E118: AI FOMO frenzy, macro update, Fox vs Dominion, US vs China & more with Brad Gerstner

Sometimes, the founder needs to have the courage to look in the mirror and say 'What I'm doing is not working. I had a plan. I missed the plan by 70%. I'm lighting capital on fire. This is a charity, not a business.' It's best to say it didn't work, shut it down, and move on, and do something else.

One of the things I've urged the company to do over the course of the last several years is parental controls. My kids use TikTok ... What I want to be able to do is set effective time limits ... TikTok has incredible video content in math and science and history. I want to be able to set a slider and say 20% of the videos that get shown over this 1-hour period have to include some of these math and science videos for my 12-year-old.

Should [TikTok] be banned? No, because I believe in a free market. Will it be banned? Yes, because it's the most obvious cultural way to pick a fight with China without actually picking a fight with China ... My advice to my friends who are shareholders... is sell. Sell it; move on.

Something like 10 or 11 billion-dollars has been invested into some 500 AI companies. I mean, I have to agree with Doug [Leone] that this is a platform shift on the same magnitude as the Internet or mobile itself. In fact, it may be bigger than both of those.

People can quibble with how Elon went about the change... at Twitter, but the reality is he lit a fuse in Silicon Valley ... I think it's a really important change because I think it breathes new productivity into all these businesses and, more importantly, it unleashes these engineers back into the ecosystem to start the next wave of companies.

Good founders have a responsibility to do what's right for themselves and their employees. Nobody else.

I would say there's maximum uncertainty in the world. The fear that inflation is uncapped the way Larry Summers was articulating in November and December is less today than it was, but what's emerged is this idea that we're going to have higher rates for longer and we're going to have a higher inflation for longer.

I think I probably said it too many times, but I'll say it again: Rates are going to be higher than we like, and they'll stay here longer than we want.

You and I got to tag along with Elon during that transition phase at Twitter, and the thing that I took away from it was just how much agency CEOs have that they're not using. I mean, Elon went in there, and he basically changed whatever he saw that he didn't like.

The TikTok ban debate is heating up ... I was just with all these investors; the main issue on their mind was global decoupling between China and the United States.

This is why I think DeSantis is doing well with the Republican base... He understands that it's not good enough just to have this, sort of, Regan-esque, totally hands-off government approach—because the radical left is advancing its agenda, not just legislatively but through corporations, through ESG, really through taking over key private sector institutions.

If you look at the employee count at Salesforce, in 2015, they had 19,000 employees. As of last year, they had 80,000 ... We don't talk about it in this way, but these large companies, these employee bases, they're not unions, but they may as well be.

I believe that if a television network knowingly spreads and endorses baseless accusations against somebody, which they know or should know is basically untrue, I think they should absolutely be liable... for defamation.

If it was a highly proprietary asset, you would have never sold 49% of it to Microsoft for $10 billion because you would assume that it was worth a trillion dollars. So, it's a huge tell on the part of OpenAI ... They understand it better than anybody else that it's a bit of a capped upside.