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

Summary

• The H20 ban is about a loophole, not tariffs: Sacks explains that Nvidia kept nerfing flops to duck each export threshold (H800, then H20), but in the reinforcement-learning/test-time-compute paradigm memory bandwidth matters more than flops — and the H20 has 20% more bandwidth than the H100, so “this chip is just frankly too good.” Nvidia guided a $5.5B quarterly hit and the stock dropped 6%; Sacks’s challenge to critics: “are you against export controls in general, or you just think that we’re drawing the line in the wrong place?”
• Chamath’s explosive allegation — and the most tradeable claim of the episode: roughly 47% of Nvidia’s revenue goes to China and China-related countries, and he believes shell companies in Singapore, Bhutan, Cambodia and Vietnam are way stations feeding chips to China. “Is there a Cursor of Bhutan that we did not know?” Chamath says the U.S. needs a mechanism to understand and disclose the traffic. Sacks confirms evasion is real (TSMC’s ~3M dies into Huawei’s Ascend 910C) and wants more staff at Commerce’s BIS, the rare agency he’d expand.
• The bear case on the ban, via Gurley/Baker and steelmanned by Friedberg: China launched a $37B push into 3nm last year, SMIC already shipped a 7nm chip in Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro, and “they’re doing it either way” — the only question is whether controls slow them at the AI layer. Chamath disagrees on timing: the tooling is “extremely non-trivial” and denial “slows them down quite a bit.”
• Trump vs Harvard escalated to the nuclear option: after Harvard’s president refused the White House’s merit-hiring/end-DEI demands, $2.2B in grants were frozen and tax-exempt status is on the table. Sacks’s legal chain — Bob Jones (1983) established that enshrined racial discrimination forfeits exemption, SFFA v Harvard (2023) found Harvard discriminating, and its new five-essay diversity application is “suspiciously similar” to DEI statements: “Harvard wants to have its cake and eat it too.”
• Friedberg’s numbers make the funding fight concrete: a $53.2B endowment throwing off ~$4B a year, Harvard billing the government an incremental 69% administrative overhead on NIH grants (average ~30%), and “the majority of the capital is being used to reinvest to make new capital” — raising whether universities, not corporate labs like Bell Labs or Google, should do fundamental research at all.
• Sacks’s civilizational frame: China passed the US in share of published foundational research around 2019 (English-language only — add Chinese and it’s a decade earlier), while “we’re bumbling around talking about pronouns.” His never-told story: a top mortgage-market banker walked away from a Federal Reserve dream job after being told to “play up your Indianness” — “we lost him. We meaning the American taxpayer.”
• Tim Dillon’s DEI-killed-Hollywood thesis: LA executives who “believe in nothing” chased marginalized voices because “they thought there was money there,” made TV for “guilty white liberals” that nobody watched, and once it stopped being profitable “rediscovered the profit motive.” DEI, in his telling, was never altruism — it’s “the establishment trying to preserve itself” through “ceremonial optical choices.”
• Science corner: three papers point to mitotherapy as a new therapeutic modality — evidence of cell-to-cell mitochondria transfer (WashU 2023), the first mitochondrial map of the human brain (Columbia), and Zhejiang University stem cells producing 854x the mitochondria at 5.7x ATP efficiency, already healing bone in a mouse osteoarthritis model.

Deep dive

1. The H20 ban is export controls, not tariffs — and the chip was “frankly too good”

• Sacks’s history lesson: the through-line starts in 2019, when Trump 1.0 banned EUV lithography to China — ASML’s ~$200M machines, the only ones on earth — a call he now reads as “really farsighted,” because without it “China might today be dominating global manufacturing of semiconductors.” Biden added the H100 in 2022; Nvidia shipped the H800 just under the flops threshold; that got banned in 2023; Nvidia answered with the H20.
• The technical catch that triggered Monday’s move: flops isn’t the only axis anymore. In the new paradigm of reinforcement learning and test-time compute, memory bandwidth matters more — and the H20 carries 20% more memory bandwidth than the H100. “I think there’s a view that this chip is just frankly too good.”
• Sacks’s framing question for critics like Bill Gurley: “are you against export controls in general, or you just think that we’re drawing the line in the wrong place?” Would you sell China the GB200 — a million units, five million at a premium? At some point some technologies are too sensitive; the only debate is where the line sits. Cost of the line: a $5.5B quarterly hit to earnings, stock down 6%, and Jensen Huang in China telling state media “the China market is very important to us.”

2. Does the ban just accelerate China’s own stack? Friedberg: they’re building it either way

• Jason channels the Gurley/Gavin Baker bear case: bans “essentially guarantee that America will lose AI” because necessity becomes the mother of invention — better to keep China buying second-tier American silicon than to force a domestic Nvidia into existence.
• Friedberg’s evidence that the fork is already taken: China began a $37 billion investment in 3nm technology last year; SMIC shipped a 7nm chip in Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro and claims its own EUV system — though from what he understands it involved heavy reverse engineering and workarounds. “I think they’re doing it either way” — the real question is whether controls hold them back at the application/AI layer for some period of time.
• Chamath’s dissent on timing: the required technology is “extremely non-trivial,” and denial “actually slows them down quite a bit.”

3. Chamath’s allegation: Nvidia’s Asian revenue is a way station for China

• His up-leveled setup: China’s 2017 State Council plan was explicit — “iconic advances” by 2020, “major engine of the industry” by 2025, “occupy the commanding heights” of AI by 2030. Against that, “the real problem that we have is that NVIDIA is not doing what is in the best interest of the United States” — the A800/H800 workarounds, then an H20 “explicitly designed for China.”
• The chart he puts up: ~47% of all Nvidia revenue goes to China and Chinese-related countries. His mechanism — an “acmecorp.com” springs up in Bhutan, Cambodia, Vietnam or Singapore with a $300–800M purchase order, Nvidia checks the boxes and looks away. “Is there a Cursor of Bhutan that we did not know? Is there a great shopping app in Cambodia?… I think the answer is no, so we already know what the answer is.”
• The mirror argument: when China retaliated on tariffs last week by constraining rare earth exports, factory lines “had to stop on a dime” — proof China understands its supply chain and can affect it. “At a minimum, the United States should have a mechanism to understand it” — whether to act is a decision for “powers that be bigger than the four of us,” but it must be disclosed. Even Dillon drops the bit: “Taiwan and Vietnam do not have the need for that many… they’re obviously flipping them.”

4. Sacks on enforcement: Lenin’s rope, and the one agency that needs MORE headcount

• Evasion is documented fact, not theory: last year TSMC was found to have produced “something like 3 million dies” that ended up in Huawei’s Ascend 910C chips — TSMC claims it thought the customer was a Bitcoin-ASIC outfit called (he thinks) SoftCo, and is being fined.
• His diagnosis borrows Lenin: “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang ourselves” — Western companies look the other way “because it’s profitable not to” enforce.
• The fix is two-part: redraw boundary lines with fewer legal loopholes, then more monitoring, inspection, and enforcement. His notable contrarian note for a DOGE-era official: Commerce’s BIS is understaffed — “this is one of the few areas of the government that I actually think needs more resources.”

5. Dillon on trade: right instincts, chaotic rollout — and the gig economy is the disease

• His verdict on Trump’s tariffs: “roughly Trump’s instincts are correct,” but “the way that the tariffs rolled out seem to be incredibly chaotic… everything’s a hard launch” — same messaging failure that made DOGE “a bit of a fiasco.” He’s genuinely unsure a fully integrated global economy can be unwound, citing Ray Dalio’s warning about the simultaneous unwinding of monetary and political structures.
• The serious core under the jokes: “cheap goods aren’t necessarily the highest organizing principle of a life” — Americans were sold cheap consumption over “a stable, functioning job and family,” and the gig economy was marketed as freedom while delivering chaos. “You lose a finger at a factory, it’s a story. Delivering burritos is a hell.”
• His cultural coda: destigmatize the electrician, plumber, contractor — the construction guy adults once pointed at as a cautionary tale “is killing it. So what he went to January 6th? He went there peacefully.”

6. Trump vs Harvard: the demands, the freeze, the nuclear tax option

• The docket: on March 31 three agencies began reviewing $9B in multi-year grants and $256M in contracts; the April 11 letter demanded merit-based hiring and admissions, cancellation of all DEI programs, reformed international admissions (no students “hostile to American values”), and viewpoint diversity across departments. President Alan Garber refused; the White House froze $2.2B in grants and $60M in contracts and is now floating revocation of tax-exempt status — done only once before, to Bob Jones University.
• Dillon’s caveat before the pile-on — he visited an encampment himself: “I don’t like deporting people that are critical of Israel” absent proven material support and due process; a non-binary Asian dressed as Hamas “is fun. It’s college.” But: “it is impossible to look at higher education in America right now and not be embarrassed. Truly, the word is embarrassment” — campuses captured by “this quasi-religious cult of insanity” elevating characteristics other than intelligence and merit.

7. Chamath: the opposite of discrimination is meritocracy — stop the rot at the top

• His indictment: Harvard sits at the absolute bottom of free-speech rankings, lost admissions cases up to the Supreme Court, and “doesn’t just have a front door, it’s got a bunch of side doors, got a bunch of back doors.” Twenty years of discrimination “made it fashionable for other schools to discriminate,” compounding down into high schools and middle schools — his local Board of Education killed AP Calculus during COVID “‘cause it made people feel bad.”
• The competitive frame: China and India are “2.5 billion people swimming in a meritocratic soup from the day they’re born… it’s eat or be eaten” — meritocratic schooling compounding into a meritocratic workforce, versus America’s “fake things that make people feel really bad about themselves.” His conclusion is categorical: “whatever it takes, the most severe and extreme measures must be undertaken to fix this.”
• His reframe of the institution itself: “It’s called Harvard Corporation for a reason… It is an asset manager that may happen to have some educational things that they do on the side” — and everyone used to copy Harvard, so what it normalizes matters nationally.

8. Friedberg’s numbers: $53B endowment, 69% overhead — and should universities do research at all?

• The tax-exemption math: a $53.2B endowment at ~7% throws off roughly $4B a year; the IP is licensed, equity is taken in startups, buildings get built — “they really do operate like technology development centers,” and “the majority of the capital is being used to reinvest to make new capital,” not to educate students. His governance test post-Chevron: the administration must “point to the laws that they believe are being violated,” not just social preference.
• The grant-overhead reveal: until the NIH’s mid-February change, Harvard billed the government an incremental $69 of administrative overhead per $100 of grant — against an average around 30%. Sacks’s reaction on clarifying it’s on top: “That’s insane.”
• The deeper question he raises: America’s best research ROI historically came from market-disciplined corporate labs — Google’s transformer paper and Waymo, Bell Labs “up until we said Bell Labs a monopoly and we broke them apart and they got destroyed” — while universities grew administrative workloads with no market incentive.
• Sacks’s chart to close the loop: China went from nothing in 2001 to neck-and-neck with the US at ~half a trillion dollars a year in gross science expenditure, and passed the US around 2019 in share of foundational research — measuring English-language publications only; add Chinese-language work “and they would have run away with this a decade earlier.” “These guys are inventing things. We’re playing catch up. Meanwhile, we’re bumbling around talking about pronouns.”

9. Sacks’s legal chain: Bob Jones plus SFFA equals the cake-and-eat-it problem

• The precedent: Bob Jones University v. IRS (1983) — the school’s “bizarre and reprehensible” interracial-dating ban cost it tax-exempt status; it kept the policy and kept operating privately. The rule: enshrine racially discriminatory policy in violation of civil rights law, lose the exemption.
• The predicate: Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) found race-based admissions violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Harvard’s response — hiding applicants’ race from readers while replacing the long-form essay with five short questions on contributing to a diverse student body, “suspiciously similar” to the DEI statements that weed out anyone who believes in “the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” With more than 80% of surveyed faculty identifying as liberal, “the idea that they’re not still doing it, I think, is hard to believe.”
• His endgame logic: either the government forces the issue now, or “every year or two we’re gonna have new litigation” with whistleblowers and new games. “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… Harvard wants to have its cake and eat it too.”
• Friedberg’s structural add, which Sacks calls “a really good point”: does federal dependence itself breed the ideology? No market feedback, no competition for capital or talent — “the accumulation of federal dollars over time makes you say, ‘I deserve federal dollars.’”

10. The Fed told a banker to “play up your Indianness” — Chamath’s never-told story

• The story: a very senior Wall Street banker — the world expert on a narrow interest-rate mortgage market, PhD thesis and all — interviewed for his dream Federal Reserve role with Jerome Powell and, Chamath thinks, Lael Brainard. Before the final round his shepherd told him: “You really need to play up your Indianness, ‘cause what we really want is somebody who can help us tell a diverse story.” His answer — “my diversity is that I know this market better than literally anyone else in the world” — and he walked. “We lost him. We meaning the American taxpayer.”
• The generalization Chamath draws: multiply that across every institution not hiring the right people and you get “a slowdown in innovation… a slow malaise. So how do you stop the rot? You have to stop it at the top.”
• Dillon’s riff earns its keep: “I just love Jerome Powell sitting there going, ‘We were on the fence about you. But you showed up with this butter chicken.’”

11. Dillon: DEI was the establishment preserving itself — and it killed Hollywood’s product

• His theory of elite institutions: they exist to “create a consensus about the values that are important to America,” and DEI is not altruism but “quite a transparent attempt for certain people to keep positions of power” via “ceremonial optical choices” — a female CEO of color installed while “the internal structure stays the same.” Even wars get “sold with social justice.” The politics are “very aesthetic”: “We don’t care about your economic circumstances. Here’s a trans Batman.”
• The Kennedy compound story, as told: sailing at Hyannis with “very smart” Harvard kids who find the Cape “kind of depressing in the winter ‘cause all these people here are on drugs” — “and it’s like, yeah, ‘cause you shipped their jobs away.”
• The Hollywood mechanics from the inside, circa 2016–18: LA executives — “they’re monsters. They care nothing about anything, and that’s why they’re good at their job” — suddenly speaking of “marginalized voices” and “empowering.” “You had the worst people in the world trying to convince you that they had an interest in marginalized voices ‘cause they thought there was money there.” But they “were never making TV that minorities wanted to watch. They were making TV that guilty white liberals wanted to watch.”
• The ending: it didn’t make money, so “all the executives that supposedly cared so much… rediscovered the profit motive. They rediscovered viewership… all these business fundamentals they had ignored.” And cancellation failed “because people at the end of the day realize that people are flawed, fallible, and human, and that’s what makes them entertaining.”

12. Education rebuilt: honesty with children, AI tutors, Palantir’s skip-college play

• Dillon, handed the education portfolio: assert that higher ed “needs to be for a purpose,” and be honest with kids from middle school on — “people have natures, they have skill sets,” and follow-your-dream is “this toxic American idea that I don’t subscribe to.” The current model hands out hundreds of thousands in loans with no plan, leaving graduates “mired in debt” through their 20s and 30s, “incapable of owning a home.”
• Friedberg’s inflection call: AI personalized education — pace, style, dialogue tuned per kid — could radically reshape the 18-years-in-a-classroom model, and “the workplace will adjust.” Exhibit A: Palantir’s paid skip-college apprenticeship — “$56,000 a year,” per Dillon, who can’t resist: “Who needs to go to college? Come be a drone here at Palantir.”
• Dillon’s counterweight on AI and jobs, from experience: he was a $13/hour double-decker tour-guide in New York while learning comedy — exactly the kind of job AI eliminates, and exactly “the jobs that allow people to get good at other things while they’re doing them.” He wants entertainers and musicians able to support themselves “while they enrich us culturally in other ways.”

13. “The Ukraine war is spiritually over” — dictator banter with a real edge

• Dillon’s taxonomy is a bit (Putin “has a lot of class… people do fall out of windows in London. It does happen, actually”; Kim Jong-un “has style”), but he flags the pivot himself: “even though it’s a joke, I am being very dead serious. The idea of it has ended. It is now just a border negotiation. It is no longer a totemic struggle for freedom” — and Chamath agrees, offering his metric: the Ukraine flags coming off X profile photos.
• The screenshot Tim puts up: Ukraine’s parliament extends martial law till August — no elections, opponents’ assets seized, press curbed. Friedberg’s dissent stays categorical: “I believe that free countries should stop non-free countries from invading them. That’s it.”
• Dillon’s Putin defense, hedges intact: first leader to call the US after 9/11, “he wanted to be in NATO… we rebuffed him,” and “the best quality of Putin is we’re not funding him. He’s not asking for a dollar.” His broader skepticism of Manichean war narratives dates to Bush’s “with us or against us” — “which I fell for, ‘cause I was 17 and on cocaine… in hindsight it didn’t work tremendously well.”

14. Science corner: mitotherapy — three papers toward a new therapeutic modality

• (Housekeeping worth one line: Friedberg won his Celebrity Jeopardy! round from third place on a Final Jeopardy “Sarajevo Film Festival” comeback — and agrees with Dillon that “there’s no upside” for anyone recognizable to go on.)
• Paper one, WashU 2023: evidence that mitochondria transfer between cells via three identified mechanisms — long theorized, now demonstrated — meaning functional mitochondria can rejuvenate energy-starved, dysfunctional cells.
• Paper two, Columbia, last month: the first mitochondrial map of the human brain, built from 703 tiny cubes of a 54-year-old donor’s brain, showing regional differences in mitochondrial density and function that may drive aging symptoms — memory loss, speech impairment, cognitive decline.
• Paper three, Zhejiang University: stem cells treated to produce 854 times the normal number of mitochondria, each averaging 5.7x more efficient at making ATP — addressing the supply bottleneck that has limited mitochondrial therapy. Applied directly to damaged cartilage in a mouse osteoarthritis model, the bone grew back. Friedberg’s call: applications from post-heart-attack repair to neuronal delivery via cerebrospinal fluid — “I think there’s gonna be a bit of a blossoming of research in this area of mitotherapy.”