The Ledger, every show

“You know, cause the alternative, you could say Theodore Hall was essentially tyranny by tech bro. You know, he decided global policy and it had huge consequences. On the other end, there's a true deep commitment to democracy, even when it feels uncomfortable.”

“There is a counterfactual world where General Atomics had a consumer subsidiary called DJI, and the consumer drone market was entirely owned by the US, and it provided for economic prosperity for America, and wrote us down the price production curve that we co…”

“We don't collect data. We don't have any data.”

“I think at the limit, it's actually kind of indefensible to have A perspective other than lawful use, because if you are salami slicing the policy, that's actually tyranny by tech bro. You know, a small number of people are constraining the maneuver space of a…”

“Certainly we see it against Palantir where there, there's CCP money flowing to organizations that are protesting us for various domestic issues here.”

“Maybe world war three is already started and 10 years from now, we'll look back and be able to perceive that.”

“For the CCP, it's not enough for China to prosper. America must fall. That's an explicit part of the strategy.”

“We have frog boiled our way to a place where we've lost deterrence.”

“Part of the potential pathology from the labs is that they have filled that hole with AGI. And so there are things that they assert as empirical that are actually articles of faith. They may be true. They may not be true. I don't know, but they get confused be…”

“This is one way in which I think the Chinese do have a little bit of an advantage, which is first of all, just to be clear, I'd bet on us, you know, a hundred times out of a hundred, but they're, they have a pragmatic approach. Like the whole point of AG of AI…”

“Part of the challenge with China is it's not enough for the CCP to prosper. America must also fall.”

“I think the traditional college degree is, is dead, and, ah, we should be betting on the American worker.”

“I think it is the single biggest change that could prepare us to avoid world war three here.”

“So I think this idea of cost plus is just disastrous for innovation. You know, there's no leverage in your business. It robs founders and entrepreneurs of the necessary incentive to invest ahead of the curve in the things that we're going to need.”

“I think empirically, we lost deterrence, and we lost deterrence about a decade ago.”

“A lot of that breaks the conventional thinking in the Pentagon, where you want to, like, lock in your design, And then just go build these things. And I think some of that is just an opioid. It's a desire to avoid pain, the complexity of making changes.”

“I think they'll get a lot of the compute for sure. And that's, and I should say, I think the value is going to accrue in those two directions, infrastructure and app layer, and that the models are going to be squeezed.”

“Every death since 1949 from communism, which is the year the Soviets got the bomb, you could say that Blood is at least partially on Theodore Hall's hands.”

“We've had autonomous weapons since the seventies and eighties. You know, you think about, like, the Aegis system that defends a carrier when it senses an incoming threat coming at the speed of a missile, it's firing off to protect the ship, and you don't have …”

“So I would posit that this is more of a difference of degree than kind. And because we're miscategorizing it as a total difference of kind, we kind of have some deranged conversations around it.”

“We're listening too much to the inventors of AI. I know that's appealing. They're geniuses. They're smart. We need to be listening to the frontline factory workers who are using AI saying, wow, I was able to add a third shift. I was able to hire more workers. …”

“I think the thing that most people don't understand about this is it is an unstable equilibrium. So if you were going to pursue a strategy like this, it actually requires a dictator to sit between these two organizations to manage that tension, to make sure it…”

“The lesson of Ukraine is that we went through 10 years of production and 10 weeks of fighting.”

“What we got wrong to summarize it would be we thought the stockpile was the deterrent. It's not the stockpile. It's the ability to generate the stockpile.”

“Because if you try to fix the system, you're going to lose. You're going to get bogged down in trench warfare. And, you know, I think you got to fix it through inspiration.”

“I don't buy the idea that these sorts of robotic weapons are going to somehow mean that humans don't have to do the fighting. You certainly want the robots to draw first blood, you want them to serve as a deterrent, but the will of the nation to actually win a…”

“You can't keep shooting two million dollar interceptors at 20,000 dollar drones and have that math work very long.”

“Just like and I interviewed Trey in my new book on this, like, just like venture, there's gonna be a power law here.”

“Famously we had to sue our customer just For the right to compete.”

“Starship heavy reuse will be under 20 bucks a kilogram”

“I actually, you know, in this case, it was weaponized against one of my favorite heretics and heroes, Colonel Drew Cukor, who invented Maven, the founder of Maven, really. But, you know, people would file complaints claiming that he was hiding illegal immigran…”

“In the last year, more has changed in the department than I've seen change in the prior 19 years, and people are seizing that moment for reformation.”

“The competition has always been the services competing. It's been competition inside of government that drove innovation, not competition from industry.”

“The Department of War is a monopsony. The nature of the monopsony is it forgets It starts imposing all sorts of constraints on its suppliers and how they behave and what they need to look like. And that led to, it's like putting, we put all of these companies …”

“So I was proud to join the army with three other colleagues. So we have Bob McGrew, chief, former chief research officer at open AI Boz, the CTO of Meta and Andrew Weill, the former chief product officer of open AI, head of science now.”

“The most compelling AI applications I'm seeing across commercial or, you know, so private sector or public sector are being built by these green suitors.”

“The platforms that are already focused on alpha are going to continue to have an advantage. It's like actually gonna be a wind that fills their sail up.”

“On the other side, the stuff that's all beta is really gonna struggle. And you can almost argue, like, maybe the beta wasn't that valuable to begin with.”

“What I see happening empirically is the models are being commoditized and we're always under pressure.”

“So our theory has always been the value is going to accrue in two places at the chips layer and at the AI infrastructure layer, what we would call ontology. But those two layers I think are going to be pretty defensible.”

“We used to think Wuxi was just some cheap set of pipetting arms for contract pharmaceutical research, and now, 50% of all clinical trials are being done in China.”

“Today, when we listen to the AI doomerism, we're listening to the inventors who are incredibly smart, but just like their creations, they have their own jagged intelligence. You know, just because they were smart at building the model doesn't mean they're goin…”

“Europe has created exactly zero companies from scratch in the last 50 years worth more than a hundred billion euro. We have created all of our trillion dollar companies from scratch in America in the last 50 years.”

“You know, the CEOs I deal with, None of them have asked me, Hey, I want to fire a bunch of people, or how do I get rid of these people? Maybe because we're too expensive for that sort of bullshit use case, but they come to me and say, I want to dominate my ind…”

“Only a founder can do that. Because if you're a professional CEO who's employed, that's, you can't survive that.”

“The DOE just came out with a study that showed we have about four years left of useful life on the assets that power our grid.”

“Now, in this trend, it means that a hundred, there's gonna be a hundred times the amount of blackouts by twenty-thirty, if we don't reverse this trend.”

“I think the cardinality of agents and models is very high. I think there will always be alpha to be achieved, you know, improved differentiation, improved outcomes by specializing to the use case. Now, it's great to start with the general models, but You will …”