The Ledger, every show

“They said, look, AI, AI is one of these technology, AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They actually said flat out to us, don't start, don't do AI startups. Like, don't fund…”

“They actually said flat out to us, don't start, don't do AI startups. Like, don't fund AI startups. Let's not, Something that we're going to allow to happen. They're not going to be allowed to exist. There's no point. They basically said AI is going to be a ga…”

“They literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community, and, like, entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed and that if we decide we need to, we're go…”

“Both the universities and the corporate employers are literally, this is true, they're literally, they literally import Africans so that they don't have to hire African Americans because they still count as black.”

“Both the universities and the corporate employers are literally, this is true. They're literally, they literally import Africans so that they don't have to hire African Americans. Because they still count as black.”

“Quite honestly, I mean, part of what's happening is big tech is against us. There, there's a, there's basically a lot of the political issues now are a civil war inside the tech industry where, The big tech companies are lobbying very aggressively for what the…”

“Vinod has been lobbying to ban open source AI. And by the way, he denies that he's been doing this, but I saw him with my own eyes when the US Congressional China Committee came to Stanford I was in the meeting where he was with, you know, 30 20 or 30 congress…”

“I actually think warfare is going to get a lot safer. Like, I think, actually, automated warfare would be much, much safer.”

“All these, like, you know, crime policy reform, defund the police things, and that causes these massive crime waves, and then, of course, low-income and minority people get hit hardest by that”

“I think AI is the exact, I think it's already that way. I think it's going to be exactly the same way. It might even be greater than that. It might be 99.9999% of the value of AI is going to accrue to the users, not to the companies that make the AI.”

“And now they all have the silver bullet excuse, right? Ah, it's AI. Right, and I know this for a fact, because number one, I talk to them, but number two, I know this for a fact, because AI until, like, literally until, like, December, right, was not actually …”

“They told us that explicitly. And yeah. And they told us exactly what you just said. They told us they're gonna ban open source. And when we challenged them on the ability to ban open source, because it's, you know, we're talking about, you know, math, you kno…”

“Like, the general purpose robotics Thing is going to happen, and it's going to happen in the next decade, and it's going to happen at giant scale, and I think there's a plausible argument, which Elon also believes, that robotics is going to be the biggest indu…”

“These human robots, like the general purpose robotics thing is going to happen, and it's going to happen in the next decade, and it's going to happen at giant scale, and I think there's a plausible argument, which Elon also believes, that robotics is going to …”

“The doomers you know, the sort of doomers, the EA people, the sort of billionaire dark, dark shadowy money billionaires sort of playing, playing, playing in the, in, in this area trying to do various kind of nefarious things you know, had actually infiltrated …”

“DJI is the most widely used drone today by many, many large, you know, American customers, including the United States Department of Defense. Right. The DOD's primary drone supplier is DJI.”

“And then number two, venture capital just ends. It's just over. Like firms like ours just like don't exist.”

“The SPLC specifically played a dominant role in the debanking and censorship and cancellation programs of the last 15 years.”

“I think it's entirely possible that we're sitting here in 10 years, you know, in 20 years or whatever, and like the, you know, the job of coder is gone, but you have this just, you know, extraordinary number of builders running around.”

“Europe is, is going to run the opposite, you know, test, which is they're going to try to prevent all this from happening, and again, I think the data's already in there which is they're, you know, they're, they've been falling very badly behind economically, …”

“The fact that political violence is like an all-time low in Western society is something that people really don't talk about.”

“And so basically if you get paid or if you get like special dispensation in school for having, you know, psychological issues, all of a sudden you see a massive spike in those psychological issues. The countries that don't have that, the other Western countrie…”

“We know that there's dark money in AI. Like a lot of the AI doomerism stuff is basically bought and paid for.”

“The current models are getting better faster at such a rate that if you are running an NVIDIA, if you're running an NVIDIA inference chip today that's three years old, you're making more money on it today than you did three years ago. Because the pace of impro…”

“The agent hiring the people, which of course is going to happen, right? It's obviously going to happen.”

“Like I kind of think in 10 years, like I'm not sure, yeah, like I'm not sure there will even be a salient concept of a programming language in the way that we understand it today.”

“How are we going to apply AI in education? The answer is we're not because it's a literal government monopoly. It is never going to change the end, and there is nothing to do. By the way, you can create an entirely new school system. Like that's the one thing …”

“The tech industry is more centralized in Silicon Valley than it has been in its entire existence, and I think it's AI.”

“If you're a television producer or if you're a news editor or whatever, like you can't possibly move your organization fast enough to stay ahead of these cycles. And so what you end up doing is you end up chasing them. And that's, and basically the role of mai…”

“All of the sort of legacy venture firms at that point, they were all like that. They were all just like tribes of lone wolves. And then the thing that we knew that was not publicly known was, generally speaking, inside the firms, they didn't even like each oth…”

“We actually need AI to work because we're going to need, you know, we're going to need machines to do all the jobs that we're not going to have people to do. Because we're literally going to depopulate, we're going to depopulate the planet over the next hundre…”

“Even if AI, like, triples the pace of economic change in the economy, it's going to just translate to, like, a much higher rate of economic growth is going to transfer, translate to a much higher rate of job growth. And, you know, there, there'll be some level…”

“I think Substack could be, like, a thousand times the size of the existing, like, content industry, whatever you want to call it, media news industry the, Collective, you know, kind of value.”

“My new version of this, my, the new test I think is happening is what we might call the GPT test, which is, okay, if what somebody says is indistinguishable from chat GPT output, like not going to make it. Right. And then the more advanced version of the test …”

“He went out and actually got a former director, ah, actually, he got, ah, a guy who had actually been in the Obama administration, as basically the head of border, the head of the border security in the Obama administration, to basically come in and give an ho…”

“Emotionally I want to like hold out hope that there is, you know, still something special. About human creativity, and I certainly believe that, and I very much want to believe that, but I don't know, when I use these things, I'm like, wow, they seem to be awf…”

“There are sitting United States politicians in, in serious offices who like literally faked Vietnam War records.”

“Einstein was the exact opposite of a moral exemplar. Einstein was Stalinist. Like, Einstein was, like, a full-on, like, Einstein was pro-Stolic, like, not even just pro-communist, was actually, like, pro-Stalin, and Einstein thought, but, like, American democr…”

“The movies that are greenlit today, right, are not gonna come out, you know, until, like, whatever, 20, yeah, it's like, twenty-twenty-seven, twenty-twenty-eight soonest, and so we, so we're in this, like, liminal period, or this interstitial period, where for…”

“The employment shifts everybody's worried about are actually not going to happen at anywhere near the velocity people think because it's like, you know, a significant, significant percentage of jobs in the US literally are, you know, licensed or unionized or c…”

“One of the things that we, that was discovered during that process that I didn't know is that in prior union agreements with the dock workers, they already had a one-to-one ratio of people sitting at home doing nothing to every productive dock worker as a cons…”

“If you don't do this, you're living in a world of Chinese robots everywhere.”

“We chose to de-industrialize through a set of explicit policy choices, you know, not, not least of which is You know, we made a lot of industrial activity illegal over time.”

“The partisanship is actually holding up the reputation of institutions that otherwise, where their ratings would, their trust ratings would literally go to zero which I think is probably what happens in the fullness of time.”

“I think the result of it was, I think it was a result of 80,000 dollars of ad spend by the Russians in, in the relevant period of the election. It was like a total of like a 140,000, but during the actual run of the election, it was 80,000 dollars, and so the …”

“It turned out that the method that was supposedly used by the Russians slash, you know, the Trump campaign to do the mind control, you know, basically like that, that method, I mean, we now know basically it never worked. Like it, the whole psych, psych, psych…”

“Crypto, you know, became incredibly politicized, and the government, US government basically launched a full-on war against it, tried to kill it.”

“And I at least believe the 21st century is basically going to be another version of that, and it so happens that we're back in a bipolar world, and we have the US and the Communist Party of China which is sort of, you know, USSR two point oh, and they have a m…”