The Ledger, every show

“Open source and is coming and is here, whether we like it or not. Of course, a lot of it will be from China. We should allow American competitors to proceed on an even footing, but basically the attempt to outlaw it or ban it or use sanctions against it is goi…”

“I hope the billionaire tax fails. It will wreck California. If it passes, it's already harmed California.”

“To create a new course, I actually need approval through a committee that is attached to the state of Virginia and exists in Richmond... And furthermore, like University of Virginia, our competitor will lobby that committee not to approve like a new degree pro…”

“Now, I actually don't think those will be the trends for the next 30 years, I feel our physical world is in some way about to break loose and change, and we'll be in a country which is more dynamic, more violent, more chaotic”

“But I think we're headed back toward more dynamism. In the U.S. And we will hate it because it will disrupt us.”

“Parts of the world, such as Eastern Europe you know, Poland maybe is catching up to the West, but most of it is being depopulated and emptying out. And it basically will never catch up.”

“There's all these major American companies that don't typically advertise it, but they use a lot of Chinese open source right now.”

“You go back to 1995 through 1998, we got half a percentage point of extra growth out of those advances. They, to me, seem less impressive than AI, so I think over time, with some slowness, we'll get that and maybe a bit more, which is great.”

“And I think AI maniacs will compete in medicine, law, business consulting, banking, wherever it is, we let them compete.”

“The unemployment rate for 18 to 24 year olds, it's back to where it was before we had good large language models. So AI is not destroying that market.”

“The AI maniacs are about to take a huge leap upwards, and there'll be this massive reallocation of status. It'll be very hard for our politics to handle that.”

“If you give a book away, the danger is a person will read it just because it's a gift. Unless you think it's the book they should be reading. It's actually a slightly cruel act to give someone a book.”

“And then when it comes to intelligence, men compress the distribution of female intelligence. So the smartest women are smarter than men think they are. Actually other women are better at judging the smartness of those women.”

“Women on average are more conscientious than men, and men have a higher variance of conscientiousness. So the least conscientious men wreak more destruction and havoc, right? So women have lower variance of conscientiousness. That means if you find a smart wom…”

“And the notion that a young person today might live to be 130 is not at all absurd. So I'm very bullish on the science.”

“I'm not necessarily bullish on biomedical companies as vehicles for earning money. A lot of regulation, sales in bio, healthcare arena can be very tough and very labor intensive. So maybe more of the gains accrue to consumers than is the case in a lot of secto…”

“Batteries, solar, wind, the big problems will end up being the law, the NIMBYs, the regulators, not the science.”

“We're never going to beat China at top-down control. That's how they're doing. Quantum computing, AI, other areas. But I think we can beat them with more innovative business and being a way better country for attracting talent.”

“In an ideal world, I don't think we would have college as a four-year experience. It would be more like a GitHub page where you've been certified in different ways, online, offline, University of Austin. You took two classes at Princeton over the summer. You l…”

“There's gonna be a lot of inequality the more global is the world, right? Because you're selling iPhones, you know, everywhere, not just to the, your local city. So that's a fact. It's not going away.”

“So in the long run, as our productivity and mobility slows down, at some point we just can't pay the bills anymore.”

“So you look at the United Kingdom, the forces that wanted Brexit, They mounted a much more effective campaign, and the pro-remain side, which I was sympathetic with, they had very poor arguments in response, they were less well coordinated, they were less will…”

“Americans typically contrast their own nation with Western Europe. That's the tradition. And then America feels so dynamic, because Western Europe is even more sluggish. And stagnant. And that's a big mistake. The notion that you should stop being Tocqueville.…”

“If you look at inequality of wealth rather than income, a lot of Western Europe has higher inequality than America does.”

“But I think with many new technologies in human history, the first 20, 30 years, they don't deliver what they promise, and then there's a huge explosive takeoff, precisely when everyone's all disillusioned. So I think we're actually on the verge of a new treme…”

“Here, clearly, more and more people are involved in innovation, but if you think of the economy as a whole, most jobs are service sector jobs, and as best we can tell, again, it's hard to measure, but productivity growth in those sectors is about zero.”

“So the world will be a lot more productive because of automation and smart software, and this will give us a lot of consumer goods for free. So we'll have this super sharp divide between the rich and the poor in terms of income, but in terms of actual consumpt…”

“So a lot of these decisions to settle in and be safe and comfortable, they're individually rational. Like, it's good to be safe, right? Stress is, is, is a bad thing. But when our society collectively makes this decision, there are ways in which we're all wors…”

“We exhausted a lot of the low-hanging fruit from combining fossil fuels with powerful machines and electricity and communications, and that, that's all to the better, but we've now entered a world where people find it hard to imagine a future very different fr…”

“But that said, a country cannot remain complacent forever. And I argue that eventually, you know, something has to give, you need a way to pay the bills, you need dynamism again, and you start seeing disruptions in your complacent life.”

“Self-driving cars could make the problem worse, you know, because you'll send out your car or your vehicle on all kinds of errands. Oh, go to Whole Foods and pick me up some smoked salmon. I'm hungry. And there may be fewer people on the road, but the people t…”

“It's much harder for millennials to save, and I fear they will have impoverished retirements. Especially since the fiscal budget on the federal side is problematic as well.”

“Minimum wage increases put people out of work. Sometimes it's a small number of people. Sometimes it's a large number of people, but I think jobs are very important, and I would look for different ways to raise wages, which we do need to do.”

“So if you raise minimum wages, say that raises food prices, there's good evidence for this, and other poor people have to pay more for their food, And a lot of those apparent first round gains get given back and they dissipate.”

“I think it's a perfectly legitimate asset that will endure and have a high value. I'm not sure its value is going to go up any at this point but it's for real, and it's not a bubble.”

“I think if Europe starts a major trade war with China, Europe will lose.”

“So you look at the United States. We do great on all these metrics. Estonia is a country that does pretty well on these metrics. A lot of parts of the world are too small-c conservative. And we'll see where different countries are going to fall on this spectru…”

“Now I'm all for today's billionaires doing more to support art, music, libraries, whatever we all might come up with, but I don't think it's going to make them loved.”

“I think it'll be more like sects than new religions. So you could write your own version of Hindu sacred books or your own version of Shiite Islam with your own, you know, slate of who the true Imams are or should be. And we're just going to see proliferation.…”

“It's possible because the surrounding society cross-subsidizes them. So you can't have a third of America being Amish. And I think they keep people in the fold because it is pretty small and tightly knit. And were there, say, three or four million Amish, which…”

“Most people cannot become entrepreneurs. They're not ambitious. They should not be ambitious. You could argue the numbers, but it's a small percentage, and other people want to work for them. So people like working in large institutions. Large institutions pay…”

“And for all this talk of the leisure dividend from AI, right now we're still in a setting where most people have to work some amount harder. That will change. But it's not about to change.”

“Online education, as we have it, is one of the world's greatest achievements ever, and we've put almost all of it in place in, say, 15 years.”

“Expose your child in teen years to as many of your friends who might be possible role models as possible. Like at some margin, they're just not going to listen to you anymore. They're not going to watch your behavior anymore. They know what you're about. They'…”

“There's good evidence that when men evaluate women, they make a few mistakes. First, they assign too much attention to the personality of the woman. So women who are perceived as difficult to get on with, men tend to discriminate against. So a given personalit…”

“More violent, more aggressive, but there are also more men who are highly extreme workaholics, right? So ambition has a higher variance in men.”

“I think we're seeing more and more competition across governments, across countries and crypto and web. Three point now will intensify this greatly and it will be a good thing.”

“And now that it's easier to move, this has all become more intense, and I think it will make an enormous positive difference for productivity and quality of governance, even within this country”