The Ledger, every show

“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.”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“For every doc worker in the U S actually works on the doc doc, there's actually somebody sitting, there's a doc worker sitting at home doing nothing, still getting paid.”

“There were both there were other big banks that wanted to buy SVB, and there were private equity firms that wanted to buy SVB, and basically do a private sector bailout requiring no, no taxpayer involvement, and the FDIC actually blocked those also.”

“Sitting here today in 2023, the following is true. More people in the world have computers in the form of smartphones specifically and internet access than have electricity or running water in their homes.”

“The AI coding thing, you know, really hit critical mass and the world's best programmers, right? Including like Linus Torvalds, you know, for the first time over the holiday break, basically said, yeah, AI is now coding better than we can.”

“One of the things that they've found over the years is if the leader is more than one standard deviation of IQ away from The followers, it's a real problem.”

“They put out a revised financial statement the summer after they defenestrated Jack Ma, and they announced that the Jack Ma, Jack and his CFO, their voting shares had been reassigned to a set of, I think it was four unnamed other People's Republic of China cit…”

“Xiaomi is one of the big Chinese makers of smartphones. They now have a car. And it's like sort of the equivalent of a Porsche Cayenne SUV. But it's like 20,000 dollars, and it's really good.”

“In the peak years up to half of total tax receipts for the state of California come from the top thousand individual taxpayers. Which is basically all tech.”

“They did not approve a new nuclear power plant designed for 40 years.”

“Facebook got just tons of, you know, it's just like this is the most trivial, stupid, useless, you know, thing that doesn't matter, you know, Facebook, there was almost a deal for Facebook to get bought by Yahoo early on, and I remember a certain very prominen…”

“There are multiple large institutions too that have been identified in public, Stanford and Yale, that now have more administrative staff than they have students.”

“Zero new plants in 40 years.”

“What we know today is McCarthy actually underestimated the level of Soviet penetration in the U.S. Government. Just on the numbers, he underestimated it. And so his estimates, you know, topped out, I believe, in the 200, and it turned out, you know, the number…”

“Moore's law has now flipped. The dynamic now, instead of increased performance, has reduced cost. You now have this dynamic where every year, year and a half, the chip companies come out with a chip that's just as fast, but half the price.”

“So the big thing happening in the world right now is the smartphone, and the significance of the smartphone is, for the first time in human history, we're going to get a computer in everybody's hands, and by everybody, I mean everybody on the planet and by eve…”

“And this is the thing I've been talking a lot about that people occasionally get angry about, because they think it won't Can't possibly come true, but I'm convinced it's going to come true, which is I think everybody on the planet by the end of the decade is …”

“The creator of the concept of the five-year plan was, of course, Joseph Stalin. Like, it was literally the Soviet Union run as five-year plans, and actually, in, in the, between the 2019 twenties, 19 fifties, that idea actually mainstreamed itself into Western…”

“It sells, it'll sell far more copies this year than any well-reviewed novel. You know, the New York Times Book Review talks about, right?”

“The total market size in like, 1999 for internet anything was like fifty million people total max maybe.”

“He's done wildly more press questions, press conferences, press briefings in the first, you know, whatever, 70 days of his new term than, you know, the, than the previous presidents did for, you know, their entire, you know, for their entire runs.”

“There were only two venture capital funds raised in all of 2009. It was us and a new couple of ventures fund, and Benoad, of course, was one of the legends of venture capital, so he was able to do that, but we were the only other literally venture fund raised …”

“Really it's only been in the last five years when I think almost everybody, like, let's say basically everybody under the age of 70 and a very large number of people over the age of 70 basically have shifted from top down media as their main Source of informat…”

“So the extreme, I think that's right in New York, the extreme, if I recall correctly, but the extreme version was California in the year 2000. In the year 2000, the top, is it go back to the price, price, price is a lot of thing. In the year 2000 50% of tax re…”

“Both parties that we're sitting here today seem to have just let the whole idea die. And I mean, that's in two parts. Number one, just all of a sudden, nobody cares about, like, vaccines. Like, there are no calls for, like, expanded vaccine development program…”

“Starting with alignment, Adam's put three hundred and fifty million dollars of his own money into Flow Living alongside us.”

“There's basically only one known education intervention at scale that actually improves outcomes after, you know, thousands of experiments. And it's one-to-one tutoring.”

“Certainly we have too many venture capital firms, like there, we've got like 500 venture capital firms in the U.S., and certainly there aren't 500 competitors in every market”

“About fifty billion dollars going into high tech. This year alone, more than a trillion dollars will be distributed from the, from just the US's 500 biggest companies. Just the S&P 500 will distribute more than a trillion dollars of cash back to their sharehol…”

“I can tell you, and in all the studies that have been done in the last, like, 20 years, the expert systems make better diagnoses than human doctors.”

“The food supply chain in the world right now is responsible for like up to half of all carbon emissions for the current level of food output and the current kinds of food we consume.”

“I believe it's because I think commercial long haul truck drivers die of life expectancy, 10 years less than their peers.”

“For sure through the 19 nineties they actually had a full-time employee who actually hand built all their servers. Because it had been in a prior union contract that all servers to be used by the Washington Post company, or yeah, sorry, the Wall Street Journal…”

“19 fifties was at the point when you had the smallest number of countries in the history of the world. Total number of countries got down to like something like 60.”

“And I read it cover to cover and they did not have the word internet in it once.”

“If you look at the American medical system, like it's distinguished by, you know, the amount of money that goes into care in the last year. Of life, which is not, you know, the case in, in many other societies.”

“And so the Soviets developed their own egalitarian biology, which, by the way, was one of the big reasons for all the famines.”

“San Francisco last year, like, authorized, I think, 6000 new housing units, right, which is just like an absurdly low number relative to the demand for people who want to move there.”

“The term carry, which is sort of how VCs get paid, the so-called carried interest, which is like the 20 or 25% that you make of the profits that, that you share. The term carry actually was the percentage of the whale that the ship carried. It was literally ph…”

“Trucking will take 10 years off your lifespan.”

“And it actually turns out the origin of the term carried interest actually is from whalers in the 12th century is where it first originated.”

“Like, in medical research, it turns out that the diseases that affect old people there's much more funding for the cure than diseases that affect young people, because the medical research funding comes from old people who have made a lot of money who have tho…”

“I think this will be endless litigation. I think that, I think actually this is going to be a whole wave of shareholder litigation that's going to follow from this, because as far as I can tell, there may be formal, there may be legal requirements for disclosu…”