Harvard University named the worst school for free speech out of 248 ‘top schools’ surveyed
‘Harvard University came in dead last with the lowest score possible, 0.00, more than four standard deviations below the mean,’ according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression's latest College Free Speech Rankings.
Examples of why Harvard achieved this ‘abysmal’ rating include the number of attempts to de-platform, punish, or fire scholars and students based on what they had said or written, disinviting outside speakers, and the fact that 63% of Havard students are cool with ‘shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus.’
“Not only did Harvard, the school where I taught for 50 years, score dead last—it got a score below zero! Harvard professors actually teach that free speech is patronizing and patriarchal. They teach that due process and free speech are for whimps and unnecessary because we already know the truth, so there is no room for dissenting opinions.
Sensing this trend, a group of over 120 Harvard professors representing dozens of departments banded together earlier this year to form the Council on Academic Freedom to defend open inquiry, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse on campus. The administration is not helping the situation, and the student body, with rare exceptions, seems to care less. The motto of Harvard should be changed from’ Veritas’ [truth], to ‘Free speech for me but not for thee.’”
—Alan Dershowitz, Author, podcaster, and former Havard constitutional law professor, and Yale law school graduate
Second-worst on the list was the University of Pennsylvania, followed by the University of South Carolina, Georgetown University, Columbia, and Fordham University. Ironically, engineering-focused schools tended to foster the most free speech.
SBF’s right-hand man pleads guilty to ‘donating’ tens of millions of FTX money to buy political influence; forfeits $1.5B in cash and Porsche.
Former FTX exec Ryan Salame admitted that from fall 2021 to November 2022, he made tens of millions of dollars in illegal political contributions at the behest of then-CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). He contributed under his name, but the money actually came from Alameda Research, the hedge fund arm of FTX. The 30-year-old Mr. Salame said these bipartisan donations would be ‘to weed out anti-crypto dems for pro-crypto dems and anti-crypto repubs for pro-crypto repubs.’ He also agreed to forfeit over $1.5 billion in personal cash, two homes, and his 2021 Porsche.
‘Ryan Salame agreed to advance the interests of FTX, Alameda Research, and his co-conspirators through an unlawful political influence campaign and an unlicensed money transmitting business, which helped FTX grow faster and larger by operating outside the law.’
—Prosecuting US Attorney Damien Williams
Part of these political contributions came indirectly from a breathtaking number of name-brand crypto, venture, private equity, pension, and government investment funds that lost $2 billion in combined bets on FTX.
Paradigm Crypto Fund ($290M), Temasek ($275M), Sequoia Capital ($214M), Thoma Bravo ($130M), Softbank ($100M), Ontario Teachers ($95M), Tiger Global ($38M), and BlackRock ($24M) all invested in FTX with no board representation and little to no corporate governance. Like the folks at Sequoia Capital, many investors seemed duped by SBF’s dreamy altruism and political agenda and skipped over much of the normal due diligence process.
SBF is set to go on trial on October 3rd on wire fraud and securities fraud charges related to his alleged looting of billions of dollars in customer funds from FTX. Three other former executives who have pleaded guilty are expected to testify against Mr. Bankman-Fried, who faces a hundred-year-plus potential prison sentence.
Our ten cents? US citizens no longer trust our archaic and anti-democratic voting and campaign fundraising system to the point that, by definition, we no longer live in a democracy. We can solve this crisis by turning the process over to the people via blockchain voting, eliminating corporate and interest group (a.k.a. PACs) donations, and limiting the dollar amount of individual contributions ($100?). Today, you need to raise $1B to be elected President—and only God knows what candidates are promising to whom to get that money. It’s all corrupt.
Did you know?
(Overheard on the streets of the global Silicon Valley. Got any hot insider tips? Email us
editor@cryptoniteventures.com)The Billionaire Boys Club
Speaking of SBF, Michael Lewis’ new book about the former billionaire, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, hits the same day his trial starts. At least nine competing Hollywood TV series and film projects are reportedly in the works based on SBF’s rise-and-fall narrative.
An exclusive excerpt from Steve Jobs’s biographer Walter Isaacson’s book, Elon Musk (available September 12th), has been posted on Axios. Learn the inside scoop on Tesla’s plans for a Robotaxi and the’ $25,000 car.’ Both have the futuristic Cybertruck look and are fully autonomous and available in 3 years.
VC Whispers
High-interest rates and lower tech stock valuations led to the most sluggish IPO environment in over a decade. But Instacart and Klaviyo’s recent IPO filings might end the drought and spur a backlog of over 200 VC-backed companies waiting to go public since early 2022 to list.
Top VCs are betting that AI-based startups will transform health care. The Andreessen Horowitz co-led a $200M round in the AI-powered drug discovery company Genesis Therapeutics is a case in point. General Catalyst, Menlo Ventures, and Lux Capital are also active in funding AI healthcare startups.
AI Tacker
OpenAI’s main rival, Toronto-based Cohere, has drafted JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs to help raise a fresh round of cash. Cohere just raised $270M in June from investors, including Oracle and Nvidia. Hedge fund Tiger Global hopes to sell a slice at a $3B valuation to put some points on the board.
😳 Startups like Clearview AI and PimEyes offer facial recognition search engines paired with billions of online photos ‘to help law enforcement.’ Clearview AI claims to have helped identify January 6th protestors and ‘shape the war in Ukraine.’ Facebook and Google developed similar apps but didn’t dare release them.
Scientists have created an AI-based decoder to turn a person’s brain activity into text. The system is non-invasive, requiring no surgical implants, and uses the same generative AI tech as ChatGPT. The technology scans brain activity and predicts what words a person is listening to.
Former Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who started Anduril, a Lord of the Rings-inspired defense startup, announced they bought the drone company Fury. The plan is for Anduril to marry its proprietary AI software to its new drone designed to fly alongside F-35 fighter jets and B-21 stealth bombers.
Best on the Block
Coinbase’s launch of a crypto lending service for institutional investors in the US is yet another major Wall Street move towards crypto adoption. Coinbase’s custody service support for the venerable BlackRock’s planned Bitcoin exchange-trade desk and Fidelity’s surveillance partner is just more momentum behind the inevitable transition of TraFi to DeFi.
Brian Armstrong says Coinbase will evolve from a simple crypto exchange interface to a ‘super app’ like Tencent’s WeChat, based on ‘decentralized protocols.’ Mr. Armstrong added that the Coinbase future Dapp will be used to manage money, digital assets, and social interactions.
Interest from US and European institutional players in digital assets (DAs) grows despite regulatory scrutiny and market uncertainty. Half (48%) of asset and hedge fund managers actively have DAs under management, 25% have DA strategies, and 44% expect that DA will be a growing business line.
On Hollywood
In another sign of the Incredible Shrinking Hollywood, the Disney+ streaming service has cut its basic subscription price to $1.99 from $7.99 to lure back the more than 11 million subscribers who left the platform in the last quarter.
Now you can own a tiny slice of Justin Bieber streaming royalties to the swooner’s hit song Company. Writer and producer Axident Schuller is selling 2,000 ETH-based NFTs, representing 1% of revenue rights to the 2015 hit that was part of Bieber’s Grammy-nominated fourth album Purpose.
Selling at the top of a shrinking world? CAA, the Hollywood talent agency powerhouse led by Bryan Lourd, Kevin Huvane, and Richard Lovett, sold a majority stake to Artémis, the investment firm controlled by François-Henri Pinault, the French fashion and luxury goods billionaire and lucky husband.
Going Green
Oslo-based H2 Green Steel raised $1.6B in equity to build the world's first large-scale green steel plant using hydrogen produced from renewable electricity—rather than coal—to deliver steel in a process emitting as much as 95% less CO2 than steel produced with traditional blast furnace technology.
Keeping up with the Teslas. Mercedes-Benz unveiled the Concept CLA Class electric vehicle built on a new architecture that will underpin future battery cars from the German auto giant. At the same time, rival BMW showed off the Vision Neue Klasse, another electric car concept revealing their EV ambitions.
The biggest US companies need to catch up to their Chinese counterparts in generating income from solar, wind, nuclear, and other types of renewable energy.
The Science of Life
Israeli VC fund Pitango raised $175M in fresh cash to invest in 15 seed to commercial-stage Israeli healthcare startups leveraging data science, AI, medical devices, and novel biology—the new fund proceeds their $150M inaugural fund in 2019. Pitango was cofounded by Shimon Peres’s son Chemi.
Unlike the Hubble space telescope, NASA’s James Webb telescope is camped hundreds of thousands of miles farther out, where it scans the heavens sitting in Earth’s shadow—permanently blocked from sunlight in -370 degrees Fahrenheit temperature.
Follow the Crypto
CoinShares tracks weekly cash inflows and outflows into crypto and noted this week that $700,000 had been invested over the past week into Salano (SOL)—the 9th consecutive week of positive inflows—making SOL ‘the most loved altcoin amongst investors at present,’ in a depressed market.
MetaMask, the world’s biggest self-custodial hot (internet-connected) wallet with over 22 million users, has added the option to connect with PayPal and banks and convert cryptos into USD and other fiats. Previously, MetaMask users would have to send ETH or other more established cryptos to Coinbase to cash out.
Straight outta Silicon Valley
Remember Clubhouse, the SF-based social audio app that boomed during the lockdown? After laying off half its staff in April, the app is rebranding as an asynchronous voice-only group message app. Once valued at $4B, the app’s live audio rooms will remain available but replace ‘followers’ with ‘friends.’
WeWork plans to renegotiate ‘nearly all leases’ which are currently priced ‘dramatically out of step with current market conditions,’ says CEO David Tolley. The SoftBank-backed office space group warned weeks ago that there was ‘substantial doubt’ about its ability to continue as a going concern.
Leaked salary data of over 12,000 Google employees in white-collar roles nationwide show people of ‘Black or African descent’ made over $20,000 less, on average, than their ‘White or Asian’ counterparts, and the gender pay gap is still very much alive. So much for the 'equity' portion of Google’s DEI policy.
Chaos & Complexity
Gallup has documented sharp declines in church attendance, confidence in organized religion, and religious identification in recent years. Americans’ beliefs regarding God, angels, heaven, hell, and the devil have also fallen by double digits since 2001.
What the Math Says
For the second year in a row and the 6th time overall, Switzerland is on top of US News & World Report’s annual Best Countries rankings. The small, landlocked central European country is followed by Canada (2), Sweden (3), Australia (4) and the US (5)—down a spot from 2022.
Slicing the data in the same US News survey and looking at which countries Americans favor most, we bump the USA to #3. Otherwise we like: (1) United Kingdom, (2) New Zealand, (3) United States, (4) Australia, (5) Sweden, (6) Canada, (7) Japan, (8) France, (9) Switzerland, (10) Germany.
Know Thy Enemy
The Chinese economy grew just 3.2% in Q2 versus the US’s growth rate of almost 6%. House prices have fallen, and consumer and business spending, investment, and exports are in the dumps. Analysts warn that China may enter a deflationary trap like Japan’s in the 1990s.
A Microsoft Threat Analysis Center report claims ‘China-affiliated actors’ are using AI-generated visual media in a ‘broad campaign’ that heavily emphasizes ‘politically divisive topics, such as gun violence, and denigrating US political figures and symbols.’
China is Apple’s third largest market, accounting for 18% ($394B) of its total revenue last year. Beijing has ordered central government agency officials not to bring iPhones into the office or use them for work and may also impose the ban on workers at state-owned companies and agencies.
Apple’s main competition in China is Huawei’s new 5G smartphone, the Mate 60 Pro, which, despite heavy Western chip sanctions, has hardware primarily made in China. Analysts say Chinese consumers see it as a big win over US sanctions and estimate the Mate 60 could eat 38% of iPhone sales in China.
Revive Thyself (or not)
The energy magic bullet. Discover CoQ10, a naturally occurring, vitamin-like antioxidant that your body produces to help energize you by neutralizing free radicals, staving off disease, preserving organ health, and rejuvenating your body.
Think of sugar as a terrible, life-altering substance that’s nothing but trouble. So, whether you’re led astray by the banana bread or just an all-purpose sweets-cravings-gone-wild, it’s time to start planning your sugar exit strategy.
Current Wisdom
“People have to understand that AI is essentially retrospective. It’s about permutations of pre-existing content. The danger is it’s rubbish in, rubbish out, rubbish all about—exponentially distributing potentially damaging content. Instead of elevating and enhancing, we find ourselves in an ever-shrinking circle of sanity. Instead of the insight that AI can potentially bring, we risk devolving into a maggot-ridden mind mold.
We are tracking how AI interacts with our content. Companies training generative AI engines to use archived material should pay the publishers who employ the trusted sources creating the content. If you derive benefit from our content, we should derive a benefit, or else you’re in danger of undermining the creation of that content.
When you look at the dramatic decline in newsroom employment in the US from 2008 to 2020 — it’s down around 57% or more—it shows how profound the first wave of digital disruption has been for the media business. With the advent of AI, we’re in a position where an even more damaging wave is looming. What you’ll see over time is a lot of litigation. Some media companies have already begun those discussions. We’re not interested in that at this stage. We’re much more interested in negotiation.”
—News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, at last week’s Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference in San Francisco.