All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E135: Wagner rebels, SCOTUS ends AA, AI M&A, startups gone bad, spacetime warps & more

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is gonna be a feisty episode. Is it? Two of us are on Grinich mean time. Two of us are on Pacific. Jake Halsdow is sleeping his head. I'm good, actually. You good? I'm good.

Starting point is 00:00:13 All right, well great to be back. Welcome to the All Conspiracy podcast where we repeat false statements and help spin them into tales of struggling against the establishment, the elite and the mainstream media. We will deliver to you the people, the revolution against the powers of P,

Starting point is 00:00:28 unless it offends. F**king nice game. Nice game. Yeah. P. Still trying to get my invite for next week. We also enjoy it. We also enjoy it.

Starting point is 00:00:38 We also enjoy sharing with you fantastic stories of opulence. Let's be neutral. Opulence, leisure and benevolent greed. Here we go. Joining me today are my co-hosts, General David Sachs, Commander of the Fourth Battalion of the Internet Tweet Brigade.

Starting point is 00:00:54 General, welcome. Joining us from a remote location. And Moscow. As there been like an establishment takeover of the pod, I mean, what's up with this intro? Yes, it is good to do it. Yeah. Every argument they make against us, your basically just conceding is true. I mean, we'll put this in. Yeah. Every argument they make against us,

Starting point is 00:01:05 your base seat is conceding is true. I know. Exactly. From his 12th century Mediterranean castle, Il Ducce, Tomat Polly Haapatia. Welcome to math. How is the Mediterranean diet treating you? Blue. Blue. And Emperor Nero Calicanas. R ruler over podcasts, paid events, entrepreneurial universities, and dental SPVs. Emperor, thank you for letting me sit near throwing today. It's good to be here. Thank you. Dental SPVs. Shout out to my dentists. Wait, you say king of STDs? What you said is PVs. So SPVs.

Starting point is 00:01:41 Endless PVs. Yeah. That's the thing with certain STDs where once you are king you're gonna be king for life That's it. It's going to be easy. Love you, Wes. I'm going to be the queen of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king. That's syndicate.com. Yeah, thank you. You've been doing, you said five shows a week lately, your voice is shot.

Starting point is 00:02:12 I thought I was starting to go. Sorry, I asked you if you'd moderate and you said, you thankfully said yes. I've got the energy. I missed last week. I enjoyed listening to you guys with BG. Great episode. Sorry, I couldn't join. but let's kick it off. That's funny.

Starting point is 00:02:27 I still haven't watched the episode that I missed. You're not interested, huh? He's like, I'm not on the show. I'm not interested. And I don't have time to participate. I don't really have time to watch it. The truth is, Zach, why don't you admit to everyone that you're in a show.

Starting point is 00:02:39 You probably watch it four or five times. Ha ha ha. All right, so let's kick this off. Obviously, you guys recorded right before the Wacker group attempted coup or potential coup or theorized coup began last week. So, Sachs, you kind of sent out a text saying, the show is already stale because you know, kind of missed that, that news cycle by publishing right after it started, but you recorded right before. So let's do just a quick recap of what happened with Russia, Ukraine, and particularly

Starting point is 00:03:14 its Wagner, Wagner Group rebellion. Last Friday, the Wagner Group, which is a Russian paramilitary organization led by Yavgeny Prigozion, launched what seemed like an armed insurrection against Russia. Wagner had occupied portions of Rostov on Don, a city of over a million people, a regional capital, and headquarters of Russia's southern military district, before setting off towards Moscow and abruptly stopping, I think about 200 kilometers before reaching Moscow city. At that point, there was supposedly a negotiation the president of Belarus got involved and a pregozion decided to step down. Putin said,

Starting point is 00:03:54 I'm not going to prosecute you for these crimes. He was given immunity and it was announced that all the members of the Wagner group were given the option of returning home or joining the Russian military and the Wagner group was going to be dissolved. Sachs, maybe you can kind of give us your summary of the events that took place. And then we'll talk a little bit about the interpretation of what we think this means for the conflict in Ukraine. Well, you're right, that this rebellion took place just after we dropped our last episode. And so everybody, both on Twitter and in the comments, was dunking on me for my

Starting point is 00:04:31 take on last week's episode that the much hyped Ukrainian counteroffensive was not succeeding, that it was in fact failing. I think there's abundant evidence for that, which hasn't changed even CNN, had written an article basically supporting the idea that the counteroffensive was not living up to what had been promised and so everyone was in the comments saying that my take had basically aged like milk. And this arm rebellion or mutiny by progoation was evidence that the Russian regime was about to collapse that Russia was. collapse that Russia was in fact on the verge of civil war and you saw the exact same people who had oversold the counteroffensive now overselling this mutiny as something that would bring down the Russian regime and the war and of course that did not happen. It was certainly a highly unusual event and I've read takes now from every different corner of the internet about what it was and what took place.

Starting point is 00:05:26 You have people speculating that this was all staged. I do not believe that. I do believe that it was an insurrection or a mutiny by pergusion. I think the trigger for it was the fact that his Wagner organization was being merged in with the Ministry of Defense and the regular Russian Army and his men were all being made to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense and the regular Russian Army and his men were all being made to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense.

Starting point is 00:05:47 That would have resulted in a giant loss of income and status for pregozion simultaneously for months now he's been criticizing. The Ministry of Defense specifically the the Minister of Defense Shogu and the. Chief General of the general staff. chief general of the general staff, Jarrasmov. So he's been vocally critical of them. And I think that this basically erupted into a mutiny by him where he basically tried to leverage his position, like you said. He marched, what they now think are about 8,000 men, which is about a quarter of Wagner into Rostov on Don.

Starting point is 00:06:24 He then took the Ministry headquarters and sent about 3,000 of his men on a convoy to Moscow. I think that, although this is probably best described as a mutiny, I think that it did have coup optionality to it. I think that pregozion was seeking to find out how much support Putin had and who might join him. And he had put out a number of statements that I think from the Russian regime's point of view, it could be described as seditious that morning. And there's a lot of evidence that he staged this attack on his base. He claimed that there was a missile attack by the Ministry of Defense, and that's what

Starting point is 00:07:00 launched this march for justice. And in his comments, he was careful not to criticize Putin directly, but he had a lot to say about ministry defense and the overall conduct of the war. And it was, I think, a harshly critical indirectly of Putin. And I think he was looking to see who might support him. And what happened is that on the way to Moscow during this convoy nobody supported him in fact all the statements came out from the other generals including sir viken including all the regional governors of members of the duma and other important figures in Russian society and there wasn't a single person willing to

Starting point is 00:07:39 publicly support pergusion and that's when put Putin went on TV called this basically an active treason and a stab in the back. And at that point, I think, pregoation's options were pretty limited. And he basically took a deal that was broker by Lukashenko in which he would go into exile in Belarus, in exchange for basically being allowed to live. That was basically the deal that was ultimately cut. And so I think where things stand today is that although I think this wasn't embarrassment and a black eye for the Russian regime, it never looks good for a regime to have any kind of mutiny or insurrection.

Starting point is 00:08:17 And I think that it does raise questions that Putin's now going to have to answer to his various allies and supporters about how stable his regime is. I think ultimately, Putin has ended up in a place of consolidating Russian society behind him. Like I said, there were no power centers that supported this mutiny. They all rallied to Putin's defense and the people of Russia, even though Purgosian is a popular figure of being kind of a war hero from the Battle of Bokmut, the Russian society supported Putin. I think he's at something like 80% poll numbers.

Starting point is 00:08:50 So I think where things stand to? Well, like Lovata Center, which is an independent polling agency, for example, these are not the Russian regime's own numbers. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Putin? Well, I don't know how LeVada center with their methodology is, but these numbers when

Starting point is 00:09:10 the numbers are bad are cited by Western sources. But there are other forms of evidence too. You may have seen this video that went viral over the past few days of this song that's now the number one chartbuster in Russia where it's this very patriotic Russian song, where they're basically singing, I am Russian, that's sort of the main chorus. Nick, can you pull up the song? I'd like to see this place. Coming at you, 95.25.

Starting point is 00:09:34 I love Russia. Oh my God, this is a serious propaganda. Wow, yeah. I mean, that looks like a pretty good party. If you look up the lyrics to the song, the English translation of the lyrics, the gist of it is, I'm basically proud to be Russian, and I don't care who doesn't like it.

Starting point is 00:10:01 That's basically the lyrics of it. How do you get invited to that party? I got so many jokes I'm not going to make a final. You gotta be careful. Be careful here folks. You gotta be careful here. Why? It looks like a fun party. It's a catchy song. I mean, I love to dress up and show up. Tell me where to show up, Putin. I think the point here is that Russian society is united behind the state in wanting to fight this war. And I think that part of the reason why Pragotian's mutiny was so oversold as an imminent coup that would bring about the collapse of the Putin regime and of the Russian war effort

Starting point is 00:10:38 and of their front line is because that we since the beginning of this war, we've had this narrative that if we applied enough pressure to Russia, that there'd be a palace intrigue and a palace coup and that liberal forces inside of Russia would rise up and topple the dictator Putin and basically get them out of this war. And I think what's happened is fairly predictable, but it's the opposite of that, which is the Russian people

Starting point is 00:11:02 are rallying around the flag and rallying around Putin, the war leader, and they are a patriotic people just like the Ukrainians. And I think both these countries, that both the Russians and the Ukrainians are a proud people. And I think they're in a fight to the death. And I think that both countries, okay, regardless as existential, and we have basically stuck ourselves in the middle of this fight to the death between these two countries. and I don't see this working out very well. Okay, so look, I will make an admission. I consider myself a modestly well-read person, modestly well informed. I had never heard of the Wagner group or pregozion prior to this coup attempt last week. Chimau, J. Cal had you guys

Starting point is 00:11:42 heard of this person before and the Wagner group? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, maybe I'm an idiot or that's just not interested. I think what was so surprising was like how out of the blue the story seemed to be last week that there was this disagreement between this person that commanded this paramilitary organization who then turned around against Putin and stood up against him and marched back towards Moscow. And it felt to me like it came a little bit out of the blue and was such like a weird kind of shocking event. Did it feel kind of like that to you guys that there was surprising instability and the

Starting point is 00:12:17 surprising potential revolution happening locally? I think stepping back here and just looking at the new cycle. Obviously, I don't think many people expected this. This is a wild card. And so people could be humble in, you know, their belief of like how much they actually understand about what's going on there. The Russian soldiers are not in favor of this war.

Starting point is 00:12:38 This is a war that's very unpopular in Russia actually. And for the Ukraine, having been invaded by Russia, they're fighting for their land and they're going to, they are much more motivated. I wouldn't believe any of this propaganda, but this is a bit of a Russia contest. Everybody on the left got on Twitter and said, this is the end of Putin. Everybody's going to rise up in the streets and they overplayed that angle of the story. And then, of course, the right or people who are pro-Russian or anti-the-West backing this war are going to take the other side, pre-Berg. They're going to take the side of, you know, oh, everybody loves Russia.

Starting point is 00:13:10 80% of people are voting for this. It's ridiculous to think that anybody in Russia is going to answer. Do you like Putin? Do you support Putin on a survey? Can you imagine Putin is a murderous dictator who kills all of his enemies and he controls through violence? Nobody's answering a survey correctly. This you know top song is complete propaganda Putin has control of the entire media apparatus there What this showed actually if you step back and you look at go to the party though if you were invited. Well, I mean are there gonna be potential LPs there?

Starting point is 00:13:42 last week potential LPs there. Last week, but I insisted joke folks, but stepping back, if you look at modern day dictators, they tend to stay in power for about three decades. Putin's in his third. And I think we're going to see in the next 10 years, Putin lose power and he's going to be out of power.

Starting point is 00:14:06 And when we look back on it, it's going to be one of two causes. It's going to be either cancer, which, you know, the speculation is that cancer and that's why he disappears from view because he might be getting treatment. And we'll look back on us that the end of his power will be his control of Russia, which he controlling these, controlling through violence and fear of violence and threat of violence is exhausting. You have to be paranoid, and that's why it generally doesn't last that long, especially compared to the West, where we have a democracy

Starting point is 00:14:34 and people last about a half decade. He will look back on his end, which will be in the next 10 years, either through cancer or through his invasion of Ukraine. This is the biggest blender he's ever made. And this is a really crazy sign that somebody would actually attempt or even float a coup is insane.

Starting point is 00:14:56 He's murdered every single person who has ever even challenged his authority in a minor way. The fact that his, one of his right-hand men, this is one of his tight inner circle. The fact that one of the people in his tight inner circle would actually start heading towards Moscow is insane. So to say this wasn't a big deal and Putin's now consolidated power

Starting point is 00:15:20 and everybody's in the street dancing, that's just not true. It's just simply not true. I never said it wasn't a big deal. I wasn't talking about you. I was talking about the mids on Twitter. I never mentioned your name. I think that your point, J. Cal, at the beginning, that this doesn't really seem to change

Starting point is 00:15:37 anyone's point of view on the outlook. Your point of view sounds like it's the same as it was a week ago. Sack, your point of view is probably the same as it was a week ago. I think there are a couple of takeaways here. First of all, they've had polling of opinion in Russia for a long time. And like I said, when the polls go the way that the Western sources want, no one questions their accuracy. Again, I don't know exactly the methodology,

Starting point is 00:16:00 but LaVada Center is an independent pollster that Western publications do trust. I hear them repeat it over and over again. And by their methodology, which I assume hasn't changed, I think Putin's popularity before the war is around 65%, now they're showing it at about 83%. Jason, you may not like the war. And I certainly don't like the war, but nobody likes the war. But I think it is simply a fact that the Russian people have rallied around the flag and they do support

Starting point is 00:16:30 this war and and poohen as the leader now i do think he has agonist face here from this progozion uprising in terms of did did i see this coming no i didn't have this on my bingo card i don't think anybody else did either however did i know progozion is certainly However, did I know who progozion is? Certainly. I mean, I've been tracking progozion statements since around February. He's been vocally criticizing the Ministry of Defense, specifically Shorgu and Jarrasmoth,

Starting point is 00:16:54 and increasingly insubordinate, and you could argue even seditious ways. I'm really kind of surprised in a way that he wasn't dealt with before this. And I'm sure that the Kremlin is kicking itself for probably not dealing with it sooner. But in terms of why he's still alive, I think that Putin had a really tough decision to make

Starting point is 00:17:13 about you quash this rebellion completely, which would have led to horrific images of violence, potentially a Moscow war. Russian killing Russians. Russians killing Russians. That might have actually led the Russian front to question itself or collapse. So I think he did the expedient thing, which is he cut a deal. He got Lukashenko to help broker and he cut a deal.

Starting point is 00:17:35 And I think at the end of the day, I think that he made the cool headed decision that was in his and in Russian interest, which was to avoid this to getting to the point of a bloody violent insurrection. Okay. Chimoff, any point of view, shift for you coming out of the pregoation event of the last week on Russia, Ukraine? I mean, I want to know how much he got paid to stop marching towards Moscow. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:03 I mean, it is like a mob us, right? It must have been a lot. Not bad for a guy that was what Putin's caterer a few years ago, right? He started a catering business. He's been a nine years in jail. This guy's like, he's been nine years in jail. It's like the soprano.

Starting point is 00:18:19 He went to jail for nine years for selling illegal hot dogs or something. And all of a sudden, 30 years later, the guy got just paid billions of dollars to basically stop his paramilitary group from taking over one of the largest countries in the world. It's not largest. Nuclear arsenal in the world, yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:33 It's so exciting. Well, just so you know who this guy is, I mean, he really is the street thug that Putin has always accused of being. He was a street thug, he did go to jail. He was one of these guys who came up in Russia as a businessman when to be a businessman, you had to be so tough. Businessmen were getting murdered left and right by gangsters. You almost had to be a

Starting point is 00:18:55 gangster yourself. Apparently, he made some money in the supermarket chain business. And that led him to create a catering business, which brought him to Putin's attention. And he started catering for the Kremlin. He's sometimes called Putin's chef. I don't think he was a chef himself. He was a guy who owned the business. And then from there, he was given the license to create this PMC, this private military corporation, Wagner Group. He wasn't the only founder of it. He had a co-founder who was actually the military man behind it. But Wagner became this group of mercenaries who do all sorts of business in Africa mainly, where they are working on behalf of governments there to protect mental resources or oil

Starting point is 00:19:38 wells, sorts of things. That's a surprise. He was a soprano's captain who would he be like, Filio Tardo, does like 20 years in jail, comes out. I think it's sort of like John Gotti going against Michael Corleone. Yeah. I think that Putin is sort of the very cold, rational guy with everything in his head who's very calculated and doesn't reveal much. More like a Michael Corleone, whereas I think that... He's a emotional erratic. He's been saying these statements for months here, which I don't see how they lose canonly. Lose canon.

Starting point is 00:20:07 And the crazy thing though is that what you saw on Twitter and social media was unrestrained glee, really delirium, over the idea that pergusion might topple Putin and become the custodian of Russia's thousands of nuclear weapons. And so my comment on this whole thing is, be careful what you wish for. Why in the world would Americans want that? We'd be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

Starting point is 00:20:33 You know, I've been saying since the beginning of the war that this fantasy that Putin's going to be toppled by a palace coup and you're going to replace him with an evolving or something like that, we're going to get Gorbachev 2.0. I said that was always unrealistic and what you're much more likely to end up with is an even worse dictator or a hardliner. And I think that is what would happen if it was going to take it over. I think it would have been much worse for the West.

Starting point is 00:20:55 The final point is, what's the takeaway from here? Is I think this is going to put more pressure on Putin to conduct the war in a more violent way. I know that people already think that the war is horrible and violent, but Putin has been criticized by hardliners on his right for basically making the war a special military operation instead of an all-out war. Progozion I think expected to find more support among the sort of ultra-nationalist in Russia and among the military who have been critical of

Starting point is 00:21:25 Putin for waging the war in what they consider to be to have how hard it or an incomplete way they would like to see this declared to be a war they would like to see the full mobilization of russian society and this is the problem that i see now is that i think put an already new but this has to underscore for him that this war is existential for him personally. If he loses at the end of not only his regime, but probably his life in Russia and I think he's going to do whatever it takes to win this war and I think you could see now over the next few months a full mobilization in Russia and I think that this could lead us to the next point of escalation in this war.

Starting point is 00:22:01 That is if this Ukrainian counteroffensive actually is successful on some level. Right now it is not succeeding, so there's no reason for Putin to do that. But if this counteroffensive succeeds, you will see the next level of escalation. So, Saks, you did a great job stringing six points together. I think my key takeaway is, which is now 18 points you've made, so you can retire for the rest of the show. My key takeaway from your series of statements, However, it's an important one, which is to watch the potential escalation driven by Putin here. Any wrap up, otherwise, I'm going to move forward with this. There's a famous Sun Zoo quote, the Supreme Order of War is to subdue the enemy without fighting. This is a big mistake, and we need to make sure that we don't get into a war with Taiwan

Starting point is 00:22:49 and China and China over Taiwan. So we have to avoid these things. And that's what's next. And I are in alignment. So into Calakinas, we heard it here first. Let's move forward with peace. I can only hope that the conflict and soon, as I've always said, I realized over the last week how little I know about the Russian military conflict with Ukraine, and I

Starting point is 00:23:10 appreciate Saks's contributions super helpful. I went to Cal, UC Berkeley, 1997, Fall 1997, and it was the last year that Cal had affirmative action admissions. And I remember at that time, there was a big case that a guy named Bockey was rejected by the University of California Davis Medical School. And he alleged reverse discrimination in 1974 and sued the University of California. And eventually it became a landmark US Supreme Court case, regents of the University of California, versus Bockey. And in 1995, the UC regents voted to eliminate affirmative action. So the year that I was at Cal, I think was the last year of affirmative action, admissions,

Starting point is 00:23:55 and it's obviously been a pretty hot topic here in California for the past,, 30 years, this morning the Supreme Court ruled on two separate cases regarding using race as an admissions criteria in college admissions. And the votes were 6-3 against affirmative action in the University of North Carolina case and 6-2 against affirmative action in the Harvard case. Katangi Brown Jackson recused herself because she previously served on Harvard's board of overseers. All the conservative as they're kind of characterized judges voted to strike down affirmative action and all the as they're characterized liberal judges voted to keep it.

Starting point is 00:24:38 Both of these cases were filed in 2014 by a group called Students for Fair Admissions. And effectively, the court said that at Harvard, at UNC, the schools were systematically discriminating against Asian-Americans and violation of civil rights laws by using their race as a system for profiling, excluding, and trying to be more inclusive of a more diverse, and racially diverse set of applicants. So, Timoth, I'd love your read, I guess,

Starting point is 00:25:08 on the surprise, or this was an expected case. I think Sachsen, I mentioned this before, but I think we both expected this to happen. I think it's probably important to maybe set up a more practical explainer. Friedberg, so Nick, if you want to just throw up that image that I just sent you, we can sort of explain the genesis of the lawsuit. So what you can see here is admit rates into Harvard by race, ethnicity,

Starting point is 00:25:44 but also by academic decile. And so what it basically shows in a nutshell is an African American student in the 40th percentile of the academic index is actually more likely to get in than an Asian student at the 100th percentile. And so that at the core is sort of what was being, that means that the Asian American student had better scores than 99% of other applicants and still didn't get in.

Starting point is 00:26:15 Right. So you have to go back, I think, to 2003, when essentially what the Supreme Court said is like, look, we're going to allow this affirmative action stuff to last, roughly for another 25 years. But by that point, we expect that the work that needed to be done will have been done. Again, this is them saying this not me. And so I think what today does is actually quite important, not just for what it means for universities, but also what it means for private enterprises.

Starting point is 00:26:52 So just to take a second on this, I think what happens today is the pretty obvious stuff, which is that you have to change university applications, you have to change all of the admissions profiling, all of the admissions profiling, all of the stuff that you would normally do. You probably, I'm not even sure if you can even have a box where you can declare race, maybe you cannot, I don't even know. But all of that changes today. So then the question is, well, what's the first order derivative?

Starting point is 00:27:19 What changes next? And I called someone who's a pretty well-known constitutional Supreme Court lawyer on this. And the next step is probably going to be around athletics-based and legacy-based admissions. So athletics-based admissions are pretty obvious, which is you don't really have great grades, but you're really stupendous at a sport that's important to that school. So then they let you in because they want to compete in said sport for whatever reason. The legacy one is even more prickly, which is, nah, you're kind of a dummy, but your parents are rich and or went to the school before. And so then they let you in as well. And his thought on this is that those things will go away. Because if you can't

Starting point is 00:28:09 use race-based admissions to kind of balance the scales, then it'll become pretty quick where somebody launches a legacy-based lawsuit or an athletic-based bias lawsuit and wins that as well. So that's the first order derivative. So, you know, the thought, are those, because those are constitutionally protected, whereas equality based on race, but it becomes a huge headache for these schools, right? And so you're gonna be fighting these admission standards

Starting point is 00:28:41 constantly changing. And so if you're not going to let, you know, a bunch of poor minority black and brown kids in, but you're letting in the sons and daughters of rich, important people, I think that that's going to paint that school in a very bad light. So I think that's important. So Shama white, typically white. Typically white. Like the one would say, the great thing over the last couple of decades is there have been a lot of minorities that have gotten into these very elite schools, which means this, their kids would be the first generation that's eligible for legacy, but you're going to

Starting point is 00:29:15 wipe that away. So I think from just a social stigma perspective, and I have a solution for this, which I'll get to at the end for those people. But so I think that's the first order derivative. The second order derivative is now what lawsuits get launched and what are the implications for private companies, right? So right now, this affects any institution that receives federal funding, and that includes all the universities.

Starting point is 00:29:38 So there's no private or public university really except for a handful that don't take this money. So they'll all have to do this. But the really important question after that will be what happens to companies like Apple or Facebook or Exxon who have race-based programs to try to attract African-American engineers or Hispanic chemists.

Starting point is 00:30:01 Whatever the program is that you wanna come up with, will those get challenged and will those companies have to change? My friends thoughts on that were that yes, that those would also change. That's going to have a really important impact on private enterprise and how they approach this stuff and how DEI stuff works. Frankly, downstream, how ESG works because all these ESG checkboxes now some of them will actually become illegal, right? So I think the importance of decision can't be really understated. It's going to the changes will be slow and then they'll be fast, they'll first touch higher ed, but then I think they'll touch private enterprise and so I think it was a

Starting point is 00:30:41 there's a very important decision in America that just happened. Jamal, what is the right ethics and values? What do you guys, I guess we could just do this around the table, J-Cowd, maybe you kick it off? Should we, from your point of view, do you think that values should include

Starting point is 00:31:03 racial diversity in admissions and universities. Yeah, this is like the ultimate. Or is the values about equality of opportunity for everyone regardless of race, right? You're asking the exact right question, I think. That's because I'm the world's greatest moderator. But yeah, go ahead.

Starting point is 00:31:19 Doing a solid job so far. And this creates a lot of cognitive dissonance for people, right? Because you really want to believe that the world is a meritocracy. And, you know, if you were to take other pursuits in the world, you'd never say like we should let race, gender, age affect people's performance in the 100-yard dash or their compensation at a company, right? All of that should be based on achievement.

Starting point is 00:31:46 And so there is a question on what achievements should be taken into account when you apply to a school. And it's pretty obvious, the legacy thing, you know, is, you know, a back door into these schools. But we want to feel like we're also making progress because listen, the world has been unfair. The world was built on slavery and our country has, you know, it's only 150 years past that and so a rights act was what, 1964 or 65?

Starting point is 00:32:17 Like we really want to see everybody achieve here. So I think you have to pause for a second and say, well, if the goal is you want to see you know black Americans perform better and I think that's the underlying concern here and it is based on the legacy of America. Well, how do you do that? And I think we're looking way too far down in the educational pipeline. The solution here is really child care. The solution here is really childcare. The solution

Starting point is 00:32:45 here is nursery schools, pre-K, elementary school education, and those things need competition, and that's where people fall behind. To be looking at this at the end of the academic journey is, I think, crazy. So, you know, when I'm president, I'm going to have 365 day a year, you know, childcare and pre-K, and that's where we should, if we really want to try to make up for some wrongs in the history of this country and try to have better outcomes, we need competition in schools, which means probably breaking some of these unions and giving people vouchers and choice. And then we have to invest more in the earliest stages of education. And I think everybody wants to see a better system here.

Starting point is 00:33:27 DEI to Chimotspoint is, it is illegal to hire people based on race gender, any of those criteria, obviously. And the DEI programs are trying to fill more applicants. So their goal, typically, in the way they don't break the law, is to just try to, in their best cases, find more applicants. But even that does feel like there's many times in life when people will say things in corporate America, like we have too many white guys in these positions. We need, we cannot hire another white guy. So the reality of DEII that I've seen up close and personal when I was at AOL, I've told the story before.

Starting point is 00:34:10 Somebody said to me, there's no way for us to make you an EVP. You have to stay at SVP and I said, why is that? Like, I'm doing all this EVP level work and they said, you're a white guy. And the entire company is white guys at EVP and we cannot add another white guy there, but we'll just give you the same bonus compensation so don't worry about it. And so there's all kinds of games being played here, but I think it's great that we're having this conversation, right?

Starting point is 00:34:32 It's a hard conversation for America to have. I think for me, I've talked about this in the past. I've always had concern when we make the shift away from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome. Because we all have this objective that we want to see everyone have equal rights to success in some way in the United States. The question is at what point do you move beyond opportunity where everyone is given an equal opportunity in this country to invest themselves in transforming their own lives versus a quality of outcome where regardless of how much you do, how much effort or your trials, you are given the same as everyone else. And that ends up looking a lot like socialism.

Starting point is 00:35:22 And it's very concerning because I think it limits progress and opportunity for everyone. The real challenge with this particular topic is college admissions about outcome or is it about opportunity. It's outcome in the sense that you spend 12 years going to elementary school and high school and working hard to get yourself into college. and working hard to get yourself into college. So it's the outcome of all of that effort, and some people aren't given the opportunity to have success during those 12 years. And it is an outcome. What do you think we should do? And it's an opportunity because it's about going to college, because without having a great college cycle, you may have a more tougher time getting into the workforce. So that is why it's a hard value question for me. I I don't have a great answer on this, but I'm just pointing out it's it's a lot like the abortion

Starting point is 00:36:09 argument where both sides have some value oriented point of view that feels like it's negating the other person's point of view. But at the end of the day, they're they're both coming from either this is an opportunity or it's an outcome decision, and that's what makes it so challenging. The National Bureau of Economic Research did a study in 2019 that they published, and what they found was that 43%, so 43% of white students admitted to Harvard were athletes or legacy students or children of faculty and staff or had a relative that were donors to the school. 43%. Wait, it's rigged. And then they found on top of that that 75% of those white students admitted from those four categories would have been rejected if they had been treated as a normal applicant. So I think for all the people that are looking at all the black and brown kids that may not get into a

Starting point is 00:37:08 place like Harvard, if you don't look at these other categories, it's a bit of a gross injustice quite honestly. So I think that these institutions have to evolve. And if you're going to be forced to be meritocratic, then actually be meritocratic. And by the way, I actually am fine with legacies and donors, but I think what should happen is you should just publish a rate card and you should make it hyper transparent. And so I love it. For the rich guy who's got an idiot son or daughter, let's just be upfront and honest with everybody. It costs $50 million to get into Stanford.

Starting point is 00:37:42 It costs $80 million to get into Harvard. We all know these numbers. so we should just publish them. You should pay the price and be done with it. And for Harvard and Stanford and Yale and all these schools, having an extra 10 or 20 dummies, but an extra 2 or 3 billion may be a reasonable trade off, but at least it would be transparent and fair. Right. This is an important free market question as well, because these are private institutions.

Starting point is 00:38:04 They're privately funded. Not if they take federal dollars or not. Agreed. Yes, but if they take federal dollars, they're not. And then it becomes a government processing. It's government influence. It's a state school. All those, is there a separate category here, just like country clubs or any private membership club where the members of the club get to decide who they want to admit to the club? And is that they want to admit to the club. And is that un-American and should the Supreme Court and should our Constitution have a role in defining how private institutions make decisions about who gets it? No, Harvard could absolutely return all the federal funding, the billions of dollars a year they get. That's totally reasonable. They can decide to just focus on legacy admits.

Starting point is 00:38:43 That's totally reasonable. It's what's in their rights. to just focus on legacy admits. That's totally reasonable. It's what's in their rights. Sacks, right? We got to hear. I know that I know that you used up your quote, your speaking quote already. Well, yeah, I didn't want to, I didn't want to butt in. I'm going to give him four of my points. I want to hear. I just want to get four of J. Caldsman. Let's go ahead. I give you four minutes. Okay. So yeah, two points, I guess. So on the legacy thing, I agree with Jamal that we should get rid of it. It's not meritocratic. I think that if they did publish a rate card that would be more honest, but there'd be two embarrassed and ashamed to do that. But I think making that argument exposes the hypocrisy of it, I've already told my kids I'm not helping them get into college.

Starting point is 00:39:18 So they're gonna have to do it on their own. And so look, I think the legacy thing is the best thing. By the way, that's the best if you can give kids that perspective. Sorry, go ahead, sex. I mean, so that's that's that's point number one. Hopefully agreed think the legacy thing. By the way, that's the best if you can give kids. Yeah. That perspective, sorry, go ahead, sex, I didn't mean it wrong. So that's my number one, fully agreed on the legacy thing. With respect to the decision itself, the, can I just clarify that? Do you believe that the legacy thing should be like, in federal law? I mean, is that a government thing?

Starting point is 00:39:39 Or do you think that that's how those institutions should behave? Because those are different. I mean, I'm asking, are you suggesting that the law should be involved, that the government should be involved? I don't know if it's illegal thing, because I don't know how to implement that law, but I think it's something they should stop doing one way or another. Maybe it should be a law, but I think it should stop.

Starting point is 00:39:55 So I think that's point one. Well, I can see things. For private membership. For private membership. So just, let me just double click on that. Do you think that should extend to private membership clubs, like country clubs as well, that they shouldn't be allowed to decide who they let in and don't let in? What makes it different that it's Harvard?

Starting point is 00:40:09 Is it because it's education versus any other private membership? No, because it takes federal funding. It takes tax credit. Okay, well, as you may know, I should not pay for some person to be able to get into a school they don't deserve to get into just because their parent went there or just because their parent wrote a check. That's unreasonable. And if they don't deserve to get into just because their parent went there or just because their parent wrote a check that's unreasonable. And if they don't take federal funding?

Starting point is 00:40:29 These schools take so much federal funding that they're quasi-public institutions, even the private ones. So that's the distinction, that's the distinction for you just to be clear. Yeah, and also there is a strong meritocracy opportunity argument on this. And I think it's why that whole parents college admission scandal was such a big deal is that for a lot of people in this country, the ability to have your kids advance themselves by being the first to get into college or going to college or going to a better college. That is a big part of creating opportunity in this country.

Starting point is 00:41:02 So for people to try and defraud that, I think created a huge backlash. So look, I think that the legacy thing just needs to end one way or another. I don't know exactly what the right legal implementation is. I have two questions for the panel. Number one, should you be able to say by geography, hey, listen, we're Harvard, we're Stanford, we want to have a representation of people from around the world. So we're going to have the top three students from each country, or a bi-population, however you do it, mathematically coming. So a little bit of geography, because I did hear from one of these coaches that cost like six figures to get your kids into the college.

Starting point is 00:41:42 They said the best thing you can do is like move to Kentucky. You know, and then Harvard and Stanford are looking to get a certain number of students from each state. I don't know how true that is, but they said that's like one of the top ways to do it. And then... Well, do you remember Jason just to build on your point? I don't know if you guys remember, but a few years ago,

Starting point is 00:41:59 the in fashion thing to do was to learn to play squash. And I remember all these parents telling me that and They had kids that were older than my kids and they were they were hiring full-time squash coaches Because apparently squash was like yes, so English shots. Yeah, I think like stop with the angle shooting guys Yes, the gun should go off you should run the the race, and your time is your time, and you should go to whatever the best school is that you deserve to get into based on your academic ability. Now, going back, the big problem, and I think Jason, you really nailed it on the head, trying to fix it with affirmative action at the university is still quite unfair in the sense

Starting point is 00:42:42 that there are so many black and brown kids, I think, with tons of potential that don't even get there. And so the real question is, what are you doing at the grade school and at the high school and at the pre-school so that you actually get more of these kids to the starting line? Because fixing it when they're 18, I think, is a little too late, right? Fixing it for three, four, and five years old, that's when they deserve and need all the help in the world. Two years old. That's why we need school choice.

Starting point is 00:43:10 We need charter schools. We need to break them monopoly that the unions have over the schools running it, running it for their own benefit. And off of the kids. If you define institutional racism as conditions that trap people and conditions of poverty across generations, I'd say the abysmal quality of our public schools are number one. Number one, two and three. And the reason

Starting point is 00:43:30 is because there's no competition in the unions run it for their own benefit. They have one. Do they shut down these schools for in California? Because they didn't want to work as they were afraid of. Don't know. Don't see the sea where we just got a label. God. Beep it out. We're going to out. That was not for the benefit of kids and it wasn't even medically necessary. That was a benefit they saw from themselves. Yeah. Jake, you come from a family that were members of unions

Starting point is 00:43:54 because they worked for fire, for police. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. We speak negatively about the effects of the teacher's unions on our public education system and I think it's absolutely correct. But how do you share the point of view from the other side? If you're a teacher and you're a member

Starting point is 00:44:13 of the union and the union takes care of you, what's the argument? Yeah, sure. To say this union is damaging public education and the teacher that's working in the union and the member of the union says, this is necessary for my livelihood to protect me for my benefit. Help us here at the point of view because we all have the strongly help point of view that the unions are destroying and eroding public education. But what do you have there? People have the right to form unions. But what we all do is we are forced to be consumers of one educational product because of how we pay taxes. We pay taxes in. I think in my, in California, we each pay $16,000 into the educational system. And so if you're a parent, you should get that 16k back and be able to choose what you do with it.

Starting point is 00:44:58 So there's competition. So the unions can have protection, but there still should be competition for these services. And I think there are two separate issues. unions can have protection, but there still should be competition for these services. And I think there are two separate issues. Yeah. There's one other thing, which is I just want to give a shout out to a nonprofit that I support called Smash Academy, Smash.org. It's done by Mitch and Freda Kapoor. The Mitch Kapoor founded Lotus 123.

Starting point is 00:45:23 If you're under the age of 40 you may not know them. And what they do is they realize that a lot of the students who do get into good colleges, it turns out a lot of the black and brown students they get accepted and they're behind in math. And so what Smash has done is they have a three year program and I go speak at it sometimes and I donate money to it. And I encourage you to do the same. They have this intensive summer program. So before you go to college, Jamoth, if you were one of those students, you know, you might get into college and then they drop out or even worse, they switch from a STEM to a non-STEM degree because they're two years behind on STEM or a year behind on STEM.

Starting point is 00:46:03 And so the Kapoorur is found this little opportunity to kind of catch people up. And I think that's what we have to do. We have to address this much earlier and not put a bandaid on it. Yeah, and the system, the Ivy League system needs to be- Well, not just Ivy's, right?

Starting point is 00:46:20 Well, sure, sure. Not just pick on Harvard, but it's like, it's like all the state schools. It's like the elite institutions, which we talk about. All institutions, all institutions that receive federal funding. They need to take a deep look in the mirror and say, are we doing the best thing for society? The second question I had for the panel was, well, I'm not getting a view of academics. Point of view, by the way, but yeah, but our pure academics, the best way to accept people into a

Starting point is 00:46:40 college, or should there be some blend of it, like putting sports aside, because that's an obvious one. But you know, is there's academics, but then there's also creativity. You know, if you, you might be terrible on your SATs or status test and you might be an incredible virtual or so pianist. So I think what is the criteria and making that criteria fair is what we all want. And it feels tremendously unfair. My point of view is if the government is funding these schools, then the government certainly has to have a point of view on what's the reasonable model for admissions. The government's not funding the schools. I love a diversity in a marketplace. I love having different schools, having different admissions criteria that allow different

Starting point is 00:47:23 people to find their path through different institutions. To your point, Juilliard does not care perhaps as much what you did on your SAT and chemistry. And art schools do not care as much how well you did in math. And STEM schools don't care whether or not you want an our competition. And I think that that's the important thing that we need to preserve.

Starting point is 00:47:49 We need to preserve optionality for institutions to define what sorts of individuals they want to try and recruit and progress and frame and get ready for the workforce and the path in life that they then choose versus trying to create a cookie cutter model for what the government says it's fair for everyone. And as much as we can take government funding out of these institutions and out of these systems and give them the freedom to set their own admissions criteria

Starting point is 00:48:15 and create differential educational systems, I think that's gonna create the best diversity of a workforce. And I would kind of be more excited about that sort of an institutional system than one that is standardized by the government. You know why that will never happen? Because the profit motive of these universities is really to be shadow organizations for their endowments. And the thing with endowments is that the people that work there very much want to get paid and behave like

Starting point is 00:48:48 profit generating organizations and I think The issue is that if their sole job was to really fund the Operational expenses of the university then the endowments would be run very differently. Like, again, I just looked up on the internet, but Harvard has about the operating expenses are roughly $5.5 billion a year, but the revenues are about $5.5 billion a year. So, if instead you had to basically fund, there was essentially no revenue per se. There was very little tuition, and you didn't take any federal funding. You'd have to come up with $5 billion a year, so you just basically take that as a draw

Starting point is 00:49:32 from your endowment. The endowment would be run very differently. It would be a don't lose money endowment that would generate very low-volve returns. I think the problem with that is that that's not how the endowment at Harvard works. They wouldn't necessarily make risk seeking investments in things like private equity and hedge funds adventure capital into the extent they did. They would just make much much fewer or much much smaller or both. So I think what you're saying could be possible, but the problem are probably the endowments at these universities. Okay, we'll look at three billion dollars by Harvard's endowment now. So yeah, it would be 10%.

Starting point is 00:50:10 Can anyone tell me who the largest real estate owner is in San Francisco? You see the king on the internet. Oh, no, I know, I know it's that our institute. The Academy of Art University. I knew this because they kept buying things and using them, I think she used all the profit over the years to buy more real estate And she accumulated the largest real estate portfolio Who is she the founder? I forgot her name This is a for-profit university or private or I mean a non-profit university Yeah, there's a lot of artists that come out of Academy Art and they work in a lot of different industries including industrial design

Starting point is 00:50:45 Including animation Actually, what I'm saying is it like RISD or is it like actually in art school? Oh, no, it's a great art school. Yeah Academy of Art Anyway, let's keep going. So look speaking of STEM making a big pivot away from art To AI couple big news items, you know, the AI friends he continues here in Silicon Valley, all the way from early to growth stage funding through to M&A events. We saw this week, Databricks, which is a privately held data infrastructure company announced that they were acquiring Mosaic ML for $1.3 billion that headline number is based

Starting point is 00:51:27 on a cash and stock purchase price, where the value of the stock that was being used to acquire Mosaic ML was based off of the last round valuation for Databricks, which was $38 billion from a fundraising that they did in 2021. So arguably the valuation should be lower and the overall purchase price could be considered lower. But that's besides the point.

Starting point is 00:51:48 Mosaic ML, as you guys may remember, is a company I mentioned a number of episodes ago led by the founder of Nirvana, which was an early AI business that was acquired by Intel. And then he started Mosaic ML. He offers open source models and I shared the performance data of their most recent announcement on the show a few weeks ago.

Starting point is 00:52:12 There's rumors. I don't have any confirmed reports, but there's rumors that Mosaic ML saw their ARR grow from $1 million to $20 million since January. There was other rumors that said they were only at $6 million of revenue. Regardless, Datab rumors that said they were only at six million of revenue. Regardless, Databricks is paying a pretty hefty premium. And I think it begs the question,

Starting point is 00:52:31 what do data infrastructure, database companies end up looking like in the future, if AI has to become part of the core infrastructure of every enterprise, and this is creating a big shift. So, SACs as our enterprise software investor expert, maybe you can share with us what this means for the sector. Does this buoy excitement for AI infrastructure startups? Does this change the investing landscape? Is it just reinforcing what folks are already doing? I think it's a reinforcement. I mean, the space is probably the hottest space where you're talking about like AI

Starting point is 00:53:06 infrastructure for enterprises. I think it's probably the hottest space right now in venture land. We actually looked at this deal. We had a small allocation there next round. They had a term sheet for a series B. Emergence was actually going to lead it and this is mosaic ML. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if it's just me telling you all this, but.

Starting point is 00:53:27 Oh, you know, I've done that. Oh, Brad, yeah, go ahead, Brad. Yeah, Brad, that's what I'm talking about. This is great. This is why people say it in. Breaking news. Breaking news. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:53:35 That a term sheet from Emergence to raise 50 million at 400 posts. Wow. And yeah, and we were going to have a small allocation in that. And as I recall, the valuation was somewhere around 30 to 35 times ARR, which actually is not that insane for a very fast-growing company in a hot space. So that implies about 10 million of ARR. I don't remember the exact figure, but I think that's sort of the ballpark, but growing very, very quickly. I mean, up from like one or two at the beginning of the year.

Starting point is 00:54:04 Right. very, very quickly. I mean, up from like one or two at the beginning of the year. Right. So I actually understand why someone would want to acquire or invest in this company, like I said, I think we wanted to invest. And while we were sort of, you know, trying our best again, you didn't say anything when I talked about them on the show a few weeks ago. You were just sitting there, mom's a word or... Actually, I knew that this deal was was basically in the works because the founder called us up and he had already promised us a small allocation around. Neveendit and he called up and said actually I've got this deal so we're putting the round on hold and so I didn't think I should say

Starting point is 00:54:37 anything because obviously it was still ongoing but yeah we knew about this deal that was kind of coming down the pipe I didn't know for sure that it would happen but but yeah we heard it was in the ballpark of this like 1.2 and 1.3 billion dollar number, which like you said, because Databricks is a private stock. Maybe it's only half of that or 750 or something like that, who knows. It's still a great deal, but you know, a lot of people are saying it's a crazy deal. I don't think it's a crazy deal because before this happened, after Navin signed the term sheet for the Series B,

Starting point is 00:55:08 an investor came over the top to invest at a $700 million valuation. So people were kind of going crazy. Now, I don't think that's necessarily a rational behavior. I think that's more of evidence of a maniac going on, but I think that what he got offered is obviously a fantastic deal.

Starting point is 00:55:24 And I think what it's evidence of is that these big enterprise-infra-accompanies are going to try and build an end-to-end toolchain here. And I think Mosaic ML had a very, very important part of the toolset, which is training up these models. Basically maximizing GPU efficiency, because GPUs are basically the scarce item right now. We have a GPU shortage and it's probably not going to get better for a year or two if that.

Starting point is 00:55:52 So, this is a very important part of the stack and I think it's probably a smart acquisition for both data breaks. Yeah, it needs to be, I mean, remember snowflake which compete with data breaks also acquired Niva, which was founded by one of my colleagues, a guy I work with, and a new really great guy, sweetheart, for $150 million last month, that deal was announced. And the pattern recognition that seems to emerge here is that if you're in the data infrastructure business, it seems like it's becoming critical to level up. That it's not just about storing and moving and manipulating data, but the interpretation of data through models and the tooling to build those models becomes a critical component of all of these toolkits that these software companies have to provide to their enterprise software companies.

Starting point is 00:56:39 It's a big leveling up that's necessary, which seems to me there's other companies out there like them that are also going to need to strap on tools like this to make themselves competitive in this market scape, which means that there are more acquisitions still to come. Yeah. Jamal, Jay, Cal, you guys agree or have a different point of view. Yeah, I'm looking at it. It's a big number, the headline number, but I agree with SACs, the actual numbers half the number. So if you look at the number of engineers they had, based on LinkedIn data and pitch book data, probably 60, 70 employees, 80 employees,

Starting point is 00:57:13 and then 40, 50 of them are engineers. So that puts it at $30 million per engineer. And that's one way to look at these acquisitions. And I think probably three to 1010 million per engineer for like really high-end engineers is more of a going price. But if this is half that amount because they bought it with monopoly money, in other words, their 2021 price for their company, it's great. And then they get nailed at freeberg. What's happening is this layer of natural language on top of any service, whether it's something as simple as Yelp or something as complicated as a giant financial company with tons of

Starting point is 00:57:54 transaction data, being able to talk to it and understand it and then have your machine learning team build tools. So business owners don't have to hire a data scientist. The actual business leaders can talk to the data and get back answers or just say, hey, tell me about our customers. How have they changed over the year? And then, hey, that's pretty interesting.

Starting point is 00:58:16 Tell me more about our customers. And how are they reacting to these three new products? And you will get back intelligence that previously was unable to be accessed. And so I was just at Sequoia yesterday with, or two days ago, with the latest seven graduates from our accelerator, we bring them to meet with SACs and his team, we bring them to meet with Sequoia.

Starting point is 00:58:43 And when we were at Sequoia, I realized that of the seven companies, four of them would not have been possible before these machine learning APIs were available. And OpenAI is but one, there are now in the companies I'm talking to, they're trialing freeberg on average, six, seven, eight language models before they pick one and they're not picking OpenAI every time. Putting that aside, these businesses were not possible before this technology was introduced and available via API in the last six to 12 months. And I think there's a bunch of businesses that economically would not work, that now work. I can give one example. There are countless meetings that are recorded over Zoom, right? Think like

Starting point is 00:59:28 a local school board meeting. Well, nobody could ever make a database of all the discussions going on at local school boards and then analyze all of them. But now, because all of those are saved on Zoom and they occur on Zoom and they're available for public record, you can ingest every single one of those and then build a Bloomberg terminal of every discussion happening at every school board, everywhere in the United States. And do that with chat GPT or any of the language models and then get really great insights from it. That would be too costly to transcribe at, you know, $100 every hour or two and normalize, let alone to analyze.

Starting point is 01:00:07 And so I'm looking at businesses as an investor, what I'm looking at right now is businesses that were previously not economically viable before this technology. And then that are now economically viable. If that makes sense, and I'm just looking at each company under that lens right now, and I'm finding a lot of interesting startups, and they seem to have that in common. Timoth, similar, news supporting this very quick evolution further up the value stack. So we were just talking about these companies that are providing effectively tooling as infrastructure. A little bit more up the value stack is inflection AI, which was started by Mustafa Saliemann and Reid Hoffman, who was a co-founder while Mustafa was working

Starting point is 01:00:52 with him as a venture partner at Greylock. But Mustafa, as you guys know, was the co-founder of DeepMind, which Google bought for $400 million, really created the core of Google's AI capability and is considered one of the kind of preeminent thought leaders and entrepreneurs that has built in this space. He started in flexion and the business just announced today that they've just closed a $1.3 billion funding round led by Microsoft, Reed Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, in video with an intention of building the largest AI cluster in the world, 22,000 in video H100s as part of the buildout. But I think you've shared Schmoth historically that these big funding rounds for these AI

Starting point is 01:01:37 businesses that haven't necessarily been launched product yet don't make sense. Is this still kind of reinforce your point and, you know, what's your read on the inflection funding? Well, the list price of an H100 is about 30,000, but the street price, so it's very hard to get it. So if you go to the, if you go to like eBay and try to buy an H100, it's like 40 or 45,000. So if you have a 22,000 cluster of H 100s, that's about 900 million dollars of capex just that and then you know all the sundry stuff around it call it roughly plus or minus a billion dollars

Starting point is 01:02:16 And so of the one and a half billion they've raised let's say a billion goes into building this 22,000 node cluster you have 500 million for SGNA. And so what that leaves behind is basically two and a half billion of enterprise value for their chatbot. So I don't know. I mean, I've never used pi. Has any of you guys used it? Do you guys know if it's good?

Starting point is 01:02:39 Jake, I'm sure you've experimented with it. Have you experimented with it or not really? Which one? Pi. That's what their chatbot is called, pi. I think it's like, hey pi.com or something. I think I did try it once and it was not memorable. Oh, Po. You mean Po?

Starting point is 01:02:58 No, not Po. No, no, no, that's a horror. That's a horror. This is part personal one where you talk to it and ask, hey, how are you doing? Their concept is you have this one relationship. It's like one chat thread. It's not kind of how I like to work with the I use threads and I share threads with my team.

Starting point is 01:03:16 I'm not a fan of this. You have one relationship with one assistant. I think the thing is, it's interesting to note that very rarely when you invest money in the billions of dollars, does the catbacks or purchase of one specific form of equipment take up literally 25% of the enterprise value? That's atypical, at least for a startup. If you're buying a fixed plant of a slow cash for generating business

Starting point is 01:03:43 then maybe a bunch of that has some value. That's what stood out to me. All of these things, ReBurg is, again, increasingly, this is all just a pass through to Nvidia. It's probably in some ways a pass through to the big cloud providers. Whenever I see a chip maker and a cloud provider come together to put in a lot of money, it's essentially round-tripping cash. They're giving them money, which then they use to buy their services and then, you know, you're just pumping revenue. So I hope it works.

Starting point is 01:04:11 Jim, I'm giving Wish in the best, but you know, that's the capital. We just talked about where the infrastructure companies that are increasingly looking like more commodity service providers, if they don't up level with AI tooling, acquiring Mosaic ML and acquiring Niva, do you think that that's an indication of more M&A to come? And if so, doesn't that justify the increased funding, the increased valuation and the activity that we're seeing in the early stage with some of these businesses. I think for sure there's going to be more M&A and I think the valuations will be high

Starting point is 01:04:49 not because these companies have a lot of revenue yet but because it's very strategic for these big and for companies to assemble. You can come up. The end to end tool chain. I think we should explain to folks what that means. Enterprise software companies provide software to businesses that are not traditionally technology companies. They also provide software to businesses that are not traditionally technology companies They also provide software to other businesses to help them build new tools to help them build out their business

Starting point is 01:05:11 So an enterprise software company can sell to United Airlines or consult a visa or consult a Ford and that software Can then be used by that company to build tools that are powered by the database or powered by the data analytics or that are powered by the database or powered by the data analytics or increasingly powered by AI tools. And so they can build AI applications and AI capabilities into their business, whether it's United Airlines or Expedia or Visa or whomever. And that's why these companies are so critical in terms of enabling the transformation of industries with AI tooling and why getting AI tooling into their capability set is so critical right now.

Starting point is 01:05:47 It's important to note, though, guys, that whenever you have the emergence of a new sector, SACS, I think you are right, that M&A goes up, but it tends to be that the valuations go down. Peak M&A froth happens at the beginning of the cycle when hype is at maximum, and facts are at the minimum. And that's okay. That's good for the startup. It's marginally negative for the existing shareholder of a large company. And then over time, it gets itself sorted out when the facts are more obvious. So, you guys remember when the optical networking craze?

Starting point is 01:06:22 Oh my God, had these multi-billion dollar acquisitions. Where did they go? They went nowhere. They just disappeared. We actually have like a market map that we did that I think can explain this concept of a end-to-end tool chain. So this is a slide that our growth team shut out to Mike Robinson and Kimmigabura. They put this together in preparation and part of the investment memo for Mosaic.

Starting point is 01:06:47 And I think to explain the point you were kind of making freeberg like, why do enterprises need the services? One really simple way of thinking about it right now is that every enterprise would like to roll out its own chat GPT. They would all like to have their own internal version of chat GPT where the employees, for

Starting point is 01:07:05 example, could ask questions and get answers. That's where all the action is right now. Every enterprise would buy that tomorrow if it existed in the way that they want. They would be the example of what they have sex. Yeah, give it an example. The idea would be that any employee in the company could ask questions to the AI model, the way you can ask chat GPT questions, and would have all the enterprises data, and it would also understand their permissions, and have all

Starting point is 01:07:27 the security settings, so that only the right feel can get the right information. That's the kind of intelligence they were on lock. I mean, there are lots of other use cases as well. So like a corporate oracle. So I can, if I'm in HR, I can ask, hey, tell me about our, you know, compensation. Yeah. Totally copilot for the CEO. I think there's going to be lots of these. I think the sales team is going to have their own co-pilot.

Starting point is 01:07:48 I think the marketing team is going to have their own co-pilot and support. Costume support has it already. Customer support will have it and cheers on their own co-pilot. So there's going to be a lot of these. But I think enterprises want one at the level of the, call it the company intranet, where employees could just ask questions. Right. But they do not want to share their data with OpenAI. That's very clear.

Starting point is 01:08:08 They want to roll out their own models. So the question is, well, how do you roll out your own model? And what the show's here is the different piece of the stack that you have to have. So first, you capture all of your data, you got to label it to be classified right for the model. You got to store it somewhere. Then you need to get one of these open-source AI

Starting point is 01:08:25 models off the shelf, and there's probably the most prominent site for this called Hugging Face, which already has something like, I think, a $2 billion valuation. That's another really crazy valuation to ARR multiple, but Hugging Face has all the open-source models. It's very active. And so people grab the latest open-source model, that's the best fit for them, and then they need to train that model. That's really where Mosaic played. There's a ton of activity right now in this last mile problem of how do you customize a model to make it suitable for your use, whether you're an enterprise, whether you're a customer

Starting point is 01:09:00 service team, whether you're a SaaS app that wants to incorporate AI capabilities into your app. That's where all the action is right now is customizing these open source models. That then leads to basically being able to get the right inferences and then there's a sort of a separate category around hardware that is, we don't play there. But this is kind of the end-ten tool chain.

Starting point is 01:09:22 I think these big tech companies are gonna be racing to put this whole thing together. To fill it out, yeah. Yeah. And that's so there'll be more emanates your prediction, which means more startup valuation boomay more capital deploying. There was a couple of articles this week and Chimoff, this is your red meat as much as Ukraine is, Saks is, because you've talked about this at length. Social messaging startup, IRL, is shutting down after a board investigation found 95% of its claimed 20 million users were actually fake. This is a company that in June of 2021 raised $170 million series C at a valuation of over a billion dollars, making it one of the many proclaimed unicorns of Silicon Valley,

Starting point is 01:10:02 led by SoftBanks Vision Fund. The investor who was sitting on the board said that they didn't know if we've ever given an investment term sheet to a startup faster than Softank gave to IRL at the time. At the same time, different story, but in the same week, a company called Bayju, which you have talked about in the past, was once valued at $22 billion and claimed to be India's most valuable startup is in turmoil turmoil as shareholders and creditors are seeking to dilute the founder and he's rushing to find Capital and raise a billion dollars to try and buoy the company process one of the investors mark the company's valuation down to 5.1 billion so down 75% I Guess the question is overall are we still seeing this kind of

Starting point is 01:10:47 I guess the question is overall, are we still seeing this kind of turmoil in Silicon Valley from dessert era funding of startups in stark juxtaposition to the excitement of the friends here on AI? It's a characteristic of the exact same thing, meaning if you replaced AI with crypto, it's the exact same thing. If you replaced AI with co-working, if you replaced AI with, I don't know, synthetic biology, if you replaced AI with SAS, this has all happened before. I think it's important to identify what this is. What this is is that there aren't enough checks and balances and there are fundamentally people who are deeply inexperienced who are in the wrong job.

Starting point is 01:11:32 And in the few key moments where the venture capitalists is supposed to add value, that person is ill-equipped and unprepared. Why? Because they were the VP of X, Y, and Z at some start up. And they got hired to no fault of their own into a dynamic because these venture funds wanted to raise larger and larger amounts of money. So what happens? You don't even know how to ask the basic questions or even more insidiously, you don't have the courage to say the hard thing. And so these things happen that are frankly inexcusable, right?

Starting point is 01:12:11 So in the case of one of these companies, and I've mentioned this before, they approach just for financing. And when we asked for a data room, we got a Google Doc link to a spreadsheet. Now there's no reasonable world in which a company is that unsophisticated when it comes to understanding their business, right? A data room should include an enormous amount of operational and financial metrics that you can use to come to your own conclusion, so that you can present it transparently to the investor. The idea that boards wouldn't even hold these companies accountable is just a sign that the board members themselves are pretty fundamentally

Starting point is 01:12:51 an experienced people. And I think the thing that we do, which is a mistake, is we say, oh, well, X, Y, and Z firm, led this deal. Yeah, that may be true, but really what it means is that firm in a grab to get the money, hired some person that checks some boxes, put them in the job, that person let around, and there just wasn't any infrastructure to either teach that person, or then that person to have the courage to hold the founder responsible. That will play out in AI as well, it's just that we're at the beginning of the hype cycle, right? Because we replace AI again, as I said with any of these other things, we sat here a little bit hand-ranging when we saw these crazy valuations for these NFT projects. Where are those now? Right? So you name them. This is about fundamentally inexperienced people

Starting point is 01:13:43 doing a job that seems pretty easy from the outside, but in practical reality, there are only a few legends in our business. Most people, and I think it was shy Goldman that did the math on this. Most people do not know how to run these businesses well. Nick will find that fleet you can show. I think it's like 2.5% of all of the funds that are in pitch books over 800 of them have ever generated more than three acts in two funds. So this is a hard business.

Starting point is 01:14:12 It turns out you can't just wake up and be an investor. It turns out and that's what we're finding. So I don't know. It's not very surprising in the end. None of this is surprising. Good. Shemop had a really good point in the middle there is that there is a generation of venture capitalists who were added during the boom, who were operators,

Starting point is 01:14:28 but they've never been taught to have the discipline of capital allocators. And one of those key pieces of discipline is asking uncomfortable questions and doing uncomfortable diligence. And you can trust people, but you need to verify. That is a key part of the job. You can trust the founders, but you have to verify that the data you have is correct.

Starting point is 01:14:50 The fact that SoftBank did this, that incredible evaluation and the person who did this deal never checked that the customers were real is makes you unfit to serve in the job. And I will do diligence and during that time period, Freeberg, I had many founders say to me, you're asking for more diligence than the lead. And this deal is closing, and we are oversubscribed. And I said, okay.

Starting point is 01:15:17 And they said, okay, so you're not gonna require, I was just gonna say, oh no, we require this diligence. We wanna see your, you know, very basic stuff, your bank statement, your PNL. We want to talk to you, once you give us a list of your first thousand, give us a list of 500 customers from last month, we'll give you five numbers. We're going to talk to five random customers. Like, people did not want to do this stuff.

Starting point is 01:15:36 We do that, this work at our firm when we start to own 5, 10% of this and we train our founders to do, to be ready for proper diligence. All that diligence is happening now. Now, in the early stages, there's not much to go on, but you can check stuff. During this period, founders used the hot market to not participate in the due diligence process. And when you look at companies, a lot of times people will suspend disbelief. This company buys you, I don't know a ton about it, but it seems to have an educational

Starting point is 01:16:08 app, like a company brilliant.org that Chemaht and I are early investors in and Chemaht think you bit it. Great, great business. But then their business and their revenue seems to be based on a series of like Kumon, like in-person instruction. That's not a high gross margin business. Sorry, if you have to have a storefront, you're not a software business anymore. And so people started giving valuations, and this is the second part, and I'll just wrap

Starting point is 01:16:34 on this. People started giving valuations to these companies that were real-world businesses, that were low margin businesses, direct to consumer, whatever it was, they suspended disbelief, and they gave them valuations for high growth, high gross margin businesses and that was another mistake. You put those two things together, not doing diligence and then just misvaluing of actual assets, that's the cleanup work that's that's going on right now and it takes years. I mean, it took decades for them to pinch Bernie Madoff. It can take 10 years for these frauds to come out.

Starting point is 01:17:07 There was a guy who kept telling the SEC about Bernie Madoff. I think he was like nine years since the first time he let them know that the perfect returns were just not possible statistically. So it takes time, but they're picking these folks up everywhere. Doke Juan got picked up in Montenegro, the guy from Luna. It's going to take a decade to clean up all of the fraud in our space.

Starting point is 01:17:32 I think this was sort of mentioned by Jamal, but I think it needs to be a bigger point, which is the influence of fun size on these decisions. I mean, crafts funds are in the 6 to 700 million range, so when we write a check, it's usually ten, fifteen, twenty million dollar check in a series A company. That's like a big check for us. We're really going to sweat that decision. For soft bank, it tends to twenty million dollar check in a hundred billion dollar fund, which is what they had.

Starting point is 01:17:59 It doesn't even make sense. It's a waste of their time. It's not even a rounding error. For them to basically make a decision. It's like a of their time. It's not even a rounding error for them to Basically make a decision. It's like a $2,000 check for you. Yeah, exactly. So for them They had to write $200 million checks To justify their time managing a hundred billion dollars and so the mistake when they make a mistake is 20 times bigger than it should be that should have been maybe a 10 million million mistake, not a $200 million mistake, but their fund size forced them to basically write these gigantic checks, and they were writing them

Starting point is 01:18:29 into companies that were effectively seed stage or series A companies. If it was into a growth stage company, I think that's fine. There's a lot more data and there's a lot more customer references that you can check at a later stage company. By the way, the number one part of the diligence I I'd say for us, other than looking at metrics, which is anyone can do, is the off-sheet references. Talking to customers from a list that you figured out yourself,

Starting point is 01:18:53 not from the company itself, is probably the single most important qualitative part of diligence. So I don't know what happened here, but. It's not stated explicitly, but I think it's important. David, you have credibility. So when you say something, sax people listen, because you have bonafides that are undeniable. Same thing with J. Cal, same thing with you, Freiburg.

Starting point is 01:19:14 I think, you know, and this may sound mean, but it's like most of these people are just XYZ middle-level VPs from a startup. And that's a great thing, but it's not necessarily going to give you the gravitas, especially if that's not what you are forced to do to help build that company. And when push comes to shove inside of a boardroom or in the middle of diligence, there has to be conflict. I think it's a necessary feature of good decisions. And that conflict arises internally within your investment team,

Starting point is 01:19:45 but it also has to come externally with the executives of the startup and with the CEO themselves, because when you're prosecuting a good decision, it's unbelievable that you agree on 100% of things, and there has to be certain things that are controversial, otherwise by definition, that company isn't really even pushing the boundary.

Starting point is 01:20:02 So I just think that these are all skills that are poorly taught while you are building a business. It is not the reason why you should have been in charge of allocating $50 and $100 million checks into companies. That is just crazy talent. I love your point, SACs, though, about fun-sized dynamics, fun-sized dynamics are destiny. Right. It really is. And the optimal fun size for venture is somewhere between 250 and 600 million according to everybody who's been doing this for, you know, more than a decade or two and who's successful. Whether it's- When the costs are coming down. So as the input costs come down, whether it's for engineers and

Starting point is 01:20:39 co-pilots and hardware and abstraction layers, then theoretically, greater outcomes should be generated with fewer dollars in, which would, again, tell you that fund sizes should actually go down, not up. But the reason they go up is because you get paid an annual management fee. And so obviously, the way to make more money is to get 2% on a larger fixed number every year versus 2% on a smaller number. Or, you know, for example, what we did was we were like, we're going to go and hit grand slams.

Starting point is 01:21:08 And so I traded off management fee in return for 30% carry. And that turned out to be literally a multi-billion dollar smart decision because I gave up tens of millions of dollars up front for back end. Now the back end could have gone to zero. And maybe it still can, so who knows? But most folks wouldn't do that. Most folks take the sort of risk-adjusted bet and say, you know what, I'll just take the 2% and I'll raise a 200 million, then a 500 million, then a billion, then a 2 billion dollar per lap. Yeah, and they stack them all and they get

Starting point is 01:21:40 the 2% and all of a sudden the profits don't matter, which means the outcomes don't matter, which means the diligence is perfunctory and it becomes a theatrical expose that you can use, this sort of thin fig leaf, you can point to LPs and say, we did our work here, give us more money for this next fund. That's the rat race that the venture community is in, and it's going to get played out in companies like IRL and buy Jews and a lot of these AI companies, quite honestly. Right, and the chickens have come home to risk for all the crap down in the mess. This time is not different.

Starting point is 01:22:11 Is I think what I'm trying to say? This time is not different. Did you guys see there was some article that reported that fundraising for late-stage funds is just like cratered. Dead. So insight was trying to raise a $10 billion fund and they've only been over raised to. I don't know, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it was 22 down10 billion fund and they've only been raised to a quarter

Starting point is 01:22:25 of the Sarticle. No, no, no, it was it was 22 down to 10 and average they've raised to. Okay, so 10% and then Tiger was trying to raise 12, they cut it to 6 and then they can only raise to. Makes sense. So basically that's like a whatever, 80 to 90% reduction in the size of these funds. Yeah, I mean, we're out of the sovereigns, the sovereigns where they were going for this money

Starting point is 01:22:47 are buying sports teams. They're like, you know what? Instead of tech, let's just buy sports teams. And they're buying series A. And they're buying Manchester United and they're buying distressed portfolios. Yeah. But there's a huge crunch.

Starting point is 01:22:59 There's a huge, we've talked about it before, but there's a huge crunch in late-stage financing. It's only going to get worse over the next 18 months. I asked Brad last week, like, how many of these army coins do you think there are? Out of the 1400, he said 30 to 40%. Yeah. I think he might be, you know, it could be, look, out of 1400, I think it could be 700 or zombie coins.

Starting point is 01:23:17 I think it's at least 700. I think it's, I think it's probably 60%. Yeah. It's, and then the other 40% let's say how many of them have a down-round coming? I think 60% go to zero of the remaining 40% half of them probably return money. And then of the remaining half, half of those maybe get one and a half X. And then you get a geometric distribution from there, which means the blended return of that entire stream

Starting point is 01:23:45 of unicorns will be about 1.1x, but it will be very massively distributed. I think that is exactly right, Tim. I would, I would, I would, I would, I would, I would, I would, Everybody's getting their money back, except if you don't have diversification. Yeah, it's, it's,

Starting point is 01:23:56 The, I think the market is sending a very clear message, which is these, These are, Sorry, you said, But he's getting, no, no, Most people won't get their money back, but money back but on average it's gonna be one extra turn yes not even the district correct. Well I'm glad that the term zombie corn has held guys we are coming up on our time do you guys want to do science corner or do you want to

Starting point is 01:24:19 yeah that we have us need to use the bathroom breaks go ahead and just go go do it. We're going to take a leak and we'll come back and make a hearing joke. You know, I'm okay. I'm going to wrap. So look, it's been great. It's been great being your host. Be Christ yourself. Give us a science. Give us a hug. You don't hug me. You don't embrace me. You don't love my interview. Freeberg. Freeberg. I actually, I posted a clip of RFK talking about vaccines. I'd love for you to listen to it and actually give us the critique. Yes. I will. Can we do it next week? That's going viral right now. He did such a good job explaining his position on that.

Starting point is 01:24:54 He did such a good job. Yeah. Look, did you guys read the office piece? I forwarded to you and I said, please read this. If you guys read that piece, I'll watch his clip and let's talk about it next week. Is that cool? So, he says that. Yeah, he is a vaccine scientist who RFK junior references often as someone that he met with and spoke with and says, I caught him in a lie. And often, basically, he said, here's exactly what happened. Here's the conversation. Here's the data. Here's the fact. Here's the science. And I would really, really, really encourage you guys to read that, please.

Starting point is 01:25:27 And then I'll watch his clip and let's have a real analytical conversation about statements that are good questions to ask and good things to interrogate and things that are being said that maybe aren't factually correct. And I think that we need to kind of really, as a service to ourselves and to people that listen to us, really do that work

Starting point is 01:25:45 So let's do that and come back and talk about it next week if that's cool But I encourage everyone to read off it. He put it on substack Nick will put the link in the notes here Let's continue. Yeah, I'll continue exactly. I think that's the most important you want to talk about that certain senator that all of a sudden just basically Gave us the Heisman. No, we've had a lot of those by the way. So let me just be clear, that's not the only Heisman we've received on the All-in-Summit. I will say that the speaker list for the All-in-Summit is extremely... ...is looking fan-tastic.

Starting point is 01:26:15 We're gonna have a great time, and I'm really excited for the conversation. But you're saying some folks Heisman does because of our support of RFK. That did happen. And specifically the fact that you actually open-minded. Yeah. And then there were other folks who were insulted by things that were said about them

Starting point is 01:26:36 by people on the show. Oh, so soft. Do you guys want to hear about the NanoGrav? Yes. They came out, you have to do it. Okay, I'll cover this one real quick. What about this slow hammer that we're all getting? What is that?

Starting point is 01:26:47 That's it, it's a slow hammer, exactly. So, go tell us. Are you talking about the new H3 EV, but it only goes up to 50 miles per hour? What is that? The new hammer, the new HV, you know, the. They have an EV? They're coming out with an EV of that.

Starting point is 01:27:00 Oh, you're kidding. It's hilarious. It's like a great troll. I remember when Schwarzenegger got the hammer back in the 90s and everyone was like, you're kidding. It's hilarious. Yeah. It's a good great troll. I remember when Schwarzenegger got the Hummer back in the 90s, and everyone was like, oh my god, he's amazing. He's the anti-invac. And then the Hummer was the cool part of DRAW. You've got to need a coupon.

Starting point is 01:27:12 Yeah, I'm in a free game like this. And he's mini-coupons. And that of Melika. Okay. So yesterday, a paper was published by an international scientific consortium. This group is called NanoGrav. And they've been using a series of instruments to measure pulsars, including a 500 meter radio telescope array,

Starting point is 01:27:34 which allows them to see what's so funny. No, I just, I'm like, three or eight of each other. What's that? It's an idea to stop myself. Get him out of there. I'm beauty, I'm beauty. The NanoGrav data that was released is 15 years of data from pulsars. You're ready, Shurgs. What's that? I had to stop myself. Get him out of here. I'm beauty, I'm beauty. The nanograph data that was released is 15 years of data from pulsars.

Starting point is 01:27:49 And pulsars are neutron stars, which are stars that have collapsed on themselves and are basically super dense and start spinning. And then these pulsars, you know, you basically like a lighthouse, you can see the light. So it looks like a, almost like a strobe light. And we can see thousands of these across the universe, and we can observe them. And the rate at which the pulsing is coming out of these pulsars tells us a lot about what is happening in the space between earth and those pulsars. And when you collect enough data over a long enough period of time, which is what these folks have just released, is 15 years worth of this data. You can start to see really interesting patterns in the data that support the theory that

Starting point is 01:28:33 space-time itself is slowly vibrating, being stretched, being compressed, being pulled apart, being pushed back together, because of very large gravitational events happening around the universe. And what that means is you guys have all seen, you know, that kind of two-dimensional image of a black hole, and Nick, if you could find one online and pull it up, where it looks like, hey, at the middle of a black hole, space itself collapses in and it collapses down. And what happens is space and time get significantly elongated when they're really close to gravity. Gravity actually pulls space, sucks it in, sucks in time, and it becomes distorted. And so when you have large black holes around the universe spinning and running past each other,

Starting point is 01:29:16 they're actually pulling and stretching space time itself, and that sends out ripples throughout the universe. Ripples that are slowly undulating, space and time itself. So by observing all of these pulsars around the universe and the rate at which these pulsars are pulsing and seeing slight variations, we can start to measure and actually see those waves, those very slow waves of space time itself undulating and being pushed and compressed.

Starting point is 01:29:46 And so it supports Einstein's general theory of relativity, which indicated that space time itself can be warped by gravity. And it provides a really interesting picture on the universe itself that all around us, we have large masses that are many, many millions or billions of light years away, that are creating waves in space and time itself that we as humans will never kind of observe, realize or feel ourselves, but as part of the fabric and the underlying nature of our universe, with space and time being

Starting point is 01:30:16 slowly worked and slowly elongated, slowly compressed, and it's a really fascinating picture of the universe. Over time, a scientist gather more and more of this data. It will provide insights into where in the universe, these massive black hole events may be occurring, and also provide insights into the early picture and the large scale structure of the universe, which helps us better understand how everything started and where we're all coming from. So it was a really fascinating data release. I think it's a really kind of profound thing

Starting point is 01:30:46 if you take a little time and think about it. It's super exciting. It's getting a lot of press coverage today and encourages all to pull our heads out of the Ukraine war and Silicon Valley and money and all this stuff and realize that there are things of extraordinary scale and structure that are happening around us. Let me ask you two questions.

Starting point is 01:31:03 Number one, why does it matter? And number two, any theories here of what we might discover, or if this goes 10X or 100X in terms of the information we're getting? Many years ago, it was theorized that there's what's called a cosmic microwave background radiation, the CMB. And what that is, it's the leftover heat

Starting point is 01:31:26 from the formation of the universe, from the universe when the big bang happened. And the scientists figured out how to create really sensitive radio telescopes and put them in orbit and they started to observe the background radiation. And what that showed us was the fingerprint of the universe, the original structure of the universe that created ultimately all the galaxies, super galaxies, and then ultimately all the stars,

Starting point is 01:31:50 and then the planets, and everything that came from that. This could be the beginning of seeing a gravitational background of the universe, where we could actually start to see perhaps the fingerprint of the space time of the whole universe, of what the actual structure of space itself and time itself looks like throughout the universe, with the perturbations being driven by some very large massive, supermassive black holes. There was a black hole discovered this week that's 30 billion times the mass of our sun. There are these massive objects out there that are actively distorting space time, and we're going to start to get a fingerprint of that with this sort of data.

Starting point is 01:32:29 And over time, that just gives us a better sense of what the overall structure of the universe looks like, not just from the heat energy that we're collecting, but also the gravitational waves that we're now able to observe through the inference of this data collection. This just makes deepens our understanding of the universe, but there's not like the universe. Yeah, which not like the universe. Yeah, which is amazing and interesting. And it validates and proves the general theory of relativity, which if you think about the

Starting point is 01:32:52 application of that down the road, that may lead to things like close to or as fast as light travel or things related to time travel. There's a lot of things that people have theorized for decades about You know black holes and the warping of space time itself. I'm not saying that any of this stuff is you see the three-body problem trailer Yeah, looks amazing. It looks amazing. It looks amazing. What a great. What a great We have to wait so long. I hate it when they put out trailers. So how long is it when is it coming out? Like next year. Oh wow. Yeah. Oh, I still haven't seen your movie. Either guys your movie that you want to be to see. Which movie to try? Oh, everything everywhere. All at once. I got a better movie for you. I got a great pull for you. It's on paper. You're right

Starting point is 01:33:37 now. The blog a movie called about Blackberry. It tells the story of Blackberry. It's like an independent film. It is awesome. I just reviewed it on this week and start ups. It's called. It's just on his Blackberry. Called Blackberry. Let me know. I think it will guys.

Starting point is 01:33:52 This has been episode 135 of the All In Pod. I really appreciate it. Oh my god. I think we've seen just enough time to get you back to your Nirvana concert. Leo. What's the background on this one? Is that a rival? What is that? What's that background? What movie? That's a black hole. That's a black hole. Just a black hole. Okay. I think that from

Starting point is 01:34:18 might be a bit. It might be a good one. I was sax's hair because he looks like did you get it cut? Sacks. He got a cut. Did you cut it? No, you broke our Heart Sacks I got a mild sloughing Show a show is the flood let's go. Let's see Oh boo. I mean it's still crazy What's good? You gotta just keep grounded out man. Jake. How you want to take us out? You do a better outro I never bought it for David sacks. We architect coming at you You do a better outro. All right, everybody for David Sacks,

Starting point is 01:34:43 the architect coming at you. Z 100 Board of Zoo, Chimouth Polyhopatia, two for Tuesdays, tears for fears coming up, and free bird with the science project. All right, traveling back in time with David free bird, two for Tuesday, Jackson Brown. To load out, here we go.

Starting point is 01:35:04 Gotcha. That's the way we're exerting his moderator. I'm We're in greatest moderator. Jason Galgok. Out of the world's greatest moderate. I can do my MPR voice if you like. Dude. All right, closing us out here, episode 135, PCRW 92.3, the sound of Santa Monica, this Sunday at the Venice Farmers Market, two for one on the organic milk,

Starting point is 01:35:24 go check it out. And we'll see you all later on the politics of culture, David Sacks chiming in on the Republican GOP position, which we did consider Friedberg deeply going into science and Chimouth Polyhapatia on wealth disparity. For everybody, I am your host here at KCRW. Jason Callaghan is the world's most moderate moderator. We'll see you next time, KCRW. I can do any of these radio bits.

Starting point is 01:35:55 Bye bye. Love you guys. I'm going to the beach. Rainman David's acting. I'm going to the beach. And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. I'm going to the beach. I'm going to the beach. What? What? What?

Starting point is 01:36:17 What? What? What? Besties are gone. I'm going to the beach. That's my dog taking it away. She's driving away. She's in the sex. We're at all. Oh man.

Starting point is 01:36:27 My ham is the actual meat. We should all just get a room and just have one big hug. Because they're all just like this sexual tension that we just need to release that. What? That beat. What? Your beer. Beer.

Starting point is 01:36:41 Beer. Beer. We need to get merch. I'm going on leave I'm going on leave

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E135: Wagner rebels, SCOTUS ends AA, AI M&A, startups gone bad, spacetime warps & more

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