The Ledger, every show

“I actually believe YouTube is more important to Google than web search if they're thinking about it properly, but that's an acquired asset.”

“I think you can trace almost Every major problem that we have in the world today to the fact that capitalism has a very short term outlook. So it maximizes for what is good today, not what is great 10 years from now.”

“Whether it's awful things, in my opinion, like say, you know, Marxist communism or Bitcoin, it always goes through this world.”

“And I think this will always be the case. They will try to always fix this, but it will always be the case that Google will be amazing at services because ads requires a service business model, and Apple will be amazing at kind of user experience and hardware.…”

“You could kind of view the written word as a temporary blip, actually, in human communication, where we did not have a way to transmit the spoken and seen words of people globally. So what we did is we minified everything. We compressed everything to this form…”

“Jordan Peterson is, you can imagine the world basically has, YouTube is a massive fuzzer where people are trying every possible permutation in terms of communication style, oration, content language, and what emerges is the best and the most addictive and the …”

“I firmly believe that for every Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, or Elon Musk, there are thousands more that never fully bloom, that never fully blossom, and become their fully realized version of themselves”

“I think we will. I think Silicon Valley has managed to produce significantly harder innovations than fixing housing, but I think that's the ticket to becoming the home for things like cryptocurrency and longevity, because ultimately people need to be able to a…”

“It is less likely that Airbnb would have been created had Michael Seibel not recruited the founders to Y Combinator, introduced them to Paul Graham, the program had been set up in place, the investment been available, demo day being available”

“Second is for the platform companies, I do think there's a less obvious but likely business model as well. Less obvious because unlike the database analogy I provided, it's not immediately clear that there'll be An Oracle or a MySQL, that is to say, a company …”

“The thing that's scarce today are people who are kind of micro influencers to others Giving them positive feedback and catalyzing this loop that ends up creating everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Elon Musk to, you know, Ramanujan or Albert Einstein.”

“What led to my success wasn't really my intellect, ambition, or talent. It was really luck. I just happened to bump into someone who knew someone who, you know, knew our first engineer. I, you know, one of our Major investors literally overheard me pitching at…”

“I think it's much more leverage to work on creating a planet that has 10 X the amount of people working on, you know flying cars or global warming or curfew. On the meta layer of the problem. And due to the amount of luck involved, I actually believe the world…”

“I actually think companies more often than not tend to be over data driven because it's the easiest way to kill the conversation is to say, let's just A-B AB test both options. And that gets them stuck in a local maximum.”

“Doing one thing Apple was, is legendary at, which is saying, let's, let's take a break from the current metrics. And let's just try to envision some type of blue sky idea. Let's not even collect data about how it's going to be. Let's use our intuition and tast…”

“So, so the core Google unit, I think, will not be able to reinvent kind of the next ad model because of traditional innovators dilemma”

“YouTube is proactive and Google is reactive. So when you go to Google, you come with an intent, and they have to satisfy that intent. I mean, since they made this fix in 2012, where they tweak the algorithm a little bit, we can talk about that in a minute. You…”

“While I was at Apple, this was before the whole Cambridge Analytica Facebook debacle I noticed this very strong organizational tilt towards privacy, towards customer and user privacy. And I gotta tell you, I was in the room, I was a little bit of the devil her…”

“Unless you have the founding team, maybe the founder involved, you're not going to be successful there.”

“Many people talk about the length of books and the fact that the content is repetitive and books should be shorter. That way people would read more, but I actually think the potency of it is that it's long and the narrative is repeated over and over and over a…”

“I always demanded Myself to finish books, and I actually heard Bill Gates actually say something similar recently. He always finishes a book. I could not think of worse advice. I think the main goal is to be reading a lot and if you find that yourself caught i…”

“I actually think fiction has a more potent effect on your mind that's just a little bit harder to track in terms of how you think, mental models, how you kind of view the world.”

“All actors are locally rational, even terrible ones like Adolf Hitler. So it made sense to them what they were doing at the time, and it's an easy thing to just call them evil, but I think the more interesting and important thing, if you really want to suppres…”

“Gmail is a product suited for communication, but ultimately when you open up a session of Gmail, there are like things you want to accomplish. and I do not think Gmail works for you to accomplish that goal. I think it works to accomplish the organizational im…”

“Happiness to me is flow. I actually think the thing all humans are seeking in life, and this is kind of a weird way to say it, because we usually use different words. You know, we usually use words like meaning, fulfillment, but I think it's flow.”

“Because fundamentally what we want to do is we want to build something that has the real benefits of the Ivy League, which is not, in my opinion, the curriculum. It is the community and the network.”

“I do think religion is an incredibly potent tool. I think it can be used like everything that's powerful. And I think it basically gets people playing an infinite game”

“Currently, the way you kind of look at the world today, there is yet to be an independent entity that you could really say is an AI company, or I think a better framework for this only exists because of the kind of latest and greatest machine learning technolo…”

“And there certainly are startups that are working on autonomy, literally with cameras and deep learning alone without the help of LIDAR.”

“I think that there are going to be business models of taking AI and applying it to a vertical in the same way that you could literally take the advent of the database and apply it to a vertical. You know, software eats the world. Is a quote I think originally …”

“The most interesting thing to me is when kind of looking at people that are hyper successful is not trying to kind of reverse engineer, you know, their current daily patterns or what they currently do day to day. And it's not even to reverse engineer how they …”

“I think we as humans are quite terrible at reverse engineering the neural net in our head. Much like it's actually quite hard within modern machine learning techniques for you to figure out that that individual thing you fed the neural net led to that specific…”

“The trick to basically becoming more lucky, and there was a cool study about this a while ago, is you can actually increase your odds of luck in the world. You know, you don't even really need pioneer. You just have to do this interesting, hard, psychologicall…”

“So in, in many ways, I think the cultural differences between Google and Apple or Facebook and Apple are just emerging properties of an ads driven business model versus we sell you shrink wrapped, you know, pieces of hardware business model.”

“It's in many ways in, in scarcity where, where you build culture. It's not in an era of plenty. And one of the most challenging things I think for Google and Facebook's culture is, you know, they really stuck a toothpick into the sand and had a massive oil wel…”

“Can organizations break away from the kind of capitalistic imperative? I guess I observed one example of it. But it really requires, I think it requires a very strong leader, like incredibly emotionally strong and A sense of plenty. Like, I don't think this wo…”

“I think the whole crew that saw the company nearly go bankrupt has that same sense of like, it's fine if we have to rebuild everything from scratch.”

“Probably the most important thing is the ability to distance your thought patterns and your emotions from your actions... But it's the idea that you can kind of play the game of life in kind of third person as opposed to first. That is incredibly important.”

“Ultimately, you're kind of a game designer as a manager and as a leader, and you want to design the best game that both aligns company incentives and employees desires. And the real way to understand people is kind of through this deeper substrate level where …”

“The games are a very interesting way to reinforce tribal bonds because games are simulations, right? So the outcomes are not catastrophic or fatal. If you're losing Quidditch, it's not like, you know, you die. So it's a helpful way to kind of embellish tribal …”

“It would not surprise me if the outcome of this research was, there was kind of the seed moment and then the catalyst moment, and those are actually distinct. There could be many months, weeks, or days, or, Would surprise me if there were hours in between.”

“Economic productivity in the United States and innovation in the United States has slowed down from just below two percent to below a percent over the course of the past few decades.”

“Our dream one day is to be able to hand out grants to a million people, and we just need to figure out a way where we can create the capital to do that.”

“And it was the closest thing to trying an iPhone for the first time. It was that level of experience. And I hadn't had that in almost a decade.”

“AI today is a little bit like that kind of big data trend everyone talked about in 2005 and six, where it's changing the world in a bunch of different ways that I'll detail in a moment. But it's not really living up to, I think, all the hype, and that's probab…”

“I also think that we are very, very bad as a species at predicting when things that are the far end of research are about to become a commodity.”

“Because when something really big happens with, say, reinforcement learning, which is an area mostly attributed to research today, it's going to happen really quickly.”

“We launched this thing called YCAI, which is an experiment, and it's a really, it's our first vertical of YC that's dedicated to AI”