The Ledger, every show

“I was taken out with Travis because benchmark capital lost their nerve.”

“Well, they came up now because as I started to look at the contracts that had been written during the last administration for the use of AI. I had a whole, holy cow moment because there were things not well beyond what you've been hearing in the press in the l…”

“And then second, after the Maduro raid, one of the primary vendor for this had raised the question, senior exec about whether their software was used during the Maduro raid, which is one of the most successful op military, military operations of our lifetime. …”

“So that set off a series of events of, whoa, are we single-threaded on a vendor who's concerned about how we're using their software after the most successful military raid and the terms of service do not comport with the future world? We've got to get other p…”

“Your models are getting stolen by the Chinese. They're going to unguard rail them and use them against us.”

“After the Maduro raid, one of their execs called Palantir, who we buy themselves through and asked them was our software used in that raid, which is by the way, classified information.”

“He was trying to protect anthropic to his credit. He was like, don't do, don't call him a supply chain risk. That's bad for the industry. Let me, maybe I can negotiate terms that they'll find acceptable.”

“It was really the, you worry, I worried about them shutting off our system at a moment of need or them messing with our system at a moment of need. Those were, we were scared.”

“Pete Hegsus, I think, is going to be, and is already, probably the greatest Secretary of War in our lifetimes.”

“He was a diplomat. He was able to get the company public, but in terms of hiring talent, innovating, and succeeding from a financial standpoint, you know, it's not, it hasn't happened. It's a, it's an F, you know.”

“That's why I think Benchmark ultimately is going to, is, has no innovation. Forget the reputation, which most entrepreneurs, if they do their deals, will find out about, but just not innovating stuck at four hundred thirty-five million for the next 10 years is…”

“The idea that autonomous weapons were an issue was sort of, I think, more marketing than anything. Because we have our own policy before that showed up that talks about that.”

“If Lockheed Martin builds a weapon for me, and they're using, ah, a technology to help them do some of these science-oriented things, physics, aerodynamics, and so on, and the vendor has expressed an unwillingness to want that to be part of the use case, well,…”

“So these companies are talking about their things in apocalyptic terms, which make it necessary for us to judge the management teams, judge their actions, Look at the terms of service. Understand how they fit in our supply chain. This technology is like nothin…”

“I think the notion that a First Amendment claim is going to hold up is, is, would be shocking, because that means that the government has no choice to make.”

“In 90 days, I think we've had 1.2 million of the three million people at the department. Use some form of AI when that was, that number was 80,000 before I started.”

“It can't, the software, the soul, someone's soul of their model, their constitution, which is not the U S constitution. Can't be dictating our command and control environment and telling generals and war fighters what to do and not do.”

“In terms of boots on the ground, there's no scenario where we have some protracted boots on the ground, Afghanistan, Iraq too, like scenario.”

“Anthropic has its own constitution. It has its own soul. It's not the U S constitution.”

“Boeing wants to use it to build fighter jets. I can't have that because I don't trust what the outputs may be because they're so wedded to their own policy preferences.”

“And Throbic's not going to be one of them if they continue sort of with their sort of posture.”

“It's a criticism on me because it's not like Trump, President Trump dipped in and he's like, hey, Emil, by the way, those guys didn't get me any money. You can't use them anymore.”

“You called president Trump and your 5000 word essay on Friday, a wannabe dictator. You're gonna have to apologize to more people than just me.”

“Which is why Boston Dynamics didn't make as much progress as Optimist did in the AI. You know, the things that started later on robotics just worked better because they were more AI infused.”

“They were the first of the big frontier AI companies to say, we want to work at Department of Defense. They were easy to work with on the contract. We're paying 47 cents For the whole year for all of this. So they're like taking, taking a loss to make sure tha…”

“The second war in Iraq and the Afghanistan war, and there were long, expensive conflicts where the benefit to the United States, looking back on it, was negative. It wasn't even neutral, right? It cost a lot of people their lives, and Afghanistan is still, Afg…”

“And now I would argue that Brian Chesky could not have built Uber.”

“Six hundred million? Five X. Yeah, six hundred billion. We would have been Instacart. We would have had a payment system because we'd have so much share of wallet. There was so much more we would have done.”

“What's the difference between Lyft and Uber? We started at the same time. Lyft is worth six billion dollars today. That's a 20 x difference. The single difference was leadership and ambition, right? The only thing you could attribute it to, because they starte…”

“I believe he's a catastrophist. Catastrophists are one who the sky's always falling”

“I think we, instead of buying Kareem in the Middle East, Postmates, Jump Bike I think all of those will be a hundred percent write downs. Those are some of the worst acquisitions done in tech. Maybe Postmates may be the worst acquisition done tech in the last …”

“So, so, or when early stage investors Get to this point where there's just a lot of paper gains. We, there should be sort of term limits on board seats, like term limit out. If I get to, you know, a 10 X return and can get you some liquidity, then you can move…”

“We just did a RFI for space-based interceptors, which is how do you put something in space that could take something down in space.”

“And one of the examples I use Palantir and Roland, SpaceX, all had to sue the government for their first big contract, because the primes were sophisticated at selling, sophisticated at protecting their interests.”

“You could do much more, be more precise, be more specific about what you're going after, what you're defending how you know, and the precision is really what's interesting to me because if you can use AI to detect and discriminate and, by discriminate, I mean,…”

“It's, you have the same rules of engagement, the same approval system. What you now have is better aggregation and synthesis of the data that you would already use to make that decision.”

“Look what happened in Venezuela. The speed at which that execution of that operation happened meant that we didn't have any casualties on our side.”

“I worry about other countries who don't have that, using AI to take humans out of the decision-making progress. They don't trust their generals. Because of graft, because of because they don't have the expertise, and they start to use machines in place of huma…”

“I think if you think about the biggest military buildup in world history in China, and you think of it, you've seen the purge of the generals and sort of the military hierarchy there,”

“We just launched our drone dominance program, and I think there was two Ukrainian companies in it. We're gonna, like, you know, onshore manufacturing here and take some of the learnings with them here to help us with our kind of smaller drone you know scenario…”

“The image that they might have, and this is not unique to them, of the Department of War or the administration, is that we don't have the safeguards that we do, that we're not paying attention to sort of the risks. We are, if not more so than most Americans wo…”

“The provisions that were in the contracts that ultimately serve the Department of War said you can't use it for planning kinetic actions, you can't use it to develop weapon systems, so all the science, engineering, aerodynamics, all...”

“They wanted us to rewrite the law because they thought Congress was just behind. They weren't understanding that new tech allowed new capabilities, but again, it's not our mission.”

“If you fast forward from 2018 where the Google Maven thing happened to 2026, and you talk to people from Google who are involved in that, I think they regret it.”

“You have four companies that you could call frontier companies, and then you have this sort of major league baseball roster of researchers, like a thousand who they're trading amongst themselves, who, if you ask the leaders of these companies are so incredibly…”

“Google didn't want to bid on the contract. Now Google is a great partner, you know, and so I'd hope some of the newer companies would learn from what Google did, which is, you know, they didn't want to serve the government because that employee mob issues, but…”

“And so they've learned a lot of lessons and you compare that to the Chinese military. They don't have a lot of experience. In fact, the decapitation they did in the Chinese military, the one guy they took out was the one guy who had experience in Vietnam. So t…”

“They say you can't use them for, you can't use them to plan a kinetic strike. You can't use their AI model to move a satellite.”