Freiburg
speaker
83 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Freiburg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Okay.
It's an important question. Last year, China announced and began a $37 billion investment in developing their own three nanometer chip technology. So the EUV lithography systems that Sachs is referencing require these wavelengths of light at about 13 and a half nanometer, which is, you know, the previous technology was like 200 plus nanometer.
So it's very, very small wavelengths of light that you have to be able to manipulate in a very kind of discrete way to print circuits that are just three nanometer wide. scale. And so 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.
And their big semiconductor companies called the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation or SMIC in China, They launched a chip, a seven nanometer chip with Huawei in their Mate 60 Pro, which is sort of like their iPhone competitor in China.
And so they're proclaiming that they've already got this EUV technology from what I understand, and Saks would know better than I, it sounds like there was a lot of reverse engineering and workaround of existing technology in order to deliver that system.
but they may now already be investing in and developing their own system. So JCal, I think they're doing it either way. I think that they're going to invest and build their own EUV and chip manufacturing capacity either way. And the question is, does this slow them down or limit their ability on the application or the AI layer? to kind of be held back for some period of time.
Harvard's endowment is $53.2 billion. Huge. Assume they make 7% return. They're making $4 billion a year in income generated from those investments in that endowment. I think there's a couple of two 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? And is that the point of federal spending and federal expenditures?
So you could kind of 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.
And 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?
So then the next question, I think, is like, what is the limit on the government's ability to influence whether or not an institution gets their capital? Is it statutory? Is it mandated by law? or does it become politically motivated, socially motivated, et cetera? Because in other parts of how we're seeing decisions being made, we're saying Chevron doctrine was thrown out.
And when Chevron doctrine gets thrown out, we can't rely on the regulatory scrutiny of the administrators of the Capitol. We have to rely on the law. And is there a law that they're relying on? And I think that's the key question is to have the administration
point to the laws that they believe are being violated to kind of make, I would say, a strongly defensible argument about why they would withhold the capital to make sure that they're compliant with the law, and whatnot, and have it not be kind of, you know, just, we would prefer to see you do things differently, because we think it's socially better.
So I think those are kind of the two 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 four 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. I mean, they really do operate like technology development centers. So, you know, what is the original kind of 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.
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 kind of socialist-oriented universities? because they're dependent on federal funding? Do you see what I'm saying? Like, is it the case that this ideology accrues over time when you are much more dependent on the government?
There's no private market. There's 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.
So 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.
And on Feb 15, or thereabouts, the NIH said any grants we give to universities now, so today, if you're a researcher, you're a scientist at a university like Harvard, I don't know if people realize this, the way you get funding for your lab, is you will apply for a grant, someone has to give you that capital to run your lab. And many grants come from the NIH.
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