The Ledger, every show

“If, again, you put me in a time machine five years from now, my gut is I come out and it, yes, the answer is yes. Just because this guy does things well and sometimes it takes a while, right? And there's going to be a lot of experimentation. It's going to be a…”

“Berkeley, right now, and UCLA, and about 20 other schools. If you want to apply to be a chemistry professor, The first thing that you do is you have to fill out a diversity statement, and it's called, that sounds nice, a diversity statement, but it's actually,…”

“That could be changing, like, Next decade. Like in our lifetimes.”

“That if AI can start moving up in intelligence, it's not going to stop at the human intelligence station. It's going to just race right by us because all of these limitations that our intelligence has”

“China has shown that maybe it's going to be harder to stay ahead of them than we thought. Maybe the, this limit on chips is not going to.”

“I think that in the near future, of course, you're going to have a higher risk of Bad guys with using AI, you know, to do things like manufacturing scary bioweapons things like that, that you really, you know, things that could really kill a billion people.”

“That's a moment of truth where the New York Times basically says, you know, the paper of record, they cross that out, and they say, we now are an arm of this political movement.”

“Housekeepers, robot nannies and housekeepers will be in the twenties.”

“12 months ago I had any inkling that AI might steal my job within, like two years. Didn't, I would have guessed, like, 20. So that's, I mean, and that's one of a hundred different things that I've been shocked about with AI in the last few months like everyone…”

“I think wokeness is two things. It's a far left ideology, and it is far left. It's, you know, postmodern, and it's Marxist, and that's fine.”

“We see James Bennett, the editor of the New York Times op-ed section, getting fired because he published an op-ed by Tom Cotton that 62% of the country agreed with, But it didn't jive with woke orthodoxy.”

“You see Denise Young at Apple, a black woman who's the head of diversity, who says, to me, diversity is not, you know, it's more complicated than just about something like race. When I look at 12 blue-eyed, blond-haired guys, I see diversity. I see different p…”

“A mob like this, they don't build anything, you know, they don't create. What they do is they appropriate, they hijack something, they take its existing good reputation, which is real, which is a lot of power, And they spend it down.”

“It's either going to be the coolest story for humans or it's the end. This is the, That is a, it is a 501 page book. And that's it. Or this is the beginning of like the new paradigm. We have a new BC AD situation. We have a BC, which is like before something t…”

“No, if it's something like really bad AI, it doesn't seem like AI would have, and they wanted to wipe us out. It doesn't seem like being on multiple planets in the solar system would really help.”

“If you can expand this a little bit and have more of this vertical axis and just think about this liberal house, you can start to say, actually the liberal, the lowercase, lowercase L liberal conservatives are more on my side than the People on the left with t…”

“During the George Floyd riots, Tom Cotton writes, they'll send in the troops, which 62% of Americans agreed with it. In that moment.”

“That, they can hold that for a while, but their power is brittle, and when certain people start saying something, gives permission for other people to say it, before you know it, more people are saying it, and they can't pitchfork anyone, and now people are st…”

“I would, if I had to guess now, I'd say, you know, 20, 35, something around there.”

“People wanted me to write about crypto, and I was kind of just like, ah, I don't know. This is, it's like this hasn't proven yet to be a huge part of the future, and if not, then it just seems so boring to write about.”

“A big email list makes it less important to have consistency. I still think it's better than not. I think that you know, it's not ideal the way I do things, but I'm very inconsistent now. I'll disappear for a while, and then I'll come out with something big, a…”

“I don't think that, that, that a new creator needs to be worrying about, oh, I only doing like writing and drawing right now. I need to also be doing TikTok. So we need to start doing video to make sure we have stuff on TikTok. I don't think I think they shoul…”

“I think that AI, if things go well, I think we're going to have so many answers. In the near future. I think we're going to solve so many problems that seem really hard to us right now. I think 20, you know, these problems won't be a match for 20 fifties human…”

“So deep down, I still kind of feel like if I went into a time machine and got out in 2080, I'd be entering an amazing world, not a horrible dystopia. But I don't know, I couldn't really defend that argument.”

“The far left and far right aren't inherently bad.”

“In high-rung politics, if someone tells me their position on guns, I have no idea what their position is on climate change or on abortion or on immigration. In low-rung politics, You hear one position from someone, boom. I, you can just look at their demeanor,…”

“The classic example, the debt was the worst thing in the world during Obama's presidency, and then Trump comes in office, starts doing up these tax packages that are adding to it, and suddenly it's no problem.”

“If you're in that, one of those upper giants, the other upper giant is a lot more on your ultimate team, if you take a big step back, than the lower giant that wears the same color.”

“Psychedelics allows you to kind of like step outside and look at the sphere, and like maybe look at it from other angles, and like walk around it, look under it, and like, and that is incredible. Like it's an incredible tool.”

“In, you know, in an echo chamber environment, there's no kind of like white blood cells to kill the virus, and so it just explains, it just, because dissent isn't okay over there. You know, it's not, not only is it not valued, it's very much frowned upon. So e…”

“There's actually not very much high quality, like really high quality stuff. There's a lot of like B minus content, C plus content out there. And if you can just work really hard and really put out, you know, a level content that people will notice.”

“LLM still can't run a gas station, you know, just because it involves all of these things that for us with general intelligence, it's no big deal for an AI. It's gonna have, it's just, it's not there. So we're still the king of the general intelligence castle.”

“The algorithms specifically, specifically incentivize what I would call like low rung thinking and low rung rhetoric you know, really tribal and also just really confident.”

“Humanoid robots seem like they're going to be everywhere. First in the industry, warehouses, then commercial, you know, pouring your coffee and folding clothes and, you know, the clothing store.”

“We already see, of course, the fracture of the shared reality because of tribal narrow cast media, you know, each telling their own story and social media, creating bubbles of reality. And I think AI can just accelerate these trends.”

“And then if you don't have any of those external structured things, then you end up in a you can end up with the monkey kind of running your whole life suddenly. So now it's like, you're actually like the monkey is making the decisions, which is actually worse…”

“It's like it's like taking content that if I write this AI post, it actually doesn't make much money because it's just on a blog. If I now go do a bunch of talks on AI, to me, that's like, that's the way that, that the, all the work I did for that AI post actu…”

“Six years ago, we hired Alicia who's the manager of lots of things which is just like the second in command at Wait But Why and does a little of everything. And that's about it. I was just like, I don't want a big team.”

“There's a diminishing return on like excitement as you keep putting those years in. So for me, it's like, I want to get from like a two or three, you know, to a six. Five or six, something like that, where it's like, oh, okay, I understand this way more deeply…”

“Fourteen million people read that in a week.”

“AI is probably gonna be dangerous not because It's going to be evil Terminator robots, but because it's going to be super powerful with unintended consequences”

“I think that we are very constrained to this one-dimensional axis.”

“It's not that people were less tribal. It's that tribalism was distributed.”

“Virality dumbs down information because nuanced information doesn't hit as hard.”

“Twitter doesn't just teach, doesn't just show you what the news is, it shows you what the perception of the news is, and it shows you what the arguments about the news is, and the different you know, a viewpoints and the different you can, and if you follow th…”

“And I do think the secret of some of the most You know, people who seem super prescient, like they can just, you know, read the future amazing at investing in stocks, or they're incredible entrepreneurs, they just can see opportunities or whatever it is. I eve…”

“A good time is when it's buzzy, but people don't quite understand it yet. It's a good time for a topic like that. You don't want to do it when everyone's like read a bunch of stuff and they already have a sense of it and it's become like now there's camps, pol…”

“He'll talk about, even if he thinks something has a 10% chance of succeeding, but it's really important, it's worth trying.”