> PG's a great thinker about the subjects he discusses, and his essays have a very high signal to noise ratio. But when this video was first posted the 'umms' was one of the top comment, and probably detracted quite a bit from the core message he was conveying. Had this been an essay, I suspect the reception would have been more positive.

You don't even have to guess-pg published the contents of this talk in the essay "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas", which was much better received than the video, judging by the HN threads.