This is going to be a feisty episode. Is it? Two of us are on Greenwich meantime, two of us are in Pacific, J. Cal still asleep in his head. I'm good, actually. You good? I'm good. 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 that be. Blessed offense. I'm still trying to get my invite for next week. All right. We also enjoy Friedberg Mums the Word. We'll 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 4th Battalion of the Internet Tweet Brigade. General welcome. Joining us from a remote location in Moscow. Has there been like an establishment takeover of the pod? I mean, what's up with this intro? Every argument they make against us, you're basically just conceding it's true.

I know, exactly. From his 12th century Mediterranean castle, Il Duce, Chamath Palihapitiya. Welcome Chamath. How is the Mediterranean diet treating you? Blue. Blue? Blue. And Emperor Nero Calacanis, ruler over podcasts, paid events, entrepreneurial universities, and dental SPVs. Emperor, thank you for letting me sit in your throne today. It's good to be here.

Thank you. Dental SPVs. Shout out to my dentists. Wait, did you say king of STDs? SPVs. Oh, SPVs. Dental SPVs, yeah. That's the thing with certain STDs, where once you are king, you're going to be king for life. Absolutely. The Syndicate.com. Yeah, thank you. You've been doing, you said, five shows a week lately?

Your voice is shot. I, my voice is starting to go, so I asked you if you'd moderate, and 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.

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. If I didn't have time to participate, I don't really have time to watch it. The truth is, Sax, why don't you admit to everyone that when you're in a show, you probably watch it four or five times.

All right, so let's kick this off. Obviously, you guys recorded right before the Wagner Group attempted coup or potential coup or theorized coup began last week. So Sax, you kind of sent out a text saying the show is already stale because you kind of missed 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 its Wagner Group rebellion. Last Friday, the Wagner Group, which is a Russian paramilitary organization led by Yevgeny Grigogin, 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 then abruptly stopping, I think, about 200 kilometers before reaching Moscow City.

At this point, there was supposedly a negotiation. The president of Belarus got involved and Grigogin decided to step down. Putin said, "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.

Sax, 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 take on last week's episode that the much-hyped Ukrainian counter-offensive 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 counter-offensive 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 armed rebellion or mutiny by Prigozhin was evidence that the Russian regime was about to collapse, that Russia was in fact on the verge of civil war.

And you saw the exact same people who had oversold the counter-offensive 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.

You have people speculating that this was all staged. I do not believe that. I do believe that it was an insurrection or mutiny by Prigozhin. 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.

That would have resulted in a giant loss of income and status for Prigozhin. Simultaneously, for months now, he's been criticizing the Ministry of Defense, specifically the Minister of Defense Shoigu and the Chief General of the General Staff, Gerasimov. 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. 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 Prigozhin 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 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 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 the Ministry of Defense and the overall conduct of the war.

And it was, I think, 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 Sergei Sergeyevich, including all the regional governors, members of the Duma, and other important figures in Russian society.

And there wasn't a single person willing to publicly support Prigozhin. And that's when Putin went on TV, called this basically an act of treason and a stab in the back. And at that point, I think Prigozhin's options were pretty limited. And he basically took a deal that was brokered 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 was an embarrassment and a black eye for the Russian regime, it never looks good for a regime to have any kind of mutiny or insurrection. And I think that it does raise questions that Putin's now gonna 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 Prigozhin is a popular figure being kind of a war hero from the Battle of Bakhmut, the Russian society supported Putin, I think he's at something like 80% poll numbers.

So I think where things stand today... Who's poll? Well, like Levada Center, which is an independent polling agency, for example. These are not the Russian regime's own numbers. And when the poll numbers... No, no, wait a minute. Would you say in a poll that you don't support Putin? Well, I don't know how Levada Center, what their methodology is, but these numbers, when 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 chart buster 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, please. Coming at you at 95.5. I love Russia. Oh my God, this is some 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.

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 them. I know, you got to be careful. Be careful here, folks. You got to be careful here. Well, you have to be careful. 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 Purgoshin'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 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 would 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 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 regard this 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 Prygosian prior to this coup attempt last week. Chamath, J. Cal, had you guys heard of this person before? And the Wagner group? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, maybe I'm an idiot or 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 surprising potential revolution happening locally? I think stepping back here and just looking at the news 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. 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 gonna, they are much more motivated.

I wouldn't believe any of this propaganda, but this is a bit of a Rorschach test. Somebody on the left got on Twitter and said, this is the end of Putin. Everybody's gonna rise up in the streets. And they overplayed that, you know, angle of the story. And then, of course, the right or people who are pro-Russian or anti the West backing this war are gonna take the other side, Preberg.

They're gonna take the side of, you know, oh, everybody loves Russia. 80% of people are voting for this. It's ridiculous to think that anybody in Russia is gonna answer, do you like Putin? Do you support Putin on a survey? Can you imagine a Putin's 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- Would you go to the party though, if you were invited? Well, I mean, are there gonna be potential LPs there?

Last week, but I think- It's just a 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 gonna see in the next 10 years, Putin lose power and he's going to be out of power.

And when we look back on it, it's gonna be one of two causes. It's gonna be either cancer, which, you know, the speculation is he's had cancer and that's why he disappears from view, because he might be getting treatment. And we'll look back on 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 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 blunder he's ever made. And this is a really crazy sign that somebody would actually attempt or even float a coup is insane. 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, you know, now consolidated power and everybody's in the street dancing. It was almost as bad as January 6. This is 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, Jake, how at the beginning that this doesn't really seem to change anyone's point of view on the outlook, your point of view sounds like it's the same as it was a week ago.

Saks, 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, but Levada 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. Nobody likes the war, yeah. 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 this war and Putin as the leader.

Now I do think he has egg on his face here from this Purgosian uprising in terms of, 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 who Purgosian is? Certainly. I mean, I've been tracking Purgosian statements since around February.

He's been vocally criticizing the Ministry of Defense, specifically Shoygu and Gerasimov, in 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 about you quash this rebellion completely, which would have led to horrific images of violence, potentially Moscow or 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 it and he cut a deal. 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, Chamath, any point of view shift for you coming out of the Purgosian 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, I mean, it is like a mob. It must have been a lot.

Not bad for a guy that was what put it Putin's caterer a few years ago, right? He started a catering business. I spent nine years in jail. This guy's like been nine years in jail. It's like the Sopranos. 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, I mean, nuclear arsenal in the world. Yeah. It's just so you know who this guy is.

I mean, he really is the street thug that Putin is 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 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 mineral resources or oil wells, all sorts of things.

In fact, if he was a Sopranos captain, who would he be? Like Phil Leotardo? Does like 20 years in jail, comes out? I think it's sort of like John Gotti going against Michael Corleone. 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 Purgosian is emotional, erratic. He's been saying these statements for months here, which I don't see how they could possibly loose canon. And the crazy thing though is, is that what you saw on Twitter and social media was unrestrained glee really delirium over the idea that Purgosian 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 and into the fire. I've been saying since the beginning of the war that this fantasy that Putin's gonna be toppled by a palace coup and you're gonna replace him with Navalny or something like that, or we're gonna 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 Purgosian had taken over. I think it would have been much worse for the West. The final point is, what's the takeaway from here is I think this is gonna 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. And Purgosian I think expected to find more support among the sort of ultra-nationalists in Russia and among the military who have been critical of Putin for waging the war in what they consider to be too half-hearted 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 Putin already knew, but this has to underscore for him that this war is existential for him personally.

If he loses, it's the end of not only his regime, but probably his life in Russia. And I think he's gonna 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.

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 Sax, 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, is 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 the Supreme Leader's action.

I just have one statement. Go ahead. I was thinking about this, like, there's a famous Sun Tzu quote, "The supreme art 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 and China, and China over Taiwan.

So we have to avoid these things. And that's where Sax and I are in alignment. Sun Tzu, Kalikinis, we heard it here first. Let's move forward with peace. I can only hope that the conflict ends 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 appreciate Sax's contributions.

Super helpful. I went to Cal, UC Berkeley, 1997, fall of '97. And it was the last year that Cal had affirmative action admissions. And I remember at that time, there was a big case, a guy named Bakke 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 Bakke. 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. And it's obviously been a pretty hot topic here in California for the past, you know, 25, 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 six to three against affirmative action in the University of North Carolina case and six to two against affirmative action in the Harvard case. Katonji Brown Jackson recused herself because she previously served on Harvard's board of overseers.

All the conservative as their, you know, kind of characterized judges voted to strike down affirmative action and all the as their characterized liberal judges voted to keep it. 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 in 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 to moth, I'd love your read, I guess, on the surprise, or this was an except expected case. I think Saxon 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, but also by academic decile. Yeah. 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 sorry, that means that means that the Asian American student had better scores than 99% of other applicants and still didn't get it. 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.

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 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 can or cannot, I don't even know.

But all of that changes today. So then the question is, well, what's the first order derivative? 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 net, 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 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 going to be fighting these admission standards 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 so important. Shemar white, typically white, typically white, although 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 wipe that away.

So I think from a 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. 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, whatever, whatever the program is that you want to come up with?

Will those get challenged? And will those companies have to change? And my friend's thoughts on that were that yes, that those would also change. And that's going to have a really important impact on private enterprise and how they approach this stuff and how de AI stuff works. And 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 there'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, it was a very important decision in America that just happened.

Jamal, what is what is the right ethics and values? I mean, what do you guys I guess we could just do this around the table, J Cal, maybe you kick it off. Should we I mean, from your point of view, do you think that values should include 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 the world's greatest moderator. But yeah, doing a solid job so far. And this creates a lot of cognitive dissonance for people, right?

Because you 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 hundred yard dash or their, their compensation at a company, right?

All of that should be based on achievement. 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 backdoor 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 Civil Rights Act was what, 1964 or 65. Like we've, we've, 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, 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 childcare. The solution 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. de AI to Chamath's point, is it is illegal to hire people based on race, gender, any of those criteria, obviously, and the de AI 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 this these positions, we need we cannot hire another white guy.

So the reality of de AI that I've seen up close and personal when I was at AOL, I've told the story before. 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, because 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?

It's a hard conversation for America to have. For me, the 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. 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 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.

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 you know, 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 into the workforce.

So that is why it's a hard value question for me. I don't have a great answer on this. But I'm just pointing out it's a lot like the abortion 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 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 for three 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 place like Harvard.

If you don't look at these other categories, it is a 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, 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 two 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 are privately funded, not if they take federal dollars. They're not agreed. Yes. But if they take federal dollars, they're not. And then it becomes a government process. 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 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, then they can decide to just focus on legacy admits. That's totally reasonable. It's within their rights. Saks, we got to hear you. I know that you used up your speaking quota already.

Well, yeah, I didn't want to butt in. Give him four of my points. I want to hear. I talked a lot in the last segment. You get four of J. Kel's minutes. Go ahead. I give you four of my minutes. So, yeah, two points, I guess. So, on the legacy thing, I agree with Jamath 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 they'd be too 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, so they're going to do it on their own.

And so, look, I think the legacy thing, by the way, that's the best gift you can give kids. Yeah, that perspective. Sorry, go ahead, Saks. I didn't mean to interrupt. So that's that's point number one, fully agreed on the legacy thing. With respect to the decision itself, that I'm sorry, 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? 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 a legal 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. So I think that's point number one. The legacy thing.

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? Is it because it's education versus any other private?

No, because it takes federal funding. It takes tax money. Well, you and 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 take federal funding, 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. 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 go into college or going to a better college, that is a big part of creating opportunity in this country.

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, or we're Stanford, we want to have a representation of people from around the world.

So we're gonna, you know, have the top three students from each country, or you know, or by population, whatever you do it, you know, mathematically, come in. And so a little bit of geography, because I did hear from one of these coaches that costs like six figures to get your kids into college, 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, the 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, angles, angle shots. Yeah, I think like, stop with the angle shooting, guys. Yes, the gun should go off, you should run 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 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 preschool, 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. Yeah, right.

Fixing it for three, four and five years old, that's when they deserve and need all the help in the world to yourself. That's why we need school choice. We need charter schools, we need to break the monopoly that the unions have over the schools running it running it for their own benefit and not fight the enemy.

If you define institutional racism as conditions that trap people in conditions of poverty across generations, I'd say the abysmal quality of our public schools are number one, and one, two, and three. And the reason is because there's no competition and the unions run it for their own benefit. How long do they shut down these schools for in California because they didn't want to work because they're afraid of don't know don't see the see where we just got a label.

God, beep it up. We're gonna be that was not for the benefit of kids. And it wasn't even medically necessary. That was a benefit they saw for themselves. Yeah, J Cal, you come you come from a family. Yep, that were members of unions because they worked for fire for police.

Is that right? Yeah. We speak negatively about the effects of the teachers unions on our public education system. 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 of the union, and the union takes care of you?

What's the argument? Sure. To say, this union is damaging public education, and the teacher that's working in the union and a member of the union says this is necessary for my livelihood to protect me for my benefit. Help us share the point of view because we all have the strongly held point of view that the unions are destroying and eroding public education.

What's the other side? Right, 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. 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. 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. If you're under the age of 40, you might not know him. 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, Jamath, 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 liberal degree to a non STEM degree, because they're two years behind on STEM or a year behind on STEM. And so the Kapoor has found this like 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, you know, needs to Well, it's not just Ivy's, right? Well, sure, sure. It's not just pick on Harvard, but it's like all the state schools as well. The elite institutions, which we talk about No, all institutions.

Okay. 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 the union point of view, by the way, but yeah. But are pure academics the best way to accept people into a 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 SAT standardized test, and you might be an incredible, virtuoso 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 people to find their path through different institutions.

To your point, Juilliard does not care, perhaps as much what you did on, you know, your SAT in 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 art competition. And I think that that's the important thing that we need to preserve.

We need to preserve optionality for institutions to define what sorts of individuals they want to try and recruit, and progress and train 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 and create differential educational systems, I think that's going to 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'll 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 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, right?

Like take again, I just looked up on the internet, but Harvard has about the operating expenses are roughly five and a half billion dollars a year, but the revenues are about five and a half billion dollars a year, right? So if instead you had to basically fund, you know, there was essentially no revenue per se, right?

There was, 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 from your endowment. The endowment would be run very differently. It would be a don't lose money endowment that would generate very low vol returns.

I think the problem with that is that that's not how the endowment or Harvard works. They wouldn't necessarily make risk seeking investments in things like private equity and hedge funds and venture capital. And to the extent they did, they would just make much, much fewer, 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, well, $53 billion by the Harvard's endowment now. So yeah, it would be 10%. Can anyone tell me who the largest real estate owner is in San Francisco? You see, we're looking at on the internet.

Oh, no, I know. I know. It's that art 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. Yeah. In San Francisco.

Sorry, who is she? The founder, I forgot her name. This is a for profit university or private? Or I mean, a nonprofit 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, including animation. So that's what I'm saying.

Is it like RISD or is it like actually an 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, a couple big news items, you know, the AI frenzy 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 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. 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 and he offers open source models. And I shared the performance data of their most recent announcement on the show a few weeks ago. You know, 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, Databricks is paying a pretty hefty premium. And I think it begs the question, 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 Sax, 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, this space is probably the hottest space. We're talking about like AI 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 in our next round. They had a term sheet for a Series B.

Emergence was actually going to lead it. This is Mosaic ML? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if I'm supposed to be telling you all this, but... This is great. This is why people tune in. Breaking news. They had a term sheet from Emergence to raise 50 million at 400 posts.

Wow. 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. 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 trying our best to get... You didn't say anything when I talked about him on the show a few weeks ago. You were just sitting there, "Mom's a word?" Actually, I knew that this deal was basically in the works because the founder called us up and he had already promised us a small allocation in the round.

Naveen did. 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 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 yeah, we heard it was in the ballpark of this like $1.2, $1.3 billion 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 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 Naveen signed the term sheet for the Series B, an investor came over the top to invest in 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 mania going on.

But I think that what he got offered is obviously a fantastic deal. And I think what it's evidence of is that these big enterprise infra companies are going to try and build an end-to-end tool chain here. And I think Mosaic ML had a very, very important part of the tool set, which is training up these models, basically maximizing GPU efficiency, because GPUs are basically the scarce item right now.

They're a GPU shortage. And it's probably not going to get better for a year or two, if that. So this is a very important part of the stack. And I think it's probably a smart acquisition for both Databricks and Mosaic. Yeah, it seems to me, I mean, remember Snowflake, which competes with Databricks, also acquired Neva, which was founded by one of my colleagues, a guy I work with, a new really great guy, Sridhar.

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.

And 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, J Cal, you guys agree or have a different point of view?

Looking at it, it's a it's a big number, the headline number, but I agree with Saks that the actual numbers half the number. So if it was, you know, if you look at the number of engineers they had, based on LinkedIn data and pitch book data, probably 6070 employees, 80 employees, and then 4050 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, you know, probably three to $10 million per engineer for like really high end engineers is more of the 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.

I think you nailed it. Freeberg, what's happening is this layer of natural language on top of any service, whether it something as simple as Yelp, or something as complicated as a giant financial company with tons of 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 data scientists, 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. Tell me more about our customers. And you know, how are they reacting to these three new products?

And you will get back in intelligence that previously was unable to be accessed. And so I was, 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 sacks and his team, we bring them to meet with Sequoia.

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 API's were available and open AI is but one. There are now in the companies I'm talking to, they're they're trialing Freeberg on average, six, seven, eight language models before they pick one, and they're not picking open AI 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 a local school board. Well, nobody could ever make a database of all the discussions going on at local school boards, and then analyze 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. insights from it. That would be too costly to transcribe at, you know, $100 every hour or two and normalize, let alone to analyze. 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. They seem to have that in common. 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 Suleiman and Reid Hoffman, who was a co founder while Mustafa was working 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 built that has built in this space.

He started inflection. And the business just announced today that they've just closed a $1.3 billion funding round led by Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Nvidia, with an intention of building the largest AI cluster in the world, 22,000 Nvidia H100s as part of the build out. But I think you've shared, Shamath, historically that these big funding rounds for these AI businesses that haven't necessarily been launched product yet don't make sense.

Is this still, you know, kind of reinforce your point? And you know, what's your read on 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 H100s, that's about $900 million of capex, just that. And then you know, all the sundry stuff around it, call it roughly plus or minus $1 billion. 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 SG&A.

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 anybody any of you guys used it? Do you guys know if it's good? Jason, I'm sure you've experimented with it.

Have you experimented with it or not really? Which one? Pi? That's what their that's what their chatbot is called pi. Yeah, I think it's like a pi.com or something. I think I did try it once. And it was not memorable. Oh, you mean po? No, not po. No, no, no, that's Quorum.

That's Quorum. Pi is like your personal one where you talk to it and ask, Hey, how are you doing? Their concept is like you have this one relationship. So 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.

So I'm not a fan of this, like 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 capex or purchase of one specific form of equipment take up literally 25% of the enterprise value, that's a typical, at least for a startup.

If you're buying a fixed plant of a slow cash flow generating business, then maybe, you know, a bunch of that has some value. So that's what stood out to me and all of these things. Freeberg 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.

So 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 just you're just pumping revenue. So I hope it works.

I wish him the best. But you know, that's the what 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, not because these companies have a lot of revenue yet, but because it's very strategic for these big infra companies to assemble 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 other businesses to help them build new tools to help them build out their business. 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 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 this, these companies are so critical in terms of enabling the transformation of industries with AI tooling and why, you know, getting AI tooling into their capability set is so critical right now. It's important to note, though, guys, that whenever you have the emergence of a new sector, Saks, 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. You know, 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 I just think it's kind of like, do you guys remember when the optical networking craze hit? Oh my God, I've had these multi-billion dollar acquisitions. And where did they go? They went, they went nowhere. They just disappeared. We actually have like a market map that we did that I think can explain this concept of an end to end tool chain.

So this is a slide that our growth team, shout out to Mike Robinson and Kevin Cabrera, they put this together in preparation and part of the investment memo for Mosaic. 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 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. Give an example of what that is, Sax. Give an example. The idea would be that, you know, any employee in the company could ask questions to the AI model, the way you can ask chat GPT questions, and it would have all the enterprise's data and it would also understand their permissions and have all the security settings so that only the right people could get the right information.

That's the kind of intelligence they want to unlock. I mean, there are lots of other use cases as well, but that's a really simple one. A corporate Oracle. So if I'm in HR, I can ask, "Hey, tell me about our compensation." A copilot. Yeah. Totally. A copilot for the CEO.

I think there's gonna be lots of these. I think the sales team is gonna have their own copilot. I think the marketing team is gonna have their own copilot. Customer support has it already. Customer support will have it. Engineers will have their own copilot. So there's gonna 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 it questions. But they do not want to share their data with open AI. That's very clear. They want to roll out their own models. So the question is, well, how do you roll out your own model?

And what this shows here is the different pieces 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 models off the shelf.

And there's probably the most prominent site for this called a 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. And that's really where Mosaic played. And 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 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 be able to get the right inferences. And there's sort of a separate category around hardware that is, you know, we don't play there. But this is kind of the end to end tool chain.

I think these big tech companies are gonna be racing to put this whole thing together. To fill it out. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm gonna go back to the description, which means more startup valuation, booming, more capital deploying. There was a couple of articles this week, and Chamath, 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 led by SoftBank's 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 SoftBank gave to IRL at the time.

At the same time, different story. But in the same week, a company called Baiju, which Chamath 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 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 to down 75%.

I guess the question is, overall, are we still seeing this kind of turmoil in Silicon Valley from the Zerp era funding of startups in stark juxtaposition to the excitement and the frenzy around 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 SaaS, 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.

In the few key moments where the venture capitalist 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 startup and they got hired through no fault of their own into a dynamic because these venture funds wanted to raise larger and larger amounts of money.

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. These things happen that are frankly inexcusable. In the case of one of these companies, and I've mentioned this before, they approached us for financing and when we asked for a data room, we got a Google doc link to a spreadsheet.

There's no reasonable world in which a company is that unsophisticated when it comes to understanding their business. 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 inexperienced people. 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 led 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 because we replace AI, again, as I said, with any of these other things. We sat here a little bit hand-wringing when we saw these crazy valuations for these NFT projects. We're at the beginning now.

You name it. Zero. This is about fundamentally inexperienced people 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 Shai Goldman that did the math on this, most people do not know how to run these businesses well.

Nick will find that tweet you can show. I think it's like 2.5% of all of the funds that are in PitchBook, so over 800 of them, have ever generated more than 3X in two funds. This is a hard business, it turns out. You can't just wake up and be an investor, it turns out, and that's what we're finding.

I don't know. It's not very surprising in the end. None of this is surprising. Good to know. I think Chamath 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, but they've never been taught to have the discipline of capital allocators.

One of those key pieces of discipline is asking uncomfortable questions and doing uncomfortable diligence. 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. The fact that SoftBank did this at an incredible valuation and the person who did this deal never checked that the customers were real makes you unfit to serve in the job.

I will do diligence. During that time period, Friedberg, I had many founders say to me, "You're asking for more diligence than the lead. This deal is closing and we are oversubscribed." I said, "Okay." They said, "Okay, so you're not going to require this?" I said, "Oh, no. We require this diligence.

We want to see your very basic stuff. Your bank statements, your P&L. We want to talk to you. Why don't you give us a list of your first 1,000. 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." People did not want to do this stuff.

We do this work at our firm when we start to own 5%, 10% of this and we train our founders 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.

When you look at companies, a lot of times people will suspend disbelief. This company, Byjo, I don't know a ton about it, but it seems to have an educational app, like a company, Brilliant.org, that Chamath and I are early investors in and Chamath incubated. Great, great business. But then their business and their revenue seems to be based on a series of Kumon-like in-person instruction.

"Oh, that's not a high gross margin business. Sorry. If you have to have a storefront, you're not a software business anymore." People started giving valuations, and this is the second part and I'll just wrap 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. 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 going on right now. It takes years. It took decades for them to pinch Bernie Madoff.

It can take 10 years for these frauds to come out. 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. It takes time, but they're picking these folks up everywhere.

Do Kwon 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. I think this was sort of mentioned by Chamath, but I think it needs to be a bigger point, which is the influence of fund size on these decisions.

I mean, Kraft funds are in the $600-700 million range. When we write a check, it's usually $10, $15, $20 million check in a Series A company. That's like a big check for us. We're really going to sweat that decision. For SoftBank, a $10-20 million check in a $100 billion fund, which is what they had, 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 $2,000 check for you. Yeah, exactly. For them, they had to write $200 million checks to justify their time managing $100 billion. The mistake, when they make a mistake, is 20 times bigger than it should be.

That should have been maybe a $10 million mistake, not a $200 million mistake. Their fund size forced them to basically write these gigantic checks, and they were writing them 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 diligence, I'd say for us, other than looking at metrics, which anyone can do, is the off-sheet references. Talking to customers from a list that you figured out yourself, not from the company itself, is probably the single most important qualitative part of diligence.

I don't know what happened here. It's not stated explicitly, but I think it's important. David, you have credibility. When you say something, Saks, people listen, because you have bona fides that are undeniable. Same thing with J. Cal, same thing with you, Freeberg. This may sound mean, but it's like most of these people are just XYZ mid-level VPs from a startup.

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. 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.

That conflict arises internally within your investment team, 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. There has to be certain things that are controversial.

Otherwise, by definition, that company isn't really even pushing the boundary. 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 town.

I love your point, Sax, though, about fund size dynamics. Fund size dynamics are destiny. It really is. The optimal fund size for venture is somewhere between 250 and 600 million, according to everybody who's been doing this for more than a decade or two and who's successful. When the costs are coming down, so as the input costs come down, whether it's for engineers and 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.

The reason they go up is because you get paid an annual management fee. Obviously, the way to make more money is to get 2% on a larger fixed number every year versus 2% on a smaller number. For example, what we did was we were like, "We're going to go and hit grand slams." I traded off management fee in return for 30% carry.

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. The back end could have gone to zero. Maybe it still can, so who knows? Most folks wouldn't do that. Most folks take the 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 fund." They overlap. Yeah, and they stack them all and they get the 2%. 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. It's going to get played out in companies like IRL and Byju's and a lot of these AI companies, quite honestly.

Right, and the chickens have come home to roost for all the crypto investments. This time is not different, 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 cratered? Dead.

Dead. So, I think it was trying to raise a $10 billion fund and they've only been able to raise two, according to this article. No, no, no. It was 22 down to 10, and of which they've raised two. Okay, so 10%. And then Tiger was trying to raise 12.

They cut it to six, and then they can only raise two. Makes sense. Yeah. So, basically, that's like a, whatever, 80% to 90% reduction in the size of these funds. Yeah, meanwhile, the sovereigns where they were going for this money are buying sports teams. They're like, "You know what?

Instead of tech, let's just buy sports teams." They're buying Series A. And they're buying Manchester United, and they're buying distressed portfolios. Yeah. And the sovereigns? But there's a huge crunch. 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, "How many of these zombie corns do you think there are out of the 1,400?" He said 30% to 40%. I think he might be, you know, it could be, look, out of 1,400, I think it could be 700 zombie corns. I think it's at least 700.

I think it's probably 60%. Yeah. 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 of unicorns will be about 1.1X, but it'll be very massively distributed. I think that is exactly right, Shama. I would... Yeah, I would... Everybody's getting their money back, except if you don't have diversification.

I think the market is sending a very clear message, which is these large... Wait, so you said everybody's getting... No, no, no. Most people won't get their money back. Most people won't get their money back, but on average, it's going to be 1X return. Yeah, so it's not going to be evenly distributed, 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... Yeah, the three of us need to use the bathroom break, so go ahead and just... If you could just go do it, we're going to go and take a leak and we'll come back and make a Uranus joke.

You know, I'm okay. I'm going to wrap. So look, it's been great. It's been great being your host. We crushed it. So give us the Science Corner. Give us a quick... You don't hug me. You don't embrace me. You don't love my contributions. We love you. 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. He did such a good job. Yeah. Look, did you guys read the Offit piece?

I forwarded it 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? Can you resend that? Yeah, he is a vaccine scientist who RFK Jr. references often as someone that he met with and spoke with and says, I caught him in a lie.

And Offit basically said, here's exactly what happened. Here's the conversation. Here's the data. Here's the facts. Here's the science. And I would really, really, really encourage you guys to read that, please. And then I'll watch his clip and like, let's have a real kind of 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. 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 sub stack.

Nick, we'll put the link in the notes here. Let's definitely continue. Let's 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 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 looking fantastic. We're gonna have a we're gonna have a great time. And I'm really excited for the conversation. You're saying some folks Heisman does because of our support of RFK.

That did happen. And specifically the fact that that's really open minded. Yeah. And then there were other folks who were insulted by things said about them by people on the show. Do you guys want to hear about the the nano grav? Yes, I came out yesterday. Okay, I'll cover this one real quick.

Wait, what about this like slow Hummer that we're all getting? What is that? That's it. It's a slow Hummer. Exactly. So tell me, are you talking about like the new h3 EV, but it only goes up to 50 miles per hour? What is that? The new Hummer the new HV, you know, the event, Evie, they're coming out with an EV of that.

Oh, you're kidding. Hilarious. Yeah. It's like a great troll. I remember when Schwarzenegger got the Hummer back in the 90s. And I was like, Oh my God, he's amazing. I can drive on your car. And then the Hummer was the cool car to drive. Yeah. And then it became like, ah, it's a lot of manly car.

Okay. So yesterday, a paper was published by an international scientific consortium. This group is called nano grav. And they've been using a series of instruments to measure pulsars, including a 500 meter radio telescope array, which allows them to see what's so funny. No, I just had like three Uranus jokes in one sentence and I had to stop myself.

I get them out now. Go ahead. I'm muting. I'm muting. The nano grav data that was released is 15 years of data from pulsars. 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 1000s 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 the theory that 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 a the middle of a black hole, space itself collapses in and collapses down.

And what happens is space and time gets 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, 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.

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 slowly warped and slowly elongated, slowly compressed.

But it's a really fascinating picture of the universe. Over time, as scientists 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. If you take a little time and think about it, it's super exciting. It's getting a lot of press coverage today and encourage us 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. Number one, why does it matter? And number two, any theories here of what we might discover, you know, if this, you know, 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 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 the 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 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. 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.

So it deepens our understanding of the universe, but there's not like the universe. Yeah, which is amazing and interesting, but and it validates and proves the general theory of relativity, which if you think about the 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.

You know, 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 did you see the three body problem trailer? Yeah, it looks amazing. It looks amazing. Amazing. What a great what a great can't believe we have to wait so long.

I hate it when they put out trailers. So how long when is it coming out for next year? Oh, wow. Yeah. Oh, I still haven't seen your movie. The guys your movie that you wanted me to see. Which one better try everything everywhere all at once. I got a better movie for you.

I got a great poll for you. It's on pay per view right now the movie called about Blackberry. It tells the story of black. Oh, I heard it's like an independent film. It is awesome. I just reviewed it on this week and startups. It's called just on his Blackberry called Blackberry.

Yeah, I think this has been episode amazing. 135 of the all in pod. I really appreciate our my god, I time together just enough time to get you back to your Nirvana concert. Oh, 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. Now I think that that's from might be a might be a sax's hair because he looks like did you get a cut sax? He got a cut. Did you cut it? No, you broke our sex.

I got a mild sloughing. Show us the flop. Let's go. Let's see. Oh, boo. I mean, it's still crazy. Sure. What's good? You gotta just keep growing it out, man. Jake, how you want to take us out? You do a better outro. All right, everybody for David sacks, the architect coming at you.

Z 100 Morning Zoo. Shabbath Poly hop to two for Tuesday's tears for fears coming up and free bird with the science project. All right, traveling back in time with David free bird to for Tuesday, Jackson Brown. Here we go. Gotcha. That's the world's greatest moderator. I think I'm the world's greatest moderator.

I could do my NPR voice if you like. Do it. All right, closing us out here. Episode 135 PCR W 92.3 the sound of Santa Monica this Sunday at the Venice farmers market two for one on the organic milk. 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 free bird deeply going into science and Chamath Polly hop at on wealth disparity for everybody. I am your host here at KCRW. Jason Calican is the world's most moderate moderator. We'll see you next time. KCRW I love you guys.

Let your winners ride. Rain Man David Sacks. We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Let your winners ride. Besties are gone. We need to get Merck. you