The Wisdom Wall

“what happens is from, from a political standpoint is the cities that are run right there in, in, in, in their local democracies, it's these super high end kind of, you know, very progressive elites. And then it's sort of the clientele underclass. Right. Um, that, um, you know, of, you know, in the U.S. it's Hispanic…”

“So if you, if you believe in job destruction, like in any kind of very large scale way, you basically don't believe that markets adapt and you, and you basically don't believe that some other company will emerge and say, I'm gonna just do this way better. And the way I'm going to do it way better is by adding people…”

“Akerloff argues once those things come on board, you get this slow diffusion of a totally new market terms where, you know, people expected birth control and the pill to, to get rid of unwanted pregnancies, but it actually had the opposite effect because it destroyed the shotgun marriage norm.”

“I think the funny thing about America is that, uh, we love speculation and speculation actually creates real value. People think of speculation as this bad thing, but in the case, in this case, we sort of got really lucky in that there was this meme stock moment for the company, which allowed us to hire and bring on…”

“All these lengthy environmental reviews turn out to be dramatically harmful to the environment because we can't fix the bottlenecks. We can't create the new transmission lines that carry electricity from the, you know, renewable sources and such. It's, it's overwhelmingly harmful to the environment to have slow…”

“Academically, it's actually funny, because school's a bundle, and actually the easiest and cheapest things to fix is actually the academics, right? Because that's tech-driven. Versus the rest of the day is all very human driven.”

“a very important premise of a free society is inequality.”

“you can never build enough houses for homeless because you're just going to keep attracting more and more and more people.”

“if you don't come out there and say, look, the fundamental, uh, way that the town has functioned on the basis of 50 years, uh, under the Impoundment Control Act, if you don't kind of go out there and, and describe that, and name it, and say, you know, we have fundamental problems with it, uh, you're not setting…”

“this kind of rigid oppressor, oppressed ideology, I don't know how anyone who looks at it can't see how it's problematic. We need a society that's not about, um, you know, crazy notions of equity. We need realistic notions of opportunity. We need to focus on, on merit.”

“Well, their results would say, look, if, if 80% of the effect is happening before people ever hit the market, that means we need to spend more time in K through 12 education.”

“it's not whether or not there's a disparity in the test scores that, that should cause you to throw out the test.”

“If, if companies have bias, then Meritocracy is completely consistent with a DEI strategy. Because what you, because if you're getting to your talent frontier and you have, and you have bias, you're removing that bias and you're saying, look, I'm just going to hire the best person for the job. Then you're getting…”

“So all occupational licensing is doing is putting up entry barriers to new suppliers, raising prices, and limiting service, uh, because, you know, there are not as many people around.”

“at least from the equations of physics, if you consider the whole system of civilization, the equations predict that the system will optimize towards its growth, towards consuming more free energy.”

“People wouldn't pay for an AI that's unaligned, doesn't do what you say, and is nefarious, right? They would pay for an AI that does, you know, is a good worker, let's say, uh, is aligned and is reliable, right? And if, if, uh, if the, you know, the, the, the person or the company that offers such AI systems could get…”

“as long as China's a big enough threat, it will be sufficient to kind of glue us together, uh, to be able to actually make some rational decisions, uh, as a society. Um, you know, maybe the presence of an external enemy is actually helpful to kind of galvanize, you know, kind of your own side to, you know, to organize…”

“I don't think what's happening now is a betrayal of liberalism. I think it's just the full realization of liberalism. Like, I think it's, it's, it's what happens when you take liberalism to the extreme, which is you declare war on the intolerant, right?”

“one of the things I think people get wrong is you don't learn to win by failing. You learn to win by working with people who have ups and downs and then win.”

“Uh, actually we found that college experience was a negative.”

“When it's all the banks that are dying, that's a central bank problem. Right. It's like all your passengers are being thrown around and turned into paste on the walls of the plane. That's the pilot's fault. That's not the passenger's fault for not fasting their seatbelt.”

“It's, I've done both, and it's much easier to launch currencies than to scale factories. And once you have that in mind, it's way easier for China or any other country, frankly, that has natural resources or manufacturing or both to launch a currency than it is for the West to just quickly build factories.”

“I think people confuse medicine and science. They're actually not the same thing. Um, and like, I didn't learn one shred of scientific thought in medical school.”

“anti-racism is a useful critique of the world. It is dangerous as a paradigm, right? Because it just doesn't explain the, it doesn't, it doesn't explain enough of the world. And that's what a paradigm is supposed to do. And it's really terrible as a regime. It's really terrible when it has coercive power, when it has…”

“Universities are not platforms for free speech. All of society is a platform for free speech. We have that, we have that right. Universities are platforms for learning, and so, um, if there's a topic that needs to be discussed that's difficult, if there's a person who's presenting a challenging perspective, the first…”

“At the end of civilization, I said the principal threat to Western civilization is not from outside. It is not from China. It is from within. And if we choose in our schools and universities to relentlessly attack our civilization and its values, then we'll only have ourselves to blame if we, if we have basically hit.”

“even from a pure utilitarian standpoint, I think that edge case harm is often exaggerated to, uh, you know, to, to basically control 99% of people.”

“crypto is to American capitalism what American capitalism was to Soviet companies.”

“by the reason I put NYT there, as opposed to CCP is NYT is upstream of the state. You know, that's to say a journalist A corporate journalist can get a politician fired, but not vice versa. It's not fully deterministic. You know, they can write a negative article in them. They may survive that, but in general, right,…”

“If in physical space, you win by a physical war, you win by invading your opponent's territory. In social space, in digital space, you win by invading their mind. And so once you think of cancel culture as not being cancel culture, but it's a state of social war.”

“If you can make something that allows for more precision strike, less collateral damage, I think it'd be morally reprehensible to refuse to do it, to try and keep your own hands.”

“if you're wondering why the museums you love and the publishing houses you love and the newspapers used to trust and, you know, the, the, the Hollywood, all of these things, if you want to understand why they are hollowed out, why they are no longer what they used to be, you have to look at the nucleation point for…”

“You need to have data to learn stuff, and, and everybody's robots were just sitting still, and it just felt like we have to get on this path where like, we're actually moving and physically interacting with the world at scale, and then we'll figure out all the rest of like, how do we train the models, how do we do the…”

“pairing human-level intelligence with even very simple, uh, you know, as you said, Vivek end-effectors, like, you can really accomplish a lot in the world.”

“the main blocker the entire time has been the intelligence, not so much like the sort of mechanical ability.”

“diffusion actually is, like, your biggest rate limiter, and diffusion is, like, a human, Has to get the intelligence from the model plus probably their data, and then they have to go interact with the real world and do something in the real world, and then bring back whatever the feedback loop is back to the model and…”

“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.”

“And I think if you're asking the question of like, how do we evaluate people on exactly the thing that AI can already do, that's kind of the wrong way.”

“even if we do that, you'll still have a revolution in the economy. You'll still have a revolution in the way things happen because the, Limiting factors now are not the technology, it's diffusion of the technology into the economy.”

“But people actually share things with AI that they won't share with the person.”

“And so you go from a situation where the reactor is over 90% of total cost of energy produced to where, and fuel is obviously single digit percentages with low enriched uranium and gigawatt scale reactors and those simple metal fuel pellets to now where the fuel is often more than half the cost. And the smaller the…”

“ultimately you would want to see a tight link between individual psychometric scores and outcomes. That would be in a way the measure of, of, of meritocracy.”

“It's much better to have that forcing mechanism of hypocrisy because you have good principles than to have no principles that actually force attention with slavery to begin with.”

“Children tend to be naturally colorblind unless they are actively programmed, uh, another way.”

“We don't want to see AI impacting their moat. So if they have a network effect, a cost of capital advantage, a regulatory moat, Those things are not going to go away with AI. However, their operating costs should be falling off a cliff.”

“I think the thing that most people don't understand about this is, um, 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's a productive tension, it doesn't get…”

“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, I think you, you, you got to fix it through inspiration.”

“Because of AI, that's changing. Uh, it's cheaper for competitors to build software. It's cheaper for people to vibe code their own software. And, um, it's also easier to migrate data because of AI agents. So I think switching costs have gone down. And so I think it's right for the way that software companies, um, the…”

“a lot of people think of AI and they think of cost cutting and they're like, oh, we can really optimize our P and L. We can use AI, automate all these jobs, cut costs. That's not the right lens to look at small businesses. And it's not right for really one reason, which is that most of the folks in the back office of a…”

“We want to win this AI war against China. We have no shot of doing that. If we cannot build the data centers, the data centers require the plumbers, the electricians, the general contractors, the HVAC technicians, so on and so forth.”

“I think in AI, what you see is that really excelling on the technical aspect just matters much more, I think, in AI than some of these other fields, and I think there's been lots and lots of businesses in the past that have been very, I'll say, like very intense logistics businesses or very tough kind of like…”

“10% of that job is basically this really fun part of just pure problem solving, thinking about what you want to build, being creative, like understanding the different solutions, deciding, okay, what architecture makes sense here? How exactly am I going to, you know, achieve my goals here? What do I want to build?…”

“most homes are not like pieces of art. Most homes in the country are not like your home. They're sort of commodity. They're, they're, they're closer to like a standard skew than a kind of one-off thing. And so you can value them sight unseen much more accurately than someone who is, ah, you know, not professional,…”

“the cost of software is just asymptotically dropping to zero of building new software, which means that the way you build a company completely changes.”

“On engineering right now, I was happy to spend, call it a 100,000 dollars to build this feature. Now it costs 20,000 dollars. I don't want less engineers. I want 10 times as many engineers, because I've actually, the set of features I would want for 20,000 dollars is huge.”

“When a nation state targets a company, guess who wins? The nation does, not the company... You cannot expect great blue chip companies that constantly every day pitch a perfect game on defense against nations that are targeting them. It's just an unfair fight.”

“there was a kind of a fatal theoretical flaw that they, ah, that they committed, ah, which was to try to create a government that was better than people. They wanted to create governing as a kind of a software program where, If you had a thousand-page rule book, you just comply with the rules, and you could have an…”

“I'm constantly told you can't have infinite growth in a finite world. Not true. Because growth can consist of doing more with less. So you halve the size of your machine or halve the amount of energy going into it. That is growth.”

“This could have been sexual selection, not natural selection. Because what do we use our big brains for? We use it to write poetry, and do art, and be funny, and all these kind of things. So we use it for seduction. So there's an argument that this thing is, ah, the human version of the peacock's tail.”

“you've got to be careful that in picking winners, you don't end up with losers picking the government.”

“the name of our product is called Time Back. Time Back. Give kids their time back. That's cool. And that is by far the most motivation.”

“And that's why we want to avoid going into a situation where we have these, you know, capabilities in space where we're shooting down other satellites. I'd much rather use electronic warfare or cyber attacks or things like that.”

“Well, I think the key thing is getting mass adoption. Like actually, My big worry in the, the competition with China, look, there's, there's all kind of worries about, like, will we move fast enough? Will we be aggressive enough? Will we, like, where will the right models be built? What is, what does it mean for the…”

“if you just put in motion executively what you can, ah, consistent with the law, it forces Congress to respond in a positive direction. There, it limits their ability to say no. In fact, they have to catch up with you, and you've set the terms with the debate.”

“in the 20th century, basically every industrial revolution in every other country that has worked in the last hundred years basically follows that model as well, so. You know, it's, it's the same thing Germany did. It's the same thing Japan did. It's the same thing Korea did. It's the same thing China, uh, is doing…”

“the way that you get populism is slow growth, right? Because you, because slow growth puts everybody in the mind of, of, of zero sum, right? Everything becomes a zero sum. You know, kind of fight for resources, um, because people don't think that there's a lot of opportunity in the future.”

“if you're gonna replant your, the sort of commanding heights of your economy on knowledge work, then what you're gonna do is you're gonna slam basically all economic growth into the cities, right? Because you're, which is what, what Silicon Valley has done, right? So you're gonna, all the software developers in one…”

“There's one area of healthcare that is incredibly sophisticated, technologically advanced, and the price curve looks like Moore's law. The price curve looks like video games. The price curve is just a straight line down, and the quality of the service has gone way up, and, and that's LASIK eye surgery. Right, and, and…”

“I think what, what it kind of shows, I would say is actually, I think we're at a point now where intelligence actually isn't the bottleneck, if that makes sense. You know, I think these models are capable of solving some really, really hard problems.”

“You know, I'd actually argue in the last bunch of years, the factory shut down. Right. Because what happened was in the public markets, everyone came to realize that you'd rather just put more money into meta than back the five billion dollar baby Public company that maybe grows up and maybe doesn't. It wasn't worth…”

“So what I think has happened now is that basically it isn't that there is innovation. It isn't that there's stuff going on, but because the factory line shut down, the whole thing has become way more bespoke, right? Where, and what I mean by that is there is a public market. Some companies can get there. There is…”

“free speech is not a right on college campus in and of itself. It's a right to the extent that it drives academic excellence from in the academic concept.”

“There's, there's no fast term accountability in venture capital. You know, sometimes you have momentum and the valuations go up and that, that does give you a feel where the things are working. But in practice, uh, you off, you know, it's five, 10 years later, you get liquidity on, on these businesses or even longer.…”

“The first one is that sort of the, uh, the InBev style, which was the three G capital InBev zero based budgeting operating style. It only works when you have things to buy. Some degree, these guys got, these guys got too successful. They bought everything. There was nothing left to buy. And all of a sudden they're…”

“that if, if, 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”

“You come for the tool, you stay for the network. We've got to build the systems of record before we get the data to do the amazing things that we always wanted to do.”

“actually, the best way in complex systems is to have A very simple uniform set of rules like property rights or contract law or tort liability. And these things are much better at adapting than trying to come up with a patchwork of systems that just lead to incredible complexity.”

“the junior mid-level engineers are able to be a lot more efficient, feel like they're able to actually learn by having the AI suggest code. So I'm, I'm, I'm seeing it a little bit more of the opposite that it's actually Up-leveling a lot of the mid-level engineers, the senior engineers, and I think this is the trend,…”

“the things that I'm bullish on are where you own a workflow for a vertical. And so everybody in that vertical is using that workflow. And so if you upgrade the model, it just makes that workflow better. And so it doesn't matter what the model is.”

“Well, no, we would say he's absolutely right, but let me explain why. Canada has a very active legal immigration program. The percentage of their citizens who are immigrants is huge as compared to us, and they have a selective immigration program, so who is immigrating into Canada? Engineers, data scientists, doctors?…”

“I think the antisemitism issue is, is not so much a left right issue. I think it's an old young issue.”

“When you get to the island, you realize that this beach invasion that everyone talks about is basically not doable. The beach beaches are very small. As I mentioned, the waters next to them are very shallow. More importantly, they can be completely far controlled from the neighboring hills.”

“My argument is always that you should just look directly at those proxies themselves. So if you're a college Admissions office and you want to, um, help disadvantaged students get in. Okay, that's fine, but don't equate blackness with disadvantage. If you want to ask if someone grew up with a single mother, ask if they…”

“it's actually much fairer to disadvantaged students, um, to weight standardized testing more highly than all the other things that colleges generally weight.”

“My view is that diversity inherently is neutral in most cases. It's neither good nor bad.”

“if I am a black person, totally committed to the, an alliance with the Jewish community, does not mean that I have lost my ability to criticize. Ok. But the difference is, you see, someone like me, I know it. When, when, when Jewish people hear me, if I say something, well, I don't think Israel should have been doing…”

“Oh, I think, I think it's really just three ingredients. One is smarts. And I learned this actually from Justice Scalia, who told me once, you always want a really smart judge, and the reason why you want a really smart judge is because they can't get snookered by the left. Alright, so that was what he said. So always…”

“Look, personnel is policy. You just have to pick the right judges. There's, there's no rule that you can put in place That's going to, that's going to contain or constrain a rogue.”

“You could, there is no way you could take a country that doesn't want to move into the 21st century Into the 21st century, no matter how many schools you bought.”

“even if you can work on technologies all day, but those that get deployed and funded, um, you know, if, if you don't have a sort of ideological or cultural support for what you're working on, uh, you're not gonna get to build and deploy, uh, certain technologies. And that kind of seeded the ideas for sort of cultural…”

“This iterative approach is the way to learn quickly and improve, even with what you're trying to do is very mission critical and failure intolerant.”

“one way you get status inside this thing called the company where you spend so many of your waking hours is to be in the loop. And so subconsciously, almost all the time, we humans, we want to be part of the process. We want to be in the loop. We want to be consulted. Either in a hard way or a soft way. We want to…”

“it's our view that if you want to quickly stop plastic from polluting the ocean, you should probably first focus on that 0.1% rather than the whole thing.”

“We're seeing a lot of our companies, productivity is going up when you actually cut the, cut the bottom 20%, bottom 30%.”

“if you could figure out how to pour enough compute and pour enough data into a neural network, there's really no limit to how, how good it could get.”

“The very, very best in the world are, the brain structure is different. One of the things that our institutions underestimate, but we're, we have an advantage in America because we have this tech scene, is that people think that there's like, you know, they're within standard deviation of the best if you're the second…”

“you would think 5000 people being paid a billion dollars would produce something more valuable than five people working for equity. Just purely intuitively, but it's not true.”

“once you reach a certain size, you are highly incentivized to stop new entrants from coming in. And the only way to do that, and particularly in a democracy, is to do state capture, is to work very closely with governments, parrot what they're saying, and then, you know, when you were coming up, there weren't…”

“You can hedge if, if it's like a one percent, you know, if you expect a one percent interest rate and it turns out to be 1.2% or something like that. Fine. You can hedge that. That's when the normal envelope, if you are told and everybody's told that it's going to be at one percent forever. And, and, and if there's…”

“And now that you have the transistor and the personal computer and the internet and the smartphone and cryptocurrency, decentralizing technology is unwinding the last several hundred years of centralization in a few decades.”

“there's always going to be the same amount of religion in a society, and, and, and if it's not going to be a historic world faith, it's going to be a political ideology, right? Or it's going to be, like, uh, kind of a cultural phenomenon. Like, I, I think that that, I think that, I think that, The manner in which,…”

“you can't take an established organization and really move it forward. It, it, it really does involve training differently, but also setting up healthcare differently.”

“all the time you hear Americans, you know, close to you walking around complaining about Big Pharma, and you, what you hear them complaining about is Big Pharma. What they're actually complaining about that they don't know is Big PBM and Big Pharmacy.”

“I think the biggest problem in education is very simple. It's that when you look at all the different players that make up education for young people, when you look at Pearson, when you look at schools, when you look at school administrators, when you look at the people that set their curriculums for states, I mean,…”

“I think my proposal is two systems. I propose one system that's like normal public school that where you have a high floor, low ceiling, everybody learns to read and write, but it's hard to go off the beaten path, but that only takes like four hours a day or something like that. And then a long tail model where, you…”

“Serrano v. Priest upset the entire Uh, the sort of shape of local funding in California. Uh, if you were building new sort of, uh, uh, housing and developments in your area, or if merely you were, uh, increasing the property tax funding in your local schools, you got the benefit. Either you could cut your local…”

“allowing a mentally ill individual to slowly kill themselves in the street is, In no way, shape, or form can be portrayed as compassionate. It's not.”

“why do we need to study, um, the history and ideas that lasted, uh, from the Western tradition is because it's not because they're Western, it's because these, these ideas shaped our world. These ideas actually made the societies that we must learn to navigate in and that made the societies that frankly Are as, you…”

“they never actually come for the alt-right, or for actual white supremacists. They come for the person that's basically agreeing with them on every issue, but differs just slightly.”

“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 woman, you're undervaluing her as a man because you're mentally…”

“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.”

“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.”

“and the only reason they'll change the regulation is if the law changes their statutory authority or a really massive special interest, like throws a fit.”

“once the Chinese figured that out, they downloaded at least four of those killer apps. They didn't really want political competition, and they definitely don't want the rule of law, because the Chinese Communist Party can't survive with those things.”

“one of my DCs is that the decentralized version of something when it works is worth 10 X, a centralized version.”

“It's a, it's capitalism compatible, you know, radical left, actually, in the sense that, you know, with communism, um, communism was the redistribution of wealth and wokeness is the redistribution of stats. You know, communism had, you know, the union strike and wokeness has the social media mob.”

“the Democrat wants more government, the Republican wants less government, the Libertarian wants no government, and the technological progressive technologist wants a new government. That's to say a new state, right?”

“the centralized state and the decentralized network, that is the real political acts of the world. That is the, that is, you know, just like, um, capitalism versus communism was the big, big fight of the, you know, 20th century. The network versus the state, the decentralized, the centralized state, that's a big fight.”

“there are four idols that people chase in life. Money, power, pleasure, and honor, by which he meant fame, and which, which we mean prestige in life. Those are idols that never bring satisfaction. They, they, they run you in the wrong direction. If you want to be ambitious, be ambitious for the, truly the four things…”

“Like you might build some fun gizmos and gadgets, you might get some things out there, but you're not going to be able to destroy the defense industrial complex and shift everybody from cost plus contracting models to product models where you actually are accountable for your success unless you get to a large enough…”

“I, I, I fundamentally believe that what we need more than anything is a social network that has a reputation score attached to every single post that an individual puts out in the world so that people will actually think about what, what it is that they're sharing and saying before they say it as opposed to after the…”

“what's funny is actually the accelerationists and the doomers sort of share roughly the same timeline, because they, they both think that AI is the, like, intelligence is the only thing that matters.”

“everyone talks about companies and software companies being success oriented, but not in the same, people don't understand what success oriented is until you go and you see how Palantir approaches success orientation, where it's like the customer's outcomes, the software doesn't matter. The, the, the, the quality of…”

“it's, it's really hard to know because once, once that, a cultural norm like that goes away, it's super hard to reinvent in the absence of extremely strict religion.”

“It just creates an endless cycle of, of legitimate racial grievances from different groups, right? And that's the most dangerous situation is several groups that think they are victims for different valid reasons.”

“And you know, now I'm 37 and I realized that's actually like a deeply negative signal for the culture of the company.”

“the person incubating the company is actually still the number one determinant of, of success. There's no like magic way to do this that you can write on a whiteboard and say.”

“The catch here is that the power law is only true in retrospect and it is very obviously true.”

“And so the interesting thing is that they are actually entering a phase where they're becoming a little bit more akin to, you know, where the Soviet Union was back in the late seventies, which is low growth, but still very, very technologically formidable.”

“the only way to solve for the product that must exist is through back propagation. You have to have really technical people sitting with the customer, understanding, figuring out what's the right product, the ability to, like, mutate and ship that product, and then, like, anneal those lessons back into the core…”

“I describe forward deployed engineers as people that, um, that metabolize pain and excrete product.”

“You can't like vibe code a network. You can't vibe code a new data set.”

“I think in the age of AI, the, the physical world is the, the slowest link.”

“the very smartest people I know are just consistently wrong on the pessimist side.”

“This tends to happen in every cycle where the infrastructure gets overdone at some point. So that, but I think this is, again, speaking to our book, is I think some of the apps and services layer companies are a lot safer when that happens, but, but I don't know.”

“through tokenized, uh, securities and other aspects, I think we can make, Much more efficient. We can have, ah, instant, almost instantaneous, depending on Uh, you know, the type of instrument, but on-chain, delivery versus payment, payment versus delivery, and so that, um, is just, uh, you know, a, a potentially…”

“pick one city and make that city successful. Figure out supply and demand in one market and make that work and then scale that model to the rest of your markets.”

“the business model of some of these contracting firms is time and materials. Which means that your business model is to never finish.”

“no matter how much we cut, and I think there's a lot of ways to cut, you can't cut your way to deficit neutrality in the government, basically. You can only solve this problem through growth, so we have to get to, like, three plus percent GDP growth”

“so when you, when you have 4000 worker safety rules, most of which are completely self-evident, it doesn't actually help, there's studies of this, it doesn't help worker safety. It actually hurts worker safety, because figuratively speaking, people have their noses in the rule books, And they trip over the saw”

“they think you can just cut some of it out. You can't cut some of it out and have it work. You can't prune a jungle. The jungle grows back. So let's say you cut 80% of the rules and the processes. The 20% that's left is still mandatory.”

“I personally think that, uh, radio played a large part in the rise of the dictators in the 19 twenties. You know, if you look at the degree to which Mussolini and Hitler, um, used radio to, As, you know, a demagogic tool.”

“you know, you get, you know, Donald Trump in America, Georgia Maloney in Italy, Nigel Farage in Britain, you know, you get similar characters, not exactly the same, but similar characters emerging at the same time in different places, and that suggests That the people taking the credit for something don't deserve quite…”

“They want to be challenged. And I remember just having discussions with other companies. I'm like, you're, you're trying to babysit them and make it nice. And they don't want to, you know, do a gas cap, you know, you know, if they literally want to come down here, work hard, show they can have impact and, and do big…”

“every educator will tell you the two things you need to educate a kid. You need a motivated student, and we'll talk about when we get to motivation. The second is, you have to put them in material of the correct difficulty. And AI tutors, and EdTech, not even ours, just EdTech does that second really well. And that's…”

“kids don't want to be consumers. They don't want to scroll TikTok and play video games all day. They only do it because our current system basically doesn't give them options.”

“understanding that tradition is a necessary condition for a new elite to arise and to arise to the challenge that we have in front of us.”

“I mean, you know, a university should not be taking positions on the matters of the day, whether the tax rate should be 47% or 45%. That's left to the partisan.”

“Well, I mean, I'm actively trying to reverse it, but, but I, I have found that the only way to really battle that is not, you're not going to be able to try and turn the Titanic.”

“If someone spends enough time in an 80 or 90% left-leaning area, then they'll begin to think that anything other than 80 or 90% left is unfair, and that it's, that the scales are being tilted.”

“writing is really just a process of thinking. And unless you're, unless you're convinced that the, that the LLM is smarter than you, then you should do the, do the hard work of thinking through the ideas.”

“We think there's about at least 10% waste in this industry because of the low bandwidth asynchronous communication nature of trading information. So that's a three hundred billion dollar opportunity in the US, almost a trillion dollar globally, right?”

“the problem is they kind of dole those out like candy, uh, where it's not that hard to get a million dollars here, a million dollars there. And a lot of people mistake that as a signal of saying you're building something that people want.”

“So the way that I think about it is like any government contracting, you requires money. It requires a contract vehicle. It requires the right person at the top to be advocating for it, the right users of it, who are the actual end users of it wanting it, and the right customers, like user and customer are different,…”

“So doing that exoatmospheric interception, it's already happening. But if you're doing it from space, you can actually do it, uh, much more cheaply and much more reliably if those assets are already lingering in space instead of needing to track from the ground, and then basically aim perfectly, make sure there's no…”

“why is it so expensive for companies to go public? Because we allow, you like, uh, essentially wide-ranging plaintiff lawsuits against public companies.”

“I think it's one of the mistakes we made with inflection was, oh, we're gonna, we're gonna go after the scale compute side, and that's something you should be very careful about doing if you're a startup.”

“precisely when people are saying, well, how do we get adoption of AI amongst young people, it's like, well, pay them something. In order to do it. Like, for example, have a result. Is it, it, whether it's give directly or anything else, it's like actually direct cash incentives are very handy. Our whole society works…”

“The interesting thing is about these physics problems is you don't even have to like perfectly model the earth. You just want to be able to throw a diversity of circumstances and be able to kind of like test out your system.”

“For the stuff that you're concerned about as it pertains to this set of people that are blaming everything on the Jews or whatever weird things happening on the right, combined with the toxicity of the left, the best antidote to all of it is American success. The more that the economy is chugging along, the more that…”

“One of the reasons that code is growing so quickly is because you have this really great feedback loop of success or failure, right? It's, you know, in, in, in healthcare or in law or something like that, you know, it's, it's a lot harder to say, you know, whether you did the right job or not and code, you can run the…”

“when you're running a big org, if you can articulate to a person or a team, make this number go up, right? I don't care how you do it, just make this number go up, right? And if this is going to be doing a good job, that actually allows for an incredible amount of creativity in terms of how you do it, right? Um,…”

“if you look at how the best For profits operate versus nonprofits with exposure to both. There is incredible beauty in being like, make money, right? And that's how you do it. It's interchangeable. It's freeing. It allows you to do great stuff. Whereas in nonprofits, you have this constant problem where you have like a…”

“the reality is the internet in general, not just Meta properties, not just Facebook, but the internet in general, it's an incredibly good machine for engagement and attention, right? It's incredibly entertaining and why it's incredibly easy to measure. You can measure time spent because you can measure time spent and…”

“Like crypto is fundamentally disruptive structurally to the incumbents because it's a very hard leap for them to make.”

“The private sector has gotten so much better at employing people that are intellectually minded and provide such better jobs on a relative basis that really, as someone pointed out to me, it's like, if you believe in capitalism at all, like, why would you go work at the sociology department of whatever? There's like a…”

“Like, 95% of jobs are not that hard, and the most committed win, right?”

“both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism Um, converge on laziness and on people not doing anything. So, uh, so I, so I, I, yeah, so I think moderate optimism is the correct thing.”

“the, the, there's, it's generally been stagnant in the world of atoms, not the world of bits for something like 50 years.”

“at the Pentagon, as you know, Joe, there's always the tendency to make a customized bespoke solution for every problem they have. Um, and if you're building a stealth bomber, okay, well, you can't just go out and find a company that's building stealth bombers for anyone besides the Pentagon. But if you're talking…”

“It, it's like quaternary if I had to put it. I mean, it just matters in such nuanced ways that, uh, there are like 10 things that matter more. The total effect magnitude of when you space your meals is teeny tiny. A lot of people in the fitness industry like to major in the minors, and so you see a lot of stuff about…”

“So testosterone is one of those things that if you're, um, older, if you're in your late thirties, forties, and so on, and blood tests confirm that you're on the low end and you have the symptoms of low testosterone, it is a very good idea to get testosterone replacement therapy.”

“But for most people, their testosterone is totally fine and absolutely not even close to the limiting factor on how they feel and their longevity and quality of life.”

“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 the wrecking ball outside the house.”

“That, they can hold that for a while, but their, their, their power is brittle, and when, 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 starting to say pitchforking is bad, and…”

“I think a lot of places where you're sending in so much money that you actually like create a culture of corruption because that becomes like the default incentive if that's what's going on.”

“And it's small. It's not ready. It didn't actually have product market fit. You dump a ton of money on it and great things happen. Not usually, actually. All sorts of waste and pockets of waste and weird cultural problems.”

“And it was through that work that actually you and we realized you can't really build technology and software at real scale and get it to the enterprise in a nonprofit context. You've got to combine the, the for profit motive to get the very best people with the mission That aligns and inspires everybody, including…”

“Normal people, people who don't have great evil, uh, you know, genetically or, uh, pre, or, you know, they weren't, um, engaging in active malice. Became concentration camp guards. Because they outsourced gradually, you know, bit by bit, pieces of their moral deliberation.”

“Human brain works on glucose. There's only so much glucose to go around. We're biologically wired to be passive. So AI presents this very interesting, sinister. It's very good in the sense that it can offload, uh, plausibly everything, but it's bad in the sense that it entices us to give up more and more.”

“AI touches everything, and so, um, AI regulation is a unique vector for, like, government Power.”

“Only the money is on the yes side that's going to benefit someone. They're the ones that have the money to hire the lobbyists to go whip up the legislature to get stuff passed.”

“I think what people are really misunderstanding is what is going to be the end product. And I think the end product is units of cognition. Right. You're going to be effectively paying for or renting, um, something that's going to think or do things on your behalf.”

“if you say take a 10% cut, And transform, um, employee headcount costs into SaaS software, you're back to half a trillion, and you've recreated the entire enterprise software market cap.”

“For many different reasons, Jews have been stereotyped and scapegoated for thousands of years, marginalized in nearly every society, and they've succeeded because they're, we're a literate people, we're a civilization, and we're focused on helping each other out. And those attributes of being civilizational, being…”

“in modern history, global power has been determined by naval power, and naval power has been determined by who has the most ships.”

“Understanding that there is no such thing as true free trade in the world as we know it. It's a nice theory that every country will just manufacture and even export the things that they're the best at, will import everything else, and life goes on merrily. The problem with that is in between you have human beings, and…”

“Everything they do is tethered to, kind of, direction from the DOD, and so they do very little, like, internal commercial innovation. There isn't a lot of internal research and development dollars spent on pure innovation that isn't tethered to a DARPA or some other type of program that the military, uh, kind of comes…”

“When these kids go out for the match where they could do their specialty in residencies, if all the committee sees whoever they'll be in considered pass or fail, The only safe assumption to make it passes at the lower end of the rung. ... It hurts the best kids, and it doesn't help the less best kids.”

“The pioneers, like I am, who create solutions to problems and then get bored as soon as they've kind of solved the problem, they get rich enough, but they're not really the richest people in the world.”

“In moments of challenge and failure, you could react in many different ways, and one of them is you could feel victim. You could feel sorry for yourself, like, oh man, this bad thing happened to me, or this person did this bad thing to me, or just bad luck, or whatever it is. And that is a place of great weakness,…”

“if you're allowing conservative perspectives, you will be smeared as a conservative or right-wing organization, even if you're aspiring to be a big tent organization.”

“race is not correlated with who's poor and who who's rich or rather it's correlated, but it's not the best proxy. Right. It's much better to simply look at people's tax returns and income if you want to see who's rich.”

“we should all be trying to treat people without regard to race. Once we, once we see race, we ought to disregard it as a reason to treat anyone differently. That's the real argument.”

“What does a black American have in common with, uh, an Ethiopian? Culturally, almost nothing.”

“There's no such thing as colorblind. You need to see color. Seeing color is the most beautiful thing in the world. It's what we attach to that color.”

“Very often, just because there's a market failure, you try to intervene, the government failure is worse.”

“So the theoretical instincts is that were that the action is really in market failures and very little attention Was given the government failures. And so as things go on, people think, yeah, market failure is a problem. They never stepped back and said, well, is government going to fix this? Is it going to make it…”

“there's a sort of, you know, checklist of things that you want to go through, but obviously this is not what government does, because you can have failure along at any of these points, and more often than not, we just go ahead with things, and there's never been any checks on what's going on. We just do it. And that's…”

“Most technical classes now, they prepackage the problem for you, and they say, here's an equation, solve for x, or, you know, and, and you spend all of this time being a third-rate computer.”

“This is why I think the external component is also key because I haven't seen any successful movements based on civil disobedience without involving foreign, uh, elements in terms of where all that.”

“initially there was a lot of inflation when you, when you're running hot like we are today, and you're financing a huge fiscal deficit like we are today with printed money like we are today, you get into this self-reinforcing inflationary cycle like we had in the seventies.”

“The thing that causes that is, um, always an economically inappropriate amount of central bank printing, and what started in the nineties was, this was really the first time any foreign banks had been materially involved in U.S. debt purchases.”

“Productivity is income saved by companies that use AI and income lost by the workers that they no longer have to hire. You know, it's, it's a, it's a force that redistributes income within the economy”

“macro has been a challenged environment for 10 years because volatility has been suppressed by the central banks. They smooth everything out. They've printed a bunch of money, created a lot of dislocations. So if they're not able to do that anymore because they have these other constraints, those dislocations will…”

“Uh, and so one of the, the sort of core tenets is to maintain variance, maintain adaptability, because, you know, it's, it's just like an early stage startup versus a late stage company. An early stage startup, things aren't, aren't fully pinned down. You're still flexible. You're still malleable. You can pivot and…”

“AI is moving on a timescale of month to month, week to week, and, you know, regulations are on a few-year timescale at best, uh, put together, and that's just too slow of a feedback loop, and it's too heavy-handed, and it's probably not the way forward.”

“Fear mongering becomes instrumental towards certain, uh, uh, people and incumbents that are trying to, uh, gather power and, and, and crystallize their position, uh, uh, uh, before, you know, uh, people realize that actually the future wasn't going to be a gloom and act actually what is going to be great.”

“So yeah, cost isn't really the problem with community college. The major, like, problem with community college, I, I sort of describe in two ways. It's like quality and completion, which is kind of a child or derivative of, of quality.”

“Once you become a large employer in a state, like you actually end up existing sometimes for your own sake as a large employer. That's very powerful. This is why you have the really powerful healthcare interests and education interests. Like it's, you know, I come from California. We have a lot of special interests all…”

“I think in general, When we analyze these very powerful technologies, we conclude that nothing improves the human condition and the state of nature more than technological progress.”

“It's also, in some sense, the opposite of cross-functional coordination and process and structure and hierarchy. Now, I'm not saying that ownership equals chaos or equals anarchy, but it involves a lot less of all of those things than we became fond of in the industrial era.”

“climate change, CO two is, is definitely a product of, uh, inferior technology. And, um, we, you know, I truly believe that through, you know, innovation and, um, you know, new, better technology, we can, um, Live lives that are even more prosperous than today, while at the same time, you know, not having those side…”

“I think there's really only four ways to outperform. You need to have a unique, unique information, unique access, unique insight, or have luck.”

“Well, that's actually one of the cool things that we've discovered, um, with GPT-III and GPT-IV, Is that, uh, the model, so the models are trained on the internet and, um, they're reading everything, right? Then they try to act like what they've seen, right? They're predicting. And so they don't know whether to predict…”

“Like the difference between neural networks and linear regression was really big. And the difference between neural networks now and neural networks two years ago is just a sequence series of tricks.”

“And so I think a lot of, like near-term safety, a lot of these discussions about bias, like they really are about the fact that the model has learned all of these things, which it's learned a lot of true facts, it's learned a lot of things that are inaccurate, but you just, you just want it to be professional like a…”

“the way that capitalists maximize their wealth is not by hoarding a new technology, it's by selling it to everybody.”

“Any, any, any time you have a clustering of people who are high in openness, inevitably they're, they're on the, they're on the political left and usually very far, uh, to the political left.”

“Mark's convinced me over the years not to raise insane amounts of money because it breaks cultures. I didn't agree with him 10 years ago. I've now seen it enough times. I know he's right, embarrassingly.”

“One of the things that entrepreneurs or builders need to understand about the valley is if you're not overtly aggressive about Representing yourself. They'll just assume that, you know, you're, it's not real.”

“almost all enterprise software that works in America, or in the world, has two characteristics. It's built in America, and it's built as a product. Yeah. And it has a third characteristic, quite frankly, that it's sold commercially.”

“the future of the West depends on buying things from people that are Sometimes, not always, outside the norm, unlikable to you, are not going to conform to your thing, are not going to do the right dinners.”

“That's really interesting because it's something that really bothers me as an entrepreneur is when everyone thinks rich people must be stealing or taking things. Cause I think that what it does is it discarges people from being honest, hardworking entrepreneurs because we get used it for the same reason, right? This…”

“I see patterns of, like, you're getting consumed in this political nonsense. You're spending so much energy. You think it's the most important thing in your life. It's not, and you're probably not really making a difference. You're just, like, getting yourself into this loop.”

“The only people who know how good the surgeon is truly are, well, either you have a national data set showing outcomes, which we don't, except for a few small things. So, but you, but the people who operate with that guy or gal know how good they are, but that isn't democratized information. So, there's, there's a,…”

“And I say to them, Because it scales. You fix stuff. And when you make money, it grows, right?”

“these are people that if you're creating a value-added product, Beyond bottom of the pyramid, you have an addressable, easy market around about forty million. After forty million, you start to hit price points, which have to be very, very, uh, uh, good, and, you know, that's when you start hitting the, the shampoo…”

“when we have areas where the government is growing, is regulating more, is getting more powerful, you see certain corporations start to have the same politics as those people in government. And when you say, oh, these world corporations, what are they doing? But that, that is actually a very strong incentive. The…”

“One of the adages of Silicon Valley that I hear really often is build it and they'll come, right? It's this belief that if the product is good enough, people will find it on their own, they'll download it, they'll pay it, and the company will be successful. And I think the thing that you learn in investing is that…”

“I would say it's a great place to start your career. You spend the first five years there, especially if you don't just stay on one program, you get into a development environment, you work on a few different things and see a few different disciplines. The, that, that frictionless ability to kind of move from program…”

“that's the underlying problem is that, uh, in big companies like that, you own none of the success, and you pay for all of the, the downside risk. So there's really no incentive for you to take a risk, whereas in startups, it's the inverse.”

“when I deal with very top talent, you have to be deal with, you have to be okay with dissent. You have to be okay with people being maybe quirky and difficult to manage and Unruly and telling you you're an idiot and all this stuff because the best people are just more difficult.”

“I don't think meditation per se is essential in the way that I would say exercise is essential and reasonable nutrition And adequate sleep are essential.”

“I don't think that 40 years ago people had that much more willpower than they do today. I just think that the environment has gotten so much worse that you would need more willpower today to fight the gravitational pull Of this environment.”

“The damaging one to me is when there's a top-down thing that's wrong, that's stopping a conversation.”

“So it's like when you don't bear the cost, when you don't have skin in the game, it doesn't matter. And that's the fundamental issue with the US healthcare system. Nobody has any skin in the game. Nobody has any skin in the game.”

“economic prosperity is what drives so many people today, especially in the region, especially where we've come from and they've come from. And this was approached really from, from the perspective of defense. There was a lot, a lot of stuff that went on behind the scenes around airplanes and sharing of information. Uh,…”

“hating Islamophobia is not more important than loving Islam.”

“we have to have categories Other than oppressed and oppressive. Uh, in which to talk about our identities.”

“Cause you think that the pay, this is the thing that I didn't understand until, until like a few years ago, is, is that you think they're payers since they want to pay less, but actually we've capped the amount of profits they can make at, it's called MLR, where they, where they have to go only have, they have to have…”

“Technology, different words is true then, or true now, but he was basically saying that, look, America is a company, is a country governed by public opinion, so what governs public opinion governs a country, and so these algorithms, the, the, the mediums that we use, social medium, social media, all the, all the, the,…”

“the means by which society has been communicating these timeless ideas. Of course it's by example, but it's also by narrative and myth and the art that you have, have up in your house, the stories you tell them, the movies you watch, you know, the, the, The people you support or don't, how, how you talk about these…”

“They just go to, they go to a co-manufacturer who makes all the skincare products. They take something off a shelf. Put your own label on it, and you put it out.”

“you could actually build Great stuff. Make money, but also do a ton of good in the world. More good than you would ordinarily do otherwise. And I think that became the foundation of my own journey in tech, because for me, it became a superpower for getting things done, for aligning people's interests to do good.”

“You cannot think about investing in African startups the way you would think about investing in Silicon Valley today, right? It's not, it's not gonna work because we're stuck in the seventies.”

“Because the globalization of the dollar, maybe this is a political statement, is the best hedge against the feds.”

“And that's why I started forward is because there's no way to make it happen from within the system. Like the system will defend the system. And so if you want to reform the system, you have to come outside of it”

“making money and having impact at scale are one and the same.”

“I think to survive In medical training, you can't ask too many questions, right? In medical school, if you start asking, why am I memorizing this list of antibiotics and the bugs they match up to, they'll say, you know, just memorize the list. This isn't the time to be asking questions. You need to pass the exam. Um,…”

“You have to trust your gut. For V ones, V ones. For the disrupt, first disruption for the, uh, version one. Many, many opinion-based decisions.”

“The thing that's so hard about education is that it has a million stakeholders. Literally everyone from parents to communities to literally real estate agents have a huge stake in education. And what that means is we end up with a system that's almost like the mean of what everyone wants instead of something that's…”

“when you learn to code, you begin to realize that all these digital systems are malleable. And if you realize that the digital systems around us are malleable, you realize that the physical systems are too.”

“once we create the tools and technologies to cure those, We have this infrastructure layer that allows us to expand it to so many others. So we cure rare cancers or cell therapies today, but we're looking and building all of the infrastructure, the manufacturing systems, the logistics, the supply chain to be able to…”

“So we've got, like, on the order of, what, a hundred, maybe 200 pharmas looking to make these M&As. So it means a hundred to 200 chief scientific officers are dictating what does.”

“The third thing though, and I said this again publicly, it was important to see the Taiwan, for the Taiwanese to see what an inspired, well-led defense, a territorial defense of their country can do, in this case, Ukraine, because that will be very important if China wants to invade Taiwan.”

“You can build all the housing and get everybody off the street housed, but if you're struggling with addiction or mental illness, you're just housed with drug addiction and mental illness.”

“in my view, great founders never fail. They may not succeed, but they never fail.”

“there are like, if you're looking for mentors in that industry, there are very few women that have succeeded in business in traditional industries, but also in the startup ecosystem specifically. So you have to kind of lean on to men to support you and to guide you and to give you their shared experience.”

“the best thing you can do is be an outsource staff for them, give them the resources they need and work behind the scenes to make sure they understand the policy.”

“We're letting right now, when no data exists, anecdotes win, and that's why isolated incidents on social media completely color how Americans view policing.”

“The idea of monolithic whiteness is relatively recent and it's, It, it smooths over so many, uh, important, uh, ethnic, uh, trajectories into kind of one thing.”

“banning is not the way, um, to achieve the, the society that we want to achieve.”

“also when you ban, you don't actually get, the true believers don't stop. Because they're not actually teaching specific CRT texts. It's a, it's a, it's a methodology. It's a way of seeing the world. It's a way of teaching.”

“liberalism. Liberalism is about, um, treating people as individuals, not as avatars of, of, uh, of identity groups.”

“It's actually, people think that being a moderate just means that like whatever people on the left or right think you just like are wishy-washy, but it's no, it's actually like very hard. You actually have to believe in compromise, believe in not getting all of what you want. You, you believe in actually, um, making…”

“You would be shocked, or maybe you wouldn't be shocked, but a lot of people would be shocked by what people believe privately compared to what their public positions actually end up being.”

“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 personality quirk counts for too much.”

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

“the hoops you have to jump through to get tenure, it's so selecting for risk-averse.”

“I see some of that, but I also see wokeness is stemming from 17th century Protestantism. And a certain kind of moralizing and part of the Puritans as well, basically.”

“Well, I think diversity is a, uh, diversity is a subset of truth. I mean, I think, you know, it's, it is a, uh, um, one of the things that we, that we, we learn in truth seeking is that human beings understand the world prismatically, that we come at truth from many different angles, many different forms of knowledge.”

“I think intellectuals tend to be, um, They're, they're predisposed to be countercultural, to be rebels, um, to sort of see themselves as existing on the, on the fringes of society.”

“these ideas are seductive, uh, they're, they're seductive because If you're the kind of intellectual vanguard, you're embedded in university and you've discovered the secret sauce to human history and the sauce tells you that actually there's no such thing as meaning and everything is empty in that, um, it's…”

“these attacks in many ways help us, because they call attention to what we're doing. So people are interested in finding out, and when they find out, Uh, they, they find that what we're doing is the opposite of what we're attacked for. And so it attracts more people to what we're doing.”

“It's kind of like punching a bully on the schoolyard, right? Once you pop them in the nose once, they never come back. And that's kind of how I view the special interest community.”

“we have to have the pre-distribution of opportunity, not just redistribution post-production.”

“The, the contact hour model encourages you to keep as many students enrolled for as long as you can because you're selling units, semester credit hour units.”

“Those are all degrees that are going to result in outstanding economic impact. That by itself creates a value base that would easily justify the funding for an entire university so that the softer programs, if you will, are carried by those who have a more tangible economic return.”

“So one of the rules of anybody considering models like this is the fewer variables, the better. Every additional variable that we add adds complexity, it adds confusion, and it will drive behavior in unintended ways.”

“the federal government has introduced a lot of regulatory reform during that time period, aimed at, like, keeping the number of regulations low, but because they haven't really changed process, they've just, like, added more paperwork and more people to it, um, the, the regulations, like, actually continue to grow.”

“Whereas the government is not getting dynamic feedback and it just continues to grow because they don't have any reason not to.”

“we've published a peer reviewed journal article, uh, in, in December, 2020, um, on a lot. We've discovered, we, we believe we've discovered a lot that the power, uh, density of these transistors, it's doubling about every 18 months. We plotted all the data. Back to like the 19 nineties. And sure enough, it's very…”

“Stagnating inability for people to debate with one another. It's bad for business too. If people are scared to express their opinions because they're going to be canceled or they can't build a good business if they're not going to be able to disagree.”

“our inability to create a, an environment where we're more forgiving and less judgmental starts creating an environment of intimidation where everybody on the left and the right start moving to the extremes, and that lack of diversity of thought.”

“the, um, currency in industry is, is money or financial, and the currency in academia is credit. And it, it just leads to interesting incentives. There's a lot of competition. People aren't kind of rowing the same direction all the time. You're trying to take credit maybe from someone else somehow.”

“That capitalism is, is not a force for evil. Capitalism is a force for good. It's helping humanity to progress. And there might be bad actors in capitalism, just like they're bad actors in business or bad doctors, bad lawyers, bad politicians. But in general, business creates value for other people.”

“Most of the time, business people are fundamentally honest because they understand they're gonna have ongoing relationships.”

“Where does America underperform competitively, internationally? We underperform in education and healthcare. The two that are most regulated have the least amount of innovation.”

“Well, they tend to be progressives that are primarily social justice warriors, then there's environmental warriors, and then there's alternative religion. All of those are sort of branches of progressivism.”

“the problem is we did evolve in tribes, and there's a tendency to, to love your own tribe, and you want to kill the other tribe. So we, we see that. Cancel cultures, like, We used to be able to just, we don't kill the other tribe. Now we cancel it. Um, and, and so we see, um, that tribalism running amok right now.”

“You know, you look for an amazing entrepreneur who has a great vision for the future. That's the same thing we look for in teachers and principals. If they have a great vision, if they know how to teach kids, let them run with it. You know, let them actually create a whole new school way of doing a school.”

“if you're going to complain about, you know, the, you know, what's going on in San Francisco or California, then you should also be trying to do something about it in any way you can, but don't just complain that San Francisco has too much homelessness or California has too much taxes. You didn't use your influence to…”

“except decline is reversible. I mean, you go through bad patches, but that doesn't mean you're going to kind of expire.”

“the real pattern in history is not rise to zenith and then gradual decline. It's quite different from that. A complex system can have a very rough patch, then it can stabilize, it can seem to be in equilibrium, And then it can fall apart very suddenly.”

“I think outside the United States it is much harder than some of my more radical libertarian friends imagine to create a new state. Small states are very vulnerable. That's one of the lessons of history. It's big empires that call the shards. And you're only a viable city-state as long as the big empires are happy for…”

“It's only when there's conflict resolution that you need markets or elections or both. And so, it's not just that, you know, America's about capitalism and democracy. In many ways, that's all that's left. Because a lot of the community that's underpinned America has been eroded”

“basically, um, blockchain's turn every user into a root user. You have total control over your data, over your money. Um, you cannot be deplatformed from it. You can't be censored.”

“So the fundamental assumptions behind geographic polities where people who are near each other share cultural norms and therefore agree on laws. And, you know, therefore can resolve disputes because they're in the same community and they have some degree of consensus. Those assumptions are being invalidated.…”

“when you think about using technology, you don't practice grit. You don't practice a characteristic that allows you to be able to kind of overcome something.”

“If we, if we are not prepared to stand on the front lines with Israel against those fundamental threats to free and democratic societies, then we are jeopardizing our own long-term interests.”

“I mean, basically the thing to look for is where is a lot of capex go? And where is that, that thing not running 24 seven? ... And so as a result of that, your activation energy in those examples is low because somebody else has put all the infrastructure in place and you're now just helping them, you know, squeeze…”

“And so if your friend circle is not super diverse, your early employee base is not going to be super diverse.”

“Satisfaction doesn't come from what you have. Satisfaction comes from what you have divided by what you want. And each of us, if we actually want to find enduring satisfaction, no matter where we are economically, we need a wants management strategy.”

“The problem that we have is we treat the poor as, as, as liabilities to manage, as opposed to assets to develop.”

“all of life's big problems that are hard to solve are complex, adaptive, human dynamic problems. And all of the solutions that we get from government are complicated.”

“The problem with social media today is social media is a complicated solution to a complex problem of loneliness. It's a, it's a basically, it's an, it's an app based complicated engineering solution to the problem of love. That's why it's utterly inadequate and not up to the task.”

“I think the right role for government in this sort of science is to support very undifferentiated basic science. That's the, that sort of is the foundation for now the ability to create Entities that are really good at taking that and turning them into medicines, drugs, new diagnostics. That's what the private sector…”

“the place that everybody was coming to it from was just assuming that we'll never have a lot of data for robotics, and we need to do everything we can to try and design our system smarter, or like, figure out tricks along the way to try and get robotics started without a lot of data.”

“Yes, if you're going to make a significant, um, robotics foundation model, um, like there's, you, you don't have any chance of just downloading, uh, enough data from the internet to, to do that. You really have to go find some way to access it.”

“If the answer is no, feel good at three to four former operators on offense. Couldn't break into your network in five to six days. It's pretty, I'd feel pretty damn good. That's the best you can do, by the way. I don't know what else you're supposed to do. And, um, and that does withstand third party inspection.”

“If the job like in the past was writing, now it's editing and shifting from being a writer to an editor is a very, uh, I think for some people they're thriving in it and some people are really shocked by it.”

“In this, in this case, you either had large scale surveys, which were low fidelity, or manual interviews, which were lower scale, but higher fidelity. And now that you can have computers talk to people, you can have The scale of the survey with the fidelity of the manual interview.”

“But the reality is, this has much lower fatigue rates than surveys. So, meaning that people will go for an hour And they won't drop off.”

“You know, we have a weird version of this in investing, where our research is called expert calls, And we run into this all the time, where you're talking to this expert who's actually being paid money to teach you something about a product or an industry, and you have to drill down, like, five different times to…”

“The answer is, like, if you are, want to have a relationship with that person, then have a relationship with that person, right? Don't, like, put AI between you and somebody you want to have a relationship with.”

“I think it bifurcates, it bifurcates the skills a little bit. So the things that made a really good product manager, a good product manager then are only amplified. So deep understanding of the customer, ability to articulate your ideas to a team with varied skills. AI only makes that job easier and therefore makes it…”

“there aren't that many companies that can withstand a billion dollar infusion, which means The universe where they can deploy these dollars just becomes more and more narrow.”

“we're usually incredibly successful with founder-led institutions, or where the, the leadership acts as if they are founders, because they, they have an ownership mentality over the entire outcome, and are willing to reimagine everything in order to achieve the goal.”

“heretics require two, two things. The space for their heresy to exist, and a little bit, a modicum of protection from the top to enable that to happen right here.”

“where traditionally back then the idea was, if you're under investigation, don't talk to the media, don't do anything. You have to have a media policy. You have to basically tell your story. But I would say the number one advice that I would give that we did not do back in those days Um, what before you, if you're…”

“I think like AI as a technical co-pilot for diligence is actually one of the most interesting use cases for AI. As an investor right now. I don't think it's a replacement for human experts necessarily, but it certainly is a huge help. If you're, if you come across a really interesting company in a field that you know a…”

“Some people are referring to this as like a headless model, and I think it's really important for companies to, to, to be thinking and building with that in mind and making sure that if their users are extremely sophisticated with how they're thinking about building their own internal AI agents, that your company can…”

“as you want to scale from, uh, hundreds in a community to thousands and then tens of thousands, you really want to do that with, with autonomy.”

“I think about where we are today as, as being akin to where automotive was in the Before, when we were still hand building them. And the question is going to be how quickly can we move from there to where Ford was when they introduced the Model T.”

“I mean, every three months you have to throw out your previous experience and, and build new experience because the tools get so much better.”

“it used to be the case that, uh, you have this entire software development life cycle and every step of that cycle, Is oriented around not wasting the super precious time of engineers writing code. And now you have suddenly this overflowing abundance of the ability to generate code from ideas, from prompts.”

“at Tesla, we had one mantra, which was, uh, you know, never go to sleep while the GPUs are idling. You know, if you let your cluster idle overnight, that's just a huge waste of resources. Just, just kick off some experiments, you know, before you go to bed so you can wake up, you get some more data. And it's, it's the…”

“a lot of times it's actually easier to solve like a frontier science or engineering problem than it is to sort of change the molasses of the existing world”

“the best founders have infinite access to capital, but influence attention, to your point, I think, LOM attention and just like cultural attention, I think that's the most scarce commodity”

“But then I think the execution bar is actually very, very tight because there is like the magic around like the founding story, the problem that we're solving for customers, but because it's less technical differentiation, The execution bar of like every single person on that team has to be very, very tight. So I think…”

“If the job like in the past was writing, now it's editing and shifting from being a writer to an editor is a very, uh, I think for some people, they're thriving in it, and some people are really shocked by it.”

“Cause right now I think like the models are already so good that the constraining factor is actually your ability to provide them the context information to win.”

“Think of, think of an ERP, think of a CRM. They're organizing, but they don't help you really run your business or make decisions in your business.”

“There's five key things that, um, AI is good at. Like, these are the tasks. You can add one more now, computer use, but you think AI is good at multi-turn conversations, document understanding, structured output, Search and reasoning. If you can break a workflow down into any of those five skills, AI would be pretty…”

“That's the biggest problem we have in America. We have an old system, an old design, and they say, well, you know, to make it better, we just need to put more money there. But if putting more money into something pushes harder, but if you're going in the wrong direction, you're pushing harder in the wrong direction.”

“So the best way to cut is to cut with a, I call it a, an off ramp, not a cliff, right? You don't want to take a program and say, well, I can't afford it. So it's gone tomorrow. No, we can't afford it. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna ratchet it down over the next three or four years.”

“And what is inflation? It's the worst tax on the poor. Because you can handle a little inflation, I can handle it, most Americans can handle it, but that 10 to 15% of Americans that are really impoverished, they have to turn on their light switch, they have to buy milk, like everybody else, and they get crushed by…”

“No, and it's what you're, you're teaching kids daily habits is actually what you're trying to incent, not just outstanding outcomes, because that's part of education.”

“one of the things I've learned as a principal now, and I've been principal for three years, is parents want their kids to be educated the way they were.”

“How we measure that is, can you argue both sides of the debate? And no matter who you are, if you can't steal me on the other side, you don't understand the debate.”

“And, and, and really the only way to get to fast, uh, shipping is Almost like building a CDN for the physical world.”

“We don't, we'll never have the, the lowest labor cost, right? Like we, we can't compete on that, but what we can compete on is efficiency through data.”

“I think by the way, AI can help with that. Like AI can identify all of this, like duplicative regulation.”

“Well, the A players at PayPal, who would be massively successful there, are not the same players as the A players at Apple, who can be massively, so you, so you actually get these areas of coherence and cultural identity”

“And that's one of the reasons why like Annalise Exynian's regional advantage is so key about the not having, you know, anti-competes is because it allows that spinoff from a large company to go do that. And I think that's one of the things that made California and Silicon Valley what it is.”

“This is one of those where, uh, oftentimes you think of like AI or products where it's like, yeah, get it out there and iterate. Uh, um, this is one of those where you're optimizing for the worst case, not the average case. This isn't search where you give some bogus result. Like you could kill somebody”

“we had the view that instead of pure text interfaces, there was going to be A lot more full interaction where, you know, AI systems could, could not just read texts and answer questions, but actually just go and interact with the real world and encode. Obviously that means debugging, pulling up the logs, reading…”

“I think that the balance in AI does just inherently swing a lot more technical. You know, it's, it's, there are a lot of pure technical problems that if you can just solve these really, really hard problems, it is, It is incredibly clear, you know, what happens and, and how you turn that into a business.”

“In, in generative AI, you know, everyone talks about kind of the whole generative AI wave. I actually think it's two waves. You know, the first wave is kind of what I'll call like imitation learning, and the second is, is more like RL, reinforcement learning.”

“Well, it's even more than that because you hold a lot of the energy and reserve for, uh, for contingencies. You don't need to increase the amount of reserve that you hold. And so if you double the energy in the battery, you're actually probably getting three times the range.”

“The thing that's exciting about these kinds of aircraft is compared to, uh, ground-based transportation, whether that's rail or, or, or cars on the road, those are linear. And so if you want to, um, you know, get more capacity, you need more lanes, you need more lanes with this, you can go, you build a new vertiport…”

“so many of our problems right now come down to the fact that the internet was born without an identity layer.”

“just because someone wrote something on the internet doesn't make it real. In fact, your default assumption in 2025 should be that it is not real, right? Um, and like in less proven otherwise.”

“Like I think seed investing is basically buying out of the money call options.”

“If you do a million crunches, your body fat on your abs will go away, which does not happen. It's all almost all systemic.”

“Another one is that if you do lots and lots of cardio, you'll lose like an unbelievable amount of weight. And that's also not true because the biggest variable for weight control is your diet and not cardio.”

“Because it seems to be that when muscles are put under tension and stretch at the same time, they grow more.”

“And then the other piece of advice is that if you eat a healthy, high protein diet and control your calories, that plus this kind of resistance training is like 80% of all of health and fitness.”

“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, and really put out, you know, a level content that people will notice.”

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

“the major challenge there is not, you know, how do you actually traverse terrain? I mean, you're driving on roads which are engineered to be a very easy to drive on. Um, the challenge is dealing with all of the different, uh, agents that are in the environment. So think about other cars, bicyclists, pedestrians, um,…”

“People who are just kind of starting work in robotics often think that you can just do things in, in simulation. Uh, but they quickly learned that it is really important to actually run your software on the robot. And then especially in field robotics, run that robot in the terrain.”

“we believe that autonomy is actually the key enabler of this. So if you imagine that you want to control 10 assets or a hundred assets, um, that means that you need something to automate some of those assets functionality. Uh, otherwise, you know, you won't be able to split your attention.”

“you can kind of imagine that maybe the payload should define the vehicle. Uh, so if you have a lighter payload, you can, you know, have a lighter, cheaper, more tradable vehicle. Uh, whereas if you have a heavier payload, you might need like a larger, more survivable vehicle in order to handle that.”

“The other thing I saw was when you have loads of smart people working in committees, things don't really happen.”

“They say they want it, and then they'll offer you 5000 bucks for it. Well, you know what? It costs a lot more than 5000 bucks to build, and a lot more than 5000 bucks to even sell it to you. It's not a business.”

“The first thing was that government only pay for the processes that they're already, that they're already doing, right?”

“I guess you have some stuff growing at 50% right now, which is unusual, but it's hard for these companies to grow faster than 20 or 30%, usually for the most part.”

“That's how I've always succeeded at Palantir, and I think at OpenGov as well, as you, as you find, but also you find at the government that there are some good people there, and you partner with them, and they, and they, and they pull you in.”

“whenever you have a technological revolution, you have two choices. You either build for freedom, or you watch as others build for control”

“When you use a Bloomberg terminal, you actually want to optimize for decision quality. When you are scrolling at night, you're kind of in engagement mode, right? So what does that tell an entrepreneur? Well, it tells maybe, like, look at those markets Where like decision quality actually matters.”

“That's the big trend right now. It's basically this try before you buy for talent, go into a market, prove that it's good, very low risk. When you think about contracting, our customers tend to see that they never want these engineers to leave them. They'll convert them to being full time and they'll scale a large team…”

“The DOD is built around execution. Execution of processes and PBE and whatever. Silicon Valley is built around innovators who create new things that never existed before. And here's the rub. The executors never come up with innovation processes. I mean, they'll do it around the edges, and it's not that we don't…”

“You could teach startups this as a process because the other mistake that goes on in Silicon Valley is thinking sales to the DOD is just simply complicated enterprise sales in the commercial market. And I laugh hysterically when, when I hear that having done both.”

“And I feel like, um, at any given moment in time, there's one or two companies that are going through this kind of golden age period where you're expanding rapidly. You're soaking in all the best talent. You're launching multiple product lines. You have this, Diversity of stuff happening, and then often those cohorts…”

“Honestly, people just don't want to pay out of pocket for their health. So to your point, you could pay a 102 hundred dollars and get information that may be life-saving. People don't want to do that, right? They're used to their employer paying for it or the government paying for it. And, uh, most of health care is…”

“I think, um, if you look at every society at its peak, or at least on its way up, you'd always have these large scale Inspiring monuments. You celebrate wins, but you also inspire the future. You inspire the next generation of people.”

“The biggest problem, well, the biggest problem that they were facing was reliability and scalability. So you can't adopt thousands of platforms if you can't get thousands of platforms. So it's building that reliability and scalability, not just in the hardware, but in the software so you can actually control them at…”

“They never talk about anything that's within their control that they could do something about fixing. And to me, that's a telltale sign that the guy who's headed for real trouble Because there are a lot of things you can't fix, but if you don't focus on the ones you can fix, you're gonna be lost.”

“Usually, as the CEO, you can perform any of the tasks better than your next subordinate, but if you don't get over that, then let them make some mistakes and then correct them. You can't grow the business because they're only 24 hours in a day anyway”

“to everyone who's successful in America, you have to acknowledge that a portion of your success Is due to the fact that you were born in America.”

“The advantage I had to Dr. King, that I could write Words, and I could hear how they would sound when he spoke them, because I had an ear that was attuned to what the words would sound like.”

“And as part of that historical institution of slavery, they developed a companion ideology to justify that system. And that companion ideology has some explicit words, but the words are real. They're called white supremacy because they had to justify how can you enslave? How can you be comfortable enslaving someone…”

“Another way to teach it is you challenge them to beat it. So see if you, see if you can. No, so not have them do it, but. But give them the challenge. How would you beat that system? If our goal were to do- How would you blow up the nuclear? To be very clear to all of your audience, nobody out there is trying to blow…”

“Uh, which was basically a decapitation of a system, and in a way, it also perhaps contributed to the conflict between Iran and Iraq shortly after the revolution, because Saddam Hussein thought that perhaps this is an opportunity.”

“A company in the US typically cannot afford to serve the SMB well in terms of like the hours of support you can offer.”

“I think the more delusional you are, the more you move towards B to C, because it takes even more to succeed.”

“Because you have to condense all of the regular payments that you do when you take a pill. You might take a pill for many years. You have to condense them all into one payment because at the end of the day, this is a single dose curative medicine.”

“Set in motion globalization, all of the trade deals we saw since then, the wave of essentially bringing three billion people into the global labor market that depressed wages and provided a bunch of cheap outsourced supply for things. So yes, you have Western demand, like debt funded consumption booming, and you have…”

“Typically, um, a new one takes over or you start to get some sort of decay in the existing order when there's a lack of technological innovation. So the US and also to some degree when you're overstretched from military perspective, because then all your sort of opponents who don't want to be under your thumb anymore,…”

“Over the past, call it, you know, 15 years, uh, Silicon Valley had developed a tremendous arsenal of, of, of enabling technologies that, um, uh, you know, we're, we're reaching in some ways kind of a, a, a, a, a maximal use in, in the context of, you know, social media and, and all the things we love building at that…”

“the creation of a mission driven culture is a company that's building a product that has an actual mission, you know, and where that mission, like, you know, makes a difference in the world, period. You can't make it up.”

“The future is, is one, uh, where logistics becomes increasingly, uh, local, uh, and increasingly small. I mean, it, it, it, a massive, uh, an aggregate, uh, but, uh, uh, hyperlocal at scale. Um, and so the notion then of hyper-local micro warehousing, you know, I think is one that's going to be, um, you know, quite,…”

“You know, you're probably going to have less competition because people are just afraid to do that.”

“The leader, the leader has to set the tone. The leader's not crazy intense. Like, however intense the leader is, everyone's going to be a little bit less intense.”

“That, that led inevitably to everybody who was writing, trying to sort of fish for that traffic to sounding totally identical in the first place. And being completely bombastic in the second, and it eroded trust. So you have now nobody trusting you, and also your business model is totally screwed.”

“On the politics side, what has to be done is you have to be, there's no special, like, death star to the rot. Like, you have to replace it, and that means funding Small, annoying races that seem trivial, but aren't. You have to find the candidates. You have to give them money. You have to change the culture.”