I think the future of humanity in space will be determined by the answer to a question and that question is what will happen first the first human born in space or the first combat fatality in space and we're working very hard to make sure it's the former you you need to prepare for it to to be the latter.
I do think that, in the long run, there's something like: the companies that are doing the most important work, on the most important problems, with the best people, tend to win. And I think AI is actually making that more true, not less true, because AI is a great equalizer on the execution side — it's getting cheaper and easier to build software. What's not getting cheaper and easier is knowing what to build.
You can take your roided up macho w you know WWE e you know warrior and give me a 90 lb man or woman in thick glasses with a drone and a hellfire missile and a command module. Let's see who wins. We fight wars now not as much with brawn but with brains and with people who have a certain level of discipline, a certain level of respect for each other.
The ones that have succeeded enormously are the ones that have had a very simple and easily expressible mission that everybody in the company understands — whether that's somebody who's answering the phones, whether it's somebody who's writing code, whether it's the chief executive. The ones that lose their way are the ones where that clarity of mission has been lost.
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.
Their approach of trying to disrupt it from a position of strength doesn't make any sense. They're basically trying to perform open heart surgery on the healthiest person, you know, in the franchise. For 50 consecutive seasons, 60 has been the number one rated news program and garnering about 9 million viewers.
You'll hear Sundar say he realized he needed to rethink how Google worked a few years ago in response to ChatGPT, and he made a lot of executive changes and big decisions to get the company in a more aggressive posture.
So you have like Tim Cook operationalizing the company, making so much money from the app store, building the business, but at the same time, he just happened to be the CEO during the greatest AI winter ever, basically from 2011 to 2022, 2023 when we started getting LLM, started getting chat bots.
The history of Uber is really the history of navigating chaos. And I think what we've learned is that the chaos is actually a feature, not a bug. Because the chaos is what creates the opportunity for a company like Uber to come in and bring order to a market that didn't have it.
if I reverse engineering my career, it's really been about normalizing disruptive technologies to make them more understood and to drive that mass adoption.
The sort of closeness that we've seen between Russia and China since the Russian invasion of Ukraine is probably the most consequential geopolitical shift that we've seen in the world over the last decade.
We recorded this conversation in the middle of the Iranian contingency, and we spent most of our time on what winning actually means in a theater like Iran.
Media rights fees are no longer built on ratings. They're built on subscriptions. And subscriptions are based off of churn, retention, and new subscriptions.
I would say all of this to me means that the rivalry has entered a new phase. The White House is talking about exploring measures to hold foreign actors accountable. That's the phrase they use for industrial scale distillation campaigns. To me, I think the important thing is that politically, geopolitically, this is a step change.
The thing that started as like Elon sort of being like I want to buy Twitter is now like a Neol with a massive supercomputer data center and a coding agent and code review for the age of AI because don't forget they own graphite now or potentially will uh and and and a social the space review
China is still a highly transactional power. It doesn't have allies with the exception of one and that is North Korea. It has a formal treaty with North Korea signed in 1961. But aside from that, China has no treaty obligation to go in and protect and defend any other country were that country to be attacked.
I was a partner at a private equity firm and they used to invest in the education sector. And as I spent time looking at the sector, I really fell in love with the school sector and I looked more closely at the opportunity and my view was how nice would it be to have a group of the best schools around the world that maintain the ethos and values of the schools that are part of the group, but yet share global best practices.
By banning the export of chips to China, the cost to China of a Taiwan invasion decreases. And so if China can't access TSMC chips anyway, it's a lot less risky to go to war.
The Chinese are playing a long game in the Middle East, but also a long game around the world. So the China of today is far deeper in the Middle East, including the Gulf, including Iran, including Iraq. When Western companies are not so forthcoming to build things, the Chinese are always there to build things.
I don't want to compete with someone in our audience that is gets to spend 100% of their time on something when we can only spend like 10% of their time on it. Like they're going to smoke us.
One of the things John talks about is cultivating the best seat in your industry – the seat with the best perspective, the most information, the best systems.
8mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
