The Ledger, every show

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 …”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“And I think having the administration say, look, this is statute and we agree with it and we're going to enforce it is, is how we're going to field a huge amount of deterrence between now and 20, 27. You know, there's not a lot of developmental things you can …”

“The shuttle used to cost 50,000 dollars a kilogram to get to orbit. Cheaper mechanisms we had were like 20,000 dollars a kilogram. And with Starship heavy reuse, we're talking about 10 to 20 bucks.”

“Every sort of sensor inference that's happening at the edge today, we throw that away.”

“It's research study after study shows that you get these CBER grants and your company never actually achieved scale.”

“There is a pretty big disconnect between the people who are responsible for fighting, really the combatant commanders and the people who are responsible for providing the equipment. And really these guys, the fighters, they don't really have a vote.”

“So I, we feel like the value is really going to accrete to folks who own the application layer and the enterprises, and we're going to go after that very hard.”

“If you go back to 1989, not that long ago, when the Berlin Wall still stood, Only six percent of major weapon system spending went to defense specialists, what we think of today as prime contractors whose only business is defense. 94% of the money for major we…”

“Epic Fury is a leapfrog in capability, but I think it also shows that there is another 10 X, hundred X to go that's illuminated by what's already been done here.”

“So when the Berlin Wall still stood in 1989, only six percent of spending on major weapon systems went to pure play defense specialists. 94% of it went to what I call as dual purpose companies. You know, yeah, a missile is single use. It's not a dual use produ…”

“80% of APIs for generic drugs are produced by China.”

“The Soviets spent seven billion dollars in 20, 26 dollars funding the peace movement, the anti-war protests.”

“China is on pace by 2030 to three x the amount of generation against the US.”

“Well, sadly, I think with the forced adoption of EHRs, what we saw is roughly a halving in the productivity of how many patients you can see per hour.”

“It used to take three years to train a worker on it. Now with an AI assistant, the workers who are prior casino workers, you know, they're not from this industry, are able to get up the curve in three months.”

“If you look at both open and closed models over time, you know, the ELOs are just up and to the right. The open ones have converged and even in some cases surpassed closed models.”

“We have like more than 300,000 workers, blue collar workers who turn wrenches in our software every day, everything from the factory floors of Chrysler to every Airbus airframe, every HD Hyundai ship.”

“My reason for immense optimism in this moment is that the founders are back. You know, more than a hundred billion dollars have been deployed in the national interest.”

“You now have a Palmer Luckey. You now have hundreds of founders and entrepreneurs that are back on the playing field with wildly heterodox ideas that are not just being yes men to what the program offices are asking for, but actually investing their own capita…”

“Right now our whole system works where, because we've divided up development from production, you get to one prototype of something that's truly exquisite, and the science and engineering behind it is amazing, but you're gonna be able to build 10 of them, and …”

“Rickover required the protection of the entirety of Congress, but the nuclear Navy he built is one of our last remaining asymmetric advantages, even now, even though he did that thing in the sixties, you know, it's truly incredible.”

“The European process is even more slow because there's an even greater emphasis on how do I show fairness across all of the EU states.”

“Yeah, I think that's probably the correct direction. And I think one that, that, that model companies will have a hard time with, right? Cause I think they need to have kind of one model to rule them all or directionally that's where it needs to go.”

“First of all, 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 y…”

“There's a reason 50% of all clinical trials, new clinical trials are happening in China and not in the US.”

“These companies trade at like less than two times revenue.”

“The modern art movement was really funded by the CIA to undermine the kind of Soviet control of art, you know, and it was broadly funded and it wasn't directed by CIA, but you can see how we have cultural values that we want to inculcate and spread.”

“In 1989, only six percent of spending on major weapon systems went to defense specialists, i.e. Companies that were exclusively in the business of defense. That's not that long ago. That's when the Berlin Wall still stood. Now that number is 86%.”