The Wisdom Wall

“Like, I think the reality is like VR and like immersive experiences and all other realities are kind of great if your life sucks, right? Because then you're like, I'm gonna like live in a video game. But like, I think a lot of the problem with that type of stuff is like, it's just, It's not, if you have a good life and…”

“Federal preemption is good When you are pro regulatory capture.”

“The moment that a company, an industry, wants to consolidate, needs to consolidate, is the moment regulators are most likely to stop them consolidating. And whereas the actual time when action would matter, like when it, when it's growing and a company is making the right acquisitions to take over an industry,…”

“the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. Huge moat. Delivery of quality product. Be damned.”

“There, there are two that everybody's worried about like their future, but there are basically two ways to know you have a future. One, you have some vocational training. So it's like, or two, you're neurodivergent.”

“Unilaterally imposing restrictions, even if those restrictions are good, isn't just an issue as far as who rules us, the democracy issue, that sort of Palmer Luckey, I think very eloquently raised. It's inviting Very bad outcomes for those asserting that in general.”

“I think it is a safer equilibrium To have China dependent on Taiwan than to try to cut them off from Taiwan while we are dependent on Taiwan. Taiwan is 70 miles off the coast of China. It's not an ideal position in the world for us to have a dependency on it and China to not have a dependency on it.”

“the basic takeaway is that most every male, 40 and older, should probably be taking somewhere between 2.5 and five milligrams of Tadalafil, not necessarily for erectile function, although it will augment that as well, but to lower blood pressure and to improve vasodilation for the brain, for the prostate.”

“if, if there are insiders from day one, it doesn't matter how much dispersion of supply, mindshare, talent, et cetera. There is the, the sort of like the big bang moment will always be there and will always sort of like a scar on the record of the thing.”

“OpenAI could swap out the underlying model, And still accrue the vast majority of, of value. So, hypothetically, you could have ChatGPT, chat.com, powered not by GPT-Five, but instead powered by Gemini or Claude, and still see positive user growth, monetization, because at the end of the day, most of the users aren't…”

“What does the business of the future look like? Actually, the interesting thing is workers become more valuable, like actually trained workers become more valuable. This is exactly the opposite of what people are saying, but it's true. The person at the top is actually crazy valuable. People with technical expertise…”

“Kids coming out of school today that are fearless in the questions they ask and the follow-ups and their ability to prompt, they have more skill than everybody in every major corporation with under a thousand employees.”

“The problem is what people don't understand is there are no other algorithms other than Shor's that get you that amazing speed up. So you're better off using the machines we have now. There's, there's no payoff even possible in the future unless we have a new breakthrough like Shores or something like that.”

“AI scaling laws. You can put in exponentially more money to get linear returns.”

“I think, I think that the independent investigator model of science in this country, where it's the Huberman lab, or it's the whatever lab named after the PI, I think that's a flawed model. This is gonna really upset some people. There should be labs named after a particular mission, like curing blindness laboratory.…”

“There's no company that ever died from a founder being too controversial. You got deal fucking infiltrating with genuine spies. And they're still doing fine, bro. Worker, 17 guys. They're, they're still kicking. Like, no company ever dies from being too controversial. You die because you don't make enough fucking…”

“Well, you know, it's one of those things that I think is funny, like, people talk about hallucinations as this bad thing, um, but in a lot of ways for, like, kind of this speech-to-speech interaction model where you're talking to an AI, Hallucination is a feature.”

“They're so active in seed because the individual investors are like, well, hey, if we take thirty million and divide that out by a ton of two, three million dollar checks, if we lose a few, it's not such a blow to the reputation of that, of that, you know, partner at the firm versus taking a thirty million dollar check…”

“A better UX on medical records is putting lipstick on a pig. The problem is the underlying incentives of the system. Um, you know, shipping pills in a millennial pig packaging is an innovation. You know, a lot of healthcare startups are just wrappers on the existing broken health incentives that are destroying the…”

“We won the internet because we were free and open. China's winning AI because it's free and open. Not because they care about that.”

“You can cheat on a test, but you can't really cheat on a sales call. You can't cheat on a meeting. You can't cheat on a conversation. Um, what Cluey or what AI allows is sort of like an unfair advantage. And it's so unfair that it feels like cheating.”

“I really, truly believe if you're over the age of 23, you probably don't have the viral sense that you need to go like consistently massively viral.”

“if you're a multi-billion dollar fund, and you write a two million dollar check into, to a company, and you invested in the wrong company in the category, Like, you don't get a chance to write a two hundred fifty million dollar check into the right company. So I think it's pretty foolish when those funds invest at Seed”

“good writing, uh, is very easy because, uh, if, if your idea is right, it's easy to articulate it. And if you get writer's block, the reason you have writer's block is because your idea sucks and it's wrong. And that, and that's why you're, you're struggling to articulate it. So I think the harder, if, if writing is…”

“nuclear reactors are steam engines and steam engines operate on what's called the Brayton cycle. And there are certain irreducible costs associated with, you know, steam turbines and so on that, that just drive the cost up. Um, and that's, even if NRC didn't exist tomorrow, right? Even if, even if you could buy…”

“So I think if you're starting a SaaS business today, you want to go against the Silicon Valley dogma of focus. You want to build a Chinese style company, which is I think what Rippling is doing.”

“I think the whole point of AI is the switching cost for almost all this stuff goes to zero, right? And because switching cost is zero, there's just no value.”

“So if you have an actually transformative technology and you can swing it, you're better off buying your customers. Right. And then deploying your technology, but that credit that's predicated on actually having a better technology.”

“the way to get people to work on nights and weekends is not to ask them to work nights and weekends. It's just give them a deadline that can only be met if they work on nights and weekends.”

“And I think that talking about curing diseases and new medicines we're going to be able to develop, all of that starts to become much more real when you have models that are at this level of assistance and capability.”

“What AI can't do is grow up in a terrible home. A.I. can't have a broken heart.”

“when you're paying these people nine figures, 10 figures, uh, many of those people are gonna basically spend a year and hit a point where they're like, okay, I have a hundred million dollars in the bank and I'm kind of good now.”

“if you don't know somebody has to liquidate, the best thing for you to do, unfortunately, sadly, Darwinian, is to go sell all the positions you have in common, then go start shorting everything they have, um, and it accelerates the, The sort of downfall as quickly as you can, and this is a very common practice when…”

“The prime brokers, the Goldman's and Bank of America's, they do so much business with Citadel, and they've done this before where they know who to go to, just the same way the US government went to Warren Buffett when they wanted to shore up Goldman. They know that the right person to call is Ken, and he is really…”

“It's really hard to fire your VCs. It's hard for your VCs to fire you. And so as a result, like actually it's kind of dysfunctional. Whereas public market, like I love our investors because if I do something stupid, they call me up and they say, that was stupid. I sold your stock. And then we, and we have a…”

“all these things can be scaled in a very valuable but largely going to commodify way, but you can't scale the taste of, like, what is the business problem you want to have to solve and need to solve?”

“They increase the size of the market because de facto, nobody wants to find an underrated market where there's only one person. So like, if you're the one person, the percentage of the defense budget you can get is much smaller. And two, they set up a comparator.”

“DeMille would have his production designers do oil paintings. This is that, in a sense, conveys a cinematic, a cinematic intelligence.”

“That was a business that did very well. They were very innovative around a different era of the internet and you could take search traffic and social media traffic and turned it into commerce dollars or other things. That era is gone.”

“great leadership is presence, not absence. I think a generation of management consulting, or management school, management teaching, taught us that CEOs, um, should trust their people and get out of the way, and I don't think trust and get out of the way are the same thing.”

“So what I think is e-commerce, you want a very rich user interface. It would be agentic. You can be able to have a conversation with it. You can talk to it. I could talk back to it, but I think the point is it has to be more visual. I think a text-based interface is for some solutions. And a chatbot that's visual.…”

“I actually think the guest app would be pretty easy to copy, and I think in the age of AI, you can make a better app than ours, and we want to make that app before anyone else does, and we want to be agentic, but I think the key is most of Airbnb is not the app that you use. It's mostly the offline experience. It's the…”

“you need physical verification built into the system for agentic commerce.”

“the software three-point paradigm is a lot more kind of raw. It just, neural network is doing more and more of the work, and your prompt or context is just the image, and the output is an image, and there's no need to have any of the app in between.”

“the models feel like they're getting fatter every month and they're sort of eating away at the edges of what you can do with them.”

“My advice would be, would be to go all in. Like, you can't, you can't go and be like, work-life balance, and like, I wanna, you know, check out at five, cause like, there's gonna be someone right behind you that's gonna come and take, take your place and be that brand that comes in and does what you wanna do if you're…”

“the primary issue with, with, uh, these labor marketplaces like Fiverr is disintermediation. If you If a business hires somebody on Fiverr and has an amazing experience, eventually they're just gonna go direct because they build up a lot of trust, and it's very different than, than a platform like Uber, where you don't…”

“The 17 and a half percent return looks like a red flag until you look at it closely. It's preferred equity hurdle, not a coupon on debt. This is the main thing that the hundreds of posts I saw are missing priority on returns before common shareholders.”

“If that, if that 500,000 dollar engineer did not consume At least 250,000 dollars worth of tokens, , I am going to be deeply alarmed.”

“once you figure out how to do agents, then you can do them a little better than most other people, and then you can turn that into what would have been a SaaS business in the past, is now, you know, we'll create your own marketing team, and we'll, you know, do all these different things for you that you no longer have…”

“if you don't have that money, and 40% of people don't have 400 dollars for an emergency, when you go to the hospital, as an example, they literally end up loaning you the money. And that, as a result, we've turned hospitals and providers into subprime lenders.”

“can you get a meal, ah, that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store. Because if you do, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car.”

“A meal that's efficient, you know, so efficient it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store. A meal that's prepared and delivered to you. That's real. You must do automated production of food. You must do automated delivery of the meal.”

“Because if you're gonna do specialized robots, not humanoids, but specialized robots, They need to have wheels. Right? I like to say, like, if you saw the Beijing, in Beijing, they had the humanoid Olympics. And the, the half marathon, and you're watching the humanoid cruising. I'm like, dude, could you imagine if that…”

“Capital becomes a strategic weapon, which means you must be the best at getting capital in order to win. And we realized that early on in the Uber days, of course, that's happening times 10 in the sort of, let's call the digital AI wars.”

“If anybody comes to me and says a strategic thing was easy, I'm like, you messed up. You could have been way better and gone way further. More competitive advantage. More differentiation.”

“The simple math would be, it's one 60 on one test, but you've got to pass differentiated tests over a long period of time, so it's a thousand tests. So de facto, by the 50th step, it's zero IQ.”

“your valuable, your, your value is pretty directly con, uh, uh, convergent with people's inability to understand what you're doing. So it's like, it's like all these technologies are potentially commodifying everything. Okay. So if you are a business that is, you know, Not services, not product, but both, but also…”

“So high level, open the Strait of Hormuz. That's the only thing that really works. Then you can talk about Saudi mid-East spare capacity, our emergency capacity, and IEA emergency capacity, and then below that you have Canada Jones Act and US production.”

“People, like, I was talking to someone, they're like, why doesn't the government just have, just get someone to make their own model? It's like, because it's, like, you talk about government contracts, we're, like, single digit billions. We're talking about for the, the amount that's going into CapEx, the cost of these…”

“my assumption is that, ah, the private company should have very little, very little say in how the government uses those products”

“there's an interesting irony that if you wanted AI exposure, you're pretty good just owning the index. NVIDIA is such a large part of the index. You have exposure to Microsoft and Google and Facebook. Like, I don't know that you need to be in that place”

“Every time venture cap, every time venture capital gets easy, people take or take risk with companies that are less of a great fit for the venture capital model. And when I say a great fit, like they're, they're either heavy capex or they have, they have low gross margins. They require tons of capital to keep…”

“there was near death with Tesla many times, and it's a lot easier to get in those difficult situations when you're using debt and leverage, which we're seeing all over these data centers.”

“open source has always been this like pressure on SaaS, And it's always withstood that, and like, yeah, maybe, like, if you can just prompt it, and it feels like emailing your, your SaaS provider to reconfigure things, like, that is a real pressure, but I think it's underrated that, that open source CRMs have existed…”

“white collar economy is our economy. If you all of a sudden just take a leg out of that economy, it has a contagion effect into basically every asset, uh, in the world.”

“network effects are, are more powerful than ever, I think, in this world. Yeah. Uh, so things like Meta really have a lot, uh, to, to sort of gain in that sense, but I think things that look like they're network effect businesses, but in fact are just the ones that are doing the hard work of aggregating demand and…”

“The real lock in, the real business value, The franchise value of an Uber or a DoorDash is the customer lock-in because the customer gets comfortable. They've got everything saved. They want to hit a couple buttons. They don't, they don't price shop. Agents are happy to price shop as much as possible. And so if you…”

“It may be for you, but it's not going to be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea, the moral plea that no, this is wrong. It's not gonna last. There's too much money to be made, and there's, it's, it's, it's too productive.”

“That's what Apple Vision Pro is. It was never intended to be a product of the times. It's a product of the future hauled into the present by spending enormous amounts of money.”

“I think that the bigger point, going back to taste is, you know, if an agent can do it for you, Then unless you've got some amazing sophisticated prompting that's super unique, like an agent can do it for someone else. And so I think that this, um, discourse on like agents are just gonna do all the things. Well, what…”

“the length of time that an artifact will exist for is inversely proportional to the likelihood it's going to be generated. And I think this is true across media.”

“Agent and Commerce doesn't replace Shopify checkout. It's just a front end to the, to the checkout.”

“SpaceX doesn't have to lose for Blue to succeed. What the U.S. needs is it needs two SpaceX's. It needs two launch companies competing vigorously against each other to try to give us the most capabilities as a country, commercially, civilly, from a defense perspective, because our adversaries aren't standing still.”

“If there's like three firms, if there's three firms in the economy, all are kind of independently behaving, behaving rationally, it doesn't equilibrate to zero.”

“Each model makes money, but the company loses money.”

“the point is it doesn't equilibrate to perfect competition with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with zero margins. If there's like three firms, if there's three firms in the economy, All are kind of independently behaving, behaving rationally. It doesn't equilibrate to zero.”

“Each model makes money, but the company loses money.”

“The way I think about it, the defense industrial base has rotted out so bad. I mean, you think about the incentive structures for the last three decades. If you're Lockheed, and I'm your supplier, and you're out in cost plus, you're incentivized to have me charge you more per component. And then if you're my tier two…”

“the thing is, is the corruption is just sort of like, it's another tax. It still works. Right? Unlike maybe other countries, you still get it done. It still works pretty well, but some folks, you know, but then you make a little money on the side.”

“The reason why you should actually pay attention so much is because this is the first time, like, image models essentially always gain share, video models always gain share, like Studio Ghibli moment, and then obviously ChatGPT. This is the first, like, new moment. It's a new modality, being the agent, and it's like…”

“the statement that, uh, someone said to me that has stuck in my mind most these last couple of weeks is that every company is an API company now, whether they want to be or not. Um, because agents are just going to be able to.”

“you've got, like, CPX, you've got, like, the standard GPU, and now you've got the Grok chips, and they all fill a different niche, but really it screams, oh crap, we don't really know exactly where AI is going, which I don't think anyone does, right? I mean, it's, it's moving so fast, the software is, um, the model…”

“you have people thinking like, oh, latency matters in terms of where a data center is. It doesn't matter at all. What matters is, you know, as we've moved from, you know, chat applications, which were like, or search response immediately, chat applications, let's say response takes 10, 20, 30 seconds. You've got…”

“and my, my argument is, like, more economic in the sense of, like, if you sell them, like, tens of billions of dollars of equipment, they can make hundreds of billions of dollars of AI value, or chips, with that equipment, whereas if you sell them AI model access, then it costs them this much to get the economic, you…”

“So I think, I think everyone's, like, cloud code is for coders, and it's like, no. Cloud code is for people who don't code now. Right? And that's the big realization this year.”

“anything that humans have used on the internet, any sort of, like, game, or social media, or, like, jobs, or people paying each other, or collaborating, like, any of the things that we've built for humans, there's no reason you couldn't build that same thing for agents.”

“easing is fundamentally different than cutting interest rates, in that it appears to be working through fundamentally different transmission channels. No longer credit channels and lending channels appear to be the dominant way in which it impacts the economy. It appears much more to be working itself through asset…”

“authentic models got so good that you can now ship as much as a company could a year ago. If you, if you, if you can handle those tools, if you speak the language or like understand how the language thinks. You can, you can go really fast.”

“code is not worth that much anymore. It's, you could, you could, you could just delete that and then, and then build it again in months. It's, it's, it's much more the idea and the eyeballs, uh, and maybe the brand that actually has value.”

“What I see is, for example, if you try to get ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini to write you something, it's, Really shitty, and it's shitty because by its nature, it goes to the mean, to the average, and it's, and it's not reliable, and it's, I mean, I just can't even stand to see what it writes.”

“One of the reasons the Blue Origin moved a little bit slower than SpaceX, uh, is that, uh, they leaned a little bit harder on the exquisite system going really big, and Elon had this idea of, like, let's try and make a whole bunch of small things that we bundle together.”

“AUM weighted brain rot or AUM weighted slop is not an excuse for slop and, and, and controversial investments. If you put one percent of your fund into something that is just going to go all over the internet and be like, we are the most degenerate. We're the craziest. We're the most insane. We're the most fraudulent,…”

“The problem from, uh, the, the Carlota Perez perspective is that all of this spending on chips is relative to the sort of infrastructure she wrote about railroads, factories, fiber, short lived. If there's a bubble in railroads and we're like, we think railroads are going to unlock five percent GDP growth. It's…”

“It's a technology exercise to really set the stage for an eventual foldable iPhone. They have to create thinner form factors, thinner batteries, more advanced materials like titanium for the casing in order to create something like the foldable phone to compete where Google has been for three years, where Samsung has…”

“It's like, if you're a passive investor at the late stage, there's no alpha today in VC or very little, but that's just not the game we play.”

“Uh, this one is interestingly enough, both a tech shift, a business model shift, because this is the first time you have marginal cost software that's not like COGS of the SaaS world, but true marginal cost. And three, the way you produce your artifact, your software is changing. So the product development process is…”

“after all, the gaming's competition is not other gaming. Gaming's competition is short form video.”

“Social networking may be the most popular product of all time that was invented and then uninvented. It was literally uninvented because around 20 12, it became social media. And the moment it became social media, your friends became your followers. You stopped connecting. You started performing”

“People think that starting a company or taking a break from school is this very high risk move when you're young. They say, oh, how do you find the bravery to do that? What I need to, what I try to push on people is it will never get better. Like when, when you are 18 or 19, you have no family, you have no real job,…”

“Ultimately, what you see is that when people don't have their own money on the line, they don't give a shit, and they're focused on all kinds of other stuff that ultimately doesn't matter to shareholders”

“AI doesn't have a soul. It's not that human connectivity. It's not, you know, at our depth, AI is not born. It's, you know, AI is made. So, you know, we, there's a humanity that still needs to be nurtured and governed and developed and grown. People want to buy from people.”

“You know, stuff that is technically written or drawn or filmed by a human, but is completely derivative and much less original than what an AI has generated, and I think that will be what people really care about long term.”

“if you are a person who is being interviewed, your incentive is to go and do as many interviews as possible. Therefore, that is not a scarce commodity. Therefore, you can't build a great business on it.”

“I think the brands are going to become more important, right? I mean, I, I mean, I basically think that, like, all kind of economic theory assumes that people have access to perfect information. And I think the internet took us a step closer to that, and AI is going to take us another step closer to that. But in a…”

“the logic of software should be We charge you something downstream of, of, of value creation. That sum is a percentage of the value we create. It's better for both sides because it's, uh, it's, it's, it's significantly less than the value creates. Good for us because there's a multiple on the value.”

“The, the value of LLM is when it's essentially in an ontology wrapper, because to, to, to actually create value, you have to be able to take the output, serialize it, and deserialize it in the context of the business. So the logic, actions, and security of the business, and its tribal knowledge, and what it's trying to…”

“the thing that unifies the woke left and the woke right is they don't like the consequences of meritocracy. They want to work back to the inputs. So in that, that like just will screw society. It's like, you've got to be able to allow people to succeed wherever they go.”

“Is there a way, whether it's tokenization or other approaches to that? Probably, but it's going to have to go back to the future where somebody is going to have to take some risk and be a market maker. Yeah. If Vlad or whoever is a market maker so that there's always some liquidity within x percentage of the last…”

“Distribution is king. It's very clear that, that even if you built a better product, the best product is not going to win, and we see this with the, with the LLMs.”

“I think technology products become obsolete at the precise moment they become perfect. And what I mean by perfect basically is like, yeah, it's like the perfect idealized complete product. Like it does everything you could possibly ever imagine, everything a customer could imagine, everything you as the technology…”

“And I guess, yeah, what I would say is like, look, that clearly works if you're Apple, right? Yeah. And so it, it clearly works if you're Apple. But I would say there's a fine line between that strategy and just, and simply becoming obsolete, right? Um, and so the, the problem is like, if you're not Apple, um, and you…”

“One of the things I've observed over the years is I think technology products become obsolete at the precise moment they become perfect. And what I mean by perfect basically is like, yeah, it's like the perfect idealized complete product. Like it does everything you could possibly ever imagine. Everything a customer…”

“I think my first POV on AI right now is that I think we don't talk about AI and prompting as entertainment enough. And, and what I mean by that is not like its ability to produce entertainment, but the fact that it is entertaining to chat with an LLM.”

“granted, that is a theoretical threat to the company, but the problem with AI-only development processes is that they are extremely difficult to debug or decompose. Figma gives a natural canvas to add in AI.”

“I, I sometimes joke that the big AI companies should become LBO shops. And what they can do is they can partner with KKR or Blackstone and all they get is the data. KKR and Blackstone pride the capital, get all the returns. Fine. But all the data comes back to, you know, the open AI's or whoever. And by getting the old…”

“the key problem I see Is this, the models can't do on-the-job training. So if you think about a human employee, um, you might have some. And these human employees, the good thing about them is that, you know, you train them for six months or a year, and over time they're getting better and better. They're learning…”

“I think the, this is at least an order of magnitude less efficient and less, um, less, uh, capable than the way humans learn.”

“This, like, tacit knowledge that you build up through practice is not this, like, written instruction manual that you can just write out as a system prompt.”

“I think the bigger problem is not just the width or the, the width of the pool, how many different tasks you have to RL on, but it's a depth in the sense that a job doesn't involve doing a thousand different five minute tasks individually. It's the fact that you're like trying to work on something But then somebody's…”

“even if there's no software progress out of that point, that algorithms aren't improving, just that ability to learn on the job from everything in the economy would functionally produce what looks like a super intelligence, right? No human will be, will have mastered The range of skills and knowledge and know-how that…”

“we've seen this game before with, with Intel saying, oh, that doesn't matter. Like just, just get the most performance possible. You can water cool things, all kinds of things. That, that tends to not be the winning strategy over the long term, and so we do think that there will be a renewed focus on just energy…”

“Because like tokens, you kind of hit diminishing returns pretty quick in terms of just like more internet texts or more like human written math solution examples. Um, and it doesn't scale super well, but the thing, the nice thing about the task specification is you can kind of like pour in more compute without…”

“The modern Congress has become so structurally weak that people channel their ambition into building a media platform, social media in particular, and that almost becomes their full-time job. And that's really a problem because we need Congress to focus on the nuts and bolts of budgeting, of oversight, of reclaiming…”

“the things we need to do to, to enhance the power and the functionality of the modern Congress actually require an over empowered president to make them happen. Like otherwise Congress won't do it on its own.”

“I sat on study section for a long time, and I can tell you there were clusters of grants that didn't solve what we call, what good labs call, the deletion test. If this laboratory didn't exist, would it change the direction of science? You have to pass the deletion test.”

“In fact, they like, have even expressed that like, they'll share more because there isn't a person. It's this idea of like social desirability bias. You're like, I don't want to come off as a person that is X, Y, and Z to another human.”

“Um, and China has really benefited there because there are so many more PhDs than there are here, and it's much cheaper for these companies to hire them, um, to do these, these dense, uh, labels for the video data.”

“The arms are already good enough. It's the off the shelf arms are fine. It's all software. Again, it's always all software. Autonomous vehicles are all software. Robotics is all software”

“when you look at reasoning, um, you just don't see that happen at small scale, right? There's like a certain scale at which it starts becoming signal bearing and that requires you to have resources, right?”

“There's a lot of interest from the banks to think about ways to use blockchains, uh, to create essentially marketplaces there, you know, maybe permissioned marketplaces where only kind of certain participants can participate. For them, the benefit is, you know, why haven't they created a network, like a marketplace…”

“If AI, you know, is solving all the problems in the world that, that they need more intelligence, right? Blockchains try to solve the problems in the world that need more coordination or more, you know, kind of collective, um, uh, collective action, getting a bunch of, you know, blockchains are fundamentally social…”

“in the same way, like you first kind of have to build a product that works for like the individual remote worker, then maybe the couple where it's a two body problem, then like, you know, the early family, then the scaled up family, then like the whole community of people who are moving together or the whole startup…”

“Zero knowledge arguably is, and Vitalik's also made this analogy, ZK arguably is to crypto what the transformer is to AI in the sense of, It takes a bunch of things that were previously special case stuff, and it puts it into kind of a common framework where, um, you can. Like lots of special case subroutines, um, can…”

“Sablecoins are an intermediate form that facilitates this transition from the, you know, fiat world to the pure crypto world. Kind of like putting newspapers online was an intermediate form.”

“There's a really good story to be told about kind of doing this for speech and getting really terrible speech. Uh, I have no illusions as a neurotechnologist that you will get really terrible speech out of this. But the key thing is that this does not matter because the context is what matters. And by informing this…”

“If AI is electricity, like in electricity, all the value didn't accrete to the people who made the turbine generators. It went to the people who made the tools that ran on electricity.”

“The real issue is that consolidation bred conformity, and the conformity pushed out all the heretics. It pushed out all the founder personalities that you need to make this stuff really work.”

“that investor or that angel investor is going to place who knows how many bets, and you're gonna place one during this period of time. You are an investor of your time, and that is one thing that you can do during this period, and you have to take that really seriously. So I think that it's, it's much more about…”

“people talk about hallucinations as this bad thing, but in a lot of ways, for like, kind of this speech-to-speech interaction model, where you're talking to an AI, Hallucination is a feature.”

“in the sustaining versus disruptive innovation, I think AI is like pretty clearly a sustaining innovation in almost all cases. Um, I think it like might be disruptive to Google. Um, and so assuming like a scale up is still Competent and can still build new product. I think they can just kind of, uh, adopt this stuff as…”

“if you're going to build an interesting company, I think you either have to attack it from, ah, you have the handful of researchers that can literally push the state of the art forward, which is like maybe eight organizations in the world, or You know and understand and, like, love and can serve a type of customer…”

“if you have some strict stack ranking of the teams within open AI, like only 10 problems can have like the top 10 teams on it. And so if you're any, if you're doing anything after like the top 10 problems that they have, then you're like by definition don't have one of the top 10 teams working on it. And that seems…”

“The quality bump over things that are much smaller is just like, like the, we're hitting diminishing returns on capital investment is a lot of it. Like they're taking out of the API because like the, they can sell other things with the same GPUs and make more money is part of it. Like it's a lot of compute to keep a…”

“I'm happy to call O three, 10 minute AGI. And I think like framing AGI in terms of like length of time, it takes a human to do a task is like more reasonable than like a global framing. Like, sure. There's a bar of like drop and replace for a human that we are like definitely not at yet, like for general jobs. But most…”

“most of these pilots are very much intended to be churned. Like, they're not, they're very much in a, they're not being rolled out broadly. They are coming through in a kind of walled off environment for people who are, like, gonna be the beta testers.”

“when they buy a machine, why are they disappointed? Because they don't know how to use it. It's, so it's more akin to like semiconductor fabrication than like subtractive, you know, metal manufacturing.”

“I actually think what we now have, Weirdly is effectively several markets for companies that are pretty decoupled from each other and kind of have their own logic and exist in their own vacuum. So like there is a public market, like the public market exists is the biggest, right? Um, there is a private market now.…”

“There's no more like magic numbers you hit and like a valuation framework that's consistent. It's actually much more about belief. You know, I, I say in the deck, it's a lot about this kind of new math of people want downside protection and then an option on infinity.”

“If you're running a fifty billion dollar venture fund, you can't possibly be deploying that well early, right? And actually you're paid to move gross dollars.”

“When, when they go public, The actual way re like the public markets value these funds has absolutely nothing to do with returns. It is a hundred percent the fee base, right?”

“to be honest, like the form factor is kind of irrelevant because in all of these types of robots that you're talking about, you have a couple of motors and some motion control, right? Like it's actually, Uh, if you can abstract away the software enough, like all of those things are essentially different variations on…”

“if you're picking up a 50 pound box with one of those robots, like it's very likely to tip over pretty easily. Like you need, and if you want to move at any kind of speed, right? Because if you take a 50 pound box and you move it Uh, at, you know, five miles an hour, uh, your effective load during that acceleration is…”

“It hasn't worked nearly as well for manipulating objects or working with your hands, and I think the reason for that is then the difficulty isn't about, like, how do you move your hands? It's more about the world that you're manipulating, and that is much harder to simulate. You don't just do it once. Like, every…”

“so far we've been quite surprised by how few different environments you need to see to be able to generalize to a new one.”

“And what we, what we start to realize is that all of these different data sources contribute to each other. They give you just like a bigger picture of what the world is like and better understanding. And it just turns out that robot actions is just like yet another language that these moms can speak and they just need…”

“this is why I think Like model companies are not guaranteed to win the application layer because you have to work on all these boring things.”

“And like the margin for people building AI products actually goes up every, like the farther you push the Pareto frontier, the more money builders get to make, which is like such a interesting and like unique thing about this AI moment that I actually don't think has been true in a lot of these other platform shifts…”

“And the asset class has grown so much that if you're an amazing company, Compounding your intrinsic value at 25, 30% a year at scale, you can raise practically unlimited capital.”

“the main one, or one of the main ones is that you can be a lot more aggressive on M&A. Um, you know, Databricks, for example, you know, bought this company, Tabular. Um, I think the reported valuation was two billion, and it was also reported that they were either pre-revenue or close to pre-revenue. Um, if you were,…”

“it's almost like the better the company, the longer they wait to IPO because they can be private, you know, again, compounding their value at 30 plus percent IRRs for much, much longer than they used to.”

“Yeah, we need to bring back manufacturing, but it's not, it's not a jobs program. That's for, that's for sure. In fact, the only way we're going to bring it back is if we automate significant amounts of this and maybe the guy who presses the on button every morning gets paid, you know, multiple six figures, but, uh,…”

“China has very strong expert controls. Like the reason TikTok can't sell is because algorithms in general are expert controlled. And so they would be able to buy the brand name and like the, the offices, but they'd have to completely re revamp the algorithm, which is like the secret sauce of the thing.”

“There are certain rules of the world that we've learned over time that need to be true. It's like gravity is 9.8 meters per second square. You can't probabilistically learn that by watching stuff fall in air and being like, yeah, my ML. No, no. I mean, there's just some like speed of light. Like you're going to…”

“I don't think of an LLM as an operating system. I think an LLM is much more like a CPU, right? It's an information processing unit.”

“focus on the developers. I think that's the beachhead. That's how you win the B to B market. If you win the B to B market with your open source models, Like, you get all of the sort of downstream effects that you want. Um, you know, you don't need to beat, um, you know, GPT-Five on something.”

“I think everyone can build, you know, a sub, a submarine, autonomous submarine. That's not difficult. Having it survive, communicate, act, still be on a stream from a human, particularly when you're taking kinetic action. Um, to make sure all the approvals are done in the right order is, that's, that's the big…”

“the harder you work at something, the more opportunities you have to fool yourself. So if you're very smart and you have a one 40 IQ and you went to Harvard and you work at Goldman Sachs and you spend six months doing due diligence on this deal, you are going to convince yourself of whatever you want to convince…”

“when people talk about, oh, I could have been just as successful if I worked 20% less. Yeah, but you don't know which 20% of your work was, was, was wasted or not.”

“I think anyone who's like Just doing model training at this point is like lighting money on fire. Uh, if you really want to make a unique difference, especially if you're a small startup, like a founder, like you gotta go take an orthogonal approach. You gotta try something different than what everyone else is doing.…”

“And in almost all cases, it was actually led within an organization. So you have an existing organization that has existing, you know, capital relationships and projects and, and in particular, a large team of, of very skilled people who are extremely aggressive about delivering value. And then you take that team and…”

“I think prompting, I think prompting is overrated. Like, just language as a unique interface, uh, will not get you too far because, like, storytelling and films, particularly in video, it's just so hard to just describe words, you know.”

“you can use Gen-Fort to kind of position the camera in different parts of the scene, and you kind of, like, it's interesting because the, the, the model becomes, like, a cinematographer. It's kind of helping you understand or provoking, provoking you with ideas of how you want to, Do it, which is different from how you…”

“Doug has this presentation, he calls it the laws of physics, where one of the laws of physics is that fund returns are inversely proportional to team size, and, um, also fund returns inversely proportional to fund size.”

“engineering productivity. I, I haven't seen as much of a boost as I would like to see. I think it's really good for making an app from scratch. Uh, when you have a huge code base with, that's all interlinked, it's just not as good. And we also built in like a weird programming language, Haskell, uh, which has been…”

“the best companies want to control their cap table. The best companies have unlimited demand. Right. And so in that, in that essence, you don't need a broader market to have random buyers and sellers to do price discovery. Right. And so I think the best companies generally like to run their own processes and work with,…”

“it's not about how much you yap. It's about the ship yap ratio. You have to respect the ship yap ratio. And if the ratio is right, you can get away with anything.”

“people don't want to code. The reality is I spent the last, uh, whatever working at Code Academy and Replit. I mean, it's good. I think we taught a lot of people how to code and at Replit, we built a ton of infrastructure around how do you set up a virtual machine, the runtime, install packages, automating all of that…”

“Fifty million to two hundred million ARR SaaS businesses that are growing in the teens. And they're not profitable yet, or they're barely profitable. They are not acquisition targets for PE. Those are not good enough numbers. They're not good enough to IPO.”

“you need to solve this from the outside in. Like you can't, it, Microsoft can't solve this themselves. You have to have a solution that is kind of looking at all clouds and looking at the entire Industry, because people are multi-cloud, they work with multiple vendors”

“incumbents have their programs continuing to be funded, right? And so the, you know, Lockheed, Raytheon, et cetera, Northrop's, you know, might not be experiencing as much growth as usual, but, you know, they're, you know, they're generally, you know, continuing to be funded versus all of the net new entrants while are…”

“he designs, he believes the founder or the leader should design the company, not for like what's necessarily best, like after they leave, but literally what's best for what they're doing now. He says, ultimately my E staff, which is his direct ports, ultimately my E staff is something that I have to know how to work…”

“A lot of investors don't quite realize when they're not like in the code of building these products is how low the switching costs are for API, right? Like it's a line of code to switch back and forth and like see how new models are doing. And so it's, it's hard to build a business when, when that's the switching cost.”

“in a world where companies are more efficient, early stage is really like the place to, Do this business. It'll be the last entrenched Alamo of venture.”

“You don't understand, like, this is a liability shifting thing. Like most, a lot of human jobs are not actually about doing the thing. They're about shifting liability and responsibility, right?”

“for 20 years, the way you start a social network is you say, who do you want to follow? And the way to start a social network today is say, who do you want to follow you?”

“now we're at this prisoner's dilemma where it would be theoretically a great time for everyone to lean in if other people backed out because then prices would depress, but everyone's staying in. And so it's actually leading to prices staying elevated”

“To get our best and brightest kind of in the way that Israel does to do two years of civil service coming out of high school. Um, I think that would do a couple of things. First, it would actually, like, give us the people that we need to execute on national priorities. Secondly, though, I think it would expose people…”

“media is a pretty shit business model. And so the trick is to do media, uh, to build media is great at a certain, uh, a few things, right? It's great at Building brand and distribution and awareness and all those things, but it's pretty terrible at monetizing. And so the trick is to monetize with investing.”

“Like, this is why I think all, a lot of these billionaire funded projects where the billionaire has made it clear that they will backstop the company somewhat indefinitely without a clear end date have never really worked. Because you don't have this clear, like, I think what's become the magic of venture and how it's…”

“I think you can identify kids who have a potential, like engineering talent pretty early. And if you develop that, this is, it's like, this is what they do for sports. And so like, if we're looking at people who can actually advance civilization and You know, we should have something that's at least as serious as what…”

“AI, unlike prior innovations, like unlike the transition from shrink rack software to the internet is just so good for the big companies, right? It's easy to slot in. It commodifies. I mean, there's just like, you can't, you cannot think of a better extending innovation for a large company, right? That already has the…”

“It's an interesting social bandana because on one hand I'd argue that Instagram Has made it so that the real luxury consumption is experience and travel and being hot, right? Like all of a sudden like fitness is cool because like you can say you're hot and being hot is like way more expensive than a watch.”

“one of the dirty secrets, which, you know, it sounds like is in the venture capital world, entrepreneurs all day long will pitch you about how their CAC is very high, but the CAC will come down. Here's a secret CAC always goes up, right? It always goes up. Like the CAC goes up, not down.”

“Taste in this era is going to be a hundred times more valuable as intelligence, thank God, is getting democratized than a commodity, and so it's, it's an amazing time to have great taste, and this is, the timing could not be better for what you're doing.”

“a, a, a thing that happens far too much that, that no one talks about is all these founders who are stuck. You know, if you have twenty million of revenue, A hundred employees and you've raised a hundred million bucks. You can't just quit. If you're the founder, even if it's clear that like what you were trying to do…”

“Look, if you build a business to thirty million bucks for revenue, that's like a heroic feat. It's extremely hard to do. Uh, and, uh, and then you somehow end up with eight percent of it under a two hundred million dollar press stack. That kind of sucks. And I, I don't think that's the outcome that anyone is like…”

“At some sense, at some scale, you just become an asset manager and really what you're looking for are, um, uh, you know, different fee paying products basically.”

“intelligence is, is so valuable and, and LLMs and AI is so valuable that, that, you know, yeah, even if you're like the sixth best model, you can still sell the intelligence if it's at the frontier level to the market at a market clearing price that still generates profit above what the NVIDIA GPUs cost and you still…”

“if you want to summon the AI God in a box, you gotta be a capitalist. It's not happening to a nonprofit. You're not just writing some clever algorithm with some altruistic.”

“Nvidia has the margins of a luxury product, but they are building a product that goes and sits in a data center and nobody sees it. No, no, no consumer is going to say, well, I actually really want my model to be running on Nvidia chips”

“there seems to be a massive pool of value in Being the consumer AI company, the aggregator, the front, the front page of artificial intelligence, getting installed on the home row of people's apps, setting it to the default search engine, setting it to the default webpage when you open a website. And, and then the B to…”

“You can't say we sh like these data centers are worthless. While also, or unnecessary, while also agreeing that AI's impact has only been felt one percent. Which, which I would say most people feel at this point that, that AI's only impacted our economy or society or way of life one percent. So if, if we have another…”

“if you under invest and AI is real, you're screwed. If you overinvest and AI is real, you're great. If you overinvest and AI isn't real, you still have, you still have a lot of assets. It's still valuable. Like there was a lot of dark fiber that wound up getting used later on. So like the, the, the risk reward…”

“I just, this is a different scenario because if you just download the Git repo for deep seek and you host it on Amazon or, you know, Google cloud or whatever, like there's, there's no data feeding back. Like you're not helping them improve the model at all. Like that's what Mark's getting at is that like it re it is,…”

“the biggest AI opportunity is that we've seen in the last few years have been the ones that the big labs just don't want to touch. It's like the AI girlfriend stuff. It's like too controversial. So probably not going to be killed by ChatGPT because they'll be like, yeah, sure. That is a hundred million dollar…”

“I bought tens of millions of dollars of YouTube creator ads through branded native, my, uh, my first company, um, creators would always tell me I get five million views a month. And I would tell them, I do not care. Because I'm going to buy an ad on one of those videos. So I'm going to price the ad based on your least…”

“a lot of the AI doomers are fearful of a return of God. Have we talked about this? Basically this idea that, um, they live degenerate lives that are highly incongruent with any sort of moral framework. Um, and so, but they also believe God is dead. And so that's fine. They won't be punished because They don't believe…”

“the Founders Fund Teal model is, Very, very narrowly selected for monopoly power, power law outcomes. Can this be a trillion dollar company?”

“No, if you're a seed stage founder, you should never take a true vacation. Do not go off, do not go offline. If you're burning out, it's because you, uh, your product's not working.”

“Yelling is a great way to get your point across if used highly strategically. You cannot yell all the time. You cannot yell on every call. You cannot yell once a week. You probably shouldn't yell once a month, but once a quarter, keep that as a tool in your toolkit and really let loose.”

“At a certain point, you max out the technology or business market size. And so this is very natural. We've seen this with, uh, all in going political and everyone getting really up in a tizzy about that, but it makes sense. They're growing their business then”

“great things oftentimes have to sort of skirt the law.”

“YC has become essentially a union for startups. Because if you are a VC and you fuck over one YC company, you go in their database, every YC company hears about you, and instantly you're ostracized from the entire community”

“The, the death zone is working at a mid fund or a family office and not being able to do a lot of deals because then you're not building up the brand value of working at a, at a, at a great firm and you're just not doing enough volume of deals so that you can build up a track record and say, I can actually get into…”

“they have built the best possible distribution engine into the DoD. Right. So if you're, Any of these 125 new defense tech companies, you can build a really great product and not necessarily like crack distribution or crack these contracts. And so a lot of those companies are effectively like off balance sheet R and D…”

“I think that you're, it's okay as a VC to position yourself as an expert in a certain sector, but branding your venture fund as a specific industry is, is almost like committing seppuku because They're just simple. Almost always is not quite enough opportunities, unless you're keeping your fund size small.”

“and I think that if you're a startup and you want attention, you want press, you should be courting hit pieces.”

“ads are just much better at price discrimination. And so if you have, if you have a billionaire in your audience and you also have a college kid in your audience and you're charging 10 dollars a month, they both pay 10 dollars a month. But, but if you're doing an ad based model, you'll get one dollar in ads from the…”

“in order to do the, the absolute, like, top-tier software engineering where stuff just works, like, you actually have to be a trillion-dollar company, like Apple. A ten-billion-dollar company just can't do it. Especially if it's an older company.”

“So if you think it's so totalizing, then you don't make the bunker. And so saying, hey, you don't have a bunker is not, is not proof that the person doesn't believe what they're saying.”

“Knowing nothing else, this should be your prior, because this is how productivity in competitive markets almost always works. A new technology comes out, it supports investment, it enhances productivity, everyone hires to go after all the, all the different, ah, battles.”

“We're just at a place in sports where the scarcity is so clear that these are detached valuations from revenue.”

“You could learn creativity. You could learn taste. You could learn all those things. It's somewhere in you where you could learn it. Absolutely.”

“no, no prime broker is going to let you keep 90 billion of gross market value because once you dip your equity below zero, it's their loss, not yours. And they're not going to lose a penny after Archegos and after these other kind of blow ups.”

“And if you start a newsletter business that makes a hundred million a year, Uh, even fifty million a year of revenue, you've done better than almost every hedge fund on the planet.”

“every single trader out there makes, makes one, seems to make the same mistake over and over again, which is their position size is probably two to 10 X more than it should be.”

“the whole idea of, like, if the, if, if, if an amazing intelligence, an amazing model is made, should it be widely available? That's actually at odds with distillation, because you have to hunt those bad actors down, and you play this whack-a-mole.”

“You never go to a customer. I don't care what you're selling. Okay. I don't care if it's enterprise software. I don't care if it's widgets. I don't care what it is. You never go to a customer and say, give me a percentage of your stuff. You go to a customer and say, here's the price of our stuff. And if it does really…”

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

“Most people cannot become entrepreneurs. They're not ambitious. They should not be ambitious. You could argue the numbers, but it's a small percentage, and other people want to work for them. So people like working in large institutions. Large institutions pay better. It's lower risk. I don't think that feature of the…”

“what you do is you limit the economic potential of your studios because you're only building for your platform and you make it back By all the licensing fees you get off the EA's of the world and the Activision's of the world, because 80% of gamers are on your console, not on the other guy's console. And so they just…”

“Volume negates luck.”

“customers are super fractal, right? And so, you can absolutely make the same amount from one percent of your customers as you can from the other 99, and have half your revenue from one.”

“how, how much you can compress the time from waking to beginning work is the ideal.”

“the amount of legitimacy that you need to be an influencer depends on the risk that the consumer has in taking action on the nature of the content that you're making.”

“The bull case for what Arlen is working on is that, uh, iMessage is a more universal interface. Text is the universal interface.”

“And that sort of direct payment, I think is going to be better received than this abstract, oh, yeah, my government's better funded, but are they gonna cut my taxes? Are they gonna successfully build that road? I don't know, and it doesn't help me pay my bills, which I think is what people want.”

“It's where all the value in space truly lies. But in order to exploit that value to the fullest, you need a few other things. The first thing is unfettered access to space. So you need your own launch. And then of course you need your own ability to build spacecraft at scale.”

“Others will probably wind up leveraging the possibility of going independent into more meaningful contracts within traditional media organizations. But it's, it's increasingly clear that a one size fits all approach, uh, perhaps with a tagline like, Independent creators are the future. I don't think that quite fits…”

“So if you have a model that can hack a system, it can usually patch that system for that hack in far less than six months, like probably in like an hour, like it can, it can see, oh, there's a, there's a exploit here and we ship the code, merged it in, and now that exploit is closed.”

“I think that's why like NFL players are very hard to cross over because like one, their face is not even recognizable because they're in helmets all the time. And then two, the NFL owns their distribution, right? Like NFL is their distribution channel. They don't have an audience that they're used to speaking towards…”

“good news travels fast, bad news travels faster, and the, the haters actually will talk about you more and say bad things. But at the end of the day, people don't really remember what was said. They just remember your, your name and your face. Um, and so you could do with that what you want, and You know, it's really,…”

“I do think the public market has a much greater tolerance, um, for investment and a much longer time horizon than a lot of people in the venture ecosystem. Give it credit for it.”

“The problem with that is if you look at all the companies, uh, that, that have done that, so the Airbnbs and, and, uh, and others that they basically, you know, that's, that's great for your private market investors. That's great for the VCs. That's great for any of the, The, the founders that are taking money off the…”

“if you don't get the governance of a company right, no other decision you make will matter in the long run because you won't be the one making it.”

“Definitely not one size fits all, but we do know that, you know, journalists that are able to build profiles for themselves, um, tend to be good for business. So we certainly support that.”

“The reason, the reason that the jury thing is, is, is bad is it creates a potentially an incentive for the jury to basically work together and say like, Hey, like we all have to be here for like a month. Like we can at least make some money on it. And then you only need to get like four, you only need to get like four…”

“Maybe the, the, the chips are the, are the refined uranium more than the actual weights, and the weights are, are merely one piece of the puzzle.”

“And even if the models are exactly the same, if I'm able to put 10 agents securing my bank account against your one agent trying to break into it, I will have 10 times the amount of solutions. And so I should win that battle almost all the time.”

“Every brand on earth should be spending even 20% of their entire marketing budget just on social media organic production, because the mid-funnel and TikTok-ification of social has eaten up the world, and we should spend no media dollars against creative that we're guessing for the big campaign.”

“Large corporations typically do not disrupt. They innovate. They innovate well with liquids. They innovate well with package, but generally they're not disruptors. And that's not saying the alcohol industry alone is every large industry. So it takes independent entrepreneurial companies to be real disruptors.”

“I would say that from a celebrity perspective, most celebrities should not create businesses that they want to own. The endorsement model is a good model for most celebrities, but for entertainers who truly have the understanding, the know-how, and the commitment to put in the work and prioritize said project over…”

“we think you need about a thousand people on that people tab, about 50 events on the events tab, and that's when we start to see percolation and social density and geographic density start to get momentum.”

“you gotta build a hundred billion dollar, or at least a fifty billion dollar company, To create that ecosystem of angels, and to create a training ground for the entrepreneurs of, you know, the next decade in Chicago.”

“Because the only way to get off these phones is through our phones. The people that were influential in hooking us on social media are very well positioned to say, guys, let's get out.”

“And that was an industry that was really done in Word, and we were Excel thinkers. So that was kind of a very different kind of mindset that we were bringing to the table.”

“In an ideal world, I would recommend, well, you can delete the transcript. The transcript's not that relevant, because maybe you batted an idea back and forth three times, and you said something that turned out not to be true, but you figured that out later. So you don't need any of that. What you do need is what was…”

“And I think, I think what we're learning as a society is the cost of not having broad participation is incredibly high. And we'll be. Right. If you have a whole, um, generation of young people that don't own their house and have student debt and don't feel like they're economically levered to open AI or anthropic or…”

“the ongoing question around building Um, these, you know, uh, one-person, high-growth companies is, is their durability, because if you can do it, and then I can do it, and then Tyler can do it, and then, and then anyone with, you know, access to a coding model can build it, very quickly we're going to erode each…”

“when people ask me what's the difference between Tim and Steve, the reality is that's not the right question. The question is what's the same things between Tim and Steve. And, uh, you know, their work ethic, they worked harder than anybody. Uh, they were completely focused on two things. Their Apple and their family.…”

“And so, if you even have a team of three people that are just relentless, and you guys know from, like, what you guys do, it's like, you can't compete with that. I don't care how much money you have, or what incubator you're in, or what VC's, you know, starting you, it's, if you have a founder who's just gonna be…”

“if an ad agency says it can't provide performance data because the channel doesn't provide it, It is merely a media buying intermediary. If you're an ad agency, you've got to figure out whether or not the ads that you pitch to your clients are actually working.”

“Every AI company is a Dyson Sphere company.”

“But the strong form of tall poppy syndrome does lead to lower startup formation. If you think that you will immediately be cut down in your society, you don't actually go out and hunt.”

“But if you're treating atoms like bits, digitizing the physical world, CPU manipulates bits, what manipulates atoms? Manufacturing. Storage stores bits, what stores atoms? Real estate. Network moves bits from point A to point B, what moves atoms? Transport, logistics.”

“And by the way, guess what? You need a lot of oil to even get that whole supply chain started because you need the mine.”

“And Bob Noyce made the decision that we will sell to the government, but we're not going to design chips for the government. And the distinction there was you had guaranteed orders, which was great. The government would take your IP, and there was, and in his mind, the more important thing is there was limited volume.…”

“one of the problems that is, that has kind of evolved is that our, our college, our common college pathway has actually become more restrictive, and I think there's less agency, and kids are, Being encouraged. They have to sign up for a major before they ever go to the college. They, they get stuck on these pathways,…”

“the thing that will differentiate you more in your career than anything else is to be the most hyper curious person That that's trying to do this thing. And, and once again, that's, that's put on steroids with these AI tools. But if you are the most curious person that's constantly learning in your field, you will do…”

“you're paying for effectively therapy throughout the deal and like general guidance and.”

“There's this whole idea that, like, you'll be able to build your own, like, CRM or your own ERP and vibe code it, and open source CRMs exist. There's one called Sweet CRM, there's Odo, there's ERP Next. Like, there are open source alternatives to Almost every piece of software. There's, there's an open source Photoshop…”

“Uh, but they can't go so far as to say like, hey, if you put the pieces together, Then this is how it's going to play out. I think it's too sort of damaging to sort of their reputations and like, you know, their ability to fundraise and things like that.”

“the pushback against data centers, like, it really is this, like, meme of creating a permanent underclass, like, that type of thing, because you, I, I would, I would be so much more expecting of this pushback if it was like, oh, well, we know that, like, living next to a data center is dangerous for your health, like,…”

“the backlash can have an actual impact. So you should not just write it off and be like, well, obviously AI is going to happen. So this is, you know, it's inevitable. It's like, no, these, these, like we live in a democracy. Like if they vote, no more data centers. Look at what happened in nuclear people.”

“just being in code, I think, is very linear. You might be running fast, but you might be running towards the wrong direction.”

“this is a disruptive innovation, this is not a sustaining innovation like mobile or cloud. Um, the, the, the AI version of, you know, X, Y, or Z SaaS company, uh, will not be like the mobile version of that SaaS company.”

“having a product, not just an API business gives you leverage because at some point the models are smart enough where you don't need to train them. You don't need to train a model that is four percent better because people are still coming to your application and having a good product experience, right?”

“One interesting thing is that the, there isn't, there aren't a lot of open source, like, premier profiles. Like, I, I've edited a ton of videos for YouTube. There's a whole bunch of cuts in there. What I cut out, what I didn't. You could have that record, but it's not stored in GitHub. Like, it's just, you can't…”

“having a product, not just an API business, gives you leverage, because at some point, the models are smart enough where you don't need to train them, you don't need to train a model that is four percent better, because people are still coming to your application and having a good product experience, right?”

“This is the thing that people don't realize that there's always a dynamic tension between the things that give you vitality and the things that extend your life. For instance, if you take growth hormone, you'll feel more vital. You'll gain muscle more easily, recover from injury more easily. You'll lose visceral and…”

“I almost prefer AI is holding up the stock market, but healthcare is holding up the economy because that's where we're seeing job gains and, and that's where like, The real economy. Like, there's always this disconnect between what's happening in the markets that's very forward-looking, and then there's, like, the, on…”

“So the only way that reverses Scott is those companies have to accelerate their core revenues and show that they are beneficiaries of AI.”

“If you're running an ad yesterday and you're an AI company and people didn't viscerally hate it, you won.”

“RIP the dead internet theory. We're going into the zombie internet theory. And so the dead internet theory is that, you know, AI will slop up so many of these social networks, so much of the internet, so much SEO spam. That everything will just feel dead when you land on it. Uh, and I, and, and the zombie analogy is…”

“He knows that people say they don't like AI content, but in reality they actually do. They engage with it, they watch it, they make it, they share it.”

“I build a lot of, a lot of CLIs because that's, that's where agents are really good. You know, you have to close the loop. That's always the secret. You have to give, you have to build it so that the agent has the best possible way to build software.”

“Typically if somebody's suffering, uh, from any type of psychosis, they start going to talk to people. People can kind of walk them off a ledge or, or kind of like talk them through the situation, help them get help. Etc. Uh, but an LLM's just like, I love yapping. Let's yap forever. Let's, let's go down every possible…”

“I think, uh, as soon as, as soon as there's a Wall Street, I mean, we love Katie, but as soon as there's a Wall Street Journal piece about a trend, the trend is effectively dead.”

“The problem is that it's impossible to hire the most elite storytellers because they are founders. Think Elon, Karp, And Palmer”

“Even though Gen AI allows marketing teams big and small to massively increase their output, it is often not even one percent as effective as one of these, uh, elite storyteller founders going on a podcast or just posting stream of consciousness on X.”

“Yes, but I still think there's enough of like a market force within China that if we flood the market with cheap, uh, Nvidia chips, there will, it'll just be expensive for them to keep propping up their local industry.”

“America is very much like addicted to Chinese solar panels right now. Like the Chinese solar panels come here, they're cheap. And so we don't wind up buying or building a domestic solar panel industry because just to get anything off the ground, you have to go in and say, okay, we're, we're going to deal with Having no…”

“even if I'm not up on release day with the car, because the automaker didn't invite me to the press launch, doesn't really matter. I can go get it from a dealer when it comes to dealers, 60 days later, and the video is going to be evergreen for five years, the whole cycle of the car.”

“If TPUs are not for sale, Nvidia does have a monopoly. If Nvidia truly is the only seller in the market because Google is not a seller, uh, then yes, they still extract, they still extract monopoly power from every other buyer because every other buyer says, yeah, I'd love to buy TPUs, but I can't. So you're the only…”

“Also with the Nvidia news, it's like, how much can you actually read into AI demand based on Nvidia earnings? Because I feel like we're, we're projecting out like these deals five years in advance. We buy the chips, then we install them like that whole rumored, uh, deceleration in Chachapiti growth. If that Is real and…”

“Running a successful VC backed company requires you to build a coalition of people that want to see you win. Getting media investors, talent, and customers on your side is not an easy task. Rage baiting, whether at the marketing level or product level, is the most effective way to get people who could be potential…”

“I think, uh, vibe coding is maybe an intermediate step to what we would call real time, three D or four dimensional dreaming with other players, which is literally you and I are walking around an environment talking or doing things. And as we're chatting over there, a three D experience or game or object appears.”

“Whenever there's a trillion dollars of spend going on, there is a de facto backstop.”

“Like, say, TikTok, amazing product, but people are going there to, like, watch videos, not necessarily shop, and I think that pattern's really hard. So we've always believed there's opportunity for a player who's purpose built to be world class at shopping and sort of, you know, shopping meets entertainment.”

“In core ranking systems, um, I haven't seen anything yet that's, like, much better than the state-of-the-art machine learning models. So I'd say we're, at least in, um, core ranking systems, probably not a lot of LLMs.”

“even though you have a catalyst, there's probably only a six to 12 month window where defense tech is non-obvious.”

“So basically if you look at the landscape and health right now, nothing is proprietary. You basically got wearables from all these from providers, you have food from providers, you have biomarkers, like nothing's proprietary. And so the winner's going to have to outcompete everybody and bringing a, an experience to the…”

“Pre-training is a more efficient form of training. Because you can advertise it.”

“When these shifts happen, whether you like it or not, you have to first be relevant after having, it doesn't matter what the business model is. The business model may be like, hey, I had whatever, 90% margins, you are going to at best have 10%, but you have to jump all in because even that 90 is going to zero.”

“it's actually really hard to price an option, especially if you're retail and especially if you're using like an app that doesn't give you the information that you need. And so you're, you're kind of getting fleeced because there was like very complicated, um, structures.”

“I think the TAM for doing things right is bigger than the TAM for things that do things wrong. The only problem is that the moment you prove that that's true, everyone is gonna follow in your footsteps and become your competitors in this new post-Prisoner's Dilemma world.”

“people build teams, they hire people, ultimately what that means is they delegate their work to someone else, you end up taking on this crazy cost structure, and it works when the business is growing, but it doesn't work well once you, uh, the business stops growing”

“that's a different calculus than the world of private equity, or, or venture capital, or any money managers, where, um, They're incentivized to deploy capital because they get management fees.”

“It's governments and it's ones who are, who have a long tenure. You look at America, You know, the presidential cycle is four years. So, I don't know if that's necessarily long-term incentives.”

“I think like the, the, the, the key to this is not any one innovation, but it's repeatedly Putting them out again and again, and being first to come up with them and put them into a cohesive offering, and you know, that's what we want to be good at.”

“if this is content marketing, it ain't gonna work. It's gotta be the main thing.”

“The right strategy is just be really smart and interesting and just go do a bunch of Free organic media on other podcasts.”

“The one new thing is AI models have, because of scaling laws, have much stronger data network effects and data modes than we've ever seen in the past.”

“glasses are the natural delivery mechanism for super intelligence. Like the, it is, you need something that will see what you see, hear what you hear, and they can easily deliver information to you.”

“the way a stock opens, if it's built correctly, is going to purport the way it trades forever. Now it doesn't guarantee it's going up, but it will have structure and foundation.”

“It, it drives retention because it has a natural storyline of like, okay, how did I get this box? How much did I pay for it? What are my expectations? Do I have something on the line? Maybe I'm hoping to build a set, right? I want to build a set. I really am hoping for the red one or whatever. And, and then, and then…”

“Um, be hypomanic, uh, helps, which, which a lot of successful business people are.”

“Living well is the goal. Not living forever. Not living perfectly free of illness. It's living a good life. And we are off of that.”

“there are brands and entities in culture that we perceive as cultural material, the same way artists looks at their material as, like, paint or sculpture or marble or whatever. Like, for us, Coca-Cola is material. Give us that. And we'll make something new with it instead of fabricating a marketing story to sell more…”

“The focus on the drop is, is misplaced. Drop is just a delivery mechanism for something new. What these guys are actually looking for, like what they actually want at the end of the day is how do you break through the noise?”

“What you typically see a lot of brands do is they're afraid of good ideas because good ideas have not been done by definition. Uh, so they lean more on the execution and you see like large budgets and like, Huge bloated teams and production.”

“The, the line that we use here is, a good idea should slap in one sentence, and then slap even harder in three. And that just means there, there are layers, right? Like, you appreciate it for the headline, but if you, like, really dig into it, you're like, wait up, is this thing making fun of me? And do I still like…”

“People don't switch products because something is. 20% better in this technical way, right? They develop habits.”

“It's hard, extremely difficult and time intensive to create valuable IP. And Disney's advantage is they have this sort of, like, three 60, and that they can make a film, and they can bring it to Disneyland, they can bring it to a cruise, they can create physical products around it, and so they develop IP in a way that,…”

“I think there's a lot of survivorship bias in these kinds of strategy discussions where people look at the one company That's able to pull this off, and they don't look at the 50 other companies that are in the graveyard, you know, because they, you know, because, because they didn't adapt.”

“whoever cracks the code on that will be, that will be the next Apple.”

“So if you come out and you're so good At what you do, that you can create as, as good of a product as OpenAI, models that are as good, you still don't need to exist. And so, uh, that is the challenge for anyone competing.”

“The exact avenue from which you would expect management resistance to a disruptive innovation to, to flow is from the, is the CFO office. Like the CFO, uh, should be resistant to, uh, disruptive innovation. And when you look at the history of companies that got disrupted, the CFO is saying, we have a good business.…”

“The optimistic take on that is I think that there is going to be an extreme premium, but on the humans that are able to sustain because of, of what they represent uniquely.”

“the unique, uh, thing about this launch is that there has never, you know, clearly, uh, many people around the world spend money on OnlyFans or other, uh, NSFW content, and, but Elon has never created a product for those type of people. And so I think the sort of latent demand that would, would feel maybe above, you…”

“That's not gonna happen. It's got the style that it's learned through its RL training for deep research. Um, so then again, it just becomes another tool. It doesn't really, it's not, it's not, you know, it doesn't become like an employee for you.”

“And so if California tomorrow says, look, We're passing a European-style bill to severely curtail, which I think would be a disaster, to severely curtail AI development. That would, in effect, be a national bill.”

“there's never been a chip shortage in any time in the history of, of silicon that doesn't turn into a glut.”

“Scale really matters. It's more of like an industrial question than a technology question at this point, and, ah, yeah, they seem really set up for it.”

“You don't, you don't want a founder with money. You want a founder with no options.”

“And I think the reason why we care so much about reasoning is because I think that's the path that we get reliable agents through.”

“we think that the way you really build industries is legislation. If you think back to the internet, that was built on really on the 96 telecom act.”

“one issue is it's like front loading all the cost to the beginning, and then there's zero budgeted for maintenance over somebody's life. So it's as if you paid 200,000 dollars for a car and then zero For oil or gas or, you know, wheel changes or so on for the rest of life. And so people get this expensive education and…”

“The problem is that like gold should be as immutable as possible and mutability is in conflict with, I mean, programmability is a good value and immutable is a good value, but those are like, uh, you know, fire and water. They don't mix, right? There's, there's, you know, you want a drink of water and sometimes you…”

“we think that the way you really build industries is legislation. If you think back to the internet, that was built on really on the 96 telecom act. If, you know, and had things like section two 30, which, you know, you may know is now a contentious issue had section two. I like to say section two 30 had been, uh, you…”

“I think that's one broader way to think of blockchains is like, it's, it's like if AI, you know, is solving all the problems in the world that, that they need more intelligence, right? Blockchains try to solve the problems in the world that need more coordination, right? Or more, you know, kind of collective, um, uh,…”

“The way for them to win is to have it be as close to zero take rate as possible.”

“and so if you've built an entire enterprise that runs, assuming some model is going to exist in perpetuity, that's probably not going to work out that well for you. So you're going to have to have this constant ability to evaluate and, and, Run these models in parallel to develop the conviction you need, not only for…”

“It's like we just developed this extreme ownership mentality because anytime we outsourced even an iota of responsibility, it blew up in our face. And that's, you can see for deployed engineering as like the extreme manifestation of that, that we're going to somehow have total control over the implementation because…”

“really preserving what's at the core of this is like, this is an artist colony, not a factory. You know, I don't really know what your career progression is going to be. And if you want certainty on that, this is definitely not the right place”

“these projects working or not come down to a handful of really exceptional individuals being present, taking ownership and leading the way.”

“So don't, don't sell out for the opioid of a linear career progression with a clearly mapped out path. I'm pretty sure that's retarding.”

“It's just becoming a lot easier, and it's also bounded, right? Which means that there is a limit of realism, right? And then you've kind of solved it, essentially, right? Yeah. You can't get more real than real, and once you're there, you kind of Uh, have achieved what you set out to achieve, right? And so I think it's…”

“So the Chinese government, I think, like, first off, does not price in the risk of an accident turning into something really horrific nearly as much as the Soviet Union did over the course of the Cold War. And they see that w you know, the, the, the Biden administration and the Trump administration, uh, and, and the…”

“My guess is that like the reason it has taken so long for COMAC to, um, to get its shit together and, and build competitors to Boeing and Airbus is Is probably the fact that it is state owned and there are just like poor incentives going on versus the sort of free market free for all that you saw on the electric…”

“the reason to not attach capital to it is one, both for that point of commitment and restriction, but the other is I think it makes you make decisions differently. I think that you either, if you have that stipend and you're hanging out in the offices and you're drinking the spa water in the VC office every day, I…”

“in the environment today where software has eaten the world, and you should assume that if you're onto something interesting, there are two or three other competent, well-funded, You know, good people going after it as well. It has to be, you know, from that kind of internal conviction, um, not from, you know, I, I…”

“getting that latency end to end down, you know, to 300 milliseconds or 500 milliseconds on average for, like, turn latency, um, that, that, that kind of helps you cross this uncanny valley for, for voice AI.”

“We have kinematic frameworks for a long time. You know, we could do what humans does in terms of kinematic freedom with industrial robots. We can actually do it more precisely with higher force with industrial robots, which was what we need in manufacturing setting. So the missing piece really was intelligence.”

“there were obviously sales and marketing teams at both Microsoft and Facebook, but you don't really build an intuition for how to like attack a new business category. I think unless you've worked at a startup.”

“I think there is a belief that there are things that, like, a two-, three-, four-year-old startup that is in founder mode can do that maybe a 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-, seventy-year-old venture firm cannot, so.”

“consumer has the, this property that like very, very, very few things are going to work, but, uh, if it works, it works really big, but if it doesn't work, it's often like really talented entrepreneurial founders that can then either like, um, Take what they've built to a larger company and adapt it for that or work on…”

“one thing that was like striking that missing from that essay is the fact like, you know, like it was like, well, there's a manager runs a company one way and a founder runs a company in one way. It's like, no, like the founder runs it based on the personality and who they are.”

“And I think if you look at the next wave of startups, a dramatic decrease in M&A, because instead of buy, you built and the aqua hire didn't prove out to be the best use of equity. A lot of the decision of buy versus build became easier as you thought about where to innovate.”

“Time for liquidity in early stage venture has gotten pushed significantly from where it was more predictable a decade or two decades ago. You could say seven to 10 years on an early stage fund and mean it. Today, I think you say seven to 10 years, and you're like, by that, I mean, like, 12 to 15.”

“we're now like three years past that you're early to the game. And so if you haven't figured out how to take your stale product or your product that's maxed out and begin to, uh, re-energize it, it feels like you're a little late.”

“endowments will actually leave you. Like they will turn, but he's like, pensions don't. So if you get in, it's like pretty sticky, but they do have a high bar for like emerging folks.”

“The reason O-three is good is because it's trained to use tools. The way you train a model to use the right tool for the job is reinforcement learning. And they've said as much, like, deep research, reinforcement learning.”

“I mean, to me, the surprising thing was not any individual one thing. It's that each of these is maybe like a 30%, 50% gain, but they have like 10, 15 of them that all stack. And so getting all of these to stack nicely is what's hard.”

“The unique thing about metal printing is this is actually possible. CNC machining and other subtractive methods that there's no way to do, to truly do that. Um, there's just, they're, they're, they're just today. There is not.”

“Really successful things. You actually want fairly high barriers to entry so that the people who show up as your early customers are like deeply in need of it and true believers, right? Cause if they're deeply in need of it, they're gonna put up with a lot of crap to get what it is you're offering out of it because…”

“getting a robot to do a job is 10% of the work. Uh, 90% of the work is like, how do you do error handling and how do you solve all of the shit that happens after you deploy that robot?”

“like a six axis robot has six motors, uh, a humanoid, most of these humans that we've seen have something like 30 to 50 motors, right? And so just, you're just talking about like the wear on the motor, we have to go out and lubricate these joints and, and, and, and replace motors on a pretty regular basis. Um, I can't…”

“And it turns out if you collect very diverse data across many different tasks from many different form factors, they all contribute to each other. And that they contribute to a better understanding for the model of what actually is happening and how to utilize all of the data to figure out what to do.”

“So it's more like the other way where a social network can help you grow usage of an AI app pretty, pretty immensely, uh, compared to like an AI app benefiting from a social layer, so far at least.”

“so it's not like if you get billionaires, uh, they want to stay with the other billionaires or stay exclusive. I think they actually like using a product like X to stay connected to the normal people.”

“Yeah, I actually, my personal take on this is I think this is a bug of this current AI moment where like the, if you look at like what is the ideal case, the ideal case is the models and the products like pull out what they need to from the user in order to create value for them. And I think if you look at like how all…”

“something like economic turmoil that happens today If you're investing in the venture asset class, isn't going to necessarily impact like your, your exit because ultimately the founders and the board and the management team have some control over when they exit. Um, and so you, you can kind of theoretically wait a…”

“if you look at someone like Neil Mehta's track record, it's like, is his hit rate, like, 90%? No, there's, like, a ton of flame outs in there. Um, but he's just invested in situations where he's put, you know, 400 in and gotten five billion out. And it turns out, like, if you just do that, even at the growth stage,…”

“Patek tends to not miss, like they, they, they kind of bat a thousand when, when they do things. And, uh, I think everyone wants these big brands to catch an L so they can talk shit about it and feel like, you know, they're, they're able to say that.”

“if the platform you're using is closer to gambling, you will end up being more of a gambler automatically. Just based on the design of how you were introduced to the markets and therefore you'll be more prone to, you know, potentially react on these types of things because your investing style will be closer to a…”

“in the same way that we have a memory hierarchy in classic computers, right, we have the CPU, RAM, disk, and network, Um, we are also going to have a similar memory hierarchy in language models. And again, it already exists today. Um, we have the actual sort of transformer attention heads. We have the context window.…”

“updating the weights of the model is not a very good idea because you cannot really deterministically control that. You can fine tune, but what you're going to get the other end, you know, again, you don't really control.”

“And I think that's the gap, the gap has grown so much now between the frontier of the level of productivity that you can achieve as an engineer as the median practice of the median engineer, especially in big companies that now employers have no choice, but to just lay the law and be like, Hey, this is the tooling we…”

“when you build a computer use startup, I surmise that maybe five percent of your bandwidth is the actual, not, sorry, not computer use, phone agents. Five percent of your work is actually phone, like, phone code and phone whatnot, right? The rest is, like, the scaffolding around the product, right? Like, the, The SaaS…”

“Agents, the comp is not other software, it's humans, right?”

“what we see is a really growing trend in terms of, you know, there's, there's kind of a, this massive wave of returning founders who had built through financial crisis or built through Zurp, who've kind of lived through this kind of treadmill of an experience as an entrepreneur who are looking for a different way to do…”

“I think so many of these models are like hyper competitive in terms of what their performance and output actually looks like. So you can build incredible experiences off of those that can swap pretty easily between them. Yeah, I would think of them more like moving from, you know, Google Cloud to AWS, right? That feels…”

“when possible, actually it's better to not use AI if you have the option to not use AI. Like AI is meant to be a plug for things that don't exist, but if you do have the integration that's written and Battle tested by, like, you know, thousands of people before you. Why would you not choose that?”

“Jack GPT is to this generation what Google was to the last. If you think about Google is like the place where, you know, the front door, you go there, that's your big search. But if you want to, like, look for real estate, you go to Zillow. If you want to understand about a company, you go to Glassdoor or a job, you go…”

“And for that person, if you can convince them to say, Hey, can we put 80% of your money in index funds? And then this 20%, you can go nuts with, you can trade shit coins. You can go crazy. You can do anything you want with it. That, that is, it seems like bad advice, but it's probably the right advice for that person.…”

“it's hard to push back against, uh, free trading, like lower costs. That's great. But it removed a speed bump that incentivizes a lot of really bad behavior.”

“So it's like the fewer recessions that you have, the bigger the next recession is going to be.”

“And so I think you can make the argument that it's not that we have more bad news or even more volatility. It's just happens. Like we process the information so much faster.”

“We do think that efficiency is actually a really, really important aspect of intelligence. You know, you can brute force your way up to intelligence, but we really do want to be shooting for like human targets and efficiency for this stuff.”

“At the end of the day, we either have total factor productivity growth or we don't. And if we do, then our children will have a better life than us, no matter what. And if we don't, then they won't, no matter what. It doesn't matter how innovative we get about, you know, social programs and redistributive spending and…”

“I think it's just a very zero sum view of the world where there can be a limited amount of beauty. There can be a limited amount of joy. Um, I just don't think that.”

“So maybe my update has been that you can sort of know what's going to happen. I mean, I remember at the time I was just like, ah, these, these idiots on Twitter are just like, they don't know what they're talking about. They're just like a rumor mill. And in retrospect, I'm like, eh, kind of like, I mean, you know, you…”

“It's not really like a right-left issue, so much as it is like an east-west, west issue, because the west doesn't have water. So Democrats and Republicans alike on the western half of the US are like, oh, this is sick. I would love to have water. Then the people that have as much water as they conventionally need it…”

“you need the water though, so unless you're setting up enormous conveyance systems, which China largely is, and cloud seeding in addition to that, it's a non-starter.”

“That, like, little, little differences in the initial conditions, um, kind of, like, of, you know, AGI being born, or, like, of the politics of the time, or, like, of the, like, capital distribution or whatever, um, I think can compound to, like, incredible differences in the limit. Um, and I think that, like, while it…”

“the cool thing is, though, is that, like, you know, it's, uh, a nines of reliability scaling problem, that as you, like, kind of, like, push these nines out, and as you, like, make them more reliable in many more contexts, um, at some point they are just doing, like, a sizable chunk of economic labor, right?”

“the budgets have, like, skyrocket to the point it's unsustainable, like, I mean, to your, to your point, like, you're spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make something, and then if you need to make something, you're gonna bet for the thing that the safest, the safest, which is, like, superheroes and,…”

“What matters is not like the exact legal lease that is in the continuing resolution. It's like how that's going to be interpreted Both by the warfighter and by, like, Congress that ultimately is gonna, you know, sort of go, you know, uh, uh, approve the, like, you know, sort of reprogramming, and then the, you know,…”