He doesn’t say quadratic time he is talking about the probability of any given string arising from a random sequence of letters. As t goes to infinity that probability approaches 1.

The monkeys don’t understand hamlet. They just bash enough keys that it appears by chance.

To be fair, I didn't watch the video to the part where he mentions monkeys writing Hamlet, but I thought the point of the monkeys is that they will stumble upon a Hamlet by accident at some point in time, by randomly pressing buttons on a keyboard. Obviously, it would take a long time, but it would happen at some point.

Could you be conflating writing hamlet with understanding how to write hamlet? as in, what it takes to end up with the same raw output though devoid of intent and meaning