The Ledger, every show

“Kids should be having kids when they're in their teens. That's when they're supposed to have them. And you could argue that maybe there's a reason to stretch it out a little bit, but if we're just talking about Physical ability and depth of well of energy. You…”

“And the result of this is that today, in almost every war game that the United States simulates against China or their proxies, the United States, ah, if we don't lose, certainly end up in a very, very bad situation.”

“Apple's got 95% of their manufacturing in China. They agreed to invest. They've invested hundreds of billions of dollars in manufacturing capacity there. They've agreed to invest a further two hundred and seventy five billion dollars in Chinese manufacturing i…”

“The US military is well behind the Chinese People's Liberation Army in the implementation of artificial intelligence.”

“There's a lot of companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere who look at those employees who are ideologically opposed to working with the military and they use them as a smokescreen Pretending that it's principled opposition that drives their decision. When in …”

“For example, one of the things that we're doing is rather than working with the intelligence community only under court order to kind of go and, you know, respond to when they think there's crime going on on the platform, we're preemptively going out there and…”

“We're saying, you know what, we're an American company, we're an American bank that supports American companies. And we will comply with US law, but we will not comply with spurious rulings from people who have no real jurisdiction or authority over us.”

“Back in the Oculus days, when we sold the company to Meta, one of the first things that happened was New York Stock Exchange emailed our contact info, email, and they asked if I would come and ring the bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Sounds pretty cool, r…”

“My current working theory is that they come from the past. So. Interesting. Ok. Coming from the future is too hard. The physics just don't seem to work out.”

“Once you have a family, you have a sort of fiduciary duty to your family to maximize their quality of life. There's no life hack that says that you're allowed to degrade the quality of your child's childhood because daddy wanted to have that grind set mindset,…”

“Who would have bet that eight years later, that Microsoft contract, that twenty-two billion dollar contract vehicle for the architecture of the Army's AR future would move over to Anduril, that we would be launching something like Eagle Eye”

“They basically botched their hardware launch, they botched their software launch, but most importantly, they over-promised. I think Magic Leap was at its best when they were non-specifically hyping themselves up, but then when they started to say, we're buildi…”

“Optically transparent AR is a path that has been so widely explored, I think it's a dead end, it's a great hack in the near term, because it gives you Real world fidelity in terms of focus and convergence and resolution of the real world. But I think it's a de…”

“And if we had been in a better place, not just the United States, but our partners, I think that things would, I think things would be very different in Ukraine. They would be very different in Taiwan. Maybe they'd even be different in Hong Kong.”

“Are we playing God with AI? Maybe a little bit but I actually wish we were playing God more. I wish we were just straight up, you know, hauling other species up into sentience. Let's, like, humans have done pretty well. Let's bring some other guys along for th…”

“There's more AI in a John Deere tractor than there is in any system that the U.S. DOD is fielding.”

“I could give a whole talk on how the executives of Silicon Valley used the vocal minority of their rank and file as a smoke screen for their dependence on China, but that's a different talk for a different day.”

“Tens of thousands of engineers across our entire country that are not working on defense currently are going to have to ask themselves if there are more important things in their careers than building photo filters or doing ad optimization.”

“Those companies have a strong incentive to lobby for and perpetuate laws that Incarcerate people for the longest period of time for the least serious crime. In other words, they don't want murderers and terrorists. They want nonviolent drug offenders who will …”

“The New York times posted a quote for me that I literally never said. And I told them like, Hey, you said that I said this, I never said that. They said, well, it's more or less what you said. We don't think the meeting is different.”

“And so for that reason, I think this is a little contrarian and not everyone agrees, but I think that the odds of a tactical nuclear weapon are very high. It will not be used on the United States. It will not be used on a NATO ally. It'll probably be a tactica…”

“And Jason, like many influential people, some of them even in this room, who have treated me like shit for years, suddenly changed their tune as soon as Andrew was on the upswing.”

“Jason and the people like him are the reason I was fired from my, from Oculus, my own company.”

“As you know, these things are very complex, but more or less, yes. I mean, there's a direct causal line from that to me being put on leave to me not being allowed to come back and then pushed out.”

“My advice to founders who are on the right has actually been, don't be public about your political leanings, because you won't accomplish anything. You will just, you will be terminated by the mob. You should focus on building, you should focus on creating val…”

“The companies that are doing defense work are totally incompetent when it comes to machine learning, AI, computer vision, and the companies that are good at those things refuse to work with DOD.”

“There's all these people at DOD who have this job, basically their job is to generate things that look real enough to make a press release, or to do a panel, or to release a video, or to talk to Congress, and none of it is actually real, or useful, or deployab…”

“If you can make something that allows for more precision strike, less collateral damage, I think it'd be morally reprehensible to refuse to do it, to try and keep your own hands.”

“In the defense space, because of the way the incentives work, where most contractors are paid kind of on a time and materials basis, they're incentivized to do the same work over and over again. They're basically incentivized to throw away everything they've d…”

“I would bet that upwards of 90% of Silicon Valley is very supportive of the military, and the perception that it's not is a symptom of another problem, which is that a very small group of radicals have managed to hijack the narrative and convince everyone that…”

“If China wanted to have a good blue water Navy, they would be kicking our butts. They are so much better at building things at large scale quickly than we are.”

“Probably, but I think most of the forward looking companies that would value that network effect, that one in particular see, see, see that in the next few years, probably all banks are going to be forced to adopt this to be competitive.”

“We decided that we needed to get our own charter because of the type of bank we were going to try to run. And the ability to have the buck stop with us. The moment that you're dependent on somebody else for the key infrastructure, the key risk management, the …”

“The biggest beneficiaries of vibe coding are going to be the hardware nerds like me. It's going to be the shape rotators not the word cells. Everyone's focused on, on, on, on how the word cells are going to be wiped out by AI, but for the shape rotators, it's …”

“That's what Apple Vision Pro is. It was never intended to be a product of the times. It's a product of the future hauled into the present by spending enormous amounts of money.”

“So we were competing against Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and in the end, Andrel beat all of them.”

“The biggest problem with optical camouflage, and the main reason you don't see a lot of money being put towards it in the modern defense base is it's not actually that useful. It's useful against human adversaries who do not have any other technology to aid th…”

“China's hundreds of times ahead of it. Hundreds of times more capacity than us.”

“I think that that is a model that is going to be a big deal here in the United States, and I think it's also going to be a big deal in allied nations that similarly have a lot of their own existing industrial capacity. You know, you don't necessarily have to b…”

“We were competing against Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and in the end, Andrew beat all of them, which was really really gratifying to, you know, go from starting this company to going toe to toe with the guys who are legends of the fighter commun…”

“Building drones that are invisible to the human eye at the ranges that you're using them, it's not just like a hypothetical. Andrew did this in like, 2019, 20 20.”

“The point is, visible spectrum optic camouflage is actually quite easy, but something like this would be trivially easily seen By you know, an infrared camera, thermal camera, you know, lidar, radar. So the biggest problem with optical camouflage, and the main…”

“So that's my bet is basically given that there's been a lot more time before now than now. Just probabilistically speaking, I think it's likely these things have been around for a very long time.”

“People think that starting a company or taking a break from school is this very high risk move when you're young. They say, oh, how do you find the bravery to do that? What I need to, what I try to push on people is it will never get better. Like when you are …”

“They're now anti-tech anti-tech media coverage. But back when tech news was about tech and not anti-tech, you know, they were covering all of these things”

“In the early days of Oculus, we were very clear with developers. So our business relations, we are not Nintendo. We are not going to compete with you and basically destroy your sales by preferentially treating our own developers better, our own studios. So we …”

“The technological path to VR displays being better than 99% of people's home viewing environments is a single digit year problem. It's not decades. It's within 10 years, certainly.”

“If SVB would not have been bailed out by the government in, in, in, You know, like, it wasn't just, like, the government's obligations. They were bailing out well beyond FDIC limits. If they wouldn't have done that, it probably would have wiped out half the te…”