and protectionism will only protect American industry for a very short window. It's actually going to deny them the competition they need to get their together.”

“Anthropic and their investors like Eric Schmidt have been some of the people that have been encouraging, you know, more and more AI oversight and AI regulation and trying to make it such that open source AI would not be legal.”

“His name is now being floated as a potential head of the NIH, and I couldn't, I can't think of a better candidate, and I'm so hopeful that, that he ends up in that role.”

“And by the way, you talk, if 80% of the zombie corns are never going to get out or are going to get out at reduced prices, I'm telling you flat out, those are being held on the large endowments, you know, as LPs at unrealistically high prices across the board.”

“And if you want to go build this next generation level three plant, I think you've got to rewrite the regulation from zero ground up, like make it, Thinner and tighter. And two, I think we've gotten to the point where we got to say this is so important you can…”

“The leaders with their closed source AI models are spending more money than any startups ever spent. You know, in lobbying efforts, and they're drafting the language that ends up in the EU doctrine”