Katie Miller

Bill Ackman says he is not worried about Harvard. He says Harvard is okay, and he has other philanthropic things he is focused on.

Katie Miller asked the longtime Harvard donor what he thinks of President Trump's effort to rid schools of wokeness, whether Harvard can eradicate some of the origination of that woke thought, and what the future of his Harvard giving is. Bill Ackman says it is actually working. A classmate who is a Harvard professor told him at a wedding that weekend that Harvard has changed dramatically in the last few years. The student body has changed significantly and gone back to being a meritocracy. People are encouraged to say what they think, and conservative students

Bill Ackman tweeted a picture of Amadea, the 100% dark chocolate he calls the best, and the bar sold out.

He could not get it anymore, so he wrote a tweet on Twitter complaining that he could not get his favorite chocolate. People started sending him boxes. He keeps a lot of the chocolate in his office and eats one whole bar when he gets hungry. Dark chocolate is his biggest guilty pleasure. He says most 100% chocolate is terrible, and Amadea is amazing.

Katie Miller tells him to mix the dark chocolate with frozen wild blueberries and calls the combination the complete level up. She says she will give him the name of the place off camera so it does not sell out.

Bill Ackman's daughter had a congenital arterial venous malformation and a large brain bleed. She lay on the ground for 15 or 16 hours, surgeons operated anyway, and cognitively she is the same person she was before.

She had no symptoms beforehand. Bill Ackman says an MRI is the only way they would have found it, and you would not take a child for an MRI without a reason. He wants to examine her Oura Ring data from earlier days for any hint of the malformation. An arterial venous malformation weakens veins in the brain. A person can have it for a whole life. It can lead to a small bleed or a burst.

When someone collapses and reaches a hospital right away, surgeons remove part of the skull

Bill Ackman met Neri Oxman after a 78-year-old Harvard professor called to set him up, and he waited because she had a boyfriend. About six months later a friend described the same woman, and Bill Ackman recognized the match.

While Bill Ackman and his ex-wife were splitting, they sent a friend an email of the kind Gwyneth Paltrow invented, saying they were splitting. Bill Ackman thinks the call came later that day or the following day. The professor said he had the most amazing woman for him, named her Neri Oxman, and invited him to a dinner party in a couple of weeks, with the caveat that her boyfriend would be there. Bill Ackman said the professor was wonderful and gay, that he did not kn

Bill Ackman says he is unafraid of negative feedback because he is not afraid of blowback or of losing his job. He believes the country does not move forward when people stay silent. Important things remain unsaid because of fear of blowback and fear that speaking could hurt someone's employment and get them fired. Because he does not share that fear, he says he is well positioned to take the risk of speaking the truth.

Katie Miller asked how long it took him to become unafraid, and how he reached a point where criticism does not land. She said she has met people with a similar net worth who still read their Google News and their news alerts and are afraid of any bit of negative criticism.

Student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy. Bill Ackman says the rule exists so people do not go to college and then, at 23, file for bankruptcy and wipe the loans out.

Katie Miller asks how to fix a system in which half of college grads work jobs that do not require a degree while they drown in student debt. Bill Ackman says he does not think an 18-year-old, maybe even a 17-year-old, signing on for student debt got the same federal disclosure as a mortgage or a credit card, or really understood the obligation. He thinks most people do not even know the loans cannot be discharged. A borrower underwater on a car, a credit card, or a home can reset through personal bankruptcy. Filing i

Bill Ackman says the Democratic Party is in the worst place it has ever been in the 250-year history of the country. He calls it a crazy radicalized anti-American thing. He says some very high-quality Democrat senators and some congressmen remain, but the Democratic Party itself is in a very bad place.

He lives in New York and says he did not take politics seriously. He always held centrist views and did not align with a party. The only people who showed up in his office were Democrats, and he supported the ones he liked as people. He registered for an independent, then registered as a Democrat to vote in an important primary, and he had not checked his registration in years. When he was pu

He calls Neuralink Jesus-level technology, as Elon has said: it can let someone communicate with their mind when they previously could not, and erase pain. He would not want to see email from inside his eyelids.

In January in Oregon with the Department of Agriculture, after two years of Rainmaker tests that mostly failed, drones seeded clouds and snow fell about 30 minutes later, twice. Radar showed streaks, and the overcast opened so the sun shone through where the snow had fallen.

Cloud-seeding technology will be increasingly available to wanton, negligent, or malicious actors. A bad actor could make it rain to interfere in a war, harm someone's business, or cause too much precipitation, which is exactly why states like Utah and Colorado regulate what is going on.

The only federal weather-modification rules date to 1972 and require a NOAA form that almost nobody sees. Reports of intent get filed, but they are not transparent, not modern, and do not really make sense, so people are not actually notified. He wants that 1972 reporting act to require stricter notice.

Forward specialists, mostly veterans, wildcat firefighters, and ski patrol, unpack the drones and fly them using radar and satellite data. The drones increasingly find the right spot in the cloud for the most snow, but a human stays in the loop to fly, ground the drone, and replace the batteries.

Releasing 20 grams of silver iodide over a large area adds parts per quadrillion of silver iodide, not one part per million, which would exceed the EPA clean-water threshold. There are 80 years of data, and Utah and Colorado have data from long-running programs on silver iodide safety.

President Xi has made becoming a weather superpower a stated priority. Rainmaker, a ragtag American startup seeking Middle East water deals, faces about 12 Chinese engineers and bureaucrats from a 40,000-person weather modification staff. China and Japan already research typhoon modulation, though making hurricanes bigger or smaller is not possible today.

Rainmaker says it was a natural disaster and had nothing to do with cloud seeding. Texas irrigation districts and groundwater conservation agencies hired the company to make water for farms. In 2025 it operated about 200 miles south of where those floods occurred two days prior, and released 70 grams of silver iodide.

Despite the name Rainmaker, the company mostly makes snow. Many clouds over the United States never naturally precipitate, so drones fly into them and release silver iodide dust. Small drops of water freeze onto the silver iodide into big snowflakes, then fall as snow or melt back into rain.

Gad Saad says the lopsidedness of Democrats versus Republicans among professors is 1 to 130. A drug study with a 1.2 to 1 odds ratio, which he also calls 1 to 1.2, means the experimental group had 20 percent more efficacy. He says the statistical significance of the professor gap is greater than any study that has ever been published in any field of science.

Katie Miller asked what large universities, including the Ivy League and Harvard, should change in hiring and retention so students get more diversity of thought. Gad Saad says he agrees completely. Whether a professor is a Republican or a Democrat does not matter, he says, when the class is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. It matt

Gad Saad only uses AI to ask very detailed questions. He entered the three health plans Ole Miss is offering into Grok because he does not understand 90% of the acronyms, and Grok told him to pick option one given his reality. Katie Miller called that a good use of AI.

Katie Miller asked whether Gad Saad lets students use AI to gather data while they work through the scientific method. He said no. He does let them use online data collection portals, so many experiments can be done online instead of requiring someone to come physically to the lab. She asked if he would worry about a student having AI collate the data, and if he uses Panagram to check for AI. He said he is not using Panagram.

Gad Saad says siding with Lindsay Clancy is suicidal empathy. He defines it as empathy hyperactivated in the wrong situations and aimed at the wrong targets. People sent all of their empathy to the one who killed the three children instead of to the three dead children.

He calls the reaction grotesque. A man who killed children can be shown facing a death penalty, but with the woman the story became her hormones and her postpartum, as if she had no personal agency. Gad Saad links the excuse to blank slate felons. The blank slate view says people are born tabula rasa, an empty mind, and only socialization makes them who they are. A felon of color born in a white supremacist society like the

Katie Miller describes a crisis among young men. Fewer are going to college, many are not dating or marrying, and some are withdrawing from the workforce. She asks what happened to men. Gad Saad says one of the most frequent emails he receives from women matches her question. A woman got dressed up, went to a place to meet someone, and no man approached her. She writes, Professor Saad, help me. Women ask where all the good men have gone. He says the men have bought into radical feminism.

He says if you teach men that anything they do is pathological, that they are toxic men, and that a compliment on how a woman looks is a form of compliment rape, then it is not difficult to imagine that mos