The Ledger, every show

“I think that Elon and Sam Altman lie, right? I think they say things they know to not be true, to Get people to do things. Right. And like, go on like with them. I just believe that from what I've seen, like, I think they're both way too smart to believe what …”

“The main fear is that a novel virus is, you know, invented, and then crispered, and we have serious problems. Which will definitely happen.”

“I think it's very cynical for these companies to even try to switch the field of play from business to politics, right? Like, I think that's a very cynical, anti-American thing to do, to be like, okay, we're not going to play and compete in capitalism in a fai…”

“I'd actually argue the average person in Silicon Valley is not as smart as like the average person in New York finance, right? They're not the best marketers. They're not the best at anything. The advantage in Silicon Valley was actually knowing how to write t…”

“Well, I think the most successful information warfare mimetic war right now is actually being won by, like, the pro-Palestinian crowd.”

“Parents of small children that is generally a bad idea. Not always, but generally a bad idea to back parents of small children.”

“I actually think that venture capitalists are probably the least sophisticated financiers, like on the planet. They just have hope, right? Like it's the only hopeful version of finance, right? Because it is like, you know, you're basically investing in people …”

“I think the answer is almost none of them, and I think AI is a terrible business.”

“And like, at some point people are going to start killing themselves and each other because of AIs.”

“I think I saw this thing about Tim O'Reilly saying like, it's pretty obvious that like they stole all the proprietary information from Safari and like their books to like build it. And it's like, it's total. I'm sure it's true. We all know that they stole ever…”

“Whenever SoftBank buys, you sell. Right. Like they are the worst investors in the history of the world. Right. And so it's just like, I've watched them crush so many companies by over capitalizing them by get, they're like, you know, they, it's hilarious. I lo…”

“Like, I think the reality is like VR and like immersive experiences and all other realities are kind of great if your life sucks, right? Because then you're like, I'm gonna like live in a video game. But like, I think a lot of the problem with that type of stu…”

“I didn't rug anything.”

“Probably the worst investors in history. We've lost so much money in valuable companies because of SoftBank.”

“Because men have nothing to lose and are worthless, and therefore are very high beta, right? Like, it's just like, you just get more, like, the dumbest people in the world are men, and some of the smartest are. The highest risk takers are men. Guess what? It t…”

“Yes, Google has not had a high performance culture Like ever.”

“So like this idea that it's work from home, Google invented the low work engineer culture.”

“Guys, I've been saying OpenAI zero the entire time. And I'm gonna keep saying it.”

“And so if you're someone like me, who's in the camp of this is a great disruptive Business technology, and zero dollars will accrue to startups, and they're all going bankrupt. I am now a zealot for no fucking way, right?”

“You have the media business talent, which with a few exceptions, I have to say that because there are some people I like, they're bees, right? They're not very talented.”

“I don't think the AI, I think the AI revolution is fake. We all know this.”

“I think Solana flips Ethereum.”

“Those number twos are always expendable. They have to be.”

“There really are two use cases. One is Dave's point, which is summarization, and the other is Brisk's case, which is data theft, right, and data laundering. Like, I agree those are the only use cases”

“Because I, if you're coming to me for help, my view is you're almost by definition, or you're saying, I need help or whatever I want help. I think you're a weak founder.”

“Most of like the line engineers and people who just kind of like, you know, show up in nine to five and crunch out small projects. They're just not that valuable and you're better off cutting them rather than doing whatever you possibly can to retain them.”

“When you get down to a lower level, because you can no longer have on-off APIs, because everything is scriptable, because these things can script any interface and interact anyway, as long as you have data sovereignty, meaning like it's your data, they're all …”

“Oh, no, to be clear, they're definitely stealing all my data as we go. There's no question about that.”

“So the story I've heard, and someone can correct me in comments, I'm sure someone will, is that when he started Salesforce, it was billed as like this cloud CRM. And this platform, but it was total bullshit. He basically went to a bunch of people and sold them…”

“What matters is that no lead is secure. And projections don't mean anything, right? And so I think that's the real story is it's too easy to switch. Leads don't matter. It's going to be impossible to financially price any of this stuff.”

“AI is globally liquid with no borders and is easy to transport. So you're going to get the lowest cost provider. There's no money to make.”

“Like SpaceX is a meme. It's a great meme. It's an awesome meme. Like, SpaceX, like Moderna, has every ability to pop out headlines that people are going to go nuts for. But, you know, it isn't that dissimilar from a GME, not in that they don't do amazing thing…”

“Historically, if you were an IQ 100 person and worked hard, you'd do fine. If you had a shovel, then it was like, oh, just go to school, and you'll do fine, because there was so much demand for, like, intellectual jobs. Those stories have run out on the capita…”

“The reason this never happens is because big fancy investors, not us lowly seed investors, but big fancy ones, have no interest in the write down, right? It's a massive write down, right, for them. And they'd rather just stick it on their books and pretend lik…”

“These things have big enterprise contracts. They're going to like milk those. They're going to Like, hack the CS, the customer support teams to zero because they can consolidate it.”

“He bailed out his XAI people. He bailed out his Twitter people. He bailed everyone out, right? So Elon gets to be the guy who makes everyone money, and if you're a SpaceX shareholder, you're like, whatever, you kind of got robbed on a few things, but number bi…”

“I think what it is, honestly, is, like, all of these people have Oppenheimer complexes and think they're working on the Manhattan Project, right?”

“This is, all you know from this is that OpenAI is struggling on revenue growth. It's like, this is the AI move, is if you're struggling on revenue growth, you have to announce a security breach that sounds scary to support your stock price. Very simple.”

“And what's gonna happen from conquest perspective, digital conquest, will be, like, a bunch of these countries will try that. It will go badly. Shit will start breaking. They'll be like, oh, shit, we need, like, the Americans. We need the, we need someone to c…”

“This isn't a technical commentary, but from like a business and economics perspective, I think all the big labs are fucked.”

“If they had gone public like a normal company a bajillion years ago, they could have been a truly important general generational company because they could have used the currency to buy everyone.”

“But, like, you taking any action as a single country does nothing, right? Like, and all it does is protect certain companies, right? And their market caps.”

“This is, the business is multiplying large numbers. It's globally liquid. There's no natural barrier to it. It's not even, energy is more barriers than this because it's hard to ship energy, not hard to ship multiplication output. Same, on top of that, there's…”

“He's not a real company like Google or Open or Meta or someone who actually five percent is meaningful, and he's not even winning the pure AI race. It's an anthropic is.”

“But it is also, like, one of those things where, like, the only way we do this is for distressed situations. It's crazy for us to not do this, so they're distressed. They're distressed.”

“Sam Altman trying to give five percent of the government to the government for regulatory capture and all this politics is so bad, right? Because all of a sudden it makes the game not a fair and open game that at least you can play with rules. It becomes a gam…”

“Like, I honestly don't care, which means these companies are all fucked.”

“I think the new line might be, love it or hate it, he's the best financier of our generation.”