SPEAKER_00: This is going to be a feisty episode. Is it? Two of us are on Greenwich Mean Time. Two of us are on Pacific. J. Cal's still asleep in his head.

SPEAKER_01: I'm good, actually.

SPEAKER_00: 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.

SPEAKER_09: Unless it offends...

SPEAKER_11: Still trying to get my invite for next week. Mums the word, Friedberg.

SPEAKER_13: Mums the word.

SPEAKER_14: Mums the word. We'll also enjoy sharing with you fantastic stories of opulence.

SPEAKER_17: Let's be neutral.

SPEAKER_16: 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.

SPEAKER_18: Has there been like an establishment takeover of the pod?

David Sacks: I mean, what's up with this intro? Yeah. Every argument they make against us, you're basically just conceding it's true.

SPEAKER_25: I know, exactly.

SPEAKER_19: From his 12th century Mediterranean castle, Il Duce, Chamath Palihapitiya. Welcome, Chamath.

SPEAKER_16: How is the Mediterranean diet treating you? Blue. Blue.

SPEAKER_29: Blue.

SPEAKER_16: 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.

SPEAKER_36: What'd you say? SPVs. Oh, SPVs.

SPEAKER_38: Gentle SPVs. Yeah. That's the thing with certain STDs where once you are king, you're going to be king for life. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_49: TheSyndicate.com. Yeah, thank you.

SPEAKER_51: You've been doing, you said five shows a week lately. Your voice is shot.

SPEAKER_53: My voice is starting to go, so I asked you if you'd moderate and you thankfully said yes.

SPEAKER_16: 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.

SPEAKER_55: That's funny. I still haven't watched the episode that I missed.

SPEAKER_58: You're not interested, huh? He's like, I'm not on the show. I'm not interested.

David Sacks: If I didn't have time to participate, I don't really have time to watch it.

SPEAKER_51: 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 know, 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 Prigozhin, 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 that point, there was supposedly a negotiation. The president of Belarus got involved and Prigozhin decided to step down. Putin said, I'm not going to persecute or I'm not going to prosecute you for these crimes. He was given immunity and it was announced that all the members of the Wagner Group were given the option of returning home or joining the Russian military and the Wagner Group was going to be dissolved. Sachs, maybe you can kind of give us your summary of the events that took place and then we'll talk a little bit about the interpretation

SPEAKER_64: of what we think this means for the conflict in Ukraine.

SPEAKER_65: 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 counteroffensive was not succeeding, that it was, in fact, failing. I think there's abundant evidence for that, which hasn't changed. Even CNN had written an article basically supporting the idea that the counteroffensive was not living up to what had been promised. And so everyone was in the comments saying that my take had basically aged like milk and this armed rebellion or mutiny by Purgosian 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 counteroffensive now overselling this mutiny as something that would bring down the Russian regime and the war. And of course, that did not happen. It was certainly a highly unusual event. And I've read takes now from every different corner of the internet about what it was and what took place. 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 Purgosian. 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 Purgosian. 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, Jurasimov. 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

SPEAKER_21: 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 Purgosian 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 Sir Vykin, including all the regional governors of members of the Duma and other important figures in Russian society. And there wasn't a single person willing to publicly support Turgosian. 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 Turgosian'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,

SPEAKER_65: 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 going to have to answer to his various

SPEAKER_21: allies and supporters about how stable his regime is. I think ultimately Putin has ended up in a place of consolidating Russian society behind him. Like I said, there were no power centers that supported this mutiny. They all rallied to Putin's defense and the people of Russia, even though Purgosian is a popular figure 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... Who's poll? Well, like Lovato Center, which is an independent polling agency, for example. These are not the Russian regime's own numbers. No, no, the point is,

SPEAKER_69: would you say in a poll that you don't support Putin?

SPEAKER_21: Well, I don't know how Lovato 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.

SPEAKER_71: Nick, can you pull up the song? I'd like to see this, please.

SPEAKER_72: Coming at you, 95.5. I love Russia. Oh my God, this is some serious propaganda.

SPEAKER_76: Wow, yeah.

SPEAKER_79: I mean, that looks like a pretty good party.

SPEAKER_21: 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

SPEAKER_82: who doesn't like it. That's basically the lyrics of it. How do you get

SPEAKER_85: invited to that party?

SPEAKER_82: I got so many jokes,

SPEAKER_85: I'm not going to make them. I know, you got to be careful. Be careful here, folks.

SPEAKER_86: You got to be careful here. 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.

SPEAKER_21: 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 Purgosian'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.

SPEAKER_51: 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 Pregosian 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 I'm 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?

SPEAKER_97: I think stepping back here

SPEAKER_53: 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 going to,

SPEAKER_97: they are much more motivated. I wouldn't believe any of this propaganda, but this is a bit of a raw shock test. Everybody on the left got on Twitter and said, this is the end of Putin. Everybody's going to rise up in the streets and they overplayed that, 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 going to take the other side, Preberg. They're going to 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 going to answer, do you like Putin? Do you support Putin on a survey? Can you imagine? 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- Did you go to the party though if you were invited? Well, I mean, are there going to be potential LPs there? Last week,

SPEAKER_101: it's just a joke, folks.

SPEAKER_97: But stepping back, if you look at modern-day dictators, they tend to stay in power for about three decades. Putin's in his third. And I think we're going to see in the next 10 years, Putin lose power and he's going to be out of power. And when we look back on it, it's going to be one of two causes. It's going to be either cancer, which, you know, the speculation is he's had cancer and that's why he disappears from view because he might be getting treatment. And we'll look back on us that the end of his power will be his control of Russia, which he controlling these, controlling through violence and fear of violence and threat of violence is exhausting. You have to be paranoid and that's why it generally doesn't last that long, especially compared to the West where we have a democracy and people last about a half decade. He will look back on his end, which will be in the next 10 years, this is the biggest blunder he's ever made and this is a really crazy sign that somebody

SPEAKER_104: 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 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

SPEAKER_106: this wasn't a big deal and Putin's, you know, now consolidated power and everybody's in the street dancing, that's just not true. This is just simply not true.

SPEAKER_109: I never said it wasn't a big deal.

SPEAKER_106: I wasn't talking about you. I was talking about the mids on Twitter. I never mentioned your name.

SPEAKER_51: I think that your point, J. Cal, 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.

SPEAKER_80: I think there are a couple of takeaways here. First of all, they've had polling of opinion in Russia

SPEAKER_65: for a long time and like I said, when the polls go the way that the Western sources want, no one questions their accuracy.

SPEAKER_21: Again, I don't know exactly the methodology, but Lovato Center is an independent pollster that Western publications do trust. I hear them repeat it over and over again and, you know, 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, you know, I certainly don't like the war. 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's statements since around February. He's been vocally criticizing the Ministry of Defense, specifically Shoigu 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, you know, violence potentially in 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.

SPEAKER_51: Okay, Chamath, any point of view shift for you coming out of the Pregosian event of the last week on Russia, Ukraine?

SPEAKER_123: I mean, I want to know how much he got paid to stop marching towards Moscow.

SPEAKER_38: Yeah. I mean, it is like a mob boss, right? It must have been a lot.

SPEAKER_16: Not bad for a guy that was, what, Putin's caterer a few years ago, right? He started

SPEAKER_127: a catering business. Guy spent nine years in jail. This guy's like- He spent 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.

SPEAKER_65: 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,

SPEAKER_21: 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, he 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. Saks, if he was

SPEAKER_137: a Sopranos captain, who would he be like? Phil Leotardo? Does like 20 years in jail, comes out?

SPEAKER_21: I think it's sort of like John Gotti going against Michael Corleone. Yeah. I think that Putin is sort of the very cold, rational guy with everything in his head who's very calculated and doesn't reveal much. Right. More like a Michael Corleone, whereas I think that Pogosian is emotional, erratic. He's been saying these statements for months here, which I don't see how they could possibly lose cannon. 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 Pogosian might topple Putin and become the custodian of Russia's thousands of nuclear weapons. And, you know, 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 fine pan and into the fire. You know, I've been saying since the beginning of the war that this fantasy that Putin's going to be toppled by a palace coup and you're going to replace him with Navalny or something like that or we're going to get Gorbachev 2.0. I said that was always unrealistic and what you're much more likely to end up with is an even worse dictator or or a hardliner. And I think that is what would have happened if Pogosian 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 going to put more pressure on Putin to conduct the war in a more violent way. I know that people already think that the war is horrible and violent but Putin has been criticized by hardliners on his right for basically making the war a special military operation instead of an all-out war. And Pogosian, 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 at the end of not only his regime but probably his life in Russia and I think he's going to do whatever it takes to win this war. And I think you could see now over the next few months a full mobilization in Russia and I think that this could lead us to the next point of escalation in this war. That is if this Ukrainian counter-offensive 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 counter-offensive succeeds you will see the next level of escalation.

SPEAKER_51: So Sachs 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

SPEAKER_121: supremacist action. You know I'm just thinking

SPEAKER_143: about this like there's a famous Sun Tzu quote the supreme art of war is to subdue

SPEAKER_53: 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

SPEAKER_102: we have to avoid these things and then that's where Sachs and I are in alignment.

SPEAKER_16: Sun Tzu Kalikainis 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

SPEAKER_51: I realized over the last week how little I know about the Russian military conflict with Ukraine and I appreciate Sachs'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

SPEAKER_147: reverse discrimination in 1974 and sued the University of California and eventually it became a landmark US Supreme

SPEAKER_51: Court case Regents of the University 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 Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself because she previously served on Harvard's board of overseers all the conservative as they're 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 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 Timoth I'd love your read I

SPEAKER_59: both expected this

SPEAKER_150: to happen I

Chamath Palihapitiya: think it's probably important to maybe set up a more practical

SPEAKER_150: 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 academic decile and so what it basically shows in a nutshell is an African American student in the 40th percentile of the academic index is actually more likely to get in than an Asian student at the 100th percentile

SPEAKER_127: and so that at the core is

SPEAKER_51: sort of that means that the Asian American student had better scores than 99% of other applicants and still didn't get in right

SPEAKER_127: right so you have to go back I think

SPEAKER_150: 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 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 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 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 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 you so that's the first order derivative so you know the thought are

SPEAKER_59: those because those aren't constitutionally protected whereas equality based on race

SPEAKER_162: but it becomes a huge headache for these schools right and so you're going to be fighting these admission

SPEAKER_150: standards constantly changing and so if you're not going to let you know a bunch of poor minority black and brown kids people I think that that's going to paint that school in a very bad light

SPEAKER_162: so I think that social

SPEAKER_171: white typically white

SPEAKER_162: 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 social stigma perspective and I have a solution for this

Chamath Palihapitiya: 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

SPEAKER_162: 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 the program is that you want to come up with will those get challenged and will those companies have to change and my friends thoughts on that were that yes that those would also change and that's going to have private enterprise and how they approach this stuff and how DEI stuff works and frankly downstream how ESG works because all these ESG checkboxes now some of them will actually become illegal

SPEAKER_150: right so I think the importance of decision can't be really understated it's going to the changes will be slow and then they'll be fast they'll first touch higher ed but then I think they'll touch private enterprise

SPEAKER_147: Chamath what is the right ethics and values I mean

SPEAKER_51: 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

SPEAKER_64: should include racial diversity in admissions and universities

SPEAKER_176: yeah this is like the ultimate or

SPEAKER_147: is the values about equality of opportunity for everyone regardless of race right you're

SPEAKER_177: asking the exact right question I think that's because I'm the

SPEAKER_178: world's greatest moderator but yeah doing

SPEAKER_177: a solid job so far and this creates a lot of cognitive dissonance for people right because you you really

SPEAKER_53: want to believe that the world is a meritocracy and you know if you were to take other pursuits in

SPEAKER_179: 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 civil rights act was what 1964 or 65 like we really want to see everybody achieve here so I think you have to pause for a second and say well if the goal is you want to see you know black Americans perform better and 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 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 and but even that does feel like there's many times in life when people will say things in corporate America like we have too many white guys in these positions we

SPEAKER_181: need we cannot hire another white guy so the reality of DEI 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

SPEAKER_16: I

SPEAKER_51: have 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 equality 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 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

SPEAKER_147: of all of that effort and some people aren't given the opportunity to have success during those 12 years

SPEAKER_51: 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 tougher time getting into the workforce so that is why it's a hard value question for me I don't have a great answer on this

SPEAKER_150: research did a study in 2019 that they published and what they found was that 43% so 43% of white students admitted to Harvard were athletes or legacy students or children of faculty and staff or had a relative that were donors to the school 43% wait it's rigged and then they found on top of that that 75% of those white students admitted from those four categories would have been rejected if they had been treated as a normal applicant so I think for all the people that are looking at all the black and brown kids that

SPEAKER_162: in 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

Chamath Palihapitiya: got an idiot son or daughter let's just be upfront and honest with everybody it costs $50 million to billion may be a reasonable trade off

SPEAKER_127: but at least it would be transparent and fair right this is an important free market question as

SPEAKER_51: well because these are private institutions they're privately funded not if they take

SPEAKER_189: federal dollars they're not

SPEAKER_51: 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

SPEAKER_00: 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

SPEAKER_51: and should the Supreme Court and should our constitution have a role in defining how private institutions make decisions about who gets it no

SPEAKER_154: Harvard could absolutely return all the federal funding the billions of dollars

SPEAKER_128: I

SPEAKER_132: know that you used up your speaking quota already well yeah I didn't want to butt in

SPEAKER_115: give him four of my points you get four of J. Kells minutes go ahead I give you four minutes so

SPEAKER_82: yeah two points I guess so on the legacy thing I agree with

SPEAKER_65: Jamath that we should get rid of it it's not meritocratic I think that college so they have to do it on their own and so look I think the legacy thing

SPEAKER_197: by the way that's the best gift you can

SPEAKER_65: 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

Chamath Palihapitiya: 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

SPEAKER_65: 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

SPEAKER_206: that's the distinction for you just to be clear and also there

SPEAKER_21: is a strong meritocracy opportunity argument on this and I think it's why that whole parents college admissions 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 the legacy thing needs to end one way or another I don't know exactly what the right legal

SPEAKER_193: implementation is

SPEAKER_179: I have two questions for the panel number one should you be able to say by geography hey

SPEAKER_53: listen we're Harvard or Stanford we want to have a representation of people from around the world so we're going

SPEAKER_181: to have the top three students from each country or you know by population however you do it you know mathematically come in so a little bit of geography because I did hear from one of these coaches that cost like six figures to get your kids into the college they 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

SPEAKER_150: 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

SPEAKER_162: 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

Chamath Palihapitiya: 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

SPEAKER_162: real question is what are you doing at the grade school and at the high school and at the preschool so that you

SPEAKER_214: help in the world two years

David Sacks: 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 for their own

SPEAKER_21: benefit and not for 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 number

SPEAKER_218: one two and three and the

SPEAKER_21: reason is because there's no competition and the unions run it for their own benefit how long do they shut down these

SPEAKER_51: for police is that right yeah we speak negatively about the effects of the teachers unions on our public education system and I think it's absolutely correct

SPEAKER_147: 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

SPEAKER_51: to protect me for my benefit

SPEAKER_228: help us share the point of view because we

SPEAKER_51: all have the strongly held point of view that the unions are destroying and eroding public education people have

SPEAKER_97: the right to form unions but what we all do is we are forced to be consumers

SPEAKER_179: of one educational product because of how we pay taxes in I 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

SPEAKER_53: a shout out to a and

SPEAKER_179: 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 the same they have this intensive summer program so before you go to college

SPEAKER_181: 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 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

SPEAKER_177: the Ivy League system you know needs to well it's not just Ivy's right let's

David Friedberg: not just pick on Harvard but it's like all the state schools institutions which we talk about institutions okay all institutions that receive federal funding

SPEAKER_181: 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

SPEAKER_239: way but yeah but

SPEAKER_181: 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 standardized tests and you might be an incredible virtuoso pianist so I think what is the criteria and making that

SPEAKER_240: criteria fair is what we all want and it feels tremendously unfair

SPEAKER_51: 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 is 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 your SAT in chemistry and art schools do not care as much how well you did in math and STEM 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

SPEAKER_147: trying to create a cookie cutter model for what the government says is 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

SPEAKER_51: set their own admissions criteria and create differential educational systems I

SPEAKER_150: 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 money endowment that would generate very low vol returns I think the problem with that is that that's not how the endowment at Harvard works they wouldn't necessarily make risk seeking investments in things like private equity and hedge funds and venture capital and to the extent they did they would just make much much much fewer much much smaller or

SPEAKER_136: Harvard endowment now so yeah it would be 10%

SPEAKER_51: can anyone tell me who the largest real estate owner is in San Francisco

SPEAKER_136: without looking on the

SPEAKER_51: internet oh no I know

SPEAKER_64: it's that art institute the academy of art university I knew

SPEAKER_246: this because they kept buying things and using them I think

SPEAKER_64: she used all the profit over the years to buy more real estate and she accumulated the largest real

SPEAKER_154: university or private or I mean a non-profit university

SPEAKER_16: 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

SPEAKER_51: including animation that's what I'm

SPEAKER_249: saying is it like RISD or is it like actually an art school oh

SPEAKER_147: no it's a great art school yeah academy of art

SPEAKER_00: anyway let's keep going so look speaking of stem making a big pivot away from art

SPEAKER_51: to AI 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 dollars that headline number is 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 dollars 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 as 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 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

SPEAKER_65: I think it's a reinforcement I mean the space is probably the hottest space we looked at this deal we had a small allocation in their next round they had a term sheet for a series B emergence was actually going to lead it and

SPEAKER_253: this is mosaic ML

SPEAKER_65: yeah yeah I don't know if I'm supposed to be telling you all this but this

SPEAKER_254: is great this is why people tune in breaking news

SPEAKER_21: they had a term sheet

SPEAKER_65: from

SPEAKER_21: emergence

SPEAKER_65: to raise 50 million at 400 post wow and we 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

SPEAKER_21: 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 right so I actually understand why someone would want to acquire or invest in this company like I said I think we wanted to invest and while we were sort of you know trying our best to

SPEAKER_74: say anything when

SPEAKER_65: 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 but yeah we heard it was in the ballpark of this like 1.2 1.3 billion dollar number which like you said because Databricks is a private stock maybe it's only

SPEAKER_21: half that or 750 or something like that who knows it's still a great deal but you know a lot of people are saying it's a crazy deal I don't think it's a crazy deal because before this happened after Naveen signed the term sheet for the series B an investor came over the top to invest at a 700 million dollar 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 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 we have 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 I mean remember

SPEAKER_51: Snowflake which competes with Databricks also acquired Neva which was founded by one of my colleagues a guy I work with and knew really great guy Sridhar for $150 million last month that deal was that 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 Jcal you guys agree or have a different point of view

SPEAKER_179: looking at it it's a it's a big number the headline number but I

SPEAKER_53: and

SPEAKER_179: that's one way to look at these acquisitions and I think you know probably three to ten million dollars per engineer for like really high end engineers is more the going price but if this is half that amount because they bought it with monopoly money in other words their

SPEAKER_181: 2021 price for their company it's great and then they get nailed it Freberg what's happening is this layer of

SPEAKER_179: 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 intelligence that previously was unable to be accessed and so I was I

SPEAKER_53: was just at Sequoia yesterday with or two days ago with the latest seven graduates from our accelerator we bring them meet with Sequoia

SPEAKER_179: and when we were at Sequoia I realized that of the seven companies four of them would not have been possible before these machine learning APIs were available and open AI is but one there are now in the companies I'm talking to they're they're trialing Freberg 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 and then analyze all 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

SPEAKER_181: board everywhere in 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 and they seem to have that in common

SPEAKER_51: 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 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 H100 as part of the build out but I think you've shared historically that these big funding rounds for these AI businesses that haven't necessarily even launched product yet don't make sense is

SPEAKER_154: about 30 odd thousand but the street price so

SPEAKER_150: 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 thousand so if you have a

Chamath Palihapitiya: 22,000 cluster of H100 that's about 900 million

SPEAKER_150: dollars of capex just that and then you know all the sundry stuff around it call it roughly plus 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

SPEAKER_128: that's what their

SPEAKER_150: chatbot is called Pi I

SPEAKER_191: think it's like hey pi dot com or something I think I did try it once and

SPEAKER_179: it was not memorable

SPEAKER_272: oh you mean po no not no no no personal

SPEAKER_179: 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

SPEAKER_137: it's not kind of how I like to work with the I use threads and

SPEAKER_191: I share threads with my team so I'm not a fan of this like you have one relationship with one assistant I

SPEAKER_150: buying buying a fixed plant of a slow cash generating business then maybe you know a bunch of that has some value so that's what stood out to me in 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

SPEAKER_51: do you think that that's an indication of more M&A to come and if so doesn't that justify the

SPEAKER_64: increased funding the increased valuation and the activity that we're seeing in the early stage with some of these businesses

SPEAKER_61: I

SPEAKER_51: 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 can sell to Ford and that software can be whether it's United Airlines or Expedia or Visa or whomever and that's why these companies are so critical in terms of enabling the transformation of industries with AI tooling and why getting AI tooling into their capability set is so critical right now

SPEAKER_154: it's important to note though guys

SPEAKER_150: that whenever you have the emergence of a new sector Sacks I think you 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 it's kind of like you guys

SPEAKER_162: remember when the optical networking craze hit and had these multi billion dollar acquisitions and where did they go

SPEAKER_150: they went nowhere they just disappeared

SPEAKER_65: 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 Gabura they put this together in preparation and part of the investment memo for Mosaic and I think to explain the point

SPEAKER_21: you were kind of making Freeberg like 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 give an example

SPEAKER_287: the idea

SPEAKER_21: would be that you know any employee in the company could ask questions to the 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 but I think enterprises want one at the level of the company intranet where employees could just ask questions and but they do not want to share their data with open AI that's like 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 piece of the stack you have to have the most prominent site for this called Hugging Face which already has something like I think a $2 billion valuation that's another like really crazy valuation to ARR multiple but Hugging Face has kind of 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 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

SPEAKER_16: so there'll be more M&A is your prediction which means more startup valuation booming more capital deploying

SPEAKER_51: there was a couple of articles this week and Chamath this is your red meat as much as Ukraine is Saxx 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

SPEAKER_184: 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

SPEAKER_51: 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 Baizu which you have talked about in the past was once valued at $22 billion and

SPEAKER_184: claimed to be India's most valuable startup is

SPEAKER_51: 75% I guess the question is overall are we still seeing this kind of turmoil in Silicon Valley from the ZERP era

SPEAKER_64: funding of startups in stark juxtaposition to the excitement and the frenzy around AI

Chamath Palihapitiya: it's a characteristic of the exact same thing meaning if you replaced

SPEAKER_150: AI with I don't know synthetic biology if you replaced AI with SAS this has all happened before I think it's important to identify what this is what

Chamath Palihapitiya: this is is that there aren't enough checks and balances and there are fundamentally people who are deeply inexperienced who are that person is ill equipped and unprepared why because they were the VP of XYZ 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 so what happens you don't even know how to

SPEAKER_150: ask the

Chamath Palihapitiya: excusable right so in the case of one of these companies and I've mentioned this before they approached us for financing

SPEAKER_162: and

Chamath Palihapitiya: when we asked

SPEAKER_162: for a data room we got a Google doc link to a spreadsheet now

Chamath Palihapitiya: there's no reasonable world in which a company is that unsophisticated when 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 and I think the thing that we do which

SPEAKER_162: 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

Chamath Palihapitiya: to get the money hired some person that checked 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

SPEAKER_162: right

Chamath Palihapitiya: 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 where are those now right so you name it 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 I think it is like 2.5% of all of the funds that are in pitch books over 800 of them have ever generated more than 3x in two funds so 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 so I don't know it's not very surprising in the end none of this is surprising

SPEAKER_179: the discipline of capital allocators and one of those key pieces of discipline is asking uncomfortable questions and doing uncomfortable diligence and you can trust people but you need to verify that is a key part of the job you can trust the founders but you have to verify that the data you have is correct the fact that SoftBank did this at incredible valuation and makes you unfit to serve in the job and I will do diligence and during that time period Freedberg I had many founders say to me you're asking for more diligence than the lead and this deal is closing and we are oversubscribed and I said okay

SPEAKER_181: and they said okay so you're not going to require this I said oh no we require this diligence we want to see your you know very basic stuff your bank statements your P&L we want to talk to give us a list of your first thousand give us a list of 500 customers from last month we'll give you five numbers we're going to talk to five random customers like to not participate in the due diligence process and when you look at companies a lot of times people will suspend disbelief you know this company by Joe I don't know a ton about it but it seems

SPEAKER_179: to have you know like an educational app like a company brilliant dot 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 and so people started giving valuations and this is the second part 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 and that was another mistake and you put those two things together not doing diligence and then just misvaluing of actual assets that's the cleanup work that's been that's going on right now and it takes years I mean it took decades for them to pinch Bernie Madoff it can take 10 know that the perfect returns were just not possible statistically so it takes time but they're picking these folks up everywhere Do Kwan got picked up in Montenegro the guy from Luna and it's going to take a decade to clean up all of the fraud

SPEAKER_292: in our space

David Sacks: I think this was sort of mentioned by Chamath but I think it needs to be a bigger point which is

SPEAKER_65: the influence of so when we write a check it's usually 10 15 20 million dollar check in a series A company that's like a big check for us we're really going to sweat that decision for SoftBank a 10 to 20 million dollar check in

SPEAKER_21: 100 billion dollar fund which is what they had it doesn't even make sense it's a waste of their managing 100 billion dollars and so the mistake when they make a mistake is 20 times bigger than it should be that should have been maybe a $10 million mistake not a $200 million mistake but their fund size forced them to 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 is 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

SPEAKER_82: so I don't know what happened here but

Chamath Palihapitiya: same thing with you Freberg I think you know and this may sound mean but it's like most of these people are just XYZ mid-level VPs from a startup and that's a great thing but it's not necessarily going to give you the gravitas especially if that's not what you are forced to do to help build that company and when push comes to shove inside of a boardroom or in the middle 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 and there has to be certain things that are controversial otherwise by definition that company isn't really even pushing the boundary so I just think that these are all skills that are poorly taught while you are building a business it is not the reason

SPEAKER_150: why you should have been in charge of allocating 50 and hundred million checks into companies that is just crazy town

SPEAKER_311: I love your point Sachs

SPEAKER_179: though about fund size dynamics are destiny right it really is and the

SPEAKER_53: optimal fund size for venture is somewhere between 250 and 600 million according to everybody who's been doing this for

SPEAKER_313: you know more than a decade or two and who's successful whether it's

Chamath Palihapitiya: 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 that the reason they go up is because you I traded off management fee in return for 30% carry and

SPEAKER_162: that turned out to be literally a multi billion dollar smart decision because I gave up tens of millions of dollars up front for back end now the back end could have gone to zero and maybe it still can

Chamath Palihapitiya: so who knows but you know most folks wouldn't do that they stack them all and they get the 2% and all of a sudden the profits don't matter which means the outcomes don't matter which means the diligence is perfunctory and it becomes a theatrical expose that you can use you know this sort of thin fig leaf you can point to LPs and say we did our work here give us more money for this next fund That's the rat race that the venture community is in and it's going to get played out in companies like IRL and Baiju's and a lot of these AI companies quite honestly

SPEAKER_154: The chickens

SPEAKER_168: have come home to roost for all the crypto investments Did you

SPEAKER_65: guys see there was some article that reported that fundraising for late stage funds is just like cratered dead So Insight was trying to raise a $10 billion fund Okay so 10% and then Tiger was trying to raise 12 they cut it to 6 and then they can only raise 2

SPEAKER_321: makes sense

SPEAKER_65: yeah so basically that's like a whatever 80 to 90% reduction in the size of these funds

SPEAKER_16: 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 and they're

SPEAKER_51: buying series A and they're buying Manchester United and they're buying distressed portfolios yeah and the there's a huge

SPEAKER_65: crunch there's a huge we've talked about before but there's a huge crunch in late stage financing it's only going to get worse over the next

SPEAKER_21: 18 months I yeah and then the other 40% let's say how many of them have a down round coming I

Chamath Palihapitiya: 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

SPEAKER_127: be about 1.1 X but it will be very massively distributed I think that is exactly right I would yeah

SPEAKER_330: everybody's getting their money back

SPEAKER_179: except if you don't have diversification yeah it's it's the I think the market is

SPEAKER_51: corner or do you want to yeah the three

SPEAKER_330: of us need to use the bathroom break so go ahead and

SPEAKER_336: just if you can just go do it we're gonna take a leak and we'll come back and make a joke you know I'm okay I'm gonna wrap so look it's been great it's been great being your

SPEAKER_341: host give us a science corner give us you don't hug me you don't

SPEAKER_342: embrace me you don't love my

SPEAKER_341: contributions

SPEAKER_150: 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

SPEAKER_56: will that's going viral right now he

SPEAKER_51: 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 often 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 to read that please and then I'll watch his clip and let's have a real 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 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 going to have a great time and I'm really excited for the conversation you're

SPEAKER_249: saying some folks Heisman does because of our support of RFK

SPEAKER_16: that did happen and specifically the fact that that's really

SPEAKER_349: open minded

SPEAKER_16: yeah and do you guys want to hear about the the nanograv release that came out yesterday okay I'll cover this

SPEAKER_197: one real quick wait what about this like slow Hummer that we're all getting what is that

SPEAKER_351: that's it it's a slow Hummer exactly

SPEAKER_352: 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

SPEAKER_341: is amazing I can drive over your car and then the Hummer was the cool car to drive yeah

SPEAKER_359: okay

SPEAKER_16: so yesterday a paper was published by an international scientific

SPEAKER_51: consortium this group is called nanograv and they've been using a series of instruments to measure pulsars including a 500 meter radio telescope array which allows them to see what's so funny

SPEAKER_363: no I just I had like three Uranus chunks in one sentence and I had to stop myself

SPEAKER_51: the nanograv 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

SPEAKER_147: 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 as 15 years worth of this data you can start to

SPEAKER_51: being compressed being pulled apart being pushed back together because of very large gravitational events happening around the universe and what that means that 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 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 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

SPEAKER_147: it provides a really interesting picture on the universe itself that all around us we have large masses that

SPEAKER_51: as humans will never kind of observe realize or feel ourselves but as part of the fabric and

SPEAKER_147: the underlying nature of our universe with space and time being slowly warped and slowly elongated slowly compressed and 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

SPEAKER_51: 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

SPEAKER_179: any theories here of what we might

SPEAKER_53: discover if this goes 10x or 100x in terms of the information we're getting

SPEAKER_147: 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

SPEAKER_51: the leftover heat from the formation of the universe when the big bang happened and the scientists figured out how to create really sensitive radio telescopes and put them in orbit and they started to observe the background radiation and what that showed us was the fingerprint of the universe the original structure of the universe that created ultimately all the galaxies super galaxies and then ultimately all the stars and the planets and everything that came

SPEAKER_147: from that this could

SPEAKER_51: actual structure of space itself and time itself looks like throughout the universe with the perturbations being driven by some very large massive super massive 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

SPEAKER_147: of data and over time that just gives us a better sense of what the overall structure of the universe looks like not

SPEAKER_51: 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

SPEAKER_97: This just deepens our understanding of the universe which is amazing and interesting

SPEAKER_51: things related to time travel there's a lot of things that people have theorized for decades about

SPEAKER_16: black holes and the warping of space time itself I'm not saying that any of this stuff is Did you

SPEAKER_99: see the three body problem trailer?

SPEAKER_16: Oh yeah it looks amazing It looks

SPEAKER_375: amazing What a great

SPEAKER_246: what a great

SPEAKER_375: can't believe we have to wait so long I hate when they put out trailers so How long

SPEAKER_376: when is it coming out

SPEAKER_375: next year Oh wow

SPEAKER_150: I still haven't seen your movie the guy's your movie that you wanted me to see

SPEAKER_246: Which movie is this? I'm going to try Everything Everywhere All at Once I got a better movie for you I got a great poll for you

SPEAKER_179: it's on pay-per-view right now a movie about Blackberry it tells the story of Blackberry it's like

SPEAKER_143: an independent film it is awesome I just reviewed it on called Blackberry yeah I think okay well guys

SPEAKER_16: this has been episode 135 of the All in Pod I really appreciate our time together

SPEAKER_306: I think we finished in just enough time to get you back to your Nirvana concert

SPEAKER_176: what's the background on this one is that a rival what is that what's that background

SPEAKER_386: what movie

SPEAKER_385: that's a black hole that's a black hole

SPEAKER_386: just a black hole okay

SPEAKER_385: I think that that's from might be

SPEAKER_115: what's going on with 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

SPEAKER_388: I got a mild fluffing

SPEAKER_389: show us show us the fluff let's go let's see oh boo

SPEAKER_375: I mean it's still crazy looks good you gotta just keep growing it out man J. Cal you want to take us out you do a better outro

SPEAKER_393: all right everybody for David Sax the architect coming at you

SPEAKER_395: Z100 Morning Zoo Shabbat Polly two for Tuesdays Tears for Fears coming up and Friedberg with the science project all right traveling back in time

SPEAKER_397: with David Friedberg two for Tuesday Jackson Brown the loadout here we go Jackson Brown gotcha

SPEAKER_395: I'm the world's greatest moderator Jason Calcans I'm the world's greatest moderator I can do my NPR voice

SPEAKER_402: if you like do it all right closing us out here episode 135 KCRW 92.3 the sound of Santa Monica this Sunday at the Venice Farmer's 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 Sax chiming in

SPEAKER_404: on the Republican GOP position which we did consider Friedberg deeply going into science and Jamal the Polly on wealth disparity for everybody I am your host here at KCRW Jason Calacan is the world's most moderate moderator

SPEAKER_410: we'll see you next time KCRW

SPEAKER_409: bye bye I can do any of these radio bits bye bye bye bye love you guys

SPEAKER_411: love you guys

SPEAKER_421: we need to get

SPEAKER_424: merch I'm going