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Harvard's cooked, Jason. Harvard's cooked. Explain. It turns out, and there's been a lot of people that's
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posted about this on X, but there continues to be rampant Title 9 violations with respect to admissions. I
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think Creme Nick, you can probably find it. I think he published one that Colombia was
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continuing to discriminate against Asian students. Harvard's original case was against Asian students. There was a
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bunch of woke stuff at other Ivy League schools like UPUPEN. There's all this rampant anti-semitism. It all needs to
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get fixed. And so I think that if you get a deal done, Harvard will have to capitulate. I think President Trump
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holds all the leverage and all the cards and there's nothing mathematically that
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Harvard can do. They can stall for probably another year and a half, but at some point they will not have the budget
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to sustain themselves and they're going to get into a huge world of hurt. What they will have to do in order to finance
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their budget in probably 18 months is start to actively sell their private equity portfolio, which by the way from
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2019 to this year almost doubled from 20 to 40%. So, an insane asset allocation,
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frankly, an asset misallocation at the top of the market to the most illquid asset class. And when people sniff this
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out, what they're going to do is Harvard was able to sell a billion dollars recently of private equity stuff in
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managers that they didn't want to support anymore at a 7% discount. There is no smart money on the street
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that's going to look at any private equity portfolio from Harvard without asking for a 20 25 30 35 40% discount
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because your back will be totally against the wall. And if you don't ask for that, you're just a bad businessman.
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So if you put all of these things together, they're going to need to reestablish federal funding. But in
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order to do it, I think the president has been very, very clear and for whatever reason, they've refused to want
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to address these issues. But the Ivy League, there's just something fundamentally broken.
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Well, and Freeberg, the Wall Street Journal, reported on Wednesday that Harvard would face a
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billion dollar budget shortfall every year if Trump followed through on his funding cuts and tax hikes. He was also
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saber rattling that he would get rid of their nonprofit status or maybe change how the endowments worked. A lot of uh
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tools I think that he could deploy here. And uh there's an excise tax by the way in the
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BBB that taxes foundation assets. I don't know what the final language was, but there is a there was a version that
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I saw where excise tax on foundations was upwards of 8% a year. I don't know if that was the final version, but
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that's an enormous amount. Let's just say it's half that. Let's just say it's 4%. But if you're paying 4% tax on your
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endowment every year, it all of a sudden starts to add up. That's like, you know,
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for Harvard like$2.5 extra billion dollars a year. that they have to pay. And uh Freeberg, reportedly Harvard is
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at the table and in discussions with the White House after a couple of months of
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defiance. What's your take on this? Is this an important priority for America and for the Trump administration? Is it
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a sideshow? What are your thoughts on the larger ramifications of this? Let me just suspend the brand and
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history and legacy of Harvard for a second. Sure. And just talk about these call them prestigious higher education
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institutions. What are the two primary functions of these institutions? The first is to educate students and the
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second is to conduct research or to create facilities for research. Remember these institutions do not direct
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research. They recruit and enable researchers to apply for grants to get funding to do their research and then
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they educate kids. I think the internet was the first leg on the stool to break higher education.
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The internet democratized access to information and knowledge. You can watch MIT graduate courses. All of the core
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kind of educational content that is delivered in prestigious higher education institutions has been
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largely democratized and is broadly available for free on the internet. That's an incredible transition that's
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happened for humanity, for society, for the world. AI is the next leg of the stool to break. And I think that AI may
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actually break education. It may break higher education and then eventually it may make its way all the way down to
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childhood in terms of rethinking from first principles. How do we educate? How is an individual getting educated? And
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what are the other benefits they get from an educational system besides just core domain knowledge? There's also
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socialization and experience with project-based work. But I think that AI fundamentally rewrites the ability for
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an individual to get a good quality education. And we could see kids in Africa and kids in South Asia getting
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the equivalent of a Harvard graduate school degree at a cost of zero through personalized tutoring enabled through AI
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and the ubiquitous access to knowledge and information. So that core function of the university I think is broken and
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they're now starting to reconcile what that actually means for the long-term viability of all of these higher
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educational institutions in the United States. The research function I think is also being rewritten around the world in
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Europe and in China and in Asia. There are independent research institutions that get research funding that can show
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up and say, "Hey, this institution is just being used to run research. It doesn't necessarily need to be within an
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educational framework. It can be an independent research institution that focuses on either a topic or a domain.
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So, I do think we're going to see more and more independent research funding happening with the grants that come out
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from the federal government, from nonprofits, from endowments and foundations that fund research. So, I
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think that there's a real reckoning underway. It's almost like these guys have created a monopoly. They've
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accumulated this capital which allows them to build these great buildings, attract these great researchers, and
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then get the research funding to fund those researchers, and then use that to raise more capital in their endowment
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and build the next building and keep this thing growing. And I think that that's breaking