The Ledger, every show

“I actually think there's very few lessons from Ukraine that are going to be relevant in the future war, candidly.”

“The incentive systems around a lot of these things are, like, if you go to the doctor, parents, one, want these ADHD, you know, Want, want, want these diagnoses. And the reason the parents want them is because it gives you extra time, it gives you extra resour…”

“There was one platform that stood up and said, hey, we are protecting free speech. And that was Substack.”

“Everything has come down the cost curve, like televisions are less expensive, everything is less expensive in consumer land, except for healthcare, except for housing, and except for education. And it's really because technology has not touched those sectors, …”

“Private equity and venture capital as a category could not be more different from what they are doing. Venture capital is creating new things from nothing, and it is creating more jobs, it is Pouring money into companies so that they can grow, expand, and solv…”

“I'm always amazed at investors who mock other investors for paying up for companies, and I think there's far more shame in losing on price than winning on price, and no one really wants to say that”

“And we've seen sort of that current that was really in existence under the former Soviet Union move to what we call democratic countries. But instead of that being influenced from kind of the state, it's been influenced from companies and from other people and…”

“Sort of this transparency that we were all looking forward to over the last decade to make things just much more elucidated to us, and I think what we're seeing is that actually that transparency breeds a lot of mistrust. These institutions only have their pow…”

“I would argue that it's the most consequential moment in terms of Elon buying Twitter, kind of, you know, displacing the trust and safety team there and kind of, you know, changing, I would say, the kind of nature of free speech for a lot of the country with t…”

“And so I think anything to do with offensive space both on the software side and the hardware side, we're very excited about.”

“China has been supplying both sides of that war. When you look at sort of the drone warfare that is, that has come out of the trenches for the last three years, You know, China is a supplier in the same way that Russia is a supplier to its own side, but that m…”

“It is by far the best Vietnam War film ever made and of course it incorporates every Vietnam War film ever made, including Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket you know, once or Born on the Fourth of July, Apocalypse Now, the best Vietnam War film ever made is Tropi…”

“This year we haven't made a single American dynamism investment in San Francisco.”

“These companies usually become holding companies pretty quickly and attract all of the talent. There's finite talent around things like aerospace. There's finite talent around things like defense. So you don't see as many competitors. And as I said, they are h…”

“Silicon Valley is the most peculiar place in the world, because it's the only place where incentives are aligned with that sort of positive sum mentality. Whereas in places like DC, no one ever turns down talking to the press because it's information trading. …”

“I think if we do our jobs right and we invest in the companies that we're intending to invest in and we tell the story, right? I think every venture capital firm will have an American dynamism practice.”

“And to me, that was some of the most liberating advice that I had received, because this field is so mimetic, and so many young people start out their careers wanting to impress other investors, and they're desperate to get into the hot deals because other peo…”

“And I think the biggest thing that I'm predicting will happen in the next 10 years to founders is that if you plan on being a successful founder, you are going to have a target on your back. It doesn't matter whether you are building a defense company or wheth…”

“The broader thesis that I have is that we are watching this incredible global decline of institutional trust, and it's not just media, it's the U.S. Government, it's Brexit, it's university education, the Catholic Church, it's any institution that used to hold…”

“You get amazing companies like Substack and Patreon and other creator-led companies that allow the creator to make more money than they could in these bloated institutions.”

“So I do think you can see a shift even at the top, even at the Washington Post and the New York Times, where people will opt out of those premier institutions because they value the freedom to monetize their following. And they also value the freedom to say wh…”

“There's a lot of regulation abroad around digital safety and misinformation that's in some ways becoming the petri dish for lobbying groups and organizations in America to bring that here.”

“There's now good research, actually, there's a study that came out maybe a month ago that showed that the only thing that's really moved the needle from a policy perspective on the birth rate Is actually work from home. It's like the one policy where if you ar…”

“I think that the future war, the infrastructure that we already have in low-earth orbit will be exceptionally important and we have to figure out ways to protect what we're building in low Earth orbit in particular.”

“Every time I talk to people on the ground and ask them, what's the most important piece of technology that you use, they all said Starlink.”

“If you have an exquisite system that was hundreds of millions of dollars, and it can be taken out with a thousand dollar drone that changes the economics of war, and it particularly changes the economics of a war of mass.”

“And it's very hard to understand the customer if you've never served, if you've never worked inside of government.”

“Are we going in gruesome violence with no purpose, which I would argue Tarantino's always misunderstood in that way?”

“Instead they were met with, these are the most evil, they're, you know, they're taken by the devil, right? Like they were met with fear. And to Mark's point, like that set off serial killers, like it gave power to this extraordinary evil for decades.”

“It is the best Hollywood film ever made, even in the fact that they were able to successfully sway the Oscars.”

“I upload every single medical diagnostic, every blood report, everything to ChatGPT, and it gives me a ton of data. That the doctors don't have time to give me.”

“Boredom's actually good. Like a lot of our life is pretty boring. Like it is important to learn how to work in big systems. Like it is important to kind of realize that, like, not everyone's gonna, like, entertain your weird rabbit hole. And so, there is somet…”

“Where we are today would not be, like, we would not be where we are today without Substack.”

“Like, I think there's this horrible meme, like we have, we're, podcasts are over, we have too much content, there's too much online, and it's like, actually, it's the opposite. If you look at any of the For You feeds, I mean, most of it is now AI slot.”

“For decades, it was very taboo to say you were building only for one country. Tech was by its nature global.”

“If there's an executive department in Washington that exists to regulate or oversee an industry, that is likely American dynamism.”

“It was more of a surprise for the people in Silicon Valley, many of whom who still had funds that were operating in China. It was more of a surprise for them. And now I don't think it's a surprise for anyone. I think everyone's gets the thesis and is, is on bo…”

“The real fundamental reason why we built a fund and a practice is because these companies sell in very different ways than all of the other companies in our portfolio.”

“I often say D.C. Got what we were doing a lot earlier than the people in Silicon Valley, but now it's just sort of an obvious thing.”

“They were very wary of companies that had to go through the long procurement cycle to work with government, and so there was sort of this meme in Silicon Valley that you can't build a big government business, and if we've seen anything over the last 10 years t…”

“Software is a revolution that is completely touching every aspect of society, but the people who are building the best forms of software are not going into government.”

“The sort of similarity of what I saw in my colleagues and what I did is it's like trying to get at the forefront of cultural shifts, even if you don't know what they mean, just trying to see, okay, are these like these weird movements that are happening in soc…”

“The kind of biggest trend in media, and I can talk about another one of our investments, Substack, which I think has sort of benefited from this trend, is that people are now brands. They are identities. And the individual journalist is ultimately more powerfu…”

“And so I think the big takeaway from my thinking there is that, you know, he was the first person to tell me that investing is much more like a multiplayer strategy game than it is like any other asset class.”

“There are very few companies, and particularly in 2017, when Andrew was founded, there wasn't anyone in Silicon Valley building a new defense contractor that wanted to compete with Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.”

“And so I very much believe that we've entered a time where it's very difficult to say what you believe, and that's why these narrow communities and these, you know, whether it's a Substack newsletter or whether it's a signal channel where you can talk to a sma…”

“Same thing with creating new defense companies like Andrel. For 30 years, the government has not been able to figure out how do we build new technology and how do we incentivize Silicon Valley to work with us, and Andrel has figured out how to align the incent…”

“I've always said that I think the social network had probably the greatest influence of the twenty-tens in terms of being a defining movie of what technology means.”