https://minutesof.com/on/economics/ Everyone on the record about economics: 56 verbatim quotes from 8 people, March 2020 to August 2026, in one chronology, each with a timestamp and a link… en Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:32:56 +0000 https://minutesof.com/q/470deb1c-05eb-4eaf-9d8c-4112dbe35a93/ https://minutesof.com/q/470deb1c-05eb-4eaf-9d8c-4112dbe35a93/ “Meta's raised at, like, 5% to 6%. I don't see why they wouldn't pay 8% Because they would happily pay 8% because the return from the compute that they're going to build is humongous.” — Dylan Patel, Dwarkesh Patel Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:57:53 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/e06c3440-97f6-494c-88a7-77a755b4e54a/ https://minutesof.com/q/e06c3440-97f6-494c-88a7-77a755b4e54a/ “And and what that now enables them to do is, hey, if I spend $10 on inference capacity, actually generate $50 of revenue,” — Dylan Patel, Dwarkesh Patel Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:57:53 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/eba19336-ae10-41b5-bcf4-869195ffbb74/ https://minutesof.com/q/eba19336-ae10-41b5-bcf4-869195ffbb74/ “Where housing doubled under the leadership of Joe Biden, rents are falling for the first time in a decade under the leadership of Donald Trump” — JD Vance, Forbes Breaking News Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:00:19 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/26bff7b5-b39f-4ba9-90aa-a79d4f8705dc/ https://minutesof.com/q/26bff7b5-b39f-4ba9-90aa-a79d4f8705dc/ “And when you give them houses that all go by right to American citizens, that's gonna increase the cost of housing for everybody else.” — JD Vance, Forbes Breaking News Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:00:19 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/8399cd47-2fb0-4af4-8f75-0f2a1430655b/ https://minutesof.com/q/8399cd47-2fb0-4af4-8f75-0f2a1430655b/ “Borgesch, he's a very smart guy. He's very plugged in. Then he pointed out that margins on compute are going up.” — Gavin Baker, Invest Like the Best Tue, 04 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/289f5368-a657-42fd-9826-8e45417ec2ab/ https://minutesof.com/q/289f5368-a657-42fd-9826-8e45417ec2ab/ “My my own company of 90 people, 30% of my cost now is tokens versus 70% employee costs.” — Dylan Patel, RAISE Summit Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:43:49 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/3bea5703-d869-4e93-bec6-70e3ecd20e14/ https://minutesof.com/q/3bea5703-d869-4e93-bec6-70e3ecd20e14/ “you calculate that once, you store it off in memory, whether it be system memory or storage, and then you pull it back in when you run the turn.” — Dylan Patel, RAISE Summit Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:44:57 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/780c360e-dead-4817-88e5-9b6077a27b0e/ https://minutesof.com/q/780c360e-dead-4817-88e5-9b6077a27b0e/ “OpenAI late last year, their margins had were roughly 30% gross margin, but if you stripped away the free users, they were at 50%. Now, total company gross margin is closer to 55%,” — Dylan Patel, RAISE Summit Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:44:57 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/7c7a92c5-fdfe-4963-b642-7f3b54fc91e0/ https://minutesof.com/q/7c7a92c5-fdfe-4963-b642-7f3b54fc91e0/ “So what is the role for human creativity, man? I don't know. I don't know. Like what I hope, one of the reasons Neuralink is such an exciting company” — Gavin Baker, Generating Alpha Podcast Wed, 08 Jul 2026 15:54:53 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/c1abee78-d176-457f-8a5b-90e353f41471/ https://minutesof.com/q/c1abee78-d176-457f-8a5b-90e353f41471/ “GPUs, at least before the craziness of the last six months, usually went around 12 to $13,000,000,000 per gigawatt.” — Dylan Patel, Sequoia Capital Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:00:25 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/5a74db41-fe73-4bf3-8db5-0364c51b4091/ https://minutesof.com/q/5a74db41-fe73-4bf3-8db5-0364c51b4091/ “I don't think there's any scenario where you just do more for less and all of a sudden everyone has 70% operating margins. That's not gonna happen.” — Bill Gurley, All-In Podcast Fri, 29 May 2026 22:47:49 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/3d3aa12b-148b-4e36-8a9c-ef47962c54bc/ https://minutesof.com/q/3d3aa12b-148b-4e36-8a9c-ef47962c54bc/ “And then subsequently, that that sends the world into a depression. Right? The world has not experienced a 20 free fall since maybe, like, a one of the great wars.” — Dylan Patel, Swole as a Service Wed, 13 May 2026 20:00:36 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/21ae8cc8-eac3-4e20-b0fd-1af8dc2884af/ https://minutesof.com/q/21ae8cc8-eac3-4e20-b0fd-1af8dc2884af/ “Today, if you add up federal, state, local government employees, plus all the contractors for the government, plus all the people that live off of a retirement check or or a welfare support check, so all the people that are living off government checks, it's about nearly half The US population.” — David Friedberg, Chris Williamson Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:00:13 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/58c981b8-c147-418b-b36a-3674aaed9fdf/ https://minutesof.com/q/58c981b8-c147-418b-b36a-3674aaed9fdf/ “For every one year, we can extend average human lifespan. We're adding tens of trillions of dollars to GDP. Right? So this is also another big economic driver.” — David Friedberg, Chris Williamson Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:00:13 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/01072960-26ea-46df-93a8-c0abe2da12f7/ https://minutesof.com/q/01072960-26ea-46df-93a8-c0abe2da12f7/ “if you get the cost of energy down to 1¢ a kilowatt hour, it absolutely expands every economy. Like, everything blows up. Like, imagine if you” — David Friedberg, Chris Williamson Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:00:13 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/439cdc0f-72fb-4af7-91f6-93a760ea35c2/ https://minutesof.com/q/439cdc0f-72fb-4af7-91f6-93a760ea35c2/ “I actually think the moon is gonna be a giant, giant, giant economy. And I think it's like one of these economies.” — David Friedberg, Chris Williamson Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:00:13 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/bfbdd28d-0078-4dc9-9606-86ee7bd03660/ https://minutesof.com/q/bfbdd28d-0078-4dc9-9606-86ee7bd03660/ “So we could run continuous mining, continuous manufacturing processes on the moon at a fraction of the cost of what it would take to do it here on Earth.” — David Friedberg, All-In Podcast Sun, 05 Apr 2026 02:26:52 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/287b3a60-f2db-491d-9b5a-175c80ce2468/ https://minutesof.com/q/287b3a60-f2db-491d-9b5a-175c80ce2468/ “And the reason is if you can get to the moon, the moon has an extraordinary abundance of material that we can mine, process, and manufacture into goods.” — David Friedberg, All-In Podcast Sun, 05 Apr 2026 02:26:52 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/bec4f50b-ae61-4935-b577-c45c8527112c/ https://minutesof.com/q/bec4f50b-ae61-4935-b577-c45c8527112c/ “Over the last couple years I've realized, wait, I actually think UBI is perfectly fine. Which I think is crazy because again, I'm very capitalist.” — Dylan Patel, Matthew Berman Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:07:47 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/bd34934b-1867-41db-90e5-d28702f49580/ https://minutesof.com/q/bd34934b-1867-41db-90e5-d28702f49580/ “Nowadays, people in the ninetieth percentile think they're middle class, and people in the fiftieth percentile don't think they're middle class.” — Dylan Patel, Matthew Berman Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:07:47 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/2d9fb7d3-a108-42ed-8c31-bc32b44f3155/ https://minutesof.com/q/2d9fb7d3-a108-42ed-8c31-bc32b44f3155/ “You can disable that where it's not automatically committed. But 2% of GitHub commits today are Cloud Code. $2,000,000,000,000 of software wages paid in the world.” — Dylan Patel, The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:30:16 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/b206ab39-c11b-4186-80e2-7930fb9768d1/ https://minutesof.com/q/b206ab39-c11b-4186-80e2-7930fb9768d1/ “That $50,000,000,000 of COGS needs to burn on infra, which cost roughly with if a five if you're talking about five year depreciation, call it $250,000,000,000, right, of infra Yeah. For a $100,000,000,000 of revenue.” — Dylan Patel, The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:30:16 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/cd25adac-de13-45a2-be3a-4ec9e9995596/ https://minutesof.com/q/cd25adac-de13-45a2-be3a-4ec9e9995596/ “The IT industry is about a trillion dollars, right, or so, plus or minus a couple. And yet the the economy of the world is about a $100,000,000,000,000.” — Jensen Huang, Cisco Wed, 04 Feb 2026 04:34:47 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/d63342d7-794d-43b2-8529-800ca943aa5a/ https://minutesof.com/q/d63342d7-794d-43b2-8529-800ca943aa5a/ “for a lot of people, I'm fine to spend 10x the price on something that completes 10x faster. So Cerberus sort of just makes a ton of sense there.” — Dylan Patel, TBPN Tue, 03 Feb 2026 23:08:03 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/f87a5f4d-a3f1-4aa1-b878-a6e57ea09c84/ https://minutesof.com/q/f87a5f4d-a3f1-4aa1-b878-a6e57ea09c84/ “By my estimate, more than half of Americans rely on a government check either directly or indirectly.” — David Friedberg, All-In Podcast Tue, 13 Jan 2026 03:27:21 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/9d4d6014-03ab-4d1a-99de-91e4784b9892/ https://minutesof.com/q/9d4d6014-03ab-4d1a-99de-91e4784b9892/ “four you know, four forty million Americans graduated in last ten years from student from college with student loan. Average student loan debt $440,000.” — David Friedberg, Network State Podcast Sun, 21 Dec 2025 08:30:07 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/f32d4f07-7608-4f56-839f-655b50f7e267/ https://minutesof.com/q/f32d4f07-7608-4f56-839f-655b50f7e267/ “the key measure of happiness was income change year over year. The more your income changes from one year to the next, the happier you are.” — David Friedberg, Network State Podcast Sun, 21 Dec 2025 08:30:07 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/b710419e-9732-4ed3-b25e-eebf6cbc3c6e/ https://minutesof.com/q/b710419e-9732-4ed3-b25e-eebf6cbc3c6e/ “at the time, it improved up to $60,000 of income a year Right. Then it flatlined beyond And then the the the key measure of happiness was income change year over year.” — David Friedberg, Network State Podcast Sun, 21 Dec 2025 08:30:07 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/46f7f4fc-5c60-4b8f-8293-dd4f74e0b5f6/ https://minutesof.com/q/46f7f4fc-5c60-4b8f-8293-dd4f74e0b5f6/ “Even though a 10% cut sounds like a lot, I'm the largest technology substack and I'm telling you that it's worth it.” — Dylan Patel, Chris Best Substack Fri, 31 Oct 2025 18:23:40 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/70800ca7-aaca-45bb-b128-a5925c5404e1/ https://minutesof.com/q/70800ca7-aaca-45bb-b128-a5925c5404e1/ “It's anywhere from 25% to 75 of the current quarter's economic growth. That's insane for The US.” — Dylan Patel, Chris Best Substack Fri, 31 Oct 2025 18:23:40 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/845190af-b6fc-4623-8ad2-fb90954f09eb/ https://minutesof.com/q/845190af-b6fc-4623-8ad2-fb90954f09eb/ “As you're launching in The US, do you have a sense Keller, are you gonna beat the unit cost to deliver with delivery drivers today and by how much?” — David Friedberg, All-In Podcast Tue, 30 Sep 2025 03:14:12 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/63064cdc-d6ca-45f2-a900-01cfe59ea5a1/ https://minutesof.com/q/63064cdc-d6ca-45f2-a900-01cfe59ea5a1/ “You could probably see that you could save at least 15 or create at least $1,500 an acre of operating profit improvement for that potato grower.” — David Friedberg, The Modern Acre Thu, 11 Sep 2025 16:54:41 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/e2f5bf43-e051-4e1a-a746-0a781099ad8d/ https://minutesof.com/q/e2f5bf43-e051-4e1a-a746-0a781099ad8d/ “And that $5,000 of revenue is requiring an investment of 1 to $2,000 an acre. So 20 to 40% of revenue to deal with all of the planting and fumigation and storage” — David Friedberg, The Modern Acre Thu, 11 Sep 2025 16:54:41 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/32f73f98-0c1a-4dc2-b8a9-b679ef176dd6/ https://minutesof.com/q/32f73f98-0c1a-4dc2-b8a9-b679ef176dd6/ “You know, you can probably see that you could save at least 15 or create at least $1,500 an acre of operating profit improvement for that potato grower.” — David Friedberg, The Modern Acre Thu, 11 Sep 2025 16:22:17 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/b12760bd-698b-424c-b3c9-af755b1888d5/ https://minutesof.com/q/b12760bd-698b-424c-b3c9-af755b1888d5/ “Okay? And that $5,000 of revenue is requiring an investment of 1 to $2,000 an acre.” — David Friedberg, The Modern Acre Thu, 11 Sep 2025 16:22:17 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/118adf92-a072-4293-96f1-0f83d0f73bf2/ https://minutesof.com/q/118adf92-a072-4293-96f1-0f83d0f73bf2/ “The US only represents about 14% of China's exports. The US only represents about 3% of China's GDP.” — Brad Gerstner, BG2 Pod Thu, 28 Aug 2025 23:39:23 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/f14c478d-6c68-4537-b652-a709482a769a/ https://minutesof.com/q/f14c478d-6c68-4537-b652-a709482a769a/ “It's the it's the physical data center conversion power conversion equipment. All of this stuff is, like, 80% of the cost. And then 20% is gonna be your land and your power and your cooling” — Dylan Patel, a16z Mon, 18 Aug 2025 18:26:43 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/017a5839-c71d-42bb-951b-8594f045c861/ https://minutesof.com/q/017a5839-c71d-42bb-951b-8594f045c861/ “there's this constant pressure cooker of continual cost reductions and engineering. It's not like, Oh, well, we make 80% margins. Our cost is low.” — Dylan Patel, Going Direct Sun, 22 Jun 2025 21:30:00 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/675ee285-ed22-4889-b6cf-5f6b6892d5c7/ https://minutesof.com/q/675ee285-ed22-4889-b6cf-5f6b6892d5c7/ “That would not pay for all of these build outs. Right? AI is useful today, but it's not capable of doing a lot of things.” — Dylan Patel, Alex Kantrowitz Wed, 23 Apr 2025 16:30:06 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/837f0a3c-d3fb-454e-ba7f-3504bfd5a136/ https://minutesof.com/q/837f0a3c-d3fb-454e-ba7f-3504bfd5a136/ “each GPU, right, once you include networking, building, all this sort of stuff maybe is you know, the GPU itself of h 100 is, like, 24,000, but once you add everything else up, it's, like, forty, forty five thousand dollars per GPU all in of everything.” — Dylan Patel, Unsupervised Learning: With Jacob Effron Tue, 21 Jan 2025 14:00:12 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/58cb4df9-acea-480b-8af4-0b91ab6d00bd/ https://minutesof.com/q/58cb4df9-acea-480b-8af4-0b91ab6d00bd/ “So for one fifth of the site, they're paying something like $12,500,000,000 over the next five years.” — Dylan Patel, Scaling Intelligence Tue, 12 Nov 2024 04:17:00 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/c17dd34d-6330-45ef-ac94-0e2d4084112b/ https://minutesof.com/q/c17dd34d-6330-45ef-ac94-0e2d4084112b/ “funding the next node would not be economically viable anymore if it weren't for AI taking off. Right? And then generating all this humongous demand for the most leading edge chip.” — Dylan Patel, Dwarkesh Patel Wed, 02 Oct 2024 14:59:36 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/0bf3507f-9deb-4dce-a5e2-5e9d21d5e7a3/ https://minutesof.com/q/0bf3507f-9deb-4dce-a5e2-5e9d21d5e7a3/ “In 2020, Morgan Stanley estimates that about $2,000,000,000 was spent on the carbon offset market, and by 2030 they expect that to be $100,000,000,000 by these large hyperscalers that have to buy these massive carbon offsets.” — Brad Gerstner, BG2 Pod Wed, 25 Sep 2024 16:21:38 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/9fe2cf7b-eeda-4a6e-a4ce-ffcf21d1ba6a/ https://minutesof.com/q/9fe2cf7b-eeda-4a6e-a4ce-ffcf21d1ba6a/ “That potato farmer today is spending somewhere between one top line, that potato farmer is making about $5,000 an acre in The US. K?” — David Friedberg, The Modern Acre Tue, 04 Jun 2024 12:55:12 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/934b2e5a-39a7-47e5-85fa-dae362b0bd56/ https://minutesof.com/q/934b2e5a-39a7-47e5-85fa-dae362b0bd56/ “Like, this is just, you know, deglobalization, highly inflationary, and will make our companies less competitive, not more.” — Bill Gurley, BG2 Pod Thu, 16 May 2024 19:31:21 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/b6ddd3b6-4831-444b-b7ce-9d242ff2ad28/ https://minutesof.com/q/b6ddd3b6-4831-444b-b7ce-9d242ff2ad28/ “And of course that makes no sense economically. So it's actually a huge structural problem. There are complaints, you know, in Reddit about Character AI on this front.” — Bill Gurley, BG2 Pod Thu, 08 Feb 2024 19:35:00 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/7037941a-ee80-4057-a5c4-ce393d0ea4d6/ https://minutesof.com/q/7037941a-ee80-4057-a5c4-ce393d0ea4d6/ “training costs are irrelevant. Right? Like, GPT four, right, like, 20,000 a one hundreds, that's that's like, I know it sounds like a lot of money.” — Dylan Patel, Latent Space Tue, 05 Dec 2023 18:16:28 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/a81c789d-69a2-44e4-83c3-7fc48f4f956d/ https://minutesof.com/q/a81c789d-69a2-44e4-83c3-7fc48f4f956d/ “Because again, the manufacturing cost of lithography is only one fourth to one fifth. So if you double lithography costs, you're only increasing the total cost of a chip by 10%, right?” — Dylan Patel, Hidden Forces Wed, 04 Oct 2023 14:00:36 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/7ad95506-cd96-461a-a0bf-ddee1c4ab959/ https://minutesof.com/q/7ad95506-cd96-461a-a0bf-ddee1c4ab959/ “They're coming up the economic ladder and they're gonna eat more meat and they're gonna eat what tastes good and they're gonna eat whatever they can afford.” — David Friedberg, Consumer VC with Mike Gelb Sun, 30 Apr 2023 12:51:57 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/e22458f3-983f-450f-85ae-780001a92a79/ https://minutesof.com/q/e22458f3-983f-450f-85ae-780001a92a79/ “And and now today, if you look at it, the cost of memory is 30 to 50% of the GPU cost. Great cost. And then obviously, NVIDIA does a four x markup on their” — Dylan Patel, Gradient Flow Thu, 02 Feb 2023 12:00:39 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/313935cb-ddf3-40fb-b63b-c57a96e93812/ https://minutesof.com/q/313935cb-ddf3-40fb-b63b-c57a96e93812/ “So the first thing we saw inflate was sort of hard commodities and soft commodities, things like energy and agricultural products and metals and so on.” — David Friedberg, Megyn Kelly Mon, 17 Oct 2022 21:00:09 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/c49084a1-a02b-47ff-920d-dfaacdfd12e4/ https://minutesof.com/q/c49084a1-a02b-47ff-920d-dfaacdfd12e4/ “Russia, in fact, now has more or less the GDP of Italy, somewhere around thirteenth or fourteenth in the world. And it has an aging population.” — Sir Richard Dearlove, Technion UK Thu, 29 Oct 2020 19:45:56 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/e687cfc9-521d-4b81-a6d4-df5f7565549e/ https://minutesof.com/q/e687cfc9-521d-4b81-a6d4-df5f7565549e/ “I mean, it's very similar to our VC funds where we get paid for helping our investors invest in companies like Snowflake.” — Brad Gerstner, Invest Like the Best Tue, 27 Oct 2020 09:30:00 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/1b7dab41-fb30-48fd-af5d-1cf29252840a/ https://minutesof.com/q/1b7dab41-fb30-48fd-af5d-1cf29252840a/ “All the costs are borne by the shareholders of the SPAC who gave us part of their shares when we set up the SPAC as a finder's fee for helping them invest in a world class company.” — Brad Gerstner, Invest Like the Best Tue, 27 Oct 2020 09:30:00 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/8203460e-31ba-4579-8cd7-55bb725eec11/ https://minutesof.com/q/8203460e-31ba-4579-8cd7-55bb725eec11/ “So the notion of some sort of flatlined or even flatlined at inflation adjusted basic income level for a large number of people will inevitably result in kind of what we're trying to prevent, which is, you know, some sort of decay, societal decay.” — David Friedberg, All-In Podcast Sat, 19 Sep 2020 04:41:45 +0000 economics https://minutesof.com/q/ad21c65d-0479-4455-9492-ccff65b3d34d/ https://minutesof.com/q/ad21c65d-0479-4455-9492-ccff65b3d34d/ “Steve Mucin, The US Treasury Secretary, was saying that we should expect 20% to 30% of the workforce to be unemployed by this summer if we keep this up.” — David Friedberg, All-In Podcast Thu, 19 Mar 2020 01:16:53 +0000 economics