[jmmcd]

Certainly, it's an exaggeration / simplification. I don't feel it is really a dishonest one, in context [*]. It feels weird for me to "defend" him here, because in general Altman is a stupendous, egregious, world-leading liar.

[*] Ok, we can differ on that. My feeling is partly because the types of distributions that can't be learned - eg hash functions - are generally the kind of functions we don't really want to learn. Underneath this are deeper questions related to no free lunch and how "nice"/"well-behaved" this universe is.