Jul 1, 2023 · 1h 36m · allin
E135: Wagner rebels, SCOTUS ends AA, AI M&A, startups gone bad, spacetime warps & more
David Friedberg · 26m spoken David Sacks · 20m spoken Jason Calacanis · 19m spoken Chamath Palihapitiya · 18m spoken
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Episode 135 of the All-In Podcast features in-depth discussions on the Wagner Group's mutiny in Russia, the Supreme Court's affirmative action ruling, major enterprise AI acquisitions, and the unraveling of inflated startup valuations. Hosted by David Friedberg, the panel blends geopolitical, legal, technological, and scientific analysis with their signature playful banter.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 99.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 6.8 Guest teaching 1.8 Guest disagreement 3.1 The hosts pushing back 3.0
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 12:50 JCal rejecting Russian poll credibility
Calacanis forcefully rejects the premise that Russian polling data reflects true public support, calling Putin a murderous dictator who controls citizens through fear.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 44:00 Friedberg demanding the union perspectiveFriedberg directly challenges the co-hosts' unanimous union bashing, forcing them to address why working teachers rely on unions for livelihood protection.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 25:47 Chamath presenting NBER Harvard admission statsChamath educates the panel on NBER hard data demonstrating that 40th percentile African American applicants had higher admission chances at Harvard than 100th percentile Asian applicants.
The host holds their own ▶ 53:23 Sacks breaking down MosaicML term sheet numbersSacks demonstrates deep domain expertise by revealing confidential Series B terms ($50M at $400M post from Emergence) and calculating exact ARR multiples for the deal.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Show Title Sequence and Host Visual Graphic | 6 | 2 | 4 | 5 | Friedberg sets up the recap of the Wagner Group mutiny. Sacks offers an extensive geopolitical overview of Prigozhin's march on Rostov and Moscow, citing Levada Center polling on Russian domestic support, which Calacanis immediately challenges as dictator-coerced propaganda. | |
| Dictatorship Dynamics, Prigozhin, and Conflict Escalation | 7 | 3 | 5 | 4 | The co-hosts debate the long-term impact of Prigozhin's rebellion on Putin's regime. Calacanis argues Putin is severely weakened and nearing the end of his rule, while Sacks details Prigozhin's background in Africa and PMC catering, arguing the event will force further war escalation. | |
| SCOTUS Ends Affirmative Action in College Admissions | 8 | 2 | 2 | 2 | Friedberg introduces the landmark Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action at Harvard and UNC. Chamath breaks down NBER study data showing racial decile discrepancies in Harvard admissions and outlines first- and second-order legal derivatives affecting corporate DEI and legacy admissions. | |
| Supreme Court Ends Affirmative Action & College Admissions Debate | 7 | 2 | 4 | 5 | The panel debates meritocracy versus equal opportunity in education. While Calacanis and Sacks criticize teachers unions and champion charter school vouchers, Friedberg pushes back by asking the group to present the perspective of unionized teachers. | |
| Databricks Acquires MosaicML for $1.3 Billion | 8 | 1 | 3 | 3 | Friedberg breaks down Databricks acquiring MosaicML for $1.3B. Sacks reveals insider deal details, including a preempted Series B term sheet from Emergence, explaining why enterprise infrastructure platforms are rushing to acquire GPU training stack tools. | |
| Inflection AI Raises $1.3B & Enterprise AI Market Mapping | 8 | 2 | 3 | 2 | The group discusses Inflection AI raising $1.3B. Chamath calculates the unit economics of their 22,000 Nvidia H100 GPU cluster, while Sacks presents Craft Ventures' market map for enterprise LLM toolchains. | |
| Startups Gone Bad: IRL Fraud, Byju's Collapse, & The VC Crisis | 9 | 2 | 5 | 3 | The co-hosts analyze startup collapses including IRL's fake user fraud and Byju's valuation markdown. Chamath and Sacks dissect structural venture capital flaws, pointing to bloated fund sizes, management fee extraction, and lack of board due diligence. | |
| Discussion on RFK Jr. and Vaccine Debate | 4 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Chamath brings up RFK Jr.'s vaccine arguments, prompting Friedberg to urge a rigorous, data-driven analysis rather than taking viral clips at face value, pointing to Dr. Paul Offit's Substack rebuttal. | |
| Science Corner: NanoGRAV and Spacetime Gravitational Waves | 9 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Friedberg delivers Science Corner, explaining NanoGRAV's 15-year dataset using pulsars to detect low-frequency gravitational waves and the background warping of spacetime. | |
| Movie Recommendations: Everything Everywhere All at Once & BlackBerry | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Brief banter to wrap the show where Calacanis recommends the movie BlackBerry and does a comical radio DJ outro. |
Statements from this episode (17)
Calacanis predicts Vladimir Putin will lose power within 10 years
“I think we're gonna see in the next 10 years, Putin lose power and he's going to be out of power.”
Sacks: A Prigozhin takeover in Russia would have yielded a worse hardliner
“What you're much more likely to end up with is an even worse dictator or a hardliner. And I think that is what would have happened if Rogozin had taken over. I think it would have been much worse for the West.”
Sacks predicts potential full Russian mobilization within months following Prigozhin mutiny
“I think you could see now over the next few months, a full mobilization in Russia. And I think that this could lead us to the next point of escalation in this war.”
Chamath predicts legacy and athletic college admissions will be eliminated
“The next step is probably going to be around athletics based and legacy based admissions. So athletics based admissions are pretty obvious, which is you don't really have great grades. But you're really stupendous at a sport that's important to that school. So…”
Chamath predicts corporate DEI and ESG programs will be outlawed
“The second order derivative is now what lawsuits get launched and what are the implications for private companies, right? So right now this affects any institution that receives federal funding, and that includes all the universities. So there's no private or …”
Chamath: 43% of white Harvard admits are athletes, legacies, or donor kin
“The National Bureau of Economic Research did a study in 2019 that they published, and what they found was that 43%, so 43% of white students admitted to Harvard were athletes, Or legacy students, or children of faculty and staff, or had a relative that were do…”
Friedberg: Academy of Art founder owns SF's largest real estate portfolio
“She used all the profit over the years to buy more real estate, and she accumulated the largest real estate portfolio in San Francisco.”
Sacks reveals MosaicML had a $50M Series B at $400M valuation
“They had a term sheet from emergence to raise fifty million at 400 posts.”
Sacks: GPU shortage will not improve for 1-2 years
“We have a GPU shortage and it's probably not going to get better for a year or two, if that.”
Calacanis: AI startups trial 6-8 models and frequently reject OpenAI
“There are now, in the companies I'm talking to, they're trialing Friedberg, on average, six, seven, eight language models before they pick one, and they're not picking OpenAI every time.”
Chamath: Chip and cloud investments in AI startups round-trip cash
“So whenever I see a chip maker and a cloud provider come together to put in a lot of money, it's essentially round tripping cash. They're giving them money, which then they use to buy their services. And then you know, you just you're just pumping revenue.”
Sacks predicts increased AI infrastructure M&A at high valuations
“I think for sure there's gonna be more M&A, and I think the valuations will be high, not because these companies have a lot of revenue yet, but because it's very strategic for these big infra companies to assemble the end-to-end toolchain.”
Sacks: Enterprises refuse to share data with OpenAI, prefer custom models
“I think enterprises want one at the level of the, call it the company intranet where employees could just ask it questions and, but they do not want to share their data with open AI. That's like very clear. They want to roll out their own models.”
Calacanis: Cleaning up startup and VC fraud will take a decade
“And it's going to take a decade to clean up all of the fraud in our space.”
Sacks: Late-stage venture financing crunch will worsen over 18 months
“There's a huge crunch in late-stage financing. It's only gonna get worse over the next 18 months.”
Chamath: 60% of unicorns will go to zero, yielding 1.1x overall return
“I think 60% go to zero. Of the remaining 40%, half of them probably return money. And then of the remaining half, half of those maybe get one and a half X. And then you get a geometric distribution from there, which means the blended return of that entire stre…”