What do Sam Altman and the Pope have in common?
They're both on newcomers list of the top quotes from 2025.
We've got 18 quotations from business leaders, tech Titans,
politicians and industry insiders.
Everything from Jensen Wong talking about America winning
the AI race to Elon Musk signaling the demise of his
relationship with Donald Trump, and even Sam Altman talking
about his GPT parenting skills with Jimmy Fallon, Senators, the
Vice president, and even the Pope hope we'll all make an
appearance on our list of the most important and impactful
quotes of 2025. This is the newcomer podcast.
Welcome to the newcomer podcast. One of our favorite things here
is to look back at the year through quotes.
Some spicy, some profound, some inane, some we think are
embarrassing. We are looking for a mix of
quotes from high profile speakers.
We've got, you know, everybody from Sam Altman to the Pope in
this list. Madeline Renbarger, yours truly
on the podcast, is the main compiler here.
So we'll she'll she'll help explain which ones we picked.
I'll. Have to defend myself on the POD
for why I think this is the most important quote of the year.
Exactly. And we we weighed in and then
and you'll have Tom Doton's melodious voice reading the
quotes to you. I like to give Tom all the
reading assignments. He's he's our audio book kind.
Of sure, yeah, Popcorn. In a different life, though, I
think you could have been an audio book reader.
So yeah, we'll, we'll get into it.
We have 18 quotes here. I think you're gonna get a great
snapshot of the wild 2025 and maybe that'll give us a little
bit of a lens into what to look for this year.
It will be no surprise that artificial intelligence looms
large. This podcast, obviously we
talked about AIA lot, so not surprising we'd be interested in
those quotes. But I think, you know, we're
we're quoting the Pope here. We're quoting, you know, the
vice president. So yeah, without further ado,
let's get into the 18 quotes that defined 2025 from CE, OS,
VCs, political leaders, and everybody else.
I'll do my best to read these in character too, OK?
That wasn't even the mandate. Well, we'll see if that if that
works even anyway. OK, we stand now with the
frontier of an AI industry that is hungry for reliable power and
high quality semiconductors. Yet too many of our friends are
deindustrializing on the one hand and chasing reliable power
out of their nations and off their grids with the other.
The AI future is not going to be won by hand wringing about
safety. It'll be won by building from
reliable power plants to the manufacturing facilities that
can produce the chips of the future.
That is JD Vance on the need for less AI regulation at the Paris
AI Action Summit, February 11th, 2025.
Madeline, why did this stand out to you?
Well, this quote I felt like was really kicking off the year with
the US on the global stage and JD Vance of all people telling
Europe that they need to LAX their AI regulations and get out
of the way for American innovation.
And I felt like both politically on lots of fronts, but the tech
industry at large in our era of effective acceleration, ISM, you
had, you know, the commander in chief's, you know, second in
command there basically saying, yeah, let's go.
It's time to build Marc Andreessen, you know, in front.
Of everyone, no safety net. No safety and the safety
regulations are only hindering, you know, our future.
And in many ways also it was not a very global friendly speech.
Other parts of the speech, you know, kind of shit on, you know?
Right, kicking off American antagonism towards Europe.
Basically, we're like, yeah, but we're going to do this, and you
better get out of the way. It was very, you know,
isolationist as well. I mean, to me, this is just JD
Advance and the administration doing full business capture of
the tech industry. This is what they paid for.
This is why they wanted him in office.
They wanted no regulation. They wanted tech to be in
control of all policy writing. They have the quasi VC as vice
president going up there and telling Europeans that they
should not regulate any of our Great American companies.
It's not going out there talking about Mistral.
It's not telling these people don't don't be regulating
Mistral and fluid stack like and lovable.
Like they want to make sure that open AI, which is, you know, Sam
lobbied very hard to get, you know, positioning in the
administration to to to leave us alone.
So hand wringing about safety. EW Gross.
We don't want, I mean, what this is in February, you know, a
couple things happen. We recently we got the AI
executive order trying to ban states from regulating AI.
Who knows how effective that will be.
So it's not just trying to block Europe, it's trying to tell
states no regulation. There was an interesting piece,
I, I believe it was in Politico, about how some of the tech
lobbyists are worried that David Sachs and crew are overplaying
their hand on AI friendliness. That basically by saying no
regulation, there's going to be such a huge backlash that this,
this strategy of saying, you know, no regulation for AI is
only going to create more enemies.
And I think that that'll emerge as we keep going through these
quotes. I mean, Tom, you had a good
story earlier this year about the AI industry being really
upset about Texas law, about energy getting cut off to data,
AI data centers first in the state.
So it's not a given that the steamroll no regulation AI
policy will even fly with Republican senators too.
Yeah. And it's notable that this quote
is from February. I think a lot has changed in the
way people view AI, specifically its political valence.
And at the end of the year, we had people like, I think Marco
Rubio and probably Josh Hawley talking about concerns over AI
and the effect it was going to have on jobs and power.
And, you know, like inflation becoming a major issue and
whether or not it's related to like the cost of power and
whether AI is driving that up became really problematic.
So things I would be interesting, Obviously, low
regulation, that's probably going to remain consistent.
But the idea that, like AI and, you know, is aligned with the
Republican Party is not really the case.
Yeah. All right.
Let's let's move on to our second quote of 2025, Tom.
All right. For some of these companies, for
a lot of our customers, it will be existential kind of life and
death decisions. And that is Ryan Peterson, a
podcast guest at one point, right, Eric?
Yep, Flexports CEO. He's talking about how President
Trump's tariffs will impact large retailers that rely on his
logistics software at Strictly VC in San Francisco on April
7th. Ryan Peterson is like Silicon
Valley's Tariff and Trade Peru running one of the most real
world startups in silicon. Valley, I was going to say, I
picked this one in part because he's, you know, the logistics
infrastructure guy in Silicon Valley.
He's been incredibly successful with growing Flex port and it's
a startup that is really dependent on government trade
policy. It's a logistics of software
company handles these big deals. So he became, you know, Silicon
Valley's point person, like you said, Eric, during the tariff
fiasco. Like how does this affect us?
How does this affect us? He went on, you know, lots of
shows explaining but and live tweeting as the policies rolled
out. And what's interesting is that
was tariff moment #1 the tariffs have changed quite a bit
throughout the year too. That was a few days after
Liberation Day, right? Yes, fresh.
Liberation Day. We were liberated then.
I will say, I mean right now the news of today at least is GDP is
doing well. I think the New York Times
headline was GDP is doing well despite tariffs.
And I don't know, it was Sax or one of the Trump aligned people
was sort of snarking the New York Times for putting tariffs
still in the headline when it's like OK, GDP seems to be OK.
So I don't know, has has the existential crisis manifested?
Well, I mean, this sort of is getting away from AI and tech
specifically, but like, I think there's an incredibly pervasive
mood among the American public that the economy isn't doing
well right now. And whether that's psychological
or real is sort of unclear. And I don't want to get in like
the will stancil fight of like, people don't really know what it
means for prices to go up. But Trump has bad approval
ratings right now. One of his lowest.
God, I feel like Jason Calcanis, like one of his lowest ranking
categories within this is the economy.
People are not happy about basically rising prices.
And one of the things that they point to were the tariffs.
And so was it existential for some of these companies?
I don't know. You've seen retailers raising
prices, blaming the tariffs for their reasons for it.
So like, I think it's contributed pure life and death.
Yeah. If they continued at the insane
Liberation Day levels, it probably would have been
incredibly difficult for retailers to to make things
work. Right.
There have been several backroom deals that have lowered them on
specific countries and concessions that other countries
have made where it's not kind of as blanket as it was on
Liberation Day for a lot of the US biggest trading partners.
So maybe we do it less, but you're totally right that
consumer sentiment is down, down, down on the economy.
Even if people are still spending, they're very unhappy
about what the the prices they're paying. 2025 was a year
living under the cloud of tariffs, which I don't think any
serious person think helped us. And the president should thank
God that all this AOAI infrastructure spending has just
been a gift to the economy, You know, just like build, build,
build for a still somewhat uncertain technology.
And yeah, the Trump administration got lucky on that
one as they were creating their own self-inflicted wound with
tariffs. Let's go to #3.
All right. Today, the Church offers its
trove of social teaching to respond to another industrial
revolution and to innovations in the field of artificial
intelligence that pose challenges to human dignity,
justice and labor. That's Pope Leo, the woke Pope
in a speech to Cardinals two days after being sworn in.
Yeah, I picked this one because, well, one thing I found
interesting about the woke Pope is that he picked the name Leo,
and he said this in relation to the first Pope.
Leo came about in early, you know, hundreds AD about
technological upheaval and he was he's really focused on
artificial intelligence as an issue that will have profound
social and religious impact on the world.
And he's paying very close attention to it.
And it doesn't surprise me, frankly, that the first American
Pope ever is, you know, tuned into American innovation and
what's going on in our business sphere over here.
But I picked it because he's expressing that he's gonna be
focused on this throughout his papacy as a very big issue.
And then what's? The other do we consider the do
we consider the other quote wasn't there There was a Pope
quote later in the year. I mean, this is a good one where
the Pope said something equally benign about AI and like Marc
Andreessen shit on it. And then Marc Andreessen had.
A quitter beef fight with the Pope, right?
Because I think we should put that one in this one.
I sort of forgot about that one. Can you pull that one up too?
Yeah, I can pull that one up. I picked this one because this
was his first speech to be so this was we're talking about.
AI in my. Yeah.
This Pope has said relatively mild things about, you know,
being thoughtful about AI. He picked his name after
somebody who navigated, not resisted necessarily another
technological revolution. And some of the tech community
can't even seem to stomach like, hey, we should.
We should be moral about this thing, which seems like the
Pope's job to remind us. I always have mixed feelings
about conflating morality with the technology because with AI,
it makes me worry that, like, people are talking about the
morality of the AI itself, like, it is imbued with some sort of
intelligence and emotional capabilities when really it's
just the humans that are in control of it.
And you know, how readily you want to implement this
technology basically to displace people.
And which is why labor is an important thing for him to bring
up. You know, I don't want to, like,
take Marc Andreessen's side. It was such an obnoxious tweet.
Well, the tweet wasn't I. OK, I finally did pull up the
tweet. We can't even quote it because
it was a GIF reaction, but it was it.
Was the woman it? Was the interviewer from the
Sydney Sweeney interview about her great jeans when she asked
her about the American Eagle Act?
So it's like reference. The Pope is tweeting about AI.
Marc Andreessen replies with a reaction image from the Sydney
Sweeney interview controversy. It was like, come on.
Yeah, it all it all sort of sucked.
And I know we'll get as this progresses like more and more
into like the tech MAGA, right, and how they fared throughout
the course of the year. So I don't want I don't want to
blow it all here. But, you know, good on the Pope
for talking about labor, because that really is eventually going
to be one of the central inanimating forces of what AI
means for the economy. And to put that front and center
and say we need to talk about that as much as possible seems
like a good idea. It's important.
I my issue on labor is always is it taking the benefits of AI and
restructuring our safety net and figuring out new jobs or
whenever you hear labor and AI you think like, well, you know,
local in New York just vetoed this legislation that was meant
to require 2 MTA workers instead of just one, right?
Like I don't think the answer should be creating make work
jobs or handicapping AI so. That right people, and I think
Sam, Sam has talked about that. Too.
Yeah, saying like, you know, some of these jobs that are
gonna be replaced by AIS weren't even really jobs in the 1st
place and we should kind of question their validity.
And he got a lot of shit for that.
I actually think that's true to an extent.
I think there are a lot of like make work is OK, Sure, we can
call them make work jobs, but it's like basically things that
were created to give people thing that is make work.
Like, you know, e-mail jobs. Basic.
Bullshit jobs. I think there's a whole book
about it #4 our 4th quote of 2025.
I think it didn't exist. I think it was a fiction to some
extent. That was Jackie Reese's at the
Breaking the Bank summit hosted by Newcomer.
And this was on the narrative that the Biden administration
was de banking institutions affiliated with
cryptocurrencies. That was from May.
Yeah. So Jackie Reese's CEO of Lead
Bank, she was basically refuting kind of a narrative that had
come up in this sort of crypto wave of the election that the
Biden administration had been actively, you know, shutting
down these companies that wanted to do crypto.
And this narrative that like, oh, we really wanted to do this,
but the regulators were way too strict.
And I do think there was some credence to that.
The Biden administration was pretty harsh on crypto
companies. But, you know, five months after
Trump is sworn in, you have, you know, the leader of this
financial institution who's very involved with these companies
basically saying, yeah, it, that didn't really happen.
That wasn't true. I don't know if I believe her
and obviously I am politically inclined to believe her and say,
oh, the Democrats problems were overstated.
But I don't know. I, I think the Biden
administration was clearly pretty hostile to
cryptocurrencies. And some of these companies had
trouble connecting with the financial system partially
because they were probably doing things that might, might not
have been legal. But I I think the Biden
administration would have been much better served to say more
stuff was bad and illegal than to let them operate in this
terrifying Gray area which created all sorts of problems.
So, I don't know, subjective call.
This is why I picked this. Quote though because I like not
everyone will agree with her statement.
Exactly. You know Eric has a dissenting
take. All right #5 quote of the year.
I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,
which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it
and undermines the work that the Doge team is doing.
That's Elon on the Republican that the big beautiful bill,
which kind of sets up the big breakup between him and Trump,
and that's in May. That exactly.
That was the line that set off the fight, and it's hard to
quote massive Twitter and Truth Social sub tweeting back and
forth in a newsletter in the same way.
So I figured this could be a good signpost for the moment.
But I would say as a moment in tech, obviously without a doubt
one of the biggest stories of the year and most significant
things happening was the Trump Elon Doge fallout and RIP Doge.
Yeah, and now the consensus is basically Doge did nothing of
value, certainly didn't bring down.
They barely cut the debt set at all.
They really didn't even. It was miniscule compared to how
much the federal government spends.
Obviously this bill is part of that because it increased
spending, but I think it's not controversial at all to say DOGE
was a failure. I want to take a little bit of
credit on this show. This tweet from Elon comes in
late May and I know on this show this was in the wake of the
Wisconsin election that Elon had spent millions of dollars on
that blew up in the Republicans faces.
And I think I said on the show, I think this is the beginning of
the end of Elon's political influence.
And really, I think that, you know, the, the, the tables
turning against Trump and like the honeymoon period beginning
of administration falling. And that is absolutely true
turned out to be the case within a couple of weeks or days of the
Wisconsin election. You have the doge fallout.
You have the entire rupture between Elon, I'm sorry, like
the doge starting to collapse, the rupture between Elon and
Trump, Trump's approval ratings start to fall.
And you really start seeing that tech's whole bet on the Trump
administration has looked in some respects really, I don't
know, just not playing panning out for any any length of time.
And so I we're going to talk more about this with the other
quotes, but like this is another one didn't work.
Out and Elon eventually tweets like Trump's in the Epstein
files which obviously very true and sort of consuming today.
I mean you know we're we're sort of swinging back around where
Elon is preparing to fund the Republicans in the midterms.
It seems like Trump and Elon are, you know, healing some of
their disagreements. And so, yeah, in a fairly short
amount of time, we saw Elon being sort of, I don't know what
the favorite son sort of at odd Trump's arm at every opportunity
doing doge access to sort of every file, then falling out
saying Trump was in the Epstein files.
And now somehow they've already repaired the relationship.
Crazy, crazy arc in 2025. Quote number six.
We've never seen anything like the user growth of ChatGPT,
particularly outside the US, and it shows how the global dynamics
of tech and distribution have changed.
That's Mary Meeker from her, I'm assuming annual trend report and
that is the that's in May. Yeah, so this was picked.
Mary Meeker, Bond Capital, writes the Tech Trend report
that sort of sets the tone of every year of what are the main
changes in tech innovation or trends people should be
following. And this was the first year she
actually made the tech trend report, the AI trend report.
Like she was like, this is so big.
This is completely changing the ecosystem.
This is the thing that we need to cover and follow.
And everything will fall forward from that because it's just AI
everything. And I think that's true.
I figured, you know, we should put in the Hall of Fame, speaker
of tech trend truths into our newsletter.
She called it. Exactly.
And it's not, you know, it's revenue too.
I mean, it is Chachi PG has just grown faster than basically any
tech product in the world. And for for whatever worry and,
you know, skepticism we have about multiples and valuations
and profits, it is a rocket ship like none other.
And every investor has reacted to that.
I guess my quick take would be that this is something that the
haters have to reckon with on AI.
Like you can talk about how consumptive it is and you know
its effect on creativity and jobs and all these things.
But to call it a scam, to call it useless, denies the fact that
there are currently around 900 million weekly users on this one
product. And if you want to tell all
these people that they're wasting their time and there's
no value to it because you don't like it, just be honest about
that. But like, and listen, I have a
million problems with AII. Don't know where this whole
thing is going to go. But like the anti AI crowd, has
not really digested what it means for this to be the fastest
growing product of all time. All right, our seventh top quote
for 2025. America's unique advantage that
no country could possibly have is President Trump.
That's Jensen Kwong on Trump's embrace of the AI industry at
the Winning the AI Race Summit in DC from July.
That was a selection in part because I was, you know, I, I
was giving them a handout because I was banished to the
far end of the press room when I went to cover this event.
I of course, I remember that, but I felt like Jensen's public
statements, especially in DCI know we're kind of policy heavy
on the front half of this year. But it was, you know, a pretty
bold declaration that he was cozying up to President Trump.
And obviously this has paid out dividends in the support of
NVIDIA and allowing, you know, not letting the export controls
on the chips and sales to China go through because, you know,
they're best buds, so. We're not we're not doing a Word
of the Year. But if there was one, it might
be sycophants. And no quote embodied this, I
think, better than Jensen's sycophancy for Trump.
And he got what he wanted. Like you're saying what, what,
what is the main thing NVIDIA wanted?
It's to be able to sell these fucking chips to China and make
oodles of money. And Trump came through.
So for shareholders, Jensen did what he needed to do, I mean.
In a moment of intense political cronyism, sucking up to the
president has worked for all these guys.
So why not do it? You know it's a good business
strategy if and if your your whole goal is to help the
shareholders, you're doing it. Yeah, I think Jensen probably
sets the mark for the most out, you know, got the most out of
being an ass sniffer to Trump. Like he got the thing that he
wanted, which was chip sales to China.
That's a lot more clear to me than like regulation, which
probably could have happened without debasing yourself to to
the president. But like Jensen wanted this
thing. He got it.
The stock benefits from it. Good on.
Good on you, Jensen. It's obviously terrible and I
don't know the Democrats and next administration is either we
need some sort of law that prevents CE OS from doing this
or. From what kissing ass?
It's just like what's? The name of the game.
Clearly we can't stop the presidency from from wielding
this. What we need is somebody like
Jensen to feel like, uh oh. Like, you know, if a Democrats
back in charge, I could literally get arrested for this
type of behavior. But I don't know, it's not good,
and we need to figure out how to avoid it when this terrible
clown show finally comes to an end.
Yeah, I mean on the chips ban thing though, it was so poorly
implemented. The cronyism needs to stop and
needs to be illegal. Hypocrisy.
Yeah, and there needs to be social and legal consequences to
it. Obviously people should only be
punished for actual laws they're breaking.
I'm not saying we should just make up laws post hoc and punish
people, but it's deeply troubling.
Quote 8 for 2025. I left this tour with a distinct
feeling that AI raises some of the same fundamental questions
that nukes did. How should they be used?
By whom? Under what rules?
Only this time we are creating a technology that can become
smarter than humans who are designing it.
That is Senator Alyssa Slotkin speaking to the Council of
Foreign Relations in New York, September 5th.
What's up with that one, Madeleine?
I I This was a kind of an eyebrow raiser.
Yeah, so I thought that, you know, a sitting US senator
bringing comparing AI to nuclear power was a pretty, you know,
bold statement, in part because I feel like all of the AICEOS
who are boosting their product and proliferating it on all of
us always make this comparison. So to have, you know, a sitting
US senator give this speech towards the Council of Foreign
Relations saying, Oh, yes, it's just as important as nukes when
you take it this seriously, that's, yes, it's a serious
issue. But also, it shows that the tech
industry's narrative is, you know, taken in by the US Senate.
I I do think Chachi BT flagged this one to me and I flagged it
to Madeline. So AI, AI is influencing.
AI says it's. Important here.
What's, what's interesting to me in some ways is that, you know,
2025 we've seen much less of the like AI supremacy AGI
conversation. Like I think last year we would
have been talking about that much more.
But, you know, I, I think we've maybe overcorrected and I think
she's right that, you know, AI has these huge existential
issues and a key part of it is that it keeps getting smarter
and is an intelligent being. I think we have another one that
sort of speaks to that. Yeah, I think the regulation of
AI is important to talk about. I think discussing a technology
that's getting smarter by leaps and bounds and it's going to
replace humanity because of its incredible intelligence is just
not accurate to the way this technology has progressed over
the last couple of years. I think it's gotten
incrementally more efficient and maybe more utility.
But to talk about this thing as like this incredible growing
force that we can't control plays into the marketing angle
of AI. There's a difference between the
complete, you know, anti AI stance.
This is all useless. It provides nothing and the
like. We have created the next Skynet.
And I do worry sometimes the amount of discussion that gets
committed to like what do we do to prevent Skynet completely
overrates the progress this technology has had in the cut in
the in the past couple of years. And I'm down to have these
discussions. But let's base it in the reality
of what it can do and what it can't do.
And what it can't do is actually think and do anything close to
what we think a true or like an intelligence could could do so.
I'm, I'm closer to the, I'm not. I mean, I, I think AI is not
positive, but it's certain. I think it's more capable than
you're describing. Newcomers quote #9 for 2025.
Everything I do is recommended by ChatGPT and then I check with
my doctors for safety. I always ask them if they
disagree and if they disagree with ChatGPT.
I ask another doctor, Jesus that is Vinod Khosla, on how much he
uses AI for personal health decisions at the Deus Ex
Medicina Summit. Another newcomer hosted Co
hosted event. This was in September.
Yeah, I felt like, you know, Vinod was landed on thick there
for how much he's using Chachi PT for health benefit.
And that was, of course, the theme of the conference that
day. But, you know, early investor in
open AI, he's talking about open AI.
It also has become a massive use case for open AI for people to
check it for healthcare questions.
And these startups like Open Evidence that are going
gangbusters right now, raising tons and tons of new funding,
seem to be basically ChatGPT for doctors.
So while I see the benefit of that, you know, it wades into
this whole question of how much should we be using AI for
healthcare? But that is clearly a use case
that has evolved this year. Yeah, I think doctors, we should
have some on the show at some point.
I'm interested to see how it's changed their job, not in like
in how they diagnose patients, but.
How they other good doctor friends we can have on.
Yeah, like how they deal with like questions from from
patients, you know, 'cause like, I'm sure like the advent of Web
MD, which is, you know, like the hackiest joke from the late 90s
of like, I went on the Internet and found I had cancer kind of
thing. But I bet that did really change
the medical profession in how you interact with patients, and
this has probably only accelerated it.
Well, I think patients come at the doctor's appointment being
like, I put my symptoms in a chachi PT and it said this,
this, this. So I think I have this and the
doctor has to, you know, respond in some way.
But maybe the doctor's also using chachi PT to check the
symptoms as well. So it's an interesting chachi PT
to chachi PT happening in the exam room.
The yeah, I mean, it's a first. Having a baby.
ChatGPT is the first line of defence in Is this medical thing
normal or not? There's a brief second where we
were worried that open AI was going to crack down on health
stuff, but I think it was a sort of false rumor.
And yeah, like you said, I think it's the use case they're really
leaning into. I have problems with the AI
industry talking about ChatGPT diagnostics as a revolution, as
something that's going to truly change the way people receive
medical care. I think it's such a poor
comparison a a poor stand in for actual medical care and like a a
professional. I know they do talk about this a
lot, but like we have major issues with the way people
receive medical treatment in this country and access to
healthcare and open AI and ChatGPT is it's like a drop in
the bucket of improvement report.
What actually needs to happen to give people better quality of
life. So I.
Well, a lot of what we need is humanity.
I mean, you know, you go to a hospital, you know, obviously my
wife gave birth this year and nurse to nurse performances
feels much more about bedside manner than medical knowledge.
And in some ways, I hope Chachi Petiti sort of makes that even
clearer. It's like, OK, if we have easy
to access resources for the actual medical knowledge, then
we're picking and elevating people based on, you know, their
bedside manner more and more than necessarily how much they
can retain medical. Knowledge.
I'm interested in in how AIS will change people's approach to
bedside manner and if it's going to cause people to become more
argumentative with their nurses and doctors because these AIS
are trained to please you and to back up your questions, confirm,
like confirm your suspicions on things.
And so if a nurse or a doctor is telling you one thing and you
put it into ChatGPT and it's like, no, you're right.
You know, don't trust the medical professional industry.
You know, you should be willing to question professionals when
it comes to your health, but it sounds like it's just going to
create more antagonism between people and their and their
doctors. But doctor, doctors, I think are
embracing it more, more than you seem to think.
Like I, I don't know. We'll see.
We should do an episode on that quote #10.
If you were thirteen years old, you should spend all your time
vibe coding. That's you should live your
life. That's Alexander Wong on TVPN in
September. Obviously he sold his company
scale this year to refer a bazillion dollars or.
Yeah, obviously he, he was around, you know, a $13 billion
exit right there, so good for him.
But yeah, well, I picked this quote in part because 1 vibe
coding obviously took off quite a bit this year.
We've all tinkered with Lovable and Cursor and the various vibe
coding tools on this show and, and the newsletter.
And also I think it's very funny to hear Alexander Wang's
dictating how 13 year olds will live their life in the future
from now on. I think there's a good Silicon
Valley culture of like, you know, we got to tell the youth
how they're going to change their entire education always.
And now it's vibe coding so. Is he a college dropout?
He has that college dropout profile.
Right. I think, I don't know if he's a
college dropout. I think he might have graduated
from college when he was 19. I think he's some sort.
Of he was a. Prodigy.
Yeah, I think he's a prodigy.
He's a math. He was a math prodigy.
So yeah, I think what he did at 13 is not going to be what
everyone does. Not your typical 13 year old.
He did drop out. MIT looks like.
Yes, he hasn't. LinkedIn grade 5 point O
dropout. Yeah, the dream.
The dream. So kind of a resume right there,
yeah. I think vibe coding is TBD as to
its actual effectiveness. There have been a lot of
interesting trend pieces about the vibe coding scene in San
Francisco, specifically in the whole startup culture built
around people that have no real technical skills but have
created their app entirely through vibe coding.
I guess I defer to you guys a little, but like I don't know
what's the last significant startup that has raised money
that was built on top of vibe Coded app?
I don't think there have been any of they all seem kind of
lame and I had fun vibe coding something that I used this year
like it's a oh, I built a this people that make fun of me about
this. I, when I go to the gym, I
always forget what locker I put my shit into.
And so I, I built an app through Chachi PT that it, it kind of
like used object like OCR to recognize the number.
So I would like hold it up to the number of the locker and it
would store the number. And so then at the end of my
workout, I would look at it and it would have the number in
there. The obvious answer to This is
why can't you just take a picture with your phone and look
at that? I was going to say I love the
Notes app. That's a great app that also
exists. You can write it down.
You have to write it down. I wanted an app that I could
just hold it up to the number and look.
I wanted a vibe, code, something and that was the idea.
And you want a purpose. It's nice to have a purpose
built app, you know. Yeah, I also learned that when
you vibe code something, it only lasts on your phone for 30 days
through through test pilot the the iPhone kind of beta testing
service. So it's it's now gone.
Locker buddy is is not a usable app.
RIP but. Yeah, I think I can somehow re
upload it there, but I, I am actually pretty skeptical of
vibe coding as something with real utility.
The fact that you can do it doesn't mean it has that much
value. And so beyond just like little
home projects like what I did, I don't really know.
This is quite the revolution that a lot of people are are
wanting it to be. Tom, do you still think we
should all learn how to code? All of us.
Well, you know, they're saying you don't ever have to learn how
to code anymore. And the the refrain was always
learn to code, learn to code. But now we have vibe coding.
The fact that we can code now in plain language, in plain
English, and that, you know, obviously there are limitations,
but it's getting better and better.
The fact that people who are themselves genius coders and
math geniuses think that you should just learn to code in
English, like that's hugely significant.
You know, I like raising my daughter.
It's like, OK, I'm spending a lot of time right now trying to
Babble with her, eventually teach her English.
You skip the step where you have to go learn some code based
language to interact with computers.
You can just use the English you learned, and all of a sudden,
you know, the humanities majors among us are going to be
empowered to build whatever we want on the Internet.
And that's validated by the math geeks this year.
Like, that's huge. I think it's landmark.
I think we're way underestimating how much it's
going to be a boon to the word cells among us.
I believe that. You know you did it.
You built the app. But what value did it truly add?
It was a fun little project. It's like I think everyone
should learn how to like build your.
Own airplanes. You didn't have enough ambition.
It was sort of a silly little project, but like, yeah.
Well, I don't know if like vibe coding allows you to like have
much more ambition than what I did.
Right. But we're near like one or two
of vibe coding. We're in the beginning.
Like, this is where tech people dominate the rest of us.
You see like, oh, it's it's just OK.
It's like, yeah, because there's a rate of growth because they're
they're just starting. Like we're just this is just
happening. This is all so fresh.
But what are what are you going to really build?
What what would you do? You have the ability to vibe
code right now? Like, what could you build in
your life that would change it in a way that you're like, Oh my
God, everyone fucking needs to. Vibe code things around the
newcomer business that I would like to build.
We are literally talking to some of the vibe coding companies
about trying to build stuff. But why wouldn't you just hire a
developer to build something for you?
Well, somebody like us, we're not gonna hire a necessarily a
great developer. It's not our expertise.
I don't know how to manage a developer, you know, And some of
the things we want, you know, it's like the beauty of vibe
coding, right? And This is why we had, you
know, Dylan Field at Figma on stage at one of our Cerebral
Valley events in London. You know, it's just like you get
to think when when you write a piece, you think about the ideas
and it makes your writing better, right?
When you're coding the thing, you're building the thing and
you start to understand what goes into it, what trade-offs
have to be made. And so I think giving the person
with the idea for the product, the ability to do the actual
thing without having to know how to code just allows you to sort
of think through it and it, yeah, it just empowers.
That you can ultimately tell a developer what you want when you
want, like an actual functional. High quality it's best for like
prototyping right now. I I agree, but like, yeah, I
think it's the trend it's. The worst it's ever gonna be.
I do think that's true to your. Point.
Yep. Yeah, Yeah.
I also think. I'll hang up on you on this one,
Tom. I think it's pretty big.
Let's circle back to this one at the end of 26.
We'll see where that coding is going.
Sounds good. I'm I'm betting the under.
All right, Quote 11. But make no mistake, what we are
dealing with is a real and mysterious creature, not a
simple and predictable machine. This is Jack Clark on the
significance of artificial intelligence development during
a speech at the Curve conference in Berkeley.
And that was in October Your your former colleague at.
Bloomberg Anthropic Co founder and my former colleague like
Jack. Jack and I have hung out, and he
is. We used to go biking.
Together tremendously. We biked on.
I went to like a punk. Rock Backyard show with him?
Yeah. Wait, no.
Way. I didn't know this, yeah.
You just to hang guy. He covered Google the most normy
beat. It was a little too wonky.
It was like, Jack, this is Bloomberg.
Like, worry about money, less about tech.
And you like, really love technology.
And then he goes off to open AI and, yeah, he turns out you make
a lot more money in Silicon Valley thinking about tech than
thinking about money. So.
I remember when he quit Bloomberg to go to open AI and
we were all like, well that's stupid.
Why would you leave a great job like Bloomberg which you ended
up doing? Yeah, I I didn't think it was
stupid. I just, you know, it was in the
reporter kool-aid cult that you spend your life.
You know, it's very hard to get into reporting.
It's hard to give it up. But kudos to Jack and Jack, you
know, runs a very success. He writes a very successful
newsletter import AI. So somehow he's able to Co found
anthropic and do the newsletter hustle and be a top thinker on
AI policy. Anyway, Madeline, we've talked
about Jack, but what what do you what stood out to you about the
quote itself? Right.
Well, I felt like 1, he was fully anthropomorphizing the AI,
which in this episode alone we've debated if that's legit or
not. And it also felt really
representative of the anthropic take.
You know what I mean? Like every, all of the
foundation model companies have sort of their stance on how much
we should regulate this or not regulate this or limit the
contents of the speech or be concerned if it's spewing
dangerous ideas or what the power of the great machine is.
And yes, AGI fears have fallen somewhat.
Out of the conversation, but Anthropic is still doing it and
they're still very concerned about safety.
So they're that was sort of the signpost of Anthropic posture.
I felt like as a quote that we should put in the list.
Yeah, I feel like it fits in with the Slotkin point of view,
which is, yes, 2025 is the year where Dumerisms out of favor and
Tom's view is ascendant. But there are still holdouts who
think this this is a thing heading to general intelligence.
It is a real and mysterious creature.
I I sort of agree with Jack. I what I actually take away from
this is less like we I've already started my piece about,
you know, the anthropomorphization of
technology. I am really interested in like
the separation of Anthropic from the rest of the AI field right
now, just as a like kudos to Dario for he's just a very
earnest guy. Like he is stuck by his guns as
I'm very worried about AII want to talk about regulation.
He has been caught in the crosshairs with with David Sachs
and the Trump administration. He he truly does not like Trump,
which, you know, causes him potential business concerns.
And I think, you know, going out of this year, Anthropic looks
like the better bet as a company right now just in terms of its
financial stability. It's aim is very true.
It's not trying to do a, you know, a million different things
and, you know, a lot can change. I saw Elon, you know, shitting
on Anthropic at some point during the year saying like
Anthropic winning was never in the cards or something like
that. And they might go public next
year, which is by no means success.
You know, that's not like an end point.
It's not like you've reached the end of your journey and you've
won. But like, they're building
something that feels a lot more reasonable right now.
Well, it's also funny Elon saying that when he's running,
you know, XAI as well as if he's just, you know, commenting on
this like he doesn't have a direct competitor stake.
Yeah, we live in the world where you pick your philosopher king,
and I think everybody on this podcast would prefer Dario to
Elon Musk and Sam Ullman, so. Plus, we all agree that Claude
is the better writing partner, I have to say.
Yes, you know, although it's. Starting to get a little sick of
antics man. The man behind the philosopher
king. So all right quote #12.
Overall, the models are not there.
I feel like the industry is making too big of a jump and is
trying to pretend like this is amazing and it's not.
It's slop. That is Andre Carpathy, my man,
during his interview on the Door Cash podcast, and that is from
October. Yeah.
So I think you can tell it worked out quite well that these
were chronologically next to each other because I did pair
these together if I was able to just throw them all on the page.
You know, we come from Anthropic, Oh my gosh, the
consequences of our actions. How will we live in the future
to where the models are right now is bad in a kind of that
kind of broke the Internet in tech world, at least when that
episode came out of having, you know, Andre Carpathy basically
say the quiet part out loud that these models are great.
There's things that they can't do as well as we'd like and
they're not. Are they God kings?
At this point, No. Yeah, I mean, this was the
interview that shook Silicon Valley.
Everybody takes what Carpathy has to say extremely seriously.
He is both technically capable and speaks in plain English.
And I, I don't think anybody is disagreeing with him directly.
You know, he's a little bit more cautious, maybe Dario, but he's,
you know, it was more sanguine about the rate of progress than
I think Silicon Valley had been up until that point.
Yeah, this is I think the first time we've mentioned it so far,
but the the the word slop, which was the actual word of the year,
although I like your sycophancy as another choice or word of the
year, Eric, I think slop is a fascinating concept.
It gets misapplied a lot. People are just calling
everything they don't like as slop, which is unfortunate
because I think it's a very specific thing, which is content
that is unmoored to general taste or, or, or interest and it
just sort of gets produced and, you know, thrown out into the
world. But AI will have to at some
point reckon the industry will have to reckon with the
prevalence of slop that has come out of these tools.
I think Mehta's launch of Vibes personifies the slop.
Is that a fair statement? Like when Vibes came out when
they were rushing to meet Sora, that to me was the slop of 2025.
Just a fully scrollable AI generated content app with no
taste discernment, no rhyme or reason, just scrolling through
the endless feed. That to me more so than just,
you know, slop being something I don't like.
To your point, Tom, that was like the the definition of what
really we're we're talking about.
Here, Yeah. And is it a replacement for
entertainment? Is it going to get, you know,
infused into, quote UN quote, mainstream entertainment?
Or will it exist as this parallel industry?
The idea of someone just tuning out and like, scrolling through
slop is very nihilistic to me. I I, I, and I'm not even saying
that like I believe AI can have many positive effects on
entertainment, but slop, if slop feed even Sora, the idea that
someone could like go through Sora as a social media tool, not
just a creation tool, but like just checking out other people's
like create. That's weird.
That's really weird to me. I I don't love that idea.
Sycophancy and Slop 2025. All right.
Quote 13 for our top quotes in 2025.
Having listened closely to my fellow San Franciscans and our
local officials, and after the largest and safest Dream Force
in our history, I do not believe the National Guard is needed to
address safety in San Francisco. My earlier comment came from an
abundance of caution around the event, and I sincerely apologize
for the concern it caused. That was Marc Benioff on X after
asking Trump to send the National Guard into San
Francisco ahead of Dreamforce. This is someone TomTom has
written a profile of Marc Benioff in which Benioff Sikhed
the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom and Yo-yo Ma on Tom
to keep the profile beat. So I'm sure Tom will have lots
to say about Benioff. But Madeline, you wanna take a
first crack at why we picked this one?
Yes, so many will ask why did I not pick the send the National
Guard quote in and of itself fairpoint.
However, I felt like the five day, like maybe not five days,
but super quick apology to the mass backlash was such a like
tail between your legs moment and it really personified to me.
Also, as we've talked about, the techs move to the right, how
quickly they'll easily swing back when they realize that it's
not working for them. Yeah, No, it was, it was, it was
astounding that he he did this, that he like he called for Marc
Benioff, you know, the good loyal Democrat, the one who was
to the left, a lot of Silicon Valley Democrats calling for
like more taxes in San Francisco.
And then, you know, then he calls for the National Guard.
It just seemed totally, you know.
He called once for a boycott of Indiana because of its anti
abortion law. He threatened to pull their
employees in Indiana out of the state because he was so offended
by a. Right.
He was like the moralizer in chief.
I mean, he was, he embraced sort of wokeism, right?
I mean, he was yeah, definitely pro like sort of the push to
DEI. I I mean, the business case is
just Salesforce is suffering and could use a a boost.
And, you know, maybe he's like, I need some of this Trump
favoritism I hear so much about, but I don't know.
Tom, get in Marc Benioff's head for a second here.
I mean, I think, I think I, I always used to use Benioff and
Ron Conway as examples of when tech people get involved in
politics and actually know what they're doing because they tend
to win. You know, Benioff supported Prop
C and it won. Whether or not that's been good
or enough for the city is a different conversation.
But he like, he backs winners. He knows when to get involved.
In stuff he claims. Yeah, yeah, on businesses, which
was, you know, to help fund homelessness initiatives.
And he spends like he's a big philanthropist and all this
stuff. You know, Ron Conway essentially
picks the mayor in San Francisco every every time there's an
election. And you saw a split between them
after this comment, after his like National Guard comments to
a point where Ron Conway, I don't think he's really buddies
with him anymore. And, and like, you know, stepped
down from the board of of of one of his foundations and.
Kudos to Ron Conway, the only tech guy with the backbone right
now. Yeah, in San Francisco and and
Dario, I think. We can, Betty.
Office Newcomer's good list, you know.
Yeah, we've got Ron. Nice list of bauddy list.
That would have been fun. Yeah, I think Benioff has got a
lot of problems to deal with, you know, as a business right
now. I mean when I think he's.
Just out of touch, like he didn't know like what's wrong
with him? Like I guess he.
Just seems to not be able to read the moment.
Or maybe he's reading it better than anyone else and things will
come back around. But I thought you saw between
the National Guard comments and then he, you know, went to a
Trump state dinner, which is fine, a White House dinner, like
it's important for these guys to to go there.
But he was like taking selfies with Pam Bondi on it and being
like, hey, the fun kids just showed up.
And it's like, no one likes Pam Bondi, dude.
Like, like, I don't even think Trump likes her right now,
right? Like.
The political instincts are way off right now.
The only thing that's more often Benioff's political instincts is
Salesforce's stock price. But.
Benioff was was he on the podcast this year, by the way?
Our podcast. Yeah.
Well, things. And at the end of that podcast,
if you stuck around the end, I still saw him like Ron Conway,
where I was like, what's going on?
Like you won't stand up to these guys.
And there were early hints because I was like, you don't
have more of a backbone than this.
You've been such a loud, like Democrat.
And he was pretty cowardly. Like I was definitely
disappointed on on that episode. But yeah, he's in a weird.
I think people lose touch at a certain point.
Even if you have a great feel for the, you know, the instincts
and the politics, at some point you just, the, the, the scene
moves on without you and you start making these kinds of
mistakes. And Benioff had so many of them
this year. I think the general billionaire
world and successful business world did not clock the shift
rapidly against Trump. That happened as quickly as it
has. And I think that they thought
that they maybe had a couple more years of this before the
pendulum swung. But the economic fallout and
people don't like the immigration crackdowns and
basically public opinion has shifted remarkably quickly away
from Trump in the last few months.
So I think a lot of people were caught a little off.
Guard, We're going to get real fascism, and we haven't gotten
the memo yet. And these guys.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. He might have better instincts
than all of us. All right quote #14 for 2025 A.
Rejection of any kind. I should like shift in my chair
a lot as I'm as I'm reading this.
Yeah. Do you have any Adderall over
there or? Yeah.
Is that what it is? OK.
You could do a push up. Adderall I think I won't get in
trouble for joking about I don't know which what it is.
My son is is neuroatypical, so I feel OK calling him out for
this. A rejection of any kind of
shared and defined sense of common culture in this nation
and others has significant costs.
We should, indeed must return to a shared national experience, an
embrace of common identity that, by definition, puts forward
certain ideas, values, cultures and ways of living at the
exclusion of others. That's Alex Karp in his Palantir
SQ3 letter to shareholders from November.
Not Deal Book where you know he we're we're referencing the
crazy physical antics of Alex Karp at Deal Book, though I
don't know if the actual prose was this.
Good quote. The prose from the deal book
moment. If we could include a video clip
in this post, I would have included a video.
However, I wanted to get the sentiment across of the twitchy
conversation. Yeah, I think Alex Karp has
been, you know, a really prominent CEO this year in tech.
Obviously, Palantir stock has gone up quite a bit and down and
fluctuated, but you know, it's been a stock to watch and his,
you know, embrace of the the West and the Trump
administration and kind of defense tech as a larger theme.
The West in the as a synonym for white people or I don't know,
the West is yeah. What does the West mean?
How they say it's like Judeo-christian values.
You know it's. A catch all for all that, you
know, and how best we should do business and live our lives.
And his sort of embrace of that kind of went mainstream and it
was enough that he put it, you know, in his quarterly letter to
shareholders that like this is the philosophy we are going to
follow at Palantir. And I think it's a philosophy
that guides a lot of these defense tech companies that are
have propped up that are all kind of children of Palantir in
a way, or children of Anderill, which is also came out of
Palantir with a lot of ex guys there.
So felt like this was a way to capture the defense tech moment
and maybe we can, you know, embed a little twitchiness
somehow when. This this I take great umbrage
embrace of common identity that by definition puts forward
certain ideas values like I'm just, you know, the great thing
about being a country organized around the Declaration of
Independence and Enlightenment ideas is that we're organized
around ideas directly. Like I, I, I feel like they're
trying to sort of they, yeah, they're the, you know, there's a
lot of identitarianism obviously on the rise this year, and this
seems to try and have it. It's.
Trying to have it both ways. It is.
It's trying to say, you know, yes, we're rah, rah America.
But if you're being rah, rah America, you have to embrace,
you know, American values of being a country founded on
ideas, not identity and, you know, nationality and race for
that narrative. And he's also trying to do it
pretty heavily. But yeah, our identity is what
matters, and that's the right one.
So it felt like, you know, really captured the spirit of
those guys. Yeah, Karp's a weird 1 though,
too. He doesn't really fit the molds
of a lot of these people. I mean the dude voted for Kamala
and so he's also like they. Always bring him out as the like
token Democrat defence tech guy at all these.
Events, yeah. Like he's kind of a Lib.
He's just sort of all over the place.
I never know what to to draw from him.
I like the idea of him as like an avatar of kind of the defence
tech moment too, because Palmer Luckey is the same sort of
thing. He's kind of hard to categorize,
but these guys matter. But Palmer is much more socially
of the maca world than yes. Well, I mean, Carp is close to
Peter Teal, so I mean, they're all I mean, it's.
Complicated. They're all complicated.
I don't have a great read on Alex Carp.
I used to go to Sun Valley, the big media tech.
Not as a man with a badge, as a reporter clinging to the edges.
Yeah, I would sit at a morsel. Please, please, CEO, can you
give me a scoop about what coffee order you're making right
now? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's it's like. That's not even a people, right?
It's like Tim Cook had a coffee with Mark Zuckerberg scoop, you
know? No, no, it was Tim.
Tim. Tim Apple was at the coffee shop
outside Sun Valley and he tried to pay with Apple Pay and they
didn't accept it. And we wrote a little item about
that for the information. It got picked up by Business
Insider. Oh, that's.
A great wheel of content. Glad you got aggregated there.
Yeah, it's it it really one of the true humiliating experiences
of my life is going to Sun Valley.
But I would see Alex Karp walking around, you know, in
between the the lodge and the duck pond.
And the amount of nervous energy emanating from this guy could
power a fucking data center. That guy is.
There's a lot. There's a lot going on there.
Let's move on. All right quote #15.
I like this one. This is where we're looking for
an ecosystem of banks, private equity, maybe even governmental,
the way governments can come to bear meaning like just first of
all, the backstop, the guarantee that allows the financing to
happen. So that was Sarah Fryer, of
course, open AICFO and whether open AI would need a federal
backstop against its spending. And that was at The Journal,
Wall Street Journal's tech live event in Napa.
And that was in November. Great, great pick, Backstop.
That's the backstop. Another word of the year,
honestly. Backstop really rang around
Twitter. I mean, that one speaks for
itself, you know, open AI CFO calling for a federal backstop
in words that she quickly walked back after this live event.
But that's the power of live journalism and why we have a
thriving events business, because you you say stuff on
stage that maybe reveals what you're really thinking about.
There was a lot of hand wringing from Open Eye after that where
they were like, that's not what we meant.
My words were taken kind of context.
I was just agreeing broadly with the premise of this.
And they had to, you know, announce that they never wanted
to do it. And then it turned out there was
some letter that Open Eye had actually sent to the
administration in which they had floated this.
I don't have the reporter to back this up.
This is purely based on intuition.
They fucking want a federal backstop.
There is no question in my mind that Open AI wants to be sure
that when they are start to take out enormous loans to pay for
their compute needs that they want to be sure that they will
not default as a company. And they got called out for it.
They kind of got a little too close to the sun.
They saw everyone on All You Know from.
Left to right had a policy memo document that floated this idea.
This was not an errant thing, she said.
And it really feels like if they'd done it more artfully,
they might have gotten away with it.
Like, it's not totally outside of reason that they could
convince the Trump administration to say, hey, it's
very strategically important that we have an investment.
We're going to guarantee loans to open AI.
There's no reason they'd fail. Like, But I mean, thankfully, I
think as we said at the top of this episode, there are enough
AI skeptics that that I think would be very politically
unpalatable. And anyone who believes in free
enterprise and risk and thinks bailouts to store the entire
economy and that capitalism means capitalism should be
against a fucking federal backstop.
Like that's the risk investors are meant to take.
They're betting on whether AI is safer, say, you know, a safe
financial investment or not. And that's the provenance of the
free market and investors, not the government.
So yeah, I'm happy to root against.
What venture capital is, it's inherently A risky investment
like that is, you know, where these companies are birthed
from. You know, that's kind of the
whole deal that you're taking a risk and it may not work out,
but you make it super rich otherwise.
So it's funny to see, you know, Open AI, the most valuable
venture backed private company in the world, might maybe is it
compared to SpaceX? Where are they?
Are they neck and neck right now?
But anyway, it's yeah, you know, we'll do our business in
private. It's not even public.
But yeah, we need a federal backstop.
But it's it's not even venture capital.
It's debt, like debt comes with risk with it.
Like that's the reason that people that take debt make money
from taking debt, taking on debt like buying up debt because it's
a risky endeavor. And so it was funny to see David
Sachs, you know, and in response to this whole thing being like,
the government will absolutely not be bailing out any AI
companies. There are lots of model
providers out there, which is an idiotic thing to say because the
whole point of being too big to fail means that like there are
wider implications to a failure. There's a fallout for it.
We said this on the show in stories on newcomer open eye
strategy of taking on these massive, you know, these massive
deals. He is a too big to fail strategy
that they are. You know, Sam Altman has been
intertwining himself into the broader economic environment
such that like if they were to default as a company, there
would be a pretty large, maybe not catastrophic, but a large
effect on on, you know, tech stocks more broadly.
And I don't know, I think he's engineered it.
This is where we're at right now, opening eyes wound into the
valuation of multiple publicly traded companies and.
If they were to collapse one day, it would have some sort of
larger economic fallout. OK, brief thing here.
It's like equity is much safer than debt, right?
You know, it's like most of the money open AI has taken on so
far is in the form of equity. So if Open AI value collapses,
Microsoft or somebody could buy it at a low price.
It doesn't mean it collapses to 0.
The real problem is if it has all this debt that you know,
outstrips its equity value, then you know, everybody could want
to avoid buying it because they would take on all this debt and
then then you have a huge problem.
So right now I don't think we have the level of debt that you
we have that sort of House of Cards.
But the debt exists at the peripheries.
Like Oracle, which is a major partner of theirs, has taken on
a lot of debt to pay for data centers.
Core Weave has taken on debt. Yeah, yeah, I mean all.
Those companies aren't gonna get saved.
That's why it's good that it's sort of externalized from from
OEI. So I I don't know that I see the
catastrophe you're painting. But Sam Altman has an insatiable
appetite for more and knows that, you know he's in the
business of scale, right. These foundation models seem
still to get smarter the more they spend on training runs, and
so he'll take as much money as he can get.
And if the government giving him a backstop to get cheap debt was
gonna be 1 path, he'd try it. But he's also happy to try
things that don't succeed and move on to the next one.
And so hopefully the backstop idea didn't take.
To Sarah Fryer, it never hurts to ask.
You never know until you ask. Exactly.
All right, Quote 16 for 2025. I think democracy's fucked if we
do this. That is from LA Adventurers.
Andy Konwinsky interviewed by me at the Cereal Valley AI Summit,
and this was about whether what would happen if the US seeds
open source on AI research advancement to China.
Yeah. So I mean, I picked that one in
part because I feel like the open source debate hadn't been
touched on as much in this list. But the the the increasing
competition with China around the AI race was a very major
theme of 2025. And they are obviously, maybe
they're cheating, but there's some evidence that suggests that
they're taking some stuff from the US But they are, you know,
kicking our ass an open source in a lot of ways.
So I think it's a fairpoint. Andy, you know, founder of
Perplexity and Databricks, very importantly so a serious guy and
has the beard to reflect his seriousness.
I don't know, Tom, a real you asked the question.
What was your take? The Rick Rubin of Tech?
Very difficult. From only in a set.
Way yeah, I think open source is a fascinating topic that was so
big at the beginning of the year because of DeepSeek and this
idea of like whether an open source model could actively
compete with, you know what the the proprietary, you know,
closed source models can do it. We've kind of forgotten about
it. China really does seem to be way
out ahead right now. Not even does seem to be they
are way out ahead. And there's a lot of open source
models that are being used by American companies that are all
made in China. And, you know, that is
concerning to a lot of people that dynamic.
And you're seeing a few companies coming up like
Reflection and maybe Meta is actually abandoning open source.
So that's kind of interesting. But I actually, I would place my
bet that 5 to 10 years from now that the most important models
probably will be open source. It just is the trend of that
kind of technology. So I guess if you're someone
like Andy, you, you better hope it's coming from an American.
What I don't understand is if it's open truly, then who cares
if it's Chinese? We can still have U.S. companies
that host 100% What what does it matter?
I mean, is he more interest? He's more worried about like the
capability and just that if you're producing the open source
research, you, you understand it better and therefore you're more
capable I. Mean it's hard to get into like
the geopolitics of it all, but I think it's he was equating open
source with democracy that like it's and that's a kind of core
belief of certain technologists is that technology should be
something that is democratically available and open source is the
only real way of getting there. And if we, you know, we believe
in a future entirely run by AI, the public should have the right
to, you know, be able to adjust it as they want and not pay a
price every single time you want to access this technology.
It's an interesting idea. Quote 17 Homestretch second to
last. We should have, like, corporate
music playing in the background, like those, like, training
videos, you know? Yeah, We are delighted by
Google's success. They've made great advances in
AI and we continue to supply to Google.
NVIDIA is a generation ahead of the industry.
It's the only platform that runs every AI model and does it
everywhere computing is done. NVIDIA offers greater
performance, versatility and fungibility than ASICS, which
are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions.
This is a tweet from Nvidia's newsroom after the release of
Google's Gemini 3, and it got a bunch of public praise.
And also I think it's specifically in response to a
story from the information that Meta was talking to Google about
purchasing a huge number of TP use from them.
Right, yes. So this I would call the quote
that personified the oh shit moment for a lot of people about
Gemini 3's launch and how successful the model was while
being trained on Google's in house TVU chips to where
everyone kind of realized Google has the full package under one
roof and we should not count out Google at this moment in the AI
race. They have top scientists, They
have a really strong high performing model.
They have a great image model they have of search engines
business that prints money for them to power all of this.
So they aren't necessarily as reliant on debt as maybe some
other people will be. And they have the chips
themselves. So that's kind of, you know, we
can debate if they're a monopoly or not since they kind of are
told they are, but it doesn't matter.
But they have an advantage here. Google stock is up 65% year to
date. It certainly has been not not a
surprise to us as you've heard on this podcast before.
I guess we should make more money betting on stocks we
believe in because we've been Tom came into the job betting
betting on Google or narratively betting on Google and
unfortunately stock is doing well.
But NVIDIA I I you know I think as Tom is going to get into this
is extreme defensiveness NPR from NVIDIA like doth protest
too much situation Yeah what are you we're.
Doing great. Our business is doing awesome.
And don't forget forget that you'll need a lot more than just
one type of chip. Exactly.
We're specialized. Yeah, I don't want to go into
the Lulu world of telling other people how to manage their calm
strategy, but sometimes not saying anything is the best
response to an event, and not even a particularly damaging one
like Nvidia's A4 fucking trillion dollar company.
You can handle like one or two bad days of trading because of a
story saying that like one company is going to be buying
your competitors chips. Like you guys are still
basically owning the whole AI chips game.
So maybe maybe don't talk too much about that.
But like in terms of Google, I have not actually messed around
with the Gemini text model that much.
I haven't, you know, seen it back and forth with that sort of
thing. But Nano Banana might be my
favorite app of the year. I think it's an incredibly fun
in a generation tool. It's so quick.
It really understands what you're asking for It I think
really is that was like the sort of lead piece of the Google
comeback, quote UN quote comeback story was the
effectiveness of Nano Banana. And they still got it, Dennis
still. He's still got it.
NVIDIA is up 36.5% this year, so not bad, but it's not not as
sexy as it as it had been. It's up over five years.
It is up 1350%. So yeah, we, we got so much
growth in what, 2024? The 2025 for NVIDIA was just
not, not as exciting. But Google, Google has been
insane. And we're getting a little
defensiveness from NVIDIA and their public, from their public
relations department. All right, our final quote for
2025 quote #18. I cannot imagine having gone
through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.
Do it again, he's not that bad. I cannot imagine having gone
through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.
That's Sam. Is that a better Sam?
I don't know. I mean, it's usually a little
more muted and and kind of confused.
He's totally reinvented his voice.
That's Sam Altman. We refer to him as Sam.
We've literally gotten questions from YouTube commenters being
like who is Sam? I think you can default.
Find another podcast Sam Sam. Altman, but but yes, there are
other Ganges. From from Lord of the Rings,
Sam, do you think we're talking about?
Sam Altman on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, December 8th,
2025. Madeline, why was this our last
quote of 2025? It was, you know, Sam Altman go
on TV and act human challenge. Oh failed.
It was you know, oh, every time we have these guys, you know,
come and defend. I mean, so much of this list was
really the AI industry coming out and saying why they're
important, why they should matter political leaders saying
why they should matter defending them as well.
This was, you know, to the normies, The Tonight Show we're
going on middle America network talk show.
Let's chat. Why is AI so great?
Oh this thing, to your point Eric, that we humans have been
doing for millions of years. Can't do it without AI.
Real relatable content there. Which is funny because on this
podcast I often invoke using Chachi BT for my newborn.
So I'm sympathetic that it is a useful thing.
But just saying it's the hyperbole of the fundraiser.
Sam Allman, right? He's he gives these maximalist
things to get people to give them his money.
And then sort of suggesting that you like needed Chachi BT to do
the most essential of human tasks.
Raising your child just shows the level of disconnection from
real humans. That doesn't make you a great
spokesman on The Tonight Show. Yeah, I think 26 is gonna be a
very critical one for the AI industry as we are well past the
point of like fun, novel growing technology.
Open AI is probably going to reach ChatGPT is going to reach
a billion weekly users some point early next year.
And their big battle is going to be getting people, the normies
comfortable with this technology and and wanting to use it
everyday and finding utility in it so that they're willing to
pay money and, you know, make this company at some point
financially stable. And if you can't do better than
Sam did on probably the softest possible interview in in media,
then it's not going to be an easy task.
Yeah, Jimmy Fallon really known for his hard hitting
interrogative questions there. Yeah, the guy's.
Donald. Trump's hair.
Maybe he should have done that for Sam.
Yeah, he should have. Yeah, that would have been good.
Should. Have ruffled ruffled his hair,
but I don't know. All right, those are the 18
quotes that defined 2025. Thanks for listening.
See you in 2026. Bye bye.
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