Trump vs Harvard, Nvidia export controls, how DEI killed Hollywood with Tim Dillon

Did you call the DNC to clean up the roadkill, Jason, from last week?

I'm an independent, folks. I know these guys keep trying to paint me as a Democrat. I'm an independent critical thinker for life, but I do think Ezra's got a little PTSD. I haven't heard from Ezra.

Does the DNC have a roadkill cleanup crew?

You have an episode like that where I thought we made great progress on dealing with those issues and came to some consensus at the end, and then every single person, universally—if they're on the right, “Oh, my God, Sacks and Chamath destroyed them.” If they're on the left, the left's position was, “Oh, my God, Sacks and Chamath finally got destroyed.” Anyway, you decide for yourself. We're just here to talk about the most important news stories.

I think Chamath is right. I think they sent the same crew that cleans up the armadillos—

My God.

—on the road.

The armadillos.

All right. Okay.

There are a couple of armadillos left lying on the side of the road.

Pronouns everywhere. Pronouns everywhere—

Come on, Tim.

—on the highway, Jason. Pronouns are everywhere. People are just trying to clean up the pronouns. The shovels weren't big enough for all the pronouns.

Friedberg was on Jeopardy again, Celebrity Jeopardy, and I don't want to ruin it for you, but he had an amazing comeback victory. I'm really excited to have on the program today one of your favorites.

One of my favorites.

Robert F. Kennedy is with us again. RFK, how are you doing? I love the glasses. You're going to make America healthy again. Welcome to the program, RFK Jr.

We found out that autism is caused mainly by this show, and we're going to have to take action. We've started to look at the different causes, but we're thinking it is the debate between Ezra Klein and Larry Summers that is the real villain here.

You let your winners ride.

Rain Man gave it to us.

We open-sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you, Wesley.

Queen of quinoa.

Tremendous.

Yeah.

Everybody knows RFK is going to do a great job. He's a little bit weird, but his wife is a smoke show. I mean, an incredible wife. RFK Jr., incredible.

Not as good. Not as good as Tim.

Not as good. Okay. Well, I'm trying to land it. What am I supposed to do? I'm up against a professional.

So, welcome to the program—

Can you just moderate so that Tim—

Yeah. Okay. Here we go.

—can be a comedian?

Don't talk over me, okay? You just sit down, Chamath.

Here we go. Three, two—

Can you do what you did last week?

What's that? Moderate for narcissists who all want to add one more thing?

Yeah. Let the experts talk. You can kind of hang back.

Yes, of course. Sacks, now here comes Sacks: “Why can't I talk? Why can't I talk? Larry Summers got a word in ahead of me.”

Can you please pass the ball? Just pass the ball. Let's go.

Here we go.

Just pass the ball and get out of the way.

Let's welcome our guest, Tim Dillon.

Let the shooter shoot.

He's an incredibly funny comedian. He has a new special, I'm Your Mother, on Netflix. He's the host of the award-winning, now in its 10th year—

Yes.

—Emmy-winning, award-winning—

Oh.

—he's got the Emmy, he's got the Tony—

Yes.

—and he's still got to get the Grammy and the Oscar. The one, the only Tim Dillon of The Tim Dillon Show podcast.

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I feel like I'm having a Zoom meeting with DOGE to prove what I've done in the last week. This is the last thing someone at the EPA sees: just these 4 guys staring at a guy like Chamath and going, “Well, we tested some soil. I think we got those numbers back.” That's what it feels like here. I feel like I'm on trial, just trying to justify my stupid job.

Would you like 8 months' severance, or would you like to be fired today? Which would you prefer? You have both options on the table.

It would've been very funny if, as soon as Tim said that, Steve Bannon popped on.

Yeah.

Just—

Well, interestingly, I don't want to speak out of school or embarrass our guest, but—

Yeah.

—Tim was supposed to join us in February.

Yes.

And like the star he is, as I mentioned—

Yeah.

—he's got the Emmy, he's got the Tony, and he's still working on the Oscar and the Grammy. He was supposed to be with us, then he canceled at the last minute, and then we found out why.

Yeah.

He ditched us to spend the day with Steve Bannon and go on The Steve Bannon Podcast. Here they are.

That's true.

Here he is.

What is this?

Look at that. That's Steve Bannon and Timmy. They were—

I took a 23andMe test, and they didn't tell me my ethnicity, but the only thing that came back was that Steve Bannon was my father.

Yes. And here they are on The Cyclone in Brooklyn. Beautiful.

Oh, my God.

They went out to Little Italy. Little Italy, here. See.

By the way, they've done a pretty decent job—

And then, of course—

—wrapping up with a little hookah.

Or maybe something more was in there. I don't know. Do you think Bannon is 420-friendly? You tell us, Timmy. Is he 420—

I think anything—I mean, Bannon would tell you that if we could start farming marijuana in America and the American working class could share in the profits—

Oh.

—I think he'd be 420-friendly.

He would be 420—

Yeah.

—friendly. 420-friendly.

No Taiwanese marijuana, though. Nothing—you know, it's got to be American.

Can I give a quick shout-out? Ten months ago, Tim Dillon went on The Tucker Carlson Show. I think the title is “Disney Boomers and the Creepy Corporations That Pretend to Love You.” It was really one of the best pieces of content I watched all of last year.

Thank you.

It's incredible. The whole thing, end to end—

Two hours well spent. I would encourage everybody to watch it. It's timeless content, actually. Really good cultural observation at the moment. It's really good.

Two white guys talking in a garage in Maine.

It seems he has a certain way. I went on and did it there. He has a way of just slipping you into this state of comfort. All of a sudden, I just started talking about all the money I'd lost on Square.

He's great. He's great at it.

It was GHP [?].

He's great at it.

He's really great at it.

It's like Megyn Kelly's great at it, too. I just did her thing, and she does it at her house. I'd just show up, and she's sitting behind the desk, and she goes, “Hi.” You sit down, and then she goes, “So your mother's a schizophrenic.” Immediately, you start crying to Megyn Kelly. They're just good.

Yeah.

They know what they're doing.

They know what they're doing.

Rufe Jim wears this betting flow [?].

1. The H20 Ban Tightens Controls

Let's get to the docket. H20s banned. The U.S.-China trade war has been escalating. On Monday, the White House informed NVIDIA that it was putting an indefinite export restriction on NVIDIA's H20 chips to China. In this filing, NVIDIA said it expected a $5.5 billion hit to quarterly earnings. The stock dropped 6%. For those of you who don't know, H20 is essentially the weaker version of the H100. It was designed to comply with these export restrictions on AI chips and allow NVIDIA to sell something into China. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was visiting China today. He told Chinese state media, quote, “The China market is very important to us.” Sacks, you're here. I think you got some official information for us on this.

What’s the story here? Wasn’t this supposed to be the chip that was made for China?

In a sense. There is a long history to this.

First of all, to be clear, we’re not talking about tariffs. We’re talking about export controls, and the export controls are designed to prevent certain sensitive technologies—technologies that could have a dual use, potential military as well as consumer applications—from going to China.

This goes all the way back to 2019. The first Trump administration placed a ban on extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment going to China. This is the key technology in the printing of transistors on the silicon wafer in the semiconductor manufacturing process, and there’s only 1 company in the world that makes these machines. They cost like $200 million. It’s called ASML, and it’s a company in the Netherlands.

In any event, the first Trump administration prevented these machines from going to China, which I think, in hindsight, was a really farsighted decision. If it weren’t for that, China might today be dominating global manufacturing of semiconductors, and their inability to get that sort of lithography equipment definitely put a dent in their plans.

Subsequent to that, in 2022, the Biden administration started adding leading-edge chips to the export control list, like you said, the H100. NVIDIA then designed a new chip that was basically a version of the H100, but they reduced the amount of FLOPs, or computational power, just below the thresholds so they could continue selling it to China. That was called the H800.

The Biden administration then added the H800 to the export control list in 2023, so NVIDIA developed the H20, which again is kind of like a nerfed version of the H100. It just has less computational power.

I think the issue is that FLOPs isn’t the only criterion by which you can measure the power of a chip. There’s also now memory bandwidth, and in the new paradigm of reinforcement learning and test-time compute, memory bandwidth actually matters more than the amount of FLOPs. If you look at the memory bandwidth on the H20, it actually has 20% more memory bandwidth than the H100. So I think there’s a view that this chip is just frankly too good.

Hmm.

My response to people who don’t think we should be restricting this is: Are you against export controls in general, or do you just think that we’re drawing the line in the wrong place here? I’ve heard folks like our friends Bill Gurley and others say that we’re making a mistake.

I think the question for those people is: Would you sell them everything? If China wanted to buy the latest NVIDIA chip, the GB200, would you sell that to them? Would you sell them 1 million of those? Would you sell them 5 million if they’re willing to pay a premium?

Hmm.

It seems to me that at some point you have to say that some technologies are just too sensitive to be sold to China. Then the question is just: Are you drawing the line in the right place?

Let me bring Friedberg in on that. Friends of the pod, like Gavin Baker, have said these tariffs and these types of bans are going to essentially guarantee that America will lose AI. Gurley has this position as well: We’re now going to force China to make its own chips. Necessity will be the mother of invention, and it’s going to escalate. We’d be better off just selling them these instead of the latest ones.

What’s your take on that—that this will be the—

Well, I think this is the critical—

The inspiration for them to build their own NVIDIA?

It’s an important question. Last year, China announced and began a $37 billion investment in developing its own 3-nanometer chip technology.

The EUV lithography systems that Sacks is referencing require these wavelengths of light at about 13.5 nanometers. The previous technology was like 200-plus nanometers, so these are very, very small wavelengths of light that you have to be able to manipulate in a very discrete way to print circuits that are just 3-nanometer scale.

It turns out that last year, China made a claim that this investment they had made was starting to pay off, and they had developed their own EUV system. Their big semiconductor company is called Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, or SMIC, in China.

They launched a 7-nanometer chip with Huawei in its Mate 60 Pro, which is sort of like its iPhone competitor in China. They’re proclaiming that they’ve already got this EUV technology. From what I understand—and Sacks would know better than I—it sounds like there was a lot of reverse engineering and workarounds of existing technology in order to deliver that system.

Got it.

But they may now already be investing in and developing their own system. So, JCal, I think they’re doing it either way.

Got it.

I think they’re going to invest in and build their own EUV and chip-manufacturing capacity either way. The question is, does this slow them down or limit their ability on the application or AI layer, holding them back for some period of time?

Obviously, it accelerates it because they have no choice but to. It accelerates their commitment to it.

So, Tim, you’ve been talking about these EUV technologies and the 200-nanometer one specifically during—

It’s my entire special.

It’s on your latest special, yeah.

It’s a little crazy that you’d rip me off like this. My entire special is about lithography.

Yeah.

That’s the hour that I do. I’m of the mind that if you give a man a chip, he makes 1 semiconductor or a few, but if you teach a man to make a chip, he makes multiple semiconductors and invades Taiwan. So that’s where I am with this.

Yeah, it feels like it.

I think we should keep them dependent. Keep selling it to them.

Yes, because—

Keep selling it to them. Treat it like Percocet.

You understand how this works.

Yes.

If somebody becomes addicted to the good stuff, then they come back. You don’t want to give them too much, because they hide.

And you hide a little. You backdoor the technology with a little surveillance and stuff. Have some fun.

You know, that’s been done before.

Sure. Backdoors all the time. Put it into everything.

Yeah, you backdoor the technology, a little surveillance capability. You slip it in there.

Yeah. Chamath, what are your thoughts coming around the horn here? You were talking publicly about this, and obviously you’ve got Groq, so you’re in the space with chips. Does this, net-net, at the end of the day, slow them down, or slow them down in the short term and speed them up in the long term?

I think that the technology they need is extremely nontrivial, and I do think that it actually slows them down quite a bit if they don’t have access to it. Can I just take a step back and up-level this?

Sure.

2. China Targets AI Dominance

I think in 2017, the State Council of China published this plan, and they were incredibly transparent and honest. They said, “This plan is for China to become a global leader in AI by 2030.”

It said, “By 2020, we need to have made iconic advances. By 2025, we should be a major engine of the industry, and by 2030, they should occupy the commanding heights in AI technology.”

So why is that important? To be honest with you, I think the real problem that we have is that NVIDIA is not doing what is in the best interest of the United States.

Oh.

David mentioned this. When the U.S. banned the sale of the top-end GPUs, the A100 and the H100, they quickly introduced the A800 and H800. What does that mean? It was just a chip that was basically the same. They slightly reduced the data-transfer speed so that it went under the export-control threshold, but it was still really usable.

Then, late last year, they introduced this thing called the H20, which was explicitly designed for China and to be compliant with U.S. rules at the time. Again, it gives these guys substantial performance.

So what do you have? You have a 2017 plan that they’ve been executing against, which is to say, “We want to dominate this space,” and you have an American company that has been working around the guidelines at every turn to try to land silicon in the hands of China.

Then you would say, “Well, maybe there’s not that much going into China.” Nick, can you throw up the chart that I sent you about NVIDIA’s revenue composition?

Let’s just call a spade a spade, guys. I think we can all do the math. About 47% of all of NVIDIA’s revenue goes to China and Chinese-related countries. When you peel back this onion, I think what you will find is a whole raft of companies that were stood up to buy these NVIDIA GPUs, essentially acting as a way station for China.

I think that is the big problem, because it doesn’t mean that it was just these chips that David and his colleagues put on an export-control list.

It was every kind of chip, and now it explains every single time we have an advance in the United States. How is it that Alibaba shows up with something incredible, and DeepSeek shows up with something better? At every turn and at every step of AI, they are at the same rate or one step ahead, and I suspect it's because these chips are being used in very sophisticated ways behind the scenes. I think that's the issue we need to address.

So just to be clear, the insight you have here, the prediction is people are selling these to Taiwan, they're selling them in Singapore—

I think it's more—

…Hong Kong—and it's a group that are zipping them over to mainland China or letting them use them.

I don't know if you saw, but I believe there was a report that there were a couple of Singaporeans who were arrested for actually trying to bring the chips into China. I don't think it's necessarily that. I think what happens is you have some entity that springs up—

Acme Corporation—

…Acme—AcmeCorp.com. They show up in Bhutan, Cambodia, Vietnam, or Singapore, and they provide a PO, a purchase order, to NVIDIA for $300 million, $500 million, or $800 million. What do you think NVIDIA's going to do? They're going to think, “Well, this is a legitimate Singaporean entity. I'm going to sell them the chips, whatever they want. It checks all the boxes.”

Hmm.

And they look away, and what we now need to figure out—

Oh, it's a big allocation. Yeah.

—is what happens once those chips get delivered. It is the only explanation for this. You don't have this requirement for this number of GPUs for those end markets. There is only one end market—

I will say, Chamath, that's an explosive allegation. Sacks, what do you think of his theory more broadly?

I think it is a fact that there have been both legal and illegal attempts to evade the U.S. export controls. That is true, and there are a number of companies that have done it. For example, last year there was a case where TSMC was discovered to have produced something like 3 million chips that went into the Huawei Ascend 910C chips. I think there were something like 3 million dies that went into the Huawei Ascend chips.

Hmm.

And I think they're being fined for that. Again, this is all public information. They claim that they thought it was for a company called, I think, SoftCo. It's basically a Bitcoin ASIC company.

Hmm.

Nonetheless, this did happen. So there have been attempts to set up shell companies to circumvent the export controls, and it is a very big problem.

Tim, what's your—what do you think more broadly about what Trump is doing with this trade war in China? Any takes on China, Taiwan, and just how Americans should look at this? Maybe we have to buy some more high-quality products. Maybe we don't get things on Temu as cheaply with these $850 exemptions, et cetera?

3. Trump's Trade War Rolls Out Chaotically

I think roughly Trump's instincts are correct. The way that the tariffs rolled out seems to be incredibly chaotic. I think that's a huge problem with a lot of what the Trump administration does. They seem to have the correct instincts, but they have a very sloppy rollout. Everything's a hard launch. Everything's incredibly—I don't know that things are messaged the right way.

The whole DOGE thing was a little bit of a fiasco because the messaging seemed off. Nobody was really out talking about what they were doing and why they were doing it. I don't know how well this works. You have a very integrated global economy. You guys know more about that than I do. Are you able to unwind that? And if you do, you have to unwind it in certain areas, and in certain areas you're going to have to allow things to probably remain relatively stable and consistent, right?

If you listen to Ray Dalio, he talks about a disaster coming from monetary policy, right? The whole unwinding of these economic and political structures happening at once. I don't know. I think Americans do overconsume a lot of crap.

Yes.

I think cheap goods aren't necessarily the highest organizing principle of a life. I think people have been sold the idea that cheap goods are more important than having a stable, functioning job and family. I think the gig economy has been sold to Americans as a way to offer them freedom and really chaos at the expense of the stability that used to come with a job with benefits that you—

Hmm.

—but the other component to that is we have to make sure that we don't have skyrocketing prices that completely decimate people either. So I think you need to find a balance. I want to see my friends work in factories. I want them to get hurt. I want to release the safety standards. I want child labor. Children are terrorists, many of them.

Yeah.

They start fights in malls. They have flash mobs. They run around Chicago trying to kill people who are just trying to have shellfish towers on the river. So yes, children should work. My friend should work in a plastics factory.

Hmm.

DoorDash is a horrible job. You lose a finger at a factory, it's a story. Delivering burritos is hell. Driving Uber—all these horrible, degrading things we make people do—

Hmm.

—and then tell them it's great.

Yes.

You should destigmatize being an electrician, a plumber, or a contractor. All these things that, when I was growing up, they'd point to a guy doing construction and go, “You're going to do that if you don't do your homework.” And then the people that did their homework are all bankrupt, and that construction guy is—

—is killing it.

He's doing pretty well. And so what if he went to January 6th? He went there peacefully. But the whole thing is, I think you need to figure out how to reintroduce the idea that this gig economy—

Hmm.

—where people surf from one unfulfilling nightmare to the next should be rethought.

Not as good.

Yeah.

Yes. Better to be in a factory losing a finger in the field—

Can I ask a question?

—building something up.

Who, in David's estimation, when you're talking about these companies that are set up to get these chips that evade export controls, do you think is setting those companies up? Is that the Chinese government? Is that an intelligence agency doing that? Who would be setting those companies up? Is it people who are interested purely in profit and are then selling those chips? That's super interesting.

Well, I think you have to ask the question, cui bono? Who benefits?

Right.

I think clearly the shell companies, the front companies, are set up by either the Chinese government or entities in China to evade the export controls because ultimately they want the chips. However, I think there is also a problem that Lenin described: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang ourselves.” I do think there are a lot of Western companies that will look the other way or turn a blind eye and just haven't been enforcing the rules as religiously as they should because it's profitable not to.

This is where I do think that the U.S. government has to be pretty tough. If we're going to have export controls in the first place, I know there are some people who don't think we should have them, but I do. I don't think we should let China have access to our leading-edge AI technology. We have to make sure that the export controls are effective, and that means there has to be some cracking down in order to make that happen.

Part of the crackdown is that we have to define the boundary lines in a more effective way, with fewer loopholes so that companies can't legally take advantage of those loopholes. But we're also going to need more monitoring, more inspection, and more enforcement. This is one of the few areas of the government that I actually think needs more resources.

I think Elon and DOGE have identified many areas of the government that are massively overstaffed, but this is one area where there's an agency inside the Department of Commerce called BIS that actually has to do all of this monitoring, inspections, and enforcement. I actually think they're understaffed relative to the importance of this particular task.

Let's have a thought starter for a second, guys. Do you think that if 47% of all of the AI capability and horsepower is being shipped to 3 Asian countries, where do you think the apps that require that amount of horsepower live? Is there a Cursor of Bhutan that we did not know? Is there a great shopping app in Cambodia that's come out of nowhere that's AI-powered? I think the answer is no, so we already know what the answer is.

The question is, this is a case where you have plausible deniability, right? I sell something to a Singaporean-registered company—plausible deniability. What am I supposed to do? You can't expect me to audit it. I think that's what NVIDIA's answer will be to this question, but what is the real expectation?

Hmm.

Let's flip it on its head. Last week, in retaliation for tariffs, China constrained the supply of rare earths outside of China, right? Leaving China—

You had certain factory lines that just had to stop on a dime, right? So they're clearly in a position to understand their supply chain, who benefits or who doesn't benefit and can be hurt by constraining supply, and they're able to affect that. At a minimum, the United States should have a mechanism to understand it.

Whether they do it or not should be up to the powers that be that are bigger than the 4 of us or the 5 of us, but that's my point: It is implausible that if you did 1 or 2 layers of work, you would not find that most of this traffic is being used by Chinese organizations. That may be okay, and that's a decision that the United States government should make, but it's something that should be disclosed to them somehow.

I think if you look at the composition of revenue for Nvidia, it is inconceivable that there's a bunch of Asian AI apps that are just crushing it so hard—

No, no, it's so obvious what's happening there. We don't need to guess. Taiwan and Vietnam do not have the need for that many domestically. They're obviously flipping them to someone, right? It's a given that some percentage of those are being resold.

Hey, Friedberg, you were on Jeopardy! Friedberg went to the next round. I wanted to get Tim in on the Jeopardy! thing.

Wait, is this the outro to that?

You should've done a more broadly accessible topic, like Harvard—

No, the chips are great.

—to begin with.

I like the chips.

You like that, Tim?

I learned something. The plausible deniability is interesting. It's like the banks that dealt with Jeffrey Epstein, and I know it's a sore topic because he was the fifth man on this show. RIP him, we miss him. But the show has never been the same.

He would've never been with us.

He would've been phenomenal on the show. Let's just say—

He would've crushed it.

Yeah, he would've been good on the show.

Yes.

He would've been good on the show.

Clearly.

So what's going on? Harvard, are we selling that to China? I'm for that.

Yes. Well, there's been a donnybrook, if you will, Tim, between Trump and Harvard.

Yeah. China's too smart to buy Harvard. They know it's a scam.

That's a good point.

Okay, here we go. I just spoke like a true Stanford guy. On March 31, 3 federal agencies announced they were reviewing $9 billion in multi-year federal grants and $256 million in contracts that went to Harvard: 3 agencies—Education, Health, and the GSA.

This past Friday, April 11, the group sent a letter to Harvard's president and the head of Harvard Corporation, laying out a series of changes. The White House is demanding merit-based hiring and admissions—staff, admissions, students, all that good stuff. Cancel all your DEI programs. No more DEI. Reform international admissions. No more admitting students who are, quote, “hostile to American values.” Increase viewpoint diversity across all departments and abolish admissions practices that served as an ideological litmus test.

Harvard's president, Alan Garber, said he would not comply. Later that day, the White House responded by freezing $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts. They now want to take away Harvard's tax-exempt status, which would be absolutely insane. It's happened once before, actually, in the 1970s. Bob Jones University in South Carolina was doing outwardly racist stuff, and the IRS, according to CNN, is looking into this.

Your thoughts, Chamath? Well, it's more than the IRS is looking into it. They're thinking of revoking their tax-exempt status.

Yeah.

How about I tee this up slightly differently?

Okay.

4. Harvard Faces a Meritocracy Fight

Tim, you brought up something that I think is really important, which is: What is the American dream for all these people who are cascading between half jobs and half measures?

That's right.

That's a really important question, and right now, if you look at the top of the educational hierarchy—Harvard—what have we seen over the last few years? They are at the absolute bottom of the rankings with respect to free speech. They have lost all of these cases, all the way up to the Supreme Court, about how they do admissions.

Harvard doesn't just have a front door; it's got a bunch of side doors and a bunch of back doors, and they discriminate. The opposite of discrimination is meritocracy. I think that with 20-plus years of discrimination, what Harvard did was make it fashionable for other schools to discriminate.

If you compound that for 20 years, it doesn't just touch the universities; it starts to touch the high schools and the middle schools. Where we live, at the beginning of COVID, we had some morons at the Board of Education decide to take away AP calculus and AP math because it made people feel bad. It's absolutely ridiculous. Then we pound these kids with ADHD pills, and what happens is what you described, Tim.

So what is the point of fixing Harvard? It's really important, because the opposite of what they do—what they do is discriminate—is a meritocracy, and we need to make that fashionable again.

The biggest reason goes back to the chip conversation. The Chinese are so well organized. If you look at the Chinese and the Indians together, those are 2.5 billion people swimming in a meritocratic soup from the day they're born. That's the only way they climb out, and it's eat or be eaten.

Then, when they graduate from an education system that is purely meritocratic, you know what they do? They enter a workforce that's also meritocratic. So it's compounded into their psyche that you just have to perform. Whereas what we do is all of these fake things that make people feel really bad about themselves.

They look at other people who they think shouldn't deserve to be in places getting those places, and so we have to turn that tide. Whatever it takes, the most severe and extreme measures must be undertaken to fix this. That's my point of view.

Tim, what are your thoughts on Trump wanting to take away the nonprofit status of Harvard?

I went to one of these encampments during the protests. I wanted to see it for myself to see what was going on. There was a lot of—you'd see a nonbinary Asian dressed up like Hamas, and I think that's fun. I think it's college, so I think that people are going to express views that are often probably anti-American. I don't think we can—you can't shield yourself from that.

I don't like deporting people who are critical of Israel, for example, unless they've committed crimes and you can prove they're providing material support—

Due process.

—due process. Well, you need to provide due process. If they're providing material support to Hamas or something like that, that's a different story. But if they're here on a legal resident visa, they should be allowed the space to express themselves as any other American citizen would.

Now, that being said, it is impossible to look at higher education in America right now and not be embarrassed. Truly, the word is embarrassment. These should be the shining examples of, as Chamath was saying, institutions that prepare people for the real world.

What they really are is that they've all been captured in this quasi-religious cult of insanity, where people are elevating different types of characteristics outside of intelligence and merit as the most important things to be considered for admission, to be given academic achievements, and things like this. It's embarrassing, and I think if these institutions are going to follow that path, they're going to have to live and die on their own.

They're not going to be able to be taxpayer-subsidized and funded. They have massive endowments from multi-billionaires whose families all go there. But like Chamath said, they do engage in discrimination.

Frankly, again, I'm not for drawing ideological lines, and I'm a big free-speech guy. But I do think that you don't find much ideological diversity on any of those campuses, certainly not in the faculties at all, and it doesn't prepare anybody for a world where all the politics are very aesthetic.

Hmm.

All these people are out there showing off, exhibiting their virtue, but at the end of the day, they're still getting a very cushy internship and a nice job, and they're going to summer in Martha's Vineyard. For example, I was lucky enough to go to the Kennedy compound this summer.

I went sailing with their family, and they're really great kids.

On the Vineyard or the Rock? Where are they?

No, they're on Hyannis Port—whatever, the famous thing.

Yes.

A lot of RFK's kids are young. They went to Harvard, and a lot of these Harvard kids are all good kids. But some of them are very interesting, right? They said to me, “You own a house in the Hamptons.” I said, “Yeah.” They said, “Do you ever go out there in the winter?” I said, “Yeah, sometimes I do. It's quiet and nice. You can write, you can work on stuff.”

They said, “Yeah, well, it's kind of depressing to come to the Cape in the winter because all these people here are on drugs.” And it's like, yeah, because you shipped their jobs away. It's stunning, and these are Harvard kids. They're very smart kids. But you have these chasms where you would think it would be completely obvious to people at this amazing academic institution that, yeah, of course the people are on drugs. They're embracing pathological behavior. They don't have a future.

But these schools have become really insular bubbles where these people have well-meaning aesthetic politics that say, “We don't care about your economic circumstances. Here's a trans Batman.”

Hmm.

I don't think that seems to be the ethos of higher education in America right now, and it's very hypocritical. I think it's why the Democratic Party no longer connects, because they're too closely associated with that type of—

Elite—

—vibe.

Identity politics.

Yeah.

Friedberg, what's your thought? Should the IRS revoke or threaten to revoke Harvard's nonprofit status? Is that a fair technique here because they won't acquiesce and do exactly as instructed? What do you think is going to happen here? Could this possibly result in them losing their IRS status?

Harvard's endowment is $53.2 billion. Assume they make a 7% return. They're making $4 billion a year in income generated from those investments in that endowment.

I think there are 2 really important questions. One is, should the role of the federal government be to give out money equally to institutions, or should the role be to give money to the institutions that are going to provide the highest ROI for America? Or is the goal to redistribute wealth? Is that the point of federal spending and federal expenditures?

You could think about Harvard, MIT, and a few other institutions that have truly great research institutions embedded within them as being the best ROI for America from a grant perspective when you're giving out research grants. That's the best place because, just like any other great technology company, it accumulates capital because it accumulates talent, and that has a network effect. Now you've got a few institutions that have a monopoly on high-quality talent, and as a result, it's the best ROI for America.

Is that what the federal government is investing in? Or should the federal government be trying to support universities all over the place that are more in need? Particularly a university that has $53 billion of capital—do they really need the federal funds?

The next question is, what is the limit on the government's ability to influence whether or not an institution gets its capital? Is it statutory? Is it mandated by law? Or does it become politically motivated, socially motivated, et cetera?

In other areas of decision-making, we're seeing that the Chevron doctrine was thrown out. When the Chevron doctrine gets thrown out, we can't rely on the regulatory scrutiny of the administrators of the capital. We have to rely on the law, and is there a law that they're relying on? I think that's the key question: to have the administration point to the laws that they believe are being violated, to make a strongly defensible argument about why they would withhold the capital, to make sure that they're compliant with the law and whatnot, rather than it being, “We would prefer to see you do things differently because we think it's socially better.”

Those are the 2 key points. Whether or not these institutions deserve nonprofit status, I don't know why an institution that has $53 billion of capital and is making probably $4 billion or $5 billion a year shouldn't pay taxes on that income.

That income is being used in a variety of ways to build nice buildings, and there's IP that's held by these institutions. That IP is used to start startups. They get equity in the startups. They have income streams on their IP. They really do operate like technology development centers. What is the original reason for saying that they should be tax-exempt? The majority of the capital is not being used to educate students. The majority of the capital is being used to reinvest to make new capital.

Sacks, what's your position on Harvard potentially losing its tax-exempt status because they will not stop their DEI programs? Or, better stated, because they want to make their own decisions about this and not have the federal government make those decisions?

Let's get to the nitty-gritty of the legal issue here. In 1983, there was a case called Bob Jones University versus the IRS, in which the IRS challenged the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because Bob Jones had this bizarre and reprehensible policy banning interracial dating on campus and interracial marriage, based on a strange interpretation of scripture. At least that's what they said it was.

In any event, Bob Jones lost that case, and they lost their tax-exempt status. As far as I know, they kept the policy, and they continue to operate as a private university. But the Supreme Court found that if you enshrine a racially discriminatory policy in violation of the civil rights laws, then you cannot get tax-exempt status.

That was the precedent. Fast-forward to 2023, and we have the case Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard. This was the Supreme Court case a few years ago that said affirmative-action policies that use race as a factor in admissions are a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's protection against racial discrimination. Harvard lost that case. They were found to be racially discriminating in admissions.

What Harvard did in the wake of that is claim that they removed access to information about an applicant's race from the admissions process so that the admissions readers don't know what race a student is. This is their claim, but at the same time that they did that, they updated their application, replacing the long-form essay that all of us filled out decades ago when we went to school with 5 shorter questions asking how applicants will contribute to a diverse student body.

Mm.

It's suspiciously similar to these DEI statements where prospective professors who are applying for jobs at these universities get asked, “How will you contribute to diversity on campus?” Things like this. It's used as a way to discriminate against conservatives or people who just think that race or diversity should not be a factor in teaching on campus.

Anyone who answers that question by saying they believe in judging people based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin, is going to get weeded out, right? Or someone who says, “I'm going to contribute to diversity on campus by contributing intellectual diversity.” Those are the types of applicants who get weeded out by these DEI statements.

We see that in another part of what the government is claiming, which is that Harvard has engaged in viewpoint discrimination against conservatives. You can see this in polling of the Harvard faculty. More than 80% of surveyed Harvard faculty identify as liberal.

My point is this: These DEI statements have been used in faculty hiring to discriminate on the basis of viewpoint and to use race as a factor in hiring. In a similar way, they've now updated their admission application to make all the essays about race. I think this idea that they're not playing a game here and they're not trying to engineer the student class around race is hard to believe, right?

These are people who have not changed their ideology. They believe what they were doing before that 2023 case was trying to engineer the percentages of each student class to match the percentages of each race in the American population. These are people who are doctrinaire about that ideology, so the idea that they're not still doing it is hard to believe.

Of course.

We all know what they're doing. The alternative to the administration saying, “Just get rid of DEI,” is that every year or 2 we're going to have new litigation where there will be some whistleblower, and it will come out that Harvard is still engaging in racial discrimination.

Harvard will be found guilty like they were in that 2023 case, and they'll change their policy, and they'll manipulate it, and they'll play some new game. There will be a new court case, and we'll keep going back and forth with them.

Or we can just say, “Stop it right now. Stop the DEI nonsense. Actually abide by both the letter and spirit of the Supreme Court decision, Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard, and stop engaging in racial discrimination.” This is why I think the administration is correct here in pressing Harvard on this.

Now look, if Harvard wants to keep playing these games, they can. No one is saying that they have to get rid of DEI. They just have to give up their federal funding the way that Bob Jones University did.

But the problem is that Harvard wants to have its cake and eat it too, right? They want to basically keep engaging in racial discrimination through these DEI policies, but they want federal funding, and you can't have both.

Do you think that these universities—or universities in general that receive federal funding—have become more ideologically, call it liberal? I would call it a little bit more socialist-oriented because they're dependent on federal funding. Do you see what I'm saying? Is it the case that this ideology accrues over time when you are much more dependent on the government?

You mean there's no market feedback that keeps you in check? There's no private market, nothing that ultimately translates into a system where you're necessarily needing to be competitive for capital, competitive for talent. The accumulation of federal dollars over time makes you say, "I deserve federal dollars," and the people that think that you deserve federal dollars—

You're making a really good point, and I think you could be right. Nick, can you please throw up the chart that I sent you, which is the amount of research between China and America?

Okay, first look at this. So again, you make these plans and you're like, "Where are we gonna put the money?" China says, "Guys, we are going to learn how to catch up to America in terms of spending on science." This is gross domestic expenditures on science, and what you see is China, from basically nothing in 2001, is now neck and neck with the United States, spending half a trillion dollars a year on core fundamental science research.

So what happens as a byproduct of that? You spend more on the way in. China is listening to the market feedback. Friedberg, let's go and explore this idea that there is no market feedback in America. What are the long-run implications?

You see it on this chart, which is a simple chart that says, "What percentage of all the foundational research comes from the United States versus China?" What's crazy about this chart is that, right around 2019, China passed the United States. This chart, by the way, only measures research that is published in English.

Yeah.

So if you added in the research that China actually publishes in Chinese, they would have run away with this a decade earlier. Then you think about, okay, what is the implication of this? The implication is obvious: these guys are inventing things. We're playing catch-up.

Meanwhile, we're bumbling around talking about pronouns. We can't get our act together. This is why we need to be decisive. What is important here?

For NIH grants, this was published by the NIH, by the way, a few weeks ago on their Twitter account, so this is an image they put out. On February 15 or thereabouts, the NIH said that any grants they give to universities now...

If you're a researcher—a scientist at a university like Harvard—I don't know if people realize this, the way you get funding for your lab is that you apply for a grant. Someone has to give you that capital to run your lab, and many grants come from the NIH. So they go to the NIH, they file for a grant. If the grant gets approved, they get $3 million, let's say.

But what happens is that at the institution where they run that lab, that institution can now bill the government for some negotiated percentage of the grant amount to cover administrative overhead. At Harvard, you know what the administrative overhead was up until February 15? 69%.

Wait, no, wait a second.

So you're saying $69 of every $100 goes to administration—

It's incremental—

Oh, $69 on top. Yeah.

The lab gets $100.

Got it.

And then Harvard bills the government $69.

That's insane.

That's insane, and this is true. The average is around 30% today across universities and other institutions. So there's also this very fundamental question that's being asked in science right now.

Which is, are universities even the right place to be doing fundamental scientific research? In the United States, there are different models. Most of our research is done either at a private company, which is a small amount of research.

And remember, I've talked about this a lot. The big companies that have a market that's telling them they have to have a positive return on invested capital, that have the scale to invest, have the most incredible returns for America. Like Google, that put out the Transformer model that launched everything that we see today and invested in Waymo for many years and drove the self-driving car revolution.

And all the work that was going on at Bell Labs, up until we said Bell Labs was a monopoly and we broke them apart and they got destroyed. So we largely aim to destroy large private research institutions in this country because we claim that they're monopolistic because of the way they source capital, which is through activities in the marketplace.

So the question today that's being asked is, should we be doing fundamental scientific research at universities, given that over time the administrative overhead has grown, and they're basically creating administrative workloads and employing people without necessarily having a market incentive?

Can I tell you a crazy story? This is a story I've never told, but a friend of mine is an incredibly well-respected banker on Wall Street. Very senior guy, works at one of the big mainline banks. This was about 18 months ago—2 years ago. He had always wanted to work in government, and they tried to get him to join the Federal Reserve.

It was for a role that was very specific and narrow. It was to manage a very specific part of the interest-rate mortgage market. It's a really important role. It's a little bit in the weeds, but it was his dream job. He did his PhD thesis on it, the whole nine yards.

So he goes through these interviews, and he sits with Jerome Powell, goes through that interview. He sits with, I think, Lael Brainard. Everybody. It was time for the final interview.

Right before it, the person who was his shepherd says to him, "You really need to play up your Indianness, because what we really want is somebody who can help us tell a diverse story."

He goes, "Well, my diversity is that I know this market better than literally anyone else in the world. Nobody knows this. I know it. I've studied it since my PhD." He was so offended. He was like, "You know what? I'm not gonna go through with this."

And we lost him—we, meaning the American taxpayer who supports all this. If you think of that example in all of the different places where we have not been hiring the right people, you get this slowdown in innovation. You get a slowdown in research, a slowdown in well-functioning organizations and institutions, and it's like a slow malaise.

So how do you stop the rot? You have to stop it at the top, and you have to do something that is meaningful. If it requires us to at least threaten Harvard—

And by the way, let's be honest. It's called Harvard Corporation for a reason, right? It's run like a corporation. It is an asset manager that may happen to have some educational things that they do on the side, which increasingly are not what we need it to do. More importantly, it doesn't set the vanguard for how everybody wants to copy. Everybody used to want to copy Harvard.

Mm.

And now the things they're copying are not the things that help us. So we have to find a way of waking them up and saying, "Guys, you have a responsibility for America." Maybe this is what it takes, and I hope they take the medicine and listen.

Well, the Colson brothers told us on a previous episode that they were just funding researchers and letting them pick their own research to a certain extent.

How would you play up your Indianness with Jerome Powell?

Well, okay. I asked him.

The idea of that is the best thing I've heard all week.

I've asked him. He was told to play up his Indianness, and he was like, "What does that mean, my Indianness?"

Right.

And they were like, "Well, talk about your love of Indian dance and Indian food." And he was like, "Are you kidding me? Is this a serious conversation?"

Yes.

He was like, "Where's a sitar?" He starts playing the sitar—

Yeah.

They got the chai masala.

Who's that guy showing up in a rickshaw?

Turn it around.

It's the chairman of the mortgage market.

It's absolutely worked out. Hey, Tim—

Yeah.

If you were in charge of this, because we do have some ins with the administration, maybe you should be directing some of this research.

If I wanted to study anything at Harvard, it would be Brigitte Macron’s gender. But I think we do have to focus on disease to an extent. Here’s what I would say to add to that conversation: These schools exist for a multitude of reasons.

One of them is to create a consensus among the wealthiest and, obviously, people who are expected to be the most powerful in society, and to create a consensus about the values that are important to America at any given time. I think the question should be: Why are these values so important, and to whom? I don’t think this is altruism, and it’s about helping the working class, helping minorities, or helping people get more economic justice. It actually seems to me quite a transparent attempt for certain people to keep positions of power and certain structures in place while offering people this idea that there’s a lot of change because there are a few ceremonial optical choices made, where we’re putting in a female CEO of color or someone who’s Indian. But the internal structure stays the same.

And if you just look at a school like Harvard and go, “Oh, well, they’re…” Yes, they’re socialist in some respects, but in some respects, actually, if you challenge the Ukraine war, if you challenge aspects of the American empire, if you challenge certain—

And look at all the wars. All of our wars are being sold with social justice. A lot of our wars are being sold because, if we don’t see a national security interest in it, we’re told that people in that country are not being treated well. That country has values that we don’t have in the West, and that may be true, but in many cases it’s not worth going to war over, and most Americans would say that. So who exactly is benefiting from these programs and these values being instituted? It isn’t low-income people in the inner city. It seems to be a lot of the establishment.

Yeah, it’s the opposite. It’s the opposite of inclusion.

It’s the opposite of inclusion.

It’s the opposite of inclusion. What has happened, exactly?

It’s the establishment trying to preserve itself by shutting out certain ideas and certain people and giving very ceremonial nods to: “Play up your Indianness, play up this, play up that.” But it’s like when the CIA goes, and she goes, “I’m the first female drone pilot.”

Mm-hmm.

A lot of Americans are going, “What exactly is our national security interest in a drone strike in whatever country? Do we need to be doing this, and should the money be better spent somewhere else?” But instead of having that conversation, it always ends up being hijacked. So this DEI, to me, just seems like a way for a lot of the same establishment people to keep their power and influence by offering these very optical advancements to people who may pay lip service to certain ideas, but when it comes down to it, they’re very loyal to the same power factions that have always driven the narrative in our country.

Completely agree.

What happened during comedy to you, Tim, and your cohort during that peak DEI, peak-cancellation period? It felt like the Overton window was closing pretty harshly on you guys.

Yeah.

There were a lot of attempted cancellations of comedians, people trying to secretly record you. You got those Yondr bags—what are those called, those bags that you put the phones in? What was that moment in time like?

5. DEI Killed Hollywood

I was told by countless executives to play up my Indianness, and I tried.

Yes, you tried.

But it was just in bad taste.

Yes.

It was in terrible taste when I came in and tried to be Indian, and it—

Mm.

No, I think here’s what it was. I started having more of a career in, let’s say, 2016, 2017, 2018, and then we were on this path where you’d go have a meeting in Los Angeles with people about doing a show or whatever, and all of these words and this verbiage would creep in. They’d go, “We’re really interested in marginalized voices, elevating voices that haven’t been heard. We’re interested in empowering people.”

Mm.

These are LA executives. They’re monsters. They care nothing about anything, and that’s why they’re good at their job, right? The only reason you can be good at your job as an executive in the entertainment business is to really not look at human beings as humans. You have to look at them as props.

Objects.

That’s obviously what you do.

Yes. Manipulating.

Right? It’s—

Pawns on the chessboard.

It’s what it is. You know what I mean?

It’s the nature of it.

If I called my agent today and said, “I’m really tired of doing everything I’m doing,” he’d say, “Have you tried drugs?” They—

Right.

Yes.

I was wondering about that because you have such high energy.

Yeah.

I don’t know why you’re not embracing the cocaine or speed or Adderall, something.

I don’t need it.

Or speed.

I don’t need it.

Or Adderall, something.

Yeah, but if I do—and, by the way, if I do—they’ll provide it to me. Here’s the deal. The way that town works—

Yes.

—is you have a bunch of people who believe in nothing, and they can’t—they can’t be effective. They have to go whichever way the wind is blowing. So when you have these people pulling up in Porsches with their houses in Malibu, and they then have a sudden interest in empowering people, these people were throwing women off into the Santa Monica Canyon for years. So it was this weird time where you had the worst people in the world trying to convince you that they had an interest in marginalized voices because they thought there was money there.

Well, guess what? It turns out Americans don’t really like to be patronized, and they were never making TV that minorities wanted to watch. They were making TV that guilty white liberals wanted to watch. It didn’t make any money. Nobody really liked it. A lot of it kind of faded away, and as soon as it stopped being profitable, all the executives in Hollywood who supposedly cared so much about marginalized voices rediscovered the profit motive.

They rediscovered the idea that they had to make entertaining stuff. They rediscovered viewership. They rediscovered numbers. They rediscovered all these business fundamentals that they had ignored because they thought there was going to be a pot of gold at the end of all this elevating and empowering, but there wasn’t because it was rejected largely by people. They didn’t want to watch it.

They were canceling all of you guys. They were canceling—

Well, they were trying. It didn’t work.

Bill Cosby? They were trying to—

They were trying. They had tried. It didn’t work, because people, at the end of the day, realize that people are flawed, fallible, and human, and that’s what makes them entertaining. You don’t want a perfect person—

Mm.

—doing anything, because that person is not going to be terribly interesting. You want someone who has flaws and has problems, obviously within reason. So I think that—

Tim, can I ask you a question?

Yeah. Yes.

Let’s say that you are—

I support Harvey Weinstein. Go on. I’m sorry. I didn’t know if that was—

No, let’s say that—

I apologize. That wasn’t the question.

Let’s say that you are in charge of education in America.

Yes.

Okay?

What would you do? Where would you start? What would you do?

6. Education Needs A Purpose

If I was in charge of education in America, number 1, I would try to assert the idea that higher education itself needs to be for a purpose, and that there needs to be more of a purpose driven from middle school through high school. We need to start getting kids to think rationally about their skill set and their ability, and I don’t think it’s a good idea for these kids to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of loans to go away for 4 years, not have a solid plan, and not execute, and then graduate mired in debt without really a pathway to paying any of it back, spending their 20s and maybe a good part of their 30s incapable of owning a home, incapable of owning anything, with no real investments.

So I think this idea that you should follow your dream, which is this toxic American idea that I don’t subscribe to, is wrong. I think people have natures, they have skill sets, and they actually have to do something within the realm of that. It requires being honest with children, which no one wants to do.

Mm.

I would try to re-engineer education to be a more practical place where you would apply some of the skills that you actually had. I’m not saying people shouldn’t be able to experiment or have freedom, but I do think that we’ve told a lie to people, which is that they can be anything they want to be and do anything they want to do, and, by the way, here’s a bunch of loans to do it. Here’s hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt.

So now you can go into debt without any plan or any logical sense of what you want to do. I think we should start putting people into a more realistic mindset—

Mm.

—in high school about what needs to happen. Otherwise, they’re taken advantage of and abused by these systems of higher education, where they graduate mired in debt and without any type of standing in society. Oh my God.

I want to add, Jason—

Go ahead, Friedberg, and then I’ve got a breaking news story. Go ahead.

I want to address this, because I think there’s a moment here that will define a very different future for education, which is a movement away from the current model of a school. AI is such a profound tool. The ability for AI to get to know your personality and teach my kids the way they want to be taught—

Hmm.

—through conversation, through engagement, through dialogue, knowing that some kids want to ask questions and some kids want to just be told stuff. Some kids work at one pace; other kids work at another pace. I know this idea of personalized education using computing has been around for decades, but we really are in this moment where the idea of spending your first 18 years of life in a classroom, where you’re being told stuff that is, quote, “the truth,” is being replaced by learning how to engage with the world, ask questions, explore your world, identify things that are interesting to you, and have them delivered to you in a very personalized, meaningful, rich way that also makes you excited about certain things and helps usher you on to the next phase of your life: “What do you want to do with this?” Get kids out of this idea that you’ve got to get the degree in order to get the job. Then I think the workplace will adjust to that. I forgot who it is, whether it was Palantir or someone, that just started doing this.

Palantir. They just did a—

Palantir, a program where they’re like, “Skip college. Come and do your apprenticeship here.” So instead of going to college, you’ll—

And it’s paid. Yeah.

—you’ll continue your education here.

$56,000 a year. Yeah.

You’ll work on projects, you’ll make money, and you’ll continue to develop while you’re learning a valuable skill. As AI takes over education, I do expect that the workplace will change, Tim, and we’ll start to see more of this integration between education and the workplace, enabled by this AI-driven development system. It’s going to be radically different from what we have today.

You fuck with this AI, Tim? Do comedians get in there?

I don’t—

You don’t fuck with it?

No. I’m a little skeptical of the tech people I talk about on my show. Of course, not you guys, but the other ones.

The other ones. The bad ones. Yeah.

You guys seem—I think it’s great. Palantir goes, “Skip college. Come get involved in advanced weapons technology.”

Sure. Go right to it.

No, I think that’s a great—I think that’s a phenomenal idea, actually. It’s like, well—counting down to murder.

Who needs to go to college? Come be a drone here at Palantir.

Absolutely.

But I like using my brain at the moment. If it starts to fail, I imagine it will, I will—

Hmm.

—I will use AI. I know people who do use AI. My producer might use AI. I don’t know. He probably won’t tell me. But—

Hmm.

—I do think that, listen, it’s—

But have you used it to learn, Tim? Have you ever done any of the chat apps where you can talk to it and say, “Hey, you want to learn or get smart on something, or get caught up on something?” You can literally just ask questions and have a conversation with it. That’s what I mean.

We’ve done it. Listen, we’ve done it.

Yeah.

We did it on the show. We had an AI bot deliver a rant in my style. It got pretty close.

Yes.

Not good enough yet, but it was pretty close and pretty interesting to see how advanced it is right now, and then how advanced it’s going to be. I worry a little bit about what you’re going to do with all of these people once AI starts taking a lot of these jobs.

Hmm.

Yeah.

The cashiers, the Uber drivers, DoorDashers—all these jobs could go away, you’re saying.

People like me—7 or 8 years ago, I was a tour guide on a double-decker bus in New York City while I was learning how to be a comedian. I was showing people the Empire State Building and the 9/11 Memorial, whatever, and these are the types of jobs. I was making $13 an hour. It wasn’t a well-paid or amazing job, but it offered me the freedom to get good at something else. I was taking a lot of risk to do it, and I tolerated that level of risk because I believed what I was doing was the right thing and the right course of action. But it’s jobs like that that allow some of the most interesting, weird lives that people should be able to live if they want to.

I don’t think everybody wants or needs to have a full-time job. There are people who have retired and go, “I’d like to be a tour guide,” or, “I’d like to work at a museum a few days a week.”

Is that where you refined your stand-up, being on the double-decker bus? Were you able to put one-liners in there, or was—

I was able to do—

—any of the—

—all kinds of stuff like that.

—shtick?

So to me, it’s those jobs, right?

Yes.

Some of those—I don’t think the entire economy should be the gig economy, but I do think some of those jobs that are going to be eliminated by AI are the jobs that allow people to get good at other things while they’re doing them.

Got it. I agree.

People in entertainment and music and stuff like that—we want them to be able to support themselves while they enrich us culturally in other ways.

A crazy breaking news story right now. Sorry, Sacks, I didn’t mean to blindside you here. I know you’re with the administration, and you don’t necessarily speak for the administration on this issue, but it looks like the Federal Reserve has a new chairman. It’s just breaking news here.

That’s so racist.

It says, “Hot off the wire: Trump has named Chamath as the chairman of the Federal Reserve.” I think all these fundraisers worked out for you. But there’s a note.

That’s so racist.

They asked Chamath to be more Sri Lankan. So, to the extent you could be more Sri Lankan, Chamath, President Trump would be appreciative.

Is Chamath Sri Lankan? Is he really Sri Lankan?

I am, but that’s so racist.

He is literally Sri Lankan.

I mean, it’s just—I didn’t—

I read a great book about the Tamil Tigers many years ago. Do you remember them?

Yes, they—

They invented suicide bombing.

They did.

Listen, be proud. Be proud of stuff.

Oh, I was a child.

Even if it’s weird braids.

Are you saying, Tim, that the great export of Sri Lanka was suicide vests?

I’m saying be proud of stuff.

Be proud.

Well, that was—

You were—

Hey.

Oh, you were the one trying to avoid the suicide vests.

No, my dad was the one who spoke out against the war. That’s why we had to skedaddle and claim refugee status in Canada.

Potato, potato. I support both. I’m the only person with the moral courage to say I support Israel and Hamas and Russia and Ukraine. You can want to see a good game. You can want to see a good game.

You—

You don’t have to take a side.

—cheer for overtime if there’s a lead change.

Listen—

You like a lead change.

It really depends in Beverly Hills who I’m having lunch with and what type of Middle Easterner they are, because I can go either way on that. I think it’s important.

You’re a diplomat.

You don’t want to be too rigid in this economy. You need to be able to move into things, and I will. I see—

And you’ve got to read the audience. You read the audience.

I see both sides. I’ve read the Israel stuff and the Palestine stuff. They’re both right. So guess what?

They’re both right.

That’s right. At the end of the day, what do you want me to do?

So what’s right for Timmy’s career is an approach you could take.

What’s right for me, what’s the easiest lunch, what’s the easiest afternoon for me—that’s the move.

Path of least resistance.

That’s the move for me, always, all the time.

Right. So it—

I—you know?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

What Putin did, was it right? No, but do I like the idea of the oligarch, the furs, the boats, the kind of lifestyle? Yes, the kind of trappings—yes. That, to me, has always spoken to me. Somebody said to me once, “You’re spiritually Russian.” So I think I have that in me, so I just can’t ignore it.

So where—how would you rank your dictators? It sounds like you’re a Putin guy, or are you a Xi guy?

7. Tim Defends Putin's Appeal

Putin has a lot of class. Whether you like him or not—

Kim Jong-un, where are you?

He has a lot of class. Number one, people do fall out of windows in London. It does happen, actually.

Accidents happen.

It’s a shame.

So it’s not always him. Sometimes somebody does take a spill.

They trip.

I like him. I like Kim Jong-un in North Korea. I like him; he has style as well.

Don’t forget Zelenskyy. Oh.

Sacks, Zelenskyy, I don’t know. He’s kind of new school.

He just extended martial law.

But can you imagine when they told—

He’s a military dictator.

“Not bring up Ukraine,” right?

He did.

So be careful.

No, I like Sacks on this, and I think—

Mm-hmm. Here we go.

When they told Putin that a comedian was now the president of Ukraine, Putin probably said, “Listen, are they serious? Are they—”

He’s being trolled. He thought he was being trolled.

“Are they even trying anymore?” He goes, “Is the CIA even trying anymore? Are you serious? Wait—the guy who played the president in a TV show is now the actual president?”

Right.

And Putin’s getting this information sitting there in his palace. I mean—

Yes.

So listen, all war is tragedy. It’s all terrible and bad, but we also—I think David’s done a phenomenal job, by the way, of looking at how you get to certain places.

Hmm. Absolutely. And then I think—

We have to go see the humor in it.

You do a lot of private shows, yeah? You do a lot of private shows, Tim. The private shows with the dictators, the despots, the monarchies—they pay three to one, four to one?

They want to laugh. These people want to laugh. Duterte likes to laugh.

Duterte.

These people want to laugh, and I’m not here to pass judgment on the audience. I’m here to bring—well, it’s actually funny. I did one private gig. I don’t get booked on a lot of private gigs, but one big Bitcoin guy in Romania had me go to his birthday party.

It was just this older oligarch-type guy, and they all spoke Romanian, so it was very hard. They paid me $100,000 to do 20 minutes, and they didn’t really understand anything. Then one guy just stood up, and I guess he recognized me. He started yelling, “Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan,” and then sat down.

So I am open to performing for anyone, really, truly.

Anyone. Idi Amin, Iran. You could just—Kim Jong-un. Just send the ticket.

Hey.

Yeah.

Is the money clean?

The check? Yes.

Is the money green over there?

The money’s not clean, but yes.

That’s got to be an underserved market.

Is Iran that dangerous? All I hear now every day is that Iran’s coming to kill everyone. Is that true? I don’t know. Are they invading? Is Iran landing in Aspen?

No, they’re just building nukes. Maybe they want to wipe out one or two countries. A little genocide.

Wish fulfillment.

How far along are they on those nukes? We don’t know that.

Eighty percent. Eighty percent of them are done. They’re perpetually at 80%. We just keep knocking out the last 20%, I think.

Yeah. I just don’t think we need boots on the ground there. I don’t think we need to do this again.

The two of you are the living embodiment of ADHD.

Yes. Well, speaking of ADHD, do we want to go ADHD or science corner?

JCal falls for every pro-war narrative there is. He’s like, “I’m against war,” but then he falls for every single narrative they put out.

Oh.

Absolutely.

Right.

Absolutely.

Right.

And what a great job you guys have done ending the war in Ukraine on day one of your administration. Congratulations.

At least he’s trying. Biden kept escalating.

Wake me up when you actually accomplish something.

Can I actually defend the administration?

Please.

We’ve actually ended it spiritually. We’ve ended it spiritually. We no longer believe in it. It’s actually happening in the physical world, but spiritually the war is over.

Yes. So you’re manifesting the end of the war spiritually.

Well, it’s over for me. The Ukraine War is fully over for me.

Got it.

Zelenskyy refuses to make a deal. You saw what happened at the White House. I mean—

If only we had a dealmaker to help with this. Let’s keep with the—

Jason, you know how you would know this for sure? My intuition tells me that what Tim just said is totally right: the number of Ukraine flags that were taken off profile photos on X.

Absolutely. Along with the pronouns.

No, even though it’s a joke, I am dead serious. The idea of it has ended.

Yeah. I think so as well.

It is now just about a border negotiation. It is no longer a totemic struggle for freedom or whatever it was being sold to us as.

I agree.

Sacks is just like you, Tim. His favorite dictator is Putin as well. Hey, Dave Friedberg, tell—

Who was the first leader after 9/11 to call the United States and express sympathy? I believe it was Vladimir Putin. How many times has Vladimir Putin threatened American interests over the last 20-odd years? Has Vladimir Putin—has Russia—been an existential threat to America? Have they disrupted huge amounts of our trade?

It seems very odd to me. He wanted to be in NATO. He wanted to be our ally. We rebuffed him. But you know what the best quality of Putin is? We’re not funding him. He’s not asking for American money. The rest of these dictators, we keep funding.

I also like that he’s well-read.

He’s well-read.

Yes.

Yeah, and also—

But he’s not coming to the White House begging.

Like new stuff, too. It's a range, right?

He's not coming to the White House every 3 months begging for more hundreds of billions.

But any criticism of the Ukraine war means that you love Putin, want to live in Russia, and think Russia's great. It's a very weird Manichean—

Right.

—sense of good and evil that was instituted by George W. Bush right after 9/11, when he said, “You're with us or against us,” and “with us” means we're going to democratize the Middle East, which I fell for because I was 17 and on cocaine.

Hmm.

In hindsight, it didn't work tremendously well, and I'm very skeptical of these narratives where they say, “So if you find any fault at all in what we're doing, you are giving aid, you're aiding and abetting a dictator.” It makes no sense to me.

You can speak for yourself.

No, you don't believe it anymore?

I believe that free countries, just to be clear, I believe that free countries should stop the non-free countries from invading them. That's it. It's a pretty simple philosophy.

He actually thinks the Ukraine is free.

Speaking of the '90s and cocaine, Friedberg, what's in Science Corner?

You'll notice he's moving on, Tim. He doesn't know how to respond to that.

Yeah. It's okay.

No, no, Friedberg is really upset that he got preempted the last couple of weeks. I'm trying to do right by Friedberg and the Friedberg stans, who are just absolutely mental now that we haven't talked about his incredible victory on Jeopardy! and we haven't gotten to Science Corner in a couple of weeks.

Congrats.

8. Friedberg Wins Celebrity Jeopardy

Tim, what game show do you want to be on, Tim?

Take care.

None. None of them. None of them.

None.

All the money on Celebrity Jeopardy!

Which one would you want to host, Tim?

No game shows.

You wouldn't host a game show? You must've been offered.

No, never. They would—I don't think I'm what they want for a game show.

You have such a money-printing machine. You could get on a game show—Family Feud or something. Wheel of Fortune.

No, but I do—

You'd make a fortune. It all goes to charity.

Friedberg, was it hard?

I shot the quarterfinal and semifinal in the same afternoon, so I didn't have any real break. You go away for lunch, and you come back for the semifinals.

Hmm.

I didn't know how to use that buzzer, and everyone else, I think, had practiced or figured that stuff out. So it was pretty difficult. My brain was just blank in some of these moments. You're just up there, there's this intensity, and you're in this game show thinking, “I know the answer. Why is it not coming out of my mouth?” Or, “Why did I say that thing that I know is wrong that just came out of my mouth?” It's a little bit scary how much your brain plays tricks on you.

All right, let's show the clip here, and then we'll go on to Science Corner. Watch this—Final Jeopardy!

I'm in last place. I was behind the entire game. I was basically in last place the whole game.

Yes, playing catch-up. Short-stacked. Here we go.

I couldn't buzz in in time.

Guest

It all comes down to this: Final Jeopardy! in a very close game.

So exciting.

Guest

Film Festivals is the category. Here's the clue, players.

Come on, Friedberg.

Guest

Called the premier movie industry event for the Balkans, this festival began 30 years ago while the city was under siege. We'll begin on the end with Dave Friedberg, who had $8,700. It looks like he changed his answer at the last minute. What happened here?

Oh.

Guest

He wrote down something and crossed it out and wrote—

Sarajevo.

Guest

—Sarajevo Film Festival.

Cool.

Guest

We can read Sarajevo, and that's the important part, right? We're going to give you credit. You wagered $8,697, and now you have $17,397.

Hmm.

Guest

You're ahead of Mina Kimes at the moment with $17,000. What did she put down? I did my math wrong. Oh, my God. She wrote down Cannes.

And she plays what?

Guest

And she wagered $1,000. That drops her down to $16,000. I'm wrong. So it comes down to Sean Gunn, who had $22,000. Did he know it was Sarajevo Film Festival?

You were one other way.

Guest

He said Bosnia. Right country, wrong city.

Ooh.

Guest

What did you wager? $12,001.

Close.

Guest

$9,999. And from third place, Dave Friedberg comes back and he's the champion of Celebrity Jeopardy!

He could have just—

Ken Jennings

—what did he do? He didn't even bet—

Wait, Friedberg, can I ask a question? This is a very serious question, and it's not disrespectful. Why do they call this Celebrity Jeopardy!?

Guest

You're correct.

Yeah. I could not identify one of those people with a gun to my head.

I don't know. There were 27. I didn't know any of them, so I felt in place.

Wow.

I felt like I belonged.

Whoo.

Exactly.

That's—I mean, I think the guy in the middle—

Guest

Exactly.

Yeah, who are the other 2 people? Well, James Gunn's brother, who played, like, the 17th guy in Guardians of the Galaxy, right?

Oh, that guy.

That's a Marvel Universe character. Pull his photo up for a second. He has a nonspeaking role in a Marvel movie. There are 1,400 Marvel movies, and this guy hasn't spoken in one.

Guest

Come on, stop.

But who was the other lady? Who's that? I mean—

She's on ESPN.

Oh, she's a researcher on ESPN. She does fencing, right?

She fences. No, I think she covers football on ESPN.

Football or foosball?

But she's got more followers than you, J. Cal, on Twitter.

But Tim's right. Was this actually Celebrity Jeopardy!?

She has 1 million followers.

Or is this just, like—

No—

—you know, Jeopardy!? Just call it—

Guest

Mid-Jeopardy.

Just call it Jeopardy! Just call it Jeopardy!

Just call it Easy Jeopardy.

Just—

Easy Jeopardy.

Just call it Jeopardy!

Just call it Easy Jeopardy. Yeah.

Just call it, “Hey, we're doing this thing now.” They should do a Comedian Jeopardy!

Charity Jeopardy!

That would crush if you had Comedian Jeopardy!

Okay, the finals are next Wednesday at 9:00 p.m.

Have you actually done the episode? Have you done the finals?

Have we done the finals?

When is the final episode? How do we make money off this? How do we front-run this? Oh, he's done it already, so you know the winner. Why don't we do a Polymarket for this, and we can all cash in and get off this show?

No.

We could all just cash in on this—

Get off the show.

Put this—somebody could shoot this dollar—

There is a dollar number, J. Cal. There is a dollar number.

Oh, God. Push it. Are people watching this? Are people watching this?

10 times 30 million.

People are watching this.

10 times 40 million.

Who's watching this?

30, I'm out. 30, I'm out.

What's 25% of that, maybe?

Who's the first to pull the ripcord?

Actually, Tim's asking—

Yeah.

—what do the ratings go, up or down, for Celebrity Jeopardy!?

Down.

Certainly down from the last one.

They used to be good, so I think regular Jeopardy!—well, they do it at 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday nights, okay?

Hmm.

So it's not even during prime time.

But there's no upside for a celebrity to go on this. If a celebrity goes on this and they're known for being smart—if George Clooney goes on, right, Tim?

Exactly. I realized this when I got there. I'm like, “Wait a second. There's no upside in me doing this. I'm going to look like an idiot.” And I answered all these stupid questions wrong, and I look like a moron. I'm like, “Why did I do that?” That was not a good move.

No, it's a stupid show that should go away. Jeopardy! should go away. Agree, agree. I mean, it's this idea that all these people nobody knows are celebrities. People at home are going, “Who the hell? What the hell is this?” The lady from ESPN says Cannes—she thinks it's in France. This is just making people mad. They go, “Hey, man, I got nothing going on, and these people are celebrities? They're idiots.” I mean, same continent.

She hit the same continent, right? It's just filling people with rage, looking at these people who aren't even celebrities and, on top of that, are morons.

I mean, you have an obligation to either be a celebrity—

It did say the Balkans.

—or be a nerd. I mean, this is a little rough, a little brutal. Hey, save the show, Dave. Please.

Okay, you guys.

Give us a Science Corner.

Okay, I'll do a quick Science Corner.

And the name of the game here, Dylan, since your first time on the show, is somehow, if you can get around the horn and put in a Uranus joke, you'll just kill with the audience.

Okay. I'm going to try to do that.

So just keep that in mind.

My producer and I are setting up a company in Bhutan.

Oh.

That's my whole thing now. You're going to be flipping H100s? Goodbye. I just learned so much on the front half of this show. It's a company in Bhutan. Give us the chips. Wink, wink. They're not going to Beijing at all. Wink. My godson's Chinese.

They go in the back. They go through the front. Maybe the side door. There's a truck. Who knows?

My godson, truly, I swear to God, they brought him to my home when he was 4 months old because they know I'm single and I have a little bit of money—not compared to you, but compared to these people—and they said, “Would you be his godfather? He's Chinese.”

Absolutely. I said, “High end. Let's go.” Four years later, they tell me, “He's actually Filipino.” I'm not even kidding. So this is why you can't trust anyone in this country about anything.

Jesus.

Even your adoption—

Wow. Oh my God.

A corrupt adoption.

Incredible. You got a free godson.

Okay, well, let's hear from Dave.

Okay, let's do Science Corner.

Here we go. Science Corner. Mitochondria.

Today is Mitochondria Therapy Day. Every cell in our body has mitochondria. Tim, you know that, right?

Yeah, it's the powerhouse of the cell.

Powerhouse of the cell, exactly.

Yeah.

It's a little organelle.

Barros, is this the last segment?

Yeah.

Yeah, you can drop off, Sacks. Okay, I'll see you guys later. Sacks, I'll see you in Moscow. I'll see you at the Putin Film Festival.

See you in Moscow.

I'll see you at the Moscow Film Festival. I need to run to Sean Hannity's show, unfortunately.

You've got to watch Sean Hannity.

Sorry. No, unfortunately. Don't say unfortunately.

Sorry.

You can leave that in. I like him.

Absolutely. He's amazing, yes.

I really enjoy you guys. Thank you for having me on. I really learned so much. This was amazing, and I'd love to do it again. I appreciate all of you. I think you're all great. Whatever you're doing on the side, whatever you people eventually get arrested for, I support you. Just know that. I'm a supporter—

Yes.

—of whatever happens to you on this podcast.

We'll do some securities fraud. Yeah, we'll get into some shenanigans.

Whenever it comes out that there's a reason why you knew so much about the Bhutan company—

Yes.

—it doesn't matter to me. I'm a fan.

Yeah.

Thank you, team.

He was great.

Yeah, I'm gone. All right, see you guys.

And then there were three.

You know what? Now I'm motivated to do Science Corner as a standalone show, and we're going to launch it in the next month.

I'm going to do Science Corner with you. You do Tav's Corner with me.

I'm going to eat lunch. I love you guys. Nick, you won't ever see me.

We're doing Science Corner. Let's go!

I got it. I got you, Science Corner. I'm with you to the end, brother. Friedberg, it's me and you, buddy. You tell me about Science Corner. I'm interested.

You're interested. We've got no listeners. We've got no audience at this point.

I'm here for your segment. Go ahead, Dave.

Aw. For the 4 of you and Chamath.

Okay.

9. Mitochondrial Therapy Shows Promise

So mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, as Tim just educated us, right? Every cell has hundreds of mitochondria. Mitochondria are what are called organelles. They have their own DNA. In fact, evolutionarily, mitochondria were bacteria that basically ended up in a symbiotic relationship with what became our cells.

We each have mitochondria, hundreds of them in each one of our cells. Each mitochondrion has its own nucleus and its own DNA. The mitochondria make the energy that the rest of the cell uses. That energy is called ATP, and the mitochondria eat up glucose, or ketones if you're in ketosis, and use that to make the ATP.

Every cell in our body gets its energy, which is what it uses to function, from the mitochondria. There's been a lot of research into the relationship between mitochondria and aging, and how dysfunctional mitochondria, as they start to break down, stop working, and become damaged, may actually be a key driver for many diseases that we experience as humans, including many cancers, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, features of autism, weak muscle tissue, et cetera.

As the cells get older and the mitochondria stop working, we make new mitochondria, but over time, the DNA degrades, the mitochondria become less effective, and there are fewer functional mitochondria per cell. The cell stops working.

Hey, can I ask you a question?

Eventually, the organism stops functioning, right? Yeah.

Have you learned anything about the connection of creatine to mitochondrial health?

It's part of some of the processes, but there's some separate research on this. It's definitely worth spending time on, which I would recommend.

But would you take it?

People are crazy about hitting 5 grams or 10 grams of creatine.

It's becoming like a trend.

Yeah, I think it's—oh, yeah, no, 5 grams. Something like that.

It's trending on Twitter. I think it's kind of like a meme or a joke in addition to being serious.

But I don't think it's a joke. Is there any science that backs that up, or not really for mitochondria?

Some. There are questions on this, like: Do you want to focus on things that are increasing biogenesis, which is the creation of new mitochondria? Does that create a better benefit?

On the creatine work, I've read some of these papers. I actually tried it for a while. I personally had an allergy to it.

Hmm.

Anyway, we can talk about it further. One of the key things was that there are 3 papers I wanted to highlight that follow an interesting theme.

The first one was from 2023 from WashU in St. Louis. These folks identified and demonstrated that mitochondria can actually transfer from one cell to another. If you've got a cell with damaged or dysfunctional mitochondria, they've identified 3 mechanisms by which mitochondria can move into a cell that needs more mitochondria that are working and more functional.

That's something that's been theorized for a long time. People have said, “Oh, well, we think mitochondria transfer,” but there wasn't really evidence of this. As of 2 years ago, these researchers provided very good evidence that mitochondria can now be put into cells.

If it's floating around, it can make its way into another cell, and as a result, it can rejuvenate or provide energy to a dysfunctional cell, which might improve dysfunctional tissue or improve disease.

The second paper was done last month out of Columbia University, and this was the first mapping of the mitochondria in the human brain. These folks created 703 tiny cubes of brain from a person who passed away, a 54-year-old donor, and then analyzed the mitochondria in each of those cubes. They used that to make a map of mitochondria in the brain.

What it showed was that different parts of the brain and different cells had different amounts of mitochondria and different mitochondrial function. That starts to highlight how the difference in energy production in different cells in different parts of the brain may actually cause things like memory loss or speech impairment.

As we age, the fact that we end up being forgetful or start to lose some of our capacity—the mitochondrial dysfunction in the brain might actually be the key driver of that aging symptomology.

The third paper, which just came out, came from a team at Zhejiang University in China. What these guys did, which was really incredible, was take stem cells from human blood and figure out a way to treat them so that they would make an excess number of mitochondria compared with what they normally would.

In fact, they were able to get those stem cells to make 854 times the number of mitochondria that those cells would normally make. Those mitochondria were, on average, 5.7 times more efficient at making energy—ATP. So they created highly energetic mitochondria, and they made a lot of them.

The idea that we can put mitochondria into our body, or into tissue in our body, to heal it or repair it has been something that folks have been researching for a long time. But the limiting factor is access to enough mitochondria. This mechanism that they developed—where they could take stem cells, make copies of the stem cells, make lots of mitochondria, isolate those mitochondria, and use them as a therapeutic tool—they did in damaged cartilage, and they were able to heal that cartilage.

This is a group that does bone and tissue repair studies, but they applied the mitochondria directly into the area where there was damage to the bone. The bone grew back, and it actually improved the healing in an incredible way. So this opens up the door to this whole new therapeutic modality, a new type of therapy called mitotherapy, or mitochondrial therapy, that, based on the series of papers we're seeing come out recently, I believe could become an incredible new therapy that may ultimately lead to treatments for many diseases we're dealing with right now.

Would this be immediately applicable to, say, people with sports injuries—meniscus, knees, ankles? You start to think about the bone spurs and chips that basketball players and football players go through. Would this be the low-hanging fruit for this technology?

Yeah, what they did this in—and I think this was published in a research journal called Bone Research or something—

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, what they did this in, and I think this was published in a research magazine called Bone or something—

Yeah, I let my subscription lapse. I have to—thanks for reminding me.

They did it in a mouse model of osteoarthritis, and it repaired that osteoarthritis. But you could see this being applied, for example, to cerebrospinal fluid, where you could basically increase the energetic mitochondrial production that finds its way into maybe neuronal cells, into neurons in your brain, and improve—

Holy cow.

—your brain function. Or you could put it into damaged hearts after heart attacks and improve heart function. There are all these theories about how you could use mitotherapy as it becomes possible to produce lots of mitochondria and use them as a therapy that can then be applied to lots of diseases.

I think there's going to be a blossoming of research in this area of mitotherapy.

Chamath, if they can get this going in the next 2 years or so, they could get this to Biden in time, and Biden could actually compete with Trump for his third term.

That's exceptionally mean.

I don't know. It's just a joke. Oh, now all of a sudden you're defending him. No, no.

By the way, did you guys see George Clooney? What do you guys think of his new haircut, his hair color?

I noticed he was dyeing his hair. He was gray, and now he looks—

It must be for an acting job because his hair—

Oh, I hadn't seen this. This is crazy.

Look, he looks—

It looks like his face is melting.

Oh my God, he looks so weird.

It looks like he did a—I don't know, what do they call that hair coloring for men? You put it in the shower. It looks very weird.

Well, he just did an interview explaining his whole op-ed on Biden, but it's—

Yes.

It's in that clip where he looks very different.

Mm.

What did he say on Biden?

He said he felt compelled to act and that it was a civic duty, although the dates don't match up, but nobody ever questioned him about that. But he looks really good.

And he did not get a call from Obama?

He looks really good with salt-and-pepper hair.

Salt-and-pepper works, 100%.

For him.

What is he doing?

Yeah, Clooney's a very handsome guy, but in that interview he did, I don't think he looked particularly—

Did you guys watch The White Lotus, by the way? Did you guys watch The White Lotus?

Yeah.

What do we think?

I don't know what it was, but I had heard from a bunch of you guys in the group chat that the show was not good, so Nat and I ignored it. Then we started it. We watched 1 episode.

Okay.

Phenomenal.

Oh, you loved it.

We're 1 episode in, but—

Okay.

It was great, and we were like, “This is really good.”

I don't think it's terrible, and the kid, Schwarzenegger—Patrick Schwarzenegger—is a fan of All-In, apparently. So we—

Patrick Schwarzenegger? I can tell that guy has one of the most—

If he watches this pod—

—interesting roles in that series. I'm really looking forward to him.

Who else was really cool?

We DM'd the other day. We're following each other, I saw, and he said, “Great pod.” He DM'd me and said, “Great pod,” and I said, “Great job.” Then I mentioned—

Patrick Schwarzenegger is your friend?

I guess. What does it mean? Micro-celebrity DM friends? I don't know.

You could be on Celebrity Jeopardy!, Jason.

I could literally be on Celebrity Jeopardy! I think I would prefer to do Hollywood Squares. I feel like Hollywood Squares is where I could shine, because you get little one-liners in. The jokes are kind of built into it. It's a lot more fun.

But I think we should do Family Feud versus another podcast squad. Us versus—

Why do you aim so high all the time?

I think Family Feud is funny. I think it's funny.

That's actually a lot of fun. That's a good idea. In fact, we should do it with Schulz and his crew—the 4 of them and the 4 of us.

Yes.

All-In versus Schulz and his crew.

That'd be hilarious.

8 people would watch.

No.

No.

You're incorrect.

People would love it, yeah.

Yeah, this is definitely something for John to get on.

Okay, if we're done sniffing our own butts, let's go. We have to go.

Okay, all right.

Besties are back.

Guest

I'm going all in. I'm going all in.