The Ledger, every show

“In the case of AI, it's really been overplayed by incentive bias, you know, motivated reasoning by the companies who are ahead and they want to pull up the ladder behind them.”

“I'm going to get in a lot of trouble for this, but I don't think we know how to build AGI”

“If we have a kinetic conflict right now, and we don't have good drone supply chain internally in the US, We're probably going to lose because those things are autonomous bullets. That's the future of all warfare.”

“I think if you trained on the open web, your model should be open source.”

“I think the New York Times content is worthless to an LLM, but that's a different story.”

“So there's only one of two stable solutions. Either you pay the copyright holders, which I actually think doesn't work, And the reason is because someone in China will crawl it, and they just dump the weights, right? So they can just crawl and dump the compres…”

“Nobody reaches enlightenment or internal happiness or does serious internal work in group settings. It is a very lonely kind of task. And so to some extent, I think that people who are constantly looking for social affirmation in their internal work, aren't th…”

“Macroeconomics is a combination of voodoo complex systems and politics. And you can find macroeconomists to take every side of every argument. So I think that discipline, because it doesn't make falsifiable predictions, which is the hallmark of science, becaus…”

“I think it's religion for nerds. You know, it's got all the same characteristics. It's unfalsifiable until it happens. It basically says the chosen ones will be saved. The world's gonna end. You know, we will be immortal. It's very hard to tell apart from a Ex…”

“We are no closer to creating a general AI. I think that we were 20 years ago.”

“And the Sand Hill Road investors stopped doing this, and even though they called themselves As being in a series A business, they really aren't probably in a series B or the series C.”

“I think drones are going to replace every single weapon system on the planet. They're going to replace Everything from aircraft carriers to airplanes, to infantrymen, soldiers. Once drones get small enough and effective enough, no other form of character will …”

“I want to take on more technical risk and less market risk. This is the classic VC learning, right? Which is you want to build something that if people Get it. If you can deliver it, you know, people will want it. And it's just hard to build as opposed to you …”

“My rules are, they gotta do one hour of math or programming, plus two hours of reading every single day. And the moment they've done that, they're free creatures.”

“The problem is that the nature of training these models is highly centralized. They benefit from supercomputer clustered compute. So it's not clear how any decentralized model can compete.”

“I'm not scared of AI. I'm scared of what a very small number of people who control AI do to the rest of us for our own good, because that's how it always works.”

“So I think that legal high skill immigration with room and time for assimilation makes sense. You want to have a brain drain on the best and brightest coming to the freest country in the world to build technology and to help civilization move forward.”

“Economic power and military power is downstream of technology. In fact, even culture is downstream of technology.”

“You could even argue deep seek. Part of the reason why we lost that is because a bunch of those kids, they studied in the US, but then we sent them back home.”

“I think we will see job creation by AI that will be as fast or faster than job destruction.”

“They sent us back the best open source model when our guys were staying closed source for safety reasons.”

“If this all ends up in the control of one company, They're actually going to be slower to innovate than if there's a dynamic system, and that dynamic system by its nature will be open.”

“Almost all technology has network effects underneath, and so even if you are open, you're still going to win, and you're still going to control all the most of it.”

“If you look at it today, probably the largest defense contractor in the world is DJI. They got all the drones. Even in Ukraine, both sides are getting all their drone parts from DJI. Now they're getting it through different supply chains and so on, but Ukraini…”

“There are entire sites like Stack Overflow and WikiHow that are basically disappeared now because you can just swallow them all up and you can just spit it all back out in ChatGPT with slight changes.”

“I probably read one to two hours a day which, and that puts me in the top point. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, one percent. I think that alone accounts for any material success that I've had in my life and the intelligence that I might have”

“The reality is life is a single player game. You're born alone. You're going to die alone. All your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. And you're gone three generations. Nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It's all single pla…”

“I think that's why the smartest and most successful people I know started out as losers. If you view yourself as a loser, as someone who has been cast out by society and has no role in normal society, then you will do your own thing, and you're much more likel…”

“I would rather, my system is, I want to see 10,000 companies, and I want to pick 500 that have a shot of being huge, and then I want the option to double down on the five winners. I don't want to just look at a hundred companies and pick 10 that I think are wi…”

“The smartest people can explain things to a child, and if you can't explain it to a child, then you don't know it.”

“Generally, at least in the tech business in Silicon Valley, great people have great outcomes. You just have to be patient. Every person that I met at the beginning of my career, 20 years ago, where I looked at it and said, wow, that guy or that gal is super ca…”

“The moment a fund is managing more than 10 or twenty million dollars in capital, it's unlikely that it's purely in the seed business. It's at least bleeding into the series A business.”

“If you look at the, probably the single most successful venture investor in on the planet right now is Y Combinator, and they have an incredibly broad portfolio, thousands upon thousands of companies, but they're very, very early.”

“Venture is a bundle of advice, control, and money, and good entrepreneurs unbundle those things and kind of purchase what they need at market rates.”

“So I would rather take a low valuation and keep control in terms of board control and control of protective provisions, rather than vice versa, just maximize the valuation, but give up control.”

“So VCs get paid really well because they're selling a commodity at its core, and that commodity is money. So they have to add on advice and brand, and those advice and brand become really important.”

“And as part of that, what's happening is that brands are unbundling. They're unbundling from the firm level to the individual level.”

“If you look at how Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are going to play out, they'll probably do away with a lot of the extraneous financial infrastructure that we have.”

“I don't believe in five year plans or grand master strategic visions because I think the world just changes too quickly these days.”

“I'd love to see venture capitalists provide an SLA, a service level agreement, put their principles and values directly online, concretely, talk about control versus not control, what valuations that they offer, et cetera. I'd like them to sell and price their…”

“I think a lot of the protocol level innovation is moving away from venture backed startups and moving into blockchain based protocols.”

“Investor to me is a side job. It's a hobby.”

“David Deutsch, I think, is basically the smartest living human.”

“A lot of these jobs that we're talking about disappearing are actually paperwork jobs. They're paperwork shuffling.”

“And the United States is very lucky in that it's very autarkic. We have all the resources, we have all the supplies, we can be upstream of everybody with all the energy. To the extent we're importing any energy, that is a choice we made. That is not because fu…”

“In terms of falling asleep, I don't think it's really about whether you look at your phone or not, believe it or not. I think it's about what you're doing on your phone. If you're doing anything that is cognitively stressful or getting your mind to spin, then …”

“All the pressure and all the anger that all the mega movement is doing against the left is pointless. It's all about keeping the right wing in line.”

“It makes us, that's why I'm doing a hardware company now. It makes me want to do something useful with my life. You know, Elon always makes me question, am I doing something useful enough with my life? It's why I don't want to be an investor.”